Comment of the Day: Ethics Quiz: The Dogs of The Titanic

Recently esteemed veteran Ethics Alarms commenter Michael West has been active in commenting again. For as long as it lasts this time, I am grateful. Under his initial handle texagg04, or “tex” for short, Michael elevated the level of discourse here, and notably vanquished Ethics Alarms’ most aggressive progressive/libertarian warrior among the commentariate, the legendary tgt. (Don’t get me wrong: I like and miss tgt, who was sharp, articulate and civil, but he fled the battlefield.)

One of Michael’s most interesting recent contribution is the one below, which examines exactly the issues I was hoping to have discussed when I composed the ethics quiz about the dogs on the Titanic. Before I turn the floor over to Michael, I want to emphasize a few points that have been obscured in the discussion:

  • One reason I offered this quiz was because I am so sure that my late wife Grace would have wanted to stay with the sinking ship rather than let a beloved pet die alone. I would have had to put her in restraints and drag her into the lifeboat, and she would have divorced (or murdered) me for doing it if I somehow survived. I’m not kidding. And I would have been the one comforting the dog…
  • Several commenters said that they would never take a dog on a ship because of the implied danger. Remember that there were no planes in 1912. For anyone leaving the US to stay overseas or vice-versa, the choice was to bring their non-human companions, not to go, or leave them behind.
  • Passengers did and do take dogs on cruise-ships, and while Michael in other posts reminds us that the Titanic was never exactly marketed as unsinkable, it was marketed as the safest ship there was, which was translated in the minds of travelers as “virtually unsinkable.”
  • I don’t want to contribute to false history. As I stated in the post, there is no evidence that Ann Elizabeth Isham chose to die with her dog, or even that she had a dog with her. She was one of the four First Class women who didn’t get into a lifeboat when the rule was “women and children first.” The others stayed with their husbands, so the story about her Great Dane was posited as an explanation. She could have saved herself and didn’t. Nobody knows why.
  • The sinking of the Titanic is one of those historical events that is so studied and written about that new evidence and theories still keep, ah, surfacing. We may not have heard the last of Ann and her ghostly Great Dane.

Now here is Michael West’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Quiz: The Dogs of The Titanic”:

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Amish Integrity? Nope. Amish Hypocrisy!

I always thought of the Amish as a devout religious sect with thee courage of their faith’s convictions, notably that technology is a tool of Satan, and the way to be closer to God is to eschew the modern developments that slowly but surely corrupt us all. That describes an ethical culture to me, if one that I personally find extreme and illogical. Google tells me that “The Amish are a traditionalist Christian group of Swiss-German Anabaptist heritage known for their pacifism, simple living, plain dress, and reluctance to adopt modern conveniences. Numbering roughly 411,000 across North America, they primarily reside in rural settlements in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana.” That’s nice. I’ve seen “Witness” several times, and assumed that Harrison Ford film more or less accurately portrayed Amish society.

I was also vaguely aware that there were variations withing the sect, based on, to some extent, relative isolation because of the general rejection of modern communication methods. Every local congregation operates under an unwritten set of rules called the Ordnung. These dictate daily life, acceptable technology, and community standards.

Today I realized that the Amish are not, in fact, a conservative religious sect that believes it can best maintain traditional values by rejecting technology. It is, in fact, a cult without integrity regarding technology. The Unabomber had more integrity.

According to New York Magazine (Stipulated: I am relying here on a source that I have found to be unreliable before, but unless the piece by Eric German is a flat-out lie as well as an attempt to defame the Amish, I believe it is trustworthy.), “The Amish Are Falling in Love With AI: Cars and TVs might be banned, but some sects are all-in on ChatGPT.”

What the hell? From the article:

“Holmes County, Ohio, has the highest concentration of Amish people of any county in the U.S. Visitors expecting to see traditional horses and buggies, bonnets and Abe Lincoln beards, won’t be disappointed. Still, they’ll find Amish entrepreneurs plugging into the digital economy and one clan of early adopters weaving generative AI into their knowledge work without much hesitation. Of course, none of this sounds like the tech-shy Amish life in the popular imagination. However, there’s no such thing as a single Amish approach to technology. There are some 2,600 Amish churches across the country, and each makes its own, separate decisions about what sorts of new hardware and software church members can use. The Wengerd’s church is Old Order Amish. Its married members dress plainly, don’t drive cars or own TVs, and don’t connect their homes to the electrical grid….Daniel is a minister in his church and has played a role in the congregation’s collective decisions to interdict smartphones and social media but to allow e-bikes, flip phones, solar-generated electricity, and religiously curated internet access. “I don’t want to paint a picture that we’re pushing for new technology and we don’t have respect for our traditions and our values,” he tells me. “We’re not just opening the door to anything.”

Sure they are. In fact, I can see no legitimate argument that a sect that embraces artificial intelligence can be taken seriously when it simultaneously rejects standard electricity, television and automobiles. Ethics is based on integrity, and requires holding to consistent standards subject to continuous testing and re-evaluation based on observed experience. Morality, in contrast, requires obeying clear rules of conduct that will be enforced by an authority, in the case of religion, God. The Amish appear to have neither a moral code nor ethical principles regarding technology. “We believe modern technology is a corrupting force in modern society and that it is not sanctioned by God, unless the technology is really cool and can save us time, like chatbots” is not a coherent code of conduct.

This is religion as Calvinball, the satirical “Calvin and Hobbes” game where the rules are made up as you go along. In Mark Harris’s novel “Bang the Drum Slowly,” a team’s baseball players fleece gullible fans by luring them into a gambling card game called “Tagwar.” It’s an acronym for “the amazing game without any rules.” It’s cheating.

Brilliant! Democrats Kill The National Womens’ Museum Because It Wouldn’t Include Non-Women! [Revised and Expanded]

Wow.

A veteran EA commenter today who excels in the contrived “gotcha!” accused me of “name-calling” because I consistently describe today’s Democratic Party as aspiring totalitarians, Machiavellian, and cheaters, and say Democrats want to gut the Constitution. It reminded me of the objection in the Continental Congress (as portrayed in “1776”) over Thomas Jefferson’s use of the word “tyrant” to describe England’s King George. Jefferson’s justification of his choice of words: “He is a tyrant.” I bet my critic really be incensed as I write—now—that today’s vote in Congress indicates that the party is also silly, doctrinaire and…wait for it….moronic.

Because it does, and it is.

Democrats, along with a few Republicans who should go the way of Thomas Massey, voted to cancel the Smithsonian’s planned Women’s History Museum because Republicans added language to its astablishment bill defining women in a manner that leaves out Renee Richards, Caitin Jenner, and the fully, ah, “intact” male “transitioners” who have been slaughtering female competitors in amateur swimming, wrestling, volleyball, and track and field. You know, like this person known as “Lia Thomas.”

The measure to establish the museum was defeated 216 to 204. Not a single Democrat voted for it, so chained is the party to radical LGBTQ propaganda.

Amazing. Amazing. The fact that most women still support a party that is so hypocritical regarding women’s welfare and rights—this is the party, remember, who made serial sexual predator Bill Clinton the keynote speaker at its national convention proclaiming the “Year of the Woman”!— is as incomprehensible as the fact that so many American Jews still vote for the party that increasing supports Hamas.

In fact, irony and hypocrisy are everywhere in this vote. The Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” Democrats and the news media) like to say that Congressional Republicans refuse to swerve from the MAGA script, but the GOP virtually never gets 100% agreement. Every House Democrat, however, wants to see a Women’s History Museum that has a special exhibit honoring this recent Democratic administration official:

How “inclusive.”

Because the proposed museum wouldn’t be pandering to anomalies like Admiral Rachel Levine and the former cute-as-a-bunny actress playing Achilles in the new Odyssey film…

…Democrats decided en masse that American women who were crucial to the founding and development of this nation despite being marginalized, abused and discriminated against shouldn’t have their fascinating and inspiring stories told at all. Their museum wouldn’t sufficiently validate the social pathogen causing parents to allow their children to be mutilated and sports to undermine the cause of female athletes after they fought so hard to compete, you see.

An earlier version of the bill was co-sponsored by 127 Democrats. Republicans on the House Administration Committee added new language to the bill last month to dedicate the museum to “preserving, researching, and presenting the history, achievements, and lived experiences of biological women.”

As opposed to, you know, men who decided they were women, wanted to be regarded as women, or pretended to be women.

Republican New York Rep. Nicole Malliotakis resigned as vice chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus today in response to the Democrats’ ridiculous tantrum, being appropriately disgusted by the vote even though 20 Democrats on the caucus co-sponsored the bill. In a letter to the committee’s co-chairs, Malliotakis pointed to Democrats on the committee refusing to cross party lines on pieces of legislation.

“If not one Problem Solvers Democrat would vote for a straightforward measure to transfer federal land for a women’s history museum simply because it was amended through regular order, during the committee process, to ensure that only biological women are exhibited, then what can we actually rely on the Caucus’ Democrats to join us on? I therefore submit my resignation as vice chair and member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, effective immediately,” Malliotakis wrote.

Good for her.

[Incidentally, I am not unalterably opposed to a National LGBTQ Museum that includesaccomplished and significant trans individuals, if they ever stop killing people…]

Open Forum on a Crazy, Rainy Friday…

Thanks to my observant sister, who told me my head should be exploding due to the IRS settlement scandal when many sources, blogs and pundits hadn’t even covered it yet, I was able to get some commentary out even ahead of my legal ethicists listserv, which, predictably since they pounce on Trump whatever he does, REALLY pounced yesterday.

On the bad side, my head hasn’t stopped exploding yet, and the whole house is a mess. And I haven’t even been able to seriously consider the gravamen of the New York Times joining Margery Taylor Greene in condemning Trump’s helping to jettison a GOP Congressman who couldn’t bring himself to condemn anti-Semitism.

On my Facebook page, a smart, Trump Deranged Jewish lawyer friend who called for everyone to vote for the illegal and dishonest “restore fairness” Virginia gerrymandering referendum, bemoaned the end of CBS radio and called it smoking gun proof that CBS was now working for MAGA. Yes, CBS radio’s demise is Trump’s fault. He even included a weepy reference to Edward R. Murrow. News radio is, like the US Postal Service, bow ties, landlines and the Sears catalogue, outdated, anachronistic and disposable, having once served a great purpose. You know, like the Model T.

Yes, it’s crazy out there. Use the Open Forum to start fixing it,

Ethics Quiz: The Dogs of The Titanic

According to J. Joseph Edgette from Widener University, there were twelve dogs that have been confirmed as passengers on the iconic doomed ship, which sank in April of 1912. Three of the dogs survived; they were all small breeds that their owners could wrap up in blankets and hide in their coats. The crew told passengers (only the First Class passengers brought their dogs) that the limited number of life boats meant that dogs would have to be left behind. 

When the ship struck the iceberg and it became clear that it was going down, the dog-loving steward in charge of the ship’s kennel released all of its canine occupants, which then ran all over the ship, surely confused, while the chaos intensified. (How did James Cameron not use that in his movie?) The three survivors were all kept in their owners’ staterooms. Lady, a Pomeranian belonging to passenger Margaret Hays, was one; Sun Yat Sen, a Pekingese belonging to Myra Harper and Henry Harper, was another, and a second Pomeranian owned by Martin and Elizabeth Rothschild was the third lucky dog.

The larger dogs that died included a King Charles Spaniel, a Poodle, a Borzoi, an Airedale, another large terrier, a Chow-Chow, a Fox Terrier, a French Bulldog and a Great Dane.

According to Titanic lore, Ann Elizabeth Isham owned the Great Dane pictured above. Rather than leave him to die alone, she chose to stay behind and comfort her beloved dog as the sea rushed in. Isham was one of the four first-class female passengers who lost their lives on the Titanic, but the only one who allegedly decided to die rather than leave her pet.

In fact, there is no evidence that she really died that way, or that she ever owned a dog, much less died with one. Nonetheless, Isham has acquired a saintly reputation among dog lovers, so let’s assume she did die rather than abandon her dog.

Your Ethics Alarms Change-of-Pace Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Was that decision rational and ethical or emotional and irresponsible?

Would you do that under similar circumstances?

I’m pretty sure my late wife Grace would have.

Incidentally, there is another famous dog story about Titanic that has also been debunked. Supposedly a Newfoundland named Rigel belonging to Titanic’s First Officer William Murdoch was able to withstand the freezing waters after the ship sank. As the rescue ship Carpathia approached, nobel Rigel barked so loudly that the ship could locate the lifeboats. 

The tale is fiction. Murdoch had no dog on board. No survivor mentioned “Rigel.” The story apparently first popped up in 1912, in “The New York Herald.” See? The news media was making stuff up even back then. The news reporter also claimed that Donald Trump was to blame for the sinking. 

Kidding!

Addendum To “I Wonder 1) What Will Be Done About This…Because Obviously It Cannot Stand, and 2) Whether I Should Wear A Bag Over My Head From Now On”: Now What? Here’s “What”….

At the conclusion of the dispiriting previous post, I wrote, “I regard the episode a betrayal of trust by everyone involved, especially the President, reckless, beyond rational defending, destructive to the nation, and politically stupid. Now what?”

Upon further thinking, I find the answer to “Now what?” surprisingly clear.

President Trump’s disgusting conduct in this matter, along with the equally unethical conduct of his lackeys in the Justice Department and Treasury Departments, almost thrusts me, and any rational, objective and ethical citizen, back to the point I found myself in October of 2016. As I wrote then and have written so many times since, there was a stark choice between voting for a President I found ethically unacceptable and an entire political party, the Democrats, that had proved itself not only unfit to govern but so Machiavellian in its quest to achieve crushing power by any means necessary that to allow them such power was irresponsible and dangerous. I abandoned my plan to reluctantly hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton, instead writing in the name of a politician I considered to be honorable and capable. (I was wrong about that, as things turned out.)

But since 2016, the Democratic Party has revealed itself as far worse—unprincipled, dangerous, anti-American— than I had concluded before that election. Donald Trump has still earned more respect for his positions, his courage, his ability to successfully battle Democrats to a draw or better, and his policy successes than I believed possible ten years ago. Moreover, Trump isn’t running against the Democrats in the mid-terms, though the Democrats, as in 2024, are running against Trump. The party’s only hopes are 1) stupid voters, 2) running again on hate, lies, and “Trump is Hitler” and 3) the Axis news media continuing to misinform and mislead the public. [Aside: when the Democratic Party’s absurd post-mortem on the 2024 election was finally released today, and blamed Harris’s loss on not emphasizing Trump’s negatives effectively (despite Harris constantly calling Trump Hitler and an ‘existential threat to democracy,’) one wag wrote that “She should have really called Trump a super-duper really evil Nazi poopy-head than simply just another Hitler, I guess.”]

Donald Trump isn’t running in 2026. He’s President, and he will stay President until 2028. Allowing the Democrats, a party that has pledged to pack the Supreme Court, add Democratic states that shouldn’t be states (like D.C.), give voting rights to non-citizens, and gut the Constitution and Bill of Rights to guarantee permanent control so as to “remake America” into a Democratic Socialist utopia, is irresponsible. The party has shown its perfidy by its vile effort in Virginia to turn a 50-50 split state into a Democratic stronghold by lying to voters and violating the Virginia constitution. It has shown its values by enabling violence and abuse of the criminal laws as tools of political warfare. That’s your party, Democrats.

To vote into power this aspiring totalitarian party as a way of punishing Trump for his greed and narcissism makes no sense, accomplishes nothing positive, and will be the approximate equivalent of knocking in our teeth with hammers. He’s still tearing down the mechanism of “good” discrimination against men and whites. He is still doing what has to be done regarding Iran, while the Democrats increasingly embrace anti-Semitism. He still is working to undo as much of the catastrophic open borders policies of the Biden Administration as possible. He is still keeping free discourse on social media safe, and he has had success forcing the news media and the education establishment to accept some reforms. All of that is important enough to let him continue to fight the Angry Left, especially since no one else appears capable of doing the job.

And anyone who tries is liable to be shot.

Now what? Now hold back your gorge and remember what is substantive, lasting, and crucial. President Trump is an incorrigible asshole, doesn’t know ethics from tapioca, and will continue to embarrass his supporters, his office, his party and the nation. But at this crazy juncture in American history, the United States of American is better off and safer than if the Democrats are allowed to grab the nation by the throat.

It’s a sickening choice, but a clear one.

I Wonder 1) What Will Be Done About This…Because Obviously It Cannot Stand, and 2) Whether I Should Wear A Bag Over My Head From Now On

The nine-page settlement agreement of President Trump’s unwinnable lawsuit against the I.R.S,, which already included an illegal tax-free provision, had that one-page coda. I wrote about it yesterday, but this is sinking in.

I feel like an idiot. Since 2016, I have tried hard to be fair to Donald Trump, to give him the presumption of good will and legitimacy all Presidents deserve, and indeed must have to function. I am certain that the attitudes of the Trump Deranged have been destructive, undemocratic, biased and irrational, but this latest development raises the strong possibility that they happened to be right.

A Democratic, progressive criminal defense attorney who believes, with so may of my friends and colleagues, that the President “Trump “has two, and only two, motivations: Self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment. He’s done nothing in his second term to suggest otherwise”—a starting point that I still believe is biased and based substantially on hate—writes today in part,

“Can Trump do this? Is any of this lawful and constitutional?….[T]his post hoc addendum to a “settlement agreement” that elevates the concept of collusion to its apex breaks ground never before molested. The idea of any past President doing something so audacious, so self-serving, so blatant, seems incredible. The public would never accept it. Perhaps the public still won’t, even if the MAGA faithful will. That remains to be seen, subject to the likelihood of the Democratic Party doing something to self-destruct and remind Americans why they elected Trump a second time despite knowing who he was. There is no ready answer as to what can be done about this…We are deep into virgin territory of graft, corruption and self-dealing, with little expectation of any governmental guardrail holding fast…And much as it’s hard to fathom what he could do that’s worse than this, it would be stunningly naive to believe that we’ve hit rock bottom.”

The rest of Scott Greenfield’s commentary is, as usual, marred by the typical hyperbole of a true-blue progressive and Trump hater, but in those words above I find nothing that I can reject. I regard the episode a betrayal of trust by everyone involved, especially the President, reckless, beyond rational defending, destructive to the nation, and politically stupid.

Now what?

Making Americans Dumber and More Ignorant Every Day: MSNow!

Jonathan Turley quoted a gobsmacking statement from MSNow’s consistently ridiculous Katy Tur that is, I kid you not, too stupid to qualify for Unethical Quote of the Month.

Commenting on Speaker Mike Johnson’s evocation of natural rights at the “Rededicate 250” rally on the mall in Washington, DC., she said, “What about this passage from Mike Johnson declaring that our rights do not derive from government? They come from “you, our creator and heavenly father.” Is this him putting God over the Declaration of Independence?”

No, you moron, it is him correctly interpreting what Thomas Jefferson wrote about natural rights, the core of the American philosophy of liberty and individual determinism over government domination. The Declaration states without equivocation, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Who or what “The Creator” is was consistently left up to individual faith and judgment by the Founders, who often used neutral terms like “Providence” to describe the origins of life, humanity and the universe. Jefferson’s point, which of course statists like the Axis of Unethical Conduct and its mouthpieces like Tur want to ignore, is that certain rights accrue in a just society to an individual automatically, and government cannot ethically or morally take those rights away. To maintain that such rights have to be granted by the government is to declare humanity unacceptably dependent on the power and will of others. The Declaration, Constitution and the Bill of Rights explain what the government can’t do.

How can someone who doesn’t understand this—because they never learned it, presumably—get to be a network news host? It’s horrifying. Similarly horrified by Tur’s ignorance, Jonathan Turley wrote today,

“The Revolution was fought over natural rights that belonged to colonists as human beings, bestowed by God and defended by the American Revolution. The Constitution created a system that guaranteed the protection of those rights contained in the Declaration of Independence.Speaker Johnson was speaking directly to the foundation of this Republic in reaffirming his faith in natural rights. Of course, the rejection of natural rights in academia and politics is consistent with the view that our rights evolve with a “living Constitution.” What the government giveth, the government may taketh away. The debate reflected in Tur’s comments could not be more timely or elemental on our 250th anniversary. We must again decide not just who we were then but who we are now as Americans. There are many who want to decouple our system from natural rights as they “reimagine” American democracy and “trash” the American Constitution.”

No wonder so many Americans are gulled by the Democrats’ cynical claim to be “protecting democracy.” They don’t know what American democracy is.

“The Unabomber Was Right”#10: DirecTV Proves It Can’t Be Trusted

They haven’t always been titled exactly that way. but the first “The Unabomber Was Right” post went up in 2017, and there have been nine since, with the most recent being here, in January. Today, however, I experienced an all-time classic.

Getting up earlier than usual, and waiting for my coffee to cool, I tuned in DirecTV channel 71 as I have been doing for, oh, 30 years or so. That channel is “News Mix”, which allows me to see sxi screens: CNN, Fox News, MSNow, BBC America, and two weather channels. To my surprise, the screen said the channel was not available, because I did not subscribe to it. Even more perplexing was the language of a second screen that popped up. “Newsmix is blocked. Our search for another channel does not indicate that your selection is available.”

Now that is the notice I get from DirecTV when a baseball game is blacked out because of regional restrictions. The news is blocked? Were we conquered by Iran overnight? I tried everything. Shutting down the TV. Disconnecting the satellite box. I kept getting those alternating screens.

So with a huge sigh of resignation, I realized that I was about to enter, once again, “The Customer Service Zone”:

“You unlock this door with a futile key of naive expectations. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of annoying AI bots, a dimension of infuriating repetition, a dimension of incompetence. You’re moving into a land of both impenetrable accents and ineptitude, of scripts, disconnections and ass-covering. You’ve just crossed over into… “The Customer Service Zone”!

DirecTV has a new, perky, sexy female voiced AI, but after I gave her all the information I asked for, she handed me over to the old AI, which asked me exactly the same questions I had just answered. I was told three times that the conversation might be recorded, so maybe someone will hear my shouts into the phone of “I already answered that!” and “And I answered that already too!”

Nah, The Democratic Party Doesn’t Have a Anti-Semitism Problem! Strange That It Has A Congressional Candidate Whose Campaign Said…

“She’ll turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking. (lt will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles which will probably be most of the Zionists).”

This is TX-35 Democratic candidate Maureen Galindo. And her very existence unmasks the Democratic Party and the American left revealing the monsters they have become.

She’s not a fringe candidate either. Galindo was the top Democrat in the March primary election, with 29.2% support to her closest competition’s 27%. Since no one got a majority, Galindo advanced to a runoff election to take place next week against sheriff’s deputy Johnny Garcia. An awful lot of progressives and Democrats (I mean “awful lot” both ways) like anti-Semites and hate Jews.

As we are increasingly seeing…we are also seeing the Axis of Unethical Conduct trying to spin away the obvious implications of Democrats producing such a vile candidate with a “Republicans have anti-Semites too!” deflection. This was Bill Maher’s deceitful tactic, as I wrote earlier this week.

Watchdog group StopAntisemitism, which is one of those “independent” groups that always bashes Republicans, said, “The standard that Democrats rightly apply to right-wing anti-Semites must apply equally to left-wing Jew-haters. Democratic leaders must clearly, publicly denounce these bigots infecting their party without hedging. They must decline to appear on platforms with Hasan Piker. They must stop winking at extremist voices and truly stand for the principles they claim to stand for.”

Wait: what “right-wing Jews haters” are leading candidates in a Congressional race? Who is a Republican equivalent of Hasan Piker? Anti-Semites Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have been emphatically rejected by President Trump, MAGA, and most conservatives. The Axis is now trying to claim that the PAC Lead Left that has spent $428,713 backing Galindo according to the latest data from Federal Election Commission filings is really run by Republicans. The problem with that dodge is that ethical, fair people won’t support anti-Semites no matter how much is spent on their political ads, unless the voters like anti-Semites and hate Jews. Both Piker and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who polls highly among potential 2028 Democratic Presidential candidates, endorsed Galinda. Is AOC a double-secret Republican agent?