Ethics Dunces

Wait…WHICH Side Of The Ideological Divide Is A Threat To Democratic Institutions Again?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

This is so outrageous that even after three cups of coffee I don’t know what to call it. Pathological hypocrisy? Playing with metaphorical matches in a kerosene factory? Prime Great Stupid? Help me out here.

In reaction to a relatively obscure 5-4 Supreme Court decision yesterday, numerous woke journalists and pundits went bonkers and argued that President Biden should just defy the ruling, you know, like Andrew Jackson did when he supposedly said, after the Court (correctly) ruled against his position in Worcester v. Georgia, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”

More about that later.

The Supreme Court yesterday temporarily reinstated a Trump environmental policy that made it harder for states to block projects that could cause water pollution. The opinion, on the so-called “emergency docket” that allows the Court to rule on urgent matters without hearing an oral argument, was unsigned and without any written explanation (so much for Justice Barrett’s “Read the opinion” remarks) prompting Chief Justice John Roberts to join the court’s three left-leaning justices in criticizing the majority’s use of the emergency docket, or as critics call it, the shadow docket.” The particulars of the case don’t matter; what does matter is the Left’s nascent totalitarians in the news media calling for direct defiance.

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The Herschel Walker Fake Credentials Scandal: Beyond The Fact That It’s Lying, Why Do Public Figures Do This?

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I don’t understand this kind of thing at all.

CNN did a deep dive into the educational boasts of Trump-backed Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker, the former NFL star and college running back legend, and discovered that he had been inflating his scholarly achievements to a ridiculous degree. He has said for years (and had the claim on his campaign website) that he graduated in the top 1% of his class at the University of Georgia. Nope. He was a B student or worse. He didn’t even graduate, though that’s the norm for pro athletes. Continue reading →

“Transgender Day of Visibility” Ethics Duncery

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Did you know yesterday was “Transgender Day of Visibility”? That’s funny, it seemed to me that this tiny minority in the U.S. has been disproportionately visible for years. Here’s the Presidents’ obsequious pander:

“To everyone celebrating Transgender Day of Visibility, I want you to know your president sees you, Jill, Kamala, Doug, our entire administration sees you for who you are. On this day and every day, we recognize the resilience, strength, and joy of transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people. We celebrate the activism and determination that have fueled the fight for transgender equality. We acknowledge the adversity and discrimination that the transgender community continues to face across our nation and around the world. Like never before, they are sharing their stories in books and magazines; breaking glass ceilings of representation on television and movie screens; enlisting — once again — to serve proudly and openly in our military; getting elected and making policy at every level of government; and running businesses, curing diseases, and serving our communities in countless other ways. Despite this progress, transgender Americans continue to face discrimination, harassment, and barriers to opportunity…I call upon all Americans to join us in lifting up the lives and voices of transgender people throughout our Nation and to work toward eliminating discrimination against all transgender, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary people — and all people.”

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First Vice-Presidents And Supreme Court Justices, And Now NFL Offensive Assistant Coaches

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The NFL’s near-complete dearth of ethics alarms is approaching comedic levels, if such a thing could be funny. This week the league that makes billions by paying young men to get a brain disease commanded all 32 NFL teams to hire a minority offensive assistant coach for the 2022 season, as, you’ve got it, another phase of the league’s “diversity” efforts.

The coach can be “a female or a member of an ethnic or racial minority,” according to the policy adopted by NFL owners during their annual meeting, and will be paid from a league-wide fund. That’s because they will all be tokens, you see, hired for PR purposes and to avoid lawsuits, so they really aren’t team hires. The new minority coaches “must work closely with the head coach and the offensive staff, with the goal of increasing minority participation in the pool of offensive coaches” that eventually produces the most sought-after candidates for head-coaching positions. In other words, they must receive remedial training because they would not have been hired based on their experience or demonstrated skills.

“It’s a recognition that at the moment, when you look at stepping stones for a head coach, they are the coordinator positions,” said Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney II, the chairman of the NFL Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee. “We clearly have a trend where coaches are coming from the offensive side of the ball in recent years, and we clearly do not have as many minorities in the offensive coordinator [job].” A quota, he means.

And that’s what counts, not putting the best football team on the field. Or something.

In addition to the offensive assistant coach mandate, the new policies in “diversity” also added women to the language of the Rooney Rule at all levels. It will now read that women and/or people of color can satisfy the old Rooney Rule requirement to interview two external minorities for top positions, including head coach. Women are not required to be interviewed, but they are now included in the fulfillment process. It is possible that a team could interview two white women for an open head coach position to satisfy the Rooney Rule, and then make a hire without ever interviewing a person of color.

Why no “differently-abled” coaches? How about blind coaches? Gay coaches? Mentally ill coaches? Little people. Non-English speakers. Mentally-challenged. Surely a trans assistant coach would be historic. Can Lia Thomas play football? Continue reading →

They Just Couldn’t Do It…Critic Wesley Morris And The New York Times Blow Up Standards, Ethics And My Head To Try To Excuse Will Smith

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Two graphics are called for to introduce this ethics horror. This:

..because I had hoped against hope that I wouldn’t have to write another post about Will Smith’s attack on Chris Rock during the Oscars broadcast. But it is obviously and ethics train wreck now, and I have no choice. And this…

…because I am stunned, shocked, and disgusted, and think, or perhaps hope, that we have reached a tipping point where the sensible people in this nation say, “Enough!”

Spuds had woken me from a sound sleep up to go outside, good boy that he is, and though I was ready to go back to bed, I made the mistake of picking up the New York Times from my lawn. Then I made the bigger mistake of taking it to the bathroom with me, and the bigger mistake yet of turning to the Arts section. And there it was: an epic, head-exploding, all-in screed by Times critic Wesley Morris explaining why Will Smith was not really to blame for his astounding, incredible, unethical, unprofessional, unjust, infantile, and criminal attack on comedian Chris Rock (who will get his Ethics Hero award from me today). but just about everyone else and everything else was.

I’m taking a pause now because my head feels ready to go off again…

They just couldn’t do it, could they? The Left, the race-baiters, black activists, the news media and the opinion-making elite could not stop themselves from turning an attack by one black celebrity on another into another bigoted weapon in the “antiracism” war against American culture. I’m such an idiot. With everything we’ve seen, I just didn’t see it coming. Oh, I expected the racists and bigots on the right to try to make Smith actions symbolic of something rotten and predictable in black culture; except for the hypocrisy of its source, I agree with the assessment of Bernice A. King, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King wrote, “Anybody who thinks ‘Black people look bad’ after the #Oscars already thought Black people look bad.” But I should have seen this stage coming, the desperate need to make Smith the victim instead of Rock, and someone, something, the wrongdoer instead of Smith. The big clue was the Oscar audience giving Smith a huge ovation after he had slapped Rock for an award he should not have been allowed to accept. I should read what I write sometimes: I already mused in one post about how different the response would have been if it had been Alec Baldwin slapping Rock.

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Ethics Dunce: NY Prosecutor Mark Pomeranz

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Last week, the New York Times and other media gleefully reported that Mark  Pomeranz, one of the senior Manhattan prosecutors who was part of the “Get Trump” effort that has been ongoing in New York almost from the minute he was Trump elected President, believed that the he was “guilty of numerous felony violations” and that it was “a grave failure of justice” not to hold him accountable.” This information came as his resignation letter somehow was released to the press.  Pomeranz submitted his resignation last month after the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg stopped pursuing an indictment of Donald Trump. Bragg had picked up the long-running attempt to charge Trump from his predecessor Cyrus Vance, Trump’s own personal Javert, who did not run for re-election.

What neither the Times nor any other source bothered to point out was that Pomeranz’s public statement that Trump was guilty of crimes were bright line violations of prosecutor ethics both in New York and across the profession.

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Unethical Quote Of The Month (And Maybe The Year): Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

“As long as they’re dangerous, I hope they all die in jail if they’re going to go back and kill Americans. It won’t bother me one bit if 39 of them die in prison. That’s a better outcome than letting them go. And if it costs $500 million to keep them in jail, keep them in jail. Because they’re going to go back to the fight. Look at the fricken Afghan government that’s made up of former detainees at Gitmo. This whole thing by the left about this war ain’t working.”

Senator Lindsey Graham in a meltdown at the confirmation hearing for SCOTUS nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, before walking out in a tizzy.

Hmmm. Is it a good thing or a bad thing that high ranking elected officials from both political parties appear to have little regard for core Constitutional principles? I’m going out on a limb here by stating that it’s a bad thing.

In fact, it is terrible.

Graham, an alleged conservative, proudly went on record as supporting “pre-crime” punitive measures (Watch “Minority Report” for a fair assessment of how that works) along with a pure “ends justifies the means” endorsement, spiced up by some “if it saves just one life” false logic. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce And Dead Ethics Alarms Don’t Begin To Describe This Admission By The Duck Duck Go CEO

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Wow.

What an idiot.

Those who use Duck Duck Go do so (or did so) because the search engine was deemed more trustworthy than Google, the high-tech monster that breaches user privacy regularly and lies about it, as well as plays games with its search algorithms to bolster its ideological agenda, all while actively engaging in censorship with its wholly owned platform, YouTube.

Now Duck Duck Go’s CEO, Gabriel Weinberg, actually boasts about manipulating search results to “highlight” what the company, in its vast and unquestioned wisdom, deems “quality” information, while burying links to what it calls disinformation.

Only dead ethics alarms could explain why he thinks this is a positive revelation. He is admitting that his platform engages in censorship, and does not support free expression, dissenting opinions, or controversial views. As a mass of critical Twitter commenters pointed out, by what divine guidance does he or his underlings know what is “disinformation”? The arrogance is staggering. What does “associated” mean? It is an open ended generality to allow silencing by association. But that’s not all:

  • Weinberg is madly virtue-signaling, presuming that Russia-hate will lead his search engine’s users to applaud a confession that Duck Duck Go will manipulate results when it feels like it, because rigging searches will only hurt “bad people.” I don’t trust Big Tech execs to decide who are bad people; too many of them are bad people. Nobody should.
  • It is more proof (on top of thousands of years of human folly)  that those with power can’t resist abusing that power.
  • His admission of the practice, and the practice itself, is gross incompetence. All Duck Duck Go had going for it was an image of trust. No one can trust a company run by someone who says, openly and without shame, “We manipulate our searches because we know best!” It is signature significance: no ethical executive would approve of  such a policy.

The company’s board should fire Weinberg immediately, and if it doesn’t, its members are as unethical, irresponsible and dim-witted as he is.

Well THAT Unethical Tweet Aged Particularly Poorly…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Biden’s tweet would have been unconscionable even if it hadn’t quickly turned out that Smollett was a hate-crime faker, a liar, and racial division-mongering fool. Like his former boss Obama, Biden didn’t have the sense to keep his uninformed and biased opinions from interfering with the judicial system, and not to try to exploit alleged crimes, uncertain crimes and uninvestigated events, accounts and rumors to exacerbate suspicion, fear and hate.

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: Ex-NY Governor Andrew Cuomo

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“If you want to cancel something, cancel federal gridlock, cancel the incompetence, cancel the infighting, cancel crime, cancel homelessness, cancel education inequality, cancel poverty, cancel racism.”

—-Disgraced Democratic ex-NY Governor  Andrew Cuomo, speaking at a Brooklyn church and claiming victim status in the “cancel culture.”

Wow.

This goes right into the Ethics Alarms “What an asshole!” file. It’s sickening virtue signalling (Hey look everyone! I’m against all these bad things! How can you not love me?) combined with throbbing demagoguery—not one of those problems can be “cancelled,” and he knows it—mixed with misdirection. We can and should cancel corrupt, abusive, bullying, ruthless sexually harassing men like Cuomo by finding them unfit to hold positions of influence and power, then kicking them out of public favor and their jobs permanently, because they are not worthy of trust.

Cuomo isn’t quite the monster Harvey Weinstein is, but his protestations ring just as offensively as they would coming from Harvey, who was, after all, just a Hollywood producer. Cuomo was entrusted by his state’s citizens with their welfare. Nobody, not even Harvey, deserves to be “cancelled” more than he does.

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Pointer: Althouse