Month: November 2023

Ethics Dunce: NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles, And A Nelson

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Let me say at the outset that the NFL and, by extension, all of its teams are so thoroughly and constantly corrupt and unethical that its periodic examples of ethical obtuseness—other than paying its players to cripple themselves, which is ongoing—should probably be categorized under The Julie Principle, as in “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, pro football’s unethical, stop wond’ring why…” This episode is also part of the Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck, however, so it’s worthy of a post.

George Norcross, who is a prominent and wealth Democratic Party activist and power broker, hung a combined American and Israeli flag from his private box at the Eagle’s Lincoln Financial Field during the team’s against the Dallas Cowboys two days ago. Stadium security confronted Norcross over the flags and took him into custody after he refused to remove them. Then they took them down.

The Eagles cited its policy that “signs, banners or similar items that are obscene or indecent, unrelated to the event, potentially offensive to other patrons, that may block the views of other fans or that are otherwise considered dangerous or inappropriate by the Eagles are prohibited.”

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Can You Guess Who “The Great Stupid,” The DEI Ethics Train Wreck And The Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck Are Ganging Up On In Germany?

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

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Yes, it’s come to this! In the town of Tangerhütte, about 2 hours east of Berlin, Germany, a daycare center that for decades has been named in honor of the most famous child murdered during the Holocaust in World War II, is removing Anne’s name. The Anne Frank Daycare Center will become the “World Explorers Daycare Center” because…wait for it!…the name makes some “migrant” parents feel “uncomfortable.” It isn’t welcoming enough, or something, now that Israel is at war with Gaza.

The daycare center’s director explains that the change from the center’s current name is now troubling “parents with migrant backgrounds” who complained that they found it “challenging” to explain Anne’s story to their children. Of course, the whole idea behind such honors is that succeeding generations remember important stories, like we remember the complex tragedy of the Civil War with statues of its many flawed participants…wait. Oops! Never mind.

City officials now insist the renaming is necessary “to celebrate the diversity” of the children attending the daycare center, as explained by Andreas Brohm, the mayor. Because of the large number of Hamas supporters in the town, Anne Frank no longer aligns with the “new focus on diversity,” Brohm said. Despite Germany’s strong support for Israel as part of its penance for launching the Holocaust under He Who Must Not Be Named, respecting diversity—Kill the Jews/ Don’t kill the Jews: Diversity! Equity! Inclusion!—elevates the feelings of many parents about the current name above “the global political situation.”

Writing at “Victory Girls,” Deanna Fisher muses,

[I]f her name comes off the daycare, where does it stop? How many schools all over the world carry her name? A lot. And how quickly will that change if the local population decides that having a school named after Anne Frank sends the “wrong” message about “diversity, equity, and inclusion”? Where does this end? Given the amount of ugly anti-Semitism we have seen this weekend, and what is promised to come, I am not sure where it ends. And I’m not sure that the West has the backbone to stop it, either.

Oh, I’m absolutely sure it doesn’t! After all, a life-time petty hood died of a drug overdose under the knee of a Minnesota cop three years ago, so of course Anne Frank’s name has to go. Come on! It makes perfect sense!

The Great Stupid is all-powerful, and its reach is infinite…

Yes, “Free Speech Is In Trouble,” But Let’s Be Clear About Why And Who’s Responsible

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“538” founder and exile Nate Silver is now opining on substack and doing very well, thank-you, but he still is an infuriatingly biased progressive pretending to be objective. His topic in “Free Speech Is In Trouble” is the 2024 (?) college free speech rankings from a College Pulse/ FIRE survey of over 55,000 undergraduates across a wide range of colleges and universities. The results are pretty clear and ambiguous: most self-identified progressive students don’t believe in free speech and want those who don’t conform to woke ideology silenced or intimidated. This poses a serious threat to the culture and democracy.

See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? But Nate, being Nate, repeatedly buries the lede and distracts from that conclusion. Oh, he says it, sort of, many times, but it’s always stated in an equivocal manner bordering on deceitful.

At the top, Silver says, “And after seeing the latest polling on what college students think about free speech, I don’t concern over “cancel culture” or the erosion of free speech norms is just some moral panic. In fact, I think people are neglecting how quick and broad the shifts have been, especially on the left.”

Not “especially” on the Left, Nate: on the Left—you know, your team. He says, as a summary of the results,”College students aren’t very enthusiastic about free speech. In particular, that’s true for liberal or left-wing students, who are at best inconsistent in their support of free speech and have very little tolerance for controversial speech they disagree with. ” Why state a generality that isn’t true? It isn’t “college students,” it’s progressive, woke students who have little commitment to free speech. “But this looks like a major generational shift from when college campuses were hotbeds of advocacy for free speech, particularly on the left,” he says a bit later. It’s not a generational shift, it’s an ideological shift and a values shift, on the Left.

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The New York Times Legal Expert Doesn’t Understand The Constitution

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Well that’s a kick in the head! Actually, the expert in question is Linda Greenhouse, the Supreme Court reporter for The Times from 1978 to 2008 and once a regular participant in those Sunday Morning network “round tables” when a talk show wanted to pretend it had a balanced and non-partisan array. Greenhouse is a strongly left-biased Democrat legal analyst, often a dishonest one, and her latest column for the Times proves again that it is propaganda and woke advocacy, not legal enlightenment, that she serves.

Once again, I wish “A Friend,” formerly our resident Times apologist, was still allowed here so I could read his tortured defense of the paper for printing this sinister crap.

Do read “Will the Supreme Court Toss Out a Gun Law Meant to Protect Women?” I wouldn’t bother to quote it if the Times didn’t make you pay for the privilege of rolling your eyes, but I will, a bit. The headline says it all, though, and by “all” I mean anti-rights, anti-due process totalitarian cant. You know, Democratic Party/progressive/ “Do Something!” stuff.

If the Constitution contains an enumerated right in its Bill of Rights, the fact that a law directly violating that right may, in the eyes of some, have some beneficial effects is irrelevant unless there is a massive, existential justification for an exception. Otherwise, the law is unconstitutional. Current progressives and Democrats don’t believe that, or rather, object to the principle. The believe that if speech “hurts” someone by making them feel bad, expresses taboo opinions or makes a sanctified group member feel “unsafe,” laws blocking or punishing that speech shouldn’t be seen as a First Amendment violation, though, in fact, they are. If the right to a fair trial has to be ignored to make sure that a cop whose knee inadvertently triggered nationwide riots and DEI craziness ends up in prison for life, well, reasons the Left, you gotta break some eggs to make a metaphorical omelette, the eggs being the Bill of Rights.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, following SCOTUS’s long-delayed and essential 2022 ruling in Bruen that the Second Amendment means what it says and is about the human right to bear arms and not militias, declared a federal law unconstitutional that prohibited a person subject to a court-issued restraining order for domestic violence from owning a gun. It was and is obviously the right decision except to anti-gun zealots who believe in pre-crime laws, red flag laws, and anything along the slippery slope to outright Second Amendment repeal. The Supreme Court is obviously going to uphold the Fifth Circuit, because its ruling was correct. The only question is whether any of the three far-left ladies on the Court will have the integrity to follow the law. I have some hope for Justice Kagan.

But to read Greenhouse, one would think, and by “one” I mean a typical American who doesn’t read SCOTUS opinions, couldn’t name five of the first ten Amendments and doesn’t comprehend what the Supreme Court’s job is, that the fact that an invalid law has good intentions should be sufficient reason to let it stand. (I doubt the law at issue even had good intentions.)

What the law allows in domestic abuse restraining orders is for judges to issue them solely on the testimony of the complainant, and that act will ban an individual from exercising his right to bear arms. Evidentiary standards are minimal; judges are inclined to grant requests for restraining orders because if there is violence against a complainant after the judge finds no cause—moral luck lurks! —the judge is going to be crucified. The other party doesn’t have a right to be present at the hearing, so the result of the law struck down would be that individuals could lose a core enumerated right without due process of law, based solely on the word of an adverse party.

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Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck Update: Tells, Hypocrites, Liars And A Jumbo, Part 2…”From The River To The Sea”

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Yikes. I posted Part I just two days ago, and realized then that I had too many items to cover for a single post. Then anti-Israel demonstrations amassed in Washington, D.C.. and outside the White House, Barack Obama made a fool of himself, “The Squad’s” most anti-Semitic member (but it’s a close race) stopped even pretending she was anything else, and heaven knows what I’m facing today. Well, as Hercules said as he faced the Augean stables, “Might as well start shoveling”….

1. The star of this shit-show is undoubtedly Rep. Rashida Tlaib, elected by a largely Palestinian district, who narrowly escaped an expulsion vote in the House after every Democrat voted her way (and over 20 Republicans too, presumably because they believe that saying disgusting things and holding opinions that defy American values shouldn’t get someone kicked out of Congress by anyone but voters. I have to agree with them). She posted a social media video showing her constitutes chanting “from the river to the sea.” That’s a call for Israel to be eliminated. That’s all it can mean, and that’s all it has ever meant. Formerly Democratic maverick Senator Kristen Sinema, tried to educate her old party’s members, posting this:

The immediate reaction from the Jew Hate gallery was to deny this undeniable fact, using absurd gerrymandered maps to show there might be some topographically possible way to simultaneously have a version of Israel and a Palestine state that reached “from the river to the sea.” These are unethical, untrustworthy human beings who lie routinely. Tlaib, who has already made it clear what she desires for Israel, went full Jumbo: “Me? Anti-Semitic?” “From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate,” Tlaib wrote in a post on X/Twitter. “My work and advocacy is always centered in justice and dignity for all people no matter faith or ethnicity.”

Right. As with all of the Left’s wailing about poor, abused Gaza, this gaslighting relies on the utter ignorance of listeners, especially college students marinated in intersectionality. Hamas’s 2017 constitution states, “Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.” It was not “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence,” and Tlaib knows it. It has been used by Hamas and other terrorist organizations for years, and its intent has never been in doubt. 

“From the river to the sea” was devised by Palestinian nationalists in the 1960s, when the entire Palestinian movement openly sought Israel’s destruction. Mainstream Palestinian groups dropped the phrase after Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization formerly recognized one another after the 1993 Oslo Accords, but it was then revived by the Hamas terrorist group and others hostile to Jews.

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Ha! Disney Gets The Message!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Discussing the last Ethics Alarms post about the totally botched live -remake of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” one of the most influential and ground-breaking (and popular, and profitable) films in Hollywood history, I told my wife, “If I were in charge of Disney, I’d just re-release the original in a restored version.”

And that’s exactly what the company is doing.

The best part about the move is that it implicitly rebukes Rachael Zeigler, the current Snow Of Color who foolishly trashed her own vehicle by calling the original dated and “weird.” It also commits the company to the ultimate version of the live-action rip-off emerging as an homage to its predecessor, not a rejection of it: all those kids who see Walt’s movie and love it are not going to like a live-version that defames Snow and her friends. Even Disney’s not that stupid. (Are they?)

Anyway, there is hope: the profit motive and the instinct to survive may have overwhelmed toxic wokism. Disney may have rediscovered the ethical virtues of competence, responsibility, and respect.

Now THIS Is An Irresponsible Biden Judicial Nominee…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The exchange above revealed much about the caliber of judicial nominees President Biden is presenting to the lock-step Democratic Senate majority.

The bio of this one, Quinnipiac University law professor Sarah French Russell, states that she “focuses her research and teaching on sentencing policy”–sentencing policy!!—“juvenile justice, prison conditions, reentry issues, ethics, and the problems of access to justice.” Ethics—when her response to being confronted outright with a letter she signed, advocating outrageous and radical measures, was to tell the assembled Senators that he had no memory of signing it and to deny that the letter said what it said…”Russell was previously Director of the Arthur Liman Public Interest Program at Yale Law School and taught in Yale’s Criminal Defense, Prison Legal Services, and Supreme Court clinics. Good old dependable Yale Law School!

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Ethics Reflections On The “Shocking” Times/Siena Poll [Expanded…and Expanded Again]

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Yes, The Horror! New polls by The New York Times and Siena College imply that if the 2024 election were held today between the two most likely candidates of the two major parties, President Biden would lose to Donald Trump by margins of 3 to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, five of the so-called “swing states,” with Biden only leading in Michigan. That projects Trump winning at least 300 electoral votes.

Says the Times about its own poll,

Discontent pulsates throughout the Times/Siena poll, with a majority of voters saying Mr. Biden’s policies have personally hurt them. The survey also reveals the extent to which the multiracial and multigenerational coalition that elected Mr. Biden is fraying. Demographic groups that backed Mr. Biden by landslide margins in 2020 are now far more closely contested, as two-thirds of the electorate sees the country moving in the wrong direction. Voters under 30 favor Mr. Biden by only a single percentage point, his lead among Hispanic voters is down to single digits and his advantage in urban areas is half of Mr. Trump’s edge in rural regions. And while women still favored Mr. Biden, men preferred Mr. Trump by twice as large a margin, reversing the gender advantage that had fueled so many Democratic gains in recent years. Black voters — long a bulwark for Democrats and for Mr. Biden — are now registering 22 percent support in these states for Mr. Trump, a level unseen in presidential politics for a Republican in modern times.

Well all righty then! What, if anything, can we glean from this, beginning with the understanding that it’s just a poll, we can’t trust polls or pollsters, and we can’t trust the New York Times or the news media? This poll could have been deliberately manipulated to push Democrats into dumping Biden, or to gull Republicans into nominating Trump, or to scare Democrats out of their deluded back-patting, or to make the GOP foolishly confident. Or the poll itself is just wrong, even today, never mind where things could go by November of 2024. Granted. But let’s suppose it is relatively accurate, arguendo, as lawyers like to say. Then what?

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Ethics Dunce, Unethical Quote, Irresponsible Ex-President OF The Month, (And OMG What A Smug, Insufferable Ass!): Barack Obama

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I was prepared to add this nauseating story to Part 2 of the previous post, “Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck Update: Tells, Hypocrites, Liars And A Jumbo” because it came to my attention after Part I was up, and because it made my head explode. Then Obama’s drivil kept me up last night, and upon re-reading Obama’s fatuous, pandering, intellectually indefensible, and, of course, being The Light-Bringer, self-aggrandizing contribution to policy debate pollution and the accelerating ethical deterioration of the Democratic Party, I realized only a stand-alone article would do.

Being interviewed on a podcast (with the retch-response inducing cutesie title “Pod Save America”) run by his adoring ex-staffers —to be fair, maybe all the bowing and misty-eyed mooning disoriented him—the ex-President, currently moving up fast on the rail as the most wildly over-praised President of all, decided to open his trap and pronounce:

“I look at this, and I think back, ‘What could I have done during my presidency to move this forward, as hard as I tried?’ But there’s a part of me that’s still saying, ‘Well, was there something else I could have done?’”

As usual for this narcissist, everything is about him, isn’t it? After all, he’s Barack Obama, and surely he could have resolved a hopeless blood feud on the Palestinian side and a stubborn insistence on survival on the Israeli side that the opposing parties involved have been unable to fix since 1948! It’s all his fault really, Barack acknowledges. He just didn’t focus enough of his super-powers on that problem while he was busy making deals with Iran giving them more money to spread terrorism and a guaranteed future nuclear bomb to wipe Israel out after he’s retired or dead, when it didn’t matter. To him, anyway.

Then Obama sagely noted that “this is century-old stuff that’s coming to the fore.” (Actually, efforts to exterminate Jews are a lot older than a century) and, the New York Times tells us, “blamed social media for amplifying the divisions and reducing a thorny international dispute to what he viewed as sloganeering.”

Yeah, all those tweets and Facebook posts have made the Palestinians want to destroy Israel even more than they’ve declared in their multitudinous “Death to Israel” statements over the past eight decades or so. Good point.

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Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck Update: Tells, Hypocrites, Liars And A Jumbo (Part I)

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

My head has been exploding all week from the stunning statements emanating from academia, journalism, “the Squad” and a sickening number of alleged progressives and Democrats calling for a “cease fire” in the war, which is code for “make Israel wait for the next terrorist attack by the murderous regime next door that has vowed to wipe it out.”

In fact, it is a good time to review the rhetorical tells coming from these people and groups as they show the filthy underside of a metaphorical rock. Just as I will not trust or respect anyone who frames the abortion issue as a matter of “choice,” or the gun policy debate as one of “common sense gun control,” any commentator, activist, reporter or politician (or Facebook friend) who uses these terms has outed themselves as historically ignorant, irresponsible, and quite possibly anti-Semitic, or at least a willing dupe of anti-Semites:

  • “Two state solution.” Unbelievable. Biden has endorsed this mirage again. The Palestinians have had the “two state solution” within their grasp several times since 1948, and rejected it. Israel, not being suicidal or insane, requires an effective declaration that any such “solution” involves an official acknowledgement that Israel has a right to exist where it exists, and will not be the target of another genocidal attack. Framing the “two-state solution” as a reasonable “compromise” is nothing more than a device  to make both adversaries seem equally responsible for the endless conflict and violence. One is. The other is not.
  • “Occupation” and “occupied Palestine/Gaza.” There is no occupation. There are no Israeli soldiers in Gaza.
  • “Settlers” and “Colonization” These terms assume a fact not resolved. Israel claims the land it effectively won in the 7 Days War, though the U.N., over-stocked as it is with nations that wanted Israel to lose that war, claims that the nation keeping the West Bank and the Golan Heights is illegal. Turning over more land to people who vowed to wipe it out does not appeal to Israel, so it permits citizens  to move there. (Good.)
  • “Apartheid state.” Israel is not apartheid. Law abiding Muslims and Christians as well as non-Semitic races live there, work there, and vote there.
  • “Resistance” means “terrorism.”
  • “Indiscriminate bombing.” Hamas uses Gaza civilians as shields, stores weapons and hides leaders in hospitals, and thus makes “discriminate bombing” impossible as well as foolish. Nor are Gazans devoid of responsibility for their own plight. They support and installed a terrorist government, and endorse its mission and methods. They are not “innocent.” Their children are, but their parents are the ones who placed their children in mortal peril. Israel has no ethical or moral duty to sacrifice its own well-being to remedy Palestinian cultural poison.

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