Government & Politics

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, April 19, 2022: “A Good Day To Die” [With Easter Bunny Update!]

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

The 19th of April is a violent ethics day in history.

—In 1775, on this date, the evening before had seen Paul Revere’s ride, and a few hours later, right about at dawn, 700 British troops marched through my home town of Arlington, Mass., then known as Menotomy, into Lexington. 77 armed minutemen under Captain John Parker waited for them on the town’s common green. Shots were exchanged, and when the Battle of Lexington ended a few minutes later, eight Americans were dead or dying and 10 others were wounded. No British soldier was killed and just one was injured, but the battle launched the Revolutionary War, for which most of us, and most of the world, are or ought to be grateful.

—In 1943 on April 19, the courageous but doomed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began when Nazi forces attempting to clear out the Polish city’s Jewish ghetto were met by gunfire from Jewish resistance fighters. The surprised Germans withdrew but soon returned, and on April 24 launched an all-out attack against the Warsaw Jews, slaughtering thousands. The Nazi army progressed down the ghettos, blowing up buildings as they went. The resistance took to the sewers to continue the fight, but their command bunker fell to the Germans on May 8, and its leaders committed suicide. During the uprising, some 300 German soldiers were killed, and thousands of Warsaw Jews were massacred.

—In Waco, Texas on April 19, 1993, the Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a tear-gas assault on the home of the Branch Davidians, an armed religious cult, after a 51-day standoff. The compound was burned to the ground, with 80 Branch Davidians, including 22 children, dying as a result.

—April 19, 1995 saw the beginning of mass domestic terrorism here, as a massive truck bomb exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The blast instantly killed more than 100 people and trapped dozens more in the rubble. When the rescue effort finally ended two weeks later, the death toll stood at 168 people killed, including 19 children who were in the building’s day-care center at the time of the blast.

Liberal pundits and Democrats blamed Rush Limbaugh, among others, who had been vocally condemning the government since the election of Bill Clinton.

1. When did Derek Chauvin get appointed to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals? In this case, the 5th Circuit ruled that an officer who deliberately caused pain to a woman because she was being “uncooperative” was in the clear. She had been arrested and was in custody, but refused to respond to the officer’s questions about her name and age. In response, the officer raised her handcuffed arms behind her back, causing, the woman said, “[e]xcruciating pain.” This was captured on the officer’s camera, and wasn’t disputed. The woman sued for violations of her Fourth Amendment rights. In ruling on an appeal, The Fifth Circuit held that such conduct by the officer—deliberately inflicting pain on a subject in custody to force compliance—was acceptable:

Nor did Martin violate Hymond’s Fourth Amendment rights. Hymond was shouting at Martin throughout the entire confrontation. She did not comply with any of Martin’s commands or instructions. Only after Hymond refused to provide Martin with her name did Martin employ any force against her. Martin’s use of force—lifting Hymond’s handcuffed arms behind her back—was relatively minimal. Hymond continued to verbally deride Martin while Martin was lifting her arms and immediately after he put her arms down. Given Hymond’s continued resistance, Martin’s use of force against Hymond was not objectively unreasonable.

The opinion literally excuses a police officer’s inflicting pain on a subject in handcuffs in response to verbal abuse and a lack of cooperation.

2. Watch: she’ll probably be elected, too. Here you can read former sex-worker and stripper Alexandra Hunt’s argument for being elected to Congress. It nicely ticks off all the boxes necessary for progressive love. I think this paragraph’s my favorite:

One does not need to boast a law degree to see how criminalization has become about a person’s identity rather than any grievance they may have committed. The prison-industrial complex has come to serve the purity model of white supremacy and places individuals into egregious living conditions if their identity deviates from white supremacy in anyway ― their race, their sexuality, their gender identity, their economic status, their nationality, or their occupation.

In fact, not having a law degree assists reaching that asinine and counter-factual conclusion. (So does hitting yourself in the head repeatedly with a frozen leg of lamb.) Elsewhere, explaining her abortion when she was 18, Hunt engages in one of my all-time most reviled rationalizations for abortion:

“I as a person was not ready to bring a child into this world, but also the world was not in a state — and is not, 10 years later, is not in a state — that I wanted to bring a child into yet, which is my decision to make. My generation faces a lack of jobs, a lack of living wage, a housing crisis, an affordable housing crisis, a student debt crisis, the climate emergency, the prison-industrial complex, and the list goes on and on. And I wanted to offer my child better.”

Actually, Alexandra, you wanted to offer your next child better. The first one you decided was better off being rubbed out of existence than getting a chance to live in the less-than-perfect world you seem to be enjoying. I’m pretty certain all potential human beings, asked whether they would prefer an imperfect life than none at all, would like their shot.

3. And now for something completely stupid…This nicely illustrates the quality of American punditry. Matt Yglesias has been a long-time progressive pundit for Slate and Vox among other platforms. He tweeted this brilliant revelation yesterday:

Continue reading →

Ethics Verdict: Non-Math Propaganda Does Not Belong In Math Textbooks

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

The New York Times reports that Florida has rejected 42 of 132 math textbooks proposed for use in public school classrooms because they “incorporate prohibited topics or unsolicited strategies” including social-emotional learning and critical race theory, according to the state’s Department of Education.

Good.

The tone of the Times article is framed to advance the “Wow, look at what radical conservative hate-mongering Neanderthals they have running the asylum in Florida, with that racist, transphobic Ron DeSantis as governor!” narrative. But this is only a partisan issue because one party’s core ideology, the Democratic Party, has, in “Happy Days” parlance, “jumped the shark,” or in my parlance, is in the process of sliding toward totalitarianism.

Here’s reporter Dana Goldstein’s second paragraph:

But Florida has a new law, which goes into effect in July, limiting the way that sexual orientation, gender identity and social-emotional skills are taught. Gov. Ron DeSantis is also expected to sign legislation, known as the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” prohibiting instruction that could prompt students to feel discomfort about a historical event because of their race, sex or national origin.

What does that have to do with a Department of Education deciding that mathematics textbooks should be entirely–not substantially, not mostly, but entirely, about mathematics? It doesn’t matter, or shouldn’t, what distractions, pet agendas, tangential advocacy or ideological indoctrination is in a math textbook. It doesn’t belong there. Standing for that rather simple and, I would think, obvious principle is not a partisan position, unless one party is interested, indeed invested, indeed determined to advance in something other than education. That something is indoctrination, and indoctrination of the young is essential for totalitarianism to grab a nation, culture, society and people by the throat. Continue reading →

From The Ethics Alarms “How Stupid Do Democrats Think The Public is?” Files: Inflation Denial Games

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This will be an interesting test of the gullibility and brain mass of the American public. Faced with epic inflation greatly worsened by the Democrat’s wild spending sprees, incompetent handling of supply chain disruptions, and virtue-signaling suppression of oil production that cannot possibly have any ameliorating effects on global climate change whatsoever, the Donkey High Command has apparently decided on a carpet-bombing “Jumbo” strategy: “Inflation? What inflation?”

We have discussed already the “Putin price hike” mantra Jen Psaki keeps repeating. Last week, I saw a White House release admitting the inflation explosion but noting that if you took out food and gas prices, the rate of inflation increase had declined thanks to deft Biden policies. This, of course, brought back memories of former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry’s immortal statement that if you didn’t include all the murders, D.C. crime rate was actually pretty good! Nancy Pelosi, Psaki and Biden have all distorted the meaning of a letter from a group of acclaimed economists endorsing the trillion dollar infrastructure bill to falsely claim that they said spending all that money would reduce inflation, so, SEE? It’s can’t be Biden’s fault! (The letter actually said, correctly, that repairing and upgrading the infrastructure would make commerce more efficient and less costly in the long-term. As the Washington Post confirmed, they were not making any statement about current inflation.)

Last week we learned that the Biden new military budget assumes only 2% inflation, meaning that its numbers are fictional.

Continue reading →

The Easter Ethics Basket: 4/17/2022. Yes, There Are Some Rotten Eggs…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Turner Movie Classics decided to kick off Easter with an abject lesson in art and life for us all. The movie is 1965’s “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” One of the very greatest of American film directors was George Stevens, who specialized in smart comedies (the Hepburn/Tracy classic “Woman of the Year”), light-hearted adventure films (“Gunga Din”) and musicals (“Swing Time,” the best in the Astaire-Rogers canon). Then, as wonderfully told in the documentary “Five Came Back,” he joined fellow directing greats John Ford, John Huston, William Wyler and Frank Capra in documenting World War II for the public, the troops, and posterity at the high cost, for all of them, of their emotional and mental health. (Wyler and Ford also suffered serious service-related injuries).

Stevens, though, drew the assignment of filming the horrors at the liberated extermination camps. When he returned to Hollywood, he didn’t feel light-hearted any more. From then on he directed dramas with serious themes, and they were his best films, like “Shane,” “Giant,” and “The Diary of Anne Frank.” Finally, he took on his most daunting challenge, filming the life of Christ with an all-star cast befitting of the project’s importance. “The Greatest Story Ever Told” is terrible; I find the film  unwatchable, and I’m not alone. Imagine the embarrassment of titling your movie “The Greatest Story Ever Told” and watching to turn out to be one of the worst movies ever made.

The bomb even has a special kick at the end when John Wayne appears as a Roman centurion staring up at Jesus on the cross, and says in the Duke’s trademark drawl, “Surely this man was the son of God!”

The Duke could shrug off, after all the resulting mockery; he had been more embarrassed playing Genghis Kahn throughout an entire film, Howard Hughes’ camp classic “The Conqueror.”

George Stevens, however, wasn’t used to bombing. The movie was a critical and box office bust, and the fiasco sent Stevens into retirement for five years. When he finally tried again, the director’s heart not only wasn’t light, it wasn’t in his work any more. “The Only Game in Town,” with Elizabeth Taylor and Warren Beatty, was an even bigger disaster than “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” though it’s easier to sit though. After all, it’s an hour shorter, and John Wayne doesn’t show up as a centurion.

The life lessons? Hubris and humility…don’t get cocky. Next: Nobody is too good or talented to fail, even at what they are best at. Finally: Aim for the stars, but be prepared to crash and burn.

1. Speaking of Stevens’ “The Diary of Anne Frank,” there was a weird episode on Ann Althouse’s blog. In one post she quoted David Mamet in his just-published book, as saying in part,

“Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich… took an adolescent girl’s diary and raped it into “The Diary of Anne Frank,” a sitcom….”

Anne has many and large holes in her cultural literacy, especially regarding film. Her commentary left it open to question whether she really believed that Hackett and Goodrich had written a comedy based on Frank’s diary (They wrote a Tony Award-winning drama as well as the acclaimed film based on it), and passed on several comments by readers who took Mamet literally as well. An example: “Joan Rivers did an interview once about what things should never be the fodder for humor….Perhaps, younger people today are distanced enough from it for a sitcom about a Jewish family hiding in an attic for over two years who are then found and killed by the Nazis to not be in poor taste.” Another  “Turning the Diary of Ann Frank into a comedy is a pretty loathsome thing to do. Things like Hogan’s Heroes worked because the Nazis were the main objects of the jokes. The victims of the Nazis aren’t.” There are others. Why would Ann let those comments through to make the commenters look like fools, especially since she helped lead them astray? Or is she, as I very much suspect, unfamiliar with the movie (which is moving and excellent)? Continue reading →

Disney And The LGTBQ Activism Ethics Train Wreck: A Prelude [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

I have been intending to examine the Disney empire’s misbegotten entry into the battle over Florida’s recently passed “Parental Rights in Education” law for weeks, but postponed the project because it is too complicated to do correctly without involving other complex issues that are closely related to it. Unfortunately, these issues have proliferated during the delay.

For example, Florida is threatening to remove Disney’s special status that allowed it to operate Disney World as an autonomous municipal government because of the company’s political action. Is that kind of punishment for a political opposition ethical? Should Disney have such special status, regardless of why it is being threatened with its removal? If the special status should be removed anyway, does it matter if it is done in response to political speech?

Here’s another: Republicans in Congress are threatening to end Disney’s copyright on Mickey Mouse, also in response to its LBGTQ activism. But that copyright should have ended decades ago, and its artificial endurance has stifled creative works blocked by thousands of other drawn-out copyrights that aren’t Disney. Now I am dealing with copyright law policy, the importance of Disney to the culture, and what, if anything, the government should do to–what? Reward it? Strengthen it? Direct it? Control it?

The Disney LGTBQ advocacy issue also involves, as virtually every issue does now, media ethics, as almost all outlets other than Fox have a clear pro-LGTBQ bias. The New York Times reporter assigned to covering Disney and the Florida law controversy is Brooks Barnes, and he can’t be trusted. In an earlier story last month, the reporter wrote,

Earlier in the week, Mr. Chapek, the company’s chief executive, botched an internal email to Disney employees. He was seeking to explain Disney’s public silence on anti-L.G.B.T.Q. legislation in Florida that activists have labeled the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

Continue reading →

A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Pop Quiz (Don’t Worry, It’s Easy): What’s Unethical About This NYT Quote?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Here is a paragraph from yesterday’s news article by reporter Jonathan Weisman in the New York Times:

In Missouri, Georgia, Ohio and now Nebraska, Republican men running for high office face significant allegations of domestic violence, stalking, even sexual assault — accusations that once would have derailed any run for office. But in an era of Republican politics when Donald J. Trump could survive and thrive amid accusations of sexual assault, opposing candidates are finding little traction in dwelling on the issues…

Now think about that for 30 seconds. What’s missing? Cue the thinking music…

Ready? Got the answer? Continue reading →

An Ethics Alarms Motto: “You Can’t Trust The Science If You Can’t Trust The Scientist”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I would hope the whole Wuhan virus fiasco would have hammered that principle home by now like a high-grade nail gun, but no. The progressives who want to use “follow the science” as their ploy to inflict the Green New Deal on America aren’t yet willing to try something else, like, say, honesty and responsible policy. So here is another case study…

A peer reviewed University of Washington study called“Mental Health Outcomes in Transgender and Nonbinary Youths Receiving Gender-Affirming Care” was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and immediately became the favorite weapon of the crowd. (The same group holds that questioning the wisdom of this marks one as “transphobic.”) The study instantly made the euphemisms “gender affirming medicine” and “gender affirming care” catch-phrases for pro-trans activists, and it was widely cited or referred to in the media and in political battles over schools’ handling of students with gender issues, real, imagined, or imposed.

The conclusion of the study, we were told, was that the students who received “gender affirming medicine” had significantly better mental health outcomes at the end of the study than they did at the beginning. The news release accompanying the study’s publication stated that “UW Medicine researchers recently found that gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary adolescents caused rates of depression to plummet.”

The study’s release was accompanied by a flashy video that claimed researchers found “gender-affirming care made a big difference in reducing depression levels for transgender youth.”

Well then! Follow the science!

Except that the study didn’t show that. Researchers with an agenda misrepresented the findings to satisfy trans advocates and activists, knowing, I assume, that 99% of those who would exploit the study wouldn’t read it. Unfortunately for them, a few did. One was journalist Jesse Singal, who looked carefully into the researchers’ numbers and couldn’t find convincing data to suggest the mental health of the transgender and nonbinary teens improved over with treatment the course of the research. Thus caught rainbow-handed, The University of Washington this week edited online materials “to more directly reflect the findings as reported in the study.”

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Ethics Breezes And Gales, 4/14/2022: The End Of A Conspiracy And The Beginning Of Conspiracy Theories [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

April 14 will always be the date that I associate above all else with Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, which occurred 157 years ago.  Lincoln and the audience at Ford’s Theater laughed uproariously, as John Wilkes Booth knew they would, at the line “Why you sockdologizing old man-trap!” in the play the Lincolns and their guests were watching, “Our American Cousin.” Booth fired a single-shot derringer into the back of Lincoln’s skull, dreew a dagger and stabbed Major Rathbone, also in Lincoln’s box along with Mrs. Lincoln and Rathbone’s fiancee, in the arm, and dramatically leaped down onto the stage, shouting Virginia’s motto,“Sic semper tyrannis! (Thus ever to tyrants!) The South is avenged!”  Booth caught his spur on a draped flag on the way down and broke his leg, but limped across the stage and out to waiting horse through a back stage exit. Lincoln never regained consciousness.

Not only was it the first and still most spectacular of the four Presidential assassinations [Notice of Correction: I originally wrote “five,” not because I can’t count, which is what usually happens, but because I was counting Reagan, because he was actually shot. Moron. Thanks to Steve-O-in NJ for alerting me, or I’d have to ban myself from the blog for passing on “misinformation”], Booth’s act and subsequent events, oddities and coincidences launched perhaps the first widespread political conspiracy theory. I wrote in 2010,

[A]s a teenager, I became fascinated by the Lincoln assassination conspiracy. A best-seller at the time was “Web of Conspiracy,” an over-heated brief for the theory that Lincoln’s War Secretary, Edwin Stanton, and others in the military were in league with John Wilkes Booth. The author, a mystery writer named Theodore Roscoe, was constantly suggesting sinister motives by asking questions like “The sealed records of the official assassination investigation were destroyed in a mysterious fire. Was the War Department afraid of what the documents would prove? Would they have implicated Stanton? We will never know.”  This tactic is on view regularly today, used generously by the purveyors of modern conspiracies…

Then again, sometimes conspiracy theories, even unlikely ones, turn out to be true. There was sure a lot of smoke around Lincoln’s assassination (after all, there really was a conspiracy, as Booth had at least five co-conspirators working on his plot for months), and it didn’t help when Robert Lincoln, Abe’s son, was caught burning his papers and told the man who interrupted him (allegedly) that he was doing so because the contained proof that a member of his father’s own cabinet was involved in his assassination. Yet none of the components of the Lincoln conspiracy narrative have held up to scrutiny, except as tantalizing suspicions.

1. First, the rest of a story...Two weeks ago Ethics Alarms covered the story of Kychelle Del Rosario, a fourth-year medical student at Wake Forest School of Medicine, who appeared to admit in a tweet that she deliberately caused pain and discomfort to a patient because he had mocked her  “preferred pronoun” pin. After her tweet was seen, circulated and attacked on social media, she deleted it in an attempted cover-up. Wake Forest suspended her pending an investigation, which is now complete. It’s conclusion: Del Rosario was grandstanding, implying that she stuck the patient a second time when she had turned the job over to a supervisor. “Our documentation verifies that after the student physician was unsuccessful in obtaining the blood draw, the student appropriately deferred a second attempt to one of our certified professionals. The student did not attempt to draw blood again,” the university stated. 

But had she deliberately missed the vein the first time to punish the “transphobic” patient? Wake Forest believed her statements that she had not, saying, “Our review revealed that the description of the patient encounter on social media does not reflect what actually occurred. We also determined that all of our procedures were followed while caring for this patient.” For her part, Del Rosarion, who expects to be reinstated, said,

“For the event mentioned in the tweet, I was performing a blood draw on a patient and during our conversation they had shown dismay at my pronoun pin,” she said. “I calmly shared my thoughts about pronouns and did not escalate the situation further. When I was doing the blood draw, I missed the first time due to my inexperience as a student, and per our policy, my supervisor performed the successful blood draw the second time….[I] never intended to harm the patient.”

She also wrote an apology to the school for her inflammatory tweet, admitting   to “poorly representing” the school and the healthcare system. [Source: Campus Reform] Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.); Ethics Dunces: GOP House Members Who Listened To Him

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I know the maxim is that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, but how do you explain this? It appears to be an example of a total fool leading the slightly less foolish.

What’s going on here? Continue reading →

The Great Stupid And Seattle Transit

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

In Michael Crichton’s”The Lost World,” a “Jurassic Park” follow-up not to be confused with the “Jurassic Park” film sequel of the same name and not one of the writer’s best, there is an interesting discussion of how some species of dinosaurs may have caused their own eventual extinction by developing toxic habits, like not caring for their young. It was the first thing I thought of when I read about the ridiculous transit system crisis in Seattle.

Oh-oh.

It shouldn’t be surprising, I suppose, that the city that encouraged woke support for the destructive George Floyd riots in 2020 has adopted other unethical policies that make the Left’s anointed feel good even though the policies can’t possible work and constitute irresponsible leaps onto ruinous slippery slopes. 

The Seattle light rail public transit system has no turnstiles: passengers are supposed to  buy a ticket or tap their pre-paid card. It’s an honor system, but in woke Seattle, the ideal purpose of government is to for almost everything, so 70%—Seventy per cent!!—of the riders are freeloaders. This means that fares cover just 5% of the system’s operating costs. 40% was the minimum Sound Transit set as a requirement.

All public transit systems lose money (though they are approved after estimates that routinely overstate likely ridership), but they will help us avoid death by climate change, see, so they are essential and wonderful per se. However, if a city just lets riders cheat, such systems cause wider problems in the social contract.

(Do we really have to keep explaining this?)

Seattle’s Sound Transit stopped even minimal enforcement of fare requirements after a study revealed that blacks were disproportionately getting fined. Ah HA! The system was racist then! How far a jump is it to apply the same logic to other laws? It is how San Francisco. ended up legalizing shop-lifting.

I’m sorry: my tone is snarkier than usual this morning. But this is all so infuriating. And unethical. And stupid. Continue reading →