Everyday Ethics Dilemmas: The Abandoned Tools

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I was walking Spuds down a street in our neighborhood when I noticed a group of tools, five or six, lying in the grass on the strip between the sidewalk and the street. They looked new: I’d guess it was about 50 dollars worth, maybe 75. There was no automobile in front of the house, though that didn’t necessarily mean no one was home.

What’s a good neighbor to do?

These were nice tools, and kids are walking around the neighborhood constantly: maybe no one would take the tools, but maybe someone would. There’s a useful but dishonest rationalization in such circumstances: they’re abandoned! I thought about picking them up and carrying them up to the front door. I considered picking up the tools, carrying them home with Spuds, and driving by later to see if the owners were home. I was tempted to just toss them from the strip to the lawn, where nobody could argue that the strip between the road and the sidewalk is public territory.

If I had not been struggling to keep my exuberant dog under control when the cooler weather makes him especially rambunctious, my calculations might have been different. In retrospect, I see that this was a Golden Rule test: what would I want someone to do if it were my tools being left behind and left to their own resources?

At the time, however, with promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, I decided to leave the tools where they were. I didn’t feel an obligation to do anything because there isn’t one (and also a useful rationalization that I need to add to the list: “This isn’t my problem”) , but clearly the more ethical course would have been to protect my neighbor’s property.

Baseball Tacitly Admits That Its Pulling The All-Star Game From Atlanta In 2021 Was Despicable Groveling To Democrats

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Oh no, ya don’t…Major League Baseball shouldn’t get off this easy, and neither should the major villains in this debacle that Ethics Alarms flagged from the very start (along with others): Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred, good election denier Stacy Abrams (when Democrats reject election results, it’s OK), and the President.

Major League Baseball announced that it has awarded the 2025 All-Star Game to Atlanta, or as one conservative wag put it, “finally decreed that Georgia is no longer racist.” You will recall that the sport had removed the 2021 game from the city after Abrams lobbied the sport to do so on the grounds that Georgia’s newly passed voter integrity law disenfranchised black voters. This was done without anyone in the Commissioner’s office bothering to read the supposedly racist law, which we know because Manfred moved the game to Denver, and Colorado has a law essentially identical to Atlanta’s. Joe Biden encouraged the MLB boycott too— he hadn’t bothered to read the law, either, or he wouldn’t have said it was “Jim Crow on steroids.”

The best part, however, was when Abrams, having pushed for the move, calling Manfred to insist on it, learned that most of the small businesses and Atlanta residents who would suffer because of the boycott (Atlanta lost an estimated $100 million in All-Star Game-related business revenue), claimed that she opposed MLB taking the game away (Biden’s puppeteers also denied that he had said what he said), double-talking this deceitful word salad:

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Curmie’s Conjectures: Eye Black Is Not Blackface. Duh.

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

by Curmie

[It turns out that Curmie and I were writing about the same issue more or less simultaneously. Shortly after I posted “The Great Stupid: Child Abuse Edition,” Curmie sent me this installment of his  periodic column, expressing concern that it was redundant. It’s not, and I’m putting up Curmie’s take for several reasons: 1) I love his writing and style; 2) he approaches the incident from some different angles than I did; 3) I believe this incident is an important one that involves many critical ethics problems: the public school disaster; hypersensitivity to racial offense, real or imagined; the indoctrination and intimidation of children; and more. The plight of J.A. is not just the metaphorical canary dying in the mine, but strong evidence of just how badly our society’s air is poisoned. It is worth more than one post. Finally, I especially want this essay read after Curmie commented recently that he disagreed with my analysis on “countless” topics. In fact, I find that his values and ethical navigation equipment are closely aligned with mine. If they weren’t, he couldn’t have dissected this story so expertly.—JM.]

***

A few days ago, I commented on Jack’s post on the high school principal in Sherman, Texas who declared that the musical Oklahoma! contains “mature adult themes, profane language, and sexual content” “would come in third place in a battle of wits with a sack of hair and an anvil.”

I hereby retract that characterization.  It appears that Sherman Principal Scott Johnson was merely a good soldier, enforcing the dictates of a superintendent and school board that can’t decide if the Victorian age was a little too permissive.  So… Johnson appears capable of giving that anvil a run for its money. 

The good news is that the international attention this case received resulted first in a decision to re-instate the original student cast but in a shortened “kids” version of the musical that would have cut the solo from Max Hightower, the trans student at the center of the controversy, and finally—when the students and parents wouldn’t accept that utterly stupid “compromise” or the notion that Oklahoma!, of all plays, ought to be bowdlerized—a return to the original version with the students the director cast.

More to the present point, when compared to Jeff Luna, the principal at Muirland Middle School in La Jolla, California, even the folks who did make the idiotic decisions that led to the kerfuffle would appear to embody all the best attributes of Solomon, Socrates, Confucius, Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci rolled into one.  We do sorta know what Ado Annie means when she laments her inability to “say no,” after all.

I was about to say that what Luna did surpasses credulity, but, alas, it does not.  There are a lot of adjectives that do apply—”boneheaded,” “irrational,” and “unconstitutional” come to mind—but unfortunately “unbelievable” has no place on the list.

Last month, a Muirland 8th-grader identified as J.A. attended a high school football game, looking like he does in the photo above.  That is, he wore eye black, just as he’s seen countless football players (and not a few baseball players) do; I won’t bother you with the literally dozens of photos of players of all races doing so.  Now, whether eye black has any direct practicality is a matter for debate.  It started as a means of keeping glare out of the eyes.  I have no idea whether it actually does that, and even if it does, it doesn’t require the amount used by J.A.  But that, of course, is irrelevant.

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The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Yeah, Thanks Lincoln Center, But I Think I’ll Skip “Jungle Book Reimagined”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Surely there are still some live theater production that are not arm-twusting agitprop and woke propaganda. Surely.

The production is described on the Lincoln Center website as a “rethinking of the Rudyard Kipling classic ‘The Jungle Book'” that “updates the original’s colonizer-centric perspective.” More specifically, the New York Times review tells us,

“Instead of a boy raised by wolves, Mowgli is a refugee girl separated from her family as sea levels surge. She is adopted by animals who have formed a peaceable kingdom in a city that humans have left behind. Many familiar characters appear, slightly altered. Baloo the bear is now a bear who was forced to dance by humans before escaping the humiliation. The Bandar-log monkeys are now former lab specimens, still traumatized by being experimented on but longing to replace their former masters. Kaa the python is dangerous and hypnotizing but also hung up on memories of captivity in a zoo.”

Gee-what-fun. Can a Disney version be far behind?

When Ethics Alarms Weren’t Even Installed: A TV Sports Sideline Reporter’s Admission

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

On a recent episode of the “Pardon My Take” podcast, the Fox Sports and NFL on Prime Video host Charissa Thompson blurted out that when she was a sideline reporter in the late 2000s, some of her football halftime reports were just made up on the spot. “I’ve said this before, so I haven’t been fired for saying it, but I’ll say it again,” she began. “I would make up the report sometimes, because … the coach wouldn’t come out at halftime, or it was too late and I didn’t want to screw up the report. So I was like, ‘I’m just gonna make this up.’ Because first of all, no coach is gonna get mad if I say, ‘Hey, we need to stop hurting ourselves, we need to be better on third down, we need to stop turning the ball over … and do a better job of getting off the field.’ They’re not gonna correct me on that. So I’m like, ‘It’s fine, I’ll just make up the report.’”

[Sidebar: This alleged professional sports reporter said “I was like” and “I’m like” in one short statement. She should be fired for that.]

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The Great Stupid, Child Abuse Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Guess why the Muirlands Middle School student above was suspended and barred from attending future sporting events in the La Jolla school district. Yes, a hysterical school administrator, almost certainly pushed by racial-grievance obsessed CRT fanatics, said that the boy wore “blackface” at a school football game. The disciplinary notice describes the student, only identified as “J.A.” as engaging in serious misconduct because he “painted his face black at a football game” making the incident an instance of “Offensive comment, intent to harm.” 

That’s odd; I’ve studied blackface and its history, and I don’t recall any minstrel shows with performers painting only half their faces black. By that standard, Star Trek was using blackface in this episode…

…which was bad enough as it was.

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An Ethics Alarms Mystery: What’s Going On Here?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It was kind of conservative pundit David Strom to let his head explode so mine didn’t have to, and he generously authored a rant so I could restrain myself.

What set him off was a legitimate provocation. Elizabeth Spiers, who is a frequent contributor to the New York Times op-ed pages, revealed in a social media spat with Noah Blum the Chief Technology Officer of Tablet, which focuses on Jewish issues, that she thinks Hamas doesn’t run Gaza:

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Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

To get you revved up to post on important or intriguing, ethics matters, here is an actual comment I just kicked out of moderation:

Hey everyone! Just stumbled upon an incredibly interesting blog about the potassium content in bananas! If you’ve ever wondered “how much potassium in a banana,” this article breaks it down in a simple and informative way. Check it out and enhance your knowledge on the benefits of this potassium-packed fruit!

You should see all of the sincere letters I get from people who will pay to have articles printed in Ethics Alarms on topics having no conceivable connection to the topic of the blog who have obviously never read a single post.

Never mind. Go crazy. Or rather, “Go bananas.”

Ethics Dunce (And Incompetent Candidate) Of The Month: Nikki Haley

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The last time Ethics Alarms had anything positive to sat about Nikki Haley, who briefly emerged in the last few weeks as a ray of hope for those who regard avoiding the dreaded, ethics-free Trump-Biden contest next year as an existential necessity, was when she was ambassador to the U.N. The Ethics Alarms position on her since is “Haley has proven herself to be a hypocrite, a cynical opportunist, and devoid of integrity.” She has again validated that negative assessment, adding some Democrat-style First Amendment hostility to the mix.

During an interview on Fox News, Haley reiterated her pledge to make anonymous commenting on social media platforms illegal, arguing that “every person on social media should be verified by their name.” If she is elected president, Haley said, social media companies would be required to authenticate people’s identity before allowing them to comment.

“When you do that, all of a sudden people have to stand by what they say,” she said. “And it gets rid of the Russian bots, the Iranian bots, and the Chinese bots. And then you’re going to get some civility when people know their name is next to what they say, and they know their pastor and their family members are going to see it.”

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Unethical Quote Of The Week: CBS’s Gayle King

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“But now, this seems to be all about politics. What do you say about that? You know, you have innocent children — Palestinians who are dying, innocent Israeli children who are dying, and no one seems to be able to say enough, stop that.”

—-CBS Morning co-host Gayle King, interviewing the father of eight-year-old Israeli hostage Emily Hand

I know I’m flogging this issue, but the talking heads and especially “Think of the children!” female wokesters just won’t shut up. In addition to that, the fact that Gayle King has her gig on CBS Mornings offends me: she is neither especially clever, watchable, intelligent or competent. She has the job because she’s Oprah Winfrey’s <cough> “galpal,” and has been hitched to Oprah’s star for more than 40 years. King is a passable talking head, but has risen far beyond what her ability would otherwise permit thanks to her powerful ally.

I could tolerate it if she didn’t constantly say such stupid things. This comment adds to the pressure being applied to Israel by U.S. media propagandists, because to the same people who want to “Do something!” about climate change and gun violence, “stop that” sounds like wisdom. Either King is cynically appealing to idiots deliberately, or she is one.

Those who have audiences of millions also have an obligation to choose what ideas they impart carefully and competently. King’s pivoting to the plight of children in Gaza while interviewing the father of an 8-year-old victim of Hamas terrorism is inexcusable. Naturally, CBS won’t do anything about it: her bosses probably see the issues with the same clarity she does.

Besides, they don’t want to make Oprah angry…