I think it’s time for a new ethicist to write “The Ethicist” column…

Kwame Anthony Appiah has been shaky all year, but he seems to be bottoming out. A disturbed inquirer who works in the I.T. department of a town government asked what he should do about his boss, who “frequently discusses bizarre ideas” including conspiracy theories about lizard people infiltrating the federal government and the Rothschilds as “vampiric blood drinkers.”

“It is not outside the realm of possibility that this alternate reality could compromise the director’s decision-making, potentially jeopardizing the security of our town’s sensitive information,” he writes, but although the concerned worker has gone “up the ladder” as we say in the ethics biz, none of the manager’s superiors think there is a problem.

“I am left in a difficult position, fearing not only for the security of our town’s data but also for my own job stability under a manager detached from reality. Is it ethical for someone in such a crucial role to openly espouse these beliefs at work?” he asks “The Ethicist.”

The last question is a legitimate one, so, naturally, Prof. Appiah virtually ignores it, only saying that because the Rothschild fantasy is a famous anti-Jewish libel, it “raises a workplace issue.” However, it is a workplace issue whether the manager is inflicting his opinions on the staff about the virtues of abortion or a plague of lizard people. The ethical policy is easy: co-workers should never proselytize others in the work place about anything and that goes triple for supervisors. Instead, “The Ethicist” turns in this direction:

“It also raises a judgment issue. Maybe their appetite for this stuff will have no effect on their professionalism, but why take the risk? People who harbor suspicions about vast conspiracies are, as we’ve learned, prone to being manipulated. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risk report for 2022 reported that 95 percent of cybersecurity failings were traceable to human error. People appear to be the weakest link in cybersecurity, and so a secure system depends on keeping track not just of hardware and software but of the people who interact with them as well. Given that you’ve tried getting senior management to do something about this, you’re entitled to act as a whistle-blower here and get the word out. I hope that you do.”

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I just returned from the funeral of my former boss, mentor, role-model, Most Unforgettable Character (well, one of them) and freind, Tom Donohue. He died earlier this month at 86. Consider this a prelude: as soon as I’m emotionally up to it, I’m going to compose and post his entry into the Ethics Alarms Hall of Heroes as an Ethics Hero Emeritus. Tom deserves the honor unquestionably as you will see; this isn’t a matter of me boosting my personal friends.

In fact, my first observation on this funeral—which, you will recall, I attended a week early, spawning this rueful post—is that Tom Donohue is an excellent example of how many great people move through American life without being sufficiently noticed, appreciated, and remembered. Tom had a wonderful life, as Clarence the Angel would have said, and it was a productive, important, consequential life that touched many hundred of lives in a positive way including mine. A movie about his life would be inspiring and entertaining. Tom walked among the powerful and famous: one of his weaknesses (that I had the guts to point out to him, I’m proud to say) was that he was, at least when I worked with him, excessively deferential and almost obsequious to celebrities, a sign, I believe, of his usually well-hidden insecurities. Maybe this flaw diminished once he landed his dream job, running the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a role that gave him real power and periodic national visibility. I remember finally snapping when I saw Tom fawning over Ed Meese, Ronald Reagan’s long-time consiglieri and eventual Attorney General. “Jesus, Tom, Ed Meese isn’t fit to carry your laundry,” I remember saying. “You should stop treating him like he’s royalty.” (Tom’s response: “I’ll think about that!”)

Tom’s death rated an obituary in the Times and the Post among other publications, but few Americans know who he was. Heck, few Americans know what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is: they think it’s a government agency. It is, in fact, a huge and influential national organization created by the business community (at the behest of President Taft) to serve as the yin to organized labor’s yang, and to advise Congress and the White House regarding the private sector’s interests in policy, national and international. The President of the Chamber has more power ( if he knows how to use it, and Tom certainly did) than most members of the U.S. President’s cabinet. Tom held that job for more than two decades.

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There are few journalists I have less respect for than Chris Cuomo, who I would have long ago labeled an Ethics Villain except that he isn’t deft enough to reach that rung on the unethical miscreant ladder. Chris is just an extreme Ethics Dunce, and has proven it repeatedly; hence his nickname “Fredo.” Yet somehow, Cuomo has correctly grasped what so many of the Trump-Deranged cannot, a factor that is core to understanding the election. On his podcast, “The Chris Cuomo Project,” Cuomo said,

“You have some low-level culture war fruit, but I don’t really think that matters. You have pain in the pocketbook. And yes, there is a story to be told that we’re doing better in terms of most other places, major economies recovering or not recovering from the pandemic. But do you really care if, at the end of the day, things cost more? Probably not….which is why they’re pushing the “Trump is a despot” thing because they’re trying to make something more important than your pocketbook. And I don’t know that that works, and I don’t know that they should even be playing at it, frankly, because I don’t think they beat Trump in a battle to the bottom of grievance. I do not think they win that. The ‘he’s a despot’ versus ‘you’re a commie,’ I think she loses. And not because I think she’s a commie—I think that’s absurd, I also think the idea that he’s a despot is absurd. You gotta stop thinking that the people who support Trump are like Trump, that they speak like Trump, that they act like Trump. They don’t. They want to hire Trump to do a dirty job. They want him to be a virus to the political corpus. They want him to disrupt, to destroy, to demean those that they disrespect and dislike, the system that they distrust and despise. They want someone to do what they believe has been done to them and that they cannot do themselves. That’s why they don’t care that he exhibits terrible behavior because they’re putting him into a terrible place. If you’re sending somebody into the jungle, do you really care if they’re a savage? You see what I’m saying?

You may not agree. You may not accept. You may not like, but that’s what it is.

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The Axis of Unethical Conduct—“the resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media—have sensed the movement toward Donald Trump and away from Kamala Harris, and not counting its members who are in pure denial, it is, to use the technical term, “freaking out.” The next week should be something: it’s “throw it on the wall and see if it sticks, we can’t be any worse off” time.

For example,

• Harris pretty clearly made up the story of her McDonald’s service, so Trump expertly trolled her by arranging to serve a stint as McDonald’s employee. Freakout. Axis hysterics screamed that it was staged. (Of course it was.) Outlets tracked down workers to criticize Trump’s frying techniques. Then, this weekend, we got this desperate effort:

No shame or decency at all. Continue reading →

It’s impossible to keep up with our hopeless news media’s dishonesty and incompetence.

My five minutes of watching Fox News today (I have added PBS to Fox News, MSNBC and CNN as my “five minutes a day” sampling chores) yielded this inexcusable botch by Fox News “media watchdog” Howard Kurtz:

Exiting a discussion of the McDonald’s flap, Kurtz quickly said, “A freind of Harris came forward and said that she worked with Harris at McDonalds, but moving on….”

That’s completely false. That “friend” (she’ works’s employed bythe Harris campaign) did not work with Harris at McDonald’s and only said that Harris’s mother, who has been dead for 15 years, told her that Harris worked at McDonald’s. That’s double hearsay even if it’s true. X says that Y said that Z did something she didn’t actually see her do. Such testimony proves nothing, but Kurtz, because he’s sloppy or lazy or has a bad staff, misinformed his audience that the woman worked with Harris at the still unidentified McDonalds.

Worse, he’s supposed to report on news media ethics, and then, as a national TV reporter, gives out wrong information.

Fox News should trade Kurtz back to CNN for Jake Tapper and a box of Crackerjacks.

Note: The WordPress bot says I should tag this post “Heart of Darkness.”

Commenter Chris Marschner’s observation that Kamala Harris is “no Jackie Robinson….She is tying an anchor around the candidacy of future black women candidates. Her campaign will be remembered” reminded me of an old Ethics Alarms post about Barack Obama. The fact that he (and Michelle, that feminist who has based her prominence, wealth and influence on her husband’s career and popularity: “Hear her roar!”) is viewed as having any positive influence over voters at all testifies to the fact that Obama played President as well as any POTUS we have had since George Washington. Oh, there have been many others as good at it: Lincoln, Harding, FDR, Ike, JFK and Reagan among the masters. This is the aspect of the job that Donald Trump is epically terrible at, and a main reason he isn’t leading in the polls by double digits. Obama, was the opposite: an inept and destructive President who survived his two terms, an election he should have lost, and, in all likelihood, the assessment of historians by looking and acting like a leader. From that post…

“The tragic legacy of Barack Obama will be recorded in three parts: his groundbreaking achievement as the nation’s first black President, his utter incompetence at governing and leadership, and his dishonesty and the dishonesty he engendered by those who reported to him. The first has been fatally undermined by the second and third, and the third, dishonesty, necessitated by the second, the relentless incompetence. The reason this is so tragic should be obvious to all. President Obama, like all trailblazers, needed to be a stand-out, exemplary performer to avoid setting back the causes his ascension needed to advance. But instead of Jackie Robinson, he has been Pumpsie Green, and that may be unfair to Pumpsie, the first black player to wear a Boston Red Sox uniform who knew his limitations, and did the best he could for as long as he could. It is also tragic because America, as much as any time in its history prior to the Civil War, needed a strong, wise, confident, unifying leader to deal with great and difficult problems that will only get worse with time. The challenges would have tested the best of leaders; for President Obama, with neither leadership instincts or talent, they have proven impossible. Worse, the basic requirements of governing have been proven to be beyond him, and he does not have the self-awareness or humility to seek the help he needs.

Key word: “unifying.”

One other note before we get into the weeds: I am always searching for signals regarding cultural emanations, and I am puzzled by the spectacular drop in Halloween decorations in my Alexandria, Virginia neighborhood compared to last year or any year within memory. This area usually goes nuts over Halloween. What’s going on here? Is it the election? Do people regard all of the “Harris-Walz” signs scary enough? Theories welcome….

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This made me laugh out loud. After my Trump-Deranged relative repeatedly defaulted to “If Trump isn’t dangerous, how come so many of those who worked closely with him now say he’s unfit and a fascist?,” I saw a Guardian headline in Memeorandum: “‘Fascist’, ‘conman’, ‘predator’, ‘cheat’: what 11 former Trump staffers say about him now.” So I looked at the article.

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Well THAT’s embarrassing!

At the end of the most recent post, discussing Amazon’s explanation for why its AI bot Alexa was telling inquirers to vote for Kamala Harris, I wrote,

“Can anyone point to an “error” by Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Amazon or Google that ever favored Trump or Republicans rather than their Axis pals and allies? Please enlighten me if there are any: I doubt there are. Amazon is “the dishonest waiter,” one of many providing lousy service to distort our democracy.”

Guess who pointed me to not only such an error in the other direction, but an error by Amazon itself, also involving Alexa? Me. I wrote about it in a post from a year ago called “AI Ethics: Should Alexa Have A Right To Its Opinion?”

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