Author: Jack Marshall

Ethics Quiz: The Fake Status Devices

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The AcryPhone, created by eKod Works, is literally a piece of acrylic shaped to look like a smartphone. It has no screen, speakers, nor even an LED. What’s it for? Supposedly the fake is for cellphone addicts to wean themselves off addiction to their smartphones. Do you believe that? I don’t. I think that explanation is like the ad copy for those suspiciously shaped battery-powered “massagers” for women that have photos showing a model using it on her neck.

The Acryphone is a prop for insecure people who can’t afford a smartphone or the costs of its service, but who want to look like they can. One reason I am quite certain of this is another product from the same country (Japan) that you see on the right: Stone Watch, a fake smart watch that doesn’t even tell time. The Stone Watches are just glossy, black pieced of plastic with a silicone band so the wearer will look like he or she is using the current fad gadget.

You have a double Ethics Quiz of the Day, and the two questions are,

Is it ethical to pretend to use one of these props in public?

and

Is it ethical to manufacture and sell them?

My tentative answer: they are both visual lies, like a phony Tale diploma hanging on an office wall. Making and selling products that have no legitimate use other than to deceive is itself unethical.

But I am open to being convinced otherwise.

Comment Of The Day: “Climate Change Media Hype, 2022”

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

I was feeling guilty about taking so long to give this spectacular Comment of the Day by Ryan Harkens the exposure it deserves, but I am glad I did. I’m pretty sick today, and getting a fourth post up was really going to be a challenge; Ryan’s profound essay is better than anything I was going to be able to produce…indeed, it’s better than most of what I write here.

Ryan’s’ topic is science, and climate science in particular. I’m honored that he vewed this forum worthy of such thoughtful and profound work.

Here is Ryan Harkens’ Comment of the Day on “Climate Change Media Hype, 2022”:

***

In the analysis of any phenomenon, there are several layers to peel back:

1. Is the phenomenon real?
2. Is the phenomenon being measure accurately?
3. Is the phenomenon on a whole beneficial or deleterious?
4. Are the causes of the phenomenon understood?
5. Are there solutions to the phenomenon?
6. Do those solutions cause more problems than the phenomenon?
7. How should those solutions be applied?

We have to understand that science is about creating hypotheses about the real world and testing them. Science collects data, analyzes data, makes predictions about the data, and then observes whether those predictions come true. Thus science can help to a certain degree with the first 6 items on the list, but it has much less to say on the 7th. But even for the first 6, science does not necessarily provide definitive answers, certainly not enough to say that any “Believe the science!” mantras should be heeded. In more detail:

1. Science can offer a tentative answer to whether a phenomenon is real. Upon testing and retesting, it can assert with a certain degree of confidence (never 100%) that a phenomenon is indeed real. But there could always be further data discovered that shows the phenomenon was not real, or at least what it was was much different that was proposed. In the case of climate science, we have observations since the 1970s that show a general warming trend. It seems very reasonable to accept that we’ve seen a general warming trend since then. However, even now there are some factors that could still upset that conclusion. The urban heat index could be greater than we imagined; the fact that most of the temperature gauges we’ve used around the world are located in first world countries, leaving much of the world unmeasured; and the reliance on satellite data (while currently of high confidence) might have some undiscovered error that invalidates 50 years of data collection. (I’m not saying this is the case or I have any evidence satellite data is flawed, just that that would be an example of how even our belief that the world has been warming could be in error.)

2. Science can only measure to a certain degree of accuracy. Again, the issues of urban heat index and the location of various temperature gauges could skew the data, and while global warming could be a real phenomenon, the degree to which the world is warming can be misrepresented by poor measurements. Similarly, efforts to reconstruct historical climate patterns based on ice core samples, tree rings, and other methods could be helpful, but still inaccurate, and thus lead to different conclusions about current warming or cooling trends. Furthermore, there is the question of whether we are truly measuring the right things? We need to measure air, land, and water temperatures at a variety of elevations, and we have to properly measure the incoming energy in the earth’s systems, as well as the outgoing energy of the earth’s systems, and this leads to literally hundreds of thousands of data points for one timestamp. Multiply that by years of data, and we are talking about an enormous amount of data, and we could still be missing a crucial measurement that we didn’t think we would actually need to measure. Continue reading →

Great, Trump’s First Unethical Quote Of The Month Of 2023

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“It wasn’t my fault that the Republicans didn’t live up to expectations in the MidTerms. I was 233-20! It was the “abortion issue,” poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on No Exceptions, even in the case of Rape, Incest, or Life of the Mother, that lost large numbers of Voters. Also, the people that pushed so hard, for decades, against abortion, got their wish from the US Supreme Court, & just plain disappeared, not to be seen again. Plus, Mitch stupid $’s!”

Donald Trump, scoring a rare (even for him) unethical Trifecta on Truth Social

No, Trump’s Ethics Quote of the Week yesterday was in a different category: Ethics Alarms “Ethics Quotes” are reserved for statements that raise ethical issues (in that case, is it responsible for a former President to express himself like an 8th grade playground bully?) but are not per se unethical in themselves. His latest is an unethical quote, and remarkably so.

It begins with a whiny, Bart Simpsonesque “I didn’t do it!” lament; this was typical of  Trump as President (to be fair, also Biden and Obama) as he habitually refused to accept responsibility when his actions backfired, but wanted all the accolades when his policies worked. (Incidentally, this is a common CEO mindset. My boss at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce once said that may job was to make him look good: when I did well, he would take credit, when i failed, it was all on me.) Trump is being substantially blamed for the failure of the “Red Wave” to materialize, and rightly so. His incessant complaining about the 2020 election allowed Democrats to make the mid-terms about him rather than their own miserable management, and his endorsements helped inflict enough weak Senate candidates on the GOP—like Herschel Walker and Dr. Oz—in winnable races that what should have been a new Republican Senate stayed Blue. Trump wasn’t solely at fault, but he shares a large chunk of the blame. Next eh engages in deceit, a specialty: many of the candidates he endorsed won, nut most were in safe districts where they would have prevailed anyway. Those 20 losses were mostly winnable races, and crucial ones that could have been won if Trump had just kept his trap shut for two years. Continue reading →

Stop Making Me Defend The National Football League!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

In a new low for reflex race-baiting, Daily Beast columnist Ernest Owens, a reliable progressive hysteric, accused the NFL of being racist because the league took more than an hour to suspend and postpone yesterday’s Monday Night Football game after Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed after making a tackle.  Hamlin, 24, went into cardiac arrest on the field and remains hospitalized in critical condition.

“One would have thought the game would have immediately been cut short. After such a drastic shift in energy and spirit, surely the game would be called without a doubt,” Owens wrote. “It would take an hour after Hamlin was first administered CPR for the NFL to officially postpone the game after first attempting to suspend it. Yes, after all of the chaos, the league thought it was practical to have the traumatized players continue to play….It would be one thing if Monday’s incident was a rare drop of the ball from the NFL, Instead, it’s another reminder of how incompetent this multibillion-dollar institution has been to its players, who are mostly Black.”

DINGDINGDINGDINGDING! There it is! The obligatory race-baiting! Hamlin is black, so the time it took to make a decision to end and postpone a nationally televised football following his medical emergency must have been motivated by racism, even though no NFL game had ever been suspended and postponed following an injury no matter how serious. The only games that have ever been cancelled and rescheduled at all since 1930 involved player strikes, and those games had not begun. One would think that a white player’s injury had previously caused a game suspension in the past for Owens to even suspect that NFL officials took too long to make their decision because of race.

No, he’s just a shameless, race-baiting asshole. It’s as simple as that. Continue reading →

These Are Poisonous Fruit Of Squandered Trust

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

A just-released Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey concluded that 49% of American adults believe it is likely that Wuhan virus vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths. Twenty-eight percent think it’s “Very Likely” that the side effects of the vaccine have been deadly to many  in contrast with 37% who don’t believe that a significant number of deaths have been caused by vaccine side effects. Fourteen percent are not sure, the usual group that isn’t sure of anything.

You can question the accuracy of this poll or all polls, you can believe that the vaccine skeptics are hysterics, you can believe that these numbers are in large part the result of “misinformation.” However, there is no question that even if they are inaccurate, the numbers show a shocking level of distrust in the pandemic vaccines, and, by extension, vaccines in general as well the health professionals and elected officials who have promoted them. When asked if there are legitimate safety concerns surrounding the shots, or whether doubts have been seeded by conspiracy theorists, 48% said there that concerns are valid. Only 37% indicated that false conspiracy theories were behind the public’s fears.

Glenn Reynolds, the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law and one of the most widely read conservative blogger, has it exactly right, writing, Continue reading →

Apparently Congress Is Stuck With George Santos [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I’m afraid I implied in an earlier post regarding New York’s pants-on-fire Congressman-elect George Santos that the House could refuse to seat him or force him to resign. That was wrong. His conduct, while unethical, did not breach House ethics rules because he wasn’t a member of Congress when he lied his head off gulling voters into electing him based on his complete misrepresentation of his background and qualifications. It’s a matter of jurisdiction. Why, punishing him would be like impeaching a former President who was no longer in office!

Prof. Turley, a Constitutional scholar, clarified the situation in a column for The Hill. He wrote in part,

The problem is that, for the most part, he is accused of something that is no crime in Congress: lying…More practically, Santos has constitutional defenses to any effort to bar him from taking his seat to represent New York’s 3rd Congressional District…. [Promised]investigations appear to be premised on the notion that a member of Congress can be denied a seat due to running on false claims….Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly, a Republican, announced an investigation into “the numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with Congressman-elect Santos.” She added that “the residents of Nassau County and other parts of the third district must have an honest and accountable representative in Congress. No one is above the law and if a crime was committed in this county, we will prosecute it.”

The fact, however, is that no congressional district anywhere in the country is guaranteed “an honest and accountable representative.”…[Santos] must be seated if he is guilty only of lying about his credentials and background…Many Santos critics cite the fact that the Constitution expressly mandates in Section 5, Article I, that “Each House shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own Members.” Those decisions on the outcome of elections have been treated as largely final and non-justiciable. However, this case is not a question over the counting or certification of votes but, rather, over the claims used to gain votes.

Continue reading →

2023 Ethics Warm-Up, 1/2/23: Buckle Up!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Well, I’m beginning the new year sick, and it hasn’t even done anything really sickening yet…

1. What does a Harvard grad’s high GPA mean? Nothing! A column in the Harvard Crimson revealed that the average GPA at Harvard is now 3.8 out of 4.0. Data analyst Aden Barton points out that this is up from 3.3 in 1991. “Are we supposed to believe that college students are just that much smarter now than decades ago?,” he asks? No. We should believe that college and higher education have become that much of a scam. Harvard had to abolish the “Dean’s List” because not making it proved you were an idiot: 92% of students were receiving the honor.

2. To be fair, Harvard is still serving as a role model...High schools are working hard to make sure that all of its students are also rated as outstanding. Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools paid almost half a million dollars to Oakland, California’s Performance Fact whose “Equity Imperative” is that all students’ academic performance result in “equal outcomes without exception.” Here’s the PowerPoint presentation for a Fall retreat.

3. If only anybody paid attention to boxing… World Boxing Council president Mauricio Sulaiman announced that the WBC is developing a system in which transgender fighters will compete against opponents who share the same biological sex. “In boxing, a man fighting a woman must never be accepted regardless of gender change. There should be no grey area around this, and we want to go into it with transparency and the correct decisions. Woman to man or man to woman transgender change will never be allowed to fight a different gender by birth,” Sulaiman said. “We are creating a set of rules and structures so that transgender boxing can take place, as they fully deserve to if they want to box. We do not yet know the numbers that there are out there, but we’re opening a universal registration in 2023, so that we can understand the boxers that are out there – and we’ll start from there.”

I’m not exactly sure what the system would be: he sounds a little confused, but who can blame him? At least he’s taken the first step toward sanity, ruling out the myth that a male boxer can become a female boxer by saying it’s so.

Continue reading →

More “Do Something!” Climate Change Hysteria!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The New York Times published a serious opinion piece that argues that one good way to save the planet from climate change is to shrink the human race. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Smaller people leave less of a carbon footprint. Brilliant! Thus, Mara Altman writes,

Thomas Samaras, who has been studying height for 40 years and is known in small circles as the Godfather of Shrink Think, a widely unknown philosophy that considers small superior, calculated that if we kept our proportions the same but were just 10 percent shorter in America alone, we would save 87 million tons of food per year (not to mention trillions of gallons of water, quadrillions of B.T.U.s of energy and millions of tons of trash)….Short people don’t just save resources, but as resources become scarcer because of the earth’s growing population and global warming, they may also be best suited for long-term survival (and not just because more of us will be able to jam into spaceships when we are forced off this planet we wrecked)….When you mate with shorter people, you’re potentially saving the planet by shrinking the needs of subsequent generations. Lowering the height minimum for prospective partners on your dating profile is a step toward a greener planet.

You can’t mock people like this enough. They don’t have any practical solutions for preventing what they fear, so instead, in a “We’ve got to DO SOMETHING!” frenzy, they propose nonsense and people actually take them seriously, because they are also in a state of media propaganda-induced terror. I ultimately decided that now was an ideal time for Sidney Wang to make his first Ethics Alarms appearance of 2023, but I was sorely tempted to use this (From “Dr. Cyclops”)…

or even this, from a comic fantasy about how women could finally take over the world… Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Donald Trump (And An Ethicist’s Zugzwang)

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Let’s start with the quote: Donald Trump wrote on his Twitter alternative Truth Social in response to the January 6 kangaroo court’s withdrawal of his subpoena,

“Was just advised that the Unselect Committee of political Thugs has withdrawn the Subpoena of me concerning the January 6th Protest of the CROOKED 2020 Presidential Election. They probably did so because they knew I did nothing wrong, or they were about to lose in Court. Perhaps the FBI’s involvement in RIGGING the Election played into their decision. In any event, the Subpoena is DEAD!”

Gee, why don’t you tell us what you really think, Mr. President?

I don’t want Presidents of the U.S. to express themselves like this, essentially in the style and with the cheap-shot rhetorical flourishes of a middle school wise-ass. It harms the office; it degrades the dignity and credibility of the office-holder, it’s a terrible example for the nation’s #1 role model to set for the young, and it undermines public confidence in the judgment and trustworthiness of the individual.

Trump talked and tweeted like this all through his four years in office, as we know, and has ever since. The approximately 30% of the electorate that, in his immortal words, would continue to support Trump if he shot someone in broad daylight in the middle of Times Square love this crap—it’s so, so authentic!–and they are dead, dead, dead wrong. This kind of outburst shows why Trump should never have been elected, and why people like him should not lead the United States —and until a weird confluence of random events and factors intervened, have not. Continue reading →

The Most Incompetent Christmas Greeting Ever!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The Askern Medical Practice in Doncaster, England intended to send out a jolly seasonal text to all of its patients wishing them a “very merry Christmas.” Instead, and don’t ask me how this could happen, the mass text told patients they had “aggressive lung cancer” that had metastasized and asked them to fill out form DS1500 for people those have a terminal illness to apply for benefits.

After freaking out many of its patients, the Center texted its “sincere apologies” saying, “This has been sent in error. Our message to you should have read We wish you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.” 

I don’t think “Oops! Sorry!” quite makes up for something like this.