This might be the easiest Ethics Dunce pick ever; at least I am certain that there couldn’t have been an easier one. When I heard which ever Democratic Party hack it was introduce Robert DeNiro as a featured speaker for the Biden campaign’s Trump Hate presser outside the Manhattan courthouse where this kangaroo kaper is inching to a conclusion, I thought, “No! They can’t be this crude, obvious and stupid. They just can’t be.”
This sort of thing shouldn’t warrant an Ethics Hero designation, it really shouldn’t. If substantial numbers of public experts, pundits, opinion-leaders and academics were all open-minded, professional, civil, lacking hubris and arrogance, capable of taking criticism without taking it personally—I could go on—Prof. Mayer’s cordial and collegial visit to Ethics Alarms to continue a discussion I began ( a bit more nastily than I should have, but, sigh, that’s me all over) by criticizing a column he authored for that Weekly Reader of daily newspapers, U.S.A. Today, would have been nothing remarkable.
But most of the people I write about here are not like that, and members of our academic bastions particularly these days are simply not in the mood to do what Prof. Mayer has done this week, engaging in good humored and provocative discussions with members of the EA commentariat on this post. This has been a gift to the readers here, and also shows class, guts, respect, humility and confidence.
I still am convinced that the professor is dead wrong about Biden being able to drop out at this stage and not trigger a catastrophe for his party even worse than what it faces by allowing him to run. In fact, I wish I could think of an amusing wager to make with him: maybe he’ll have some ideas.
And I wonder what he thinks of Monty Python….
Tons of discretionary cash allows “philanthropists,” who are frequently tunnel-visioned ideologues and aspiring authoritarians, to magnify their mistakes, misconceptions, biases and delusions into widespread catastrophes, all with the arrogance that luck and good fortune so often creates. Melinda Gates, Bill’s ex, has a couple billion dollars to play with thanks to marrying well and divorcing better, and her recent op-ed in the New York Times illustrates this principle.
There are so many ominous tells in Gates’s “The Enemies of Progress Play Offense. I Want to Help Even the Match” that I don’t have time to flag them all. The headline is one: doctrinaire progressives always equate their agenda items with “progress,” which is a word that implies beneficial change. That rhetorical trick has handicapped conservative thought and policy-making for centuries, though it is demonstrably false. Communism wasn’t “progress,” it was and has been a blight on civilization. The acceptance of promiscuous sex and having children out of wedlock wasn’t “progress;” the acceptance and legalization of recreational drugs isn’t “progress;” letting aliens stream over our borders largely without interference and consequences isn’t “progress;” using abortion as a primary means of birth control wasn’t “progress.” As obvious as these conclusions should be, the “change equals progress” fiction still works, which is why the Left still employs it regularly..
Her declaration to launch her new foundation vibrates with bias as well as bigotry. “We know” she writes, “that women’s political participation is associated with decreased corruption. That peace agreements are more durable when women are involved in writing them.” No, we don’t. That’s hoary anti-male propaganda (and “is associated with” screams “Weasel words!”)
Gates deplores “the Taliban takeover” that “has erased 20 years of progress for women and girls” without having the guts to risk the ire of her progressive audience by pointing out exactly who was responsible for abandoning women to the cruelty of the Taliban. She calls U.S. maternal mortality rates “unconscionable,” which implies wrongdoing. The Times link provided in the column suggests otherwise: the problem of high mortality rates in the U.S. is substantially the result of lifestyle choices available to mothers in a free society, including women in the U.S. delaying child birth past the healthiest time to have children.
Of course Gates doesn’t have the integrity to use plain language when it conveys unpleasant facts that undercut her advocacy: her cover-phrase for being able to kill a nascent human being is “reproductive rights,” neatly skipping the “right to grow and live” component of the issue. She also revels in pseudo-science, writing, “the number of teenage girls experiencing suicidal thoughts and persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness is at a decade high.” Sure, Melinda. Because of all the advances in mind-reading, I’m sure. How would one get that “number”?
And what kind of leader does Gates regard as a model for achieving her version of “progress”? “Recently, I offered 12 people whose work I admire their own $20 million grant-making fund to distribute as he or she sees fit,” Gates reveals. “That group….includes the former prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern.” Gates’ op-ed keeps referring to lost rights, yet one of her most admired people is the dictatorial former leader of New Zealand during the pandemic, who imposed draconian measures on her nation that crushed individual rights, while she sucked up to China, one of the world’s worst human rights offenders, in pursuit of economic benefits. China, of course, was responsible for the pandemic that Asdern used to expand her power to dictatorial levels.
Someone as arrogant and biased as Gates with two billion dollars to blow is like an ADD teen running amuck in a glass factory. Good luck, everyone!
Documentaries can be informative, entertaining and influential, but the more I watch them and the more accessible they become through the streaming platforms, the more it is apparent that they are too often pure propaganda instruments and inherently untrustworthy. Almost no documentaries are made from a neutral or objective points of view. In today’s indoctrination-oriented educational system, they are increasingly weaponized to advance political agendas. Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” despite having many of its “truths” debunked and declared bad science, is still turning up in classrooms as if it weren’t the slick manipulative advocacy production it is. There is the despicable Michael Moore, of course, all of whose documentaries cheat with deceptive editing and politically slanted deceit. Even Ken Burns, whom I once admired, proved with his “The US and the Holocaust” that he could not be trusted. I’m a fool: he is affiliated with PBS. Of course he’s pushing a progressive agenda.
Documentaries should be watched with the presumption that they are dishonest, made from biased perspectives, and untrustworthy. Then it is the burden of the documentary to prove otherwise.
Morgan Spurlock died this week of cancer at the relatively young age of 53. He had one great idea for a gimmick documentary, pulled it off with humor and wit, and made himself famous and rich in the process. The idea became his Oscar-nominated 2004 film “Super Size Me,” documenting his physical deterioration as he ate nothing but McDonald’s fast food for 30 days. The movie followed Spurlock and his girlfriend throughout his Golden Arches orgy, with intermittent interviews with health experts and visits to his alarmed physician as he packed on 25 unhealthy pounds and found his liver function deteriorating. Naturally, many schools across the country couldn’t resist showing the film to gullible students. But the documentary, which earned more than $22 million at the box office, was entirely a scam. (Spurlock certainly left some clues: his production company was called “The Con.”) It was pretty obvious from the beginning, or should have been, that this was hardly a valid scientific experiment, but the same woke, anti-corporate dictators that cheered when Michael Bloomberg taxed jumbo sugary drinks in New York City were thrilled to pretend it was.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, speaking at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, where she was being honored….for what, I can’t imagine.
Awww! Poor Sonja! What’s she crying about? That she’s obviously over her head on the Supreme Court with actual legal scholars and experts who can make persuasive arguments about what the law is and what the Constitution means instead of just relying on warm, fuzzy feelings and mandatory progressive sentiment? That mean old conservatives aren’t buying her “But…but…it would be nicer if we decided this way” routine?
Did Sandra Day O’Connor, when she was in the minority on a liberal majority court, ever say she just went into her office and wept when a SCOTUS vote didn’t go her way? Did Ruth Bader Ginsburg, when she was on the losing end of a 5-4 ruling? Did Scalia? No, but this Justice not only weeps over her defeats, she thinks its something to be proud of.
Honestly, I don’t know how this woman can look at herself in the mirror.
Much of the American public is fed up and disgusted with what I call the Four W’s: the woke, the weak, weenies, and weasels. All are labels for ethical voids. The woke are incompetent and irresponsible. The weak lack the “enabling virtues,” the character traits that permit one to be ethical: courage, fortitude, valor, sacrifice, honor, humility and forgiveness. Weenies lack integrity, and weasels, in some ways the worst of the bunch, are dishonest and untrustworthy, as well as operating under the unethical delusion that the ends justify the means. If one wants to objectively comprehend why so many people support Donald Trump for President, despite his dazzling array of disqualifying character traits, look no further than the Four W’s. For a current day politician, he is remarkably free of those crippling characteristics, not entirely and not in all cases, but substantially, and impressively in comparison to almost any other public figure.
Yesterday, Nikki Haley said she would be voting for Trump in the upcoming election. Let’s see [This is a corrected version of what I first posted: I missed some twists and turns]…first she was Trump’s U.S. Ambassador, and apparently a booster. She resigned in 2018 for mysterious reasons, then, after serving on the Boeing board just long enough for that to register as a black mark, she initially defended Trump after the rioters hit the Capitol in January of 2021 (saying it was not “his best” moment—you know how I hate that rationalization). Then, just bit later in the same month, told an interviewer, “We need to acknowledge he let us down. He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”
What is “we can’t let that ever happen again” supposed to mean, if not “Don’t support this man”?
Then, as Biden’s slow-moving car crash proceeded and it looked like Donald Trump wasn’t finished as a political force yet, Haley started trying to edge back into his good graces…until she thought she saw an opportunity to be the GOP nominee herself. Then she was again condemning Trump, insulting him relentlessly, questioning his mental fitness, saying that he is, like Biden, “too old,” and calling Trump and Biden “equally bad.” She accused him of having disrespect for the military, indicating that “he’s not qualified to be the president of the United States, because I don’t trust him to protect them.” After signing the required GOP pledge to support whoever was nominated by the party to run in November as a condition predicate to participating in the debates (and criticizing Trump for not signing the pledge and boycotting the debates himself), Haley then reneged on that pledge once it was clear that nobody would stop Trump. She argued that she wasn’t bound by it (au contraire: lawyers are ethically obligated to be true to their pledges) because the party she thought she was supporting wasn’t what the Republican Party now is in its embrace of Donald Trump, or something.
Why all the flip-flopping, back-tracking, reversals, double-talk and hypocrisy? She makes John Kerry look like Sir Thomas More. She makes Bill Clinton look like George Washington, and if Bill was asked who chopped down the cherry tree, he would say, “It depends what you mean by ‘chopped’.” But Haley now thinks she has a shot at being chosen as Trump’s running mate: after all, she never shot her dog. Nikki Haley has made it clear that she will say anything at that she thinks will benefit her ambition and quest for power. No one should ever believe her, trust her or rely on her, ever.
She would have been the perfect running mate for Trump, about five reversals ago. Trump has a flat learning curve, but he was betrayed by so many so often since 2016 that he would no more tie his fates to Nikki Haley than shoot a nail gun into his skull.
Nikki Haley is indisputably a weasel. I can’t imagine a worse one.
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell has all sorts of red flags in his resume. He went to Harvard for one thing, and describes himself as a “European socialist.” At Harvard you can’t major in journalism: you work on the daily paper, The Crimson. O’Donnell didn’t do that: he wrote for the fake news satirical student publication, the Lampoon. O’Donnell became an openly biased and agenda-driven MSNBC news anchor by making TV contacts while writing scripts for TV’s imaginary leftist nirvana White House fantasy, “The West Wing.” Later he was Keith Olberman’s stand-in on MSNBC, which should tell you all you need to know.
And yet…much as I fart in his general direction, as he personifies just how vile MSNBC is and just how self-lobotomizing anyone is who uses it to get their “news,” I am shocked at the degraded character and shame-free embrace of ethical relativism O’Donnell displayed yesterday.
The big news coming out of the “Get Trump!” fiasco in Manhattan was that the prosecution’s star witness Michael Cohen, already a disbarred lawyer and a convicted perjurer, further enhanced his credibility by admitting that he had stolen $30,000 from his employer and client, Donald Trump. Here is how O’Donnell described it:
Or does it know but doesn’t want its readers to know?
The Times headline must have been labored over intensely to come up with a phrasing that didn’t read immediately as racially biased, since what is being described is racial bias, if standard “good” racial bias : “Democrats Aim for a Breakthrough for Black Women in the Senate.” The “breakthrough” is electing black women rather than white women or men, meaning that the party is declaring a preference for candidates based on gender and color. Funny, that was called bigotry when I was a lad. But black women are better than white women or any kind of man. Or they deserve success and power more. Or something: I better read my DEI manual again.
But never mind: it was the beginning of the article that struck me like a John Wayne punch in the jaw:
Carol Moseley Braun, one of only two Black women to have been elected to the Senate in U.S. history, was in Paris on Wednesday when she was informed that another Black woman, Angela Alsobrooks, had won the Democratic nomination for an open Senate seat in Maryland.
“Praise the Lord,” she said with relief and surprise. “That’s wonderful.”
…“It’s been a long time coming,” said Ms. Moseley Braun, who became the first Black female senator when she was elected from Illinois in 1992 and now serves as chairwoman of the United States African Development Foundation. The second, from California, is now the vice president, Kamala Harris. A third, Laphonza Butler, Democrat of California, was appointed to fill a vacant seat, but is not running for re-election.
Ah, Carol Moseley Braun! (That’s her above.)The first, “historic” black female Senator was, not to beat around the bush, a serial crook, protected by the corrupt Democratic establishment under Bill Clinton, and now by the New York Times, because anything that undermines the DEI, “good discrimination” narrative isn’t news “fit to print,” or in this instance, history fit to print.
… a smug, narcissistic, ethics-challenged, unprincipled, Machiavellian demagogue who helps pollute our civic discourse rather than enhance it. Of course, Tucker had already proved that, but because he was fairly articulately bloviating cherished right-wing talking points and arguments every night on his top-rated Fox News show, conservatives and Republicans were blinded to his rather obvious flaws. (Do I have to post the Cognitive Dissonance Scale again? Nah, I’ll just link to the tag this time…)
Upon the arrival of Carlson’s 100th show since Fox News fired him (one more example of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons), several publications have noted that Carlson’s focus has descended into cheap tabloid territory as he desperately seeks publicity, clicks and eyeballs. Of course he has. Carlson doesn’t need the money (he’s a trust fund kid and has a net worth estimated at $30 million); he could easily maintain whatever integrity he had and present serious, useful analysis from the conservative side on whatever platform he used as he waits for his Fox contract to run out. Nah, he wants fame and power. Sooooo….(From Unherd)
In the comments to the previous post regarding the juvenile incivility and playground level exchanges of insults in the House of Representatives last week, Chris Marschner notes in part,
“Today, our representatives are products of our public education system where the original classics have been banned for being offensive to one group or discarded as irrelevant to current society. Linguistic presentations today reflect the gutter because that is how the teachers they had speak.’
Last night, before Chris issued his comment, I had already resolved to write about the following revolting development:
In a new episode of “Blue Bloods,” the long-running CBS police and family drama that Ethics Alarms awarded “Ethical TV Show of the Year” several times back when I was doing such things, the show concluded with Erin ( Bridget Moynihan), the NYC prosecutor and police commissioner Tom Selleck’s daughter, making an erection joke. At Sunday dinner. And not even an original or particular funny one.
The discussion around the dinner table of this devout Catholic extended family—where grandpa constantly reminds the brood to “keep it civil”—involved the fifth wedding anniversary of youngest son Jamie (Well Estes) and his policewoman wife. The group noted that traditionally this was the “Wooden” anniversary. Erin then asked, “So, Jamie, are you up to giving her wood?”and punctuated her witticism with a suggestive upward arm thrust.
Hearty laughter all around.
I look forward to next season, when Sunday dinner is disrupted by Grandpa (Len Cariou) loudly farting during dessert.
How can anyone still argue, as I have many times, that Donald Trump is too crude to be President?
Ethics Alarms 