Ethics Quiz: Prison Labor

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Voters in Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont are voting next month on measures that will eliminate an exception to prohibitions against slavery or involuntary servitude when forced labor is part of the punishment for a crime. In Alabama, for example, the State Constitution would be amended to remove an exception that allows involuntary servitude “for the punishment of crime.” The U.S. Constitution also has an“exceptions clause” that allows convicted criminals to be forced into involuntary servitude.

The clause is found in the 13th Amendment, which was ratified in 1865: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

If such a measure passes, forced prison labor could be challenged a a violation of Constitutional rights. “We do not need to enslave people in order to punish them,” the New York Times quotes on former prisoner and an advocate of the proposed legal changes as saying, a typical example of lazy advocacy. No, we don’t need to make prisoners work as part of the prison experience. That’s not the issue. The question is whether society is acting unethically when it does so. Right now, absent an elimination of the prison exceptions to involuntary servitude, the practice is legal.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is….

Is it unethical to make prisoners work while incarcerated for little or no compensation?

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Déjà Vu Ethics: The Washington Post Is Stunned To Find That The Public’s Attitude Toward Affirmative Action Hasn’t Changed In 50 Years.

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I’m not, nor should anyone else be surprised.

Writes the Post:

More than 6 in 10 Americans support a ban on the consideration of race in college admissions, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll, but an equally robust majority endorses programs to boost racial diversity on campuses….On Oct. 31, the justices will hear arguments in cases challenging race-conscious admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.If the court’s conservative majority reverses decades of precedent and prohibits the consideration of race and ethnicity, the Post-Schar School poll conducted this month finds 63 percent of adults would support the change. At the same time, 64 percent say programs designed to increase racial diversity of students are a good thing. Support for boosting diversity is high across racial and ethnic groups, while Black Americans are less supportive of banning race as a factor in admissions than people of other backgrounds.

Does this even qualify as news at this point? Back at the very start of the affirmative action movement in colleges and universities, polling always showed that the public objected to “racial quotas,” meaning that race and color would be a decisive factor in admitting college applicants, but if quotas were vaguely framed as “affirmative action,” meaning “let’s do something to avoid perpetuating a permanent underclass in American society by increasing the proportion of minority college graduates,” then the public was substantially favorable. Has any public policy question ever been more vulnerable to polling manipulation by choice of words?

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What A Surprise: A Biological Male Crushed The Face Of A Female Player In A High School Girl’s Volleyball Game!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Who could have seen this coming? What a completely unexpected development! A complete freak accident! Of course, nobody’s at fault.

Yes, I am indulging in rueful sarcasm.

During a high school girl’s volleyball game in Cherokee County, North Carolina, a transgender player spiked a ball so forcefully that it caused “severe injuries” to a young girl’s head and neck. The girl is experiencing long-term concussion symptoms including vision problems, and has not been cleared to return to play either by a physician or a neurologist. And now, suddenly, because someone was seriously hurt as a result of the adults in charge ignoring an obvious, unnecessary and dangerous risk in order that they not be chastised as “transphobic,” the Cherokee County Board of Education voted to cancel all future games against the opposing school, Highlands High School, which allows a transfemale who has the advantage of the size and muscle mass conferred by going through puberty as a male to play on its girls volleyball team.

This is, of course, another nauseating example of the Barn Door Fallacy, as well as many other ethics-related phenomena, including epic incompetence and moral luck. For the fact that girl got her face smashed in because she was playing against a biological males who never should have been allowed to be across a net from her didn’t change anything, it just made what should have been apparent anyway undeniable. Putting biological males who “identify” as females into competition with girls and women is unfair, crazy, bonkers, dangerous—a perfect example of placing ideology over reality, and not thinking about the inevitable negative consequences to follow.

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“What’s on the Minds of 12 Young Voters?” Not Much, And Not Enough

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

It is usually depressing when one digs into the sausage-making that is elections, and the recent New York Times inquiry into the pre-election reasoning of 12 young voters (20-somethings, with one 18-year-old) is especially so. Luckily, the statistics show our young voters to be the least likely to actually bother to cast votes, but still, these are the citizens we’re rearing, and attention must be paid.

Here is a summary of what they told the Times…

Jayda Priester, 25 [Atlanta]: “The most important issue for me is defunding the police. I am hugely for defunding the police and putting other resources available for crisis management, de-escalation.”

Me: Jayda says she hasn’t decided whether to vote at all. Good. Anyone who even considers defunding the police is too ignorant, naive and foolish to be a responsible citizen.

Kyle Moore, 28, [Wisconsin]: “I feel like the 20s generation does not express or voice their opinion as strongly as they should, like the older generations. They hold back more and don’t come out and voice or vote clearly enough to see the country succeeding.”

Me: Kyle should read the responses of the other 12 “young voters,” like Jayda. Opinions that misinformed don’t contribute anything positive to the national discourse. Maybe the smarter ones are holding back because they know they don’t understand matters sufficiently to have an informed opinion.

Kadie Mercier, 29, [Philadelphia]: “As an emergency-department nurse, we see people come in all the time that are in very poor health because they’re unable to afford their medications or find a primary care provider. And so it’s something that I’m really passionate about, making sure these people can avoid coming to the emergency department.”

Me: Kadie is apparently a single issue voter, and is informed to some degree on that issue. Single-issue voting is irresponsible, and thus unethical, but it has the advantage of being uncomplicated.

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Observations On NYT Pundit David Brooks’ Ethics Quote Of The Week

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“G.O.P. candidates are telling a very clear class/culture/status war narrative in which common-sense Americans are being assaulted by elite progressives who let the homeless take over the streets, teach sex ed to 5-year-olds, manufacture fake news, run woke corporations, open the border and refuse to do anything about fentanyl deaths and the sorts of things that affect regular people. In other words, candidates like Lake wrap a dozen different issues into one coherent class war story. And it seems to be working.”

—-NYT columnist David Brooks, allegedly one of the token conservatives in the Times pundit stable, about what he thinks is driving the likely “red wave” in the upcoming elections.

Brooks prefaced this weird statement by writing that “[t]he Trumpified G.O.P. deserves to be a marginalized and disgraced force in American life.”

Observations:

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Ethics Hero: Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.)

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

We have come to quite a disturbing point in our political culture when an elected official can be designated an Ethics Alarms Ethics Hero for doing nothing more than telling the truth. Yet here we are.

The House Majority Whip wasn’t revealing any great secret, just telling the truth about what Joe Biden and so many other Democrats have been lying about—well, one of the the matters they have been lying about. Asked on MSNBC about the inflation affecting typical citizens that they feel might be caused by Democrats spending like there is no tomorrow, Rep. Clyburn answered, “Well, let me make it very clear. All of us are concerned about these rising costs, and all of us knew this would be the case when we put in place this recovery program. Any time you put more money into the economy, prices tend to rise.”

Oh. So it wasn’t the pandemic, or Trump, or Putin as the President and his paid liar, Karine Jean-Pierre, have been saying for months, or “unanticipated and large shocks to the economy” as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen claimed in June. It was all the spending by Democrats, like the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Biden signed in March, that sent prices soaring, and Democratic leadership knew it would do exactly that. And I guess they weren’t too concerned, since they went ahead with the huge spending bill anyway, even though the Administration was already exploding the National Debt.

Well, thanks for the candor, Congressman. We knew this anyway, but its refreshing to hear one of those most responsible admit it.

How Does Kevin Spacey Get His Career Back?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

He doesn’t, that’s all.

Yesterday, a federal jury in Manhattan found actor Kevin Spacey not liable for battery in actor Anthony Rapp’s  lawsuit accusing Spacey of climbing on top of him and making a sexual advance in 1986, when Rapp was 14. This was the accusation that ended Spacey’s acting career five years ago, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein feeding frenzy with #MeToo Valkyries searching the landscape for villainous men to destroy. Actual justice was only a small part of the mission; mostly it was a power play, a mass cancellation project designed to bring down as many powerful men as possible and to provide accusers-who-must-be-believed with their skin to wear as trophies.

Of course, once such hobgoblins of little minds as consistency required a necessary ally of the Left like Joe Biden to also suffer the consequences of his repeated sexually harassing ways, the fever broke. Still, lots of genuine villains were metaphorically killed along the way, many who “needed killin'” as Texans are wont to say, like Weinstein, surely, and also Matt Lauer, Louis C.K., Bill O’Reilly, Bill Cosby, Rep. Blake Farenthold, CBS chairman Les Moonves and others. More were just swept out in “The Terror” for no good reason, like poor Sen. Al Franken, or without the accusations against them being substantiated of tested in court. In the majority of the cases, the once powerful men were replaced by women, and that was part of the mission as well.

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Morning Ethics Wake-Up, 10/21/2022: Krugman, Logan, Justice Barrett, Garbage And Poop

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

October 21 reminds me that I’m only up to Woodrow Wilson in the Ethics Alarms examination of qualified competitors for Joe Biden in the “Worst U.S. President Ever” Competition. Biden, as we can see every day, looks worse and worse, but this date in 1921 stands as a reminder that a President whom conventional historical wisdom usually relegates to the bottom of the barrel was more than the corrupt, sex-obsessed boob he has been portrayed as by predominantly Democrat academics. On October 21, Harding gave a brave speech in Alabama condemning lynchings, which at that time were occurring in the South at a rate of about two black men lynched a week. Harding, in contrast to his Jim Crow-supporting predecessor, Wilson, advocated full rights for African Americans as well as suffrage for women. He supported the Dyer Anti-lynching Bill in 1920, which passed in the House but died in the Senate, thanks to the determined resistance of Southern Democrats.

1. Garbage to the left of me, garbage to the right…today’s refrain on Fox News is that the record-setting early voting in Georgia “proves” that  Biden and Stacey Abrams calling the new Georgia election law  “Jim Crow 2.0” was race-baiting and lies. The Democrats’ despicable rhetoric was indeed race-baiting and dishonest, but the voting turn-out proves nothing of the sort. How could it? Less than 50% of the public votes; less than 50% would probably vote if all they had to do was to do so psychically. For all anyone knows, all the extra early voters haven’t been affected by the new rules at all, and would have voted if the law had never passed. Next, Abrams, who really is a horrible character, tried to answer the conservative media’s mockery by “clarifying” that she never meant that the new law would stop anyone from voting who was willing to put in the effort, just that voting should require no effort at all. Oh. But Jim Crow actually made it impossible for blacks to vote no matter what they did. I feel like I’m watching a debate between an idiot and a con-artist… Continue reading →

Most Unethical Non-Criminal Cabinet Member In History?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Well, I don’t know. Quite a few Cabinet members have been convicted of crimes in office, and the Biden Cabinet has other bad apples, notably Attorney General Merrick Garland. Still, it’s hard to imagine any federal department head more incompetent or guilty of dereliction of duty than Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Or more of a weasel. To be fair, he is the first Cuban-born Homeland Security Secretary, which makes him “historic” and yet another diversity feather in the current Democratic regime’s cap. And after all, that’s what’s really important, right?

I wish I were kidding.

Mayorkas, you no doubt recall, says that our Southern border is “secure,” apparently using the archaic definition of “secure” that meant “as porous as cheesecloth” in Chaucerian English. He also attempted to install an Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board, until even the Democratic Party’s captive news media objected, which always signals that the Left’s totalitarian aspirations are getting ahead of themselves. But he really secured his place in the U.S. Cabinet Members Chamber of Horrors, it has now been revealed, by deliberately condemning border agents of whipping illegal immigrants along the Texas-Mexico border when he knew the allegations were false.

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