U.S. Society

Ethics Quote Of The Month: The 5th Circuit Court Of Appeals

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“We find that the White House, acting in concert with the Surgeon General’s office, likely (1) coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences, and (2) significantly encouraged the platforms’ decisions by commandeering their decision-making processes, both in violation of the First Amendment.”

—A three-judge panel of the The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, substantially upholding a lower court’s preliminary injunction in The State of Missouri et al v Joseph R. Biden, Jr., et al,

The Per Curiam opinion is here, and its legal and ethical clarity cannot be overstated. The Court wrote in part,

. . . On multiple occasions, the officials coerced the platforms into direct action via urgent, uncompromising demands to moderate content. Privately, the officials were not shy in their requests—they asked the platforms to remove posts “ASAP” and accounts “immediately,” and to “slow[] down” or “demote[]” content.

It is uncontested that, between the White House and the Surgeon General’s office, government officials asked the platforms to remove undesirable posts and users from their platforms, sent follow-up messages of condemnation when they did not, and publicly called on the platforms to act. When the officials’ demands were not met, the platforms received promises of legal regime changes, enforcement actions, and other unspoken threats.

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Friday Forum, Open For Business

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

It’s come to this.

I’m playing “The Learned Judge” in a lightly staged concert version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Trial by Jury” this weekend at the Georgetown Law Center. (That’s a different production of the show above.) The cast is made up of current students and alums from the past 50 years. Gilbert’s resolution of the musical law suit in which a jilted bride is suing a rogue for breach of promise of marriage is that the judge (me) decides to marry the plaintiff himself, a decision that she is delighted with. In announcing this “judgment,” I came down to the young woman, a first year law student, playing the plaintiff “Angelina” and placed my arm around gently around her waist, then transitioned to holding her hands in mine as we sang the final bars of the show.

The director asked that I only place my hand on Angelina’s shoulder rather than around the waist, because the production might be criticized for endorsing sexual harassment.

But you all chat about whatever ethics matters are making your lives interesting, exciting, or miserable.

Observations On An Incident At McDonald’s

/ Jack Marshall / 85 Comments

For various reasons the most convenient route to a late lunch was the nearest McDonald’s, so after my wife’s physical therapy session, I reluctantly hit the drive-thu. All went surprisingly well at first: for a welcome change, someone who could speak clear-English was at the mic, and the order was correct on the screen (though the prices for fast food now are absurd). Two sandwiches, one small fries, no drinks, easy-peezy.

The order was simple, Grace didn’t bother to check the bag when I handed it to her at the window, but it felt light, so she checked after we had pulled away. Sure enough, there was only one of the two sandwiches we had ordered.

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What Does It Say About The State Of Higher Education In The U.S. That Its Oldest And Most Prestigious Institution Is The Nation’s Most Hostile To Free Speech?

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

It’s a rhetorical question. What this says is that the culture of the United States of America, which has been nurtured for centuries to embrace personal liberty and pluralism, is being threatened by its elite educational institutions and the indoctrinated citizens they graduate.

I suppose I should take some satisfaction that I began blowing the metaphorical whistle on my alma mater years ago, and felt sufficiently embarrassed by the ethics rot overwhelming the ivy there to turn my diploma face to the wall and to explain in my class notes that I would be boycotting the class reunion. Simply put, the American college long considered the exemplar for higher education cannot become fascistically woke without dire consequences to the nation. Harvard alumni, many, maybe even most, of whom recognize this, have been negligent in allowing matter to reach this point. But that point has been reached.

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: The Education Secretary’s Play List

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Wow. What an idiot.

Here are some sample lyrics from the songs our Education Dept. Secretary loves:

“Out o’ town, put it down for the Father of Rap And if yo’ ass get cracked, bitches, shut your trap. Come back, get back, that’s the part of success.”

“Fuck all you hoes. Get a grip, motherfucker!”

“My my, I’m big huh, I rip my prick through your hooters I’m sick, you couldn’t measure my dick with six rulers”

Secretary Cardona can listen to, read and love whatever he chooses, but his tweet—he quickly deleted it, of course, after multiple social media commenters explained to him that the tweet called into question his priorities and judgment—is a red flag to parents who don’t want their children to be immersed in a sexually-obsessed culture when they need to learn academic skills. This is the official who is overseeing U.S. education policy, and he saw nothing inappropriate about endorsing songs with lyrics like “Fuck all you hoes.”

Comment Of The Day: “I Don’t Feel I Can Trust The Teachers,” Says A Colorado Parent. Gee, Lady, What Was Your First Clue?”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

In “Free Fall,” a novel by William Golding of “Lord of the Flies” fame, the narrator searches through his past to try to learn when he lost control of his life. I think about that relatively obscure novel, an odd addition to a college course reading list, frequently, but not in relation to my own life (which has either always been out of control or, depending on how you look at it, entirely within my control). I think about in relations to topics like what Here’s Johnny is writing about in his Comment of the Day.

When did teaching professionals lose control of their common sense, professional ethics and respect for parents? It isn’t just them, of course: politicians, lawyers, judges, academics, doctors, journalists, prosecutors, corporate executives and more have all jumped the metaphorical rails during the Great Stupid, and even before. What did it? What was the tipping point?

That’s a topic for another day, I suppose. Right now, this Comment of the Day is a concise, clear statement of what was once an uncontroversial truth. But what the hell happened???

With his Comment of the Day on the post, “I Don’t Feel I Can Trust The Teachers,” Says A Colorado Parent. Gee, Lady, What Was Your First Clue?,” Heeeeere’s Here’s Johnny!….

***

I taught high school students for 20 years, a second career for me, and up through the time I retired from that 14 years ago, I never encountered this kind of thinking, that parents must be kept in the dark when it comes to a dramatic life-changing situation for their child. As OB asks [I paraphrase], ‘What the hell is it with gender ID anyway?’

It was true when I was teaching and it is true now that teachers have a special role in helping kids through those many difficult years of growing up. Are there things a kid might tell a teacher that they wouldn’t tell their parents? Yes, of course. Are there parents who would react in a way not in the best interests of the child? Yes, or course. And, responsible teachers have to know the difference, when to tell the kid that, ‘This is something I cannot keep in confidence; I have to discuss it with your parent(s)’, or, alternatively, “This is something that you will have to think about very seriously, maybe do some reading, maybe talk to a guidance counselor, maybe meet with the school psychologist’, and so on.

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Nah, There’s No Big Tech Partisan Censorship! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

When you consider the many ways elections can be “rigged,” “fixed” or “stolen,” consider the subtle, often invisible ways search engines like Google prioritize sources of information, advocacy, and political opinion. There is plenty of evidence that this is occurring with increasing vigor (Ethics Alarms itself appears to be a target), and the recent experience of video journalist Matt Orfeala is particularly chilling.

Orfeala made and posted the video above that consists entirely of video clips, arranged to make the quite valid point that Democrats have “denied elections” for decades without being accused of criminal fraud or supporting insurrections, insurrection defined as “attempting to disqualify states’ slate of electors.” Nonetheless, the video was “demonetized” by YouTube, which is owned by Google, on the grounds that it advocated a “dangerous organization.” You know, like Joe…

…says the Republican Party is. Here’s the notice YouTube sent :

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“I Don’t Feel I Can Trust The Teachers,” Says A Colorado Parent. Gee, Lady, What Was Your First Clue?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Since the utter corruption and lack of trustworthiness of journalists was the topic of today’s first post, it’s only fair to re-visit the other contender for America’s most corrupt alleged profession, educators. Deciding which of the two now virtually full-time Leftist indoctrination groups is more unethical makes an ethicist sound like Faye Dunaway being slapped by Jack Nicholson in “Chinatown”: “She’s my daughter!” <slap!> “She’s my sister!” <slap!>My daughter!” <slap!>“My sister!”

What sparked this sudden epiphany from the school board member (in the JeffCo Public Schools district in Jefferson County,Colorado) was this revelation: Teachers have been giving students surveys about their “gender identity,” because they believe that this is more important than, say, teaching them to add, write, and think. There are several parent lawsuits regarding the practice, so the Colorado affiliate of the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, instructed its members to destroy any evidence of having given students a gender identity survey

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September Ethics Inventory Check

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

On this date, September 1, in 1971, the Pittsburgh Pirates manager Danny Murtaugh wrote down the first all-black lineup in Major League Baseball history. It wasn’t noticed at the time, even by most of the players. The landmark was only quickly mentioned during the team’s radio broadcast of the game, which the Bucs won before a tiny crowd of 11,278 in Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium. The line-up was a completely natural occurrance, according to Murtaugh, who was not one to decide on personnel based on “diversity, equity and inclusion,” which had not yet begun its path of destruction across the culture and society. “When it comes to making out the lineup, I’m colorblind, and the athletes know it,” he said. “The best men in our organization are the ones who are here. And the ones who are here all play, depending on when the circumstances present themselves.”

Deciding on employment, opportunities and benefits based on merit! What a concept! Meanwhile, this month’s Harvard Alumni magazine featuring the university’s new President, who just coincidentally has spent her entire career career from college onward promoting “diversity” and writing about systemic racism in America, discusses the Supreme Court’s affirmative action knock-down by quoting her response to it, promising that the institution will continue to “believe—deeply—that a thriving, diverse intellectual community is essential to academic excellence and critical to shaping the next generation of leaders.” That is clearly code for “policies that make race and ethnicity a primary factor in admission when tangible and substantive measures of ability and achievement will not reach the desired result” are essential to academic excellence and critical to shaping the next generation of leaders. The obvious response to that is “Prove it!” There is no persuasive data demonstrating the benefits of “diversity” in a student body or in an education, certainly not to the extent that it justifies, as Justice Roberts wrote in the SCOTUS opinion, making race a negative factor in determining who gets admitted to an elite college. At Harvard, “diversity” is usually an illusion: there as everywhere else, student form their own peer groups and associations based on mutual interests and affinities. Justifying racial discrimination by extolling a factor’s benefits that literally no research confirms is the ultimate progressive conceit. Would that all-black Pirates team have been better with a couple of white players on the field—or better still, a proportion of white players matching the national demographics? Somehow I don’t think so.

Incidentally, the Pirates won the World Series in 1971.

1. And now for something completely different...was this unethical?

2. Huh. Tough question…Yesterday Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell froze for an extended period for the second time in less than two months. Possibly McConnell is experiencing one of the common effects of a concussion, which he suffered after a fall in March; that’s the current line of the Republican PR machine Meanwhile, Senator Diane Feinstein seems to be little more than a puppet being propped up by aides, and Pennsylvania default Senator John Fetterman is stumbling along with a brain damaged by a stroke. “What can be done to address the issue of a Senator who is unable to do the job?” asks legal commentator Michael Dorf.

Me! Call on me! What can be done is for parties to have the integrity to stop running candidates who are too old (if you will hit 80 during the term you are running for, you’re too old) and for politicians to have the respect for the public and their office not to offer themselves as candidates when the know, or should know (somebody tell them!) that their faculties and health are failing. Why is that so hard to establish as a “democratic norm”?

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Labor Day Weekend Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

As is usual on holiday weekends around here, the tumbleweeds will be blowing through the cyber-streets no matter what fascinating ethical conundrums I can find. Nevertheless, perhaps the few, those happy few, can make up in quality here what EA will almost certainly lack in quantity.

We shall see, will we not?

You’re up!