Month: May 2019

A Memorial Day Popeye: Life Competence And Climbing Everest

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I’ve been tempted to write this post for more than a decade, but the picture above, of the line to reach the summit of Mount Everest stretching out like the ticket line for an Avengers movie, was the last straw. As Popeye said, “That’s all I can stand, cause I can’t stands no more!”

The operative words are life competence and narcissism. Climbing Everest requires and American to pay around $65,000, not counting travel and related expenses. It also involves risking one’s life, as the many perpetually frozen corpses on the way to the top vividly illustrate. And what, exactly, is one pretending to accomplish by reaching the top of Mount Everest?

I will defend to the death one’s right to spend one’s own money and time any way an individual pleases, as long as he or she isn’t neglecting a duty or harming someone in the process. Agreeing that people have the right to waste their time and money—and precious residence on Earth—in pursuit of phony achievements that in truth achieve nothing is very different from pronouncing it right and good are not the same thing.  If the only way you can claim that your life has meaning is to climb Mount Everest, you have flunked Life 101. Asserting that climbing to the top of a big mountain—with the assistance of paid guides who will literally drag you there if necessary—is admirable, a mark of character, and something to regard as a substantive life achievement is the height of delusion and narcissism—the Everest of delusion and narcissism, in fact.

See, climbing the highest mountain peak is a metaphor for rising to a challenge that is worth rising to, not a challenge itself. The first explorers who reached the top of Everest accomplished something. The 6, 561st climber to do it wasn’t an explorer, he was a tourist. If someone wants to visit Disneyland, that’s fine, but it’s nothing to boast about.

An achievement is building something, fixing something, helping someone, creating something, changing something, giving something, growing something, making a life other than your own, a community, a family, a nation, a culture, a little bit better, richer, more civilized. What does trying to climb Everest contribute to anything but the list of stupid and pointless deaths? That $65,000 could start a business, save a life, send someone to college or a trade school, feed hungry children, or save abused animals. If someone tried to impress me by saying, “I climbed to the top of Everest!,” my reaction would the same as if they said, “I once won a hot dog eating contest!” except that I would add, “Ah! You’re an idiot, then.” At least the hotdog eating contest didn’t cost $65,000 to enter.

Our culture has somehow become so perverted that it cannot distinguish real , meaningful achievements from phony ones. Kim Kardashian became a rich celebrity and made her whole. slutty  family celebrities along with her because she made a sex tape and has an unusually large and shapely butt. At least her tape and her butt entertain  and give pleasure to others: these aren’t great contributions to the culture, but they are contributions. Kim is more worthy of respect and admiration than someone whose claim to respect is climbing a mountain.

Today, Memorial Day, we honor men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice for their nation and the values it represents, not to fill in a “bucket list,” not so they could boast about it or bolster their self-esteem, but because they understood the difference between what matters in life,. and what, in the end, is trivia. Those rich mountain climbers are the victims of a sick culture that no longer makes that distinction. My father led us to the top of El Capitan in Yosemite, because, as a father, he felt it was hsi duty to enrich the experiences of his children. Every step he took was painful, because a hand grenade had mangled his left foot during the war. That climb was an achievement, and he never boasted about it to anyone.

Recognizing these artificial heroes for what they are is part of the trail down the mountain to a society that knows what is a genuine achievement, and what is only grandstanding and self-indulgence.

Memorial Day Weekend Ethics Warm-Up, 5/26/19: The Fish, The Fist Bump, And Harriets’s Lament

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Good Morning!

Here is another of my father’s favorite Sousa marches, “The Black Horse Troop.” I remember thinking about the march when I saw that the riderless horse in my father’s Arlington funeral procession was all black.

1. Let’s start with a fish story…

That’s Tom Volk holding  the nearly 17-pound walleye he caught along the Heart River in Mandan, North Dakota. Little did he know that what was briefly a happy experince for him would end up with him being attacked on social media and prosecuted by the state. A fish is considered hooked illegally—it’s actually a crime—if the hook was in the fish’s back rather than its mouth. As soon as Volk claimed the record, he was accused of cheating. The Game and Fish Department opened a criminal investigation. Volk had to hire  a lawyer, and the prosecution could have an impact on his career:  Volk serves as a city councilman in North Dakota and works in drug prevention for the state government.

Finally game wardens compiled an 11-page report on the fish after conducting witness interviews. The county prosecutor said  his office had reached “a consensus view” that the walleye had been improperly hooked. The chief game warden said he was convinced that the fish was “foul-hooked,” but also believed that Mr. Volk might not have known about the infraction until after he left the riverbank. His department issued a written warning, disqualifying the fish from record consideration, but no criminal citation.

The walleye could not be reached for comment. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“What can we do better for those of us covering your candidacies far away from where the first votes will be cast in Iowa and New Hampshire?”

—MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, to former “It” candidate Beto O’Rourke regarding his campaign for the democratic party nomination to run against Donald Trump.

Later, she told Beto, “I’ll leave you with some free advice. Grab Garrett [Haake], who is NBC’s correspondent on your campaign and tell him what’s on your mind. If you don’t like the coverage, you can change it. You’re the candidate.”

Funny, I don’t think President Trump was ever told that when he was running in 2016.

This, I think, is how the blatant and intensifying mainstream media bias will eventually blow up what’s left of American political journalism. Reporters will become so used to supporting the Left and pursuing their own progressive agendas that they won’t even try to hide it. Firmly in their own bubble, they will gradually forget that there is something to hide.

Oh—do I need to point out that in ethical journalism the subject doesn’t get to dictate to the reporter? Or that a reporter should not seek the approval of a subject regarding how he or she is covered? I hope not.

If reporters reveal such unethical collaboration with campaigns and candidates on national TV, what do you think goes on behind the scenes?

This episode once again raises a conundrum I’ve mentioned before. Do the Democrats and progressives who continue to argue, often condescendingly, that the perception of mainstream media bias is all in the minds of conservatives really believe it,  are they really so deluded and biased themselves that they can’t see what is so obvious, or are they deliberately aiding media manipulation by a strategy of continuous denial?

The Incredibly Stupid But Nonetheless Revealing Nancy Pelosi Video Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Seldom does a news story I deem too predictable and silly to warrant posting about suddenly explode into a full-fledged ethics train wreck, but this time, it did. President Trump apparently couldn’t resist the irony of Speaker Pelosi calling for “an intervention” for him in one of her typical rambling, halting, disturbing performances, and tweeted “PELOSI STAMMERS THROUGH NEWS CONFERENCE” along with a video.

This was, of course, both juvenile, petty and typical conduct by the President. At this point, I don’t see how anyone can get upset about it, be surprised by it, or pretend to be outraged by it. Doing so is one more marker of Trump Derangement: yes, we KNOW you hate the man and can’t stand his manner, manners, and mannerisms. These were a matter of record years before he was elected. Anyone who voted for him knew the was part of the package. What possibly is accomplished by railing about it now?

“The man’s an asshole! No, really, look, he really, really is an asshole! Don’t you see? HE’S REALLY AN ASSHOLE!!!!” We see, for God’s sake. We’ve always seen. Shut up! [See: The Julie Principle.]

Now, if Donald Trump were 14, or not President of the United States and obligated to be a role model and epitome of dignity and rectitude, one could sympathize with this latest example of tit-for-tat payback. Pelosi accused him of a “cover-up” because he has chosen not to cooperate with Democrats looking for things—something, anything— to impeach him with. This is the three year old “we know you must have done something horrible because you are horrible,” guilty until proven innocent smear that the “resistance” has used from the moment Trump was elected to try to undermine his Presidency in an  undemocratic, slow-motion coup unlike anything the nation has endured before. Then she made her “intervention” comment. Of course the President resents it and is furious, and he has never denied that his personal ethics code demands that he strike back when he is attacked. No, it isn’t ethical, admirable or Presidential. But it’s him.

The Speaker was also crossing lines of decorum that shouldn’t be crossed, but that horse not only left the Democratic barn long ago, it has traveled cross-country, mated repeatedly, and has nasty, mean-spirited, hateful colts galloping all over the place. One of Trump’s gifts is making his enemies behave worse than he does, and the Democrats and the “resistance” have taken the bait and asked for more, the fools. All they had to do was to take the high road, speak respectfully but sadly about the President’s transgressions, stick to the facts, and refrain from name-calling and ad hominem attacks. Like the man on the ledge heeding “Jump!” chants, they chose to follow the worst of their supporters’ demands instead, proving, of course, that they were no better than the President, and, I would argue, worse. Continue reading →

Memorial Day Weekend Ethics Warm-Up, 5/25/2019: Julian, Conan, Naomi, and Ousamequin

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

It’s going to be a Sousa weekend here. The piece above is one I bet you haven’t heard before. President Chester A. Arthur ordered Sousa to compose a replacement for  1812’s   “Hail to the Chief,” which had announced Presidents since John Quincy Adams, although it went in and out of fashion. (President Polk, it is said, always had “Hail to the Chief” played because he was so physically unimpressive that nobody noticed when he entered a room without the fanfare!) After Arthur left office, Presidents returned to to”Hail to Chief,” and Eisenhower made it the official tune of the office in 1954.

1. A First Amendment stretch. Julian Assange has been indicted. Good. He conspired with a weak-minded and troubled soldier to prompt him, now her, to steal U.S. secrets so he could publish them and promote his anarchist website, Wikileaks. The act almost certainly got U.S. agents killed and did other irreparable harm. Assange isn’t a journalist, and publishing stolen classified information isn’t journalism. Naturally journalists are lining up to defend Assange, especially the New York Times, which was the beneficiary of the Pentagon Papers ruling. They see a conviction of Assange the way abortion zealots see bans on late-term abortions: a camel’s nose in the tent, the slippery slope.

The use of journalistic publications as illegal document laundering devices has always been the least compelling aspect of First Amendment protection of freedom of the Press. I have never believed that it was a wise and fair protection, and if Assange’s just desserts weaken the right of newspapers to publish troop movements,  private citizens’ tax returns, and grand jury proceedings, good.

2. Did Conan O’Brien steal a writer’s jokes? You decide! Here is a joke Robert Kaseberg wrote on Twitter on June 9, 2015: Continue reading →

And Another One BitesThe Dust: Bowling Green State’s Unethical Slap At Lillian Gish [UPDATED]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The problem with so many of the statue-toppling/ renaming debacles at U.S. universities isn’t just that they are  transparent grandstanding, virtue-signalling and pandering to power-seeking black activists. The more disturbing problem is the intellectual vacuousness and lack of critical thought that school administrators display in the process of their grovels. The recent action of Bowling Green State University in Ohio is a particularly noxious example.

[Correction notice: the post originally had the university in Virginia, perhaps because I was once pulled over for reckless driving in Bowling Green, Virginia. Anyway, that was wrong. My apologies.]

Lillian Gish ( 1893-1993) had an epic  film career spanning 75 years, from 1912, in silent films,  to 1987. She was frequently  called the “First Lady of American Cinema,” and film historians credit her with introducing basic movie performing techniques to her craft. The PBS series, American Masters devoted an episode to Gish’s life and achievements; Turner Classics Movies observes,

Having pioneered screen acting from vaudeville entertainment into a form of artistic expression, actress Lillian Gish forged a new creative path at a time when more serious thespians regarded motion pictures as a rather base form of employment. Gish brought to her roles a sense of craft substantially different from that practiced by her theatrical colleagues. In time, her sensitive performances elevated not only her stature as an actress, but also the reputation of movies themselves. 

She had 120 film and TV credits before she was done, including “Night of the Hunter,” an enduring classic. In short, she was important. She enhanced the culture and her industry, and she earned her honors. She should be remembered.

Bowling Green State University has honored  Lillian Gish (and her less-celebrated acting sister Dorothy) for more than 40 years. But members of the college’s Black Student Union objected the theater’s name, on the grounds that in 1915, when she was 22 years old, she was one of the stars in D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” a seminal work in the U.S. film canon by one of its most talented and influential directors. The film, despite its artistic merits and importance to the development of the movies, is widely regarded as racist in content and purpose, celebrating as it does the rise of the Klu Klux Klan. The film is also blamed in part for the rise of Jim Crow in the South, also aided by President Woodrow Wilson’s open promotion of the movie as well as Griffith’s political views.

None of which has anything to do with Lillian Gish. Actors don’t write scripts or control a movie’s message, nor are they responsible for how audiences perceive a film beyond their own performances. D.W. Griffith was not only the early 20th Century’s equivalent of a Stanley Kubrick or Steven Spielberg, he was young Lillian’s patron and metor. She had literally no choice other than to accept his decision to cast her in his Reconstruction opus; to rebuff him would have risked ending her career. Nor was there any way, in 1915, for Gish to know what the impact of “Birth of a Nation” might be, or to know, while she was being filmed, what the director would do with the footage.

Gish was not responsible for the movie, and holding that she was is as ignorant and indefensible as it is unfair. Continue reading →

From The “Easy Ethics Questions That Some People Think Are Hard” File: “Should A Father Warn His Daughter’s Boyfriend That She’s A Sociopath?”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Of course not.

On the the sub-Reddit “AmITheAsshole” board,  a father consulted the group as to whether it would be  wrong for him to warn daughter’s fiancé-to-be  that she’s been diagnosed  as a clinical sociopath. She is  attracted to her boyfriend, he said, she has told him in the past that  she doesn’t feel love or empathy towards anyone, nor guilt or  grief.  Yup, that sounds like a sociopath, all right. A doctor diagnosed the daughter as suffering from antisocial personality disorder at age 18.

“She exhibited odd, disturbing behavior at a young age, and after a serious incident of abuse towards her younger sister, I realized she needed professional help,” Dad wrote. “Throughout her elementary years she struggled heavily, getting in lots of trouble in school for lying, cruelty, and all other types of misbehaviors. With an enormous amount of therapy and support, her bad behavior was minimized as she grew older.”

Her boyfriend has no idea, the father believes, what kind of person he will be marrying, and the father believes that he has a right to know, saying,  “I really like and respect this young man, and would feel awful keeping this ‘secret’ from him, and letting him walk into a marriage without this piece of knowledge.”

Yet since her diagnosis, the daughter seems to have her behavior under control. She has a good job, successfully navigated through college and has  many friends. She is also popular on the dating scene.

The Reddit participants seem to have been flummoxed by the father’s dilemma. I’m not. The ethical course is clear. Continue reading →

Tim Conway Died Just In Time

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Tim Conway, the gentle, bumbling comedian whose comedy skills formed the backbone of “McHale’s Navy” and “The Carol Burnett Show,”  died this week. As various publications were celebrating his long career, they also made it clear to me that he would have had no career at all if he had been born a few decades later.

The obituaries focused on three of Conway’s most best known and most popular characters. . One was Mr. Tudball, the inept middle manager in a bad toupee who spoke in a funny Scandinavian accent of indeterminate origin.

Accents, however, cannot be laughed at  today: it has been decreed by the political correctness police that using exaggerated accents to make people laugh is really encouraging hate, racism and xenophobia. All of the great dialect comics and comic actors of the past, such as Sid Ceasar, Arte Johnson, Danny Kaye, Bill Dana, Jonathan Winters and more: they weren’t really funny. They were hate-mongers.

Then there was the Oldest Man, whom Tim played in a white fright wig. He barely could walk, you see—just inched along in absurdly small steps. Continue reading →

Early Memorial Day Weekend Ethics Warm-Up, 5/24/19: Movies And Women, Real And Imagined

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

Good Morning!

My father loved Sousa marches. So do I. Sousa was a genius in a very narrow range, but a genius he was. The Liberty Bell was one of my dad’s favorites. Here is a great website to familiarize yourself with the great march-master’s creations; it has instant links to each march.

1. Since it has done such a superb job ensuring world peace, the U.N. moves on to the important stuff… Unesco has issued a report claiming that having female voices in machines like GPS’s, smartphones and personal assistant devices reinforces gender stereotypes and enables the oppression of women. From the Times:

“Obedient and obliging machines that pretend to be women are entering our homes, cars and offices,” Saniye Gulser Corat, Unesco’s director for gender equality, said in a statement. “The world needs to pay much closer attention to how, when and whether A.I. technologies are gendered and, crucially, who is gendering them.”One particularly worrying reflection of this is the “deflecting, lackluster or apologetic responses” that these assistants give to insults. The report borrows its title — “I’d Blush if I Could” — from a standard response from Siri, the Apple voice assistant, when a user hurled a gendered expletive at it. When a user tells Alexa, “You’re hot,” her typical response has been a cheery, “That’s nice of you to say!” Siri’s response was recently altered to a more flattened “I don’t know how to respond to that,” but the report suggests that the technology remains gender biased, arguing that the problem starts with engineering teams that are staffed overwhelmingly by men. “Siri’s ‘female’ obsequiousness — and the servility expressed by so many other digital assistants projected as young women — provides a powerful illustration of gender biases coded into technology products,” the report found.

Gee, that’s funny: I thought the reason a woman’s dulcet tones were used in such devices is because they were easier on the ear than, say, HAL. Nor would it occur to me that a woman was being subservient or submissive when the female voice was coming from a lump of metal and plastic on a table.

FACT: Yes, a consumer should have the option of having a device speak in a male or female voice.

FACT: If the owner of such a device wants to insult it, make sexual comments to it, or crush it with a hammer, that’s none of the U.N.’s business.

FACT:  Programming AI to be adversarial to its owner, whatever voice the device is using, is unethical, and, obviously, bad business.

Unesco’s report is the epitome of manufactured offense. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Quiz: The Insensitive Exam Question”

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

 

I am hopping slickwilly’s answer to the ethics quiz about “Above the Law” editor and social justice warrior taking offense at a Georgetown Law Center prof’s exam question over several other languishing but equally deserving Comment of the Day. The main reason is that it’s witty and mordantly funny, and it made me laugh out loud.

Yes, it qualifies as a rant, and I know there’s a line of long-standing in the Comment policies that says “political rants are not welcome.” However, as readers here know, every rule has exceptions, and several apply to slickwilly’s work. To begin with, any literary form, if executed well, is worthy of respect. Second, Ethics Alarms bestows special privileges on regular commenters here, who add so much to the content and quality of the blog. Finally, I have to concede that sometimes only a rant will do.

The astounding hypocrisy, dishonesty and Orwellian tactics of the “resistance” appear to be immune from rational, traditional analysis. When, for example, Mr Trump’s enraged and hateful foes accuse him of being a fascist while they encourage their supporters to physically intimidate anyone who supports the President, or say that Trump endangers democracy as they attempt to undermine public trust in the President and the nation’s institutions, dispassionate arguments fail to have much impact—it is, as I have said at various times, like arguing with lunatics or toddlers. Rants can provide special clarity by crystallizing the frustration and anger created by trying to engage ethically with a shamelessly unethical adversary. I don’t want rants to become the currency of the realm here, but this one is timely and skillful.

Here is slickwilly’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Quiz: The Insensitive Exam Question”:

“Was the professor’s exam question unethical, as in irresponsible and uncaring?”

Hell, no!

Color me surprised that a progressive hack found something to be offended by.

What, President Trump not taken to Twitter lately? Was this a slow news day in Mystal’s neck of the woods? Weren’t there pygmies in Africa with acne to write about? No pictures of swimming polar bears denoting some perceived deficiency with their habitat, undoubtedly caused by evil man?

‘Snowflake’ is an apt term for what academia and progressives are indoctrinating students into becoming.

If you cannot stand up to the adversity of life, cannot even hear a point of view not dictated by your progressive masters;

If you cannot stand to be reminded that the thing you are outraged about TODAY was the thing you endorsed YESTERDAY;

If the mere presence of a designated ‘deplorable’ on campus sends you fleeing to a room with coloring books and puppies;

If the term ‘safe’ implies a space and not a condition of a runner in Baseball;

If you believe in violence against those who disagree with progressive cant, yet self defense by those attacked is not a natural and correct response;

If you believe that everyone should pay ‘their fair share’ yet complain when YOU have to pony up;

If you believe that Roe-v-Wade is written in stone, yet Heller-v-District of Columbia should be reversed upon a whim; Continue reading →