Month: October 2022

Morning Ethics Wake-Up, 10/21/2022: Krugman, Logan, Justice Barrett, Garbage And Poop

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

October 21 reminds me that I’m only up to Woodrow Wilson in the Ethics Alarms examination of qualified competitors for Joe Biden in the “Worst U.S. President Ever” Competition. Biden, as we can see every day, looks worse and worse, but this date in 1921 stands as a reminder that a President whom conventional historical wisdom usually relegates to the bottom of the barrel was more than the corrupt, sex-obsessed boob he has been portrayed as by predominantly Democrat academics. On October 21, Harding gave a brave speech in Alabama condemning lynchings, which at that time were occurring in the South at a rate of about two black men lynched a week. Harding, in contrast to his Jim Crow-supporting predecessor, Wilson, advocated full rights for African Americans as well as suffrage for women. He supported the Dyer Anti-lynching Bill in 1920, which passed in the House but died in the Senate, thanks to the determined resistance of Southern Democrats.

1. Garbage to the left of me, garbage to the right…today’s refrain on Fox News is that the record-setting early voting in Georgia “proves” that  Biden and Stacey Abrams calling the new Georgia election law  “Jim Crow 2.0” was race-baiting and lies. The Democrats’ despicable rhetoric was indeed race-baiting and dishonest, but the voting turn-out proves nothing of the sort. How could it? Less than 50% of the public votes; less than 50% would probably vote if all they had to do was to do so psychically. For all anyone knows, all the extra early voters haven’t been affected by the new rules at all, and would have voted if the law had never passed. Next, Abrams, who really is a horrible character, tried to answer the conservative media’s mockery by “clarifying” that she never meant that the new law would stop anyone from voting who was willing to put in the effort, just that voting should require no effort at all. Oh. But Jim Crow actually made it impossible for blacks to vote no matter what they did. I feel like I’m watching a debate between an idiot and a con-artist… Continue reading →

Most Unethical Non-Criminal Cabinet Member In History?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Well, I don’t know. Quite a few Cabinet members have been convicted of crimes in office, and the Biden Cabinet has other bad apples, notably Attorney General Merrick Garland. Still, it’s hard to imagine any federal department head more incompetent or guilty of dereliction of duty than Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Or more of a weasel. To be fair, he is the first Cuban-born Homeland Security Secretary, which makes him “historic” and yet another diversity feather in the current Democratic regime’s cap. And after all, that’s what’s really important, right?

I wish I were kidding.

Mayorkas, you no doubt recall, says that our Southern border is “secure,” apparently using the archaic definition of “secure” that meant “as porous as cheesecloth” in Chaucerian English. He also attempted to install an Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board, until even the Democratic Party’s captive news media objected, which always signals that the Left’s totalitarian aspirations are getting ahead of themselves. But he really secured his place in the U.S. Cabinet Members Chamber of Horrors, it has now been revealed, by deliberately condemning border agents of whipping illegal immigrants along the Texas-Mexico border when he knew the allegations were false.

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Funniest Ethics Quote Ever: The Marshall Project

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

—The Marshall Project, in its analysis of President Biden’s much ballyhooed mass pardon for people convicted of federal marijuana possession, heralded in the news media as the largest act of clemency in a generation.

Weeell, that wasn’t exactly true, was it? As the Marshall Project analysis explains, while the act may have symbolic force in prompting some states to extend clemency to pot violators, and while at the federal level there aboutt 6,500 people with prior marijuana possession convictions on their records may benefit from the pardon by restoring civic rights like voting, or serving on juries,  but only if the marijuana charge was the only felony on their record.

In short, the grand gesture, a sop to the Democratic Party’s drug-loving base, was pure deceit, misleading the public to believe it was something it was not to a ridiculous degree. The way the mainstream media played it, the President was letting harmless, non-violent offenders out of prison and addressing “over-incarceration.” In realty, the “mass pardon” released nobody. Continue reading →

Hypocrisy Check: If You Think Suffering Lingering Effects From A Stroke Disqualifies John Fetterman For The U.S. Senate, How Can You Support Herschel Walker?

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Those who fervently believe that it is important to the future well-being of the nation to get the U.S. Senate out of clutches of the Democrats understandably regard the U.S. Senate race in Georgia, where ex-football hero Herschel Walker is attempting to knock Sen. Ralph Warnock out of office using celebrity, Donald Trump’s endorsement, an “R” next to his name and little else, as a crucial battleground. However, one can’t espouse ethical principles and discard them when they become inconvenient. (Well, one can, but it is dishonest and wrong.) The same people who rightly insist that John Fetterman’s lingering disabilities resulting from a May stroke make it irresponsible for him to continue running for Senator in Pennsylvania are choosing to ignore Herschel Walker’s claims that he has been “cured” of dissociative identity disorder (DID), aka. multiple personality disorder, that favorite mental aberration of Hollywood horror movies. Continue reading →

What Is The Fair And Just Punishment for Charles Southall III?

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

After all, his crimes were non-violent. He’s African-American, and systemic racism has caused the “over-incarceration” of black men. He’s a man of God, and the Bible tells us to forgive. It says that there should be redemption even after heinous wrongdoing. Should Charles Southall III even spend time in prison at all?

For more than three decades, he has led the First Emanuel Baptist church in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. But the minister also embezzled donations from congregants that were supposed to fund charity projects and building improvements. He stole grant and loan funds from the Edgar P Harney Spirit of Excellence Academy that he had created, and deposited them in a bank account controlled by him and an accomplice. He converted rental and sale payments on properties owned by his church. All together, the minister took about $900,000, and used the money to pay off his personal expenses and purchases.

He pleaded guilty and has pledged to pay back what he can. The guess is that Southall will spend less than a decade in prison, probably much less. Are you satisfied with that result?

I’m not.

The verdict here on Ethics Alarms is that even a decade isn’t enough. This man has done far more harm than the typical thief, even more than the typical thief of nearly a million dollars. He took money that was supposed to help the needy. He misused funds families of ordinary means gave to the church in the spirit of charity and generosity. He abused their trust, and quite possibly damaged the faith of many of them. Southall betrayed his profession, and it is a profession that is supposed to bolster virtue and values in society, not make a mockery of them.

What Southall did is worse, in my view, than armed robbery. It deserves the same kind of harsh sentence Bernie Madoff received for stealing the assets of foundations, investors and retirees. Madoff took billions, and was sentenced to 150 years, because that was the maximum the law allowed. Madoff, however, didn’t steal his money in the name of God, charity, and community service.

150 years locked up for Southall seems about right to me.

Sunset Ethics Reflections, 10/19/2022: How Much Of This Stuff Matters, Anyway?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I’m increasingly feeling like it is impossible to distinguish the important and substantive ethics developments from those that are just annoying or depressing. For example, this:

That’s the new  Anna May Wong quarter, honoring the Chinese-American actress who joined the Hollywood community during the silent film era. Yes, it’s “historic”: she is the first Asian American to appear on US currency. This is the fifth new coin in the American Women Quarters Program. The others, all appearing in 2022, feature poet and activist Maya Angelou (of course); the first American woman in space, Sally Ride; Cherokee Nation leader Wilma Mankiller; and suffragist Nina Otero-Warren.

I don’t really care, but Wong is a trivia answer. She only is getting this honor because of her race. Quick: name a famous Anna May Wong role or film. Hint: There aren’t any. Handing out honors like having one’s image on a quarter based on race alone is racial discrimination. You want important American women on some quarters? Fine: try Eleanor Roosevelt. Abigail Adams. Harriet Beecher Stow. Lillian Hellman. Babe Zacharias. Marion Anderson. Sophy Treadwell. Emily Dickinson. Inventor-Actress Hedy Lamarr. Heck, Julia Child. There are hundreds of women who contributed more to U.S. society and culture than Anna May Wong, but she was the “right” color.

The question is whether this kind of thing is too trivial to bother with, or whether it is another unethical precedent-setting, tiny metaphorical cut.

1. No, John, this isn’t a medical record, and it doesn’t help. In a useful example of how one can convince everyone that he is indeed hiding something, the John Fetterman campaign released a letter by Dr. Clifford Chen saying that the Pennsylvania Democrat running for the open U.S. Senate seat  has “significantly improved” following his stroke in May and “can work full duty in public office.” The campaign  called this a “medical report” after Fetterman’s refusal to release his  health records began being criticized even in the Democratic Party allied news media. “Overall, Lt. Governor Fetterman is well and shows strong commitment to maintaining good fitness and health practices. He has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office,” Chen wrote. But Chen, while he is one of Fetterman’s doctors, is a Democratic Party donor and a Fetterman donor as well. That’s a conflict of interest, and a letter from one’s physician is not the equivalent of health records. Why not just release the records? Well, we know why. It’s the same reason that Donald Trump doesn’t release his tax returns. Continue reading →

Is Everyone Being Unfair To Kamala Harris?

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments
Nobody says that public philosopher Jordan Peterson is an inarticulate boob, and Veep Kamala Harris now has an unshakeable reputation as one. Yet Harris has never exceeded the level of Authentic Frontier Gibberish spewed by Peterson in that clip, which cannot be claimed to have been “taken out of context”: there is no context under the stars in which Peterson’s blather is anything but doubletalk delivered with stunning passion. It immediately reminded me of the Monty Python classic about “meanings,” here.

I confess; when any public figure engages in such blatant oral obfuscation or convoluted rhetoric, I am suspicious of their trustworthiness from that point onward. Ann Althouse, however, defends Peterson, and, by extension, Harris (and Joe Biden and many more) by writing today,

We’re living in a time when your worst few seconds will be ripped out of context and held up to discredit you. Better never to speak on camera at all than to risk creating one of these horrible clips to be used against you. We’re created a mediascape where only the cocky and reckless will speak freely. Ironically, Peterson will be one of those people. Everyone else will shrink out of public view.

Is it unfair to expect public figures and those who opine and speak for a living to do better than that, though? I know I’ve had some bad moments on the radio and in public presentations over the years, but surely there is a level of gabled thought and rhetoric that can be fairly taken as signature significance, and proof that a speaker just isn’t worth paying attention to.

Or is that unfair?

The Curse Of The 10-Year-Old Rape Victim

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Democrats really are relying on the Dobbs decision and the substantial blood-lust among a large segment of their constituencies for maximizing dead fetuses to rescue the 2022 mid-term elections from what should be, by all measures, a catastrophe for the Woke. Wow. Running primarily on abortion as the #1 national issue would be bizarre under any circumstances—it is, after all, a matter that specifically involves the ending of innocent human lives—but doing so this year, when so many other problems concern American citizens more than making it as easy as possible to off living human beings in wombs, is particularly weird. But then, as EA has noted before, it’s all the Democrats have other than claiming that Republicans are fascists while they act and talk like…fascists.

The rest is deny, deny, deny: The economy is wonderful! The border is secure! Gas prices aren’t that high, and you should be buying electric cars anyway! Crime surge? What crime surge? “Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,” as the King of Siam would say.

The depressing thing is that for close to 50% of our under-educated, misinformed, gullible and dim population, this pathetic platform of rationalizations and lies will be enough, and their response will be, “Sound good to me!” It is the pro-abortion arguments, however, that are particularly outrageous. Yesterday Ethics Alarms noted an op-ed by a physician that called a procedure unrelated to ending a pregnancy “an abortion.” Yahoo! offered an article this week headlined, “America is facing a diaper crisis, and the anti-abortion movement is making it worse.” Such warped utilitarian logic is supposed to carry Democrats, if not to victory in November, at least to a less crushing defeat. Good luck with that. This is a party with no shame in 2022.

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Ethics Quiz: The Cartoon Quote

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

I would, left to my own instincts, categorize this as a “When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring” episode. But Legal Insurrection, a conservative commentary blog that I find to be usually reasonable, feels otherwise, so I’ll frame this as an ethics quiz.

Robert Ternansky, a lecturer at UC-San Diego, was interrupted by loud speaking  from the hallway outside his classroom. Ternansky walked into the hallway and seeing students he took to be Hispanic, immediately quoted the signature catch phrases of now politically incorrect Warner Bros. cartoon character Speedy Gonzalez, “The Fastest Mouse in All of Mexico”: “Sí, sí señor! Ándale, ándale! Arriba, arriba!”The video of the class also catches Ternansky  asking his students, “How do you say ‘quiet’ in Mexican?” One replies, it seems, “Caliente,” and the lecturer says,  “Caliente, huh? Help me. All I knew how to say was ‘Ándale, ándale, arriba, arriba.’ I don’t think that was — to be quiet? That’s like hurry up? Did I insult them?”

Apparently! Students complained, and the school responded with this statement:

UC San Diego officials were recently made aware of offensive and hurtful comments that a professor made in a chemistry class when video of the comments was posted to social media. At that time, the professor was engaged about his comments, and it was made clear to him that they do not reflect our community values of inclusivity and respect. The professor has since apologized to the students and will be doing so to others involved.

As a reminder to our community, and as was shared with media outlets who inquired, UC San Diego is committed to the highest standards of civility and decency toward all. We are committed to promoting and supporting a community where all people can work and learn together in an atmosphere free of abusive or demeaning treatment.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is, in the words of Legal Insurrection writer Mike LaChance…

“Does this strike anyone as a bit of an overreaction?”

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“1776” Actress Sara Porkalob Is An Ethics Dunce And Should Be Fired

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The new, non-traditionally cast, “diversity”-pandering revival of “1776” is about to open on Broadway. Ethics Alarms already discussed it here: the production seems like a cynical, misguided, truly terrible idea that is likely to crash and burn, but as I wrote last month, “I hope the result is brilliant and illuminating.” I also wrote, “What I see, however, is a cynical abortion of a classic musical motivated by arrogance, ignorance, and greed.” In other words, the thing has a lot of self-inflicted problems standing in the way of critical and financial success, nicely symbolized by the photo above of an Asian-American woman playing slaveholding Continental Congress member Edward Rutledge singing “Molasses to Rum to Slaves” in the musical’s most dramatic scene. As a stage director and American history fanatic, I don’t see how having that song performed by someone who can’t evoke Rutledge in any way does anything but undermine the best song in the show. But hey, you never know.

One thing the radical production doesn’t need, however, is for that same performer to trash the production publicly. Here is “Rutledge,” Sara Porkalob, in an interview with Vulture’s Jason P. Frank:

“To me, the play is a relic. It is a dusty, old thing… On the inside, I’m cringing… I’m like, It’s okay. I wouldn’t have wanted it this way, but I am doing my job….[The direction] is horrible. I hate it… What I want to do with my time is make new works with collaborators…I feel like I’m going to work.”

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