Memorial Day Ethics Reflections…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Nice.

The Democratic National Committee decided to use Memorial Day to attack the President of the United States. Of course it did. Despite all of the party’s rhetoric about saving democracy (while it was undermining it to a degree never before seen in U.S. history—go ahead, challenge that!), this is a party that literally doesn’t like the United States (maybe hate is too strong).

That tweet was so offensive, even Democrats objected. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, (D-Ill.) tweeted, “It is incredibly distasteful to use our heroic dead for a political attack on Memorial Day. I’m a Democrat and I condemn this post by the DNC.”

And the DNC pulled it, replacing it with this…

…without comment, apology, anything. Tweet? What tweet? But it was the fact it could be tweeted at all that is signature significance. The party is blaming the “kids” that it had in charge of social media during the holiday, but this just means the Gen Z radicals the party has indoctrinated in our schools and with its media don’t yet understand that the mask has to stay on a bit longer or else…

Can’t have that.

The DNC was just one example. I wrote yesterday about Democrats declaring the holiday “Celebrate a Dead Arrest-Resisting Street Thug Day,” including Minneapolis’s woke mayor, who had to be reminded it was also a holiday to honor patriots and heroes. I note that Fark, the often funny, left-biased satirical news aggregator, posted this yesterday…

If challenged, I’m sure Fark would say that it was satirizing the Trump Deranged progs who still think the Epstein files hold damning evidence against the President. You know the old saying though…”Fool me once..”? I’ve checked Fark for years. It’s about as non-partisan as Stephen Colbert. As for Fark’s favorite party—well, do you remember the Memorial Day message posted by Kamala Harris—you know, that whizbang, smart-as-a-whip candidate for President who only lost because American are racists and sexist? Here , let me refresh your memory…

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Ethical Quotes of the Week: Medal of Honor Recipients Will Swenson and Matt Williams

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Her face (as usual when she isn’t interviewing a Democrat or an Axis ally) etched with pain. ABC’s awful Margaret Brennan dragged out the “Everything is Terrible Under President Trump” Big Lie and asked two Congressional Medal of Honor recipients a “When did you stop beating your wife?”-style question. “What specifically makes you optimistic? Because this country, at times, can feel dark, these days, there’s a lot of darkness. What makes you feel optimistic?,” she asked.

You see the trick? She framed the question so that it would mean “I’m optimistic despite how terrible things are with this Fascist President.” But Will Swenson, on the right, didn’t fall into her trap. He answered,

“Well, ultimately, because we’re in Washington, D.C., and everything revolves around politics, we have to remember that politics aren’t everything. American lives continue on. Children are born, children go to school. Lives are achieved. Dreams are achieved. This country is a great place. It’s not politics. It’s not just what’s the news bites coming off of media. Ultimately, we continue forward as a country, continually imperfect, continually evolving forward, always trying to achieve a more perfect union. That’s what’s important to remember, what we can achieve aspirationally. No other place in history, time or on this planet have ever gotten to where we are today. We need to be proud of that, and we need to remember that is what we stay focused on, what we can be.”

Then Brennan, disappointed with the answer, tried to reframe it to meet her agenda, saying, “What we can be, and the promise of it….” Ah. So you agree there’s nothing NOW to feel good about, but maybe things will get better! She is scum. When Brennan asked the same question to Matt Williams (on the left) he also plowed under her “gotcha!” attempt, saying,

“You know, I agree with Will. I think, you know, it’s- it’s so important to remember who we are as a country, and take an opportunity to celebrate that, and think about all the- the challenges that we’ve overcome, how far we’ve actually come. You know, I think if you- if you frame it that way, you think very deeply about our trials and tribulations from beginning to today, we’ve made tremendous strides. Our country is, you know, we’re a super- global superpower. Our economy is doing well. All those things are great. And- and take politics aside out of this whole conversation. Just talk about our communities, that- that we live in, and the people that you surround yourself with, and your families, and the opportunity to be free and, you know, choose what school you go to, and where you want to live and do what you want to do, and what career path you go down or don’t if you want to, you know, I mean, there’s so much to be positive about. And I think the opportunity to celebrate America’s 250th birthday, you know, over the course of this next year is- is amazing. There’s so many great places to visit. You know, the National Mall is going to be full of Americana. And what we’re going to- celebrating ourselves, which I think we should take the time to do. I think it’s very important. You know, across the country, you know something we’re very passionate about at the National Medal of Honor Museum in Arlington, Texas, is a phenomenal beacon that stands to talk about and house our, not only our story, the story of the Medal, and what the Medal represents itself. And I would challenge people to go there and celebrate our history as well. You know, it’s so important. There’s so many great things to go do and great things to visit and don’t just take part in it, because it’s something to do on a weekend, right? Think about why you’re doing it, and when you’re there in the crowds and you’re enjoying yourself, and you’re taking your family to go talk about our country and celebrate our country, actually celebrate it. Be grateful for what you’ve got and the opportunity that was provided for you. If you do that, I don’t see how you can’t be optimistic about our future.”

Disappointed that her “dark times” leading question failed, Brennan ended the interview.

Unethical (and Tasteless) Tweet Of The Month: Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) [Updated and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Call me sentimental and patriotic, but on Memorial Day 2026, I believe we have better people to remember than George Floyd, and almost anyone is more appropriate to honor.

We can and should blame President Trump, along with the foolish voters of Georgia, for the fact that someone as unqualified and ethically inert as Sen. Warnock is in Congress today and not haunting a ramshackle church somewhere. You will recall that Trump made the two 2021 special Georgia Senate elections into referendums on the January 6 riots and his claims of a stolen election, and managed to snatch two defeats from the jaws of victory.

Still, using Memorial Day to extol a lifetime street punk who was overdosing on fentanyl while resisting arrest demonstrates a special kind of sick priorities. There is literally nothing, zero, nada, to admire, respect or honor George Floyd for. He was in the right wrong place at the right wrong time, and an audacious cabal of race-hustlers exploited his accidental death by bad cop to extort all manner of weak principled businesses and institutions into white guilt seizures, causing extensive, perhaps irreparable harm to the nation, society, race relations, the justice system and more. Poor dumb, useless George wasn’t at fault for any of this, but Senator Warnock and ethics villains like him were.

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Oh Look, Pope Leo Presumes To Tell Us What To Do With A.I.! Ethics Observations, Part II

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The summary of the Pope Leo’s open letter to “all people of good will” is at Part I, along with a link to the whole 42,000 word opus. News reports on the document can be read here, here and here.

1. The document appears to begin, as we would expect, from the basic socialist/Communist/progressive bias the Catholic Church has always displayed, which includes suspicion and contempt for capitalism. In the text, Pope Leo says that while “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” he added that “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.” The encyclical doesn’t resolve the obvious conflict that has always existed in that perspective: technology ideally improves the quality of life for humanity, saves resources and redistributes them elsewhere, and often reduces the costs of goods and services making them more affordable to all. One of my favorite inventors, Walter Hunt (inventor of the safety pin), invented the first practical sewing machine but didn’t patent or market it because he was certain that it would put seamstresses out of work. So Elias Howe patented the sewing machine instead. Were more jobs lost or created by the invention? I have no idea. This has been the inevitable sequence with new technology throughout human history: its ultimate impact is usually impossible to predict.

Ethics Lesson: Trying to develop rules and laws limiting the uses of emerging technology is stifling as well as futile, and foolish to boot.

2. A Pope using the Biblical fable of the Tower of Babel as his primary analogy to justify limiting the use of artificial intelligence is signature significance that makes me, for one, tend to roll my eyes at the entire document. That’s a story about the Old Testament God finding sinful the aspirations of mankind and sabotaging an effort by humans to cooperate in creating something ambitious and unprecedented. The encyclical demands acceptance of human limits, while science, capitalism and American individualism set no limits on human advancement. The Pope seems to be saying the equivalent of “If God had meant for us to fly, he would have given us wings.”

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Oh Look, Pope Leo Presumes To Tell Us What To Do With A.I.! Ethics Observations, Part I: The Text

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The big news this morning is that Pope Leo XIV issued an A.I encyclical titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity,” his first such document. These things are supposed to impart authoritative teachings on moral or social challenges, but fall short of the legal status of a papal bull, which is a formal declaration of an article of faith or moral law. Catholics are supposed to use encyclicals to guide their lifestyles and choices. You know, like devout Catholic Joe Biden believing abortion is murder while supporting the practice so Democrats won’t lose the the single female vote.

I started to read the thing, which is over 200 pages, and officially feel bad about giving up 25% through, especially since I routinely criticize people who attack court decisions without reading them. Do I trust the various reporters and pundits who are supposed to summarize and explain the document? No. However, unlike court decisions, which I am accustomed to reading and have the experience and training to understand, a Pope’s declaration about how we should work with new technology has as much relevance to a non religious question as his opinion on one of the legal controversies settled by a Supreme Court decision: none whatsoever. He is not, by any framework, an expert on technology. He has a bias, indeed many biases, that he has already made clear, and the Pope’s view on A.I. is exactly as valuable as the opinion of of one of my next door neighbors, and maybe not as well informed.

The document has some significance because it will doubtless be used as an appeal of to authority is future debates over A.I. policy even though it shouldn’t be.

Ironically, one of my first substantive uses of A.I. is to ask one of the things to summarize “Magnifica Humanitas.” The result is below, so those of you who are not speed readers or who actually have lives so spending the time necessary to read what the Pope has wrought isn’t practical can prepare for the Ethics Alarms reaction to come. I suppose there is always the possibility that the bot read it, thought “Oh-oh!” and slanted its summary to advance its own welfare and evil plans…

Anyway, here is the summary, which is presumably objective, but who knows? I’ll be back with ethical observations in Part 2. (I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the hanging letters in some of the sentence breaks without WordPress getting funky. I’m sorry.)

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Another “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Smoking Gun, As If We Needed Any More…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This exchange…

Ethics villain, Jim Acosta eventually quit CNN in a snit because it began showing a little bit of balance regarding President Trump, but how was such a partisan, biased Axis hack allowed to be CNN’s White House correspondent in the first place? The guy is an A1 Choice USDA -certified ethics villain and, incidentally, an asshole.

Cheer-leading for Colbert is signature significance, to begin with. Gutfield is correct on the facts: it has been verified repeatedly that CBS was losing millions on Colbert.

A swollen staff is part of the reason; the other reason is that Colbert deliberately alienated half the country.

Acosta then defaults to the Axis narrative that President Trump got Colbert cancelled. It’s a lie, flat out. “Dear Leader” is a sarcastic name used by the Trump Deranged. This Axis “advocacy journalist” was out to trash President Trump from the moment he was elected,

Then Acosta privets to the “poor fired employees” guilt trip. They lost their jobs because the show they were working for was losing money! It happens to the best of us (and me, several times). That’s how business works in the U.S. Too bad this isn’t the socialist worker’s paradise Acosta and his fellow travelers dream about. And Gutfield didn’t celebrate the staff losing their jobs anyway. He stated that the staff was ridiculously huge, which it was.

[I will link to Jim Acosta’s ugly EA dossier when WordPress is functioning better, which it currently is not, and its “Happiness Engineers” (Yuck!) have been useless.]

He’s an Ethics Villain. When people complain about Trump calling the news media the “enemy of the people,” Jim Acosta is Exhibit A in the President’s defense.

Note: Exhibit B could be Dana Milbank, whom the Washington Post finally jettisoned as one of its partisan columnists after years of Axis hackery. Today on ABC he cited as one of the three reasons Kamala Harris lost the election was “the backlash against a black woman being the Democratic nominee.” Just thinking that, never mind saying it in public, disqualifies anyone as a serious and trustworthy analyst. Milbank was a political reporter and columnist for the Washington Post for 25 years.

On Trying To See Both Sides Of The Illegal Immigration Issue…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
A Guest Post by Ryan Harkins

[This guest post’s origin was the most recent Open Forum. Personally, I don’t believe there is a rational, ethical, realistic “other side” to the issue. As I wrote in a longer response to Ryan that you can read here, “the issue of illegal immigration is quite simple. It’s against the law. It’s against the law because open borders to a country like the US is literally national suicide…The immigration laws we have, flawed or not, have to be enforced uniformly and strictly.”—JM]

My wife and I have been debating the illegal immigration issue on and off for a while now, and part of the reason we keep returning to ethics of the illegal immigration issue is the fact that so many in leadership in the Catholic Church have been very critical of Trump’s deportation efforts.  As faithful Catholics, we believe we need to listen when our bishops speak.  It doesn’t mean we mindlessly agree, but in cases where the bishops take a position we initially oppose, it is incumbent upon us to study and ponder the issue as thoroughly as we can before making any objections.  

To that end, my wife and I are trying to be as open as we possibly can regarding the issue of how to manage people who are in our country and in our local communities illegally.  I have told her that I think the best way to understand a viewpoint with which we disagree is to argue from that viewpoint and to steelman its arguments as best we can.  Interestingly enough, my wife and I do highlight differing aspects of why we have problems with illegal immigration.  I focus very heavily on the human trafficking issue.  She focuses very heavily on the financial injustices the illegal immigration causes. 

From the trafficking standpoint, I think that is it clear that a lot of illegal immigrants end up practically as slave labor, which has largely been overlooked because it seems like it keeps prices down in the supermarket.  But far more devastating is the sex trafficking which never seems to get the attention it deserves, especially when so many of these “lost and displaced children” end up serving the debauched desires of affluent Americans who believe they can continue their predations because “Who would dare contact the authorities?”. 

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Ethics Quote of the Week: “Victory Girls”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

“So here we are … where prominent Democrats across the country spanning politicians, media, academia and even celebrities … have been overtly anti-Semitic for a number of years, but NOW we are supposed to believe Jeffries claiming Galindo crossed a line? “Free Palestine” agitators can stalk and beat-up Jewish students with no repercussions but Galindo wanting to imprison “American Zionists” is a bridge too far?…Democrats in Texas voted for her in enough numbers to put her in the runoff. You just don’t like that she might lose the election over her beliefs. You can’t Jedi Mind Trick yourself out of your party’s Nazi problem.”

—Victory Girls blogger Darleen Clark, correctly noting the gaslighting and hypocrisy of Democratic Party leaders pretending to erupt in horror after Texas Democratic congressional candidate Maureen Galindo openly talked about prison camps for “American Zionists” and “castration processing centers” as if she were the first prominent member of their party to advocate anti-Jewish, anti-Israel positions and spit anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Apparently Democrats are worried that too many voters might finally realize what their party has become. As I mentioned in the previous post,  “recent polls, show that two-thirds of Democrats (67%) now support Palestinians over Israel, with only 17% being on the side of the nation and the population Hamas wants to push into the sea and off the map.” Galindo is a mainstream Democrat now, and was appealing to the base. Jeffries, who posted this…

is being deliberately deceitful, but as my Dad used to say in such situations, “What else is new?” Clark correctly notes that Jeffries didn’t mention that he was referring to a Democrat, and even (Aren’t these people disgusting?) implies that she is a Republican! Now here is AOC, herself anti-Israel and anti-Semitic, doing the same thing in response to Galindo’s plans:

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Update On The Trump-IRS Settlement Scandal, and More Leftover Ethics…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

There are a substantial number of Republican Senators who are taking proper notice of Trump’s stunning explosion of conflicts of interest and dubious Constitutional manipulations last week. (I assume all Democratic Senators are in opposition, since they would oppose anything relating to the President anyway.)Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche met with GOP Senators to discuss the nearly $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” his Department of Justice will supposedly operate as part of a settlement President Trump reached with the IRS, with the cash distributed by commissioners, appointed by Blanche (again supposedly) to selected victims of “unfair treatment by the government.” Most offensive of all, the odoriferous deal shields Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization from further action by the IRS. Reportedly there was general anger and disgust over the arrangement among the Senators. Sen. Mitch McConnell called the fund “morally wrong.” “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong – Take your pick,” he said. I’d vote for both stupid and ethically wrong, not that McConnell is an authority on right and wrong from any perspective.

I continue to think, or at least hope, that this abomination will be stopped. As I already wrote when asked in a comment, this, unlike the artificial offenses behind the two purely partisan impeachments in Trump’s first term, is a genuine impeachable offense. That’s a non-starter now, though if the Democrats take the House they will be looking for any excuse for indicting Trump, and this will be an irresistible temptation.

It is apparent by the public reaction, however, that not many people who weren’t already Trump Deranged are all that upset about the scam, that many MAGA loyalists are satisfied, even enthusiastic with it, and the vast majority don’t understand what’s going on. It might even win more votes for the GOP than it loses.

In other ethics news:

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Comment of the Day: Ethics Quiz: The Dogs of The Titanic

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Recently esteemed veteran Ethics Alarms commenter Michael West has been active in commenting again. For as long as it lasts this time, I am grateful. Under his initial handle texagg04, or “tex” for short, Michael elevated the level of discourse here, and notably vanquished Ethics Alarms’ most aggressive progressive/libertarian warrior among the commentariate, the legendary tgt. (Don’t get me wrong: I like and miss tgt, who was sharp, articulate and civil, but he fled the battlefield.)

One of Michael’s most interesting recent contribution is the one below, which examines exactly the issues I was hoping to have discussed when I composed the ethics quiz about the dogs on the Titanic. Before I turn the floor over to Michael, I want to emphasize a few points that have been obscured in the discussion:

  • One reason I offered this quiz was because I am so sure that my late wife Grace would have wanted to stay with the sinking ship rather than let a beloved pet die alone. I would have had to put her in restraints and drag her into the lifeboat, and she would have divorced (or murdered) me for doing it if I somehow survived. I’m not kidding. And I would have been the one comforting the dog…
  • Several commenters said that they would never take a dog on a ship because of the implied danger. Remember that there were no planes in 1912. For anyone leaving the US to stay overseas or vice-versa, the choice was to bring their non-human companions, not to go, or leave them behind.
  • Passengers did and do take dogs on cruise-ships, and while Michael in other posts reminds us that the Titanic was never exactly marketed as unsinkable, it was marketed as the safest ship there was, which was translated in the minds of travelers as “virtually unsinkable.”
  • I don’t want to contribute to false history. As I stated in the post, there is no evidence that Ann Elizabeth Isham chose to die with her dog, or even that she had a dog with her. She was one of the four First Class women who didn’t get into a lifeboat when the rule was “women and children first.” The others stayed with their husbands, so the story about her Great Dane was posited as an explanation. She could have saved herself and didn’t. Nobody knows why.
  • The sinking of the Titanic is one of those historical events that is so studied and written about that new evidence and theories still keep, ah, surfacing. We may not have heard the last of Ann and her ghostly Great Dane.

Now here is Michael West’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Quiz: The Dogs of The Titanic”:

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