Author: Jack Marshall

Disney vs. DeSantis Ethics Update

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

 

1. NPR reported that “DeSantis wanted to punish Disney. Repealing its tax status may hurt taxpayers instead. The bill will undercut Disney’s autonomy, but it could impose a steep cost on Orange and Osceola counties, where the theme park is located. The two counties would inherit the Disney district’s debts, which officials say would result in higher taxes.” This theme was echoed—talk about echo chambers!–all over the mainstream media, and it appears to be nonsense, an attempt to undermine the decision and to mislead the public. “Officials” turned out to be a single Orange County Democrat, so the plural was fake news as well as a dishonest appeal to authority. In addition, the only entity certain to see a tax hike as a result of the loss of Disney’s special status will be Disney because its tax break is gone. And why would Florida be on the hook for Disney’s debts? Disney borrowed the money, and Disney still has the cash to pay them off. [Source: Don Surber]

2. On the incompetence and irresponsible conduct front, Disney’s action’s mandate this standard Ethics Alarms clip in reference to the company’s woke CEO…

Since it impetuously shot off its public declaration of opposition to the Florida Parental Rights Law, Disney’s stock has dropped precipitously, costing the company nearly $50 billion in value. This hurts stockholders obviously, and constitutes a needless self-inflicted wound. Continue reading →

Expert? EXPERT? Fauci Doesn’t Even Comprehend The Government He Works For!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Or, in the alternative, he has finally revealed himself as another aspiring totalitarian progressive. Either way, the doctor is a dangerous, arrogant, power-abusing fool, and it’s way past time to get rid of him.

Last week Dr. Fauci—may he go down in U.S. history as one of the nation’s true villains—said:

“We are concerned about … the courts getting involved in things that are unequivocally a public health decision… This is a CDC issue, should not have been a court issue… It was perfectly logical.”

Yes, he really said this. No, I wouldn’t kid you, he really did. He is Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President of the United States. He has been director of the NIAID since 1984. From 1983 to 2002, Fauci was one of the world’s most frequently cited scientists across all scientific journals. In 2008, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

And yet he either doesn’t understand the Constitution of the United States, or wants to overturn it in favor of a dictatorship of experts. Ironically, he epitomizes exactly what is wrong with “experts” in so many fields. They tend to be single-minded and locked into tunnel vision. They drift toward favoring processes that favor an “ends justify the means” philosophy. They are ultimately untrustworthy and unethical. Continue reading →

“Oh. Well That’s Completely Reasonable.”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

More than a year since the 2020 election, the mainstream media’s statement as fact that there were no reasons to question the integrity of the Presidential vote elected Joe Biden, and that the continuing insistence by Donald Trump that the election was “stolen” is a lie are still virtually daily features of the news. It was the main topic in the unethically edited Piers Morgan interview of Trump this week. Meanwhile, the “Trump has set out to destroy Americans’ trust in elections!” mantra is the linchpin in the “Republicans are an existential threat to democracy!” Big Lie that has become one of the handful of desperate messages the Democratic Party will use to try to avoid disaster in November.

Trump’s conviction (he’s may be mistaken, but he’s not lying) that the election was stolen is currently being weaponized by the Democratic House to show that the Jan.6 riot at the Capitol was an attempted coup (while their two partisan impeachments were not), and that his supporters in the GOP were accomplices in an “insurrection.”

Intrinsic to the narrative is the sub-narrative that Republicans are gullible zombies who believe whatever Trump tells them to believe, and that there is no evidence whatsoever to support suspicions about the election, though in crucial states voting laws were loosened illegally, insecure “drop-boxes” were widely employed, and mail-in ballots made undetectable vote manipulation ridiculously easy….never mind the successful efforts by social media platforms and the mainstream media to bury significant news that would hurt Biden’s support.

You know: no reason to be suspicious whatsoever. Continue reading →

Rep. Cawthorne And The Cross-Dressing Future Congressman Principle Question

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Yes, this is a funny controversy, but not entirely trivial. And you knew Ethics Alarms would be on it like hound on a hock of ham, because examining the Naked Teacher Principle [NTP]and its real or proposed extensions, sisters, cousins and aunts, have been a periodic obsession of both Ethics Alarms and its predecessor, The Ethics Scoreboard. Add to that the fact that that Madison Cawthorn (R-NC.), is both a Christian values-spouting politician and a mega-jerk, and the photo above, showing him cavorting in lingerie, cannot be ignored (or, once seen, unseen).

The Principle states that a secondary school teacher or administrator (or other role model for children) who allows pictures of himself or herself to be widely publicized, as on the web, showing the teacher naked or engaging in sexually provocative poses, cannot complain when he or she is dismissed by the school as a result.

It is important to remember that even the Naked Teacher Principle does not hold that teachers necessarily should be dismissed if old photos surface of them online that show more of them than parents and schools want students to see, but that it is their own carelessness that created their career crisis, and that the decision to dismiss them is ethically defensible. Most recent posts on the topic involve whether the NTP can be applied to other professions.The last time it was discussed, in 2012, involved a nurse who made money on the side by posing provocatively on a sexually themed website. The conclusion here was was that there was no “Naked Nurse Principle,” and that her firing was unjust.  The previous NTP-related post involved, almost a year before that one,  rebutting the argument that there are similar principles regarding police and firefighters. Some of the more interesting versions that have been explored on Ethics Alarms include The Female Bodybuilder Firefighter Principle, The Drag Queen Principal Principle, The Online Porn Star Teacher Principle, Naked Naval War College Professor Principle, and more.

So now we must ask, “Is there a Cross-Dressing Future Congressman Principle”? Continue reading →

School For Snowflakes: Time To Raze The University Of Central Florida And Sow The Campus With Salt

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The problem, unfortunately, is that in this case the relatively unimportant institution may be another indicator of the totalitarian drift of American higher education as a whole.

Three University of Central Florida students asked a court to declare the school’s  discriminatory-harassment policy unconstitutional. All three wanted to express views against abortion, affirmative action and illegal immigration, as well as their opinions on  LGBTQ issues, but said that they dared not to do so  because of the university’s oppressive speech and conduct rules. After the lower court refused to consider the case on procedural grounds, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the speech restrictions.

A junior high school student relatively familiar with the First Amendment could have figured this out. What is terrifying is that such a censorious, viewpoint-restricting piece of anti-democratic poison could have been concocted and enforced on any American campus. The University of Central Florida’s “discriminatory harassment” policy states, Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The Fake Trump Interview Walk-Out Story

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Yesterday, the conservative New York Post reported,

Former President Donald Trump blasted Piers Morgan as “very dishonest” while walking out of an interview with the TV presenter and Post columnist after being pressed on his claims that he lost the 2020 presidential election due to voter fraud.

The walk-out story was picked up and reported in many other publications and forums. It wasn’t true. Morgan and whoever handles his promotion had sent out edited segments of a much longer interview on his new TV show, “Piers Morgan Uncensored” on Talk TV, which debuts next week.

An audio recording indicated that the interview did not end with Trump storming off the set, as the promotional video indicated and the Post and others reported. According to the recording, the two men thanked each other and laughed as the interview came to an end. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Tune-Up, 2/22/22: A Very Special Episode…

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

1.  “What’s going on here?” I have not decided what exactly the article “The New Homophobia” in Newsweek (Flagged this morning by Althouse: Pointer for Ann!) means or portends: it is, after all, just one man’s opinion. However, I sense that it is relevant to the issues underlying the Disney vs. Florida controversy.

Excerpts…

I learned about queer theory, an obscure academic discipline based largely on the writing of the late French intellectual Michel Foucault, who believed that society categorizes people—male or female, heterosexual or homosexual—in order to oppress them. The solution is to intentionally blur—or “queer”—the boundaries of these categories. Soon this “queering” became the predominant method of discussing and analyzing gender and sexuality in universities…

***

This might not be a concern if, by adopting these new identities, young people were merely playing with the boundaries of normative gender expression—something that gays, lesbians, feminists, most liberals and even many conservatives would welcome two decades into the 21st century. But many young boys do not stop at simply painting their fingernails and wearing dresses, and young girls do more than cut their hair short and play football. With increasing frequency, these children are given drugs to block their puberty, cross-sex hormones and irreversible surgeries, all the while cheered on first by online communities, then the mainstream media and now the current presidential administration…

*** Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Transgender Pro Golfer Mianne Bagger

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Nothing quite warms the cockles of an ethicist’s heart like a public figure stating the truth against his or her own perceived interests. That’s ethics. Add to that when such a statement is likely to enrage an especially vicious and ruthless activist mob, and the result is a clear Ethics Hero: ethics perception plus integrity and courage.

Australian professional golfer Mianne Bagger, the first transgender athlete to compete in a professional golf tournament Down Under, told news.com.au. that she supports a bill thatwould exclude trans athletes from female sports. “Letting trans athletes compete in female sport is a slap in the face to women,” Bagger told an interviewer. She explained that trans women competing in female sports leagues when they are  more biologically similar to men and often have not undergone the medical procedures necessary for complete transition is unfair and undermines the integrity of the sport.

(Are you reading this, Lia?) Continue reading →

DeSantis Strikes Back: Ethics Dunce Disney Gets The Legal And Ethical Consequences It Deserved

/ Jack Marshall / 54 Comments

During a special session called for the purpose, Florida’s Senate has passed a bill that would end the special autonomous tax district status granted to Walt Disney World 1967. The bill now goes to Florida’s House, where passage is expected. Gov. DeSantis will, of course, sign the bill into law.

Good.

The mainstream news media and its minions are pushing, hard, the skewed narrative that this is GOP hypocrisy, with a state government using its power to punish a corporation’s free speech. That, however, is not a correct analysis.

What Disney did, when it publicly announced that it would protest and fight to repeal the Parental Rights in Education Law (falsely and dishonestly tagged the “Don’t Say Gay” law by LGTBQ activists, including much of the news media), was to breach the implicit conditions of its 55 year-old deal with the State of Florida, and, in an uncharacteristic blunder, prompt it to do what it had an ethical and legal duty to do anyway.

By 1967, Walt Disney himself had been negotiating a sweetheart deal with Florida since Walt Disney World was just another twinkle in his eye. The planned 40 acre complex was audacious and unprecedented, and audacious because it was unprecedented. Central Florida was an under-utilized swamp, and Disney was promising to turn it into the biggest tourist destination in the U.S. This would mean publicity, tourism ,commerce, hotel construction, jobs, tax revenue and development for Florida, and Disney was a tough negotiator. (Another Disney theme park project planned for Manassas, Virginia was abruptly killed when that state was less than accommodating.) Disney had a well-earned reputation for doing things right, so Florida saw nothing but benefits in allow it nearly complete freedom to build and run the new theme park the way it chose, without meddling from regulators. When Disney wanted to build a building, fill in a lake, or pave a road, it didn’t have to seek permits or approval, allowing the place to operate and start making money for itself and Florida as early as possible. Continue reading →