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WaPo: “Republican Overseeing Alamo Renovation Ousted After ‘Woke’ Social Media Post” Ethics Alarms: “Better Safe Than Sorry.”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I know, I know: Ethics Alarms’ annual “Remember the Alamo!’ posts usually don’t start until February. But an important Alamo story with ethics lessons reaching beyond the legendary Texas battle is in the news, and attention should be paid.

Kate Rogers had been leading the $550 million renovation of the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick reviewed a copy of her 2023 PhD dissertation on museums affecting history is taught in schools. “Personally, I would love to see the Alamo become a beacon for historical reconciliation and a place that brings people together versus tearing them apart, but politically that may not be possible at this time,” her dissertation stated. Patrick asked her to resign as CEO of the Alamo Trust based on that sentiment, and Rogers refused. declined. The next day, Patrick publicly called for her resignation. This time, Rogers complied.

This week, Rogers sued, alleging wrongful termination. The theory: forcing her to resign for what she wrote in her dissertation was a violation of her free speech rights. The dissertation wasn’t the whole story, however. On her watch, a social media post from the Alamo Trust had prompted this letter…

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Comment of the Day: “Discovered While Researching ‘Trump Derangement'(And Seeking A Cure)…”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

In “Pulp Fiction,” leading up to the film’s memorable twist scene with John Travolta and Uma Thurmond tripping the light fantastic for a prize at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, Uma notes how great it is to visit the rest room at a resturant and come back to your table to find that your order has arrived. Now in my case, I find it similarly wonderful to wake up bleary-eyed with my brain in second gear to find a qualified Comment of the Day waiting for me.

That was the case today with DaveL (one of Ethics Alarms’ five regular commenters) depositing on my metaphorical Ethics Alarms table an excellent debunking of the DEI “sales pitch,” as he described it, in the fake “Calvin and Hobbes” cartoon above.

DaveL uses facts to rebut Calvin. The wokeness-crippled progressives who approvingly post such garbage on my Facebook feed are, in contrast, just insisting they are certain of their warped world view because they have willed it so. I have given up arguing with such people: I used to link Ethics Alarms essays (and sometimes comments) on Facebook, but all that accomplished was losing “friends” and having the posts ignored. People don’t like having their faith challenged by ugly reality. They wouldn’t consider the post and went off somewhere to sing “Imagine.”

Sigh.

Get well soon, my friends.

Here is DaveL’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Discovered While Researching ‘Trump Derangement'(And Seeking A Cure)…”

***

What Calvin says in the comic strip, like the words that DEI stands for, are the sales pitch. Just as there wasn’t a whole lot of genuine Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité to go around in the early years of the French Revolution, these slogans are a lie.

This is perhaps most plainly seen anywhere you have a years-long, multi-stage selection process. Take for instance the admission of new lawyers to the bar. There’s the SAT and undergraduate admissions, undergraduate performance and graduation, the LSAT and law school admissions, law school graduation, and finally the bar exam. What do these show us? That at every stage, DEI philosophy prioritizes the passing of low performers from favored demographics over higher performers from disfavored demographics.

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And Now…Here Comes A.I. Derangement Syndrome!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“Coca-Cola’s AI ad just ruined Christmas… again” rages tech blog CB (Creative Bloq) Wow. A Coca-Cola by-the-numbers holiday ad lasting a bit more than 60 seconds ruined Christmas just like the Grinch or Mr. Potter. How is that possible?

It isn’t, but apparently the new tool of artificial intelligence which can create things like the Coke ad faster and cheaper than CGI has some folks losing their jingle bells. What’s going on here?

This: the Marxists and progressives on social media and elsewhere are upset because AI puts actors out of work, or soon will. Of course, except for Santa, there are no humans in the ad to be put out of work, but the critics on X and elsewhere aren’t fooled. Coke used cute animals, see, so people would be fooled into thinking that AI wasn’t taking away human jobs. “Firstly, can you really put aside the issues of AI generated creative displacing artists simply by using animals instead of humans?,” Fergus McCallum, CEO at TBWA\MCR wonders. “Even if you can, there’s no getting away from the lack of joy and authenticity. As audiences start to turn away from the AI slop being served to them on a daily basis, Coca-Cola are in danger of becoming inauthentic too. Whatever happened to ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing’?!”

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Needed: A Smart Phone and Social Media Code of Ethics (At Least)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Begosh and begorrah! “Rolling Stone” published a useful ethics essay! The topic: Gen Z altering their conduct and becoming wary of social contact because of fear of public shaming.

Eli Thompson writes in part,

At the Chicago high school I graduated from in June, phones were out during private and public moments. It could be in class when someone fumbled a presentation, or the cafeteria when someone tripped. Most clips stayed in private Snapchat group chats, shared among a few dozen kids. But they could spread further, and cut deeper. Last year, a friend from another school was filmed in his attempt to ask a girl out in the hallway. Even though it was awkward, he didn’t do anything crazy in the video and it was mostly just a rejection. But someone recorded him and posted it on a Snapchat story. The video had the caption, “Bro thought he had a chance,” and over 200 people saw it by the time he got to lunch…Trends such as “fail compilations” or “cringe challenges” — posts showing awkward mistakes or uncomfortable situations meant to make others laugh — encourage people to document embarrassing moments…After seeing these moments play out, I realized this was no longer a far-off fear. It changed how young men conducted themselves in real life. The threat of public shaming makes normal interactions risky and at times can lessen the chance young men will pursue relationships or go on dates. Constant fear of embarrassment can leave some young men too hesitant to take the social risks needed for dating. The fear of online exposure doesn’t just stop certain young men from asking girls out — it can plant seeds of resentment that threaten to fracture gender relations for a long time. 

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Ethics Hero For The Ages: Elon Musk

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I have long planned on writing a thorough post about how much the United States, its culture, its future as a viable democracy and its avoidance (so far) of a close call with progressive neo-totalitarianism owes to Elon Musk. This isn’t it. However, once again he has used his boundless wealth and creativity to strike down an engine of cultural indoctrination and Orwellian twisting of knowledge and history. Buying Twitter and ending its flagrant partisan bias was a landmark in American freedom of speech, one that may well have made the election of Donald Trump possible. His latest adventure may be even more important.

He has launched Grokipedia, the desperately needed alternative to Wikipedia. It is still a work in progress, as Musk admits, but by being AI-driven (the bot in charge is Elon’s Grok), the online living encyclopedia avoids the progressive bias and vulnerability to partisan manipulation that had caused me to only resort to Wikipedia when the topic was immune from political bias.

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The Demon Pazuzu Appears To Be A Democrat…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

…since he (it?) sure has been speaking for a lot of Democratic Party candidates…if you can believe its (his?) alleged victims.

Of course, you can’t.

In California, the leading candidate to replace Gavin Newsom as governor, Rep. Katie Porter, has been bedeviled by emerging videos of her abusing staffers, refusing to tolerate probing questions from interviewers, and generally acting like a witch on wheels (It’s Halloween!) Porter and her political allies insist that these clips don’t show “the real Katie,’ which is comforting, since that demon impersonating Porter just stops short of spewing green vomit.

Then there is Jay Jones, who in his passionate apology last night (during a televised debate between the two candidates for Attorney General in Virginia) characterized his extended discourse on how much he wants to murder his political opponents and see their children dead as a “mistake.”

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A Democratic Government Should Not Be Afraid of Words: The Charlie Kirk Assassination Ethics Train Wreck Rolls On

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Ugh. Yesterday, President Trump posthumously awarded Charlie Kirk the Medal of Freedom. That was an appropriate way to express admiration and appreciation for the martyred conservative activist. (MSNBC, alone among the networks, didn’t feel the ceremony was newsworthy. Now, a newsworthy ceremony for the network was President Biden giving the Presidential Citizen’s Medal to Liz Cheney for running a Star Chamber against American citizens tand her own party o make sure the public understands the difference between bad rioting—the half-day Capitol embarrassment by conservative morons—and good rioting—the nation-wide, May through December 2020 Black Lives Matter “mostly peaceful protests” by Democrats—at least according to”MS.” Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias…).

An inappropriate, cheesy, grandstanding pro-Kirk gesture absurdly hostile to freedom of speech was the Trump State Department revoking the visas of six foreigners who made derisive comments about Kirk or who joked about his assassination. Oh no, not THAT! Foreigners making jokes!

The State Department said yesterday that it had determined the six unidentified foreign nationals from Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Paraguay and South Africa should lose their visas after reviewing their online social media posts and clips about Kirk. “[We]will defend our borders, our culture, and our citizens by enforcing our immigration laws,” the State Department said. “Aliens who take advantage of America’s hospitality while celebrating the assassination of our citizens will be removed.”

Celebrating.

Next up from this weirdly thin-skinned gang: prosecuting whoever celebrates LA Dodger victories in the baseball play-offs. The move hands a metaphorical spiked club to the Trump-Deranged who claim this President wants to cancel the First Amendment. Dumb. Abuse of power.

Unethical.

Morons.

Michael Mann Helpfully Continues To Prove Just How Much “Climate Science” Is Warped By Partisan Agendas and Unprofessional Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Climate change hysterics cannot discuss the basis for their passion without mentioning Michael Mann, who must be regarded as the face of whole climate change movement. Wikipedia makes him seem like a master of his domain:

Mann has contributed to the scientific understanding of historic climate change based on the temperature record of the past thousand years. He has pioneered techniques to find patterns in past climate change and to isolate climate signals from noisy data.

As lead author of a paper produced in 1998 with co-authors Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes, Mann used advanced statistical techniques to find regional variations in a hemispherical climate reconstruction covering the past 600 years. In 1999 the same team used these techniques to produce a reconstruction over the past 1,000 years (MBH99), which was dubbed the “hockey stick graph” because of its shape. He was one of eight lead authors of the “Observed Climate Variability and Change” chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report published in 2001. A graph based on the MBH99 paper was highlighted in several parts of the report and was given wide publicity. The IPCC acknowledged that his work, along with that of the many other lead authors and review editors, contributed to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which was won jointly by the IPCC and Al Gore.

Mann was organizing committee chair for the National Academy of Sciences Frontiers of Science in 2003 and has received a number of honors and awards including selection by Scientific American as one of the fifty leading visionaries in science and technology in 2002. In 2012 he was inducted as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and was awarded the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and awarded the status of distinguished professor in Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. In 2017, he was elected a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

Mann is author of more than 200 peer-reviewed and edited publications. He has also published six books: Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming (2008), The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (2012), together with co-author Tom Toles, The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy (2016) with Megan Herbert, The Tantrum That Saved the World (2018), The New Climate War (2021), and Our Fragile Moment (2023). In 2012, the European Geosciences Union described his publication record as “outstanding for a scientist of his relatively young age”. Mann is a co-founder and contributor to the climatology blog RealClimate.

All the honors and accolades prove is how politicized the scientific community is, and how progressive bias has infected so many of the world’s institutions. His so-called “hockey stick graph,” supposedly a reconstruction of past climate temperatures, was shown to be the product of dishonest statistics methodology; for example, it conveniently ignored the Medieval Warm Period that continues to bedevil the climate change narrative.

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Weird Tales of the Charlie Kirk Assassination Ethics Train Wreck: The Very Just Firing of Suzanne Swierc

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Do reporters understand what the First Amendment means? It would be passing strange if they did not, but to read and hear all the teeth-gnashing and garment-rending over lawyers, teachers and others justifiably dismissed for social media posts that announced to the world that they were cruel, irresponsible, biased or just not very bright, I find myself wondering.

The New York Times has one of their sob story features [gift link!] about an employee at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana who found herself the target of online abuse and ultimately a negative employment action for posting this sentiment on Facebook: “If you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends.” The “private” statement went viral, as they say (if you think anything you post on line is “private,” you are a fool at the very least), and five days after it went up, Suzanne Swierc was fired as the director of health and advocacy at Ball State.

Good. It would have been irresponsible not to fire her, but Times writer Sabrina Tavernise writes that firings like hers raise “questions about the limits of free speech.” Some of the alleged more than 145 people fired in the wake of Kirk’s assassination may raise those questions, but not this one.

As is par for the course, the Times story mischaracterized the meaning and import of the central fact in the story: what Swierc posted. She didn’t express anything specifically negative about Kirk. She did not cheer on his death or call him names. Her post declared her inability to be “friends” with anyone who held an opinion about Charlie Kirk that was different from hers. Those one cannot be friends with, as opposed to those one hasn’t become friends with yet, are expressly adversaries, persona non grata or even enemies. Treating anyone as an enemy because of their opinions and openly announcing that this is one’s practice is an embrace of bigotry and intolerance. It is proof of dead ethics alarms.

A university staff member responsible for providing services to students as director of health and advocacy (whatever that means) or any other function cannot be trusted to do so fairly if that is her attitude. If it isn’t her attitude, Swierc should not have written that it was.

Swierc was fired, not for her opinion of Charlie Kirk, but because she proved she was unable to deal fairly with people holding diverse viewpoints. Sadly, surveys indicate that a lot of Americans have this malady, and the bulk of them are progressives: if you don’t think like they do, you’re by definition a bad person and not worthy of their friendship. That is an unethical mindset as well as a disqualifying one for many jobs.

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Tales of The Great Stupid: Race-baiting Serena Williams Shows “Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” Like Harmonious Race Relations

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Why in the world would Serena Williams, of all people, think it is necessary or appropriate to engage in public race-baiting? The woman is rich and famous, and became a national idol playing a sport that has an overwhelmingly white fan base. Never mind: Serena was triggered when she encountered a decorative cotton plant (reportedly fake) in an un-named luxury hotel. The retired women’s tennis legend, now 43, took a video of the vase holding a cotton plant on a table in the hallway, and asked her Instagram followers, “Alright, everyone. How do we feel about cotton as decoration? Personally for me, it doesn’t feel great.”

Yeah, you’re right, Serena, the New York hotel placed a cotton plant in the hallway to slyly remind you that 150 years ago black slaves were forced to pick cotton in states hundreds of miles away. I think you should organize a boycott and start a protest organization called Cotton Plants Matter.

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