Humor and Satire

Answering My Own Ethics Quiz: “Is This Troll By The White House Ethical?”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Damn right it is.

In fact, it’s brilliant, well-deserved, and spot-on. The purpose of trolling Trump-style is to make your opponents, detractors and adversaries start screaming and kicking things. Normally I would say that 1) causing people pain, psychic or otherwise, for no other reason than to do it, is unethical and that 2) for a President of the United States to engage in such conduct is petty, an abuse of position and and beneath him. But the fools, knaves, assholes and clods that make up the Trump Deranged just nearly got the President killed again. This particular trolling post, mocking the “No Kings” idiocy that has polluted the very concept of public demonstrations and protest as free speech, is a wonderful way to respond to those responsible.

To wit..

1 The President comparing himself to the UK’s King Charles brightly illustrates how silly the protest was to begin with. None of the kings extant in the world today, with Charles being the most prominent example, have any real power except for prestige and cultural respect.

2. If Americans and the mews media allowed Trump the formal respect and deference that the English royals receive, our politics, culture and society would be far healthier.

3. The Founders’ concept of our Executive was, in fact, that he have the status of a king but with his powers limited and controlled by two equally powerful government institutions. This is why both John Adams and Alexander Hamilton were shocked when our first President eschewed any of the trappings of royalty.

4. The difference between the conduct of the UK’s King and our President, especially this one, is striking. King Charles, like his mother, rarely allows reporters to shout questions at him, or addresses hostile audiences like Trump was about to do before the shooting started, or will take part in a contentious interview with a journalist as Trump has done many times, most recently with Norah O’Donnell. Framing them both as “kings” neatly points out the distinction. Our king is more accessible, a commoner (one might wish a bit less common) and self-effacing.

5. Real kings, and many of Charles’ predecessors, would execute or imprison critics, especially those as hateful and vicious as those who have taken part in the “No Kings” rallies. President Trump just teases them. That’s the epitome of a beneficent monarch.

6. Ann Althouse this morning chides the White House for, she says, sacrificing integrity (“consistency”) for trolling. Baloney. Trump trolling his undemocratic foes, who do not believe in allowing an elected President to govern, is one constant in his two terms. The post says, in effect, “Nyah, Nyah, Nyah. Nyah! I’m POTUS and you’re not. Bite me!”

Yes, childish, but Trump’s targets are children—worse, really, because children have an excuse for acting immaturely and adults do not. In the context of what he has put up with, it is a restrained, clever, and well-deserved rebuke.

My Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is the White House’s “TWO KINGS’ gag ethical?

Answer: It’s better than ethical. It’s perfect.

Stop Making Me Defend Jimmy Kimmel (AGAIN)!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The latest unfair conservative assault on Jimmy Kimmel led me to do a quick survey of all the Ethics Alarms “Stop Making Me Defend X” posts. With this one, Jimmy indeed becomes the leading non-political figure in number of SMEDX entries, with three. I bet you can guess the leader in the political figure category: yes, it’s Donald Trump. (In second place is Joe Biden.)

President Trump was the subject of the very first such post, way back in 2015 when I was writing a “Letting Donald Trump be President is like letting a chimp pilot a passenger jet” post almost weekly. The list of figures (and sometimes other things) that have prompted rueful defenses here is a rogues gallery: Kathy Griffin, Robert De Nero, Bill Maher, Bill and Hillary, Eric Swalwell, Eric Adams, Chris Cuomo…the most recent was Jeff Bezos, just a week ago. The previous SMEDX effort in defense of ABC’s disgusting late night host was last September. I began it like this, quoting my first defense of this asshole in 2017, and I wouldn’t change a single word today:

“I detest Jimmy Kimmel. I loathe him. He is the most revolting of all the Left-Licking late night and cable progressive comics, worse than Colbert, Maher, Samantha Bee, all of them. All of them combined. He is an ongoing blight on the ethics of American society, and yet he is self-righteous in the process.’ My opinion of Kimmel has, if anything, deteriorated since I wrote that.”

However, the current conservative pundit, website and MAGA attacks on Kimmel as the symbol of Axis hate-rhetoric that irresponsibly encourages Trump Deranged assassins is completely unfair. (So are the attacks on House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries for his “total war” statement.)

On his show last week, Kimmel was riffing on what he might say if he were the MC at the upcoming White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “Our first lady, Melania, is here. Look at Melania, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow,” Kimmel said. Of course Kimmel didn’t know that there would be an assassination attempt that night. But more importantly, there was nothing violent about the joke at all. In fact, it was well-constructed; the line can be interpreted in several ways, but taking it to be referring to Trump’s assassination is not among them.

Melania is considerably younger than her husband: in an earlier era, she would be called a “trophy wife.” I think I may have heard a wag make nearly that same joke decades ago when I attended a trial lawyers association convention. The number of decrepit antediluvian millionaire lawyers with gorgeous 20- or 30- something women on their arms was fairly revolting. Kimmel’s joke could have easily been made about the late professional bimbo Anna Nicole Smith when she married, at 26, an 89-year-old billionaire. Remember?

I can see why the First Lady was insulted by the innuendo (a bit “too close to the bone”), and, taking a cue from her husband, exploited Kimmel’s bad luck to pounce on Jimmy the way Jimmy pounces on the President literally every night his show airs. Nonetheless, it was unethical. “Tit for tat,” revenge and deliberate mischaracterizations are still unethical no matter how much the target “has it coming.”

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“Going Out Like A Lamb” Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

It was time for EA to do its annual March posting of my favorite Saturday Night Live performance. Hearkening back to this week’s contentious debate about the ethics of wasting one’s life, which began here, I give you John Belushi. I’m still furious with the troubled comic for robbing the world of all the laughter and entertainment his gifts would have provided had he managed to survive his 30s.

In case you’re interested, my March came in like a Woolly Rhinoceros and is going out like a sea slug.

And on the topic of comedians, how did you like President Trump joking about Pearl Harbor to the Japanese Prime Minister? If you are minimally culturally literate, this classic comic performance should have come to mind…

But I digress. Please proceed to the ethics aisle…and you can certainly talk about the war.

Ethics Pro Tip: If You’re a Realtor Using AI To Scam Potential Customers, You’re Not Only Unethical, You’re an Idiot

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Since AI bots are gradually corrupting everything from funny dog videos to legal briefs, it should not surprise anyone to learn that the little buggers are making real estate ads unreliable too. “Realtors Are Using AI Images of Homes They’re Selling. Comparing Them to the Real Thing Will Make You Mad as Hell” lays out this revolting development. “Future” writes,

“Realtors have made extensive use of the tech, manipulating photos of properties beyond recognition by giving facades and interiors a heavy coat of AI-generated paint. Text descriptions of properties have turned into a heap of ChatGPT-generated buzzwords, devolving an already frustrating house hunt into a genuinely exasperating experience. Making sense of what a rental apartment actually looks like in the real world has regressed into a guessing game. We’ve already come across bizarre listings of inexplicably classified houses with smoothed-over architectural features, misplaced trees, nonsensically rearranged furniture, and mangled props.”

Fortunately, the people most likely to cheat using AI are also the ones who have exceeded their Peter Principle ceilings and are incompetent at their chosen fields, hence the felt need to used bots to try to fool others who probably are smarter than they are. The ethics values are incompetence and dishonesty.

And thus we have the risible tale of the listing for a property in Fort Totten, a suburb in northern Washington, D.C., that has been taken down from Apartments.com. While the ad was up, it seemingly promised that for just $1,800 a month, a lucky renter could have her own bathroom Hell-spawn. See it in the photo above, crawling onto the bathroom sink?

Giraffe360, an AI image editing tool for real estate photos, points out on its website that real estate organizations “consistently prohibit” edits that remove or alter structural elements, erase or modify views, or digitally renovate or upgrade interiors or exteriors. “Here’s a simple test: if an edit would require physical renovation to achieve in real life, it shouldn’t be in an MLS listing photo,” it advises. But there is a loophole: edits that create H.P. Lovecraft creature features on the property probably should also be taboo.

“How do you not notice the melted demon crawling out of the wall before you hit publish?” one user wrote, attempting to rebut the presumption that AI image editing tools were involved. That’s an easy question that regular Ethics Alarms readers can answer by quoting The Waco Kid: “You know. Morons!”

Breaking!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

….and Savannagh Guthrie’s mother is still missing.

I know I’m harping on this, but it needs to be harped on. The news networks are still giving breathless reports on this single disappearance of a woman the American public knew nothing about 11 days ago, and whose only claim to importance is that she is the mother of the Today Show’s hostess, which doesn’t even mean as much as it did a decade ago.

The Today Show made Dave Garroway, Tom Brokaw, John Chancellor, Barbara Walters, Jane Pauley, Joe Garragiola and Bryant Gumbel national figures; also Willard Scott and J. Fred Muggs, a chimp, once upon a time when most American actually watched the morning show. Now? I bet more Americans listen to Bad Bunny recordings than had a clue who Savannah Guthrie was before CNN, MSNBC and Fox News started spewing this story up our metaphorical noses like Navage.

Yet there are already specials being aired about Mrs. Guthrie’s disappearance, which makes no difference to the fate of the nation, the state of the union, or the welfare of the public in any way, shape or form. The coverage, which now resembles the endless obsession with the Malaysian airline disappearance (but a lot more than one woman vanished with that mystery), is preventing the public from learning about other events and issues that are genuinely important to more than a single family. It is also helping the news media bury stories its political bias causes it to want buried.

(I find myself fighting the impulse to hope that Mrs. Guthrie was abducted and eaten by a trans female illegal immigrant Gavin Newsom supporter, who had been arrested and released 12 times by the Biden Administration.)

This episode does have importance, however. It is important because it proves that our journalists are not journalists. They are greedy, irresponsible hacks who hold the same ethical standards as drug dealers and organized crim: prey on people’s base needs and addictions, because it’s so profitable. Hey, everybody loves a mystery, right?

Sure…and the tale of Savannah Guthrie’s mom, however it turns out, will make a dandy “48 Hours” episode. One. Last night we were getting breathless updates about an arrest. The guy’s been released: now the mystery is whether he is a DoorDash driver or not.

It would all be funny if it wasn’t so damning. The people we rely on to inform us so we can be competent citizens in a republic are silly, greedy, irresponsible and untrustworthy hacks. We shouldn’t need this ridiculous spectacle to convince us by now, but how can anyone doubt it after this?

Not Quite De Minimis Non Curat Lex, But Mighty Close…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

When I heard that Rep. Omar had been “assaulted” and “attacked,” I assumed that something violent had occurred. When I read that a “substance” has been “hurled” at her, I assumed that the substance was 1) toxic and 2) aimed at her face.

Nah. The idiot squirted liquid harmlessly at her chest, and the “substance” turned out to be vinegar. It might as well have been water. For her part, the scamster, anti-Semitic “Squad” member didn’t even appear startled, much less harmed.

Yes, there is no question that this qualifies as an assault, as it placed a victim in legitimate fear of an un-consented to touching. The “substance” could have been bleach or battery acid or that stuff that made Margaret Qualley crawl out of Dem Moore’s back, and it could have been squirted in her eyes. We obviously can’t have public figures or even random, normal citizens on the street having that happen to them, so the “attacker” has to be tried and punished, I would assume with probation and a fine.

However, in reality what occurred was less consequential than a cream pie in the face, and Omar has been playing victim now for days, whining about bigotry and intimidation, and behaving as if not going into hiding after a few drops of vinegar hit her clothes (Would that even stain?) makes her Joan of Arc. And she’s getting TV time for doing it!

Meanwhile, the Left’s pundits are furious that President Trump suggested that the mini-spectacle was “staged.” Of course Trump should shut up in cases like this, but if they were going to fake a pathetic “attack” on Omar to give her a chance to play victim and wanted to make sure she was never in a scintilla of peril, that’s what it would look like.

The Left is also ethically estopped from complaining about Trump’s effort to minimize an indignity inflicted on a Democrat after so many Trump Deranged pundits, like Joy Reid, claimed the assassination attempt on Trump where a man sitting behind him was shot dead was “staged.” Then there was so much of the Left’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death, as in “Hooray!”

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The DEI Slippery Slope Goes Here:

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Suraj Bhaskar, 20, from Uttar Pradesh, one of the Indian states, failed the NEET medical school admission exam twice. Determined to become a doctor, however, the plucky young man wouldn’t give up. Indian law mandates a 5% set aside in admissions for people with disabilities (PwDs) in government-aided higher education institutions, including medical colleges.

So he cut off his foot.

A police investigation indicated the violent assault on Suraj that his older brother reported was in fact a carefully planned ruse. The aspiring doctor was indeed found unconscious with a severed foot, but the plot fell apart rapidly.

“The accused tried to mislead the investigation with a fabricated story, but his claims did not stand scrutiny during sustained questioning and examination of evidence,” a police spokesperson told local reporters. A diary belonging to Suraj conatined an entry that read, “I will become an MBBS doctor in 2026,” and his girlfriend testified to Suraj’s obsession with getting into medical school. He had unsuccessfully tried to obtain disability-related documents a few months prior, but was foiled. The medical report determined that Suraj’s foot had been cleanly cut off, most likely with a machine, and the incision was too clean to have been inflicted with a violent knife attack as the two brothers claimed. The syringes found in a field near where Suraj lay strongly suggested that used a drug to numb his legs before performing the self-amputation.

His foot is still missing.

There appears to be some doubt as to whether any charges or punishment will follow with this scheme, which is widely seen as self-punishing. If nothing else, Suraj’s medical career has definitely gotten off on the wrong foot.

I’m sorry, but I regard it as unethical to pass up an obvious punch line like that.

Musk’s Ethics Rorschach Maduro Meme

/ Jack Marshall / 14 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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