U.S. Society

Municipal Government Ethics Follies [Clarified]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Do you think the Federal and state governments have major ethics culture problems? Municipal governments say “Hold my beer!”

1. The city with the deadest ethics alarms in the U.S.? It might be Quincy, Florida…

Quincy hired Robert Nixon as its city manager. Now Quincy Commissioner Beverly Nash has called on the city commission to terminate Nixon, alleging the city violated its own guidelines and possibly state law by hiring him. Why, you well may ask?

Nixon had pleaded guilty to charges of embezzling government funds and served 21 months in prison. The 2010 criminal case was brought after Nixon and an accomplice schemed to pocket $134,000 in federal Housing and Urban Development grant money meant for Tallahassee-area small businesses. Nixon was the director of Florida A&M University’s urban policy institute when he stole from a grant fund-holding account at Florida A&M Federal Credit Union, where his co-defendant was president. The two tried to disguise withdrawals as consulting and administrative fees. They got caught red-handed.

Quincy has a population of about 8,000 and is located at the center of Gadsden County. “Technically we have gone astray and violated our own policies and procedures,” Nash said during a city commission meeting. “When adherence to policy slowly erodes, what is left? Wrong becomes right. The lines and boundaries are missing and blurred.”

The controversy is bogged down in a technical debate over whether or not it is illegal for Quincy to hire a convicted felon who has not had his right to hold official office restored. You can read the details of that irrelevancy here. It doesn’t matter whether Quincy can hire someone who had embezzled government fund as its city manager. Whether the city can or not, it is incompetent, irresponsible and stupid to do so. This is signature significance on metaphorical steroids. Nixon, predictably, is full of talk about redemption and second chances. “I had a debt to society and I paid it. I think it’s important that there is a pathway forward for people with felonies who want a second chance,” Nixon says. Sure there is a pathway: that path begins somewhere the felon does not have opportunities to steal his employer’s money.

The reality is this: nobody who is trustworthy embezzles government funds once or ever. Maybe a city could justify hiring a contrite former embezzler as its city manager after every candidate in the country who has not embezzled cash perishes from some China-planted ethics plague. Absent that unlikely scenario, the hiring is indefensible.

Here’s my favorite part of this astounding story: The Quincy city attorney was one of Nixon’s defense lawyers in the embezzlement case.

2. Oh no, flags again…

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Amazing Stories of The Great Stupid: “Interracial Dating as a Sociopolitical Strategy”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

This headline on a New York Times “The Ethicist Column” justly attracted mockery across the conservative media spectrum: “As a White Man, Can I Date Women of Color to Advance My Antiracism?” One could do a packed seminar on what’s wrong with that question. You can do whatever you want to do within the law. Whether you are white or not doesn’t change that fact. Dating to make a political statement rather than dating because you want to develop a personal, intimate, lasting relationship with someone else is a Kantian ethics violation, using a human being as a means to an end, thus demeaning and manipulating that person.

This is a victim of The Great Stupid, crying for help without realizing it. My favorites excerpts from the head-exploding letter to Prof. Kwame Anthony Appiah from”Name Withheld”(“a straight white dude and recent college grad who has very progressive beliefs and is looking for a committed partner who, in time, can equitably raise a family with me”):

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Friday Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Everything is a chore right now: I’m sore all over and can hardly walk after falling down a flight of stairs in the dark at my sister’s house while looking for her dog to take to my house after she (my sister, not the dog) ended up in a hospital emergency room unexpectedly two nights ago.

So the more lively and provocative you are here, the happier I’ll be. And I’m still looking for guest posts: one is on the runway now.

Meanwhile, here’s a headline (on the ABA site) that I guarantee will be ripped off by “Law and Order” or some other TV show very soon: “Judge texted bailiff, clerk that he can’t be in court next day because ‘I just shot my wife,’ jurors are told.”

Confronting My Biases, Episode 18: “I See Stupid People…”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Yesterday’s most ridiculous story made me ponder a long-standing bias I know I inherited from my father. The basics:

“A Canadian tourist trying to photograph a shark in shallow water at a beach in the Turks and Caicos Islands this month was bitten by the shark and lost both of her hands, officials said….The shark was about six feet long, according to the Turks and Caicos government, but its species was unclear. The tourist had “attempted to engage with the animal” in an effort to take pictures of it before she was bitten on Feb. 7, the Department of Environment and Coastal Resources in Turks and Caicos said in a statement.“

I have two instant reaction to tales like this. The first is, “What an idiot!” The second is to think of puns and mean jokes, in this case, “Let’s give this woman a hand!” I know it isn’t a kind reaction, or compassionate, or empathetic. On the other hand (there I go again!), if I lost my hands trying to take a photo of a live shark close enough to bite me, I would declare myself an idiot and be awash in shame and self-hate.

Last July I wrote about some guy who injured himself grievously after deliberately lighting a firecracker that he had placed on his head. My feelings about this woman (“She wanted to figure out how to take a photo of a shark, but was stumped!”) are exactly the same. I don’t like the fact that insurance premiums go up because companies have to pay health policies for people who do things like blowing their own heads up and playing with sharks.

I know it’s a bad side of my character. Still, does the Golden Rule apply when there is no way in hell you would do what you are supposed to be sympathetic to the “other” who has been hurt by doing it?

Oh…it doesn’t matter what the species of the shark that attacked the woman was. It was a shark.

She’s gonna need a bigger brain…

In the Rear-View Mirror: “Reflections On President’s Day, 2012: A United States Diminished in Power, Influence and Ideals”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

On President’s Day in 2012, I wrote a dispirited assessment of where the United States stood regarding spreading American ideals and values to other nations. This was in the context of Barack Obama’s feckless foreign policy, which, as with his puppet stand-in later, Joe Biden, consisted of threats and warnings (remember Obama’s “red line” in Syria?) without credibility of resolve. I thought about the post as I was contemplating how J.D. Vance was getting mockery and criticism from the Axis because he exhorted our allies in Europe to begin a new commitment to freedom of speech.

The main thrust of the essay was the question of whether the United States should be “the world’s policeman,” a situation that now has fallen into ethics zugzwang: it is irresponsible for the U.S. not to accept the role of world policeman, and irresponsible for us to accept it either.

“Quite simply, we can’t afford it,” I wrote. “Not with a Congress and an Administration that appear unwilling and unable to confront rising budget deficits and crushing debt with sensible tax reform and unavoidable entitlement reductions.” I found the 13-year old post useful and thought provoking for perspective purposes. It raised many questions. Is the U.S. better off today than in 2012, when I was so depressed about its prospects and integrity? What does it mean to “make Amerca great again” in 2025?

I’ll have some more 2025 thoughts at the end. Here is the rest of that post:

***

Yesterday Congress and the President passed yet another government hand-out of money it doesn’t have and refuses to raise elsewhere, among other things continuing to turn unemployment insurance, once a short-term cushion for job-seekers, into long-term government compensation for the unemployed. Part of the reckless debt escalation was caused by the last President [George W. Bush] unconscionably engaging in overseas combat in multiple theaters without having the courage or sense  to insist that the public pay for it. The current administration [the Obama Administration] is incapable of grasping that real money, not just borrowed funds, needs to pay for anything. The needle is well into the red zone on debt; we don’t have the resources for any discretionary military action.

Ron Paul thinks that’s a good thing, as do his libertarian supporters. President Obama, it seems, thinks similarly. They are tragically wrong. Though it is a popular position likely to be supported by the fantasists who think war can just be wished away, the narrowly selfish who think the U.S. should be an island fortress, and those to whom any expenditure that isn’t used to expand  cradle-to-grave government care is a betrayal of human rights, the abandonment of America’s long-standing world leadership in fighting totalitarianism, oppression, murder and genocide is a catastrophe for both the world and us. Continue reading →

VP Vance’s Speech and the Complete Unmasking of the Totalitarian American Left: Part I

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Prelude.

Well, here I am again, starting off the Ethics Alarms day with a post related to politics and government. This is not a political blog, and I strive mightily to prevent it from being one. However, I cannot operate an ethics information and analysis site that fulfills (or, to be realistic, attempts to fulfill) the mission I have set for it and ignore massive, serious, indeed historic events and issues that have ethics principles not only at their core, but at risk because of them.

Those who have followed Ethics Alarms for the past decade know that I had made up my mind to vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election because I had concluded that Donald Trump lacked literally every character trait, instinct and qualification that my study of leadership and the American Presidency had taught me that a U.S. President must have. I knew that Hillary Clinton and, of course, her husband were corrupt, dishonest and untrustworthy, but I also knew that she had the intellectual ability and at least some of the experience necessary to handle the job. I wrote dozens of posts about how unfit Donald Trump was, and that doesn’t take into account the Trump critiques I had written years before he had announced his candidacy in 2015.

Then, mere weeks from the election, I realized that the Democratic Party had rigged the nomination process to ensure Clinton’s victory, and that Clinton and the Democratic Party were ready, willing and eager to cheat in order to obtain power. How far that party (and the rotted news media that conspired with it) would go, as we now know, was fully revealed over the next eight years.

I decided, a couple of days before I had to vote, that it was a choice between an unfit candidate—Trump—and a dangerous, anti-democratic party ironically called the Democratic Party. I voted for neither as a matter of principle. I found myself surprised when my emotional reaction to Trump’s stunning upset was relief. The American system had, once again, gotten lucky. The public had recognized what I had, though almost too late, recognized myself.

An arrogant, elite, ruthless political party had the culture, society and government by the throat, and by a miraculous confluence of unlikely and indeed accidental events, had been at least temporarily foiled. It was a result that I analogized to the “futile and stupid” rebellion of the Deltas in the finale of “Animal House,” when the expelled Faber College students demonstrated their contempt for the system that had mistreated them by disrupting a parade and humiliating those in power.

And, memorably, the most chaotic of the rebels ended up a U.S. Senator.

The next four years proved my analysis of the Democratic Party correct, in fact too generous. It marshaled its allies in the news media, education, the law, the judiciary, academia, Big Tech, the federal bureaucracy and, of course the news media to launch what I have tagged as “the 2026 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck,” denying an elected U.S. President the mantle of legitimacy as well as the basic deference, respect, honor and cooperation a POTUS must have to carry out his agenda and policies. This divided the country to a dangerous extent. It set terrible precedents that I concluded, correctly, would damage the office and the future functioning of democratic institutions.

Worst of all, perhaps—it is a close competition—I saw an entire political party representing a large proportion of the public actively seeking to weaken and distort the First Amendment, the metaphorical beating heart of the unique structure our Founders created. This was (and is) a party that not only supports but relies upon a journalistic establishment that does not keep the public informed, but rather seeks to manipulate it by withholding information and employing partisan bias and advocacy in what are supposed to be objective news reports. This mutated Democratic Party also endorses censorship, using the usefully vague terms “hate speech” and “misinformation” to justify quashing dissenting views, opinions and analysis that the party deems a threat to its primacy.

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President’s Day Long Weekend Ethics Potpourri

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Let me briefly re-state my unalterable position that it was unethical, disrespectful and foolish for the U.S. to reduce George Washington’s birthday (Feb. 22) to a catch-all excuse for a long weekend. I wrote at length about this here, three years ago. An excerpt:

“How many Americans of our rich national past have a birthday celebrated as a national holiday? One: Martin Luther King. That surely makes the anti-white racists and the “the most important aspect of the United States is its racial divisions” gang—you know, Democrats—happy, but it is also misleading and ridiculous. The most important single figure, black, brown, white or whatever it is currently acceptable to call Asians and Native Americans (I haven’t checked this morning), is George Washington. He was, as George Will likes to say, “the indispensable man”—no George, no U.S. His birthday absolutely should be a national holiday….. The only thing most children are taught about him, other than his many “firsts,” is that he was a slaveholder, which had no impact on the development of the nation he helped create at all. It has been crafted into a weapon to use against our nation, but that isn’t George’s doing: by the end of his life, he had come to realize how wrong slavery was, and unlike Thomas Jefferson, did something about it, freeing his slaves in his will. George Washington earned his own national holiday. Give him his birthday back, and move President’s Day to some other random Monday.”

I have also come to believe that Abraham Lincoln deserves a national holiday as well. Abe would have had one if his birthday wasn’t so close to both George’s and Valentine’s Day. I’d give Abe his day on the anniversary of his Gettysburg Address, but November 19 is too close to Thanksgiving. April 14th? That’s Abe’s assassination, which would be a ghoulish way to honor him. The best date, I think, would fall on March 4, when Lincoln was sworn in as President. We would have no United States of America as we know it without either George or Abe. Let’s show a little respect.

In other ethics news…

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The Ethical Responsibility to be a Conspiracy Theorist

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Guest Post by Martin Bishop

Every day now, we are drowning in Conspiracies. And we always have theories about what really transpired.

From whether there was election fraud in 2020 to thinking you saw the fast food guy dropped your sandwich on the floor, they’re a daily part of life.

But if you ask the kid behind the fast food counter, and he said “Nah bro!” with a smirk, few of us would say “welp, he is the one in the paper hat!”

Yet that is exactly what many do when people wear shiny suits and have makeup and studio lighting, or wear glasses and have “doctor” or an Ivy League school affixed to their name. Those are uniforms – the fast food chain’s paper hat of the modern Oracle we come to for our answers.

Now, we have a POTUS who not just promised but signed Executive Orders demanding the release of some of our favorite Conspiracy Theory subjects: the murders of JFK, RFK, and MLK. This same President went on Joe Rogan’s podcast for his last big media appearance before the 2024 Election – a podcast widely known for discussing UFOs, alternate realities, and Bigfoot. So it seems a good time to bring up my position that it is not only in our personal interest, but our ethical duty to be a Conspiracy Theorist.

Let’s review some things we were not only told to accept, but many of us have been threatened with the loss of our jobs if we publicly questioned them:

  • Epstein Island is a sick right wing fantasy
  • COVID originated in Bat Soup
  • That 99 cent masks filter viruses
  • 6 feet safe!
  • 100% safe and effective
  • That 7-year-olds understand the implications and can consent to having a doctor cut up and rearrange their genitals
  • Joe Biden was of sound mind
  • Hunter’s laptop was a fraud

I could go on but I imagine there’s a word limit on this thing (J6, George Floyd, RussiaGate/Steele Dossier, Diddy, Twitter files, and Jussie Smollett – okay I’ll leave it that and let your memories hum… there’s gotta be a “We Didn’t Start the Fire” parody in there).

The phrase  “conspiracy theorist” has been tossed around like hand sanitizer in 2020 – and speaking of COVID, the other popular term flung around  is “pseudoscience”.

Mathematician and hyper-rationalist Eric Weinstein refers to this rather brilliantly as “Weaponization of Stigma”. My favorite example of the WoS is Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis. In 1847, he proposed that the postpartum infection in new mothers could be drastically reduced by —gasp!— the doctors washing their hands, especially after handling dead bodies.

In his experiments he reduced mortality rates from 18% to 2%, a phenomenal decrease. His reward? Being run out of his profession by other doctors and getting referred to an insane asylum, where he died of septic shock.

His pre-germ theory idea that there were “cadaverous particles” transferring to vulnerable mothers was declared pseudoscience. Never mind his studies, that’s crazy talk! Trust the Science!

This exact concept was also brilliantly dramatized in Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People,” (I highly recommend Arthur Miller’s wonderful distilled adaptation).. The added element was the local politician being bullied into condemning the scientist because of money, similar to keeping the beaches open in Jaws, but I’m getting away from my point here.

We watched the one of the largest transferals of wealth occur as people living paycheck-to-paycheck and running small businesses got shut down, while pharmaceutical companies and the “approved” big companies made billions.

We watched thousands of medical professionals lose their voices if not their jobs. We watched the science be “settled,” one censored account after another. All the while telling us we were crazy for questioning things… this is the definition of gaslighting.

Now since the Truth is never sharper than when it’s embedded in good comedy, I’d like to share this brilliant bit by Ron Funches:

The key section:

“How do you not believe in conspiracy theories? I understand not all of them, not most of them, but you don’t believe in ANY conspiracy theories? You just think the government is batting 1.000 and telling us the whole truth? That’s a strong stance to take.”

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Unethical Quote of the Month: Pope Francis [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

The Pope has issued a letter (It’s in larger type at the link than what you’ll see below) to the “Bishops of the United States of America.”

Ethics verdicts: Abuse of position, abuse of authority, grandstanding, hypocrisy, breach of responsibility and intellectual dishonesty.

Nice job, Your Holiness.

Because you are likely to be semi-conscious or have your brains splattered on the ceiling from serial head-explosions after reading this thing, I’ll make my other ethics observations now:

1. I’ll pay attention to the Pope’s dictates about how my country handles illegal immigration when the Vatican lets anyone who feels like it move into Vatican City because it will give them “a better life.” Instead of sending the “worst of the worst” to Guantanamo, let’s send them right to the Pope. Based on this screed, I’m sure he’ll welcome them with open arms in the spirit of recognizing the inherent human rights of “the most fragile and marginalized.”

2. Anyone who uses the migration practices that existed in the Middle East over 2,000 years ago as an analogy to 21st century policy issues in the United States of America is either a con artist, a liar or an idiot. The same goes for comparing Jesus to fentanyl smugglers. Fans of the Pope can take their pick. It’s an indefensible, insulting, reductive argument. Nobody should make such comparisons who are over the age of six; for a major world figure revered by millions to stoop to it is signature significance for demagoguery.

3. The Pope admonishes Americans not to equate illegal conduct with criminal conduct. Funny, I just looked up “criminal conduct” and the definitions all boil down to “Criminal conduct is an unlawful act that breaks the law.” Call me a nit-picker, but it sure seems that  breaking our laws to come into and stay in the U.S. is the equivalent of a criminal act.

Maybe it’s a language thing. Does “not criminal” in Italian mean “lawbreaking that the Pope regards as excusable if one is ‘poor and marginalized’? Continue reading →