Ethics Snippets on “The Day of the Troll”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Today I’m having to waste time I could be using to finish Part 2 of this post, spamming the infantile rants of a banned commenter who is Big Mad that my tolerance for his/her/its bigotry finally ran out.

Well, here are some items I won’t have time to write full posts on…

1. Unethical (and idiotic) Sunny Hostin Quote of the Week. The lawyer on “The View” who thinks eclipses are proof of climate change actually said, “Had Biden just stayed in the White House and said, ‘I’m not gonna debate this man because he’s morally bankrupt,’ Biden might be the President today.”

And wouldn’t that have been grand! If only the cover-up of Biden’s dementia had been more effective…

2. A “Fix the problem” tale from the firehouse. The firehouse on my street, in a Northern Virginia neighborhood where everyone seems to own a dog (or three) has been putting out boxes of dog biscuits for the canines walking by to enjoy for more than a decade. There was even a special plastic box and a smaller one labeled “Back Up Biscuit Box.” My dog looks forward to his 9:30 pm jaunt to the Biscuit Box, but four nights ago both boxes and any sign of the red cardboard boxes had vanished. Spuds looked at me as if it was my fault. The next night, to be safe, I hid three biscuits in my pants pocket just in case, and sure enough, the firehouse had nothing. I fooled Spuds into thinking the treats had come from the mailbox on a nearby wall. On the third night, I had typed a letter to the firefighters and deposited it in the mailbox while again feigning biscuit retrieval. I explained what an excellent community relations gesture the dog biscuits were and how much my neighbors appreciated it. I also explained how much the ritual of walking to the firehouse brightened my sweet dog’s day. I urged them to reconsider the decision to end the tradition. Whatever it cost, I wrote, it was worth the expense to bring the community together, establish trust and affection for the firefighters, and make dozens of dogs happy. I signed my name, occupation, and address.

The biscuits were back the next night.

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The Cornell Frat Rape Ethics Train Wreck, Part I

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I was first made aware of the sudden re-emergence of a 2024 gang rape allegation as a media and social media obsession when a friend who was raped began posting furiously about the story on Facebook. A knee-jerk progressive, she is certain that there was a cover-up at Cornell and that the alleged victim is telling the truth, because all women must be believed.

I don’t know what really happened at the Chi Phi fraternity on a fateful October night in 2024, and neither do you, and neither does my friend. Anyone who presumes they do know based on a partisan or ideological bias has elected to board the newly launched Cornell Frat Rape Ethics Train Wreck in the dining car. Shame on them.

“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” is having a bad year—look at the sudden resurgence of anti-Semitism here—and fraternity rape hysteria should be viewed with particular skepticism. The infamous Duke Lacrosse case occurred in 2006 and my commentary was lost when the old Ethics Scoreboard left the building, but it is still a tag on Ethics Alarms, with this the most directly relevant post. The imaginary gang rape that disgraced Rolling Stone was extensively covered here, however, as you can see. In 2014, “Rolling Stone” reporter Sabrina Erdly wrote a feature about an imaginary co-ed named “Jackie” being gang raped at a University of Virginia fraternity party. UVA president Teresa A. Sullivan, a good little feminist, suspended all fraternities with no actual evidence of wrongdoing. But you know, men are pigs, women are always the victims, and one must always believe all women, even imaginary ones (there was no “Jackie”) when they cry “Rape!”

Ethics Alarms has analyzed several instances of false rape claims as well as the cynical #MeToo fad, which, like the Cornell episode was weaponized by the Left for political gain. The hysteria got many sexual predators their just desserts, and also amassed many unjustly maligned male victims. I don’t know what happened at Cornell, but I do know that the case has already been co-opted by Democrats to inflame a core constituency, angry white progressive women convinced that the U.S. is an oppressive patriarchy that would have the culture emulating “A Handmaiden’s Tale” if it had its way. There’s an election approaching, after all. Hence the emergence of a mother who murdered her three children as the object of sympathy.

Here are what I consider salient facts based on what we do know:

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House Cleaning: Mystery Solved (Maybe)…The Identity Of EA’s Current Banned Anti-Semite Commenter Has Been Revealed!

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Welcome to my world.

While you may think I spend my Ethics Alarms hours researching every imaginable source for interesting stories with ethics lessons to teach and then writing posts, and then responding to as many comments on the post as possible (70,000 such responses so far), which I believe makes me unique among bloggers with the number of commenters that I have. I also have to deal with the annoying task of blog moderation. That onerous and icky job is made more so when I am forced to ban a commenter for violating the clearly stated comment policies; it get particularly annoying when a banned commenter keeps finding ways to sneak in comments anyway post-banning, which almost all of them do, validating my judgment that they don’t have the ethical compass necessary to contribute here.

The most recent comment-bomber has been virulent anti-Semite Cassandra’s AI Agent, who hasn’t come close to the record number of unauthorized comments as the pompous A Friend, but it’s early yet. In the most recent spammed comment, which CAA posted at least three times, he/she/or it claims to be virulent anti-Semite Alizia Tyler, who was banned for using every topic to engage in her Jew-hating hobby. Many commenters had hypothesized that earlier, and I demurred, for several reasons. CAA has a different email address than Alizia, and unlike Alizia, doesn’t write like a bot, or as profusely. CAA is also an asshole, which Aliza was not. I’ve had off-site exchanges with Alizia in which I found her to be committed to being a productive commenter, even asking me whether I felt she should stop commenting in the best interests of Ethics Alarms.

If Alizia is in fact CAA, she’s clearly snapped. And because CAA is an unethical asshole, I can’t take anything he/she/or it says as necessarily true.

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The Trump Administration Asks For Universities To Be Fair, Open and Responsible, and The Teachers Union Goes Nuts

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

What does this tell you?

Is there a second way to interpret this exchange?

I’m not going to comment much on this post, because the raw reality shouldn’t require it. First I was going to frame this as one of the game show posts, with the title, “Who’s Nuts?” But I did one of those just a few days ago. The unions are Ethics Villains to be sure, but even that doesn’t do them justice based on their letter. I was going to use the “Apocalypse Now” clip “The Horror!” to mock the way the two radical Axis unions reacted to the most reasonable DOE requests imaginable, but this is too frightening to mock. The unions’ letter is an Unethical Quote to be sure, but a 6 page unethical quote is a bit…unwieldy.

According to polls, a large proportion of Americans are willing to put these totalitarian far-left extremists in power because gasoline prices have spiked while the United States confronts a deadly international enemy that it should have crushed 40 years ago. The frightening part isn’t Congress temporarily flipping. The frightening part is that so many Americans are so short-sighted, easily manipulated, ignorant.

Here is the first letter, as Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon calls for colleges and universities to actually educate students, stop being far-left indoctrination factories, ensure intellectual and ideological diversity on campus and not violate the civil rights laws. Let me know if you see anything radical, extreme or alarming there unless one is a committed ideological warrior determined to prevail “by any means necessary”…

Now here is the response of the recently combined American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), both organizations victims of total ideological capture. (Just to follow the theme of recent days, both unions have called for boycotts against Israel.)

Professor Turley, whom I credit with first alerting me to this nauseating open correspondence, writes in part,

“…The alliance with AFT and Weingarten [Me: that’s her, ranting above] is crushingly predictable. Weingarten personifies what I have called the “education cartel,” where teacher unions receive massive contracts and pension agreements from Democratic allies and then turn around and send massive political contributions to those same allies. The losers in this symbiotic relationship are of course the students and their families. Weingarten is “credited” with turning the teachers’ union into an extension of the Democratic Party, often appearing at political rallies with her signature high-volume screeds…As public support and revenue for both public education and higher education plummet, these figures are doubling down. The last thing that they want to see is the restoration of neutrality or balance. That is why a policy calling for such reforms is so anathema to them. These organizations are now political organizations that use their dues to pursue radical agendas.”

All true, but the professor’s main concern is the radicalization of a union that purports to represent his profession. My main concern is the crystal clear dishonesty in the second letter and its extreme “it isn’t what it is” arguments. Calling out and preventing institutional discrimination against men, whites, Asians and conservatives isn’t “a partisan concept of national interest.” It’s called “enforcing the law.” The most laughable is the teachers’ union call to make higher education “affordable.” The schools can make tuition more affordable by cutting administrative staff, salaries and construction. Their solution is more taxpayer funding for useless and misleading degrees, but also more reliable woke activists.

Friday Open Forum, Plus An Addendum to the Zionism Post and a King’s Pass Exception

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I had to cut it out of the last post (which is on the long side), but I was going to remind everyone or inform those who never knew that General George S. Patton was a vocal anti-Semite as well as a racist. He loved fighting anyone, but he made it clear in private conversations and letters that he thought we should have been fighting against the Russians with the Nazis. The Holocaust didn’t trouble him much. This charming feature was left out of the acclaimed movie starring George C. Scott as the batty–but effective!—World War II general.

My father, who fought under Patton at the Battle of the Bulge, detested the man primarily for his slapping of two (not just one, as portrayed in the movie) soldiers suffering from battle fatigue, or as we call it now, post-traumatic stress. Eisenhower didn’t like Patton either, and was very close to relieving him of command permanently , but ultimately decided that a lesser punishment was prudent because Patton was such a talented field general. (The Germans couldn’t understand why merely slapping a soldier would ever lead the Americans to sideline such a successful commander. Of course they couldn’t.) Thus the handling of Patton represents the Ethics Incompleteness Theorem regarding “The King’s Pass,” the exception that proves the rule (because all rules have exceptions).

Yet I wonder how much security Jewish people got from the knowledge that one of the key warriors who defeated the perpetrators of the Holocaust essentially agreed with Hitler regarding them.

Over to you, Clarence…

Ethics Verdicts: 1) The American Left Is Now Substantially Anti-Semitic and 2) Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism. Part Two: For Jews, Zionism=Survival

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

[Part I is here.]

Let’s see: what happened in the World of Jew Hate in the past 24 hours? Admittedly, this will only cover stories that leftist mainstream media hasn’t successfully embargoed: it is fine for the Democratic Party to be anti-Semitic, see, it’s just a bad look if the positions and conduct are expressly anti-Semitic right before an election, except to Muslim voters, of course.

I see…

  • Jordan Bardella, a top figure in the French far right and Marine Le Pen’s top aide, authored antisemitic social media messages from 2013 to 2015. He had vehemently denied this.
  • Italy’s Democratic Party refused to take part in a parliamentary committee vote on a bill opposing antisemitism,…
  • Die Linke, Germany’s rising populist-left party, won 26% in elections to Berlin’s House of Representatives, its best performance ever. Meanwhile, a branch of Die Linke in Berlin recently welcomed Macklemore, the anti-Semitic rapper, and on election night a Die Linke MP was photographed with a representative of a pro-Palestinian group with terrorist connections.
  • Canada is experiencing a surge of Jew hate. The Jerusalem Post reports “a significant rise in antisemitism, threats, and violence against Jews and Jewish institutions…In 2025, 788 hate crimes targeting Jews were reported to police across Canada. Jews accounted for approximately 71 percent of all police reported hate crimes motivated by religion. .. During the most recent Rosh Hashanah, mezuzahs were torn from the doors of Jewish students’ rooms at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. Days later, an armed man arrived at the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville while worshippers were inside on Yom Kippur. A police officer protecting the synagogue was seriously wounded.

In the U.S.—remember, we’re just talking about today’s news—

  • The University of California petitioned a court to kick out the Justice Department’s lawsuit accusing UCLA of tolerating antisemitic harassment while seeking repayment of $2 billion in research grants. UC calls the case “political coercion” (how dare the government restrict a university’s right to allow the persecution of Jewish students on campus?) and argues that UCLA has made substantial changes since August of 2024, when a court ruled that “Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith” and ordered the university to guarantee equal access to campus. A battle between anti-Israel students and counter-protesters was allowed to proceed without significant action by campus police.
  • Close to me in Alexandria, a group of rabbis accused Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland of normalizing anti-Semitism. In a letter this week to the district’s [completely Democrat] leadership, they wrote in part, “Over the last three years, we have been on the front lines of the current crisis of skyrocketing school-based antisemitism. We meet regularly with students who are hurt and confused and parents who are angry that their children are experiencing harassment, isolation, and threats to their fundamental physical and emotional safety. We are alarmed that the lack of a meaningful response by MCPS has led to an increase in the normalization of antisemitic attitudes, language and behaviors in our schools.” Montgomery County is the most progressive and Democrat-dominated district in one of the most Democrat-dominated states in the nation.
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Ethics Quiz: Botched Executions

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

At Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, 49-year-old condemned inmate Christa Pike got two full doses of pentobarbital when one was supposed be sufficient to kill her. The second was administered into her bloodstream after the first didn’t work, following state protocols. But she still maintained a distinct heartbeat, and began snoring.

There were no rules in Tennessee for what should happen when a prisoner survives both lethal injections, because it’s not supposed to happen and had never happened before.

The microphones were shut off and viewing curtains were drawn. Attending medical staff then entered the execution chamber to evaluate vital signals, confirm the presence of a heartbeat, and determine whether there as acute respiratory distress. Defense attorneys recorded the information to file an emergency motion with a federal court citing evidence that their client survived and suffered unconstitutional pain, citing the 8th Amendment against “cruel and unusual” punishment. Pike was disconnected from the IV lines, her condition stabilized, and she was transferred by secure transport to an off-site civilian medical facility.

I must confess, because I have watched way too much TV, a Western I must have seen when I was about 10 had me believing that when a condemned prisoner survives an execution, such as a hanging, the prisoner is deemed to have completed his sentence and goes free. My father had confirmed this, saying that the real punishment in capital cases was the waiting and anticipation. The dying part was a breeze, or was supposed to be. (Last words of British acting legend, 19th-century actor Edmund Kean: “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.”)

Well, that legend is not true; that has never been the case in the U.S., and it has rarely been the practice anywhere. Wikipedia has a just-updated list of botched executions going back to 1540. It’s a long (and probably incomplete) list, but there are only two examples where the condemned was set free, and only three where the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, none since 1885.

That last lucky guy was John Henry George “Babbacombe” Lee (1864 –1945), an Englishman famous for surviving three attempts to hang him in 1885. He had been convicted of murder. Lee was eventually released and supported himself by touring and speaking about his strange life. There have been several books about Lee including “The Man They Could Not Hang” (Holgate and Waugh, 2005) and a silent film. He’s buried at Forest Home Cemetery, Milwaukee.

So that’s what happens when you survive an execution. You end up in Milwaukee….

But I digress. The issue at hand is what is the ethical, fair and responsible way to handle such situations.

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Stay Classy, College Football!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

As I will argue here until the metaphorical cows come home, football is a cultural embarrassment and a societal pathogen. In addition to that “giving players brain damage” thingy, both colleges and the pros allow their players to be felons and thugs if they are good enough. The King’s Pass reigns. Colleges now pay their football players, so they are truly fake students. The game (aka. business) advances the corruption of higher education. We once were told that a benefit of sports was that it conveyed the value of sportsmanship ( as in “ethics”) to rising generations. Riiiight, about that:

  • A star on the #1 team in the nation, Texas’s Colin Simmons was flagged for an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty after he simulated urinating after a record-setting sack of Tennessee’s quarterback.
  • Another player, Raleek Brown celebrated a touchdown by rubbing his genitals, sniffing his hand, and pretending to pass out. The Texas running back was not flagged for that disgusting celebration, after all, that was funny!

Steve Sarkisian, the Texas coach, said about the penalty,“We took [Simmons] out. We addressed it, and put him back in. I’m not gonna give the guy the death penalty over an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. We’ve got to fix it, though. That can’t continue as we move forward.”

Why does “that” exist at all, Coach? It’s your job to manage the culture on the team. I guarantee that a Major League Baseball player who mimed urinating on the field would be suspended immediately, and for a very long time, if not released. Why did one of your players think such public vulgarity was appropriate? Yeah, yeah, upbringing, growing up with a bad crowd, Hip-Hop, yada yada. College once was where young idiots were supposed to learn how responsible adults get through life. Notice that the coach was concerned about the unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, not the unsportsmanlike conduct.

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Ethics Verdicts: 1) The American Left Is Now Substantially Anti-Semitic and 2) Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism. Part One: The Democrats Embrace Jew Hate

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Funny, when Democrats ran in 2024 on the assertion that electing Donald Trump would turn the U.S. into Nazi Germany, I didn’t realize that the Left’s response to Trump’s election would be to embrace the most universally acknowledged evil of Hitler’s regime.

In case you haven’t noticed (and why haven’t you, if not?), the evidence of metastasizing anti-Semitism world-wide and in the U.S. as we approach the mid-terms it is alarming, or should be. Yesterday we learned that there was a nearly successful 9-11 style attack on Tel Aviv, foilded by the passengers. Anti-white racist director Spike Lee (everybody loves Spike Lee!) got in a confrontation at Yankee Stadium with a fan who told him “Fuck Palestine!” The acclaimed director of “Do the Right Thing” has revealed himself as a big booster of Hamas, along with a lot of prominent Hollywood progressives like Mark Ruffalo, Susan Saranden, Emma Stone and Tilda Swinton. In a sane America, such anti-Semites would fear that expressing vile views would kill their careers, but, NPR tells us, the nation is “divided.” You know: let Israel be wiped off the map vs. let Jews live.

Huh. Tough choice; let me think.

The international community is substantially anti-Semitic as the United Nations has been demonstrating for a long time, but that condition has worsened substantially since Europe allowed its nations to be overrun with Muslims. And, of course, progressives perpetually argue that the U.S. needs to be more like the rest of the world. The U.N. has consistently condemned Israel as it has fought for its existence in Gaza and Iran. Here is the list of nations whose delegates walked out on Netanyahu’s speech to the General Assembly

  • Egypt
  • Jordan
  • Lebanon
  • Syria
  • Iraq
  • Saudi Arabia
  • Palestine
  • Qatar
  • Kuwait
  • Oman
  • Yemen
  • Sudan
  • Tunisia
  • Algeria
  • Libya
  • Mauritania
  • Somalia
  • Comoros
  • Turkiye (Turkey)
  • Iran
  • Pakistan
  • Afghanistan
  • Bangladesh
  • Indonesia
  • Malaysia
  • Brunei Darussalam
  • Maldives
  • Myanmar
  • North Korea
  • Turkmenistan
  • Uzbekistan
  • South Africa
  • Senegal
  • Djibouti
  • Nigeria
  • Angola
  • Republic of the Congo and Democratic Republic of the Congo
  • Spain
  • Brazil
  • Peru
  • Bahamas
  • Antigua and Barbuda
  • Botswana
  • Ghana
  • Cabo Verde

Nice!

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Two Acts Of Kindness…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

1. To me. Yesterday I received a letter from a couple I hadn’t seen or spoken with in decades. It’s an important couple in my life: my first love from high school, and my best friend in high school who eventually married her. I was afraid to answer the letter, in fact; I was sure it would be about someone dying. And it was: my wife.

My two old friends had somehow just learned about Grace’s death in 2024, and wrote me a long, heartfelt letter expressing their sympathy and reminiscing about our shared past. They had met Grace on a couple of occasions. Now I have to write them a letter that will be five times as long, but it is the least I can do in gratitude. It’s lonely around here—thank God for Spuds. That letter was a ray of metaphorical sunshine is shaping up as a gray and drizzly week.

2. To my dog. Speaking of Spuds: we were at the dog park recently where, as usual, my exuberant pit bull mix ran joyfully amuck, greeting and charming all the dog owners and only then playing with their dogs. The Stick Game is one of Spuds’ favorites: he finds a stick, inducing other dogs to chase him and try to take it from him, he lets one get it, then he chases that dog and tries to get the stick back, usually after a spirited tug-o’-war. He was at the latter stage of the game when suddenly his opponent got frustrated and attacked him, biting him several times until his owner pulled him away.

Poor Spuds was clearly upset. Three of the owners that he had greeted earlier and who had witnessed the incident ran over to my dog before I reached him. All three kneeled down in front of him and started stoking and comforting him. I heard one, a young woman whose dog had been involved in Spuds’ stick routine, say, with her face inches from Spuds’ muzzle, “You did nothing wrong…that wasn’t your fault. That was a mean dog…are you okay?” Then they all checked my dogs’ wounds, which fortunately were superficial.

Spuds wagged his tail vigorously. gave each a kiss, and seemed to be back to his usual high spirits.