Those stories both appeared on March 27. Both are still up, too. Apparently the earth is spinning both faster and more slowly at the same time!!!!
Dana? Dana! Ah, here she is…
The NBC story is here; CBS’s is here.
I wonder what NPR says? That should settle it. After all, it is a news organization built on a foundation of robust editorial standards and practices, well-constructed to withstand the hardest of gazes.
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Pointer: Not the Bee.
Let’s see if the tax-payer funded progressive propaganda network has even Harvard’s survival instinct, or is even more arrogant. Amazingly enough, this story has gotten worse since I posted about it just four days ago.
You will recall that veteran NPR journalist, Uri Berliner, frustrated that his concerns about blatant progressive and Democratic bias reaching destructive proportions in the workplace he loved, blew a harsh whistle with an article on Substack headlined “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.” Nothing in the article was surprising, certainly not to me, except that a current and prominent staffer wrote it. NPR, also hardly unexpectedly, circled its wagons while pretending Berliner didn’t write what he wrote, but rather a criticism of NPR’s DEI obsession. In fact he was writing about the lack of diversity at NPR of the kind that matters: viewpoint diversity and political diversity. One smoking gun he cited in his piece was the infamous tweet by NPR’s former public editor, now the Editor-in-Chief at USA Today:
Yes, in the world of “advocacy journalism,” being wrong gets you promoted, as long as you’re wrong while helping Democrats.
Then, incredibly, proving how deluded the organization is regarding both its own bias and the right way to respond to Berliner, NPR’s newly appointed CEO lied, spun and erected straw men. That’s sure to bolster NPR’s credibility!
Unlike most ethics quizzes, I’ve made up my mind about this incident, but I acknowledge that others may feel differently and have good reasons—maybe—to do so. I hate it, however.
The NBA’s LA. Clippers and Chick-fil-A collaborated on a promotion that if a player on an opposing team misses two consecutive free-throw attempts, fans will win a free Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich. And thus it was that when Houston Rockets’ Boban Marjanovic went to the free-throw with 4:44 to play in the fourth and final quarter of the Rockets’ game against the Clippers with his team leading 105-97 (not an insuperable margin), he had a twinkle in his eye. He missed his first shot, and the Clipper fans stared cheering—for chicken. Marjanovic looked around, pointed at himself, and bounced his shot off the basket rim. The fans went wild, and Marjanovic seemed to revel in his failure.
Yecchh.
…not that I want to influence you, now.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz on this Patriots Day (in Boston) is…
Just listen to those idiots in the broadcast booth…
I absolutely think it was unethical; in fact, the NBA and his team should fine and suspend Marjanovic. But this is emblematic of why I detest pro basketball only slightly less passionately than I do the NFL. The sport has no integrity. Regular season games are virtually meaningless. Players literally play about 60% harder during the play-offs: you can see it.
This episode was disgusting, and unethical in more ways than one:
This excellent Comment of the Day (which I happen to agree with completely, though that is never a requirement for COTDs) was sparked by a statement by esteemed EA squid, Extradimensional Cephalopod. This seem like a propitious time to salute EC, who is very thoughtful on this classic ethics conflict issue, for alerting me to a Zoom debate on abortion held by his group, Braver Angels (“leading the nation’s largest cross-partisan, volunteer-led movement to bridge the partisan divide…”).
Here is jeffguinn’s Comment of the Day on the post, “A Tragedy in the Czech Republic Reveals the Pro-Abortion Hypocrisy,” which appeared here on April 10:
***
Extradimensional Cephalopod said: It sounds like you’re presupposing the existence of a person who is killed in that situation. I think it’s simple enough to understand that people live in human brains, and if a human body hasn’t developed a brain, that means a person cannot yet have started to live in that body. Does that make sense?
Presuming the concept of personhood is morally relevant, then it makes sense. That presumption is the entire basis upon which the pro-choice point of view rests.
Accept as presented the assumption that personhood is an objectively definable state before which there is no ethical alarm set off by choosing an abortion.
Even granting without dissent that most essential assumption gains nothing.
Existence preceding personhood — the interval between achieving that status and conception — still has precisely two ways of ending: natural cause, or homicide. There is no other option.
Philip Galanes’ stultifyingly woke advice column in the New York Times has been off my metaphorical radar screen since I dumped the print version of the paper, but somehow (I don’t recall why) this recent inquiry is an exception. Here was the inquirer’s question:
My wife and I attended my nephew’s wedding 18 months ago. He and his wife are now expecting a baby, and I was looking forward to meeting my newest relative. The problem: At their wedding, group pictures of our extended family were taken before my wife and I realized it. When we asked the photographer why we had been overlooked, he only reiterated that pictures had already been taken. My wife, a woman of color, believes that racism may be the reason for our exclusion. She wants nothing to do with my nephew or his family again. I understand her feelings, but I’d like to restart these relationships. My wife doesn’t want me to broach the subject. Thoughts?
Yecchh.
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) released this month the results of an experiment designed to measuring the degree of racial bias displayed by various large companies when choosing which job résumés justify further consideration for hiring.
Ninety-seven of the some of the largest companies in the country were sent made-up résumés by fictional job applicants, in nearly identical pairs with equivalent qualifications but bearing names that (the researchers presumed) suggested that the applicants were white or black, and male or female. Latisha and Amy was one pair; Lamar and Adam was another.
This week the NBER released the results, the researchers’ conclusions, and names of the companies. The study seemed to show that, on average, employers contacted the fake white applicants 9.5% more often than the fake black applicants, though this depended on the company. Those logos above represent the companies with the smallest racial gaps in hiring, based on the experiment’s results.
This was the largest such experiment yet, with researchers sending 80,000 résumés applying for 10,000 jobs between 2019 to 2021. The apparent racial bias seemed to spike in food stores, food products, freight and transport, and wholesale enterprises. The New York Times concludes, “The results demonstrate how entrenched employment discrimination is in parts of the U.S. labor market — and the extent to which Black workers start behind in certain industries.”
The Times also quotes Daiquiri Steele, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama School of Law who previously worked for the Department of Labor on employment discrimination as saying, “I am not in the least bit surprised. If you’re having trouble breaking in, the biggest issue is the ripple effect it has. It affects your wages and the economy of your community going forward. The results demonstrate how entrenched employment discrimination is in parts of the U.S. labor market — and the extent to which Black workers start behind in certain industries.” (Gee, what kind of name is “Daiquiri”?)
Oopsie! Adidas was shocked..shocked! to discover that its soccer jersey customizing kit made the number 44 due look exactly like the symbol used by Nazi SS units during the WWII. That was, as you know but apparently no one in the chain of command at Adidas did, the brutal section of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich that carried out “The Final Solution.” A German historian, Michael König, first pointed out that the kit’s design was “very questionable.” That’s called an “understatement.”
An Adidas spokesperson insisted that the kit’s resemblance to the SS thunderbolts was unintentional. [Notice of correction: I originally left out the “un.”] “We as a company are committed to opposing xenophobia, antisemitism, violence and hatred in every form,” he said. “We will block personalization of the jerseys.”
Nobody in Germany found that design objectionable until a historian pointed it out?
Oh-oh…
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Pointer: Curmie
I have long thought Joe Biden was an idiot, even before he started losing brain cells like a scalp shed dandruff, and the complete fecklessness of the 21st Century mutation of the Democratic Party has been brain-blowing for quite awhile as well. This sequence, however, is signature significance for an administration without any internal logic or ethical compass at all:
1. Hamas (a.k.a. the government of Gaza) launches a brutal sneak attack on civilians in Israel, raping women, killing babies, and taking hostages. The U.S. condemns the attack and proclaims its full support of Israel.
2. Israel, appropriately and necessarily, declares war on Hamas (and therefore Gaza), vowing that it will not permit the terrorist organization to exist literally next-door. The U.S. provides economic aid and weapons to the effort.
3. Israel’s assault kills Gazans as well as Hamas fighters, which is how Hamas intends it, because the Hamas tunnels containing war material and fighters is deliberately positioned under schools, hospitals and other structures that turn Gazans into human shields.
I can’t resist. What were the odds that both famous sets of female conjoined twins would justifiably spark ethics commentary within just three months of each other? And yet here we are…
In January, Ethics Alarms designated Brittany Hansel, the “single” member of the amazing Hansel twins (who, I would argue, are really a two headed woman), an Ethics Hero for the mind-boggling concessions and sacrifices she has had to (and will continue to have to) endure so her dominant sister Abigail can be married. Now comes the news that he oldest living conjoined twins have died at the age of 62.
I’ve been fascinated by the Schappell twins most of my life, since their birth was widely publicized when I was a kid. They were joined at the head and shared 30% of their brains, so obviously separating them was not a realistic possibility. Frankly, I had forgotten about them until this morning: apparently my brain can only handle one set of conjoined twins at a time.
Digression: Is “set” the accepted term? And that question makes me recall a memorable line from “The Simpsons” in a Halloween episode where Bart is revealed to be one half of a good/evil set of conjoined twins. As the Simpsons’ pediatrician, Dr. Hibbard, tells the tale to Lisa (we don’t see much of Dr. Hibbard any more since it was decided that it was racist to have a white actor voice a “black” cartoon character. That, in turn, is one reason I don’t see much of “The Simpsons” any more), the doctor refers to Bart and his brother as “Siamese Twins.” Lisa, pedantic and politically correct as ever, tells him that such individuals prefer the term “conjoined twins,” to which Hibbard replies, “Hillbillies prefer to be called “Sons of the South,” too, but it ain’t going to happen!”
Digression over…back to the late Schappell twins: Their various obituaries are full of head-spinning (something these twins could not do) details with ethics implications:
I almost called this “Kaine’s Delusion,” because it was the junior Virginia Senator, former governor and failed Hillary Clinton running mate whose fatuous remarks made me realize that this rationalization, a frequently used one, had some how been left off the list.
Yoda’s Annoyance fits neatly among the sub-rationalizations under #38. The Miscreant’s Mulligan or “Give him/her/them/me a break!” the versatile rationalization that aims to duck the consequences of wrongful conduct by making others feel guilty about placing responsibility squarely where it belongs, by arguing that the miscreant isn’t so bad, isn’t different from anyone else, that he or she meant well, or that the critic is just being an old meanie. The closely relate #38 A.“Mercy For Miscreants, ” embodies the theory that there should be cap on criticism handed out to groups and individuals no matter how much wrongful conduct has been authored by them.
38 B: Excessive Accountability, or “He’s (She’s) Suffered Enough,” previously most often heard when a parent has negligently allowed an infant or small child to perish in a locked car, has recently been repurposed to defend parents who allow their kids to get a hold of their negligently stored firearms, killing others or themselves as a result. Finally authorities are prosecuting such parents. (Good!) Next we have #38C. Biden’s Inoculation or “I don’t deny that I do this!,” which is based on the slippery theory that bad conduct is mitigated by one’s open admission and acknowledgment that it’s a bad habit. This one is a close cousin of a two others on the list, like #19A. Donald’s Dodge, or “I never said I was perfect!” and #41 A. Popeye’s Excuse, or “I am what I am.”
38 D would have been 38 A if I had added it earlier when I should have, and not waited for Tim Kaine to make an ass of himself by saying yesterday at a “block party” at a local park in Dumfries, Virginia…
