Confronting My Biases, Episode 10: Anyone Who Buys A “Seven Person Tricycle”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I saw this ridiculous thing in the latest Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue. It costs $20,000, and the description says it is great for teambuilding and conferences.

Suuuure.

Ethics Alarms has stated many times that nobody’s legal use of their own resources that isn’t aimed at causing harm can be called unethical if it doesn’t cause the purchaser to default on other obligations. I believe that.

I must say, however, that I would have a difficult time wrestling my contempt to the floor for anyone, or any company, that couldn’t find a more productive use for $20,000 than buying that ugly piece of junk. It’s only good for a conference if the conference has exactly 7 people involved, and even that’s giving the theory the benefit of more doubt than it deserves. Spending $20,000 on something as trivial and useless as a “seven person tricycle” is just broadcasting a message that says, “Look at me with awe, peasants! I have money to burn, and I’d rather burn it than use it to accomplish anything worth accomplishing!”

I don’t like people who think like that, and I never will. Yes, it’s a bias.

I think I’ll keep it.

And While We’re On the Topic of “Science” and Climate Change…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

President Joe Biden’s climate adviser Ali Zaidi continued the intellectual dishonesty of the Biden administration’s climate change pandering, warning this week that that the President’s political rivals are preparing a “U-turn agenda” that would reverse all the administration’s “progress.” He was appealing to young, ignorant, woke climate change cultists who are threatening to refuse to support Biden’s re-election, since he hasn’t sent U.S. business and society back to the stone age.

Zaidi said that a reversal of Biden’s policies “actually puts us on a U-turn trajectory. A U-turn to [a] less competitive economy. A U-turn to unsafe communities, a U-turn on jobs. That’s a really big deal. It’s very problematic.”

He also claimed, ludicrously, that passions of young people on this topic reflects their experiences, with “wildfires turning the skies orange” and policymakers’ actions “failing to meet the urgency their generation believes is needed to keep global temperature increases in check.” He said, however, that the administration is heeding the the “call of science,” with Biden is committed to his goal of slashing U.S. emissions in half this decade.

None of the wildfires of recent years have been credibly connected to climate change. Moreover, who cares what barely-educated life-neophytes “believe”? They don’t actually know anything except what demagogues and partisan scientists dumbing down their rhetoric tell them.

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitor Files: This Is The Quality of Judge Biden Is Nominating and the Senate is Confirming

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

In the stunning exchange above on May 22, Sen. Ted Cruz confronted one of Biden’s nominees to the Federal bench who placed a serial rapist who is a biological male (that is, all standard equipment included) in a women’s prison. She claimed, incredibly, that she always makes her decisions based on the facts of a case and the law, while repeatedly refusing to answer Cruz’s specific questions by repeating an obviously pre-programmed evasive answer (like the three university presidents who kept saying that whether anti-Semitic speech was acceptable on campus depended on “the context”), “I considered the facts presented to me, and I reached a decision…,” etc.

Cruz contended that the judge made ideological loyalty a higher priority than the fact or law, citing the fact that she deemed a 6’2″ serial rapist with a penis a “safe” inmate in a prison full of women.

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An Expert Bemoans How Experts Have Destroyed the Public’s Trust in Them While She Misleads the Public In Her Criticism

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Zeynep Tufekci, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, seemed to be leveling harsh criticism at the health community. “Under questioning by a congressional subcommittee, top officials from the National Institutes of Health, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, acknowledged that some key parts of the public health guidance their agencies promoted during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic were not backed up by solid science,” she wrote. “What’s more, inconvenient information was kept from the public — suppressed, denied or disparaged as crackpot nonsense…Officials didn’t just spread these dubious ideas, they also demeaned anyone who dared to question them…Dr. David Morens, a senior N.I.H. figure, was deleting emails that discussed pandemic origins and using his personal account so as to avoid public oversight. “We’re all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” he wrote to the head of a nonprofit involved in research at the Wuhan lab.”

Her condemnation appeared uncompromising: “I wish I could say these were all just examples of the science evolving in real time, but they actually demonstrate obstinacy, arrogance and cowardice. Instead of circling the wagons, these officials should have been responsibly and transparently informing the public to the best of their knowledge and abilities. Their delays, falsehoods and misrepresentations had terrible real-time effects on the lives of Americans. Failure to acknowledge the basic facts of Covid transmission led the authorities to pointlessly close beaches and parks, leaving city dwellers to huddle in the much more dangerous confines of cramped and poorly ventilated apartments. The same failure also delayed the opening of schools and caused untold millions of dollars to be wasted.”

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Ethics Heroes: New York Times Readers

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Who would have thought that New York Times readers could do such a terrific Peter Sellers impression?

Paul Krugman, once a Nobel Prize winner, now the very model of a modern progressive hack, issued his contribution to the current “Protect Joe Biden!” hysteria among pundits and journalists. It’s called “Why You Shouldn’t Obsess About the National Debt,” and if this won’t get the Nobel people to demand their prize in economics back, nothing will.

The intellectual dishonesty of the piece is stunning even for Krugman—I remember how an old friend favorably posted one of Krugman’s columns to Facebook and the scales fell from my eyes making me realize that the old friend was an idiot and had always been one—and the rationalizations he uses to shrug away the $34 trillion national debt are breathtaking in their audacity. Some examples:

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Saturday Ethics Inventory, 6/8/2024

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Once again, a pile-up on Route Ethics has me doing another Saturday multi-story post. These take twice as long as most posts to prepare, and generally attract less than average traffic and minimal comments. Nonetheless, they are necessary, for me if not anyone else, just to come closer to covering the topic.

Sooooooooooo,

1. Starting off lightly, with more evidence from “The Ethicist” that people are indeed getting ethically dumber: Today’s inquirer literally asks, “Is lying ethical?”

2. The D.E.I. Ethics Train Wreck hasn’t stopped yet, Harvard notwithstanding. The University of California, Los Angeles, was accused by a whistleblower of discriminating on the basis of race in violation of California and U.S. law. Black and Latino applicants. it was alleged, are held to lower standards than whites and Asians on exams and other measurements of competence. The dean of the medical school, Steven Dubinett, denied the claims and said that students and faculty “are held to the highest standards of academic excellence.” Hiring and admissions decisions are “based on merit,” not race, “in a process consistent with state and federal law.” Oopsie! Dubinett himself directs a center within the medical school, the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, that includes an illegal a race-based fellowship.

3. More on UCLA: You can read about how far UCLA’s medical school has fallen here. The take-away from the report is that both admissions and graduation standards are being lowered for minorities. One professor claimed that “a student in the operating room could not identify a major artery when asked, then berated the professor for putting her on the spot.” “I don’t know how some of these students are going to be junior doctors,” another UCLA professor said. “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”

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Ethics Observations On the “Shitposter’s” Scoop

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Last night I saw this story in the New York Post, relayed by conservative provocateur Ace of Spades:

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan revealed Friday that a Facebook user claiming to be a “cousin” of a juror in former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial suggested he had advanced knowledge of last week’s guilty verdict. 

“Today, the Court became aware of a comment that was posted on the Unified Court System’s public Facebook page and which I now bring to your attention,” Merchan wrote in a letter to Trump attorney Todd Blanche and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. 

“In the comment, the user, ‘Michael Anderson,’ states: ‘My cousin is a juror and says Trump is getting convicted … Thank you folks for all your hard work!!! ….’” the judge explained. 

The story also reveals that “Michael Anderson” is a self-admitted “shitposter,” someone who uses social media to spread falsehoods and derail serious discussions on politics and other matters.

Hmmmm.

So the guy, if he is a guy, who revealed this supposed conspiracy to rig the jury verdict against Donald Trump has no credibility at all. He’s a lying asshole and proud of it—you know, like Michael Cohen.

It is only responsible for the judge to reveal this, and for an investigation to take place. This, in turn, will probably give “Michael Anderson” the fifteen minutes of fame he craves, and inspire more assholes to enter the wonderful, profitable, destructive field of “shitposting.”

Meanwhile, I saw MAGA types all over the web last night calling for the trial verdict to be abandoned based on this almost certain trolling effort, thus making themselves look like gullible fools, and confirmation bias victims.

Is this a great country or what?

My Challenge to Tom Selleck: I Dare You to Put This Story On “Blue Bloods”!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Let me summarize:

1. In the summer of 2022, approximately 10,000 NYPD officers took the exam to get promoted to sergeant—you know, the one they’re always talking about on “Bluebloods,” now heading into its 15th and final season, Tom Selleck’s paene to NYC’s men and women in blue. This was an unprecedented number because the pandemic lockdown had delayed the exam for two years. The exam was offered in four sessions over two days to accommodate the unusually large number.

2. An investigation from the City’s Department of Investigation has determined that about 1,200 of the cops who participated cheated.

3. Those officers brought cell phones with cameras into the exam and participated in group chats to help each other through the test. They discussed possible answers and offered advice to each other, with those who had already taken the exam on the first day helping out the officers taking the exam on the second day.

4. This, of course, was explicitly forbidden, as the officers were told to place their cell phones in plastic bags under their chairs. But more than10% violated that rule.

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Ethics Dunce, Redux: Justice Clarence Thomas

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In a new filing released today, Justice Clarence Thomas amended his financial disclosure for 2019 to note that he “inadvertently omitted” reporting two extravagant vacations paid for by conservative billionaire Harlan Crow, one to Indonesia and the other to the Bohemian Grove, an all-male retreat in northern California. Just slipped his mind! Hey, it could happen to anybody! Who hasn’t completely forgotten about a luxury trip they have enjoyed on the dime of a politically active tycoon? Heck, I know I just remembered one today, after I read this story. Well, it’s all better now; Thomas just retroactively corrected his lie of omission from five years ago.

Anyone who accepts this is ethically estopped from complaining about the White House editing Joe Biden’s blabberings to make him sound less like he belongs in a hospice.

Pro Publica correctly notes that last year, when these and other examples unusual largess from Crow—like paying for Thomas’s mother’s house—were revealed, Thomas’s “Justice Thomas’s lawyers issued a statement on the Justice’s behalf. saying that the allegations were untrue.

Like all lawyers, Supreme Court Justices are prohibited from lying in the course of their professional conduct. The prohibition on lawyer conduct is serious, but even more serious for judges, and extra-special, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious serious for the highest judges in the land.

Thomas is a disgrace, as I have said before.

But at least he never let his wife fly a 250-year-old historical flag that some idiots used to express their own political opinions…

Is “The Great Stupid” Finally Receding? There Is Hope: From Harvard!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

What a freak Ethel Merman was! She was 68 when she performed that madly optimistic Anthony Newley-Leslie Bricusse song, one of my all-time favorites (Newley sang it better).

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced that it will stop requiring a diversity, inclusion, and belonging statement as part of its faculty hiring process. Dean of Faculty Affairs and Planning Nina Zipser announced that the change was made because existing requirements were “too narrow in the information they attempted to gather” and potentially confusing for international candidates. Sure. This is a face-saving explanation, because Harvard’s DEI obsession has lost the staggering school alumni support, donations, prestige and credibility, and also because DEI is a fad that couldn’t stand up to long term scrutiny.

It’s also discriminatory.

And stupid.

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