The up-scale retailer Hammacher Schlemmer is battling it out with The Sharper Image in the high-priced Chritsmas gifts, toys food items and decorations market for people who literally have money to burn. I’m especially impressed with the golf ball-locating glasses, the Belgian Chocolate Hot Cocoa Bombs that “explode with flavor” in a cup of hot milk, at only $5 a bomb, and the “first marble run with a track that is suspended in mid-air for only $199.95. However, what caught the ethicist’s eye was the “Your Year to Remember” wall art, which commemorates a birthday or anniversary with coins minted in that year, plus bold graphics that list “major news events” along with pop culture and sports happenings.
For some strange reason, the catalogue designers chose 1968 as the year to display. You can’t make it out from the graphic above, but the major news events listed are…
When Ethics Alarms first covered the case of a Christian website designer who was prosecuted for refusing to design a website celebrating a same sex wedding, I wrote at the top, “I will state up front that I am confident that this decision will get to the U.S. Supreme Court, and that if and when it does, it will be reversed.”
Now the case has indeed arrived at the Supreme Court. Its likely reversal (the website designer, a trial and a appeals court ruled, could not refuse to design a website celebrating a same-sex wedding) is being blamed by the LGBTQ suck-up media on all those evil conservatives who have invaded the Court since it ducked the matter of Christian baker Jack Phillips, who refused to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. SCOTUS decided in favor of Phillips on technical rather than substantive grounds, with a waffling majority opinion by Justice Kennedy, who specialized in such things. Kennedy is gone, but the reason the web designer is likely to win isn’t the change in the composition of the Court, but because the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was dead wrong when it ruled in 2021 that Lorie Smith and her company, 303 Creative, violated a Colorado law by refusing to create a website for a same sex union.
A new 16-member committee was charged with voting on the Hall of Fame membership cases of eight select players who had failed to acquire the necessary number of votes in their years on the main Hall ballots, which are cast by, ugh, baseball’s sportswriters. The results of their deliberations were announced yesterday: of the seven, only one, former Blue Jays first baseman Fred McGriff received the required twelve votes. He is deserving beyond a doubt, but the bigger story and even better news from an ethics perspective is that Barry Bonds, the King of the Steroid Cheats, the game’s career and single season record-holder in home runs, was rejected again. Also seeing their otherwise Hall-worthy career achievements rejected were Bond’s fellow PED-tarnished colleagues Roger Clemens and Rafael Palmeiro, both of whom, like Bonds, received few votes from the committee members.
On Thanksgiving Day, Shannon Epstein, 25, climbed aboard a Spirit Airlines flight headed from New Orleans to New Jersey. However, after the plane left the gate but before it could take off, Epstein allegedly began causing a scene, accusing a Latina family seated near her of “smuggling cocaine.”
Because of the wild accusation, airport officials decided to redirect the plane back to the gate so that Epstein could be removed. However, she refused to cooperate, reports say. When deputies tried to force her to deplane, she became “extremely combative,” said Capt. Jason Rivarde of the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office.
During a scuffle with six deputies at Louis Armstrong International Airport, Epstein supposedly caused several injuries. She has been accused of biting one officer in the arm to such an extent that she broke the skin. She has also been accused of kicking another officer in the groin.
Many other news sources including NBC News, Yahoo! and The New York Post are headlining this story and giving it far more circulation and attention than the typical “wacko goes nuts on an airplane” tale.
Why do Shannon Epstein’s antics matter? They don’t. She’s irrelevant to the nation, national security, the economy and the culture. Thousands of more substantive crimes have been committed by similarly insignificant people since she had her meltdown.
At halftime in the Brigham Young University (BYU) and Stanford University’s (Stanford) football game in California, Stanford’s band devoted its halftime show to insulting the Mormon faith The skit was called “Gay Chicken,” and featured a mock wedding ceremony of two women,using the words of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints marriage ceremony that declares a man and woman united “for time and all eternity.” In the skit, the wedding officiant quoted Genesis 1:28 and directed both women to “be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.”
Gee, that sounds so hilarious I can’t imagine why the many Mormons in the crowd would feel attacked! They should have been laughing their heads off! Well, some people just have no sense of humor….
Kwame Anthony Appiah, the New York Time’s advice column ethicist who really is an ethicist, was atsked with this query from “Name Withheld”:
I am a Black woman and I signed up as a mentor for a law-student-mentoring program at my alma mater. I made a request for a Black mentee, but I was paired with a white woman. Now I’m second-guessing participating in the program. Black attorneys make up less than 5 percent of all attorneys and continue to face horrific experiences in law school and in the legal community.
This is whom I envisioned myself supporting when I registered for the program as a recent graduate. I imagined deep conversations about law professors and law-firm culture, and sharing how I’ve learned to navigate them as a Black woman. Not only will these conversations not apply to my mentee the same way, but I can’t help wondering if assisting them will ultimately contribute to my own oppression.
There are so many factors in her favor that I don’t really want to help give her even more of a leg up in my free time. On the other hand, I don’t have anything against her, and law school is universally scary during the first year. Should I be thinking about this differently? Is it wrong to bow out?
In my view, this is the gold standard of Christmas carols. Nobody know for certain who write the soaring melody. It might have been Handel.
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I apologize for the various WordPress glitches of late. They are fooling around with the software again. Now, on every draft post, I have to put up with idiotic suggestions from the platform on what to write about. Just now, it was, “Are you more of a night or morning person?” Get off my screen, you meddling fools! I don’t need your pedestrian input to find inspirations for an ethics blog’s content.
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The Twitter censorship story reminded me again of how biased, cowardly and dead wrong the left-ish commenters and silent readers here were over the past few years to flee Ethics Alarms because it accurately, fairly and objectively figured out how unjustified and sinister their favorite party’s treatment of President Trump, how contrived and rigged the Russian collusion investigation was, how destructive the two partisan impeachments were, how dangerous the mainstream media’s transformation into a propaganda weapon had become, and how ethically rotten their favorite party was. Ethics Alarms was right, they were wrong, and if even one of the self-exiled who pulled themselves up to their full height, stuck their defiant chins in the air, and accused me of “drinking the Kool-Aid” had an atom of courage or integrity, they would apologize and ask to have their commenting privileges restored. Instead, they remain enablers of the attacks on individual rights and democratic institutions by their apathy, acquiescence, and denial. People are always accusing me of being “upset” about the ethics issues we cover here. I almost never am. This, however, pisses me off.
1. Hopeless, but admirable.…Since Google has traveled from “Don’t Be Evil” to Big Tech ethics villainy, a new search engine has been launched, Freespoke, as a non-totalitarianism-enabling alternative. The problem with all of these competitors, like DuckDuckGo, is that they just aren’t as reliable. Still, I’ll give this one a chance. Here’s a good sign: a search for”ethics blog” turned up Ethics Alarms on the first page, 7th in line. On Google, the same search placed Ethics Alarms on the sixth page, after many sites that receive far less traffic and several that are functionally dead, like the Legal Ethics Forum, which once was one of my favorite resources. Its last post was last January, yet its two pages ahead of EA. Gee, I wonder why that would be? Looks like I can’t blame all of the reduced traffic here on pusillanimous wokesters… Continue reading →
“Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
—-Former President Donald Trump, simultaneously making a fool of himself and fulfilling Democrats’ most extreme scaremongering regarding his candidacy on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Maybe he reads Ethics Alarms, and sensed that I was beginning to question my hasty designation of him as the 2022 Asshole of the Year after Kanye West’s sudden emergence as a Hitler fanboy and a Holocausr denier. If that was Trump’s objective, he succeeded: that statement laps West, in part because Ye is just a publicity-seeking, unstable rapper with a insatiable thirst for publicity, and nobody should pay much attention to him. Trump is far, far more influential, but is just as reckless in abusing his prominence.
That statement is signature significance and res ipsa loquitur; the latter, because no one should have to have explained to them why it is irresponsible, unhinged, and stupid, and the latter because only a politician who has lost all contact with reality would say something like that, ever, even once. And I’m not going to explain it. If you’re smart enough to come here, you’re smart enough to figure out what wrong with Trump’s quote without assistance.
In the first installment of this year’s Christmas music ethics review, I only plumbed the depths of the insulting lyrics in the Unethical Lyrics category. A much larger and more irritating sub-category lies ahead: incompetent Christmas song lyrics.Before I start, I must mention a lyric that now ruins a wonderful Christmas hymn for me, thanks to my sister. When we were children, she commented after hearing a rendition of the 19th century carol “O Holy Night,” “Why would I want to fall on my knees? It hurts to fall on your knees!” Then, year after year, every time we heard the song, she would interject a loud “OW!” after the lines,
Fall on your knees!O hear the angel voices!
I can’t hear the song now without hearing the “OW!” as well. But that lyric isn’t the lyricist’s fault. These are… Continue reading →
This is going to be only one post when it ought to be about five. I’m restraining myself; here is another example of a story that has me in a self-flagellating mood because I have so mismanaged my life, time, opportunities and talents that I am reduced to fulminating futilely on an obscure blog that does nothing to effect any substantive change, at a period in our culture’s journey when ignorance and malevolence threaten the nation’s essence. Meanwhile, the likes of Alyssa Milano, Milo Yiannopoulos, and social media “influencers ” have millions of followers who heed their “wisdom.” Continue reading →
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