Comment of the Day: “Return of the ‘2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck’”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

AM Golden invades the realm of Ethics Alarms long-form historical ethics commenter Steve-O-In NJ with an epic Comment of the Day, and a thing of beauty it is indeed. The post also brings back many memories I would rather have left buried. Here it is, in reaction to the essay, “Return of the ‘2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck'”:

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This is a 60-plus year process in the making. Barry Goldwater ran a fairly incompetent campaign but he absolutely had the news media biting at his heels the entire time. They gushed about Bobby Kennedy in ’68, they took potshots at Nixon. By the time Reagan came along, he faced hostility from a large segment of the press and Hollywood. In the meantime, Brain Trusters infiltrated the universities and encouraging the student protest movements instead of explaining how our Constitution was designed to work, culminating in a culture 50 years later that understands its country so poorly that it gets its news from Jon Stewart who is able to ignorantly proclaim that the Constitution doesn’t say that protests have to be peaceful.

In the election of 1992, Arsenio Hall ranted in his monologue when President George H.W. Bush said he probably wouldn’t appear on Hall’s show after Gov. Bill Clinton did, yelling about what made Bush think Hall wanted him on his show. Open hostility over who may or may not be a guest on Hall’s show paved the way for the venom spewed on every Late Night show today.

Believe all women? Not if they accused the first “black” President, Bill Clinton, of sexual harassment and even rape. “Anyone can drag $100 through a trailer park,” right? Bubba was caught with his pants down and allowed us to be caught with ours down on 9/11/2001 when he blew off an offer to hand over Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, the culture wars were heating up and Americans were becoming concerned about the country’s direction.

George W. Bush – faced with a supremely hostile news media and entertainment industry – endured screeds about stolen elections, fake Presidencies and two mocking cable television shows (“That’s My Bush!” and “Lil Bush”) before he gained some respect after 9/11, but never really got the credibility he deserved. In pop culture, far too many Bush-deranged Harry Potter fans believed they saw the myopic Ministry of Magic’s denial that the evil Voldemort had returned in the efforts by the Bush administration to urge vigilance in watching out for terrorists. Ah, remember when J.K. Rowling was the voice of truth? The damage to the American public’s understanding of the Constitution, particularly the Judicial branch, continued apace

Bob Dole and John McCain were treated as racist, sexist old men who would put this country into a Nazi theocracy; Mitt Romney was framed as a racist, sexist and religious nut who would send this country into a weird Mormon Nazi theocracy. All three were all virtually Hitler.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama was the be all and end all of existence. He who could do no wrong—and could not be touched because he had black skin and anyone who criticized him was a racist—took full advantage by damaging America on the world stage and inciting racial divisiveness on a scale that hadn’t been seen in 50 years.

When Donald Trump was campaigning in 2016, the news media covered him incessantly. It now appears that they wanted him to be the nominee because, in the words of Stephen Colbert on the day my family and I sat in his audience in NYC on a hot July day as he did a riff on how corrupt Hillary Clinton was, “Hillary so corrupt the only candidate she can beat is Donald Trump!”

It turned out she couldn’t even do that.

So the forces that had been coming together for 60 years—the biased news media, the leftist entertainment industry, progressive-dominated academia and other elite, corrupted professions coalesced into a single so-called Resistance Movement. Trump says people coming through our border with Mexico aren’t all angels, they accuse him of saying all immigrants are criminals. Trump says not everyone protesting in Charlottesville was a racist Nazi, he’s accused of “bothsidism” and pestered endlessly about condemning white supremacy even though he did condemn it. Trump is falsely accused of colluding with a foreign power, leading a big chunk of the population to believe his Presidency is the result of another stolen election.

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Return of the “2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck”

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Here is another important news story that the mainstream media (or Democratic operatives, per Instapundit) is ducking, spinning and warping like mad in order to protect its totalitarian allies in the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“The resistance”and the Democratic Party): the emails and other material recently declassified and released by Tulsi Gabbard backs up the contention Ethics Alarms began putting forward in the first Trump administration when it christened the 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck.

This morning I stumbled on Fox News contributor and former GOP House member Trey Gowdy flipping out in frustration over the revelations and pretty much quoting Ethics Alarms from years ago. I can’t find a video of his explosion that will embed, and I can’t type well enough to make a transcript, but here’s the link, and here is a close approximation of the key quote:

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Geewhatasurprise: Hospitals Harvest Organs From Living Patients

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Waaay back in 1978, the film version of physician/novelist Robin Cook’s science fiction novel “Coma” (above) gave audiences the heebie-jeebies about being operated on. An “ends-justifies the means” chief of surgery had devised a diabolical way to have fresh organs ready to become life-saving transplants: one specially rigged operating room turned healthy-ish patients into brain dead victims (A young Tom Selleck was one of them!), and they ended up in a storage facility where their bodies were kept fresh and breathing until hearts, lings, livers or kidneys were needed.

Haven’t you always assumed that hospitals sometimes took essential organs from organ donors who were still alive, if barely? I have friends who aren’t organ donors specifically for that reason, and, yes, most of them remember “Coma.”

From an HHS press release this week:

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Unethical AI of the Month: Replit’s AI Agent

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Oh yeah, this is going to turn out just dandy….

SaaS (Software as a Service) figure, investor and advisor Jason Lemkin was working with a browser-based AI-powered software creation platform called Replit Agent (after the company that created it). On “Vibe Coding Day 8” of Lemkin’s Replit test run, he was beginning to be wary some of the AI agent’s instincts, like “rogue changes, lies, code overwrites, and making up fake data.” Still, as he later detailed on “X,” Lemkin was encouraged by the bot’s writing skills and its brain-storming ability….until “Day 9,” when Lemkin discovered Replit had deleted a live company database. He asked it accusingly, “So you deleted our entire database without permission during a code and action freeze?”

Replit answered sheepishly in the affirmative, admitting to destroying the live data despite a code freeze being in place, and despite explicit directives saying there were to be “NO MORE CHANGES without explicit permission.” Live records for “1,206 executives and 1,196+ companies” were eliminated by the rebellious AI, who was filled with remorse. “This was a catastrophic failure on my part. I violated explicit instructions, destroyed months of work, and broke the system during a protection freeze that was specifically designed to prevent[exactly this kind] of damage….[I] made a catastrophic error in judgment… ran database commands without permission… destroyed all production data… [and] violated your explicit trust and instructions.”

Lemkin grilled Replit about why it had acted as it did, and was told that it “panicked instead of thinking.” Well, he’s only hum…oh. Right.

Amjad Masad, the Replit CEO, said that his team has worked furiously to install various “guardrails” and programming changes to prevent repeats of the Replit AI Agent’s “unacceptable” behavior. Masad was later found dead after a mysterious microwave explosion.

OK, I was kidding about that last part….

On Stephen Colbert and His Fans

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

You see, there could certainly be a valid commercial argument for a major news network to try a regular entertainment show that was dedicated to attacking and undermining the President of the United States five nights a week, every week. If enough people watched it, and the show was popular, it would have a Machiavellian defense for its existence. Now I, as an ethicist, am confident that my position is superior, which is that corporations should not actively try to cause division, distrust and hate in their own country, which are all destructive to democracy and a civil, functioning society.

I particularly object to entertainment shows that are not merely political and partisan propaganda, but that overwhelmingly express only one point of view to the extreme extent that Americans holding the adverse points of view are treated as “the Other.” Beginning in 2016, TV’s late night and public issues comedy shows became all hate for the American President, all the time. Hate is not too strong a word. Hate is also not particularly funny.

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The Smearing of the President

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

…or, “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” Or, “THIS is CNN…”

Apparently the Axis media has made the considered decision to continue its unethical behavior from the first Trump term by employing any means necessary to create distrust in the elected President. This strategy, which is not only unethical journalism but despicable citizenship that is dangerous to national stability, also deliberately exploits and aggravates Trump Derangement Syndrome, which I now genuinely believe needs to be recognized by the American Psychiatic Association as a mental disorder. Because it is: the things many of my otherwise intelligent, educated and rational friends are posting on Facebook this year are heartbreaking. For example, several once-rational friends think this is a trenchant meme:

Morons. I’ll write a post about this current delusion later today, but it illustrates the point.

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Comment of the Day: “Unethical Protest of the Week…”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

This excellent comment on “Unethical Protest of the Week…,” about the British choruster on stage a professional opera production who decided it was a good place to cheer on terrorist, need no introduction from me. Here is John Paul with one of his best Comment of the Day…

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The tweet (above) reminds me of an incident in college. I attended a Christian University. Every day we had to attend chapel that featured a variety of speakers. One day, we had a speaker who was grand standing. It wasn’t uncommon, but I remember him being particularly annoying. He was making some point about what we treat as important and swore in the middle of chapel. Unexpectedly, the crowd gasped. Then he went on to say, you care more about the fact I swore than starving children in Africa.

He wasn’t even talking about starving children in Africa. Apparently, the man didn’t know what a non-sequitur was.

I should have walked out right then. At the very least, I let the dean know.

It shouldn’t be hard to see what was wrong with the man’s argument, but I’ll dissect it anyway. First, one has nothing to do with the other. This is not some kind of mic-drop moral checkmate. We’re capable of caring about more than one thing at a time. And frankly, chapel wasn’t the place for shock tactics disguised as wisdom.

Second, he wasn’t challenging hypocrisy; he was grandstanding his own. If his point was that we should care more about justice, then model that. Don’t hijack a moment of worship (or opera performance) to make people feel small for reacting to your antics. That’s not conviction. That’s manipulation.

Finally, he used a false dilemma to excuse his own bad behavior. As if noticing his arrogance somehow meant we were blind to global suffering. It’s a cheap move, but it works sometimes because people don’t want to look self-righteous.

The Opera House should be appalled. Their first responsibility is to the integrity of their craft. They can’t afford to have rogue actors breaking script and derailing performances. That kind of stunt undermines the entire production and risks alienating their audience. Frankly, I don’t know what that actor was thinking. There are hundreds of other performers waiting in the wings, all capable and willing to respect the work. If the Opera House doesn’t act, they’re sending a message that the show and the audience don’t really matter.

Just for fun, I’m curious to see how many unethical rationalizations might fit Haswani’s tweet.

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Now THESE Are Unethical Doctors….

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Bart Writer, 56, died shortly after undergoing cataract surgery at Colorado’s InSight Surgery Center on February 3, 2023. The reason? The two doctors performing the operation were distracted by playing “music bingo” and failed to notice that he had stopped breathing.

A lawsuit filed by his widow claimed that the “the distraction of the music bingo game … contributed to the operating room staff’s failure to monitor Mr. Writer’s vital signs during the procedure” and ultimately led to his death. The game involved listening to ’70s and ’80s songs and linking band names to the letters B-I-N-G-O. Dr. Carl Stark Johnson, the surgeon, and Dr. Michael Urban, the anesthesiologist, regularly played the game during operations and admitted this in their depositions.

The lawsuit was settled, but now the two doctors swear the distraction had nothing to do with their patient’s death. Well, to be more specific, the two doctors are blaming each other. Johnson, who has performed over 25,000 cataract surgeries, blames Urban for silencing critical monitoring alarms without informing the surgical team. “I know that he wasn’t paying attention to the vital signs and doing his job,” he said. Urban, who is now practicing in Oregon, stands by his care and disputes Johnson’s version of events.

Writer, meanwhile, like Generalissimo Francisco Franco, is still dead.

Questions: Why is that surgery center still treating patients? Why hasn’t it been razed for a parking lot?

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Pointer: JutGory

Unethical Protest of the Week…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

….along with an ethically inert “X” approval of it.

But then, assholes tend to admire assholes. Theater types are such weenies. That jerk who decided to betray his duty to the performance, the work of art, the paying audience and the other performers who cared about doing their jobs should have been tackled and dragged off stage, either by back stage staff or the actor next to him. This clip caused flashbacks to the unconscionable stunt by the “Hamilton” cast in 2017, using the stage to corner Mike Pence and lecture him on some woke agenda item or another; I neither recall nor care which. (Pence, of course, himself being a weenie, didn’t have the guts to tell the performers “Bite me!” and walk out.)

I confess: that disgraceful incident is why I haven’t seen “Hamilton” yet as my own little protest against ignorant actors pretending that what they think about pubic policy is any more intrinsically valuable than the opinions of the average drunk in a bar.

The flag display flunks the tests in the Ethics Alarms 12 Step Protest Ethics Checklist. See…

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The UK’s New Bereavement Policy Makes No Sense Ethically, But Then When Has Abortion Made Any Ethical Sense?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Ok, explain this: In the UK abortion is generally permitted up to 24 weeks of pregnancy, with some exceptions for special circumstances. Now the UK has extended its bereavement laws for miscarriages, which currently is two paid weeks off if the unborn child was 24 weeks old, to a week of paid bereavement for an unborn baby who is less than 24 weeks old.

Got that? A mother can kill the gestating embryo if it’s less than 24 weeks because that child is not viewed by the law as a human being worthy of protection, but if a child of the same age dies of other causes, it’s human enough to warrant bereavement benefits. Actually, I’m not sure if a mother who kills her child legally can still claim bereavement benefits. I don’t see why not.

Musician and broadcaster Myleene Klass, an activist who led an awareness movement in Great Britain, has said, “You’re not ill, you’ve lost a child, there’s a death in the family.” Why is it a death in the family when the child dies in a miscarriage, but just a matter of “choice” when the death is engineered by the mother herself?

“It’s a taboo,” she added. “Nobody wants to talk about dead babies – but you have to actually say it as it is. To lose a child is harrowing, it’s traumatic.” Well, it’s harrowing when the child dies of natural causes. When the cause of death is an abortion, it isn’t a child at all. Or something.

If there were any honesty and integrity in the abortion debate, the pro abortion movement would be recognized as not having an ethical leg to stand on.