Month: August 2022

Prof. Turley’s Mutual Defense Proposal To Battle Ideological State Government Boycotts

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Ethics Alarms wrote about the efforts by some “blue” states, notably California, to unethically bully other states into bending to their partisan will in opposition to their own voters in this post from last month, condemning the practice. That essay involved California’s “black list” preventing state travel to others states that in California’s consistently warped assessment, “discriminates” against LGBTQ Americans—you know, like by not allowing biological men to instantly become female collegiate swimmers just by saying they are.

This is not the first coercive effort of its kind, nor will it be the last. Major League Baseball was convinced to move its All-Star Game in 2021 from Atlanta because a reasonable Georgia voting integrity law was falsely labeled as “voter suppression.” California was at it again last week, as Gov. Newsome called upon Hollywood production companies to stop filming in states such as Georgia or Oklahoma with strict anti-abortion laws. In other states, legislation is developing  to block any state contracts with businesses in states with anti-LGBTQ legislation or pro-gun ownership laws, or that significantly limit abortion.

The July EA post concluded,

California’s attack on pluralism, democracy and federalism as well as its unethical efforts to try to influence governing decisions of other states is far, far worse that any imagined “discrimination” the Golden State claims to be reacting to. California has no respect for other states; it refuses to acknowledge that everyone doesn’t agree with California’s frequently warped vales and priorities and that there is nothing wrong with that; and it is deliberately acting as an agent of discord and division in the nation at a time when such conduct by a state, an official, or even a celebrity is particularly irresponsible.

California’s boycott list expresses exactly the same un-American spirit as bars, restaurants and other establishments that refuse service based on political views (Ethics Alarms has discussed that revolting trend many times)….

How can California’s toxic conduct be stopped? …This may be one of those rare exceptions where “tit for tat” becomes ethical as a last resort. The other states should consider taking retaliatory measures against California, and execute their own boycotts.

Now Jonathan Turley, the rapidly red-pilling Constitutional Law scholar from George Washington Law School in D.C., has proposed a formula to do exactly that. He writes in part,

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The FBI Raid On Mar-a-Lago

/ Jack Marshall / 60 Comments

Above are some of Andrew Yang’s tweets regarding the raid on Donald Trump’s resort residence in Palm Beach,Florida yesterday, executed by the FBI reportedly to find and retrieve classified documents that the former President improperly kept after leaving the White House. Yang is a tech executive and an amateur politician at best, but he’s smart and perceptive, and as the recent founder of a (doomed) centrist third party with national aspirations, is arguably more objective than most observers.

Except Ethics Alarms, of course…

Here is what we know: The Times reports…

Trump said on Monday that the F.B.I. had searched his Palm Beach, Fla., home and had broken open a safe — an account signaling a major escalation in the various investigations into the final stages of his presidency.

The search, according to multiple people familiar with the investigation, appeared to be focused on material that Mr. Trump had brought with him to Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence, when he left the White House. Those boxes contained many pages of classified documents, according to a person familiar with their contents.

Mr. Trump delayed returning 15 boxes of material requested by officials with the National Archives for many months, only doing so when there became a threat of action to retrieve them. The case was referred to the Justice Department by the archives early this year….

The F.B.I. would have needed to convince a judge that it had probable cause that a crime had been committed, and that agents might find evidence at Mar-a-Lago, to get a search warrant. Proceeding with a search on a former president’s home would almost surely have required sign-off from top officials at the bureau and the Justice Department.

Trump’s statement regarding the raid was classic Trump:

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Poe’s Law In “The Great Stupid”: Which Is Satire And Which Is Woke Derangement?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Two stories, both head-explodingly idiotic, both linked to Bizarro World Ethics and pathological virtue-signaling needs in oppressive leftist-indoctrination saturated cultures. One is a gag, the other is a tragedy, yet there is hardly a filament of difference between them in the 21st Century ethics and rationality rot they illustrate.

I read the two in succession by pure coincidence, and Poe’s Law immediately leaped into my mind. Poe’s Law was formulated in 20o5 (by Nathan Poe, not Edgar Allan Poe) and has become an essential concept since. It holds that satirical accounts involving extreme examples of ideological insanity can be impossible to distinguish from actual events, because current ideological extremism defies parody. Let’s cut to the chase, for this isn’t a quiz: the satirical piece was “I apologize for my white baby.”

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Stop Making Me Defend Pete Rose!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Pete Rose, baseball’s all-time hit leader who received a lifetime (and justified) ban from baseball for betting on games while a manager, was my very first Ethics Dunce, way back in January of 2004, on the old Ethics Scoreboard. Since then Pete has come up here often, with a thick and varied ethics dossier. The man is a slimeball; there is no disputing it. He knowingly violated baseball’s most inviolate rule; he lied about it in more than one way; he ended up in jail for defrauding the IRS; he has attempted multiple schemes to cash in on his own misconduct. Rose is the poster boy for the King’s Pass: he assumed that rules and laws didn’t apply to him because he was a Great and Beloved Player. Yes, he was a great, beloved, unique and entertaining player, but Pete Rose wouldn’t know an ethical value if it were nailed to his forehead.

And yet…the most recent attack on Rose’s character is contrived and unfair.

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Ethics Dunces: The Sensitive Lawyers

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

From the Washington Post:

The last thing Fred Guttenberg told his 14-year-old daughter was that it was time for her to go, that she was going to be late. Hours after rushing his two children to school that Valentine’s Day morning in 2018, a shooter unleashed a barrage of gunfire inside a Parkland, Fla., high school — killing 17 people, including Jaime Guttenberg.

During Tuesday’s sentencing proceedings for the convicted shooter, Nikolas Cruz, Guttenberg’s voice broke while he talked of the imagined future he had for Jaime, one that never came to be. But his were not the only tears falling in court — members of Cruz’s defense team were also crying, videos show.

“I cannot recall if I actually ever did tell Jaime that day how much I loved her. I never knew that I would lose the chance to say it over and over and over again,” Guttenberg said as public defender Nawal Najet Bashiman dabbed her eyes with a tissue. Two others on Cruz’s team also shed tears during testimony Tuesday.

That is Assistant public defender Tamara Curtis wiping her eyes in the photo above.

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From Acceptance To Celebration: An Ethics Conflict (Don’t Bother Trying To Explain This To Bill Maher)

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

With his uncanny instinct for taking bows for making an obvious observation while missing the point, pseudo-comic Bill Maher once again engaged in his favorite topic of fat-shaming last week, this time with a “Eureka!” to share. The U.S. has inexplicably gone from fat acceptance to “fat celebration,” which the HBO wit <gag!choke!> calls a “disturbing trend.”

This isn’t a “trend,” nor is it disturbing, and it isn’t a phenomenon confined to obesity. Bill could have educated his audience—which, as usual, arfed and clapped like the human seals they are—but instead ignored the real problem, which is partially fueled by people like him.

And it’s an ethical one. Society’s goal is to make the human beings within it safe and happy. This requires setting standards, much of which it accomplishes with law and law enforcement, and the rest it pursues by making values, virtues and positive, societally beneficial conduct clear. Society then encourages and rewards those who meet those standards, and shames, disapproves and rejects those who defy them.

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Insomnia Ethics, 8/8/2022: Disney, “Diversity,”Dogs And Dodges…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I actually have been lying awake with a not-quite-dismal headache, and all sorts of ethics nightmares real and imagined have been spooling through my fevered brain, so I decided to hell with it, might as well write an in-between warm-up and hope that it calms me down enough to get back to sleep.

Among other issues, I am annoyed that I didn’t get to a warm-up yesterday because August 7 is another date chock full of ethics milestones, notably the the passage of the infamous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving President Johnson almost unrestrained powers to oppose “communist aggression” in Southeast Asia. Not only was this the floodgates-opening moment for the U.S.’s disastrous Vietnam entanglement, but it permanently (so far, at least) accelerated Congress’s abdication of its constitutional duties to oversee the Executive’s war-making proclivities. August 7 was also the date in 1912 upon which Teddy Roosevelt completed his fateful, ego-driven move to split the Republican Party, preferring a public tantrum that would ultimately inflict Woodrow Wilson, arguably our worst President ever, on the Republic, over accepting the consequences of his own impulsiveness when he foolishly forswore running for a second full term in office. Not surprisingly, Teddy had found his hand-picked successor (and best friend) William Howard Taft not sufficiently Teddy-like, and when the GOP dutifully renominated Taft for another term that he would have won easily, Roosevelt launched his Bull Moose Party to oppose both Taft and Wilson. His own party then nominated Roosevelt 110 years ago, violently changing the course of history in ways too convoluted to guess.

1. What’s going on with Disney? The best answer appear to be “Really, really, incompetent management.” When I read complaints about Walt’s creation retiring its creator’s opening day speech from its anniversary celebration after 67-years, I assumed that it was all just “Disney has gone crazy woke!” conservative hysteria. Then I read the speech, which I had last heard when I first visited Disneyland when I was a college sophomore, on one of the most fun days of my life. Here is what Walt said:

To all who come to this happy place: Welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams and the hard facts that have created America with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world. Thank you.

That’s the mission statement for the entire Disney journey, and eloquently stated too. What could anyone, especially anyone charged with continuing to make the company thrive, object to about that perfect expression of why Disney is important to American culture? An organization that becomes estranged from its founder (or Founders) is risking its soul and survival. I hope that the erasure of Walt’s words from this year’s celebration is just another in a long string of dumb management decisions. I fear that it is much more than that.

2. Apparently racial discrimination is now the official policy of New York City. The New York Post reports that  New York City Mayor Eric Adams has requested that city agencies provide photographs of potential candidates for jobs at City Hall  ranging from assistant commissioner to departmental press secretary. The ubiquitous “unnamed city officials” explained that the request is part of  an effort to hire more diverse staffers, a euphemism for “so the city can hire based on skin color.” Unethical. Of course. The officials the Post interviewed said they supported a  diverse workforce but worried that the practice is  causing the Adams administration “to make hiring decisions with a greater emphasis on race and ethnicity than merit.” The Mayor, ridiculously, swears that having the photos will merely help him recognize his employees in the sprawling city workforce. Continue reading →

Performing Arts Ethics: Amateur And Professional Ethics Dunces, Part 2…The Amateurs [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

In Part 1, I wrote: “Performance artists generally and across all levels and regions tend to be incompetent at ethical analysis, and their ethics alarms aren’t merely dysfunctional, they are warped.” Unfortunately, this applies to aspiring performance artists among amateur ranks as well.

RGV Productions works  with The Door Christian Fellowship Ministries of McAllen, and thus was responsible for live-streamed performances of a youth production of the Broadway hit “Hamilton” this weekend at the Door McAllen Church in McAllen, Texas. The production added scenes and dialogue and changed lines. During the climactic (and historical) duel between Aaron Burr and Hamilton, for example, the titular character says, “What is a legacy? It’s knowing you repented and accepted the gospel of Jesus Christ that sets men free. You sent your sinless son of man on Calvary to die for me!”

Sure doesn’t sound like Alexander to me! At the end of the show, a pastor delivered a sermon that included a passage you will never hear on Broadway, except as satire: “Maybe you struggle with alcohol, with drugs, with homosexuality, maybe you struggle with other things in life, your finances, whatever, God can help you tonight. He wants to forgive you for your sins.”

Uh, can’t do that.  The licensing rights to perform any show that hasn’t passed into the public domain specifically forbid it. Now, to be fair, RGV Productions and the church never obtained the rights: they are still unavailable, as is the norm when a Broadway show is in its initial run. Never mind: these disrespectful scofflaws did the show, or their mutant version of it, anyway. Continue reading →

Performing Arts Ethics: Amateur And Professional Ethics Dunces, Part I…The Professional

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

More than a decade ago, while I was the artistic director for a Northern Virginia professional theater I had co-founded, I offered the greater D.C. theater association a draft ethics code that I had developed after I realizes that the ethics alarms of the typical area theater professional were approximately the same as those of the average drug cartel boss. The response was telling: I received a formal thank-you, but was told that the theater community had no interest in ethics, and had done just fine without any code.

This attitude is not unique to Washington D.C. and environs, or regional theater. Performance artists generally and across all levels and regions tend to be incompetent at ethical analysis, and their ethics alarms aren’t merely dysfunctional, they are warped.

From the world of professional performing, for example, we have this controversy, arising from the announcement that actor James Franco (far left), a Portugese-Swedish-Jewish American, has been cast as Fidel Castro in a film project, and celebrated Hispanic actor John Lequizamo (on the right) was outraged over the casting choice.  “How is this still going on? How is Hollywood excluding us but stealing our narratives as well?” Leguizamo wrote. “No more appropriation Hollywood and streamers! Boycott! This F’d up! Plus seriously difficult story to tell without aggrandizement which would b wrong!”

As you can see, the actor was so upset that he lost the ability to communicate in coherent English.

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It’s “Be Kind To (Cute) Rapist Teachers Week” In Texas

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

That’s former Houston-area middle school teacher Marka Bodine above. Isn’t she pretty? Much too pretty to have to be in an icky old jail. So despite the fact that she was convicted of grooming, harassing, raping and continuously sexually abusing a 13-year-old student until he was 16 years old and finally alerted authorities, Bodine was only sentenced to to 60 days in jail with 10 years of probation. Shades of the infamous 2005 case of Debra Lafave, another sick but comely teacher who raped one of her 14-year-old students! Her lawyer successfully convinced the judge that their client was “too pretty for prison,” and honestly, who can argue with that? Here’s Debra:

As you can see, Marka isn’t quite the hottie that Debra was, so it’s only fair that she got some jail time. But wait! There’s more! Because Marka had given birth shortly before her sentencing (the baby was not her rape victim’s—Whew!— that would be the saga of teacher rapist Mary Kay LeTourneau), Harris County Judge Greg Glass postponed her imprisonment for a full year. Continue reading →