Month: September 2024

Ethics Quiz: Sympathy For Really Stupid Accident Victims

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

That’s a scene above from Quentin Tarntino’s “Death Proof,” and a dumber movie you are never likely to encounter. The clip is there not to celebrate the movie, originally half of a misconceived bomb called “Grind House,” but to illustrate the real and incredibly stupid phenomenon called “car surfing,” which has had a recent resurgence among teens thanks to social media.

15-year-old Cyprus High School (Utah) sophomore Ava Broadhead is now in a coma after she fell off the top of a moving car. She was car-surfing, and “unfortunately, pavement isn’t as forgiving and the victim hit their head,” a police officer told the news media. Ava suffered massive head injuries and faces a long recovery, with the chances of regaining her previous level of brain function slim.

A GoFundMe page seeks donations for Anna, stating, “Your generous donations will go directly toward her medical care and the resources needed to support her recovery. Any amount, no matter how small, will make a huge difference in Ava’s journey. If you are unable to contribute financially, we ask that you keep Ava in your prayers and share her story to raise awareness about the real dangers of car surfing.”

Who has have explained to them the dangers of riding on the outside of a moving car?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

How much compassion and sympathy, if any, is appropriate in response to someone harming themselves by engaging in such reckless behavior?

This kind of story always puts me in a quandary; I think I have posted about my dilemma before. My son nearly got himself killed or crippled a few times, although never doing anything quite as stupid as car-surfing. I note that the Go-Fund-Me page has raised only $6,000 so far, and I strongly suspect the weak response is because many have the same reflex reaction I do, which is that I’d rather give money to the victims of misfortunes they didn’t almost literally ask for. Anna’s story reminded me of the July Fourth accident this year when an idiot put fireworks on his head and set them off.

Of course Anna gets some points off her Darwin Awards score by virtue of her tender age…but how many? She devastated her own life while immersing her family in tragedy and the crushing burden of caring for her. It wasn’t intentional, but a drunk getting behind the wheel of a car isn’t intentionally trying to kill anyone, either.

I know that this self-inflicted tragedy will naturally cause many to blame social media. The suspicion lingers, however, that anyone foolish enough to try car-surfing is going to be disaster-prone one way or another.

Perplexing Ethics Quote of the Week: Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“I have never trusted the people who want to be President, and I have despaired over the structural problem that we’re always stuck having to vote for somebody who has strongly desired the presidency.”

—-Ann Althouse, in a very strange blog post in which she sympathizes with Kamala Harris for what Althouse sees as a weariness and dislike of campaigning.

I suppose it is good to know that Althouse doesn’t comprehend the nature of leadership, leaders and the people who aspire to be leaders, but as someone who has studied leadership for a long, long time as well as having done my share of leading (and leadership is one of the major topics of this blog), I must say that her comment is perplexing to say the least.

Leadership is a special role that requires special traits, talents and abilities, and one of those traits is believing oneself to be a leader while being willing to accept the responsibility leadership requires. The greater the responsibilities a leadership position entails, the more essential it is that a leader be confident in his or her ability to meet those responsibilities, and seek the burden they confer.

Stating that one does not trust people who want to be President to be President is like saying you only trust a doctor who never wanted to be a doctor. It makes no sense. Every one of our best and most acclaimed Presidents demonstrated their leadership abilities at a young age and actively sought leadership, proceeding to the next stage after demonstrated success. We have had a few reluctant Presidents, all Vice-Presidents thrust into a job they didn’t expect, and some, notably Chester A. Arthur, managed to overcome their lack of an appetite for leadership to do a workmanlike job. Other so-called “accidental Presidents,” notably Teddy Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, were natural leaders and thrilled to become President.

There are plenty of reasons to distrust the so-called “leader type.” Most, if not all are narcissists. Power does corrupt, and many who seek power and who are skilled in using it are also often drawn to the abuse of power for to less than admirable motives. Nevertheless, leadership requires confidence, a willingness to accept accountability, the courage to take risks, and a belief in the likelihood of success based on a history of success. Not wanting to lead strongly suggests an absence of these essential leadership traits.

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Verdict: When Your Town Is Being Overrun, It’s Not Racist To Use The Term ‘Overrun.’” [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Proving that even banned commenters have their uses, Chris Marschner offered a persuasive and enlightening rebuttal of the contention by a quickly-banned new commenter here that accounts of the problems visited on Springfield, Ohio by an overwhelming influx of Haitian immigrants were tainted by racism.

Chris’s Comment of the Day combines two comments that were piggy-backed in the thread, and here they are, inspired by the post, “Ethics Verdict: When Your Town Is Being Overrun, It’s Not Racist To Use The Term ‘Overrun.’”

***

Reuters did a good job spinning the actual data. Medicaid skyrocketing in the last three years; wage growth grew only after the pandemic and dropped faster than a neighboring town’s starting in 2022. Housing costs rose three times faster than in the US as a whole. Unemployment has been rising faster than in neighboring areas and the US as a whole.

Reuters makes the point that wage growth stayed above 6% longer than Dayton or the overall economy, but failed to say that it became more volatile as migrants moved in, dropping faster and farther than either Dayton or the US.

The story also makes statements like “false claims” by residents at community meetings and white supremacist protests during a jazz festival. Both statements are inflammatory and included no evidence to support the claims made.

Reuters has a progressive bias in all its reporting. Reuters wrote:
“More recently, Vance and other Republicans have amplified false claims aired by some residents at weekly city commission meetings. City commissioners in their public comments have pushed back, noting that the vast majority of Haitians are in the country legally and have a right to live where they choose”

The first statement states that locals are liars and the last statement fails to acknowledge that their legal status is exactly what the complaint is about. If Joe Biden had made an executive order giving temporary legal status for anyone in the world, anyone showing up would be here legally. At issue is the administration’s role in creating a massive influx of people who have not had to go through our normal processes to ensure they will not be a charge on society.

They continued,

“It is still a jarring increase from around 3,500 in just a few years – too fast to be reflected yet in Census data and the equivalent of 1.6 million or so new arrivals to New York City. There are growing pains – indeed outright tension – as a result, with sometimes ugly rhetoric at city commission open comment periods. A small group of white supremacists marched through town during a jazz festival in mid-August. For many local civic and business leaders, however, the advantages of having more people to fill jobs, start businesses, and buy goods and services are not lost.”

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Our Objective News Media: ‘Trump May Have Caused His Own Assassination Attempt’

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

That was USA Today’s reporting of the Trump assassination attempt yesterday. (I haven’t checked to see if it has been changed.)

The sub-head is a non-sequitur unless the reader is supposed to conclude that there is a causal connection between Trump’s Truth Social post, Vance’s provocative comments on Sunday Morning TV, and the later assassination attempt.

There is no defending such blatant partisan hackery from a news source. The fact that this nonsense could make it to the USA Today site without a sane professional putting a stop to it is damning. Are we supposed to conclude that the shooter was an offended Taylor Swift fan? USA Today might as well have written, “The incident occurred that same day that Trump had hush puppies for breakfast.”

Again, this is how you try rig an election, at least if you’re aiming at the moron vote—which is, sadly, considerable.

_______________

Pointer: Willem Reese

Observations on Tim Walz’s Advice On How Democrats Should Go About “Winning the Battle” of the 2024 Presidential Election

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Walz, speaking at a Harris rally in Wisconsin, told the faithful that the key to a Democratic victory was their “trying to have that hard conversation in the produce aisle, with the person you saw there at the grocery store, and ask, ‘have you voted yet?”

Observations:

1. If someone I didn’t know were to ask me that “in the produce aisle,” my first response would be, “Who the hell are you?” and my follow-up would be “Bite me!”

2. If someone I knew asked me that as anything but incidental chit-chat preceded by “How’s the family?” and “Are you too disappointed in the Red Sox?,” I’d answer, “No, because I believe everyone should vote on election day unless it’s physically impossible to do so.”

3. The political Left’s fondness for trying to bully or harass people into accepting or adopting their political views is a marker of the totalitarian turn the whole port side of the political spectrum has taken. Maxine Waters urged Democrats to confront Trump officials when they were with their families or walking down the street. Black Lives Matter activists intimidadted diners to profess support for their racist scam “or else.” Starbucks briefly tried to get its barristas to engage customers in debates over social issues. Democrats also have issued guides to haranguing one’s family at Thanksgiving dinner. Has anyone on the political Right advocated this obnoxious and offensive strategy? If so, I missed it.

4. Several wags have noted that the grocery store should be the last place Democrats try to recruit voters…

5. Wow, is Harris-Walz really using “A New Way” as a slogan? How generic and clichéd can you get? In Robert Redford’s “The Candidate,” about the packaging and disillusionment of a Kennedy-esque Senatorial candidate, he was saddled with the fatuous “There’s got to be a better way” as his empty mantra. That movie was made in 1972. Using an old slogan doesn’t exactly make “A New Way” seem very sincere or genuine.

[WordPress wants me to tag this post “Marcel Walz” and “Frightfest.” Huh?]

Supporting Abortion Is the Most Unethical Reason To Vote For a U.S. Presidential Candidate Since the Dixiecrats, and Maybe Worse

/ Jack Marshall / 57 Comments

Were it not for the apparently huge number of women willing to make a radical incompetent, Kamala Harris, the leader of the nation because she favors allowing mothers to kill their unborn children at will, the Democrats would be facing the prospect of a landslide loss come November. Almost every other major demographic group has moved toward Trump and for a very obvious reason: the Biden Presidency has been a disaster, and the Democratic Party has abandoned any fealty to American values, principles and democracy in pursuit of unbridled power. Yet a growing number of voters now say abortion is their top issue in 2024. Amazing. Amazing and indefensible morally and ethically.

Think about that. Abortion—killing unborn human beings—is the most important issue for millions of voters. This isn’t a virtue or a process embraced by admirable cultures: the Soviet Union used abortion as a primary form of birth control, and so has China. These are nations that do not value human life as our founding documents declare that our unique society does. Abortion doesn’t make America stronger economically, or keep the world safe from ruthless foreign regimes, or help small businesses thrive, or make the nation energy independent; it doesn’t make our public education any better, reduce crime, drug addiction and disease. In the vast majority of cases, abortion accomplishes two objectives: it allows women an extra level of protection if their sexual activity results in an inconvenient pregnancy, and it lets mothers employ medical professionals to kill their unwanted children before the law protects those innocent lives.

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Accountability, Please. If or When Trump Loses the 2024 Election And Says It Was Rigged, Ethics Villain ABC Will Join In The Chorus That His Claim Is “Baseless” [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

During the (one hopes) final 2024 Presidential Debate, GOP nominee Donald Trump stated that “Crime here is up and through the roof, despite their fraudulent statements that they made. Crime in this country is through the roof.” Since Democratic appointee Kamala Harris was indicating disagreement, ABC moderator David Muir rushed to her aid, saying, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”

As you know, Muir believed his role in the debate was to”factcheck” Trump while letting Harris declare outright falsehood if she chose to. This time, Trump tried to rebut Muir, saying “…the FBI — they were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud. Just like their number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud.”

Well, as usual Trump misused the word “fraud,”the FBI didn’t issue the jobs report, and if you think he is Satan, or Hitler, or Godzilla, you are not inclined to believe anything he says, but Trump was right and Muir was wrong in addition to being a biased and unethical debate moderator. Newly released data from the Dept. of Justice this week backed Trump. Okay, the crime didn’t literally break through any roofs, so I’m sure that characterization by Trump goes into the Washington Post’s Trump lies database, but still… This was DOJ’s survey from Bureau of Justice statistics  that includes crimes that may not have been reported to police. The annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) showed total instances of reported violent crime — including rape, robbery and aggravated assault — is up from 5.6 per 1,000 in 2020 to 8.7 per 1,000 in 2023.

The highest recent rate of violent crime during the Biden years was in 2022, when the survey counted 9.8 instances per 1,000 people over the age of 12 being victims, Rape increased from 1.2 incidents per 1,000 in 2020 to 1.7 in 2023. Robbery rose from 1.6 per 1,000 in 2020 to 2.6 per 1,000 in 2023. Aggravated assault rose from 2.9 per 1,000 in 2020 to 4.5 per 1,000 in 2023. As Crime Prevention Research Center president John Lott tried to explain in a piece published after Muir’s deliberately misleading “factcheck,”

Here’s the full report, and like so many statistics, one can spin and arrange the numbers to make various points, some contradictory. What you can’t do with them, at least ethically, if you are an alleged journalist is interrupt a Presidential debate to make one candidate look dishonest in front of a national audience because you and your employers want his opponent to win the election.

Muir and ABC should suffer serious consequences for their conduct, but they won’t. At very least, both should correct the false impression left by Muir and apologize to the public, and not just in a quiet tweet. That won’t happen either.

ABC is biased, corrupt and untrustworthy.

______________________

Source: Legal Insurrection

Ethics Verdict: When Your Town Is Being Overrun, It’s Not Racist To Use The Term “Overrun.”

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

How Orwellian of CNN! When former Trump administration official Tricia McLaughlin explained why residents of Springfield, Ohio was being “overrun” by Haitian immigrants, “CNN NewsNight With Abby Phillip” host Phillip insisted that using words like “overrun” was “part of the problem.” Part of what problem? The problem of letting the American public know exactly what is happening in their country as a result of Biden Administration open border policies? Yes, that is a problem for Democrats, and I can certainly understand how our Big Brother party wants to eliminate words that can accurately explain the situation.

What is the nice word for what’s going on when 20,000 recent immigrants from a third world country and hopelessly messed up culture descend on a struggling town of just 60,000? That’s a 30% influx of completely unassimilated foreigners in a town that is having trouble caring for the people living there already. Is the town being “visited”? No, these arrivals are planning on staying: Springfield must seem like Disney World to someone from Haiti. Are the Haitians enhancing the town? No, because such a large group of new residents lacking familiarity with English and other cultural norms can’t avoid causing serious problems, and they are. “Overrun” is as good a word for what’s happening as I can think of.

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The Legitimate and Important Ethics Conflict Behind the Springfield Cat-Eating Controversy

/ Jack Marshall / 54 Comments

As he does so often, Donald Trump accepted something he read or heard as gospel truth and repeated it as fact, this time in a Presidential debate, and was promptly ‘factchecked” and subsequently ridiculed. The back-ground: a large number of Haitian “migrants,” who may or may not be here legally, seem to have ended up in Springfield, Ohio. One resident complained that they were eating pet geese and cats, her claim went viral, and the meme-makers have had a field day…

…as you can see.

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Opera Ethics! A Diva Attack In Seoul

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

Yikes. A performer who did this in one of my shows would have to enter the witness protection program, because I would be hunting her down. With a crossbow.

South Korean tenor Alfred Kim, responding to uproarious applause, was performing an encore of “E lucevan le stelle,” a famous aria in the third act of Puccini’s “Tosca” at an opera house in Seoul. His co-star, celebrated soprano Angela Gheorghiu who was singing the title role, marched onstage and demanded that he stop.

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