Among the many ways the last few years of Wokemania has reduced the quality of American life and our access to the pursuit of happiness is the creation of the ideology-linked addiction to virtually useless masks and a near-crippling phobia regarding the threat of air-borne illnesses created by fearmongering during the pandemic.
Much as I hate to give attention to rule-breaking visitors here who get themselves banned, I need to clean this up.
Yesterday a former commenter who who was banned years ago returned with a semi-reasonable comment, and I, mixing up screen names, unwittingly welcomed him back thinking he had been AWOL rather than banned. That was my fault; I apologized upon discovering it, and in penance, left up the couple of comments he had left thinking that I had relented, here.
I also informed him—that’s “Chris”— that no further comments of his would remain on EA going forward. Nevertheless, he dumped more comments on other posts today, and also inspired a couple of other banned commenters to invade.
When I spam banned commenters’ attempts to sneak back on, any replies legitimate commenter make to them vanish as well. I know it is easy to miss the ban announcements, as I can’t place them on every post. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Now back to work…
I almost missed this kerfuffle completely. Of all people, one of my most reliably Democrat-supporting friends raised it, beginning by saying. “I know this is not something a good progressive is supposed to say or think, but….
…why in the world is it ‘racist’ to say ‘colored people’ but politically correct to use the term ‘people of color’ when by the undeniable rules of English, they mean exactly the same thing?”
She continued, “And how can anyone belonging to an organization called ‘The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’ accuse someone of being a racist for saying it?”
Arizona Republican Rep. Eli Crane was arguing for his amendment to the defense budget and policy bill, as he wants to prohibit the Pentagon from requiring participation in DEI training or the use of ” race-based concepts” in the hiring, promotion or retention of individuals. In the course of debate, Crane said “My amendment has nothing to do with whether or not colored people or black people or anybody can serve, okay? It has nothing to do with color of your skin… any of that stuff.”
Recognizing a “gotcha!” when she saw one, black Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty, an enthusiastic member of the racist Congressional Black Caucus, demanded Crane’s words be stricken from the congressional record. “I am asking for unanimous consent to take down the words of referring to me or any of my colleagues as “colored people,'” said the dues-paying member of the NAACP. Crane wanted to amend his comments to “people of color,” but Beatty insisted that she wanted his words stricken. Censorship is, after all, her party’s way, and no Republicans had the guts to object.The chair ordered Cranes entire statement stricken by unanimous consent.
Beatty then worked to exploit the gaffe for all it was worth, writing on Twitter: “I am still in utter and disbelief that a Republican uttered the words ‘colored people’ in reference to African-American service members who sacrifice their lives for our freedom… I will not tolerate such racist and repugnant words in the House Chamber or anywhere in the Congress. That’s why I asked that those words be stricken from the record, which was done so by unanimous consent.” Then the Ohio Democrat told CBS that Crane’s explanation that he “misspoke” was a lie. “He didn’t misspeak,” Beatty said. “He said clearly what, in my opinion, he intended to.”
In other words, he intended to use a racist slur.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
In a depressing AP story about a poll supposedly showing that a large majority of Americans don’t believe democracy is working as it should in the U.S. today, one disillusioned voter, a “moderate Republican,” singled out the GOP’s investigations of Hunter Biden as a prime example of misplaced priorities.
“Hunter Biden — what does that have to do with us?” he asked, neatly demonstrating why the Founders decided that a pure democracy was dangerous, and that a republic was much safer in many respects.
Hunter Biden is not important at all isolated from what he represents, which is strong evidence that the President of the United States is 1) lying 2) abusing power and influence to assist his pathetic ne’er do well son 3) possibly benefiting from his son’s influence peddling 4) corrupting the justice system to protect his family, and 5) untrustworthy, because he is willing to place other priorities above the interests of the United States of America. The fact that the “moderate Republican,” whose argument is that the President’s son has “nothing to do with the economy,” can’t comprehend this, is a perfect example of how most U.S. citizens don’t understand the basic concepts of ethics, government and law.
Consider the White House cocaine fiasco. A white substance in a plastic bag was found in the White House library and identified as cocaine. Hunter Biden had been to his father’s abode three days before the discovery. Hunter has been a cocaine user in the past, and there is video and photographic evidence of that. From the beginning, the White House made every effort imaginable to keep the public and the media’s suspicions going to the obvious place. On July 5, less than 72 hours after the discovery, a law enforcement source leaked to Politico that the owner of the drugs would likely never be known. National security adviser Jake Sullivan suggested the drug could have belonged to construction workers renovating the West Wing Situation Room, and Joe’s paid liar Karine Jean-Pierre flipped into indignant “How dare you!’ mode when a reporter asked if the envelope might have belonged to a Biden. She also said, laughably, insisted that the Secret Service would never allow the President to dictate how they handled delicate matters at the White House. “We are not involved in this,” Jean-Pierre said. “This is something that the Secret Service handles. It’s under their protocol.” Sure. Who believes this?
On July 13, the Secret Service concluded its investigation without naming a suspect, saying that it could not narrow the group of people who had access to the area to “a person of interest.” Hunter was never questioned. The Secret Service briefed members of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on its findings.
Senator Tom Cotton had an amusing analogy to this narrative.”This is like if the Hamburglar lived in the White House, all the hamburgers disappeared, and they said they didn’t have any suspects or no one they could question,” he said. Meanwhile, conservative pundit and former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino says that his former colleagues are furious, and that they know who brought the cocaine into the White House, adding,
“So there’s probably less than 200 people who could have left this cocaine, by the way, in a bag which is plastic, which is non-porous, meaning it’s probably not that hard to pull a latent print. They’ve got to know who did it. The question is, who’s pressuring them to not find out who did it? And it’s gotta be coming from this White House. This is terrible. Don’t destroy this agency like the FBI. It’s really unbecoming. A lot of my former colleagues at the Secret Service who retired, they are absolutely furious about this. Oh yeah, yeah, I can tell you, I got 50 emails, communications, texts from people. ‘This is embarrassing, humiliating.’ These are good guys, man, guys who worked for Obama and Bush, non-partisan guys, most of them aren’t even political. This is embarrassing. They know exactly who it was.”
And sports bookies are releasing odds on who owned the drugs.
Baseball legend and Cincinnati Reds icon Johnny Bench was in attendance over the weekend at a Reds news conference announcing that former Reds general manager Gabe Paul, among others, was being inducted into the Reds Hall of Fame. Paul, who died in 1998, was represented by his daughter, Jennie Paul. As part of the event, Pete Rose alluded to his first contract negotiation with Paul when Rose was just out of high school.”Gabe Paul signed me to a contract for 400 bucks a month,” Pete recalled, prompting Jennie Paul to say, “That cheap? Never mind!”
Rose’s long-time team mate Bench then shouted out, “He was Jewish!” (Gabe Paul was, indeed, Jewish.) The next day, Bench apologized, saying “I recognize my comment was insensitive. I apologized to Jennie for taking away from her father the full attention he deserves. Gabe Paul earned his place in the Reds Hall of Fame, same as the others who stood on that stage, I am sorry that some of the focus is on my inappropriate remark instead of solely on Gabe’s achievement.”
For her part, Paul’s daughter said she hadn’t heard Bench’s gaffe.
I’ve been thinking about when Bench’s comment would have been appropriate, if ever. If he were Jewish it would have been an insider self-mocking joke: would it be acceptible than? If Paul were alive, in the room, and surrounded by nothing but close friends accustomed to “busting each others’ chops,” like Clint Eastwood’s character in “Gran Torino” when he’s trading ethnic insults with his pal the barber, would it be acceptable? Clearly Johnny’s outburst in the actual situation must have been one of those things that pops out of one’s mouth and you immediately want to stuff it back in again.
Should anyone think less of Bench because of this incident?
You have to feel a little bit sorry for Media Matters. The far-Left propaganda outlet that specializes in spinning for progressives while supposedly flagging “fake news” on the right has to restrict itself primarily to Fox News, though it does participate enthusiastically when it wants to assist the mainstream media in burying stories like the discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop or the mysterious <cough!> discovery of cocaine in the White House. NewsBusters, in contrast, has almost the entire mainstream media spectrum to mine for outrageously biased and unethical news coverage, even with its own conservative bias in full operation. And the alleged giants of the once honorable field of journalism keep churning out frightening examples like this:
Back in March, Ethics Alarms discussed the ethical issues implicated when marketing departments begin using Artificial Intelligence to “increase the number and diversity of our models for our products in a sustainable way,” as one retailer phrased it. The scenario echoed the plot of “Looker,” a 1981 Michael Crichton science fiction thriller in which a high-tech research firm convinces companies that real, live models, even after cosmetic surgery, can’t approach the physical perfection that will optimally influence consumers. In its diabolical scheme, models are offered a contracts to have their faces and figures scanned to create 3D computer-generated avatars, indistinguishable from the live versions, which would be animated by A.I. programs for use in TV commercials. Once their bodies are duplicated digitally, the human beings get lifetime paychecks and can retire, since their more perfect CGI dopplegangers will be doing their work for them. As he did so often during his brilliant, too-sort life, Crichton anticipated a serious ethical crisis arising out of developing technology. “Looker” is almost here.
Last week,the 160,000-member union SAG-AFTRA announced that it would join the the screenwriters union in its industry strike after failing to secure a new contract with movie studios and streaming services. The Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists President Fran Drescher—yes, “The Nanny” herself—- condemned the AMPTP’s “shameful” and “disgusting” treatment of the union’s members. Among the major points of dispute is how to preserve acting and writing jobs that could soon be imperiled by the rapid development of computer technology and artificial intelligence.
by Curmie
Twentysomething years ago, a few months after completing my PhD, I got a phone call from my mentor in Asian theatre, who, upon learning job search wasn’t going as well as I might have hoped, asked if I wanted to teach a couple sections of the university’s Eastern Civilizations course. I asked if I was really qualified to teach such a course. His response: “You know something, and you can read.”
Based largely on his recommendation, I got an interview for the position. I made no attempt to conceal my ignorance of a lot of what I’d be teaching. But the department had struggled with grad students who had lost control of their classrooms, and I’d taught full-time for ten years before entering the doctoral program; I got the job. The head of the Eastern Civ program closed the interview with “There are some books in my office you’ll want to read before you start.” I knew something, and I could read.
That’s relevant to my consideration of the recent ruling of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Porter v. Board of Trustees of North Carolina State University, in which a tenured faculty member claimed to have been punished for arguing against certain initiatives undertaken by his department. I’m no lawyer, so there’s some legalese I’m not so sure about, and I have no interest in chasing down all the precedents cited by either the majority or the dissent to see if they really say what these judges say they say. But I know something and I can read.
More to the point, one of the texts I taught in that Eastern Civ course was Confucius’s Analects, which I had to get to know a lot better than I did previously in order to teach it to someone else. One of the central tenets of Confucian thought was his argument against having too many laws, as no one could possibly predict all the various special circumstances surrounding every dispute. Context matters; timing matters; motives matter. Confucius’s solution was to turn everything over to a wise counselor (like him) who would weigh all the relevant elements on a case by case basis. That’s not the way our justice system works, nor would it be practical, but it’s easy to see its appeal… in theory, at least.
Significantly, Confucius’s reservations about laws’ inability to anticipate all the possible combinations of circumstances are the first cousin if not the sibling of what Jack calls the “ethics incompleteness principle” which asserts that there “are always anomalies on the periphery of every normative system, no matter how sound or well articulated.”
[In the original version of this post I confused readers by forgetting to erase pieces of the source article that I had pasted to the draft to save me the time of jumping back and forth between screens. My fault. Then I compounded the problem by leaving out the link. Fixed. It was all my fault; can’t blame WordPress this time.]
What a moron.
But then if criminals were smart, we’d be in even more trouble than we are…
Lady Gaga promised to pay a $500,0000 reward for the return of her two kidnapped French Bulldogs Gustav and Koji (two of the three above: sorry, I don’t know which). The pop icon’s dogwalker was shot and injured during the theft. Emulating the plot twist in the Mel Gibson thriller “Ransom,” however, one of the participants in the kidnapping scheme decided to collect the reward, arguing that because Gaga had said she would pay for the dogs’ return “no questions asked,” she was obligated even to pay someone who was involved in the crime.
Seeking the outlandish reward, Jennifer McBride was arrested when she turned in the dogs at a police station. She pleaded no contest to knowingly receiving stolen property and was sentenced to probation. I suppose the scheme was to have her collect the reward and split it with the dognappers.
After Lady Gaga warbled, “You’ve got to be kidding!’ when McBride asked for the money, McBride sued her for breach of contract.
Uh, no.
In rejecting the claim, Judge Hollie J. Fujie of Los Angeles Superior Court cited the ancient “unclean hands doctrine,” which holds that a litigant cannot benefit from a situation he or she deliberately helped to bring about by illegal or unethical conduct.
“The unclean hands doctrine demands that a plaintiff act fairly in the matter for which he seeks a remedy,” Fujie wrote, adding that the UHD “is an equitable rationale for refusing a plaintiff relief where principles of fairness dictate that the plaintiff should not recover, regardless of the merits of their claim.”
My position on parents endangering young children by seeking “all-time youngest” records for them and forcing them into unnecessarily dangerous recreational activities the kids can’t possibly understand or consent to is, I fear, unalterable. (Above is the 1996 wreck of the plane piloted by 7-year-old Jessica Dubroff, whose parents had her attempting to become the youngest trainee pilot to fly a light aircraft across the United States. Local, national, and international news media cheered on Dubroff’s story until she, her training pilot and her father died in the crash. )
However outdoors enthusiast Sarah B. mounted as strong a case against my position as I can imagine, in two successive comments combined here as Sarah B.’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Not This Issue Again! Arrest These Parents For Child Endangerment, Please…”:
***
I think there may be a misunderstanding on how Wyoming papers handle kid stories which I think changes a few things.
In small towns like most of Wyoming (not the urban hell that is Casper, Cheyenne, or Laramie), a story with a kid gets written long before a story about Bud Light and Dylan Mulvaney. I made the front page of our local paper at least a half dozen times as a kid, and made the paper dozens of times. Every year, the middle school and high school band/choir concerts would make the front page the day after they were held. If you consider that we did three concerts a semester for each of band and choir in high school, and two concerts a semester for each of middle school band and choir, that is ten days where the kids make the front page each school year. The high school homecoming royalty would make the front page on Thursday after the Wednesday reveal, the parade would always make front page on Friday, the game on Saturday, with the dance making page two. Prom was front page material. When four kids from our school got the best scholarship to the University of Wyoming one year, we made the front page. Every semester honor roll for every level of school made about third page. Placing in a math competition, debate competition, etc would always get a name in the paper, usually a picture too, and often on the front page. High school sports covered the front page every week.
I say this to emphasize my belief that this shouldn’t be considered as bad as you think. Newspapers gush over “youngest” this and “oldest” that. It makes people read the paper. National news is a page six or eight item and international news, like a war between Ukraine and Russia, is usually found below the fold on the comics page, under the Sudoku and Dear Abby.
People want the stories with the kids. Front page news is preferred to have a picture of a kid. A kid doing something good, like winning the coupon for a free pizza at the drawing at the library book fair, is a great front page story. Getting to the top of Devil’s Tower is just as good, and should be considered with the same gravity.
This is just standard newspaper fodder, nothing to get so excited about.
Ethics Alarms 