I just watched “It Follows” for the third time in six years. (That’s why I’m writing this post at 4:10 am.)The 2014 horror film is original and avoids the usual cliches: there is no cabin in the woods, no zombies, no heavy-breathing slasher in a mask, no demonic possession or haunted family heirloom. The first time I saw it, all I could think about was how creepy it was. The second time, my attention was drawn to the writing and direction, which are excellent.
This time, all I could think of was ethics.
Horror, like science fiction, is a genre that frequently lends itself to ethical considerations, creating rare, indeed weird, problems and dilemmas that nonetheless need to be solved by traditional ethical decision-making processes. “It Follows” is a great example.
This latest opus by Steve-O-in NJ probably qualifies as a rant; I picture him furiously scribbling on paper in a trance, as in “automatic writing” when a medium is channeling Jean Dixon from the beyond. But it’s very good and thoughtful rant. I hope I edited it properly. Oh…I should mention that the tweets above echoing the meme Steve mentions at the start surprised me. I really didn’t think those celebrities could possibly be that stupid.
I saw a meme yesterday that kind of says everything about where the mainstream media and the left (but I repeat myself) are coming from now. It had no picture, it simply said “I want to live in a country where Colin Kaepernick is regarded as a hero and Kyle Rittenhouse is regarded as a terrorist.” I bit my tongue and didn’t say what I was thinking: that ostentatious disloyalty doesn’t make you even close to a hero and let’s let a jury decide what Rittenhouse is, because 1. I wasn’t changing the poster’s mind; and 2. The problem was bigger than those specific examples. Anyone who writes or reposts something like that is in effect saying “I want everyone to think like me and agree with me.” The left and the media have been thinking like that since probably the Clinton days. There’s a reason CNN was then called “the Clinton News Network.”
I have to ask, though, why is Andrew Sullivan just getting this now? Oh, that’s right, the right was opposed to a sudden and seismic cultural shift involving one of the basic building blocks of society, and nothing else mattered, it was all about the belief that heterosexual and homosexual couples were exactly the same and should be treated exactly the same. Single-issue voting is short-sighted, single-issue partisanship is just stupid. Like any other bias, it makes the objective inobjective, the wise foolish, the smart stupid, and the truthful liars.
Dutch missionary Andrew van der Bilj, aka “Brother Andrew” and “God’s Smuggler” used to pray “God, you have made blind eyes see, please make seeing eyes blind,” when he crossed the borders into Communist countries, carrying Bibles and other religious literature that would be considered contraband. Bias seems to do a far better job than God ever did blinding people to a lot more than a few Bibles being brought into an atheistic country.
Well, yesterday’s “Moby-Dick” reflections were supposed to be the intro to a warm-up that never was; it got too long and ate the post, just like Moby (or Mocha) would have. So here is what was supposed to follow, with a few updates…
1. This was almost an ethics quiz, but I’m pretty certain about the answer. Peloton has blocked users of its website from displaying hashtags reading “Let’s go Brandon” in their personal profiles.The company says the phrase violates their guidelines. The question is, does it? “Hateful, offensive, or obscene speech is strictly forbidden on the Peloton Service,” the company’s guidelines say. “This includes any leaderboard names, locations, profile pictures, Tags or any other User Content that promotes, relates to, or condones lack of respect, discrimination, or violence of any kind against individuals or groups based on [the usual list]… or political affiliation.”
Since “Let’s go Brandon!” is code for “Fuck Joe Biden,” it is “Fuck Joe Biden” just like “SOS” means “Help!” That certainly is somewhere in “hateful , offensive, or obscene” whether some people find it funny or not. [Pointer: JutGory]
2. The cliche for this is “kabuki theater.” The sham of the Glasgow climate change summit was highlighted at the very end, when China and India, among the world’s biggest burners of coal, raised last-minute objections to language in the unenforceable pact pledging a “phase out” of coal and demanded that it be changed to “phase down,” whatever that means. Since their only option was to accept this crucial weakening of the terms or not to have an agreement they could wave to claim “progress,” the change was accepted. COP26 President Alok Sharma said he was “deeply sorry” for the let-down. “I understand the deep disappointment. It’s also vital we protect this package,” Sharma said. Without China and India’s full commitment and supportive action, the goals of the climate change reforms can’t be met, making the sacrifices, if really made, by the United States and other nations virtue signaling without purpose….you know, like the Biden administration shutting down pipelines.
It sure took a while, Andrew, but it’s good to have you on board. Every little bit helps.
Andrew Sullivan is writing at substack now, the place where disillusioned former henchmen (and henchwomen, like Bari Weiss) of the biased and partisan mainstream news media have retreated after they sensed that somehow the people they were working for were doing more harm than good. Some, like independent journalist/muckraker Green Greenwald, flipped loyalties completely and declared his disgust with fury, even pointing out the news media’s campaign of lies against Donald Trump. Sullivan has, in contrast and until now, been unwilling to admit what has been obvious for a very long time: American journalism has really become “the enemy of the people.”
Oh, he has gradually picked off other and related examples of progressive ethics rot in our societyof many : check out the first 12 Ethics Alarms essays here, going back to 2014. These all must have been hard for him, for Sullivan is a moderate conservative turned progressive (by the gay marriage issue), and he doubtlessly would like to support his newfound companions. Yet he couldn’t quite bring himself to accept what I, to name just one objective analysts, figured out and have been documenting for more than a decade.
Now he has. Whew! I thought it would never happen.
In “Denial,” the film about the lawsuit by British Holocaust denier and fake historian David Irving against American Deborah Lipstadt, Tom Wilkinson as Lipstadt’s barrister Richard Rampton, in the process of excoriating Irving to the court where the case is being tried, says in a memorable speech,
My lord, during this trial, we have heard from Professor Evans and others of at least 25 major falsifications of history. Well, says Mr. Irving, “all historians make mistakes.” But there is a difference between negligence, which is random in its effect, and a deliberateness, which is far more one-sided. All Mr. Irving’s little fictions, all his tweaks of the evidence all tend in the same direction: the exculpation of Adolf Hitler. He is, to use an analogy, like the waiter who always gives the wrong change. If he is honest, we may expect sometimes his mistakes to favor the customers, sometimes himself. But Mr. Irving is the dishonest waiter. All his mistakes work in his favor. How far, if at all, Mr. Irving’s Antisemitism is the cause of his Hitler apology, or vice versa, is unimportant. Whether they are taken together or individually, it is clear that they have led him to prostitute his reputation as a serious historian in favor of a bogus rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler and the dissemination of virulent Antisemitic propaganda.
Today marks the 170th anniversary of the publication of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” or “The Whale”(never forget that hyphen!). What does the 19th century novel with the most famous opening line in American literature have to do with ethics? Oh, only everything…and not just ethics, but leadership, values, perspective, chaos, hubris, and the ethics-related fact that you never know how things will work out, so all you can do is the best you can.
“Moby-Dick” was Jack Marshall, Sr.’s favorite novel by far, and he had read almost every classic of his era and going back 200 years before he was in high school. I read the book in a tattered hard-cover edition full of my dad’s notes in the margins. (If only I could have read his handwriting!) “Moby-Dick” is tough sailing; public schools did Melville no favors by making high-schoolers read it, even in the redacted versions. Hollywood did even more damage: the book cannot be filmed. The best and most profound parts of novel are the narrator, Melville/Ishmael’s philosophical musings, like when he asks what a dead whale might be thinking when a harpooner nearly downs in its brains.
Eventually, I was able to honor both Dad, Melville and Orson Welles by mounting a production of Welles’ brilliant (but flop) theatrical version, “Moby-Dick Rehearsed,” which I repaired thanks to my father’s comments and inspiration. It was, by far, the most successful production of the American Century Theater’s two decades, the most successful professional production Orson’s invention has ever had, and my most satisfying experience as a director.
I personally decided that Ben &Jerry’s outrageously expensive ice cream for the Woke and Wonderful would never cross through Marshall doors when it created a flavor honoring partisan hate-monger Stephen Colbert. The company’s cynical political pandering has only gotten worse since. Perhaps the most nauseating aspect of the company’s pose is that it’s obviously a marketing plan to appeal to ice-cream loving progressives. The real Ben and Jerry sold off the brand years ago, like any good socialists, accepting millions to allow a multi-national corporation to pretend it’s the founder as it spouts simple-minded leftist talking points. This tweet, however, charged into Ethics Alarms Popeye territory…
I went to law school to be a prosecutor, and was one for about two weeks after I passed the Massachusetts Bar. Then I was quickly disillusioned, and realized that the weird, intrinsically ethically-conflicted criminal justice system was something out of which I had to get, and the sooner the better. I never looked back, and the situation is even worse now than I thought it was then.
Netflix has truly eye-opening and disturbing documentary about the subject of John Grisham’s only non-fiction book (out of more than 40). Both the book and the film are called “An Innocent Man,” and involve two criminal cases, both murder-rapes of young women, in the small town of Ada, Oklahoma in the Eighties. The title is ambiguous, for there isn’t just one innocent man, but four, all wrongly convicted of rape and murder because of police and prosecutorial misconduct of head-exploding magnitude. At the end of the documentary, two of the men had been freed after serving 12 years for a murder and rape with no physical evidence that incriminated them, and the remaining two were pursuing appeals. (One of them, who had been on death row, was finally freed last summer. The other has had his conviction overturned, but the state is appealing. Both of the men had been in prison for 35 years.)
The prosecutor was the same for both murder cases, and his comments defy belief. In one case, the actual murderer was the prosecution’s prime witness against the innocent men convicted, and evidence implicating him at the time of the crime was withheld by the Ada police who were involved with killer in a drug scheme. More evidence, so-called Brady material that prosecutors are required by law to reveal to defense attorneys, was illegally withheld by the DA. Asked if he owed an apology to the two men the jury convicted when the uncovered evidence prompted their release, the prosecutor’s reply was that he had nothing to apologize for, because he did his job.
No, his job is to try and convict guilty people. That case was finally blown up by the Innocence Project and DNA evidence.
The other case is even worse, believe it or not. A missing girl was seen by a single witness, from a distance, at night, being pulled into a car by two men. An artist’s crude approximation of the witness’s description led to the arrest of one suspectn, who was first shown to the witness, and then the witness was asked to pick him out of a line-up. (That’s an illegal line-up trick, as you can guess.) The second suspect was arrested because he knew the first suspect, and because one of the sketches vaguely resembled him. The first suspect, a young man known in the town as “slow,” confessed following r many hours of grilling by police and gave a detailed description of what the two men had done to the girl, including where they had buried her. Then the second man was led to confirm his own participation in the crime as it had been described by his friend. The taped confessions (and not the illegal questioning leading up to them, which was not recorded) were the only evidence presented at their trial.
Decades later, the body of the victim was found in a shallow grave 30 miles from where the convicted men had said she was buried. She was clothed in a dress bearing no resemblance to the one the men described. Most disturbing of all, forensics showed no evidence of rape, and she had been killed by a single bullet to the back of the head, not by stabbing. The men got a new trial, and were convicted again, with the same DA arguing for their guilt. His explanation: the girl was dead, they confessed to the killing, and the details don’t matter.
Among the 800 pages of Brady material withheld from the two men’s lawyers: a man who resembled one of the sketches had come to police and confessed to the murder before they were convicted.
Just kidding! Presidents often try to stretch the already rubber boundaries of what the Constitution and even the law requires, only to get slapped down by the courts. This kind of thing was only grounds for impeachment (according to the Trump Deranged, the mainstream media pundits and Democrats) when Donald Trump did it.
But President Trump never tried anything as egregiously dictatorial as the vaccine mandate.
Tell us again who is “a threat to democracy.”
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, issued a rulingat the end of this week upholding a stay of the mandate after temporarily halting the mandate last weekend in response to lawsuits filed by and legal groups. The Washington Post, telegraphing its bias as usual, calls them “Republican-aligned businesses and legal groups.” Since the mandate was wildly excessive and pretty clearly illegal, the question is why “Democratic–aligned” organizations don’t also oppose it. I guess that’s nor really much of a question.
The Post also emphasizes that the panel consisted of judges appointed by Reagan or Trump, because in Progressivese, that means the ruling is partisan. No, it really isn’t. It’s just right, as any fair reading of the opinion by Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt and joined by Judges Edith H. Jones and Stuart Kyle Duncan will reveal. Of course, none of your metaphorically screaming Facebook friends will read it.
You will, though, right? It’s pretty thorough and damning, as well as bit nasty, which any administration trying something like this deserves. (It’s better than an impeachment!)
On this date in 1982, the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C. It has one of the more remarkable stories of any memorial or monument in our Capital. A deceptively simple V-shaped black-granite wall inscribed with the names of the 57,939 Americans who died in the conflict arranged in order of death date, the striking and sober memorial was the design of Maya Lin, a Yale University architecture student who won a nationwide competition. Many veterans and veterans’ groups initially hated Lin’s winning design, which they felt degraded their service and represented the controversial war ” as an ugly gash in our history.” However, within months of the memorial’s dedication, either by design or kismet, it became the most dynamic memorial of them all, as veterans and families of the perished walked the black reflective wall seeking the names of their loved ones and then leaving notes, flowers, photos, dog tags and even cans of beer. That tradition hasn’t changed since: the spot is among the most moving in the city, or anywhere in the nation. A Smithsonian Institution director called it “a community of feelings, almost a sacred precinct,” and a veteran declared that “it’s the parade we never got.”
My law school and section classmate, Robert W. Doubek, was one of the dedicated veterans instrumental in making the memorial a reality. He also graced the cast of a couple of my Gilbert and Sullivan shows at Georgetown. Bob wrote about how the memorial was created here.
1. Good for him. Stephen Sweeney, the second most powerful lawmaker in New Jersey and victim of one of the most stunning upsets of all those that rocked his party on election day, conceded defeat last week. The loss had been close enough to justify waiting until all the votes had come in, but eventually Sweeney had to face reality: virtually unknown truck driver Edward Durr had beaten him with a threadbare campaign—he spent less than $2000— that nobody believed could succeed. Once, Sweeney was considered a future contender to be governor of the Garden State. No more.
“The results of Tuesday’s election are in. All votes have been fairly counted. And I, of course, accept the results,” Sweeney said. “I want to congratulate Mr. Durr and wish him the best of luck. The people in the third legislative district are the best in New Jersey. It has been an honor and a privilege to represent them in the state Senate and to serve as the president of the state Senate.”
That’s the way it’s supposed to be done. Hillary, Trump and Stacey Abrams, take note.
Nothing thrills the soul of this ethicist more than a terrific legal ethics controversy leaping off the page in his morning newspaper on a Saturday morning. Better still, it involved, not the Kyle Rittenhouse trial but that other trial, the one really involving racist vigilantes—the trial of the three white men who shot black jogger Ahmaud Arbery as they attempted to make a “citizen’s arrest.”
Kevin Gough, the lawyer who represents William Bryan, one of the three men accused of murdering Arbery, asked Judge Timothy R. Walmsley to ban “high-profile members of the African American community” from the Brunswick, Georgia courtroom. The lawyer argued that the presence of the Rev. Al Sharpton at the trial last week could be “intimidating” to jurors. “We don’t want any more Black pastors coming in here,” Gough said.
The New York Times this morning headlined its story in the print edition “Cantankerous Lawyer At Arbery Trial Crossed Over A Line, Critics Say.” (The online edition’s version is bit more restrained: “Lawyer for Man Accused of Killing Ahmaud Arbery Draws Scrutiny.”) Of course, all lawyers for defendants in high-profile cases draw scrutiny. Fake news!) Interestingly but hardly surprisingly, the Times print headline is misleading. What “critics” say Gough crossed a line? Well, that would be Al Sharpton and another black pastor. The word “critics” implies objective observors who are disinterested parties. But that’s the Times these days. Sad, really.
Then the Times spends the rest of the piece, 21 paragraphs worth, telling readers what a loose cannon Gough is. Does the article ever bother to explain the legal, ethical and factual justifications for Gough’s request? Not at all. That’s not just sad, that’s journalism malpractice. Incompetence or deliberate disinformation? It’s Hanlon’s Razor time!
Ethics Alarms 