Month: May 2023

(Pssst! The “Travel Advisories” Issued By The NAACP And Other Groups Are Just Unethical And Cynically Misrepresented Boycotts)

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The least organizations can do is to have the integrity to call their boycotts “boycotts.” In its latest partisan and divisive move debasing the organization’s original mission, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People issued a travel warning last week, claiming the sunshine state “devalues and marginalizes” issues facing “communities of color.”

“Florida is openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals,” the NAACP said. “Before traveling to Florida, please understand that the state of Florida devalues and marginalizes the contributions of and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color.”

Funny: “people of color” are a lot safer in Florida than they are in, say, Chicago, and the NAACP hasn’t issued any “travel advisories” about that perilous locale. Never mind: The Human Rights Campaign, knowing a neat trick when it sees one, issued its own imaginary travel advisory replete with misleading claims about Florida “banning books.” LULAC has gotten into the act too, as the progressive, pro-open borders Latino advocacy group urged people to avoid traveling to Florida because a new immigration set to go into effect in July will punish employers for hiring illegal immigrants. Other organizations supporting illegal immigration have sent out “travel advisories” regarding Florida.

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Ethics Dunce: Target (Again)

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Morons.

Yesterday Target sent out a mass internal email (above) continuing the woke pandering that has already cost the company billions in stock losses. The posturing and now the doubling down makes no sense from a business perspective or an ethical perspective. The chain had to close over a hundred outlets last year: this is just management incompetence that endangers the jobs and livelihood of the same people the email is “thanking.”

Here’s the text, in case you have as bad reading vision as I do:

“Yesterday was a very hard day for Target, and as CEO Brian Cornell said, thank you for the care you’ve shown each other, our frontline teams, and the LGBTQIA+ community. Today brings more reflection, pain and the need for continued care as our team, hometown and world remember the murder of George Floyd. As you make space to take care of yourself and each other, know that you can always tap into these tools from Team Member LIfe Resources, and as Mental Health Awareness Month continues, turn to Take Five to Take Care hub for more wellbeing support.”

I wouldn’t personally boycott Target because it is promoting gonad-tucking bathing suits for mentally-ill men, but I might stop frequenting a store that wants to celebrate the George Floyd disaster as if it were the Alamo or The Maine. There was literally nothing good that came out of the Summer of Floyd. People died, communities set themselves up for more crime and violence by rejecting the police; rioting spread across the nation, the justice system was compromised by a jury allowed to deliberate despite prejudicial influences during the trial, and then apparently ignored the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard to convict Derek Chauvin.

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Last May 2023 Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I had one last chance to use the cheery song from “Camelot” again, so I took it. The 2023 revival of that show opened to near unanimous pans from critics in April (ironically); the book had been over-hauled by “The West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin, and arrived with black knights of the Round Table among other panders to the woke Broadway crowd. It also arrived without Julie Andrews and Richard Burton, which was the real killer: the original “Camelot” had iconic stars, lovely stars, spectacle, and a really bad book (unlike the classic book it was based on, “The Once and Future King” by T.H. White. It also had a wistful title song that was turned into the valedictory of the Kennedy Presidency, ending with “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot!“

In Sorkin’s version, Guenevere refers to the song as “dumb” and, later, as “that stupid song about the weather.” Nice.

Cheer me up with fascinating ethics observations, please:

Ethics Observations On The Machete-Wielding CUNY Prof.

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Does anyone recall anything like this happening in previous crazy times, like the mid-Sixties? If you somehow missed this episode, “listen my children and you will hear…”

Shellyne Rodriguez was an adjunct art professor at CUNY Hunter College in New York City. When she saw a group of pro-life students, members of Students for Life, distributing anti-abortion materials on campus earlier this month, she attacked, throwing their pamphlets in the air and screaming at them, saying,

“You’re not educating shit! This is fucking propaganda! What are you going to do like anti-trans next? This is bullshit! This is violent. You’re triggering my students!”

After a shaken student tried to babble and apology (for existing?)Rodriguez responded, “No, you’re not! Because you can’t even have a fucking baby. So you don’t even know what that is…Get this shit out of here, fuck this shit!” Then she threw the group’s pamphlets off their table.

Hunter’s pro-choice student group, CUNY for Abortion Rights, tried to defend the indefensible, thus destroying their own credibility, stating (falsely)

“Hunter College adjunct educator Shellyne Rodriguez approached the display, constructively critiqued the group members, and eventually physically took down items from the table.  Her actions to shut down the tabling were fully justified, and are part of a long and celebrated CUNY legacy of confronting groups such as military recruiters who disseminate misleading information. Anti-abortion groups are in collusion with anti-queer and trans, anti-labor, anti-Palestinian campaigns, in a larger [sense] violate people’s bodily autonomy, economic well-being, and collective determination.”

The statement was co-signed by the Palestine Solidarity Alliance.

But wait! There’s more!

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Cognitive Dissonance Alert! Can I Still Ethically Enjoy “Tie Me Kangaroo Down”?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’ve enjoyed that early Sixties novelty song “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport!” since I first heard it. It’s genuinely funny, employed black humor ahead of its time, and is cleverly written and performed. But I never bothered to learn who sang it or wrote it, until I learned the answer to both questions this morning when I read the obituary of Rolf Harris, who did both.

Rolf Harris was a popular British entertainer and TV personality who was convicted of sexually abusing young girls, and sent to prison. He never apologized to any of his victims (though he did apologize for using the racially charged slang “abo” in his hit song).

Ick. Here’s the Cognitive Dissonance Scale again…

The scale indicates positive and negative attitudes regarding people, places, subjects, events and ideas. Remember that like it or not, things that are connected tend to pull the things they are connected to up or down the scale. “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport!” is far from my favorite song, but it’s a solid +5 on the scale. Famous male celebrities who use their power and fame to sexually abuse children, however, are at least at -100, or lower. I don’t know how I can listen to a silly song and still be amused while my mind is telling me that the singer and author was a predatory monster.

And yet…and yet…I have written here many times that it is unethical to downgrade a critical assessment of a work of art because of the character of its creator, and that the art and the artist should be considered separately,

I believe that. I just don’t know that I can do it.

Now THAT’S An Incompetent Baker…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The family ordered the birthday cake design on the left, but the cake delivered was the one on the right, with cute little sperms instead of heart-shaped balloons.

The boy’s name was also Zayeem, not “Yazeem.”

But, to be fair, that baker will happily bake a same-sex wedding cake…

The DeSantis Announcement Incompetence: This Is What Happens When No One On Your Staff—Or You—Knows Their Presidential History

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Yes, the Twitter announcement was a mess, but that’s not what bothered me. What bothered me was this, five minutes and 46 seconds into Gov. Ron DeSantis’s long-awaited entry into the race for the White House…

(05:46)
We must return normalcy to our communities. America’s a sovereign country. Our borders must be respected. We cannot have foreigners pouring into our country illegally by the millions. We cannot allow drug cartels to poison our population with fentanyl. Public deserves safe communities and law and order must be maintained in American cities. We can’t have inmates running the asylum, and we must reject attacks on the men and women of law enforcement.

Normalcy??? The word was invented by then U.S. Senator Warren G. Harding when he ran for President in 1920. (The proper word was and is “normality.”) “Back to Normalcy” became his campaign slogan and is forever associated with Harding, who won election easily and went on to be regarded as one the nation’s worst Presidents, though historians are grudgingly coming to accept that he wasn’t a bad as his racist predecessor, Woodrow Wilson.

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Boy, Is The Pro-Trans Mania Leading Us In Strange Places Or What? Now It Has Conservatives Accusing “The Life Of Brian” Of Not Being Bold Enough….

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Well, I sure didn’t see THIS coming.

When the Monty Python satire “The Life of Brian” was released in 1979, conservative groups, calling it blasphemous, called for protests and boycotts in the U.S. and Great Britain. Now, as two of the living and not-completely-senile members of the comedy troupe, Eric Idle and John Cleese, prepare to launch a stage version of the movie, conservatives are complaining that they aren’t willing to make the adaptation edgy enough.

In one scene that has taken on more significance lately than it seemed to have 40 years ago, a discussion between “People’s Front of Judea” members Stan (played by Idle, on the left above) and Reg (Cleese) involves Stan saying that he wants to be known as Loretta and to have babies. ‘It’s every man’s right to have babies if you want them,” Stan insists. When Reg points out that, as a man, he can’t have babies, Stan protests, “Don’t you oppress me.”

To hear conservatives describe the scene now, one would think it was the funniest scene in the film. It wasn’t even the funniest scene involving the People’s Front of Judea. But I digress: apparently after trial readings of the script for the stage version, Idle and Cleese decided that they should cut the bit.

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Easy Call: The Target Boycott Is Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 55 Comments

Most boycotts are unethical; the threatened Target boycott is worse than most.

Target is one of the largest American general-merchandise retailers, with more than 1,900 stores nationwide. Every year, for more than a decade, it has offered products celebrating Pride Month. This year, taking advantage of the pro-trans fad, it is selling female bathing suits with a “tuck” feature to accommodate biological men identifying as women—you know, like Lia Thomas.

Ew.

However, such products are legal, and if Target offers them and customers buy them, it is not the business or concern of customers who don’t want to buy them. Yet this year’s Target collection has generated threats of a national boycott as well as, according to Target, actions rsiking the safety of its staff. The company told the Wall Street Journal that people have confronted workers in stores, knocked down Pride merchandise displays and put threatening posts on social media using video recorded from inside stores.

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Ethics Dunce: Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy [Link Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

There is no way not to take yesterday’s public warning from the nation’s top health official as ominous, indeed sinister. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy expounded on the risks of social media to children and teens, citing possible “harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” The remarkable 19-page advisory, begins by acknowledging that the effects of social media on adolescent mental health are not well understood, and even that social media can be beneficial to “some users.” It then goes on to argue ,“There are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”

And thus the U.S. Surgeon General lays the groundwork for government censorship, despite admitting that there is insufficient hard data to support his conclusions. Parental supervision is not enough for this government, as we have already seen in multiple settings. After all, “it takes a village,” the village that one side of the current culture wars is trying to define includes treating words and expression as “harm” from which people must be kept “safe.” Predictably, the near-completely compliant national news media is behind such government appropriation of parental authority, in this as well as other matters.

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