Humor and Satire

The First “Bite Me!” Award of 2024 Goes To…The Department of Transportation

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Last January, Ethics Alarms introduced the “Bite Me!”, an Ethics Alarms designation reserved for either an individual whose “response to being bullied, pressured and threatened into submissiveness is to say, “Do your worst. I believe in what I am doing, and I don’t grovel to mobs,” or as used several times in the course of 2023, the author of unethical conduct that demands the response, “Bite me!”

Our increasingly (under President Biden) power-abusing and dictatorial federal government ranks the first “Bite Me” of 2024 for this “Karen”-ish nonsense: the federal government is asking state agencies to stop posting traffic signs using humor, like one above in Maine, and has given the states two years to ease off the funny stuff, after which the “or else” will kick in. DOT says that funny signs can be distracting, and, of course, since all Americans are hopeless sheep who must be protected from even the periodic ill-timed giggle, Biden’s micro-managing minions think it is in their legitimate jurisdiction to dictate the tone and wording of traffic messages.

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Racial Bias and Prejudice at the Golden Globes Awards

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The Golden Globes audience of the Hollywood woke laughed and applauded at the lame and insulting recitation of white stereotypes by a black and an Asian presenter over the weekend. In fact, I don’t object to racial and ethnic stereotypes used for humor, as long as there is a single standard for all. However, it is not news that at this point in our increasingly unethical culture, there isn’t any taboo on making racially denigrating jokes about whites while the same kinds of jokes about any other group will lead to shunning, unemployment, and career disruption. If you want to ensure that racial disharmony gets worse instead of better, that’s a brilliant strategy. Yes, it is hypocrisy exemplified, but those who benefit from this double standard rationalize its appropriateness in a number of ways, or just don’t care.

The Golden Globes were back on prime time after a couple of years’ exile for, among other problems, complaints about their dearth of “diversity,” so you know what the new regime’s priorities were. Signalling their sincerity, the choice of host for the evening was ‘historic”: we are told that Jo Kay was the first Filipino American comedian to serve as MC for the broadcast, and only the second Asian. He was also, if not the first embarrassingly incompetent host, a reminder that choosing a comedian because of his ethnicity rather than his comedy skills is a dubious strategy. Even the reliably woke audience in the seats couldn’t manage to make themselves laugh at him, historic Filipino or not, and Jo Kay bombed. Good.

Watch him be asked back…

In such a warped and rigged environment, how proud of her award could Lily Gladstone be when she became became the “historic” first indigenous person to win a Golden Globe for best actress, for her turn in “Killers of the Flower Moon”? Naturally, she basked in a standing ovation, which at this Golden Globes ceremony, was probably recognition for not being white.

Slow News Day At PolitiFact?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

PolitiFact is arguably the most biased and the least trustworthy of the fact-checking operations—it or Snopes. Its dossier on EA is thick and nauseating: PolitiFact’s releases are progressive and Democratic Party propaganda masquerading as illumination and non-partisan reality. I’d love to know who made the decision to “fact-check” an obviously tongue-in-cheek video claiming that Hillary Clinton is really a lizard.

Did they really think this needed to be debunked? If so, the organization is run by morons. Was the fact-check also a joke? Professional organizations that want the public to trust them can’t afford to make such jokes. Alleged professional organizations with records of deceit, bias and dishonesty like PolitiFact especially can’t afford to make such jokes, because so many of their serious “fact-checks” are only slightly less absurd.

The “Hillary isn’t a lizard” piece is written with no hints of irony or humor, which is, of course, the right way to present such a thing if it is a joke. I really don’t know what to make of the article. I thought Snopes repeatedly fact-checking Babylon Bee gags was bad, but this—well, come to think of it, there is one possible justification. Anyone who trusts PolitiFact despite its long and ugly record of incompetence and bias is conceivably dumb enough to believe that Hillary Clinton is a lizard. In that case, PolitiFact is simply serving the needs of its market.

Another possibility, I suppose, is that Hillary really is a lizard, and PolitiFact is working with the Left, as usual, to make sure the truth doesn’t get out.

Observations on Media Research Center’s 2023 Political Joke Survey

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The Media Research Center, a conservative “media watchdog” roughly the Right’s equivalent of Media Matters but with a much bigger job, analyzed six of the daily late night comedy shows: Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”, NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” CBS’s “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and “The Late Late Show with James Corden” until its April exit, from January 3, 2023 through December 22, 2023. The results are here. The researchers counted 9,518 jokes they judged political in nature, and broke them down into categories. 1,601 targeted progressive, Democrats and figures on the left of the political spectrum. 186 aimed at people, groups, or institutions not associated with either side. 7,729 or 81% of the jokes were considered barbs at were directed at individual, organization or positions considered to be conservative. 493 targets were the objects of a single joke, with 285 of these on the right, 167 on the left, and the remaining 41 on non-partisan topics.

The unbalanced percentages are only a surprise in that they are less lopsided than I would have guessed, but still obviously showan absurdly unfair partisan bias. If, as was once the norm in all political comedy, all sides and parties were mocked relatively equally with the President in the White House taking most of the fire, political humor can be fairly categorized as entertainment with the primary objective being to make as many people laugh as possible. Distorted to this extent, however, late night comedy becomes a self-evident propaganda weapon that plays a significant part in the mainstream media mission to sway elections and manipulate public opinion.

Some telling findings:

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I Can’t Resist Posting This Before I Hit The Sack….

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

This was sent to me by Harvard late Sunday night.

Somehow, I doubt that the dangers of ultra-processed foods are really the top priorities in Cambridge right now….

Stop Making Me Defend (Ugh!) Megan Rapinoe!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I haven’t gone back and checked all of the Ethics Alarms “Don’t Make Me Defend…” posts, but its hard to imagine one involving a public figure I admire less than Megan Rapinoe. Her only legitimate claim to significance is that she was a talented player in a game I wouldn’t abandon my sock drawer to watch, yet she has used that narrow platform to bray a series of woke knee-jerk pronouncements that showed her to be ignorant, anti-American, and the kind of militant feminist who gives feminism a bad name. That, added to an abrasive and narcissistic personality, has made her a blight on the sports landscape and others. And yet…

…fair is fair, and unfair is unfair. Conservatives detest Rapinoe, naturally, and today they pounced on an off-the-cuff comment she made exactly the way the progressive media has deliberately attacked every statement made by Donald Trump that could possibly be interpreted as dumb, mean, sinister or otherwise objectionable when the same words would be ignored from anyone else. I sometimes call this “The Perpetually Jaundiced Eye.” I hate it, and I hate it no matter who the victim is. Yes, even Megan Rapinoe.

During the National Women’s Soccer League Championship, in what had been announced the final match of her storied soccer career, Megan tore her Achilles tendon. This, coming off her humiliating botch of a crucial penalty kick in her team’s loss in the World Cup gave Rapinoe an exit that was approximately the exact opposite of Ted Williams’ (or Roy Hobbs’) home run in his last at bat.

In the post-match, post-injury, and post-career press conference, Rapinoe said, “I’m not a religious person or anything and if there was a god, like, this is proof that there isn’t. This is fucked up. It’s just fucked up. Six minutes in and I eat my Achilles!”

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Cartoon Ethics Quiz: Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The British newspaper The Guardian fired its long-time (over 40 years) cartoonist Steve Bell after he submitted what is being called an anti-Semitic political cartoon (above).

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Does that cartoon justify termination?

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A Ruthless CEO Explains What To Do “When Life Hands You Lemons”

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

Mike Flannagan (not the old Orioles pitcher) is a rising star director/screenwriter in the horror genre. His brilliant and complex mash-up of “The Haunting of Hill House” was as good as any horror movie or series I’ve ever seen, and his two follow-ups, one a re-thinking of “The Turn of the Screw,” are also smart, original and excellent. Now his mash-up of Edgar Alan Poe tales in a modern day horror story evoking the Sackler family and the opioid scandal is on Netflix. As with the previous three, “The Fall of the House of Usher”—the Ushers are the Sacklers— is cast substantially with his “rep company” including E.T.’s Henry Thomas and Annabeth Gish.

Last night I saw the episode in which the Faux Sackler family head and chief villain, played by Bruce Greenwood, gives a spontaneous speech about what smart businesses do when “Life hands them lemons,” and boy, it sure isn’t “make lemonade.” The second I heard it, when I had stopped applauding, I decided that the speech was an instant classic, much cleverer and better than Oliver Stone’s celebrated “Greed is good” speech that he wrote for Michael Douglas in “Wall Street.” It should be appearing soon in business school lectures across the country, and maybe laws schools too. I’m going to use it in an ethics seminar.

Flannagan’s speech for the bitter Usher family head is at once funny, chilling, revealing and true, perfectly encapsulating the ruthless logic of 21st Century capitalism as well as the soul of entrepreneurism.

Flat Ethics Learning Curve Of The Last Two Decades: Progressives And Democrats Calling For A “Cease-Fire” Before Israel Can Respond Appropriately To The Hamas Terror Attack.

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

This tweet was taken down, though only after 12 hours had passed. Watch: the Biden Administration will now soon claim it was posted by a rogue intern. [ UPDATE: I was close!] The U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs in Jerusalem also tweeted for “all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks” on the very day of Hamas’s invasion of Israel. That post also was deleted.

Satire though it is, the Babylon Bee’s reaction is spot on:

“It seems that US Secretary of State Blinken deleted yesterday’s tweet where he ‘encouraged’ Hamas-supporting Turkey arranging a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel. Are there any actual adults in charge in Foggy Bottom?” tweeted retired US diplomat Alberto Miguel Fernandez. Who is surprised? Many on the Left opposed any military action against Afghanistan after the 9-11 bombings. Meanwhile, as the whiff of moral equivalency wafts through the wokified air, Hamas has threatened to execute civilian hostages on live TV, stating, “From this moment on, we announced that any targeting of innocent civilians without warning will be met, regretfully to say, by executing one of the hostages in our custody and we will be forced to broadcast this execution.” The ethical distinction should be clear, but to frighteningly many, it is not:

Maybe Biden will make more billions of dollars available to Iran if it can get Hamas to stop…

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Pointer and Source for the cartoon above: Instapundit.

No, Not A Divine Miracle, Nor Even A Religious Charlatan Who’s Now Overdrawn At The Moral Luck Bank…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It’s a hoax.

The viral video above supposedly shows a Nigerian pastor with the handle ‘Pastor Daniel’ entering the lions’ cage at a zoo to show that nothing can happen to a man of God, just like in the Bible story. “Pastor Daniel brought his church members to show them that nothing can happen to a man of God,” a Nigerian blogger wrote on Instagram. In Kenya, a local television station shared the video and it caught the attention of a member of the Kenyan parliament, Ronald Karauri. “I volunteer to take him to the Maasai Mara [national park] please, all expenses paid. We look for the lions and he can go walk with them,” he posted on Twitter/X.

Uh, no. The BBC investigated, and the video is from Somalia, while the episode shot took place in 2021 in the Somali capital, Mogadishu. The “pastor” was Mohamed Abdirahman Mohamed. He is a zookeeper and explained at the time that he raised the young lions that he is shown playing with.

Now, in 1991 a genuine emulator of the biblical Daniel, “Prophet Daniel Abodunrin,” actually did enter the lion enclosure at the University of Ibadan zoo in Nigeria. He was a real preacher, and invited his followers to watch him as he demonstrated how the power of faith can tame the savage beasts. After entering the lions’ den—it is believed a zookeeper let him in—Abodunrin chanted Bible verses while commanding communicating the big cats to be peaceful

The lions pounced on him, tore Abodunrin apart, and ate him.

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