I’m stuck in seminars until this afternoon, and I’m hoping the commentariat here can get a jump on some of the ethics-involved news of the day, like this,
Horowitz report is damning for the FBI and unsettling for the rest of us
contrasted with this…
Former top FBI lawyer: I want Trump ‘to apologize to me’
contrasted with this… IG Report Confirms Schiff FISA Memo Media Praised Was Riddled With Lies
then of course, there is this: Democrats unveil 2 articles of impeachment against Trump
…or anything else that moves you, related to ethics, of course.
Ethics Alarms 
A rare positive article:
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/people-leaving-snacks-delivery-workers-142600261.html
Are people obligated to thank their delivery driver in this way? Of course not. But what a great way to demonstrate civility and kindess to people rushing to get the packages delivered!
I hadn’t expected the pro-feudalism component of society to ally itself with the pro-abortion component of society. But they have, with aplomb.
Edward the Longshanks approves this message.
I wonder why they do not use this argument.
https://ethicsalarms.com/2014/05/27/a-futile-ethics-request-to-anti-gun-activists-dont-exploit-richard-martinez/#comment-203483
Here was a response by Scott Jacobs.
The Red Flag laws are much, much worse. A man was even killed in the enforcement of these laws.
Where is Scott Jacobs’s rebel army? It seems he could not put his money where his mouth is.
Personally I think Red Flag laws will end up in the the Supreme Court and be ruled unconstitutional.
I am very pro-gun… I mean like all law abiding citizens should have the right to posses, carry and practice with weapons commensurate with what a typical infantry soldier might have. So that is fully automatic assault rifles, machine guns (M249 / M60 / BAR etc…), grenade launchers, Anti-Aircraft missiles, Anti-Tank rifles. (some of this would be rather expensive to own.. but if you are law abiding, more power to you).
All that said. With proper due-process I do not especially have an issue with the idea of a Red-Flag law, but you would have to show substantial evidence of violent tendencies, or mental health issues that clearly indicate a break with reality.
The key part of your last paragraph is “with proper due process” which I don’t believe is taking place under mist red flag laws. The “defendant” is not allowed to defend themself.
Michael Ejercito,
Your thoughts on this topic are quite similar to what the Nazi’s did to the Jews?
I never advocated gassing deviants to death.
I said “quite similar” NOT exactly the same, so I’d genuinely appreciate if you would read the English I wrote something other than dumbass.
Please explain these similarities..
You’re kidding right?
This is self-evident Michael if you’ve ever had even the briefest exposure to what the Nazi’s did, but here’s a brief list just in case you really are this blindly ignorant:
1. Strip persons of their civil rights without due process.
2. Proclaim persons “deviant” because of they differ from socially accepted norms.
3. Force “deviants” to register with the state.
4. Force “deviants” to wear identifying insignia so everyone knows they are.
5. Ban “deviants” from specific jobs.
6. Indoctrinate the public with propaganda demeaning “deviants”.
7. Encourage the general public to openly discriminate against “deviants”.
These kinds of things are all things totalitarian minded Nazi’s did to “purify” their society.
Honest Question: Was your whole purpose in that thread to troll others with facetiousness and you had fun with your continuing prodding or were you offering your honest opinion?
There is no place in the Constitution where it explicitly protects a woman’s right to order a doctor to kill a completely helpless human being with an abortion, so why didn’t the Supreme Court use that argument to permanently ban abortions nation wide. Your argument is not grounded in reality.
It seems quite apparent you are mimicking the Star-of-David badges to be worn by Jewish persons, the restrictions of professions open to Jewish persons, the duty of non-Jews to report suspicious behavior of Jewish persons, etc.
“Deviants will be required to wear distinctive insignia. Failure or refusal to do so will be a felony. Again, there is no fundamental right to be free from wearing distinctive insignia when required to do so by the state.
Deviants will be banned from certain professions, such as law or medicine. There is no fundamental right to practice law or medicine or any profession.”
I mean, as long as you’re at it….
I don’t know who wrote the first quote, but I’m like 99% sure that it’s just a very well done satire. The parallels to Nazi Germany, 1984, or the USSR are plain as day and it’s covered under a paper thin veneer of respect for the laws of the Constitution while simultaneously violating them in practice and spirit.
He provided a link to the thread; read it all.
So I skimmed it but either Michael is insane or he’s trolling. My money is on trolling but I admit I don’t get the troll (maybe it’s over my head).
This season has produced a litany of strained analogies in the Nativity Scene world. All of course having to do with immigration. Given the level of contortion some of them have achieved, I don’t think the Left is even trying anymore.
Pretty Joseph and Mary were coming for a Roman legally required census. Kind of the opposite of open borders. Not sure how anyone with an IQ above room temperature would connect them.
I do a lot of driving. Like a lot. I work remotely so I can pretty much work from wherever I want within my own timezone tolerance – I’m not going to work through the local night and sleep through the local day. I also have friends and family scattered around the country so I generally dont have to stay at hotels either.
Sometimes I do 15k miles in three months and when youre on the road that often you notice some patterns. Firstly, American drivers have terrible left lane discipline. They’ll get into the left lane and coast. Even if there isn’t anyone in the slow lane to the right of them, it often creates traffic jams. All it takes is one or two lemmings following behind the slow person and a smattering of cars every now and again in the right lane and you’ve created a rolling road block. The window of opportunity to jump in the right lane is too small to safely get through that number of cars. Other times there is a car in the right lane and they’re just inadvertently speed matching and don’t care that they’re creating a cork. These traffic snarls often move below the speed limits and severely hamper the throughput that the highway was designed to produce.
Another form of driver is what I’ve come to call a don’t-pass-me-bro. He’s the guy that speeds up to block you out of passing attempts or after you’ve passed him adds a couple of mph to the cruise control so that so he overtakes you and “gets back in the the lead”. More on him another time.
When I see these slow left lane lemmings I feel driven to fix the problem. I work my way up the stack until I can floor it in one of the gaps and get ahead of them. I make it a point to roll my window down and flip them off as I pass. The idea is to create a negative social interaction that will discourage them from practicing discourteous driving behaviors like going slow in the passing lane and being oblivious to the car build up behind them. Most of the time I can see them check their rear view mirrors and get over after I pass. In those cases the negative social interaction did it’s job and the idiot uncorks the road. A minority of the time they don’t move but the act of jumping them breaks the other lemmings out of their spell and they start to climb around the slow poke and break the block that way.
Sometimes they get pissed and floor it to pursue me and give me a piece of their mind. I’m not terribly bothered by it though – after the Marines, people yelling in anger at you doesn’t really have the same psychological impact. No ones tried to run me off the road but if they did my car is fast and nimble enough to get away (given the demographics of the pursuers) and I keep a pistol in the glove box so even if they run me off the road and try to drag me out of the car I’m covered there too. What bothers me the most, is that if they manage to catch up and vent out their window they’ll feel better and the effect of the negative emotion that I’m leveraging to discourage future anti-social behaviors is diminished.
What’s interesting, is that sometimes the person blocking the left lane is a semi or box truck. Literally 100% of the time that it’s a semi or a box truck they pursue. I’ve had semis screaming along at 90 mph to catch up and yell at me out of their window. I’ve only been ‘caught’ twice but both times I could tell the driver was very self satisfied. It’s not often that semis block the left lane – I’ve noticed that your average big truck driver is much more aware of the road and how it’s supposed to function that your average Karen. But of the eleven times I’ve flipped off a careless truck driver, I’ve been chased eleven times. Even in those cases, at the end of the day the problem was solved, the slow poke wasn’t blocking the pass lane anymore.
So why do I mention all this? Firstly to comment on the duty to provide negative social consequences for unreasonably discourteous behavior because the alternative is to let it to go unchallenged and in doing so, slowly but surely allow it spread farther and deeper. If we don’t want traffic (or people) to get worse, then we need to get better at discouraging behavior that makes for bad traffic (and shitty people). Also to reiterate the negative relationship between socially courteous behavior and the willingness to engage in conflict. People who are willing to act like ass holes will escalate conflicts at a higher rate. I feel like this is a big reason why so many people won’t stand up to assholes on the road, or people talking during a movie, or letting their kids act up in restaurants. Maybe theres a better way than flipping people off but given that you’re communicating at highway speeds with all the wind, limited attention that you can devote to signaling while navigating at speed, and the limited window where they can actually see that signal… it’s really tough to beat flipping people off. So, all in all, I guess I just want people to be more willing to flip off assholes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
A very interesting perspective…and I think you’ve proven my wife right yet again.
Funny story in a similar vein:
A few months ago we were driving on I-235 in Des Moines, IA, and I passed a young lady who was dividing her time between the reality of pushing a four-thousand-pound box of steel down the road at 60mph and the virtual world of her text-message life. I told my wife I was going to get in front of her and gradually slow down. My wife was all, “No, don’t, she’ll run into you.”
I pulled in front of her and backed down to 55, then 50. Pretty soon she pulled around me and gave me the dirtiest look and said something I couldn’t lip-read (though it didn’t appear obscene), to which I smiled and mouthed, “Get off your phone!”
She wasn’t being discourteous as much as she was being downright dangerous. I didn’t flip her off, but now I feel better because of the positive “negative reinforcement” I was able to give.
I like your comment, but allow me to add a wrinkle to certain “other” troublesome patterns. I drive a car that’s 15 years old, but sometimes I get behind the wheel of a modern marvel and I learn something new. New cars these days have a fancy cruise control that matches speed and keeps a set distance from the car in front of you. Why is this important? Well, I noticed on a road trip recently that a car was behind me and I thought he wanted to pass. I moved over, he moved over, I sped up…but there wasn’t even a difference, he was right there without any reaction time.
We might have human drivers figured out, but these newer cars are changing what we perceive to be intentional human actions.
Another example, I’m currently in a 2019 loaner car and if you’ve got this thing in Eco mode, you can’t really do any jack rabbit acceleration. It’s made me realize that when I’m at an intersection and the car in front of me doesn’t do any nimble maneuvers to make a turn or to get going, it may not really be the driver’s full intention, but that of the car.
We are now entering a new phase of traffic school and the lessons we learn about how cars change human behavior might just bring us a steep learning curve.
I’m not sure I have much more of a point to this comment, but it’s an interesting observation of mine. Kind of like how I went skiing 2 years ago for the first time in 15 years and I was completely shocked that 99% of skiers were wearing helmets. Like, WTF? I felt out of place with my snow hat on a ski hill.
Automatic headlights precipitated another change in how I view driver behavior. The newer versions use a camera to decide when to change states, and this allows them to NOT blind someone who is is front of you.
However, sometimes the computer makes a mistake, and flashes the drive coming at you. This is a common ‘you are using your brights’ signal which almost always prompts the other drives to respond with ‘those are not brights, let me show you my brights.’ This used to worry me until I got used to the situations that caused the interaction, and I learned to turn off my automatic headlights.
Now days I understand that bright flashing could be the car making bad decisions, not the human drives.
So now I turn off my automatic headlights to manage their errors… why did I need this innovation in the first place again?
Funny story, this morning my loaner car brake checked someone by itself. They were mad.
I too drive a fair bit, not as much as you but still more than average. I also live out in the middle of nowhere so I’m driving curvey back roads. Having lived here for decades, I know every curve well and can take the road far faster than the unfamiliar.
I’ve noted that some really are driven bat shit crazy by being passed. I don’t understand where they are coming from. If anyone wants to go faster than me, I help them pass and will even let them by. My only request is that I never see them again. I don’t get people who pass and then slow down, they are infuriating. I’ll often mess with them and stick them behind a truck.
Most of the time, they are not prepared and I pass before they can react, so they take off to chase me. I take it as my personal challenge to leave them behind. The funniest are lifted trucks, they have no chance but that doesn’t stop them trying.
We had a crash near here that killed a woman and her son. The family wanted to blame the other driver. But he had a dash cam and all he did was pass and keep going fast. She tried to keep up and failed, eventually plunging into a river after flying off the road. He didn’t make any gesture or anything, it was simply him passing that set her off.
Dashcams. 100% necessity that people still don’t realize is a necessity. Without that footage, he might have been facing a homicide trial.
A former public defender now criminal defense solo I know advises against ever tempting a road rage response. Why? Too many asshole drivers are armed and batshit crazy and will think nothing of pulling out their piece and blowing you away right through your window.
Yes, 100%. https://northglenn-thorntonsentinel.com/stories/child-dead-three-injured-in-suspected-road-rage-shooting,263416?
I keep front and rear dashcams and what I’ve found is that the front camera keeps me from doing stupid things and the rear camera keeps others from doing stupid things.
Part of the divide, I think, between what I see as the left and the right is a difference of philosophy regarding the rules of the game.
I’ve said this before: The left doesn’t have principles outside the accumulation of power, this makes their job easier in that they don’t have any pesky moral baggage to concern themselves with giving them an unparalleled maneuverability in political discussions: They can turn 180 degrees on a dime, completely contradict what they said mere seconds before, sometimes pausing briefly to assert some tenuous distinction between the situations, and continue on as if nothing has happened.
The drawback is that in a group that values a conformity of thought, having the guiding principles of a coke-addled squirrel covered in bouncy balls, fresh off a ten hour ride in a paint shaker means that often, some of the less-manic members might miss a memo and say something deserving of cancellation or a stay in a state-sponsored re-education camp. It also means that the people espousing these ideas, especially when in office long enough, will invariably fall short of their own (temporarily) stated ideals (See Nadler’s position on partisan impeachments as exhibit A), and that kind of hypocrisy doesn’t play well with moderates.
That hasn’t been an issue for them until very recently, because unless that hypocrisy is particularly egregious, or their most recent position particularly vile, they had the media writ large working to actively cover for them, and it worked; there weren’t many personal collections of news video clips, there weren’t many outlets willing to dredge past records up, YouTube wasn’t a thing, and so it was basically up to the memory of the electorate, which I could metaphorically illustrate as a brain-damaged goldfish perpetually surprised by the cool new castle they swim by every five minutes, to hold Democrats responsible… Which probably worked as well as you think it did. Because 90% of news media are registered Democrats, 5% are lying when they take that survey, and the rest work at Fox, which has an audience almost entirely comprised of people who already knew or had an inkling that a lot of what they saw from the rest of the media writ large was a smokescreen for the Democrat party, moderates were almost certainly spoon fed the narrative of progressive choice, or at least a safe pablum of positions leaning that way.
That’s changed. Progressive grip on the media narrative is in a freefall. They can call it “fake news” in one of the most epic examples of a lack of self-awareness to ever exist, and to be fair to them, some of the information out there is complete, grade-A bullshit, but for the most part, an apple is an apple, and when presented with enough examples of apples, I think that especially among the moderates, the truth wins out. It’s why you see progressives scramble every time some inconvenient truth drops, desperately pleading with their audience not to rip that curtain aside, going so far as to saying during the 2016 election cycle that it was illegal for anyone other than them to view the Wikileaks posts…. Which probably did more to drive people towards those posts than deter them… See above regarding an amazing lack of awareness.
Which brings me to my real point: I have no idea what the hell Democrat leadership is thinking in regard to this impeachment. I really don’t.
Look, despite most of the Democratic leadership putting on affectations that would lead most thinking adults to wonder if perhaps some of them might be happier in an old-folks home, Nancy Pelosi in particular, the fact of the matter is that you don’t get positions like that by collecting bottlecaps, and inertia only keeps you there so long. These aren’t stupid people. To this day, I’m not exactly sure how Nancy got the squad to fire their JD staff and shut the hell up, but it’s been *amazingly* effective. All that said though, I wonder if they are so used to the paradigm of media covering for them and the unwashed masses being swayed by that cover that they don’t understand what’s going on.
Because, let’s face it, Democrats aren’t holding impeachment hearings… They know the senate is going to vote it down. No, this is an eight-figure, multi-year, single-use, continually running 2020 political ad. The problem for them is that we aren’t really learning anything new; Trump is a dishonest, corrupt, nepotistic boor with all the linguistic poise of a meat axe? Hold the presses! And I think this is backfiring on them, I really do. Between the very old, very white (as they love to remind us) field slowly walkering their way through the Democratic primary, and the increasingly shrill tone of the revolving door of impeachment efforts, Trump’s polling numbers are already on the rise. And that was before the latest jobs report came out. The Democratic spin on impeachment is generally falling flat outside the progressive bubble.
So…. What’s the game? What’s the goal? What is the ideal narrative? What is the thought process in continuing the impeachment narrative if it’s doomed to fail, and their message isn’t even being well received? What the fresh hell is with the mad rush to get the house to vote by Christmas? As best I can figure, the Democrats know the end game is the senate votes their impeachment down, so they want to lose spectacularly so they can say the Republicans are all corrupt and in Trump’s pocket…. But they’re still going to lose spectacularly, and in politics, that’s an absolute poison pill. Do they think they can actually succeed? That they owe it to the electorate they lied to, promising impeachment before even knowing what they would impeach for? Maybe… But see above for my opinion on the memory of the electorate. Having a fresh defeat to wallow in, I think, might go over about as well as Trump’s victory did to begin with.
And won’t that just be great?
I’ve asked myself those questions often about what the Democrats have been doing. After discussions over the years with fully consumed progressives I’ve come to the conclusion from my ivory upper mid-west tower that in the minds of the extreme political left the Constitution as a barrier, a system, standing in their way to their Socialist utopia, so if “the system” won’t allow them to remove President Trump then it’s easy to paint “the system” as being what’s wrong. Progressives and a large swath of the political left have become totalitarians and most of them can’t see what they’ve become. I firmly believe now that the totalitarian Democrats, progressives in particular, are actively constructing their hill to die on, I honestly think they want to bring down the entire system to put in place their “utopia”. The only way they can bring down the whole system is to convince a majority of the population that the whole system as evil and what better way than to portray a divisive Trump as evil and if the system won’t allow them to remove evil, then the system allows evil, therefore the system is evil too. We’ve been heading here for quite a while.
This is not an opinion I just pulled out of the blue, this is from many years of observation and personally knowing what the end goals of some progressives has been. The problem is that their Socialist utopia aspirations have turned totalitarian and the totalitarian infestation has spread.
This post is COTD worthy, in my opinion. Well stated, HT.
I don’t have an answer, either. Is the bubble so complete (so round, so firmly packed) that they really don’t see how terrible the optics are? Are they looking for an excuse to burn it all down?
Destined to fail.
Ruth Bader Ginsburgs age and health could be on reason the left is going bonkers to make Trump unelectable.
Progressives never counted on someone like Trump , who does not feel obligated to please the media or other singular people , would be chosen by enough people to threaten their ability to control the electorate.
This creature (our “constitutional expert” professor friend from the hearings) is the type they want more of:
GREAT post, HT, with one caveat.
“Between the very old, very white (as they love to remind us) field slowly walkering their way through the Democratic primary…” (bolds mine)
Elizabeth Warren’s still in it…um…thus far…
“What’s the game? What’s the goal?”
I think that they’re afraid that if they don’t impeach, their hard-core leftists will bolt.
…but where they gonna GO?
They could decide not to vote, or they could drift to the Libertarian Party.
The hard left are too statist/totalitarian to want to pair up with libertarians. Best case scenario, they organize a significant third party pushing AOC-like candidates, and pull votes from the dems.
They won’t go anywhere, they’ll stay Democrats, they’ll just sit the next one out.
Actually they win either way. If Trump is impeached in the House and it fails in the Senate as it most likely will, Michael Moore or someone of his ill will make a very scary conspiracy movie along the lines of Oliver Stone’s paranoid fantasies. The charade will certainly go on with the hack journalists speculating how this horror could have happened.
Michael who?
This clown: https://variety.com/2018/film/columns/how-michael-moore-lost-his-audience-fahrenheit-11-9-1202953813/
(I was being facetious)
We sometimes note that those on the left often act, with the support of academia, like children, with their various antics of tantrums, triggers, and snowflakery. I recently read an old (Next, 2006) Michael Crichton novel that contained the following:
“British Researcher Blames Formal Education – Professors, Scientists “Strikingly Immature”
If you believe the adults around you are acting like children, you’re probably right. In technical terms, it is called “psychological neoteny,” the persistence of childhood behavior into adulthood. And it’s on the rise.
According to Dr. Bruce Charlton, evolutionary psychiatrist at Newcastle upon Tyne, human beings now take longer to reach mental maturity — and many never do so at all.
Charlton believes this is an accidental by-product of formal education that lasts well into the twenties. “Formal education requires a child-like stance of receptivity,” which “counteracts the attainment of psychological maturity” that would normally occur in the late teens or early twenties.
He notes that “academics, teachers, scientists and many other professionals are often strikingly immature.” He calls them “unpredictable, unbalanced in priorities, and tending to overreact.”
The rest of the text is, serendipitously, here (link below) in a 2019 post by Dr. Charlon, where he references the novel (which is about genetics, including the “maturity gene”) and expands on previous comments about his theory. He also links (has to be cut and pasted) to more explanation of why he calls it “not one of my best” He seems to mainly have changed his mind about whether delayed maturity is an overall good thing (facilitating receptivity to learning). His first post: http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2019/06/my-lame-claim-to-fame-im-featured-in.html
In that first post, he writes in the comments section: “I used to consider PN socially adaptive. Now I am aware 1. that psychological neoteny it is related to the chosen extinction of The West – it is a part of our implicit self-hatred, our covert self-annihilation (subfertility and mass immigration/ strategic population replacement – we in the athestic West are actively working to destroy our selves, our lineage and our society); 2. that PN is not adaptive, rather it is a symptom of a disease.”
Hello, Alizia! (To whom I preemptively apologize, if she has already referenced Dr. Charlton, and I’ve forgotten it or overlooked a post of hers)..
Fearsome Gang Weapons bravely secured ~ 55 years ago in the 77 Square Miles Surrounded By A Sea Of Reality.
According to the Democrats’ theories, if it is forbidden to investigate Joe Biden because he is running for office, doesn’t that mean he is obstructing justice by running?
Just askin’
It absolutely would.
Here is Ilya Somin’s take.
https://reason.com/2019/12/10/impeachment-and-the-spending-power-revisited
What is missing from the analysis is the existence of a writ of mandamus, or other court order or judgment, requiring Trump to immediately issue the aid in question.
I agree with Alan M. Dershowitz that a mere dispute between Congress and the President over the latter’s ministerial duties and discretion should be addressed by the courts. Only if the President defies a court order should impeachment be on the table.
President Obama’s 2011 Dear Colleague Letter was arguably an usurpation of Congress’s power of the purse, as it was a threat to withhold federal funds from universities unless they set up kangaroo courts to violate the due process rights of male students. But absent Obama defying a writ of mandamus to release the funds to the universities notwithstanding the Letter, impeachment would have been too harsh a remedy.
It is important to note what President Trump is not accused of.
He is not accused of fabricating or forging evidence against the Bidens.
He is not accused of withholding evidence that could exculpate the Bidens.
He is not accused of asking President Zelensky to withhold any evidence that might exculpate the Bidens.
The whole basis for abuse of power is that the fact that Joe Biden is a candidate for the Democratic nomination. It would not have been considered an abuse of power if Trump threatened to withhold aid unless Zelensky opened or reopened an investigation against Random Joe Sixpack.
For that matter, Random Joe Sixpack could have asked Zelensky to investigate Biden, promising to donate to a charity in Ukraine, and it would not have been illegal.
Congressman Adam Schiff at the announcement of the impeachment charges said the following…
When I heard this statement it was 100% clear that the Democrats still think that Trump cheated his way into the White House, that he is cheating his way through his presidency, and that they firmly believe that Trump has and is getting foreign help.
I don’t personally remember the Democrats using the word “cheat” in this manner in the past, but now it’s been introduced on the world stage in reference to the President of the United States, I think this is unethical. I think this is another signature significant statement from the Democrats. The Democrats are morally bankrupt.
They first have to establish that foreign help is cheating.
They have yet to do so.
Uh, wouldn’t they also have to prove he received foreign help?
Nice job there EA commentariat. Impressive. Maybe there should be one open forum per week? Might keep comments to Jack’s posts more focused on the issues presented? Would provide a forum for mini posts by our most erudite commenters.
HT, I still think the Dems want Trump destroyed because he’s not a politician. He doesn’t pose an existential threat to democracy or the constitution or anything else OTHER THAN the continued health and well being of career politicians and all their various enablers and accessories and co-conspirators.