Author: Jack Marshall

Ethics Heroes: New York Times Readers

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Who would have thought that New York Times readers could do such a terrific Peter Sellers impression?

Paul Krugman, once a Nobel Prize winner, now the very model of a modern progressive hack, issued his contribution to the current “Protect Joe Biden!” hysteria among pundits and journalists. It’s called “Why You Shouldn’t Obsess About the National Debt,” and if this won’t get the Nobel people to demand their prize in economics back, nothing will.

The intellectual dishonesty of the piece is stunning even for Krugman—I remember how an old friend favorably posted one of Krugman’s columns to Facebook and the scales fell from my eyes making me realize that the old friend was an idiot and had always been one—and the rationalizations he uses to shrug away the $34 trillion national debt are breathtaking in their audacity. Some examples:

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Saturday Ethics Inventory, 6/8/2024

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Once again, a pile-up on Route Ethics has me doing another Saturday multi-story post. These take twice as long as most posts to prepare, and generally attract less than average traffic and minimal comments. Nonetheless, they are necessary, for me if not anyone else, just to come closer to covering the topic.

Sooooooooooo,

1. Starting off lightly, with more evidence from “The Ethicist” that people are indeed getting ethically dumber: Today’s inquirer literally asks, “Is lying ethical?”

2. The D.E.I. Ethics Train Wreck hasn’t stopped yet, Harvard notwithstanding. The University of California, Los Angeles, was accused by a whistleblower of discriminating on the basis of race in violation of California and U.S. law. Black and Latino applicants. it was alleged, are held to lower standards than whites and Asians on exams and other measurements of competence. The dean of the medical school, Steven Dubinett, denied the claims and said that students and faculty “are held to the highest standards of academic excellence.” Hiring and admissions decisions are “based on merit,” not race, “in a process consistent with state and federal law.” Oopsie! Dubinett himself directs a center within the medical school, the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, that includes an illegal a race-based fellowship.

3. More on UCLA: You can read about how far UCLA’s medical school has fallen here. The take-away from the report is that both admissions and graduation standards are being lowered for minorities. One professor claimed that “a student in the operating room could not identify a major artery when asked, then berated the professor for putting her on the spot.” “I don’t know how some of these students are going to be junior doctors,” another UCLA professor said. “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”

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Ethics Observations On the “Shitposter’s” Scoop

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Last night I saw this story in the New York Post, relayed by conservative provocateur Ace of Spades:

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan revealed Friday that a Facebook user claiming to be a “cousin” of a juror in former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial suggested he had advanced knowledge of last week’s guilty verdict. 

“Today, the Court became aware of a comment that was posted on the Unified Court System’s public Facebook page and which I now bring to your attention,” Merchan wrote in a letter to Trump attorney Todd Blanche and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. 

“In the comment, the user, ‘Michael Anderson,’ states: ‘My cousin is a juror and says Trump is getting convicted … Thank you folks for all your hard work!!! ….’” the judge explained. 

The story also reveals that “Michael Anderson” is a self-admitted “shitposter,” someone who uses social media to spread falsehoods and derail serious discussions on politics and other matters.

Hmmmm.

So the guy, if he is a guy, who revealed this supposed conspiracy to rig the jury verdict against Donald Trump has no credibility at all. He’s a lying asshole and proud of it—you know, like Michael Cohen.

It is only responsible for the judge to reveal this, and for an investigation to take place. This, in turn, will probably give “Michael Anderson” the fifteen minutes of fame he craves, and inspire more assholes to enter the wonderful, profitable, destructive field of “shitposting.”

Meanwhile, I saw MAGA types all over the web last night calling for the trial verdict to be abandoned based on this almost certain trolling effort, thus making themselves look like gullible fools, and confirmation bias victims.

Is this a great country or what?

My Challenge to Tom Selleck: I Dare You to Put This Story On “Blue Bloods”!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Let me summarize:

1. In the summer of 2022, approximately 10,000 NYPD officers took the exam to get promoted to sergeant—you know, the one they’re always talking about on “Bluebloods,” now heading into its 15th and final season, Tom Selleck’s paene to NYC’s men and women in blue. This was an unprecedented number because the pandemic lockdown had delayed the exam for two years. The exam was offered in four sessions over two days to accommodate the unusually large number.

2. An investigation from the City’s Department of Investigation has determined that about 1,200 of the cops who participated cheated.

3. Those officers brought cell phones with cameras into the exam and participated in group chats to help each other through the test. They discussed possible answers and offered advice to each other, with those who had already taken the exam on the first day helping out the officers taking the exam on the second day.

4. This, of course, was explicitly forbidden, as the officers were told to place their cell phones in plastic bags under their chairs. But more than10% violated that rule.

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Ethics Dunce, Redux: Justice Clarence Thomas

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In a new filing released today, Justice Clarence Thomas amended his financial disclosure for 2019 to note that he “inadvertently omitted” reporting two extravagant vacations paid for by conservative billionaire Harlan Crow, one to Indonesia and the other to the Bohemian Grove, an all-male retreat in northern California. Just slipped his mind! Hey, it could happen to anybody! Who hasn’t completely forgotten about a luxury trip they have enjoyed on the dime of a politically active tycoon? Heck, I know I just remembered one today, after I read this story. Well, it’s all better now; Thomas just retroactively corrected his lie of omission from five years ago.

Anyone who accepts this is ethically estopped from complaining about the White House editing Joe Biden’s blabberings to make him sound less like he belongs in a hospice.

Pro Publica correctly notes that last year, when these and other examples unusual largess from Crow—like paying for Thomas’s mother’s house—were revealed, Thomas’s “Justice Thomas’s lawyers issued a statement on the Justice’s behalf. saying that the allegations were untrue.

Like all lawyers, Supreme Court Justices are prohibited from lying in the course of their professional conduct. The prohibition on lawyer conduct is serious, but even more serious for judges, and extra-special, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious serious for the highest judges in the land.

Thomas is a disgrace, as I have said before.

But at least he never let his wife fly a 250-year-old historical flag that some idiots used to express their own political opinions…

Is “The Great Stupid” Finally Receding? There Is Hope: From Harvard!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

What a freak Ethel Merman was! She was 68 when she performed that madly optimistic Anthony Newley-Leslie Bricusse song, one of my all-time favorites (Newley sang it better).

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced that it will stop requiring a diversity, inclusion, and belonging statement as part of its faculty hiring process. Dean of Faculty Affairs and Planning Nina Zipser announced that the change was made because existing requirements were “too narrow in the information they attempted to gather” and potentially confusing for international candidates. Sure. This is a face-saving explanation, because Harvard’s DEI obsession has lost the staggering school alumni support, donations, prestige and credibility, and also because DEI is a fad that couldn’t stand up to long term scrutiny.

It’s also discriminatory.

And stupid.

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Weird Tales of “The Great Stupid,” Beauty Pageant Division

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Sara Milliken, 23, was named “Miss Alabama” when she was selected by judges as the #1 beauty in the regional semi-finals of the National American Miss pageant. I find myself at a loss to explain or analyze this. Beauty pageants were always odd, and in 2024 they are anachronistic ghosts of long-dead cultural attitudes and tastes that never made much sense.

So end them, for heaven’s sake. If they have to stoop to stunts like calling a morbidly obese woman the most beautiful woman on the stage, what’s the point?

In response to Sara’s victory and the entirely predictable tsunami of ridicule it has attracted on social media, various apologists have raved about Sarah’s “inner beauty.” Okay, then call them “inner beauty pageants,” have all the contestants wear burlap sacks instead of gowns, ban make-up and styled hair—heck, maybe tell contestants they can’t bathe for a moth—and stop pretending that by any American cultural norm or standard a grossly obese young woman heading for a heart attack before she’s 40 is “beautiful.” And exactly what message does this silly result send to young women? Traditional beauty pageants were condemned for promoting eating disorders. What does this kind of pageant promote?

The political-correctness mandates suffocating the news media into ludicrousness was on special display with this story. The Daily Mail’s intellectually dishonest reporting was typical: Sarah was a “plus-size”winner. (Sarah is eye-poppingly fat, making Lizzo seem trim.) Social media commenters who criticized her weight were “trolls.” (They were legitimately questioning the result of the “beauty” contest.)

Scoring in the pageant, as explained on its website, is based on “personality, confidence and communication.” “Braces, glasses, skin problems, varying heights, weights and appearances, are all a part of creating the special and unique individual that you are and that we want to celebrate,’ the website states. It might as well have included “major birth defects” and lizard people.

Got it. This is a personality contest, and the organizers and sponsors are falsely packaging it in the guise of a beauty pageant in an audacious bait and switch. That’s unethical, and all involved deserve every bit of criticism they get.

Signature Significance: China’s Fake Waterfall

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Why would anyone—any nation, any organization, any business or individual—trust a nation that would do something like this?

A major tourist attraction, Yuntai Falls, at the Yuntai Mountain scenic resort in China’s central Henan province, has been promoted as China’s “tallest uninterrupted waterfall” to its millions of yearly visitors. But this week a hiker’s video revealed that the falls are fed by a secret network of water pipes. In a statement, officials admitted that they added water to the cascade to improve the viewing experience for tourists. OK, technically the waterfall admitted that it was phony, as the statement said, “Depending on the season, I cannot guarantee that I am in my best condition whenever my friends come to see me.”

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More Evidence of the Ethical Dumbing Down of America…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

For some time now, I’ve noticed that the reader ethics questions posed to Kwame Anthony Appiah, the New York Times Magazine’s proprietor of “The Ethicist” advice column, have become more obvious, often embarrassingly so. Appiah, a real ethicist (he teaches philosophy at NYU) is easily the best of the advice columnists who have held his job, though, naturally, I would be better still. But the point of the column, presumably, is to educate readers about ethical decision-making and standards for ethical analysis. A question that provokes the reaction, “What? Are you kidding? DUH!” does not accomplish that objective.

Now, it’s possible that Appiah is a competent ethicist but a lousy question selector. It’s also possible, since the descent of The Great Stupid over the land and related recent cultural disasters, like eight years of terrible role models in the White House, the politicization of public education and universities, and the continuing deterioration of popular culture, which, believe it or not, used to specialize in ethics lessons for the masses, ethical literacy is in a death spiral.

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