Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 4/29/2021: Bucket List Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

bucket on head

In truth, I hate bucket lists and the whole concept behind them, which I regard as emblematic of a general misunderstanding of the nature of life. However, I must say that the experience I had last night—waking up at 4 am with my mouth full of blood—is certainly a unique and memorable experience that everyone should have. In my case, it was literally a bucket list item, because I could have used a bucket to deal with the problem.

As it turns out, the issue was neither as bad as it sounds or looked, at least according to my oral surgeon. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the last ten days (and nights) have been something of an ordeal, reaching its peak yesterday, when I only had the time and energy to put up a single post, and one about Ellen DeGeneris at that. I also could only walk Spuds briefly, I missed two client deadlines, I’m late paying my bar dues (two of them) and so many people are annoyed with me that I might as well join the Republican Party.

I also find myself getting worried, really for the first time, about health impeding my many projects and aspirations. The great pop philosopher Satchel Paige trenchantly observed, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?” In my case, the answer would always be about 14, and I’m proud of it. My friends and relatives are depressing me: they are younger than me and they are retired or soon will be. They look old , and sound old. An old geezer at the dog park where Spuds romps always latches on to me like a barnacle (he’s also a Bostonian refugee), and I thought the guy was about 80. Last week I learned that he’s six years younger than me!

Like both my parents, I have always been blessed with good health and energy, but boy it’s hard to feel 14 when you get hit with a cascade of health issues like what I’ve had to deal with lately. But the obligation is to, as Winston Churchill, liked to say, “keep buggering on.”

1. Giving it away. This is the story of my life, or one of them: this week a longtime client wanted to do a video promo for a seminar I’ll be doing next month. And asked if I would write the copy, and do the video, because they “talked about it and agreed that I was better at these things than anyone on staff.” And I said yes. My wife and business partner things I’m a sap in such matters, and indeed, through the years I have given others the benefit of my time and talents without compensation to a ridiculous extent. This one of many reasons I will not be spending my golden years playing golf. It’s my fault, and only my fault. Once you get a reputation for giving your work away, people and organizations will take advantage of it.

2. Postcards from Cancel Culture Hell: Poet and writer Joseph Massey penned a exposition of his cancellation at the height of #MeToo—you know, before progressives decided that sexual harassment didn’t matter when it’s done by politicians they find useful. It’s a long essay, as is the linked essay about what he did that got him cancelled (not good), but his last section is worth remembering should the mob ever come for you. He writes,

The Roman poet Ovid, after he was exiled in 8 AD for pissing off Emperor Augustus, wrote: “they’ve stripped me of all they could take, / yet my talent remains my joy, my constant companion.” Companionship in joy that is invulnerable to any individual or mob, or worldly condition, is one sure way to save yourself from falling for the traps small minds have set before you. Set your mind on preserving the parts of you they can’t take away.

3. Let’s play “Idiot or Liar”... I have now heard Joe Biden say repeatedly that “you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater.” First of all, that’s not true; second, it’s a hackneyed reference to a generally derided opinion. (Ken White, who feels the way about this quote that I do about the “77 cents of every dollar” fake state, did an epic job dismantling it here.) Joe has a law degree, and either he doesn’t understand the point of the quote from Justice Holmes, or he’s deliberately misrepresenting it. Which is it? I have absolutely no idea.

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Ellen DeGeneris Meets The Cognitive Dissonance Scale

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Ellen DeGeneres’s brand and reputation have always been built on the illusion that she was nice. She was called the “Be Kind” Lady. Then, last July, BuzzFeed reported that several of her popular daytime talk show’s former and current staff members said they had been subjected to “racism, fear and intimidation” on the set. Other staff members said producers had sexually harassed them. Warner Bros. investigated the complaints and concluded that there were major problems. Three of the show’s producers were fired. When DeGeneres returned from the show’s summer hiatus to open its 18th season, she began with a vague and deeply unsatisfying apology. “I learned that things happen here that never should have happened,” she said in part. “I take that very seriously. And I want to say I am so sorry to the people who were affected.”

Well wait a minute: whose name is on the title card? Who believes that Ellen DeGeneres had no idea what was going on in the management of the Ellen DeGeneres show? How is that even possible? And if it is possible, it’s still unforgivable. She is accountable.

There were also increasingly frequent accounts suggesting that Ellen herself wasn’t so nice. (I am reminded of my late night conversation with the late Broadway choreographer Thommie Walsh, who said, “You have to remember, Jack, that virtually all star performers are horrible people.”) Among the disturbing allegations was the claim that staff on DeGeneres’ show were instructed not to talk to her. She supposedly tried to get a waitress fired who chipped one of Ellen’s nail. There were leaks that she expressed contempt for her audience behind the scenes.

Sometimes the public surprises me: after all, it voted for Joe Biden to be President, and Joe has a completely phony nice-guy image that has been exposed again and again as a cynical facade. Yet in Ellen’s case, her hypocrisy was rejected. “Ellen,” the ratings companies report, has lost more than a million viewers since September, averaging 1.5 million viewers over the last six months, down from 2.6 million in the same period last year.

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Undercovers Ethics, 4/27/21

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Well, here I am trying to write a post in bed. This never works our well, but it’s this or nothing. I have clients waiting, my dog is mad at me for not walking him on a gorgeous day, and I wish I could just soldier through it all. I can’t, though, and feel like an utter failure. I’ve in pain in more than one location, a lower back strain being the latest addition, I’m in the midst of an allergy attack, and all the drugs have made me nauseous and dizzy. But ethics waits for no one, and it certainly isn’t going to wait for the likes of me.

1. This is what “systemic racism” propaganda produces…an op-ed by a civil engineering student from the University of California, Los Angeles, written for the the College Fix documents some of his discussion with the woke-infected on campus. He says he recently took part in an online debate about “systemic racism” during which some UCLA students complained that automatic soap dispensers are racist. One student said the dispensers “don’t see her hands” because of her dark skin. Another student claimed that the dispensers force “black and brown” people to show their palms, “the only light areas of the skin,” before the liquid soap comes out.

Both students are delusional, but this is how the current “racist America all the time everywhere” makes gullible and insecure blacks paranoid and miserable.

2. Blame Mitch McConnell for the “court packing” rationalizations. Last week, a Georgetown law student—poor bastard— confronted Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) when he accused Democrats of making a “power grab.””You didn’t see Republicans, when we had control of the Senate, try to rig the game. You didn’t see us try to pack the court,” he said. The law student protested, “How is court packing any different than what the Republicans did in 2016 and 2020?”

“We filled vacancies, that’s not packing the court,” Cruz insisted, as the law student insisted there was no difference between what Republicans refusing to consider President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to replace Justice Scalia, did and what Democrats are now trying to do by expanding the court. “They’re doing something that’s allowed under the Constitution,” the student countered. “It’s not an obstruction to the rule of law if it’s in the law.”

Ugh. Mitch McConnell’s unethical—not illegal—gambit to bury the Garland nomination under a contrived election year rule may have worked, but Republicans will be suffering for it for generations—and they deserve to. No, what the GOP did wasn’t “court packing,” which has had a specific, well-understood meaning since FDR tried it. But the laws student is already adept at the progressive craft of redefining words and concepts to meet whatever goal they are seeking to justify at the moment.

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Ethics Quiz: Race-Based Vaccines

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

It’s hard to believe that officials in Hamilton, Ontario, one of Canada largest cities, didn’t hear the faint clanging of ethics alarms when they came up with this policy.

The CBC reported that public health officials pressured the agency to “prioritize racialized, disabled and low-income residents.” I think “racialized” is a cool euphemism, don’t you? How does one get “racialized”?

75% of Hamilton’s population is white, but non-white communities have accounted for nearly half of all pandemic cases in the city.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is Hamilton’s policy ethical?

I’m amazed no city has tried this in the U.S.

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: New York City Councilman Chaim Deutsch

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

crooked councilman

This guy is quite a piece of… work.

Chaim Deutsch, a New York City councilman representing Brooklyn pleaded guilty to federal tax evasion last week. He didn’t pay $82,000 in taxes and deducted fraudulent business expenses related to his real estate management company. For that, the Democrat could face up to a year in prison. He doesn’t have to resign though, due to a technicality.

Under the public officers law, Council members face automatic expulsion if they plead guilty to a felony or a crime related to their elected office. But Deutsch, in his plea deal, only pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, and it involved his personal finances. He doesn’t have to resign, and apparently he won’t.

Deutsch’s lawyer says his client’s guilty plea won’t interfere with his ability to carry out his Council duties. “He intends to fulfill the will of the voters and complete the term for which he was elected,” the mouthpiece says. I’m pretty sure the will of the voters has substantially changed, now that they know they voted for a crook. And a felon—which is what Deutsch is no matter what he pleaded to—can’t possibly ” carry out his Council duties.” Among those duties is maintaining the public’s trust. He is also likely to have his influence on the Council reduced to the vanishing point, as it plans on punishing Brooklyn’s finest if he refuses to resign. That’s certainly not in the interests of his constituents.

“New York City Council member Chaim Deutsch admitted today that he defrauded the I.R.S. in connection with his real estate business,” Audrey Strauss, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement. “As an elected official and community leader, Deutsch had a particular responsibility to follow the law. Instead, over a multiyear period, Deutsch concealed his true business income to avoid paying his fair share of taxes.”

But Deutsch is determined to follow one law, at least: the one allowing him to stay in office until his term expires. He’s a stickler for that one.

Comment Of The Day: “Monday Ethics Meander, 4/26/2021: Oscar, Rachel, Ma’Khia And The ACLU” (Item #4: The Oscars)

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
 

I announced in a post today that I would no longer devote essays to the Academy Awards Show because it no longer has the cultural importance and influence to make it important, nor the integrity to make discussing its ethical issues worth the time to write about. I may not have been clear that this kills me. The annual Oscar broadcast was a big event in my family, and we almost always had seen all of the nominated films and performances. My dad, as a veteran, had privileges at Hanscom Air Base not far from Arlington, Mass., and at the movie theater on the base showed movies before general release. Tickets cost 25 cents for kids, 50 cents for adults, and there would be 5-6 different movies every week. It wasn’t unusual for the Marshalls to see three new films in some weeks. I used to care who won the Oscars: when John Wayne won Best Actor for “True Grit,” which my friends from high school and college knew I loved and had seen many times, I got phone calls from all over the country.

But in those days, political grandstanding was for acknowledged jerks like Marlon Brando: the Oscars were managed as a unifying feature of society, not a divisive one, as they should be. the hosts were middle-of-the road types like Johnny Carson and Bob Hope; the past was honored and respected. No doubt about it, the show and the industry was all-white, but that, like the rest of the nation, was changing. Destroying something in order to save it is almost always unethical, but that’s what they did to the Academy Awards, like so many other institutions. Most of them I don’t miss. I miss the Academy Awards, but they are officially toast, and the Academy did it to itself, with a big assist from Hollywood.

But A.M. Golden did an excellent job in his overview today after watching the Oscars so I wouldn’t have to. Here is his Comment of the Day on the Oscars section in “Monday Ethics Meander, 4/26/2021: Oscar, Rachel, Ma’Khia And The ACLU“:

Prologue: Well, the only part of the Oscars I ever watch is the “In Memoriam” segment the day after so I can see who they left off. This year’s snubs:

David Prowse – Darth Vader
Jeremy Bulloch – Boba Fett
John Saxon – primarily known for TV but also appeared in a number of films.
Kenny Rogers – musician, yes, but starred in a movie.
Honor Blackman – Bond girl
Geno Silva
Annie Ross
Mac Davis – musician, again, but also starred in a movie
Stuart Whitman – primarily known for TV, but appeared in “The Longest Day” and “The Comancheros” with John Wayne.
Diana Serra Cary a.k.a. “Baby Peggy” –

They included late African-American actress Ja’Net Dubois, who was best-known as wacky neighbor Willona Woods in the tv sitcom “Good Times”, whose film work appears to be relatively insignificant. She died several days after last year’s Oscar telecast and wouldn’t have been included then anyway, but including her at all in the Oscar In Memoriam seems odd, especially in comparison to some of the above exclusions who had more prominent roles on film.

It’s not unusual for the Oscars (or the Emmys, for that matter) to pad their “In Memoriam” segments with performers who were best known for music or sports. I think the Oscars included Steve Jobs one year.

But I couldn’t shake the notion that they stuck Ja’Net in there to make sure there were some African-Americans in there. Kind of like the ridiculous extreme of Ricky Gervais’ 2020 Golden Globes joke about him refusing to allow an “In Memoriam” segment there because there wasn’t enough diversity in the people who died.

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Monday Ethics Meander, 4/26/2021: Oscar, Rachel, Ma’Khia And The ACLU [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Beyond the admirable speech by Tyler Perry, I’m not devoting any whole posts to the Oscars, which are no longer culturally significant enough to compensate for their traditional lack of integrity. I will note in this preface to today’s ethics notes that the results yesterday proved the advantage of anonymous voting. Basically under a command to honor minority artists irrespective of merit, since the awards, and all awards, and all honors, benefits and advancement, must be based on “diversity and inclusion” above all else, the voters nonetheless voted for old white British guy Anthony Hopkins for Best Actor over Chadwick Boseman, who was considered the frontrunner for the award since he had the unbeatable qualities of being excellent in the role (of a rebel musician in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,”) being black, and being dead. I think it may have been a tiny backlash against the Racialization of Everything. It’s too bad this was where that point was made, since Boseman was obviously a huge talent and would have been a worthy winner.

But I won’t be doing my annual tribute to the performers that the Oscars left off its “In Memoriam” segment this year, or ever again. Turner Movie Classics does one every year that’s less rushed, more interesting, and better. Who needs the Academy Awards version, especially since it has rebranded itself as an affirmative action organization? Nine of the 20 acting nominations went to minorities this year. Did their ethnic origins and skin shade help them get the nod? Like all the other kinds of bias that pollute the Oscars, the fact that there is even a question makes the the exercise unworthy of serious respect.

1. The irrational bias against police reaches the level of farce. I assumed even the most deranged, anti-cop, wokist heralds of presumed racism would back off from their accusations once they had the facts in the shooting of teenager Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus right before she was able to stab another young woman. Former Reason writer now with the Washington Post, Radley Balko, was the exception, talking down his tweet critical of the cops and apologizing for his premature criticism. In contrast, shameless demagogues like Valerie Jarrett—this woman was Barack Obama’s prime advisor—think about that—wrote, “A Black teenage girl named Ma’Khia Bryant was killed because a police officer immediately decided to shoot her multiple times in order to break up a knife fight. Demand accountability.” No, he shot her to save the other black girl’s life. In order to make the wacked-out assessment made byof Jarrett and others, progressives are pushing the astounding narrative that knife fights are just part of growing up back. Even sillier are the amateur recommendations of how police could stop an imminent knife attack without resorting to gunfire. These include “long sticks,” “shouting ‘drop the weapon,” “tripping the assailant,” “rubber bullets,” “dogs,” trying to talk to the attacker,” and the ever-popular “winging her.”

Personally, I’m fond of the old Marty McFly trick of pointing and shouting, “What the hell is THAT??” as a distraction. It worked with Biff!

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One More Time: It Is Unethical For The News Media To Present Idiots As Commentators

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

In the case at hand, the appellation “idiot” is neither unfair nor ad hominem. For some mysterious reason, CBS News anchor Lana Zak decided to feature former U.S. professional soccer player Lori Lindsey as an authority on the issues involved in transgender participation in female sports. Lindsey rapidly demonstrated that she lacked the knowledge, analytical skills and rhetorical ability for the role, as she defaulted to woke buzz-words that had nothing to do with the topic. Asked about various bills being considered around the country that would ban transitioning biological males from competing against girls and women, Lindsay babbled,

“These bills do uphold white supremacy under the guise of protecting women’s sport when we actually know that women’s sport, protection of it, would be to have more funding and to have more women in leadership positions and equal pay. But the reality, though, is that these youth just want to participate with their friends and play sports like everyone else.”

What? How is “white supremacy” involved in trying to keep trans competitors out of women’s sports?

Not able to resist endorsing this gibberish, Zak asked, “I want to circle back to something you said earlier about these bills are trying to perpetuate supremacy. I imagine that there are parents at home who have genetically, or who have daughters who were assigned a female gender at birth, and that are concerned that their child is not going to get a fair shake in competing against other people, against a trans girl and they’re not thinking this is a supremacists position. How do you appeal to that parent that feels it is just about the sports to see that there’s actually a greater debate that is a proxy for?”

Feel that pressure building in your skull yet? The reason such parents don’t feel that it is a “supremacists position” is that the issue has nothing to do with race, other than the fact that race is the default argument for every progressive position when it runs out of legitimate arguments.

Answering like the 10-year-old she reasons like, Lindsay’s reply was this:

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Ethical Quote Of The Day: Tyler Perry

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“Stand in the middle, because that’s where healing happens.That’s where conversation happens. That’s where change happens. It happens in the middle So anyone who wants to meet me in the middle, to refuse hate, to refuse blanket judgment, and to help lift someone’s feet off the ground, this one is for you, too.”

—Tyler Perry, African-American playwright, screenwriter, producer, director and actor, in his acceptance speech for the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at last night’s Academy Awards

Perry was one of the few attendees at last night’s Oscars who could make such a contrarian speech without looking like a hypocrite. He has always been defiantly politically incorrect in his plays and screenplays, which critics frequently attack on the grounds that he employs negative black stereotypes. (What Perry has proved is that African -Americans can laugh at themselves, at least as long as the satirist is the right skin-shade.) He is also extraordinarily wealthy and powerful within the industry, and doesn’t have to signal his virtue to anyone. At another point in his speech, Perry said,

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Announcement: I’m Deleting My Twitter Account. It Is An Unethical Platform, And No One Should Support It

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Twitter, which has already shown that it is willing and ready to use it power to control whose opinions reach the public, admitted this weekend that it has agreed to a request from the Indian government to censor tweets from that nation been critical of Prime Minister Modi and his administration’s disastrous response to the Wuhan virus pandemic.

That’s from Prof. Turley’s article on this disgraceful conduct by an American corporation. Local Indian legislators are among those being silenced with Twitter’s complicity:

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