Author: Jack Marshall

Thank God It’s The Friday Ethics Tune-Up, 12/9/2022, And Speaking Of Tunes…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

It was awfully gutsy of Michael Bublé to set up that time-traveling duet with Bing, especially with that song. But he’s so obviously moved by the whole concept of singing with his idol, it works. Bing sings rings around him, of course.

I skipped mentioning the significance of the last two December dates on the calendar, both of which are days that shall live in infamy: the attack on Pearl Harbor on the 7th, and the assassination of John Lennon by a lunatic on December 8. There’s enough going sour right now without looking for bad memories.

1. I can’t justify naming Arizona Senator Kristen Sinema an Ethics Hero for it, but the news this morning that  Sinema is leaving the Democratic Party and changing her party affiliation to Independent has some ethical resonance. It’s just too early to tell what she intends the practical effect of the change to be. It sure looks like a shot across the bow of an arrogant party that has consistently clashed with he principles regarding how a republic should work. As Ethics Alarms has held before, an elected official who switches parties is ethically obligated to resign and run again under her new designation, otherwise this is a betrayal of the voters. The only time a politician did this the ethical way that comes to mind was when Phil Graham of Texas resigned when he left the Donkeys for the Elephants, and that was a long time ago. One result of Sinema’s defection: while Republican have 49 Senators under their banner, Democrats now have only 48, with three Independents padding their forces. Democrats have lost the House, and their President is a bumbling, manipulated failure. In other words, they have a mandate!

2. Ron Burgundy smiles… Diverse but incompetent White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre embarrassed herself again  when she  read the wrong scripted response to a question this week during a White House press briefing. The really disturbing part was that it took her so long to realize it. She is, indeed, an idiot, but a female, black, lesbian immigrant idiot, so as Tony the Tiger would say, “Sheeee’s GREAT!”  A reporter asked for the White House’s reaction to Sen. Jean Shaheen (D-N.H.) claiming that moving South Carolina ahead of New Hampshire in the Democratic primary schedule would make her state “vulnerable for her party.” The Most Inept Presidential Paid Liar Ever checked her pre-scripted notes and said,

So, look, we honor — we honor the Hatch Act, as I mentioned many times before, here, as we are talking about a potential election — a 2024 presidential election. But, looking backward, it is the ultimate irony, you know, that the 2020 election was — was proven by the Trump administration’s Homeland…

Then perhaps tipped off by the reporters looking like the audience in “The Producers” at the conclusion of “Springtime for Hitler,” Jean-Pierre called an oopsie, and said, “Oh, sorry, I think I got ahead of myself there,” and giggled. This isn’t funny, though. It’s tragic and insulting.

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Open Forum, Or “Let’s All Meet At The Street Corner And Sing Ethics Carols!”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Deck the page with rage at TwitterBla bla bla bla bla, bla bla bla blah! ‘Censorship should not seem bitterBla bla bla bla bla, bla bla bla blah! Free expression’s really hatefulBla bla bla, bla bla, bla, bla bla blah!Strangling it could make us grateful…Bla bla bla bla bla, bla bla bla blah!

Sing out, everybody! Cocoa and cookies at my house after!

 

The Other Shoe Drops: How Will The MSM Deny Twitter’s Viewpoint Censorship Now?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Just as Ethics Alarms was flagging the frantic efforts among the left-biased news media and others to deny the obvious and accurate implications of Twitter’s Hunter Biden laptop story censorship—the social media platform deliberately used its power to mislead the public and bolster Democrats— New York Times refugee Bari Weiss dropped the next metaphorical shoe, reporting on more newly released Twitter documents that show its pre-Elon Musk regime was “creating blacklists, preventing disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limiting the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users” and all based on an anti-conservative, pro-progressive agenda.

I can’t wait to see how The Washington Post, Phillip Bump and TechDirt apply Yoo’s Rationalization (“It isn’t what it is”) to muddy the issue this time.

Bari Weiss revealed her conclusions from studying the evidence sent to her by Twitter Avenger Elon Musk in a Twitter stream like the one employed by Matt Taibbi in the earlier revelations—you know, about how the Hunter Biden laptop facts were censored, which the New YorkTimes, Washington Post and the news networks shrugged off as “a nothingburger” because it was “old news,” Hunter Biden didn’t matter, and the laptop story wouldn’t have changed the result of the election anyway, so who cares if was censored by Twitter, and yes, them too?

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In Dedham, Massachusetts, A Library’s Christmas Tree Makes People “Uncomfortable”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

So the board of library trustees and the library director responded to an undisclosed number of complaints by banning the tree, so nobody can enjoy it.

Ever since uber-athiest Madeleine Murray O’Hair’s lawsuit got the Supreme Court to rededicate itself to ensuring that national, state and local governments did not endorse a particular religion in defiance of the Constitution’s establishment cause, there has been a tug of war over how America should celebrate Christmas. Are office Christmas parties “insensitive”? Should elevators play “Joy to the World?” Is the greeting “Merry Christmas!” offensive to someone who isn’t a Christian?

Prior to Mrs. O’Hair’s attack, the balance between religious and secular elements at Christmas time was solid. Schools included traditional Christmas carols in their annual programs without anyone seriously regarding it as pro-Christian propaganda; Bing Crosby was as likely to sing “O Holy Night” as “White Christmas” on his TV Christmas specials. Then the lawsuits started flying over public crèche displays, and otherwise rational people began causing trouble. I remember a smart and generally sensible female executive at an association I worked for in the ’80s making a huge issue out of a “Christmas elves” staff gift exchange mandated by the executive director. She was Jewish, and felt “excluded” by “Christmas elves.” So the gimmick was renamed the “holiday pixies” program. What the heck are “holiday pixies?” Unless she was one, which I doubt, how did that make her feel more “included”? Her successful Christmas protest only managed to put a sour taste in everyone’s mouth and divide the staff, just as the current Christmas nonsense divides the country.

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The Twitter Hunter Biden Laptop Censorship Proves Social Media’s Anti-Democracy Slant, And The Media’s Rush To Excuse It Proves Theirs

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

This was a test of integrity for the mainstream news media, and they, most predictably, flunked it, and outed themselves as the shamelessly unethical propaganda-spewing hacks they are. Depressing, but good to know, as if we didn’t know already.

As an exemplar of the whole, ugly, revolting effort to dismiss evidence that a biased and partisan Twitter staff deliberately buried a news story that might have harmed Joe Biden’s prospects of winning the 2016 election, Phillip Bump’s “analysis” in the Washington Post could hardly be more damning. Its very headline is an unethical rationalization and an appeal to consequentialism: “No, limiting the Hunter Biden laptop story didn’t cost Trump the election.”

Let’s just start with that, okay? Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The Britney Griner Trade

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

 Brittney Griner, the  U.S.-hating WNBA star who was sentenced to nine years in a Russian prison for violating Russian drug laws charges was traded to the U.S for international arms dealer Viktor Bout, an international criminal who was serving a 25 year sentence. Meanwhile, retired U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, also imprisoned in Russia and for nearly four years, remains there. He was convicted on espionage charges that the U.S. has called false, which doesn’t mean they are false, of course.

Observations:

  • You knew this was going to be the result, didn’t you? It was as certain as anything in foreign relations could be. Griner is black, a female and a lesbian as well as a sports celebrity who parrots progressive anti-American ideology. Biden might appoint her to the Supreme Court: she ticks all the right boxes.
  • The Biden Administration wasn’t wrong to seek her release. Russia had deliberately throw its metaphorical book at her; bu U.S. standards, her sentence was cruel and unusual. Our government is duty bound to try to rescue its citizens when foreign governments abuse them.
  • In baseball terms, this trade was like a team trading a superstar pitcher to its major divisional rival for a third-string catcher and a bag of stale peanuts. Griner has no national security or diplomatic use whatsoever; her sole value is political, as the Democrats will apparently do anything to pander to the three constituent groups Griner belongs to. Here’s a description of Bout, in contrast:

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Scary Headlines From “The Great Stupid”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I couldn’t resist a post in “The American Thinker” which listed 12 “headlines you never would have seen just a few short years ago,” because 10 of 12 had appeared on my birthday, December 1. That explains why my favorite recent Great Stupid headline didn’t make the list, “Shark Week Lacks Diversity, Overrepresents Men Named Mike, Scientists Say,” which sparked two Ethics Alarms posts yesterday, here and here. Eric Utter writes that taken together, the list “looks like a harbinger of chaos and disaster.” I won’t argue with that, especially since I see worse headlines than these every day and have time and gorge to write about only some of them. Here are nine of the twelve:

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Arrogant, Deluded And Ignorant Is No Way To Go Through Life, Jennifer Lawrence…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Jennifer Lawrence is a charismatic, versatile, talented movie star, but someone misled her into believing that everything that pops into her head is worth saying, and it isn’t. In this case, it wasn’t just banal or gratuitous progressive blather points, but a wildly false and disrespectful over-praising of her own significance at the expense of actresses that she ought to be honoring rather than insulting.

In a recent interview with Variety magazine, the star of the “Hunger Games” movies (beginning in 2012), “Silver Lining Playbook” and other films said,

“I remember when I was doing ‘Hunger Games,’ nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn’t work. We were told … girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead.”

If you don’t know your film history, don’t make statements about film history. It makes one look like a conceited fool, as the social media mob rushed to inform Lawrence. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Dispatches From The Great Stupid, ‘D.E.I.’ Division: This Story From The Washington Post Was Not A Joke…Well, Not Intended As One, Anyway”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In her Comment of the Day on the lament by female shark researchers that they are under-represented in their field (without any supporting evidence of how many aspiring but unfulfilled female shark researchers there are), Sarah B. neatly expresses how “diversity-equity-inclusion” based arguments for hiring create justifications for bias while supposedly addressing the problem of bias.

Here is Sarah B. on the post, “Dispatches From The Great Stupid, “D.E.I.” Division: This Story From The Washington Post Was Not A Joke…Well, Not Intended As One, Anyway”…

***

Women do have trouble in the hard sciences. This is true. HOWEVER if we act like whiny little bitches, no one will take us seriously when we need to be taken seriously. Do these DIE-obsessed women not understand that not only are they shooting themselves in the feet, but they are making it harder for all the rest of us?

Employer-Employee relations suffer. If I were hiring researchers, it would be hard to WANT to hire women given the current rules. As a woman I also have confidence issues, as I am uncertain if I was hired as anything more than a diversity hire. Am I really the best for a job, especially if I’m finding something about it very challenging? Is this simply a case of needing to step up and improve myself professionally, or am I just a check-box who is under-qualified and never expected or even capable of performing?

Finally the relationship with coworkers suffers. If my coworker is a diversity hire, they get paid about what I do, but I have to do their work which has me put in hours of unpaid overtime to keep my job while they float. This leads to hate and discontent. And as a potentially qualified person seen as a diversity hire, we need to work much harder than our coworkers with more results than our coworkers to get the basic respect because we start so far in negative territory on the Cognitive Dissonance scale.

As a further note, even if DIE had a point, trans and BIPOC rules have essentially neutered it because who can tell if Mike on “Shark Week” doesn’t identify as Michaela in its personal life and is 1/1024 BIPOC?

Women need to stand up against DIE hiring (yes I’m aware of the real acronym) and work to get jobs due to our qualifications, not our box-checking.

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A Christmas Music Ethics Spectacular! [Third Stanza: The Good, The Bad, And The Creepy]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The New York Times has an article about the competition to create a new Christmas music standard, or at least a hit song for streaming.  The piece’s “Rules of the Game:

No. 1: The public prefers the old classics, and isn’t too interested in new songs.

No. 2: Singers shouldn’t wander too far from the melody.

No. 3: “You can’t be too corny at Christmas. You totally get a free pass.”

Corny is fine, but what about creepy?

D. Dark Christmas Songs

1. Traditional Carols

The problem with “The Carol of the Bells” isn’t the lyrics, it’s the music. The thing is affirmatively creepy; my mother hated it, and compared the tune to “The Hall of the Mountain King.” No other Christmas music has been so frequently used darkly. It came, then, as no surprise when the TV horror mini-series “Nos4A2,” based on a novel by Stephen King’s son, used the carol as its theme music. The show is the tale of a damned man who kidnaps children and takes them to “Christmasland” where they are kids forever, and also become little vampires. The music, which is by a Ukrainian composer, is unquestionably ominous. Why it has remained in the Christmas canon is a mystery to me.

Another carol in a minor key is “We Three Kings,” which contains this cheerful lyric in Verse 4, sung by Balthazar:

Myrrh is mine; its bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom;—
Sorrowing, sighing,
Bleeding, dying,
Sealed in the stone-cold tomb

Merry Christmas!

And why would you give that stuff to a baby?

I’m going to call “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” a traditional carol since its lyrics are more than a century old. It’s not creepy, but it is a sad song, and sadder still when one knows its origins. 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem titled “Christmas Bells” on Christmas Day, December 25, 1863. He was in despair: his son had been wounded fighting for the Union the month before, and the poet feared he would die. The author of “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “Evangeline” and other famous poems also was still mourning his second wife, who had died horribly in a fire two years earlier. He was not in a good state of mind when he wrote,

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