Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 1/21/2022: Christmas’s And Meat Loaf’s End Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Meat Loaf has died. The hilariously theatrical pop singer with the big voice was responsible for one of the great ethics songs: “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights.” It packed almost everything into one epic musical journey: temptation, non-ethical considerations vs. ethics, betrayal, consequences and cosmic retribution.

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Absent a last-minute reprieve or a relapse of whatever it is that I’ve been battling, this looks like the final day for our especially lovely, inspiring Christmas tree. I always feel like I’m making the world a little meaner and less hopeful when I take it down. This post, from three years ago, still stands.

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In U.S. ethics history, January 21 stands for one of the more significant pardons in American Presidential annals, because in 1977 Jimmy Carter pardoned all those young men, hundreds of thousands of them, who had fled to Canada rather than risk being drafted to fight in Vietnam. (Only half came back. I am tempted to say, “Good!,” but I won’t…) Those who left as a matter of principle and those who ran off because they wouldn’t have fought for their country under any circumstances (this was the era of “Better Red than Dead,” after all) were treated the same. It was a utilitarian trade-off, and whether the President’s decision was unethical (my Vietnam vet friends said it made them feel like suckers) or ethical (it definitely helped heal the national divisions over that misguided conflict), it was certainly brave and consequential. For example, that single act probably killed the draft as much as anything else.

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Feel free to debate that issue here; I’m not up to it today myself. There won’t be the usual Friday Open Forum because there was one just two days ago (and it’s still open!). Full disclosure: in my fevered state, I really thought it was Friday when it was Wednesday.

1. This video is worrisome if it’s genuine, and it may not be. A young woman freaks out after getting a positive Wuhan variant test result, and acts as if she’s been sentenced to die on the rack and wheel. I fear this is what two years of politically-driven pandemic hysteria is turning our rising generations into: cowards, whiners, phobics and weenies. Her tearful lament ““The coolest characteristic about myself is that I haven’t gotten it!” is particularly nauseating. Continue reading →

Fake News Watch 2: The Missing Mask

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Compared to the above mass fake news about mass graves that have not, in fact, been verified, NPR’s bit of false reporting on Supreme Court intrigue seems trivial, and is. NPR’s longtime liberal-leaning Supreme Court reporter impugned Democratic Party boogie man Neil Gorsuch—He stole Merrick Garland’s seat!—by writing that Mean Neil was trying to kill Justice Sotomayor ( who “has diabetes, a condition that puts her at high risk for serious illness, or even death” from the Wuhan virus) or something, because he refused to wear a mask despite Justice Roberts “asking” him to.  Sotomayor, therefore, has to participate in the Court’s work via Zoom. Gorsuch is, apparently, fully vaccinated, and doesn’t have the virus. Continue reading →

Fake News Watch: 1. The Graves

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

This was another bad week for media trust, or would be, if the news media would fairly report its own unethical behavior.

Sometimes my instincts serve me well. I have piles of New York Times articles lying around my office, all intended to be the basis of future posts. Back in October, I was preparing to write a post based on this story and this one, about “evidence that 215 children were buried on the grounds of a British Columbia school, one of the many in Canada set up to forcibly assimilate them.” The stories about mass graves started arriving in May of last year, and the allegations were horrific. “In the past four weeks, two Indigenous communities said they have discovered hundreds of unmarked graves of children who may have died at the schools of disease or neglect, or even been killed,” wrote the Times.

I didn’t write that post; something about the story seemed off to me. This was true despite the fact that my confirmation bias regarding misdeeds on the part of the Catholic Church, which ran the schools, is strong.

It didn’t seem off to the mainstream media, though. CNN reported a “gruesome discovery.” The Washington Post wrote that the “mass grave” “dragged the horror of Canada’s mistreatment of Indigenous people back into the spotlight.” The unmarked burial place of children was reported to the public as fact. The photo above, from the National Post, was captioned, “Hundreds of children’s shoes remain in place at a memorial outside the Alberta Legislature building in Edmonton on Monday May 31, 2021. A vigil was held Sunday May 30, 2021 in memory of the 215 indigenous children whose remains were discovered on the grounds of a former Roman Catholic church residential school in Kamloops, B.C.”

Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The President’s Press Conference And Reactions To It

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

In no particular order…

  • On Hugh Hewitt’s show, Senator Rand Paul opined that President Biden shouldn’t be permitted to speak in public because it was dangerous. One might think that was an over-the-top statement (though censoring the last President was an ongoing project of Democrats, eventually executed by the party’s social media tools), but in the press conference yesterday, Biden appeared to give Russia a green light to invade the Ukraine. That’s pretty dangerous, I’d say.

The situation is clear: Putin is sabre-rattling about taking over the Ukraine in hopes of getting valuable concessions from the West to stay on his side of the border.  Biden is supposed to be making it clear that to do so would have unacceptable consequences, not by drawing an imaginary “red line” that he wouldn’t have the guts to enforce ( Robert Ludlum would have called this “The Obama Obfuscation”), but by being a convincing and formidable champion of international law whom Putin would have reason to fear. Instead, yesterday Biden offered a bribe to Putin by volunteering that NATO won’t make Ukraine a member. That’s bone-headed negotiation practice: giving away a bargaining chip without being assured of anything in return. (Joe has clearly not studied the Cuban Missile Crisis.) Then Biden suggested Putin “has no choice” but to invade now, and that his “guess” was that Putin “probably would go in.”  Oh! Then it’s all right I guess! Biden also said that the invasion would be successful: “The cost of going into Ukraine in terms of physical loss of life for the Russians — they’ll be able to prevail over time, but it’s going to be heavy.” In the alternative, Biden implied Russia might well get away with “a minor incursion.” Translation: “My advice, Vlad is take over  one piece of the Ukraine at a time.” 

Has any President uttered such dangerous statements affecting another nation’s sovereignty during a press conference? Paul has a case. Continue reading →

What Do You Know: Illumination Still Works! Sometimes, Anyway…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This is an encouraging development. Maybe, just maybe, cumulative arguments like those that appear at Ethics Alarms eventually create positive change by shining light on unethical situations capable of remedy, and forcing lazy, cowardly or inattentive authorities to change course.

It’s nice to think so, anyway.

Spurred by the escalating controversy over the unfair triumphs of transgender Penn swimmer Lia Thomas in NCAA women’s meets, the NCAA announced a crucial change in its policy regarding transgender athletes. The eligibility of  transgender athletes to compete with women will now follow the sport-by-sport model adopted by the U.S. and international Olympic committees.  The new policy goes into effect immediately.

It would seem to mean that Lia, formerly James, will be out of the pool. USA Swimming policies follow the International Olympic Committee, and IOC’s rules state:

“Trans female athletes must demonstrate a total testosterone level in serum below 10 nmol/L for at least 12 consecutive months prior to competition and must remain below this threshold throughout the period of desired eligibility to compete in the female category in any event.”

What will happen to all those records Thomas set while hovering somewhere between male and female has not been determined.

I’m sure the NCAA would have been happy to remain blindly woke if it could have gotten away with it. If Ethics Alarms contributed in some tiny way to making sure they didn’t, that’s encouraging.

What would be even more encouraging is if feminists would stand up for the female athletes they fought so hard for, rather than meekly parroting LGTBQ propaganda.

 

 

 

When Ethics Alarms Don’t Work, Haven’t Been Installed, And Are Not Required In A Rotting Public School System, You Get This…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Yes, your eyes don’t deceive you and the photo isn’t doctored. That’s a teacher in one of the elementary schools at the North Penn School District taping a mask to the face of a student. Some quick-fingered fellow student captured the moment and posted it on social media—give THAT student a civic contribution award.

Here’s the self-damning statement about the incident from the North Penn School District: Continue reading →

Ethics Shortcuts, 1/19/2022

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Would you guess that I had to look at hundreds of “shortcut” graphics before I found a single one that didn’t relate to computers?

This is a dull date in ethics history. One event worthy of ethics note is the so-called “Dean Scream,” when in 2004, Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean ad-libbed a shriek at the end of a enthusiastic pledge to keep fighting all the way to the convention. He had just finished third in the Iowa Caucuses despite being the supposed front-runner for the nomination according to many prognosticators. But all anyone remembered after that January 19 night was the scream, which was played on loops on talk radio and opened Dean up to merciless ridicule. It was very unfair to Dean, of course, but a preview of what was to come in 21st Century politics, where sound bite mockery overwhelmed substantive argument.  Dean was an unqualified, mean-spirited, radical jerk, as he has proven repeatedly since; those qualities should have ended his career in electoral politics, not a momentarily loss of vocal control. This is no way to run a democracy.

I know a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, but I was curious about whether I felt the same way about the “Dean Scream” when it occurred. So I checked the Ethics Scoreboard, the Ethics Alarm predecessor that operated from 2004 to 2009, and..I did! In 2006, I included this in a longer post about flaming laptops:

Global circulation of bad moments captured on video, audio, or e-mail may not be ethical when it serves no purpose other than to embarrass someone for amusement or to score cheap political points. The Scoreboard has noted such examples as the sleeping cable repairman, Michael Moore’s gleeful use of footage in “Fahrenheit 911” that showed the former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz licking his comb, and the media’s malicious use of the “Dean scream” tape to make Howard Dean look like a lunatic, effectively sinking his presidential bid. Taking an insensitive or uncivil personal e-mail from another and sending it on a world wide tour to humiliate the writer is similarly unethical.

The fact that the nation was fortunate to be rid of Dean (he did later serve as the DNC Chair) is just moral luck.

1. Bias not only makes you stupid, it makes you unqualified to run the FCC. If the President is serious about seeking unity and bipartisanship, why does he keep nominating proto-single-party ideologues like this? His nominee for commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission has repeatedly tweeted her belief that Fox New is a “threat to democracy,” the current code for “dares to oppose progressive policies.” Gigi Sohn was announced as Biden’s FCC nominee in October, and was hyped as  “one of the nation’s leading public advocates for open, affordable, and democratic communications networks.” When she was not confirmed in 2021, Biden re-nominated Sohn this month. The nomination is, as they say, DOA, and should be. In one 2019 tweet, Sohn said, 

“I agree that scrutiny of big tech is essential, as is scrutiny of big telecom, cable & media. And trust me, the latter have played their own role in destroying democracy & electing autocrats. Like, say, Fox News?” 

One year later, when another Twitterer complained about social media censoring  posts about the Hunter Biden laptop story, Sohn replied: “So do you still want me to believe that social media is more dangerous to our democracy than Fox News?”

Without Fox News, for all its own biases, crudeness and excesses, broadcast news would be unanimous and relentless progressive and Democratic Party propaganda….and that is just what the Biden Administration wants, apparently. Sohn’s nomination goes right onto the Ethics Alarms list of brazen ways Democrats are attempting to gut democracy while accusing Donald Trump, conservatives and Republicans of threatening it.

2. Sometimes??? Jonathan Chait has a long and overwhelmingly negative rap sheet on Ethics Alarms, but he recently authored a post that bravely countered the prevailing progressive narrative, which I will discuss in a later post. But its title! “Progressives Still Haven’t Reckoned With It. Sometimes you need to own up to an error so it’s not repeated.”

I think the word you’re looking for, Jonathan, is “always” …which means you have a lot of backtracking to do. Continue reading →

Black Like Us

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

 Confirming my own half-baked research, apparently African-American actors are indeed disproportionately represented in TV commercials now. American Thinker records,

In the United States today, the White population (not including Hispanics) is 57.8%….Blacks comprise 14% of the U.S. population but appear in 50% of commercials. White actors now appear to promote health insurance, gold, loans, and some medicines. Moreover, if a White person appears in a commercial, he/she is usually old, sick, a freak, or at the very least, an appendage to a Black partner. If there’s a doctor on the screen, he’s usually Black, while the patient is usually White. Caucasian young men appear in only 4% of the commercials! If some aliens began to study the population of Planet Earth through our TV commercials they would have a somewhat distorted picture of Americans, to put it mildly.

Continue reading →

Open Forum: You Are The Substitute Teachers Now

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

On days like this I am especially grateful for both the Ethics Alarms Open Forums and the verve and seriousness with which readers here participate in them.

I thought of the substitute teacher theme because of a story circulating on social media, so it must be true. A substitute teacher (I always felt sorry for them, didn’t you?) claimed on Tik-Tok that she had been fired by one school because she refused to “meow” back to a girl in the class who, she was told by the students, “identified” as a kitten. The teacher laughed, made a joke about a litter box, and the girl/kitten complained. I assume that the story is fake and intended to make a point that hardly needs to be made again, but the fact that we can’t be 100% certain it’s fake is the real ethics issue here. How did we allow people so extreme and irrational to have so much influence over the culture that we would even be in doubt? Can this get worse? Can it be reversed?

But heck, I might have dreamed the whole thing anyway in my fevered state. Never mind. I’m going back to bed; I just sneezed on the screen.

Ethics Observations On An Article That Ruined My Day

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

It’s difficult for me to formulate complicated arguments when I’m drugged to the gills and sick, so I am, reluctantly, delaying a couple of pieces on the metaphorical runway to catch up on what other people are writing. Big mistake. I just finished a substack post by Paul Musgrave, a political scientist and writer whose newsletter is called “Systematic Hatreds.” It takes its title from a line in “The Education of Henry Adams,” one of my father’s favorite books: “Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds.” Musgrave, whom I never heard of before, is writing about how he teaches what he calls “the post-legacy media generation.”

It is clear early on in his depressing piece that that almost no one in that generation has heard of Henry Adams, or John Quincy Adams, Abigail Adams, and probably not John Adams either. There’s an excellent chance few have even heard of Morticia Addams, Charles Addams, or know that Eric Adams is the latest mayor of New York City. In fact, it’s quite fair to conclude that none of these soon-to-be-crucial citizens know much of anything at all, because they do not read—literally, do not—and get whatever information the do get from similarly handicapped peers on social media. Musgrave is in the trenches, and he writes,

Continue reading →