Around the World

“Titan” Submersible Tragedy Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Debris from the OceanGate Expeditions Titan submersible was found Yesterday. As feared, all five of those on board perished. There has been a splash of ethics-related matters in the wake of the disaster:

1. Former US President Barack Obama, once again proving the hoary “stopped clock” metaphor’s accuracy, criticized Western media hypocrisy for making a missing submersible carrying five wealthy would-be adventurers on a tour of the Titanic’s wreckage a sensational news story while giving little coverage to a refugee-filled trawler sinking off Greece with up to 700 people on board. At least 82 people died in that tragedy this week, and hundreds more are feared to have drowned. The incident off Greece was completely overshadowed by the Titan rescue operation as soon as news of its disappearance surfaced. BBC, CNN, the New York Times covered the Titan rescue operation minute by minute. Meanwhile, no survivors or bodies have been found since the trawler sank carrying an estimated 750 men, women and children from Syria, Egypt, Palestine and Pakistan.

Of course the disparity in news coverage is due to commerce and profits blotting out journalism as well as decency. “Titanic” is a magic word that generates clicks and TV ratings, and despite their pretenses at other times, the news media knows that its readers are more interested in the fate of five rich people on a high-priced, high-tech junket than 750 poor refugees on a trawler. If journalists were the professionals they claim to be, they would report the news according to its obvious human and international priorities, and let the clicks fall where they may. But they aren’t. As we know.

Obama is right.

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It’s The Wuhan Virus, And Attention Should Be Paid

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Boy, have I gotten a lot of grief for never capitulating to the thought-control demand that the contagion responsible for the pandemic, the lockdown, my business losing 45% of its income for two years (and counting), my sister wearing a mask in her car, seven-inning baseball games, an untrustworthy 2020 election and more be called the anodyne name “Covid 19,” or just “Covid” to its mask-obsessed friends. Here at Ethics Alarms, it is the Wuhan virus and always has been, because it was obvious from the start that China’s province is where this disaster (and its equally disastrous cover-up) started, but as usual of late, the mainstream media and progressives decided to use the adoption of a fair and informative name that ensures permanent responsibility, if not accountability, for millions of deaths and the savaging of the US economy for its favorite hobby of race-baiting. Yes, once again, the truth was racist, and censorship necessary because assholes incapable of rational thought would abuse facts to justify beating up and terrorizing anyone who looked Asian.

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From China, An “It Isn’t What It Is” For the Ages: “Rat Head Gate”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength.” The frighteningly Orwellian progressive movement and its Democratic Party facilitators have emulated Big Brother in their conviction that if you repeat an obvious lie often enough (and the news media helps out by at least looking the other way), enough lazy, careless citizens will accept whatever you say. Thus biological men have no advantage over women in athletic contests, the Southern border is secure, the economy is great, hiring people because of their color isn’t racial discrimination and a fetus isn’t a human life. On the Ethics Alarms Rationalization List, this is #64. Yoo’s Rationalization or “It isn’t what it is,” named after the Bush Administration lawyer who explained that waterboarding wasn’t torture. Totalitarian regimes depend on #64, which is why its emergence as a Democratic Party staple is especially ominous.

China, speaking of totalitarian regimes, has developed a culture in which “It isn’t what it is” has become the proverbial hammer for authorities who see every controversy as a nail. At the cafeteria of the Jiangxi Vocational Technical College of Industry Trade in Nanchang, China, a student found a desiccated rat’s head in his bowl of rice and memorialized the unordered meal item on his cell phone. When he confronted the cafeteria staff, however, he was assured that it wasn’t a rat’s head, but a duck’s neck. (That’s apparently considered just yummy in China. They even charged the student extra. I’m kidding…)

I’d include a photo, but it’s too disgusting; trust me, the head belonged to a rat. It has fur, it has little rat teeth. The nauseated student’s video quickly spread on Chinese social media, but the school stuck to its duck head story, because “It isn’t what it is” only works if you repeat your lie with gusto, and forever. Last week, the Jiangxi Vocational Technical College put out an official statement that the thing was duck, not rat, and the local food supervision bureau also confirmed that it was a duck neck. School officials warned students not to discuss the incident online anymore, or they would face serious consequences.

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Comment Of The Day: “An Ethics Alarms D-Day Mission…”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Michael, whose whole family is very dear to me, occasionally contributes a thoughtful comment here and this time brought me to tears with this Comment of the Day, his D-Day-inspired remembrances of his visits to Normandy. Those are some of his photos above: EA is honored to post both them and the post they represent.

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Went to the beaches, yet again (been many times and always took guests who visited when we lived in France). I remain impressed by the outpouring of positive feelings from the residents of Normandy.

Although generations change, the memories are kept alive in the families. That is, no doubt, why the headstones at the American Cemetery have American and French flags planted by volunteers from the region.

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Ethics Dunce: Ireland

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Boy, if Ireland thought they had mad cows before….

Ireland’s government is reportedly seriously considering plans to destroy 200,000 cows to meet its mandatory climate change targets from the nutsy-cuckoo European Union. Farmers will be offered financial inducements participate in the bovine holocaust. Thus the collateral damage of net zero emissions insanity, a sub-category of The Great Stupid, is extending to cows, just as AOC wants it to in her “Green New Deal.”

There shouldn’t be a lot to argue about here: killing 200,000 Irish cows now will have exactly no effect on the climate even if the most apocalyptic and hysterical scientific models are correct. It’s like the Biden and Obama killing pipelines: it’s just climate change theater and virtue-signaling, except that the pipeline decisions just killed jobs and brain cells of rational people thinking about them.

And yes, in this case, just seriously considering such an obviously wasteful policy is sufficient to justify Ethics Dunce honors even if ultimately rationality prevails. Even pondering such idiocy is signature significance, as when grandpa says, “Yeah, I was thinking about flapping my arms and flying out the window to visit Neverland, but decided it was too far away.” You call the rest home and double quick, even if Gramps had seemed lucid before.

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This Doesn’t Mean Wine Aficionados Are Pompous Frauds But It Sure Points In That Direction

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Eric Boschman, once named Belgium’s best sommelier (that’s wine steward in English), now an entertainer, and the team at On n’est pas des pigeons, a Belgian consumer magazine and television program, bought a cheap supermarket wine and entered it at the prestigious international wine competition, Gilbert et Gaillard. To try to fool the experts with a wine that cost less than three bucks, they made up a name for the swill, calling it “Chateau Colombier,” and designed a phony label. They told the judges that it was made from rare grapes in Côtes de Sambre and Meuse (wherever they are). Along with the entrance fee and samples of the wine for tasting, the tricksters provided fake laboratory data of the acidity, alcohol and sugar levels borrowed from a genuine prize-winning wine. Boschman, meanwhile, praised the wine as exceptional to fellow sommeliers and wine enthusiasts, attempting to seed confirmation bias.

And it worked! The supermarket wine won the gold medal, with judges describing it as “suave, nervous (a quality of fresh wine) and rich palate with clean young scents that promise a nice complexity, very interesting.”

As with the wags who submit fake research papers to “peer-reviewed” scholarly journals, this wine charade was dishonest, but I will give it a utilitarian pass for exposing a process that has too little integrity to be trusted, for the benefit of consumers.

Of course, I say this as someone who couldn’t tell a real fine wine from a class of motor oil.

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Source: Oddity Central

Wait! Is THIS Peak Stupid In The Age Of The Great Stupid?

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

It’s a now-familiar tactic when minority groups seek attention and enhanced self-esteem: find a universally admired historical figure of note and claim that he or she was a member of that group. Abraham Lincoln was gay! Cleopatra was black! (That worked out well…) Jesus was gay AND black! Still, I didn’t see this coming, but the Great Stupid knows no bounds, apparently:

Worshipers at a Trinity College at Cambridge were treated to a sermon by Joshua Heath, currently seeking a PhD in theology. He argued that Christ takes on a transgender body in historical artwork, appearing both masculine and feminine in different paintings.  As proof, he displayed Jean Malouel’s painting called “The Pieta,” in which the body of Christ is shown with blood running down his side. Heath noted that the blood coming down from the side wound of Christ to the groin in the painting “takes on a decidedly vaginal appearance.”  “[I]f the body of Christ as these works suggest the body of all bodies, then his body is also the trans body,” Heath concluded.

Oh. So if someone paints a portrait of me a few centuries from now showing me with the head of an aardvark, that would be solid evidence that I had the head of an an aardvark? Good thinking there, Ace. Paintings of Jesus prove absolutely nothing, as the “Jesus was black” advocates correctly pointed out. The evidence indicates he was probably dark-skinned and swarthy, and less than five feet tall. But trans is “in,” so we now have to debate whether Christ “identified” as a woman.

The residents of Woke World are apparently incapable of saying, “That’s ridiculous” when an “in” group is the topic, so Michael Banner, the Dean and Director of Studies in Theology and Religious Studies at Trinity College felt it necessary to endorse Heath’s fantasy. He wrote in response to a complaint about the sermon that Heath’s “speculation was legitimate, whether or not you or I or anyone else disagrees with the interpretation.” 

Can The Great Stupid get more stupid than this?

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Source: Campus Reform

When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: Fun At Auschwitz!

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

That’s an ice cream stand just outside Poland’s shrine to the victims of the Holocaust, the Auschwitz death camp. Isn’t it nice that tourists there will be able to grab a delicious ice cream cone for refreshment? Now here…

…a woman posed glamorously on the tracks that brought the railroad cars stuffed with captive Jews to be gassed. If I had to wager, I’d say the couple is American. In my various adventures abroad, I wanted to hide my head under a bag many times as I saw American tourists behaving abominably at such locales as Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London. But it isn’t just Americans: my wife’s sister reported that at Pearl Harbor she witnessed smiling Japanese tourists posing by the memorials to the Arizona, the Oklahoma and the Utah.

Where does this attitude come from? Over at Victory Girls, Kim Hirsch writes, “Money and fame have replaced honor and memory of the history which changed the world.” I’d put it a little differently: as our culture increasingly sends the message that history is just another tool of politics, the public is either ignorant of the facts of the past, unable to understand why those facts are still important, or believe that history is irrelevant to their lives.

Unethical Website Of The Month: “The Anarchist”

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

“The Anarchist”is the website of a hate-based Toronto coffee shop of the same name. Ironically, Ethics Alarms just learned of the site’s existence as it announced the demise of the business. (Good!) The shop anointed itself as “an anti-capitalist cafe, shop and radical community space on stolen land”—yes, the owners are delusional. It was a “pay what you choose” establishment designed to spit in the metaphorical eye of evil Capitalism. Of course it went belly-up, though the fact that the carzy project lasted even a year is impressive, sort of, in the same way Brian Stelter getting hired is impressive.

Here are some highlights from the website:

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Two For The “Shut Up And Act” Files

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The ethical formula is to concentrate critical evaluations on the message rather than the messenger, but celebrities using their popularity and influence to push for policies they are unqualified to evaluate and activism they are too corrupt to promote have to be in a separate category. They use their cognitive dissonance scale weight to make irresponsible positions seem reasonable to those sad and numerous members of the public who assume that being rich, beautiful and talented automatically makes one wise.

I know the temptation for these stars of both the glittering and the shooting- variety is great, but it is their duty to resist it except in the rare instances where they have more practical experience and knowledge of an issue than the average airport show-shine stand proprietor, and fully functioning ethics alarms. (Remember: Hollywood shorts out ethics alarms .)

Two prominent actresses in recent days have illustrated the principle.

1. Kate Winslet

Winslet is one of my favorite actresses, but unfortunately she’s British. The British don’t understand or support freedom of speech and expression, as anyone who watched the anti-monarchists being hauled away by police at King Charles’ coronation can attest. Accepting a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award for her performance in a show about the dangers of social media, Winslet said,

To people in power and to people who can make change, please criminalize harmful content. Please eradicate harmful content. We don’t want it. We want our children back.”

Shut up, Kate.

Who is “we”? What is “harmful?” Dim bulbs like Winslet, waving the “Think of the Children!” banner, will lead us right to Big Brother’s door. If you’re worried about what your children see online, set rules for them and enforce them yourself. Better yet, teach them about what social media is and how to avoid its many perils. Monitor what they are hearing from their teachers in school, if you want them “back.” Educate yourself, and then educate them. It’s your job, not the government’s.

2. Natalie Portman

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