Crazy progressives are not good for anyone. Bias makes you stupid, but crazy makes you dangerous. What is causing all of these meltdowns, in which previously respected people and institutions on the left side of the ideological spectrum throw their trustworthiness to the winds? Is it panic? Desperation? The obvious catastrophe that is the Biden administration? The decisive demonstration that the Russian collusion hoax was a Clinton-led conspiracy? The frightening specter of a Trump return? Abortion and affirmative action dishonesty finally facing principled challenges? What?
I don’t know, but the signs are portentous…
Biden’s National Park Service, which operates Ford’s Theater (where Lincoln was shot) tweeted for no discernible reason,
What the hell? Damn right we put Lincoln on a pedestal, and also in a big chair over-looking the Mall and the Capitol. That’s because the nation owes its existence to Abe, as well as the best expressions of its ideals. Why would the operators of the memorial to Lincoln’s death issue such a weasel-worded invitation to diminish Lincoln’s legacy? Ford’ Theater only exists today because of Lincoln, just like the United States of America. The anti-American wacko segment of the critical race theory cabal is now handling communications for Ford’s Theater, is it?
Today is a big ethics date: on September 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln announced that his Emancipation Proclamation was on the way. Finally issued on January 1 of the next year, its primary initial significance was that the document defined the Civil War as a fight to abolish slavery, not merely to restore the Union. In fact, the Presidential order to come couldn’t free anyone, since it only applied in practice to Northern states where slavery was already banned. On this date, Lincoln told blacks in the Confederacy that they would be free within 100 days. Well, theoretically, anyway. The proclamation, when its official version arrived, also called for the recruitment and establishment of black military units among the Union forces. An estimated 180,000 African-Americans went on to serve in the army, while about 18,000 served in the navy.
The redefinition of the war’s mission announced on this date was a political masterstroke. Suddenly, backing the Confederacy meant favoring slavery, so anti-slavery Great Britain and France could not ally themselves with the South.
1. Not a play review, just more propaganda for open borders...New York theater is back, and so is the “Good Illegal Immigrant” trope. A new play called “Sanctuary City” is being cheered on by critics, although, or perhaps because, its theme is that it’s just so mean and cruel for the United States to enforce its laws against “undocumented immigrants” (that’s illegal immigrants to the honest). The review is headlined, “Slamming a door on a Dream.” The use of the dream metaphor is deliberate deceit; that one may dream of achieving one’s goals by breaking laws doesn’t make the act of breaking those laws any more justifiable. As with “they just want a better life!”, this is an appeal to emotion over facts. Bank robbers want to be rich_–they just want a better life too. So do cheating husbands who kill their wives for the insurance money. That the news media continues to enable this dishonest and unethical theme shows us just how untrustworthy they are. Here’s nauseating last line in the review by Jesse Green, a regular panderer to the woke: “Newark may be a sanctuary city, but there is no sanctuary to protect you from the necessary betrayals of those you love — including your adopted country.” No. It is a betrayal of U.S. citizens to allow lawbreakers to force their way into our country, and it isn’t a foreign citizens’ adopted country until we choose to adopt them.
2. Nah, the critical race theory movement being pushed in the schools isn’t racist! Look:
Yes, this is the largest teachers union in Pennsylvania eagerly promoting a workshop that attacks parents based on their race. Verdict: racism is unethical. So-called anti-racism based on racism is unethical. The sky is blue, and the sea is wet. [Source: Not the Bee]
The other ethically significant event to occur on this date was the 1973 tennis match between top women’s player Billie Jean King, 29, and Bobby Riggs, 55, at that point in his career a self-promoting huckster and loud-mouth, but not much of a tennis player. Somehow, this obvious mismatch was dubbed “The Battle of the Sexes,” enabling it to attract a huge TV audience, and King’s victory became a tipping point in the women’s equality movement. I liken it to the George Floyd fiasco in that respect: the contrived symbolism of the event overwhelmed the facts. Riggs, who one was a highly-ranked male tennis pro, had been shooting off his mouth about how even a broken down senior player like him was better than the best women in the sport. He was trying to get a play-day and a resurgence of lucrative fame by goading a female pro into a match, and it worked: Australian Margaret Court, then #1 in the female pro ranks, took the bait and choked, playing horribly while losing to Riggs’ soft serves, spin shots and lobs. Her friend King set out to redeem her, and won in straight sets, proving that one of the best female players in the world in her prime could defeat a male player almost twice her age. Wow.
The lesson: when enough people really, really want something to be true, they’ll decide it is true regardless of the facts.
1. From the “How Stupid Do They Think We Are?” files: The New York Times gives front page attention to First Lady Jill Biden’s (I’m sorry, Dr. Jill Biden—and she can call me “Dr.” too, since I’m as much one as she is) determination to make Joe’s campaign promise to bring “unity” back to the U.S. a reality. The promise was offensive when it was made, and if FLOTUS really thinks it is achievable, she’s a Doctor of Delusion. The recent revelations about how the Clinton campaign conspired to create a false conspiracy narrative that crippled Donald Trump’s Presidency while Democrats accused the Americans who voted for him of being racists, xenophobes, fascists and morons establishes how shamefully the Axis of Unethical Conduct set out to divide the public in order to regain power. It’s impossible to govern effectively without some measure of national unity, as they knew when they shredded any hope of such unity to sabotage Trump. Now that they are hobbled by the very conditions they set out to create, the sadly inadequate leader they foisted on the nation wants unity back. Gall, chutzpah, naivete, cynical, hypocritical, ethics estoppel, stupid, insulting—I can’t find a word or phrase sufficiently harsh to describe such a goal. They can’t be trusted with unity, and they don’t deserve it either. Good luck, Jill.
1. More evidence that social media corrupts everything it touches…In an interview about her hit HBO mini-series “Mare of Eastham” (not bad, if you like being depressed), actress Kate Winslet revealed that actresses are sometimes cast in plum roles by producers because they have more social media followers than actresses who are better suited for the parts. Considering fake Twitter followers can be bought, this is strong incentive for actors to cheat. It isn’t that Twitter itself is unethical, just that it is a catalyst for unethical conduct in so many ways. Again permit me to quote the Amityville House: “GET OUT!!!“
2. Speaking of actors, Frederick March has been cancelled by his alma mater. University of Wisconsin officials have removed the late, great Fredric March’s name from campus theaters. March is one of the greatest and most prolific of American film actors who also had a distinguished stage career, despite the fact that few under the age of 60 today could identify him. (His most acclaimed movie is the iconic “The Best Years of Our Lives,” and the role most would recognize is probably his performance opposite Spencer Tracy in “Inherit the Wind,” where March channels William Jennings Bryan.) March’s artistic achievements and his mastery of his craft certainly make him an appropriate figure to memorialize with a theater, except for one detail: when March was a student over a hundred years ago, he joined an organization called the Ku Klux Klan that apparently had no affiliation with the notorious racist and nativist Southern organization of the same name. John MacWhorter explains the confusion here.
Investigations into March’s beliefs and activities show that, if anything, he was a vocal opponent of racism all of his life, so tarring him as a Klansman is unfair and untrue. But in 2018, the university took his name off the Fredric March Play Circle Theater on the Madison campus, and did the same this year to a theater on its Oshkosh campus. After all, students need to fell “safe” from a dead actor’s naive conduct before anyone had heard of him a century ago because of the accidental death of a petty criminal and drug addict under the knee of a brutal cop. McWhorter quotes a Madison student actor as saying, “I cannot believe that my friends and I have been performing in a space named after someone who would have considered all of us to be lesser beings…I find it so ironic that we are sharing our intersectional stories in a theater that honors a racist.” Ah, yes, the Great Stupid, where Facts Don’t Matter.
But I don’t think the University of Wisconsin had much choice but to consign March’s memorials to Cancel Culture Hell. If the school had to spend tens of thousands to remove a giant boulder that was once called a “niggerhead” because students protested, administrators were only being realistic to conceded that they could only lose if they tried to defend Frederick March….unless and until they did a better job teaching students to think.
It was only two days ago—less, really—that I highlighted performer/celebrity logorrhea victim Nicki Minaj’s cretinous statements about the Wuhan virus vaccine, which, naturally, have been cheered by various conservative trolls like Tucker Carlson as if Minaj ever gives any thought to what she opines before she broadcasts it to her fans. Now I have to defend the rapper whom I had the misfortune to become acquainted with when she was an American Idol judge and made poor Mariah Carey roll her eyes so hard I was afraid they might pop out of her head when Minaj offered one ridiculous thought after another.
You see Twitter, which I quit a few months ago for exactly this reason, banned Minaj for tweeting her dumb story about her cousin’s friend in Trinidad supposedly becoming impotent after being vaccinated after ”his testicles became swollen.” The theory, I gather, is that Nicki was spreading “misinformation.”
Minaj is angry about this, and in the blunt, crude, self-important stream of consciousness manner for which she is famous, expressed her pique. She said in a video directed at her fans and Twitter followers [Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy read…]:
Boy, that week went by fast…maybe because I was a worthless slug and got fewer posts up than my self-imposed minimum. On the plus side, that should leave more fascinating ethics issues for you to debate.
Leroy Fick died in June, but not before gaining a small measure of ethics immortality by giving his name to an Ethics Alarms term of art. In 2011, Leroy happily admitted that he had continued to collect public assistance after winning $2 million dollars in the Michigan lottery because a loophole in the law allowed him to do so. Thus his name was originally attached to those guilty of especially despicable, anti-social conduct. Eventually, the definition was refined to mean “unethical people who openly and blatantly violates social norms of responsibility, honesty or fairness without shame or remorse.”
That’s Leroy in the photo above. Ficks lack ethics alarms, so it will not surprise you to learn that many of them end up in jail. Leroy did.
The Comment of the Day below is really two consecutive comments in the same thread, as Sarah B. argues that fathers are not only justified in leaving their jobs at critical times to be with their wives at childbirth and thereafter for as long as they deem necessary, but that this is the most ethical choice. My note prompting her response involved the case of Red Sox star Alex Verdugo, who left the team at a crucial time when the season hung in the balance, and stayed away for four days to be with his girlfriend and their new-born child: there is no indication that he provided anything but companionship and moral support.
(I just learned that he is not married to the mother (above). No, I don’t think that changes the ethics issue, though itraises others.)
I stated that this was a breach of his duty to the team, which he is paid handsomely to respect. I am quite certain that this is the correct ethical position, but my view represents the resolution of an ethics conflict, where two ethical principles oppose one another. I can’t say that how Sarah prioritizes these principles is wrong, only that I would prioritize them differently, and have in analogous situations.
“The priorities are linked, but still need to be ranked and four days is nothing. Heck, if my husband only got four days after the birth of our children, unless his absence from me would literally cause someone to die, I’d give him the choice of his job or his family. If we want men to step up and be good husbands and fathers (which would do amazing things for our society) we need to let them do that. Considering what a woman’s body goes through with the birth of a child and the incredible amount of healing she must do after the fact, four days barely lets a mom get home from the hospital (having had complication-free natural births has led to us getting to go home on day three at my hospital) and set up a good feeding schedule for the first kid (my best kid so far took two weeks before we got the bugs worked out enough for their health and mine). Subsequent kids require so much more because of the need to care for the older children too. The fact of being in high levels of pain for every action and dealing with incredible dizziness for days lead to a new mom being a literal danger to herself and the baby (not to mention any other kids) if left alone. According to my OBs, that condition is totally normal, even expected.
“Due to the danger, new moms are forbidden from lifting their own child or walking with the child in their arms in my hospital. My hospital also asks about the support a mother can expect for at least two weeks post baby before they will even let the child go home with the mother. Sure, a lot of us rely on other family members for that second (or third or fourth week), but the dad has to be there in the beginning if he wants to start himself off on a good foot of proper prioritization of responsibility. Most marriages I have seen where a dad does not give totally of himself for 1-2 weeks after a baby are at best strained. The mother needs support, and who is best able and most desired to give that support, but the father of the baby? If MLB cannot give new fathers a week away at minimum, they need to require that their players are celibate while on contract, so no babies come about. If a multimillion dollar contract is enough to abandon a wife and kid for at a time of great need, it should be enough to abandon sex for. Family is the primary responsibility, and all the more so at the birth of a baby.
1. Civil War progressive smugness is starting to get to me...Netflix is showing “Cold Mountain,” which I only saw in a redacted version on my flight home from Mongolia in 2003. This time, it struck me completely differently. The film adaptation of the novel about the suffering of ordinary Southerners during the Civil War reminded me how arrogant, ignorant and smugly cruel the social justice warriors are who want to topple all monuments to and memories of what half of this country endured, frequently with great courage, during a war that was infinitely more nuanced than “Pro-slavery vs Anti-slavery.”
Near the center of Old Town Alexandria, about 15 minutes from my home, was a statue of an unnamed Confederate soldier that stood at the intersection of two major streets. It was hauled away last summer at the peak of the George Floyd Freakout with nary a defender in the local media. The average soldier for the South, as “Cold Mountain” makes clear, wasn’t a supporter of slavery, didn’t own slaves, and was just following the decisions of state leaders who believed, quite correctly, that their states had every right to leave the U.S. when they felt it was in their best interests. Lincoln’s refusal to let them do so was legally wrong but ethically and pragmatically correct, but that doesn’t mean that the common man siding with states he regarded as his “country” were evil, traitors, or without character. The common Confederate soldiers, along with their families, were victims in many ways, and, as Mrs. Loman says, “Attention should be paid.” A statue commemorating their experiences, exploits and suffering is not only appropriate but valuable.
“Cold Mountain” made my mind flash back to this post, in which a social justice warrior baseball writer, Craig Calcaterra, mocked the opposition to Virginia tearing down Lee’s famous statue in Richmond by writing, “The only sad part of this is that, now that the statue is gone, how will we ever know what happened in the Civil War? I mean, that’s what those things were all about, right? At least according to a lot of people on the right who are so enthralled with monuments to racists and traitors.”
Calcaterra proved in that statement that HE doesn’t know what happened in the Civil War.
2. In case there is any doubt, pro-Trump “whataboutism” is exactly as obnoxious as anti-Trump “whataboutism.” A reader of Ethics Alarms sent me an email reacting to Sunday”s post about the “Fuck Biden” outbreak. She suggested that I was hypocritical, asking “Did you complain about the ‘Fuck Trump’ phenomenon?” and accusing me of a double standard. Nah, I never complained about the endless disrespect and calumny heaped on President Trump—I only wrote about it constantly from November, 2016 to the present! To use one of my Dad’s favorite expressions, the email made me “hit the roof,” so I wrote back in part,
Yesterday, on the anniversary of the Twin Towers’ fall, President Biden was heckled by vocal members of a crowd, and “Fuck Biden” chants broke out at various football games across the nation. As an American and a scholar of the Presidency, I view this development with sadness and worry. As an ethicist, I look upon it as a confirmation of much of my analysis during the Trump administration, and what was tagged on Ethics Alarms as the 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck. As a critic of what the nation’s progressives and the Democratic Party have devolved into, my reaction is anger tinged with satisfaction. This is what they did to the Presidency. I warned them, as did others with a lot more authority and influence than I, that the harm they were inflicting on the office, the nation and the government might be irreversible and ruinous. They didn’t listen, or, more likely, they didn’t care. All that mattered was their hatred for Donald Trump. Now their President is inheriting the inevitable results of the wreckage from their recklessness.
Ethics Alarms 