Government & Politics

From The Ethics Alarms Mailbag: “Why Do You Insist On Calling Covid “The Wuhan Virus”?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Because that’s what it is?

I’m actually grateful for the question, because I have become more adamant about resisting the deliberately deceptive misnomer for the virus as time goes on and more information becomes available. In 2020, when the pandemic was just starting to wreck the United States’ on many levels, it was pretty obvious that the virus had its start in the Wuhan province of China. Whether it was from a lab or the (disgusting, third-world level wet markets) was and still is uncertain, but Wuhan is where the first recorded case emerged, and where the pathogen took first hold in December of 2019.

Early on in 2020, then-President Trump and some media sources referred to the virus as the “Wuhan virus” or the “China virus,” and these useful and descriptive terms were quickly declared unfair, inaccurate, and “racist.” by the Left. Part of the motivation was, I believe, to suck up to China, a corrupt and dangerous nation that too many businesses and industries (like Hollywood and the NBA) view as a profitable target for unprincipled pandering, Another aspect of the linguistic cover-up was to, as usual in the age of The Great Stupid, choose censorship and public confusion in the quixotic and bizarre effort to make certain groups feel “safe” (as in “safe from reality”). Because there are morons who will bully and mistreat Chinese-Americans as “punishment” for a disaster they could not be rationally blamed for, the widiculous woke decreed that the origins and true responsibility for the pandemic must be obscured by technical jargon. Continue reading →

Dead Body Ethics: Why Is “Mind Your Own Damn Business!” Such A Difficult Principle To Grasp?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This post was almost titled “Stop Making Me Defend Governor Hochul!” Conservative pundits, bloggers and busybodies are freaking out over Governor Kathy Hochul (D-NY) signing into law legislation that makes New York the sixth state to legalize the composting human remains. The law adds “natural organic reduction” to cremation and entombment as legal ways to dispose of bodies. The new law defines the practice as the “contained, accelerated conversion of human remains to soil” in a “structure, room, or other space” in which decomposition can occur.

To all of which I say, “Fine.” Any time government increases individual autonomy and the liberty to do as citizens please as long as it doesn’t harm society or other individuals, or infringe on their rights, that’s an ethics win. It is especially encouraging to see a Democratic governor move in this direction, since her party has lately embraced a philosophy of seeking more restrictions on core American rights—like, say, freedom of speech— rather than fewer.

Never mind, though: some on the right are eager to bash Hochul anyway.

Here’s “Not the Bee”s” John Knox:

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These Are Poisonous Fruit Of Squandered Trust

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

A just-released Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey concluded that 49% of American adults believe it is likely that Wuhan virus vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths. Twenty-eight percent think it’s “Very Likely” that the side effects of the vaccine have been deadly to many  in contrast with 37% who don’t believe that a significant number of deaths have been caused by vaccine side effects. Fourteen percent are not sure, the usual group that isn’t sure of anything.

You can question the accuracy of this poll or all polls, you can believe that the vaccine skeptics are hysterics, you can believe that these numbers are in large part the result of “misinformation.” However, there is no question that even if they are inaccurate, the numbers show a shocking level of distrust in the pandemic vaccines, and, by extension, vaccines in general as well the health professionals and elected officials who have promoted them. When asked if there are legitimate safety concerns surrounding the shots, or whether doubts have been seeded by conspiracy theorists, 48% said there that concerns are valid. Only 37% indicated that false conspiracy theories were behind the public’s fears.

Glenn Reynolds, the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law and one of the most widely read conservative blogger, has it exactly right, writing, Continue reading →

Can You Spot What’s Misleading And Incompetent About This “Study”?

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Of course you can!

So why couldn’t the researchers?

An online survey  asked consumers to order virtual meals after randomly looking over menus that either had some form of climate labeling or none at all. 23.5% more of those who ordered from a menu that noted  “the least green” choices made a “sustainable” meal choice than those who ordered from menus without such information.

More than 5,000 adults 18 and older participated in the test in March and April of this year. They were told to imagine that they were at a restaurant ordering dinner. Subjects were randomly assigned to view only one of three menus on which every food option was identified by a photo that could be clicked when placing an order. One menu featured standard, climate neutral codes below each meal photo. Another featured red labels stating “high climate impact” under meals that included beef. A third menu featured green labels stating “low climate impact” under those meals that did not include beef.

The researchers concluded that both the high and low climate impact menu labels were effective at encouraging more sustainable food selections compared to the control. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Announcer’s Suspension

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

North Carolina State basketball and football announcer Gary Hahn, broadcasting the NC State-Maryland Mayo Bowl game, said at one point, “down among all the illegal aliens in El Paso it’s UCLA 14 and Pittsburgh 6.” Learfield Communications suspended the Wolfpack Sports Network play-by-play announcer “indefinitely” following the game.

Various media outlets have described the statement as “offensive,” but it was unquestionably factual.

illegal immigrants are crossing the border into El Paso, Texas at a record pace. The mayor has declared a state of emergency. If it was the politically incorrect term “illegal alien” that was deemed offensive, the description is still used on some official government websites, perhaps because that’s what they are.

There is some crucial information we don’t have yet, though. Does Learfield Communications have a policy forbidding its announcers from making political comments during broadcasts? It should. There is no justification at all for sports broadcasters to bring non-sports topics, opinions and commentary into their broadcasts. I regard doing that as offensive whether I agree with the commentary or not. It is unprofessional: I don’t care what a baseball of football play-by-play announcer thinks about anything other that the game he or she is describing, and using that role to make gratuitous comments on public issues and current events is an abuse of position.

Was Hahn warned about this in the past? If this was his first offense, even if there is a policy, an indefinite suspension is unethically severe, so I won’t even bring that factor into today’s employment ethics Ethics Quiz, which is…

Can suspending Hahn for making a gratuitous reference to El Paso’s “illegal aliens” be ethically justified?

Outkick points out that Hahn might be excused for thinking that such editorializing is acceptable today based on the conduct of broadcasters like ESPN’s Mark Jones. ESPN (that’s Disney!) seems to encourage Jones, who routinely injects his extreme, woke, biased opinions into his basketball game coverage, constantly slamming Donald Trump, denigrating conservatives, even at one point making the false claim that Jacob Blake was unarmed to jibe with Black Lives Matter propaganda. The problem with that excuse for Hahn is 1) ESPN has clearly given Jones, at least, a green light to be unprofessional 2) Jones is black, and as we have seen elsewhere (CNN’s Don Lemon), there are different standards of professionalism for some black broadcast journalists. 3)Making gratuitous statements that offend conservatives is okay; offending progressives, even with facts, is currently far more risky.

My quiz answer: Absent a written policy, Hahn should have been warned and nothing more. If he violated a policy, a brief suspension would send a valid message.

I, however, am not broadcasting football or basketball game. They are illegal aliens (or illegal immigrants), not “migrants” or the other euphemisms and cover phrases, and that’s what they should be called, so the public understands the issue.

On The Freedom Of Speech Front…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Strangely, many of the same people who are claiming that democracy is hanging by a thread or two are also trying to fray a rather obvious thread, the right to free expression and free speech. Since that First Amendment thingy is a bear, they have to find ways around it that will stifle ideas, opinions and arguments that interfere with the “greater good”.”” (as they see it, natch). Or pretend the First Amendment “isn’t what it is” (#64).

Recent developments:

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Thoughts While Reading Classmate Entries In My Alma Mater’s Anniversary Report, #4: Imagine…If John Lennon Had Graduated From Harvard

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

If John Lennon had graduated from Harvard (and not been assassinated, of course) he might have written the ridiculous insufferable screed I just read in my anniversary report. I knew the author as a freshman, and did not enjoy the experience: the fact that he appears to be just as big a jerk today as he was when he was 18 confirms my long-held conclusion that maturity is a myth and most people don’t change as much as we would like to think.

Of course this guy is obsessed with climate change. He is downcast about the “prospects for the future of human civilization,” seeing “pending catastrophe” due to our “abuse of Mother Nature,” and there’s “very little time” to turn things around. No, Al Gore was not in my class.

Millions are going to die, “water wars” will rage, nuclear wars are inevitable, and hoards of climate-displaced refugees in the millions will roam the earth. Everyone must reduce their carbon footprint to zero–ZERO!—immediately, “not next year, not in five years, but now” or we are doomed. That means, this expert says (I can’t figure out what his real area of expertise is, but I don’t care, either), going cold turkey on fossil fuels and buying electric cars or, presumably, using bicycles and roller skates. Airplanes are right out, I guess.

He goes on to lecture on the need to abandon “tribalism,” self-interest, nations, success (“tribal dominance”) basic human aspirations and ambitions, all of it, because it is these maladies that have brought us to this perilous state. I’ll give him credit for one thing: at least he realizes that the kind of ascetic existence that he demands of humanity can’t possibly occur under the current governmental and societal structures, though he never has the guts to come right out and say what he’s advocating: world dictatorship by some body or individual who is wise and beneficent. For that would be the only way his formula for survival could ever be carried out, and that formula is exactly as absurd as Lennon’s lyrics in “Imagine.” It can’t happen, won’t happen, and most important of all, shouldn’t happen. Two and a half pages and 2,000 words of environmental, utopian virtue-signaling, all culminating in an urgent, indeed hysterical exhortation to not only do the impossible and impractical, but also do it without any reasonable assurance that such radical measures will work.

Good plan!

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David Brooks, A Trump Derangement And “Bias Makes You Stupid” Case Study

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks should have that famous epitaph tattooed on his forehead.

He was once an independent, erudite, interesting essayist of conservative leanings. Then he accepted big bucks to be the New York Times’ token conservative pundit. Soon, after forced contact with Charles Blow, Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman, the Times version on the Stockholm Syndrome took over shortly before the election of Donald Trump, whom, to be fair, the tweedy and classist Brooks surely would have regarded as icky even before his re-education by the Times. Today’s model of David Brooks is incapable of objective analysis, He serves a neon-bright cautionary tale of what happens when bias eats away at one’s analytical abilities and credibility.

Take his latest column…please.

It is called “The Sad Tales of George Santos,” but it quickly devolves into one more gratuitous attack on Donald Trump. What it most reveals, however, is how far David Brooks has fallen.

Halfway through this mess, Brooks writes, after stating the obvious about Rep.-elect George Santos,

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Thoughts While Reading Classmate Entries In My Alma Mater’s Anniversary Report, #3

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I have just a few general observations this time.

  • I know I have mentioned this before, but I can’t get past it: it is remarkable to me, but maybe it shouldn’t be, how many of my classmates regard climate change as their greatest concern for the future.These are (mostly) smart, analytical people, yet climate change conventional wisdom has been successfully implanted in their brains by relentless media hammering and by cognitive dissonance (that is, what the “good” people believe must be good and true) so deeply that they are incapable of perceiving obvious logical fallacies. The people society trusts to devise substantive and practical solutions to our problems are stuck in the “Do something!” mode. Scary.
  • Trump Derangement rages.
  • So does wilful historical revisionism. One Democrat wrote that his wife was an “Eisenhower Republican” but had abandoned the current Republican Party because it had become too radically conservative. Eisenhower Republicans would make today’s GOP seem like the Antifa. Kennedy Democrats were more conservative than today’s Republican Party.
  • By far my favorite ethical weirdness, though, is the widespread obsession with exaggerating the significance of the January 6 Capitol rioting while referring to it as both an “insurrection” and a bleak portent of the decline of democracy. This opinion is coming from the class that overwhelmingly supported the student take-over of the Harvard administration building and cheered the students who battled riot police who tried to clear out the mob! That invasion of Harvard offices was just a microcosm of the Capitol riot, a foolish and doomed tantrum, except that the students were angry that their school was supporting a war over which they had no authority or control, while the Capitol rioters were protesting what they believed was a perversion of a Presidential election that had rendered their votes and rights effectively null and void. While the students were never held accountable for their civil disobedience, the Capitol rioters have been severely punished. After decades that should have made them wiser, the former students who never held any fantasies that their brief take-over of university offices would allow them to overthrow the Harvard administration now solemnly claim that a few hundred jacked-up idiots with bear spray and sticks thought they could take over the United States government.

Climate Change Media Hype, 2022

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The more I think about it, the more the Wuhan virus fiasco strikes me as a microcosm (not too micro, unfortunately) of the climate change hysteria. Both are “Do Something!” debacles; both have demonstrated that those who argue for lock-step compliance with ideologically driven “science” don’t understand the science they demand we bow to. And, as we have seen, the policies applied to both problems have proved to be irresponsible, reckless, expensive, and destructive. Nevertheless, a substantial portion of the population remains brainwashed by climate change hysteria, even those individuals with brains one would think are too substantial to wash, much like the once sane and competent Americans who wear masks alone in their automobiles and while walking their dogs. I am seeing this in my college reunion report, as I slog through hundreds of life stories. A majority of them express terror at the looming climate apocalypse. Their solution is massive “structural change”…you know, “one world” government, though few are bold or honest enough to say so clearly.

Aiding and abetting the hysteria that is so useful to those who find democracy an inconvenience is the mainstream media. Just as it hyped the risks of the pandemic, never clearly explaining that the virus was overwhelmingly a mortal threat only to the already sick, elderly or obese—all the better to justify shutting down schools, businesses, social interaction and the economy, the news media continued to exaggerate and misrepresent the effects of climate change in 2022. Continue reading →