In the latest “Halloween” installment, 2021’s “Halloween Kills”—I cannot believe that they are still recycling this franchise, which was repetitions and boring decades ago, but such is the creativity of modern Hollywood—apparently immortal serial killer Michael Myers, aka “The Shape,” guts a gay couple inside their home and poses them tenderly at the scene. Now, I would think that Michael is displaying new found wokeness in his choice of victims, since his original targets were horny heterosexual teens, a habit later adopted by Michael’s lesser imitator (and his Mom), Jason Voorhees of the equally endless “Friday the Thirteenth” franchise. He should be celebrated, right?
Uh, no. On social media, Michael, still wearing his iconic Willim Shatner mask, is being accused of revealing a homophobic side. My favorite of the many anti-Michael tweets: “Michael Myers is a racist homophobic murderer. No respect for him now.”
I was hit between the eyes by another example of this hypocrisy this morning, when I read the “Letters to the Editor” section of the Times. A reader named Roger Hirschberg—yes, own it Roger, you shameless propagandist—authored a letter that the Times headlined “Facebook Misinformation.” In the first paragraph, Roger decries Facebook policies that “enable and protect misinformation.” In the very next sentence, he condemns Facebook management for allowing such misinformation “in pursuit of profits,” and cites Facebook’s entries related to “the January 6 insurrection.”
Isn’t that amusing? Roger puffs himself up like a bullfrog in indignation over a communications company pandering to the mob while cashing in, and then gives the Times a chance to do the same, allowing his false characterization of the Capitol riot as an “insurrection,” because that’s the current Big Lie being weaponized by the Left.
Now, I wouldn’t want the Times to censor Roger’s deliberate misinformation—the FBI, if one considers it trustworthy, has definitively debunked that description, as did Merrick Garland in last weeks hearings—because we benefit from revelations with signature significance: if you call the riot an “insurrection,” you’re a lie-spreading jerk or a lazy fool who believes whatever your favorite party tells you. I would expect an ethical publication that respects its readers to acknowledge Roger’s hypocrisy if it chooses to publish his letter, however. If it doesn’t, then the Times is deliberately advancing misinformation….but then it’s the good kind. You know: the kind that can be used to smear Donald Trump and Republicans. Thanks, Roger!
1 This isn’t funny, ethical, brave or helpful. He should be sanctioned, but House Democrats wouldn’t dare. They know what their members got away with.
2. If Duncan wants to say “Fuck Joe Biden” on the House floor, then let him come out and say it and accept the consequences. At least I can have a measure of respect for that, though not much. Adults snickering at the “Let’s Go Brandon” game remind me of those camp songs like “Shaving cream” or “Helen had a Steamboat” where it was supposed to be hilarious that you never actually said the naughty word that rhymed. The game was just barely tolerable among ten-year-olds, and we have members of Congress who act like this? Be proud, America.
3. The Ethics Alarms position (which cost it about 40% of its readers since 2017) that the office of the President must be accorded a basic level of respect and fairness by the public must apply regardless of who is in the White House, or our republic does not work. One reason I was so critical of the despicable treatment of President Trump across the culture was precisely for this reason: I knew Republicans and conservatives wouldn’t be able resist treating Biden as unethically as Trump was treated, and, if possible, worse.
It is amazing how frequently the mainstream media states that President Trump’s assertion that he won the 2020 election is a “lie.” It’s not a lie: he believes it, and there are some good reasons to believe it, though stating it as a fact is irresponsible, but you know: Trump. The widespread use of mail-in ballots automatically creates a rebuttable presumption of fraud: when someone other than the voter can fill out a ballot and the vote is still counted, then someone other than the voter WILL fill out a ballot; the only question is how many. Since Democrats tried one unethical route to getting Trump after another for four years, it’s completely reasonable for him to wonder if the election was fixed, with or without evidence.
But I digress. The point is that Trump’s insistence that the Presidency was stolen has been condemned roundly by Democrats and the news media, as well as many Republicans. And yet at a campaign rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Democratic candidate for Governor Terry McAuliffe was accompanied by unsuccessful Georgia gubernatorial Stacey Abrams and said that she “would be the governor of Georgia today had the governor of Georgia not disenfranchised 1.4 million Georgia voters before the election. That’s what happened to Stacey Abrams. They took the votes away.” Then Abrams repeated her claim that she has made since she lost in 2018: “I come from a state where I was not entitled to become the governor, but as an American citizen and a citizen of Georgia, I’m going to fight for every person who has the right to vote to be able to cast that vote” as McAuliffe nodded approvingly.
In 1993, artist Sam Kerson painted a mural depicting the progression of American slavery from the slave trade through to the Underground railroad. “The Underground Railroad, Vermont and the Fugitive Slave” celebrates “the efforts of black and white Americans in Vermont and throughout the United States to achieve freedom and justice,” as Kerson explains on his website. Here’s the second panel of the artwork…
Funded by a grant from the Puffin Foundation, the mural was mounted at the Chase Community Center at the Vermont Law School in South Royalton, Vermont. African-American students had periodically taken offense at the artist’s style, and that reaction became a substantial movement after a white cop with a history of equal-opportunity bullying in Minneapolis managed to contribute to the death of a criminal resisting arrest who happened to be black. Naturally, this immediately affected what kind of art could be exhibited in public. I’m not being sarcastic: that’s what happened, as bizarre as it is.
The Glenn Youngkin campaign—he’s the Republican running for governor of Virginia–has been circulating this campaign sign for McAuliffe, endorsing the statement that the Democratic candidate made in a televised debate that has his poll numbers in a freefall. (What McAuliffe said was “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”)
Could this possibly be a Democratic party-approved sign? I wondered if it was a “false flag” by the Republicans. The message contradicts what McAuliffe has been saying in recent days about supporting active parental involvement in public school education.
If the sign is genuine, what kind of person would approve of such a message? It’s stunning what goes on in some classrooms, everything from child abuse to mis-instruction to indoctrination. Parents who don’t monitor how and what their children are taught are irresponsible and negligent; it’s as simple as that.
Could the Democrats in Virginia be this stupid? How is that possible?
On October 24, 1945, the United Nations Charter became effective, marking this date as the international organization’s official birthday. What a disappointment the U.N. has been! The idea of a body made up of representatives of the nations of the world dedicated to promoting peace and mutual cooperation for the good of humanity was always a quixotic and probably doomed mission, one shared by the U.N.’s ill-conceived predecessor, Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations.
I am old enough, however, to remember when the American public believed in and respected the U.N. Its meetings were broadcast regularly by PBS; the U.N’s second Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld was one of the world’s most admired men, and the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (ironically, since his father had effectively killed the League of Nations by blocking the U.S.’s membership in the new body in the Senate), was immensely popular. The U.N. has had its moments, notably during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, but it squandered the public’s trust with outrageous committee appointments, placing brazen human rights violators on its Human Rights Council for example (currently Russia, China and Cuba are members), persistent efforts at world government, which is and should always be an offense to the U.S. Constitution, and corruption at the highest levels that have become impossible to excuse. Today the United Nations’ existence is largely symbolic. Maybe that’s enough to justify the expense, but we once thought the United Nations would be so much more.
1. Searching for an ethical newsaggregator...but I can’t find one. I visited the Drudge Report for the first time in months, and saw this link: FACEBOOK Faulted by Staff Over Insurrection…
Drudge has been abandoned by many conservatives over the site’s decision to spin anti-Trump, but continuing to call the January 6 riot an “insurrection” after the FBI’s report conclusively showed it wasn’t one is signature significance for a propaganda site. Over at the aggregator that has snatched away Drudge’s Trump-supporting audience, Citizen Free Press, the coverage of the unfolding Alec Baldwin gunfire accident includes this headline: “PHOTOS — This is the woman Alec Baldwin put in charge of firearms for his low budget film…” and this image of the film’s armorist:
Oh, I see! Based on her looks, we know she must have been incompetent! This is nothing but bigotry, and it is why so many people detest conservatives.
2. Until more people show some courage and principles, this kind of thing will only become more frequent and get worse. Witness the revolting development from Coastal Carolina University. The College Fix reports:
“On September 16, students filed into a classroom, and some students noted the names of several students of color were written on a whiteboard at the front of the class. Thinking this was some sort of list singling out minority students, the offended students planned a campus protest on September 21 instead of going to class.But the names were actually part of a list of students who may want to hang out together, drawn up by a visiting artist who had been counseling two students of color after the previous class. One of the students had said she felt isolated and wanted to get to know other minority students in the theater department, so the group brainstormed a list of potential friends. The school later admitted the list was “a resource for newer students who are looking to be in community with other BIPOC students.”
Never mind; Facts Don’t Matter! The school apologized to the mistakenly offended students with a statement that “faculty and students involved as well as the Theatre Department as a whole are deeply sorry to anyone who was affected by this incident.” That’s right: the school apologized to the students for the students leaping to conclusions and protesting before they knew what they were protesting about. Not only that, the visiting artist who created the list to help the minority students also apologized, calling her actions “thoughtless and careless.” Yes, it is certainly careless to assume that students in the era of The Great Stupid will be capable of being fair, responsible, and reasonable when they have unlimited power to make administrators and instructors lick their metaphorical boots on a whim.
I know, I know…enough Superman already. What is this, “Seinfeld”? I was fully intending to have a Superman-free zone this weekend, but Steve-O-in NJ’s deft and historically illuminating comment on the second of the four honored comments on the last ethics quiz could not be ignored.
I think it shouldn’t be lost on folks here that Superman first appeared in Action Comics No. 1 in 1938. He came to be during the Depression, when this country was at its lowest and believing in itself the least. He was the creation of two aspiring Jewish writers named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who first conceived of him as a mind-reading, super-strong, and bald (!) villain given his powers by an experimental drug in a 1932 story called “Reign of the Supermen.” It wasn’t until 1935 that Superman became a hero and acquired his now well-known background, cape, and uniform. They had really wanted to get published in the comics pages as a strip, but when they kept getting turned down, eventually they signed away the rights to Jack Liebowitz, who had just formed Detective Comics, which would later become simply “DC” (although Detective Comics would continue to be published as a title and a year later Batman would debut there, but that’s another story). At least they’d finally see Superman published.
The rest, as they say, is history. However, Superman has, at least to some degree, always been an idealized “man of his times.” In the first few issues he was actually a bit of a smart aleck, and at one point anti-industrialist. Among other things, at one point he but two munitions manufacturers out of business, blaming them for war (THAT vanished with the coming of WW2). A real shocker was early on when he confronted a woman who had murdered someone. She drew a gun on him, whereupon he crushed the barrel out of shape, grabbed her hand, and asked her if she would surrender, “or shall I give you a taste of how that gun felt when I applied the pressure?” She of course surrendered, ruefully admitting that she would get the chair for the murder. Superman pitilessly replied, “you should have thought of that before you took a human life.” Obviously this would not fly now. It gets better when the character takes to radio in 1940, with a slightly modified origin story where he ages on the journey to Earth from Krypton and steps fully formed from the spacecraft, including being able to speak English. At one point he goes to confront a villain at his home, but finds only his Filipino houseboy, who of course speaks with a very exaggerated accent. He proceeds to intimidate him physically, and warn him, including a mild ethnic slur, that if he’s lied to him he’ll come back and kill him.
