Month: July 2021

Verdict: Feminists And Lesbians Need To Find Better Role Models And Heroes

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Violette Morris

“On This Day She” is a book published this year dedicated to “the women whom [sic] time has forgotten; those who didn’t make it into the history books and those whom [sic] society failed to uphold as significant figures in their own right.” There is also a website following through on the premise of the book (and promoting it), from whence the misleading tweet above emanated. Though the book does admit to including women who engaged in “the bad” and who it deems unjustly ignored by history, the tweet above undercuts that admission. The hint is in the last sentence. Why was Morris killed by the French Resistance in 1944?

She was a Nazi, that’s why, and a traitor as well. Morris, a French citizen, sourced black-market petrol for the Nazis, ran a garage for the Luftwaffe, and drove for the Nazi and Vichy hierarchy. After Germany took over France, she worked to foil the operations of the Special Operations Executive, an English organization that aided the Resistance. Claims that she also engaged in spying activities and Nazi torture are disputed, but never mind: what she did do was sufficient to have her known as “The Hyena of the Gestapo” and sentenced to death in absentia. She was ultimately shot and killed—assassinated, to be technical— when her car was ambushed by the Resistance.

Good.

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Afternoon Ethics Clean-up, 7/5/2021: July Fifth Weirdness And “Justice”

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Celebrating July 5th as a federal holiday is affirmatively strange, because not much good happened on this date. Ted Williams died on July 5, 2002, for example. In 1852, Frederick Douglass picked this date to give his “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” anti-America speech to the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, laying the groundwork for anti-America movements in the black community ever since. On this date in 1921, baseball began unraveling the worst scandal in U.S. professional sports, as it concluded that the 1919 World Series had been fixed by gamblers bribing the key players on the Chicago White Sox, aka “The Black Sox.” It was also the date, in 1865, that a military tribunal convicted David Herold, George Atzerodt, Lewis Payne, Mary Surratt, Michael O’Laughlin, Edward Spangler, Samuel Arnold and Dr. Samuel Mudd of “maliciously, unlawfully, and traitorously” conspiring with John Wilkes Booth and others to assassinate President Lincoln on April 14, 1865, and planning to kill General Grant, Vice President Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward. It was one of the most unfair trials in U.S. history, despite the fact that all of the alleged conspirators were probably guilty. Herold, Atzerodt, Payne, and Surratt were executed [above].

In short, it’s not a good date for ethics.

So far…

1 Ethics Alarms has a new Ethics Villain to keep tabs on. David Cole, the ACLU Legal Director who made an ass of himself and attacked his organization’s own client by criticizing a SCOTUS decision that followed the ACLU’s position, was the main authority in a New York Times review of the Court’s just completed term. Here’s nice Cole quote: “The new court is definitely conservative, but that doesn’t mean it is necessarily hostile to civil liberties. It protected many liberties that conservatives favor, including religious liberty, property rights, free speech, the privacy of the home and the right of the wealthy to donate to charities anonymously.”

No partisan bias there! Wait, David, just what are the rights that the progressive justices protect?

2. Speaking of SCOTUS, Steve-O-in NJ asked for my opinion of this idiotic essay in The Week: “The case for ending judicial review.” It reminded me that I never finished the Ethics Alarms compendium of fake news categories, of which this is one: Fantasy Controversies. This kind of essay might as well be “The case for eliminating sex,” “The case for using flatulence to fly to the moon” or “The case for a cheese-based economy.” There is no way for Congress to stop the Court from overruling laws—Separation of Powers exemplified— it finds unconstitutional short of a Constitutional amendment, which is fantasy itself. At the end of the essay, the author concludes, ‘Well, maybe it’s not such a good idea after all.’

It is unethical to waste readers’ time.

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How Stupid Can The Great Stupid Get? Now Responsible And Humane Pet Ownership Is”Racist”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

SPUDS16

This, when you think about it, is consistent with the developing logic of the “antiracism” scam and The Great Stupid. The legal theory that the impact of a reasonable policy could be deemed racist if it had “disparate impact” on a minority group gradually metastasized into the Bizarro World belief that black community cultural pathologies had to be granted immunity from negative consequences in the interests of fairness. This, in turn, encourages cultural pathologies, which further disadvantage the black community and undermine societal values generally.

It is one of the intrinsically terrible ideas that once would have gained no traction with those possessing any critical thinking skills whatsoever, but after sufficient indoctrination and propaganda, almost any idea can begin to seem reasonable. But does it go this far?

Researchers with the University of Denver’s Institute for Human-Animal Connection argue that animal control policies and pet adoption requirements perpetuate racial inequities. Their “Punishment to Support: The Need to Align Animal Control Enforcement with the Human Social Justice Movement” argues that animal control enforcement and punishment disproportionately hurt people of color and low-income communities, and thus constitute “systemic racism.”

The authors, led by Kevin Nolan Morris, who holds an endowed chair, point to racial biases in requirements of “responsible pet ownership,” you know, little matters like leash laws, rabies vaccination requirements, anti-tethering laws, responsible handling of “at-risk” animals, providing shelter, behavioral training or veterinary care, and investigations of cruelty, abuse and neglect. This is all discriminatory, because African-American lifestyles, attitudes and culture often don’t mesh with such habits. Thus “racism, classism, and the White dominant culture” mandates animal treatment standards that are “largely unobtainable for anyone in the U.S. other than white, middle, and upper-class individuals,” the paper argues.

That’s right: a large number of blacks can’t or won’t treat animals with kindness and due care, so requiring such conduct of those who choose to own animals is racist.

Stupid enough for you?

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And The July 5 Comment Of The Day Trifecta Concludes With Arthur In Maine’s Delicious Analysis of “Your 4th Of July Ethics Quiz: Food Racism?”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

鮟肝

Finally, in the last of today’s opening trio of outstanding and varied Comments of the Day, Arthur in Maine, whom I did not know until this comment was a former chef, whips up a filling and pleasurable examination of of the issues raised in “Your 4th Of July Ethics Quiz: Food Racism?”...

There’s no longer any doubt in my mind: people are actively looking for ways to be offended. In the case of BLM, for example, the belief is clearly simple-minded rage at the rank-and-file level, but among those further up the chain it’s obviously about power and the grift. Calibrate your outrage correctly, and one can lead quite a handsome life.

Racism (and its first cousins misogyny and homophobia) is the perfect charge to level to achieve this (lucky souls like Lori Lightfoot can, and do, score the trifecta by claiming all three).

As a recovering professional chef (I haven’t lifted a pan for a paycheck in more than 30 years, and still miss it almost every day) I can tell you that serious pro cooks may be able to wow you with the complexity of their offerings. But the foods most of them prefer to eat generally trace back to poverty foods – those developed in poor cultures, where most people ate what the rich folk wouldn’t.

Most Americans, regardless of when or how their ancestors first showed up, simply don’t understand that in most other parts of the world NOTHING goes to waste. We give our scraps to cats and dogs. But very few other places do that. Thus, it’s little wonder that someone figured out a way to make duck feet in a way that actually tastes good. For the record, I would order those in a heartbeat, with full knowledge, just to try them! But in a place like China centuries ago, wasting protein like that was unthinkable, so you did what you could to make them tasty and that’s what’s for supper.

This doesn’t mean I like everything – not by a long shot. I find tripe revolting, and it’s extremely popular in first-world France. As a true afficionado of sushi, I’ll try anything – and just about the only thing I’ve ever been horribly disappointed in at a great sushi bar was ankimo – which is steamed monkfish liver. [Above] It was described to me as the “foie gras of Japan,” and I can see why. But it was still vile. I like foie gras, but not when it’s overlayed with the aroma of a cod-liver-oil-based ointment my mother used to use on us when we were small.

Some cultures happily eat grubs – no thank you. Others eat various insects; again, I’ll pass, but you’re welcome to my helping. The fact is that every culture has its culinary oddities and we’ve all got different tastes. This doesn’t mean our distaste for something is racist. It merely means that it’s so far outside of our culinary comfort zones that we just can’t get our heads around the idea. Many cultures find the American fondness for huge slabs of meat served up with starch baffling, for a variety of reasons.

This, by the way, extends beyond ingredients. There are those only too happy to make accusations of “cultural appropriation” when it comes to food. It is not. When I cook Chinese or Thai or Indian or Mexican food, I do so as a student, not as an appropriator. I do it because I’ve had the good fortune to taste these wonderful cuisines done properly. I want to understand how they’re done, partly because cooking professionally makes you fascinated by differing techniques and ingredients, and partly because I love to eat them and access to these foods locally, prepared by those from that region, is sharply limited. In the case of Chinese, especially, Chinese-American food has been so heavily adapted to North American tastes that it bears little resemblance to the real thing – and almost all of the adaptation has been done by Chinese cooks and restaurant owners. I really want to try the real thing.

Far as I’m concerned, when I make up a dinner of low-country shrimp and grits, the last thing on my mind is contempt for the poor Blacks for whom this was subsistence food. Rather, I’m thinking “this is absolutely ingenious. They took cheap stuff (grits) and free stuff (shrimp) and whatever else they had lying around and made it transcendent!” For me to cook it is not appropriation – it is the deepest possible respect.

I could make a similar argument with music, but I think you folks get my drift. This is “The Great Stupid” and “A Nation of Assholes,” to use Jack’s terms, colliding head-on to form a Great Nation of Stupid Assholes. We’d better come up with a way to pull out of this dive, and quickly.

The Comment Of The Day Trifecta Continues, With P.M. Lawrence’s Further Observations On Custer’s Clash With J.E.B. Stuart in “July 3: Pickett’s Charge, Custer’s First Stand, Ethics And Leadership”…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Ethics Alarms has readers all over the globe and several regular non-American commenters as well. Their perceptions are always interesting and sometimes enlightening in ways the USA-steeped commentariat here would be challenged to duplicate. P.M. Lawrence is one of our esteemed foreign correspondents, and in this Comment of the Day on my post on the epic events of July 3, 1863 in a little shoe-making town in Pennsylvania…

As I mentioned in comments to earlier posts on this topic at this site, it is entirely possible that Lee planned Pickett’s Charge to work in conjunction with the attack on the rear. This follows from precedents in military history, of which Lee would have been well aware from his experience as an instructor. In particular, Gettysburg was an “encounter battle”, brought about by a less than planned encounter; when that happens, the major risk is that whoever withdraws first suffers a terrible pursuit of the sort Napoleon showed the world – so both try to fight it out, following the logic of game theory’s “prisoner’s dilemma”, “tragedy of the commons”, or “money auction”. (At least Lee was able to fight long and hard enough to thwart that worst possible outcome, and he may well have known that and been trying for that at the time, at least once victory was unlikely.)

Back to the precedents: Lee may well have modeled his tactics (not strategy) on Oudenarde, which was also an encounter battle; when that started, Marlborough realised his predicament early on and detached a Dutch flying column to march around the fighting to attack the French reinforcements in flank hours later, before those could reach and feed the fight that Marlborough was also feeding all along (in Grant’s phrase), a feeding which Marlborough had to do to keep everything in play until the Dutch blow fell.

However, to the best of my knowledge Lee never claimed later that he had been trying to do this, even though the similarities to precedents are striking.

By the way, U.S. culture has so changed its concepts and terminology that “honor” does not mean what honour now means in British English or other European languages, or what it meant in the U.S.A. of that era. I would venture to suggest that U.S.A.-ians do not now have access to this concept at all, what with language now steering them to a different concept entirely. Think how you could now access the old meaning of “gay”, if you even wished to. It’s the sort of thing Orwell brought out in “1984”. (Hint: police lying to suspects is not honourable – and anyone who argues otherwise is invoking different concepts, which is the point I am trying to highlight.)

Also by the way, it is an old precept that “the secret of military discipline is that the soldiers should be more scared of the sergeants than of the enemy”, which may have been at work here. It may be found in the writings of Montaigne and of Frederick the Great, with “officers” substituting for “sergeants” (the term “officers” also covers N.C.O.s in many continental European languages).

A Comment Of The Day Trifecta! First Up, Curmie’s COTD On “Independence Day Ethics Fireworks, July 4th, 2021: ‘The Stars And Stripes Forever,’ And Other Matters”…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Tenure

In yesterday’s Independence Day post, I challenged readers to present “an honest, factual, non-ideological defense” of the University of North Carolina’s decision to award a tenured faculty position in journalism to to New York Times race huckster and “1619 Project” propagandist Nikole Hannah-Jones. I did not expect a serious response, much less a persuasive one, as the challenge was, in my mind, akin to challenging someone to translate the Zodiac Killer’s code.

But reader Curmie has lived and worked in the world of academia whereas I only visited periodically, and understands why these things happen, and why, after a certain point in the process, have to happen. Here his his Comment of the Day on “Independence Day Ethics Fireworks, July 4th, 2021: ‘The Stars And Stripes Forever,’ And Other Matters,” Item #2.

I’m not sure if I can offer a “non-ideological defense” of the UNC Trustees’ reversal in the Hannah-Jones case. But I can say I’m one of the few people in the country who sees the decision as neither a triumph nor a capitulation. And I suppose that as one of the more liberal of your readers and as a veteran of three decades in tenure-track and tenured positions at colleges and universities, I might be the logical… erm… advocate?

So… Unless things work fundamentally differently in North Carolina than in the state university systems with which I’m more familiar, there are some things the average person might not completely understand.

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Your 4th Of July Ethics Quiz: Food Racism?

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

duck_leg_wrap

Let’s play the ever more popular quiz show, ” Is It Racist?”!

Today’s topic: Late-night television host James Corden has long featured on his show a food-centered “Truth or Dare” variation called “Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts.” Celebrities choose to either answer personal questions or take a bite of a food that most viewers would deem nauseating or not properly food at all. Recently the cherubic British comic employed a table in the bit filled with Asian delicacies like chicken feet, pig’s blood and thousand-year eggs.

That was too much for the online outrage squad, apparently. An online petition condemning Corden’s use of Asian foods as disgusting has attracted than 46,000 signatories. The premise is that making fun of Asian food is racist.

Kim Saira, 24, a Los Angeles activist who organized the petition, told an interviewer, “James Corden is a white person and is actively using ingredients from Asian cultures and profiting from it and showing it in such a negative light. There’s a way to not like foods and still be respectful about it.”

The New York Times interviewed Lok Siu, an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley who agreed that Corden’s joke is indeed racist because it disrespects people’s cultures. The choice of Asian foods to highlight as disgusting to typical Americans makes Asian Americans feel more vulnerable or marginalized.

Really, Professor?

Oh yes indeed! “You use food as a metaphor to describe that distance, the kind of strangeness between a group of people that you don’t understand and their habits, the way they’re eating, the smell that comes with the spices,” she said. “There’s something around the way we discuss food, the way we think about food in our acceptance or rejection of it, it’s a rejection of a culture and the people that’s associated with it.” Siu regards the food as a metaphor for Asians not qualifying as “normal.”

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Comment Of The Day: “Independence Day Ethics Fireworks, July 4th, 2021: ‘The Stars And Stripes Forever,’ And Other Matters”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Happy Birthday, America

This Comment of the Day on today’s Fourth of July post, by Steve-O-in NJ, needs no introduction. Neither does he, as the Ethics Alarms leader in Comments of the Day with more than 30 before this one.

Today we celebrate the birthday of the United States, well, some of us do, anyway.

Some say that today means nothing, because the actions of men more than two centuries ago do not match up with the opinions of people not even two years ago. Others say that today never meant a thing, because this nation is a bad nation that’s just happened to get it right once or twice. Thank God this generation is finally getting it right, and we’re finally moving past the past 245 years, they say. We can’t go back and change the results of the elections in 2016, 2000, and 1980, we can’t go back and convince Teddy Roosevelt not to run in 1912, we can’t go back and stop Congress from declaring war on Spain in 1898, we can’t go back and prevent the Civil War, and we can’t go back and convince the Founding Fathers to abolish slavery right out of the gate in 1787, they say. We can’t go back and make cooler heads prevail in 1775, or stop the arrival of slaves in 1619, or make Columbus turn back, they say. However, we the people of today can break with all of that, and move forward with a new nation, unfettered by that past. None of it means a thing. It’s tainted.

I seem to remember a man born Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot, saying it was now Year Zero and everything before was nullified. You can look up what happened there. I also seem to remember a man born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, later called Lenin, saying everything that came before was tainted and needed to be erased. You can look up what happened there too. Before that a revolutionary parliament that included such luminaries as Maximilien Robespierre declared it to be Year One of a new age, with the months of the year renamed completely and weeks of seven days replaced by weeks of ten. You can also look up what happened there.

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Independence Day Ethics Fireworks, July 4th, 2021: “The Stars And Stripes Forever,” And Other Matters [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

There are so many important and fascinating things associated with the Fourth of July, and “The Stars and Stripes Forever” is one of them. In his autobiography, “Marching Along,” Sousa wrote that he composed the march on Christmas Day, 1896, on board an ocean liner on his way home from a vacation with his wife. He had just learned of the death of David Blakely, the manager of the Sousa Band and was moved to create his most stirring march—which for Sousa is saying a lot— as a personal tribute. He composed the march in his head, not writing any notes down until he arrived in the U.S. The piece was first performed at Willow Grove Park, a Philadelphia suburb on May 14, 1897, and was an instant hit, as you would expect. An Act of Congress in 1987 made it official National March of the United States of America, so I assume that Gwen Berry hates it too, along with the Star Spangled Banner. (Gwen, arrogant and ignorant social justice warrior that she is, was recently exposed as racist and hypocrite with some old tweets that surfaced. Hilariously, she has defended herself by comparing her plight to that of Justice Kavanaugh, as if 1) she had ever defended Kavanaugh when he was being smeared, 2) there was any verifiable evidence against Kavanaugh as opposed to her smoking gun tweets, and 3) there is no distinction between a 35-year old rumor about a distinguished judge’s conduct as a child and published proof of an obnoxious athlete’s character as an adult. But I digress…)

In show biz, and particularly in the theater and the circus, Sousa’s masterpiece is sometimes called “the Disaster March,” because it was once common for theaters and circuses to have their bands or orchestras play it to alert the audience that there was a dangerous emergency, like a fire. (Yes, it is ethical to play “The Stars and Stripes Forever in a crowded theater). The idea was that the number was a code for staff that allowed them to organize the audience’s orderly exit without causing panic. The march was played, for example, during the Hartford circus fire of July 6, 1944.

One of the strangest and oddly fitting coincidences in U.S. history occurred on July 4th, 1826, when two of the primary architects of American independence, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, died within hours of each other.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone. Since the very first, the holiday has never been celebrated while under such cultural attack. Don’t let the propaganda of America’s haters diminish one of the most glorious and beneficent days in world history.

1. What do we make of this Gallup poll? In a generally confusing set of results, the one stand-out in the recent Gallup poll regarding public’s perceptions of the state of the pandemic was that 57% of Republicans think its over and only 4% of Democrats do. That’s a huge gap, showing an alarming disparity in world view, perception, attitudes and thought process. I tend to view part of the 4% as confirmation bias: conservatives are far more resentful of the State’s incursions on their personal liberties using the virus as a justification (or an excuse) than the totalitarianism-enabling Left. On the other hand, and there are many other hands here, being certain that the pandemic is over is dumb, since if we have learned on thing about the health care “experts,” they have been wrong as often as right. We have also learned that politics has driven the narrative about the virus as much as the facts have. I thought Democrats trusted science, and the GOP doesn’t. That would suggest that the latter would be more wary of the current green lights.

On yet another hand, Republicans tend to be far less risk averse than modern Democrats, adopting the traditional spirit of the nation that Democrats are in the process of rejecting. Gallup does not give the party- affiliation breakdown of the 40% of those polled who say that the nation will never return to normal. I know lots of Democrats who say now that they plan on wearing masks forever, and no Republican. On the OTHER hand, a non-Democrat could easily conclude that we will never return to pre-Wuhan normalcy because power-wielding Democrats will never allow it.

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“Ethics Dunce” Is Not Sufficient To Describe Frederick County Councilman Kai Hagen

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Frederick-County-Sheriff-Chuck-Jenkins-Frederick-County-Councilman-Kai-Hagen

What would be more accurate term? Well, “asshole” comes to mind.

A Frederick County deputy pulled over a vehicle for a tag violation on June 20 when he noticed another vehicle pull up nearby. The deputy reportedly first feared for his life, and that it could be a cop assassination set-up. But the driver of the second vehicle introduced himself as Democratic county councilman Kai Hagen, and he refused to leave the scene until the detained driver, an African-American, acknowledged that he was “OK.” County Sheriff Chuck Jenkins, a Republican, went on WFMD-AM’s “Mid-Maryland Live” last week to condemn the grandstanding Councilman.

“I’m enraged, I’m angry, I was livid when it happened, there’s no excuse for it, it’s unlawful,” Jenkins said. “This is outrageous. Who in the hell does he think he is?” Jenkins added, while noting that Hagen could legitimately have been cited for his actions.

Not could have been, should have. The deputy handled the matter badly, falling for the old “Do you know who I am?” trick. It doesn’t matter who the interloper was. He was interfering with lawful law enforcement.

Hagen then called in to the radio station to explain his conduct, confirming that he had turned his vehicle around and circled back to the scene to ensure that the stopped driver was all right when he noticed his skin color—you know, that he wasn’t being beat up, shot, having drugs planted on him, being made to sing “The Camptown Races” or having his neck knelt on, which we all know is what white cops want to do to blacks.

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