I guess I should start off by admitting that I have never found Roseanne Barr sufficiently witty, original or entertaining to make up for the ugliness of her world view, her horrible nasal screech, and her unjustified belief in her own brilliance.
I never could stand her hit sitcom or sit through an entire episode, so the reboot was about as welcome to me as most reboots (like the sad zombie version of “Murphy Brown”), but even a little less. When she managed to get herself fired and transformed into a pariah for making a racist slur against Barack Obama’s top advisor (and Michelle’s pal) Valerie Jarrett, tweeting in 2018 that Jarrett was the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Planet of the Apes movies, I didn’t feel sorry for her. The tweet was racist, and it was a mark of Barr’s arrogance, built up over years of being excessively praised and rewarded for being “outrageous”—I file her in the same general category as similarly unfunny shock-jocks like Howard Stern—that no ethics alarms went off when she thought it would be hilarious to compare an Obama staffer to a monkey. It was also stunningly stupid. From my ethicist perspective, Barr made the offense worse by claiming that she had no idea that Jarrett was black. Sure, Roseanne. Continue reading →
What’s going on here? As is often the case, it depends on who you are and what your perspective is.
The House voted by large margins to adopt resolutions that would overturn a two laws passed by the District of Columbia’s City Council. It was the first attempt to interfere with the District’s “home rule’ privileges in more than 30 years, when Congress overruled a local law in 1991 to annul a measure that would have allowed the construction of an apartment and office complex 20 feet above the city’s downtown height limit. Nothing in the District is allowed to be taller than the Washington Monument, and that was considered a potential wound to the Capital’s mystique and the honor due to its namesake.
Congress can exercise authority over D.C. local affairs, according to the District Clause of the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17). Congress reviews all D.C. legislation before it can become law (the members seldom read them, or course, usually acting as rubber stamps) and can change or reveres D.C. legislation. It is a power that Congress hesitates to use, however, especially when Democrats are in the majority. The two measures opposed this time, however were just asking for a slapdown. One allowed non-citizens to vote in local elections, a recent fad in woke cities, D.C.’s Revised Criminal Code Act of 2022, which would lower penalties for a number of violent criminal offenses.
The reaction of D.C.’s race-obsessed political class was so predictable it wasn’t even a challenge. Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s nonvoting House delegate, reacted to the House vote by playing the plantation card, saying, “D.C. residents, a majority of whom are Black and brown, are either unworthy or incapable of governing themselves.” Continue reading →
I heard Carly Simon’s hit (she co-wrote the lyrics) in the car today; I hadn’t listened to it or thought about it for decades. When I first listened to the song, I just took it as more whiny Sixties “our parents don’t know how to live and we’re still stuck with the world and values they created” lament. Now, after being married myself and actually fighting through life, I realize its a much smarter and perceptive song than I thought, and one that raises a lot of complex ethics issues. I’d be very interested in the commentariat’s thoughts about… Continue reading →
Here is a second Comment of the Day on the brief post about the unforgivable “Proud Family” race-huckstering video circulated by the Disney wokesters. The company and the brand deserves to suffer for this, and it looks it will. JutGory’s take is significantly different from that of the previous COTD on this topic.
Two bits of information that haven’t appeared here before:
“40 acres and a mule” wasn’t a broken promise as much as it was an irresponsible one. It didn’t come from Congress or the President; there was no law passed. That old softy General Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, and it directed confiscated Confederate land to be distributed to freed slaves. (No mule is mentioned.) By June, the land had been allocated to 40,000 freed slaves, but there were 4 million of them. The war was officially over by then, and the government wasn’t bound by a single general’s promise, nor could it be.
Disney’s propaganda piece repeats the “hand up, don’t shoot!” Big Lie from the Michael Brown affair….just like Black Lives Matters.
Slavery did create a certain amount of wealth in the country for sure.
But, I am sure that those who created this video do not want to examine the true nature of that wealth creation.
Slaves were treated like beasts of burden. They do not magically generate wealth. There is an inherent COST to BENEFIT analysis that must be done.
And, slaveholders did that. Whatever wealth that was built by slaves came with an economic COST. Slavery did not mean slave labor was free.
You could just as easily say (taking a cue from the video) mule labor built this country.
You also need to look at the fragility of wealth. I have read hundreds of “slave narratives” (the interviews from the WPA don’t count as much as “narratives” as those of Booker Washington, Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman) and one of the recurring themes in a lot of them interviews of ex-slaves was that Union troops plundered Southern Plantations as they moved through. They took food, property, etc. as they went through the South and freed up plantations. Continue reading →
Today, February 9, has several important ethics and cultural markers. It was the date in 1964 that Ed Sullivan presented the Beatles to American television, and nothing was ever the same. How wonderful it was to have a single national meeting place every Sunday night where popular culture could be shared and passed on to multiple generations! That’s impossible today. I watch tapes of that episode of Ed’s show laughing and crying at the same time. The screaming! The crazed joy on the faces of those girls! It was nuts, and it was somehow marvelous—such innocence, such magic, stupid though it was. We will never, never see anything like that again.
Another marker was in 1971, when the Hall of Fame put Satchel Paige on the ballot, leading to his eventual admission after being voted in by sportswriters. He was unquestionably a great pitcher, but he didn’t make it to the majors until he was far past his prime, indeed 42 years old, making him the oldest rookie in MLB history—and he was still excellent, serving in relief for the World Champion 1948 Cleveland Indians. Baseball’s color line, of course, had kept Paige locked in the Negro Leagues, along with many other players who could have been stars in the big leagues, until Jackie Robinson integrated the sport in 1947. Other Negro League greats followed Paige into the Hall despite never playing in the majors. It is often forgotten now, but it was Ted Williams, in his Hall of Fame acceptance speech, who started the movement to recognize the Negro Leagues players by making the point that their omission continued a great injustice.
1. The rest of the story...Curmie alerted me that Cardinal Local Schools reversed its administrators’ unethical decision to cancel the high school musical, “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” because of aspects of the show that those same administrators should have been aware of when the show was was chosen for production. Music Theater International, which owns the licensing rights, and the show’s authors agreed to 23 requested revisions including a different song to take the place of the controversial “erection” number. Curmie writes, tongue firmly in cheek, “I’m sure the national humiliation they endured was completely irrelevant to this change of course.”
I like to think, in its small way, Ethics Alarms helped; the big assist goes to the original production’s cast members who spoke out.
I personally hold the position that if a school is going to have to make 23 substantive changes in a show to find it acceptable for its performers and audience, the school should find a different musical. Samuel Beckett would agree with me. Continue reading →
“Unrestricted free speech, paradoxically, results in less speech, not more.”
—-Yoel Roth, the former head of Twitter’s Office of Trust and Safety, testifying before the the House Oversight Committee.
Imagine: Twitter had someone who thinks like that running its content review operation.
Free speech may result in less speech in a setting where participants are required to defend their positions and opinions, and cannot claim the comforting protection of an ideological echo chamber. Roth was unable to distinguish between manner of speech, which requires moderation, and censoring speech for content, which is what Twitter did to please and placate its progressive users.
First, Roth said that “Twitter found that users were unhappy with the company’s approach to content moderation and that this … dissatisfaction drove people away from the service. This has consequences for what we mean by free speech on social media.” Then he said, “Again and again, we saw the speech of a small number of abusive users drive away countless others.”
Which was it, abusive speech, or content? As we have learned from watching student-driven censorship on college campuses, speech that counters leftist cant and challenges progressive positions is “unsafe” and thus abusive. A free society must have free speech, and that means that members of that society need to learn to communicate and accept that the marketplace of ideas is challenging, intense, and even frightening.
Roth literally said that Twitter believed you have to destroy free speech in order to save it—and he didn’t even realize how Orwellian that is.
That’s Procrustes portrayed above, in both of his favored acts of mayhem. I checked: I’ve used the term “Procrustean” several times here, but never was kind enough to explain the term’s origins, which is what makes it cool.
Procrustes was the nastiest of the bad guys the mythological Greek hero Theseus encountered on his way to killing the Minotaur in Crete. Procrustes would invite a weary traveler to take refuge for the night, offering him sustenance and a bed—but the bed was a deadly trap. Procrustes guaranteed every guest would fit the bed neatly, but that was because it converted into a rack, stretching anyone who was too short. If a guest was too tall, Procrustes just hacked off enough inches from the feet up to ensure that the bed would fit him, too. Theseus killed the psycho, but the word procrustean eventually entered legal lexicon to describe an argument that illogically squeezed facts or omitted them to make a theory fit the law.
I thought of old Procrustes immediately when I read that Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in the District Court for the District of Columbia suggested after a hearing that the Thirteenth Amendment might have created a right to abortions. Wait, you well might ask, “How could an amendment created specifically to make slavery illegal, passed right after the Civil War, be construed to enshrine abortion as a right?” The short answer is, “It can’t and doesn’t.” The stupid, intellectually dishonest answer, however, is the one that the previously responsible female judge has decided to promote.
Once again, Michelle Goldberg pulls into the lead for “Worst and Most Biased New York Times Columnist.” This is impressive, because so many Times columnists are unethical blights on national soul. Paul Krugman, Gail Collins, Charles M. Blow, Maureen Dowd, Jamelle Bouie…it’s an awful group; I could teach a “Bias Makes You Stupid” ethics course using only their columns as materials. I doubt that even these pundits would be foolish enough to claim Biden is a “great President.” Here I am, still comparing records to determine if he’ll be regarded as the worst President ever, and she claims that.
I try to rate Presidents by their own standards, and by his own stated standards, Biden has been a failure. He said he needed to bring a divided country together, and by fully placing himself in thrall to the most radical segments of the Left, he has made the partisan and ideological divide worse, and dangerously so. Like Obama, his policies and rhetoric have exacerbated racial tensions. Long a supporter of the military, he has overseen a brutal weakening of the Armed Forces, by making woke indoctrination a priority over national defense. A supposed women’s rights advocate, Biden has allowed trans-mania to undermine women’s sports. While giving lip service to Constitutional Rights, his administration has used its power and influence to illegally urge private entities to censor speech. He has allowed the National Debt to explode; he has presided over such extreme inflation that wage increases cannot keep up. The horde of illegal immigrants pouring over the border has never been more overwhelming, yet he allows his Vice President and Cabinet members to claim that “the border is secure.” He has openly endorsed racial discrimination in his appointments. After joining in the Democratic chorus that Trump “undermined democratic institutions,” Biden has used the “bully pulpit” institution to focus hate on political opponents. His Justice Department allowed illegal harassment of Supreme Court members. The FBI has been revealed as partisan and corrupt. Under his Transportation Secretary there have been more crises in the system than at any time since 9/11. His fecklessness in international relations allowed Putin to feel secure in invading Ukraine. Biden has harmed the nation with purely symbolic and otherwise useless climate change measures, like cancelling the XL Pipeline. Crime rates are soaring; and worst of all, he has indulged his party’s increasing thirst for constraining personal liberties, free expression and dissent.
I could go on, but it is exhausting and depressing.
The text of the speech as released is here; it does not, of course, contain the usual Biden word-slurring, stumbles and botches.
In case you want to save time, I’ll give you a short summary: last night’s State of the Union Speech was as unethical and despicable as any I can recall. I would have to go back and review some others, notably some of Bill Clinton’s to be certain, and you know, sock drawer. It doesn’t really matter whether it was “the most” unethical; it was unethical enough to be disgraceful, and to leave the nation no better, and quite possibly worse, than before President Biden delivered it.
The photo above, which I have posted at least three times before and intend to keep posting until Biden is out of office or drooling in a home somewhere, is not from last night’s speech, but from his democratic norm-shattering “Soul of the Nation” speech, or as I call it, his ‘anyone who opposes me and my party is an evil fascist and an enemy of the state’ speech. It is relevant because no President who makes a speech like that can credibly or ethically come back less than five months later and say, as he did last night, Continue reading →
“Does the State of the Union speech matter anymore? Here’s what an expert says,” asks a headline at Yahoo News. The “expert” is Jeff Shesol, a historian, former-deputy chief speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, and a partner at West Wing Writers. Naturally Yahoo, whose bias is open and unrestrained, made sure it chose a partisan Democrat for its expert. Heaven forbid that it would seek an objective opinion, which would have to lay the destruction of the State of the Union as anything more than a needless reminder of how dysfunctional the federal government has become squarely at the previous Speaker’s feet.
The one bit of condign justice, to again borrow George Will’s favorite term, is that Nancy managed to destroy what was once a useful Presidential tool for building public consensus and, most important of all, bolstering trust in our Republic so thoroughly that her own party’s President can’t make use of it—and he needs the help desperately.
Ethics Alarms 