Month: December 2021

Ethics Alarms On The New York Times’ “Most Important Debates” Of 2021, Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Part I set some kind of Ethics Alarms record for reader disinterest, which I much admit, I don’t understand. These are all topics we have covered in some detail here over the last year, and the analysis of them by the alleged “newspaper of record’s” experts is, to say the least, perverse and revealing…yet the post’s first installment inspired just a single comment. Well, the Times’ take on the remaining issues are arguably worse. I find it fascinating, anyway. Here’s the rest of the highlights…

Can we save the planet?

It is embarrassing for a supposedly respectable news organization to frame an issue in such a hysterical and intentionally fear-mongering manner, which assumes one side of a debate is correct without reflection of nuance. The Times’ author on this topic, Farhad Manjoo, is a tech reporter, not an expert on climatology, so he has been given a platform to opine on something he doesn’t understand sufficiently to discuss reliably. On the topic of climate change, this is, sadly, typical. His article contains the kind of sentence midway through that would normally make me stop reading because of the bias, spin, hyperbole and mendacity: “During the Trump years — as the United States tore up international climate deals and flood and fire consumed swaths of the globe — unrestrained alarm about the climate became the most cleareyed of takes.”

There were no “climate deals,” just unenforceable virtue-signaling and posturing like the Paris Accords; the link between present day “flood and fire” and climate change is speculative at best, and unrestrained alarm is never “cleareyed,’ especially when those alarmed, like Manjoo, couldn’t read a climate model if Mr. Rogers was there explaining it. Then, after telling us that the Trump years were a prelude to doom, he says that since 2014, things are looking up. Much of what he calls “bending the needle” occurred under Trump.

Should the Philip Roth biography have been pulled?

This one is so easy and obvious that the fact that the Times thinks it deserves special attention is itself a tell. The answer is “Of course not!,” as an Ethics Alarms post explained. An absolutely competent biography was pulled by its publisher, W.W. Norton, never to be in print again, because its author, who had written other acclaimed biographies, was in the process of being “cancelled” for allegations of sexual misconduct toward women. I wrote,

“…[P]ublisher W.W. Norton sent a memo to its staff announcing that it will permanently take Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth out of print, as a result of allegations that Bailey sexually assaulted multiple women and also behaved inappropriately toward his students when he was an eighth grade English teacher.

If that sentence makes sense to you, The Big Stupid has you by the brain stem.

It apparently makes sense to the Times, although its review of the matter doesn’t answer its own question. Why not? This is also obvious: as journalists, the idea that what a writer writes should be judged by what a writer’s personal life has involved is anathema, but the Times’ readers are so woke that the paper would dare not say so. Integrity! Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month (And Most Revealing Unethical Quote Of 2021): Atlantic Senior Editor Ron Brownstein

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

“I don’t think it’s fundamentally about incivility. It’s about insurrection.”

—-Ron Brownstein, Senior Editor of “The Atlantic” magazine and political analyst for CNN, commenting on the “Let’s go, Brandon!” episode during President Biden’s Christmas Eve session with NORAD tracking Santa’s sleigh

[In case you were MIA over Christmas weekend–like most people—Ethics Alarms covered what Brownstein was commenting on here,  and here (Item #3)]

Brownstein went on to say,

[T]he whole Let’s Go Brandon kind of motif is a reflection of the view of two-thirds of the Republican base, driven by Trump’s claims, false claims, and the Big Lie, that Biden is an illegitimate president.

And it reflects the findings in multiple polls by the American Enterprise Institute, Vanderbilt University, and others, that a majority of Republican voters now say the American way of life is disappearing, so fast that traditional American way of life that we may have to use force to save it.

I think you’re seeing — this is a manifestation, not just of incivility but of the fundamental view of the illegitimacy, and the ominous shores we’re sailing toward very quickly in 2022 and especially 2024.

A digression is in order...Commenters critical of Ethics Alarms, both here and on my off-site email, often say that I am irrationally “angry” about situations and incidents that I rate as unethical. That’s an unfair tactic employed to misrepresent what are serious, analytical assessments as emotional ones. I write hard–always have; it’s my style— but I’m not an angry person. I’m essentially an optimistic and happy person. I don’t fume over politics or the culture: I’m aware of developments, but getting angry does no good at all, and I’m not wired that way.

But Brownstein’s statement does make me angry (that’s me above). Who charted that course to that shore, Ron, you flaming, dishonest asshole? Your magazine, along with the rest of the “resistance” that it helped fuel for the length of the entire Trump administration, from the moment he was elected in 2016. Continue reading →

H Jackson Browne And “Life’s Little Instruction Book”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In 1991, H. Jackson Brown Jr. hit the best seller lists with a humble tome called “Life’s Little Instruction Book.” It consisted of 511 pieces of advice, common sense, traditional wisdom and best practices in life, adapted from a hand-written 32 page guide he handed to his son when he went off to college. “This is what your dad knows about living a rewarding life,” Brown told his son. He had tried his hand at authorship with two earlier books of fatherly advice, but decided that his latest approach had more promise.

It sure did. Re-tooled and expanded into “Life’s Little Instruction Book,” it was a bestseller for years, much imitated, and a contribution both to Brown’s fame and financial well-being and the nation’s healthy ethics alarms. By 1997, the book had sold about seven million copies, and it was translated into 33 languages

The book is all about ethics, though not explicitly. Even the corniest of the entries are based in ethical principles. “Resist the temptation” just means to keep your ethics alarms functioning and not let them be silenced by non-ethical considerations. #34, “At meetings, resist turning around to see who has just arrived late,” is a Golden Rule application; #22, “Learn three clean jokes,”is a subtle way to remind us to not allow incivility to become a habit.  “Avoid sarcastic remarks,” # 81, is no more than a caution against being a habitual jerk. #89, “Don’t let anyone ever see you tipsy” is a call for dignity and decorum. #254, “Learn to show cheerfulness, even when you don’t feel like it,” is a reminder that being a responsible member of society means not allowing your own feelings to undermine your group’s spirit. “Overtip breakfast waitresses”  was #7, a call for generosity and gratitude. #144, much ridiculed at the time, is “Take someone bowling.” It just means be kind, and to reach out to someone who might be lonely.

Ethics is never considered cool, and efforts to encourage good behavior is typically mocked. Journalists and critics mostly ridiculed “Life’s Little Instruction Book” as collection of naive nostrums unrelated to the real world. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Brian O’Neill wrote, in a typical reaction, that the book was “designed to teach nothing but how to part with $5.95.”

In truth, what Brown’s book most resembled was  “110 Rules of  Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,” which our first President was forced to commit to memory by his father. Those rules served George well, and had a major impact on the degree to which he was trusted by the infamously competitive and back-stabbing Founders. Pretty much all of George’s guidelines turn up in various forms in the “Instruction Book;” I have often wondered if Brown ever read them. His book also has one advantage over the “110 Rules”: it isn’t interrupted with archaic howlers like George’s #13:

 Kill no vermin, or fleas, lice, ticks, etc. in the sight of others; if you see any filth or thick spittle put your foot dexterously upon it; if it be upon the clothes of your companions, put it off privately, and if it be upon your own clothes, return thanks to him who puts it off.

Continue reading →

Boxing Day Ethics Parcels, 12/26/2021: Assholes, Hypocrites, Fake Martyrs And Monsters [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

There was originally a video of the incident above, but YouTube took it down, and its videos are the only ones I can use. You can see the video here. The episode is instructive, as it…

1) …shows how far things can get out of hand when people with dead ethics alarms meet by chance…

2)…demonstrates how the still ongoing fear-mongering over the Wuhan virus and friends by the news media is exacerbating already-strained fault-lines in U.S. society

3)…how really, really stupid the mask rules are and how ignorant fanatics are who think masks are more than minimally helpful in keeping infection at bay.

When once normal people start using the conflict resolving skills of guests on the old Jerry Springer Show, we need to worry about it. The man’s solution to being confronted in this incident was to start name-calling. (Calling anyone “Karen” is signature significance for a dolt); the woman’s approach was to start acting like a first-grader. I particular like her declaration that she won’t wear her mask until he puts on his. One article I saw today claimed that this kind of mask dispute was about “What it meant to be an American.” No, it’s about the importance of not being an asshole just because someone else is being an asshole.

Conservative talk-radio host Monica Matthews tweeted: “The legacy of Fauci, CDC, WHO, NIH, Congress & every airline. This is what they’ve done to us. Merry Christmas.” Indeed those culprits don’t help, but nobody makes anyone act unethically.

1. Project Veritas Ethics Train Wreck update! When last we looked in on this mess, Justice Charles D. Wood of State Supreme Court in Westchester County had issued an order requiring the The New York Times to cease further efforts to solicit or acquire attorney-client privileged material, including information related to Ashley Biden’s diary, and also blocked the Times from publishing documents prepared by Project Veritas lawyers f that the paper had acquired through leaks from the FBI. The Times’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, described the ruling as “unconstitutional.” On December 24, the judge, ordered The Times to turn over any physical copies of the Project Veritas documents in question, and to destroy any electronic copies in the newspaper’s possession. Now the Times says it will seek a stay of the ruling and will appeal.

The publisher of The Times, A.G. Sulzberger, said in a statement,

“This ruling should raise alarms not just for advocates of press freedoms but for anyone concerned about the dangers of government overreach into what the public can and cannot know. In defiance of law settled in the Pentagon Papers case, this judge has barred The Times from publishing information about a prominent and influential organization that was obtained legally in the ordinary course of reporting.”

Well, “legally” is a weasel word here: the documents were illegally leaked to the Times, though they could legally accept them because the press thinks document laundering is wonderful, and it usually gets away with it. Nevertheless, the public has no “right to know” about the communications between an organization and its lawyers. Continue reading →

Ethics Alarms On The New York Times’ “Most Important Debates” Of 2021, Part 1

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Debates Times

The print edition of today’s Sunday Times, the usually unreadable Sunday Review Section (which I mostly stopped reading mid-Trump administration when it became a monotonous and shrill “bash the President” orgy every week), is devoted to an alleged examination of “The Year in Opinion.” Online, the feature is called “The Year in 41 Debates.” At Ethics Alarms, I have several apropos descriptions of it:

  • Predictable, as the Times’ commentary follows the paper’s usual lock-step progressive/Democratic Party bias
  • Dishonest, and many of the “debates” are framed in ways that support the writer’s spin on the topic at hand, which is advocacy, not review, and
  • Satisfying, because the vast majority of the issues and events were covered here, and, with the invaluable assistance of EA commenters, better (and without the $80 a month charge I pay to review the daily distortions of the U.S.’s “paper of record”), with the exception of a couple I missed that were not worth covering anyway. For example, apparently on January 2 a social media controversy erupted over whether a father was mean to his daughter by not helping her figure out how to open a can of beans. He was attacked world-wide, dubbed”Bean Dad,” and accused of abusive and toxic behavior. I’m glad I missed that one….and
  • Facile

I am going to briefly encapsulate some of the Times’ takes on the significant, nonbean-related topics that relate to ethics, or the Times’ lack of them. I’ll be skipping the pure partisan punditry, like “Is the G.O.P. still the party of Trump?” Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Christmas Ethics Stocking Stuffers, 12/25/21,” Item #3, The ACLU And Canceling Student Loan Debts

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Activists And Musicians Gather At The White House To Greet The Staff With Joyful Music And A Demand To Cancel Student Debt

I have a frightening backlog of posts and topics (especially after getting the bare minimum up during the traditional Christmas Traffic Crash,though in 2021 the whole year has been something of a crash, but “that way madness lies”), but this Comment of the Day by the ever-provocative and reasonable Extradimensional Cephalopod pushed it’s way to the front of the line on sheer merit.

Here is his/its (EC had never specified his pronouns, and for that I am grateful) COTD on yesterday’s collection of notes, specifically #3 on the ALCU pimping for student loan forgiveness:

***

I think the whole “student debt” issue should be re-framed.

Q1: Why do so many people need to go to college?

A1a: To learn how to think, in theory.
Rejoinder to A1: They should be learning to think in primary and secondary schools, and in their families and communities.
A1b: To get jobs that require college degrees.

From A1b:
Q2: Why do they need jobs that require college degrees? Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Jared Schmeck [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

That’s nice…embarrassing the President of the United States while he’s engaged in a non-partisan Christmas-related appearance. How clever. How brave.

What an asshole.

As you can see above, President Biden and the First Lady were set up by (allegedly) a father participating in the annual White House NORAD Santa-tracking call, who ended his conversation with POTUS with the “Let’s Go Brandon,” the code for “Fuck Joe Biden.”  After the caller, identified as “Jared from Oregon,” but later revealed to be Jared Schmeck, wished the President and Jill Biden a merry Christmas and added, “…and let’s go Brandon!” Poor clueless Joe responded “Let’s go Brandon, I agree!”

Hilarity and ridicule quickly followed in conservative media- and social medialand.

Continue reading →

Christmas Ethics Stocking Stuffers, 12/25/21

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

One of my favorite Christmas songs, introduced by one of my favorite singers…the remarkable story of “Do You Hear What I Hear?’, written during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, was last told in a  2018 Ethics Alarms post.

1. Because women and minorities must be the “heroes” of everything…Washington Post “gender” contributor Monica Hesse contributed a truly fatuous (but predictable) column yesterday explaining that Mary (Donna Reed) was the “real hero” of “It’s A Wonderful Life,” which  had its 2021 updated ethics companion published here on Christmas Eve. Hesse’s one use to society is to demonstrate repeatedly that if the only tool one has is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. All Hesse’s column shows is that she doesn’t understand the movie or its message despite claiming to love it.  George is the hero of the story, but he doesn’t realize it—that’s the point. Next on the hero standings has to be Clarence the Angel, who does stop George from killing himself, as well as teach him that that he hasn’t been a failure, the misconception that leads George to the bridge. Mary certainly does her part, but reframing the film as one centering on her is like  so many other such distortions during The Great Stupid: it requires woke biases to smother perspective, common sense and facts. Here’s Hesse’s whole case:

When, in one flashback, a market crash threatens to sink the Bailey Building & Loan, whose idea is it to donate George and Mary’s honeymoon funds to keep things afloat? Not George’s. Panicked customers are storming the lobby when Mary shows up with fistfuls of cash. When George wants to throw rocks at an abandoned house, it’s Mary who suggests they restore the house instead. The film’s final, triumphant scene is only made possible because while George’s genius plan to correct his uncle’s error involves jumping off a bridge for the life insurance policy, Mary is racing around town rustling up donations.

Well, A) the honeymoon money was the money George had saved, and Mary offered to give it up without consulting her new spouse: it wasn’t hers to give, as I noted in the IAWL post; B) calling Mary’s determination to renovate a derelict house “heroic” is quite a stretch, and Hesse’s representation of the scene is false. Mary never says she wants to renovate it; she says, “It’s full of romance, that old place. I’d like to live in it,” which sounds more like hyperbole than an expression of dedication to the cause of historic building restoration. Then she picks up a rock and breaks a window. C) Mary’s canvassing for cash would never have led to that grand finale if Clarence hadn’t stopped George from killing himself. Besides, most of Mary’s fundraising was unnecessary: all she needed to do was call up poor Sam Wainwright, whom she and George betrayed and mocked, and exploit his tenderness for Mary and inexplicable affection for George. Sam’s generosity made all the other donations superfluous.

Continue reading →

The Ethics Alarms 2021 Christmas Eve Edition Of The Complete “It’s A Wonderful Life” Ethics Guide!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Wonderful Life2

2021 Introduction

I haven’t seen the film yet this holiday season, but I did listen to the radio version, also starring James Stewart and Donna Reed last night. It’s not much of a substitute. As it was with last year, this movie’s intended message needs to be considered and taken to heart in 2021. Frank Capra, the movie’s director ,designed the film to explain why it’s a wonderful country we live in. It may be that more and more vocal and powerful people want to send the opposite message today than ever before.

The fascinating and moving documentary “Five Came Back” (on Netflix) has been shown several times in the Marshall house this year. It tells the story of how five of Hollywood’s greatest directors, William Wyler, George Stevens, John Ford, John Huston and Frank Capra were recruited by the Pentagon to document World War II, some of their efforts to be used as propaganda, some as a record of remarkable time. All five directors were profoundly changed by what they saw, and Capra was no exception. He went into the war as perhaps America’s most popular film director, creator of upbeat movies celebrating common Americans doing extraordinary things, the nation’s families, the power of love and American exceptionalism. They called his movies “Capra Corn,” and the description fit such classics as “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington,” “Meet John Doe,” and other critical and box office hits. Following World War II and his experience overseas, Capra no longer felt as upbeat about life and human nature, though he remained a passionate patriot. Like the returning soldiers found the culture changed and his emotions raw. Families whose loved one had died or returned with disabling wounds struggled to believe that their sacrifices were justified. The atom bombs that ended the war also opened up a dangerous new era of paranoia and fear.

Capra and his director compatriots in the war effort decided to start a new production company, driven by directors rather than soulless studio moguls.  “It’s A Wonderful Life,” a far more complex and often dark story than the pre-war Capra creations, was chosen to be the first project of the new Liberty Pictures. Based on an idea by author Philip Van Doren Stern, it was the story of a good man who becomes bitter and disillusioned when his plans and aspirations become derailed by the random surprises of life.  Unable to get his short story published, Stern had sent it to friends as a 21-page Christmas card. Film producer David Hempstead read it, and bought the movie rights for Capra’s company. The story was just what America needed, Capra reasoned, to restore its belief that what the nation had accomplished was worth the pain, loss and sacrifice, and that the nation itself had led a “wonderful life” despite many mistakes and missteps. The new film could restore the nation’s flagging optimism, pride and hope.

Capra immediately thought of actor and now war hero James Stewart to play protagonist George Bailey. Three years of flying bombing raids against the Nazis in the US Air Force had left the the 37-year-old suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome, and like his non-celebrity comrades in arms, Stewart returned home in 1945 to find that everything had changed: his contract with MGM had run out, his agent had retired, and other stars had taken his place. Stewart signed on with the ambitious project, hoping neither of them lost their  touch.

As production proceeded in 1946, the cast and crew felt they were making an important movie. Bedford Falls became one of the largest American film sets ever created to that point at four acres, with 75 fake stores and buildings, a three-block main street, and 20 full-grown oak trees. To avoid the traditional problem of fake-looking snow, the special effects department invented a new and more realistic process. (I wish it was used more often: fake snow drives me crazy in movies.)

Stewart, who was still suffering from the effects of the war and at times was close to quitting. In the scene where George, in a roadside bar, desperate and defeated, is praying to a God he doesn’t believe in. He rubs a trembling hand against his mouth, and starts to cry. The gesture wasn’t in the script, or requested by Capra. It was real.

Stewart explained years later,

“I felt the loneliness, the hopelessness of people who had nowhere to turn, and my eyes filled with tears. I broke down sobbing. That was not planned at all.”

Stewart felt George Bailey was his career’s best performance (it is) and Capra believed he had made his best film. “I thought it was the greatest film I ever made,” he said later. “Better yet, I thought it was the greatest film anybody ever made.”

It may be, but it started out as a catastrophic flop. The movie lost money and its failure killed Capra’s production company. His directing career never recovered, and what he believed was his greatest work was forgotten for decades. Republic Pictures, which owned the film’s copyright, didn’t bother to renew the rights in 1974. It was essentially free to local television channels, and they began showing it constantly.

Quality and genius have a way of defeating critics. Capra was right, Stewart was right, the cast and crew were right. It is a classic; more than that, it is a movie that can change lives. The story accomplishes just what Capra intended it to accomplish. In a New York Times piece about the movie by a self-professed cynic, Wendell Jamieson wrote about seeing the movie for the first time as teen in a classroom showing, and confessed,

It’s something I felt while watching the film all those years ago, but was too embarrassed to reveal….That last scene, when Harry comes back from the war and says, “To my big brother, George, the richest man in town”? Well, as I sat in that classroom, despite the dreary view of the parking lot; despite the moronic Uncle Billy; despite the too-perfect wife, Mary; and all of George’s lost opportunities, I felt a tingling chill around my neck and behind my ears. Fifteen years old and imagining myself an angry young man, I got all choked up. And I still do.

Yeah, me too. But the reason isn’t that its a manipulative, sentimental ending, though that was what contemporary critics complained about. The reason is that Harry’s toast states a life truth that too many of us go through our own lives missing. What makes our lives successful (or not), and what makes makes our existence meaningful is not how much money we accumulate, or how much power we wield, or how famous we are. What matters is how we affect the lives of those who share our lives, and whether we leave our neighborhood, communities, associations and nation better or worse than it would have been “if we had never been born.”

It’s a tough lesson, and some of us, perhaps most, never learn it. “It’s A Wonderful Life,” though it shows how one man finally got  the message using Heaven, alternate reality, angels and fantasy to do articulate it, can be a powerful ethics tool.

1. “If It’s About Ethics, God Must Be Involved”

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Hark! It’s The Christmas Eve Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Merry Christmas, everyone! 

I can’t wait to see what ethical gifts you ethics angels leave under our metaphorical tree!