Month: August 2023

Regarding Vivek Ramaswamy’s “Ten Campaign Commandments”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

At last week’s Trumpless GOP candidates debate, wild card provocateur Vivek Ramaswamy announced his list of “10 campaign commandments:”

1. God is real.

2. There are two genders.

3. Human flourishing requires fossil fuels.

4. Reverse racism is racism.

5. An open border is no border.

6. Parents determine the education of their children.

7. The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.

8. Capitalism lifts people up from poverty.

9. There are three branches of the U.S. government, not four.

10. The U.S. Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history.

Ethics-related observations:

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Ethics Hero: 14-Year-Old Connor Halsa

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Well, let’s start out today with a hopeful story; I don’t know about you, but I need one.

14-year-old Connor Halsa of Moorhead, Minnesota was fishing with his family on Lake of the Woods when he hooked an Iowa farmer’s lost wallet that had come to rest about 20 feet under the surface of the large ( 85 miles long and 56 miles across at its widest point) lake. The previous summer, Jim Denney’s boat had capsized in rough waters, and when he dried out later, he discovered that his wallet was gone along with the $2,000 vacation money he had stored there.

After Connor discovered the wallet and the cash and had dried it all out, he agreed with his father that the next step was tracking down the money’s owner.The only clue inside the wallet was a faded business card with a phone number belonging to a livestock owner in western Wisconsin. The number led them to Denney at his Mount Ayr, Iowa farm. The astonished farmer tried to give Connor a reward, but he refused, saying that he should not be rewarded for doing what was obviously the right thing.

Isn’t that nice? Well, get over it; now its time to start wallowing in the usual muck….

PS. Connor wearing a T-shirt that appears to honor my dog had nothing to do with his selection as today’s Ethics Hero.

_____________

Source: The Star Tribune

Two Turley Columns: The Georgia Indictment And A Biden Impeachment Inquiry

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Prof. Jonathan Turley has two excellent and revealing columns up right now, one dealing with the ongoing assault on Donald Trump from the Axis of Unethical Conduct that Ethics Alarms readers are familiar with (that’s the “resistance”/Democratic Party/mainstream media alliance that set out to punish Trump for defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016), and the other, stunningly, advocating a House inquiry into the impeachment of Joe Biden.

I have a special interest in both columns, which I will explain while sending you, I hope, over to Prof. Turley’s site to read both of his essays. I want to begin by, not for the first time, saluting Turley. He has courageously maintained studied objectivity and a lack of partisan bias in his erudite commentary on the political horrors of the past nearly three decades, beginning with his guest appearances on cable and network news shows during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Because the George Washington Law School professor has not disgraced himself like so many of his academic colleagues by submitting to full-blown Trump Derangement and woke-polluter legal analysis, he is now widely derided on the Left (and presumably at GW) as knee-jerk conservative and Republican apologist, which he definitely is not. As a result, Turley, who once was welcome on all of the public affairs shows and had op-eds in the usual leftist-propaganda publications, is now reduced to offering commentary on Fox News and the conservative New York Post, with The Hill being his only remaining non-GOP leaning platform. He also feels required to place an “I’m not biased, I’m an objective and fact-driven analyst” litany in every blog post that points out that an Axis position is unethical or wrong. For example, here is one from yesterday’s column about the Washington Post’s misrepresentation of the Georgia indictment against Trump:

“When the Mar-a-Lago indictment came down, I was one of the first to say that I considered it a strong case. I have since noted that the case seems to be strengthening with time….I have long disagreed with Trump over his claim of systemic voting fraud. I criticized Trump’s Jan. 6 speech while he was giving it. I supported Vice President Mike Pence and his certification of the election of Joe Biden. I have also regularly criticized Trump when I felt that such criticism was warranted. This does not change my view of whether the call is compelling evidence of a crime….”

It’s an indictment of the state of our public discourse that Turley feels compelled to do that—he issues comparable disclaimers several times a week—but that’s what honest pundits they have to in these times of intimidation and cancellation by the totalitarian left. (Last week, I was asked to delete the reference to Ethics Alarms in my CV accompanying my expert opinion in a court case because “the judge is very progressive.”) Here are my brief comments on the two recent columns.

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‘….Then They Came For Robert E. Lee’s Horse, And I Did Not Speak Out…’

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Earlier this month, Washington and Lee University, as part of its contrived efforts to keep using the names of two American icons who also were slaveholders while continuing to grovel to the political correctness mob, removed markers erected in memory of Robert E. Lee’s famous horse, Traveller. The steed’s gravestone was removed (he’s buried on the campus), and a commemorative plaque came down as well.

Traveller carried Lee during the Civil War and later, when the ex-general became president of the then-Washington College from 1865 until his death in 1871. Traveller died a few months after his owner. But newly uncovered documents revealed that Traveller was a virulent racist, and worse, kept a stable of enslaved Shetland ponies on the Washington and Lee campus.

Okay, I was kidding about that last part.

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: Biden Climate Envoy John Kerry

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“Without facts or economics on their side, they [“climate deniers”] flatly deny what is happening to our planet and what we must do to save it. They incite a movement against what they falsely label ‘climate change fanaticism,’ as they conveniently forget that the dictionary definition of a cult is the dismissal of facts in devotion to a lie.”

—-Biden Administration “climate envoy” John Kerry, speaking in Scotland after arriving on his private jet that emitted more carbon into the atmosphere than any of the automobiles I have driven or will drive in my lifetime.

Wow. Imagine, people actually voted for this boob to be President. And what a wonderful example of projection: has there ever been any movement that smacked of cultism more than the climate change freak-out? Kerry, whose entire public career has been a sustained war against facts (most people still think he’s Irish, for example), embodies the discredited theory that saying something is true when it isn’t constitutes a fact. Here’s a fact: crippling the U.S. economy to reach climate change policy goals will achieve nothing except hardship and disaster unless a magic formula is developed to force China, India, Russia and developing nations to do the same, and there is no such formula. What is it, then, that we “must do” to save the planet, John? Accept a Democratic Party dictatorship? Put the U.N. in charge of everything and everybody? Put YOU in charge?

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The Kiss

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

This topic was unwittingly recommended by my younger sister, a reliably liberal Democrat who, to my knowledge, has never read Ethics Alarms once in its 23 years of existence. (Don’t you think that’s strange? I think that’s strange, but I refuse to let it bother me. Much….). She had to tell me about the eruption of an international women’s rights, #MeToo, “sexual assault” cancel culture controversy in the wake of Spain’s first Women’s World Cup championship because I pay as little attention to soccer, international or otherwise, as humanly possible.

Shortly after the championship game’s final whistle, Luis Rubiales, the head of Spain’s Soccer Federation, joined the jubilant on-field celebration, and at the award ceremony, Rubiales took midfielder Jennifer Hermoso’s head in both his hands and…kissed her on the lips!!!!

Searching for relevance and headlines now that her own soccer career is mercifully over, woke activist Megan Rapinoe told The Athletic that the kiss reflected “the deep level of misogyny and sexism in the federation. It made me think of how much we are required to endure.” (I don’t know about the “we” part in Rapinoe’s case: I think an over-excited soccer official would be more likely to spontaneously kiss a scorpion.) Everybody piled on. Spanish soccer coach Jorge Vilda ripped Rubiales, saying in part “I regret deeply that the victory of Spanish women’s football has been harmed by the inappropriate behavior that our, until now, top leader, Luis Rubiales, has carried out.” Eleven members of the Spanish women’s team coaching staff tendered their resignations over the weekend, expressing “their firm and categorical condemnation of Luis Rubiales’ behavior towards Jenni Hermoso.” 81 Spanish players, including all 23 World champions, vowed to go on strike and refuse to play until Rubiales is removed from his position. FIFA, the international soccer organization, suspended Rubiales from all football-related activity for 90 days pending an investigation—yeah, maybe he secretly planned the kiss weeks in advance, for example). The Spanish government publicly supported the decision.

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The New York Times Publishes A Feature About Ethics And Doesn’t Mention Ethics Once, Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

[Once again, I apologize for the dumb error in Part I, where the Unethical Conduct Score and Jerk Score for #8, “Playing gory video games,“ were both supposed to be zero and I inexplicably had them both as “4.“]

To recap, I am examining the ethical logic—if any— being displayed in each of the 16 sections of the Times piece titled “The Virtues of Being Bad,” rating the combination of unethical conduct described and rationalizing it in a public form from 0 (not unethical at all) to 5 (very unethical) as well as assigning a “jerk score” to each of the authors, writers all, again ranging from zero (not a jerk) to 5 (Jerk-o-rama). Part I covered the first eight; now here is 9-16. Warning: it gets pretty weird from here on…

9. “ I, a responsible parent, feed my kids McDonald’s and other junk food. Not all the time. But I do. And they love it.” Oh, so what? This is the most “unethical” conduct this writer engages in? I don’t believe it. It’s more unethical to accept free publicity in a New York Times feature and do so little to earn it.

Unethical Conduct Score: 0. Jerk Score: 2.

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The New York Times Publishes A Feature About Ethics And Doesn’t Mention Ethics Once, Part I [#8 Corrected!]

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

This should be expected, since the Times no longer practices ethics, shows much interests in it, or demonstrates that it understands what ethics is.

In a bizarre feature called “The Virtues of Being Bad,” 16 writers (I never heard of any of them, and I follow such things) wrote confessionals about their “guilty pleasures” of doing bad things, supposedly the only “bad” things they do. (In most cases, I doubt it.) Here is the annoying introduction…

“Mocktails and sunscreen, masking and mindfulness — for those of us who strive to be upright, responsible citizens, the constant reminders of various ways we ought to be good are all around us. They’re almost enough to make you forget the pleasures of being a little bit bad. We asked 16 writers — most of them respectable adults — about the irresponsible, immoral, indulgent things they do. Transgression has the power to teach us something about how we ought to live. But it’s also just … fun?”

I’ll briefly comment on the ethical logic—if any— being displayed in each of the 16 sections, rating the combination of unethical conduct described and rationalizing it in a public form from 0 (not unethical at all) to 5 (very unethical). I won’t mention the authors, because, frankly, I don’t care who they are. Any feature that confounds non-ethical considerations like “fun” with ethical conduct is too subversive and badly reasoned to generate anything but contempt. Along with the ethics score, I’ll also assign a jerk score to each of the authors, again from zero (not a jerk) to 5. Here we go with the first eight; 9-16 will be discussed in Part 2.

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THIS Is MSNBC!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Upset by Donald Trump’s mugshot, one of MSNBC’s racist hosts (it has several), Joy Reid, indulged herself in a full hate-rant meltdown, saying on the air,

“As a teenager living in New York, I’ve said it before, this is why I never watched ‘The Apprentice.’ I despised Donald Trump. He signified the rich white guy in Manhattan that absolutely hated and despised me. I still remember he made five teenagers my age  take a mug shot.  I despised Donald Trump because to me he signified the rich white guy in Manhattan that absolutely hated and despised me, my cousins, my friends”…So, people like Giuliani, and people like Trump, persecuted black and brown people in New York. It’s what they did for fun. It’s what they did for pleasure. They enjoyed it. They enjoyed lording over people who had nothing, who had no million-dollar lawyers. Who couldn’t change lawyers at the top of a hat and get a different hip-hop lawyer in the next day when they’re tired of one. Who couldn’t go to make their case on Fox, or a Newsmax, who had nothing, and who Donald Trump loaded his everything over. And still, people who looked like them, put him in rap longs. It was indignity, to me, that something I loved, a culture I loved, lionized that. To me, this is justice. The fact that Manhattan didn’t give him a mugshot, I thought was offensive. I thought that the feds, we know it looks like, he was the president of the United States. Okay, offensive. Everyone else had to take them. This case, and I think Fani Willis is a hero, she’s a national hero, because she, more than any other prosecutor in this country, and I respect Jack Smith, and I respect all the prosecutors that are doing this. She is the only one who said, these wealthy, powerful, privileged men and women are just American citizens and when they break the law, they will take that picture.”

No hate, bias, and fantasy here! Say what you may about Fox News and CNN, the other two outrageously untrustworthy, incompetent, biased and unethical broadcast news outlets (NBC, CBS, ABC and PBS are merely untrustworthy, incompetent, biased and unethical), at least they eventually dumped Tucker Carlson, Bill O’Reilly, Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo and Brian Stelter. There was a time when MSNBC had standards too: it fired Keith Olbermann when he went too too far (he always went too far), Melissa Harris Perry, another toxic anti-white racist, and Martin Bashir, but that was before Donald Trump ran for President, and MSNBC became the “anything goes” channel.

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More Weird Tales Of “The Great Stupid”: One “Jewface” Casting Controversy Wasn’t Stupid Enough; Woke World Insists On Another One

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The most recent nut-ball casting ethics lunacy that finds something anti-Semitic about prosthetic noses makes my brain hurt. It is such fanatic political correctness and woke “gotcha!” extremism that led to this recent post, in which I mused about owing vile radio talk show host Michael Savage an apology for condemning his claim years ago that liberalism is a mental disease.

Everything I wrote about the complaints that casting eminent non-Jewish actor Bradley Cooper as composer Leonard Bernstein and having him wear make-up (including a fake nose) to look more like Bernstein applies to the wacko criticism of casting Helen Mirren as Golda Meir in “Golda” (that’s Hellen on the right above) and having her outfitted with a big nose. In fact, you could just read the Bernstein post substituting “Golda Meir” for “Leonard Bernstein” and “Helen Mirren” for “Bradley Cooper.” In fairness, Mirren requires more make-up than Cooper because she is an attractive woman, and Golda was anything but (big nose notwithstanding, Lenny was a handsome man), and it would take a prosthetic nose to make almost any actress be a credible Golda Meir on screen. Mirren is perhaps the most distinguished actress in her age range right now, and a complex and historic figure like Meir deserves no less for her film biography. Never mind, though: what matters in these days of woke madness isn’t good acting or good movies, but racial, ethnic and gender spoils, all executed with the integrity of Calvinball.

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