Ethics Train Wrecks

Greer’s Ranch Cafe Et Al. v. The United States Small Business Administration: No Government Discrimination Based On Race Or Gender Means No Government Discrimination Based On Race Or Gender

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

OK to be white

When the government says that it isn’t OK to be white (or male), that’s not just unfair, it’s unconstitutional. Why is this so hard to grasp? Why is it controversial?

Texas federal district court Judge Reed O’Connor ruled last week that the Biden Administration was engaged in racial and gender discrimination in the administration of pandemic relief funds under the American Rescue Plan Act. NO! The BIDEN ADMINISTRATION handing out special benefits to women and blacks to the disadvantage of whites based on no other distinctions but race and gender? Impossible! Completely out of character!

Thanks, I had a huge sarcasm lump in my gorge that showed up on my last X-ray as a horseshoe crab. Whew! Finally got that thing out!

Judge O’Connor found that the Biden administration deliberately engaged in systemic gender and race discrimination in implementing Wuhan virus relief for American restaurants. Café owner Philip Greer sued the Small Business Administration arguing that he needs the same financial assistance as minority restauranteurs under the newly enacted American Rescue Plan Act, since his Greer’s Ranch Café lost over $100,000 during the pandemic. But Greer learned that he could not receive benefits from the Restaurant Restoration Fund approved by Congress because he is the “wrong” gender and the “wrong” color.

The White House and the Democratic-controlled Congress want women, minorities and “socially and economically disadvantaged” people” to be first in line. $2.7 billion already has been distributed through the fund and there are almost 150,000 pending applications from owners who will get preferential treatment over Greer. The SBA confirms it already has requests for $65 billion in payments under the fund. Greer worries that he might not get any assistance at all….because he is white. And—yecchh!—male.

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White Supremacy Confirmation Bias: How Do You Argue With Someone Who Reasons Like This?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

confirmation_bias

A blog that has been out there much longer than mine (and which conveniently leaves the blogger’s identity mysterious) argues that “implementing vaccine passports would be a white supremacist measure.” The Biden administration is encouraging such documentation, and the ultra-woke state of Oregon has announced that these will be required for its citizens to go unmasked in any indoor, public-access gathering. I am not concerned here with the wisdom of the policy. I want to know how anyone can have a rational conversation with someone who is convinced such a measure is evidence of “white supremacy.”

Whoeverthehellheorsheis writes,

“[P]oor people are much less likely to be vaccinated than higher-income persons…According to the long-set standards of Black Lives Matter and other critical-theory advocates, whether racial disparities like this are intended or not is irrelevant. These disparities are the results of racial discrimination and white privilege baked into the social-legal-medical networks for centuries. Therefore, it does not matter that this gap in immunization is not intended. It does not matter that the men and women managing the vaccine program and distribution, or administering it to the public, do not discriminate at the vaccine sites by the race of persons who come for the shots. Lack of deliberate intent does not excuse systemic racism. The fact that matters is this: “Black and Latino people are far more likely to live in poverty than white people, and despite having died at higher rates throughout the pandemic, they are receiving fewer vaccines than white people.” 

The argument is instructive, which is why I am bothering to publish it. If any disparity exists in any area where blacks and other non-white groups have statistically less positive outcomes than whites, it is per se proof of “white supremacy.” The fact of statistical variation is the proof, and reasons don’t matter. This is an especially useful example, because there is no reason at all for poor people or minorities not to be vaccinated. The vaccinations are free and ubiquitous. The greatest cost imaginable would be a cab ride. One doesn’t need online access to get one.

Minorities and poorer populations—they are not the same thing—are lagging behind in getting the shots, and by choice. Now, in the case of African Americans, an argument could be made that systemic flaws in the school system, or systemically rooted inadequacies in nutrition leading to cognitive damage, or pockets of African American culture crippled by paranoia and superstition as an outgrowth of centuries of abuse from slavery, are examples of harm from past white supremacy. However, a policy that only confers a disadvantage on a group because that group chooses to be disadvantaged cannot be condemned as an expression of hostility toward that group, or as a means of keeping that group disadvantaged.

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Ethics Miscreants In Yet Another Police-Involved Death Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Ronald Greene

Another death of a black man in an encounter with the police has re-emerged from 2019, this time from Louisiana. It has even more of the unethical elements of past tragedies/botches/fiascos than usual, and the cast of characters are all playing their now familiar parts to maximize the likelihood of protests, riots, political grandstanding and confusion, not to mention more deaths and further damage to race relation and law enforcement. Good job, everyone!

This is a true ethics train wreck, because nobody, literally nobody, who has been involved with the episode so far has behaved ethically. At this point, I see no hope that the mess can be cleaned up, but maybe we can learn something from how thoroughly another Police Meet Black Lawbreaker disaster has been mishandled by everyone to ensure the worst conceivable outcome. In no particular order, here is a list of those responsible for the Ronald Greene Ethics Train Wreck.

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Ethics Observations On Declining Support For Black Lives Matter

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Here are two charts from a New York Times opinion piece on changing public views regarding Black Lives Matter:

BLM support 1

BLM support 2

The piece compares polls to polls, so perhaps justifies more faith than the usual poll-based analysis. The authors’ biases are nicely flagged by their occupations and affiliations. Both are professors at extremely Left-tilted institutions with faculties where conservatives have to wear disguises, if they exist there at all. Jennifer Chudy is an assistant professor of social sciences and political science at Wellesley College who studies white racial guilt, sympathy and prejudice. The fact of that area of concentration defines the confirmation bias involved. Hakeem Jefferson is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University, and he studies studies race and identity. To be direct, both professors depend on finding racism in America to justifying their academic existence. They are part of the race grievance industry. Chudy is Asian-American; Jefferson is black.

The article introduces its subject, the changing level of support for Black Lives Matter—the organization, not its deceitful slogan—this way:

“Though there is, in the data, reason for some optimism, the more general picture contradicts the idea that the country underwent a racial reckoning. Last summer, as Black Americans turned their sorrow into action, attitudes — especially white attitudes — shifted from tacit support to outright opposition, a pattern familiar in American history. Whereas support for Black Lives Matter remains relatively high among racial and ethnic minorities, support among white Americans has proved both fickle and volatile.”

Talk about broadcasting one’s bias up front! By “some optimism,” it is clear (especially after reading the whole article) that the authors mean “public support for the admirable movement/group Black Lives Matter in American society may have staying power if we can just find a way to deal with these racist white people.” I have some optimism after seeing those charts as well. In my case, however, “some optimism” means “maybe the public is finally catching on to this destructive con job by Marxist race-hustlers.”

Other observations:

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/21/2021, To A Chorus Of Cicadas

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Cicada Ethics: Sweep up all the disgusting things (and their husks) that have accumulated on your front walk at least twice a day so people don’t have to walk on them and their dogs don’t eat them.

1. Charles Grodin (1935-2021): Thanks a lot! Charles Grodin was a talented and versatile actor who was extremely good at playing dislikable characters. We can blame him (not Jon Stewart) for creating the unfortunate cultural phenomenon of the allegedly funny TV talk show host who decides he is qualified to bombard viewers with partisan rants. It’s a self-indulgent abuse of power, position and trust, but it’s also now the norm, with every late night talk show host (and Staurday Night Live) but the generally sweet James Cordon using their show as a platform to bash Republicans and conservatives and extoll progressives no matter how mockworthy they are. Grodin started the bait-and-switch (He’s funny! Wait, why is he so angry and preaching at us?) in the mid-Nineties, and though it eventually killed his show (not soon enough), the template was born.

Grodin made Ethics Alarms in 2014, with his campaign against the felony murder rule.

2. Speaking of staying in one’s lane…Yet another ugly result of social media is the phenomenon of people publishing uninformed opinions that they are unqualified to be so emphatic about. A baseball writer and recovering lawyer, Craig Calcaterra, whom I have referenced here before, has migrated from NBC Sports to substack, and is asking me to subscribe to his newsletter. Craig is funny and smart, and his baseball analysis is superior to most. But he is addicted to making political pronouncements, and while he has a right to his biased and often ignorant opinions on things he’s far from an expert on, I’ll be damned if I’ll pay to read them. For essentially the same reasons I object to watching football players “take a knee” during the National Anthem, I expect sports writers to stick to sports. Here’s a tip to anyone peddling a newsletter to me: I regard referring to the January 6 Capitol riot as a “deadly insurrection” as Democratic Party propagandist and signature significance for a pundit who is not concerned with facts.

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The Reverend Robert Wright Lee Car On The Confederate Statuary Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Fake Lee

I missed this, a case where refusing to subscribe to my local paper, The Washington Post, bit me. (I decided that if I have to get a flagrantly left-wing biased newspaper that has chosen to be a propaganda organ for the Democratic Party, I might as well get the best flagrantly left-wing biased newspaper that has chosen to be a propaganda organ for the Democratic Party and not #2.

Glenn Kessler, the Post’s “Factchecker” who tries to be objective but is so marinated in his organization’s biases that he fails as often as not, tried to save face for his employers by revealing that a man who has repeatedly represented himself as a descendant of General Robert E. Lee (On his website, Rob Lee describes himself as “a descendant of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.”) in order to justify toppling statues of the Confederate icon is, in fact, nothing of the kind. He is as much a relative of General Lee as Elizabeth Warren is a Cherokee. Nonetheless, the Post published an opinion piece on June 7, 2020, by Rev. Robert E. Lee VI titled, “Robert E. Lee is my ancestor. Take down his statue, and let his cause be lost.” The Post editor identified the author as the fourth great-nephew of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The headline, the description, and the justification for publishing the op-ed were, in order, a lie, journalism negligence, and misinformation. That was a year ago. Now Kessler decides to check the facts? Nice job, Speedy.

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/20/21: Happy Birthday, John Stuart Mill!

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Mill

John Stuart Mill (1806–73), was born on May 20, not merely the most important figure in ethics to have a connection to this day, but also the most important human being born on this day in the history of civilization—yes, even more than Cher, who turns 75 today. Mill’s refined the concept of liberty that required the freedom of the individual in opposition to state control. He was the most influential proponent of utilitarianism, the crucial ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham. He helped reform scientific inquiry and research, recognizing the pervasive risks of confirmation bias, by clearly explaining the premises of falsifiability as the key component in the scientific method.

Mill was also a Member of Parliament and a towering figure in liberal political philosophy. You have certainly heard or read his most famous quote: “A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.”

A thorough biography and analysis of his work is here.

1. Justice Breyer doesn’t care about making sure the Supreme Court doesn’t get more conservative. Good. That’s not his job. Democrats realize that their control of the Senate is hanging by a thread, “thread” defined as a few superannuated Senators who could drop dead any second, giving the GOP a majority. Thus they are increasingly pushing Justice Stephen G. Breyer, 82, to retire now so Joe Biden can name an appropriately liberal replacement (who will also have to be female and black, vastly limiting the pool of possible choices without concern for actual legal competence.) “Breyer’s best chance at protecting his legacy and impact on the law is to resign now, clearing the way for a younger justice who shares his judicial outlook,” wrote Erwin Chemerinsky, the hyper-partisan dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley in The Washington Post this month. Got that? The 80+year-old Democratic Senators have to hold on to their jobs like grim death, but Breyer is being lobbied to retire. Hypocrisy, they name is Democrat! But it isn’t Breyer:

The Justice has been particularly vocal about the importance of not allowing politics to influence judges’ work, including their decisions about when to retire. “My experience of more than 30 years as a judge has shown me that, once men and women take the judicial oath, they take the oath to heart,” he said last month in a lecture at Harvard Law School. “They are loyal to the rule of law, not to the political party that helped to secure their appointment….If the public sees judges as politicians in robes, its confidence in the courts, and in the rule of law itself, can only diminish, diminishing the court’s power.”

I wonder if he’s read (or seen) “The Pelican Brief”…Meanwhile, research suggest that retirement tends to kill Supreme Court Justices. A paper in The Journal of Demography studied the effects of retirement by Supreme Court justices on their future longevity, and found that the effect of retirement was about the same as smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. The Democrats don’t care if Breyer dies sooner than later, though, as long as he does it when they can pick his successor, or after he’s quit.

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Integrity Test: What Does It Tell Us When Black Lives Matter Emulates The Westboro Baptist Church?

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

BLM protest

The Westboro Baptist Church, aka “the Phelpsians,” infuriated the Left and Right by disrupting services for fallen soldiers with anti-gay chants, epithets and signs. Now Black Lives Matter is adopting that despicable groups’ tactics and ethics. If you are surprised, you haven’t been paying attention.

On May 7, fallen police officers were finally honored on Capitol Square in Madison, Wisconsin at the Law Enforcement Memorial. For most of 2020 and 2021, law enforcement officers who died in the line of duty couldn’t be properly remembered because of pandemic restrictions

As reported by Madison’s WEAU-TV, six names were added to the honor roll last week as law enforcement officers and their families gathered in the square to see those heroes added to the 285 names already on the memorial. The governor and attorney general joined a police procession as the ceremony began. But minutes into the event, Black Lives Matter protesters began disrupting it and talking over the speakers . A protester with a bullhorn began shouting, “Do you support Black Lives Matter?” “How come the African-American national anthem wasn’t played?” a heckler added, in one of the more civil exclamations. “I’m begging you motherfuckerers to stop killing people that look like me!” was more typical. Rap music with lyrics like “fuck the police” was playing during a moment of silence. A pastor began to deliver a prayer, and she was booed. A protester yelled, “Murderers!”as she finished.

The courts have determined that such harassment is constitutionally protected as expressive speech: Black Lives Matter can thank the Phelpsians for that, as well as for perfecting their tactics. But both the Westboro Baptist Church and BLM exemplify the abuse of free speech, and demonstrate by their hateful and cruel behavior their deep, deep ethics rot. One group was dedicated to anti-gay bigotry; the other is advancing an anti-white, anti-police, anti-rule of law and anti-America agenda. The Phelpsians were marginal and more of an irritation than anything else. Black Lives Matter, in contrast, has a street with block letters honoring it in the middle of the nation’s capitol. Its name was emblazoned across the Fenway Park bleachers last baseball season, and featured on every NBA court. The Democratic National Committee and the current Vice-President of the United States cheered on their riots, which cost billions.

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A Critical Race Theory Primer

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Guest post by JP

(From an Ethics Alarms Open Forum)

A while ago I told you all about my opportunity to run for the school board. I didn’t win (not even close). The incumbent and a teacher at the local university were the winners. I (and another conservative candidate) decided that we were going to do our civic duty and attend the meetings anyway (they are open to the public). We learned that the next one was going to have someone there proposing CRT for our school system. This worried me and the other woman a lot, so we decided to prepare a rebuttal.

CRT (Critical Race Theory) is a ideology that asserts that at its core the United States is a fundamentally racist country. This means that all aspects and institutions such as our system of government, our laws, our economy, and equal protection are built upon protecting white supremacy and keeping down black people and minorities. However, CRT does not limit itself to only white supremacy; it also seeks to protect people from so called white institutions such as capitalism and patriarchy, and the nuclear family.

The idea of CRT is not new, going back at least 40 years. It is typically attributed to two CRT scholars, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Theirwork is built upon a twisted definition of racism that isn’t what the average person would understand. Most people understand racism to be prejudice against a particular person or group of individuals based on skin color (or perhaps even culture). Going back to their book, “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction,” Stefancic and Delgado argue there is no objective way to define racism, essentially arguing that it is whatever the everyday experience is for a person of color in this country. This leads us to our first two big problems with CRT: Interest convergence and  lived experience. Continue reading →

End Of Week Ethics Regrets, 5/14/2021: Trevor Noah’s Wit, The Yankees’ Great Vaccine Experience, And Other Puzzlements

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

regret

1. Baseball Ethics notes:

  • Ethics Heroes: The Houston Astros. When I forgive them for cheating their way to the 2017 World Championship, they might be worthy of a full post the next time they do something exemplary. The Astros are providing furnished apartments to minor-league players across all levels this season. According to The Athletic, they are  the only club doing this. Minor league players are obscenely underpaid, and have to find desperation lodging on salaries that aren’t much better than minimum wage. What the Astros are doing should be the industry standard. Is this an attempt by a bad actor to prove it has come into the light? Maybe. It’s still admirable.
  • In the category of “It isn’t what it is,” we have a bizarre statement from New York Yankees general manager Brian Cashman. The Yankees have confirmed eight cases of the Wuhan virus this week, with shortstop Gleyber Torres  the first player to test positive. The other seven cases had been among the Yankees’ coaching and support staffs, including pitching coach Matt Blake, third-base coach Phil Nevin and first-base coach Reggie Willits. Something is clearly amiss, either in what the team has been doing or in the effectiveness of the Johnosn and Johnson  single shot vaccine, which is what the Yankees provided to the team. Cashman said, in a longer statement to the press,

“The one thing I take from this is I believe the vaccine is working. We can take great comfort, thankfully, that all who were vaccinated with the J&J, provided from two different states, the one batch in New York, the other batch in Florida, at various different times, one in March versus obviously earlier in April, we believe it has protected us from obviously something severe or something much more difficult to be handling than we currently are.”

Or, the fact that so many Yankees who were  “fully vaccinated” got the virus anyway might suggest that the vaccine involved isn’t that great. I would come to that conclusion before “the vaccine is working.” Baseball players are young, athletes, and as far removed from high risk as one could find. Before the vaccine, only one player who contracted the virus last season became seriously ill, and that was from aside effect of the illness rather than the illness itself.

2. Explain those rules again for me, please? In today’s Arts section of the New York Times, we have this note:

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