Robert DeNiro’s political rants about Donald Trump are crude, ad hominem attacks and a poor reflection on his character and intelligence, as I have noted more than once, most recently here. It doesn’t matter, however, how much of a jerk DeNiro is and how deluded he may be about the worth of his partisan opinions, at least as far as the legitimate plaudits he has earned for his acting (I don’t especially enjoy him as an actor, but I appreciate his talent and craft from a technical perspective) or other aspects of his life.
Interestingly, the major American historical landmarks mentioned on This Day in History are mostly cultural touch points (though Benecict Arnold was court-martialed on this date in 1779.) Marilyn Monroe was born in 1926—is she a fading icon, or is she permanently in that rare category, like Shirley Temple, John Wayne, Elvis, and Charlie Chaplin? CNN began: I actually remember what a big deal was made in 1980 about Ted Turner breaking through the network news monopoly with the world’s first 24-hour television news network. Talk about unintended consequences and shattered promise! Not only has CNN fallen into ruin, it also heralded the slow rot of broadcast news into voracious entertainment seeking ratings and audience approval rather than, you know, facts and that ethical journalism thingy. Then there was the release of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the first Beatles album I ever owned and one that was and still ranks as the biggest rock or pop phenomenon ever. I was moved to buy it in part because I was fascinated by the history and pop culture trivia test on the famous cover. Boy, if that stuff was trivia in 1967, it’s super-trivia now. It took a lot to get my attention in Boston in the summer of 1967, My Favorite Year, because the Red Sox were in a pennant race for the first time in my life. I still remember hearing “A Day in the Life” playing for the first time on my parents’ old Magnavox stereo with volume turned up. That amazing song sounds just as fresh and surprising every time I hear it, most recently three days ago on the Siruis/XM Beatles Channel.
1. Trump guilty verdict update: It’s still too early to determine what the full effect of Alvin Bragg’s momentarily successful “Get Trump!” plot will be on the election: all we have now, mostly, is theories and opinions. We do know that it will certainly intensify the support of those who were already all-in for the Once and Future (maybe) President; we know that the verdict triggered a fund-raising bonanza for him; the rest is unclear. Esteemed EA commenter Michael West wrote yesterday, “This election is not about Biden and Trump anymore – it’s about the fundamental social fabric of the nation as espoused by the “civic religion” centered on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – a civic religion that has served us well. How you vote tells us, now, less about what policies you wish to advance and more about whether or not you want the American experiment in ordered liberty to continue. A vote for Biden or any democrat tells me absolutely everything about you that you *do not care at all* about the republic which has blessed us directly and BILLIONS more indirectly with increased freedom, tolerance, security and commerce. A vote for Trump is the *ethical duty* of anyone who wants to poke the eye of totalitarian Behemoth that is the DNC as a demonstration of belief in our system and its reparability.”
Major League Baseball’s absurd and self-wounding decision to lump all of the old Negro League season and career statistics in with those of its own players is impossible to defend logically or ethically. Ethics Alarms discussed this debacle of racial pandering here, three days ago. What is interesting—Interesting? Perhaps disturbing would be a better word—is how few baseball experts, statisticians, historians, players and fans are defending this indefensible decision or criticizing it. As to the latter, they simply don’t have the guts; they are terrified of being called racists. Regarding the former, there is really no good argument to be made. MLB’s groveling and pandering should call for baseball’s version of a welter of “It’s OK to be white” banners and signs at the games. Instead, both the sport and society itself is treating this “it isn’t what it is” classic like a particularly odoriferous fart in an elevator. Apparently it’s impolite to call attention to it.
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) June 1, 2024
On the Josephson Institute’s Pillars of Character, one of the values comprising the fourth pillar, Fairness, is proportionality. Proportionality is essential to perspective, and understanding te need to maintain a broad perspective is essential to fairness, a core ethical value.
When I first started watching that video meme above, my immediate reaction was, “Oh, please. This is ridiculous. Then I saw the pay-off, and laughed out loud. I would have laughed just as hardily if the two men had been reversed.
Being unable to appreciate good-natured, puckish satire when it is aimed at your favorite politician, party, elected official, organization is a sign of a closed mind and an absence of proportionality and perspective. That video makes both candidates look silly, and that’s just fine.
If you can’t see the humor, I feel sorry for you. And I fear you. You have lost all perspective, and that leads to fanaticism.
Just think: these are the people who run the high-priced institutions that are supposed to teach our rising generations critical thinking, logic and life skills.
Would you let this happen?
The University of California at Santa Cruz hired Amanda Reiterman to teach two 120-student lecture classes on classical texts and Greek history. Reiterman who holds a Ph.D. and has taught as a part-time lecturer at the university since 2020, was paid to design the course, do the lectures, and plan the discussion sessions. She recommended a former student of hers who had just earned her bachelor’s degree to be hired as her teaching assistant. Administrators began the hiring process and copied Reiterman…causing her to discover that thanks to a 2022 strike settlement after 48,000 graduate students, postdocs, and researchers in the University of California system walked off thee job to win pay increases and expanded benefits, many teaching assistants are earning more than lecturers, and in some cases, like this one, more than their supervisors and the instructors in their own classes. When Reiterman learned that her teaching assistant would earn $3,236 per month, $300 more than her own monthly pay, she quit. It was not about the money, she told the Chronicle of Higher Education, but the principle. “I felt like I could not teach a class under those circumstances.” Reiterman dropped out as instructor for one class and arranged to teach another class in a different department with fewer students and no teaching assistant.
Brava! No weenie she.
Why did no ethics alarms ring for these administrators? I suspect that when your entire sense of fairness and equity is being mangled and distorted by compensatory benefit theories and DEI cant, little matters like paying a subordinate more than a supervisor with far more experience and credentials just doesn’t resonate the way it once would have, before The Great Stupid spread its dark bat-wings across the horizon, blotting out the sun.
Decades ago, running a foundation where my supervisor negotiated salaries after I decided on who to hire, my first male staff member extracted a higher salary than his equivalent female member on my staff, who had been there longer. I immediately pointed this out to my boss, who agreed to raise the salaries of the women on the staff to the same level. I didn’t even have to argue with him: he knew immediately that it was the only just course.
It’s so disheartening. One has to fight, working in my field, not to conclude, “Not only is a majority of the public cripplingly stupid, ignorant and ethically obtuse, a frightening percentage of those who run our private and public organizations and institutions are also stupid, ignorant and ethically obtuse.” That way despair and madness lies.
I’ve been getting a lot of inquiries about the verdict in the falsely dubbed “hush-money trial” that came down with unseemly speed yesterday. As with other high profile trials where I have not been on the jury or in the courtroom, I don’t have a legitimate basis for much ethical analysis of the trial itself, including the competence of the attorneys or the judge. The Kyle Rittenhouse prosecution was an exception, because of the blatant prosecutorial misconduct in that case that was evident from direct quotes (and the defense’s ethics were dodgy as well).
The position that it was unethical to bring this case to trial as a form of what has been dubbed “lawfare” by critics is already locked in for me, and that is the most important feature of the case. As to the substance of the charges, the absurd number of counts in the indictment were obvious over-charging, an unethical prosecution trick but one that isn’t ever punished. The fact that Michael Cohen was the “star” witness against Trump should have, in my view, made the prosecution’s case insufficient to sustain a conviction on its face. Maybe others in historically significant criminal trials have been convicted “beyond a reasonable doubt” based on the testimony of such a throbbing habitual liar—the Lincoln assassination conspirators and Sir Thomas More come to mind—-but the former was a pro forma military tribunal affair where the defendants’ rights were severely restricted and there was never any chance that they would not be convicted, and the latter took place in England under the direction of a vengeful despot.
The fact that the verdict came down so quickly in what was a very strange and complicated case—with judge’s instructions to the jury that would take me a couple of days to read and understand—strongly suggests a jury that had made up its mind already. I believe that it was wrong not to sequester the jury: I did see a lot of the broadcast media coverage, and it was generally disgusting. The ugly cheerleading for a conviction on all the channels except Fox News, which sounded like an arm of the defense team, couldn’t help but bias the jury.
Oh, this is too good. If the Ethics God is responsible for this, she’s a genius.
You know that supposed “Stop the Steal”-connected flag that the Alito vacation home had flying over it briefly last summer? The flag that “proved” that the conservative Justice was either a serial mad flag-flyer who had engaged in “the appearance of impropriety” by showing his sympathies for the January 6 Capitol rioters twice, previously with an upside-down U.S. flag, or had wrongly “permitted” his wife to express such sentiments via flag twice, the first time almost four years ago? That flag?
That flag, the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, has been displayed along with other historic U.S. flags outside San Francisco’s City Hall for more than half a century. Along with 17 other flags representing different moments in American history, the flag favored by Mrs. Alito (of course the flag conspiracy purveyors are certain that the Supreme Court Justice is lying and that he is the real culprit, just because) appears in the Pavilion of American Flags in Civic Center Plaza.
The claim that Donald Trump is a racist is one of the most popular of the Big Lies used against him for decades, while the overwhelming evidence is that he treats people of all races equally badly. The “he’s going to do X” is one of my most detested methods of attacking anyone, and it’s a favorite of Biden’s (Mitt Romney was going to put blacks “back in chains,” according to Joe, if you recall). The “Trump’s going to say X” trope is even more revolting, but does anyone seriously doubt that Trump wouldn’t be as supportive of black pro-Trump rioting morons as he would white ones? You never know what Trump will do or say, but I’ll confidently wager that he would be making even a bigger deal over his support for the rioters if they were black. Of course he’d be talking about pardons. If you’re going to engage in gratuitous race-baiting, you can at least make sense.
That statement by Biden opens the door to literally any campaign cheap shots and low blows now. Biden supporters are ethically estopped from complaining if Trump, to offer a hypothetical, suggests that Biden is secretly lusting after his daughter based on her diary entries. Biden has given the green light to any slander, any libel, any lie and any kind of character assassination no matter how unfair or vile.
To say he’s in a glass house is a severe understatement.
I really, literally, couldn’t care less what the Episcopal Church does, or any church, really, as long as it isn’t enabling crimes, abusing its influence or actively making its followers stupid. But…seriously, Episcopals?
In affirmation and celebration of The Episcopal Church’s LGBTQ+ members, the Office of Communication is pleased to unveil a new Pride shieldavailable onlinefor churchwide use. The design retains the upper-left blue corner of The Episcopal Church’s shield logo and incorporates elements of the traditional Pride flag as well as the Progress Pride flag and Philadelphia Pride flag. In their use of black, brown, pink, and light-blue diagonal lines, thelatter two flagsrepresent intersectional progress in acknowledging people who are often overlooked by the mainstream LGBTQ+ movement: communities of color; the transgender community; and the many thousands harmed by anti-LGBTQ+ policy—from those who lost their lives in the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ‘90s, to those still disproportionately impacted today…Forhalf a century, Episcopalians have been working toward a greater understanding and radical inclusion of all God’s children. …In June 2023, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry issued avideo messageof encouragement to “all of my LGBTQ+ family members,” noting, “I believe deep in my soul that God is always seeking to create a world and a society where all are loved, where justice is done, and where the God-given equality of us all is honored in our relationships, in our social arrangements, and in law.” Last month, the church announced the hire of its first gender justice staff officer, a new position called for by the 80th General Convention and dedicated to justice, advocacy, and inclusion work focused on women and LGBTQ+ people.
“In the United States, the bodily autonomy of women and trans people is under attack, and fully 50% of LGBTQ+ Americans live in poverty,” said Aaron Scott, gender justice staff officer. “I am grateful for the care and intention that went into designing this new Pride shield as it not only represents the LGBTQ+ community more fully, but also lifts those who, out of sheer necessity of survival and dignity, have fought the hardest and sacrificed the most for the thriving of all of us.”
Discuss. I don’t even know how to phrase an ethics quiz in response to this.
Ethics Alarms 