Gallup has another of its yearly trust polls out, this one covering institutions. It should surprise no one that virtually every institution covered showed a decline in public trust. This is a long-term trend, and for a democracy, an existential threat that our leaders in all of those institutions have not been taking sufficiently seriously. The one surprise in the survey is that the only institution that showed a rise in public trust since last year: the police!
Here is the list:
Pretty dead around here yesterday; my fault, I guess. I hate when life gets in the way of ethics.
On July 18, 1989, 21-year-old Rebecca Schaeffer, a rising Hollywood actress who had starred with Pam Dawber (of “Mork and Mindy” fame) in the television sitcom “My Sister Sam” was murdered at her Los Angeles home by Robert John Bardo, a deranged stalker who was obsessed with her. Like a lot of horrible events, this one had some beneficial results: stalking was finally recognized as an extreme and dangerous form of sexual harassment, and not as mere cute romantic perseverance, as it was represented in, for example, “The Graduate.”
In 1969 on this date, Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts drove off a rickety bridge on Chappaquiddick Island. Kennedy escaped his submerged car, but 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne drowned, and Kennedy did not report the fatal car accident for 10 hours while he, his aides and family members plotted how to frame the story to minimize the scandal. (Ted was extremely lucky—or maybe this was a canny part of the cover-up— that his negligent manslaughter didn’t get to the news media until Apollo 11 moon landing mission was nearing its climax) In one of the worst examples of “The King’s Pass” in U.S. history, Kennedy was never arrested or charged as he should have been, Kennedy hush money kept Mary Jo’s family at bay, and ethics-free Massachusetts voters kept re-electing the last of the Kennedy brothers to the U.S. Senate for decades. The episode did probably keep him from becoming President, so there’s that.
On July 18, 1925, Volume One of Adolf Hitler’s autobiography, “Mein Kampf,” a blue print for the nightmare to follow, was published. Enough said…
On this date in 1914, Labor martyr Joe Hill, the activist folksinger whose pro-labor folk songs included one that introduced the expression “pie in the sky,” was sentenced to die by a conservative and anti-Labor jury in Utah. He had been arrested and charged with murdering two Salt Lake City policemen during a grocery store robbery, but the evidence was flimsy, and his guilt has been debated ever since. Most historians think Hill’s execution by firing squad was political; nobody believes he was properly found guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
No date is devoid of some honorable birthdays—Nelson Mandella was born on July 18, as was John Glenn—but July 18 is marked by also being the birthday of the one man whose name became an insult: Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling. He was the Norwegian military officer and politician who became a Nazi collaborator and served as the figurehead leader of his country’s government during its Nazi occupation during World War II. After the war he was executed by a firing squad, and “quisling” now means “a traitor who collaborates with an enemy force.”
And an apparent unethical act on this date in 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt’s nomination for a precedent-breaking third Presidential term, illustrates the Ethics Incompleteness Principle. While George Washington’s self-imposed two-term limit was a wise and important safety-valve on the Presidency to make the rise of a popular dictator more difficult (and FDR was exactly the kind of man who was a threat to be such a figure), every ethics rule has an exception. Winston Churchill (among others) was convinced that any other President would have risked a Nazi victory in World War II, and he was right. Churchill lobbied FDR hard to break with tradition; after the war, that broken tradition became a Constitution mandate.
2. Baseball crowd ethics: An asshole in the Yankee Stadium left field bleachers threw a baseball at Red Sox leftfielder Alex Verdugo during last night’s Sox-Yankees game and hit him, causing Boston to pull its team off the field. This sort of thing used to happen a lot in the game’s primitive days a hundred years ago. It’s rare now, but less rare among Yankee fans than anywhere else. Other fans around the assailant cheered the attack, while some pointed him out to stadium security, which removed him, one hopes to a jail cell.
With this post. a follow-up to this one regarding the hypocritical and ominous Presidential attack on vaccine-related “disinformation” on Facebook, Ethics Alarms ends the suspension of George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who writes the generally excellent “Res Ipsa Loguitur” blog and who has distinguished himself during the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck for refusing to follow the unethical lead of his biased and Trump-Deranged colleagues in law and academia, and having the courage to point out many of their worst betrayals of the public trust. I suspended the professor at the beginning of June for carelessly advancing a favorite Democratic party Big Lie on his blog, that a media recount after the 2000 election showed George W. Bush had actually lost the popular vote in Florida, and thus Al Gore was the rightful winner of the Presidency. I wrote, “Ethics Alarms is giving him a month’s suspension, or until he fixes his error and apologizes.” Well, he sort of fixed the error but never apologized, so I made the suspension six weeks. I’m happy to be able to reference his blog again, and as a happy coincidence, one of his recent posts nicely supported what I had just written.
Turley pointed to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki admitting that the Biden administration is working with Facebook to flag “problematic” posts that “spread disinformation” on the Whan virus vaccine and related matters. She had said that the Administration has created “aggressive” policing systems to spot “misinformation” to be “flagged” for the social media companies. He wrote in part,
“Obviously, anyone can object to postings. There is a greater danger when the government has a systemic process for aggressively flagging material to be censored. The real problem however is with the censorship system itself. We have seen how there needs to be little coordination between political figures and the media to maintain controlled narratives in public debates and discussions.”
By “little” the sometimes obsessively cautious professor means “none.” He continues,
The first ethics take-away from President Biden’s attack on Facebook for “vaccine disinformation” is that the Left’s totalitarian tendencies and embrace of censorship become more obvious and less hidden every day.
The second ethics take-away is that Joe Biden, of all people, has a lot of gall complaining about social media disinformation when he is in the White House in large part because of it.
The third is that the entire Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck has been dominated by outright propaganda and intentional manipulation of public opinion by the news media, federal agencies, medical organizations and “experts,” and Democrats are particularly ethically estopped from complaining about the same process that they have been employing for more than five years to their advantage.
As he boarded Marine One for a weekend at the ol’ Presidential hide-out at Camp David in Maryland, President Biden was asked what his message was to social media platforms regarding vaccine disinformation.
“They’re killing people,” he said. “Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that — and they’re killing people.”
John Paul, aka JP, adds his experiences to the discussion of Wikipedia bias and ethics, broached yesterday in his Comment of the Day to Item #2 of the post, “Mid-Day Ethics Mop-Up, 7/15/2021: Trump Derangement, Wikipedia, And Fact-Checking”:
“While I know I am not the best writer, I like to consider myself a studious person. But this was done through some rather painstaking classes I had to take in undergraduate and graduate classes. One of those classes was Scripture Interpretation. It is by far the hardest class I took in undergrad. My professor spent the first two weeks, making sure we knew how to do proper research. It was there I first learned (2005 I think) about Wikipedia. He said, it was not a site to be trusted and would not be considered useful for the course. This peeked my curiosity. So I went in during his office hours to asked him why. He told me: Go down to the men’s bathroom down the hall, use the last stall on the right, then come back and tell him what I saw.
“This was a rather strange request to tell me why I shouldn’t trust a website, but I figured he must have had a point, so down I went to the empty bathroom, found the stall, looked in it and saw what was a rather normal looking stall. Confused, I looked around the toilet, checked the toilet paper holder, looked up at the ceiling, found nothing. I was about to admit defeat when It occur to me to check the back of the door. It was there I found numerous jokes about a particular student (just one). There must have been quite a few. Mostly, they were told in the Chuck Norris style of jokes like “God said, let there be light” and X says, “Say please.” There were attempts to fix this problem with obvious layers of paint, but it was a band aid to a persistent problem.
“So I went back and old him what I found. He then pulled up the Wikipedia for our school and there with information about our school were the same jokes about the same student found in the stall. The site used his first and last name. The professor told me that no matter how many times and has changed it himself, he keeps encountering the same problem. The site and the bathroom keep popping up with the same lewd comments and jokes.
I promise, this tour takes a lot less than three hours…
1. Nah, Black Lives Matter isn’t a Marxist organization! Here was the public statement of BLM regarding the pro-democracy demonstrations in Cuba:
Yeah, all those Cubans waving U.S. flags and calling for “Freedom!” are blaming the U.S. for their miserable lives under Communism. “Great Stupid, thy name is Black Lives Matter!” Well, nickname anyway.
2. Ethics Quote of the Week: Sen. Marco Rubio. The Cuban-American Senator from Florida replied to this channeled Communist propaganda by tweeting, “Wait… [Cuba] had restrictions on importing food & medicine? How can that be? All week long the national media has been reporting it’s the US embargo restricting food & medicine to Cuba.” He added, “My office stands ready to help the leaders of the Black Lives Matter organization emigrate to [Cuba].”
Bazinga!
To be fair, “It isn’t what it is” is an argument lawyers are trained to make, but this is especially glaring.
The Florida Supreme Court recently voted to prohibit the approval of continuing legal education credits for any CLE program with diversity “quotas.” This was a broadside at the ABA, which in 2017 approved a Diversity & Inclusion CLE Policy that requires all its sponsored or co-sponsored CLE programs with three or more panelists, including the moderator, to have at least one member of a a “diverse group.” Programs with five to eight panelists must have at least two diverse members and programs with nine or more panelists must have at least three diverse members. This will supposedly help accomplish the ABA’s Goal III , which aims to eliminate bias and enhance diversity in the profession.
There is a disconnect here, since the only purpose of continuing legal education is to do as good a job as possible keeping lawyers abreast of the law and developments in their profession. Does the skin color, gender, ethnicity or other characteristics of the CLE instructors and trainers advance that purpose in any way? I don’t see how, and neither did the court, which wrote in part,
I was looking for Robinson Crusoe and Friday illustrations, and boy, if they thought that Teddy Roosevelt statue that’s they’re taking down in New York City radiated white supremacy, they hadn’t checked out Daniel Defoe’s masterpiece lately. Is that novel ever read in school any more? (It’s a terrific novel, and one of my Dad’s favorites…and he read everything.) With “To Kill A Mockingbird” being banned in some schools, I wonder how much literature will be sacrificed to political correctness and The Great Stupid. And how many pop culture nuggets…I was alternately amused then shocked to hear the 1957 Australian goof “Tie Me Kangaroo Down” played on Sirius XM, for the song is hilarious as well as racially insensitive to the max with this verse (remember that the song purports to quote the last requests of an old Aussie stockman on his deathbed):
Let me Abos go loose, Bruce
Let me Abos go loose
They’re of no further use, Bruce
So let me Abos go loose!
I just checked:one of the lyrics websites excised that verse while claiming that it was printing the whole song.
But I digress. Write about anything you want, as long as it has an ethics theme…
That was Biden nominee Catherine Lhamon in her confirmation hearing this week, answering a question about whether she would enforce the DeVos Education Department regulation requiring due process and the presumption of innocence in campus evaluations of sexual misconduct complains by female students. Remember this quote the next time you read one of those claims that Republicans or conservatives are existential threats to democracy and civil rights. What Lhamon is literally saying is that due process is a bad thing, because it allows those accused of crimes or misconduct to escape punishment when allegations against them can’t be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s what she means. And what she said means that she, those who think like her on the progressive side of the spectrum, and anyone who would give her power are existential threats to democracy and civil rights.
Lhamon was doubling down on this May 2020 tweet— Continue reading
And, as in this case, stupid.
Marine experts and and animal rights advocate in Australia want the public and media to refrain from using the word “attack” when sharks, meaning no harm, bump into a human swimmer and inadvertently take his or her arm, leg or head off. They suggest that violent, even fatal human meetings with the predatory fish be described with more neutral words such as “interactions.” “negative encounters,” or “incidents” the Sydney Morning Herald recently reported.
All of these, as is usually the case with euphemisms and “cover words,” convey less than accurate information. When an animal intentionally inflicts harm, it’s an attack. It might be an attack based on misidentification—“Hey! That doesn’t taste like a seal!”—but it’s still an attack.
Oh, no, says University of Sydney language researcher Christopher Pepin-Neff: “Shark attack’ is a lie.” He argues that a majority of what people call “attacks” are merely nips and minor injuries from smaller sharks. Apparently prior to the 1930s such episodes were once called “shark accidents.”
“Shark accident” is intentionally vague. Would poor Chrissie, above, call what the shark did to her an “accident”? And I know they use the language a little differently in Down Under, but since when does whether an animal bite qualifies as an attack depend on the size of the creature? If a rapid squirrel “nips” me, I have to call it a “squirrel accident”?
This is like the “Wuhan virus” censorship. Because some idiots react to the truth by being irrational, we have to obscure reality according to the woke, misguided, and addled enemies of free expression.
What happened to poor Chrissy was an attack, and the attacker was a shark.
