Democrats

The Brazen Dishonesty Of Move-On.Org

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

If you know the background, this is hilarious…but not surprising.

Move-On.org has been an ethics burr under my saddle since they first sullied the political scene with their emergence during the Clinton impeachment drama. The name of the organization stood for the proposition, an out-growth of the ethically corrupting Democratic defenses of President Clinton’s conduct, that we should all get along, that the President and the nation had suffered enough, it was all just a big misunderstanding over sex and “private personal conduct,” and in the interests of everyone, we should just “move on to pressing issues facing the country.’”

This was transparent and dishonest partisan garbage at the time, and I wrote about it extensively on the old Ethics Scoreboard (which will be back on-line as soon as I have the stomach to fight via-email with the cheap hosting site that refuses to allow any direct phone contact, and is improperly holding my website hostage.) The group’s underlying supposition was and is corrupt: yes, the President illegally used an intern as his sex toy in the White House, lied under oath in a court proceeding, and used his power to hide evidence and cover-up his acts, but we should just let that go because there are more important things to worry about. The “ethically corrupting Democratic defenses of President Clinton’s conduct’ that spawned the cynical Move-On efforts were 1) It’s just sex. 2) lying about sex under oath isn’t really lying, because “everybody does it” 3) the President using his power and position to get sexual favors from an intern and U.S. government employee is no big deal; and 4) Come on, lots of other Presidents did bad stuff. Continue reading →

Early Ethics Observations On Reactions To The Mueller Report

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

It was exactly 12:45 pm when I was informed by NPR that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer had issued a joint statement claiming the Attorney General Barr’s four page summary of the report released today had misled Congress. The report had been released at 11:00 am, and was over 400 pages long, as well as extremely dense, full of detailed legal arguments that even lawyers…like me…would have to read slowly and maybe more than once. What are the chances that Chuck and Nancy had read the report  by 12:45? I think “none” is a fair answer. It’s highly unlikely that any of their staff had read the report by them either. The accusation against Barr was a lie.

See that graphic above? That’s the dishonest fundraiser Democrats sent out almost immediately to inspire indignation from Democrats who haven’t read the report. If there are any ethical Democrats whose reaction to this isn’t “How dare my party treat me like I’m an idiot and give me false and misleading information and analysis to separate me from my money?” I’d like to hear from them. Maybe there just aren’t any ethical Democrats at all. At this point, I’m willing to entertain that possibility.

By the way, I’m about 40% through the report, though not in sequence. It is thorough, professional and appears to be fair. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Reparations Again”

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Reparations for slavery are 1) impossible 2) unaffordable  3) offensive, and 4) guaranteed to worsen race relations rather than repair them, but as long as progressives feel the need to pander to a victim mentality among blacks and think they can prosper by professing to support what they must know is a cynical fantasy, we will continue to hear about them. Ethics Alarms, in turn, will have to keep noting the proposal is unethical.

We got a classic example of the kind of “logic” applied by reparations-mongers when one of the more obscure and unqualified contenders for the Democratic Presidential nomination—you can imagine how obscure and unqualified that must be—announced her support for taking the money from other races to enrich anyone who identifies as the offspring of slaves. Marianne Williams—quick, now, who is she?—told CNN over the weekend,

“It’s simply a debt we owe. This country will not heal until we take a serious moral inventory. A nation must undergo the same level of deep moral inventory [and] admission of our character defects. Racism is a character defect. Let’s end this. Let’s fix this. Let’s solve this. Reparations won’t end everything but it will be a profound gift. It implies a mea culpa. It implies a recognition of a debt owed and therefore, it carries not only economic power but spiritual force — whatever it costs, it’s time to do this.”

Sure.

Here is A.M. Golden’s Comment of the Day on the post, Reprations Again.

I’ll be back with a brief comment after A.M. has his say.

I oppose reparations. It’s no better than the lottery or a medical settlement.

In the Black Community, the concept of “Giving Back to the Community” is huge. It’s expected that, if you run a business in the neighborhood, you will use your largess to help your neighbors. This is, in part, why Asian-owned businesses that tend to be family run get flack because they don’t hire within the community. A wealthy resident or a business owner is made to feel obligated to fund a community center or food pantry (though this is really just making the lottery winner a forced charitable organization or even an extension of government). But, in many cases, “Giving Back to Community” means that you just hand over money to people as loans that are, in actuality, gifts.

I remember attending a sci-fi convention a few years ago with a notable black actor who spent many years working at his trade before becoming famous. At his Q&A session, he talked about a charitable organization he is involved with that sends minority children out into a type of summer camp in open places like Montana so they can be exposed to nature and a different environment. Halfway through the panel, an African-American fellow walked in, sat down, raised his hand and asked what the actor had done to “Give back to the community”. The actor then repeated his earlier description of his charitable work. After that, the newcomer left…probably to go into other Q&A sessions to determine if other black actors were pulling their weight. Continue reading →

Afternoon Ethics Romp, 4/10/2019: A Swirl Of Emotions…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Ah, I feel wefweshed!

Just took a post-seminar nap—one of the bennies of a hime business– counted philosophers jumping over a fence, and now I’m awake and ready to rumble…

1. Wow. The quality of posts on this morning’s Open Forum is off the charts. Now my self-esteem is crushed , since it’s obvious that I’m keep the group back with my mundane commentary. If you haven’t dropped in on the colloquy yet, I recommend it highly.

2. This is why we can’t  have nice things, and will have fewer and fewer of them as time goes on…Related to a thread in the Open Forum, about a controversy over the way artificial intelligence screens job applicants is this news from a week ago. Google announced that it was dissolving a newly established panel. called the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC). which was founded to guide “responsible development of AI” at the tech giant (colossus/ behemoth/monster). The group was to have eight members and meet four times over the course of 2019 to consider issues and recommendation regarding Google’s AI program. The idea was to have an intellectually and ideologically diverse group to avoid “group think” and narrow perspectives.

I know something about such enterprises. I once had the job of running independent scholarly research within the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on contentious policy matters. My methodology was to invite experts from all sides of the issue, the political divide, and spectrum of professions and occupations. The method worked. Oh, we had arguments, minority reports, everything you might expect, but the committee meeting were civil, stimulating and often surprising. This, of course, requires an open mind and mutual respect from all involved. Continue reading →

Reparations Again.

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

Almost all of the Democratic Presidential wannabes are claiming that they support reparations for slavery. This is signature significance for shameless pandering and dishonesty, of course, and pretty redolent, in my assessment, of buying black votes. There are many, many things coming out of the mouths of the various demagogues, empty suits and crypto-socialists aspiring to unseat Donald Trump that are impossible–banning combustion engines, free college for all, ending the Electoral College, and many more—but reparations is a special species of fantasy, wrong in every way.

I have been periodically reading scholarly and not so scholarly debates about the feasibility  and justification for reparations for decades, and I have come to see this as less of a policy debate than a confession of defeat. Of course, every year that the timeline retreats from the end of slavery, the more logically untenable the mass hand-out of massive amounts of money that the nation cannot afford  to the descendants of slaves becomes. Ethically it was always untenable, and guaranteed, if such an irresponsible thing actually happened, to exacerbate racial divisions while creating endless demands for similar programs to benefit other groups, especially Native Americans. And why shouldn’t women receive reparations for all those centuries of forced labor and childbearing without civil rights, if the United States is going into the retroactive damages business?

Polling is a bad way to conduct a nation’s business, but sometimes the public can detect a true stinker when it sees one:. Reparations are unpopular with about 80% of the population, and I sense that even progressives just pretend to tolerate politicians who blather on about it because they know it’s all for show, and designed to harvest naive votes for more practical crazy leftist proposals.

Many of these proposals involve trying to somehow solve the gaps between black and white success and achievement in America, and mostly consist of rigging the system in various ways, especially now that Affirmative Action’s days are numbered, (and didn’t work that well anyway). Are a disproportionate number of blacks getting tossed out of school? Stop holding blacks to disciplinary standards—better yet, stop holding any students to disciplinary standards. Bad test scores making it more difficult to justify discriminating against Asian-Americans with better test scores? Eliminate testing as part of the college admission process!  Are too many African-Americans incarcerated? Legalize as many of the crimes as possible, and then  stop sending non-violent law-breakers to prison. These and other measures are no more fair of logical than reparations, just cheaper and easier to con or guilt Americans into accepting.

Back in March of 2016, I temporarily lost my mind in the wake of our first black President’s utter failure to address our race problems, despite his soaring rhetoric.  Charts from the Brookings Institution’s Social Mobility Memos blog were posted to the web, and starkly indicated that the  apparently intractable problems of American blacks that I studied in college had failed to improve in 50 years. I wrote this post, in which I  concluded, after a number of depressing observations, Continue reading →

No, Ann, The Fact That The Accusation Against Joe Bides Was a “Hit” Doesn’t Mean It Wasn’t Necessary And Right.

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Ann Althouse has fallen into the Biden harassment rationalization trap.

How disappointing.

She writes,

“I’m not a Joe Biden fan. I thought he was loathsome in the 2012 VP debate with Paul Ryan (live-blogged here (“Ryan is speaking earnestly about preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons, and Biden is chuckling toothily, his body shaking like Santa Claus”)). And I’m a longtime opponent of sexual harassment (and kept true to the position even when Bill Clinton, the first person I ever voted for for President who won, got accused of it). But this hit job has made me sympathetic to Joe. I’m surprised how distinct and strong my emotional reaction is.”

So am I.

As regular readers here know, Althouse is one of my most quoted commentators here, because she is objective and usually perceptive.  Her mistake in sympathizing with Biden, however, betrays some kind of ethical blind spot. This is the common confusion of motive with conduct.  If the conduct is objectively ethical, then the fact that there may be less than ethical motives behind it doesn’t change anything about the ethics verdict. No doubt about it, the first of the accusations against Biden for sexual harassment and misconduct (There have been more since ) came from a Bernie devotee, and was, as Ann says, a political hit. Continue reading →

On Biden And Sexual Harassment, The Left, As Always, Is Hypocritical, But The Right, As Usual, Is Stupid

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Ah, the good old days, when men were men and in charge, and women knew they were there to hug…

The question of the ages is, which is worse?

It’s a close call, but I vote for the conservative side.

It is true, transparent and pretty embarrassing (I hope) that so many progressives, the Walking Woke, and even feminists are tying their own brains and ours into knots by trying to defend Obama’s long-time happy-go-lucky serial toucher/ hugger/ kisser/ sniffer, nuzzler and groper. We’ve seen this integrity vacuum from them before, as when Gloria Steinem, after successfully selling the undeniable concept that when a man has superior power over a woman, that woman cannot meaningfully consent to being mauled (with love, of course) in the workplace or even boinked after-hours, changed her position so Bill Clinton could escape the consequences of his own sleazy and illegal behavior.

The hypocrisy,is especially egregious now, as I already discussed, because sexual harassment law has been around for over 30 years, because we are two decades past Monica Madness, because Al Franken is watching old Saturday Night Live videos somewhere in Minnesota, and because #MeToo was supposed to have made sure that America “got it.” How is the world can Biden pretend that this doesn’t apply to him? In a 2017 appearance at George Mason University, he defended the Obama “guilty until proven innocent” approach to campus sexual assault allegations, saying: “Guys, a woman who is dead drunk cannot consent — you are raping her! We’ve got to talk about this. Consent requires affirmative consent! . . . If you can’t get her to say ‘yes’ because she wants to, you ain’t much.” And Joe, a woman who is within feel-up distance of a Senator or Vice-President can’t give affirmative consent to touching, hugging, kissing, sniffing, nuzzling and groping, either. This isn’t hard. Continue reading →