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Stop Making Me Defend Sydney Sweeney!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
Thank heaven for little girls...

The degree to which progressive and Democrat hysterics have decided that Hollywood sex symbol Sydney Sweeney is evil.,.EVIL! has truly exposed the festering insanity of the Left. Now the comely and curvy actress, who has nothing to fear at this stage of her career, can happily troll these fools while making the whole liberal end of the ideological spectrum reveal how completely its occupants will reverse its stereotypical endorsement of all things sexual if it can be weaponized against the Right.

Sweeney’s unforgivable crime is that she is suspected of being conservative, or something, as a result of her cheeky “good jeans/genes” ad. You know, white supremacy. Only a black bombshell is allowed to make such a commercial or play on words. Sydney refused to apologize, then had the audacity to make a sexually provocative sports commercial that was no more offensive that the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues have been since the Sixties.

Now the Political Correctness Furies have descended on Sydney with their talons out again. What did she do this time? In the latest video for her SYRN lingerie line, she was costumed as a character from “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (above).

Quick, now: who is that supposed to be?

Social media condemned the portrayal as“disgusting” because the actress was allegedly sexualizing a “beloved child character.” “Is she actually turning Cindy Lou, the [purest] sweetest child into a sex symbol!?!? Fire that creative director and get a brain Sydney Sweeney,” one person wrote. Another asked, “Why is she posing as child characters in a lingerie ad?”

Let me clarify some things that reveal how strained this outrage is…

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Santa Rosa City (Cal.) Schools: Unethical, Illegal, Unconstitutional, Un-American—Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The Cornell Rape Ethics Train Wreck just made a nasty stop.

The captain of the Piner High School football team posted the phrase “Free the Cornell Seven” on Instagram.

So what? That post is entirely, completely, protected free speech, and any semi-informed American dolt over the age of 18 should know it. That message does not involve the school or its students in any way. It is pure opinion.

Never mind. Santa Rosa City Schools officials announced last week that the student had been punished. So far, all we know about the punishment is that the player was barred from attending a team dinner. It doesn’t matter if the punishment was a reprimand in the principal’s office. A school can’t do that.

Not punished, however, were the approximately 200 students—nobody bothered to take names or count them— who walked out of class to protest the fact that their school hadn’t sufficiently punished a fellow student for making a statement of opinion that could not be legally, ethically or constitutionally punished. This is bonkers. The conduct of those students must be punished. Not only that, the teachers and administrators responsible for them not comprehending the essentials of free speech, the First Amendment and the Constitution at such an advanced age should be sacked.

The protesters demanded “accountability” for the football team captain. So did many parents, who complained to the school district that the message “makes light of sexual assault and should not be tolerated.” Not be tolerated? The school’s principal’s answer to the parents should have been,

“Mind your own damn business and get out of my face. You need to go back to high school yourself. You don’t know what you are talking about. First, anyone, including a student here, is free to post any opinion on a controversy in New York on his or her personal social media accounts any time they choose. We have to “tolerate it.” Second, there is no evidence that a sexual assault occurred, despite your fellow travelers on the Left seeking to wreck the lives of young men as a show of solidarity with the worst of American feminists.”

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Once Again Your Host Wrestled His Fingers To The Floor…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Another cherished Facebook friend wrote a few days ago that it was the anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s death (October 6) in Laramie, Wyoming. He was the young gay man who was beaten, tortured, and left to die tied to a split rail fence in 1998. Because gay activism was on the rise, a martyr was useful and the murder was lurid enough to attract eyeballs (“If it bleeds, it leads”), Shepard’s murder immediately was styled as a hate crime. After all, he was gay.

My friend wrote, in part, “We pray for the repose of his soul along with the souls of all those taken from us in prejudice.” But there is no evidence that Shepard’s murder was motivated by his homosexuality, other the fact that he was gay. As with the George Floyd debacle, the event was a gleaming example of presumed prejudice, fed by a powerful minority group that was pushing the “hate crime” concept hard. Eventually Barack Obama signed a federal hate crime law bearing Shepard’s name—of course he did, because that’s our O. But there is more evidence that Shepard’s death was the result of a drug deal gone wrong rather than anti-gay hate. Nevertheless, the story is still framed as a hate crime. Here’s NBC (gee, what a great news department!) stating as fact that Shepard’s death was motivated by homophobia.

My friend is gay, usually rational and always astute. It bothers me to see him spreading urban legends and bad history. But his heartfelt post got all sorts of “care” and “love” imogis, and I didn’t have the heart to spoil a public pandering.

Shepard died horribly, but so do lots of people, and that he’s remembered today because he happened to be a gay crime victim when so many genuine heroes are forgotten bugs me: you know how I am. There is not only a duty to remember but a duty to remember accurately, as well as a duty not to make people more ignorant than they already are.

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“The Hader Gotcha” Returns: This Is Today’s Left. Face It.

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers hired Braiden Bell as their play-by-play announcer this month and then fired him on the same day. Why? He authored dumb and tasteless social media posts when he was 14- and 15-years-old. Got that? I hate to keep repeating this refrain, but this is today’s Left. This is Portland. This is the Democratic Party: bullies, hysterics, cruel intolerant ideologues. This is also what progressives who vote for a “blue wave” are endorsing, and what sane Americans who can’t be bothered to vote are enabling.

Ironically, I can’t blame the Portland Trail Blazers too much. This is the sick, warped environment in which they do business—Oregon, one of the most hopeless leftist states. This is the culture in which the team has to survive: a mob of ethics-free dogmatic jerks lacking fairness, proportion or empathy. Braiden Bell doesn’t matter to them; he is collateral damage.

“The Portland Trail Blazers have zero tolerance for racist, sexist, or harmful comments,” the team said in a cowardly social media statement announcing Bell’s dismissal. “Social media posts made by our recently announced play-by-play broadcaster are in clear violation of team and league policies, as well as our values and expectations. Therefore, we will not be moving forward with this broadcaster.”

Gee, did he once throw a crayon at his kindergarten teacher? The team surely doesn’t tolerate violence. Did he steal a kiss from a little girl in the second grade? Destroy him: sexual harassment is not acceptable!

I’m sorry, but this story on top of the feminist lynch mob trying to ruin the lives of the “Cornell 7,” the pro-abortion fanatics styling a mother who murdered her children as a martyr, the woke board who fired the non-profit exec for a hair style they viewed as “cultural appropriation,” and the principal who rigged a class election to elect her daughter and still kept her job has me in the foulest of moods. These are bad people who want to create a terrible, dysfunctional culture fueled by warped values.

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Speaking of Cheating Democrats…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The New York Times revealed yesterday that a group called Frontier Media has paid TikTok “influencers” to post pro-James Talarico content on social media. Talarico is the Democratic challenger for an open Texas U.S. Senate seat deemed crucial to his party’s chanced of taking the Senate in November. But Talarico’s campaign told the Times regarding the discovery,

.

…so I guess they are as innocent as little lambs. You will recall paying for celebrity endorsements was part of Kamala’s “we go high” campaign strategy. Just for the record since I’m sure you don’t need to be told, this is lying. Such conduct falsely represents to the public that a trusted individual has independently concluded that a candidate deserves to be elected, while the payers do not reveal their influence and the payees don’t reveal their incentives.

This latest cheating to elect Talarico has surfaced nearly a month after an employee for a pro-Talarico PAC was caught on video explaining that the group was “paying people for their votes” through a “paid relational program.” The undercover video resulted in the employee’s firing (for getting caught).

Two related notes:

  • Lest you be overly impressed that the Times reported this story (“SEE?” I can imagine banned commenter and loyal Times bias-denier “A Friend” bellowing in his bunker), the paper buried the lead as best it could. The headline was “On Texas TikTok, it’s all about Talarico,” and there was no mention of the pay-offs until 18 screens into the article.
  • The Times piece also revealed that despite TikTok’s emergence as a social media power (and that young voters increasingly use it as a primary source of news), Republicans lag absurdly behind Democrats in using the videos as a marketing tool. Morons. Being slow to embrace technological and web innovations is how the party managed to lose the 2012 Presidential election. For these mid-terms Democrats have handed them so much ammunition that the GOP should be lapping them in the polls. “The Stupid Party” sobriquet remains as accurate as ever.

Ethics Verdicts: 1) The American Left Is Now Substantially Anti-Semitic and 2) Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism. Part One: The Democrats Embrace Jew Hate

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Funny, when Democrats ran in 2024 on the assertion that electing Donald Trump would turn the U.S. into Nazi Germany, I didn’t realize that the Left’s response to Trump’s election would be to embrace the most universally acknowledged evil of Hitler’s regime.

In case you haven’t noticed (and why haven’t you, if not?), the evidence of metastasizing anti-Semitism world-wide and in the U.S. as we approach the mid-terms it is alarming, or should be. Yesterday we learned that there was a nearly successful 9-11 style attack on Tel Aviv, foilded by the passengers. Anti-white racist director Spike Lee (everybody loves Spike Lee!) got in a confrontation at Yankee Stadium with a fan who told him “Fuck Palestine!” The acclaimed director of “Do the Right Thing” has revealed himself as a big booster of Hamas, along with a lot of prominent Hollywood progressives like Mark Ruffalo, Susan Saranden, Emma Stone and Tilda Swinton. In a sane America, such anti-Semites would fear that expressing vile views would kill their careers, but, NPR tells us, the nation is “divided.” You know: let Israel be wiped off the map vs. let Jews live.

Huh. Tough choice; let me think.

The international community is substantially anti-Semitic as the United Nations has been demonstrating for a long time, but that condition has worsened substantially since Europe allowed its nations to be overrun with Muslims. And, of course, progressives perpetually argue that the U.S. needs to be more like the rest of the world. The U.N. has consistently condemned Israel as it has fought for its existence in Gaza and Iran. Here is the list of nations whose delegates walked out on Netanyahu’s speech to the General Assembly

  • Egypt
  • Jordan
  • Lebanon
  • Syria
  • Iraq
  • Saudi Arabia
  • Palestine
  • Qatar
  • Kuwait
  • Oman
  • Yemen
  • Sudan
  • Tunisia
  • Algeria
  • Libya
  • Mauritania
  • Somalia
  • Comoros
  • Turkiye (Turkey)
  • Iran
  • Pakistan
  • Afghanistan
  • Bangladesh
  • Indonesia
  • Malaysia
  • Brunei Darussalam
  • Maldives
  • Myanmar
  • North Korea
  • Turkmenistan
  • Uzbekistan
  • South Africa
  • Senegal
  • Djibouti
  • Nigeria
  • Angola
  • Republic of the Congo and Democratic Republic of the Congo
  • Spain
  • Brazil
  • Peru
  • Bahamas
  • Antigua and Barbuda
  • Botswana
  • Ghana
  • Cabo Verde

Nice!

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Comment of the Day: “Not An Ethics Quiz: The “Lake America” Sweatshirts”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I’ve been remiss in posting deserving “Comments of the Day,” and I apologize. It’s not that there haven’t been worthy submissions, its just been a fact that getting content up on EA at all has been especially challenging of late. The last Comment of the Day was almost a month ago. Yikes.

Below, after a brief observation on the specific incident inspiring the post, Charles Abbott segues from the CEO fired for trolling the Trump Deranged in social media with a photo saluting “Lake America” to the ideological grandstanding that has taken over Facebook, at least based on what I am reading there.

Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “Not An Ethics Quiz: The “Lake America” Sweatshirts”:

It seems the safest thing to do is simply to shut up. That will be a post for another day.

I want to redirect this comment to the topic of your experiences on Facebook. I’m not an expert on the the topic but I’ve had a Facebook account for approximately 20 years now. Like many of us.

You often post that you are surprised by the sorts of posts and comments and behaviors you see on Facebook from people you know personally and/or professionally.

Here’s the way it looks to me. If Facebook has ever been a place where people went to debate things in good faith, or to seek the truth, or to strive after correcting error, that time is long gone.

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Ethics Quiz: The “Impossible” Wheel of Fortune Puzzle

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Devoted fans of the long-time TV game show “Wheel of Fortune “—“You know, morons!”— are enraged, as least based on the uproar on social media, because the puzzle board above foiled a competitor in the “bonus round,” costing him a car.

David Shepard of Atlanta, Georgia, was the unfortunate contestant. The pop culture media seems to think it’s relevant that he’s a cancer survivor. It isn’t. If the puzzle was unfair, then it was just as unfair whether he was cancer survivor, Sydney Sweeney, a convicted felon or Eric Swalwell. The amplified fury is another example of “toxic empathy,” as well as ethics ignorance.

But back to the issue at hand:

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is that puzzle unfair?

I can’t tell you the answer, because if you know it on your own, it will probably influence your answer to the quiz. According to TV Insider, fans of the show are screaming that “nobody uses that word” and that it was part of a conspiracy to avoid giving away a $50,000 Audi. I didn’t solve the puzzle in the time allowed ( I tried before my coffee) but I certainly know the word. “Have you ever heard that phrase? Let us know in the comments,” asks TV Insider.

Take me now, Lord.

And it’s a word, not a “phrase.”

On the side of the protesters as much as I can stand to be, that puzzle reminds me of the gag in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” where the mystical keeper of “The Bridge of Death” asks three easy questions of one of King Arthur’s Knights (“What is your name? What is your quest? What’s your favorite color?”) then replaces the color question with “What is the capital of Assyria?” for Sir Robin (who is magically flung into the gorge) and “What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?” for King Arthur.

Nonetheless, it is a real word, and the show never promised that its puzzles could all be solved by people who never progressed beyond Junior Scrabble…

Post Script: According to the AI bot I just asked, the average airspeed velocity of an unladen European swallow is about 24 miles per hour, or 11 meters per second. Of course, that answer could be completely made up, and I don’t care enough to check.

A Popeye For A Trump Deranged Facebook Friend…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Slowly but surely, they are forcing me to tell them how full of shit they are.

Posting this from the Kennedy Center’s marble slobber over our most over-rated President,

…a friend of many decades proclaimed on Facebook, “Can you imagine ANYTHING approaching this coming out of the current administration?”

As Popeye memorably said (many times) before swallowing his un-canned spinach and going bonkers, “That’s all I can stands, I can’t stands no more!!!” I responded, as nicely as I could,

“There just has to be some way to make your point without advancing shameless Kennedy hagiography, Jon. JFK always talked a good game…there is also substantial evidence that he organized a gang rape, compromised US security by having an affair with a foreign spy (as well as with a Mafia don’s moll), and was saved from being the man who triggered WW3 only because a Russian Premier decided it was worth backing down and getting purged to save millions from death. No, JFK wasn’t afraid of Jackie’s grace and beauty so he humiliated her by being a serial adulterer and sexual predator. Marilyn writhing at his birthday party in a dress that made her look naked, basically broadcasting their sexual relationship, may be the most disgusting public moment in US political history. And of course, Kennedy didn’t write most of his fine words, not even the ones that got him a Pulitzer Prize for “Profiles in Courage,” which was mostly authored by Ted Sorenson. It’s amazing what being assassinated or dying young will do for one’s reputation. As SNL writer Michael O’Donahue said when Elvis died, “Good career move!” Kennedy was a bad man and weak President. I really don’t care what he “said” and neither should anyone else.”

I can’t wait to see how the blithering idiots who “loved ” “sad-faced” and “angry-faced” his post try to spin that. I’m betting my friend, who knows I know what I’m talking about when it comes to Presidential history, will default to “But Trump…!” because that’s all he’s got.

Little by little, drip by drip, these people are forcing me to point out their ignorance, bias and stupidity.

[Oh…and someone tell Jack’s ghostwriter that it’s properly “that,” not “which.”]

The “Get Trump!” Files: The Washington Post Weaponizes “The Streisand Effect”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Of course it did.

Some, or many, Trump-haters out there…or the Democratic National Committee—after all, Democrats cheat—sent out into social media the above fake photos of the President kissing White House aide Natalie Harp, the young aide who has been targeted by the Angry Left as a possible object of Trump’s sexual attention. This went “viral,” The Washington Post claims, though if my fanatically Trump-Deranged Facebook friends didn’t peep about it, and they believe anything if it can be interpreted a barely negative about the President, I am dubious.

So the Washington Post decided to make certain that as many people see the photos as possible. Althouse’s immediate reaction was “WaPo wants you to know it’s fake… but you’ve got to see this, got to get it imprinted on your fragile brain.” Bingo. The Post even introduces the fake photos with “‘Hoaxes like these are “death by a thousand cuts’ that chip away at people’s trust, one expert said.” And here’s another cut! I wonder if the Post staff stood around in a mob while the article was being prepared, chanting “CUT! CUT! CUT! CUT!”

The Post did include references to BBC journalist and fact-checker Shayan Sardarizadeh’s nine-part thread on X, explaining his process for determining that both images were resolutely fakes. That arrives deep into the article however.

In 2003, Barbara Streisand sued to force an aerial photographer to remove a photo of her Malibu cliff-top mansion from a website. The lawsuit made the photo into global news, and hundreds of thousands of views and downloads when the photo had only been downloaded six times, twice by Babs’ lawyers, before the controversy. Techdirt later coined the term “The Streisand Effect,” which has come up many times on Ethics Alarms. Frankly, I’m surprised that the Axis of Unethical Conduct hasn’t been using AI-generated fake photos far more than it has so far. “CUT! CUT! CUT! CUT!” Of course it is an unethical and despicable practice, but as Harry Reid will remind us from the Lake of Fire in Hell, “It works!”