I can’t resist. I’m sorry. It’s unprofessional of me. But I am so sick of reading the whining, caterwauling, insults and ignorance on my Facebook feed, and this video hit me at exactly the wrong time.
It speaks for itself…
U.S. Society
Pssst! MSNBC! Loyalty Is An Ethical Value…
Waiting for my oven to preheat, I watched a bit of MSNBC this afternoon. They were discussing Trump’s early appointments, and the talking heads and panelists must have used the term “loyal” close to a hundred times, all with the tone of voice one would expect uttering the word, “diseased.” The fact that Trump’s appointments suggest that he is only interested in departments heads and advisors who will be “loyal” to him and dedicated to advancing his agenda was relayed to the MSNBC audience as if the panel had discovered that all the individuals named so far are lizard people. Because, as we all know, other Presidents have reveled in appointing office holders who hated their guts.
The Academic Cheating Problem: It’s Not Just About Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a troubling, if not unexpected report, “Cheating Has Become Normal: Faculty members are overwhelmed, and the solutions aren’t clear.” It begins with an anecdote that would be funny if it weren’t so apocalyptic. A professor caught a student cheating, and warned him that the next time this happened, he would be failed in the course. The student wrote an abject apology, full of contrition and assurances. Then his next assignment was found to be composed by an AI bot. Then, just for giggles, the prof asked the same bot to compose a letter of apology for a student who had been caught cheating. The bot produced exactly the apology the student had submitted, word for word.
From the article:
Comment of the Day: “Wait, WHAT??? Unethical Quote of the Month: NPR CEO Katherine Maher”
Let me begin by thanking commenter Edward for tracking down the source of the Maher quote, which at the time I posted I could not track, and my source, Elon Musk, didn’t help any by not bothering to include it in his post. It is the Ted Talk above, made when Maher was CEO at Wikipedia.
Not to leave you in any unnecessary suspense, I hate her talk with the fury of a thousand typhoons. Any time I hear the “you have your truth and I have mine” New Age blather, I tune out, spit three times, and have a stiff drink. It is a cornerstone of woke ideology and subjective ethics, and I say to hell with it.
Nonetheless, Extradimensional Cephalopod does his usual meticulously fair and open-minded response, this time to my question of whether the statement, “I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done,” could be justified. He does as good a job as I can imagine anyone doing, but I’m not buying. Before realizing I should post this as a COTD, I replied to EC’s post on the original essay’s thread; I’ll re-post it following his (its?) Comment of the Day on the post, “Wait, WHAT??? Unethical Quote of the Month: NPR CEO Katherine Maher”…
***
“…what possible context could justify it?”
I can’t guarantee that Maher meant what she said in a benign sense, but such a sense does indeed exist.
Allow me to rephrase the statement in question:
Before: “I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”
After: “I think our obsession with forcing everyone to agree with our interpretations of the available evidence interfered with us finding enough relevant points of agreement that we could establish mutually acceptable approaches on important issues.”
The confusion lies in the conflation of “truth” to mean three different things:
Wait, WHAT??? Unethical Quote of the Month: NPR CEO Katherine Maher
“I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”
—NPR CEO Katherine Maher
Elon Musk posted the video of Maher saying this…
I can’t find the date of that speech or the context of the quote, but what possible context could justify it? If that isn’t pure Big Brother, what is? “Can’t let the truth get in the way of progress!” This is the totalitarian mindset that (I hope) was one of the things enough voters rejected a week ago. This is the ends justifies the means ideology embraced by the Axis of Unethical Conduct, including the news media that lied, dissembled, covered up and broadcast false narratives during the campaign and, of course, long before.
If You Want To Get Depressed Fast, Visit “Level,” Home of Black Paranoia, Self-Pity and Anti-White Racism
Well that was a mistake.
Medium, the pay-walled website for bloggers who don’t produce enough content for a blog of their own, sent me an alert about a new article called “When I Learned My White Friends Didn’t Care About Me” by someone named L.G. Ware. Well, foolishly, I decided to try to read it (I have a limited subscription to “Medium,” I don’t remember why.) When I realized the link was just a tease to get me to pay, I did a little checking around the web and found another version of post on a website I had happily been una-WARE-of before (I’m 11-years-old before my first cup of coffee) called Level. Not only was I presented with L.G.’s whining about how he knows white American hate blacks because they voted for Trump, I was introduced to many black writers who are under the same crippling (for them and for the nation) delusion.
Perusing the site is like having a window on what deliberate racial division-aimed rhetoric from the Left has done to the mind of black America, propelling race relations backwards. It isn’t just that you see either: the level of objective critical thinking these assorted essays—all aimed at black readers: less likely to be challenged that way—reveal also tells us much about how our politicized education system has handicapped large chunks of the public. “All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye” wrote a wise man, but he was white, so I guess nobody reads him any more. The entire Level site is metaphorically yellow. Let’s peruse it a bit, shall we?
L.G. has several posts there, but “The Day My White Friends Betrayed Me” is representative. This was obviously the post his Medium screed was adapted from. Some quotes…
The No-College Smear
I woke up in the middle of the night and ended up watching the re-run of Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” which included someone doing a breakdown of the demographic groups that shifted toward Trump in the election. He kept emphasizing, however, that “college educated Americans” now strongly support Democrats. The implication was clear. Those are the smart voters, the educated and sophisticated voters. His analysis fed neatly into one of the most popular narratives the Axis is currently using to explain away last Tuesday’s wipeout. Trump voters are stupid. You know, in addition to being garbage.
College grads who voted for Harris naturally agree with that analysis: they think they are superior to those corrupt Trump voters and doubly superior to the large proportion of them who spent the years after high school earning a living and being exposed to the real world. After all, if they had sufficient IQs, they would have college degrees, right?
Here We Go Again! “Norms”
It was just about two week ago when I returned to Harvard’s unethical and dishonest propagandist Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt to pronounce them Academic Ethics Villains. These two favorites of the New York Times are substantially responsible for the Axis of Unethical Conduct‘s Big Lie #6: “Trump’s Defiance Of Norms Is A Threat To Democracy,” a cornerstone of the Harris Campaign’s desperate “Trump is Hitler” strategy.
They had just issued another of their fear-mongering and academically indefensible Times op-eds, banging that same metaphorical drum with their (profitable!) argument that any genuine student of Presidential history (like they claim to be) knows is 100% hooey, and using the beat to argue for Democrats taking unprecedented measures to block Trump from the presidency….all of which defy previous democratic norms! The Levitsky and Ziblatt hypocrisy has nonetheless become, apparently, a standard weapon for the Axis to use against Trump, as increasingly absurd as it. That this is true shows just how dire the state of the Totalitarian Left is following Trump’s victory: they really have no unbroken arrows in their quiver, just noodles and boomerangs.
And so it is that the “Trump violates norms!” argument has resurfaced already. From CNN yesterday on “Newsroom with Fredericka Whitfield:
Post Election Insanity Week Ethics Inventory, 11/10/24
I have accumulated so many items, election-related and non-election related, that I am forced to get up one of the potpourri posts even though their work/response ratio is terrible.
I did have a moment of clarity regarding our Once and Future President, however. Trump’s insistence that he won the 2020 election, not just that it was rigged (as it was) against him, and not just that he should have won the Electoral Vote, but that he literally won it, as in getting more votes than Biden, has always been pretty embarrassing, especially since he never yielded on the point and repeated it ad nauseam. The claim certainly gave ammunition to the Trump Deranged, the Axis of Unethical Conduct, and the “Trump lies all the time” mobs. He couldn’t prove it, and it seemed like a scab that Trump kept picking at and wouldn’t allow to heal. I now think that it is possible that there was a method to his madness [“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it;” Act 2, Scene 2.] as there often is.
I realized this after writing the post about the history of Presidents winning elections after losing one. Only Richard Nixon won the Presidency after losing both the popular vote and in the Electoral College in a previous election. Usually losing Presidential candidates are permanently tarred after a loss; they are seen by both their parties and the public as “losers.” Why nominate or vote for a loser? Even in Nixon’s case, he felt the need to separate himself from his past: in 1968, he branded himself as “the new Nixon,” even appearing in a self-mocking cameo on “Rowen and Martin’s Laugh-in” (“Sock it to me??).
As a salesman and promoter, Trump had to know the toxic effect of being branded a loser, and “loser” is one of his go-to insults. I don’t think he really was convinced that he won the popular vote, but rather that he felt branding himself as a foiled winner rather than publicly accepting the reality that he lost was the right play. Trump could run as a winner, and if his obstinate insistence that he won in 2020 was a target for Axis ridicule and condemnation, so be it. It was worth it for him to never accept the label “loser.”
Dishonest? Unethical? Sure. But not crazy. And in the context of Presidential campaign framing, not very far outside the norm, if at all.
And now here’s the rest of the story…
Number Appropriation Ethics! Yes, The Great Stupid and the Post 2024 Election Freakout Have Teamed Up…
I am really trying to find ethics topics that don’t focus on Trump Derangement, the 2024 Post Election Freakout and the Post 2024 Election Ethics Train Wreck. I am. I’m as sick of the idiocy and ethically-clueless (Accountability? Responsibility? Honesty? Fairness?) outbursts as much as you are. More than you are—I have to write about this crap. Then a story like this one slimes by my eyes. I can’t ignore something this stupid. So, it pulls me back in.
Before I get into this embarrassing muck: above is a clip from the Ethics Alarms Hollywood Clip Archive, listing the videos I use regularly to categorize a particular type of ethics tale. I considered commenting on this story by posting every video that applies. I think it’s an all-time record—go to the post and see how many you would include. I count nine.
Now hold on to your skull: The New York Post reports that students and alumni of Pomona College are furious with Donald Trump because…wait for it…he has ruined their favorite number for them.
You see, 47 is Pomona’s lucky number. Now, I would think that one of the purposes of an institute of higher edication is to disabuse its eventual graduates of the idea that there are such things as lucky numbers, but never mind.
The number 47 has eerily appeared repeatedly in the 137-year history of the private liberal arts college, located in Claremont, California. Exits on the 10 and 210 freeways to get to Pomona College are both number 47. The organ at the college’s music auditorium has 47 pipes in the top row. There were 47 enrolled students at the time of the first graduating class in 1894. The largest dorm on campus, officially known as Florence Carrier Blaisdell and Della Mullock Mudd Hall, has 47 characters in the title and was completed in 1947. The dorm’s staircase contains 47 balusters. So, naturally and completely reasonably, alums of the school have a “47 Society.”
No I’m not making this up. See?
But the evil…EVIL! Donald Trump is the 47th President, damn him, so now it’s all ruined…
Graduate Terril Jones told reporters taht he fears that he can’t wear his Pomona 47 hat in public, lest he be identified as a Trump supporter in public. “I definitely feel that the Trump campaign has co-opted it in a way that makes it difficult for all people who love 47 to display it.” Another alumni scratched his number 47 car sticker off of his rear window. Yet another has reconsidered getting an honorary 47 tattoo since Trump’s win. Trump’s victory “is the worst thing to happen to our beloved number, possibly ever,” one graduate wrote on the “47 Society’s Facebook page.
Trump now sports a MAGA hat with the numbers 45-47 on the side. His campaign platform was called Agenda 47. An LA Times assistant editor complains in an op-ed “It feels like Trump and his followers have appropriated my favorite number,” he whines.
It feels to me like you’re a Trump Deranged idiot.
Ethics Alarms 