Month: November 2024

A Nelson For “The View” and Sunny Hostin

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

“The Simpsons'” Nelson Muntz has been getting a workout on Ethics Alarms lately, because the Trump Deranged and the Axis totalitarians have been falling flat on their faces in their own filth with hilarious regularity.

On a recent episode of “The View,” the all-woke, all Trump-Deranged, all-too-dumb-to-breathe panel attacked President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks and Matt Gaetz’s nomination in particular, as former prosecutor Sunny Hostin, who thinks that earthquakes and eclipses are proof of cliamte change, expressed horror that Trump could nominate the former Congressman with such damning “allegations” having been made against him. Wow, she must have been some prosecutor with that attitude toward unproven allegations!

Three minutes after Hostin’s unethical diatribe, Whoopi Goldberg interjected, “Sonny, you have a legal note.” You see, Donald Trump is suing ABC for defamation. It’s a doomed suit I think, but ABC’s lawyers, being lawyerly, don’t want to take any chances. They heard Hostin’s rant and quickly rushed on the air a legal disclaimer that–Haha!—Hostin was ordered to read. Which she did, with the facial expression and tone of a North Korean-held American prisoner of war being forced to read a “confession”:

“I do have a legal note. Thank you, Whoopi,” Hostin replied. She continued,

“Matt Gaetz has long denied all allegations, calling the claims, quote, ‘invented,’ and saying in a statement to ABC News that ‘this false smear following a three-year criminal investigation should be viewed with great skepticism. The DOJ investigation was closed with no charges being brought.”

Whoopi then sent the show into a commercial. I’m surprised the network’s lawyers didn’t make Hostin recite, “ABC also wants to assure readers that I am an idiot, and what I say, as with all the other members of ‘The View,’ should never be taken seriously.”

To be clear, the position here is not that Gaetz should be rejected as Attorney General because of the allegations against him, but because he is not only unqualified to be a U.S. Attorney General, he’s unqualified to be a member of Congress. He’s untrustworthy, and based on his legal experience as well as his mass of outrageous statements, I wouldn’t hire him for any legal task I can think of. Trump obviously intends the nomination to demonstrate his contempt for the Justice Department under Merrick Garland, a sentiment that is understandable and justified. If that is the message he wants to send, however, he should have just nominated a baboon and avoided any ambiguity.

America’s Pop Culture May Save Us Yet: The “Trump Dance”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

This is the most wonderfully strange country, isn’t it? I have mentioned here before how the United States “won” the World’s Fair called “Expo 67.” A huge, imposing Soviet Union pavilion displayed threshers, tractors and other farm equipment, tanks and satellites, perfectly capturing the harsh gray gravity of life in the USSR. Not far away was the United States pavilion, housed in a giant transparent geodesic dome (courtesy of Buckminister Fuller), filled with joyful explosions of American pop culture: Raggedy Ann dolls, artifacts from the baseball Hall of Fame, cool cars, rock ‘n roll and classic movie clips running on loops. There was Gary Cooper alone in the dusty street; Cary Grant being shot at by that crop duster; Julie Andrews spinning on the mountain top at the start of “The Sound of Music,” Gene Kelly singing in the rain. Tough choice for the international visitors: which country would you want to live in?

And now, after one of the bitterest Presidential campaigns in our history, following almost a decade of a constantly widening breach in our politics, values and discourse, the essential light-heartedness (and habitual triviality) that has always been a feature of our national character is pulling us together.

I didn’t see this coming.

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Thanks, BlueSky!

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

The self-proclaimed progressive onclave social media platform designed to isolate the Good people from unclean thoughts and their Nazi neighbors is proving to be a magnificent social experiment testing the proposition that the Mutated Left of the 21st Century can’t tolerate dissent or any ideas that don’t make them feel warm and cuddly.

As first noted here by commenter Michael R., “Apparently, all the liberals who left X went to BlueSky and immediately started reporting everyone else for not being ‘woke’ enough for their tastes. Their ‘hate speech’ and ‘misinformation’ reports have gone from 350,000 in all to 2023 to over 40,000/day since the election. Of course, some moderation requests probably can’t even get in because they are busy.” Yes, the experiment is working out just fine. These people, as they and their Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates demonstrated, don’t get that freedom of speech thingy. The funny part is that it was in great part the bubble progressives live in that led their party to its2024 disaster, and their solution is …..to construct a stronger bubble.

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Comment of the Day: “Pop Ethics Quiz! What Is The Ethical Response To An Adult Who Posts This Fatuous Meme…”

/ Jack Marshall / 52 Comments

I love this Comment of the Day from the blog’s resident Canadian commentator, because it opens a discussion that I believe is essential for an understanding of the peculiar culture here in the United States, raised by someone who, unlike citizens here, has every reason to misunderstand it. I am especially sympathetic because an astounding number of U.S. citizens don’t understand it, in great part because of their failure to absorb the history of their own nation. So, in a slight departure from the usual format for EA Comments of the Day, here is Humble Talent’s COTD on the post asking of the meme above, “…What Is The Ethical Response To An Adult Who Posts This Fatuous Meme…?”, to be followed by my explanation in response to the question he poses.

***

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Ethics Quiz: Smoking Daddy

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

In the YouTube video posted by “web influencer” Rosanna Pansino (over 14 million YouTube subscribers—I’m all the way up to around 230 followers in my recent return to Twitter/X!—the 39-year-old baking star smokes her dead father’s ashes in accordance with his dying wish. She says her father, dying of leukemia, wanted her to grow a marijuana plant with his ashes and then smoke him. So five years after he died, with his pot plant flourishing, Pansino lit a joint that had particles of her father in it and smoked it for the entertainment of her YouTube audience.

Classy. So tasteful.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day…

“Is this unethical, or just icky?”

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Megyn and Mika and Joe, Oh My! Three Ethics Dunces

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Not merely social media chatterers but many others (like Nikki Haley, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Fox News (of course) and CNN’s John Berman, and, if anyone cares, Keith Olberman) are castigating MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who chattered away yesterday about how they had flown to Mar-A-Largo to kiss the ring, or ass, or whatever, of President-Elect Trump. This seemed like a craven reversal of their stance during the entire campaign, one that became more extreme and shrill as Election Day approached, that Trump was a fool, a racist, an enemy of democracy, a threat to the nation, and literally an American Hitler. The pilgrimage to Florida seemed like a craven reversal because that’s what it was. Joe and Mika proved that they are, at heart, “Good Germans.”

Trump has done nothing since his election that would warrant the Trump-Deranged from abandoning their hysterical position, since he had done nothing to justify it in the first place. All the obsequious reversal by the “Morning Joe” duo indicated was hypocrisy and a complete lack of integrity, not that we didn’t already know that. To be fair to Joe and Mika, they work for MSNBC, where nobody knows the meaning of integrity, honesty, or “ethics.” It’s a propaganda arm of the Angry Left. All “Morning Joe” does is follow orders. This spectacular double-reverse backflip in mid-air (I’m mentally humming “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite”) however, is despicable even by MSNBC’s wretched standards.

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Orange Juice Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

This is a weird one.

Tropicana, the orange juice people,  decided it was time to redesign its carafe-style plastic bottle that it has used for years, replacing it with a more traditional-looking plastic bottle. It also reduced the amount of juice from  52 ounces to 46 ounces, and redesigned the label.

Loyal Tropicana drinkers don’t like the new look of the bottles, and are accusing the company of “shrinkflation.” Tropicana suggests that retailers sell the new 46-ounce version for $3.99, 70 cents less than the carafe, but stores don’t have to comply and many aren’t. Sales of the popular brand crashed shortly after the new containers were unveiled. Tropicana’s sales dropped 8.3% in July from 2023, they dropped 10.9% in August, and by October, Tropicana’s sales had dropped 19%.

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Wait, I’m Sorry, I’m Getting All Confused: WHICH Is the Party That Is An Existential Threat To Democracy?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Yesterday, Ethics Alarms noted [Item #6] that Democrats in Pennsylvania had voted in favor of counting mail-in ballots that were ruled invalid by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and will be counting those disqualified ballots to try to overturn the apparent victory of GOP Senator-elect Dave McCormick over incumbent Sen. Bob Casey in the upcoming recount. The Associated Press called the race for McCormick on November 7, and he is now leading Casey by over 17,000 votes.

This fondness for counting void votes is, of course, passing strange conduct from the party whose captive journalists keep saying that President-Elect Trump’s four years of claims that the 2020 Presidential election was “stolen” from him are “completely groundless.” Pennsylvania’s electoral college votes are among those the incoming President felt were stolen. Call me crazy and paint me puce, but I’d say deliberately and openly counting votes the state Supreme Court says are invalid is prima facie evidence that this a party not above cheating to hold onto power.

Now, after the Republican National Committee sued last week after several counties decided to openly cheat by counting ballots with incorrect dates, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court today reiterated its decision from November 5. Justice David Wecht wrote in his concurring statement that it is “critical to the rule of law that individual counties and municipalities and their elected and appointed officials, like any other parties, obey orders of this Court.” Justice Kevin Brobson likewise wrote that local election officials do not “have the authority to ignore Election Code provisions that they believe are unconstitutional.” The Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed on November 1 that requiring mail-in ballots to have handwritten dates is constitutional.

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It’s Time To Accept Reality: We Can’t Trust Science Writers, So We Can’t Trust What We Read About Science

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The ethics rot of “Scientific American” came to a climax last week with the firing of longtime editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth after she went on a social media tirade against Trump voters and tried to blame it on the demon Pazuzu (well, not explicitly, but that was what her “apology” amounted to). During her tenure she had politicized the once respected science magazine, using it to advance her own social justice agenda which dovetailed nicely with that of the extreme progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Weaponizing science for political advantage is more totalitarianism on the hoof, and one might think that Helmuth’s demise might slow down or even begin to terminate this dangerous trend, once rampant on the Reactionary Right, now characteristic of the Doctrinaire Left. Nope.

Based on the latest from esteemed (not by me, but still…) science writer John Horgan, who modestly calls himself “The Science Writer”—he’s a science writer—the political roots of the field’s ethics rot is already embedded too deeply to extract. Horgan has strong credentials, as he’d be the first to tell you. He’s been writing for Scientific American since 1986 with an eight year break in the middle, and also authors pieces on science issues for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, Washington Post, Time and Newsweek. He has written several books; he’s has been interviewed on PBS, MSNBC, NPR, AP, BBC, and other broadcast media. He’s  lectured at Harvard, Yale, MIT, Caltech, Princeton, McGill and the London School of Economics, among other institutions.

Yet Horgan still thinks that scientists are correct to be driven by political bias and to let it affect their work. His recent essay in the wake of Hormuth’s oh-so-well-deserved demise is a flashing neon warning that science, as an objective, fact-driven, intellectual pursuit for the good of mankind (aka “a profession”) is as dead as Darwin, or mighty close to it. Horgan’s website piece is titled, “Scientific American Loses Its Bold Leader.” “Bold” is a terrific ambiguous cover word. In the case of Hormuth, it means courageous and reckless to the point of subverting her duties. From there, The Science Writer argues,

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