Ethics Train Wrecks

The Project Veritas Ethics Train Wreck (So Far)…[Updated!]

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Train-Wreck air

This was certainly inevitable. Project Veritas is an unethical journalism organization with a one-way bias (that’s to the Right, in case you have been studying loftier matters), meaning that it is not interested in truth or informing the public, but only the truth (maybe) that benefits a particular political agenda. But unethical people and organizations where the ends justify the means is a motto provoke unethical responses in the other direction—it is the ethics version of Newton’s Third Law—and that is where ethics train wrecks come from.

The ends of Project Veritas’s various unethical means have been revealing and valuable in many cases. A corrupt community organizing group, ACORN, was exposed, as it deserved to be. Planned Parenthood’s ghoulish lack of respect for human life was also exposed, with fewer consequences. It wasn’t really necessary for Corporation for Public Broadcasting executives to be gulled into saying for posterity that the taxpayer-funded company is progressive and biased because that should be screamingly obvious to anyone who isn’t biased themselves. But progressives (and those brainwashed by the progressive media) continue to gaslight critics with the Jumbo-esque “Bias? What bias?” defense of the indefensible, so this Project Veritas hit was satisfying, if not ethical.

Now, as we knew it would, those embarrassed or exposed by Project Veritas are striking back. The focus is President Biden’s troubled daughter Ashley’s diary, in which, among other things, she suggests that her father showered with her when she was a child. The diary found its way into the clutches of Project Veritas before the election, though it did not publish any of it. (Its explanation for this choice, that O’Keefe felt doing so would be seen as a “cheap shot,” defies belief coming from the King of Cheap Shots, but never mind.) Apparently, the New York Times’ investigation found, Ashley left her diary behind when she moved out of the home of a friend, and it was found by a woman named Aimee Harris, who moved in after Ashley left. {The Times feels it necessary to detail Harris’s personal and financial problems, which is completely irrelevant to the diary. That’s a real cheap shot. Her conduct is what matters in the report, not her problems.)

Harris, whom the Times makes sure we know “was a fan of Mr. Trump,” meaning she was by definition evil, learned that Ashley had stayed there previously and had left some things behind. Harris apparently found the diary.

Subsequent debates center on whether the diary was lost or abandoned. I don’t care about the legal haggling: Harris was ethically obligated to contact Ms. Biden and ask what she wanted done with it. The options for responses were a) “Sent it back to me”; b) “Destroy it,”and c) “I don’t care what you do with it.” Only c) would have entitled Harris to read Biden’s private entrees, or to give it to anyone but Biden.

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Now THIS Is Spin…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

WILl report

The Wisconsin State Journal’s coverage of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty’s examination of the 2020 election in the state is headlined, “Conservative law firm’s review of 2020 election: No ‘big steal,’ but plenty of problems” and says in part,

“10-month review of Wisconsin’s 2020 elections conducted by a conservative Milwaukee law firm… found no evidence of the kind of fraud being alleged by allies of former President Donald Trump… who falsely contend last year’s presidential election was ‘stolen.’ At the same time, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty found ‘it is almost certain’ that ‘the number of votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory.’ With the country’s two major political parties sharply at odds over whether the 2020 presidential election was legitimate, the review, released Tuesday, walks a fine line in asserting there were serious problems with the way elections were run in Wisconsin in 2020, but that it’s very unlikely those problems denied a Trump a second term….

The news media just can’t play it straight, particularly where Trump is involved.

Note that the story has to note that it was a “conservative law firm” performing the study, so its results are in question from the start, or at least that’s what the Journal wants readers to assume. Then notice that the claims of a stolen election are unequivocally described as “false,” though the report being discussed found that it’s only “unlikely” that the irregularities their research uncovered “denied a Trump a second term.” Yet if it is indeed “almost certain” that ‘the number of votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory,” then it is possible that such votes—just illegal, I guess, but not “fraudulent”?—did “steal ” the election.

Nothing to see here…move along.

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What Is The Ethical Response To Marcus Lamb’s Ironic Death?

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Lamb

Marcus Lamb, the evangelical founder of the Texas-based Christian television network Daystar, died on November 30. In an example of extreme cosmic irony/justice/retribution/satire, the cause was a virulent case of infection from the Wuhan virus. The previously healthy (though he had diabetes) 64-year-old was unvaccinated, and indeed was a vocal antivaxxer. Lamb, his wife (they were a Jim and Tammy-style team) and other Daystar broadcasters have been opposing the pandemic vaccines, presumably influencing many of the more than 108 million households the network reaches via cable TV providers to do likelwise On May 10, for example, the Lambs claimed that the vaccines “killed your immune system.”

“We want to warn you, we want to help you, we want to give you an alternative,” Lamb said. The alternatives he recommended were ivermectin, budesonide and hydroxychloroquine, all drugs that have not been proven to be effective or safe in the treatment of the virus, and, naturally, prayer.

Well, as Old Lodgeskins memorably says in “Little Big Man,” “Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

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Is It Too Late To Call It “The Wuhan Virus” Or Better Yet, “The China Virus”?

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

Coronavirus_H

I believe this issue should be settled in the context of the immortal words of Chinese dissident Paladin Cheng, who said, “Don’t trust China. China is asshole.”

There is no longer any serious dispute over where the pandemic came from, or why it spread so far and did so much damage before the world was able to respond in a timely fashion. Either the virus arose from the unsanitary, disease breeding Wuhan wet markets, or escaped from a Wuhan lab. Then China, we also now know, covered up the rampaging contagion, allowing it to travel via plane and other means to all corners of the globe.

Conclusion: China is accountable. China is liable. China is asshole.

Of course, we knew the latter even before the pandemic, but China is also profitable, which is why everyone from the NBA to Hollywood to Disney to Hunter Biden still want to avoid making certain that the public knows just how bad—evil, even—the Chinese government and culture is. I presume that after multiple mutations and other distractions, in five years or less most of the public won’t know or remember where the virus that we allowed to wreck the economy, society and culture came from. Where is “Covid,” anyway?

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Take The Ethics Alarms Rittenhouse Case Pledge: “I Vow To Slap Down The False Narrative Whenever I Encounter It, Forever!”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Witherspoon tweet

The five jagged prongs of the fantasy version of the Rittenhouse case are 1) He carried a semi-automatic weapon “across state lines” to cause trouble; 2) the teen is a white supremacist, hence a racist, and was “hunting” virtuous social justice crusaders justly and peacefully protesting ; 3) the three men he shot were innocent victims, and two of them were murdered, 4) the rioting Rittenhouse was opposing was a protest over a white police officer brutally killing an unarmed black man, and 5) the jury’s failure to convict resulted from the inherent racism of the justice system.

Within those prongs are at least (let’s see…) twelve lies that can no longer be excused by confusion over the facts. Nor is it an excuse that someone like Witherspoon has been reading and watching the wrong news reports (as well as getting her political views from within a progressive bubble), because every American knows or should knows that such sources cannot be believed or trusted.

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Thanks, Professor: We Needed That

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Professor Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr. is criminal law specialist who trains Harvard Law students and practices law. He has just issued a superb explanation and analysis of the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict—fair, objective, and best of all, readable by those whose eyes usually glaze over at legal scholarship.

It should, in a just and sane society, permanently shut up—embarrass, even— the politicians, celebrities, and social media dolts who are still calling the jury’s verdict “racist” or an indictment of the legal system. Of course, it won’t. If there is a more annoying example of people loudly braying uninformed opinions about a technically complex matter that they know little or nothing about, I can’t think of it right now.

On “The View,” ABC’s depressingly popular “gullible idiots watching progressive idiots” news show, panel leader Whoopi Goldberg (because in the land of the blind…well, you know the metaphor), declared that Rittenhouse was a murderer. People will take that as authority, you know. She played a video of Anthony Huber’s father on CNN holding an urn containing his son’s ashes and emoting bitterly against Rittenhouse going free, as if the lament of a parent in such situations ever is anything but an irrelevant appeal to emotion. Then, armed with this irrefutable “evidence,” Whoopi gave her verdict on Rittenhouse, saying of Huber (who was shot while beating the teen with a skateboard), “He saw someone get shot. He thought he was doing the right thing. So … even all the excuses in the world does not change the fact that three people got shot. Two people were murdered. To me it’s murder. I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry too, Whoopi. I’m sorry you lack the sense of responsibility to keep your opinions on issues you don’t have the knowledge and background to understand to yourself, and instead wield them to make the public stupid. I’m sorry you believe “thinking you are doing the right thing” is ever a justification for doing the wrong thing (and you don’t believe that yourself: were the men who lynched Emmett Till blameless because they thought they were doing the right thing?). You have no way of knowing what Huber thought anyway. I’m sorry you are so ignorant that you can say something like “if he shot them and they died, then he’s a murderer,” which is redolent of your failure to take the initiative over the years to fill the gaps in your high school dropout education. Mostly I’m sorry that you’re not getting enough work as an actress and comic, both occupations you’re brilliantly qualified to do, so you’re stuck with being an incompetent pundit for a living.

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A Rittenhouse Verdict Inventory Of Ethics Heroes, Dunces, Villains And Fools, Part III: Facts Don’t Matter

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Above is a comic I never heard of (but one with a regular platform), grandstanding over the Ritterhouse verdict as she reveals that she either has no idea what the facts are in the case, or is deliberately hate-mongering by sending lies into the public consciousness. She tells us that she takes her responsibility to “tell people what they need to know” seriously, and then tells them what isn’t true. “It’s not OK”, she says with great emotion. “For a man to garb a rifle, travel across state lines, and shoot three people and walk free.” In fact, it’s not “OK” for anyone to deliberately misstate the key facts of a controversial episode to the many ignoramuses who may be listening and are likely to be misled.

Rittenhouse did not “grab a rifle” and cross state lines. The law says that it is “OK” for someone—regardless of their race— to defend themselves with deadly force if they reasonably believe his life is at stake. Then she goes on to outright racism, claiming that whites have “always” escaped consequences when they engage in murder. She calls the judge and jury racist, for participating in a trial that acquitted a white man for shooting three other white men.

She seemed like an excellent introduction to this list of similarly dishonest, ignorant or hateful people showing their lack of fairness and critical thinking skills as they descended into hysteria and ugly rhetoric…because so many on the Left are receptive to it. This is not about a difference of legitimate opinion when Americans of note or in positions of influence and responsibility engage in inflammatory declarations based on a false description of what occurred.

Certainly the news media, even more than usual, played its “enemy of the people” role to the hilt, but its flagrant false reporting on the Jacob Blake shooting was four months ago. There is no excuse for anyone with integrity and responsibility still talking about the Kenosha police shooting “an unarmed black man” or representing Blake as anything other than a dangerous outlaw who was engaged in a crime, and justly shot. Because there was no racism or police brutality involved, the protests and riots supposedly prompted by the episode were contrived and based on incompetent (or intentionally incendiary) reporting. The subsequent narrative, that Rittenhouse was opposing “racial justice” and thus a “white supremacist” because he (foolishly, recklessly) sought to mitigate the destruction caused by an ongoing riot (triggered by an incident that only was “racist” in the overheated minds of the reporters and race-hucksters) cannot be defended.

The fools and dunces whose statements are noted below are shooting off their mouths (or social media accounts) in defiance of reality. As Bari Weiss points out in her substack essay (Pointer: John Paul),

To acknowledge the facts of what happened that night is not political. It is simply to acknowledge reality. It is to say that facts are still facts and that lies are lies. It is to insist that mob justice is not justice. It is to say that media consensus is not the equivalent of due process.

And, I would add, it is to say that just because politicians, celebrities, pundits and your Facebook pals are taking a position that literally makes no sense and is based on extreme bias and fantasy is not justification for following the parade.

Below is an incomplete list of the “Facts Don’t Matter” mob. Not surprisingly, I didn’t particularly respect any of these people even before they beclowned themselves in this ethics train wreck. Even so, there are serious problems in the culture (and the educational system) when so many default to gullibility, confusion, miserable logic and emotion. The unethical reaction to the Rittenhouse verdict is, perhaps, more significant than the verdict itself.

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A Rittenhouse Verdict Inventory Of Ethics Heroes, Dunces, Villains And Fools, Part I: Not Many Heroes

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

We should condition ourselves to cherish those public events that lure so many into definitively exposing their character, values and acumen for all to see. The Jacob Blake shooting, the subsequent demonstration and rioting, and the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, all intertwined, constituted such opportunities.

There are very few organizations, publications and individuals who will leave the stage in this annoying act in The Great Stupid drama deserving the designation of Ethics Hero. Rittenhouse certainly doesn’t, and thus the misguided pundits, politicians and others calling him that are dolts. He might be called brave, but bravery without good judgment, skill and experience too often leads to disaster, as it did in this tragedy.

Among the easily identified heroes are, first by several laps, the jury. I thought it was possible that, like the Chauvin jury, the twelve citizens might yield to the unethical public pressure being placed on them and refuse to see the reasonable doubt that made a conviction of Rittenhouse unjust as a matter of law, once the non-felony charges were dismissed. They didn’t yield, and delivered the fair and correct verdict despite irresponsible statements by elected officials who should know better, a less than sterling performance by Rittenhouse’s defense, credible threats of rioting in their community if they refused to follow the Black Lives Matter/Antifa script, and legitimate concerns about their own safety. Continue reading →

And The Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman/ George Floyd/ Kyle Rittenhouse Ethics Train Wreck Rolls On…..

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Prosecutor-square

In the tricky practice of ethics train wreck taxonomy, placing the Rittenhouse trial in the proper category is a challenge. Is the Tale of the Gun-toting Teen its own media bias and activist -fueled social and legal disaster, or is it just an extension of another?

I lean toward assigning this fiasco to the latter category, making it just one more extension of the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck, which eventually begat the George Floyd Freakout, which in turn led to the contrived outrage over the police shooting of Jacob Blake that spat out Rittenhouse’s unhelpful improvisation. After all, Martin, Floyd and Blake all were episodes that had nothing to do with race but that were hyped into divisive racial controversies and trials by irresponsible demagogues, protesters, politicians and reporters.

What I especially like about attributing all of this societal wreckage into a single ethics train wreck is that it demonstrates just how disastrous President Obama’s inflammatory comments equating Martin to “his son” were—as Ethics Alarms pointed out at the time. Maybe if the blame is squarely placed at the metaphorical fish head, Presidents will stop shooting off their mouths like that. (President Biden, do recall, falsely called Rittenhouse a white supremacist.)

This is all prelude to pointing out what a projectile vomit debacle yesterday’s closing arguments were. Both the prosecution and the defense stomped all over proper criminal trial practice and professional ethics.

For the prosecution…

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Ethics Quiz: Indoctrination On Sesame Street

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Seseme St Covid

I don’t know why I didn’t see this coming.

Big Bird tweeted a few days ago, “I got the COVID-19 vaccine today! My wing is feeling a little sore, but it’ll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy. Ms. Hill even said I’ve been getting vaccines since I was a little bird. I had no idea!” Naturally, President Biden, who watches Sesame Street religiously (yes, it’s a cheap shot, but I’m in a bad mood) tweeted back, “Good on ya, @BigBird. Getting vaccinated is the best way to keep your whole neighborhood safe.”

This set off an immediate partisan and ideological debate, with conservative hone-schooling mother, blogger and pundit Bethany Mandel taking a leadership role. She wrote in part,

Just as “Sesame Street” isn’t content with allowing parents the freedom to guide their children’s own moral compass, so too are they uncomfortable with the idea of parents making individual risk assessments for their children’s health and safety. There is a moral absolutism necessary to be part of the left, which is where “Sesame Street’s” writers appear to fall. The messaging on COVID-19 vaccination has become yet another absolutist position. Big Bird’s tweet doesn’t exist just on Twitter. It’s part of a larger campaign from the series to “educate” parents on the vaccine.

Earlier this year, she wrote about the iconic children’s educational show shifting from ABCs and vocabulary into the culture wars:

Those in charge of messaging and programming children’s media have positioned themselves as arbiters of our children’s moral compass. And that Soviet-style demand for a universal, well-curated set of beliefs from a particular coastal lens should concern all parents — not just those with religious or personal beliefs that make them uncomfortable with a particular episode of “Sesame Street” aired during Pride Month.

Parents should take note: The aim of children’s media is no longer just to provide free, education-minded babysitting while you get ready for work.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

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