Month: December 2023

Unethical Tweet Of The Week: Barbra Streisand

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I thought Barbra was smarter than Alyssa Milano, Rob Reiner and Joy Behar.

I’m sure she is, or once was; dementia creeps up on you. I really don’t know how to explain this.

Is she being cleverly deceitful? Yes, some prices are falling, like gas, but prices as a whole are not. They are still rising, the effects of Biden’s inflationary policies are still hurting the middle class and the poor, and the Democrats’ “Inflation Reduction” Act: has had slightly more salutary effects than Gerald Ford’s W.I.N. button, but nothing to boast about. Inflation “coming down” means that the rate of prices going up is lessening, not that prices are actually less than they were. Does Streisand really not know that?

The claim about Trump is definitely deceit. The mainstream media helped with that one,using the pandemic lockdown results that savaged the American economy to conclude that, as CNN, that scrupulously unbiased news source, wrote in September 2020 as part of the media’s push to elect a mentally-declining President because the public thinks he’s a nice guy, “Trump’s job losses are the worst of any American president on record.”

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At Least Newsweek Is Trying

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Newsweek has been trying to find its way for some time now, sometimes reading like part of the “conservative media,” other times staying in step with the mainstream media leftist bias. Now it is including the device above after all of its articles.

It’s a start. The weaknesses of such subjective ratings are obvious: true ideologues and the hopelessly biased can’t see any news story that isn’t slanted to support their worldview as “fair.” The data presumably can also be rigged by repeat ratings. Nevertheless, I applaud Newsweek’s effort, and would like to see more publications and news organizations use such a ratings system on their stories. Maybe the mere presence of such a check-point will provide incentive to reporters to cool the “advocacy journalism.”

We can help encourage other publication to use a ratings system by rewarding Newsweek. I’m going to use it as a source more often on Ethics Alarms.

What Is The Ethical Way To Compensate Glynn Simmons?

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Hint: There isn’t one.

Glynn Simmons, 70, was convicted of murder in 1975. Yesterday he was exonerated in court after he had spent more than 48 years in prison. Well, on the plus side, he now holds the record for the longest time served by a wrongfully convicted inmate in the United States. That’s something, isn’t it?

Judge Amy Palumbo of Oklahoma County District Court declared Simmons innocent of the crime that had occurred during a liquor store robbery. As is often the case in such episodes, an eye witness got it wrong. As is also too often the case, it was determined that prosecutors withheld important evidence from the defense. It’s not all good news for Glynn: he was just diagnosed with cancer. The last time he was free, Simmons was 27 years old.

“Don’t let nobody tell you that it can’t happen, because it really can,” Simmons said a news conference after the ruling. Depressing but obviously true. The man’s life has been taken away from him. Those primarily responsible, a careless witness and unethical prosecutors, can’t be punished. It will take time for Simmons to get significant damages from the state, and time is what this justice system debacle robbed from him. There is no remedy.

No system is or can be perfect. The justice system has failed before and will fail again. That, however, does not mitigate the tragedy of Glynn Simmons’ ruined life. It only makes it more frustrating.

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[Note: WordPress’s AI-recommended tags on this post; “Ben Simmons,” “NBA,” Brooklyn Nets”]

Hump Day Ethics Bumps, 12/20/23

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

You may have noticed that there has not been the same frequency of Christmas-related posts on EA this year. I’m sorry; it’s the most ethical time of year, but even hearing a Christmas carol depresses me right now, and I need to be in top form because challenges and crises are accumulating on all fronts, professional, familial, financial and personal. No tree, no decorations, no parties or festive social events…no fun. Sometimes life forces tough choices, and though this is one I never imagined I would have to make, here it is. It’s time to be a responsible adult. I hate being a responsible adult…

1. The City Journal (an excellent site) on the Harvard president’s scandal:

“…The hypocrisies are mounting at Harvard. The school’s academically undistinguished, DEI-happy, and arguably malevolent new president has been unmasked as a repeat plagiarist by Christopher F. Rufo and Christopher Brunet, Aaron Sibarium, Isabel Vincent and her colleagues at the New York Post, and Phillip W. Magness. After apologizing for her words before Congress with the admission, “Words matter,” President Gay, along with the rest of the Harvard machine, went straight back to disregarding basic codes of conduct and acting as though words didn’t matter. No more legalese for this president or for the 11 other members of the Harvard Corporation: just a behind-the-scenes legal threat of defamation against the Post, which was poised already in late October to break the story.

Unlike the conflict in the Middle East, which even I—an ardent supporter of Israel—admit is complicated, academic dishonesty is rarely complicated. In most cases, including Gay’s, there is no middle ground: either you are a plagiarist or you aren’t.

Gay is guilty of plagiarism by the code of conduct of any modern academic organization, certainly including Harvard and Phillips Exeter Academy, where she went to school and was a trustee until this past June.

Gay’s record of dishonesty is extensive. At last count, incontrovertible examples of plagiarism have been uncovered in seven publications spanning 14 years, including her Harvard dissertation. Any one of even her less egregious infractions—shorter phrases lifted from cited works without quotation marks—would land a Harvard student in hot water. Any one of her larger infractions—paragraphs lifted from works not cited at all—would almost certainly result in suspension. And any student who displayed this full range of behavior would be expelled.

Everyone knows this. The members of the Harvard Corporation know this. The five living former presidents of Harvard who “offer[ed their] strong support” know this. Those scholars from whom she plagiarized but who inexplicably deny that she did so, or say that they don’t care, know this.…Gay herself knows this, surely, despite saying, “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship.”

As long as Gay remains president—indeed, as long as she remains a member of the faculty—Harvard is in greater trouble than its higher-ups appear to understand.

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Comment of the Day: “The Harvard President’s New Scandal: Now The Only Way Gay Can Prove She’s Fit To Lead The University Is To Leave It”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Wow, those 7 days went by fast! I had flagged this memorable comment by JutGory as a Comment of the Day on the 13th, fully intending to get it up every single day since then, and my plans kept getting derailed (because this is how everything has been going since October around here). Fortunately, this particular entry is timeless, another example of one of my favorite kinds of reader comment, a personal reminiscence with an ethics kick. Also fortunately, the disgrace of Harvard president Claudine Gay, the matter that inspired Jut, is still reverberating. Still, I apologize for my delay.

Here is JutGory’s Comment of the Day on the post, “The Harvard President’s New Scandal: Now The Only Way Gay Can Prove She’s Fit To Lead The University Is To Leave It”:

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I am not sure what to think of allegations of plagiarism.

I am probably both stupid and smart in this regard.

I attended St. John’s College. Plagiarism was hardly an issue. Everything you wrote was supposed to be original. If you wrote about Plato, it did not matter if you failed to attribute criticisms to Aristotle.

No one would plagiarize Aquinas when criticizing Aristotle.

If you plagiarized Plotinus in commenting on Plato, who would know?

The idea was not to research things, it was to think things.

(Amusingly, I attributed to Jesus a quote that was actually one of Rabbi Hillel. Who knew?)

Going into grad school in Philosophy, I was delightfully amused when my Logic Professor was surprised at my course essay. He expected a “book report” sort of essay, while I gave him an original response to the the work. I did not cite anything. Why should I? The thoughts came out of my head, and my name was on the front page of the paper.

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Colorado’s Supreme Court Thrusts The Nation Into A Constitutional Crisis

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

Colorado Supreme Court yesterday became the first to declare former President Donald Trump ineligible to run for the White House under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. This removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot, but the court immediately stayed its own order until the Supreme Court settles the issue for all time. With several Democratic operatives and allies trying this legal Hail Mary to remove the major threat to the party holding on to the Presidency, it was inevitable that SCOTUS would have to deal with the crack-brained theory eventually.

The reaction to the decision was something I’ve never seen before: the desperate Axis (the resistance, Democrats and the mainstream media) was giddy about the decision because it provides some hope that Joe Biden won’t have to face Trump in the 2024 election, while conservatives and Trump-supporting Republicans were high-fiving each other because they believe the decision provides smoking gun evidence that the Left is trying to win an election by keeping its most feared political opponent off the ballot “by any means necessary.” That certainly is the sense that was conveyed by Althouse’s mostly conservative (but not strongly Trump-supporting) commenters last night. Althouse called the 14th Amendment ploy a “wild legal theory.” Here are the first 19 comments (the 20th is too long, but it also rejects the decision…):

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‘Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Racial Bias!’

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The Associated Press reports on New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul setting up a commission to make “non-binding” recommendations regarding the state’s debt to the victims of slavery, presumably that they should be addressed by monetary reparations. This is going to take at least a year, after which Hochul assumes, I’m guessing, that she’ll be able to use reparations as a wedge issue. But I digress; the post is about this section of the story:

The idea of using public money to compensate the descendants of enslaved people is almost certain to draw a backlash from some, including some white people who don’t believe they should have to pay for the sins of long-ago ancestors, and other ethnic groups that weren’t involved in the slave trade.

The Associated Press certainly understands evil, racist “white people.” It just knows they will selfishly want to hold on to their ill-gotten wealth and protest a massive transfer of cash from those who had nothing to do with slavery to those who never experienced slavery a day in their lives or ever knew anyone who did. And surely no African-Americans will be objective enough see the logical, economic and political problems with such a plan.

The AP apparently employs no editors capable of reading that swill and had and gently saying to some proudly woke reporter, “Uh, no. This is blatant racial stereotyping. Try again. I have an idea: why not just report the facts without indulging in mind-reading or making baseless predictions of what will happen more than a year from now? Incidentally, reparations are hardly a new idea, so you don’t need to speculate about what “some white people” are ‘almost certain to think.’ You can factually report on what economists, social scientists and other experts on both sides of the issue and of a variety of races and ethnicities have already said about the concept.”

On “The Crown,” National Anthems, Tradition, And That Guy Making A Sex Video In The Capitol

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Perhaps I am the only one who immediately thought of Aidan Maese-Czeropki when I read this Brit’s complaints about “God Save the King,” but that’s the way my mind works.

Apparently the University of Bristol has dropped the UK national anthem from its graduation ceremony, and that decision has roiled the traditionalists in Britain. “University bosses have been accused of hating British culture and pandering to wokes,” one paper reported. The deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, posted on X: “If Bristol University are too ashamed of their British heritage, presumably they no longer want to be subsidised by [the] British taxpayer?” Education Secretary Gillian Keegan said that “universities should stand up for our British values and stop giving in to woke ideology.” But Guardian lifestyle columnist Tim Dowling took the predictable progressive line: all that traditional stuff is behind the times, stuffy and boring. “God Save the King is not a good song. It plods. It goes nowhere,” he writes. “The first three lines end with the same word, as if no one could be bothered to come up with a rhyme for king. Obviously this made things easy the first time they had to change it to queen, but there’s no historical evidence that anyone was thinking that far ahead.”

Wouldn’t it be great if the British national anthem were something flashy and fun like “Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen? (That’s my suggestion, not Tim’s.) No, it wouldn’t be great; Dowling doesn’t get it, just as so many people don’t get it, just as Aiden the Sex Machine doesn’t get it, just as those who complain about our national anthem don’t get it.

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Great, Something Else To Worry About…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

On CNN Business, we learn…

Intercity bus lines like Greyhound, Trailways and Megabus, an overlooked but essential part of America’s transportation system, carry twice the number of people who take Amtrak every year. But the whole network faces a growing crisis: Greyhound and other private companies’ bus terminals are rapidly closing around the country.

Houston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Tampa, Louisville, Charlottesville, Portland, Oregon, and other downtown bus depots have shuttered in recent years. Bus terminals in major hubs like Chicago and Dallas are also set to close. Greyhound and other companies have relocated their stops far away from city centers, which are often inaccessible by public transit, switched to curbside service or eliminated routes altogether.

These stations built decades ago are shuttering because of high operating costs, government underfunding and, surprisingly, the entrance of an investment firm buying up Greyhound’s real estate for lucrative resale.

Wait, what was that last part?

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The Ethics Sage Asks, “Can America Ever Regain Its Civility?” No! Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Last month Steven Mintz, aka.”The Ethics Sage,” wrote a plaintive lament about how far civility has declined in our society. Steven is a distinguished philosopher and writes passionately about ethics. He’s passionate about this topic too, but can offer little in the way of solutions to a problem he has visited before. His most recent essay mostly describes the problem. He writes in part,

“Who should we blame for the decline in civility? There is enough blame to go around, but I will focus on the primary culprits. The ABA survey reports that 34% of those polled said family and friends should hold the primary responsibility for improving civility in society, while 27% said that responsibility should fall to public officials. And 90% of respondents said parents and families are most responsible for instilling civility in children, followed by schools at 6%. This result is surprising. What should a school do if not to foster good behavior, concern for others, kindness and empathy? We have clearly lost our way in that regard. We are only in control of our own actions. However, our behavior can influence others in a positive way. We need to model civil behavior, so our kids learn how to behave in the classroom and at home.”

Mintz ultimately concludes “call me a cynic but I expect things to get worse before they get better.” What would make them get better? The Ethics Sage is whistling past the graveyard to suggest that parents and school have the power to turn things around. The culture itself now encourages and glamorizes incivility.

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