Last week on YouTube’s “The Morning Meeting,” Mark Halperin and Dan Turrentine appeared to acknowledge Ethics Alarms’ “Julie Principle.” They just didn’t know what it was called.
President Trump had delivered the commencement address at West Point while wearing a red MAGA cap (Oh NOOOO! He’s violating “norms” again!) and on Monday published a Memorial Day Truth Social post like some of his previous holiday wishes—you know, one of his “Merry Christmas, you filthy animal!” style shots. Halperin noted that many Democratic critics and pundits, right on cue, were freaking out.
“If you read [historian] Heather Cox Richardson or the emails and texts I get from my Democratic sources, as I said before, the Trump administration’s over. And it’s just a bankrupt, you know, corrupt mess and he’s already a failed president and he’s not getting anything done. That’s their point of view. They also are very taken with his wearing a MAGA hat … to give … a West Point graduation speech,” Halperin said. “They’re taken with his tweet, his Truth Social post, saying ‘Happy Memorial Day’ and criticizing Joe Biden. And they’re back to a Adam Schiffian and [biased and Trump Deranged historian] Heather Cox Richardson point of view, which is everything Trump does is an epic disaster and that the American people will turn on him and Republicans in the midterms because he’s impolite.”
Halperin then asked co-host and former Democratic strategist Dan Turrentine what he thought about the reaction to Trump’s trolling. “Look, to me, focusing on his style is not where one should be, because it’s been consistent for ten years. It’s been litigated ad nauseam … wearing a MAGA hat, like, kind of his in-your-face style ….like it’s what people love and other people tolerate, right? I mean, that’s how I would phrase it,” Turrentine responded. “To me, the focus should be on action … Trump is an authentic street fighter. It’s just, you may not like it, but we’ve litigated this. Like, get over it!”
Like, people listen to podcasts from, like, people who are that inarticulate…but I, like, digress…
Halperin agreed. “I heard from so many people yesterday about the Truth Social post, and I went and I read it and I was like, ‘Yeah, not the way anyone else who’s ever been president would write it, but I just cannot believe that, you know, nine years or whatever it is after he said … he didn’t like John McCain because he got shot down, nine years after he, you know, said all the things he said in 2015 and 2016, we’re still having this conversation about whether his political fate will be tied to how rude he is on social media? I just can’t believe it, really,” Halperin said. “I mean, again, I find this so confusing because, again, I’m not approving of his Truth Social post. I just think if you’re a Democrat and you’re trying to win politically, that talking about these Truth Social posts — like, if anything’s ever been priced into the stock of anything, it is this, I think.”
How much time and verbiage these guys could have saved by just saying, as Julie sang in “Show Boat,” “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly!”
Sing whatever ethics tunes you want. Just try to stay on key….
Ethics Alarms 
Can we talk about bootleg DVDs?
Throughout the history of America’s entertainment industry, there have been movies and television shows lost to time. Either the shows were aired live and no recordings exist, only master copies of shows exist in some salt vault somewhere in West Virginia some or the shows were aired on television in reruns but some issue prevents them from being released on physical media (music rights are a big reason, particularly with shows that liberally used popular songs for which the rights must be secured for a DVD release).
Once VCRs were invented, people were able to record shows for their personal collections and some of those collections are still out there. Rare commercials, made-for-TV movies, recordings of now-obscure theatrical films that either had no physical media release at all or are only available on long-ago limited VHS releases that are hard to find, short-lived television shows that didn’t get enough episodes to rerun and other gems are waiting to see the light of day again.
The problem, of course, is that these are copyrighted Intellectual Properties. If there is no significant financial incentive for the copyright owners to release DVD/blu-rays for these works, they won’t be seen again.
Let’s set aside the legalities here for a moment because this is an ethics site.
Suppose I have a favorite performer. I want to see as much of this person’s repertoire as possible. Problem: there are a couple of rarely-aired TV movies from the ’70s that were never released on VHS or DVD. The movies have never been rerun on broadcast or cable TV and they’re not on any streaming service. Some people taped the movies when they aired, though, and have digitized them so they can be uploaded to YouTube. YouTube can and does shut down accounts and remove videos of intellectual properties if they are reported.
If no one uploads the movies to YouTube or if they are removed before I can see them, how do I see them?
Answer: some people out there transfer their VHS recordings to DVD and sell them to collectors.
Should I buy a DVD of one of those movies I want to see if it is not available anywhere else?
Remember, I’m focusing on the ethics here, not the law.
Is it ethical to purchase a DVD of an otherwise unavailable broadcast from a third party seller?
The biggest argument by the industry against doing so is that it takes money out of the hands of those who made it. In this case, however, no money is being lost. The broadcast in question is sitting in a vault in a studio making no one any money at all. Actors, writers or directors are not getting any royalties from a show that is never rerun, percentage of DVD sales when none are released and no recognition for it when no one can binge-watch it on Netflix.
The same scenario could apply to burned CDs of out of print musical recordings, printed or electronic texts of out of print books or DVDs of theatrical films that have been long forgotten.
What do you think? Am I just rationalizing here?
Forgive me for hitch-hiking on your post here, AM, but Word Press still won’t let me post a free-standing comment on my posts, and I want to get this in…
My sister was furious with me for posting this last week here:
“Rep. Jasmine Crocket—oh please, please PLEASE nominate her to run for President, Democrats!—decided to try the now-familiar Axis device of accusing Trump and the Republicans of what her party is guilty of. She’s saying that Republicans are ignoring Trump’s cognitive decline. My Trump Deranged sister actually believes that, in part because the Left thinks not supporting socialism, open borders, anti-white discrimination in hiring, trans athletes clobbering women in sporting competitions and Politburo-style executive branch government is crazy.”
She quite properly objects to the implication that she is a supporter of the Mad Left’s positions I listed. That was sloppy writing on my part. She may be Trump Deranged, but she doesn’t hold any of those beliefs. Moreover, she agrees that if indeed there was a mass cover-up pf Biden’s decline, that is a major scandal and a Constitutional outrage, and honest Democrats (like her) should be as furious about it as Republicans.
I have apologized to her profusely, and promised to clarify the misconception.
This topic struck home for me how devoid of reality the left wing echo chamber is.
One of my daughters falls in the anit-Trump echo chamber. Back in October, when Trump appeared on Joe Rogan, I watched a few highlights but not the entire interview. I, like you, am no Trump fan. But the Joe Rogan interview was really favorable to Trump. It went quite well, making Trump seem quite personable.
I had mentioned that I thought Trump had done uncarictaristically well on the Joe Rogan show, that he came of as even likeable in the interview. My daughter told me that “oh, no, Trump’s cognitive decline was really bad. He slured his words and sounded confused. That interview was horrible for Trump.” I pressed, and my duahter assured me that there were clips she saw that pointing this out.
Givin that the clips were by right wing people, I assumed that their reporting and clip selection could be misleading. So I watched the full three hours, it was available on the Joe Rogan website. Never once did I see anything that hinted at congnitive issues. The fact that Trump did 3 hours straight, no notes, no pee break, was very impressive given his age.
I’m convinced that either there is video, but it is doctored, or the video never even existed but the echo chamber bounces around things and anything unfavorable to Trump is swallowed whole without a moment’s thought to if it is true or not.
More likely, your daughter saw and heard what she wanted to see despite the video because it was framed by those in her echo chamber as being indicative of cognitive decline.
This makes me think of the issues we’ve had with anime and manga coming to the United States. My wife and I enjoy some anime and manga (though we are hardly otakus), and we did run into disappointments when a company purchased the right to a series we enjoyed, found out it could not keep producing an American version, and discontinued the series. Such companies would hold onto the licensing so that it was not legitimate for independent groups to make fan-translations that are publicly accessible, but for anyone wanting more of the series, they either had to learn Japanese or give up. (ADV and Tokyopop, I’m looking at you!)
There are some competing factors here. The fan translations can actually help the product by making it more accessible, attracting a larger base, and perhaps even propelling the product into the realm of profitability. On the other hand, there will always be a portion of that base that won’t pay for anything, and would resent a company swooping in to buy a license and make an official production for a price. In non-ethical considerations, I would make a calculation based on how much the bootleg version can increase the appeal, and whether petitions might drive a company to release the license or start production again.
In the ethical considerations, though, the sad reality is that all these recordings are in the realm of “wants” not “needs.” For genuine needs, breaking the law to acquire what is needed can be the lesser of the two evils. But for wants, the ethical calculation does not present the unlawful acquisition as a lesser evil. It may be painful for all these old recordings to perish, but that doesn’t justify violating the law to distribute them for a price. Whoever wants to distribute should be willing to request permission to do so, and accept no as the answer if that happens to be the answer. But if companies are at all smart, they could just insist on a small cut, and allow other people to do all the heavy lifting for them. I personally have no idea how difficult it would be to attain permission to redistribute DVDs of otherwise inaccessible programs, but that seems to me to be the right thing to do.
It’s probably the profit element that makes it an ethics issue for those who sell the transferred media.
Back in the day, the showrunners of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” would include a “Keep Distributing the Tapes” message during the closing credits because they knew fans were trading tapes of the shows with each other.
When the series started being released on VHS, the fan community then limited tape trading to those episodes that were not yet available for sale. In this case, of course, the tapes were being traded, not sold.
It’s interesting to see a kind of grassroots community of fans help each other in that way. Your anime example is a good one, too.
On the other hand, you also have the soap opera fans who have fond memories of shows that are decades old with thousands of episodes that may never be released, are not being rerun on cable – the defunct Soapnet cable channel is long gone – or available for streaming. YouTube videos of complete episodes have to be caught before they’re removed. There is a huge market out there for classic episodes of daytime soaps from their Golden Eras, so to speak. I can’t imagine how the studio could possibly get the rights for the actors, musicians and other creatives who’ve worked on these shows over the decades without compromising the integrity of the work.
As it is, it’s horrific to try to watch classic episodes of “Saturday Night Live” on Peacock with musical guest segments cut out and sometimes multiple skits, reducing some episodes to 15-20 minutes.
Software world has similar issues, and the vintage gaming community has termed this class of media as ‘abandonware’, for the gray area between market unavailability and copyright expiration or explicit release to the public domain.
Nintendo had recently flexed muscle in the arena; after they had began to re-market a handful of old games on the Wii and Switch platforms, they shut down several websites offering those and other games for download.
The 3D printing community also had a recent controversy over the design of a simple tugboat design called “benchy” that had built into it several difficult to print areas that could be measured to determine printer accuracy.
The company that released the design was sold, and thousands of derivatives of the design were made by the community. The new company didn’t respond to an inquiry about the design, and out of caution all the derivatives disappeared from the Internet.
It’s an old issue… My childhood choir director wrote “Out of print” on the Xeroxed pages of sheet music given to us for practice. I don’t know if they were indeed from a book no longer sold, a means to gather desired songs (many in the public domain anyway) from several books, or an easy excuse not to order books for each child.
For computer games, one company made a business model for it.
Good Old Games or GoG as it’s known, started out by finding popular games no longer in print. They found the rights holder, made a deal, and reverse engineered the game to run on modern computers.
They have made quite a successful business and brought joy to many people who had fond memories of older games.
I believe, but don’t recall for certain that they have also done some games where the creator simply could not be tracked down.
And one defining feature of their games is that they are all done without rights management software. Most gamers appreciate not having to look up codes in manuals that no longer exist.
On a different note, I sell used books. There exist authors who resent used book dealers- they don’t get a royalty from the books I sell.
This is both short sighted and wrong. Every book was sold new at some point and they got a royalty them.
But the main point is very simple -there are millions of books out there. If I sell someone a used book and he likes it, what does that do to the odds he will go out and buy a new book by that author?
Surely a lot better than the reader picking that author at random. Of course if I have more of that author he’s even more likely to get them from the person who turned him onto the author.
Not to mention that I sell them a lot cheaper than the $10 or $20 (or more) that author new book costs.
But mainly, people enjoy being steered to someone they’ll like. The personal touch is a powerful thing. Handselling, as it’s called, can make all the difference in a bookstore, whether new or used.
I’m going to take the position that anything longer than 20 years for copyright is unethical. At that point, the money needed to support the creator is more than enough. At one time, patents and copyrights were both 20 years. Patents are still 20 years, but copyright is now 90. All because the artists, record companies and Hollywood have better lobbists than engineers.
Here is an unethical post that showed up on my InstaGram feed.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DJfV1Rji0tK/
The author simply dismissed the idea of false rape accusations as a bad thing.
Also, InstyaGram user DAApplejuice wrote this comment.
“Less than FIVE percent of REPORTED cases are false. But yes be worried about YOUR life being ruined”
So if less than five percent of reported rape cases are false, what is the point of the Innocence Project?
Good point. After all, “It were better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that one Innocent Person should be Condemned.”
I wonder what DAApplejuice would say to Increase Mather?
I wonder why some people would want to carve out an exception to this principle in rape accusations?
It’s not so much unethical as stupid. Because X happens that is unfair and unjust, it mitigates Y happening that is equally unjust. This is a critical thinking fail. Moron.
You should check out the InstaGram profile.
https://www.InstaGram.com/NakedlyDressed/
Keith Olbermann has a problem with strong women who don’t see the world the way they should, but has he learned to keep his over-active piehole shut since Ann Coulter b!tchslapped him into the cheap seats with her seminal Olbermann’s Plastic Ivy?
Not exactly.
When he attacked the fetching Riley Gaines (no shrinking violet, she!), she not only wiped the floor with him, but challenged him to a swimming race with the proceeds going to charity.
MONEY QUOTE: “I’d challenge @KeithOlbermann to a race where the loser puts up $ to the charity of the winners choice, but NO ONE WANTS TO SEE HIM IN A SPEEDO.” (bolds/caps/italics mine)
While Olbermann richly deserves every last bit of emasculating embarrassment that comes his way, was it ethical for Gaines to publicly dare him to throw down knowing full well the outcome would supply him with nothing less than a completely degrading humiliation of galactic proportions?
PWS
Absolutely yes! And if Keith is going to compete, it would be in his best interests to identify ahead of the event.
Crap! I ruined my own joke! I hate it when I do a bunch of editing, rip out the punchline, and catch my mistake too late. The final sentence should read…
And if Keith is going to compete, it would be in his best interests to identify as a woman ahead of the event.
Good one…even if we had to wait…
PWS
If you’ll allow me to submit for discussion an idea I’ve seen in my youtube surfing of late:
“Black Fatigue”.
The idea is that the race hustlers have pushed so far, so egregiously, and that such large swaths of the black community have embraced the idea that any criticism of black people is racism, never mind a fair, rational, analysis of behavior, it’s resulted in massive amounts of really poor behavior by black people in public settings. Fights/riots at cruise ship lines, incidents in airports of entitled behavior (like the airline employees denying a guy his flight because he complained of a check in fee! I thought Jack covered that one?), outbursts in restaurants and patrons going behind fast food counters to fight the employees, etc., yet always thinking they’re in the right.
It’s the idea that the little boy has cried wolf one too many times and the push back may have begun. The catalyst for this, I think, is the Karmelo Anthony/Austin Metcalf incident. Part and parcel to that is the $750K the Anthony family has raised for his defense, and, moreso probably the content of the commentary among the donors; it is apparently the standard fare race hustling language, and justifying murder. Within a week or two of Anthonly’s go fund me (I think the company is Give Send Go?), someone puts up the video of Shiloh Hendricks (sp?), a white woman, calling a little kid “the n-word” (said in frustration as the little kid kept rifling through her backpack/babybag despite her repeatedly admonishing the little creep). Typically this would of course result in her being cancelled, doxxed, etc, her life generally ruined. Knowing this, she also posted up a “go fund me” account asking for help given the firestorm coming. She has raised $750K as well, and the usual suspects are horrified.
Not long after that, I saw a video of an Uber driver, after a short struggle trying to explain the rideshare rules regarding pick up, ride, and drop off to a black woman who, halfway through the trip, wanted the uber driver go back to the pick up point because she forgot something. He was polite the first few times, the black woman was just obnoxious and entitled the entire time. At the termination of both the verbal event and the ride, he used the impolite term for negro, saying that if she was going to act like one, he would treat her that way and call her that, get out. The interesting thing about that is I believe that particular video/commentary was put out by a (non-crazy) black person.
I think the genesis of the madness where black people can never be criticized stems from the Rodney King incident. Notwithstanding the fact that RK is likely a bridge too far, he was on PCP, and I believe there was footage of him throwing cops off like rag dolls. How to subdue someone like that? There were no tasers or less-than-lethal options at that time. It went to trial, and of course the officers were acquitted. In any case, I think that set the tone for everything that has followed; no rational person could find any justification for what happened there, and the play on white guilt was full steam ahead, especially when it came to any police interaction. Everything became a police brutality accusation, culminating in “Hands up don’t shoot”, “I can’t breath” (I believe that’s the Eric Garner case), and, finally, the wrongful conviction of several Minneapolis cops at the George Floyd incident. In the case of Derek Chauvin in particular, I think at worst it’s a case of what one YouTube creator calls “awful but lawful”. But I digress. From those incidents, the idea that black people can do no wrong just grows and grows.
Along with this is the rise of hip hop and rap gaining immense popularity. Notwithstanding Vanilla Ice or Eminem, it is the music of black, largely inner city culture, and they of course throw the impolite term for negro around with ubiquity. They try to justify its use with a whole bunch of weak sauce arguments, but they all fall apart with the white girl singing the rap song lyrics that her “friend” videoed and put online, ruining the singing girl’s future. Any rational, logical person (including those of color) called out the hypocrisy, but the tipping point had not yet been reached, and society at large still toed the line that to criticize any black behavior was racist.
And of course, the incubator of all this is the “mainstream” media, which up until the last few years, really had a stranglehold on information; their alliance with the race hustlers meant there wasn’t much a logical rebuttal with the facts was going to do against the graduation photo of Michael Brown and many others “victims of police brutality” who were on their way to making a better life when they were shot by police (after pointing guns and shooting at the cops, trying to stab their friends to death, etc…). Apparently the effect of your people being celebrated as victims no matter who they tried to rob or kill creates a very empowering feeling where you’re not responsible for anything you do.
But with the advent of social media – the largest companies of which still put their fingers on the scale, but again I again digress – we can get the entirety of the video footage to see what happened for ourselves. Between multiple channels of body cam footage, and popular YouTubers who were cops to add some context, and other (conservative) media pointing out the crime statistics showing that half of all violent crime arrests are accounted for by just 13% of the population (and far less, given it’s not black women and children committing these crimes), and the populace at large begins to say, “uh, hold on there, skippy” when they hear the race hustlers cry “injustice!”.
Depending on how the movement grows, I guess I fear the return of that kind of “hateful” language, without anybody realizing it’s become pervasive again, and without regard to the “normal” black populace. That said, if still something like 90% of blacks vote democrat, it’s probably fair to say they are biased in the direction of liberal/woke attitudes, and it may create more unfortunate division within the nation. Now, as an interesting aside, once the algorithm started putting more of the “Black Fatigue” videos in my queue, nearly all of them were created by black content creators. If there’s an actual acknowledgement of egregious behavior within the black community at large, that would be something.
I think the ethical implication is something we’ve discussed on this site, where despite the ridiculous behavior of the left, Jack states those on the right should not begin to use the tactics of the left in response. My somewhat tongue in cheek response to that is we’re following the golden rule, treating them the way they want to be treated. Will the response to “Black Fatigue” result in more impolite behavior and division? Or is it just a “natural” beginning response to a correction long overdue?
Hopefully it’s a worthy topic of discussion. If not, I’ll just see myself out….
Scott Adams has said such things, along with a whole lot more that has gotten him cancelled. The problem of course, is he’s right on all of it. He’s a smart and preceptive guy. That’s why his cartoons did so well.
Right now he’s untouchable, but as time goes on, more and more poeople are going to start agreeing with what he said.
Here is an ethics question that my family has been presented with. My state recently passed a law stating that homeschooling and private schooled families can apply for around 60% of the money that would typically go to their school district (all geographically designed) to be put in an Educational Savings Account (ESA) for their children. This account can then be used for tuition, books, assistive technologies, therapies, and other school supplies and activities. Most of it has to be done through a Marketplace, but there is the ability to request reimbursement through a paperwork heavy process for things not found in the Marketplace. Of course, taking the state money means proving that your kids are getting an education in the subjects the state wants, and taking standardized tests with scores that are acceptable for the state, causing the state to have influence in your homeschooling, which, in my household, is not to be desired and is currently being fiercely debated, though I do teach the subjects and give the standardized tests.
Obviously the money is tempting to any parent. I believe greed is factoring into my attitude, causing my analyses to struggle. We have spent around $4000 in tuition, books, and supplies, preparing for this upcoming school year. Adding in a specialized OT for my special needs daughter – probably running us a couple thousand, and the fact that she’s going to need the next set of dyslexia specific reading accommodations in a few months, costing likely another $500-750. In addition, I need more printer toner, in color too, which is expensive and would love to cover the cost with money not my own. I have been dreaming of a laminator, a paper cutter, and some other standard (public school) classroom supplies for some assignments that would greatly benefit, but never have budgeted the money for these, always finding workarounds. Art supplies in a quality appropriate for middle school are prohibitively expensive to buy in a house full of careless children. Frankly, there is a recommended reading library from my academy that I would like to provide my children. However, books are expensive, so I only buy a minimum for our Literature class and a couple extra for character rounding, where a $7000 per kid budget would afford me a lot more books. This is a financial burden, though it is one we have gladly born for the sake of our children. Certainly, parents have been bearing these burdens alone, and choose to do so for their children. I have been no different.
As my husband and I were discussing if we wanted to have these ESAs, we thought this money might be unethical for us to take. While it is obviously legal, that is not the concern. We have the finances to do this for our children without government assistance. I won’t say that we don’t feel a pinch, but our costs are significantly lower than parents who put their kids in private school. Should we take money that would otherwise go to our failing school district and use it to alleviate our burden somewhat? Or is taking money that could help our school district (if they spent it wisely) when we have no true need of it simply unethical?
I think if it’s offered, it’s not unethical to take it, but there appear to be strings attached that are undesireable.
Is there some group of homeschooling parents in the area who can pool resources to share a paper cutter, a laminator and other high-end items. Surely, not everyone needs a laminator every day, right?
Of course, there would be the decision as to where to keep these items. Hopefully, it would work out better than when Bart, MIlhouse and Martin decided to share a comic book.
Bart, Martin and Milhouse can’t share a comic book
It’s not unethical to accept a resource if it’s offered. I **do** think it’s unethical for the state to fund public educations with property tax dollars, then also require homeschoolers and private schoolers to fund their own educations with no opportunity to realize a share of the substantial per-student outlay that they’re otherwise entitled to.
Mirroring A M’s post, growing up homeschooled for most of primary education, family leveraged libraries and church education programs (even churches not attendees or members of) to obtain access to specialized equipment and to pool resources for the same.