respect

Arrogant, Deluded And Ignorant Is No Way To Go Through Life, Jennifer Lawrence…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Jennifer Lawrence is a charismatic, versatile, talented movie star, but someone misled her into believing that everything that pops into her head is worth saying, and it isn’t. In this case, it wasn’t just banal or gratuitous progressive blather points, but a wildly false and disrespectful over-praising of her own significance at the expense of actresses that she ought to be honoring rather than insulting.

In a recent interview with Variety magazine, the star of the “Hunger Games” movies (beginning in 2012), “Silver Lining Playbook” and other films said,

“I remember when I was doing ‘Hunger Games,’ nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn’t work. We were told … girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead.”

If you don’t know your film history, don’t make statements about film history. It makes one look like a conceited fool, as the social media mob rushed to inform Lawrence. Continue reading →

Iconic Movie Hero Ethics: The Humiliation Of Indiana Jones

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

One upon a time, Hollywood showed respect to its greatest movie heroes. They deserved it, after all. We never had to see what became of Rick Blaine as he battled the Nazis. We never had to watch Scarlet chase Rhett. Nobody made as watch the plucky Hickory High School basketball team try to hold on to its title the next year after its miracle triumph. Hollywood got greedy (greedier), though, as imaginations ran out and audiences looked elsewhere for their entertainment. And thus the sublime ending of “Rocky” (“There ain’t gonna be no rematch!” “Don’t want one!”) was eroded and superseded by endless inferior sequels. “Star Wars” ended with a jubilant celebration of victory over the Empire and the characters happy, safe, and young, but studio finances dictated that it all had to be diluted with inferior and derivative prequels and sequels, with audiences being tortured by aging husks of Leia, Luke and Han Solo, instead of allowing them to be preserved in our memories as immortal, like legends should.

Now it’s Indiana Jones’ turn. Spielberg and Lucas already set up the perfect farewell for Indy in the third of the original trilogy, flawed as it was. We saw him ride off with his father and Marcus Brody into the sunset after drinking from the Holy Grail, which should have conferred eternal youth. Perfect!

They couldn’t let it go, though, or the studio couldn’t, or Spielberg’s alimony, or something. So we had to watch, many years later, an over-the-hill Indy in a jumping-the-shark fourth film that George Lucas signaled would stretch out the franchise ad infinitum by symbolically passing The Hat on to Indiana’s newly discovered son, the then young and promising Shia LaBeouf.

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President’s Day On Ethics Alarms: The Nation’s Incompetent, Disrespectful, Unethical Treatment Of George Washington’s Birthday [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

How many Americans of our rich national past have a birthday celebrated as a national holiday? One: Martin Luther King. That surely makes the anti-white racists and the “the most important aspect of the United States is its racial divisions” gang—you know, Democrats—happy, but it is also misleading and ridiculous. The most important single figure, black, brown, white or whatever it is currently acceptable to call Asians and Native Americans (I haven’t checked this morning), is George Washington. He was, as George Will likes to say, “the indispensable man”—no George, no U.S. His birthday absolutely should be a national holiday.

Yet it isn’t, due to a confluence of factors. You can’t call today “George Washington’s Birthday,” because the date is February 21, and George was born on the 22nd. In the just-launched 4th season of Amazon’s clever and brilliantly cast comedy series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” the heroine, on the road, learns that her parents are having a birthday party for her young son. “The real date wasn’t good for me,” her very weird father (Tony Shaloub) explains. “He’s five! He won’t notice.” “What kind of people change a kid’s birthday?” she protests.

Americans. And worse, we did it to the man to whom we owe the greatest debt of all.

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Dress Code Ethics (Again) From The “Oh, Come ON!” Files: The Immodest Fitness Model

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

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Two days ago, American Airlines denied boarding for Deniz Saypinar, a Turkish-born fitness model traveling from Dallas-Fort Worth to Miami because, the carrier explained to her, its conditions of carriage require all customers to dress “appropriately,” and her outfit wasn’t appropriate.

Ya think? That photo above shows how she presented herself at the gate.

“The customer was advised of our policy and was rebooked on a subsequent flight. The customer has since arrived in Miami,” the airline’s rep said.

Deniz is in great shape; I wonder why, if she was going to grandstand like this, she didn’t just wear a g-string and pasties and go all the way with it. I do not believe for a second that she expected to be allowed on the plane dressed like that. She wanted to set off a controversy and win herself Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame, while giving feminists something to shout about.

“You will never believe what happened to me at Texas Airport,” first non-American citizen to win the US National Bikini Fitness Competition in 2021 wailed to her 1 million followers on Instagram as she posted her attire.

Oh yes I will!

“I am an athlete, and now I have to wait here until the morning,” she wrote. “I like to wear feminine clothes that reveal my femininity, but I never dress in a way that will offend anyone. I’m mature and civilized enough to know what I can and cannot wear. I don’t deserve to be treated like the worst person in the world for wearing denim shorts What separates us from animals if humans can’t control even their most primitive impulses? I feel insulted. They wouldn’t let me on the plane because I wore these shorts in the United States.”

Uh, I wouldn’t call that an exactly fair description of what happened. She wasn’t treated “like the worst person in the world,” although she should have been treated as a narcissist and ruthless self-promoter who deliberately wasted the time of airline staff and caused a pointless controversy just to get her name and figure publicized. And she wasn’t rejected as a passenger for “wearing denim shorts.”

” What separates us from animals if humans can’t control even their most primitive impulses? ” has to win an irony award: it is the model who can’t control her primitive impulse to display herself in places where such displays are rude and disruptive. Decorum and manners in public also separate us from animals. Wearing reasonably modest clothing in public is basic civility, showing respect for others.

What do you want to bet that she wears that kind of outfit and then, when some little fat guy stares at her, gets indignant?

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I Can’t Let THIS Pass: CNN Reinstates Jeffrey Toobin

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

They really did. Am I surprised? I can’t say that I am exactly. Of course, any responsible organization would fire an employee who was publicly revealed (oops, almost said “exposed”) masturbating on camera during a Zoomed staff meeting. A real estate firm? Of course. A law firm? No question about it. A consulting firm? A university? Naturally. Not only was what Toobin did during a New Yorker meeting per se sexual harassment, it was signature significance for a sick puppy with the judgment of someone who likes to play “dodge ’em” on the freeway.

I was worried that in my various posts about Toobin’s Folly, I might have stated that CNN would never take Toobin back (they suspended him; the New Yorker canned him). I didn’t. I did write about Toobin’s future utility as a legal analyst, which is what Toobin purports to do, saying

“Again, why would anyone care what an analyst thinks who has shown such head-explodingly bad judgment, disrespect for the workplace and colleagues, and juvenile instincts?“

I also saw foreshadowing of today development in this post, in which I pronounced myself a moron for being resistant to the idea that progressives will excuse each other for just about anything, writing,

“I continue to be unable to grasp the complete attempted inside-out-ization of all American logic, principles and values by the people who currently control the White House, half of Congress, the schools, the universities, the news media, social media, Big Tech and entertainment.”

And sure enough, CNN brought back Toobin today. Wow. Asked by CNN’s Alisyn Camerota “what he was thinking,” Toobin replied that he “wasn’t thinking very well or very much,” and called his conduct “deeply moronic.” Yeah, that’s just what inquiring viewers want in their legal analysis: the opinions of someone who doesn’t think well or very much and is periodically moronic in the workplace by his own admission.

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Just Bake The Damn Cake, Jack!

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

trans cake

Jack Phillips, the stubborn Christian baker who owns Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, is being sued again, this time because he refused to make a custom cake celebrating a clients’ gender transition. In 2012, the baker refused to bake a custom cake for a same-sex wedding and was accused of unlawful discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 for Phillips overturning the decision of the Commission on the grounds that it was obviously biased against him as well as devout Christians. One commissioner even compared Phillips’s invocation of his Christian beliefs to justify rejecting the cake design to defenses of slavery and the Holocaust. Yeah, I remember that the Nazis were really unreasonable about cakes. SCOTUS never reached the constitutional question of whether the government can compel people to create speech or artistic expressions they object to on religious grounds or otherwise.

If a custom cake design is art, then I think the answer to this is easy: no. Similarly wedding photographs, though if you used what we got from our wedding photographer, calling them “art” is a stretch.

With a conservative Supreme Court, the baker wins. And yet…

The first time around, after finally getting all the facts, I held that both Phillips and the gay couple who obviously targeted him to bend him to their will were being jerks. My position hasn’t changed a bit. I wrote here,

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The Ethics Arguments For Voting For President Trump And Joe Biden, Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

2020 election

Part I is here.

At the end of this post, I will repost, from the archives, my Ethics Alarms essay from November 7, 2016 titled, “Donald Trump: A Pre-Election Ethics Alarms Character and Trustworthiness Review: 2005-2016.” I’m going to comment on how and why my assessment now is different (and how it is not) before the piece, because it’s long, and to some extent out of date.

Reading over the essay below, I had two thoughts immediately. One was that it was more vociferous than I remembered, and the other was amusement, looking at it again, of how many times I have been accused of being a “Trumpster” and a “Trump supporter” over last four years.

My assessment of Donald Trump has changed over that period in the following respects:

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Ethics Observations On Kayla Eubanks, The Southwest Airlines Flying Slob

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

southwest-dress-code-64

Chicago’s Kayla Eubanks is indignant because Southwest Airlines staff refused to allow her to board her flight, saying her attire was not fit for travel. low-cut top was “lewd, obscene, and offensive.”  Eventually a pilot gave her a cover-up T-shirt so she could get on the plane. Once in the air, she took it off.

Eubanks complained via Twitter, writing, “Y’all I was KICKED OFF my @SouthwestAir flight because my boobs are ‘lewd, obscene, and offensive.’ I was told that passengers may look at me in my attire and be offended.” In her following tweets, Kayla wrote,

“I really wanna know why @SouthwestAir is policing my clothes like this. How will my shirt impact my flight, for myself, the other passengers, or even the pilot?…Y’all have a dress code for CUSTOMERS who pay to get on a plane?…It’s the constant policing of women’s bodies for me.”

Posting a  video of one of Southwest’s female gate employees fumbling to answer Eubanks’ questions about a dress code, Kayla added. “[she] practically did cartwheels to ensure that I wouldn’t get on this plane y’all. I was held at the gate for 30 minutes because of my shirt.”  On the video, Kayla can be heard telling the sympathetic pilot who eventually loaned her the shirt, “I have to leave my tits at home? Obviously not.”

Stay classy, Kayla.

Following the flap, in which the mainstream media sympathizes with Eubanks, a spokesperson for Southwest Airlines told the New York Post that the company reached out to Eubanks directly to issue an apology, and refunded Eubanks’ fare

“Regarding our policies, each situation is very different, and our employees are responsible for following our Contract of Carriage, available on our website,” the spokesperson explained. “According to the material posted online, the company ‘may, in its sole discretion, refuse to transport, or may remove from an aircraft at any point,’ a passenger who engages ‘in lewd, obscene, or patently offensive behavior, including wearing clothes that are lewd, obscene, or patently offensive.”

Observations:

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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 →

Zoom Ethics: “Your Boss Should Not Be Asking You To Wear Makeup On Zoom”? Your Boss Should Not Be Asking You To Wear Makeup, Period…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

From a woman’s lament on Refinery29:

While Caroline was trying to establish a strict work-life balance — despite rarely leaving her apartment — she still found herself mindlessly checking her emails ahead of the week. That’s when she noticed a message pop up from her executive director. In the email, which was addressed to the entire company, her boss provided tips and resources for “looking good on video calls” — from lighting and backgrounds to personal hygiene. While his advice to invest in an advanced webcam setup infuriated Caroline (because of income disparities within her company), she was most bewildered by his suggestion to wear makeup. “While it’d be bad advice at any time for playing into sexism, it just felt incredibly tone-deaf during this particular time,” she tells Refinery29. “It was demoralizing. It’s not appropriate to be talking to women about their appearance and much less so during a crisis.”

Caroline isn’t alone. On social media, you’ll find many women sharing their frustrations of being told they look tired or less engaged, and some have even reported managers who flat-out ordered them to wear makeup for video calls. “I’ve had more than one Zoom meeting where my boss has asked if I’m tired. This is just my face without makeup,” wrote one Twitter user. “First day we had a meeting, my boss said, ‘You guys didn’t put on any makeup!”

Whoa! A male superior telling a woman she has to wear make-up in the workplace is potentially sexual harassment. It’s also just plain wrong. Don’t we know this by now? Continue reading →