Ethics Alarms Award Nominee

Trump-Deranged Asshole Media Headline of the Day: The Economic Times

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I had to wrestle with myself about whether to post this first, or the next post.

Here’s the headline from The Economic Times:

“Trump’s Raised Fist: What the gesture means which is widely used by fascists, socialists, and communists”

…yeah, and also Rocky, Norma Rae, the much-lionized protesting American runners at the Olympics on the winner’s platform, baseball players after they have hit game-winning home runs, my Vietnam War protesting fellow students at Harvard,

and, oh, just about everyone in the past few centuries or so who wanted to symbolize defiance, victory, strength and resistance to forces that would abuse and persecute them.

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‘Why Columbia, It Profits a University Nothing To Give Its Soul For The Whole World… But For An Ethics Villain Like Dean Josef Sorrett?’

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I don’t understand the latest chapter in Columbia’s anti-Semitism scandal at all. I don’t understand how anyone connected to the university can look at themselves in the mirror after this. I don’t understand how alumni and donors can tolerate it. Most astounding of all, in its shameless embrace of The King’s Pass, Columbia University has managed to make Harvard look like an ethics exemplar by comparison.

No, I don’t understand.

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Ethics Dunce and Unethical Quote of the Month: NYT Columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Once again we are faced with the despicable ethics violation of an alleged authority making her readers dumber and more ignorant. And, once again, the example falls in the category of someone unqualified to read a Supreme Court opinion declaring what the holding means without understanding it.

Tressie McMillan Cottom is a 2020 MacArthur “genius” grant recipient who opines in the Times and elsewhere on culture, “higher education, work, media and inequality”(she is black, so I guess that’s mandatory). Her credentials do not justify her writing this in her latest essay:

“[T]he Supreme Court finally weighed in on presidential immunity. There is no other way to read its decision than as a signal that whoever owns the Republican Party also owns the power to break the law.”

That’s funny, because there is no possible way to read that ridiculously misrepresented decision to mean that at all. If she’s read the decision, then she’s lying or incompetent. If she hasn’t read the decision, then her ethical breach is worse. Continue reading →

How Low Will The Mainstream Media Stoop In Its Desperation To Somehow Save Joe Biden? Oh, Even Lower Than This…Just Give It Time…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Journalism! Yes, it’s true: trying to smear Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to pick up a couple straying percentage points as a whole point herd seems to be abandoning President Gabby Johnson (“Rarit!”) after his debate debacle, Vanity Fair actually published an “exposé” claiming that the third party candidate was photographed eating a barbecued dog in Korea:

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Or stupidity…I read about that story and decided it was obviously nonsense. Then I saw the photo, and knew it was nonsense: As Lloyd Bentsen would say, “I’ve kept goats. I’ve seen barbecued goats, and dogs have been friends of mine: that was no dog.”

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Jill Biden: An Ethics Villain’s Route to Power

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

This explains a lot…

Since there is some reason to suspect that Jill Biden has been doing an Edith Wilson impression for at least some of her husband’s ill-starred term as President, a substacker decided to do a deep dive into Dr. Jill Biden’s dissertation to assess exactly how intellectually qualified she is to be shadow-President. What she found was, to understate it, horrifying….and yet, all in all, not surprising.

To summarize, the doctorate of education Jill received from the University of Delaware in January 2007 was based on a “scholarly” dissertation that was objectively crap. It is riddled with typos, mathematical errors, and horrible writing. Holly Mathnerd (not her real name, presumably) writes in part (this is a huge essay),

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Ethics Villain: “Morning Joe” Scarborough, But You Should Have Known That Already

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

If Joe Scarborough had a scrap of decency, an atom of responsibility, or a wisp of the capacity for shame, he would voluntarily end his “Morning Joe” show, retire to private life, and ideally wear a paper bag over his head ’til the end of his days. Of course, if MSNBC was a professional news operation and not a den of hacks, it wouldn’t allow Scarborough back on the air next week.

I nearly posted about Scarborough two days ago, before I saw this clip today. He was featured in the Times piece titled “One by One, Biden’s Closest Media Allies Defect After the Debate.” The main three close Biden “media allies” mentioned were Morning Joe, Van Jones and NYT columnist Thomas Friedman. I was going to write something along the lines of, “Scarborough, Jones and Friedman! Would it be possible to gather an array of less credible, more ethically-revolting weasels? Having allies like them mean nothing, and having allies like them abandon you means nothing. Has the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog ever been more applicable?” Here’s the last addition to Van Jones’ Ethics Alarms dossier: he’s a proven anti-white race-huckster and face-man who cleans up nice for cameras and usually keeps his inner racist at bay so he can keep his lucrative CNN gig. The last time Friedman made the blog was in 2019, when he wrote that President Trump was “protected by big media outlets”! He really wrote that.

Now here’s how the sad Times story begins, talking about Scarborough:

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And Now For Something Completely Different: An Ethics Challenge on Slavery Reparations

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Except for one brief moment of frustration and madness, Ethics Alarms has been consistent in its derision of the concept of reparations for slavery. Illogical, legally unhinged, divisive, anti-democratic and most of all, impossible, this really bad idea, a favorite of get-rich-quick racial grievance hucksters and reality-resistant progressives, still hangs around like old unwashed socks, and no amount of argument or reasoning seems to be able to send them to the rag pile. Recently both California, where terrible leftist ideas go to thrive and ruin things, and New York, which really should be moved to the West Coast, have both at least pretended to endorse reparations for slavery. California’s ridiculous reparations task force has proposed giving $223,200 each to all descendants of slaves in California, on the theory that it will be a just remedy for housing discrimination against blacks between 1933 and 1977. The cost to California taxpayers would be about $559 billion, more than California’s entire annual budget (that the state already can’t afford), and that doesn’t include the massive cost of administrating the hand-outs and dealing with all the law suits it is bound to generate.

Brilliant. But that’s reparations for you! Logic, common sense and reality have nothing to do with it.

Now comes two wokey professors from—you guessed it, Harvard, to issue a scholarly paper published in “The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences,” titled “Normalizing Reparations: U.S. Precedent, Norms, and Models for Compensating Harms and Implications for Reparations to Black Americans.” The thesis of this thing is essentially that reparations for slavery should be paid because “Everybody Does It,” offering variations of the #1 rationalization on the list that don’t properly apply to slavery at all. (What? The descendants of slaves are not like fishermen facing depleted fish stocks?) The paper is being called a “study”: it is not a study, but rather an activist advocacy piece. (I would have bet that both scholars are black; nope, just one is, although I would not be surprised to learn that Linda J. Bilmes signed on just to help Cornell William Brooks avoid the obvious accusation of bias and conflict of interest. And, naturally, at Harvard taking on such a mission, certifiably bats though it is, can only enhance her popularity on campus.)

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From the Unethical Expert File: A Pet Expert Proves She Knows Nothing About Pets

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Why would TIME magazine print such self-evident junk? Oh, I know, I know…it’s about dogs and cats, so it is guaranteed clickbait, she’s written a book, so she must be an “expert” and if you can’t believe an ethicist, who can you believe? “The Case Against Pets” is intellectually dishonest, silly, and violates the Ethics Alarms principle that advocating an impossible course of action is unethical no matter how wonderful it would be if it could happen. (My favorite: pacifism.)

The author is Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist and the author of several books, including the one this thing is obviously meant to hype, “A Dog’s World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World without Humans.” Boy, talk about a title signaling a dumb book! Next up: “Imagining the Lives of Dogs If They Could Graduate From Law School.”

Has this woman actually ever owned a dog? She says she has pets: I’m betting that it’s a hissing cockroach. Here are some of her assertions:

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: the Woke Shackles Tighten…

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Jennifer Sey, once a competitive gymnast on the U.S. Women’s Olympic team, has launched a new clothing line focused on the threat to women’s sports by the woke-driven incursion of “transitioned” or “transitioning” biological males.

TikTok responded to her ad on that platform by banning he company from advertising with this:

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Just Stop. The Left’s Propaganda Machine Keeps Pretending Dr. Fauci Is a Hero When He’s the Exact Opposite

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments


Stephen Colbert is really is beneath contempt. His late night show proudly promoted the guest appearance of Anthony Fauci last week, which is roughly the equivalent of cheering for the Sackler family. This is one of the subtle ways—not so subtle, really—that the media pimps for Democrats and the party’s agenda (“The Government knows best, proles!”) Colbert only has guests that align with the Axis; Nancy Pelosi was another recent guest, and the producers obviously have no interest in presenting anyone who isn’t fully part of the “team.” They also don’t have any interest in entertaining audience members who, having paid attention and having not been brainwashed, know the likes of Pelosi and Fauci for what they are.

Fauci, however, is a far more nauseating and unforgivable object of fawning idolatry than even Pelosi. He’s a certifiable, no-contest ethics villain: incompetent, irresponsible, dishonest, hypocritical, an abuser of power, position and influence, and the perfect poster boy for the fake “Trust the science!” mantra that the Left has weaponized for political gain.

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