Apt Analogy of the Month: Jaguar’s Suicidal Ad=Kamala Harris’s Campaign

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Ann Althouse gets the pointer for finding this: Giles Coren of the London Times wrote in “I take Jaguar’s woeful woke rebrand personally/From heritage British cars to classroom lessons, there’s always one demographic under attack — the middle classes” …

“And Jaguar’s answer to the crapness of a car they can no longer persuade middle-aged, middle-class, professional family men to buy? Improve the car? Persuade the men? Or, wait, try to sell it instead to anorexic, teenage, intersex manga fans of colour, because they might just be stupid enough to fall for it? Except the ad’s not for them, is it? Like most adverts now, this is a story of rich white heterosexuals selling stuff to other rich white heterosexuals, using images of multi-ethnic, pansexual, differently abled humans in order to appear progressive, without actually doing or changing anything…. The ads stand for NOTHING…. They are born of a contempt for the middle of society, which is conceived at the top with the imagined complicity of the bottom. It’s pure Kamala Harris. It’s ‘joy.’ It is the sort of thing that got Trump elected: a small number of ivory tower wokeists alienating the middle class and pushing nice people further and further to the right.”

Bingo! What a perfect analogy: they should show the Jaguar silliness on talking head shows every time a progressive propagandist says Trump won because of sexism and racism, or because the voters are stupid. Would anyone smart buy a Jaguar based on that ad? (EA posted on it last week.)

Meanwhile, the meme-makers and parodists have been having a ball mocking the thing, while Jaguar’s managing director, Rawdon Glover, has described criticism of its incompetent marketing campaign as “vile hatred and intolerance,” saying that its message has been lost in “a blaze of intolerance.” Sounds exactly like Rob Reiner, The View, and all of my bitter Facebook friends, doesn’t he? Jaguar is a corporate hypocrite as well: it has been pointed out that most obvious transsexual model in the ad was cut out of the version showing in the Middle East.

For your early Sunday viewing pleasure, here are a couple of the parodies I could embed. (There’s another one where a rampaging jaguar attacks the models.) But the real ad is funnier than any parody, especially when one considers that its makers thought it would sell luxury cars.

Stop Making Me Defend Katy Perry!

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Pop singing star Katy Perry has one of the longer and less complimentary Ethics Alarms dossiers among overly-influential celebrity types. Let’s see: her last appearance was as an Ethics Dunce in 2023, when she freaked out on “American Idol” over the fact that a contestant had survived a school shooting. Katy screamed, “This is not OK!,” announced that the country had “fucking failed us” and that she was “scared too.” I wrote, in part,

“That’s fine, Katy. Now go along with these nice men in the white coats, and they will help you. This is just the latest example of how celebrities degrade both the level of civic discourse on important issues and the intellectual abilities of anyone foolish enough to take them seriously. I’m pretty sure that no one, literally no one, believes that mass shootings anywhere, not just in schools, are “OK;” Perry was seeking virtue-signaling points for stating the screamingly obvious. Moreover, I am 100% certain that Perry doesn’t have the tiniest clue about how the U.S. has “fucking failed us” because of this school shooting or any schools shooting. What do you want, Katy? Martial law? No Bill of Rights? Everyone stuck going to school via Zoom forever? And if Katy Perry is ‘scared too,’ she should hire better bodyguards.”

Now Katy is being attacked from the conservative side because of a trademark dispute she won in Australia. The Daily Caller wrote in an editorial that Perry had “successfully bullied a woman in court and won, marking another unfair victory by a pretentious celebrity.” The story: An Australian woman named Katie Perry launched a fashion label using her name. Katy Perry’s real name is Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson, which the Daily Caller seem to think is significant. (It isn’t.) Perry also had a trademark for clothes using Katy Perry, and sued Katie for trademark infringement, not for, as Katie describes it, using her own birth name for her brand. Katie beat Katy in the initial round, but Katy filed an appeal and won. “Now the designer has lost everything she worked so hard to build,” sobs Tucker Carlson’s news and commentary site. “This is everything that’s wrong with Hollywood.”

No, this is everything wrong with conservative media. “An innocent person can no longer operate her long-time business with her own legal name. Fake Katy Perry for the win — seriously?” says the Caller.

Ugh. The Daily Caller chose to leave out some rather important details, I’m guessing because it’s open season on show biz celebrities now that Donald Trump’s win has them seeking exile, BlueSky, or rest homes. Among the relevant facts absent from the editorial:

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“Clayton Lockett Is Dead, Right? Then 1) Good! and 2) His Execution Wasn’t ‘Botched'”: The Sequel

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Demonstrators in Washington rally against the death penalty outside the Supreme Court building Oct. 13, 2021. (CNS photo/Jonathan Ernst, Reuters)

Following this introduction is an EA post from ten years ago about a “botched” execution. The issue has come around again: The always woke online tabloid The Guardian is caterwauling over another messy execution, this time in Alabama. “The only lesson from this grim sequence of events is that when states use human beings as guinea pigs for lethal experiments, they are bound to suffer, whether at the point of a needle or behind a mask,” Matt Wells, deputy director of the human rights group Reprieve US, is quoted as saying. OK, they suffer. I have no sympathy for them. Killing human beings is hard, and murderers like Clayton Lockett and Carey Dale Grayson are at fault for making society kill them. There are ways of killing the condemned that involve no suffering at all, and I don’t know what we don’t make use of them except that they are a bit spectacular. In India, they used to execute people by training an elephant to step on their heads and smash them like a grape. I don’t understand why states have to be fooling around with methods as baroque as nitrogen poisoning.

The Guardian also includes the obligatory anti-capital punishment statement from the daughter of the victim. “Murdering inmates under the guise of justice needs to stop,” Jodi Haley, who was 12 when her mother was killed, told reporters. “No one should have the right to take a person’s possibilities, days, and life.” Well, Jodi, you have been indoctrinated to your disadvantage and society’s best interests. Nobody has the right to make me pay to keep them alive when they have violated the conditions of the social compact, and when allowing them to live devalues the lives of others while requiring lesser punishments for other terrible crimes.

I was going to reprint the post below substituting Grayson for Lockett, but that isn’t necessary. Everything below applies to the Alabama execution as well.

____________________

Capital punishment foes have no shame, and (I know I am a broken record on this, and it cheers me no more than it pleases you), the knee-jerk journalists who have been squarely in their camp for decades refuse to illuminate their constant hypocrisy. In Connecticut, for example, holding that putting to death the monstrous perpetrators of the Petit home invasion was “immoral,” anti-death penalty advocates argued that the extended time it took to handle appeals made the death penalty more expensive than life imprisonment—an added expense for which the advocates themselves are accountable.

A similar dynamic is at work in the aftermath of the execution of convicted murderer and rapist Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma.Witnesses to his execution by lethal injection said Lockett convulsed and writhed on the gurney, sat up and started to speak before officials blocked the witnesses’ view by pulling a curtain. Apparently his vein “blew,” and instead of killing him efficiently,  the new, three-drug “cocktail” arrived at as the means of execution in Oklahoma after extensive study and litigation failed to work as advertised.  Why was there an excessively complex system involving multiple drugs used in this execution? It was the result of cumulative efforts by anti-death penalty zealots to make sure the process was above all, “humane.” Of course, the more complicated a process is, the more moving parts it has, the more likely it is to fail.

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Critics Say Trump Is Only Appointing Those Who Are Reliably Loyal To Him. Damn Right, and Here’s Why…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Representative Barry Loudermilk  chairs the Committee on House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight, and released a report this week showing that the Department of Defense Inspector General was part of a coverup of the Department of Defense’s intentional choice to delay the deployment of the D.C. National Guard to the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The DOD IG concealed the extent and cause of the delay in order to protect Department of Defense and Pentagon leadership, the report found, and did not candidly evaluate the actions of senior officials including Secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy, who failed to relay deployment orders to Major General William Walker, the Commander of the DC National Guard on January 6.

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Ethics Quiz: MSNBC

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Above is the initial headline MSNBC put up this week regarding Jose Ibarra, the illegal alien found guilty of murdering 22-year-old Laken Riley. It’s pretty amazing, even for MSNBC.

Riley was the George nursing student murdered and raped in February by the member of the notorious Venezualan gang, Tren de Aragua. Iberra was illegally in the U.S. but the insane Democratic policies pandering to illegals had seemed to have worked in concert to keep him here so he could inflict maximum  carnage.

He attacked his victim while she was running on a trail at the University of Georgia campus in Athens, and the murder immediately crystalized public outrage over the Biden administration’s handling of illegal border crossings. It should have: it was a perfect tipping point for a long-running national debate that shouldn’t be a debate. While lawmakers in Georgia quickly passed  tougher rules on immigration after the killing and Trump’s supporters used the tragedy to highlight his signature issue, Democrats and the progressive extremists on MSNBC rushed to issue excuses and rationalizations to insist that illegal immigrants are mostly the salt of earth, my least favorite theme being the idiotic and deceitful argument that immigrants commit fewer crimes in proportion to their numbers than American citizens.

[Arrgh. 1. The data is misleading. 2. The issue is illegal immigrants, which the Left continues to describe as just “immigrants” so it can accuse conservatives of opposing all immigration. 3. All crimes committed by illegal immigrants should not have been committed at all and are the result of progressive open border madness and its fatuous accompanying appeal to emotion, “These are just human beings trying to have a better life for themselves and their families.” I’m sorry I mentioned this. The “fewer crimes” cheat makes me furious. I apologize for the tangent. ]

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More on BlueSky: It’s an Unethical Social Media Platform

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Just two days ago Ethics Alarms featured a somewhat sarcastic post “thanking” BlueSky for “provid[ing] a wonderful way for the intolerant, doctrinaire, anti-speech progressives who have divided the country and the culture while endangering civic discourse and democracy to show exactly who and what they are.”

But seriously folks, the new Twitter/X competitor, like so many things embraced by the Angry Totalitarian Left in recent years, is another shot to the solar plexus of a functioning democracy.

Kevin Roose , the technology columnist for The New York Times and a co-host of the Times tech podcast, “Hard Fork” illustrates why the platform is so sinister while praising it in a Times column. “You may be wondering why Bluesky — an experimental social media app that was started in 2019 under Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s former chief executive, before becoming an independent company in 2021 — is attracting so much attention these days,” he writes.

No I don’t wonder at all: it’s clear as a bell on my nose. My Trump Deranged Facebook Friends have made the reasons they are fleeing to BlueSky explicit. They don’t want to be exposed to any opinions, news or events that challenge their biases and partisan assumptions. They regard anyone who doesn’t bow down to progressive cant, even as it is proving intellectually and practically bankrupt by the minute, as stupid, immoral and a blight on existence. BlueSky is the web equivalent of joining a cult or a commune.

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Rationalization #19B, ‘The Insidious Confession,” or “It Wasn’t the Best Choice” Is Officially Re-Named: “The Bus Driver’s Mitigation.” Here’s Why…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Talk about a parent’s worst nightmare…

In Castle Rock, Colorado, a relief school bus driver got rattled and confused when the kids wouldn’t quiet down and the tablet showing his route broke down. His solution was to drop all the students off at an unscheduled stop miles from their homes. More than 40 students were abandoned at a busy intersection, and the bus drove away.

Parents were not pleased.

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Ethics Dunces: 17 Democratic Senators

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

To be specific: Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Tim Kaine (D-VA), Angus King (I-ME), Ed Markey (D-MA), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Brian Schatz (D-HI), Tina Smith (D-MN), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Peter Welch (D-VT), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM), Rafael Warnock (D-GA) and Chris Murphy (D-CT).

Yikes, what a rogues gallery! This unethical group voted for three resolutions submitted by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) seeking to block transfers of crucial weaponry to Israel. Their logic is the same as the Hamas-supporting student protestor who harassed Jewish students on campuses across the country, as well as the anti-Semites who dominate the United Nations. let’s listen to the career-long ethics dunce, Senator Durbin. “This war must end,” Durbin said in a statement after the vote. “Israel’s strategy of deadly attacks on and near civilian populations must end as well. The United States should not be sending arms and ammunition that continue to take the lives of innocent people. It is time for real humanitarian aid to reach the Palestinian people. I will stand by Israel, but I will not support the devastation of Gaza and the deaths of thousands of innocent Palestinians.”

Palestinians are no more innocent of the terrorist attacks against Israel than the citizens of Germany and Japan were of the war-mongering of their governments. The war being fought by Israel “must end” when that nation is no longer a target for genocide by Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. It is astounding that the same party whose President is risking World War III by escalating the Ukrainian conflict is pressuring a loyal ally and a true democracy (the Ukrainian government is still a somewhat shaky republic) to forgo a just and necessary war in the interest of its survival.

No Republicans voted for the resolutions, and even the Biden White House, like a stopped clock, was right this time: “Disapproving arms purchases for Israel at this moment would … put wind in the sails of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas at the worst possible moment,” it told the Democratic Senate contingent.

Trans-Mania Loses Disney But Gains…Jaguar?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

What’s going on here?

A couple of things, I think. The two ethics issues are trustworthiness and competence.

Apparently Jaguar has decided that it is within the mission of a car manufacturer to promote transsexuals and other forms of dubious sexuality. Or maybe clowns, based on the characters above that inhabit the company’s very strange ad. Have you seen it? No?

Here you go….

That’s right, no mention of driving, cars, or anything related to transportation. This is a cognitive dissonance scale maneuver for someone seeking a ridiculously narrow market. The ad says “being sexually ambiguous is cool.” Is it? I don’t think so; I think being sexually ambiguous is a problem. Like many minorities with problems, I understand the urge to insist that the problem is really an advantage and a badge of honor, something to take pride in, but why is Jaguar making that argument at the expense of promoting their product?

The ad is propaganda tinged with virtue-signalling for those who think extreme advocacy for marginal sexual identities is virtuous. I don’t regard it as virtuous. I regard this ad as a company abusing its influence by presuming to indoctrinate the public to achieve an interest group’s agenda. Meanwhile, the ad is incompetent advertising, since it doesn’t promote the product the company is supposed to be selling.

At least when Bud Light decided to promote transsexuals while marketing beer, the beer was somewhere in evidence. For all we know after watching that Jaguar ad, the new Jaguar looks like a Stanley Steamer.

And the Great Stupid is still rolling on…

Post-Election Pre-Holiday Madness Friday Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

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:

Ugh. Please do better…