Month: June 2023

Res Ipsa Loquitur, But Here Are Some Ethics Observations Anyway

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

TikTok influencer and transwoman Rose Montoya filmed herself topless in front of the White House during a Joe Biden’s pandering Pride event. Montoya was joined by two transmales who were also shirtless. Stay classy, trans activists! The White House was horrified, stating, “This behavior is inappropriate and disrespectful for any event at the White House. It is not reflective of the event we hosted to celebrate LGBTQI+ families or the other hundreds of guests who were in attendance… Individuals in the video will not be invited to future events.”

Awwww. The White House set itself up for this conduct, and got exactly what it deserved. Montoya responded by saying that she was not trying to be inappropriate but simply “living in joy.” “Why is my chest now deemed illegal when I show it off, however before I came out as trans, it was not,” she asked?

Yes, she is an idiot.

Further observations:

1. If the LGTBQ+ community wants to alienate a majority of the country, stunts like that will do the trick. It is astoundingly incompetent and irresponsible for the still vulnerable group to allow its most juvenile and narcissistic members to represent it in the news and in public forums.

2. The episode also demonstrates the kind of thing that will push the public to the Right. Whoever managed the President’s Pride Pander should be fired. Stupidly violating the flag-flying code was relatively trivial (though Republicans pounced), but allowing the White House to be used as a pro-trans exhibitionism prop was insane, especially in light of Biden’s posturing about bringing dignity back to the Presidency.

3. Now the White House is caught in the middle, like Bud Light and Target.

4. Good.

More Gallup: On The Transgender Fad, The Public Is Ethically, But Predictably, Confused, Mostly Because It Is Ignorant

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Gallup’s’ latest survey results are affirmatively strange, but then the topic is strange: American attitudes towards transgender issues. I believe the survey intersects with the one EA discussed yesterday, indicating that conservative self-identification was ticking up. It would have been stunning it it didn’t tick up, considering that the political and social Left has thrown all caution and moderation to the four winds and is openly advocating the most extreme and viscerally (as well as ethically) disgusting policies and beliefs imaginable, from 9 month abortions to legalizing theft. The unexpected Woke World obsession with transsexual “transitioning” is another example, though most Americans haven’t thought about it very carefully or thoroughly yet as Gallup’s polling makes clear.

The above survey, for example, is bizarre. I don’t see what morality has to do with an adult individual’s decision regarding transsexual surgery, non-surgical treatment, or “identification,” unless one is a Christian Scientist who opposes medical intervention, or someone who still subscribes to ancient religious taboos on all non-conforming sexuality and relationships. Obviously most American aren’t in either group. Those polled, and apparently those doing the polling, were seemingly using “moral” as a synonym for “ethical,” because most American are no longer taught what ethics is. They don’t know what “moral” means either.

Continue reading →

It’s The Wuhan Virus, And Attention Should Be Paid

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Boy, have I gotten a lot of grief for never capitulating to the thought-control demand that the contagion responsible for the pandemic, the lockdown, my business losing 45% of its income for two years (and counting), my sister wearing a mask in her car, seven-inning baseball games, an untrustworthy 2020 election and more be called the anodyne name “Covid 19,” or just “Covid” to its mask-obsessed friends. Here at Ethics Alarms, it is the Wuhan virus and always has been, because it was obvious from the start that China’s province is where this disaster (and its equally disastrous cover-up) started, but as usual of late, the mainstream media and progressives decided to use the adoption of a fair and informative name that ensures permanent responsibility, if not accountability, for millions of deaths and the savaging of the US economy for its favorite hobby of race-baiting. Yes, once again, the truth was racist, and censorship necessary because assholes incapable of rational thought would abuse facts to justify beating up and terrorizing anyone who looked Asian.

Continue reading →

And Another One Bites The Dust To Conform To The Woke Indoctrination Imperative…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA) chooses debate topics for high school competition and runs hundreds of high school tournaments including the annual national tournament, which started this week  in Arizona. Six thousand students from across the country will compete. The NSDA  rules are very clear that “Judges should decide the round as it is debated, not based on their personal beliefs.”

Nevertheless, Tabroom, a public database maintained by the NSDA, reveals that the organization does not enforce its rules, apparently in the interest of what progressives regard as “the greater good.” The database includes each judge’s “paradigm,” meaning what that judge regards as important in judging debating technique. (The use of jargon like “paradigm” is why I dropped out of debate club.) Does a debater speak too fast, look down when speaking, have an annoying voice, or say “uh” too much? Does he or she use too many anecdotes, rationalizations or appeals to authority? When debate competitors learn that a particular judge will be judging their performance, they need to pay heed to that judge’s priorities….which is why the presence of this judge’s “paradigm” in the database is disturbing:

Continue reading →

Perfect: My Legal Ethics Colleagues Want To Rig Donald Trump’s Trial…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 83 Comments

In a superb and spot-on essay, “Death of the Professions,” Laura Hollis writes,

The landscape of professional America should be a stalwart bastion of standards and commitment to truth. Instead, it is increasingly pockmarked by the impact craters of contemporary culture: the erosion of standards, the denial of truth, the capitulation to political pressure, and ideological lockstep borne of fear.

Ethics Alarms has tracked this accelerating phenomenon for quite a while now. Journalists and educators have been the most prominent examples, but may more are in almost as dire condition ethically: doctors, lawyers, historians, psychiatrists, and many others. I’m not including the ethics rot in pretend “professions” like acting, where, not untypically, a presenter in last night’s Tony Awards referred to Florida governor Ron DeSantis as a KKK “Grand Wizard” and got a huge ovation from the glitterati. (Morons.)

One would think that at least ethicists would be immune from this destructive malady, and, in so thinking, you would be dead wrong. I belong to an association of legal ethicists, and I estimate that at least 75% of them, probably more are Trump Deranged. Yesterday the groups’ listserv was alive with horror at the fact that Aileen M. Cannon, the federal judge assigned to the Justice Department’s criminal case against Trump, was appointed by Trump. This meant to many of my colleagues that she was unfit to preside, obviously biased, and had to be replaced. One of my favorite<cough!>participants wrote in part, “Unless I am wrong on the history, Judge Cannon is the first judge in the history of our country to be in a position to incarcerate the person who gave her her job….The fact that [Trump] appointed her is grounds for recusal. It creates an appearance of impropriety. That’s basic ethics.”

Most (again, not all) of the cyber-assembled dutifully accepted this as reasonable. It is worth recalling that the same group assailed Trump’s similarly silly complaint that a judge of Hispanic descent was unable to rule fairly on Trump’s illegal immigration policies, and my own belief that a judge in an undisclosed same sex domestic relationship should have recused himself in the case examining the Constitutionality of California’s same-sex marriage restrictions. Nobody mentioned the obvious hypocrisy, except me (they don’t like me very much), as I wrote in partial response that if a judge appointed by Trump was unethical to preside over Trump’s trial, it must also be “basic ethics” that “a judge who was appointed and confirmed by members of a party that has been openly trying to use questionable means to remove a President from first his office and later any position of political influence should not be permitted to decide whether that same individual can be in a position to take the White House from that party.”

Continue reading →

When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: How Could A Company Not Realize This Was Sexual Harassment?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The mind boggles; my mind, anyway. S&S Activewear, according to a lawsuit, proposed as a class action in 2020 by a group of former employees, pumped loud, “sexually graphic, violently misogynistic music” through at least five speakers across a large warehouse. Artists like Eminem and Lil Wayne were heard performing rap and hip-hop employing vulgar language, often with lyrics that described violence towards women.

One song cited was Eminem’s 2000 hit “Stan,” about an obsessed fan taking the rap star’s music so literally that he kills his pregnant girlfriend and himself by driving off a bridge. Well all righty then! Management shrugged off complaints about this junk being played in the Nevada warehouse according to the suit, in defiance of the company’s own sexual harassment policy. This fostered a hostile work environment environment where employees shared porn videos and made inappropriate remarks and gestures towards female employees. The suit claimed that the company’s HR manager told at least one woman to just ignore the music.

Continue reading →

OH NOOOO! Gallup Says Facism Is On The Rise In The US!!

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Well, that may be a bit over-stated, though not in the parlance of the Democratic Party and its propaganda agents in the news media. What Gallup really found, in its annual survey of U.S. values and beliefs, is that social conservatism is on the rise, and has reached its highest level in a decade, since 2012. Gee…what…a…surprise…

Gallup, being, as much as it tries to fight it, also infected with partisan bias, doubletalks its explanation for charts like these:

Continue reading →

A Reminder That Conservative Media Is No More Honest Or Trustworthy Than The Mainstream Media: The Red Sox-Matt Dermody Fiasco

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

No, you idiots, the Boston Red Sox did not demote a major league pitcher because he said “something publicly that goes against what the Leftist elites want you to believe.” This totally manufactured “gotcha!” story, initially pushed by the only intermittently reliable New York Post (meaning it isn’t reliable at all, which made it easy for the pro-Biden censors to hide the Hunter Biden laptop story) was flogged to death by P.J. Media’s Robert Spencer. Its gist: Matt Dermody, who started Boston’s final game last week in a series against the Cleveland Indi–sorry, Guardians, was demoted after the game “because he has dared to depart from our insane society’s wholehearted worship of sexual deviance.”

I venture to conclude that Spencer didn’t watch the game. You see, I did. You had to be watching from the National Anthem, because Dermody was only around for three innings, and even that was touch-and-go. I also was aware of a controversy in “Red Sox Nation” over Dermody being brought up from the minor leagues to start that game, but it had nothing to do with his social media comments in 2021. Oh, the usual suspects like the Boston Globe tried to assail the team for even signing a pitcher who wouldn’t wave a rainbow flag, but the real problem with the move was that it made no sense as a baseball tactic. The Red Sox have been in a protracted slump, they had fallen into last place in the hyper-competitive American League East, and they needed a win to stay above .500 and to win the series, which was tied 1-1. Cleveland is a weaker team than the Sox (though they are in second place in the pathetic AL Central), but the Sox still needed a competent performance from whomever they started.

Dermody, it was obvious from the moment the announcement was made that he was being brought up from Worchester, wasn’t likely to provide it. He is a 31-year-old retread who had been forgettable in four brief stints with the Blue Jays and Cubs and hadn’t even been getting batters out in the minors. Every Red Sox fan, as well as a Red Sox beat writer who has been my friend for 20 years, thought the decision to use him was asinine….and it had nothing, nada, zilch to do with his views regarding gays.

Continue reading →

[Pssst! Missouri State University Trustees! You Really Are Ethically Obligate To Fire MSU President Clif Smart And There’s No Getting Around It

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The Equal Protection Project (EqualProtect.org) of the Legal Insurrection Foundation asked the Missouri Attorney General to investigate a “business boot camp” at Missouri State University that specifically excluded white males. The story began getting media coverage—mostly from conservative news media, of course, since the rest regards this as “good” discrimination as an extension of the DEI fad. Caught red- or at least pink-handed, MSU cried “Never mind!” and announced that future business boot camps would be open to everyone, even evil white males. However, the school’s oxymoronically-named president Clif Smart really and truly said this:

“Frankly, I still don’t think we did anything wrong … given that we have multiple cohorts of this going on and this was just one cohort that was limited. We won’t do that. We’ll do a better job on the marketing and information (and) dissemination side and review the process to make sure that everyone has a chance to participate, but we’re not going to exclude people.”

Continue reading →

Call Me A Stickler, But I Don’t Want Anyone Who Talks Like This Deciding What Is Acceptable Speech, Discourse Or Opinion…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said this during an interview on the “Lex Fridman Podcast”about his discovered wisdom about the difficulty of censoring social media:

“So misinformation, I think, has been a really tricky one because there are things that are obviously false, right, or they may be factual but may not be harmful. So are you gonna censor someone for just being wrong? If there’s no kind of harm implication of what they’re doing? There’s a bunch of real issues and challenges there.  Just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier in the pandemic where there were real health implications, but there hadn’t been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the kind of establishment on that kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true. And that stuff is really tough, right? It really undermines trust,”

Oh for God’s sake….Observations:

Continue reading →