History

Apparently Whom A Presidential Candidate Chooses As VP Hardly Matters To Voters. Should It?

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Is the Pop Catholic? Is Joe Biden demented? Of course the VP choice should matter. In fact, it is irresponsible and incompetent for voters not to regard the second slot on national tickets as potential deal-breakers. However, who is running for VP is firmly in shrug territory for the vast majority of Americans, and always has been.

Rasmussen Reports found in a recent survey of both Democrats and Republicans that Trump’s VP, soon to be announced, won’t make “much of a difference” on Election Day. 82% of Republicans and 81% of Democrats said that they didn’t care. Just 12% of Republican and Democratic likely voters told pollsters that Trump’s VP might tip the scales for them on Election Day.

I’m surprised it was that high. Not only voters, but parties and Presidents have been insanely unconcerned with the qualifications and leadership ability of Vice-Presidential candidates from the very first one, John Adams, who had no governing experience when he was named George’s back-up and was temperamentally ill-suited for leadership—as he quickly proved when he was elected President to succeed Washington. [Note: for some reason I gave Adams a pass when I posted the first installment of the “Worst President Ever” series, and have revised that post. He wasn’t the worst President, but he was definitely one of the worst.]

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And Now For Something Completely Different: An Ethics Challenge on Slavery Reparations

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Except for one brief moment of frustration and madness, Ethics Alarms has been consistent in its derision of the concept of reparations for slavery. Illogical, legally unhinged, divisive, anti-democratic and most of all, impossible, this really bad idea, a favorite of get-rich-quick racial grievance hucksters and reality-resistant progressives, still hangs around like old unwashed socks, and no amount of argument or reasoning seems to be able to send them to the rag pile. Recently both California, where terrible leftist ideas go to thrive and ruin things, and New York, which really should be moved to the West Coast, have both at least pretended to endorse reparations for slavery. California’s ridiculous reparations task force has proposed giving $223,200 each to all descendants of slaves in California, on the theory that it will be a just remedy for housing discrimination against blacks between 1933 and 1977. The cost to California taxpayers would be about $559 billion, more than California’s entire annual budget (that the state already can’t afford), and that doesn’t include the massive cost of administrating the hand-outs and dealing with all the law suits it is bound to generate.

Brilliant. But that’s reparations for you! Logic, common sense and reality have nothing to do with it.

Now comes two wokey professors from—you guessed it, Harvard, to issue a scholarly paper published in “The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences,” titled “Normalizing Reparations: U.S. Precedent, Norms, and Models for Compensating Harms and Implications for Reparations to Black Americans.” The thesis of this thing is essentially that reparations for slavery should be paid because “Everybody Does It,” offering variations of the #1 rationalization on the list that don’t properly apply to slavery at all. (What? The descendants of slaves are not like fishermen facing depleted fish stocks?) The paper is being called a “study”: it is not a study, but rather an activist advocacy piece. (I would have bet that both scholars are black; nope, just one is, although I would not be surprised to learn that Linda J. Bilmes signed on just to help Cornell William Brooks avoid the obvious accusation of bias and conflict of interest. And, naturally, at Harvard taking on such a mission, certifiably bats though it is, can only enhance her popularity on campus.)

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Science? No, Fearmongering, As a Deliberate Catalyst For Totalitarianism

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

If I had the time and inclination, I could locate dozens of trenchant quotes from Orwell and others making the same crucial point: fear is the enemy of liberty, and that aspiring dictators recognize that a population in fear of its safety will inevitably bargain away the freedoms and the autonomy of themselves and others. “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery” was the way Thomas Jefferson put it, although usually in Latin. The idea behind America and its crucial unique rebellious character was that as a people we are worthy of democracy because we have the guts and fortitude to resist the siren song of peaceful security. Hence Ben Franklin’s much-quoted, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” FDR, clever and cynical, inveighed against the dangers of fear (“We have nothing to fear but fear itself!”) even as he made brilliant use of fear to make himself the nearest thing to a dictator the U.S. has ever had.

The progressives who visit Ethics Alarms freaked out yesterday over a post in which I referenced the current mutated U.S. Left’s increasingly blatant drift toward totalitarianism…you know,

There was more traffic on that post than there has been on any post here not linked by some mega-site like “Instapundit.” The truth hurts. Ironically, I just stumbled upon an example of our now thoroughly corrupted scientific establishment wielding the tactic of fearmongering by the device of arguing that the public is denying the truth, with the truth being, “EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE! THE WORST EVER! WE’RE DOOMED IF THE SMART PEOPLE DON’T RESCUE US! FAST!“

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Comment of the Day: “Ethics Quote of the Month: Banned EA Commenter ‘David’” (2)

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

As I just banned another misbehaving commenter who stopped off here just to show he was smarter than me and to defend Snopes (“…But for Snopes?”), it seems a propitious time to post this Comment of the Day, the second (the first is here) to be inspired by my post about another banned commenter calling me a “Trump supporting fascist.” And he was much smarter than the jerk I just banned.

Here is A M Golden’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Quote of the Month: Banned EA Commenter ‘David’”:

***

When I was about 11 years old, my grandparents’ church showed a movie called “The Hiding Place” about a Dutch family that hid Jews from the Nazis. I was fascinated by the idea that there could exist a country so very unlike America where people could be punished for helping others. Since I was already very interested in history, I began what is now a 40-plus-year study of the Third Reich and Hitler, in particular.

I do not consider myself an expert; however, I am certainly more knowledgeable than the average layperson. I have read hundreds of books over the years concerning Nazi Germany and not just the military build-up and harassment of Jews. I’ve read a lot about the culture, the education and the day-to-day life of Germans.

And, of course, I’ve read multiple biographies of Hitler himself. Not every biography is created equal, though (Don’t get me started on movies about Hitler. The last one I tried to watch was a TV movie called “Hitler: The Rise of Evil” starring an otherwise fine actor named Robert Carlyle. I turned it off after 10 minutes due to the blatant misrepresentations and outright fabrications of Hitler’s early life. Apparently, the expert consultant had his name taken off of it for the same reason). Some biographies are pretty bad and postulate things that are not likely to be true. A good example of this are the ones that try to push the idea that Hitler was a homosexual.

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Ethics Dunce: Geoffrey Hinton, “The Godfather of Artificial Intelligence”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

You should know the name Geoffrey Hinton by now. To the extent that any one scientist is credited with the emergence of artificial intelligence, he’s it. He was among the winners of the prestigious Turing Prize for his break-through in artificial neural networks, and his discoveries were crucial in the development of advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) software today like Chat GPT and Google’s Bard. He spent 50 years developing the technology, the last 10 pf which working on AI at Google before he quit in 2023. His reason: he was alarmed at the lack of sufficient safety measures to ensure that AI technology doesn’t do more harm than good.

And yet, as revealed in a recent interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Hinton still believes that his work to bring AI to artificial life was time well-spent, that his baby was worth nurturing because of its potential benefits to humanity, and that—-get this—all we have to do is, for the first time in the history of mankind, predict the dangers, risks and looming unintended consequences of an emerging new technology, get everything right the first time, not make any mistakes, not be blindly reckless in applying it, and avoid the kind of genie-out-of-the-bottle catastrophes that world has experienced (and is experiencing!) over and over again.

That’s all!

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Just Stop. The Left’s Propaganda Machine Keeps Pretending Dr. Fauci Is a Hero When He’s the Exact Opposite

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments


Stephen Colbert is really is beneath contempt. His late night show proudly promoted the guest appearance of Anthony Fauci last week, which is roughly the equivalent of cheering for the Sackler family. This is one of the subtle ways—not so subtle, really—that the media pimps for Democrats and the party’s agenda (“The Government knows best, proles!”) Colbert only has guests that align with the Axis; Nancy Pelosi was another recent guest, and the producers obviously have no interest in presenting anyone who isn’t fully part of the “team.” They also don’t have any interest in entertaining audience members who, having paid attention and having not been brainwashed, know the likes of Pelosi and Fauci for what they are.

Fauci, however, is a far more nauseating and unforgivable object of fawning idolatry than even Pelosi. He’s a certifiable, no-contest ethics villain: incompetent, irresponsible, dishonest, hypocritical, an abuser of power, position and influence, and the perfect poster boy for the fake “Trust the science!” mantra that the Left has weaponized for political gain.

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Encore: “An Ethics Alarms D-Day Mission”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

navy-memorial-normandy

I first posted this essay on Veteran’s Day several years ago, and I re-posted it on the anniversary of D-Day in 2021. The crucial facts of the June 6, 1944 invasion of Normandy that it discusses are still hardly ever mentioned, at least not when I’m around to read or hear it, in any news media or historical features about the battle for Omaha Beach. As I wrote originally and will state now, I don’t understand this. The ongoing mystery constitutes one more “duty to remember” crusade by your windmill-tilting host. So up the post goes again this June 6, as I fulfill my pledge to post it on every D-Day anniversary until this largely untold story is as familiar as the sight of Robert Mitchum, as Brig. Gen. Norman Cota, sicking a fresh cigar in his mouth and saying, as the final line in “The Longest Day,” “Run me up the hill, son!”

***

After all these many years of reading about and watching movies and TV shows about D-Day, June 6, 1944,  I discovered how the US Navy saved the invasion and maybe the world after stumbling upon a 2009 documentary on the Smithsonian channel.

If you recall the way the story is told in “The Longest Day” and other accounts, US troops were pinned down by horrific fire from the German defenses on Omaha beach until Gen. Norman Cota (Robert Mitchum in the movie) rallied them to move forward, and by persistence his infantry troops ultimately broke through. Yet it was US destroyers off the Normandy shore that turned the tide of the battle at Omaha, an element that isn’t shown in “The Longest Day” (or “Saving Private Ryan”)at all.

Though it was not part of the plan, the captains of the Navy destroyers decided to come in to within 800 yards of the beach and use their big guns at (for them) point blank range to pound the German artillery, machine gun nests and sharpshooters. The barrage essentially wiped them out, allowing Cota’s troops to get up and over without being slaughtered. I’ve never seen that explained or depicted in any film, and according to the Smithsonian’s video, apparently it is a vital feature of the battle that had been inexplicably neglected. No monument to the US Navy commemorating its contributions on 6/6/44 was erected at Normandy until 2009.

Here’s the relevant part of account from the  Naval History website on “Operation Neptune,” the Navy counterpart to Operation Overlord:

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This Isn’t a Baseball Ethics Post, It’s a “Money Makes Organizations Forget Their Core Values” Post

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Gee, what a surprise.

Major League Baseball, almost destroyed by a gambling scandal in 1919, with two of its greatest players, Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose (its all-time hit leader), banned from the game and exiled from the Hall of Fame for participating in baseball gambling (Jackson helped throw a World Series for gamblers; that’s him above. He was no Ray Liotta, was he?), is suddenly awash in new gambling scandals. How could this happen, you may ask? Easy. Once the Supreme Court opened the door to online gambling, all of the professional sports leaped into the money pit. Now online sports gambling outfits like DraftKings are the most ubiquitous sponsors of televised sports. In the middle of televised Red Sox games, the screen will show the odds on bets like “Will Rafael Devers hit a homerun?” David Ortiz, a lifetime Red Sox hero and icon, stars in commercials for DraftKings. The obvious message is that gambling on baseball is fun, virtuous, harmless, and…

For Major League Baseball, with its history, of all sports, to take this U-Turn was wildly irresponsible and perilous. How can the sport maintain the fan’s trust in the legitimacy of games played in an environment where billions are being wagered on them, openly and without any fear of corrupting the players?

Fay Vincent, the last real baseball commissioner (the first one was appointed because of the Black Sox scandal in 1919) told the Times, “The inevitability of corruption is triggered by the enormous amount of money that’s at stake. When you pour all this gambling money into baseball, or all the professional sports — or for that matter, even amateur sports — that amount of money is so staggering that eventually the players and I think, tragically, the umpires, the regulators, everybody is going to be tempted to see if they can get a million dollars.”

Vincent is an ethical man. The current “commissioner” (he’s the owners’ toady, just like Bud Selig, his predecessor), not so much. In a statement reacting to baseball this week banning one Major League Player for life for gambling on his own team and suspending four more for a year, Rob Manfred ludicrously said, “The strict enforcement of Major League Baseball’s rules and policies governing gambling conduct is a critical component of upholding our most important priority: protecting the integrity of our games for the fans. The longstanding prohibition against betting on Major League Baseball games by those in the sport has been a bedrock principle for over a century.”

Funny that after decades of no gambling scandals, baseball is suddenly drowning in them. What a coinkydink!

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A.I. Ethics Update: Nothing Has Changed!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Oh, there have been lots more incidents and scandals involving artificial intelligence bots doing crazy things, or going rogue, or making fools of people who relied on them. But the ethics hasn’t changed. It’s still the ethics that should be applied to all new and shiny technology, but never is.

We don’t yet understand this technology. We cannot trust it, and we need to go slow, be careful, be patient. We won’t. We never do.

Above is a result someone got and posted after asking Google’s Gemini AI the ridiculous question, “Are there snakes at thesis defenses?” The fact that generative artificial intelligence ever goes bats and makes up stuff like that is sufficient reason not to trust it, any more than you would trust an employee who said or wrote something like that when he wasn’t kidding around. Or a child.

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The DEI-ing of Major League Baseball’s Statistics: Oh. Wait, WHAT?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Major League Baseball’s absurd and self-wounding decision to lump all of the old Negro League season and career statistics in with those of its own players is impossible to defend logically or ethically. Ethics Alarms discussed this debacle of racial pandering here, three days ago. What is interesting—Interesting? Perhaps disturbing would be a better word—is how few baseball experts, statisticians, historians, players and fans are defending this indefensible decision or criticizing it. As to the latter, they simply don’t have the guts; they are terrified of being called racists. Regarding the former, there is really no good argument to be made. MLB’s groveling and pandering should call for baseball’s version of a welter of “It’s OK to be white” banners and signs at the games. Instead, both the sport and society itself is treating this “it isn’t what it is” classic like a particularly odoriferous fart in an elevator. Apparently it’s impolite to call attention to it.

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