Columbus Day Ethics Voyage, 2022: What The Heck Did Chris Get Us Into?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Thoughts...

  • That Columbus sketch was recorded in 1961. Was Stan Freberg ahead of his time , or what?
  • Boy, Paul Fries did a great Orson Welles impression!
  • Ethics Alarms has blown hot and cold on Columbus Day; you can read (or reread) the negative take from nine years ago here. Still, he was a brave man and a visionary, and attention must be paid.
  • And yet in the daily feature “This Day in History” for today, Columbus isn’t mentioned, perhaps because the “New World” was sighted on October 11. The stupid Monday holiday rule makes no sense when it is linked to an actual event with an established date. Columbus’s big moment at least deserves the right date.

1. Elon Musk can’t take over soon enough for me. Twitter, right on cue, proved its totalitarian inclinations by banning this tweet on the pretense that it was “misinformation”:

It wasn’t misinformation, just information that upsets a progressive, vaccine Nazi narrative. Eventually Twitter was shamed into reinstating the announcement, but it doesn’t matter: again, this is signature significance. A trustworthy platform doesn’t do this, not even once. Prof. Turley on his blog was astute enough to remind us that years ago, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal was asked how Twitter would balance its efforts to combat misinformation with wanting to “protect free speech as a core value” and to respect the First Amendment. He responded that the company is “not to be bound by the First Amendment” and will regulate content as “reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.” Agrawal said the company would “focus less on thinking about free speech” because “speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.” Got it. [Pointer: Steve Witherspoon]

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What’s The Ethical Response To Totalitarian Big Tech Companies Like PayPal?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

PayPal added a new term of service to its fine print stating that on November 3, a user will incur a fine of $2,500 when any of the 429 million of them dare to express what the Dark, Woke Lords of PayPal deem to be “misinformation.” You know, by now, how that goes.

This deservedly caused what the media likes to call a”firestorm of protest,” so the mega-company quickly said they didn’t mean it, and that it was all due to an innocent mistake—you know, like by a pimply-faced intern who somehow was allowed to craft the new Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). Who believes that? There’s a Nigerian Prince I want to introduce them to.

If the company was that careless and incompetent, then nobody should trust them. If they intended the levy fines for WrongThink, then nobody should trust them. If they have such contempt for the public that they would float a lie like that and expect anyone to buy it, then nobody should trust them.

Conclusion: PayPal can’t be trusted.

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Derek Chauvin Has Appealed His Conviction, And If The Justice System Has Any Integrity, He Should Win

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Unfortunately, I doubt that the justice system today has such integrity when it involves racial issues.

The lawyers for Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter after his white knee appeared to be the proximate cause of black petty hood George Floyd in May 2020, have filed an appeal brief.

Let’s see, what have they got…

  • His lawyers argue that Chauvin never had a chance to receive a fair trial. Ya think? How could anyone claim otherwise?
  • They argued that the nationwide riots poisoned the jury pool. Yes, they did. How could they not?
  • The well-publicized threat that the rioting would resume and escalate Chauvin were found not guilty virtually guaranteed Chauvin’s conviction. Well, I know I assumed it would. Didn’t you? The brief argues that no circumstance could be “more prejudicial … than that of a juror discovering that the City he or she resides in is bracing for a riot … in the event the defendant on whose jury you sit is acquitted.”
  • The brief says that the news media and law enforcement tainted the proceedings by glorifying Floyd and demonizing Chauvin. That’s a fair description.

  • The brief  condemns the state’s expediting the legal process against Chauvin instead of permitting a “cooling period.” “It is not mere speculation to anticipate that allowing a longer, reasonable duration of time would allow the community to feel less of the pressure from fallout from the Floyd riots,” the brief states. That states the obvious. It is also obvious that Black Lives Matter, activists and anti-police groups wanted Chauvin’s head on a pike so they could claim a victory. (No one ever had produced any evidence that Floyd’s death arose from racial bias.)

  • The brief objects to the fact that juror Brandon Mitchell lied on the pre-trial jury questionnaire “regarding his views of the case and the extent of his activism.” Mitchell checked “No” when asked whether he had ever advocated for police reform or demonstrated “about police use of force or police brutality,” but Mitchell actively participated in at least one George Floyd-themed demonstration and was photographed wearing a t-shirt that read, “BLM : Get Your Knee Off Our Necks.” Mitchell says he “forgot.” Right.

I have no liking for Derek Chauvin, but he was railroaded and sacrificed to a national race freak-out. It was an outrageously unfair trial, and he deserves a new one. Unfortunately, that one will be unfair too, and if he were to be acquitted, naturally there would be riots.

Ethics Observations On Biden’s Mass Marijuana Pardon

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The pardon is irresponsible, cynical and unethical. It is also transparent: like the college loan forgiveness stunt (which is unconstitutional and a good bet to be knocked down), this is another sop to the Democratic base showing that Biden is keeping his promises made on the 2020 campaign trail. If it does serious damage to the Rule of Law, society, cultural ethics and developing young brains, hey, it’s worth it. Maybe getting more pot-heads to vote will keep the Democrats in power.

The pardon certainly doesn’t reflect any deeply-held convictions by the President, who doesn’t have such convictions. (This is a man who, please note, says he is a devout Roman Catholic who believes that the unborn are human lives from conception, but who champions abortion.) Biden opposed pot legalization until he became the Democratic nominee for president in 2020. Integrity? What’s integrity?

The pardon is guaranteed to lead to an increase in crime. The people with federal convictions for marijuana possession who Biden pardoned broke the law because they felt like it. They don’t respect the law, and Biden’s move endorses that disrespect. Such law-breakers will break other laws, and probably have.

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Yesterday’s Biased Mainstream Media 2022 Election Panic Exhibit B: The Washington Post’s Gaslighting

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

If you were troubled by yesterday’s Exhibit A regarding the degree to which the mainstream media is “all-in” to try to somehow convince potential voters that everything is really hunky-dory so they should vote Democrat next month, Exhibit B will really unsettled your grits. That would be this analysis by Washington Post political reporter Phillip Bump, a “numbers” guy who is only robbed of the title of Most Shamelessly Partisan WaPo Columnist because Dana Milbank is still at large. (Trump-Deranged Jennifer Rubin has become such a hack that she doesn’t qualify as a columnist any more.)

Bump’s contrived thesis is that there is no big crime problem that can be laid at the feet of Democrats and the Biden Administration; it’s all the concoction of Fox News and right wing conspiracy theorists. His excuse for this exercise in gaslighting was a Fox News segment in which political analyst Gianno Caldwell asked Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y) about rising crime rates. Caldwell’s brother was shot dead in Chicago in June, so I guess one could perhaps argue that he has a distorted view of matters, and that the the whole rising crime thingy is his imagination. But it isn’t, which is perhaps the reason Nadler refused to answer the question.

Americans’ concern about rising crime are at their highest levels since 2016, and no wonder.

Though the number of homicides and some violent crimes dropped slightly in the first half of 2022 compared to 2021, violence in major American cities still remains dramatically higher than it was before the pandemic.

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ER Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I’m running back and forth to the Alexandria hospital’s Emergency Room today (don’t ask why). It’s been at least 6 months since the last unpleasant visit, and something new has been added in the check-in area. It is a large sign warning that “aggressive, threatening or inappropriate conduct or language” will not be tolerated, and may result in refusals to offer treatment.

It was immediately evident why the hospital felt such a threat was necessary. The place was a disaster. It was obviously understaffed, and the staff members that were there were rude, distracted, slow and harried. I watched a 90-year old woman stand at the check-in window as the woman behind it left without explanation abandoning the potential patient who was literally whimpering as the minutes ticked by. “At least there’s no emergency,” I said to the angry lady. She was not amused.

As with so many other places in which professional, timely service is expected and once, before the pandemic gave them an excuse to go with skeleton staffing, was delivered, the ER was lowering its standards and telling people that they could like it or lump it, but they had better not complain or express frustration.

And life in the USA gets just a little bit shittier.

“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Sunday Continues With An Unethical Quote Of The Week From Media Matters President Angelo Carusone

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“[Fox News] had a profound distorting effect on the news media, on our society. And if you look at what Musk says about social media, we are in the same moment, just updated 30 years later…[He] sees Twitter, and the policies that he wants to put in place and the way that he wants to use the platform, as a way to balance out those other social networks.”

—-Angelo Carusone, president of the pro-progressive media bias organization Media Matters, comparing Elon Musk’s pending acquisition of Twitter to when Fox News broke the liberal monopoly on network news more than two decades ago

Give Angelo credit: he’s right, even if he can’t distinguish a good development from a bad one. But then, that’s Media Matters for you, nearly completely ethics-free. (I generally ignore MM because it is so clearly dishonest and untrustworthy, but it does have a odoriferous Ethics Alarms dossier, here.)

These periodic themes on Ethics Alarms aren’t planned, but wowie zowie, have a lot of examples of the news media’s leftist bias been flying by today!

Caruso’s quote is signature significance for the arrogance and totalitarian instincts of such people. I seldom watch Fox News because it so often is pitched to idiots incapable of critical thought, and its star pundits like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are perpetually intellectually dishonest. Nonetheless, Fox News’ appearance on the scene was arguably the most important and essential development in American journalism before journalists decided not to practice journalism any more and almost completely stomp on the principles enshrined in the profession’s ethics codes.

How many news stories that the mainstream media tried to bury or distort would we have never been informed fully about (or informed about at all) without one network that existed, indeed with its own biases, to balance out the Borg-like perspective of the vast majority of its competitors?

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Today’s Biased Mainstream Media 2022 Election Panic Exhibit A: The New York Times Flags A Conspiracy Theory [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I was going to post about this one days ago, got distracted, and then was reminded about again when I saw today’s Exhibit B (coming along soon).

As Ethics Alarms has been chronicling (incompletely to be sure), the mainstream media is as panicked as its client, the Democratic Party, about the likelihood that the multilateral disasters created by administration policies as well as the performance of progressive governors and big city mayors will lead to an epic rejection in the November mid-term elections. I expect the mainstream media, deep in the throes of a “Bias Makes You Stupid” attack, to cross even more journalism ethics lines than it has been and further undermines what’s left of its credibility as the big day approaches.

The major themes in this desperation assault on reality and public awareness seem to be…

  • …the Supreme Court letting legislatures decide how to regulate abortion is an attack on democracy.
  • …the Republicans tried to take over the government in 2021 with the Capitol riot, so the Democrats must be allowed to continue eliminating and punishing dissent in the name of freedom.
  • …Donald Trump and anyone who supports him is a Nazi, as President Biden clearly explained during his cool Adolf Hitler impression
  • …”It isn’t what it is” explains and excuses anti-white racial discrimination in public policy; the illegal immigration wave; inflation; the increase in crime, soaring gas prices, public treasury hand-outs to those who haven’t paid their college loans while the suckers who met their financial obligations are just patsies; the frightening politicizing of the Justice Department as a Leftist state policing tool; the sexualizing of  public school education and everything else that seems to be spinning out of control,and
  • ….all opposition efforts to criticize or condemn any or all of the above is “a conspiracy theory” or a “Big Lie”

Exhibit A is an example of the latter, and a pretty amusing one, if one can find the total rot of American journalism funny. Continue reading →

Death By Trust

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

It took quite a few mistakes, varieties of wrongful conduct, incompetence and negligence to kill Phil Paxson. He was driving home from his daughter’s ninth birthday party in Hickory, North Carolina, using a GPS to guide himself through a dark and rainy night. But the GPS hadn’t been updated for a while: Phil was going to get around to it, but never did. The GPS directed him to take a bridge that was no longer there: it had been washed away in a storm nine years ago. It still wasn’t repaired because the state of North Carolina and the city of Hickory couldn’t, or wouldn’t, agree on who should pay for it.

While they were debating, kids kept stealing the warning signs and barriers, like the young Addams Family son above. There was no barrier or warning as Phil drove along, following the dulcet tones of the GPS lady.

So he plunged into the river to his death on September 29, 2022.

The Unibomber would have something to say about our dependence on technology, and how dangerous it is to rely on machines. Relying on government bureaucracies is even more dangerous. Apparently we also can’t rely on families, schools, churches and society to install the most basic ethics alarms in our young, like the one that pings when they think, “Hey, that ‘STOP! Bridge Out!’ sign would look cool in my room!”

Phil Paxon was killed by an excess of trust.

The Answer To This “Ethics Question” is Easy, But There’s More To It Than The Answer

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The New York Times headline is “How a Dog’s Killing Turned Brooklyn Progressives Against One Another.”

It begins with this opening, which is raw meat tor an ethics blogger:

Real-world ethics question: In a well-used city park, a man with a history of erratic behavior attacks a dog and its owner with a stick; five days later, the dog dies. The man is Black, the dog owner white; the adjoining neighborhood is famously progressive, often critical of the police and jail system. At the same time, crime is up in the neighborhood, with attacks by emotionally disturbed people around the city putting some residents on edge.

In a dog-loving, progressive enclave, where pushing law and order can clash with calls for social justice, what’s the right thing to do? How do you protect the public without furthering injustice against this man?

Well, let’s start with the point that if an ethics question isn’t “real world,” then it’s useless, or at best a waste of time. Ethics is the process of figuring out what the right thing to do is in possible situations that require balancing, prioritizing, and maintaining societal standards and principles without which civilization devolves into chaos. The first question shows flawed ethical analysis from the outset: “In a dog-loving, progressive enclave, where pushing law and order can clash with calls for social justice, what’s the right thing to do?” The right thing to do isn’t affected by how dog-loving the community may be, or what attitudes toward law enforcement and social justice may be. Attitudes, like biases, don’t alter the ethics rules, they just affect whether the results of applying them are popular.

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