An Unpleasant Reminder Of Why Ethics Alarms Holds That Political Cartoons Are Unethical (and Outdated)

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

This:

As I wrote in 2017, it’s time, long past time, really, for political cartoons to be sent to the ash heap of history.

To clear up any confusion: I’m not a huge fan of memes, but I’m warming up to them a little because they are unequivocally graphic jokes, intended to be outrageous, satirical, maybe offensive but always funny. Political cartoons evolved as artistic punditry; they might use humor, but their ultimate goal was to make serious, trenchant, ideally witty observations on the political scene while appearing in newspaper editorial pages.

With very, very, very few exceptions, political cartoonists are artists who are partisan one-trick ponies.They are neither as smart or as analytical as they think they are. The template for these would be Herb Block, the mysteriously acclaimed Washington Post political cartoonist, who thought he was being clever by always drawing businessmen with huge bellies and smoking long cigars, or making Richard Nixon look like an axe-murderer.

That shameless cartoon above was posted with approval by an old friend of mine, a history professor at an elite college. To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement. How many things are wrong with that thing? The mind boggles. The juxtaposition of the flag-raising over Iwo Jima and the majority opinion in Louisiana v. Callais makes no sense. The implication that the long-needed judicial holding that a 60 year old law crafted to deal with conditions in the Southern states in 1965 no longer is relevant to those states in the 21st century is somehow pushing the nation back 160 years is temporally, historically, factually and legally gibberish. True, it is a pictorial equivalent of the Democrat’s House leader’s meltdown, as the ridiculous Hakeem Jeffries ranted, “Because we know this unprecedented assault on black political representation, the likes of which we have not seen since the Jim Crow era, the ghost of the Confederacy has afflicted the United States Supreme Court majority and is invading and haunting the nation right now! ” That, however was, or should be, an embarrassment to all Democrats and black Americans with a 6th grade education.

Pages: 1 2

Ethics Dunce and Incompetent Elected Official: Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) missed the last 43 House votes and hadn’t been seen for a month, several news reports noted yesterday. Moreover, her office had been mum on the matter. The eight-term incumbent is 83 years old, and her last recorded House vote was on April 17. House reporter Jaime Dupree noted on BlueSky Wednesday that she “missed all 10 votes on Wednesday in the House,” leading to the questions being raised yesterday. “80% of life is just showing up,” Woody Allen supposedly said. That’s a low bar, and Wilson still hasn’t cleared it.

Last night, Wilson surfaced at last and explained that she is recovering from eye surgery. “Following left eye surgery, my priority has been ensuring a full and responsible recovery,” Wilson said. “Although I am currently unable to fly under my doctors’ orders, my work has not stopped for a single day. While recovering in the district, I have continued carrying out my official duties, meeting with leaders, local organizations, city and county officials, and constituents.”

Nope, not good enough, not hardly. Normal people can’t just disappear from work for a month without adverse consequences, and elected officials have a duty to their constituents to be on the job or to inform the public and the news media why they aren’t. Wilson’s X timeline showed no change since she disappeared four weeks ago, and her staff was apparently under instructions to keep everyone in the dark about her whereabouts, in one case posting a photo of her represented as recent that was really a year old. That’s unacceptable.

Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense went AWOL too, though only for ten days, in 2024. He should have been fired, but Joe didn’t fire anybody, no matter how useless, incompetent or unqualified he or she might be. Wilson should be fired by her district’s voters in November, but of course she won’t be.

If you cant trust your Congresswoman to show up to vote or let you know why she isn’t, then you can’t trust your Congresswoman, period. Wilson’s party is claiming that Jim Crow is back and blacks are being “disenfranchised” because the Supreme Court won’t allow “good discrimination” to guarantee majority black districts. Wilson represents one of those districts, and not showing up in Congress to vote really does “disenfranchise ” her constituents.

Of course, Wilson now assures us that she was “carrying out [her] official duties,” except for the only one that is absolutely required. Why would anyone believe her?

Friday Open Forum, Confused Edition…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Dana expresses my state of disorientation on several fronts, such as…

  • The Strait of Hormuz. The President says the U.S. doesn’t need an open Strait of Hormuz, but the rest of the world does. (For example, we have this headline: “Strait of Hormuz closure causes Diet Coke shortage in India.”) So why is the useless-as-usual United Nations sitting this out? I guess to ask the question is to answer it. The same applies to NATO, as far as I’m concerned. I’m increasingly drawn to Trump’s position that the U.S. funds most of NATO and it is not too much to ask for members to back up the U.S. in an international matter of national importance, like the war against Iran. I guess they have too many Muslims to pander to and they hate Jews too much. Good to know, and to Hell with the ingrates.
  • The Federalist claims that as with the abortion decision, the SCOTUS pro-progressive distaff bloc intentionally “slow-walked” another Alito-written opinion, Louisiana v. Callais, which threw a metaphorical monkey wrench into Democrats’ race-based gerrymandering.  I wrote posted on the Dobbs stunt here. But the logic in “After The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway’s new book exposed the dangerous delay of Dobbs, the liberal justices appear to have stalled again” makes no sense. Even though the article praises Justice Kagan, the Slow-Walking Justice, for her political chops, the delay of Callais has hurt the Democrats, leaving them little time come up with ways to maneuver around the decision. The reason Virginia’s high court striking down the dishonest referendum seeking to “restore fairness” by virtually ending the Congressional representation of conservative Virginians was so devastating is that the clock has almost run out.

I also don’t understand the last three posts attracting readers but almost no comments: Update on “Dog-Rapegate”: Israel Is Suing the Times , Ethics Dunce: D.C. Bar Senior Assistant Disciplinary Counsel Jack Metzler and Comment of the Day: “What Exactly Are California’s ‘Values’? Can Anybody Explain?, especially the one about the D.C. Bar.

Anyway, moving on: it’s Friday, and I need your contributions. Contribute!

Update on “Dog-Rapegate”: Israel Is Suing the Times

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Good.

(I’m reserving that space until the funny dog rape memes come out. They have to be on the way.)

Israeli officials not only released a bombshell report this week extensively documenting Hamas violence on and after the October 7 terrorist ambush, but they are also suing The New York Times for libel as a response to its publishing Nick Kristof’s outrageous claim that Israel was torturing Palestinian prisoners by, among other methods, having them sexually assaulted by trained dogs. The Times also released the libelous accusation on the day before a new, thoroughly sourced report on Hamas violence, “Silenced No More,” was scheduled for release. The Times, almost alone among news outlets, refused to publish that because it reflected poorly on Hamas. It preferred to assert that Jews are training Lassie and Rin Tin Tin to get off on anal rape.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry announced May 14, “Following the publication by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times of one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press, which also received the backing of the newspaper, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar have instructed the initiation of a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times.”

The news media has been abusing its privilege under New York Times v. Sullivan with increasing boldness in recent years, and many have suggested (including me) that the standards for punishable slander and libel need to be re-thought in light of a profession no longer committed to honesty and independent public service. To be fair, it is jolly decent of the Times to eliminate any question that the paper is nothing less than a Democratic talking point propaganda organ. Democrats hate Israel and Jews now, or perhaps you haven’t noticed. The Times has, as I wrote here (#6), even doubled-down on Kristof’s evidence-free claims.

As CNN token conservative Scott Jennings wrote on “X”: “Dying on dog rape hill. What a choice.”

Comment of the Day: “What Exactly Are California’s ‘Values’? Can Anybody Explain?

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Sarah B, not to be confused with the other eminent commenter here with a similar handle, put together a two-part comment that provides an overview of the growing problem of sexual predator teachers. Ethics Alarms has done a lot on this topic, but not lately, perhaps because there are so many other things wrong with our education system. This may have been the most recent; I should have had a tag for “predator teachers.”

I should shut up now: it’s a long piece, and worth reading, Here is Sarah B’s Comment of the Day on the post, “What Exactly Are California’s “Values”? Can Anybody Explain?”

***

As much as I hate to defend California, this is hardly unique.  Wyoming has similar policies and we are about as red as they come.  A previous principal in my town harassed/seduced teachers and students who reached the age of 18.  Because all of his predations were of adults (even if only technically), he remained at his job for nearly a dozen years before enough complaints and the loss of too many teachers forced the school board to finally let him go.  Just this last couple of years, a special education teacher was arrested after sexually abusing lots of kids just a few towns over from us.  He had been skirting the edges of the law for years, but finally crossed enough lines that he could be arrested and fired, after abusing at least a handful of kids.

The other stories I know of are teachers who abuse students in other ways, not sexually, but I personally do not see much of a difference between a teacher who sexually harasses students and a teacher who beats students up, since children should be safe and unharmed in the school system if it were any good.  Therefore, I’m picking on a favorite story of mine involving my cousin, since I know many of the particulars that I might otherwise not know in detail.  He worked in one town and was fired for wrestling his students and put a few too many in headlocks.  After being fired for this, he was transferred to another town, where he rug-burnt a few handfuls of his students.  He got fired again, and was hired as the youth pastor at the local Baptist church.  He wrestled a few more kids harshly and is currently not allowed to be the only adult present when the youth group meets. 

Frankly, if one looks at the data, 38% of all students in 7th-12th grade receive sexual harassment/abuse in the public school system from adults, according to some studies in 2017.  I caution that these studies have broad definitions of sexual abuse/harassment, including things ranging from rape to cat-calling to inappropriate jokes and sexual comments.  Of course, the more minor offenses of inappropriate comments and commentary are far more common than the more serious ones.  Grooming behavior is reported separately, but is very common.  The adults also range from teachers to coaches, bus drivers to lunch ladies to janitors, and everything in between.  However, 63% of the behavior nationwide comes from teachers.

Pages: 1 2

Ethics Dunce: D.C. Bar Senior Assistant Disciplinary Counsel Jack Metzler

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

As I often say (or think) in such situations, “Yikes!”

I’m going to send you to a thorough exposé over at Signal, a conservative website, which means its thorough coverage of this example of irresponsible conduct in a position of trust as well as a stunning “bias makes you stupid” display will be brushed off by some as just a partisan attack. I’m certain some ideological hostility helped prompt the piece, but it is accurate, which means that Signal has flagged a genuine ethics problem. Good for Signal.

D.C. Bar Senior Assistant Disciplinary Counsel Jack Metzler has posted dozens of inflammatory, openly partisan, politically-motivated comments on social media for years,. He has mocked, insulted and attacked conservative Supreme Court Justices (but never the liberal minority). He has reposted with favor attacks on Donald Trump and Elon Musk (for his conservative views.) It appears someone finally told him, “Hey, moron, what are you doing?” and he’s taken down the worst of the tweets. The internet is forever, though. And Metzler has moved to BlueSky, the Twitter/”X” alternative for progressives who can’t tolerate people and opinions that don’t toe the woke line. I regard that as signature significance for Trump Derangement and partisan indoctrination.

Pages: 1 2

List Incompetence: “The 100 Best Vocalists of All Time”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I think this is my third post on “list ethics.” My first was in 2011, reviewing a sloppy, careless list called “The Fifty Most Unforgivable Acts in Baseball History.” The second was in 2020, about a list called “The 25 Greatest Actors Of The 21st Century (So Far).” The list I’m writing about this time is even worse than those two; in fact, it’s unforgivable.

I get it: lists are clickbait and exist so people can argue over them. They almost always have a gimmick: if you make a list of the greatest rock and pop groups of all time, you can’t have The Beatles as #1, because any idiot could decide that. You pick “The Zombies” or “Heart.” Bill James, the baseball stats pioneer, wrote a book ranking the greatest baseball players at each position. Everyone knows that Ted Williams gets #1 in left field, but Bill picked Stan Musial. It’s cynical and dishonest, but lists are arbitrary and meaningless anyway.

I read lots of them and my eyes hurt from rolling. I only get seriously critical when a list covers something I know a lot about. Baseball history and acting history are in that category, and so is popular music history. What I wrote about the baseball list in 2011 applies with even greater force to “The 100 Best Vocalists of All Time” compiled by Consequence, a website I never heard of and based on this effort, will never visit again. I wrote (I’m substituting the topic of the list at issue today):

“If you are going to write about history, there is a duty to perform diligent research, even for a silly online list. Misrepresentations online have a large probability of misleading people. The list isn’t close to complete; it isn’t consistent; it isn’t well-researched.. Anyone who looked at the list and assumed that these are [the best vocalists of all time] would be seriously misinformed.”

The list is introduced by this description of its methodology, and its flaw becomes clear. “To generate our list of the top 100 vocalists of all time,” it says, “we polled over 50 musicians, including Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Class of ’26er Steve Stevens, rising stars like Samia, Blondshell, and Kneecap, and established icons Randy Blythe, Mike Patton, and Linda Perry, plus many more. After we assembled the surveys into the spine of the list, our staff chimed in with more picks, mostly historical, to round things out. The final ranking is a curated perspective on the hundreds of names that were nominated.”

Pages: 1 2

Clean-up On Aisle Ethics, 5/13/2026

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Ironically, I am doing one of these collection posts not because I received TWO emails from the assembled today telling me that I write too many posts, but because of the reason I write as many as I do. I don’t have the time (or the resources) to accomplish my mission as it is, which is to focus ethical analysis on the ethics issues all around us that should be thought of in that context, but seldom are. Why aren’t they? The answer is that they are seldom analyzed in an ethics context because most of our journalists, pundits, educators, politicians, lawyers, and “experts” don’t think about ethics very often, and neither do most of our friends, relatives and colleagues.

Today I felt bombarded with ethics stories and questions, and suffered ethics brain lock that stopped me from doing some important paying consulting work and meeting looming deadlines. Tomorrow I have a Zoom ethics seminar to teach (I hate Zoom) for two hours smack dab in the middle of the day. I’d love to write full posts on all of these, but I can’t. So here are some short versions…

1. There is a long, excellent Comment of the Day by Sarah B that I intended to get up today. Tomorrow, Sarah. I promise.

2. The Murdough Murders. South Carolina’s high court today overturned the murder convictions against Alex Murdaugh, the disbarred, thieving lawyer a manipulated jury had found guilty of murdering his wife and one of his sons in one of those “sensational” trials. The State Supreme Court found that “shocking jury interference” by a court clerk who oversaw jurors during the 2023 trial meant that Mr. Murdaugh’s convictions had to be thrown out.

Ethics Alarms figured out that the trial and the verdict was a farce and said so in 2024, here.

The State says it will retry Murdaugh, which will cost the state millions and achieve nothing even if he is convicted of murder again, and he shouldn’t be. He is already serving a prison term (for financial crimes) that will amount to a life sentence. The State’s claimed motives for the two killings are bats, automatic reasonable doubt with a thinking jury.

Pages: 1 2

Ethics Dunces: The San Francisco Giants

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Unbelievable.

But then, it is San Francisco, after all.

For some reason, the San Francisco Giants first year manager, Tony Vitello, couldn’t figure out that his outfielders’ post-victory celebratory ritual was inappropriate in a public venue, on TV, while playing America’s Pastime in front of family audiences.

The Commissioner’s office finally told them to cut it out. Why it took until May, I have no idea.

I would have fined the manager, the players and the team. A lot.

Morons.

Ethics Alarms Encore: “Aesop’s Unethical and Misleading Fable: The North Wind and the Sun”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

north-wind-and-the-sun-story-oil-painting

[ Like the hillbilly who pledged to take a bath every week whether he needed it or not, this is a post from 2011 that I vow to re-post every ten years whether I need to or not. It is the mystery post of Ethics Alarms: a throw-away essay on a slow ethics day that is one of a handful that accumulates new views regularly. (Another post in this category is here, but that is a bit more understandable.) I was moved to do another re-post because an episode of “Mad Men,” which I am finally watching (and glad, because it is an excellent ethics series) had a character using Aesop’s Worst Fable Ever to explain advertising philosophy.  I wrote the original post talking with my late wife  how Aesop’s Fables were joining Mother Goose stories,  Edward Lear limericks and American folk songs in the Discarded Bin of our culture. I then stumbled upon a fable I had never read or heard about.  To my surprise the post attracted intense criticism from fans of the story; I even had to ban a commenter who got hysterical about it. Apparently there are a lot of Sun-worshipers out there. Anyway, here it is again.]

Today, by happenstance, I heard an Aesop’s Fable that I had never encountered before recited on the radio. Like all Aesop’s Fables, at least in its modern re-telling, this one had a moral attached , and is also a statement of ethical values. Unlike most of the fables, however, it doesn’t make its case. It is, in fact, an intellectually dishonest, indeed an unethical, fable.

It is called “The North Wind and the Sun,” and in most sources reads like this:

“The North Wind and the Sun disputed as to which was the most powerful, and agreed that he should be declared the victor who could first strip a wayfaring man of his clothes. The North Wind first tried his power and blew with all his might, but the keener his blasts, the closer the Traveler wrapped his cloak around him, until at last, resigning all hope of victory, the Wind called upon the Sun to see what he could do. The Sun suddenly shone out with all his warmth. The Traveler no sooner felt his genial rays than he took off one garment after another, and at last, fairly overcome with heat, undressed and bathed in a stream that lay in his path.”

The moral of the fable is variously stated as “Persuasion is better than Force” , or “Gentleness and kind persuasion win where force and bluster fail.”

The fable proves neither. In reality, it is a vivid example of dishonest argument, using euphemisms and false characterizations to “prove” a proposition that an advocate is biased toward from the outset. Continue reading →