Month: June 2024

Ethics Quiz: “Heterosexual Awesomeness Month”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Who didn’t see this coming?

And why did it take so long?

Naturally, the reaction was explosive on both sides of the, uh, well, both sides. “News about Heterosexual Awesomeness Month has spread worldwide!,” the bar announced in a follow-up social media post. “Many people have asked how they can support us. Owner Mark Fitzpatrick is excited to build a 25,000 sq ft community event center nearby to host events, provide amazing and wholesome food, support conservative ideas, and help true conservatives get elected. So, we started a GiveSendGo fund. For the haters spewing venom, perhaps you feel bad and want to contribute a few dollars now? For the rest of you reasonable people, if you feel inclined to give, please do! May God bless you!”

The Old State Saloon in in Eagle, Idaho, not far from Boise, and its promotional stunt is the work of new owner Mark Fitzpatrick, a South California transplant who bought the bar in 2023 and who describes himself as “a Christian, conservative, Constitution supporter, retired police officer, and family man.”

Ew!

The fact that this promotion is taking place during “Pride Month,” when everyone is supposed shout out hosannas for minority sexual practices while festooning everything in rainbows, means that it is also being taken as a shot across the hallowed bow of wokeness. LGBQ Nation snarks, ” Fitzpatrick claims to have banned a couple of dozen hateful negative Facebook commenters for ‘using horrific words, expletives, using the name of the Lord in vain, etc,’ but it’s hard to tell one heterosexual man’s hate from another’s unbridled excitement.”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is “Heterosexual Awesomeness Month” unethical?

I’m open to being convinced otherwise, but I think it is a divisive tactic, essentially tit for tat, but inevitable and perhaps necessary. Once upon a time “days” and “months” designated to celebrate particular components of the American melting pot were benign and opportunities for all to signal appreciation for our component cultures. The practice quickly curdled into group chauvinism and anti-majority bigotry with the continued celebration of Black History Month, Women’s History Month and Pride Month. Those groups once arguably needed their “months” to restore self-esteem after long being discriminated against, but now they just resonate as “Who needs whites and men?” exercises in division.

As an aside, anyone who is “proud” of their sex life has problems. I remember when Grant was tiny and we watched “Sesame Street” together, I was consistently amused by a oft repeated number in which a bovine Muppet sang, “I’m proud, proud, proud to be a cow!” “Pride Month” strikes me as similarly excessive. OK, so you’re gay. I don’t care. I’m bald. What do either of us have to be “proud ” about?

If it is unimaginable to have a “Heterosexual Pride Month” or “White Achievement Month” or “Hooray for Men Month,” and it is, then it’s time for those other month-long celebrations to be retired as past their pull dates, and now doing more harm than good.

To that end, I suppose “Heterosexual Awesomeness Month” has a certain “So how do YOU like it?” appeal. Nevertheless, two wrongs don’t make a right.

Added: I have to include that “Proud to be a Cow” song. Here you go…

Observations on the Early Post-Trump Conviction Polling

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

It’s early yet, and things could change, and yes, polls, but…

Observations:

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I Wonder: How Long Before Enough of the Public Finds the Anti-Democracy Maneuvers of the Party That Claims to be Defending Democracy Hypocritical, Cynical, and Unacceptable?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The Washington Times reports that the Democratic National Committee today will vote to change party rules so the party can quietly nominate Joe Biden via Zoom before its convention. Not only will this maneuver supposedly enure that an early ballot filing deadline in Ohio won’t keep Biden off the ballot there ( Gov. Mike DeWine has already signed a law to extend the filing deadline to make sure Biden is on the ballot, so the party’s claim that the virtual nomination is necessary for that reason is hooey), it will “eliminate any realistic chance disgruntled party members will try to replace Mr. Biden on the ballot with a more desirable candidate amid alarming poll numbers that show him trailing former President Donald Trump both nationally and in the critical battleground states.”

You know: can’t let that democracy thingy get in the way of The Party’s anointment of its Leader.

“Once President Biden is virtually nominated, then that will be it. He will be the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party and only death or incapacitation will prevent that moving forward,” said Josh Putnam, party rules expert and founder of FHQ Strategies LLC, a non-partisan political consulting venture. “There will be no substitutes.”

Nominating Biden ahead of the convention also has the advantage of minimizing the bad optics of the anticipated convention protests by several groups who believe Biden has betrayed their interests. It also will ensure that the convention, and thus the “mostly peaceful” protests get as little TV airtime as possible. A coalition of organizations under the banner “March on The DNC” announced they plan to “bring our demands” to the Democratic National Convention. They want permits to demonstrate near the convention center “to bring the people’s agenda to within sight and sound of the Democratic Party leadership.” Oh, can’t have that! To re-phrase a memorable line from “Dr. Strangelove”: “You can’t have a political demonstration here! This is the Democratic Party Convention!”

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I Detest the Phrase “I’m Just Sayin’!,” But If I Used the Phrase “I’m Just Sayin’!” I’d Present This Re-Surfaced Story Showing the Double Standards Used to “Get Trump!” By Saying “I’m Just Sayin’…”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Well this is interesting. And not at all surprising.

Enterprising conservative blogger Matt Margolis dredged up an almost completely ignored report in the New York Post during Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012 that revealed Obama’s efforts in 2008 to “hush” big-mouth anti-white, anti-America (“God bless America? I say God damn America!”) racist minister Jeremiah Wright. Wright, you will recall, was Obama’s supposed “spiritual advisor” whose Sunday sermons qua rants the future President said he attended religiously (snort) for many years. We now know that although Obama solved his Wright problem by denouncing him publicly, Obama’s true views were much closer to those of his mentor than most voters would have been comfortable with in 2012.

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Another Example of How the Right, the Left, the News Media and the Government Make Certain It’s Impossible For Everyone Else to Know What the Hell is Going On….

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The PJ Media headline is certainly a click-magnet: “Biden Admin Tampered With Evidence, Altered Biden’s Hur Interview Transcript.” If one has been following all of the machinations of this totalitarian-leaning cabal, that seems perfectly in character. Sure, why not? If they’ll contrive ways to keep their major political rival in court if not in jail a few months before the election, what won’t they try to get away with?

The story, however, is more equivocal. In a federal court filing, the Department of Justice admitted  that the transcript of President Joe Biden’s testimony to Special Counsel Robert Hur was missing “filler words (such as ‘um’ or ‘uh’)” and words that “may have been repeated when spoken (such as ‘I, I’ or ‘and, and’)”:

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Charities and Non-Profits That Assist Illegal Immigrants Have “Become Targets of Extremists.” Good!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I suppose I should clarify that by noting that what the New York Times calls “extremists” are really “Americans who believe that organizations shouldn’t be aiding and abetting law-breakers and those who deliberately defy U.S. immigration laws.”

This Times story (again, I’m making a gift of it, because I pay the Times fees so you don’t have to) is a virtual cornucopia of fake news and progressive propaganda devices by the Times (but I will doubtless get a protesting email from self-banned Time apologist “A Friend” saying that it’s OK because some Times readers point out the dishonesty.)

Let’s see: the gist of the thing is that “after President Biden took office in 2021 promising a more humane approach to migration, these faith-based groups have increasingly become the subjects of conspiracy theories and targets for far-right activists and Republican members of Congress, who accuse them of promoting an invasion to displace white Americans and engaging in child trafficking and migrant smuggling. The organizations say those claims are baseless.”

I’m dizzy already:

  • “More humane approach to migration” means  and meant “less enforcement of immigration laws against illegal immigrants.” Enforcing laws in general is considered cruel and racist by the 21st Century version of progressives.
  • “faith-based groups” is being used here to signal virtue and good intentions because that suits the writer’s agenda and that of the Times market. Being “faith-based” is considered meaningless, however, when the “faith-based” are opposing the killing of unborn children or objecting to being forced express support for same-sex weddings.
  • See that framing? Any objections to open borders is based on the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, sayeth the Times. That’s a lie by omission. Most Americans who object to letting illegal immigrants get away with breaking our laws do so because illegal immigrants shouldn’t get away with breaking our laws. I, for example, don’t care if they end up voting for Truth, Justice and the American Way. I wouldn’t care if they were all white, or albinos even. They don’t belong here. Let them get in line like they are supposed to. And the “human trafficking” stuff: this is a classic example of deceptive cherry-picking, making a position look ridiculous by only mentioning the bad arguments for it while ignoring the valid ones.
  • Sure, those claims are baseless. The claims that the “faith-based organizations” are aiding and abetting illegal conduct, however, are 100% true.

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Unethical Quote of the Month: NYT Columnist Maureen Dowd

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

“….I found the guilty verdicts bracing. A dozen Americans had finally sliced through Trump’s reality distortion field and said, simply, “You’re lying and cheating and it’s not right.” Even though the case was a stretch and not the strongest one against Trump, there was something refreshing about the jury doing what no one else around Trump has been able to do — not the inexplicably sycophantish Republican lawmakers, not the corrupt Supreme Court, not the slowpoke Merrick Garland.”

—-The  “Queen of Snark” Maureen Dowd in yesterday’s Sunday New York Times, gloating over Trump’s conviction even while acknowledging what the sham of a trial really was from the beginning.

I suppose I could and maybe should call this an ethical quote of the month, since Dowd is saying the quiet part out loud and admitting what the Democratic Party’s “lawfare” really is, not that the ugly truth is exactly a big secret. [Here’s “gift link” to the column, which is otherwise behind a paywall.)

Red-pilled former Rolling Stone pundit Matt Taibbi writes on his substack, “Whoa. Trump has so altered American consciousness that detractors feel comfortable publicly supporting the idea of slapping 34 felony convictions on the man as punishment for alleged earlier offenses.”

That’s exactly what all of these trials are about. Trump’s a bad guy, see. He never should have been elected by that undemocratic Electoral College gimmick and stopped wonderful Hillary Clinton from being the first DEI female President. The idea was to “Get Trump,” just like the idea when he was President was to “impeach the motherfucker,” as a distinguished member of “The Squad” told an adoring crowd.

“Show me the man, I’ll show you the crime,” boasted Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s secret police chief. With an international wheeler-dealer in hotels and construction like Trump, adopting Stalinesque tactics against a feared political opponent was a sure thing, so hey, “Let’s do it!” Taibbi continues, “Dowd’s slip (if it was one) wasn’t rare. Editorial pages, broadcast panels, even political mailers in the past days implored readers to focus on Trump’s overall history, not this particular case.”

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A.I. Ethics Update: Nothing Has Changed!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Oh, there have been lots more incidents and scandals involving artificial intelligence bots doing crazy things, or going rogue, or making fools of people who relied on them. But the ethics hasn’t changed. It’s still the ethics that should be applied to all new and shiny technology, but never is.

We don’t yet understand this technology. We cannot trust it, and we need to go slow, be careful, be patient. We won’t. We never do.

Above is a result someone got and posted after asking Google’s Gemini AI the ridiculous question, “Are there snakes at thesis defenses?” The fact that generative artificial intelligence ever goes bats and makes up stuff like that is sufficient reason not to trust it, any more than you would trust an employee who said or wrote something like that when he wasn’t kidding around. Or a child.

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Ethics Quiz: The Senators’ Letter

/ Jack Marshall / 65 Comments

I think I could check through the names of the 20 or so most prolific Ethics Alarms commenters and guess with nearly 100% accuracy how each of them will respond to this ethics quiz.

Eight Republican Senate Republicans released a letter after President’s Trump was declared guilty as charged in his mysterious “he did something illegal in there somewhere and besides, he’s a bad guy and everyone should hate him” trial in Manhattan. It declares that they will not do anything to support President Biden for the rest of his term in office: not vote on any legislation for non-security funding, not vote on judicial and political nominations, not not vote in favor of “expedited consideration and passage” of any Democrat-proposed legislation.

Signed by conservative GOP Senators Mike Lee, J.D. Vance (Ohio), Tommy Tuberville (Ala.), Eric Schmitt (Mo.), Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.), Rick Scott (Fla.), Roger Marshall (Kan.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.), the terse missive states,

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Ethics Thoughts on Diversity and the Ithaca (NY) “Student of Color United Summit”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The DEI hucksters and hypocrites are in the process of giving diversity a bad name (also equity and inclusion, but those are for another day.) Like so many other features of life and human existence, diversity can be a very good thing, and it can be a detriment to legitimate goals and objectives in different contexts, or even at the same time.

Stipulated: what is unethical about the current DEI fad/obsession/scam/hustle/mania is that its goal isn’t to achieve diversity in settings where it may be beneficial to society, but rather to use the deceitful rhetoric of diversity to excuse engaging in otherwise illegal discrimination and prejudice for the benefit of particular minority groups, usually the groups that the DEI warriors belong to themselves.

I had an eye-opening experience recently. I was teaching the ethics component of a three day training program for program for paralegals and legal professionals who work in large firms. When I got in front of the class, I was immediately struck by the demographics of group, which was about 80 in number. More than 90% of the attendees were black women between the ages of 25 and 45, with just a few men and about the same number of white women, less than five. I haven’t tried to analyze why the paralegal field has shaken out that way in this legal community, but here was what struck me: the group’s dynamic was completely different from and better than the usual professional groups I speak to, which are typically more male than female and overwhelmingly white.

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