U.S. Society

Monday Ethics Reflections, 8/9/2021: A Bad Ethics Date, Looking To Change The Trend…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Narcissus Addams

My wife and boss, Grace, emailed me this morning with a list of major events that occurred on August 9th, remarking, “NOW THIS WAS AN INTERESTING DAY IN HISTORY !” Indeed it was: this is a major marker of ethically provocative events, each worth not just a post, but a debate, a book, and museum:

  • Richard Nixon’s resignation as the 37th President of the United States took place at noon on August 9, 1974, avoiding the personals shame and the national trauma of an impeachment and trial, back when an impeachment was still an impeachment (and not, as the Democrats recently transformed it, a purely partisan device to demonstrate hatred of the elected President). This put an unelected President into office, Gerald Ford, who soon after taking office announced that he was pardoning the man who appointed. This act forever defined Ford’s brief Presidency, and was either a courageous act of political sacrifice on his part, or part of a corrupt scheme to allow Nixon to escape criminal prosecution. (I believe the former description is the correct one.)
  • On 2014, a black teen, Michael Brown, was shot to death in Ferguson, Missouri, by a white police officer. The episode launched an ongoing Ethics Train Wreck that is still stopping for passengers and causing great destruction to this day.
  • It was on August 9, 1969, that members of Charles Manson’s “family” murdered five people in movie director Roman Polanski’s Beverly Hills, California, home, including Polanski’s pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate. Less than two days later, the cult members killed again, murdering  Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary in their home. The murders finally ended the myth of the “peace and love” Sixties while casting a shadow over the lives of many not butchered that night, from the Beach Boys to Doris Day to Hollywood, especially perhaps Polanski, who eventually became a living Ethics Train Wreck himself.
  • Speaking of the hippies, Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden, or, A Life in the Woods” was  published on August 9, 1854 and became a staple in the intellectual arsenal of those advocating “dropping out” of society. “Dropping out” of society is unethical.
  • August 9, 2010 was the day that JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater actually attracted praise for his “fuck you” exit from his job as a Jet Blue flight attendant. Not from Ethics Alarms, though…
  • And speaking of metaphorical “funk you’s,” on this day in 1936, African American track star Jesse Owens won his fourth gold medal of the Berlin Olympics in the 4×100-meter relay, thus foiling and infuriating Nazi leader Adolf Hitler plan to use the Games for “master race” propaganda.
  • Finally, though it should probably by first, it was on August 9, 1945, that the U.S. dropped a second atom bomb on the citizens of Japan, at Nagasaki, finally speeding Japan’s unconditional surrender. If the decision to drop the first atom bomb is controversial, the ethics controversy over the second is even more contentious.

1. Oh, let’s start with another Wuhan vaccination matter, this one from the Ethicist, who was asked,

My elderly mother is in an independent-living facility where all the residents have been vaccinated …Protocols are very strict, and no resident has gotten sick. [A] relative who lives nearby… is not vaccinated. This facility will soon mandate that all visitors be vaccinated, but my relative plans to dissemble in order to evade the requirement. Should I … tell the facility that my relative is not vaccinated?

Does she really have to get expert advice to figure this out? Continue reading →

Now THAT’S Gender Equality…[UPDATED]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

A common trope in movies and TV that drives me nuts is when the male lead is battling a villain, gang or monster and his female love interest, spouse or companion cringes uselessly as she looks on. If the hero is beaten she is likely toast, yet such female characters nonetheless leave the fighting to the man as they do little more than hope for the best. One of feminism’s many benefits to society is the erosion of this tradition, although it has been a slow process. I now see the women in such situations at least make an effort to help out about half the time.

The first major breakthrough may have been nearly 70 years ago in “High Noon,” when Quaker and pacifist Grace Kelly twice takes violent action to assist her man in peril, outnumbered marshal Gary Cooper. Still, women have been indoctrinated with the passive female bystander tradition for a long time. Even if screen heroines are more frequently moved to attack their male protectors’ assailants, real life evidence that the cultural transition has occurred is scant.

The video above, however radiates hope. A drunken jackass ran out onto the field at Dodger Stadium during a game yesterday, and with the male security team in pursuit (and falling behind), the Dodgers ball girl, Marissa Rohan, intervened and body-slammed the guy over the wall.

Perfect. Grace Kelly would be proud.

That’s progress.

[In the original post, I asked for information regarding the ball girl’s name. Curmie got it to me, and I have edited the post accordingly. Reader JutGory made the valid point below that the Dodgers and the media were probably trying to protect the young woman’s privacy sinec she is a minor and could possibly be brought into litigation. However, if her name is now out there,there is no risk in it being published here.]

“Kill A Western Cultural Institution, Wear Its Skin”: The Case of Classical Music

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Beethovan

Scholar and essayist Heather Mac Donald has written a thorough, fascinating and depressing study of how, as absurd as this sounds (and is), the fact that a drug-addicted petty criminal died under a white cop’s knee in Minneapolis has led to the death throes of classical music. The plot is familiar: seizing upon and exploiting white guilt and using the all-purpose weapons of race-baiting and threats of “cancellation,” various alliances of progressives, activists, academics, journalists, politicians and easily recruited naive rich liberals band together to claim that institution X is a feature of white supremacy and must be eliminated, shunned, replaced or destroyed. Taken by surprise and lacking the integrity, courage and fortitude to fight for Western cultural values, the groups that should be the guardians of our icons and institutions easily fall into postures of submission.

Mac Donald’s essay, “Classical Music’s Suicide Pact,” is in two parts (I and II), both published in City Journal, where she writes regularly. Perhaps the most telling part of the work is this one, at the end of Part II:

“Though the keepers of our tradition know that classical music is a priceless inheritance, fear paralyzes them as that legacy goes down. Among the leaders contacted for this article were conductors Daniel Barenboim, Dudamel himself, Riccardo Muti, Franz Welser-Möst, Valery Gergiev, Gianandrea Noseda, Charles Dutoit, James Conlon, Neeme Järvi, and Masaaki Suzuki; pianists András Schiff, Mitsuko Uchida, Lang Lang, Evgeny Kissin, and Richard Goode; singers Anna Netrebko, James Morris, and Angel Blue; and composers John Harbison and Wynton Marsalis. All either declined to comment or ignored the query. Company managers were just as tight-lipped. The Met’s Peter Gelb refused an interview; the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Matías Tarnopolsky, Jonathan Martin of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and Jeff Alexander of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra were also unwilling to speak. Simon Woods’s assistant said that he was caught up in moving to New Jersey and thus unavailable. (A source said that he had been in New Jersey for months already.) Those music professionals who did speak to me, with few exceptions, required that they be referred to in so generalized a category that it would contain thousands of members.”

This is, of course, fear, but also a betrayal of the culture. Things that are important and deserve protection must be protected, and those in a position to do so have an obligation to the public and the culture not to hide from controversy and confrontation, but to engage in both. But artists are notoriously lacking in fortitude, and this is especially so when what is required of them involves defying the Left, which is where most artists have gravitated for centuries.

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Woke Derangement Symdrome-Infected Conservatives Board An Ethics Train Wreck To…Hungary??

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

This was late crossing my consciousness, perhaps because I do not trust Tucker Carlson and will not watch his allegedly sincere rants because we know, or should, that he is more interested in ratings than principles. The idea of prominent conservatives suddenly deciding the the U.S. can learn from Hungary, of all places, is ridiculous on its face, but I did not realize the extent to which the current wokeness epidemic has driven many conservatives and Republicans into the mouth of madness.

Carlson has been broadcasting nightly from Budapest, as he has interviewed and celebrated Hungary’s corrupt and authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban.There is no excuse for this, but Carlson thinks Fox News viewers will approve of his: Orban has defied the European Union on the issue of accepting illegal immigrants and refugees, and has installed harsh measures against trans individuals and LGBTQ people generally. He also has taken action to intimidate and control the news media. In embracing such a leader, Carlson (and others—I’ll get to them shortly) is realizing the worst stereotypes of conservative Americans.

Orban is a central-casting anti-democracy thug. Last year, he pushed the Hungarian parliament, which his party controls, to pass laws creating a state of emergency without a time limit, granting him the ability to rule by decree, suspending elections to fill positions that have become conveniently vacant between regular elections, and permitting prison sentences for spreading “fake news.” But his real appeal to Carlson and the Cro Magnon subspecies of conservatives is his persecution of gays and trans individuals. In 2020, Orbán’s government ended legal recognition of transgendered people, and his party has proposed legislation to ban “LGBtQ positive content” in movies, books or advertising.

Gee, what a great guy! Do conservatives comprehend the cognitive dissonance scale at all? This autocratic creep is so underwater on the scale, I’d say a minus hundred or more…

Cognitive Dissonance-SMALL

…that he would drag the Puppies Are Adorable Party below zero if it endorsed him. But on their own currently warped scale, conservatives’ terror over losing such culture war battles as the same-sex marriage debate and illegal immigration restrictions has wokeness so low on the their scale that an aspiring dictator who opposes gays and illegals appears to be in positive territory.

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End Of Week Ethics Bombs, 8/6/21

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Hiroshima

August 6, 1945 is one of the most important ethics days of all, and among the most controversial. The United States bomber Enola Gay—now on exhibit in a hangar near Dulles Airport, dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people were killed in seconds, and another 35,000 were injured. More than 60,000 would be dead by the end of the year from the effects of the fallout. Was the launching of the nuclear age by the United States ethically justified to save American lives (an invasion of the Japanese mainland had been estimated to risk a million U.S. casualties) and end the war? Was President Harry Truman guilty of a war crime, as non-combatants, including children, constituted most of the deaths? Did the horrible results of the new weapon prevent World War III, or make it more likely? These are still intensely debated questions by scholars, historians, theologians, military strategists, philosophers and peace activists.

1. Well, I’ve been spoiling for a fight, shopping around Northern Virginia and fining myself one of the few unmasked. So far, nobody’s said a word, but anyone who does is in for it. I’ve been vaccinated twice and probably had a mild, symptom-free infection before that. I have always been unusually resistant to viruses. Mask fog up my glasses and make me miserable. If you have chosen not to get your shots, swell, that’s your choice, but your exercise of personal liberty is not going to restrict mine without a fight. And don’t tell me I have to wear a mask so phobics feel “safe.” That’s not my problem either. I am not inclined to “social distance,” either. The mask fetish is going to strangle community, society and the joy of life unless we draw some hard lines. I’m drawing.

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Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 52 Comments

open_sesame

This is as good a place as any to announce a new commenting rule on Ethics Alarms that I should have thought of earlier.

On a post from June, a new commenter entered the fray making the increasingly popular Rationalization #64 claim that the kiddie versions of Critical Race Theory that are being used as propaganda in schools (the “1619 Project” course materials qualify) aren’t really CRT, which is “only taught in law schools.” (I’m not sure it is taught in law schools at all, since it has nothing to do with law.) When I replied that I didn’t appreciate that kind of disinformation on Ethics Alarms, he devolved into outright insults and the clichéd “Good day, sir!” exit that I’m still sick of, though it hasn’t surfaced in a while. I banned him of course (I was being generous to allow his first comment on, in retrospect: I’m looking for articulate progressives, but this jerk was a poor candidate), and I warned him about defying the ban, as he had the whiff about him of someone who would. Sure enough, he tried to return with successively more insulting retorts, which were promptly deleted.

This inspired me to launch the new rule: If a commenter is banned, and comes back and comments anyway, all of that commenter’s previous comments and posts will be sent to Spam Hell.

This isn’t an ex post facto edict, so the mercifully few past commenters who did this won’t be penalized (and I would not want to lose the contributions from the best of them). It also won’t apply to the self-banned going forward.

So that’s that.

Now, please contribute your usual provocative and ethical observations in this week’s Open Forum.

Evening Ethics Crash, 8/5/2021: Ronnie, Walt, Ashli, Craig And, Well, Read For Yourself

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

1. An epic example of Presidential courage, ethics and leadership, and he was hated for it because enforcing law is so mean... On August 5, 1981, President Ronald Reagan began firing 11,359 air-traffic controllers engaged in an illegal and unethical strike against the public, something public employees must never do. Reagan ordered them to return to work, and the union, PATCO, thought he was bluffing. Big mistake. He wasn’t.

The president of the Professional Air-Traffic Controllers Association was found in contempt by a federal judge and ordered to pay $1,000 a day in fines until his members complied, and President Reagan carried out his threat. The 11,359 air-traffic controllers who had not returned to work were not only fired, they received a a lifetime ban by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Another President, Calvin Coolidge, when he was Governor of Massachusetts, laid down the principle that holding the public hostage to the demands of employees responsible for their health, safety and welfare was illegal and wrong. President Roosevelt stated that public unions were a menace, and so they have shown themselves to be. Oddly, while liberals were furious with Reagan, no one accused him of being a dictator or an “autocrat.” He believed in following the law.

2. The propaganda worms its way into your brain….I watched the old Disney movie “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” for the first time in many decades, and it was better than I remembered. The performances are excellent, with Kirk Douglas obviously having the time of his life; the art direction is spectacular; it has lots of classic Walt Disney touches, like the cute sea lion, and the special effects, especially the robotic giant squid (which I much prefer to recent CGI equivalents) is amazing for 65 years ago. And it was fun to be reminded of the inspirations for two Indiana Jones movie scenes. (Two more are in James Mason’s next Jules Verne epic, “Journey to the Center of the Earth.”

Then came the scene where the Nautilus is attacked by Papua New Guinea natives, who board the sub. They are repelled when Captain Nemo electrifies the hull, and we see all of the natives jumping around comically and jumping into the seas as little electric bolts shoot out from the deck. The white guys are laughing, of course. There is nothing wrong with the scene, which could have played out just that way in reality, but it made me uncomfortable—you know, stereotyped natives, smug white people with superior technology. Political correctness even ruins fantasy.

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Wednesday Ethics Catch-Up, 8/4/2021: Isn’t It Systemic?

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

This really is a catch-up, because i never got yesterday’s Warm-Up posted, and a lot has been going on…

1. Systemic denial! Name that rationalization! Governor Cuomo’s ridiculous excuse for his serial sexual harassment—that he’s touchy-feely-huggy-kissy with everyone, not just comely females in the workplace—needs its own rationalization along the lines of “I’m like this to everyone equally, so it’s OK!” it would be a sub-rationalization to #1, “Everybody Does It.” But I am torn: should I name it after the governor, or after George Bernard Shaw’s misanthrope Henry Higgins, who memorably argued (in both “Pygmalian” and the musical based on it, “My Fair Lady,”) that “the great secret…is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls”?

I’m tending toward “Higgins’ Misconception.”

2. Also in the category of reader feedback is my call for answers to this question, raised in the lively thread following the recent Comment of the Day: “How many of the Ethics Alarms readers know Idina Menzel, Kelli O’Hara, Laura Benanti, Audra McDonald, and Sutton Foster? How many could recognize their faces or voices?” My theory: systemic live theater decline…

3. Systemic confusion… Kate Coyne-McCoy, the top Rhode Island Democratic Party strategist and political consultant, sent a now-deleted tweet this week coyly wishing death on GOP Senator Lindsay Graham after his recent positive Wuhan virus test despite being vaccinated.

“It’s wrong to hope he dies from Covid right? Asking for a friend,” Coyne-McCoy tweeted. And who should register a protest but the Black Lives Matter Rhode Island political action committee, which issued a statement condemning Coyne-McCoy’s comments as “extremely distasteful and insensitive.” “Regardless of political affiliation the disregard for human life is unacceptable and should not be tolerated anywhere within any political party,” the group said. “How can we trust someone with such blatant disregard for human life with the will of RI voters?” The group added, “BLM RI PAC strongly urges RI Governor Dan McKee and House Speaker Joseph Shekarchi to call for her immediate resignation, as those views regardless of political affiliation should never be accepted.”

What’s going on here? Is BLM suddenly going bipartisan? Is this a trick? And aren’t they saying that “all lives matter”?

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Tokyo Olympics Update: Ethics Lessons From The Losers

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

laurel-hubbard

I’m not going to watch a second of these ethically offensive Olympics—it will just encourage them. But like most big, complex, messy human endeavors, the Tokyo Olympics has triggered some interesting ethics issues. Ethics Alarms has discussed some of them; here are some others:

I. The Transgender Weightlifter

Laurel Hubbard, the first transgender athlete to compete at the Olympics and was generally assumed to be the likely winner since she was a 43 year-old former male competing against young women who had never had the advantage of going through puberty and training while male, was eliminated. She failed to record a single lift in three attempts in Monday’s over-87-kilogram super-heavyweights competition. That’s terrific, since she shouldn’t have been competing at all, but it’s also just moral luck. It doesn’t change the ethics equation in any way.

She had an unfair and artificial biological advantage, and only cowardice in the face of the Woke Army could account for the Olympics allowing her to take her obviously un-female assets (above) into a female competition. This is wrong, and undermines women’s sports, but I feel like it should be obvious, and Ethics Alarms has discussed the issue thoroughly already. New Zealand was wrong to permit her to represent it in the Games; Hubbard was wrong to compete. Women and feminists are foolish to ally themselves with the trans activists who are undermining women’s sports.

It was nostalgic, I must admit, to have the reminder of the mysterious Press sisters, the oddly androgynous Soviet Olympians who set 26 world records between 1959 and 1966 and retired abruptly when the Olympics started checking under female competitors’ genes.

Press sisters

We never found out whether the Press sisters were altered or disguised males, intersex, or women who had been shot up with more male hormones than Arnold Schwarzenegger. But everyone in America knew that having the compete against our female athletes was typical Russian cheating. Good times, good times…

2. The Weird Case Of Novak Djokovic’s Inconvenient Truth

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Sunday Ethics Warm-Up, 8/1/2021: Simone Biles-Free Zone Edition!

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Tower shooting

I don’t think that we need to debate the ethics of deranged mass shootings. The first one I was ever aware of occurred on this date in 1966. Charles Whitman, a former Eagle Scout and Marine, brought a stockpile of guns and ammunition to the observatory platform atop a 300-foot tower at the University of Texas. He had packed food and other supplies, and before settling in for 90 minutes of deadly target practice, killing some victims from as far away as 500 yards—he was a trained marksman—Whitman killed the tower receptionist and two tourists. He eventually shot 46 people, killing 14 and wounding 32 before being killed by police. The night before, on July 31, Whitman wrote a note saying, “After my death, I wish an autopsy on me be performed to see if there’s any mental disorders.” Whitman then went to his mother’s home to murder her, using a knife and a gun. He returned home to stab his wife to death.

Whitman’s story does raise medical ethics issues. He was seeing a psychiatrist, and in March told him that he was having uncontrollable fits of anger. Whitman apparently even said that he was thinking about going up to the tower with a rifle and shooting people. “Well, your hour is up, Mr. Whitman. Same time next week, then?” The intersection of mental illness with individual rights continues to be an unresolved ethics conflict 54 years later. In addition, the rare but media-hyped phenomenon of mass shootings has become a serious threat to the right of sane and responsible Americans to own firearms. See #5 below.

1. The King’s Pass in show business. A new book by James Lapine tells the antic story of how the Sondheim musical “Sunday in the Park With George” came to be a Broadway legend. Lapine wrote the book and directed the show. The cult musical—actually all Sondheim shows are cult musicals–eventually won a Pulitzer Prize ( you know, like the “1619 Project”) and bunch of Tony nominations. I was amazed to read that the show’s star, Mandy Patinkin, at one point walked out on the production and was barely persuaded to return. Lapine writes that he never fully trusted Patinkin again. Why does anyone trust him? In fact, how does he still have a career? Patinkin has made a habit of bailing on projects that depended on him. He quit “Chicago Hope,” and later abandoned “Criminal Minds,” which had him as its lead. To answer my own question, he still has a career because of “The King’s Pass,” Rationalization #11. He’s a unique talent, unusually versatile, and producers and directors give him tolerance that lesser actors would never receive. Mandy knows it, too, and so he kept indulging himself, throwing tantrums and breaking commitments, for decades. He appears to have mellowed a bit in his golden years.

2. Speaking of Broadway, the ethical value missed here is “competence”…There is more evidence that the theater community doesn’t realize the existential peril live theater is in (the medium has been on the endangered list for decades) as it copes with the cultural and financial wreckage from the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck. Just as theaters are re-opening, the Broadway theater owners have decreed that audience members will be required to wear masks at all times.

I have one word for that: “Bye!” Maybe some fools are rich, submissive and tolerant enough to pay $100 bucks or more for the privilege of being uncomfortable for three hours. Not me. My glasses fog up when I wear masks. I have been vaccinated; I’m fairly sure I was exposed to the virus before then and had minimal symptoms, and much as I believe in live theater, I will not indulge the politically-motivated dictatorship of virtue-signalling pandemic hysterics. The industry is cutting its own throat, but then theater has never been brimming with logic or common sense.

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