Month: April 2023

“Blue Bloods” Jumps The Ethics Shark

/ Jack Marshall / 51 Comments

I can’t be too hard on “Blue Bloods.”

The CBS series is an amazing phenomenon, surviving for 13 seasons (it’s been renewed for 14th) in the teeth of an anti-police, anti-law and order, anti-traditional family, anti-American political and cultural upheaval. The Tom Selleck-starring vehicle—Selleck himself is a member of the NRA board of directors–follows the adventures and careers of the devout, white, Irish Catholic Reagan family that considers New York law enforcement the “family business.” Frank (Selleck) is the Police Commissioner, Granddad was too, one son is a Manhattan police detective and the other a police sergeant whose wife is a patrolwoman. Erin, the sole daughter, is Manhattan ADA, and this season is running for District Attorney. Every Sunday the whole family gathers for dinner, and prays. There are no LGTBQ members of the Reagan family, and, so far, no bi-racial marriages.*

Back when I compiled detailed year-end awards, “Blue Bloods” was a repeat winner of the coveted “Most Ethical TV Series.” It regularly has examined complex ethics dilemmas in the work place, law and family settings, while dealing with the most extensive interlocking conflicts of interest imaginable, usually competently.

Maybe Selleck, who is reportedly retiring from the show after this season and is an executive producer, is just tired of fighting.

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Ethics Hero: Fox News

/ Jack Marshall / 55 Comments

Now THERE’s something I never thought I’d put in a headline…

“FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways,” Fox News announced today in a statement. “We thank him for this service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.”

Good.

There will be a lot of cheering from those on the political left who wanted to censor Tucker, but he brought this upon himself, and in fact the move was late in coming. Carlson’s was the network’s most-watched prime-time show, and the most popular and profitable news commentary TV show on cable. In 2022, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” averaged 3.32 million total viewers and received the largest audience with the golden 25-to-54 age demographic. But as Ethics Alarms has pointed out repeatedly, he is an ethics corrupter on the national scene, and the evidence in the Dominion defamation law suit that Fox just settled for three-quarters of a billion dollars proved that he couldn’t even be trusted to tell viewers what his real opinions were.

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Oh-Oh, Now I’m Really In Trouble: Democrats Want To Criminalize Typos

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Somehow I missed this, but it does fit in nicely with the previous post on the totalitarian drift of our oldest political party.

Stacey Plaskett, a non-voting Democrat Representative of the Virgin Islands, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, authored a letter that accused journalist Matt Taibbi of perjury in his testimony before Congress on the flimsiest of pretexts. In one “Twitter Files’ tweet and in his subsequent Congressional testimony, Taibbi, suddenly a villain in Democratic eyes because he was one of the independent reporters given access to “the Twitter files” for public release purposes, had mistakenly confused CISA, the government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, with CIS, the Center for Internet Security, a non-profit private entity. Or he had added an “A’ by mistake, which is what I would have done. Taibbi corrected the tweet, but Plaskett accused him of deliberate dishonesty in his testimony that quoted it, writing,

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No Primary Debates? The Democratic Party Looks More Soviet By The Hour…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Nicely anticipating what he would be up against—perhaps because it’s so obvious from the recent Presidential election cycles—Robert Kennedy, Jr talked about totalitarianism in a recent interview. “It’s been the dream ambition of every totalitarian regime in the history of mankind to exert total control over every aspect of human behavior,” he said, noting that technology makes this ambition easier than ever to achieve. Junior RFK is the most interesting and potentially the most disruptive of the Democrats planning to challenge Joe Biden for the 2024 Presidential election, but at the time he may not have anticipated his party’s plan to eliminate him and anyone else as serious competition. The Washington Post reported last week that “the national Democratic Party has said it will support Biden’s reelection, and it has no plans to sponsor primary debates.”

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A “Bias Makes You Stupid” Classic: Duke’s Economically Ignorant Economics Prof.

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Duke University professor of economics William Darity wants $14 trillion in reparations to be paid to African Americans. That would roughly break down to $350,000 per recipient. True, he was blathering on the “Dr. Phil” show, and perhaps thought nobody with more than a GED would be watching. Nonetheless he said, for public consumption, that trillions in financial reparations should be handed out to “reduce the wealth gap” between white and black Americans. Where will all that money come from, the phony TV doctor asked? Oh, from the Federal government, which will apparently make it magically appear, replied the evidently phony economist. Will a $350,000 windfall be enough to do any lasting good for the vast majority of blacks who would receive it? Oh, probably not, but it will feel good.

Or something. California’s task force on imaginary reparations things they should be at least $5 million per eligible resident. Sure, why not? Why not $10 million?

In the past, the professor has estimated that reparations would cost between $10 and $12 trillion. Of course, those figures are also impossible and ridiculous, so we need not make too big a thing out of his latest demand.

The National Debt, even the most woke and irresponsible economists will admit if you back them against a wall, is getting, indeed is, dangerously large already at about $32 trillion. Increasing it by 40% in a short period of time is a recipe for economic disaster that would adversely affect all races and creeds.

One doesn’t even need to get into the absurd practical, social, political and legal impediments to such a mass transfer of wealth, which would be enough to make such Darity’s reparations plan madness even if it were affordable, which it is not now and never will be. The ethics question is: How can Duke responsibly employ a professor who advocates such reckless economic policy? What can students learn from this man, who places his race and political biases ahead of his scholarship?

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Ethics Update: The Bud Light-Dylan Mulvaney Ethics Train Wreck [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The main development is that after Budweiser’s CEO’s fatuous non-apology fell flat, Alissa Heinerscheid, the marketing VP of the Bud Light brand, was placed on “leave of absence” status, meaning she’s been canned but the company wants to try to let passions cool down so it isn’t attacked by a non-beer-drinking LGTBQ mob accusing it of being transphobic.

Good. She deserved to be fired. She placed political DEI grandstanding ahead of her job, which is to sell beer. It is fine to try to expand a market, but the trick is to do that without alienating the market you have. This isn’t really an exotic concept, though it appears to have eluded Disney as well. It’s stunningly simple. If someone likes and has loyalty to a product, and the product deliberately links itself to an image or spokesperson that the loyal consumer doesn’t like, doesn’t want to endorse, doesn’t agree with, or just finds off-putting or icky, the consumer is very likely to have second thoughts about the brand. What’s so hard about that?

Before making the blunder [Notice of Correction: Here I originally wrote “after,” which was wrong. Sorry. ], Heinerscheid had arrogantly described her approach as a necessary turn away from “fratty, kind of out of touch humor.” Then she led her company to embrace a controversial drag performer whom many regard as ridiculing women while repulsing men. She must have thought she was immune from consequences, as a “historic” DEI hire by a beer company. She set back the cause of female executives in her industry while hurting the product she was supposed to help.

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Unethical Website Of The Month: Only Dinosaurs

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I’ve seen weirder websites, but not many.

Only Dinosaurs is the website of the “Custom Animatronic Dinosaur Manufacturing Expert,” which describes itself as providing “cost-effective realistic animatronic dinosaur manufacturing services from China.” You can get instant online quotes in minutes, orders in days! But that’s not the reason the site is unethical.

The amount of mistaken and confused information the public gets on the web ranges from harmless to deadly, and Only Dinosaurs has managed to perpetrate some that I never thought was information at all.

The site has a page called “The Top 15 Friendliest Dinosaurs.” It begins with this fifth grade English exposition (I’m guessing the whole site is translated from Chinese, and none too well at that):

If you’ve watched the movie, “Jurassic Park,” you might probably believe that all dinosaurs are big and scary, and they all eat humans. That’s not particularly true. So, if you find yourself really scared of dinosaurs, I have news for you — not all dinosaurs are mean and scary. In fact, some of them are actually pretty friendly and downright cute. So, enough about the T-Rex; let’s have a look at some of the friendliest dinosaurs ever. The tip here is, if the dinosaur is an herbivore, then it’s probably going to be a friendly one since it’s not after blood. However, you can’t risk guessing it right? Therefore, here is a quick list first so you can take them all in:

Whoever wrote that hadn’t seen “Jurassic Park,” which is remarkable for a site that sells animatronic dinosaurs, since the movie represented the most successful and influential use of animatronic dinosaurs of all time. The movie doesn’t present all dinosaurs as “big and scary’: some are presented as big and harmless (the Brachiosurus; the Triceratops), and others are presented as not-so-big and deadly (the Dilophosaurus that eats “Newman,” though the actual beast was larger and a “veggiesaur.”) What does “not particularly true” mean? The statement that all dinosaurs were “big and scary” is definitely not true. Then the passage starts to sound like the writer believes dinosaurs are still around, but that’s okay, it’s all in fun, presumably. Nevertheless, presuming to know which dinosaur species were “friendly” is bonkers. No paleontologist has ever claimed to have discovered that from the fossil record, because the temperaments of prehistoric animals is unknown.

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For Your Ethics Reading List…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I’ve just ordered “Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop”by Harvard business school professor Max Bazerman. Having read about the book, I’m curious to see if any of his strategies have not already been discussed on Ethics Alarms extensively. I suspect not.

On his website, Bazerman writes in part,

[A]lmost all of us have been complicit in the unethical behavior of others. “Complicit” tells compelling stories of those who enabled the Theranos and WeWork scandals, the opioid crisis, the sexual abuse that led to the #MeToo movement, and the January 6th U.S. Capitol attack. The book describes seven different behavioral profiles that can lead to complicity in wrongdoing…and offers concrete and detailed solutions, describing how individuals, leaders, and organizations can more effectively prevent complicity. By challenging the notion that a few bad apples are responsible for society’s ills, “Complicit” implicates us all—and offers a path for creating a more ethical world.

The Harvard connection is one red flag; another is Bazerman’s inclusion of “systemic privilege, including white privilege” among his markers of complicity in unethical conduct and corruption. He is clearly a reliably woke member of the progressive academic mob, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he has nothing to contribute to the topic.

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Oh For God’s Sake…A 6th Grader Should Know This Law Is Unconstitutional, And The Texas Senate Doesn’t? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Texas Senate Bill 1515, introduced by Sen. Phil King (R-Weatherford), an ethics dunce, is on the way to the Texas House for consideration. Given the degree of right-wing derangement in Texas, a fair match for Woke Derangement in California, New York and other states, it’s a better than an even bet that public schools in Texas will be required to prominently display the Ten Commandments in every classroom starting next school year. Next up, I suppose, will be a Texas law requiring citizens to say the Lord’s Prayer every morning and to pass a yearly Bible literacy test or be forced to wear sack cloth and ashes. There is no chance, zip, nada, uh-uh, zippo, that the Ten Commandments law survives a legal challenge. None. That is not, as Mona Lisa Vito states under oath in “My Cousin Vinny,” an opinion. It’s a fact.

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Psst! When You’re This Estranged From Human, Societal And Cultural Norms And Standards, No Advice Columnist Can Save You

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The New York Times “Ethicist” got a jaw-dropping inquiry this week:

Nearly a year ago, I began dating two friends — I’ll call them Rachel and Dave — who were already themselves in a relationship. We all had no experience with polyamory. The throuple ended fairly quickly, with no one being at fault; the other two continued to date but broke up not too long afterward. Since then, Rachel and Dave have dated on and off, Rachel and I were casually together and Dave and I have been close friends who sleep together occasionally. There have also been relationships with others outside this group. At times, we have all behaved badly, sleeping together behind the other’s back, knowing the knowledge would hurt the other. Strong emotions, love and pain have arisen on all sides.

Throughout the past year, as multiple complex situations arose, we have all wished for a model of behavior. Monogamy-centered media suggests that one should avoid dating a friend’s ex-partner. Is this correct? And if so, can this concept be universalized? Do Rachel and Dave get “priority,” in that they should be together and I should not pursue either, because they dated first? What do we owe to our romantic partners and friends when the situations are complex?

His advice doesn’t interest me; you can read it here if it interests you. My focus is on the inquirer, predictably signed in as “Name Withheld.”

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