OK, “Jane Doe” Was A Lying, Venal, Fick. It Doesn’t Make Abortion Any More Or Less Ethical

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

In the final 20 minutes of the documentary “AKA Jane Roe,” “Roe,” whose real name was Norma McCorvey, reveals that when she converted to an anti-abortion, born-again ex-gay Christian with the help of leaders of the evangelical Christian right, she was scamming them, us, everybody. Before that stunning reversal, she had been at the center the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, in which the U.S. Supreme court declared that the right to have an abortion was protected by the U.S. Constitution.

“This is my deathbed confession,” she says in the film, sitting in a chair, on oxygen, in her nursing home room , quite evidently pleased with herself. She is asked , “Did [the evangelicals] use you as a trophy?” “Of course,” she replies. “I was the Big Fish.”

“Do you think you would say that you used them?” “Well,” says McCorvey, “I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money and they took me out in front of the cameras and told me what to say. That’s what I’d say.” She even gives an example of her scripted anti-abortion lines. “I’m a good actress,” she points out. “Of course, I’m not acting now.”

Of course.

McCorvey isn’t the first litigant in ground-breaking jurisprudence to change her mind. William J. Murray, the atheist son of activist Madeline Murray O’Hair, who used his complaint about being forced to pray in school to launch the litigation that eventually  got all school prayer in public schools banned as unconstitutional, later became an ardent Christian. This always leads opponents of the decision to respond with “See? SEE?” Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Check-Up, 5/21/2020: My Mind’s On Viruses For Some Reason…

/ Jack Marshall / 94 Comments

Feeling better.

Thanks for all the concern and good wishes.

1. How can we be told that we need to trust “scientists” regarding the Wuhan Virus when they have so far proven uncertain, inconsistent, and, much of the time, wrong? Chatting with my sister about my own symptoms, which I told her did not include key pandemic features but did include others not on the list, she informed me that the list of symptoms had been recently expanded by the CDC. I checked: she’s right. As of April 30, the symptoms of COVID-19 can include fatigue, dry coughs, non-dry coughs, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, fever, chills, muscle pain, sore throat, headache,loss of taste or smell,  nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea, as well as “other symptoms.”

Got it. Everything is a potential symptom, including no symptoms at all. Gee, CDC, thanks for all the timely information.

In further news, the  CDC now says coronavirus ‘does not spread easily’ via contaminated surfaces.

Our policy-makers have been making decisions in the dark from the beginning. The entire episode should go down in history as a massive failure of the public health establishment. Continue reading →

Susan Rice Again, Part 1

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Of the many important ethics developments waiting for me to get out of bed and for my brain to start functioning, I think this one is the most important right now. I’m going to have to finish it in installments, since I can only last about 30 minutes before having to rest. I apologize for the inconvenience.

What you see above is the finally completely-declassified Jan. 20, 2017 memo  Susan Rice sent to herself via email documenting a January 5 Oval Office meeting with then-President Obama and others.  January 20 was the official end date of the Obama administration, because President Trump was sworn into office that day.

[What a coincidence!]

The memo was declassified by Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell and transmitted to the Justice Department. Republican Senator Ron Johnson’s office, representing Wisconsin, released the memo to the news media.

Observations:

1. It was ridiculously difficult to find a complete copy of the entire memo. Almost ever source wanting describe it, when I prefer to read such things, because I don’t trust journalists or pundits, and neither should anyone.

2. Let’s refamiliarize ourselves with Susan Rice. Rice was Obama’s National Security Advisor when she wrote the email, but previously she had been named the Ethics Alarms Liar of the Year for 2014, and that wasn’t even her worst year for lying. In 2014 she earned the title for going on ABC to tell America that Bowe Bergdahl “…served the United States with honor and distinction…” Bergdalh, you may recall,  was in fact a deserter, who left his troops in Afghanistan and walked into a Taliban camp. He was eventually obtained in trade for five terrorists, all ready to kill again, in what the Obama administration regarded as a good deal.

Since Obama never had any scandals and the non-Obama-worshiping media was questioning the logic behind this, Rice was dispatched as Obama’s favorite spin-merchant to quiet the controversy her usual way, by lying, and not very convincingly either. Remember, she had already disgraced herself on September 16, 2012, when she was U.N. Ambassador and Obama sent her to all the talk shows to lie about Benghazi, since the truth was problematic and it was an election year. Rice kept repeating the script that the attack on the compound was spontaneous, was not a terrorist action, and was caused by an anti-Muslim YouTube video.

Her ABC statement about Bergdahl was too self-evidently ridiculous for even the mainstream media to swallow, so Rice was later dispatched to CNN to “walk back” her ridiculous comment, which I reacted to at the time by being glad my army veteran father hadn’t lived to hear it, since it might have killed him. On CNN she “explained” to Jim Acosta,

“…what I was referring to was the fact that this was a young man who volunteered to serve his country in uniform at a time of war. That, in and of itself, is a very honorable thing.”

This only could have meant,  1) “I think you, as a member of the boot-licking pro-Obama media, will accept this, because you pretty much accept anything if it protects The Great One,” or, 2) “We think the American public has the IQ of wood chips, and will think this makes sense,” or 3) “I, Susan Rice, have the IQ of wood chips, and really believe what I just said. Doesn’t it make you sleep soundly at night knowing that someone like me is the National Security Advisor.”

Don’t rule out #3, but #1 didn’t quite work, even with a partisan hack like Acosta, who couldn’t resist asking, “Honor and distinction?”But he allowed Rice to change the subject, and she pivoted to talking about the presumption of innocence.

I wrote at the time what a competent journalist not willing to enable such deception should have responded:

“What? Wait a minute, Ambassador Rice, you didn’t say Bergdahl was honorable. You said he served with honor and distinction. Enlisting is honorable and admirable to be sure, but service is what an enlistee does after volunteering for service. Are you saying that the act of enlisting makes a soldier’s service honorable whatever he does on the field of battle? So the soldier who went rogue and shot several of his comrades would still be, by your definition, honorable? Do you really believe that we should honor any soldier, even a deserter? A traitor? Is there anything in your definition of honorable that a soldier could do after volunteering for service that forfeits that honor?

“You also said that Bergdahl “served with distinction. “How is that covered by the mere fact of his enlisting? Do you mean “distinction” literally, as in, “not every soldier walks away from his post and gets himself captured by the Taliban”? For I agree—that’s certainly distinctive—thank God—but how is it honorable?“

Rice, I am quite certain, would have embarrassed herself with whatever huminahumina babble that direct question would have provoked, because she just isn’t that bright, which raises the questions of what Obama had her in important positions, and why she was his designated liar. Even Hillary was a better liar.

That interview got worse, believe it or not. For mere seconds after flagrantly spinning her false characterization of Bergdahl as a soldier who served “with honor and distinction,” she said,

“I’m upfront with the American people and I always do my best on behalf of my country and I do my best to tell the facts as I know them.”

That’s Susan Rice!

More to come.

 

Bad Day Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

Here I am, getting the first Ethics Alarms post up after 2:00 am, and feeling guilty. There are about ten important ethics issues and stories to be covered, and I feel I am obligated to get them covered.

But it’s going to be more difficult than usual. We just learned that two members of our household have tested positive for the Wuhan virus. I am sick with some other damn thing, basic flu symptoms plus traveling, intermittent pain in the muscles of my back and legs (no fever, no dry cough, really no Wuhan symptoms at all other than being tired). I also have a sudden backlog of paying consultant work, which takes me twice as long as it should when I’m drugged and run-down, and I am really drugged and run down.

My father and the various cultural and historical models that formed my own values, caused me to place soldiering through these kinds of  obstacles high among my life’s priorities. My dad went though his post-military life walking, hiking, playing with his children and other activities with a roughly reconstructed foot—the result of a W.W. II hand grenade’s carnage—that looked like some kind of demonic potato. He never complained or used it as an excuse to beg out of what he considered his duties; I remember saying to my mother, “It’s amazing that Dad does everything he does with a foot that looks like that. I would think it would hurt him.” She said, “Are you kidding? His foot hurts him terribly all the time.” My father’s attitude was that tough times, seemingly overwhelming challenges  and misfortunes were inevitable and were such intrinsic aspects of life that to overreact to them or allow yourself to be paralyzed in their wake was foolish.  One of his favorite quotes was Joan Howard Maurer’s tale,

“One day as I sat musing, sad and lonely without a friend, a voice came to me from out of the gloom saying, ‘Cheer up. Things could be worse.’ So I cheered up and sure enough—things got worse.”

 

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “If You Present Me With Appeals Like This, You Will NEVER Have My Support”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I’m grateful to JP for making the connection between the insulting, shaming marketing ploys I wrote about in the post and the similar techniques I see on Facebook. Not all of them involve virtue-signaling, as in the “Share this appeal for X charity and prove you care, or we’ll know you’re a cheap unfeeling bastard.” Just as bad are the “prove you’re really my friend by writing a sentence about where we met, because I’m going to unfriend everyone who doesn’t” posts. I’m not your validation monkey. Grow up.

A pretty good summary of obnoxious Facebook posts is this article, which observes,

Annoying statuses typically reek of one or more of these five motivations:

1) Image Crafting. The author wants to affect the way people think of her.

2) Narcissism. The author’s thoughts, opinions, and life philosophies matter. The author and the author’s life are interesting in and of themselves.

3) Attention Craving. The author wants attention.

4) Jealousy Inducing. The author wants to make people jealous of him or his life.

5) Loneliness. The author is feeling lonely and wants Facebook to make it better.

Notably absent from the piece is the obnoxious conduct my Facebook friends are addicted to: searching for and posting every anti-Trump news item or opinion piece they can find day after day.

Here is JP’s Comment of the Day on the post, “If You Present Me With Appeals Like This, You Will NEVER Have My Support”:

For a while now I have noticed that there is a trend (especially among evangelicals) to share religious or faith-based content on Facebook that state something like: “I bet this won’t even get one share,” or “Share if you like Jesus, skip if you want Satan to win.”  As a Christian and a minister, 100% of the time I will not share it or like it at all. That does not make me a bad or callous person. As a human, I am emphatic and sympathetic about the plight of the sad kid in a third world country  shown on the post. As a Christian, not only do I not want Satan to win, I know he has already lost. So what’s the problem? Why won’t I share?

Well, before I answer that, I want to back up here.

Why do people share things on Facebook? A survey done by the Fractl marketing agency said 48% of posts were done because others will find them interesting.  52% focused on things the posters were thinking or feeling. Only 11% of posts are intended to educate others (and we all know how well that is going). While it wasn’t mentioned in the survey, it was clear that 100% of posts were about the people themselves posting them. Therefore everything being stated by the person  related to the person in some way. I don’t think that is a bad thing, in fact, I’m pretty sure that is Facebook’s sole purpose. So when a person shares that picture, in some way they are saying they themselves are Christian, or “hey this is an issue I care about!” However, I find this  highly problematic.

The first way relates to the Blaze offer. One of the reasons this marketing campaign is so successful is because people are gullible, weak-minded, or proud. You challenge them on an issue that attacks them in someway, and they feel like they have to respond. It reminds me Marty McFly’s self-destructive flaw  in the “Back to the Future ” movies. He couldn’t back down when someone called him “chicken.” It was Doc who had to tell Marty that if he didn’t learn to walk away, he was going to suffer the consequences. The second movie shows us the future where Marty’s  life will be ruined after he gets in a car accident by accepting a drag race challenge after being called a chicken. This fate is erased in the third film after he finally learns to resist the trigger.

While I doubt any of our sharing or agreeing will have any lasting consequences (other than a flooded email box), I wonder if this pattern builds up to something bigger — (I know: slippery slope!). Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Month: Carol Roth

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

“I am so sick of the media trying to create celebrity politicians. Public service should be about representing us as citizens, not creating stardom for the person in office. Nobody “deserves” to hold an office. The focus should be on policies, principles, experience, etc.”

—Radio host and author Carol Roth on Twitter, commenting on the recent Washington Post puff piece on Stacey Abrams

Yes, that ridiculous photo above really accompanied a Washington Post magazine profile on Stacy Abrams. It really did. A few excerpts from the article:

  • “Whether or not she’s chosen as Biden’s running mate, she has moved into a unique space in American politics. DuBose Porter, former chair of the Georgia Democratic Party, told me she is “brilliant,” praise that comes in spite of what some view as a relatively thin political résumé”

“Some view!” It’s a ridiculously thin résumé for someone who, we are told,  predicts that “she’ll be elected president by 2040.” It was a thin résumé for someone running for governor of Georgia.

  • “When she is finally introduced the women shout and leap to their feet. Young women stand on chairs, camera phones flash. Abrams, who appears both amused and slightly disturbed by the fuss over her, takes control of the chaotic scene. I’ve witnessed this level of affection for very few political leaders in the Democratic circles I’ve been in since the 1980s. They have the last names Clinton (both Hillary and Bill), Sanders, Warren, Jackson and Obama (both Michelle and Barack).”

Con artists all.

  • “Pandemonium ensues as she walks to the far left of the stage, like a runway supermodel, stops on a dime, poses, tilts her head slightly and smiles. Camera flashes explode. She next pivots and walks slowly to the center of the stage, freezes there and repeats the pose. Again, the flashes explode. Abrams is summoning her inner actress, and she is both enjoying the moment and getting through it to get to the conversation. She then pivots and walks to the far right of the stage, same. You wonder whether she has done this before, because it is not necessarily what one would expect from a 46-year-old politician who was nearly elected the first black female governor in U.S. history.”

Yup, that’s the first thing that leapt to my mind when I saw that photo: supermodel! Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/19/2020: They Can’t Handle The Truth

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

You want warm? I’ll give you warm!

1. That candidacy flamed out quickly! A movement seemed to be underway to have New York governor Andrew Cuomo replace doddering Joe Biden as the Democratic Presidential nominee when his press briefings regarding his state’s handling of the pandemic seemed so much clearer and straightforward than President Trump’s. (Not exactly a high bar, that.) Then the actual consequences of his leadership became apparent. Cuomo had issued a directive on March 25 requiring nursing facilities to accept patients recovering from the Wuhan virus,  and the policy, as many health experts predicted at the time, was a disaster. More than 5,400 New Yorkers have died in nursing facilities from the virus, forcing Cuomo to withdraw his directive last week. Then New York officials admitted to miscounting nursing home Wuhan virus deaths by only counting residents who died from the disease in the facility itself , intentionally omitting the deaths of residents who died after being transferred to a hospital.

The other problem for Cuomo when he was suddenly thrust into the limelight is that the man is an arrogant jerk who can’t seem to hide it, though the news media usually labors mightily to help him try. Over the weekend, however, a reporter asked Cuomo, “Governor, what would you say to families who have suffered losses inside nursing homes? They’re looking for accountability, and they’d like to see justice.”

Imagine the uproar if Donald Trump had given Cuomo’s answer, which ended with a shrug:

Older people, vulnerable people are going to die from this virus. That is going to happen despite whatever you do. Because with all our progress as a society, we can’t keep everyone alive. Despite what everything you do and older people are more vulnerable. And that is a fact. And that is not going to change.

Oh, I think it matters what you do, Governor. For example, deliberately placing people with a highly contagious disease in a crowded facility filled with the kind of people most at risk of dying from the virus pretty much ensures that more of those vulnerable people will die than would have otherwise. Continue reading →

If You Present Me With Appeals Like This, You Will NEVER Have My Support

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I’ve been presented with dozens of these obnoxious things with their false dichotomy tricks in recent years, including many from political candidates. I have intended to post about it for quite a while, but I was waiting for one that especially annoyed me, and yesterday the conservative news aggregator The Blaze won the metaphorical Kewpie doll.

This approach insults anyone who chooses not to accept a an offer, giving them a choice between “yes, sure, junk up my in box with even more emails than I am getting already” and a self-confession of moral and intellectual inadequacy. There really is no difference between the Blaze’s “no” option and an outright attack, as in “If you don’t agree to sign up for our stories (and also allow us to sell your data to God knows who), you are obviously a gullible tool who is responsible for the sorry state of American society.”

Apparently this device works, which is why so many websites use it. That in itself is disturbing. When did Americans become so easily shamed and intimidated? I’ve received subscription offers from supposedly reputable newspapers that gave me the choice between “Sign me up!” and “No, I don’t care about award-winning journalism that will keep me informed about the news every responsible citizen needs to know.” That literally means, “If you don’t want to subscribe to our paper, you’re an irresponsible, apathetic, uninformed citizen.” No, I’m not, and you and your desperate, arrogant publication can bite me.

After that, I wouldn’t subscribe if it were the last newspaper on earth.

“What”s Going On Here?” The Polls

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Now there’s a poll that you won’t find highlighted in many mainstream media reports. From the Washington Examiner, part of the conservative media:

Despite a wave of critical news coverage and Democratic catcalls, President Trump sits at his “highest” approval in the latest Gallup survey, and above where four of the last six presidents, including Barack Obama and George W. Bush, were at this point of the first term.

…After two weeks of bad news on the coronavirus and economic front, Trump maintained his 49% approval rating, and his disapproval crept up just 1 point, to 48% in the Gallup survey of adults, a broad test.

Gallup said that Trump’s approval is “tied for the best of his presidency.”

…At 49%, Trump is a hair away from the generally accepted 50%-51% approval political experts consider a lock to win reelection. Both Obama and Bush were at 50% approval on their reelection days.

The paper adds that some pollsters attribute Trump’s positive number to “backlash against the media’s coverage of Trump and the coronavirus and the economy.”

Wow! That’s some theory. So they theorize that a lot of Americans not appreciating a cabal of Democrats, members of Congress, the news media and popular culture figures relentlessly attacking, insulting, impugning and accusing the President of the United States and the head and symbol of their nation on any pretext might cause them to rally to the support of their elected leader, whom they recognize is trying to perform a near impossible job when attempted under the best of conditions, never mind when power forces in society are determined to sabotage you. Huh. I never would have thought of that.

Observations: Continue reading →

As An Ethics Alarms Public Service, Here’s Another Reminder Of What A Phony, Dishonest, Brain-Dead “Factcheck” Site Snopes Is

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Judge websites, social media platforms and your friends who rely on this flagrantly unethical site  as authority accordingly.

For some reason there has been an outbreak of tips to Ethics Alarms involving the usual Snopes stunts, including its factchecking  the conservative satire site, the Babylon Bee. Reader Pennagain reminded me of this classic though, which nicely sums up Snopes in a concise, stinky package.

The Snopes question it supposedly examined (but didn’t) in a 2018 “FactCheck” has resurfaced because there is a new podcast about the Banks tragedy. (I can tell when Banks’ story is attracting attention again when the EA post about Wanetta Gibson starts picking up traffic.)

Here’s the rest of that “factcheck”:

Snopes pulls this bait and switch trick a lot. The answer to linkbait question ‘Was Banks wrongly convicted of rape?” is  “Yes”, and any assertion to that effect isn’t “mostly true,” it’s absolutely, 100% true. Beneath the question that heads the “inquiry,” Snopes significantly rephrases the “claim” which it then “debunks” by giving us the breathless revelations that Gibson didn’t recant ON Facebook, she contacted Banks through Facebook and then confessed in person, and that Banks “only” served 5 years and two months, not “six.” Continue reading →