This one has my ethics alarms ringing, but I can’t seem to find anything unethical about it.
A recently published patent application from Ford describes a system that would lock drivers out of their vehicles for nonpayment and allow the vehicle to repossess itself.
The patent document was formally published on February 23. Titled “Systems and Methods to Repossess a Vehicle,” it outlines different methods that could be taken if the vehicle’s owner misses payments. This would trigger a”repossession system computer,” which would be capable of disabling “a functionality of one or more components of the vehicle,” including the air conditioning, and radio.” “Incessant and unpleasant sound” could be turned on “every time the owner is present in the vehicle.” Finally, the car could be placed in a “lockout condition,” unable to be driven except in the case of an emergency.
…the Minnesota District Court ruling that biological males must be allowed to compete in women’s powerlifting competitions if they “identify” as female. (The posts referenced above are here and here).
The decision, which declared USA Powerlifting’s 2019 policy barring biological men from competing against women illegal in the state a violation of the Minnesota Human Rights Act. That it is, because the Minnesota Human Rights Act is unethical in its treatment of the transgender issue, not to mention bats. The ruling requires USA Powerlifting to amend its policy to allow transgender people to compete along with other members of their self-identities sex. As a result, female power-lifters who didn’t have the advantage of going through puberty as males are going to be squashed in competition with newly minted ex-men. If ever there was a sport where allowing transexual competitors was unconscionable, this is it.
But Minnesota is right up there (down there?) with California, Washington, Oregon, New York and Vermont when it comes to placing woke ideology over reality.
In “Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?,” Suzy Weiss writes as if students taking advantage of loose standards and professorial sloth to cheat is a recent phenomenon. I can assure her (and her readers) that it’s not. The example she begins with brought back nasty memories for me.
When it was time for Sam Beyda, then a freshman at Columbia University, to take his Calculus I midterm, the professor told students they had 90 minutes.
But the exam would be administered online. And even though every student was expected to take it alone, in their dorms or apartments or at the library, it wouldn’t be proctored. And they had 24 hours to turn it in.
“Anyone who hears that knows it’s a free-for-all,” Beyda told me.
Beyda, an economics major, said students texted each other answers; looked up solutions on Chegg, a crowdsourced website with answers to exam questions; and used calculators, which were technically verboten.
He finished the exam in under an hour, he said. Other students spent two or three hours on it. Some classmates paid older students who had already taken the course to do it for them.
“Professors just don’t care,” he told me.
The online wrinkle is obviously an addition to the mix, but I encountered this exact scenaio at Georgetown Law Center. My Constitutional Law professor, Nathan Lewin, gave the class a take-home, open-book, self-timed mid-term exam. We were to complete the multi-question essay test in a single session of three hours precisely, which is exactly what I did, dropping my pen mid-way through the last question. After I turned the exam in, I was informed by several classmates that I was a sucker. Continue reading →
That was the predictably partisan slant of Vox regarding the highly skeptical reception Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness bribe to young voters in the run-up to the 2022 midterms got from most of the Supreme Court Justices in oral arguments in two cases, Biden v. Nebraska and Department of Education v. Brown. But that’s Vox for you.
Whether the $400 billion treasury heist is Constitutional or not, it is definitely unethical to the core, and not just because the U.S. is already approaching—has surpassed?—perilous National Debt levels during an administration determined to buy votes and power. Responsible taxpayers are going to be forced to gift irresponsible students who took out loans they couldn’t afford, with many hoping they wouldn’t have to. Responsible college graduates (or their parents) who paid back all of their student loans or never got them will be played for chumps. This is the measure that Vox, and to be fair, most of the mainstream media, is representing as wonderful.
The legal and Constitutional disputes are closer than the ethical one. A sloppily drafted 2003 law authorized the Secretary of Education to address emergencies, in full knowledge, one assumes, that the party favoring brute federal power believes that “no emergency should go to waste.” The language of the law is especially dangerous in an era where much of the Democratic Party is is openly totalitarian in methods and rhetoric. The Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003, the HEROES Act (Oooo! Such a clever acronym!), gives the Secretary of Education power to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” to protect borrowers affected by “a war or other military operation or national emergency.”
Like all laws now, most Senators and House members probably didn’t read or think about the bill carefully if at all: it was a post 9-11 reflex. President Bush didn’t have the sense to veto it either. Now, thanks to the contrived “national emergency” of the pandemic, there is at least a colorable claim that the act enables the obscene giveaway. It might be stupid, but SCOTUS is supposed to decide if it is legal.
There are some really, really, unethical, incompetent big city mayors running amuck right now, but it would be hard to argue that any of them are worse than Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot. She easily won the Ethics Alarms 2022 award as “Most Unethical Mayor of the Year.” From that post…
Lightfoot moved slightly ahead on the pack after it was revealed that she asked teachers to try yo dragoon Chicago students into volunteering for her campaign, then lied about it, but this was standard stuff for her. In May, she tried to incite violence against the Supreme Court. She’s classy, too: Lightfoot took the stage at a “Pride” event–she is gay, after all—and declared, “Fuck Clarence Thomas!” But her forte is clearly hypocrisy, denial, and dishonesty, while counting on Chicago blacks, the primary victims of her inept crime policies, to support her anyway. No wonder: this year she suggested that blacks caught on camera speeding or running lights should get a break on extra fines and fees, or pay based on an amount proportionate to their income.
In a final flurry of Black History Month pandering by the Biden administration, the missile cruiser USS Chancellorsville was renamed USS Robert Smalls. A US government Naming Commission reviewed military bases and vessels that appeared to honor the Confederacy and made recommendations regarding which should to be renamed. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin approved the commission’s recommendations in October 2022, and this was one of the results. Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro announced that the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser would lose its previous name and henceforth would bear the name of Smalls, a former slave who took over a Confederate ship and delivered it to the Union navy.
Esteemed reader Steve-O-in NJ brought this story to ethics Alarms’ attention, and makes this argument:
It used to be we would name carriers after battles, but, for whatever reason, when these cruisers, once the most expensive and most sophisticated non-carrier vessels afloat in the US Navy, were built, they decided to name them after battles instead (with one exception, the USS Thomas S. Gates, which left active service long ago because it was not built with the vertical launch system). I questioned this choice of names from the get-go, since as far as I know all US ships named after battles were named for US victories or at least battles where our forces gave a good account of themselves (one of the other ships in the class is the USS Chosin, another the USS Anzio). Why did they decide to name this one after a disastrous US defeat? Well, presumably the same reason the names USS Semmes, USS Buchanan, USS Waddell, and USS Barney found their way into the Charles F. Adams and Spruance classes of destroyers, but are unlikely to be used again.
I can think of a long list of names that would not break the class tradition, nor stick out like a sore thumb, and speak to the entire US. Notably the names USS Saratoga and USS Lexington are not presently in use, nor the names USS Coral Sea or USS Midway. Give me a few minutes and I’ll come up with a dozen more. But of course this couldn’t be just a switch of names to something more universally admired, it HAD to be the name of a former slave, as a rebuke to those evil racists who dared name a ship after a legendary victory led by Robert E. Lee, and now everyone who sees it or hears the name will know of the rebuke.
A two-part Ethics Quiz of the Day arises from this discussion:
The simplest commentary on this episode would be, “Oh, grow up.”
A 21-year-old mattress salesman named Trey Louis performed Whiskey Myers’ 2016 song “Stone” as his “American Idol” audition for pop singer Kay Perry and fellow judges Lionel Richie and Luke Bryan. (He wasn’t bad at all.) After receiving a positive response from the three, Louis was asked by Bryan why he’s auditioning out for “American Idol.”
“I’m from Santa Fe, Texas. In May 2018, a gunman walked into my school,” Louis replied, becoming emotional. “I was in Art Room 1. He shot up Art Room 2 before he made his way to Art Room 1. I lost a lot of friends. Eight students were killed. Two teachers were killed. It’s just really been negative, man. Santa Fe’s had a bad rap here since 2018.”
(That doesn’t exactly answer the question, but never mind…)
Perry quickly throttled the other judges in over-the-top emotional grandstanding, first putting her head in her hands and weeping, and then screaming, Continue reading →
Rep. Andrew Ogles (R-Tenn.) acknowledged yesterday that he “misstated” the degree he had received from Middle Tennessee State University when he told voters that he received a degree in international relations. Ogles said his degree was actually for “liberal studies,” a general education degree typically for those who cannot settle on a major. He claims that the mistake was inadvertent, and he just forgot his major.
Sure, Andy.
That baloney might be palatable if he hadn’t been shown to have falsified so many other aspects of his résumé. For example…
For some reason, Black History Month and the corporate pandering to it have really bothered me this year. The streaming services all have special race-segregated categories this month, for example. I just heard a promo on the Sirius MLB channel with an announcer from a vintage game clip (the one where Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s career home run record) screaming that a “black man is now baseball’s all-time home run champion!” What matters is that Henry Aaron broke the record, regardless of his skin shade. Funny, I don’t recall anyone noting, when Barry Bonds broke Aaron’s record aided by illegal drugs, that “a black man is now baseball’s first all-time home run champion to achieve the distinction by cheating!”
Meanwhile, professional organizations felt it necessary to present programs like this one, by the New York City Bar:
The national obsession with race is a sickness, and only perpetuates division and distrust. It has to stop.
1. Ugh! More unethical web list misinformation...I checked out another of those annoying on-line “slideshows,” this one purporting to list the 35 “Best Movies That Are Actually True To History.” Some of the selections were valid (notably “Gettysburg”), but there are too many better choices than most included on the list to count, and one in particular was unforgivable: “Saving Private Ryan.”
My father regarded that film as offensively unrealistic, and wrote the military advisor on the movie to complain in a 20+ page memo. Details aside, however, the entire plot conceit of the “film”Private Ryan” was absurd, and an insult to General George Marshall. There is no way Marshall would have made the welfare of a single GI a higher priority than ensuring a successful post-Normandy invasion campaign, but that is what Spielberg’s film imagines. Furthermore, the letter allegedly written by President Lincoln that inspires Marshall’s crack-brained scheme in the film has been pretty conclusively proven to have been authored by John Hay, Lincoln’s secretary. Not only that, but the object of the letter, the tragic mother who had supposedly lost five sons in Civil War battles, definitely didn’t.
The Mid Vermont Christian School girls basketball team, the Eagles, were set to play against the Long Trail Mountain Lions in the fourth game of state championship tournament playoffs last week. But the Eagles forfeited the game and lost their place in the tournament, taking the position it was unfair and unsafe for a high school girls team to have to play against a team with a biological male on its squad.
Which, of course, it was and is.
[That’s another trans member of a women’s basketball team above, but illustrative of the problem…don’t you think?]
Ethics Alarms 