double standards

Unethical Headline Of The Month: The New York Times

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Oh, the horror of it all! State Representative Shri Thanedar, a 67-year old Indian- American multimillionaire, beat eight Black candidates in the Democratic primary for Michigan’s 13th Congressional District.

Democrats voted for him, that’s all. Would the Times dare to ask accusingly in bold type, “Why a White Democratic City Won’t Have a White Democrat as Mayor”? in response to the election of Michelle Wu? I’m guessing no: that would be perceived as racist, because it would be. The article is full of statements like, “Black leaders describe it as “embarrassing” and “disappointing,” and argue that Detroit should have representation that reflects its population, which is 77 percent Black” and “The outcome is also testing the limits of racial representation in a city with a long tradition of Black political power.” Wait—isn’t “racial representation” the supposed pernicious tradition of systemic racism in the U.S.that is being used to justify outright racial discrimination against whites in 2022? Was Barack Obama’s election “embarrassing” and “disappointing” to white Americans? Do our leaders and representatives have to “look like us” to be acceptable? Clearly, only leaders who black Americans trust have to “look like them.” Really? If true, that wouldn’t speak very well of black Americans. But wait–isn’t making that observation “racist”?

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Today’s Dumb Woke Hollywood Casting Question: “Why Does Hollywood Keep Using Fat Suits?” [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The New York Times today decides to try a new frontier in the woke casting double standard adventure—you know, the incoherent theory that minority actors should be considered for all roles and all character types regardless of sex, race, size or physical characteristics, but it is unethical for white performers to play any character that they have to act and use make-up to evoke. You know, like good Hollywood liberal Tom Hanks claimed when he issued his recent  mea culpa for playing a gay, AIDS battling lawyer in “Philadelphia.”  So, using the same logic, Tom must have been equally hostile to “diversity, equity and inclusion” when he took a role away from some brilliant, unknown actor with a 75 IQ to play Forrest Gump, just as an autistic actor should have starred in “Rain Man” instead of Dustin Hoffman.

Suuuure. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The Great Stupid often has that effect on me. Sorry.

The Times’ query, in the headline to a column by Arts Section pundit Farah Fleurima, is “Why Does Hollywood Keep Using Fat Suits?” Gee, it’s a mystery! And come to think of it, why does Hollywood keep using make-up? Special effects? Fake blood?

Here’s a much tougher question: why does the New York Times let people who know nothing about performing, entertainment, business, audiences, comedy, and casting write columns like this? Continue reading →

More “Little Mermaid” Ethics: The White Ariel Version Of The Black Ariel Version Of The White Animated Ariel

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

In yesterday’s post, “Stop Making Me Defend Disney!,” Ethics Alarms looked at the controversy over Disney’s live-action version of its 1989 classic animated film “The Little Mermaid” that casts a black performer, Halle Bailey (not Halle Berry) as the Hans Christian Anderson heroine. Well, this one is moving fast.

One of the many fans who object to imposing “diversity, equity and inclusion” on “The Little Mermaid” announced via Twitter that technology was now available that could digitally transform Bailey into a white, red-haired mermaid just as Disney had transformed its original Ariel into a black one:

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Ethics Hero: Fox News White House Correspondent Peter Doocy

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I guess I’m going to have to show young Doocy more respect. The flagrant nepotism that allowed him to acquire an on-air job with Fox News made me reflexively suspicious of his qualifications, but he has proved himself to be a quick learner, a tough questioner, and as in this latest episode, gutsy.

Doocy asked President Biden’s paid liar Karine Jean-Pierre about Democratic claims that the 2016 election was “stolen” or illegitimate as a counterpoint to the President’s Reichstag address last week asserting that GOP rhetoric that Biden’s 2020 election victory was illicit threatened democracy.  When Jean-Pierre ducked Doocy’s question, saying that the White House will focus on the present rather than 2016 (baseball fans recognize this as the “Mark McGwire Deflection”), Doocy read her some of her own past tweets, like…

and…

“If denying an election is extreme now, why wasn’t it then?” Doocy asked. Continue reading →

Performing Arts Ethics: Amateur And Professional Ethics Dunces, Part I…The Professional

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

More than a decade ago, while I was the artistic director for a Northern Virginia professional theater I had co-founded, I offered the greater D.C. theater association a draft ethics code that I had developed after I realizes that the ethics alarms of the typical area theater professional were approximately the same as those of the average drug cartel boss. The response was telling: I received a formal thank-you, but was told that the theater community had no interest in ethics, and had done just fine without any code.

This attitude is not unique to Washington D.C. and environs, or regional theater. Performance artists generally and across all levels and regions tend to be incompetent at ethical analysis, and their ethics alarms aren’t merely dysfunctional, they are warped.

From the world of professional performing, for example, we have this controversy, arising from the announcement that actor James Franco (far left), a Portugese-Swedish-Jewish American, has been cast as Fidel Castro in a film project, and celebrated Hispanic actor John Lequizamo (on the right) was outraged over the casting choice.  “How is this still going on? How is Hollywood excluding us but stealing our narratives as well?” Leguizamo wrote. “No more appropriation Hollywood and streamers! Boycott! This F’d up! Plus seriously difficult story to tell without aggrandizement which would b wrong!”

As you can see, the actor was so upset that he lost the ability to communicate in coherent English.

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It’s “Be Kind To (Cute) Rapist Teachers Week” In Texas

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

That’s former Houston-area middle school teacher Marka Bodine above. Isn’t she pretty? Much too pretty to have to be in an icky old jail. So despite the fact that she was convicted of grooming, harassing, raping and continuously sexually abusing a 13-year-old student until he was 16 years old and finally alerted authorities, Bodine was only sentenced to to 60 days in jail with 10 years of probation. Shades of the infamous 2005 case of Debra Lafave, another sick but comely teacher who raped one of her 14-year-old students! Her lawyer successfully convinced the judge that their client was “too pretty for prison,” and honestly, who can argue with that? Here’s Debra:

As you can see, Marka isn’t quite the hottie that Debra was, so it’s only fair that she got some jail time. But wait! There’s more! Because Marka had given birth shortly before her sentencing (the baby was not her rape victim’s—Whew!— that would be the saga of teacher rapist Mary Kay LeTourneau), Harris County Judge Greg Glass postponed her imprisonment for a full year. Continue reading →

Another Nomination For The Double Standards And Hypocrisy Hall of Fame…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The nomination isn’t for the actress above, exactly, but for the progressive, race-obsessed, anti-white Hollywood culture that she is part of. That’s Ana de Armas, and she’s Cuban, not that there’s anything wrong with that. She’s been cast as Marilyn Monroe in a new Netflix movie, not that there should be anything wrong with that, either.

“I do want to play Latina. But I don’t want to put a basket of fruit on my head every single time,” she told the media. “So that’s my hope, that I can show that we can do anything if we’re given the time to prepare, and if we’re given just the chance, just the chance,’ she added. ‘You can do any film — Blonde — you can do anything.”

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Ethics And Gullibility Test In Georgia: How Long Can Stacey Abrams Fool Enough Of The People Enough Of The Time? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Stacey Abrams epitomizes so many unethical 21st Century political archetypes that I’ll miss her when she’s gone, which will be soon if there is justice in the universe. She is the classic example of a ruthless politician whose rise has been super-charged by cynically exploiting group divisions. Her own Teflon membership in two of those groups, women and blacks, have allowed her to get away with claiming that her election defeat as a Democratic candidate for Georgia governor was based on fraud without mainstream media criticism even as Donald Trump has been attacked literally every day for making the same claim about his defeat: it’s been Black Woman Seeking Justice/Orange Man Bad Loser all the way. Abrams played a dangerous game of two-faced public mendacity when she lobbied Major League Baseball to pull its 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta based on her misrepresentations of the GOP-backed Georgia election reform law, and then, when it became obvious how much money and how many jobs the city would lose because of the (epicly stupid—MLB execs had not even read the law, simply trusting Abrams as their human wet finger in the wind of public opinion) boycott, she claimed that she had never wanted the game to be pulled.

Abrams has also perhaps been the most influential force in the “It Isn’t What It Is” campaign by Democrats to convince the public that ensuring the integrity of elections is “voter suppression.”

Yet she is running for Governor again, thus posing another test of Abraham Lincoln’s famous maxim. Can she fool or continue to fool enough of the people? The news media, of course, can be counted upon to help mightily. Abrams just committed what would be for any politician held to normal standards a decisive gaffe, saying at a campaign event,

“I am tired of hearing about how we’re the best state in the country to do business when we are the worst state in the country to live. Let me contextualize. When you’re No. 48 for mental health, when we’re No. 1 for maternal mortality, when you have an incarceration rate that is on the rise and wages are on the decline, then you are not the Number 1 place to live.”

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Morning Ethics Heat-Up, 5/18/2022: More Judicial Review And Lies

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Because I was otherwise obsessed, I missed noting yesterday a true landmark in law and ethics. It was that date in 1954 when a unanimous the  Supreme Court handed down the unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, ruling that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Linda Brown, a young African American girl had been denied admission to her local elementary school in Topeka, Kansas, because of the color of her skin.

Written in 1896 as the KKK roamed the South, the SCOTUS ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson held that “separate but equal” accommodations in railroad cars conformed to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. Plessy was interpreted as justifying segregation in everything from buses to water fountains to elementary schools. The white school Brown attempted to attend was far superior to her the segregation-mandated alternative and miles closer to her home, so The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People  took up Linda’s cause. Thurgood Marshall led Brown’s legal team, and on May 17, 1954, Plessy was overturned after 58 years as “the law of the land” despite the siren call of stare decisus. The opinion written by Chief Justice Earl Warren declared that “separate but equal” was an unconstitutional doctrine in ringing terms: “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”  A year later, the Supreme Court published guidelines requiring public school systems to integrate “with all deliberate speed.”

1. Prudent and responsible, if not courageous. Speaking of SCOTUS, newly confirmed Justice-in-Waiting Ketanji Brown Jackson sat for an interview by the Washington Post and was asked about the leak of Justice Alito’s draft opinion in the Dobbs abortion case. Conservative media was triggered by this section:

Q: What was your response when you when you saw the draft leak [of a Supreme Court opinion that would strike down Roe v. Wade]?

A: Everybody who is familiar with the court and the way in which it works was shocked by that. Such a departure from normal order.

Q: Do you think it was a good thing or a bad thing?

A: I can’t answer that.

Q: What do you think about peaceful protests outside of Supreme Court justices’ homes?

A: I don’t have any comment.

Charles Cooke at the National Review writes, “This ranges from somewhere between cowardly and sinister, much like the failure of the justices to issue a joint statement that echoes the chief justice’s condemnation of the leak and statement of determination to identify the leaker, and that condemns the protests, which violate federal law.”

Wrong. SCOTUS justices should not issue opinions on such matters. Her statement that the leak was a breach of the normal order was factual, and breaches of normal order in any institution are unethical. She was right to go no further. As for the demonstrators, some of them may be arrested at some point, and a statement by a Supreme Court Justice regarding their conduct could interfere with a fair trial.

Her responses give me more reason to trust Jackson’s judgment, not less.

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This, Apparently, Is Ethical “Misinformation”…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The New York Time Book Review this week includes a review by novelist Mitchell S. Jackson of Elizabeth Alexander’s book “The Trayvon Generation.” I haven’t read the book itself, but it’s goals and orientation are clear from the review by Jackson. Jackson is, like Alexander, a Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory endorsing activist. If I were editing a book review supplement, I would think it mandatory to assign a reviewer to Alexander’s work who wasn’t so obviously predisposed to agree with her views and praise them, but that’s just not how the Times rolls these days. But this isn’t the point of my post.

This is: in the middle of his review, Alexander wrote—and the Times printed—

Never forget — on Feb. 26, 2012, a hella overzealous volunteer neighborhood watch captain named George Zimmerman stalked and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

Never forget — on July 13, 2013, a jury acquitted Zimmerman, an egregious verdict that fomented the Black Lives Matter movement into being.

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