Long-form master Steve-O-in NJ is in top form with this Comment of the Day.
For an end of the ideological spectrum that so recently was slapped with the dead fish of condign justice in the election just completed, progressives sure are being slow to start trimming their hypocrisy and realigning their warped values.The same people who wanted to lock up a courageous rescuer who stopped, permanently, a dangerous and deranged homeless man who was endangering riders on a NYC subway are cheering on a murderous narcissist who shot a man in the back because he wants free health care and his back hurts. I continue to marvel at how our culture spawned such a large mass of confused people. I also continue to wonder how they can be cured.
Here is Steve-O’s Comment of the Day on the post about Elizabeth Warren, one of our most despicable Senators, rationalizing cold-blooded murder:
***
America has always been a nation where there has been tension between the Puritan, seeking to impose a particular morality, and the cowboy, who is all about rugged individualism, self-help, and doing it your way. America has also always been a nation where when the ballot box, the jury box, and the soapbox have failed, we don’t hesitate to turn to the cartridge box. It’s all well and good to talk about the ideals we stand for or write about them, but sometimes, as in 1776, there’s no choice but to pick up a gun and make them happen.
Luigi Mangione was not looking to make freedom happen. He wasn’t even striking back at a healthcare system that had denied a loved one needed treatment and that person had died. He was a rich kid from a rich family who got a severe back injury playing an extreme sport which was advertised as extreme, and medicine could not fix it for him. For whatever reason, he blamed the health insurance system, and targeted one of its leaders. This wasn’t about any kind of lofty ideal, this was a pure and simple revenge killing.
The fact of the matter is that there was really nothing here other than that. There are those in this country who glorify revenge and getting even, and it has become a part of our culture. If you go to the movies, you’re going to see a huge number of pictures that are all about someone being wronged and taking revenge personally on whoever did the wrong. There’s also the whole gangster culture of movies where they glorify organized crime figures who never forgive and never forget, but sometimes wait until the time is right. A big chunk of The godfather series is about Don Vito Corleone seeking revenge against the man who killed his father and forced his family to immigrate. It takes decades, and the building of a business empire, but it is all leading up to that moment when he faces Don Ciccio, who is receiving him as a guest, reveals who he really is, and carves him open like a roast.
We all admit to revenge ourselves, sometimes for stupid and petty things. It’s not for nothing that we say that what goes around comes around and that payback is frequently a bitch. We also all tell ourselves that we are not vengeful people or petty people and that if we do something to someone in retaliation that’s different because that person deserved it.
Heck, even CNN reported it (but not MSNBC). Crystal Mangum, the exotic dancer who in 2006 accused three Duke lacrosse players of rape launching an ethics train wreck that ended up costing the city of Durham damages, derailed the academic careers of the three students, got the lacrosse team coach fired, and resulted in a rare instance of a prosecutor being disbarred, finally admitted what everyone should have figured out by now.
“I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong. And I betrayed the trust of a lot of other people who believed in me,” Mangum announced on the podcast “Let’s Talk with Kat.” “I made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God.”
I’m probably not celebrating Christmas anywhere but on Ethics Alarms this year. Last Christmas was truly awful in every way, with my wife Grace in pain and suffering from some creeping malady that killed her in February and that I was too blind to detect (and so were her doctors). We were also in our worst financial crunch in 25 years of running our ethics business, my son was having personal problems, and all was definitely not happy and bright.
I am certainly conflicted about the holiday this year. I am a passionate Christmas booster, as long-time readers here know, because I regard the secular holiday as a vital social balm as well as an ethics catalyst. It is a unique holiday that calls on us to be kind, generous and forgiving, and, if possible (I’m trying!) to just be happy for life and its wonders. I am not religious, but I do believe that this is a profoundly ethical time of year. We all need Christmas, frankly. I need it, even though I dread every minute of it this year.
One of the special features of Christmas is that it is soaked with nostalgia and traditions along with bittersweet memories of people and events long past. Charles Dickens got this aspect of the holiday exactly right; it is why I love “A Christmas Carol” so much and have so often participated in public presentations of the story. My last professional directing gig was a staged reading of it, and that was the fourth time I have overseen one; I also have organized and directed three mass “radio” readings, using conference call technology and the sound effects wizardry of Keith Bell. (Where is Keith these days? See, there’s another memory knocking!).
With The American Century Theater, I co-wrote and presented two Christmas musical revues: “If Only In My Dreams,” which centered on the letters GIs wrote home at Christmastime during World War II, and “An American Century Christmas,” a salute to the old-fashioned TV Christmas specials and perennial Christmas movies like the three that have Ethics Alarms “guides’ here: “It’s A Wonderful Life,” which I posted at Thanksgiving, “White Christmas,” which will be updated and posted soon, and on Christmas Eve this year, “Miracle on 34th Street.” The first revue was more popular, but the second was my favorite, because it was generated entirely by my own warm memories of what Christmas was like for me and my sister growing up in Arlington, Massachusetts.
Both of our parents were Depression kids in poor families and their Christmases were spare at best, so both were determined to make the holiday magical for their children. And it was. We would decorate the tree carefully and lovingly a week before the 25th—I remember my mother insisting that each strand of genuine tin tinsel saved for years be placed individually on the branches—and go to bed after hanging our (huge) stockings with visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads. When we got up on Christmas morning, my parents had meticulous constructed a “Christmas panorama,” with the giant stockings stuffed with gadgets, oranges, walnuts and small packages lying by the fireplace, and the whole living room covered with presents, mine on the left of the living room, my sister’s on the right. The gifts were mostly unwrapped, and the vista was ever spectacular.
My father, a photography fanatic who was terrible at his hobby, had the old home movie projector spotlights blazing. He would record Edith and I coming down the stairs to see the amazing treasure left by Santa as mom looked on beaming and eager to see our reactions. My parents insisted on going through this ritual even after we were in college! My mother wouldn’t let the tradition go.
In 1963, the week before Christmas, Bing Crosby hosted “The Hollywood Palace,” a live variety show that was always headed by some entertainment legend, though Bing had the honor more than anyone else. That week he introduced a new Christmas song, the last popular Christmas song to have an unambiguous religious context. That was “Do You Hear What I Hear?,” and the video above was what I saw live. Something in the song immediately resonated with me; I was always a Bing Crosby fan, following the guidance of my father, but I loved everything about the new song despite its childlike simplicity. I said so immediately following Bing’s rendition. Sure enough, the song was playing on our old Magnavox stereo when my sister and I came down the stairs in our pajamas on Christmas morning.
“Do You Hear What I Hear?,” Bing’s version of course though there have been hundreds of covers, is the first Christmas song I play every year as soon as whiffs of holly, evergreens and mistletoe are in the air. It throws my mind back to those magical Christmases that Grace and I tried to recreate for our son every year while he was growing up. That magic was significantly dimmed when my father died, in his sleep, on my birthday in 2009, leading to the saddest Marshall Christmas. The spirit fell away a bit more the next year, when my mother, who never got over losing the love of her life after 58 years of marriage, was in the hospital fighting a voracious hospital infestion that killed her two months later. Christmas was never the same after Mom died: it was her joy and obsession. Still Christmas reminds me of her, and Dad, and that lost magic…and Bing.
I was pondering when and whether to put up a post about “Do You Here What I Hear?” this year when I checked out Ann Althouse’s blog and discovered that she had posted the video as a joke after her post about Jill Biden getting a laugh at her Christmas comments wishing the assembled “joy.” Apparently some took her choice of words as a sly swipe at Kamala Harris’s ill-fated “joy” theme.
In the comments to the post, some wags made jokes about how the shepherd boy tells the king to bring the “child shivering in the cold” silver and gold when what the baby needed was a blanket or a space heater. Yeah, good one: they made those jokes in 1963. Some jackass wrote, “If you listen to the lyrics, “Do You Hear What I Hear” ranks right up there with “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” for supposedly secular seasonal songs with aggressively creepy quasi-Christian imagery applied to Progressive pieties.”
Oh, bite me. The song was never intended to be “secular” and how it can be heard as “anti-Christian” is beyond me. And Bing: he was a devout Catholic, and one of the reasons Crosby became the voice of Christmas is that he sang Christmas music with such reverence and conviction. (The other reason was that he had that amazing, rich, expressive voice.).
It is especially perverse to impugn the lyrics of a Christmas song written by a man with the first name “Noël.” “Do You Hear What I Hear” was written in October of 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, by a married songwriting team that wondered at the time if it would be the last thing they ever did. Regney, the lyricist, was born in France and had studied music at the Strasbourg Conservatory and at the Conservatoire National de Paris. When France was overwhelmed by Hitler’s troops in 1940, he was conscripted into the German army. As a Nazi soldier, Noël secretly joined the French underground and served as a spy, passing information along to the resistance. Once he led German soldiers into a trap where they were massacred by French fighters who cut them down in a crossfire. Regney was shot too, but survived. He then deserted and worked with the French underground until the end of the war. Continue reading →
The New York Post reports that wanted posters targeting CEOs of insurance and other health care companies are appearing in Manhattan. Some say “HEALTH CARE CEOS SHOULD NOT FEEL SAFE” and include the words “DENY,” “DEFEND,” and “DEPOSE,” which are the same words that the cute assassin who shot UnitedHealthcare’s CEO wrote on his bullets. The posters also feature each executive’s salary, and some have appeared with the photos of CEOs of non-health care companies, like Goldman Sachs. ABC reports some posters say “UnitedHealthcare killed everyday people for the sake of profit. As a result Brian Thompson was denied his claim to life. Who will be denied next?”
2023 Georgetown Law School grad Jinan Chehade had been offered a job as an associate at the prominent law firm Foley & Lardner. The firm’s Director of Diversity and Inclusion told her they “valued and supported” her Arab Muslim heritage, and she took that to mean, “Go ahead and publicly support Hamas,murder,rape and hostage-taking, and it’s fine if you also proclaim your hatred of Jews and your inability to interpret world history too.
Chehade worked as a summer clerk at Foley in 2023 and was slated to join the firm as a full-time associate at its Chicago office two months ago. But following last year’s October 7th terrorist attacks attacks on Israel by Hamas, she began speaking out against Israel on her social media accounts and at a public Chicago City Hall meeting. Chehade appeared at the meeting wrapped in a keffiyeh and spoke out against a resolution condemning the Hamas massacre that started the current Gazan war. Though “the Western Zionist-controlled media machine would have you believe” it was an unprovoked attack, she said, the attack was just because it was the “legal right” of Palestinians to strike back for “75 years of occupation” by Israel’s “apartheid regime.”
The New York Times Sunday advice column “The Ethicist” has been indulging itself by joining in the mass Times mourning over the election of Donald Trump and the failure of the paper’s years long propaganda campaign against him. The past four featured questions have been “Is It Fair to Judge a Friend by the Way She Voted?”, “Can Voters Be Held Accountable for Their Candidate’s Behavior?”, “Am I a Hypocrite for Calling Donald Trump a Liar?”, and my personal favorite, “My Mom Voted for Trump. Can We Let It Go?” It has taken a month to get back to genuine ethics dilemmas and conflicts, but at last Prof. Appiah is where he is supposed to be all the time.
1. Should alcoholics who have destroyed their livers be eligible for liver transplants?
2. Is the recipient of a liver transplant behaving unethically if he or she returns to the same lifestyle that ruined the first one?
3. Do the friends of the now boozing liver transplant recipient “have an obligation to tell this man’s wife that he’s still drinking?”
The first one came up for debate nationwide when Mickey Mantle, the hard-drinking baseball great, strangely came up at the top of a liver transplant list despite being predominantly responsible for his first liver’s demise. Organ transplant waiting lists are created using several formulas and weighted values, which makes sense when distributing rare commodities. On the other hand, this is a slippery slope that slides directly into punishing people for not exercising enough, eating too much pizza, smoking or favoring dangerous hobbies, like motorcycle racing, and withholding medical care or insurance coverage of the adverse results. Alcoholism, as I learned the hard way, is not volitional though alcohol abuse is, and good luck telling the two apart.
2. The second question is also squarely in an ethics gray area. Once the liver is in an individual’s body, he or she should have complete autonomy. Sure, it’s irresponsible for someone with obligations to others to take unnecessary risks with his or her life, but that’s true with or without a new liver. I can’t define a special obligation to those who did not receive a particular liver that should affect the recipient’s decisions going forward. What happens to the new liver won’t help or harm those who didn’t get it.
3. The third question is the easy one, and Golden Rule 101. Would you want to be told if your loved one was secretly endangering his or her health? Sure you would. However, if the wife in this case has been paying attention to her alcoholic husband, I doubt very much that anyone needs to tell her that he’s drinking again.
“Violence is never the answer. This guy gets a trial who’s allegedly killed the CEO of UnitedHealth. But you can only push people so far. And then they start to take matters into their own hands.”
—Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) rationalizing the actions of a cowardly assassin who who shot an innocent man in the back.
One minor benefit of the vicious, calculated and certifiably insane execution-style murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is that it proved a catalyst for self-unmasking by so many unethical socialists and crypto-communists on the Left. Many of these same people were wishing death on Donald Trump earlier this year, or describing him in ways calculated to motivate slightly more deranged people to kill him…and several tried.
Warren represents a very sick strain running through Woke World: people who wanted to see hero Daniel Penny convicted of murder for stopping a dangerous madman whom their policies had loosed on the public have been cheering for Luigi Mangione. This is how much they want a socialized healthcare system so we have to wait months to have a needed operation: they are willing to see insurance executives murdered to make their point.
President Trump says he will pardon the January 6 rioters. President Biden just pardoned his son for crimes we may not even know about yet. “The Nation”—yes, the far Left crypto-Commie rag is nuts, but still—argued this week that Biden should issue a blanket pardon to all illegal immigrants.
Quotes by his guy, a defrocked Methodist pastor known for his social and political activism and “writings from a liberal Christian perspective,” (I’m quoting Wikipedia there) always start popping up on social media this time of year. He’s been quoted a lot on Facebook especially lately because he is a vocal advocate of the idiotic “Mary and Joseph were immigrants too” analogy used by nice, deluded people to justify open borders and illegal immigrants.
These memes are notable because their emotion-based, legally and ethically bonkers argument is even more absurd than the one that claims the U.S. should let everybody in because the Statue of Liberty says so. I think I banned a commenter this year for using that one, invoking the Ethics Alarms “Stupidity Rule.” I will do the same if someone makes the “we should let illegals in because all they want is better lives for their children just like Mary and Joseph” argument. The same logic justifies theft. This is how shoplifting became legal in California.
Pavolovitz, who has about 374,000 followers on Twitter/X, every one of them dumber than when they first encountered him, was at it again this holiday season, posting after the election last month, “It’s good the Christians excited about the mass deportation of immigrants weren’t in Egypt when Jesus’s family fled there, or we’d have a much shorter Bible.”
It’s unethical to use one’s influence and reputation to make people ignorant and stupid: that fatuous statement (and his many like it) marks Pavolovitz as an Ethics Corrupter. I’m assuming readers here don’t have to have explained to them the reasons why analogies between public policies today in the United States and those in the Middle East 2,000 years ago are completely invalid and useless.
When one X-user pointed out to Pavolovitz that his argument was flawed, this modern follower of Jesus replied, “You’re a Trump lapdog. Your opinion of me is irrelevant. Shove it.”
To be fair, that last part is a rough translation of what Jesus said to the Romans…
Ethics Alarms 