Around the World

From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: I Think Mexico Might Have A Teeny Ethics Culture Problem…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I could be wrong, of course.

Out of the 30,000 participants at last month’s Mexico City Marathon, about 11,000 runners have been disqualified for cheating by using illegal means to beat the 26.2-mile course. More than 1 out of 3 racers used various non-foot methods of transportation or other unethical tactics.

Mexico has become a drug and crime infested hell-hole, with large portions of the country run by cartels. Its presidency has been license to steal and accept bribes for a couple centuries now. No wonder illegal immigrants breaching our laws to get here see nothing wrong with their conduct: their nation has been rotting from the proverbial head down for as long as they can remember. What constitutes ethics in Mexico today? In 2015, Donald Trump was accused of racism and bigotry for saying that Mexico wasn’t sending us “their best people.” It is beginning to look like Mexico’s “best” are the ones who are leaving, and even they aren’t trustworthy.

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A Rationalization #22 Mitigation Of U.S. Progressive Racial Spoils: Canada Is Even Worse

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Rationalization #22, in my view the worst of the over 100 rationalizations on the list, is called “The Comparative Virtue Excuse,” or “It’s not the worst thing.” I immediately thought of it when I read the head-exploding account of how a father escaped jail time in Canada for incest that resulted in the birth of a disabled child who has been placed in foster care. The father admitted that he had regularly had sexual relations with his daughter since she was 19 or 20. Incest is typically punishable with a jail sentence of at least two years and as high as 14 years, but a majority of the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal decided last month that the father shouldn’t have to spend any time in jail at all, just two years of house arrest, with a monitor. That’s nice. He can even continue his loving relationship with his daughter under those rules.

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This War Crimes Prosecution Is Vengeance, Not Justice

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

After Ethics Alarms looked at the case of a German tennis player freaking out because a fan quoted the Nazi-era lyrics of the German National anthem while he was playing a match, I found out that the German justice system has metaphorically said, “Hold my beer!”

German prosecutors announced last week that they have charged a 98-year-old man with being an accessory to 3,300 murders because he served as a guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1943 and 1945. The indictment states that he “supported the cruel and malicious killing of thousands of prisoners as a member of the SS guard detail.”In recent years, German courts have ruled that people who helped a Nazi death camp function can be prosecuted as accessories to the extermination there without direct evidence that they participated in any particular deaths.

If a trial goes forward, the unnamed defendant will be tried as a juvenile. He was only 17 when he was required to be a concentration camp guard.

I certainly hope putting a 98-year-old man through the ordeal of a trial and, if he lives long enough, imprisonment for not opposing the Hitler regime as a teenager when the adults around him were going mad makes Germans feel better.

The fact that this cruel prosecution is being brought underlines the deep cultural problems that led Germany to Hitler, and shows that they still are distorting the nation’s understanding of right and wrong.

More Weird Tales Of “The Great Stupid”: Martha Stewart Abuses An Iceberg

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Mock away. The climate change fanatics are truly bananas.

Lifestyle media icon Martha Stewart was vacationing on a cruise around Greenland and posted a photograph of a cocktail chilled by ice she said had been chipped off an iceberg. “End of the first zodiac cruise from @swanhelleniccruises into a very beautiful fjord on the east coast of Greenland,” she wrote in the post. “We actually captured a small iceberg for our cocktails tonight.” Wait a sec—Marlon would like a word…

Stewart was immediately scorched on social media because using ice from an iceberg is promoting global warming, or cruelty to icebergs, or anti-Semitic (“Iceberg, Goldberg, what’s the difference?”) or something. “Wealthy white people drinking their iceberg cocktails while the planet is in flames is a bit tone deaf,” wrote a typical hysteric. “Please don’t use an endangered whale or seal to make any elitist meals like you did with the disappearing iceberg,” wrote another. You know: morons.

Martha is no weenie: She followed up by posting a photograph of an iceberg and wrote, “Pleated iceberg. Perfect for cocktails!”

Perfect response, too.

I would have been tempted to post a photo of me eating a polar bear steak.

“Ick” vs. Ethics: The Nazi Gems Collection

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Once again, we encounter the conundrum of so-called “dirty money.”

In May, the auction house Christie’s sold a collection of jewels and jewelry from the estate of Heidi Horten, an Austrian philanthropist. The auction earned $202 million, establishing the Horten sale as the biggest precious gem sale ever. There was, however, an ethics controversy: all that jewelry had been bought with a fortune amassed by Horten’s husband Helmut, a Nazi who bought up Jewish businesses in forced sales during the Holocaust.

The Holocaust Educational Trust called the May auction a “true insult to victims of the Holocaust.” Yoram Dvash, president of the World Federation of Diamond Bourses, wrote, “In a time of Holocaust denial and the resurgence of antisemitism around the world, we find it especially appalling that a world-renowned auction house would engage in such a sale.” David Schaecter, president of Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation USA, which represents support groups for victims’ families in the U.S., called the sale “appalling” and said it had perpetuated “a disgraceful pattern of whitewashing Holocaust profiteers.” But Christie’s officials argued that the proceeds of the sale would go to the Heidi Horten Foundation, which supports medical research and a museum containing her art collection. The auction house also pledged to donate some of its own profits arising from the sale to Holocaust research and education.

Since May, however, attacks on the collection, Chistie’s, and the money paid for the jewels at auction have escalated. Christie’s announced this week that a scheduled November sale of more lots of jewelry from the Heidi Horten collection would be canceled, citing the “intense scrutiny” from Jewish organizations and some critics. The Jerusalem Post reported that other Jewish groups had rejected Christie’s donations from the May auction.

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: Biden Climate Envoy John Kerry

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“Without facts or economics on their side, they [“climate deniers”] flatly deny what is happening to our planet and what we must do to save it. They incite a movement against what they falsely label ‘climate change fanaticism,’ as they conveniently forget that the dictionary definition of a cult is the dismissal of facts in devotion to a lie.”

—-Biden Administration “climate envoy” John Kerry, speaking in Scotland after arriving on his private jet that emitted more carbon into the atmosphere than any of the automobiles I have driven or will drive in my lifetime.

Wow. Imagine, people actually voted for this boob to be President. And what a wonderful example of projection: has there ever been any movement that smacked of cultism more than the climate change freak-out? Kerry, whose entire public career has been a sustained war against facts (most people still think he’s Irish, for example), embodies the discredited theory that saying something is true when it isn’t constitutes a fact. Here’s a fact: crippling the U.S. economy to reach climate change policy goals will achieve nothing except hardship and disaster unless a magic formula is developed to force China, India, Russia and developing nations to do the same, and there is no such formula. What is it, then, that we “must do” to save the planet, John? Accept a Democratic Party dictatorship? Put the U.N. in charge of everything and everybody? Put YOU in charge?

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The Kiss

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

This topic was unwittingly recommended by my younger sister, a reliably liberal Democrat who, to my knowledge, has never read Ethics Alarms once in its 23 years of existence. (Don’t you think that’s strange? I think that’s strange, but I refuse to let it bother me. Much….). She had to tell me about the eruption of an international women’s rights, #MeToo, “sexual assault” cancel culture controversy in the wake of Spain’s first Women’s World Cup championship because I pay as little attention to soccer, international or otherwise, as humanly possible.

Shortly after the championship game’s final whistle, Luis Rubiales, the head of Spain’s Soccer Federation, joined the jubilant on-field celebration, and at the award ceremony, Rubiales took midfielder Jennifer Hermoso’s head in both his hands and…kissed her on the lips!!!!

Searching for relevance and headlines now that her own soccer career is mercifully over, woke activist Megan Rapinoe told The Athletic that the kiss reflected “the deep level of misogyny and sexism in the federation. It made me think of how much we are required to endure.” (I don’t know about the “we” part in Rapinoe’s case: I think an over-excited soccer official would be more likely to spontaneously kiss a scorpion.) Everybody piled on. Spanish soccer coach Jorge Vilda ripped Rubiales, saying in part “I regret deeply that the victory of Spanish women’s football has been harmed by the inappropriate behavior that our, until now, top leader, Luis Rubiales, has carried out.” Eleven members of the Spanish women’s team coaching staff tendered their resignations over the weekend, expressing “their firm and categorical condemnation of Luis Rubiales’ behavior towards Jenni Hermoso.” 81 Spanish players, including all 23 World champions, vowed to go on strike and refuse to play until Rubiales is removed from his position. FIFA, the international soccer organization, suspended Rubiales from all football-related activity for 90 days pending an investigation—yeah, maybe he secretly planned the kiss weeks in advance, for example). The Spanish government publicly supported the decision.

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: A French Town’s Solution To Excessive Speeding In An Intersection

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The town is Bauné, near Angers, home to 1,700 people. But because of its location at the crossroads between two departmental roads, roughly 2,300 cars pass through Bauné and reach speeds of over 60 mph even though the town’s signs at the intersection demand far lower velocity. So in order to get drivers to slow down, some genius had the brainstorm of using the intentionally confounding road markings above, and local authorities agreed to adopt the strategy.

Confused drivers are slowing down, all right. Other effective solutions would have been having blinding strobe lights flashing at drivers or insult-spewing mimes throwing water balloons at windshields.

Here’s an aerial view of the mess:

The International Chess Federation Doesn’t Understand Its Own Game, Biology, And Who Knows What Else…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Funny, I thought chess players were supposed to be intelligent—observant, capable of long-term planning, adept at strategy, those kinds of things.

That’s one more stereotype to discard. The people who run international chess competitions have just outed themselves as morons. The International Chess Federation, or FIDE just banned transgender women from competing in men’s chess tournaments and stripped trans men of women’s chess titles they won. The body revealed its guidelines for transgender competitors this week, thus highlighting its long-running idiocy.

Okay, fine: defining the gender of chess players by their chromosomes would be a solution to a problem if there were a problem, but there isn’t. There is no reason to segregate female and male chess players except ancient prejudice and ignorance—well that, and if it is decided that the fewer little chess players conceived, the better.

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Death On K2 And The Duty To Rescue

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The AP story and ensuing controversy about Norwegian climber Kristin Harila and her decision, along with many other mountaineers, to leave a climbing companion dying in the snow on K2 immediately rang a metaphorical bell: Haven’t we discussed this issue before on Ethics Alarms? Indeed we have.

Back in 2011, I reposted a 2006 essay from the old (but still useful) EA predecessor The Ethics Scoreboard about the death of 34-year-old David Sharp on Mount Everest, after over 40 other climbers walked past him on their trek to the famous peak. It concluded,

The significance of the David Sharp tragedy is not that the mountaineers did the wrong thing. Of course they did the wrong thing. Nor is it that they are callous or unethical people, for they are probably no more so than you or I. The importance of the story is that it vividly shows how difficult it can be to make even obvious ethical choices when powerful non-ethical considerations are in our sights. Every one of us has a goal or a dream or a desire that could make us walk by a dying man. It is our responsibility to recognize what those goals, dreams and desires are, and to force ourselves not to forget about right and wrong as we approach them.

Harila was on K2 to set a record, and she did: along with her Sherpa guide, Tenjin, they became the world’s fastest climbers by getting to the top of the world’s second highest peak, scaling the world’s 14 highest mountains in 92 days. But of course that mission had nothing to do with her decision to leave Mohammad Hassan, a Pakistani porter and father of three, to die after he slipped and fell off the narrow path to the summit. The Norwegian climber told The Associated Press on Sunday that “in the snowy condition we had up there that day, it wouldn’t be possible to carry him down.”

It was impossible! All righty then, case closed!

Drone footage showed dozens of climbers pushing past Hassan to reach the mountain peak, the path to which was unusually crowded that day (July 27), because it was the last day of the season for a possible ascent. The nerve of that guy losing it all up by falling!

Austrian climber Wilhelm Steindl, who shot the drone footage after he had abandoned the climb because of bad weather, told the AP that more could have been done to save Hassan. “Everyone would have had to turn back to bring the injured person back down to the valley. I don’t want to kind of directly blame anybody, I’m just saying there was no rescue operation initiated and that’s really very, very tragic because that’s actually the most normal thing one would do in a situation like that.”

Well, to be fair, it isn’t. What might have changed the way the climbers reacted would have been a strong leader with the personal magnetism and persuasive skills to reorient the climbers from pursuing powerful non-ethical considerations to embracing an ethical one. No doubt about it, trying to get the injured man down the mountain involved sacrifice and risk, and might not even succeed. There is, however, an ethical duty to try. A life was at stake.

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