U.S. Society

The Disastrous Crash Of Medical Ethics, In Two Videos [Link Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Earlier this week, I discussed the frightening and discouraging phenomenon of American professions becoming so politicized that they no longer can be trusted to serve public interests objectively and competently. If a profession cannot be trusted, then it is no longer a profession. Laura Hollis’s point in “Death of the Professions” is worth repeating:

The landscape of professional America should be a stalwart bastion of standards and commitment to truth. Instead, it is increasingly pockmarked by the impact craters of contemporary culture: the erosion of standards, the denial of truth, the capitulation to political pressure, and ideological lockstep borne of fear.

The previous post discussed this phenomenon in the context of the legal profession and its legal ethics extension, but arguably the partisan pollution of the medical profession has been worse. It has become a full participant in the newly-recognized Transsexual Promotion Ethics Train Wreck even as it is running down children: so much for “Do no harm.”

Re-watching “The Silence of the Lambs” last week, I was reminded that once the few clinics performing sex-change surgeries would apply stringent standards to applicants. “Buffalo Bill,” the serial killer in the film (and novel) was turned down for such surgery multiple times. Today, apparently, the radical procedures are no longer considered potentially harmful because the medical profession has bought into the deceptive, benign sounding cover-phrase, “gender affirming treatment.”

In the video above, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) pressed expert witnesses yesterday about the scientific justification for sex-change treatments of children and the authority for claims of the potential long-term benefits of these usually irreversible procedures. His Subcommittee on Health has convened to take up a number of proposals concerning health care access and research support, and Crenshaw wants to ensure that taxpayer money is not used to fund sex-change surgery on kids. “This is taxpayer money, and when 70% of taxpayers opposed these barbaric treatments on minors, then taxpayers should not fund it,” he said.

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Ethical Quote Of The Month: Elon Musk

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“You are the government. They are NOT your kids.”

—Entrepreneur and Twitter savior Elon Musk, responding to the Biden Administration’s totalitarian rhetoric in its latest pander to the LGBTQ lobby.

The White House released a tweet from the Biden-Harris administration that stated, “To the LGBTQI+ Community – the Biden-Harris Administration has your back.” The video accompanying the tweet states, “these are our kids,” and “not somebody else’s kids; they’re all our kids.”

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Epiphany: Ted Kaczynski Was Substantially Right, And I’m Beginning To Understand Sweeney Todd, Too

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

The death of “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski once again reminded me that his “manifesto” about how technology was progressively making life unbearable was, yes, crazy, but he had a valid point. [You may consider today’s post a second installment to this one, from 2017]. I have long believed that the up-tick in seemingly random mass shootings is the predictable result of those who inject technology into our lives just because they can, selfishly making just getting through the day brain-killingly complex for people somewhere in the lower third of the intelligence scale, and a lot of people who are better off than that too. At some point, the anger and frustration reaches the point where you want to grab a rifle, find a tower, and start shooting.

This is essentially what happens to Sweeney Todd in the Sondheim musical of the same name, as he explains in the show’s first act finale why serial killing is logical:

We all deserve to die
Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett
Tell you why
Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief
For the rest of us, death will be a relief
We all deserve to die!

I began reflecting on both Ted and Sweeney when I tried to register for the Massachusetts Bar before they suspended me for non-payment of my 2023 annual dues. You have to do it online, and one reason I was late was that I hate the Mass. Board of Bar Overseers website, which always breaks down.

First, the site makes you log in. It wouldn’t let me, even though the password was correct and supposedly filled in automatically. The BBO can’t be bothered to have the feature that lets you see the letters and numbers so only little black dots appear. I had to ask to “reset” my password. Since I couldn’t see the figures, it took two tries to match the the thing, and then I was transferred to a page informing me that I could not move on to filling out my dues sheet until I had completed a “demographic survey.” I’m tempted to put it up: you wouldn’t believe it. If you didn’t type in a date in the right format (I eventually realized that tiny print AFTER each question told you what was acceptable) the question would register as “incomplete” when you selected “Done” at the end. The survey asked me to choose my “preferred” race and ethnicity from umpteen options and also asked which “sex or gender” I “identified” as. (In the comments section, I wrote that who or what I chose to have sex with, or not, and how, was none of the BBO’s business whatsoever.) The survey form was clumsy as well as insulting, it kept flagging reasons a response wouldn’t be accepted, and it took so long to load when it finally passed muster that I thought the program had broken down.

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Ethics Role Model Of The Week: CBS Reporter Samantha Rivera

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I’m going to try out this new category after frequent protests here when Ethics Alarms designates someone an Ethics Hero for doing his or her job.

In a now viral moment, CBS News Miami reporter Samantha Rivera stiff-armed a fan who attempted to muscle into her shot during in a live broadcast after Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Finals. And she never stopped smiling or talking.

That’s my idea of feminism in action, and exactly what any professional should do. Finish the job, deal with unexpected challenges, persevere, and don’t be a weenie.

The main thrust of the news coverage of the incident is that Rivera has received death threats on social media for—what, exactly? Keeping an asshole from getting his drunken face on TV? I don’t get it, but concentrating on the social media reaction is giving undue importance to moral luck. Rivera’s sterling conduct was in the ethics books as soon as she did it.

Parents should show that clip to their daughters…heck, show it to sons, too.

__________

Pointer: Other Bill

More Gallup: On The Transgender Fad, The Public Is Ethically, But Predictably, Confused, Mostly Because It Is Ignorant

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Gallup’s’ latest survey results are affirmatively strange, but then the topic is strange: American attitudes towards transgender issues. I believe the survey intersects with the one EA discussed yesterday, indicating that conservative self-identification was ticking up. It would have been stunning it it didn’t tick up, considering that the political and social Left has thrown all caution and moderation to the four winds and is openly advocating the most extreme and viscerally (as well as ethically) disgusting policies and beliefs imaginable, from 9 month abortions to legalizing theft. The unexpected Woke World obsession with transsexual “transitioning” is another example, though most Americans haven’t thought about it very carefully or thoroughly yet as Gallup’s polling makes clear.

The above survey, for example, is bizarre. I don’t see what morality has to do with an adult individual’s decision regarding transsexual surgery, non-surgical treatment, or “identification,” unless one is a Christian Scientist who opposes medical intervention, or someone who still subscribes to ancient religious taboos on all non-conforming sexuality and relationships. Obviously most American aren’t in either group. Those polled, and apparently those doing the polling, were seemingly using “moral” as a synonym for “ethical,” because most American are no longer taught what ethics is. They don’t know what “moral” means either.

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Perfect: My Legal Ethics Colleagues Want To Rig Donald Trump’s Trial…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 83 Comments

In a superb and spot-on essay, “Death of the Professions,” Laura Hollis writes,

The landscape of professional America should be a stalwart bastion of standards and commitment to truth. Instead, it is increasingly pockmarked by the impact craters of contemporary culture: the erosion of standards, the denial of truth, the capitulation to political pressure, and ideological lockstep borne of fear.

Ethics Alarms has tracked this accelerating phenomenon for quite a while now. Journalists and educators have been the most prominent examples, but may more are in almost as dire condition ethically: doctors, lawyers, historians, psychiatrists, and many others. I’m not including the ethics rot in pretend “professions” like acting, where, not untypically, a presenter in last night’s Tony Awards referred to Florida governor Ron DeSantis as a KKK “Grand Wizard” and got a huge ovation from the glitterati. (Morons.)

One would think that at least ethicists would be immune from this destructive malady, and, in so thinking, you would be dead wrong. I belong to an association of legal ethicists, and I estimate that at least 75% of them, probably more are Trump Deranged. Yesterday the groups’ listserv was alive with horror at the fact that Aileen M. Cannon, the federal judge assigned to the Justice Department’s criminal case against Trump, was appointed by Trump. This meant to many of my colleagues that she was unfit to preside, obviously biased, and had to be replaced. One of my favorite<cough!>participants wrote in part, “Unless I am wrong on the history, Judge Cannon is the first judge in the history of our country to be in a position to incarcerate the person who gave her her job….The fact that [Trump] appointed her is grounds for recusal. It creates an appearance of impropriety. That’s basic ethics.”

Most (again, not all) of the cyber-assembled dutifully accepted this as reasonable. It is worth recalling that the same group assailed Trump’s similarly silly complaint that a judge of Hispanic descent was unable to rule fairly on Trump’s illegal immigration policies, and my own belief that a judge in an undisclosed same sex domestic relationship should have recused himself in the case examining the Constitutionality of California’s same-sex marriage restrictions. Nobody mentioned the obvious hypocrisy, except me (they don’t like me very much), as I wrote in partial response that if a judge appointed by Trump was unethical to preside over Trump’s trial, it must also be “basic ethics” that “a judge who was appointed and confirmed by members of a party that has been openly trying to use questionable means to remove a President from first his office and later any position of political influence should not be permitted to decide whether that same individual can be in a position to take the White House from that party.”

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OH NOOOO! Gallup Says Facism Is On The Rise In The US!!

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Well, that may be a bit over-stated, though not in the parlance of the Democratic Party and its propaganda agents in the news media. What Gallup really found, in its annual survey of U.S. values and beliefs, is that social conservatism is on the rise, and has reached its highest level in a decade, since 2012. Gee…what…a…surprise…

Gallup, being, as much as it tries to fight it, also infected with partisan bias, doubletalks its explanation for charts like these:

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A Reminder That Conservative Media Is No More Honest Or Trustworthy Than The Mainstream Media: The Red Sox-Matt Dermody Fiasco

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

No, you idiots, the Boston Red Sox did not demote a major league pitcher because he said “something publicly that goes against what the Leftist elites want you to believe.” This totally manufactured “gotcha!” story, initially pushed by the only intermittently reliable New York Post (meaning it isn’t reliable at all, which made it easy for the pro-Biden censors to hide the Hunter Biden laptop story) was flogged to death by P.J. Media’s Robert Spencer. Its gist: Matt Dermody, who started Boston’s final game last week in a series against the Cleveland Indi–sorry, Guardians, was demoted after the game “because he has dared to depart from our insane society’s wholehearted worship of sexual deviance.”

I venture to conclude that Spencer didn’t watch the game. You see, I did. You had to be watching from the National Anthem, because Dermody was only around for three innings, and even that was touch-and-go. I also was aware of a controversy in “Red Sox Nation” over Dermody being brought up from the minor leagues to start that game, but it had nothing to do with his social media comments in 2021. Oh, the usual suspects like the Boston Globe tried to assail the team for even signing a pitcher who wouldn’t wave a rainbow flag, but the real problem with the move was that it made no sense as a baseball tactic. The Red Sox have been in a protracted slump, they had fallen into last place in the hyper-competitive American League East, and they needed a win to stay above .500 and to win the series, which was tied 1-1. Cleveland is a weaker team than the Sox (though they are in second place in the pathetic AL Central), but the Sox still needed a competent performance from whomever they started.

Dermody, it was obvious from the moment the announcement was made that he was being brought up from Worchester, wasn’t likely to provide it. He is a 31-year-old retread who had been forgettable in four brief stints with the Blue Jays and Cubs and hadn’t even been getting batters out in the minors. Every Red Sox fan, as well as a Red Sox beat writer who has been my friend for 20 years, thought the decision to use him was asinine….and it had nothing, nada, zilch to do with his views regarding gays.

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Update: More Ethics Observations On The Trump Indictment [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

For the record, I am royally sick of this topic already, and it’s just starting, with more than a year to go. I’m sick of Trump, I’m sick of the Democrats’ “destroy the village to save it” obsession with stopping Trump without just winning elections fairly and squarely, and I’m sick of the hypocrisy on all sides, and I’m really sick of reading obnoxious comments in moderation from single-minded ignoramuses who won’t even try to examine all sides of a complex issue, probably because they aren’t capable of it.

Sure, I’ll double down. I wrote on Friday that the decision to indict Trump was wildly irresponsible (if you didn’t discern that from my comparison to cloning dinosaurs, maybe you need to find another blog to hang out at) and was a utilitarian botch of existential proportions, and the tsunami is already developing, as that tweet above from a generally perceptive conservative Twitter wag indicates. Also predictably, gloating Democrats are tossing more of the afore-mentioned jet fuel on the fire, like this asshole:

Yecchhh. But let’s dig in…

1. The last post on this matter has surpassed the number of comments that allow normal people to read them all, so I’ll be overlapping a bit. For example, Alan Dershowitz also framed the indictment as I did, writing in Newsweek that it was “The Most Dangerous Indictment in History,” and saying in part,

This moment portends a massive change in the norms of this nation that all Americans who care about the neutral rule of law should pay close attention to, for it raises the specter of the partisan weaponization of the criminal justice system—not just by the Democrats targeting Trump but by Republicans who will certainly retaliate when they regain control of the criminal charging process.

That is how a large proportion of the public will regard it, and the evidence is irrelevant. Dershowitz also reminded me of Big Lie #6, “Trump’s Defiance Of Norms Is A Threat To Democracy.”

Remember? Democrats are hoping you won’t, but throughout the Trump Presidency, the accusation from the “resistance”/Democratic Party/mainstream media alliance (The Axis of Unethical Conduct) was that Trump was undermining democracy by not following unwritten “norms”—you know, like not using impeachment as a partisan tactic, not attempting to de-legitimatize the President, his election, and the Supreme Court, not weaponizing a health emergency to justify loosening election integrity measures, not intentionally violating the Constitution with Executive Orders like the one requiring Federal workers to be vaccinated, not giving a national speech declaring anyone who opposes his policies of being fascists and dangers to democracy…wait, I’m sorry! Those were some of the norms Democrats chose to defy; I get confused sometimes. My point is that the hypocrisy is staggering. There is a reason no former President or current major Presidential constender has ever been arrested or indicted by the rival party: it reeks of Third World dictatorships, and almost guarantees dangerous national division. This is why Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon.

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Friday Finale: The Trump Indictment, Trolls, And Turley

/ Jack Marshall / 122 Comments

1. I banned a troll today. The relatively new commenter kept pretending not to understand my point introducing the Open Forum, which was that for the Biden Administration’s now indisputably partisan and politicized Justice Department to indict its Democratic President’s chief rival for essentially the same conduct that Biden engaged in was “throwing jet fuel” on what is already a highly combustible political division in the country, and thus reckless and irresponsible. The now-banned commenter kept pointing to technical distinctions and differences in details between Biden’s misappropriation of classified documents and Trump’s, which misses the ethics point, either deliberately (trolling) or stupidly.

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