Mary Katharine Ham: The New F***ing Tone Is Here

Funny because it's true.

Actually it's not funny. It's disgraceful and maddening.

It continues to wig me out that the "news" people presume to be the monitors and checks on everyone else, via the power of asking pointed questions, but will not stand for such questions themselves.

What a useful thing it would be to have the New York Times editors and columnists and reporters stand for questioning by a hostile. skeptical audience for three hours every month. How much bias that would expose.

But they won't. Everyone but them must answer questions about their job performance, sweetheart deals for friends, and corrupt, conflicted-in-interest decisions.

There are only three possible reasons to explain why the media relentlessly covers any untoward statement by conservative protesters and never reports at all on calls to violence by the left:

1. They believe leftwingers and unionmembers are incapable of being incited to violence. This is absurd on its face.

2. They believe that leftwingers and union members have a right to be angry. That is, when they call their opponents Hitler, they're actually right -- their opponents are Hitler.

3. They are simply political actors doing what political actors do, inventing political arguments and special pleadings having nothing at all to do with the truth or objectivity.

Let me point out regarding possiblility 2 -- that leftwingers are right to call opponents Hitler and suggest political violence, because they are just that legitimately aggrieved -- that an ethic is a rule that is supposed to apply to all parties without regard of whether or not the prohibited behavior is moral or justified or "right" in the particular case. See, the whole point of ethics is that it is a bright-line, objective code that does not rely on calls about morality in a particular circumstance -- such calls are often fuzzy, and almost always compromised by self-interest.

Yes, I know everyone on the left thinks they're "right" in every ugly utterance they scream. But those on the right who shout ugly things also think they're right; you cannot then base a standard of behavior on the subjectively shifting sands of who's "right."

An ethic is supposed to be a rule of behavior that is divorced from such subjective claims about personal latitude due to the claimed moral urgency of one's cause.

If an ethic does not bind all equally, then it's not an ethic, and is, really, nothing at all. It's a fucking whine, that's what it is.

posted by Ace at 04:03 PM

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