Month: March 2023

The Unethical Fake Country Of “The United States of Kailasa”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I don’t know about you, but I sure wonder why the United States continues to prop up the United Nations, which, among its many other recent failures, did nothing to stop Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The United States is still by far the largest donor to the U.N., contributing more than $12 billion in 2021, almost one-fifth of the generally anti-American organization’s budget. President Trump, you may recall, tried to cut funding, but that’s because he was a bigot and a xenophobe in Putin’s pocket.

No, that’s not a digression: the United Nations is so incompetent that it allowed a fake nation to attend two of its meetings recently. Above is Vijayapriya Nithyananda, who said she was representing Kailasa as its “permanent ambassador” to the UN at one of those meetings. There is no “Kailasa,” though it has a website. Does that make it a “virtual nation”? I don’t know and don’t care. The site claims that Kailasa includes “two billion practicing Hindus” among its population, and that it has a flag, a constitution, a central bank, and passports.

Come to think of it, Kailasa would probably be a better U.N. member than Iran, among others.

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In Virginia, More Evidence Of Gross Public Education Incompetence

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Here is what Al Gore might call an “inconvenient truth,” except that this really is truth, while Al’s was propaganda: there is no valid reason for any responsible parent to entrust the mind and future of a child with the kinds of teachers, administrators and “experts” currently being produced by the U.S. education sector.

What you see above is one more piece of damning evidence.It is a recent test question in an advanced placement (AP) government course in Fairfax County, Virginia’s largest school district, one of the largest in the country, and just a short drive from my home. The question challenged students to choose an “accurate comparison of liberals versus conservatives,” giving them multiple choices.

It sure stumped me. After all, the difference between liberals and conservatives lie in belief systems and ideological orientation, not occupations and demographic categories. However, this basic fact appears to have escaped the creators of the question. (The “correct” answer, at least according to the dimwits who devised the thing, is “C.”)

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Ethics Conundrum: Is Teaching That Communism Is Evil History or Indoctrination?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

All of the turmoil over public school indoctrination of students regarding such matters as climate change, systemic racism and LGBTQ normalization naturally raises the question of whether there are legitimate topics for indoctrination in the United States. Should students be taught, for example, that democracy is good? That the Bill of Rights are crucial to the united States’ culture? That capitalism works/

What about teaching students that Communism, at least in its execution, is a dangerous and deadly ideology? Is that a fact?

I was prompted to consider this issue after reading NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd’s characteristically inarticulate objections to Gov. DeSantis signing a bill last May designating November 10 to be set aside for teaching Florida students at all grade levels “about the evils of communist regimes throughout history.”

“I don’t know if DeSantis is going to be talking to swing voters, here’s like one of the things he said in Vegas yesterday; take a listen to this,” Todd like said prior to playing like a clip of the Republican touting his program. “You know, …it’s sort of like, look, being a Floridian, I sort of know what he’s trying to play there and all of that. I went to Florida public schools we were taught this: It was called history. It just seems like a weird politicizing—you know he’s going out of his way to politicize something.”

Isn’t it amazing that NBC has employed an individual presiding over an iconic news show who speaks that way on live TV?

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Monday Ethics Warm-Up, 3/13/23: “It’s All Over! What’s The Point?” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“Republicans pounced” on the discovery that aging juvenile climate scold Greta Thunberg had deleted the above tweet since, you may have noticed, either humanity has not been wiped out five years after her warning, or, if doom is imminent, we might as well be comfy and have fun while we wait for the inevitable. No, it’s not a “gotcha!”; it’s a mandatory “you’re a demagogue, a fake dealing, you traffic in fraudulent science and hysteria, and we’re on to you” statement that is long overdue.

This is an example of the kind of ethics-related items that get lost when I go too long without warm-ups and similar collection posts. Last week I inadvertently deleted a file of topics on the metaphorical Ethics Alarms runway, and I’ve been trying to reconstitute the file since.

Jane Fonda, who now sports pink hair as befits her finally unmasked little old lady status, provided another nearly-missed item, when she told the fawning idiots of “The View” that her solution to the proliferation of anti-abortion laws around the country”, the communist, anti-American activist declared that “does involve murder,” in addition to “marching and protesting.” After it appeared that some people, even from the progressive camps, had a problem with this, Jane resorted to Rationalization #55,The Joke Excuse, or “I was only kidding!” Whether she was kidding or not (the women on “The View’s” panel weren’t laughing) similar “jokes” aimed at progressive policy-makers have been used to justify censorship and even criminal investigations. I think her earlier comment in the segment was even more telling, when she said,

“We have experienced many decades now of having agency over our body, of being able to determine when and how many children to have. We know what that feels like. We know what that’s done for our lives. We’re not going back. I don’t care what the laws are. We’re not going back. It’s true. It’s the truth. We’re not going to do it. We’re going to fight.”

Talk about insurrections! When hard-liners on gay marriage like Mike Huckabee suggested that “God’s law” dictated defiance of the Supreme Court, critics (like me) correctly condemned that approach. On “The View,” Fonda’s unethical rejection of  the judicial system prompted Sunny Hostin to say that Fonda was set to “get a Nobel Prize very, very soon.” The frightening thing is that the way the Nobel Peace Prize is deteriorating, she could be right.

If “The View” was a legitimate public interest news show and not a coven of biased dim-bulbs, someone should have asked Fonda to clarify her position. Is she saying that “agency” over her body justified taking an innocent human life? If not, is it that she regards unborn children as not human, or not lives? Or does her advocacy of “murder” to reinstate that “agency”apply to the unborn? Anyone making extreme statements like Fonda’s must be required to defend them, but they seldom are.

1. While we are on the topic of “insurrections”: I noted yesterday that the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences choosing smug leftist asshole Jimmy Kimmel as the Oscars host contradicted the stated goal of avoiding political polarization and luring the alienated half of the country back to the broadcast after years of insulting it. I read that Kimmel had been sternly instructed to go light on politics—you know, because he’s such a trustworthy guy. Predictably, this ass went ahead and snarked anyway, in his introduction to the Best Editing category, “Anyone who has ever received a text message from their father knows how important editing is.  Editors do amazing things. Editors can turn 44,000 hours of violent insurrection footage into a respectful sight-seeing tour of the Capitol. Their work is underappreciated.” Not to belabor the obvious, but in an actual insurrection, the man designated by the judge at sentencing as its symbol won’t be found in any footage being led around by police. Continue reading →

Not Quite An Unethical Lawsuit, Just An Unusually Stupid One

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Some slick lawyers somehow talked some dumb and greedy jocks into launching a class action suit against Ivy League colleges because—get this-–they don’t have athletic scholarships. The Hail Mary lawsuit argues that Brown, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia and Cornell Universities, Dartmouth College, and the University of Pennsylvania have illegally conspired to limit financial aid by banning athletic scholarships.

They also ban chess scholarships, Gilbert & Sullivan scholarships, and cooking scholarships, incidentally.

“Regardless of whether considered as a restraint on the price of education, the value of financial aid, the price of athletic services, or the level of compensation to Ivy League athletes, the Ivy League Agreement is per se illegal,” the lawsuit states.

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Now THAT’S An Unethical Umpire!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

There is an ethical argument for this ridiculous, game ending call, though not a very persuasive one. At the college level, the umpire was teaching a young player a lesson: don’t show up the umpire, or your team might be hurt.

I said it wasn’t very persuasive. Obviously punitive calls like this hurt the game in the yes of fans while undermining trust in umpires. (Ethics Alarms is breathlessly waiting for robo-called balls and strikes). The late Red Sox TV color man Jerry Remy, a former player, used to talk about how certain umpires would deliberately “squeeze” him in their strike calls because Remy was a frequent complainer, but none, presumably, was ever as obvious about it as the ump in the video. That was both ridiculous and stupid; he has, reportedly, been suspended.

Good.

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Pointer: Tim LeVier

What A Happy Coinkydink! In A DEI-Obsessed Year, The Most Deserving Artists For Oscars Just Happened To Be Asian And Black!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The 2023 Academy Awards seemed determined to test just how gullible and naive movie fans are. Integrity? What’s integrity? Just as complaints about the dearth of “enough” Oscar nominations being bestowed on African-American actors and designer magically resulted in “historic” numbers of awards to blacks in subsequent years, recent publicized complaints about how “Asian actors have been underrepresented” in the awards just happened to be addressed by “historic” numbers of Asian winners in multiple categories at the 2023 Oscars.

All because they were the “best,” of course. What, you don’t trust Hollywood?

Yes, yes, I’m sure they were all “deserving.” Well, all but Jamie Lee Curtis as “Best Supporting Actress,” perhaps, since her award was pretty obviously that hoary Oscar tradition, a well-liked veteran performer nearing the end of the line getting a prize for participation and good sportsmanship having little to do with the performance. (See: James Coburn, Hellen Hayes, George Burns, Don Ameche, etc.). But seriously, how long can the Oscars maintain the charade that its nominations and awards are anything more than calculated political virtue-signaling calibrated to match the progressive obsession of the moment after this?

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Time-Warp Ethics: Observations On “The Cher Show” (1975)

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Observations:

  • The song “I’m a Woman,” by famed songwriting duo Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, was written in 1962 and was once considered a standard. Is it politically incorrect today, since the entire definition of “woman” has been thrown into ambiguity and disrepute? I would say that it can’t be performed today. Is that reversible? Should it be?
  • The opening “girl-talk” between Welch and Cher is truly cringey. It’s hard to imagine U.S.culture returning to a point where that would be considered cute, except as satire. Both Raquel (who died this year) and Cher were famously capable and tough pros–maybe they were engaging in satire at the time…satire that reinforced sexist stereotypes while mocking them.
  • Brava to Cher for being willing to appear in that costume next to Welch. That’s generous performing and the mark of an ethical (and confident) host. She was willing to highlight her guest’s assets even they overshadowed her own. Many divas then and now would never tolerate such an unflattering comparison.
  • The Citizen Free Press, which dug up this clip today, fatuously introduced it by asking “Does Raquel have a better voice than Cher?” Morons. Talk about no good deed going unpunished: This is what Cher gets for picking a number for the two to perform that has a tiny range right in Welch’s vocal wheelhouse. Again, Cher was letting her guest shine at her own expense. No, Raquel Welch did not have a better voice than Cher, or one that was nearly as good. However, the video shows that she was capable of filling more than the sex symbol pigeon-hole she was stuck into by Hollywood for most of her career.
  • She could dance, too. (Cher could not.) This clip of Raquel giving her all to entertain the troops in Vietnam is a reminder that she too could be generous:

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Blogger-Law Prof. Glenn Reynolds, The “Instapundit”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“ETHICISTS GENERALLY HAVE LITTLE TO OFFER, AND THAT INCLUDES ASTROPHYSICISTS ACTING AS ETHICISTS”

—Conservative blogger and pundit Professor Glenn Reynolds, reacting to the “Ars Technica” post, “Are we ethically ready to set up shop in space?”

I agree with Reynolds completely, and the article that prompted his dismissal of my field (except in rare cases, hence “generally”) deserved it.

It begins (the author is Diana Gittig, who “received her B.A. in Biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania, and then a Ph.D. in Cell Biology and Genetics from Cornell,”and “is a freelance science writer and editor in New York’):

Off-Earth will amaze you: On nearly every page, it will have your jaw dropping in response to mind-blowing revelations and your head nodding vigorously in sudden recognition of some of your own half-realized thoughts (assuming you think about things like settling space). It will also have your head shaking sadly in resignation at the many immense challenges author Erika Nesvold describes. But the amazement will win out. Off-Earth: Ethical Questions and Quandaries for Living in Outer Space is really, really good…

The chapter headings, all of them questions, give a great indication of the issues she highlights in the book. Should we even settle space? Why? Who gets to go? How will property rights be distributed and finite resources be allocated? Do we need to protect the environment in space? How will we do that? What happens when someone breaks the rules or needs medical care? What if that person is the only one who can fix the water purifier? Underlying all of these questions, as yet unaddressed by any public or private institution currently shooting rockets into the air: who gets to decide?

Many of these issues have been dealt with, extensively, in fiction. But Nesvolt doesn’t really mention these works except to caution against the risk of taking them as prophecy.

Had it not triggered my bullshit alarm so thoroughly, I might have stopped reading there. Wait: this brilliant author supposedly explores the ethical hypotheticals that have been exhaustively examined by over a century of science fiction writers in literature, movies and TV without mentioning them? That’s unethical! It’s incompetent, irresponsible, unfair and disrespectful: the book is discredited as a trustworthy source of ethics analysis at the outset.

It is the final paragraph of the brilliant reviewer of the allegedly brilliant astrophyicist-ethicist’s revelations, however, that conclusively proves Reynold’s assessment is spot on. Ready?

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Visiting Dog Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

A question to the New York Times’ “The Ethicist” raised multiple issues, perhaps the least interesting of which was the subject of the letter:

My brother-in-law and his wife adopted a dog a year ago. Since then, every time they have come over to our home, they have brought the dog too. My husband and children aren’t incredibly fond of pets. This creates some uncomfortable situations for us. I don’t think we truly enjoy their company, because they are always running around after the dog while they are with us. I have tried to indirectly hint that getting a dog sitter may be an option, but that’s hit or miss.

Nowadays we don’t feel that comfortable inviting them over as often. I feel sad, because it’s creating a distance between us. Shouldn’t they just accept the fact that not everyone is comfortable with a pet and find ways to leave it at home (for a few hours) instead of taking it with them everywhere they go? I hate bringing this up with my husband, because I know he is torn as well. How can we delicately and politely let them know without hurting their feelings?

“The Ethicist,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, issued the obvious answer: it is ethics blindness for visitors not to seek permission to bring their dogs to another home (even if the dog isn’t a Caucasian Shepherd like the one above), but also irresponsible for a family being inflicted with an unwanted canine guest to keep its resentment secret so it can fester. The brother-in-law should be told that his family dog isn’t welcome.

I was bothered by other things in the letter: Continue reading →