Rights

The Augusta National Golf Club. Shows How Virtue-Signaling Can Be Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“Virtue-signaling” was going to be the 2017 Ethics Alarms “Unethical Trend of the Year” if I had ever had time to compile that year’s “Ethics Alarms Best and Worst” lists. Until it was overtaken by “presumed racism” in 2020, it was probably the winner in 2018 and 2019 as well. Now it’s on the rise again, thanks to corporations beclowning themselves and abusing their societal roles by taking political stands based on nothing but a desire to appeal to the woke social media mobs.

Signaling one’s virtue, real or imaginary, is not necessarily unethical, but it is always obnoxious. Just as smart people don’t have claim that they are smart, good people and organizations that ostentatiously trumpet what they think will get them societal brownie points should start ethics alarms faintly ringing. I don’t trust such organizations. They are usually sucking up to what they perceive as majorities, meaning that they have no ethical principles themselves, and, sadly, most businesses don’t. At its best, virtue-signaling shows a deficit in humility, modesty, and self-restraint. Its worst is nicely demonstrated by the recent statement by Fred Ridley, the chairman of Augusta National Golf Club.

Since Major League Baseball immolated itself and gratuitously harmed the Atlanta community by relocating the 2021 All Star Game as its demonstration of unethical virtue-signaling, activist have been pushing the PGA to do the same with the Masters. Is “lemminging” a word?

The responsible course for the Masters and related parties to take would be to shut up, firmly. It is a sports organization, and should not have any position on political matters and partisan debates. But Ridley, who is especially worthless in this matter because for his golf club to lose the Masters would be a disaster of biblical proportions—“Dogs and cats, playing golf together!”—, so he has a conflict of interest, apparently couldn’t help himself, or was forced into blathering by some of his club’s more influential and less intelligent members.

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End Of Day Ethics, 4/7/2021: “Ick,” Ethics, And Law

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

And as we bid farewell to April 7 and good morning to April 8, I want to wish my wonderful, kind, talented and tolerant wife of 40 years a happy birthday. I owe everything to her.

1. Well, you can’t accuse satellite radio of being politically correct…the Comedy Legend Sirius channel is a welcome oasis in the woke era humor desert, with routines old enough to remind one what it was like when comedians only had to worry about being funny to the audience at hand—and yet there are limits. At least, there should be. Today I heard an old Louis C.K. routine about his childhood. You recall how C.K. became a #MeToo arch-villain, costing him his show, bookings, and essentially his career, don’t you? He set a new low for celebrity sexual harassment by masturbating in front of non-consenting female visitors to his hotel room, and on more than one occasion. Ick. Also sick. In the routine featured on Sirius-XM, the comedian was reminiscing, to audience hilarity, how he showed his penis to a girl with Down Syndrome when he was nine. I don’t know that I would have ever found that story funny, but hearing C.K. tell it in light of his later revealed proclivities was an experience I could have lived my whole life without having. Since it is now clear to me that whoever programs that channel can’t be trusted to apply any discretion or common sense at all, I’m not sure it is safe for me to drive with it playing…

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Ethics Observations On Major League Baseball Boycotting Georgia

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

allstarlogo2021.0

Here I am, trying to be loyal, understanding, broad-minded and forgiving, and baseball kicks me in the metaphorical snarglies on Day #1 of the Red Sox season. The Sox managed to lose yesterday to the pathetic Orioles in perhaps the most boring Opening Day I have ever watched, getting just two hits off of an assortment of bargain basement pitchers, scoring no runs, allowing only 4,000 fans into Fenway, and giving up the deciding run because its new free agent hot-shot fielder botched a sure double-play ball at second base—but I’m not even talking about that.

On April 1, I wrote,

Let’s see just how stupid Major League Baseball is. Democrats want MLB to remove the All-Star Game from Atlanta because Georgia passed a voting regulations bill that the party is lying about. If the sport allows itself to be used this way—I’m sure many players will boycott the game without having a clue about the law—many of them look for ways to opt out of it anyway—there will be no end to such manipulation., and baseball, of all sports, cannot effort to be seen as partisan. I’ll write a full post on this mess later.

This is that post. Indeed MLB did capitulate to Democrats and pull the game, though I am not certain that “stupid” was the correct word. The right words are “cowardly,” “cynical,” and “being a weenie.” Also greedy. And completely predictable.

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And The Shackles Tighten Still More: The Continuing Big Tech Censorship Of Donald Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Once I would have headlined this post with “Stop Making Me Defend Donald Trump!” But this is no longer about Donald Trump, and readers who can’t figure this out, frankly, are too dense and gullible to read here.

Earlier this week, former President Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump posted on Instagram: “BIG SHOW TONIGHT – I will be joined by President Donald Trump on The Right View!!”

Then, when she posted her “big show,” Facebook took down the video of her interview with the ex-President after sending her an email stating that content with the voice of former President Trump “is not currently allowed on our platforms (including new posts with President Trump speaking).” The Facebook spokesman said the video was not permitted on Facebook and Instagram because of the former president’s indefinite suspension. Facebook also warned that any future posts featuring Trump would also be removed “resulting in additional limitations on accounts that posted it.”

I wouldn’t walk down my stairs to watch Trump be interviewed by Eric Trump’s wife, or just about any interviewer, frankly. Nonetheless, he is a recent President, a former President, a political leader, and an important historical, cultural and political figure in the United States of America, which is allegedly a free country. Millions of members of the public are interested in his words, beliefs and activities, and access to information about those should not be impeded by powerful private companies.

The news media’s embargo on facts and events for its partisan objectives created this slippery slope, and this slide is accelerating. Tech companies and communications corporations are actively controlling what Americans can see, hear, think about, and think. An entire political party and its corrupted “base” are perfectly satisfied with this distortion of democracy. Others are just quietly being misled, and are now the apocryphal slowly boiling frogs, doomed to have teeth ripping at the flesh of their legs before they understand what has happened to them.

Meanwhile, anyone–like me—seeing something ominous in this is a “conspiracy theorist”—you know, liars and wackos. Why would anyone see a conspiracy at work when a major political figure approximately half the nation voted for to be President less than four months ago is erased from the public eye and ear by a joint campaign stretching across the airwaves and the internet? Crazy!

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Ethics Villain: GoFundMe…As The Shackles Tighten

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Scott Mineo founded “Parents Against Critical Theory” to fight the suddenly surging anti-white and racist “Critical Race Theory” inclusion in the curriculum of Loudon County (Va.) public schools. Then members of an Orwellian-named Facebook group, “Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County,” launched a campaign against his and other parent groups seeking not to have their children subjected to racial demagoguery. The aspiring community totalitarians compiled lists of parents opposing the indoctrination effort, their spouses and their employers, and rallied their members to try to shut down the non-submissive websites. Mineo’s page raised nearly $4,000 by March 22 until a former Loudoun County School Board Equity Committee member, Charlotte McConnell, urged current committee members and the school board to report the page as objectionable.

Three days later, GoFundMe informed Mineo that his fundraising appeal was taken down because it constituted “prohibited conduct.”

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Res Ipsa Loquitur: The Unethical Tweet Of The Week

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

The res ipsa loquitur part is that anyone who would write this, publish this, say this or think this is ignorant, irreponsible. and an idiot, by definition.

What the tweet doesn’t tell you is…

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Comment Of The Day: “Sunday Ethics Peeps, 3/28/21…Item #4: Qualified Immunity”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m trying to catch up on the Comments of the Day.

Here is Michael R’s entry regarding New York City’s recent elimination of qualified immunity for police officers, from #4 in the post, Sunday Ethics Peeps, 3/28/21: “Hey, Everybody! Free Gym Memberships!”:

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One More Time: Conservative Personal Liberty Faces Off Against Enforced Progressive Cant

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Shawnee

This time, personal liberty won.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Shawnee State professor Nicholas Meriwether, who had been reprimanded and disciplined because he “refused to refer to students by their ‘preferred pronouns. ‘” The small Ohio state school had issued a 2016 order that that any professor who “refused to use a pronoun that reflects a student’s self-asserted gender identity” would face discipline. When Meriwether asked if his own beliefs affected what he could call students, the official response was that he must call students what they demanded “regardless of” his own “convictions or views on the subject.” The student in question was male in appearance but identified as female. Meriwether maintained that his Christian faith forbade him from referring to a male in female terms; the student, according to Meriwether, threatened him if he refused to comply with the pronoun edict.  The court over-ruled a lower federal district court and held that university officials had violated the professor’s First Amendment rights to free speech and to the free exercise of his religion, thus attempting to“wield alarming power to compel ideological conformity.”

Normally, as in the Christian baker scenarios, I would take the position that, law aside—ethics, you know!—, this is an “asshole meets asshole” situation. How hard is it for either party to just yield a bit, respect the other’s sensitivities, extreme or not, and be accommodating? It is a Golden Rule opportunity. This time, however, it seems clear that the professor was willing to be reasonable, and the woke, non-binery, transitioning or whatever he or she was student was determined to go to extreme lengths to bend the professor to “her” will.

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up: Snap Out Of It!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This morning, instead of the usual grainy 1930’s movies TCM usually shows before noon, it was featuring “Casablanca” for some reason. It’s a good thing, because the recent news had me heading for the bridge. As usual, the legendary singing duel at Ric’s between the Nazis and the French put me in a defiant mood, so I decided it was a good time to bring back the incredible Mirielle Mathiue and one of her signature performances of “La Marseillaise.” I’m a big fan of “The Star Spangled Banner,” but as inspiring national anthems go, this is the gold standard.

Now I feel better, and will at least until I finish this post.

1. You want racial conflict? This is how you get racial conflict. One benefit of the warm-up format is that I can write as little as possible about things that would make me up-chuck if I had to compose full posts about them. Following on the “systemic racism” myth, Oakland, California is launching a guaranteed income experiment called Oakland Resilient Families. 600 families in the city will receive $500-a-month payments over the next 18 months “to eliminate racial wealth inequalities.” Oakland’s guaranteed income program is only for low-income black, indigenous, and people of color, or BIPOC, families.

Whites cannot apply. If Oakland’s whites are poor, they have no excuses. They are just lazy, useless losers, I guess.

Families must apply online in the coming weeks and months in order to enter a pool of potential recipients, from which eligible families will be randomly selected to receive the cash payments.

I don’t have to explain what’s unethical about this, do I? Or what’s stupid about it? Or irresponsible?

In related news, a Kentucky mother is in custody on murder charges after her 2-year-old son overdosed on fentanyl while she slept. She had bought the drug with her stimulus money.

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Rainy Day Ethics Puddles, 3/24/2021:

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

1 Shut up or be funny. For some reason, the fact that Monday’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers’ included a gratuitous and facile lecture by the host about gun control legislation was plastered all over the progressive news media as if he had begun speaking in tongues or channeling the ghost of Emily Dickinson. I hate to be a spoil sport, but who cares what Seth Myers thinks about gun control? He’s a comedian and a comedy writer, and has been nothing but since college. Again, he has no brief to lecture anyone on that topic: he has his job to be funny, and the show he hosts is, theoretically at least, a comedy show. Did Julia Child ever lecture her PBS audience about U.S. nuclear policy while explaining how to cook an omelette? No. Did Walter Cronkite ever break into knock-knock jokes during The CBS Evening News? Never. Did Andy Williams ever pause in the middle of “Moon River” to deliver his analysis of a Presidential campaign? Absolutely not.

Myers has a right to his opinion, as sophomoric and echo chamber-nourished as it may be (he was pimping for “common sense gun laws,” which is what people say when they have no idea what laws will stop the criminal use of guns, but want us to “do something”), but it is arrogant and presumptuous to perform a bait and switch on his audience, which doesn’t come to his show for public policy wisdom. If they do, he has an ethical obligation to make it clear that they shouldn’t. As far as I can tell, Myers knows zilch about law, guns, government, or the Constitution, yet he presumes to use a vehicle awarded to him only because of an alleged gift for topical humor (personally, I don’t see it) for political advocacy.

Be funny, get educated, run for office, or shut up, Seth. And incidentally, there are not mass shootings “three or four times a week” and never have been. In a single atypical week, there were two mass shootings, and no Constitutional gun laws are likely to have stopped either of them.

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