Gender and Sex

Talk About “The Wrong Hill To Die On”: Lisa Cook’s Refusal To Obey The President’s Lawful Dismissal Is Just Defiance

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The woman doesn’t have a metaphorical leg to stand on, except the disgusting (but still reflex), “There goes that racist Trump again, trying to bring down a black woman.”

“I strongly recommend that you suspend Ms. Cook from the Federal Reserve Board immediately,” states senior DOJ Ed Martin’s letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. Of course. If he doesn’t suspend her, that’s grounds to fire Powell. “No one believes it’s appropriate for her to remain in her role while serious questions linger,” wrote Martin. That’s not quite right: Democrats and the Trump Deranged believe that everyone should just refuse to acknowledge that Donald Trump is President of the United States.

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Examining Two Unethical Pathologies

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The substacker “Holly Mathnerd,” not for the first time, has a well-written and interesting post about her reaction to a book by the “star” of a reality show I had never heard of and definitely never watched. Christine Brown Woolley’s memoir “Sister Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Family, and Finding Freedom,” released today, is about one of the “stars” of “Sister Wives,” a reality show that has been running for 15 years, including 20 seasons. The show centers on Kody Brown, a fundamentalist Mormon man with twelve children from three wives. His “family” dwells in what Holly calls a “polygamist house”with three apartments branching off a shared common space. That’s Kody above with one of his other wives.

Yikes.

I really don’t care about the details. Polygamy and polyamory (the same thing but without bothering with the marriages) are unethical; never mind the morality issues. Like adultery and prostitution, these are practices that undermine families, real marriages, subjugate women and harm children. Libertarians see nothing wrong with polygamy, or at least think it should be legal, which adequately tells you what’s wrong with libertarians.

I can’t imagine buying a book by a woman who voluntarily submitted to a polyamorous relationship and now wants to make money by writing about what a mistake it was. Gee, ya think? I put Woolley’s memoir in the same category as I would a book by someone who used to shoot nails into his head but who now realizes it was probably a mistake.

From Holly Mathnerd’s account, it seems like the better part of the book is its account of just how phony “reality” shows are, not that this should be a shock to anyone who is familiar with the genre. Holly writes in part,

“…The memoir also peels back the curtain on how fake “reality” really is. Watching the show, you’d think you were seeing the Browns’ daily life: family dinners, arguments, weddings, tears. But Christine makes clear that what you’re really seeing is a carefully curated product — sometimes scripted, sometimes manipulated, always edited with an eye toward what would get people talking on Twitter.

Kody, in particular, seemed to understand this instinctively. He weaponized the cameras. He would drop painful revelations on air — things Christine was hearing for the first time along with millions of strangers — and then claim that the wives couldn’t “control the narrative” because they weren’t “being honest enough.” Meanwhile, what they were really up against was the power of editing: hours of footage boiled down into forty-two minutes that could make anyone look like a saint, a villain, or an afterthought depending on what the producers wanted.

It reminded me of the gaslighting built into the whole setup. The audience was constantly asked to question its own eyes: “No, you didn’t see favoritism; you saw family unity. No, you didn’t see cruelty; you saw tough love. No, you didn’t see neglect; you saw the noble sacrifice of plural marriage.” Christine’s memoir blows a hole in that façade by admitting what fans always suspected: our eyes weren’t lying, the edit was….

Another benefit of the post was that the blogger introduced the term “parasocial relationship,” which I had never encountered before. She didn’t define it, but I looked it up: Google’s bot says that “a parasocial relationship is a one-sided, one-way connection in which an individual develops a strong sense of intimacy, familiarity, and emotional investment with a public figure or fictional character they don’t know personally. These relationships are common and often occur through media, such as television, social media, or podcasts, where an individual feels like they have a personal connection with the person or character on screen or in their feed. While these relationships can be a natural part of human behavior and even provide positive influences, they become unhealthy if they interfere with real-life interactions or daily functioning.” 

Good to know! You can read Holly’s post here….

Unethical Quote of the Month: MSNBC’s Jen Psaki

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

“Prayer is not freaking enough. Prayer does not end school shootings. Prayers do not make parents feel safe sending their kids to school. Prayer does not bring these kids back. Enough with the thoughts and prayers.”

—-Former Biden paid liar (no, not her, the smart one) Jen Psaki, now an MSNBC propagandist, joining in the mandatory Axis spin following another mass shooting.

For some reason a memo went out from Totalitarian Central in the Axis network telling all loyalists to attack the obligatory references to prayer after two children were killed and more than a dozen others were injured this week when a shooter opened fire during Mass at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis.

Psaki’s anti-prayer outburst on Twitter along with several other progressive anti-gun demagogues can go in to a dictionary definition of “straw man.” Nobody suggested that prayers were sufficient to address mass shootings and criminal gun violence. Nobody suggested that praying would bring the dead back either. Nor does anyone seriously believe that the victims were killed because they were praying: churches and schools have become crime scenes of choice by the murderously deranged because those are places that ban or prohibit fire arms, so a law-abiding gun owner is not as likely to be around to stop the carnage. Never mind: the Usual Suspects were instructed (no, I don’t think it is a coincidence) to denigrate Americans of faith—after all, too many of them support Evil President Trump.

“These children were probably praying when they were shot to death at Catholic school. Don’t give us your fucking thoughts and prayers. Trump got rid of the Office of Gun Violence and Prevention. Trump gutted the resources that were in place to keep our communities safe,” Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., wrote on social media. Good one, Max! There is no evidence that the Office of Gun Violence and Prevention prevented any gun violence or could: it was just another “do something” waste of government funds. Meanwhile, WHAT resources “that keep communities safe”? Frost didn’t say, because anything he said would be idiotic or a lie. He did get a chance to say “fuck,” though, since that proves that a Democrat is serious.

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About That “Racist” Democrat Sign in Virginia…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I’ve been wrestling with myself over whether to comment on the photo above, which is getting lots of play in the conservative media (especially in the D.C. area) and none at all in the Axis news sources. To begin with, I have been wondering whether the sign is a fake. The alleged message that is causing all the ruckus is on the back of the sign, and something else is on the other side that I can’t quite make out. Odd.

Winsome Sears is the Lieutenant Governor in Virginia and was widely regarded as a rising star of the GOP when the conservative black woman was elected, but she has been regularly thrashed in the polls compared to her Democratic opponent, Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a pro-abortion Pelosi acolyte whose shtick is to pose as a “moderate” since compared to so many of her thoroughly whacked-out woke colleagues, she is one.

Is that message on the back of the sign really racist? It is unquestionably stupid, and proposes a dubious analogy, but is referring to a candidate’s race inherently “racist”?

I tend toward regarding that message as Golden Rule-based, as in “How would you feel if a law prevented you from using public facilities?” I suspect that Sears could deftly explain why the two situations are not equivalent, but by the admittedly low standards of political signs generally, I’m inclined to give that one a pass.

The other issue being raised by the sign in some quarters is the age, gender and race of the woman holding it. Many have commented on how the loudest protesters against the National Guard’s efforts to reduce crime in D.C. are white seniors, and white senior women especially. Why is this? Aging hippies? Is it because seniors are the demographic most likely to watch cable news, and thus are most susceptible to MSNBC brain (and ethics) rot?

Pleading Not Guilty Is Never Unethical, But On Occasion It Is…What? Futile? Disingenuous?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

In 2019, John R. Anderson III, 42 (above) was sentenced to six years in prison for aggravated stalking in DeKalb County (Illinois). Now he’s being charged with stalking again in a new case, as he faces 11 counts of stalking, harassing and violating an order of protection. Anderson has pleaded not guilty, which is his Constitutional right. Of course he’s innocent until proven guilty, and he and his lawyer cannot be called unethical for wanting to make the prosecution prove the case against him beyond a reasonable doubt.

Nonetheless, this appears to be one of those cases where the not guilty plea itself is likely to destroy any credibility the defendant might have. You see, Anderson allowed himself to star in a 2022 episode of “I Am a Stalker.” Not only that, but the woman he admitted to stalking in that episode is the same woman he is accused of stalking in the current case.

According to court records, his re-stalking occurred last December and January of this year. First he violated a 2024 order of protection and “harassed” the woman by placing messages and content on her cellphone, writing a letter to her, texting her and making repeated calls to her using different phone numbers and apps to hide his contact information. He also is accused of surveilling her residence by parking in front of her home and her place of employment, “repeatedly calling and texting her,” and placing cupcakes on her vehicle.

Oooh, “cupcake stalking” sounds especially creepy.

Authorities say that Anderson gained access to her car, placed a GPS tracking device in it, and gained access to her Amazon Alexa device. This guy is good. He sure sounds like an especially experienced and professional stalker; this is probably why Netflix sought him out for its series, which my sock drawer crisis sadly preventing me from watching.

My pro tip would be that any time one’s plea is likely to cause the jury to roll their eyes so hard their eyeballs cramp, cutting a plea deal with the prosecutor is the wiser and, yes, the more ethical course.

Was Jen Pawol the Most Qualified Umpire or Was She Just “Historic”?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Over the weekend, minor league umpire Jen Pawol became the first woman to umpire in a Major League Baseball game, handling the bases in Game 1 of an Atlanta Braves-Miami Marlins doubleheader then moving behind the plate to call balls and strikes for Sunday’s game. Of course, MLB made a great hullabaloo over the momentous occasion. At various times during the season, minor league umpires are brought up to the big leagues to fill in for umpires getting their union-dictated vacations. Pawol is the only woman currently umpiring in the minor leagues. Thanks to baseball’s (and Commissioner Rob Manfred’s) wokeness obsession, she took her place in baseball history with a lingering and unavoidable doubt: would a man with her record and credentials have been chosen by MLB for the weekend umpiring chores? Were there more qualified and deserving male umpires who were passed over because they had y-chromosomes?

This is the scourge that the DEI fad has created. I feel sympathy for Pawol, but there is no avoiding it.

Naturally, MLB was ready for the questions and the suspicion. “Jen Pawol’s MLB debut is no PR stunt — she earned it the hard way” blared a Fox News headline, following an MLB press release. Methinks they doth protest too much. My suspicions were raised because just a few days earlier, the Boston Red Sox created team “history” by having an all-female broadcast team for a game. Why? Well, you know, because. The women were fine, professional play-by-play and color announcers, but nothing special except for their high voices. I’m sure there were plenty of long-time minor league male broadcasters who would have loved the chance to do a big league game, but, again, they wouldn’t be “historic,” so they were out of luck.

As with umpires, almost all baseball broadcasters are male and white. There’s no demonstrable discrimination at the heart of this: it’s self selection. Women don’t play hardball; blacks tend to be drawn to other sports as well. Why should that circumstance provide a special advantage to the minorities who do enter the field? Baseball doesn’t benefit from diversity of umpires: what matters is getting the calls right. Baseball fans want engaging, knowledgeable game broadcasts, and couldn’t care less about the sex and color of those providing it.

Meanwhile, there is still room for Manfred to carve out some more gratuitous history: baseball still hasn’t had a heterosexual female ump in the major leagues.

Sydney Sweeney Indeed Has Great Genes and Those Freaking Out Over Her Jeans Ad Do Not

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

If an attractive black model or actress had made this commercial, nobody would be complaining. But because Sweeney is white and blonde, and because the American Left has lost its mind, a classic provocative blue-jeans ad (Remember Brooke Shields saying “Nothing gets between me and my Calvins”?) is being cited as proof that America is embracing Hitler’s Master Race narrative. Sure.

This warrants an Ethics Alarms “Bite Me!” if anything does.

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Comment of the Day: “Return of the ‘2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck’”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

AM Golden invades the realm of Ethics Alarms long-form historical ethics commenter Steve-O-In NJ with an epic Comment of the Day, and a thing of beauty it is indeed. The post also brings back many memories I would rather have left buried. Here it is, in reaction to the essay, “Return of the ‘2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck'”:

***

This is a 60-plus year process in the making. Barry Goldwater ran a fairly incompetent campaign but he absolutely had the news media biting at his heels the entire time. They gushed about Bobby Kennedy in ’68, they took potshots at Nixon. By the time Reagan came along, he faced hostility from a large segment of the press and Hollywood. In the meantime, Brain Trusters infiltrated the universities and encouraging the student protest movements instead of explaining how our Constitution was designed to work, culminating in a culture 50 years later that understands its country so poorly that it gets its news from Jon Stewart who is able to ignorantly proclaim that the Constitution doesn’t say that protests have to be peaceful.

In the election of 1992, Arsenio Hall ranted in his monologue when President George H.W. Bush said he probably wouldn’t appear on Hall’s show after Gov. Bill Clinton did, yelling about what made Bush think Hall wanted him on his show. Open hostility over who may or may not be a guest on Hall’s show paved the way for the venom spewed on every Late Night show today.

Believe all women? Not if they accused the first “black” President, Bill Clinton, of sexual harassment and even rape. “Anyone can drag $100 through a trailer park,” right? Bubba was caught with his pants down and allowed us to be caught with ours down on 9/11/2001 when he blew off an offer to hand over Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, the culture wars were heating up and Americans were becoming concerned about the country’s direction.

George W. Bush – faced with a supremely hostile news media and entertainment industry – endured screeds about stolen elections, fake Presidencies and two mocking cable television shows (“That’s My Bush!” and “Lil Bush”) before he gained some respect after 9/11, but never really got the credibility he deserved. In pop culture, far too many Bush-deranged Harry Potter fans believed they saw the myopic Ministry of Magic’s denial that the evil Voldemort had returned in the efforts by the Bush administration to urge vigilance in watching out for terrorists. Ah, remember when J.K. Rowling was the voice of truth? The damage to the American public’s understanding of the Constitution, particularly the Judicial branch, continued apace

Bob Dole and John McCain were treated as racist, sexist old men who would put this country into a Nazi theocracy; Mitt Romney was framed as a racist, sexist and religious nut who would send this country into a weird Mormon Nazi theocracy. All three were all virtually Hitler.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama was the be all and end all of existence. He who could do no wrong—and could not be touched because he had black skin and anyone who criticized him was a racist—took full advantage by damaging America on the world stage and inciting racial divisiveness on a scale that hadn’t been seen in 50 years.

When Donald Trump was campaigning in 2016, the news media covered him incessantly. It now appears that they wanted him to be the nominee because, in the words of Stephen Colbert on the day my family and I sat in his audience in NYC on a hot July day as he did a riff on how corrupt Hillary Clinton was, “Hillary so corrupt the only candidate she can beat is Donald Trump!”

It turned out she couldn’t even do that.

So the forces that had been coming together for 60 years—the biased news media, the leftist entertainment industry, progressive-dominated academia and other elite, corrupted professions coalesced into a single so-called Resistance Movement. Trump says people coming through our border with Mexico aren’t all angels, they accuse him of saying all immigrants are criminals. Trump says not everyone protesting in Charlottesville was a racist Nazi, he’s accused of “bothsidism” and pestered endlessly about condemning white supremacy even though he did condemn it. Trump is falsely accused of colluding with a foreign power, leading a big chunk of the population to believe his Presidency is the result of another stolen election.

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Geewhatasurprise: Hospitals Harvest Organs From Living Patients

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Waaay back in 1978, the film version of physician/novelist Robin Cook’s science fiction novel “Coma” (above) gave audiences the heebie-jeebies about being operated on. An “ends-justifies the means” chief of surgery had devised a diabolical way to have fresh organs ready to become life-saving transplants: one specially rigged operating room turned healthy-ish patients into brain dead victims (A young Tom Selleck was one of them!), and they ended up in a storage facility where their bodies were kept fresh and breathing until hearts, lings, livers or kidneys were needed.

Haven’t you always assumed that hospitals sometimes took essential organs from organ donors who were still alive, if barely? I have friends who aren’t organ donors specifically for that reason, and, yes, most of them remember “Coma.”

From an HHS press release this week:

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I Guess, This Being An Ethics Blog, I Have To Post On “Coldplaygate.”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Social media has gone bonkers since last Wednesday night, when Andy Byron, the married CEO of New York-based software development company Astronomer, was caught by a “Kiss-cam” cuddling Kristin Cabot, the company’s head of human resources, on the Jumbotron at a Coldplay concert at Gillette stadium in Foxborough, Mass. When the two realized they were on camera, they went out of their way to look as guilty as possible, pulling apart, with her turning her back on the camera and him ducking out of view.

Morons. When you are caught beyond escaping, life competence dictates that you must have the presence of mind to maintain whatever shred of dignity you may have left. (Practice helps.) The couple’s futile efforts at a cover-up prompted Coldplay front man Chris Martin to say from the stage: “Either they’re having an affair or they’re very shy.”

Then the clip gained millions of hits on X, TikTok and Instagram, so it was easy to identify the illicit lovers. Astronomer announced that it had put Byron on leave, saying, “Astronomer is committed to the values and culture that have guided us since our founding. Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability.” Over the weekend, Byron resigned.

The incident is an instant classic, which means people will remember it longer than the usual day-and-a-half. The Philadelphia Phillies made fun of the scandal by screening a video on the Jumbotron during Friday night’s game showing the team’s mascot Phillie Phanatic in an embrace with a fuzzy green companion. Commemorative merchandise, such as a sweatshirt bearing the legend “I TOOK MY SIDEPIECE TO THE COLDPLAY CONCERT AND IT RUINED MY LIFE” can be purchased online.

Ethics notes…

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