Author: Jack Marshall

Ethics Warm-Up, 9/11/21:Remembering The Victims Of The Twin Towers, Pentagon, And Flight 93 Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I’m going to watch the film “Flight 93” again as my 9/11 commemoration. It is an excellent, if almost too clinical, approximation of what went on when the terrorists tried to fly a plane into the Capitol or White House, after picking what had to be the worst possible set of passengers to try to intimidate. Otherwise, I will avoid TV commentary today as I would the plague. Turner Movie Classics may have been making some wry commentary the last two days: first, it ran a series of old historicla disaster movies like “A Night To Remember” (The Titanic) and “San Francisco” (the earthquake and the fire). Then last night was “cult night.” September 11 and its aftermath was all about cults: Islam, Al Qida, neocons, Truthers.

This date will also always remind me of the utter incompetence of the news media. I will never forget the idiot on CNN who, after the second plane hit a tower, said when a colleague offered that it looked like a terrorist attack, that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions, that it just could be a coincidence. These are the people we trust to inform us about events affecting our lives.

1. Justifiable homicide? Tucker Gales, a 15-year-old from Columbia County in Georgia shot his father in the head with a .22-caliber rifle back in October 2020. Last week, a grand jury decided that Gales explanation that he did it because “he had enough of his father abusing his mother” was good enough for them. The teen will not be indicted. Good.

Wesley Gales’ had a well-documented pattern of violent abuse. He allegedly threatened to shoot his son in the head and “kicked his ex-wife in the groin area,” the The Augusta Chronicle reported. A few months before his son killed him, Wesley Gales pleaded guilty to domestic abuse and child cruelty charges. “The police visited the home multiple times since 2011. No action was taken to remove this family from the danger in the home. He pleaded for help on multiple occasions and the system failed him,” said Emily Martinez, the organizer of a GoFundMe campaign for Tucker. “It’s a sad day because this child had to take matters into his own to hands to defend and protect him and his mom.”

The grand jury call doesn’t surprise me, and it is consistent with a lot of cases as well. I once wrote an appellate brief for a man who was convicted of shooting the neighborhood bully who regularly beat him up. There were a lot of self-defense opinions holding that a potential victim with good reason to believe that an individual was getting ready to seriously injure him or her was justified in using deadly force. The fact that the shooter in this case was a juvenile made his case especially compelling.

2. Incompetent ad of the year! Here’s a WayFair ad for a coffee table:

Here’s another shot of the same photo:

Apparently the photo originated with the supplier. Nobody at Wayfair can read upside-down, I guess. An investigation is underway…

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Ethics Quote Of The Month: “Election 2020 Grassroots Canvas Report”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

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“It is obvious to anyone that voting by mail is ripe for fraud. The US Mail is not meant to be a secure transactional system. We have all known since we were children that you don’t send cash through the mail –our voting rights are far more sacred than cash. Bipartisan and Democrat Voter studies and commissions have found vote-by-mail to have the highest risk of fraud1 and most first-world democracies, such as Germany, either ban Vote-by-Mail outright or place very heavy restrictions on its use. Banning Vote-by-mail is a very simple solution to a huge problem for our Country. We cannot give up our fundamental right to vote, upon which America was built, simply because we are too lazy to go cast a vote in person.”

—– Liz Harris, in the Executive Summary to the just issued “Maricopa County “Election 2020 Grassroots Canvass Report.”

An independent canvas of the 2020 election in Maricopa County claims to have found over 260,000 “lost” and “ghost” votes, according to a report released last week. This effort is independent of the audit being done by the state legislature, and was the work of the Voter Integrity Project, founded by Liz Harris. The canvas only visited about 12,000 voters in Maricopa county, so the estimates reported, frequently misleadingly, are extrapolations of the data actually obtained. The report is here.

What the group claims to have shown is that there were “an estimated” 173,104 “missing or lost” votes in a county that essentially gave the state’s electoral votes to Joe Biden. Of course, Donald Trump is crowing about this, and of course the mainstream media is ignoring the canvass as the work of crazy “Trumpists.” However, Harris’s opening statement to the report is, or should be, undeniable. Her assessment is identical to what others were saying before the election, in which Democrats in states across the country successfully used the combined hysteria over George Floyd’s death and the pandemic to push through relaxed voting procedures that were an open invitation to manipulation. Republicans and honest civil libertarians were caught flatfooted and were too late in reacting, so the election went forward with millions of mail-in ballots that changed hands untold times before being recorded (if they were recorded).

It was a fait accompli. There was no way to prove that the election had been “stolen” or even that a substantial number of votes had been changed, harvested, lost or faked, not in time to do anything about it. Faced with a rigged election—that it was rigged doesn’t mean it was stolen, but it was rigged—that resulted in a personal defeat, then-President Trump was obligated by his office, tradition and basic ethical principles of leadership and character to accept the results, allow a peaceful transfer of power, and allow others to determine what happened. But Trump posses no basic ethical principles of leadership and character, at least in sufficient quantity, so he claimed instead that he won the election, and even hired a bunch of incompetent lawyers to try to overturn the results without sufficient hard evidence to do so. (Now many of them are being disciplined by bars and courts.)

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Ethics Observations On The Black Baltimore HS Student Near The Top Half Of His Class Despite A 0.13 Grade Point Average

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Augusta Fells

The story, from the ABC local affiliate, is here. A quick summary:

Baltimore City mother Tiffany France’s reached out to local TV stations to complain when she learned that her 17-year-old son, who attends Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts in west Baltimore, will not only not graduate this year, but will be returned to the 9th grade. His transcripts show him passing just three classes in four years, earning 2.5 credits. France says she didn’t find that out until February, and thought her oldest son was doing well because was being promoted. He failed Spanish I and Algebra I but was promoted to Spanish II and Algebra II. He also failed English II but was passed on to English III. In his first three years at Augusta Fells, the boy failed 22 classes and was late or absent 272 days. France says, however, that despite what school policy requires when a student is absent, she was never contacted. Maybe that’s because, on a curve, he was doing fine. France’s son’s transcripts show his class rank is 62 out of 120, meaning about half his classmates, have a 0.13 grade point average or lower.

The ABC story concludes,

“Project Baltimore asked the City Schools administrator what they would say to France. The administrator replied, ‘I didn’t have a hand on this student, but I worked for City Schools. So, he is one of my kids. I would hug her, and I would apologize profusely.’ ‘He feels embarrassed, he feels like a failure,” France said of her son. “I’m like, you can’t feel like that. And you have to be strong and you got to keep fighting. Life is about fighting. Things happen, but you got to keep fighting. And he’s willing, he’s trying, but who would he turn to when the people that’s supposed to help him is not? Who do he turn to?‘

Observations:

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Res Ipsa Loquitur: The Jan. 6 “Insurrection” vs. The George Floyd “Mostly Peaceful Protests”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

RealClearInvestigations developed the database below. The thing speaks for itself…

Riot chart

Short Week Ethics Short Takes, 9/10/2021

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

What are the odds that Randy Newman’s satirical song would be attacked today as offensive and accused of making short people feel unsafe? I think pretty high in favor, don’t you?

I was thinking about this after watching “Movie 43” last night, an astounding 2013 project in which a huge, all-star cast was recruited into doing a series of sophomoric, gutter humor skits that had bad taste galore but not much humor or wit beyond “Oh my God, I can’t believe they did that!” Still, while the movie got horrible reviews (although the critics calling it “The Worst Movie Ever Made” beclowned themselves: I can name 20 worse ones off the top of my head) and bombed, I am pretty sure that it would spark boycotts and “cancellations” today for being so spectacularly politically incorrect. Watching it, I was nostalgic for the time when artists could cross lines and not have a virtual price placed on their heads. In just seven years, we have come to a place where Americans are terrified of enraging the woke. I think watching Movie 43 is good tonic for that, and also good practice for those who want to purge their inner weenie.

1. One more bit of proof that we should not trust “experts,” scientists, or academics. Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has written several best-selling books, such as “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” (2011) and “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress” (2018) and is regarded as a public intellectual. Yet when the New York Times asked him, “Do you see any irrational beliefs as useful?,” Pinker answered,

“Yeah. For example, every time the media blames a fire or a storm on climate change, it’s a dubious argument in the sense that those are events that belong to weather, not climate. You can never attribute a particular event to a trend. It’s also the case, given that there is an availability bias in human cognition, that people tend to be more influenced by images and narratives and anecdotes than trends. If a particular anecdote or event can in the public mind be equated with a trend, and the impression that people get from the flamboyant image gets them to appreciate what in reality is a trend, then I have no problem with using it that way.”

Yes, this respected intellectual believes that deceiving the public is justified if it leads them to support the “right” policies and beliefs. He, and those like him, are the real threats to democracy.

My Harvard diploma is already facing the wall; staring today, I’m going to spit at it when I pass by…

Coincidentally, today I was asked to write something for my class’s reunion book. What should I write?

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Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

Question Time

By all means, talk about the President’s vaccine mandate if you want, or anything else ethics-related. I wish I had time to do a deep dive into the legality of such a move, and I wish the news media was competent enough to do one for me. I do like the question offered on several blogs about how Biden thinks that he can mandate vaccinations when he is on record saying that he can’t mandate masks.

And The Race For Most Dishonest NYT Leftist Propagandist Tightens!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

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“It’s Charles M. Blow in front as they round the turn, but HERE COMES KRUGMAN MAKING HIS MOVE ON THE RAIL!!!”

It’s so exciting!

I was going to include this as a note in the warm-up, and then I read all of the comments referring to the Democratic Party’s no longer even disguised embrace of totalitarianism, and decided, Jack Point-style, “Oh, I can’t let this pass!” For Krugman proved with his characteristic gaslighting op-ed this morning, hilariously headlined, “Foreign Terrorists Have Never Been Our Biggest Threat,” that if nothing else, he has chutzpah to spare. Who else would choose this moment, in a 9/11-themed column, to assert that Republicans are an existential threat to democracy? It would be satire, if only so many Times readers didn’t believe it. That fact makes it tragedy.

Let me remind you of Rationalization #64, which has increasingly become the operating philosophy of the Axis of Unethical Conduct as Trump-Derangement became an epidemic .Even I had forgotten that the description of the technique cited Krugman as a prime practitioner:

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A New Victim At Umpqua Community College

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Umpqua

The name of the school was so familiar, I thought I had already written on this issue. But no: the past Ethics Alarms pieces were related—dimly–to the fate of student Kaylyn Willis, but this ethics outrage in involving her is new. In 2015 there was a mass shooting at the school, prompting the usual eruption of finger-pointing and dishonest claims by the anti-gun hysterics. I wrote about the latter here and elsewhere. Obviously, the tragedy is a raw wound, but that’s no excuse for what the school has done to Willis.

In the winter 2021 term, Willis enrolled in “Chronic I,” a class taught by Patrick Harris. Harris assigned students to use “critical imagining” to create stories from the perspective of a person suffering from a chronic disease. For a May, 2021 assignment, Harris asked his students to reflect on the support systems of chronically ill individuals and how a person with a chronic illness might respond to the sudden and unexpected loss of such support. Willis imagined a scenario in which a woman suffering from ALS shoots her husband, who is also her primary caretaker. Her fiction was based on a real case where a jury found a man “not guilty” of murdering his wife and sister-in-law because he suffered from ALS-related mental health issues. She posted her assignment on-line, as she had been directed to do.

Harris, it is fair to say, flipped out. He gave Willis an F, saying, “Do you honestly think that your post on a nursing school assignment was appropriate? Joking about killing your husband? I’m really questioning your critical thinking if you think this was an appropriate discussion post.”  Harris indicated that he viewed her story as particularly offensive after the 2015 shooting on UCC’s campus. 

School officials informed Willis that she was expelled from the program because her post violated its handbook prohibiting “[a]cts which are dishonest, disrespectful, or disruptive.” The Grievance Panel’s written decision stated that Willis’ post was “insensitive” and “failed to take into consideration the events of UCC’s past and the impact her post could have.” Her appeal was denied and she is now unable to seek admission to any other Oregon Consortium Nursing Education programs.

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Assorted Ethics Business, 9/9/2021

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

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1. Look! Another survey you can’t trust! Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America and author of “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America,” is co-founder of Fix Our House, a new campaign for proportional representation designed, apparently, to turn the U.S. into Italy. It’s a bad idea, but in a Times op-ed, he argues for six parties, divided according to ideological fault lines. He even has a 20 question survey you can take that places you in or near one of the parties.

Here is how valid that survey is: I was told “You are closest to the Christian Conservative Party.” To be fair to Lee, his survey did place me closer to dead center than to that party, and furthest away from The Progressive Party.

2. Foiled again! President Biden one again had to pull the nomination of an openly radical zealot from a position such an individual has no business being in: David Chipman will not head the ATF. He openly advocated banning many kinds of guns, and has been hostile to the Second Amendment. Before his nomination, Chipman worked as a senior policy adviser at the Giffords Law Center, which announces on its website landing page, “We’re on a mission to save lives from gun violence.” Translation: “We’re on a mission to make it difficult for law-abiding citizens to acquire firearms. Chipman’s exchange with Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) of the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this year should have sealed his fate. Kennedy asked Chipman, “Do you believe in private ownership of assault weapons?” Chipman quickly responded in the affirmative. Kennedy then asked him, “Do you believe in banning assault weapons?” Chipman responded that he does. So Kennedy asked how Chipman would define “assault weapons.” Chipman said that “assault weapons would be something that members of Congress would define.”

“Well, how do you define it?” Kennedy asked. Chipman finally said, “There’s no way I could define an assault weapon.”

Got it. He wants to ban a kind of guns he can’t define, and that could be defined any way the government chooses.

Bye!

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Introduction To “Thoughts On What An Ethical Solution To The Abortion Ethics Conflict Might Look Like, Part 2: A Solution” [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

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I’ll post the 25 stipulations from Part I at the bottom of Part II for easy reference; I’ll be quoting the number in some cases. But not right now…I realized that an introduction is necessary.

It’s important to clarify an essential point up front: as long as the two sides in the abortion controversy refuse to acknowledge the validity of the other side’s interest and concern, no solution to the problem is possible, and until that point, it is almost a waste of time discussing it. In this respect, it is like another ongoing ethics conflict, the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians. (That one I believe is hopeless, and the only solution is an unethical one: a war that leaves one side or the other standing. That may happen; I don’t see it as a likely resolution of the abortion question.

Related to this condition precedent to any resolution is the fact that the pro- and anti- abortion sides (Let’s send “pro-life and “pro-choice” to ethics hell where they belong) must stop demonizing the other. That practice makes compromise and literally impossible, and a problem like abortion cannot be addressed ethically without the recognition that balancing of interests must occur at some level.

In this area, abortion separates itself from the ethics and human rights dispute it most resembles. The analogy is useful in some respects (as we shall see), but not in the area of compromise. The period preceding the Civil War was a fiasco of attempted compromise regarding slavery, and every attempt made the situation worse, more unethical, more unjust, and more contentious. Slavery really is an absolutist problem: it is absolutely wrong, and there are not ethical principles on both sides, unlike abortion. The pro-slavery case was economic, making slavery an ethics dilemma (non-ethical considerations vs ethical ones), unlike abortion. Because abortion is an ethics conflict, each side must accept a solution that is partially unethical, or there will never be a solution.

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