A few posts fewer than usual this week, even after (mostly) being relieved from the burden of dealing with last week’s paired “Attack of the Trolls” and “The Return of the Banned Commenters.” Sorry. Maybe today’s Open Forum can cover some of the important ethics topics I missed.
I’ve been laboring over a tricky ethics report on a tough issue, and it has literally been keeping me awake at night. I did have a “Eureka!” moment yesterday, while walking Spuds. Does that make any part of my dog-walking duties legitimately billable time?
Meanwhile, the various pundits on the Left and Right—are there any from the center?—all are annoying me. I’ve encountered several conservative writers who can’t resist mocking Chris Christie’s weight while attacking him on other grounds. (“Just drop out and get back to the buffet,” one advises the former N.J. governor this morning.) On the other side of the great divide, Charles M. Blow, arguably the biggest asshole in the New York Times stable of them, actually wrote a column rationalizing the brawl in Montgomery, Alabama, in which a mob of blacks attacked a handful of whites who were arguing, then fighting, with a riverboat co-captain who was trying to clear a berth for his vessel. Since the man is black, this made the the episode presumptively a racist incident, though there is no evidence that the same jerks who attacked Damien Pickett wouldn’t have behaved in exactly the same, Cro-Magnon manner if he had been white like them. Wrote Blow: “Black people coming to the defense of that Black man wasn’t just a specific thing that happened at one place and time; it was also a departure, in some ways, from the most memorable images in a history that includes centuries of Black-targeted brutality, which traces the journey of Black people in this land that became the United States.”
Is everybody an asshole?
Ethics Alarms 
I knew it! I’m surrounded by assholes!
When we’re immersed in a culture, it becomes normalized in our perception. When assholery is rampant and widespread, we perhaps stop even noticing that it is assholery. It takes being steeped in a culture of reasoned ethics that gives us even a chance of recognizing that assholery is afoot. Or if people take the assholery to a new level, so that it is recognized as such, there could be sufficient backlash that it makes people reappraise their behavior. So, in context of the latter option, I have one suggestion:
Keep firing, assholes!
Well, everybody’s a jerkass to somebody, I think. Unless you’re Mother Theresa, which most of us aren’t, it’s inevitable that you’re going to step on some toes. Sometimes it just can’t be avoided. The difference is that some folks do it only when they have to, and others do it when they can. Most of us by adulthood have the sense not to deliberately make others uncomfortable or make things difficult for others unless that’s our job, and even then, it’s just supposed to be business. Thankfully tearing into each other here seems to have faded, and is limited to trolls and banned commenters. However, it seems that in the media/pundit world the Michael Moore virus has spread, and the rule seems NOT to be stay on substance if you can, but instead never to pass up the opportunity for a cheap shot if it presents itself and never to pass up the opportunity to ruthlessly push your own agenda if it presents itself. Oh, and feel free to treat the other side like shit, since they don’t deserve to be treated like people.
I don’t think it helps that anyone with time on his hands and internet access can build a blog where only his opinions count, and where he can post all the obnoxious pictures he wants, with no one really saying anything unless he really goes off the deep end. If I want to post pictures of myself firing a pistol with the caption “don’t mess with me,” or of myself drinking coffee from a mug that says, “Liberal tears,” I can do it, and really no one can stop me. I can also brush off anyone who protests. This is not a recipe for keeping assholery down.
No we are not a nation of assholes. It’s just they get all the attention from the clickbait-media. If more reporting focused on the noble, selfless, and inspiring things millions of Americans do daily, more people would do noble, selfless, and inspiring things.
At first, I thought the question was:
Does that make any part of my dog-walking duties legitimately billable time?
But, I guess the answer to that question is too obvious.
-Jut
Is it obvious?
It was not uncommon for me to have a practice Eureka moment in the shower in the morning before going to the office. Our minds don’t stop working when we’re asleep. Not sure sleep time can be billed, but conscious processing sure can. A lawyer’s time is his stock in trade. Must that time be clocked sitting at a desk? No. Of course, I’m just a plain old, retired private practitioner, not an ethics expert.
Seems to me Eureka moments are over in a flash, but, yep, brain work. So, I’m thinking about three seconds billable. And be sure to provide the client an itemized bill so they know what they’re paying for.
But when do Eureka moments start?
A millisecond before they end. But, really, the question is ridiculous. A lawyer asking if something, anything, is billable? I detect a question which has already answered itself.
We are a nation of Ad Hominem addicts, unable to see the difference between debating an actual issue and shouting “BURN THE WITCH!!! OH SHE TURNED ME INTO A NEWT!”
–Dwayne
And I don’t think it’s getting better….
Here is an article worth commenting about.
https://reason.com/volokh/2023/08/10/trump-is-disqualified-from-being-on-any-election-ballots/
– Steven Calbresi
What a load of malarky.
Of course a trial is not strictly necessary to exclude an individual who is under 35 or not a natural born citizen from the ballot. However, if there is a dispute of fact, the purported candidate would have the right to appeal and present counter evidence that they are of age or naturally born. The court could then consider the evidence and compel inclusion on the ballot if found to meet those stated requirements and were otherwise eligible.
The same would go for any secretary of state attempting to exclude Trump on the basis of “insurrection”; Trump would have the right to appeal, and indeed would prevail on the facts. An emergency injunction protecting his right to be included on the ballot would be issued almost immediately to prevent irreparable harm, and a summary judgement would follow suit.
Everything else in this passage are fatally flawed arguments that Trump committed insurrection by any sane legal definition. These flawed arguments, absent outright perjury, are all that a secretary of state could offer in defense of excluding Trump from the ballot. Any judge, except one who were terminally biased against Trump (which is sadly not out the question), would reject the arguments and order Trump be listed on the ballot.
I’m not at all sure why the AUC goes to such torturous lengths to find ways to keep Trump off the ballot. They’ll simply harvest enough mail in votes to win the electoral college and “defeat” Trump. A Democrat win in 2024 is a foregone conclusion. I don’t think there will ever be another president who is not a Democrat. The Democrats are simply too expert at rigging elections without leaving any fingerprints. If they could do it to control the House, they would. There are just too many Congressional districts outside major urban areas.
So what would stop Republicans from doing ballot harvesting?
I think the local Democratic party operatives control the voting process in urban areas in key states where there are lots of ballots to be harvested, Michael. Harvesting then appears simply as high voter turnout among minorities. I don’t think Republicans have access to the ballots and don’t have a pool of otherwise unmotivated voters whose ballots can be filled out and harvested by operatives. It’s a Democratic party game.
Republicans don’t have access to as many large, concentrated pools of ignorant and ill-informed voters that can be “assisted”?
Render the ballot box useless, and people will turn to the cartridge box.
“Trump tried to persuade Vice President Mike Pence and Members of Congress not to count certain state electoral votes, which had been validly cast.”
Right . . . like the votes from Pennsylvania where the state government changed the rules about mail-in voting and what would be considered valid votes in direct violation of the state’s constitution which prescribes how any changes to voting rules must be done. This is fact.
Judges didn’t deny that the change of voting rules was illegitimate but chose to let it stand–in contravention of the Rule of Law–because of a utilitarian decision that overturning the results would cause more harm (in the form of chaos to a national election and disenfranchising a large number of legitimate votes) than would be caused by letting the vote totals stand (allowing a large number of invalid votes to be illegally counted as valid).
Funny, I don’t remember anyone wanting to charge the governor of Pennsylvania with “insurrection”….
–Dwayne
Scott Greenfield over at SJ had a post today about this topic also.
Fine. Give it your best shot. Is this one of those issues that can be appealed directly to the Supreme Court?
I can guarantee that Trump’s lawyers will show up the next day, suing to get something like this overturned — and I’d be about 99.44% sure they would succeed in short order.
Sheesh.
At a certain level yes, we all become assholes. One psychologist noted, “How we disparage others reveals who we are and what we value. As a supreme individualist who values competition we should not be surprised Donald Trump repeatedly savages his competitors for their supposed personal failings.
“At some level this is a rather harmless way to express hostility. As Freud wrote, “the man who first flung a word of abuse at his enemy instead of a spear was the founder of civilisation”. We might just hope that [if Trump again becomes President] he becomes a little more civil.”
What’s going on here?
AG Merrick “Goblin” Garland appoints special prosecutor in Hunter Biden investigation.
Is it as James Comer says, elsewhere noted: ‘“This move by Attorney General Garland is part of the Justice Department’s efforts to attempt a Biden family coverup in light of the House Oversight Committee’s mounting evidence of President Joe Biden’s role in his family’s schemes selling ‘the brand’ for millions of dollars to foreign nationals,”Comer, who is leading the effort by House Republicans investigating Joe Biden and his family, said in a statement on Friday.’>
That seems entirely believable.
Bizarre, isn’t it? Make the guy who suppressed the investigation of Hunter a Special Counsel?
Well, yeah. This way he can refuse to talk to the House Judiciary committee because it’s an ‘ongoing investigation’, which will again go nowhere — they’ve kicked the can further down the road.
Jonathan Turley has been calling for Garland to appoint a special counsel on the Hunter Biden matter for at least a couple years. If this doesn’t reflect a conflict of interest for DOJ what could? But I don’t think this is quite what Turley had in mind.
Madness, if I might quote one of Jack’s contributors.
Follow-up from a story from earlier this week:
https://ftw.usatoday.com/lists/al-michaels-orioles-announcer-suspension-doofus-video-reaction?csp=trueanthem&utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR2_BnVU_47HSonDdyMCtwshvipWBLlBuau0mI-EQYqiQveyVW2qx-y3OfQ_aem_AVzRL0V_gtsLN1olhegDG2evArAywnxk_bn8Pf5ooJzLXo6X5KwAPEnUZfZuFH_6FYY#ll73epoutkbdqki73is
-Jut
Funny. Al says they should suspend the guy who suspended Mr. Brown. Hah. Al, it was probably one of the Angelos boys. Owners tend to not suspend themselves, Al.
Well, I’ve got to say that you have to know you’ve screwed up when you get Al Michaels going after you like that.
It’s almost like having Ted Williams or Babe Ruth call you out. Not a good look.
And reports are that the doofus in question would be the Orioles owner John Angelos.
In the meanwhile, Camden Yards resonates with chants of “Free Kevin Brown”.
The Orioles are having a season for the ages so far. Who knows how far they’ll go this year, but this is the face ownership wants to show to the public?
A poll that tells us about polls and ourselves.
Read the responses – a large component of socialist commenters are convinced this tells us about socialists and capitalists and how the socialists are all altruistic and capitalists are all selfish.
Another large component of capitalist commenters agree that the poll is about socialism and capitalism but that the question is so stupidly worded, it only shows why idiots are socialists.
Another, smaller, component of commenters are game theory and statistician types pointing out the complete faultiness of the question. Of course a red vote is the only way to go – there is 0 risk involved in voting red. A true prisoner’s dilemma has to create some sort of disincentive to vote red, that doesn’t necessarily overrule a vote for red.
I think the poll *accidentally* tells us about polls and ourselves. The blue option, coming first, is worded to imply it is the most altruistic and benevolent choice (even though it is the most foolish). Having been primed with this information, we hit the tersely worded red choice, already primed with the idea that it is not the altruistic or benevolent choice (yet it’s the safest bet for *everyone*).
And, in a reply to this, I’ll give the best response to this poll I’ve found so far, followed by the funniest.
That very first “I” should be “A”
And you explained everything as I was writing my reply…
You can see I fall into the game-theoretic category…
Yeah, there’s literally 0 reasons to vote blue except that it’s very quickly convincing that somehow it’s more morally pure…even though it actually isn’t.
Interesting. From a game-theoretic standpoint, everyone should choose the red pill as optimal for their own survival. No matter how the poll goes, if you picked the red pill, you live. If you pick a blue pill, you are depending on at least half the other respondents to also pick blue, so your survival is indeterminate and dependent on others’ outcomes. But it seems quite weighted emotionally for the players to pick the blue pill, with the promise that if enough people pick the blue pill, everyone lives. There is one aspect that I likewise find interesting: if everyone picks the red pill, everyone lives.
“If you pick a blue pill, you are depending on at least half the other respondents to also pick blue, so your survival is indeterminate and dependent on others’ outcomes.”
And literally the *only* reason to pick blue is to hope to bail other people out of making a bad choice with the hopes that someone will come along and bail you out – a scenario that wouldn’t exist if people hadn’t been convinced to make the bad decision to begin with.
I could be led to believe that this is more intricate than it seems. Obviously the 0-risk red choice is optimal for personal survival, but we do have to ask if the point of the game is to optimize personal survival or total survival. If we examine this latter goal, we can see from some calculations that the expected number of people surviving (assuming an even distribution of outcomes) is roughly 87.5%. This occurs, of course, when you have 87.5% of the people select the red pill. In an analysis of how much work it takes to achieve at least the expected outcome, you either need 50%+1 of the people to vote blue, or 87.5% of the people to vote red. The latter appears to be the harder task, especially since we cannot trust that everyone will act optimally. That being said, all this analysis is adding layers of complexity that were not explicitly mentioned in the original poll.
There is literally no reason to pick blue except to *feel* morally superior.
Oh, have some fun with the thought experiment. One of things we do with these games is tweak the premises to see how the outcome changes, if it does.
I wonder how respondents would answer if we actually attached something more real-world to the scenario, e.g.
You are an inhabitant on a sinking island. You can either cross the bridge to safety (red pill) or remain on the island and hope for rescue (blue pill). If more than 50% of the inhabitants on the island remain on the island, a rescue team will be sent, and everyone will be saved. But if 50% or more leave the island, anyone who remains behind drowns. Do you pick the red pill or the blue pill?
I also wonder how respondents would change their answer if the threshold for the blue pill was increased or decreased. I would guess the lower the threshold for the blue pill, the more people would pick the blue pill, and the higher the threshhold, the less people would pick it. What do you think?
Isn’t the goal to have both options each have some level of incentive and some level of disincentive? In the non-modified scenario – there is NO disincentive to pick the ‘selfish’ option and there is no incentive to pick the ‘altruistic’ option. In your modified scenario – now we’re just measuring laziness and the group now incentivized to join the lazy to keep them safe.
Is that the “Hank Johnson” dilemma?
I have been thinking this scenario.
What if the blue pill people got, for the rest of their lives, free lodging, free food, a free car, free maintenance for the loading and car, free fuel, an d free electricity, while dying within a nanosecond if less than 50% choose the blue pill.
Red pill does not provide anybenefit or impose any cost.
It’s ultimately a question of whether or not you are obligated to to put yourself at grave risk along with hopefully enough others to cover for an assumed tiny percentage that are
1) cannot understand the question posed because of its manipulative wording
2) are also assuming it’s their duty to help cover for an assumed tiny percentage that cannot understand the question posed because of its manipulative wording as well on for help cover for people who think like them
I’ll admit I haven’t looked deeply at the comments myself. Is there any impression that, in the line of “moral superiority”, that people are feeling that by picking red they are responsible for the hypothetical death of the blues? Again, the poll doesn’t spell that out, so it is open how people would interpret it. So I’m sure the outraged blues are horrified that the reds would “kill” the blues to save themselves, while the reds think the blues are idiots who couldn’t be bothered to save themselves.
And as for the dropoff where many people stop picking blue, I’ll bet it is between 55% and 60%, where people intuitively start feeling the probabilities are against them.
I have to also wonder how this poll would have differed if the colors were swapped, but every other detail was the same. I’m sure many people in the US would automatically associate red and blue with the political parties, and of course the evil conservatives are only out for themselves, since they won’t band together with the liberals to fight climate change, and all their attitudes are death sentences for minorities, LGBTQ, and women.
Regardless of whatever it is, it isn’t an analogy for real life in which any number of hundreds of considerations in your private life interact with an equally complex number of communal considerations about which you have an opinion.
The poll is certainly being relied upon by simple-minded commenters to make the stereotypical “blue and red” dichotomy.
And hyper-asinine simplifications like that, meant to guilt people, do have the affect of convincing masses of joining in on all manner of terrible policy that is ‘altruistic’.
Further down the line, another fun question being asked is: at what percentage of blue, is the cut off point for there to be a drastic reduction in people willing to wholly risk themselves on behalf of others’ mistakes?
Is it 55% blue vote, then everyone lives?
Is it 60% blue vote, then everyone lives?
If the vote numbers are to be believed…then somewhere well before 65% is where you’d have a catastrophic fall off of people’s willingness to take the blue pill.
In other news, the test could NOT be done on the same set of people who just took this test because they already know how many are willing to go blue pill.
Read his back and forth with the other.