Author: Jack Marshall

Suppertime Ethics Delicacies! 1/12/2022: A Suspicious Email! A Mean Family! A New Kind Of Discrimination! And What The Hell Is A Türkiye?

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Ugh. I have about seven half-finished posts, and today was only saved by having some excellent Comments of the Day on the runway. I spent most of it alternating between walking Spuds and working out a fascinating but difficult legal ethics question from a client, in one of a surprising number of areas where the legal profession hasn’t decided what’s ethical yet.

1. Was this really necessary? Turkey, showing no respect whatsoever for geography books, mapmakers, poor spellers and English speakers, decided to change its name from Turkey to Türkiye, which is the English spelling, believe it or not. “The phrase Türkiye represents and expresses the culture, civilization and values of the Turkish nation in the best way,” an announcement explained. Wait, it’s a phrase?

2. Hey! A new kind of discrimination! Over at Practical Ethics, Charles Foster complains about “the bias in favour of consciousness, and the consequent denigration of the unconscious.” Here is a sample:

“…we see it supremely (and supremely self-servingly) in philosophy, because philosophy is all about the exercise of those ‘higher cognitive functions’. When modern philosophers agree with Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living, they really mean that if you can’t think in the focused, highly cognitive way that they do, you might as well bow out – a conclusion on all fours with the decisions of the judges in PVS cases. Lay people might think that philosophy is a no-holds-barred search for the truth about the universe: it’s not; it’s based on the assumption that the universe perceived and perceivable by our quotidian consciousness is all that there is, and that that consciousness is therefore the only tool available for probing the universe….

3. A scandal? A smoking gun? Maybe…In newly obtained emails between National School Boards Association board members Marnie Maldonado and Kristi Swett dated October 5-6, 2021, Ms. Swett, who is an officer of the NSBA, seems to say that Biden’s Secretary of Education,  Miguel Cardona, solicited the association’s infamous letter asking the Justice Department to sic its agents on CRT-protesting parents as “domestic terrorists.” Justice then relied on the NSBA letter to send out its own threatening  memo directing the FBI to mobilize in support of local education officials who had to deal with these citizens who insisted that they should have a say in what their children were being taught. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Bias Also Makes Philosophers Stupid”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Cornell associate professor of philosophy Kate Manne, decided to employ the disciplines of philosophy to rationalize why she didn’t want to diet any more, calling the urge to lose weight “immoral.” Is it unethical to misuse ethical principles for selfish ends, making trusting readers less informed in the process? I think so.

Commenter Isaac submitted this Comment of the Day to register his objections to her arguments, as he examined the post, “Bias Also Makes Philosophers Stupid” [that’s reality TV star Tammy Slaten above with her boyfriend, who likes her just the way she is…]

***

This part is unforgivable and exposes a tainted, delusional worldview:

“patriarchal forces — the forces that tell girls and women in particular to be small, meek, slight, slim and quiet…”

Let’s break down what the “patriarchy” is supposedly demanding of girls, according to the lens through which people indoctrinated like this see the world:

1. “Small” – Women are smaller than men, across the board. Is biology a patriarchal system? Is she saying that by ballooning out into an obese woman, she will achieve equality with taller men and their more dense body structures? Or is she just saying that the patriarchy demands healthy women? (Historically, that’s not even true, if old European paintings have taught me anything.) But even if it were true that the patriarchy desires fit women, survival in a state of nature also demands a healthy body. If anything, “patriarchal” structures (like agriculture and cities) have made it possible for obese people to even exist in the first place. In some utopian feminist treehouse-jungle, fat women would just be eaten by tigers.

This is even dumber when you consider that NOBODY likes, wants, or respects a fat man. As if the patriarchy loves fat dudes but not fat women. She’s already veered into insanity, and it’s just getting started.

2. “Meek” – This is also a product of biology, not culture. Men have higher levels of testosterone, which means they generally take more risks, are louder, more aggressive, and act out more physically, compared to women. If women were as aggressive as men but with otherwise the same biology, they would be getting themselves killed in violent confrontations with men at obscene rates throughout history. It’s not likely that the demographic balance between men and women would even be sustainable that way, which means over time women would just go back to being largely “meek” again, as less aggressive women would outlast more aggressive ones. Instead of celebrating the unique qualities of women, this philosopher thinks that it’s unfair that women aren’t just…men.

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “On Transgender Competitors Being Permitted In Women’s Sports: Is It Possible To Be More Ethically And Logically Muddled Than This?”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In this Comment of the Day, the first of two this morning, Extradimensional Cephalopod provides useful perspective on the logical and ethical flaws inherent in the trans athletes fiasco, as well as the weak arguments presented by advocates of biological males competing in girls’ and women’s sports. [That’s transgender female powerlifter Janae Kroc above, before (when she was Matthew Kroczaleski, and after. He/she calls himself/herself “gender fluid,” so when feeling feminine, Janae competes against women. She does…well.]

Here is EC’s COTD, on the post, “On Transgender Competitors Being Permitted In Women’s Sports: Is It Possible To Be More Ethically And Logically Muddled Than This?”

***

The nature of most sports is a form of the liability of conflict: uncertain motivational obstacles. People want to be uncertain about the outcome of a sporting event, such that much of what decides the outcome is the motivation, the character, and the efforts of the competitors. That’s why weight classes in wrestling and boxing exist. If one competitor is larger and more physically powerful than the others, and that makes a predictable difference, that moves the event into the realm of scarcity: known physical obstacles, and out of the realm of sports.

If we want to spend the money to decouple gender and ability in sports, well and good. As long as they’re tied together, though, ability must be the priority for arranging match-ups, or else it stops being sport. (Testosterone treatments are a separate factor that would probably need to have its own class, because they’re artificial treatments that cause muscle growth.)

Due to budgetary constraints, only a subset of the most physically capable (cisgender) students are usually able to compete in academic sports, which rules out most students. (Sometimes there are also the equivalent of the Paralympics, to allow people with physical impairments to compete in sports with other athletes of similar physical ability.) Everyone who doesn’t make the team does other things, and sometimes they do amateur sports. People aren’t entitled to be on the school team, though. Continue reading →

Observations On The Rasmussen Poll Showing Trump Crushing Biden If The Election Were Held Today

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

First of all, polls.

The one in question is Rasmussen, which is the among the few polling organizations that do not have a perpetual left-wing bias, and that may have a conservative political bias. It is also worth noting that the election will not be held today, or even this year. Thus it is in the category of fake news that Ethics Alarms calls “future news.”

Many doubt, with some justification, that Joe Biden will last as President until 2024. He’s 79, and before this year is out will turn 80, what my father called the threshold to “the red zone,” when anyone that ancient or older faces a not insubstantial daily risk of dropping dead with little or no warning. Dad made it to 89 before dying—unexpectedly—during a nap, but he looked and seemed a lot healthier and less on the decline than Joe these days. Comedian Bob Saget was just 65 when his time ran out last week, also without warning, and he wasn’t even in the yellow zone.

Trump is no spring chicken either. He’ll be 76 this Spring: would you want to bet the farm that he’ll make 78 sufficiently hale and hearty to run a vigorous campaign, hold chatty rallies, and insult everyone who disagrees with him daily? The life expectancy of a 78-year-old male now is less than 10 years. That’s cutting it close. I’ll keep that farm, thanks.

Oh yeah, about the poll. A new Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey concluded that if the election were held today, 40% of likely U.S. voters would vote for President Biden, and 46% would vote for the previous POTUS, a large advantage.  10% say they would choose some other candidate in a Biden-Trump rematch, which doesn’t mean much: nobody knows who those other candidates might be, or if there will be any worthy of attention. If the also-rans are no better than the pathetic alternatives who were on the 2016 ballot, 10% is a highly inflated number.

Trump would get 81% support from GOP voters—that’s against Biden, remember: he’d get almost 100% when if he ran against, say, a piece of cheese. Biden would get 75% of Democrats, which is low for a party’s incumbent President.  With  independent voters, however, Trump would win today by a 16-point margin,  45% to Biden’s 29%.

Other observations that flow from this data… Continue reading →

P.M. Ethics Dispatches, 1/11/2022

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

We have to keep baseball ethics alive even if baseball itself is in a state of suspension: the owner and players are, for the first time in decades, arguing about how to divide up their billions, everything from roster size to minimum salaries are on the table, and as of now, the two sides aren’t even talking with the season just a couple of months away. One of the issues to be settled is whether the National League will finally capitulate and adopt the designated hitter rule, which was accepted in the American League on this date in 1973, a day which many traditionalist fans then and now regard as an unforgivable scar on the integrity of the game. Baseball has always been celebrated for its equity and balance: as it was envisioned, every player on the field had to both hit and play defense. The DH, which is a batter who never uses a glove, also allowed the pitcher to be a defense-only specialist, never picking up a bat which, advocates of the new rule argued, was a result much to be wished, since the vast majority of hurlers are only slightly better at hitting the ball than your fat old uncle Curt who played semi-pro ball in his twenties. All these decades years later, the National League and its fans have stubbornly maintained that the DH was a vile, utilitarian gimmick spurred by non-ethical considerations, mainly greed. When the rule was adopted, American League attendance lagged behind the NL, which also was winning most of the All Star games, in part because that league had embraced black stars far more rapidly than “the junior league.” The DH, the theory went, would make games more exciting, with more offense, while eliminating all the .168 batters in the ninth spot in every line-up.

I had a letter published in Sports Illustrated in 1973 explaining why I opposed the DH as a Boston Red Sox fan. Since then, I have grudgingly come to accept the benefits of the rule: it gave the Sox David Ortiz, allowed Carl Yastrzemski to play a few more years, and let American League fans see such all-time greats as Hank Aaron at the plate after they could no longer play the field. It was a breach of the game’s integrity, but it worked.

1. At least that’s fixed. The Supreme Court issued a corrected transcript of the oral arguments in the Biden vaccine mandate case, and it now accurately records Justice Gorsuch as saying he believes the seasonal flu kills “hundreds…thousands of people every year.” The original version wrongly quoted him as saying hundreds of thousands, which allowed those desperately trying to defend the outrageously wrong assertions by Justice Sotomayor regarding the Wuhan virus to point to Gorsuch and claim, “See? Conservatives are just as bad!” Prime among these was the steadily deteriorating Elie Mystal at “The Nation,” who, typically for him, refused to accept the correction. Sotomayor is one of the all-time worst Supreme Court justices, though she will be valuable as a constant reminder of the perils of affirmative action. Her jurisprudence makes the much maligned Clarence Thomas look like Louis Brandeis by comparison. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Now THIS Is An Irresponsible Mother! So…

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

A 4-year-old Detroit girl is in critical condition after being shot in the arm and leg. Her mother is in custody: first she said that her daughter was wounded in an attempted robbery, then she admitted that her gun went off accidentally while she was cleaning it.

Twice.

Now, this ethics quiz is based on the facts as the mother stated them. According to the reports, there are many reasons to doubt what she is now claiming—for example, police say the girl’s mother said the firearm was inside the apartment, but they did not find any gun there after getting a warrant and searching. But let’s assume, arguendo, as lawyers say, that she is telling the truth. Let’s also assume that she isn’t crazy or a drug addict.

According to the ATF, these are the conditions under which a citizen can lose the Second Amendment Right To Bear Arms:

Continue reading →

It’s Only January 11, And Yet This Might Already Be The Ethics Story Of The Year: The Nazi-Loving Police Chief

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

This story made my head explode, and for once, it was worth it. I LOVE this story! It touches on so much…idiocy,incompetence, dead ethics alarms, unions, a soupçon of “The Producers,” incredible excuses and more—I don’t want to give away the one detail that made me laugh out loud yet. And perhaps best of all, it comes out of Washington state, one of the epicenters of The Great Stupid.

I am going to try to relate the tale without giggling, and then I’ll have some observations at the end. Alert: my telling may contain a bit of sarcasm here and there. I’m sorry. I can’t resist.

In Kent, Washington, a King County suburb of Seattle, Mayor Dana Ralph (D) apologized profusely to her city in a 30 minute video. Why? Well, she admitted that her administration badly mis-estimated what the public’s reaction would be to the town’s decision not to fire Assistant Chief Derek Kammerzell, and to instead suspend him for two weeks while allowing him to treat the time off as a vacation, meaning that he was paid. You can understand why the mayor and her staff would be blindsided by the outrage; after all, all Kammerzell did was show every sign of being a Nazi.

All right, that may be a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much. An investigation that began in September of 2020 after a complaint lodged by a member of the police force determined that Kammerzell, a 27-year Kent police veteran, Continue reading →

Really Late Ethics Warm-Up, 1/10/22: It’s Hard Being Woke

/ Jack Marshall / 56 Comments

What did we learn from the Ethics Alarms “echo chamber” survey? Not much, unfortunately. Most respondents clustered around the center, to the right, which I didn’t need a survey to figure out. I work very hard to keep the perspective here as moderate as possible, but then this is not a political blog, and ethics should come from a centrist perspective. (If one is far left, however, it all looks far right to you.) I was disappointed that more non-commenters didn’t participate, but then non-commenters don’t participate. There were only a couple. I also was disappointed that virtually all of the intermittent commenters  whom I know tend to a progressive tilt didn’t take the various tests. Why would that be? I have no idea.

I doubt that there is any way to keep a blog like this one truly diverse, at least among the commenters. Cognitive dissonance is powerful: if someone regularly disagrees with the analysis here, the natural tendency is to stop reading, or, apparently, as we recently witnessed with a now departed mad troll, to stop playing nice.

I force myself to cover far left and left-biased sites like Salon, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair,The Daily Beast, Boing-Boing, Mother Jones, Vox and others, but it’s not fun. I doubt I would subject myself to the experience if it wasn’t part of my job. (The far right sites are pretty annoying as well.) Others, the rational, generally fair sites like Reason and Five-Thirty-Eight, are frequently enlightening.

One note to counter excessive negative talk about the traffic here (which I am primarily to blame for): there are very few blogs or websites dedicated to ethics. I’m disappointed that the upward trend traffic here experienced through 2017 didn’t continue, but if there is an ethics commentary site on the web that offers as much content and has as much traffic as this one, I haven’t found it.

1. It’s a shame this didn’t happen in the U.S. so everyone could make sheep jokes and I could decree the messaging incompetent…To encourage more Germans to get the Wuhan vaccine, Hanspeter Etzold, who works with shepherds and animals to run team-building events for companies in the northern German town of Schneverdingen, organized 700 sheep to form a giant syringe. See?

“Sheep are popular with people and carry positive emotional connotations. So perhaps they can reach many people emotionally when logic and scientific reasoning don’t do the job,” Etzold says. Yup, if you can’t convince people to do what you want using facts and logic, it’s time to use fear, or fake facts, or propaganda, or threats, or insults. Or sheep. [Pointer: Willem Reese]

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Introduction: Will The Audacious ‘It Isn’t What it is’ Propaganda Assault By The American Left Succeed?”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

And today’s Comment of the Day by Steve-O-in-NJ is….but seriously folks, Steve-O has been especially pointed and prolific since he was called a “racist suck-up” by a troll who got himself banned here in record time. (Steve-O’s commentary on that was also Comment of the Day worthy.) This COTD takes off from the post’s citing of the Obama Administration’s disingenuous justification for not enforcing our immigration laws. And then there’s more.

Here is Steve-O’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Introduction: Will The Audacious ‘It Isn’t What it is’ Propaganda Assault By The American Left Succeed?”

***

Prosecutorial discretion? Prosecutorial discretion is moving to dismiss a case because the evidence is weak and might not make it over the hump of reasonable doubt or there were procedural errors that might result in it getting kicked. It might also be dropping prosecutions because the law has changed or is about to change (i.e. the repeal of the Volstead Act). Like any discretion, though, it can be abused, and I’d say that wholesale refusals to enforce broad areas of the law constitute abuse of discretion. The point of being a prosecutor in the first place is to enforce the law by prosecuting offenders, not thwart the law by dismissing offenders.

The times were when this crap wasn’t tolerated. Waaay back in 1994 George Pataki was elected Governor of New York, denying Mario Cuomo the fourth term that now his son will also never get. He was elected partially on the promise to bring back the death penalty, which Cuomo steadfastly opposed. He did and was applauded for doing so by a fed-up populace. However, liberal “maverick ” (or so the media called him) Robert Johnson, then District Attorney of the Bronx, publicly declared that his office would not seek the death penalty under any circumstances. Inevitably, a case that was eligible came up, he declined to seek the penalty, and Pataki’s AG took the case away from him, which the courts later upheld, since District Attorney was an executive office and the governor was the head of the executive branch, although NY district attorneys are elected, not appointed by him like county prosecutors are in NJ. That said, I am metaphysically certain that there would have been no such case had the governor and the DA not been of different political parties. Even assuming the death penalty was already in place, and not a just-passed pet project of the governor, I am certain that a Democratic governor would have just said “prosecutorial discretion” and that would have been the end of it.

Continue reading →

On Transgender Competitors Being Permitted In Women’s Sports: Is It Possible To Be More Ethically And Logically Muddled Than This?

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

I doubt it. I doubt if anything can be more ethically and logically muddled than the article —actually two articles—about another biological male crushing female competitors in a women’s sports competition. Right at the start, the USA Today piece sets a new absurd bar for “It isn’t what it is” rhetoric. The article begins, “The sentiment is universal: Everyone agrees that Andraya Yearwood should be allowed to compete in her chosen races as a girl.”

Wait: the same article in its headline says that Yearwood’s eligibility is a matter of “controversy.” If there is controversy, then obviously the sentiment isn’t “universal.” Normally, a statement that self-evidently contradictory would make me stop reading because the writer is an idiot, but I read this junk so you won’t have to.

The next sentence is just as bad:

After all, she identifies as a girl, trains alongside fellow females and plans to eventually undergo hormone therapy to complete a transition from her male birth gender to female.

“After all’? None of that is convincing proof that a biological male should be competing against women. Then Cam Smith—that’s the name of the idiot, whom USA Today entrusts with High School sports stories—gets the Triple Crown, or a hat trick, or whatever you call three brain-melting statements in a row: Continue reading →