Character

Ingratitude, Racism And Statue Toppling At The Asian Art Museum

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I’ll begin with the ethics conclusion, and show how we get there.

If your organization, institution, or nation owes its existence to an individual that hindsight-wielding critics want to erase, your choice is to tell them to get lost while continuing to officially recognize the debt such organization, institution, or nation  owes to that individual, or to dissolve the entity. Recognizing in some form the fact that a founder has blemishes on his or her past may be justified and practical. Continuing to benefit from that founder’s actions while metaphorically kicking him or her in the teeth, however, is unethical and, in fact, despicable.

Thus we arrive at the current controversy at the Asian Art Museum  in San Francisco. The focus of the mess is the bust of Adrian Brundage you see above. Brundage is most remembered as the long-time (twenty years) President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and most reviled for his decision not to cancel the Munich Games in 1972 after the terrorist attack on the Israeli team in 1972. (I agreed with him then, incidentally, and still believe that he was correct, and courageous, in his decision.) Brundage also, however, created the Asian Art Museum, which is the centerpiece of San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza, and which Brundage gave to the city in 1966 to house his fabulous personal collection of approximately 8,000 art pieces.

The New York Times story about the emerging controversy at the museum begins, “For 48 years, visitors to this city’s Asian Art Museum have had to pass the bust of Avery Brundage.” That’s right, they “had” to pass that bust because what they were coming to see belonged to Avery Brundage, the museum’s collection was his gift, and it was and is appropriate for that to be respected and acknowledged.

Given an opportunity by the zeitgeist of the George Floyd Freakout, however, the museum’s director and chief executive, Jay Xu, announced to a meeting of the board and commissioners in June that he was having Brundage’s bust  removed. There are two reasons given in the article. One is that Brundage was accused of being a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semitic (with the decision not to stop the 1972 Olympics being cited as a prime piece of evidence for the latter), and that the museum he created “presents Asian art from a mostly white perspective.”

As for the last complaint, I will characterize it this way: it’s racism, pure and straight.

The George Floyd Freakout is being used to justify a national effort to “Get whitey,” and this disgusting outbreak of anti-white hatred (that so many white Americans are accepting with the meek submission and hollowed out character of post rats-in-his-face Winston Smith) will not end until sufficient numbers of the rational label it what it is: opportunistic hate and racism.

The museum presents Asian art from a “mostly white perspective”  because the museum’s collection was originally created by a  collector of Asian Art who was white. That does not justify an indictment of the collection, and if an Asian-American wants to establish a museum that reflects Asian art from a mostly Asian-American  perspective—not an Asian perspective now, be consistent, you racists!—then that Asian-American is welcome to spend millions on his or her own collection,  give it to the city, and see if anybody wants to see it. Continue reading →

It’s Time To Play That Exciting Game Show, “Liar Or Idiot?” !!!!

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Hello everybody! Welcome to “Liar or Idiot?” the popular ethics game show!  Welcome panel! And here’s today’s challenge…

This is Ramsey BethAnn Bearse! Remember when she was Miss Kentucky in 2014?

Poor Ramsey—she’s 29 now— was sentenced to jail for two years after sending sending  photos “of a sexual nature” to a middle school teen  when she was working as a West Virginia school teacher. She told the court that it was all a big mistake.

“The young man’s name was listed next to my husband’s on my phone,” Bearse explained. “From there, he asked me for more and I panicked. I was afraid to not appease him. When he asked for more, I sent him more photos of me which led to him sending a photo of his privates.”

It could happen to anybody! But wait…why was a middle school student’s phone number on her speed dial? Something to think about, panel! Continue reading →

Colleges Have Become An Existential Threat To Free Speech, Thought, And Democracy. They Have To Be Opposed And Reformed [CORRECTED]

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

From the cover of Ben Shapiro’s book. Of course, most campuses won’t allow Shapiro to speak there, and explain how students are being brainwashed…

And that will take determination, character, and guts.

Two horrifying stories from our campuses illustrate the urgency of concerted, relentless opposition.  Warning: the second is even worse than the first:

1.University of Connecticut

The president and vice president of the University of Connecticut’s Undergraduate Student Government rejected the will of the students who voted them them into their positions four months ago, and announced that they were resigning. The reason, they said, was that it was inherently racist for white people to lead. Of course, it is racist by definition to claim that one race or another is more qualified to do anything, but this is the apparent quality of a UConn education on display.

VP Alex Ose , according to The Daily Campus,  quit while citing “the climate and incidents of racial injustice across the country and at the university,” and added,

I feel that it is my duty to step down from my position to make space for BIPOC (black, indigineous and people of color) voices to truly rise and be heard. It is my responsibility to make space, not to create an echo.

Fascinating. The fact that she is so devoid of critical thinking skills as to state something like this publicly is, ironically, a good reason for her to resign, but wanting to “make space” for “black, indigineous and people of color”—she misspelled indigenous—regardless of their qualifications, intelligence, judgment ability and experience is not.

As noted here earlier, this is the emerging “answer” to Question 13 (“What is the “systemic reform regarding race in America” that the George Floyd protests purport to be seeking?“): installing a color-based system that excludes merit, and designating whites as a subordinate class. UConn has apparently done an excellent job indoctrinating white students into accepting that second-class status. Go Huskies!

President Joshua Crow’s explanation for his resignation was slightly less idiotic, but still entirely based on race rather than any rational distinction. He said, “It is important in this time to ensure that marginalized groups have the platforms they need.”

Whatever that means. Need to do what? President of the student government isn’t a platform, it’s a job. What does “ensure” mean? Apparently it means ignoring the votes of students, and deciding what is “needed” by edict. If white people are marginalizing themselves, does that still make marginalizing unethical?

To be fair, college students have the excuse that they are young, inexperienced, prone to being influenced by emotion and peer pressure, and, as this nauseating display of virtue-signaling shows, badly educated. College administrators and faculty, however, have no such excuse, which is why the next account is even worse. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “KABOOM! Anti-White Stereotyping At The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture”

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

After a brief pause in eligible Comments of the Day, I am suddenly inundated with candidates, with blogging veteran Glenn Logan at the fore with two more to follow on his recent post. These, and another non-Logan COTD on the runway, were sparked by the Ethics Alarms post about the above content on a Smithsonian website, which threatens all records for “well-intentioned “racial stereotyping.

Here’s Glenn’s Comment of the Day #2 of three, (with the next coming up later today. Three is a row is a record!) on the post, “KABOOM! Anti-White Stereotyping At The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture”: Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The Nick Cannon Meltdown

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

This is the kind of story that makes me doubt my own cultural literacy. Until the controversy involving Nick Cannon, I had never heard of the guy, and wouldn’t recognize him if he walked into my living room.  Yet he’s been around for 20 years as a juvenile TV star, a rapper, comic, actor, producer, director, the TV host of all sorts of shows I didn’t watch, and since 2012 he’s had his own show on MTV called “Wild and Out.” He also has a podcast.

The news that ViacomCBS had fired Cannon resonated throughout the popular media, and qualifies, apparently, as a Big Deal. In the June 30 installment of Cannon’s podcast, “Cannon’s Class,” he interviewed Professor Griff, a rapper who was a part of the group Public Enemy before being forced out after he said in an interview with The Washington Times, “The Jews are wicked. And we can prove this.” He also said that Jews were responsible for “the majority of wickedness that goes on across the globe.”

“I’m hated now because I told the truth,” Griffin told Cannon, who was immediately sympathetic. “You’re speaking facts,!”  Cannon said. “There’s no reason to be scared of anything when you’re speaking the truth.”

After referring to Dr. Griff as a “legend,” Cannon said he wished that Louis Farrakhan, the anti-white demagogue with a long history of anti-Semitic comments, had not been blocked by Facebook.

Then Cannon endorsed Griffin’s contention that six dominant media companies were controlled by Jews, comparing it to the power of the Rothschilds, the banking family at the center  of various  anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. “I find myself wanting to debate this idea and it gets real wishy and washy and unclear for me when we give so much power to the ‘theys,’ and ‘theys’ then turn into illuminati, the Zionists, the Rothschilds,”  Cannon said later in the podcast.

Got it. He’s an anti-Semite. Continue reading →

Ethics Outburst, 7/15/2020: An Execution, An Exoneration, A “Never Mind!” And More Freakouts…

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

1. Least surprising ethics revelation of the day: Kanye West is an asshole.  After posting this,

..sending the news media into a frenzy, setting off speculation about how much of the crucial black vote his candidacy might siphon off from Joe Biden, exciting all of those who inexplicably take the man seriously after ample evidence over the years that he is emotionally unstable, West has decided a mere eleven days later that he doesn’t want to run after all. His organization had hired 180 people who trusted him.

If there is a more irresponsible celebrity alive, I don’t want to know about him. Continue reading →

My Georgetown Diploma Joins My Harvard Diploma In Facing The Wall In Shame

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Georgetown has apparently programmed its victims of a liberal education to not only believe in the suppression of free speech and dissent from the majority, but to engage in it. Nice.

By the way, Georgetown, the backs of Harvard’s diplomas are much more attractive than the backs of yours.

Georgetown University junior Billy Torgerson received a formal condemnation from  the Georgetown University Student Association as well as a call for the college to investigate him for “bias” based on a column, “A Nation Of Virtuous Individuals,” that he authored and posted on his own website.

That’s all you need to know, really. It is none of the Student Association’s business what a Georgetown student posts online on his own forum. The principle articulated in the recent Supreme Court case B.L v. Mahanoy Area School District holds even if the action of a student group doesn’t strictly constitute what the opinion prohibits. This is chilling free speech.

Torgerson’s primary “crime” seems to be that he opposes another recent SCOTUS ruling,  Bostock v. Clayton County, which extended protections under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to transgender individuals.  I think he’s wrong, but Torgerson’s position is similar to that of the  three dissenting judges  and many conservative analysts. And it doesn’t matter if he’s wrong. He has every right to state his opinion without being punished. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Gary Garrels

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The carnage of the George Floyd Terror, aka George Floyd Freakout, aka George Floyd Ethics Train Wreck, claimed another victim yesterday, and Ethics Alarms is designating him the Ethics Dunce. We really need a new category for people like Gary Gerrels, the now ex-senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Placed in a position where he could take a strong  position against unhinged woke bullying, when every element of common sense, integrity, fairness and reality was aligned in his favor, he prostrated himself to the mob. “Ethics Coward,” perhaps? “Ethics Weenie”? “Ethics Fool”? “Useful Ethics Idiot”?

Garrels  triggered the process of his cancellation by concluding a presentation on how to diversify the museum’s holdings by saying, “don’t worry, we will definitely still continue to collect white artists.” In a ZOOM meeting of museum employees, Garrels  voiced a similar position, saying  that the museum could not avoid collecting the work of white men, which he described as “reverse discrimination.” Shortly thereafter employees created and began signing an online petition demanding that he leave the museum.
Continue reading →

In Defense Of The Terrorist: Clarence Darrow Eulogy For John Brown

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

In the ongoing debate here regarding what constitutes a great American—sparked by reader valkygrrl’s guest post on the topic as well as the President’s recent remarks at Mount Rushmore, the question of whether abolitionist John Brown belongs has been the most contentious. I don’t believe that one can ethically assign a murderer and law-breaker (and unraveling fanatic) like Brown to the “great American” category,  but a figure unquestionably smarter than I whom I believe unquestionably was  one of the greatest Americans did, and his argument deserves attention and thought. That figure is Clarence Darrow.

Brown was much admired by Darrow’s iconoclast father, Amirus Darrow, and his mother was an anti-slavery activist, turning the Darrow home into a stop on the Underground Railroad.  Born in 1857, Darrow was too young to remember the pre-Civil War period, and Brown was hanged in 1859. Nonetheless, the admiration for Brown was passed on from father to son, and there are moments in Darrow’s career where his actions seemed consistent with Brown’s philosophy of the ends justifying the means when the stakes were important enough, notably the conduct that almost got him disbarred and imprisoned for jury tampering. (Darrow was guilty, but was acquitted because he had a great defense attorney—Clarence Darrow.)

John Brown was a hero of Darrow’s , who didn’t have many: the abolitionist, Voltaire, and his friend and mentor John Peter Altgeld were about it, as far as I can tell. Periodically, on the anniversary of Brown’s birthday (May 8), Darrow would give a speech eulogizing Brown to a progressive group. Its final sentence is the most quoted:

The radical of today is the conservative of tomorrow, and other martyrs take up the work through other nights, and the dumb and stupid world plants its weary feet upon the slippery sand, soaked by their blood, and the world moves on.

Incredibly, Darrow’s John Brown Eulogy is impossible to find on the web now; I have no idea why. (Enter that sentence in Google, and what pops up is…me!) Thus I am  reproducing Darrow’s speech here, for two purposes: first, to let you consider Clarence Darrow ‘s argument for why we should honor John Brown, and second, to have an online home for it.

It is not the whole speech, but my own shortened and edited version. I am still hunting for the whole document in a form I can post (I have it in several books), and when I find it, I’ll substitute the complete version for this: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: New York Times Editor Bari Weiss

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

I supposed that should have read “former New York Times editor Bari Weiss.” Until her resignation today,  from 2017 to 2020, Weiss was the staff editor for the opinion section of the The New York Times.

Her letter of resignation to the Times publisher is here.  It is beyond excellent, beyond brave, beyond important.  It is breathtaking.

She writes in part,

I joined the paper with gratitude and optimism three years ago. I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home. The reason for this effort was clear: The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers…

But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else…

Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative. Continue reading →