Month: March 2023

Bad Shakespeare Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Off-off Broadway, in Brooklyn, a small professional theater company in Brooklyn called Target Margin Theater is presenting, it claims, “Pericles,” one of William Shakespeare’s less-celebrated dramas, and I’m being kind. The play is a mess, and one might wonder why a 1608 play that only survives because Shakespeare’s name is on it keeps getting productions at all.

Well, to ask the question is to answer it: “Pericles” gets produced now and then because Shakespeare’s name is on it. It’s the cognitive dissonance scale at work: the Bard is so high on the scale that he even elevates the worthless junk he wrote, kind-of wrote or badly wrote like “Timon of Athens” and “Titus Andronicus” out of deep, deep negative territory on the scale because he is held in such high regard. Surely something produced by a genius must have redeeming qualities, directors and producers reason, and maybe we can be the ones to find them after all these centuries!

It is a bit like recording a cover of “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?” because it’s a Beatles song.”

But the Target Margin Theater production of the Bard’s Bomb tries some things. For example, the convoluted plot of “Pericles” gets started with the revelation that a nasty king, having lost his wife, has turned to his beautiful daughter “with whom the father liking took and her to incest did provoke.” However in this production, that line is rendered as, “The dude sleeps with his daughter.”

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Ethics Quiz: Axis Sally

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Mediocre movies can still raise important ethics questions, and so it is with a 2021 bomb called “American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally.” The film dramatizes the bizarre tale of Mildred Gillars, a Maine-born American woman of modest looks and talents who rode her aspirations for a Hollywood career into an infamous gig as an infamous Nazi German radio propagandist during World War II. My father told me about her broadcasts from Berlin, and how she used sexy tones to tell American servicemen that they were doomed, that the Jews, not Germany, were their real enemy, and that their wives and girlfriends were cheating on them while they were in Europe fighting Hitler’s “invincible army.”

Her last broadcast was just a few days before Germany surrendered; Gillars was arrested and charged with being a traitor. In 1948, “Axis Sally” faced a very real threat of being hanged as she went on trial for eight counts of treason. Thanks in great part to a vigorous (if reluctant) defense by famed criminal defense attorney James Laughlin, played by Al Pacino in the film, the jury found her guilty of only one, and what could have been a 30 year jail term turned into ten.

Dad said that American GIs thought “she”Axis Sally” was hilarious, that no soldiers took her seriously, and that her singing was terrible. Her broadcasts were popular in the U.S., as she often relayed news of American prisoners of war to show how well they were being treated by their German captors.

Although I suspect that Pacino’s ringing closing argument in her defense was punched up considerably from the original by Laughlin and maybe even contained some arguments Laughlin did not make, the points he raises in the movie are fascinating:

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Belched Forth From The Depths Of “The Great Stupid,” The Latest Excuse To Be Unethical: “Adultism”!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The latest addition to “intersectionality” is “adultism,” defined as the “[s]ystemic/interpersonal exclusion of youth from decisions that impact their lives.” You see where this is coming from, right? Transgender activists want children to be able to decide to sexually mutilate themselves without parental or government interference, once they have been thoroughly indoctrinated by their teachers, peers and the news media into believing that changing genders like socks makes one happy, healthy and wise.

I had somehow missed the latest toxic substance the mad Left had begun leaking into the culture. It’s exhausting keeping up with this stuff; it is like an existential game of Whack-A- Mole that never ends. The longer society gives allows these calculated corruptions to sink in and pollute minds, the more damage they do, and the harder they are to beat back.

University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) professor Josefina Bañales told a panel last month that “adultism” “excludes youth from the opportunity to speak about their own racialized experiences, their own ways that they’re navigating the world” because psychology was developed by “white adults.” Picking up on the concept, Professor Julie Maslowsky, who works in the School of Public Health at UIC, recently made the assertion that abortions are essential because, without one, a woman is left with an “economic hardship and insecurity which lasts for years.” This came during in a presentation on “Reproductive Justice.”

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Don’t Be Fooled: The Woke Know Exactly What “Woke” Means

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

In a typical incident, Whoopie Goldberg, once an iconoclast and truth-teller who didn’t bow to political correctness, groveled an apology to Woke World after…

…for using the word “gypped” in a spontaneous comment among “The View’s” usual incompetent blather. Now a virtual slave to the social media mob (Oooh, can I say “slave”?) Whoopie quickly told her Woke masters that she didn’t mean to utter a taboo word when she said, “The people who still believe that [Donald Trump] got gypped somehow in the election will still believe that he cared enough about his wife to pay … that money from his personal thing.”

She should be apologizing for taking a check to communicate like an illiterate 8th grader, but no: here was her actual apology: “When you’re a certain age, you use words that you know from when you were a kid or you remember saying and that’s what I did today. And I shouldn’t have. I should’ve thought about it a little longer before I said it, but I didn’t, and I should’ve said cheated, but I used another word and I’m really, really sorry.”

“Gyp” as a verb supposedly began as a reference to Gypsies and their alleged tendency to steal or trick unsuspecting marks. Did Whoopie use the term to insult the people who the language police demanded be called “Romani”? No. Did anyone have any problem understanding what she meant by “gypped”? No. Is she an Ethics Dunce by falling into line and acting like a good little bootlicker when she should have said, “I have nothing to apologize for. The whole ‘if a word may have originated from a reference that was motivated by prejudice or malice hundreds of years ago, it must be banned in 2023′”‘ is censorious garbage, and I refuse to follow it; grow the hell up!”?

Absolutely.

Sadly, poor Whoopie is now stuck for life babbling with a bunch of idiots on TV and can’t afford to be courageous or principled, for she depends on Woke World to make a living.

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: Oklahoma Republicans Vote Against Banning Corporal Punishment Of Disabled Students

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

As an ethicist, I see news stories like this and want to hurl myself through the nearest wood-chipper. On the Left, we have racial-grievance fanatics claiming that eliminating discipline for disrupting class is necessary to avoid perpetuating “systemic racism.” On the Right, we have virtual Neanderthals with ethical standards stuck in the 19th century advocating teachers hitting cognitively challenged kids because…the Bible says so.

No wonder it’s so easy for Leftist fascism to get a foothold in our culture, when conservatives undermine their credibility with positions like that.

Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plains and apparently through one ear and out the other of a lot of elected officials, is one of the 19 laggards that permit child abuse in the public schools. (Watch the Indian School corporal punishment inflicted on students in the “1923” miniseries now streaming on Paramount+, if you dare.) Democrats in the state legislature introduced House Bill 1028, a modest proposal—I would think—to outlaw school district personnel from “using corporal punishment on any student identified with a disability in accordance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.” It didn’t even outlaw teachers beating kids in general, just students with disabilities. But the GOP has a super-majority, and not enough alleged conservatives (why is beating students “conservative” voted against the bill to narrowly kill it, 45-43.

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This Tears It: Biden Supporters Are Forever Ethically Estopped From Complaining About Trump’s “Lies”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

The point at which Trump-Deranged, pro-Biden warriors could credibly claim that the current President is any less prone to uttering counter-factual fantasy than the previous one passed long before Joe Biden was elected, but it officially reached the absurdity level during Biden’s soft-ball  interview with actor Kal Penn, who was guest hosting “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central.

When Penn asked Biden about his “evolution” on same-sex marriage, the perpetually addled POTUS exploded informed and objective heads all over America with this self-evident fiction, saying that in 1960, when he was in high school, Biden was momentarily shocked to see two men kissing. He said that his dad turned to him and said, “Joey, it’s simple, they love each other,” and that Joe adopted that approach ever since. “Doesn’t matter whether it’s same-sex or a heterosexual couple, they should be able to be married,” Biden told Penn. “What is the problem? So, listen to your auntie and uncle, get married. Do it now.”

That was an utter and complete fabrication, though Penn didn’t challenge it, either because he doesn’t know enough about Biden to conduct a competent interview, or because he doesn’t have the guts to call out an obvious lie. Continue reading →

Update: The Judge Kyle Duncan/Stanford Law/Heckler’s Veto Fiasco Aftermath (So Far)

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

It remains to be seen whether the Stanford Law students’ “heckler’s veto” of invited Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan will be a tipping point in national recognition of how far our educational institutions are drifting away from liberal principles like freedom of speech, or whether the mainstream media’s now routine efforts to suppress any news event that threatens the woke agenda will smother the disgraceful story in its metaphorical crib. Incredibly, The New York Times didn’t cover the story at all, as of this morning. Over at the Washington Post there was also no news coverage, but now-irrelevant pundit George Will got an op-ed out titled “Expensively credentialed, negligibly educated Stanford brats threw a tantrum.” That’s pretty safe: the Woke, meaning most of the Post’s readers, never read Will, and since he threw a tantrum and began supporting the Democratic Party because the aging, bowtie-wearing elitist thinks Donald Trump is an unmannerly cur, a lot of conservatives no longer read him either. Since the frightening ethics debacle of law students at an esteemed law school showing contempt for a federal judge and the schools DEI administrator cheering them on, there have been many newsworthy developments and reactions, even if our Leftist propaganda machine (aka the mainstream media) doesn’t want us to know about it….such as:

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A Comment Of The Day Spectacular! Re: “Ethics Conundrum: Is Teaching That Communism Is Evil History or Indoctrination?”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This has never happened before. The Ethics Alarms post on teaching communism attracted a modest number of comments (only 9 when you subtract my kibitzing), but five of them, by Ethics Alarms stalwarts JutGory, Steve-O-in-NJ, Extradimensional Cephalopod, Chris Marschner and Steve Witherspoon, rate Comment of the Day status. I’m posting them together (you can also go straight to the post itself, here, and find the whole conversation) for clarity and convenience, and also because I’m afraid if I post them individually a new visitor might think that I have died….

First up, Extradimensional Cephalopod:

***

There is no excuse for any kind of indoctrination. Existentialist epistemology provides a bright line between education and indoctrination.

Here is how to teach about communism without indoctrination:

“Here is what happened in these communist countries: the communications, the policies, the statistics, the conflicts, et cetera. Here is how we obtained this information. Some people say there are alternative inferences we could draw about the past based on the raw data in the present; here are some of the arguments about which inferences are more likely. Write a short essay on how people drew their various conclusions about historical events from the evidence available.

“As for communism itself, some people say that the principles of communism are inherently dysfunctional for running a society, and here is their reasoning for concluding this, both in the abstract and based on the historical events we discussed earlier. Others say that communism could still work in theory. They draw different conclusions from the historical events, saying that communist principles did not contribute to the downfall of communist countries. Write a short essay on how people drew their various conclusions about the causes of the collapse of communist countries from the evidence available.

Any proponent of the feasibility of a political ideology is asked answer an indefinitely long series of questions in the form of “how would your society handle X situation?”, because any real such society would have to answer those questions in real life, and before we go through the effort of overhauling everything people like to make sure the new society has plans for how to deal with the situations it creates. The plans the ideology provides must be convincing–they must be solutions whose outcomes people would consider both desirable and probable, otherwise people will dismiss the ideology as incomplete at best and irredeemably flawed at worst. Write a long essay on some situations communism might have to deal with, the results you predict from those situations, and the various opinions people might have about the results. At least one of those situations must involve experts making a mistake, and at least one must involve people breaking rules. ”

This approach is infinitely more rewarding for society than simply telling people that an idea is good or bad, and that’s just off the top of my head.

By the way, having spoken with communists, I find that despite providing good descriptions of the problems of capitalism, communism fails to provide any answers beyond “tell everyone about communism and then we’ll all get together and confiscate the property of the rich, and we’ll share it fairly.” I am disappointed that communists don’t seem inclined to remedy this critical lack of foresight.

***

Here is JutGory:

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Wait, How Can Rebeca F. Rothstein Still Be Employed As A Middle School Teacher? Why Are Parents Allowing Her To Warp Their Children? I Don’t Understand This At All…[Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

This story is incomprehensible.

Rebeca F. Rothstein apparently still works at North Bethesda Middle School in the Montgomery County School District despite posting on social media that “‘as a teacher I wish we could do more with our students like teach anti-racism and how to be kind people. Does anyone else feel like… we can skip the math, skip the science, like we’ll do that next year. Maybe this year we focus on teaching our youth how to be anti-racist.” Elsewhere she posted about providing “Marxist literature” to her students. “Fuck capitalism,” she wrote, and in another post shared that she was “tired after a long day of indoctrinating students.” In a video she put on TikTok, Rothstein said,

“I had to un-brainwash myself from capitalism in order to fall in love with socialism and communism. If everyone had the same amount of money, then money wouldn’t be worth anything.”

Wow. I sure want a teacher with that kind of keen insight teaching our next generation!

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Observations On A Telling Exchange In A New York Times Opinion Column…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The column is a weekly feature on the Times opinion pages. Snarky progressive shill Gail Collins supposedly debates pseudo-conservative pundit Bret Stephens (who has called for the repeal of the Second Amendment) on various issues of the day. It is written as a spontaneous conversation, which it obviously is not: I detest the format, which is inherently deceptive. Ted Kennedy and Orin Hatch used to have a radio spot where they would debate an issue “from the right and left.” The two were obviously reading from an agreed-upon script, and not very convincingly. It insulted listeners’ intelligence, as this column insults Times readers. Here’s how today’s installment begins:

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