It’s time.
Your topics, your takes. Me, I’ll be Zooming in New Jersey, with an all-Beatles legal ethics seminar featuring the great Mike Messer, until after noon.
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Ethics Alarms 
Has anyone else found it strange that:
1. Canada’s response to truckers protesting pandemic restrictions and its response to a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine are essentially the same?
2. Media outlets seem to be doing a remarkably good job of correctly differentiating, for instance, a T-72B3 tank from a T-72B obr 1990 tank, who a few months ago were talking nonsense about .9mm fully semiautomatic weapons?
DaveL,
1. Canada is rapidly rolling into totalitarianism.
2. It’s all about the narrative.
Laurence Tribe went on another anti-constitutional rant, and then he tried to cover his ass by claiming that it wasn’t what it is, Tribe is a liar trying to literally undermine the Constitution. Tribe is a damn fool, an unethical political hack and he’s a person like Tribe in a position that he’s in is a danger to the Constitution and danger to we the people.
Alan Dershowitz covered many of Tribe’s anti-Constitutional delusional rants nicely in the following video.
https://rumble.com/vvolym-february-23-2022.html
Laurence Tribe is a totalitarian and he’s bastardizing the definition of treason just like the extreme political left has been bastardizing definitions of things for a decade or more, he’s an immoral political hack.
Extreme progressive’s four tenants of “truth”…
…that’s the dead end of a progressives’ ability to think critically.
For Laurence Tribe, the ends justifies the means.
I have a comment that was eaten due to a link to a video.
I still have friends and relatives in Ukraine, they are in Kiev. I have been in contact with them. It is quite scary. The total failure of the first day of the Ukrainian Army is quite staggering compared to the bluster of the last 8 years how it is the strongest army in Europe. I was not fooled by that to begin. On an ethics view, in Kiev they have been handing out automatic rifles to people who would volunteer for defense, no training or anything, reminding me of the German Volks Sturm. My guess must be that it is getting desperate around Kiev. There has been report of civilians being killed, because they were mistaken as enemy saboteur forces. Russian forces are moving from multiple directions, the closest being from the North and North-West, being around 20 mi on the outskirts of the city. It is such a mess. I have to give credit to the Russians. They really planned and prepared this operation, and it is high level stuff. Reminds of me of the 1990 US Desert Storm, with the taking out of anti air defenses and military airports first, ensuring Russian air supremacy.
The Ukrainians should just surrender like the French. What’s the point of enduring needless death and destruction?
As Jack says, war is unethical in general, but if you have to do it, the most ethical thing is to end it as fast as possible. If that requires overwhelming use of force, then that should be used. I am pessimistic about the Ukrainian armed forces manpower and capabilities at this point. I can imagine the fall of Kiev in the coming days. That will be a demoralizing blow to the Ukrainian forces. I totally get the Ukrainians putting up the good fight, I don’t think the momentum on their side right now.
I read this yesterday, and thought it was a good analysis and summation of the forces driving the divisions in the US population and much of the unethical behavior we see in current events.
https://americanmind.org/salvo/a-house-aggrieved-cannot-stand/
“ Today’s populist discontent is a byproduct of the grievance economy—and a backlash against the unfair rules by which it operates. When moral virtue is determined wholly by the grievances held by a particular individual or class, this encourages an endless deliberation about which grievances are legitimate (and thus, embody real debts), and a toxic calculus to determine who has more grievance (and therefore, a more compelling demand for redress). In short, the people with the most grievances become the good people—people whose concerns are granted a disproportionate weight in public life. The people who purportedly have fewer grievances are implicitly marked as bad people—people whose demands for political satisfaction can be safely ignored.
The effect of this grievance economy is that you have an entire nation of people who have been trained to be aggrieved, but the regime rules by ensuring that certain grievances will be routinely dismissed.”
Thanks N.P. Great quote. I’ll read the article.
The other day I was thinking (always dangerous), “You know, it was wrong and unfair that I didn’t get into Harvard or Yale.” I only had 1250 Boards (a full deviation from 1600s), but why shouldn’t I have gotten into Harvard or Yale, or even Williams (if I’d been brazen enough to have applied)? I mean, hey, if schools are supposed to look like the population, why aren’t the guys with 1250 Boards represented at the top schools? Why aren’t members from every point on the bell curve of SAT scores represented at every college and university? Why are we only worried about skin color? I’m aggrieved! The system has discriminated against me. Mediocre Intellects Matter!
Whew. That’s a great article.
Interesting article – and well worth the read.
If there is -has been – a soft shift in political currency to grievance, then those who notice will have two options: to scramble and cash in, or refuse to accept the proffered currency. There’s a division. But the people proposing the new form of currency naturally want to make sure they have a monopoly on it’s distribution, so they declare some forms of it to be counterfeit – and only they can tell which is which. There’s an acceleration of power imbalance.
Now the people whose grievances are declared counterfeit can either argue their case, joining the scramble on the stock market floor, or throw down their cash, and join the group who are fighting against the adoption of the new currency. Another division. Furthermore, in an attempt to minimize the opposition, the people who are driving the shift try to hide the existence of the shift at all, minimizing it where they can’t hide it, and blameshifting where they can’t minimize it.
All of this political and economic struggle ignores a rather unhealthy reality: using grievance as a form of currency is about as healthy as using lumps of raw uranium. The stuff is toxic. The people who are struggling to accumulate it and hoard it are getting sicker and sicker. Some of them realize this from time to time. But to cure the disease is to admit that all the cash you’ve stored up is worthless, the power struggle was pointless, and your illness is your own damn fault. Now you feel guilty and suddenly broke at the same time. Worse, in the grievance economy, feeling guilty is an acknowledgment of debt. You’re not just broke, you’re bankrupt. And you still don’t feel very good, either.
It fits. In a lot of ways, it fits. The people who have figured out how to leverage the new currency are powerful so long as the debts are acknowledged. The media and big tech are thrilled – the media suddenly find that they run the stock exchange and big tech runs the mint.
Danged if I know what to do about fixing it, but understanding the problem has to be part of the solution, right?
Ugh. Will “woke” politics wind up paving a silk road to invasion from the East?
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This just seems insane to me. Any government who bases their intelligence program on race “perceptions” deserves to suffer the consequences, but damn it, I’m not down with more intelligence failures.
As a person who fought communism, I’ll be damned if I’ll support making it easier on them because the perception of their race or ethnicity might be impugned.
Once again, the advice, “Better to be silent and thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt,” attributed to Abraham Lincoln proves to be golden:
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Oops, Stephen King, that tweet did not age well…
In fact, it’s incredibly stupid. Trump’s unpredictability (and undeniable guts) is why Putin didn’t try this stuff when he was in power. He knew Obama and Biden and their supporters would be push-overs. King’s take is 180 degrees wrong.
Not sure whether it’s whistling past the graveyard or pissing into the wind. Weird, Lefty projection.
Yep.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10552019/Incredible-moment-crowd-diners-attempts-lift-car-people.html
Here’s a Covid death: People dining on sidewalks to be safe from an infection being run over and killed by large, heavy vehicles parking, you know, in parking spaces, right next to people dining on sidewalks right next to curbs of major thoroughfares. Good job, CDC! Dining al fresco is not cool when you’re next to traffic and cars parking. Hello. Serve diners in dining rooms. Follow the physics.
CTE rears its ugly head again in a tragic overdose of a football player:
https://www.aol.com/sports/former-hawaii-qb-colt-brennan-032700784.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9zZWFyY2gueWFob28uY29tLw&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAMTWNRf61r3Xdi0u7wlqLcv0LeDj15En2s6Aa5SuZo89hr73yZNz1Y1OZnzFIy0FFr5SZcnb5aWnoNb8Nwe4Z9pJGBNy9hOVSoiOyemp0CL7nP4mj-01sZNAOvrBV4ctd924k3r8YlEDuCQtw0ZZi3Y-Mlreh7EDA20Hr7_oO25N
I wonder if youth football isn’t the real culprit in CTE. I went to high school with guys who played full pads football in seventh and eighth grades. I always thought guys who played football, even in high school, were nuts for doing so. I’ve come to believe it was playing football that made them nuts.