U.S. Society

Comment of the Day: “Unethical Tweet Of The Week: President-Elect Donald Trump (Sigh!)”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Regarding consequences…

Here is the Comment of the Day, an illustrative reminiscence from Michael R. in response to the post, “Unethical Tweet Of The Week: President-Elect Donald Trump (Sigh!).” It requires no further introduction…

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Well, for 4 years, the federal government, the media, academia, and Hollywood have called me a far right extremist (and a lot worse). Federal agencies have training that lists Christians, white heterosexuals, etc. as domestic terrorist threats. These are the rules now. As long as the left thinks that they can treat their political opponents as threats to democracy, as bigots, and as domestic terrorists without ever being treated similarly by their political opponents, nothing will change.

It is being reported that 30 tech company founders have recently been de-banked. This comes after thousand or tens of thousands of other conservatives have been de-banked for their personal beliefs or political affiliation. If you are a conservative, you can’t become a teacher (the teacher ed programs have viewpoint interviews), you can’t get government internships (you need to volunteer for leftist organizations as part of the pre-reqs), and you will have a hard time going to law school. Med School will soon be an impossibility with the current leftist ideology being pushed. As long as there are no consequences for the left, there will never be support to stop such viewpoint discrimination.

When I was in college, I found out that one of my classmates had been sleeping in the lobby of the dorm for several weeks. Her roommate had moved her boyfriend into the dorm room and they wouldn’t let her in. When she went to the RA and the dorm director, they told her that “You two are both adults, you just need to discuss it and work it out”. She was frustrated because the roommate would not compromise on this. I laughed and said “Why should she? She has everything she wants and there are no downsides for her. What are YOU going to do about it?” So, I asked a freshman football player to go to her dorm room, pretend to be her boyfriend and ‘discuss’ the matter with the roommate and boyfriend. Well, he brought along the entire offensive line. Once he announced that he was her boyfriend, the roommate’s boyfriend fled. The roommate left school the next week. Nothing will change unless there are consequences.

Black Friday Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Sorry, this is up late for many reasons, but primarily because 1) I am blotto and exhausted after an emotional week, as well as dreading the next stage of Holiday Horrors, 2) I forgot it was Friday. I really did. Pathetic.

Let’s see what kind of new ethics topic you can come up with. If you’re really in a black mood, you might want to watch the tongue-in-cheek “Halloween”-inspired horror film “Thanksgiving,” in which a mysterious slasher disguised as a pilgrim creatively knocks off the people he (or she?) holds responsible for a Black Friday riot at a local retail store that resulted in the trampling deaths of several shoppers. Do I need to tell you what the maniac’s ultimate murder in a movie with that title is?

Comment of the Day: “Stupid Thanksgiving Tricks” [Item #1]

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Gregg Wiggins, an old friend and frequent theater production colleague, issued this Comment of the Day in explanation of the reasons for my complaint yesterday about NBC’s crack staff repeatedly mispronouncing the name of the Radio City Musical Hall Rockettes during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade broadcast yesterday…. three different ways!

Not very related to Gregg’s post but related to the parade: The New York Tines reported yesterday that the parade became “the most-watched entertainment show in the United States only over the past three years.” Theories for the reasons this has happened vary. One is that the event is still completely apolitical (unlike almost every other form of entertainment programming); another is that the public increasingly longs for a simpler time, remembering that their families watched the parade when they were children and the holidays seemed magical. Yet another holds that a lot of people can’t afford to go to see shows in New York City any more, and the parade’s (lip-synced) street performances of current Broadway fare is the closest they will ever get. I think the development may be an encouraging example of how the culture can still be unified and brought together by shared traditions and experiences. The closest thing to a consensus that the New York Times found is that everyone agrees about the parade remaining essentially the same decade after decade, unlike almost everything else.

Except that the network broadcasters no longer know how to pronounce “Rockettes.”

Here’s Gregg Wiggins on the post, “Stupid Thanksgiving Tricks”…

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It’s About Time! Finally Another Progressive Fake Stat Used To Justify Open Borders Has Been Debunked

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Thank you, Crime Prevention Research Center, John R. Lott Jr, and RealClearInvestigations. But what took you so long?

This ridiculous-on-its-face fake statistic started being prominently wielded by Democrats and progressives in 2024: “Statistics show that [“immigrants”/”undocumented aliens”/”migrants”] are less likely to commit crimes than American citizens.” Fortunately, for a statistic that sounded dubious from the second it was first claimed, the rationalization was unpersuasive even if it had been true. Ethics Alarms swatted this intellectually dishonest talking point away several times, pointing out that crimes committed by individuals here illegally should never have been committed at all because the perpetrators should never have been in a position to commit them. Such crimes are all the direct result of U.S. government negligence, incompetence, or deliberate failure to enforce existing immigration laws. A single murder, rape or other crime committed by an illegal immigrant is still one too many, and inexcusable.

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Ethics Dunces: The Trump-Deranged Michigan Women Who Did THIS…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments
https://twitter.com/i/status/1861766333160993165

Why is this unethical? Let me count the ways…

1. It is grandstanding and virtue-signaling without purpose.

2. It demeans women. This is the kind of stereotypical, weak, emotional female behavior that causes biases to linger. I am constantly irritated at movies and TV shows that depitctwomen screaming like little girls if they see a dead body or witness some other traumatic event. I never heard my mother scream; I don’t think she ever did. I’ve never heard my sister scream. My late wife screamed exactly once in our 43 years of marriage, when she saw her cat in the jaws of a stray dog on our porch. Screaming over the results of an election is the mark of, if not mental illness, serious arrested adolescence.

3. The stunt makes progressives look incompetent, desperate and untrustworthy. They may be all of these things, but it is the duty of members of any group not to bring disrepute and ridicule down on other members.

4. Being proud of Trump Derangement shows a distinct distortion of values, such as proportion, prudence, dignity and responsibility.

Is it possible that this was done entirely as satire? If so, the stunt failed spectacularly, because no one seems to have seen it that way.

Paging Moral Luck! Paging Moral Luck!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Judge S. Kato Crews, a progressive appointee by President Biden to the U.S. District Court in Colorado, refused to allow an injunction against the San Jose State women’s volleyball team from including a biologically male “transwoman” (above) to compete with the team in a women’s volleyball conference tournament this week. He ruled that appellate and Supreme Court precedents clearly establish that the protections of Title IX and the 14th Amendment apply to transgender individuals.

A key factor in the decision seems to be that the plaintiffs, which are the other colleges in San Jose State’s conference, a current co-captain of the San Jose team, other former players and the recently-suspended assistant coach, should have filed the suit earlier. The conference’s transgender participation policy has been in effect since 2022 and four conference opponents and one non-conference opponent forfeited games against San Jose State beginning in September.

“The rush to litigate these complex issues now over a mandatory injunction,” Crews ruled, “places too a heavy burden on the defendants”—the Mountain West Conference and its commissioner, two administrators at San Jose State, the school’s head volleyball coach and the board of trustees of the California State University System. That’s a reasonable judicial call under most circumstances, but the judge and the entire pro-trans movement in the U.S. is now at the mercy of moral luck. That is the annoying life reality that random occurrences out of the control of decision-makers have a way of retroactively defining a decision as either prudent and wise or reckless and wrong. Crews’ decision neatly tees up the perfect conditions for moral luck to settle the trans athletes in women’s sports controversy

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Did the New York Times Deliberately Set Up This Straight-line For The Obvious Joke, Or Are Its Editors Completely Clueless?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The headline is obviously false. Everyone knows Biden is going to pardon Hunter.

A Show Of Hands, Now: Who’s Shocked That A “Technology Misinformation” Expert Used A.I. Generated Fake Information?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

geewhatasurprise. But as Mastercard would say, this story is priceless.

Professor Jeff Hancock is founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, and his faculty biography states that he is “well-known for his research on how people use deception with technology.” Apparently he knows the subject very well: Hancock submitted an affidavit supporting new legislation in Minnesota that bans the use of so-called “deep fake” technology in support of a candidate (or to discredit one) in an election. Republican state Rep. Mary Franson is challenging the law in federal court as a violation of the First Amendment (which, of course, it is). But Democrats don’t like the First Amendment. Surely you know that by now.

But I digress…

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A Bit More DEI Among Trump’s Cabinet and Agency Picks Would Have Been Ethical

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

…as in prudent, responsible, respectful, and competent.

President-elect Trump’s best mouthpiece, Rep. Byron Donalds, essentially humina-humina-ed the question on CNN about whether Al Sharpton’s criticism of the nomination and appointments so far emanating from Mar-A Largo was valid. Certainly Sharpton’s rationale isn’t valid: that Trump “owes” black voters more African American cabinet members, but the presence of just a single black nominee among the many selections, that being former NFL player Scott Turner nominated last week be Secretary for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is at very least unwise. Turner was part of Trump’s executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council; now he steps into the job held last time by Dr. Ben Carson. No, I don’t think there is any chance Turner will be rejected by the Senate.

It certainly looks like Trump has designated HUD as the slot for tokens: Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon who revealed himself during the 2016 debates to be an idiot savant, had no qualifications for HUD other than his skin color. Turner is more qualified, but still: if Trump wanted to ensure that the “Trump is racist” trope continues unabated, he could hardly have pursued a course that would have supported it more vividly. There are certainly a lot of nominations and appointments “of color,” but in the United States, for obvious reasons, blacks are in a special category.

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Pre-Thanksgiving Ethics Turkey Shoot, 11/24/24

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Maybe The Great Stupid is receding at last; there are some faint signs.

Apropos of Thanksgiving, some appear to be having second thoughts about one of the silliest and most unnecessary political correctness outbreaks, the mass fervor to strip athletic teams of nicknames, logos and mascots that evoked Native American culture. If you check back, Ethics Alarms and its predecessor (2004-2009) The Ethics Scoreboard called it: the result of the political correctness excesses would be to virtually erase Native Americans, aka “Indians,” from the nation’s cultural memory. I said this more than once, and that they would come to regret it. Hollywood doesn’t make Westerns much any more, Disney has labeled “Peter Pan” (my favorite of Walt’s animated features) racist because of its portrayal of our North American predecessors, and the Land O’ Lakes girl is gone. Yet now the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources is negotiating with the NFL and the Washington “Commanders” (previously the Redskins) to bring back the banned Redskins logo. “We have good discussions with the NFL and with the Commanders,”  Montana Senator Steve Daines told FOX News. “There’s good faith in negotiations going forward that’s going to allow this logo to be used again. Perhaps revenues going to a foundation that could help Native Americans in sports and so forth.” So the Washington Commanders, who adopted that boring generic name in 2020 as the Great Stupid was roaring across the land, would bring back this logo

…but without the name (which most fans still use anyway) even though it has nothing to do with “Commanders.”  Makes sense to me! No, honestly, it makes no sense at all. That logo was designed by a man named Walter “Blackie” Wetzel, a councilman and chairman of the Blackfeet Nation and president of the National Congress of American Indians. The profile in the center is said to have been modeled on Blackfeet Chief John Two Guns White Calf, and Wetzel intended the art to represent Blackfeet power to “introduce that power into the minds of our nation and world.” Never mind: social justice warriors decided it was racist, even though polls showed that Native Americans mostly found team names and logos associated with their culture innocuous or even complimentary.

And here’s something really stupid: Did you know that the Washington NFL team didn’t even bother to change its team song, “Hail to the Redskins!” despite its stereotypical faux Indian melody and beat? They just changed the lyrics to “Hail to the Commanders,” which adds an extra syllable so the song no longer scans!

On other fronts…

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