I wish we didn’t.
I wouldn’t raise the issue except that the conservative blogs and commentators seem to be horrified by this most minor of pop culture developments—the sexual orientation of a five-decades-old Hanna-Barbara cartoon character?–and the usual progressive suspects are awash with joy. (Well, I guess you have to take your victories where you find them, however minuscule.)
The ethics issues are encompassed in the routine question, “What’s going on here?”
Just because Trump is paranoid doesn’t mean almost everyone around him isn’t trying to stab him in the back.
From the New York Times:
Shortly after turning over 15 boxes of government material to the National Archives in January, former President Donald J. Trump directed a lawyer working for him to tell the archives that he had returned all the documents he had taken from the White House at the end of his presidency, according to two people familiar with the discussion.
The lawyer, Alex Cannon, had become a point of contact for officials with the National Archives, who had tried for months to get Mr. Trump to return presidential records that he failed to turn over upon leaving office. Mr. Cannon declined to convey Mr. Trump’s message to the archives because he was not sure if it was true, the people said.
The story was leaked to, naturally, Maggie Haberman, the full-time Trump Fury on the Times staff. She’s currently peddling a book full of anti-Trump tales, gossip and embarrassments. A lot of her stories over the last six years have been about what the President supposedly said behind closed door, or suggested, or asked others to do, none of which actually came to anything but the point is to make Trump look bad, dangerous or stupid. Of course, ethical aides, associates and lawyer don’t tell hostile reporters (or anyone at all) about such conversations because they are in the positions they are because the President trusts them. Donald Trump has been betrayed by such people more times, I would estimate, than all of the last six Presidents combined. Continue reading
Gee, what a shocking development! Non-gay audiences haven’t flocked to see a romantic comedy that advertises itself like that!
I’m a movie fan. I have lots of gay friends, family members and associates: I worked in the theater for decades. I respect them all; I support their right to live and love and marry whomever they please; I want them to be treated like any other law-abiding Americans in all things as they are judged solely on the content of their character, and regard discrimination and bias against them as despicable and unconscionable.
But I don’t enjoy watching gay sex and related activities. I have every right to feel that way. I would no more pay, or take time out of my sock drawer duties, to see “Bros” than I would watch an NFL game, or attend a one-man show by Alec Baldwin. So sue me. But I think there are millions of Americans with similar tastes, and they span the generations.
Apparently the makers of “Bros” convinced themselves that non-gay (I will say “cis” when there is a loaded gun at my head and not before) Americans, who are, believe it or not, the majority, would go to see a romantic comedy about gays because they have been told that they should, and are bigots if the don’t comply. Non-gay America replied, “Bite me!,” and good for them. Continue reading
The first observation is that neither of the surprises should surprise anyone at all. Former NFL football star Herschel Walker is about as vulnerable a political candidate for high office as one can imagine, even in the “Get Trump!” era. I’ve covered much of this already. He’s exaggerated his scholastic achievements, hidden the fact that he has several children conceived without the formality of marriage, admitted bouts with mental illness and a suicide attempt, and vaguely acknowledges committing domestic violence.
Walker has no political experience or relevant achievements that would make him a qualified candidate for the U.S. Senate in Georgia. He’s a local celebrity and has personal charisma; he is also an African-American in a state with a lot of black voters (and football fans). That’s about it. In the United States of America in the Age of the Great Stupid, that can also be enough.
It was irresponsible for the Republican Party to present such a cynically-chosen nominee to the voters of Georgia, incompetent for voters to check his name in the primary, and certifiably stupid for the GOP to store a substantial amount of their chances of taking back control of the Senate on such a shaky vessel.
Yesterday, they all got what they deserved… Continue reading
…and for Amherst itself, a test of how well its totalitarian indoctrination program is working. Just look at this head-exploding thing:
Well.
The new policy at Amherst College has each student and teacher fill out an anonymous survey to state whether they want a mask mandate in their classroom. If a single student, or the instructor, so desires, everyone will be required to wear a mask, despite the fact that masking as the paranoid and largely useless security-blanket response to the lurking Wuhan virus and its relatives is no longer required by CDC guidelines (Science!) and that masks are now almost exclusively worn by phobics, lock-step progressives seeking to show their fealty using the equivalent of a Nazi armband, and people so immuno-compromised that they probably shouldn’t be out in public at all. Continue reading
Ugh. Even the trustworthy right-ish media misled inexcusably on this one, and, of course, “Republicans pounced.”
Two days ago, Indian actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas asked Harris at a Democratic National Committee event about the Biden administration’s goals as a “global influencer” on climate policy when it comes to poorer countries.
“It is our lowest-income communities and our communities of color that are most impacted by these extreme conditions and impacted by issues that are not of their own making,” Harris replied. “And so we have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity.”
How did this become a statement by Harris about how aid would be distributed to communities in Florida and South Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Ian? Let’s see:
Like the questions discussed today posed to “The Ethicist,” I view the dbate over whether a community should create a public memorial to the victims of a serial killer, in this instance Jeffrey Dahmer, an easy ethics call. Unfortunately, for people who can’t distinguish between emotional reasoning and common sense, determining what is “the right thing’ is remarkably difficult.
Toward the end of the Netflix series “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” the actress portraying a Dahmer neighbor is shown inquiring at a Milwaukee city office regarding a proposed park memorial to be built at the former site of the Oxford Apartments, where Dahmer committed most of his grisly murders. A sober message appears on the screen stating, “No park or memorial to Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims was ever built on the site of the Oxford Apartments.”
To which the appropriate response is “Good!”
I could have easily made Judge James Ho of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals an Ethics Hero for the second time in 2022, and maybe I should. (The first time was in February, when he tossed his planned speech at Georgetown University Law Center to chastise the school for its treatment of Professor Illya Shapiro, who dared to utter an opinion that was insufficiently supportive of “diversity” as greater value to the Supreme Court than actual legal acumen. This time his principled stand has more metaphorical teeth, but we should at least consider its ethical validity.
In Judge Ho’s keynote address to the Kentucky Chapters Conference of the Federalist Society—you know, the fascists—- the judge deplored speakers being shouted down and censored at law schools across the country. Then, after singling out Yale Law School as being particularly hostile to non-compliant viewpoints and determined to engage in ideological indoctrination rather than legal education, he announced that he would no longer be hiring law clerks with Yale Law degrees, saying, “Starting today, I will no longer hire law clerks from Yale Law School. And I hope that other judges will join me as well. I certainly reserve the right to add other schools in the future. But my sincere hope is that I won’t have to.” Continue reading
…and also of course, master progressive panderer Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it into law.
Newsom signed a bill yesterday to limiting the use of hip-hop lyrics as evidence in the criminal trials of rappers, a blatant sop to the African-American fans of the artists, inevitably black, who have an alarming record for assaulting, battering, raping or killing people
The law, welcomed by rappers, their fans, record producers, record industry executives and Black Lives Matter, is the first in the country to ensure someone’s “creative expression” is not used to “introduce stereotypes or active bias” against a defendant or be used as evidence in a trial against them. Yes, that would be because Assembly Bill 2799 is an unnecessary law that would only surface in one of the very few states so thoroughly addled by extreme Leftist ethics rot that such a monstrosity would even be considered without causing crippling laughing fits. A similar bill in New York failed earlier this year—yes, New York is one of those states.
