Author: Jack Marshall

The Canada-Meta Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Boy, who do you root for in a face-off like this?

Meta Platforms—that’s Facebook and Instagram— ended access to news on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada earlier this month in opposition to a new law requiring internet companies to pay news publishers. The Online News Act was passed by the Canadian parliament to force platforms like Google parent Alphabet and Meta to negotiate commercial deals with Canadian news publishers (including the government) for news content. Part of a global trend to make tech firms pay for news, both Meta and Google told Canada in June they would block access to news on their platforms in the country if the law wasn’t changed.

“News outlets voluntarily share content on Facebook and Instagram to expand their audiences and help their bottom line,” Rachel Curran, Meta’s head of public policy in Canada, said in a public statement. But, she said, “people using our platforms don’t come to us for news.”

Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge responded,”This is irresponsible. They would rather block their users from accessing good quality and local news instead of paying their fair share to news organizations. We’re going to keep standing our ground. After all, if the Government can’t stand up for Canadians against tech giants, who will?”

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Rolling Stone Proves You Can Find Ethics Enlightenment In The Strangest Places

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

What could be a more unlikely locale for ethics lessons than a standard web click-bait list? Yet against all odds and defying all precedent, Rolling Stone has posted such a list that could sustain multiple courses in ethics: business ethics, popular culture ethics, media ethics, and ethical decision-making generally. It is called “The 50 Worst Decisions in TV History.”

Not all of the items on the list have ethical implications, and not all of the choices for the list belong there. Not only that, what I thought would be the #1 Worst Decision right up to the end in Rolling Stone’s countdown was missing entirely, presumably because of the generational bias (and ignorance) of the writers. Almost all of the TV network and production decisions listed occurred in the last thirty years: I assume this is why the list even missed ABC’s infamous decision to replace the ailing Dick York as Darren, the long-suffering hubby of Samantha the Witch on its hit sitcom “Bewitched,” with another, lookalike actor, the inferior Dick Sargent, without any explanation on the show, as if the audience wouldn’t notice. (Ethics lesson: Treating your customers/followers/fans/audience members like idiots is disrespectful, incompetent, and irresponsible: unethical.)

No, that wasn’t the missing #1. Be patient.

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Comment Of The Day: “How Can We ‘Trust The Science’ When It’s Distorted By Activist Scientists?” Audubon’s Bird Scam”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

On days like today, taken up by a frantic effort to prepare for an all-new seminar I’m teaching the usual unexpected crisis, plus wasting time dealing with a partisan troll whom I knew from the start was eventually going to get herself banned (and she did), I am especially grateful for thoughtful Comments of the Day in the inventory to keep the quality content coming. Such is Ryan Harkins’ comment on the post, “How Can We ‘Trust The Science’ When It’s Distorted By Activist Scientists?” —and here it is:

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I can certainly applaud the desire to mitigate damage to our native fauna that our cities create, but I would think there are several things that any advocacy group should keep in mind.

1. Sensationalism might spur the gullible, but it trashes credibility among anyone who bothers to investigate. Once you’ve lost credibility, it is an enormous uphill battle to regain trust.

2. In the same vein, even accurate numbers need to be placed in context. A billion birds a year sounds like a frighteningly high number. But it gives no context for how severe the problem is. It could be an imminent threat to all bird populations, or it could be a very minor issue. Killing a billion humans would be devastating to the human race. Killing a billion ants doesn’t even make a dent in their overall population. I Googled around and found that estimates put the bird population in the US and Canada at about 7.2 billion. However, that doesn’t mean that in 8 years, there would be no more birds. Yes, since 1970, that number has declined from over 10 billion, but that means 3 billion overall over 50 years. However, even that doesn’t provide the full context, because people need to understand the various causes that impacted bird population loss (which is largely due to loss of habitat), and they need to understand that killing a billion birds a year doesn’t lead to an overall decline of a billion birds in the total population. Instead, many of those birds will have died of predators, disease, old age, or other accidents, and their deaths often mean resources made available to the remaining birds who will then survive and reproduce. The real question is how quickly the overall bird population is declining, and whether that decline is accelerating or leveling off.

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Ethics Quiz: The NFL Turns Compassionate

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This past Saturday night in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Isiah Bolden, a cornerback for the Ne England Patriots, collided with a teammate, lay motionless on the ground, and was put on a cart to be rolled off the field. Though there was little more than 10 minutes to play, the NFL canceled the rest of the game. Patriots coach Bill Belichick praised the NFL for acting quickly. Patriots players then praised Belichick. Bolden was released from the hospital the next morning and appeared to be in good health, but the Patriots canceled a pair scheduled of joint practices anyway.

Conservative political pundit and sports commentator Jason Whitlock wrote of the episode, “The enemies of football and masculinity have won. They killed football. They won the long war of convincing men that the key to happiness is choosing safety over freedom, safety over everything.” Whitlock is saying, in essence, that the incident has greater significance beyond football, that it demonstrates that the progressive weenification of the culture has reached a critical and dangerous level that has ominous implications for American society at large.

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“What’s Going On Here?” Glad You Asked, Miles….

/ Jack Marshall / 69 Comments

The full tweet:

“What happened to Lahaina is a tragedy. Thousands still missing, including children. Everything that could’ve gone wrong went wrong. Sirens didn’t go off, water that could’ve been used to put out the flames was restricted, and power lines kept operating despite the danger posed by hurricane winds. The governor of Hawaii can’t even maintain proper eye contact with the camera as he talks about the systemic failures that led to this avoidable catastrophe. Will anyone be held accountable? Given the relative media blackout, it looks like they’re trying to sweep the situation under the carpet like so much ash. When Hurricane Katrina happened, it’s all the media would talk about. What’s going on here?”

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Comment Of The Day: “In Maui, DEI Insanity Kills”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The key question is: “Will any mainstream media pundit have the courage to make the points esteemed Ethics Alarms commenter Sarah B makes below, in her Comment of the Day to the post, “In Maui, DEI Insanity Kills”?

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So I’m going to say something that , at first glance, may sound pretty unethical here, but let me defend it first, before telling me that I’m going all in on Rationalizations. That being said, my TL,DR is “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

I do think that it is fair to argue that, for the most part, the people of Lahaina had it coming. This fire was the rather predictable consequence of years of bad judgement and voting practices. First, the sugar cane farming dissolution into non-native dry grassland came because “we couldn’t possibly grow sugar cane there, it was too insensitive to the natives”. Then they didn’t make any reasonable plans to replace the farms with native plants that could handle both the wetter times and the drier times, but instead just let the farms grow over, which led to imported grass and other vegetation taking root off of spreading seeds. This worked out for a bit when things were wet, but these grasses are unable to handle the drier times. That led to a high fire hazard with a high burn interval.

Then they decided that they would go all in on the green energy to the degree that there was a huge governmental push (which often starts with the residents) for green production over safe electric lines, AFTER there was already substantial documentation that the power lines were likely to cause significant fires. Of course, the electric company is nowhere near blameless, but neither are the voters.

The idea that we now have DIE standing in the way of appropriate water being used to put out a fire, because we find that DIE is more important than lives and property (after all, we are founded on the notion of diversity, equity, and inclusion right, not that old fashioned life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness), well, that is a conscious choice by the Hawaii electorate too.

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Future Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Pennsylvania Congressional Candidate Salem Snow

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Salem Snow is a social worker running for Congress in Philadelphia as a Democrat. He’s a Black Lives Matter fan, and describes himself as a “Leftist” and “aggressively pro-worker.” Of course he includes his pronouns in his Twitter profile. That’s all dumb enough, but he also tweeted this:

You watch: he’ll probably get elected. Is this a great country, or what?

Incidentally, it’s unethical to look that smug in a photo when you write something as stupid as that tweet.

In Maui, DEI Insanity Kills

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

The routine placement of DEI famatics in positions of authority around America is a dangerous and destructive fad. Witness M. Kaleo Manuel, former deputy director of the Hawaii Commission on Water Resource Management, who said in a livestream debate hosted by the University of Hawaii last year, in discussing water distribution on the island,

“Let water connect us and not divide us! We can share it, but it requires true conversations about equity…How do we coexist with the resources we have?”

Manuel, a former Obama Foundation leader who coached volunteers in “practical skill building for social change,” Manuel said he considered water “an important tool for social justice.” So it should not be surprising that when the real estate developer that supplies water to areas southeast of Lahaina recognized the threat posed by a dangerous combination of high winds and drought-parched grasses in Maui and asked Manuel for permission to fill up one of its private reservoirs in case firefighters needed it, the Obama social justice warrior’s main concern was equity, not preventing death and destruction from fire. Manuel told the company that it had to consult with a local farmer about the impact of water diversion before he would approve the request. Five hours passed without water being added to the reservoir, and the brush fire that had been contained that morning flared up again and swept through Lahaina, burning everything and everyone in its path.

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How Can We “Trust The Science” When It’s Distorted By Activist Scientists? Audubon’s Bird Scam

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

How? We can’t. Next?

The National Audubon Society, the famous non-profit dedicated to the conservation of birds and their habitats, wants to make the U.S. “bird safe” by shaming homeowners into “turn[ing] off unnecessary lights at night” and “clos[ing] blinds, [and] curtains,” along with other precautionary measures. Businesses should install bird-safe glass, for example, which has patterns that make it more visible to birds. This, the Audubon’s ornithologists claim, will save the lives of “up to a billion birds a year.” The group told WBAL-TV viewers in Baltimore that “lighting and reflectivity, specifically during migration for birds, is a really dangerous problem and kills up to one billion birds in North America per year.”

Sure. Advocacy groups love fake statistics, and this one screeches “Made-up!” like a bald eagle in heat. That “up to one billion” number is partially based on a 2014 abstract estimating that between “365 and 988 million birds” are killed annually by “building collisions” in the United States. Of course, since the objective isn’t to fairly communicate facts but to support the extreme positions of single-issue activists, the Society chose the highest estimate, already probably polluted by confirmation bias, and rounded up. The society used estimated bird collisions with walls to assess the deadliness of windows alone. In addition, the fake number mixed in ball park estimates that North America has lost 3 billion birds since 1970, and oh, let’s say a third of those died in “building collisions.” Yes, let’s.

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Ethics Observations On A Rare Outburst Of Anti-Biden Candor On CNN…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Well. Let’s see…

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