Around the World

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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A Boy Who Identifies As A Girl Won An Irish Dancing Competition…Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I was thinking of making this an ethics quiz, but I couldn’t decide what to ask.

The Daily Signal reports—an exclusive!—that a teenage boy who identifies as a girl is heading to the Irish Dancing World Championships after placing first in the U14 2023 Southern Region Oireachtas competitions. The conservative website tells us that the winner competed as a boy and placed 11th in the world in the Coimisiún Le Rincí Gaelacha (CLRG) World Championships just eight months ago, in April 2023. (These kids just grow up and change sex so darn fast these days!). In the meantime, a “non-binary” contestant won another Irish dancing competition in August.

Irish dancing competitions are typically divided by gender. The Daily Signal reports, “Parents of girls competing in Irish dance are frustrated and outraged, saying that they cannot understand why a boy with physical advantages is allowed to dance against their daughters.” Huh? I would think a male would have only physical disadvantages in competing against girls in a dancing competition, just as a male dancer would be at a disadvantage trying to win the part of the Sugarplum Fairy in “The Nutcracker.” I assume female Irish dancers are supposed to appear, well, feminine while wowing judges with their footwork. If not, why is the competition restricted to girls?

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“Dr. Who” Ethics: Isaac Newton Was Indian? I Did Not Know That!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

In the latest “Dr. Who” adventure on the BBC (if you don’t know about this long-running cult scifi show, google it), Sir Isaac Newton is played by an actor of Indian heritage:

This raises several issues, most of which Ethics Alarms has delved into before:

1. Does it matter? As Curmie declared in his Comment of the Day regarding my post about another BBC production in which Anne Boleyn was played by a black actress…yes, it does, but it depends on the context and the objective of the casting. The major consideration in any non-traditional casting is whether it works, meaning that the casting isn’t distracting, that it adds something to the work beyond being just a gimmick. (The black Anne Boleyn was a gimmick.) In Curmie’s opinion, almost nobody was likely to see the black actress in the role and think, ““I didn’t know Anne Boleyn was black.” I am less certain of that assumption in the case of a brown Isaac Newton.

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The American Bar Association Reminds Me Why I Am No Longer A Member

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Ethics duncery, abuse of influence, cowardice, bias…oh, lots of things.

The president of the American Bar Association, Mary Smith, leaped onto the careering Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck on behalf of the organization she leads, issuing a statement two days after the October 7 terrorist attack on music festival attendees in Israel that said,

“The American Bar Association unequivocally condemns the attacks of Hamas on Israeli citizens that have killed hundreds. The kidnapping of helpless civilians by Hamas—including women and children abducted at gunpoint—for use in Gaza as hostages and human shields violates international laws. Brutal attacks on civilians are never a solution to disputes or a justifiable way to air grievances. Israel and the Palestinians have had long-running disagreements and differences, but that in no way justifies the actions of Hamas. The state of Israel has the right to exist, and its citizens are entitled to live in safety and peace. The ABA calls on both sides to show restraint to spare the lives of the innocent people caught up in these attacks. The ABA also calls for all hostages to be released and for all parties to stop hostilities and settle their disputes in a peaceful and legal fashion and with the rule of law.”

For a lawyer (and the supposedly most prestigious lawyer organization), that’s an astoundingly self-contradictory statement. Despite giving lip service to the obvious definition of a terror attack on civilians as unjustifiable, the statement goes on to claim that Israel has no right to respond to the attack as an act of war, calling for a “peaceful solution” while implying that any armed response will breach “the rule of law.” Then she struck again on October 17, writing that the ABA,

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A Teachers’ Union Reveals What It Is, Suddenly Decides To Take It All Back And Pretend It Didn’t Mean It

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

…thus raising the immediate question of whether parents and particularly Jews are as dumb as the teachers apparently think they are. We shall see.

The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers passed a resolution on Oct. 25th to “condemn the role our [America] government plays in supporting the system of Israeli occupation and apartheid, which lies at the root of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.” In addition, the resolution demanded that Minnesota lawmakers repeal the state’s anti-BDS legislation. 

Not surprisingly, there was a massive negative reaction to the October resolution because it revealed that a majority of the teachers in the union were..

  • Anti-Semitic.
  • Ignorant
  • Completely in thrall to anti-white, anti-democratic ideology
  • Excessively concerned with woke politics than with education, and
  • Not sufficiently trustworthy to be teaching children.
  • Missing basic ethics alarms.

Oopsie! The Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas sent a letter signed by over 800 citizens to interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox and the MPS school board protesting in part,

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Once Again, The Single “Fact-Checking” Source That I Once Thought Was Fair And Trustworthy Shows Its Partisan Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I can start this post with part of the opening section of a post from July, 2022:

For decades now, I had held on to the hopeful fiction that at least one factchecking organization, the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.Org, at least could be relied upon to make a good faith effort to do its job objectively. Oh, it has always had a left-leaning bias, make no mistake about that. Many years ago I was at a conference where the keynote speaker was the head of FactCheck.Org. She proudly proclaimed the organization’s “absolute objectivity and non-partisanship.” When it came to time for audience questions, I couldn’t restrain myself: by pure coincidence, I happened to have in my briefcase a recent “factcheck” by the group that outright misstated a fact to minimize negative characterizations of Bill Clinton. I read the relevant passage to the speaker, and asked, “How can you honestly describe that passage as anything other than partisan and biased?” Her response was, as I recall, “Huminahuminahumina...”

But still, I am a sap. I so wanted to believe that there was an exception to my conviction that factcheckers are all Democrat propagandists. And now FactCheck has engaged in an instance of flagrant (and inept) propaganda under the guise of factchecking…

Now fast-forward to the post-Hamas massacre progressive crisis. FactCheck.Org posted a factcheck titles, “Cruz Distorts Facts on Biden Support for Israel.” Writer Eugene Kiely concluded that there is “little support” for Senator Ted Cruz’s claim in a Fox News interview that “literally from within minutes of when this horrific attack began on Oct. 7, the Biden White House has been telling Israel, do not retaliate, cease-fire, stop, do not kill the terrorists.”

Heck, anyone who reads Ethics Alarms could have debunked the debunker. I wrote here,

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Post-Thanksgiving Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 11/24/2023: Who Expected Anti-Semitism And Trump-Derangement To Translate Into Anti-Thanksgiving Assaults?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

As usual now, much of the mainstream media spent Thanksgiving and the days leading up to the holiday exploiting the opportunity to bash the tradition, the holiday, and the United States. There was special urgency this time: the negative emphasis on the unique American holiday was galvanized by the anti-Jewish/anti-Israel/pro-Hamas narrative a disturbing proportion of the American Left has embraced in its opposition of Israel defending its right to exist.

“De-colonization” is the 2023 buzzword. “Native Americans=blacks, Palestinians, and other victims whites and the United States. And, again as usual, we were told that it was our duty to ruin a warm, family-oriented, non-partisan tradition by using it to harangue other family members about the evils of Israel, the Supreme Court, Republicans and Donald Trump.

The Left’s growing anti-Thanksgiving tradition also seemed to gain intensity because of the widespread panic over polls showing Trump increasing his lead in voter support over the President as the 2024 election gets closer. Here’s a nice, unbiased cartoon from the Boston Globe, for example, simultaneously equating Trump with those evil colonizing Pilgrims and the turkey with foolish Americans who don’t know enough to avoid voting for a dangerous leader:

It was called “the Last Thanksgiving.” I really question this strategy. The Left is gambling that being the party of anti-Americanism is a winning approach. In fact, they are somehow turning Donald Trump into Ronald Reagan, the leader who saw the U.S. as a “shining city on the hill.” That seems especially foolish framing when Biden’s weak Presidency is already reminiscent of Jimmy Carter’s, complete with American hostages being held by radical Islamist terrorists. Good plan!

Here are some highlights of the anti-Thanksgiving craziness:

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Comment Of The Day: “What Do You Conclude From This Woman’s Head-Exploding Rant?”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Do you know what I am thankful for? I’m thankful for the engaged, wise,, articulate and loyal group of commenters Ethics Alarms has. Thank-you. You all make every day an adventure and a revelation. And you make me laugh.

For a vivid example, I awoke this morning to this Comment of the Day from Rob Thompson, who doesn’t weigh in here often—the last time was four years ago—but makes his contributions count. Here are his thoughts on this the likely roots of this horrifying and annoying video and its likely roots, which I apologize for having to post again but the discussion can’t be fully appreciated without it.

This is Robert Thompson’s Comment of the Day on the post, “What Do You Conclude From This Woman’s Head-Exploding Rant?”…and have a wonderful, warm Thanksgiving, everyone.

***

Her video typifies what we see every day. Many high school students follow this mentality of “I wasn’t taught this” placing the onus on the educational system. And while this has merit, it isn’t the only problem.

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The Cognitive Dissonance Scale And Jobs Lost After Hamas-Israel War Outbursts On Social Media

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The scenario has been a theme this week. Someone shoots off his or her metaphorical mouth showing ignorance and probable anti-Semitic bias in a social media post designed for public consumption, and loses a job when the employer decides that it doesn’t want to lose business from those who might wonder, “Why do they hire people like that?”

It is not a First Amendment issue. It is a an irresponsible employee issue. Hollywood has been especially busy. Spyglass, the company that owns the “Scream” film franchise, fired actress Melissa Barrera from the upcoming “Scream VII” (There are going to be seven of these?) after she posted standard issue “genocide/innocent Gazans/ cruel Israel messages. “THIS IS GENOCIDE & ETHNIC CLEANSING,” she concluded.

1) No, it isn’t, and 2) You really don’t understand the Cognitive Dissonance Scale, do you?

It’s really quite simple, Melissa…

For the vast majority of Americans who pay attention and aren’t intersectional fanatics, supporting the Palestinian-Hamas “From the river to the sea” mission is at the bottom of the scale. People who want to see movies must regard the films and its stars above zero, ideally quite a bit above. If that film or its stars associate themselves with a deeply negative point of view or conduct, that connection (think of being tied to an anchor) drags the positive attitudes down, meaning fewer tickets sold, and in turn fewer profits.

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What Do You Conclude From This Woman’s Head-Exploding Rant?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Trust me, I know this thing painful to watch all the way through, but please do it, and then reflect with me upon what this ridiculous person’s monologue portends. Her name is Savrienna Abrre, and she is now residing in Canada, as she tells us repeatedly, compelling the response, “GOOD!” That’s one less vote for, oh, I don’t know, Robert Kennedy Jr, or maybe Woody Woodpecker.

Savrienna is the kind of person, apparently, who becomes a social media star, which is to say, she’s a narcissistic cretin. It does take some kind of talent to babble on like she does so assaultively and continuously, smiling like a zany and never thinking, “Wow, like, I’m sounding like a complete idiot!,” but I don’t know what that talent is called. I am willing to lay odds that she is courting the same fate at the hands of her husband as the subject of this limerick by the late, great Edward Gory:

There was a young woman whose stammer

Was atrocious, and so was her grammar.

But they were not improved

When her husband was moved

To bash in her teeth with a hammer…

Savrienna blames the American public school system. As I am a constant critic of that institution, aka, “smoldering ruin,” you might think that I sympathize with her, but I do not in the least. She is an incurious fool of stunning intellectual laziness, whose choice of friends and associates has reflected her shallowness.

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