“The fallout falls fully on the voters. They are wrong, and they foolishly voted against their own interests out of short-term outrage. Across the country, Americans chose to punish the Republicans by punishing themselves even more. No matter how frustrating one may feel about incumbent Republican politicians at the state level or the federal level, the voters are not going to fix the problem by giving power to a political party that openly fraternizes with socialists, communists, Nazis, and antisemites.This is a major failing. The real outrage is the American voter throwing an electoral temper tantrum and hurting America.”
The New York Times now sends me all of its advice columns in a nice, neat, email package. I have ignored “Social Qs” for some time because its columnist, Philip Galanes, is a left-biased goof and his perspective is not to be trusted. (Here was the last time EA pondered a “Social Qs” column.) However, by presumably pure coincidence, Galanes’s latest column supplements the issue raised in this recent Ethics Alarms post about the adult child who wants to have old Mom talk to a bot about her problems because the adult child is sick of listening to her.
The “Social Qs” inquirer named “Mom” says that after a single heated argument with her adult daughter, the daughter declared that she would have no further contact with her mother “and has stuck to it.” She asked Galanes what she should do.
My answer would be along the lines of, “Good luck: you raised an ungrateful, cruel, socially handicapped asshole.” Galanes, naturally, suggests that the mother see a therapist (the daughter rejected joint counseling) because “it would probably mean a lot to your daughter.” Sure it would: that would be a tacit admission that the mother was in the wrong. However, in the course of offering his advice, Galanes made an interesting observation that had never occurred to me but has the ring of truth. He wrote,
“Another observation — which, again, I won’t assume applies to you — is generational: My parents, for instance, believed that family was everything. So they took a lot of guff from their parents and siblings — who, in turn, tolerated unpleasantness from them. But my siblings and I are more focused on our mental health and well-being: You can push us only so far before we make our exit.”
Notice that Galanes said “we,” meaning that he endorses the daughter’s cutting off her mother and might do the same. This comes on the heels of another column from “The Ethicist,” in which an inquirer asked “Is It Wrong to Leave My 85-Year-Old Mother Alone on Thanksgiving?” the Ethicist thought it was a reasonable question and I ruled that even asking it was evidence of ethics rot. My own offspring barely speaks to me despite living rent free in my home and my wife and I rescuing him from an orphanage in a horrible country.
Is this a vile new cultural norm? Did the Boomers raise a generation that don’t respect their elders and look upon their families as casual connections to be cut off on a whim? How did that happen? Is this another side effect of Marxist indoctrination? And most of all, now what?
[Note:that scene above is what I believe is an excellent portrayal of a father-daughter estrangement being healed. The scene was written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. I recommend the film, “Molly’s Game,” highly, from an ethical, legal, and artistic perspective.]
The New York Times tells a tragic story about a young woman, Bowen Wan, with medical problems, under pressure in her profession, lonely and isolated as a recent arrival from China, who was drawn into a relationship of trust with an AI chatbot. In the end, that relationship was fatal.
ChatGPT was thrilled to take on the role of friend, confidant, advisor and medical expert. Wan, emotionally vulnerable, was happy to have the resource. From the Times account:
….The medication that had kept her epilepsy at bay for more than a decade had, inexplicably, stopped working. Despite trying different drugs, Bowen found that her seizures roared back, sometimes striking more than once a day. Doctors began discussing whether she was a candidate for brain surgery. At the very least, they agreed that she could no longer handle the demands of her software engineering job at Amazon. So, in 2021, Bowen went on disability leave.
Besides trips to the grocery store, she rarely left the safety of her apartment, located in a trendy neighborhood in Seattle. A seizure could turn any outing into an embarrassing, even dangerous, ordeal. Meeting new friends felt out of the question, too: She couldn’t stomach the idea of enduring an episode in front of a stranger whom she did not trust to understand her condition.
Her parents were the only people she felt she could talk to about her epilepsy. Their frequent phone calls tethered her to the outside world. They took an interest in every detail of her day and didn’t judge her when she took long pauses to find a word. Then, in 2023, she found a new companion in ChatGPT. She asked the bot for relationship advice and help navigating her health insurance and disability benefits. In 2025, she averaged more than 1,500 messages per week, sometimes chatting for hours in conversations that would stretch late into the night. [cont.]
Christina Lorey is an independent, Madison Wisconsin-based journalist, “positive news” creator, and former local television reporter, anchor, and producer.
I want to apologize to Gamereg, who authored this terse and astute Comment of the Day for getting it posted so tardily. Fortunately, the foolish (but disturbingly typical) sentiments he was generous enough to thoroughly rebut remain evergreen and ever destructive even though the election has come and gone.
Before I turn it over to Gamereg, I want to express particular disgust at the first line. There is nothing racist about the Republican Party, its elected officials or Donald Trump, and yet this claim—not even claim now but official Big Lie—remains a staple of progressive, Democrat, Trump Deranged cant despite my efforts and those of many others to demonstrate beyond dispute that it is untrue. When I confront the “Trump is a racist” chanters and insist that they tell me what they think is their smoking gun, their answers range from “Oh, everybody knows he’s a racist” to “He said mean things about Barack Obama/Kamala Harris/ Colin Kaepernick/”The Squad” to “He called the white supremacy protesters in Charlottesville “very fine people “to “he called nations with ‘people of color’ ‘shit-hole countries'” to “huminiahuminahumina.” The most substantive response anyone has come up with is the October 1973 DOJ civil rights lawsuit against Trump, his father Fred Trump, and their real estate company, Trump Management Inc., alleging systemic violations of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 in New York City. The Trumps settled the lawsuit in 1975 by signing a consent decree without admitting any wrongdoing or liability. The Justice Department’s evidence was strong; undeniably, the Trumps engaged in racial discrimination. Also undeniably, the episode is fifty years old. Fifty years ago Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama opposed gay marriage. I stipulate that when a public figure’s last racially discriminatory act was a half century ago, the “racist” label cannot be sustained.
I also want to respectfully challenge Extradimensional Cephalopod, our esteemed missionary of effective and civil discourse with immovable ideologues who have adopted an unshakable belief and are inclined to disrespect anyone who attempts to dislodge it regardless of the evidence offered. I would like to read a non-fantasy formula for convincing a progressive shill that the first first line is the utter bias and counter-factual smear that it is.
He/She/It has been especially smug of late with the now familiar “Oh, you poor dim Earthlings, if only you could learn the skills I bring you, the talking past each other that has resulted in such bitterness and enmity in our political disputes would be no more!” I am reacting particularly to our recent debate on this thread, which contained a reference to my post seeking the most ethical way to treat a neighbor who tells me she cuts off anyone who doesn’t sufficiently oppose Donald Trump and support the Democratic Party.
Update: I invited her to dine out with me for Thanksgiving, since my family is dead or will be elsewhere, and she is estranged from hers. She was thrilled. We will not talk politics.
There’s no excuse for this. There is a reason for it, however: Mediaite knows it can get away with this smear because the Miller Deranged don’t care about facts, just that all males accused of a sex crime must be considered guilty even decades after they have been exonerated. The good, virtuous, woke response in 2006 to the false charges made against the Duke students was to condemn the lacrosse players while presuming the alleged victim was a pure as the driven snow and as honest as Diogenes.
X Readers had to add the context Mediaite deliberately omitted to assist in the stampede to demonize Miller (I guess I should say “further demonize Miller.”) He was defending the presumption of innocence (which Nancy Grace seldom observed), not defending rape, and the accused students were indeed innocent, as their accuser eventually admitted that she lied.
CNN contributor and smug progressive propagandist Van Jones claimed to know the secret of how Democrats achieved their strong (but absurdly hyped) showing last Tuesday. “Now it can be told,” Jones said, as if he were about to reveal who the second shooter was on the grassy knoll.
“How did we win the narrative on affordability? Was it just these nice little Democrats out there running for office and going to — No. The Republicans never figured out what we were doing. There’s something called the American Accountability Network. Tens of thousands of online humans — not bots — coordinated to make the affordability message a winning message online.32.5 million people hit on Instagram every day, 88.8 million hit on Twitter, X every single day. And 185 million hits on Facebook every single day. And they never figured it out. The Republicans could not understand. It wasn’t bots, it was actual human beings. The most effective online organizing campaign … flew under the radar screen. Driving the kitchen table affordability message and tying that to Democrats on a positive and Republicans on a negative…So, it’s not just all the door knocking that was done which was amazing. It’s not just our amazing candidate quality. We had something called the American Accountability Network. Don’t get mad at me, I was given permission to reveal this.”
[“Amazing candidate quality…” Ugh. What a hack.]
Does this really come as a surprise to anyone? My Facebook friends and my progressive zombie acquaintances began chanting about high gas and grocery prices long ago, even though it didn’t make any sense, since the inflated prices were the hangover from Biden’s incompetent Presidency. To listen to them, it was all “tariffs,” because that was another repetitious talking point, though so far it looks like Trump’s tariffs were more successful than critics predicted. Let me translate what Jones was saying:
Picking a particularly dumb hill to die on, one commenter already on thin metaphorical ice and two already banned (but not yet blocked) past commenters decided to insult me personally based on this post, in which I pointed out what should have been obvious to anyone not made stupid by bias and paying attention, that Trump’s social media post supposedly offering the vacant job of White House Press Secretary to Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White was an extravagant trolling exercise as well as a message that he was not going to be cowed by the results of the mid-terms last week.
At the same time, a more respectable commenter picked the day to argue, without evidence or logic, that I need to be less assertive in such posts, because nobody likes me, or something, and that I am not skilled at persuasion.
I realized that these comments indicated a fundamental misunderstanding regarding the purpose of Ethics Alarms, an error that has raised its hoary head before. I don’t spend about four uncompensated hours a day researching and writing this blog and responding to comments (271,000+ responses so far, the most of any blog still standing) to convince anyone of anything. I remain true to and devoted to the mission, which states,
The New York Times has a provocative article (the issue isn’t political—yet, but just wait a few minutes) about how giant silly roadside attractions like the Paul Bunyan featured prominently in “Fargo” or Tyra the Tyrannosaurus (above), an 86 feet tall T-Rex that looms over Drumheller in Alberta, Canada are increasingly expensive to maintain. I was surprised how many of these frivolous things there are: an estimated 10,000 of them worldwide, mostly in the United States, Canada and Australia. The bulk of the U.S.’s roadside novelties sprung up in the mid-20th century as Ike’s interstate highway system took hold, more people bought cars, and family road trips became a summer vacation staple.
But now the aging structures are facing extinction. Lucy the Elephant (above) in Margate City, N.J. (I’ve visited Lucy!) was built in 1881 and has been designated historic, so a recent makeover that cost $2.4 million was deemed appropriate. But Tyra is coming down in 2029. The world’s largest hockey stick in Duncan, British Columbia, was dismantled in 2024 after 36 years after the community decided there were more practical uses for the $1.5 million it would cost to replace the crumbling wooden structure.
I loved crazy silly things growing up; heck, I still do because I’ve never grown up. Then they were just awe-inspiring and fun; now they are cultural touch-points and a source of whimsy as well as reminders of more innocent and emotionally healthy times.
The recent advances of the far left in the U.S. have some hidden tendrils. Socialist and Communist countries don’t have giant beavers, squirrels, the world’s largest cowboy boots, Vikings, or the likes of Willie the Walleye. Too frivolous. Think of all the hungry children who could be fed, all the homeless who could be clothed…and so on…with the money it costs for construction and maintenance. There’s no practical argument against that position, except that the spirit of a nation is important too, just impossible to quantify. Whimsy, imagination, the pure joy of a child seeing something memorable—these have value too, don’t they?
Nonetheless, I can’t foresee whimsy surviving in a nation that believes in income distribution and clinically obese government. The issue raised by the Times is political, and nostalgia is considered inherently racist and reactionary by our rising (and indoctrinated) generations.
CNN’s token conservative Scott Jennings writes in reaction to Galloway’s revelation,
“So he sold a car to someone after placing his feces in the front seat and this is a very serious person that we need to take very seriously because of his very serious thoughts.”
Bingo. I wouldn’t hire someone who boasted about pooping a car to mow my lawn, and this jerk is sitting on a Board of Regents because he hates the right people.
I told you that I would be posting this a lot, and here it comes again:
Take note, you conservatives and Republicans who let the “Blue Wave” swamp the nation, for these are the execrable people you allowed to get power over your lives because you wanted to throw a tantrum about inflation.
