“Google, Google On The Screen, What’s The Best Ethics Blog You’ve Seen?”

The answer I got in my most recent test of where EA ranks in Google searches was discouraging if not surprising. Ethics Alarms used to pop up on the very first screen when you searched for “ethics websites” or “ethics blogs.” Now it’s buried so deep that I got tired clicking and gave up. “Nah, there’s no Big Tech ideological bias!” Yes, I do believe that the marginalizing of Ethics Alarms is substantially based on politics.

My clicking did turn up something useful and provocative, however. Feedly has a page titled The Best Ethics Blogs and Websites, though, like Donald Trump and others, it conflates popularity with quality. It ranks the top 50 “most popular” ethics blogs and websites.

I can’t figure out what its criteria are, but one way or another Ethics Alarms ranks #5 on the list. Even that honor is an apples-and-oranges conclusion. Ahead of EA is “The Ethicist,” #2, which isn’t a blog but a Sunday Times newspaper column with a website. “Everyday Ethics”(#3) and “Practical Ethics” (#1) are both UK websites, and #4 is the narrow range “Business Ethics.”

My favorite aspect of this listing however, was the description of each site’s output. “Everyday Ethics” has one article a week; “Practical Ethics” has an article a month. “The Ethicist” features two articles a week. “Business Ethics” also has just one new piece a month.

Ethics Alarms averages, the site says, 23 articles a week, behind only #50, “Corruption”( with 564 articles a week from around the world) and #12, bioethics.com, which has 35 articles a week. After these three, the most prolific ethics site has just 6 articles a week.

Sunday Morning Ethics Thoughts…

I’m having trouble waking up this morning sufficiently to write a full post, so I’m going to break form and just issue some random observations:

One reason I suspended the tradition here of giving out year-end ethics awards was that “Most Unethical Profession” never changed. It was always a tie between educators and journalists, and both their race to the bottom.. In the post-debacle analyses of Zohran Mandani’s election as mayor, two themes keep surfacing. One is that young college-educated voters strongly favored Mamdani while young non-college grads did not. “It’s almost as if going to college now makes people stupid,” a guest on Fox News said this morning. Yes, graduating from college without learning that communism never works and gets people killed is evidence of a failed educational system. President Trump’s efforts to force universities to eschew progressive indoctrination for actual education is one of the most important and crucial aspects of his Presidency. Regarding our “enemy of the people” news media, Prof. Glenn Reynolds wrote today of Mamdani, “He’s an ignorant, angry leftist, who believes what ignorant, angry leftists always believe. The press should have been pointing this out all along. I mean, the leftist press, but they don’t do this kind of thing to leftists.” Bingo! The biased and unethical educators are making our rising generations stupid and ignorant, and our biased and unethical news media is aiding and abetting by refusing to enlighten them.

***

I sure wish Curmie, the erudite, once open-minded progressive-ish columnist here would shake off his Trump Derangement and return to offer EA readers perspective on issues like the one above. He would be welcomed with open arms. I continue to be amazed at the stuff he posts on social media. Curmie is trapped in the same state of mind as Jimmy Kimmel’s wife (pity her!) who says that she can’t abide being around family members who voted for President Trump.

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Announcement: “Fuck” Has Been Officially Upgraded From Taboo Obscenity to Mainstream Colloquialism

This battle was lost long ago.

“Wheel of Fortune” has launched a new “What the Fun?” category because it implies “fuck.” The One Million Moms group is disgusted and outraged. “The once family-friendly ‘Wheel of Fortune’ game show is no more,” its site declared on October 30. “Unfortunately, the recently added puzzle category ‘What the Fun’ aims at a mature, modern audience with insinuated profanity making it no longer suitable for family viewing.”

“It is not the show it was with this implication of the f-word,” it continued. “Parents will have to explain to their children that the primetime program they were once allowed to watch is no longer a clean show.” The page included a link for a petition on which to pledge never to watch the show again unless the category is eliminated. More than 12,500 have signed.

Imagine a life so devoid of meaning and so full of discretionary time that one can organize a campaign to change a “Wheel of Fortune” category.

I have news for the conservative group, and by now it is old news. “Fuck” is now just acceptable naughtiness, and not the taboo obscenity it once was. Ditto “shit.” There are lots of reason why this has happened, and things like “What the Fun” are a big one.

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Open Forum! Round Three?…

After a long period of wan responses to the weekly Ethics Alarms free-for all, the last two installments have been historically lively and erudite. I am hoping for another round of equal quantity and quality.

I would like someone to explain to me the strange phenomenon of the EA collective posts, like this one yesterday combining 6 topics to which I would usually devote full individual posts to, attracting such few comments. It is one of the reasons I suspended the practice of doing one of these every day. I know if the MIA veteran EA commenter Eeyore were still roaming this blog, the photo of Sydney Sweeney in all of her—well, something—would have inspired a reaction, and probably a funny one. (I miss Eeyore.)

Anyway, let’s see if you can keep the streak of superb open forums going….

“Ick,” Ethics, or “Woo Hoo!”, and Other Briefly Noted Ethics Matters of Various Weight

1. Sydney Sweeney has been the source of dubious controversies several times this year, most notably when her ad for a jeans company played with the double entendre evident in saying she had great “genes.” Since she’s white and stacked, see that means she’s a white supremacist, or something. The silver see-though dress she wore on a recent “red carpet” launched a different controversy, though also one involving her extreme feminist charms. Conservative pundit Megyn Kelly, hardly one to hide her own curves, declared,

“So she was on the red carpet last night and she decided to show off her number one asset, which, contrary to the American Eagle jeans ad, is not really her jeans, it’s her enormous breasts, which are spectacular. No one would take that away from her. But, controversial opinion, I object to this. I disapprove of the dress she wore because it’s completely see-through. You can see her entire nipples. She reminded me of Kim Kardashian, who overshares and then takes away the thing that is the sexiest, which is every guy’s hope to be the one who actually sees them for real, and leaving little to the imagination.” 

Gee, you can be more articulate than that, Megyn. Let me try to help out. It’s not a flattering look at all, and just coarsens the culture, potentially corrupting young women in the process. The grotesque display reduces a woman, a human being, to just a pair of mammary glands. It’s not just degrading to Sweeney, who has presumably consented to being so dehumanized, it degrades women in general and men who are frozen in the headlights. My verdict is that this is “Ick” more than ethics, but it’s a close call.

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Ethics Observations on the Nov. 4 Election Results

Never mind the political significance of last night’s pretty much nationwide Democratic Party sweep of the major state and local elections: The password is “ethics,” as they used to whisper on Allen Ludden’s classic TV game show. So let’s look at the ethics…

Observations:

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Unethical Quote of the Month: Ethics Villain Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.)

“[H]e’s just a vile creature, the worst thing on the face of the Earth.”

—-Former Speaker of the House, current House member and Ethics Villain Nancy Pelosi, describing Donald Trump and doing her part to amplify hateful partisan rhetoric and point the public toward from political violence.

Pelosi was even challenged on the assertion that the President of the United States is “the worst thing on earth”during her interview with CNN’s Elex Michaelson last night. “You think he’s the worst thing on the face of the Earth?” Michaelson asked incredulously. Worse than war, cancer, child rape, ebola, cannibalism, terrorism, “Fear Factor,” pineapple on pizza and Sydney Sweeney?

“I do, yeah, I do,” Pelosi, who is a disgrace, responded, doubling down. “Because he’s the President of the United States, and he does not honor the Constitution of the United States. In fact, he’s turned the Supreme Court into a rogue court. He’s abolished the House of Representatives. He’s chilled the press.” 

Why, says Nancy, the President has chilled the press so much that CNN broadcasts disgusting and denigrating hyperbole by his political foes! (Did you know that Donald Trump lies all the time?)

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Ethical Quote of the Week: Actress Jennifer Lawrence

“I don’t want to start turning people off to films and to art that could change consciousness or change the world because they don’t like my political opinions,” she added. “I want to protect my craft so that you can still get lost in what I’m doing. And if I can’t say something that’s going to speak to some kind of peace or lowering the temperature or some sort of solution, I don’t want to be a part of the problem. I don’t want to make the problem worse.” 

—-Actress Jennifer Lawrence, finally, in her maturity, figuring out that it’s not part of an artist’s job to be public pundit, and that abusing celebrity in that fashion risks undermining that artist’s professional mission.

Lawrence prefaced her remarks by saying on The New York Times’  The Interview podcast,“During the first Trump administration, I felt like I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off. But as we’ve learned, election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for. So then what am I doing? I’m just sharing my opinion on something that’s going to add fuel to a fire that’s ripping the country apart.”

And, may I add, as it would be expecting a lot for a Hollywood star to mention this, her opinions regarding politics and social issues deserve no more attention that that of the local barfly, and conceivably less.

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Nah, There’s No “Deep State”…

Among the furious “It isn’t what it is” gaslighting that the Mad Left routinely engages in—“Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!”; “Nah, Biden wasn’t suffering from dementia in the White House, he was sharp as a tack!”; “Nah, Kamala Harris wasn’t a DEI nominee!”; “Nah, there’s no such thing as the Antifa!” and so on, and so on—the Trump Deranged refuse to admit that there is an embedded progressive “Deep State” (and often not so deep) that set out to sabotage Trump in his first term and to do everything possible to prevent his re-election in 2020.

One of many metaphorical smoking guns regarding the efforts of the Deep State was the organized effort by U.S. intelligence officials to make certain that the evidence of Biden family influence peddling on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop was discredited and avoided by the Axis media prior to the 2020 election. Shortly after The New York Post’s broke the story in October 2020 51 then current and former intelligence officials signed an open letter challenging the authenticity of the laptop.

Though they had no direct knowledge of the situation, the 51 abused their positions, authority and intelligence credentials to undermine The Post’s reporting weeks before the 2020 election. Politico’s headline was typical of how the letter was interpreted by the news media and the public :“Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” Twitter banned the Post’s story from its platform. During the second 2020 presidential debate held on October 22, 2020, Joe Biden repeated the narrative, saying, “Look, there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan!” (Fact check? Of course not.) Biden later repeated the claim in a “60 Minutes” interview held on October 25, 2020. No fact check then, either. Mission accomplished! The letter did its job (it worked) and Biden was elected.

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Unethical Quote of the Month: Un-Named California Lawyer

Gail Herriot is Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law and a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights since 2007. She is a conservative, so much of the civil rights racket (“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Eric Hoffer) objects to her existence.

Herriot recently posted the following jaw-dropping letter that she received from a member of the California Bar:

Dear Ms. Heriot,
 
This letter serves as a formal cease and desist demand regarding your ongoing, public, and targeted efforts to undermine and harass the Black community and its advocates for equity, in direct violation of state and federal civil rights laws and your ethical obligations as a member of the bar.
 
Your activities—including those publicly associated with the California Foundation for Equal Rights (CFER) (among others) and campaigns explicitly opposing Black-focused equity —constitute racial targeting and harassment under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 1981, and applicable state hate crime and anti-discrimination statutes. Such conduct is not protected expression when it rises to the level of coordinated intimidation or bias-based obstruction of legally protected programs. It is particularly egregious that your public campaigns have focused solely on efforts benefiting the Black community, while remaining silent on or even supportive of state and federal allocations to other racial or ethnic groups. 
 
For example: In 2021 and 2022, the State of California directed substantial funding—over $165 million—to AAPI anti-hate initiatives, a commendable effort to address rising hate incidents against Asian Americans.
 
In 2024, the California Legislature authorized over $300 million in support for Holocaust survivors and members of the Jewish community, recognizing their suffering and need for continued support.
 
Despite these allocations, your campaigns have not targeted or criticized these initiatives—only those aimed at repairing centuries of harm done to Black Americans, who remain the most frequent victims of race-based hate crimes nationwide according to federal data. Your selective and racially targeted opposition to Black equity initiatives, combined with your public standing as an attorney, member of a federal civil rights commission and educator, magnifies the discriminatory impact and constitutes a pattern of bias-based harassment under both state and federal law.
 
Accordingly, you are hereby ordered to immediately cease and desist from any further direct or indirect harassment, public misinformation, or racially targeted advocacy directed toward the Black community or programs designed to support it. Continued actions of this nature may result in:
 
Formal referral to state bar disciplinary authorities for violations of the Rules of Professional Conduct concerning bias, harassment, and discrimination; and
 
Referral to appropriate civil rights enforcement agencies for investigation under state and federal hate crime and civil rights statutes.
 
Please provide written confirmation within ten (10) business days that you have received this notice and that you will comply fully with its terms.
 
Warmest Regards,

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