I know that it’s relatively easy to be bold, principled and even reckless when you have billions of dollars to play with, but that should not diminish the admiration due to Elon Musk for sinking 40 billion dollars into what might be a quixotic effort to bolster freedom of public discourse and information online by reforming one of the worst partisan offenders in that crucial area.

As with the mainstream media’s abandonment of democratic principles to become a progressive/Democratic Party propaganda tool, the major social media platforms have engaged in outright censorship based on viewpoint discrimination, and, like the mainstream media, have dismissed complaints about bias as “conspiracy theories.” In addition to opening up Twitter to all viewpoints, Musk has also vowed to publish Twitter records demonstrating exactly how biased its previous content vetting process was. Wonderful.

As I’m sure he predicted when he threw down this gauntlet, the attacks on him have come from all angles and directions. The Biden administration darkly warned that it would be “watching” him closely—nah, no intimidation attempt there! Glenn Greewald writes of the media’s attacks,

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I just took down the post showing how David Portnoy was unethically slimed by the New York Times. When I tried to add the link to his video (which I did not feel was necessary to make the point, but several readers asked for it), WordPress went rogue and eliminated the headline, even though it showed on my draft. (The mysterious “draft that doesn’t match what appears when the draft is published” problem is always a nightmare.) I tried everything to fix it—new version, re-editing, copying, going back to the original version. After way too long spent on a minor post, I decided to hell with it. You can check out what I regarded as res ipsa loquitur here, at Instapundit.

A few comments went away with the post; I’m sorry, except for Steve Witherspoon: his comment prompted me to do whatever I did that made WordPress turn on me. I blame him.

I finally figured out how I can resuscitate the Ethics Alarms Awards after a five year drought. What made them impossible beginning in 2017, after eight years of announcing the Best and Worst of ethics every year, was their sheer size and the time it took to assemble them, essentially keeping me from effectively covering developing ethics events and issues in order to review old ones. I usually couldn’t get the job finished until February. Starting today, I’ll be posting at least one award each day through mid-January, 2023. Then I’ll gather them up for two summary posts. Nominations are encouraged: if you want a review of the categories—and I will always consider news ones, the 2016 Worst in Ethics awards are here, here, here; the “Best” categories can be recalled here and here.

1. I might as well get started: Here’s the Ethics Alarms 2022 Asshole of the Year.Yes, it has to be Donald Trump, though it was a closer race than I expected. The dinner with “Ye” and the ridiculous Nick Fuentes, plus Trump’s changing stories about how the dinner came to pass, locked the honor up, but the threats directed at Gov. DeSantis after Trump’s obsession with his 2020 loss helped cost the GOP the Senate had already made him the presumptive champ in this category—again.  What really clinched it was that Mediaite’s Trump-Deranged, blatantly biased reporter Tommy Christopher reported today that Trump asked Kanje “Ye” West to be his running mate in 2024. I don’t believe anything Christopher writes, but I still found myself wondering if the story could possibly be true. Trump is that big an asshole. Runner-up: Liz Cheney.

2. The ethics value missing here: proportion. A real headline today: “Alcohol-fueled family game of Monopoly turns violent as furniture is overturned, gunfire erupts — and man goes to jail on assault with a deadly weapon charge” Continue reading →

Here I was, all ready to shut down Ethics Alarms posting for the day, and I ran across this awful story, which I honestly don’t understand at all. There have to be some basic equipment ethics alarms that have to work in everyone, right?

Charleston, South Carolina police were called to investigate the home of 24-year-old Donald Gekonge when an apartment manager reported that he had found a child alone in the apartment yesterday. They discovered the child sleeping in a bed in the living room. When they walked into the room, the child “immediately reached for an empty water bottle.” The child seemed to be in good condition. Police then spoke to an unnamed person who said Gekonge had sent a message that he was in New York City. Eventually police reached him, and he said that someone was caring for his son, he just wasn’t certain who.

This is always a bad sign.

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I know my wedding to Grace Bowen Marshall 42 years ago was important because virtually nothing else genuinely significant in world history happened on November 23. The date is amazingly weak on important birthdays too: the most impressive are Franklin Peirce, our tragically weak 14th President (just when the nation needed a strong one), and, in 1921, Jack Marshall, the Hollywoord musician, arranger and composer who wrote the theme music for “The Munsters,” among other things.

The calendar this year is, as it happens, like it was the year we got married. We had changed the date from the 22nd to the 23rd because neither of us wanted Kennedy’s assassination on our minds. After a wedding presided over by Grace’s dad, a Methodist minister, we enjoyed a wild reception highlighted by a performance by the combined talents of the two musical revue groups I had performed in and directed, The Showstoppers and the political satire group, The Music Lobby. Then it was off to a romantic evening at the historic Hay-Adams hotel, across the park from The White House. The next day was Thanksgiving, which we celebrated by having a turkey picnic on the floor of our just-purchased, unfurnished home in Alexandria, Virginia. Then it was off to Zion’s Crossroads, near Charlottesville, for a brief honeymoon at an inn converted from an old plantation. They had a honeymoon cottage, and today we would be expected to be horrified by its history as the slave overseer’s residents. We weren’t then, and I’m not now.

As Gus says to Woodrow call as he dies in “Lonesome Dove,” “It’s been a hell of a party.” And we still haven’t opened all the presents…

1. When Ethics Alarms don’t ring: Fashion company Balenciaga has withdrawn a really oogy advertisement campaign featuring children with sexualized teddy bears, but such an ethics botch is signature significance. In one photo, one of the little girls poses on a sofa by one of plush bear bags, surrounded by wine glasses and branded bondage gear.

A sharp-eyed viewer spotted a copy of a Supreme Court opinion declaring pornography protected speech in another photo with a child. Here’s another one in the series:

The company’s apology as it abandoned the ads also doesn’t suggest familiarity with basic ethics alarms. “We sincerely apologize for any offense our holiday campaign may have caused. Our plush bear bags should not have been featured with children in this campaign. We have immediately removed the campaign from all platforms,” the apology posted on its Instagram page read in part. “We take this matter very seriously and are taking legal action against the parties responsible for creating the set and including unapproved items for our Spring 23 campaign photoshoot. We strongly condemn abuse of children in any form. We stand for children’s safety and well-being.”

Someone just sneaked those ads into publication without the company’s knowledge, eh? Sure.

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Few days in American history set the trillions of marbles on the boundary-less billiard table rolling quite as wildly as this one, in 1963, when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated. If a butterfly fluttering its wings in the Amazon could start a chain reaction resulting in a rainstorm in Central Park, imagine what might be different today if the motorcade had taken a different route that sunny day in Dallas. The answer: anything and everything. It’s very likely that there would be no Ethics Alarms, for example, to pick a tiny example at random.

1. Continuing on that theme…a new study from the WeCount coalition, a pro-abortion organization, estimates that the number of abortions nationwide fell by 10,000 in the first two months following the Dobbs decision. According to The New York Times,WeCount found that 22,000 fewer induced abortions were performed in states with pro-life laws in July and August, compared with the baseline beginning in April, before Dobbs. In states where abortion-on-demand remained legal, abortions increased by roughly 12,000, leading to a net decline of 10,000. There were just under 7,400 fewer abortions in August than in June. Extrapolating that figure over 12 months, you nearly 90,000 fewer abortions per year.

What changes in our world, our lives and our future might those 90,000 human beings cause? A President could be among them, or several. A presidential assassin. The next Ted Bundy, Steve Jobs, Orson Welles, Thomas Edison, Tom Brady, Bobby Orr, Paul McCartney, Bill Russell or Martin Luther King. We don’t know, and will never know. [Pointer: The Federalist]

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