Ethics Dunces

Paging Mel Brooks! Madison, Wisconsin’s Halloween Hitler Costume Freak-Out

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I don’t understand this story at all. It represents a complete loss of perspective, human, societal and ethical. I do not know how we got to this place, but we need to get out of it, and the faster the better.

On Halloween, a man was seen in Madison, Wisconsin walking down state street dressed as Adolf Hitler. We are told that horrified onlookers called the police. Oh, fine. In a college town, more than one person, who would normally be the village idiot, thinks it is illegal to dress as a historical character. The police department felt it had to issue a statement explaining that wearing the costume did not “rise to the level of a prosecutable crime” and that the faux Nazi leader “engaged in protected freedoms of speech and expression.” The statement, however, also said that the act of such costuming  justified “fear and disgust” and was “troubling.”

Well, after Ethics Breach #1 in the episode, the ignorant fools calling the police, this was Ethics Breach #2. It is not the police department’s job or function to critique Halloween costumes, especially in Halloween. “Fear’??? This was too scary a costume for Halloween? Or does “fear” mean that the alarmists legitimately felt that they would be harmed by…what, looking at the guy? Were they afraid he would invade Poland? As an ethicist, I’m disgusted that the Madison police would validate hysterical feelings of disgust. The guy was wearing a costume on Halloween! It is not the police department’s business to announce how anyone else should feel about it. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce (At Least): ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I had become thoroughly sick of ESPN’s race-obsessed loud-mouth Stephen A. Smith long before I stopped watching the channel. Eventually I even eliminated it from our satellite package: ESPN, like everything Disney touches lately (except the Beatles), is unwatchable, and Smith is Exhibit A. His latest bit of gratuitous race-baiting would get him canned from any respectable network, but then there are no respectable networks. Naturally, he had to endorse Houston manager Dusty Baker’s biased and brain-dead assertion that Major League Baseball had some kind of vendetta against or racist avoidance of American-born black players (because foreign-born black players aren’t really black, or something). Just ponder this :

Continue reading →

2022 Mid-Term Elections Panic Report: The New York Times Editors Endorse Terrorism

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

There are a lot of signs that the Woke, the Left, the Resistance, Democrats and the news media that filters reality for their objectives are collectively losing their grip in theincreasingly unavoidable realization that their dreams of societal transformation in America are going to be significantly hobbled by the upcoming vote-fest. We saw this stage coming (or should have) some time ago, with perhaps the most striking confirmation arriving when Joe Biden decided to channel Der Fuhrer while calling half the population fascists. Yet I didn’t see this coming, because I am a sap, and persist in my childish idealism telling me that as wacko as they seem right now, these are all traditional, ethical Americans at heart who are just having a bad six or seven years.

In the span of less than a week, the New York Times editors thought it responsible to publish two op-ed columns extolling the virtues of terrorism when not enough people want to do what the Good, Wise, Smart People—you know, like them—have decided is best. Jamelle Boiue, whose usual specialty in Times punditry is anti-white racism, actually lionized John Brown, whose body not only lies a-moldering in the grave but was an engine of random murder and terrorism.

Channeling W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1909 ode to Brown (the populists of that era often admired the lunatic: Clarence Darrow was also an admirer), Bouie agrees that Brown was motivated by “social doctrines of the French Revolution with its emphasis on freedom and power in political life” (Speaking of terror!), and his “inchoate but growing belief in a more just and a more equal distribution of property.” He continues in part,

“Has John Brown no message — no legacy, then, to the twentieth century?” asks Du Bois. “He has and it is this great word: the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression….Viewed in this light, Du Bois says, the memory of John Brown stands as a “mighty warning” to the United States and its peers. To wait to rectify the sins of the present — to sidestep justice in favor of comfort — is to make the final price of liberty all the more expensive…

“What Brown decided, Du Bois continues, was that he had to strike a blow for justice in his time. “It will cost something — even blood and suffering — but it will not cost as much as waiting…Du Bois’s broadside against hierarchy and exclusion still lands with as much force in 2022 as I’m sure it did in 1909. His warning that the tolerance of injustice will only lead to darker places and “darker deeds” is still relevant. And his closing reminder that without real “equality of opportunity” the best in humanity cannot be “discovered and conserved” remains as true now as it was then.”

Who’s advocating civil war now?

Continue reading →

Most Unethical Non-Criminal Cabinet Member In History?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Well, I don’t know. Quite a few Cabinet members have been convicted of crimes in office, and the Biden Cabinet has other bad apples, notably Attorney General Merrick Garland. Still, it’s hard to imagine any federal department head more incompetent or guilty of dereliction of duty than Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Or more of a weasel. To be fair, he is the first Cuban-born Homeland Security Secretary, which makes him “historic” and yet another diversity feather in the current Democratic regime’s cap. And after all, that’s what’s really important, right?

I wish I were kidding.

Mayorkas, you no doubt recall, says that our Southern border is “secure,” apparently using the archaic definition of “secure” that meant “as porous as cheesecloth” in Chaucerian English. He also attempted to install an Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board, until even the Democratic Party’s captive news media objected, which always signals that the Left’s totalitarian aspirations are getting ahead of themselves. But he really secured his place in the U.S. Cabinet Members Chamber of Horrors, it has now been revealed, by deliberately condemning border agents of whipping illegal immigrants along the Texas-Mexico border when he knew the allegations were false.

Continue reading →

“1776” Actress Sara Porkalob Is An Ethics Dunce And Should Be Fired

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The new, non-traditionally cast, “diversity”-pandering revival of “1776” is about to open on Broadway. Ethics Alarms already discussed it here: the production seems like a cynical, misguided, truly terrible idea that is likely to crash and burn, but as I wrote last month, “I hope the result is brilliant and illuminating.” I also wrote, “What I see, however, is a cynical abortion of a classic musical motivated by arrogance, ignorance, and greed.” In other words, the thing has a lot of self-inflicted problems standing in the way of critical and financial success, nicely symbolized by the photo above of an Asian-American woman playing slaveholding Continental Congress member Edward Rutledge singing “Molasses to Rum to Slaves” in the musical’s most dramatic scene. As a stage director and American history fanatic, I don’t see how having that song performed by someone who can’t evoke Rutledge in any way does anything but undermine the best song in the show. But hey, you never know.

One thing the radical production doesn’t need, however, is for that same performer to trash the production publicly. Here is “Rutledge,” Sara Porkalob, in an interview with Vulture’s Jason P. Frank:

“To me, the play is a relic. It is a dusty, old thing… On the inside, I’m cringing… I’m like, It’s okay. I wouldn’t have wanted it this way, but I am doing my job….[The direction] is horrible. I hate it… What I want to do with my time is make new works with collaborators…I feel like I’m going to work.”

Continue reading →

Clarence Thomas Gets A Rare “Double Dunce,” Ethical And Political

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I really don’t comprehend how this can happen with someone like Justice Clarence Thomas. Donald Trump, sure. But Thomas is smarter than this.

Between 2003 and 2007, Ginni Thomas, the Justice’s controversial wife and a hard-Right activist, earned $686,589 from the Heritage Foundation, according to a Common Cause review of the foundation’s IRS records. Yet Justice Thomas failed to note the income in his Supreme Court financial disclosure forms for those years. He checked a box labeled “none” where “spousal non-investment income” is supposed to be disclosed.

Federal judges are bound by law to disclose the source of spousal income, meaning that if the information found by Common Cause is accurate, Thomas did not comply with the law. SCOTUS justices are supposed to obey the law, even more than everybody else, in some respects. Legal ethics expert Steven Lubet (I used his legal ethics textbook when I taught the subject at American University!) says that a failure to disclose spousal income by a federal judge “is not a crime of any sort, but there is a potential civil penalty” for it. “I am not aware of a single case of a judge being penalized simply for this,” the professor says.

Continue reading →

Now THIS Is An Unethical Movie Review!

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

True, it comes to us from The Daily Kos, so it shouldn’t be news. That far, far Left site jumped the ethics shark so long ago, the shark was a Megalodon, and the Julie Principle was devised for such situations. The Daily Kos is dishonest, biased, and believes in stimulating its loyal progressive-wacko readership by any means necessary, so why is Ethics Alarms pointing out that it is again doing what it does and can be relied upon to do, without shame or regret?

Just this: unethical film, stage, and book reviews are a passion of mine, and I’ve never seen one this bad.

The headline at the Kos is “Movie review: ‘My Son Hunter’ is a soft-porn conspiracy flick for weird conservative incels.”

Continue reading →

The President Scores A Jumbo!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

And it’s a really funny Jumbo, almost as funny as Jimmy’s (“Elephant? What elephant?”), if you ignore how sad, scary and pathetic Biden saying that now is.

Biden last night: “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.”

Biden today: “I don’t consider any Trump supporter a threat to the country.”

Divisive rhetoric? What divisive rhetoric?”

Ah, so many things jump into my fevered brain…

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: The Denver Public School System

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Oh yeah, our public school students are in the very best of hands.

Get this:

A video called “Don’t be a Bystander: 6 Tips for Responding to Racist Attacks,” was shown to Denver South High School students in their classes. The film explains that “in our current political moment, White supremacists and White nationalists have been emboldened, and as a result, public attacks are on the rise.”  Those tips for responding to “racist attacks” include do “not call the police” because it “escalates, rather than reduces” violence.  You see, “police have been trained to see people of color, gender-nonconforming folks, and Muslims as criminals, they often treat victims as perpetrators of violence. So, if the victim hasn’t asked you to call the police, do not — I repeat, do not — call the police.”

Apparently some parents had a problem with this particularly heinous example of indoctrination. Five law enforcement associations in Colorado also objected  to the video, warning that it would increase “negative perceptions of law enforcement and [hurt] our efforts to build trusting relationships within the communities we serve, including schools and student populations.”

Ya think?

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: The Operators Of Detroit’s Belle Isle Park

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

This place should not be in business.

The Giant Slide at Belle Isle Park reopened last week after being closed for two years because of the pandemic (how this ride could possibly be a virus-spreader is beyond me, but that’s The Great Stupid for you). The 50-foot metal slide has been a  Detroit summer tradition since 1967. When it went back into operation last week, however, “the waxing was a little robust,” according to Ron Olson, the chief of parks and recreation for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. It’s nice that he can be so cavalier about people nearly breaking their necks. As a result of that robust waxing, every bump in the slide sent fun-seekers airborne, as you can see from one of the many videos made of the thing above. One woman bumped her head and lost her phone, headphones, glasses, a shoe and even a sock on the way down.

What fun! GMAC Cash, a Detroit rapper, even put the experience to song: “You can break your back, on the Giant Slide,” he raps. “You can even break your neck, on the giant slide. You can even bump your head, on the giant slide.”

Apparently nobody connected with the park bothered to stage a few test runs to see if the slide was safe after being put back into service after two years. No state agency checked it either, though most such amusement park attractions have to be inspected before the public can use them. It gets worse. Even though the ride was obviously dangerous, over 500 sliders risked their necks before the slugs operating the park thought hard about the violence they were seeing and said, “Ya know, maybe we need to fix this.” Then they closed the ride. (It reopened last weekend.)

The ethical values on display here are competence and responsibility, or rather the lack of them. The fact that nobody was seriously injured is pure moral luck. This is how people get killed.

The episode ranks an “Otter”: