Ethics Dunces

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 →

Unethical (and Pathetic) Quote of the Week: President Joe Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“No one said I had to.”

That was the President of the United States, not just a grown man but the democratically elected leader of our government, in response to the question posed by George Stephanopolos last night in the interview designed to calm American fears that Joe Biden is not capable of doing his job.

How diminishing, damning, desperate and depressing.

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Open Forum, Hopefully Not Entirely Dominated By Joe Biden’s Dementia, But First, THIS…[Corrected: Wrong Link Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 51 Comments

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Once again, I am resolving to ding any commenter who comes here to argue that the news media is, as that damning headline and banner has the nerve to suggest by the “Support” button, “Independent Fact-based Journalism.”

The White House’s reliance on today’s pre-taped [!!!!], pitifully short (30 minutes? Seriously?) Biden interview with Democratic Party operative George Stephanopoulos to put everyone at ease is more flaming evidence that this administration is convinced that the public is too stupid to metaphorically come out of the rain. So what if Biden can get through a single, carefully planned interview with a friendly, indeed complicit, talking head? That interview last week was signature significance. A trustworthy, fit leaders doesn’t have a “bad night” like that, even once. Equating not having a “bad night” once with the significance of having one is so mild-meltingly stupid that it competes vigorously with the other ridiculous attempts to minimize the epic irresponsibility of Biden running for a second term in the White House. “So he babbled and froze and faded out and gaped like a grouper: He doesn’t always do that!” This is like arguing, “So he had a massive heart attack—he doesn’t always have heart attacks!” And the news media is actually running with this talking point like it isn’t the stupidest thing making making Kamala Harris Vice-President.

[UGH! I just saw this disgraceful “It isn’t what it is” piece. How can these hacks look themselves in the mirror?]

NOTICE of CORRECTION: For some reason, that link was mistakenly to the debate transcript. That wasn’t where it was supposed to go, though the transcript is also infuriating—check Biden’s worst answer, the one that ends with “we beat Medicare.” The transcript makes it seem like Biden’s answer was half-comprehensible, which it wasn’t. At all. But the linked article is to a Baltimore Sun column [“Biden’s debate performance a B-, not a bomb”] where the shameless tool of a gaslighter blames the whole disaster on Biden’s alleged “stutter.”

Incidentally, is anyone working today? I am, but it sure seem like I’m the only one….

Observations On This Smoking Gun Evidence That Nothing Is Too Unethical For Today’s Totalitarian Democrats

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I started reading a column in the Huffington Post that Ethics Alarms commenter Cornelius Gotchberg linked to today, and got almost half-way through it before I realized it wasn’t satire. But, horrifyingly, “It’s Time For The Biden Campaign To Embrace AI” isn’t satire. And now we know what kind of ethical limitations Democrats and progressives place on their tactics as they desperately try to save Joe Biden and their own metaphorical necks.

None. No limits at all. By any means necessary. The ends justify the means. In what this dangerous party has become, it’s Machiavelli and Big Brother all the way down.

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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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“OOOOOOKE—lahoma Where The Fools Want Bibles In the Schools…”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Morons.

Just as the Far Left plays into the worst conservative stereotypes about them with demands like abortion right up to birth and open borders, the Far Right parodies itself with Constitution-defying laws like Louisiana’s requiring the Ten Commendments to be displayed in public school classrooms. Now Oklahoma says, “Hold my beer!”with the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters announcing in a memo today that every Oklahoma school must teach students the Bible the 2024-2025 school year. “The Bible is an indispensable historical and cultural touchstone,” Walters said in a press release unveiling the mandate. “Without basic knowledge of it, Oklahoma students are unable to properly contextualize the foundation of our nation which is why Oklahoma educational standards provide for its instruction. This is not merely an educational directive but a crucial step in ensuring our students grasp the core values and historical context of our country.”

There is no chance, none, zip, nada, that this obviously religiously motivated law will stand up to judicial scrutiny. This is pure grandstanding.

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Update: Josef Sorett, Dean of Columbia College, Is An Ethics Villain

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Sorett has revealed himself to be the most despicable, incompetent and untrustworthy leader of a prestigious U.S. college, an astounding achievement when you consider the competition.

Silly me, I thought the original story was as bad as it could get. How wrong I was. To recap this post, during a Columbia panel on the campus’s anti-Semitism, Sorett, the Dean of Columbia College, exchanged mocking and derisive texts about the panelists statements about how the pro-Hamas protesters had poisoned the educational environment for Jewish students with the vice dean and chief administrative officer of the college, the dean of undergraduate student life; and the associate dean for student and family support. Unfortunately for all of them, another attendee behind one of the texters took incriminating snap shots of the cell phone screen that revealed the dismissive texts.

After being busted, Sorett tried the Pazuzu Excuse (‘what I said or did wasn’t really me!’) which is bad enough, but “the rest of the story” is worse. This creep fuzzed over the fact that he was part of the texting orgy in his original statement after the texts were revealed, and then put the other three administrators on leave! Nice. The least he could have done was show some solidarity with his fellow anti-Semites and suspend himself. As the highest ranking member of the gossip group, a strong argument can be made that he ratified and enabled the offensive discussion. In fact, I’ll make it: he was more accountable than the three administrators he punished.

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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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No, Doctors, “Do No Harm” Does Not Mean “Make Anti-Israel/Gaza War Statements in Your Hospital”…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

We knew, or should have, that the medical profession was not immune from the ethics rot brought upon us by the advent of The George Floyd Freakout, the 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck, The Great Stupid (and its DEI sub-cult) and the rest. Here is a throbbing example.

At the University of California, San Francisco, one of the nation’s most respected medical schools and teaching hospitals, medical students and doctors have been protesting the war in Gaza. Chants of “intifada, intifada, long live intifada!” could be heard by patients in their hospital rooms at the U.C.S.F. Medical Center. It doesn’t really matter what the chants were: they could bebeen “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” (one of my personal favorites.) Medical personnel should never promote political views in a hospital. Why isn’t that obvious?

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Ethics Dunce: Geoffrey Hinton, “The Godfather of Artificial Intelligence”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

You should know the name Geoffrey Hinton by now. To the extent that any one scientist is credited with the emergence of artificial intelligence, he’s it. He was among the winners of the prestigious Turing Prize for his break-through in artificial neural networks, and his discoveries were crucial in the development of advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) software today like Chat GPT and Google’s Bard. He spent 50 years developing the technology, the last 10 pf which working on AI at Google before he quit in 2023. His reason: he was alarmed at the lack of sufficient safety measures to ensure that AI technology doesn’t do more harm than good.

And yet, as revealed in a recent interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Hinton still believes that his work to bring AI to artificial life was time well-spent, that his baby was worth nurturing because of its potential benefits to humanity, and that—-get this—all we have to do is, for the first time in the history of mankind, predict the dangers, risks and looming unintended consequences of an emerging new technology, get everything right the first time, not make any mistakes, not be blindly reckless in applying it, and avoid the kind of genie-out-of-the-bottle catastrophes that world has experienced (and is experiencing!) over and over again.

That’s all!

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