Last May 2023 Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I had one last chance to use the cheery song from “Camelot” again, so I took it. The 2023 revival of that show opened to near unanimous pans from critics in April (ironically); the book had been over-hauled by “The West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin, and arrived with black knights of the Round Table among other panders to the woke Broadway crowd. It also arrived without Julie Andrews and Richard Burton, which was the real killer: the original “Camelot” had iconic stars, lovely stars, spectacle, and a really bad book (unlike the classic book it was based on, “The Once and Future King” by T.H. White. It also had a wistful title song that was turned into the valedictory of the Kennedy Presidency, ending with “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot!“

In Sorkin’s version, Guenevere refers to the song as “dumb” and, later, as “that stupid song about the weather.” Nice.

Cheer me up with fascinating ethics observations, please:

Ethics Observations On The Machete-Wielding CUNY Prof.

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Does anyone recall anything like this happening in previous crazy times, like the mid-Sixties? If you somehow missed this episode, “listen my children and you will hear…”

Shellyne Rodriguez was an adjunct art professor at CUNY Hunter College in New York City. When she saw a group of pro-life students, members of Students for Life, distributing anti-abortion materials on campus earlier this month, she attacked, throwing their pamphlets in the air and screaming at them, saying,

“You’re not educating shit! This is fucking propaganda! What are you going to do like anti-trans next? This is bullshit! This is violent. You’re triggering my students!”

After a shaken student tried to babble and apology (for existing?)Rodriguez responded, “No, you’re not! Because you can’t even have a fucking baby. So you don’t even know what that is…Get this shit out of here, fuck this shit!” Then she threw the group’s pamphlets off their table.

Hunter’s pro-choice student group, CUNY for Abortion Rights, tried to defend the indefensible, thus destroying their own credibility, stating (falsely)

“Hunter College adjunct educator Shellyne Rodriguez approached the display, constructively critiqued the group members, and eventually physically took down items from the table.  Her actions to shut down the tabling were fully justified, and are part of a long and celebrated CUNY legacy of confronting groups such as military recruiters who disseminate misleading information. Anti-abortion groups are in collusion with anti-queer and trans, anti-labor, anti-Palestinian campaigns, in a larger [sense] violate people’s bodily autonomy, economic well-being, and collective determination.”

The statement was co-signed by the Palestine Solidarity Alliance.

But wait! There’s more!

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Cognitive Dissonance Alert! Can I Still Ethically Enjoy “Tie Me Kangaroo Down”?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’ve enjoyed that early Sixties novelty song “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport!” since I first heard it. It’s genuinely funny, employed black humor ahead of its time, and is cleverly written and performed. But I never bothered to learn who sang it or wrote it, until I learned the answer to both questions this morning when I read the obituary of Rolf Harris, who did both.

Rolf Harris was a popular British entertainer and TV personality who was convicted of sexually abusing young girls, and sent to prison. He never apologized to any of his victims (though he did apologize for using the racially charged slang “abo” in his hit song).

Ick. Here’s the Cognitive Dissonance Scale again…

The scale indicates positive and negative attitudes regarding people, places, subjects, events and ideas. Remember that like it or not, things that are connected tend to pull the things they are connected to up or down the scale. “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport!” is far from my favorite song, but it’s a solid +5 on the scale. Famous male celebrities who use their power and fame to sexually abuse children, however, are at least at -100, or lower. I don’t know how I can listen to a silly song and still be amused while my mind is telling me that the singer and author was a predatory monster.

And yet…and yet…I have written here many times that it is unethical to downgrade a critical assessment of a work of art because of the character of its creator, and that the art and the artist should be considered separately,

I believe that. I just don’t know that I can do it.

Now THAT’S An Incompetent Baker…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The family ordered the birthday cake design on the left, but the cake delivered was the one on the right, with cute little sperms instead of heart-shaped balloons.

The boy’s name was also Zayeem, not “Yazeem.”

But, to be fair, that baker will happily bake a same-sex wedding cake…

The DeSantis Announcement Incompetence: This Is What Happens When No One On Your Staff—Or You—Knows Their Presidential History

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Yes, the Twitter announcement was a mess, but that’s not what bothered me. What bothered me was this, five minutes and 46 seconds into Gov. Ron DeSantis’s long-awaited entry into the race for the White House…

(05:46)
We must return normalcy to our communities. America’s a sovereign country. Our borders must be respected. We cannot have foreigners pouring into our country illegally by the millions. We cannot allow drug cartels to poison our population with fentanyl. Public deserves safe communities and law and order must be maintained in American cities. We can’t have inmates running the asylum, and we must reject attacks on the men and women of law enforcement.

Normalcy??? The word was invented by then U.S. Senator Warren G. Harding when he ran for President in 1920. (The proper word was and is “normality.”) “Back to Normalcy” became his campaign slogan and is forever associated with Harding, who won election easily and went on to be regarded as one the nation’s worst Presidents, though historians are grudgingly coming to accept that he wasn’t a bad as his racist predecessor, Woodrow Wilson.

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Boy, Is The Pro-Trans Mania Leading Us In Strange Places Or What? Now It Has Conservatives Accusing “The Life Of Brian” Of Not Being Bold Enough….

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Well, I sure didn’t see THIS coming.

When the Monty Python satire “The Life of Brian” was released in 1979, conservative groups, calling it blasphemous, called for protests and boycotts in the U.S. and Great Britain. Now, as two of the living and not-completely-senile members of the comedy troupe, Eric Idle and John Cleese, prepare to launch a stage version of the movie, conservatives are complaining that they aren’t willing to make the adaptation edgy enough.

In one scene that has taken on more significance lately than it seemed to have 40 years ago, a discussion between “People’s Front of Judea” members Stan (played by Idle, on the left above) and Reg (Cleese) involves Stan saying that he wants to be known as Loretta and to have babies. ‘It’s every man’s right to have babies if you want them,” Stan insists. When Reg points out that, as a man, he can’t have babies, Stan protests, “Don’t you oppress me.”

To hear conservatives describe the scene now, one would think it was the funniest scene in the film. It wasn’t even the funniest scene involving the People’s Front of Judea. But I digress: apparently after trial readings of the script for the stage version, Idle and Cleese decided that they should cut the bit.

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Easy Call: The Target Boycott Is Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 55 Comments

Most boycotts are unethical; the threatened Target boycott is worse than most.

Target is one of the largest American general-merchandise retailers, with more than 1,900 stores nationwide. Every year, for more than a decade, it has offered products celebrating Pride Month. This year, taking advantage of the pro-trans fad, it is selling female bathing suits with a “tuck” feature to accommodate biological men identifying as women—you know, like Lia Thomas.

Ew.

However, such products are legal, and if Target offers them and customers buy them, it is not the business or concern of customers who don’t want to buy them. Yet this year’s Target collection has generated threats of a national boycott as well as, according to Target, actions rsiking the safety of its staff. The company told the Wall Street Journal that people have confronted workers in stores, knocked down Pride merchandise displays and put threatening posts on social media using video recorded from inside stores.

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Ethics Dunce: Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy [Link Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

There is no way not to take yesterday’s public warning from the nation’s top health official as ominous, indeed sinister. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy expounded on the risks of social media to children and teens, citing possible “harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” The remarkable 19-page advisory, begins by acknowledging that the effects of social media on adolescent mental health are not well understood, and even that social media can be beneficial to “some users.” It then goes on to argue ,“There are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”

And thus the U.S. Surgeon General lays the groundwork for government censorship, despite admitting that there is insufficient hard data to support his conclusions. Parental supervision is not enough for this government, as we have already seen in multiple settings. After all, “it takes a village,” the village that one side of the current culture wars is trying to define includes treating words and expression as “harm” from which people must be kept “safe.” Predictably, the near-completely compliant national news media is behind such government appropriation of parental authority, in this as well as other matters.

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Oh Great, Just What We Needed: “Nick Sandmann II: Citi Bike Karen”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Surely you recall the Nick Sandmann episode? That’s when a young Catholic school student visiting the Lincoln Memorial was confronted by a Native American activist who got in his face while the high school student’s group was trapped between protesters, and because a single photograph appeared to show Sandmann “smirking” (and because he was wearing a MAGA cap), he was called a racist by various pundits and reporters on NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN,The Guardian, Huffington Post, NPR, Slate, The Hill, Gannett News, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Several alleged comic, like Bill Maher, also tarred the boy as a racist. CNN, the Post, NBC and others ended up settling laws suits after Sandmann’s lawyer sued for defamation The full video showed conclusively that the Native American activist was the aggressor, and that.Sandmann’s “smirk” was simply a momentary expression of discomfort while he was placed in a difficult position.

As in the cases of the Mike Brown shooting, the George Floyd death, Kyle Rittenhouse, and now Daniel Penny, currently facing a possible manslaughter trial for killing a black, mentally-ill homeless man who was threatening subway passengers in New York City, the media’s reflex attitude in any ambiguous confrontation between a white American and a member of a currently sanctified minority group is to assume the white individual is at fault and indulging his or her racist beliefs. After all, as the late Leslie Gore might have sung if she were an anti-white racist, “That’s the Way Whites Are.”

Now we have another example, the Saga of “Citi Bike Karen.” The video above went viral on social media showing a pregnant woman named Sarah Comrie arguing with young man about a Citi Bike that he was trying to take away from her. As Comrie protested and cried for help, she is heckled and intimidated by a group of five blacks surrounding her. Finally, she gave up and rented another bike.

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The Problem Isn’t The Poem But The School And The Teachers Who Would Teach It

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Poet Amanda Gorman’s interminable poem “The Hill We Climb,” read by the poetess at Joe Biden’s Inauguration, has apparently been removed from the curriculum of elementary schools in Miami-Dade County, Florida as inappropriate for grade-schoolers. It took an objection from a single parent to get the job done, which the mainstream media thinks is significant—you know, a single complaint is enough to “ban” literature. It is significant, but not in the way they think. It is significant because it shows how few parents are actively engaged in their children’s education and properly on the look-out for political indoctrination in the schools.

The poem is inappropriate for sixth grade and under even if it were taught competently and objectively. I could see the thing being used productively in high school, for example to teach what agitprop is, how events are framed differently by various political factions, or to show what bad poetry is. Unfortunately, using “The Hill We Climb” appropriately requires a level of skill and objectivity most teachers lack, and a degree of trust today’s teaching profession doesn’t deserve.

Now here is the poem:

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