Author: Jack Marshall

Update: So Kellyanne Conway’s Behind-The-Scenes White House Book Doesn’t Tell Negative Tales About Trump. It’s Still Unethical.

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

In this recent post, Item #4, I pronounced “Here’s the Deal,” former Trump campaign manager, PR flack and advisor KellyAnne Conway’s 500 page memoir of her White House days, an unethical betrayal of trust and professional ethics. According to the Washington Post,, Conway’s “tell-all” doesn’t do her former boss dirt, just other co-workers, like Jared Kushner and Anthony Fauci.

This post is to make a clarification: It doesn’t matter. Conway is still cashing in, and her book is still unethical. Workplaces do not work without mutual trust, and that means that no one can be candid, honest and spontaneous while thinking that what they do or say might be made public by an undeclared spy, mole, or blabber-mouth. Those like Conway who write books and get them out before the main characters have retired, died or faded from memory damage the workplace, politics, government, and human relations. They are ethics corrupters. They are selfish, destructive, betrayers. All of them. It doesn’t matter whether their fame arose from politics, Hollywood, the business world, journalism or someplace else. Such authors betray the trust of others for their own gain, unless every single individual mentioned by name for what they said or did has given advance consent.

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Comment Of The Day: “You Didn’t Really Think That It Was Only The Catholic Church That Had This Problem, Did You?”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The post about the Southern Baptist Convention’s decades-long cover-up of child sexual abuse within its ranks provoked several illuminating comments.

Here is repeat Comment of the Day author John Paul on “You Didn’t Really Think That It Was Only The Catholic Church That Had This Problem, Did You?”:

***

I am a minister in a Church of Christ. We are non-denominational, but as a whole we share a common belief system that tends to be the same from church to church. For those of you who aren’t familiar with what that means, it means that our core beliefs are the same, but each church operates under a group of people that are native to that church and meet the biblical requirements of elder.

I started my ministry back in 2004. Though I went to a college almost 500 miles from my hometown, I tried to get an internship at a local church that was associated with the Church of Christ in the town I grew up in. It came down to me and another young gentleman and while the church was kind to me, the reason they gave me for not giving me the job is that they did not want a local. Fair enough: I wished them luck and ended up taking a internship in a different state altogether.

I bring this up because less than 1.5 years later I returned to that church with my new wife for the Christmas holiday. The size was almost 1/2 less than I remembered and the general atmosphere was somber. We figured that many of the members were traveling like we were and we didn’t think much of it except at the very end of the service where worship was hi-jacked by the leadership (without letting the visitors know) to take a survey.

Question one: “What do you think we could have done better?” Continue reading →

On “Correct Pronouns,” Part I: Roxane Gay

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It tells you pretty much all you need to know about the biases of the New York Times that its workplace ethics column, “Work Friend,” is authored by race-obsessed, radical, and combative gay feminist Roxane Gay. No biases there! She has also been described here as a prolific writer of prose and fiction and a visiting professor at Yale, and that’s all accurate too. However, her biases increasingly poison her advice as thoroughly as they poison her opinion columns.

Her last two of those for the Times were a laborious spin job to make Will Smith’s attack on Chris Rock at the Oscars somehow virtuous (“a rare moment when a Black woman was publicly defended”) and a standard issue rant against the likely Supreme Court ruling striking down Roe.

Ugh. I have to pause a bit here because I have concluded that Gay is too often intellectually and rhetorically dishonest because of her ideological mission, and people like that shouldn’t have regular platforms (or advice columns) in the New York Times. Here is a representative line from that second essay: “[W]e should not live in a world where someone who is raped is forced to carry a pregnancy to term because a minority of Americans believe the unborn are more important than the people who give birth to them.”

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Ethics Dunce: Major League Baseball, As Usual

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The alternate headline would be “Now THIS is pandering!”

As discussed here, White Sox star shortstop Tim Anderson, an African-American, cried “Racism!” because Yankee third baseman Josh Donaldson mockingly called him “Jackie” during the last game between the teams, nearly provoking a “bench-emptying on-field brawl,” as it is typically called, that, also typically, never involved any actual fighting. By “Jackie” Donaldson was sarcastically referencing an ill-considered interview Anderson once gave in which he immodestly compared himself to the color-line shattering Hall of Famer. Needless to say (I hope) calling a black player “Jackie” after he has made an ass of himself by such a self-glorifying comparison isn’t racist. The proper term is “well-deserved.”

I wrote in the post, “Baseball has been a full participant in The Great Stupid, so don’t bet against it punishing Donaldson for “sarcasm that heightens racial sensitivities,” or something.” Bingo! That’s exactly what MLB did, setting a new high (low?) for weenie-ism and race pandering.

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Early Evening Ethics Aggravations, 5/23/2022: Facts Don’t Matter, Words Don’t Matter, Aiming A Loaded Shotgun At A Black Jogger Doesn’t Matter…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Currently bugging me…

  • Walking Spuds just now before the rains come, I saw no fewer than five fellow Alexandrians, ranging in age from about 60 to 13, walking along on a lovely, cool day without appearing to look up once from their cell phone screens. I said “Hi!” to two of them, but they didn’t hear me because they had earbuds blocking out all auditory stimulation from the outside world. One was walking a dog trailing behind., but I could have replaced it with a rabid wolverine for al she would have noticed.
  • Right after I posted about Stacey Abrams’ ongoing con and the mainstream media’s immediate resort to the “Republicans pounce!” deflection, New York Times reporter Trip Gabriel tweeted, “Why did John Fetterman chase down a Black person with a shotgun?’ asks Barnette. The GOP use of this 2013 incident – which some PA Dems predicted would be used in the general to discourage Black turnout – has begun.” Barnette is recently defeated GOP Pennsylvania Senate hopeful Kathy Barnette, who raised the 2013 incident when Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman detained an innocent African-American jogger with a loaded shotgun and pointed it at his chest. How rude of her! (That was criminal assault, by the way.) Instapundit asks, “Who Among Us Has Not Chased Down an Unarmed Black Jogger with a Shotgun?” and the National Review muses on how the mainstream media would handle a similar incident if the candidate in question were a conservative rather than an extreme progressive “Bernie Bro.”

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You Didn’t Really Think That It Was Only The Catholic Church That Had This Problem, Did You?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

From the Houston Chronicle:

For 20 years, leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention — including a former president now accused of sexual assault — routinely silenced and disparaged sexual abuse survivors, ignored calls for policies to stop predators, and dismissed reforms that they privately said could protect children but might cost the SBC money if abuse victims later sued…The historic, nearly 400-page report details how a small, insular and influential group of leaders “singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC to the exclusion of other considerations” to prevent abuse. The report was published by Guidepost Solutions, an independent firm that conducted 330 interviews and reviewed two decades of internal SBC files in the seven-month investigation….

“Survivors and others who reported abuse were ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refrain that the SBC could take no action due to its (structure) — even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation,” Guidepost’s report concluded….

Above are some of the 220 people who, since 1998, worked or volunteered in Southern Baptist churches and were sentenced for sex crimes. Continue reading →

Ethics And Gullibility Test In Georgia: How Long Can Stacey Abrams Fool Enough Of The People Enough Of The Time? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Stacey Abrams epitomizes so many unethical 21st Century political archetypes that I’ll miss her when she’s gone, which will be soon if there is justice in the universe. She is the classic example of a ruthless politician whose rise has been super-charged by cynically exploiting group divisions. Her own Teflon membership in two of those groups, women and blacks, have allowed her to get away with claiming that her election defeat as a Democratic candidate for Georgia governor was based on fraud without mainstream media criticism even as Donald Trump has been attacked literally every day for making the same claim about his defeat: it’s been Black Woman Seeking Justice/Orange Man Bad Loser all the way. Abrams played a dangerous game of two-faced public mendacity when she lobbied Major League Baseball to pull its 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta based on her misrepresentations of the GOP-backed Georgia election reform law, and then, when it became obvious how much money and how many jobs the city would lose because of the (epicly stupid—MLB execs had not even read the law, simply trusting Abrams as their human wet finger in the wind of public opinion) boycott, she claimed that she had never wanted the game to be pulled.

Abrams has also perhaps been the most influential force in the “It Isn’t What It Is” campaign by Democrats to convince the public that ensuring the integrity of elections is “voter suppression.”

Yet she is running for Governor again, thus posing another test of Abraham Lincoln’s famous maxim. Can she fool or continue to fool enough of the people? The news media, of course, can be counted upon to help mightily. Abrams just committed what would be for any politician held to normal standards a decisive gaffe, saying at a campaign event,

“I am tired of hearing about how we’re the best state in the country to do business when we are the worst state in the country to live. Let me contextualize. When you’re No. 48 for mental health, when we’re No. 1 for maternal mortality, when you have an incarceration rate that is on the rise and wages are on the decline, then you are not the Number 1 place to live.”

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It’s Confirmation Bias, Stupid!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I have now seen various versions of this question on multiple blogs, websites, and in comments around the web—this is the version from “The Last Refuge,” a conservative site:

“How did Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann spend 2 years investigating Trump-Russia; with a team of 19 lawyers, $40 million in resources, 40 FBI agents, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants and 500 witnesses; and not find out that Hillary Clinton created the hoax they were investigating?”

It was confirmation bias. It’s really as simple as that. Even though the lawyers and agents involved in the investigation could not find the smoking gun evidence they were sure was there somewhere showing that Donald Trump and his odious minions conspired with America’s enemies to steal the 2016 election from its rightful winner, Hillary Clinton, they were absolutely certain that’s what happened, and still probably believe that’s what happened. They believed it fervently before the investigation ever began, and it poisoned the objectivity and the legitimacy of their work throughout.

Every aspect of Trump’s Presidency was poisoned by confirmation bias—from the news media, from academics, from the Washington D.C. culture, from the popular culture—stretching back before he was nominated. He was a bad guy, that’s all, and everything he did or said was filtered through that jaundiced perception. It is impossible for anyone to succeed in any job, and definitely not the hardest job in the civilized world, burdened with that handicap.

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Sunday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/22/22: I Smell Violence In The Air

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

You want violence instead of civil discourse? In 1856, you got it when on this date, South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner in the Senate over the expansion of slavery and Sumner’s speech excoriating slavery-supporting Senators by name. Brooks entered the Senate chamber and used his cane to beat Sumner, who was sitting at his desk. Sumner’s legs were pinned under the desk, which was bolted to the floor, so he could not escape. If Brooks had not been pulled away, Sumner might have been killed. But the attacker became an instant hero in the South, as supporters sent him commemorative canes. Sumner could not return to the Senate for three years because of his injuries.

Nice. And it appears to me that there are a lot of cultural exhortations to violence occurring right now. Democrats are actively fear-mongering about an imaginary “threat to democracy” posed by Republicans, even as Democrats push for restrictions on free speech and continue with their partisan show trials over the Capitol riot. Violence in response to any police shooting involving a black citizen is now routine, and abortion activists are threatening violence in response to the looming Roe reversal. Meanwhile, the media is assisting in the despicable effort to pin the Buffalo shooting on Tucker Carlson and Fox News

Always happy to help out, the Mad Men (and women) have recently decided that killing the people who you don’t like or disagree with is acceptable and hilarious. In this Amazon Prime TV ad, we’re supposed to applaud a man being killed because he tries to flirt with a woman at a party:

In this one, Apple shows a young woman, the commercial’s protagonist, vaporizing the people who threaten her privacy:

The message is that it’s justifiable to employ violence to get rid of bad people. This is called “playing with fire.”

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The Worst President Ever? Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

In Part 1, an embarrassing 20 days ago, Ethics Alarms looked at the first ten American Presidents and found only two, James Madison and John Tyler, even slightly worthy of consideration. Neither were bad enough however to qualify for the finals, however. The next group, 11-20, have more promising candidates.

Zachary Taylor, like William Henry Harrison not long before him, never had a chance, dying after less than a year-and-a-half in office. The old general signaled that he would have been a strong President in the same sense that Andrew Jackson (and Donald Trump) were strong, which is not to say that he would have necessarily been good for the country. In the mold of Jackson, Taylor was a slave-holder who was determined not to let the demands of the slave-happy South tear the nation apart. His successor, Millard Fillmore, is often assumed to be a poor President because he has a funny name, but he wasn’t terrible. He presided over the adoption of the Compromise of 1850, which may have delayed the South’s attempt at succession until Abe Lincoln was around to deal with it, and dealt competently with a mess of foreign affairs problems in his less than three years in the White House.

America had to wait four more years, through the successful if openly imperialistic Polk administration, to get to its first strong candidates for Worst President, and then got four within the next five:

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