China

High Noon Ethics Showdown, 4/2/2020: Reality Dawns

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Yyyyyyup!

Interestingly, the usually busy street bordering on our cul de sac looks just like this right now, except Gary Cooper isn’t anywhere to be seen…

1. What? The U.S. does NOT have more Wuhan virus cases than China? How can that be??? Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.), hardly a knee-jerk Trump apologist, who sits on the Senate committee that deals with classified intelligence, said the Chinese Communist Party continues to lie about the death toll from the virus. He has said information he has viewed shows the United States does not surpass China in terms of deaths. This was obvious to anyone not actively trying to use the spread of the illness for partisan advantage, but it’s nice to have confirmation.

“The claim that the United States has more coronavirus deaths than China is false,” Sasse said yesterday. “Without commenting on any classified information, this much is painfully obvious: The Chinese Communist Party has lied, is lying, and will continue to lie about coronavirus to protect the regime. Beijing’s garbage propaganda shouldn’t be taken seriously by the World Health Organization, by independent journalists, or by the American epidemiologists who are going to beat this terrible virus.”

This, of course, further impugns the news media. Stephen Kruiser wrote,

“Every day, they find new ways to reinforce the “Enemy of People” status that they have been earning every day in the Trump era. They’ve routinely scolded anyone who accurately refers to the virus as being of Chinese origin, screaming “RACISM!” as if they were getting paid each time they uttered or typed the word. What has been most insidious has been the parroting of whatever China reports about the virus. Almost everyone in American media has been acting as ChiCom public relations lackeys, taking everything that the Chinese government says and passing it along without questioning any of it.”

Continue reading →

Having Previously Concentrated Only On Idiotic Reasons Not To Call The Contagion By The Name It Deserves, The Deranged Settle On A Vile And Unethical One

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I have managed to post twice about the name game, and the ridiculous effort to find some way to justify not identifying the Wuhan virus by its place of origin, a campaign led by, naturally enough, its place of origin. The first post focused on the idea that calling a Chinese virus a Chinese virus was “racist,” a concept so devoid of reason and logic that it made my brain hurt.

The fact that the concept was enthusiastically embraced by such proven blights on the political scene as Rep. Omar was  one major clue that  dastardly motives were involved. This was a pretty much flat out resort to Big Lie #4 in the “resistance” Big Lie tool box, that one being “Trump is a racist/ white supremacist.” It was a short post, because there was no legitimate argument to rebut. Continue reading →

Thank God This Miserable Week Is Over Ethics Review, 3/27/2020: Of Pangolins, Pandemics And Pronouns

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Good afternoon.

Stop blaming my favorite animal, the pangolin, or the so-called “scaly anteater,” for the pandemic!

That’s a tree pangolin above in a defensive posture. Ever since the nexus for the outbreak of COVID-19 was traced back to a wet market in Hubei province, scientists have been looking for the virus’s heritage.  It’s possible that the virus emerged in a colony of horseshoe bats in Yunnan, a province that borders the south-east Asian country of Myanmar. But some fingers are also pointing at the pangolin, which was once believed to have bats in its ancestry. The animal, like others that American wouldn’t recognize, is the most trafficked beast in the world due to the supposed health benefits of its scales, with most of that traffic ending in China. A search for the “missing link” in the chain of the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 has uncovered two close cousins of the variety of coronavirus that started the pandemic in Wuhan in pangolins smuggled into China. Not THE virus, however.  Here’s a photo of a pangolin unfurled:

1. It is outrageous that a U.S. newspaper would include this sentence…From an article about the joys of Randolph Scott Westerns by Times film critic Ben Kinegsberg: “The depiction of Native Americans as horse-eating, husband-killing savages doesn’t sit well in modern eyes, and the name of Henry Silva’s character in “The Tall T” is so offensive it cannot be printed.”

Well, it has to printed somewhere, or the information itself has been permanently erased! If a newspaper is going to start  purging words, names, history  and facts, where does it stop? I’ve been trying to imagine what name could justify the Times refusing to reveal it, other than “Voldemort.” What could it be? Let’s check the Internet Movie Database (the film is “The Tall T“)… Continue reading →

Ann Althouse’s Son Gets 4 Out Of 5 Right, And 4 Out Of 5 Ain’t Bad

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Athouse’s son, John Althouse Cohen, has his own eclectic blog, and I check in now and then. He’s intelligent, as I would expect, though his endorsement of the transparently pandering Pete Buttigieg was disappointing. Now and then his mother directs her huge readership over to him, which is what she did with a post called “Things I’m tired of hearing about the coronavirus.”

It seems unfair that John’s post has, as of now, zero comments, and Ann’s post consisting of nothing more than a link to that post has 118 comments as I write this. Why wouldn’t her readers give the author of the post their attention and support instead of his mother?

Be that as it may, John mentioned five things he was sick of hearing during the current pandemic, and four out of five reasons for his fatigue were valid. One is an attempt to excuse the inexcusable, using an intellectually dishonest argument.

Here are John’s four legitimate beefs: Continue reading →

Stop Pushing Chinese Propaganda: Giving A Chinese Name To The Virus Is Appropriate And Ethical

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Incredibly, reporters asked President Trump multiple times yesterday to account for a rumor that one of his aides had referred to the Wuhan virus, aka “Century 21”,  or something like that, as the “Kung Fu Flu.”  (Heh. )

A. It isn’t “racist” if someone, or many people, did use the quip, and B. Why is that even worthy of discussion? I may be wrong, but as the news media’s efforts to use Big Lies to impugn the President are based on slimmer and more trivial excuses, I expect the majority of the public to eventually figure out what’s going on.

Axios just released a time line, based in part on a new study of how the virus took hold in China. It introduces its work this way:

Axios has compiled a timeline of the earliest weeks of the coronavirus outbreak in China, highlighting when the cover-up started and ended — and showing how, during that time, the virus already started spreading around the world, including to the United States.

Why it matters: A study published in March indicated that if Chinese authorities had acted three weeks earlier than they did, the number of coronavirus cases could have been reduced by 95% and its geographic spread limited.

This timeline, compiled from information reported by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the South China Morning Post and other sources, shows that China’s cover-up and the delay in serious measures to contain the virus lasted about three weeks.

The study, by Southhampton University, is here.

The information indicates clearly that China is accountable. China is responsible for the severity of the pandemic. China deserves to have that responsibility recognized, and those trying to use race-baiting and linguistic stunts to assist in the cover-up are assisting a brutal totalitarian regime. Those who are doing this out of animus for the President are beneath contempt.

No, China should not be asked to pay reparations for its unfortunate role in the crisis, though a recent poll asserts that 42 percent of Americans “feel that China should pay at least some of the world’s coronavirus bills.” This kind of disaster could happen to any nation, though, as you can see in the chart above, it keeps happening to China. It is more likely to happen in a nation like China, that obstructs the free flow of information. It still didn’t intend to infect the world.

I assume.

However, China should accept responsibility, as well as the shame of having a pandemic named after a Chinese starting point.

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 3/16/2020: Zugswang!

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Good morning, inmates!

I’ve been reading that social isolation may be deadly. Zugswang!

Last week “ethics zugswang” made a return to Ethics Alarms, and you can expect to read a lot more of it. The chess term describing the dilemma is which the only safe move is to stay still, and staying still is impossible, seems to be applying to increasing numbers of dire situations recently, especially in the ethical sense, in which all choices are unethical.Upon reflection, several posts involved ethics zugswang even when I didn’t use that term. The woman whose student loan debts topped 900,000 dollars is in zugswang. Progressive feminists who use gender-baiting as a partisan weapon are in self-condemned zugswang when political allies use misogynist terms against conservative women.

It’s really fun saying “zugswang,” but I will try to touch on some matters that don’t involve ethics zugswang….like…

1. “Hogan’s Heroes” ethics. I never thought it would happen, but a cable channel is re-running “Hogan’s Heroes” episodes. The very popular Sixties sitcom about POW prison camp and the wacky and inept Nazis running it has been thoroughly excoriated as outrageously tasteless and politically incorrect. My father loved the show because anything that made the Nazis look ridiculous was aces with him. Is it tasteless and offensive to show “Hogan’s Heroes” today?

It was clearly satire, in the same spirit as Larry, Moe and Curly playing Hitler and cronies, or Charley Chaplin in “The Great Dictator”—or, to pick a recent example, the child’s view of Hitler as an imaginary friend in “Jo-Jo Rabbit.” The show obviously took its inspiration from “The Great Escape,” of which it is virtually a parody (without the executions, of course.) WW II vets like my father were accustomed to the Nazis being ridiculed and trivialized in the process. In an age that has seen the Holocaust Museum’s exhibits and widely distributed documentaries about the full barbarity of Nazi Germany, the satire may no longer work.

There are other reasons why “Hogan’s Heroes” is no longer funny, despite the very talented cast. Its laugh track is annoying now, especially when the jokes are old and repetitive: how hard can you keep laughing when Sgt. Schultz (John Banner) says “I know nothing! NOTHING!” for the thousandth time? Perhaps the kiss of death for the series is the ubiquity of series star Bob Crane as Hogan, Crane was always smarmy for my taste, but knowing his fate—Crane was bludgeoned to death by a likely participant in his sick S & M porno ring that involved, among other revolting activities,  secretly videotaping women engaged in sex—make watching the show a painful experience. Continue reading →

Pandemic Ethics Observations, Part I: The Name Game

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Let’s start with the name, shall we? Until further notice, Ethics Alarms will call this thing the Wuhan virus, in part out of sheer orneriness, but also because…

  • It’s better than the “Whaeveryoucallit Virus”
  • There’s no Wuhan beer that will unfairly lose money because people are so stupid.
  • Covid-19 is a terrible name for anything, even the 19th covid, whoever he is
  • Chinese coronavirus and Chinese virus are just OK, but the first is too long, and the second is too generic. Like I prefer to use destinations like Sichuan and Mandarin when talking about Chinese food, even bad Chinese food. I’m sure that’s racist too.
  • The people strenuously objecting to the name are almost without exception utter jerks. Such as…

Omar’s logic here is so self-evidently contrived that if someone can’t immediately explain why, I’m not going to waste my time explaining it to them.

…but mostly because the virus still appears to have largely emanated from the Wuhan Province in China, and I’ll be damned if the hypocritical race-baiting efforts by the news media and political correctness addicts are going to dictate how I communicate. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 12/4/19: Trump Derangement And The Bad Guys

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

 

Good Morning!

1. Quote of the Day: David Bernstein on Instapundit: “What do you call a candidate pool with too women, a gay man, a jew, a half-Jew, and a Catholic?  If you’ve drank a certain type of Kool-Aid, you can this “not diverse”–even though there has been only one Catholic president, and no gay, Jewish, or woman presidents. The obsession with arbitrary and artificial “official” minority status may be the single worse feature of the modern chattering classes.”

Well, of course the problem is “white”: the Democratic party has been demonizing whites for years, and anti-white bigotry is accepted and even cheered. I also disagree  that the “obsession with arbitrary and artificial “official” minority status may be the single worse feature of the modern chattering classes.”  I can think of worse features, but it’s certainly a bad one.

2. Now THIS is Trump Derangement!Long time Leftist wacko Amanda Marcotte persuaded the fast-sinking Salon tp publish her screed headlined, “How Donald Trump ruined Christmas: I won’t celebrate this year, and he’s why: My enthusiasm for the Christmas season was always weak. Amid the ugliness of Trump’s America, it’s disappeared.”

Her lament fits squarely into Big Lie #5 (“Everything is terrible.”) What is amusing and telling is that even though Salon’s readership is as hard left as the site, virtually every comment on her piece is negative. Here is the first one to come up, but the rest pretty much echo it:

Summary: The author is an atheist who doesn’t even believe in the central premise of Christmas, doesn’t have a great relationship with her family, and never really put forward an effort to celebrate the holiday in the past, but somehow Trump has ruined Christmas. She still likes Thanksgiving, however, because it has fewer cultural attachments.

Reaction: How in the world something this mind-bendingly stupid managed to get published by a major company is beyond me, and it’s an example of how the fanatical left has adopted a rhetoric of self-perpetuating trauma around this presidency. “How dare you vote for Trump because it makes me sad! Yes, linoleum makes me sad too, but especially Trump!” It is as if, somehow, they consider the rest of the country responsible for making sure that no part of their eggshell-tranquility is maintained, regardless of the fact that their fragility is entirely of their own making. News flash: No one cares.

Continue reading →

Ethics Warm-Up, 10/15/2019: Farrow, James, Biden, And Another Diploma Bites The Dust…[CORRECTED]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Great.

Now there’s a tidal wave of too many ethics stories and issues to cover…

…and more than ever, I feel that an impeachment information and analysis website is essential, a civic  obligation, and likley to foce me to live out of a cardboard box. I also need to get Mrs. Q’s featured column launched. Naturally, I leave on another ethics seminar road trip today.

If the Red Sox were in the post-season, I’d have to shoot myself…

1. The up-side of the NBA’s cowardly pandering to China and its suppression of basic human rights…we learned what a shallow hypocrite LeBron James is. Of course, many of us knew this when James did his grandstanding champion of social justice act and  extolled Colin Kaepernick’s useless and incoherent protest.  “I stand with anyone who believes in change,” the B-ball superstar said, as if that means something.  It was still enough to attract excessive praise from the sports media. Last week, however, as the Los Angeles Lakers  returned home from a week-long tour of China, James said,

“Yes, we do have freedom of speech.  But at times, there are ramifications for the negative that can happen when you’re not thinking about others, when you only think about yourself. I don’t want to get into a word or sentence feud with Daryl Morey, but I believe he wasn’t educated on the situation at hand, and he spoke.”

Morey, the Houston Rockets GM who tweeted support for the Hong Kong protesters resisting China’s iron boot, only lacked education on how venal and without principles his league was, including stars like James. Morey was “thinking of others”: he was thinking of the people of Hong Kong desperately trying to hold on to as much liberty as they can. No, he wasn’t thinking about James’s giant paycheck, which is clearly all LeBron cares about.

He can take solace in a victory in the NBA’s “It’s not the worst thing” sweepstakes. San Farncisco Warriors coach Steve Kerr, when asked if he’d ever been confronted about human rights abuses on earlier trips to China, Kerr replied, “No. Nor has (America’s) record of human rights abuses come up either… People in China didn’t ask me about, you know, people owning AR-15s and mowing each other down in a mall.”

That’s right, Steve, there is obvious moral equivalency between China’s 30-65 million mass murders and its current oppressive government, and the United States of America. Continue reading →

Ethics Heroes: “South Park” Creators Trey Parker And Matt Stone

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

China’s right: that looks dangerous to me!

Unlike the National Basketball Association, satirists Parker and Stone know that their duties as Americans include representing American values to the world and standing by them even when threatened with negative consequences.

After “South Park’s” latest episode, which mocked China’s influence over Hollywood, the Chinese government banned the series. The Hollywood Reporter revealed that China removed all hints of”South Park” from its Internet, eliminating any social media references as well as episodes and clips from the streaming service Youku.

In response, the “South Park” creators issued a pointed satirical “apology” to China:

“Like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts. We too love money more than freedom and democracy. Xi doesn’t look like Winnie the Pooh at all. Tune into our 300th episode this Wednesday at 10! Long live the great Communist Party of China. May the autumn’s sorghum harvest be bountiful. We good now China?”

Perfect. Now watch the NBA condemn “South Park” as racist, or something.

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Pointer: Phlinn

Facts: Fox News