History

Unethical Self-Parody Of The Year: France

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Confirming the fairness of every joke since World War II about the French being “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” (Groundskeeper Willy’s memorable description on”The Simpsons” ), French President Emanuel Macron said in a BBC interview that there is “no justification” for Israel’s bombing campaign and ground offensive against Gaza and Hamas, although, as Old Blues Once sang so well about love and marriage, “you can’t bomb one without the other.”

“There is no reason for that and no legitimacy. So we do urge Israel to stop,” Macron said, embracing the suddenly popular “proportional response theory” of war now that Jews defending their nation are involved. You can’t really blame him, I guess, as France saw no reason to keep fighting the Nazis when they attacked his country, either.

Macron added to his fatuous surrender monkey outburst by asserting “all civilians having nothing to do with terrorists.” Even when those civilians knowingly elect those terrorist to run their country!

Is France a great country, or what?

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Saturday Ethics Trick-Or Treat Leftovers, 11/4/2023

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

November 4 is lively ethics date in addition to the aforementioned robbery of King Tut’s tomb. There have been two notable assassinations on this date that have current news resonance: Then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in 1995, and in 1928, gambler Arnold Rothstein, who was instrumental in fixing the 1919 World Series. (If the Arizona Diamondbacks has won the World Series just completed, I would have suspected a fix, especially with baseball sullying itself with a full embrace of online gambling last season.) Just to show how fast cultural and ethical winds can shift, it was on this date in 2008 that Proposition 8 was passed in California, banning same-sex marriage. Today I wouldn’t be surprised to see Gavin Newsome sign a bill making it a felony to say anything negative about same-sex marriages. The Iran hostage crisis began in 1979: yes, it’s true, Democrats: once the Iranians were the bad guys. In 1956, the USSR under Khrushchev sent in the tanks and crushed the flickering of democracy in Hungary. The late Diane Feinstein was elected California Senator for the first time, highlighting the Democrats’ incredibly cynical “Year of the Woman,” during which misogynist and serial sexual harasser Bill Clinton was held up by the party as a paragon of virtue. And in 2008, of course, Barack Obama was elected, proving that the United States was not the racist nation his administration and its supporters helped convince black citizens that it was over the next eight years.

Boy, this really has been a terrible date for ethics.

Let’s hope today doesn’t add to the list…

1. Could this be it? Is this the tipping point? In Dighton, Mass, (This Massachusetts boy never heard of it!), a female high school field hockey player was badly injured and sent to the hospital after a fierce shot by “a male player” hit her in the face. Whether the player on the other team “identified” as female or was just a male playing a female sport because Massachusetts’ way to avoid controversies is to just eliminate gender separations in all sports is unclear so far. It shouldn’t make any difference.

In the ridiculously woke Bay State, the incident is being treated like a live hand-grenade, but it is still setting off ethics alarms. Dighton-Rehoboth Superintendent Bill Runey said in a letter to families that “[w]hile I understand that the MIAA has guidelines in place for co-ed participation under section 43 of their handbook, this incident dramatically magnifies the concerns of many about player safety,” Runey wrote. Gee, ya think?

2. See? Baseball makes you smart! (As opposed to football, which gives you dementia…) The latest issue of the Baseball Research Journal (the fruit of a generous gift from my friend Bob Kenney) had a feature article on the burning topic of why Ty Cobb was named “Tyrus.” My first reaction was, “Wow, they are really digging deep for topics at SABR,” but, as is often the case, research on a seemingly trivial topic yielded wide-ranging and valuable information. Cobb believed that his first name was original and the invention of his father, a history professor, whom the baseball great thought bestowed on his son the name to honor the city of Tyre’s courageous resistance to Alexander the Great, who eventually destroyed it. This, in turn, would indicate that all subsequent Tyruses were named after Ty Cobb. In the course of debunking that story, historian William H. Cobb discovered and reveals,

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10 Ethics Takeaways From Wapo’s “Students Hated ‘To Kill A Mockingbird.’ Their teachers Tried To Dump It”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Subhead: “Four progressive teachers in Washington’s Mukilteo School District wanted to protect students from a book they saw as outdated and harmful. The blowback was fierce.”

To begin with, read it all, and to the extent you can stand it, the comments. I included some trenchant quotes below, however.

Now the takeaways:

1. If there is a more vivid and depressing illustration of how far public education, teacher competence and race relations have declined since, oh, let’s say 2008, I don’t know what it could be.

2. The episode was triggered, a black student told the Post, when a white teen read “nigger” while reading “Mockingbird” to the class. The student disobeyed the teacher’s instructions to skip the slur, and “the kid looked at every Black person — there’s three Black people in that class — and smiled.” Well: a) Asking a student to read a passage of any book to the class when she feels part of the text must be skipped is incompetent. b) Of all the passages to have a student read from “Mockingbird,” choosing one that includes “nigger” smacks of deliberate sabotage. c) Presumed facial expression racism? At this rate, we should be back to “separate but equal” in no time.

3. “Freeman-Miller wondered: Did the school really have to teach Harper Lee’s classic but polarizing novel, as was mandatory for all freshmen?” There is no reason for any novel to be regarded as “polarizing,” except to those who regard literature as indoctrination tools. The educational process is to read the novel, discuss its literary merit, its context, its cultural significance, the ideas it communicates, and it why it works (or not) for a particular reader.

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A “Great Stupid”-George Floyd Freakout Mash-up Classic! The Fentanyl Overdose Death Of A Black Perp In Minnesota Will Result In A Name Change For Scott’s Oriole

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I’m not kidding.

This story has convinced me that the obsessions of the woke-infected have no limits. Hold on to your skulls…

The American Ornithological Society announced yesterday that it will remove human names from the common names for birds to create “a more inclusive environment for people of diverse backgrounds interested in bird-watching.” It is expected that around 80 birds in the U.S. and Canada will be renamed, the announcement says.

Wait, what?

It seems that this political correctness movement among bird brains began in 2018, when a college student named Robert Driver proposed renaming the McKown’s longspur, a small bird in the Central United States was named for John P. McKown, who collected the first specimen of the species in 1851. Ah, but Driver’s research revealed that McKown was insufficiently psychic about what causes would be deemed acceptable in a hundred years or so, and thus he fought Native American in the Seminole Indian in 1856, then participated in an expedition against Mormons in Utah in 1858, and worst of all, became general in the Confederate Army. Driver’s crusade was rejected at the time, because…well, it was stupid, to be blunt. The bird was named for McKown because McKown first spotted and identified it. His politics, positions on Indian relations and military exploits have exactly nothing to do with that distinction. 99.99% of people who hear the name “McKown’s longspur” don’t know or care who McKown was, or what he did in the Seminole War, nor should they. Driver—I’ll have to check to see what wokeness indoctrination factory he got his degree from—was just a bit ahead of his time. His ilk hadn’t started toppling Thomas Jefferson statues yet.

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Comment Of The Day: “The Unalterable Ethics Alarms Position: …Destroying [Lee’s] Statues Is Unethical And Foolish

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Here is Chris Marschner’s macro-analysis of the forces leading to Robert E. Lee’s head being melted down. Read it: his Comment of the Day connects dots you may not have considered, as he reacts to the post, “The Unalterable Ethics Alarms Position: Robert E. Lee Was A Complex And Important American Who Deserves Public Recognition, And Destroying His Statues Is Unethical And Foolish”:

***

I believe this mentality is why so many want to do away with the electoral college and rely on majoritarian rule.

These people have no understanding that the United States is comprised of 50 sovereign states that have joined together as a group for the benefit of all members in that group.

Had majoritarian rule been the case from the country’s inception there might have been no civil war and blacks would still be treated as 2nd class citizens. The whole concept of America as a melting pot might be reserved only to the degree that Europeans would be allowed entrance Our republic preserves minority rights that majoritarian rule will not.

Majoritarian rule creates the impetus for factionalized insurgencies to emerge against the rule makers. Which is why the Middle East is always fighting among themselves for centuries. Every faction wants autonomy to set rules for themselves and others.

Far too many of our citizens have such limited understanding of our history because they are taught to analyze events by hearing talking points and sound bites.

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The Unmasking Continues: So A Big Chunk Of The American Left Hates Christians AND Jews Now?

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

I did not see this coming, but perhaps I should have. After all, they have been telling us that they hate whites, males, and Americans for years.

This has been an ugly month for Democrats and progressives, if anyone is paying attention and not soaked with denial. America’s campuses, after decades of indoctrination, are erupting with open anti-Semitism, and the Left’s captive media has spread terrorist propaganda. The Associated Press told its reporters not to call Hamas killers “terrorists” after they massacred civilians, raped women, and took a couple hundred hostages from Israel on October 7. The Voice of America issued instructions to avoid calling Hamas “terrorists.” On October 12, Yale’s campus newspaper censored what it called “unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men” from a pro-Israel article by a student. (Yale professor Nicholas Christakis asked, “Are the hostage-taking, murder of children in their beds, burning of people alive, and parading of nude captive women in the street also ‘unsubstantiated’?”)

After Cornell students posted messages to university websites sewing sentiments like “If i see a pig male jew i will stab you and slit your throat,” “eliminate jewish living from cornell campus,” and an especially ominous, “gonna shoot up 104 west,” the kosher dining hall on campus, the school boldly advised Jewish students to avoid that dining hall. 

Silly me: I thought this Babylon Bee story was satire.

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Today’s “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Updates: The Lewiston Shooting And “Arghh! Biden Has A Primary Challenger!”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

bias

The fact that so many loyal Democrats and smug progressives will still look you in the eye and say that mainstream media bias is a right-wing conspiracy theory speaks eloquently of the corruption of American politics, individual integrity and democracy. Two depressing examples:

1. The missing mass shootings.

Kevin Downey reviews the large number of mass shootings since the Lewiston massacre, and points out that even though one would assume that a) they are all newsworthy and b) that the anti-gun journalism establishment would want such tragedies to be known, only the Maine shooting ticked off the right boxes to advance the agreed-upon MSM narrative without undermining some part of it. In addition to the high body count, the Lewiston massacre featured a white male shooter using a semi-automatic weapon (that they could call “an assault weapon”). And he apparently liked some conservative social media posts, meaning that the shooting was really Donald Trump’s fault.

Maine authorities were also warned about Robert R. Card II in plenty of time to stop him if they had followed established policies but didn’t. Oh, never mind: as with the Uvalde shooting and others, it’s the guns, the victims and the shooter that matter, not the fact that existing laws and competent law enforcement should have been sufficient to prevent the disaster.

Since the Lewiston shooting (October 25) there were ten more mass shootings, leaving 14 dead and 65 wounded. Two took place in Chicago (of course) and left 19 people shot.In one shooting involving a handgun, 15 victims were hit by gunfire. That there weren’t more deaths is moral luck. The mostly ignored shootings involved shooters “of color,” drug gatherings, parties substantially attended by non-whites, and weapons that couldn’t plausibly be called “weapons of war.”

Downey also cited the amusing idiocy of, again, Joy Behar on “The View,” produced by ABC News, showing abject gun ignorance ( I missed it–sock drawer…). She said (and no one on the set had the wit, integrity or knowledge to contradict her),”If you shoot with an AR-15, let’s say you shoot a deer, you can’t eat it because you basically demolish the animal.” She “doesn’t know the difference between an AR-15 and a bazooka,” writes Downey. That’s fair.

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Really, New York Times? Stephen King’s Facile, Ignorant Appeal To Emotion And Anti-Second Amendment Bias Is Worthy Of Space On Your Op-Ed Page?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Well, to be fair, Stephen King is an acclaimed writer of horror fantasy, so he qualifies as a thoughtful authority on…wait, no he doesn’t, does he? King does live in Maine, though, so there’s that.

Here’s King’s entire opinion piece titled, “We’re Out of Things to Say.” (I’m not going to read the Times readers’ comments, because they will just send me to the wood-chipper.) as he pretends that a sloppily-conceived, virtue-signaling sigh is enlightenment:

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Cultural Literacy Competence Fail!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

As frequent vistors here know, I would argue that competent citizens should be sufficiently aware of cultural history to know who Bill Russell, Bob Feller and Bob Gibson are at very least. The elderly female contestant was alive and conscious while Bob Gibson and Bill Russell were active and frequently in the news. Surely someone presuming to appear as a contestant on “Jeopardy!” should have this level of U.S. sports history knowledge.

But perhaps you disagree…

The Unalterable Ethics Alarms Position: Robert E. Lee Was A Complex And Important American Who Deserves Public Recognition, And Destroying His Statues Is Unethical And Foolish

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The New York Times turned to a biased art historian to discuss the melting down of the Charlottesville statue of Robert E. Lee that was the focal point of the infamous 2017 riot. Ethics Alarms has spilled too much metaphorical ink over statue-toppling and historical airbrushing already—you can find most of them under this tag or this one. I can summarize them all easily: tearing down statues betrays a totalitarian-mentality and undemocratic values, an intolerance of unpopular beliefs and ideas, and a favorable attitude toward thought-control and censoring history. I hate it, it’s unethical, and I’m not even a fan of Robert E. Lee.

Rigging the commentary (what were the chances that an African-American art historian would object to destroying a Lee statue?), the Times got what it evidently wanted: an almost obscenely gleeful account of Lee’s symbolic melting down. “Acrid fumes penetrated the respirators we had been issued,” Erin Thompson writes. “When the foundryman finally turned off his torch and tapped at the head with a mallet, Lee’s face fell clattering to the floor.” She quotes a founder of the statue-toppling group that helped accomplish the destruction as saying, “It feels like witnessing a public execution.” Clearly, it was a good feeling. You know, like the “reform Communists” felt when they tore down Stalin’s statue and threw his mummified corpse in a hole. “Stalin? Who’s Stalin?” Now the same people who helped the dictator murder millions could pretend it all never happened. It is traditions like this that ensure that Russians never learn from its history, because they don’t like to acknowledge history.

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