Government & Politics

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.

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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.

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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 →

Founders’ Are Denigrated In Their Own Homes …And An Organized Protest Is Required

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Apparently the Mad Left’s historical air-brushing mania that began with toppling statues of important American figures from the Confederacy such as Robert E. Lee, moved on to removing statues of Teddy Roosevelt and banning benign college mascots that evoked the Revolutionary era (like George Washington U’s “Colonial”), and generally has sought to “cancel” any American patriot or President who owned slaves, is now turning tours of Thomas Jefferson’s and James Madison’s homes in Virginia into attacks on the two essential figures in our democracy.

At Monticello, Jefferson’s self-designed home that is a tourist attraction in Charlottesville, Virginia, the non-profit operating the site is using its progressive political agenda to make a visit less a pilgrimage of respect than indoctrination into anti-Jeffersonism. A recent visitor described the experience as “depressing and demoralizing and truly upsetting,” with Jefferson-hostile tour guides claiming that his reputation is “wildly overblown.” Of course, this is all because Jefferson was a slave-holder, in direct contradiction of the values and rights he espoused in the Declaration of Independence. Arguably, Jefferson’s slave-holding was more revolting than that of other men of his time, as it included treating one of his slaves, Sally Hemings (and his dead wife’s half-sister) as his concubine. Ick. But Jefferson was a weak and conflicted man with a brilliant and perceptive mind; his slave-holding and other personal flaws, and there were many, are not why he must be celebrated and honored as one of those most responsible for the nation’s existence.

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Leadership Ethics: The First Lady’s Ignorant Whine

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Dr. Jill is having a difficult month. I almost put her latest post-breakfast taco remarks under the “Unethical Quote” heading, but her infuriating comments during a private Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Nantucket, Massachusetts qualify as more ignorant and incompetent than anything else.

Attempting to defend her husband’s miserable performance as President over the past 18 months and to rebut the public’s overwhelmingly negative assessment of his Presidency so far, the First Lady whined—and yes, that is a fair characterization—

“[The President] had so many hopes and plans for things he wanted to do, but every time you turned around, he had to address the problems of the moment…He’s just had so many things thrown his way. Who would have ever thought about what happened [with the Supreme Court overturning] Roe v Wade? Well, maybe we saw it coming, but still we didn’t believe it. The gun violence in this country is absolutely appalling. We didn’t see the war in Ukraine coming.” 

Awww, poor Joe! He’s had to deal with the same challenge as every other President since the beginning of the Republic! Damn! It’s just one thing after another! Who could have predicted it?

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Comment Of The Day On The Unethical Political Squeeze On Non-Profits And Foundations [Open Forum]

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Veteran commenter Humble Talent contributed a needed post on an important issue that Ethics Alarms has negligently ignored: the efforts by ideologically drive governments to control the charitable activities of non-profit organizations. The phenomenon extends well beyond the aspect HT discusses: I encountered it with my non-profit theater company. We stubbornly refused to allow grant money to determine our artistic choices, but most theaters were not so resolute. Companies that choose trendy progressive ideology-advancing plays and that cast according to thinly disguised minority group quotas get the money, and letting money drive are leads to bad art: it’s one of many reasons I decided to close the American Century Theater’s doors.

Humble’s Comment of the Day, from this Open Forum, is a cautionary tale. Here it is:

***

I’m on the board of a Community Foundation associated with The Community Foundations of Canada (CFC). The CFC recently had a change in leadership after a wave of retirements, and the new leadership is, not to put too fine a point on it, insufferably woke. Every meeting is predicated by a litany of talk about personal privilege and land declarations. Every new initiative includes language about anti-racism or the importance of DIE. It’s creating issues.

Community foundations operate endowment funds. We take in dollars from our donors, invest them wisely, steward the money, and disburse the proceeds net our expenses into our community. We are non-profits, so we’re tax exempt, and that’s wonderful, but it comes with some requirements: Regardless of how well the market does, we are required by law to disburse at least 3.5% of our funds back into the market on an annual basis. That’s referred to as the “Disbursement Quota” or DQ. We’ve always done better than that. Our positions are public, and we disburse on average 4.5% going back to the community (it varies a little) and budget a .75% management fee for overhead (mostly staff), which we’re never over. Depending on by how much we beat budget, we treat the difference as a kind of emergency fund for out-of-cycle disbursements (we recently hired a translator for the middle school from that pool). We fund investments to the local hospital, the schools, the golf course, the local theatre, the museum, kids sports, social groups, the Salvation Army… The list goes on. In an average year we’ll have maybe 50 requests and depending on the specific asks and our capacity, about 2/3 of them will get at least partially funded.

This, we are told, is not enough. We are hoarding treasure, we are told. We are underserving our communities, we are told. Regardless of how the donors directed their funds, we should ignore their wishes and find some brown people to give money to, we are told… Perhaps not so directly, but I shit you not, that’s the spirit of that has been said. Last year, the government of Canada bandied the idea about of raising the DQ from 3.5% to 5%, or even 10%. In response, the CFC, who is supposed to represent us, said: “Yes please Mr. Government, please pillage our funds. Please fund your short term political aspirations out of our funds and destroy what community-minded people have spent a lifetime building.”

I kid, of course, they didn’t say that. What they said was, and I quote:

“The disbursement quota was created to make sure charities were moving resources to address societal needs. Many conversations around the disbursement quota have been debating percentages. Should it be 3.5%? 5%? 10%?

These conversations tend to be reductive and risk being a distraction at a moment when the federal government can play a critical role in better enabling philanthropic organizations to meet the needs of their communities now and into the future.” Continue reading →

Even More Weird Tales Of The Great Stupid! WaPo Publishes A Peak Stupid Op-Ed, Then Censors Readers Who Say It’s Stupid

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I really do wonder at what point the vast majority of Americans who have not become irreversibly deranged by the confluence of the Trump Freakout, the George Floyd Freakout, the Trans Freakout ,the Wuhan Virus Freakout and the Roe Reversal Freakout sharply slap their foreheads “I could have had a V8!” style and ask, “Why are we letting these unstable, untrustworthy people dominate our discourse and manipulate our culture?”

For the provocation keep escalating. The Washington Post’s editors actually thought that a Poe’s Law evoking piece headlined “My name is a Confederate monument, so I cross it out when I write it” was worthy of publication. In an orgy of narcissism, U.S. history-hatred and virtue-signalling, a writer named Bayard Woods saluted his ridiculous habit of crossing out his own name, which he says, “had stood as a Confederate monument over every story I had ever written.” See, the Bayards and the Woodses had owned slaves. By this brilliant logic, I should cross out my name too, since Chief Justice John Marshall was a slaveholder and “Jack” honors Jack the Ripper.

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The Most Reliable Of The Factcheckers Turns Full Propagandist

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

My contempt for the mainstream media’s rejection of professional ethics to serve as the lickspittle lackeys of the Democratic Party and its progressive stakeholders knows no bounds. In the same general pernicious category lie the media’s allies—social media, Big Tech, and the self-proclaimed factcheckers. For decades now, I had held on to the hopeful fiction that at least one factchecking organization, the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.Org, at least could be relied upon to make a good faith effort to do its job objectively. Oh, it has always had a left-leaning bias, make no mistake about that. Many years ago I was at a conference where the keynote speaker was the head of FactCheck.Org. She proudly proclaimed the organization’s “absolute objectivity and non-partisanship.” When it came to time for audience questions, I couldn’t restrain myself: by pure coincidence, I happened to have in my briefcase a recent “factcheck” by the group that outright misstated a fact to minimize negative characterizations of Bill Clinton. I read the relevant passage to the speaker, and asked, “How can you honestly describe that passage as anything other than partisan and biased?” Her response was, as I recall, “Huminahuminahumina...”

But still, I am a sap. I so wanted to believe that there was an exception to my conviction that factcheckers are all Democrat propagandists. And now FactCheck has engaged in an instance of flagrant (and inept) propaganda under the guise of factchecking that is worthy of Baghdad Bob or Pravda.

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