Government & Politics

This Weekend In Pro-Abortion Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

SCOTUS protest

Let’s examine this by categories….

Warped Concepts of How the System Works: Yet another Women’s March, like all of them, misleadingly labeled to avoid the ugly transparency that “March to be Able to Kill the Unborn at Will” would broadcast, ended up at the steps of the Supreme Court yesterday. Thousands traveled to Washington, D.C. to demand abortion rights, as if the Supreme Court decides complex issues according to who shouts the loudest, is most passionate, or has the coolest signs. Demonstrators surrounded the court,shouting “My body, my choice” and cheering loudly to the beat of drums.

Morons. These assaults on the Curt have driven me mad for decades, as what they demonstrate is that difficult matters of law, precedent and policy can be decided by slogans and the incoherent bellows from a mob. It’s an insult to the Court, the Constitution, and the system. If you have a valid argument, file an amicus brief. These demonstrations, and it doesn’t matter what their goal is our which side of the ideological spectrum they come from, waste time, energy, passion and taxpayer funds. Is the idea intimidation? Good luck with that. Persuasion? Sure, a bunch of screaming and weeping activists are going to persuade anyone but TV talking heads. Narcissistic grandstanding?

There you go.

Continue reading →

Saturday Ethics Romps, 10/2/21: Slap-downs, Stolen Art, Strokes, Silliness, Stupid Pet Owner Tricks, And More! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

What do you think, hoax or not? Conservative blogs are all treating the video above as classic woke-boob self-own, but I am dubious. How did the video get posted, unless the fanatic vegetarian has a self-deprecating sense of humor, and what are the odds of that? If the video is real, it once again raises the ethics issue of dietary fanatics imposing their obsessions on helpless pets, or worse, infants.

1. The stroke of ethics! On this day in 1919, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke, launching an epic government ethics breach by his wife Edith and his doctor. They kept the public and government officials in the dark about the President’s true condition: Edith signed official documents, and the doctor was brought into some deliberations. Wilson slowly recovered to some extent, though how capable he was of discharging the duties of his office for the rest of his term, until March of 1921, is a matter of considerable debate and speculation. Despite this debacle, with the nation being led by an invalid figurehead with his inexperienced wife making key decisions, it took the assassination of Jack Kennedy, not long after the previous President, Eisenhower, suffered serious cardiac events during his Presidency decades later to trigger the passage of the 25th Amendment, which lays out the procedure for relieving a disabled POTUS. [Notice of Correction: the original version of this post had the dates wrong. Thanks to valkygrrl for the note!] The 25th, in turn, then spurred an ethics foul of its own, as “the resistance,” Democrats and their allies in the media tried to warp the clear intent of the amendment to justify removing Donald Trump from office, on the grounds that he was “unfit.”

2. When does pundit hysteria cross the line into irresponsible and incompetent journalism? Whatever the line is, Rolling Stone writer Jeff Goodell charged over it with this unhinged screed. When I read something like this, I always wonder how many readers are persuaded by it, and how many are astute enough to conclude, “This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about!” Here is how the article begins: “West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin just cooked the planet. I don’t mean that in a metaphorical sense. I mean that literally. Unless Manchin changes his negotiating position dramatically in the near future, he will be remembered as the man who, when the moment of decision came, chose to condemn virtually every living creature on Earth to a hellish future of suffering, hardship, and death.” Even by the low, low standards of climate change apocolyptia, this is inexcusable. No U.S. bill can have substantial impact on the world’s climate by itself, and all but a few of the most extreme and politicized climatologists don’t claim that even the worst case scenarios would “condemn virtually every living creature on Earth to a hellish future of suffering, hardship, and death.” How can anyone trust a writer who spews out stuff like this? How can readers of Rolling Stone take a publication seriously that green-lights it? Is Twitter pulling down the tweets that link to the article? No, of course not. It’s not “misinformation,” because it’s a good lie, aimed at the Greater Good, I guess.

Continue reading →

In Florida, “I Eat Ass” And A Qualified Immunity Ethics Conundrum

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

i-eat-ass-mask-black

A policeman’s lot is not a happy one, and qualified immunity, the doctrine that exists to shield officers and other state officials from liability when they commit torts in the course of their duties, is under fire because of its role in blocking accountability for cops who engage in police brutality. But without qualified immunity, policing would become even more perilous than it already is.

Take the “I Eat Ass” controversy.

Please.

In Florida, jerk Dillon Shane Webb had a sticker on his vehicle that boasted “I Eat Ass.” (Some may disagree, but Ethics Alarms regards public display of that legend signature significance, as a non-jerk would never do it. Not even once). Columbia County Sheriff’s Deputy Travis English pulled Webb over in May of 2019 and demanded that he cover up the message. Webb refused, and he was subsequently arrested and jailed for “obscene writing on vehicles” and “resisting an officer without violence,” because he had refused to obscure the sticker. Reason, the libertarian cite that is usually more reasonable, wrote that Officer English “took exception” to “I Eat Ass.” No, the officer was under the impression that the display violated Fla. Stat. § 847.011(2), which prohibits “any sticker, decal, emblem or other device attached to a motor vehicle containing obscene descriptions, photographs, or depictions.”

Continue reading →

How Donald Trump Could Be A Great American And Ethics Hero, But Almost Certainly Won’t

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

scylla-and-charybdis

One of the benefits of not having Donald Trump as President—such benefits do not include having Joe Biden in the White House—is that I don’t have to write about him as often or regularly point out the relentless efforts to de-legitimize and destroy his Presidency. However, the Trump Deranged in the news media and the Angry Left in general let Trump live, as the cliche goes, rent-free in their heads, so now he has become a boogeyman. Say his name three times in front of a mirror, and he’ll appear and murder democracy.

On his substack newsletter, Andrew Sullivan, who occasionally called out Trump Derangement excesses but still never could bring himself to extend any respect to The Donald, weighed in today with an essay called “How Biden Could Bring Back Trump.” What the piece is really about is how wretched Biden’s Presidency has been so far, especially regarding illegal immigration. But to get his core readership’s attention, Sullivan felt he had to frame the argument as he does in his final two paragraphs:

“…the immigration debate reflects an elite that simply cannot imagine why most normal citizens think that enforcing a country’s borders is not an exercise in white supremacist violence, but a core function of any basic government. Which is to say that far from taming the brushfire of right ethno-populism, Biden may be fueling it. Trump may not need to send the country into a constitutional crisis in 2024. If mass migration continues to accelerate under this administration, and Biden seems unable or unwilling to do anything about it, Tump could win that election in a romp. And deserve to.”

Andrew can’t bring himself to quite say that Trump was right about illegal immigration all along, that the public mostly agreed with him because they aren’t insane, and that Biden’s policies and rhetoric are incompetence itself. He does write, though, to be fair to Sullivan, “The temptation to reduce every normie concern about immigration to ‘white supremacy’ was too hard to eschew. And the view that “All Borders Are Racist” — as perfect an expression of woke extremism as “Defund the Police” and “Pregnant People” — became an elite cause. Nation-states and borders? That has been left in the dust of the Obama era.” Bingo to that. Still, the big scare isn’t the collapse of the rule of law and the natural disastrous consequences of open borders. It’s that it all might bring Truuuuuuump back.

Continue reading →

The ACLU Believes Certain Sports Are Racist Now…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The logic and legal reasoning underlying the American Civil Liberty Union’s current bit of woke grandstanding is profoundly depressing. These people are lawyers. This is the caliber of legal minds we are supposed to trust to protect the Bill of Rights?

Central Michigan University eliminated its men’s track and field team. It shouldn’t matter why, but in its announcement of the move in May of 2020, the school cited budget concerns in the midst of the pandemic lockdown. This seems reasonable; when funds are tight, colleges should be spending money on education rather than sports. The controversy was launched when CMU decided this year to add a men’s golf program.

The decision, the ACLU of Michigan decided, was racist in light of the fate of track and field. In one letter, the organization protested that track and field was crucial to the Black community because it has “offered many a way out of oppressive poverty.”

I’d like to see the data on that.

Then the ACLU wrote the university president on September 16 that golf, in contrast, was a “white sport.” “Country clubs that have been the training grounds for elite golfers have historically been racially exclusive,” the letter states. “Add to that the expense of the sport and the socio-economic circumstances of many African Americans, and the reasons for the whiteness of golf are quite evident.”

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month (But Thanks For The Candor, Terry!): Former Va. Governor And Current Gubernatorial Candidate Terry McAuliffe

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach.”

Terry McAuliffe, Democratic candidate for Governor of Virginia, in  the televised debate with Republican adversary Glenn Youngkin

Every now and then one of the crypto-totalitarian Democrats or progressives slip up and rip his or her mask off, and McAuliffe’s sudden outburst of damning truth was a real Jack Nicholson “You’re damn right I did!” moment. I know virtually nothing about Glenn Youngkin, but I know too much about Clinton bag-man McAuliffe, and if God’s in his heaven and there is justice in the cosmos, this outburst will keep McAuliffe, who is corrupt and almost as slimy as the Clintons, out of the Governor’s mansion. It isn’t the reason I won’t be voting for Terry, who was Bill’s fundraiser, only because it doesn’t have to be. There are so many other reasons, as his Ethics Alarms dossier shows and the alarming essay below from my previous platform, The Ethics Scoreboard, amply demonstrates.

But enough of McAuliffe for now, for this post isn’t really about him as much as it is about his quote and what (and who—Terry was also Chair of the Democratic National Committee) it represents. For it expresses fairly the current attitude of the Left regarding public education. Children are in school for progressives, Democrats, Marxists and anti-American activists to indoctrinate. Gabriel Gipes, the so-called “Antifa Teacher” was an extreme case, but lazy parents and apathetic citizens allowed the Left to take over the educational establishment (as well as other institutions) a long time ago. Now they are shocked—shocked!-–with the advent of critical race theory and the “1619 Project’s” pollution of public school curricula—to find that our children have been and are being programmed to accept progressive cant as truth, and even to oppose the Bill of Rights as well as the foundational culture of the nation itself.

Continue reading →

Res Ipsa Loquitur: The 2021 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowships…[CORRECTED]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

MacArthur grants

The MacArthur Foundation named the recipients of its 2021 “genius” grants. Above are the 15 honorees NPR chose to represent the group Each will receive $625,000, which they are free to spend however they see fit: Left to right, top row to bottom, are Hanif Abdurraqib, Daniel Alarcón, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Jordan Casteel, Don Mee Choi, Nicole Fleetwood, Cristina Ibarra, Ibram X. Kendi, Daniel Lind-Ramos, Monica Muñoz Martinez, Safiya Noble, Alex Rivera, Jacqueline Stewart, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.

As you can see, all the Fellows shown are “of color.” Since I can’t count, this originally confused me into thinking these were all of the Fellows, but ten were missing. [Hence the correction.] I checked of the remaining ten, three are white, and the ethnicity of one is uncertain: I can’t find any reference to her parents. There is only one Asian-American in the 25, which is decidedly strange. So the final tally, counting the mystery woman as white, is four out of 25 “geniuses” among the individuals chosen, 16%. The 2020 Census found 61% of Americans were white.

Is it racially insensitive to mention this? The Foundation is confident that its obvious bias won’t be criticized—this kind of disproportionate demographic mix would be considered evidence of discrimination in most contexts—and NPR decided only to highlight the “of color” honorees. What happened to “inclusion and diversity”?

Meanwhile, I am officially humiliated by belonging to such an inferior race.

_________________________

Pointer: Here’s Johnny, who alerted me to the fact that I miscounted.

Having To Argue The Obvious On Gender Identity: “Trans”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

lienear constant

it’s not as catchy as “Bias makes you stupid, ” but “Ideology makes you unethical” is just as true. However, just as bias is unavoidable, ideologies of some kind are necessary. The trick is to find one that doesn’t do more harm than good.

The diagram above was explained to me by a friend, fan and boss, the late Richard Halpern. He was a devotee of Chaos Theory, which he called his “religion.’ Life is chaos, he said, and human systems were chaotic. He likened living to a passenger plane’s journey through the endlessly unpredictable air currents and weather phenomenon in the skies. He analogized the plane’s guidance system to a linear constant through chaos, without which, Rich said, the plane would be lost. “No plane follows the charted path the whole trip, because it is constantly knocked off course, but that constant is there for the plane to return to. Ideologies are the same: you have to have that ever-present constant or be lost, with no basis for deciding where to turn, and when you’re navigating through chaos, it really doesn’t matter what it is.

This is why religion is so useful, and all mandated value systems, what Ethics Alarms defines as “morality.” Laws are mandated moral codes, You don’t have to make a million separate decisions, just one: Follow that constant! The constant can be repugnant to others or based on myth and bias, but once someone commits to it, it will do the job. This is where cults come from. This is how Amway became successful. This is why people elevate political and social goals to the point that all of their decisions about who to associate with, what to watch and read and how to align priorities are based on them. Abortion. The environment. “Social justice.”

A new book by Helen Joyce, an Irish journalist who is executive editor for events business of “The Economist,” takes on one of the weirder ideologies that has arisen in recent years, what she calls “gender-identity ideology.” It would be nice if she were a psychiatrist, or a doctor, but then those and most other professional groups in the United States have been so cowed into knee-jerk alliance with the progressive movement that any member of them daring to challenge the cant would face “cancellation.” Her book is titled “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality.” To be fair, that title could be fairly and accurately adapted to any ideology; remember that neo-conservative icon Irving Kristol (yes, Bill’s dad) famously said that a conservative was “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” (A cynic is a neo-conservative who was mugged by Iraq.)

Continue reading →

Weekend Ethics Warm-Up, 9/26/2021: Down The Hole As We Vilify The Good Guys To Advance An Agenda

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Hole

Well, it worked with the false Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown narratives, so why not try it again? I was about to devote a segment here to the hysterical “Border Patrol whipping poor migrants” tale neing manufactured by the administration and the media, but it warrants a full post. I’ll just note the smoking gun huminahumina response from DHS Secretary Mayorkas last week when Peter Doocy of Fox News—gee, why don’t the reporters from other outlets ask administration officials tough questions?—asked him why President Joe Biden accused Border Patrol agents of “strapping migrants.” Doocy asked, “You said on Saturday — or rather, on the 20th, ‘To ensure control of the horse, long reins are used.’ The person who took these photos of the Border Patrol agents says, ‘I’ve never seen them whip anyone.’ So, why is the President out there today talking about people being ‘strapped?'” Hmmm. Because Biden has always been a shameless hack? Because nobody tells him what’s going on? Because creating sympathy for illegals while villifying law enforcement officials for doing their jobs is central to the Left’s open borders agenda? Mayorkas babbled,”So let me, um, uh, let me correct, um, uh, the statements in your question, if I may…” When Doocy (you know, for someone who only has his job because of outrageous nepotism, he has been performing admirably) countered, “They’re direct quotes,” the Secretary of Homeland Security said, “It was on Friday when I was, uh — actually, it was on Monday, I believe, uh, when I was in Del Rio, uh, on the ground, uh, and I made the statements without having seen the images. I saw the images on the flight back, and I made the statement that I did with respect to what those images suggested.The horses have long reins, and, uh, the image in the photograph that we all saw that horrified the nation, raised serious questions about what it— about what occurred and of — as I stated quite clearly — it conjured up images of what has occurred in the past.”

That’s as close to an admission of deliberate obfuscation for political ends as you’re likely to see. What should matter is what was really happening, not what images were conjured up by confirmation bias and or what photos “suggested.”

1. The Great Stupid comes for “Lonesome Dove.” As a lifetime Western movies aficionado, I have concluded that the TV mini-series of Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove” is the greatest Western ever made. Watching it again yesterday to cheer me up after I woke up with Churchill’s “Black Dog” on my head, I was nauseated to find that the streaming version now carries a warning about “Culturally insensitive portrayals.” After all, the story about cowboys moving a herd to Montana told from their perspective included some dangerous and violent Indians. Of course, for every mean Native American there were about ten cruel and ruthless whites, but somehow I don’t think the trigger warning was referring to them.

2. Speaking of the “Zimmerman murdered innocent teen Trayvon Martin” lie…New York Times drama critic Salamishah Margaret Tillet , the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing who is essentially an activist uninterested in fair or objective analysis, meaning that her reviews are propaganda, wrote about the re-opened Broadway play “Pass Over” by writing of the playwright,

“Nwandu originally wrote “Pass Over” in response to the killing of Trayvon Martin, seeking to channel the grief and rage that so many African Americans were grappling with. Its latest iteration, she has said, is speaking to the widespread racial justice protests of the summer of 2020. As a result, “Pass Over” is one of the few works of art that really charts Black Lives Matter as a movement responding to the racial justice needs of its day.”

But if the play, which involves a white cop called “master” threatening and menacing them was a response to Martin’s death, it was a response based on media lies and deliberately divisive warping of facts to vilify whites and police. That rage and grief was manufactured for political ends, and the investigation and the trial exploring Martin’s death had to be deliberately ignored for Tillet to write such a paragraph and for the Times to publish it.

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Miami Beach City Commission Candidate Kristen Rosen Gonzalez

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“Well, I’m perceived as being Hispanic. I’m perceived as being Hispanic by all of the Hispanics in my community. I’m their girl. My last name is Hispanic. I know I’m not Hispanic… I’m sorry I probably oversold myself. If you want to nail me to the cross, go ahead. Make me look foolish.”

—-Kristen Rosen Gonzalez, a Democrat running for the Miami Beach City Commission, upon being questioned about claiming to be Hispanic when she bears the name “Gonzalez” only because of her marriage to a man with that name, whom she divorced eleven years ago.

Oh, you’re perceived as being Hispanic, so that mean it’s OK to say you are Hispanic! Sure, that’s consistent! It’s like the progressive rule that if you say you are female you are female, and if you say you are black, you’re black!

This may be the ideal template for a 2021 Democratic candidate. She does have a still-active role model of sorts: President Biden’s current climate czar, John Kerry, who early in his political career in Massachusetts used shamrocks on his campaign materials to suggest that he was Irish. There was no Irish in his lineage whatsoever; his paternal grandparents were Jewish. But even Kerry, who is far from the sharpest knife in the cutlery rack, never tried to justify his deception. (He was never called on it either.)

This woman—I assume she really is a woman—referred to herself as “the most high-profile Hispanic Democrat in the City of Miami Beach.”  It was an outright lie. When she was called on it, the best she could do was to justify an intentional misrepresentation by arguing that because her last name fooled people into thinking what wasn’t true was true, it was acceptable to perpetuate the misconception.

Why hasn’t this ridiculous woman withdrawn from the race yet? Why isn’t she hiding her head under a bag? Who finds these people?

The quote above gets worse as it goes along. It’s nice that she knows that she’s not Hispanic—I suppose being a liar is marginally preferable in a commission member than being insane—but she says she’s probably “oversold herself”? She’s falsely convinced all the Hispanics in her community that she’s one of them! What’s “probably” about that? And “oversold” in this case means lied. Nothing else, nothing better. Lied. Then, in a masterpiece of ethics jujitsu and gall, she actually tries to make herself the victim by comparing herself to Jesus Christ!

Continue reading →