Well, that may be a bit over-stated, though not in the parlance of the Democratic Party and its propaganda agents in the news media. What Gallup really found, in its annual survey of U.S. values and beliefs, is that social conservatism is on the rise, and has reached its highest level in a decade, since 2012. Gee…what…a…surprise…
Gallup, being, as much as it tries to fight it, also infected with partisan bias, doubletalks its explanation for charts like these:
I’ve enjoyed that early Sixties novelty song “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport!” since I first heard it. It’s genuinely funny, employed black humor ahead of its time, and is cleverly written and performed. But I never bothered to learn who sang it or wrote it, until I learned the answer to both questions this morning when I read the obituary of Rolf Harris, who did both.
Rolf Harris was a popular British entertainer and TV personality who was convicted of sexually abusing young girls, and sent to prison. He never apologized to any of his victims (though he did apologize for using the racially charged slang “abo” in his hit song).
Ick. Here’s the Cognitive Dissonance Scale again…
The scale indicates positive and negative attitudes regarding people, places, subjects, events and ideas. Remember that like it or not, things that are connected tend to pull the things they are connected to up or down the scale. “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport!” is far from my favorite song, but it’s a solid +5 on the scale. Famous male celebrities who use their power and fame to sexually abuse children, however, are at least at -100, or lower. I don’t know how I can listen to a silly song and still be amused while my mind is telling me that the singer and author was a predatory monster.
And yet…and yet…I have written here many times that it is unethical to downgrade a critical assessment of a work of art because of the character of its creator, and that the art and the artist should be considered separately,
I believe that. I just don’t know that I can do it.
The last time EA visited the corporate cautionary tale was on April 23, here. Today’s post should be the end-point for this particular ethics matter, but you never know.
1. This isn’t going to blow over. Some commenters here and professional woke spinners in the news media tried to make the case that the backlash over Bud Light putting trans performance artist/influencer Dylan Mulvaney on a Bud Light can and featuring the camp figure in a promotion pandering to LGTBQ audiences was short-lived and a “nothingburger.” That has not been the case. Bud Light sales have fallen significantly for the third consecutive week. Beer Business Daily described the response to the campaign as a “shocking deterioration” of Bud Light’s market share. “We’ve never seen such a dramatic shift in national share in such a short period of time,” the newsletter said. Meanwhile, Bud Light’s biggest competitors like Coors Light and Miller Light are gaining consumers while Bud Light loses them.
So the immediate ethics breach here was competence. Corporations are supposed to use marketing to increase sales, profit and favorable views of their products—in fact, they are obligated to. Using marketing and messaging to endorse controversial political positions as self-conscious virtue-signaling is irresponsible, and, frankly, stunningly stupid. Pick your analogy: Bud Light featuring Jane Fonda on a can during the Vietnam war? How about Cindy Sheehan on a can during the Bush administration? It is amazing that Bud Light’s management was so estranged from the views of its own market.
2. It is not the job of corporations to try to change the views of its market.
I really thought the New York Magazine article titled “Ron DeSantis Eating Pudding With His Fingers Will End His 2024 Bid” was a joke…even though it appeared in the section called “Intelligencer,” which past experience has taught me often contains the dumbest essays ever contrived by homo sapiens. But it wasn’t a joke. Margaret Hartmann, the senior editor for “Intelligencer” who wrote the thing was serious. Observe…
Ron DeSantis has been hit with a food-related accusation so weird it may end his 2024 presidential bid before it officially starts. The Daily Beast reports that according to two sources, the Florida governor once ate chocolate pudding with three fingers… I’m calling it now: This story will follow DeSantis like pudding sticks to fingers. The devil is in the details. The report doesn’t say DeSantis dipped a finger into his pudding sheepishly; he used three fingers, presumably as a scoop. And it’s established in the preceding paragraph that he regularly ate during meetings, “like a starving animal who has never eaten before… getting shit everywhere.” This paints a vivid picture of being trapped in a conference room with your boss as he shoves most of his hand into a pudding cup, scoops the goo into his mouth, licks his fingers, and goes back in for more, with chocolate still smeared around his lips. Disgusting!
Observations:
Off-off Broadway, in Brooklyn, a small professional theater company in Brooklyn called Target Margin Theater is presenting, it claims, “Pericles,” one of William Shakespeare’s less-celebrated dramas, and I’m being kind. The play is a mess, and one might wonder why a 1608 play that only survives because Shakespeare’s name is on it keeps getting productions at all.
Well, to ask the question is to answer it: “Pericles” gets produced now and then because Shakespeare’s name is on it. It’s the cognitive dissonance scale at work: the Bard is so high on the scale that he even elevates the worthless junk he wrote, kind-of wrote or badly wrote like “Timon of Athens” and “Titus Andronicus” out of deep, deep negative territory on the scale because he is held in such high regard. Surely something produced by a genius must have redeeming qualities, directors and producers reason, and maybe we can be the ones to find them after all these centuries!
It is a bit like recording a cover of “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?” because it’s a Beatles song.”
But the Target Margin Theater production of the Bard’s Bomb tries some things. For example, the convoluted plot of “Pericles” gets started with the revelation that a nasty king, having lost his wife, has turned to his beautiful daughter “with whom the father liking took and her to incest did provoke.” However in this production, that line is rendered as, “The dude sleeps with his daughter.”
I guess I should start off by admitting that I have never found Roseanne Barr sufficiently witty, original or entertaining to make up for the ugliness of her world view, her horrible nasal screech, and her unjustified belief in her own brilliance.
I never could stand her hit sitcom or sit through an entire episode, so the reboot was about as welcome to me as most reboots (like the sad zombie version of “Murphy Brown”), but even a little less. When she managed to get herself fired and transformed into a pariah for making a racist slur against Barack Obama’s top advisor (and Michelle’s pal) Valerie Jarrett, tweeting in 2018 that Jarrett was the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Planet of the Apes movies, I didn’t feel sorry for her. The tweet was racist, and it was a mark of Barr’s arrogance, built up over years of being excessively praised and rewarded for being “outrageous”—I file her in the same general category as similarly unfunny shock-jocks like Howard Stern—that no ethics alarms went off when she thought it would be hilarious to compare an Obama staffer to a monkey. It was also stunningly stupid. From my ethicist perspective, Barr made the offense worse by claiming that she had no idea that Jarrett was black. Sure, Roseanne. Continue reading
Boy, only diehards are on Ethics Alarms today, yesterday too. I don’t get it; it’s a long weekend, but so what? It’s not like everyone is traveling on long weekends while American are still trembling in terror over the Wuhan virus. Must ethics take a holiday? Apparently so...
1. How can anyone have sympathy for New Yorkers? The city is falling apart. Crime is up, the wealthy are fleeing, corporations are fleeing, the mayor has eliminated admission tests for much of the public school system and stated that his goal is to redistribute wealth, Times Square has returned to pre-Rudy squalor, and tourism was falling like a rock even before the pandemic. They voted for a confessed socialist as mayor (and for his communist, conflict-of-interest flaunting wife)—perhaps acceptable as a novelty—then re-elected him after a disastrous first term. Now, six months ahead of this year’s Democratic mayoral primary that will decide who the next mayor will be because the city’s minorities wouldn’t vote for a Republican if he was running against Nero, the natives are getting restless. Polls show that New Yorkers regard de Blasio’s pet issues of combating climate change and pollution on the bottom of their priority list, but only 56% of respondents said they hold a “very or somewhat unfavorable” view of the guy that was the architect of the city’s collapse. Why isn’t it more like 90%? I suppose for the same reason they elected him twice. In democracy, you get what you deserve. Civic literacy is the individual’s ethical responsibility, nobody else’s.
2. Now THIS is an incompetent elected official…Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D) actually said in a video posted last week—I wouldn’t kid you!-–“This idea that saying that Pennsylvania was ‘rigged’ or that we were ‘trying to steal the election,’ that’s a lie. And you do not have the right, that is not protected speech.” Fetterman goes on to say that Twitter should have immediately removed any tweet from President Donald Trump that questioned the integrity of the election, and, in the immortal mark of someone who doesn’t know the First Amendment from a Yorkshire Terrier, compared Trump’s claims to “yelling fire in a crowded theater when there is none.”
This idiot is reportedly considering a run for the U.S. Senate in 2022.
To be fair, Fetterman’s view of the free speech,which is to say “there is none unless progressives approve,” appears to be on the way to becoming the predominant one in the Democratic Party.
Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos…
I’d call this an ethics train wreck if it wasn’t so stupid.
During a rally for the conservative Moms for America, Mary Miller, a freshman Illinois Republican member of the House, said conservatives would lose unless “we win the hearts and minds of our children. This is the battle. Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’”
Responding with classic “gotcha!” verve, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said in an interview about Miller, “She’s been on this earth long enough to know that invoking the beliefs of Hitler as being right in any respect is inappropriate and wrong. It’s wrong enough that she should not be in Congress.”
Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) piled on, saying that Miller should resign and be replaced with “someone who better understands the sacrifices our brave service members made during World War II.” Illinois’ Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Miller’s comment at the rally “disgusting.” Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger called the Hitler comments “garbage.” Echoing, I’m sure, many shameless progressive pundits, Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham described Miller in a column as “the first-term representative from Illinois who had quoted Hitler approvingly at a “Save the Republic” rally the day before.
Naturally, Rep. Miller had to grovel a clumsy apology:
What’s going on here? Stupidity, grandstanding, dishonesty, virtue signaling, oh, lots of things.
In “A Clockwork Orange,” Alex, the violent anti-hero, is captured and subjected to a brutal re-conditioning process to stop his enjoyment of raping, beating, and killing. Unfortunately, the disturbing images he is shown as part of his treatment are accompanied by the works of his favorite composer, Beethoven. Alex begs his captors to stop the treatment saying “It’s a sin! He did no harm to anyone! Beethoven just wrote music!” At the end of his ordeal, Alex is released, and whenever he tries to commit an act of violence he gets so sick that he wants to die. As an unintended consequence of his treatment, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony has the same sickening effect on him, so Alex can no longer listen to the composer he loves.
The process that ruined Beethoven for Alex is a basic cognitive dissonance scale exercise.
Linking music that is high on Alex’s scale to images and experiences he finds repulsive or upsetting, along with pain and discomfort—these are all are low, in negative territory— inevitably brings Beethoven down to the point where he can no longer experience pleasure from his compositions.
Many great and popular works of music have been damaged this way, most recently this Christmas in Nashville, when a strange man named Anthony Quinn Warner blew up a city block and died in the blast.
Moments before it blew up,Warner’s parked RV broadcast Petula Clark’s iconic 1964 hit “Downtown“:
When you’re alone and life is making you lonely
You can always go
Downtown!
When you’ve got worries, all the noise and the hurry
Seems to help, I know,
Downtown!
Then the explosion came, ripping through a downtown Nashville block, injuring at least eight people and damaging more than 40 buildings.
(The Introduction is here.; Chapter I is here.;Chapter 2 is here; Chapter 3 is here.)
When we last saw Kris Kringle, he had become a big hit at Macy’s by sending shoppers to Gimbel’s, and even was making inroads on young Susan’s precocious skepticism after she heard him speak Dutch. The story really begins going off the ethics rails at this point.
Doris decides that it would probably be responsible to have Kris checked out by the company psychologist, Mr. Sawyer, since her Santa is, after all, nuts. Yah think? In truth, it is per se irresponsible for Macy’s to knowingly employ a Santa Claus operating under the delusion that he is really Santa. The first authority a store would consult in real life, yes, even in the 1950s, would be a member of the legal department. If anything happened to a child in Macy’s store while sitting on the lap of a man who openly claimed to be a mythological figure, the lawsuits would write themselves. Thus the story really takes a turn toward an indictment of capitalism and corporate ethics: Macy’s is willing to put children at risk for some extra profit. Luckily, nobody has noticed in the past half-century.
Here we have a famous breach of competence by the screenwriter, George Seaton. While boasting to Doris about all the mental acuity tests he has passed, Kris says,
“I’ve taken dozens of them. Never failed one yet. Know them by heart. “How many days in the week?” Seven! “How many fingers do you see?” “Four!”….No damage to the nervous system! “Who was the first President of the United States?” George Washington! “Who was Vice-President under John Quincy Adams?” Daniel D. Tompkins! I’ll bet your Mr. Sawyer doesn’t know that!”
He doesn’t know that because it isn’t true. Tompkins was Vice-President under James Monroe, the fifth President, not Adams, #6. It drives me crazy when Hollywood allows historical misinformation to pollute the minds of the historically ignorant public, because there’s no excuse for it. Even before the internet, this fake fact could have been checked using any dictionary or encyclopedia. Nobody cared enough to bother. To make the mistake worse, John Quincy Adams’ VP was, unlike Thompkins, an important historical figure, John C. Calhoun.
Ethics Alarms 