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.

3. Thank God the Biden Administration has returned openness and trustworthiness to government! From the New York Times yesterday:

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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,

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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.

No, I won’t say “Good!,” but they deserve it.

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I’m going to watch the film “Flight 93” again as my 9/11 commemoration. It is an excellent, if almost too clinical, approximation of what went on when the terrorists tried to fly a plane into the Capitol or White House, after picking what had to be the worst possible set of passengers to try to intimidate. Otherwise, I will avoid TV commentary today as I would the plague. Turner Movie Classics may have been making some wry commentary the last two days: first, it ran a series of old historicla disaster movies like “A Night To Remember” (The Titanic) and “San Francisco” (the earthquake and the fire). Then last night was “cult night.” September 11 and its aftermath was all about cults: Islam, Al Qida, neocons, Truthers.

This date will also always remind me of the utter incompetence of the news media. I will never forget the idiot on CNN who, after the second plane hit a tower, said when a colleague offered that it looked like a terrorist attack, that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions, that it just could be a coincidence. These are the people we trust to inform us about events affecting our lives.

1. Justifiable homicide? Tucker Gales, a 15-year-old from Columbia County in Georgia shot his father in the head with a .22-caliber rifle back in October 2020. Last week, a grand jury decided that Gales explanation that he did it because “he had enough of his father abusing his mother” was good enough for them. The teen will not be indicted. Good.

Wesley Gales’ had a well-documented pattern of violent abuse. He allegedly threatened to shoot his son in the head and “kicked his ex-wife in the groin area,” the The Augusta Chronicle reported. A few months before his son killed him, Wesley Gales pleaded guilty to domestic abuse and child cruelty charges. “The police visited the home multiple times since 2011. No action was taken to remove this family from the danger in the home. He pleaded for help on multiple occasions and the system failed him,” said Emily Martinez, the organizer of a GoFundMe campaign for Tucker. “It’s a sad day because this child had to take matters into his own to hands to defend and protect him and his mom.”

The grand jury call doesn’t surprise me, and it is consistent with a lot of cases as well. I once wrote an appellate brief for a man who was convicted of shooting the neighborhood bully who regularly beat him up. There were a lot of self-defense opinions holding that a potential victim with good reason to believe that an individual was getting ready to seriously injure him or her was justified in using deadly force. The fact that the shooter in this case was a juvenile made his case especially compelling.

2. Incompetent ad of the year! Here’s a WayFair ad for a coffee table:

Here’s another shot of the same photo:

Apparently the photo originated with the supplier. Nobody at Wayfair can read upside-down, I guess. An investigation is underway…

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RealClearInvestigations developed the database below. The thing speaks for itself…