It may be just me, but I’m getting sick of the same ethics topics coming up over and over again of late.
You can help out (as many of you do) by sending me candidates for analysis and discussion (though no one can replace retired story scout Fred, whose assistance I miss dearly), but in the meantime I invite you to launch some here.
And good night, Mrs. Q, wherever you are…
Ethics Alarms 
https://www.newsweek.com/lily-cade-transphobic-rant-full-transcript-1645922
Was it ethical to publish an article where the only named contributor was known to have such views, in the name of “balance”?
Was it ethical to interview someone who disagreed with such views, and who informed the BBC about this person’s confession to rape and past threats of violence, then not to use any of that interview as it didn’t fit the lede?
Is there any other interpretation that is plausible other than, as one Trans BBC employee has said
“There is deeply engrained institutional transphobia at the heart of the BBC, exacerbated by promotion of anti-LGBT+ views in the name of “balance”.
Good catch, ZB…thanks, I missed this.
De Nada. There’s too much to catch it all.
This would have been a nothingburger, just another ranting screed, had the Beeb not been involved.
Anyone who has had to dive into the world of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism would have seen it all before.
I’ve had to, professionally. Tasked with ensuring legal reform committees get all the opinions out there, not just ones I approve of. “Balance” I think it’s called. I don’t editorialise, just let the articles speak for themselves.
There is nothing balanced in that screed, and the author is obviously completely mentally unbalanced. It took me a while to even find the calls to violence, as most of it is ranting and raving about social media, smart phones, pedophilia, parents, NewSpeak and a bunch of other things I don’t completely understand. The author sounds unhinged. Of course, half of what is published these days on this topic is written by crazy people arguing the opposite viewpoint, so perhaps it might actually technically be “balanced”.
If crazy people such as this example are the only people the media is bringing in to make counter arguments to transgender activism, then that is not balanced or ethical. You cannot solve any problem by letting crazy people make the arguments.
While I don’t think it is ethical to pretend crazy people represent the entirety of one side of a discussion, it might be ethical to show the viewpoints of crazy people so readers can understand the problems that the crazy people create.
The BBC has to go to such people though.
There has been almost complete radio silence on this by Momsnet, Get the L Out, and the LGB Alliance, all of whom have been deeply embarassed by this.
Of the handful of comments, some have said “She’s right though”.
More have praised her courage in saying out loud what they all were thinking, but were too afraid to say for fear of being labelled “transphobic”.
A very few are wondering what the fuss is all about, as these views have been circulating internally in these groups for many years now, espoused by many academics and luminaries who are anti Trans, just in less raw terms.
Apart from Emeritus Professor of Ethics Janice Raymond’s call for Trans people to be “morally mandated out of existence”, or Bev Jo Von Dohre on Trans women saying:
“They expect we’ll be shocked to see statistics about them being killed, and don’t realize, some of us wish they would ALL be dead. ”
There are many examples of lesser lights calling for such extermination.
The only thing that is different is that this has now been given the imprimatur of the BBC.
—
” The article incorporated a social media poll held by the anti-transgender campaign group Get the L Out. The survey, conducted in 2019 and titled “Lesbians at Ground Zero: How transgenderism is conquering the lesbian body,” was self-published on the group’s website. The survey introduction described the “lesbian body as a battleground” at risk of destruction, citing a quote from Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire that said that “all transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artefact, appropriating this body for themselves.”
The survey received criticism for its self-selection bias and small sample size; NBC’s Jo Yurcaba found that it violated the BBC’s editorial guidelines against using such surveys “in a way which leads our audience to believe they are more robust than they are”. The BBC said that the survey usage was appropriate due to a lack of data on whether lesbians are being pressured into sex by some trans women.
—
You know, the way that due to the lack of data on Jews drinking the blood of Christian children, they have to go to the NSDAP for testimony.
The BBC so far has insisted that the article passed its rigorous editorial policy.
IMO, French men generally, and Macron specifically, will kiss anyone that gets within smooching distance.
VP Harris? Not so much, as Macron executes a NO CHEEK SNEAK.
Don Lemon is one amazing individual. Man, oh man! I wish I got paid handsomely to say such idiotic things:
jvb
Oh my!!!
Is what the White House and the DOJ did ethical?
In a word, no. The Biden Administration has weaponized the DOJ and FBI.
jvb
johnburger2013 wrote, “In a word, no. The Biden Administration has weaponized the DOJ and FBI.”
On a different front, they also weaponized OSHA.
https://www.thecut.com/2021/10/mother-daughter-debate-abortion-rights.html
What do think about this piece in The Cut? It seems like it was published to shame the mother and push abortion rights, but makes a lot of the abortion debate seem sophomoric.
Okay, I admit I found this funny:
Michigan’s Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) claims that two Bloody Marys on an empty stomach led to her being drunkenly wheeled out of Spartan Stadium on Oct. 30, while the University of Michigan (UM) played Michigan State University (MSU) in a rivalry college football matchup.
…
She then admitted to drunkenly stumbling out of the stadium, before being relegated to a wheelchair and schlepped to her car where a designated driver awaited.
“I had a few folks help me up the stairs and someone grabbed a wheelchair so as to prevent me from stumbling in the parking lot,” she said.
Funny, but…
This is signature significance. Public officials, particularly law enforcement officials, do not deserve even one “oopsie” when it comes to public intoxication to the point of incapacitation. If you feel you must imbibe copious quantities, do it at home.
Her extreme enforcement of COVID restrictions make this a particularly galling faux pas — tough rules for thee but not for me. Try this while being a high-profile executive at most Fortune 500 companies and find out what happens.
She has shamed herself and the state of Michigan, and given her department a black eye by flaunting the PI laws. She should resign. She won’t of course. Her apology was typically lame.
Media coverage of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial has been an unending cavalcade of ignorance, bigotry, spin, and outright lies, but a recent episode struck me as particularly funny.
The prosecution sought to introduce into evidence a video and images that were digitally “zoomed in” to a great degree. The defense argued, admittedly clumsily and with some inane digressions into “logarithms”, essentially that zooming an image in digitally necessarily inserts new pixels, which are generated by some algorithm unknown to the court, and which could introduce artifacts, and called for an expert witness to testify about how it all worked before zoomed-in video could be introduced. This of course, correct, as anybody with an image processing or any digital signal processing background can tell you. We call the problem of figuring out how to color those extra pixels “interpolation”, and there are many different ways to do it – linear, cubic fit, Fourier transform methods, there are even machine-learning based AI methods. They’re not going to paste Barack Obama’s face on someone else’s body or other such PhotoShop trickery, but if you’re trying to blow up a tiny blob of pixels into a giant, fuzzy blob so you can argue whether it’s a hand with a gun or just a hand, you need to know the exact shape and color of that blob is going to be highly dependent on the algorithm you choose.
So what’s so funny about all this? All the journalists, even supposed “tech” journalists, who excoriated the defense and the judge for being so ignorant of how Apple’s “Pinch and Zoom” feature worked – as if any of them had any idea of the interpolation algorithm being used or the artifacts that could result. This is basically like saying “What’s all this nonsense about oscillating electric fields and magnetic flux in a toaster? You put bread in it and push down the lever, that’s all it is!”
Not a weenie.
https://nypost.com/2021/11/10/john-cleese-pulls-out-of-woke-cambridge-university-event/
Minister of Sharp Rebukes.
“ The New York Times has just published what appears to be leaked, privileged communications between James O’Keefe and his lawyer after his phones were seized in the raid on his home by the feds.”
https://therightscoop.com/scandal-new-york-times-publishes-okeefes-privileged-communications-after-his-phones-were-taken-by-feds-harmeet-dhillon-says-its-illegal/
It appears that the FBI raided O’Keefe, then leaked all the seized documents to the NYT, who is currently engaged in a lawsuit with O’Keefe. The NYT promptly published these documents, some of which were covered by attorney-client privilege. How serious of an ethical violation is this?
The Michael Brown Sr. seeks “justice”.
https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/ferguson-rises/
Ferguson Rises
Premiered November 8, 2021
by Mobolaji Olambiwonnu and David Oyelowo
Michael Brown Sr. seeks justice after a white police officer kills his son in Ferguson.
At least the summary did say “murdered” but it’s probably in the documentary.
Screw up and move up, eh?
https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/11/biden-admin-doubles-down-on-disaster-reportedly-looking-for-wh-spot-for-mcauliffe-after-he-lost-state-biden-won-by-10-points/
jvb
Looks like we were worrying about the wrong person on that space flight with William Shatner. I just saw a story that one of the other folks on that flight was just killed in a plane crash in New Jersey, age 49.
Dangerous, this flying into space…..