Race

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 8/28/2020: A Bad Couple Of Months For Museums And Sexual Predators

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Good morning!

1. Related to absolutely nothing anyone is currently thinking about...I was re-watching “Spotlight” to remind myself that the news media sometimes does its job, and again was reminded how Hollywood constantly makes Americans more ignorant by its sheer arrogance and laziness. The film, which reasonably accurately recounts how the Boston Globe’s investigative “Spotlight” team broke the story of the extensive Catholic Church cover-up of pedophile priests, a scandal still unfolding now, 20 years later, has a scene in which a lawyer who represents the victims of such priests tells a reporter that he’s effective because he’s an “outsider.” “I’m Armenian,” he says. “How many Armenians do you know in Boston?” Having been brought up in Boston, I know that the answer to this question is “A LOT.” Boston was a center of Armenian immigration at the turn of the 20th Century, and its Armenian community, in the city and especially the suburbs, is huge and influential. There are many Armenian organizations as well. In Arlington, Mass., where my family lived, Armenian-Americans were prominent in business and government. The little side street where we lived, Brunswick Road, had ten families living on it: the Marshalls, the Gares, and the Moreland,  the Zeffs (who were Jewish, then two Sakoians, the Nazarians, the Catherians, the Berbarians, and the Masmanians. Just Googling “Boston Armenian conmmunity” would have let the film-makers know the scene was nonsense, and they couldn’t be bothered.

2. And speaking of  sexual predators…the cover-up of sexual predators in the coaching ranks for Olympic sports is being exposed slowly but surely.  Last month a lawsuit was filed against Richard Callaghan, an elite American figure skating coach best known for coaching Tara Lipinski to an Olympic gold medal in 1998 and coaching Todd Eldredge to a world title and six national championships. The suit alleges ongoing sexual abuse of one skater that endured over two decades. Callaghan’s victims were male, not female, but the story is familiar: parents guilelessly entrust their talented athletic children to mentor/coaches in swimming, skating, and gymnastics, without considering for a moment what attracts many of these people to working with children and teens.

Another sport that is coming to terms with a sexual predator is equestrian competition.  George Morris, an Olympics equestrian coach known as  a “kingmaker” for his success with riders,  was barred for life from the sport by the United States Equestrian Federation  based on an investigation of alleged sexual misconduct He is now facing lawsuits filed this month by two people claiming that he raped them as teenagers. Jimmy Williams, another  riding coach who guided many Olympians and  was also named in a lawsuit by a woman who said Williams had sexually assaulted her from the ages of 12 to 17.  Though Williams died in 1993, he was recorded as barred for life from the federation in 2018—yes, a dead man was banned for life— after an investigation by The New York Times revealed accusations by nearly a dozen women, including the Olympian Anne Kursinski, that he had preyed upon them as girls.

Parents are so desperate to live vicariously through their offspring that they willingly hand their kids over to the care of predators. I’m sorry to say this, but absent thorough, thorough investigation, it is irresponsible to trust these coaches. The history and what we know of human nature presents too much of a risk.

The same applies to allowing children to work in professional theater, TV, and movies. Continue reading →

Ethics Cool Down, 8/27/2020, From A Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Day…

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

(I told you there would be more)

1. Kudos to luckyesteeyoreman, the venerable EA commenter who exactly predicted what Joe Biden’s ventriloquists would have him say about the riots, aka “the angry genie the progressives will never get back in the bottle”: The violence is “Donald Trump’s America.”  Lucky bested me: I never thought even the Democrats could be that incompetent. By claiming that the riots are the President’s fault, he sends exactly the opposite message from the one he needs to send,which is that the riots are not being blamed on Trump, but on the Democrats. Biden’s argument, “he made me riot” is one that the campus Left has been justly mocked for, and nobody but cowering college administrators and indoctrinated students regard it as anything but risible.

2. Speaking of things the Democrats and media are having no luck blaming on Donald Trump, Issues and Insights published five charts that nicely debunk the “The pandemic in the US is worse than anywhere!” talking point.  These are the best:

Of course, nobody in their right mind or who isn’t a Times reporter or  works for CNN believes the figures from China, Iran, or Russia.

Then there is this. Continue reading →

Ethics Warm-Up, 8/26/2020: Impending Zoom

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

This, as some of you might recall, is the logo for the old PBS kids series, the lively cast members of which are now middle-aged and arthritic. i don’t like to think about it…

Ugh.

I’m hoping to get this posted while I’m simultaneously preparing for a three-hour legal ethics seminar for CLE credit sponsored by the D.C. Bar. Zoom seminars are grueling, and they remove my major asset, which is facilitating lively discussions about various ethical dilemmas.  Participants just don’t talk, and for all I know they are watching porn.

Incidentally, if you haven’t seen “Host,” you should. It’s a horror film about a Zoom meeting that goes really, really wrong. And its less than half as long as the seminar I’m about to do.

1. And speaking of horror…What the hell?

This is D.C. Comic’s new, politically correct, non-sexually objectified, woke Wonder Woman. Why can’t a plus sized woman in mom jeans be a super-hero, the artist asks.  Well of course she can, just as a fat ,flabby, bald , half-shaven, acne-suffering man can be Spiderman, if he gets bitten by the right arachnid. There is nothing wrong with idealized heroes, however. No matter how much the feminists try to brainwash little girls, Fat Barbie is never going to be a thing.

I hate to be conspiracy-minded, but chunky, A-cup Diana Prince reeks of Maoist cultural brain-washing. It’s suicidal virtue-signaling by D.C., who are deliberately alienating WW’s teenage  male fans, who will not get excited about a Wonder Woman movie starring Rosie O’Donnell, no matter how progressive that is. Continue reading →

Ethics Train Wreck Déjà Vu In Kenosha

/ Jack Marshall / 60 Comments

Now THIS is “blood on their hands!

Three people were shot overnight in Kenosha, Wisconsin in  the third straight night of “mostly peaceful protests,” aka “rioting and looting” in response to a police shooting which may have been completely justified. Two of last night’s shooting victims died. Meanwhile, the mobs damaged and burned buildings and businesses around the city. Here’s a car lot torched by the “peaceful protesters”:

As we have seen with the George Floyd mob rule and before that, the riots in Atlanta (over the similarly ambiguous Wendy’s shooting), Ferguson (Mike Brown) and Baltimore (Freddie Gray), this damage to innocent people and their businesses is being “justified”—in truth, nothing could justify it—as a reaction to racism and police brutality when neither have been demonstrated by an investigation. But as we have seen, Facts Don’t Matter, and due process for cops doesn’t exist. Eager to disrupt society and seize power as supine politicians snivel, opportunistic revolutionaries along with some well-meaning but misguided activists, are savaging a community and causing far more damage than the original incident, based on supposition, bias, and raw emotion.

Other than the rioters themselves, these are the responsible individuals and organizations: Continue reading →

I Don’t Care If The Axis Of Unethical Conduct Is Panicking, Their Rhetoric Is Unforgivable (CONTINUED)

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

[The beginning of this article is here.]

You know her comments crashed over any line pf decency, propriety and civility because the mainstream media largely ignored them. “We take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Pelosi said on MSNBC. “And, sadly, the domestic enemies to our voting system and honoring our Constitution are right at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with their allies in the Congress of the United States,” ,Of course, being a den of hacks, no follow-up could ever occur on MSNBC. Only Fox News, the New York Post, and some conservative outlets thought the Speaker of the House declaring an entire political party and its President “domestic enemies” was something the public has a right to know.  CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, Politico and other AUC members buried it, though such rhetoric is a call to insurrection and violence, coming from the same party that wouldn’t rebuff Maxine Waters and others who called for the harassment of Trump administration officials in public places.

No, this is not the equivalent of  President Trump calling the mainstream media “enemies of the people,” which, it should be noted, caused that same mainstream media to decry the words as a prelude to an authoritarian take-over.  The media is not the government, and all citizens can do to journalists who betray the trust the Founders put in the Fourth Estate to keep the public objectively informed is to stop believing them, which, thankfully, a large portion of the public has.  In contrast, for a powerful elected official to call the party in the White House “domestic enemies” is indescribably wrong, and I say that because my inner thesaurus fails me.

“I was shot because of this kind of unhinged rhetoric,” House Republican Whip Steve Scalise said. Representative Dan Crenshaw (R., Texas) called  the statement were “gross and divisive;” while Senator Kelly Loeffler called them “appalling.”  Not bad, but those adjective still don’t measure the amazing breach of democratic norms Pelosi’s words represent. (Remember, Democrats have been saying it  is Trump who endangers democracy by his breach of “norms,” like firing an unethical and incompetent FBI Director.) Pelosii’s hateful rhetoric is only slightly less divisive than the beating of Charles Sumner on the Senate Floor.

Her words were  also flamingly hypocritical. Pelosi’s Democrats have orchestrated one attempted coup after another, working to deliberately undermine the public’s faith in their government, nation and Constitution, and using leaks, conspiracy theories, falsified documents, support for lawlessness and manufactured narratives to to it. No party has done such damage to America  since the Civil War. Even the news media’s efforts shouldn’t be able to keep cognizant Americans from figuring out “what’s going on here.” Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Lazy Saturday Ethics Diversions, 8/22/2020: Hypocrisy Again,” Item #3 (Goodyear Saga Cont.)

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments
[I originally had a video clip here that perfectly illustrated, satirically, the craven instincts of corporate America as it grovels to Black Lives Matter. It is a from a classic “Simpsons” episode, “Deep Space Homer,” in which Kent Brockman, the idiot Springfield news anchor whose intellect  makes Ted Baxter seem like Tim Russert, mistakenly comes to believe that the Earth is about to be conquered by giant ants. He immediately pivots to sucking up to the ants in his broadcasts. Then, just before posting the clip, I thought, wait, is someone going to accuse me of comparing African Americans to insects, when I’m accurately comparing our jelly-spined corporate leaders to a cowardly fool? And I chickened out. Now I’m disgusted with myself. Thus is life in cancel-culture America]

***

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far away, I remember I offered a competition here for the most obnoxious, cloying, blatantly pandering corporate statement in reaction to the George Floyd Freakout. This followed so closely on the heels of a corporate rush to exploit the pandemic with obnoxious, cloying, blatantly pandering messages ( “In these specail/difficult/ stressful times…”) that I realized, too late, that I was risking my sanity. Many, many readers sent  entries my way (thank you), and I slogged through them all, even though all but a handful read like they were written by the same cheap bot that had created the pandemic-licking garbage

I used to work for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and got to know a lot of CEO ans their top lieutenants. I left that career chapter convinced that the negative public image of corporations and the people who ran them was shallow and mistaken. The rush of many of the same companies I worked to embrace racist, violent, Marxist Black Lives Matter has erased all of the. These companies and their management are themselves shallow and mistaken, and worse. They are virtually traitors to American ideals—those stories about American industrialists sucking up to Hitler no longer seem incredible as they once did—; they are cowardly; they are venal, and they are stupid, stupid, stupid.

Unfortunately, so many of them have adopted this despicable strategy that we can’t even punish them by switching loyalties to their competitors. And the reverse is true: these corporations are deliberately throwing in with the forces of indoctrination, censorship and suppression.  Where I live, in Northern Virginia, I have seen dozens of Black Lives Matter signs, and many more Biden 2020 signs. I have not seen a single Trump sign, and it is because people are afraid of having their homes vandalized and their kids being called racists at school. This un-American, anti-American environment of fear is what the powerful, influential corporate sector has decided that it is in their scrimey, greedy,  stock option-protecting, collaborationist interests to support. I will not forgive them for that. I always knew corporations were untrustworthy, of course, but I never thought they were this untrustworthy.

Good to know.

Thus I am not ready to let the Goodyear episode go quite yet.  Fortunately, Glenn Logan is on one of his periodic rolls. Here is his Comment of the Day, the second in a row, on  Item #3  in the post,  “Lazy Saturday Ethics Diversions, 8/22/2020: Hypocrisy Again.“

[Oh: the “best” corporate pander to Black Lives Matter was easily the short-lived,  but immortally bone-headed, “Popeyes is nothing without Black lives,”]

Jack wrote:

3. Does Goodyear win the “Trying to Be On All Sides At Once Without Consequences” prize in the corporate division?

They have a lot of company who just did it smarter, in my opinion. But having said that, here’s an observation:

I understand corporate impulses to place themselves on the (please forgive me for this) “right side of history.” During my whole life, we have seen corporate virtue signaling, mostly on television but occasionally in print.

With the advent of social media, a lot of things have changed for the worse when it comes to corporations and social issues. In the instant case, it seems corporations have acknowledged, and to some extent embraced, the unethical Black Lives Matter trope, “Silence is violence.” Certainly, activists on all sides of the debate spend a lot of time raising social issues at corporate leadership, and engaging in various levels of complaints or even boycotts at their expense — in common vernacular, “calling them out.”

I think most Americans with functional cerebra not terminally infected with the passions of the moment would prefer to see corporations stay out of divisive social issues and do what they are best at — produce products or services for our consumption and engage in social issues, especially and mostly at their local level, quietly and competently. The problem is, because so much of our private conversation has become nationalized through social media, a comparatively small number of voices can have a disproportionate impact on corporate behavior, especially when amplified by a media invested in one side of the argument. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers

/ Jack Marshall / 73 Comments

“While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country, We stand with all those who have and continue to demand justice, equity, and accountability for Black lives in our country.”

—Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers (D…naturally) in a statement following an officer involved shooting in Kenosha last night, before any investigation has occurred, knowing that the rioters were already gearing up to cause violence and destruction.

And, of course, violence and destruction is what he got.

Police have not commented on what led to the shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man, in Kenosha, Wisconsin.  He was taken to Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee after being shot multiple times, in the back, as he appeared to be entering his car and perhaps reaching for something. (I’m no expert, but doesn’t the fact that more than one cop reflexively started shooting suggest that there was  a reason other than “Oh!Here’s an uarmed black man: let’s shoot him”?)

At this point, the important facts are not known, just irrelevant facts injected into the story to make the police look like villains. Blake was apparently shot in front of his kids. Irrelevant.  It is said that he was trying to break up a fight between two women—he’s a peacemaker!—which is what precipitated the police call. Irrelevant. What is relevant is why the police fired, and what action Blake was engaged in or appeared to be engaged in immediately before the shooting. That is not clear in the video. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “The Hypocrisy And Dishonesty Of The Democratic National Convention Apparently Made Rose McGowan’s Head Explode”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Glenn Logan took on the macro-issue of broad-brush political pronouncements in his Comment of the Day, which was only touched upon in the original post. That concerned activist Rose McGowran’s angry tweets,

I wrote in part that

“we see the limitations of Twitter…its advantage is that it is the only way to communicate with a large—far, far too large—proportion  of the American public, which is unlikely if not unable to read anything serious that has more words than a combination of three or four bumperstickers…McGowan’s assertions are “right,” is a general, meat-axe way, but they aren’t arguments. They are the ” this just is” pronouncements of someone who won’t countenance an argument, and, in most cases, isn’t capable of making one. That’s Black Lives Matter. That’s “the resistance.” That’s Maxine Waters and MSNBC….

Glenn took off from there in his Comment of the Day on the post, “The Hypocrisy And Dishonesty Of The Democratic National Convention Apparently Made Rose McGowan’s Head Explode”…

Too right, and that list is so long the full one would require a bigger blog.

What interests me is how often we all engage in these kind of broad-brush arguments that reject any aspect of nuance. Some Democrats have, to varying degrees, addressed many or even all of the ends she thinks are desirable. So have some Republicans.

The intractable problems of society cannot be solved by pronouncements, either of solutions or failures. That’s why they remain intractable. Black people most notably have refused to participate in extracting their “people” from poverty, crime, dependency and negative perceptions. “Brown” people is not a race or even a thing, and claiming they may be characterized in the same way as blacks renders the statement absurd. Each racial group has unique problems relating to their culture, their perception by our society, and their willingness to integrate into America.

I find it interesting that the Democrats completely ignore “yellow” people as if they never had the struggles of other minority populations — a risible idea that has infected the Democrat identity-politics groupthink. But the Asians have shown how to fight all the problems blacks and some other races have suffered through for generations — by willingly assimilating into America.

The fact that black people haven’t embraced this idea despite living here longer than Asians is a big part of why so little progress has been made. Now, blacks want new, government-enforced segregation policies created to further alienate them from America. Can there be any doubt as to how this new demand will work out if implemented?

“Police brutality?” The vast majority of police are professionals and behave that way. But to Rose, who has only a proverbial hammer, there are nothing but nails in blue. Continue reading →

Sunday Ethics Warm-Up, 8/23/2020, As If Anyone Needs To be Warmed Up Today…

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Hot enough for ya?

1. False narrative, bad analogy. The popular media narrative is that President Trump is in a similar position to George H.W. Bush in 1988, when polls at this point showed him trailing Democratic Presidential nominee Michael Dukakis by a large margin. Conservative media had cited the comparison earlier this summer to make the simple point that being behind in the polls in July is relatively meaningless. Lately the mainstream media has been flogging the analogy in order to continue its doomsday prediction for the Trump campaign.

“Bush ’88 rally could be map for Trump ’20” is somehow deemed worthy of a front page spot in the Sunday Times. To begin with, that’s fake news of the “future news” variety. (“…or, it might not be.”) More importantly, it’s straw man: the article exists to to show that President Trump may not be able to prevail, because, you see, having begun with the false assertion that his situation is similar to Bush’s, the Times explains that the situations aren’t that similar at all. The bad analogy is created to rebut it.

In fact, the differences between the Bush challenge in 1988 and Trump’s in 2020 mostly favor the President. Bush was never a popular figure; he was distrusted by conservatives, and only was nominated because an epicly popular President, Ronald Reagan, anointed him as his approved successor. (Barack Obama, in contrast, avoided “anointing” Biden.) A strong Democratic opponent would have beaten Bush; Dukakis was weak. He was ahead in the polls when nobody outside of Massachusetts knew what  he was like. Trump has a large base of passionate supporters, something Bush never had. He is an incumbant (Bush was not), and if they run, incumbents almost always win. Bush was an awful debater; Trump has proven effective in debates. And while Dukakis was completely supported by the liberal wing of the party, Biden has critics on the hard left, among feminists (the non-hypocrite faction), and African Americans. The Democratic party of the 1980s had not spent four years trying to overturn an election. Moreover, polls are less reliable now than they were before news media bias began warping them, and Trump’s support, as the last election showed,  is especially hard to measure. Continue reading →

Friday Ethics Round-Up, 8/21/2020: Democratic National Convention Hangover Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

No, John Wayne doesn’t speak Spanish in “Red River,” but this was the only clip I could find of its iconic “Yahoo!” sequence. This may be the best Western ever; I don’t know, I go back and forth on it. Amazingly, Howard Hawks never won an Oscar…but then neither did Orson Wells, Alfred Hitchcock, or Cecil B. De Mille.

1. Now this is uncivil and unethical political speech (Pointer: Tim Levier):

No, it’s not justified by “tit for tat,” but the ugly, ad hominem abuse heaped on President Trump by the Democrats this week was hardly better.

2. Oh, it’s Friday; why not check in with Paige Spiranac? You remember Paige, right? I posted about her here. She’s not much of a professional golfer, but she is now a “social influencer.” She has power and influence because, let’s be frank, she looks like this, and makes sure everyone knows it:

Now she has a viral ethics tweet about slow golfers:

That’s slowLY, Paige. Mustn’t enable those “dumb blonde” jokes.

This has actually sparked a controversy in social media, though there shouldn’t be any question that excessively pokey golfers are being rude and inconsiderate. The rationalizations being offered by defenders of slow play are, sadly, illustrative of the ethics skills of too much of the public. For example:

“That’s a dumb comment. Golf is a leisure sport. You are meant to enjoy the sport with friends and family and take time while doing it. Especially if you’re not playing for millions.”

Continue reading →