Author: Jack Marshall

How Far Have Our Universities Traveled Into Thought Control Territory? This Far: Stanford Wants To Punish A Student For Reading A Politically Incorrect Historical Document

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

A while back, one of this blog’s self-exiled commenters told me that he left because I had become more hostile to the Left in recent years, in contrast to my position when Ethics Alarms started in 2010. He’s right, of course. In 2010, this story would have been unimaginable. My standards haven’t changed. But one whole side of the political spectrum has been abandoning ethics and core American principles with increasing arrogance, aggressiveness and ruthlessness.

I am in shock over this latest episode.

After a photo of a Stanford student reading Adolf Hitler’s autobiography “Mein Kampf” circulated on campus, The Stanford Daily revealed that administrators were working with the students involved to “address” the incident. Two campus rabbis emailed Jewish students saying administrators “are in ongoing conversation with the individuals involved, who are committed to and actively engaged in a process of reckoning and sincere repair.”

Reckoning—for reading something? “Repair”? Is that the strong stench of re-education I feel in my nostrils? Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Jack Phillips (of Masterpiece Cakeshop):

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

It is a basic life skill: quit while you’re ahead.

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission acted in the grip of anti-religious bias when it enforced an anti-discrimination law against baker Jack Phillips. He had famously refused to bake a wedding cake celebrating the wedding of same sex couple Charlie Craig and Dave Mullins in 2012. But that was just a technical victory for Baker; SCOTUS chose not to rule did not rule on the macro-controversies over whether a business can invoke religious objections to deny service to LGBTQ people, whether a cake is art or just a product offered by a public accommodation, or whether forcing a baker to create a cake for a gay wedding is compelled speech.

Sadly, annoyingly, unethically and stupidly, neither Baker nor the activists who are determined to bend him to their will had the sense to declare a truce.

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Bill James Shows How To Maintain Trustworthiness

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The Bill James Baseball Handbook is full of useful facts, stats and analysis for baseball aficionados as usual this year. Bill hasn’t written as much this year as he has in the past, but his contributions are provocative, informative and sharp. James has been a major influence on my approach to ethics, even though he has devoted his considerable analytical skills to baseball, only occasionally crossing over to other realms (like true crime) with mixed results. Readers here encounter James’ concepts most frequently when I reference signature significance, but in a broad sense, reading his work over the years also heightened my appreciation of the dangers of confirmation bias and the importance of challenging conventional wisdom.

James has an unusual article in this year’s Handbook: an apology. In “OPS and Runs Scored,” he begins by saying he has “40-year-old egg on his face,” It was that long ago that the baseball stat world, in part because of James’ work, began lobbying for OPS to be the standard by which a batter’s effectiveness was measured. OPS is a stat that combines on-base percentage—how often a player reaches base via walk or hit (any being hit by a pitch), a statistic that logically is more revealing than a batting average—-and slugging percentage, which indicates power by dividing bases (a home run is four bases, a single just one) into at bats.

Bill explains that the OPS stat was sold as having an arithmetic relationship to runs scored, a straight-line relationship that meant that if a team increased it OPS by 10% it would score 10% more runs. The apology is based on the fact that James, he says, accepted this conclusion and advanced it himself like everyone else in the sabermetrics community—and the conclusion was wrong. He writes that he is very, very, very ashamed to admit that he never checked himself, but relied on what he was told. The claim was “completely wrong,” he writes. When he finally did check the relationship between OPS and runs score, he found that it was a geometric relationship, not arithmetic. If a team increases its OPS by 10% it won’t score 10% more runs. It will score 21% more runs. That’s a big difference. You have to square the OPS to get the right result in predicted runs scored.

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Facebook Suddenly Rediscovers The Democratic Principle Of Free Speech, And (Of Course), Rep. Schiff Objects

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Nick Clegg, Meta’s (that is, Facebook’s) president of global affairs, announced that Donald Trump’s Instagram and Facebook accounts would be reinstated after more than two years of being unethically banned from both platforms, while Twitter, as we now know, was doing likewise for partisan and ideological reasons. Trump was still President of the United States when Facebook censored him, and this late capitulation to what Meta must see as a slow shift in public perception doesn’t mitigate or erase that misconduct at all. We can’t trust these people, and they are very powerful. They helped, eagerly helped, advance a party’s anti-democratic agenda, and will undoubtedly try to find ways to do so again. But they can’t be effective propagandists if not enough people trust them. That’s why Clegg said,

“The public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying — the good, the bad and the ugly — so that they can make informed choices at the ballot boxBut that does not mean there are no limits to what people can say on our platform. When there is a clear risk of real world harm — a deliberately high bar for Meta to intervene in public discourse — we act.”

And who is Nick Clegg, or any Big Tech honcho, or anyone, frankly, to decide what mere words create a “risk of real world harm”—and is that “real world harm,” or “real world harm”? The guy can’t even avoid being ambiguous while explaining his company’s standards, and that’s no accident. Suppressing speech and political expression thrives in ambiguity.  Any speech that doesn’t cross the line into criminal fraud or incitement as defined in statutes does not cause either “real world harm,” or “real world harm.” The suppression of speech by biased, often ignorant, corrupt intermediaries does cause harm. But if the prevailing metaphorical winds shift again, Clegg and Meta/Facebook will censor Trump again, or any other perceived threat to the divine progressive agenda. Count on it. Continue reading →

Alec Baldwin Should Have Watched More TV. Or He’s An Idiot. Or Both

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

An opinion piece by Farhad Manjoo in today’s New York Times begins,

Shortly after a prop gun Alec Baldwin was holding fired a bullet that killed a cinematographer and wounded a director on the set of the movie “Rust,” in October 2021, he told the police in New Mexico that he’d be willing to do whatever they requested, including sitting for an interview at the station. In an interrogation room later that afternoon, detectives began by informing Baldwin of his rights: He had the right to remain silent. Anything he said could be used against him in court. He was free to consult with an attorney; if he could not afford an attorney, one would be appointed for him. And he could stop the interrogation at any point he wished.“My only question is, am I being charged with something?” Baldwin asked.Not at all, the police said. Reading his rights, one detective told him, was “just a formality.”And so, without his attorney present, while the police recorded him, Baldwin talked. And talked. And talked. At that point, Baldwin knew only that the film’s director, Joel Souza, and its cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, had been injured; detectives would inform him at the end of the interrogation that Hutchins had died. Still, for about an hour, Baldwin not only answered detectives’ many questions about the shooting but also offered his own theories about the incident and suggested the next steps the police might pursue in their investigation.

He then says, “Defense lawyers I talked to said Baldwin’s case should serve as a reminder that if you are involved in a serious incident, it’s best not to talk to the police unless you have an attorney present.”

Gee, ya think? How could Baldwin have not known that? How could Manjoo have needed to ask defense lawyers to discover that? How could anyone not know that?

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Trust Technology To Solve Our Energy Conservation Problems, Do You? Consider Minnechaug Regional High School…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

 Minnechaug Regional High School near Springfield, Massachusetts, installed a state of the art  lighting system when it was built over a decade ago. The system was supposed to save money and energy. But on August 24, 2021, the software that ran the system broke down. Minnechaug is the only high school in its district and serves 1,200 students from the towns of Wilbraham and Hampden. The environmentally-conscious school board insisted on a “green lighting system” run on software installed by a company called 5th Light. It would automatically adjusting the lighting, saving electricity, money, and Boston from being under water.

But in August 2021, something went wrong, and the lighting system went into default. The default setting is “lights on.” The school tried to contact  Reflex Lighting only to discover that the company had been sold and resold several times since the high school was built. The current management of Reflex Lighting had a hard time locating anyone familiar with the high school’s lighting system. Many of the parts necessary for repairs had to be sent from China.

The consequence has been that the lights at the school have been blazing day and night to this day. That’s 18 months.

“We are very much aware this is costing taxpayers a significant amount of money,” Aaron Osborne, the assistant superintendent of finance at the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District. “And we have been doing everything we can to get this problem solved.”

Technology is far more complicated and subject to unexpected chaotic results than society’s leaders, managers and policy makers understand. This wasn’t an escaped T-Rex or SkyNet taking over the world, but the problem is the same: lazy assumptions about technology and insufficient attention to the danger of allowing cool tech to exceed the ability of human beings to operate it competently.

More Ethics Emanations From The World Of Medicine: The Charles Cullen Story

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Having spent a fair amount of time yesterday and today in a hospital, I was reminded of this post that had been stalled on the runway…

In November of last year, Netflix began running “The Good Nurse,” a disturbing movie based on the real story of Charles Cullen, a serial killer-nurse (played by Eddie Redmayne in the film), who murdered between 45 and over 400 patients at a series of hospitals and medical facilities in New jersey and Pennsylvania over a 16-year period. The film concentrates on the colleague who finally brought him down, Amy Loughren, a fellow nurse and freind (played by Jessica Chastain) who alerted the police after she became suspicious of Cullen’s links to patient deaths as well as his irregular computer accessing of medications.

The real horror of the film and the facts is that so many of the administrators of  the hospitals where Cullen committed his murders either strongly suspected that he was killing patients, were certain he was, or resorted to contrived ignorance to avoid discovering what was right in front of their staff’s eyes. At least 16 hospitals fired Cullen on various other grounds and gave him sufficiently ambiguous recommendations to allow him to find new employment where he could kill again. Law enforcement authorities were also alerted by hospital staff more than once, and let Cullen slip through their fingers. Continue reading →

Strange Medical Ethics: A Personal Tale

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

My wife just completed a procedure for a blacked carotid artery, obviously a stroke risk. She had the same procedure two years ago on the other side of her neck. In the discussions with the surgeon, he emphasized that this was a serious condition and had been put off too long: the artery was 80-90% blocked.

“You have a choice,” he said. “I can take care of this side just like last time, and the problem will be gone.”

“Or you can take part in an NIH study that will use experimental drugs and treatment over the next five years. It’s your choice.”

I had to interject. “What do you recommend?” I asked. “It’s up to you,” he replied. I said, “You just said this is a serious problem that poses the risk of a debilitating stroke. You said that you could fix the problem next week, and it would be gone. Why would my wife choose to endure the condition for five years?”

“For the good of humanity,” he answered. Continue reading →

Clean-up On Aisle Ethics, 1/25/2023: “What The Buck?”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It’s come to this: as Hollywood has decided to prioritize extreme politics, political correctness and “diversity” over entertainment and even profits, and classic comedies like “Animal House,” “Airplane!,” “Tootsie,” “Blazing Saddles” and “The Bad New Bears” have been blacklisted,  Tinsel Town puts out films like “The Menu.” That 2022 film is allegedly a comedy in which Ralph Fiennes, as a bitter master chef who hosts gourmet dinners for the elite and wealthy at a secluded island, murders his guests as “dessert” by scattering Graham crackers around, clothing them in giant marshmallow jackets, placing milk chocolate hats on their heads, and setting everything, and them, on fire. Yes, human s’mores!

It got rave reviews from critics, too.

1. Not this again… Jackson Hewitt 2023 commercial for getting tax refund advances employs yet another juvenile “we cleverly used a dirty word without really saying it” trope that treats its audience like sniggering 11-year-olds, using “What the buck?” and “Buck yeah!” It would be slightly less objectionable if the ploy was original, but it’s not.

I don’t trust companies that have such a low opinion of their market, or, in the alternative, are run by dolts who would approve such a gutter-level campaign. Nobody should. Fuck Jackson Hewitt.

2.  The Baseball Hall of Fame announced the results of its voting yesterday, and ethics prevailed: steroid cheats and toxic assholes Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez both failed to get the necessary votes again. Good. The only player elected was Scott Rolen, who was a quality player and terrific fielder at third base over a long National League career, but one of the least famous players ever elected to the Hall of Fame. I firmly believe that being famous, which includes being considered the best player on one’s team and one of the best in the league, should be a mandatory criteria to get into Cooperstown. Many baseball writers—you know, morons—argue that baseball is too demanding of its Hall, with less than 1% of its players being considered sufficiently “great.” It should literally become the “Hall of Very Good,” said Ryan Spilborghs, a former MLB player who has his own show on the Siruis-XM baseball channel. His sole justification? The other pro sports are more lenient. That was it. “Everybody does it.” Continue reading →