Tell me more about how drug use is a victimless crime. I’m sure these assholes loved that argument
Lally 25, and Dilly, 26, were found dead of overdoses in the den of their McKeesport, Pennsylvania home this week, with three young children elsewhere in the house. They had recently posted on Facebook about how much they loved their children.
Not more than getting high, of course.
The parents may have been dead for a day or more before their bodies were found, after their 7-year-0ld daughter had told a school bus driver that she didn’t want to go inside her home because she couldn’t wake up her parents before dressing herself and heading to school. The bus company notified the school, and school officials called the police.
The girl, her 9-month-old girl, a 3-year-old boy and a 5-year-old boy were examined at a hospital, and social welfare officials assumed custody of the children. All in all, this is a good development for the children, whose parents were irresponsible, irredeemable, reckless fools. Continue reading →
“…but just shut the hell up about it, or we’ll have to suspend you. Love, The Administration”
Episodes like this, coming out of the wreckage we call higher education, raise at least three troubling questions:
1. If universities are this ignorant of the principle of free speech, why is anyone surprised that our younger generations are so willing to sacrifice it for political ends?
2. How can institutions run by administrators this immune to basic ethical decision-making reasoning be trusted to competently educate their students?
3. How many equally outrageous policies do schools inflict on their students that we don’t hear about?
FIRE, as usual, is on the case, and has written to the school to explain to them why this is abusive and a flagrant First Amendment violation. One student who had received a warning about her discussing about her suicidal feelings with her friends on campus, and was told not to have such conversations. She asked for clarification from Associate Dean of Students Mary Brundage, writing,
Just to clarify, the email said that if I spoke to students about it that it would create a distraction—which could create disciplinary action against me. . . . I was also wondering if I respond to concerned people, is that enough to get me in trouble? I do not want to worry others by not responding and I do not want to have the possibility of getting expelled by reaching out to my friends during this emotionally trying time and I see the possibility of misunderstanding or getting more concerned.
” Nice law firm you got here. Too bad if something were to happen to it…”
As I explained here and here in 2015, the process of judicially determining whether the Defense of Marriage Act was constitutional or not was unethically sabotaged by threats to and improper lobbying of the law firm that had agreed to defend it. The Justice Department and the President had refused to do their sworn duty to uphold the laws of the United States, and same-sex marriage activists pressured the biggest client of the firm that had accepted the case to pass the pressure along. It worked. The firm dropped the case, precipitating a resignation by the partner handling it and this ringing assertion of traditional legal ethics:
“…[D]efending unpopular positions is what lawyers do. The adversary system of justice depends on it, especially in cases where the passions run high. Efforts to delegitimize any representation for one side of a legal controversy are a profound threat to the rule of law.”
This was, we are learning, not an anomaly. On the Volokh Conspiracy, law professor Josh Blackmon relates how the same strategy of applying of unethical political pressure, and the unprofessional capitulation of major law firms to it, nearly made a legitimate challenge to illegal payments to insurers under Obamacare impossible. He explains in part: Continue reading →
My economics professor in college was the late John Kenneth Galbraith, a best-selling author, New Frontier favorite and celebrity, to the extent that an economist can be a celebrity. One of the foundations of his fame was his theory that big corporations were becoming the successors to nations. They were, he said, on the way to becoming more powerful than nations, and the working people of the world would begin being more loyal to them than nations or religions.There were a lot of economic and management consequences of this, but it was the ethical implications that most interested me.
Corporate cultures would increasingly steer individual beliefs and behaviors, and strong forces would push these industrial giants to be less driven by profits and more ethically reponsible, since employees would want to be a “citizens” of a corporate state in which they could take pride. Similarly, stockholders wanted to be able to be proud of their holdings, as well as make money with them. His book explaining this theory, “The New Industrial State,” was a sensation. Part of the motive behind the book, my professor being a big government advocate too, was to lay the foundation of the case that these new “states” had to be carefully guided and regulated lest one go rogue and abuse its power to disastrous effect. Still, the position of the book was optimistic: the new giant corporations were scary, but there were forces at work that would make them want to be good and do good while making all that money.
Well, so much for that college course. The unfolding ethics mess that is the Epipen fiasco shows us an ugly company with an unethical culture run by an unethical CEO and invested in by people who don’t give a damn that the company is despicable, as long as they make money. The regulatory system that could have been built on Galbraith’s fantasy has failed utterly.
To make a long, complicated and depressing story shorter, here is a summary with some links at the end. Continue reading →
Once the New York Times embraced the rationalization “Ethics is a luxury we can’t afford” and announced that journalists had a duty to bias their reporting to block Donald Trump’s election, this result was foretold. It was really foretold in 2008, when the news media first abandoned even the pretense of fairness and objectivity to ensure the election of our first black President.
Matt Lauer, of all people, became the object of furious invective after he hosted a live prime-time forum with Trump and Hillary. He was accused of unfairness, gullibility and even sexism in his handling of the event. His main offenses: not “fact-checking” Trump, as when he said, not for the first time, that he opposed the Iraq invasion from the beginning (he didn’t), and grilling Hillary about her e-mail machinations.
The only way the transcript supports the latter contention is if one is Bernie Sanders and believes Hillary’s “stupid e-mail” is irrelevant. Lauer didn’t spend an inappropriate time on this issue, given what a perfect example it is of Clinton’s Arrogance, deviousness, lack of transparency, and, apparently, incompetence and recklessness. I’d say he was easy on Hillary: he didn’t mention her sleazy conflicts with Clinton Foundation donors at all, and she is much less adept at spinning that slam-dunk conflict of interest and ethical violation than with her e-mail, which she has been lying about for more than a year. Pro-Clinton news media, which is to say, news media, howled about Lauer not challenging Trump’s thoroughly disproven claim about opposing the Iraq War, but Clinton already had done this, saying, “Now, my opponent was for the war in Iraq. He says he wasn’t. You can go back and look at the record. He supported it. He told Howard Stern he supported it.” Maybe Lauer thought that was enough; it should have been: Trump’s lie on this score has been well-publicized, including here, on Ethics Alarms.
Meanwhile, he did not challenge Clinton on her obviously false claim that emails cannot be considered classified if they do not contain formal classification markings, and worst of all, he did not challenge her unconstitutional call to ban citizens who are placed on a no-fly list from exercising their Second Amendment rights. This is especially important, because this fact isn’t understood by most Americans, and a Presidential candidate advocating defiance of the Constitution is, or should be, a big deal. Never mind, though: Lauer wasn’t supposed to be tough on Hillary. He was only supposed to be hard on Trump, and because he wasn’t “hard enough,” a.k.a., “harder,” a.k.a. “biased like the rest of the mainstream coverage,” then it means that he was incompetent. Continue reading →
“Researchers from Ohio State University recruited 80 college students as test subjects. Half were told to drink a solution containing 1,000 milligrams of acetaminophen, while the second half were given a placebo drink containing no drugs. After the medication took effect, the two groups were instructed to rate the pain levels of people in eight different fictional situations — all were emotionally or physically traumatic scenarios. One story involved a person forced to deal with a parent’s unexpected death, another a person with a severe stab wound. Researchers found that students who had taken acetaminophen rated the pain levels of the traumatized story characters lower than those who had ingested the placebo liquid.
In another experiment involving 114 students, half drank the acetaminophen solution and the other half were given the placebo. Both groups were then subjected to brief, loud blasts of white noise and asked to rate the pain levels of a fictionalized participant who had experienced the same. Those who had consumed the acetaminophen solution rated both their own pain and the pain of others who experienced the noise lower than those who drank the placebo solution did. In another study section, subjects were shown short videos depicting a person being socially rejected from a group and were asked to rate the level of emotional pain the rejection caused. Here again, the group that drank the acetaminophen-infused liquid rated the pain lower than those who had only ingested the placebo drink.”
Hmmmm.
A few reactions to this:
1. Many news reports on these weird studies summarize the findings as “Common pain-killers can make you less empathetic.” “These findings suggest other people’s pain doesn’t seem as big of a deal to you when you’ve taken acetaminophen,” Dominik Mischkowski, the study’s co-author and a former Ph.D. candidate from Ohio State University, said in a news release.
Says Baldwin Way, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University: “Empathy is important. If you are having an argument with your spouse and you just took acetaminophen, this research suggests you might be less understanding of what you did to hurt your spouse’s feelings.”
I think I know what is going on here. This seems to be one of many ideologically-inspired studies, designed to make the case that those who are privileged and are in less daily distress are naturally less likely to be capable of empathy, and hence have less ethical reactions to the distress of others, including that caused by the conduct of the empathy-impaired. Continue reading →
As of the time I’m writing this, the New York Times mentions nothing about Clinton’s coughing fit, either on its website, or in its hard copy edition. Not does the Post, which I just had delivered to me despite having cancelled our subscription weeks ago, mention the coughing. None of the major networks covered her coughing fit yesterday.
What’s going on here?
Good question, and not just from the usual ethics analysis perspective, which often starts with this query. What is going on with Hillary?
1. I have no idea. I do know that when I have two-minute coughing fits, it means that I’m sick. It doesn’t mean I’m dying, but if the cough becomes chronic, I see a doctor. Hillary Clinton has been having coughing episodes during speeches and televised appearances for quite some time, though none this severe. However, a Presidential candidate having a coughing fit while speaking is the news item, not the joke she makes to recover. (By the way, that was quick thinking by Hillary, and I admire the quip…unless she had it pre-planned in case she had a coughing fit.). She is in her late sixties. There are some doubts about her health. A presidential campaign is grueling for anyone; I’m amazed it hasn’t incapacitated a candidate yet. The fact that the conservative, Hillary-hating news media is all over this story is expected, but that doesn’t mean their attention isn’t valid and responsible journalism. The news media has an ethical obligation to investigate and let the public know whether or not a candidate for President is fit, temporarily under the weather, or suffering from some more serious malady that might affect his or her ability to do the job.
2. The initial reaction of most of the mainstream media was to shrug off this story, bury it, or ignore it, while the conservative news media was almost gleefully running with it, especially Drudge, who has been chronicling Hillary’s chronic cough for a long time. MSNBC even cut from its live feed away mid-fit, which is inexcusable, but exactly the kind of reflex Clinton-protecting we are seeing more and more frequently. This is another smoking gun example of the unprofessional and dangerous partisan bias in the media, as well as the reason why rational Americans should be grateful that there are right-slanting news sources to prevent journalists and liberal politicians collaborating in cover-ups.
3. The comics and celebrities, as well as liberal pundits, are going to look very bad if their mockery of those asking legitimate questions about Clinton ends up being rebutted by facts. They already look bad. Some have equated concerns about Clinton’s health with the Obama birth certificate controversy, coining the term “healthers,” to set up legitimate inquiries for condemnation as bias or derangement. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni submitted a satirical column about suspicions that Hillary has “an 11th toe,” writing…
“I don’t have the medical records. She refuses to release them. But just try to come up with some other explanation for why she’s so infrequently photographed in sandals or flip-flops; why she seldom appears barefoot in public; why, during debates, she keeps her legs, especially the lower halves, tucked carefully behind the lectern…She’s covering something up, and it’s that freakish, disqualifying digit.”
On CBS “Late Night, ” host Stephen Colbert said he was shocked to learn that he has started menopause, using the same method of medical research Clinton critics are basing questions about her health upon: searching the web.
The Clinton health issue on the liberal side is entering Jumbo territory: “Coughing fits? What coughing fits?”
4. The mainstream media’s double standard could not be more glaring. Journalists obsessed over John McCain’s age and his melanoma removal during the 2008 campaign, as they celebrated Obama’s youth and energy. The incidents and circumstantial evidence relating to Hillary Clinton’s health and suggesting that there may be a problem have reached the point where the question demands a full and aggressive media inquiry. Her serious fall and concussion are well documented. She appears unsteady in many photographs. She uses steps to get into her car. She appears to be avoiding live interviews and press conferences. She used her concussion as an explanation for why she couldn’t remember State protocols for her e-mails. She has coughing fits. It could all add up to nothing, and it could be something. The array raises legitimate doubts, and since we are talking about the Clintons, there is no reason to believe the Hillary’s camp’s reassurances. We know she lies, and that her staff lies for her. The public has a right to know what, if anything, is going on with her health.
5. The conservative website WND has mostly excellent coverage of the coughing fit (and apparently a second Clinton suffered talking to reporters on her plane). It also has statements from several physicians who argue that it is completely legitimate for doctors to raise questions about Clinton’s health. Said one of them, Dr. Jane Orient, M.D., executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons:
“I’m not making a diagnosis. I can look at the video. You can look .For a or a medical professional to simply ignore the evidence would be completely reckless…Meeting someone with these symptoms personally would require a “How are you?” These are not ridiculous questions.”
[UPDATE: I forgot to note, as I intended, that one of the ways the WND story is NOT excellent is that it perpetuates the current false accusation that CNN’s Dr. Drew Pinsky had his show cancelled because he questioned Hillary’s health in a radio interview. The game is classic post hoc ergo propter hoc nonsense: his show’s cancellation was announced after his statement, hence it must have been cancelled because of his statement. Dr. Drew has debunked this himself, though he confirmed that the blowback from CNN after his statement was severe.]
6. Of course they aren’t. But just as some journalists have suggested that the perceived special danger posed by Donald Trump justifies the psychiatric profession diagnosing his supposed mental instability from afar, that same perceived danger seems to be causing journalists to rationalize ignoring troubling health symptoms from his opposition. The reasoning clinician Hal Brown used in his post on the Daily Kos to argue for professionals issuing opinions regarding Trump’s narcissism applies with even more force to Hillary’s physical symptoms.
7. I don’t know why the anti-Trump news media isn’t eagerly covering Clinton’s health problems. Tim Kaine, bland and wishy-washy as he is, wasn’t a terrible governor of Virginia (where I live). He’s much more trustworthy and honest than Hillary–heck, virtually anyone in public life is. He’d be an easy choice over Trump; I’d even feel better about voting for Hillary knowing that it was likely that she wouldn’t finish her term. Hillary can lose to Trump, who, whatever else one might think about him, always shows energy and appears to be younger than he is, like Ronald Reagan. Watch what happens in the polls when Clinton has a two-minute coughing fit during a debate, and defaults to the same line about being allergic to Trump.
Beginning in 2012, Dr. Lee Daugherty Biddison, a critical care physician at Johns Hopkins and some colleagues have held public forums around Maryland to solicit the public’s opinions about how life-saving medical assistance should be distributed when there are too many desperately ill patients and not enough resources. The exercise was part of the preparation for Biddenson’s participation in preparing official recommendations for state agencies that might end up as national guidelines regarding when doctors should remove one patient from a ventilator to save another who might have a better chance of surviving, or whether the young should have priority over the old.
Ethically, this is pure ends justifying the means stuff. The Golden Rule is useless—How would you like to be treated? I’d want to be left on the ventilator, of course!–and Kantian ethics break down, since Immanuel forbade using human life to achieve even the best objectives…like saving a human life. Such trade-offs of life for life (or lives) is the realm of utilitarianism, and an especially brutal variety….so brutal that I doubt that it is ethics at all.
When Dr. Biddenson justifies his public forums by saying that he wants to include current societal values in his life-for-a-life calculations, she is really seeking current biases, because that’s all they are. On the Titanic, it was women and children first, not because it made societal sense to allow some of the most productive and vibrant minds alive to drown simply because they had a Y chromosome, but because that’s just the way it was. Old women and sick children got on lifeboats; young men, like emerging mystery writer Jacque Futrelle (and brilliant young artist Leonardo DiCaprio), went down with the ship. That’s not utilitarianism. That’s sentimentalism.
The New York Times article mostly demonstrates that human beings are incapable of making ethical guidelines, because Kant was right: when you start trading one life for another, it’s inherently unethical, even if you have no choice but to do it. Does it make societal sense to take away Stephen Hawking’s ventilator to help a drug-addicted, habitual criminal survive? Well, should violating drug laws sentence a kid to death? TILT! There are no ethical answers, just biased decisions. Continue reading →
There is an Ethics Alarms post “going viral” right now, at least as viral as any post on an ethics blog is likely to go. For two weeks now, my post at the end of July about how the “urban legends” site Snopes had descended into dishonest, spinning, fact-distorting partisan/ left “factchecking” hackery has lapped all others here, and been shared to record levels on Facebook (nearing 11,000 shares) and Reddit.
This is nice, of course. It has brought a few (though not many) new commenters to the blog, and presumably more readers who stayed to peruse other topics. It has made August 2016, usually a fairly dead month, the most heavily trafficked month in Ethics Alarms annals. The post alerted some people to why Snopes is untrustworthy, though not, apparently, the Washington Post, which cited it as authority just a few days ago. It also prompted, on Reddit and Facebook, several thousand smug “this is not news, I’ve known this for years” comments. Where were your blog post, jerks?
The post’s wide circulation through the web also made me aware that a conspiracy theory holding that Democrats and the Hillary Corrupted maintain a team of attack commenters who go to blogs and attempt to muddy the waters when the truth about Clinton threatens to break through the denial dam might be accurate. I have received four or five almost identical comments on that post attempting to deny my dissection of Snopes’ pathetic attempt to prove that Hillary didn’t defend a child rapist, didn’t discredit his young victim in the process, didn’t know he was guilty when she did it, and didn’t laugh about the case in a recorded interview. None of the four commenters read all of my post, which echoed a previous one in pointing out, as I always do, that a lawyer defending a criminal is not unethical, that the attacks on Hillary for doing so were ignorant and unfair, and that Hillary Clinton has nothing to apologize for in this case. Never mind: all four of these commenters ( and some others which never made it onto the blog) shifted into similar boilerplate language claiming I was attacking her too, and preceded to repeat Snopes’ dishonest “factchecking” as if the documentation of its falsity I presented in the post didn’t exist.
Nonetheless, the Snopes revelation was not the Ethics Alarms post I would have chosen to “go viral.” There have been many essay in the last six year that I was, and am, especially proud of and believe were original, perceptive and important, and that have been barely read by anyone, never linked to or shared, and that have had all the impact of a shell thrown into the surf. How I wish my warning to the Republican Party , for example, urging it not to permit Donald Trump to participate in the primaries, had received similar attention. Not a single editorial board or pundit saw the peril looming, or at least they didn’t write or talk about it if they did, because having The Donald spouting his inanities would be good copy and “fun.”
One such post dates back to the first full year of Ethics Alarms: The Amazing Mouthwash Deception: Helping Alcoholics Relapse For Profit, from August 2010. In six years, it has amassed about the same number of views that the Snopes piece amassed in half a month. Yet the topic, how mouthwash manufacturers profit significantly by hiding the widespread use of their product by alcoholics who use mouthwash to conceal their destructive disease from family members and co-workers, is barely mentioned on the web—a few places, and almost all of them since the post. Still, Congress hasn’t held hearings, regulatory agencies haven’t noticed, and the products still carry warnings that fool non-alcoholics into believing that the stuff is poison, so nobody drinks it. Lives could be saved, marriages rescued, and endangered businesses might survive, if what I wrote was generally known
I’ve done the original research and put the problem out there. At least I’ve tried, and I will continue to write about the problem, which I have learned about first hand.
My efforts haven’t been completely futile. I have received some gratifying comments and off-site e-mails from family members who read the article, discovered that a loved one was secret drinker, and got them help. I have also received a few responses that confirmed my work, though none quite like this one from new reader Dave, an alcoholic himself.
Here is his remarkable and cryptic Comment of the Day on the post, The Amazing Mouthwash Deception: Helping Alcoholics Relapse For Profit. Is it intentional irony? Is it sarcasm? Is it support, in the form of criticism? You decide:
Halfway through your article I decided it would be a good idea to go to shoppers and grab myself a bottle. I’d been so triggered today, only being a week sober prior. It’s great, you know, the mouthwash deception as you call it. I spend roughly $3.50 on a bottle of Life brand yellow mouthwash and it gets me radically twisted, with zero hangover. So not only does it make it easier for me to be a functioning alcoholic based on its inexpensiveness and zero hangover qualities, it is also amazingly convenient in that within 10 minutes I have three different 24 hour grocery stores I can go to in order to get a bottle.
Alcoholism is a shitty disease, believe me, I have lost much at the expense of it.
Tell me more about how drug use is a victimless crime. I’m sure these assholes loved that argument
Ethics Alarms 