Ethics Dunce, Unethical Quote, Irresponsible Ex-President OF The Month, (And OMG What A Smug, Insufferable Ass!): Barack Obama

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I was prepared to add this nauseating story to Part 2 of the previous post, “Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck Update: Tells, Hypocrites, Liars And A Jumbo” because it came to my attention after Part I was up, and because it made my head explode. Then Obama’s drivil kept me up last night, and upon re-reading Obama’s fatuous, pandering, intellectually indefensible, and, of course, being The Light-Bringer, self-aggrandizing contribution to policy debate pollution and the accelerating ethical deterioration of the Democratic Party, I realized only a stand-alone article would do.

Being interviewed on a podcast (with the retch-response inducing cutesie title “Pod Save America”) run by his adoring ex-staffers —to be fair, maybe all the bowing and misty-eyed mooning disoriented him—the ex-President, currently moving up fast on the rail as the most wildly over-praised President of all, decided to open his trap and pronounce:

“I look at this, and I think back, ‘What could I have done during my presidency to move this forward, as hard as I tried?’ But there’s a part of me that’s still saying, ‘Well, was there something else I could have done?’”

As usual for this narcissist, everything is about him, isn’t it? After all, he’s Barack Obama, and surely he could have resolved a hopeless blood feud on the Palestinian side and a stubborn insistence on survival on the Israeli side that the opposing parties involved have been unable to fix since 1948! It’s all his fault really, Barack acknowledges. He just didn’t focus enough of his super-powers on that problem while he was busy making deals with Iran giving them more money to spread terrorism and a guaranteed future nuclear bomb to wipe Israel out after he’s retired or dead, when it didn’t matter. To him, anyway.

Then Obama sagely noted that “this is century-old stuff that’s coming to the fore.” (Actually, efforts to exterminate Jews are a lot older than a century) and, the New York Times tells us, “blamed social media for amplifying the divisions and reducing a thorny international dispute to what he viewed as sloganeering.”

Yeah, all those tweets and Facebook posts have made the Palestinians want to destroy Israel even more than they’ve declared in their multitudinous “Death to Israel” statements over the past eight decades or so. Good point.

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Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck Update: Tells, Hypocrites, Liars And A Jumbo (Part I)

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

My head has been exploding all week from the stunning statements emanating from academia, journalism, “the Squad” and a sickening number of alleged progressives and Democrats calling for a “cease fire” in the war, which is code for “make Israel wait for the next terrorist attack by the murderous regime next door that has vowed to wipe it out.”

In fact, it is a good time to review the rhetorical tells coming from these people and groups as they show the filthy underside of a metaphorical rock. Just as I will not trust or respect anyone who frames the abortion issue as a matter of “choice,” or the gun policy debate as one of “common sense gun control,” any commentator, activist, reporter or politician (or Facebook friend) who uses these terms has outed themselves as historically ignorant, irresponsible, and quite possibly anti-Semitic, or at least a willing dupe of anti-Semites:

  • “Two state solution.” Unbelievable. Biden has endorsed this mirage again. The Palestinians have had the “two state solution” within their grasp several times since 1948, and rejected it. Israel, not being suicidal or insane, requires an effective declaration that any such “solution” involves an official acknowledgement that Israel has a right to exist where it exists, and will not be the target of another genocidal attack. Framing the “two-state solution” as a reasonable “compromise” is nothing more than a device  to make both adversaries seem equally responsible for the endless conflict and violence. One is. The other is not.
  • “Occupation” and “occupied Palestine/Gaza.” There is no occupation. There are no Israeli soldiers in Gaza.
  • “Settlers” and “Colonization” These terms assume a fact not resolved. Israel claims the land it effectively won in the 7 Days War, though the U.N., over-stocked as it is with nations that wanted Israel to lose that war, claims that the nation keeping the West Bank and the Golan Heights is illegal. Turning over more land to people who vowed to wipe it out does not appeal to Israel, so it permits citizens  to move there. (Good.)
  • “Apartheid state.” Israel is not apartheid. Law abiding Muslims and Christians as well as non-Semitic races live there, work there, and vote there.
  • “Resistance” means “terrorism.”
  • “Indiscriminate bombing.” Hamas uses Gaza civilians as shields, stores weapons and hides leaders in hospitals, and thus makes “discriminate bombing” impossible as well as foolish. Nor are Gazans devoid of responsibility for their own plight. They support and installed a terrorist government, and endorse its mission and methods. They are not “innocent.” Their children are, but their parents are the ones who placed their children in mortal peril. Israel has no ethical or moral duty to sacrifice its own well-being to remedy Palestinian cultural poison.

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Saturday Ethics Trick-Or Treat Leftovers, 11/4/2023

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

November 4 is lively ethics date in addition to the aforementioned robbery of King Tut’s tomb. There have been two notable assassinations on this date that have current news resonance: Then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in 1995, and in 1928, gambler Arnold Rothstein, who was instrumental in fixing the 1919 World Series. (If the Arizona Diamondbacks has won the World Series just completed, I would have suspected a fix, especially with baseball sullying itself with a full embrace of online gambling last season.) Just to show how fast cultural and ethical winds can shift, it was on this date in 2008 that Proposition 8 was passed in California, banning same-sex marriage. Today I wouldn’t be surprised to see Gavin Newsome sign a bill making it a felony to say anything negative about same-sex marriages. The Iran hostage crisis began in 1979: yes, it’s true, Democrats: once the Iranians were the bad guys. In 1956, the USSR under Khrushchev sent in the tanks and crushed the flickering of democracy in Hungary. The late Diane Feinstein was elected California Senator for the first time, highlighting the Democrats’ incredibly cynical “Year of the Woman,” during which misogynist and serial sexual harasser Bill Clinton was held up by the party as a paragon of virtue. And in 2008, of course, Barack Obama was elected, proving that the United States was not the racist nation his administration and its supporters helped convince black citizens that it was over the next eight years.

Boy, this really has been a terrible date for ethics.

Let’s hope today doesn’t add to the list…

1. Could this be it? Is this the tipping point? In Dighton, Mass, (This Massachusetts boy never heard of it!), a female high school field hockey player was badly injured and sent to the hospital after a fierce shot by “a male player” hit her in the face. Whether the player on the other team “identified” as female or was just a male playing a female sport because Massachusetts’ way to avoid controversies is to just eliminate gender separations in all sports is unclear so far. It shouldn’t make any difference.

In the ridiculously woke Bay State, the incident is being treated like a live hand-grenade, but it is still setting off ethics alarms. Dighton-Rehoboth Superintendent Bill Runey said in a letter to families that “[w]hile I understand that the MIAA has guidelines in place for co-ed participation under section 43 of their handbook, this incident dramatically magnifies the concerns of many about player safety,” Runey wrote. Gee, ya think?

2. See? Baseball makes you smart! (As opposed to football, which gives you dementia…) The latest issue of the Baseball Research Journal (the fruit of a generous gift from my friend Bob Kenney) had a feature article on the burning topic of why Ty Cobb was named “Tyrus.” My first reaction was, “Wow, they are really digging deep for topics at SABR,” but, as is often the case, research on a seemingly trivial topic yielded wide-ranging and valuable information. Cobb believed that his first name was original and the invention of his father, a history professor, whom the baseball great thought bestowed on his son the name to honor the city of Tyre’s courageous resistance to Alexander the Great, who eventually destroyed it. This, in turn, would indicate that all subsequent Tyruses were named after Ty Cobb. In the course of debunking that story, historian William H. Cobb discovered and reveals,

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This Is The Mentality That Allows You To Thrive As A Democratic Party Political Consultant In 2023…

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

The speaker is Ally Sammarco, a D.C.-based Democratic political consultant who pretends to be a firm, ARS Media LLC. You get an early clue about Sammarco’s ethical orientation by the fact that the ARS media website keeps referring to the company as “we” but when you click on “Who we are” you get just one name, hers. Lawyers are subject to discipline if they do this, but political consultants, obviously, don’t have to be ethical, since their job is recommending lies.

Her presumably self-written description of what she does is working “with clients on messaging to Democrats and swing voters, using creative social and digital media strategies.” You know, like posting misleading, Big Brotheresque videos on TikTok and Twitter, then responding to legitimate criticism with snark like, “Literally the replies on this show how many Republican men actually think that they could actually take out a shooter with an AR-15 with zero training.” Literally! Is this just dishonest deflection when she knows she’s mouthing pro-totalitarian propaganda, or is Ally really that stupid? It doesn’t make any difference really: this woman makes her living getting paid to advise Democrats. Ponder that for a nonce. What does this tell us?

As I noted to Ally, “It will keep you safe” is the standard aspiring totalitarian rationalization for the government infringing on any individual rights, from the First Amendment, to Due Process, to the right to a fair trial. In one of his more prescient quotes, Benjamin Franklin wrote: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Today’s Left is charging full-speed against that core American principle, betting that the average voter is too ignorant, too stupid, and too terrified to realize what progressives and Democrats want to do to them until it is too late.

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Rescued Comment Of The Day: “Ethics And The Joker’s Mustache”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

In honor of King Tut’s tomb being opened on this date in 1922, here is a recovered lost treasure from the Ethics Alarms vault…

I know there are many, maybe hundreds, of Comment of the Day-worthy reactions to Ethics Alarms posts that never made it to this point, for a welter of reasons good and bad. If all of them could be tracked down and resuscitated, I could avoid writing about Donald Trump or the ethics rot of the increasingly disturbing American Left for months—wow, an old COTD archeology project sounds better the more I think of it! Stop it, Jack, get back to the point…

The point is that I found this excellent Comment of the Day by Marie Dowd by pure chance as I was researching the site on another matter, and was annoyed with myself for missing it the first time, way back in 2019.

I apologize, Marie! I can only plead that I was distracted: there were 24 comments on that ethics and TV trivia post, but only two that could be called substantive. Three alerted me to my careless mistakes (like calling the collective noun for critics a “snivel” instead of a “shrivel”), and most of the rest were jokes. Actually, there was a second excellent comment in the thread, that one by Pennagain, who has been missing from the ethics wars for quite a while. (I’m worried.)

Anyway, the topic, like the Joker’s hair, is ever-green, so Marie’s Comment of the Day on the burning issue of Cesar Romero leaving his mustache on despite being cast to play Batman’s clean-shaven arch-nemisis remains as fresh today as it was more than four years ago. So here it is, on “Ethics And The Joker’s Mustache”:

***

I’ve thought about this mustache far too many times for my own comfort.

As a kid, the intended audience even if I was too young to care during its run, I really did not notice. The reception was always fuzzy out in the country. >not a problem

In-universe, Joker’s insane. Merry prankster is the most forgiving way to tag him. Any version would grow a handlebar or do anything to mess with people’s heads, especially the Bat. Annoying Batman would be a laugh in character. >not a problem!

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10 Ethics Takeaways From Wapo’s “Students Hated ‘To Kill A Mockingbird.’ Their teachers Tried To Dump It”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Subhead: “Four progressive teachers in Washington’s Mukilteo School District wanted to protect students from a book they saw as outdated and harmful. The blowback was fierce.”

To begin with, read it all, and to the extent you can stand it, the comments. I included some trenchant quotes below, however.

Now the takeaways:

1. If there is a more vivid and depressing illustration of how far public education, teacher competence and race relations have declined since, oh, let’s say 2008, I don’t know what it could be.

2. The episode was triggered, a black student told the Post, when a white teen read “nigger” while reading “Mockingbird” to the class. The student disobeyed the teacher’s instructions to skip the slur, and “the kid looked at every Black person — there’s three Black people in that class — and smiled.” Well: a) Asking a student to read a passage of any book to the class when she feels part of the text must be skipped is incompetent. b) Of all the passages to have a student read from “Mockingbird,” choosing one that includes “nigger” smacks of deliberate sabotage. c) Presumed facial expression racism? At this rate, we should be back to “separate but equal” in no time.

3. “Freeman-Miller wondered: Did the school really have to teach Harper Lee’s classic but polarizing novel, as was mandatory for all freshmen?” There is no reason for any novel to be regarded as “polarizing,” except to those who regard literature as indoctrination tools. The educational process is to read the novel, discuss its literary merit, its context, its cultural significance, the ideas it communicates, and it why it works (or not) for a particular reader.

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Ethical Quote Of The Week: Richard Fernandez

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“One of the most poorly informed debates in the media coverage of war, is the concept of ‘proportionality’. The average person understands it as a kind of transaction. If X kills N citizens of Y, then Y can fairly retaliate by killing N*(1+i) citizens of X, i being a penalty….”

—Conservative commentator Richard Fernandez, tweeting as “wretchedthecat”

Bingo.

This central logical and historical fallacy is central to the pacifist’s unethical delusion. Fernandez explains,

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The Beatles’ “Last Song”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The category is botched exit ethics.

As I strongly assumed would be the case, yesterday’s much-hyped release of “the last Beatles recording” gave to the eagerly waiting world one more wan, down-beat sigh of a zombie song by the late John Lennon from his Blue Period, electronically turned into a sub-par Beatles number by adding contemporary contributions from Paul and Ringo, some instrumentation from the also deceased George Harrison, and sound engineering by “Fifth Beatle” George Martin’s son. Thus we have a trilogy of such things, with “Now and Then” being added to the similarly mediocre and lugubrious “Free as a Bird” and “True Love,” all of them home demos recorded by Lennon after the group dissolved and approved for Beatlizing by Yoko Ono.

One is compelled to ask, “Why?” Yoko doesn’t need the money; neither do the remaining ex-Beatles of George Harrison’s estate. The “last song” is going to be released on a commemorative 45 with “Love Me Do,” the group’s first hit. That’s nice. Two mediocre Beatles songs on one disc. This is akin to commemorating Shakespear by releasing “Titus Andronicus” and “Henry the VIII” as a set. This song, like the previous two, do nothing to enhance the reputations of Lennon or the group. If these were typical of the Beatles’ creative output, the band would be less fondly remembered than the Strawberry Alarm Clock (of “Incense and Peppermints” fame; in fact, I’d rather listen to that silly song than hear “Now and Then” again).

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Ethics Quiz: Is A Candidate Who Records Herself Urinating In The Snow And Posts The Video To Social Media Fit To Serve In The Virginia Legislature?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I’m kidding. This isn’t really an ethics quiz post. It’s a “When did the Democratic Party completely lose its collective mind?” post.

In Old Virginny, where I live, where multiple communities feel it necessary to criminalize over-age trick-or-treating, where the state Democratic Party felt that Clinton bag man Terry McAuliffe was a fine choice to be governor, and where the same party was until recently running a candidate who performed sex-acts for cash with her husband on a porn site, Jessica Anderson (shown proudly peeing in the snow above) is a nominated and widely endorsed candidate for Virginia’s House of Delegates.

Her professionally-designed website describes her as “not a politician; she is an everyday person who advocates for her community.” When did people who piss in the snow and publicize the process start qualifying as “everyday people”? I’ve known a lot of normal and abnormal people in my epic life, and I’m fairly certain that none of them have done this or would consider doing this. In truth, I was considering an ethics quiz involving another TikTok post by Jessica; this one:

The question would have been, “Is it fair to judge a grown woman who dresses as an eggplant and flaunts herself doing so online as not sufficiently trustworthy to be an elected official?”

Close reading of Jessica’s website reveals other red flags, one being that she favors unconstitutional “red flag laws” inflicting pre-crime breaches of due process and individual rights based on vague standards applied by the government. Her aspiring totalitarian explanation: “The idea that someone is seen as a substantial threat and could face little legal ramifications and endanger members of our community, should warrant stricter criminal consequences.” Being “seen” as a threat warrants criminal consequences! That the mark of a 2023 progressive Democrat, even one who doesn’t revel in peeing in the snow…

The peeing eggplant candidate also proves herself to be deliberately misleading, describing abortion (one must assume that’s what she’s talking about) on her site’s homepage as “reproductive rights,” the current cover-term now that “choice” has been outed as the disinformation it is. If one clicks through, abortion is finally extolled by the candidate, but the page presents another red flag regarding Jessica’s fitness: professionally designed as it is, her campaign site reveals her as careless, ungrammatical and inarticulate or, in the alternative, someone who delegates to incompetents. Here’s the text on the abortion issue, highlights mine:

Youngkin and VA-GOP have advocate for abortion bans, recently pushing for a 15 week ban specifically, Yet, they fail to discuss that a 15 week ban does NOT stop elective abortions and instead causes doctors to hesitate, putting patients at risk of sepsis, blood loss, organ failure, reproductive organ loss, coma and even death. These types of laws also eliminate families ability to make a personal decision when they are presented with the horrible reality that their wanted child is not viable and will not survive childbirth. We also know that 93% of all abortions nationwide, occur by or before 13 weeks, with only 6% occurring between 13 and 20 weeks. So we need to ask ourselves why politicians are trying to legislate a 15 week ban, that only impacts 2.5% of all abortions, which are medically necessary due to fetal abnormalities and/or maternal mortality. Legislators have no business in our doctor’s offices, making our personal and life-altering medical decisions, and putting our healthcare providers at legal risk simply for providing us care. I believe the long-standing law in Virginia, which allows for abortion access through the 2nd trimester and that in the rare instance of a 3rd trimester abortion, healthcare providers must respond quickly and ethically. It outlines that if a pregnancy is terminated in the 3rd trimester, it requires a physician along with 2 consulting physicians, to deem the procedure medically necessary. The further arbitrary laws being discussed and introduced are nothing more than political grandstanding and serve no purpose than to control this deeply personal decision.

This section and others on the site do explain why the candidate believes that education is important, I suppose. I also concede that this is how most “everyday” people think and write. Elected officials and representatives responsible for our laws and policies, however, should be better and smarter than the average American, a rather low bar to clear. The 2023 version of the Democratic Party and their progressive allies clearly don’t accept this rather obvious principle (See: Rep. Jamaal Bowman). Anderson’s endorsement page shows that she’s the darling of all the usual suspects, and enthusiastically supported by the leaders of her party in Virginia, who, by extension, apparently also applaud public peeing.