Confronting My Biases, Episode 22: This!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Talk about res ipsa loquitur.

Another title I considered for this post: “Now THAT’S a comb-over!”

I know that it is wrong to take an instant dislike to someone because of his or her appearance. You can’t judge a book by its cover, after all, it is what’s inside that matters, and so on. A dear friend and theater world associate died this year, and he was a odd-looking, gay, neurodivergent costume designer who presented himself in public so bizarrely at times that it boggled my mind. He was also as kind a human being as you could find in a lifetime of searching.

But Kolby, Kolby, Kolby...the fussy mustache? The prissy smile? That hair? I find myself asking, “What are the chances that this guy is even barely tolerable? What message is he sending with all of this? Why is he sending that message?

Related questions include: How serious can Democrats be about attracting support from young men if they promote their embrace of this guy? Does the whole party reject the premise of the Cognitive Dissonance Scale? If he’s a secret political genius or something, shouldn’t they hid him in bunker or have him wear a mask like Mexican wrestlers?

Would you let someone who looked like this date your daughter? Your son? Would you trust him to babysit?

I’ll give Dana the last word…

Ethics Duncery: The Boston Red Sox Host a Drag Show for “Pride Night”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Ethics Alarms giveth and Ethics Alarms taketh away…

I was considering dropping this post, which has been on the runway in a holding pattern, but decided that I couldn’t let the Boston Red Sox get too full of themselves for doing the right thing.

Before its 10-8 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays a week ago, fans including families and children expecting an innocent night with the National Pastime entered the gates of Fenway Park to be confronted by a drag show. The Red Sox had a stage built in front of concessions stands so exhibitionist narcissists with various gender issues could pose and preen.

Huh. Now what does cross-dressing, transvestism and non-standard sexual proclivities have to do with baseball? The answer is absolutely nothing, except that baseball teams under MLB Comissioner Rob Manfred and the Red Sox longtime owner John Henry (who once dated Katie Couric, which is all you have to know) are cringingly woke. The Sox went so far as to paint “Black Lives Matter” on the outside of Fenway facing the Mass Pike in 2020, and more than half the team boycotted the traditional invitation to the White House after its last World Championship in 2018. (Racist Orange Hitler was President then too).

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From Boston, a Stunning “King’s Pass” Rejection [Updated!]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“The King’s Pass” is #11 on the EA Rationalizations List, where it is described as follows:

One will often hear unethical behavior excused because the person involved is so important, so accomplished, and has done such great things for so many people that we should look the other way, just this once. This is a terribly dangerous mindset, because celebrities and powerful public figures come to depend on it. Their achievements, in their own minds and those of their supporters and fans, have earned them a more lenient ethical standard. This pass for bad behavior is as insidious as it is pervasive, and should be recognized and rejected whenever it raises its slimy head. In fact, the more respectable and accomplished an individual is, the more damage he or she can do through unethical conduct, because such individuals engender great trust.

Sports teams, both professional and amateur, are among the organizations most vulnerable to The King’s Pass, which is also called “The Star Syndrome.” Thus it is particularly satisfying to see the only sports team I care about, the Boston Red Sox, take a strong stand against the rationalization in one of the most vivid anti-#11 moves within memory by any organization in sports or out.

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Look! The House’s Dumbest Member Filed a Smart Bill On Judicial Ethics!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Rep. Hank Johnson, the Democratic Congressman who famously expressed the fear that “Guam might tip over” because of all the U.S. military equipment on the island, filed his ‘‘Transparency and Responsibility in Upholding Standards in the Judiciary Act’ (or the ‘‘TRUST Act’’ to its friends). The bill aims to deal with a serious ethics problem in the judiciary, one of many.

Under the Judicial Conduct & Disability Act, the law that supposedly governs judicial discipline, investigations into misconduct are terminated when a judge retires, resigns, or dies. How convenient! The mere departure of a judge from the bench is enough to halt any inquiry into alleged abuses of their office, misconduct, even crimes. This system shields bad judges from accountability

With life tenure and unchecked power, judges have lots of opportunity to engage in outrageous behavior, and many do. Berating and demeaning (or sexually harassing) law clerks, forcing them to watch pornography, firing clerks on a whim, and judged concealing serious cognitive decline are among the offenses that have resulted in zero consequences for judges in recent years: all a judge needs to do to keep his or her pension and reputation is to quit. If they are not senile, they can often nab high-paying jobs with law firms.

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The Ethics Verdict on the President’s “No Kings” Trolling [UPDATED and CORRECTED]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Wonderful. Perfect.

Unfortunately, this was a hoax that fooled the mostly reliable source I found it posted on, with no hint that it wasn’t authentic. Twitter/X cheated me out of my blue check payment and blocked me from my account for no discernible reason and I am not going to follow Truth Social any more than I am likely to hang out at Bluesky.

I originally wrote in part, “Yes, this is a violation of “norms” except for Trump’s norms, of which this is a familiar example. No other President would issue such a sarcastic jibe at passionate protesters against his leadership and policies no matter how ell-earned. That, I believe, would be their failing. President Trump is the perfect person to deliver the devastating coup de gras to these foolish, hysterical, unhinged boobs. Only he can say with such vivid authority, “You didn’t lay a hand on me!”

Alas, it was too good to be true, and I should have realized that. The real Real Donald Trump could not resist writing something much cruder and insulting.

I’ll just end with my obligatory statement that deliberately posting false information on the web is unethical even if one isn’t a journalist.

Special thanks to my friend James Flood, who was the first one to flag my gullibility.

Can Anybody Point To A Single Thing Positive That the “No Kings” Protests Accomplished?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

I can.

Three, in fact.

But I’ll save them for the end. Meanwhile, yesterday’s mass scream of frustration was about as futile and useless as a protest can be. Let’s review the Ethics Alarms Protest Ethics Check List:

1. Is this protest just and necessary?

2. Is the primary motive for the protest unclear, personal, selfish, too broad, or narrow?

3. Is the means of protest appropriate to the objective?

4. Is there a significant chance that it will achieve an ethical objective or contribute to doing so?

5. What will this protest cost, and who will have to pay the bill?

6. Will the individuals or organizations that are the targets of the protest also be the ones who will most powerfully feel its effects?

7. Will innocent people be adversely affected by this action? (If so, how many?)

8. Is there a significant possibility that anyone will be hurt or harmed? (if so, how seriously? How many people?)

9. Are the protesters prepared to take full responsibility for the consequences of the protest?

10. Would an objective person feel that the protest is fair, reasonable, and proportional to its goal?

11. What is the likelihood that the protest will be remembered as important, coherent, useful, effective and influential?

12. Could the same resources, energy and time be more productively used toward achieving the same goals, or better ones?

The cumulative clear answers show a protest that is even sillier than the usual ones. We don’t have a king, and Donald Trump doesn’t act like one. If he did (or could), all the obstructionist, partisan judges we have seen over-reaching to block his legitimate policies would be in prison, without heads, or on the lam. The anti-democratic citizens (and illegals) demonstrating yesterday are not the supporters of our elected President and our system that elected him, but those who still refuse to accept that election (or his first one, for that matte).

They were also carrying signs like this (in Boston, at least):

Yes, this guy’s a moron.

“Number of kings holding steady at zero,” one conservative wag tweeted.

“The No Kings protests appear to be a massive success,” wrote long-time Trump Derangement victim Jonathan Chait. Success at what? Meanwhile, con-artist Elizabeth Warren tweeted, ‘Today, I stand with the millions of Americans making clear this country doesn’t belong to a king. It’s a democracy, and it belongs to the people.”

And the people voted for Trump over the undemocratically-nominated DEI hack your party gave them as an alternative, after four years of using a shell of a man as a puppet POTUS.

Trump is as much a king as Warren is a Native American.

I see three positive results of the protests. First, they were entirely peaceful, reminding everyone smart enough to be reminded but dumb enough not to have figured it out themselves. The events produced what constitutional protests are supposed to look like, and they were exactly what the anti-ICE riots in L.A. are not. Second, the protests illustrated why the Democratic Party is so unpopular and in danger of crumbling, just like its representatives in Congress showed us when they acted like second-graders to protest Trump’s State of the Union speech a few months ago. The protests contained a mess of varied far-Left obsessions, illustrated by Pride flags, pro-Hamas displays, call-outs for illegal immigrants, and advocacy for socialism and Communism.

Mostly, however, the protests were a nice safety valve release for the Trump Deranged like the sad, once-intelligent seniors on my Facebook feed, who sounded like they were going to the senior prom.

Naming Ethics: Your Children Can Suffer For Your Ignorance

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This one will be short, if not sweet.

A Reddit user shared this baby shower announcement on the sub-reddit devoted to terrible baby names, mostly absurd spellings….but this isn’t a spelling problem:

Yes, the parents are morons.

It seems that they didn’t know about the worst nuclear facility disaster in history, which rendered the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl a veritable ghost town in 1986, In some movies, it’s a zombie town. But the parents just thought it was a pretty name. You know, like “Treblinka.” Or “Malmedy.”

It is unknown at this point whether someone will back Mom and Dad into a corner, slap them silly, and tell them that they cannot stick an innocent child with that name, although naming a child “Chernobyl” is perfectly legal. It did prompt some inspired mockery on Reddit, though.

My favorite: “I guess it’s a nuclear family.”

Now THIS Is Legitimate “Guilt By Association”…

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Vance Luther Boelter, the man being sought for the murder of two Minnesota state legislators, was appointed by Democratic Governor Tim Walz to a state board in 2019. Boelter also had flyers for today’s anti-Trump “No Kings” protests in his car along with a manifesto and a list of 70 political targets.

Minnesota House Democratic leader Melissa Hortman and her husband were fatally shot in their home, and state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife barely survived the assassin’s attack on them. Hortman had received a lot of publicity for voting to block state benefits from going to illegal aliens.

Gov. Tim (Knucklehead) Walz said these appeared to be a “targeted act of political violence.” Boy, you have to get up pretty early in the morning to slip something by Tim…

Walz, as you probably know, has been fomenting violence against ICE and the Trump Administration by calling the immigration enforcement agency “the Gustapo.”

Kudos To The New York Times For Finally Eliminating All Doubt That It Is a Democratic Party Propaganda Organ And Not a “Newspaper”…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This would be an Unethical Quote of the Week if there were any reason to believe what the New York Times says about President Trump, and if the Times didn’t make equally unethical quotes every day.

Here’s part of the Times editorial titled, “Antisemitism Is an Urgent Problem. Too Many People Are Making Excuses”:

“…The political right, including President Trump, deserves substantial blame. Yes, he has led a government crackdown against antisemitism on college campuses, and that crackdown has caused colleges to become more serious about addressing the problem. But Mr. Trump has also used the subject as a pretext for his broader campaign against the independence of higher education. The combination risks turning antisemitism into yet another partisan issue, encouraging opponents to dismiss it as one of his invented realities.

Even worse, Mr. Trump had made it normal to hate, by using bigoted language about a range of groups, including immigrants, women and trans Americans. Since he entered the political scene, attacks on Asian, Black, Latino and L.G.B.T. Americans have spiked, according to the F.B.I. While he claims to deplore antisemitism, his actions tell a different story. He has dined with a Holocaust denier, and his Republican Party has nominated antisemites for elected offices, including governor of North Carolina. Mr. Trump himself praised as “very fine people” the attendees of a 2017 march in Charlottesville, Va., that featured the chant “Jews will not replace us.” On Jan. 6, 2021, at least one rioter attacking the Capitol screamed that he was looking for “the big Jew,” referring to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, Mr. Schumer has said.”

It gives me great pleasure to know that Times boot-licker ” “A Friend,” the long-banned EA commenter who has set a nearly unbreakable record for unauthorized posts here, most bleating about how unfair I am to the noble Times, will be desperately searching for a way to rationalize that verbal offal without having to admit, “Okay, the Times editors are partisan hacks.”

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Ethics Quiz: The Flag Day Parade [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The military parade planned today in my sort-of current hometown city, Washington, D.C., creates no valid basis for criticism…well, except for the Trump Deranged, the foes of the U.S. military, the pacifists (aka.”the deluded”) and in general the same people who find expressions of American patriotism distasteful because they detest the United States, its core values (not socialist or communist) and those who are and have been prepared to defend it.

My father, were he alive and not 105 years old which is what he would have been today if he hadn’t died in 2009, would have gone to see the parade, and not been particularly diplomatic with anyone who protested or criticize it. Dad was U.S. Army through and through (he was also a Boy Scout and family man through and through). He would get up and march all by himself at Fourth of July concerts on the Mall when they played a Sousa march. He would hang out at the W.W.II Memorial wearing his medals, so visiting school groups could see, meet and talk to “a real Second World War Army veteran.”

Yes, Jack Marshall, Sr. would have loved seeing, and, if possible, being a part of President Trump’s grand parade today to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. Making veterans young and old feel proud and appreciated by their country, its Capital and its President is, all by itself, justification for a parade.

Even if this were not the Army’s birthday, Flag Day alone would justify a parade today. The nation has some apologetic grovelling to do after the many examples of disrespect and slander over the decades by such despicable creeps as Colin Kaepernick and his pack of kneelers.

Best of all, from my perspective, is the fact that this is, absurdly, another Pride Month, which features parades and other “Look at us! Aren’t we great?” exercises of narcissism based on how one happens to have sex and whom with. In contrast, veterans really have done something worth celebrating and honoring, and they stand for values and ethics: those who cheer Pride parades and virtue-signalling are ethically estopped from saying a single discouraging word about today’s parade.

Nevertheless,

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of this July 14th is…

Is it responsible and prudent for President Trump to be holding this parade today?

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