Some of the Wokish opinion pieces being belched out of The Great Stupid are so outlandish they transcend being selected as Ethics Alarms “Unethical Quotes of the Month.” A truly deranged quote isn’t unethical so much as it is tragic, even one as brain-melting as this one, from “The Conversation,” a website which risibly claims to provide “academic rigor, journalistic flair.” Yeah, only academic rigor could produce an essay like “Pantry porn’ on TikTok and Instagram makes obsessively organized kitchens a new status symbol.”
Here’s the ‘money quote’, the section that proves beyond all doubt that the only reason to take the time to read this precious, arrogant clap-trap is to gain insight into just how crazy the victim-obsessed Left has become:
You knew this was coming sooner or later, I assume, regardless of the facts, the possible consequences, the further polarization of the nation and culture. It was inevitable the second Donald Trump shocked the establishment and stopped Hillary Clinton from becoming President the next step in the assumed progressive takeover of the government and American society. He had a target on his back even before he was inaugurated, and in the ensuing nearly seven years Trump was subjected without pause to contrived Big Lies proclaimed by “the resistance,” the Democrats and the news media designed to poison public opinion and prevent his re-election, dishonest impeachment theories (as well as two unethical impeachments), politically motivated raid on his home, and the unethical, relentless pursuit of prosecutors seeking to find a crime to charge him with, which is absolutely an abuse of the prosecutoral function.
Now victory, if you are warped enough to see it as that, is near. A Manhattan grand jury is expected to hand down the much awaited indictment this week, perhaps as early as Tuesday. No U.S. President has ever been indicted or arrested in or out of office, so I’m sure the sick hearts of the Trump-Deranged are bursting out of their chests with joy in anticipation.
This morning, my wife sent me on a mission to buy a new portable calculator. At the nearby strip-mall, there are three retail options right in a row: Target, Staples, and Best Buy. Target looked crowded, and the Best Buy is huge and bewildering, so I chose the more modest-sized Staples, where ProEthics has an account.
When I entered, none of the aisle and section signs—there were about two dozen— indicated that the store even offers calculators, though I knew that couldn’t be the case in an office supply store. There was a 15 foot banner proclaiming “CUSTOMER SERVICE,” however, with one female clerk beneath it, processing the purchase of an ancient man who was moving in slow motion. After waiting a few minutes and realizing that the transaction might take until Arbor Day, I asked the Staples employee where I could find the calculators, assuming it was an easily and quickly answered query and that I could get the information before the aged customer finished searching through his wallet.
The employee obviously had no idea. She said, “I think it’s down there somewhere,” pointing to the other side of the store. “Is there an aisle sign that I should look for?” I asked. “You know, let me check with somebody; just wait a minute,” she replied, and went back to Methuselah.
“Bye!” I said sharply, and left the store. [ Update:I was wrong to write that, because I did NOT say anything, sharply or otherwise as I left Staples. A sharp “bye” would have perfectly expressed by state of mind, however. Still, that was a false account.] I then went to Best Buy; its customer service staffer gave me directions, pointed out a sign and a section, and I had picked out the item in less than five minutes.
After completing the purchase, I went back to the young man at the service desk and thanked him for his competence. I also told him how his counterpart at Staples had blown it, and that Best Buy had my business from now on.
Just when I am convinced that The Great Stupid has finally reached peak stupid and the dimwits, hypocrites and virtue-signaling addicts in Woke World cannot embarrass themselves, society, the culture, the nation and the human race any more thoroughly, something like the “controversy” over Brendan Fraser winning the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in “The Whale” comes along.
I no longer watch the Academy Awards, I had no interest in seeing a movie about the travails of weighing 600 pounds and I’m not all that crazy about Brendan Frasier (though “The Mummy” was fun), so I heard about this a bit late. You see, Frasier wore a fat suit to play the hero of the movie. The actor is about 60 pounds past his physical prime when he played George of the Jungle (a funny Tarzan, more or less), but he hasn’t gotten that fat yet, so this was a necessary device. However, Fat is Beautiful activists slammed the picture, Frasier and the Oscars because 1) the film made fat seem unattractive and—this is the best part—it was discriminatory for the part of “the Whale” not to be cast with a real morbidly obese actor. (Brendan is only obese.)
This date in 1905 marks one of the most felicitous and essential marriages in U.S. Presidential history, as future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt wed his fifth cousin once removed, Eleanor Roosevelt, in New York, thus unifying the two branches of the elite Roosevelt family. Eleanor, herself an impressive intellect and activist, became her husband’s legs, rock and essential wing-woman as well as his moral compass (to the extent possible, at least). FDR was a pragmatist with natural leadership skills and gifts that exceeded those of all but a few of his predecessors, but he was far from an idealist, as he revealed here and there, often with troubling consequences. What other Presidents would not have reached the White House without a felicitous choice of life-partner? John Adams, certainly; in all likelihood, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton as well. Maybe Obama, but with Adams and Franklin, there is no doubt.
1. You have to admit, it has been an impressive scam, if a destructive one. The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank and research center, has put together a database tracking corporate America’s capitulation to what the institute calls “possibly the most lucrative shakedown of corporate America in its history.” Spokepersons for the institute reveal in Newsweek that while “most Americans have happily moved on from the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM)-driven ransacking of some 200 American cities, which resulted in as much as $2 billion in property damage and at least 25 deaths,” the bounty from the group’s white-guilt and fear-driven squeeze on corporate America has been wildly under-publicized. Claremont Institute’s database indicated that BLM was pledged “an astonishing $82.9 billion to the BLM movement and related causes. This includes more than $123 million to the BLM parent organizations directly.” Claremont writes that the figures, “while shocking, likely underrepresent the true magnitude of the shakedown as some companies failed to make known their contributions, and many BLM organizations remain unknown.”
The figures are even more infuriating than that suit of armor with the huge “Black Lives Matter” sign that I have to walk by with Spuds every day. Among the biggest funders of BLM according to Claremont has been JPMorgan Chase, with a $30 billion ‘Racial Equity Commitment to “close the racial wealth gap.” Abbott Labs has pledged $25 million; Adidas $120 million. Amazon gave BLM and its subsidiaries $169,550,000….all of this to promote racial division, Marxist politics and anti-white racism, without even minimal assurances of legitimate financial stewardship controls.
I really thought the New York Magazine article titled “Ron DeSantis Eating Pudding With His Fingers Will End His 2024 Bid” was a joke…even though it appeared in the section called “Intelligencer,” which past experience has taught me often contains the dumbest essays ever contrived by homo sapiens. But it wasn’t a joke. Margaret Hartmann, the senior editor for “Intelligencer” who wrote the thing was serious. Observe…
Ron DeSantishas been hit with a food-related accusation so weird it may end his 2024 presidential bid before it officially starts. The Daily Beast reportsthat according to two sources, the Florida governor once ate chocolate pudding with three fingers… I’m calling it now: This story will follow DeSantis like pudding sticks to fingers. The devil is in the details. The report doesn’t say DeSantis dipped a finger into his pudding sheepishly; he used three fingers, presumably as a scoop. And it’s established in the preceding paragraph that he regularly ate during meetings, “like a starving animal who has never eaten before… getting shit everywhere.” This paints a vivid picture of being trapped in a conference room with your boss as he shoves most of his hand into a pudding cup, scoops the goo into his mouth, licks his fingers, and goes back in for more, with chocolate still smeared around his lips. Disgusting!
Before I turn EA over to the commentariat, I have to say that the erudite and thoughtful people who honor me by checking in here also give me hope that reason, precise communication and intellectual cross-pollination will survive, and productive civilization with it, despite all evidence to the contrary.
There is a lot of that: I just leafed through the first “People” Magazine I have seen in many years (it was sent to my wife as a promotion), and it is profoundly depressing. The pop culture magazine used to have genuine articles; now it is almost completely taken over by snippets of a hundred words or less accompanied by photos of the B, C, and D level celebrities who have split-up or had babies without being married or worn “stunning” clothes at a Hollywood event. Obviously the publication is now pitched to the texting and social media-addicted masses who have the attention span of kittens and the reading tastes of fifth grade drop-outs.
And I thought USA Today had deteriorated! “People” makes the old movie fan mags like “Photoplay” look like “Remembrance of Things Past” by comparison.
Off-off Broadway, in Brooklyn, a small professional theater company in Brooklyn called Target Margin Theater is presenting, it claims, “Pericles,” one of William Shakespeare’s less-celebrated dramas, and I’m being kind. The play is a mess, and one might wonder why a 1608 play that only survives because Shakespeare’s name is on it keeps getting productions at all.
Well, to ask the question is to answer it: “Pericles” gets produced now and then because Shakespeare’s name is on it. It’s the cognitive dissonance scale at work: the Bard is so high on the scale that he even elevates the worthless junk he wrote, kind-of wrote or badly wrote like “Timon of Athens” and “Titus Andronicus” out of deep, deep negative territory on the scale because he is held in such high regard. Surely something produced by a genius must have redeeming qualities, directors and producers reason, and maybe we can be the ones to find them after all these centuries!
It is a bit like recording a cover of “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?” because it’s a Beatles song.”
But the Target Margin Theater production of the Bard’s Bomb tries some things. For example, the convoluted plot of “Pericles” gets started with the revelation that a nasty king, having lost his wife, has turned to his beautiful daughter “with whom the father liking took and her to incest did provoke.” However in this production, that line is rendered as, “The dude sleeps with his daughter.”
Mediocre movies can still raise important ethics questions, and so it is with a 2021 bomb called “American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally.” The film dramatizes the bizarre tale of Mildred Gillars, a Maine-born American woman of modest looks and talents who rode her aspirations for a Hollywood career into an infamous gig as an infamous Nazi German radio propagandist during World War II. My father told me about her broadcasts from Berlin, and how she used sexy tones to tell American servicemen that they were doomed, that the Jews, not Germany, were their real enemy, and that their wives and girlfriends were cheating on them while they were in Europe fighting Hitler’s “invincible army.”
Her last broadcast was just a few days before Germany surrendered; Gillars was arrested and charged with being a traitor. In 1948, “Axis Sally” faced a very real threat of being hanged as she went on trial for eight counts of treason. Thanks in great part to a vigorous (if reluctant) defense by famed criminal defense attorney James Laughlin, played by Al Pacino in the film, the jury found her guilty of only one, and what could have been a 30 year jail term turned into ten.
Dad said that American GIs thought “she”Axis Sally” was hilarious, that no soldiers took her seriously, and that her singing was terrible. Her broadcasts were popular in the U.S., as she often relayed news of American prisoners of war to show how well they were being treated by their German captors.
Although I suspect that Pacino’s ringing closing argument in her defense was punched up considerably from the original by Laughlin and maybe even contained some arguments Laughlin did not make, the points he raises in the movie are fascinating:
The latest addition to “intersectionality” is “adultism,” defined as the “[s]ystemic/interpersonal exclusion of youth from decisions that impact their lives.” You see where this is coming from, right? Transgender activists want children to be able to decide to sexually mutilate themselves without parental or government interference, once they have been thoroughly indoctrinated by their teachers, peers and the news media into believing that changing genders like socks makes one happy, healthy and wise.
I had somehow missed the latest toxic substance the mad Left had begun leaking into the culture. It’s exhausting keeping up with this stuff; it is like an existential game of Whack-A- Mole that never ends. The longer society gives allows these calculated corruptions to sink in and pollute minds, the more damage they do, and the harder they are to beat back.
University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) professor Josefina Bañales told a panel last month that “adultism” “excludes youth from the opportunity to speak about their own racialized experiences, their own ways that they’re navigating the world” because psychology was developed by “white adults.” Picking up on the concept, Professor Julie Maslowsky, who works in the School of Public Health at UIC, recently made the assertion that abortions are essential because, without one, a woman is left with an “economic hardship and insecurity which lasts for years.” This came during in a presentation on “Reproductive Justice.”
Ethics Alarms 