Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck

Sunday Ethics Shots, 7/11/2021: A Rescue, Larry Vaughn In Tokyo, Joe Trippi Trips, And “La Bamba” Meets Calvinball

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Alexander Hamilton died on this date in 1804, in a bizarre episode in U.S. history with profound ethical and political implications. There Aaron Burr fatally shot dead the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury and essential political thinker in an illegal duel at Weehawken, New Jersey. It was, of course, unethical to break the law, especially for these two men, who qualified as national leaders. Hamilton’s son had died defending his father’s honor in 1801 at the exact same spot (What was Alexander thinking?)

According to Hamilton’s “second,” Hamilton deliberately fired his weapon into the air rather than at Burr, a gentlemanly gesture and also a profoundly stupid one, if Hamilton believed half the things he had said and written about Burr’s character for years. This was why they were dueling, after all. Burr’s second claimed that Hamilton fired at Burr and missed, and the more I’ve thought abut this, the more I’ve come to believe that this is the more likely scenario. Hamilton was anything but naive, reckless or stupid. Yes, he was a crack shot, but anyone can miss. Even if the gesture of “throwing away his shot” as “Hamilton” puts it, would have impressed some adversaries and been seen as a display of mercy and an offer of reconciliation, it made no sense at all with this adversary. Moreover, Hamilton considered Burr a threat to the nation—he was right about that—why wouldn’t he shoot him? Whatever really happened, Burr, who had the second shot, killed Hamilton with a ball that went through his stomach into his spine. Hamilton died the next day.

This ended Burr’s political career: Would killing Burr have ended Hamilton’s? Probably, but Burr was the one who had issued the challenge. Maybe Hamilton would have been excused by the public. Maybe he would have ultimately become President; all the Founders of his magnitude except Ben Franklin did. For good or ill, Alexander Hamilton would have been a strong and probably transformative leader. But if he hadn’t died at Weehawken, it’s unlikely that we would have “Hamilton” the musical….

1. Baseball, hotdogs, and a bystander hero. Dr. Willie Ross, the father of Washington Nationals pitcher Joe Ross, saved the life of a choking fan midway through yesterday 10-4 Giants win over Washington at Oracle Park in San Francisco. Ross saw that a female spectator was choking, and when Ross came over to her seat to check on her, she couldn’t talk. Ross helped dislodge two pieces of a hot dog by using the Heimlich maneuver, then reached into her throat to take out the third and final piece. The woman, who is a nurse, could breath and speak at last. Ross received a standing ovation from nearby fans.

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Comment Of The Day: “The Ethics Of The Government’s Planned Door-To-Door Vaccination Campaign”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

vaccine protest

A nice “Bite me!” Comment of the Day by Demeter on the post, “The Ethics Of The Government’s Planned Door-To-Door Vaccination Campaign”:

I have gotten to date: a phone call, numerous post cards, and a text message, along with emails from my insurance company and… of course, FB announcements. If people are unaware of vaccines, their purpose, safety, etc… a knock on the door likely will not matter. Actually, it makes me want to dig in my heels to NOT do this.

I feel like there’s medical discrimination at play. Never have I ever been convinced to “do the right thing” with lotteries, scholarships for kids, phone calls asking me to schedule an appointment, a postcard, and now door to door. Umm, Fuck you. No.

I was considering it. Now “they” can leave me alone or see me in a courtroom. Translation: You would be better off shutting your stupid mouths and letting me work through the information, IN MY OWN TIME. If I die, I die. It’s my choice. You’re vaccinated so what do you care what I do? Or are they saying they don’t work as claimed? Pick one people, you can’t have both.

Side note: our history is full of amazing and epic scientific breakthroughs of things that turned out not to be safe, that we thought were, and and ended up killing thousands or more. Tell you what, Biden: Go back to the lab (you have a cancer cure so this should be simple!), create an airborne vaccine—I’m sure nothing could possibly go wrong—and you’d get your wish to have everyone vaccinated for the greater good.

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The Ethics Of The Government’s Planned Door-To-Door Vaccination Campaign [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

President Biden has announced that there will be a door-to-door campaign designed to inform people in less-vaccinated sections of the country to encourage getting the shots and to address concerns about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine. Many Republican, conservatives and civil libertarians fell the plan is an abuse of power. “How about don’t knock on my door. You’re not my parents. You’re the government. Make the vaccine available, and let people be free to choose. Why is that concept so hard for the left?” Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) tweeted. “The government now wants to go door-to-door to convince you to get an ‘optional’ vaccine,” Rep. Lauren Boebert, (R-Colo)., snarked. Some reactions were a bit more hysterical, such as this from GOP Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene:

“Biden pushing a vaccine that is NOT FDA approved shows covid is a political tool used to control people. People have a choice, they don’t need your medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations. You can’t force people to be part of the human experiment.”

But you know…Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Is a representative of the Federal Government coming to your home to try to get you to do something you have chosen not to do or may not want to do an abuse of power? It might be. I have ruled it unethical for uniformed police officers to come to homes seeking contributions to police charities, and indeed this practice has largely been stopped because it was viewed as inherently coercive. A government representative coming to your home to urge you to do anything, from paying taxes to brushing your teeth, may be stressful and feel like the heavy hand of Big Brothers. Moreover, such a visit strongly suggests “We are watching you!”

My guess is that the national public health goal of having as many Americans vaccinated as possible would be seen by most courts as a sufficient justification for this minimal incursion on public privacy, but I also wouldn’t be surprised to see one or more court rule that the government has no business coming to you home to metaphorically twist your arm.

The Ethics Alarms verdict is that door-to-door visits are ethically defensible if…

  • Each home targeted for such a visits gets advance notice of at least 72 hours, and an opportunity to opt out.
  • The government representative begins every visit by handing out a document and reciting it’s contents, which should be something like a Miranda Warning:

Hello, my name is XXXXXXXXXXXXXX, and I am representing the Federal Government in a national effort to encourage the public to be fully vaccinated against the Wuhan virus. You have no obligation to listen to me, invite me into your home, take or read the materials I have for you or to get vaccinated. If you prefer, I will leave immediately. However, I would be grateful if you would allow me to explain why it is important for you and members of your family to get vaccinated, and to answer any questions you might have. If you decline this visit, there will be no penalties or consequences, nor will your decision be noted on any government records.

Update: Upon thinking some more about this, I would want to see this added:

“Furthermore. no benefits or advantages will accrue to any of your neighbors who do not decline to speak with me, allow me into their homes, or accept my materials.”

Absent such warning, any visit by a government employee (or volunteer) is potentially coercive and an abuse of government power.

Law vs. Ethics #1: Harvard Screws Over Its Students, But It’s All Legal, So There

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Harvard welsome

Two rueful thoughts before I begin:

  • One of my college graduating class’s big reunions is next year. Harvard always does an amazing job of throwing a party (having a bank account larger than the treasuries of some countries let you do that , I have many friends and room mates I yearn to see again, and I haven’t been back home to Boston in 17 years. But I’ll be damned if I’ll honor Harvard with my presence. It has been an ethics disgrace consistently for several years, and I am ashamed of my association with the institution, as well as my family’s association (my father and sister graduated from the college, and my mother worked there for over 20 years, culminating in her becoming an assistant dean.)
  • I could really enlighten NPR’s listeners about the difference between law and ethics in this case, if I hadn’t been blackballed for daring to explain how accusations of sexual harassment against public figures like Donald Trump were not necessarily fair even if they were sincere. Oh, well—NPR can bite me.

With that introduction, be it known that in the case of Barkhordar et al v. President and Fellows of Harvard College,  Harvard University won a dismissal today of a lawsuit by students over its decision not to partially refund tuition when it evicted students from dorms and moved classes online early in the Wuhan virus pandemic. Continue reading →

Ethics Madness On The Golf Course

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I saw this story four days ago, and talked myself out of posting about it because I decided there had to be something I was missing and I didn’t feel like spending time researching pro golf, since I find golf so boring.But I couldn’t help myself, and kept reading articles, and now I’m convinced. This was wrong. And it was nuts. (Yeah, I’m pretty sick of the “Madness!” clip from the last seconds of “The Bridge Over The River Kwai” too—that’s James Donald, incidentally. I’m more sick of the apparently endless stream of incidents in The Great Stupid that prompt it.)

Golf pro Jon Rahm crushing the field in the PGA’s Memorial Tournament; indeed, he was on the way to a possible course record He had a six-stroke lead, and was 18 under par. Only golf legend Ben Hogan has done as well on that course in the tournament’s history. I had never heard of Rahm (though I will now know him as “that poor bastard), but he’s apparently the #3 ranked golfer in the world. That rating would have risen, and as would his bank account, when he won the nearly 1.7 million dollar prize money.

Right in the end of a round, however, on international TV, Rahm was told that he had been disqualified. The tournament’s medical adviser walked up to himafter he had played his final shot and gave him the news that he had tested positive for the Wuhan virus. Rahm had been undergoing daily tests after discovering before the tournament that he had come into close contact with someone who had tested positive.  Each of his previous tests had come back negative, but the positive test, once it was verified, was viewed as disqualifying. He took it, well, like a prole and a devotee of Vox. He tweeted,

“I’m very disappointed in having to withdraw from the Memorial Tournament. This is one of those things that happens in life, one of those moments where how we respond to a setback defines us as people. I’m very thankful that my family and I are all OK. I will take all of the necessary precautions to be safe and healthy, and I look forward to returning to the golf course as soon as possible.”

I might have defined myself by tweeting (if I hadn’t banned Twitter from my life),

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It’s Time For Jack’s “Believe It Or Not!” Vox Actually Published This Essay Three Days Ago!

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

believe-it-or-not 2

The article by German Lopez in Vox published on June 4 is more than just head exploding. It is clinical evidence of brain dysfunction or such deep cynicism and disrespect for readers that the author and editors should be under surveillance. I’m exaggerating only slightly.

Vox is an openly Leftist website founded by Ezra Klein, who pretended to be an ethical journalist at the Washington Post until his outrageous partisan bias became too obvious to deny. Since then it has become the kind of news and commentary source, like MSNBC, only taken seriously by those who want to hear a slanted, spun, openly partisan view of reality that jibes with their unalterable world view. Yet this thing is unbelievable even by that standard.

Over the past week, even the mainstream media has accepted the likelihood that its government, and particularly its health authorities led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, lied to the public repeatedly, hid evidence and covered up facts and documents throughout the pandemic, prime among those fact the likely origins of the Wuhan virus (you’ll never guess where it came from!) This was a betrayal of trust of epic and historic proportions. So what does Vox identify as America’s “biggest pandemic failure”?

We’re not more like China! Or Iran! We don’t automatically bow to government restrictions on our liberties. We don’t trust the experts to run our lives! Some excerpts:

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Unethical Quote Of The Pandemic: Dr. Anthony Fauci

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Above is Dr. Fauci during his baseball game theater last year, when he went out to the mound at Nationals Park to throw out the first pitch, and wore a facemask, though he was outdoors, there were no fans in the stands, and nobody was within a hundred feet of him. Then, once he thought he was off-camera, he took off his mask while sitting right next to two friends who were wearing theirs, for some reason. Thanks in great part to Fauci’s misinformation and pandemic fear-mongering, when I attended a Nats game this year I was required to wear a mask between bites of my hotdog, again despite there being nobody near me.  What fun. Yet here is Fauci’s quote:

This email, one of thousands being perused after a Freedom of Information Act dump, demonstrates that the CDC official advising the Trump administration and treated like a benign, all-knowing God of Science during the first year of the pandemic was and is a manipulative, two-faced, untrustworthy hack.

This should not shock anyone at this point, though Fauci worshipers, like mask worshipers (my sister wears two, in her car alone, still) will probably be in lifetime denial. Oh, heck, let me digress to an example. My woke-diseased baseball writer/ lawyer colleague, Craig Calcaterra, who is peddling a substack baseball commentary newsletter that I would eagerly subscribe to if he could resist off-topic progressive madness, wrote today in part,

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 6/3/2021

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I like to use this clip to start the day at least once a month….I’m also trying to overcome my cognitive dissonance regarding the film it’s from, in my view the greatest film musical ever made (no better one is likely to appear in the future), and the fact that the man it was made to honor, songwriter Arthur Freed who also ran MGM’s musical division during its “Golden Age,” exposed himself to a teenaged Shirley Temple when she was considering a move to that studio after her singing and dancing tot career at RKO had been ended by hormones. That information, which I only discovered this year, really has made “Singin’ in the Rain” hard to watch for me, much as O.J. Simpson’s presence almost ruins “The Naked Gun.”

1. Speaking of movie clips, this one is apt:

Actor John Cena posted a video to Sena Wiebo, China’s Twitterish social media platform, apologizing to Chinese fans—in Mandarin!– for calling Taiwan a “country” in his recent interview promoting “F9,” the latest installment of the “Fast & Furious” franchise. What a weasel. There may be diplomatic reasons that justify apologies to China, but an American citizen kowtowing to this Evil Empire (that just recently gave its citizens permission to have up to three children) is despicable. China maintains that it has dominion over Taiwan, a self-governed democracy that maintains its own sovereignty, while China is, in essence, a totalitarian regime. Cena grovelled because Chinese ticket sales are an essential part of most Hollywood movies’ profit, but apparently he did not grovel enough for China, and too much for Americans.

Ticket sales for “F9” in China have crashed, according to the Hollywood Reporter, because Cena was supposed to say that Taiwan is part of China. They have crashed in the U.S., because the kinds of Americans who are likely to go to “Fast and Furious” films tend not to appreciate actors who suck up to a genocidal, pandemic-spreading international menace.

2. Regarding Donald Trump, please refer to everything I wrote about him prior to November, 2016. His latest fiasco, the one-month blog that was just pulled down with all of its posts deleted, is signature significance. Trump doesn’t have sufficient respect for his followers, his party or the world in general to plan, be responsible, appear trustworthy, or to do or say anything but what pops into his head at a given moment. If he cared about the nation, he would be working to find a younger, less polarizing figure. Ideally, this individual would be blessed with charisma and ability, and could hold on to Trump’s supporters while appealing to NeverTrump conservatives and those disgusted with the Biden administration. That should be just about everybody who doesn’t advocate repealing the Bill of Rights. Instead, he’s on his usual ego trip, giving the news media constant opportunities to use his nonsense to keep the Trump Hate pandemic raging, and the public distracted from real problems, like…

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Two Wins For Law And Ethics Over Ideology

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

DC RULES_blind justice

Judges are proving less partisan and ideologically driven than the increasingly totalitarian Left had hoped.

1. In Vitolo v. Guzman, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Cincinnati ruled last week that the federal government violates the equal protection clause when it considers race or sex in in allocating Wuhan virus relief funds. Following the same track as the earlier case discussed here, the Court agreed that the U.S. Small Business Administration violated the Constitution by giving preference to minority- and women-owned restaurants.

Antonio Vitolo and his wife own a restaurant called Jake’s Bar and Grill. Vitolo is white, his wife is Hispanic, and they each own 50% of the restaurant. Of course, Jake could have gamed the easily manipuated SBA system by just handing his wife the extra 1%. The government requires small businesses to be at least 51% owned by women, veterans or “socially and economically disadvantaged” people to jump to the head of the line, because someone is presumed to be socially disadvantaged if they are a member of a designated racial or ethnic group. A person is considered economically disadvantaged if they are socially disadvantaged, and they face diminished capital and credit opportunities. In such a system, whether the business owner being given preference has actually been disadvantaged doesn’t matter. He or she is presumed to be disadvantaged. This nicely follows the circular logic of Critical Race Theory.

The group preferences are taken into consideration during the first 21 days in which the Small Business Administration awards the pandemic grants to restaurants. After priority applications submitted during that period are processed, the Small Business Administration processes grant requests in the order that they were received. That is, white men come last.

The 6th Circuit majority said Vitolo and his wife are entitled to an injunction forcing the government to grant their application, if approved, before all later-filed applications, and that their color and gender should be irrelevant. The government did not demonstrate a “compelling interest” justifying preferences based on race or sex.

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A Deeper Dive Into The Western Washington University “No Exit” Protest

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

empty seast

Guest Post by Rick Jones

[Before I turn the floor over to Rick, also known here as “Curmie,” a couple of comments are in order. I had hoped that the post yesterday about the Western Washington University student protest over the decision to produce “No Exit,” the 1944 existential drama by Jean-Paul Sartre, would generate commentary from Rick, for several reasons. First, he is one of my favorite bloggers on his own, the proprietor of Curmudgeon Central, which has a new post up right now regarding the George Floyd incident one year mark. More relevant to our topic right here and now, Rick is a distinguished college professor, drama teacher and stage director, who has special insight into university students and live theater. As he reveals in the article to come, he also is better qualified to discuss “No Exit” than I; indeed, he has now convinced me to give the work another chance, since it has been decades since I read or saw it.

I also was thrilled to receive this submission from Rick because I feel very strongly that live theater is imperiled in the U.S. I know most readers here do not share my dedication to theater; few Americans do, and fewer all the time. But I have lived a double life (as a character in Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Inspector Hound” adds “At least!”), spending  as much of my passions and energies on theater as any other pursuit from high school until to five years ago, when I ended the 20-year run of my small, maverick, professional theater company. My timing was excellent, because the panic-driven lockdown has killed many of The American Century Theater’s competitors here in the D.C. area, maybe most of them, and a year of using Zoom and streaming services has undoubtedly convinced many one time audience members that live theater isn’t worth the time, inconvenience or expense. In the same period, toxic political correctness, political obsession and woke fanaticism has grown exponentially, and these were existential threats to theater already.

The “No Exit” controversy is a symptom of a very serious threat to live performance art, which has been a force for uniting societies and enlightening the public for centuries. We need it more than ever now. A lot is at stake. JM]

***

My department has produced “No Exit”(which, by the way, I like a lot more than you do, Jack) twice in the last decade.  The first of these was directed by a talented and intelligent female student (an ardent feminist, by the way) who went on to earn a Master’s from a prestigious university overseas.  And we also did an online-only production last fall, directed by a colleague who’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever known, with a PhD in Theatre from arguably the best doctoral program in the country.  Oh, did I mention that she’s a lesbian? 

And, of course, the sense of isolation in the play was a major reason the play was chosen: because we all have a greater understanding of that phenomenon now than even the most creative thinkers could have managed a year earlier.  Moreover, please forgive me if I think that perhaps my colleague, who has published and taught courses on Queer Theatre, might have a more sophisticated understanding of the concepts at play in that particular theoretical framework than would a gaggle of pretentiously woke undergrads.

I am apparently lucky not to be at WWU.  When I announced my show for this spring as Jean Genet’s “The Maids”and described the two central characters as “would-be murderers who engage in sado-masochistic lesbian incest,” it generated interest on the part of most of our best actresses; if there was any dissent—from either very liberal students or a very conservative larger community—I never heard about it.  (Side note: although it wasn’t produced until later, “The Maids” was chosen and announced prior to”No Exit” which was a late substitution for a play we were unable to do.  I wouldn’t have chosen to do two existential French dramas from the 1940s in the same season, but that’s what we ended up with.)

But revenons à nos moutons.  When I started this response, I intended to go point by point through the students’ commentary, but that got really long, as virtually everything they say is nonsense.  So: a few general points:

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