Month: June 2025

“Jaws” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

I have another classic ethics movie post in the pipeline, but this is the 50th anniversary of the Summer of “Jaws,” and attention should be paid. An obnoxious comment this morning from retired law professor blogress Ann Althouse drew my attention to the topic. She wrote,

“As for “Jaws,” I’ve never seen it. I’ve always imagined that it would bore me. I still feel that way. Waiting around for a shark to attack someone? I don’t see the point. I don’t have a tag for sharks. I have to give this post my “fish” tag. Have I ever seen a movie about fish? I don’t think so.”

Her quote isn’t exactly unethical, but it betrays an arrogance and a wilful ignorance of popular culture that does not show Ann in a good light. Althouse has some shocking gaps in her film and television literacy, and, as in this case, she often seems proud of her ignorance. As with all iconic movies and TV shows, being unfamiliar with “Jaws” means that you don’t comprehend references that have become part of modern communication: “You’re going to need a bigger boat!” and “This was no boating accident” come immediately to mind.

Someone saying, “I imagine that what so many people enjoy and remember would bore me” is a way of asserting unearned superiority; it reminds me of the snobs in Harvard bedroom community Arlington, Mass. who would say, “Oh, we never watch anything but PBS (you crass, low-brow peasants).” And they missed “Perry Mason,””The Defenders,” “The Honeymooners,” “The Hollywood Palace,” “The Avengers,” “Maverick,” “The Carol Burnett Show,” “The Smothers Comedy Brothers Hour,” “The Ed Sullivan Show,” “The Twilight Zone” and dozens more, all in the secure but ignorant belief that they were too sophisticated for such tripe.

Ann saying that she’s too sophisticated to watch “a movie about a fish” is like someone saying that they’ve never seen “Casablanca” because “who wants to see a movie about Morocco?,’ or “Singing in the Rain” because singing in the rain is a silly thing to do. A competent, curious, responsible member of society wants to see “Jaws” because 1) it is famous 2) it is a cultural touch-point 3) one should understand why people remember and care about it and 4) when the public embraces anything so completely, whether it is “Hamilton” or baseball or “The Mikado,” or Elvis or “Sergent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” or “Star Wars,” or “The Godfather” or Frank Sinatra or the Mona Lisa or “Oklahoma!” or John Wayne or Chuck Berry or Madonna or Taylor Swift or Bugs Bunny or Beethoven’s Fifth—the list is very long—the public’s opinion deserves respect. This why Rachel Zegler’s dissing of the original “Snow White” was so foolish and destructive. Nobody has to like or admire anything, but when a particular work of art or cultural phenomenon reaches icon status, there is always a reason. Not knowing the reason means one is just that much more incompetent as a participant in society.

“Jaws” is an important and even after 50 years, entertaining and powerful movie. Among its virtues:

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Off With Their Heads! The Unsustainable Echo Chamber of Bluesky

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Guest Column by A M Golden

[From your host: I held this excellent guest column submission for about a week, waiting for a propitious time to post it. JD Vance’s adventure on the platform, which I discussed here, was exactly the context I was waiting for. And it gives me an0ther chance to feature Bing….JM]

Anyone who doubts the uniqueness of the American Revolution need only to look to France several years later when revolutionaries stormed the Bastille and set up a Republic.  As revolutions were wont to do, those who replaced the guys in charge eventually demanded that everyone follow their ideas in lockstep.  Those who did not were accused of lacking sufficient revolutionary fervor and risked literally losing their heads.  The self-righteous Jacobins who forced this pure ideology eventually devoured themselves as, again, revolutionaries are wont to do, until the head Jacobin, Robespierre, eventually lost his own head and disenchantment led to the installation of Napoleon as Top Dog.

That should have happened in the United States, too.  Despite the passions of the Federalists and the Jeffersonian anti-Federalists, though some nasty words were printed and spoken aloud, no one was murdered for his lack of purity (unless you count Alexander Hamilton, which I don’t because that was less an ideological battle than a personal grudge).

Ever since talented-but-socially-awkward Elon Musk bought Twitter, turned it into X and antagonized all those people who bought his so-called climate-friendly vehicles, those same Tesla owners have flocked to every other faddish social media that promises 24/7 Trump/Musk hate in addition to freedom from having to be exposed to the opinions of those who disagree with them.

It was one of our illustrious commentators here (I do not remember which one.  I apologize.  It’s been three years and I’ve slept since then) who suggested that many of the Hollywood types would realize their mistake when they exchange 80,000 followers for 80.  That person was right.

I have belonged to Facebook for years.  I’ve tried Instagram but find it unwieldy and boring.  I couldn’t help it, however, when one of my favorite performers made the Grand Announcement that he was headed over to the new Post.News in 2022, which promised conversations “moderated for civility”.  It took ten days to get me onboarded and I found the place to be overwhelmingly progressive….and small. 

Don’t get me wrong, there was a huge influx of members.  Then nothing.  Some of them even proposed that members try to make a positive platform there by building a community not based on complaining about the platform they’d just left.  I heavily curated what I followed and then began contributing content on a daily basis: I recommended books on history that I’d read myself.  I amassed over 30 followers over the next 18 months; the favorite performer barely broke 100.

Ultimately, though, it was not a sustainable platform. It folded.  Once again, members were looking for places to hide from the world, including Favorite Performer, and were pulled into Bluesky.  This time, I didn’t take the plunge.

Now, it appears that Bluesky has reached its ideological saturation point.  This week, Megan McArdle wrote this entry in the Washington Post: Bluesky’s decline stems from never hearing from other side .

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The ABA Is Defending Its Racially Discriminatory Scholarships…Of Course It Is.

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Res ipsa loquitur, no?

In April, the American Alliance for Equal Rights led by Edward Blum, the scourge of affirmative action and “good discrimination” policies, filed a complaint in an Illinois federal court alleging that the American Bar Association’s 25-year-old Legal Opportunity Scholarship discriminates against white applicants. Since their skin color renders them unable to apply, this contention seems beyond debate. The question is whether, as a trade association, the ABA has a right to discriminate.

The Alliance said it is representing an unnamed white male law school applicant who says that he would apply for the $15,000 Legal Opportunity Scholarship were he not prevented from doing so because he is the “wrong” race. The ABA awards between 20 and 25 such scholarships annually to incoming law students, according to its website, which is excerpted above.

I should have covered this in April: sorry. [Believe me, if I could find a way to work on the blog full-time without ending up living on cat food and in a shack by the docks, I would.] Anyway, this kind of thing is why I do not pay dues to the ABA, and why I am suspicious of any lawyer who does. It is an interesting case. I assumed that Blum would lose if the case proceeded, and that his main objective was to shame the ABA into opening up the race-based scholarships to all. But the ABA has no shame. And I knew that.

The American Bar Association responded to Blum’s suit this week, arguing that a scholarship program designed to boost diversity among law students is protected free speech. The 25-year-old Legal Opportunity Scholarship, the largest lawyer association in the nation asserts, is protected under the First Amendment. In its motion to dismiss the ABA also claimed that plaintiff American Alliance for Equal Rights lacks standing to sue.

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As I Predicted (Along With Many Others) Judge Breyer’s Partisan and Over-Reaching Order Has Been Blocked…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

…because it was unethical and legally indefensible. Of course, the libertarians loved it because they are almost as Trump Deranged as the Axis. Libertarians don’t like strong Presidents who don’t hesitate to use their Constitutional and statutory powers. Fortunately, most Americans do and always have. Libertarians’ list of favorite Presidents begin with Calvin Coolidge. What color is the sky on your planet, Illya Somin?

A federal appeals court on June 19 extended its block of a Judge Breyer’s flamingly partisan order that directed President Trump to return control of California’s National Guard to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was obviously determined to let pro-open border crazies harass ICE agents and riot across Los Angeles.

The three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals in the 9th Circuit issued a unanimous order, and one of the three judges was a Biden appointee! The roughly 4,000 National Guard troops can now stay in Los Angeles, to protect federal property and U.S. immigration agents, while preventing a replay of George Floyd Madness that the Mad Left would dearly love to see. Could a “Undovument Migrants’ Lives Matter” group be far behind?

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An Ethical Problem Solving Challenge: The Malfunctioning Parking Station

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I’m training a new Clarence Darrow for my legal ethics seminar employing many of Darrow’s Greatest Hits, and met him at his apartment in Arlington, VA. There is usually street parking which now is a absurdly 1) expensive and 2) automated, but as we all should know by now, the Unabomber was right, and we are slaves to gratuitous technology.

I had to park in an open space, then, instead of easily depositing a fre coins in a meter, had to walk half-a-block to the nearest parking station (and half a block away from my destination). Then I pushed a start button, plugged in my credit card, and pushed the maximum time allowed, 2 hours. I was informed that my “payment was complete” ($9.85!) and was to take the ticket the station would print and walk back to my car, get back in it, put the ticket on the dashboard visible through the window, and voila! A longer, more complicated, more expensive parking process, made so by the wonders of technology!

But no ticket came out. It churned, and it churned, then a red message flashed saying “Out of Order! Please go to another station.”

Oh no you don’t! The machine said my payment had already been accepted. I was not going to meekly allow this stupid system to make me pay TWO exorbitant fees for parking once. Nor was I going to abandon the space, which is what I saw another driver do when confronted with the same malfunctioning station.

Assuming that getting a sledge hammer and destroying the parking stations is out of the question, what ethical solution to the problem would you employ?

I’ll tell you what I did in the comments eventually. (Hint: It worked!)

I Think We Can Fairly Rule That Oregon Has Become Bizarro World and Normal, Real World Ethics Do Not Apply There…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Ethic Alarms has frequently used Superman Comics’ Bizarro World analogy to discuss the problem arising when a culture is so warped and so confused that normal ethical principles have no applicability. When one is in a culture where white is black, up is down and crazy is sane, it makes no sense to act according to traditional ethical values. They won’t work there.

The best and most ethical response to a Bizarro World culture is to follow the sage advice of the Amityville House and “Get OUT!” A common example of this problem is in the workplace, when one realizes that the culture is corrupt, incompetent and devoid of ethical considerations. The choices an ethical employee has are to remain in the organization and be corrupted by it, to devote oneself to changing the organization, which is often futile, or to quit.

The latest dispatch from uber-woke Oregon makes it clear that the Amityville House’s solution may be the only one remaining. The new session for the Oregon House of Representatives was opened by a performance by two black drag queens this week because it’s Pride Month, and that means that professionalism, dignity and decorum must be sacrificed because….well, just because. Democratic Rep. Travis Nelson (D, of course), the first openly LGBTQ+ African American Oregon legislator—he’s historic, so he can do no wrong!— invited Isaiah Esquire and Aqua Flora to perform for the session’s opening ceremony. The House speaker, also being a Democrat, didn’t have the integrity to tell him, “You are out of your mind! Absolutely not!” So the result was this:

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Open Forum! [And One More Complaint About “The View”…]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I woke up today with so much already happening on the ethics front that I immediately knew I had no chance of making a dent in it, especially since I am facing deadlines and crises on other fronts. Let me get one minor matter out of the way before I turn it over to you, dear EA contributers.

There were two items in yesterday’s potpourri post relating to the persistent insanity on “The View.” I wonder if I should just ignore that idiot program from now on, applying the Julie Principle. Occasionally the thing makes news, but it is a blight on the culture and social discourse. Barbara Walters, who started it, needs to be marked down in critical assessments of her career because her creation inflicted Joy Behar, Whoopie and Sunny Hostin and the rest on our social and political discourse.

Here is one last “View”-related ethics ugliness. Speaking on the “Behind the Table” podcast this week (who listens to these things?), Hostin, arguably the worst of the worst on the current panel, discussed the moment when Kamala Harris declared on the show that she wouldn’t change a thing her alleged boss, Joe Biden, had done during his Presidency. Harris’s fatuous response—did she ever say anything that wasn’t fatuous?—came after Hostin tossed the Democrats’ DEI nominee the softest of softball questions: what would she do differently from Biden? “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” said Kamala.

Many believe that Harris lost the 2024 election in that moment, which is scary to think given how many other reasons she gave the voters to vote Republican. Hostin, in the podcast, said, “I knew it instantly when she answered it. Which is why I asked the follow-up question, ‘is there one thing?’  Because I knew, I could see the soundbite and I knew what was going to happen, but I thought it was a really fair question and I thought it was a question that she would expect… I feel terrible.” 

Bob Hoge writes at Redstate, “Such are the depths to which our mainstream media has sunk, that a professional pundit doesn’t have regrets about trying to push an incompetent candidate on the country; no, her real regret is that Kamala was exposed.”

Sad but true.

Your turn!

Ethics Dunce: NY Mets Catcher Luis Torrens

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

If you play a sport professionally and make 1.5 million dollars to do it as Luis Torrens does, you are obligated to know the damn rules. Torrens, if he knew them, forgot one of them in the play above that occurred yesterday in the Mets’ game against the Atlanta Braves.

You see, baseball players can not use their equipment or uniforms to affect the movements of a baseball. One’s bare hand, sure; one’s foot even. A player’s glove, of course, is used to catch the ball. But not equipment or parts of the uniform. A player can’t legally catch a ball in his hat, for example. Players have thrown their gloves at home run balls to deflect them back on the field, and a special rule forbids even that.

With runners on second and third, a pitch in the dirt from Mets starter Paul Blackburn forced Torrens to slide to block the ball from rolling away and allowing the runners to advance. But as he hustled over to the ball, the catcher used his mask to stop it from rolling further before grabbing it with his glove.  The umpires declared that Torrens had violated MLB Rule 5.06(b)(3)(E), declaring that it is illegal when “a fielder deliberately touches a pitched ball with his cap, mask or any part of his uniform detached from its proper place on his person.” The Braves runner on third was awarded home plate, scoring an unearned run, and the runner of second advanced to third base.

Juneteenth Ethics Inclusion [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

Juneteenth is our first, and one hopes, last DEI holiday. The idea of having national holidays contrived to celebrate particular racial, ethnic and gender groups in an outburst of white male guilt is anti-American to the core and profoundly offensive. True, Rationalization #22 (“There are worse things.”) provides some solace; the holiday is hardly the worst thing that the national freakout over a drug-addicted black thug resisting arrest in Minneapolis and running into the wrong cop inflicted on the U.S. But the year Biden’s autopen established it, 2021, speaks volumes.

Meanwhile….

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Who Didn’t See the “Whataboutism” Defense of the Biden Dementia Cover-up Coming?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I call this pathetic, and depressing evidence of just how low the Axis and its supporters are willing to stoop to avoid admitting their obvious wrongdoing.

Desperate Democrats in my life started resorting to this in early 2024, despite its being strained and unethical. Trump, you see, was just as mentally fading as Biden. Sure, whatever you say, Trump Derangement Face! Maybe they even have convinced themselves that they believe this. “Listen to his rambling! The crazy things he says!”

Of course, Trump has always been like this, at least for as long as I’ve paid attention to him which has been several decades now. Nevertheless, no one can miss his extraordinary energy, his willingness to be seen and interviewed, and his resilience. There is, literally, no comparison with Biden’s obvious physical and mental deterioration, nor does it seem plausible that anyone would be able to hijack Trump’s power in the White House like Biden’s aides did to poor Joe.

But here’s Mediaite this week with a headline identical to several other Axis propaganda sites—yup, a memo must have gone out!—“Trump Drops Papers He Just Signed and Mistakenly Refers to the U.K. as ‘The European Union.’”

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