I thought the virtue-signaling, mindless attack on all things Russian crossed the line into bigotry and persecution when an eminent Russian-born conductor lost his job with two German orchestras because he refused to publicly condemn Vladimir Putin. (I wouldn’t publicly condemn Satan if an employer ordered me to. That would be submitting to an abuse of power.) Then the Met fired a principal soprano for the same reason, and things really got weird.
Bars and restaurants started banning vodka. Russian cat breeds were banned from cat shows. A popular french fries with cheese curds and gravy dish was taken off menus in France and Canada because the name for it sounded like “Putin.” Today, the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra has removed Tchaikovsky from its upcoming concert because, the announcement said, playing compositions by the Russian composer, who died in 1893 is considered by the orchestra ‘to be inappropriate at this time.’ Continue reading →
Before we bid the Alamo goodbye for another year (in which there was virtually no mention of the event in the media, despite the obvious parallels with Ukraine’s plight), I have a few ethics observations on the 1960 John Wayne film, some of which I may have offered before:
The version on Amazon Prime is unfair to the movie, cutting out almost half an hour from the version that was originally released. The film was an epic and produced to be one, complete with an overture and an intermission. These should be restored. Some of the cuts aren’t missed, like the irrelevant and sentimental birthday party for Capt. Dickinson’s daughter (played by Wayne’s own daughter) along with the sappy song Ken Curtis sings to her. Still, it’s an important movie, and deserves more respect. The parson’s death scene is a particularly cruel cut.
The film is perhaps the perfect embodiment of the lesson of another Wayne film, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” In virtually every instance where the screenplay had to choose between the actual events and the myths as the Alamo tale has been told through the years, it was the myth that won out. There is a justification for that. The Alamo is a symbol of bravery, sacrifice, continuing to fight against hopeless odds, and the American spirit. That’s what John Wayne wanted to make a film about, not history. As one Texas historian said in a documentary, “The movie is wrong about almost everything, but it feels right.” In this it resembles the current debate over how to teach American history to children.
Wayne’s carelessness (or inexperience) as a director occasionally hurts the film, like when Chill Wills accompanies himself on the guitar and it’s obvious that he isn’t even trying to look like he’s playing it. I’m not a stickler for accents, but it also annoys me that Laurence Harvey uses a Southern drawl in his first scene, and speaks like the very British actor he was for the rest of the movie. On the other hand, Wayne’s direction of the final night before the slaughter is excellent and moving.
The movie went to great lengths to avoid denigrating Mexicans. There is an exchange where they Alamo defenders express their admiration for their enemies’ courage, and Wayne shows weeping Mexican women tending to the fallen troops.
The screenplay includes an Al Sharpton-style ploy by Davy Crockett. To convince his Tennesseans to join the Alamo cause, he creates a fake letter from Santa Anna, to Crockett, warning him and his men not to involve themselves in the fight, and threatening their lives if they do. As Crockett assumed, his men take offense and resolve to join the fight simply to defy the Mexican general. Davy admits that he wrote the letter, and is amazed that this doesn’t change their reaction at all. After all, they insist, Santa Anna would have made such a threat, so the letter might as well be true! Shades of Tawana Brawley…
Let’s dispense with an obvious myth right at the outset: rankings of American universities, colleges, law schools and the rest are garbage, and always have been. The criteria is subjective, the weighting is subjective, the scores and numbers are a witch’s brew, and who know what kinds of lobbying and other means of persuasion go into the determinations of the likes of U.S. News Report? Nevertheless, schools use these bogus things to entice applications and alumni donations, and they work….because people believe what they want to believe.
Columbia, generally regarded as a second-tier Ivy League university, has risen from 18th place in 1988, to a stunning 2nd place this year, with only Princeton and, Harvard and MIT ahead of it. THAT should swell the endowment! However, an ethical (and luckily for him, tenured) professor of mathematics, Michael Thaddeus exposed his own university’s skulduggery in rigging its ranking. Continue reading →
1. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the decision overturning Bill Cosby’s rape conviction in Pennsylvania. Good. The appeal was on the verge of being frivolous. Cosby was and is guilty as sin and a monster, but even monsters have constitutional rights, and prosecutors violated his. The public has been badly informed regarding this case and the due process rights involved, and the prosecutors who appealed the results of their own botch don’t help with statements like this one from Montgomery County district attorney, Kevin R. Steele, who said in a statement regarding the case, “All crime victims deserve to be heard, treated with respect and be supported through their day in court.”
That’s deliberate obfuscation and #MeToo pandering. Cosby’s argument for being released had nothing to do with his victims at all.
2. There is hope! One ethical trend that has reversed centuries of Western apathy and arrogance over looted treasures from less affluent countries is the grudging acknowledgement that these artifacts were stolen, and that there is an ethical imperative to return them. The latest example of late justice is the 55 antiquities returned to Greece by the Manhattan district attorney’s office last month. The Elgin Marbles still are trapped in the British Museum, but there is real progress. Greece may get them back yet. Continue reading →
I’ve been considering this feature for a long time, and it seems like as good a time as any to try it out..
There are nearly 30 Ethics Alarms posts in an average week, and when one throws in the four or five issues covered in the warm-ups and their equivalents, that adds another 30 or so topics to the mix. I even get complaints from readers that there is too much content here, particularly if a reader, having a life, skips a day or two. In this feature, I will make my selections of what I consider to be the five most valuable posts of the previous seven days, with the comment threads taken into consideration.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr did an admirable and courageous job navigating the metaphorical shoals of holding the position in the Trump Administration. Because his boss was so roundly maligned and hated by the “resistance”/Democratic Party/ mainstream media alliance, he was accused of being everything from a toady to a criminal accomplice, though Barr was one of the least partisan AG’s in recent memory, especially when compared to Barack Obama’s two full-fledged consigliares, Holder and Lynch.
Of course Barr didn’t care for Trump; virtually no one who ever worked with or for Trump got along with him. Nevertheless, I did not expect Bill Barr to join the venal opportunists who rushed to cash in with books betraying a President’s confidences with back-stabbing tales “out of school.” Once such books were understood to be unethical (if not illegal), at least until the President in question was dead. But once David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s disgraced budget director, broke the taboo, many similarly flawed former White House employees and appointees followed. Trump’s subordinates, however, have been the worst by far.
Before we get to today’s ethics, we mustn’t let remembering the Alamo cause us to forget other ethically significant events in U.S. history. Yesterday marked the date in 1770 when a mob of American colonists gathered at the Customs House in Boston and began taunting and throwing objects at were protesting the occupation of their city by British troops, who had arrived in Boston two years before to enforce unpopular taxes passed by a British parliament. Young British private Hugh Montgomery was hit by a rock or an icy snowball, and he discharged his musket at the crowd. Other soldiers began firing, and the result was five “Patriots” were dead or fatally wounded. In a landmark moment for the American legal profession, John Adams and Josiah Quincy defended the hated soldiers and got all of them off except two who were found guilty of manslaughter. Their thumbs were branded with an “M” as their punishment.
Protesters and rioters have always prospered by provoking authorities into excessive force (or what the protesters were able to convince the public was excessive) ; the cause doesn’t matter. Incidentally, none of the Boston mob were prosecuted for “insurrection,” nor was the primary protest instigator, Samuel Adams.
1. Well waddya know! Hollywood celebrities who broadcast their political views are often incompetent and ignorant! Consider this tweet by actress Patricia Arquette:
Lessons:
If Twitter doesn’t make you stupid, it will show everyone how stupid you are.
This tweet got 1,156 “likes.” Twitter also makes tweet readers stupid.
Celebrities like Arquette really think their opinions on issues not connected to the reason for their fame should be taken more seriously than anyone else with two-digit IQs and a 7th grade-levl education.
These irresponsible celebrities include the “internet influencers.” They drive the opinions of those who don’t have the attention spans to read more than a dozen words or so at a time. This is a substantial, even decisive portion of the American public.
Arquette has had minimal education, so it was the news media’s duty to make sure she and people like her were informed about what this “NATO” thingy was that everyone was always talking about.
The New York Times is the main focus of my ongoing lament about the unethical journalism in a nation that desperately needs better. This is in part a function of the fact that it is the paper I subscribe to (at great personal expense despite being in the ambit of the Times’ rival, the Washington Post, which I could have on my lawn for the proverbial song), but mainly because it is, by far, the best of mainstream journalism, so its bias and consistent dishonesty is particularly telling (and frightening.) Ethics Alarms does under-examine the Post, though, and I have to work on that.
I considered this while reading a post by John Schroeder at conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt’s website triggered by a Post “news story.” The WaPo piece said in part,
A father’s runaway political rage and his son’s revulsion at lawlessness enthralled a federal jury Thursday as the first criminal trial stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack revealed a nation and a family plunged into ruinous conflict by former president Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election.
Really? It’s Trump’s fault? You sure about that? So, The Beatles really did make Charles Manson do it? Jodie Foster is the actual reason John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan?…[P]eople are responsible their own actions and their own responses to events. We have a will and just because somebody or something pushes our buttons, it does not mean we are not responsible for what we do when the buttons are pushed….This is not reporting on the trial, this is Beltway bubble obsession with Trump hatred. Unlike the Congressional hearings on Jan. 6 which are pure political theater and completely devoid of any actual meaning, the criminal trials are where justice is to be served, and yet the press is reporting on them as if they were just more political theater.
Well, I think the trials are also political theater, as they have made clear that only conservative rioters get prosecuted in the current version of American “justice.” But I digress. The Post publishes more of these kinds of reports, and that is why I subscribe to the Times.
1. A measure to protect women’s sports, and progressives are attacking it. Integrity is one of the hardest of all ethical values, as the supporters of allowing trans athletes to make female sports competitions unfair and futile continue to prove. Prodded by the news of a biological male transgender member of the UPenn women’s swim team crushing all competitors with his male-puberty-generated physique, Iowa became the 11ths state to ban biological males from competing inwomen’s sports when Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed a bill into law last week. “This is a victory for girls’ sports in Iowa. No amount of talent, training or effort can make up for the natural physical advantages males have over females. It’s simply a reality of human biology,” Reynolds said in a statement. “Forcing females to compete against males is the opposite of inclusivity and it’s absolutely unfair.” Continue reading →
The 21st Century is just not turning out the way I expected at all.
The details of the underlying controversy can be read here, if you dare. What interests me is this part:
The suit was filed by former Chicago Park District deputy general counsel George Smyrniotis against the city and Lightfoot….The lawsuit alleges that when Lightfoot heard of the plan, she said she would cancel the parade’s permit, and she ordered an immediate Zoom call.
On that call, Smyrniotis says that Lightfoot “proceeded to berate and defame” the lawyers and questioned their credentials.
Lightfoot told them “not to do a [fucking] thing with that statue without my approval.”
“Get that [fucking] statue back before noon tomorrow or I am going to have you fired,” Lightfoot also said, according to the suit.
She is also accused of making obscene comments to Smyrniotis and King.
“You make some kind of secret agreement with Italians. … You are out there stroking your dicks over the Columbus statue, I am trying to keep Chicago police officers from being shot and you are trying to get them shot,” Lightfoot allegedly said. “My dick is bigger than yours and the Italians, I have the biggest dick in Chicago.”
Smyrniotis says the comments defamed him by claiming he couldn’t do his job.
Ethics Alarms 