U.S. Society

Blogging Ethics: Althouse Snaps!

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I’d say, all things considered, Ann Althouse runs my favorite blog. The former University of Wisconsin law prof who insists that she is “fiercely” non-partisan has a much broader range of topics on her eponymous site, many of them quirky, but she shadows ethics and legal ethics related stories that are Ethics Alarms fodder, and her commenters have become very similar in perspective to the commenters here. Her reactions to the Trump years and the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck were usually very similar to mine, so obviously she is fair, objective, and perceptive. I keep sending links her way even though she resolutely refused to give Ethics Alarms a link before she eliminated links entirely, and it appears her weird obsession with drawing cartoon rats has finally abated.

But this morning, the blogger announced that she was unhappy with her readers’ comments, which she lightly moderates, and ran a poll to get feedback as she apparently considers eliminating them altogether. I don’t know what Ann dings, but the comments I see only includes a few that Ethics Alarms wouldn’t post. The vast majority of readers polled voted for either her current moderation standards to remains as they are, or for her to moderate everything but block very little. (I voted with 14% for “Comments must go through moderation, and Althouse selects the most readable for publication.” None of the choices mirrored my approach, which is to moderate initial comments strictly and give leeway to veteran commenters while suspending or banning those who violate the Comment Policies.

Althouse is apparently upset with commenter criticism. In response to the comments on her poll, she responded in a series of comments (Althouse, unlike me, seldom enters the commenting ranks on her own posts):

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Another Threatened Democracy Canary In The Dark Totalitarian Mine…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

But this is nice: after spending almost every word since the 2016 election joining the relentless media attack on Donald Trump and the democratic process that elected him, The Atlantic is back to applying some critical thinking to the dangers of the Left.

In the magazine now, Conor Freidersdorf tells us that the only parent in Evanston, Illinois who would go on the record as opposing critical race theory indoctrination in the schools was a black mother and school-board candidate, who, unlike the others, was self-employed. His recent article on the curriculum in Evanston featured quotes from “parents who favor diversity, racial equality, and inclusiveness but object to lessons that they believe cross a line into indoctrination” but all the parents he interviewed “would be quoted only anonymously, out of fear that they would be harassed online or even lose their jobs.” Now he has found Ndona Muboyayi, who as a candidate for the school board in District 65 opposes the Black Lives Matter-spawned message her own children are getting, and says she speak out openly because she is an independent consultant and won’t “cancel” herself.

Hmmmm. That sounds familiar somehow…

Writes blogger Amy Alkon, who flagged the article: “This is a sign of how sick and toxically infested with the racist race profiteering of [Ibram X] Kendi and the like our society has become.”

Indeed it is.

Here is Muboyayi

…and here is some of her commentary from her interview with Freidersdorf:

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Open Forum Drill!

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Today was loused up by more dental adventures, but I learned something valuable that should have occurred to me long ago: Don’t assume your dentist is right, especially when he or she advocates expensive procedures. Today I visited my third tooth expert in a month, following the debacle of a week ago when I arrived at the elite oral surgeon my new dentist referred me to for three extractions, one of which he had added to my dentist’s original assessment. After I walked out of that appointment following what I felt was an unethical jerk-around by the staff, I decided to try another dentist who came highly recommended by a friend. To my surprise, and after enough x-rays to have me worried about mutating into an axolotl, today’s dentist said he thought I needed only one immediate extraction for sure, and that he could save one of the teeth while the other one could wait. This dentist, unlike the oral surgeon, also accepted my insurance. What a concept! A second opinion! And one that might save me thousands of dollars!

But I digress.

Let’s see if we can have a lively Friday Open Forum as last week, which was outstanding.

I expect second, third and fourth opinions on everything ethics.

And The Shackles Tighten Still More: The Continuing Big Tech Censorship Of Donald Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Once I would have headlined this post with “Stop Making Me Defend Donald Trump!” But this is no longer about Donald Trump, and readers who can’t figure this out, frankly, are too dense and gullible to read here.

Earlier this week, former President Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump posted on Instagram: “BIG SHOW TONIGHT – I will be joined by President Donald Trump on The Right View!!”

Then, when she posted her “big show,” Facebook took down the video of her interview with the ex-President after sending her an email stating that content with the voice of former President Trump “is not currently allowed on our platforms (including new posts with President Trump speaking).” The Facebook spokesman said the video was not permitted on Facebook and Instagram because of the former president’s indefinite suspension. Facebook also warned that any future posts featuring Trump would also be removed “resulting in additional limitations on accounts that posted it.”

I wouldn’t walk down my stairs to watch Trump be interviewed by Eric Trump’s wife, or just about any interviewer, frankly. Nonetheless, he is a recent President, a former President, a political leader, and an important historical, cultural and political figure in the United States of America, which is allegedly a free country. Millions of members of the public are interested in his words, beliefs and activities, and access to information about those should not be impeded by powerful private companies.

The news media’s embargo on facts and events for its partisan objectives created this slippery slope, and this slide is accelerating. Tech companies and communications corporations are actively controlling what Americans can see, hear, think about, and think. An entire political party and its corrupted “base” are perfectly satisfied with this distortion of democracy. Others are just quietly being misled, and are now the apocryphal slowly boiling frogs, doomed to have teeth ripping at the flesh of their legs before they understand what has happened to them.

Meanwhile, anyone–like me—seeing something ominous in this is a “conspiracy theorist”—you know, liars and wackos. Why would anyone see a conspiracy at work when a major political figure approximately half the nation voted for to be President less than four months ago is erased from the public eye and ear by a joint campaign stretching across the airwaves and the internet? Crazy!

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Comment Of The Day: “Sunday Ethics Peeps, 3/28/21…Item #4: Qualified Immunity”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m trying to catch up on the Comments of the Day.

Here is Michael R’s entry regarding New York City’s recent elimination of qualified immunity for police officers, from #4 in the post, Sunday Ethics Peeps, 3/28/21: “Hey, Everybody! Free Gym Memberships!”:

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 3/30/21: Ready to Play Ball (Sigh)…Plus Leaks, GULC, Pandemic Deaths, China, And Narratives.

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Well, I’m reluctantly back on board for the baseball season in general, and the Boston Red Sox rooting section specifically. It was touch and go for a while. For the first time since I was 11, I bailed on the baseball season completely with months to go last year. The reason was disgust. I was nauseated by the fake fans in the stands, the fake sounds emanating from the speakers, and the ridiculous rule experiments, like play-offs that admitted losing teams, seven inning games in double-headers and extra-innings beginning with runners on base for no discernible reason. Then there was MLB’s ostentatious suck-up to Black Lives Matter, with the Red Sox being prime offenders in that category, plastering giant salutes to anti-white racism in centerfield and outside Fenway Park.The final straw for me was the the spontaneous player walk-out to protest the “racism” of Breonna Taylor’s accidental death in a police shootout, which had nothing to do with race. MLB simply capitulated to a wildcat strike, players not only playing politics, but racial politics, partisan politics, and worst of all, ignorant politics. That did it. I didn’t watch a game or follow the team of my childhood for the rest of the season, nor any of the post-season. The Red Sox cooperated by stinking up the field as they hadn’t done since a couple of seasons in the Nineties.

I tried not to think about baseball during the off-season, because I dreaded having to make the decision of whether to stick with the game that had given me so much pleasure, excitement and wisdom since the first decade of my life. Further alienating me was Boston’s unethical (but popular!) choice to bring back Alex Cora as the team manager, despite his role in orchestrating season-long cheating in Houston as the 2017 Astros bench coach, and allowing a lesser but still significant cheating scheme to take place during the 2018 Red Sox season as my home team’s manager.

The first test came when I had to decide whether to pay for the Direct TV MLB broadcasts. I paid. Then Sirius-XM (the bastards) announced that the MLB radio channels would no longer be free with my satellite radio subscription, and that for the coming season I would have to pay an additional 6 bucks a month. I paid that too.

I’m not happy, and I am certainly not looking forward to the 2021 season, which starts in a few days, the way I once welcomed the “boys of summer.” In the end, the decision came down to loyalty, gratitude, forgiveness, and hope. As I already stated, baseball has given me many decades of joy and entertainment, and as I used to say on my professional biography, the Red Sox taught me much of what I believe about “the nature of good, evil, justice, and chaos.” I owe the team more than a personal “cancellation” over one misbegotten season.

1. More on the ongoing Georgetown University Law Center ethics meltdown…Professor Josh Blackmun has an analysis here; Ethics Alarms tracked this story earlier this month. Blackmun writes in his conclusion,

The Georgetown University Law Center is in a precarious state. Junior faculty members will be required to conform to standards inconsistent with free thought and exchange. Senior faculty members who resist will be forced out, quietly or overtly. And the most outraged students now have absolute control over the law school. Any demand they make, no matter how unreasonable, must be accommodated. Again, GULC is the canary in the coal mine. These changes will soon trickle down throughout the rankings–unless an administration is willing to say no to groups. I doubt many deans have that intestinal fortitude to say a student’s offense is unreasonable. Indeed, their own jobs may be on the line. I fear for the state of the legal academy.

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Pulling Out Another Ethics Alarms Open Forum…

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

I’m getting ready to have three tooth extractions in a couple of hours, so I’m grateful that the EA commentariat is more than capable of holding things down here until I’m in some kind of shape to think about more than oral surgery.

Morning Ethics Warm-Up: Snap Out Of It!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This morning, instead of the usual grainy 1930’s movies TCM usually shows before noon, it was featuring “Casablanca” for some reason. It’s a good thing, because the recent news had me heading for the bridge. As usual, the legendary singing duel at Ric’s between the Nazis and the French put me in a defiant mood, so I decided it was a good time to bring back the incredible Mirielle Mathiue and one of her signature performances of “La Marseillaise.” I’m a big fan of “The Star Spangled Banner,” but as inspiring national anthems go, this is the gold standard.

Now I feel better, and will at least until I finish this post.

1. You want racial conflict? This is how you get racial conflict. One benefit of the warm-up format is that I can write as little as possible about things that would make me up-chuck if I had to compose full posts about them. Following on the “systemic racism” myth, Oakland, California is launching a guaranteed income experiment called Oakland Resilient Families. 600 families in the city will receive $500-a-month payments over the next 18 months “to eliminate racial wealth inequalities.” Oakland’s guaranteed income program is only for low-income black, indigenous, and people of color, or BIPOC, families.

Whites cannot apply. If Oakland’s whites are poor, they have no excuses. They are just lazy, useless losers, I guess.

Families must apply online in the coming weeks and months in order to enter a pool of potential recipients, from which eligible families will be randomly selected to receive the cash payments.

I don’t have to explain what’s unethical about this, do I? Or what’s stupid about it? Or irresponsible?

In related news, a Kentucky mother is in custody on murder charges after her 2-year-old son overdosed on fentanyl while she slept. She had bought the drug with her stimulus money.

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Rainy Day Ethics Puddles, 3/24/2021:

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

1 Shut up or be funny. For some reason, the fact that Monday’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers’ included a gratuitous and facile lecture by the host about gun control legislation was plastered all over the progressive news media as if he had begun speaking in tongues or channeling the ghost of Emily Dickinson. I hate to be a spoil sport, but who cares what Seth Myers thinks about gun control? He’s a comedian and a comedy writer, and has been nothing but since college. Again, he has no brief to lecture anyone on that topic: he has his job to be funny, and the show he hosts is, theoretically at least, a comedy show. Did Julia Child ever lecture her PBS audience about U.S. nuclear policy while explaining how to cook an omelette? No. Did Walter Cronkite ever break into knock-knock jokes during The CBS Evening News? Never. Did Andy Williams ever pause in the middle of “Moon River” to deliver his analysis of a Presidential campaign? Absolutely not.

Myers has a right to his opinion, as sophomoric and echo chamber-nourished as it may be (he was pimping for “common sense gun laws,” which is what people say when they have no idea what laws will stop the criminal use of guns, but want us to “do something”), but it is arrogant and presumptuous to perform a bait and switch on his audience, which doesn’t come to his show for public policy wisdom. If they do, he has an ethical obligation to make it clear that they shouldn’t. As far as I can tell, Myers knows zilch about law, guns, government, or the Constitution, yet he presumes to use a vehicle awarded to him only because of an alleged gift for topical humor (personally, I don’t see it) for political advocacy.

Be funny, get educated, run for office, or shut up, Seth. And incidentally, there are not mass shootings “three or four times a week” and never have been. In a single atypical week, there were two mass shootings, and no Constitutional gun laws are likely to have stopped either of them.

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Wow, Bias Really DOES Make You Stupid!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The New York Times, like many shameless purveyors of left-leaning propaganda, has responded to the copious metaphorical blood drawn by the conservative (and funny) satire site The Babylon Bee by accusing it of being a “misinformation site.”

Morons.

Snopes, the dishonest “factchecking” site, has fallen into this pit of despond more than once, but then their idiocy is a matter of record (that places like Facebook choose to ignore for some reason). The Times’ political coverage has been sliding from slanted to dishonest to disgraceful, but I assumed—because I am a sap—that the paper was still above this.

No, it isn’t.

In a recent Times article, article, the Bee was referred to as an example of a “far-right misinformation site” that “sometimes trafficked in misinformation under the guise of satire.” This is approximately as valid as accusing the late Mad Magazine of being a misinformation vehicle. Fortunately, the people who run the Bee are not weenies. They responded,

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