In yesterday’s post, “Stop Making Me Defend Disney!,” Ethics Alarms looked at the controversy over Disney’s live-action version of its 1989 classic animated film “The Little Mermaid” that casts a black performer, Halle Bailey (not Halle Berry) as the Hans Christian Anderson heroine. Well, this one is moving fast.
One of the many fans who object to imposing “diversity, equity and inclusion” on “The Little Mermaid” announced via Twitter that technology was now available that could digitally transform Bailey into a white, red-haired mermaid just as Disney had transformed its original Ariel into a black one:
This story is simultaneously inspiring and horrifying.
A sixth-grade class in the Davisville Middle School in the North Kingstown School District in Rhode Island was being subjected to a teacher (so far, unnamed) who was cruel to the boys and sexually harassed the girls, leering at them, giving them pet names, and asking them to dance. The teacher was also a coach, and reportedly told the class that he had received complaints from parents in the past without any consequences. The continuing flirting and sexual innuendos made the girls in the class uncomfortable, so the next year, as seventh graders, some of the boys reported the teacher’s conduct to their parents and adminsitrator at the school. All the adults shrugged the complaints off, the boys say. Continue reading →
Disney has a tough job, trying to maintain its roles as a great middle class cultural icon and celebrator of Americana in the midst of social upheaval and culture wars. It couldn’t be doing a lousier, lazier, more destructive job of it, either, but that is, as they say, neither here nor there. The issue of the day is whether Disney deserves to be pilloried for its new teaser trailer for the live-action version of its animated classic “The Little Mermaid.”
It does not.
Conservative media is now resolutely anti-House of Mouse, so it is actively gloating over the detected (but inconclusive) negative reaction to the first look at the film scheduled to hit theaters in May of 2003. Ed Driscoll at Instapundit writes, “Disney in particular absolutely loves …to both gin-up hype, and wave away large scale fan hatred of their latest reboot.” But since fans haven’t seen the film yet, since it hasn’t been finished, “large scale hatred’ is an unwarranted assumption. At The Daily Wire, it is implied that there are widespread objections to the red-headed Ariel of the 1989 animated film being played by Halle Bailey, an African-American, and that fans of the original film who don’t like the color change are being called “racists” by the Woke and wonderful.
Well, I don’t know what else I can do to express my shame and revulsion at having a Harvard diploma. I’ve turned it to the wall, and lowered it to the floor. I boycotted my class reunion this year, and wrote why in my class notes. This latest despicable breach of ethics and academic integrity is still baffling to me. Stelter proved himself over and over again to be an unethical journalist, a fake expert on journalism ethics, a transparently biased hack and a liar incapable of admitting either his misconduct or that of his employer, CNN. Even the title of his weekly show, “Reliable Sources,” was a lie: Stelter’s reports were reliably unreliable. He did not, as his show promised, cover and critique news media conduct, misdeeds and controversies. Increasingly, he focused his criticism only on Fox News, while his own network was lapping the field in scandals.
What does it tell us, then, about Harvard, its Kennedy School (which Bill O’Reilly constantly boasted about attending for a few months) and its Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy that they would issue this press release? I hope the answer is obvious to all:
Boy, that’s a headline I never thought I’d write. I detest Jimmy Kimmel. I loathe him. He is the most revolting of all the Left-Licking late night and cable progressive comics, worse than Colbert, Maher, Samantha Bee, all of them. All of them combined. He is an ongoing blight on the ethics of American society, and yet he is self-righteous in the process. I long ago decided that the Emmys were even more rigged and less ethical than other award shows, so I never watch the broadcast. Kimmel was the host this year, so that made the show even less appealing, if indeed that is possible. Thus I missed an incident which, had I witnessed it in real time, would have ensured that I wrote this post before this one, from yesterday: “A Case Study Of How Race-Baiting And Race-Bullying Undermines “Diversity” And “Inclusion”: The New Yorker’s Cartoons.”
For they are essentially about the same phenomenon.
What happened was this: Will Arnett, before presenting the nominees for best writing in a comedy series, dragged a supposedly unconscious and drunken Kimmel onto the stage with him. Arnett told the audience that Kimmel had lost again as a nominee in the late night comedy category, and “he just got into the skinny margaritas back there.” The host who is chagrined at not getting a award in the show he is hosting is an old, old joke: Bob Hope used it every year at the Oscars. Kimmel was just adding a new wrinkle. Continue reading →
Wow. CNN starting to criticize Democrats is remarkable enough, but the Washington Post biting the metaphorical hand that feeds it?
Theories abound. Maybe, as my freind Tom Fuller says, the Post editors have concluded that “there is some shit I will not eat.” Maybe Biden’s Speech From Hell that had fascist techniques all over it while calling half the nation fascist was too much even for these long-time accessories. I don’t know, but yesterday the Post editors erupted with rare disgust over the unethical machinations of Democrat John Fetterman, who is, essentially, trying to cheat his way to a victory in the crucial Pennsylvania U.S. Senate race.
Maybe what aroused the Post’s dormant sense of ethics was Fetterman’s absurd pandering to the pro-abortion crown in a 9/11 campaign rally—kind of appropriate, since 9/11 was about taking innocent lives just like abortion is—in which he shouted, “My name is John FetterWoman!” to a cheering crowd of idiots. Fetterman reiterated his support for abortion until birth, and pledged that he would vote to codify Roe v. Wade, which makes no sense since Roe outlawed most abortions after the first trimester.
“Women are the reason we can win. Let me say that again: Women are the reason we win.” Fetterman told the crowd. “Don’t piss women off!”
To quote Olson Johnson in “Blazing Saddles,” “Now who can argue with that?” Continue reading →
The cartoon above is from the current issue of The New Yorker, the woke urban sophisticate’s bible, renowned for its witty, esoteric cartoons since its founding in the flapper era. And yet as woke and progressive and Democratic Party-bootlicking-addicted as it is, The New Yorker rarely includes black characters in its cartoons, and hasn’t since its inception. I checked the most recent compendium of New Yorker cartoons covering eight decades and thousands and thousand of humorous drawings. In only a handful (out of thousands and thousands) do cartoon characters of color even appear in crowd scenes and backgrounds. If they do, they look like the male character above from the only cartoon from the current New Yorker issue to show black characters at all. There were 14 cartoons in the issue, and in the outlier above, blacks are portrayed as white people with tans. I’m sure some professor somewhere will pronounce that representation as offensive anyway. Continue reading →
Esteemed commenter Extradimensional Cephalopod spent an admirable amount of time and effort last week exploring and debating the desirability (or not) of ranked choice voting systems. As a special gift to Ethics Alarms readers, E.C. summed up all of the issues in a single epic comment, and I have added his addendum to that comment as well.
Alright, I’ve collected the arguments people have brought against ranked choice voting and condensed my counterpoints. What do you think?
1. RCV is more complicated than voters can follow.
Counterpoints: Not if we educate them competently, like we already sometimes do with regular ballots. If they’re not capable of comprehending ranked preferences and a ballot that accepts them, then their vote would be meaningless noise even under a first-past-the-post system. If that describes most voters, we’ve got a bigger problem. However, standardized testing indicates that many children can understand and fill out bubble-sheets correctly, so adults should be alright. Continue reading →
Several readers mentioned that EA did not have contain any mention of September 11, 2001 yesterday. The fact is that I didn’t have anything new or perceptive to say. I was also nauseated into paralysis by Virginia’s Mark Warner (D), one of my state’s Senators, appearing on “Face the Nation”with the assignment of comparing a sneak terrorist attack from a foreign country that killed 2,977 Americans to the one-day riot by a mob of demented assholes carrying sticks and bear-spray. Asked by CBS News anchor Margaret Brennan’s question about where the country is 21 years after the terror attacks, the chair chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee couldn’t resist resorting to his desperate party’s current strategy of fearmongering about “election deniers” as existential threats to the nation. “The stunning thing to me is here we are 20 years later and the attack on the symbol of our democracy is not coming from terrorists, but it came from literally insurgents attacking the Capitol on January 6,” Warner said, confirming his reservation for an eternal place in Hell. “So I believe we are stronger, I believe our intelligence community has performed remarkably, I think the threat of terror has diminished, I think we still have new challenges in terms of nation [and] state challenges,” he continued. “Russia and longer term, a technology competition with China, but I do worry about some of the activity in this country where the election deniers, the insurgency that took place on January 6, that’s something I hope we can see that same kind of unity of spirit.”
1. To be fair, Sen. Warner’s comments still didn’t bother me as much as another Kamala Harris horrifying lies-and-babble-fest, which I didn’t see live. Harris’s latest occurred on “Meet the Press,” which I have ceased watching permanently until, at very least, super-hack Chuck Todd is replaced as host. Todd asked Harris about the ongoing Biden-made crisis at the southern border where a record number of illegal immigrants are entering the United States. “Would you call the border secure?,” he queried, perhaps referencing the recent asinine assertion by the Secretary of Homeland Security that indeed the porous border is secure. Harris answered that “the border is secure, but we also have a broken immigration system, in particular over the last four years before we came in, and it needs to be fixed.” That’s a new “It isn’t what it is” dodge: Trump is responsible for the current crisis at the border? Harris’s claim that the border was “secure” provoked a rare expression of amazement from a mainstream media talking head at a Democrat’s lie, and from Chuck Todd, no less, who usually sees his role as a propaganda facilitator.
I feel like I can’t let baseball off the hook while I’m being hard on the NFL today.
Of course, football’s ethical problem (well, one of the many) is that it allows too many players on the field who are killers, rapists and thugs, while baseball’s ethical problem is that it habitually changes the rules of the game rather than make the players accept the consequences of their own flaws.
You know, like Democrats…
Beginning in 2023, Major League Baseball will enforce a set of restrictions it claims “will return the game to a more traditional aesthetic” by outlawing extreme defensive shifts. The goal is to encourage batters to put more balls in play rather than swing for the fences, a trend that has led to record numbers of strikeouts. The theory is that once they feel they have a better chance of getting a hit without knocking the ball out of the park, batter will try to make contact and thus hit more ground balls and line-drives, giving players in the field more opportunities to showcase their athleticism. The changes are: Continue reading →
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