It was 11 am, and having dropped my wife off for a physical therapy session and skipped breakfast, I decided to indulge my self in a guilty pleasure: a McDonald’s sausage biscuit. Say what you will about Mickey D’s: their sausage biscuits beat Jimmy Dean’s, and don’t tempt me to talk about the 7-11 barely-edible version.
So I waited in the Drive-Thru line at the nearest branch (the one that only occasionally get its orders right), and when I finally reached the speaker, made a quick and simple request: “A hash browns and sausage biscuit, please. That’s all.”
A woman said in an impenetrable accent, “Sorry, no biscuit. Just [????].” I had no clue what she was saying. It sounded like “eh.” “Pardon me? Could you repeat that?,” I asked. “No biscuit. Only [????].” Well, I had already decided to cancel the order, since the whole point was the item that wasn’t available, but as a matter of principle, I was damned if I was going to leave without knowing what the mystery word was.
If something like this had appeared just a few years ago—you know, before the dark shadow of The Great Stupid had covered the civilized world—it would have been regarded as a joke.
Springfield College in Massachusetts has campus language police guidelines that, among other acts of indoctrination and attempted Orwellian mind-control, discourages students from using the word “father.” I assume that synonyms are similarly taboo, like “dad,” “daddy,” “pop,” and “papa,” and “pappy,” as well as “grandfather,” “granddad,” and “pop-pop.” “Mother,” and other “gender specific” terms like brother, sister, “boyfriend,” “girlfriend,” “husband,” “wife,” “son,” and “daughter” are also considered wrong and harmful.
The list prohibitions are not new at Springfield, and Ethics Alarms has discussed similar Orwellian nonsense at other schools before. I mention this example now because any educational institution that indulges in this kind of Great Stupid woke indoctrination needs to be exposed, mocked, derided, shunned, and driven either to close or reform. This isn’t an educational institution’s job. Constraining communication, serving as propaganda agents for political movements and using its position and influence to advance GoodSpeak is unethical, and extremely so.
Chicken Orbs are a supervised chicken foraging enclosure. With a diameter of 55cm, they are perfect for medium-sized pampered pet chickens to allow them to roam the backyard, or to take them on foraging adventures beyond the backyard boundaries. A modern tool for urban farmers to take control over the when, where, and how the hens forage.
On Mediaite this morning–that’s the useful if still left-biased news media headline aggregator–there are 38 main stories and 17 of them involve Donald Trump. Quite a few also involve ethics issues, unless you consider the man’s very existence in our world an ethics issue, I have to deal with sorting this out every single day: if I give the constant tsunami of ethics issues raised by this persistent celebrity from Hell the attention and analysis they require, the blog ends up being as much about politics as ethics. Worse, the Trump Deranged apparently can’t process the concept that people can be unethical themselves and still have a right to be treated fairly, so any post delving into that situation, which has been an ongoing ethics scandal since at least 2016 (The 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck) is immediately attacked as “supporting” Trump. This, in turn, leads to a repetitive scenario like the one we saw twice this week, with two new and prolific single issue commenters flogging their hatred of the man refusing to move on to other topics, getting antagonistic, and forcing me to ban them.
Of course, non-Trump ethics news hasn’t been great lately either. Yesterday, I had to decide if this story—“Penn State professor arrested for having sex with dog”—was worthy of a post. I decided against it, even though I had a great line to use: “His horrified colleagues finally learned what he really meant when he told them, “I’ll be in the lab…”
Earlier this week, I discussed the frightening and discouraging phenomenon of American professions becoming so politicized that they no longer can be trusted to serve public interests objectively and competently. If a profession cannot be trusted, then it is no longer a profession. Laura Hollis’s point in “Death of the Professions” is worth repeating:
The landscape of professional America should be a stalwart bastion of standards and commitment to truth. Instead, it is increasingly pockmarked by the impact craters of contemporary culture: the erosion of standards, the denial of truth, the capitulation to political pressure, and ideological lockstep borne of fear.
The previous post discussed this phenomenon in the context of the legal profession and its legal ethics extension, but arguably the partisan pollution of the medical profession has been worse. It has become a full participant in the newly-recognized Transsexual Promotion Ethics Train Wreck even as it is running down children: so much for “Do no harm.”
Re-watching “The Silence of the Lambs” last week, I was reminded that once the few clinics performing sex-change surgeries would apply stringent standards to applicants. “Buffalo Bill,” the serial killer in the film (and novel) was turned down for such surgery multiple times. Today, apparently, the radical procedures are no longer considered potentially harmful because the medical profession has bought into the deceptive, benign sounding cover-phrase, “gender affirming treatment.”
In the video above, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) pressed expert witnesses yesterday about the scientific justification for sex-change treatments of children and the authority for claims of the potential long-term benefits of these usually irreversible procedures. His Subcommittee on Health has convened to take up a number of proposals concerning health care access and research support, and Crenshaw wants to ensure that taxpayer money is not used to fund sex-change surgery on kids. “This is taxpayer money, and when 70% of taxpayers opposed these barbaric treatments on minors, then taxpayers should not fund it,” he said.
I don’t know what else to say about the above. Which is worse? PBS’s flagrantly partisan and anti-Trump double standard (the government-funded network had no similar warning appended to Present Biden’s hysterical and irresponsible “Soul of the Nation”diatribe, aka. “the Reichstag speech,” in which he told Americans that his political opposition represented a threat to democracy, or Fox News’ outrageously partisan chryon, which I honestly thought was a hoax when I first saw it.
This one should have been obvious, but was so devious that I missed it. I bet you did too.
The indictment says that Trump’s alleged illegal conduct related to 102 classified documents. What you see above are four of six photos the Justice Department included in the indictment, apparently showing Trumps trove of stolen government materials. I don’t know how large the documents were, but assuming that those photos weren’t staged, they must have been taken before the boxes were examined. I’ll believe they contained paper (unlike the very similar piles of boxes in three of the rooms in my home, which also contain, for example, dinosaur models), but it is wildly unlikely that the boxes contain just 102 classified documents.
Never mind: that’s how all of the news sources presented them, and that is why the Justice Department probably included the photos: to poison public opinion against the former President. Poisoning public opinion is also poisoning the jury pool, and as we know, much of the public doesn’t have to be metaphorically poisoned. I realized this open deceit as I read my Facebook friends’ comments mocking the photos as proving how flagrant Trump’s “crime” was. The photos, in fact, prove nothing, except this: 1) the Justice Department lawyers who prepared the indictment violated the ethics rules and 2) it worked, because so many Americans want to believe that Trump is guilty.
—Entrepreneur and Twitter savior Elon Musk, responding to the Biden Administration’s totalitarian rhetoric in its latest pander to the LGBTQ lobby.
The White House released a tweet from the Biden-Harris administration that stated, “To the LGBTQI+ Community – the Biden-Harris Administration has your back.” The video accompanying the tweet states, “these are our kids,” and “not somebody else’s kids; they’re all our kids.”
The agreed-upon “resistance”/Democratic/mainstream media rebuttal of complaints that the Justice Department has fashioned a new set of standards for prosecution in order to neutralized Donald Trump is being met by smug accusations of “Whataboutism.” Whataboutism is one of the Ethics Alarms rationalizations on the list, and high up that list, at #2. Before I wrote this post, I checked what I had written, which was short and to the point:
The mongrel offspring of The Golden Rationalization and the Bible-based dodges a bit farther down the list, the “They’re Just as Bad” Excuse is both a rationalization and a distraction. As a rationalization, it posits the absurd argument that because there is other wrongdoing by others that is similar, as bad or worse than the unethical conduct under examination, the wrongdoer’s conduct shouldn’t be criticized or noticed. As a distraction, the excuse is a pathetic attempt to focus a critic’s attention elsewhere, by shouting, “Never mind me! Why aren’t you going after those guys?”
Moved by the current “Axis of Unethical Conduct’s distortion of the concept, I added the following to avoid future confusion (or corrupt rhetorical misappropriation):
The death of “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski once again reminded me that his “manifesto” about how technology was progressively making life unbearable was, yes, crazy, but he had a valid point. [You may consider today’s post a second installment to this one, from 2017]. I have long believed that the up-tick in seemingly random mass shootings is the predictable result of those who inject technology into our lives just because they can, selfishly making just getting through the day brain-killingly complex for people somewhere in the lower third of the intelligence scale, and a lot of people who are better off than that too. At some point, the anger and frustration reaches the point where you want to grab a rifle, find a tower, and start shooting.
This is essentially what happens to Sweeney Todd in the Sondheim musical of the same name, as he explains in the show’s first act finale why serial killing is logical:
We all deserve to die Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett Tell you why Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief For the rest of us, death will be a relief We all deserve to die!
I began reflecting on both Ted and Sweeney when I tried to register for the Massachusetts Bar before they suspended me for non-payment of my 2023 annual dues. You have to do it online, and one reason I was late was that I hate the Mass. Board of Bar Overseers website, which always breaks down.
First, the site makes you log in. It wouldn’t let me, even though the password was correct and supposedly filled in automatically. The BBO can’t be bothered to have the feature that lets you see the letters and numbers so only little black dots appear. I had to ask to “reset” my password. Since I couldn’t see the figures, it took two tries to match the the thing, and then I was transferred to a page informing me that I could not move on to filling out my dues sheet until I had completed a “demographic survey.” I’m tempted to put it up: you wouldn’t believe it. If you didn’t type in a date in the right format (I eventually realized that tiny print AFTER each question told you what was acceptable) the question would register as “incomplete” when you selected “Done” at the end. The survey asked me to choose my “preferred” race and ethnicity from umpteen options and also asked which “sex or gender” I “identified” as. (In the comments section, I wrote that who or what I chose to have sex with, or not, and how, was none of the BBO’s business whatsoever.) The survey form was clumsy as well as insulting, it kept flagging reasons a response wouldn’t be accepted, and it took so long to load when it finally passed muster that I thought the program had broken down.
Ethics Alarms 