Character

How Can Anyone Trust An Elected Official That Does This?

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

Yes, that’s the Honorable Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, after breaking the law in a useless protest before the Supreme Court building, pretending to be handcuffed for the crowd, and then, ridiculously, deciding that a gesture of defiance was better, so she drops the shackled act and raises her arm.

Her fellow Squadder Ilhan Omar also faked handcuffs or zip-ties.

This cynical play-acting is signature significance for frauds, hucksters, scammers and liars. No one with integrity does this. No one with instincts better than a 12-year-old tries it either. The charade proves disrespect for the public, and confidence that they can get away with outright deception without consequences.

They might as well have faked limps, or spilled ketchup on their foreheads.

If elected officials will try this kind of childish fakery, what else are they capable of lying about?

The answer is “Everything.”

Tuesday Morning Ethics Warm-Up. 7/19/2022: Harvard, Redheads, Uvalde, Bad House Guests And More

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

A lot of people find images like this, and the motto, offensive, presumably because of the association with Ronald Reagan, who brilliantly appropriated optimistic patriotism as a conservative value in response to Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” vision of the nation. Being negatively triggered by one’s own flag and expressions of pride and enthusiasm regarding the nation it represents is not a healthy state of mind, and therefore it is unethical conduct to actively promote such an attitude…which we now see being done every day.

1. It may be unethical, but Harvard at least has gall…In April, Harvard University set out to exceed its previous record for virtue signaling, committing $100 million to “redress its ties to slavery” after a report concluded that slavery played an “integral” role in shaping the University. This is the Cambridge version of reparations, and the flagrant act of misusing donated non-profit funds wasn’t even controversial. The whole board signed on without dissent, which shows how Borg-like the Harvard leadership is. “Diversity” of thought when wokeness is at issue is not welcome. In this month’s alumni magazine, amusingly, Harvard begs for contributions to keep the magazine operating at a high level (it is an excellent alumni magazine), as if  tossing away 100 million dollars on non-educational matters didn’t make the appeal ridiculous. As one contrarian alum noted in a letter to the editor, if Harvard can give away all that money to assuage its conscience about supporting and benefiting long ago from a legal and predominant practice that had gone on for centuries, “it doesn’t need mine.”

In other damning news from Old Ivy, the Harvard  web site calls Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard,  currently pending before the Supreme Court, as a “politically motivated lawsuit.”  That’s the case in which Asian-American students allege that Harvard discriminates against them (like it discriminates against whites) in its admissions policies.  The web site states, “Harvard College does not discriminate against applicants from any group in its admission processes.” This is pure “it isn’t what it is” gaslighting. One can argue that affirmative action, which is the real issue  in the case, should continue and that it passes ethical standards via utilitarian balancing, but it cannot be denied that  the practice isn’t discrimination. The statement is a lie. Continue reading →

Leadership Ethics: The First Lady’s Ignorant Whine

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Dr. Jill is having a difficult month. I almost put her latest post-breakfast taco remarks under the “Unethical Quote” heading, but her infuriating comments during a private Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Nantucket, Massachusetts qualify as more ignorant and incompetent than anything else.

Attempting to defend her husband’s miserable performance as President over the past 18 months and to rebut the public’s overwhelmingly negative assessment of his Presidency so far, the First Lady whined—and yes, that is a fair characterization—

“[The President] had so many hopes and plans for things he wanted to do, but every time you turned around, he had to address the problems of the moment…He’s just had so many things thrown his way. Who would have ever thought about what happened [with the Supreme Court overturning] Roe v Wade? Well, maybe we saw it coming, but still we didn’t believe it. The gun violence in this country is absolutely appalling. We didn’t see the war in Ukraine coming.” 

Awww, poor Joe! He’s had to deal with the same challenge as every other President since the beginning of the Republic! Damn! It’s just one thing after another! Who could have predicted it?

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: GOP Senate Candidate Herschel Walker [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

“Since we don’t control the air, our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air. So when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then — now we got we to clean that back up.”

Yes, Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker really said those words, in that order. The gibberish is on a recently released video of an appearance he made last week at a local GOP picnic in Hall County, northeast of Atlanta, when Walker spoke, if you can call it that, about climate change. The Republican Party, desperate to take control of the Senate, actually nominated a candidate to defeat Democratic incumbent Ralph Warnock whose grasp of science, logic and language is that infantile.

Walker’s sole qualifications, if you can call them that, for the Senate are that he is a local and national sports celebrity, and black. He has no other qualifications. In addition to his obvious lack of education and erudition, he has also lied repeatedly for years, presenting himself as someone he is not. He is a neon-bright hypocrite, lecturing about the responsibilities of fatherhood while hiding the existence of his own children conceived without the security of a secure relationship with their mothers. Continue reading →

Thursday Ethics Thinkin’ And Theorizin’, 7/14/2022: The Horror…The Horror…

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

I just stumbled upon that video from “The Red Skelton Show,” vintage early Seventies. The ethical values being destroyed here are competence and respect (for the audience, for the culture, for the nation, for music and dance.) You can learn so much from the thing, and yet it raises so many questions…like, how did the culture devolve from “Good Morning!” in “Singing in the Rain” to this slop in 20 years? Is this what killed movie musicals—a sudden lack of taste? What caused it? Did the choreographer know he or she was presenting shit? How could he live with himself? They paid someone to create that! Did Simon and Garfunkel see this? Why didn’t they kill themselves? How do we explain Liberace to future generations? How can anyone claim that the US is a nest of white supremacy when whites publicly humiliated themselves like this? Seeing those dancers with their insipid expression and their ridiculous outfits made me want to rip my skin off.

If the United States could survive the Seventies, it can survive again. This video gives me hope and perspective, and I will regard it as beneficial on balance, provided that I can get it out of my brain before it drives me stark, raving mad.

1. Least surprising poll result of the year: A Pew Research Center poll determined that, among reporters who say their outlet’s audience leans left, 30% support “equal coverage for all sides,” and 69% said that “it is not always deserved.” I have problems with Pew’s framing of the issue—you know, polls. Presenting the facts fairly and objectively shouldn’t involve “sides” at all. The objective should be to explain events and issues without picking or having “sides.”

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: UC Berkeley Law Prof. Khiara Bridges

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“I’m answering a more interesting question to me”

—-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 →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 7/11/2022: Twitter Wars And More

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

But first, a cheerful song, because it’s all downhill from here…

Speaking of music, some opening notes are in order:

  • Yesterday was the anniversary of the much-heralded Scopes “Monkey Trial,” a 1925 ethics train wreck that I wrote about extensively last year, here and here.
  • Today, July 11, marks two of the most vivid examples of how random chance changes everything—history, culture, values, traditions– in ways that cannot be imagined. The first was the foolish duel in 1804 between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr that resulted in Hamilton’s premature death (but ultimately in a boffo Broadway musical!). The second was Count Claus von Stauffenberg’s close-but-no-cigar assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler in 1944.
  • Nearer to the present, the apparent collapse of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is disappointing, because it would make reporting on various Twitter-Twiggered ethics issues a lot easier if I could start an account again in good conscience, as I was prepared to do once the service got out from under the clutches of its current censorious and progressive-biased masters.
  • I also haven’t felt like participating in Facebook of late, as the Woke Hysteria among my once rational friends there over the recent SCOTUS decisions is too great a temptation–as in “target”— for me. Right now they just want an echo chamber to scream in, and that’s what they have. Someone somewhere on the web opined yesterday that late night talk shows,  “Saturday Night Live” and its ilk were no longer primarily about comedy, but rather therapy sessions for angry and depressed progressives and Democrats, with the shows using mockery and insults to reaffirm their convictions about “the others”—those dumb, evil, racist conservatives. I think that may be a perceptive analysis. “Saturday Night Live” is a particularly vivid example: the show that once reveled in portraying Gerald Ford as a bumbling klutz and George W. Bush as an outright moron week after week while they were in the White House now hesitates to exploit the comedy gold represented by Biden’s misadventures and Kamala Harris in general. It proves that SNL is more interested in hanging out with the cool kids than actually being funny—which is supposedly its mission. This is a conflict of interest, and the producer and writers aren’t even attempting to resolve it ethically.

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 →

Just Because Someone Is An Idiot Doesn’t Mean It’s Ethical To Make A Fool Out Of Him: The Roy Moore Libel Suit Dismissal

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at New York refused to revive a lawsuit filed by former Alabama Chief Justice and failed Senate candidate from Alabama Roy Moore (and his wife) against  comedian comedian Sasha Baron Cohen. Moore v. Baron Cohen  had its genesis when the “Borat” satirist and actor tricked Moore into traveling to Washington, D.C. to receive a fictional award for supporting Israel and to be interviewed for Israeli TV. It was all a set-up to ridicule Moore on an installment of Cohen’s Showtime production, “Who Is America?”

Cohen presented himself to Moore as an Israeli anti-terrorism expert with a high-tech military intelligence device ( he’s holding it above) that supposedly was able to detect pedophiles. Moore’s Senate run was crushed by credible allegations that he had sought relationships with underage teenage girls: the episode of the program in which the interview aired was introduced with news clips reporting those allegations, including one involving a fourteen-year-old girl at the time. In a cringeworthy confrontation, Cohen’s character waved “the pedophile-detector” over Moore as it beeped loudly. Moore then walked out of the “interview.” Moore and his wife sued for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: R.I. State Senator Tiara Mack

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

I’m late to the party on this one, but it deserves a special post.

That’s Rhode Island state senator Tiara Mack’s Fourth of July video, showing her (as you can see) twerking upside-down in a bikini. Mack says to the camera, “Vote Senator Mack.” Classy!

The mind boggles. Elected officials are obligated to represent high standards of decorum and respect for their office. Does it really have to be explained why this conduct is irresponsible and disrespectful, as well as civically incompetent? If twerking half-naked on one’s head is acceptable public behavior by a legislator, what isn’t? This is, in the words of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “defining deviancy down.” Continue reading →

From The “Res Ipsa Loquitur” (“The Thing Speaks For Itself”) Files

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

In addition, this is also signature significance.

What kind of political party in America over its long history, other than the American Communist Party, would think it would be appropriate to post such a thing, even once? What kind of political party would have such Bizarro World American values that it would think, even for a second, that its members and potential recruits would appreciate such a sentiment? What kind of political party would hire someone, even one employee—I don’t care if he or she is a teenager—who would lack the ethics alarms to know such an announcement would be a national insult?

As I’ve mentioned before, one supplementary benefit of the Dobbs decision is that it has caused a lot of activists, politicians, celebrities and organizations to show the world just how ruthless, corrupted and vicious they are.

The tweet was deleted.

Too late!