Citizenship

“The Meat Axe”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I had some amusing bloody meat-axe graphics all ready to go for this post, but it is really about flat learning curves: the Democratic Party’s, the Axis news media’s, and maybe, frighteningly, the public’s.

Yes, once again we have a looming test of just how stupid the public really is. Democrats are betting their very existence on the public being as dumb as a box of Joe Bidens, and the biased, anti-Trump news media, having already been completely exposed as the enemies of the people Donald Trump said they are, have predominantly fallen back to the same tactics that served them so well in Trump 1.0. The unethical “advocacy journalists” are gambling that propaganda will prevail, and that the 2024 election was just a blip because the Democrats ran a babbling fool—but a historic one!—for President.

Trump’s tsunami of executive orders along with the relentless DOGE assault has the Axis searching for a magic bullet or two. They settled on two old unethical stand-bys: ad hominem attacks, aka. “kill the messenger,” and “It’s a constitutional crisis!” Trump being elected at all was a constitutional crisis for the Angry Left, and the phony “He’s breaching traditional democratic norms!” trope was core to both impeachments and the “Trump is Hitler” campaign refrain.

Elon Musk is being vilified by using classic Democrat class warfare tactics: he’s been successful and is rich, so obviously he’s only helping Trump cut spending because he greedy and he’ll make money from it somehow. How dumb does someone have to be to buy that logic? If there is anyone in the world who can be trusted not to be serving his country for the money, it’s Musk. I heard some mouth-foaming contributor on CNN screaming this morning that “Trump is a liar and criminal” and “Musk wasn’t even born here!,” an odd argument from a defender of illegal immigrants.

But the EA “Flat Learning Curve” graphic is up there because I heard Chuck Schumer—is he really an idiot or does he just play one on TV?—say that sure, everyone agrees that there is too much waste in government spending, but “this is a meat-axe!” Yup, it sure is, Chuck, and if you don’t know by now that the only way to seriously address systemic corruption, waste, incompetence, dishonesty and obstruction is with a meat-axe (or blow-torch, or metaphorical nuclear bomb), you’ve never successfully managed anything.

Experienced managers know this, and both Musk and Trump are experienced managers as well as successful ones. Good leaders know it too. Heck, I know it.

What Schumer is really saying is, “We don’t want to solve this problem, we want to look like we want to solve this problem, and we are confident that you out there listening are so uneducated, inexperienced, naive and gullible that you’ll fall for it…again.”

When a system is broken, corrupt and incorrigible, and because of its dysfunction causing constant harm, the technique of carefully trying to extract the jewels buried in the shit pile never works. It takes too long. Every inch of the shit will have advocates claiming that it isn’t really shit. Paring down the bureaucracy gets delegated to the bureaucracy, and improvement is minimal if you are lucky. Most of the time, the inefficiency, waste and corruption just gets worse. Nobody can deny that this is the futile path the United States government has been treading.

Continue reading →

Abuse of Celebrity: Selena Dumb Gomez’s Virtue-Signaling

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The video of former Disney star Selena Gomez weeping over the deportations of illegal immigrants who should be deported is a brilliant reminder that Hollywood makes you stupid. Gomez posted it on her Instagram which has 424 million followers and I want to kill myself.

Gomez is difficult to understand amid all the sobbing and histrionics, but here’s the text: “I just want to say I am so sorry… all my people are getting attacked [by Trump’s deportations]. The children. I’m so sorry, I wish I could do something, but I can’t, I don’t know what to do. I’ll try everything, I promise.”

To state the obvious, being subject to law enforcement isn’t being “attacked.” It is breathtakingly obnoxious for Gomez to call illegal immigrants “her people”—she’s an American citizen, and we are her people. Of course she plays the always popular “Think of the children!” card. And the hubris necessary for a B-list celebrity—she was okay in “The Dead Don’t Die”— to apologize for something she has no power over whatsoever, and to promise to “try everything” to stop it when there is nothing she can do is especially staggering.

“Entertainment Tonight” isn’t much better, saying in that clip that the deportation policy mostly “targets Latinos.” No, you hacks, it entirely targets illegal immigrants.

You can say this weepy virtue-signaling is harmless, but the fact that an ignorant woman like Gomez has over 400 million followers means that a political, cultural and ethics dunce can influence a dangerous number of people, making them stupid, fearful, and bad citizens. It has always been thus that our most talented artists (not that Selena is one of those) usually lack intellectual and critical thinking abilities on par with their performing abilities. They also tend to be emotionally frozen somewhere between the 6th and 11th grade. There are exceptions, of course, but social media has given these Dunning-Kruger victims a way to spread their juvenile politics and poor civics literacy far and wide, usually infecting the young most of all, and most damaging of all.

Maybe I’ll make a video of myself weeping over this…

Two Executive Orders, One Extra-Constitutional, the Other Unconstitutional (and Unethical Too)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Let’s talk about the “un”-EO first. Federal District Court judge, John C. Coughenour, temporarily blocked President Trump’s executive order to end automatic citizenship for babies born on American soil, the so called “anchor baby” phenomenon. Three days after Trump issued his executive order, the judge sided with the first four states that sued, saying, “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.” 22 states, along with activist groups and expectant mothers, have now filed lawsuits to halt order on the grounds that it violates the 14th Amendment. Courts have always interpreted the amendment’s section stating that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States” as applying to (almost) every baby born in the United States.

“Frankly,” Judge Coughenour added, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” Well, lawyers don’t usually state propositions, even Hail Mary theories like this one equivocally. I think Trump’s lawyers told him that the order would almost certainly be found unconstitutional, and maybe they told him that it is unconstitutional. I am pretty certain it is, and that nothing short of a Constitutional amendment can change the law.

Continue reading →

The Country’s In the Very Best of Hands! Reps. Mace and Crockett Disgrace Themselves, Congress, and Nation

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

During the debate over the House bill to stop males “transitioning” to glorious womanhood from injuring female athletes while cheating their way to taking their scholarships, records, championships and safety, two of the worst female members of Congress—and that’s quite an achievement, given the competition— showed (again) why the public no longer trusts its republic. The two women showed themselves to be ethics dunces, incompetent elected officials, disastrous role models and, to get technical about it, assholes.

Continue reading →

When Your Trump-Deranged, Slowly Metamorphosing Into Full Leftist Totalitarian Friends and Relatives Deny What Their “Movement” Has Become, Waive This In Their Smug, Red, Contorted Faces…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This must stop, here, there, and everywhere.

As frequent readers here know, Ethics Alarms has been referring to the Axis of Unethical Conduct (an Ethics Alarms term, and a fair one) as a totalitarianism-leaning, anti-American phenomenon for years now, as I have tracked the frightening progress on the 2016 Ethics Train Wreck and all of its many offshoots. I have used made this point frequently and, I recognize, emphatically to the point that many object to those and related labels as inflammatory and biased, which they are not because my assessment is objective and accurate. I could also say, with justification, “If the show fits, wear it,” and even “If the shoe fits wear it, you assholes.”

Today I was sent promotional spam by my old hometown newspaper, the lone surviving conservative #2 paper in Boston (The Dominating Axis representative is the always Democratic Boston Globe) after the slow amalgam of four newspapers with long histories of service to the people of New England: The Boston Herald, the Boston Traveler, the Boston Record and the Boston American. That headline above was all I needed to spark a head explosion with several subsequent explosions that left bits of brain and bone on my keyboard and computer screen after I read the entire report.

Continue reading →

The Liz Cheney Ethics Zugswang Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Now this is an ethics conflict.

It is increasingly clear that former Congresswoman Liz Cheney broke the law as well as several ethics rules while doing her utmost to incriminate President Trump during the all-Democrat/ Never-Trump Republican J-6 committee star chamber orchestrated by Nancy Pelosi. It is wrong to break the law. It is especially wrong to break the law when you are an elected official and law-maker. Such officials should not only be held to a higher standard, but should be role models for the public that elected them. It follows, then, that when they break the law—it seems that Cheney participated in the destruction of evidence as well as coaching a witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, to lie under oath while unethically meeting with her, a represented witness, without her lawyer being present—they should be treated like anyone else who breaks the law.

If elected officials are not prosecuted and held to account when they violate the law, it is the worst manifestation of the King’s Pass, the insidious and pervasive rationalization (#11 on the list) in which individuals who are famous, popular, powerful, accomplished, productive or successful are allowed to escape the earned consequences of their own misconduct when a less powerful or popular individual would face the full penalties of the law. Such episodes seriously erode public trust in our legal system and power structure. The cliche is “No one is above the law,” but except for the case of indisputable bribery or violent felonies, elected officials are seldom prosecuted, and sometimes not even for those crimes.

Continue reading →

Suzannah Van Rooy’s Self-Righteous Bigotry Not Only Makes Her A Bad Bar Employee, It Makes Her A Bad American

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Suzannah Van Rooy, a server at Beuchert’s Saloon on Capitol Hill in D.C., told “The Washingtonian,” “I personally would refuse to serve any person in office who I know of as being a sex trafficker or trying to deport millions of people.” “It’s not, ‘Oh, we hate Republicans,’” she explained. “It’s that this person has moral convictions that are strongly opposed to mine, and I don’t feel comfortable serving them.” “People were a lot more motivated the first time around to do those kinds of shows of passion. This time around, there is kind of a sense of defeat and acceptance,” Van Rooy added. “But I hope that people still do stand up to this administration and tell them their thoughts on their misbehavior.” Van Rooy also felt it was appropriate to make similar comments on the restaurant’s social media accounts.

Ms. Van Rooy was promptly fired for her misbehavior. Good. In announcing her canning on its Facebook page, the restaurant said in part, “[A]s a restaurant we are simply horrified to be associated with base prejudice. None of us saw this coming….we would welcome any opportunity to clarify that Ms. Van Rooy is not a manager at our restaurant but instead a part time server and that she had no authority or permission to act as spokesperson or hijack our social media accounts. We beg you all not to condemn the group of hardworking folks who have made Beuchert’s Saloon a neighborhood mainstay for a over dozen years. We are still the same restaurant known for its warm service and friendly staff, and hope you will all visit us soon. We look forward to serving you. All of you.”

Continue reading →

From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files:

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The New York Post reports that wanted posters targeting CEOs of insurance and other health care companies are appearing in Manhattan. Some say “HEALTH CARE CEOS SHOULD NOT FEEL SAFE” and include the words “DENY,” “DEFEND,” and “DEPOSE,” which are the same words that the cute assassin who shot UnitedHealthcare’s CEO wrote on his bullets. The posters also feature each executive’s salary, and some have appeared with the photos of CEOs of non-health care companies, like Goldman Sachs. ABC reports some posters say “UnitedHealthcare killed everyday people for the sake of profit. As a result Brian Thompson was denied his claim to life. Who will be denied next?”

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce (And Ethics Corrupter): John Pavlovitz

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Quotes by his guy, a defrocked Methodist pastor known for his social and political activism and “writings from a liberal Christian perspective,” (I’m quoting Wikipedia there) always start popping up on social media this time of year. He’s been quoted a lot on Facebook especially lately because he is a vocal advocate of the idiotic “Mary and Joseph were immigrants too” analogy used by nice, deluded people to justify open borders and illegal immigrants.

These memes are notable because their emotion-based, legally and ethically bonkers argument is even more absurd than the one that claims the U.S. should let everybody in because the Statue of Liberty says so. I think I banned a commenter this year for using that one, invoking the Ethics Alarms “Stupidity Rule.” I will do the same if someone makes the “we should let illegals in because all they want is better lives for their children just like Mary and Joseph” argument. The same logic justifies theft. This is how shoplifting became legal in California.

Pavolovitz, who has about 374,000 followers on Twitter/X, every one of them dumber than when they first encountered him, was at it again this holiday season, posting after the election last month, “It’s good the Christians excited about the mass deportation of immigrants weren’t in Egypt when Jesus’s family fled there, or we’d have a much shorter Bible.”

It’s unethical to use one’s influence and reputation to make people ignorant and stupid: that fatuous statement (and his many like it) marks Pavolovitz as an Ethics Corrupter. I’m assuming readers here don’t have to have explained to them the reasons why analogies between public policies today in the United States and those in the Middle East 2,000 years ago are completely invalid and useless.

When one X-user pointed out to Pavolovitz that his argument was flawed, this modern follower of Jesus replied, “You’re a Trump lapdog. Your opinion of me is irrelevant. Shove it.”

To be fair, that last part is a rough translation of what Jesus said to the Romans…

The Ethics Conflict In The Daniel Penny Case

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

With yesterday’s developments in the Daniel Penny trial, it is appropriate to ponder the various ethical issues involved.

Below I have reposted the 2023 essay titled “Ethics Quote Of The Month: Heather MacDonald.” Its main thrust was to highlight MacDonald’s excellent article about how his arrest and prosecution reflected another outbreak of the “Black Lives Matter” bias of presumed racism. Penny is white, the violent lunatic who was menacing NYC subway riders when Penny stepped in and, the prosecution claimed, murdered him in an act of vigilantism, was black. It is highly doubtful that any prosecution would have followed the incident if the races were reversed. For example, the colors were reversed in the Ashli Babbitt shooting by a Capitol cop on January 6, 2021, and the black officer was not only exonerated but given a promotion.

Yesterday, Judge Maxwell Wiley dismissed the second-degree manslaughter charge against ex-Marine Penny in the death of Jordan Neely at the request of prosecutors after jurors said they were deadlocked on the primary charge. He then told the jury to continue deliberating on  the lesser charge of whether Penny committed criminally negligent homicide when he put the black, disturbed, homeless man in a choke-hold resulting in his death. The dismissed second-degree manslaughter charge carried a maximum 15-year sentence; criminally negligent homicide carries a four-year maximum sentence. While this was happening, Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) told reporters that he was planning to introduce a resolution to award Daniel Penny the Congressional Gold Medal. “Daniel Penny’s actions exemplify what it means to stand against the grain to do right in a world that rewards moral cowardice,” said Crane, a retired Navy SEAL.  “Our system of ‘justice’ is fiercely corrupt, allowing degenerates to steamroll our laws and our sense of security, while punishing the righteous. Mr. Penny bravely stood in the gap to defy this corrupt system and protect his fellow Americans. I’m immensely proud to introduce this resolution to award him with the Congressional Gold Medal to recognize his heroism.”

You can hardly highlight an ethics conflict in brighter colors than that. Penny could be found guilty of a crime, and at the same time be officially recognized as a hero. An ethics conflict is when two equally valid ethical principles oppose each other and dictate a different result. That’s the situation here, and the answer to the starting point for ethical analysis, “What’s going on here?“

The racially biased motivation for charging Penny may be another example of authorities doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. If you listen to Fox News regarding the trial, you will hear laments that the prosecution sends the wrong message to Americans. One commentator cited the 60-year-old Kitty Genovese incident, which Ethics Alarms has frequently referenced. A woman was murdered as many residents of a nearby apartment complex heard her screams, but none of them called the police or sought to intervene. The prosecution of Penny validates their non-action, the commentator said. It encourages passive citizenship and rejects the duty to rescue.

No, that’s an analogy too far: the man threatening passengers on the subway was right in front of Penny; the people who ignored Genovese’s screams only had to pick up a phone. Nobody held them to blame for not running out to rescue the woman and fight off her attacker. They didn’t perform the minimum acts of good citizenship required in such a situation. Penny’s trial raises the legitimate question of when maximum intervention is justified, and what the consequences should be if something goes wrong.

Does society want to encourage and reward vigilantes? The “Death Wish” movies explored that issue, albeit at an infantile level. At very least, shouldn’t part of the message sent to citizens be that if you choose to intervene in a situation that would normally be handled by law enforcement, you had better be careful, prudent and effective or else you will be accountable for what goes wrong as a result of your initiative? After all, isn’t it certain that a police officer whose choke-hold killed Neely under the same circumstances would probably be tried, or at very least sued for damages (as Penny will be, if he is ultimately acquitted)? Indeed, based on the George Floyd fiasco, Neely’s death at the hands of an over-zealous cop might have sparked a new round of mostly peaceful protests and Neely’s elevation to martyr status.

As a society and one that encourages courage, compassion, and civic involvement, we should encourage citizens to intervene and “fix the problem” if they are in a position to do so and have the skills and judgment to do it effectively. Yet a society that encourages vigilantes is courting chaos and the collapse of the rule of law.  I absolutely regard Penny as a hero, but even heroes must be accountable for their actions. What is the most ethical message to send society about citizen rescuers?

I don’t think it is as easy a question as Penny’s supporters claim.

Now here’s the article from past year:

***

“When government abdicates its responsibility to maintain public safety, a few citizens, for now at least, will step into the breach. Penny was one of them. He restrained Neely not out of racism or malice but to protect his fellow passengers. He was showing classically male virtues: chivalry, courage and initiative. Male heroism threatens the entitlement state by providing an example of self-reliance apart from the professional helper class. And for that reason, he must be taken down.”

—Heather Mac Donald, in her scorching essay, “Daniel Penny is a scapegoat for a failed system”

That paragraph continues,

A homicide charge is the most efficient way to discourage such initiative in the future. Stigma is another. The mainstream media has characterized the millions of dollars in donations that have poured into Daniel Penny’s legal defense fund as the mark of ignorant bigots who support militaristic white vigilantes.

There is no way law enforcement can or should avoid at least exploring a manslaughter charge when an unarmed citizen is killed after a good Samaritan intervenes in a situation that he or she sees as potentially dangerous. Nevertheless, what appears to be the planned vilification of ex-Marine Daniel Penny by Democrats and the news media to put desperately-needed wind back in the metaphorical sails of Black Lives Matter and to goose racial division as the 2024 elections approach graphically illustrates just how unethical and ruthless the 21st Century American Left has become. (I know, I know, we don’t need any more evidence…). Mac Donald’s essay is superb, as many of hers often are. Do read it all, and them make your Facebook friends’ heads explode by sharing it.

Here are some other juicy and spot-on excerpts:

Continue reading →