culture

“Justice for the Nicholas Brothers”…Again

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Sometimes it all seems worth it.

Yesterday, late at night, I received an e-mail from a music teacher at a Catholic elementary school in Connecticut. He had introduced his young students to great musicians of the past, such as Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, and arouse their admiration and excitement when he showed them videos of The Nicholas Brothers. Recently he came upon my post on Fayard and Harold from 2012, and felt compelled to write me agreeing with my lament that such miraculous performers could be so forgotten today because of their marginalization by the film industry and society. He wrote…

“We have most definitely talked of racism but I now want to read the class your article and get the feedback. Your article is succinct and eloquent.  Your article assessment is sadly true. My goal is not necessarily to revive the Nicholas Brothers:  it is to kindle in each of the kids in the class the spirit of excellence that each of us has and to let nothing stop us from reaching the top.”
To be honest, I had forgotten about my post about remembering the Nicholas Brothers. I checked: the post has only been read by about a thousand visitors since I wrote it; if my objective is to keep the legacy of these amazing dancers alive, it’s probably time for a re-post.

At the Sun Valley Lodge, there is a television station devoted to playing the 1941 film “Sun Valley Serenade” on a loop. It is a genuinely awful movie, starring John Payne of “Miracle on 34th Street” fame, Norwegian ice skater Sonia Henie, and Milton Berle, although it does show the famous ski resort in the days when guests used to be towed around the slopes on their skis by horses. Last time I was in Sun Valley to give a presentation, I watched about half the film in disconnected bites, since I never can sleep on such trips. This time I finally saw the whole thing. At about 3 AM, as Glenn Miller was leading his band in the longest version of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” in history, Fayard and Harold Nicholas suddenly flipped onto the screen, and “Sun Valley Serenade” briefly went from fatuous to immortal.

If your reflex response to that last sentence was “WHO??,” you are part of the reason for this post, and also in the vast and deprived majority of Americans. As I circulated among my future audience of lawyers and their spouses yesterday morning, happily informing them that the terrible movie playing around the clock in their rooms included the dance team called “the unforgettable Nicholas Brothers” in more than one tribute, I learned that none of them had any idea what I was talking about, and many of these individuals were old enough to have been able to see Fayard and Harold in a theater. The Nicholas Brothers were, you see, the greatest tap-dancers who ever lived, and the most amazing dance team that ever will be. Continue reading →

Of Kanye And Caitlin: What Are Rational Ethics Standards For Halloween Costumes?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

boston-marathon-victim

The standards of acceptable Halloween costuming, as you might have predicted given the catalyst President Obama has given to extreme restrictive political correctness, keeps evolving to the hypersensitive and the restrictive. The issue is easier with children’s costumes: children’s masquerades should be age-appropriate; they should not be manikins for their parent’s senses of humor or political views, and as long as they are in the spirit of horror movies, the criticism of those who don’t understand horror movies should be jeered at or ignored. The major controversies arise now over adult costumes. Ethics Alarms has been covering the phenomenon for  awhile: let’s review the topic as previously explored here before I delve into its 2015 edition: Continue reading →

“Elfin’ Around,” Best Buy? Really?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

bestbuy_logoBest Buy just became the latest TV advertiser to conclude that it’s astonishingly clever and hilarious to evoke “fuck” in a commercial, one that I just heard at 7:54 PM. The spot extolling Christmas shopping at Best Buy (it isn’t even Halloween yet) featured a cheery announcer pointing out that when you shop there, you won’t be “elfin’ around.” Get it? It sounds like “effin,” a cover-word that means “fucking,” and is meant to be heard as “fucking.”  But, see, it’s SO clever, see, because it’s NOT “effin’,” but “ELFin’,” and this is a Christmas ad! Wow! Christmas AND Fake Fuck in the same word! There must have been high fives all around when the writers came up with this one.

An ethical management would have told them to grow up, and fired the lot of them. This is 2015, however, a banner one in the coarsening of America, so Best Buy decided it was cool to join Verizon, Booking.com, CNN, and President Obama —you know, our national role model?— in following the lead of K-Mart’s disgusting  “ship my pants” ad in 2013. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Who Are You Calling A Nut?” And Other Ethics Issues In The Community College Shooting Aftermath (Continued)”

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

GunsBad-copy

Ethics Alarms’ eccentric philosopher Michael Ejercito, who excels in asking provocative questions, ends his Comment of the Day regarding the attack on gun ownership with the query, “Why do people use such discredited arguments?”

There’s certainly a lot of discredited arguments in the air. A writer named Michael Pusitan wrote a risible post (inspiring a very funny Animal House referenced take-town by the Instapundit) about getting rid of his guns, ending with this passage:

Last week, I sat in a hotel room and watched the President talk about the latest mass shooting and how they had become routine and the concern that nothing would change. I started to shrug it off and pretend in my mind that there was nothing I could do. But the idea that gun culture doesn’t bear some responsibility for these killings didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t want to be a part of gun culture anymore.

I was never going to use these guns for self-defense, they were safely locked and out of reach. I don’t hunt. I don’t shoot clays. There are no dangerous animals where I live. There are no zombies. I’m not a police officer or soldier. I am not part of a well regulated militia. There’s no reason for me to have them.

So I got rid of them. Firearms are no longer a hobby of mine.

This well-exposes the logical disconnect of virtually all the “WE GOTTA DO SOMETHING!” rants from political exploiters of the recent shootings, where the tragedy is used to insist on measures that will have no effect on preventing the tragedies at issue. Pusitan getting rid of his guns is grandstanding, that’s all. His action won’t save a single life, and if he snapped and decided to go shoot up a church he’d still be able to buy the guns to do it. Meanwhile, the statement “I didn’t want to be a part of gun culture anymore” is pure, distilled ignorance. It’s not the gun culture, you fool, it’s the culture, and unless you want to book a slow boat to China, you’re part of it whether you like it or not, because you live here, and derive the good and the bad from the uniquely vital and productive individual initiative and freedom-based culture that is the United States of America.

(Instapundit’s joke quotes Otter: THESE TIMES CALL FOR A REALLY STUPID, FUTILE GESTURE. And he’s just the guy who can do it.)

The answers to Michael’s question are many: because they don’t know what they are talking about, because they have no good, honest proposals, just bad, dishonest ones, because they are preaching to the choir and not really interested in changing anyone’s mind, because the whole debate is framed by emotion, not facts.

Here is Michael Ejercito‘s Comment of the Day on the post, “Who Are You Calling A Nut?” And Other Ethics Issues In The Community College Shooting Aftermath (Continued)”

A column from George Skelton on this issue, and my response.

It is really quite simple: Guns are designed for killing. The more guns there are, the more people get killed. That’s not just simple logic. It’s simple fact.

The same thing have been argued with regards to alcohol- or black people.

And no other developed nation comes close to us in firearms fatalities. We’re at 10-plus per 100,000 people. One third are homicides, two thirds are suicides.

I wonder if George Skelton even heard that California has legalized assisted suicide. The state thus declared that suicide is a good thing. Continue reading →

A Bobby Jindal Critic Asks, “Would I Be Uncivil If I Were To Suggest That Somebody Punch This Man Right In His Dick?” Why Yes, I Believe You Would…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
By all means, this should be our model for political discourse...

By all means, this should be our model for political discourse…

Gov. Bobby Jindal, desperately trying to stay relevant in the Republican race to be the party nominee in 2016, weighed in on the Oregon community college shooting with an extensive blog post that shows, if nothing else, that the Fifties live. It’s pretty awful, designating as “root causes” of the violence such Oldies but Stupidees as “glorifying violence” in popular culture (Actually, this one is closer  to 1650), movies, TV shows, music (Run, Tipper! This is your chance!) the decline of religion ( “…we flaunt the laws of God and common decency”—I think you mean “flout” there, Bobby), the decline of the family…you know the list. The problem with Jindal’s rant—other than its exaggerations, poor writing and hysterical tone— is that taking any single event and attributing it to generic causes is demagoguery, and as intellectually dishonest as  blaming the NRA every time someone is murdered with a gun.

The Huffington Post, mocking Jindal’s eminently mockable screed, asked “What about gun violence?” as if Jindal left out the one obvious “root cause.” Is it really necessary to point out that gun violence is responsible for gun violence? But that’s anti-gun code for guns, you see. Guns are responsible for the shootings. Take the evil guns away, and nobody dies! That this facile and deceitful dead end reasoning is so accepted among progressives and liberals that it is considered an obvious truth is depressing, but I digress.

Jindal is also depressing, since the only remedy for violent movies, TV shows and video games is censorship of one kind or another, and you know what the Right will do if it gets that started: TV couples will again be sleeping in twin beds like Rob and Laura Petrie by edict. His lack of logic is depressing too—how does someone like this get elected a governor?—when he attributes alleged conditions like “the family is a mess” to a rampage by someone who might have been raised like Opie Taylor but whose mind just snapped, as they have a tendency to do. Again, a single incident has specific causes. Jindal’s main argument is exactly as exploitative and dishonest as using the Oregon shooting to lobby for gun regulations that wouldn’t have stopped the shooting. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Al Roker’s Unethical Selfie And Malfunctioning Ethics Alarm

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Roker-selfie

The question here is a simple one.

On the scene of the devastating flooding in South Carolina, Today Show weather man Al Roker tweeted a selfie of him and  NBC colleagues beaming happily in front of a collapsed highway and a trapped car, with the caption “My crew and I getting ready to report on East Coast flooding from S. Carolina on @NBCNightlyNews with Kate Snow.”

Yes, after many complained on social media about the discordant juxtaposition of cheerful self-promotion and tragedy, Roker apologized, but not before.  The basic question is “What the hell is the matter with these people?“, or as today’s Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz asks,

Is Roker’s insensitivity signature significance of a malfunctioning ethics alarm, or just an excusable one-time mistake?

Continue reading →

“What’s Going On Here?”:The Secret Service’s Vindictive Leak

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments
I was going to use another "fish rotting from the head" picture, but Thomas of Beckett's murder---which Henry didn't direct, mind you!---seemed more appropriate.

I was going to use another “fish rotting from the head” picture, but Thomas of Beckett’s murder—which Henry didn’t direct, mind you!—seemed more appropriate.

Last week, we learned that Secret Service Assistant Director Edward Lowery suggested that unflattering information the agency had in its files about a Republican Congressman ­who had been critical of the service—and who hasn’t been?— should be leaked to public as the agency’s revenge. And it was.

“Some information that he might find embarrassing needs to get out,”  Lowry wrote in an e-mail to a fellow director on March 31, commenting on an internal file that was being widely circulated inside the service. “Just to be fair.” Soon an internet source reported that Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, had applied to be a Secret Service agent in 2003 and was rejected. That information was part of a Chaffetz personnel file stored in a restricted Secret Service database and required by law to remain private.

During an inspector general’s investigation, Lowery denied that he directed anyone to leak the private information about Chaffetz to the press and said his e-mail was simply venting. How Clintonian. No, he didn’t direct anyone to do it: he just said that it should be done, as in “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?”

So far, this self-evident dodge has been enough to keep Lowery in his job, because as those who are honest and fair know, there is no accountability in the Obama Administration, and if a Republican Congressman is embarrassed, everyone knows the President is smiling about it. Lowry was  promoted to the post of Assistant Director for Training a month ago to help reform the agency after outrageous security lapses that Chaffetz had helped expose and criticize.

That’s some reformer! Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Fox News Anchor Shepard Smith

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments
Looks thoughtful, sounds thoughtful, isn't thinking...

Looks thoughtful, sounds thoughtful, isn’t thinking…

“I don’t know…I think we are in a weird place in the world when the following things are considered political. Five things, I’m going to tick them off. These are the five things that were on his and our president’s agenda. Caring for the marginalized and the poor — that’s now political. Advancing economic opportunity for all. Political? Serving as good stewards of the environment. Protecting religious minorities and promoting religious freedom globally. Welcoming [and] integrating immigrants and refugees globally. And that’s political?”

—-Fox News anchor Shep Smith last week, responding to critics of the Pope’s visit to the U.S. and his message, as it was being celebrated by Democrats, Catholics, intellectually dishonest progressives, and, apparently, naive news anchors.

The short answer to Smith’s question is, “Of course it’s political. All of those issues are political.” I would also add, “How can you report political news and not understand that they are political?”

Now I’m going to tick them off:

….”Caring for the marginalized and the poor” requires time, money and personnel, as well as planning and efficiency. All of those in turn require re-allocating resources away from other needs and activities, including important ones that allow people to avoid poverty and marginalization. A society that makes cariung for the non-productive members of society its first priority becomes non-productive itself. So where does “caring for the marginalized and the poor” fit on the priority list? What is the definition of  “the marginalized and the poor”? The Pope doesn’t have to define them, but to seriously create policy that accomplishes the goal of “caring for” them—which also requires a definition—is a political task.
Continue reading →

Trying To Find A Good Analogy For The Horrific Failure Of America’s Colleges Being Accompanied By The Myth That A College Degree Is Essential

/ Jack Marshall / 55 Comments
Great. What is it you think you did???

Great. What is it you think you did???

This latest example of a “Look! College grads are too ignorant to come in out of the rain!” survey” isn’t entirely surprising to me, but it is infuriating in a new way. Usually I react to such things with intensified contempt for the grads themselves, their lack of intellectual curiosity, their failure to meet the barest of requirements for competent citizenship. I still feel that way, but my disgust has refocused on other miscreants: the schools themselves, but most of all, the shills for continuing the myth that a college education is not only indispensable for personal and professional success, but worth beggaring the nation to ensure that everyone obtains one.

From a press release of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (and one which was ignored by the news media so they could spend all their time giving Donald Trump free publicity. That’s incredibly incompetent, but hey, the news media is run by college grads, so what do you expect?):

College Graduates Don’t Know Basic Facts About the Constitution

WASHINGTON, D.C., September 8, 2015 — The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) today released a survey that shows how little college graduates and the general public know about the Constitution.

According to the study, nearly 10% of college graduates think Judith Sheindlin — commonly known as Judge Judy — is on the Supreme Court; one-third of college graduates can’t identify the Bill of Rights as a name given to a group of Constitutional amendments; and 32% believe that Representative John Boehner is the current president of the U.S. Senate. Shockingly, 46% of college grads don’t know the election cycle — six years for senators, two years for representatives. Turning to the general population, the report finds that over half (54%) of those surveyed cannot identify the Bill of Rights accurately, and over 1 in 10 (11%) of those ages 25–34 believe that the Constitution must be reauthorized every four years….

Continue reading →

A Nation Of Assholes: The Ultimate, Undeniable And Crucial Reason Donald Trump Must Never Be President

/ Jack Marshall / 68 Comments

assholesI have had this essay ready to go for at least a month; I honestly didn’t think it would be necessary to post it. Nonetheless,  I kept in on the bench, just in case. I was confident that the point to be made was too obvious, and that even those bitter, angry, irresponsible, ignorant whateverthehelltheyares who are keeping Trump’s candidacy afloat—and thus making it more difficult to sort out the real candidates—would have figured it out by now. I was wrong.

There are lots of reasons why Donald Trump shouldn’t be anyone’s candidate to be President. He is a narcissist, for one thing, and that is a pathology. Narcissists are dangerous in positions of power. He has no experience in politics, which he appears  to believe, based on his statements, consists primarily of bribing people, since that is what it largely means in his eternally corrupt businesses of construction and gambling, and pitching them things, which is not the same as persuasion.  He seems to think leading a company and leading a nation are similar jobs: they are not, though they involve some common skills. Trump is largely ignorant of most issues facing us, and takes pride in winging it, simply saying the first thing that pops into his mind. What Presidents of the United States say have cascading impact: think about the horrible consequences of Obama’s infamous “red line” statement, which has led to the willingness of despots and terrorists to defy U.S. interests and warnings, confident that nothing would be done by a confrontation-averse President. Anyone assuming President Trump would be different in this regard from candidate Trump is the sort of person who would trust Iran to follow a nuclear agreement, a current monstrosity that is also, in part, the result of Obama’s “red line” gaffe.

The one area where Trump has actually put forth a fleshed-out policy is red meat nonsense, completely unworkable and impractical, as well as offensive to core American values. That is his absurd “Deport them all, build a wall, amend the Constitution” illegal immigration prescription. Yes, the illegal immigration joint negligence perpetrated by greedy business interests and cynical Democratic party strategists who would trade the best interests of the nation and the rule of law for long term demographic trends favoring their party is infuriating and frightening. Still, proposing ludicrous solutions that can’t be accomplished (even if sane people wanted them to be) is neither a mark of intelligence nor responsible leadership.

Beyond immigration, Trump is all generalities and posturing. He’s “tough.” Tough can be good; tough without principles, and Trump appears to have none, is, by turns, bluster, stubbornness, cruelty, recklessness and bullying. Donald Trump really seems to have no regard for ethics at all, which makes him, by definition, untrustworthy. Being untrustworthy is an ethical deficiency no leader can have. Continue reading →