Ethics Quiz: Alec And The Philharmonic [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I did not know that Alec “Quick-Draw” Baldwin, currently criminal charges in New Mexico as a consequence of his fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins while filming the film “Rust,” is and has been the New York Philharmonic’s radio host. In writing this,  I am admitting that I haven’t listened to live broadcasts of the orchestra in a long time, probably since Leonard Bernstein was waving the baton. On the other hand, if I knew I had to listen to Baldwin to hear “Peter and the Wolf” again (Lenny’s rendition was big hit when I was 10), I wouldn’t have listened anyway. I can tolerate Baldwin in older films (like “The Hunt for the Red October”) before he became a public asshole, and in more recent movies (like “The Departed,” “Pearl Harbor” and the “Mission Impossible” films) where he is only in a small supporting role: he is, after all, a competent actor (like many assholes). In any other setting, however, if Alec is connected with it, count me out; the cognitive dissonance is too great.

The New York Post reports that despite the actor facing homicide murder charges (two counts of involuntary manslaughter) , the Philharmonic will allow Baldwin to keep his role as the famed orchestra’s  radio host and will remain a member of its board of directors. “He has been an incredibly strong person on the board, and very, very helpful and I think that will probably carry us today,” Charles F. Neimeth, a fellow board member, said in explaining the organization’s decision. “He’s been a strong contributor, both financially and otherwise.” Continue reading →

“The Ethicist” On Allowing Your Kids To Associate With The Children Of Crooks [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

One of the downsides of only getting the digital version of the New York Times (because I no longer could justify sending such an unethical and nation-damaging publication almost a hundred bucks a month) is that I don’t keep up with “The Ethicist,” aka Kwame Anthony Appiah, as well as I did when the Times Magazine was always available in our bathroom. A recent catch-up session revealed a lot of interesting topics posed by “The Ethicist’s” readers, as well as some that shouldn’t require an ethicist to figure out ( “Is It OK to Let My Relatives Think Their Dead Sister Is Still Alive?”).

At the end of January, a mother asked whether she should have let her children go to a sleepover at a new classmate’s home after she discovered that the parents  “are now infamous for their unscrupulous and callous illegal business dealings that ultimately led to a multimillion-dollar settlement with our city government.” The mother was concerned about punishing the couple’s children for their parents’ misdeeds. “Should we let the children hang out?” she asks. “How much do we share with our own child, who is old enough to understand why their behavior is unacceptable?”

As usual the ethics teacher goes into great detail examining all pros and cons, writing things like, “Your duties to your own child do take precedence over your concerns for the children of others. In the philosophical literature on “partiality” — the special concern we have toward those with whom we have special relationships — some have argued that it’s morally permissible to give your own children priority. In my view, it isn’t merely permissible; it’s morally obligatory. What you owe to your child is not the same as what you owe to just any child.” Continue reading →

Replay: Still Time To Be Ethical And Decide Not To Watch The Super Bowl

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

[I was going to write a brand new post pointing out why watching the Super Bowl (and the ads of the NFL’s unethical accessories) was unconscionable, but then I remembered how many times I’ve written similar pieces, and constantly going over the same unethical territory is eating away at my joie de vie—“my twinkle,” as Cosmo Kramer would say. Cant have that, so here is a previous post on the theme from 2019.

It is remarkable to me that the near death of Damar Hamlin mid game less than two months ago has essentially vanished from the sports pages after a brief flurry of “why do we cheer on this mayhem?” pieces before the NFL’s play-offs started. The big concern seems to be whether President Biden is snubbing Fox News be refusing to give a mid-game Super Bowl interview (which is supposedly a “tradition”) or Fox News is snubbing President Biden. In any event Joe’s not being interviewed, though a chat with someone who is cognitively damaged during the game might do some good by reminding viewers what they are cheering.]

Let me say something good about the New York Times: not all of it’s editorials are repetitious attacks on President Trump, just most of them. Last week editorial board member Alex Kinsbury persuaded his colleague to let him used the space for an opinion both ethical and irrefutable. A quick summary: Football is maiming its players, the NFL doesn’t care, and if you watch the Super Bowl and support its sponsors, you’re complicit.

But then you knew that, right? At least you know it if you’re been coming here for any length of time.

Recalling a hard hit on Patriots star Rob Gronkowski, Kinsbury writes, “As the sound of the hit faded into a commercial break, I realized with absolute certainty that I couldn’t watch football anymore. There aren’t enough yards to gain or Super Bowl rings to win that are worth the cost.”

True. What took you so long? He continues by reviewing the well-publicized data:

The first research into the link between football and traumatic brain injury was published in 2005. Since then, the science has become impossible to ignore. In 2017, The Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of the autopsies of the brains of 111 deceased former N.F.L. players, whose relatives gave their bodies up for study. The group was not a random sample, yet 110 showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., a degenerative brain disease linked to concussions. Research published in November estimated that a minimum of 10 percent of all professional football players would develop C.T.E. at some point in their lives.

10% is wishful thinking, even for the  players who can still think. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Dispatches From The Great Stupid, An Ethics Dunce Family, And West Coast Bizarro World”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

The tale of the social justice warrior baker whose family announced that in her honor and memory they didn’t want any law enforcement “violence “—like, say, punishment, to be inflicted on her killers has generated a fascinating discussion.

Here is the Comment of the Day by Steve-O-in-NJ, who had been on quite a roll lately. The post under examination is “Dispatches From The Great Stupid, An Ethics Dunce Family, And West Coast Bizarro World”…

***

I thought most of the aging hippies moved to upstate New York (home of Ithaca, the City of Evil according to many conservatives) and Vermont (the land of gray ponytails).

All silliness aside, this statement makes me want to yawn, not get angry. One of the ending themes I return to in my writing, both historical and fictional, is that evil always returns, although it may wear a different name or a different face, and it falls to a new generation to fight and defeat it. Yesterday it might have worn a hammer and sickle, the day before that it might have worn a swastika or a rising sun, today it wears a crescent or a double-headed eagle. But the underlying idea, that it is going to impose its will and its vision by force, never changes.

The foolish idealism that often supports it keeps returning also, though it too wears a different name and face in every age, actually often many different names and faces in each age. Today it wears the pan-African colors of Black Lives Matter and the rainbow colors of militant abnormal sexuality. Yesterday it wore the tie-dye of the hippies and the ragged habit of Christian anarchism. There have always been the black-clad true anarchists to spur the idealists along or take the action the idealists balk at. The underlying ideal is always the same: a perfect society with no coercion and perfectly good people, obtained by resistance to the current order. Yesterday the anthem was John Lennon’s “Imagine,” today it’s Brett Dennen’s “Heaven”: Continue reading →

‘OK, But What Has He Done Lately?’

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Conservative black scholar Thomas Sowell, now 92 but still as courageous and perceptive as ever, has, to engage in understatement, been critical of the fake history “1619 Project,” now being inflicted on school children across the country. That centerpiece of current CRT indoctrination is the brain-child of Nicole Hannah-Jones, an African-American reporter with an agenda, and for her divisive misinformation, declared hooey by a large number of historians who can smell rot when they encounter it, she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, and later a tenured chair in “Race and Journalism,” as if that was a legitimate study rather than propaganda, at Howard.

Flushed with the perceived authority such a contrived position confers, and lacking the sense God gave a lemming, Professor Hannah-Jones took to Twitter yesterday to sneer, “Other than being Black, what exactly is Sowell’s expertise in slavery or history?” Proving that she asked this employing the same diligence and research skills that marked her “1619 Project” (which claimed that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery, and is low-grade baloney), one of the many Twitterphiles who weighed in to mock her listed Sowell’s relevant publications by year: Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: On ChatGPT And Artificial Intelligence

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

On yesterday’s Open Forum, Null Pointer clarified some of the ethics issues surrounding ChatGPT, currently causing panic and consternation among teachers worried that their students will use artificial intelligence to write their essays. (They are already receiving an artificial education from most of those teachers, so this seems a bit hypocritical to me.)

Here is Null Pointer’s edifying Comment of the Day:

***

“AI” programs like ChatGPT are interesting toys that have some real world utility, but are not really artificial intelligence. They are pattern recognition applications. I would not suggest using them to do one’s homework because they lie. They are trained on large datasets pulled from the internet, and if the data pulled off the internet is wrong, then they spit out wrong answers. If they don’t know the answer, they make things up. https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/8/23590864/google-ai-chatbot-bard-mistake-error-exoplanet-demo

Like any tool, the ethics lies in the user utilizing them. Having someone or something else do your homework for you is cheating. Using an AI to proofread your grammar is not really any different than the built in grammar checks in Microsoft Word. Pattern recognition tools probably have a lot of real world utility, but they are not going to be replacing humans anytime soon. Continue reading →

Dispatches From The Great Stupid, An Ethics Dunce Family, And West Coast Bizarro World [Link Fixed!]

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

This story is so mind-meltingly stupid that it actually makes me angry.

I am not going to be kind. When woke delusions get this serious, innocent people are going to be hurt. That’s Jennifer Angel above, a small business owner and Oakland baker. She was an anarchist and extreme social justice advocate, as if anarchy doesn’t lead directly to injustice. I’m sure she was a nice person, just permanently crippled by living too long in California and hanging out with aging hippies. Jennifer didn’t deserve to die, and die horribly, but she did: when a thief broke into Angel’s car while she was in it, grabbed something and jumped into a getaway car, Angel chased the thief—after all, that’s what you have to do when there are no police, as Angel wished. Sadly, she got caught in the door of the fleeing vehicle was dragged down the street, her head smashing against the pavement repeatedly. She was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Angel’s family and friends issued a statement, and it is utopian claptrap for the ages. here is most of it, and when I can’t stand by without commenting, I will interrupt: Continue reading →

An Integrity Test For Senator Romney

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Well played, Tulsi!

Let’s see if Mitt has the integrity and character to apologize. If so, he had better do it soon. Will he? I’m guessing that he will eat the metaphorical crow.

Ethics Dunce: Fox News anchor Julie Banderas

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Journalists have pretty much jettisoned every other ethical value connected to their profession, so it shouldn’t surprise me that they’ve jettisoned professionalism as well. Come on, dude, you didn’t really think that Don “Isn’t it cute that I’m drunk and ranting on TV” Lemon was unique, did you?

Fox News anchor Julie Banderas—no, I don’t believe she got her lofty perch in broadcast news for her reporting skills, but then neither did Chris Cuomo—was one of the gang on “Gutfield!,” Fox News’ evening comedy talk show last week. She exploited the opportunity to announce that she was divorcing the father of her three children live as she launched into a bitter diatribe against Valentine’s Day..

“Fuck Valentine’s Day!” she said. “Yeah, it’s stupid. I mean, even when I was married, I didn’t get shit for Valentine’s Day.”

“Wait, you’re no longer married?” host Greg Gutfeld asked.

“Well, I’m getting a divorce. I’m gonna go ahead and say it right here for the first time,” the trusted news anchor replied. Her announcement was planned, because she told her Twitter followers that she would be making it on the show that night. “Thank you everyone, congratulations are already in order,” she continued. “If you know me, you’ll clap. That was breaking news, listen you don’t have to be a guy to not get shit on Valentine’s Day, come talk to me after the show. It’s a Hallmark holiday, it’s stupid. It’s just absolutely ridiculous and I don’t think you need one day.”

Observations: Continue reading →

Trans Ethics Train Wreck Update: Why Is All This This Happening? [With A Bonus Comment Of The Day On “Hogwarts Legacy”]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Among the many things I don’t understand about the increasingly bizarre trans-advocacy bullying and propaganda is the ideological divide. Why are Democrats and progressives supporting this manifestly bonkers—and unethical—effort to defy reality?

Some of the latest “revoltin’ developments”:

1. The unhinged fury at J.K. Rowling for not falling in with the pro-trans guerillas.

Today is the release date for Hogwarts Legacy, the most highly anticipated video game of 2023. But many trans-fans are conflicted about the game because of supposedly transphobic comments made  about transgender people by J.K. Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter, Hogwarts, and the whole empire.  Conveniently, EA Comment-Master Humble Talent registered a report on today’s Open Forum. In his Comment of the Day, slightly shortened here (read it all at the link) HT writes,

[P]rogressives hate JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, feminist icon, and TERF extraordinaire. It’s not like Rowling is particularly offensive….The problem isn’t that she’s offensive, the problem is that she’s a traitor. Worse, she’s a traitor that they helped prop up, she has “Fuck You” levels of money, and nothing they do can actually cancel her, because again… She’s independently wealthy, isn’t particularly offensive, and doesn’t care what they think.

Her offense, such that it is, is a less than enthusiastic endorsement of the trans agenda. She has no problems using pronouns, she tries, generally, to be polite, but sometimes uses a variation of the TERF maxim of “there are very few places where gender actually matters anymore, but where it does, it matters a lot” and doesn’t put much stock in the idea of trans women in women’s sport, and feels that trans women shouldn’t be in women’s prisons or abuse shelters, off the top of my head.

Trans people, not very well adjusted to reality to begin with, are so used to getting their way when they whine on Twitter that they’re not dealing very well with the idea that Warner Brothers would continue to risk their ire by further developing the Harry Potter Franchise, which in some very unclear way involving assumed royalties benefits Rowling, the newest iteration of which is “Hogwarts Legacy.”

…It’s fairly obvious that the developers were acutely aware that they were going to be under a DEI microscope, so there is a LOT of representation in the game. This isn’t a huge departure from the source material, there was a lot of representation there too… Rowling is, after all, progressive….

Very early on in the game, you meet the Potterverse’s first trans character: Sirona Ryan. Trans people apparently don’t think that pandering was enough, because Sirona starts with Sir, and that’s an obvious slight.

Because of course it is. The developers going out of their way to try to cleanse the franchise of the filth of its creator by shoehorning in as much DEI as possible is just cover so that they could name their first trans character Manlina McBeefcake to squick the trans people they’re not actually pandering to. Because that makes sense.

Which is the theme here… Nothing is enough. They’re bound and determined to hate it. Which is why the success of the game seems to feel like pure rock salt in the open wound of their entire existence. It’s a good game with a very popular franchise released at a time when there aren’t any other new releases worth note on the market.

So…. What do you do when something you hate is succeeding and you’re really unused to the market not giving a damn about your displeasure? You melt down. The fireworks over this have been some of the most entertaining terminally online bullshit I’ve seen in my life. Brigades of trans people and their allies are joining Twitch streams of people playing HL and cramming their chats with bile, article after article after article written by progressives whining belligerently over the market’s apathy to their discomfort, but most interestingly, because it’s new: Someone coded a website that would log whenever someone streamed HL and compiled it in a searchable database, so trans people could know who to boycott…. Which was basically everyone, so it’s not exactly effective.

Any and all of this would have been derided by the same people doing it as targeted harassment and bullying if they were the target of what they’re doing to others, and they’re doing it without a spark of self awareness. Which lends more credit, I think, to my prevailing theory of: These people don’t actually care about targeted harassment, bullying, or any other professed principle. They’re consistently unhappy people and their single last joy in life is bitching with the intent of depriving other people of the joy they are incapable of feeling.

2. More Lia Thomas ethics rot… Continue reading →