Author: Jack Marshall

Unethical Quote of the Month: Kamala Harris (and Other Notes From the CNN Interview)

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

“My values have not changed.”

—-Kamala Harris last night, repeating an obviously memorized response to anticipated questions by CNN’s Dana Bash about the many policy flip-flops she has executed since becoming the Democratic Party nominee.

This mantra was repeated three times in various forms, once prefaced by “let’s be clear.” To me the statement makes it clear that Harris’s “values” don’t include integrity or honesty. (I know: we already knew that.) Like her spectacular pretzelism of simultaneously running on “change” while maintaining that the Biden Administration she is part of has been all aces, this weasel-phrase is another transparently devious device to have it both ways.

Read her exchange with Bash about her sudden embrace of fracking. It makes no sense, especially in light of her later response that “her values have not changed” regarding the environment and that she still supports the Green New Deal, which mandates banning fracking.

A public official with consistent, sincerely held values does not and can not reverse herself on major issues unless significant new information and evidence has changed the problem. The significant new information that has caused Harris to flip-flop like the Flying Wallendas is polling that tell her that her previous positions on those issues will cost her votes. The values that have not changed are Harris’s ambition and her willingness to say and do anything to be elected. Those are not ethical values.

[I want to mention here that I took a break to have a cup of coffee and heard on the DirecTV NewsMix Channel that Trump and Vance are “pouncing” on Harris’s values line. This is why people accuse me of following Fox News talking points. Hey, if others come to the same conclusion I do, that just speaks well for them; it doesn’t mean I needed their help to figure it out.]

More on the interview:

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Comment of the Day: Curmie, On “On ‘the Truthful, Brief, 21-Point Biography of Kamala Harris’: Ten Ethics Observations”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

This submission by Ethics Alarms intermittent guest columnist Curmie created a categorization problem. Is it another installment of “Curmie’s Conjectures” (They are all here) ? Should I call it On “the Truthful, Brief, 21-Point Biography of Kamala Harris”: Ten Ethics Observations, Part 2? Oh, I don’t know: I wrote and posted Part I before 5 am this morning when I woke up after a nightmare and such minutia is beyond me until I get at least two more cups of coffee in me.

Curmie’s analysis (he only stooped to “But Trump!” once) is enhanced in my eyes at least by Curmie’s mention of Christine Vole, the treacherous witness of the prosecution in the classic Billy Wilder film version of “Witness for the Prosecution.” Now, heeeeeeeeeeere’s Curmie!

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Yesterday, in my first day of teaching (except as an invited guest) in over two years, I closed both my classes by urging skepticism, including of what I tell them. As an example of what I hope to get them to do, I used some of my current research: trying to determine who directed the production of a particular play. The play was staged before it was common practice to include the director’s name was on the program, in publicity materials, or in newspaper reviews.

Conventional wisdom, presented with only a single piece of evidence, suggests that the playwright directed his own play. Several prominent theatre historians all say so, most of them without citing any evidence at all. A couple of other scholars suggest, without explicitly arguing against the playwright as director, that the leading actress took over the function while the normal director for the company was ill and away from the city. They don’t provide much evidence, either.

Based on a number of factors, I think it’s about 98% certain that conventional wisdom is wrong, but 1). 98% is different from 100%, and 2). I’m not convinced of the counter-arguments, either. Maybe when I hear back from the company’s archivist my impressions will change. Maybe there isn’t enough primary source material to make a difference; maybe I’ll be able to prove (“beyond reasonable doubt”) that the playwright didn’t direct the play. Maybe I’ll be left with a speculative piece that claims “the preponderance of the evidence” is that he didn’t. Maybe I’ll end up agreeing with conventional wisdom. But I’m going to do everything I can to get all the evidence before finalizing my opinion, and I’m not going to say something is true if I only suspect that it might be.

CP, on the other hand, immediately loses all (and yes, I mean all) credibility by the claim that “you cannot deny the factual accuracy of what I am about to say.” Actually, yes, I can. Next.

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On “the Truthful, Brief, 21-Point Biography of Kamala Harris”: Ten Ethics Observations

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I don’t know who “Cynical Publius” is: does it matter? (Grok is the irritating Twitter/”X” AI bot, and I couldn’t stop it from photo-bombing my screen shot.)

Points:

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Ethics Observations On Nate Silver’s Latest Election Odds

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Nate Silver announced today that his famous election projection model shows Trump leading again, representing a nearly ten-point swing in Trump’s favor within two weeks. Remember, those aren’t poll percentages. They are the odds of each candidate winning the Presidency based on Nate’s mysterious weighting of polls and pollsters.

What is significant is that Silver detects movement in Trump’s direction now even after the mainstream media’s all-in efforts to promote Harris and assist her in the historically unethical “She isn’t what she is” campaign, the worst attempt at voter deception since 1840, when the Whigs sold Virginia squire William Henry Harrison as a back-woods rustic. Even after..

  • …a Democratic National Convention that was virtually all Trump-bashing throughout while painting Harris as the candidate of “joy.” Even after…
  • …Pundits and talking heads unconscionably morphed into Harris campaign surrogates, defending Tim Walz combat lies and twisting themselves into metaphorical pretzels to deny that Harris was handed the responsibility of dealing with the border crisis. Even after…
  • …Harris successfully avoided having to answer questions about her policy positions even once since Joe Biden was ousted from the presumed ticket.

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 14: Female Baseball Broadcasters

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

There is really no good excuse for this one, just reasons, but I’m trying, I really am.

Major League Baseball is making a concerted effort to get more women into the baseball broadcast booths for both radio and TV. I don’t know if this is a DEI-inspired initiative or just a rational response to a long-lasting gender prejudice. Either way, there is no reason why a woman who knows the game, has a pleasing voice and is an experienced broadcaster shouldn’t be doing play-by-play or color commentary.

I am not used to it, however; nobody is. Baseball games to loyal fans are the voices of Vin Scully, Earnie Harwell, Mel Allen, Curt Gowdy, Harry Carey, and the rest. It didn’t help that the first prominent national baseball female broadcaster was whoever the young softball star was who was put in a three-person ESPN Sunday Night Baseball booth next to Alex (yecchh!) Rodriguez several years ago. Cheatin’ A-Rod was terrible as always, but she was embarrassing: NOW should have petitioned to have her fired. She was cute, which I suspect was the major reason she got the job, but most of the time she was giggling or laughing. She set the cause of female baseball broadcasting back at least a decade.

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“Why does a public school herd its students into campaign events — replete with student musicians repurposing the school’s fight song to support a political candidate? It’s compulsory schooling and compulsory participation in politics. The purpose is openly political.”

Bloggress Ann Althouse, criticizing a Harris campaign stop at a high school in Georgia.

I am inclined to agree with Althouse and see this as totalitarian-ish indoctrination, but only because the public schools have been tending increasingly that way in recent years. It’s possible, I think, that the motivations of the teachers and the school were not partisan but educational. In a healthier era when parties didn’t try to demonize each other, a chance to experience a Presidential campaign up close would have been regarded as unique teaching opportunity. I know that in 1960, when I first began my obsession with U.S. Presidents, I would have loved to be in the middle of a candidate’s visit, and which candidate would have mattered to me not one whit.

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Labor Day Weekend Open Forum: Defenestration Edition!

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

This month, August, 2024, has already broken the all-time Ethics Alarms record for banned commenters with seven, the last kicked out late last night. There are still two days to go, so the chances look good for eight or more.

Appropriately, this morning I will be holding this month’s version of my two hour, Continuing Legal Education legal ethics Zoom seminar for TRT, “Professionalism, the Key to Ethical Lawyering and Trustworthy Justice.” It was my noting in this post that I taught this seminar from my home office 90 minutes after finding my wife of 43 years dead in our living room that partially triggered the barrage, it appears.

Frequent commenter and critic here Extradimensional Cephalopod usefully pointed out that commenters who thought (or claimed to think) I was an unfeeling Mike Dukakis clone (or something) couldn’t grasp the concept of professionalism because, well, they apparently weren’t professionals. However, these now banished Ethics Alarms visitors could have enlightened themselves had they availed themselves of the EA search engine, which would have revealed that as a professional ethics specialist, I have discussed and explained the concept repeatedly.

Other banned commenters, including the previous record-setting group just two months ago, in June, may have descended on Ethics Alarms because I decided to become active on my newish Twitter/”X” account by linking to the Ethics Alarms posts that concentrated on the 2024 Election Ethics Train Wreck and related matters, and a political party whose name I will not mention (and shouldn’t need to) will try to destroy anyone who dares to offer opposition to its quest for power.

Ask Robert Kennedy, Jr.

But I digress. This is your weekly space to discuss whatever ethics issues you want to discuss, even me, as long as you haven’t been banned.

I’ll be fulfilling my professional obligations….

A Canary Dies In The NYC Ethics Mine

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

In New York City, close to one million bus riders, about one out of every two passengers, board buses without paying. The loss of revenue for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has reached a critical stage, and yet the city has yet to do anything about it, because it doesn’t know what to do. It may be too late.

New York’s fare evasion problem is by far the worst in the U.S. and among the worst of any major city in the world. The Wuhan virus freakout, as it did to so many other aspects of our economy, culture and society, made the situation worse, in part because the city had the brilliant idea that it would help get through the lockdown to make bus rides free. People don’t easily go back to paying for what they have been told they can have for nothing.

This, ladies and germs, is cultural rot and ethics collapse. In 2022, the transit authority lost $315 million because of bus fare evasion and $285 million as a result of subway turnstile jumpers, according to a 2023 report commissioned by the M.T.A. Taxpayers foot the bill for the freeloaders, naturally.

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More Non-Traditional Casting Double Standards Hypocrisy: “Whitewashing ‘Little Shop of Horrors'”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Here is another installment of a frequent topic on Ethics Alarms: non-traditional casting, DEI casting, and and virtue-signaling stunt casting just to appear woke. The position here as a long-time stage director who has been responsible for some audacious non-traditional casting in my time (I once cast the role Cole Porter with a woman) remains unchanged: if it works and the audience enjoys the show as much or more than it would have with a traditional casting choice, then all is well. (Full disclosure: casting Cold Porter as female did NOT work. At all…)

The mission of any stage production is to be fair to the show’s creators and make the production as effective theatrically as possible, not to make political or social statements that get in the way. (Prime example of the latter: this.)

Curmie sent me a link to “Yes, You Can Whitewash ‘Little Shop of Horrors’, But Please Don’t” at Chris Peterson’s Onstage blog. I love the musical (my old high school doubles tennis partner, Frank Luz, co-starred as the sadistic dentist in the original off-Broadway production and the cast album) based on the wonderful 1960 Roger Corman camp movie classic. I thought its creators would revive the genre, but Disney snapped them up (“The Little Mermaid”; “Beauty and the Beast”) and then half the team, Howard Ashman, died.

Peterson cites the license-holders’ quite reasonable casting note:

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The Great Stupid Rolls On: Remarkably, “Finger Gun 5” Surpasses the Original and All the Previous Sequels In Cruelty and Hysteria

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This is where the “Do Something!” mentality regarding guns gets us.

Ethics Alarms has covered four previous instances where demented and incompetent school officials in Tennessee have yielded to panic as the justification for policy and expelled—not merely suspended, but expelled—-for a whole year, a 10-year-old boy after he pointed his finger in the shape of a gun and made mock “machine gun” noises.

I reviewed the history and the abject stupidity of this plot last September in “That Bomb “Finger Gun” Should Have Never Been Made At All: How Did We End Up With ‘Finger Gun 4’??” and I am not feeling all that well this morning, so excuse me for not rehashing this idiocy again: that post is pretty thorough. It recalled the original school administrator finger gun hysteric’s “comment “justification” that it was important for an unlicensed finger gun wielder to “understand the implications of the gesture”, to which I responded as I ruled the school’s conduct child abuse,

What implications of the gesture? That he is about to shoot bullets out of his finger? That he intends to kill someone with all the firepower an unarmed 6-year-old can muster? That he is making a mimed reference to a Connecticut school massacre he probably doesn’t know a thing about? Why should it matter what his “intent is? It’s a hand gesture! It isn’t vulgar or threatening except to silly phobics in the school system.

and concluded, focusing on “Finger Gun 4,” in which that idiot school administrator cited the current “climate” as justifying the suspension of another six-year-old,

Here’s the climate: teachers and administrators see their roles as cultural revolutionaries and believe schools should be turned into breeding grounds for future progressive voters who think the United States is racist, abortion is a right, open borders are compassionate, income redistribution is essential, reparations must be made, and guns are evil, along with whites, men, and Republicans. The implications are that no responsible parent should entrust their kids to public school.

The justification for this instance of “Do something!” grandstanding is a new state law that had only recently gone into effect. It was passed after a former student shot and killed six people at The Covenant School in Nashville (Look! The Barn Door Fallacy!) and requires students to be expelled for at least a year if they “threaten mass violence” on school property. Of course, no one in their right mind thinks that a 10-year-old making his hand into a gun-like shape is seriously threatening anyone, but these people are not in their right minds.

They will, of course, all be voting Democrat in November.

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Pointer: Reason