I was thinking about making the latest Atlantic essay “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty: We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID” an Ethics Quiz. Wouldn’t that be the civilized, forgiving, soothing, fair thing to do? After all, as author, a Brown professor named Emily Oster, argues, weren’t “most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society”? They meant well! (Rationalization #3A The Road To Hell) Anyone can make a mistake! (#19. The Perfection Diversion) OK, we could have done better! (#19B The Insidious Confession) That’s in the past! (#52. The Underwood Maneuver). There are so, so many more rationalizations, all employed here to avoid accountability by those who richly deserve it. And I realized that this was coming from The Atlantic, one of the leaders of the Trump-hating media, and a herald of the Progressive New Order. Of course they want an amnesty.
Author: Jack Marshall
Mark Your Calendars: The Next Anti-Supreme Court Freak-Out Is Scheduled For June
In 1978’s Bakke decision, a fractured majority of the Supreme Court found that universities could consider race to build a diverse student body, agreeing that educational benefits could flow from diversity. At the same time, the opinion prohibited quotas, requiring universities to undertake a “holistic” review of each applicant in which race could be a factor. The Supreme Court affirmed this foggy principle in 2003’s Grutter v. Bollinger and again in 2016’s Fisher v. Texas. Schools, meanwhile, became adept at making sure that holistic approach resulted in the desired racial proportions.
Now the Supreme Court appears ready to rule that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unlawful. Five hours of arguments and questioning in the two cases’ oral presentations before the justices made that abundantly clear, but it was already clear long before. The cases’ decisions won’t be handed down until June 2023 (unless that majority opinion gets leaked too), but the Left is already laying the groundwork for a Dobbs-like freak-out.
The clear media talking point memo apparently requires all stories to call such a decision ” a move that would overrule decades of precedents.” But this is deliberately disingenuous. From the beginning, the Supreme Court allowed colleges and diversities to use race in their admission procedures while acknowledging that it was a special exception to the equal protection requirement of the 14th Amendment that was necessitated by the unusual circumstances of slavery and Jim Crow. (It was, in fact, a perfect example of the Ethics Incompleteness Principle, where a valid rule did not work well in a unique situation, and thus s special, unique solution had to be crafted that does NOT serve as a precedent.) Justice Sandra Day O’Connor admitted as much in her opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), concluding that affirmative action in college admissions is justifiable, but not forever: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in student body diversity] approved today.”
It was a bad and confusing opinion: if the law and the Constitution is the same, why would it be acceptable to violate it then but not 25 years later? It is now 19 years later; 25 years was not a scientific estimate, but just wait: one of the arguments that will be aimed at the SCOTUS opinion in June will be that it’s “too soon.”
Yet Another Pre-Election Story That Should Be Getting Major News Coverage As Relevant To Which Party Is Threatening Democracy
Come to think of it, the Democrats are wielding hammers, though metaphorical ones. More evidence has arrived on how the social media platforms work to serve the current government’s power objectives by suppressing dissent. This has been called a “right wing conspiracy theory” even though the immediate response by Facebook and Twitter to the Hunter Biden laptop report would have been enough to get to a jury if the platforms could be prosecuted for “trying to fix a Presidential election,” and that was two years ago. But every bit of new proof is helpful to convince those apathetic and gullible Americans who need to be hit over the heads with a hammer—I have hammers on the brain today for some reason—before they’ll pay attention.
Twitter: In a final show of defiance that also proved Elon Musk right, Twitter suspended several conservative accounts just as Musk began cleaning house, and only one week before the midterm elections.
Jake Denton, a research associate at Heritage’s Tech Policy Center, found himself suspended on Twitter at 11:10 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 29. Vince Dao, editor-in-chief at the conservative organization American Virtue, had his account suspended a day earlier. Neither had any hint about what led to their suspensions.
Denton said yesterday,
Ethics Alarm! The Public School Political Indoctrination In Fairfax, Virginia Rates Two “Geenas”
I know Geena has already appeared here recently, but Americans really should be afraid of this story out of Fairfax, Virginia, and be especially afraid as they consider how long such sinister brain-washing of our young has been going on. The incident has a lot more relevance to the elections next week than an isolated attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, which has none. If we had a responsible journalistic establishment in the country any more, there would be an uproar over such strategies aimed at public school students. As it is, only Fox News has bothered to cover the story at all, and not very well at that.
Fifth graders were assigned the task of critiquing an anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment, anti-NRA essay as part of a persuasive writing fifth-grade unit from the teachers’ aide, “Units of Study in Opinion, Information, and Narrative Writing.” The screed is a fake child’s essay, obviously written by an adult. The clear purpose of the exercise is not to develop critical thinking skills but rather to embed anti-gun beliefs in children too young to evaluate and resist them. Here is the essay:
Further Observations On The Paul Pelosi Attack And Aftermath [Updated]
The ultimate take-away from the madness surrounding the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband is this: if Democrats and their media allies are devoting this much spin and energy into making it into an “October surprise,” they have reached peak desperation. To repeat myself from yesterday, who otherwise inclined to vote for a Republican would change his or her vote based on the “The evil, fascist Republicans who want to destroy democracy caused the violent attack by a whack-job on Nancy Pelosi’s husband with their hateful rhetoric and must be stopped by any means necessary” narrative? I can’t believe there is anyone in that category. I can easily believe, however, that some independent on the metaphorical fence might be prompted to conclude, “Wow, these people have lost their friggin’ minds. I don’t want to have anything to do with them.” Or, as King Arthur would say,
And yet they are going with it. Amazing.
Other notes:
WaPo’s Environment Scold Earns a “Jacques Brel” For Halloween!
As the Ethics Alarms glossary explains, the Jacques Brel is a special Ethics Alarms award bestowed on those who evoke the late, great French troubadour’s observation, “If you leave it up to them, they’ll crochet the world the color of goose shit.” Seldom have I encountered a more deserving recipient than Washington Post environment reporter Allyson Chiu, who was allowed by apparently standard-less editors to inflict on the world her essay, “How you can make more socially conscious Halloween candy choices.”
To be fair, it isn’t quite as obnoxious and deranged as the article I encountered a while back that instructed climate change phobics to carefully divide the plies in each roll of toilet paper to double the utility of each roll (and save trees, see), but its headline is funnier. What has to happen to someone—indoctrination, a bad experience at Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory—to think like this?
Here are what some of Allyson’s fellow travelers tell her to relay to readers:
Ethics Dunce (At Least): ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith
I had become thoroughly sick of ESPN’s race-obsessed loud-mouth Stephen A. Smith long before I stopped watching the channel. Eventually I even eliminated it from our satellite package: ESPN, like everything Disney touches lately (except the Beatles), is unwatchable, and Smith is Exhibit A. His latest bit of gratuitous race-baiting would get him canned from any respectable network, but then there are no respectable networks. Naturally, he had to endorse Houston manager Dusty Baker’s biased and brain-dead assertion that Major League Baseball had some kind of vendetta against or racist avoidance of American-born black players (because foreign-born black players aren’t really black, or something). Just ponder this :
Sunday Ethics Reflections, 10/30/2022: What’s Going On Here?
I have no idea if the various scandalous theories about the Paul Pelosi beating have any truth in them, but I will say this: the Democrats and members of the media that immediately leaped to the Gabby Giffords replay that Republican rhetoric seeded the attack richly deserve to be humiliated, which they will be if the incident turns out to be a gay hook-up gone wrong. The Axis immediately defaulted to exploiting the incident before they had the facts—if they are settled, I haven’t seen them— and now there at least appears to be some chance that the whole thing was misrepresented. The key takeaways ethically are 1) leaping to use the attack as a political weapon was indefensible and 2) if we had ethical journalists, reporters from major outlets would be digging to find the facts. Right now, it is only the fringes of the conservative media and blogosphere that even appears curious. Why did Paul Pelosi refer to his attacker as “a friend”? Why wasn’t there evidence of a break-in? Is there security footage, and what does it show? Glenn Greenwald tweeted, “Many journalists see the glaring questions and evidentiary holes in the Paul Pelosi narrative. But they also know how important that narrative is to Dems right before the mid-terms. So why stick their heads up, provoke a liberal Twitter mob, and be branded? That’s the climate.”
Well, it’s an unethical climate.
1. How hard should we be on Eric Burton? The Texas native and the founding member of The Black Pumas took the field at Minute Maid Park to start off Game #1 of the World Series with his rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and botched the lyrics. This has happened to many more prominent singers before, most famously Robert Goulet, in a performance he was mocked for until the end of his career. Having botched lyrics I know cold in a public performance myself (more than once, in fact), I am inclined to be kind and forgiving, but his rendition was also pitchy, and just didn’t sound very good. To my ear, it seemed that he was more interested in showing off his voice and riffs than actually doing the song justice, and that song deserves respect.
Baseball Ethics: Dusty’s Lament [Corrected]
Houston Astros manager Dusty Baker, who absent an epic upset by the inferior Phillies is about to cap off his long and illustrious baseball career with a World Series championship, blundered into a rare (for him) and foolish outburst sparked by the news that there are no “American-born black players” competing in the World Series. You see, there are black players, a lot of them, on the Astros and Phillies, and many of them are American citizens, but they were born south of that almost non-existent U.S. border, so I guess they don’t count. So Dusty dusted off his racial resentment, and announced in response to being informed about this carefully layered statistic, “Nah, don’t tell me that. That’s terrible for the state of the game. Wow! Terrible. “Quote me. I am ashamed of the game.”
And I’m ashamed of you, Dusty. That’s an ignorant and unfair comment. It’s not as if baseball wouldn’t sign a trained squid to a mega-million dollar contract if he hit like Aaron Judge, the assumed American League Most Valuable Player this season. (Incidentally, Judge is biracial, and would be counted as black if he decided to “identify” as such.) Is Dusty ashamed of Judge? There are many reasons the percentage of black players has fallen in recent decades. The 2022 percentage of African-Americans was about 7%, or half the proportion in the population generally. The main reason for this is not any racial discrimination by baseball, but because of the choices made by black athletes and social forces affecting them.
Update: The Axis Of Unethical Conduct’s 2022 Mid-Term Elections Freak-Out
I’d like to know who was the genius that suggested “The evil, fascist Republicans who want to destroy democracy caused the violent attack by a whack-job on Nancy Pelosi’s husband with their hateful rhetoric must be stopped by any means necessary” would be a smart and persuasive argument to turn the Red Tide and pull off an upset on November 8. Then I’d like to have those among the “resistance,” Democrats, and mainstream media—that’s the Ethics Alarms Axis of Unethical Conduct—- who reacted with, “Hey! That’s brilliant!” explain their reasoning before checking themselves into a hospital, because they’re the ones who are acting like they have been hit in the skull with a hammer.
Can they really not detect the obvious hypocrisy and self-contradictory reasoning of this strategy? Apparently not. Yet it was Democratic Senate Majority Leader who pointed the way to an eventual assassination attempt on Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh by shouting, “I want to tell you, Justice Kavanaugh and Justice Gorsuch, you have unleashed a whirlwind, and you will pay the price.You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions!” Then just this month, Nancy Pelosi told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that she would have attacked President Trump on January 6, 2021 if he had come to the Capitol “I would have punched him out. I said I would have punched him out. I would have gone to jail. And I would have been happy to do so.”
Because Republicans, and especially Trump, are evil and dangerous, you see. And they engage in hateful rhetoric that incites their supporters (of which Paul Pelosi’s attacker was not one by all indications) to take violent action! As Olsen Johnson so wisely observed,
Here are some recent examples of the commentary arising from that parallel universe:
