hypocrisy

Comments Of The Day (3): “An Especially Ugly Ethics Quiz: Cam Betrayed”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

There have been many excellent posts on the Ethics Quiz about the couple that executed their apparently loving therapy dog, a Staffordshire Bull Terrier named Cam. Three comments stand out (I could easily have selected twice this many, however) , one by Paul W. Schlecht, another by slickwilly, and a third by Elizabeth II. They cover some common ground, and together show the complexity and breadth of this issue, which goes beyond mere animal cruelty to our society’s emotional connection, confusion and hypocrisy about animals generally. I decided that they complement each other, and am posting them as a set.

First, here is slickwilly’s Comment of the Day on the post, “An Especially Ugly Ethics Quiz: Cam Betrayed”:

Growing up rural, animal management is a way of life. You care for ‘commercial’ animals and you care for ‘pets.’ Confusing the two causes problems with regards to ‘final disposition.’ You never torture the animal (as this was considered a lack of character and a sign of a dangerous person) but attempt to make the act as painless as possible. (Note this is why you never hunt deer with an insufficient caliber, or take low probability shots that may wound but not quickly lower the target’s blood pressure to induce unconsciousness. Not only is is more humane, but also prevents the meat from being tainted or lost.)

A good working definition of a commercial animal versus a pet is driven by what type of profits are earned on the animal. We (generally) keep and pay for pets for emotional reasons (a type of profit), and do not expect monetary profit. Commercial animals are for food and profit. The line can blur, as in the case of military bomb dogs or ‘barn’ cats, but this generally is the case. It is a pet if you cannot bear to think of eating it. Cows can be pets. Dogs can be junk yard guard animals. The owner’s feelings make the difference.

I remember some folks who were unable to kill their show chickens, pigs, sheep, (or whatever) for delivery to the buyer (who did not bid on a live animal, and paid well over market value to support the college aspirations of the seller.) The Ag teacher’s advice was to never name a meat production animal, if you intend to sell it. Reluctance to complete the life cycle of such animals indicated the person was not suited to that sort of rural agricultural activity. Go grow corn if you like, but don’t raise beef. There was no shame in this: find what you like to do and do it. But make no mistake: anyone who has cared for 20 pigs knows they are NOT pets, and they EAT a lot, which has to be paid for.

Continue reading →

Sexual Harassment, Victim Blaming, Toxic Corporate Cultures, President Trump’s Defense and Other Ethics Notes On Bill O’Reilly’s Fall (Part II))

/ Jack Marshall / 55 Comments

The Ethics Alarms audit of the Bill O’Reilly canning by Fox (okay, technically it wasn’t a firing, but it was) continues…

9. One problem with the Left’s thinly veiled joy at getting O’Reilly is that it encourages the Right’s narrative that O’Reilly’s only crime was being conservative. Also not helping were President Trump’s interview statements about O’Reilly to the New York Times, in which he said in part,

“I think he’s a person I know well — he is a good person… I think he shouldn’t have settled; personally I think he shouldn’t have settled. Because you should have taken it all the way. I don’t think Bill did anything wrong.”

Stupid, stupid, stupid; irresponsible. Maybe two stupids and two irresponsibles. Do otherwise good people engage in sexual harassment? Of course: good people do bad things. But when a prominent individual says publicly that a sexual harasser is a good person, it sends a message that sexual harassment, like all abuse, doesn’t create a rebuttable presumption that someone is not a good person. Add to that Trump’s last statement, “I don’t think Bill did anything wrong,” and the toxic messaging is complete. Either that statement means that the President is, based on nothing, claiming that the allegations against O’Reilly are untrue, or worse, he is saying that there is nothing wrong with sexual harassment. Based on his infamous exchange with Bill Bush, there is good reason to believe that this is exactly what he means.

10. That interview, in turn, led inevitably to this fatuous and offensive article by conservative blogger Roger Simon. Sure, Roger, you dummy, O’Reilly did nothing wrong except support Donald Trump. Count the rationalizations in this piece of offal by one of the shimmering stars in the Pajama Media firmament of conservative thought-leaders.

The sad truth is the many conservatives—most?—really don’t think sexual harassment is a big deal. It is one of many ethics blind spots.

11. One conservative who lacks that blind spot—though she has lots of others—is Sarah Palin, who had this exchange yesterday with CNN’s Jake Tapper: Continue reading →

Yale’s Core Values Betrayal: The Case Of The Student’s Unnecessarily Provocative Philosophy Essay

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

It certainly appears as if U.S. higher education is sailing toward the shoals of ethics bankruptcy, full speed ahead. It also appears that Yale, although it’s part of a tightly bunched armada, is leading the way.

A law suit called Doe v. Yale tells a jaw-dropping tale that once would have been unbelievable, “once” meaning “before a large segment of the culture accepted the proposition that free expression and thought were undesirable unless they met certain lockstep requirements that will ease the way to a progressive utopia.” The plaintiff, a male student, claims that Yale punished him for the offense of writing a class essay that offended a female teaching assistant.

According to his lawsuit, in late 2013 a philosophy teaching assistant filed a complaint with the university’s Title IX office, complaining about a short paper “Doe” had written in the class she was helping to teach.  The essay discussed Socrates’ discussion, recounted in Plato’s “Republic,” of the three divisions of the soul and their relationship to justice. It applied the Greek philosopher’s ideas to rape, arguing that the crime was also an irrational act in which  the soul’s appetites and spirited components overwhelm its reason, which must have primacy for mankind to be moral and just.

The Title IX coordinator, an associate dean in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences named Pamela Schirmeister, told Doe that his essay was “unnecessarily provocative.” By daring to discuss rape, he had committed an offense against the teaching assistant. He was told to have no contact with the teaching assistant, and ordered to attend sensitivity training at the university’s mental-health center—re-education and indoctrination, in other words. “Doe” was now, he was told, a “person of interest” to Yale, meaning that that the college was now going to be watching him with a grounded suspicion that he was a potential danger to the campus.

What followed, a few months later, were two dubious accusations of sexual assault by female students, both handled with the slanted, pro-accuser, due process-avoiding  approach that has become epidemic on campuses since President Obama’s Dept of Education issued its infamous “Dear Colleague” letter in April of 2011.  Ethics Alarms has discussed some of these cases and the letter, but that is not the topic before us today.

Today the topic is the suppression of free speech, thought, and expression on college campuses.  Continue reading →

Yes, Black Lives Matters Is A Racist Organization (Racism Is Unethical)

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Black Lives Matter has banned whites from attending an upcoming event in Philadelphia, designating it as  “black only.”

The April 15 meeting will plan  projects and initiatives for the upcoming year as well as serving as a “black only space”  for people—well, those who are the right color— to “meet, strategize and organize.” Whites are explicitly banned from the meeting, according to the organization’s Facebook event page.

When criticism began coming over Twitter, Black Lives Matter Philly explained that their meetings are “black centered.”

Oh.

Racist.

As Ethics Alarms has stated repeatedly.

While reminding all that the Democratic Party still officially endorses BLM and thus its hypocritical anti-white racism as well, there is this: Continue reading →

No, Bill O’Reilly Shouldn’t Be Fired For Making Fun Of Rep. Maxine Waters’ Hair

/ Jack Marshall / 117 Comments

Bill O’Reilly should have been fired before he made fun of Maxine Waters’ hair. Now would be the worst time imaginable to fire the blow-hard, untrustworthy Fox News pundit, because it would allow partisans to silence an opinion-maker whose opinions they hate by employing shameless and unjustified race-baiting. That tactic, employed repeatedly and futilely against Rush Limbaugh and other high profile conservatives, is unethical, and must not be validated by success.

In case you don’t follow O’Reilly, 1) I salute your taste and time management, and 2) here’s what caused the controversy:

O’Reilly was stopping by the set of “Fox and Friends,” and along with the gang on the couch watched some of Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters’ speech attacking President Trump. After the clip, O’Reilly said, “I didn’t hear a word she said. I was looking at the James Brown wig.”

Being in the Land of the Dimwits, O’Reilly sparked an idiotic defense from co-host Ainsley Earhardt, who said, fatuously, “You can’t go after a woman. Plus, I think she’s very attractive.”

Why in the world can’t you “go after a woman” when the woman is an elected official who says ridiculous things as routinely as clockwork? Earhardt’s statement was sexist on its face, and as O’Reilly quickly found out, it wasn’t sexism that he was going to be accused of with his mean James Brown wig comment. By the way…

…he had a point.

It’s a nasty, ad hominem, unprofessional point, however, that lowers political discourse into the gutter. O’Reilly has been doing this in various ways from the beginning of his career, when he wasn’t misrepresenting his credentials, his conduct, or other matters. This, however, was a relatively minor example.

Never mind though: Waters is black, so by the infinitely adjustable weaponizing definition of racism used by progressives, black activists and Democrats for the previous eight years, to criticize her at all is to be a racist. This was a sub-version; criticizing a black woman’s hair is racist. OK, comparing a black woman’s wig to an iconic black soul singer’s wig is racist. Or something: just cry racism, and the hope is that it will tar O’Reilly so badly that he will become unemployable, and no progressive will ever have their blood pressure raised by him again.

All over social media, progressives of note and non-note called for Bill’s head because his comment was “racist.” This really takes chutzpah, since mocking Donald Trump’s hair and skin-color virtually became a national pastime in Leftist Land during the 2016 campaign, and is still. What’s the standard being advocated here? Calling a white President”s comeover anything from a dead animal to decomposing vegetables is perfectly acceptable political discourse, but comparing a black House member’s wig to the hair of a dead rock icon is too horrible to tolerate? The Washington Post published a feature called “The 100 Greatest Descriptions of Donald Trump;s Hair” last June. It included such entries as

  • A mullet that died in some horrific accident
  • Combed like he’s televangelist Benny Hinn.
  • Like Biff, from “Back to the Future”
  • Like Lucille Ball
  • Like a troll doll

And most worthy of discussion,  this: Continue reading →

No, A Democratic Senator Attending A Party In Honor Of A Trump Appointee He Opposed Isn’t “Hypocrisy”…It’s Called “Statesmanship,” “Sportsmanship,” And “Professionalism”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

To be fair, we see so little of either now that many may no longer be able to recognize the two traits any more.

The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news source wrote,

A Democratic senator who couldn’t “in good conscience” vote for Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross still attended a ritzy cocktail party welcoming him to the nation’s capital.On Wednesday, Georgetown socialite and Washington Post editor Lally Weymouth, daughter of the paper’s former publisher, Katherine Graham, hosted a “Welcome to Washington, D.C.” party for Ross at the Georgetown mansion of former Republican diplomat C. Boyden Gray. West Virginia’s Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin attended that party, according to Politico Playbook, rubbing shoulders with Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

Manchin’s attendance marked an about-face for the Democrat, who attempted to block Ross’s cabinet appointment.

In February, Manchin said he could not “in good conscience … give Wilbur Ross a promotion.” The senator credited Ross’s career as a billionaire investor—which earned him the nickname ” King of Bankruptcy”—and his involvement in the West Virginia mining industry for his decision to oppose the appointment along with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

“Following my extensive vetting, meeting with him, watching his nomination and reaching out to West Virginians who have worked with him directly, I cannot in good conscience look the families of the fallen Sago miners or the Weirton Steel workers who lost their jobs in the eye knowing I voted to give Wilbur Ross a promotion,” Manchin said in a statement at the time….

Steven Law, president of the GOP Senate Leadership Fund, criticized his attendance as a sign of “Washington hypocrisy.” “Apparently Joe Manchin’s ‘good conscience’ waits in the car while he stops in for cocktails on the Washington D.C. party circuit,” Law said in a statement. “Senate Leadership Manchin thinks he can fool West Virginia voters with his Washington hypocrisy, but we believe they are catching on to Manchin’s worn-out act.”

So it was principled, then, for Rep. John Lewis to boycott President Trump’s inauguration? It’s principled, then, for Democrats to refuse to respect the office of the President, because they didn’t vote for Donald Trump. Is that what Steven Law is saying?

Do Republicans think before they make statements like this? Continue reading →

KABOOM! Unethical Quote Of The Month, And Maybe Hypocrisy Of The Century: Nancy Pelosi

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

I’m stunned. I honestly did not think it was possible for  Nancy Pelosi to surprise me any more, as my expectations for her utterances are so low as to be subterranean. I certainly didn’t think she could make my head explode again. Pelosi accomplished the impossible, however, by including this astounding line in a letter to Paul Ryan regarding a GOP replacement for the Affordable Care Act. She actually wrote…

“The American people and Members have a right to know the full impact of this legislation before any vote in Committee or by the whole House.”

KABOOM!

1. This is the same woman whose most famous quote, regarding the ACA, is “We have to pass the  bill so that you can find out what’s in it….” 

2. The law the Republicans want to replace with something the “American people and Members have a right to know the full impact of … before any vote in Committee or by the whole House” was one that almost no Democrats read before voting for it, so even they didn’t understand its “full impact.”

3. The ACA passed in this manner included a mandate that Pelosi and her party swore was not a tax but a penalty, and then when the law was challenged argued to the Supreme Court that it wasn’t a penalty, but a tax.

4. The President of the United States who signed the ACA materially misrepresented the impact of the law repeatedly by stating that it allowed Americans who wanted to keep their current health plans to do so.

How dare Nancy Pelosi make that demand? How astoundingly hypocritical, overflowing with gall, and immune to self-awareness can any human being be? This is like Bill Clinton lecturing Donald Trump about avoiding intimate relations with subordinates, but worse.

Of course she’s right, but Pelosi is the last person on earth, literally the last person, entitled to demand transparency regarding health care bills. How can she say something like this? Is she senile? Is she trying to look ridiculous? Is she so completely devoid of integrity that she can advocate the exact opposite of her own conduct and that of her party without a twinge of irony or shame? Does she believe that her followers are so blind, stupid an unable to hold a memory in their heads that they won’t see how offensive this is, coming from her?

Are they that blind and stupid?

Ethics Dunces In Arms: Gloria Steinem And The New York Times Demonstrate How “The Star Syndrome” Works

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Gloria 2017 (right), with her ghostwriter, Gloria 2007 ( left)

Last week, Gloria Steinem authored an op-ed in The New York Times headlined, “Women Have Chick-Flicks. What About Men?”.

It was standard issue male-bashing; biased and badly researched junk, but more interestingly, at least half of it was ten years old, substantially lifted from a piece Steinem wrote for the Women’s Media Center website in 2007. This kind of lazy self-plagiarism is a major ethical breach that respectable publications do not suffer gladly, at least when the miscreant isn’t a feminist icon that their editors worship, or at least feel has earned immunity from those annoying ethical principles lesser mortals have to deal with.

As an aside, it really is a silly op-ed, not worthy of publication the first time, much less plagiarizing now. Some excerpts:

I was on a flight from New York to Seattle when a long delay on the tarmac prompted the airline to offer us a free movie. As the flight attendant read the choices aloud, a young man across the aisle said, “I don’t watch chick flicks!” I knew what he meant, and so did the woman sitting next to me. A “chick flick” is one that has more dialogue than car chases, more relationships than special effects, and whose suspense comes more from how people live than from how they get killed.

Translation: “Men are morons, women are sophisticates.” No generalizations or stereotypes there…

Think about it: If “Anna Karenina” had been by Leah Tolstoy, or “The Scarlet Letter” by Nancy Hawthorne or “A Doll’s House” by Henrietta Ibsen — if “The Invisible Man” had been “The Invisible Woman” — would they have been hailed as classics? Suppose Shakespeare had really been the Dark Lady who some people still think he/she was. I bet most of her plays and all of her sonnets would have been dismissed as ye olde Elizabethan chick lit and buried until they were resurrected by stubborn feminist scholars of today.

Two words: Prove it. Since  very few  great female authors were writing similarly brilliant literature in those periods, Steinem’s bet is rigged. Where are those buried woman-authored masterpieces that stand up as the equals of “King Lear” and  “War and Peace”? I’ll make another bet: I bet if those works had been written by women, we’d know it, and they would be just as admired and immortal as the works authored by men. Has Gloria heard of Wuthering Heights? Jane Eyre? Frankenstein? Pride and Prejudice? Has she heard of Jane Austen?

But I digress.

The original article published referred to that airplane flight as taken by Steinem  “recently.” That word was taken out after Gloria’s cheat was discovered, and this “Editor’s Note” was added: Continue reading →

Gee, Would It Really Have Been So Hard For Democrats And The News Media To Just To Admit That Rep. Richmond’s ‘The President’s Female Counselor Looks Like She’s Used To Giving Blow-jobs’ Joke Was Wrong, Period? Apparently So. Wow.

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

Great apology there, Cedric. Ugh.

Why do I think this story is a big deal? I think it’s a big deal because it exposes–

…the white-hot hatred of Republicans by so much of the Left, on the level we have seen with Sarah Palin being attacked for running for office while being a mother, and Martin Bashir on MSNBC wishing that someone would defecate in her mouth, to the extent that they are literally willing to abandon and reject their own alleged core principles…

…calling into question whether they even are core principles, rather than calculated pandering to receptive groups, and thus..

…raising the specter of epic hypocrisy, which is a lack of integrity and honesty.

Then there is this: I have a brilliant younger sister. She is a lawyer, a litigator, a singer, and actress, the hardest working person I know, and someone who has always been able to match or surpass me in every field. Yet I have watched as her achievements have occurred in the teeth of a stiff wind of sexist bias, often making her unhappy, angry, resentful and stressed when she deserved so much better. Growing up with her, it never occurred to me that this kind of prejudice existed until I was the captain of the high school chess team, and saw how the other teams’ players—all male: our team had the only female players (3) in the Greater Boston chess league— were openly contemptuous that a “girl” would presume to challenge them. It was great: my sister slaughtered them. She is a merciless chess player, a killer, and didn’t merely beat her male opponents but humiliated them. She had the best record on the team. Yes, gender bias is personal with me. I hate it.

To briefly recap: Cedric Richmond, an African American  Democratic Congressman, leeringly implied, as a speaker at an event, that KellyAnne Conway’s posture in a photo taken in the Oval Office, “really looked kind of familiar in that position there. Don’t answer — and I don’t want you to refer back to the 1990s.” It was a reference to fellatio, and the old, old slur against successful women that they “suck their way to the top.” This was obvious and blatant, and yet when conservatives and Republicans–and only conservatives and Republicans—protested, Richmond, incredibly, denied that his comments had any offensive content or intent. He is a liar.

Then, in the wake of  stunning silence of any leader of the Democratic Party, major feminist, major news organizations and liberal pundits, CNN’s Jake Tapper pressed Rep. Richmond’s leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi, to condemn his remarks. She refused, and also lied. One prominent Democrat without portfolio or post, Chelsea Clinton, did condemn that “joke,” which hardly salvages the party’s integrity and honor. Her mother? Madeleine Albright? Elizabeth Warren? Donna Brazile? Michelle Obama? Senator Gillibrand? Maureen Dowd? Rachel Maddow? Anyone? Hello? Bueller?

Crickets. Yet it was undeniable, as one pundit noted, that a Republican who made such a comment about Valerie Jarret would have been “run out of town.” Wrote The Federalist’s Bethany Mandel yesterday,

This “on her knees” comment from a sitting Democratic lawmaker was largely ignored by the liberal media and those who consume it. This comment is just one of many recent incidents of sexism aimed in Conway’s direction, justified because she’s a traitor to her gender, as many feminists have claimed; a female Uncle Tom. Instead of being applauded for her groundbreaking work as a campaign manager on the biggest upset political campaign in American history, Conway is fodder for attacks on her looks and sexuality, often at the hands of individuals who claim to be feminists.Our president may have a history of misogyny, but it’s becoming increasingly clear many of those in the resistance against him are merely fair-weather feminists: happy to wage or at best ignore attacks on women based on their sex because they think it’s fair to attack the president at any cost.

Bingo.

Now comes the next chapter, as those who have exposed their deep hate and corrupting hypocrisy try to worm their way back into the public trust. Continue reading →

Double Standards, Hypocrisy, News Media Bias, “Bias Makes You Stupid” And Cognitive Dissonance—This One Has Them All! Thanks, Ben Carson!

/ Jack Marshall / 155 Comments

Here come some dreamy immigrants, longing to be free!

HUD Secretary Ben Carson is, as we learned last year, an idiot, or perhaps and idiot savant. He’s also a Republican and currently in the Trump Administration. Clearly, anything he says is likely to be  ridiculous, and probably offensive. Barack Obama, on the other hand, is brilliant. Brilliant, I tell you! He is also idolized by journalists—he sends a thrill up Chris Matthews’ leg!—, and, indeed in part because he is a Democrat and a liberal. Obama is also, of course, worshiped by blacks, intellectuals and progressives. Carson is black too,  but he is a Republican and a conservative, so the black thing is cancelled out.

Now, what happens when Carson and Obama say exactly the same thing?

While speaking to a group of employees at his department on Monday, Carson said:

“There were other immigrants who came in the bottom of slave ships, who worked even longer, even harder, for less, but they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great grandsons, great granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”

What an idiot! “Immigrants?” mocked the NAACP. The Washington Post, New York Times, the Hill, Politico, and others headlined Carson’s comments, so bizarre, stupid and insensitive were they. Listen to this dummy! And Trump appointed him as a Department head! “Ben You’re A Fool! Slaves were not Immigrants!“ headlined the Miami Herald.

Now, a while back, when the brilliant, progressive, President Barack Obama ,said this about slave ships:

We say it so often, we sometimes forget what it means — we are a nation of immigrants. Unless you are one of the first Americans, a Native American, we are all descended from folks who came from someplace else — whether they arrived on the Mayflower or on a slave ship, whether they came through Ellis Island or crossed the Rio Grande.

Continue reading →