Ethics Train Wrecks

It’s The Wuhan Virus, And Attention Should Be Paid

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Boy, have I gotten a lot of grief for never capitulating to the thought-control demand that the contagion responsible for the pandemic, the lockdown, my business losing 45% of its income for two years (and counting), my sister wearing a mask in her car, seven-inning baseball games, an untrustworthy 2020 election and more be called the anodyne name “Covid 19,” or just “Covid” to its mask-obsessed friends. Here at Ethics Alarms, it is the Wuhan virus and always has been, because it was obvious from the start that China’s province is where this disaster (and its equally disastrous cover-up) started, but as usual of late, the mainstream media and progressives decided to use the adoption of a fair and informative name that ensures permanent responsibility, if not accountability, for millions of deaths and the savaging of the US economy for its favorite hobby of race-baiting. Yes, once again, the truth was racist, and censorship necessary because assholes incapable of rational thought would abuse facts to justify beating up and terrorizing anyone who looked Asian.

Continue reading →

And Another One Bites The Dust To Conform To The Woke Indoctrination Imperative…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA) chooses debate topics for high school competition and runs hundreds of high school tournaments including the annual national tournament, which started this week  in Arizona. Six thousand students from across the country will compete. The NSDA  rules are very clear that “Judges should decide the round as it is debated, not based on their personal beliefs.”

Nevertheless, Tabroom, a public database maintained by the NSDA, reveals that the organization does not enforce its rules, apparently in the interest of what progressives regard as “the greater good.” The database includes each judge’s “paradigm,” meaning what that judge regards as important in judging debating technique. (The use of jargon like “paradigm” is why I dropped out of debate club.) Does a debater speak too fast, look down when speaking, have an annoying voice, or say “uh” too much? Does he or she use too many anecdotes, rationalizations or appeals to authority? When debate competitors learn that a particular judge will be judging their performance, they need to pay heed to that judge’s priorities….which is why the presence of this judge’s “paradigm” in the database is disturbing:

Continue reading →

OH NOOOO! Gallup Says Facism Is On The Rise In The US!!

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Well, that may be a bit over-stated, though not in the parlance of the Democratic Party and its propaganda agents in the news media. What Gallup really found, in its annual survey of U.S. values and beliefs, is that social conservatism is on the rise, and has reached its highest level in a decade, since 2012. Gee…what…a…surprise…

Gallup, being, as much as it tries to fight it, also infected with partisan bias, doubletalks its explanation for charts like these:

Continue reading →

Update: More Ethics Observations On The Trump Indictment [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

For the record, I am royally sick of this topic already, and it’s just starting, with more than a year to go. I’m sick of Trump, I’m sick of the Democrats’ “destroy the village to save it” obsession with stopping Trump without just winning elections fairly and squarely, and I’m sick of the hypocrisy on all sides, and I’m really sick of reading obnoxious comments in moderation from single-minded ignoramuses who won’t even try to examine all sides of a complex issue, probably because they aren’t capable of it.

Sure, I’ll double down. I wrote on Friday that the decision to indict Trump was wildly irresponsible (if you didn’t discern that from my comparison to cloning dinosaurs, maybe you need to find another blog to hang out at) and was a utilitarian botch of existential proportions, and the tsunami is already developing, as that tweet above from a generally perceptive conservative Twitter wag indicates. Also predictably, gloating Democrats are tossing more of the afore-mentioned jet fuel on the fire, like this asshole:

Yecchhh. But let’s dig in…

1. The last post on this matter has surpassed the number of comments that allow normal people to read them all, so I’ll be overlapping a bit. For example, Alan Dershowitz also framed the indictment as I did, writing in Newsweek that it was “The Most Dangerous Indictment in History,” and saying in part,

This moment portends a massive change in the norms of this nation that all Americans who care about the neutral rule of law should pay close attention to, for it raises the specter of the partisan weaponization of the criminal justice system—not just by the Democrats targeting Trump but by Republicans who will certainly retaliate when they regain control of the criminal charging process.

That is how a large proportion of the public will regard it, and the evidence is irrelevant. Dershowitz also reminded me of Big Lie #6, “Trump’s Defiance Of Norms Is A Threat To Democracy.”

Remember? Democrats are hoping you won’t, but throughout the Trump Presidency, the accusation from the “resistance”/Democratic Party/mainstream media alliance (The Axis of Unethical Conduct) was that Trump was undermining democracy by not following unwritten “norms”—you know, like not using impeachment as a partisan tactic, not attempting to de-legitimatize the President, his election, and the Supreme Court, not weaponizing a health emergency to justify loosening election integrity measures, not intentionally violating the Constitution with Executive Orders like the one requiring Federal workers to be vaccinated, not giving a national speech declaring anyone who opposes his policies of being fascists and dangers to democracy…wait, I’m sorry! Those were some of the norms Democrats chose to defy; I get confused sometimes. My point is that the hypocrisy is staggering. There is a reason no former President or current major Presidential constender has ever been arrested or indicted by the rival party: it reeks of Third World dictatorships, and almost guarantees dangerous national division. This is why Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon.

Continue reading →

I Have To Ask: What Is Disney Doing And Why?

/ Jack Marshall / 57 Comments

For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been planning a long post examining what Disney’s mission and methodology need to be in 21st Century America. Walt’s creation faces an important challenge and a difficult one, and I would hope that the people responsible for guiding a company whose role in shaping U.S. culture has been both successful and beneficent as well as profitable are up to the task. They had better be, for the sake of the culture, not merely stockholders.

I was well on the way to devising a post I felt would be perceptive and provocative when I saw the video above. That stopped me cold. I wasn’t exactly optimistic about Disney, which has been a major positive influence in my own life, being able to safely navigate around the cultural icebergs in the roiling societal seas ahead before I watched the thing, but now I am as confused as I am depressed.

The classic starting point for ethical analysis is “What’s going on here?” In this case, it is more appropriate to ask, “What THE HELL is going on here?”

I’m open to suggestions.

OK, I Admit It: Target Is Making It Difficult To Maintain The Ethics Alarms Anti-Organized Boycott Position…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Fox News reports…

“Target Corporation is partnering with a K-12 education group for which focuses on getting districts to adopt policies that will keep parents in the dark on their child’s in-school gender transition, providing sexually explicit books to schools for free, and integrating gender ideology at all levels of curriculum in public schools…”GLSEN leads the movement in creating affirming… and anti-racist spaces for LGBTQIA+ students. We are proud of 10+ years of collaboration with GLSEN and continue to support their mission,” Target said. The retail giant provides annual donations to GLSEN. GLSEN calls for gender ideology to be integrated into all classes, even math. It provides educators instructions on how they can make math “more inclusive of trans and non-binary identities” by including “they/them” pronouns in word problems. In another example, GLSEN recommended that teachers intervene if students are making graphs about sex and gender to ensure it includes the ideology supported by GLSEN. “When students are creating their own surveys, if they want to include data for biological sex, teachers need to be sure they include both intersex and other as choices.””[A]nd if the students want to include data for gender, a variety of choices need to be included, such as agender, genderfluid, female, male, nonbinary, transman, transwoman, and other,” a lesson plan continued….

To date, the retail giant has donated at least $2.1 million to GLSEN, which offers districts and students guidance on how to hide gender transitions from parents. 

For example, its policy for districts said, “[The local education agency] shall ensure that all personally identifiable and medical information relating to transgender and nonbinary students is kept confidential… Staff or educators shall not disclose any information that may reveal a student’s gender identity to others, including parents or guardian… This disclosure must be discussed with the student, prior to any action.”

Corporations have many of the same rights as individuals, and if Target wants to contribute to an organization that guides schools to conspire against parents and indoctrinate students into LGBTQ+ ideology and political agendas against the wishes of their parents (where doing so is legal), it has that right. Similarly, I have the right, and, I believe, the ethical obligation to ensure that none of my money finds its way to GLSEN or any similarly unethical organization through Target.

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Ty Cobb (No, This Is NOT A Baseball Post)

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

That stylish-looking gentleman above is Ty Cobb III, a descendant of the iconic baseball player, himself a rather infamous ethics dunce. I never quite figured out Ty III’s relationship to Ty the First, but that is neither here nor there. I wish I didn’t have to write this post: I know Ty a bit, for we were in the same class at Harvard (where he already was sporting that handlebar mustache), and I knew many of his friends a lot better than I knew him. He is a nice guy, a funny guy, and by all accounts a terrific lawyer. He may have been the best lawyer ever associated with Donald Trump: Ty joined the White House staff to manage legal matters surrounding the Mueller investigation—yes, the Russian collusion scam run by the Democrats, the FBI, and the news media. He reported directly to Trump, and he was extensively quoted during the media frenzy over that disgusting set-up.

On May 2, 2018, Cobb announced that he was retiring as White House special counsel, and later that year, said that he did not think the Mueller investigation was a “witch hunt,” later saying in an ABC News interview on March 5, 2019, that he thought Mueller was “an American hero.” I almost blew my ethics whistle then; I didn’t: I should have. As a lawyer the public identified with President Trump (though his client was the office, not the man), Ty’s apparent vouching for the investigation was bound to be taken by the public (and certainly the news media) as a hint that someone on the inside with legal expertise knew Trump was guilty. I know I looked at it that way.

Now he’s done it again. Cobb told the news media that the “feds are coming fast” for Trump, and predicted that the investigation into the his alleged mishandling of classified documents will land him in prison. Spewing his opinions like an oil gusher, Cobb said,

Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Month: Blogger Andrew Sullivan

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“If gay men and lesbians want to return to liberal politics, to protect gay children, and to win back the sane center, we are going to have to disown and distance ourselves from this nihilist extremism.”

—Legendary Blogger Andrew Sullivan, in a tortured substack critique of the current pro-trans fad and its consequences on children, gays and society.

Sullivan is tortured by a lot of things, being trapped in cognitive dissonance hell as a religious and essentially conservative pundit has been driven into the arms of Democrats by his hatred of Donald Trump and Republican opposition to gay marriage. Nonetheless, he is a smart analytical thinker who writes like an angel, and his essay “The Queers Versus The Homosexuals,” arguing that “the erasure of gay men and lesbians” is going to be the inevitable result of the current trans activism madness, is very much worth reading even in its truncated form, since the whole thing is only accessible to Andrew’s subscribers. (If I had the discretionary funds to pay for any substack essayist, Sullivan would probably be as good as anyone.)

A selection of some of his other points to ponder:

Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The Shemy Schembechler Firing

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

What a mess.

Glenn ‘Shemy’ Schembechler, son of legendary Wolverines football coach Bo Schembechler, the winningest coach in Michigan football history who took the Wolverines to 10 Rose Bowls, was was hired as the University of Michigan’s assistant director of recruiting on May 17. Three says later he was fired (well, “forced to resign”). His demise was caused by his habit of “liking” controversial tweets on Twitter.

A statement from the school attributed Schembechler’s forced resignation to social media activity that “caused concern and pain for individuals in our community.” Here’s one of those “liked tweets,” in a Twitter tiff over a quote from Thomas Sowell:

Ethics Observations:

Continue reading →

CNN’s Internal War Over The Trump Townhall Shows How Corrupt And Dangerous U.S. Journalism Has Become

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Of all the offensive, obnoxious and outrageous things Donald Trump has said or tweeted, none infuriated progressives more than his calling the news media the “enemies of the people.” This is ironic, because nothing he’s ever said was more true or important to express.

Ace of Spades, the conservative blogging provocateur who is often as incisive as he is inflammatory, issued an impressive examination of what is transpiring at CNN in the wake of last week’s Trump “townhall.” He predicts, as others are predicting, that CNN chief Chris Licht’s days are numbered because the programming went against the pure, near-MSNBC level of full-throated Democratic propaganda CNN has been selling as “news” for more than a decade. It seems clear—and it really shouldn’t be surprising—that the audience CNN has nurtured by slanting its reporting isn’t interested in opposing views, perspective or objective analysis. Thus there has been a sudden drop in CNN ratings following the Trump event similar to the exodus from Fox News following the removal of its demagogue-in-chief, Tucker Carlson. Both migrations are evidence of ethics corruption, but of the two, punishing CNN for what once would have been considered responsible and necessary journalism is the more ominous.

Ace’s various references reveal, among other things…

Continue reading →