There is absolutely no excuse, none, for readers to not engage in an epic ethics donnybrook in this week’s open forum. What else are you going to do? Watch young men begin their slow descent into premature dementia from successive concussions as thousands cheer? Watch the “Get Back” Beatles documentary? OK, that’s actually a good idea (I watched Part 1 last night), but that still won’t take up the whole day…
Ethics Alarms 
OK, a question for the group.
In yesterday’s Macy’s parade, a K-Pop group (don’t ask me their name: not exactly my genre) appeared on the telecast, not even bothering to lip-synch to the song they were supposedly performing.
Assuming they were under no contractual obligation to at least pretend to be singing live, what is their ethical position? No one, certainly no sentient adult, would have been taken in by the pseudo-singing of all the other acts… but sentient adults aren’t the target audience of K-Pop. Are these teenage performers to be scorned for not playing by the presumed rules of the game, or applauded as the equivalent of Toto pulling back the curtain and revealing the truth about the Wizard?
I am on the fence. It’s a parade and everyone knows the performances and expressions of peace, love, and understanding are canned. I say, ethics neutral. For instance, Iron Maiden appeared on Top of the Pops many moons ago and, as a rule of the show, were required to lip sync to their song. Well, headbangers being headbangers, they decided to mock their way through the performance making fun of themselves and the show, to the great consternation of the show’s producers but to raucous laughter of their fans. It was one of the most popular shows at that time.
jvb
I wouldn’t dream of asking you their name, but I would reveal my old foginess by asking you what K-Pop is.
But to answer your question, it seems to me that even their target audience would appreciate the modicum of respect given by lip-synching. Otherwise, they might start to wonder if there was some other group actually doing the singing and that wouldn’t end well.
Pop musicians from Korea, that are inexplicably popular. They take young pretty musicians, and create a heavily produced product (think fake band like the Monkey’s, but with a techno sound). When the artists age out, rinse and repeat.
I couldn’t be sure if the girls new why they were in NYC, let alone knew they were supposed to pretend to sing. My guess, they thought they were supposed to be eye candy and wave, and a fake performance was literally foreign to them.
Great thread-
Thank you Michael West for that link.
Good commentary with examples of how the conquering people part of history should be put into perspective along with a fine example of how terribly destructive virtue signaling woke teachers are to young impressionable minds. See Lillia Gajewski’s anecdote about her mulatto niece and the song Jingle Bells.
“Here’s the thing: throughout the existence of homo sapiens, stronger groups have taken from, abused, and killed weaker groups (whether because of technology, superior strategy, or sheer numbers). The word slave comes from the Latin for Slavic people, whom the Romans vigorously enslaved. Slavery existed in Africa for millennia before Europeans came. Tribes in the Americas waged war on the others long before Columbus or Cortez (see, Aztec wall of skulls in Mexico City). The history of Europe is mostly a history of war and bloodshed from prehistory through WWII. None of this is meant to be an excuse, but to say that the issue is not a unique feature of America but a feature of humanity. By nature we’re much more like chimpanzees than bonobos. If the tables were turned and the Apache had guns and cannons and sailing ships and armies and large numbers and came to Europe where those things were unknown, how would that have played out? Similarly. It’s a tragedy but humanity is doing somewhat better these days and we need to stop the self-flagellation, and stop the hubris of thinking that the sins of 200 years ago are unique VS the sins of 1000 or 2000 or 10,000 years ago just because they are fresher in memory.” James P.
Solid
Some potentially interesting topics that the left seems to be pushing are:
Asking unvaccinated guests not to attend thanksgiving
Looking at thanksgiving through the lens of oppression
“The obligation” (as I’ve seen one person call it) to challenge any family members who don’t want to be vaccinated *during* Thanksgiving dinner
Turning Thanksgiving into an arena for political confrontation on almost all topics
My wording is a little off on the third point. I meant asking during Thanksgiving dinner, not being vaccinated during Thanksgiving dinner! (Though, who knows?)
When the sanctimonious vaccine nazis often only wear a mask for a photo op. When the sanctimonious vaccine nazis don’t even trust their vaccine to protect them from the unvaccinated, when the sanctimonious vaccine nazis wear a mask while alone in their vehicle, are we really obligated to take them seriously?
St. Obama’s Administration sent out talking points to his followers to discuss the Affordable Care Act’s many and endless virtues over Thanksgiving. Having thoroughly politicized the holiday, then, this is really no different. It is totalitarian disguised as “safety first”>
jvb
I see St. Anthony of Fauci is not banning flights from southern Africa over the new variant there. (Why are we permitted to say out loud where this variant is coming from? Do the South Africans and others not buy sufficient amounts of our debt or make our sneakers?) Will this decision be slammed as killing Americans? Or will it be praised as not being racist and xenophobic? Is he following the science or being reckless? I guess we’ll just have to see how specifically our betters decide we need to view this, but of course, St. Anthony is always right.
I guess the appropriate call and response in the Lefty Church of Secular Humanism is: Priest (or journalist): “St. Anthony of Fauci.” The Faithful: “Pray for us.”
But wait, there’s more!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10247227/US-ban-travel-eight-African-countries-bid-stop-spread-Nu-COVID-variant.html
Biden has evidently over ruled St. Anthony of Fauci! Doesn’t Biden believe in science? Is he a racist? Is his administration in chaos and out of control? Isn’t everyone from everywhere supposed to be able to enter the United States at will?
Assholes.
A church’s bell ringer passed away so they posted the position. An armless man came in wanting the job; the clergy weren’t sure he could do it, but he convinced them to let him try. They climbed the bell tower and the guy ran toward the bell and hit it with his head producing a magnificent sound, so they gave him the job.
The next day he went to ring the bell, tripped, bounced off the bell and fell to the sidewalk below. Two guys were walking past, and one asked the other, “Do you know this guy?” The second guy responded, “No, but his face rings a bell.”
The next day, the dead guy’s armless twin brother comes in for the vacant bell ringer position. Up to the bell tower they went, and when he ran at the bell, he tripped and fell to the concrete. The same two guys walk by and one asks, “Do you know him?”
The second guy responds, “No, but he’s a dead ringer for that guy we saw yesterday.”
Oh. you are gonna spend eons in Purgatory for that post!
jvb
Considering my…um…body of work, I’m playing with house money….
Bell jokes?
OK, you asked for it:
Hey, what’s brown and sounds like a bell?
Dunnnnnggggggg! 😀
Saw a bee fly right into a bell; a real humdinger.
Got some ideas whilst sitting in the church bell tower. I was inspired.
Why are there “cow bells?” Their horns don’t work.
You guys are striking just the right note.
You’s don’t think we should tone it down a bit…?
Black Lives Matter’s Thanksgiving message to the rest of us xenophobic, racist folks. You are on stolen land. No, you are eating dry turkey and overcooked stuffing (because no one, especially no skinny white people who grew up on peanut butter and jelly with the crust cut off, can cook either of these things correctly) on stolen land.
steal
[stēl]
VERB
stolen (past participle)
take (another person’s property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it.
“thieves stole her bicycle” · [more]
synonyms:
theft · thieving · thievery · robbery · larceny · burglary · shoplifting · pilfering · [more]
dishonestly pass off (another person’s ideas) as one’s own.
“accusations that one group had stolen ideas from the other were soon flying”
synonyms:
plagiarize · copy · pass off as one’s own · infringe the copyright of · pirate · poach · borrow · appropriate
conquer
[ˈkäNGkər]
VERB
overcome and take control of (a place or people) by use of military force.
“the Magyars conquered Hungary in the Middle Ages”
synonyms:
defeat · beat · vanquish · trounce · annihilate · triumph over · be victorious over · best · get the better of · worst · bring someone to their knees · overcome · overwhelm · [more]
So tell me, which of the above definitions more accurately reflects what happened here in the US? To steal something from someone, the other person must first possess it. Can you really steal from those who don’t believe anyone can own land? Not really. But you can conquer that area. Unfortunately, history is almost nothing but conquests. It’s not the story of people becoming friends. History has been about conquests since Sargon of Akkad conquered the Sumerians and since Joshua led the Hebrews over the Jordan to attack and take the city of Jericho.
In fact, if you go all the way back to the earliest Biblical stories, the Hebrews first came to be when and because a sheik in the Bronze Age Mesopotamian city of Ur answered a call that came directly from the man upstairs promising him the land originally promised to Caanan, grandson of Ham, because Ham proved himself unworthy by seeing Noah drunk and uncovered in his tent and doing nothing about it. Most of the rest of the Old Testament is about the Hebrews getting, losing, and getting back the land promised to them by God. Most of us grew up reading of Joshua bringing the walls of Jericho down and cheering on David as he stood up to Goliath, giving Saul’s army the chance to defeat the Philistines, and never once asking the question of whether they were right. However, come to the modern state of Israel, and suddenly it’s stolen land, stolen from the Palestinians, who were never a nation to begin with, and at any rate were Johnny-come-latelys since the Caananites, Hebrews, Seleucid Greeks, Romans, Persians (briefly), Byzantines, Crusaders, and Turks.
The fact is that it’s not really about the Israelis, the Palestinians, or any of these other folks who previously occupied the land now known as Israel. It’s about politics, and about delegitimizing the State of Israel, which the left hates for a lot of reasons, like being a strong US ally, like not putting up with terrorism, like standing up to Iran now and Saddam Hussein in his day. By proxy, it’s about delegitimizing the State of Israel’s supporters here, by calling them thieves, murderers, and so on, while telling bs stories about the warm, welcoming Palestinian people who do nothing but get victimized.
Yes, the Americas were conquered. Yes, the Indians got the short end of the stick pretty much every time. That’s what happened pretty much every time in history that a less developed society took on a more developed one, like the Ethiopians with simple bows and clubs fighting the more organized and better armed Egyptians, or the chaotic and in some cases nomadic Irish facing the heavily armored and armed Normans (in fact the Irish word gallowglass, for armored infantry, comes from the Gaelic words for “gray stranger” reflecting the mail armor of the Normans, which was new to a lot of them).
I’ve got news for you. The western hemisphere was never going to stay undiscovered forever. The Indians were not peaceful tree-huggers, although some were more peaceful than others. Those tended to get knocked about, conquered, sacrificed, and even eaten by those who were not, i.e. the Iroquois in North America, the Caribs in the islands, and the Aztecs in Mexico. Everything was against them once Columbus landed, immunities, demographics, technology, everything. By the time Pontiac’s Rebellion ended at Bushy Run, three new settlers came for every one the Indians killed, while every Indian brave lost in battle was close to irreplaceable. That wasn’t theft, that was flat-up conquest in a war that Pontiac and his compatriots lost because they had neither the numbers nor the weaponry to defeat the forces of the British Empire.
I’ve got more news for you. Like Israel, it’s not about the people involved. It’s about politics, and about the left trying to shame the rest of us.
Happy Holidays.
Living where I do, I’m glad the Apaches have been neutralized.
This is at the heart of the whole Terra Nullius argument here in Australia. I looked into it and came to certain conclusions:-
(1.) It is accurate as far as it goes, but only as regards land proper* and in a narrow technical way that omits certain things.
(2.) The effective reversal here of the Terra Nullius argument by the Mabo decision created more issues, which have not yet all matured and shown their consequences but which I will cover in point (4.) below.
(3.) You certainly can “steal from those who don’t believe anyone can own land”, you just can’t steal land as such from them. For instance, most Australian aborigines (not Eddie Mabo’s lot) believed that the proper* subject matter of property* rights was women, weapons and dogs, not necessarily in that order, so anyone freeing their women was – in their eyes – stealing them.
(4.) Aboriginal cultures can be construed as having had property* rights that operated in relation to land, such as hunting rights, even though those rights did not emanate from land owning as such and were vested communally or collectively rather than individually (see also our own history of the Enclosure of the Commons and the Highland Clearances, and look at the interplay of Brehon Law and the Penal Laws in various stages of the pacification of Ireland). To the extent that these property* rights existed and were infringed upon, they could and should have been compensated for, e.g. with properly* negotiated quitclaims and/or quitrents – concepts that hark back to dealing with very similar topics in our own history. Without that, there was indeed stealing.
(5.) It often backfires when there are attempts at compensation that work through treating those other cultures’ property* subject matter concepts as though they are our concepts. This happened quite often and far earlier when there was an attempt to do the right thing from the beginning, e.g. British handling of Ryotwary in India and the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand (where things overheated a generation later, when British outright land purchase came up against Maori sale of lifetime enjoyment without prejudice to heirs’ rights – think entailment, and get a wider insight into our own lost customary practices by reading Meir Kohn’s work on preindustrial European finance at https://sites.dartmouth.edu/mkohn). More importantly for us today, attempts at setting things right that way are a form of unintended cultural imperialism, in that they force the compensated to start working with unfamiliar concepts. This is a big deal as it creates a pathway to alienation as the new owners have trouble hanging on (see the Indian allotment movement in the U.S.A.**). And precisely that is hitting aborigines in Australia who are being given land rights “back” as though they were Eddie Mabo’s lot even when they are not: almost as soon as they find themselves land owners, many find themselves hit with hefty local land tax bills they do not have the liquidity to cover as they have not enjoyed the yield long enough to gain that, and they have trouble getting capital on decent terms and/or knowing how not to lose it (land tax being an exception to actual property* rights in land that has encroached on land ownership in our culture over time, but which would have struck many other cultures as outrageous theft).
For what it’s worth, with the possible exception of the Jackson Purchase of the western parts of Kentucky and Tennessee, every last square inch of the U.S.A. was on one or more occasions either stolen outright, obtained under the colour of purchase after the application of duress, or obtained from others with no better title – and, considering that, the funds for the Jackson Purchase are of dubious origin. Of course, there is nothing special about the U.S.A. in this; have a look at the Declaration of Arbroath sometime.
* It is no coincidence that these words are conceptually as well as lexicographically related.
** I came across this when I was attempting to research the English allotment movement that aimed at setting up potato grounds and similar for the support of the poor, only to find that U.S.-centric internet search engines kept steering me wrong.
That happens not to be the case, thus:-
– See above about rights in relation to land even when land is not owned as such; the same may be said of being a nation, e.g. Shakespeare calls the Welsh a nation despite there having never, ever been a Welsh nation state. It is on a par with saying that marriages by definition take place in a church before a priest.
– There are archaeological, genetic, and historical lines of evidence that amply show that the Palestinians, far from being Johnny-come-latelys, are in fact more directly descendants of the denizens of the area in Jesus’s time than nearly all modern Jews, only being obscured in that by successive cultural shifts like religious conversions, e.g. Ottoman tax records show an entire Jewish village in Palestine converting to Islam in the seventeenth century for tax reasons. Yes, Arabs did invade during the rise of Islam – but, as Glubb Pasha pointed out, they stayed in cantonments while that was the frontier, then moved on as richer areas were seized.
Comment of the Day, and one that saves me a post, my favorite kind. It’s often a nice surprise to see what PM Lawrence has left in the Ethics Alarms stocking, even when it’s coal. I’m hoping for AM Lawrence to show up more often.
I’m behind on preparing a similarly lengthy reply to a comment from about a week ago, I’m sorry to say. Maybe I’ll have it ready soon – I’m about half way through.
Welcome to my world!
Am I the only o e old enough to remember when the Left declared travel bans from foreign nations to be the depth of abject depravity when Trump tried to stall the introduction of the Wuhan Virus to the United States?
Destined to be recognized as a definitive IIPTDXTTNMIAFB!
Apparently, following the Greek alphabet isn’t required:
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2021/11/skipping-xi-and-going-straight-to.html?m=1
jvb