Government & Politics

Ethics Villain: Surprise! (Not Really…) It’s Cassidy Hutchinson!

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Even for the rarefied, rank air of Ethics Villains, Cassidy Hutchinson, the January 6 Witch Hunt “star witness,” reeks.

Hutchinson became a goddess of the Trump Deranged when  she testified in Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s prime time TV show-trial in June. The former White House aide to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows dramatically claimed that she “still struggle[s] to work through the emotions” of that admittedly ugly day. “As an American, I was disgusted. It was unpatriotic,” Hutchinson said. “We were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie, and it was something that was really hard in that moment to digest.”

Sure, Cassidy.

You’re busted. Continue reading →

“Freefall” Ethics Reflections: “Is This It?”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

British novelist William Golding, whom you probably know best as the author of “Lord of the Flies,” wrote a disturbing novel the year I was born called “Freefall.” It was on the reading list of a literature course I took as a college junior, and though it was easily the least well-known of the novels we studied (and is one of Golding’s least-known books as well), “Freefall” is the one that has most echoed back to me at various times over the decades.

The first-person narrator is a miserable and depressed man, an artist, imprisoned in a German prisoner of war camp during World War II and awaiting torture in a small, dark store room. In fear and isolation, he finds his mind reviewing the minutiae of his life, as he searches for the exact moment when his life went horribly and irretrievably wrong and he lost control. In flashbacks, he constantly stops, sometimes after re-living what seems to be the most trivial event, and asks “Was this it? Was this the moment?’

I thought about “Freefall” once again this morning, as I tried to process a series of absurd and incomprehensible recent occurrences and statements. “Is this it?” I found myself wondering, like Golding’s pathetic hero, “Is this it? Is this the moment The Great Stupid completely obliterates all reason and leaves the United States public wandering around aimlessly moaning like the zombies in ‘The Walking Dead’?”

No, it’s not a particularly momentous chain of events, just one that can’t happen anywhere that has sturdy values, trustworthy leadership, and functioning ethics alarms.

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Musings On The Transgender Problem”

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Before I present Tom P.’s Comment of the Day, one of several excellent reader reactions to the post, indulge me as I respond in detail to a slur on me by the now-banned commenter who claimed that associating transgender individuals with a “problem” evoked a fascist mindset and the genocidal intent of Hitler’s “final solution.” It was this repeatedly nasty commenter’s doubling down on his accusation that finally moved me to ban him after multiple warnings from me and his repeated defiance of appropriate discourse here.

The guy was a relentless progressive troll, though a relatively smart one, and fair debate was not on his agenda. What has become a routine tactic among such partisans here and elsewhere is to attempt to constrain language in order to make coherent arguments against Leftist cant more difficult, and also to play cognitive dissonance games by attaching sinister and discredited figures, positions and rhetoric to legitimate discourse that the ideologues don’t want to deal with fairly, or can’t.

Of course I wasn’t thinking of “the Jewish Problem,” as it was characterized by Hitler and his minions when I titled the post “Ethics Musings On The Transgender Problem,” but even if that abuse of the term “problem” had popped into my mind, it wouldn’t have dissuaded me. One dishonest and dastardly use of language for propaganda purposes cannot and should not restrict the legitimate use of the same words by others.

Germany had no “Jewish problem.” Germany’s Jewish community was among the most productive, loyal and successful ethnic groups in the nation. Hitler slandered these innocent citizens with the false claim that their religion, race and culture made them a threat to civilization, and did so with the specific goal of creating popular supports tor exterminating them. This history, I was told, meant that anyone assessing any group of any kind as a “problem” is unethical.

This is all part of the now familiar race-baiting, dog-whistling, political correctness “gotcha!” strategy used by various interest groups on the left to stifle legitimate discussion and to brand adversaries as unfit for the public square. I won’t play. If I was going to criticize the title of that post, it would be on the basis that the headline suggested that the problem discussed in the essay, the difficulty of determining whether trangenderism should be regarded as abnormal, was the only “transgender problem.” There are, of course, many. Problem: How do we ethically integrate true transgender individuals into gender-segregated sports? Problem: How does society simultaneously eliminate the stigma attached to individuals coping with serious gender identity issues without encouraging gender confusion among the young? There are others.

As for the blanket assertion that it is unethical to designate any group as a problem as far as public policy and ethical treatment goes, I reject it completely. Too many groups pose serious and difficult problems for society to mention them all, but some that come to my mind immediately, remembering that even problematic groups have members who present possible solutions to the problems or who may make valuable contributions to it, are:

  • Illegal immigrants.
  • Corporations
  • Koran-obeying Muslims
  • Unmarried parents
  • Black Lives Matters members and supporters
  • Trump supporters
  • Ideologues
  • Racists
  • Billionaires
  • The homeless
  • Alcoholics
  • Drug addicts, users and peddlers
  • Ignorant citizens
  • Stupid people.
  • Sexual predators
  • Incels
  • White supremacists
  • Journalists
  • Teachers, professors and school administrators…

I could go on and on. The fact that I regard these and other groups as creating problems (perhaps it would have been better have used “challenge” rather than “problem”….but it was only a headline) for American society today does not mean that I advocate wiping them off the face of the earth.

Here is Tom P.’s Comment of the Day on the post “Ethics Musings On The Transgender Problem”…

***

The whole furor surrounding transgenderism is multifaceted. This is true of virtually all polarizing issues. Pick any polarizing issue and within the pro and con camps, you will find the following subcamps: radical activists, passionate true believers, opportunists, virtue signaling supporters, go-a-longs to get-a-longs, and casual non-vocal supporters. Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month (And Unethical Quote Of The Month Too!): Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.)

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Really…what an idiot. There is no excuse for a political party allowing someone this obnoxious and stupid to run under its banner for Congress. After all, stupid people have a strong majority in many districts, and parties have an obligation to mitigate this democracy-mocking problem by at least trying not to nominate candidates like Matt Gaetz. Ethics Alarms didn’t need his latest embarrassment to make this observation about Gaetz: he already earned it several times over. Just peruse his EA dossier. Gaetz’s most recent mention here for being like he is was in April, and a year earlier I expounded on his creepiness at length, concluding in part,

I have seen enough to conclude that Rep. Gaetz is a creep. I don’t like creeps, and as a general proposition I don’t think creeps should be in positions of influence and power, because you can’t trust creeps. They are ethically “bent”….I know that Gaetz is a creep because he screams creepiness, like his stunt of wearing a gas mask on the floor of the House of Representatives during debate over the first pandemic aid bill, and joining a group of Republicans who forced their way into a closed congressional witness deposition during the run-up to Trump’s first impeachment in 2019. ...Then there’s his revelation last year that he has been living with a 19-year-old non-biological male, un-adopted “son”, Cuban immigrant Nestor Galban, whom he met when Galban was 12 and Gaetz was dating his older sister.

Or just listen to the guy.

As in so many other cases, the fact that someone like him could be elected speaks horribly about the voters in his district, the party that nominated him, and the state of democracy generally. His various statements show him to have a scarlet “C” on his forehead.

All of which is a prelude to his most recent episode: saying this to a crowd of Turning Point conservatives yesterday:

“Why is it that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about having abortions? Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb.”

But that’s Matt!

Observations:

Continue reading →

Wow! Extreme Ideology And Resistance To Stubborn Reality Leads To Astoundingly Unethical And Irresponsible Policies…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I don’t understand this at all. I don’t understand how intelligent officials—and by “intelligent” here I only mean “smart enough to put their socks on before their shoes”—-can possibly convince themselves that ignoring common sense and the collected wisdom of centuries as well as the acquired knowledge of recent decades will have anything but disastrous results. But here we stand:

  • In June, the California Highway Patrol arrested two men after a search of their vehicle revealed a stash of cocaine and 150,000 fentanyl pills. Based on the amount of drugs involved, they were booked into jail with an initial bail amount of $1 million each. (Fentanyl kills people.) But a pre-trial risk assessment of the suspects resulted in the men being classified  “low risk,” so they were released on their own recognizance without either the local D.A. or law enforcement officials being consulted. The two men, 25-year-old Jose Zendejas and 19-year-old Benito Madrigal, faced up to 14 years in state prison. They were expected to show up back in court on July 21. Shockingly, they did not. Nobody knows where they are.Their release is part of the social justice movement to eliminate bail because it discriminates against poor people. It also helps with the over-incarceration problem, because it allows criminals to get away with their crimes and harm society again, while broadcasting the message to other would be criminals that they are in a low-risk, high rewards profession as long as they stay where fantasy-blinded progressives run things….like California.

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Friday Ethics Fire Sale, 7/22/2022: We Didn’t Start The Fire!

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Tip: Showtime’s “Billions” is streaming. It’s an excellent ethics series, with a plot-driven clash between legal ethics, business ethics, marital ethics and workplace ethics.

And Paul Giamatti (“John Adams”) remains the best actor related to a (late, much missed) Commissioner of Baseball ever.

1. AOC set up her reflex defenders to look foolish (not that they don’t deserve to) First, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) denied that her arrest outside the Supreme Court on Tuesday was “performative art,” and claimed, risibly, that she was not pretending to be handcuffed for the cameras. However, about 30 minutes before the arrests of pro-abortion protesters outside the Supreme Court including 17 Democratic House members, a staffer for AOC’s fellow “Squad “member Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) let a metaphorical cat out of the bag. Jeremy Slevin tweeted, adding that the stunt would be live-streamed,:

“Members of Congress, including @IlhanMN will be participating in a civil disobedience at the Supreme Court, potentially including arrests, shortly. 1 PM ET/12 PM CT,”

After her indignant denials, Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Instagram, “This was an activist-led civil disobedience, where activists & organizers from [the far-left Center for Popular Democracy Action Fund ] + others asked members of Congress to submit themselves for arrest in front of the Supreme Court.”

In other words, it was indeed “performative art.” Moreover, it is unethical for members of Congress to allow themselves to be recruited as advocacy props for other organizations. That’s not their job. It is particularly not their job because the Supreme Court is not constructed to conform its legal determinations to public protests or the desires of elected officials…nor should it or can it,

On a technical note ( which Ann Althouse, being the way she is, focused upon mightily), civil disobedience is when a protester violates the law they are protesting, and accepts the penalties for doing so. AOC and the rest were not arrested for performing illegal abortions, but for blocking traffic.

Continue reading →

Ethics Musings On The Transgender Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 60 Comments

Is being transgender a mental disorder? A lot of news and controversies around the suddenly militant minority seems to compel honest consideration of the question. It is definitely not a formal disorder, but that doesn’t deal with the issue. The medical profession, which is, as has been periodically documented on Ethics Alarms, is now politically-driven and in the directing of progressive positions and agendas.

Up until 2012, transgenderism was labeled a mental disorder; that year, the American Psychiatric Association revised its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and struck transgenderism from the list. Now, woke institutions like the Cleveland Clinic state outright, “Being transgender is not a mental illness. But people who are transgender face unique challenges, such as gender dysphoria and discrimination, which can affect their mental health….” The Clinic then adopts whole cloth the familiar transgender narrative, uncritically, as if it is scientific fact rather than an ideological position:

Healthcare providers assign a baby a sex at birth. Babies may be assigned female at birth (AFAB) or assigned male at birth (AMAB) based on their external physical genitalia. The term “cisgender” describes people who identify as the gender that matches their assigned sex. (For example, if you’re born biologically female and you identify as female, then you’re cisgender.) But for some people, as they grow up and understand themselves better, they find that their gender doesn’t match their assigned, biological sex.

Continue reading →

Afternoon Ethics Woolgathering, 7/20/2022: Conspiracies And Condign Justice

/ Jack Marshall / 93 Comments

July 20 should be permanently recognized as Conspiracy Theory Day. It’s the anniversary of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in 1969, and the event spawned one of the most hilarious of all conspiracy theories, that the whole thing was faked by NASA. Many believe it still. This one is an anti-government conspiracy theory, so perhaps the “Truthers” fantasy that George W. Bush bombed the Pentagon and Twin Towers on 9/11 has passed it. Or maybe the theory that a Kennedy assassination conspiracy involving President Johnson and the CIA is at the top of the list. My 8th grade history professor told our class that it was a fact that FDR conspired to let the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor so the U.S. would enter the war.

A friend from childhood, smart to the point of brilliance, who once commented here often, sincerely believes that Barack Obama’s natural born citizenship is a hoax.

These conspiracy theories that cause people to believe their own government is a malign force are very harmful. More harmful yet is the current environment, where both political parties are vigorously pursuing conspiracy theories against the other.

It does not help the situation that some conspiracy theories, like the one that long held that the government was withholding evidence of unidentified flying objects, turn out to be true.

1. Condign justice dept. “Condign justice” was a term I never heard or read before George Will started using it. Then I stopped reading George Will, whose NeverTrumpism revealed him to be a classist hypocrite, requiring me to use it. Today’s example is the mayors of New York City and Washington D.C. complaining bitterly about being inundated with illegal immigrants. New York is suffering in great part because of its proud position as a “sanctuary city,” thus encouraging illegals to violate our laws. NYC Mayor Eric Adams demanded yesterday that the federal government help pay for what he said was a wave of illegal immigrants pouring into the city, as he whined about the city’s “safety net” being strained by busloads of people coming from border states and elsewhere. (CBS News helpfully apes Adams in calling the border-breachers “asylum-seekers,” hoping to cover-up what they really are.)  Awww. Well gee, Mayor, if you didn’t openly invite them and say they would be welcomed and protected from our mean old laws, maybe there wouldn’t be so darn many.

Some old saw about making beds seems to be appropriate here. Idiot. Continue reading →

How Can Anyone Trust An Elected Official That Does This?

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

Yes, that’s the Honorable Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, after breaking the law in a useless protest before the Supreme Court building, pretending to be handcuffed for the crowd, and then, ridiculously, deciding that a gesture of defiance was better, so she drops the shackled act and raises her arm.

Her fellow Squadder Ilhan Omar also faked handcuffs or zip-ties.

This cynical play-acting is signature significance for frauds, hucksters, scammers and liars. No one with integrity does this. No one with instincts better than a 12-year-old tries it either. The charade proves disrespect for the public, and confidence that they can get away with outright deception without consequences.

They might as well have faked limps, or spilled ketchup on their foreheads.

If elected officials will try this kind of childish fakery, what else are they capable of lying about?

The answer is “Everything.”

Gallup Finds “Media Confidence Ratings at Record Lows”…Well, Good!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Why “good”? It’s obviously not good that the trustworthiness of journalism has declined so precipitously. What is good, since the news media has proven itself to be so biased, irresponsible, dishonest and untrustworthy, is that the public is waking up and no longer trusts it. That minimizes the damage. It does not solve, however, the existential danger to our democracy of having a propaganda system instead of objective and reliable reporting.

Sure, this is a poll, and polls themselves are biased and unreliable. Gallup and Pew, however, are the most reliable of the pollsters, and this one at least seems right. 11% trust in TV news is essentially no trust at all: that number represents the moron component that shows up in every poll. (The 16% trust level in newspapers is irrationally high.) Continue reading →