U.S. Society

Clean-up On Aisle Ethics, 1/25/2023: “What The Buck?”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It’s come to this: as Hollywood has decided to prioritize extreme politics, political correctness and “diversity” over entertainment and even profits, and classic comedies like “Animal House,” “Airplane!,” “Tootsie,” “Blazing Saddles” and “The Bad New Bears” have been blacklisted,  Tinsel Town puts out films like “The Menu.” That 2022 film is allegedly a comedy in which Ralph Fiennes, as a bitter master chef who hosts gourmet dinners for the elite and wealthy at a secluded island, murders his guests as “dessert” by scattering Graham crackers around, clothing them in giant marshmallow jackets, placing milk chocolate hats on their heads, and setting everything, and them, on fire. Yes, human s’mores!

It got rave reviews from critics, too.

1. Not this again… Jackson Hewitt 2023 commercial for getting tax refund advances employs yet another juvenile “we cleverly used a dirty word without really saying it” trope that treats its audience like sniggering 11-year-olds, using “What the buck?” and “Buck yeah!” It would be slightly less objectionable if the ploy was original, but it’s not.

I don’t trust companies that have such a low opinion of their market, or, in the alternative, are run by dolts who would approve such a gutter-level campaign. Nobody should. Fuck Jackson Hewitt.

2.  The Baseball Hall of Fame announced the results of its voting yesterday, and ethics prevailed: steroid cheats and toxic assholes Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez both failed to get the necessary votes again. Good. The only player elected was Scott Rolen, who was a quality player and terrific fielder at third base over a long National League career, but one of the least famous players ever elected to the Hall of Fame. I firmly believe that being famous, which includes being considered the best player on one’s team and one of the best in the league, should be a mandatory criteria to get into Cooperstown. Many baseball writers—you know, morons—argue that baseball is too demanding of its Hall, with less than 1% of its players being considered sufficiently “great.” It should literally become the “Hall of Very Good,” said Ryan Spilborghs, a former MLB player who has his own show on the Siruis-XM baseball channel. His sole justification? The other pro sports are more lenient. That was it. “Everybody does it.” Continue reading →

Why Our Culture Needs Old Movies

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Typical of the free-association manner in which my brain works, a fatuous essay by a New York Times pundit about a subject he doesn’t understand (but I do)–performing—excavated an ethics memory from my childhood that hadn’t sparked a neuron in decades.

Frank Bruni, for some reason, felt it was necessary to re-hash the ancient debate over whether a movie star is really a skilled “actor,” and can be deserving of an Oscar over “real” actors. Naturally, his target was Tom Cruise and his performance in “Top Gun: Maverick,” the most popular and successful movie of the year. I don’t feel like arguing with Bruni over this; I’ve had the debate too many times. (No, Cruise isn’t going to get an Oscar for this sequel, but he has given Oscar-worthy performances before, because nobody can play Tom Cruise as well as he can). I’ll just give the short version: if an actor plays a part better than any other actor could, it is irrelevant that he can’t play any other part. As a director, I’ll cast a charismatic one-trick pony who is perfect for a particular role over a brilliant, versatile artist who could play Hamlet to cheers every time.

But that is neither here nor there. Here is there: Bruni’s discourse made me think of Spencer Tracy, a movie star and superb actor who had a wonderfully dismissive view of his own field, and then “Edison the Man,” the 1940 biopic, starring Tracy, about Thomas Edison. It was a black and white film that my father made a point of having me see. That film sparked my early interest in Edison, American inventors, technology and extraordinary people through history.

One scene in the movie, however, made a special impression. Edison and his research lab have been laboring on the creation of a practical incandescent light bulb day and night for months. Finally they think they have the right design, and the tungsten filament bulb to be tested is carefully assembled. The new bulb is handed to Jimmy, a teen who does odd jobs at the laboratory, and he dashes across the facility to give it to Edison. In his excitement, Jimmy trips and falls, smashing the precious bulb. Edison’s crew is furious; Edison reproaches the lad. Jimmy is devastated and inconsolable. When Edison’s men finally craft a replacement bulb, Edison calls for Jimmy and give him custody of the bulb, and asks him again to carry it to its destination on the other side of the building. Jimmy, striding carefully and slowly this time, completes his historic task.

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Comment Of The Day: “In The Dispute Over The Fate Of The Elgin Marbles, It Is Time For The Brits To Choose Ethics Over Law”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Last week, Ethics Alarms confidently presented the ethics verdict that it was high time—more than high time, in fact—for the British Museum to finally return the so-called “Elgin Marbles” to Greece. As the priceless art was literally ripped off the Parthenon, I didn’t think the question justified an ethics quiz. I still am unconvinced by the arguments that the Brits should hold on to their ill-gotten gains, but I am the grandson of a Spartan, after all. There were several excellent comments asserting ethical grounds for the British position; this one was outstanding.

Here is P.M.Lawrence’s epic tutorial, rebuttal, and Comment of the Day on the post, “In The Dispute Over The Fate Of The Elgin Marbles, It Is Time For The Brits To Choose Ethics Over Law”:

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“In the early 1800s, Lord Elgin, a British aristocrat, shipped to England treasures of Greek antiquity that he had strip-mined from Greece, including the carved frieze panels that had decorated the Parthenon. Supposedly this was done with the permission of Turkey, which was then ruling Greece, which is like your home invaders giving neighbors permission to take the art off your walls…”

There is a little more to it than that:-

– On the legal maxim of “nemo dat quod non habet”, of course the Turks couldn’t convey title. But they didn’t, they offered a quitclaim, as it were; they removed themselves from obstructing.

– As regards any original owners, there simply weren’t any left. The last remaining ones were ended by rounds of persecution of pagans, centuries earlier.

– As far as any generic claims of common heritage of western civilisation go, and those claims only go for want of better (there being no direct heirs), what better place to put the items than in a museum furthering that common heritage? Are the British somehow less heirs of that than are the Graeculi? Particularly considering how much safer the items were in that museum(those not taken have suffered horribly from war, corrosion, and what not). And, of course, the very word “museum” proclaims that furthering that common heritage.

Now, none of that conveys title to the British Museum, but adverse possession in the years since does – adverse, in that no better claimant came forward. Just as today’s Greeks feel an understandable connection to these items, as they do to the Lions of St. Mark’s, so too do today’s British – and as today’s Venetians do to the Lions of St. Mark’s. They are as intertwined with the histories of each place as of the other.

The Solomonic solution would be to sand blast the items to the condition of those not taken if any effort to transfer them were ever made. But I expect the Sir Humphreys will loudly assert ownership while underhandedly arranging a loan in name only with no means of foreclosing, just as they have with foundational documents that ought to have remained in British archives. That would satisfy none but the Sir Humphreys.

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Sunday Morning Ethics Warm-Up: I Woke Up Feeling Like A King!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Unfortunately, the king I woke up feeling like is King Canute. I was reviewing the trends in the past ten years of ethics posts, and there is no question that the nation’s ethical bearings are worse, not better. Fewer people read the blog than five years ago.

Ethics blindness in national and political matters seems more advanced among my neighbors, colleagues, friends and relatives than ever before (although almost none of these read Ethics Alarms or have ever read it, which says something about me, though I’m not sure what,)This was a particularly depressing week from the ethics perspective, but then they’re all depressing. The unfolding Joe Biden document scandal kept getting worse, and rather than admit Biden’s hypocrisy and the dangerous double standards applied to Trump, partisans invested in a weak, corrupt, mentally deficient President shifted into denial mode. Evidence of Virginia schools deliberately sabotaging superior students in pursuit of “equal outcomes” for those who don’t do their homework, come to school stoned and disrupt classes kept on coming, and the DEI-converted dealt with the matter by denying it. A Democratic Congressional leader introduced legislation criminalizing not just speech, but thought. Facebook chilled MY speech because its bots didn’t understand what I posted.

The signs of rot were (are) everywhere, in matters large and small. I learned that a lawyer received professional discipline because a judge thought “Gadzooks!” was a dirty word, or something, reminding me that we rely on judges who have the same level of literacy as Michael Steele.

I received the always welcome “Bill James Baseball Handbook” for 2023, and a featured article by Joe Posnanski, much revered as an intellectual giant among sportswriters, demonstrated that the intellectual giant among sportswriters is as ethically inert as all the others. There were lots of outbursts like this one, by a much-honored African-American writer whose work has appeared in the The Atlantic, New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME, ESPN, NPR, CNN, and more:

It’s worth mentioning, I guess, that the way we use the tale of King Canute the Great  (985 to 1035) who was real king of England and a successful one, is unfair to him, making him out to be an idiot. If he did have his throne placed on the banks of the Thames and futilely demand that the rising tide subside (and there is some evidence that the incident really occurred), it was not because he was arrogant or a fool, as the typical telling of the story implies. As “the rest of the story” shows, as related in one of the earliest accounts ( by Henry of Huntingdon in his “Historia Anglorum”):

“But the sea carried on rising as usual without any reverence for his person, and soaked his feet and legs. Then he moving away said:  “All the inhabitants of the world should know that the power of kings is vain and trivial, and that none is worthy of the name of king but He whose command the heaven, earth and sea obey by eternal laws”.

The ones who should heed King Canute are the allegedly smart people like John Kerry (Sorry, I couldn’t write that without giggling) at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Continue reading →

Translation Ethics: Helluva Job, FEMA!

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Nice, careful, professional work by the Federal Emergency Management Agency!

I’m kidding.

After a typhoon caused extensive damage to homes along Alaska’s western coast in September, FEMA’s job was to help residents repair property damage. Since most of the residents were native Alaskans, FEMA chose Accent on Languages, a Berkeley, California company, to translate its usual instructions on how to apply for aid.

They chose…poorly. The documents victims of the typhoon received would have been right at home in the Monty Python skit that featured translation book howlers like “My hovercraft is full of eels.” The Yup’ik and Inupiaq translations were nonsense. “Tomorrow he will go hunting very early, and will nothing,” read one mysterious passage. “Your husband is a polar bear, skinny,” another said. One document had bee translated into Inuktitut, an indigenous language that nobody uses in Alaska.

FEMA fired the translation company. It appears that the words in the “translated” documents were randomly lifted taken from Nikolai Vakhtin’s “Yupik Eskimo Texts from the 1940s.” “They clearly just grabbed the words from the document and then just put them in some random order and gave something that looked like Yup’ik but made no sense,” concluded an investigator.

The company’s CEO wrote, “We make no excuses for erroneous translations, and we deeply regret any inconvenience this has caused to the local community,” adding that FEMA would be getting a refund.

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Source: Associated Press

2022 Worst of Ethics Awards: Most Unethical Mayor And Unethical Rationalization Of The Year

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

That video that I saw today on the Federalist site clinched two 2022 Worst of Ethics Awards for me, not that either was a tough call.

Unethical Rationalization of the Year: #64. Yoo’s Rationalization or “It isn’t what it is”

Frankly,Rationalization #64 would won this award in each of the past three years, which is pretty amazing for such a late addition to the list.

The reason, I think, is that the American public either has behaved so gullible and stpudly, or the political class and journalists have concluded that it is so gullible and stupid that the strategy of calling night day, day  night,good bad, bad good and failure success has become too attractive to resist. 2022 was the zenith of this revolting development so far, but there is no reason to think 2023 won’t be worse. We’re hardly started, and there is Karine Jean-Pierre telling reporters that the White House is being transparent about Joe’s confidential documents stash while she refuses to answer questions about it. Last year, the administration line about the chaos at the border was that the border was secure. LGBTQ+ activists looked us right in our eyes and told us that a man became a woman simply by deciding he was, and sports leaders announced that biological men who were now trans women had no advantage over natural-born women in athletic competitions while it was obvious that they did. Meanwhile runaway inflation wasn’t runaway inflation, Twitter’s partisan censorship wasn’t partisan censorship. John Fetterman was not cognitively impaired by his stroke. The January 6 House inquiry was unbiased and fair, with no partisan objectives. And when Joe Biden gave his Reichstag, he sounded and looked like a Nazi while accusing Republicans of being Nazis. There’s lots more. I’ve never seen anything like it. Continue reading →

Wait—Facts Are “Dangerous” Now? I Thought They Just Didn’t Matter…

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

What possible justification could there be for Democrats to oppose releasing all of the footage of the January 6 riot for public viewing?

Last week, Speaker McCarthy said he will make public the thousands of hours of footage from January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol as the “public should see what happened” that day, rather than rely on the report from the rigged and partisan House Select Committee that (sort of )investigated the event. Democrats don’t want the stuff released. Why?

Appearing o MSNBC, where outageous statements are treated as pearls, former Democrat rep Elaine Luria, now just another MSNBC Democratic Party mouthpiece, argued,

If you release all of the security tapes at the Capitol… every bit of information that would lay out a road map for someone who wants to come try to do something like this again, that is really dangerous for the future security of the Capitol… A large portion of the tapes have been released in different contexts.

Oh, well then..wait, what? A complete failure of a mob action might provide guidance to “someone ” who wants to do the same thing because it was such a roaring triumph? 

I thought public information and transparency were always  good things in a democracy. Why wouldn’t Democrats want the public to see all the horrors of what they have compared to the Civil War, Pearl Harbor and 9-11? Most of the approximately 14,000 hours of footage from that day has never been reviewed by the public or the media. Full transparency doesn’t cause conspiracy theories; it defeats them. It’s like the JFK assassination files and UFOs.

Release it all.

Tuesday Evening Ethics Effulgence, 1/17/23: Art, Rights And Privileges

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I wonder: which is more significant in U.S. ethics history? On this date in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sounded his famous warning about the malign influence of the growing perpetual military bureaucracy and the industrial interests dependent upon it, a “military-industrial complex” that benefited from war and was vulnerable to an abuse of power.. Eisenhower warned, “[while] we recognize the imperative need for this development…We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence…The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Largely forgotten now was Ike’s other admonition: “As we peer into society’s future, we–you and I, and our government–must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow,” he said. “We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.”

Then there was 1994, when on this date Paula Jones accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment, leading to Clinton’s in-court perjury and, indirectly, his impeachment via the Monica Lewinsky mess. Clinton, I believe, corrupted the entire Democratic Party, made George W. Bush’s election possible, and began the decline of the respect and credibility the U.S. Presidency must have to be effective.

Or maybe, in some sense, this date in 1964 planted a truly insidious seed of ethics rot in our culture. On this date, NBC gave the go-ahead for the production of “The Monkeys,” a TV sitcom about a fake pop band modeled on the Beatles as they were portrayed in “A Hard Days Night.” Eventually assembled from struggling musicians and two has-been former child stars, the briefly successful development began the toxic trend of ersatz celebrity, even though, as it turned out, the fake band wasn’t much worse than a lot of the real bands the Sixties inflicted on us.

1. MLK pornographic sculpture update: In an op-ed in the Boston Herald, Rasheed Walters wrote in part of the fiasco,

The Boston Common’s illustrious history and Boston’s popularity as a tourist destination made this opportunity to honor the Kings that much more fitting. Furthermore, this statue will represent how far Boston has evolved in the last 50 years from a racist city to a world-class city inclusive of all people, reflecting Dr. King’s dream [but] the statue that was supposed to symbolize an embrace between Dr. King and Mrs. King was nothing more than two arms detached from a body. Depending on the angle, the statue appeared to be feces, sexual innuendo, or a “woke penis,” as described by the New York Post. The “Embrace Statue” is an utter insult to the honor and legacy of the Kings, an embarrassment to the city of Boston, and an aesthetically unpleasant addition to the country’s oldest park….This spectacular failure has been the subject of countless jokes around the country. However, Black Bostonians are not laughing; we are outraged, dissatisfied, and upset that this opportunity was squandered. We don’t see any statues depicting the severed arm of General George Washington brandishing a sword. So, why should we see statues of our African American heroes mutilated?

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Sunday Ethics Buffet, 1/15/2023: You’re Gonna LOVE #6…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I watched “Bananas” for the first time in decades. It was influential on better comedies to come, notably the Zucker-Abrahams films, and Mel Brooks stole some of the gags (as have I, in some stage shows). I had forgotten that Marvin Hamlisch did the (annoying) score and that Sylvester Stallone appeared as a subway thug in an uncredited role. But it’s no use: I just can’t enjoy watching Woody Allen now that I know what a toxic creep he is. Cognitive dissonance strikes again!

I also watched an ethically provocative 2020 revenge drama called “Becky,” in which a bullied and depressed thirteen-year-old girl methodically and diabolically foils four escaped convicts who invade her father’s home and murder him. “Foils” is an understatement: she stalks, traps and kills all four in progressively more cruel and vicious attacks. I was about half-way through when I realized the story was basically “Home Alone” without the gags.

1. What hacks these people are...Ann Althouse flagged a ridiculously strained piece by Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine “explaining” why Joe Biden (as VP) keeping classified documents he wasn’t authorized to have is so much more innocent and forgivable than Donald Trump (as President). I have read so many of these, and they are useful reminders of just how partisan and foolish the mainstream media is. Chait is such a reliable Democratic spinmeister and rationalizer that this article was highly predictable: he was one of those who attributed Hillary’s loss to Trump to the fake historical “fact” that the same party seldom wins the White House for three straight terms—you know,except for 1920, ’24, and ’28, then 1932, ’36, ’40, ’44 and ’48, then 1980, ’84 and ’88, with only the Electoral College stopping a 1992, ’96, 2000 run, just like it stopped a 2008, ’12, ’16 string. (I know I’m unreasonably triggered by that false factoid, but I can’t help it.)

2. On ABC’s brain-rotting public events show “The View, meanwhile, co-host Joy Behar exclaimed, “Just as we’re this close to getting [Trump], somehow these documents appear.” Then slightly less stupid (but equally biased) co-host Sunny Hostin added, “Does it feel like the Republicans are behind it?”

Barbara Walters, who died this month to many accolades, really stained her legacy by inflicting “The View” on America

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