Author: Jack Marshall

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 12/6/2022: Christmas Is Coming, With Ethics Falling Flat…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Who IS that guy? He’s flat! I sure hope there really aren’t four of him. This particular traditional carol has been largely skipped over on YouTube, limiting choices severely.

1. ” I didn’t say what I said!” Donald Trump’s idiotic and alarming outburst after the Twitter censorship revelations has attracted the horrified reaction anyone could have predicted (but him, apparently) the second the words tumbled from his brain onto Truth Social. Now he’s denying that he suggested terminating the Constitution, hearkening back to such episodes as his claiming he opposed the invasion of Iraq. “The Fake News is actually trying to convince the American People that I said I wanted to ‘terminate’ the Constitution. This is simply more DISINFORMATION & LIES,” Trump wrote yesterday on his social media platform. Sure. By what rules of English does “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” mean that the speaker isn’t proposing exactly that? Yes, yes, we all know that Trump just says stuff and that his version of language is approximate and fleeting in meaning. Lord knows I’ve written that enough times. But when your political adversaries are winning elections by saying that you want to be a dictator, using that diversion to hide their own totalitarian machinations, that statement is still unforgivable.

Buried in his original statement is Trump’s calling the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story a “fraud.” Whatever it was, it wasn’t fraud. This is just a word Trump uses. Meanwhile, Politico, in the article linked above, dutifully parrots the mainstream media line that Trump is “falsely asserting that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election.” Politico doesn’t know Trump’s fraud allegations are false; it’s unknowable. Then it says, again as scripted by the Axis, “Trump, who was impeached twice and regularly denies his loss in the last presidential election, perpetuated the untrue claim in both Truth Social posts that 2020 election was stolen.” What do his two partisan and illicit impeachments have to do with anything? And again: Politico doesn’t know that the election wasn’t stolen; indeed the laptop cover-up is strong evidence that it may have been.

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Oh-Oh…The New Supreme Court Justice Made One Of The Worst Analogies I’ve Ever Heard

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

I’m going to give Justice Jackson the benefit of the doubt. Anyone, even a distinguished judge, can have a bad day and say something that just doesn’t come out right. Still, it must be said, her contribution to the many analogies and hypotheticals being tossed around in the Supreme Court during the oral argument of 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the case where a web designer claims that forcing her to create a wedding website for a same-sex couple violates her First Amendment Rights, was jaw-droppingly bad. Frightening, even.

Justice Neil Gorsuch had correctly noted that the objection at issue was not based on the status of the same-sex couple, but instead, the message that the business owner did not want to send. The question isn’t the “who” Gorsuch said, but the “what.” Exactly. And that’s why CNN’s headline on the case, “Supreme Court conservatives seem to side with website designer who doesn’t want to work with same-sex couples” is false and misleading. Lorie Smith has been very clear that she will work for anyone; she just won’t make same-sex wedding websites. It’s not “Who,” but “What.”

Now consider Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s rejoinder. Pay attention, please:

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Ethics Quiz: The Cartoonist’s Regret

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

                                        Hell’s video store

Sometimes Ethics Alarms is on these matters quicker than anyone; sometimes it takes a while. Two years ago, retired “Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson confessed that the above cartoon was the only one he could think of at the moment that he felt he should apologize for. He wrote,

Ace Ethics Alarms commenter JutGory alerted me to Larson’s lament, which had been recalled in this recent post on the site “Screen Rant.” I tended to find that the cartoonist’s apology reflected well on his  ethics alarms, as did the Screen Rant pundit, who wrote,

In the end, he put his ego aside and admitted he unfairly judged the movie and criticized it without ever seeing it. The Far Side creator sharing his mistake shows that even the most talented and self-aware cartoonists can accidentally cross a line without initially realizing it. Thankfully, after seeing the movie for himself, Gary Larson understood an apology was warranted for the Far Side comic.

Jut, however, has a different take. He wrote,

It was a joke that landed well because of popular sentiment at the time it was made. Thinking about it another way, what if he saw Ishtar at the time and liked it?  He could still make the same joke because it would resonate with the public.  It would still be funny. I guess the real question is whether comics are bound by the same rules as a critic.  A critic should know what it is criticizing.  A comic is going for a laugh.  And, to the extent it was an “unfair” joke (I am not sure it is, as the movie had a widely-known bad reputation), is an apology necessary.  Most jokes are “unfair” to some extent.  But, does that, in itself, require an apology.  From a critic, yes; from a comic, no.

Ooooo, I think I may have to agree with Jut.

Maybe.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Does Gary Larson have anything to apologize for?

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A Hammacher Schlemmer Exclusive: Historical Ignorance For Christmas!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The up-scale retailer Hammacher Schlemmer is battling it out with The Sharper Image in the high-priced Chritsmas gifts, toys food items and decorations market for people who literally have money to burn. I’m especially impressed with the golf ball-locating glasses, the Belgian Chocolate Hot Cocoa Bombs that “explode with flavor” in a cup of hot milk, at only $5 a bomb, and the “first marble run with a track that is suspended in mid-air for only $199.95. However, what caught the ethicist’s eye was the “Your Year to Remember” wall art, which commemorates a birthday or anniversary with coins minted in that year, plus bold graphics that list “major news events” along with pop culture and sports happenings.

For some strange reason, the catalogue designers chose 1968 as the year to display. You can’t make it out from the graphic above, but the major news events listed are…

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Ugh. This Again. Except That A Website Isn’t Like A Cake. [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

When Ethics Alarms first covered the case of a Christian website designer who was prosecuted for refusing to design a website celebrating a same sex wedding, I wrote at the top, “I will state up front that I am confident that this decision will get to the U.S. Supreme Court, and that if and when it does, it will be reversed.”

Now the case has indeed arrived at the Supreme Court. Its likely reversal (the website designer, a trial and a appeals court ruled, could not refuse to design a website celebrating a same-sex wedding) is being blamed by the LGBTQ suck-up media on all those evil conservatives who have invaded the Court since it ducked the matter of Christian baker Jack Phillips, who refused to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. SCOTUS decided in favor of Phillips on technical rather than substantive grounds, with a waffling majority opinion by Justice Kennedy, who specialized in such things. Kennedy is gone, but the reason the web designer is likely to win isn’t the change in the composition of the Court, but because the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was dead wrong when it ruled in 2021 that Lorie Smith and her company, 303 Creative, violated a Colorado law by refusing to create a website for a same sex union.

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Ethics Heroes: The Baseball Hall of Fame Era Committee

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

A new 16-member committee was charged with voting on the Hall of Fame membership cases of eight select players who had failed to acquire the necessary number of votes in their years on the main Hall ballots, which are cast by, ugh, baseball’s sportswriters. The results of their deliberations were announced yesterday: of the seven, only one, former Blue Jays first baseman Fred McGriff received the required twelve votes. He is deserving beyond a doubt, but the bigger story and even better news from an ethics perspective is that Barry Bonds, the King of the Steroid Cheats, the game’s career and single season record-holder in home runs, was rejected again. Also seeing their otherwise Hall-worthy career achievements rejected were Bond’s fellow PED-tarnished colleagues Roger Clemens and Rafael Palmeiro, both of whom, like Bonds, received few votes from the committee members.

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What Shannon Epstein Does Is Not National News And It Is Unethical Journalism To Pretend It Is

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

From The Blaze:

On Thanksgiving Day, Shannon Epstein, 25, climbed aboard a Spirit Airlines flight headed from New Orleans to New Jersey. However, after the plane left the gate but before it could take off, Epstein allegedly began causing a scene, accusing a Latina family seated near her of “smuggling cocaine.”

Because of the wild accusation, airport officials decided to redirect the plane back to the gate so that Epstein could be removed. However, she refused to cooperate, reports say. When deputies tried to force her to deplane, she became “extremely combative,” said Capt. Jason Rivarde of the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office.

During a scuffle with six deputies at Louis Armstrong International Airport, Epstein supposedly caused several injuries. She has been accused of biting one officer in the arm to such an extent that she broke the skin. She has also been accused of kicking another officer in the groin.

Many other news sources including NBC News, Yahoo! and The New York Post are headlining this story and giving it far more circulation and attention than the typical “wacko goes nuts on an airplane” tale.

Why do Shannon Epstein’s antics matter? They don’t. She’s irrelevant to the nation, national security, the economy and the culture. Thousands of more substantive crimes have been committed by similarly insignificant people since she had her meltdown.

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From EA’s “When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring” Files: The Stanford Marching Band’s Religious Mockery

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Nice.

At halftime in the Brigham Young University (BYU) and Stanford University’s (Stanford) football game in California, Stanford’s band devoted its halftime show to insulting the Mormon faith The skit was called “Gay Chicken,” and featured a mock wedding ceremony of two women,using the words of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints marriage ceremony that declares a man and woman united “for time and all eternity.” In the skit, the wedding   officiant quoted Genesis 1:28 and directed both women to “be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.”

Gee, that sounds so hilarious I can’t imagine why the many Mormons in the crowd would feel attacked! They should have been laughing their heads off! Well, some people just have no sense of humor….

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“The Ethicist” Had A Long Answer To This Question. I Have A Short One…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Kwame Anthony Appiah, the New York Time’s advice column ethicist who really is an ethicist, was atsked with this query from “Name Withheld”:

I am a Black woman and I signed up as a mentor for a law-student-mentoring program at my alma mater. I made a request for a Black mentee, but I was paired with a white woman. Now I’m second-guessing participating in the program. Black attorneys make up less than 5 percent of all attorneys and continue to face horrific experiences in law school and in the legal community.

This is whom I envisioned myself supporting when I registered for the program as a recent graduate. I imagined deep conversations about law professors and law-firm culture, and sharing how I’ve learned to navigate them as a Black woman. Not only will these conversations not apply to my mentee the same way, but I can’t help wondering if assisting them will ultimately contribute to my own oppression.

There are so many factors in her favor that I don’t really want to help give her even more of a leg up in my free time. On the other hand, I don’t have anything against her, and law school is universally scary during the first year. Should I be thinking about this differently? Is it wrong to bow out?

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Sunday Morning Ethics Sing-Out, 12/4/2022: Search Engines, Harvey’s Junk, Another Confused Actor, And More

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

In my view, this is the gold standard of Christmas carols. Nobody know for certain who write the soaring melody. It might have been Handel.

***

I apologize for the various WordPress glitches of late. They are fooling around with the software again. Now, on every draft post, I have to put up with idiotic suggestions from the platform on what to write about. Just now, it was, “Are you more of a night or morning person?” Get off my screen, you meddling fools! I don’t need your pedestrian input to find inspirations for an ethics blog’s content.

***

The Twitter censorship story reminded me again of how biased, cowardly and dead wrong the left-ish commenters and silent readers here were over the past few years to flee Ethics Alarms because it accurately, fairly and objectively figured out how unjustified and sinister their favorite party’s treatment of  President Trump, how contrived and rigged the Russian collusion investigation was, how destructive the two partisan impeachments were, how dangerous the mainstream media’s transformation into a propaganda weapon had become, and how ethically rotten their favorite party was. Ethics Alarms was right, they were wrong, and if even one of the self-exiled who pulled themselves up to their full height, stuck their defiant chins in the air, and accused me of “drinking the Kool-Aid” had an atom of courage or integrity, they would apologize and ask to have their commenting privileges restored. Instead, they remain enablers of the attacks on individual rights and democratic institutions by their apathy, acquiescence, and denial. People are always accusing me of being “upset” about the ethics issues we cover here. I almost never am. This, however, pisses me off.

1. Hopeless, but admirable.…Since Google has traveled from “Don’t Be Evil” to Big Tech ethics villainy, a new search engine has been launched, Freespoke, as a non-totalitarianism-enabling alternative.  The problem with all of these competitors, like DuckDuckGo, is that they just aren’t as reliable. Still, I’ll give this one a chance. Here’s a good sign: a search for”ethics blog” turned up Ethics Alarms on the first page, 7th in line. On Google, the same search placed Ethics Alarms on the sixth page, after many sites that receive far less traffic and several that are functionally dead, like the Legal Ethics Forum, which once was one of my favorite resources. Its last post was last January, yet its two pages ahead of  EA. Gee, I wonder why that would be? Looks like I can’t blame all of the reduced traffic here on pusillanimous wokesters… Continue reading →