I thought the virtue-signaling, mindless attack on all things Russian crossed the line into bigotry and persecution when an eminent Russian-born conductor lost his job with two German orchestras because he refused to publicly condemn Vladimir Putin. (I wouldn’t publicly condemn Satan if an employer ordered me to. That would be submitting to an abuse of power.) Then the Met fired a principal soprano for the same reason, and things really got weird.
Bars and restaurants started banning vodka. Russian cat breeds were banned from cat shows. A popular french fries with cheese curds and gravy dish was taken off menus in France and Canada because the name for it sounded like “Putin.” Today, the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra has removed Tchaikovsky from its upcoming concert because, the announcement said, playing compositions by the Russian composer, who died in 1893 is considered by the orchestra ‘to be inappropriate at this time.’ Continue reading →
Disney and “My Three Sons” actor Tim Considine, who died last week at age 82, in an interview quoted in his New York Times obituary.
Considine was referring to his success and rich experiences in life, which he felt were relatively undeserved. He did not regard himself as especially talented or ambitious.
The more I ponder his statement, the more profound I think it is. Understanding that there is no justice in the world is a necessary predicate for committing to an ethical life for the right reasons. Society needs as many people as possible striving to be good, having their lives exert a net benefit on others, and being exemplars of ethical values as often as they can. These habits and objectives must be committed to while fully understanding that they only collectively and on balance result in desirable results, and sometimes not even that. Continue reading →
1. How many times do I have to say that Twitter makes you stupid? Here’s a U.S. Senator publicly calling for the assassination of a foreign leader:
It is fine to think this or even to say it in private, as long as you are not Donald Trump and you know whoever you talk to will immediately leak it to the media. However, Executive Order 11905signed on February 18, 1976, by President Gerald Ford, banned political assassination.This EO was reinforced by Jimmy Carter’s Executive Order 12036 in 1978. It is still the law in the United States. Graham is a lawyer, and he knows that as a lawyer, it is an ethics breach to cause a third party to do what the lawyer cannot do himself.
Moreover, if such an act were to take place, Graham’s tweet would be justification for Russia to suspect, or even conclude, that the U.S. government was responsible. A foreign power assassinating or even attempting to assassinate a nation’s leader is an act of war.
2. Where’s Bandy Lee when you need her? It is unethical for a psychiatrist to diagnose anyone with mental illness without examining the patient in person. This is why the American Psychiatric Association’s Principles of Medical Ethics state that its members should not give a professional opinions about public figures whom they have not examined in person, and from whom they have not obtained consent to discuss their mental health in public statements. Never mind: Bandy Lee of Yale, a Professor of Psychiatry, made a brief career out of breaking the rule regarding President Trump, because hating Trump suspends all ethical obligations and values. MSNBC and CNN flocked to her; eventually, Yale fired her. Now, if it was unethical for a psychiatrist to be diagnosing a political figure as mentally ill from afar, and it is, what is it called when a non-psychiatrist goes on Fox News and claims to be convinces that something has snapped in Vladimir Putin’s head? That what Condoleeza Rice has done twice already. Her opinion on the topic of Putin’s sanity is no more authoritative than that of anyone else who hasn’t spoken to Putin face to face in years. Continue reading →
In my early years (40s, 50s), there was racism aplenty. The small community I lived in, the schools I attended, the activities I was involved in, all were white and as WASPish as they come. My parents didn’t seem to be especially racist, but one comment I do remember was my mother saying that Negroes (the accepted term way back then, although ‘colored people’ was also used) were okay so long as they “stayed in their place.” Their place was the segregated part of the nearby rather large city.
Fortunately for me, my career path took me away from both that mentality and that kind of segregation, via a military that was integrated and a second career in education in a community even more thoroughly integrated. Times changed. I changed. And, now, I am supposed to accept segregation once again? Well, count me out. Continue reading →
“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.” That quote, from Maya Angelou, inspired The Undefeated, an ESPN media platform that, from its start in 2016, has helped shape the national conversation by exploring the intersection of race, sports and culture from a Black point of view. On Monday, ESPN said it would rebrand and expand the operation, which will now go by the name … Andscape…
“It’s time to talk about Black and everything,” Raina Kelley, Andscape’s editor in chief, said in a phone interview. “Far beyond just sports and athletes.” She continued: “How do you be an individual as a Black person in America with your own unique set of interests, some of which are bound together by melanin, but not all of them? And how do you feel whole? We wanted to create a space where Black people could be Black people: Black led, Black P.O.V., absolutely. But also where there were no definitions and no rules about what being Black meant, what you had to talk about.”
Among of the most emotionally resonant and thrilling moments in movies are when a large group spontaneously expresses unity of mind, loyalty, sentiment, or just the joy of living by lifting up their voices in song, as one. A healthy society should engender such moments and nourish the shared values and emotions that create them.
What today could prompt a large group to sing together today? The National Anthem once provided such moments, but the NFL has aided race-separatists by forcing the so-called “Black National Anthem” to compete with the “Star-Spangled Banner,” making it, despicably, a “white national anthem.” Today’s preeminent musical form, hip-hop, doesn’t lend itself to mass singalongs.
Here are six memorable examples from the Hollywood archives of movies celebrating the human instinct to burst into shared intense feeling, expressed in song. Incredibly, I found none of these classics in various on-line lists of “greatest movie crowd singing scenes.” The people who put together those lists don’t get it (and also don’t know classic films.) No, the “Wayne’s World’ lip-syncing of “Bohemian Rhapsody” doesn’t qualify, great as it is. It’s not a crowd scene, and Queen is doing all the singing anyway.
The Ethics Alarms top six, in random order:
1. From “The Sound of Music”:“Edelweiss”
This is the only entry from a musical, but the context is entirely dramatic, and the scene could have easily been in a straight drama. The Nazis have taken over Austria. Captain Von Trapp (Christoper Plummer), ordered to take his place in the Nazi navy, mourns the end of the Austria he knew, and knows that his fellow Austrians watching his family perform in a music festival as the uniformed Nazis loom over them, share his sentiments. He sings a simple Austrian folk tune, manages to give the audience an opportunity to express their sadness and defiance.
2. From “San Francisco”: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”
This isn’t even the best crowd singing moment in the great 1936 Clark Gable/Spencer Tracy/Jeanette McDonald movie that climaxes with the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. At the end of the film, Gable, a cynical rogue whose romance with opera singer McDonald has foundered on his rejection of religion, has searched for her in the ravaged city. He finds her alive and helping survivors, and is so moved that he thanks God for the first time in his life. Then the news comes that the fire is out, and the people of San Francisco resolve to rebuild their city bigger and better than ever, as Jeanette leads them in song…
It involves one of my mother’s favorite Hollywood villains, Jack Palance. Younger readers probably remember him only in his long, lucrative late-career self-parody period (Watch “Shane”: what’s the matter with you?), which got him one of those weird Best Actor Oscars for just doing what he had done naturally for decades, but hammier, in “City Slickers.” (He was also aided by lines like “I crap bigger than you.” (To Billy Crystal.)
The actor was born in Pennsylvania as Volodymyr Palahniuk, the son of Ukrainian immigrants. In 2004, after Palance’s final film and just two years before his death, a Hollywood celebration of “Russian Nights” in Los Angeles ended with an awards ceremony. “Russian Nights” was a week-long film festival that celebrated “Russian contributions to the world of art,” and was sponsored in part by the Russian Ministry of Culture. Russian president Vladimir Putin endorsed the propaganda event. Scheduled to receive “narodny artyst” awards ( translated as “the Russian People’s Choice Award”) were Dustin Hoffman and Jack Palance. Hoffman, like Palance boasted of Ukrainian heritage.
“You know, you just, you plan a trip, you wanna go there. I’ve wanted to go to Italy for four years and I haven’t been able to make it because of the pandemic, and now this, you know?”
—“The View” co-host Joy Behar, explaining why she was upset about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The full exchange:
Co-host Sonny Hostin: “Estimates are 50,000 Ukrainians will be dead or wounded and this is going to start a refugee crisis in Europe,” said. “We’re talking about 5 million people that are going to be displaced. It’s heartbreaking to hear what is going to happen.”
Behar: “Yeah, I’m scared of what’s gonna happen in Western Europe, too. You know, you just, you plan a trip, you wanna go there. I’ve wanted to go to Italy for four years and I haven’t been able to make it because of the pandemic, and now this, you know? It’s like, who’s gonna, what’s gonna happen there?”
Fortunately, a smaller and smaller percentage of Americans pay attention to TV award shows like the Oscars, Tonys, Emmys and the rest. That’s just moral luck, though: it doesn’t diminish the unethical nature of what they are trying to do.
This coming Saturday night, on Feb 26, BET will broadcast the 53rd Annual NAACP Image Awards. Presenters will include Issa Rae, Kerry Washington, LL Cool J, Morgan Freeman, Questlove, Tiffany Haddish, Zendaya, and others. Special honors will go to Samuel L. Jackson (the NAACP Chairman’s Award) and Nikole Hannah-Jones (the Social Justice Impact Award). The winners of the non-televised awards have been announced already: every winner, like every nominee is black. Continue reading →
The assault on free expression as well as the speech-chilling practice of seeking to publicly crush those who do not observe the social justice dictates of progressives in power advanced ominously yesterday. Unsurprisingly, the episode at issue occurred at an Ivy League University, as our educational sectors have been among the trailblazers in speech and idea suppression. Unsurprising to me at least was that it involved Twitter. Just like in the Illya Shapiro controversy at Georgetown Law Center, a scholar didn’t use quite the words he should have (to be safe, and safety is everything these days) according to the Democrats’ Little Red Book. This time, however, the hammer fell harder. Continue reading →
Ethics Alarms 