And so it begins. Starting today, as I already wrote about at excessive length here, I enter a period of involuntary nostalgia, regret and sadness, beginning with today’s anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, followed tomorrow by my first wedding anniversary in 43 years with no marriage to celebrate. Maybe this explains why I have even less sympathy for my Facebook friends still weeping, raging and making asses of themselves over the election loss by the worst major Presidential candidate in at least 150 years. Let’s see what they’re up to [I’m checking Facebook….]
Oh! It’s stupid meme day! One FBF posted this meme inspired by Communist Robert Reich…
George Soros and Bill Gates, of course, are purely benign in their use of their resources. Another posts this trenchant commentary:
Rob Reiner has puzzled me for a long, long time. He can’t be stupid; his father Carl was a brilliant writer and comic, quick on his feet, witty, and able to hold his own with Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and Neil Simon. Rob was once an excellent film director: “This Is Spinal Tap (1984), “The Sure Thing” (1985), “Stand by Me” (1986), “The Princess Bride” (1987), “When Harry Met Sally,” (1989), “Misery (1990), and “A Few Good Men” (1992). I’m also an excellent director, so maybe I’m inclined to assume that talent is linked to intelligence. But Reiner’s success in Hollywood has crashed as his partisan progressive fervor has slipped into fanaticism.
His Ethics Alarms dossier is frightening. In 2022, he actually tweeted this,
and didn’t expect to be laughed at. His Trump Derangement worsened, resulting in this tweet
and later, when he denied on Bill Maher’s HBO show that the press buried the Hunter Biden laptop story and then deflected to, “You know it’s not justified? Using armed violence to try to kill people in the Capital. That’s not justified!” I wrote at the time,” So many once intelligent people are like Reiner now. Isn’t that frightening? Don’t some Americans, the ones who aren’t too far gone, hear a celebrity talk like that and think, “Wait…I’m on the same side as that guy? Do I sound like that? What’s happened to me?”
Yesterday I was chatting with a woman whose two Golden Doodles are fond of romping with Spuds. She told me about her recent experience at a private school where her daughter attends, but soon will attend no more, as you will shortly understand.
This school is famously progressive, and among other things indulges “furry” delusions among its students. Don’t you know about “furries??
Oh, listen my children and you shall hear of this crazy fad the woke hold dear…
Is the New York Times really so desperate for anti-Trump, “let’s kill all the unborn babies” screeds that they have to dip into the high school newspaper pool? I saw this op-ed by a 16-year-old girl in The Salt Lake Tribune, which picked it up from the New York Times. There is no excuse for it. Titled, “I’m 16. On Nov. 6 the Girls Cried, and the Boys Played Minecraft,” the piece is irresponsible to publish for many reasons:
I don’t believe that it is likely to have been the 16-year-old’s work alone. I believe it was influenced by adults, and that they used her to promote their views, on the theory that “out of the mouths of babes” would have more persuasive power than “out of the mouths of pro-abortion extremists who believe nothing is more important than allowing mothers to kill unborn children.
The named author, whose name I will not mention here so as to in some tiny way mitigate the harm this publicity is likely to inflict on her, is too young to give valid consent to being exploited in this manner. The op-ed is forever. She isn’t out of high school. She shouldn’t have to begin adulthood already branded as self-branded bigot, sexist, demonizer of a President and abortion activist.
It would be a poor op-ed unworthy of publication if it were written by an adult.
Here are just a few excerpts to give you the spirit the thing: Continue reading →
This quiz comes from the latest inquiry to “The Ethicist.” I disagree with much of Prof. Appiah’s answer, as I often have lately, but I do concede that the question is worthy of a serious ponder.
On their way out a restaurant, a family group was interrupted by a stranger who had also dined there. He said to the inquirer’s comely daughter-in-law, “With all due respect, you are very attractive.” The inquirer rebuked him saying, “That is wholly inappropriate, sir.” The inquiry continued,
“My cousin snapped at me that it was only a compliment. My sister got mad at me for upsetting my cousin. My daughter-in-law appreciated my reaction but said that she has had “way creepier men say way creepier things to her.” I responded to them all that a stranger has no business commenting on the looks of a person, good or bad, and that this man would never have said a word if any man had been standing with us. Who is right?”
Before I give you The Ethicist’s answer and mine,
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is….
“Are spontaneous compliments on a stranger’s appearance per se unethical?”
“The Simpsons'” Nelson Muntz has been getting a workout on Ethics Alarms lately, because the Trump Deranged and the Axis totalitarians have been falling flat on their faces in their own filth with hilarious regularity.
On a recent episode of “The View,” the all-woke, all Trump-Deranged, all-too-dumb-to-breathe panel attacked President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks and Matt Gaetz’s nomination in particular, as former prosecutor Sunny Hostin, who thinks that earthquakes and eclipses are proof of cliamte change, expressed horror that Trump could nominate the former Congressman with such damning “allegations” having been made against him. Wow, she must have been some prosecutor with that attitude toward unproven allegations!
Three minutes after Hostin’s unethical diatribe, Whoopi Goldberg interjected, “Sonny, you have a legal note.” You see, Donald Trump is suing ABC for defamation. It’s a doomed suit I think, but ABC’s lawyers, being lawyerly, don’t want to take any chances. They heard Hostin’s rant and quickly rushed on the air a legal disclaimer that–Haha!—Hostin was ordered to read. Which she did, with the facial expression and tone of a North Korean-held American prisoner of war being forced to read a “confession”:
“I do have a legal note. Thank you, Whoopi,” Hostin replied. She continued,
“Matt Gaetz has long denied all allegations, calling the claims, quote, ‘invented,’ and saying in a statement to ABC News that ‘this false smear following a three-year criminal investigation should be viewed with great skepticism. The DOJ investigation was closed with no charges being brought.”
Whoopi then sent the show into a commercial. I’m surprised the network’s lawyers didn’t make Hostin recite, “ABC also wants to assure readers that I am an idiot, and what I say, as with all the other members of ‘The View,’ should never be taken seriously.”
To be clear, the position here is not that Gaetz should be rejected as Attorney General because of the allegations against him, but because he is not only unqualified to be a U.S. Attorney General, he’s unqualified to be a member of Congress. He’s untrustworthy, and based on his legal experience as well as his mass of outrageous statements, I wouldn’t hire him for any legal task I can think of. Trump obviously intends the nomination to demonstrate his contempt for the Justice Department under Merrick Garland, a sentiment that is understandable and justified. If that is the message he wants to send, however, he should have just nominated a baboon and avoided any ambiguity.
This is the most wonderfully strange country, isn’t it? I have mentioned here before how the United States “won” the World’s Fair called “Expo 67.” A huge, imposing Soviet Union pavilion displayed threshers, tractors and other farm equipment, tanks and satellites, perfectly capturing the harsh gray gravity of life in the USSR. Not far away was the United States pavilion, housed in a giant transparent geodesic dome (courtesy of Buckminister Fuller), filled with joyful explosions of American pop culture: Raggedy Ann dolls, artifacts from the baseball Hall of Fame, cool cars, rock ‘n roll and classic movie clips running on loops. There was Gary Cooper alone in the dusty street; Cary Grant being shot at by that crop duster; Julie Andrews spinning on the mountain top at the start of “The Sound of Music,” Gene Kelly singing in the rain. Tough choice for the international visitors: which country would you want to live in?
And now, after one of the bitterest Presidential campaigns in our history, following almost a decade of a constantly widening breach in our politics, values and discourse, the essential light-heartedness (and habitual triviality) that has always been a feature of our national character is pulling us together.
The self-proclaimed progressive onclave social media platform designed to isolate the Good people from unclean thoughts and their Nazi neighbors is proving to be a magnificent social experiment testing the proposition that the Mutated Left of the 21st Century can’t tolerate dissent or any ideas that don’t make them feel warm and cuddly.
As first noted here by commenter Michael R., “Apparently, all the liberals who left X went to BlueSky and immediately started reporting everyone else for not being ‘woke’ enough for their tastes. Their ‘hate speech’ and ‘misinformation’ reports have gone from 350,000 in all to 2023 to over 40,000/day since the election. Of course, some moderation requests probably can’t even get in because they are busy.” Yes, the experiment is working out just fine. These people, as they and their Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates demonstrated, don’t get that freedom of speech thingy. The funny part is that it was in great part the bubble progressives live in that led their party to its2024 disaster, and their solution is …..to construct a stronger bubble.
I love this Comment of the Day from the blog’s resident Canadian commentator, because it opens a discussion that I believe is essential for an understanding of the peculiar culture here in the United States, raised by someone who, unlike citizens here, has every reason to misunderstand it. I am especially sympathetic because an astounding number of U.S. citizens don’t understand it, in great part because of their failure to absorb the history of their own nation. So, in a slight departure from the usual format for EA Comments of the Day, here is Humble Talent’s COTD on the post asking of the meme above, “…What Is The Ethical Response To An Adult Who Posts This Fatuous Meme…?”, to be followed by my explanation in response to the question he poses.
Not merely social media chatterers but many others (like Nikki Haley, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Fox News (of course) and CNN’s John Berman, and, if anyone cares, Keith Olberman) are castigating MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who chattered away yesterday about how they had flown to Mar-A-Largo to kiss the ring, or ass, or whatever, of President-Elect Trump. This seemed like a craven reversal of their stance during the entire campaign, one that became more extreme and shrill as Election Day approached, that Trump was a fool, a racist, an enemy of democracy, a threat to the nation, and literally an American Hitler. The pilgrimage to Florida seemed like a craven reversal because that’s what it was. Joe and Mika proved that they are, at heart, “Good Germans.”
Trump has done nothing since his election that would warrant the Trump-Deranged from abandoning their hysterical position, since he had done nothing to justify it in the first place. All the obsequious reversal by the “Morning Joe” duo indicated was hypocrisy and a complete lack of integrity, not that we didn’t already know that. To be fair to Joe and Mika, they work for MSNBC, where nobody knows the meaning of integrity, honesty, or “ethics.” It’s a propaganda arm of the Angry Left. All “Morning Joe” does is follow orders. This spectacular double-reverse backflip in mid-air (I’m mentally humming “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite”) however, is despicable even by MSNBC’s wretched standards.
Ethics Alarms 