Ethics Heroes

Elon Musk: “Delusional,” Huckster, or Credible Dreamer?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

A twitter user I have never heard of (but who somehow has amassed over half a million followers posted that tweet above with the comment, “I don’t understand why people continue investing in a company whose CEO is self-evidently delusional and whose plans for the business have no basis in reality.” Another user quickly pointed out that the eccentric billionaire entrepreneur “reduced the cost of launch to orbit by ~90%, mainstreamed electric cars, and gave a paralyzed man the ability to control a computer with his mind.” Yes, that’s a complete rebuttal to the “influencer’s” snark. Why do investors trust Musk? Because he’s an out-of-the-box thinker with the resources to make impossible-seeming ideas reality, and has a track record that says, “Don’t bet against him.”

Regular readers here know that I detest John Lennon’s anthem for idiots, “Imagine.” John identifies himself as a “dreamer,” which he rationalizes “Everybody does it” style: He’s not the only one who thinks we can achieve his juvenile version of utopia (“Nothing to live or die for…”). But John was a minimally educated lifetime musician and poet: like the Everly Brothers, all he could do was dream (and they were silly dreams anyway). Elon Musk has shown that he is capable of making some previously impossible dreams possible. That deserves awe and respect.

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Ethics Hero: Singer Tish Hyman

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

In an ethics seminar I recently described how conduct could be legal but unethical (example: lying) and ethical but illegal (civil disobedience). Singer Trish Hyman decided that a little disturbance of the peace in a Gold’s Gym’s cafe area was the best way to draw attention to the gym’s unethical (and stupid….but woke, so it’s okay) practices regarding dangling penises in women’s changing rooms, so she shouted out her complaint raucously and made sure it was recorded.

The Beverly Center Gold’s Gym revoked the singer’s membership after she complained that a transgender wannabe woman (“with a big dick”) being in the women’s dressing room. “Today I was naked in the locker room. I turned around, and there was a man there. Boy clothes, lip gloss, standing there looking at me, and I’m butt naked,” Hyman said in a video posted on TikTok.

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President Donald Trump Can’t Even Be An Ethics Hero Properly…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Yesterday, at the last possible minute, President Trump endorsed Andrew Cuomo in a typically antic Truth Social post. From that perspective, it’s an act of ethical heroism. He’s doing something that is not in his best interests or those of his party. Trump clearly loves New York City even though it doesn’t love him. He is choosing the future welfare of the city’s mostly Democratic residents over what will benefit his party, the Republican Party, by throwing the weight and prestige of his office behind a Democrat (running as an Independent, but never mind) rather than the GOP spoiler, Curtis Sliwa.

Kudos for the President. Making sure as few people as possible vote for Sliwa, who is on the way to becoming New York City’s Harold Staasen, is contrary to principles of party loyalty but the right thing to do. Trump’s endorsement:

“If Communist Candidate Zohran Mamdani wins the Election for Mayor of New York City, it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required, to my beloved first home, because of the fact that, as a Communist, this once great City has ZERO chance of success, or even survival! It can only get worse with a Communist at the helm, and I don’t want to send, as President, good money after bad. It is my obligation to run the Nation, and it is my strong conviction that New York City will be a Complete and Total Economic and Social Disaster should Mamdani win. A vote for Curtis Sliwa (who looks much better without the beret!) is a vote for Mamdani. Whether you personally like Andrew Cuomo or not, you really have no choice. You must vote for him, and hope he does a fantastic job. He is capable of it, Mamdani is not!”

Trump being Trump and reflexively perverse, he just had to do the right thing in the worst possible way, threatening the city and its residents in the process. Thus did he cross over the line from endorsing a candidate (normal, ethical) to threatening the city if it doesn’t do what he wants. That’s election interference, because he is applying coercion, or what feels like it.

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Ethics Hero For The Ages: Elon Musk

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I have long planned on writing a thorough post about how much the United States, its culture, its future as a viable democracy and its avoidance (so far) of a close call with progressive neo-totalitarianism owes to Elon Musk. This isn’t it. However, once again he has used his boundless wealth and creativity to strike down an engine of cultural indoctrination and Orwellian twisting of knowledge and history. Buying Twitter and ending its flagrant partisan bias was a landmark in American freedom of speech, one that may well have made the election of Donald Trump possible. His latest adventure may be even more important.

He has launched Grokipedia, the desperately needed alternative to Wikipedia. It is still a work in progress, as Musk admits, but by being AI-driven (the bot in charge is Elon’s Grok), the online living encyclopedia avoids the progressive bias and vulnerability to partisan manipulation that had caused me to only resort to Wikipedia when the topic was immune from political bias.

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Ethics Hero: Bill Gates, Who Finally Figured Out That Climate Change Doom Is Hype

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Bill Gates, nerd and “on the spectrum” sufferer that he is, also has the advantage of being sufficiently rich that he is insulated from Leftist fury when he defies wokist cant. Today the climate change scam collective is presumably freaking out because Gates has issued a memo saying, in effect, “Oopsie! What a stupid I am! I let a bunch of agenda-driven scientists and lying (or ignorant) activists convince me to waste billions of dollars on their dishonest hustle! Oh well, live and learn…”

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Ethics Heroes: The Academy of Classical Christian Studies High School Girls Basketball Team (Oklahoma City)

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

It’s time for an encouraging ethics tale, and this is one.

(That’s Pandora above, viewing the last, and only benign, occupant of her famous box. Hope!)

The Academy of Classical Christian Studies high school girls basketball team in Oklahoma City won last season’s division championship game. A last second buzzer-beating basket against Apache High School did the job. But something didn’t feel right to Academy head coach Brendan King …perhaps the faint ping of an ethics alarm. He went home that night and watched the game tape.

“As soon as I walked out of the locker room, my stomach kind of turned into knots. And I said, ‘I’m going to need to know if we really won this game or not,'” King told reporters. Sure enough, when he checked the tape and tallied up the baskets, he discovered his team had actually lost. The true score should have been 43-42, with Apache High the victors and the winners of the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association girls basketball championship. Somehow 2 points had been mistakenly given to King’s team, making it the 43-42 winners.

League rules state that once a game is completed, it is in the books and the records can’t be changed.  King decided to tell his team the bad news anyway. The girls unanimously agreed what the right course was, and it was to appeal their own victory. In an unprecedented reversal, the league agreed, and King surrendered the championship plaque to Apache High.

Apache girls basketball head coach Amy Merriweather said that more than the championship, she and her team were grateful for the ethics lesson. “It showed us, you know, there are still good people in this world,” Merriweather said. “It’s something we’ll always remember.”

Indeed.

There is hope.

_____________________

Pointer: Jon

Ethics Hero: Animal Care Centers of New York City

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Finding its facilities with a surplus of pit bull breeds and pit bull mixes to find homes for, the Animal Care Centers of New York City hit on a creative solution. It released a video that opens with “We’ve never seen this many doodles at our shelter before.” What follows is a series of photos and video clips of “doodles” that are really obvious pit bull mixes wearing curly wigs.

“Doodles,” for the dog-challenged, refers to the popular designer breeds and other mixes of non-poodle dog breeds with poodles, usually creating digs with hypoallergenic coats. Labradoodles are poodles crossed with Labrador Retrievers, Sheepadoodles are English Sheep Dog-poodle mixes, and Golden Doodles, the most popular of all, are poodles bred with Golden Retrievers.

The video mocks the “doodles” craze while also placing their much maligned (and unjustly so) pit bulls and pit bull mixes in a benign light. And mirabale dictu, it worked! Families who never would have considered adopting a pit bull type dogs came to the shelter and did so, and the staff at the shelters believe that the video is being widely circulated, helping to dispel the wide-spread fear of and bias against these loving, sweet tempered dogs perpetuated by ignorant anti-pit bigots.

Spuds approves.

Ethics Hero (Sort of): Jay Carey [Updated & Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

In my recent ethics seminars I have been discussing categories of conduct that are ethical but illegal and legal but unethical. The best example of ethical and illegal is civil disobedience, when a citizen intentionally and openly violates a law to call attention to the law’s (alleged) flaw or flaws, and commences to accept the consequences of his or her crime in order to focus public attention on the injustice. (Clarence Darrow loved civil disobedience…).

Jay Carey received a Bronze Star during the Iraq War, and joined a (misguided) veterans’ protest against the deployment of National Guard troops in the nation’s capital because he has been watching too much CNN or something. What does a North Carolina resident know about crime in Washington, D.C.? OK, he’s probably Trump Deranged and Axis media-brainwashed, but never mind, that’s not the issue here.

The veteran was arrested after burning an American flag near the White House and says he plans on taking his case, if it proceeds, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. “Presidents don’t make law, and Congress will make no law that infringes upon our rights in accordance with the First Amendment,” Carey told reporters. Trump’s recent executive order declaring that flag-burning was a crime (EA discussed it here) prompted him to engage in civil disobedience.

“I realized that I needed to, that day, go and burn a flag in front of the White House to have the biggest impact and send the message to the President that he’s not allowed to do that,” Carey explained, He burned the flag in Lafayette Square, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, making sure that his defiance was captured in videos posted on social media.

Carey is seen telling bystanders that the President’s executive order violates the First Amendment. “I served over 20 years in the United States Army,” he said. “I fought for every single one of your rights to express yourself in however you feel that you may want to express yourself.”

In the earlier version of this post, I said at this point, “That’s the way to do it, Jay. The Founders would be proud. Good luck: I think you’ll win this one.” The problem is that as far as civil disobedience goes, at least, Jay did not accomplish his objective. As commenter Chris Marschner points out below, Jay was only charged with lighting a fire in an undesignated area and lighting a fire in a manner that causes damage to real property or park resources. He might as well have been burning New York Yankees pennant. There is no way his case will get to the Supreme Court, and he didn’t manage to violate the pseudo law he was protecting.

So there is one more requirement for ethical civil disobedience: competence. Under stand the law you’re trying to violate. Since Jay Carey didn’t, I can’t really award him an Ethics Hero designation for his attempt. But it was a sincere attempt.

Ethics Hero: Maluma

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Here I am, with almost a dozen important ethics issues languishing thanks to my (I hope) temporary incapacity, picking the least consequential of them all to begin EA’s blogging day. Go figure.

Colombian rapper Maluma (whom I had never heard of before) halted his Mexico City concert to admonish an audience member who had brought a baby, presumably hers, to the event. He was in the middle of a song, in fact, when he noticed the infant in the audience and called out the woman.

“Do you think it’s a good idea to bring a 1-year-old baby to a concert where the decibels are this fucking high?” he asked. “That baby doesn’t even know what it’s doing here! Next time, protect their ears or something. For real. It’s heavy. It’s your responsibility.”

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Ethics Hero: Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Perez, a 37-year-old auto shop owner, second-term congresswoman and co-chair of the center-leaning Blue Dog Coalition, horrified colleagues on both sides of the aisle by offering an amendment to the “Legislative Appropriations Act”, H.R. 4249. Her addition would have required Congress to create basic guidelines in Congress to ensure that members were able to serve the public “unimpeded by significant irreversible cognitive impairment.” The amendment was unanimously rejected, but she is not giving up. In a poll of the 230,000 people who subscribe to her newsletter, more than 90% supported the proposal. Perez says her constituents raise the issue frequently, and their belief that elected officials are frequently too impaired by age to be effective is causing spreading distrust of our government.

Gee, I can’t imagine why they would feel that way…

…but I digress.

Rep. Perez noted that she found it disturbing that among the oil paintings of the past chairs of the powerful Appropriations Committee is a large portrait of Kay Granger, the former Republican congresswoman from Texas who suffered from mental decline for years when a conservative news outlet found her, at the age of 81, living in an assisted living facility that included a memory care unit while she still held office.

There are now more members of Congress age 70 and above than ever before, while the second oldest President ever to serve is in the White House. Perez insists that there should be standards that prevent members from serving past the point where they no longer have the capacity to cast votes and do business on behalf of their constituents.“It’s a question of whether the elected member is making the decisions,” Rep. Perez said. “It’s really not about a single member; it’s about a systemic failure.”

Bingo.