hate

Query: How Many Ways Is This Poster Unethical Or Ethically Obtuse?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Trans-Hate-719x730

Here’s my preliminary list:

1. It deliberately or ignorantly confounds bias with hate. Bias is a preference that may or may not be rational. There is no evidence that those men who would not choose to date trans women hate them. Do short men choose not to date tall women because they hate them? Do educated men prefer not to date high school drop-outs because they hate them?

2. Thus the poster denies the human right to choose who we want to have romantic relationships with. If it’s hateful not to want to date women who used to be men, then it’s hateful to choose only to date attractive women, thin women, strong women, Jewish women, women of one’s own religion, nationality or race. Personal preference is itself unacceptable if it does not advance the current definition of social justice.

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Saturday Ethics Bits and Pieces, 10/24/2020: Sushi And Coyotes

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

1. Another day, another police shooting where the black victim entirely brought his fate upon himself, resulting in, of course, another protest. This time the episode was in San Bernardino, California. An officer was dispatched at 11:16 p.m. in response a 911 call about a man jumping on cars in a parking lot. He’s “really drunk and he’s waving around a gun…and he’s just going crazy,” the caller told the police dispatcher. She described him as a black man with a white shirt and black shorts.

As soon as police learned he was black, they might as well have replied, “Sorry. He’s your problem.”

Body camera video shows the officer approaching Matthew Bender, who fits the description by the 911 caller. The police officer pulls out his gun and tells Bender, “Let me see your hands.” Bender  raises his hands briefly and then puts them back on his side, walking away from the officer and telling the cop, “Man, I’m going to the store.” The officer holsters his gun away and attempts to apprehend Bender, who tells him, “Don’t touch me!” The police officer wrestles Bender to the ground and tells him, “Stop fighting, dude.” Bender is seen on video reaching for an item in his waistband that appears to be a handgun.  As both men get up from the ground, and the officer draws his weapon and fires four shots at Bender, which proved fatal. A loaded, unregistered pistol was found on the suspect, who had a criminal record going back 17 years, , with arrests attempted murder, false imprisonment, domestic violence, theft and possession of narcotics. Shortly after the incident was reported, demonstrators shouting, “Abolish the police!” “Defund the police!” and “Fuck the police!” took to the streets, blocking  an intersection and attacking vehicles.

The policy the demonstrators in these episodes want is one where the police are defenseless, arrests are impossible, and black skin ensures immunity from law enforcement. This is neither just, fair, nor rational.

2. Give hate a chance. Hate is in, as you know: the Democrats are depending on it, and little else, to bring them victory next month. A website called BestLife developed a formula for determining the “most hated states,”  ranked from least hated to most hated. Who hates a state? I’ve been in 48 of them plus the District, and I like some more than others, but hating a state seems pathological to me. I assume the calculations preceded the George Floyd Freakout, because Washington, Oregon and Minnesota come out far too positively in light of their behavior since June. And why is Oklahoma the fourth most hated state?

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The American Bar Association Has Lost Faith In Professionalism, It Seems.

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

For as long as I can remember, lawyers took pride in that fact that they could pound away at each other in the court room, shout, sneer, mock and beat an adversary into a metaphorical pulp, and put it all aside the second the case was finished. The idea that being friends, even close friends, with an opposing advocate compromised a lawyer’s determination and willingness to fight for his or her client was an anathema to the whole concept of professionalism. During the Civil War, West Point classmates on opposite sides sometimes met before a battle, shared a whisky, old memories and a few tears, and the next day did their best to kill each other. That mindset was analogous to how I was taught lawyers were supposed to behave, and, indeed, did.

Now the American Bar Association has apparently decided that it was all a myth. In  Formal Opinion 494, “Conflicts Arising Out of a Lawyer’s Personal Relationship with Opposing Counsel,” the ABA expresses doubts that many lawyers are up to the task.

“A personal interest conflict may arise out of a lawyer’s relationship with opposing counsel, the ABA now says. “Lawyers must examine the nature of the relationship to determine if it creates a …conflict and, if so, whether the lawyer reasonably believes the lawyer will be able to provide competent and diligent representation to each affected client who must then give informed consent, confirmed in writing.”

The opinion breaks possible personal relationships into three categories:

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‘All You Need Is Hate, Hate—Hate Is All You Need’…The Sequel!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

That was the title of a post on February 19. That title is appropriate now, and so is the beginning of that post…

“Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

It is ironic that President Richard Nixon’s most profound quote, an ethics quote, in fact, should have come as he left the Presidency, in his farewell remarks immediately after resigning his office in 1974 as impeachment and removal seemed unavoidable. It is doubly ironic that his words so prophetically apply at this moment to the target of his own hate that destroyed Nixon, the Democratic Party.

That the entire, ugly spectacle of a great political party shredding its own ideals and capitulating to unreasoning, all-consuming hate as its sole reason for being is not a new observation at Ethics Alarms, but it has reached its apotheosis… the final, total corruption of the party that once styled itself as the herals of peace and love was cleared and paved once Democrats, pushed by the fanatics of the “resistance,” abandoned policy commitment and fealty to America ideals and principles. The party devoted its energy and passion to making its attack on Donald Trump entirely personal, betting that never ceasing ad hominem rhetoric abetted by the now almost completely submissive left-biased media would be sufficient to bring down the Trump Presidency, hopefully without the messiness of an election, but if not, then at the polls in November.

Never before has  the brief for defeating an incumbant President been based on sheer hatred and little else. The reason why this is true becomes more evident every day, for Nixon was right. Hate is destroying the soul of the Democratic Party and its members. Its  strategy of employing the  atomic version of the politics of personal destruction, which the decried during the Clinton years, has torn the country apart to an extent that may have rendered it ungovernable.

There! Thank you, February Jack! You just saved August Jack the trouble of composing over 300 words. Now let’s talk about the hate assault of the Democratic allies..

  • Bette Midler. What a great talent she was, and what a vile creep she is. Midler is also typical of the Hollywood elite and once-elite—who constantly show why performers should shut up and reform. They are, however, fine examples of their non-famous compadres on social media. Here was Midler’s tweet about Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention:

Hypocrisy is the coin of the realm up and down the Democratic Party. These fake progressives weep for the plight of illegal immigrants who avoid sufficient involvement in American society to speak English at all. Yet they think they can seamlessly use insults  they would declare racist, sexist or otherwise proof of some form of cancel-worthy bigotry if they issued from a Republican, conservative, or heaven forfend, the President, and yet turn around and employ the same weaponized verbiage against those domestic enemies” (per Nancy Pelosi) with impunity. Continue reading →

Sunday Ethics Apparitions, 8/16/2020: Triceratops? What Triceratops? What IS A Triceratops?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

1. From the Ethics Alarms cultural literacy files. I remember this re- tweet by acclaimed novelist Joyce Carol Oates from 2015; I can’t believe I didn’t post on it then. (Pointer to Ann Althouse for reminding me of it today):

Now,  I would like to believe that Oates was joking (I’m not sure about Tilley), but she is not known for madcap humor. Apparently “Jurassic Park,” Steven Spielberg  and popular culture are beneath her, and she was so focused on literature in school that dinosaurs completely missed her attention. I regard this as being estranged from one’s culture, and I regard that as irresponsible.

2. Question: If Twitter is taking down tweets involving hate speech, why is unequivocal hate like this permitted? Robert Trump, the President’s younger brother, died yesterday. The President wrote,

“It is with heavy heart I share that my wonderful brother, Robert, peacefully passed away tonight. He was not just my brother, he was my best friend. He will be greatly missed, but we will meet again. His memory will live on in my heart forever. Robert, I love you. Rest in peace.”

Yet the hateful, vicious “resistance” couldn’t rise to a moment of bipartisan decency. The hashtag #wrongtrump, is the second highest trending on Twitter, with more than 80,000  tweets last I checked. Among the the ghouls were journalist David Leavitt., ” who tweeted, “What did he promise the devil for the Grim Reaper to take the #wrongtrump ???” (5.7 thousand people “loved” the sentiment), and Bishop Talbert Swan, president of the Springfield, Massachusetts, branch of the NAACP (and a pastor, which will perhaps help illuminate my attitudes toward organized religion), who wrote “Dear Grim Reaper, You took the #wrongtrump.” That one got 10,000 hearts.

These are mean, bad people with dead ethics alarms. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “HBO Max Adds A Disclaimer For Morons Onto ‘Blazing Saddles’”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I would not have expected mysterious veteran commenter Extradimensional Cephalopod to be the one to score a Comment of the Day regarding the idiotic and offensive “trigger warning” HBO Max felt it had to append to “Blazing Saddles.” Mel Brooks’ satire (and fart jokes) would not seem to the kind of thing a squid from another plane of existence would be able to appreciate. Shows what I know.

But seriously folks, this is the first ethical analysis of “Blazing Saddles” I’ve ever seen, heard, or imagined. And as usual with EC, it is thoughtful and enlightening.

Here is Extradimensional Cephalopod ‘s Comment of the Day on hate, contempt, and  the post, “HBO Max Adds A Disclaimer For Morons Onto ‘Blazing Saddles’”:

On the one hand, I agree with the people ridiculing the disclaimer. On the other hand, if it gets more people to watch the film and learn to appreciate satire, I’m in favor of a little message at the beginning that says, “It’s okay, you’re not a bad person for watching this film.” I’d like to get to the point where we don’t need the disclaimer, though.

When you mention hate and contempt, it makes me realize that most of what people refer to as “hate” is actually contempt, and that sloppy language prevents them from realizing what they want and what they need to do to get it. People don’t just want to eliminate “hate”—they want to be respected. Continue reading →

OK, What’s Going On Here?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

In the Washington Post yesterday, the Washington Post’s Sunday “Outlook” section included an op-ed in which  Lawrence Downes,  a former member of the New York Times editorial board, enthusiastically wrote about his new pastime:

[I have] right-wing culture war books from the Fox-News-angry-White-person’s superhero universe. Besides Hannity, I’ve got Lou Dobbs, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Rudy Giuliani and Bernie Kerik. The list is not comprehensive. It includes Karl Rove and Hugh Hewitt but not Newt Gingrich, Tucker Carlson or Donald Trump…The Fox folks seemed so bilious and out of place in that pleasant company, like toadstools among the daffodils. So I’d buy them up and take them home. Not for reading, which brought no pleasure, but for quarantine. The books are dispatches from a phony war, the one Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes helped gin up and got obscenely rich on. If you believe, as I do, that the plutocrat propagandists of Fox, talk radio and the GOP are lying liars who have vandalized our politics and country, then finding a Hannity or Ingraham book is like finding one of their bricks. The books piled up in my basement, out of circulation (which was the point) but always naggingly present, like asbestos. I wanted to be rid of them. And yet I paused, because even contemplating destroying books felt terrible…

I hit on the answer…. About once a week, I tear them into strips. I add them to the coffee grounds, potato and carrot peelings, onion and avocado skins, asparagus stubs, the papery bits of garlic, eggshells and dead flowers, and let the worms do the rest…

Turning propaganda into worm castings is not going to measurably reduce the amount of Fox News-iness in the environment. It is not strictly necessary. But if Hannity and company want to keep telling us that we are all at war, to keep stoking the flames and fanning the fear, then, for the good of this country, the people we love, the democracy we might lose and the world we want, so be it.

What’s going on here? Continue reading →

Now THIS Is Trump Derangement! Also: Ethics Dunce, Unethical Quote Of The Month, Unethical Tweet…[CORRECTED]

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Remember Jemele Hill? She was the African American co-host on ESPN who got herself fired because she couldn’t restrain herself from making hysterical anti-Trump declarations and other politically inflammatory social media posts and outbursts despite being warned, even by the left-wing Disney mouthpiece ESPN, to cool it. I wrote a couple of posts about her; since then she has receded into irrelevance, where angry, vile public figures like her belong. Oh, now she works for The Atlantic, a publication almost as much obsessed with Trump-bashing as  Stephen Colbert. The problem is that Hill is irrational, arrogant, and somehow under the impression that her vendettas have any societal use whatsoever.She also is laboring under the delusion that her emotion-soaked, undisciplined brain is a fine-tuned instrument. It’s not. She a classic example of someone what was told she was brilliant her whole life by lazy and incompetent mentors and instructors, and has been permanently handicapped as a result. And as a result, she serves society garbage, thinking it is caviar.

Yesterday the Boston Globe reported that New England Patriots owner Bob Kraft had sent a  team plane to China to pick up 1.7 million  N95 masks to fly to Massachusetts for the use of health care workers as they care for patients ill withe the Wuhan virus.

Search as you might, there is no negative spin you can place on Kraft’s act. It is altruistic. It is compassionate. It is an act of service to his community and the state that supports his team.

Now here is what Jemele Hill tweeted: Continue reading →

Biden’s Brain, Part II: Betrayal And Denial

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

(Part I is here.)

The poll above was offered to her blog’s readers by Ann Althouse this morning.  Those were the early results, but they haven’t changed significantly. The fact that she felt the need to have the poll is significant, as is the fact that only 1% (its doubled, to 2%) would say that Joe Biden definitely didn’t have dementia. This isn’t a right wing rumor or organized slander, like so many of the “resistance” big lies. People have eyes and ears. They notice.

The hypocrisy demonstrated by the Democrats, who have been claiming that Trump is mentally unfit to be President, now apparently determined to nominate a man who is clinically unfit or soon will be is astounding. The only historical analogue that comes close is in 1944, hen the Democrats  went through with nominating Franklin Roosevelt, though he was deathly ill and nobody who saw him or spent any time with him could fail to know it. FDR had already been President for twelve years, though, and there was still a war on. That’s some excuse, though not much.

Today’s Democrats have none. Here’s left-wing cartoonist Ted Rall:

Now Democrats are conspiring to gaslight the American people by engineering the presidential election of a man clearly suffering from dementia, Joe Biden. This is no time to be “polite.” We are talking about the presidency. As always, we need a frank, intelligent discussion and debate about the issues and the candidates….Contrary to current ridiculous Democratic talking points, it is not ageist to point this out. One out of seven Americans over the age of 70 suffers from dementia. (Biden is 77.) If it’s ageist to talk about dementia among the elderly, it’s ageist to talk about immaturity among the young.  It is neither necessary nor possible to scientifically determine whether the former vice president has dementia. On the other hand, you don’t need an astronomer to know that the sun rises in the east. If you have encountered dementia, you know Joe Biden has it.

This may be the only time I have agreed with Ted Rall about anything.

Rall also makes the point, which I have made elsewhere, that Democrats have been trapped into supporting Biden because they believe defeating Trump is so important that they are willing to use a disabled man on the verge of incoherence to do it. That–I would say “if true” except that its truth seems undeniable—is so wrong and irresponsible that it almost defies belief. The party’s duty, any party’s duty, is to give the American people a candidate who will, in their view, be an effective President. Choosing Biden, in contrast, is like the Moors mounting the corpse of El Cid on his horse to “lead” the army during the siege of Valencia.

If the party was preparing to open the convention and take extraordinary measures to stop Bernie Sanders from leading the party to defeat on a platform of socialism, a responsible party should deem it equally urgent to block the nomination of candidate in Biden’s condition. That the party, and so many of its Trump-Deranged members and supporters, can’t or won’t see that is yet another indication of how completely hatred and anger over the 2016 election has corrupted it.

Much of the February 19 Ethics Alarms post about how hatred had driven Democrats into the hypocritical position of embracing Michael Bloomberg is applicable to the resurgence of Biden with just the substitution of names. This paragraph, however, needs no changes: Continue reading →

Amy’s Exit, Joe’s Door-Hanger [UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

1. Senator Klobuchar eliminated the “none of the above” option from Democratic primary voters by dropping out today. This makes little sense: she’s dropping out because Biden won in South Carolina, where he was expected to win all along? Then she endorsed Joe Biden, which is irresponsible. Biden is a slowly devolving wreck, and every member of the Democratic Party has an obligation to at least try to present a mentally capable candidate for the public to consider. At his current rate of decline (let’s see, not to complain, just to be up-to-date, what did he say today? Nope, nothing, He must have been resting),

UPDATE! Joe wasn’t resting, so he did have brain synapse issues. From the Washington Examiner (Pointer:  77Zoomie):

2020 Democrat Joe Biden stumbled over his words as he attempted to recite the Declaration of Independence ahead of Super Tuesday. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the former vice president said during a campaign event in Texas on Monday. “All men and women created by — you know, you know, the thing”….he also accidentally referred to Super Tuesday as “Super Thursday” before correcting himself.

Joe will be a walking, babbling appeal to the 25th Amendment before November rolls around.

Ah-HA! Could that be why Amy endorsed him? Biden’s Vice-President choice will be scrutinized more carefully than any #2 since Richard Nixon in 1956 when Ike was running for a second term following a heart attack. (My wife asked today what Mrs. Biden was like, referencing Mrs. Wilson secretly taking over for Woodrow after his devastating stroke. Biden presumably has to pick an African American or a woman as his running mate.

Her choice is also a betrayal by the sisterhood of Elizabeth Warren, who is still hanging around, hoping for intervention from The Great Spirit, or something. Biden is a serial sexual harasser and assault master. The feminist, #MeToo wing of the Democratic Party  are as hypocritical in its support of Joe as the NAACP is in its support of Michael Jackson imitator Gov. Ralph Northam. In all the debates, neither Warren, nor Klobuchar, nor Kamala Harris, nor even pariah Tulsi Gabbard had the guts and integrity to confront Biden on his dirty old uncle routine. No Democratic woman should endorse Biden; it’s as unethical as cheering Bill Clinton. Oh, right…

The consensus among pundits right now is that Klobuchar’s endorsement signals that the Democratic establishment is desperate to stop Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination. That Joe Biden is their “firewall” tells us just how spectacularly the party has failed its job of finding a competent and trustworthy candidate, just as both parties failed in 2016.

2. Klobuchar’s withdrawal won’t have as much impact on tomorrow’s primaries because so many states allow early voting. This is one more reason early voting is wrong, and should be banned. It deceives voters into making a crucial decision without all the data is in, sometimes rendering votes null and virtuously void.

3. The party of women, minorities and the young somehow has managed to reach the nomination’s final laps with four white candidates, with Senator Warren being the only woman and the relative whippersnapper at 70. Of the remaining three men, one isn’t a Democrat (Sanders), one served in his only significant elected position as a Republican, and the other is relying on his connection to the inexplicably popular Barack Obama, whose failure to endorse him is a neon indictment.

Yikes. Good job, everybody! Continue reading →