Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck

Scared Yet? I Want To Hear A Legitimate Defense Of YouTube Censoring Senator Paul’s Speech…

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Spoiler: There isn’t one.

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), the U.S. Senate’s most passionate libertarian, was suspended from YouTube for expressing his strong opposition to Wuhan virus mandates and calling for widespread citizen resistance. This is res ipsa loquitur: Big Tech is using its corporate power to support government policies and prevent dissent. The argument that YouTube (that is, Google) is a private entity and not bound by the First Amendment is disingenuous, just as similar arguments defending Facebook, Twitter and other social media banning President Trump as well as posts that offer opinions and positions they don’t want the public to see. When corporations use their massive power and influence to suppress speech and control the flow of information, they pose an existential threat to democracy. When they exercise this power to advance the political agenda of a specific group, individual or party, that threat is worse. When they are censoring and distorting on behalf of the government, the threat is dire.

Paul released a rebuttal and condemnation of YouTube’s indefensible action, and it was also taken down by Our Video Masters. You can view it here, on Rumble. If I could embed it, I would.

Let me turn the floor over to Professor Turley, not as an appeal to authority, but because there is no reason for me to write in different words what he has said persuasively already:

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Comment Of The Day: “Comment Of The Day: ‘Theater Ethics Meets Pandemic Ethics…’”

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

It has been a hugely informative and entertaining knockdown, drag-out comment battle over vaccine hesitancy the last few days on not just one but two posts on the topic. It’s time to add another. One irony of long comment threads, which make me happy as a blog proprietor, is that many readers don’t have the patience to pick through them. I’m sometimes guilty of that myself.

This Comment of the Day by Ryan Harkins on Humble Talent’s own provocative (to understate it) Comment Of The Day on my post, “Theater Ethics Meets Pandemic Ethics: If I Were Still Running My Theater Company And We Had A Large Cast Show In Production…” deserves to be highlighted. Here it is (and I forgive Ryan for not calling the virus by it’s rightful, earned non-partisan name.)

***

First, I want to take exception to conflating hesitancy to take the COVID-19 vaccines and anti-vaxxers. There’s a huge difference between being skeptical about one particular vaccine and being skeptical about all vaccines. And conflating the two blurs the issues and dismisses out of hand legitimate arguments and concerns.

I stand in an odd position, because I oppose getting any of the COVID-19 vaccines, and I have been vaccinated. I took the double doses of the Moderna vaccine when it became available at my workplace. Was it to protect my family (my wife is pregnant with our fourth)? Not at all. We’re all healthy, and the odds of the coronavirus having any effect other than a harsh cold for my household is surprisingly small. Was it because my workplace pressured me into it? No, though I will cite that the 14 days paid sick time goes away if I snag a sufficiently large batch of SARS-CoV-2 and I’m not vaccinated.

So why did I get the vaccine? At the time, I believed it the right thing to do to help the efforts of reaching herd immunity. So what has changed since then? Let’s consider my thinking, meandering as it is.

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Comment Of The Day: “Theater Ethics Meets Pandemic Ethics…”

/ Jack Marshall / 127 Comments

I was getting ready to write about Sen. Rand Paul’s manifesto above ( he really is a libertarian, isn’t he?) when Humble Talent’s Comment of The Day, on the post “Theater Ethics Meets Pandemic Ethics: If I Were Still Running My Theater Company And We Had A Large Cast Show In Production…”

Perfect timing, and my favorite kind: it saved me the effort of writing a post. This should open up the pandemic and vaccine debate nicely, and get it out of the constricting limitation of live theater.

Heeeeeeere’s Humble…!

***

I find these Covid threads just… really tedious.

I have found common cause with the American left on precious few issues in my lifetime, and I often find that even when I agree with them, they put the issue forward in the most obnoxious and useless way possible: They mock, they demean, they use bad arguments, and even when they’ve come to the right conclusion they rarely understand the source material. It’s frustrating.

But on this one discrete topic…. I understand mocking anti-vaxxers.

Sorry guys, if you’re in the vaccine skeptic group… You are being dumb. Your body your right, yada yada yada. Sure. You have the right to be dumb. Just because it’s your right to be an idiot doesn’t shield you from the consequences of being an idiot. And while telling you that you’re an idiot, pressuring you not to be an idiot, and there being consequences to being an idiot might harm your tender egos, America isn’t going to end.

The reason why I feel on this one discrete topic, mocking anti-vaxxers, particularly American anti-vaxxers is appropriate is because there was no convincing you. On this topic, more than any other in recent history, you are completely information resistant.

“Well Jeff! Look at Israel, they’re having a spike right now, and most of their cases are breakthrough cases, how do you explain that?!?!”

Because everyone is experiencing a spike right now, international travel isn’t completely locked down, the vaccines were never sold as being 100% effective and as new variants come out the efficacy is only going to lower, and because more than 95% of Israeli adults are vaccinated. So when anyone in Israel gets Covid it is orders of magnitude more likely that the case will be a breakthrough than a non-vaccinated case.

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Theater Ethics Meets Pandemic Ethics: If I Were Still Running My Theater Company And We Had A Large Cast Show In Production…

/ Jack Marshall / 70 Comments

LES_MISÉRABLES.

…the policy would be that every member of the cast, staff and crew would have to be vaccinated and show proof of it. They would, of course, be free to refuse, which is their right. But they still would have no right to work on the production, and to endanger the health of others essential to the show’s success. You can’t rehearse with social distancing, nor with actors wearing masks.

I’ve seen viruses run amuck through casts and ruin shows. Your rights stop when they start adversely and unnecessarily affecting my business and projects. Take your own risks and good fortune to you, but don’t impose them on me.

(Incidentally, I would never produce or direct the show you see above. I consider it unethical to put shows on stage that I can’t stand watching and listening to myself.)

End Of Week Ethics Bombs, 8/6/21

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Hiroshima

August 6, 1945 is one of the most important ethics days of all, and among the most controversial. The United States bomber Enola Gay—now on exhibit in a hangar near Dulles Airport, dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people were killed in seconds, and another 35,000 were injured. More than 60,000 would be dead by the end of the year from the effects of the fallout. Was the launching of the nuclear age by the United States ethically justified to save American lives (an invasion of the Japanese mainland had been estimated to risk a million U.S. casualties) and end the war? Was President Harry Truman guilty of a war crime, as non-combatants, including children, constituted most of the deaths? Did the horrible results of the new weapon prevent World War III, or make it more likely? These are still intensely debated questions by scholars, historians, theologians, military strategists, philosophers and peace activists.

1. Well, I’ve been spoiling for a fight, shopping around Northern Virginia and fining myself one of the few unmasked. So far, nobody’s said a word, but anyone who does is in for it. I’ve been vaccinated twice and probably had a mild, symptom-free infection before that. I have always been unusually resistant to viruses. Mask fog up my glasses and make me miserable. If you have chosen not to get your shots, swell, that’s your choice, but your exercise of personal liberty is not going to restrict mine without a fight. And don’t tell me I have to wear a mask so phobics feel “safe.” That’s not my problem either. I am not inclined to “social distance,” either. The mask fetish is going to strangle community, society and the joy of life unless we draw some hard lines. I’m drawing.

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President Biden Does His Andrew Jackson Impression, And It Is Not Becoming

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Andrew-Jackson

President Jackson is quoted as saying, after learning of his rebuke by the U.S. Supreme Court in Worcester v. Georgia, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” That was “King Andy,” though and through, whether he actually said it or not. Jackson’s contempt for the ruling, which supported Native American sovereignty, contributed to its violation by other courts and Georgia laid the groundwork for the unlawful removal of Cherokees from the state in what became know as “The Trial of Tears.” Jackson did some important things as President, and has a strong argument as a great one, but his willingness to violate the Constitution when it suited his convictions is hard to justify, even when his desired end seemed to be worth his illegal means. Jackson (a Democrat) was Donald Trump’s favorite President, but it is Joe Biden who is openly channeling him now. The difference is that few Democrats, mainstream media journalists and pundits are screaming that Joe is a threat to Democracy. Yet what he is doing really is such a threat.

This spring, a court struck down the nationwide eviction moratorium adopted by the Trump administration last September at the height of the pandemic lockdown, ruling that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had no statutory authority to extend it. The case was appealed, and five justices of the Supreme Court signaled that they agreed with the lower court as they simultaneously voted to allow the eviction freeze to stand because it was set to expire just a few weeks later, on July 31, anyway. Any fair reading of the opinions make it clear that the SCOTUS majority holds that the eviction freeze cannot continue beyond that date without an act of Congress.

Never mind! President Biden announced his support for extending the eviction moratorium, unconstitutional or not. It was later preserved by a divided Supreme Court despite the view of a majority that it was unconstitutional. Though he acknowledged that his administration’s legal experts overwhelmingly told him that any extension would violate the Constitution, he said it was worth extending the moratorium because it would take time for a court to intervene, giving his administration time to “get $45 billion dollars out to people who are in fact behind on the rent and don’t have the money”despite the lack of constitutional authority to do so. In other words, they would have time to break the law before they had to stop.

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Unethical Tweet Of The Month: Speaker Nancy Pelosi

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Unethical tweet Pelosi

Ah. Let us count the ways the Speaker’s tweet is unethical:

1. It is false, meaning true disinformation, not only about the power of the incompetent and untrustworthy Centers for Disease Control, but also regarding the law.

2. How is the tweet still up? Why isn’t Pelosi’s account suspended? She has not only delivered false information about the moratorium, but about limitations on government power. Twitter has been banning tweets from no-name dufusses that make erroneous assertions (or just opinions that Twitter would rather see not made), but complete misrepresentation of the system spread by a high-ranking leader is as serious as it gets. (The answer, I suspect, is that “disinformation” coming from a powerful Democrat is hunky-dory with our Big Tech Masters.)

3. Is Pelosi lying, or does she just not follow the legal news? Either way is unethical for someone in her position. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on two weeks ago that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lacked authority for the national moratorium it imposed last year on most residential evictions as part of the effort to help curb the spread of the coronavirus. They did this knowing the Supreme Court would back them up, because in a narrow 5-4 ruling upholding the moratorium temporarily on June 29, Justice Kavanaugh, the swing vote in the decision, wrote,

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Trump To The Patriotic Pro-Vaccine Rescue? Of Course Not. And Try As I Might, I Can’t Blame Him

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

burning-bridge

I have now read many articles, almost all of them from pundits who for five years heaped the most abusive rhetoric on the previous President of the United States that any POTUS has had to endure, that Donald Trump should join President Biden, or Barack Obama, or even George W. Bush for a national, joint appeal to the vaccinated to do the right thing for their nation, swallow their fears, and get their shots. Writes one Trump-detesting letter writer to the Times this morning (well, the odds are high that anyone who writes to the Times is Trump-detesting”) who imagines an Obama-Trump Kumbaya PSA spot where a smiling Trump sits next to Barack and says, “We hardly agree on anything , but we do agree on one thing: You should get the Covid vaccine now!” “It just takes two grown men to do it!” the saddened patriot concludes.

Sure, in a vacuum, this fantasy seems reasonable. In reality, it can never happen, and I find myself gravitating to an unethical position that says that if Democrats like Biden and Obama, or Bush, really want Trump to join with them on anything but especially this, they should have to pay a large, painful and probably unpalatable price.

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Another IIPTDXTTNMIAFB Classic: Biden On Vaccinations!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Biden town hall

IIPTDXTTNMIAFB is Ethics Alarmseese for “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.” I could probably feature such stories every day, but that would be as boring as these episodes are infuriating. They all come under the sub-heading of “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias,” which I could justifiably update to “Nah, the mainstream news media didn’t steal the Presidency for Joe Biden.”

This one was so egregious that the AP even did a “factcheck”, but muted its description so absurdly that it is a perfect IIPTDXTTNMIAFB.

You see, President Biden said, in a CNN town meeting during which he periodically babbled incoherently, “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the IC unit, and you’re not going to die…You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”

That is a lie. It’s a lie because it is demonstrably false, and like so much else involving the pandemic, it is deliberate misinformation to manipulate the public. The Democrats, after all, fervently believe that the ends justify the means in all things. Apparently the truth, which the Biden Administration knows and thus its head is responsible for knowing, just isn’t good enough to move the herd along as its masters desire, so the strategy is to lie.

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Dear MSM And Indignant Pundits: It Isn’t Just Conservatives And Republicans Who Have Undermined Confidence In The Pandemic Vaccines…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

This isn’t “Whataboutism.” It’s “Stoplyingthroughyour#!%!@#teethism”.

Holden tweet

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