Month: April 2025

Law vs. Ethics (Again): The AP Wins Its Lawsuit

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

When the Associated Press refused to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” in its style book, the White House excluded the once-essential news organization from its press briefings.The AP filed a lawsuit arguing that this was a violation of the First Amendment by the Trump Administration, as an infringement on the Freedom of the Press and the first Amendment.

Yesterday U.S. District Court Judge Trevor McFadden ruled in the AP’s favor, granting the AP’s motion for a preliminary injunction. Judge McFadden acknowledged that there is no constitutional right to attend a press briefing at the White House:

[T]his injunction does not limit the various permissible reasons the Government may have for excluding journalists from limited-access events. It does not mandate that all eligible journalists, or indeed any journalists at all, be given access to the President or nonpublic government spaces. It does not prohibit government officials from freely choosing which journalists to sit down with for interviews or which ones’ questions they answer. And it certainly does not prevent senior officials from publicly expressing their own views……[But]while the AP does not have a constitutional right to enter the Oval Office, it does have a right to not be excluded because of its viewpoint….

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Comment of the Day: “How Should We Deal With Friends Who Believe Ridiculous Conspiracy Theories?”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Another epic and irritatingly rational Comment of the Day from Extradimensional Cephalopod, this one on the thorny topic of discussing unlikely conspiracy theories with true believers. Almost all of E.C.’s contributions to Ethics Alarms topics are helpful and impressive; this is one of his—its?—best.

This is Extradimensional Cephalopod’s Comment of the Day on the post, “How Should We Deal With Friends Who Believe Ridiculous Conspiracy Theories?”:

Your friend has arrived at a conclusion that is based on, generously speaking, an implausible interpretation of the evidence surrounding the Titanic’s disaster. If he were looking at the evidence with no biases, he presumably would not have come to this conclusion. Therefore, I suspect that he has either an emotional attachment to the conclusion, or an emotional attachment to the process he used to reach it.

An person’s attachment to a conclusion might be as personal as a belief about what that conclusion says about them or someone they respect, or it might be as impersonal as preferring a more pleasant view of the world, such as one where disasters don’t just happen by accident.

An attachment to the reasoning process may be based on a fear of not having a good alternative reasoning process to turn to, a fear of what conclusions those alternative processes might lead to, or (similarly) an attachment to another conclusion that they arrived at through their current process. For example: “I have to believe this person wearing a cape is a bad person, because if people who aren’t bad can wear capes, that means that maybe I did a bad thing by attacking those other people for wearing capes.”

I’d like to talk with your friend and see how his worldview compares to what I suspect it is. My preliminary hypothesis is that your friend’s subconscious reasoning process is loosely based on the following premises, which I am not rendering judgment on at this time:

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“Why aren’t progressives on Trump‘s side here? The issues of consumerism, labor conditions, slavery, and environmentalism are all on Trump‘s side, and we’ve got progressives crying over the drop in stock prices.”

—Bloggress Ann Althouse, neatly noting, regarding the Axis’s fury over tariffs, why Trump’s tariffs  against China, the Left’s hypocrisy and incoherence.

Gee, thanks, Ann! I’ve been asking this exact question of my various Trump Deranged relatives and friends, though not on social media. No answers, of course, except this one, which isn’t exactly ennobling: “Because I just lost thousands of dollars in the value of my stock portfolio!” Wait, I thought it’s the bad guys that only care about their own wealth and everyone else be damned.

Ann adds Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s statement earlier this week: “I’m not happy with what’s going on in the market today, but the distribution of equities across households? The top 10% of Americans own 88% of equities. Eighty-eight percent of the stock market. The next 40% owns 12%. The bottom 50% has debt. They have credit card bills. They rent their homes. They have auto loans. And we’ve got to give them some relief.”

Political parties have never been known for integrity, but in a very long time of watching the Donkeys and the Elephants, I have never seen a party descend into such complete self-destructive chaos as today’s Democratic party.

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Ethics Quiz: The Good Deportable Immigrant

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The New York Times has a variation on its routine “Won’t someone please think of the good illegal immigrants’ children?” sob story; this time it’s “Won’t somebody please think of the good green card conditions violator’s disabled American friend?”

For four years, Alfredo Orellana, 31, has been a caregiver and pal for Luke Ferris, a 28-year-old with severe autism. “The pair worked out at the gym, got tacos and played video games together. They exchanged elbow bumps,” the Times says.

Awww!

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How Should We Deal With Friends Who Believe Ridiculous Conspiracy Theories?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

A friend and business associate just stunned me by professing belief in a conspiracy theory that I had never encountered before. He doesn’t see it as a theory, either: he is certain that it is historical fact, that it has been covered up by historians and other malign forces, and that eventually it will all be revealed.

This one is, I am quite certain, bonkers, just as bonkers as the Truther claim that Bush and Cheney were really behind the attack on the Twin Towers. My cognitive dissonance scale is in revolt: I have to trust and rely on this individual, whom I respect and admire. Yet embracing something this wacky is a red flag. A big one.

The short version of the conspiracy is that the calamitous sinking of “Titanic” in 1912 was secretly orchestrated by financier J.P. Morgan. His motive was to remove three powerful businessmen—Benjamin Guggenheim, Isidor Straus, and John Jacob Astor—who opposed the formation of the Federal Reserve.

A related conspiracy theory is that as part of an insurance fraud scheme, Morgan had “Titanic” secretly switched with one of its sister ships, “Olympic.” That one is, if possible, even wackier than the murder plot, and like it, the theory is easy to debunk. Both ships had distinct construction identification numbers or yard numbers that were stamped on many of their parts, including their wood paneling. “Olympic’s” yard number was 400 and “Titanic’s” was 401. Many artifacts bearing the number 401 have been raised from the wreck of “Titanic,” and items auctioned off after “Olympic” was retired in 1935 show the number 400. Also, I can’t figure out why switching nearly identical ships would benefit anyone, but we don’t need to go into that.

As for the murder plot—

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Honors Inflation In The Age of “The Great Stupid”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Today we were given the “historic” news that Billie Jean King has become The First Female Athlete to Be Honored With A Star On The Hollywood Walk of Fame!!!! That’s funny…I always thought the Hollywood landmark and tourist attraction was designed to honor entertainers, and not athletes. But for some reason—in fact, the reasons will become obvious shortly—the Walk of Fame added a Sports Entertainment category in 2021. Few noticed.

The Walk is a fake honor anyway. Its approximately 2,800 five-pointed terrazzo-and-brass stars are embedded in the sidewalks along 15 blocks of Hollywood Boulevard and three blocks of Vine Street. The star began being installed in 1960 and are supposed to be are monuments to achievement in the particular categories in the entertainment industry. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce chooses who gets a star based on mysterious criteria when a celebrity or his or her sponsors will fund the creation, installation and maintenance of a star. Currently, the price for the honor is $75,000. The Chamber obviously calculated that sports stars are rich and have big egos and fan bases. That means that they deserve to be considered “entertainers.”

How long before the Hollywood Chamber decides to install stars for TV news pundits on the Walk? Politicians! Murderers! O.J. could have three stars: athlete, movie actor, and for being the most entertaining defendant in a murder trial ever.

So far, no white male athletes have been deemed sufficiently entertaining to rate a star. The current ranks of starred athletes number three: Billie Jean, Carl Weathers (Apollo Creed in “Rocky” and an actor whose accomplishments as an athlete amount to an undistinguished career in professional football), and Michael Strahan, a better NFL player (he made the NFL Hall of Fame) and successful TV host.

Depressed Ethics Considerations, April 8, 2025

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Today is my late wife’s birthday, and I’m surprised how much it is affecting me. And I really can’t afford to be off my metaphorical game right now.

Here’s a Facebook post from another once reasonable, calm, considered lawyer Facebook Friend: “We entered The Great War 108 years ago today. Don’t tell The Orange Dick-tater that name or he’ll get jealous and want to start an even Greater War.” Another anti-Trump warrior—and former staffer of mine— claimed that AG Bondi has announced a new policy allowing the Feds to “seize” the gun of anyone deemed to be a “threat.” I couldn’t find any news reports on such a development. “They said the Democrats were coming for their guns!” she wrote in high dudgeon today. The only gun policy development, posted on today by WaPo, is “Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Monday that she would rescind a Biden-era gun policy that yanked licenses from federally licensed firearm dealers if they intentionally falsified records or sold weapons without running a background check.” That’s deliberate fake news. The Biden gun policy yanked licenses from federally licensed firearm dealers if they were deemed to have intentionally falsified records or sold weapons without running a background check under a “no-tolerance” perspective. Opponents said that this would cause dealers to lose their licenses for paperwork errors.

It is increasingly difficult to find straightforward, honest and complete reporting.

Meanwhile,

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Comment of the Day: “Tariffs Have Been Needed For Decades”

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

I meant to post this retort to Steve Witherspoon’s guest column yesterday (as it was “Tariffs Monday” at Ethics Alarms, but was waylaid by life. Canadian EA correspondent Humble Talent began a long and lively debate thread with his Comment of the Day, and I encourage you to read it all, here. Meanwhile, here’s Humble…

Oh! I almost forgot: I read another anti-tariff piece today titled “I Shot the Tariff.” I should have thought of that. Phooey.

…

I’m always disappointed when there’s something that I’m actually familiar with in the media, because a lot of the media smudging that happens around the areas that they’re familiar with stand out like a sore thumb.

Tariffs have been one of those things. And this attack on Free Trade is another.

You want to know what’s bullshit? The idea that any nation can pull of autarky (“a system where a country or region aims for self-sufficiency, minimizing or eliminating international trade and relying primarily on its own resources and production.”) No one can pull off autarky and maintain efficiency, product diversity, and quality of life. You will eventually need to trade for something.

You want an example for America? Potash. There are exactly three active potash mines in America, because the resource effectively does not exist in America. You import 96% of potash used for crop fertilizer. Without potash imports, you would be unable to add phosphorus to your crop input chemistry, and your yields would suffer. Which would then impact your already insufficient food production system. Your people would literally starve. Which means there will be trade.

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I’d Say This Shows a Serious Ethics Deficit On the Leftward Side of the Ideological Scale, No? I Mean, I Could Be Wrong….

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Rutgers University’s Social Perception Lab and The Network Contagion Research Institute performed a survey to assess support for political violence in the U.S. Among the findings: 55% of those who identify as progressive said murdering Trump can be justified. Forty-eight per cent said killing Elon Musk might be reasonable as well. Of the group surveyed as a whole, 38% said it was at least arguably justifiable to murder Trump with 31% feeling the same about Musk.

“The findings signal a threat to political stability and public safety,” NCRI/Rutgers concluded after thinking really hard about it. The NCRI/Rutgers survey also found that 39.8% of respondents said that they could justify destroying a Tesla dealership to protest DOGE.

Be proud, Democrats! You now are the party of violent morons.

David Winston’s opinion piece for Roll-Call accurately describes how dangerous this kind of “resistance” culture is for the party, never mind for its hit targets. He writes in part,

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The National Parks’ Dumb Response To Trump’s “No DEI” EO Explains So, So Many Things…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The National Park Service website has an Underground Railroad page. It used to feature a large photograph of the remarkable female “conductor,” Harriet Tubman (left above). The page began, “The Underground Railroad — the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, through the end of the Civil War — refers to the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage.” But some boob or combination of boobs thought that the Trump EOs and other measures aimed at purging divisive, partisan and often discriminatory “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs from the government, education and other private institutions mandated eliminating straightforward and historically accurate information. It wasn’t just the National Parks Service, of course. The Defense Department also eliminated many pages that celebrated important minority veterans, such as civil rights champion and icon, Jackie Robinson.

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