Two stories, both head-explodingly idiotic, both linked to Bizarro World Ethics and pathological virtue-signaling needs in oppressive leftist-indoctrination saturated cultures. One is a gag, the other is a tragedy, yet there is hardly a filament of difference between them in the 21st Century ethics and rationality rot they illustrate.
I read the two in succession by pure coincidence, and Poe’s Law immediately leaped into my mind. Poe’s Law was formulated in 20o5 (by Nathan Poe, not Edgar Allan Poe) and has become an essential concept since. It holds that satirical accounts involving extreme examples of ideological insanity can be impossible to distinguish from actual events, because current ideological extremism defies parody. Let’s cut to the chase, for this isn’t a quiz: the satirical piece was “I apologize for my white baby.”
The last thing Fred Guttenberg told his 14-year-old daughter was that it was time for her to go, that she was going to be late. Hours after rushing his two children to school that Valentine’s Day morning in 2018, a shooter unleashed a barrage of gunfire inside a Parkland, Fla., high school — killing 17 people, including Jaime Guttenberg.
During Tuesday’s sentencing proceedings for the convicted shooter, Nikolas Cruz, Guttenberg’s voice broke while he talked of the imagined future he had for Jaime, one that never came to be. But his were not the only tears falling in court — members of Cruz’s defense team were also crying, videos show.
“I cannot recall if I actually ever did tell Jaime that day how much I loved her. I never knew that I would lose the chance to say it over and over and over again,” Guttenberg said as public defender Nawal Najet Bashiman dabbed her eyes with a tissue. Two others on Cruz’s team also shed tears during testimony Tuesday.
That is Assistant public defender Tamara Curtis wiping her eyes in the photo above.
With his uncanny instinct for taking bows for making an obvious observation while missing the point, pseudo-comic Bill Maher once again engaged in his favorite topic of fat-shaming last week, this time with a “Eureka!” to share. The U.S. has inexplicably gone from fat acceptance to “fat celebration,” which the HBO wit <gag!choke!> calls a “disturbing trend.”
This isn’t a “trend,” nor is it disturbing, and it isn’t a phenomenon confined to obesity. Bill could have educated his audience—which, as usual, arfed and clapped like the human seals they are—but instead ignored the real problem, which is partially fueled by people like him.
And it’s an ethical one. Society’s goal is to make the human beings within it safe and happy. This requires setting standards, much of which it accomplishes with law and law enforcement, and the rest it pursues by making values, virtues and positive, societally beneficial conduct clear. Society then encourages and rewards those who meet those standards, and shames, disapproves and rejects those who defy them.
I actually have been lying awake with a not-quite-dismal headache, and all sorts of ethics nightmares real and imagined have been spooling through my fevered brain, so I decided to hell with it, might as well write an in-between warm-up and hope that it calms me down enough to get back to sleep.
Among other issues, I am annoyed that I didn’t get to a warm-up yesterday because August 7 is another date chock full of ethics milestones, notably the the passage of the infamous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving President Johnson almost unrestrained powers to oppose “communist aggression” in Southeast Asia. Not only was this the floodgates-opening moment for the U.S.’s disastrous Vietnam entanglement, but it permanently (so far, at least) accelerated Congress’s abdication of its constitutional duties to oversee the Executive’s war-making proclivities. August 7 was also the date in 1912 upon which Teddy Roosevelt completed his fateful, ego-driven move to split the Republican Party, preferring a public tantrum that would ultimately inflict Woodrow Wilson, arguably our worst President ever, on the Republic, over accepting the consequences of his own impulsiveness when he foolishly forswore running for a second full term in office. Not surprisingly, Teddy had found his hand-picked successor (and best friend) William Howard Taft not sufficiently Teddy-like, and when the GOP dutifully renominated Taft for another term that he would have won easily, Roosevelt launched his Bull Moose Party to oppose both Taft and Wilson. His own party then nominated Roosevelt 110 years ago, violently changing the course of history in ways too convoluted to guess.
1. What’s going on with Disney? The best answer appear to be “Really, really, incompetent management.” When I read complaints about Walt’s creation retiring its creator’s opening day speech from its anniversary celebration after 67-years, I assumed that it was all just “Disney has gone crazy woke!” conservative hysteria. Then I read the speech, which I had last heard when I first visited Disneyland when I was a college sophomore, on one of the most fun days of my life. Here is what Walt said:
To all who come to this happy place: Welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams and the hard facts that have created America with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world. Thank you.
That’s the mission statement for the entire Disney journey, and eloquently stated too. What could anyone, especially anyone charged with continuing to make the company thrive, object to about that perfect expression of why Disney is important to American culture? An organization that becomes estranged from its founder (or Founders) is risking its soul and survival. I hope that the erasure of Walt’s words from this year’s celebration is just another in a long string of dumb management decisions. I fear that it is much more than that.
2. Apparently racial discrimination is now the official policy of New York City. The New York Post reports that New York City Mayor Eric Adams has requested that city agencies provide photographs of potential candidates for jobs at City Hall ranging from assistant commissioner to departmental press secretary. The ubiquitous “unnamed city officials” explained that the request is part of an effort to hire more diverse staffers, a euphemism for “so the city can hire based on skin color.” Unethical. Of course. The officials the Post interviewed said they supported a diverse workforce but worried that the practice is causing the Adams administration “to make hiring decisions with a greater emphasis on race and ethnicity than merit.” The Mayor, ridiculously, swears that having the photos will merely help him recognize his employees in the sprawling city workforce. Continue reading →
What? Democrats manipulate health protocols for political advantage and expediency? Another conspiracy theory, conservatives? “Not hardly,” as Big Jake would say. Democrats are flagrantly disregarding their sacred Wuhan virus safety protocols because they can’t afford and positive testing or quarantines when the upcoming vote on the latest spending and tax bill (the hilariously oxymoronic titled Inflation Reduction Act) is expected to be razor thin. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) said there is no “plan B” when it comes to passing the controversial spending package, because Democrats are “going to stay healthy.” Reportedly Democratic Senators could “bring [their] ventilator and still vote.” The Hill nickname for this hypocritical exercise, far from the first involving progressives and the pandemic, is “Don’t test, don’t tell.”
And yet people doubt the sincerity of the Left’s pandemic scaremongering….
1. And while we’re on the topic of trustworthy science, a French physicist posted this photo, writing (in French, of course), “Photo of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, located 4.2 light years from us. She was taken by the [James Webb Space Telescope]. This level of detail… A new world is revealed day after day”:
It was really a slice of chorizo sausage. Trust the science! (Just not the scientists…)
2. At what point will the vast majority of the public just point and laugh at people who react like this? U.S. and British TV personality Gordon Ramsey, a chef, food critic and restaurateur, was shown in a video surveying a flock of lambs for future consumption while saying, “Yummy yum yum yum yum yum. I’m going to eat you. Which one’s going in the oven first?” Then he picked one.
Social media critics were horrified. Morons.
3. And speaking of morons: Alex Jones. A jury found the “Infowars” conspiracy theory hack guilty of defamation for falsely claiming—ridiculously claiming— that the 2021 attack on the Newtown, Connecticut elementary school that took the lives of 20 children was a hoax. He was ordered to pay $4.1 million in compensatory damages, then another $45.2 million in punitive damages…and this was just for two of the families. Expect the damages to be significantly reduced, but it appears to be a good verdict. Lying is protected under the First Amendment, but Jones’ lies in this case implicated the parents of murdered children in a plot with no evidence whatsoever, though Jones implied that there was. That’s defamation. (I know, because that’s not what I did when an Ethics Alarms reader claimed that I defamed him.)
4. I won’t say Georgia candidate for Governor, Stacey Abrams, is a moron, but her “explanation” of how she squares her faith with her support for abortion is, shall we say, interesting:
It is a medical decision. And while your faith tradition may tell you that you personally do not want to make that choice, it is not my right as a Christian to impose that value system on someone else because the value that should overhang everything is the right to make our own decisions, the free will that the God I believe in gave us. And my responsiblity as a legislator is to make certain that we allow doctors and nurses and medical professionals to make medical decisions and that politicians stay out of it.
Incoherent and insulting. The decision of a healthy woman to terminate a healthy fetus is not a “medical decision.” Moreover, if an individual believes that killing a fetus is ending the life of a human being, it matters not how an individual reached that conclusion, be it the Bible, biochemistry or experience: that individual has an obligation to act on that belief. Abrams is endorsing subjective ethical standards even when they involve homicide, an inexcusable position for a lawmaker. All laws involve elected officials deciding on what societal values and standards must be, and imposing them.
5. Bottom ethics item of the day: Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker’s state budget included a pardon signed by Massachusetts’ Governor Charlie Baker, thus exonerating Elizabeth Johnson from her 1692 conviction for practicing witchcraft in Salem.
This was the culmination of a three-year effort by civics teacher Carrie LaPierre and students at North Andover middle school, who relentlessly campaigned to exonerate Johnson with an assist by a state senator who apparently doesn’t have enough to do.
My verdict: stupid grandstanding and virtue-signaling. None of those found guilty of witchcraft require exoneration, because everyone knows there were no witches. The linked article describe’s Johnson’s name as”seemingly-forever smeared by the witchcraft conviction.” To whom? Who knows her name at all today? This isn’t like Bill Clinton finally pardoning the captain of the “Indianapolis,” who was unjustly court-martialed for an infamous naval disaster he could not have prevented. [Pointer: JutGory]
Scattered thoughts, because my brain is melting...
Showtime’s “Billions” is my new favorite ethics show, especially since it includes such a heavy dose of legal ethics dilemmas. One irritation, though, is the way every character routinely and casually refers to Taylor Mason, the nonbinary arch-enemy of ruthless hedge fund trader Bobby Axelrod (Damien Lewis), as “they” without hesitation or question because “they” demand it. Much of the time the use of the plural pronoun renders the dialogue incomprehensible: are they (meaning the real they, the ones talking) referring to Mason, or to Mason’s company, or the company’s employees? It is impossible to tell much of the time. I do not believe for a second that lock-step compliance with pronoun dictates would be so universal in non-woke areas like commodity transaction policing or hedge funds. This is New York City, not California. The show’s writers are both virtue-signaling and indoctrinating. I resent it.
Modern art is a scam, isn’t it? This…
…is a pickle stuck on the ceiling. Titled “Pickle,” the “thought-provoking artwork” is the work of Australian artist Matthew Griffin. It is now on display at the Michael Lett Gallery in Auckland., and consists of that ketchup-smeared pickle slice, attached to the ceiling of the art gallery. It’s price tag is 10,000 New Zealand dollars, or $6,200 American.
Beyoncé, good little woke soldier of censorship that she is, dutifully removed the “ablest slur” spaz from one of her songs after some contrived offense police complained. Now Monica Lewinsky wantsBeyoncé to airbrush her 2014 song “Partition,” because it includes the one-time White House intern’s name as a synonym for a certain sexual act (but not sex! Bill said it didn’t count as sex!). Just think of all the songs that will have to be rewritten when the Left’s purge of “hurtful” lyrics, if “hurtful” means anything the hypersensitive, the power-playing, and the Orwellian linguists focus on.
Wynton Yates, a black lawyer from New Orleans, posted a TikTok video last week expressing his outrage that Airbnb was listing the “Panther Burn Cottage” at Belmont Plantation in Mississippi as a luxury bed-and-breakfast rental. The remodeled structure was described as an “1830s slave cabin” that had also been used as a “tenant sharecroppers cabin” before being converted.
“How is this okay in somebody’s mind to rent this out — a place where human beings were kept as slaves — rent this out as a bed and breakfast?” Yates asked in the video. Naturally the social media mobs reacted like Pavlov’s dogs to a bell, and, also naturally, Airbnb groveled an apology and took down the listing.
Thus does cowardice and conflict avoidance create dubious cultural standards.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Is it unethical to rent out or stay in a structure that was once used as slave quarters?
1. Stop making me defend Nancy Pelosi! Many pundits on the left, notably the notoriously pro-China New York Times veteran Tom Friedman, declared that Speaker Pelosi, currently on an Asian tour, should heed China’s warnings and not visit Taiwan. Friedman’s column, headlined “Why Pelosi’s Visit to Taiwan Is Utterly Reckless,” argued,
“Nothing good will come of it. Taiwan will not be more secure or more prosperous as a result of this purely symbolic visit, and a lot of bad things could happen. These include a Chinese military response that could result in the U.S. being plunged into indirect conflicts with a nuclear-armed Russia and a nuclear-armed China at the same time.”
The Biden administration, as usual, has been sending mixed and incoherent messages. Not Pelosi. She not only is visiting Taiwan, she is reaffirming what the Biden administration has been hesitating to state straight out. “Our visit reiterates that America stands with Taiwan: a robust, vibrant democracy and our important partner in the Indo-Pacific,” Pelosi said on Twitter. What her visit says is just as unequivocal: the United States of America doesn’t take orders from Chairman Xi, or any foreign despot. If there was any question whether Pelosi should land in Taiwan, it should have evaporated the second China started saber-rattling. And mirabile dictu, it did!
This was a strange day that kept me out of the office and Ethics Alarms from morn til dusk. Sorry: couldn’t be helped. It will stand in my memory as the day I was asked, in an official appearance as an ethicist in a bar deliberation over the fitness of a young man to be allowed into the august profession of “lawyer,” this question: “Do you believe character should be taught in law school?”
It might be the most bizarre question I have been asked by anyone over the age of 9 in my life. “Character” isn’t a subject or even a definable feature. If someone hasn’t developed character by the age of 21, I cannot imagine how a law school would teach it.
1. Quickly approaching “Julie Principle” territory is The Nation’s Elie Mystal, who has a long dossier at Ethics Alarms from the days before his mind snapped like a dry twig in the wind, leaving him a perpetually furious, racist, hatemongering fool. Yet that’s good enough for MSNBC, which would feature a drooling lunatic in a straitjacket if he or she spouted sufficiently venomous insults about Republicans (and Donald Trump, of course).
“It’s going to be a close election in Georgia because Walker has the backing of the Republicans. You ask why are Republicans backing this man who’s so clearly unintelligent, who so clearly doesn’t have independent thoughts, but that’s actually the reason. Walker is going do what he’s told, and that is what Republicans like. That’s what Republicans want from their Negroes: to do what they were told. And Walker presents exactly as a person who lacks independent thoughts, lacks an independent agenda, lacks an independent ability to grasp policies, and he’s just going to go in there and vote like Mitch McConnell tells them to vote.”
I am definitely not a Walker fan, but the denigrating “Negro” slur should have been flagged and reprimanded by the MSNBC host, except that it was Tiffany Cross, who is almost a female version of Elie. Moreover, it is hilarious for a Democrat to mock any Republican for “doing what he is told,” when the current Democrats in the House and Senate have voted in lockstep with their leaders’ demands almost without exception.
Cultural milestones turn up in the damnedest places, and from the most surprising people.Actress Nichelle Nichols, the African-American who was the communications officer on the original “Star Trek” and the first round of films based on the iconic TV sci-fi series, died yesterday at 89. She was more model than actress, and as her role developed, much to her disappointment, the part of “Uhura” became little more than set dressing. But she played one of the first black female characters on TV to have a non-subservient role, indeed Uhura was fourth in the “Enterprise” chain of command. (Whoopi Goldberg claimedthat when she was a teen and saw “Star Trek” for the firts time, she screamed to her family, “Come quick, come quick. There’s a Black lady on television and she ain’t no maid!”) In her autobiography, Nichols wrote that Martin Luther King told her that she was advancing civil rights objectives, and convinced her not to quit when William Shatner was getting too obnoxious. Her great moment of destiny came, however, in the 1968 episode, “Plato’s Stepchildren,” about a aliens who used mind control. At one point, they forced Kirk and Uhura, who were never romantically involved, to engage in a passionate kiss.
The legend, which is the version of the event now printed, is that the kiss caused great controversy and upheaval. I saw it: I don’t recall any negative reaction, or any reaction at all. It was a kiss that wasn’t genuine but forced: if the smooch was intended as a statement by show creator Gene Roddenberry, it was a very tepid one. Nevertheless, in the decades since, that moment on a forgettable episode of a cheesy and not very popular Sixties TV series has taken on the reputation of being a societal tipping point, and Nichelle Nichols died as a figure of far more cultural significance than her role as “glorified telephone operator in space” whose catch-phrase was “Hailing frequencies open, sir” would normally create.
You never know.
1. We have freedom of speech. They don’t. And here, many progressives would love to take a lot of it away. Here’s an example of what gets you punished in Great Britain, for example:
Darren Brady, 51, was arrested Hampshire Police and placed in handcuffs at his home in Aldershot for sharing the graphic above, a swastika assembled out of four LGBT pride flags. On the video of the arrest, shot on a mobile phone, Brady can be heard asking the three police officers: “Why am I in cuffs?” An officer replies, “Someone has been caused anxiety based on your social media post. That is why you have been arrested.” Continue reading →
