I just realized that those words can be put in any order and still communicate the same message….
Keep it ethical, now…
Month: June 2024
Signature Significance: China’s Fake Waterfall
Why would anyone—any nation, any organization, any business or individual—trust a nation that would do something like this?
A major tourist attraction, Yuntai Falls, at the Yuntai Mountain scenic resort in China’s central Henan province, has been promoted as China’s “tallest uninterrupted waterfall” to its millions of yearly visitors. But this week a hiker’s video revealed that the falls are fed by a secret network of water pipes. In a statement, officials admitted that they added water to the cascade to improve the viewing experience for tourists. OK, technically the waterfall admitted that it was phony, as the statement said, “Depending on the season, I cannot guarantee that I am in my best condition whenever my friends come to see me.”
More Evidence of the Ethical Dumbing Down of America…
For some time now, I’ve noticed that the reader ethics questions posed to Kwame Anthony Appiah, the New York Times Magazine’s proprietor of “The Ethicist” advice column, have become more obvious, often embarrassingly so. Appiah, a real ethicist (he teaches philosophy at NYU) is easily the best of the advice columnists who have held his job, though, naturally, I would be better still. But the point of the column, presumably, is to educate readers about ethical decision-making and standards for ethical analysis. A question that provokes the reaction, “What? Are you kidding? DUH!” does not accomplish that objective.
Now, it’s possible that Appiah is a competent ethicist but a lousy question selector. It’s also possible, since the descent of The Great Stupid over the land and related recent cultural disasters, like eight years of terrible role models in the White House, the politicization of public education and universities, and the continuing deterioration of popular culture, which, believe it or not, used to specialize in ethics lessons for the masses, ethical literacy is in a death spiral.
Confronting My Biases, Episode 9: People Who Use Profile Photos Like This…
That’s Liz Wolfe, a regular writer at Reason.
Why would anyone present themselves to the world and strangers with a pose like that? (I am going to try to ignore another bias in this post, otherwise attractive people who wear nose rings, which I regard as the equivalent of deliberately having a booger hanging out of a nostril.) I’m a stage director: interpreting and evoking facial expressions and body language is what I do (and well, by the way). I would direct an actress to use that pose and expression if she were playing a character who was arrogant, defiant, remote, contemptuous of the world and hostile.
Someone who presents themselves in such a manner in real life is either so insecure that she is trying to keep everyone at a safe distance, or arrogant, defiant, remote, contemptuous of the world, hostile, and proud of it. This is a form of visual incivility. “Why should I waste time with you, peasant?,” that look says to me. And my response to that look is, “Oh, bite me. Get over yourself. Grow up.”
Wow. The Trump-Deranged Media Hacks Are Still Flogging the Ridiculous Alito Flag Angle!
Now this is desperation. The upside-down U.S. flag incident that the New York Times treated as a “scoop” three-and-a-half years after it took place started falling apart almost immediately, so then the Times concocted an even more attenuated flag-based theory that Justice Joseph Alito had signaled his approval of the January 6, 2021 rioting at the Capitol. In neither case was there any evidence that Alito flew the flags or was aware of their significance; he explained the incidents, but, see, because he’s a conservative SCOTUS Justice, the Axis just assumes he must be lying.
The fact that the second flag was used by Black Lives Matter more prominently than by the J-6 idiots? Never mind. That the same flag had been flying without incident for 50 years outside the City Hall of the wokiest city on the continent? So what? That the sainted Justice Ginsburg unambiguously signaled her conflict of interest regarding all things Trump with a symbolic protest she made explicit? That the attack on Alito had to rely on the pre-women’s liberation, anti-feminist theory that a husband is responsible for the conduct of his wife? Hey, this is the American Left of 2024: Double Standards and Hypocrisy Don’t Matter when you’re trying to save democracy! That the Washington Post reporter who investigated the Alito home’s fluttering distress symbol when it happened decided it was a proverbial nothingburger?
About that…. serial Ethics Alarms Ethics Dunce Eric Wemple, who is the Washington Post’s “media critic” these days, thus telling you all you need to know about the credibility of the Washington Post, was actually allowed to issue an op-ed yesterday condemning his own paper for its “deference to Justice Alito” handing “a scoop to the New York Times.” In this thing, Wemple really says that the Post ignored a “sizzling tip” in 2021. That there was a nautical distress signal flag flying over the Alito home was a sizzling tip! Sizzling! Yes, he really wrote that.
Encore: “An Ethics Alarms D-Day Mission”
I first posted this essay on Veteran’s Day several years ago, and I re-posted it on the anniversary of D-Day in 2021. The crucial facts of the June 6, 1944 invasion of Normandy that it discusses are still hardly ever mentioned, at least not when I’m around to read or hear it, in any news media or historical features about the battle for Omaha Beach. As I wrote originally and will state now, I don’t understand this. The ongoing mystery constitutes one more “duty to remember” crusade by your windmill-tilting host. So up the post goes again this June 6, as I fulfill my pledge to post it on every D-Day anniversary until this largely untold story is as familiar as the sight of Robert Mitchum, as Brig. Gen. Norman Cota, sicking a fresh cigar in his mouth and saying, as the final line in “The Longest Day,” “Run me up the hill, son!”
***
After all these many years of reading about and watching movies and TV shows about D-Day, June 6, 1944, I discovered how the US Navy saved the invasion and maybe the world after stumbling upon a 2009 documentary on the Smithsonian channel.
If you recall the way the story is told in “The Longest Day” and other accounts, US troops were pinned down by horrific fire from the German defenses on Omaha beach until Gen. Norman Cota (Robert Mitchum in the movie) rallied them to move forward, and by persistence his infantry troops ultimately broke through. Yet it was US destroyers off the Normandy shore that turned the tide of the battle at Omaha, an element that isn’t shown in “The Longest Day” (or “Saving Private Ryan”)at all.
Though it was not part of the plan, the captains of the Navy destroyers decided to come in to within 800 yards of the beach and use their big guns at (for them) point blank range to pound the German artillery, machine gun nests and sharpshooters. The barrage essentially wiped them out, allowing Cota’s troops to get up and over without being slaughtered. I’ve never seen that explained or depicted in any film, and according to the Smithsonian’s video, apparently it is a vital feature of the battle that had been inexplicably neglected. No monument to the US Navy commemorating its contributions on 6/6/44 was erected at Normandy until 2009.
Here’s the relevant part of account from the Naval History website on “Operation Neptune,” the Navy counterpart to Operation Overlord:
Ethics Alarms Sends Its Thanks To The Federalist For Neatly Explaining Why EA’s “2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck” Diagnosis Was and Is Correct
The “2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck” isn’t the longest running Ethics Alarms ethics train wreck or even the most disastrous, perhaps (The Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck is older and arguably worse, since it encompasses the Ferguson Ethics Train Wreck and the George Floyd Ethics Train Wreck too), But it has been disastrous enough. Fredo is up there again because, dammit, I was right about how sinister and dangerous the Democrats’ response to Trump’s shock defeat of Hillary. If anything, I underestimated how bad it would be, but for my correct analysis this blog was abandoned by all of the Trump haters who were sure I was their ally, since I had been pointing out the new President’s myriad flaws for two years.
Well, bias made them stupid, and I was punished for it. “You’ve drunk the Kool-Aid!” declared a previously esteemed visitor here when I (again, correctly) called the Mueller investigation what it was, a set-up to cripple Trump’s Presidency by Clinton allies in law enforcement, Congress and the media. “Banned Bob,” as the appropriately exiled commenter Bob Ghery will be known as henceforth, wrote in a recent comment that he had followed EA for years but noticed a while back that it had become “political and angry.” I hate the “angry” cheap shot; it’s a popular way to discredit my considered analysis as emotional, which it is not. I was and am emphatic that what the Democratic Party has done since the 2016 election has created a looming existential threat to American institutions, values and democracy. I’m not “angry” about it. And I have been forced to spend more time on political ethics because this epic breach of political ethics in America is the most important ethics story by far since Ethics Alarms started in 2009, indeed since Watergate.
I’m obligated to write about it. I will stop when the Axis stops using totalitarian tactics to undermine the Constitution, our culture, our communities, and our political discourse.
Thus I was thrilled to read the latest post in The Federalist titled, “Democrats’ 2016 Election Trutherism Lurks Behind Trump’s Show Trial Conviction.” An excerpt:
This Isn’t a Baseball Ethics Post, It’s a “Money Makes Organizations Forget Their Core Values” Post
Gee, what a surprise.
Major League Baseball, almost destroyed by a gambling scandal in 1919, with two of its greatest players, Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose (its all-time hit leader), banned from the game and exiled from the Hall of Fame for participating in baseball gambling (Jackson helped throw a World Series for gamblers; that’s him above. He was no Ray Liotta, was he?), is suddenly awash in new gambling scandals. How could this happen, you may ask? Easy. Once the Supreme Court opened the door to online gambling, all of the professional sports leaped into the money pit. Now online sports gambling outfits like DraftKings are the most ubiquitous sponsors of televised sports. In the middle of televised Red Sox games, the screen will show the odds on bets like “Will Rafael Devers hit a homerun?” David Ortiz, a lifetime Red Sox hero and icon, stars in commercials for DraftKings. The obvious message is that gambling on baseball is fun, virtuous, harmless, and…
For Major League Baseball, with its history, of all sports, to take this U-Turn was wildly irresponsible and perilous. How can the sport maintain the fan’s trust in the legitimacy of games played in an environment where billions are being wagered on them, openly and without any fear of corrupting the players?
Fay Vincent, the last real baseball commissioner (the first one was appointed because of the Black Sox scandal in 1919) told the Times, “The inevitability of corruption is triggered by the enormous amount of money that’s at stake. When you pour all this gambling money into baseball, or all the professional sports — or for that matter, even amateur sports — that amount of money is so staggering that eventually the players and I think, tragically, the umpires, the regulators, everybody is going to be tempted to see if they can get a million dollars.”
Vincent is an ethical man. The current “commissioner” (he’s the owners’ toady, just like Bud Selig, his predecessor), not so much. In a statement reacting to baseball this week banning one Major League Player for life for gambling on his own team and suspending four more for a year, Rob Manfred ludicrously said, “The strict enforcement of Major League Baseball’s rules and policies governing gambling conduct is a critical component of upholding our most important priority: protecting the integrity of our games for the fans. The longstanding prohibition against betting on Major League Baseball games by those in the sport has been a bedrock principle for over a century.”
Funny that after decades of no gambling scandals, baseball is suddenly drowning in them. What a coinkydink!
Unethical Quote of the Month: President Joe Biden (Alternate Headline: “What a Shameless Asshole!”)
“We must face a simple truth.To protect America as a land that welcomes immigrants, we must first secure the border and secure it now.”
—President Biden, outrageously adopting Donald Trump’s long-standing position that he party has condemned as racist and “xenophobic” because his poll numbers are looking bad.
Seldom has the “Die Hard” clip (from the Ethics Alarms Hollywood Clip Archive) been more appropriate or infuriating. For more than three years, Joe Biden’s administration deliberately signaled to aspiring alien lawbreakers that they would be wink-winked into the United States despite defying immigration laws, let free to run amuck if that’s what they chose to do, and law enforcement would look the other way. Officials like Kamala Harris and Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas gaslighted the public by insisting the border was secure when anyone with eyes or a camera could see it was anything but. An estimated 2.5 illegals have entered the country across this “secure border.” Awakening to the reality that the majority of the American public doesn’t view that as “a Great Replacement Conspiracy,” but simply as incompetent, irresponsible, dangerous and wrong—you know, like Donald Trump said in 2015 as he launched his (quixotic, everyone thought) candidacy for the Presidency and was tarred as a racist for it?—suddenly, Mirabile Dictu!, Biden is singing a different metaphorical tune.
Ethics Observations on the Harvard/Columbia “Nakba” Article Episode
What’s Nakba? It is a pro-Palestinian framing of the forever conflict in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians. Nakba refers to the beginning, when the United Nations announced its two-state resolution of the Palestine conflict with Israel getting one of them, and the Arab states along with the Palestinians attacked the new Israel territory with the objective of making the Israeli state a single Palestinian state. Israel won, and that historical episode is referred to as Nakba, “the disaster,” by the Palestinians.
I view it as the equivalent of the die-hard Confederacy fans in today’s South calling the Civil War “the war of Northern aggression.” It’s a false and biased framing that justifies everything the Palestinians do and try to do to Israel (like wiping it off the map), including terrorism. It is the reverse of the more correct and honest Israeli framing, which is that Palestinians could have had their state in 1948, tried to wipe out Israel instead, and now reside in the mess of their own making.
Soon after Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack (the hostages appear to all be dead by the way, which should have been assumed by now), the Harvard Law Review asked Rabea Eghbariah, a Palestinian doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School and human rights lawyer, to prepare a scholarly article taking the Palestinian side of the latest conflict. Eghbariah, who has tried landmark Palestinian civil rights cases before the Israeli Supreme Court, submitted one, a 2,000-word essay arguing that Israel’s attack on Gaza following the Hamas act of war should be evaluated through the lens of Nakba, and within the “legal framework” of “genocide.”
Ethics Alarms 