A Psychology “Expert” Reveals “the No. 1 Phrase to Shut Down a Manipulator” [Bad Link Fixed!]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

And to that I say, “Bite me.”

Shadé Zahrai, a CNBC contributor, weighs in with her advice regarding “one of the most effective ways to stop a manipulator.“ She says that the magic phrase is: “That’s interesting. Tell me more.”

This is passive-aggressive weenieism, as well as dishonest. I don’t tell people that I find something interesting unless it is, in fact interesting. Doing so is a lie. If I’m using “interesting” sarcastically but want “the manipulator” to think I’m sincere, that’s deceit, another form of dishonesty. Much of the time the “expert’s” use of “That’s interesting” is just another version of “Why bless your heart!”

So the expert says that the way to foil “manipulators” is to be manipulative. How expert of her! She recommends versions of her all-purpose defense if someone is trying to subtly coerce you, if someone is trying to guilt-trip you, and if someone is trying to gaslight you. Her discovery is nothing but warmed over 70’s era versions of the obnoxious (and and manipulative) deflections “I hear you” and “I acknowledge the validity of your feelings.” It’s conflict avoidance when conflict is needed.

If someone attacks me with an unfounded or unfair accusation, I might say, “Ok, produce your evidence, if you have any.” I might say, “That doesn’t deserve a response.” I might say, “What’s the matter with you?” But “That’s interesting” isn’t in the cards.

I don’t find it interesting when someone denies what I know to be true. I’ll say, “Nope, you’re wrong; your memory has betrayed you, or you’re lying. Which is it?” If someone says, “After everything I’ve done for you, this is how you repay me?” I will say, “I’m not repaying you. I’m doing what I believe has to be done, and our past interaction has nothing to do with it. I’m sorry my decision upsets you.” If someone says, “If you really cared, you’d agree with me, ” I’ll respond with, “Don’t try that emotional blackmail on me. It’s insulting, and I resent it.”

All around us now we are under psychological attack by people who want us be passive, fearful wimps, terrified on taking on liars, bullies and jerks directly. Don’t let them get away with it.

Ethics Observation on the Larry Bushart Fiasco

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Do read this New York Times story [gift link]about Larry Bushart, a progressive Facebook addict who was arrested and spent 37 days on jail after being arrested on the theory that a meme he posted (that he didn’t create) was a “true threat” and thus a felony. He was held on a two-million dollar bond. I mentioned the case last November, but had limited information then.

Believe it or not—I can barely believe it—the meme above is what got Bushart arrested! Eventually the charges were dropped, but understandably, the 61-year-old retired police officer isn’t posting memes on Facebook any more, and is hesitant to express his contrarian opinions on social media. In a real sense, his free speech has been “chilled” by state action…state action that was unethical, illegal, an abuse of discretion and power, and mind-numbingly stupid. It is also a cautionary tale.

Observations:

Pages: 1 2

Comment of the Day: “On Lincoln’s Favorite Poem, and the Poems’ We Memorize…”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

What a joy to wake up this morning not only to a spectacular Comment of the Day, but also to a note from an MIA commenter who was last seen in these parts almost nine years ago! I welcome Lisa Smith back to Ethics Alarms with a well-deserved Comment of the Day honor, for her note on the post, “On Lincoln’s Favorite Poem, and the Poems’ We Memorize…”

(I couldn’t resist leading this off with one of two brilliant Charles Addams cartoon about “The Raven.” The other has Poe pondering as a raven, perching over his door, says, “Occasionally.”)

***

I don’t know – Poe’s Raven has one of my favorite lines; it isn’t at all profound, but it is profoundly delightful to speak and to allow to roll over the brain like a cool river. I memorized the entire poem when I was a teen in the late 70’s and can still recite it. (But for the life of me, I can’t remember the “new” neighbor’s names, even though they have been here five or six years. Their dog is Annie. My priorities are laid bare, I suppose.)

“And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain thrills me, fills me with fantastic terrors never felt before.”

There may be errors in there. I write it from memory alone. [JM: Pretty close! “And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain, thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before”]

Poetry makes equals of us all. From Bukowski to Shakespeare. They speak to each person in their own way.

Pages: 1 2

Dear Prof. Turley: Clean Up Your Comments Section

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I check Jonathan Turley’s blog “Res Ipsa Loquitur” a couple times a week. Why? First, he often covers a topic I am already focusing on; second, he writes well and scrupulously tries to give a balanced analysis. He also knows his lane, and generally stays in it. The professor has definitely been red-pilled in the Trump era; he is as disgusted with Democratic Party’s deceit and double standards as I am, and the Axis news media’s bias has become evident to him as well, as in this recent post.

Yes, it’s true, I also enjoy Turley’s column because I almost always agree with him (and he with me), as in his expressed disgust with Representative Roe Kahana.

But I come to admonish Turley, not to praise him. His reader comments are a disgrace. The comments on every post typically deteriorate into general Trump derangement screeds, non-substantive snarking, and rants about topics not even slightly related to Turley’s post, with an occasional substantive contribution buried in there somewhere if one is willing to scroll through meters of garbage.

In addition, most of the comments are anonymous, with three or four commenters named “Anonymous” sometimes arguing in the same thread. Turley, as a national figure with periodic columns in The Hill and New York Post as well frequent appearances on Fox News, has a lot of readers on his blog and consequently many comments, usually over a hundred per post. Today I spent over an hour on an extensive post of over a thousand words, and as of this minute, a grand total of 63 people have bothered to look at it. But quantity doesn’t mean quality on Turley’s blog because he doesn’t bother to moderate comments beyond removing spam. For the most part, the readers comments add nothing to his site. In fact, they diminish its value.

I am very proud of the tough, substantive, perceptive and thought provoking comments I see on the Ethics Alarms posts. I don’t pretend that my work here can match the professor’s for scholarship and erudition, but the commentariate laps any other blog I have encountered.

I’m in debt to you all. Thanks.

Ethics Quote of the Month: Lindsey Vonn

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

For a while it looked like star American downhill skier Lindsey Vonn would lose the leg she broke a week ago when she crashed 13 seconds into her run and was airlifted off the course by helicopter. Vonn suffered a complex tibia fracture that will require multiple surgeries to repair. Her third surgery was completed successfully.

I came across Vonn’s post about her injury and the state of mind that led to it while I was completing the last post about inspiring poems. In the last Open Forum, there was some criticism of the athlete for subjecting herself to the risk of further injury by insisting on competing despite a recent and unhealed ACL tear. Her Instagram post below persuasively addressed such critiques. It also struck me as perfectly embodying the lessons and values contained in Kipling’s “If,” my father’s favorite poem and one of the inspiring works of poetry schools no longer teach.

Lindsey wrote,

Perfect.

On Lincoln’s Favorite Poem, and the Poems’ We Memorize…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This topic is almost tangential to ethics, but not entirely. I give Althouse credit for raising it: she sometimes comments on crossword puzzles—I hate crossword puzzles and have never finished one in my life—and was set off into one of her tangents by the clue, “8 letters: “Poem so beloved by Abraham Lincoln that he carried it in his pocket and memorized it.” As it happens, I know the answer (Ann did not): it’s Poe’s “The Raven.” No surprise there: Abe was a depressive, and that dark poem about lingering suicidal thoughts fits his character and also his taste in poetry. I think “The Raven” is doggerel, and so were Lincoln’s poems: yes, he wrote poems, and was always puzzling to me that such a poetic writer would write such pedestrian poetry. He’s nt the only one who fits that description: Herman Melville’s poems, save for the one that ends “Billy Budd, ” is also shockingly bad. But I digress…

Ann guessed that the poem was “Invictus,” which would make sense if Abe favored a poem that inspired him, as, I believe, many of us do. That one ends with the famous verse,

“It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.”

Teddy Roosevelt loved that one, as you might guess. The topic got me thinking about how our schools used to teach ethics as well as literature, not to mention mental acuity, by requiring us to memorize poems. I’m sure they don’t do this now, and I’m also confident that the declining ethical instincts as well as literary competence of today’s youth are in part rooted in this sad development.

Poetry is becoming a dead genre. Althouse excluded songs from her musings about what favorite poems say about our values and character, and I find that strange. Song lyrics are poems, at least the best of them. No unscored poem touches me as much as Irving Kahal’s lyrics to Sammy Fain’s haunting melody, one of my late wife’s favorites….

I’ll be seeing you
In all the old familiar places
That this heart of mine embraces
All day through

In that small cafe
The park across the way
The children’s carousel
The chestnut tree, the wishing well 
I’ll be seeing you
In every lovely summer’s day
In everything that’s light and gay
I’ll always think of you that way

I’ll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I’ll be looking at the moon
But I’ll be seeing you…

Similarly, the touching Longfellow poem about his depression during the Civil War over the death of his wife, the wounding of his son and the conflict dividing his country was set to music, making it classic Christmas song that has endured in the culture beyond most of his poems. Putting a poem to music shouldn’t disqualify the poem as a poem, though the melody can enhance its power and popularly.

My favorite poems were narrative poems the celebrated heroism, courage, sacrifice, devotion and nobility. I have written several times about my father’s favorite poem, Rudyard Kipling’s “If” : the lines “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster…And treat those two impostors just the same”; has become my credo over the years, and served me well. This past Halloween I posted my favorite poem, “The Highwayman,” which I memorized when I was 10 and have recited to audiences many times since. It is about a young woman who gives her life to warn her lover. I also memorized Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” an inspiring poem about an American patriot.

Pages: 1 2

A Happy Valentine’s Day To All, And To “A Friend,” A Gift!

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Behold (below) yet another “smoking gun” delineating the bias and lack of objectivity and integrity of the New York Times. The paper is the very model of a modern “dishonest waiter”, for all of its double standards, contradictions and hypocrisy goes one way: to advance progressive agendas and Axis propaganda. See?

Yet for years now, self-banned commenter “A Friend” has comment section-bombed Ethics Alarms with defenses of the New York Times when it is criticized here, usually with posts beginning with “Come on, Jack!” These get sent to EA Spam Hell when they show up as soon as I see them of course, each one putting “A Friend” even deeper on the black list than he already is.

Today, however, to show my love for all of this blog’s readers, even the trolls, deranged and assholes, I will offer a symbolic temporary suspension of “A Friend’s” ban, if he offers a sincere, rational, defense of the Times’ “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” performance in this case.

Can he (or anyone) rebut my conclusion that the Times, forever allying itself with climate change confirmation bias victims, has proven that it will contrive an argument that literally any occurrence, statistics or phenomena is proof of the dire effects of climate change according to “scientists,” which often means to the Axis media of which it is a charter member, “some old guy with a duck on his head holding the Bozo Chair in Chemistry at Itawamba Community College that we found after searching for a week.”?

The offer will stand for 48 hours.

I’m expecting great things.

Ethics Observations on the A.I. Tom Cruise-Brad Pitt Fake Fight Video

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

That video was posted two days ago by Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson, who was nominated for an Oscar in the short film category in 2002. He says his faux fight came from a two-line prompt into A.I. bot Seedance 2.0, owned by the Chinese parent company of TikTok, ByteDance.

The video went viral after screenwriter Rhett Reese (“Deadpool & Wolverine”, “Zombieland”) posted dire thoughts about what it portends on Twitter/”X.” earlier this week.“I hate to say it,” Reese wrote. “It’s likely over for us.”

““In next to no time,” he wrote later, ” one person is going to be able to sit at a computer and create a movie indistinguishable from what Hollywood now releases. True, if that person is no good, it will suck. But if that person possesses Christopher Nolan’s talent and taste (and someone like that will rapidly come along), it will be tremendous.” Now Hollywood is trembling in terror.

Pages: 1 2

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Cal.) Locks Up “Incompetent Elected Official of the Month” AND Chases the Leaders in the Super-Competitive 2026 “Unethical Asshole of the Year” Race!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This is so exciting!

Also depressing, of course. I believe it is fair to conclude that the U.S. Congress has never had so many unqualified, intellectually inferior, obnoxious, ethics-free jackasses staining its halls and reputation at the same time. True, it is difficult to assess the quality of our elected officials prior to, say, World War II, but my conclusion is based on the belief that if the U.S. ever had a government more dominated by knaves, villains and fools, we wouldn’t have lasted this long.

Even with such daunting competition (Marjory Taylor Green, “The Squad,” Rep. Raskin, Rep. Boebert, Senator Senator Hirono, et al.) Khanna managed to stand out yesterday. No only did he state on the floor of the House and on public media that four men were sex criminals when they were not, he followed up his indefensible gaffe by refusing to apologize and instead stooping to “Whataboutism,” Rationalization #2, the Democratic Party’s favorite after #22, “It’s not the worst thing.” Here is #2, if you haven’t reviewed the Rationalization List lately:

Pages: 1 2

Ethics Dunce (Again): Georgetown University Law Center…and May I Add: KABOOM!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

From Ethics Alarms, December 10, 2023…

Late yesterday,the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, resigned, and the school’s chairman of the board followed with his own resignation a couple of hours later. Magill was one of three elite college presidents who embarrassed themselves and their employers with offensive, legalistic answers to pointed questions from Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) regarding their school’s tolerance of anti-Semitism on their campus in the wake of the October Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, and their weak responses to demonstrations on their campuses that could fairly be called threatening to Jewish students.

UPenn’s situation became critical when alumnus Ross Stevens announced that he was withdrawing a gift worth around $100 million. That would be a significant loss even for Harvard, whose endowment exceeds the treasuries of many nations. The resignation immediately focused attention on Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president of just a couple of months, whose responses to Stefanik’s withering cross-examination in the Congressional hearing were extremely similar to Magill’s. The resignation of all three women was called for in an unusual letter signed by 72 members of Congress, many of them Democrats.

I just received this message as a Georgetown University Law Center alumnus:

Dear Georgetown Law Alumni,

It gives me great pleasure to share with you that M. Elizabeth (Liz) Magill has been appointed as the next Executive Vice President and Dean of Georgetown University Law Center, beginning August 1, 2026. President Robert M. Groves’ announcement is linked here.

Professor Magill brings to Georgetown Law a wealth of experience leading some of our nation’s most prestigious universities and law schools, including serving as President of the University of Pennsylvania, Executive Vice President and Provost of the University of Virginia, and Dean of Stanford Law School. I am pleased to share that, in addition to her role as Executive Vice President and Dean, Professor Magill will join the Law Center as a tenured member of the faculty. And her Georgetown roots run deep—her father and three of her siblings are Georgetown graduates.

Professor Magill is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Virginia School of Law, where she was articles development editor of the Virginia Law Review. Following law school, she clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and then for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She is an award-winning scholar of administrative and constitutional law whose research focuses on topics such as the separation of powers, standing, regulation, and judicial review. She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member of the American Law Institute.

This is a critical time for the Law Center and the University. I am confident that Professor Magill is the right person to lead the Law Center into a new era marked by academic excellence, financial resilience, and national prominence. There will be many opportunities over the next several months for you to meet Professor Magill. In the meantime, please join me in welcoming her to Georgetown University and to the Law Center. 

Sincerely,

Joshua C. Teitelbaum
Interim Dean & Executive Vice President
David Belding Professor of Law

Pages: 1 2