Comment Of The Day (2): “Today’s Dobbs Leak Freakout Developments And Observations”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This Comment of the Day, by Chris Marschner, is on a different topic entirely, the much discussed assertion by Justice Alito in his draft opinion that abortion cannot legitimately be called a Constitutional right because unlike the other rights, it was generally disapproved in American society and condemned or regarded as shameful over centuries of Western culture.

Chris’ comment was posted in rebuttal of another by esteemed commenter zoebrain, who wrote,

Women Health. Summer 1979;4(2):159-67.
Abortion in early America : Z Acevedo

“This piece describes abortion practices in use from the 1600s to the 19th century among the inhabitants of North America. The abortive techniques of women from different ethnic and racial groups as found in historical literature are revealed. Thus, the point is made that abortion is not simply a “now issue” that effects select women. Instead, it is demonstrated that it is a widespread practice as solidly rooted in our past as it is in the present.”

” Abortion was frequently practiced in North America during the period from 1600 to 1900. Many tribal societies knew how to induce abortions. They used a variety of methods including the use of black root and cedar root as abortifacient agents. During the colonial period, the legality of abortion varied from colony to colony and reflected the attitude of the European country which controlled the specific colony. In the British colonies abortions were legal if they were performed prior to quickening. In the French colonies abortions were frequently performed despite the fact that they were considered to be illegal. In the Spanish and Portuguese colonies abortion was illegal. From 1776 until the mid-1800s abortion was viewed as socially unacceptable; however, abortions were not illegal in most states. During the 1860s a number of states passed anti-abortion laws. Most of these laws were ambiguous and difficult to enforce. After 1860 stronger anti-abortion laws were passed and these laws were more vigorously enforced. ”

Alito is factually incorrect in his statements.

This is as good a place as any to remind readers that comments chosen as a Comment of the Day does not necessarily represent my position or that of Ethics Alarms.

Here is Chris Maschner’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Today’s Dobbs Leak Freakout Developments And Observations”…

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Zoe: Your citation was published in 1979, six years after Roe was decided. There would be no reason to publish this unless the practice was in need of a defense. That in itself suggests that significant attitudinal differences existed in American society even after Roe was decided. Those differences are still prevalent today and may even be more entrenched throughout the nation. Alito’s opinion made the point that Roe and Casey could not be settled simply by decree.

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day (1): “Today’s Dobbs Leak Freakout Developments And Observations”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Keeping up with the Supreme Court draft Alito opinion Freakout and the other ethics offal flying around has put me seriously behind in posting deserving Comments of the Day. There are two related to the May 5 Freakout post alone; this is the first of them, a neat summary of the state of affairs in Woke World.

Here is sooner 8728’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Today’s Dobbs Leak Freakout Developments And Observations”…

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If you notice, the far left’s policies are always about removing responsibility for bad decisions. You had reckless sex? Get rid of the baby. You didn’t pay your rent because you smoked pot and lost your job? Unemployment benefits. You don’t want to go back to work because you have an irrational fear of COVID-19? Let’s keep paying your rent. You committed a crime (and you are a minority), no jail time or possibly even a fine.

The test is too hard? Lower the standards. You can’t speak proper English? Attack proper English as elitist. Your culture teaches that it’s okay to beat your wife? Don’t judge other cultures who are different than you? There’s a dumbing down going on in this country. [Host’s Note: This process is what Ethics Alarms refers to as “The Great Stupid.”] Continue reading →

Writer Jumi Bello Just Doesn’t Quite Get That “Plagiarism” Thingy, Or “What An Idiot!”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This hilarious story of an epic Ethics Dunce immediately reminded me of the classic Charles Addams cartoon above.

Jumi Bello, 30, was making the finishing touches on her debut novel “The Leaving,” scheduled to be released this summer, but after she disclosed to her publisher that she had expropriated material from other sources, the book was pulled. Bello then wrote a personal essay on the website Literary Hub explaining how her plagiarism came about.  The novel was about a young black woman’s unplanned pregnancy. Bello wrote that she had never been pregnant and searched for descriptions of the experience on the web.

“I tell myself I’m just borrowing and changing the language,”  Bello wrote in the essay, which was supposed to be a cautionary tale for other writers who might rationalize plagiarism.  “I tell myself I will rewrite these parts later during the editorial phase. I will make this story mine again.”

After the essay was published,  writers and publications such as Gawker, pointed out that Bello’s essay about plagiarism also had unethically used the writings of others without attribution. Yes, her essay about plagiarism was plagiarized.

Literary Hub removed the essay and said in a statement, “Because of inconsistencies in the story and, crucially, a further incident of plagiarism in the published piece, we decided to pull the essay.” But wait! There’s more! She plagiarized from a website about plagiarism! Jonathan Bailey, who writes the website Plagiarism Today, wrote that Bello’s essay “included poor paraphrasing without attribution of an article that I wrote over a decade ago.”

What an idiot.

And she can quote me.

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Pointer and Facts: New York Times.

Facebook Is Factchecking Memes Now…But Only Those Progressives Don’t Like

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Alveda King, the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., shared a pro-life meme on Facebook that claims that readers’ grandmothers carried part of them inside their wombs. Facebook chose to impugn the post by claiming it “lacked context.” Well of course it did. It’s a meme. The topic is complex, and the meme only summarizes one interpretation of the facts. It seems clear that Facebook applied a different standard for this expression of a point of view that could be judged an anti-abortion opinion than it had for literally millions of left-of-center memes it users have posted. For example, Facebook had no problem with this idiotic meme posted by a friend of mine who should know better:

Talk about “missing context”! Nor did Facebook have any issued with this meme during the Kavanaugh hearings:

Context? How about outright lies? Nah, there’s no Facebook anti-conservative bias… Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Vulgar Exclamation That Wasn’t

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This is a weird ethics quiz, I’ll admit: it involves conduct that didn’t really take place.

In a game between the Cleveland “Guardians” (they are really the Indians) and Chicago White Sox, Cleveland had a runner on second with two outs when Owen Miller lifted an easy fly to right field, where Chicago outfielder Gavin Sheets should have easily made the play. Instead, in what is technically called a “clank,” the ball bounced right off his glove and went past him for an embarrassing error. The runner on second scored, and Cleveland’s radio color commentator, former player Rick Manning, could be heard saying “Are you shitting me?” as play-by-play man Tom Hamilton described the error.

Much hilarity ensued on social media.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

What is the fair and responsible consequence for a professional broadcaster who utters a spontaneous vulgarity or obscenity on the air?

Continue reading →

Ethics Signs And Portents, 5/10/2022: Langella’s Lament, Kellogg’s Indoctrination, Lightfoot’s Incitement, And Yellen’s idiocy.

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

That photo of the dueling signs in my neighborhood (Alexandria, VA) is from the Washington Post last week. Ethics Alarms first noted this obnoxious phenomenon here in 2016, with several updates since.

That’s some scoop there, Lois Lane!

1. Now here’s an even more obnoxious sign of the times: cereal boxes presuming to indoctrinate kids. What possible excuse is there for this, on the side of this Kellogg’s box:

I don’t care about the box design or the cereal: it’s a product, and if a parent wants to buy it, swell. It’s a marketing gimmick. Yuck, but so what? However, this, on the side panel, steps over the line into the culture wars and indoctrination. Not on my breakfast table…

2. Oh, fine: the Treasury Secretary is an idiot as well as an Ethics Dunce. Janet Yellen is now on record as endorsing one of the more offensive and cretinous arguments in favor of Roe v. Wade: snuffing out more children in the womb is good for the economy! “I believe that eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades,” she said in response to a question at a Senate Banking Committee hearing. Continue reading →

And The Shackles Tighten: Weaponizing Accreditation For Ideological Conformity

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC) has voted to downgrade the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media to “provisional accreditation” status. Why? ACEJMC felt that the school’s commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) was less than robust after journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones turned down a tenured position there. A controversy over her hiring arose in 2021 when  Hannah-Jones was offered the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, but only as a five-year contract position instead of tenure. Then, after her supporters forced the trustees to offer tenure by accusing them of racism—it always works! —Hannah-Jones rejected the school to take a tenured position at Howard University.

“[T]he UNC Hussman School is dealing with an existential crisis both internally and externally,” the ACEJMC wrote. “The [Hannah-Jones] controversy… exposed long-standing problems. Many stem from inconsistencies in executing the goals in the 2016 Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan.”

No, the fact that the school offered a thoroughly exposed fake historian and fact-manipulating, racist journalist  a teaching position at all raise questions about Hussman being fit to train journalists. Nikole Hannah-Jones is an unscrupulous activist, not a journalist, and the dishonesty and misrepresentations of American history in her polemic “1619 Project” are not in serious dispute. She should not have been offered the chair in the first place. The should not be employed as a journalist, never mind being paid to teach journalism. Continue reading →

SCOTUS Leak Freakout Update: The Times’ Unethical Editorial Of The Month

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

It’s rare that one sees blunt incivility in an old and revered political publication like the National Review, but here was the headline of Charles Cook’s column there yesterday:

The New York Times’ Editorial Board Is Apparently Extremely Stupid

I had read the editorial and my reaction had been the same, except that I would have been tempted to leave out “apparently.” I’d also categorize this as old news, at least to readers of Ethics Alarms. Then, for a nonce, I regretted the absence of self-exiled commenter “A Friend,” since his predictable efforts to defend the indefensible in the Times would have been particularly entertaining in this case.

Here’s the the paragraph Cooke was reacting to:

Imagine that every state were free to choose whether to allow Black people and white people to marry. Some states would permit such marriages; others probably wouldn’t. The laws would be a mishmash, and interracial couples would suffer, legally consigned to second-class status depending on where they lived.

This is the newspaper that is regarded as the flagship of the news media. This is the newspaper that holds itself up as a paragon of objective news analysis. This is a newspaper that claims that its perspective isn’t skewed by a progressive bias.

This is the newspaper I have been paying almost 90 bucks a month to have delivered every day for four years. Yes, I’m stupid too.

Here, in part, is what Cooke writes in his understandable disgust: Continue reading →

The New York Times Wordle Ethics Zugzwang

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Boy, did the Times deserve this.

The paper acquired the online game Wordle earlier this year after it became a viral hit. Answers to the puzzle game are assigned months in advance. In a pure coincidence reminiscent of the London crossword puzzle incident that almost derailed D-Day, yesterday’s Worldle answer happened to evoke the current freakout over the draft Supreme Court opinion that suggests that Roe v. Wade may finally be going down for the count. The answer was “fetus.”

Can’t have that! The Times moved quickly to de-trigger the game for sensitive (and virtuously woke) devotees, writing,

Continue reading →

Monday Ethics Madness, 5/9/2022: Villains! Leakers,The Paid Liar, The ABA, And More

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Major Clipton’s been AWOL lately. Good to have him back, since his commentary is especially germane.

To begin on an upbeat note: there is a house on the route I walk Spuds in the evening that has started having elaborate lawn and porch decorations all year round. The elaborate Halloween display began in late September and lasted until November, when a giant inflatable turkey took over as well as some horns of plenty. Right after Thanksgiving the outrageous Christmas decorations went up. January featured a 2022 display, which gave way to the family’s best yet, a Mardi Gras-themed salute complete with purple, green and orange lights, New Orleans street signs, and plastic beads hanging from the trees. That was up through March. During April, the yard was being landscaped, and I wondered what was in store for May.

There is a full-size inflated Jabba the Hutt on the porch.

I am tempted to knock on their door and tell the family what a boon their whimsy is to the neighborhood. It is such a welcome contrast with the many virtue-signalling scolds who subject us to Black Lives Matter endorsements and various rainbow lawns signs shouting such profound messages as “Love is Love” and “Ramalamadingdong.”

1. Ethics Villain: Jen Psaki, and President Biden is accountable. The demonstrations outside the homes of Supreme Court Justices continue, Justice Alito has been moved to a secure, undisclosed location, and Psaki muttered platitudes when asked if Biden condemns the [illegal!] harassment of the Justices. She also was asked if Biden condemned the leak, and she ignored the question.

But Donald Trump undermined democratic institutions. Continue reading →