Month: December 2022

Friday Evening Ethics Festival, 12/16/2022:

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

What a failure today has been, and all I was absolutely determined to accomplish was getting the lights on the tree…

1. NOW he’s figured it out..Former Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey, weenie that he may be, has now figured out how Twitter should operate. He has penned an interesting piece full of regrets and second thoughts, containing these proposed core Twitter principles for the future. He begins his reflections,

There’s a lot of conversation around the #TwitterFiles. Here’s my take, and thoughts on how to fix the issues identified. 
I’ll start with the principles I’ve come to believe…based on everything I’ve learned and experienced through my past actions as a Twitter co-founder and lead:
  1. Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control.
  2. Only the original author may remove content they produce.
  3. Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice.
The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone….
 
Gee, I don’t know what he’s making such a big deal about: the mainstream news media still doesn’t think the Twitter Files are worth reporting….

Continue reading →

Holiday Madness Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I’m hoping to hear brilliant ethics analysis and provocative topics for debate…..

Ethics Observations On Musk’s Blitzkrieg Twitter Account Bans

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Interesting.

Twitter (aka Elon Musk) suspended the accounts of journalists from CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post and other news sources yesterday, without warning and initially without giving any explanation.

Later last night, Musk tweeted, “Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info. Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok.”

This morning, however, there was still confusion over whether all of those suspended had engaged in doxxing.

Observations:

Continue reading →

A Christmas Music Ethics Spectacular, Final Chorus: Updates And Unfinished Business!

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

These songs each fall into a special category, so I saved them for last:

E. Creepiest totalitarian lyrics to a Christmas song that was already bad

That would be the 1977  duet between Bing Crosby and David Bowie singing “The Little Drummer Boy.” In Bing’s last (and posthumously broadcast) TV Christmas special, he sang “The Little Drummer Boy” while  Bowie sang something that sounded like John Lennon on a bad day about world peace blahtattty blah in counterpoint.  I found the song retchworthy when I saw it in ’77, but some people actually like it, perhaps because of the spectacle of the greatest American popular music auteur singing with a much younger pop music icon.

Here are the lyrics of Bowie’s section:

Peace on Earth, can it be
Years from now, perhaps we’ll see
See the day of glory
See the day, when men of good will
Live in peace, live in peace again

Peace on Earth, can it be
Every child must be made aware
Every child must be made to care
Care enough for his fellow man
To give all the love that he can

I pray my wish will come true
For my child and your child too
He’ll see the day of glory
See the day when men of good will
Live in peace, live in peace again.

The couplet,

Every child must be made aware
Every child must be made to care

is, I wrote in 1n 2018, ” insidious, creepy, totalitarian, arrogant, and redolent of what we are currently seeing in the schools, with various state and media-approved thought-control efforts…in lesson plans.” Yes, let’s make children care about peace, banning guns, banning fossil fuels, permitting abortion, LGBTQ rights. Make them care about what their programmers care about. I didn’t expect much out of Bowie, but it was Bing’s show, and he didn’t 86 those lyrics as he should have, perhaps because Bing, at least when raising his first family, was big on “making children care” about what he wanted them to care about by physical force if necessary.

F. Most unfairly maligned non-Christmas song played almost exclusively at Christmas

Continue reading →

A Language Ethics Quiz: Regarding “Groomer”

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Conservatives have been using the word “groomer” this year to describe advocates of teaching school children (as young as third grade in some cases) about LGTBQ sexual practices and relationships, while presenting them in a positive light. Targets of the word have ranged from defiant LGTBQ teachers exposed by The Libs of TikTok, to libraries promoting drag readings for kids, to the advocates for “gender-affirming therapy” for teens and younger without parental approval, to Disney’s recent obsession with injecting gay sexual issues into its films and TV offerings.

R.L. Stoller objects. He says he is a “child liberation theologian” (?), and a child and survivor advocate with “a Masters in Child Protection”—okey-dokey, let’s take that as genuine authority arguendo. He objects to the use of “groomer” in the current trend, writing in part,

Continue reading →

Riddle Me This: How Is The Republican National Committee Like Black Lives Matters?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Like all good riddles, this one has more than one answer, though none of them are funny. Ironic, perhaps. Infuriating, surely. Nauseating, absolutely.

The first answer is that both misappropriate money donated to them by passionate supporters who foolishly trusted their leadership and staffs to use the funds to accomplish the organizations’ promised mission. Another answer is that the unethical betrayers of trust in both organizations will fall back on Rationalization #13. The Saint’s Excuse: “It’s for a good cause” to try to justify and minimize their betrayal.

The GOP’s resounding flop in the recent mid-term election despite conditions that historically have guaranteed a large number of Senate and House victories to the advantage of the party not holding the White House has donors asking questions and pointing fingers. The conservative website RedState acquired a report dated October 7, 2022 that examined the RNC’s 2021-22 spending up to that time. What it shows is an unethical, incompetent, unprofessional untrustworthy non-profit organization that took millions in donations it solicited with promises of turning them into national policy and regime change and wasted millions on the whims and comfort of its managers instead.

The report calculated expenditures of more than $500,000 in private jet expenses, $64,000 at clothing retailers, and $321,000 in floral arrangements, among other details. Here is the full list—remember, this is only for the 2021-2022 cycle:

Continue reading →

Nah, Democrats In Congress Aren’t Trying To Circumvent the First Amendment By Pressuring Private Entities To Censor Political Speech They Don’t Like…What Would Ever Give You That Idea?

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

This week, three Democratic members of the House, Adam Schiff, André Carson, Kathy Castor, and Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, sent a letter on Congressional stationery to Meta’s President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, urging, pushing and pressuring his company (Meta is the re-branded Facebook parent) to continue to block former President Donald Trump from communicating his opinions, positions and thoughts. The entire letter’s text is below.

It is a smoking gun. Sure, the letter isn’t exactly official, and yes, the four Democrats do not say they speak for Congress as a whole, and yes, it isn’t technically a First Amendment violation, because there is no law involved, and the signers of the letter have no immediate power to make Meta do anything. The letter however, carries an intrinsic veiled threat, and its message is clear: “We can’t censor Trump, so we want you do do it for us.” That is a disgusting violation of the spirit and intent of the First Amendment, making it shockingly clear once again how little respect this corrupted party has for basic individual rights, and how far it is tilting in the direction of totalitarianism. I’m anticipating the sound of a large BOOM emanating from downtown D.C. when Professor Turley reads the letter; presumably he will find it as disturbing as I do. Imagine a similar letter to a major network urging it not to cover the speeches of a prominent critic of Democratic policies, and to ban him from being interviewed as well. I see no substantive difference.

(Just to be clear: “election denial” is protected speech, and Democrats have engaged in it frequently and freely for 20 years.)

The letter follows…It is addressed to Nicholas Clegg President, Global Affairs Meta,1 Hacker WayMenlo Park, California, and begins, ” To Mr. Clegg”:

Continue reading →

Dictionary Ethics: Thanks, Cambridge, But I’ll Ask Billy Joel Next Time…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I was going to make this an Ethics Quiz, but decided that the verdict was pretty clear.

Conservative media and blogs have been fulminating over the Cambridge Dictionary’s decision to add a definition of woman—perhaps to help out Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose answer at her conformation hearing that she wasn’t a “biologist” and thus couldn’t define “woman” will haunt her forever (good!)—that jibes with woke fantasies. Now, along with the standard definition of woman as “An adult female human being,” we are stuck with (at least if we consult the Cambridge Dictionary, which I don’t) “An adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.”

At a basic level, the publication is getting criticism it doesn’t deserve. Dictionaries follow language use trends, they don’t lead them. My language maven friends often complain about the loss of useful distinctions in the English language when they become erased by such frequent sloppy use that even dictionaries endorse the misuse. But in language, unlike in ethics, “everybody does it” is usually decisive. I find the distinction between “that” and “which” useful, but many dictionaries have given up and define the words as interchangeable. Nonetheless, I will continue to honor the distinction, just as I will not use the Cambridge alternate definition of “woman. I will acknowledge that many people, perhaps not enough to justify the definition but apparently enough for this one dictionary, do use the new meaning—which to me means “If you say you’re a duck and quack like a duck, that’s literally enough to make you a duck.”

Continue reading →

Oregon’s Governor Spares 17 Murderers Who Deserve To Die

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

It is clear the the 2022 Ethics Alarms Award for the Most Incompetent Elected Official of the Year is going to come down to the wire. Oregon Governor Kate Brown, already a strong contender (as she was in 2021 and 2020), just delivered a pure grandstanding exhibition that insulted multiple juries, undermined the rule of law, and in effect lowered the penalty for vicious murder to that of far less heinous crimes.

Her decision to commute the death sentences of 17 convicted killers who have forfeited the right to live in civilized society is legal, and the power she has to make it is necessary. There has to be some safety valve for the justice system, which is bound to fail as all systems do, and making the executive the final arbiter of extreme and unusual cases is the best of several flawed options. However, many governors abuse this power, and, like Brown, use it to pander to a political base. Here, from Oregon Live, is the list of the seventeen men on Death Row that Brown feels deserve to continue to live at taxpayers’ expense: Continue reading →

When Officials And Institutions Unethically Engage In Ideological Bullying

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The news  was that former college soccer player Kiersten Hening could proceed in her First Amendment lawsuit against Virginia Tech soccer coach Charles “Chugger” Adair. [Full disclosure: I have a reflexive bias against anyone who sports the nickname “Chugger.”] She alleges that he benched her after subjecting her to a vicious dressing down in front of the team, for her refusal to support the Black Lives Matter-dictated kneeling gesture supported by him and most of her teammates in 2020. Hening and two teammates declined to kneel during the Atlantic Coast Conference’s Unity Statement, which was read on stadium loudspeakers prior to the season opener against the University of Virginia in September 2020. 

The court ruled that the lawsuit’s claims are worthy of being decided by a jury, declining a motion for summary judgment filed by the coach. Continue reading →