language

It’s Time To Play That Exciting Game Show, “Worth Confronting or Too Trivial To Bitch About?”!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Hello everybody! I’m your ethics game show host Wink Smarmy, and welcome to “Worth Confronting or Too Trivial To Bitch About?”,” the popular ethics game show where our contestants try to decide whether clearly unethical conduct is worth only a shrug and a giggle, or is serious enough to try to stop.

Here’s our special guest, Touchy McCrankface, with the problem he encountered recently…

“Hello, panel. My name is is Touchy McCrankface. For some reason I am still a Facebook user despite that platform banning my favorite blog Ethics Alarms for almost two years because one of their censors decided that it was racist to even discuss the topic of blackface’s appearance in some classic movies. When a Facebook friend  I actually care about has allowed his or her birthday to be announced on Facebook, I will sometimes, as I am prompted, wish that friend a “Happy Birthday.”

“I do not use the stupid and juvenile pre-programmed emojis Facebook tries to stick on my message, the little cakes, candles and party hats. Recently I sent just such a birthday message to an old friend. Let’s call him “Mike.”

After I sent my “Happy Birthday”,  Facebook sent me the equivalent of a receipt. I have no idea why. Maybe it has always done this, but I’ve never noticed one before, or if I have, I never bothered to read one. The message to me read,

“You wished Michael XXXXX a happy birthday on their profile.”

This, frankly, ticked me off. First of all, I knew that. But most of all, I don’t use the pronouns “they” and “their” for single individuals, as in “non-conjoined twins.” If you seem to be male to me, I will use the pronouns “You/he/him. If you seem to be female, I will use “You/she/her.” If I can’t tell, I won’t use any pronoun, constructing a sentence so that “misgendering” isn’t necessary, since men and boys don’t typically like being mistaken for women and girls, and vice-versa. If someone informs me that “he” wants to be refereed to as “she,” that’s fine: I aim to please. Similarly with 250 pound bearded bald guys who want to be called “she.” I’ll call you a pangolin or an Archaeopteryx if that’s what you want, as long as you don’t try to make me eat insects or worms with you. (Archaeopteryx is described as an “early bird,” and as we all know, the early bird catches the worm.)

But I will NOT agree to utter a grammatical monstrosity by using a plural pronoun in reference to one individual. And if you tell me you haven’t decided on your gender, or that it switches back and forth without warning, I will respond, most politely, “Please let me know when you make up your mind or get psychiatric help. Until then, you’ll be “him” or “her” to me.

But back to Facebook….My friend Mike has been married trice, has two grown kids and is as male and heterosexual, as well as unambiguously so, as anyone I have ever met. Who or what is Facebook to impose a plural pronoun on him, or to suggest that it is appropriate to do so in either his case or anyone’s case? 

I view this as subtle cultural indoctrination regarding a societal practice that is at best a stupid fad and at worst ‘grooming’.” 

Thanks, Touchy! Before I throw the challenge over to you, contestants, let me ask our resident ethicist, Jack Marshall, about Touchy’s dilemma. Jack, is this worth bitching about?

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Unethical Quote of the Year (2026): New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

—New New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in his speech yesterday to too many ignorant voters who have no idea what he’s talking about and what they are in for.

Choosing that “Bananas” clip from the Ethics Alarms Hollywood clip archive was too easy; not only is it one of my favorites, but other pundits and social media wags has already made the connection to Woody’s Allen’s fictional South American country of San Marcos. And Mamdani’s open embrace of communism in that sentence was, indeed, bananas. I am sorely tempted to just leave the post at that: it’s res ipsa loguitur. It speaks for itself.

Yet it doesn’t speak for itself: that’s the scary part. That is what our education system’s collapse into incompetence and indoctrination has brought us. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” wrote George Santayana in his 1905 book, “The Life of Reason.” The average American not nearing retirement age is likely to say, upon hearing Mamdani’s seductive threat, “Collectivism! Sounds good to me!” as well as “Who’s Santayana?”

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Ethics Quote of the Month: CBS Evening News

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“On too many stories, the press has missed the story. Because we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.” That changes now. The new CBS Evening News starts Monday at 6:30 p.m. ET on CBS.”

—Out of the mouth of new anchor Tony Dokoupil, on behalf of CBS News.

CBS, like ABC, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, has allowed political agendas and unprofessional practices, not to mention laziness and bias, to make broadcast journalism untrustworthy, corrupt and destructive to a well-functioning democracy for decades. Now, after New York Times rebel Bari Weiss has been installed by the network’s new owners to restore balance, fairness, objectivity and competence to CBS News, once the gold standard for TV news reporting (or so we thought), CBS is promising a reset. That would mean a good faith attempt to return to ethical journalism.

Do you believe it? There are good reasons to be dubious, and that statement, which was presumably drafted with some care, is one of them:

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A Dead Canary in Our Political Mine: The U.S. Mayor Who Can’t Understand English

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I must confess, if you had told me even ten years ago that this was possible in the U.S., I would have laughed heartily. I certainly underestimated the damage to American culture about to be wreaked by the Democratic Party’s open borders lunacy.

The mayor of Lawrence, Massachusetts, Brian DePena requested the assistance of a translator during a court appearance last week.

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Stay Classy, DC Police Chief Smith! [Corrected and Revised]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I’ve got four posts up today, and I’m tired, but I can’t resist this one…

Outgoing D.C. Police Chief Pamela Smith decided to show what she was made of as she spoke as the honoree in a good-bye ceremony yesterday. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform had accused her of manipulating data to make it seem that crime has decreased in the District of Columbia when it had not. She could have stuck around, of course, until the final numbers were in, but instead she decided that she would leave her post “to be with her family.” That’s always a good dodge when you’re being investigated. In her farewell speech, she played the God card (she’s also a reverend at a Baptist church in D.C.), then the “haters” card, and finally the “it’s not my fault” card. Wait: are the statistics correct, or are they wrong? Smith’s argument somehow came out, “The statistics were accurate, but if they’re not, somebody else rigged them!”

That’s accountability, D.C. Government style!

“How dare you? How dare you attack my integrity? Attack my character? You don’t know who I belong to!” she said. Wait, what does THAT mean?

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More on Trump Derangement and I.C.E.

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I still am noodling about how exactly to define Trump Derangement beyond listing the symptoms. I’d say, for example, that a retired and distinguished lawyer re-posting with favor a typical Occupy Democrats Facebook rant qualifies as one. This particular Occupy Democrat post—is that group worse than Move-On, better, or the same?—expressed outrage over “US citizen and Army veteran George Retes'” testimony to Congress over (if he is to be believed) a mistaken arrest and abusive treatment by I.C.E., as it mistook him as an illegal immigrant. Naturally, since he was recruited by Democrats to impugn the agency, my friend (and a somewhat famous classmate who has been engaging in what I would call borderline unethical conduct by regularly attacking his former client, President Trump) automatically accepted his account over that of Homeland Security, which in a release rebutted Retes’ claim as well as that of others who have been cited by critics as being falsely detained or arrested.

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Awww! The Knucklehead Is Offended By the “R-Word”!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Good!

Tim Walz, the self-proclaimed knucklehead governor of woke-addled Minnesota, is complaining that mean people have been driving by his home and shouting “retard” out their windows. “This creates danger,” the censorship supporting governor said yesterday. “… I’ve never seen this before: people driving by my house and using the R-word in front of people. This is shameful, and I have yet to see an elected official — a Republican elected official — say you’re right, that’s shameful.”

“We know how these things go,” the hypocrite added. “It starts with taunts; they turn to violence.” Oh. You mean like you and your party calling Donald Trump Hitler, calling ICE agents Nazis, and Republican fascists? Funny, I don’t recall Walz making this argument after Trump had two assassination attempts against him and Charlie Kirk was shot dead during a speech.

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Larry Bushart, Justin Carter, Josh Pillault: Martyrs To Anti-Gun Fearmongering and School Shooting Hysteria

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Today Greg Lukianoff, the president and chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, has a guest column in the New York Times about the unethical persecution of Bushart, a 61-year-old retired police officer living in Lexington, Tennessee, who ended up in jail for 37 days for posting a meme on social media post that some hysteric took to be a threat to shoot up a school. His was a particularly head-scratching case of the wild over-reaction to stupid and vicious comments about Charlie Kirk after his assassination. Lukianoff uses his column to condemn all negative consequences of all of those comments, usually by the Trump Deranged and Axis media-indoctrinated.

From the column:

Mr. Bushart’s case would be alarming even if it were the sole instance of institutional overreaction to a response to Mr. Kirk’s killing. But it is not unique. A recent review by Reuters of court records, local media reports and public statements found that more than 600 Americans have been fired, suspended, investigated or disciplined by employers for comments about the Kirk assassination. Mr. Bushart, too, lost his job — because he was in jail.

At my organization, we have tallied 80 attempts to punish academics over their remarks about Mr. Kirk since his killing, resulting so far in about 40 investigations or disciplinary actions and 18 terminations.

The Bushart case is a poor one to send Lukianoff to his soapbox: he wasn’t arrested over what he said about Kirk. I don’t think he was fired, either, since the column begins by telling us he is retired. Moreover, FIRE’s absolutism is misplaced: there are very good reasons to fire teachers who celebrated a man’s death by violence for his political views. To begin with, they are terrible, hateful leftists who shouldn’t be corrupting young minds.

But the column did remind me that I had never learned (or written about…I’m sorry) the resolution of the far worse case of Justin Carter, a Texas teenager (above) who was arrested in 2013 for commenting on Facebook with a fellow gamer, “Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts. lol. jk.” A Canadian jerk who read the exchange decided to report Justin to the Austin police, who then arrested him–he was 18 at the time—searched his family’s house, and charged him with making a “terroristic threat.”

I wrote a great deal about the case in 2013, beginning with this post, “The Persecution Of Justin Carter And The Consequences Of Fear-Mongering: If This Doesn’t Make You Angry, Something’s The Matter With You.” I just re-read it: I blamed the teen’s abuse on the Obama Administration’s exploitation of the Newtown school shooting to create sufficient anxiety among parents to move the metaphorical needle on gun control, and I was right. Where I was wrong was in not keeping Ethics Alarms readers updated on Carter’s fate, though I referred to his case as recently as 2018.

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Announcement: “Fuck” Has Been Officially Upgraded From Taboo Obscenity to Mainstream Colloquialism

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

This battle was lost long ago.

“Wheel of Fortune” has launched a new “What the Fun?” category because it implies “fuck.” The One Million Moms group is disgusted and outraged. “The once family-friendly ‘Wheel of Fortune’ game show is no more,” its site declared on October 30. “Unfortunately, the recently added puzzle category ‘What the Fun’ aims at a mature, modern audience with insinuated profanity making it no longer suitable for family viewing.”

“It is not the show it was with this implication of the f-word,” it continued. “Parents will have to explain to their children that the primetime program they were once allowed to watch is no longer a clean show.” The page included a link for a petition on which to pledge never to watch the show again unless the category is eliminated. More than 12,500 have signed.

Imagine a life so devoid of meaning and so full of discretionary time that one can organize a campaign to change a “Wheel of Fortune” category.

I have news for the conservative group, and by now it is old news. “Fuck” is now just acceptable naughtiness, and not the taboo obscenity it once was. Ditto “shit.” There are lots of reason why this has happened, and things like “What the Fun” are a big one.

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Ethical or Unethical Quote? President Trump on Nancy Pelosi:

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments


“Nancy Pelosi, the old and broken political hack who Impeached me twice and lost, is finally calling it ‘quits.’ She illegally made a fortune in the Stock Market, ripped off the American Public, and was a disaster for America. I’m glad to see the stench of Nancy Pelosi go!!!”

—President Donald Trump on Truth Social today, responding to the news that Ethics Villain Nancy Pelosi will not run for another term. (What do you really think, Mr. President?)

I was going to frame this as an Ethics Quiz, but thought better of it. Of course a U.S President shouldn’t stoop to this kind of rhetoric, even if everyone else is, about him. “Old and broken,” “hack” and “stench” cross the line into ad hominem, but then that’s Trump, unfortunately. The sentiment, however is deserved, which is why EA designated Pelosi as an Ethics Villain. She has been an unequivocally destructive force on the U.S. scene, from her irresponsible and unethical ushering of Obamacare through to passage without letting it be thoroughly vetted, to her ruinous impeachments (we no longer have a non-partisan impeachment option, thanks to her precedents) to her disgusting performance during Trump’s final State of the Union address in his last term, to the rigged “J-6” hearings. Trump is also correct about her insider trading, though she has the defense of “Everybody does it,” just not as effectively as she did.

Yes, Trump’s message is typical “tit-for-tat” after she called him a “vile creature” and the “worst thing on the face of the earth,” to which “hack” and “stench” seem mild insults in comparison. President still have an obligation to eschew such name-calling and “take the high road,” a principle that Trump either rejects or refuses to acknowledge.

On the other hand, as Captain Hook would never say, everything Trump said is true. So there’s that… Ann Althouse wrote that she was impressed that Trump didn’t slip any sexist rhetoric into his message.

And that, my friends, is called damning with faint praise.