Humor and Satire

Musk’s Ethics Rorschach Maduro Meme

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I was originally going to make Elon Musk’s endorsement of the meme above on Twitter/”X” an ethics quiz, but decided, after reading the furious and wide-ranging arguments from Ann Althouse’s own commenters that I’d rather focus on this as an example of how political orientation, personal morality and confirmation bias combine to make cultural coherence increasingly difficult today.

The main focus of the comments…there are 141 of them now (I’m envious)—is on Althouse’s declaration that it is “shameful” for Musk to circulate such a thing with a laughing emoji.

I must confess, I didn’t completely get the joke at first because I didn’t recognize rapper, P Diddy (Sean Combs), now serving time in a Federal prison for sex-related charges. Rap and Hip-Hop are big holes in my cultural literacy.

Had I used the meme as an EA ethics quiz, my own conclusions would have been 1) jokes are not unethical if they make people laugh, even if they are cruel, vulgar, or politically incorrect, but 2) it is unethical, as in irresponsible and incompetent, for important, valuable, influential figures in our culture to gratuitously and recklessly undermine their own credibility and popularity by associating themselves with divisive practices and ideas for no good reason. President Trump does this constantly. It is Cognitive Dissonance Scale malpractice.

However, Ann’s single word “Shameful” landed in her blog like a bomb thrown into Times Square at midnight on New Year’s Eve. You can (and should) read the responses here. An incomplete summary of the various arguments:

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Flashback: Depressing How Little Has Changed In 16 Long Years…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I was looking for an appropriate “Night Before Christmas” post and found this instead, a parody I wrote on Christmas Eve in 2009, the very first year of Ethics Alarms, in reaction to the ethically-tainted passage of the “Affordable Care Act,” which didn’t make health care affordable. I knew the bill was smoke and mirrors and that it would not accomplish what it was supposed to do.  I knew that we would be in one mess or another as a result of the ugly thing, supposedly the signature legislation of the Obama Administration…and sad thing is that it probably was. What does that tell you?

I was struck, as you will be, how much of my mordant satire seems relevant today, and how little has changed.

So let’s travel back to that halcyon year, and the day before Christmas…

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BREAKING! I Was Hoaxed Again! “Behold Portland’s Holiday Thing! (How Progressives Get This Way and Can They Be Cured?)” Is Officially Retracted

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

UPDATE!

Well this is all I needed on a busy day that just included me re-injuring my leg after being pulled off my feet by Spuds. The post below is based on a hoax, and damn the hoaxers to hell. Spreading false stories on the web is unethical, and satire sites are obligated to signal when a post is intended as parody. A few notes:

1. Thanks to the crack EA commentariate for flagging this.

2. The fake story is still up on the usually reliable conservative commentary site Victory Girls, which linked to the fake story I used.

The VG Naughty List: Just A Few

3. I was fooled because first, none of the quotes sounded unlikely given what we have heard and witnessed in Portland in the recent past, and

4. I had never seen a “butt plug” before.I apologize to Ethics Alarms readers and the City of Portland. I try to be careful, but this time I was fooled.

5. Apparently the hoax was inspired by Portland’s city officials this year referring to their annual tree lighting event as just “the tree” or “winter tree,” deliberately omitting the word “Christmas.” Typical dumb Portland wokeness at work: if the hoaxers had only made it clear what they were spoofing, I’d call it a successful and well-deserved satire.

6. I apologize to all, including the City of Portland, for my error.

***

I missed this, which happened about a week ago, in part because I view Portland as a lost cause. You know those zombie apocalypse movies where the survivors will say, sadly, “Boston’s gone, San Diego’s gone”? Portland’s gone, and has been for a long time. I would say it’s Patient Zero for Trump Derangement, woke insanity, anti-Americanism and The Great Stupid, except there are so many other candidates: New York City, California, Minnesota. None of them, however, have descended so far into incompetent cultural madness as Portland, as exemplified by the Christmas, sorry, Holiday Thing the city unveiled this month.

Portland officially replaced its traditional Christmas tree—to be fair, it’s so hard to find evergreen trees in Oregon these days—with that whatever it is above. Officials described the holiday display as “bold,” “inclusive,” and “a meaningful departure from tree-based expectations.”

How far gone do you have to be to utter the words “tree-based expectations” without feeling ridiculous?

City leaders, presumably the same ones who let Black Lives Matter take over parts of the city five year sago, explained the traditional Christmas tree ultimately failed to reflect Portland’s “evolving” relationship with holidays. Thus the “inclusive” replacement, officials said, is intentionally ambiguous, streamlined, and designed to invite interpretation.

I, for example, interpret it as “meaningless, joyless crap.”

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Now THIS Is A Frivolous Lawsuit…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Ethics Alarms has mentioned before the fact that it is very difficult for a lawyer to violate Rule 3.1 in the Rules of Professional Conduct, which prohibits frivolous law suits and appeals. The ABA version of the rule, “Meritorious Claims & Contentions,” states,

“A lawyer shall not bring or defend a proceeding, or assert or controvert an issue therein, unless there is a basis in law and fact for doing so that is not frivolous, which includes a good faith argument for an extension, modification or reversal of existing law. A lawyer for the defendant in a criminal proceeding, or the respondent in a proceeding that could result in incarceration, may nevertheless so defend the proceeding as to require that every element of the case be established.”

Why is it hard to violate the rule? It is because even the most desperate “Hail Mary” law suits sometimes win. “Good faith” simply requires that the attorney bringing the suit honestly believes it might succeed, which means that it helps if he’s an idiot.

The last time Ethics Alarms suggested a law suit was sanctionably frivolous was in 2020, when Alan Dershowitz sued CNN for what was just typical sloppy, biased CNN reporting. The First Amendment protects news outlets from defamation suits by public figures unless the defamatory news is deliberate and malicious. I flagged another 3.1 violation in 2019, when a lawyer filed 49 appeals for the same client in a condo dispute despite the fact that multiple judges had rejected his arguments and said, in effect, “Don’t come back here again with this crap!”

Today I learned about a frivolous sexual harassment lawsuit by a female lawyer against another lawyer at her former firm. As an epitome of frivolity, it takes the metaphorical cake.

Her complaint alleged that the man ogled and stared at her, took photographs, and generally created a hostile work environment by his unwanted attentions.

The defendant is blind.

The Obligatory Joke Principle

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Today a Facebook friend who is addicted to posting about the most mundane and prosaic matters on her page. Today, the press had to be alerted to this revelation: “For some reason my phone no longer recognizes my thumb-print.” Talk about the problems of the privileged! I’m sure it’s Trump’s fault. She added, “Does anyone else have this problem?”

A comment read: “Yes. My phone doesn’t recognize your thumbprint either.”

I hope, if I had seen the query first, I would have issued the same mandatory response. When Fate, or God, or whoever is in charge of cosmic humor delivers to you through the mouth or text of an agent a slow, hanging curve-ball of a straight-line that begs to be knocked out of the metaphoric ballpark and you let it go by, you have violated a sacred obligation to the human race. It needs as much mirth and merriment as it can get, and if a perfect opportunity to get a laugh like that set-up goes unrealized—because of fear, lack of attention, witlessness or self-absorption—a grievous ethics offense had been committed. Shame. Shame.

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Ethics Quiz of the Day: Mencken-Style Ad Hominem

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

At the Washiungton Free Beacon, columnist Andrew Stiles writes,

Jack Schlossberg, the sentient boat shoe and semi-employed TikTok user, is running for Congress in New York. It was bound to happen. The 32-year-old Democrat belongs to the Kennedy dynasty—that inexplicably beloved menagerie of goon-faced Habsburgian freaks, Nantucket douche bros, chronic alcoholics, and bloated sex pests. Schlossberg, a mentally deranged internet addict who cracks jokes about guzzling “Jew blood” and “male jizz,” has sought to inject the storied Kennedy brand with Gen Z flare.

That anti-Kennedy invective made me laugh out loud more than once. But is it fair commentary to mix in so much ad hominem invective in an opinion column if it is genuinely funny, at least to a substantial number of readers (or listeners)?

Famous (or infamous) journalist-pundit H.L. Mencken (1880-1956, above) excelled at this sort of thing; he may have even invented it. Here is part of his “obituary” for three-time (losing) Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan after he died shortly after he faced off against Clarence Darrow in Dayton, Tennessee in Tennessee v. Scopes aka, “Monkey Trial”:

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“Right To Offend: The Black Comedy Revolution” and the Duty to Remember

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

So much of the nation’s cultural health and societal values rely on our fulfillment of the duty to remember. Thanks to our incompetent and unethical education system and the increasing estrangement of American history from our popular culture, recent generations share so little important historical and cultural touchpoints as Americans that effective cross-generational communication is becoming impossible. Television could be a nostrum for this dangerous phenomenon, if only finding the constructive and informative programming were not a task akin to finding, as the saying goes, a needle in needle stack.

I was thinking about this after I stumbled upon the 2022 Starz documentary, “Right to Offend: The Black Comedy Revolution,” a two-part series that I only saw because I am briefly getting Starz free on DirecTV. I missed it entirely when it was new, and have never read or heard anything about it. I haven’t seen the whole series yet either, and only watched an incomplete stretch of Episode One. But that was enough to trigger several thoughts, and to make me schedule a serious viewing of the whole thing from beginning to end.

Among those revelations,

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Ethics Quiz: My Father’s Dream Prank

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

My father, Jack A. Marshall Sr. was always remarkably fatalistic about death, much to the chagrin of my mother. She was never amused when he repeated his supposed desire to be displayed sitting in a chair, eyes open, at his wake with a metal plate in the floor in front of his casket that would trigger a recording when mourners stepped on it. Then a recording would boom out in his voice saying, “Hello! I’m so glad that you came!”

Dad was half-kidding, but only half. My father hated the solemnity of funerals and found open casket wakes barbaric. Yet I have to believe he would have been secretly honored by the send-off the military gave him when he was buried at Arlington, with the horse-drawn caisson, the riderless steed and the 21-gun salute.

Today I learned that someone actually carried out my father’s threatened posthumous prank, but even in worst taste than what he proposed. The Wills, Trusts, & Estates Prof Blog reveals that Irish grandpa Shay Bradley, a Dublin native, arranged that after his death in 2019 a recording of his voice would be played at his funeral from inside his grave. Mourners heard repeated banging noises that sounded like they were coming from the interior of the coffin. “Hello? It is dark in here! Let me out! I can hear you! Is that the priest I can hear? I am in the box, can you hear that?” his voice could be heard shouting, in apparent panic.

Hilarity ensued.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is executing such a prank at a funeral ethical?

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Friday Open Forum, Halloween Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 98 Comments

I have a two-hour Zoom ethics seminar to teach this morning as lawyers who have waited until the last minute to get their ethics CLE credits in will be counting on me to rescue them.

Please help me out by leaving some ethics treats here at the open forum.

Meanwhile, if you have access to Disney+ and haven’t seen the “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” segment of the Master’s “Ichabod and Mr. Toad” since you were a tot (or ever), I recommend it highly. The first segment (an adaptation of “The Wind in the Willows”) is also excellent but not Halloween-themed.

Ethics Quiz: Fairness to AOC

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Ethics Alarms only covers a fraction of the statements by prominent people that prompt the response, “What, if anything, were they thinking?” For example, I was torn today whether to mention Kamala Harris saying in a recent interview (with Axis journalist Kara Swisher, whom I have been calling out for her hackery for 30 years) on her book tour (What were they thinking to send Kamala out on a book tour?), that “some have said” that she was “the most qualified candidate ever to run for President.” Because Swisher is such a hack, she didn’t have the integrity to burst out laughing and tell Harris, “Oh, Kamala, you are so funny!” Yeah, and some have said, “I am the Lizard King!” and “Of course dogs can talk, they just don’t have anything to say!” Maybe, MAYBE, and I am giving her the benefit of the doubt here, Harris was only the second least qualified Presidential candidate of a major party in U.S. history. But I digress.

In last night’s predictably horrifying town hall meeting on CNN featuring American communist Bernie Sanders and Dunning-Kruger victim Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), AOC went for the Gold and may have said the stupidest thing that not only she has ever said in public but perhaps the stupidest thing any elected official has said in public, though Rep. Hank Johnson expressing a fear that so much U.S. military personnel and equipment on the island of Guam might cause it to “tip over” creates a daunting challenge.

Ranting in her usual pop-eyed hysterical style about how evil corporations were polluting the nation and that “rivers were on fire” because they were “pouring chemicals” into waterways and killing people, AOC was quick to name the first corporate villain to pop into what she audaciously calls her “mind.” Was it Monsanto, mayhap? Dow Chemical? Dupont? LyondellBasell Industries, the largest U.S. chemical company? Oh no. The Congresswoman, regarded by many pundits as the rising leader of the Democratic Party, has bigger game in her sights, and she immediately, without hesitation, named the vile polluter.

“Deloitte.”

Yes, the accounting firm. I’ve been trying to think of a company that she could have named that would be less guilty of pollution. The Boston Red Sox? I dunno, the team flies a lot. Hey, but anyone can make a mistake. Right? It was just a “speako.” It isn’t really evidence that Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t know what the hell she is talking about half the time, is it?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is it unfair to hold such an obvious brain fart against AOC?

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