Ethics Quotes

On the False Equivilency of Anti-Semitism and Islamaphobia Invoked By President Biden and Others

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“But let’s be clear about this as well. There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students. There is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans. It’s simply wrong. There is no place for racism in America. It’s all wrong. It’s un-American.”

That’s President Biden in his long delayed statement regarding the pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic demonstrations breaking out in college campuses and in cities across the country. As usual, he isn’t clear at all. There have been no demonstrations against Muslims or Arab Americans. What does Islamophobia have to do with the price of bacon, as my father used to say?

The problem at hand is mobs calling for the eradication of Israel, the sole bastion of democracy in the Middle East, and the death of Jews. Those involved are actively declaring their support for Hamas and Palestinian terrorism, meaning, again, advocating the eradication of Israel and the death of Jews.

Throwing this unique and particularly horrible outbreak of ethic and religious hate, discrimination and persecution under the huge progressive abused-minority tent with Arabs and Muslims deliberately dilutes accountability. Americans are justly wary of Islam, with its declared determination to wipe out infidels, and nobody ever set out to exterminate six million Arabs. Nobody murdered an Arab or Palestinian Olympic team, either. Anti-Semitism is different in kind, in great part because it is centuries old lingers in cultures and societies like the shingles virus, ready to break out without warning.

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Ethics Quote of the Week: David Marcus

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Marcus is an American entrepreneur. His depressing but revealing (though hardly surprising quote is in this tweet, which also relates nicely to the previous post:

Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: President Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“I condemn the antisemitic protests.That’s why I have set up a program to deal with that. I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

—President Joe Biden answering a shouted question at an Earth Day event at Prince William Forest Park in Triangle, Virginia outside Washington, DC.

Joe Biden saying something stupid, incomprehensible or dishonest is a virtually daily occurrence, but some of his statements have significant consequences, taking them out of Julie Principle territory. This one continues his astounding effort to try to pander to both sides of the Hamas-Israel conflict and their respective supporters simultaneously. It is such an obviously impossible and indefensible mission that it’s amazing that there is anyone who isn’t disgusted and insulted by it, for it is predicated on the belief that everyone is even dumber than Joe.

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Bitter, Pathetic, Miserable Hillary Clinton

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Yes, I know I’m breaking my own rule about not using unflattering photos of Hillary Cinton, a pledge I made during the 2016 Presidential campaign I think—it might have been earlier. She deserves it in this instance.

I feel genuine compassion for Hillary, just as I do for Al Gore (and Samuel J. Tilden) up to a point. It must be terrible to win the popular vote for President of the United States and lose the election. I think it must be a little like what I am trying to deal with right now after waking up one morning and finding my wife dead.

Hillary is bitter and angry, and I understand that. The ethical mandate in such a situation is to strive to deal with these emotions with dignity, and, in her position as a public figure that many Americans admire and respect (mistakenly), to serve as a role model for everyone else who finds themselves suddenly losing something or someone that assumed they had firmly and safely in their embrace.

She’s failed that mandate spectacularly and repeatedly. Clinton lost the Presidency, not only by the quirk of the Electoral College, but also through her own perfidy, arrogance and incompetence, yet she refuses to take responsibility for any of that. In her view, at least publicly, it is all Donald Trump’s fault, along with the”deplorables” who voted for him. From the moment she learned that she had lost the 2016 election in a stunning upset, Clinton has set out to do everything and anything she can to hurt him, beginning with declaring his election illegitimate, spawning the Russian collusion investigation that crippled his Presidency, and using every opportunity to trigger the Trump Deranged with inevitably diminishing returns.

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Never Mind NPR: No One Should Trust the New York Times After Its “Get Trump!” Editorial

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ethics Villain? “Bias makes you stupid”? “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!”? Unethical Quote of the Month? Oh, let’s start with that one:

“Donald Trump, who relentlessly undermined the justice system while in office and since, is enjoying the same protections and guarantees of fairness and due process before the law that he sought to deny to others during his term.”

—-The New York Times editorial board, in yesterday’s biased, manipulative, Trump-Deranged misinformation-fest titled, “Donald Trump and American Justice”

This is no more and no less that a “WE HATE YOU TRUMP! HATE HATE HATE!” statement. As President, Trump never did anything to “deny fairness and due process” to “others.” The claim to the contrary not journalism and it’s not punditry. It is just hurling accusations without support. Yet the Times editorial board never protested when President Obama used his “bully pulpit” to suggest that American citizens were guilty of crimes before they had been tried or even charged, as in the case of George Zimmerman. The editorial provides no examples or evidence to support the statement, because there aren’t any.

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Conservative Pundit David Burge, a.k.a. “Iowahawk” [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Burge’s tweet above was in response to the episode described by ultra-woke UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky in the statement below (you can view Chemerinsky’s damning Ethics Alarms dossier here).

Gee what a surprise.

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A TRIPLE Jumbo for Joe!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ok, we need a new rule, as Bill Maher likes to say.

Politicians who don’t have the integrity, energy, tech savvy or whatever else it takes to run their own social media accounts may not deny that what was posted in their names, with their permission, by their paid agents, are their true sentiments. I regard the practice of proxy tweeters and Instagrammers per se unethical anyway: the message says it’s from, say, “Joe Biden,” but it’s really from 22 year-old Ohio State grad Stanislaus “Blinky” Furbusher, a former circus geek whose uncle is a big Democratic donor, and whose opinion about anything would normally not get the national attention a typical Oakland A’s day game gets. That makes such a ghost-posted message a lie, flat out. Say what you will, and I have, about Donald Trump’s often stupid and obnoxious tweets, at least he’s the one who sends them, and he accepts full responsibility for them too. (And he knows how to send them, which admittedly isn’t much, but I bet Joe Biden hasn’t sent a tweet in his life.)

This is all by way of noting that when asked about the political and religious controversy about Biden proclaiming Easter Sunday “Transgender Day of Visibility” [Item #3] (the ridiculously named and conceived “day” pandering to the tiny minority represented by the “T’ in LGBTQ and dedicated to destroying women’s sports), the President, who doesn’t lie like Donald Trump and has a mind like a steel trap (we are told) denied that he had done it.

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Unethical Quote of the Week: President Joe Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“They have a point.”

—President Biden responding to pro-Hamas and Palestinians protesters at a campaign event in North Carolina yesterday after they shouted “What about the health care in Gaza?” before being ushered out by security.

This wasn’t Biden’s senility on display. Nor was it one of his lies. That statement demonstrates this President’s complete ethical and moral void as well as his cowardice, the result of which is to render him incapable of analyzing any situation requiring coherent views of history and a commitment to do the right thing regardless of political fallout.

Biden wants to avoid alienating any voter block, This profound lack of integrity prevents him from leading, leaving him only with the task of unprincipled pandering.

The protesters did not “have a point,” any more than protesters shouting “What about health care in Berlin?” during the Allies’ bombing of the city during World War II would have had a point. “We need to get a lot more care into Gaza,” Biden said. Why? The United States is providing weapons for Israel to conquer Gaza and eliminate Hamas, which is supported by a large majority of the population there. Another protester, apparently as clueless as Biden, called out that health centers in Gaza were “being bombed.” Yup, sure are, and that’s because Hamas is hiding in tunnels under such places so that civilians have to die for Hamas to be subjected to the punishment it deserves and dim bulb weaklings like Joe Biden can claim that pro-terrorism, anti-Israel protesters “have a point.”

I have recorded many statements by Donald Trump that I have ruled should, under normal circumstances, disqualify him from office. None are as disqualifying as those four fatuous, offensive words from Biden yesterday.

Unethical Quote of the Month: Lawrence Martin

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“The greater likelihood is that extremes of free speech will continue to be tolerated, creating a pathway for more Donald Trumps.”

—Washington, D.C.-based journalist Lawrence Martin, a Canadian journalist, bemoaning how the “elites” no longer control the limits of free speech because of the internet, and the results are disastrous in a column titled, “Excessive free speech is a breeding ground for more Trumps.”

Even though this guy could be classified as a Canadian journalist, make no mistake: he is stating out loud how a large component, even a majority perhaps, feels about freedom of speech when it doesn’t stop with letting  journalists and their favorite politicians and glitterati say, state and opine about what ever they want in the public square. This is exactly what “saying the quiet part out loud” means.

For that, I suppose we should be thankful to Martin. I would say we should also be thankful that he almost exclusively writes for Canadian publications—you know, the ones that cover the Great Stupid infected country to the north that is seriously considering a law,  Bill C-63, that would establish life sentences for “speech crimes.” Oh, don’t worry: Martin feels that the bill goes “too far.” That’s nice. Based on his screed, I’m sure he favors lesser sentences. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Month: Missouri and Louisiana

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“The bully pulpit is not a pulpit to bully.”

—-The attorneys for Missouri and Louisiana in their U.S. Supreme Court opposition to staying the unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit order declaring that officials from the White House, the surgeon general’s office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the F.B.I. had violated the First Amendment by secretly pressuring social media platforms to take down posts as “misinformation.”

What a great line! I’m amazed it has never been used before: an instant classic and useful quote.

Today the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the oral arguments in a case to determine whether the Biden administration violated the First Amendment in combating that endlessly useful word to progressive and Democratic censors, “misinformation,” on social media platforms. There are four case before SCOTUS on this topic, which, among other expressions of alarm, was the target of the so-called “Twitter Files” posts organized by Elon Musk in 2022.

The case being argued today, like the other ones, arose from revealed communications from administration officials urging/ persuading/ threatening social media platforms to take down Left-unfriendly posts on the Wuhan virus vaccines, the 2020 election and Hunter Biden’s laptop and other matters. Last year, the Fifth Circuit hit the Biden administration with an injunction that severely limited this tactic. The three judge panel wrote,

Defendants, and their employees and agents, shall take no
actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or
significantly encourage social-media companies to remove,
delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their
algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected
free speech. That includes, but is not limited to, compelling the
platforms to act, such as by intimating that some form of
punishment will follow a failure to comply with any request, or
supervising, directing, or otherwise meaningfully controlling
the social-media companies’ decision-making processes.

And the Biden administration opposed that language. Let me repeat that for emphasis: the Biden administration opposed that language. This is, you will recall, the administration and the party that has based its campaign against Republicans before the election this year on the premise that it is the Republicans and their presumptive Presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who pose an existential threat to democracy. Yet these are the same aspiring totalitarians who used the power of the government—“Nice little business you have here…be a shame if anything were to happen to it!”—to secretly coerce, pressure, and infiltrate (read the whole order linked above) social media and Big Tech platforms to do their bidding regarding what opinions and assertions could be communicated by citizens.

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