Author: Jack Marshall

Nah, The Democrats Would Never Cheat To Hold On To Power! Whatever Would Make Anyone Think That?

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I saw the photoshopped Joe Biden photo that “allegedly” had been sent out by “Team Biden” last night, and decided that I couldn’t rely on the conservative source, since I would not put it past “Team GOP” to photoshop a picture and then claim Democrats were responsible. This is what we’ve come to—we literally cannot trust any source, any account, any claim, and neither Right nor Left nor their media mouthpieces are sufficiently trustworthy, fair, honest or decent that you, I or anyone can be sure of the facts about virtually anything.

(Fuck.)

However, I traced down the source of the fake. Here’s the whole photo, in a tweet from Democratic strategist and former party chair Chris Jackson….

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Ethics Quiz Of The Day: “Gotcha!” Or “Benefit Of The Doubt”?

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

That’s yesterday’s Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, titled “Some Theme’s Missing,”, above. Does the pattern of the letter squares remind you of anything? Given that December 18 is the first night of Hanukkah, many found the resemblance of the puzzle to a Nazi swastika…disturbing. Sinister even.

Republicans pounced. New York Times-haters pounced. Donald Trump Jr. pounced, on Twitter. Israel’s Israel National News thought it notable that the swastika crossword was published following what it deemed an anti-Semitic op-ed by the Times the day before, warning that Benjamin “Netanyahu’s government…is a significant threat to the future of Israel — its direction, its security and even the idea of a Jewish homeland.”

The publication also posted a poll asking readers if the puzzle’s design was “intentional Nazi imagery or an unfortunate coincidence?” Of the 440 votes, nearly 85% deemed the symbol to be deliberate.

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Institutional Ethics Dunce: The U.S. Congress

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The House of Representatives passed legislation last week ordering the Capitol’s bust of Roger Taney, the Supreme Court Chief Justice who wrote the Dred Scott decision, to Hell, or someplace. It will be replaced by a new bust of Thurgood Marshall, the first black judge to serve on Court.

Of course it will. This naked political grandstanding wouldn’t be complete without installing a black judge’s image as a rebuke to the evil white judge. The legislation now heads to President Biden’s desk to be signed, probably followed by a victory jig.

The pandering legislation says that Taney’s bust is “unsuitable for the honor of display to the many visitors to the Capitol.” It currently sits at the entrance of the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol where the Supreme Court met from 1810 to 1860. Taney led the court from 1836 to 1864.

“While the removal of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s bust from the Capitol does not relieve the Congress of the historical wrongs it committed to protect the institution of slavery, it expresses Congress’s recognition of one of the most notorious wrongs to have ever taken place in one of its rooms, that of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s Dred Scott v. Sandford decision,” the legislation says. I wonder how many of the members who voted for the legislation know anything about Taney or have ever engaged in an objective reading of his opinion. My guess: not many. Maybe none.

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The Elon Musk-Twitter Ethics Roller-Coaster Ride Continues

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

(I hate roller-coasters.)

The last week has demonstrated clearly, I think we can all agree, that 1) there is an urgent need for Twitter to be de-politicized, stripped of partisan censorship, and become a trustworthy platform for the unfettered distribution of news, information and opinion to the public, and 2) Elon Musk is too much of a loose cannon to be the manager of Twitter’s reform.

Yesterday almost qualified as a meltdown, or a tantrum, or something. Maybe a joke. Who knows with him? He teased his withdrawal from the daily management of the reeling social media giant. He hinted that the company was teetering on bankruptcy. He put his continued tenure as CEO up for a vote, pledging to abide by the results.

Chaos. Musk is quite a bit like Donald Trump, which shouldn’t be surprising: the successful entrepreneur/ CEO/ autocrat/narcissist is a well-understood personality type, and management by chaos is a management style that can be very effective for the short term in a private company (but not the U.S. government). I worked for a chaos manager for seven years, and he was brilliant at it, but I decided then and there that I could never operate that way. It is hard on subordinates, employees and stake-holders; only the chaotic manager enjoys the pressure. It is a non-Golden Rule management style that relies entirely on utilitarianism as its ethical justification. Yes, the methods causes breakdowns, anxiety and constant crisis, but if it “works,” it’s worth the pain. That’s what Musk has been doing.

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He’s Right Of Course, Turning Back The Clock On This Predictably Disastrous Progressive Policy Requires More Competent Leadership Than This…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Brevard County (Florida) Sheriff Wayne Ivey chose the county jail to make a passionate public statement about the deteriorating discipline in public schools and its catastrophic consequences last month. Flanked by law enforcement partners, school board chair Matt Susin, and 18th District State Attorney Phil Archer, Ivey needed urgent reform.

As it was his job,to keep schools safe from all forms of harm,  “the clowns who continually disrupt our classrooms, our assemblies, with their bad behavior” had to change, Ivey said, and he pledges to be active in executing that change:

“Our teachers are distracted, they can’t do their jobs anymore, they’re spending more time dealing with children disrupting their class than they are in teaching those that came there to learn….As a result, we are losing teachers in mass order. Teachers that can no longer take having their class disrupted by these clowns. We are losing those that came here to passionately teach our students, that are passionate about teaching others.”

 Ivey pointed to “the failure of school discipline policy” in Brevard County allowing a minority of students to repeatedly engage in class violence, disrupting lessons while attacking teachers physically and verbally. The sheriff said that teachers and principals were “handcuffed” regarding  discipline, with excessive bureaucratic obstacles rendering the process to request disciplinary action slow, burdensome and ineffective. Continue reading →

Mid-Annual Tree Lighting Ordeal Ethics Ornaments, 12/18/2022: A Slippery Slope, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, A Dinner For Schmucks, And A Hungry Hippo…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I type this with scratches on my wrists. Let’s see: my Christmas tree lighting saga began yesterday when I discovered that almost half of the thousand plus lights  I tested and put away a year ago went dead for no apparent reason. A wild hunt to five stores revealed a run on multi-colored lights all over Alexandria, and the terrible news that the Old Town Alexandria landmark “The Christmas Attic” had closed its doors, so my hope of purchasing some unique colored lights as I have in the past was foiled, perhaps forever. Today, having eventually found some barely acceptable replacements for the dead strings, I discovered that my lovely 9 ft. Fasier fir was one of those perverse trees with dense branches growing sideways, Then the first string I hung, in the middle of the tree, stopped working after several more had covered it, and the hunt for the loose connection, ultimately successful, scarred my arms for life. I’m writing this post to calm down; I have several hours of pain and frustration ahead of me.

Mel Torme left all of that out of his song….

In the midst of all this, a Trump Deranged commenter whom I had passed through moderation called me a “Maga propaganda” channeling “hack” because I use the term Wuhan virus” to describe the destructive pathogen that originated in the Wuhan province in China. I have explained in detail why Ethics Alarms does this: the short justification is that I am nobody’s political correctness monkey, facts aren’t racist, and the Left’s campaign to eliminate Wuhan virus from the lexicon was in great part a feature of the ongoing effort to cast President Trump as a racist based on nothing at all.

I also, I hope you notice, refuse to capitalize the b in “black” (and the w in “white”) just because a white-guilt-predator activist committee somewhere decided that was a hoop good little antiracists had to jump through. This is exactly the same principle behind my refusal to let anyone dictate that I use their pronouns if I doubt their accuracy and the individual has done nothing to justify my trust and  good will.

1. Pete Gray, the one-armed outfielder, and Jim Abbott, the one handed pitcher, applaud (figuratively)…  Hansel Emmanuel,  a 6-foot-6 freshman guard on the  Northwestern State basketball team, dribbled between two defenders to deliver “a thunderous dunk” in a 91-73 win over Louisiana-Monroe. It was his first basket of the season. Emmanuel has only one arm. See?

Emmanuel,  19,  lost his left arm just below his shoulder in a childhood accident. He ended the game scoring five points with two rebounds in eight minutes. After the game, Emmanuel said, “I know my family was proud. I had to keep working. You can’t give up.” Continue reading →

No, Anti-Kavanaugh Obsessives, Attending A Holiday Party Does Not Constitute “An Appearance Of Impropriety” [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Ooooh, scary! Politico reported that Justice Brett Kavanaugh attended a private holiday party last week at the home of Matt Schlapp, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Coalition (CPAC). Attendees included Stephen Miller, whose group America First Legal Foundation, it reported, “has interests in cases now pending before the court.”

Bloomberg Law seems to think social engagements over the holidays aree suspicious actions triggering “the appearance of impropriety” prohibitions all judges are told to avoid. They are not. The problem is that now there is a glut of committed ideologues determined to intimidate, neutralize and delegitimatize the Supreme Court, and to those biased critics, virtually anything a conservative justice does appears improper. In Kavanaugh’s case, unsubstantiated juvenile conduct while in high school was cited as sufficiently improper to overshadow his impeccable record as an adult judge.

Attending a party with people who “live, eat, and breathe conservative political action” is either reflective of a level of insensitivity to that development or indifference to it, says Charles Geyh, an Indiana University Maurer School of law professor. “This is the worst possible time for this,” he said. “That development” is the Court being unjustly and disingenuously attacked for legitimate and legally justifiable decisions that the Left hates. The prohibition against “the appearance of impropriety” means conduct that could be reasonably and objectively seen as improper, not conduct that partisan fanatics find convenient to call improper. Professionals like lawyers, politicians and judges should be capable of interacting socially with those they may disagree with, and there should be no adverse inferences from accepting a private party invitation. As the late Justice Scalia insisted, even Supreme Court Justices are entitled to a social life. If the job requires living like a cloistered monk, no one will want the job.

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Ethics Quote Of The Week: Dinesh D’Souza

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“The mainstream media can’t risk covering the Twitter Files. If they admit rampant collusion between govt agencies and Twitter, they’ll have to inquire about Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Google. The whole censorship regime would unravel. Better to pretend nothing’s happening!”

—-Conservative scholar and author Dinesh D’Souza, via Twitter, of course.

Whatever one may think of D’Souza, and wherever one may fall in the partisan divide, I don’t see what other explanation there is for the stubborn, self-destructive refusal by the mainstream media to acknowledge what the Twitter files’ reporting by Matt Taibbi et al. has revealed. (Once again today, the New York Times contains no mention of the issue at all.)

It’s a mass, extended Jumbo. Continue reading →

J. Robert Oppenheimer Is Finally Proven Innocent Of Being A Communist Spy. A Lot Of Good It Does Him Now…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Sixty-eight years after he was disgraced and his reputation ruined, brilliant physicist and atomic bomb architect J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose security clearance with the Atomic Energy Commission was revoked on the grounds that he was a supporter of Communism, has been finally declared innocent of that charge. Declassified documents, the Department of Energy has ruled, show that the investigation that rendered the American hero a broken man (he died 12 years later at the age of 62) was biased and flawed.

Energy Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm said in a statement that  “ evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed.”

That’s nice. My immediate thoughts when I read this: Continue reading →

The Complete 2022 “White Christmas” Ethics Companion, Revised And Updated

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White-Christmas

2022 Introduction

 Last year I wondered whether the 1954 Christmas movie musical “White Christmas” was on the way out of the Christmas movie canon as anti-white racism took root during “The Great Stupid.” It looks like that’s the case. It is, after all, about as white as a movie can get, even for the Fifties.  If it is canceled, the loss will matter. “White Christmas” is an entertaining Christmas romantic comedy and family film with an excellent Irving Berlin score, a brilliant cast and an effectively sentimental and moving climax.

That should be enough, and in 1954 it definitely was enough: the movie was a critical and box office hit. If “White Christmas” doesn’t mesh with the cynicism of our current culture, well, maybe that’s our problem less than it is the movie’s. As for the film losing popularity because it isn’t “diverse” and “inclusive,” I will posit this: if there comes a time when an innocent fable about kindness toward an old hero down on his luck no longer resonates because of the skin-shades of the characters, the values and priorities of American arts and society will have reached a dangerous level of confusion.

And if your children can’t enjoy music, laughter and  sentiment expertly inspired by some of the greatest talents this nation has ever produced, you’ve raised them wrong.

I know that my commentary on this movie, in contrast to the tone of the ethics guides to “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Miracle on 34th Street” is too snarky. (Two very close friends who love the film get mad at me every year.) I’m just not the right audience for “White Christmas.” As a stage director and critic I prize narrative clarity and consistency; as an ethicist I find the usual ethics short-cuts the protagonists in musicals usually stoop to more distracting than the typical audience member. The film also seems to radiate a certain “we know this movie can’t miss, so we can blow off a lot of stuff” vibe, and that’s unethical—unprofessional and disrespectful of the audience. I expect better of director Michael Curtiz, who, after all, directed “Casablanca.”

But the producers knew they had a hit in the making: a remake of the very successful “Holiday Inn”; a Christmas movie; a film built around the best-selling record of all time (then and now); a star, Bing Crosby, whose films seldom missed and who was identified with Christmas;  a score by one of the most successful and popular song-writers of his generation in Irving Berlin; a unique performer with his own fan base in Danny Kaye, and a very popular Fifties chanteuse at the peak of her popularity and talents in Rosemary Clooney. “White Christmas” was certain to be good, but as Bing Crosby groused tears later, it could have been great, and should have been. The film-makers were satisfied with making it just good enough, and were confident that the audience wouldn’t notice or care.

That ticks me off in the arts and in any other field. It really ticks me off when that cynical approach works.

One of the most ethical features of the movie was behind the scenes, an ethical act that allowed it to be made, undertaken by one of the most unlikely people imaginable, Danny Kaye.  Kaye was a major factor in launching my interest in performing, musicals, and comedy, but my research into the real man, when I was in the process of collaborating on a musical about his relationship with his wife and muse, songwriter Sylvia Fine, revealed that  the real Danny Kaye was a miserable, paranoid, selfish, mean and insecure sociopath when he wasn’t playing “Danny Kaye,” which could be on stage or off it. In this case, however—and nobody know why—the abused Jewish kid went to unusual lengths to save a Christmas movie.

“White Christmas” had been conceived as a remake of “Holiday Inn” with the same stars as that black-and-white musical, Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. Fred couldn’t do the project, so his part was re-written for Donald O’Connor, who became ill so close to shooting that there was no time to retool the script and have the film ready for its target holiday release. In desperation, the producers asked Kaye if he would play Bing’s sidekick even though it meant 1) playing a support, which Kaye had never done in a movie since becoming a star 2) playing a role that didn’t’ highlight his special talents (for those, watch “The Court Jester”), and 3) subordinating himself to Bing Crosby, who was indeed the bigger star and box office draw, and most daring of all, exposing his own limitations by doing dance numbers created for Donald O’Connor. Kaye was not a trained dancer, just a gifted mimic and athlete who could do almost anything he tried well. Danny demanded $200,000 and 10% of the gross to rescue the project, but he still was doing so at considerable personal risk…and he didn’t need the money. Sylvia was a financial whiz.

Everyone around Danny Kaye was shocked that he agreed to all of this. Not only did he agree, he also amazed everyone by not playing the under-appreciated star on set, by doing O’Connor’s choreography as well as he did, and by knowing how not to steal focus from the star, something he infamously refused to do on Broadway when he was in “Lady in the Dark” with Gertrude Lawrence. “White Christmas” was the top grossing film of 1954 and the most successful movie musical up to that time. Kaye’s uncharacteristic unselfishness and characteristic versatility made that level of success possible.

Maybe next year I’ll soften the commentary. 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. It has many high points, musical and comedic, they more than justify the flaws, and we will never see the likes of Crosby, Kaye and Clooney again (and Vera-Ellen was no slouch). Whatever faults “White Christmas” may have, it’s whiteness isn’t one of them.

1. The First Scene

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