This isn’t funny any more, if it ever was. I was pondering whether reports that an organization called The Trans Cultural Mindfulness Alliance is demanding that Apple Music and Spotify remove the Aretha Franklin 1968 song “Natural Woman” from their playlists because it “perpetuates multiple harmful anti-trans stereotypes,” since “there is no such thing as a ‘natural’ woman.” The group claims that the song “has helped inspire acts of harm against transgender women.”
Really? I’d like to see the citations for that. I know I want to run amuck with a machete every time I hear “Imagine,” but Aretha never made me feel violent.
I couldn’t believe this story could be true, until I encountered this story, which is even dumber.
Last year, Mars Wrigley changed the shoes of some of its cartoon M&M’s characters that appear in TV ads. Conservatives were upset. Let me repeat that: some conservatives were upset because of a change in the design of anthropomorphic animated candies’ shoes.Tucker Carlson criticized the character makeovers as “Woke M&M’s.” Slow news day, Tucker?
M&M’s marketers had re-shod the green “female” M&M’s high heels with flats and replaced the intimidating brown “female” M&M’s stilettos for smaller heels.
Tucker pounced! “M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous,” Carlson said on his show. “Until the moment when you wouldn’t want to have a drink with any one of them. That’s the goal. When you’re totally turned off, we’ve achieved equity. They’ve won.” Continue reading →
This is how my mind works: a cowardly, foolish and irresponsible university does a double-backflip policy reversal after pandering to Muslim bullies on campus, and my mind immediately goes to Emily Litella’s SNL catchphrase, the U.S. News controversy over school rankings (which was supposed to be this morning’s opening piece) and…Cracker Barrel. In fact, now that I think about it, it’s quite conceivable that the same weenies who were running Cracker Barrel a while back are now in charge of Hamline, a small and evidently crummy Minnesota university.
Regarding Emily: after its obviously outrageous mistreatment of an adjunct art professor in response to an in-class controversy (described at Ethics Alarms earlier this month) properly attracted harsh criticism from all sides, the unjustly maligned and sacked teacher sued. Then Hamline folded like a tyro facing Amarillo Slim in Texas Hold’em. Hamline’s president, Fayneese S. Miller, had puffed herself up like a woke bullfrog to virtue-signal about how respect for the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.” In this case, “respect” meant ignoring the fact that some Muslim students were throwing a fit over an art teacher teaching art that some extreme sects of their religion think should be taboo (Some Muslims don’t like freedom of expression, and might kill you to prove it) even though the course instructor had given them ample warning and opportunity to avoid the Satanic spectacle of viewing this famous painting….
.After all, letting the inmates run the asylum is what a lot of wokey schools do these days. But once the notice of the lawsuit was received, and Hamline’s lawyers informed the school’s leadership that they were going to lose and lose big, Fayneese, together with the chair of the university’s board of trustees who was probably holding a shiv to Miller’s kidney, litella-ed this pathetic retraction: Continue reading →
Both GOP House members now are recanting their votes the so-called Respect for Marriage Act, which passed the House with 47 Republicans voting with the unanimous Democratic throng. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, says his original vote was the result of “confusion” and because Speaker Nancy Pelosi “rushed” the bill through to the floor vote. Rep. Mario Diaz-Belart said yesterday,
“My record shows that I am a long-standing advocate against discrimination of all types. I, however, cannot support any effort that undermines religious liberties by failing to provide legitimate safeguards for faith-based organizations that object based on their deeply-held religious beliefs.”
What really happened is that conservatives on social media and in the punditry scorched the Republicans who voted for the measure, which is necessary, obvious, benign and a gift to the GOP if was capable of thinking straight, so now these two cowards are backing down and claiming that they didn’t mean it.
Look, the job of a House member is this simple: read a bill and decide if you support it or not. I can respect someone who votes for a bill and someone who votes against it, but doing what these two are doing is the equivalent of announcing, “I can’t do my job!”
Congress does not need incompetents, and it does not need weenies. It really doesn’t need incompetent weenies.
The increasingly unjust, unfair, harmful pandering to pseudo-transgender opportunists has got to eventually trigger a massive awakening in which Americans say, “Wait…what are we doing? This is crazy! Why have we allowed this to go on this long? Or at all?”
In the most recent debacle, Seattle Academy’s Aspen Hoffman, ranked 72nd in boys’ track as a freshman, transitioned to female, sort of, as a sophomore, was allowed to compete as girl, and suddenly started winning races.
Hoffman finished first in the 5,000 meter race, and broke Seattle Academy’s girls’ record with a time that would have achieved 48th place in the boys’ division. This is Barry Bonds-level cheating. It also shows how California derangement is infectious: both Washington and Oregon have lost their grip on reality, rationality, responsibility and ethics. When are their citizens going to stop being weenies and stop the madness? It’s their duty as citizens, after all.
Fifteen years ago, Washington state’s guidelines for transgender athletes held that male athletes had to undergo surgery and two years of hormone therapy before they could compete as females. Four years ago, the surgery mandate was lifted and only“documented testosterone suppression therapy” was required. Then, in 2021 as The Great Stupid raged, the state ruled that transgender athletes only had to “consistently express” a gender. Well, yes, that seems reasonable as far as it goes. You don’t want athletes saying, “I’m male!” “I’m female!” “I’m male!” “I’m female!” between races like Faye Dunaway between slaps in “Chinatown.” But then there’s the other matter—biological males have a huge advantage.
If only more Americans understood, as Christina Leonard obviously does, that this nation was founded to be the home of the free and the brave, not the refuge of weenies.
Christina Leonard of Revere, Mass. had booked 10 rooms in September for $169 a night, plus tax, at Home2 Suites by Hilton for her wedding in Foxboro next May. Then she received an email from the hotel (on Route 1 in Walpole, Mass.—I know it well) canceling her room block. It had just been announced that Taylor Swift will be performing at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro that same Spring weekend. The hotel manager told Christina over the phone that “they could charge up to $1,000 per room for this.”
Gouging, then! What a classy operation Hilton runs.
Christina remind the hotel that she has signed a contract and sent it back, but the sales manager told her—HA!— he never signed it. She reminded him that she has emails confirming the dates. If she were a lawyer, she would have pointed out that she relied on the agreement, and that the hotel caused her to rely on it. In reality, the Hilton didn’t have a legal leg to stand on, but companies will often attempt to bluff non-lawyers with fake technicalities like “we never signed the contract we agreed to.” They do this because it usually works….with weenies.
Ethics Alarms has frequently discussed the ethical and professional deterioration of the historian profession, as it, like so many other professions and institutions, has given up integrity for ideology and political agendas. History itself is under attack as a result, with historical censorship and airbrushing increasingly being favored over objective and balanced examination that does not distort past figures and events by the viewing them through the lens of “presentism.”
In an essay on the website of the American Historical Association, the organization’s president, James Sweet, offered constructive criticism of the trend, writing in part,
Market Hotel agreed to host a concert on July 8th featuring the musical stylings of attempted Reagan assassin John Hinckley, Jr., who has been released into the world on the theory that he was never technically guilty of a crime because he was insane at the time. Hinckley called the show the beginning of his “Redemption Tour,” during which he will play his songs (are those bad rip-offs of Dylan dedicated to Jodie Foster on the program?) to promote, he says, rehabilitation for formerly incarcerated criminals and the mentally ill. Continue reading →
Don’t you think it’s odd that there isn’t a single really great song about mothers? There are lots of great father songs.
My mom, whom I think about every day and miss terribly, was wonderful in so many ways, but was almost as unethical as my father was ethical. It’s a tribute to his parenting that he communicated to my sister and me early on that this was just a quirk, and while mom had much to teach about love, loyalty and compassion, hers was not the ethical or moral compass to follow.
I just saw a man riding a real, honest-to-goodness velocipede in the church parking lot across from our house! I have never seen that in real life, only in photos and old movies.
The eighth of May, 1945, was the day when German troops throughout Europe finally laid down their arms, and World War II, the worst catastrophe the modern world has ever suffered through, featuring the most unethical and cruel aggressors imaginable, finally came to an end. Evil easily could have triumphed; that it did not was as much a function of luck as anything else. This is always a day on which to draw a collective breath. Whew! That was a close one…
1. Funny, but stupid. This meme is fascinating.
It could easily be intended to mock the kind of hysterical distortions from the Left’s Supreme Court leak freakout—on that basis, I laughed when I saw it. However, it almost certainly IS one of those hysterical distortions, which reduce debate to an infantile level. I’m sure many progressives think it’s profound. [Pointer: Arthur in Maine] Continue reading →
Just from casual observation and also from having to comb the news and opinion sites, I think people are going nuts, and there are other people in high, powerful and influential places trying to keep them that way, since they will be all the more receptive to irrational ideas.
February 8 is an appropriate date to remember, not just in Black History Month (we should not have months that favor single races, genders and ethnicities, first, because there are only 12, and second, because it is divisive and discriminatory, and therefor unethical), always. This was the date of the Orangeburg Massacre in1968, when police officers in Orangeburg, South Carolina open fire on a mostly black crowd of youths during a protest against racial segregation. Three were killed and about 30 were wounded; one of the dead was a high school student siting on a curb waiting for his mother to pick him up.
It all began when activists in Orangeburg pointed out that Harry Floyd’s bowling alley was segregated despite the 1964 Civil Rights Act making such a policy illegal. Floyd refused to obey the law, and authorities in Orangeburg refused to enforce it. A protest followed and extended into days. After a window was smashed in the bowling alley by protesters, police responded with clubs and arrests. Then the protest spread to South Carolina State University, one of the “historically black colleges.” (These are also an anachronism and inherently hypocritical.) When a report of a fire on campus set by protesters caused the Highway Patrol to respond, one protester threw a piece of wood at the officers, who opened fire. Several investigations failed to back up the Highway Patrol’s claim that the demonstrators had attacked them with fire bombs and sniper fire.
With everything else that happened in 1968, still one of the most cataclysmic years in U.S. history, the Orangeburg Massacre has been relatively neglected in our collective memory. While researching the event today, I noticed this statement on the History Channel site:
Shootings on college and high school campuses continue to plague the United States, as does police violence against African Americans—nearly 1,000 people are killed by police every year, and Black people are 2.5 times more likely to die at the hands of law enforcement than white people.
It is unethical for a history website to spin and distort facts like that. The campus “shootings” referred to are not police shootings. Since 1968, every campus shooting—I count eight— has been at the hands of someone who was mentally ill. Eight in 53 years is not a “plague.” After mentioning “police violence against African Americans,” itself a loaded phrase, the article jumps to the total number killed by police, which includes whites, and the 2.5 number is deceptive without context: blacks are 2.5 times more likely to have confrontations with the police, and not just because they are black.
These are anti-gun, anti-police, Black Lives Matter talking points, not “history.”
1. Of course they will. The New York Times notes that the tactics of Nancy Pelosi’s partisan witch hunt, the Jan. 6 Panel, will guarantee that Republicans will return the criminalization of politics in kind when they are in power. “The House select committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol is borrowing techniques from federal prosecutions, employing aggressive tactics typically used against mobsters and terrorists…[to] develop evidence that could prompt a criminal case,” the article begins.
What the article doesn’t say, but what is screamingly obvious, is that the primary objective of the 100% biased investigation is to try to stop Donald Trump and his allies from gaining power in 2024. If they can lock him up, all the better. The Times does say that using the House investigative process this way is unprecedented. Wait! I thought defying “democratic norms” was what made Trump a threat to democracy! I’m so confused!
Seeking to find reasons to imprison political opponents is banana republic-style politics, and while Trump audiences may have chanted to lock Hillary up, it is the Democrats who are actually seeking to prosecute an opponent they hate and fear. They are also using a rigged investigation to do it: it’s bipartisan in name only. Republicans are angry, and should be, as should be anyone who is really interested in protecting democracy. The GOP, however, will not take the ethical course and take steps to prevent future House Star Chambers. You know it won’t. It will take that broken norm, and turn it on the party that broke it. Continue reading →
For the first Ethics Quiz of the new year, consider Patton Oswalt. The gnomish comedian and left-wing wit has long been on my hate list, not for his work, for he is extremely sharp and often very funny, but out of envy: he managed to snag the heart of lovely actress Meredith Salenger, his wife and one of my all-time Hollywood crushes, despite Oswalt looking like a nuclear accident victim. But that is neither here nor there.
What is here and now is this: Oswalt had posted photos memorializing a nice gesture by long-time friend Dave Chappelle on New Year’s Eve. Oswalt, who was doing small show in Seattle (he mostly does small shows, which explains why you may not have heard of Patton Oswalt) got a spontaneous call from Chappelle to come over to the nearby stadium and join him in Chappelle’s huge show. Oswlat wrote gratefully on Instagram,
“I waved good-bye to this hell-year with a genius I started comedy with 34 years ago. He works an arena like he’s talking to one person and charming their skin off. Anyway, I ended the year with a real friend and a deep laugh. Can’t ask for much more.”
Of course the social media mobs took after him for being a friend of that anti-trans bigot Chappelle. First, Oswalt took down all the hate posts, and then felt compelled to explain himself, writing, Continue reading →
Morons. Everywhere I look, morons.
Ethics Alarms 