This should be simple. On its face, the armed raid on Mar-a-Largo appears to be a massive political blunder and a despicable and dangerous continuation of the progressive/Democratic Party effort to criminalize politics, especially when Donald Trump is the quarry…and that’s just if the early morning grandstanding was exactly what the Justice Department claims it was. It was still an excessive (and intentionally disrespectful) use of criminal law enforcement power against a political adversary of the government employing it, and therefore carries at very least the appearance of impropriety, which Justice Department officials are bound not to engage in.
As I already mentioned, it also shatters a core democratic norm, which when Trump was President, was pronounced as a terrifying and threatening thing by the Axis of Unethical Conduct along with their academic lackeys even when the norm being breached wasn’t a norm at all. This norm, however, is important. Once a government starts targeting political opponents, can Chile be far away?
We don’t know enough to go farther than that, but if this is accurate, from the New York Post…
Trump’s attorneys, led by Evan Corcoran, had been cooperating fully with federal authorities on the return of the documents to the National Archives and Records Administration, according to sources.
…then Merrick Garland and Sgt Biden Schultz (“I know nothing! NOTHING!”) have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.” (Is it mixing metaphors to allude to both “Hogan’s Heroes” and “I Love Lucy” in the same sentence?) Presumably, we’ll get the explanations, or some facsimile soon. We’d better. Continue reading →
The purported results of a Monmouth University survey make no sense whatsoever, which is illuminating…about why we should pay no attention to polls. This one was supposed to show the impact of the endless January 6 Commission hearings. Apparently they have had no impact at all. 38% of adults said they believe Trump was directly responsible for the Jan. 6 riot compared to 42% who said the same in June before the hearings began. Well, anyone who believed President Trump was directly responsible for the riot is a) an idiot b) not interested in facts or evidence or c) so biased and determined to believe all anti-Trump media spin that they probably didn’t watch the hearings anyway.
That, of course, is what is so absurd about the poll. It didn’t isolate respondents who watched the hearings or paid attention to them from those who did not. This feature appeals to elude the news media. For example, the Washington Examiner writes, “Another 32% said they don’t believe Trump did anything wrong after viewing the hearings, compared to 30% the month before.” Wrong. All the poll shows are the numbers in June and in August after the prime time hearings were shown. The numbers don’t reflect what respondents who watched the hearings thought before and after them. Continue reading →
Everything is loused up, delayed and failing today. I don’t want to talk about it…
Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who carved out a niche by claiming that Donald Trump uniquely defied “democratic norms,” thus pointing the government toward “authoritarian” rule, had better be hiding their heads in bags now. The theme was quickly picked up by other unethical (as in partisan and biased without admitting so) academics like historian Alan Lichtman, and it became one of the more popular Big Lies weaponized by the Left-allied mainstream media, as in this Washington Post hit piece.
Ethics Alarms took the position that this was a contrived new standard dreamed up just for Trump (and to sell books and get MSNBC gigs, of course), concocted for political warfare,and it was. Meanwhile, Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have been notably silent as the Joe Biden Presidency has shattered one “norm” after another, most spectacularly in using the Justice Department (and Congress, as well as his party generally) to harass and attempt to neutralize a former President of the United States and past and likely future adversary at the ballot box. The raid on Mar-a-Largo was the ultimate IIPTDXTTNMIAFB(“Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden”), and one that genuinely threatens democracy, unlike, say, firing a wildly incompetent and untrustworthy FBI director. Not a peep from the “norms” police though.
Gee. What a surprise.
1. Here’s another “surprise”: when a group becomes entitled and protected, “inclusion and diversity” fly out the metaphorical window. Assistant professor of community health and director of the Health Promotion Center at York College Vincent Jones II and professor and director of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Middlebury College Laurie Essig write in the Boston Globe that heterosexual bachelorette partiers are ruining the all-gay scene in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The male-loving women, it seems, have found the long-time arts, galleries and gays town on the tip of Cap Cod the perfect place to party without the inconvenience of being hit on, at least not by men. The residents claim the women are “asserting their privilege” in what should be LGBTQ+ “safe spaces.” Worse still, the straight infestation consists of “mostly white women.” How dare they? Continue reading →
Two stories, both head-explodingly idiotic, both linked to Bizarro World Ethics and pathological virtue-signaling needs in oppressive leftist-indoctrination saturated cultures. One is a gag, the other is a tragedy, yet there is hardly a filament of difference between them in the 21st Century ethics and rationality rot they illustrate.
I read the two in succession by pure coincidence, and Poe’s Law immediately leaped into my mind. Poe’s Law was formulated in 20o5 (by Nathan Poe, not Edgar Allan Poe) and has become an essential concept since. It holds that satirical accounts involving extreme examples of ideological insanity can be impossible to distinguish from actual events, because current ideological extremism defies parody. Let’s cut to the chase, for this isn’t a quiz: the satirical piece was “I apologize for my white baby.”
The last thing Fred Guttenberg told his 14-year-old daughter was that it was time for her to go, that she was going to be late. Hours after rushing his two children to school that Valentine’s Day morning in 2018, a shooter unleashed a barrage of gunfire inside a Parkland, Fla., high school — killing 17 people, including Jaime Guttenberg.
During Tuesday’s sentencing proceedings for the convicted shooter, Nikolas Cruz, Guttenberg’s voice broke while he talked of the imagined future he had for Jaime, one that never came to be. But his were not the only tears falling in court — members of Cruz’s defense team were also crying, videos show.
“I cannot recall if I actually ever did tell Jaime that day how much I loved her. I never knew that I would lose the chance to say it over and over and over again,” Guttenberg said as public defender Nawal Najet Bashiman dabbed her eyes with a tissue. Two others on Cruz’s team also shed tears during testimony Tuesday.
That is Assistant public defender Tamara Curtis wiping her eyes in the photo above.
With his uncanny instinct for taking bows for making an obvious observation while missing the point, pseudo-comic Bill Maher once again engaged in his favorite topic of fat-shaming last week, this time with a “Eureka!” to share. The U.S. has inexplicably gone from fat acceptance to “fat celebration,” which the HBO wit <gag!choke!> calls a “disturbing trend.”
This isn’t a “trend,” nor is it disturbing, and it isn’t a phenomenon confined to obesity. Bill could have educated his audience—which, as usual, arfed and clapped like the human seals they are—but instead ignored the real problem, which is partially fueled by people like him.
And it’s an ethical one. Society’s goal is to make the human beings within it safe and happy. This requires setting standards, much of which it accomplishes with law and law enforcement, and the rest it pursues by making values, virtues and positive, societally beneficial conduct clear. Society then encourages and rewards those who meet those standards, and shames, disapproves and rejects those who defy them.
I actually have been lying awake with a not-quite-dismal headache, and all sorts of ethics nightmares real and imagined have been spooling through my fevered brain, so I decided to hell with it, might as well write an in-between warm-up and hope that it calms me down enough to get back to sleep.
Among other issues, I am annoyed that I didn’t get to a warm-up yesterday because August 7 is another date chock full of ethics milestones, notably the the passage of the infamous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving President Johnson almost unrestrained powers to oppose “communist aggression” in Southeast Asia. Not only was this the floodgates-opening moment for the U.S.’s disastrous Vietnam entanglement, but it permanently (so far, at least) accelerated Congress’s abdication of its constitutional duties to oversee the Executive’s war-making proclivities. August 7 was also the date in 1912 upon which Teddy Roosevelt completed his fateful, ego-driven move to split the Republican Party, preferring a public tantrum that would ultimately inflict Woodrow Wilson, arguably our worst President ever, on the Republic, over accepting the consequences of his own impulsiveness when he foolishly forswore running for a second full term in office. Not surprisingly, Teddy had found his hand-picked successor (and best friend) William Howard Taft not sufficiently Teddy-like, and when the GOP dutifully renominated Taft for another term that he would have won easily, Roosevelt launched his Bull Moose Party to oppose both Taft and Wilson. His own party then nominated Roosevelt 110 years ago, violently changing the course of history in ways too convoluted to guess.
1. What’s going on with Disney? The best answer appear to be “Really, really, incompetent management.” When I read complaints about Walt’s creation retiring its creator’s opening day speech from its anniversary celebration after 67-years, I assumed that it was all just “Disney has gone crazy woke!” conservative hysteria. Then I read the speech, which I had last heard when I first visited Disneyland when I was a college sophomore, on one of the most fun days of my life. Here is what Walt said:
To all who come to this happy place: Welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams and the hard facts that have created America with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world. Thank you.
That’s the mission statement for the entire Disney journey, and eloquently stated too. What could anyone, especially anyone charged with continuing to make the company thrive, object to about that perfect expression of why Disney is important to American culture? An organization that becomes estranged from its founder (or Founders) is risking its soul and survival. I hope that the erasure of Walt’s words from this year’s celebration is just another in a long string of dumb management decisions. I fear that it is much more than that.
2. Apparently racial discrimination is now the official policy of New York City. The New York Post reports that New York City Mayor Eric Adams has requested that city agencies provide photographs of potential candidates for jobs at City Hall ranging from assistant commissioner to departmental press secretary. The ubiquitous “unnamed city officials” explained that the request is part of an effort to hire more diverse staffers, a euphemism for “so the city can hire based on skin color.” Unethical. Of course. The officials the Post interviewed said they supported a diverse workforce but worried that the practice is causing the Adams administration “to make hiring decisions with a greater emphasis on race and ethnicity than merit.” The Mayor, ridiculously, swears that having the photos will merely help him recognize his employees in the sprawling city workforce. Continue reading →
What? Democrats manipulate health protocols for political advantage and expediency? Another conspiracy theory, conservatives? “Not hardly,” as Big Jake would say. Democrats are flagrantly disregarding their sacred Wuhan virus safety protocols because they can’t afford and positive testing or quarantines when the upcoming vote on the latest spending and tax bill (the hilariously oxymoronic titled Inflation Reduction Act) is expected to be razor thin. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) said there is no “plan B” when it comes to passing the controversial spending package, because Democrats are “going to stay healthy.” Reportedly Democratic Senators could “bring [their] ventilator and still vote.” The Hill nickname for this hypocritical exercise, far from the first involving progressives and the pandemic, is “Don’t test, don’t tell.”
And yet people doubt the sincerity of the Left’s pandemic scaremongering….
1. And while we’re on the topic of trustworthy science, a French physicist posted this photo, writing (in French, of course), “Photo of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, located 4.2 light years from us. She was taken by the [James Webb Space Telescope]. This level of detail… A new world is revealed day after day”:
It was really a slice of chorizo sausage. Trust the science! (Just not the scientists…)
2. At what point will the vast majority of the public just point and laugh at people who react like this? U.S. and British TV personality Gordon Ramsey, a chef, food critic and restaurateur, was shown in a video surveying a flock of lambs for future consumption while saying, “Yummy yum yum yum yum yum. I’m going to eat you. Which one’s going in the oven first?” Then he picked one.
Social media critics were horrified. Morons.
3. And speaking of morons: Alex Jones. A jury found the “Infowars” conspiracy theory hack guilty of defamation for falsely claiming—ridiculously claiming— that the 2021 attack on the Newtown, Connecticut elementary school that took the lives of 20 children was a hoax. He was ordered to pay $4.1 million in compensatory damages, then another $45.2 million in punitive damages…and this was just for two of the families. Expect the damages to be significantly reduced, but it appears to be a good verdict. Lying is protected under the First Amendment, but Jones’ lies in this case implicated the parents of murdered children in a plot with no evidence whatsoever, though Jones implied that there was. That’s defamation. (I know, because that’s not what I did when an Ethics Alarms reader claimed that I defamed him.)
4. I won’t say Georgia candidate for Governor, Stacey Abrams, is a moron, but her “explanation” of how she squares her faith with her support for abortion is, shall we say, interesting:
It is a medical decision. And while your faith tradition may tell you that you personally do not want to make that choice, it is not my right as a Christian to impose that value system on someone else because the value that should overhang everything is the right to make our own decisions, the free will that the God I believe in gave us. And my responsiblity as a legislator is to make certain that we allow doctors and nurses and medical professionals to make medical decisions and that politicians stay out of it.
Incoherent and insulting. The decision of a healthy woman to terminate a healthy fetus is not a “medical decision.” Moreover, if an individual believes that killing a fetus is ending the life of a human being, it matters not how an individual reached that conclusion, be it the Bible, biochemistry or experience: that individual has an obligation to act on that belief. Abrams is endorsing subjective ethical standards even when they involve homicide, an inexcusable position for a lawmaker. All laws involve elected officials deciding on what societal values and standards must be, and imposing them.
5. Bottom ethics item of the day: Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker’s state budget included a pardon signed by Massachusetts’ Governor Charlie Baker, thus exonerating Elizabeth Johnson from her 1692 conviction for practicing witchcraft in Salem.
This was the culmination of a three-year effort by civics teacher Carrie LaPierre and students at North Andover middle school, who relentlessly campaigned to exonerate Johnson with an assist by a state senator who apparently doesn’t have enough to do.
My verdict: stupid grandstanding and virtue-signaling. None of those found guilty of witchcraft require exoneration, because everyone knows there were no witches. The linked article describe’s Johnson’s name as”seemingly-forever smeared by the witchcraft conviction.” To whom? Who knows her name at all today? This isn’t like Bill Clinton finally pardoning the captain of the “Indianapolis,” who was unjustly court-martialed for an infamous naval disaster he could not have prevented. [Pointer: JutGory]
Scattered thoughts, because my brain is melting...
Showtime’s “Billions” is my new favorite ethics show, especially since it includes such a heavy dose of legal ethics dilemmas. One irritation, though, is the way every character routinely and casually refers to Taylor Mason, the nonbinary arch-enemy of ruthless hedge fund trader Bobby Axelrod (Damien Lewis), as “they” without hesitation or question because “they” demand it. Much of the time the use of the plural pronoun renders the dialogue incomprehensible: are they (meaning the real they, the ones talking) referring to Mason, or to Mason’s company, or the company’s employees? It is impossible to tell much of the time. I do not believe for a second that lock-step compliance with pronoun dictates would be so universal in non-woke areas like commodity transaction policing or hedge funds. This is New York City, not California. The show’s writers are both virtue-signaling and indoctrinating. I resent it.
Modern art is a scam, isn’t it? This…
…is a pickle stuck on the ceiling. Titled “Pickle,” the “thought-provoking artwork” is the work of Australian artist Matthew Griffin. It is now on display at the Michael Lett Gallery in Auckland., and consists of that ketchup-smeared pickle slice, attached to the ceiling of the art gallery. It’s price tag is 10,000 New Zealand dollars, or $6,200 American.
Beyoncé, good little woke soldier of censorship that she is, dutifully removed the “ablest slur” spaz from one of her songs after some contrived offense police complained. Now Monica Lewinsky wantsBeyoncé to airbrush her 2014 song “Partition,” because it includes the one-time White House intern’s name as a synonym for a certain sexual act (but not sex! Bill said it didn’t count as sex!). Just think of all the songs that will have to be rewritten when the Left’s purge of “hurtful” lyrics, if “hurtful” means anything the hypersensitive, the power-playing, and the Orwellian linguists focus on.
Wynton Yates, a black lawyer from New Orleans, posted a TikTok video last week expressing his outrage that Airbnb was listing the “Panther Burn Cottage” at Belmont Plantation in Mississippi as a luxury bed-and-breakfast rental. The remodeled structure was described as an “1830s slave cabin” that had also been used as a “tenant sharecroppers cabin” before being converted.
“How is this okay in somebody’s mind to rent this out — a place where human beings were kept as slaves — rent this out as a bed and breakfast?” Yates asked in the video. Naturally the social media mobs reacted like Pavlov’s dogs to a bell, and, also naturally, Airbnb groveled an apology and took down the listing.
Thus does cowardice and conflict avoidance create dubious cultural standards.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Is it unethical to rent out or stay in a structure that was once used as slave quarters?
Ethics Alarms 