July 3 is a major date in U.S. history, slammed as it is between the epic significance of July 2 and 4 in the birth of our nation, and representing the crucial final day in the battle of Gettysburg, which in retrospect we can see as the critical moment when that nation was preserved as one.
Pickett’s Charge and the too little noted role of Gen. George Armstrong Custer have many ethics lessons to teach: the annually re-posted Ethics Alarms essay on those topics are here.
1. Get woke, go broke, and make someone else pay the price…Disney has been taking multiple hits as a result of its current mouse-eared masters determination to take sides in the culture wars, a one way ratchet that as Bud Light and Target (among others) have discovered, there is no way to backtrack or repent. Now it appears that its latest summer blockbuster attempt, “Indiana Jones and the Graying Temples of Doom” or whatever the misbegotten project is being called, is having approximately the same level of audience interest as, say, a sequel to “Body Heat” featuring the now 200 pound Kathleen Turner. When the most positive movie reviews say, “It really isn’t as bad as everyone expected,” you know there’s a problem. So how is Disney fixing the problem? By gutting the other businesses it owns! ESPN and National Geographic are the latest victims. Meanwhile, there are no signs that Walt’s wounded cultural icon is retreating to the neutral position it should have maintained all along.
2. Gaslighting from the Times (again). The more I think about the Times headline, “With Supreme Court Decision, College Admissions Could Become More Subjective,” the worse it seems. Is the Times telling us that using the color of an applicant’s skin as a determinant was being “objective”? Is it implying that anyone is arguing that deciding among many more qualified applicants than Harvard can hold (that’s why God made Yale!) is possible without considerable subjectivity? This is one more example of how the SCOTUS decision is being distorted in order to mislead the 99% of American who either won’t read the decision or won’t understand it if they do. It’s really a pretty simple ruling. Colleges can make their choices on the basis of many subjective judgments, but U.S. law and the Constitution forbid discriminating on the basis of race.
3. One more thing regarding the affirmative action ruling freak-out: I’ve discovered the fallback position of rational Democrats and progressives who can’t bring themselves to defend affirmative action on its merits. It is the same as the technical attack on Dobbs: the Court may be right, but it was too late to overturn a precedent, so the ruling is a dangerous signal that no SCOTUS opinion is safe when the ideological timber of the Court changes. My standard response to that argument is: “So you think Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) should have been followed because it had stood for more than half a century, and Brown v. Bd. of Education was wrongly decided?” The response is always, “Huminahuminahumina.” The bar for reversing established precedent is appropriately high; it’s just that progressives favor reversing decisions they hate but want to keep decisions they like but can’t defend.
4. A SCOTUS decision overlooked in the uproar: a ruling last week that the First Amendment restricts laws that make it a crime to issue threats on the internet, saying that prosecutors must prove that a Colorado man who had sent disturbing messages to a singer-songwriter had acted recklessly in her causing emotional harm. “The state must show that the defendant consciously disregarded a substantial risk that his communications would be viewed as threatening violence,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the majority in the 7-to-2 decision. Justice Kagan pointed out that “true threats” like libel, incitement, obscenity and fighting words (but not “hate speech”), are indeed unprotected by the First Amendment, but she that the risk of chilling protected speech imposed an added burden on prosecutors. “The speaker’s fear of mistaking whether a statement is a threat; his fear of the legal system getting that judgment wrong; his fear, in any event, of incurring legal costs — all those may lead him to swallow words that are in fact not true threats,” she wrote.
One wonders, then, why Kagan refused to join the majority in the Colorado website decision, which was also based on upholding freedom of expression and speech (as well as religion.) By not doing so, she gave strength to those who argue that judges are conflicted when groups they belong to have an interest in a case. The critics of the Court’s ruling that a website designer can’t be forced to design a site that carries a message her religion opposes have falsely claimed that the majority was endorsing merchants discriminating against gays. Kagan, who is gay, has to know that’s bunk, and she should have said so.
5. More SCOTUS…sorry, I keep thinking of issues: A big deal is being made, or being attempted to be made, about the discovery that the Christian graphic artist in Littleton, Colorado who argued that free speech protections allowed her to refuse to design wedding websites for same-sex couples apparently cited a phony request in her court filings. In 2016, Lorie Smith asked for an injunction to prevent her being charged under Colorado’s anti-discrimination if she including a message on the webpage for her company, 303 Creative, stating that she would not create wedding websites for gay couples. In subsequent court documents, her lawyers cited a request from someone named Stewart who asked for Smith’s services for his upcoming wedding to a person named “Mike.” “We are getting married early next year and would love some design work done for our invites, placenames etc. We might also stretch to a website,” the message cited in the case read.
It was only after the decision came down that reporters decided to check on Stewart and Mike. Using the contact information provided by Smith, reporters tracked down Stewart, who is happily married to a woman and who had no idea he had been mentioned in the decision. It’s certainly weird, but Smith’s position did not rely on “Stewart and Mike” legally or factually. Nonetheless, I am hearing critic of the ruling using this to claim that the decision was based on “lies.”
Ethics Alarms 
1. Indiana Jones and the dial of destiny unfortunately has gone the same path as the last few Star Wars movies and Amazon’s poorly written Rings of Power project. It came in at number one but did not have very much competition, and certainly no fresh competition. It only made about 70 million, which is what it had been projected to make. The unfortunate fact is that it cost $300 million to make and that’s just to make it. That doesn’t even consider the various promotional activities and work plus other incidentals that figure into making a movie, promoting it, and getting it out there (for the distributors and theaters take their cut). By the time all of that is figured in, this movie has to make between $500 million dollars and $600 million dollars just to break even, and this is a disappointing projection as to whether it will get there or not. Even if it does break even, or make a marginal profit, it is still essentially a failure, because people don’t make big blockbusters like this to break even or make small profits. They make them to make big profits.
I haven’t seen it yet, I almost don’t need to because I knew the plot weeks ago. Apart from the first 20 minutes or so, which show a computer rejuvenated Indy battling the Nazis, which is what he’s good at, the rest is actually pretty depressing. Someone pointed out to me that the theme of the young hero growing into a bitter, unhappy old man is getting used way too often in these Lucasfilm remakes. I was really kind of hoping that this movie would not make use of time travel, which there’s always problems with, but it did, although the rumors that he would meet his younger self, and his younger self would be killed, and therefore his female sidekick would have to take up the mantle of Indiana Jones from the start are unfounded. Truth be told, of all of Indy’s female sidekicks, Helena is both the most annoying and the least likeable, yes, less likeable than the shrill Willie Scott or the turncoat villainess Elsa Schneider, although she does have the fact that she is not a Nazi going for her.
I think a big part of the loss of appeal here is that, like Kingdom of the Crystal skull, it veered from the religious and classical based legends of the first three movies. There is a certain level of broad appeal to the idea of a story in which the heroes are encountering and perhaps fiddling with something more than mortal, maybe even something that was not designed to be fiddled with or is by nature dangerous if fiddled with. There is also a certain level of appeal in knowing that just because something is supposed to be good does not necessarily mean it is going to be safe. Space aliens and a completely new legendary device that can only be described as magical do not quite have the same appeal. The former is because we have all been there and done that in the late 1990s with The X-Files and everything that followed (plus Indiana Jones was never intended to be that kind of science fiction), and the latter is because a completely new device associated with a Greek engineer who was never really associated with legend or miracles just does not have the same resonance. I won’t give away the ending, but suffice it to say that there are really no great changes or achievements at the end. I have concluded that they really should have left it alone after the four horsemen rode off against the sunset at the end of Last Crusade.
The current studios really need to stop this business of buying or taking over all of the valuable intellectual properties and trying to catch lightning in a bottle twice or “improve” on them by bringing them into line with current values. They need to get rid of Kathleen Kennedy, who keeps using the same one trick of destroying the previously popular hero and bringing some perfect female lead in. Unfortunately, like the folks in that other story about the letter from the mother of the bride who shut her brother out of his niece’s wedding, a lot of these people can’t see what they’re doing wrong. They will just blame fans having the wrong values.
2. Of course it’s a distortion. Gaslighting is one of many tricks the left is good at. Even when they lose, they win, because the other side can’t win except by cheating or by deceiving with the wrong values.
3. I think your last sentence says it better than almost anyone else could. To progressives, the law is always capable of being changed… until it reaches where they want it to be, then it is a thing decided and can’t be disturbed. It’s just the same as recounts, the votes must be counted, until they reach a number that puts the Democrat over the top, then all challenges need to stop for the good of the nation.
4. No one has ever confirmed that Justice Kagan is in fact gay, and, according to her Wikipedia article, there doesn’t seem to be any solid evidence out there. However, the fact that that belief is out there certainly doesn’t help the situation where she seems to have contradicted herself based on a group she may or may not belong to.
5. Classic leftist tactics. Even when they lose, they win, because there is some fatal flaw in whatever led to the victory. If this was not a question, you would be hearing stuff about how the six justices who decided this matter or appointed by presidents who did not win the popular vote and confirmed by a senate whose yes votes came from states that did not represent a majority of the populace. Funny, but when 31 states voted against gay marriage back at the beginning of the century, you didn’t hear them saying that the will of the majority should be respected. Like everything else, the American left loves majority rule when the majority votes in its favor, it hates majority rule when the majority of votes against it, because the majority is clearly wrong if it votes against it.
5. Why didn’t that surface as the case progressed through the courts? It wasn’t a controversy? How could that go unnoticed and unattended to at all the levels? Weird.
How do reporters track down someone who is unrelated to a case by simply a first name. Wouldn’t some unique identifier be required by a reporter to state that this is the person claimed by these lawyers? I’m confused.
I reread the paragraph, but it still makes no sense that a person would give contact information to a reporter for a story that the person made up.
Supreme Court decisions don’t seem to be based on deep research. In Board of Education v. Earls, for example, you will see that the main point was that you can drug test students for extracurricular activities because it isn’t mandatory. Well, in the school district in question in this case, those ‘extracurricular’ activities go on the students transcripts and students are required to participate in ‘extracurricular’ activities to graduate. Somehow, the Supreme Court missed that. So, the Supreme Court found that ALL students can be forced to undergo drug testing, while saying the opposite.
The courts decide how they want to decide. A lot of times the specifics of the case don’t seem to matter.
The problem with the latest Indiana Jones is that as with the recent Star Wars movies and most Disney’s movies, they show that these companies have no more creativity left in them (thus resorting to remakes and/or building up on existing movies and franchises), and/or that they’re deliberately woke’fying classic movies and franchises but replacing white characters with BIPOCs and/or replacing males (or emasculating them) with “girl power” based female characters. People are sick of that crap; which is why movies like the new Top Gun are crushing them
It isn’t just that it is a bad story, it is a bad story that they use for EVERYTHING. I haven’t seen it, but let me guess:
The beloved hero character is overshadowed by a girl that is the key to everything.
She knows how to do everything the hero could do, but better, and without trying.
The hero is just a bumbling fool compared to her, he needs to just let her fix/solve/be everything.
She probably will have some dialogue about how bad/lame/evil/pathetic men are or how much better women are at everything.
How did I do?
Re SCOTUS and affirmative action: This old Bork-era video of Thomas Sowell has been resurfacing on the interwebs. He notes an often overlooked result of the practice, causing harm to those it’s intended to help.
I have a bone to pick with arguments that the decision striking down Affirmative Action “overturned decades of precedent”. The precedent on this question has long held that AA must, at some point, end. When precedent says a thing must end, it isn’t overturning precedent to say “it ends now”.
Yeah, I used that one too, and it is absolutely accurate. Justice Thomas’s concurring opinion is at fault.
I saw the new Indiana Jones movie last night. Unfortunately, I’ve found of late that going into movies with low expectations sometimes helps.
But I didn’t find it terrible. I also didn’t get the Woke feeling from it.
Maybe it would help to define Woke.
Having a female character in a film isn’t Woke. Indiana Jones wasn’t replaced by a female any more than he was replaced by the illegitimate son he found out he had in the last movie. Every Indiana Jones film has a female co-star. Some of them are love interests, some are femme fatales. Some are both. This one is a previously unmentioned goddaughter so she’s definitely not a love interest.
He’s old and grumpy, yes. He’s Harrison Ford, after all. Yes, I did get grumpy old Han Solo vibes from him, particularly in one plot point that eerily mirrors in general Solo’s story from the last movies, but don’t we all change as we get older? The female students in his classes aren’t googly-eyed as much as bored these days. That’s not Woke. That’s life.
It’s been mentioned in other comments that old people are going to see Indy. That’s my assessment, too. We were among the less than 10 people in the theater last night. I didn’t see young people. A few years ago, our son was looking up Oscar hosts from the past, looked up and asked, “Who’s Bob Hope?” It made me sad. Hope was enjoyed by three generations but the current one doesn’t have a clue who he was. Likewise, Harrison Ford doesn’t quite have the same box office pull he did in the ’80s and ’90s. The new generation may discover him in the upcoming Marvel films where he’s replacing the late William Hurt but he’s on the waning side of his career right now. He was too old to come back as Indy. I still believe that. But it still wasn’t a terrible film. And fewer people going to see an 80-year-old man as opposed to a 40-year old running all over the world getting into increasingly dangerous scrapes isn’t because of the movie’s Wokeness. It’s because he’s an 80-year old man. And because the young people don’t know who Indiana Jones is or why they should care.
Is there increased diversity in this films? Sure…but there’ve always been ethnic minorities in Indy films. And the increased diversity helps reflect the time period the film is now set in. We see black people with Afros. We see women starting to move into positions of authority. That’s not Woke.
I think people are assuming Wokeness in things because Disney is involved.
Now, for those who have seen the film and disagree, I’d like the opportunity to discuss your observations in more detail. I’ve tried to be mindful of spoilers here.
I’m glad you went. I’m torn. “It’s not as bad as I thought it would be” seems to be the main critical reaction from reviewers. That’s a depressingly low bar. I’m a loyal fan of the franchise, but each of the first 4 were substantially less great than the one before, and that de-aging technology irritated me in “The Irishman”: I’m not eager to see it again. The film will make me sad, and I have too much to be sad about already. I find it sad that Ford feels he has to do this, or that he’ll mar his own character just for money. I find it sad that the film doesn’t have Spielberg at the helm, so at least we’ll have his flair. I find it sad that an exhilarating action genre now is attracting only retirees and nostalgia buffs.
As a directer and writer, I find it sad that when “The Last Crusade” had given us the perfect final image for Indy, riding off literally into the sunset with his father (and Marcus), that exit has been spoiled—twice. I find it depressing that Disney is so creatively spent that it has to stoop to desperate retreads.
And it makes me sad that Disney has placed itself in a situation where confirmation bias has people seeing wokeness in everything they do. That’s a disaster of their own making. While Walt was alive, the assumption was that we were going to see something magical, for all ages and classes, done as well as it could possibly be done, that children would love.
I think I just talked myself out of seeing the Last of Indy.
Cary Grant retired from films when he decided that he could no longer be a plausible romantic love interest, because that image WAS Cary Grant. Marlene Dietrich, after her disastrous fall from a stage that ended her career, refused to leave her apartment and was never photographed, saying that she had spent her life creating an image and wouldn’t allow it to be ruined in her waning years.
The de-aging isn’t too bad. It’s definitely Ford’s voice, albeit lacking the strength it used to have.
Let’s not forget Salah also being in that final ride at the end of Last Crusade. The reason that’s important is they’re supposed to be a parallel with the Four Horsemen of the Bible, who represent the end of all things.
Oh well, Indy now passes into the realm of writers and fanfic. I have two ideas already, entitled “Indiana Jones and the Seal of Solomon,” and “Indiana Jones and the Secret of the Four Faces.”
I forgot about Salah! Nice catch.
This version of Disney would have brought back “Shane,” last seen riding into the shadows, slumped over from his wounds, but victorious in defending the family, farmers, democracy, justice, and the American way.
These days, even Superman doesn’t fight for “truth, justice, and the American way.” The new slogan is “truth, justice, and a better tomorrow.”
“Is the Times telling us that using the color of an applicant’s skin as a determinant was being “objective”?”
I doubt very much they meant it that way, but functionally, you aren’t too far off. One of the better moments of the Roberts majority ruling (The Thomas concurrence was better) was a point made about quotas – I’m working from memory here, but the point was made that despite the university saying that they didn’t have racial quotas, the reality was that the racial breakdown percentages for a recent ten year stretch of time was flat to the point where the average deviation from the line was tenths of a percentage.
Frankly, because they ostensibly had to have some kind of internal mechanism to justify what was obviously a quota, the administrative effort it must have taken to organize that is impressive.
Jack,
Your number “3. One more thing” comment reminded me of a conversation I had with a progressive acquaintance of mine a while back. He has some diversity position at the highly progressive Syracuse University. He was lecturing me on how much I benefited from white privilege. He went on and on citing various statistics. At one point he cited the high incarceration rate for blacks in our prison system. I stopped him and asked with as much shock in my voice as I could without coming across as phony or sarcastic. Do you mean the government is locking up thousands of innocent blacks? His lecture immediately stopped, and he finished his beer while talking about the round of golf we had finished playing earlier. It was a beautiful thing. Funny he has never brought up the subject of white privilege with me again.