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Friday Open Forum!
It’s time!
U.S. Society
On Trump, Tucker, The GOP Debate And The News Media On A Depressing Wednesday Night, Part 2
I’m feeling better now, sort of, so let us dig in to the hope-suffocating debacle that was last night’s Republican candidates debate. Why debacle? Well, thanks to the complicity of Tucker Carlson, there was no way for viewers to compare any of the candidates to the front-runner who thinks it’s ethical to sit on his lead. (Certain to achieved a .400 average by sitting out a season-ending double-header in 1941, Ted Williams, as a matter of integrity, insisted on risking the historical achievement and played both games anyway, raising his average to .406.) In the harsh glare of live TV, none of the assembled did what they had to do, which was convince substantial numbers of viewers that “Hey! This option is less obnoxious than Donald Trump and would beat Joe Biden!”
As a group, the candidates failed the easiest test, when they were asked by Martha MacCallum, “Do you believe in human behavior causing climate change? Raise your hand if you do.” None of the candidates had a sufficiently articulate and knowledgeable response, and having one should be hard. DeSantis used it to grandstand (We are not schoolchildren. Let’s have the debate…”) and then ducked the question. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, meanwhile, ducked the question ANd fled into Fantasyland, saying, “First of all, we do care about clean air, clean water. We want to see that taken care of, but there is a right way to do it. The right way is first of all, yes, is climate change real? Yes, it is. But if you want to go and really change the environment, we need to start telling China and India that they have to lower their emissions.”
And As Long As We’re Talking About The Ethics Rot At The Washington Post…
This headline: “In Trump cases, experts say defendant’s rhetoric will be hard to police.”
No news organization where the ethics alarms ring beyond the janatorial staff would allow that to go out into the world unless it was confident that a totalitarian regime would soom be handing out favors.
Wrote Ann Althouse, in one of her better distillations of an ethics issue: “Rhetoric should be hard to police.” Funny, that creature of the First Amendment, the Washington Post, think it’s a problem, writing, “Advisers say the Trump campaign sees a benefit in him testing boundaries by publicly attacking judges and prosecutors — either he gets away with it, or he gets to play the victim for being censored by the courts.”
Ann’s reaction, in my terms, is “Good!” She comments, “It’s a great free-speech safeguard that restrictions on free speech generate the argument that there’s a violation of free speech. Those whose freedom of speech is violated should “play the victim.” If you don’t like your opponents “playing the victim,” one option is not to victimize them.”
Whatever sadistic god decided to make a repulsive creep like Donald Trump the target of the most ominous and dangerous attack on the democratic system and the Constitution in our history has a lot of explaining to do. It is essentially impossible to feel sorry for Trump, but fair and civically responsible citizens must rally to his side while condemning the mob pursuing him, at least on principle. It literally doesn’t matter whether Trump is a jerk, a secret cannibal or Jack the Ripper come to the 21st Century in H.G. Wells’ time machine. If we let the corrupt Democratic totalitarians silence and punish him to clear the field for what’s left of Joe Biden, nobody is safe. There has to be some way to punish the Left without letting a vicious, unaccountable creep sit in the place of Washington, Lincoln, FDR and Reagan.
Isn’t there? Please?
The Canada-Meta Ethics Train Wreck
Boy, who do you root for in a face-off like this?
Meta Platforms—that’s Facebook and Instagram— ended access to news on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada earlier this month in opposition to a new law requiring internet companies to pay news publishers. The Online News Act was passed by the Canadian parliament to force platforms like Google parent Alphabet and Meta to negotiate commercial deals with Canadian news publishers (including the government) for news content. Part of a global trend to make tech firms pay for news, both Meta and Google told Canada in June they would block access to news on their platforms in the country if the law wasn’t changed.
“News outlets voluntarily share content on Facebook and Instagram to expand their audiences and help their bottom line,” Rachel Curran, Meta’s head of public policy in Canada, said in a public statement. But, she said, “people using our platforms don’t come to us for news.”
Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge responded,”This is irresponsible. They would rather block their users from accessing good quality and local news instead of paying their fair share to news organizations. We’re going to keep standing our ground. After all, if the Government can’t stand up for Canadians against tech giants, who will?”
Rolling Stone Proves You Can Find Ethics Enlightenment In The Strangest Places
What could be a more unlikely locale for ethics lessons than a standard web click-bait list? Yet against all odds and defying all precedent, Rolling Stone has posted such a list that could sustain multiple courses in ethics: business ethics, popular culture ethics, media ethics, and ethical decision-making generally. It is called “The 50 Worst Decisions in TV History.”
Not all of the items on the list have ethical implications, and not all of the choices for the list belong there. Not only that, what I thought would be the #1 Worst Decision right up to the end in Rolling Stone’s countdown was missing entirely, presumably because of the generational bias (and ignorance) of the writers. Almost all of the TV network and production decisions listed occurred in the last thirty years: I assume this is why the list even missed ABC’s infamous decision to replace the ailing Dick York as Darren, the long-suffering hubby of Samantha the Witch on its hit sitcom “Bewitched,” with another, lookalike actor, the inferior Dick Sargent, without any explanation on the show, as if the audience wouldn’t notice. (Ethics lesson: Treating your customers/followers/fans/audience members like idiots is disrespectful, incompetent, and irresponsible: unethical.)
No, that wasn’t the missing #1. Be patient.
Ethics Quiz: The NFL Turns Compassionate
This past Saturday night in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Isiah Bolden, a cornerback for the Ne England Patriots, collided with a teammate, lay motionless on the ground, and was put on a cart to be rolled off the field. Though there was little more than 10 minutes to play, the NFL canceled the rest of the game. Patriots coach Bill Belichick praised the NFL for acting quickly. Patriots players then praised Belichick. Bolden was released from the hospital the next morning and appeared to be in good health, but the Patriots canceled a pair scheduled of joint practices anyway.
Conservative political pundit and sports commentator Jason Whitlock wrote of the episode, “The enemies of football and masculinity have won. They killed football. They won the long war of convincing men that the key to happiness is choosing safety over freedom, safety over everything.” Whitlock is saying, in essence, that the incident has greater significance beyond football, that it demonstrates that the progressive weenification of the culture has reached a critical and dangerous level that has ominous implications for American society at large.
Comment Of The Day: “In Maui, DEI Insanity Kills”
The key question is: “Will any mainstream media pundit have the courage to make the points esteemed Ethics Alarms commenter Sarah B makes below, in her Comment of the Day to the post, “In Maui, DEI Insanity Kills”?
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So I’m going to say something that , at first glance, may sound pretty unethical here, but let me defend it first, before telling me that I’m going all in on Rationalizations. That being said, my TL,DR is “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
I do think that it is fair to argue that, for the most part, the people of Lahaina had it coming. This fire was the rather predictable consequence of years of bad judgement and voting practices. First, the sugar cane farming dissolution into non-native dry grassland came because “we couldn’t possibly grow sugar cane there, it was too insensitive to the natives”. Then they didn’t make any reasonable plans to replace the farms with native plants that could handle both the wetter times and the drier times, but instead just let the farms grow over, which led to imported grass and other vegetation taking root off of spreading seeds. This worked out for a bit when things were wet, but these grasses are unable to handle the drier times. That led to a high fire hazard with a high burn interval.
Then they decided that they would go all in on the green energy to the degree that there was a huge governmental push (which often starts with the residents) for green production over safe electric lines, AFTER there was already substantial documentation that the power lines were likely to cause significant fires. Of course, the electric company is nowhere near blameless, but neither are the voters.
The idea that we now have DIE standing in the way of appropriate water being used to put out a fire, because we find that DIE is more important than lives and property (after all, we are founded on the notion of diversity, equity, and inclusion right, not that old fashioned life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness), well, that is a conscious choice by the Hawaii electorate too.
In Maui, DEI Insanity Kills
The routine placement of DEI famatics in positions of authority around America is a dangerous and destructive fad. Witness M. Kaleo Manuel, former deputy director of the Hawaii Commission on Water Resource Management, who said in a livestream debate hosted by the University of Hawaii last year, in discussing water distribution on the island,
“Let water connect us and not divide us! We can share it, but it requires true conversations about equity…How do we coexist with the resources we have?”
Manuel, a former Obama Foundation leader who coached volunteers in “practical skill building for social change,” Manuel said he considered water “an important tool for social justice.” So it should not be surprising that when the real estate developer that supplies water to areas southeast of Lahaina recognized the threat posed by a dangerous combination of high winds and drought-parched grasses in Maui and asked Manuel for permission to fill up one of its private reservoirs in case firefighters needed it, the Obama social justice warrior’s main concern was equity, not preventing death and destruction from fire. Manuel told the company that it had to consult with a local farmer about the impact of water diversion before he would approve the request. Five hours passed without water being added to the reservoir, and the brush fire that had been contained that morning flared up again and swept through Lahaina, burning everything and everyone in its path.
Ethics Quiz: SkyNet’s Avocations
District Court Judge for the District Of Columbia Beryl A. Howell endorsed the United States Copyright Office’s decision to refuse copyright protection to the owner of an artificial intelligence system that generated visual art. Stephen Thaler owns a program called the “Creativity Machine,” but he was denied a copyright by the office for a piece of visual art his system created. It “lacked human authorship,” Howell decided, meaning that it lacked the “bedrock requirement of copyright.”
“[T]his case presents only the question of whether a work generated autonomously by a computer system is eligible for copyright,” Howell wrote. “In the absence of any human involvement in the creation of the work, the clear and straightforward answer is the one given by the Register: No.”
Wait: the thing didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to create something. A human being was involved at some level. If a human enters the perimeters that an AI program follows and the result is unique art, isn’t that sufficient “human involvement”?
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Is that ruling competent and fair?
My guess is that this is another (of many) examples of courts misunderstanding new technology, with rulings that will eventually look silly in the rear-view mirror.
Climate Change: Is There Anything It Can’t Do?
How can you tell that you’ve landed on a woke website where facts don’t matter? Here’s one way: the site features a story that tries to explain the declining attendance at the Disney theme parks without mentioning the headlong, suicidal rush of the Disney organization to embrace radical progressivism and all that entails. Here’s another big clue: the propaganda site defaults to climate change, the Left’s all-purpose explanation for anything people don’t like, because that’s how fear-mongering and indoctrination works.
Ethics Alarms 