Sunday Evening Ethics Reflections, 3/7/21: Two More For Cuomo, Too Late For Kasich, Too Stupid To Be Believed, And Too Cowardly To Be Of Any Use…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

evening-reflections

1. Well, what do you know! Two more women have come forward to accuse New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment, making a total of five now. The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have the stories.

A former press aide, Karen Hinton, told the Post that Cuomo embraced her in a Los Angeles hotel room in 2000. Ana Liss, another ex-aide, said the governor hugged and kissed her and grabbed her waist in 2014. As we have discussed here often, true sexual harassers are habitual and incorrigible. It’s not a mistake or a lot of misunderstandings. These are powerful individuals who feels entitled to abuse that power with subordinates who are likely to be reluctant to resist or report the misconduct.

2. Where was she when John Kasich needed to be told? Ann Althouse has a post titled, Is there someone in your life who is annoying you with the conversational tic “Do you know what?” In 2016, desperately seeking some alternative to Donald Trump among the large and fatally flawed GOP field seeking the party’s Presidential nomination, I was so annoyed by Kasich employing that tic (or its equivalent, “Guess what?”) that I tuned him out every time he spoke. Why didn’t anyone tell him? I’m a stage director: I’ve corrected dozens of actor tics. Any politician who is so inattentive that he or she can’t acknowledge and address a bad communication habit (Kamala Harris’s laugh!) is intrinsically untrustworthy, inattentive and lazy. It’s a tell.

3. Look! A public “How stupid, frightened and gullible are you?” test! This ridiculous thing is a real product designed to wear all day and night to protect you from the deadly viruses, microbes and pollutants that threaten to kill us all.

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Another 7-11 Encounter: There Is Hope.

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

yankees-vs-red-sox

For over a decade, a cynical, destructive, dangerous and—let’s see, is there another good adjective? Yes!— unethical strategy has been pursued to strip away all trust between the races, to use racial guilt for profit and power, to make black Americans fear and hate white Americans and to cause white Americans to resent their blacks neighbors. This is, disgracefully, a deliberate choice by elements in our society and politics in order to achieve power. It is an existential threat to the United States, our society and our culture, and has never been more so than now.

I was running an errand for Grace to the local 7-11. As I got out of my car, wearing a black #*&!@#!! mask, my path intersected with that of another man on the way to the convenience store. All I could see were his eyes and his skin-color (he was African-American), and the rest was attire: a New York Yankees cap and a Yankees team jacket. I was one up on him: I was wearing my Red Sox cap, a Boston team jacked AND my Red Sox canvas deck shoes.

The stranger, who appeared to be around my age, froze dramatically as we came face to face about ten feet apart, extended his arms, and exclaimed, “What is this, a beer ad?” and laughed. I replied, “I think it has to be!,” and he followed me into the store. We stopped a few feet inside the door, and talked for 20 minutes about baseball, our teams, various players, baseball ethics (steroids and cheating), and life. He was such a friendly, smart and funny guy; I loved talking with him. Then he gave me a fist bump, and we parted. I never even got his name.

There was nothing in our interaction that day that involved race or anything else contentious. We were just two human beings and citizens of the United States who have a lot more in common and a lot more to talk about together than group identities and conflict. The encounter reminded me that the bonds that unite us as a nation are still stronger and more resilient than the enemies of democracy think they are.

And as I got back into my car, the most famous quote from Anne Frank’s diary suddenly popped into my head: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Not all people, certainly, but just maybe enough of them.

There is hope.

Comment Of The Day: “Today’s Dispatch From ‘The Great Stupid’: The Chivalry Assignment “

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Come for the ethics, stay for the chivalry lesson!

Steve-O-From NJ ( as I strongly suspected he would) responded to the infuriating tale of the high school teacher who ordered her students to act out her infantile and politically-warped view of “chivalry” with a brief lesson on what Medieval chivalry was really about. Obviously an Ethics Alarms post can’t cover this entire, rich topic, but students reading here would come away with a lot more genuine historical perspective than the young victims of a feminist teacher’s ignorance at Texas’s Shallowater High School. This Comment of the Day is admittedly tangential to the ethics issue, which is that our public school teachers frequently don’t know what they are blathering about, and are too often more concerned with woke indoctrination than they are in education.

It also points up a dilemma. Teachers should be capable of conveying the essentials of “the three ‘Rs,'” and perhaps age-appropriate science and geography. But history? Most teachers were educated in a school system that neglected or distorted history, and their own knowledge and analytical abilities in this subject are, to be kind, inadequate. Thus they pass along their own biases, misunderstandings and flawed knowledge to the next generation. I would conclude that teachers should be required to stick to the approved history textbooks and their lesson plans, except that most of those have been polluted by ideological agendas too.

Well, that’s a topic for another day. Right now, the topic is Chivalry.

Here is Steve-O’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Today’s Dispatch From ‘The Great Stupid’: The Chivalry Assignment“:

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As The NYT Charles M. Blow Desperately Searches For A Topic Worthy Of His Brilliance Now That He Can’t Attack Donald Trump In Every Column, And Settles On A Cartoon Skunk…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

pepe

Of course Charles M. Blow quickly jumped on the “Cancel Dr. Seuss” bandwagon. I’m sure he was ticked off that he didn’t think of it first. The really woke publications have to include a race-baiter niche (or several) on their staffs, and Blow occupies that prime slot at the New York Times. Blow is an anti-white bigot in general, but he’s versatile: for the four years in which the Times enabled his virulent Trump Derangement, Blow proved he was also adept in pushing almost all of the anti-Trump Big Lies, not only the one that asserts that he is a racist. His columns were like crack for Trump-Haters. For everyone else, they were, like Blow himself, staggeringly repetitious, predicable, pompous, and boring.

Now, with Trump only intermittently in the news, Blow has a problem, being addicted to anti-Trump crack himself, and he’s clearly foundering. In his anti-Seuss screed—if you’re white like Theodore Geisel, Blow will presume you’re a racist (incidentally, he begins his columns by writing, “As a child, I was led to believe that Blackness was inferior.” That’s odd: I wasn’t!)—he also attacked Warner Bros. cartoon character Pepé Le Pew for contributing to “rape culture,” which is hilarious wokism self-parody.

Pepé Le Pew is one of the lesser Warner Brothers animated stars, an amorous French skunk whose cartoons consisted of a single gag: an incurable romantic obsessed with the pursuit of amorous conquests, Pepé kept mistaking cats and other creatures as female skunks (they somehow got white stripes painted on them in various accidents, hence the species misidentification), whereupon he would aggressively woo them, including hugging and kissing them without their consent.

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Saturday Ethics Diversions, 3/6/21…And Remember The Alamo!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Alamo morning

On this March date in 1836, after a 13 day siege, the Battle of the Alamo ended when a pre-dawn attack by the much larger Mexican force slaughtered the 200 (or more) Texan defenders, creating many legends—the line in the sand, Jim Bowie’s desperate fight from his sickbed, Davy Crockett battling on as the Mexicans poured over the walls of the fort— and an iconic symbol of American bravery, sacrifice, and resistance of tyranny. The final minutes of the defenders were spent in desperate hand-to-hand combat with knives, swords and clubs.

Thirteen days earlier, on February 23, Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna ordered a siege of the Alamo Mission, near present-day San Antonio. It was occupied by rebel Texas forces. They spent the next two week ducking shells during the night and repairing the fort during the day. On the night of the 5th, however, there was no shelling. The exhausted men of the Alamo finally had a chance to sleep, and the Mexicans were almost inside the walls before they awakened. The bloody battle was over in less than 30 minutes. Several Texans reportedly surrendered, but Santa Anna ordered all prisoners executed, as he had promised when William Barrett Travis refused to surrender at the outset of the seige. Historians estimate that the battle cost Santa Anna between 400 and 600 soldiers, a high price for a fort with little strategic value. On April 21, 1836, Texas and Mexico fought again at the Battle of San Jacinto. This time it was the Mexicans who were surprised, and the rout won independence from Mexico and brought the Texas Revolution to an end.

I’ll be watching the 1960 John Wayne movie tonight. It is historically inaccurate in almost every way, but if there was ever an event in our history when the legend was more important than the reality, it is the battle of the Alamo.

1. It’s great to see that the news media and others have adopted a more fair and forgiving sta… Oh. Oh, right. “It’s amazing. Indian-descent Americans are taking over the country: you, my vice president, my speechwriter,” President Biden told Swati Mohan, NASA’s guidance and controls operations lead for the Mars Perseverance rover landing. Imagine the reaction from Democrats and pundits had the previous President said that. It would have been a story for weeks. The episode would have been cited any time one of the Trump Deranged was asked to defend the hardy Big Lie that Trump was a racist. Now that Joe Biden is President, the office is back to having the benefit of a presumption of good will, which is necessary for any President to do his job. About the only people mentioning Joe’s latest—read his quote with Jews or “blacks” in place of “Indian-descent Americans”—are bitter conservative pundits, and people like me, who foolishly believe that the same standards should be applied regardless of race, creed, gender or political affiliation.

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Today’s Dispatch From “The Great Stupid”: The Chivalry Assignment (Corrected)

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Chivalry

At Texas’s Shallowater High School, a “chivalry” assignment given to female students required girls to “dress in a feminine manner,” lower their heads and curtsy to please men, “walk behind men daintily as if their feet were bound,” and “not complain or whine.” The boys were told to dress in jackets and ties, pick up any object dropped by “the ladies” and to hold doors open, among other things.

The alleged purpose of the assignment was to “demonstrate to the school how the code of chivalry and standards set in the medieval concept of courtly love carries over into the modern day.” An assignment sheet included a set of “rules” with a line for an “adult witness signature” next to each:

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Comment Of The Day: “And THIS Is And THIS Is Why Critical Race Theory Needs To Be Banned In Our Schools……”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Manifesto

It’s an open letter! It’s an analysis! It’s a warning! It’s a manifesto! It’s fodder for debate!

Veteran Ethics Alarms commenter and provocateur Steve-O-in NJ is in fine form in his smoking Comment of the Day on the post, “And THIS Is Why Critical Race Theory Needs To Be Banned In Our Schools.”

Here it is:

You know, this is as good a time as any for me to reveal my open letter to the people behind this indoctrination and those who go along with it.

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When Ethics Fails, The Law Steps In, And Often Makes An Ass Of Itself…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Greg-Abbott

There is no excuse for this:

Abbott tweet

Well, let me clarify that a bit. Anger, frustration, outrage at the open attack on democracy and a level playing field in the marketplace of ideas are all legitimate reasons for someone to default to “there ought to be a law!,” but there is no excuse for elected officials like Abbott and Texas legislators displaying such ignorance of the Bill of Rights.

Stipulated: what Big Tech and the social media platforms are doing right now, deliberately and brazenly attempting to slam their fists down on the scales of democracy to make it as difficult as possible to communicate opinions, news and other expression that our rising woke dictators find inconvenient, is a genuine threat to the nation’s values and existence. However, those same values will be weakened if laws mandating companies to be fair and ethical undermine the First Amendment. As the giddy AUC and my Trump Deranged Facebook friends immediately reply to any criticism of the growing censorship of conservatives and especially President Trump, a private company has a nearly absolute right to decide who has access to its free services. As the social justice crusaders don’t say, but prove every time they make this kneejerk observation, they are thrilled to see their fellow citizens muzzled this way, since it advances their own interests. Big Tech and the social media companies have the right, but it is not right for them to abuse it this way when they have so much control over public debate and information.

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Pre-Weekend Ethics Prep, 3/5/2021: Obama Disses Pete, John Defends The Redcoats, Harvard Beats Crump, And Zoom Strikes Again

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Massacre-jpg

1. Today this post, from two years ago, is suddenly getting a lot of views. The reason: there was a resolution of the long-shot law suit by the descendants of two slaves in photographs owned by Harvard University. The slave’s descendant, Tamara Lanier, had employed Benjamin Crump, legal race-hustler without peer, to sue on the Hail Mary theory that

“the images are the “spoils of theft,” because as slaves Renty and Delia were unable to give consent to being photographed., and that Harvard is illegally profiting from the images by using them for “advertising and commercial purposes.” By keeping the photos, the lawsuit claims, Harvard has perpetuated the hallmarks of slavery that prevented African-Americans from holding, conveying or inheriting personal property.”

Sure, Ben….from the post:

“Harvard and other universities set themselves up for this by caving to historical airbrushing demands by the students they have helped indoctrinate, such as when Georgetown University established a policy giving an edge  in admissions to descendants of slaves who were sold to fund the school. I would say they have this coming and let them sleep on the bed of nails their laziness and cowardice have made, but therein lies a real danger. Harvard, which of late has been devising and defending one bad progressive idea after another (like discriminating against Asian Americans as Harvard’s own way of helping African Americans get admitted to the college), might just decide to be woke rather than responsible, and let Mrs. Lanier take the photos, thus setting a precedent with endless potential to cause havoc.”

Justice Camille F. Sarrouf of Middlesex County Superior Court this week acknowledged that the daguerreotypes had been taken under “horrific circumstances” but said that if the enslaved subjects, Renty and Delia, did not own the images when they were made in 1850, then their descendant who brought the lawsuit, Tamara Lanier, did not own them either.

Duh.

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It Wasn’t Censorship That Caused The Principal To Take Down The Student’s Transgender Essay…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

teaching-writing

Courthouse News Service reports that a March 2 opinion by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia has ruled that the Anderson Mill Elementary School in Spartanburg County, South Carolina and its principal had not exceeded their authority to regulate school-sponsored student speech when they refused to distribute a student essay on a controversial topic.

At issue was an essay authored by a 10-year-old girl on the topic of transgender individuals. Thework was originally included in an essay collection placed in the student’s classroom and distributed to parents. The school principal ordered the essay to be removed, telling the girl’s mother that it was age-inappropriate and would upset some parents. The mother filed a lawsuit on behalf of herself and her daughter for a claimed violation of the First Amendment, naming the principal, the school and the school district as defendants.

The law is pretty clear on this point, and I suspect that this was a pro-trans rights grandstanding and virtue-signaling exercise by someone who has time on their hands and money to burn, and who found a lawyer wanting to make noise about alleged anti-transgender discrimination…which this incident was not.

I regard such lawsuits as unethical abuses of process.

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