Is There Any Way Pres. Biden’s Appointment of Minyon Moore As An Advisor For His Supreme Court Pick Could Be Called Ethical?

I don’t understand this at all. Lately, I’ve been wondering if Biden is deliberately trying to lose any lingering, mouth-breathing, drooling supporters he might have who aren’t total ideologues impervious to reason, like…well, Minyon Moore.

Three weeks ago, CNN reported that Biden had selected “three key outside advisers” to guide his still unnamed nominee—though we do know what color and gender she is— through the nomination process. “Minyon Moore, a veteran Democratic strategist and political director for former President Bill Clinton, will lead the efforts to activate outside advocacy groups in support of the nominee,” we were told. We were not told, however, that Moore was sitting on the board of directors of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation when she was appointed, and was so sitting as recently as four days ago.

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 2/22/2022: Happy Birthday, George Washington, And Thanks To The Lesser Men Who Succeeded Him

Today is our first President’s real birthday, and if anyone deserves two celebrations, it’s George Washington. One way to celebrate this unique and essential man is by refreshing oneself on the principles that guided his moral and ethical development from childhood to adulthood, George Washington’s 110 Rules, one of many ethics resources in the right hand column that nobody reads. The best is #110: “Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.“

Unfortunately I did not see this fatuous and obnoxious article on Politico before I had posted regarding President’s Day. Writes John Harris, a veteran political journalist who simply does not know what he is talking about:

A democracy really shouldn’t be mythologizing presidents at all. From the left it seems obvious that we don’t need a holiday honoring 46 presidents, all of them men. From the right it seems obvious that we don’t need to be honoring the aggrandizement of Washington-based politicians.

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After Dark Ethics Potpourri, 2/21/2022: President’s Day Edition, Or “Mister We Could Use A Man Like Ronald Reagan Again”

In case I haven’t been sufficiently clear, the same ethical principle that I spent four years insisting on during Donald Trump’s administration is equally important during the Biden Administration. Every President, and hence the Office itself, deserves and needs a modicum of respect and deference, or our system doesn’t function. In turn, every President has a duty to work to keep the office respectable by his demeanor, words, appearance and conduct.

Virulent partisanship makes the first requirement unattainable in sufficient degree, and the unavoidable pay-back that any Democratic successor would receive from those who—legitimately—resented the absolute refusal of the “resistance,” Democrats and the media to give Trump the shred of a chance before burying him in ridicule and hate has pushed abuse of the office below levels from which it is unlikely to be able to recover.

I thought the American Presidency was on life support after the destructive parade of LBJ and the hate directed at him over Vietnam, Nixon and Watergate, Ford, whom pop culture treated as an unprecedented boob, and Jimmy Carter, whose disastrous idea of the Presidency was to pretend not to be a leader. Then, as has so often been the case, the exact right type of President for what ailed the nation and the position showed up. Ronald Reagan played POTUS beautifully, and restored the office, substantially though not completely, to its previous iconic status. I’ll never forget that hard-line Democrat and the chief lobbyist for the American Trial Lawyers Association while I was there, who hated Reagan’s policies, telling me, “If his policies weren’t bad enough, he also knows exactly how to be an American leader, damn him.”

Ronald Reagan left the Presidency in far better shape than he found it.

  1. Pop Ethics Quiz: Is this an appropriate activity by the American Bar Association? The “Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge ” has been curated by the ABA Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Council. The ABA’s introduction to its syllabus states:

“The Challenge invites participants to complete a syllabus of 21 short assignments (typically taking 15-30 minutes), over 21 consecutive days, that include readings, videos or podcasts. It has been intentionally crafted to focus on the Black American experience. The assignments seek to expose participants to perspectives on elements of Black history, identity and culture, and to the Black community’s experience of racism in America. Even this focus on Black Americans cannot possibly highlight all of the diversity of experiences and opinions within the Black community itself, much less substitute for learnings about any other community of color. This syllabus is but an introduction to what we hope will be a rewarding journey that extends far beyond the limits of this project.”

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Addendum To The Previous Post: Remember, It Is Foolish Not To Trust The Government…

Heeeeere’s Kamala!

“What I made clear in our meeting is that, again, this is a dynamic situation. And depending on what happens in the coming days, we will reevaluate the need that Ukraine has and our ability to support…The purpose of the sanctions has always been and continues to be deterrence. But let’s also recognize the unique nature of the sanctions that we have outlined. These are some of the greatest sanctions, if not the strongest that we’ve ever issued, as I articulated yesterday. It is directed at institutions — in particular, financial institutions — and individuals, and it will exact absolute harm for the Russian economy. And their government… [But] As the president has said we believe that Putin’s made his decision. Period.”

Yes, that was the Vice-President of the United States, engaging in Authentic Frontier Gibberish to simultaneously describe U.S. sanctions as designed to deter the threatened Russian invasion of the Ukraine, designate those sanctions as the “greatest,” and then to admit that deterrence is futile.

Can Americans trust that this word salad is honest and transparent?

No.

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Dear American Left, And With All Due Respect, Your Totalitarian Inclinations Are Showing…

The top featured letter to the editor today in the New York Times is from Big Brother-loving Richard Cantor:

Re “The Covid Policy That Really Mattered Wasn’t a Policy” (column, Feb. 7):

Ezra Klein’s insightful column points out that the root causes of our failure to deal with Covid adequately both nationally and internationally were more our lack of solidarity and our mistrust of government than policies. In other words, they were due to our social dysfunction.

That insight has profoundly negative implications for human survival that go well beyond Covid. It indicates that we are incapable of dealing with the much larger threats of global warming and devastation of the environment no matter what engineering miracles we discover, because we lack the solidarity and trust necessary to tackle those threats to continued human existence.

We are doomed not because we do not know what must be done; we are doomed because we will neither cooperate with each other nor support our respective governments to get it done. Mankind is now on its last merry-go-round ride and that ride is coming to an end much sooner than most people realize, not because we lack the knowledge to prevent catastrophe, but because too many people refuse to acknowledge the truth for very selfish and shortsighted reasons.

The most urgent things we need to do are to face facts honestly and start getting along with one another to deal with them.

It is astounding to me that anyone who has watched the last two years unfold could conclude that failure to trust the government was an existential problem, or that a solution to current challenges facing the U.S. is to trust the government more. Putting aside the observation that Ezra Klein, a pure progressive propagandist who eschews objective analysis, who started Vox and was also behind “JournoList,” a select Google group controlled by Klein and limited to “several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics,” has never issued an unbiased column not propelled by a leftist agenda in his life, the failure to see the government’s pandemic response as irrefutable proof that the government can NOT be trusted can only be called a fevered delusion.

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The Women’s Free Skate Disaster Everybody Needed To See

Now let’s see if any lessons were learned. I’m dubious.

As even those, like me, who have the integrity combined with a low nausea threshold that prevented me from watching China’s version of the 1936 Munich Olympics, now know about Olympics darling doper Kamila Valieva choking spectacularly in the Women’s Free Skate long program and falling out of the medal race. One has to feel sympathy for the girl, who was subjected to unimaginable pressures because of a tangle of terrible, stupid, unethical decisions made by the adults around her. Beyond that, the result was perfect, exposing so much of what is corrupt and intolerable about so many things: the Olympics generally, these Olympics, women’s skating, women’s sports, Russia, and more.

We begin with the fact that Valieva should never have been allowed to skate in the individual event after testing positive for a banned substance before the Games. The reasoning of the Olympics powers that holding her to the same standards that adults would be held to in the same events she competes with them is subjecting her to “harm” is unethical, the ultimate “Think of the children!’ rationalization. Gee, you idiots, how did that harm avoidance plan work out for her? In what universe would the 15-year-old skater be more harmed by being doped out of the Olympics as any adult skater would be, than by having to compete with a major scandal hanging over her head, and collapsing under the pressure? Sure, what happened was moral luck, but the best case scenario would have also been terrible: the girl stuns the world with a brilliant program, and every medal remains in limbo for months.

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Ethics Summary Of Stories I Would Have Full Posts On If Today Hadn’t Been FUBAR, 2/19/2022

1. Well this is certainly moronic…NBC senior reporter Alex Sietz-Wald said out-loud on MSNBC that the biggest challenge for Democrat governors ending their mask mandates is that the Left has made mask-wearing such a fetish of their woke identity that they may resist giving it up:

So I think this is going to be a challenge for a lot of Democratic leaders to get their base comfortable with the idea of going back to normal. I mean, for the past two years so much of the identity of what it meant to be a Democrat, to follow the science, was tied up in masking and following these rules and regulations. And if you didn’t do that, you were, you know, a bad person, you were Ron DeSantis, you were a denier. So, now, these Democratic leaders need to get their base comfortable with unwinding all of that.

Follow which science when? The masking has long been virtue-signalling for those who think complying with arbitrary authoritarian edicts is virtuous. It was most appropriate that the first Democrat TV personality to proclaim that “I would wear a mask and I might do that indefinitely. Why do I need the flu or a cold even?” was “The View’s” resident moron, Joy Behar. In a moment of rare self-awareness, she attributed this decision to “the little voice in her head.” Indeed, few have smaller ones, and Joy proved it by being caught just hours later dining out with her friends without a mask. Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On A Discrimination Enabler’s Confession

Over at Quillette, an American University teacher calling himself “Keith David” (I can’t find a reference for him) writes “A Student Sleuth Found Evidence that Our University Practices Reverse Racism. Here’s Why I Advised Him Not to Publish It.”

It is a long article, and deserves to be read in its entirety even at the risk of having your head explode. I find the author’s approach to the problem both typical and depressing, but before I enumerate my reactions, here are some major points in the article: Continue reading →

Our Unprofessional Professionals, Our Inexpert Experts: The Ethicist And The Economist

One of the most disturbing aspects of the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck was the ugly spectacle of once esteemed professions deciding en masse to ditch their integrity in order to join the “Get Trump!” mob with the cool kids. Historians, lawyers, judges, psychiatrists, scholars, civil libertarians, journalists, educators…yes, and ethicists—all these groups disgraced themselves and breached the one, overarching mandate for those who supposedly labor for the public good: be trustworthy. Then came The Great Stupid, compounding the damage to society and the culture by showing “experts” to be equally unreliable, burdened as they were by crippling bias, political agendas, and flawed skills and assumptions.

Two recent examples highlighted this trend. First up, the ethicist.

Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a professor at Duke Law School, is co-director of the Center for Sports Law & Policy and a senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. She authored a jaw-droppingly lame op-ed for the Washington Post headlined, “Yes, Kamila Valieva should be skating in Beijing.” There isn’t a single valid ethical principle behind her entire, constructed-for-sentimentalists argument.

Her first sentence would normally make me quit reading any opinion piece: “Russian Kamila Valieva is the best figure skater on the planet, she is gorgeous to watch perform and she should be skating in Beijing.” This is the equivalent of “Barry Bonds is a great player and we should ignore the fact that’s he’s a steroid cheat.” An ethicist is openly elevating the most obvious non-ethical consideration seasoned with personal bias, that the author thinks she is “gorgeous” on the ice, over the clear ethical consideration that the skater broke the rules, and had they been enforced, she wouldn’t be at the Olympics at all.

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That Emergency Open Forum Two Weeks Ago Was Such A Blast, Let’s Do It Again!

Fortuitously, this time the emergency room visit is occurring on a Friday, when an open forum would normally occur anyway! What luck! Calloo callay!

Go crazy with ethics analysis and provocation, please. I’ll see ya when I see ya…