Stop Hanging On!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Guest Post By James Rogers

Why are we hanging onto a relationship for which we should be actively separating ourselves?

Is it ethical to cling to something you know is more than dead, when it is demonstrably existentially dangerous?

What is this relationship that is so toxic? The intact 50 states comprising the United States. My proposition is: We must separate from states, leaders and groups actively attempting to destroy the U.S. Constitution and American culture before there is no Constitution left to protect us and a culture seeking to exterminate us.

The states themselves are rather obvious: California, New Mexico, Illinois, New York, Vermont, Connecticut, Washington, Delaware, New Jersey, Minnesota, and distinct portions of other states like western Oregon, northern and eastern Virginia, eastern Pennsylvania, southern lower Michigan, southeastern Wisconsin, plus the District of Columbia.

The leaders can be broadly described as Democratic Socialists, so-called democracy advocates, cultural cancers such as the “gender affirming care” and abortion-on-demand advocates. The names on this list are long, but they all subscribe to the Obama-imagined fundamental transformation of the US against those clinging to the Constitution, God and guns.

They have proven via political violence, poisonous policies, and social canceling that we are their targets. COVID policies experimentally divided the country into individualists and collectivists. Obedience was the metric / the crux of COVID policy. Even now, after proof being provided of the malicious nature of government policies during the period, the true believers call out individualists as deniers. Similarly issues like DEI, puberty blockers, climate change, court packing, electoral college elimination, unfettered immigration, no voter ID, history rewrites, endless lawfare, judicial overreach and trans activism are alive and very well among the places and people described above. Nearly everything they believe is intentionally malicious, not real, or so grossly exaggerated it is ludicrous.

The United States is not united. To expect us to somehow become united again is a fantasy. And yet our traditional notion of America of 50 United States persists…as we fervently hope this will go away once people come to their senses. These people and policies are not rational, nor will they ever be. Stop the delusion.

The more we cling to the self-deception the more opportunity those seeking to unravel the culture have to do terrible things, endangering everything we believe to be right, valuable, and sustainable as a society.

In the original colonies the sentiment was join or die. Now we must separate ourselves to survive and begin to thrive again in a society worth keeping.

Life Ethics, Professional Ethics, Family Ethics, Baseball Ethics: Paternity Leave During A Crisis

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This issue, which I feel strongly about and have so written, more than once, reared its ugly metaphorical head again this week.

The San Diego Padres were added to the National League in 1969. The team has been in two World Series, losing both quickly; the last time was in 1996. They have only made the National League Championship Series three times. The team closed the season hot, and faced the best team in baseball, at least based on their record, the Milwaukee Brewers, with high hopes. Among the team’s many stars (more, in fact, then Milwaukee) is Mason Miller, by consensus the best 9th inning relief pitcher (aka “closer”) in the game.

The Padres lost the first game of the five game series due to a fluke, as described here. They lost Game #2 as well, and faced elimination in Game #3. It was “all hands on deck,” the Alamo, Custer’s Last Stand. Nevertheless, before the game, Mason Miller chose to take paternity leave, a privilege the players won in a contract battle with owners in 2011.

My ethics analysis of this conduct begins with “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.” The entire season, 162 games, many millions of dollars, millions of fans, a city’s economy and community, players’ careers and income, managers’ and coaches’ jobs, team sponsors and more ride on which teams win in the post-season. My position is that Miller’s decision was selfish, irresponsible and a breach of duty. His team not only needed him, but depended on him. His wife’s pregnancy had had hit no crisis (I checked); she also had other support available. If I were a team mate or the management, I would conclude that Mason Miller could not be trusted. An employee who flees in a crisis is not a desirable employee, especially when the employee is paid $4 million dollars for eight months of service.

Moral Luck Alert! The Padres won the game without Miller, then lost the next one, ending their World Series quest.

Ethics Alarms hosted an intense debate on this exact topic in 2021. I wrote in part,

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Stunningly, a Fair and Perceptive Essay On The Cornell Gang Rape Ethics Train Wreck…In Slate! [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Knock me over with a feather. I once subscribed to Slate when it was an innovative commentary e-magazine genuinely striving to be independent and non-partisan. Then it went full woke and Trump Deranged, and managed to get on the EA blacklist. Frankly, I didn’t know it was still being published. But Hanna Stotland an independent educational consultant specializing in crisis management authoring her second Slate piece after seven years, delivered a superb analysis.

UPDATE: You can read the whole paywalled article at the archive link provided in the comments below by James Flood. [Thanks, James.] I was tempted to paste the whole thing into this post, but that would be unethical….

Some notable passages from the publicly available version deserve emphasis and should whet your curiosity:

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The Case of the Bondage-Promoting Congressional Candidate

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Christoper Gallant, 37, is an openly gay military pilot, former air traffic controller and volunteer firefighter who is running against Rep. Nick LaLota, who represents New York’s First District, covering eastern Suffolk County. Photos “surfaced,” as they like to say, showing Gallant in an explicit ad campaign modeling leather bondage gear. In some of the photos he appears to be doing…stuff…with another man.

The photos originally appeared on the site of a bondage apparel company called Mr. S Leather about 15 or 16 years ago. In response to the photos entering the campaign conversation, Gallant’s lawyer said that the photographs “were taken during a private, consensual photo session involving Chris and his then-partner, with whom he was in a committed four-year relationship. Chris was also friends with the owner of Mr. S Leather, and the shoot was intended to be fun and personal, with the understanding that Mr. S could use select images in connection with certain products” and that Gallant “remains fully committed to his campaign and to earning the trust of the people he seeks to represent.”

Right. About that trust thingy—oh! I forgot to mention that Gallant is the Democratic Congressional candidate in the race! Did I have to?

“This is the Democratic congressional candidate for CD1,” the local GOP wrote on Facebook above the smaller photo above. “Is this who you want to represent us in Washington DC?” That’s certainly a fair question. I hold that there is an equivalent of EA’s recently revisited Naked Teacher Principle in play here, though I’m not sure what I would call it. A candidate who has allowed himself to be photographed like that gets no sympathy from me if that choice eventually costs him a job teaching in a public school, and the standards of character and role model fitness for a member of Congress should be a higher bar than the one required of teachers. Sadly, considering the current Congress, that is obviously not the case.

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Update on the Tragic, Trump Derangement-Fueled Deterioration of the Once Ethical and Perceptive Ken White

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Why don’t “the guys” take personal responsibility????

Unethical Quote Of The Month: NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s October 7th Message

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.

The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing. Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them – all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes.Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.

To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.”

New York’s anti-Semitic, Islamist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, in his official statement on the anniversary of the unprovoked and ambush Palestinian terrorist attack on Israel that included the murder of unarmed civilians, rapes, infanticide, and the taking of over 200 hostages, mist of whom died.

I could have had a much longer headline, and had to restrain myself to avoid posting one. Anyone who agrees with this vile man is an Ethics Dunce, as is anyone who voted for him or would argue that such votes can be justified. Mandani qualifies for an EA “Incompetent Elected Official” designation, because condemning the victims of terrorism while supposedly memorializing those victims is incompetent and irresponsible, unless one is an Ethics Villain, which Mayor Mamdani certainly is.

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Ethics Hero: Brit Hume

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Today is the 30th anniversary of the debut of Fox News, a day that will live in infamy for the Totalitarian Left, much as Elon Musk’s rescue of Twitter is reviled. Americans under the age of about 50 never reflect upon what broadcast news was like before October 7, 1996, and most of them can’t imagine how crucial the conservative news network has been to our democracy.

The emergence of Fox News has had some unfortunate and unanticipated consequences too, but those who argue that the United States, its public, culture and society would be better off with no TV news options other than the liberal Democrat monopoly of reporting and opinions, which was the state of the medium before Rupert Murdoch’s daring innovation, is revealing their own bias.

The revolution may well have failed without Brit Hume, so today seems like an appropriate time to honor him. Hume started his career in national broadcast news with ABC—you know, the company that now calls “The View” a news program. In 1989, he became ABC’s chief White House correspondent and was prominent in that role until he quit in 1996 to join the new rebel network. A thorough professional, a recognizable face and a respected name, he instantly gave credibility and visibility to the Roger Ailes-led project.

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KABOOM! Cornell Picks Disgraced “Deep State” Ethics Villain Sally Yates To Investigate Cornell Rape Controversy

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Well, there goes my head.

Apparently there are no genuinely apolitical, unbiased, independent, trustworthy, competent lawyers who have the ability to investigate the accelerating Ethics Train Wreck launched by a booze, pot and ketamine-fueled orgy at a Cornell fraternity. (Previous EA posts on the thing are here and here) Gee, I’m kinda surprised. I would have thought, with all the millions of lawyers in this country, there would be at least a couple without the flaming ethics deficits of Letitia James, the lawfare New York Attorney General appointed Special Prosecutor for the state investigation, and to handle the Cornell investigation…waaait for it…

Sally Yates!

Yes, it’s Sally Yates, the Obama Justice Department appointee who refused to execute President Trump ‘s policies in his first term when she was Acting Attorney General, then after she was fired (she should have been disbarred) joined the Axis Russian Collusion conspiracy. Ethics Alarms had several posts condemning this proudly unethical lawyer, a true Ethics Villain, like…

Key quote (mine):

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Senator Le Pétomane?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

There are so many reasons for Michiganders regardless of party and ideological bent not to vote for Abdul El-Sayed that the revelation that he likes to fart in public seems trivial in comparison. He’s a Communist who lies about his beliefs; he has called for defunding the police and he is anti-Semitic, though to today’s Democrats that’s a good thing. He refused to disavow his pal Hasan Piker, who is a vocal America-hater. Naturally Bernie Sanders, AOC and Obama are supporting El-Sayed.

Now a longtime aid to the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan has quit and gone rogue, calling his former boss for whom he worked as a bodyguard and a staff assistant a “manufactured man” who has maturity more appropriate to a high school locker room. Jordan Domingue told the media that during El-Sayed’s gubernatorial and Senate campaigns, he realized that the candidate was a “30-year-old leapfrogging into a job he was inexperienced for and only got through connections.”

“Now I’m far from blameless, and will reflect for years how I let myself be captured by loyalty and personality,” Domingue added. “When he acted like an entitled mobster to elected officials in 2017-2018, I excused it as a justified outsider earning their place. When he would say one thing to one group and another thing to a different group hours later, I considered it just the norm or ‘strategic ambiguity’ as he calls it.”

What Domingue really found intolerable, however, was El-Sayed’s affection for openly passing gas in front of staffers. “He would openly do so without warning or embarrassment as his form of stand-up comedy,” Domingue wrote. “To this day for him, the act of farting is easily one of the funniest things a person can do.”

Is that a good reason to vote against him, along with, you know, the fact that El-Sayed is an anti-American lunatic, which doesn’t bother the Mad Left these days? Le Pétomane was the stage name of Joseph Pujol (1857 –1945) who was a professional “fartist.” Not only could he fart at will, he could fart tunes. The Governor in “Blazing Saddles,” played by Mel Brooks, is named in honor of Le Pétomane.

There are lots of reasons to be dubious about this story. For one thing, it has “disgruntled employee” written all over it. For another, it was first reported by The Gateway Pundit, which is on the EA blacklist. I will also point out that supporters of Donald Trump are ethically estopped from assailing a candidate for having a sophomoric sense of humor and running for an office “he was inexperienced for.”

I also note that the levels of dignity and decorum, not to mention maturity, that the public has a right to expect from its elected officials has already been reduced to high school and even elementary school level by such class acts as GOP Rep. Lauren Boberg, Senator Fetterman dressing like gym rat and this…

Nonetheless, thinking that farting intentionally at the workplace is acceptable conduct does raise serious questions about judgment and socialization, if not sanity. And wouldn’t you agree that a superior intentionally farting among staffers in the workplace constitutes creating a “hostile work environment”?

A College Degree Is No Longer Worth the Cost or Time In the Assessment of Normal Americans, But Crucial To Indoctrination By The Totalitarian Left…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The only reason so many polled still think that colleges are essential to education is that their own education was inadequate and their critical thinking faculties are under-developed. Or they are Democrats. Or both.

Substacker Steven Hayward writes,

Nearly every day brings fresh news of another university facing a huge budget deficit and enacting significant cuts to programs and personnel. The latest is the University of Minnesota, which is imposing cuts to fill a $225 million shortfall over the next two years chiefly because of the declining enrollment that everyone knew was coming. The University of Maine is likewise imposing—gasp!—faculty layoffs to close a $19 million budget shortfall.

Yet universities were heedless of the coming financial collapse, and went on building climbing walls, plush dorms, and adding more and more layers of useless and/or mendacious administrators (you gotta put those gender studies majors to work somewhere). (I reported here previously about the travails of Syracuse University, which is cutting whole departments because of falling enrollment and plunging revenue.)

Meanwhile, here is what an Ivy League education produces:

They haven’t even been taught the meaning of “justice.”