President’s Day On Ethics Alarms: The Nation’s Incompetent, Disrespectful, Unethical Treatment Of George Washington’s Birthday [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

How many Americans of our rich national past have a birthday celebrated as a national holiday? One: Martin Luther King. That surely makes the anti-white racists and the “the most important aspect of the United States is its racial divisions” gang—you know, Democrats—happy, but it is also misleading and ridiculous. The most important single figure, black, brown, white or whatever it is currently acceptable to call Asians and Native Americans (I haven’t checked this morning), is George Washington. He was, as George Will likes to say, “the indispensable man”—no George, no U.S. His birthday absolutely should be a national holiday.

Yet it isn’t, due to a confluence of factors. You can’t call today “George Washington’s Birthday,” because the date is February 21, and George was born on the 22nd. In the just-launched 4th season of Amazon’s clever and brilliantly cast comedy series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” the heroine, on the road, learns that her parents are having a birthday party for her young son. “The real date wasn’t good for me,” her very weird father (Tony Shaloub) explains. “He’s five! He won’t notice.” “What kind of people change a kid’s birthday?” she protests.

Americans. And worse, we did it to the man to whom we owe the greatest debt of all.

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The “Sub-Minimum Wage” Debate

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I confess, I was completely unaware of this issue, or the fact that we even have a so-called “sub-minimum wage.” Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act allows individuals with Down Syndrome or other intellectual or developmental disabilities to take certain specially regulated jobs at less than the minimum wage. The usual “raise the minimum wage” crowd wants the exception eliminated, and many states are preparing to do so. Advocates for the disabled and Down Syndrome individuals argue that it is important to keep the sub-minimum wage.

I don’t understand this controversy at all.

Opponents of eliminating the sub-minimum wage argue that it will cause many Down Syndrome individuals to lose their jobs. Of course it will, but how is this different from the fate of all the minimally skilled workers without technical disabilities who lose their jobs when the regular minimum wage is raised? Why is their plight less urgent than that of the disabled? If it is acknowledged that a sub-minimum wage keeps those who cannot perform at a level worth the minimum wage in the work force, why limit that rationale to the genetically disadvantaged?

But the opponents of killing the sub-minimum wage rely on the worst possible arguments to support keeping it. Here’s the “Dissenting Statement and Rebuttal of Commissioner Gail L. Heriot in Report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: Subminimum Wages: Impact on the Civil Rights of People with Disabilities. (September 17, 2020).” Heriot, one of the few conservatives on the Commission, writes,

Section 14(c) was adopted in 1938 at the same time as the first federal
minimum wage. Back then it was believed—no doubt correctly—that a federal  minimum wage would cause many disabled persons to become unemployable. An exception was thus created.

(There is also a time-limited exception for youth employment.)

Why wasn’t it also believed that the same principle would apply to every other individual, handicapped or not, who was unable to perform a job worth the minimum wage? Isn’t the assumption that Down Syndrome sufferers are less employable than than the ordinary lazy, poorly educated, unmotivated and none-too-bright American low-skilled worker simple bigotry? My experience with Down Syndrome workers is that they are often better at their jobs than their non-Down peers—harder working, more polite, more reliable. If a sub-minimum wage makes sense, then a minimum wage makes no sense. Continue reading →

The Women’s Free Skate Disaster Everybody Needed To See

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Now let’s see if any lessons were learned. I’m dubious.

As even those, like me, who have the integrity combined with a low nausea threshold that prevented me from watching China’s version of the 1936 Munich Olympics, now know about Olympics darling doper Kamila Valieva choking spectacularly in the Women’s Free Skate long program and falling out of the medal race. One has to feel sympathy for the girl, who was subjected to unimaginable pressures because of a tangle of terrible, stupid, unethical decisions made by the adults around her. Beyond that, the result was perfect, exposing so much of what is corrupt and intolerable about so many things: the Olympics generally, these Olympics, women’s skating, women’s sports, Russia, and more.

We begin with the fact that Valieva should never have been allowed to skate in the individual event after testing positive for a banned substance before the Games. The reasoning of the Olympics powers that holding her to the same standards that adults would be held to in the same events she competes with them is subjecting her to “harm” is unethical, the ultimate “Think of the children!’ rationalization. Gee, you idiots, how did that harm avoidance plan work out for her? In what universe would the 15-year-old skater be more harmed by being doped out of the Olympics as any adult skater would be, than by having to compete with a major scandal hanging over her head, and collapsing under the pressure? Sure, what happened was moral luck, but the best case scenario would have also been terrible: the girl stuns the world with a brilliant program, and every medal remains in limbo for months.

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On “Decertification,” Everybody’s Wrong (Or Lying)…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

When everybody’s unethical, it begins to be difficult to figure out what “ethical” would be.

In Wisconsin, some Republican officials have launched a serious (though ridiculous) “decertification” effort, an effort to persuade the Wisconsin Legislature to rescind the state’s 10 electoral votes, thereby starting a movement in other states where President Trump lost by a narrow margin and there are reasons to doubt the integrity of the count. In Arizona, a Republican state legislator running for secretary of state, and other GOP candidates for Congress, have also called for withdrawing the state’s electoral votes, which went to President Biden. Last September, Trump wrote a letter to Georgia officials asking them to decertify Biden’s Peach Tree State victory, but there was no response, appropriately.

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Ethics Summary Of Stories I Would Have Full Posts On If Today Hadn’t Been FUBAR, 2/19/2022

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

1. Well this is certainly moronic…NBC senior reporter Alex Sietz-Wald said out-loud on MSNBC that the biggest challenge for Democrat governors ending their mask mandates is that the Left has made mask-wearing such a fetish of their woke identity that they may resist giving it up:

So I think this is going to be a challenge for a lot of Democratic leaders to get their base comfortable with the idea of going back to normal. I mean, for the past two years so much of the identity of what it meant to be a Democrat, to follow the science, was tied up in masking and following these rules and regulations. And if you didn’t do that, you were, you know, a bad person, you were Ron DeSantis, you were a denier. So, now, these Democratic leaders need to get their base comfortable with unwinding all of that.

Follow which science when? The masking has long been virtue-signalling for those who think complying with arbitrary authoritarian edicts is virtuous. It was most appropriate that the first Democrat TV personality to proclaim that “I would wear a mask and I might do that indefinitely. Why do I need the flu or a cold even?” was “The View’s” resident moron, Joy Behar. In a moment of rare self-awareness, she attributed this decision to “the little voice in her head.” Indeed, few have smaller ones, and Joy proved it by being caught just hours later dining out with her friends without a mask. Continue reading →

Remembering The Donner Party

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

On February 19, 1847, rescuers finally reached the surviving members of one of the great ethics challenges of U.S. history, the Donner Party, a group of California-bound emigrants stranded by snow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains that ended up resorting to cannibalism when they were trapped by bad weather.

89 pioneers including 31 members of the Donner and Reed families set out in a wagon train from Springfield, Illinois the previous summer. They decided to try the so-called “Hastings Cutoff,” a supposed short-cut that an ambitious attorney, Lansford Hastings, had mentioned in 1845 in “The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California,” his well-selling book that claimed to be one-stop guide to traveling West.

The book contained a passing reference to a route that would save more than 300 miles over the traditional California Trail that previous emigrants had used, saying, “The most direct route, for the California emigrants, would be to leave the Oregon route, about two hundred miles east from Fort Hall, thence bearing west southwest, to the Salt Lake; and thence continuing down to the bay of St. Francisco.”

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Ethics Observations On A Discrimination Enabler’s Confession

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Over at Quillette, an American University teacher calling himself “Keith David” (I can’t find a reference for him) writes “A Student Sleuth Found Evidence that Our University Practices Reverse Racism. Here’s Why I Advised Him Not to Publish It.”

It is a long article, and deserves to be read in its entirety even at the risk of having your head explode. I find the author’s approach to the problem both typical and depressing, but before I enumerate my reactions, here are some major points in the article: Continue reading →

Our Unprofessional Professionals, Our Inexpert Experts: The Ethicist And The Economist

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

One of the most disturbing aspects of the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck was the ugly spectacle of once esteemed professions deciding en masse to ditch their integrity in order to join the “Get Trump!” mob with the cool kids. Historians, lawyers, judges, psychiatrists, scholars, civil libertarians, journalists, educators…yes, and ethicists—all these groups disgraced themselves and breached the one, overarching mandate for those who supposedly labor for the public good: be trustworthy. Then came The Great Stupid, compounding the damage to society and the culture by showing “experts” to be equally unreliable, burdened as they were by crippling bias, political agendas, and flawed skills and assumptions.

Two recent examples highlighted this trend. First up, the ethicist.

Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a professor at Duke Law School, is co-director of the Center for Sports Law & Policy and a senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. She authored a jaw-droppingly lame op-ed for the Washington Post headlined, “Yes, Kamila Valieva should be skating in Beijing.” There isn’t a single valid ethical principle behind her entire, constructed-for-sentimentalists argument.

Her first sentence would normally make me quit reading any opinion piece: “Russian Kamila Valieva is the best figure skater on the planet, she is gorgeous to watch perform and she should be skating in Beijing.” This is the equivalent of “Barry Bonds is a great player and we should ignore the fact that’s he’s a steroid cheat.” An ethicist is openly elevating the most obvious non-ethical consideration seasoned with personal bias, that the author thinks she is “gorgeous” on the ice, over the clear ethical consideration that the skater broke the rules, and had they been enforced, she wouldn’t be at the Olympics at all.

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That Emergency Open Forum Two Weeks Ago Was Such A Blast, Let’s Do It Again!

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Fortuitously, this time the emergency room visit is occurring on a Friday, when an open forum would normally occur anyway! What luck! Calloo callay!

Go crazy with ethics analysis and provocation, please. I’ll see ya when I see ya…

An Indiana School Allowed Parents To Let Parents Opt Their Kids Out Of Black History Month Lessons? GOOD!

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Two Washington Post Ethics Dunce-worthy episodes, back to back!

The Post published this headline as if it was an obvious, res ipsa loquitur, outrage:

An Indiana school planned Black History Month lessons. A letter sent to parents allowed them to opt out.

“Those crazy, racist conservatives again!” was the unstated assumption of the Post’s article. After the consent form…

….was circulated on social media, such an uproar was raised by fans of anti-America indoctrination in the public schools that the school district Superintendent Emily Tracy felt that she had to send a letter to families and staff members, acknowledging the opt-out form and promising that the school district is “gathering more information on the matter” but “In the meantime, know that we support teaching about the facts in our history including historical injustices. Our District is and will continue to be committed to having compassion for all and supporting an education community that will allow all students, staff, families and community members the opportunity to feel welcome.” Continue reading →