Ethics Quote of the Week: Benjamin Franklin

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

“Thinking aloud is a habit which is responsible for most of mankind’s misery.”

Benjamin Franklin, quoted in the 2008 series “John Adams,” spoken by Franklin (Tom Wilkerson) as advice to Adams (Paul Giamatti)

I wasn’t looking for more perspective on Donald Trump’s most recent disqualifying outburst when I revisited the first two episodes of HBO’s 2008 series “John Adams” after many years. My wife and I were just seeking something intellectually stimulating, inspiring and real to watch after completing the bizarre fictional entanglements of “The Affair.” By pure happenstance, however, a dramatized conversation between John Adams and Benjamin Franklin following a session of the Continental Congress in 1775 had immediate relevance both to the post and several of the comment threads following it in which Trump defenders praised his apparently unbreakable habit of blurting out or typing every thought that jumps into his head.

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KABOOM! The Progressive Propaganda Media Is This Desperate To Stop RFK, Jr.

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

This is pretty funny, actually, or would be, if we hadn’t seen similar tactics used repeatedly against the previous President of the United States.

Here’s what Robert Kennedy, Jr. tweeted in its entirety:

Since the assassination of my father in 1968, candidates for president are provided Secret Service protection. But not me. Typical turnaround time for pro forma protection requests from presidential candidates is 14-days. After 88-days of no response and after several follow-ups by our campaign, the Biden Administration just denied our request.  Secretary Mayorkas: “I have determined that Secret Service protection for Robert F Kennedy Jr. is not warranted at this time.” Our campaign’s request included a 67-page report from the world’s leading protection firm, detailing unique and well established security and safety risks aside from commonplace death threats.

Got that? Okay, now what about that tweet seems sinister to you, other than what RFK Jr. is alleging?

Here, let me give you some time…

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…Ethics Hero: Elon Musk (Again)

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

(See: “It’s Come To This: “Liking” A Politically Incorrect, Bad Taste Joke On Social Media Can Get You Suspended In The United States Of America”)

Bravo.

The Puppeteering Of Sen. Feinstein

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“Have you no sense of decency? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?‘

With those deft, live-televised and well-timed (and planned in advance) words, lawyer Joseph Welch set off ethics alarms around the country that stripped the mask from Sen. Joe McCarthy and signaled the end of one of the ugliest episodes of political misconduct in American history. The Democratic Party is in the midst of another such episode of its own construction, but it’s doubtful that a Welch-like question would have any effect today. Nonetheless, the Democratic Party’s cynical and desperate manipulation of the brain-damaged (John Fetterman) and the elderly and senile (President Biden) to maintain its tenuous hold on power is an abandonment of decency arguably as disgusting and anti-Democratic as McCarthy’s smearing of political foes as Communists.

The party’s reduction of Senator Diane Feinstein, 90, once a sharp and professional Senator from California, but now a sick, mentally-diminished shell, to its marionette is particularly ugly. Last week, Feinstein relinquished the power of attorney to her daughter, a tacit admission that she was no longer competent to handle her own affairs. Yet she remains in a position that requires her to participate in decisions regarding the affairs of the United States, and its many millions of citizens. How could she be incapable of acting in her own interest but still qualified to do the job her constituents (foolishly) elected her to do? Obviously, she can’t.

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Comment Of The Day: “First Open Forum Of August!”

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

Michael West, who used to weigh in here far more frequently than he has been able to in recent years, issued a well-timed commentary in last week’s Friday open forum. It’s a perfect intro, if a bit ironic, to a post I’ll get up today if climate change doesn’t kill us all about the intractable reaction some have had to yesterday’s heresy that Donald Trump has officially jumped the legitimate Presidential candidate shark. The recent ban-ee actually sounded like Trump, warning me of dire consequences should I not succumb to his arguments and dance to his off-key tune.

Here is Michael West’s Comment of the Day on the most recent open forum:

***

On the widening worldview dichotomy, objectivity and debate:

Can a progressive commenter ever last here anymore?

The complaints that this is a conservative echo chamber have some practical merit – in that most of the commenters here have a libertarian or conservative lean. The progressives all left, mostly of their own accord, many because their own assertions painted themselves into logic corners from which all they had left was the vitriol that eventually got them banned.

Therein lies the question – can a progressive commenter last here without admitting that their entire train of thought has gone off the rails? And once a progressive commenter does have that realization – can they honestly remain progressive anymore?

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It’s Come To This: “Liking” A Politically Incorrect, Bad Taste Joke On Social Media Can Get You Suspended In The United States Of America

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Madness.

Rising NASCAR driver Noah Gragson was suspended indefinitely for liking a meme on Instagram. The meme was a pun evoking the “Little Mermaid” song “Under the Sea,” sung in all versions by Sebastian the Crab. It showed the crab with George Floyd’s head superimposed with a reference to his demise, like this:

Too soon? Once his politically incorrect sense of humor was brought to its attention, Gregson was suspended indefinitely by his team, the Legacy Motor Club, and by NASCAR as well. “NASCAR fully supports Legacy Motor Club’s decision to suspend Noah Gragson,” the racing association stated. “Following his actions on social media, NASCAR has determined that Gragson has violated the Member Conduct section of the 2023 NASCAR Rule Book and has placed him under indefinite suspension.”

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Comment Of The Day: “MAGA Loyalists: Do You REALLY Believe That Anyone Who Makes A Public Threat Like This Can Be Trusted To Be President?…”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I am proud to present an epic Comment of he Day by A M Golden on the post, “MAGA Loyalists: Do You REALLY Believe That Anyone Who Makes A Public Threat Like This Can Be Trusted To Be President? Because He Can’t…Ever.” It is wise, wide-raanging and nuanced, so I’m not going to waste your time with an introduction. Just read, think, and enjoy.

***

As the saying goes, “When someone tells you who they really are, believe them.” We have enough evidence to see with our own eyes and ears who Trump is and who he is not and that should not be relevant to who Joe Biden is and who he is not.

This entry, the previous one in the latest installment of the “Nation of Assholes” series and the one before that about Rudy Giuliani’s untrustworthy secret recorder have all coalesced in my mind this weekend as I have spent several days wearing myself out over planning for a pop-culture convention next week by following other conventions in other cities on social media to determine how the shows are accommodating the guests’ requirements under SAG-AFTRA’s strike rules and what that means for how I should approach any celebrity guest I wish to meet.

I get tired of holding the hands of new convention-goers who don’t understand the rules, ask for clarification and end up not following my advice. I get tired of veteran convention-goers who think they have the right to get around the rules. For entitled people who cut lines, who try to sweet-talk the guest into extra perks and who make little to no effort to ask polite, intelligent questions. They make everything harder on everyone else. Celebrities won’t want to attend these things if people don’t understand or respect boundaries. I have too many stories to recount of fans acting like inconsiderate asses and those stories are from before the pandemic.

We are already an entitled enough culture that treats celebrities like commodities, as if buying a movie ticket or following a TV program requires that anyone who appeared in the same owes us unlimited time, an autograph, a selfie, a kidney… One of the best things about the strike is that it’s finally becoming somewhat public knowledge that most actors aren’t millionaires.

We treat others like us even worse. Not only do we not put most of our fellow citizens on pedestals, but we don’t even afford them the basic respect of treating them the way we would want to be treated. As long as there’s something in it for us, I guess…

Somehow, qualities of character, such as honesty, integrity, patience, kindness, self-control (sorry, I think I wandered into the Fruits of the Spirit from the Bible) seem to have been lost very quickly. We are a mess as a culture and there’s a lot of blame to go around, not least because we have forgotten the Golden Rule.

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Why Big Lies Work: A Case Study

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Well, another one.

Democrats and the mainstream media decided to go nuclear with the false accusation that the new Florida history guidelines, championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, want schools to teach that slavery was beneficial to enslaved African Americans. It’s an outright lie, as anyone who reviewed the guidelines could see, and as Ethics Alarms explained. The Vice President of the United States made the accusation in multiple venues before African American audiences. (Yes, she’s an idiot, but she’s still Vice-President, and her statements are publicized widely). The usual race-baiters and liars among the partisan punditry, like MSNBC’s vile Joy Reid, repeated the lie, and even a GOP Presidential hopeful, weak, cowardly Sen. Tim Scott, gave it credence.

Far from being evidence of racism, white supremacy or prejudice, the guidelines are really evidence of how extremism succeeds by producing “compromises” that are irresponsibly radical anyway. The slavery history teaching guidelines require an absurdly disproportionate emphasis on slavery in grade school, and will result in inadequate instruction on many other more essential topics and skills. Never mind though: as Hitler and Goebbels explained, the purpose of Big Lies is to get a damaging narrative widely distributed, so much so that the target has to respond to it, giving the lie legitimacy and keeping it in the public consciousness.

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MAGA Loyalists: Do You REALLY Believe That Anyone Who Makes A Public Threat Like This Can Be Trusted To Be President? Because He Can’t…Ever

/ Jack Marshall / 82 Comments

Astounding. It’s not astounding that the former President thinks this way, it’s astounding that he is so devoid of ethics alarms, self-restraint, common sense and an understanding of the justice system that he would post such smoking gun evidence that he is a dangerous bully with the instincts of a badly-raised child. Donald Trump actually and truly posted this threat yesterday, in all caps as usual, on his social media site, Truth Social:

That’s the tipping point for me, and it should be for any sane American. I believe that it is existentially crucial that the increasingly anti-democratic Democrats be punished for their unethical conduct and totalitarian aspirations over the past eight years. I would vote for almost anyone over Joe Biden after his complete capitulation to the Dark Side, but “almost anyone” does not include, for example, Putin, Dracula, Diane Feinstein, Rob Reiner, Mitch McConnell, or Cujo…or Donald Trump. Not after this. Hillary Clinton jumps in front of Trump after this. So do some others on that list.

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New From The “Nation Of Assholes”: Movie Theater Of Assholes

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Back in 2015, Ethics Alarms sagely predicted that an election of Donald Trump as President would begin a death spiral of American manners, civility and societal comity. It proved to be a lot more accurate than any cliamte change predictions so far, but it was still too optimistic. As EA has documented since, all ends of the political spectrum have devoted themselves to trashing respect, manners and decorum since 2016. Yes, Trump has been a catalyst, but so has “the resistance,” Democrats, Black Lives Matter and popular culture. And the destructive pandemic lockdown: don’t forget that.

We continue to discover the breadth and width of the unanticipated carnage of that dumb policy, from children who can’t read to the horrible “ghost runner” in Major League Baseball extra-inning games. Now, the Wall Street Journal reports:

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