loyalty

No Surprise: Prince Harry Is An Ethics Dunce, and Also an Idiot

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

On the superb Showtime series “Ray Donovan,” actor Dash Mihok played Ray’s sad, stupid, easily manipulated brother, “Bunchie.” I always thought self-exiled Prince Harry was disturbingly Bunchie-like in appearance and intellect, and he proved the latter resemblance spectacularly in recent weeks.

As I discussed in an earlier post, Prince Harry attended one of the World Series games in L.A. with he and his insufferable wife wearing blue-and-white Dodgers caps. Harry’s father, King Charles, is the official ruler of Canada, a part of the British Commonwealth, and given that the Dodgers’ opposition in baseball’s ultimate series was the Toronto Blue Jays, many Brits and Canadians were upset that a member of the royal family would publicly favor the American competitor over the Canadian one. Of course they were. Imagine the scandal if one of Trump’s sons ostentatiously cheered on a Russian athlete in the Olympics.

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J.K. Rowling Smacks Down “Hermione”: Is It Ethical To Attack The Person You Owe Your Wealth, Fame and Influence To?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

To be clear, the one attacking the person she owes her wealth, fame and influence to isn’t Rowling, the creator of the Harry Potter books and the billion dollar industry it spawned, but Emma Watson, the now grown child actress who played cute Hermione in the films. It is Watson who has been criticizing Rowling by name for years because the British author has openly challenged the whole concept of transsexual ideology: that people can change their sex by just deciding they are the opposite sex than their genes make them and have the law accede to their decision.

The ethics issue today is not whether Rowling is right or wrong. The question is whether Watson (along with her fellow Harry Potter child stars Rupert Grint and Daniel Radcliffe) has behaved with gratuitous disloyalty and ingratitude by attacking Rowling by name while she is being vilified and threatened by other celebrities and the woke news media.

Not to keep you in suspense, the answer is yes. Rowling finally had enough, and responded with the scathing social media take-down of Watson that the actress deserves.

What was apparently the magical straw for Rowling was Watson saying in a recent podcast that that their opposing views on trans rights do not mean she can’t or doesn’t “treasure” Rowling as a person. “I will never believe that one negates the other and that my experience of that person, I don’t get to keep and cherish,” the has-been star blathered. “I think it’s my deepest wish that I hope people who don’t agree with my opinion will love me, and I hope I can keep loving people who I don’t necessarily share the same opinion with.”

That hypocrisy, for that’s what it is, was too much for Rowling, who unleashed her considerable rhetorical talents on Watson, and brava to that. Rowling wrote in part,

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Tough Call: Who Is the Greater Ethics Dunce, David Hogg or the Democrats Who Elected Him Vice-Chair of the DNC? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

David Hogg, had he not been a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a mass shooting occurred, might have grown up to be a useful, ethical, productive and emotionally healthy human being. Unfortunately, he is likely to be a lifetime victim of the shooting, for it propelled him into the career path of being a professional single-issue fanatic, America’s Greta Thunberg but on the issue of gun control rather than climate change. In an example of the chaos PTSD can wreak on the vulnerable, Hogg has been transformed into a cynical grifter by a mass-murderer’s bullets. It’s tragic, but that doesn’t mean his unethical conduct should be tolerated, much less rewarded.

Barely two weeks after his election as a Democratic National Committee official, Hogg began using DNC contact lists to solicit donations to his own political action committee, “Leaders We Deserve.” That PAC pays his salary of more than $100,000 a year, according to Federal Election Commission records. “David Hogg here: I was just elected DNC Vice Chair! This is a huge win for our movement to make the Democratic Party more reflective of our base: youthful, energetic, and ready to win,” reads one the texts he sent out to the DNC’s vast database. The texts include a link to his PAC.

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Sorry Joe: You Knew She Was a Scorpion All Along

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Here I am still fighting off multiple crises personal, professional and financial arising from my wife’s sudden death, and trying to actually earn money, no easy task in the field of ethics unless one is unethical, which so many of my more successful colleagues are. Unfortunately, I have no discipline. I am behind on several deadlines that will keep me working into the wee hours this weekend, and yet emanations from the twin ethics train wrecks that are Biden’s debate melt-down and Trump’s near-miss assassination attempt keep dragging me back to Ethics Alarms.

Like this one: sources are reporting that the President is “seething” at Nancy Pelosi, who is widely believed to be behind the wave of House Democrats calling for Biden to step down as the presumptive nominee. California Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a close ally of Pelosi—figures—released a letter calling for Biden to step aside. House Democrats close to Pelosi, attributed today’s new defections, especially Lofgren’s letter to Biden,to the former speaker. Biden regarded Pelosi as an ally. He trusted her.

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How Do You Solve A Problem Like Rep. Omar?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I was actually going to begin this post with a parody of the cheery song from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music,” “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?,” but decided against it for two reasons. First, no English words rhyme with “Omar,” so you’re stuck with fake sort-of rhymes like “home are” and “sonar,” and second, this is too serious a problem to cover in a song parody.

Among Donald Trump’s myriad offensive, stupid and gratuitously inflammatory comments while President was when he said in 2019 that the members of “the Squad” should “go back to where they came from.” This was particularly inept since most of that group of radical, socialist, anti-Semitic and or dumb-as-bricks Democrats are “from” the good ol’ USA, but in the case of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) at least, Trump may have had a valid point that he, as usual, chose the worst possible way to express.

In 2019, Omar declared as part of the anti-Semitic theme much of the Squad vocally embraces, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says that it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.” Her message was that a lot of U.S. officials—you know, Jews— allowed a conflicting fealty to Israel to blunt their duty to pursue what is in the best interest of the United States. But yesterday, a video surfaced on Twitter/X showing Omar rousing a Somali-American crowd in her district by saying in part,

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Ethics Dunce: Ty Cobb (No, This Is NOT A Baseball Post)

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

That stylish-looking gentleman above is Ty Cobb III, a descendant of the iconic baseball player, himself a rather infamous ethics dunce. I never quite figured out Ty III’s relationship to Ty the First, but that is neither here nor there. I wish I didn’t have to write this post: I know Ty a bit, for we were in the same class at Harvard (where he already was sporting that handlebar mustache), and I knew many of his friends a lot better than I knew him. He is a nice guy, a funny guy, and by all accounts a terrific lawyer. He may have been the best lawyer ever associated with Donald Trump: Ty joined the White House staff to manage legal matters surrounding the Mueller investigation—yes, the Russian collusion scam run by the Democrats, the FBI, and the news media. He reported directly to Trump, and he was extensively quoted during the media frenzy over that disgusting set-up.

On May 2, 2018, Cobb announced that he was retiring as White House special counsel, and later that year, said that he did not think the Mueller investigation was a “witch hunt,” later saying in an ABC News interview on March 5, 2019, that he thought Mueller was “an American hero.” I almost blew my ethics whistle then; I didn’t: I should have. As a lawyer the public identified with President Trump (though his client was the office, not the man), Ty’s apparent vouching for the investigation was bound to be taken by the public (and certainly the news media) as a hint that someone on the inside with legal expertise knew Trump was guilty. I know I looked at it that way.

Now he’s done it again. Cobb told the news media that the “feds are coming fast” for Trump, and predicted that the investigation into the his alleged mishandling of classified documents will land him in prison. Spewing his opinions like an oil gusher, Cobb said,

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An Ethics Conflict Conundrum: The Fraudulent Friend

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

From “The Ethicist” (that’s the New York Times Magazine’s ethics advice columnist, his name is Kwame Anthony Appiah, and he’s not bad) comes a new version of an eternal ethics conflict that I have encountered both hypothetically and in life:

My friend told me that she and her husband, who combined earn around $500,000, asked their son’s stepmother to declare him on her taxes for the last two years so that he could get more financial aid for college. Their son doesn’t even live with the stepmother, and she provides no support.

I just learned that her son is now getting a full grant to a very expensive private college. I’m supposed to take a weekend trip with my friend in a few weeks, but I’m so angry about this I don’t know if I can speak to her. Is this fraud? What is my responsibility in this situation?

“The Ethicist” waffles and settles on,

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Sunday Afternoon Ethics Reflections, 11/20/2022, Part I: The Nuremberg Trials And Donald Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This time I’m separating the usual intro to these ethics potpourris with the enumerated stories. I began by noting that this is the anniversary of the beginning of the Nuremberg Trials in 1945, as notable an ethics milestone as one could imagine, from several perspectives. The trials were an admirable effort to make grand statement about the line of inhuman evil that even war could not justify and that a world would not countenance. They were also significantly hypocritical, just as the post-Civil War trial of Andersonville Prison commander Henry Wirz, the sole judicial precedent for Nuremberg, was hypocritical, punishment inflicted on the losers of a terrible war that could easily have been brought against the war’s victors if the results had been reversed.

There really was no enforceable international law to base the Nuremberg Trials on, making the trials illegal if not unethical. Did they stop genocide? No, and one could argue that the show trails didn’t even slow genocide down. They did, I guess, make people think; one important result of the trials was that the films of liberated death camps, made by U.S. troops and supervised by the great Hollywood director George Stevens, were finally shown. How much the trials made people think is much open to debate. I have always been fascinated by the issues raised by the Nuremberg Trials, and Abby Mann’s 2001 stage version of “Judgment at Nuremberg” was one of the productions I oversaw at The American Century Theater. Directed by Joe Banno, it included post show discussions after every performance, some with D.C. area historians, lawyers and judges as guests. Incredibly, I felt, the show had never been produced in the Washington D.C. area, professionally or professionally. Disgracefully is perhaps the better word. TACT’s was a professional, thoughtful and excellent production, yet the Washington Post refused to review it. “Dated,” was their verdict on most of my theater’s productions. The apathy about “Judgment at Nuremberg” was a major factor in persuading me to end my theater’s 20 year-long mission of presenting neglected American stage works of historical, cultural, theatrical or ethical significance.

But I digress. While I was checking to see whether I had noted this anniversary before (I had not), I found the following post, which was the earliest Ethics Alarms entry featuring a reference to the Nuremberg Trials. Written in 2012, it makes fascinating reading today, so here it is. One nostalgic note: Among the commenters on that post more than a decade ago were Michael Boyd (last heard from on this date ten years ago), Brook Styler (final comment), Chase Martinez ( left in 2015), Julian Hung (last heard from in August of last year), Danielle (who wished me a Merry Christmas in 2016, and vanished), Modern Knight ( final comment in 2017), and several one-time commenters who never returned. But Michael Ejercito was among them, speaking of loyalty. The good kind.

The Donald’s Dangerous Ethics: Loyalty Trumps Honesty On “Celebrity Apprentice”

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“1776” Actress Sara Porkalob Is An Ethics Dunce And Should Be Fired

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The new, non-traditionally cast, “diversity”-pandering revival of “1776” is about to open on Broadway. Ethics Alarms already discussed it here: the production seems like a cynical, misguided, truly terrible idea that is likely to crash and burn, but as I wrote last month, “I hope the result is brilliant and illuminating.” I also wrote, “What I see, however, is a cynical abortion of a classic musical motivated by arrogance, ignorance, and greed.” In other words, the thing has a lot of self-inflicted problems standing in the way of critical and financial success, nicely symbolized by the photo above of an Asian-American woman playing slaveholding Continental Congress member Edward Rutledge singing “Molasses to Rum to Slaves” in the musical’s most dramatic scene. As a stage director and American history fanatic, I don’t see how having that song performed by someone who can’t evoke Rutledge in any way does anything but undermine the best song in the show. But hey, you never know.

One thing the radical production doesn’t need, however, is for that same performer to trash the production publicly. Here is “Rutledge,” Sara Porkalob, in an interview with Vulture’s Jason P. Frank:

“To me, the play is a relic. It is a dusty, old thing… On the inside, I’m cringing… I’m like, It’s okay. I wouldn’t have wanted it this way, but I am doing my job….[The direction] is horrible. I hate it… What I want to do with my time is make new works with collaborators…I feel like I’m going to work.”

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Ethics Quiz: The Turn-Coat Olympians

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Maybe that headline is a bit slanted for an ethics quiz. Anyway…

The story in many media sources was about the mean Chinese social media mob attacking Beverly Zhu, a 19-year-old figure skater who was born and raised in the United States but competes for China under the name Zhu Yi. In the same Times story, I learned about another U.S born and raised Olympian, Eileen Gu, a freeskier who also chose to represent in the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and won the gold in the women’s freestyle skiing big air event. (As I think I’ve hinted here, Olympic Games held to promote a brutal Communist regime which uses its wealth to corrupt American institutions and was responsible for infecting the world are well down my priority list, below eating slugs and watch Alec Baldwin movies.

However, once I was made aware of the two athletes, my reaction was “What the hell?” If it had any principles, our boot-licking government would have boycotted the ’22 Olympics for real, and not substituted a symbolic and toothless “diplomatic boycott.” If our athletes cared about opposing little things like genocide and slave labor, some of them would have stayed home, or at least defied Nancy Pelosi’s warning not to make Big Chinese Brother mad by, for example, telling the truth.

But Zhu and Gu are in a whole other category. They deliberately joined the Chinese team to defeat the United States of America, where they have been raised and have benefited from all of the freedom and quality of life advantages China does not provide to its citizens. Never mind criticizing the regime, these women are actively assisting it.

My verdict? That is unethical, disloyal, and despicable.

Change my mind, if you can.

Your Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Do you agree that the two athlete’s decision to compete for China and against the U.S. is unethical?

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