U.S. Society

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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A Simone Biles Thought Experiment I Dare Her Apologists To Try…

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Womens soccer goalie

The New York Times writes of the U.S. Women’s Soccer team’s desperate-needed victory over the Netherlands in the Olympics:

“It was only afterward that Alyssa Naeher let down her guard. After she had dived to saved the penalty kick late in the game. After she had dived again to push aside the header in extra time. After she had turned away not one but two penalties in the shootout. Naeher’s teammates count on her to do her job as well as they do theirs every time they take the field. Better than they do even, since their mistakes have a tendency to wind up in the back of her net.

“In the quarterfinals of the Olympic tournament on Friday, facing a dangerous Netherlands attack, that had already happened twice. Now the United States needed Naeher to save them again. After the teams played a 2-2 tie, a penalty kick shootout would decide who would go to the semifinals, and who would go home. The Americans turned to Naeher. Save us, they said. Just like you have before. “There’s no one else I’d rather have in the net than her,” midfielder Rose Lavelle said later. “She’s saved us so many times.” And so Naeher, who had saved her teams in big games and small ones, in World Cups and friendlies, saved them again.”

Now imagine that Naeher suddenly announced when the game was a tie that she would not guard the goal in the shootout, but was quitting the game. “It’s been really stressful, this Olympic Games,” she says. “I think just as a whole, not having an audience, there are a lot of different variables going into it. It’s been a long week, it’s been a long Olympic process, it’s been a long year. So just a lot of different variables, and I think we’re just a little bit too stressed out. But we should be out here having fun, and sometimes that’s not the case. I truly do feel like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders at times.”

So she quits, just as her team is depending on her. The back-up goalie takes her place, and the American Women’s Soccer Team loses, and is out of the Olympics.

Would Naeher be hailed as a hero and a role model? Would her team mates say afterwards that they support her decision 100%?

There Goes My Head! The Latest On Simone Biles…

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

jackheadexplosion

The LA Times just blew up my head, which is my problem, and also made it mandatory to once again raise the increasingly aggravating matter of Simone Biles, the greatest, most courageous gymnast who ever quit on her team because the pressure just became too much. The latter is your problem because I assume you’re as sick of reading about Biles as I am sick of thinking about her.

In an article bemoaning how the failure of so many of America’s putative stars in the Tokyo Olympics has put “the Games in a deep hole with lots of digging to be done,” Times sportswriter David Wharton wrote,

“Biles could help. Though facing some detractors, she has received a wave of support on social media over the past 24 hours and, speaking with reporters, sounded as if she might compete in the all-around and individual events beginning later this week. ‘Just a lot of different variables and I think we’re just a little stressed out,” she said, adding that “we’re going to take it a day at a time.‘ Given the very personal yet very public circumstances of Biles’ withdrawal on Tuesday, [assistant professor of sports management at the University of New Haven Jason] Chung believes her return could become an even bigger story. “I could imagine it bringing more viewers because of the human-interest angle,” he said. “Having someone of her magnitude and ability struggling emotionally, people might be interested to see how she weathers the storm. “Also,” he said, “she could draw younger viewers who connect with that kind of authenticity.”

This passage made my head explode four or five times—it’s hard to count when your brains are on the ceiling.The last was the worst–AUTHENTICITY???? Paging Inigo Montoya:

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Comment Of The Day: “Gee, Jason Whitlock, What Do You REALLY Think About Simone Biles’ Quitting On The Olympics?”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Yes, I guess this is the sixth post related to the Simone Biles controversy. Isaac’s Comment of the Day elaborates on one of the many reasons this episode bothered me so much and continues to, especially as the excuses and rationalizations for Biles’ conduct appear to be taking over the “narrative” in the absence of what I consider persuasive facts and arguments. The next ugly shoe to drop, I predict, will be when the female American gymnast who won a gold in Tokyo gets endorsement contracts in preference to the “Greatest of All Time” who somehow couldn’t access that greatness when the spotlight was on, and chose not to try. The preference for the winner over the “hero” will be attributed to malign influences. Just wait.

Giving women appropriate power and influence in American culture has been generally beneficial to all, but the ascension of traditional female virtues has had the unfortunate effect of diluting some of the the very values that allowed the United States to come into existence and succeed over the centuries. The disastrous handling of the pandemic has been one example of how this development is not an unalloyed good, and the fact that Biles’ conduct is not merely greeted with sympathy, which is nice, but praise, which is offensive, is another.

Here is Isaac’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Gee, Jason Whitlock, What Do You REALLY Think About Simone Biles’ Quitting On The Olympics?”

***

America used to be associated with very masculine qualities: toughness, stoicism, risk-taking. This reputation did not exclude American women. Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Calamity Jane, Amelia Earhart.

It’s easy to point out the Generation X and millennials’ glaring lack of these qualities, but to me it’s their parents who steered America wrong. Specifically every boomer who jumped on the socialist bandwagon and participated in the 1960s and 70s revolutions against marriage, Christianity, monogamy, patriotism, sobriety, and hard work. The ones who think Woodstock was some kind of beautiful, transformative event. The ones who wax nostalgic about the “Summer of Love” when their poorly-raised grandkids turn chunks of Seattle into murder-dystopias. The generation that necessitated the invention of the term “latch-key kid” to describe their neglected children.

So I perused Simone Biles’ Wikipedia page, and, sure enough…in and out of foster care…abandoned by Mom…no Dad ever in the picture. Showed incredible talent that was her ticket to a secure future, only to be one of the gymnasts sexually exploited by serial abuser and boomer Larry Nassau. Diagnosed with ADHD; currently on medication. These are the symptoms of growing up in a world created by the values of the 60s and 70s. We can mock them for not knowing how to talk to girls, change a tire, be in a stable relationship, or cope with stress…but these are things people learn from their dads, their faith, and their stable community of neighbors, extended family, and church. Younger generations were not only not given those things; they were taught they didn’t need them.

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