Author: Jack Marshall

“The Ethicist” Begins 2025 With a De Minimis Ethics Dilemma and an Impossible One

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

2024 was a bad year for the New York Times’s ethics advice columnist, Kwame Anthony Appiah. “He”The Ethicist” showed unseemly sympathy for the Trump Deranged all year, and not of the “You poor SOB! Get help!” variety, but more frequently of the “You make a good point!” sort, as in “I can see why you might want to cut off your mother for wanting to vote for Trump!” I was interested to see if the inevitability of Trump’s return might swerve Prof Appiah back to more useful commentary on more valid inquiries. So far, the results in 2025 have been mixed.

This week, for example, Appiah thought this silly question was worth considering (It isn’t):

“I am going to tell a brief story about my friend at his funeral. The incident happened 65 years ago. The problem is that I am unsure whether the details of the story, as I remember them, are factual or just in my imagination. No one who was a witness at the time is still living. Should I make this story delightful and not worry about the facts, or make the story short, truthful and perhaps dull?“

Good heavens. This guy is the living embodiment of Casper Milquetoast, the famous invention of legendary cartoonist H.T. Webster. Casper was the original weenie, so terrified of making mistakes, defying authority or breaking rules that he was in a constant case of paralysis. The idea of a story at a memorial service or funeral is to reveal something characteristic, admirable or charming about the departed and, if possible, to move or entertain the assembled. This guy is the only one alive who can recount whatever the anecdote is, so to the extent it exists at all now, he is the only authority and witness. So what if his memory isn’t exactly accurate? What’s he afraid of?

The advice I’d be tempted to give him is, “You sound too silly to be trusted to speak at anyone’s funeral. Why don’t you leave the task to somebody who understands what the purpose of such speeches are?” Or maybe tell him to watch the classic Japanese film “Rashomon,” about the difficulty of establishing objective truth. “The Ethicist,” who shouldn’t have selected such a dumb question in the first place, blathers on about how “everybody does” what the inquirer is so worried about and cites psychological studies about how we edit our memories. Blecchh.

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The New York Times Unveils (and Retracts) An Early Contender For ‘Headline of the Year’

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This is wonderful in so, so many ways

The headline went up on the Times website around 3:30 pm yesterday as a follow-up to this story, and, if I had seen it, be assured that I would have posted on it then. I would have seen it too, if I hung out on Twitter/”X” all day, which is apparently what amazing numbers of supposedly busy people do.

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Boy, One Of Our Most Deified Presidents Sure Agreed To Some Bone-Headed Ideas…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

As I have mentioned here many times, there is no way around ranking Franklin Roosevelt as one of our top five Presidents: his handling of World War II from the U.S. perspective and his leadership during the Great Depression, which didn’t so much fix the economic problems as raise the public’s faith in our system of government when it easily could have collapsed, are so important and momentous that all of his missteps and blunders pale by comparison. Nevertheless there were many of these, some quite damning.

I only recently learned about one of them that I somehow had missed all these years—probably because our historians have been and are still overwhelmingly left-biased and inclined towards hagiography where FDR is concerned.

Henry Morgenthau Jr. was Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury from 1934 until FDR’s death. He was a trusted advisor whose scope of interest and influence far exceeded the usual territory of his office. In 1944, Morgenthau got far over his metaphorical skis and proposed a scheme for the post-war world, specifically, as he said, “I want to make Germany so impotent that she cannot forge the tools of war – another world war.”

You know, because that strategy worked out so well the first time, after World War I…

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Curmie’s Conjectures: Too White A Christmas?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

by Curmie

[Curmie raises so many casting ethics issues that fascinate me in this post that I’m going to announce right now that I’ll post a veritable “Part II” tomorrow, although it will be “Jack’s Conjectures”, or something. Not that I disagree with anything the esteemed Ethics Alarms featured columnist writes here, because I don’t. Here’s a clue about one issue I’ll be covering which Curmie only hints at: for a cast to be sufficiently “diverse,” do the BIPOC members have to obviously LOOK like they are “of color”? I’m thinking of performers like Jennifer Beals, the late Olivia Hussey, and Jessica Alba—JM]

Jack and I exchanged a couple of emails about this story, which I first saw on the OnStageBlog back around Thanksgiving, when this was still news.  I’m pretty sure both of us wanted the other to write about it.  So, a little late, here we go…

The case involves the casting of the Christmas-themed musical Elf at Broadway at Music Circus in Sacramento.  OnStageBlog’s founder Chris Peterson often gets what Curmie’s grad school mentor would call “foam-flecked,” and his editorial here is no exception.  But he does have a point.  Sort of.

The company came under criticism when they announced the cast list for Elf; although a number of the leads were non-white, the entire chorus (seen above) looks pretty vanilla, white-passing if not literally white. Actress (or is she a “social media manager for major hotel brands”?) Victoria Price is one of those who led the charge, pointing to the difference between the Broadway ensemble and the one in Sacramento, and noting that any comments critical of the casting were being deleted.  (I assume she’s telling the truth about this.)

Tony nominee Amber Imam joined the fray, writing that Price’s criticism of both the casting and the removal of negative comments was “absolutely right.  A show that takes place in NEW YORK CITY cannot… CAN NOT have an ensemble that LOOKS LIKE THIS!!!  Do better.  Have you learned nothing?????”

The company’s CEO Scott Klier issued a response that made the situation much, much worse: “cover-up worse than the crime” worse.  Here’s part of it:

“Inclusivity has been and remains my casting and staffing goal for every production. I fell short of that goal for ELF. There is an uncomfortable truth here: Our industry as a whole has largely failed to attract, train and foster the artists necessary to meet today’s demand, and I fear this conversation will continue until it does. It will unfortunately take time. The painful reality of ELF’s casting process was that both the casting submissions and audition attendance revealed few candidates of color and, while those few were undoubtedly talented, they did not meet the dance, music and acting criteria set by our team.”

Hoo boy… Claiming inclusivity as a “goal” and then going 0-for-15 at fulfilling it?  Blaming other people while admitting the decision was yours?  Admitting there’s a “demand” and then ignoring it? 

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And As Long As We Are Talking About Doing The Right Things For (Perhaps) the Wrong Reasons: Zuckerberg and Meta

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder and its alter-ego Meta’s chief executive, announced that his flagship social media platform, along with Instagram and Threads, will end its longstanding (and biased, and flawed) fact-checking program, moving instead to a “community notes” system like the one employed by Elon Musk’s reinvention of Twitter.

Good. What took so long?

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Zuckerberg said. The company’s current fact-checking system had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.” “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

In truth, anyone should have been able to figure out that Facebook’s “fact checkers” were progressive, dishonest, partisan hacks. The censors included Snopes (EA dossier here) and PolitiFact (even worse dossier here), which Ethics Alarms, among many others, had marked as biased and untrustworthy years ago, indeed well before Facebook turned to them as censors. The truth is that one person’s “bad stuff” is another’s stimulating opinion or analysis. This shouldn’t be a difficult concept, but in the Age of the Great Stupid, it is. The 21st Century Left likes censorship, indeed has relied on it to hold power, and has embraced the practice on college campuses, social media, and in the news. Sad but true.

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Now THIS Is Trump Derangement…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Maybe it would be therapeutic for January 6 to be officially declared “Trump Derangement Victims Day,” in honor of all the otherwise sane and reasonable Americans who were driven to fear, loathing and madness by the very exitsnace of Donald J. Trump. The villains who spread this destructive contagion are too many to list, although our lame duck, dying brain POTUS just awarded several of them citizen honors. Meanwhile, if we had such a holiday, those unfortunate sufferers could use the day therapeutically, and let all of their hate out like a primal scream.

I came to this conclusion after reading the following yesterday on a legal blog that I usually admire:

“There are arguments to be made that many who participated in the insurrection of January 6, 2021 thought they were being patriots defending a nation from a stolen election, even though it was a nonsensical lie fed to the willingly delusional by an amoral narcissist who wasn’t strong enough to endure the humiliation of failure. There are arguments to be made that some sentences imposed on J6 insurrectionists were excessive, even though capital police were beaten and bloodied. But there are no arguments that January 6th didn’t happen as it was seen, experienced and suffered that day, as Trump gleefully watched. Yet here we are, Trump re-elected and promising to pardon or grant clemency to his Hallelujah chorus. Here we are, Trump re-elected and urging the jailing of the January 6th House commission for prosecuting him too well, pretending that most of his own administration’s testimony against him didn’t exist or was somehow the result of tampering by then-Congresswoman Liz Cheney, of the radically progressive Cheney clan. Here we are, Trump re-elected as the former vice president acknowledges that the president demanded he violate the Constitution or be hung by Trump’s most violent sycophants…As his own Republican toadies scampered for cover and condemned his call to “fight like hell” that brought the worst of his followers to the second storming of the Capital, Trump relished in the glory of people willing to kill, or die, for him, not because he cared a whit for any of them but because he cared too much for himself…if you have chosen fantasy over reality, and want desperately enough to believe in the absurd excuses constructed around January 6th, so be it. Time will judge Trump’s administration. Time will judge Trump, the vulgar, deceitful, amoral, narcissistic ignoramus. But January 6th happened.

Yikes.

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Ethics Hero: VP Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Harris has had, in my estimation, several opportunities to earn Ethics Hero status here in the past, and whiffed every time. Yesterday, she achieved that status by the easiest route imaginable: by simply doing her job, indeed one of the very few requirements of a job that has always been under-burdened by official duties.

Vice-President Harris officiated as the two houses of Congress met in joint session to formally count the Electoral College votes for President and certify the results. “The votes for president of the United States are as follows,” Harris declared, as she was bound to, after each state’s totals were read. “Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida has received 312 votes.” When Republican members of Congress rose to their feet to applaud, Harris managed to look non-committal, even if she might have been thinking, “Fuck you all.”

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‘Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!’ An Unethical Quote and an Exposé

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ethics Alarms made it clear, I hope, that one reason I believed that it was crucial for Donald Trump to win the election was to decisively foil the news media’s attempt to defeat him through relentless unethical journalism. To be honest, I sometimes think, like right now, that this was even more important than rejecting the nascent and sometimes not-so-nascent totalitarianism of the 21st Century Democratic Party and the American Left. It is now clear to even the most die-hard propagandists masquerading as “independent journalists” that the mask is off, the jig is up, and all but the most gullible and ignorant of the American public don’t trust them any more. That’s wonderful, but if reform is on the horizon, it’s barely detectable.

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Snow Day Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Yet another episode of “It’s Hell Being an Ethicist…

It’s a snow day in the D.C. area. Most stores are closed, and most workers are taking the day off. For families with young kids it’s unavoidable: schools around here close with even a prediction of snow. For someone born and bred in New England, this phobia over the white stuff seems especially ludicrous; there are maybe five inches on the ground right now, and in Boston, that would not even slow traffic down, much less close schools. It took at least a two or three feet of snow to close the schools when I was a nubbin.

Still, the old memories are bright. A snow day was always marked by a nice fire in the fireplace, hot cocoa, playing board games with my sister and, of course, dressing warm and going sledding. Today is a snow day. But I have a home office and no excuse not to work—even though I worked all weekend, even though everything in my mind and body is saying, “Take it easy! This is one of life’s special joys! It’s a respite from responsibility! Give yourself a break—heck, everybody else is doing it!“

Ah, but that last part, the Golden Rationalization, is like a splash ice water in the puss. I see the chart of “The Six Pillars of Character” on the wall, and “diligence” is staring at me. So is “responsibility,” and “prudence.” I’m behind in so many things, and there is so much I need to finish, then more still after I finish that. Snow days are about being carefree and having fun. I can’t remember the last time I had fun.

I want a snow day; I deserve a snow day. A snow day would be good for me.

But I’m an ethicist, and I have to be consistent: “Integrity ” is staring at me now. I have to work. No snow day for me.

Fuck.

January 6 Should Live in Infamy, But Not For The Reasons Democrats and the News Media Are Telling Us Today [Updated!]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The true significance of January 6 is that the response of the Biden Administration and the Democrats in Congress to a demonstration that turned into a riot was a virtual flare warning Americans that our government and one of its two major parties are flirting with totalitarianism. The aftermath also sent a clear, if distorted by, again, the news media, message that a double standard exists in law enforcement, encouraged and nourished by the the totalitarian-trending Left.

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