U.S. Society

What Do You Believe?

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Not exactly ethics, but proto-ethics: our beliefs vastly affect, even control, how our ethics alarms are calibrated, what makes them sound, and what disables them. Beliefs can be biases (not all biases are bad), but they also constitute what our linear constant is for navigating the chaos of life—and we all need that. Beliefs define our values as well as how we interpret the world.

In the most famous scene from the cult baseball film “Bull Durham,” Crash Davis, the iconoclastic minor league catcher played by Kevin Costner, is asked what he believes. He answers (unrealistically rapidly, as if he had memorized the speech in advance, which has always bothered me from a directorial perspective, but I digress)

“I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman’s back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.” 

My list is better (and longer) than Crash’s, and I’ll probably post it later, but right now I’d like to see what the readers here believe.

I started to think about this when I realized that I have no idea what one of the Presidential candidates believes, and I am not entirely sure what the other one believes either. I think that Donald Trump, based on his family background and the culture he was raised in, believes in the capitalist system, individuality, entrepreneurial spirit, minimal government interference with personal liberties, traditional male and female roles, strong leadership, not being a weenie, America as a force for good in the world, American exceptionalism, that abortion is wrong, that he is almost always right and is the one person he can trust to fix what he sees as wrong with our government, and that the 2020 election was rigged against him.

I have no clue what Kamala Harris believes.

This is a problem.

What do you believe, if you are comfortable revealing it?

______________

[I thought everyone should be reminded that the great Frankie Laine sang songs other than “Rawhide.”]

This Is J.D. Vance’s Real Job During the Campaign: Interpreter

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Grilled by a CNN reporter over Donald Trump’s comments at the black journalists convention about Kamala Harris’s, uh, fluid ethnic identification, his running mate replied that they “don’t give me pause at all.” Vance continued, “Look, all he said is that Kamala Harris is a chameleon. She goes to Georgia two days ago, she was raised in Canada, she puts on a fake southern accent. She is everything to everybody and she pretends to be something different depending on which audience she’s in front of. I think it’s reasonable for the president to call that out, and that’s all he did.”

Bingo.

Trump needs an effective interpreter to periodically decipher his stream-of-consciousness riffs, and since it is clear that attacking, spinning, and misrepresenting the GOP Presidential nominee’s words as proof that he is a lying madman, racist, sexist Hitler monster Marvel supervillain is going to be the primary approach the mainstream media will take to cover this campaign, it is very fortunate that Trump named an articulate and fearless interlocutor to share the ticket with him. Vance is an interpreter.

Among the myriad reasons that Presidential nominees have selected their VPs, almost none of them having anything to do with whether the selections have sufficient experience, ability and qualifications to lead the country, that’s a better reason than most.

It Seems Increasingly Likely That Nobody Is Running the Government, the News Media Is Hiding It As Much As It Can, And the Public Is Too Dumb To Care. Nice.

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

What’s going on here?

Oh, nothing much: just

a) a demented President who has been forcibly removed from his party’s ticket despite already engaging in a Presidential debate and being voted onto that ticket by millions of Democrats,

b) a DEI VP who has never received a single vote from anyone to be President being summarily installed, Soviet-style, by a shadowy body of party leaders, some out of elected office (like Barack Obama), as the new candidate,

c) the anointed Presidential candidate and the actual President who was kicked to the metaphorical curb both making appearances and meeting with foreign officials like they were President when quite possibly neither is acting in that role, without

d) the news media showing the least curiosity about…

…and instead following DNC memos dictating that it keep emphasizing that the DEI VP didn’t do what she really did, hadn’t said what she really had, and is “exciting” while it concentrates on calling the Republican VP candidate “weird”—you know, like Harrison Butker-–and throttling him for what he blathered indelicately in a single interview seven years ago, as

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Flagrant Virtue-Signaling of the Year: CEO of Olympic Broadcasting Services Yiannis Exarchos

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I’m sure glad I ignore the Olympics as the corrupt, greed-infested fiasco it had been for decades, because if I gave a rip, the Paris Olympics would have my head exploding more frequently than Old Faithful blows. The whole enterprise appears to be run by silly, incompetent, unethical bureaucrats and con artists.

Here’s a particularly nauseating example: the CEO of Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) Yiannis Exarchos decided to burnish his woke creds by telling reporters in Paris that his organization updated its guidelines for camera operators, most of whom are men, to inveigh against “sexist” portrayals of female athletes at the 2024 Summer Olympics. “Unfortunately, in some events they are still being filmed in a way that you can identify that stereotypes and sexism remains, even from the way in which some camera operators are framing differently men and women athletes,” Exarchos said, making no sense at all. “Women athletes are not there because they are more attractive or sexy or whatever. They are there because they are elite athletes.” Exarchos said that the problem primarily stems from “unconscious bias,” which leads to camera operators and TV editors favoring more close-up shots of women than of men.

Oh, shut the HELL up! TV editors favor more close-up shots of women than men because women are more attractive than men, the demographics of Olympic viewing for many events slants male, and there is nothing offensive or disrespectful about showing Olympic athletes like this German sprinter,

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Unethical Film and Theater Reviewer Bias, Part II: “OK, It’s a Good Movie, But Where’s the Climate Change Propaganda?”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I supposed technically Margeret Renkl isn’t a film reviewer for the Times: officially she’s a “contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.” I don’t care: she criticizes an action movie that audiences are enjoying because it doesn’t deliver the progressive agenda propaganda that she thinks good little Big Brotherites should jam into the brains of the trusting public at every opportunity.

Renkle can bite me, and so can the Times for publishing her dreck.

Renkl and the Times concede that “Twisters,” which appears to be the non-superhero hit that Hollywood desperately needs, “ is a humdinger of a summer blockbuster that delivers exactly what theatergoers want in an action film: plenty of explosions, destruction, high-speed chases and heroism, all with a dash of wit and sexual tension thrown in. It is not — and does not aspire to be — high cinematic art.” However, it is, she argues, a missed “golden opportunity to talk about what scientists know and don’t know about how climate change might be affecting the formation, strength, frequency and geographic distribution of tornadoes, or why they now tend to develop in groups.”

No, it’s really not. A movie people want to see for escape and entertainment isn’t a “golden opportunity” for the writers and producers to bombard them with favored and faddish data related to progressive public policy. The Ethics Alarms standard response to the “Why are you talking/writing/singing about what you want to instead of what I want to” is “Write your own blog, direct your own play, produce your own movie or sing your own song.

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Monday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 7/29/24

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

That sappy John Denver song is just one of the ones that has choked me up when I’ve stumbled across it while listening to the radio in my car. I feel like I’ve let all of my friends and colleagues down; everyone has been so caring and supportive, I’ve been taken out for dinner, friends I haven’t heard from for years have called me just to see how I am. Yet I can’t say that I’m one bit better today than I was March first, a day after finding my body wife and the love of my life dead and staring on our sofa. I had a terrible nightmare about Grace two days ago. And the songs are the worst: songs I remember from our wedding, our first dance at the reception (“Wonderland by Night”), the song I sang for Grace that night (“Let a Woman in Your Life” from “My Fair Lady”) songs I recall from when we were dating, “Another You,” which moved me to end our six month separation, even “The Way We Were.” I’m literally afraid to turn on the radio. Meanwhile, I can’t imagine anything more boring and tedious than having someone constantly expressing their pain at something that happened almost half a year ago, so I don’t want to talk about how miserable I am, and yet talking would help. A little.

Please excuse that self-indulgent introduction.

1. Is Google really burying Trump searches? That’s the latest conspiracy theory. I don’t trust Google, and I have no doubt that Big Tech is mostly all-in concerning forcing Kamala Harris down the nation’s metaphorical throat. Still, this seems like a software glitch to me. So “assassination attempt on Tru…” doesn’t produce “Trump” in the autofill, but Truman. (Was there an assassination attempt on Truman? I missed that.) Why is anyone paying attention to autofill? Learn to search better: “Trump assassination” immediately pulls up all the news stories. There is so much genuinely sinister manipulation of information going on, it’s foolish to try to manufacture any.

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Curmie’s Conjectures: “Curse You, Red Baron!”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

by Curmie

[This is Jack: Almost as if in response to my secret wish, Curmie has submitted a column designed to turn our attention away from politics, division, culture wars and the rest, instead focusing his analysis on pizza ads. Makes me hungry for more…but not more Red Baron pizza. I’ve been eating a lot of frozen pizza since Grace died, and have placed Red Baron on my blacklist. Yechh. DiGiorno, Frescetta and Trader Joe’s offerings are far superior. ]

I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m a little starved for something, anything, other than politics.  The thought that anyone would vote for either of the likely contenders for the presidency (as opposed to against the alternative) is chilling.  So I’ve been casting about, looking for something else to write about.  This may not be much, but at least it’s something.  And I did sort of open the door for this kind of post last Christmas season with an analysis of ads for Monopoly.

Red Baron (the pizza company, not Snoopy’s antagonist, but why pass up an opportunity like this?) has released a trio of new commercials, all connected to the joys of sharing.  They’re not going to convince my wife and me to buy their product—we’ve tried it and found the gustatory difference between it and cardboard to be insignificant (your mileage may vary), but that doesn’t mean their commercials are similarly boring.

Indeed, “Baddie Librarians,” in which two stereotypically bespectacled (complete with glasses chains) older women naughtily share a pizza intended for a single person, is trite but at least reasonably cute.  “Hipsters” is even more fun, as sharing a delicious pizza leads to sharing of a different sort: one character “shares” that he’s tired of being hip, another (her name is Willow, of course) admits that she doesn’t even know what her neck tattoo means, the pizza is described as “way better than kale” (I’ll grant that much), and kombucha is called “garbage water.”  It’s not laugh-out-loud funny, but at least it brings a smile.

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The Ethics Mission, If You Choose To Accept It: Don’t Let The News Media Deceive The Public About Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I don’t think the Citizen Free Press is being dishonest or misleading in its characterization of the compilation above. Kamala Harris has, many times, expressed her support for basic Marxism, as indeed the “equity” component of the Left’s current obsession (and cover-phrase for “good” racial and gender discrimination) is a Marxist buzzword. Harris’s assertion that fairness demands that “everybody ends up in the same place” is both alien to American values and Communism exemplified (or what Communists claim to seek, snce the real goals of political leaders under Communism is to dominate and dictate to the public).

That’s a valuable set of clips for many reasons, prime among them is that it shows who and what Harris is just as the news media—the Enemy of the People, as Donald Trump correctly said in one of his most perceptive moments—is trying mightily to re-introduce Harris to the public as something she isn’t. Many things, in fact. Moderate. Competent. Trustworthy. Genuine. “Exciting.” Likable. Honest. Smart. Harris is none of these things.

In the one of the clips above, Harris actually says that equality means “everyone should get the same thing.” That’s NOT what equality means; it has especially doesn’t mean that in this country. Equality means that everyone has the same rights under the law, among them the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It does not mean that everyone has some right to “get” the same thing regardless of their ability, talent, willingness to take risks, work ethic, determination, diligence, virtue and skill. Kamala Harris is either ignorant, not very bright, confused, or lying: personally, I think she’s all four, which makes her smug demeanor while spouting this garbage particularly infuriating.

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Ethics Quiz: Bury My Medal At Wounded Knee [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Once again, I thought a headline was a joke when I first read it:“Pentagon to review Medals of Honor awarded to soldiers for 1890 Wounded Knee actions.” The headline was at Stars and Stripes, though, not The Babylon Bee.

The reassessment was requested by Congress in 2022 on a day when it was feeling particularly woke and I guess had nothing better to worry about. Now Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered a “five-person panel of experts”—experts on what it was like to be in the cavalry in 1890, I guess?—to review the legitimacy of the Medals of Honor awarded to twenty U.S. soldiers for their actions during the 1890 Battle of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, eventually regarded as a massacre of Native Americans after Dee Brown’s best-selling account of the battle won acclaim and its own awards.

“The scope of the [panel’s] review is limited to reviewing each [Wounded Knee Creek Medal of Honor] awardee’s individual actions during this specific engagement on or about Dec. 29, 1890,” Austin wrote in a memo made public this week. The panel “may consider the context of the overall engagement as appropriate, including as necessary to understand each … recipient’s individual actions.”

The now infamous battle saw the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry kill or wound over 350 members of the Lakota tribe, with about half of those killed being women and children. 25 U.S. soldiers also died in the incident, which was not planned as a massacre or even a confrontation.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is it fair to revoke a soldier’s medal of valor under these circumstances?

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