Comment Of The Day: “The Ethics Mess That Is US Race Relations, Chapter III: The Martin Luther King Day Essay”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

In today’s Comment of the Day, Michael R explores the effects of college costs, student loans and ideological indoctrination on schools’ ability to provide an the valuable education students think they are paying for. Some of the factors he mentions I didn’t know about; I’m not sure  I’ve ever read about them anywhere else.

Here is the veteran Ethics Alarms contributor’s  Comment of the Day on the post, “The Ethics Mess That Is US Race Relations, Chapter III: The Martin Luther King Day Essay.”

I don’t think all universities have become worthless. There are a lot of problems with the universities and much of it has to do with student loans and leftist indoctrination.

Student loans make people forget about how much college actually costs. Students go to colleges with nicer dorms, bigger ‘Wellness Centers’, and more activities because they can ‘afford’ it with loans. This resulted in an ‘arms race’ to ditch traditional dorms for suites, and now full apartments for students. It resulted in big ‘Wellness Centers’ instead of gyms. It resulted in vast Student Activities staff and budgets. It resulted in more and more sports. I would estimate that only about 1/3 of college costs these days go to academics and academic support (academic buildings, utilities, janitorial, etc). The rest is sports, activities, and administration. If you had a lean college with good academics, but old-style dorms, no student life, and no sports, it would go bankrupt quickly. College is expensive these days because the students and the parents DEMAND it be that way. Continue reading →

It’s A Super-Political Day, With Iowa, The STU, And The Impeachment Wrapping Up, So I Will Forgive Myself For Yet Another Politics-Related Post…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

A. Let this be a reminder that the social media giants will try to place their fists on the scale this election cycle.

The political spot above, a creation of the Republican group America Rising, was flagged by Twitter, which warned users that   “The following media includes potentially sensitive content.”

What’s the sensitive content? The video is overwhelmingly constructed of news clips and recorded quotes from political figures, including the President, that were broadcast nationwide.   It appears that Twitter considers pro-Trump, Republican, conservative advocacy, even of a res ipsa loquitur variety, inherently offensive to its audience. That may well be true, but the Russian attempts to manipulate what voters see and here in the 2016 campaign will be  dwarfed by the domestic efforts by the social media platforms and search engines—all for the greater good, of course.

B. Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Go ahead, enablers and deniers, rationalize  this one. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“You see what they are doing? They’re blaming Iowa. It’s not the fault of the Democratic Party. It’s Iowa’s fault. After the citizens of Iowa put up with all that interaction with candidates swarming the state for the past year (and more) and after they showed up for this elaborate nighttime gathering in groups in gyms and showing support with their bodies, they are blamed for the screw-up of the party!”

Iconoclastic blogger Ann Althouse, reacting to the Democratic Party’s attempts to mitigate the Iowa Caucuses debacle.

At least they aren’t blaming it all on Trump. Yet.

Ann continues..

The other blame-shifting I’m seeing is: The computers did it. There was an app and it somehow caused all the trouble. Reminiscent of Hillary’s wipe-it-with-a-cloth computer problems. I really don’t want to hear excuses that have to do with computers getting things wrong. This cannot have been a complicated app, and the backup was to use the phones, yet they want to blame the phone lines too! It’s just not credible.”

What triggered Althouse  were Washington Post  headlines telling her that
Sen. Dick Durbin said  it was time to end the Iowa caucuses and that Howard Dean said that Iowa should no longer lead the primary parade.

What I especially like about Ann is that her academic detachment allows her to focus on aspects of an issue that most analysts miss because they care about the results more than she does. This talent is annoying when it results in her going off on tangents about how a particular word is used in a quote or article–she’s been obsessed with the word “garnered” for a couple of weeks now—but this is an example of her picking up on an ethics issue that nobody else, including me, was mentioning: the avoidance of accountability.

I was shocked when I woke up this morning after sleeping in—bad night—to see that the results of the Caucus still hadn’t been announced. It’s a massive embarrassment for the party, and again—commenter Michael West disagrees with me on this, but I’ll double down now—it is bad for everyone, not just Democrats. Ann was focusing on this as well, I think.

The Iowa Caucuses have long been celebrated as old fashioned democracy in action: citizens meeting in firehouse hall and churches, debating, making their preferences known. I come from Arlington, Massachusetts, the largest municipality in the nation that still uses the town meeting system of governance. Local and regional democracy, though the Left increasingly derides it in its quest for global government, is the heart of American values. This kind of breakdown, catalyzed by inflicting technology on a system that has worked just fine without it, undermines public trust in our institutions.

That is dangerous.

Moreover, it is in everyone’s interests, in a two party system, for both parties to find the best possible candidate. This was a point I kept making in 2016. For either party’s system to blow up increases the likelihood that chaos will taint the  process, and cause unforeseen and unintended results—as it did the last time.

That said, the conservative pundits are certainly having fun. Like here. And here. And here. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 2/4/2020: Meltdown In Iowa Edition [CORRECTED]

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Good Morning!

As I write this, there are still no final results from the Iowa Caucuses. The cause seems to be some faulty software and generally poor planning by the Iowa Democrats, resulting in chaos. There is a lot of schadenfreude going on at the conservative websites, and it is unseemly. Much as the Democrats deserve to fall on their faces, this is botched democracy in action, and nobody should be gloating about it.  It’s unfair to all of the campaign workers and supporters of the various candidates—even though the supporters of some candidates should hide their heads under a bag—and chaos in the process serves nobody’s interests. What are the odds President Trump sends out a mocking tweet about it this morning?

Here’s Nate Silver explaining what a catastrophe this is for Democrats.

The bon mot turning up in comment sections and social media over and over again last night was “The Democrats can’t handle a caucus, and they want to run the whole country?”

Until the real vote totals are in  it’s all speculation, but it looks like Joe Biden crashed and burned, with his vote totals missing the 15% threshold required to win any delegates.

1. Pete being Pete. Remember what the Ethics Alarms verdict was on Pete Buttigieg a while back? It stands. Mayor Buttigieg declared himself the winner before any useful vote totals were in. Mediaite: “All this dumpster fire of an Iowa caucus was missing was a candidate who declared victory without a single vote being reported. But shortly after midnight eastern on Tuesday morning, Mayor Pete put the cherry on top of this hideous sundae with a confounding speech in which he seemed to proclaim himself the winner.” He has been sharply criticized by just about everybody, and deserves to be. It’s a jerk move.

Meanwhile, the Sanders camp, remembering the underhanded treatment he received from the DNC in 2016, is suggesting that this may all be a plot by the Democratic Dark lords to rob him of a big victory and the proverbial “Iowa Bounce.” I don’t blame them.

2. Stop making me defend Joe Biden! Biden is getting “Ew!’s and “Ick!”s as a result of this photo..

..taken when he gave his 19-year-old granddaughter s peck on the lips during an Iowa rally. Granted, this wouldn’t be an issue if Joe didn’t have a well-deserved reputation for  inappropriate public behavior with women and girls, but this is one of the best examples I have ever seen of how a photograph, contrary to the old saying, can and do lie. The kiss lasted a nanosecond, but the photo makes it look like Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in “The Thomas Crown Affair.” Continue reading →

More Evidence Of The Ethics Void That Is Elizabeth Warren.

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

As America waits for the results of the epically botched Iowa caucuses, the fact that Elizabeth Warren still attracts any support at all is more testimony to the fact that 1) a lot of people are just as dumb as Warren thinks they are, and 2) Democrats just aren’t paying attention.

In an awful field for the Democratic Presidential nomination, Warren stands out for her Machiavellian manipulation, pandering and abuse of her presumed authority as a scholar. After I posted on Facebook about her head-explosionworthy promise to let trans teens have a veto over a cabinet position, maybe the most ridiculous pledge I’ve ever heard from any candidate regaring anything, a Facebook friend wrote that I appeared to be biased against Warren. It’s true—I am irrationally biased against politicians who say things they obviously don’t mean in order to get votes, and who are shameless, lying, demagogues.

Liz had a particularly revealing few days before the caucuses.  The Wall Street Journal reported: Continue reading →

Rep. Adam Schiff’s “Have You No Sense Of Decency?” Moment

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Well, another “Have you no decency?” moment…

“Trump could offer Alaska to the Russians in exchange for support in the next election, or decide to move to Mar-A-Lago permanently and leave Jared Kushner to run the country, delegating to him the decision whether they go to war.”

—Lead House Impeachment Manager Congressman Adam Schiff of California during closing arguments in the Senate impeachment trial Monday, bringing  unconscionable partisan fear-mongering and anti-Trump hysteria to a new low.

Res ipsa loquitur.

And failure to recognize Schiff as an unprincipled and shameless buffoon is a symptom of Stage 5 Trump Derangement.

The Ethics Mess That Is US Race Relations, Chapter III: The Martin Luther King Day Essay

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

[Chapter I is here; Chapter II is here.]

Let’s start with a quick summary:

  • The University of Montana’s student Martin Luther King Jr. Day Committee, made up of members of the Black Student Union, the head of the African-American studies program, and members of the community, decided to hold a writing contest to honor the civil rights leader.

It was called “King’s Legacy Lives: A Writing Contest,” and the essay challenge was to explain  how the entrant was  “implementing Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy” at the University.

  • Six students submitted an essay.

All six were white. (Oh-oh.)

  • A “blind review process” chose four winners who subsequently took part in a a special MLK Day event, a panel discussion about how King’s legacy had  influenced their lives with keynote speaker, UM alumna and Montana Racial Equity Project Outreach Coordinator Meshayla Cox.

Unfortunately, the University couldn’t avoid announcing the contest results. Continue reading →

Unethical Tweet Of The Week: The Tweeter In Chief

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

The President could win this category every week, but this one is especially annoying.

  • It gives his enemies—and they are enemies—a stick to beat him with, since they obsess about the most trivial things he says or does anyway whether there is anything wrong with them or not.
  • It reinforces the stereotype that he is an idiot.
  • In doing so, it undermines his credibility and trust as a leader.
  • It makes what is supposed to be an honor for the Chiefs into a joke.
  • The gaffe alienates one entire state, if not two.
  • It exhibits extreme carelessness.
  • It potentially injures untold Americans, who rolled their eyes so hard that they risked blindness.
  • A President should know the states and major cities of the nation he leads…without having to check.

If the President is determined to communicate directly to the public, he is obligated  to do so with care, consideration, and competence. He doesn’t.

But we knew that.

Ethics Dunce: Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa)

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Ugh.

Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) said yesterday, “I think this door of impeachable whatever has been opened. Joe Biden should be very careful what he’s asking for because, you know, we can have a situation where if it should ever be President Biden, that immediately, people, right the day after he would be elected would be saying, ‘Well, we’re going to impeach him.’”

No, no, no. Someone should wash Ernst’s mouth out with soap. That door needs to be slammed shut, and Ernst is a fool for suggesting otherwise, even hypothetically.

What the Democrats did, by deciding from the moment Donald Trump was elected to seek a way to remove him, undermined our democracy and its institutions. It also threatened—threatens-— to institutionalize  a  precedent that would make every  elected President to come a permanent target  of a soft coup by those who lost the contest to decide who was “fit” to be President.  From the beginning, one of the main reasons the Democrats’ undemocratic strategy was so evidently dangerous was the powerful “tit for tat” reflex in politics. Sometimes, the understanding that in politics “what goes around comes around” is a restraining force on irresponsible and unethical partisan warfare. This time it wasn’t, but that does not mean that the Republicans should reciprocate in kind. That is exactly what they must not do. If that is their approach, they will complete the destruction that the Democrats started. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 2/3/2020: Super Bowl Hangover Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Well HEL-LO!

1.”A Nation Of Assholes” indeed. Not for the first time, the NFL and the Super Bowl, aided and abetted by the network whose news arm presents almost all of its female on-air talent as bimbos, is excoriated for it, has a movie made about it, and doesn’t care, presented a half-time show that spectacularly violated FCC rules about what could be broadcast when children are likely to be watching. There were stripper poles, crotch grabs, crotch shots and simulated sex. You know: family entertainment.

Did you know Donald Trump is a crude vulgarian?

Here’s some of Megan Fox’s critique:

…The camerawork was outrageously gross, zooming in on Lopez’s barely covered crotch, so close that the viewer could see some sort of silver maxi pad sticking out from either side of her way-too-small fraud of a garment. If that thing wasn’t riding up between her front-hole lips, then my 6o-inch HDTV television was lying to me, and HD never lies… The only thing separating her anus from the camera is a pair of sheer stockings and a black thong. This is not okay. What the hell is wrong with the NFL? … Also, the cameramen were focused on JLo’s crotch for most of the performance….If you want to see it go find it. But it’s indecent and totally inappropriate for the Super Bowl halftime show. Shakira was not as offensive, although the cameramen also could not stay away from her crotch. But at least she was wearing an imitation of a skirt and she wasn’t on a stripper pole. Yep. JLo did a striptease pole dance while barely-dressed backup dancers simulated an orgy underneath her. It was disgusting.

What is the message here for young women exactly? You are not a sexual object and can demand men be fired for looking at you or complimenting you in the #MeToo era. You can also dress up like a whore and gyrate around on stage half-naked for the pleasure of men, but if they take pleasure in it, you can accuse them of being harassers. Get it?

Continue reading →