Month: November 2024

Trans-Mania Loses Disney But Gains…Jaguar?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

What’s going on here?

A couple of things, I think. The two ethics issues are trustworthiness and competence.

Apparently Jaguar has decided that it is within the mission of a car manufacturer to promote transsexuals and other forms of dubious sexuality. Or maybe clowns, based on the characters above that inhabit the company’s very strange ad. Have you seen it? No?

Here you go….

That’s right, no mention of driving, cars, or anything related to transportation. This is a cognitive dissonance scale maneuver for someone seeking a ridiculously narrow market. The ad says “being sexually ambiguous is cool.” Is it? I don’t think so; I think being sexually ambiguous is a problem. Like many minorities with problems, I understand the urge to insist that the problem is really an advantage and a badge of honor, something to take pride in, but why is Jaguar making that argument at the expense of promoting their product?

The ad is propaganda tinged with virtue-signalling for those who think extreme advocacy for marginal sexual identities is virtuous. I don’t regard it as virtuous. I regard this ad as a company abusing its influence by presuming to indoctrinate the public to achieve an interest group’s agenda. Meanwhile, the ad is incompetent advertising, since it doesn’t promote the product the company is supposed to be selling.

At least when Bud Light decided to promote transsexuals while marketing beer, the beer was somewhere in evidence. For all we know after watching that Jaguar ad, the new Jaguar looks like a Stanley Steamer.

And the Great Stupid is still rolling on…

Post-Election Pre-Holiday Madness Friday Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

And so it begins. Starting today, as I already wrote about at excessive length here, I enter a period of involuntary nostalgia, regret and sadness, beginning with today’s anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, followed tomorrow by my first wedding anniversary in 43 years with no marriage to celebrate. Maybe this explains why I have even less sympathy for my Facebook friends still weeping, raging and making asses of themselves over the election loss by the worst major Presidential candidate in at least 150 years. Let’s see what they’re up to [I’m checking Facebook….]

Oh! It’s stupid meme day! One FBF posted this meme inspired by Communist Robert Reich…

George Soros and Bill Gates, of course, are purely benign in their use of their resources. Another posts this trenchant commentary:

Ugh. Please do better…

Breaking: Trump Has A New Attorney General Nominee, and Arguably, She’s Worse Than Matt Gaetz…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

It’s Pam Bondi.

Ugh.

  • She was the Ethics Alarms Unethical Prosecutor of the Year in 2016.
  • That year I wrote,

    “Florida’s attorney general Pam Bondi personally solicited a political contribution from Donald Trump while she considered joining an investigation of alleged fraud at Trump University and its affiliates, AP reports Trump’s $25,000 donation to Bondi came from a Trump family foundation in a likely violation of rules surrounding legitimate activities by 501 C (3) charities, which are not allowed to engage in political grant-making. And Justice for All, a political group backing Bondi’s re-election,  reported receiving the check on Sept. 17, 2013 — four days after Bondi’s office publicly announced she was considering joining a New York state probe of Trump University’s activities.”

  • Still later, after the 2016 election, I wrote,

Continue reading →

Hello. This Is Rob! He Used To Be A Successful Hollywood Director Until Trump Derangement Destroyed His Brain. Won’t You Give a Tax-Deductible Donation To Defeat This Terrible Disease?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Rob Reiner has puzzled me for a long, long time. He can’t be stupid; his father Carl  was a brilliant writer and comic, quick on his feet, witty, and able to hold his own with Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and Neil Simon. Rob was once an excellent film director: “This Is Spinal Tap (1984), “The Sure Thing” (1985), “Stand by Me” (1986), “The Princess Bride” (1987), “When Harry Met Sally,” (1989), “Misery (1990), and “A Few Good Men” (1992). I’m also an excellent director, so maybe I’m inclined to assume that talent is linked to intelligence. But Reiner’s success in Hollywood has crashed as his partisan progressive fervor has slipped into fanaticism.

His Ethics Alarms dossier is frightening. In 2022, he actually tweeted this,

and didn’t expect to be laughed at. His Trump Derangement worsened, resulting in this tweet

and later, when he denied on Bill Maher’s HBO show that the press buried the Hunter Biden laptop story and then deflected to, “You know it’s not justified? Using armed violence to try to kill people in the Capital. That’s not justified!” I wrote at the time,” So many once intelligent people are like Reiner now. Isn’t that frightening? Don’t some Americans, the ones who aren’t too far gone, hear a celebrity talk like that and think, “Wait…I’m on the same side as that guy? Do I sound like that? What’s happened to me?”

Continue reading →

One More Reason Trump Won…The Barking Girl at the Classroom Window

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

[No, I am not making up what follows…]

Yesterday I was chatting with a woman whose two Golden Doodles are fond of romping with Spuds. She told me about her recent experience at a private school where her daughter attends, but soon will attend no more, as you will shortly understand.

This school is famously progressive, and among other things indulges “furry” delusions among its students. Don’t you know about “furries??

Oh, listen my children and you shall hear of this crazy fad the woke hold dear…

Continue reading →

Gaetz Withdraws His Name: Good

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

This story is “breaking,” but I have to comment. Gaetz can’t be called an Ethics Hero here: if he were one, he would have declined the nomination immediately, as this controversy was, or should have been, a forgone conclusion. He said all the right things today,

“There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1. I remain fully committed to see that Donald J. Trump is the most successful President in history. I will forever be honored that  President Trump nominated me to lead the Department of Justice and I’m certain he will Save America.”

…but he could have said them a week ago.

Whatever: As a lawyer, I would have joined any petitions or organized professional protests against Gaetz being confirmed for the job of the nation’s top attorney. I don’t blame Trump for wishing the plague on the Justice Department and hating my profession, but Gaetz was too far over the line. Several of his other appointments are uncomfortably close to the line if not over it as well, but Gaetz’s selection was so indefensible that it risked undermining Trump’s credibility before his administration got underway.

Is one of Gaetz’s motivations for “doing the right thing” the fear that if he didn’t withdraw, matters would come to the public’s attention that would sink the rest of his political career? Oh, probably. I don’t care. What matters is that an unqualified nominee took himself out of the running before too much damage was done..

It’s Come To This: Now the New York Times Is Publishing Trump-Derangement and Pro-Abortion Op-Eds By 16-Year-Olds

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Is the New York Times really so desperate for anti-Trump, “let’s kill all the unborn babies” screeds that they have to dip into the high school newspaper pool? I saw this op-ed by a 16-year-old girl in The Salt Lake Tribune, which picked it up from the New York Times. There is no excuse for it. Titled, “I’m 16. On Nov. 6 the Girls Cried, and the Boys Played Minecraft,” the piece is irresponsible to publish for many reasons:

  • I don’t believe that it is likely to have been the 16-year-old’s work alone. I believe it was influenced by adults, and that they used her to promote their views, on the theory that “out of the mouths of babes” would have more persuasive power than “out of the mouths of pro-abortion extremists who believe nothing is more important than allowing mothers to kill unborn children.
  • The named author, whose name I will not mention here so as to in some tiny way mitigate the harm this publicity is likely to inflict on her, is too young to give valid consent to being exploited in this manner. The op-ed is forever. She isn’t out of high school. She shouldn’t have to begin adulthood already branded as self-branded bigot, sexist, demonizer of a President and abortion activist.
  • It would be a poor op-ed unworthy of publication if it were written by an adult.

Here are just a few excerpts to give you the spirit the thing: Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Offensive Compliment

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

This quiz comes from the latest inquiry to “The Ethicist.” I disagree with much of Prof. Appiah’s answer, as I often have lately, but I do concede that the question is worthy of a serious ponder.

On their way out a restaurant, a family group was interrupted by a stranger who had also dined there. He said to the inquirer’s comely daughter-in-law, “With all due respect, you are very attractive.” The inquirer rebuked him saying, “That is wholly inappropriate, sir.” The inquiry continued,

“My cousin snapped at me that it was only a compliment. My sister got mad at me for upsetting my cousin. My daughter-in-law appreciated my reaction but said that she has had “way creepier men say way creepier things to her.” I responded to them all that a stranger has no business commenting on the looks of a person, good or bad, and that this man would never have said a word if any man had been standing with us. Who is right?”

Before I give you The Ethicist’s answer and mine,

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is….

“Are spontaneous  compliments on a stranger’s appearance per se unethical?”

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month (And Maybe The Year): Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia [Updated and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

“I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country, and people violate laws any time they want. So, for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention to it. There’s nothing more important than counting votes.”

—Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia, excusing Bucks County’s decision to count misdated or undated mail-in ballots after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court clearly stated that such ballots were invalid.

[Expanded commentary is below, after the original post.]

You can’t get much more unethical than that in so few words.

1. The edict about the invalid ballots wasn’t a court precedent, it was a ruling.  If she doesn’t know the difference, she has no business being a commissioner. If she does know the difference, then she was lying.

2. Next she invokes the hoariest unethical rationalization of them all, #1 on the list,, “Everybody Does It.”

3. The statement that people violate laws any time they want is false and a direct attack on the Rule of Law as well as the character of Americans. In fact, the vast majority of American obey the law. Continue reading →

Weenie of the Week: Disney [Pointer Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Is it too much to ask Disney to at least have the courage of its oppressively woke convictions?

An episode of the new Disney animated show “Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur” that centered on a transgender character was pulled from the series and there are no plans to broadcast it.

The Disney Channel will not show the episode in 2025 apparently because of its LGBTQ storyline, which involves a transgender character named Brooklyn who is on the girl’s volleyball team and faces discrimination from the opposing team’s coach. The evil coach uses a magic key to lock Brooklyn and her teammates in the girl’s locker room so they can’t play. Brooklyn, who wears pride-themed kneepads and has a “Trans is beautiful” sticker on her water bottle, tells her team mates, “I’m trans, my very existence breaks Greer’s rules.”

Although Disney claims that the timing of the cancellation notice is a coincidence, it seems that all of the artists involved in creating the episode believe that the Presidential election results motivated the decision. Emmy Cicirega, a storyboard artist, wrote on X, “Disney should be ashamed of themselves for canning this episode. You don’t get to approve approve approve something and then destroy it at the last minute, shattering the crew’s hard work and hopes.” Another animator tweeted, “If an episode got this far, it was approved multiple times by multiple divisions, only to suddenly be struck down at the last second? Total breakdown of process and spitting on your team’s careful/thoughtful work…The action being preemptive makes it so much worse to me. The absolute cowardice and second guessing when actually this is when this content is needed most.”

Disney denies it all, but why should anyone trust Disney these days? It does seem spectacularly stupid to self-censor a work of art because of a Presidential election and a close one at that. It seems just as stupid to pull an episode that everyone will think became too controversial because of Trump’s win. If Disney believes as fervently in its all-in support of LGBTQ issues as its much maligned output in recent years suggests, then the company should show some integrity and guts, stick to its metaphorical guns, and tell Brooklyn’s story. One thing you could count on Walt for: if he had a vision, he didn’t care whose ire it aroused. Like all great artists, innovators and creators, if where he was going was into a headwind, he wouldn’t turn back. The decision to red pencil Brooklyn’s story reeks of a company without principles just trying to go where the winds seem to be blowing. Weenies.

Now watch everyone blame the lost episode of “Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur” on Trump.

____________

Pointer: Willem Reese [This is a correction: I initially credited JutGory for the tip, who quickly disavowed. EA apologizes to all concerned.]