Around the World

Comment Of The Day: “In The Dispute Over The Fate Of The Elgin Marbles, It Is Time For The Brits To Choose Ethics Over Law”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Last week, Ethics Alarms confidently presented the ethics verdict that it was high time—more than high time, in fact—for the British Museum to finally return the so-called “Elgin Marbles” to Greece. As the priceless art was literally ripped off the Parthenon, I didn’t think the question justified an ethics quiz. I still am unconvinced by the arguments that the Brits should hold on to their ill-gotten gains, but I am the grandson of a Spartan, after all. There were several excellent comments asserting ethical grounds for the British position; this one was outstanding.

Here is P.M.Lawrence’s epic tutorial, rebuttal, and Comment of the Day on the post, “In The Dispute Over The Fate Of The Elgin Marbles, It Is Time For The Brits To Choose Ethics Over Law”:

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“In the early 1800s, Lord Elgin, a British aristocrat, shipped to England treasures of Greek antiquity that he had strip-mined from Greece, including the carved frieze panels that had decorated the Parthenon. Supposedly this was done with the permission of Turkey, which was then ruling Greece, which is like your home invaders giving neighbors permission to take the art off your walls…”

There is a little more to it than that:-

– On the legal maxim of “nemo dat quod non habet”, of course the Turks couldn’t convey title. But they didn’t, they offered a quitclaim, as it were; they removed themselves from obstructing.

– As regards any original owners, there simply weren’t any left. The last remaining ones were ended by rounds of persecution of pagans, centuries earlier.

– As far as any generic claims of common heritage of western civilisation go, and those claims only go for want of better (there being no direct heirs), what better place to put the items than in a museum furthering that common heritage? Are the British somehow less heirs of that than are the Graeculi? Particularly considering how much safer the items were in that museum(those not taken have suffered horribly from war, corrosion, and what not). And, of course, the very word “museum” proclaims that furthering that common heritage.

Now, none of that conveys title to the British Museum, but adverse possession in the years since does – adverse, in that no better claimant came forward. Just as today’s Greeks feel an understandable connection to these items, as they do to the Lions of St. Mark’s, so too do today’s British – and as today’s Venetians do to the Lions of St. Mark’s. They are as intertwined with the histories of each place as of the other.

The Solomonic solution would be to sand blast the items to the condition of those not taken if any effort to transfer them were ever made. But I expect the Sir Humphreys will loudly assert ownership while underhandedly arranging a loan in name only with no means of foreclosing, just as they have with foundational documents that ought to have remained in British archives. That would satisfy none but the Sir Humphreys.

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Ethics Quiz: Condign Justice Or Schadenfreude?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

In India, two cock-fighting enthusiasts bled to death at cockfighting events. Both were fatally wounded knives attached to their roosters’ feet.

 Gande Suryapraksha Rao was tying blades to the feet of his prized cock before a bout when his bird,  alarmed by the crowd, flew up and cut Gande’s leg. He bled to death before they could get him to a hospital. In the second incident, a 20-year-old spectator was cut by a bladed bird as he stood near the cockfighting pit. The blade  cut open the man’s hand, and he also bled to death.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is,

Would it be unethical to publicly express satisfaction in the two men’s fate?

…like if I were to write of their demise, “Good!” ?

They are human beings, after all, and cruelty to animals is not a capital offense. Are these incidents really like a bomb-maker blowing himself up by mistake? A bank robber who trips leaving the bank and dies in the fall? A drug dealer who ODs on his own product?

Or are these deaths condign justice that should be hailed far and wide to send the message that the underlying conduct is intolerable?

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Pointer: JuGory [I had miscredited this, then corrected it and botched the edit. Sorry to all.]

In The Dispute Over The Fate Of The Elgin Marbles, It Is Time For The Brits To Choose Ethics Over Law

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

My mother stole a piece of the Parthenon. She was Greek, my father and she were visiting Athens, and when no one was looking (including my father) she scooped up a 1 x 8 inch chuck of white marble by the ruins and smuggled it home, where she displayed it on her fireplace mantle. My sister and I were horrified when we learned what the piece was, and plotted various ways to have it returned without getting our aged mother prosecuted. When they moved from Arlington, Mass. to Arlington, Va, the item just vanished, or so Mom said. (We didn’t believe her.) It was never seen again.

I think about this family scandal whenever I think of the seemingly endless dispute over the Elgin Marbles.

In the early 1800s, Lord Elgin, a British aristocrat, shipped to England treasures of Greek antiquity that he had strip-mined from Greece, including the carved frieze panels that had decorated the Parthenon. Supposedly this was done with the permission of Turkey, which was then ruling Greece, which is like your home invaders giving neighbors permission to take the art off your walls. The “Elgin Marbles” were sold to the British government and became among the most valued artifacts in the collection of the British Museum in London. As my mother’s son, I know they were among my top three favorite exhibits when I first visited, along with the Rosetta Stone and Paul McCartney’s handwritten draft of the lyrics for “Yesterday.”

Well, Greece has been asking for the Elgin Marbles back for over two centuries now, and if the museum has a leg to stand on in keeping them, it pretty much comes down to that hoary (and not exactly true) line, “possession is 9/10s of the law.” However, recent decades have seen a cultural shift as Western colonization and imperialism have acquired a bad reputation. Many museums are returning such looted treasures to where they were created and, I believe, belong. Why, then, haven’t the Elgin Marbles been sent back to Greece as its government demands, urges, and begs?

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John Kerry’s Comments At The World Economic Forum Show How Irresponsible And Incompetent US Climate Change Policy Is

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

To be clear, the fact that John Kerry, a proven dim bulb, is allowed to address any group at all as the representative of the U.S. government (he’s the U.S. special presidential “envoy for climate”) also shows how irresponsible and incompetent the Biden administration is. Kerry, a college grad of even less distinction than Al Gore and with no science training, is as qualified to speak about the complex details of climate change as Greta Thunberg. Nonetheless, his fatuous presentation this week in Davos, Switzerland is revealing for anyone not blinded by climate change propaganda, talking points and doomsday scenarios.

Here are some of the fake Irish politician’s astute observations:

  • “I’m convinced we will get to a low-carbon, no-carbon economy — we’re going to get there because we have to.

We can do it because we have to. Now there’s persuasive logic, at least to someone like Kerry. This would be talking down to an audience and patronizing them, if Kerry himself wasn’t likely to believe such rubbish. We’ll reduce the National Debt—because we have to! We’ll eliminate gun violence—because we have to!  We’ll end war and racism—because we have to!

  • “I am not convinced we’re going to get there in time to do what the scientists said, which is avoid the worst consequences of the crisis.”

According to the past predictions of those same scientists, we should have already seen coastal cities under water, snow a  distant memory, and the polar bears keeping company with passenger pigeons….not that John Kerry being “convinced” of anything related to science should carry any weight whatsoever. He’s just mouthing what cherry-picked “experts” say in highly simplified, politically slanted summaries.

  • “And those worst consequences are going to affect millions of people all around the world, [in] Africa and other places. Of the 20 most affected countries in the world from [the] climate crisis, 17 are in Africa.”

Ironically, it is exactly those same developing countries that most need to employ fossil fuels to advance economically—you know, like the United States did.

  • “So, how do we get there? Well, the lesson I’ve learned in the last years and I learned it as secretary [of State] and I’ve learned it since, reinforced in spades, is: money, money, money, money, money, money, money.”

That’s the Democratic way, all right: throw money at any problem whether you know what you’re doing or not. And if there’s one thing the United States has, with its National Debt of 31 trillion dollars, it’s money. The federal government  borrowed $4 billion a day in 2022.

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Bitter Harry: Famous Grandchildren Ethics #2

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Part I is here.

A London pub has announced that it will be selling a ‘Harry’s Bitter’ beer in response to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s tell-all Netflix documentary, “Harry and Meghan” as well as Prince Harry’s family dirty laundry opus, “Spare.” Well-played. For Diana and Charles’ youngest offspring is indeed Bitter Harry, and a weak and rotten Royal to boot.

Because the U.S. is in the throes of The Great Stupid, in part a hangover from the George Floyd Freakout, Harry and his gold-digger spouse Meghan are more popular here than in the UK. Some Americans just enjot seeing the Royal Family shat-upon; some are suckers for those who play the racism victim card, Meghan’s specialty (with Harry’s dog-like assistance), and some were so absurdly smitten with the late Princess Diana, herself often an unseemly publicity addict, that her sons can do no wrong in their eyes. Nonetheless, Harry’s exploitation of his family’s misplaced trust for cash and cheap celebrity is the mark of a royal asshole as well as one whose bitterness has rendered his ethics alarms useless.

What kind of person deliberately reveals—often with dark shading borne of dark agendas—private conversations and family secrets in a manner guaranteed to embarrass, insult and infuriate named relatives and stain the reputation of those who have expired? The answer is… a petty, untrustworthy person. Harry doesn’t need the money, but apparently he needs something else: revenge, probably. He evidently has adopted his late mother’s attitude toward the Royal Family, blames them for her demise, and is doing everything he and his wife can think of to cause them pain.

This is ironic, because the only reason anyone cares a twig for either Harry or his C-list actress wife is his membership in that family. Harry is the epitome of a celebrity who is famous without having done anything constructive, admirable, or praiseworthy. He doesn’t have to work; he was born with the metaphorical silver spoon, and nothing short of treason or murder could remove it—indeed, if British history is any guide, not even those things.

However, he has been relatively cut off, and his wife, at least, wants to make sure they have a bright future ahead of interviews with Jimmy Kimmel, guest spots on sitcoms and starring roles as infomercial pitch-nobles. Thus the plan is to tar King Charles, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, Prince William and the rest as racists and creeps, even if it makes Harry and Meghan look creepy too. Creepy celebrities do quite well here.

Maureen Dowd, amusingly snarky with a drop of illumination as usual, writes,

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Equal Time: A Dog’s Life Ethics Update

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Having just posted about the mistreatment of cats, it is only fair to note some recent stories involving canine-human interactions.

1. At Gravelly Hill in Caterham, Surrey (that’s in England), a dog-walker was apparently attacked by the dogs she was caring for and mauled to death. There is some question how many dogs she was walking, but it may have been as many as nine. “Eight dogs have been detained” is how some news reports put it. Other reports say that none of the dogs involved were believed to be “dangerous breeds,” meaning none were pit bull breeds or looked like them (which is all a dog needs to be considered a pit bull: looking kind-of, sort-of like what someone thinks a pit bull looks like, meaning that my first Jack Russell which a silly twit started screaming about because she thought he was a pit bull was a pit bull).

Among the culprits were, police believe, a collie, a Leonberger, a cokapoo and two dachshunds. (I’m betting on the dachshunds as the ringleaders.) A Leonberger is a giant breed, typically weighing at least 150 pounds—I’d say a dog that big is potentially “dangerous.” In fact, any dog is dangerous if its in a pack.

Walking that many dogs, whether it was seven or nine, is irresponsible. It’s not fair to the dogs, and obviously perilous to the walker: I’m surprised there haven’t been more tragedies like this. The owners of the dogs are also implicated for entrusting their dogs to over-burdened caretakers.

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Nah, There No Progressive Social Media Platform Bias!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The British political commentary magazine “The Spectator” has published a nearly1400 word explanation for why the cover above was rejected for a Facebook advertisement (an “advert” in Brit-talk) as not complying with the platform’s policies, while these covers…

…were deemed acceptable.

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From The Ethics Alarms Mailbag: “Why Do You Insist On Calling Covid “The Wuhan Virus”?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Because that’s what it is?

I’m actually grateful for the question, because I have become more adamant about resisting the deliberately deceptive misnomer for the virus as time goes on and more information becomes available. In 2020, when the pandemic was just starting to wreck the United States’ on many levels, it was pretty obvious that the virus had its start in the Wuhan province of China. Whether it was from a lab or the (disgusting, third-world level wet markets) was and still is uncertain, but Wuhan is where the first recorded case emerged, and where the pathogen took first hold in December of 2019.

Early on in 2020, then-President Trump and some media sources referred to the virus as the “Wuhan virus” or the “China virus,” and these useful and descriptive terms were quickly declared unfair, inaccurate, and “racist.” by the Left. Part of the motivation was, I believe, to suck up to China, a corrupt and dangerous nation that too many businesses and industries (like Hollywood and the NBA) view as a profitable target for unprincipled pandering, Another aspect of the linguistic cover-up was to, as usual in the age of The Great Stupid, choose censorship and public confusion in the quixotic and bizarre effort to make certain groups feel “safe” (as in “safe from reality”). Because there are morons who will bully and mistreat Chinese-Americans as “punishment” for a disaster they could not be rationally blamed for, the widiculous woke decreed that the origins and true responsibility for the pandemic must be obscured by technical jargon. Continue reading →

Now THIS Is Incompetent Policing! (International Division)

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Police in Santa Marta, Colombia, recently published a wanted poster for 12 dangerous criminals in the town, asking the public for help in apprehending them. All are members of the “Los Pachenca” drug cartel and are suspects in a series of crimes committed in Santa Marta in recent months. The published poster (above), however, only mentioned the suspects’ nicknames without revealing their real names, and only generic silhouettes were offered rather than actual photos.

Nevertheless, the police department acted as if their procedure was serious and reasonable. “It is very important that citizens help us identify the people who are affecting life throughout the city,” the police high command said to supplement the poster. “We are going to provide payments for data that allow us to identify them.”

The mockery of the absurdly inept dragnet was instant and relentless. One wag noted that it should be easy to identify cartel members since “they all look identical.”

The department quickly pulled the poster. See? It’s not completely incompetent after all!

Ethics Quiz: The Fake Status Devices

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The AcryPhone, created by eKod Works, is literally a piece of acrylic shaped to look like a smartphone. It has no screen, speakers, nor even an LED. What’s it for? Supposedly the fake is for cellphone addicts to wean themselves off addiction to their smartphones. Do you believe that? I don’t. I think that explanation is like the ad copy for those suspiciously shaped battery-powered “massagers” for women that have photos showing a model using it on her neck.

The Acryphone is a prop for insecure people who can’t afford a smartphone or the costs of its service, but who want to look like they can. One reason I am quite certain of this is another product from the same country (Japan) that you see on the right: Stone Watch, a fake smart watch that doesn’t even tell time. The Stone Watches are just glossy, black pieced of plastic with a silicone band so the wearer will look like he or she is using the current fad gadget.

You have a double Ethics Quiz of the Day, and the two questions are,

Is it ethical to pretend to use one of these props in public?

and

Is it ethical to manufacture and sell them?

My tentative answer: they are both visual lies, like a phony Tale diploma hanging on an office wall. Making and selling products that have no legitimate use other than to deceive is itself unethical.

But I am open to being convinced otherwise.