Sorry, this is later that I intended…
I’ve been working on accounting ethics, which always slows down my metabolism to Galapagos tortoise levels…
1.Worst lie of the year (so far)…In Winter Park, Florida, Jorge Torres was found dead , zipped into a suitcase. Suspect Sarah Boone insisted that it was all a tragic mistake. They were playing hide and seek, she said, and he just hid too well. A cellphone video, however, caught his cries for help from inside the suitcase, as she said, “That’s what I feel like when you cheat on me!” Boone, however, told police that the wacky couple thought it would be funny if he got inside the suitcase. They were drinking at the time and who hasn’t zipped up a loved one in a suitcase when spirits run high? Unfortunately, Sarah passed out on her bed, and when she woke up hours later, poor Jorge was dead.
That’s her story, and she’s sticking with it.
2. Remember “Baby Peggy”? Probably not, but she was probably the last living link to the silent movie era, and she died this week at 101. She was also one of the earliest examples of the child abuse that became routine in Hollywood. Baby Peggy, real name Peggy-Jean Montgomery, had made about 150 movies by the time she was five-years-old, and was a multi-millionaire at four. As has been the norm with child stars from Peggy through Jackie Coogan to Gary Coleman, Peggy’s parents stole her money and spent it all. They also let her risk life and limb in pursuit of her “art” that she was too young to understand. During her silent-film career, “Baby Peggy” was thrown from a speeding pickup truck, narrowly escaped a horse trampling and survived near-drownings and incineration.
Having spent all her money, Peggy’s father insisted on a raise for his little cash cow when she was seven, and got her fired instead. She was reduced to working as a teenage extra for three dollars a day, and then, as Diana Serra Cary, she became a respected author of books on the film history.
Here she is at her prime, in 1923:
3. Hillary Clinton resorts to the Golden Rationalization. Of course she does! Reacting to the news that her loyal supporter and patron Harvey Weinstein was found guilty of sexual assault and rape, obviously the tip of his sexual predator iceberg—and there is no question, none, that Clinton knew exactly what kind of man she was a allied with— Clinton’s defense was Rationalization #1, “Everybody does it.”
Clinton was attending the Berlin International Film Festival for the screening of her new documentary, “Hillary,”—boy, I can’t wait to see that!— when a reporter asked her about her Weinstein connection. “He contributed to every Democrat’s campaign. He contributed to Barack Obama’s campaign, and John Kerry’s campaign, and Al Gore’s campaign, and everybody’s campaign,” she said.
So they are all shameless scum, then?
4. Is there an ethical justification for this? I can’t see any.
Yesterday, 41 Democratic Senators voted to block the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act by filibustering the legislation to stop it from receiving a final vote. The bill would have required doctors to provide standard medical care to newborn infants who survive abortion procedures. Infants who leave the womb alive are called human babies, though CNN yesterday, trying to spin the unspinnable, called them “living fetuses.”
The three U.S. Senators who are running for President, Sanders, Klobuchar and Warren voted against another version of the legislation last year. The bill defeated yesterday entirely by Democratic fealty to extreme abortion activists mandates that if a baby is born alive following a botched abortion, the doctor must protect that baby and give the same medical care that any other baby would receive. That’s it. That’s what the Democratic Party opposes.
There is no logical reason to oppose the legislation, unless one subscribes to Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s chilling description of how a doctor—like him–handles such a situation…
“The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
There have been no comprehensible explanations by the Democrats regarding why they think breathing infants no longer in the womb should be allowed to die. At a Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing earlier this month, Senator Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) said that the measure was unnecessary under federal law and called it part of an effort to “take control of women’s bodies.”
How is trying to save the life of a baby no longer connected to a woman’s body taking control of the woman’s body?
Hirono, who repeatedly disgraces herself, continued, “No one here is in favor of infanticide; no one here is in favor of killing or harming infants. Infanticide is a crime, and it always has been.”
Citing a 2002 law that says all infants are treated as legal persons with legal protections, the Senator continued, “So if infanticide is already illegal in this country, then why are we here? Why are my Senate Republican colleagues pushing so hard for this bill? And the answer is simple: This bill is the latest in a decades long effort by Republicans aiming to take control of women’s bodies and prevent us from exercising our constitutional right to make personal decisions which include abortion in this country….I heard that the state has an interest in the unborn child. I thought the state also has an interest in women having control over our own bodies.”
How is trying to save the life of a baby no longer connected to a woman’s body taking control of the woman’s body?
Senator Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) rebutted Hirono’s disingenuous claims about the redundancy of the proposed legislation, saying,
“Infanticide is indeed illegal in the U.S., and yet in half of the states, there is no criminalization of walking away from the baby and allowing it to die by exposure.There’s an active-passive distinction and a state-federal distinction which are both pretty fundamental.”
Indeed , only 26 states have laws requiring doctors to exercise professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life of an infant born-alive after an abortion attempt.
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Sources: The Blaze, National Review
Ethics Alarms 
4. Senator Mazie Hirono (D-Mars).
She’d have an excuse if she were from Mars.
Might as well be.
2. I first learned of Baby Peggy while watching a Child Stars panel on basic cable about 20 years ago. Hollywood hasn’t changed much. It’s learned to protect the money a little bit better, but it’s never learned to protect the children.
4. The only distinction here is that the baby was born during an abortion. When it comes to abortion, all reason or conscience flies out the window with its advocates. HIrono can’t see an actual living, breathing child because she’s wearing abortion-colored glasses which tell her that abortion must be protected as is at all costs.
Because abortion advocates don’t care about the children either.
I would like to think the state could charge an abortionist who let a living child die with either child neglect, or at a minimum, failure to report child neglect.
One would also imagine the states that refuse to pass survivor laws would also not be very aggressive in using existing laws to obtain the same goal.
Pete Singer (Chair of Biotethics at Princeton) has given that rationalization. Ezekiel Emmanuel (Head of the Department of Medical Ethics at the U. of Penn.) has seconded it. Singer claims that infants aren’t really people yet because they aren’t aware. They don’t really count as human beings. He has suggested infants can be ‘aborted’ until 2 years of age or so. Twenty years ago, he took the extreme position that abortion should be legal until birth. Ezekiel Emmanuel applies good atheist ethics to the situation and takes the approach that there is no inherent value in human life. The only reason we think so is because of outdated evil white European Judeo-Christian morality. We haven’t made much of an investment in young children, so to let them die is not much of a loss. If they get sick, let them die. It is just easier to make a new one. You will find this analysis in the Democrat’s ‘Complete Live’s System’ that is the basis of their universal health care ideal.
In the last year or two, I have noticed that this view has become common among Democrats I know. Even people that were previously pro-life Democrats now defend infanticide. Heretical thinking is no longer allowed in the Democratic Party.
Click to access huntoon.pdf
https://www.equip.org/article/peter-singers-bold-defense-of-infanticide/
This follows the same path as the belief, once viewed as hilarious, that oral sex wasn’t sex. That Orwellian version of reality became necessary when Bill Clinton said he didn’t have sex with Monica.
Since when did Democrats care about civil rights or constitutional rights?
I has always bugged me when people say this is a woman controlling her body. A child is not a part of the mother. The child is a separate person. I liken it more to the Roman concept of patria potestas, a matria potestas if you will. If that is what you believe, just say so. The insistence that children are just part of the mother annoys me, especially in cases like this when the children have already been born. The concept of a matria potestas is more consistent with such instances.
3) Is that an “Everybody does it”?
What is the conduct being rationalized? Weinstein’s donation or Hilary’s acceptance of it?
If it’s Weinstein’s donation, how is a donation unethical because the person donating is a monster? I could see a donation being unethical if the objective of the donation is unethical – be it to support some nefarious policy or to curry favor of a politician. So, if we’re saying that donating to Hillary is unethical (and one could say that it is), then her deflecting to other recipients of donations would be more akin to “They’re Just as Bad” (#2), right?
It’s a harder argument (if not impossible) to make that the donation is unethical because Weinstein himself is a monster, but it is a lead in to the other question:
Is the conduct in question Hillary’s acceptance of the donation? This is the better argument, and I would think that *IF* her acceptance of the donation is unethical, then yes this is an “Everybody does it”. While I would probably agree that it is unethical to accept a donation from Weinstein, I’m not fully sold on the rule.
What’s the calculus on to accepting a donation from an unethical person? There’s a continuum here, in fact maybe the confluence of a couple of continua.
At one end of one continuum is big name, influential unethical people…at the other end is no count unknown unethical people. It would be nearly impossible to expect a recipient to police their donation rolls of ALL unethical people even if that means researching Melvin Schlubnuckles of Drubbinsville, Wyoming, whose donation should be refused because he’s a serial rapist. But Weinstein?
At one end of another continuum is high level super unethical conduct…at the other end is petty behavior of an unethical nature. It would be nearly impossible to expect a recipient to police their donation rolls of people engaging in ALL unethical conduct even if that means researching Melvin (a different Melvin) and his intentional stop sign running and refusing his donation. But Weinstein?
At one end of yet another continuum (a political activity continuum) is donating large amounts of money…at the other end is simply endorsing a particular political candidate. Here we have more clarity, already, we’ve already determined that a candidate is NOT obligated to denounce every last shmoe (even racist shmoes) who come out of the wood work to support a candidate. Even endorsements of high level despicable people, like David Duke, don’t obligate a candidate to disavow that support for that candidate to be ethical. Getting to the other end of this continuum are the material supports, in this case, donations.
I can agree that this changes the calculus…a bit. But even this, it must be conditioned on the other two continua described…while a candidate probably *should* disavow donations, I don’t know if there’s an ethical obligation that a candidate must disavow donations from bad people. And if there is indeed some “level” on the other two continua that do obligate such a refusal of money…what’s the level?
Excellent observations, Michael.
jvb
Thanks!