Ethics Train Wrecks

Ethics Quiz: The Border Humanitarian

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

I am having a hard time with this one.

This week the New York Times and other publications gave a hero’s send-off to Eddie Canales, who died on July 30 at the age of 76. No doubt about it, he was a caring, selfless, compassionate man.

Unfortunately, his caring and compassion were applied to assist those seeking to break U.S. law. From the Times obituary:

For over a decade, Mr. Canales placed dozens of water stations — giant blue plastic barrels marked “Agua” filled with gallon water jugs — along the region’s routes for migrants evading a checkpoint on U.S. Route 281, about 70 miles north of the border with Mexico. The migrants, who are usually led (and sometimes abandoned) by smugglers, known as “coyotes,” leave the main road and undertake a perilous journey through featureless scrub and bush to evade the Border Patrol.

Some don’t make it. Those who fail succumb to severe dehydration, hunger and exposure to the unforgiving elements in a semi-desert where temperatures can easily reach 100 degrees in the summer and drop below freezing during the winter. Mr. Canales led a campaign to recover, identify and ensure proper burials for the migrants’ remains. The mission required forcefulness and tact. The land is private and belongs to South Texas ranchers, many indifferent or hostile. Some have created armed posses dressed in military gear to hunt up the migrants and turn them over to the authorities, as shown in a trenchant 2021 documentary about Mr. Canales’s work, “Missing in Brooks County.”

…Mr. Canales successfully placed more than 170 water stations across seven counties, the outposts recognizable from afar by flags with a red cross flown high….

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is….

Is it ethical to honor someone for intentionally facilitating the efforts of others to violate U.S. law?

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Comment of the Day: “Accountability? What’s Accountability? Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle Still Has Her Job…”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I have neglected Comments of the Day of late I know, and I am sorry about that. There have been many excellent comments, and also many I have not had time to read carefully: the responses to the “What do you believe?” post alone generated many strong COTD candidates (and they are still coming in).

I might as well start with a comment I said I would post under the designation three weeks ago, and whiffed: Michael R.’s brief arguing that the Secret Service’s epic botch in Pennsylvania that only avoided getting Donald Trump killed by the intervention of moral luck was no accident.

Is the EA post that inspired Michael moot? After all, Kim Cheatle finally resigned after the indignity of having Congress members of both parties tell her to. However, the information that has been drip, drip, dripping out about the near-assassination has not disproved Michael’s thesis; if anything it bolsters his argument.

Ultimately, the question, as it so frequently does in the Age of the Great Stupid, comes down to Hanlon’s Razor: Is it intentional malice, or is it incompetence? The COTD concludes, “To cling to an incredibly unlikely incompetence argument in light of a much more likely explanation is only required if you don’t want to acknowledge something you are unwilling to accept.”

Maybe, but I will still cling even while admitting that other recent Hanlon’s Razor mysteries that have been popping up (“Did Democrats and the media just miss the fact that Joe Biden was a proto-vegetable because they are lazy, biased and inept, or did they deliberately participate in a conspiracy to deceive the American people ‘to save democracy’?” is one obvious example) demand the malice label.

Here’s Michael R’s Comment on the Day on the post, “Accountability? What’s Accountability? Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle Still Has Her Job, and Only the Prominence of a Confederacy of Ethics Dunces Can Explain That.”

***

You have to make a lot of hand wringing arguments to state:

(1) They didn’t put snipers on the roof that THEY identified as a threat.

(2) They didn’t secure the building despite the threat of the roof.

(3) They didn’t notice the guy on the roof despite the fact that the crowd had been taking pictures of him for 25+ minutes.

(4) They let a 20 year old kid drive up, unload a ladder, climb onto the roof spread out his blanket, assemble the rifle and take 7 or 8 shots accidentally. That is the most generous assessment. If THEY left the ladder to the roof there for access, it is worse.

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Weekend Ethics Update, 8/10/24: Paul Harvey and Other Alarms

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

That’s a famous segment from Paul Harvey’s radio show, unearthed by Citizens Free Press. It’s fascinating in retrospect and worthy of reflection no matter what your political orientation may be. I place it in the same category as “A Clockwork Orange” and “Network,” commentaries that seemed dystopian and extreme when they first appeared, but that when viewed now are disquietly familiar. The date makes Harvey’s commentary particularly interesting, for 1964 was the cusp of the Sixties, right before its tornado winds blew traditional values and American respect for its institutions into tiny pieces, never again to be assembled quite as securely again.

Harvey was a proud conservative, of course: many of his beliefs today are considered Cro-Magnon. He was not responsible for the video, which engages in several cheap shots; the gay couple from “Modern Family,” for example, don’t deserve their appearance here: it was a loving same sex marriage between two kind men who were loving parents (and the least strange characters in the show). Nevertheless, Harvey was prescient in many ways, unfortunately for all of us.

1. How do PolitFact’s partisan hacks look at themselves in the mirror? The most biased and dishonest of all the factchecking organizations—and that’s quite a distinction—was at it again this week as it joined the effort to pretend Kamala Harris isn’t what she is.

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Democracy! The Biden Administration Tagged Biden Critic Tulsi Gabbard As a Potential Terrorist

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Yesterday Matt Taibbi, the red-pilled former “Rolling Stone” reporter who turned against the Axis (that’s the Axis of Unethical Conduct, or AUC: “the resistance,” the Democratic Party, and the mainstream media) when he realized he was working for the bad guys, revealed what should be a “Holy crap!” story about former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.

She has been targeted by the Biden Administration as a potential terrorist, placed on a no-fly list, and harassed at multiple airports. Coincidentally <cough> this came just a few weeks after Gabbard again criticized the current regime’s conduct and rhetoric.

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Ethics Observations on the Tim Walz Military Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Boy, Major Jack Marshall Sr. would have hated this guy!  

Are you caught up? Here:

The Minnesota National Guard confirmed today that Gov. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ newly-minted running mate to the cheers of the woke everywhere, did not retire as a command sergeant major like he has claimed for years, including on his official gubernatorial biography.

The reality is that Walz “retired as a master sergeant in 2005 for benefit purposes, but he did not complete additional coursework at the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy,” Army Lt. Col. Kristen Augé, the Minnesota National Guard’s State Public Affairs Officer informed the media.

In 2018, a National Guardsman claimed on social media and in a paid ad that that Walz, then running for governor, declined to deploy to Iraq for combat duty in 2005 and forfeited his title of command sergeant major. But Walz’s biography, published on the state’s official website, says that “Command Sergeant Major Walz” retired from the Minnesota National Guard in 2005 while he was serving as one of the highest ranking members of the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion.

The timeline seems to be that Walz was promoted in September of 2004 in anticipation of his going into battle. When Walz’s battalion was ordered to mobilize for an active duty deployment to Iraq in May of 2005, however, Walz “quit, leaving the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion and its soldiers without its senior non-commissioned officer, as it prepared to go into battle. Two Command Sergeants Major confirmed this version of events.

J.D. Vance, who fought in Iraq, “pounced,” stating, “When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, you know what he did? He dropped out of the army and allowed his unit to go without him, a fact that he’s been criticized for aggressively by a lot of the people that he served with.”

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I Know It’s Indelicate To Ask Right Now, But What Did The Late Billy Bean Do To Justify The Public Tributes…Or His Job?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

My main awareness of ex-Major League player Billy Bean before I read of his death yesterday was that he was always getting confused with Billy Beane, with an “e,” the Oakland A’s executive credited with inventing “Moneyball” and who was played by Brad Pitt in the movie of the same name. Yesterday I read about No-E Billy dying at 60 of a dread disease:

“Former MLB outfielder Billy Bean, who has served in the commissioner’s office as senior vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion as well as a special assistant to the commissioner, died at his home today following a battle with acute myeloid leukemia per an announcement from the league… Following the end of his playing career, Bean followed in the footsteps of former Dodgers and A’s outfielder Glenn Burke in 1999 to become just the second MLB played in history to publicly come out as gay…After playing 272 games in the majors with three organizations across six years, Bean returned to baseball in 2014 when he was appointed as the league’s first ever ambassador for inclusion by then-commissioner Bud Selig. He continued to serve in the commissioner’s office under Rob Manfred and was eventually promoted to the senior vice president role he held until his death. In his role with the league, Bean worked with all 30 organizations and is credited with instrumental roles in developing education programs and expanding mental health resources available to players all across affiliated ball.

The New York Times obituary in its captive sports publication is no more revealing. This may sound harsh, but it appears that Billy Bean was given a lifetime sinecure with baseball for no other reason than because he had sex with men. After that, MLB could always point to the fact that it had a VP of “inclusion” to show it was properly woke and “with it.”

The previous Commissioner of Baseball, used-car-dealer-to-the core Bud Selig, hired Bean to deflect negative publicity from LGBT activist groups (there was no “Q” then) for no other reason than that Bean had written a briefly sensational book about being a closeted gay in the Major Leagues and was now “out.” The current, marginally less slimy Commissioner, Rob Manfred, naturally had to keep Bean around, and why wouldn’t he, especially as the George Floyd Freakout, DEI Madness and The Great Stupid devoured the land?

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“This Is Kamala Harris” Episode #2: Kamala Explains Cloud Computing

/ Jack Marshall / 69 Comments

This ridiculous section of an as yet undated Harris speech (or appearance, or nervous breakdown) would have once fallen into the Ethics Alarms Julie Principle category. Yes, yes, we all know that the Vice President is a babbling idiot, and there’s no point in pouncing on every time she proves it; after all, fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly. That, however, was before the Democratic Party, in its desperation after being caught deceiving the American people (with the aid of its propaganda organs, the biased and unethical news media) that President Biden wasn’t teetering on the brink of total senility, decided to make Kamala its nominee for President while bypassing primaries, debates, voting, competition—you know, that whole democracy thingy they claim to be protecting.

Now, however, the various emerging examples of Harris talking off the top of what we generously call “her head” becomes suddenly relevant, and not to be ignored out of pity and kindness. As I wrote in installment #1 of “This is Kamala Harris” last week…

“Evidence like this will be buried, ignored, or denied by the mainstream media, just like Hunter Biden’s laptop, until enough Americans have been deceived to put Harris in the White House….Harris’s distorted values, cracked logic, obnoxious character and arrogance are all intolerable, and most normal people will see that, if they only are allowed to read, watch and hear. “

Why is this particularly ludicrous example of Kamala being Kamala (I know, we have been told that using her first name is sexist and racist. Bite me.) significant? Several reasons, including the fact that almost all the major news sources now know about it but have refused to mention it, just as they continue to hide the substance of Harris’s extreme policy positions. Yet if Joe Biden, at least once the order had gone out to bring him down, had babbled like this the MSM might well have cited it as more proof that there were squirrels in his attic, metaphorically speaking or in actuality. And in contrast, as we all know and as I wrote in the earlier post, “each word out of Donald Trump’s ever-open mouth will be spun and fact-checked to put him in the worst light possible.”

Among the other reasons the video is significant:

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Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias! George Stephanopoulos vs. Rep. Byron Donalds

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

As everyone knows by now, Donald Trump, appearing at the Black Journalists Association conference, responded to a question about whether he regards Harris as a D.E.I candidate by going in another direction, one that raised the issue of Harris’s integrity and ever-changing positions.

“Well, I can say, no, I think it’s maybe a little bit different,” Trump began. “So, I’ve known her a long time indirectly, not directly very much, and she was always of Indian heritage. And she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black. And now she wants to be known as black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black? But you know what, I respect either one.”

Trump was trolling, as usual, and spitting into the metaphorical wind, also as usual, so the reaction was entirely predictable, as EA already discussed here. It’s a week later, and the Axis is still trying to make a Trump ad lib the focus of its campaign “coverage.”

On ABC today, George Stephanopoulos couldn’t restrain his inner Democrat hack and flipped out because Trump surrogate Rep. Byron Donalds refused to concede that Harris’s manipulation of her various ethnic identity cards wasn’t a legitimate point for Trump to make. Here’s the full exchange:

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Being Fair To Imane Khelif

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I sure am glad I had the sense (for a change) to wait a while before writing about what is likely to be the most lasting ethics controversy of the 2024 Paris Olympics. The initial hysteria in the conservative media didn’t add up. My prize for the worst headline goes to the conservative sports blog Outkick: “Olympic Boxer Pretending To Be A Woman Pummels Opponent in 26 Seconds, Making Her Cry.” Nice.

What happened to launch this mess was an Olympic women’s boxing march pitting Algerian Imane Khelif and Italian boxer Angela Carini against each other. After 46 seconds Carini quit, something that almost never happens in in Olympic boxing. She didn’t shake Khelif’s hand after the referee raised it, then sank to her knees, weeping. She told reporters that she quit because of the pain from those opening punches from her opponent, saying that she has never been hit so hard in her life. Instantly, critic made the episode part of the trans women in sports controversy, a la Lia Thomas et al. That was simply wrong, careless, sloppy and unethical. Here is how the conservative commentary collective PJ Media described the scene:

On Thursday, the Olympics put on a disgraceful show, pitting a man with XY chromosomes against a biological woman. Algeria’s Imane Khelif won the 16 welterweight bout over Italy’s Angela Carini after pummeling his opponent’s head over and over again. After having her head slammed by the biological male for 46 seconds, Carini was done. She removed herself from the match and then crumbled to the mat in tears. Everyone who watched saw that the Italian boxer was no match for the Algerian, who had been disqualified from previous competitions for testing positive for male chromosomes. 

Wrong. Imane Khelif is not a biological man, but intersex, meaning that the proper analogy for her dilemma in Olympic competition is the intersex runner, Caster Semenya, whom I most recently discussed last fall. Here is how that post ended…

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Perfect! NYC’s Democratic Mayor’s Lawyer Reveals That Party’s Attitude Toward the Constitution

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

As anyone who can read could have predicted, even New York’s wildly left-leaning Supreme Court ruled against Mayor Eric Adams’ unconstitutional attempt to stop buses full of illegal immigrants from dropping them off in that hallowed “sanctuary,” New York City.

In January, the mayor filed a lawsuit against 17 charter bus companies that had transported asylum seekers to New York City from Texas and Florida.. The lawsuit alleged that the bus companies violated New York’s Social Services Law by dropping off the illegals without providing a means of support, and sought over $700 million to compensate the city for the cost of shelter, food and health care. The suit was breathtaking in its hypocrisy—sanctuary? Hello?—as well as about as close to frivolous as a law suit can be without making me file an ethics complaint against the lawyers. The New York Civil Liberties Union said that the Mayor’s actions were unconstitutional. The court agreed.

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