This excellent comment on “Unethical Protest of the Week…,” about the British choruster on stage a professional opera production who decided it was a good place to cheer on terrorist, need no introduction from me. Here is John Paul with one of his best Comment of the Day…

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The tweet (above) reminds me of an incident in college. I attended a Christian University. Every day we had to attend chapel that featured a variety of speakers. One day, we had a speaker who was grand standing. It wasn’t uncommon, but I remember him being particularly annoying. He was making some point about what we treat as important and swore in the middle of chapel. Unexpectedly, the crowd gasped. Then he went on to say, you care more about the fact I swore than starving children in Africa.

He wasn’t even talking about starving children in Africa. Apparently, the man didn’t know what a non-sequitur was.

I should have walked out right then. At the very least, I let the dean know.

It shouldn’t be hard to see what was wrong with the man’s argument, but I’ll dissect it anyway. First, one has nothing to do with the other. This is not some kind of mic-drop moral checkmate. We’re capable of caring about more than one thing at a time. And frankly, chapel wasn’t the place for shock tactics disguised as wisdom.

Second, he wasn’t challenging hypocrisy; he was grandstanding his own. If his point was that we should care more about justice, then model that. Don’t hijack a moment of worship (or opera performance) to make people feel small for reacting to your antics. That’s not conviction. That’s manipulation.

Finally, he used a false dilemma to excuse his own bad behavior. As if noticing his arrogance somehow meant we were blind to global suffering. It’s a cheap move, but it works sometimes because people don’t want to look self-righteous.

The Opera House should be appalled. Their first responsibility is to the integrity of their craft. They can’t afford to have rogue actors breaking script and derailing performances. That kind of stunt undermines the entire production and risks alienating their audience. Frankly, I don’t know what that actor was thinking. There are hundreds of other performers waiting in the wings, all capable and willing to respect the work. If the Opera House doesn’t act, they’re sending a message that the show and the audience don’t really matter.

Just for fun, I’m curious to see how many unethical rationalizations might fit Haswani’s tweet.

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Is the most recent idiotic, over-his-skis, abuse of power and position outburst by President Trump a genuine big deal? No, it isn’t. But his gratuitous attempt to re-open the old political correctness victories resulting in the forced name changes of two sports teams, the Cleveland Indians (boringly recast as “the Guardians”) and the Washington Redskins (even more boringly renamed “The Commanders”) is exactly what Trump does not need right now. What he needs is to project some stability even as the disgusting Axis keeps trying “Hail Mary” fake controversies like the Epstein “client list” and the supposed Trump plot to get rid of Stephen Colbert.

It is not the President’s business to stick his metaphorical nose into the naming of sports franchises; they aren’t the Gulf of Mexico. Presuming that it is his business plays right into the “king” narrative, and for Trump to do that is just plain incompetent. The effort has no upside and lots of potential political problems, as illustrated by the second Truth Social post in the series.

A President can’t use government pressure to make a private organization change its name: that is a First Amendment violation and a pretty obvious one. Trump’s obsession with “I might…” trolling isn’t funny, and, again, gives his opponents and the Trump Deranged more ammunition for their unhinged hate and hysteria. He “might” revoke Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship. Riiiight. This kind of thing just makes the President of the United States look petty and weak. I don’t understand why Trump can’t see that.

I hated the decision to change the Redskins to the Commanders (heaven knows I wrote about it enough) , and hated the decision to change the Indians to the Guardians even more. But both the American League’s Cleveland ball club and Washington’s NFL franchise should send President a Trump a loud, clear “Bite me.”

I actually like this quote a great deal, and think the Times, for once, is spot on…

“Party officials described the draft document as focusing on the 2024 election as a whole, but not on the presidential campaign — which is something like eating at a steakhouse and then reviewing the salad.”

—-The New York Times in a piece called “Democrats’ 2024 Autopsy Is Described as Avoiding the Likeliest Cause of Death.”

The Democratic Party, in addition to being exposed as a the real foe of democracy domestically, advocates for open borders, puppet Presidencies, using the justice system as a political weapon, cheating in women’s sports, racial discrimination in hiring and, lately, communism, also has revealed itself as a party of abject cowards. Its latest favorite tactic is walking out of Congress when they don’t like what the majority is likely to do, but what the Times describes is astoundingly craven. The party’s analysis of why it lost the White House in 2024 is going to avoid what everyone knows are the reasons it lost

That, my friend, is a cover-up, but it is even worse than that. It is signature significance for an organizational culture that is so infected with “It isn’t what it is” reactions to unpleasant reality that it is even incapable of honestly addressing its own problems. How can anyone trust a party so self-hobbled to manage anything, lead anywhere, accomplish any goal or mission? Why would anyone trust such a party? How can you justify belonging to a party—believing in a party—that even lies to itself?

From the article:

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Nobody else has to write about this asshole here—it is an open forum, after all—but I want to get my ethics call on the announcement that CBS is canceling “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” out of the way lest it fester and turn into a fatal brain tumor.

That ethics call is “GOOD! It’s about damn time!” Never mind that I don’t find Colbert funny and never have; my opinion of his smug style of humor is irrelevant. But he has been for more than a decade a divisive force in American culture, exacerbating political divisions and intolerance, misleading people foolish enough to take his partisan talking points as fact, and one of many Axis of Unethical Conduct allies who have been deliberately ripping at the connective tissue that holds the nation together. He’s an ethics villain.

Naturally, the Axis is upset and, as usual, lying. “CBS canceled Colbert’s show just THREE DAYS after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount for its $16M settlement with Trump — a deal that looks like bribery,” Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote on social media from her tee-pee. “America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.” It was cancelled because CBS decided that a an expensive late night TV show with pretty miserable ratings that was dedicated to insulting and denigrating half of the country was probably not a smart investment, and was never an ethical one. Warren, a lawyer, former professor and U.S. Senator apparently doesn’t even know what “bribe” means. No, come to think of it, she’s just calculating that enough citizens don’t know what the word means to mislead them.

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