“Welcome Summer!” Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Last week on YouTube’s “The Morning Meeting,” Mark Halperin and Dan Turrentine appeared to acknowledge Ethics Alarms’ “Julie Principle.” They just didn’t know what it was called.

President Trump had delivered the commencement address at West Point while wearing a red MAGA cap (Oh NOOOO! He’s violating “norms” again!) and on Monday published a Memorial Day Truth Social post like some of his previous holiday wishes—you know, one of his “Merry Christmas, you filthy animal!” style shots. Halperin noted that many Democratic critics and pundits, right on cue, were freaking out.

“If you read [historian] Heather Cox Richardson or the emails and texts I get from my Democratic sources, as I said before, the Trump administration’s over. And it’s just a bankrupt, you know, corrupt mess and he’s already a failed president and he’s not getting anything done. That’s their point of view. They also are very taken with his wearing a MAGA hat … to give … a West Point graduation speech,” Halperin said. “They’re taken with his tweet, his Truth Social post, saying ‘Happy Memorial Day’ and criticizing Joe Biden. And they’re back to a Adam Schiffian and [biased and Trump Deranged historian] Heather Cox Richardson point of view, which is everything Trump does is an epic disaster and that the American people will turn on him and Republicans in the midterms because he’s impolite.”

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Fan Ethics: The Diane and Joe Saga [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Guest column by AM Golden

[From your host: This scary, poignant guest post sat un-noticed in my in-box for many weeks. I would have posted it immediately if I hadn’t missed it. Regular commenter AM Golden paints a vivid picture of how celebrity worship, then pursuit, can lead down dark alleys and perhaps to tragedy. At the end of this cautionary tale, AM writes, “Joe can obviously handle this situation himself.” I’m not sure it’s so obvious. Rebecca Shaeffer couldn’t handle it. Jody Foster didn’t handle it sufficiently wee to prevent her fan from nearly killing Ronald Reagan. John Lennon couldn’t handle it. Among AM’s provocative questions at the end of this case study is what ethical obligations an observer has to try to persuade someone in the throes of a dangerous obsession to change course, back off, or seek help. My reflex instinct is to say there is such an obligation, as there always is when one is in a unique position to prevent harm and fix a serious problem. That is a far easier position to defend in the abstract than in reality.–JM]

About 18 months ago, I made a comment about the importance of one’s Good Name – one’s reputation – that was honored with a Comment of the Day.   Among the stories related in that comment was the recent crushing experience of a fan I called Diane, who had a less-than stellar encounter with her favorite actor whom I dubbed “Joe Darling”. 

It seems that Diane had been sending Joe emails through the public contact option on his website.  Many emails.  She had also been sending gifts to his private residence: All unsolicited; all unanswered.  This had gone on for three years before she met him at a pop culture convention.  Her thinking seems to have been that he would have told her if he wanted her to stop.  She’d also ordered a Cameo from him that had gone unfulfilled. I’d admitted back then that I had gotten vibes from her social media comments that she was a little fixated on Joe, who by all accounts a happily married man.  It had never occurred to me that she had been contacting him directly. 

When she went to his table at the convention, he figured out who she was.  He told her that he considered her behavior borderline stalking and that it needed to stop or he would take further action.  Mortified, she apologized and assured him she would leave him alone.  She admitted online that she feels like she ruins everything.

Admittedly, I felt sorry for her.  No fan likes these kinds of stories.  They reflect poorly on all of us.  I also felt that she had probably overlooked warning signs along the way that would have spared her such embarrassment.   Could there have been a misunderstanding?  Curious, I looked over her public social media page.  Sure enough, there was enough evidence there to indict her as an obsessed fan and a particularly obtuse one. Her behavior since then has not changed my opinion.

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I’ve Been Looking For an Excuse to Note the Passing of Harrison Ruffin Tyler, and I Finally Found One…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Harrison Tyler was the grandson of John Tyler, our tenth President of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” fame, who became President when William Henry Harrison died. When my late wife Grace and I were on our honeymoon, we met Harrison Tyler as we toured Sherwood Forest, the Tyler family home and plantation. He was still working as a chemical engineer at the time. I knew that Tyler had many offspring and was still spawning them in his 60s, but I found it astounding that his grandson was still among us. John Tyler was 63 when son Lyon Gardiner Tyler was born, and Lyon was 75 when Harrison was born.

The ethics connection popped up in Ann Althouse’s post about Harrison Tyler, who died on Memorial Day. She quoted from a biography of Tyler that called him a racist. One of Ann’s astute commenters criticized the label as injecting “a kind of modern commentary” into a biography of a 19th Century historical figure. Ann bristled at that, writing that the conduct so described was “out and proud racism” and asking, “You think that’s modern commentary”?

Another commenter slapped Ann down decisively. “The Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded utterance of the word racism was by a man named Richard Henry Pratt in 1902,” the commenter wrote. “Yes, I think labeling the mindset of an 1840’s person using a word that wasn’t in their vocabulary is an author’s intrusion.” Yet another commenter wrote, “Racism was the water people swam in back then.”

Bingo. At a time when blacks were almost universally believed to be an inferior sub-species of human, “racism” as we now define it didn’t exist. Calling a President in the 1840s a racist is like saying that physicians who practiced bleeding in the 18th century engaged in medical malpractice. It’s presentism.

I’m surprised Althouse fell into that trap.

 

 

 

In San Francisco, the Dumb Rise and Almost Immediate Fall of “Grading for Equity”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments


When I am forced to consider what is considered “right” and “wrong” in California in general and San Francisco particularly, I feel like I have stumbled into a real life Bizarro World. That is the cube-shaped planet in “Superman” comics where brain-damaged mutations of Superman and Lois Lane pursue a topsy-turvy existence constrained by practices and values that are the reverse of what normal Earthlings regard as self-evident.

The latest manifestation of this West Coast insanity is, or was, “Grading for Equity“, a woke education scheme that was scheduled to be imposed this fall at 14 high schools and over 10,000 students. “Grading for Equity” forbids homework or weekly tests from being counted in a student’s final semester grade. All that counts are student grades on a final examination, which can be taken as many times as it takes to pass. “Grading for Equity” also de-emphasizes the importance of timely performance, completion of assignments, and consistent attendance, so students turning in assignments late will not be penalized. Not showing up at class will not affect grades either.Students with scores as low as 80 (out of 100) will get an A; a score as low as 21 will be considered sufficient to pass, with a D.

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In a Competitive Commencement Season, Evelyn Harris Makes a Strong Bid For Most Unethical Speech of 2025

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Favorites Tim Walz, Scott Pelley and Kermit the Frog may have fallen to an underdog: “musician and activist” Evelyn Harris (whoever she is) may have succeeded in embarrassing her host school the most of all with her 2025 commencement speech.

For some reason, Smith College, which has apparently become too woke to function, included Harris, a relatively obscure singer (but more importantly, an activist) among its all female honorees this year. The most prominent one of these would probably be far-left historian Danielle Allen, who has several items in her Ethics Alarms dossier. Or maybe it would be the (historic!) highest ranking trans official in US history, former assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service Rachel Levine, one of Biden’s DEI appointments. Then there was new age-y guru Preeti Simran Sethi, the only one of the four who is a Smith grad. All of these, however, whatever their issues, at least managed to compose their own speech to give to the graduates.

Harris didn’t. Smith officials learned that her entire speech had been cribbed from other sources without attribution (you know, like Joe Biden once did), and had to inform the Smith community that it had been deceived. “It has come to our attention that one of our honorary degree recipients — musician Evelyn M. Harris — borrowed much of her speech to graduates and their families from the commencement speeches of others without the attribution typical of and central to the ideals of academic integrity,” the letter read in part.

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“Mostly Peaceful” Bullshit

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Guest Post by Mrs. Q

From your host: Ok, this is technically a Comment of the Day on the post, “Let Us Call the George Floyd Freakout What It Was.” I decided that it warrants guest post status for several good reasons. 1) We haven’t had a guest post for a while, and I am still seeking submissions. 2) The George Floyd aftermath disaster is one of the signature ethics outrages of my life, and is certainly worthy of more than one post saying so on its 5th anniversary. 3) I’m slyly trying to entice Mrs. Q to revive her featured column on Ethics Alarms, and 4) not for the first time, I like her take on a current ethics topic better than my own.—JM.

If anyone hasn’t had a chance to see this documentary, I’ll link it here: The Fall of Minneapolis | A Crowdfunded Documentary.

As some longtime readers here may remember, I am from Minneapolis and grew up literally at ground zero, where the Third Precinct, Auto Zone, and Minnehaha Lake Wine and Spirits were burned to a crisp. For three days and nights I watched others livestream on multiple cameras everything I knew from 4-14 years old go from vandalized to looted to burned from May 25th-28th. The first building they burned, was ironically, the last place I ever saw my black father work (it was a Snyders Drug Store then). I’d wait for him on the sidewalk in front of our four-plex, watching as he would step out the door of the building and head a half block home. Now that memory is infused with flames.

Then the riots went global.

What so many forget is that it was quite literally a war zone in Minneapolis. The documentary linked above illustrates what I witnessed. Areas were under siege and neighbors were trapped in their homes for days. It wasn’t just that crime increased, it was that the police could not help anyone. There were neighbor reports of rioters putting accelerants around neighborhoods, so people had to patrol their areas while putting themselves at risk for being attacked physically. I spoke with friends who had to flee in the early morning to get their families safe. And those who thought their BLM or Biden yard signs would save them were met with the same violence as everyone else.

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One For the Unethical Quote of the Month Hall of Fame…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“Yes, there were many mistakes, but everybody makes mistakes.”

—–Liliya A. Medvedeva, Russian pensioner, quoted by the New York Times in “Stalin’s Image Returns to Moscow’s Subway, Honoring a Brutal History” about how many Russians regard the brutal dictator as a hero for his role in defeating Germany in World War II.

But Lily, everybody doesn’t make “mistakes” that result in the deaths or executions of between six and nine million people.

You idiot.

For the record, Lily’s rationalization is one of the most obnoxious on the list, #19, The Perfection Diversion, or “Nobody’s Perfect!” and “Everybody makes mistakes!”

Our Toothbrushes Can Spy On Us, As the Ghost of the Unabomber Smiles

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

A British private detective told the British tabloids about how an electric toothbrush revealed a cheating hubby’s extramarital affair. One of his clients was a married mother-of-two who was checking on her children’s dental hygiene habits. She installed a smartphone app that tracked the use of the family’s electric toothbrush.

The woman noticed that the brush was being used at times when the kids were at school and her husband was supposedly at work. Was there a mad tooth-brusher on the loose, breaking into homes to clean his teeth? Had her children become toothbrushing fanatics, skipping classes to use the Crest? Was the toothbrush moonlighting with another family?

No, but the truth was worse. Her husband was having sexual liaisons with his lover on mornings when his wife thought he was at work. She saw a routine: the electric toothbrush was being used on Friday mornings, and upon checking, she discovered that her louse of a spouse hadn’t arrived at his office in the city on a Friday morning in months. Instead, he had been “makin’ whoopee,” as the song goes, with a colleague right in the family home, until the electric toothbrush ratted him out.

I don’t see any unethical conduct here except for that of the illicit lovers, but I do detect a pre-unethical condition when one can’t even secretly brush one’s own teeth.

Re Abortion: Another “Bias Makes You Stupid” Op-Ed in the NYT

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

It’s kind of funny when headline writers are so clueless and biased that what they think is a “res ipsa loquitur” story proving one thing actually reveals something completely different.

The headline on a Times op-ed ed last week was “A Brain-Dead Woman Is Being Kept on Machines to Gestate a Fetus. It Was Inevitable.” (I’m using my last gift link of the month on this one, so you’d better read it!) The writer was Kimberly Mutcherson, a professor at Rutgers Law School.

The entire piece radiates contempt for the concept of treating the unborn as human lives, which, you know, they are and rather undeniably so. Readers are informed that Adriana Smith is brain dead, and has been connected to life support machines for more than 90 days to save the life of her baby. Smith was nine weeks pregnant when she died from multiple blood clots in her brain.

“Her fetus’s heart continued to beat,” writes the professor, as if it was an abandoned car with a functioning carburetor. Georgia, she explains, is one of those crazy, fetus-worshiping states where a nascent human being is deemed a human life that can’t be snuffed out on a whim if it has a heartbeat. This, to the op-ed’s author, the headline writer and the New York Times is completely unfathomable.

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Let Us Call the George Floyd Freakout What It Was

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

…a cynical, dishonest, politically-motivated exploitation of an otherwise meaningless arrest gone wrong, fueled by a Machiavellian party, irresponsible journalism, and a biased justice system. The ethics train wreck was a disaster for race relations, law enforcement, and the nation as a whole.

I would typically say “Good job, everybody!” at this juncture, except I refuse to take any blame for this one. I saw Black Lives Matter for what it was from the beginning, and identified the phoniness of the George Floyd riots immediately. Too bad so few people read Ethics Alarms.

There should be accountability, but there won’t be.

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