Character

Ugh.How Many Times Will Trump And The Mainstream Media Make Me Write This Post?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I can’t avoid it this time: the episode comes too close on the metaphorical heels of Curmie’s examination of biased and misleading reporting (here and here) and the post about the desperate AUC (the Axis of Unethical Conduct) settling on declaring Trump an American Hitler as its best shot at keeping him out of the White House if they fail at “locking him up.”

What happened next was so similar to what was described in my post that it’s almost comical. In an Iowa town hall with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Trump was asked about the current scare-mongering narrative that he was going to be a dictator. Trump, who apparently can’t stop himself from trolling, said,

“He says, you’re not going to be a dictator, are you? I said no, no, no — other than day one. We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling (for oil). After that I’m not a dictator.”

And how was that quote relayed on multiple outlets? “Trump says he’ll be a dictator from Day One.” See? He admits it! Aaron Rupar, the same shameless hack I mentioned in the earlier post, tweeted, “Trump admits he plans to do some dictatorial things on “day one” of his second term.” Rupar’s a dishonest asshole, but he’s not stupid. He knows that what Trump was describing isn’t “dictatorial,” but he exploited, as usual, Trump’s inflammatory language.

The executive branch has statutory power to close borders under certain circumstances. If Trump used that power, it wouldn’t be “dictatorial,” it would be legal and backed by democratically- determined laws. If the President doesn’t have statutory power to do something, he can’t do it. As for “drilling”: all Trump can do is lift Biden’s executive orders blocking drilling. The measures he’d be eliminating were no less “dictatorial” than his orders cancelling them. The President can’t order private companies to drill (or else what, shoot the executives?). So once againTrump was being careless in his rhetoric, thus throwing raw meat for his foes in the media and the Trump-Deranged to freak out over. And, of course, they took the bait.

Trump enjoys doing this, even though it fuels the hysterical and biased coverage of everything he says or does, even though it increases political divisions in our society. He’s having fun giving the news media what it wants, and they have no scruples or restraint either. The rest of the country are victims.

We have almost a year of this to go. Isn’t that great?

The Ethics Alarms 2023 “It’s A Wonderful Life” Ethics Guide, With A New Introduction

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

2023 INTRODUCTION

It’s time again for the Ethics Alarms annual posting of its ethics guide to perhaps the best ethics movie ever made, Frank Capra’s now iconic “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Past time, in fact: last year I concluded that the movie really belonged in the Thanksgiving movie canon, not Christmas. However, as I wrote in the 2022 preface,

 Like George, I often feel like I didn’t achieve and experience what I could have, that my choices too often didn’t pan out, that I barely missed the breaks that I needed when I most needed them…What makes our lives successful (or not), and what makes makes our existence meaningful is not how much money we accumulate, or how much power we wield, or how famous we are. What matters is how we affect the lives of those who share our lives, and whether we leave our neighborhood, communities, associations and nation better or worse than it would have been “if we had never been born.” It’s a tough lesson, and some of us, perhaps most, never learn it…I’m not sure I have learned it yet, to be honest with myself. Intellectually, perhaps, but not emotionally.

I have to admit that I still haven’t genuinely accepted the lesson of the film. Maybe it’s time to watch it again; I haven’t since last year, and recently I’ve been feeling a bit too much like George to get up the courage. I’m posting this the day after my birthday, an all-time low for the number of friends, colleagues and relatives who remembered it (five, and my wife didn’t recall until mid-morning, with my son remembering around 10 pm), cards (one) and gifts (none). I don’t care about any of those things really, but I once believed that with as much ability and talent I had been lucky enough to be born with, and the additional advantages of wonderful parents and citizenship in the United States, I would have achieved enough that, oh, I don’t know, I might have earned a Wikipedia page by now. It’s stupid; I know it is. This is a tough time for my business and my family, and a lot of the problems are the result of my own selfish choices and mistakes as well as my hard-wired proclivity to cause trouble and not back down after the consequences start becoming clear. I’m seriously considering not celebrating Christmas this year, and we have always been a big Christmas family, because several recent disasters  require the money to go elsewhere.

And yet, as I have been musing about all of this lately, I cannot deny that I, like George, have had a wonderful life, and, frankly, one that has been a lot more interesting and varied than George’s was. My various crazy projects and eventually defunct missions have been responsible for many marriages and many children, and now grandchildren. I’ve inspired some people to take risks that panned out well for them, and have advanced the careers of several artists. I’ve made a lot of people laugh. There are some plays and musical being performed more frequently now that my theater company rescued from obscurity, and, weirdest of all, a student theater organization that I started is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary. And, of course, there is my son, who we adopted from a hell-hole in Russia and who is making the most of his opportunities in the land of opportunity.

It’s not a bad legacy. I’m not heading to the bridge, but I need to snap out of this mood…cue Cher!

I guess it is time for me to watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” again….

1. “If It’s About Ethics, God Must Be Involved”

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Ethics Quiz: The Star’s Apology

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Last month, actress Susan Sarandon became a deserving casualty of the Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck after she spoke at at a pro-Palestinian rally and said that American Jews feeling threatened by the pro-Hamas protesters, demonstrators and rioters (like the Cornell students who had to hide in their dorms)were “getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence.” This epically stupid comment got her dropped by United Talent Agency, whose management is Jewish. As I noted here, “the agency concluded, probably accurately, that Sarandon’s comments diminished her value to them, and perhaps having a pro-terrorism client might deter more rational artists from seeking their aid.”

Apparently Sarandon, who has progressed through her romantic lead stage into and out of her mother role stage and now is getting grandmother parts isn’t quite ready to hang up her acting spurs, and decided that she had made a potential career-ending mistake that needed fixing. So she has now issued this apology:

Your first Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of December is…

Is her apology sincere, trustworthy, and sufficient?

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Ethics Dunce: The Federalist

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I could easily make this an Unethical Quote of the Month post too.

I had fondly hoped that I had written my last sentence about the disgusting blight on the republic that calls himself “George Santos,” but no: I just read the ethics-free, Machiavellian, “the ends justify the mean” protest by The Federalist titled, “George Santos’ Expulsion Is Further Proof The GOP Is A Potemkin Political Party.” One of the supposed media flagships of conservative thought has announced that if the Republican Party really cared about conservative principles, it would happily allow a dishonest, untrustworthy, and stunningly dumb Congressman elected under false pretenses remain in Congress under their banner, because they need him to “tackle” the “aforementioned”crises plaguing the country.”

It is a disgusting, indefensible, unethical position, demonstrating that the Democratic Party’s ethics rot has spread. Consider these excerpts:

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On His Way Out, Rep. Santos Kindly Demonstrates Why

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The House just voted 311 to 114 (with two cowardly members voting “present”) to make New York Congressman George Santos only the sixth in history to be deemed unworthy of an elected seat. The GOP members mostly supported the draconian punishment despite facing a tough race in the special election Santos’s disgrace now triggers. If I were a voter in that Long Island and Queens district, I’d be tempted to vote for the Democrat just to make the Republican Party pay for allowing a fraud and a crook like Santos to be its nominee. Of course, the Democrats and the local news media also share some blame for not doing due diligence to uncover important facts about a wildly unqualified candidate, but the GOP has to be first in line to be held accountable after Santos himself.

Yesterday, facing his likely humiliation, the biggest phony ever elected to Congress put his essential sliminess on full display, vowing revenge on his party and, like so many villains in movies about conspiracies and corruption, swearing that ‘if I go down, I’ll take all of you down with me!’

“I will do the same thing that members did to me and go to the Office of Congressional Ethics, all throughout today and tomorrow and report, everything that I think is relevant to the committee for them to look into,” said Santos. He’s already promised to file a complaint about the ridiculous Rep. Jamaal Bowman, the Mad Fire Alarmist. Yes, Bowman should be sanctioned, but compared to Santos he’s John Quincy Adams.

Santos’s reaction to being expelled is a stinking pile of rationalizations, as discussed here. His pledge to get revenge is another bit of signature significance. If Santos had any ethical instincts at all, any concept of why he was being kicked out of Congress, any flicker of conscience, dignity, responsibility or decency, he would have exited with a statement expressing his regret for his past actions, apologizing for soiling (well, further soiling) the reputation of the body he was elected to serve in, and promising to devote his future activities to honorable public service, while acknowledging that there is, at this time, no reason to believe him. Then it might have been said of his leaving Congress, in the manner of Malcolm’s description of MacBeth at his execution,

Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it.

But George Santos doesn’t possess those character traits: he’s a throbbing sociopath, and unlike more successful sociopaths in our government, he’s not smart or wily enough to hide it.

Ethics Hero: Senator Chuck Schumer

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Schumer, as the nation’s highest ranking elected official of Jewish heritage, is the ideal official to call out the Left’s rampant anti-Semitism that has been exposed since the October 6 Hamas attack on Israel. Doing so involved considerable political risks, and frankly, I didn’t think he had the guts to do it. Yesterday, however, Schumer delivered an impassioned speech in the Senate condemning members of his own party and ideological persuasion for “unknowingly aiding and abetting” anti-Semitism in the name of social justice, and thus fueling bigotry against Jews as Israel battles for its survival against Hamas.

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Hey, I’m Calm! Stuff Like This Doesn’t Bother Me At All. I’m Just An Uninvolved Observer.

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

And happy!

See?

Stories like this one coming up—another Great Stupid epic, again with links to the George Floyd Ethics Train Wreck—have been proliferating lately. When I first saw the headline on a report that D.C.’s black, woke, totally incompetent mayor Muriel Bowser had “re-painted” her insane giant Black Lives Matter mural, confirmation bias kicked in: I read it to mean that she had finally removed the insulting monstrosity by having it painted over. I was even preparing a post about how trying to undo a massive ethics botch often calls attention to what was so wrong in the first place, and that in this case, Bowser was in ethics zugzwang because so many of her residents are still blind Black Lives Matter supporters, aka. anti-white, anti-police, anti-America racists.

But that’s not what the story said. The real story is that Bowser chose now to spruce up the huge, infamous street mural shouting “Black Lives Matter” that she had painted in 2020 as BLM mobs were “mostly peacefully” demonstrating through the city and the nation, at times confronting white D.C. diners and demanding that they pledge fealty to the Marxist movement. The refurbishment cost $271,231, including $217,680 in labor costs and $53,551 in paint supplies.

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From Trump Crony Roger Stone, New Vistas In Shameless Deceit

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The fact that Roger Stone supports Donald Trump and that Trump regards him as a friend, advisor and ally is almost enough, all by itself, to justify refusing to vote for Trump no matter who or what he runs against next. Stone, about the slimiest denizen in a scum-filled profession that includes such slimy practitioners as Dick Morris and Lanny Davis (that is, political consultants and operatives), stooped to a new low by calling the wife of Trump rival Ron DeSantis a “cunt” in the coded Twitter/X message above.

I did not know, prior to this incident, about the social media-speak “SeeUNextTuesday,” which means “cunt” like “Let’s go Brandon!” means “Fuck Joe Biden.” It’s pretty obvious, once you think about it, and gutter-level political rhetoric (though HBO allowed Bill Maher to use the term outright when GOP women were the target.). Stone, however, human fungus that he is, added to his ethics foul by denying that he called Casey DeSantis a “cunt,” tweeting ““NOT what I said! Typical @mediate smear.” (The mostly left-leaning political website had stated that “Stone Calls Casey DeSantis a C***,” though it wasn’t the only news source reporting the slur.)

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Guest Column: Shoplifting Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

by Sarah B.

[Introduction: This excellent post by Sarah B, who has a history of them, posed a dilemma. It was originally posted in this week’s Open Forum, but the comment easily could have been a Comment of the Day on two recent posts, “Irony: The Washington Post Telling CVS How To Handle Rampant Shoplifting,” and “Technology Ethics Fail: Self-Checkout.”

In the end, I decided to publish it as a guest post, as Sarah herself told us up front what she was commenting on, writing, “This article, about a woman who wrote a piece for the newspaper anonymously about how and why she shoplifts, is worth discussing,” referring to “I’m a middle-class shoplifter – and here’s why I’m happy to confess it” in the UK’s Independent. Proving once again that valuable insights can be obtained from idiotic essays, Sarah’s post is far, far, FAR superior to the article that apparently spawned it. The explanation of “anonymous” about why she’s apparently “happy” about being a shoplifter was so devoid of either logic or ethics comprehension that it made my phantom hair hurt. Among her fatuous excuses and rationalizations were “It’s easy, so it’s the stores’ fault,” “I don’t even see it as shoplifting” (#64 on the rationalizations list, “It isn’t what it is”), “I’m owed it,” and #22, the worst rationalization of all, “It’s not the worst thing,” because she “would only do this in a supermarket chain, rather than any family-run small business.” People like the author make me want to chuck my business and profession and become a pimp or something. Why do I spend so much time on ethics when so many people think like this? Fortunately, Sarah had a different and more constructive reaction.—JM.]

***

First, there is no doubt that her actions are unethical, and while we could just analyze this as a “name the rationalizations”, I also think that a deep dive into the article can show many things about our society and make for a good discussion. There are options for discussing how she doesn’t shoplift because she has to, but does it to decrease the prices of expensive alternatives instead of paying for what she wants. However, I want to look at how I think we could combat her “how-to guide”.

This seems to me to be a great case study in “locks keep an honest man honest.” The author admits that much of her stealing is predicated on the app-shopping and self-checkout philosophy of big stores. My main proposal, after looking at this, is to somehow return to the “good old days” of customer service.

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 4: People Who Are Still Wearing Masks

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I can say right up front that I’m not getting over this one.

I am a bit less hostile if the mask-wearer is elderly, as I can imagine that they might be seriously immuno-compromised. But when I see a family with young children and they are all masked, I can only think “child abuse” and “morons.” Indeed, I am tempted to ask them what the hell they think they are doing.

Today, in Northern Virginia, I still see teens walking alone outside wearing masks. I still see clerks at my CVS wearing masks, often working side-by-side with maskless co-workers. Most of the masks I’m seeing now are not the medical-grade masks that might have some small value in preventing infection: they are primarily plain old cloth masks or paper masks, as in “useless.”

The mask-wearers are, I am certain, almost 100% woke, virtue-signaling knee-jerk progressives who would happily elect Kamala Harris as President if given the chance. Wearing the things is a political statement as much as anything else. I perceive the masked as gullible to government propaganda and media scare-mongering for political advantage. I view them as fearful, lazy and apathetic individuals who have completely rejected core American character traits, like risk-taking, autonomy and independence.

Perhaps most important of all, I view the wearing of masks now as a deliberate signal that the individual does not want to interact with me, the community or society. I can’t read their expressions; when they talk, it is muffled and I have trouble hearing them. For me, they might as well be wearing paper bags over their heads.

I believe the masked among us are eroding the vital inter-relationships, human contact and communication that makes society enjoyable and productive.

No, I’m not getting over this bias.

I’m not even sure it is a bias.