Month: May 2023

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Actor Richard Dreyfuss

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“Am I being told that I will never have a chance to play a black man? Is someone else being told that if they’re not Jewish, they shouldn’t play the Merchant of Venice? Are we crazy? Do we not know that art is art?…This is so patronizing. It’s so thoughtless and treating people like children.”

—-Actor Richard Dreyfuss, Academy Award-winner, lamenting the successful invasion of “diversity, equity and inclusion” into his profession and the movie industry.

Dreyfuss’s outburst was provoked when he was asked in an interview with PBS’s Firing Line about his opinion of the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences’ new DEI mandates, which will kick in for the 2025 Oscars. “They make me vomit,” the famously outspoken Hollywood liberal said. “No one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give in to the latest, most current idea of what morality is. What are we risking? Are we really risking hurting people’s feelings? You can’t legislate that. You have to let life be life and I’m sorry, I don’t think there is a minority or majority in the country that has to be catered to like that.”

The answers to Dreyfuss’s queries are, in order,

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Comment Of The Day: “Today’s Kentucky Derby Metaphor: Journalists May Be The Enemies Of Our Democracy, But Teachers Are Coming Up On The Inside Rail….”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

What I am looking for in the Ethics Alarms comments is constructive, literate expositions on opinions and conclusions regarding the ethics-related issues raised here. Regular commenters who have proven their seriousness and genuine interest in the topic have leave to leave the periodic facetious or non-substantive posts, but the conduct of lesser and inevitable short-tenured commenters whose technique consists of “no it isn’t” assertions without proffers of evidence, new information or fresh analysis, pollute the site and defeat its mission.

Recently I had to ban two practitioners of this dark art who were tirelessly pushing the progressive narrative that Tucker Carlson had proven himself to be a racist during his late Fox News show. I asked a simple question: What’s an example of this alleged racism? One answered—after calling Carlson racist!—that the word couldn’t be defined; the other said that the conclusion was justified by nothing in particular, just “deductive reasoning.” Baseball analyst Bill James once wrote that when someone says something is true because they just know it is, that’s a bullshit alarm. Those commenters were eventually banned for other misconduct, but flinging bullshit around the place is not going to be tolerated.

In contrast, we have the following Comment of the Day by Jim Hodgson, as he offers actual evidence of how the current values rot in our education system can be countered, and has been, at least in his community. Here it is, in response to the post, “Today’s Kentucky Derby Metaphor: Journalists May Be The Enemies Of Our Democracy, But Teachers Are Coming Up On The Inside Rail….”

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Although I am helping homeschool my two grandsons, I am still confident that our local (county) school system is substantially “woke free,” for several reasons. One reason is our community values which are overwhelmingly conservative to moderate with only a smattering of loonies from our local (church affiliated) university and a few legacy Democrats. The second reason is aware and involved parents, grandparents and other taxpayers who keep the school board accountable. School board meetings are always packed, even when there is not a hint of controversy in the air. There are also a lot of parent and grandparent volunteers in our schools who keep up with everything that is going on in the classrooms.

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Ethics Observations On Joyce Carol Oates’ Twitter Humiliation

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

 

Oates, a prolific and much-honored writer as well as a college professor,deleted the tweet after merciless mockery. In case you are, like her, unfamiliar with Marvel Comics tropes, the intergalactic supervillain Thanos wields the Infinity Gauntlet,”one of the most powerful objects in the [Marvel] Universe.” It empowers the wearer to do anything and everything imaginable.

Observations:

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Next Up On The Rapidly Expanding List Of Speech Progressives Want To Censor: “Fear Speech”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

New York Times reporter and opinion writer Julia Angwin has been given a prominent space in the latest Sunday Times to expound on why another kind of speech needs to be suppressed, controlled and if possible, censored: “fear speech.”

Already the relentlessly radicalizing progressive hoard has embraced the anti-American concept of censoring other kinds of speech according to their very subjective definitions: “misinformation,” meaning opinions or analysis they disagree with, or distortions of truth that emanate from someplace or some one not devoted to advancing the Left’s goals and agendas, and “hate speech,” which they want to have excluded from First Amendment protections as they define it on a case by case basis. Now the Times is starting the metaphorical ball rolling to target more speech that these two categories might miss. Its designated messenger declares,

This year, Facebook and Twitter allowed a video of a talk to be distributed on their platforms in which Michael J. Knowles, a right-wing pundit, called for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated.” The Conservative Political Action Coalition, which hosted the talk, said in its social media posts promoting the video that the talk was “all about the left’s attempt to erase biological women from modern society.”

None of this was censored by the tech platforms because neither Mr. Knowles nor CPAC violated the platforms’ hate speech rules that prohibit direct attacks against people based on who they are. But by allowing such speech to be disseminated on their platforms, the social media companies were doing something that should perhaps concern us even more: They were stoking fear of a marginalized group.

Note the carefully crafted rhetoric: stoking fear of a marginalized group. Stoking fear of a group to marginalize it as much as possible for political gain is apparently hunky-dory, as in…

She continues,

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Signature Significance And The Julie Principle Confront “The Ethicist”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Ethicist” of the New York Times Magazine, doesn’t read Ethics Alarms so he isn’t conversant in two core EA concepts: signature significance, the fact that a single example of conduct can be enough to make a definitive judgment about an individual’s unethical nature, and The Julie Principle, which holds that once you recognize an individual’s flaws, you can accept them and continue the relationship, or use them to decide the individual is too flawed to tolerate, but it is pointless to keep complaining about them.A question from a disillusioned wife this week raised both, and “The Ethicist” acquitted himself well without directly acknowledging either.

“Theresa” revealed that her husband had tossed a banana peel out the passenger’s side window while she was driving on a highway. She protested, emphasizing her objection to littering and his setting a bad example for their 13-year-old in the back seat. He rationalized that the banana peel would “biodegrade”,“ and as if that wasn’t lame enough, defaulted to “I’m an adult, so I’ll do as I want.” After the incident, “Theresa” showed him an article about the dangers of throwing garbage on the street, plus a copy of the Massachusetts law declaring his conduct illegal. Her husband responded with, “Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?”

“He refuses to acknowledge that he made a mistake or change his behavior,” “The Ethicist’s” inquirer wrote, adding that the deadlock on the issue is making her question her marriage.

At the outset, I have to agree that the episode might make me question the character of someone I had just met—not merely question it, in fact, but perhaps make a confident diagnosis: this guy is an asshole, and the sequence is signature significance. The only feature of the story that possibly rescues it from being signature significance is that it can be broken down into components:

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Today’s Kentucky Derby Metaphor: Journalists May Be The Enemies Of Our Democracy, But Teachers Are Coming Up On The Inside Rail….

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The Colorado Education Association (CEA) has approved a resolution produced by the union that states, “CEA believes that capitalism requires exploitation of children, public schools, land, labor, and/or resources. Capitalism is in opposition to fully addressing systemic racism (the school to prison pipeline), climate change, patriarchy, (gender and LGBTQ disparities), education inequality, and income inequality.” A previous draft, apparently edited to avoid being too transparent in revealing the educators’ Marxist agenda, called to replace capitalism with a “new equitable economic system.”

Nice!

But wait…there’s more!

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No, It Is Not “Sexist” To Argue That Senator Feinstein Should Resign

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The New York Times editorial board has issued an editorial calling on Senator Diane Feinstein to step down. It is an entirely partisan appeal, but that’s the Times: the editors are worried that her continued absence from active participation and impairment due to advanced age (she’s 89, and obviously declining in health and cognitive acuity) will threaten the progressive agenda. Their position that Feinstein needs to be responsible and retire is no less valid, however. It was irresponsible for her to run for reelection in 2018, and irresponsible for California voters to elect her. Now the aged Senator is unable to vote or attend committee meetings because of her declining health, and there is no indication when that situation will improve.

So of course she should step down. But Democrats gotta Democrat, so Rep. Nancy Pelosi, herself 83 and another abuser of the public official’s duty not to continue in office past her pull-date, has accused the Times and others of “sexism.” You know the formula by now: if anyone criticizes what a Democratic woman does, it’s sexism, just as when anyone criticizes what a black Democrat does, it’s racism. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton showed that the tactic works, and now it is SOP. “‘I’ve never seen them go after a man who was sick in the Senate in that way,’ Pelosi said regarding the calls for Feinstein’s resignation.

Sadly, the supposedly rational and independent law prof-blogger Ann Althouse (who had the sense to retire from teaching before she started spiraling into incompetence) has sided with the ex-Speaker. “But isn’t Pelosi right?,” she wrote yesterday. “Something has been done badly by men for a long, long time, and suddenly it just has to stop… because a woman is doing it?”

Ugh. No, Pelosi is NOT right, and Ann’s ethical reasoning is depressing. That’s as pure an “Everybody does it” rationalization as you are ever going to see. Male Senators were foolishly allowed to continue in office when they were incapacitated (Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, absent for four years with heart problems and Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota, unable to do his job for three years after a stroke) or outrageously old (Strom Thurmond, who served into his 100th year and had probably been senile for years), so Ann concludes that the ethical approach now is for Senators to keep on being irresponsible because that’s the way it’s always been done, even though the practice impedes the operation of the government?

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Res Ipsa Loquitur: Our Incompetent News Media

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

During today’s historic coronation of King Charles III, covered live by all of the news networks, the American reporters on ABC, NBC and CBS all referred to Charles being “coronated.”

The proper term is “crowned.” Dozens of sources would have so informed them—if they had done minimal research. No, it is not a big thing. It is just one more example of how negligently and lazily our journalists perform their jobs.

And thus once again I have to ask: Why does anyone trust these people? How can anyone trust these people? Journalism is no longer a profession in the United States. It is self-indulgent, privileged club.

If You Need Additional Evidence That Paying Attention To Celebrities’ Political Posturing Is Evidence of Crippling Gullibility—And You Shouldn’t—Here It Is

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

That’s Kim Kardashian above, the perfect embodiment of empty celebrity. She was one of many “glitterati” who attended the 2023 Met Gala on May 1, and willingly participated in the theme, “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty.” The whole event was billed as a tribute to the late fashion icon one of the all-time great designers, who was also indisputably a terrible person, at least according to the public pronouncements and signaled values of Hollywood’s, New York’s, cosmopolitan and the fashion world’s stars.

Piers Morgan, who, like a stopped clock, occasionally is spot-on accurate, was outraged by the event’s hypocrisy, writing,

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