Ethics Quiz: Personal Assistant Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I almost called this, “Stop Making Me Defend Robert De Niro!’

De Niro proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he’s a toxic, narcissistic asshole when he was going around the country shouting “Fuck Trump” at various Trump Derangement gatherings. He’s a great actor, but at 80 he’s now in that difficult period of decline when he should be retired but can’t resist the paychecks or the sudden lack of public attention.

De Niro’s ex-personal assistant Graham Chase Robinson is suing him for discrimination, and the trial is not showing the actor in a very favorable light. As her various allegations were presented to him on the stand—-asking her to scratch his back, giving her degrading tasks, making unreasonable demands (like asking Robinson to “Uber him” a martini from a favorite bar at 11 p.m.), not respecting her personal time (he called her twice while she was at her grandmother’s funeral telling her to buy a bus ticket for his son), and being abusive (he called her a “fucking spoiled brat”), De Niro’s response was always some version of, “Big deal. So what?”

De Niro paid his personal assistant $300,000 a year.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is it unethical for someone to pay an assistant to accept abuse and disrespectful treatment?

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Comment Of The Day: “The Unalterable Ethics Alarms Position: …Destroying [Lee’s] Statues Is Unethical And Foolish

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Here is Chris Marschner’s macro-analysis of the forces leading to Robert E. Lee’s head being melted down. Read it: his Comment of the Day connects dots you may not have considered, as he reacts to the post, “The Unalterable Ethics Alarms Position: Robert E. Lee Was A Complex And Important American Who Deserves Public Recognition, And Destroying His Statues Is Unethical And Foolish”:

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I believe this mentality is why so many want to do away with the electoral college and rely on majoritarian rule.

These people have no understanding that the United States is comprised of 50 sovereign states that have joined together as a group for the benefit of all members in that group.

Had majoritarian rule been the case from the country’s inception there might have been no civil war and blacks would still be treated as 2nd class citizens. The whole concept of America as a melting pot might be reserved only to the degree that Europeans would be allowed entrance Our republic preserves minority rights that majoritarian rule will not.

Majoritarian rule creates the impetus for factionalized insurgencies to emerge against the rule makers. Which is why the Middle East is always fighting among themselves for centuries. Every faction wants autonomy to set rules for themselves and others.

Far too many of our citizens have such limited understanding of our history because they are taught to analyze events by hearing talking points and sound bites.

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Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck Update: Look ! Here’s A University Whose Reaction To Campus Anti-Semitism Is Even Worse Than Harvard’s

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

If you had “University of Wisconsin” on your train wreck bingo card—and why wouldn’t you?—collect your prize. The Nazis claimed that Jews were exaggerating about Kristallnacht too.

Dana Loesch reported that “pro-Hamas protesters staged aggressive demonstrations outside of the Hillel at the University of Wisconsin-Madison which caused Jewish students to fear for their safety.” She pointed out how this is part of the disturbing (and George Floyd Freak-out assisted—this is my analysis, not Dana’s) trend across the country: “Jewish students are being targeted: they’ve been barricaded into libraries, targeted on campus, are battling antisemitism, and feel unsafe.”

So how has the University of Wisconsin, long one of the most enthusiastic indoctrination centers of extreme wokism (which has somehow pointed its students toward applauding terrorism against Israel), responded to its Jewish students feeling like outcasts and targets on their own campus? Astoundingly, the message is “Oh, come on! It’s not as bad as all that!” Look:

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The Great Stupid, Halloween Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Trick-or-treaters over 14 in Chesapeake, Virginia can be charged with a misdemeanor. Norfolk, Suffolk, Portsmouth, and Virginia Beach nearby bar kids over 12 from trick-or-treating. Rayne, Louisiana, and Jacksonville, Illinois, also ban teenage trick-or-treaters. An ordinance in Belleville, Illinois, slaps insufficiently immature door bell-ringers with a $1,000 fine.

Morons. The same communities don’t punish juvenile adults who have spoiled the kids holiday by expropriating it. The theory these silly places have adopted is, we are told, that they are trying to reduce teenage crime. I believe there are already laws against teenage crime. Most of the same elected officials who are pushing these laws also wanted to force teens to wear masks not too long ago.

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Ethics Dunce: The North American Grappling Association (And All The Sports Organizations Like It)

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

After several female martial artists withdrew from competitions in fear of being injured by much stronger transgender fighters, The North American Grappling Association (NAGA) has overhauled its rules to prevent such unfair and dangerous contests.

It was the right thing to do, you say? Yeah, it was the right thing to do many months ago. What were they waiting for? This is a sport in which physical strength is obviously a major factor, and the advantage of going through puberty as a male is obviously going to be a factor. Natural-born female competitors shouldn’t have ever been placed in the position of having to choose between dropping out and risking getting crushed by recently-minted female with testosterone aided skeletal structure and muscles.

NAGA isn’t an Ethics Dunce because it decided to protect the integrity of the sport and the safety of its female fighters, it’s an Ethics Dunce because it was too cowardly, negligent, irresponsible and incompetent to do it the second the possibility raised its hairy head, stubbly head that a converted male might enter their competitions under their rules. NAGA didn’t take action because they wished and hoped that they could duck the issue without LGBTQ+ activists and social media mobs coming after them. Maybe, these despicable weenies thought, everyone would get along. Maybe women with their original lady parts wouldn’t object.

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Never Mind “Are American Students Prepared for College?”…Are They Prepared For Life?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Well, no.

And framing the problem as one of college preparedness doesn’t help.

Dr. Steven Mintz, Professor Emeritus at Cal Poly State University in San Luis Obispo, (aka”The Ethics Sage”,””) posted a depressing essay about the decline of US ACT scores on his blog. He begins, “By now you’ve probably heard that ACT test scores for the class of 2023 were the worst in at least 32 years.” Actually I hadn’t heard, but it’s not surprising: the U.S. education system, as I’m sick of writing and you must be sick of reading, has rotted through. That chart above is one of several alarming graphics the professor’s article features, supposedly listing the top mentioned goals “when I grow up” for Chinese, British and U.S. students.

Unlike the Sage, I don’t think wanting to be an astronaut is a lot more realistic or admirable than wanting to be a “YouTuber”—in fact, I think the chart shows that Chinese students have been pretty much sucked into the same cultural muck that ours have. “When I was a lad,” kids wanted to be lawyers, doctors, and President of the United States. Twenty years ago, my son wanted to be exactly what he is today, an auto mechanic. Today’s culture doesn’t encourage or respect learning, knowledge, or quality thinking. The emphasis is on empty credentials that are believed to lead to fame, wealth and power, and among those credentials are degrees, which Mintz, as an old school academic, naively reveres as the equivalent of education, intellectual enrichment, and broadening perspectives. For most graduates, they haven’t signified those for a long, long time.

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The Unmasking Continues: So A Big Chunk Of The American Left Hates Christians AND Jews Now?

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

I did not see this coming, but perhaps I should have. After all, they have been telling us that they hate whites, males, and Americans for years.

This has been an ugly month for Democrats and progressives, if anyone is paying attention and not soaked with denial. America’s campuses, after decades of indoctrination, are erupting with open anti-Semitism, and the Left’s captive media has spread terrorist propaganda. The Associated Press told its reporters not to call Hamas killers “terrorists” after they massacred civilians, raped women, and took a couple hundred hostages from Israel on October 7. The Voice of America issued instructions to avoid calling Hamas “terrorists.” On October 12, Yale’s campus newspaper censored what it called “unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men” from a pro-Israel article by a student. (Yale professor Nicholas Christakis asked, “Are the hostage-taking, murder of children in their beds, burning of people alive, and parading of nude captive women in the street also ‘unsubstantiated’?”)

After Cornell students posted messages to university websites sewing sentiments like “If i see a pig male jew i will stab you and slit your throat,” “eliminate jewish living from cornell campus,” and an especially ominous, “gonna shoot up 104 west,” the kosher dining hall on campus, the school boldly advised Jewish students to avoid that dining hall. 

Silly me: I thought this Babylon Bee story was satire.

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My Favorite Poem: An Ethics Tale, A Romance, And A Ghost Story…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Happy Halloween, from Ethics Alarms!

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The Highwayman

By Alfred Noyes

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.   

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.   

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,   

And the highwayman came riding—

         Riding—riding—

The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

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Disney’s Sunk Costs Fiasco, And Introducing “The Nelson”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Disney, which has completely lost its way as a cultural icon, story-teller, entertainment source and exemplar, recently announced that it will be delaying its release of the live-action “Snow White” for at least a year after terrible publicity and a big-mouthed star made its $300,000,000 plus investment look shaky at best. Initially, the thinking was that the studio, recently the victim of one high-budget bomb after another, was just hoping to let all the controversy fade away, but no. The plan, it turns out, is to spend as much as another 100 million dollars to add CGI dwarfs, modeled on the animated originals, to the film and to remove whatever the hell these were…

…which was the DEI-driven, uber-woke Disney replacement for the iconic little fellas after a single short actor had complained that keeping that feature of the classic fairy tale would be uncool. The company really made an artistic decision this way. It really did. Morons. Walt would have rolled in his grave if he weren’t frozen stiff.

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Today’s “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Updates: The Lewiston Shooting And “Arghh! Biden Has A Primary Challenger!”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

bias

The fact that so many loyal Democrats and smug progressives will still look you in the eye and say that mainstream media bias is a right-wing conspiracy theory speaks eloquently of the corruption of American politics, individual integrity and democracy. Two depressing examples:

1. The missing mass shootings.

Kevin Downey reviews the large number of mass shootings since the Lewiston massacre, and points out that even though one would assume that a) they are all newsworthy and b) that the anti-gun journalism establishment would want such tragedies to be known, only the Maine shooting ticked off the right boxes to advance the agreed-upon MSM narrative without undermining some part of it. In addition to the high body count, the Lewiston massacre featured a white male shooter using a semi-automatic weapon (that they could call “an assault weapon”). And he apparently liked some conservative social media posts, meaning that the shooting was really Donald Trump’s fault.

Maine authorities were also warned about Robert R. Card II in plenty of time to stop him if they had followed established policies but didn’t. Oh, never mind: as with the Uvalde shooting and others, it’s the guns, the victims and the shooter that matter, not the fact that existing laws and competent law enforcement should have been sufficient to prevent the disaster.

Since the Lewiston shooting (October 25) there were ten more mass shootings, leaving 14 dead and 65 wounded. Two took place in Chicago (of course) and left 19 people shot.In one shooting involving a handgun, 15 victims were hit by gunfire. That there weren’t more deaths is moral luck. The mostly ignored shootings involved shooters “of color,” drug gatherings, parties substantially attended by non-whites, and weapons that couldn’t plausibly be called “weapons of war.”

Downey also cited the amusing idiocy of, again, Joy Behar on “The View,” produced by ABC News, showing abject gun ignorance ( I missed it–sock drawer…). She said (and no one on the set had the wit, integrity or knowledge to contradict her),”If you shoot with an AR-15, let’s say you shoot a deer, you can’t eat it because you basically demolish the animal.” She “doesn’t know the difference between an AR-15 and a bazooka,” writes Downey. That’s fair.

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