Author: Jack Marshall

2023 Asshole Of The Year Runner-Up: Aidan Maese-Czeropki, And 2023 “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Headline Of The Year: NBC News

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Yes, it’s that time of year when Ethics Alarms will be announcing as many Best of… and Worst of…ethics awards as I get around to posting. A bit of background, in case you rely on the New York Times for your Washington. D.C. news (the Times up to now has ignored the embarrassing—to Democrats–saga completely):

The American Spectator was the first to reveal that a staffer for Senator Ben Cardin (D-Md) regularly posted images and videos on Twitter (“X”) of himself having sex with a male partner. One such video was particularly provocative: the sex show was captured in a conference room in the Hart Senate Office Building, where his boss the Senator’s office is located. The star is shown naked except for a jock strap, on on all fours, facing away from the camera, with a cartoon of the Capitol Dome covering his posterior. The Daily Caller then posted the video, leading the Capitol police to investigate (Prof. Turley explains that the video may be evidence of a crime).

It wasn’t exactly a case requiring Columbo, since the staffer had made the video publicly available. He was identified as Cardin aide Aidan Maese-Czeropski, 24, and was quickly fired in a terse, “we don’t want to talk about it” statement from Cardin’s office.

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The Complete “White Christmas” Ethics Companion, With A New Introduction For 2023

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

White-Christmas

2023 Introduction

In last year’s introduction, which I recommend if you are seeing this Guide for the first time—it’s longer and more informative than what I’m offering this year— I concluded by writing, “The movie works (even I get choked up at the end); you just have to turn off your brain to fully enjoy it the way it was meant to be enjoyed.” That’s all that matters right now for me. I’m posting the second of the ethics guides to classic Christmas movies tonight because, to quote Jerry Herman’s one Christmas song, I “need a little Christmas” about now, and as flawed as it is in so many ways, “White Christmas” does bring back memories of happier holidays. My Dad, Army through and through, was a sucker for the climax of the film when the old general (Dean Jagger) sees his former company assembled to give him tribute just as he was feeling useless. Bing Crosby is forever associated with my many happy Christmases as a child, and Christmas itself evokes warm memories of my mother, who treated every December 25th as the challenge of a lifetime: it had to be “the best Christmas ever for her family,” whereupon she would worry that the next Christmas wouldn’t be as good, and that would depress her. My mother thought every Christmas was going to be her last.

So in a year when the Marshalls are not going to have their usual spectacular Christmas tree that takes me five hours to decorate, when as with Thanksgiving, there will be no festive banquet at a table surrounded by family and friends, there will be no stockings or presents because choosing ethics as a pursuit has its disadvantages and being destitute at the end of the year is sometimes one of them, a sappy Christmas movie that ends with two happy couples, an old man being reassured that his life had meaning and Bing singing “White Christmas” is just what the psych ward ordered. I’m going to watch the movie tonight, and then I’ll “go to sleep, counting my blessings.”

1. The First Scene

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Secret Santa Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

The New York Time’s Magazine’s ethicist answers ethics questions arising in everyday life. I ask them. I guess that’s why he gets paid…

But I digress: here’s my dilemma…I just received a nice Hickory Farms box of cheeses and summer sausage. There was no card, and no clue as to who might have sent it. I have a few candidates for the Secret Santa, but all of them, in the past, have included cards. A couple are long-time clients, but neither of them is under any obligation to send me gifts, and I am genuinely surprised when they arrive, as they have now for many years. If I thank them, and they didn’t send the box and have no plans on sending me anything this year, that will be awkward for both of us. If one of them did send the box, and the card that was supposed to accompany it was left out somehow the packing, I don’t want to seem like an ungrateful wretch.

What is the ethical way to handle this?

Ethics Hero: Edelson Law Firm Founder Jay Edelson

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The large plaintiffs’ law firm Edelson PC announced that it will boycott recruiting events at Harvard Law School as a consequence of Harvard University president Claudine Gay’s Congressional testimony shrugging off campus antisemitism as “free speech,” followed by Harvard’s subsequent endorsement of Gay’s leadership. The firm informed Harvard Law’s career services office in a letter that announced the firm will skip the upcoming January law school recruitment as well Harvard’s larger on-campus interviewing event in August, when major firms do their hiring of summer associates.

Firm founder and CEO Jay Edelson explained, “This is not about Harvard law students. This is about the leadership of Harvard and how much of a megaphone it has on the world stage. They should use that megaphone responsibly.” Edelson added, “I understand that this is not going to be as relevant to them than if Skadden Arps pulled out, but I’m hoping they start seeing that even the liberal firms think this is well past a line.”

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files….

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This supercut of Democrats and their mainstream media minions (well, and Liz Cheney, of course) flogging Big Lie #3 ( “Trump Is A Fascist/Hitler/Dictator/Monster”) is a really funny, or, if you are a member of the Democratic Party, sad. If someone you know thinks it’s genuinely scary, however, try to get them some help.

Behold…

Interesting! FireFox, my browser, is blocking this video from posting, though embed codes just like it have always worked. I’m sorry, you’ll just have to go here to see what this post is about:

https://news.grabien.com/story-media-warn-if-trump-s-re-elected-every-bad-thing-they-can-possibly-ima

Incidentally, that once responsible, respected Presidential historian who keeps showing up is Michael Beschloss, whose EA dossier is here.

Ethics List Update, 12/15/23

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

It is stressful and irritating to have so many ethics stories dancing in my head like sugarplums, so I’m going to indulge myself in a quick exercise to get them out there and make room for the incoming stampede….

1. Yes, Michelle Goldberg really is this clueless. The scary part is that there are so many like her. The most irritating Times opinion writer—-not the worst, now, there are worse than her, like Jamelle Bouie, Paul Krugman and the inimitable Charles Blow, but she’s the one who irritates me the most—put her name under an op-ed titled, “What’s Driving Former Progressives to the Right?” Gee, what a mystery! What could it be? “Liberals and leftists have lots of excellent policy ideas, but rarely articulate a plausible vision of the future,” she decides. What are those “excellent policy ideas”? Goldberg points to dismantling “capitalism, the carceral state, heteropatriarchy [and] the nuclear family” and concludes that doing these marvelous things are just too darn hard for the faint-hearted.

It’s easier to be conservative, see: “The right has an advantage in appealing to dislocated and atomized people: It doesn’t have to provide a compelling view of the future. All it needs is a romantic conception of the past, to which it can offer the false promise of return. When people are scared and full of despair, “let’s go back to the way things were” is a potent message, especially for those with memories of happier times.”

Yeah, that must be it, Michelle.

It couldn’t possibly be that after assessing the state of the nation since 2008 and watching the collapse of the education system, rot in the cities, a rise in racial preferences, rampant inflation and an out-of-control national debt, chaos at the border, riots across the country launched by a Marxist scam group, the explosion of state-driven censorship efforts in the name of fighting “misinformation,” the transformation of journalism into a Leftist propaganda network, the return of anti-Semitism, the gradual destruction of women’s sports by trans-madness, and—there is a lot more—cutting to the chase, this…

…that some progressives have done what rational adults do when they find that something they really wanted to work doesn’t: they try something else.

Nah. It couldn’t be that...

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Look! Another Racial Casting Controversy!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I love this one: it involves one of my favorite actors and one of my favorite historical figures.

Denzel Washington has lapped Sydney Poitier as the most successful and, in my view, most versatile and best black Hollywood star in film history, so one would think his casting to portray any historical figure would be seen as a boon to that figure’s fans. In this case, you would be wrong. Denzel is playing the Carthaginian general Hannibal in a Netflix historical epic, and Le Monde reports that in Tunisia, Hannibal’s old stomping ground, Hannibal’s admirers are furious. The casting has even been debated in the Tunisian parliament. Tunisian MP Yassine Mami railed about “the risk of falsification of history” while calling on members to join him in “defending Tunisian identity”.

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After Harvard’s Wagon-Circling: This Will Not End Well….

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

While I was certain that Harvard would not have the integrity or guts to dump its albatross of a president having trapped the university in DEI Hell by selecting a black female social justice warrior in the first place, I have never held any illusions that this reflex circling of the progressive wagons and rote vote of confidence would do anything to slow Harvard’s demise. To be curt: the nation’s most prestigious university—for now—has a flat learning curve.

Isn’t that ironic.

Here are three updates on the ongoing Harvard debacle:

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The Story Of “Do You Hear What I Hear?”….And The Christmas Kick-Off Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Last week’s forum was the deadest ever, so I’m hoping that injecting some holiday cheer into this one will spark more dialogue. After all, if the wind, a lamb, a shepherd boy, a mighty king and people everywhere can have a productive conversation, Ethics Alarms readers should be able to bring some Goodness and Light too.

As some inspiration, I’m reposting below the Ethics Alarms entry about the origins of my favorite of the modern—“modern” as in “post World War II”—Christmas songs, first sung by my favorite Christmas minstrel.

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Ethics Quiz: Christmas Dancing At The White House

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Relax…today’s ethics quiz has nothing to do with whether Jill Biden’s Christmas video featuring the modern ballet troupe Dorrance Dance is your cup of eggnog.

Rather it is this…

Is it responsible and ethical for the White House to use the holidays to promote a politically radical, anti-police, anti-white, Marxist organization like Dorrance Dance?

For Dorrance Dance is an overtly and outspokenly Marxist dance company that even prominently displays a quote from Angela Davis on its website: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” The group advocates defunding the police across the country, and prominently endorses Black Lives Matters, another Marxist organization.

The group’s radical politics are a bit buried on its website behind standard aspirational artistic blather like “Our goal is to engage with audiences on a musical and emotional level, and to share the complex history and powerful legacy of this American art form throughout the country and the world.” Well, yes, that, and ending capitalism and the United States of America as we know it in order to achieve “racial justice.”

My answer to the quiz is that as long as the group keeps its politics out of its work for the White House, good luck to them. They were engaged—I hope—because of their dance artistry rather than their contempt for the United States. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Bidens had no idea what the group advocates.

Yes, it’s annoying that Dorrance Dance will undoubtedly use its White House gig as cognitive dissonance helium to elevate their public image into more positive territory than any organization connected to Angela Davis, Black Lives Matter and Karl Marx deserves. But if we chose our art based on the political sophistication and delusions of artists, we’d just end up with bad art.