Government & Politics

This, Apparently, Is Ethical “Misinformation”…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The New York Time Book Review this week includes a review by novelist Mitchell S. Jackson of Elizabeth Alexander’s book “The Trayvon Generation.” I haven’t read the book itself, but it’s goals and orientation are clear from the review by Jackson. Jackson is, like Alexander, a Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory endorsing activist. If I were editing a book review supplement, I would think it mandatory to assign a reviewer to Alexander’s work who wasn’t so obviously predisposed to agree with her views and praise them, but that’s just not how the Times rolls these days. But this isn’t the point of my post.

This is: in the middle of his review, Alexander wrote—and the Times printed—

Never forget — on Feb. 26, 2012, a hella overzealous volunteer neighborhood watch captain named George Zimmerman stalked and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

Never forget — on July 13, 2013, a jury acquitted Zimmerman, an egregious verdict that fomented the Black Lives Matter movement into being.

Continue reading →

Expert? EXPERT? Fauci Doesn’t Even Comprehend The Government He Works For!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Or, in the alternative, he has finally revealed himself as another aspiring totalitarian progressive. Either way, the doctor is a dangerous, arrogant, power-abusing fool, and it’s way past time to get rid of him.

Last week Dr. Fauci—may he go down in U.S. history as one of the nation’s true villains—said:

“We are concerned about … the courts getting involved in things that are unequivocally a public health decision… This is a CDC issue, should not have been a court issue… It was perfectly logical.”

Yes, he really said this. No, I wouldn’t kid you, he really did. He is Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President of the United States. He has been director of the NIAID since 1984. From 1983 to 2002, Fauci was one of the world’s most frequently cited scientists across all scientific journals. In 2008, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

And yet he either doesn’t understand the Constitution of the United States, or wants to overturn it in favor of a dictatorship of experts. Ironically, he epitomizes exactly what is wrong with “experts” in so many fields. They tend to be single-minded and locked into tunnel vision. They drift toward favoring processes that favor an “ends justify the means” philosophy. They are ultimately untrustworthy and unethical. Continue reading →

Rep. Cawthorne And The Cross-Dressing Future Congressman Principle Question

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Yes, this is a funny controversy, but not entirely trivial. And you knew Ethics Alarms would be on it like hound on a hock of ham, because examining the Naked Teacher Principle [NTP]and its real or proposed extensions, sisters, cousins and aunts, have been a periodic obsession of both Ethics Alarms and its predecessor, The Ethics Scoreboard. Add to that the fact that that Madison Cawthorn (R-NC.), is both a Christian values-spouting politician and a mega-jerk, and the photo above, showing him cavorting in lingerie, cannot be ignored (or, once seen, unseen).

The Principle states that a secondary school teacher or administrator (or other role model for children) who allows pictures of himself or herself to be widely publicized, as on the web, showing the teacher naked or engaging in sexually provocative poses, cannot complain when he or she is dismissed by the school as a result.

It is important to remember that even the Naked Teacher Principle does not hold that teachers necessarily should be dismissed if old photos surface of them online that show more of them than parents and schools want students to see, but that it is their own carelessness that created their career crisis, and that the decision to dismiss them is ethically defensible. Most recent posts on the topic involve whether the NTP can be applied to other professions.The last time it was discussed, in 2012, involved a nurse who made money on the side by posing provocatively on a sexually themed website. The conclusion here was was that there was no “Naked Nurse Principle,” and that her firing was unjust.  The previous NTP-related post involved, almost a year before that one,  rebutting the argument that there are similar principles regarding police and firefighters. Some of the more interesting versions that have been explored on Ethics Alarms include The Female Bodybuilder Firefighter Principle, The Drag Queen Principal Principle, The Online Porn Star Teacher Principle, Naked Naval War College Professor Principle, and more.

So now we must ask, “Is there a Cross-Dressing Future Congressman Principle”? Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The Fake Trump Interview Walk-Out Story

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Yesterday, the conservative New York Post reported,

Former President Donald Trump blasted Piers Morgan as “very dishonest” while walking out of an interview with the TV presenter and Post columnist after being pressed on his claims that he lost the 2020 presidential election due to voter fraud.

The walk-out story was picked up and reported in many other publications and forums. It wasn’t true. Morgan and whoever handles his promotion had sent out edited segments of a much longer interview on his new TV show, “Piers Morgan Uncensored” on Talk TV, which debuts next week.

An audio recording indicated that the interview did not end with Trump storming off the set, as the promotional video indicated and the Post and others reported. According to the recording, the two men thanked each other and laughed as the interview came to an end. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Tune-Up, 2/22/22: A Very Special Episode…

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

1.  “What’s going on here?” I have not decided what exactly the article “The New Homophobia” in Newsweek (Flagged this morning by Althouse: Pointer for Ann!) means or portends: it is, after all, just one man’s opinion. However, I sense that it is relevant to the issues underlying the Disney vs. Florida controversy.

Excerpts…

I learned about queer theory, an obscure academic discipline based largely on the writing of the late French intellectual Michel Foucault, who believed that society categorizes people—male or female, heterosexual or homosexual—in order to oppress them. The solution is to intentionally blur—or “queer”—the boundaries of these categories. Soon this “queering” became the predominant method of discussing and analyzing gender and sexuality in universities…

***

This might not be a concern if, by adopting these new identities, young people were merely playing with the boundaries of normative gender expression—something that gays, lesbians, feminists, most liberals and even many conservatives would welcome two decades into the 21st century. But many young boys do not stop at simply painting their fingernails and wearing dresses, and young girls do more than cut their hair short and play football. With increasing frequency, these children are given drugs to block their puberty, cross-sex hormones and irreversible surgeries, all the while cheered on first by online communities, then the mainstream media and now the current presidential administration…

*** Continue reading →

DeSantis Strikes Back: Ethics Dunce Disney Gets The Legal And Ethical Consequences It Deserved

/ Jack Marshall / 54 Comments

During a special session called for the purpose, Florida’s Senate has passed a bill that would end the special autonomous tax district status granted to Walt Disney World 1967. The bill now goes to Florida’s House, where passage is expected. Gov. DeSantis will, of course, sign the bill into law.

Good.

The mainstream news media and its minions are pushing, hard, the skewed narrative that this is GOP hypocrisy, with a state government using its power to punish a corporation’s free speech. That, however, is not a correct analysis.

What Disney did, when it publicly announced that it would protest and fight to repeal the Parental Rights in Education Law (falsely and dishonestly tagged the “Don’t Say Gay” law by LGTBQ activists, including much of the news media), was to breach the implicit conditions of its 55 year-old deal with the State of Florida, and, in an uncharacteristic blunder, prompt it to do what it had an ethical and legal duty to do anyway.

By 1967, Walt Disney himself had been negotiating a sweetheart deal with Florida since Walt Disney World was just another twinkle in his eye. The planned 40 acre complex was audacious and unprecedented, and audacious because it was unprecedented. Central Florida was an under-utilized swamp, and Disney was promising to turn it into the biggest tourist destination in the U.S. This would mean publicity, tourism ,commerce, hotel construction, jobs, tax revenue and development for Florida, and Disney was a tough negotiator. (Another Disney theme park project planned for Manassas, Virginia was abruptly killed when that state was less than accommodating.) Disney had a well-earned reputation for doing things right, so Florida saw nothing but benefits in allow it nearly complete freedom to build and run the new theme park the way it chose, without meddling from regulators. When Disney wanted to build a building, fill in a lake, or pave a road, it didn’t have to seek permits or approval, allowing the place to operate and start making money for itself and Florida as early as possible. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Verdict: “Non-Math Propaganda Does Not Belong In Math Textbooks”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Here are Humble Talent’s observations, a Comment of the Day, regarding the matter of math textbooks and teaching being used as a method to seed “social justice” constructs, which was discussed in the post, “Ethics Verdict: Non-Math Propaganda Does Not Belong In Math Textbooks”:

***

What’s been interesting to me recently is the fundamental lack of self awareness exhibited from progressives in these cases.

I get it. They’re bubbled. They do a disproportionate amount of their communication either with people who already think like them or with strangers on platforms that filter their already tilted perspectives through algorithms or self curation. But at some point it beggars belief.

I wrote about CRT last June (https://humbletalent.substack.com/p/critical-race-theory?s=w), and predicted that it would be the issue we’d still be talking about in 2022. It’s a racial issue, which progressives feel very strongly about. It’s an issue where they are wrong, but refuse to reflect on. And it’s an issue with a *very* interested and entrenched demographic involved (parents). Continue reading →

Now THAT’S An Incompetent Journalist!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I have several large, complicated ethics issues to write about (like the LibsofTikTok fiasco) and I’m not looking forward to it, so I’m starting this morning with an easy call that confirms many of my deeply held convictions.

One is that journalists, as a group, just aren’t that sharp. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions: this is a field that has never attracted the best and the brightest, and it is a structural problem that has become a major problem in the age of the “new journalism,” which is advocacy journalism, as in unethical journalism. The people with the largest metaphorical megaphone lack the wisdom, acumen, education of critical thinking skills to justify their having it. Yet they really think they know best, and have the right and the duty to use a job that was supposed to be about informing the public to manipulate public opinion for what journalists think is “the greater good.” They don’t know what the greater good is. Most don’t know what “good” is.

Chris Cillizza isn’t just any journalist: he’s supposed to be one of the better ones. Horrible thought: he probably is. He’s an editor at CNN, and before that he wrote the daily political blog of The Washington Post, and was a regular writer for the Post on political issues as well as a frequent panelist on “Meet the Press.” He also has a long rap sheet on Ethics Alarms, despite the fact that I avoid following his regular forays into fake news, propaganda, and biased punditry. Who knows what I’ve missed. Continue reading →

Two From The Ethics Alarms “I Don’t Understand This At All” Files…Part II: The Bad Cop Catch-22

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

In 1995, Darryl Howard [above] was wrongfully convicted of murder and imprisoned for more than two decades, one of many egregious miscarriages of justice during that period in Durham, North Carolina. Mike NiFong, the infamous prosecutor who pursued the Duke Lacrosse case, prosecuted him, and a Durham detective named Darrell Dowdy fabricated evidence while doing a negligent investigation. The Innocence Project helped free Howard; in 2016, the convictions were vacated and the DA who succeeded NiFong dismissed the charges. In April 2021, Gov. Roy Cooper officially pardoned Howard, who sued the city and Dowdy, and in December, a federal jury found former Detective  Dowdy had indeed framed him. A jury awarded Howard $6 million.

Durham, however, is refusing to pay and wants Howard to pay the legal fees of of two city employees who were eventually dismissed from the suit.

“I proved my innocence. I went through every court. Every judge says what this was, even the governor,” Howard told the Raleigh News & Observer. “Now I have to fight again.” Durham’s employees robbed Howard of the prime years of his life, but the city has tried every legal tactic to avoid addressing the injustice it was responsible for inflicting on him. One of its arguments is that since Howard had a record of various crimes and convictions before he was wrongly sent to prison for murder, it shouldn’t have to compensate him as if he were a model citizen.

Head explosion time. That’s one of the most unethical and illogical arguments I’ve ever heard a government make. Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month AND Unethical Tweet Of The Week: Mass. State Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa (D-1st Hampshire District)

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

  • Do we really have more elected officials at the local, state and national levels who are spectacularly ignorant of basic civics and the U.S. Constitution, or does it just seem that way?
  • How typical is this idiot/totalitarian of Democrats generally?
  • How can anyone trust, never mind vote for, someone who thinks she won’t be pilloried for stating that government power should not be constrained by laws?
  • Incompetent elected officials like this are far, far more dangerous than Joy Behar, who thinks the Supreme Court passes bills. All Joy does is talk on TV. Sabadosa is in a position where her ignorance and fondness for government dictatorship can do real damage.