Ethics Alarms Award Nominee

“Does Anybody Care?” The Justice System’s Ominous Sacrifice Of Derek Chauvin

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Glenn Loury, is an economist, academic, and author who holds the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University. Since he is tenured, Loury doesn’t feel constrained by the lock-step ideological conformity so many of his race (he’s black) hew to in the wake of the George Floyd Freakout. In his latest newsletter on substack, Loury writes in part,

Poetic truth “thri[ves] more by coercion than reason,” accusing all who dispute it of complicity with the ineradicably racist system that governs and has always governed the country.

That Darren Wilson executed Michael Brown is one such poetic truth; that Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd is, I believe, another. Despite the aptness of Steele’s term, poetic truth is no truth at all, nor is it particularly poetic. It is power masquerading as fact, brute force in the guise of knowledge. The cities that burned across the country following Floyd’s death were expressions of such a truth, as was the incarceration of the police officers convicted of a crime they did not commit. The scramble to implement race-based policies and quotas, to elevate self-appointed gurus of “antiracism,” and to proclaim, against all evidence, the unreconstructed nature of American society were all tendrils of the same truth, which still threatens to assert itself whenever an incident emerges that fits its preferred pattern.

The cost in life, limb, and property incurred by this particular poetic truth would be bad enough. But I fear that, in the aftermath, when the embers have cooled and Chauvin’s name has been forgotten by everyone save his family, the true danger of the poetic truth of George Floyd will come to fruition.

Later in the piece, Loury quotes John McWhorter, the New York Times pundit: Continue reading →

The American Bar Association Reminds Me Why I Am No Longer A Member

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Ethics duncery, abuse of influence, cowardice, bias…oh, lots of things.

The president of the American Bar Association, Mary Smith, leaped onto the careering Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck on behalf of the organization she leads, issuing a statement two days after the October 7 terrorist attack on music festival attendees in Israel that said,

“The American Bar Association unequivocally condemns the attacks of Hamas on Israeli citizens that have killed hundreds. The kidnapping of helpless civilians by Hamas—including women and children abducted at gunpoint—for use in Gaza as hostages and human shields violates international laws. Brutal attacks on civilians are never a solution to disputes or a justifiable way to air grievances. Israel and the Palestinians have had long-running disagreements and differences, but that in no way justifies the actions of Hamas. The state of Israel has the right to exist, and its citizens are entitled to live in safety and peace. The ABA calls on both sides to show restraint to spare the lives of the innocent people caught up in these attacks. The ABA also calls for all hostages to be released and for all parties to stop hostilities and settle their disputes in a peaceful and legal fashion and with the rule of law.”

For a lawyer (and the supposedly most prestigious lawyer organization), that’s an astoundingly self-contradictory statement. Despite giving lip service to the obvious definition of a terror attack on civilians as unjustifiable, the statement goes on to claim that Israel has no right to respond to the attack as an act of war, calling for a “peaceful solution” while implying that any armed response will breach “the rule of law.” Then she struck again on October 17, writing that the ABA,

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On His Way Out, Rep. Santos Kindly Demonstrates Why

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The House just voted 311 to 114 (with two cowardly members voting “present”) to make New York Congressman George Santos only the sixth in history to be deemed unworthy of an elected seat. The GOP members mostly supported the draconian punishment despite facing a tough race in the special election Santos’s disgrace now triggers. If I were a voter in that Long Island and Queens district, I’d be tempted to vote for the Democrat just to make the Republican Party pay for allowing a fraud and a crook like Santos to be its nominee. Of course, the Democrats and the local news media also share some blame for not doing due diligence to uncover important facts about a wildly unqualified candidate, but the GOP has to be first in line to be held accountable after Santos himself.

Yesterday, facing his likely humiliation, the biggest phony ever elected to Congress put his essential sliminess on full display, vowing revenge on his party and, like so many villains in movies about conspiracies and corruption, swearing that ‘if I go down, I’ll take all of you down with me!’

“I will do the same thing that members did to me and go to the Office of Congressional Ethics, all throughout today and tomorrow and report, everything that I think is relevant to the committee for them to look into,” said Santos. He’s already promised to file a complaint about the ridiculous Rep. Jamaal Bowman, the Mad Fire Alarmist. Yes, Bowman should be sanctioned, but compared to Santos he’s John Quincy Adams.

Santos’s reaction to being expelled is a stinking pile of rationalizations, as discussed here. His pledge to get revenge is another bit of signature significance. If Santos had any ethical instincts at all, any concept of why he was being kicked out of Congress, any flicker of conscience, dignity, responsibility or decency, he would have exited with a statement expressing his regret for his past actions, apologizing for soiling (well, further soiling) the reputation of the body he was elected to serve in, and promising to devote his future activities to honorable public service, while acknowledging that there is, at this time, no reason to believe him. Then it might have been said of his leaving Congress, in the manner of Malcolm’s description of MacBeth at his execution,

Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it.

But George Santos doesn’t possess those character traits: he’s a throbbing sociopath, and unlike more successful sociopaths in our government, he’s not smart or wily enough to hide it.

Hey, I’m Calm! Stuff Like This Doesn’t Bother Me At All. I’m Just An Uninvolved Observer.

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

And happy!

See?

Stories like this one coming up—another Great Stupid epic, again with links to the George Floyd Ethics Train Wreck—have been proliferating lately. When I first saw the headline on a report that D.C.’s black, woke, totally incompetent mayor Muriel Bowser had “re-painted” her insane giant Black Lives Matter mural, confirmation bias kicked in: I read it to mean that she had finally removed the insulting monstrosity by having it painted over. I was even preparing a post about how trying to undo a massive ethics botch often calls attention to what was so wrong in the first place, and that in this case, Bowser was in ethics zugzwang because so many of her residents are still blind Black Lives Matter supporters, aka. anti-white, anti-police, anti-America racists.

But that’s not what the story said. The real story is that Bowser chose now to spruce up the huge, infamous street mural shouting “Black Lives Matter” that she had painted in 2020 as BLM mobs were “mostly peacefully” demonstrating through the city and the nation, at times confronting white D.C. diners and demanding that they pledge fealty to the Marxist movement. The refurbishment cost $271,231, including $217,680 in labor costs and $53,551 in paint supplies.

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A Teachers’ Union Reveals What It Is, Suddenly Decides To Take It All Back And Pretend It Didn’t Mean It

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

…thus raising the immediate question of whether parents and particularly Jews are as dumb as the teachers apparently think they are. We shall see.

The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers passed a resolution on Oct. 25th to “condemn the role our [America] government plays in supporting the system of Israeli occupation and apartheid, which lies at the root of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.” In addition, the resolution demanded that Minnesota lawmakers repeal the state’s anti-BDS legislation. 

Not surprisingly, there was a massive negative reaction to the October resolution because it revealed that a majority of the teachers in the union were..

  • Anti-Semitic.
  • Ignorant
  • Completely in thrall to anti-white, anti-democratic ideology
  • Excessively concerned with woke politics than with education, and
  • Not sufficiently trustworthy to be teaching children.
  • Missing basic ethics alarms.

Oopsie! The Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas sent a letter signed by over 800 citizens to interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox and the MPS school board protesting in part,

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Ethics Villains: Carron J. Phillips And The Woke Activism Website That Employs Him [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This is what Woke World has become in the Age of the Great Stupid, as the George Floyd Ethics Train Wreck continues to run amuck. It is, essentially, a race-baiting bully. (Among other revolting things.)

Carron J. Phillips, a writer for the recently resurrected website Deadspin, which wasn’t reliable in its original form as an internet tabloid, decided to use this photo of a young Kansas City Chiefs fan sitting in the stands…

…to justify the headline,

The “native headdress” complaint ignored the fact that the NFL team’s name is “The Chiefs” and that fans have been showing their support like this…

…for decades. And, of course, that the target of Phillips and Deadspin is a little boy who we now know was 5-years-old. But wait! There’s more! After Carron posted that photo on X with a link to his despicable article, X-users responded with this…

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Boomerang! The Unethical Law New York Passed To Get Donald Trump Just Nailed NYC’s Black, Democrat Mayor!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

If anything rates a Nelson, this does.

Back in May, I posted an Ethics Quiz asking if the Adult Survivors Act signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2022 to suck up to #MeToo voters was ethical. It provides a one-year window for people (aka women) to bring lawsuits over alleged sexual assaults occurring years or decades ago. Now a #MeToo law suit against New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been filed in the New York Supreme Court just before the law’s grace period expires today.

I wrote,

It was and is a blatantly political measure, pandering to the #MeToo crowd, which itself is deeply conflicted and corrupt. Now bad, bad men like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and…surprise! Donald Trump, can be sued during a convenient one year window no matter how long ago their alleged sexual misconduct took place, or how blurry memories of the details may be. Never mind that the protection against unfair sexual assault and sexual harassment lawsuits based on accusations that only surface when the accuser calculates that there are forces at play in society (like “Believe all woman”) making a victory likely should be available to all citizens. Never mind that such late-hit lawsuits rely on emotion and politics as much as evidence…

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Post-Thanksgiving Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 11/24/2023: Who Expected Anti-Semitism And Trump-Derangement To Translate Into Anti-Thanksgiving Assaults?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

As usual now, much of the mainstream media spent Thanksgiving and the days leading up to the holiday exploiting the opportunity to bash the tradition, the holiday, and the United States. There was special urgency this time: the negative emphasis on the unique American holiday was galvanized by the anti-Jewish/anti-Israel/pro-Hamas narrative a disturbing proportion of the American Left has embraced in its opposition of Israel defending its right to exist.

“De-colonization” is the 2023 buzzword. “Native Americans=blacks, Palestinians, and other victims whites and the United States. And, again as usual, we were told that it was our duty to ruin a warm, family-oriented, non-partisan tradition by using it to harangue other family members about the evils of Israel, the Supreme Court, Republicans and Donald Trump.

The Left’s growing anti-Thanksgiving tradition also seemed to gain intensity because of the widespread panic over polls showing Trump increasing his lead in voter support over the President as the 2024 election gets closer. Here’s a nice, unbiased cartoon from the Boston Globe, for example, simultaneously equating Trump with those evil colonizing Pilgrims and the turkey with foolish Americans who don’t know enough to avoid voting for a dangerous leader:

It was called “the Last Thanksgiving.” I really question this strategy. The Left is gambling that being the party of anti-Americanism is a winning approach. In fact, they are somehow turning Donald Trump into Ronald Reagan, the leader who saw the U.S. as a “shining city on the hill.” That seems especially foolish framing when Biden’s weak Presidency is already reminiscent of Jimmy Carter’s, complete with American hostages being held by radical Islamist terrorists. Good plan!

Here are some highlights of the anti-Thanksgiving craziness:

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What Do You Conclude From This Woman’s Head-Exploding Rant?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Trust me, I know this thing painful to watch all the way through, but please do it, and then reflect with me upon what this ridiculous person’s monologue portends. Her name is Savrienna Abrre, and she is now residing in Canada, as she tells us repeatedly, compelling the response, “GOOD!” That’s one less vote for, oh, I don’t know, Robert Kennedy Jr, or maybe Woody Woodpecker.

Savrienna is the kind of person, apparently, who becomes a social media star, which is to say, she’s a narcissistic cretin. It does take some kind of talent to babble on like she does so assaultively and continuously, smiling like a zany and never thinking, “Wow, like, I’m sounding like a complete idiot!,” but I don’t know what that talent is called. I am willing to lay odds that she is courting the same fate at the hands of her husband as the subject of this limerick by the late, great Edward Gory:

There was a young woman whose stammer

Was atrocious, and so was her grammar.

But they were not improved

When her husband was moved

To bash in her teeth with a hammer…

Savrienna blames the American public school system. As I am a constant critic of that institution, aka, “smoldering ruin,” you might think that I sympathize with her, but I do not in the least. She is an incurious fool of stunning intellectual laziness, whose choice of friends and associates has reflected her shallowness.

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Ethics Mystery: How Many Of These Disasters Will It Take For Progressives To Realize That Their Woke Delusions Are Just Plain Wrong?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Case study: In 2021, Oregon became the first US state to decriminalize hard drugs like heroin, crack and fentanyl. After all, possession and sales are “victimless crimes,” right? And non-violent, too. Nobody’s hurt when family members, parents, spouses and employees become addicts except the drug-users themselves! Oregon’ brainwashed progressives overwhelmingly voted for Measure 110 in a referendum in November 2020, believing the left wing/ libertarian cant that making the possession and use of narcotics legal would make it easier to get addicts treated.

Just three years later, an Emerson poll shows that 56% of voters want to make the drugs illegal again. Why? I bet you can guess, even though the voters in Oregon couldn’t figure it out since wokeness ate their brains. The addicted are flocking to the state, requiring Oregon to deal with more addicts than it can handle. Under Measure 110, those in possession of the now-legal drugs are issued a ticket that results in a theoretical $100 fine, but the penalty will be lifted once the individual calls a self-help line and seeks treatment. Not surprisingly, the system is a bust. Eugene’s police chief reported that out of 6,000 people cited, fewer than 125 followed through.

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