This clip was just recommended by commenter deacondan86 in response to “How Can These People (Democrats, Journalists) Look Themselves in the Mirror Without Retching?,” and I thank him for it. I have a feeling it will get a work-out here in the coming months.
Arts & Entertainment
Unabomber Memorial Ethics Explosions, 5/15-18/25 (PS: I’m Not Dead, but Thanks Neil, Ryan, Jon et al. for Worrying About Me…)
Yes, it is I.
My internet went out right before midnight on the 14th, which means my office and home phones also haven’t worked since then until just a little while ago. Neither did my streaming services. Verizon, which I switched back to in November because Comcast was unreliable and cost too much, put me through the usual customer service Hell before I reached what I thought was a competent human being. It took me almost a half an hour of arguing with Verizon’s “automated assistant” to get to said CHB, who immediately contradicted hiscyber-colleague by confirming that yes, there had been an “incident” in my area (the bot had denied it) and a crew was working on the outage. That was the supposedly the good news; the bad news was that I might be trapped in the Stone Age (okay, I’m exaggerating: that statement would go into the Washington Post’s Trump Lie Database if the President said it) until as late as 4:45 pm on the 15th.
But you didn’t read this post on the 15th, did you? That would be because 4:45 pm. came and went, and still I couldn’t communicate with the outside world. Meanwhile, clients were screaming, Ethics Alarms was languishing, “fish is jumpin’” and I was reduced to singing “Summertime” from “Porgy and Bess” for some reason. In a 52 minute phone call with Verizon in which I listened to a very polite, pleasant, customer service representative who spoke relatively clear pidgin English in a high-pitched voice (I couldn’t place the accent), I discovered that the company couldn’t send a technician to my house until Friday afternoon. Next, my phone stopped receiving signals too, so I couldn’t even keep up with comments.
A very nice technician showed up at 1:30 pm and was fooling around with things for an hour. He replaced “the box” and then told me that he had been informed that the problem couldn’t be resolved by him, and that his supervisor told him to tell me that the outage wouldn’t be corrected until 6:45 am yesterday, Saturday the 17th. It wasn’t. Verizon promised to have another technician come by between 11am and 3pm on Sunday. That actually came to pass, and it turned out the previous technician had inserted the wrong thingy in the wrong plug, or something.
Ol’ Crazy Ted, the Harvard grad terrorist, has again been proven right: it’s ridiculous what I (you, we) can’t do without key technology, and one of them is maintaining an ethics blog.
Well, I still could prepare a post on Word and have it ready to go up when civilization reappears, so that’s what I started to do Friday morning and am revising now, as I try to forget that I have God only knows (I switched to singing the Beach Boys because I can’t remember all the words to “Summertime” right now) how many emails to answer that I haven’t seen yet. I don’t have email on my cell phone, you see, because I tell my ethics classes that the less confidential, client-related stuff you have on your phone, the better.
Meanwhile,
Confronting My Biases, Episode 20: The Chessboard Tell
It’s been three years since I last mentioned this ethics pet peeve. I was triggered just yesterday by the commercial above, which I was inclined to favor because it includes my late father’s favorite dog breed (also one of mine), the majestic Irish Wolfhound. I have nothing new to say about the issue, but as I wrote in 2022, “If this post stops just one human being from making that stupid mistake, my life will not have been in vain after all.”
In the ad above, we twice catch glimpses of a garden chessboard, like those royalty once would use with human beings as the chess pieces. (Mel Brooks spoofs this recreation in his “History of the World, Part 1.”). I saw the ad several times before I realized the board was set up wrong. I would never buy a Range Rover Sport anyway, but if I were in the market for one, that inexcusable gaffe would ensure that I bought something else. Or took the bus.
Ethics Quote of the Month: Yeah, It’s Bill Maher, Much As It Pains Me To Admit It
“If the thought leaders in the Democratic Party keep encouraging and not rebuking the idea that America is cringe and the people who run Gaza are great,” he warned, “the Democrats are doomed.”
—HBO’s “clown nose on/clown nose off” comic Bill Maher on his weekly political commentary and discussion show “Real Time.”
I have made it clear in the past few months that I do not take professional asshole Bill Maher’s recent criticism of progressives and the Democratic Party to be sincere or particularly admirable. He is obviously making self-serving calculations regarding where his own best interests lie, and the comic is smart enough (not as smart as he thinks he is, but smart enough) to recognize a declining brand when he sees one. Nevertheless, we should always try to judge a message independently of a flawed messenger.
Maher is right. Last month a Harvard poll found that only 24% of young Democrats said they were proud of being American compared to a 76% of young Republicans. (I find it alarming that a quarter of young Republicans aren’t proud of the U.S.). The poll surveyed 2,096 Americans from 18 to 29 years old nationally, and among Democrat respondents, an amazing 54% said they are embarrassed to be Americans while 21% said they were neither proud not embarrassed. With Republicans, it was 8% embarrassed and 16% neither proud nor embarrassed
Yeah, yeah, “polls” and “Harvard.” Still.
In addition to his Quote of the Month, Maher told his audience after citing the results,
“Seriously, this is a serious problem for Democrats,” Maher said during his Friday monologue. “Less than 1 in 4 Democrats under 30 say they’re proud to be an American. 54% say they’re embarrassed by it. Embarrassed? Like America is your mom picking you up at school? You’re embarrassed to be an American? Well guess what — the feeling’s mutual, because you have no perspective. Is America perfect? No, of course not. No country is. But the US is leagues ahead of the rest of the world on most of the progressive issues that are important to young people. America has 14-million women-owned businesses. Seventeen percent of black women are starting businesses, which is faster than white women or white men. Gay Americans are free to marry and 49% of them own property. Yes, in America gays buy buildings. In other places, they get thrown off them….And we proudly live in a land where every TV commercial features a mix-raced couple, including the ones where it makes no sense. Mom’s black, dad’s white, and the kid’s Asian.”
Well, I’m embarrassed by that last part, but Bill’s over-all analysis is valid.
It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that the Children of the Left hate America, because for decades our education system, news media-celebrated activists and elected leaders have been assiduously indoctrinating children from kindergarten through college to believe that the U.S. is defined by slavery, racism, colonialism, bigotry, murder, unjust wars and robber barons. And for much of that period, Bill Maher and his ilk have been cheering the anti-Americanism on. But New Bill is absolutely correct about the Democrats committing cultural suicide and trying to lead the public off the cliff with them.
Whether he means it or not.
Yes, Actors Who Refuse to Perform With Trump In The Audience Should Be Blacklisted
Grennell is absolutely, 100% correct. For actors to withhold their talents and services from an entire audience because they may have ideological differences with a member of that audience (or many) is unforgivably unprofessional and a breach of ethics deserving punishment, condemantion and shunning.
Howard Sherman, an author and critic whose existence I had been blissfully unaware of before this day, issued an insufferable essay on Facebook that naturally my many show biz friends, Trump Deranged all, rushed to share and applaud. The post is as nauseating as it is overlong and unethical: I read it so you don’t have to, but here are some lowlights to “How the Blacklisting Starts.”
See, he’s saying that an industry deciding that members who are unethical and refuse to do their jobs is the same as an industry putting members on a blacklist for their political beliefs, as Hollywood did to Communist sympathizers during the McCarthy era, and asd Hollywood does now to conservatives (like, say, James Woods). That’s bonkers, and exactly backwards. It is the misguided artists linking their art to political views who are emulating those blacklisters of yore. I’ll pick out some of the more pernicious misrepresentations in Sherman’s post… Continue reading
The Unethical Attack On SNAP Expenditures On Coca-Cola Products and Junk Food
Back in my first year of law school we studied a case involving poor D.C. residents spending financial assistance checks on non-essentials like furniture thanks to a special deal offered by a local store. My contracts professor, the legendary Richard Alan Gordon, gave an impassioned speech decrying the court’s conclusion that the store’s promotion was wrong and the money was misused. “Why is sustenance for the soul less essential than sustenance for the body?” he asked in his famous stentorian tones.
Okay, food stamp recipients spending them on Coca-Cola products is not quite in the same exalted territory as the life enhancements at the center of that case (I can’t recall it the case cite), but to me, the principle is the same. Conservatives are on the wrong side of this ethics debate. I don’t care if Coca-Cola makes a lot of money off of food stamps. People enjoy their products. They make people happy. Poor people deserve to be happy too now and then in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services Secretary, and Brooke Rollins, the Agriculture Secretary, both advocate stripping soft drinks and junk food from SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. RFKJ has called for the government to stop allowing the nearly $113 billion program that serves about 42 million Americans to be spent on “ soda or processed foods.” “The one place that I would say that we need to really change policy is the SNAP program and food stamps and in school lunches,” Kennedy told Fox News. “There, the federal government in many cases is paying for it. And we shouldn’t be subsidizing people to eat poison.”
Well, one man’s poison is another man’s pudding. Rollins has said, “When a taxpayer is putting money into SNAP, are they OK with us using their tax dollars to feed really bad food and sugary drinks to children who perhaps need something more nutritious?” No, the correct question is whether Americans think that the poor and low of income should have taxpayers lightening their burden and allowing them to make the same choices regarding the pursuit of happiness that anyone else has, within practical limits.
If Only MSNBC Hosts Could Be Explained This Way…
Last year, Australian Radio Network’s CADA station, broadcasting from Sydney, introduced a perky young female host (above) who called herself “Thy.” Her popular show called “Workdays with Thy” featured music for four hours a day from Monday to Friday with the pleasant-sounding young woman chattering away between songs and ads.
It took about six months for inquiring minds to started asking questions about who Thy was and where she came from, since she never gave her last name and no biographical information seemed to exist on her anywhere. Some listeners also claimed on social media that certain phrases she liked to use sounded identical every time. CADA eventually had to admit that Thy didn’t exist: “she” was an “it,” a direct kin of Siri, a bot whose AI-generated software had been developed by the voice-cloning firm ElevenLabs. This was a six month “experiment.”
The network issued a statement, saying, “This is a space being explored by broadcasters globally, and while the trial has offered valuable insights, it’s also reinforced the unique value that personalities bring to creating truly compelling content.” Why would anyone believe that? Sirius-XM had Wolfman Jack hosting a Sixties radio show for years using his old tapes and remastered versions of the songs he played even though he died a decade before without the satellite network ever telling listeners that this Wolfman was just a recording. It has been doing the same thing recently on its Seventies channel with Casey Kasem’s old “Top 40” show, without bothering reveal that Casey died with dementia in 2014 after retiring in 2009.
Maybe it’s just me, but I find AI disc jockeys less creepy than dead ones, and a station using either without letting listeners know is unethical.
Not as unethical, however, as featuring live hosts like Simone Sanders and even arguably live ones like Chris Matthews.
I Think It’s Admirable That the Pulitzers Are So Transparent About Their Blatant Partisan Bias, Don’t You?
The announcement of the Pulitzer prizes were broadcast live on the organization’s website, and what everyone should be able to agree was the photo of the year was snubbed. That, of course, is the second photo above, shot by Evan Vucci of the Associated Press and generally appreciated as a masterpiece of composition, story-telling and drama. But, of course, the photo is alao widely believed to have helped Donald Trump get elected President, so by definition the photo is bad, and must not be honored. Another photo related to the assassination attempt, the first one above taken by Doug Mills, won the prize instead. After all, that one had the good people thinking ruefully, “Damn. Missed him by that much!”
The snubbed photo will be in history books and regarded as one of the most memorable moments captured on film, along with the GI kissing the nurse in Times Square, Harry Truman holding up the “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline, the naked Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack, and the Frenchman weeping as Hitler’s army swept down a Paris street. An angry Monica Showalter writes at American Thinker,
The picture turned up on t-shirts, coffee mugs, stickers and posters, signaling how much the public was moved by it….But it was hardly propaganda — it was the work of an experienced photographer able to act with split-second instincts in a dangerous situation with events still unfolding….I have no inside line on why this photo didn’t win the Pulitzer, despite being so deserving of it. Did the AP not promote it, or did the Pulitzer board shun it, on what could only be political grounds? Either way, it’s a disgrace. The photo had Pulitzer written all over it, and the judges could only view the thing through wokester-impaired eyes.
As for me, I an neither disappointed nor surprised, not after this now thoroughly corrupt organization awarded a Pulitzer prize for the racist, fake history lesson of “The 1619 Project.” In truth I am impressed: the deliberate decision to ignore such a deserving photo says to all, “Yes, the Pulitzers are partisan and politically biased. We don’t care. In fact, we’re proud. Suck it!”
Thanks for your candor. We get the message.
“Res Ipsa Loquitur” at the Vatican: The Pope’s Tombstone
Did you know that the spacing between letters is known as kerning? I had never encountered the term before, so the high profile botch committed by the stonecutter and those responsible for overseeing the completion of the recently deceased Pope’s tombstone has had at least one salutary effect: it has shined a spotlight on a seldom used word. Thanks, you boobs!
It and they have also revealed stunning ineptitude and carelessness at the highest level of public visibility and historical permanence. The kerning between the letters on Pope Francis’s tombstone make the ten letters read “F R A NCISC VS, rather than how it was supposed to read, “FRANCISCVS,” his name in Latin.
Brilliant. I wonder…. what’s the punishment in Hell for poor workmanship?
Regarding “Conclave”
As the Cardinals meet in Rome to find a new Pope for real, it is a propitious time to consider “Conclave,” the “thriller” (as Wikipedia calls it, a stretch) about a fictional conclave after the death of a fictional Pope. I had several friends recommend the film to me, and I finally watched it this week.
I’ll complete this ethics overview without spoilers since the film is relatively new, but wow, what a disappointment. Strong cast, excellent performances, brilliant production design and cinematography, but still, “Conclave” has to be one of the most wildly over-praised films I’ve seen since “Don’t Look Up!,” “The Crying Game” or “Ghost.” This overt Hollywood woke propaganda piece received eight nominations at the 97th Academy Awards, a number once reserved for all-time classics like “Ben-Hur,” “West Side Story” or “Lawrence of Arabia.” Its Best Picture nomination shows how far movie-making standards have fallen and that it won Best Adapted Screenplay is outrageous, since the screenplay was the worst aspect of the movie, predictable, over-wrought and unbelievable.
My late wife was superb at sleuthing out “surprise” endings of movies by the half-way mark or earlier; this time I felt like I was channeling her spirit because I guessed the movie’s ending (and woke propaganda mission) the second the key character showed up. I also thought, “Oh no, really? They are stooping to this?” Indeed they were.
“Conclave” is, ultimately, trivial and soap opera-ish, no better and less entertaining than the loony movie version of Dan Brown’s follow-up to “The Da Vinci Code,” “Angels and Demons.” Along the way to an anti-climax, we get more of the “white man bad/black man victim,” pro-LGTBQ+ proselytizing that Tinseltown has been addicted to for years.
I’ll give “Conclave” this: it was better than “Snow White” and a lot shorter than “Wicked.”
Ethics Alarms 