Month: November 2021

Ethics Dunce: Camilla Parker Bowles [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Fart manners

This goes right into the “Stop making me defend Joe Biden!” files. And, if I had one, the “Princess Diana was right about Camilla” files.

During the recent virtue-signaling, wasteful gathering in Scotland to discuss climate change, at which, for some reason, the wife of Prince Charles, Camilla Parker Bowles, The Duchess of Cornwall was attending, the President of the United States had occasion to spend a bit of time chatting with the woman who “crowded” Princess Di’s marriage.

And, during this bit of time, Joe Biden emitted an involuntary flatulent outburst. Now, even forgetting for the nonce the fact that Joe is older than dirt, this can happen to anyone in public, and the most basic Golden Rule-based manner of reacting to it is not to. Never elling anyone else, especially the media, about said discharge is even more required by etiquette, empathy, and reciprocity. [ Note of correction: That “not” got dropped in the original version posted last night. Ugh. Sorry.]This is true no matter who the unfortunate farter is, but it is certainly true when the individual is a world leader who must try to maintain an image of strength and dignity.

But what was Camilla’s reaction? The Daily Mail reports that Parker Bowles “hasn’t stopped talking about” Biden’s accident. The fart was, per the Daily Mail’s source, both “long” and “loud,” and also “impossible to ignore.”

This is despicable on her part: unkind, cruel, and a breach of respect and diplomacy. As Danielle Cohen observes over at “The Cut”: “Is there not a “discussing farts” section in the royal etiquette curriculum? I can’t believe Meghan Markle got in trouble for wearing nail polish and Camilla is allowed to do … this.”

Judicial Ethics Villain: Judge Amy Berman Jackson

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Thoughtcrime

You just can’t do this.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama-appointee, has made her animus against Donald Trump clear for years. She ordered Trump ally Paul Manafort into solitary confinement and was cavalier about law enforcement against Roger Stone. How anyone, including the judge herself, could think it was appropriate for her to preside over the fates of any of the January 6 rioters, is beyond me.

Nonetheless, she did, and is, and just demonstrated what kind of justice any of them can expect.

Michael Sibick is one of the more egregious rioters. He was arrested and charged with assaulting and robbing a Metropolitan Police Department officer of his police badge and radio during the attack on the Capitol, and stands indicted on 10 counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, robbery, and engaging in physical violence on the Capitol grounds. Though most defendants with far more extensive charges are usually granted bail, he has not, and has been incarcerated since March.

Last week, lucky Sibick had his renewed motion for bail considered by Judge Jackson. In a groveling letter to her, he wrote, in a letter to Judge Jackson, Sibick wrote:

“January 6th was a disgrace to our nation that left a scar Trump is ultimately responsible for, but we are strong and we will heal from it.  While many praise Trump, I loathe him.  His words and actions are nefarious causing pain and harm to the world. He is not a leader and should be ostracized from any political future, what he honestly needs to do is go away!”

Gee, Mike, why were you so upset about the election, then? Well, never mind: the whole idea of these prosecutions is to make the idiotic rioters blame Trump, so go ahead. The letter seemed to satisfy Jackson, even though the Biden Department of Justice wants to keep him locked up—domestic terrorist, don’t you know! Still, she had some special conditions if the now fully converted Trump-Hater was going to be able to breath free, even for a little while.

Jackson added conditions to the bail order that to gain release, Sibick had to agree not to watch “any news programs or political programs or talk shows” and not to attend any “political rallies.” Nor can Sibick “use any social media–including, but not limited to, Parler, Gab, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Discord, Twitter, SnapChat, TikTok, and any similar platform–on any electronic device (e.g, phone, table, computer, laptop).” By use, I assume that means “read.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Constitution prohibits the government from directly imposing a particular ban on constitutionally protected activities, and the “unconstitutional conditions” doctrine means that it cannot ban simply taking in ideas (as in rallies, online or from TV) as a condition of of pre-trial release. Do notice how the first social media platforms Jackson mentions are the conservative ones.

This case would be an ideal one to challenge for an American Civil Liberties Union that, sadly, no longer exists. Once, liberals would find this totalitarian-style restriction on thought as offensive as conservatives. So far, the only pundits I see sounding alarms are the conservatives.

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Pointer: Legal Insurrection

“Rust,” Guns, And The Barn Door Fallacy

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Barn door

The Barn Door Fallacy drives me crazy, and right now a particularly absurd outbreak of it is underway. The phenomenon, named after the old saw about “locking the barn door after the horse is gone,” is the product of pure emotionalism trumping reality: take extreme measures after a rare and perhaps preventable (though not necessarily) tragedy or accident as if doing so will change the fact that the unfortunate event happened. The “defund the police” madness was an obvious example: see, if there are no police, no police officer will ever unjustly kill an unarmed black man ever again! Problem solved! Brilliant!

These over-reactions are many things, all of them wrong. They are virtue-signalling by public officials who care less about solving a real problem than showing their empathy and outrage at something that “shouldn’t have happened.” They are irresponsible, because they advocate rushing into radical “solutions” to problems that are magnified by the proximity of the tragic event, and because the barn door fallacy advocates usually are insufficiently knowledgeable, often shockingly ignorant, in fact, regarding what they are grandstanding about. Moreover, the nostrums frequently are fueled by logical fallacies and rationalizations, such as “We have to do something!” and “If it saves just one life…!”

Much of the time, measures inspired by the Barn Door Fallacy make many things worse without making anything better. That is the likely result of the current Bran Door Fallacy freakout over the fatal gun accident on the set of “Rust,” in which a prop gun wielded by the movie’s star and producer, Alec Baldwin, fired a bullet that killed one and wounded another.

Now many in the movie industry are demanding that real guns be banned from all movie productions. Dozens of cinematographers have signed a pledge not to work on projects using functional firearms. A state lawmaker in California is drafting legislation that would ban operational firearms from sets.

Now, here’s a quiz: how many deaths from firearms have occurred on movie or TV production sets in the last, say, 50 years? Think about all the hundreds, thousands of gun battles and shootouts you have seen or know about. How many shooting deaths?

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They’re Shocked—SHOCKED!—That Trump Officials Deliberately Violated The Hatch Act

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Henry Kerner heads the Office of Special Counsel, and his new report following investigations into violations of the 1939 vintage law, known as the Hatch Act, that prohibits Federal employees from using their position to campaign for political candidates fingers thirteen of President Donald Trump’s senior aides, including his son-in-law and his chief of staff. It shows that they blatantly breached the law during the last weeks of the 2020 Presidential campaign, calculating that the Office of Special Counsel would not have time to investigate and issue findings before Election Day.

I’d say that calculation was correct, wouldn’t you? The report has come out more than a year later.

“Senior Trump administration officials chose to use their official authority not for the legitimate functions of the government, but to promote the re-election of President Trump in violation of the law,” the report concluded, adding, “The administration’s willful disregard for the law was especially pernicious considering the timing of when many of these violations took place.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what are you gong to do about it, other than make faces and write mean things? The Hatch Act is a perfect example of the principle that if people can cheat to obtain power or keep power, they will, if they know the penalties will be minimal or less. This is why mail-in ballots corrupt the electoral system, along with other holes in voting integrity. The Hatch Act isn’t enforced, so all administrations allow their officials to violate it. I don’t know if the law is enforceable. It is naive and irresponsible to expect Trump’s aides or any Presidential underlings regardless of party to eschew this unethical practice when they know they can get away with it, and the potential benefits of the violations are significant.

A President has to show that he regards the law as important. I can’t recall any President doing that as long as I’ve followed politics.

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There Is Hope: They Stopped Complaining About The US’s Broken Higher Education System, And Did Something About It…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

U of Austin

A group of distinguished scholars, iconoclasts and activists, alarmed “by the illiberalism and censoriousness prevalent in America’s most prestigious universities,”will establish a new university dedicated to free speech.”

It will be called the University of Austin, or UATX. Next summer the project will begin modestly with “Forbidden Courses,” a noncredit program designed to offer a “spirited discussion about the most provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities.” The next phase will be masters programs and if all goes well, undergraduate degrees will follow.

The campus, a real one, not a virtual campus, will be set in the Austin, Texas, area. The new university’s president is Pano Kanelos, the former president of St. John’s College in Annapolis. Several famous dissenters from the current culture of woke conformity and campus censorship that has poisoned the university experience in the U.S. led him to this point. Bari Weiss, the exiled Opinion editor for The New York Times; historian Niall Ferguson of the Hoover Institution; Heather Heying, an evolutionary biologist; Joe Lonsdale, a technology entrepreneur and co-founder of Palantir Technologies, the data analytics firm; Lawrence H. Summers, the former Harvard president; Steven Pinker, a Harvard linguist and psychologist; David Mamet, the playwright; and Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown are among those involved.

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Ethics Quiz: Indoctrination On Sesame Street

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Seseme St Covid

I don’t know why I didn’t see this coming.

Big Bird tweeted a few days ago, “I got the COVID-19 vaccine today! My wing is feeling a little sore, but it’ll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy. Ms. Hill even said I’ve been getting vaccines since I was a little bird. I had no idea!” Naturally, President Biden, who watches Sesame Street religiously (yes, it’s a cheap shot, but I’m in a bad mood) tweeted back, “Good on ya, @BigBird. Getting vaccinated is the best way to keep your whole neighborhood safe.”

This set off an immediate partisan and ideological debate, with conservative hone-schooling mother, blogger and pundit Bethany Mandel taking a leadership role. She wrote in part,

Just as “Sesame Street” isn’t content with allowing parents the freedom to guide their children’s own moral compass, so too are they uncomfortable with the idea of parents making individual risk assessments for their children’s health and safety. There is a moral absolutism necessary to be part of the left, which is where “Sesame Street’s” writers appear to fall. The messaging on COVID-19 vaccination has become yet another absolutist position. Big Bird’s tweet doesn’t exist just on Twitter. It’s part of a larger campaign from the series to “educate” parents on the vaccine.

Earlier this year, she wrote about the iconic children’s educational show shifting from ABCs and vocabulary into the culture wars:

Those in charge of messaging and programming children’s media have positioned themselves as arbiters of our children’s moral compass. And that Soviet-style demand for a universal, well-curated set of beliefs from a particular coastal lens should concern all parents — not just those with religious or personal beliefs that make them uncomfortable with a particular episode of “Sesame Street” aired during Pride Month.

Parents should take note: The aim of children’s media is no longer just to provide free, education-minded babysitting while you get ready for work.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

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From “The Best People” Files: CNN Finds An Ex-Trump Staffer Nobody Remembers To Make Headlines By Saying Trump Will Try To Be A Dictator If He’s Allowed Back In The White House

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Farah

This one is cross-filed with the Ethics Alarms “Fake News” stories, in the “Future News” sub-file. I would say it’s disgusting, but the mainstream media’s standards have become so disgusting that I don’t know what qualifies as disgusting any more. It’s like complaining, “This is a disgusting maggot-infested road-kill sandwich!!! I should be able to get a better maggot-infested road-kill sandwich than this!”

CNN dredged up Alyssa Farah, who previously served as White House communications director under President Donald Trump for a few months in 2020. She was a guest because apparently CNN was tipped off that she could be counted on to denigrate her former boss. We will be seeing more of this, as the mainstream news media embarks on its mission of trying to torpedo Trump’s 2021 Presidential prospects, since it is increasingly clear that a relatively bright GOP sea anemone will be able to defeat Joe Biden. Factual problems with Trump are obviously deemed inadequate, so now the media is stooping to getting predictions of dire actions from people with no more expertise or credibility than Alyssa Milano.

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 11/9/2021: Kristallnacht Means That This Date Has Nowhere To Go But Up

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

kristallnacht

On November 9, 1938, Hitler’s  Nazis began their campaign of terror against Jewish people by destroying their homes and businesses in Germany and Austria. This was “Kristallnacht,” or “Night of Broken Glass,” which continued through November 10, and is now recognized as the beginning of the Holocaust. The carnage of hate left approximately 100 Jews dead, 7,500 Jewish businesses damaged and hundreds of synagogues, homes, schools and graveyards vandalized. About 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, with many of them sent to concentration camps for several months until they promised to leave Germany. How many supposedly educated American know about the significance of this date? I’ll be watching to see where the news media notes it, and which sources do. The event is not generally taught in the public schools; I didn’t learn about it my school system back in Arlington, Massachusetts, which was then regarded as one of the best in the state. Sir Lawrence Olivier was my teacher, as my family never missed an episode of “The World at War” on Sundays.

1. Here’s another reason I pay obscene amounts to read the New York Times: it is astounding how extreme Left the Times Sunday Book Review section is. This is the part of the paper that makes no pretense of being written for anyone but the New York City intellectuals, and it is fingerprint evidence of just how smug, biased, anti-capitalism and contemptuous of their own country this toxic group is. The Times just published a compendium of notable reviews during the publication’s 125 year history, and the brie and Chablis Democrats loved it, especially novelist Mario Puzo’s snide review of conservative William F. Buckley’s 1968 collection of essays, “The Jewelers Eye.” Here was the passage that spattered brains on my bathroom ceiling:

“Buckley is as royally condescending to his betters as he is to peasantry. He derides Arthur Schlesinger for talking such nonsense as that the best defense against Communism may be the social welfare state. Again this is surely innocence at work. He doesn’t quite get Schlesinger’s drift, which is, obviously, that when a force stronger than yourself says, “Your money or your life,” you hand over the money, and if you’re really smart you hand over some of your money before anybody gets tough about it. It would seem unnecessary to simplify in such a fashion, but Buckley still thinks he is being begged for a handout; Schlesinger knows it’s a stickup. I do not mean to cast aspersions on the welfare state with this analogy; after all, a stickup within the legal framework of our society — via the vote, etc. — is the last word in exercising individual freedom.”

Yes, Puzo is advocating socialism as a wise and necessary capitulation to the inevitable march of Communism. Gee, I bet he was surprised when the Wall fell. And while Buckley was annoying, Puzo calling Schlesinger his “better” is more than biased, it’s ridiculous. Schlesinger was the Kennedys’ court liar, successfully draping the sociopaths in glory for decades until their corruption was undeniable. He also warped the American historical record for half a century by, among other things, declaring Woodrow Wilson a great President and Eisenhower a weak one. But of all the reviews of the past the Times chose to reprint, guess which one came in for the most praise in the next Review’s letter section.

2. Speaking of The Times on Sundays, “The Ethicist” covered a dilemma that I bet social media has made disturbingly common. A woman wrote to Appiah (that’s the Ethicist’s real name) explaining that she had an affair with a cad who, unbeknownst to her, was in a supposedly committed relationship with someone else all the while. He dumped the inquirer (and had taken up with another back-up lover), and then she discovered that her ex-‘s partner was one of her Facebook friends, though one she had never met. Now the FBF was visiting her city, and wanted to finally meet.

The question: should she tell her that her love is really a cheating heel? The Ethicist gets it right (he usually does): Of course. Why wouldn’t she? It’s the Golden Rule all the way. The fact that she also gets to stick it to the bastard is just a collateral benefit.

3. Who are those 15%? Yesterday CNN was reporting on yet another depressing poll of Joe Biden’s approval (I know, polls). This one said that “only” 15% of those polled strongly felt that the President was doing a good job. Who are these idiots? What is it that they like so much?

The lies? The dementia? The gas prices? Afghanistan? Hunter’s paintings? The flood of illegal immigrants? The College Fix found an unexpected answer: somewhere in that 15% of mouth-breathers are Brown University professors. Professor Wendy Schiller of the Brown political science department, for example, praised Biden for bringing a restoration of “stability” and “predictability” to the Presidency: “He seems to me to have a moral fortitude where he is really certain that what he’s trying to do is the right thing to do for as many people as possible.”

Ivy League professors who reason like that are teaching our best and brightest.

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Why Do We Let People Like This Idiot Into Congress?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Anime video

Somehow, this story seems related to the previous post.

Paul Gosar (R-AZ) tweeted out an altered anime video that attacks illegal immigrants (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and shows someone with two swords attacking a giant Joe Bden head. The video in his tweet used clips from popular Japanese anime “Attack on Titan,” and opens with Gosar’s name under Japanese text, which reads “attack of immigrants” (if you can read Japanese) before it continues to show real clips of Gosar and Border Patrol agents spliced alongside scenes from the anime show’s opening credits.

Several news outlets say the video shows Gosar killing killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. If it does, I missed it, but then I could barely stand watching the thing. If that’s really in the video, I’d say it’s unprofessional, uncivil and unethical. All of it is inexcusable, though.

What’s the matter with this guy? Is he 12? This isn’t the kind of video a member of Congress should be having made, or put on social media. It’s an embarrassment to Congress, his party, his state, and his country. By what bizarre concept of public service and the House ethics rules could anyone conclude that such an assaultive, offensive, infantile piece of agitprop belongs in the public square?

If the rumored 2022 “red wave” doesn’t accomplish anything better than to put more jerks like Gosar in the House, it’s not worth the effort.

Yet Another “A Nation Of Assholes” Update, On Ice…

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

foxes-goalie-2

I wish that I was as prescient all the time as I was in 2015, when I warned of the cultural rot relating to basic societal civility that would surely come if the United States elected a leader as habitually vulgar and nasty in his rhetoric as Donald Trump. True, I mistakenly predicted that the effects would be concentrated in the young, when in fact Mr. Trump’s lack of restraint and taste was quickly adopted by his political foes as well as entertainers and pundits.

The most recent evidence of my prognostication powers, however, comes from the group I originally signaled were most vulnerable: high school students. During a hockey game last week between the Armstrong River Hawks and the Mars Fighting Planets in Pennsylvania, a number of Armstrong Junior-Senior High School students began chanting “she’s a whore” and “suck our dicks” at the Mars goalie. The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Hockey League announced last week that Armstrong students would be prohibited from attending games for the remainder of the season, including during the playoffs.

What possessed these students? I grew up in hockey-crazy Greater Boston, and my high school was state hockey power. I never heard chants like that. What changed?

The President of the United States changed, that’s what. Trump is no racist and he wasn’t Hitler, but his disrespect for woman and his verbal misogyny cannot be denied, nor can his vulgar rhetoric, though much of the worst of that was leaked by staffers who betrayed his trust in ways no previous President had to endure. Moreover, the despicable chants at the hockey game come while half the media is rationalizing and excusing a coded “Fuck Joe Biden” chant, and at recent sporting events, not even coded. That chant too flows directly from Trump’s un-Presidential boorishness.

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