Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/23/2018: The Honored And the Dishonorable

Good morning!

1. A major ethics condemnation of Harvard will be posted soon; this is just the ours de vours...Harvard is disgracing itself and embarrassing its alumni one more time by awarding Hillary Clinton the once-prestigious Radcliffe Medal—it can’t be prestigious after this fiasco–for her “transformative impact on society” as part of the school’s graduation activities this week.  Harvard says Clinton was chosen for the award because she’s a “champion for human rights,” a “skilled legislator” and “an advocate of American leadership” on the world stage.

Let’s get this straight up front, shall we? Harvard, headed by feminist social justice warrior Drew Faust, is giving an award named after Harvard’s now defunct sister school that championed female power, dignity, and achievement independent of men, to the woman who meticulously enabled, aided and abetted a serial harasser, sexual abuser, and philanderer by intimidating and disparaging his female victims, so she could ride on his coat-tails to achieve wealth, influence and power that she never could have attained otherwise. Once within reach of that power, she managed to botch two Presidential runs against unlikely underdogs, while reducing the feminist message to “vote for vaginas.” Meanwhile, she joined with her husband in creating a massive influence peddling business that made them both rich. Having lost a Presidential election that she only had to stay out of major scandals to win, she has become the only losing Presidential candidate in U.S. history to continue whining about her loss at every opportunity for 18 months, thus strengthening a negative female stereotype.

Did I miss anything? Probably. This is once more consolation prize Progressive Feminist Inc. is giving to Hillary as virtue-signaling, which is ironic, because it signals hypocrisy, corruption, and dishonesty.  She is an ethics corrupter. She has made the culture, politics, society, and the nation worse. Harvard’s award is just one more example.

2. Not exactly Lincoln-Douglas…The recent Munk debate–part of a series series of  discussions that the news media keeps calling “highbrow,” which only shows how lowbrow the news media is—considered the statement, “Be it resolved, what you call political correctness, I call progress…”

What you call “progress,” I call thought control, censorship, and partisan bullying, and I say the hell with it.  Race-baiting professor Michael Eric Dyson and left-wing pundit Michelle Goldberg defended the indefensible “pro” position, and probably believe it, too, which is depressing all by itself. The “con” side at least had glib, currently-in University of Toronto Clinical Psychologist Jordan Peterson, who has a best-selling book and who became a celebrity after winning a duel of wits with an unarmed British journalist. He was paired with British actor /entertainer Stephen Fry: these debates are so highbrow, the organizers don’t think anyone will watch them if they don’t have jokes.  Even if the sides had been fairly constructed (any team with Michelle Goldberg on it has been sabotaged), it’s a terrible debate topic. The day the “pro” side wins is the day “1984” has arrived. Predictably, “con” won, and this was in Canada, which doesn’t have a First Amendment (the term “political correctness’ is inherently hostile to freedom of speech, and don’t think for a second progressives don’t know it.)

So, saddled with a losing argument, Dyson did what he does: he played the race card. “You’re a mean, mad, white man,” he said to Peterson at one point. End of debate, if I am moderating. When you have to stoop to ad hominem attacks, you’ve lost.  An equally acceptable rejoinder by Peterson would have been, “And you’re a black son of a bitch.”

Technical knockout. And Dyson unmasked himself as the fraud that he is. Continue reading

Ethics Quote Of The Day: Clinical Psychologist Dr. Jordan B. Peterson [UPDATED]

“Because in order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive. I mean, look at the conversation we’re having right now. You’re certainly willing to risk offending me in the pursuit of truth. Why should you have the right to do that? It’s been rather uncomfortable. […] You’re doing what you should do, which is digging a bit to see what the hell is going on. And that is what you should do. But you’re exercising your freedom of speech to certainly risk offending me, and that’s fine. More power to you, as far as I’m concerned.”

—–University of Toronto Clinical Psychologist Dr. Jordan B. Peterson responding to a British Journalist who asked him in an interview, “Why should your right to freedom of speech trump a trans person’s right not to be offended?

When the interviewer, Cathy Newman, was unable to muster a response, Peterson said,  “Ha! Gotcha.” To her credit, Newman replied,

“You have got me. You have got me. I’m trying to work that through my head. It took awhile. It took awhile. It took awhile.”

I’ll give her credit for having sufficient integrity to admit that she hadn’t thought the issue through, but that’s all I’ll give her credit for. What Peterson said should be obvious to any half-conscious and minimally educated individual. The episode is less about great truths dawning as the result of a sage’s perceptive words than it is about the relentless shallowness of journalists, making their presumptuous efforts to mold the thought and opinions of anyone else not just ridiculous, but infuriating.

Can you sense that I’m losing patience with journalists today? Perhaps it was hearing this, from non-doctor, non-smart person, fake-news purveyor for anti-Trump shill CNN Alisyn Camerota yesterday:

“So in 2009 the president’s calcium score, before he was president, was 34. In 2013, before he was president, it was 98. Today it’s 133. And as you see from the little cheat sheet, fine print below, a score of over 100 means a high risk of heart attack or heart disease within three to five years.”

…leading to this graphic…

But the President’s physician. asked directly by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s medical authority, said he did not:

Never mind. A CNN doctor who has never examined the President feels empowered to contradict the doctor who has, and who is responsible for his health. With any normal patient, Gupta’s conduct would be a breach of medical ethics, interfering with the doctor patient relationship. In this case, since the news media can get away with anything, it’s just one more example of arrogant, unethical journalism, manufacturing fake news.

Or perhaps of wishful thinking.

 

UPDATE: Moments after I posted this, CNN sent me this graphic with Dr. Gupta’s smiling face:

Yeah, I’d like to cut right to the facts, but on CNN, the snark, bias, stupidity and opinion make the facts all but impossible to detect. Talk about irony! What are ‘”facts” to you, Doctor? Indeed, what are “facts” to your whole network?