Author: Jack Marshall

Weekend Ethics Warm-Up, 1/10/2021: Onward!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

We need a rousing hymn today!

Today marks two major milestones in the largely failed effort to use international bodies to promote world peace.

On January 10, 1920, the League of Nations formally was launched when the Covenant of the League of Nations, ratified by 42 nations in 1919, took effect. Unfortunately for the body, the United States was not one of the 42, the Republican-controlled Senate having rejected the pact after President Woodrow Wilson had condemned the world to another world war by enabling brutal revenge on Germany by the winners of the Great War in order to get his dream off the drawing board.

The League of Nations proceeded without the United States, holding its first meeting in Geneva on November 15, 1920. During the 1920s, the League, headquartered in Geneva,successfully mediated minor international disputes. But when serious international tensions rose in the early 1930s, the League proved tragically ineffectual. After its invasion of China was condemned, Japan just quit the organization. Nor did the organization deal with the rearmament of Germany and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. By the time World War II began, the League was silent and effectively defunct. In 1946, the League of Nations was officially dissolved with the the first meeting of the United Nations, which, coincidentally or by chance, also occurred on January 10. Whether its successor at this time in its history is any more effectual than the League of Nations was a topic for another day.

1 You think we’ve got ethics problems? If Rationalization #22 works for you, here’s something to ponder: I June, the Pakistani aviation minister told the nation’s Parliament that around a third of the pilots working for Pakistan air carriers had fraudulent pilot licenses.

2. Let’s see: is it possible for me to disagree with anyone more than I disagree with this guy? I don’t think so. Michigan State Professor Peter De Costa told MSU Today that it constituted “linguistic racism,” which he defines as “acts of racism […] perpetuated against individuals on the basis of their language use,” to ask a person to repeat what he said because you can’t understand what he or she said due to a strong non-English accent. [Pointer: The College Fix]

I guess its better to just pretend you understand, and make a mistake, or not to be able to respond to what the individual asked.

De Costa’s article “Linguistic racism: its negative effects and why we need to contest it” was published in the “International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.” Note that when someone boasts of having a “peer-reviewed article” published in a scholarly journal, that doesn’t mean the article isn’t utter crap, or that the author is worth paying attention to.

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Comments Of The Day: “The Friday Ethics Alarms Open Forum” ( Forced Cultural Shifts Thread) [Corrected!]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Inquisition

This is really an Ethics Question and Answer of the Day.

Steve Witherspoon [ Notice of Correction: I erroneously attributed this to the wrong Steve, not that Steve-O-in NJ doesn’t also ask provocative questions. I apologize to Steve W, and thank Other Bill for the correction…] asked a provocative question in our last Open Forum, which is what the Ethics Alarms open forums are for:

When a large segment of a society wants to shift their culture in a very major way and in a way that has historically been widely opposed, is using propaganda and intimidation to “force” the desired cultural shift on a population ethical, in other words, when trying to shift culture does the ends justify the means?

Before answering, think about major cultural shifts in the USA’s history. A few examples of major cultural shift are when the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights and the Constitution were written or when slavery was abolished or when electricity and phone lines were wired across the USA or when automobiles began to gradually take over the streets across the USA or when airplanes became common place or when the population began to shift from print media and word of mouth as their only sources of information to radios and then to televisions or the civil rights marches in the 1960’s. There are a multitude of examples of major cultural shifts in the United States.

So…

When trying to shift culture, does the ends justify the means?

Commenter Ryan Harkins provided an excellent and thought-provoking answer:

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Scared Yet? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 62 Comments

Trump Twitter

I have taken quite a bit of flack on social media and elsewhere for my decision, a long and tortured time in the making, to vote for the re-election as President of a man whom I have always, for more than a decade, correctly identified as lacking most of the crucial abilities and characteristics that an American President must have. Primary among these is a commitment to ethical conduct. To these critics, President Trump’s irresponsible conduct in personally attempting to lead a public protest against the 2020 election—much as his political opponents mounted a protest against his election on 2016—proved the folly of my decision..

It did not. The President behaving as I always knew he was capable of behaving merely demonstrated why my decision was such a difficult one and so extended in the making. To the contrary, the conduct of those anti-democratic, totalitarian-tending foes of Trump and the basic American values of which he, in a sick twist of fate, stood as the most reliable and powerful guardian, has convinced me that my decision was the correct one. The Axis of Unethical Conduct has made it undeniable in recent weeks that it intends to abridge speech, stifle dissent, restrict civil rights and weaken Constitutional liberties to the extent it can get away with to cement one -party rule and ideological conformity with Leftist cant.

This is the result I began to fear in late October of 2016, when I decided that I could not in good conscience vote to give power to a party, the Democrats, that I no longer believed were committed to the core values of the United States of America, nor to the rule of law. This is the result I realized was inevitable if President Trump, as awful as he is, was defeated. I was correct. Like all iron-booted parties of totalitarian regimes, Democratic leaders are calling for the punishment of their political opponents. Their allies have begun unprecedented measures to prevent opposing views to be widely circulated, and not just views, but facts. The disgusting riot in the Capitol is being exploited to rush through restrictions on free speech and political discourse while emotion is ascendant and Republicans and conservatives are restrained and embarrassed. As one of Joe Biden’s soon-to-be henchmen famously said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” The Democrats aren’t, and are creating a far greater one.

I would expect principled Democrats and progressives to see how dangerous and un-American this strike against pluralism by their friends and idols is, but so far, I don’t see it. Maybe there are no principled Democrats and progressives. More likely, they have been cowed and intimidated into the lockstep compliance that today’s Left demands.

Here is the latest attack..

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Ethics Alarms Ethics Check: Did Joe Biden Call Ted Cruz And Josh Hawley “Nazis”? [Revised]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Big Lie

I don’t do factchecks, I do ethics checks. Both GOP Senators Ted Cruz and and Josh Hawley have leaped on a Joe Biden attack and said that the President Elect called them “Nazis.” Many conservative pundits and websites have similarly accused Biden of the ultimate “otherizing.”

Biden did not call Cruz and Hawley Nazis.

He told reporters in Wilmington, Delaware, where Joe is God,

“They should be just flat beaten the next time they run. The American public has a real good, clear look at who they are. They’re part of the big lie.Goebbels and the great lie. You keep repeating the lie, repeating the lie.”

Because Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler defined the Big Lie tactic–that’s what Biden is referring to when he says “Goebbels and the great lie”— and though they authored one of the biggest Big Lies of all time, saying that a politician or a political party is using the Big Lie tactic cannot be the equivalent of calling that politician Hitler, Goebbels, or a Nazi. The reason is that long before the two Nazi propaganda experts mastered the Big Lie, it had been used extensively for centuries, and it has been used ever since often with great effectiveness, always unethically, by parties and politicians who could not possibly be called Nazis in their beliefs, policies, values or methods. The Big Lie is now a standard political weapon. The idea is to make a public assertion that is so horrifying and outlandish that the public demands that it be denied by its target, and argued about. The genius of the Big Lie tactic is that forcing the argument itself gives the Big Lie credibility. The approach of simply ignoring Big Lies and saying by word or action, “That doesn’t even justify a rebuttal, and I won’t dignify it with one” usually doesn’t work.

I swear, the first example of this that jumped into my head was Harry Reid’s intentional slur during the 2012 Presidential campaign that Mitt Romney had paid no taxes for the previous decade. When asked about his Big Lie after the election, Reid answered, “Romney didn’t win, did he?”

The Big Lie tactic is all about the ends justifying the means.

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Pelosi’s Unconscionable “Snap Impeachment,” Part I: Welcome to Plan T

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

T

In Ethics Alarms’ compilation of the previous 19 attempts at removing President Trump since his election had been stalled at Plan S, the unconstitutional, cynical and non-substantive impeachment of President Trump on spurious grounds in 2019. It’s lack of validity was demonstrated by the fact that neither the news media nor Democrats mentioned the sham during the 2020 Presidential campaign. In the introduction to the list, I wrote,

When Plan S, which late novelist Robert Ludlum might have called “The Ukrainian Perversion” if it had been one of his novels, fails like the rest, or if President Trump is re-elected, the list will keep growing. As scholar Victor Hanson Davis has pointed out, the sheer number of these successive plans belies the claim that this is not an ongoing attempt at a soft coup.

As it turned, out I was more right than I intended to be. Never did I suspect that Democrats would continue to try to remove the President before the end of his term even if they won the 2020 Presidential election, but they are doing so because the other 19 attempts failed. Since this cannot reasonably be called a soft coup, since the Democrats have already won the White House, Plan T must be recognized for what it is: an act of pure hate and vengeance, and a deliberate, calculated insult to Trump’s supporters as well as those citizens who believe that that their government should not behave like third-world failed state.

The rest of this post will be added to “Presidential Impeachment/Removal Plans, 2016 to 2020”:

Plan T (added 1/9/21): Trump should be impeached for “inciting a riot” with his speech to supporters on January 6, as Congress gathered to officially approve the states’ electoral college vote making Joe Biden the 46th President. The transcript is here.

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Ethics Cool-Down, 1/8/2021: Be Afraid…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 79 Comments

I checked: over the past seven years, no fewer than six regular Ethics Alarms commenters have written me to say they were withdrawing from the blog for reasons related to their emotional, mental or physical health.

Ethics is supposed to be good for you…

1. The President announced that he would not be attending Joe Biden’s inauguration, thus overtaking Hillary Clinton as the “worst loser” in all of American Presidential history. Andrew Johnson declined to see in his successor, President Grant, and was certainly bitter, but he didn’t lose the election: he wasn’t even nominated. John Adams, who did lose to Jefferson in his bid for a second term, didn’t attend his lifetime frenemy’s swearing in, but had the valid excuse that he was mourning the death of his son Charles. John Quincy Adams, John’s son, comes closest to Trump’s sore loser act, as he also refused to go to the inauguration of the man who defeated him, Andrew Jackson. However, “Quincy” had good reason to be afraid of “Old Hickory,” who was furious with Adams for letting his campaign attack his wife.

Trump should attend the inauguration, of course, though I am not surprised that he isn’t. It would be a unifying gesture, and would also show character, courage, and patriotism. It is an important tradition for the incoming and outgoing Presidents to jointly engage in the orderly transfer of power.

2. The vise tightens. Apparently Big Tech and social media have decided not to even try to hide their collective assault on free expression and dissenting views:

  • Twitter permanently banned the President of the United States from its platform. I don’t care what their official excuse is: this is a major communications source placing its fist down hard on one side of the scales of political discourse. It signaled this long ago, for those of us who weren’t trying to gaslight the public. Civil libertarians should be concerned, but they aren’t, because they almost unanimously are perfectly happy to see those they don’t like or disagree with silenced. Iran’s Ayatollah, meanwhile, can still send out tweets while he supports terrorism.
  • Facebook also banned the President from its platform. Again, this is purely partisan political censorship. The US is facing a single party in control of two branches of the government allied with the news media, social media and the tech firms to stifle dissent and political opposition.

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“All They Have To Do Is Not Be Crazy, And They Can’t Even Do That” Observations

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The quote in the title, in various forms, has been repeated as a running gag on Instapundit, the conservative mega-blog, for four years now. The idea behind it was that in light of the chaotic and intentionally obnoxious style of the President, Democrats only needed to behave in a statesmanlike, responsible, fair and judicious manner to prevail politically. Instead, they did exactly the opposite.

The problem is that acting crazy worked. The increasingly radical leftist base wanted to rain anger and hate down on President Trump while trying every avenue to remove him without having to brave an election. After originally resisting, the Democratic leadership eventually capitulated, bolstered by now completely partisan news media and the Republican NeverTrumpers, whose hatred of the President was as much driven by class as politics. Now that Democrats have won control of the Senate as well as the White House, they apparently see no reason to stop the formula that succeeded so well—at the cost of dividing the nation, risking violence, destroying trust in our institutions, and cementing a new normal of endless political warfare, but still. This has become the party of “the ends justifies the means.”

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January 7, 2021 Ethics Nightcap, The “Everything Is Spinning Wildly Out Of Control” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

spinning-out-of-control

Well, the national mood is clearly infecting Ethics Alarms. First a self-banned commenter from the past starts sending me private hate mail for no discernible reason. Then another banned commenter sends an attack comment while I’m sleeping. THEN a previously rational commenter of some note proclaims his exit because, he says, all I write about is politics, and because he said I excused the President for inciting a riot (which I did not). Then another commenter started calling participants here Nazis,and yet another commenter, whom I trust to use more restraint, also used a Nazi analogy to describe the Hill riot yesterday.

I expect better here, frankly; better, fairer, and more civil.

I get it: readers aren’t immune from being freaked-out during freakouts, but please, read “If,” (my father’s favorite poem, and a lifetime credo for him and his son) and calm the hell down:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run –
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!

(And if you let Rudyard’s 19th Century male bias dissuade you from paying attention to his message, you’ll be a fool, my friend.)

I’ll only address one of the commenter upsets I described above: the accusation that Ethics Alarms has been writing about politics and neglecting ethics. I resent that, because I have been killing myself trying to find non-political ethics stories that are worth writing about, at a time when almost everything has been politicized. At the same time, I cannot in good conscience fail to explicate the unethical and unprecedented effort to sabotage an elected US President and all that has involved and corrupted since 2016, so this has necessarily involved many posts, more than I would have liked. It is the most significant U.S. ethics catastrophe of the last hundred years at least, and attention should be paid. What happened yesterday was a direct and predictable consequence of this.

Yet even so, Ethics Alarms has been and continues to be about all topics and all spheres of ethics. There are four or more posts most days, and four or five mini-posts in the “warm-ups.” Find another website that includes more diverse material on the topic of ethics; go ahead, try.

I will also note that the complaining commenter has not availed himself of the open forums, which exist specifically to invite readers to raise issues related to ethics that I may have missed or neglected. This is a participatory forum.

Annoyingly, the commenter who made this complaint also said that he had mostly “skimmed” posts here for the last year or so. Well, Ethics Alarms is not for “skimming,” and if one cannot read all of what I write, I’m not very interested in your opinions on what you have only half-comprehended.

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Ethic Hero: Former White House Chief Of Staff Mick Mulvaney

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Mick M

Mulvaney resigned in the wake of yesterday’s lunacy, saying “I can’t stay here…It doesn’t affect the transition. But it’s what I’ve got… And I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of my friends resign over the course of the next 24-48 hours.Those who choose to stay, and I have talked with some of them, are choosing to stay because they’re worried the president might put someone worse in.”

His current position is as a special envoy to Northern Ireland—not exactly a crucial cog— and he only had a few months left in the role at best. Still, this is the principled way to show disapproval of one’s own administration’s conduct. It will be interesting to see if his prediction of further resignations comes true.

Even Trump’s most ardent defenders have to concede that the President asks a lot of those under him, and often expects them to accept outright abuse. I won’t miss the workplace chaos that this management style brought to the White House; nobody will.

High level public resignations—higher level than Mulvaney’s, frankly—would benefit the Republic in general if they became commonplace tools to hold Presidents publicly accountable for misconduct.

Maybe Mulvaney can create a new “norm.” I hope so, but will not be holding my breath.