Month: August 2021

Ethics Quote Of The Month: Prof. Glenn Loury

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“You can’t have an under-representation without having an over-representation. Are the people who come out on top guilty of “privilege”? Did they “steal” their success? Do they owe their success to the denial of opportunity to someone else? Even if so here or there, is it universally true in every case? Is that a dictum that we have to adhere to? I would submit that this is the wrong way to think about social outcomes. You can see that it’s the wrong way from the places this sort of thinking leads you. “

—Glenn Loury, Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University, an African-American, in the inaugural essay of the new Journal of Free Black Thought.

You won’t see Loury interviewed on CNN , MSNBC, NPR or the networks. He undermines the narrative—a lot of them, in fact. In his essay, his primary target is Black Lives Matter, as part of his warning against the ascendancy of “bad ideas.” He writes,

“Racial essentialism is one of these bad ideas…If we can’t find some way of countering the underlying problematic ideological commitment to race as an essentialist category, we’re in trouble. Martin Luther King had the right idea with colorblindness, yet today it’s regarded as a microaggression to say one doesn’t see color. Of course, it’s impossible literally not to see color, but despite pressure from cultural elites, we needn’t give it the overarching significance we now do. In fact, if we’re going to make our experiment in democracy work, we mustn’t give it such significance.”

He goes on,

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End Of Week Ethics Bombs, 8/6/21

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Hiroshima

August 6, 1945 is one of the most important ethics days of all, and among the most controversial. The United States bomber Enola Gay—now on exhibit in a hangar near Dulles Airport, dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people were killed in seconds, and another 35,000 were injured. More than 60,000 would be dead by the end of the year from the effects of the fallout. Was the launching of the nuclear age by the United States ethically justified to save American lives (an invasion of the Japanese mainland had been estimated to risk a million U.S. casualties) and end the war? Was President Harry Truman guilty of a war crime, as non-combatants, including children, constituted most of the deaths? Did the horrible results of the new weapon prevent World War III, or make it more likely? These are still intensely debated questions by scholars, historians, theologians, military strategists, philosophers and peace activists.

1. Well, I’ve been spoiling for a fight, shopping around Northern Virginia and fining myself one of the few unmasked. So far, nobody’s said a word, but anyone who does is in for it. I’ve been vaccinated twice and probably had a mild, symptom-free infection before that. I have always been unusually resistant to viruses. Mask fog up my glasses and make me miserable. If you have chosen not to get your shots, swell, that’s your choice, but your exercise of personal liberty is not going to restrict mine without a fight. And don’t tell me I have to wear a mask so phobics feel “safe.” That’s not my problem either. I am not inclined to “social distance,” either. The mask fetish is going to strangle community, society and the joy of life unless we draw some hard lines. I’m drawing.

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President Biden Does His Andrew Jackson Impression, And It Is Not Becoming

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Andrew-Jackson

President Jackson is quoted as saying, after learning of his rebuke by the U.S. Supreme Court in Worcester v. Georgia, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” That was “King Andy,” though and through, whether he actually said it or not. Jackson’s contempt for the ruling, which supported Native American sovereignty, contributed to its violation by other courts and Georgia laid the groundwork for the unlawful removal of Cherokees from the state in what became know as “The Trial of Tears.” Jackson did some important things as President, and has a strong argument as a great one, but his willingness to violate the Constitution when it suited his convictions is hard to justify, even when his desired end seemed to be worth his illegal means. Jackson (a Democrat) was Donald Trump’s favorite President, but it is Joe Biden who is openly channeling him now. The difference is that few Democrats, mainstream media journalists and pundits are screaming that Joe is a threat to Democracy. Yet what he is doing really is such a threat.

This spring, a court struck down the nationwide eviction moratorium adopted by the Trump administration last September at the height of the pandemic lockdown, ruling that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had no statutory authority to extend it. The case was appealed, and five justices of the Supreme Court signaled that they agreed with the lower court as they simultaneously voted to allow the eviction freeze to stand because it was set to expire just a few weeks later, on July 31, anyway. Any fair reading of the opinions make it clear that the SCOTUS majority holds that the eviction freeze cannot continue beyond that date without an act of Congress.

Never mind! President Biden announced his support for extending the eviction moratorium, unconstitutional or not. It was later preserved by a divided Supreme Court despite the view of a majority that it was unconstitutional. Though he acknowledged that his administration’s legal experts overwhelmingly told him that any extension would violate the Constitution, he said it was worth extending the moratorium because it would take time for a court to intervene, giving his administration time to “get $45 billion dollars out to people who are in fact behind on the rent and don’t have the money”despite the lack of constitutional authority to do so. In other words, they would have time to break the law before they had to stop.

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Ethics Observations On Jeb Bush’s Olympics Tweet…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Jeb Tweet

1. Flagrant virtue-signaling is nauseating enough, but incompetent virtue-signaling is just sad.

2. This is why public figures, celebrities, politicians, journalists, academics and lawyers are irresponsible to send tweets. Twitter makes you stupid, and if you are already stupid, it lets everybody know.

3. Nobody should care about medal totals, other than the fact that the nation spends far too much money on preparing for the Olympics, and its a rough way to gauge how well the funds are being spent. The U.S. should care about the way its athletes comport themselves, and the character they demonstrate to the world.

4. Surely Jeb isn’t suggesting that national policy regarding immigration or indeed anything should be influenced by the results in the Olympics. Because that would really be stupid.

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Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 52 Comments

open_sesame

This is as good a place as any to announce a new commenting rule on Ethics Alarms that I should have thought of earlier.

On a post from June, a new commenter entered the fray making the increasingly popular Rationalization #64 claim that the kiddie versions of Critical Race Theory that are being used as propaganda in schools (the “1619 Project” course materials qualify) aren’t really CRT, which is “only taught in law schools.” (I’m not sure it is taught in law schools at all, since it has nothing to do with law.) When I replied that I didn’t appreciate that kind of disinformation on Ethics Alarms, he devolved into outright insults and the clichéd “Good day, sir!” exit that I’m still sick of, though it hasn’t surfaced in a while. I banned him of course (I was being generous to allow his first comment on, in retrospect: I’m looking for articulate progressives, but this jerk was a poor candidate), and I warned him about defying the ban, as he had the whiff about him of someone who would. Sure enough, he tried to return with successively more insulting retorts, which were promptly deleted.

This inspired me to launch the new rule: If a commenter is banned, and comes back and comments anyway, all of that commenter’s previous comments and posts will be sent to Spam Hell.

This isn’t an ex post facto edict, so the mercifully few past commenters who did this won’t be penalized (and I would not want to lose the contributions from the best of them). It also won’t apply to the self-banned going forward.

So that’s that.

Now, please contribute your usual provocative and ethical observations in this week’s Open Forum.

Say Howdy To The Latest Addition To The Rationalizations List: #1D, Higgins’ Misconception”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Higgins

The title of Rationalization 1D comes from literature, specifically George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 drama, “Pygmalian,” better known today for its musical adaptation,”My Fair Lady.” The moment when Shaw’s obnoxious and misanthropic antihero Henry Higgins defines his rationalization occurs in Act 5; Alan J. Lerner lifted it almost verbatim for his book of the musical. Arrogant speech expert Higgins, having been rebuked by Eliza, the flower girl whom he taught to speak like an upper-class British woman to win a bet, for his cruel and uncivil conduct toward her says in his defense,

HIGGINS. … If you come back I shall treat you just as I have always treated you. I can’t change my nature; and I don’t intend to change my manners. My manners are exactly the same as Colonel Pickering’s.

LIZA. That’s not true. He treats a flower girl as if she was a duchess.

HIGGINS. And I treat a duchess as if she was a flower girl.

LIZA. I see.

HIGGINS. Just so….The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

I immediately thought of this exchange when Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, in his rambling denial of multiple sexual harassment and sexual assault allegations, proclaimed his innocence (His victims don’t understand him!) by arguing that as a red-blooded Italian he’s just wired to be physically demonstrative, and treats everyone the same way.

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Evening Ethics Crash, 8/5/2021: Ronnie, Walt, Ashli, Craig And, Well, Read For Yourself

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

1. An epic example of Presidential courage, ethics and leadership, and he was hated for it because enforcing law is so mean... On August 5, 1981, President Ronald Reagan began firing 11,359 air-traffic controllers engaged in an illegal and unethical strike against the public, something public employees must never do. Reagan ordered them to return to work, and the union, PATCO, thought he was bluffing. Big mistake. He wasn’t.

The president of the Professional Air-Traffic Controllers Association was found in contempt by a federal judge and ordered to pay $1,000 a day in fines until his members complied, and President Reagan carried out his threat. The 11,359 air-traffic controllers who had not returned to work were not only fired, they received a a lifetime ban by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Another President, Calvin Coolidge, when he was Governor of Massachusetts, laid down the principle that holding the public hostage to the demands of employees responsible for their health, safety and welfare was illegal and wrong. President Roosevelt stated that public unions were a menace, and so they have shown themselves to be. Oddly, while liberals were furious with Reagan, no one accused him of being a dictator or an “autocrat.” He believed in following the law.

2. The propaganda worms its way into your brain….I watched the old Disney movie “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” for the first time in many decades, and it was better than I remembered. The performances are excellent, with Kirk Douglas obviously having the time of his life; the art direction is spectacular; it has lots of classic Walt Disney touches, like the cute sea lion, and the special effects, especially the robotic giant squid (which I much prefer to recent CGI equivalents) is amazing for 65 years ago. And it was fun to be reminded of the inspirations for two Indiana Jones movie scenes. (Two more are in James Mason’s next Jules Verne epic, “Journey to the Center of the Earth.”

Then came the scene where the Nautilus is attacked by Papua New Guinea natives, who board the sub. They are repelled when Captain Nemo electrifies the hull, and we see all of the natives jumping around comically and jumping into the seas as little electric bolts shoot out from the deck. The white guys are laughing, of course. There is nothing wrong with the scene, which could have played out just that way in reality, but it made me uncomfortable—you know, stereotyped natives, smug white people with superior technology. Political correctness even ruins fantasy.

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Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month, Year, Decade, Century, And Eon: Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.)

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I know, I know, this is res ipsa loquitur. Anyone with a functioning brain, unlike Rep. Bush, will immediately see the hilarious flaw in her “reasoning,” if one can call it that. There may be high-functioning mollusks that could see it. But I’ve had a crummy day, and deserve some fun.

Yes, this isn’t a parody or a deep fake. (House Whip James Clyburn might think it is, since he swears no Democrat has ever advocated defundung the police. Well, him, but no others…) We really have someone in Congress who passionately, angrily insists that taxpayers should pay for her private security force so she can make sure the U.S. Congress defunds the police. There isn’t enough space in this post to explain how many alarms one had to lack in order to be recoded saying something like this. Not just ethics alarms, but hyp[ocrisy alarms, common sense alarms, alarms, “Wow, I’m embarrarsing party, my district, my family, my friends, and all of my teachers!” alarms, and of course the crucial “Gee, I’m sounding like an idiot!” She is the best illustration of the Dunning-Kruger Effect I have ever seen.

We knew, if we knew anything about Bush at all, that she was an idiot. After all, she ran as a Black Lives Matter candidate and still believes that Mike Brown was shot while holding up his arms and saying “Hands Up! Don’t shoot!” She’s obviously unqualified to be a lawmaker, but the video shows she’s also too lacking in basic cognitive function to be 7-11 clerk, a crossing guard, an au pere, a gardener, a house-painter, a dog-walker. or a lemonade stand proprietor. She mistakes passion and certitude for wisdom. She also is likely to mistake an anteater for a spoon.

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Remember Cooper vs. Cooper, The Racist Dog Owner Against The Black Birdwatcher In Central Park? Well, Our Crack Journalists Finally Got All The Facts Nailed Down 15 Months Later…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Amy Cooper

…but not before Amy Cooper had to flee the country and go into hiding.

To refresh your memory about this Ethics Train Wreck that has been silently rolling all this time, review the posts about on Ethics Alarms here (describing the episode, or at least as we told about it), here, about a month later, commenting on New York City District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.’s unethical decision to prosecute Amy Cooper (which he partially justified based on the the intervening George Floyd Freakout), and finally here, from March, when I discussed Amy having to agree to endure state-mandate brainwashing in order to have Vance’s persecution dropped. The short version—but read the posts—is that White Amy Cooper walking her dog off-leash in Central Park was confronted by Black Christian Cooper, a birdwatching enthusiast, who demanded that she leash her dog and filmed her reactions as she demanded that he stop, then called 911. His video showed her telling authorities with increasing agitation that “An African-American man” was threatening her. Black Cooper’s sister then posted the video on line,White Amy became the personification of a racist “Karen,” and the story nicely set the stage for the George Floyd mess, which, through contrived logic and unscrupulous hype, it was linked to.

I must confess that I am proud of Ethics Alarms for its coverage of this case. Even before I had the additional facts (because nobody did), I correctly discerned that both Amy and Christian Cooper, the black bird-watcher whom she called the cops on,

—behaved like jerks,

—that the fury Christian brought down on Amy’s head was disproportionate to her conduct,

—that Don Lemon and others making what was a minor local tiff into a national controversy was unconscionable, and

—that Amy did not deserve to lose her job, career, dog and reputation, plus be prosecuted and get a lifetime ban from using Central Park,

….because, in essence, she was white and behaved like an asshole. (Some readers seemed to think that the fact that Amy eventually got her dog back was sufficient mitigation.) I wrote in the first post, “Proportion is an ethical value. It appears to be completely absent from this fiasco, on all sides.” Truer words I have seldom published, and that was before the recent revelations.

Bari Weiss, the New York Times rebel and exile I wrote about here, has a podcast, and in her most recent release reveals what some non-mainstream media reporters discovered when they dug deeper than their mainstream counterparts bothered to do. Amy Cooper, now living abroad to escape the constant harassment and abuse she endured in the wake of the incident, also is interviewed.

We learn that…

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It’s Looking Like “Advocacy Journalism” Thursday, Beginning With A Trivial But Troubling Example…

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Carter Stewart

The more I examine news reports and even features, the clearer it becomes that what we now generously call “journalists” feel entitled to manipulate, distort and omit facts in order to support their desired narrative while pushing public opinion in the direction they prefer as propagandists. I was taking a break from ethics by reading the sports pages (What was I thinking?), perusing a Times piece about the New York Mets failing to sign their #1 draft pick, and the consequences to both the young player (Kumar Rocker) and the team. The article focused on the similar experience of Carter Stewart, now a pitcher for the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks in Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball league. (And you thought “Cleveland Guardians” was a bad baseball team name!) Carter is the focus of the story, as we learn from Times writer Alex Coffey that he is bitter and angry about the consequences of his failing to sign with the Braves when he was their first pick in 2018. Stewart says that when the 2019 draft arrived after he had amassed impressive statistics pitching in college, he decided to opt out of the system that had, in his view, betrayed him. He signed a six-year contract with Japan’s Hawks for $7 million. “I had no real allegiance to Major League Baseball,” he told the Times. “They hadn’t done anything for me so far, so why did I have to force myself to stay here?”

Wait, what about the United States, Carter? Has the nation of your birth “done anything for you”? Is it all about money? What’s going on here?

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