Ethics Alarms first mentioned the Karmelo Anthony case a year ago in the context of how completely screwed up woke Minnesota has become. Anthony, a teen who allegedly stabbed an unarmed white student to death at a school track meet, is the beneficiary of a GoFundMe effort that raised a large sum of money. Many conservative pundits wrote that this was a black backlash against a racist white woman who had attracted large donations to support her when a black man posted a video on social media that caught her in the act of calling him a “nigger.” I wrote in part,
“Anthony, who is black, is accused of stabbing 17-year-old Austin Metcalf, who was white, to death during a rain delay at their high school track meet. Anthony has not faced trial yet and claims that he in innocent by reason of self-defense. The online fundraising campaign on his behalf has raised over a half-million dollars. The clear difference between that and [the racist white woman’s] ill-gotten booty: Anthony hasn’t been found guilty of anything yet, and raising money for his defense is not, as some are claiming, the same as rewarding him for murdering a white kid. The accused teen’s family is the object of this fundraising campaign, and it is not inherently endorsing a black kid murdering a white kid to show sympathy for his family with a contribution.”
This ethics train wreck is still running. Anthony’s trial is finally getting started, and, naturally, the usual race-hustlers and victim-mongers are already claiming that the young man is another victim of racism by evil whites. Protesters were out in front of the courthouse chanting “Self-defense is not a crime!” They have no idea whether Karmelo has a legitimate self-defense case, but he’s black, so that’s all they need to know that he’s being framed by the racist justice system.
A straight “Unethical Quote of the Week” or “Incompetent Elected Official” EA honor still doesn’t do Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) justice. She is special. Well, I hope she is.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was crossing rhetorical sword points with Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) during the House hearing over U.S. military action in Iran. When Rep. Chu accused the administration of not caring about Americans’ financial struggles—which is, after all, completely irrelevant to the decision to defang a hostile nation seeking nuclear weapons that has been at war with the U.S. since 1979— Bessent asked her who was President of the U.S. during World War I. After a pause, apparently to check all the blank files in her memory banks, Chu answered “I don’t know.”
The gimmick of walking through college campuses or other denizens of the young, woke and stupid and exposing the stunning ignorance on parade is an old one. Jay Leno developed it into an art form with his “Jay Walking” segment on the “Tonight” show. Jesse Waters has displayed versions of the bit on Fox News for quite a few Memorial Days now, asking young beach-goers about basic U.S. military history.
I know, I know. We have no idea how many people had to be interviewed to collect the staggeringly wrong answers. The dumbest participants are featured multiple times. Maybe these were the only embarrassing responses, though, frankly, I doubt that. I have mentioned before a lawyer I worked with who had been an associate at Skadden Arps, and was a graduate of Cornell. She had no clue when the Civil War was, guessing its dates to be “somewhere in the 1930s???” “Well, I was an economics major,” she explained.
These videos have the same perverse appeal as reality shows: they give audiences a chance to feel superior. It’s the same appeal that carnival freak shows had in past generations. Nevertheless, I believe that Watters’ Memorial Day debacles have value, because they provoke some clarity as well as foreboding.
First, the fact that there is a single adult American without a brain tumor, dementia or a closed head injury who doesn’t know who we fought in the Revolutionary War or who guesses that Albania was the world threat in World War II is a serious indictment of our culture, parenting, and the educational system from pre-school through college. One such idiot is too many. That more than one can be located on the same California beach on the same day portends of a decaying society being undernourished by atrophied minds. Democracy, more than any other form of government, depends on an engaged and informed populace. If people can reach adulthood that ignorant, we don’t have one, or at least we don’t have enough of one.
Second, it is arguably even more alarming that these dolts all laugh and giggle when their pet rock-level ignorance is exposed. They shouldn’t find it funny; they should be humiliated. They should dash into the surf to drown themselves. At very least they should tearfully apologize to, well, everyone.
These people vote. They are the audience that the Axis news media aim at, and the low information citizens that politicians like AOC, Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, Mamdani and James Talerico pander to. They, and people like them everywhere, are the reason the world doesn’t work.
I write comedy; I perform comedy, I have directed award winning comedies. I like satire, parody, slapstick and sophomoric humor. Will Rogers, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, W.S. Gilbert, Oscar Levant, Jerry Seinfeld, P.G. Wodehouse, Lewis Black and Chris Rock all amuse me, as will a good knock-knock joke. Those answers on the beach, however do not elicit a smile from me. They elicit despair.
The summary of the Pope Leo’s open letter to “all people of good will” is at Part I, along with a link to the whole 42,000 word opus. News reports on the document can be read here, hereand here.
1. The document appears to begin, as we would expect, from the basic socialist/Communist/progressive bias the Catholic Church has always displayed, which includes suspicion and contempt for capitalism. In the text, Pope Leo says that while “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” he added that “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.” The encyclical doesn’t resolve the obvious conflict that has always existed in that perspective: technology ideally improves the quality of life for humanity, saves resources and redistributes them elsewhere, and often reduces the costs of goods and services making them more affordable to all. One of my favorite inventors, Walter Hunt (inventor of the safety pin), invented the first practical sewing machine but didn’t patent or market it because he was certain that it would put seamstresses out of work. So Elias Howe patented the sewing machine instead. Were more jobs lost or created by the invention? I have no idea. This has been the inevitable sequence with new technology throughout human history: its ultimate impact is usually impossible to predict.
Ethics Lesson: Trying to develop rules and laws limiting the uses of emerging technology is stifling as well as futile, and foolish to boot.
2. A Pope using the Biblical fable of the Tower of Babel as his primary analogy to justify limiting the use of artificial intelligence is signature significance that makes me, for one, tend to roll my eyes at the entire document. That’s a story about the Old Testament God finding sinful the aspirations of mankind and sabotaging an effort by humans to cooperate in creating something ambitious and unprecedented. The encyclical demands acceptance of human limits, while science, capitalism and American individualism set no limits on human advancement. The Pope seems to be saying the equivalent of “If God had meant for us to fly, he would have given us wings.”
[This guest post’s origin was the most recent Open Forum. Personally, I don’t believe there is a rational, ethical, realistic “other side” to the issue. As I wrote in a longer response to Ryan that you can read here, “the issue of illegal immigration is quite simple. It’s against the law. It’s against the law because open borders to a country like the US is literally national suicide…The immigration laws we have, flawed or not, have to be enforced uniformly and strictly.”—JM]
My wife and I have been debating the illegal immigration issue on and off for a while now, and part of the reason we keep returning to ethics of the illegal immigration issue is the fact that so many in leadership in the Catholic Church have been very critical of Trump’s deportation efforts. As faithful Catholics, we believe we need to listen when our bishops speak. It doesn’t mean we mindlessly agree, but in cases where the bishops take a position we initially oppose, it is incumbent upon us to study and ponder the issue as thoroughly as we can before making any objections.
To that end, my wife and I are trying to be as open as we possibly can regarding the issue of how to manage people who are in our country and in our local communities illegally. I have told her that I think the best way to understand a viewpoint with which we disagree is to argue from that viewpoint and to steelman its arguments as best we can. Interestingly enough, my wife and I do highlight differing aspects of why we have problems with illegal immigration. I focus very heavily on the human trafficking issue. She focuses very heavily on the financial injustices the illegal immigration causes.
From the trafficking standpoint, I think that is it clear that a lot of illegal immigrants end up practically as slave labor, which has largely been overlooked because it seems like it keeps prices down in the supermarket. But far more devastating is the sex trafficking which never seems to get the attention it deserves, especially when so many of these “lost and displaced children” end up serving the debauched desires of affluent Americans who believe they can continue their predations because “Who would dare contact the authorities?”.
I always thought of the Amish as a devout religious sect with thee courage of their faith’s convictions, notably that technology is a tool of Satan, and the way to be closer to God is to eschew the modern developments that slowly but surely corrupt us all. That describes an ethical culture to me, if one that I personally find extreme and illogical. Google tells me that “The Amish are a traditionalist Christian group of Swiss-German Anabaptist heritage known for their pacifism, simple living, plain dress, and reluctance to adopt modern conveniences. Numbering roughly 411,000 across North America, they primarily reside in rural settlements in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana.” That’s nice. I’ve seen “Witness” several times, and assumed that Harrison Ford film more or less accurately portrayed Amish society.
I was also vaguely aware that there were variations withing the sect, based on, to some extent, relative isolation because of the general rejection of modern communication methods. Every local congregation operates under an unwritten set of rules called the Ordnung. These dictate daily life, acceptable technology, and community standards.
Today I realized that the Amish are not, in fact, a conservative religious sect that believes it can best maintain traditional values by rejecting technology. It is, in fact, a cult without integrity regarding technology. The Unabomber had more integrity.
According to New York Magazine (Stipulated:I am relying here on a source that I have found to be unreliable before, but unless the piece by Eric German is a flat-out lie as well as an attempt to defame the Amish, I believe it is trustworthy.), “The Amish Are Falling in Love With AI: Cars and TVs might be banned, but some sects are all-in on ChatGPT.”
“Holmes County, Ohio, has the highest concentration of Amish people of any county in the U.S. Visitors expecting to see traditional horses and buggies, bonnets and Abe Lincoln beards, won’t be disappointed. Still, they’ll find Amish entrepreneurs plugging into the digital economy and one clan of early adopters weaving generative AI into their knowledge work without much hesitation. Of course, none of this sounds like the tech-shy Amish life in the popular imagination. However, there’s no such thing as a single Amish approach to technology. There are some 2,600 Amish churches across the country, and each makes its own, separate decisions about what sorts of new hardware and software church members can use. The Wengerd’s church is Old Order Amish. Its married members dress plainly, don’t drive cars or own TVs, and don’t connect their homes to the electrical grid….Daniel is a minister in his church and has played a role in the congregation’s collective decisions to interdict smartphones and social media but to allow e-bikes, flip phones, solar-generated electricity, and religiously curated internet access. “I don’t want to paint a picture that we’re pushing for new technology and we don’t have respect for our traditions and our values,” he tells me. “We’re not just opening the door to anything.”
Sure they are. In fact, I can see no legitimate argument that a sect that embraces artificial intelligence can be taken seriously when it simultaneously rejects standard electricity, television and automobiles. Ethics is based on integrity, and requires holding to consistent standards subject to continuous testing and re-evaluation based on observed experience. Morality, in contrast, requires obeying clear rules of conduct that will be enforced by an authority, in the case of religion, God. The Amish appear to have neither a moral code nor ethical principles regarding technology. “We believe modern technology is a corrupting force in modern society and that it is not sanctioned by God, unless the technology is really cool and can save us time, like chatbots” is not a coherent code of conduct.
This is religion as Calvinball, the satirical “Calvin and Hobbes” game where the rules are made up as you go along. In Mark Harris’s novel “Bang the Drum Slowly,” a team’s baseball players fleece gullible fans by luring them into a gambling card game called “Tagwar.” It’s an acronym for “the amazing game without any rules.” It’s cheating.
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and author of, among other works, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” he has been vocal on criticizing attacks on campus free speech for more than a decade, warning that the American education system is handicapping generations of students by allowing them to avoid ideas, opinions, and even facts that they find unpalatable. Last week he gave the guest commencement speech at NYU, but not before students, including the Executive Committee of the NYU Student Government Assembly, angrily protested his selection…because they found his ideas and opinions opposed to their “values.”
As Mr Rogers would say, “Can you say ‘irony’? Sure you can!” Below is the hilarious letter they sent to the school’s administration. Frankly, I don’t know how any student with the sense to come in out of a lightning storm could read this and not think, “Wait a minute…doesn’t this letter prove that this Haidt guy may be on to something?”
But no. Read this thing without your head exploding or dissolving into giggles. I’ll try to keep my comments brief at the end:
[From your host:I know the headline and graphic is my style and not Ryan’s. The valuable commentary below came out of a thread on the last Open Forum. I decided that it was worthy of a stand-alone guest post, especially since I should have written pretty much the same post when this news was first reported.Also, with this post I am officially Christening “The Climate Change Hysteria Ethics Train Wreck.” I should have done it years ago. JM]
I’m seeing some news that the IPCC (the International Panel on Climate Change) has rejected the RCP8.5 model as pretty much an impossible scenario. What is significant about this is how much research and how many policies were based on this scenario. With the IPCC actually stating that RCP8.5 is simply not plausible, the foundation for so much of the climate change hysteria has been ripped away.
To provide a little more detail, RCP8.5 is one of thousands of different models (computer simulations) trying to predict the impact of human activity on climate change up to the year 2100. These models try to take into account factors like human population growth, adoption or rolling back of climate policies, differing degrees of climate forcing due to carbon dioxide (because the science is definitely NOT settled on how much forcing CO2 actually contributes), and a host of other factors. RCP8.5 has always been one of the most extreme models, predicting an increase of 8.5 W/m^2 by 2100. There are scores of other models that are far more modest in their projections, and certainly observed data has favored models that project something closer to 3.4 W/m^2, though even those are diverging from observed data as time goes on.
The upshot, though, is the sheer scope of how much of the world’s climate policies are based on RCP8.5. From this article, we have
“Why this matters: these scenarios live in policy. The now-implausible upper-end scenarios — RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0 — are not just academic constructs used in esoteric research. They are embedded in the policies and regulations of most of the world’s largest economies, found across the world’s most important multilateral institutions, and used in the climate stress tests that govern hundreds of billions of dollars in bank capital. National climate impact assessments in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the Netherlands all use RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5 as a reference scenario. The Network for Greening the Financial System framework, used by more than 140 central banks, has utilized a “Hot House World” scenario calibrated to RCP8.5 physical risk into the bank stress tests run by the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Banque de France, and the US Federal Reserve. The World Bank’s Climate Change Knowledge Portal, which provides the climate diagnostics that feed into the Country Climate and Development Reports for more than 100 client countries, defaults to SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0.”
We have trillions of dollars worldwide tied into climate policies. Europe is practically destroying itself trying to achieve Net Zero targets. Industries are dying, people are facing energy insecurity, prices are skyrocketing, and the entire continent is growing in unrest over the devastation to livelihoods. All this comes from countries making policies based on a model that people have warned for years is unrealistic. But the good news is at least with the IPCC ruling the scenario implausible, there is no defense for anyone to keep using those high-end scenarios to craft policy.
Sadly, I’ll bet few policies are actually updated to reflect this ruling.
Sarah B, not to be confused with the other eminent commenter here with a similar handle, put together a two-part comment that provides an overview of the growing problem of sexual predator teachers. Ethics Alarms has done a lot on this topic, but not lately, perhaps because there are so many other things wrong with our education system. This may have been the most recent; I should have had a tag for “predator teachers.”
As much as I hate to defend California, this is hardly unique. Wyoming has similar policies and we are about as red as they come. A previous principal in my town harassed/seduced teachers and students who reached the age of 18. Because all of his predations were of adults (even if only technically), he remained at his job for nearly a dozen years before enough complaints and the loss of too many teachers forced the school board to finally let him go. Just this last couple of years, a special education teacher was arrested after sexually abusing lots of kids just a few towns over from us. He had been skirting the edges of the law for years, but finally crossed enough lines that he could be arrested and fired, after abusing at least a handful of kids.
The other stories I know of are teachers who abuse students in other ways, not sexually, but I personally do not see much of a difference between a teacher who sexually harasses students and a teacher who beats students up, since children should be safe and unharmed in the school system if it were any good. Therefore, I’m picking on a favorite story of mine involving my cousin, since I know many of the particulars that I might otherwise not know in detail. He worked in one town and was fired for wrestling his students and put a few too many in headlocks. After being fired for this, he was transferred to another town, where he rug-burnt a few handfuls of his students. He got fired again, and was hired as the youth pastor at the local Baptist church. He wrestled a few more kids harshly and is currently not allowed to be the only adult present when the youth group meets.
Frankly, if one looks at the data, 38% of all students in 7th-12th grade receive sexual harassment/abuse in the public school system from adults, according to some studies in 2017. I caution that these studies have broad definitions of sexual abuse/harassment, including things ranging from rape to cat-calling to inappropriate jokes and sexual comments. Of course, the more minor offenses of inappropriate comments and commentary are far more common than the more serious ones. Grooming behavior is reported separately, but is very common. The adults also range from teachers to coaches, bus drivers to lunch ladies to janitors, and everything in between. However, 63% of the behavior nationwide comes from teachers.
[ Like the hillbilly who pledged to take a bath every week whether he needed it or not, this is a post from 2011 that I vow to re-post every ten years whether I need to or not. It is the mystery post of Ethics Alarms: a throw-away essay on a slow ethics day that is one of a handful that accumulates new views regularly. (Another post in this category is here, but that is a bit more understandable.) I was moved to do another re-post because an episode of “Mad Men,” which I am finally watching (and glad, because it is an excellent ethics series) had a character using Aesop’s Worst Fable Ever to explain advertising philosophy. I wrote the original post talking with my late wife how Aesop’s Fables were joining Mother Goose stories, Edward Lear limericks and American folk songs in the Discarded Bin of our culture. I then stumbled upon a fable I had never read or heard about. To my surprise the post attracted intense criticism from fans of the story; I even had to ban a commenter who got hysterical about it. Apparently there are a lot of Sun-worshipers out there. Anyway, here it is again.]
Today, by happenstance, I heard an Aesop’s Fable that I had never encountered before recited on the radio. Like all Aesop’s Fables, at least in its modern re-telling, this one had a moral attached , and is also a statement of ethical values. Unlike most of the fables, however, it doesn’t make its case. It is, in fact, an intellectually dishonest, indeed an unethical, fable.
It is called “The North Wind and the Sun,” and in most sources reads like this:
“The North Wind and the Sun disputed as to which was the most powerful, and agreed that he should be declared the victor who could first strip a wayfaring man of his clothes. The North Wind first tried his power and blew with all his might, but the keener his blasts, the closer the Traveler wrapped his cloak around him, until at last, resigning all hope of victory, the Wind called upon the Sun to see what he could do. The Sun suddenly shone out with all his warmth. The Traveler no sooner felt his genial rays than he took off one garment after another, and at last, fairly overcome with heat, undressed and bathed in a stream that lay in his path.”
The fable proves neither. In reality, it is a vivid example of dishonest argument, using euphemisms and false characterizations to “prove” a proposition that an advocate is biased toward from the outset. Continue reading →
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