Dear Ashli: You Do Know That What You Are Advocating Is Pure Bigotry, Right?

The self-indicting that is arising from the 2024 Election Freakout has nicely exposed the hypocrisy behind the progressive masks of decency and virtue. Let’s listen to Ashli, the lovely young thing above, who has enthusiastically embraced the South Korean “4B Movement.”  The name ‘4B’ comes from the Korean words for four ‘Nos’: no heterosexual sex, no marriage, no children, and no relationships, all starting with the letter ‘b.’ Her journey is described in a revealing piece in the Daily Mail.

The brutal murder of a woman in a subway station by a man who reportedly said he was ‘sick of being ignored by women.’ sparked the ptotest by many Korean women against all men. That seems fair and logical. No, in fact it makes no sense at all, but it does to Ashli.  “Out of this tragedy, a wave of female anger turned into action. Women took control of their lives,” she writes. I’ve come to the conclusion that men can be dangerous. That’s why, two years ago at the age of 34, I chose to disengage from men entirely.

She gives her reasons. “I knew so many women who were hurt by the men they loved and trusted. Men they vowed to love and who vowed to love them. Men they slept next to at night.” Then, “the overturning of Roe cemented everything I already knew. Five justices—four of them men—decided we didn’t deserve control over our own bodies. The new MAGA Republican Party, with its hyper-masculine, power-hungry grip, cheered it on.”

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Ethics Quiz: The Maori MP Protest

Wow. Now THAT’s a protest!

New Zealand’s Parliament was temporarily suspended yesterday when Māori lawmakers suddenly launched into a haka, a traditional group dance. It was intended to demonstrated the nation’s Indigenous people’s community’s passionate objections to a bill that would reinterpret the country’s founding treaty with the Maoris.

When the proposal was read, and Māori lawmaker Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke was asked how her party, Te Pāti Māori, would vote on the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill. The response was what you see above.

So, you’re not in favor of it, then?

Other opposition members joined the performance on the floor, and onlooker is the gallery also started dancing. The chamber’s speaker, Gerry Brownlee, temporarily stopped the session. Maipi-Clarke was suspended over the protest.

I’m not going to get in the high weeds of the bill, but will only present…

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day, which is…

Was this an unethical demonstration—disrespectful, disruptive, and a breach of proper decorum—or an ethical one?

I am decidedly undecided on this one. I sure don’t want to give AOC any ideas. The routine was cool, though, and effective.

On the Other Hand (As Capt. Hook Liked to Say), There Are Columnists Like The Appropriately Named Sabrina Haake….

Once again, I find myself asking, how can an alleged opinion writer issue utter crap like this and live with herself? How can a newspaper justify publishing it, or pay someone so dishonest or rock-dumb to write it? How can anyone with two brain cells to rub together read it and say, “Duhh..yup! Sound’s right to me!“?

This fraudulent authority is a trial lawyer who claims to specialize in First Amendment cases, though her screed here tells us that she doesn’t get that free speech thingy. Sabrina is also a failed Democratic candidate for Congress. Her essay is called, “Trump didn’t win; disinformation did.” If I didn’t write an ethics blog, that headline alone would be sufficient for me to eschew the pleasure of reading it.

Just listen (well, metaphorically) to this woman…

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Fact: Matt Gaetz Really Is the Worst Nomination For Attorney General In U.S. History [Expanded]

For once, the over-the-top criticism of a Trump decision is completely justified, and maybe even understated. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), just nominated by the President-Elect to be his Attorney General, has no legitimate qualifications for the job at all, which requires managing a 115,000-person agency. He has no management experience. He has no prosecutorial experience. He is a licensed lawyer, but has very little legal practice experience. No previous Attorney General, going back to Edmund Randolph, Washington’s first AG, had such a sparse legal resume. Randolph had been governor of Virginia.

I am more qualified to be the Attorney General than Matt Gaetz, and I can think of many personal friends and colleagues who are more qualified for the job than I am. If I threw a rock into a cocktail reception at the D.C. Bar, I would hit a more qualified lawyer.

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Two Stupid Questions and One Damning Answer

If there areany lingering doubt about why the news media has no credibility with the American people and its influence is diminishing like an ice cube left of the sidewalk on a hot summer’s day, ponder these two questions at yesterday’s White House press briefing.

#1. TIME’s correspondent Brian Bennett asked the President’s incompetent paid liar, “President Trump has promised to launch the largest deportation in American history when he becomes president. Are there steps that President Biden is taking in the next 70 days to try to protect certain populations in the United States from deportation? Does he want to extend parole or take other steps that would protect people from that deportation?”

Good one, Brian. “What steps is the President taking to prevent President Trump from enforcing laws that his administration has refused to enforce?” To members of our woke journalistic cabal, this makes perfect sense.

#2. Bloomberg’s Skylar Woodhouse asked, “President-elect Trump — there’s reports that Elon Musk is having a lot of sway in terms of his decisions, in terms of who President-elect Trump is, you know, having come into his administration, sitting in on meetings with — with foreign leaders, and Elon Musk has said, you know, there’s parts that he wants to sort of reshape maybe the government. Is President Biden concerned at all over Elon Musk’s influence over President-elect Trump and potentially what that could look like for our country?”

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Ethics Dunce: Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Nominee To Be Defense Secretary

This will not end well.

Oh, I get it. Trump ran through six Defense Secretaries in four years (a record) and had an adversary relationship with the Pentagon. As with so many other Departments, entrenched resistance to Trump’s leadership flourishes there, and there are cultural issues as well.

The sort-of new President has learned a hard lesson, and wants a loyal outsider to tackle the Defense Department. Harry Truman once described the department as a feather bed where you punched a problem in one part of the bed and another problem would pop right up.

DOD is huge, a labyrinth of interlocking bureaucracies, and managing it requires superb leadership skills, diplomacy, organization and more. There is no reason to believe that Pete Hegseth possesses any of these.

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Ethics Hero: Joe Biden

He didn’t have to be gracious. Few would have blamed him if he was not. He could have followed through with the obligatory meeting between an outgoing POTUS and an incoming one from the other party stiffly, coldly and as formally as possible. After all, Donald Trump had refused to extend the courtesy of such a meeting to him, when Biden won the election in 2020.

But instead of tit-for-tat, payback, bitterness or resentment, President Biden said, “Welcome back.” Never mind that this is an odd thing to say to man whom his party (and Biden himself) had pronounced a fascist and an existentialist threat to democracy. Trump, himself addicted to outrageous hyperbole as a lifestyle, knows more than most that this was just a campaign ploy, albeit a particularly divisive and unfair one. “Welcome back” is as close as President Biden could come to saying, “It’s over, you won, and no hard feelings,” even if the hard feelings are there, for how could they not be?

It is supremely ironic that Joe Biden’s most remembered quote as President will be this one, uttered as he his administration is going out not with a bang, but a whimper. (George Washington also had a famous quote acknowledging his successor: “I am fairly out and you fairly in! George said to John Adams. “See which of us will be happiest!”)

At the end of ” MacBeth”Malcolm says of vanquished Thane of Cawdor, “Nothing dignified him in this life more than his leaving it.” It may be said of Joe Biden that “Nothing so dignified his Presidency as his leaving it.” I suspect that it will be.

The Academic Cheating Problem: It’s Not Just About Education

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a troubling, if not unexpected report, “Cheating Has Become Normal: Faculty members are overwhelmed, and the solutions aren’t clear.” It begins with an anecdote that would be funny if it weren’t so apocalyptic. A professor caught a student cheating, and warned him that the next time this happened, he would be failed in the course. The student wrote an abject apology, full of contrition and assurances. Then his next assignment was found to be composed by an AI bot. Then, just for giggles, the prof asked the same bot to compose a letter of apology for a student who had been caught cheating. The bot produced exactly the apology the student had submitted, word for word.

From the article:

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Wait, WHAT??? Unethical Quote of the Month: NPR CEO Katherine Maher

“I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”

—NPR CEO Katherine Maher

Elon Musk posted the video of Maher saying this…

I can’t find the date of that speech or the context of the quote, but what possible context could justify it? If that isn’t pure Big Brother, what is? “Can’t let the truth get in the way of progress!” This is the totalitarian mindset that (I hope) was one of the things enough voters rejected a week ago. This is the ends justifies the means ideology embraced by the Axis of Unethical Conduct, including the news media that lied, dissembled, covered up and broadcast false narratives during the campaign and, of course, long before.

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Journalism! An NBC Reporter Steals a News Story on the FEMA Scandal, Tries To Blur it, Gets Caught…

Three days ago, the Daily Wire broke the news that a FEMA employee ordered workers to bypass the homes of Trump supporters as they surveyed the damage caused by Hurricane Milton in Florida. This was a damning story in many respects; among them, Republican claims that this was happening were “fact-checked” by the Democratic Party allied media and declared “misinformation” before the truth came out.

The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro’s conservative website, broke the story because the mainstream media was probably burying it, but once it was out, every outlet had to report it and credit the Wire. Well, almost every outlet. NBC Breaking News reporter Mirna Alsharif, formerly of CNN, used the Daily Wire report without giving credit to the source. Hey, maybe she should apply to be President of Harvard! Then she omitted key information to try to make the scandal less clear.

But social media pounced, as it should have. The reporter’s responses were unprofessional, to say the least. Then she killed her Twitter account after being thoroughly exposed….

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