Christmas Countdown Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Presumably you know what to do by now…

About the song: apparently Harry Belafonte never performed this classic for TV; if he did, no one’s put it on YouTube. Every year, I admire his rendition of “Mary’s Boy Child” more. The singer introduced the song into the popular Christmas canon in 1956, after hearing it sung by a choir. It has been covered many, many times by singers ranging from Andy Williams to Charlotte Church, but is one of the very few Christmas songs without an interpretation by Bing Crosby.

Ethics Quote of the Month: 2022 Nobel Prize Recipient Philip H. Dybvig

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Commenting on Harvard’s increasingly apparent appointment of an under-qualified, diversity hire as the university’s president, Dr. Dybvig, who was a co-winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel “for research on banks and financial crises,” said,

‘‘I realize I have been too pure. I assumed that a lot of people shared my dream (expressed for example by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King) of ending oppression. However, the dream of most people (especially but not exclusively the oppressed) seems to be becoming the oppressor. This is why there is a strong correlation between abusers of children and people who were abused as children.  Claudine Gay has power now and she is the oppressor of any group not favored by her and other people in power. This is a common pattern in governments heading for totalitarianism. First, say you represent the oppressed. Then you get power and oppress non-favored groups. This leaves you in a morally indefensible position that could not survive given free speech, so you do what you can to destroy anyone (“counterrevolutionaries”) who disagrees with your narrative.’’

In related commentary, Jason Riley wrote in the Wall Street Journal in answer to the question of why Harvard can’t and won’t fire Gay, “To admit she has performed poorly is to raise basic questions about the entire ‘diversity’ enterprise.” Prof. Glenn Reynolds, commenting on both pieces, suggests that there are benefits “for her to remain as a lasting discredit to Harvard.” I agree with that as well. The mask has dropped, and all can see (who are willing to see) the ugliness beneath.

Comment of the Day: “Now Here’s A Scary Poll Result…”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Ethics Alarms post regarding the Harvard-Harris poll showing that Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 had wildly diverging beliefs from the rest of the population in supporting “woke values and victim culture” ended with the plaintive query, “Now what?”

Michael R, in his Comment of the Day to “Now Here’s A Scary Poll Result…,” answered the question thusly:

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Hmm… So, maybe you CAN’T allow people who hate this country and what it stands for teach the children. Maybe you CAN’T let them control the media including the news. Maybe you CAN’T let them be hired by the government and take over the 4th branch. We have allowed this for 50 years and now we are surprised by the results.

Who could have predicted this would be the outcome?

Of course, everyone with a brain predicted this at least since the 1970’s. Now, the problem is what to do about it? You can’t fix the education system.

  • You can’t hire teachers that aren’t fixated on spreading the woke mind virus because the people doing the hiring only hire people who have appropriate brain washing.
  • You can’t become a teacher if you don’t support the woke mind virus because the education faculties will throw you out otherwise.
  • Even if the faculty don’t want to throw you out, the professional standards call for DEI, pronoun usage, etc. It is a requirement of the program that you believe these things.
  • If you don’t pledge allegiance to the woke agenda, you don’t meet the requirements of the teacher ed program. Even if that is ignored, the accreditation body would remove the department’s accreditation if they allowed an outsider to become a teacher.
  • Even if you somehow overcame that, the teacher’s union would eliminate any teacher hired who didn’t conform.

There are a couple obvious options.

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Business Ethics Dunces: Best Buy and Geek Squad

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

No, they are not ready to help, or at least not yesterday, when I gave the Geek Squad at my local Best Buy an opportunity to live up to its claims on the Best Buy website.

ProEthics had an emergency yesterday. Grace’s laptop, from which she runs our business, wouldn’t start; we couldn’t get the power to go on. We know we need to replace it because it is old and has been having hiccups more frequently recently, but the end-of-year cash flow being what it is, were hoping to deal with the issue in January. My son has the magic touch regarding all forms of technology and anything mechanical, but he was at work, and I decided that we should deal with the crisis without interfering with his life. My neighbor has maintained a Geek Squad service contract for many years (though her computer needs do not involve a business), so I decided to give them a try. A corner of the local Best Buy is devoted to the computer repair and service company, which they acquired some time ago.

There was a bad omen at the start: two people were waiting, and no one was behind the counter. “She said she’ll be back in a minute,” one of the customers told me. As you know, almost every establishment, doctor’s office, restaurant and retail business is understaffed now, thanks to foolish minimum wage increases and businesses trying to keep costs down with epic inflation by hiring fewer employees. Customer service is virtually extinct. Best Buy, which once was notable for its plethora of employees on the floor who could answer questions and guide you through your visit, has now joined the trend.

When the Geek Squad staff member on counter duty returned, it was not a smiling man or a women professionally dressed in the Squad uniform pictured, but a strutting young lady with her hair in a durag with some kind of big bow on top. She had false eyelashes so thick and long that she appeared to be in party attire, with extreme make-up.

Well, heck….I decided that if Geek Squad felt she was a computer expert, she was a computer expert. I tried to explain my problem, including that my business relied on this laptop and that trying to get it working was crucial, but she cut me off saying, “Well let’s plug this in and see if it starts.” As I tried to say, “Yeah, it’s been plugged in all morning and it won’t…” she left the counter again, leaving me gaping like a fish. She returned in about five minutes, saw no sign of life and said, “It’s dead, sir. You need to buy a new computer. They’re over there…” She started to leave again. I said, “Wait. I told you this was an emergency. If I buy a new computer, I need you to transfer the data from this one.” “We can do that, but it’s going to take two to four days,” she said. “As I said, this is an emergency,” I replied. “Can’t you do the job faster than that?”

“Sir, we have our people working on other computers; that’s the fastest we can be,” she said dismissively, and left again. I was going to ask for assistance in sifting through the options, but didn’t have the chance. I took back the laptop and left.

Well, guess what? When my son got home from work, he took the laptop and returned it a few hours later. It’s working fine.

Well…

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Unethical Tweet Of The Week: Barbra Streisand

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I thought Barbra was smarter than Alyssa Milano, Rob Reiner and Joy Behar.

I’m sure she is, or once was; dementia creeps up on you. I really don’t know how to explain this.

Is she being cleverly deceitful? Yes, some prices are falling, like gas, but prices as a whole are not. They are still rising, the effects of Biden’s inflationary policies are still hurting the middle class and the poor, and the Democrats’ “Inflation Reduction” Act: has had slightly more salutary effects than Gerald Ford’s W.I.N. button, but nothing to boast about. Inflation “coming down” means that the rate of prices going up is lessening, not that prices are actually less than they were. Does Streisand really not know that?

The claim about Trump is definitely deceit. The mainstream media helped with that one,using the pandemic lockdown results that savaged the American economy to conclude that, as CNN, that scrupulously unbiased news source, wrote in September 2020 as part of the media’s push to elect a mentally-declining President because the public thinks he’s a nice guy, “Trump’s job losses are the worst of any American president on record.”

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At Least Newsweek Is Trying

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Newsweek has been trying to find its way for some time now, sometimes reading like part of the “conservative media,” other times staying in step with the mainstream media leftist bias. Now it is including the device above after all of its articles.

It’s a start. The weaknesses of such subjective ratings are obvious: true ideologues and the hopelessly biased can’t see any news story that isn’t slanted to support their worldview as “fair.” The data presumably can also be rigged by repeat ratings. Nevertheless, I applaud Newsweek’s effort, and would like to see more publications and news organizations use such a ratings system on their stories. Maybe the mere presence of such a check-point will provide incentive to reporters to cool the “advocacy journalism.”

We can help encourage other publication to use a ratings system by rewarding Newsweek. I’m going to use it as a source more often on Ethics Alarms.

What Is The Ethical Way To Compensate Glynn Simmons?

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Hint: There isn’t one.

Glynn Simmons, 70, was convicted of murder in 1975. Yesterday he was exonerated in court after he had spent more than 48 years in prison. Well, on the plus side, he now holds the record for the longest time served by a wrongfully convicted inmate in the United States. That’s something, isn’t it?

Judge Amy Palumbo of Oklahoma County District Court declared Simmons innocent of the crime that had occurred during a liquor store robbery. As is often the case in such episodes, an eye witness got it wrong. As is also too often the case, it was determined that prosecutors withheld important evidence from the defense. It’s not all good news for Glynn: he was just diagnosed with cancer. The last time he was free, Simmons was 27 years old.

“Don’t let nobody tell you that it can’t happen, because it really can,” Simmons said a news conference after the ruling. Depressing but obviously true. The man’s life has been taken away from him. Those primarily responsible, a careless witness and unethical prosecutors, can’t be punished. It will take time for Simmons to get significant damages from the state, and time is what this justice system debacle robbed from him. There is no remedy.

No system is or can be perfect. The justice system has failed before and will fail again. That, however, does not mitigate the tragedy of Glynn Simmons’ ruined life. It only makes it more frustrating.

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[Note: WordPress’s AI-recommended tags on this post; “Ben Simmons,” “NBA,” Brooklyn Nets”]

Hump Day Ethics Bumps, 12/20/23

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

You may have noticed that there has not been the same frequency of Christmas-related posts on EA this year. I’m sorry; it’s the most ethical time of year, but even hearing a Christmas carol depresses me right now, and I need to be in top form because challenges and crises are accumulating on all fronts, professional, familial, financial and personal. No tree, no decorations, no parties or festive social events…no fun. Sometimes life forces tough choices, and though this is one I never imagined I would have to make, here it is. It’s time to be a responsible adult. I hate being a responsible adult…

1. The City Journal (an excellent site) on the Harvard president’s scandal:

“…The hypocrisies are mounting at Harvard. The school’s academically undistinguished, DEI-happy, and arguably malevolent new president has been unmasked as a repeat plagiarist by Christopher F. Rufo and Christopher Brunet, Aaron Sibarium, Isabel Vincent and her colleagues at the New York Post, and Phillip W. Magness. After apologizing for her words before Congress with the admission, “Words matter,” President Gay, along with the rest of the Harvard machine, went straight back to disregarding basic codes of conduct and acting as though words didn’t matter. No more legalese for this president or for the 11 other members of the Harvard Corporation: just a behind-the-scenes legal threat of defamation against the Post, which was poised already in late October to break the story.

Unlike the conflict in the Middle East, which even I—an ardent supporter of Israel—admit is complicated, academic dishonesty is rarely complicated. In most cases, including Gay’s, there is no middle ground: either you are a plagiarist or you aren’t.

Gay is guilty of plagiarism by the code of conduct of any modern academic organization, certainly including Harvard and Phillips Exeter Academy, where she went to school and was a trustee until this past June.

Gay’s record of dishonesty is extensive. At last count, incontrovertible examples of plagiarism have been uncovered in seven publications spanning 14 years, including her Harvard dissertation. Any one of even her less egregious infractions—shorter phrases lifted from cited works without quotation marks—would land a Harvard student in hot water. Any one of her larger infractions—paragraphs lifted from works not cited at all—would almost certainly result in suspension. And any student who displayed this full range of behavior would be expelled.

Everyone knows this. The members of the Harvard Corporation know this. The five living former presidents of Harvard who “offer[ed their] strong support” know this. Those scholars from whom she plagiarized but who inexplicably deny that she did so, or say that they don’t care, know this.…Gay herself knows this, surely, despite saying, “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship.”

As long as Gay remains president—indeed, as long as she remains a member of the faculty—Harvard is in greater trouble than its higher-ups appear to understand.

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Comment of the Day: “The Harvard President’s New Scandal: Now The Only Way Gay Can Prove She’s Fit To Lead The University Is To Leave It”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Wow, those 7 days went by fast! I had flagged this memorable comment by JutGory as a Comment of the Day on the 13th, fully intending to get it up every single day since then, and my plans kept getting derailed (because this is how everything has been going since October around here). Fortunately, this particular entry is timeless, another example of one of my favorite kinds of reader comment, a personal reminiscence with an ethics kick. Also fortunately, the disgrace of Harvard president Claudine Gay, the matter that inspired Jut, is still reverberating. Still, I apologize for my delay.

Here is JutGory’s Comment of the Day on the post, “The Harvard President’s New Scandal: Now The Only Way Gay Can Prove She’s Fit To Lead The University Is To Leave It”:

***

I am not sure what to think of allegations of plagiarism.

I am probably both stupid and smart in this regard.

I attended St. John’s College. Plagiarism was hardly an issue. Everything you wrote was supposed to be original. If you wrote about Plato, it did not matter if you failed to attribute criticisms to Aristotle.

No one would plagiarize Aquinas when criticizing Aristotle.

If you plagiarized Plotinus in commenting on Plato, who would know?

The idea was not to research things, it was to think things.

(Amusingly, I attributed to Jesus a quote that was actually one of Rabbi Hillel. Who knew?)

Going into grad school in Philosophy, I was delightfully amused when my Logic Professor was surprised at my course essay. He expected a “book report” sort of essay, while I gave him an original response to the the work. I did not cite anything. Why should I? The thoughts came out of my head, and my name was on the front page of the paper.

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Colorado’s Supreme Court Thrusts The Nation Into A Constitutional Crisis

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

Colorado Supreme Court yesterday became the first to declare former President Donald Trump ineligible to run for the White House under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. This removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot, but the court immediately stayed its own order until the Supreme Court settles the issue for all time. With several Democratic operatives and allies trying this legal Hail Mary to remove the major threat to the party holding on to the Presidency, it was inevitable that SCOTUS would have to deal with the crack-brained theory eventually.

The reaction to the decision was something I’ve never seen before: the desperate Axis (the resistance, Democrats and the mainstream media) was giddy about the decision because it provides some hope that Joe Biden won’t have to face Trump in the 2024 election, while conservatives and Trump-supporting Republicans were high-fiving each other because they believe the decision provides smoking gun evidence that the Left is trying to win an election by keeping its most feared political opponent off the ballot “by any means necessary.” That certainly is the sense that was conveyed by Althouse’s mostly conservative (but not strongly Trump-supporting) commenters last night. Althouse called the 14th Amendment ploy a “wild legal theory.” Here are the first 19 comments (the 20th is too long, but it also rejects the decision…):

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