Ethics Quotes

Ethics Quote Of The Day: Ethics Villain Dr. Anthony Fauci

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“Man, I think, almost paradoxically, you had people who were on the fence about getting vaccinated thinking, why are they forcing me to do this? And that sometimes-beautiful independent streak in our country becomes counterproductive.”

—Dr. Anthony Fauci, major architect of the Wuhan virus lockdown catastrophe, in a discussing how the government’s dictatorial vaccination policies caused a drop in pubic trust of all vaccinations.

I have a lot to write about Dr. Fauci’s long interview in the New York Times, as well as some of his other jaw-dropping comments last week, but I’m lacking time and energy right now, and this quote demands immediate attention.

Fauci, who used his reputation and influence to trap the United States into a disastrous course of action that caused lasting harm to the nation, its culture, its economy, its children and society, articulates above the totalitarian’s lament about the United States of America. We are hearing this a great deal of late, as the Democratic Party, now the locus of totalitarian aspiration here, is increasingly open and candid about what so many of its leaders hate about America. Too many people just refuse to take orders from the smarter, more virtuous, more social justice-minded in power. Clearly, something needs to be done about it.

There’s nothing paradoxical about the phenomenon Fauci’s whining about at all. The lying, manipulation, false “facts” and abuse of authority used by health officials, Fauci prominent among them, eventually became apparent. Americans, who call themselves that rather than United Kingdom citizens because a nation was organized around the bold theory that the people—not kings, not unaccountable groups, not “experts”— have the right and duty to decide what’s in their best interest, returned to core values. Millions of people moved here to embrace the new experiment, and as a result, the independent streak is more deeply embedded in the culture than our native fans of dictatorship seem to comprehend. Decades of indoctrination from the now fully complicit news media and most of the education sector have weakened it and threaten it, but like the flag over Fort McHenry, it’s still there.

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Unethical Quote Of The Day: Wesley Lowery In “The Columbia Journalism Review”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“We pull no punches: when the weight of the objective evidence is clear, we must not conceal the truth through euphemism; rather, we should employ direct language. Our aim is not to be perceived as impartial by the people we imagine are our readers, but to accurately inform them about the world they live in.” 

—-Reporter Wesley Lowery, Journalist in Residence at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, in his essay, “A Test of the News”

When I encountered the essay titled “A Test of the News” in the Columbia Journalism Review, I foolishly anticipated a careful diagnostic analysis of why American journalism was so ethically wretched, and a perceptive prescription for fixing the problem. Boy, do I have a flat learning curve. Why would I ever think that, knowing what I, what you, what anyone who has been paying attention knows from observing the carnage unethical, incompetent, biased journalism has inflicted on American democracy over the past decade? My delusion was especially unforgivable since 1) Lowery is a journalist, 2) he’s a Pulitzer Prize -winning journalist, and you know what kind of journalists the Pulitzers like, and 3) he’s also an college instructor. Education is running neck and neck with journalism as our most thoroughly unethical profession, though journalism is clearly the one most likely beyond repair.

The first three paragraphs of Lowery’s screed were bad enough, but I didn’t reach the point where I normally would have stopped reading until paragraph #4:

“To this day, news organizations across the country often rely on euphemisms instead of clarity in clear cases of racism (“racially charged,” “racially tinged”) and acts of government violence (“officer-involved shooting”). Such decisions, I wrote, are journalistic failings, but also moral ones: when the weight of the evidence is clear, it is wrong to conceal the truth. Justified as “objectivity,” they are in fact its distortion.”

When a police officer shoots an arrested suspect who tries to take his gun from him and then charges him with his 300 pound bulk, that is “government violence, “and the “weight of evidence is clear”—you know, as in “Hands up, don’t shoot!” That recycled Black Lives Matters mythology pretty much reveals all I need to know about Wesley Lowery, and he confirms my conclusion with the egomaniacal quote at the beginning of this post. He believes, as do so many editors and reporters echoing the same arrogant delusion, that journalists, narrow as their education and experience is, are capable of explaining to the public the true nature of the world they live in. This means the world view journalists want them to live in. Yet reporters do not know when the “weight of objective evidence is clear”; they don’t have the depth, wisdom or intellect to know what the “truth” is (don’t make me list examples again), and what ideological propagandists like Lowery call “accurate” includes shading, spin, soaked with bias, and the strategic omission of facts that undermine their narratives. The delusion is that having an outsized bullhorn automatically confers the ability to use it responsibly.

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Now THAT’S An Unethical Concession Speech!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election Tuesday gave Democrats (well, liberals/progressives—the election is supposedly non-partisan) a one-vote majority as it faces deliberations over the state’s abortion ban, its gerrymandered legislative districts and the voting rules for the 2024 presidential election. Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz’s defeated former state Supreme Court justice Daniel Kelly and ended 15 years of conservative control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Kelly’s concession speech made Richard Nixon look gracious. Ethics Dunce, Unethical Quote, Incompetent UN-elected official—Kelly qualifies for several EA designations, none of them positive. His speech alone shows that the voters made the right choice. Who wants a judge with such atrocious judgment?

What a jerk.

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Pointer: valkygrrl

Unethical Quote Of The Month: 65 Professors And 558 Other Faculty Members And Students Of Washington & Lee University

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“We ask that the University prevent Matt Walsh from speaking on our campus and that the University live out its Statement of Commitment to Diversity by taking action to protect its minority students from future harmful events.”

—623 Washington & Lee signatories, including 65 professors and law professors, of an online petition to block a conservative speaker from appearing on campus

Displaying either ignorance or contempt for the core American ethical principle of freedom of speech, 623 members of the Washington & Lee University community, mostly students and faculty members but with a few others mixed in, maybe cafeteria workers or something, have signed an online petition insisting that conservative political commentator and author Matt Walsh be prevented from speaking at the Virginia campus on March 30, on the currently controversial topic of “What is a woman.” Walsh has been a deliberately inflammatory critic of the current extremist, indeed brain-melting phenomenon of transsexual madness, which has reached such heights (or depths) that the last confirmed Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court professed an inability to define “woman.” Walsh stars in online documentary film “What Is a Woman?” created by the conservative website, The Daily Wire.

What is so disturbing about the petition, which is reproduced in its entirety below, is the anti-democratic logic and ideology it displays, though all of this is now familiar to anyone following the descent of the American Left into aspiring totalitarianism. The position one whole side of the American political spectrum has now almost completely accepted as legitimate is that dissent from its obviously virtuous and correct cant (they are on the “right side of history,” after all) is the equivalent of violence and causes permanent “harm” to member of its constituency or society in general. The petition justifies its existence by providing frightening proof of many horrible truths, among them that the U.S.’s institutions of higher learning now indoctrinate their students into anti-democratic philosophies. Here is just a sample of the petitioners’ reasoning:

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: Lawyer Jerry Goldfeder

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“You know, it’s not a slam-dunk. But I think that survives a motion to dismiss, and then let the jury decide.”

—-Jerry H. Goldfeder, a special counsel at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP and an  expert in New York state election law, to the New York Times regarding Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg’s supposedly imminent indictment and prosecution of former President Donald Trump.

That is an flat-out unethical endorsement of prosecutorial abuse of power, for not only a lawyer, but a lawyer in a major Manhattan law firm, being quoted as authority in the New York Times, uncritically, of course.

An ethical prosecutor does not bring a case unless he or she is certain that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The issue isn’t whether the prosecution will prevail, but whether the prosecutor has sufficient evidence to justify it prevailing with an objective and fair jury. Surviving a motion to dismiss is not an ethical standard; it’s the bottom-of-the-barrel standard. The judge agreeing that the case has no merit at all as a matter of law, is not the equivalent of holding that the case should not be brought by an ethical prosecutor. “Hey, who knows if the guy is guilty or if we have the evidence to convict? Let’s just get it in front of a jury and see what they think!”

Unspoken in this case: “After all, the point is to make Trump look bad, right? If we can get a conviction, it’s frosting on the cake.”

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This Tears It: Biden Supporters Are Forever Ethically Estopped From Complaining About Trump’s “Lies”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

The point at which Trump-Deranged, pro-Biden warriors could credibly claim that the current President is any less prone to uttering counter-factual fantasy than the previous one passed long before Joe Biden was elected, but it officially reached the absurdity level during Biden’s soft-ball  interview with actor Kal Penn, who was guest hosting “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central.

When Penn asked Biden about his “evolution” on same-sex marriage, the perpetually addled POTUS exploded informed and objective heads all over America with this self-evident fiction, saying that in 1960, when he was in high school, Biden was momentarily shocked to see two men kissing. He said that his dad turned to him and said, “Joey, it’s simple, they love each other,” and that Joe adopted that approach ever since. “Doesn’t matter whether it’s same-sex or a heterosexual couple, they should be able to be married,” Biden told Penn. “What is the problem? So, listen to your auntie and uncle, get married. Do it now.”

That was an utter and complete fabrication, though Penn didn’t challenge it, either because he doesn’t know enough about Biden to conduct a competent interview, or because he doesn’t have the guts to call out an obvious lie. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Blogger-Law Prof. Glenn Reynolds, The “Instapundit”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“ETHICISTS GENERALLY HAVE LITTLE TO OFFER, AND THAT INCLUDES ASTROPHYSICISTS ACTING AS ETHICISTS”

—Conservative blogger and pundit Professor Glenn Reynolds, reacting to the “Ars Technica” post, “Are we ethically ready to set up shop in space?”

I agree with Reynolds completely, and the article that prompted his dismissal of my field (except in rare cases, hence “generally”) deserved it.

It begins (the author is Diana Gittig, who “received her B.A. in Biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania, and then a Ph.D. in Cell Biology and Genetics from Cornell,”and “is a freelance science writer and editor in New York’):

Off-Earth will amaze you: On nearly every page, it will have your jaw dropping in response to mind-blowing revelations and your head nodding vigorously in sudden recognition of some of your own half-realized thoughts (assuming you think about things like settling space). It will also have your head shaking sadly in resignation at the many immense challenges author Erika Nesvold describes. But the amazement will win out. Off-Earth: Ethical Questions and Quandaries for Living in Outer Space is really, really good…

The chapter headings, all of them questions, give a great indication of the issues she highlights in the book. Should we even settle space? Why? Who gets to go? How will property rights be distributed and finite resources be allocated? Do we need to protect the environment in space? How will we do that? What happens when someone breaks the rules or needs medical care? What if that person is the only one who can fix the water purifier? Underlying all of these questions, as yet unaddressed by any public or private institution currently shooting rockets into the air: who gets to decide?

Many of these issues have been dealt with, extensively, in fiction. But Nesvolt doesn’t really mention these works except to caution against the risk of taking them as prophecy.

Had it not triggered my bullshit alarm so thoroughly, I might have stopped reading there. Wait: this brilliant author supposedly explores the ethical hypotheticals that have been exhaustively examined by over a century of science fiction writers in literature, movies and TV without mentioning them? That’s unethical! It’s incompetent, irresponsible, unfair and disrespectful: the book is discredited as a trustworthy source of ethics analysis at the outset.

It is the final paragraph of the brilliant reviewer of the allegedly brilliant astrophyicist-ethicist’s revelations, however, that conclusively proves Reynold’s assessment is spot on. Ready?

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An Unethical Quote Spectacular!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

There are a lot of really unethical people saying some astounding things lately. Such as…

1. Incompetent Elected Official Of the Month Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX), who completely beclowned herself in the The House Weaponization Subcommittee examination of Twitter Files heralds Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger. She was determined to discredit them for daring to reveal the efforts by her party and its allies to bury the Hunter Biden laptop story and censor critics, and apparently did no research into te topic of the hearings at all, announcing that she didn’t know what “a substack” was and showing complete ignorance regarding Bari Weiss. (Ah, if only she read Ethics Alarms!) Meanwhile, all of a sudden Democrats oppose journalists’ desire to protect their sources.

2. Not included in the video above was an offensive question by serial unethical House hack Debbie Wasserman Schulz, the former DNC chair who rigged the 2016 primaries for Hillary Clinton. She accused Matt Taibbi of profiting from authoring the “Twitter Files” reports, implying that he was motivated by persoanl profit, saying: “After the ‘Twitter Files,’ your followers doubled … I imagine your Substack readership … increased significantly because of the work that you did for Elon Musk.”

These people really lash out when they’re exposed, don’t they?

3. Over to the Republican side: Jenna Ellis, one of President Trump’s lawyers in the post-election push to have the results examined, admitted in Colorado Bar disciplinary proceedings that she deliberately engaged in the following misrepresentations “for selfish reasons”:

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Unethical Quote Of The Week: Jill Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“Ridiculous…“We would never even discuss something like that. How many 30-year-olds could travel to Poland, get on the train? Go nine more hours, go to Ukraine, meet with President  Zelensky? So, look at the man. Look what he’s doing. Look what he continues to do each and every day.”

—First Lady Jill Biden, after being asked during a CNN interview about Nikki Haley’s proposal that politicians over the age of 75 undergo mental competency testing.

In related news, Lance Armstrong declared that testing competitive cyclists for doping is “ridiculous,” and O.J. Simpson opined that DNA technology was “ridiculous.”

Fortunately, all we need to do to determine the competency of First Ladies is to analyze a cretinous answer like that one to a flamingly easy question. We are looking, Jill. And it’s not pretty. The words the First Lady was searching for were not “ridiculous,” but responsible, necessary, and “a matter of common sens

The United States has already courted disaster with Presidents continuing in office after their mental faculties have been damaged or declined. President Pierce was impaired by grief, crippling depression and alcoholism during his single term in office, which occurred at a crucial point in the deadly run-up to the Civil War. Woodrow Wilson infamously remained President after being crippled by a major stroke. There is evidence that President Reagan’s cognitive stability was declining during his presidency.

As for Jill’s human meal-ticket, no modern President has shown so many signs of mental decline and confusion, and this frightening development has come after a career in public office unmarked by intellectual acuity at its zenith. Every responsible Presidential candidate should be required to pledge to take such competency tests on a regular basis and agree to resign from office once a thorough, non-partisan diagnosis confirmed by multiple physicians concludes that there is significant cognitive decline.

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Ethics Quote Of The Week: Actress Glenn Close

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“Nixon was pardoned, and the gut punch to our body politic turned into a festering cynicism about our leaders, which has only grown in the years since. Nixon should have been held accountable. And so should Donald Trump. Another gut punch may prove fatal.”

—-Esteemed actress Glenn Close, who was raised in a cult, whose only jobs have involved performing before and after college (where she majored in theater), and who has no more expertise or authority on these issues than anyone else, including my favorite Harris Teeter check-out clerk, in a letter to the editor  that was given op-ed opinion status by the New York Times….because, you see, she’s a great actress, so of course her opinion is special.

Boy, am I sick of writing versions of this post.

Hollywood “resistance” culture and cant notwithstanding, there are no parallels between President Richard Nixon and President Donald Trump, other than the fact that most journalists hated both of them. Even in that respect, there are material differences: the journalists who hated Nixon at least made a pass at objective reporting, though they were thrilled when he provided them with an opportunity to attack. As has been documented here so often that even I’m bored with it, the tactics of the resistance/Democratic Party/ mainstream media regarding Trump was to assume he had committed heinous acts, and to see their task as removing him from office (or making sure he never again runs for office) by searching for some justification. This was the strategy that led to the two weak and unconstitutional impeachments and that produced the list of Big Lies fed to the public throughout Trump’s term in office (and after). It is an unethical and sinister strategy, and the approach of various prosecutors—“Let’s search for something we can get this guy on!” is a breach of legal and prosecutorial ethics as well.

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