Wow! Congratulations! An Unethical Triple Crown!
The depressing thing is that I should have to explain to some people what’s unethical about this.
The show, it appears, was sold out. Never mind. People who were not going to be at the show didn’t want people who did to have the chance, and a cowardly, mealy-mouthed, censorship-embracing management didn’t have the integrity or ethical literacy to tell them to learn to live with the reality that everyone doesn’t have to think like they think.
…if you can keep from weeping, that is.
Quick, now: what classic Shakespearean drama is the scene pictured above from? Hint 1: the show is being produced by Shakespeare in the Park. Hint 2: it’s one of the Histories.
Give up? Boy, are you illiterate! That’s a scene from “Richard III” of course! That’s King Richard—you know, the hunchback?–on the right. Continue reading
Why “good”? It’s obviously not good that the trustworthiness of journalism has declined so precipitously. What is good, since the news media has proven itself to be so biased, irresponsible, dishonest and untrustworthy, is that the public is waking up and no longer trusts it. That minimizes the damage. It does not solve, however, the existential danger to our democracy of having a propaganda system instead of objective and reliable reporting.
Sure, this is a poll, and polls themselves are biased and unreliable. Gallup and Pew, however, are the most reliable of the pollsters, and this one at least seems right. 11% trust in TV news is essentially no trust at all: that number represents the moron component that shows up in every poll. (The 16% trust level in newspapers is irrationally high.) Continue reading
I really do wonder at what point the vast majority of Americans who have not become irreversibly deranged by the confluence of the Trump Freakout, the George Floyd Freakout, the Trans Freakout ,the Wuhan Virus Freakout and the Roe Reversal Freakout sharply slap their foreheads “I could have had a V8!” style and ask, “Why are we letting these unstable, untrustworthy people dominate our discourse and manipulate our culture?”
For the provocation keep escalating. The Washington Post’s editors actually thought that a Poe’s Law evoking piece headlined “My name is a Confederate monument, so I cross it out when I write it” was worthy of publication. In an orgy of narcissism, U.S. history-hatred and virtue-signalling, a writer named Bayard Woods saluted his ridiculous habit of crossing out his own name, which he says, “had stood as a Confederate monument over every story I had ever written.” See, the Bayards and the Woodses had owned slaves. By this brilliant logic, I should cross out my name too, since Chief Justice John Marshall was a slaveholder and “Jack” honors Jack the Ripper.
My contempt for the mainstream media’s rejection of professional ethics to serve as the lickspittle lackeys of the Democratic Party and its progressive stakeholders knows no bounds. In the same general pernicious category lie the media’s allies—social media, Big Tech, and the self-proclaimed factcheckers. 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 that is worthy of Baghdad Bob or Pravda.
The Times article yesterday was headlined, “Victoria’s Secret and What’s Sexy Now: A rebranding and a new documentary have the lingerie company back in the cultural cross hairs.” The piece emits barely-restrained enthusiasm for VS’s controversial rebranding and implies that the effort, while having to overcome much bias and cultural headwinds, is succeeding….and should. The final words written by NYT fashion maven Vanessa Friedman are these:
[P]erhaps the real takeaway from all of this is that no one person or brand or size or shape gets to say what’s sexy — and that should be seen as a good thing.
That sexy in the end has to do with feeling at ease in your skin, rather than in any single garment. That there are as many definitions of the term as there are people in the world. And that actual empowerment doesn’t come in a bra and panty set. It comes out of it.
Her article begins by saying that when the fantasy female bedroom attire company announced, in a fit of wokeness, that it would “become a champion of female empowerment, replacing its bevy of supermodel angels with the VS Collective, ten women of great accomplishment as well as varying ages and body types — the news was met, generally (and understandably), with raised eyebrows.” Among those virtual eyebrows were those of this blog, which observed at the time in part [Item #3]:
—-Insufferably arrogant and disrespectful witness Prof. Khiara Bridges, after being told by Senator John Cornyn (R-Tx) during today’s Senate hearing,regarding the fall of Roe v. Wade via the Dobbs decision, that she hadn’t answered the question he asked.
The question Cornyn asked was, “Do you think that a baby that is not yet born has value?” She answered, “I believe that a person with a capacity for pregnancy has value.”
And there it is. A flat-out, defiant refusal to acknowledge the existence of the other life in the abortion equation. Her response to Cornyn’s protest that she hadn’t asked the question insulted both the Senator and the professor’s supposed area of expertise, the law. No witness in a trial could say that she was answering a question of her own conceit that interested her more than the one she was asked. No witness at a Congressional hearing can ethically do it either. Nor could a law student in class or on an exam. Continue reading
I have standing to complain, but they don’t.
A New York Times/Siena College poll just out purports to show that 64% of Democratic voters don’t want Joe Biden to be President after his current term expires, and the reason is that even they can tell the country is falling apart. Biden has been President for less than two years, and yet it has come to this already.
Assuming the poll is accurate (you know…polls) this result warrants a dirge from the tiniest violin in existence. How dare Democrats say this, when they foisted Biden on the nation with full knowledge that he was too old, declining mentally, and was a career mediocrity on the smartest day of his life? It was an epic example of irresponsible citizenship and a breach of trust, motivated, like most actions by members of their party since 2016, by pure, primitive, unreasoning, unquenchable hatred of Donald Trump. They would have voted for an inanimate carbon rod for President in 2020 if polls showed it to have the best chance of winning.
But first, a cheerful song, because it’s all downhill from here…
Speaking of music, some opening notes are in order:
1. Twitter Wars #1: @Ka1zoku_Qu0d, an idiot of the sort that literally clogs Twitter, posted this: “Hold on I want to make sure I say this carefully. Yeah Anne Frank had white privilege. Bad things happen to people with white privilege also but don’t tell the whites that.” This caused so much static on the platform that “Anne Frank” ended up “trending.” Continue reading
Many years ago, I was charged with running a U.S. Chamber of Commerce study on rising Hispanic business in the U.S. I worked with many Hispanic scholars and organizations, including the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. One of the recommendations in the draft report, written by a Cuban-American diplomat and scholar, was that Hispanic-Americans needed to purge their culture of toxic habits and traditions that undermined business success, and the primary example was tardiness and a lack of concern with meeting deadlines and appointment times.
The point was especially vibrant because the meetings of the group were almost always delayed while we waited for several key members who wandered in anywhere from 30 minutes to more than an hour after the designated time.
There was some animated debate over this, because some members—not just the habitually tardy ones—tried to argue that impugning the “manyana” attitude tradition would be an insult, allowing “white” values to erase “brown” ones, and declaring non-Hispanic culture “superior.” Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 