Yet More Evidence Of An Already Self-Evident Proposition: Our Journalists Are Disgustingly Biased and “Enemies of the People”: The NYC ISIS Terrorist Attack

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I have mused several time here that anyone who seriously asserts in a comment that the mainstream media isn’t fatally biased against conservatives, Republicans, and, naturally, President Trump risks being banned from the commenting wars. I have yet to act on that threat, because only one respectable commenter has challenged me on that assertion, one who has earned a multitude of Ethics Alarms brownie points for good faith and courageous arguments that often run counter to the currents here.

Nonetheless, the position is untenable, and has been for years. The latest example days ago when a smoking IED was tossed at a group of protestors outside Gracie Mansion by an ISIS-supporting terrorist yelling “Allah Ackbar!” Since the U.S. is in the process of attacking Iran, and since the mainstream media is committed to elevating the welfare of Muslims (and illegal immigrants, and violent criminals, Somali fraudsters, anti-American elected officials and international foes of the U.S….) over the interests of law-abiding, loyal and patriotic American citizens, the mainstream media immediately framed the attempted terrorist act as a bigoted attack on NYC’s Muslim Communist mayor Zohran Mamdani:

CBS announced, “Improvised explosive found at protests near Manhattan’s Gracie Mansion, Mamdani’s official residence, NYPD says.”

NBC:

UPI: “Suspicious devices ignited at anti-Islam protest in New York”

The Hill: “Device ignited at Gracie Mansion protest was explosive: NYPD.”

I admit it: I was fooled. I thought, based on perusing the reports, that the bombs, which the NYT initially described without noting that they were explosive, were hurled by anti-Islam protesters.

CNN’s framing was so disgusting that the Axis news network had to issue a retraction, which itself was misleading:

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The Classic Ethics Problem That Isn’t As Hard As Everyone Thinks It Is…

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

I’ve been hearing and reading debates about the old (1884) criminal case The Queen v. Dudley and Stephens since law school, and I must say, I’m a bit sick of it.

A wealthy lawyer from Australia purchased bought a yacht named the Mignonette and hired a Captain Dudley to sail it to him it from England. Dudley and his three crew members encountered a violent a storm off the coast of Africa, and the Mignonette was swamped. Its captain and crew escaped in a lifeboat with minimal provisions. After more than three weeks adrift, the captain decided that all of them would die of hunger and thirst unless extreme measures were taken, so he took them. He decided that cabin boy Richard Parker, a 17-year-old orphan, should be slaughtered and eaten. The captain’s reasoning: Parker was already delirious from drinking seawater, so he was deemed the weakest and least likely to survive anyway. The three men killed to boy, collected his blood in a bailer and drank it, then removed his heart and liver and ate them.

It worked! They were rescued in time, just a few days later in fact. Dudley and the First Mate Edwin Stephens were also prosecuted and found guilty of murder, a result that was considered revolutionary, since resorting to cannibalism in such dire circumstances was considered a normal course of action, “the custom of the sea.” In the U.S. at the time, the courts widely accepted the “necessity doctrine,” which excuses some illegal acts if they are performed in good faith to prevent a greater harm.

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The Most Trump-Deranged, Privileged, Aging Progressive Facebook Post Ever…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

A long-time friend, part of a retired two-lawyer couple, just posted a furious anti-Trump rant on Facebook because “Trump’s” war on Iran has interfered with their planned three-week luxury cruise. “The mid-terms can’t come soon enough!” she concludes.

Naturally, no one is pointing out in the comments the warped values and priorities such a post conveys. The outburst also shows how confident bubble-dwellers on social media become that their world-view is the only one decent, intelligent and respectable American could possible adhere to.

Harvard Grade Inflation Ethics and the DEI Train Wreck, Part II: Harvard’s Retort

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Back in 2015, in an earlier grade- and recognition-inflation post, I wrote in horror about the growing tendency of high schools to name up to a third of the graduating class “valedictorians.” I observed in part,

“…this atrocious practice is obviously catching on. Integrity is such a chore. Excellence, superiority, achievement…they are all chores too. As for the genuinely superior students, they are out of luck: this is the high school equivalent of all the gladiators standing up and crying “I’m Spartacus!,” except now it’s “I’m the smartest one in the class!” This Maoist denial of the fact that some of us earn more success than others and that there is nothing wrong with doing so is all the rage…”

Clearly, this destructive concept was allowed to expand and flourish in the next decade, resulting in the indignant squeals of indignation from minority students at Harvard as the school resolves to stop lying to them and the world about their diligence, abilities and achievements.

In a cover essay in the current issue of Harvard Magazine, Lindsay Mitchell writes about “The True Cost of Grade Inflation,” focuses not on the costs of deceiving employers and flooding the job market with young sufferers of the Dunning-Kruger syndrome, but on student self-esteem and stress. The former Harvard instructor writes in part,

“…As Amanda Claybaugh, the dean of undergraduate education who authored the October grade inflation report, told me, “One might expect that a world where everyone got A’s would be a very relaxed world, but actually, it’s the most stressed-out world of all.”…The psychology driving this grade-frenzied atmosphere stems from the way A’s flooding the marketplace changes their value as a currency, rendering them both essential and trash at the same time. When you feel that everybody’s got an A, then you must get one, too—every time—or you have failed to keep up with the mainstream. Yet all the A’s in the world will still do zilch to get you ahead…

“…the swelling fear of not keeping up with the perfectly graded masses discourages students from taking academic risks. On campus, stories abound of introductory classes populated by enrollees who don’t need them—many have already taken a version of the same class in high school—but who are willing to repeat the material to have their A outcome in the bag. In those classes, if there’s a curve set by the highest or median score, students taking the class to actually learn the material are often left to claim the lower grades.

“And instead of picking courses that might prove challenging or just exploratory, many students aggressively seek out “gems,” the new Harvard slang for “guts”: easy classes without rigorous grading schemes. Meanwhile, the number of students taking classes pass-fail drifts upward, as students cower before intimidating subjects and elect the route that obviates grading altogether…terrified students would often email me their revised drafts repeatedly to get me to say they were “okay” before I graded them. On occasion, someone emailed me every couple of hours when I didn’t respond immediately. With one abject soul, I was able to track her miserable night by looking at the string of messages she dispatched through the wee hours, while I was sleeping. She had sent me her thesis statement over and over—with each successive iteration showing an almost imperceptible tweak—pleading with me to tell her if it sounded like an A thesis…When students become this obsessed with grades, the student-teacher interaction is reframed in crudely transactional terms…I, as the instructor, acted merely as a giver of A’s, and my willingness (or lack thereof) to grant them in turn defined the value of the student, who would go out into the world and make money or attain status in proportion to her graded value. With this mindset, my students mostly received solid A’s with an attitude of relief rather than joy. Any grade below that, on the other hand, landed as deflating or even ruinous, depending on how GPA-dependent that student’s future plans were…

“In my own classes, I frequently encountered reading comprehension issues serious enough to hamper the putative goal of a writing class—and even seemed to witness students’ reading skills degrading in real time. In my early Expos days, I liked to bring an old Lampoon parody of a Harvard student essay into class to read aloud together—with each person taking the next sentence round robin at the seminar table—as a lighthearted way to kick off a discussion of my students’ own papers. After several years, though, I noticed more and more students seemed unfamiliar with the vocabulary in the parody, with many now stumbling over words like “penchant,” “motif,” and “preponderance.” I finally stopped bringing the Lampoon piece to class, since by then the laughs had turned scarce and the faces had turned red with embarrassment…These students were not puffed up with unjustified praise, like the entitled Harvardian of the grade inflation think pieces. They showed awareness that they were not performing as well as they should…Many students feel the inflated grades they’ve received compose a smooth edifice that surrounds them and could crumble at any moment to reveal the pockmarked reality of their performance. For some, this can become a source of shame, because their inflated A’s suggest their faults are unspeakable and must be hidden, whereas, for all they know, other students’ A’s are entirely deserved. Grade inflation then becomes a dimension of imposter syndrome that reflects other aspects of this generation’s coming-of-age experience. It is similar to looking repeatedly at a friend’s social media posts portraying her life as perfect, while knowing that your own posts were curated to obscure a multitude of flaws…

“Most of the students I talked to about the grade inflation report, even while admitting grades are too high, took a defensive stance. They were already being worked to the point of exhaustion—and now Harvard was talking about making things harder yet? These conversations confirmed how entrenched grade inflation is in the modern educational landscape. To reinstate strict academic standards, Harvard will need to help students see how a world with fewer A’s could be a better one for all involved…”

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Harvard Grade Inflation Ethics and the DEI Train Wreck, Part I: A Depressing Protest From Students “Of Color”

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

[This is a long post, but I urge you to read it all the way through. I cannot imagine a more powerful rebuttal to the advocates of “diversity, equity and inclusion.”]

Last October, in “Harvard’s Self-Indicting Grade Inflation Report,” I wrote about the school’s embarrassing report that revealed that 60% of the grades handed out at the supposedly elite college (my alma matter, and my sister’s, and my father’s, where my mother was Dean of Housing once-upon-a-time) are now As, making Harvard resemble Garrisons Keilor’s imaginary Minnesota community where “all the children” seem to be are “above average” even though that’s impossible.

In a prescient comment (as is often the case), AM Golden wrote in part, taking off from a Dean Amanda Claybaugh’s statement that it was desirable to “ produce a broader distribution of grades,”

That’s the problem. They don’t want to admit they accept unqualified applicants because many of those applicants will be disproportionately minorities. Returning standards to what an elite institution should have will mess with the faculty push for D.E.I. The standards have to stay low if the experiment is to be prioritized over pure academics. They have set too many precedents to easily back away now…

They have created bubbles where remote learning, mask wearing, protesting for the correct causes and making equal outcomes are virtues valued over a solid education. Backing up now will cause mass revolt on campuses. Like the news media, the colleges will be accused of caving to Trump. The asylum has been run by people who should have been inmates for so long that the actual inmates can’t be helped.

Sometimes I think Ethics Alarms is the only online community where clear-eyed vision dependably resides. For right on cue, as Harvard announced a long term effort to start grading seriously again, a coalition of “of color” Harvard students sent this open letter to the campus:

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Ethics Hero: Laura Hughes

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The widow of high school teacher Jason Hughes, 40, who died during a student prank gone horribly wrong in Gainesville, Georgia, is demonstrating how some human beings can overcome anger, bitterness and the emotional need for retribution, choosing compassion and empathy instead.

Around 11 p.m. on March 6, Jordan Wallace, Elijah Tate Owens, Aiden Hucks, Ana Katherine Luque and Ariana Cruz, all 18-years-old, toilet-papered trees outside the Hughes’ home, a continuation of their school’s tradition of such pranks during exam week. As the group piled into two vehicles to flee, Jason Hughes ran out of his home to confront the teens, but tripped and fell into the road. Wallace, who had already begun speeding away in a pickup truck, accidentally ran over the prone teacher. The teens left their vehicles to render aid, but Hughes perished in the incident.

All five teens were charged with criminal trespassing and littering on private property; Wallace has has been charged with first degree murder as well as reckless driving.

Laura Hughes, who is also a teacher, is pleading with authorities to drop the criminal charges. “We ask that you continue to pray for our family and also for the students involved in the accident along with their families,” she said in a statement to reporters. “Please join us in extending grace and mercy to them as Christ has done for us…This is a terrible tragedy, and our family is determined to prevent a separate tragedy from occurring, ruining the lives of these students.”

The late father of two (above, next to his wife) wasn’t trying to angrily confront the pranksters but “was excited and waiting to catch them in the act,” Laura told the New York Times. Insisting that her husband was not pursuing the students to reprimand them but rather to express comradery with their innocently-intended prank. Hughes said that criminal punishment “would be counter to Jason’s lifelong dedication of investing in the lives of these children.”

First degree murder sounds like extreme over-charging by authorities. The entire episode is a blazing example of the caprices of moral luck. I agree that the students’ punishment should be left to the school if Laura Hughes doesn’t want to press charges. Ethics tells us that it is time to mitigate the damage, not to make the damage worse.

Jesse Jackson Jr. Properly Slams Obama and Biden for Trying To Turning His Father’s Funeral Into An Anti-Trump Campaign Rally

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Well good for him.

Jackson said, during a private memorial service at Rainbow Push Coalition headquarters in Chicago, that “[Y]esterday, I listened for several hours to three United States presidents who do not know Jesse Jackson.”

He continued,

“He maintained a tense relationship with the political order, not because the presidents were white or black, but the demands of our message, the demands of speaking for the least of these — those who are disinherited, the damned, the dispossessed, the disrespected — demanded not Democratic or Republican solutions, but demanded a consistent, prophetic voice that at no point in time ever sold us out as people. And it speaks volumes about who the Rev. Jesse Jackson was.”

Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Joe Biden all used their eulogies to attack the President and his policies, though, as you might have guessed, Harris was the most obnoxious and made the least sense. “Let me just say I predicted a lot about what’s happening right now,” Harris smirked. “I’m not into saying I told you so but we did see it coming.” I’d love to ask her what it was exactly that she “saw coming.” The forceful repudiation of the weak, zombie administration she was part of? The voters’ rejection of her embarrassing DEI candidacy? Her running mate’s utter disgrace and exposure as a corrupt hack?

Jackson’s was a subtle and measured rebuke, so subtle and measured that most of the Axis media felt it necessary to ignore it. Many, realizing how inappropriate it was for Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to turn attention away from Jackson’s father and onto their hatred of Donald Trump at Jesse Jackson Sr.’s funeral, also worked to hide the Democrats’ nauseating conduct from the public…after all, there’s an election coming!

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Daryl Hannah Asks, “How Can ‘Love Story’ Get Away With” Portraying Her As A Villainous Creep? Simple: Hollywood Has No Ethics, And Never Had Any.

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Poor Daryl.

Nobody apparently told her about the industry she worked in for all those years. In an angry op-ed in the New York Times (gift link), Hannah, once one of the late John F. Kennedy Jr.’s girlfriends, protests that the FX TV series “Love Story” about the romance between John-John and Carolyn Bessette exploits her while warping the truth and marring her reputation.

“The actions and behaviors attributed to me are untrue,” Hannah writes. “I have never used cocaine in my life or hosted cocaine-fueled parties. I have never pressured anyone into marriage. I have never desecrated any family heirloom or intruded upon anyone’s private memorial. I have never planted any story in the press. I never compared Jacqueline Onassis’ death to a dog’s.”

I believe her, maybe, but it doesn’t matter. Fictionalized versions of living people’s lives, when those people are celebrities, are immune from lawsuits unless they can be shown to have represented the falsehoods as true (by definition, a fictionalized series does not do that), and done so with malice. One of the show’s producers explained why Hannah’s character was cast as a villain: “Given how much we’re rooting for John and Carolyn, Daryl Hannah occupies a space where she’s an adversary to what you want narratively in the story.” Oh. Then its all right to show her doing and saying things she didn’t do or say.

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Personal Taste Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

In a Sunday post on Powerline, Scott Johnson, an unrepentant Hall & Oates fan, begins a review of a recent John Oates concert by writing, “John Oates is one-half of what is generally recognized as the most successful duo in music history.” And thus did he fall into the eternal trap awaiting those who state matters of personal taste as fact.

I’ve fallen into it myself. It is hard not to: once your mind has locked itself into an opinion about what is “best” and what/who/where is better than whatever/whoever/wherever, confirmation bias takes over, and objective thought is nearly impossible.

Johnson was, as I knew the second I read that sentence, dragged to the metaphorical woodshed by his readers. Wrote one, in the second comment on the post, “John Oates is one-half of what is generally recognized as the most successful duo in music history? Maybe by sales. But in terms of their work, let me introduce you to the music of Simon & Garfunkel. Then the Everly Brothers. Then the Carpenters. Then Ike & Tina Turner.” Another wrote, “My guess is that Scott included that appraisal just to raise some feathers.
‘Maybe by sales.”‘Actually, I’d guess that the first three you mention sold way more records than Hall and Oates. Musically speaking, my candidate for the most successful duo might be Steely Dan, which, for most of its tenure, was really the duo of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker with various backing musicians.”

Next came this: “Yes to Simon and Garfunkel. Yes to Phil and Don. No to the Carpenters and heck no to Ike and Tina.”

Now in my case, and by my tastes, I would rank Simon and Garfunkle way ahead of Hall and Oates, and the Everly Brothers as well. No, of course The Carpenters aren’t in the same league, though Karen Carpenter was the greatest vocalist ever to sing with any rock or pop duo. Another group didn’t last as long, and perhaps this is because my college room mate played their Greatest Hits album day and night, but I rank the Righteous Brothers ahead of Hall and Oates as well.

Such absolute verdicts also risk being incomplete and ill-informed because of bias blindness. I wondered about another duo who made their mark in the decidedly uncool genre of “easy listening” music, but they were damn good, and lasted a long time. The piano duo Ferrante & Teicher recorded over 150 albums, were fixtures on the variety TV shows of the Fifties and Sixties, and sold over 90 million records worldwide during their career. From the 1950s until they retired in 1989, they earned 22 gold and platinum records, dwarfing the output of both Hall and Oates and Paul and Artie.

You have to admit, as that video of them playing one of their biggest hits, “The Theme From Exodus,” the piano boys did what they did as well as it was possible to do it, for a long time, and with a lot of admirers.

Be Proud, Democrats! This Is The Face of Your Party:

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Nice! And Carville speaks for if not all, a majority of the Axis. I defy anyone to justify this with facts and logic as opposed to an appeal to emotion. There is no justification, and Carville’s party’s determination to make hatred for the nation’s elected leader viral and controlling of our nation’s fate and policies is ethically indefensible.

Nor do I care to hear protests that Carville is an outlier. A showboat, yes, but he is expressing exactly what the American Left has allowed to sustain its agenda. Hate. Ugly, corrosive, irrational, destructive hate. We saw the antics of Democrats during the State of the Union, and it was only a slight escalation of Speaker Nancy Pelosis despicable conduct during Trumps 2020 SOTU. The democrats are all Carvillized. Some just hide it better than others.

Amazingly, most of the hate is rooted in bitterness and bad sportsmanship. Democrats lost power because they proved themselves dishonest, corrupt and incompetent…and their reaction to losing is anger? Fury? Hatred of the man who beat them? How juvenile. How embarrassing.

How unethical.

How sad.