Disney and “My Three Sons” actor Tim Considine, who died last week at age 82, in an interview quoted in his New York Times obituary.
Considine was referring to his success and rich experiences in life, which he felt were relatively undeserved. He did not regard himself as especially talented or ambitious.
The more I ponder his statement, the more profound I think it is. Understanding that there is no justice in the world is a necessary predicate for committing to an ethical life for the right reasons. Society needs as many people as possible striving to be good, having their lives exert a net benefit on others, and being exemplars of ethical values as often as they can. These habits and objectives must be committed to while fully understanding that they only collectively and on balance result in desirable results, and sometimes not even that. Continue reading →
I’ve been considering this feature for a long time, and it seems like as good a time as any to try it out..
There are nearly 30 Ethics Alarms posts in an average week, and when one throws in the four or five issues covered in the warm-ups and their equivalents, that adds another 30 or so topics to the mix. I even get complaints from readers that there is too much content here, particularly if a reader, having a life, skips a day or two. In this feature, I will make my selections of what I consider to be the five most valuable posts of the previous seven days, with the comment threads taken into consideration.
I really thought punishing Russian cats to show solidarity with Ukraine was as ridiculous as anti-Putin virtue-signaling mania could get. I was wrong. I stupidly forgot Heinlein’s Law: “Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.”
It is time to officially declare “The Great Stupid” a world-wide pandemic. Woodrow Wilson set the Spanish Flu against the world by sending infected doughboys out to fight in a pointless European war, and now social media combined with Americans’ narcissism and addiction to serial pandering “in these difficult times” has done it again.
Poutine, a strange gloppy dish popular among some in France and Canada, is being pulled from some restaurants in those countries to protest Russia’s invasion. In French, the word for the french fries, cheese curd and gravy recipe, from the French-Canadian pronunciation of the English word “pudding,” is pronounced like the Russian dictator’s name. That’s close enough to justify, in the “minds” of some protesters, punishing the food and its fans.
Removing poutine from menus, it is safe to say, will have as much effect on Putin’s conduct as President Biden slashing U.S. oil production will have on the course of climate change. It’s that stupid.
The move did at least spawn a good formulaic joke on Twitter, as one wag wrote, “Please stop confusing Putin and poutine. One is a dangerous and unwholesome mix of greasy, lumpy and congealed ingredients, the other is a delicious food.”*
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Pointer: Curmie
[I’ve eaten poutine. There’s a reason it hasn’t caught on in the United States.]
Stipulated: Judge Jackson is a fully qualified choice to succeed Justice Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court. Also stipulated: she should be and will be confirmed and by a large majority, unless Republicans are as petty and foolish as I think they are.
However, the soon to be Justice Jackson has an unwaivable conflict of interest in the contentious Harvard admissions case, which I would term a “scandal.” Harvard unambiguously discriminates against Asian-American applicants to inflate the numbers of lesser qualified black and Hispanic students admitted to the college. In the era of The Great Stupid, when racial discrimination is treated as “antiracism,” this SCOTUS case is a high profile and significant one, and Future Justice Jackson has a dog in the hunt, as they say. Jackson serves on Harvard’s board of overseers, one of the University’s two governing boards. The board plays “an integral role in the governance of the university.” End of controversy. She’s integrally involved with a party in the case. It is a classic conflict, and cause for recusal. Continue reading →
I was struck this morning by the presence of yet another Donald Trump-related headline and story on the front page of the New York Times. The phenomenon really is remarkable. The man currently holds no elected position; there is no campaign he is currently involved in; he has been banned from social media (no mean tweets or typos to mock!) and the last public incident he was even tangentially involved in was more than three years ago. In the Times’ features, op-eds and news stories, the paper does everything it can to minimize his importance; for example, the Times review of Bill Barr’s book describes Trump as “an ostentatious, thrice-married reality television star who bragged about grabbing women’s genitals.” (No bias there!) Why is such trivial figure still daily front page news?
I wish I had been counting the number of Trump-bashing stories and reports the Times has published over the period since he left office. Like the current House of Representatives witch hunt to try to find a way to prosecute Trump for a riot he neither directed nor called for (and that couldn’t have possibly benefited his interests), the Times’ choice to keep negative news reporting about him front and center can only be called obsessive partisanship and unethical journalism.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr did an admirable and courageous job navigating the metaphorical shoals of holding the position in the Trump Administration. Because his boss was so roundly maligned and hated by the “resistance”/Democratic Party/ mainstream media alliance, he was accused of being everything from a toady to a criminal accomplice, though Barr was one of the least partisan AG’s in recent memory, especially when compared to Barack Obama’s two full-fledged consigliares, Holder and Lynch.
Of course Barr didn’t care for Trump; virtually no one who ever worked with or for Trump got along with him. Nevertheless, I did not expect Bill Barr to join the venal opportunists who rushed to cash in with books betraying a President’s confidences with back-stabbing tales “out of school.” Once such books were understood to be unethical (if not illegal), at least until the President in question was dead. But once David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s disgraced budget director, broke the taboo, many similarly flawed former White House employees and appointees followed. Trump’s subordinates, however, have been the worst by far.
Before we get to today’s ethics, we mustn’t let remembering the Alamo cause us to forget other ethically significant events in U.S. history. Yesterday marked the date in 1770 when a mob of American colonists gathered at the Customs House in Boston and began taunting and throwing objects at were protesting the occupation of their city by British troops, who had arrived in Boston two years before to enforce unpopular taxes passed by a British parliament. Young British private Hugh Montgomery was hit by a rock or an icy snowball, and he discharged his musket at the crowd. Other soldiers began firing, and the result was five “Patriots” were dead or fatally wounded. In a landmark moment for the American legal profession, John Adams and Josiah Quincy defended the hated soldiers and got all of them off except two who were found guilty of manslaughter. Their thumbs were branded with an “M” as their punishment.
Protesters and rioters have always prospered by provoking authorities into excessive force (or what the protesters were able to convince the public was excessive) ; the cause doesn’t matter. Incidentally, none of the Boston mob were prosecuted for “insurrection,” nor was the primary protest instigator, Samuel Adams.
1. Well waddya know! Hollywood celebrities who broadcast their political views are often incompetent and ignorant! Consider this tweet by actress Patricia Arquette:
Lessons:
If Twitter doesn’t make you stupid, it will show everyone how stupid you are.
This tweet got 1,156 “likes.” Twitter also makes tweet readers stupid.
Celebrities like Arquette really think their opinions on issues not connected to the reason for their fame should be taken more seriously than anyone else with two-digit IQs and a 7th grade-levl education.
These irresponsible celebrities include the “internet influencers.” They drive the opinions of those who don’t have the attention spans to read more than a dozen words or so at a time. This is a substantial, even decisive portion of the American public.
Arquette has had minimal education, so it was the news media’s duty to make sure she and people like her were informed about what this “NATO” thingy was that everyone was always talking about.
I hope a lot of you are enjoying Michael West‘s generous labor of love during the countdown to the Alamo’s fall. It is, as I’ve said here often, one of the most vivid and fascinating of all ethics chapters in U.S. history, and the fact that it is neglected in popular culture and public education to the degree it is disgraceful, like much of this nation’s negligent and cavalier attitude toward history.
I want to apologize to readers and especially Michael for a mistake I have made. One of my sources, echoing others, printed the Mexican dictator’s name as “Santa Ana,” with one “n.” Convinced that I had been perpetrating an error, i began lnocking off the second “n” in Michael’s posts and my own, though I always had assumed that “Anna” was correct.
Well, it was and is correct. His full name is Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón. Now I have to go back and correct the correction.
Here is Michael’s focus on Day 11 of the siege, March 4, 1836.
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It was cold that evening that the Mexican Artillerymen of the 1st Brigade under command of General Gaona settled down into their camp somewhere south of modern day Yancey, Texas. They had been on a forced march since late January. The moon was full that evening, perfect for night operations – and despite the Texans being bottled up about 45 miles away, Native American raiders were still a possible threat. Reports had been received that straggling soldiers had been ambushed. Continue reading →
Certain themes and issues are certain to recur on an ethics blog and never be resolved. Among them are abortion, “hate speech,” illegal immigration, reparations for slavery, drug legalization, gun control, war (HUH! What is is good for?], climate change and capital punishment. From the captain’s chair at Ethics Alarms, some of these seem more difficult than others. Capital punishment is not among them. [Above is the sensational and illegal photo in 1925 of the first woman ever sent to the electric chair as the switch was pulled. Ruth Snyder, a housewife from Queens, New York, took a lover and recruited him in a plot that ended with her husband’s brutal death; a reporter had a secret camera device strapped to his leg. Her story was the basis of many fictionalized versions, including the classic film noirs “Double Indemnity” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and the brilliant expressionist stage drama “Machinal” by Sophy Treadwell.]
I’ll play: I believe non-lethal crimes that ruin lives to the magnitude that Bernie Madoff did with his Ponzi scheme ethically support a death sentence. Last week the late investing whiz’s sister and her husband were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide that was probably another consequence of his crime.
I read the Bucklew case, where the SCOTUS decided, quite sensibly, that there is no right to a painless execution. What stuck out to me is the penultimate paragraph in Breyer’s dissent, in which he states that as we move forward there may be no constitutional way to implement the death penalty. That, I submit, is one more reason we needed to either get that sixth conservative justice on the Court or get Breyer out of there. Continue reading →
The New York Times is the main focus of my ongoing lament about the unethical journalism in a nation that desperately needs better. This is in part a function of the fact that it is the paper I subscribe to (at great personal expense despite being in the ambit of the Times’ rival, the Washington Post, which I could have on my lawn for the proverbial song), but mainly because it is, by far, the best of mainstream journalism, so its bias and consistent dishonesty is particularly telling (and frightening.) Ethics Alarms does under-examine the Post, though, and I have to work on that.
I considered this while reading a post by John Schroeder at conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt’s website triggered by a Post “news story.” The WaPo piece said in part,
A father’s runaway political rage and his son’s revulsion at lawlessness enthralled a federal jury Thursday as the first criminal trial stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack revealed a nation and a family plunged into ruinous conflict by former president Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election.
Really? It’s Trump’s fault? You sure about that? So, The Beatles really did make Charles Manson do it? Jodie Foster is the actual reason John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan?…[P]eople are responsible their own actions and their own responses to events. We have a will and just because somebody or something pushes our buttons, it does not mean we are not responsible for what we do when the buttons are pushed….This is not reporting on the trial, this is Beltway bubble obsession with Trump hatred. Unlike the Congressional hearings on Jan. 6 which are pure political theater and completely devoid of any actual meaning, the criminal trials are where justice is to be served, and yet the press is reporting on them as if they were just more political theater.
Well, I think the trials are also political theater, as they have made clear that only conservative rioters get prosecuted in the current version of American “justice.” But I digress. The Post publishes more of these kinds of reports, and that is why I subscribe to the Times.
1. A measure to protect women’s sports, and progressives are attacking it. Integrity is one of the hardest of all ethical values, as the supporters of allowing trans athletes to make female sports competitions unfair and futile continue to prove. Prodded by the news of a biological male transgender member of the UPenn women’s swim team crushing all competitors with his male-puberty-generated physique, Iowa became the 11ths state to ban biological males from competing inwomen’s sports when Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed a bill into law last week. “This is a victory for girls’ sports in Iowa. No amount of talent, training or effort can make up for the natural physical advantages males have over females. It’s simply a reality of human biology,” Reynolds said in a statement. “Forcing females to compete against males is the opposite of inclusivity and it’s absolutely unfair.” Continue reading →
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