More Strange Tales Of The Great Stupid: Calling All Hunchbacks!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I’ve written about this nonsense before, maybe too much, but I’m a stage director, dammit, and its important to me. Not unlike other realms I travel in, theater and show business generally is polluted by a lot of terrible ideas advocated by a lot of influential people whose intellect and breadth of experience is not sufficient for the amount of credibility they carry.

These are artists whose mission is creating entertaining and compelling theater, yet their craving for acceptance in the knee-jerk wokeness-obsessed bubble in which they work causes them to undermine their art for approval from fanatics who couldn’t care less about drama.

So now The Great Stupid has produced this: Gregory Doran, the outgoing head of the Royal Shakespeare Company, has decided that only disabled actors should now be cast as Richard III. Casting able-bodied actors for the role, which was written by Shakespeare as a deformed, twisted man traditionally portrayed as a hunchback, “would probably not be acceptable.”

Oh, “not acceptable” to who, you pathetic, grovelling fool? Audiences? I doubt it. The Wicked Woke are overwhelmingly from recent generations who are as likely to go to live theater, especially Shakespeare, as they would a Gregorian Chant concert. The playwright, one of the most freakishly perceptive human beings ever birthed? No, he would recognize your silly prejudice as the anti-artistic rot it is, and mock it with eloquence I can’t possibly approach. Continue reading →

A Mother’s Day Ethics Bouquet, 5/8/2022: For You, Mom, Even Though Ethics Wasn’t Your Long Suit…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

  • Don’t you think it’s odd that there isn’t a single really great song about mothers? There are lots of great father songs.
  • My mom, whom I think about every day and miss terribly, was wonderful in so many ways, but was almost as unethical as my father was ethical. It’s a tribute to his parenting that he communicated to my sister and me early on that this was just a quirk, and while mom had much to teach about love, loyalty and compassion, hers was not the ethical or moral compass to follow.
  • I just saw a man riding a real, honest-to-goodness velocipede in the church parking lot across from our house! I have never seen that in real life, only in photos and old movies.
  • The eighth of May, 1945, was  the day when German troops throughout Europe finally laid down their arms, and World War II, the worst catastrophe the modern world has ever suffered through, featuring the most unethical and cruel aggressors imaginable, finally came to an end. Evil easily could have triumphed; that it did not was as much a function of luck as anything else. This is always a day on which to draw a collective breath. Whew! That was a close one…

1. Funny, but stupid. This meme is fascinating.

It could easily be intended to mock the kind of hysterical distortions from the Left’s Supreme Court leak freakout—on that basis, I laughed when I saw it. However, it almost certainly IS one of those hysterical distortions, which reduce debate to an infantile level. I’m sure many progressives think it’s profound. [Pointer: Arthur in Maine] Continue reading →

The Dishonesty And Desperation Of “Pro-Choice” Advocates In The Wake Of The Dobbs Leak, Part I: Anything But The Issues

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Another one of the ironic boons from the despicable Supreme Court leak of Justice Alito’s draft majority opinion portending that Roe v. Wade is about to be overruled is how vividly it has exposed the intellectually dishonest and unethical nature of “pro choice” arguments. This comes as no surprise to anyone who has been following the abortion debate diligently, but in their fury and panic, abortion advocates are revealing just how weak their case is. They are also revealing that those who are willing to sacrifice nascent human lives for other objectives tend to have no compunction about using rationalizations, ad hominem attacks, classic logical fallacies and fearmongering as well as outright lies, when they finally have to defend their positions.

The reappearance of the costumes from “The Handmaiden’s Tale” is a neat symbol of the whole phenomenon. (How many of such protesters haven’t read Roe, the Alito draft, or Margaret Atwood’s novel? My guess: most of them.) To be fair, prominent Democrats like this guy endorsed the hysteria:

That delusion was apiece with the suggestion that women could force men to support abortion on demand by going on a sex strike. Similarly ducking the issues are the illegal demonstrations at the homes of Justices before it is even known who voted to end Roe, and President Biden’s moronic declaration in response to the leak that “this MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history—-in recent American history.”

Since Roe v. Wade has been almost unanimously regarded in legal and academic circles as a badly reasoned opinion (even Ruth Bader Ginsburg conceded it was a botch), the epitome of flagrant judicial activism and legislation by judges, those trying to defend the decision now have had to resort to distractions, diversions, straw men and fictional slippery slopes. “Next those fascists will ban inter-racial marriage and Brown v. Board of Education!” more than a few Democratic officials and pundits have proclaimed, apparently forgetting that just a few weeks ago they were demanding that Justice Thomas, the dean of the Court’s conservatives, recuse himself because of the activities of his very white wife.

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Details And Nuance In The Dartmouth/FIRE/College Republicans Collision

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The contretemps between the campus Republican group at Dartmouth, the college, and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education was discussed here a couple of days ago, using sources I thought sufficiently thorough. They weren’t nearly as thorough, however, as Ethics Alarms commenter Curmie, who performed a superb deep dive into the facts and competing narratives.

As you would expect with such careful research, his analysis is consequently more nuanced and fair than mine, though it reaches a conclusion regarding Dartmouth that is close enough to the Ethics Alarms version for horseshoes. I wish I had written the equivalent of Curmie’s analysis at the outset, but at least we have the fuller story now.

It’s too long for me to justify posting, but I’d rather send you to Curmie’s blog anyway: just click on this link: “Dartmouth Wins Three-Way Battle for Looking the Worst”

If you post your comments here, I promise to cross-post them on Curmie’s blog.

The No-White Men Allowed MBA Programs: An Ethics Inquiry

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I was considering making this an ethics quiz, but it would be too easy: of course graduate programs that practice gender and racial discrimination in admission are unethical, though the dead-ethics alarms administrators who approve such monstrosities apparently don’t think so. Thus this is an inquiry into who, what, when, and why, all addressing the question of how this could happen?

Perhaps I should rephrase that slightly: How the hell could this happen?

Yum! Brands, which owns Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and KFC, operated a franchise owner training and business degree program at two universities, the University of Louisville (where Jack Marshall Sr. attended college until he transferred) and Howard University. The Yum! Franchise Accelerator MBA was limited, according to its materials, to “underrepresented people of color and women.” Following a federal investigation, the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education announced in a letter last week that the two universities had agreed to make the “Yum! Franchise Accelerator Fellowship is open to all eligible students regardless of race, color, national origin, sex, disability, or age.”

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbid discrimination on the basis of race at institutions that receive federal funding. Did the two institutions miss it? It was in all the papers. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 forbids discrimination on the basis of sex. This, I thought, was also rather well-publicized. Not enough, apparently.

And yet here we are, or were.

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Saturday Ethics Shots, 5/7/2022: The Law, “The View,” Hillary, And An Idiot (Or More)

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Remember Walt Tuvell? He was the commenter from a few years ago that I banned for various (good) reasons, and he subsequently sued me in Massachusetts for “defamation.” I won the frivolous suit and the subsequent appeal (representing myself) at the cost of quite a bit of money and time, but with a renewed appreciation for how much the civil justice system is willing to bend over backwards to allow pro se litigants to have their day in court even when the justification for that day (or many days) is fanciful.

Well, last week the esteemed law professor Eugene Volokh discovered the case, and wrote at The Volokh Conspiracy:

I just came across a case that seriously considers the issue of whether (here, falsely) accusing someone of being an academic is defamatory. From Justice Christopher Barry-Smith in Tuvell v. Marshall (Mass. Super. Ct. 2017), a libel lawsuit that stemmed from a commenter banning controversy at the Ethics Alarms blog:

“Tuvell takes particular issue with Marshall’s statements in the Initial Post that the author of the email was an “academic” and that the “American Left” (which includes academics) “have gone completely off the ethics rails since November 8, 2016.” Even if Tuvell had been identified as the author of the email, these statements could not serve as a basis for a defamation claim. The term “academic,” even when used in this context, cannot be properly viewed as a statement that “would tend to hold the plaintiff up to scorn, hatred, ridicule or contempt, in the minds of any considerable and respectable segment in the community” and is therefore not defamatory. Phelan, 443 Mass. at 56 (emphasis added)….”

Good to know!

The complaint about my mistaken (BOY was it mistaken!) description of Walt as “an academic” was,remarkably, among the more legitimate of his defamation claims.

1. Speaking of Professor Volokh, he noted that the SCOTUS justice intimidation Jen Psaki proclaimed as no big deal is, in fact, illegal.under 18 U.S.C. § 1507:

  1. Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or
  2. with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty,
  3. pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or
  4. in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer, or
  5. with such intent uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence,
  6. shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

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Andrew Sullivan On The Dobbs Leak Freakout

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

It has been fascinating to watch Andrew Sullivan, a conservative turned Trump-deranged progressive during from about 2015 on, express his rising dismay at his adopted “side’s” drift to totalitarianism as it uses lies as metaphorical oars in the stream of public opinion.. Sullivan is too emotional to be a reliable pundit, but he’s smart and writes like an angel. His current essay about how Democrats and progressives have abandoned even the pretense of rationality is instructive.

He also mounts an impressive list of ridiculous statements by abortion fans and supposedly trustworthy progressive commentators that are signature significance. Nobody should trust people who say or write garbage like this. Ever. Here are some of Andrew’s gems, only some of which I had stumbled over earlier (the comments in parentheses are mine, not Sullivan’s):

  • Roxane Gay tweeted:“I have typed and deleted a great many comments What do you say when nine people can dictate what happens to your body? It’s ridiculous and hateful.” [That is not, of course, what a reversal of Roe would mean, but disinformation has always been at the heart of the “pro-choice” position.]

  • “The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer announced that the court had abolished the entire 20th century. Yep: no more suffrage for women! Jim Crow now!”

  • Jessica Valenti: “Stripping women of their humanity and rights isn’t a consequence of the ‘pro-life’ agenda, it’s the entire point.” 

  • The Washington Post’s now thoroughly insane Jennifer Rubin: “The right-wing justices and their supporters appear ready to reject one of the Founders’ core principles: that religion shall not be imposed by government edict.” (The smear that opposing Roe constitutes a religious edict is truly despicable, and a lot of abortion fans are stooping to it.)

  • Kurt Andersen another one:“It really is kind of remarkable that only one in five Americans call themselves Catholic, but of the Supreme Court majority apparently about to permit abortion to be outlawed, all but one are Catholic and that one was raised Catholic.”

  • Kamala Harris (who supports her adversary’s position every time she tries to counter it, whatever the topic) was, predicably, Kamala-like:

    Those Republican leaders who are trying to weaponize the use of the law against women. Well we say, ‘How dare they?’ How dare they tell a woman what she can do and cannot do with her own body? How dare they? How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future? How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms?

To this and more, Sullivan observes,

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End Of A Bad Ethics Week Sign-Off, 5/6/2022: Espy, Psaki, Chappelle, And Terrible Movies

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Is it unethical to make really bad movies? I’m talking about irredeemable garbage, not inspired lunacy like Ed Wood films, so mind-blowingly terrible that they are hypnotic as well as unforgettable. Isn’t it irresponsible to spend money and mislead audiences when you have no talent whatsoever?

I’ve been thinking about this ever since we tried to watch “Birdemic: Shock and Terror,” which we were counting on to be amusingly bad, and it was, instead, bad beyond all expectations. Though it was obviously modeled on “The Birds,” no birds appeared until half-way through the film, and they may have been the worst special effects I have ever seen anywhere. The sound quality was poor, and the writer-director makes Wood seem like Orson Welles by comparison. The movie also makes Mystery Science Theater 3000’s “Manos, the Hands of Fate” seem like “Casablanca.” (That famously awful film, at a $19,000 budget, was still almost twice as expensive to make as “Birdemic.”) We had to bail on the film when the birds appeared, because screeching woke up Spuds and put him in a panic.

Here’s the whole film. The “birds” appear at the 47 minute mark, but the acting and dialogue really has to be experienced to be believed:

There is a sequel.

1. Is Jen Psaki the worst weasel ever to serve as a Presidents paid liar? It’s hard to say, but her exchange with Peter Doocy on the doxxing of the Supreme Court justices is truly despicable. (No wonder MSNBC wants to hire her.)

Doocy: “[Y]ou guys spent some time…talking about what you think are…extreme wings of the [GOP]. Do you think the progressive activists that are now planning protests outside of justices’ houses are extreme?”

Psaki: “Peaceful protests? No. Peaceful protest is not extreme.”

But the question wasn’t about peaceful legal protests. It was about illegal protests that violate the privacy—how’s that for hypocrisy?—of Suprem Court members and their families.

Doocy: “Some of these justices have young kids. Their neighbors are not all public figures, so would [Biden] think about waving activists that want to go into…neighborhoods in VA and MD?”

Psaki: “Peter…our view is that peaceful protests, there is a long history…of that.”

What? A long history of harassing and trying to intimidate SCOTUS justices at home? Even if that wasn’t an outright lie, the fact that there’s a long history of misconduct doesn’t excuse the misconduct. She could have given the same answer regarding tar and feathers.

Doocy: “Is [protesting outside the homes of justices] the kind of thing [Biden] wants to help your side make their point?”

Psaki: “Look, [his] view is that there’s a lot of passion, a lot of fear, a lot of sadness…We want people’s privacy to be respected.”

Translation: “Emotion justifies everything, and I don’t want to answer your question.”

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Unethical Website Of The Year: Ruth Sent Us

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Ruth Sent Us, a smugly ignorant and unethical website of recent vintage by–what’s your guess, teenagers? Woke undergrads who never read a SCOTUS opinion? The editorial staff of The Nation? Mean satirists?—anyway, people up to no good, has suddenly been getting publicity because it posted the home addresses of the six non-progressive Supreme Court justices. They want people to “protest” outside of their houses.

The Stupid is strong with this one, so naturally it will appeal to the stupid who walk among us. It is generally illegal for more than two protesters to “demonstrate” in front of a residence, and also illegal for them to demonstrate in a neighborhood off private property without a permit. Never mind: Ruth Sent Us has announced a “Walk-by” of SCOTUS homes on May 11. The mob is being urged to wear red “Handmaid’s Tale” robes. Of course they are: referencing the dystopian science fiction novel is signature significance for someone who hasn’t given two thoughts to the issues involved in abortion and couldn’t comprehend Alito’s draft opinion if it were accompanied by pictures and ana interpretive dance troupe. Continue reading →

I Kill My Times Subscription, And Suddenly The Paper Stops Burying Facts That Impugn Democrats…It Worked!

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

This time anyway…if I had known they cared, I would have done it years ago!

I jest. Still, it was a shock to see the article “Not Good for Learning: New research is showing the high costs of long school closures in some communities” in yesterday’s New York Times, and even a greater shock to see the author: David Leonhardt, who was one of the most indefensibly partisan of the Times op-ed stable when he was an editorial columnist. (Check his EA dossier, here.)

Yet Leonhardt reveals,

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