Government & Politics

Rueful Ethics Observations On The 2023 State Of The Union Address

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The text of the speech as released is here; it does not, of course, contain the usual Biden word-slurring, stumbles and botches.

In case you want to save time, I’ll give you a short summary: last night’s State of the Union Speech was as unethical and despicable as any I can recall. I would have to go back and review some others, notably some of Bill Clinton’s to be certain, and you know, sock drawer. It doesn’t really matter whether it was “the most” unethical; it was unethical enough to be disgraceful, and to leave the nation no better, and quite possibly worse, than before President Biden delivered it.

The photo above, which I have posted at least three times before and intend to keep posting until Biden is out of office or drooling in a home somewhere, is not from last night’s speech, but from his democratic norm-shattering “Soul of the Nation” speech, or as I call it, his ‘anyone who opposes me and my party is an evil  fascist and an enemy of the state’ speech. It is relevant because no President who makes a speech like that can credibly or ethically come back less than five months later and say, as he did last night, Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “‘What’s Going On Here?’ Why Does Disney Think It Is Appropriate To Produce And Circulate Abrasive, Divisive, Confrontational Interest Group Propaganda And Indoctrination Like This?”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I have a confession to make. I know that the ethical and moral deterioration of the Disney corporation is a major ethics catastrophe with dire consequences for our society and culture, and Ethics Alarms should have been covering it more thoroughly. It hasn’t, and that’s because this topic is particularly painful for me.

I owe so much to Disney’s creations and philosophy. I learned a lot of ethics from the shows and movies growing up, and many of my most enduring and important interests and hobbies were inspired by Walt’s vision. My fascination with dinosaurs began with the terrifying T-Rex sequence in “The Rite of Spring” segment of “Fantasia,” for example. My reverence for the Alamo was inspired by Disney’s “Davy Crockett” series. The first dramatic production of any kind that genuinely move me was “Bambi.” I never got to visit a Disney theme park until college, but finally going to Disneyland after dreaming about it as a kid was one of the epiphanal experiences of my entire life: it was perhaps the only time something I had looked forward to was even better than I expected it to be. Disney’s perfectionism—at the parks, which were immaculate and overlooked no detail to immerse visitors in the fantasy, and in the TV shows and movies—influenced my own view of professionalism and my approach to directing for the stage. His courage and certitude in pursuing risky creative projects that everyone was telling him were doomed to fail—a full length animated film?—bolstered my own resolve when I have had project ideas that seemed nuts to everyone but me.

(And some were nuts, as it turned out. But the times I was right more than made up for those.)

I could go on, but I won’t. The point is that attacking Disney for me is like savaging a childhood hero, or even a parent. But the country, its culture and mental health is being harmed by the current distortion of Walt’s creation’s destructive alliance with the radical Left. It deserves to be attacked, and it’s time I got down to it.

This Comment of the Day (actually two comments, in sequence) by jmv0405 on the depressing post yesterday on a Disney Critical Race Theory video, makes up for some of that lost time by getting the discussion jump-started. It is also a perceptive and illuminating perspective that I wouldn’t have seen without the comment’s guidance. Continue reading →

Stop Making Me Defend The Grammys! (And It Would Be Refreshing If Republicans Stopped Embarrassing Themselves, Too)

/ Jack Marshall / 52 Comments

You know, if Republicans don’t want to end up with a party base with an average age beyond even that of the Supreme Court, they have to stop channeling the ludicrous ministers of the 1950’s who declared rock and roll the Devil’s music and held bonfires of Elvis Presley records. To be blunt, it’s hysterical and stupid, and the young tend to have contempt for old fogeys who call their entertainment satanic….as well they should.

But the Right just can’t help itself. Even after the Elvis freak-out guaranteed that successive generation of teenagers would still be laughing at old black-and-white films of nerdy, balding, middle-aged white guys in horn-rims pronouncing  The King’s hips a danger to America’s soul, its learning curve is flatter than flat. For there was Ted Cruz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and other conservatives today making asses of themselves and anyone who occasionally takes their party seriously by expressing horror at last night’s Grammys whacked-out highlight,  Sam Smith and Kim Petras‘ performance of “Unholy” featuring fire, demon-imitating dangers, blood-red lighting, and Smith in a set of  horns just like Mr. Scratch. Continue reading →

“What’s Going On Here?” Why Does Disney Think It Is Appropriate To Produce And Circulate Abrasive, Divisive, Confrontational Interest Group Propaganda And Indoctrination Like This?

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Anyone?

I don’t like being shouted at by cartoon characters. Even if they had a valid point, my response to this kind of assaultive advocacy is, has ever been, and always will be…

Bite me.

And There It Is, The Smoking Gun! A Pulitzer-Winning Journalist Declares That His Biased Partisan Opinion Is “Fact”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

This is a fact: most of today’s journalists really think like this, being arrogant, self-inflated, ignorant and incompetent hacks who believe “journalism” means advancing the “greater good” through their craft, the “greater good as defined, of course, by them..

During a National Press Club panel last month supposedly on the journalistic challenges of covering extremism—meaning “How do we make sure as many Democrats are elected as possible, since that is the party 98% of us support?”, Wesley Lowery, the former Washington Post reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism for his coverage of the Ferguson race riots, told his fawning audience,

“We have one political party that traffics in the same talking points as white supremacists, be it on immigration, be it on Muslims, be it on any number of issues, where the mainstream political rhetoric could be written by avowed racists…I’ll be honest, I don’t think very much about the mantle of neutrality. It’s either raining outside or it’s not raining outside. I’m not particularly interested in sounding neutral about which it is….[The Republican Party] is a mix of nativism, of anti-urbanism, of anti-cosmopolitanism, a fear of immigrants. It’s the exact same things that drove the Klan movement of the 1920s. But to say that in public—the way that Newsbusters is going to headline the write-up of this panel is going to be that I compared Donald Trump to the Klan. Right? Now this is a literal true factual description. How can we understand our moment if we are not allowed to make any comparison or add any context?”

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Plumbing The Depths Of The Great Stupid: I Usually Don’t Continue Reading Articles That Start With First Sentences Like This One, Missing Out On Hilarious Race-Obsessed Delusions…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Before we delve into the substance of the article at issue, let me express my gratitude to author David Kaufman for giving me another opportunity to post a brilliant cartoon by one of my heroes, New Yorker satirist/philosopher/humorist Charles Addams. If you read here often, you have seen his work highlighted periodically because it is so often appropriate. In this case, that cartoon above, which made me laugh out loud when I first saw it as a high school student, immediately leapt to mind when I read that Kaufman believes the little white figures in the “walk/don’t walk” traffic lights represent white people.

Did anyone, at the New Yorker, among its readers, among the millions of people who have seen that creepy but very funny drawing in the best-selling collections of Addams’ mordant humor think for a second that it had anything to do with race? No, because it didn’t, doesn’t, and until quite recently, before The Great Stupid spread hate, fear, darkness and toxic cretinism over the land, nobody would be so woke-mad and brainwashed to see racism in everything that they would come to such a bonkers conclusion. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Victor Davis Hanson

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“[W]hen everything becomes racist, then nothing in particular can be racist.”

—Revered conservative scholar and pundit Victor Davis Hanson in his column prompted by the absurd progressive calms that the beating death of young Tyre Nichols by five black police officers was caused by “white supremacy” and “systemic racism.”

Hanson’s piece “Race Everywhere” neatly supports my observation in the previous post that it is time to retire February ‘s designation as “Black History Month” (though “Hot Breakfast Month” can stay). His thesis:

In sum, class, not race, remains the best litmus test of being underprivileged in America. It is no longer synonymous with race.  No wonder the identity politics industry now strains to attach prefixes such as “systemic” or “implicit” to “racism,” or “micro” to “aggression,” purportedly to ferret out bias that otherwise is not apparent. Pause to reflect that America is the only successful multiracial constitutional republic in history.To survive in an increasingly dysfunctional and hostile world abroad, the unique idea of the United States requires concord.  But national cohesion is only possible through citizens subordinating their tribal interests to a common culture. Only then do they cease being automatons of warring tribes and collectives. 

Hanson includes many examples of the fact-immune push to elevate the black race above all others in the U.S. while deliberately reversing our national and societal progress away from segregation and racial hostility, as well as why the movement is neither rational nor responsible. Three that I was aware of include,

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Gee, Could Massachusetts Democrats Come Up With A MORE Unethical Bill?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

[You know,  writing this blog of late has made me feel like I’m Uma Thurman in “Kill Bill I,” fighting O-Ren Ishii’s (Lucy Liu) personal army, The Crazy 88’s. The ethics stories just get worse and worse, especially from the world of government and politics, and they keep on coming. The mission of this blog is to, in some small way, try to encourage ethical analysis and sensitivity in the culture of a nation uniquely dependent on it, and all I see is the ethics in our culture, especially in the professions (which exist to be trusted) and our institutions (all of them) deteriorating rapidly and seemingly deliberately. The effort feels hopeless. Maybe a better analogy than The Bride’s mass battle in “Kill Bill I” is Viking king Ragnar (Ernest Borgnine) fighting gleefully and futilely in a pit full of hungry wolves in “The Vikings.” After all, Uma wins her fight. But Ethics Alarms is not directed by Quentin Tarantino.

What prompts these musings? This item from the State of my birth: Massachusetts Democrats have offered a bill giving prison inmates reduced sentences when they donate their kidneys and bone marrow. State Reps. Carlos Gonzalez and Judith Garcia came up with this monstrosity, which aims to create “The Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Program” within the Massachusetts Department of Corrections. Prisoners would be able to shave between 60 days to a year off their sentences. 

Talk about killing bills—I’d love that bill as a hypothetical in an ethics class, though I would think it might be too easy for anyone old enough to vote. In The Guardian’s story, we read that the bill “has raised ethical concerns.” YA THINK??? Continue reading →

Yet Another Explanation For The Tyre Nichols Police Attack That Doesn’t Involve “White Supremacy”…And It Is Very Much Based On Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Radlye Balko made a cogent and well-supported case that the horrible beating death of young hands Tyre Nichols at the hands of five ‘elite” black Memphis cops was the result of cities creating unaccountable special urban law enforcement teams that are negligently supervised, trained and selected. Now comes iconoclast sportswriter, podcaster and pundit Jason Whitlock, a co-founder of “Outkick,” to offer a more explosive, and unwelcome explanation (in the woke community at least):

[T]he five police officers mimicked gang behavior and that the whole sad event is a byproduct of communities overrun with matriarchal values and controlled by single black mothers….the conversation we should be having in reaction to Tyre Nichols centers on the cost of destroying the black family.

…

Black urban areas are dominated by matriarchal rulership. It’s an utter failure and disaster. These areas all operate similar to Memphis. Crime is astronomical. Young men settle their differences with deadly violence. Academic performance hovers at record lows. Illegitimacy rates skyrocket.

Tyre Nichols was 29. The five police officers who participated in beating him to death range in age from 24 to 32. The behavior we witnessed from the officers resembles what happens when a group of Vice Lords catch a Gangster Disciple on their turf. The Disciple will flee. The Vice Lords will chase. Violence ensues.

My point is what we saw Friday night does not appear to be an outgrowth of bad policing. I’ve yet to see video evidence that depicts what caused the traffic stop and why Nichols had to be snatched from his car. It doesn’t feel like we’ve been shown the complete story. Something about the encounter feels far more personal than anything born of the frustration created by a resistant suspect. The use of pepper spray makes zero sense.

It feels like the outgrowth of a rotten culture, a culture where black men are canonized and celebrated for handling petty beefs and disrespect with lethal violence. That type of emotional violence is commonplace within zip codes dominated by the matriarchy.

Tyre Nichols cried out for his mama for a reason. I’m not saying that to belittle Nichols. I’m saying it’s a reflection of modern black culture, a culture that inappropriately places women at the top of the food chain. Mama is the ultimate authority and savior.

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring…Or Were Never Installed: The Caring Asst. Principal

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

First of all, has Ms. Harvey (idiot/idiot/idiot’s) been fired yet? Why not? At least the principal reacted quickly, sending out this: Continue reading →