Ugh. I have about seven half-finished posts, and today was only saved by having some excellent Comments of the Day on the runway. I spent most of it alternating between walking Spuds and working out a fascinating but difficult legal ethics question from a client, in one of a surprising number of areas where the legal profession hasn’t decided what’s ethical yet.

1. Was this really necessary? Turkey, showing no respect whatsoever for geography books, mapmakers, poor spellers and English speakers, decided to change its name from Turkey to Türkiye, which is the English spelling, believe it or not. “The phrase Türkiye represents and expresses the culture, civilization and values of the Turkish nation in the best way,” an announcement explained. Wait, it’s a phrase?

2. Hey! A new kind of discrimination! Over at Practical Ethics, Charles Foster complains about “the bias in favour of consciousness, and the consequent denigration of the unconscious.” Here is a sample:

“…we see it supremely (and supremely self-servingly) in philosophy, because philosophy is all about the exercise of those ‘higher cognitive functions’. When modern philosophers agree with Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living, they really mean that if you can’t think in the focused, highly cognitive way that they do, you might as well bow out – a conclusion on all fours with the decisions of the judges in PVS cases. Lay people might think that philosophy is a no-holds-barred search for the truth about the universe: it’s not; it’s based on the assumption that the universe perceived and perceivable by our quotidian consciousness is all that there is, and that that consciousness is therefore the only tool available for probing the universe….

3. A scandal? A smoking gun? Maybe…In newly obtained emails between National School Boards Association board members Marnie Maldonado and Kristi Swett dated October 5-6, 2021, Ms. Swett, who is an officer of the NSBA, seems to say that Biden’s Secretary of Education,  Miguel Cardona, solicited the association’s infamous letter asking the Justice Department to sic its agents on CRT-protesting parents as “domestic terrorists.” Justice then relied on the NSBA letter to send out its own threatening  memo directing the FBI to mobilize in support of local education officials who had to deal with these citizens who insisted that they should have a say in what their children were being taught. Continue reading →

What did we learn from the Ethics Alarms “echo chamber” survey? Not much, unfortunately. Most respondents clustered around the center, to the right, which I didn’t need a survey to figure out. I work very hard to keep the perspective here as moderate as possible, but then this is not a political blog, and ethics should come from a centrist perspective. (If one is far left, however, it all looks far right to you.) I was disappointed that more non-commenters didn’t participate, but then non-commenters don’t participate. There were only a couple. I also was disappointed that virtually all of the intermittent commenters  whom I know tend to a progressive tilt didn’t take the various tests. Why would that be? I have no idea.

I doubt that there is any way to keep a blog like this one truly diverse, at least among the commenters. Cognitive dissonance is powerful: if someone regularly disagrees with the analysis here, the natural tendency is to stop reading, or, apparently, as we recently witnessed with a now departed mad troll, to stop playing nice.

I force myself to cover far left and left-biased sites like Salon, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair,The Daily Beast, Boing-Boing, Mother Jones, Vox and others, but it’s not fun. I doubt I would subject myself to the experience if it wasn’t part of my job. (The far right sites are pretty annoying as well.) Others, the rational, generally fair sites like Reason and Five-Thirty-Eight, are frequently enlightening.

One note to counter excessive negative talk about the traffic here (which I am primarily to blame for): there are very few blogs or websites dedicated to ethics. I’m disappointed that the upward trend traffic here experienced through 2017 didn’t continue, but if there is an ethics commentary site on the web that offers as much content and has as much traffic as this one, I haven’t found it.

1. It’s a shame this didn’t happen in the U.S. so everyone could make sheep jokes and I could decree the messaging incompetent…To encourage more Germans to get the Wuhan vaccine, Hanspeter Etzold, who works with shepherds and animals to run team-building events for companies in the northern German town of Schneverdingen, organized 700 sheep to form a giant syringe. See?

In a memorable “Seinfeld” episode, George secretly adds lobster meat to eggs he cooks for a group breakfast at a vacation cottage gathering. His goal: to get his revenge on a female Jewish guest who embarrassed him, and whose faith forbids her from eating shellfish. Luckily for George, she wasn’t allergic to shellfish.

Now we are learning about a real life episode in which a woman’s new roommate, a vegan, decided to do “something nice” and switched the woman’s typical breakfast food with vegan alternatives. The roomie, Erin, presented pancakes, bacon strips, and hash browns for her new friend, who unbeknownst to her had  severe food allergies. The woman asked Erin what was in the food, and was told “it was regular bacon. Not that it was fake bacon or that it had soy.”

After the woman took a few bites, Erin  revealed the switch, smiling. “At this point, she does a ‘Ta-da,’ and smugly told us ‘I bet it tastes exactly like meat,'” Erin’s victim wrote. She is highly allergic to soy, and began going into anaphylactic shock. An ambulance had to rush her to the hospital, where she remained for two days. Continue reading →

I don’t know about you, but I found Jan. 6’s orgy of hype and hate by Democrats and the news media in their effort to make a year-old event that had little significance into a permanent threat to the nation stunningly transparent. In many ways, it was also more damaging to the nation and its political culture than what it was supposedly condemning.

It amazes me that the same party that has been flogging the imaginary “destroying democratic norms” accusation against Donald Trump would have its own party’s President smash a critical norm so cynically by attacking a previous President and potential re-election opponent like Biden did yesterday. It was desperate, it was hypocritical, it was unwarranted, and it was flagrantly divisive. It also came from a POTUS who entered office pledging his determination to be a unifying force. Harris, meanwhile, managed to be even more nauseating than Joe by comparing the Capitol riots to the 9/11 bombings and Pearl Harbor. Is she that stupid? Meanwhile, the President’s whose party—and Vice-President—cheered on the BLM rioters ended his remarks with “We’re a nation of laws, of order, not chaos. Of peace, not violence.”

How much of the public is completely unable to see such hypocrisy? Democrats better hope it’s a lot. but as H. L. Mencken observed, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people…

1. From the archives: Res Ipsa Loquitur…

2. And nobody could possibly go broke underestimating the stupidity and shamelessness of journalists…S.V. Dáte, the Huffington Post’s White House correspondent, tweeted that the January 6 riot was “1000 times worse” than 9/11.

How can anyone justify or explain that, except as uncontrolled Trump Derangement or deliberate false narrative building?

3. The Federalist did a nice job recalling  episodes of leftist mobs violently invading government buildings, none of which have been noted in mainstream media accounts of the 1/6 riot—all the better to prevent their readers from having necessary perspective. One took place as recently as October 14, 2021, when climate activists breached the Interior Department, and  demonstrators outside struggled with law enforcement officers as the mob tried to force its way in the building, shouting “Go inside! Go inside!” Some  pinned police against a wall, and there were a number of injuries, with one police officer being transported to the hospital. In 2011, thousands of progressives opposed to Republican Gov. Scott Walker invaded the Wisconsin state Capitol.  Then there was the George Floyd mob’s attack on the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon in July 2020. They began setting fires inside the fence protecting the courthouse and launching projectiles over it while trying to take it down. Several rioters got over the fence, as the mob aimed projectiles and flashed lasers at the federal police officers who tried to protect the building.

Of course, all of the incidents recalled by the Federalist are materially different: they couldn’t be connected to support for Donald Trump, or used by the media and Democrats to undermine it. Continue reading →

So far, our list of those responsible for the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol includes Donald Trump, his staff and advisors, the Capitol Police and other authorities, and the rioters themselves. Before we return to those who share responsibility for the riot, there are some who have been widely accused of triggering it who did not.

Prime among the them are the Republican Senators and Representatives who had stated that they would vote against certification. This was not the first time that members of Congress had opposed certification of a Presidential election; notably, Democratic members of Congress did so after both the 2000 and 2004 elections. In both cases, as with Republicans in 2021, the stance represented a symbolic objection to aspects of the election that the members felt were problematic and needed to be addressed. No riots were triggered when the Democrats engaged in the move, and there was no reason for Republicans to hesitate to do the same. Nor is there any reason to believe that the yo-yos who rushed the Capitol would not have done so absent the announcements of the 150 GOP members who said they would withhold their approval. As with much of the over-heated accusations against Trump, the claim that the objections of the GOP Senators and House members fueled an “insurrection” is a deliberate distortion by Democrats and the left-biased media as a political strategy

Another group being fingered in the concerted effort to use the riot to further several partisan agendas, the primary one being to somehow allow Democrats to hold power, is that opinion-wielding pundits, blogger and podcasters pushed a “big lie” that the election results were fraudulent, inflaming pro-Trump fanatics. A Times piece pushing this position began by stating,

Weeks before the 2020 presidential election, the conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck outlined his prediction for how Election Day would unfold: President Donald J. Trump would be winning that night, but his lead would erode as dubious mail-in ballots arrived, giving Joseph R. Biden Jr. an unlikely edge.

“No one will believe the outcome because they’ve changed the way we’re electing a president this time,” he said.

None of the predictions of widespread voter fraud came true. But podcasters frequently advanced the false belief that the election was illegitimate, first as a trickle before the election and then as a tsunami in the weeks leading up to the violent attack at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to new research.

Wait a minute: Beck was exactly right! Mail-in ballots were dubious, and remain so. Nobody knows, still, how much voter fraud there was, only that there is insufficient evidence to demonstrate it. And the opinion that the election was “illegitimate” is exactly that: an opinion, and one that many predicted would be rampant if the fearmongering over the pandemic prompted legislatures and governors to allow a voting method that did not have and could not have the integrity of in-person voting.

The study the Times piece was based on “analyzed nearly 1,500 episodes, showing the extent to which podcasts pushed misinformation about voter fraud.” The definition of “misinformation” the study employed was that of the self-identified liberal think-tank, The Bookings Institute, which is on the mailing list of Democratic Party mouthpieces just like the Times is. The remedy for this proliferation of “misinformation,” according to Brookings and the Times? Can’t you guess?

The new research underscores the extent to which podcasts have spread misinformation using platforms operated by Apple, Google, Spotify and others, often with little content moderation. While social media companies have been widely criticized for their role in spreading misinformation about the election and Covid-19 vaccines, they have cracked down on both in the last year. Podcasts and the companies distributing them have been spared similar scrutiny, researchers say, in large part because podcasts are harder to analyze and review.

Continue reading →