U.S. Society

Ethics Quiz: Fairness To Joe Biden And A Confirmation Bias Test

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I’ll make his is short and sweet:

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is that video something or nothing?

Greg Price is a conservative gadfly; if I could have found a version of the clip that was without commentary, I would have used that. naturally, none of the Left-biased mainstream media feel that the video is noteworthy. Fox News, however, does.

Biden’s treatment of women, and little girls has nothing to do with dementia, but it a long-time proclivity that has troubled me, and that render his fervent feminist supporters as hypocritical in my eyes. This example may seem ambiguous or innocent to some. Where I was brought up, Boston, a stranger who presumed to treat a child like this would be at risk of getting punched. Of course, Biden has security around him, and is abusing his privilege and power by placing the mother in an awkward position. But if the President did not have the well-established record as a sniffer and harasser, would this episode bother anyone, even Greg Price? Is this just Ick, not ethics?

Open Ethics Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

(And I haven’t even had time to read what you entered in the last one…)

This has been a genuinely rotten seven days for your host on all fronts including Ethics Alarms, where readership was down even considering the two-day interruption when my PC was fried. There weren’t even Red Sox games to take my mind off of more substantive matters, since this was All-Star Game week, and baseball’s All-Star Game is just one more piece of evidence of societal ethics rot. It used to have integrity and be played like a real game by the best in the sport; now the thing has all the authenticity of a company picnic softball game.

Oh…there was one bit of silver lining: Remember this post? To my shock and amazement, the organization reversed itself and asked me to do a new ethics seminar under its auspices. I had emailed a letter of protest to the Executive Director the same day I blogged about being fired for telling the truth; I did not apologize. The letter included the same points I made here: I said directly that the decision was not only unfair and unprofessional, but that as Continuing Legal Education providers, the company was ethically obligated to make every effort to get lawyers back in the classroom where training is more likely to be effective. I assumed that this would be the last contact I had with it.

And they reversed their decision. Having refused to grovel and held to my principles when faced with the negative consequences of a stand too many times to count over the years (a habit acquired from Jack Marshall, Sr.), I did not anticipate this result.

There is hope.

Unethical Quote Of The Week And Worst Apology Of The Month: Doug Dechert

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

New York gossip columnist Doug Dechert (above right), during the Robert F. Kennedy Jr.presidential campaign event for the press that he was hosting, became enraged during a contentious exchange regarding climate change and shouted,

“I’m farting!”

as he did, in fact, fart loudly for the assembled. That’s The Ethics Alarms Unethical Quote of the Week, ironically, because it was completely honest and factual. Later, he provided the Ethics Alarms Worst Apology of the Month, and maybe the year, by telling the New York Post, “I apologize for using my flatulence as a medium of public commentary in your presence.”

This is also ironic, because it is a straightforward and seemingly sincere apology without qualifications, and yet is still terrible, indeed uniquely terrible, because it doesn’t even fit on the Apology Scale.

I suppose the closest would be #9: “Deceitful apologies, in which the wording of the apology is crafted to appear apologetic when it is not (“if my words offended, I am sorry”). Another variation: apologizing for a tangential matter other than the act or words that warranted an apology.” But the wording is deliberately humorous, raising the suspicion that Doug Dechert isn’t sorry at all, and doesn’t care if everyone knows he isn’t sorry. Moreover, intentionally farting at a public event you organized for a presidential candidate and announcing it, thus turning the event into a fiasco that can only embarrass the individual it was supposed to benefit, is one of those things that can’t be apologized for, like setting someone’s cat on fire.

Come to think of it, Dechert also should be in the running for the Ethics Alarms’ Asshole of the Year title. For more reasons than one.

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A.I. Ethics Updates

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

1. Apparently Alexa and its ilk are causing heartburn among legal scholars. How should conversations over-heard by virtual assistants be treated when they are offered as evidence in court? Among the analogies that are being run up the metaphorical flagpole is a comparison with …parrots, as an eavesdropper who can accurately repeats information it overheard but was not expected to disclose. Courts have refused to admit testimony by parrots. In one case, a parrot named Max repeatedly cried out, “Richard, no, no, no!” after the murder of his owner. The defense attorney in the case wanted to have this evidence admitted the accused murder’s name was Gary. The attorney argued, unsuccessfully, that the “testimony” was not hearsay, but rather like a recording device. Despite expert testimony that that breed of parrot had the ability to accurately repeat statements, the evidence was excluded.
In another case, Bud the Parrot, began incessantly repeating, “Don’t fucking
shoot!” after one of his owners shot the other.

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Ethics Dunces, Sociology Dunces, Law Enforcement Dunces…Whatever: The California Reparations Task Force

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Try a mind experiment: if California’s ridiculous and racist Reparations Task Force wanted to exacerbate racial tensions as much as humanly possible while also making African-Americans seem as toxic to society as a KKK Grand Dragon could imagine in a fever dream, what would it be doing differently that it is doing right now? We know that the group is already recommending that millions of dollars in taxpayer reparations for slavery be handed out to the state’s blacks, even though slavery never existed in the Golden State. But wait, there’s more!

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I’m Baaaaack! (Here’s What Happened…)

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

For now, this will have to be just a quick note and an apology. Shortly before noon on Friday, I was writing a course summary for a monthly professionalism program I’ll be doing for lawyers next year when, literally out of a clear blue sky, lightening struck so near to our home in Alexandria that the house shook. Scared the hell out of me.

The crash was accompanied by a loud “snap” sound, and my computer screen went black. The internet modem also went dead: it was fried, and had to be replaced. I couldn’t start my PC (my laptop died a while ago, and I’ve been saving up to replace that). Comcast arrived to replace the modem Saturday afternoon, but the computer took longer: a part was damaged by the strike, and my son just installed the replacement. Fortunately, I didn’t lose any data.

This is the first time I’ve been online since Friday, and I obviously have a lot of catching up to do. I’m just thrilled I can get even a non-substantive post up today, so only one day was missed entirely.

Finally:

  • Many thanks to commenter E2. She knows my sister, and my sister passed along my disaster to her while relaying my request that she let everyone know that I wasn’t dead.
  • I’m so sorry.
  • Live every day to its fullest, because if a bolt of lightning can come out of a clear blue sky and fry my computer…well, you know the rest.
  • Thanks to everyone who added quality content here while I was frozen out. (Did any banned commenters take advantage of the sheriff being out of town? I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

Flagrant Virtue-Signaling Of The Century: Ben & Jerry’s

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This tweet is so astoundingly transparent and stupid that it isn’t even worth boycotting the ice cream over, though apparently some people are.

It is a core tenet at Ethics Alarms that demands, plans, assertions and proposals that are impossible to realize are not ethical, but are instead incompetent, irresponsible, intellectually dishonest and a waste of everybody’s time, as well as conduct that makes already stupid people dumber yet. “Imagine” is the universal anthem for such statements.

Assuming that the authors of that tweet are not literally morons—and who knows, really—the thing is simply a cry for applause from Woke World. Oh, aren’t these people wonderful! They want to remedy injustice!

To be fair, the suggestion that the U.S. return all of its land to the Native American tribes is only a bit more absurd than slavery reparations, or as Rationalization #22 puts it, “There are worse things.”

Ethics Zugzwang And High School Theater

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I have no idea what can be done about this now, but it is among the saddest consequences of the culture wars and The Great Stupid, and, as is so often the case, the casualties are children….which means that in the long-term, the casualty will be American society itself.

Ethics Alarms has periodically chronicled the sagas of high school theatrical productions halted or distorted by various politics- or ideology-based complaints and protests, but I never focused on what a tightening strangle-hold on cultural education this phenomenon represents. The New York Times examined the problem here, and though the Times slant seeks to blame it all on conservatives (you know, those meanies who also want to “ban books”), the description of the problem is accurate and gloomy. A sample:

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Now THIS Is Woke, (Or) “Bias Makes You Stupid, And Vice Versa”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

This is a woman whom the government of San Francisco deem qualified to render competent, objective service regarding the appropriateness and extent of reparations for slavery the black residents of San Francisco should receive.

Nikcole Cunningham serves on the ultra-woke City By The Bay’s 15-person African American Reparations Advisory Committee. This is what she had to say about straight white men:

“Straight white men are abusive. Straight white men are serial killers,” Cunningham told the news outlet. “They have the most — I watch these shows — the most serial killers. Straight white men are the ones who are shooting up schools, right? So they are a danger to society (not all of them)…They’re not [supporting reparations.]So if anything, they pose more of a harm than support and help. And then you got to remember their ancestors.. are the ones who were standing out here in their Sunday best watching black people hang and burn. So until white people come to grips with their ancestry too and make amends with them, to say, I want to be the change..“white supremacy is ingrained in the DNA in this country and definitely in this city.”

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Ethics Quotes For The Fourth: On Liberty, Freedom, and Democracy [Part I]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“

“Hurrah for the flag of the free!
May it wave as our standard forever,
The gem of the land and the sea,
The banner of the right.

“Let despots remember the day
When our fathers with mighty endeavor
Proclaimed as they marched to the fray
That by their might and by their right
It waves forever.”

—–John Phillip Sousa, “The Stars and Stripes Forever”

“Democracy is like sex. When it is good, it is very very good. And when its is bad, it is still pretty good.”

—–Anonymous.

“The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.”

—-Henry Ward Beecher, American preacher

“Democracy is moral before it is political.”

—- Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice

“The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.”

—-  Jimmy  Carter

“A constitutional democracy like ours is perhaps the most difficult of man’s social arrangements to manage successfully. Our scheme of society is more dependent than any other form of government on knowledge and wisdom and self-discipline for the achievement of its aims. For our democracy implies the reign of reason on the most extensive scale. The Founders of this Nation were not imbued with the modern cynicism that the only thing that history teaches is that it teaches nothing. They acted on the conviction that the experience of man sheds a good deal of light on his nature. It sheds a good deal of light not merely on the need for effective power if a society is to be at once cohesive and civilized, but also on the need for limitations on the power of governors over the governed.”

—- Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court Justice

“In contrast to totalitarianism, democracy can face and live with the truth about itself.”

—-Sidney Hook, American philosopher and historian

“America’s experiment with government of the people, by the people, and for the people depends not only on constitutional structure and organization but also on the commitment, person to person, that we make to each other.”

—-Robert Hutchins Continue reading →