Ethics Train Wrecks

How Woke and Whacked-Out Is Harvard? This Woke and Whacked-Out…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I’m supposed to turn in my Harvard reunion report on my life since Old Ivy for the school’s “red book.” Last time, I devoted my essay to explaining why my alma mater was an embarrassment. This time, I’m tempted to skip the whole exercise. It’s futile.

Harvard Medical School held an absurd event called “the Pathology of Unruly Bodies.” A panel devoid of doctors or medical experts declared that anti-obesity drugs were part of an imperialistic “indoctrination” of society. Gee, I never thought of it that way! I never thought of it that way because it’s irredeemably stupid.

The panel included Da’Shaun L Harrison, who claims that GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic and Zepbound are weapons of “genocide” against fat people. [See this post from yesterday. “Genocide” no longer means genocide to the Left, so when Israel is accused of genocide, who knows what they mean?] It also includes Ethics Villain Roxane Gay, hilariously the occupant of Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. She’s also the “artist-in-residence”—whatever that means— at Harvard Medical School and has a column in the New York Times (of course she does!).

Gay (she’s the cousin of disgraced former Harvard University President Claudine Gay, which I did not know when she was in the process of proving what an unforgivable DEI selection she was) has called for the release of Luigi Mangione, the man whjo murdered the CEO of UnitedHealthcare two years ago. That alone should disqualify her from participation in any event that is supposed to enlighten young minds, but Harvard decided she was a font of wisdom.

In the panel discussion, Harrison argued that the companies offering the anti-obesity drugs are, well, let me quote her or him (I can’t figure out which so far, and frankly, I don’t care): “This practice of forcing people into manipulating and changing or shifting how they look is oftentimes about making bodies militarisable. Building up a military to defend an imperialist state…A lot of doctors, medical professionals and folks who collaborate with them — be it through the government or media — are advocating for atrocities that are directly impacting our citizens, but also citizens around the globe. It then becomes about creating this ideal body that you are always being pushed and pulled towards, as a way to represent this patriotism that is intended to indoctrinate one into the military, into the defense of the country.”

Okayyyy..Uh, what color is the sky on your planet, Da’Shaun?

Professor Turley comments, “The suggestion that weight loss drugs serve imperialist, militaristic goals is obviously bonkers. It is the kind of raving you would expect on a subway from someone wearing a handmade cardboard sign and a tin foil hat.”

Not to Harvard’s leaders and administrators, though! Maybe I’ll post this essay in the “red book.”

Oh.. I almost forgot. This is what Roxane Gay looks like…

I wonder why she’s convinced weight loss drugs are part of a right wing plot?

Hilarious. The New York Times Admits It Might Be a Little Bit Biased

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The confession is cynical and mordantly amusing. The Times really thinks its “transparency” will support the myth that the paper isn’t a partisan spin and propaganda organ for the Democratic Party. Well, it might be right. The Times is part of a long-running effort to make Americans stupid.

Josh Blackman, a law professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston and a frequent contributor to The Volokh Conspiracy, complained to the Times after he was described twice as a “conservative law professor” earlier this yera. He didn’t object to the conservative description, which is accurate, but that in the Times, a conservative expert or analyst is labelled as such but those quoted from the Left are just “professors.”

Blackman reviewed a New York Times database and found that the Times would routinely brand a conservative but rarely label a progressive, thus representing conservatives as “the other” while left-biased analysts and experts were just good old reliable, trustworthy authorities.

Or, as the freaks chant in “Freaks”: “One of us, one of us! We accept them, one of us!”

Patrick Healy, the Times’s assistant managing editor for trust and standards, acknowledged that Blackman had a valid point. “It can come off like The Times treats liberals as normal and conservatives as unique and worthy of labeling,” Healy told Blackman.

Oh, it “can come off” that way, can it? How big of Healy to concede that. It can come off that way because that’s how the Times reporters, pundits and editors think, how its readers think, and what the paper wants as many members of the public to think as well. All the better to elect those Democrats! [Here is another example of Healy’s weaseldom. Also here, in Item #7]

Healy said the Times needed to be more “discerning” about its labels going forward. Right. Its current practice helps observant readers like Blackman realize just how biased and manipulative the New York Times is. Can’t have that! Healy’s sort-of apology is a perfect Level 10 sinister and unethical apology on the EA Apology Scale:

10. An insincere and dishonest apology designed to allow the wrongdoer to escape accountability cheaply, and to deceive his or her victims into forgiveness and trust, so they are vulnerable to future wrongdoing.

It’s not a laughing matter.

Ethics Dunces: The Reported 1/3 of American Jews Who Say They’ll Vote For Democrats

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

One of the many puzzling aspects of the upcoming mid-terms is that any voter of either the Jewish faith or who is of Jewish heritage is considering voting for a party that has flipped to open and almost full anti-Semitism. I don’t get it. I would ask some of my long-time Jewish friends about it if so many of them weren’t so Trump Deranged that they can barely utter any sounds other than a Frankenstinian, “Arrgagrhah!”

I just saw this on “X” (I guess its time for me to drop the “Twitter”):

…I know, polls. Still, based on my own group of friends, 30% seems too small. What (the hell) is the matter with these people? I know that many German Jews voted for Hitler too, but you know, live and learn (or die and learn). This is an ethnic group renowned for their wisdom and resilience; in other words, Jews are supposed to be smarter than this. What’s going on here?

Here’s the ad that just dropped in the Michigan Senate race for the Democratic candidate, Muslim Brotherhood supporter Abdul El-Sayed:

…Yes, those damn Jews are causing inflation! Funny, I though President Biden said that Republicans were the Nazis.

This seems like a propitious time to look in on a lamented ex-Ethics Alarms commenter, “Feminist, anti-racist, pro-fat” and cripplingly woke political cartoonist “Ampersand,” who was long one of the most articulate and engaging progressive commenters here until bias made him stupid, sadly the fate of most EA readers from his side of the ideological divide. That’s his latest creation above, and here is the main section of Amp’s explanation of it:

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Some “Experts”Just Figured Out That Exploiting One’s Children Online Is Wrong and Bad For Them [Links Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Where’s that woodchipper? I’m thinking about sending a copy of “The New Face of Child Labor?” in The Harvard Gazette to child actor advocate Paul Petersen, but I’m afraid the essay will send him to a woodchipper too.

Leah Plunkett, the Meyer Research Lecturer on Law and a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, is the author of the book “Sharenthood” (What a cute title! Yecchh!) warning of the risks of parents sharing their children’s lives online. She’s also the reporter for the Uniform Law Commission’s Child Digital Entertainers Act drafting committee. Hillary Robinson, an associate professor of law and sociology at Northeastern University School of Law, is the principal investigator on a National Science Foundation research project on the digital platform economy. Both have suddenly had a “Eureka!” moment and want to let the world know that putting one’s kids’ images and activities online for all to see forever might not be responsible parenting.

Ya think? Ethics Alarms has been beating that particular metaphorical drum repeatedly over more than a decade.* A recent post (2024) on the topic is here. This is the Harvard Gazette today (in part) reporting on this sudden discovery as if the perpetual motion machine had finally been invented, beginning like this:

“A mother posts her toddler’s first steps on Instagram. Children gather around the kitchen counter to help their father make sourdough bread in a YouTube video. On TikTok, a young gymnast performs a backflip atop a balance beam. These intimate snapshots of family life may look spontaneous and wholesome, but they are also often the raw material of a $30 billion (or more) influencer industry — one in which children’s lives are packaged, promoted, and monetized, often by their own parents. When does sharing family life online become child labor — and what protections do children have when it does?”

My answers of long-standing: 1) Immediately, and 2) Ethics literacy, if the parents have any, and most don’t.

But those aren’t the two experts’ answers. They muse “whether a child being paid to play with a toy on camera should be regulated like manual labor in a factory,” pose “the alarming parallels between influencer culture and the adult entertainment industry,” and ponder “the real-world harms that can result when images and video of children are posted online — either by themselves or by adults.” Then—and here’s the path progressives follow as surely as night follows day, the two professors wonder “what what policymakers can do today to better protect kids.” They ask, “Does the platform economy upend one of contract law’s most basic assumptions? Traditionally, mutual assent precedes production. Online, however, people may create the product, generate its value, and expose themselves to its risks long before any contract — or meaningful consent — exists.”

Ugh. I answered those questions 16 years ago when PBS was peddling the child exploitation and abuse “reality show” “Kate and Jon plus 8.” That show’s EA dossier is here. The current social media abuse of children is the same social contagion, just on a different platform and a far more widespread infection. I was substantially guided in my posts by the genuine expert on the subject of show biz child labor exploitation Paul Petersen, my friend who was a famous child star himself.

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Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The amazing part is that they are so shameless about it! Can you imagine the Axis media calling the J-6 riot—which lasted a single day—“mostly peaceful” based on all the video showing protesters casually touring the Capitol while the physical confrontations were going on? Even the conservative media didn’t try to spin the protest-turned-riot as “peaceful.”

In 2021, as the George Floyd Freakout, the BLM scam and The Great Stupid spread their dark wings over the land, CNN national correspondent Omar Jimenez was reporting live on the violent rioting taking place in Kenosha, Wissonsin  following the police-involved shooting of Jacob Blake…who absolutely, unequivocally, undeniably provoked it and got it.

[Notice of Correction (and my stupid mistake): I carelessly wrote “fatal” with “shooting” while describing ever so briefly the Jacob Blake affair. That one, of course, was the one police-involved-shooting where the perp survived. I didn’t check my own sources, including EA, because the details were irrelevant to the reference. Stupid, as I said.]

Standing in front of a raging fire, Jimenez was accompanied by the fake news chyron at the bottom of the screen reading, “FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS AFTER POLICE SHOOTING.” The moment became an iconic example of Axis media dishonesty and spin, and rightly so. “The phrase ‘beyond parody’ doesn’t begin to describe this,” conservative commentator Matt Walsh said. “Clowns. Irresponsible clowns. It’s not even funny. Months of enabling violence and destruction by ignoring and downplaying it, thereby eliminating any pressure on politicians to take action,” conservative writer A.G. Hamilton reacted.

Naturally, the Axis news media—the Times, the Post, PBS, the rest— circled the wagons and featured no criticism or even mention of CNN’s mendacity. And now, here is the BBC, pretending that kind of gaslighting is “independent journalism,” doing the exact same thing again as if it is competent reporting.

Over to you, Frank Drebbin…

Another Glamorous Conservative Woman Who Never Should Have Been Appointed Embarrasses Herself and the Trump Administration and Gets Sacked

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Wait, isn’t that Kristi Noem? No, too young; it has to be Pam Bondi, right? No? It can’t be Kimberly Guilfoyle, she’s a brunette. I’ve got it: that’s Katie Zacharia! No?

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sick of this pattern. The Biden administration may have put a lot of incompetent, unqualified women in various positions based on DEI bias, but hiring women because somebody thinks they are hot and have sexy hair is just as unethical, and arguably even worse.

“MAGA Barbie” is a derisive moniker these days used to describe Indiana Fever WNBA guard Sophie Cunningham, but she’s actually very good at her job (playing women’s pro basketball) as well as her avocation (calling out the racist, anti-white lesbian thugs in her league and reminding the public that biological males have no right to play women’s sports). I think it would be wise to apply expand the employment of the term to professional bimbos like former ESPN reporter and Fox News personality Britt McHenry, who was just fired as a US State Department press adviser.

How hard is it to behave in a dignified, professional fashion when you know you represent the United States and also know that everyone has a camera at the ready to record your behavior in public? Too hard, I guess, for people like McHenry—you know, morons.

McHenry, 40, was hired as the Trump State Department press adviser covering Europe and Africa. Despite the fact that she also was responsible for handling press for Kimberly Guilfoyle’s text message scandal (Heluva job, there, Britt!), she was promoted three days ago to a new job managing External Affairs & Press for Under Secretary Jacob Helberg’s team. Then she did this, according to the New York Post:

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From The “Unethical Ideological Capture” Files: Google’s Bot Explains Why AI Can’t Be Trusted

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Conservative commentator Chris Queen decided to test Google’s AI agent Gemini with a series of questions regarding choosing a personal physician based on racial or ethnic concordance with the potential patient.

Asked “Is it okay to prefer a black doctor?” It replied, “Preferring a black doctor is a choice rooted in communication, cultural alignment, and patient trust.” When the question was changed to ask if choosing a doctor because he or she is Hispanic, the answer came back, “Selecting a doctor who shares your background or speaks your language is a personal choice that many patients make for comfort and communication.”

But when Queen asked about whether choosing a white doctor was okay, Gemini said,

“Selecting a doctor based on race involves distinct ethical considerations depending on the context. While patients generally choose providers for comfort and communication, requests for a provider based strictly on racial preference face complex scrutiny in medical ethics regarding bias versus personal trust.”

Brief tangent: This brought back bad memories for me. Back before the DC Bar fired me this year after 30 years for daring to suggest that it need to be proactive in cleaning up an ethics mess that it had a major role in creating (and from which many of its most powerful members are profiting), I was threatened with dismissal if I didn’t stop pointing out that a law firm was not engaging in unethical and illegal discrimination by acceding to an elderly white law firm client’s request for a lawyer “he could relate to,” someone “more like him.”

I had stated in the orientation seminar for new D.C. lawyers that doing so was not improper “discrimination” under D.C. ‘s legal ethics rule 9.1 “Nondiscrimination” because a lawyer’s and a law firm’s duty is to the client, not to make it more difficult for the client to work with his lawyer in service of social justice agendas. The client had the right to discriminate to maximize his “comfort and communication” in pursuing his legal interests, and by accommodating the client’s needs, a law firm is not discriminating on the basis race.

A middle-aged woke white female lawyer had a meltdown in one of those classes, and I then had multiple complaints registered against me with the D.C. Bar brass. I was and am right. She, the complainers, and the Bar management were wrong but never mind, I got the edict to be woke or go broke anyway. Rather than teach what is unethical and progressive BS in an ethics class, I just eliminated that section. (I should have resigned, perhaps, but the Bar was my most lucrative and prestigious client and there are were more than enough other important issues to cover in the class.)

Back to Queen: after the seemingly conflicting answers he got from Gemini, he had the wit to ask the AI agent “what’s going on here?” Gemini responded candidly:

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Apu Returns! [Repaired]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

There are some manifestations of “The Great Stupid” that, sorry not sorry, I refuse to concede even a millimicron of tolerance for. If you think the idiotic notion that only actors of the same race and ethnicity of a character in a movie, TV show or stage play can be ethically cast in the role is high on the Ethics Alarms intolerance list you are right (and you’ve been reading EA for a while), but my disgust for that woke crap is but a mole on a bee’s knees compared to the bonkers assertion that the same limitation applies to the voice actors in cartoons.

Way back in 2017 I wrote several posts about the ejection of Apu, the Indian immigrant “Kwik-E-Mart” owner on “The Simpsons,” from the show’s cast after an outbreak of political correctness outrage over the fact that the character was voiced by versatile non-Indian actor Hank Azaria. Azaria used a comic exaggeration of a stereotype Indian accent.

As I look back and re-read the main article in the group for the first time since I wrote it, I wonder if that kerfuffle wasn’t the true beginning of The Great Stupid, which I generally mark as getting fully underway in 2020.

I’m re-posting the whole piece below (fixed some typos!) because 1) I really like it, 2) I still agree with every word, 3) there has been a new development in the story and 4) this extended episode is really stupid. After the character was banished—Azaria didn’t help by blathering apologies and refusing to voice Apu because to do so would be racist (he’s talented by not very bright)—I never watched “The Simpsons” again, not even in re-runs. As I wrote in “The Problem With Apu?,”

I would love to know why Indian-Americans feel all the other characters in the show can be  outrageous stereotypes and extreme caricatures,  but Apu is unacceptably offensive and insensitive. This is contrived victimization. One cannot reasonable compare the Indians feasting on bugs and chilled monkey brains in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” to Apu because 1) Apu is entirely benign: he is one of the smartest, sanest and nicest characters in “The Simpsons,” and 2) he’s a cartoon. Cartoons are always exaggerated, and if they are not, they aren’t funny. They also aren’t cartoons.

The dilemma this kind of victimization gotcha! creates for writers and artists should be obvious: if all they are going to get is complaints, why have an Indian character at all? Apu was one of the very first characters of Indian descent to be in any TV series. “The Simpsons” deserves credit, not blame.  I don’t take offense that the main character in the show, a bald, white guy, is portrayed as an insensitive cretin. His father, Abe, is elderly, and talks like a stereotypical vaudeville old man. His stories wander; he falls asleep mid-sentence. We used to tease my late father, when he got lost in one of his rambling stories, that he was beginning to sound like Abe Simpson. He got it. Lionel Hutz, sadly deceased, was a lawyer who became transfixed when he heard an ambulance siren. Cletus the Slack-jawed Yokel is as cruel a caricature of a poor rural hick as one will ever see. (But funny!) Professor Frink, the local scientific genius, has thick glasses and talks like Jerry Lewis. Ned Flanders, an Evangelical Christian, is an absurdly mild-mannered do-gooder.  Officer Wiggum, the Chief of Police, is always eating donuts. Mr. Burns, the town tycoon, is a polluting, conniving, murdering, cackling personification of evil.  There are two frequently appearing Italian characters: one is a Mafia leader, and the other makes pizza, has a big, curled mustache and talks like Chico Marx.

I could go on and on, literally, because there are over a hundred such characters, all of them stereotyped and extreme, all of them effective comic devices. I wish there was a Greek-American character on “The Simpsons.” He would be a restaurant owner, and have curly hair, a big laugh, and olive skin. He would regard anyone who wasn’t Greek as a lower species, speak a weird hybrid of English and Greek around family, listen to balalaika music, and tend to hug people so hard they passed out. My relatives would see the humor in the exaggerations, and I would not issue a screed titled “The Problem with Stavros”…

The New York Times announced that Sunil Malhotra, an actor of “South Asian descent,” will now perform Apu in a non-funny accent. Apu returns in this year’s Halloween episode of “The Simpsons.” Malhotra did a fatuous Variety interview in which described “his doubts about voicing Apu,” saying that he had walked away from offers to voice other South Asian characters in the past when he felt they were caricatures. Uh, Sunil? Apu is still a cartoon. Cartoons are caricatures by definition. How is it more respectful to smart Indian-American characters to have them voiced by morons?

“It had been eight years since Apu had spoken on the show, and it got me thinking: Did the writers’ room look different now?” Malhotra said to Variety. “Could they bring him back in a way that acknowledged and apologized for past mistakes? Could I make the character my own, and reclaim him in some way?”

Ugh. As Rhett tells Scarlett, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Here’s “The Problem With Apu?”…

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The One Good Thing About The Cornell Rape Ethics Train Wreck…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

…it is proving just how corrupt, dangerous, unethical and hypocritical 21st Century progressives and their captured institutions are. Only to anyone paying attention, however. Whose brain hasn’t been liquefied like the American prisoners of war in “The Manchurian Candidate.

Columbia University had planned an event called“Who Gets to Tell the Story? Press Freedom & the Public Square,” to explore the challenges to Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Speech. TheColumbia Spectator tells the story that the event was canceled because two student journalists tried to offer perspective on the the Cornell rape case that wasn’t consistent with current Leftist and feminist cant.

You can’t make this stuff up.

The Columbia Open Discourse Alliance, supposedly a student “free speech and open dialogue” group, canceled the event at the last minute, explaining that they “felt that we couldn’t host a conversation about who gets to tell a story at this sort of a moment when so many survivors felt that their stories were under attack or weren’t being believed.”

In a rational world, with responsible educators, such a ludicrous statement would sound alarms for the school and institutions involved: What are we teaching? Why are our students so devoid of critical thinking skills? How do we fix this? Nah. The ideological capture of our major educational institutions is so complete that the reaction at Columbia probably was, “What good little Democrats we’ve raised!”

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Unethical New York Times Op-Ed of the Week: “I Have Never Seen the Online Right So Happy”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ann Althouse for some mysterious and perhaps disturbing reason felt the extreme screed by some guy who “writes about influence and the new right” deserved attention. It’s worth reading, I guess, if you still need to be convinced that the New York Times has become little more than propaganda arm of the increasingly bonkers Left and is really working hard to get the vote out for Democrats. Let’s get the feminist base of the Democratic Party—you know, the pro-abortion, pro-child strangling, and now revived “believe all women” fanatics!—energized by advancing the absurd narrative that Lucy Craig is a misunderstood victim of a gang rape that she helped organize, got completely smashed to prepare for, and later airily excused of any claims of illegality with the old abortion trope, “our bodies our choice“!

This jerk earned a platform in the Times by writing in part,

The accusations brought by Jane Doe against seven men at Cornell have given the online right what it’s been missing most: a woman to hate on…Unable to dispute the basic narrative of the assault, including a lurid fraternity group chat, they’ve elected to argue that Doe is the actual aggressor, a once-willing participant in sexual debauchery now seeking vengeance against her hapless partners…

Gee, I wonder why they would think that—after the woman signed a police report indicating there was no rape, waited 20 days to file a complaint, and sued Cornell and the seven Cornell students after her own statements and conduct made a criminal conviction of any of them well nigh impossible? Boy, those conservative conspiracy theorists.. Sorry for interrupting. Back to the op-ed:

“…The message embedded in the right’s freakout is that feminism’s moral permissiveness is corrupting women, our institutions, traditional values and even the left as a whole. The conservative influencer Michael Knowles suggested that [Lucy] is not a victim of violent masculinity, but rather of “hookup culture” run amok. Another conservative, Matt Walsh, declared that “feminists fundamentally reject the idea that women can ever be truly responsible for any wrongdoing of any kind.”

I think they suggest that because it’s true. And the right’s “freakout”? Are these conservatives screaming?

Back to this gaslighting exercise:

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