Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 7/11/2022: Twitter Wars And More

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

But first, a cheerful song, because it’s all downhill from here…

Speaking of music, some opening notes are in order:

  • Yesterday was the anniversary of the much-heralded Scopes “Monkey Trial,” a 1925 ethics train wreck that I wrote about extensively last year, here and here.
  • Today, July 11, marks two of the most vivid examples of how random chance changes everything—history, culture, values, traditions– in ways that cannot be imagined. The first was the foolish duel in 1804 between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr that resulted in Hamilton’s premature death (but ultimately in a boffo Broadway musical!). The second was Count Claus von Stauffenberg’s close-but-no-cigar assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler in 1944.
  • Nearer to the present, the apparent collapse of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is disappointing, because it would make reporting on various Twitter-Twiggered ethics issues a lot easier if I could start an account again in good conscience, as I was prepared to do once the service got out from under the clutches of its current censorious and progressive-biased masters.
  • I also haven’t felt like participating in Facebook of late, as the Woke Hysteria among my once rational friends there over the recent SCOTUS decisions is too great a temptation–as in “target”— for me. Right now they just want an echo chamber to scream in, and that’s what they have. Someone somewhere on the web opined yesterday that late night talk shows,  “Saturday Night Live” and its ilk were no longer primarily about comedy, but rather therapy sessions for angry and depressed progressives and Democrats, with the shows using mockery and insults to reaffirm their convictions about “the others”—those dumb, evil, racist conservatives. I think that may be a perceptive analysis. “Saturday Night Live” is a particularly vivid example: the show that once reveled in portraying Gerald Ford as a bumbling klutz and George W. Bush as an outright moron week after week while they were in the White House now hesitates to exploit the comedy gold represented by Biden’s misadventures and Kamala Harris in general. It proves that SNL is more interested in hanging out with the cool kids than actually being funny—which is supposedly its mission. This is a conflict of interest, and the producer and writers aren’t even attempting to resolve it ethically.

1. Twitter Wars #1: @Ka1zoku_Qu0d, an idiot of the sort that literally clogs Twitter, posted this: “Hold on I want to make sure I say this carefully. Yeah Anne Frank had white privilege. Bad things happen to people with white privilege also but don’t tell the whites that.” This caused so much static on the platform that “Anne Frank” ended up “trending.” Continue reading →

Just Because Someone Is An Idiot Doesn’t Mean It’s Ethical To Make A Fool Out Of Him: The Roy Moore Libel Suit Dismissal

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at New York refused to revive a lawsuit filed by former Alabama Chief Justice and failed Senate candidate from Alabama Roy Moore (and his wife) against  comedian comedian Sasha Baron Cohen. Moore v. Baron Cohen  had its genesis when the “Borat” satirist and actor tricked Moore into traveling to Washington, D.C. to receive a fictional award for supporting Israel and to be interviewed for Israeli TV. It was all a set-up to ridicule Moore on an installment of Cohen’s Showtime production, “Who Is America?”

Cohen presented himself to Moore as an Israeli anti-terrorism expert with a high-tech military intelligence device ( he’s holding it above) that supposedly was able to detect pedophiles. Moore’s Senate run was crushed by credible allegations that he had sought relationships with underage teenage girls: the episode of the program in which the interview aired was introduced with news clips reporting those allegations, including one involving a fourteen-year-old girl at the time. In a cringeworthy confrontation, Cohen’s character waved “the pedophile-detector” over Moore as it beeped loudly. Moore then walked out of the “interview.” Moore and his wife sued for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: NYT Columnist David Brooks

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Compared to most of the mouth-foaming progressive activist and propagandists that make up the New York Times stable of pundits, I suppose you could call David Brooks a sort-of conservative, everything being relative. But he also poses as a public intellectual and “the adult in the room,” which is why his recent disinformation while serving as a guest on the PBS NewsHour last week is so damning.

In a discussion about gun control, Brooks responded to host host Judy Woodruff query, “You agree the likelihood of there being any more federal action on guns is very unlikely?” by saying,

I have never understood why an Australian-style gun buyback is an affront to anybody. It’s an open choice. You can sell your gun or not. But if we’re going to reduce 400 million guns, it would take something like that, not even just banning future purchases. I mean, we have got 400 million here!

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The Tracey Harris Murder Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I stumbled across a year-old CBS “48 Hours” episode that depressed me about the state of ethics alarms in the culture, but to be fair, almost everything is doing that right now.

Tracey Harris (with her daughter, above) vanished from her home in Ozark, Alabama on March 7, 1990. A week later, her body was found in the nearby Choctawhatchee River, and the autopsy revealed that Tracey had drowned, though she had marks on her neck consistent with strangulation. Her death was ruled a homicide. Suspicion immediately fell on her ex-husband Carl, who had continued to live with Tracey and their young daughter after their divorce. He was rumored to be abusive, and had been having an affair with a local teen. Investigators believed, but could not prove, that Carl was the last person to see Tracey alive.

Police and prosecutors interviewed over a dozen neighbors and acquaintances of the Harrises, but there was never sufficient evidence to arrest Carl or seek an indictment. However, the community hostility inflamed by the widespread belief that Carl had murdered his popular former wife drove him to leave the county. Tracey’s parents adopted his daughter, who remains permanently estranged from him.

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Saturday Ethics Blowing In The Wind, 7/9/2022: Dead Ethics Alarms All Over

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Bob Dylan recorded “Blowin’ in the Wind” on this date in 1962. It’s one of my favorite ethics songs, and I have written several parody versions of it focusing on legal ethics issue that the legal profession has not quite figured out yet.

Which reminds me: I heard a wretched Dylan imitation in the background of a movie last night. The increasingly common cheap-out of using a fake version of a famous recording to fool inattentive or ignorant audiences while avoiding paying for the original version is, I feel, both insulting and annoying as well as unethical. Even shows that use oldies as a unifying theme do it, like the “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” fake the records; the closed caption will read “Bob Dylan sings “Blowin’ in the Wind” when it obviously isn’t Bob. Kudos to the directors like Martin Scorsese, who have the integrity and the respect for both their audiences and the original artists to shell out the extra bucks and get rights to play the real thing.

1. President Biden’s failure to urge Americans not to harass officials and judges at their homes or when they are in public as private citizens shows his hypocrisy, lack of integrity, and failure as an ethical leader. ..or it shows that he’s a puppet and his puppeteers are anti-democratic thugs. Note:

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Ethics Quiz: Travails Of A Transgender Sex Offender

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

As Samuel L. Jackson would say if he were preparing to delve into this ethics quiz:

“Ella” is transgender woman now, whatever that means, but back when Ella was a 15-year-old boy, and stood 6-foot, 5-inches while weighing in at more than 300 pounds, she, though then a he, joined another teen in sexually assaulting a 110 pound autistic 14-year-old boy who was blind in one eye and autistic. The Pre-Ella then taunted the kid on Facebook. The male predecessor of Ella pleaded no contest to one count of sexual assault of a child under 16 years of age and spent time in two juvenile detention and treatment centers. Somewhere along the way Ella decided she needed to transition to female-hood, so when, in her new female-identifying edition, she was ordered to register as a sex offender, she objected. Under Wisconsin law, sex offenders must register a legal name and any aliases they use, and they may not legally change their name. That seems reasonable, since there is no point to legally registering as a sex offender to alert the community of sex offending proclivities if one can just foil the measure by using a different name.

Ella has been “Ella” since her teens and is now 22. She argued that requiring her to register as a sex offender under her male name given at birth violates her First Amendment right to express her true female identity. She also contended the registry requirement, as applied to her, amounted to cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment, in essence making her out herself as a former him, or a former him trapped in a female body, or something.

The Wisconsin Court of Appeals rejected Ella’s claims,  and last week, four mean old conservatives outvoted the court’s liberal members on the Wisconsin Supreme Court also denied Ella’s attempt to change her name after hearing arguments in the case in February. Continue reading →

Ethics Verdict: Morton’s Steak House Is Right, And Above The Law, Karine Jean-Pierre And The Rest Are Assholes

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Unfortunately, no word but the A-word will do, once again.

It’s disturbing and ominous that one half of the U.S. political culture has embraced vigorous assholery as part of its ideology, but yesterday’s exchange of positions regarding the right to enjoy one’s life shows that no other conclusion is plausible.

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh attempted to dine in the Washington DC Morton’s Steak House earlier this week, and assholes calling themselves  protesters (they were gathered by the “ShutDown DC” activist group) showed up outside the restaurant after receiving a tip from other assholes that Kavanaugh was there.

“While the badasses @OurRightsDC and his own neighbors are gathered outside #Kavanaugh’s home, the justice seems to have snuck out for a swanky DC dinner,” the group posted on Twitter. “We got a tip from someone who spotted him around 7:40. DM us if you want to join him…we’re sure he can pull up a seat!” Student loan forgiveness activist Melissa Byrne (now there is another political position devoid of ethics alarms)  tweeted out the restaurant’s phone number, writing, “Folks should call Mortons [sic] at +1 (202) 955-5997 and tell them it’s gross they welcomed Brett Kavanaugh as a diner tonight. Men who take away women’s  rights should be shunned.”

Justice Kavanaugh left the establishment through a back exit after having his fill of being harassed and as well as causing his fellow diners to be disturbed.  ShutDown DC tweeted: “We hear Kavanaugh snuck out the back with his security detail. @mortons should be ashamed for welcoming a man who so clearly hates women.”

Of course. ‘Our victims should be ashamed.’ The Mark of Asshole!

Morton’s issued the following assessment of the incident:

“Honorable Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh and all of our other patrons at the restaurant were unduly harassed by unruly protestors while eating dinner at our Morton’s restaurant. Politics, regardless of your side or views, should not trample the freedom at play of the right to congregate and eat dinner. There is a time and place for everything. Disturbing the dinner of all of our customers was an act of selfishness and void of decency.”

Exactly. This is also a neat and handy ethics test: if one of your friends or relatives doesn’t agree with this basic statement, he or she may be assholes. Or well on their way to becoming one.

But numerous personages and commentators on the Left leaped at the chance to side with the protesters, whose response to Morton’s was to tweet, “No rights for us, no peace for you. Get f–ked @mortons.”

As the chorus would have sung if Disney’s delightful Fifties TV series “Zorro” had been called “Assholes”…

Out of the night, when the full moon is bright
Comes a mob that’s filled with Assholes!
Its justice charade is of fallacies made…
In turn it makes them assholes.
Assholes! They make the sign of the A!
Assholes! If only they’d go away!

Assholes!
Assholes!
Assholes!

I’m sorry, I just had to get that out of my system.

Speaking for the White House, and thus President Biden and his party, paid liar Karine Jean-Pierre responded to a question about the incident (from guess who) by babbling, “People have the right, this is what Democracy is. Of course people have a right to privacy but people also have the right to protest peacefully, peacefully, it’s the intimidation and the violence that we condemn.”

Ethics Fool. The right to protest doesn’t make all protests right, and exacting revenge on a SCOTUS justice for doing his job, which is to interpret the law, while disrupting a business and its patrons is dead wrong and indefensible in any ethical system. This “protest” is really intimidation. The threat is clear: if you don’t do what the mob wants, you and your family will never have a moment’s peace. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Major League Baseball

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I can’t believe it. MLB did something right for a change. I thought I might never see the day.

Today is the announcement of the starters for the 2022 All-Star Game, based on fan voting. The hype is sort of sad, as the game itself, once considered a major sporting event that attracted huge TV ratings, is a bit of a dinosaur thanks to interleague play and the fact that the players make so much money that it isn’t worth it to them to play hard or care about which league’s all-stars win. But never mind: it’ still be far the most entertaining of the various all-star games with by far the richest history.

But I digress. For literally decades I and many others have complained about the repeated situation where one of the game’s greatest players, in his last season, is left off the team because his mid-season statistics are no longer stellar. Thus baseball fans were regularly robbed of the chance to see a guaranteed Hall of Famer one last time in the “Mid-Summer Classic,” despite his status as a career “All-Star.” The game is for the fans, after all, and survives on legends, memories and nostalgia.

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Comment Of The Day: “More Weird Tales Of The Great Stupid: ‘Urgency Is A White Supremacy Value'”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Some people have the rare gift of being able to look at every problem with fresh, unbiased eyes, avoiding the biases, assumptions and conventional wisdom that blinds the rest of us. Ethics Alarms is extremely fortunate to have several regular commentators who fit that description. One of them is Extradimensional Cephalopod.

Here is its Comment of the Day on the post about “urgency” being called a value of white supremacy.

***

In the interests of intellectual integrity and fostering mutual understanding, I must raise the strongest argument I can think of for tardiness. Not tardiness within a culture of punctuality, of course, but tardiness as a culturally accepted habit. Breaking commitments on a whim is never going to be a good idea in a society, because all society relies on trust on some level.

However, a society can exist where everyone knows and accepts that meeting times are suggestions by default and that people will prioritize socialization and relationship-building, however long it takes, over concrete business decisions. By necessity, this would mean that all business decisions would be done more slowly, and logistics would be delayed in responding to any changes. All materials and products would arrive later than in a society with punctual meetings and decisions, so people would wait longer for things they requested. However, they may also have more time to share with those around them. They are not spending that time participating in the proverbial “rat race”.

It’s a tradeoff between swift gratification of material wants and needs versus having more time to spend relaxing with one’s community.

Are there ways of avoiding having to make this tradeoff, to have both more personal time and also more material convenience, and to let people further customize the ratio based on their own individual preferences? Most likely. And yes, those approaches will require committing to mutual expectations, whether those expectations are exacting or flexible.

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Dispirited Ethics Notes That Won’t Make A Ripple Or Change Anything So Why Do I Bother?, 7/8/22

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Beset with self-doubt, anxiety, frustration, despair and futility today. I apologize in advance in case it colors my prose…

1. Again, making the public stupid. I heard a news-reader this morning read directly from a White House press release stating that President Biden was going to announce to the nation that he was signing an executive order “guaranteeing” women’s “reproductive health” and access to abortions. This combination of official deception and journalism negligence is why so many members of the public think the President is a king. Whatever the announcement is, it can’t trump state laws. It can’t make federal law. Those of us who actually pay attention know what this is: pro-abortion activists and Democratic donors told the White House that they are furious that Biden isn’t prominently “fighting” for abortion. This is the result: grandstanding. Continue reading →