memes

Musk’s Ethics Rorschach Maduro Meme

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I was originally going to make Elon Musk’s endorsement of the meme above on Twitter/”X” an ethics quiz, but decided, after reading the furious and wide-ranging arguments from Ann Althouse’s own commenters that I’d rather focus on this as an example of how political orientation, personal morality and confirmation bias combine to make cultural coherence increasingly difficult today.

The main focus of the comments…there are 141 of them now (I’m envious)—is on Althouse’s declaration that it is “shameful” for Musk to circulate such a thing with a laughing emoji.

I must confess, I didn’t completely get the joke at first because I didn’t recognize rapper, P Diddy (Sean Combs), now serving time in a Federal prison for sex-related charges. Rap and Hip-Hop are big holes in my cultural literacy.

Had I used the meme as an EA ethics quiz, my own conclusions would have been 1) jokes are not unethical if they make people laugh, even if they are cruel, vulgar, or politically incorrect, but 2) it is unethical, as in irresponsible and incompetent, for important, valuable, influential figures in our culture to gratuitously and recklessly undermine their own credibility and popularity by associating themselves with divisive practices and ideas for no good reason. President Trump does this constantly. It is Cognitive Dissonance Scale malpractice.

However, Ann’s single word “Shameful” landed in her blog like a bomb thrown into Times Square at midnight on New Year’s Eve. You can (and should) read the responses here. An incomplete summary of the various arguments:

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Observations on an Anti-Trump Meme That Will Be Posted By One Of My Trump-Deranged Facebook Friends Any Second Now…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Typical, desperate, ignorant and stupid.

Right now I’m placing bets on which of my Stage 5 Trump-Deranged friends or relatives will bite first. Let’s see..

1. This logic is like that of the man who kills his parents and wants sympathy from the judge because he’s a orphan. Trump was impeached twice by Democrats in the House, in both cases without thorough hearings and with contrived accusations and dubious evidence. He was also acquitted in the Senate, and correctly so.

2. The “34 felony convictions” have been effectively vacated. Though the convictions have not been overturned yet, no conviction is final until appeals have been exhausted. The fraud case in question was always pure lawfare, designed by New York Democrats and a partisan AG to “get Trump,” as that Attorney General campaigned on: she promised to “get Trump.” After all, he was threatening to win the White House. Those convictions were also for a single act that all authorities agree harmed no one, was standard business practice, and would never have prompted legal action had not Donald Trump been involved.

3. My favorite fallacy here, however, is that academic credentials have any relevance to leadership ability or successful Presidencies at all. For that matter, presumed intellectual ability hasn’t correlated with Presidential success either. To take the obvious example, Abraham Lincoln had no academic credentials. Harry Truman, an average intellect at best, proved to be a far better President than many with advanced degrees (or Harvard educations), such as John Adams, William Howard Taft, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama.

4. Best of all comparisons with Trump is this one, authored by social media wit David Burge in response to that meme above:

He’s referring, of course, to the Second Worst President Ever, Woodrow Wilson.

More Saturday Facebook Trump-Deranged Freakouts! Pop Ethics Quiz: Which of These Is More Unethical?

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Are you ready?

This…

Or this…

Tough choice, don’t you think? Both posters are educated, intelligent and, on most topics. rational and responsible. Yet the first has posted a viewpoint that can only emanate from a communist or confirmed socialist: Unlimited health care and food assistance for “the poor”? It exudes the kind of hyperbole that earned Donald Trump the reputation for lying: “destroy” the educational system by getting rid of the wasteful and inept Department of Education and telling colleges that they can no longer enable anti-Semitism and practice racial discrimination? “Abuse desperate <cough> illegal immigrants? And who said that the United States “believes in Christianity” or any faith, when the Constitution explicitly prohibits a national religion?

The second, however, was initially circulated by a group protesting MSNBC’s firing of Joy Reid, a virulent anti-white racist, and the level of cognition it demonstrates shows it. The thing revels in apples vs. oranges comparisons, and its primary concern is that Trump dared to criticize the wonderful President whose only claim to anything but destructive mediocrity is his color. Finally, it appeals to the authority of un-named Presidential rankings regardless of the evaluator, when such ranking have been dominated by liberal and progressive historians since I was six.

Please let me know which you think is worse and why. And if your genuine reaction is, “Both sound about right to me!,” somehow you got here when you really want to be here.

__________________

Incidentally, I fully intended to put up a substantive post as well as two or more Comments of the Day, but I made the mistake of checking Facebook, had successive head explosions, and this was the best I could muster…

Ethics Dunce (And Ethics Corrupter): John Pavlovitz

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Quotes by his guy, a defrocked Methodist pastor known for his social and political activism and “writings from a liberal Christian perspective,” (I’m quoting Wikipedia there) always start popping up on social media this time of year. He’s been quoted a lot on Facebook especially lately because he is a vocal advocate of the idiotic “Mary and Joseph were immigrants too” analogy used by nice, deluded people to justify open borders and illegal immigrants.

These memes are notable because their emotion-based, legally and ethically bonkers argument is even more absurd than the one that claims the U.S. should let everybody in because the Statue of Liberty says so. I think I banned a commenter this year for using that one, invoking the Ethics Alarms “Stupidity Rule.” I will do the same if someone makes the “we should let illegals in because all they want is better lives for their children just like Mary and Joseph” argument. The same logic justifies theft. This is how shoplifting became legal in California.

Pavolovitz, who has about 374,000 followers on Twitter/X, every one of them dumber than when they first encountered him, was at it again this holiday season, posting after the election last month, “It’s good the Christians excited about the mass deportation of immigrants weren’t in Egypt when Jesus’s family fled there, or we’d have a much shorter Bible.”

It’s unethical to use one’s influence and reputation to make people ignorant and stupid: that fatuous statement (and his many like it) marks Pavolovitz as an Ethics Corrupter. I’m assuming readers here don’t have to have explained to them the reasons why analogies between public policies today in the United States and those in the Middle East 2,000 years ago are completely invalid and useless.

When one X-user pointed out to Pavolovitz that his argument was flawed, this modern follower of Jesus replied, “You’re a Trump lapdog. Your opinion of me is irrelevant. Shove it.”

To be fair, that last part is a rough translation of what Jesus said to the Romans…

Pop Ethics Quiz! What Is The Ethical Response To An Adult Who Posts This Fatuous Meme…

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

…other than “You are an ignorant moron!”?

Harris Is Losing the Meme Wars, So Naturally Democrats Want To Censor Memes

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Who would have expected the AI metaphorical tidal wave to have an influence on the Presidential election? Memes are a breeze to make using artificial intelligence, and while I got heartily sick of my Facebook friends bombarding me with political ones, I have to admit that the technology has the silver lining of taking blunt and biased punditry out of the political cartoonist monopoly and letting some very witty people make satirical political statements.

So far, at least, it appears that conservatives have mastered meming before the Left has, and in this race for President, that is having impact, though how much and how significant is impossible to tell. However, it is clear that the Kamala-Harris-as-a-Communist memes are getting under the skin of some Democrats—one of my Trump-Deranged relatives was complaining about those just yesterday—and so now there are calls for “something to be done” about anti-Harris memes. On MSNBC’s “The Sunday Show,” NPR’s Maria Hinojosa was very upset about AI images of Harris presented in Maoist uniforms:

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The Legitimate and Important Ethics Conflict Behind the Springfield Cat-Eating Controversy

/ Jack Marshall / 54 Comments

As he does so often, Donald Trump accepted something he read or heard as gospel truth and repeated it as fact, this time in a Presidential debate, and was promptly ‘factchecked” and subsequently ridiculed. The back-ground: a large number of Haitian “migrants,” who may or may not be here legally, seem to have ended up in Springfield, Ohio. One resident complained that they were eating pet geese and cats, her claim went viral, and the meme-makers have had a field day…

…as you can see.

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Thoughts On An Unethical Meme…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The meme above appeared this morning in Powerline’s usually amusing and occasionally brilliant “The Week in Pictures.” It was also used to illustrate “Tucker Carlson’s bad history,” an excellent essay by The Washington Examiner’s Dominic Greene on the same topic as the recent EA post about Tucker’s slobbering endorsement of a Hitler apologist and Holocaust denier.

Greene wrote in part,

The latest imbecile to visit Tucker’s virtual shed is Darryl Cooper. Cooper’s eccentric rambles through the thickets of history have won him virality on X. Unfortunately, the virality is akin to intellectual syphilis. Once you’ve convinced yourself that the truth is hidden, nay, occulted by dark forces, you can mask the worst symptoms of infection, but the mind rot is hard to cure. Cooper has convinced himself that Winston Churchill was a “terrorist” installed in power by “Zionists” and “financiers” so he could be the “chief villain” of World War II. Cooper also claims the Holocaust was an accident and that prewar Europe really did have what Hitler called a “Jewish problem,” rather than a problem with Jews.

Carlson introduced Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Cooper blew it by admitting that he’d prepared for his interminable podcast series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by reading six books and then recited a medley of baseless suppositions, false generalizations, and open “secrets” about the origins of World War II. Had Carlson attempted actual journalism, this tissue of lies would have disintegrated like cheap toilet paper. Instead, Carlson toggled between his customary facial expressions (frowning as if struck by a bolt of historiographical lightning, slack-jawed and mindblown as though he’s still following the Grateful Dead) and failed to question any of it.

In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In the kingdom of the illiterate, Mr. Six-Books is a regular Arnold Toynbee. If your “research” skips primary documents and foreign languages but convinces you that Hitler was misunderstood (he wasn’t), that Churchill was a “terrorist” (he wasn’t), that the Germans invaded Poland without a plan for what to do with prisoners of war (they didn’t), and that the Holocaust was accidental (it wasn’t), you might have an ax to grind — perhaps a double-headed ax with runic symbols. But why is Tucker fawning over a poor man’s Pat Buchanan?

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It’s Come To This: “Liking” A Politically Incorrect, Bad Taste Joke On Social Media Can Get You Suspended In The United States Of America

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Madness.

Rising NASCAR driver Noah Gragson was suspended indefinitely for liking a meme on Instagram. The meme was a pun evoking the “Little Mermaid” song “Under the Sea,” sung in all versions by Sebastian the Crab. It showed the crab with George Floyd’s head superimposed with a reference to his demise, like this:

Too soon? Once his politically incorrect sense of humor was brought to its attention, Gregson was suspended indefinitely by his team, the Legacy Motor Club, and by NASCAR as well. “NASCAR fully supports Legacy Motor Club’s decision to suspend Noah Gragson,” the racing association stated. “Following his actions on social media, NASCAR has determined that Gragson has violated the Member Conduct section of the 2023 NASCAR Rule Book and has placed him under indefinite suspension.”

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The State of Certainty And Reliability of Climate Change Forecasts And Analysis

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Since some EA commenters have chosen to send their credibility to die on the metaphorical hill of Rep. Omar’s ridiculous climate change tweet of last week, I felt this paired set of reports made an important point. Amazingly, so far at least, these irreconcilable contradictions—and this is far from the only one in the climate change “settled science” debate—- don’t seem to shake the faith of climate change fanatics even a little bit.

Which itself is useful information….