Needed: A Smart Phone and Social Media Code of Ethics (At Least)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Begosh and begorrah! “Rolling Stone” published a useful ethics essay! The topic: Gen Z altering their conduct and becoming wary of social contact because of fear of public shaming.

Eli Thompson writes in part,

At the Chicago high school I graduated from in June, phones were out during private and public moments. It could be in class when someone fumbled a presentation, or the cafeteria when someone tripped. Most clips stayed in private Snapchat group chats, shared among a few dozen kids. But they could spread further, and cut deeper. Last year, a friend from another school was filmed in his attempt to ask a girl out in the hallway. Even though it was awkward, he didn’t do anything crazy in the video and it was mostly just a rejection. But someone recorded him and posted it on a Snapchat story. The video had the caption, “Bro thought he had a chance,” and over 200 people saw it by the time he got to lunch…Trends such as “fail compilations” or “cringe challenges” — posts showing awkward mistakes or uncomfortable situations meant to make others laugh — encourage people to document embarrassing moments…After seeing these moments play out, I realized this was no longer a far-off fear. It changed how young men conducted themselves in real life. The threat of public shaming makes normal interactions risky and at times can lessen the chance young men will pursue relationships or go on dates. Constant fear of embarrassment can leave some young men too hesitant to take the social risks needed for dating. The fear of online exposure doesn’t just stop certain young men from asking girls out — it can plant seeds of resentment that threaten to fracture gender relations for a long time. 

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Ethics Quiz: The Charlie Kirk Statue

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

(See? I spelled “Charlie” right this time!)

Utah Valley University is where conservative activist Charley Kirk was murdered. Reasonably, the school has proposed erecting a statue in honor of Kirk, who was widely admired for his character and legacy, the student group Turning Point USA, a spearhead of the conservative and MAGA movements.

The proposal has sparked furious controversy on the campus, however. UVU Students for a Democratic Society, a progressive group, argues that Kirk is not worthy of such an honor, that students oppose a statue that will make them feel “unsafe” (as in “represents viewpoints that they disagree with.” I know, I know…) and that they don’t want “outsiders” coming on the campus to gawk at a statue.

“We’re out here because we want to protest any sort of Charlie Kirk memorial,” a student protester told reporters at a recent rally. “We don’t want his likeness on campus; we don’t want his likeness sort of immortalized.” Signs at the group’s rally had legends like “No Kirk on Campus” and “Memorial For Unity Not Hate.”

There are dueling petitions pushing for and against a statue to Kirk, with the opposition threatening to tear down a Kirk memorial if one appears. Considering how the Mad Left went on a statue-toppling rampage not long ago, this does not seem like an idle threat—or, if you like, an idol threat.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is it respectful and responsible for a school to erect a statue that inspires such strong divisions on campus?

I regard this as a tough ethics call. Even if the protesters represent a vocal minority, even if their hatred for Kirk is based on misunderstandings or extremism, even if not erecting a Kirk statue will constitute a successful heckler’s veto, I question whether insisting on a statue (that is certain to be defaced, vandalized or destroyed) of a political figure in the current polarized environment on campuses and elsewhere is simply fanning flames that need to be extinguished.

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Pointer: College Fix

‘Bias Makes You Stupid’ (And Untrustworthy) Case Study: Jonathan Chait

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Oh dear. So disheartening.

Jonathan Chait is a policy analyst and pundit who has, in the course of only writing for progressive and Axis publications and offering opinions on similar platforms in the broadcast news realm, has shown himself capable of principled disagreement with his party (guess which) and progressive cant. On the other hand, he is Trump Deranged, as he demonstrated the last time I criticized him. Then he wrote regarding the first stupid “No Kings” protest in June, “The No Kings protests appear to be a massive success.” (My comment: “Success at what?“) But Chait is clearly intelligent and capable of perceptive analysis, which is why the tweet above is so disturbing aside from the fact that it forces me to again think about Karine Jean-Pierre.

She’s on a book tour hyping her memoir of looking like a fool almost every day as Joe Biden’s paid liar for two years, “Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines.” Jean-Pierre describes what she considers the Democratic Party’s betrayal of Joe Biden: “I watched Democratic leadership abandon, and in the end betray, a man who’d led our country through a pandemic and a time of historic political turmoil,” she writes.

Jean-Pierre’s gimmick is that she claims to be so outraged that the party pushed Biden to step aside as the Presidential nominee after his Presidential debate meltdown against Donald Trump, and that it “couldn’t articulate the achievements of the Biden/Harris administration well enough” that she has decided to leave the Democratic Party and become a political independent.

Talk about chutzpah: this woman is estopped from complaining about anyone’s failure to articulate anything.

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Ethics Hero For The Ages: Elon Musk

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I have long planned on writing a thorough post about how much the United States, its culture, its future as a viable democracy and its avoidance (so far) of a close call with progressive neo-totalitarianism owes to Elon Musk. This isn’t it. However, once again he has used his boundless wealth and creativity to strike down an engine of cultural indoctrination and Orwellian twisting of knowledge and history. Buying Twitter and ending its flagrant partisan bias was a landmark in American freedom of speech, one that may well have made the election of Donald Trump possible. His latest adventure may be even more important.

He has launched Grokipedia, the desperately needed alternative to Wikipedia. It is still a work in progress, as Musk admits, but by being AI-driven (the bot in charge is Elon’s Grok), the online living encyclopedia avoids the progressive bias and vulnerability to partisan manipulation that had caused me to only resort to Wikipedia when the topic was immune from political bias.

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Harvard’s Self-Indicting Grade Inflation Report

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Harvard College’s Office of Undergraduate Education issued a 25- page report sent to faculty and Harvard College students this week. Incredibly, it revealed that more 60% of the grades awarded to Harvard undergraduates are A’s, which, of course, means that the school’s standards of performance are elusive at best. The report concluded that Harvard’s current grading system is “damaging the academic culture of the College.” Ya think? It is more than that. Such low standards of excellence mean that a Harvard diploma, which the world accepts as powerful evidence of merit and superior intellectual skills, is a fraud.

The report drew on years of data on student grades and course evaluations, as well as surveys of faculty and student leaders. A faculty committee found earlier this year that undergraduates often prioritize other interests over classwork…you know, like protesting in favor of terrorists and against Jews. Still, the report found that the amount of time students say they spend on coursework outside of class each week has remained stable over the past two decades.

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Unethical Rant of the Year: MSNBC Left-Wing Propagandist Lawrence O’Donnell

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Lawrence O’Donnell, right up there with the most shameless Axis media hacks in captivity even compared to the rest of MSNBC, usually goes his merry way slamming Republicans, conservatives and President Trump, avoiding inconvenient facts, objectivity and balance at all costs, appealing only to American who don’t want news or fair analysis, just confirmation of their own world view. When people decry the harsh division in American society today, O’Donnell is one of the prime villains, in part because he has been championing “advocacy journalism” ( as in unethical journalism) for so long.

Here’s his Ethics Alarms dossier. The last time I bothered to mention him at all (he’s always biased and unethical: The Julie Principle applies), was last year when I elevated him from mere Unethical Broadcast Journalist to Ethics Corrupter. Yes, I defended O’Donnell once…for being caught on video screaming at the MSNBC staff and shouting “fuck” among other epithets. I don’t think anyone’s most embarrassing private moments should be made “viral.”

However, this time attention should be paid, as Willy Loman’s widow says at the end of “Death of a Salesman.” O’Donnell snapped on the air yesterday and began denigrating Scott Jennings, the articulate, restrained token conservative and Donald Trump advocate on CNN’s on-air team. Jennings does a superb job vivisecting the usually emotional, knee-jerk, woke Trump-Deranged fury that he encounters on the various panels and in the numerous discussions he participates in, providing a much-needed counterpoint on CNN, which has evolved into MSNBC lite: reliably unethically biased, but with occasional outbreaks of non-partisan reality.

For some reason a sole voice of non-Axis perspective on a rival network is deeply offensive to O’Donnell. How dare Jennings defend President Trump? How dare he undermine the perpetual efforts of the news media to destroy him and defeat his policies? The Unethical Rant of 2025 was the result. Here is the whole amazing thing:

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Let’s Make This Short and Sweet: “Now What?”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The House Oversight Committee has released a damning (but hardly surprising, given what we already knew) report concluding that senior aides to President Joe Biden exercised his Presidential powers without his knowledge or consent, including his signing of executive actions and deciding and directing national policy.

The 90-page report is titled “The Biden Autopen Presidency: Decline, Delusion, and Deception in the White House.” (Might have tried to be a bit more restrained there, partisan-wise…) The report documents how Biden’s inner circle ran the government when he could not, while concealing his cognitive deterioration, strictly staging his appearances and controlling Biden’s decision-making. Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) said the findings raise “constitutional and criminal concerns” about the validity of executive actions taken between 2021 and the end of his term in office.

Yes, that seems like a fair assessment. As is usual in such matters, the Democrats on the committee released the obligatory “this is a partisan witch hunt” rebuttal, but the evidence throughout the report seems beyond reasonable dispute. The evidence does not prove Biden’s staff acted without authority, the Democrats say, because it is always nearly impossible to prove a negative. Right. That’s the best they have?

To save us both time, read the Washington Examiner’s extensive report on the report, here. My considered, measured analysis: Holy crap!

So the question is, “Now what?” At the bare minimum, the Department of Justice must revise its guidance on the use of the autopen on Presidential Executive Orders. A 2005 DOJ memo held that Presidents can use the autopen for official documents, but it wasn’t until President Barack Obama used it to sign legislation in 2011 while he was abroad that the gates were opened for the Biden team’s abuse.

A lot needs to happen in light of this confirmation of our worst fears. I’ll post about that in a follow-up, but reader suggestions are welcome.

Ethics Hero: Bill Gates, Who Finally Figured Out That Climate Change Doom Is Hype

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Bill Gates, nerd and “on the spectrum” sufferer that he is, also has the advantage of being sufficiently rich that he is insulated from Leftist fury when he defies wokist cant. Today the climate change scam collective is presumably freaking out because Gates has issued a memo saying, in effect, “Oopsie! What a stupid I am! I let a bunch of agenda-driven scientists and lying (or ignorant) activists convince me to waste billions of dollars on their dishonest hustle! Oh well, live and learn…”

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You Know, Ethics Alarms Would Stop Posting So Often About The Constant Unethical Assault On Our Elected President If The News Media Would Stop Its Unethical Assault On Our Elected President…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Because I can’t let crap like this pass; I’m sorry, I just can’t.

The headline in the Times says, “Trump Says a Recent M.R.I. Scan Was ‘Perfect,’ and He’d ‘Love’ a Third Term”: President Trump made the comments on the second day of his trip to Asia. The Constitution limits presidents to two terms, but Mr. Trump has suggested he might try to circumvent it.” No, he didn’t say anything of the sort. The President said he was healthy, and that he would “love to do it,” as in a third term. That does not suggest that he would try to circumvent the Constitution. When I say I would love to have Elon Musk’s resources, and I would, it does nor mean that I am tempted to rob him. If I say I would love to spend a night with Sydney Sweeney, it does not mean I am plotting to abduct her.

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Ethics Musings On Dr. Attia’s “60 Minutes” Feature

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

My major concern is the very beginning of the interview, in which Attia, whose specialty is human longevity, says, “At 75, both men and women fall off a cliff…. At the population level, it’s unmistakable what happens at the age of 75.” The statement has special resonance for me, as my birthday is December 1 (known locally as “Jack Finding His Father Dead in a Chair Day”). I don’t look forward to falling off any cliffs.

To frame the discussion with the threshold question to begin most ethics inquiries, “What’s going on here?”

1. The doctor is irresponsible and lying. He doesn’t say that statistically, there is a definite, measurable decline in human health as a result of aging if one is looking at the human population as a whole. He says “At 75, both men and women fall off a cliff,” which will be heard as “At 75, all men and women fall off a cliff.” That is quite simply not true. It certainly isn’t true for my family, as my mother, father, and grandmother all were lively, productive, engaged and active well into their late 80’s. I just got a Facebook post from Pat Boone showing him training in a gym; he also does a weekly radio show on the Sirius ’50s channel in which he is witty, erudite, funny and except for a little hoarseness, immediately recognizable as the same guy who sang “April Love.” Pat’s 91. My next door neighbors are a decade older than me, and as far as I can see and hear, they are as active and lucid as ever, and I’ve known them for almost 45 years.

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