Author: Jack Marshall

NOOOOOO! “The Ethicist” Just Endorsed The Golden Rationalization As Justification For Deception.

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

It isn’t quite head-exploding, because the New York Times “The Ethicist” column has seen its columnist—there have been five of them, I think—promote unethical conduct all too frequently over the years. But the current ethics advice maven, Kwame Anthony Appiah, is a real ethicist, unlike the others, and I expect better of him. Because of his credentials and assumed authority, his unethical advice this week is particularly damaging. And to clarify my statement I quote one of many memorable exchanges during the testimony of Miss Mona Lisa Vitto (Marissa Tomei) in the climax of “My Cousin Vinny”:

D.A. Jim Trotter (Lane Smith): Objection, Your Honor! Can we clarify to the court whether the witness is stating opinion or fact?

Judge Chamberlain Haller (Fred Gwynne) : [to Lisa] This is your opinion?

Mona Lisa Vito: It’s a fact.

The inquirer asked whether it was unethical for him to list a fake publisher on the title page of his self-published book that he created on Amazon, apparently a common practice that Amazon permits. He also asked whether it would be unethical to tell a bookstore owner who agreed to sell the book on consignment that the book was published by his made-up book company.

“The Ethicst” answers the first query this way:

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Worst of Ethics Award 2022: Most Unethical Quote Of The Year

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

There were more unethical quotes this year than I recall reading and hearing in a long time, and that’s just the ones Ethics Alarms chose to highlight. Winners in the category included The New York Times (twice) and the Washington Post, CNN’s finally dismissed hack Chris Cuomo, Joy Behar (I just picked one; there were about a hundred or so), Georgetown Law Center’s Dean, William Trainor, Donald Trump (twice!), Chris’s corrupt and disgraced brother, former NY governor Andrew Cuomo, Sen. Lindsay Graham, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Dr. Fauci, Nusrat Jahan Choudhury, a federal court nominee who “explained” in her confirmation hearing that she lied in an address to Princeton students to “make a rhetorical point”; Joe Biden (again, for one of about a hundred 2022 quotes that would qualify); Kamala Harris of course, Nancy Pelosi, Rep Eric Swalwell, Barack Obama, Golden State Warriors owner Chamath Palihapitiya, CNN intelligence analyst Robert Baer, and Van Jones (today!), Ann Hathaway, Media Matters chief Angelo Carusone, Herschel Walker (again, take your pick), AOC (ditto), NY Governor Kathy Hochul, Liz Cheney, GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz, GOP Rep. Mary Miller, Democratic Senator Chris Coons, Kim Sill, founder of the Shelter Hope Pet Shop, and Stacey Abrams.

Many of these could have easily been winners in a more temperate year, but President Biden lapped them all with his September, televised “Soul of the Nation” speech that was “wildly unethical…irresponsible, disrespectful, unfair, and un-American, as well as hypocritical, indeed a betrayal, from a leader who promised on his Inauguration Day, “We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature. For without unity there is no peace, only bitterness and fury. No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos. This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge, and unity is the path forward.”

Biden gave a fascist speech to accuse his political opponents of being fascists

No American President has ever delivered such a despicable addess. It debased his office, and damaged the Republic. But, to be fair, it may have influenced enough fools to keep Democrats from the mid-term wipe-out they deserved. So there’s that.

Most Unethical Quote of the Year: President Joe Biden

No contest.

Two Quick Items That I’m Afraid I’ll Miss Noting If I Don’t Get Them Up Now….

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

No time to do a full potpourri, not ready for a full post, Spuds wants to go out and all hell is breaking out, and meanwhile, this Saturday seems even deader than usual, but still, ethics developments are ethics developments, soooooo…

1. Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of Trust and Safety during what we are gradually learning was a full-bore effort to stifle opinions and information the Democrats and progressive community didn’t want to deal with, tweeted out things like this during the Trump administration:

Bias? What bias? Who wouldn’t trust someone like that to decide what’s “hate speech” and not fit for Twitters?

2. NBC News reported that “The Kremlin gave the White House the choice of either Griner or Whelan — or none.” Then, after the White House, Biden, Karine Jean-Pierre, and CNN said that the white ex-Marine being held in a Russian prison for four years already was never an option in trade for the deadly arms dealer, only the black, gay, anti-US “icon,” NBC quietly changed its website to match that narrative, changing the line to say, “the Kremlin ultimately gave the White House the choice of either Griner or no one after different options were proposed.”  (This is known as “stealth editing,” and is both unethical and suspicious).

NBC couldn’t slip it by, though, because people noticed, so hours later it added, “an earlier version of this article misstated the choice the Biden administration was given over hostages. It was to swap for Griner or no one, not a choice between Griner or Whelan.”

Of course, the Biden administration would never pressure NBC to assist  a White House PR cover-up, right? And even if it did, NBC, being an ethical and trustworthy journalistic organization, would never agree to do so, right? It’s just a coincidence that NBC News also suspended national correspondent Miguel Almaguer after he reported facts about the Paul Pelosi attack that didn’t follow the official pre-mid-term elections Democratic talking points and has never explained why, and Almaguer has been missing from the network ever since—right?

Seeing anything fishy or sinister in such conduct by a major news network is just wacko conspiracy stuff. Yes? Right?

Unethical Quote Of The Week: CNN Contributor Van Jones

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Van was speaking of the Brittany Griner prisoner trade with Russia…

“This is huge. First of all, that’s a decade-defining image when you saw her wife sitting there, Kamala Harris was there, president is there, such a human image, and yet it just shows this president got it done. He cared enough about this individual person to get her home. It was shocking for young Americans to see an icon like that snatched, locked up, treated like garbage and nine years, ten years for bringing some cannabis oil, medically prescribed. So these are decade-defining images. I guarantee you there will be young people 10, 20, 30 years from now who will remember this moment because she is an icon. It’s really, really extraordinary. And people are talking about this other guy. He’s so terrible. Look, there’s a lot of terrible people in the world, a lot of terrible people in Russia. What you can’t allow to happen is have a black female icon treated like garbage and America do nothing about it. Something was done about it, and people are going to be proud of that.”

—Race-obsessed pundit Van Jones, once Barack Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar,” blathering on to try to justify President Biden trading an arrogant, dumb, America-bashing athlete who defied State Department travel warnings for money and got caught with illegal drugs in Russia, for an international arms dealer and terrorism purveyor, Viktor Bout, who is a good bet to kill lots of people with his skills.

That’s a little long for an Unethical Quote, but the full thing is necessary to give a proper sense of just how ethically obtuse, factually-nonsensical and outright stupid the quote is. Van Jones has proved over the past that he is not incapable of perceptive analysis, but he persists in outburst like this one, usually conscening race, that make him one of the epitomes of the Ethics Alarms motto, “Bias Makes You Stupid. Jones is smarter than this quote makes him sound, so we must assume that he knows what he’s saying is garbage, but he’s saying it on CNN anyway.

Ethics Strike One.

  • “Decade defining image?” Stop insulting our intelligence. Griner will be completely forgotten as soon as she quits basketball, and only lightly remembered before that. How many people remember Bo Bergdahl now?

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More Twitter Revelations…Crickets Or Denials From The Complicit Mainstream Media And The Left’s Censorship Beneficiaries

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Keep it up, guys. With every effort to deny that what happened was what happened, the corrupted U.S. journalists and their employers erode public trust in their profession further, and with it their power. Eventually, there will be a breaking point and an ugly reckoning. Good. They have been asking for it. Yeah, keep up the gaslighting and denial. The fools really think they can bury the story. Even at Memeorandum, which is usually an objective news aggregator, the tweeted revelations by Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi are invisible. (Top story as I write this: a soccer reporter has died.) Very disappointing: I thought they were better than this. Still, the site’s bias is worth knowing about. I will not trust it as I have in the past.

Here’s a smoking gun: look at the transcript of an NPR interview with Newt Gingrich. Newt is unethical slime, but he’s very intelligent unethical slime, and when his personal agendas don’t interfere with his analysis, he is worth listening to. (I learned more in a private two hour seminar with young Newt when he was a Congressman than I learned in many full Government courses at Harvard.) Pay special attention to the NPR interviewer’s refusal to deal with reality that implicates NPR:

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Ethics Quiz: The Milking Class Gaffe

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The photo above was taken in a Plains state elementary school in the early 1950s, and depicts a cow-milking exercise. It is, obviously, one of those “Oops!” unfortunate—but funny!—shots that ended up in a local newspaper somewhere because nobody noticed the problem until it was too late.

A Facebook friend posted it on the social media platform for “a chuckle”, and it was clear that the reaction was…restrained.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is tougher than it may seem…

Is posting that photo unethical, as it will be legitimately offensive to some, or is it innocently funny, and only objectionable to the political correctness scolds?

I thought it was funny when I saw it. I also thought my friend would get a fair amount of flack. But the more I think about the factors involved, the more uncertain I am of the answer to the quiz question…

  • Is posting the photo in a public forum a Golden Rule breach? Obviously the photo embarrasses the teacher who, as my freind wrote, “probably wishes she had been standing for the photo.” My friend, however, was a professional performer, in a field where being able to laugh at moments that would humiliate normal people is essential.
  • Based on the period of the photo, it is certain that the teacher by now must be either dead or too old to care about an old newspaper clipping. Does that take the Golden Rule off the table.
  • It is more likely that the children shown might be embarrassed by the photo, or were when it was originally published. Does that matter? Was showing it more unethical then than now, when parents (unethically, even though “everybody does it”) post videos of their children in embarrassing (but funny!) situations constantly?
  • Some people thought  the photo was very funny, and appreciated seeing it. It brightened their day! Is that enough to make showing the picture ethical? What formula should we use to determine whether utilitarian analysis justifies an action where the benefits are tangible and the “harm” is ephemeral? If the photo brightened one viewer’s day, isn’t that enough?
  • One critic of the photo sniffed, “Photoshopped!” If so, and I note that there is always someone who will try to discredit any photo they object to as photoshopped whether it was or not, does it matter to the question at hand. If it’s funny, it’s funny. Or, since it is theoretically funnier if genuine, does being photoshopped change the utilitarian analysis? Should it?
  • Can showing the photo be justified as a social statement and attempt at a course correction, echoing the common lament that the culture is becoming humor adverse thanks to woke-poisoning, and it is a serious problem?

Worst of Ethics Award 2022: Most Unethical Trend Of The Year

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The Winner: Totalitarianism.

In truth, there was one more Ethics Alarms post featuring references to nascent totalitarianism in 2021 than this year, but I neglected to publish the Awards last year. Before that, the word  hardly had to be used here at all: ironic, since according one of the primary Big Lies weaponized by “the resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media was that the previous President was an “autocrat” and seeking to end democracy.

Over the past two years we have seen direct and open defiance of the Constitution, with a President deliberately making edicts that he previously acknowledged were beyond his power. We are seeing political show trials, partisan witch hunts (the democratic norm defying Jan. 6 Commission), attempts to install truth commissions in a federal agency, efforts to cripple the Supreme Court, efforts to prevent Republicans from running for office, Justice Department intimidation of parents who oppose racist course material and the promotion of LGBTQ sexual relationships and practices, evidence of rogue law enforcement agencies with political agendas, government-encouraged suppression of speech and dissent and corporations willing to be agents of such suppression, the artificial extension of national “emergencies” to expand executive power, and punishment of dissent in the schools, universities and even law firms…all while the majority of the mainstream media rejects integrity and objectivity to issuing propaganda “for the greater good.”

Perhaps most disturbing of all, a U.S. President gave a nationally televised speech in which he directed citizens to fear the opposition party as “clear and present dangers” to the nation, while doing the most striking imitation of a fascist demagogue ever to be seen coast-to-coast. And the impression was widely praised.

Where this stops, nobody knows.

Comment Of The Day: “Dispatches From The Great Stupid, “D.E.I.” Division: This Story From The Washington Post Was Not A Joke…”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

In addition to perfectly encapsulating the insanity of our times and being unintentionally hilarious, the Washington Post headline, “‘Shark Week’ lacks diversity, overrepresents men named Mike, scientists say” also did society a favor by triggering Chris Marschner’s Comment of the Day.

He has a lot of interesting observations here, as well as revelations about something I know absolutely nothing about, sea exploration, that wasn’t explained in old re-runs of “Sea Hunt.”

Here is Chris’s Comment of the Day on the EA post about the dumbest serious headline of the year...

***

Have any of the researchers currently studying the number of times white males are showcased on these series actually pitched an idea to Discovery? I don’t think Discovery Channel calls guys named Mike to do a show for them about sharks. The only Mike that I am aware of on the series is Mike Rowe who has developed a number of programs for the Discovery Channel, most notably Dirty Jobs. I suppose because I don’t see a lot of women cleaning hog pens or standing next to a blast furnace that too is discriminatory. What that Mike has done for making non-white collar jobs desirable and dignified is what most of us should aspire to emulate.

Yes, most of the shows do focus on the shark’s hunting behavior but the attacks showcased are not about attacks on humans but on prey species. Nothing captures the viewer like an 8-foot, 2000 pound Great White breach the surface as it hunts a seal (or a replica of one). The replicas are scientific instruments that take various measurements such as bite force and jaw size. When the focus is on the hunting behaviors of other pelagic species, the focus on speed and tactics. As a diver, I want to know as much about the behavior of certain species that I may encounter in the wild. One of my most favorite dives was a wreck called the Proteus where I had the privilege of swimming with over three dozen 6-8 foot Sand Tiger sharks. When I tell people about my diving, I often hear women claim they would not attempt to dive with sharks. Men probably think the same but are less inclined to admit it.

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Thank God It’s The Friday Ethics Tune-Up, 12/9/2022, And Speaking Of Tunes…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

It was awfully gutsy of Michael Bublé to set up that time-traveling duet with Bing, especially with that song. But he’s so obviously moved by the whole concept of singing with his idol, it works. Bing sings rings around him, of course.

I skipped mentioning the significance of the last two December dates on the calendar, both of which are days that shall live in infamy: the attack on Pearl Harbor on the 7th, and the assassination of John Lennon by a lunatic on December 8. There’s enough going sour right now without looking for bad memories.

1. I can’t justify naming Arizona Senator Kristen Sinema an Ethics Hero for it, but the news this morning that  Sinema is leaving the Democratic Party and changing her party affiliation to Independent has some ethical resonance. It’s just too early to tell what she intends the practical effect of the change to be. It sure looks like a shot across the bow of an arrogant party that has consistently clashed with he principles regarding how a republic should work. As Ethics Alarms has held before, an elected official who switches parties is ethically obligated to resign and run again under her new designation, otherwise this is a betrayal of the voters. The only time a politician did this the ethical way that comes to mind was when Phil Graham of Texas resigned when he left the Donkeys for the Elephants, and that was a long time ago. One result of Sinema’s defection: while Republican have 49 Senators under their banner, Democrats now have only 48, with three Independents padding their forces. Democrats have lost the House, and their President is a bumbling, manipulated failure. In other words, they have a mandate!

2. Ron Burgundy smiles… Diverse but incompetent White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre embarrassed herself again  when she  read the wrong scripted response to a question this week during a White House press briefing. The really disturbing part was that it took her so long to realize it. She is, indeed, an idiot, but a female, black, lesbian immigrant idiot, so as Tony the Tiger would say, “Sheeee’s GREAT!”  A reporter asked for the White House’s reaction to Sen. Jean Shaheen (D-N.H.) claiming that moving South Carolina ahead of New Hampshire in the Democratic primary schedule would make her state “vulnerable for her party.” The Most Inept Presidential Paid Liar Ever checked her pre-scripted notes and said,

So, look, we honor — we honor the Hatch Act, as I mentioned many times before, here, as we are talking about a potential election — a 2024 presidential election. But, looking backward, it is the ultimate irony, you know, that the 2020 election was — was proven by the Trump administration’s Homeland…

Then perhaps tipped off by the reporters looking like the audience in “The Producers” at the conclusion of “Springtime for Hitler,” Jean-Pierre called an oopsie, and said, “Oh, sorry, I think I got ahead of myself there,” and giggled. This isn’t funny, though. It’s tragic and insulting.

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Open Forum, Or “Let’s All Meet At The Street Corner And Sing Ethics Carols!”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Deck the page with rage at TwitterBla bla bla bla bla, bla bla bla blah! ‘Censorship should not seem bitterBla bla bla bla bla, bla bla bla blah! Free expression’s really hatefulBla bla bla, bla bla, bla, bla bla blah!Strangling it could make us grateful…Bla bla bla bla bla, bla bla bla blah!

Sing out, everybody! Cocoa and cookies at my house after!