Government & Politics

When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: The Self-Disqualification Of Rep. Louise Frankel (D-Fla.)

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Now THAT was a freak-out…and a particularly telling one.

Richard Kline, owner of City Diner in West Palm Beach, Florida, dared to display the campaign poster above, promoting Rep. Louise Frankel’s Republican opponent in the upcoming November election. Frankel has eaten at the diner for many years, and made it clear that this obligated the owner to support her re-election campaign, or at least not to oppose it. When someone told her about the presence of the poster in the diner, she stormed into Kline’s establishment and began berating and threatening him. Of course someone caught it all on cell phone video, and posted the scene on YouTube.

What did she think would happen? In addition to indicating that the Congresswoman has no self-control, believes she is entitled to power, and has no respect for a constituent’s right to support whatever candidate he or she chooses, the outburst demonstrates that she’s not smart enough to be entrusted with lawmaking.

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“A Nation Of Assholes,” Congressional Division

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Nice! There has been a recent outbreak of further uncivil, undignified speech and communication from members of Congress, who are, unfortunately role models and set help societal standards. The recent outburst have come from Democrats, though the phenomenon is not limited to that more rapidly rotting party….on the other hand, no Republican House member has yet said, in reference to President Biden, “Let’s impeach the motherfucker!” as Rep. Rashida Tlaib  did regarding President Trump. On the other hand, two Republican House members, Bill Posey and Jeff Duncan, evoked “Let’s go Brandon!” during House, which is the equivalent of  “Fuck Joe Biden.”

Chuy Garcia’s tweet is special, though. The Cook County House rep’s deep dive into vulgarity against  a random critic on Twitter was in print (though he deleted it eventually) and was unethical, unprofessional and unseemly in many ways. “Retarded,” of course, is a banned word in Progressive World. “Dipshit” is not acceptable discourse by an elected official, nor is “fucking” and its variations, though Rep. Talaib would doubtless argue that the normal rules don’t apply when the target is Donald Trump, just like “journalists” now argue that his existence justifies their routinely—but righteous!—biased and misleading reporting. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Ex CNN Anchor Chris Cuomo

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“I saw a lot of brave men and women deciding to take somebody on who had a tremendous amount of power and who had come at them by name too and that’s a scary thing.”

—-Disgraced CNN star Chris Cuomo, celebrating himself and CNN for slanting new reports in order to oppose Donald Trump.

Cuomo could not have made a stronger case against the left-biased news media if that had been his objective. Many of his statements to Bill Maher in Cuomo’s appearance on HBO’s “Real Time” would serve as well as the above to prove just how arrogant and unethical Cuomo’s previous profession has become. For example, there is this: Continue reading →

Why Must I Be A Blogging Ethicist In Ethics Zugzwang?

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

I was going to sing it, but it doesn’t fit the music…

Here is my problem…

Describing the ugly developments arising out of the Democratic Soviet-style show trial aimed at neutralizing Donald Trump by criminalizing his post election excesses, and, if possible, intimidating and harassing his supporters past and present, esteemed former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy writes in part, Continue reading →

Dispatches From The Great Stupid, Climate Change Grandstanding Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

We owe this tale to the always mordantly amusing Manhattan Contrarian.

Like his counterpart in the White House, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont, (D, of course), is addicted to completely useless climate change measures. Last week he signed the bipartisan Clean Air Act, and in the subsequent celebration of this epic moment, a State Senator spouted rhetoric about waiting for Washington, D.C. to “save the planet.” Anyone who actually understands anything about the vicissitudes of climate change and the wildly complex interaction of factors affecting it knows that Washington, D.C. can’t “save the planet,” but Lamont’s state really can’t save the planet. The Manhattan Contrarian explains that Connecticut…

…has a population of only about 3.6 million. Its greenhouse gas emissions are in the range of about 41 MMTCO2e per year, which is well less than 0.1% of total world annual emissions of about 49,000 MMTCO2e. You could zero out Connecticut’s emissions entirely, and it wouldn’t even amount to a rounding error in the world total. Indeed, the increase that occurs each year in China’s CO2 emissions is a multiple of Connecticut’s total emissions. (According to Our World in Data here, from 2019 to 2020, latest years given, China’s CO2 emissions went from 10.49 to 10.67 billion tons, a one-year increase of about 180 million tons, or well more than four times the total annual emissions of Connecticut.)

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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.

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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:

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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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