This story is too disturbing to describe, so I’m going to just give you the link. Briefly, it involves a couple, she a veteran, he a soldier, killing their therapy dog, laughing as they did it, and filming the event. They were arrested on charges of animal cruelty. Read the story, here, and then consider the Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day, which is…
In “The Magnificent Seven,” the original classic, not last year’s disappointing re-make, Harry Luck (Brad Dexter) had always been convinced that the real reason the Seven had agreed to help a poor Mexican village fight a predatory bandit band was because the town had a secret treasure to share. (It didn’t.) Harry refuses to join the rest as they make one desperate effort to help the farmers, then at the peak of the gunfire gallops back into the village to join the battle–and is promptly shot. Dying, he begs Chris (Yul Brenner) to confirm his suspicions…
Harry Luck: Chris… I hate to die a sucker. We didn’t come here just to keep an eye on a lot of corn and chili peppers, did we? There was something else all along, wasn’t there?
Chris: Yes, Harry. You had it pegged right all along.
Harry: I knew it. What was it?
Chris: Gold. Sacks of it.
Harry: Sounds… beautiful. How much?
Chris: At least a hundred and fifty.
Harry: My cut would have been what?
Chris: About seventy thousand.
Harry: I’ll be damned. (He dies)
Chris: Maybe you won’t be.
Today’s news has another story involving lying to a dying man, a really stupid story.
Michael Garland Elliott, 75, died of congestive heart failure in his Oregon home ,surrounded by his caregivers, neighbors and friends. Right before the end, his ex-wife,spoke with him over the phone from her home in Austin, Texas.
She told him that President Trump had been impeached. “I knew it was his very, very last moments,” Teresa Elliott told reporters. “I knew that would bring him comfort and it did. He then took his final breath.”
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
I have now read three accounts in borderline news sources about a Mississippi married couple who went to a fertility clinic and discovered to their horror that they were “identical twins.” I’m assuming it is a fake news story, perhaps planted through collusion with the Trump campaign by Russian government operatives, and not just because identical twins cannot be different sexes. (Hey! Maybe one of them had gender reassignment surgery! Now that would be a story!)
I suppose it’s possible; Robert Ripley found odder coincidences for decades, but never mind: let’s assume for the sake of ethics problem-solving practice that the story is true. (I’ll be stunned if it is.)
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Key question: Is this ick rather than ethics?
Trap: I’m not asking what’s moral.
It’s all yours…
No, not THAT one.
This:
“Illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border has continued to fall under President Trump, dropping 67 percent through the end of March, the former border commissioner told Congress on Tuesday. That’s even bigger than the drop reported for February, when the number of illegal immigrants caught — a yardstick for the overall flow — dropped by 40 percent.
“It’s actually up to 67 percent drop compared to last year,” David V. Aguilar, a former chief of the Border Patrol and former acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, told the Senate Homeland Security Committee.”
Your Ethics Alarms This-Should-Be-EasyBut-I’m-Dying-To-Hear-The-Reasoning-Of-Those-Who-Don’t-Think-So Ethics Quiz of the Day:
The above tweet and graphic somehow wended its way to Chelsea Clinton. You know: Hope of the Democratic Party Chelsea Clinton? Lifetime Impact Award winner Chelsea Clinton? Graduate of Stanford, with a masters degree from Oxford—that Chelsea Clinton?
Here is how that Chelsea Clinton responded:
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz Of The Day is…
And why?
“No, this is the exact hat Lincoln was wearing when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. People forget that.”
“Nope, Lincoln was wearing that exact hat at the Theater.”
“Nope, they found a picture of Lincoln wearing a MAGA hat from the nineteenth century. No photoshop needed.”
“I remember this photo was taken at the 1856 Republican National Convention and is real.”
“It’s as real as those Bosnian snipers.”
My answer: she should be as much and as wittily as possible, as long as one agrees that similar treatment should greet one’s own brain-farts if they are especially funny, like this one is. This will be a great test of Chelsea’s character: if she can take the ribbing and laugh at herself, that will win her points with me.
If she doesn’t understand what’s wrong with the tweet, however…well, that would be a problem.
________________________
Pointer: Newsbusters
The Supreme Court ruled today that courts must reject the usual rule that jury deliberations are secret when evidence emerges they were marred by racial or ethnic bias. The 5-to-3 decision was triggered by statements made during jury deliberations in a 2010 sexual assault trial, when a juror said of the defendant, “I think he did it because he’s Mexican, and Mexican men take whatever they want.” The juror was a former law enforcement officer, and after the trial was over, two other jurors submitted sworn statements describing what he had said during deliberations.
Those statements, the Court’s majority said, warranted an investigation by the trial judge into deliberations that are ordinarily secret. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined Justice Kennedy in the majority opinion.
I hope you remember Rachel Dolezal, the former NAACP branch president who falsely claimed to be black, double-talked and lied about her racial origins, and was defended by the “race is just a social construct” crowd on the left, as part of the same ideological fantasy that holds that a man can be a woman by just deciding that she is one. Ethics Alarms discussed her strange story here, here, and here.
Following her 15 minutes of fame, Rachel was somehow unable to manage a book contract or a speaking tour, perhaps because she is a walking, talking Achilles heel for several beloved progressive myths, Now she’s jobless and living on food stamps, and facing foreclosure and expects to be evicted next month.
“There’s no protected class for me,” she told The Guardian. “I’m this generic, ambiguous scapegoat for white people to call me a race traitor and take out their hostility on. And I’m a target for anger and pain about white people from the black community. It’s like I am the worst of all these worlds…I do think a more complex label would be helpful, but we don’t really have that vocabulary. I feel like the idea of being trans-black would be much more accurate than ‘I’m white.’ Because you know, I’m not white.”
Of course, she is.
Dolezal says she’s been rejected for over 100 jobs. She has had offers on the freak show circuit, in porn and reality TV. But Dolezal is not uneducated or dumb. Surely there are many jobs that she could perform, and well.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz Of The Day is this…
Jerry Seinfeld sends out a tweet to announce new episodes of his Crackle series “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” typically with a joke involving the guest comic’s name. For example, his tweet from two weeks ago read: “New Comedians. Cars Getting Coffee! Cedric The Entertainer. No affiliation with Cedric The Regular Person.” On Thursday, Seinfeld’s tweet used a predictable pun on the name of his guest, as you can see in the screen shot above:
“New! Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Lewis Black. Black’s life matters.”
Today’s incredibly easy Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:
Former Politico staffer Mike Allen published a leaked list of what he says are the names of individuals who were being considered for Hillary Clinton Cabinet jobs.
Nobody knows if the list is accurate or genuine, but Allen is well connected, and many assume it is. For the purpose of the Ethics Quiz, we will also assume the list is authentic, but whether it is or not doesn’t matter regarding the ethical principles involved. Here is the list:
No, the quiz query does not involve The Horror of John Podesta for Secretary of State. Note rather the 11th bullet point: “EPA: likely an African-American (and/or at Education).”
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is this:
A Skowhegan, Maine Trump voter.
The quiz itself has little to do with the fact that Michael Turner is the kind of bad American, bad neighbor, bad community member and jerk who makes Ebenezer Scrooge seem like a mensch, but ponder on his conduct anyway. If you are one of the residents in Skowhegan, Maine and you call Turner LP Gas in Skowhegan, Maine to buy propane to heat your home, you get this message from the owner:
“If you voted for Donald Trump for president, I will no longer be delivering your gas. Please find someone else.”
No, it’s not a hate crime, it’s just hate. It gets cold in Maine, and Skowhegan, like the rest of the state, has a lot of poor people among it’s 8500 or so residents. It also has many who are elderly and poor, for whom having to find another propane supplier may be not just inconvenient, but life-threatening. This is why we have public accommodation laws: To protect us, especially the vulnerable among us, from bigots and bullies like Michael Turner.
He is no different in his lack of decency and the void of ethical values in his soul than the racists who refused to allow black citizens to frequent their establishments before the Civil Rights Act, bridal shop owners who won’t sell wedding dresses to same-sex couples, and the innkeepers who turned away a pregnant woman and her husband long ago, on a night we celebrate soon.
Ethics Alarms has discussed this ugly phenomenon many times. The Bush administration tried to validate it by approving the so called “workers’ right of conscience, ” that permitted a wide variety of health care workers to refuse to administer treatments they found morally repugnant. President Obama, to his credit, restricted that wide-open door to division and bigotry, then allowed the rest of his years in office to exacerbate societal schisms to the point that we have large numbers of a political party trying to overturn a legal election while calling Americans who dared to vote differently than they did racists, sexists and fascists.
A recent Ethics Alarms post titled, “Americans: End This Slippery Slope Now, Before It’s Too Late,” about a Washington, D.C. restaurant that publicly apologized for letting an alt-right group to eat there, asked,
Are all groups, families and individuals now going to be required to declare their political and ideological positions before being allowed to order a lasagna? What is an acceptable group? If there is a protest over a Black Lives Matter dinner, will Maggiano’s apologize? If Mike Pence and his family eats there and the “Hamilton” cast protests, does that mean they will refuse to serve cannoli members of the Trump administration? Despite the fact that the protests came from progressives, the attack on the restaurant is totalitarian in substance. What is being commanded is conformity of thought.
Ah, but the persecutors are the good guys, don’t you understand? They know they are right, so they can rationalize hurting anyone who isn’t like them. Michael Turner is this breed of citizen. I must admit, when I warned that electing Donald Trump would turn the U.S. into a nation of assholes, I didn’t anticipate that it would be assholes like Michael Turner.
There’s no quiz on this topic, for it is settled ethics that his practice of punishing neighbors for their political views stinks. No, the quiz involves the conduct of Turner’s customers:
Today’s Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz is this…
Ethics Alarms 