George Floyd Ethics Train Wreck

Requiem For “My Mammy”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

 

I was just running an errand, and on the Sirius XM 60’s Channel they were playing the top 40 songs from this date in 1967 (my favorite year). And what should come on but The Happenings, the Four Seasons-imitating group best known for “See You In September” and the whitest group in history, singing “My Mammy,” the Al Jolson trademark song that he originally sang in blackface.  (I apologize for using the non- “Jazz Singer” version of Jolson singing the song, but an article about blackface got Ethics Alarms banned from Facebook, and I don’t want to give them provocation to have me shot The video above also has another Jolson standard, “April Showers.” There’s nothing wrong with more Jolson; he was one of the great ones.)

I had forgotten that The Happenings had a mild hit with it as the follow-up to “I Got Rhythm.” “My Mammy,”music by Walter Donaldson and lyrics by Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis, is a terrific, tingles-up -the-spine song and performance piece (“I’d walk a million miles for one of your smiles!”), but I assume it is now impossible to present because of its blackface connotations.

The loss of “My Mammy” isn’t  a great tragedy, but it’s still a tragedy. Big chunks of our culture are going to be torched before this insanity burns itself out, if it ever does. I have a feeling that I’ll be fighting this battle for the rest of my life.

More Speech Suppression And Intimidation On The Campus: The Juniata Affair

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The “Concerned Juniatian” was a student named Colin Daly. This was the very end of a much longer screed (You can read the whole, very long letter here) that the Juniatia College student sent to his campus community anonymously. Juniata is a small Pennsylvania liberal arts college affiliated with the Church of the Brethren, a Christian denomination. It is also apparently devoid of respect for such values as free speech, individuality, and dissent.

Daly, a senior, wrote the email without including his name but accidentally “left identifying information on the system he used to distribute his post to all of Juniata’s email accounts,” according to PennLive.

Before it identified Daly as the author, the college’s President James Troha wrote in a statement that the email contained “slurs, hateful language, and intimations of violence directed at members of our community on the basis of their identity.” There is no threat of any kind in the letter, and the “slurs” are words referred to as slurs, not used as slurs. Here’s the section of the letter I assume Troha is referring to:

I’d like to see Daly sue Troha for libel; I think he’d have a strong case.

The next day, after it was determined that Daly was the author, the college released a new statement. claiming that “law enforcement agencies are continuing their own investigations of the matter,” and suggesting that the letter’s author student may have broken state and federal laws.

That’s some education students at Juniata are getting. Continue reading →

On Polls, Biden, Britney Spears, And”Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Note #71, 546

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Back when he was the lone moderate voice on Mediaite, Joe Concha had a brief set-to with Ethics Alarms that concluded with him writing some nice things about us. I hope he still checks in now and then. Concha’s with The Hill now, and one of the journalists who is fair to all sides while acknowledging his profession’s progressive rot.

In related but completely predictable news, the latest Rasmussen Report’s weekly White House Watch shows the President trailing Biden 44% to 47%, nearly within the margin of error, making up more than half of the alleged ten point deficit the same poll showed a little over a week ago.  The significance of this is not the numbers. As I keep pointing out, polls are generally unreliable, polls this far from a Presidential are especially unreliable, and polls involving President Trump and  phantom candidate Joe Biden are about as unreliable as polls can be.

Moreover, the news media has been using polls to demoralize Trump supporters, not to mention foes of open borders, speech suppression, racial and gender quotas, slavery reparations, presumption of guilt for males accused of sexual assault, government sanctioned riots, police defunding, drug legalization, the Green New Deal, manipulative news media, gun confiscation, airbrushing history, denigrating America, partisan coups, totalitarianism—you know, what the Far Left has pushed the Democratic Party into supporting, or at least pretending to. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 7/16/2020: Dreadlocks, Kareem, Scrabble And “Political Slogan? What Political Slogan?”

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

1. This Morning’s Grovel: A white Seattle hairdresser apologized profusely for daring to wear dreadlocks. The key quote: “I have come to understand—far too belatedly—that my hairstyle is harmful.”

To lightly paraphrase Orwell: ‘She loved Big Brother.’

It’s hard to work up any sympathy for people like Irene—weak, ignorant, unwilling to stand up for basic  human rights, like being able to wear your hair any damn way you want to. This is yet another of the one-way “rules” that are being delivered by edict as an alleged remedy for “systemic racism”: Blacks can do anything they want to, whites are severely limited. The hair rules: black women can straighten their hair, dye it blonde, adopt any style the choose as a method of self expression, but a white woman who chooses dreadlocks has “harmful hair.”

Those who won’t stand up for their own liberties deserve to lose them. Irene is a fool, and betraying the values of her country. Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The Nick Cannon Meltdown

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

This is the kind of story that makes me doubt my own cultural literacy. Until the controversy involving Nick Cannon, I had never heard of the guy, and wouldn’t recognize him if he walked into my living room.  Yet he’s been around for 20 years as a juvenile TV star, a rapper, comic, actor, producer, director, the TV host of all sorts of shows I didn’t watch, and since 2012 he’s had his own show on MTV called “Wild and Out.” He also has a podcast.

The news that ViacomCBS had fired Cannon resonated throughout the popular media, and qualifies, apparently, as a Big Deal. In the June 30 installment of Cannon’s podcast, “Cannon’s Class,” he interviewed Professor Griff, a rapper who was a part of the group Public Enemy before being forced out after he said in an interview with The Washington Times, “The Jews are wicked. And we can prove this.” He also said that Jews were responsible for “the majority of wickedness that goes on across the globe.”

“I’m hated now because I told the truth,” Griffin told Cannon, who was immediately sympathetic. “You’re speaking facts,!”  Cannon said. “There’s no reason to be scared of anything when you’re speaking the truth.”

After referring to Dr. Griff as a “legend,” Cannon said he wished that Louis Farrakhan, the anti-white demagogue with a long history of anti-Semitic comments, had not been blocked by Facebook.

Then Cannon endorsed Griffin’s contention that six dominant media companies were controlled by Jews, comparing it to the power of the Rothschilds, the banking family at the center  of various  anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. “I find myself wanting to debate this idea and it gets real wishy and washy and unclear for me when we give so much power to the ‘theys,’ and ‘theys’ then turn into illuminati, the Zionists, the Rothschilds,”  Cannon said later in the podcast.

Got it. He’s an anti-Semite. Continue reading →

Ethics Outburst, 7/15/2020: An Execution, An Exoneration, A “Never Mind!” And More Freakouts…

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

1. Least surprising ethics revelation of the day: Kanye West is an asshole.  After posting this,

..sending the news media into a frenzy, setting off speculation about how much of the crucial black vote his candidacy might siphon off from Joe Biden, exciting all of those who inexplicably take the man seriously after ample evidence over the years that he is emotionally unstable, West has decided a mere eleven days later that he doesn’t want to run after all. His organization had hired 180 people who trusted him.

If there is a more irresponsible celebrity alive, I don’t want to know about him. Continue reading →

My Georgetown Diploma Joins My Harvard Diploma In Facing The Wall In Shame

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Georgetown has apparently programmed its victims of a liberal education to not only believe in the suppression of free speech and dissent from the majority, but to engage in it. Nice.

By the way, Georgetown, the backs of Harvard’s diplomas are much more attractive than the backs of yours.

Georgetown University junior Billy Torgerson received a formal condemnation from  the Georgetown University Student Association as well as a call for the college to investigate him for “bias” based on a column, “A Nation Of Virtuous Individuals,” that he authored and posted on his own website.

That’s all you need to know, really. It is none of the Student Association’s business what a Georgetown student posts online on his own forum. The principle articulated in the recent Supreme Court case B.L v. Mahanoy Area School District holds even if the action of a student group doesn’t strictly constitute what the opinion prohibits. This is chilling free speech.

Torgerson’s primary “crime” seems to be that he opposes another recent SCOTUS ruling,  Bostock v. Clayton County, which extended protections under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to transgender individuals.  I think he’s wrong, but Torgerson’s position is similar to that of the  three dissenting judges  and many conservative analysts. And it doesn’t matter if he’s wrong. He has every right to state his opinion without being punished. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Gary Garrels

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The carnage of the George Floyd Terror, aka George Floyd Freakout, aka George Floyd Ethics Train Wreck, claimed another victim yesterday, and Ethics Alarms is designating him the Ethics Dunce. We really need a new category for people like Gary Gerrels, the now ex-senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Placed in a position where he could take a strong  position against unhinged woke bullying, when every element of common sense, integrity, fairness and reality was aligned in his favor, he prostrated himself to the mob. “Ethics Coward,” perhaps? “Ethics Weenie”? “Ethics Fool”? “Useful Ethics Idiot”?

Garrels  triggered the process of his cancellation by concluding a presentation on how to diversify the museum’s holdings by saying, “don’t worry, we will definitely still continue to collect white artists.” In a ZOOM meeting of museum employees, Garrels  voiced a similar position, saying  that the museum could not avoid collecting the work of white men, which he described as “reverse discrimination.” Shortly thereafter employees created and began signing an online petition demanding that he leave the museum.
Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Quote Of The Day: Roger Kimball”

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I held back a bit on Glenn Logan’s Comment of the Day, because it depressed me, and also because I assume some will argue that it is less about ethics than politics. But the condition Glenn is diagnosing is the direct outgrowth of what Ethics Alarms tagged long ago as the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, and it’s all about ethics, or rather the lack of them.

Here is Glenn Logan’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Quote Of The Day: Roger Kimball”:

Roger Simon said:

And just about now, a great chasm is opening up. The choice, they see, is not so much between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. It is between the America they love—that Donald Trump celebrates—and the out-of-control forces of anti-American hatred that, though he does not understand them, Joe Biden manages to blink and nod and gibber around.

I find this far too simplistic to be truly useful, even though it is powerfully argued. This piece reminds me of a quote by Hannibal Lechter in Silence Of The Lambs:

First principles, Clarice. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature?

So what is the nature of the “particular thing” the Left seeks? Donald Trump’s defeat is the simple answer, facile and, in some ways, honest. But that’s just a manifestation of what the Left wants, and the conclusion it hopes we’ll all reach.

The Left has always been of the opinion that every election that does not produce the result they demand is illegitimate. Even if Trump carries every state but the deepest blue, they will still have that opinion, which indicates that they really don’t care who the GOP puts forth in nomination — unless a Democrat wins, the election will be considered illegitimate and the president a fraud.

Fundamentally, the Left doesn’t even accept the liberals in the country, because most liberals are not calling for massive structural change. That’s why you see so many nominally “on the Left” get “canceled” on social media — because they aren’t “woke” enough. Biden himself would be a victim if he were still in a primary with Sanders or, especially, with Corey Booker or Camella Harris. As it is, he’s just a useful idiot whom the Left hopes to use to capture power, then remove and replace with a more useful idiot. Biden is going to be spending all his time proving he doesn’t deserve replacement.

The nature of this “particular thing” is not about Trump — Trump is its public face, its boogeyman. The “particular thing” into which Simon purports to inquire is far larger than one man. Instead, it is doubtless the entire U.S. system of government and elections. The Left would like to cancel large swaths of government, such is ICE, the FBI, the CIA, and even the military and replace it with organs of social change, indoctrination, and retribution against those who oppose it. Continue reading →

High Noon Ethics Showdown, 7/14/2020

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“High Noon” is an ethics movie to be sure, but a very strange one. I put it on a list of ethics movies in 2016, but as I wrote then,

“High Noon” is a Western that shows the American people at their worst, refusing to help a single law man threatened on his wedding day, and cringing in fear and denial when their values need to be fought for.

I have long felt that the movie is like a “Twilight Zone” episode, or a Western version of “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.” What’s wrong with those people? However, it feels less like a Rod Serling parable now, when I find myself thinking “What’s wrong with those people?” several times a day as I surf the news feeds.

It is reported that John Wayne was offered the role of the desperate law man, eventually played by the Duke’s friend, Gary Cooper. Wayne, who was always protective of the heroic character he had created over the course of his career, hated the script, and turned it down. I cannot imagine John Wayne running around a town begging for help as four gunfighters are on the way to seek revenge, and apparently neither could he. In response to “High Noon,” Wayne and Howard Hawks made “Rio Bravo,” about a sheriff who keeps refusing assistance as a rancher hires gunfighters to free the sheriff’s prisoner, his brother.  At every turn, people keep saving the sheriff anyway.

I think one reason Wayne wanted to star in “True Grit” so much is that Rooster Cogburn, old and fat, takes on four villains by himself, charging them on horseback with the reins in his teeth and guns blazing.

1. It’s amazing that everyone isn’t sick of this yet. The latest Times “fact check” of President Trump, like so many others, relies on an interpretations of the notoriously sloppy-speaking POTUS that nobody fair and attentive could possible  think was his intended meaning. The statement at issue was that “99% of which are totally harmless.”

By “totally harmless,” the hyperbole addicted President meant “aren’t fatal.” The game, however, is to pretend the Presidents words, whatever they are, are lies. (The Washington Post just updated its hilarious Trump lie database. I challenge anyone to pick ten entries at random that even include a majority of “lies.”)

The Times even writes, “Studies that have calculated the death rate based on broader antibody testing that takes these silent cases into consideration suggest an infection death rate of less than 1 percent, said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.” Continue reading →