1. Ay Caramba! Does anyone think that former Playboy model Eva Marie has a legitimate complaint because she was kicked off a Southwest flight along with her seven-year-old son for wearing this outfit on board?
I don’t. She said she was “humiliated and embarrassed” when a Southwest Airlines flight attendant told her she couldn’t board looking like that. I don’t believe it for a second. She was seeking publicity. “When they threatened to remove me off the plane if I didn’t have a change of clothes, I felt completely humiliated, embarrassed and highly offended,” the Instagram influencer said of the incident. “I’m an A list member for SWA and have a credit card with the airline and I have perks that allow any person traveling with me to fly free because of my high status with the airline. So even as being a loyal customer with them, I felt like the other women on the plane were judging me based on my attire and they were saying my breasts are too large,” she added. “Well, that’s something I can’t help.”
No, you shameless jerk, they were judging you because you won’t observe even minimal social conventions, like not going out in public looking like a stripper mid-routine. If she is a “high status” member of the airline, then she is presumably aware that it has a dress code. It is overwhelmingly likely that she pulled this as a stunt to gain Instagram users to “influence,” and exploited Southwest to do so.
The airline would be fair and reasonable to ban her from flying.
2. Moral luck, rationalization and the early morning phone call. My oldest and best friend called my office at 5:30 am on a Sunday to inquire about a piece of attire he had left in my car a couple of weeks earlier. By sheerest luck, a bout of insomnia had me in my office, working on Ethics Alarms. But that was pure luck: I don’t get up that early, and he knows it. Typically, a phone call coming in at such a weird hour frightens me, since I assume it is an emergency if it isn’t a wrong number. Indeed, I picked up the phone after recognizing his number and said, “What’s wrong?”
My wife, who heard the phone ring from the bedroom and was similarly alarmed rebuked me for not reprimanding my friend. “That’s outrageous! You don’t call someone on a Sunday at that hour for something so trivial!” she said. True, I argued, but as it was, it didn’t inconvenience me at all. He drove over, picked up the item as I handed it to him through his car window, and all was easy and pleasant.
Unfortunately for me, my wife reads Ethics Alarms, and pointed out that the fact that the call didn’t awaken and alarm me was moral luck, and that I was applying Consequentialism (#3) as well as “No Harm, No Foul” (#8) from the Rationalizations list. When I said that my friend deserved more generous treatment after our long relationship, she countered with Rationalization #10, The King’s Pass, Ethics Accounting (#21), Yoo’s Rationalization (#64) , and #59, “I’m All Right With It.”
3. NOW some election-related news….We have another hanging chad situation in Arizona, it appears. Morons—or Democratic schemers— running some of the polling places in heavily GOP precincts gave voters Sharpie pens to fill in their ballots, and those pens’ marks don’t register with the voting machines.
4. At least Portland voters aren’t as unethical and incompetent as they might be. At one point, the weak, antifa and Black Lives Matter-pandering Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler was behind in double digits—wait, never mind, those were polls, and thus as reliable as a Ouija board. Anyway, Portland voters last night soundly defeated his challenger, Sarah Innarone, who is pro-riot and pro-antifa, as well as being a Communist. She recently wore a skirt honoring, among other murderers, Mao, the worst mass murderer of them all.
Portland voters are still incompetent and irresponsible to allow an inept leader like Wheeler to only have an un-American totalitarian like Innarone as an alternative to his continuing in office.
5. More good news: Maybe California isn’t completely irredeemable either! Last night, California voters rejected Proposition 16, which would have repealed the state’s ban on affirmative action policies including the the consideration of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in university admissions, public employment and contracting.
Ethics Alarms 
#2 Did you say “touché” to your wife?
No. “Humina humina.”
Forgive me but…
ROFLMFAO!!!!!!!!!
#4 There are more and more of these wackos getting in public office.
#3 I wonder if that will force a hand recount in the state?
I was given a felt tip pen (Paper Mate Flair Felt Pen, Medium Point, Black Ink) and my ballot worked – I’m in upstate NY. Most of the sharpie pens I’ve seen have a very fine point; so, you’d have to “work” to fill in a ballot circle completely (I guess).
I could accept a Biden victory if it is legitimate but the current aftermath has me asking a lot of questions and I feel uneasy about Biden coming out on top in this election. I’m having to take a break from all this as I’m saturated (or burned out) from 4 years of political turmoil.
I actually looked at this on our ballot when I voted so I make sure I’m using the correct writing instrument; this is the first year our ballots didn’t explicitly state that a ball point pen must be used, felt tip markets could not to be used until this year.
Our local bank supplied all the black ball point pens used in our polling place and they handed out one pen to absolutely every voter even if they brought their own pen to use for voting and they were instructed to use the provided pen and take it home. They knew the pens they were providing always worked.
We have a couple on our local radio station who are political analysts and who moved here from Arizona a while ago. They still have contacts there and mentioned Wednesday afternoon that Arizona Republicans are furious about the state being called so early — they contend that there are still (as of Wednesday) hundreds of thousands of in person votes to be counted that are heavily Republican.
A) Arizona is hardly the first state to be quickly called for a Democratic candidate whilst other states that seem obvious to go Republican hang out in never never land interminably — Texas this cycle and Alaska it seems like every cycle.
B)I’ve been keeping an eye on the Arizona vote totals and they do keep getting closer in Trump’s favor. Doing the math there still appear to be about 400,000 votes left to be tabulated.
C)Wouldn’t it be a hoot if Trump’s reelection ultimately went through Arizona?
NC won’t declare until next week. You don’t think that could be the Democratic PTB there trying to hold the vote back in the hopes it wouldn’t matter? Nah, couldn’t be.
Nope, the media is going to call it for Biden and then everyone is supposed to go home.
#3 appears to be false, and sharpie is actually preferred by the tabulation machines. It’s politifact but it’s a direct factual claim, with supporting video from before the election. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/nov/04/facebook-posts/voting-machines-dont-read-ballots-filled-sharpies-/
Dismissed as moot before this day is over.
I’d take that bet.
On which side, that it will or it won’t?
#1. I never get these flights…
You ask :”Does anyone think that former Playboy model Eva Marie has a legitimate complaint because she was kicked off a Southwest flight”.
Doesn’t she have a constitutional right ….. “equal protection’ in the 14th amendment’?
Tongue presumably in cheek, and on that basis, I like it. However,there is no Constitutional protection against discrimination based on reasonable standards applied by a private business.
Okay, time for the leftist wannabe micro-managers of everything to be consistent, for a change.
They want a national database of registered gun owners. Uh-huh…
How about also a national database of registered voter fingerprints? [bouncing my eyebrows]
Along with FEDERAL laws and regulations to ensure the integrity of mail-in ballot-casting. Like, requiring every mail-in ballot to have a legible fingerprint of the voter pressed onto it. A print that can be matched and verified in the database. If no match, then invalid ballot. [bouncing eyebrows again]
Of course, it’s so “Iraqi” – you know, like the purple thumbs used in elections in that country to identify persons who had already cast their ballot – it’s an “insult to democracy”…I can already hear the resistance planning their riots and rhetoric. But dammit to hell, they’ll have that gun-owner database…
And of course the good career Democrat bureaucrats at BATFE will run that database, and they’ll charge “registration fees” higher than the cost of the guns that the owners have or want to have.
The FCC is trying to up the ham radio licensing fees to $50 up from $15. That may not seem like much, but when you are having a hard time getting younger people (high school, college) interested in ham radio, it is significant.
There was an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal this week suggesting that it is time we make use of modern technology to identify voters. The writer was proposing that we have a facial recognition database in the cloud — you’d have to devise security methods against hackers, of course.
The idea behind it was that once you were registered in this database, you would be uniquely identified and you would be known for all future elections. I.e. you could cheat — but only the very first time and then you’d be in the system.
I mentally scoffed when I first saw the title of the piece, but it’s actually an intriguing idea.
Simply impossible in the foreseeable future. Facial recognition is impossible to audit, and requires local polls to be connected to a central database to check in real time whether someone’s face has voted already elsewhere. That database will be Target 0 for anyone who wants to tamper with an election.
It also doesn’t fundamentally work better than having a clerk check a photo ID and crossing the voter’s name off the voter roll.
People simply have a duty to make sure they are registered to vote before an election so that their name appears on the roll. No amount technology can compensate for lack of voter care.
And one party is dead set against voters having to do anything other than the bare minimum to cast their vote, no ID, no signature, no postmark, no nothing. Because voter fraud doesn’t exist, you know, and requiring any kind of effort is trying to suppress the poor and people of color.
I heard a story once about how in 2004 someone bussed 4 or 5 mentally handicapped adults to the polls and guided them to vote for John Kerry “because he’s a great man who wants to do good things for this country,” before bussing them back to their facility.
But no, there’s no such thing as fraud. 100K votes in the middle of the night is totally on the up and up.
Actually, now that I read your reply I realize that I forgot to include the primary impetus for the column.
Basically, the idea was that we should be catching up to 21st century technology and, since 90+% of adults have cell phones (this is true, even most of the 70 & 80 year olds that come in to have their taxes done have cell phones) — it is past time for us to devise a method to vote via cell phone.
Therefore, every cell phone can take a selfie — validate your vote with a picture from your phone to the national database and voila!
Now there are one or two folks who might object to a national facial recognition database…….
Yeah, if only big tech companies haven’t absolutely signaled their commitment to the Democrat New American Order. You think DNC shenanigans and fraud are bad now? Wait until they have a private corporation’s access to cancelling your vote that way.
I spent a beautiful day yesterday not knowing a single thing about how the election did or didn’t turn out. I avoided all news sites, tv stations with news on them and anything else that might reveal the results or lack thereof.
It was a great day.
I basically did the same; however, my wife was watching frequently throughout the day and I was exposed to some news even though I did my best to ignore it and exit the family room quickly. I’m through watching; I feel it’s a done deal for Biden/Harris – they will be installed as the next P/VP. So, for me there’s no more reason to watch. If, by some chance, it turns out different, I’ll find out but I think the chances of Trump staying in office are vanishingly small.
Hopefully, this brief comment didn’t disturb your serenity – I’m going to spend some time outside again today as it is again in the mid to upper 60s.
4) OH LOOK! Portland is violently cracking down on the antifa mobs.
I wonder why now? I just DON’T understand the timing AT ALL!
Can someone explain?
There’s a concept known as the “fallacy fallacy.” In summary, many people treat logical fallacies as if they automatically mean the argument is incorrect, but this is in itself fallacious. If you say “Bob is an asshole who roots for the Yankees, so he’ll make a terrible County Clerk?” You’re engaging in the ad hominem fallacy- but it might STILL be the case that Bob would make a bad County Clerk.
You’ve made your list of rationalizations so big with so many absolute definitions, I think you’ve created a hidden “rationalization fallacy.” That is, just because behavior meets the definition of one of the rationalizations, does not mean it is necessarily bad behavior. It may technically match with items on your list, but I don’t think you can call it unethical to not care that a friend did something theoretically rude that actually didn’t cause any hassle.
I think it’s stipulated that a rationalization is actually NOT a rationalization if the behavior IS ethical.
But I think being called at 5:30 in the morning for something trivial falls in the column of unethical…regardless of how easily forgiveable it is.
You just created the fallacy fallacy fallacy!
You also reminded me to revise the intro, which had read,
Discussions about ethical issues, not to mention attempts to encourage ethical behavior, are constantly derailed by the invocation of common misstatements of ethical principles. Some of these are honest misconceptions, some are intentional distortions, some are self-serving rationalizations, and some, upon examination, simply make no sense at all.
Some common ones are listed here. It will never be a complete list, and additions are welcome. All of us can benefit from reviewing them from time to time, so that we may detect them in the arguments of others, and be aware of what we are doing when we use them ourselves.
I need to add that many of the rationalizations listed can gave legitimate applications. In the commentary on the particular rationalizations listed, I often note that. but I’m thinking about adding a standard statement under each one that says “May be a legitimate argument in certain situations.”
The idea of the extensive list is to make the ethics alarms ring whenever you hear one of the rationalizations being used by others or when they pop into your own head. The next step is considering whether the intent is to rationalize, or, as I often put it (not an original statement from me)whether one is lying to oneself to justify wrongful conduct.
Even #1, “Everybody does it,” can have a legitimate application, but it’s usually used as a rationalization. The fact that it has occasional validity doesn’t change that, just as the fact that some use the rationalization stated incorrectly doesn’t mean it isn’t a rationanalization in the context noted.
#3: Is that actually the case? Because in Michigan there’s a lot of screaming about a secret sharpie conspiracy to keep votes from being counted. All of the election authorities, the Secretary of State, the people who make the voting machines, and everyone else who knows what’s going on have said “no, a sharpie works fine, it actually dries faster than a ballpoint pen so it’s technically a slightly BETTER way to fill in a ballot.” Meanwhile, the conspiracy theorists are claiming that because state law says “use a blue or black ink pen” that the voting machine somehow magically knows that a sharpie isn’t a “pen.”
So I’m immediately skeptical of whether there are actually votes going uncounted in Utah because of sharpie ballots, or whether that’s just something being asserted without evidence by people who saw it on the internet.
The complaint in question is real, and is based on the fact that markers soak through the ballots, invalidating them (or not.) In VA, we were told that only ballpoints would work.
I see. In Michigan, at least, the ballots are 1) made thick enough that they won’t easily bleed through, and 2) if a voter DOES spend enough time scribbling with a sharpie to force bleed-through, the sides of the ballot are aligned so the bleed-through form a bubble on one side won’t spoil the ballot on the other side (it would bleed through in an irrelevant blank area, in other words).
That’s interesting…