By all means, talk about the President’s vaccine mandate if you want, or anything else ethics-related. I wish I had time to do a deep dive into the legality of such a move, and I wish the news media was competent enough to do one for me. I do like the question offered on several blogs about how Biden thinks that he can mandate vaccinations when he is on record saying that he can’t mandate masks.
“It’s Charles M. Blow in front as they round the turn, but HERE COMES KRUGMAN MAKING HIS MOVE ON THE RAIL!!!”
It’s so exciting!
I was going to include this as a note in the warm-up, and then I read all of the comments referring to the Democratic Party’s no longer even disguised embrace of totalitarianism, and decided, Jack Point-style, “Oh, I can’t let this pass!” For Krugman proved with his characteristic gaslighting op-ed this morning, hilariously headlined, “Foreign Terrorists Have Never Been Our Biggest Threat,” that if nothing else, he has chutzpah to spare. Who else would choose this moment, in a 9/11-themed column, to assert that Republicans are an existential threat to democracy? It would be satire, if only so many Times readers didn’t believe it. That fact makes it tragedy.
Let me remind you of Rationalization #64, which has increasingly become the operating philosophy of the Axis of Unethical Conduct as Trump-Derangement became an epidemic .Even I had forgotten that the description of the technique cited Krugman as a prime practitioner:
The name of the school was so familiar, I thought I had already written on this issue. But no: the past Ethics Alarms pieces were related—dimly–to the fate of student Kaylyn Willis, but this ethics outrage in involving her is new. In 2015 there was a mass shooting at the school, prompting the usual eruption of finger-pointing and dishonest claims by the anti-gun hysterics. I wrote about the latter here and elsewhere. Obviously, the tragedy is a raw wound, but that’s no excuse for what the school has done to Willis.
In the winter 2021 term, Willis enrolled in “Chronic I,” a class taught by Patrick Harris. Harris assigned students to use “critical imagining” to create stories from the perspective of a person suffering from a chronic disease. For a May, 2021 assignment, Harris asked his students to reflect on the support systems of chronically ill individuals and how a person with a chronic illness might respond to the sudden and unexpected loss of such support. Willis imagined a scenario in which a woman suffering from ALS shoots her husband, who is also her primary caretaker. Her fiction was based on a real case where a jury found a man “not guilty” of murdering his wife and sister-in-law because he suffered from ALS-related mental health issues. She posted her assignment on-line, as she had been directed to do.
Harris, it is fair to say, flipped out. He gave Willis an F, saying, “Do you honestly think that your post on a nursing school assignment was appropriate? Joking about killing your husband? I’m really questioning your critical thinking if you think this was an appropriate discussion post.” Harris indicated that he viewed her story as particularly offensive after the 2015 shooting on UCC’s campus.
School officials informed Willis that she was expelled from the program because her post violated its handbook prohibiting “[a]cts which are dishonest, disrespectful, or disruptive.” The Grievance Panel’s written decision stated that Willis’ post was “insensitive” and “failed to take into consideration the events of UCC’s past and the impact her post could have.” Her appeal was denied and she is now unable to seek admission to any other Oregon Consortium Nursing Education programs.
1. Look! Another survey you can’t trust! Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America and author of “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America,” is co-founder of Fix Our House, a new campaign for proportional representation designed, apparently, to turn the U.S. into Italy. It’s a bad idea, but in a Times op-ed, he argues for six parties, divided according to ideological fault lines. He even has a 20 question survey you can take that places you in or near one of the parties.
Here is how valid that survey is: I was told “You are closest to the Christian Conservative Party.” To be fair to Lee, his survey did place me closer to dead center than to that party, and furthest away from The Progressive Party.
2. Foiled again! President Biden one again had to pull the nomination of an openly radical zealot from a position such an individual has no business being in: David Chipman will not head the ATF. He openly advocated banning many kinds of guns, and has been hostile to the Second Amendment. Before his nomination, Chipman worked as a senior policy adviser at the Giffords Law Center, which announces on its website landing page, “We’re on a mission to save lives from gun violence.” Translation: “We’re on a mission to make it difficult for law-abiding citizens to acquire firearms. Chipman’s exchange with Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) of the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this year should have sealed his fate. Kennedy asked Chipman, “Do you believe in private ownership of assault weapons?” Chipman quickly responded in the affirmative. Kennedy then asked him, “Do you believe in banning assault weapons?” Chipman responded that he does. So Kennedy asked how Chipman would define “assault weapons.” Chipman said that “assault weapons would be something that members of Congress would define.”
“Well, how do you define it?” Kennedy asked. Chipman finally said, “There’s no way I could define an assault weapon.”
Got it. He wants to ban a kind of guns he can’t define, and that could be defined any way the government chooses.
Bye!
I’ll post the 25 stipulations from Part I at the bottom of Part II for easy reference; I’ll be quoting the number in some cases. But not right now…I realized that an introduction is necessary.
It’s important to clarify an essential point up front: as long as the two sides in the abortion controversy refuse to acknowledge the validity of the other side’s interest and concern, no solution to the problem is possible, and until that point, it is almost a waste of time discussing it. In this respect, it is like another ongoing ethics conflict, the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians. (That one I believe is hopeless, and the only solution is an unethical one: a war that leaves one side or the other standing. That may happen; I don’t see it as a likely resolution of the abortion question.
Related to this condition precedent to any resolution is the fact that the pro- and anti- abortion sides (Let’s send “pro-life and “pro-choice” to ethics hell where they belong) must stop demonizing the other. That practice makes compromise and literally impossible, and a problem like abortion cannot be addressed ethically without the recognition that balancing of interests must occur at some level.
In this area, abortion separates itself from the ethics and human rights dispute it most resembles. The analogy is useful in some respects (as we shall see), but not in the area of compromise. The period preceding the Civil War was a fiasco of attempted compromise regarding slavery, and every attempt made the situation worse, more unethical, more unjust, and more contentious. Slavery really is an absolutist problem: it is absolutely wrong, and there are not ethical principles on both sides, unlike abortion. The pro-slavery case was economic, making slavery an ethics dilemma (non-ethical considerations vs ethical ones), unlike abortion. Because abortion is an ethics conflict, each side must accept a solution that is partially unethical, or there will never be a solution.
I was surprised to find how often I have written about the Steve Bartman incident (shown above) here. For those of you who missed it (and if you are not a baseball fan, couldn’t care less) the episode is rife with ethics lessons.
Bartman was the hapless young Chicago Cubs fan in 2003 who unintentionally interfered with a foul ball that might have been catchable by Cubs outfielder Moises Alou in the decisive game of 2003 National League Championship Series. Bartman’s mistake (it didn’t help that he was wearing earphones and watching the ball rather than the action on the field) began a chain of random events that ended in a complete collapse by Chicago in that very same half-inning, sending the Miami Marlins and not the Cubs, who had seemed comfortably ahead, to the World Series.
Bartman issued a sincere and pitiful apology but it didn’t help. He was widely vilified by Chicago fans, who at that point had not seen a pennant-winning team in their lifetimes. Sportswriters joined in, and he was literally run out of town. Bartman’s name then became part of Cubs and baseball lore, one more chapter in the sad saga had been called “the Billy Goat Curse,” the uncanny inability of the Chicago National League team to win it all. The Cubs finally broke the imaginary curse in 2016, and in a show of kindness and remorse, privately awarded Bartman an official Chicago Cubs 2016 World Series Championship ring.
That was nice, but Bartman’s life had already been, if not ruined, seriously degraded by the incident. I thought about poor Steve last night, when a foul ball nearing Fenway Park’s “Green Monster” left field wall wafted its way down the foul line. As Sox outfielder Danny Santana tracked it, so did several fans in the seats that look over the grandstand onto the field. Their eyes were on the ball, and as it moved way from foul territory into fair–maybe: in Fenway Park at that point, it is only a matter of a few feet’s difference—one fan lunged for the ball, deflecting it away from Santana’s glove.
The weekend was spent dealing with all manner of unexpected crises, from my sister’s dog-sitter having to abandon the pooch, then having to play taxi as she faced vehicle problems, to my wife’s business email being hacked and all of her sent files being erased, Then after a holiday, which always louses me up since we are always working even though no one else is, yesterday saw me spending three and a half hours getting a painful root canal. I slept until noon today, and now have no idea what I’m doing…
1. Multiple mainstream media sources keep describing the Texas voting bill as “restricting voting” or creating “voting limitations.” That’s an unethical description, in headlines or in the stories themselves. Nobody who is eligible to vote is “restricted’ from doing so. Laws regulating how elections are conducted in order to ensure security and integrity are not restrictions, nor do they “limit” voting. These slanted versions of reality are not designed to inform, but to misinform: their duty is to explain what the law does without categorizing it in order to build fear and resentment. Is a law saying that citizens can’t vote twice restricting voting? How about a law making sure it’s difficult to vote twice? Are laws making certain that only citizens can vote, as the law already requires, “restrictive”?
2. Speaking of fake news...All manner of media sources, especially the usual suspects like the Daily Kos, repeated the fake Rolling Stone story discussed here without bothering to check it’s accuracy—just like Rolling Stone. Rachel Maddow, whom so many of my Trump Deranged Facebook friends still swear is a trustworthy journalist, behaved typically for her (and MSNBC):
Meanwhile, did Twitter suspend the accounts of Rolling Stone or any of the other pundits and “journalists” who tweeted or re-tweeted this misinformation? Of course not. No, I’m not proud that I left Twitter in protest, I’m ashamed that it took me so long to do it…
…but still I am stunned by how deep the NFL’s lack of principles, craven weakness in the fact of political correctness bullying, and near complete contempt for its fans goes. Still! What the hell’s the matter with me?
Trembling in fear of Black Lives Matter and the strength of a players union with almost 80% black membership, the NFL announced that it will permit players to display progressive and Black Lives Matter propaganda on their outfits. The league is going so far as to provide six pre-approved phrases for players to choose from for display on their helmets during games: “Black Lives Matter,” “End Racism,” “Stop Hate,” “Inspire Change,” “It Takes All Of Us,” and “Say Their Stories.” (For some reason, “Ramalama-ding-dong” didn’t make the cut.) The league will also allow home teams to have one of two phrases written across the end zones of their fields: “End Racism” or “It Takes All Of Us.”
So now the NFL thinks that presenting a sporting event for which fans pay ridiculous sums for tickets reasonable includes partisan, divisive, race-based propaganda as part of the unavoidable experience. If NFL fans don’t push back against this and hard, they are weenies, and not just that, they are aiding and abetting an undemocratic and divisive trend. The one cynical consideration the ethically inert owners and executives may be counting on is that nobody in the stadium can read what players have on their helmets. All right, two considerations: the average mouth-breathing NFL fan wouldn’t care if Joe Wonderful had “KKK” or Man-Boy Love Association slogans on his helmet as long as he throws that game-winning touchdown pass.
I just learned today that “Shout!,” the Isley Brothers’ classic, never reached higher than #47 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959, in a single that covered both sides of the 45. Listening to the recording now (and forever), that is simply stunning. There may not be a more exciting, spontaneous, rousing recording of any song by any artist, ever.
Yet somehow it was quickly forgotten, until a fake group called “Otis Day and the Knights” performed a terrific cover in the 1978 comedy “Animal House,” and suddenly it was a standard at wedding and parties all over the country. Why? It’s just wonderful, that’s all, and nobody sang it like the Isley Brothers. For the most part, nobody tries: there were a few obscure covers before the song was rediscovered (The Beatles did a version in 1964), but it is one of those songs where nobody wants to be compared to the sublime original.
This kind of thing gives me hope. Good ideas get lost, bad ones thrive (for a while), hacks and phonies make millions and great artists die in gutters. But now and then justice happens, maybe by fate, maybe by luck, and just maybe because life is more ethical than we think it is.
Maybe this kind of thing bothers me more than it bothers most people, but the internal contradictions and racial issues pretzeling in a recent Times puff piece on Marvel’s latest superhero film, “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” had my brain short-circuiting like one of those computers that Captain Kirk would disable on “Star Trek” by feeding them self-contradictory statements.
Consider these quotes from the article, which was authored by Robert Ito. Apparently diversity means that only Asian American reporters can write about Asian-American super-hero movies. Or do you think it was just a coincidence? Sure it was. But I digress…
Why is any of this true? Why does the race of a comic book character matter at all? Does race make the character of the story more entertaining? To whom, other than racists? Can only Asian directors and writers create such a movie? Does that mean they can’t work on movies about non-Asian superheroes, or just that it’s not desirable to have a white (or black?) director and writer for movies like this one? I’m so confused… Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 