It’s come to this.
I’m playing “The Learned Judge” in a lightly staged concert version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Trial by Jury” this weekend at the Georgetown Law Center. (That’s a different production of the show above.) The cast is made up of current students and alums from the past 50 years. Gilbert’s resolution of the musical law suit in which a jilted bride is suing a rogue for breach of promise of marriage is that the judge (me) decides to marry the plaintiff himself, a decision that she is delighted with. In announcing this “judgment,” I came down to the young woman, a first year law student, playing the plaintiff “Angelina” and placed my arm around gently around her waist, then transitioned to holding her hands in mine as we sang the final bars of the show.
The director asked that I only place my hand on Angelina’s shoulder rather than around the waist, because the production might be criticized for endorsing sexual harassment.
But you all chat about whatever ethics matters are making your lives interesting, exciting, or miserable.
Ethics Alarms 
Around the time of the inauguration there was a question of “If you had to make predictions for how the next 4 years will shake out, what would you predict?”
I predicted the following and I just thought I’d comment on how accurate or inaccurate I was.
I’m going to go out on a limb and make the following predictions:
1. The attempt to post-presidentially impeach Trump will fail, but only just. The votes to convict will come from the just-reelected or the 100% safe, and I don’t think there are 17 of them. When it becomes evident that it’s going to fall short, the Senate will wrap the vote up quickly, since they are otherwise wasting time.
Accurate. This was not hard.
2. Biden will end up with egg on his face one way or another early on from this pending “caravan.” If he lets them in he loses the center and hardens the right, If he turns them away or delays them he is going to get abuse from the left. This will become a perennial problem with him just as it did with Obama, as red states battle him over resettlement of immigrants.
Accurate in spirit – the border is a complete mess.
3. State attacks on Trump will fizzle out as it becomes evident they are taking the focus off the new administration.
Accurate initially, but later sunk by the Fulton County DA’s one-woman crusade.
4. The pandemic will not get any better anytime soon, as vaccinations go slower than expected and new strains emerge. The death toll will continue to climb. The new administration will, of course, attempt to blame it on Trump, but as the spring does not get appreciably better and another summer’s worth of everything gets canceled that will start to ring hollow.
Accurate, more people died on Biden watch than on Trump’s, and it was the beginning of 2022 before there was any real hope.
5. The market will sag and eventually settle into a much lower level than it was at under Trump during the non-pandemic years.
Accurate, it’s still in bad shape.
6. Gas prices will start to go up above $3/gallon.
Accurate, and how.
7. The Trump tax cuts will expire and a new increase will be passed. Everyone will feel the pinch.
We’ll see, the cuts have not expired yet.
8. A single payer health care bill will pass the house, but fall short in the Senate.
Wrong, no such bill has been proposed, only the ridiculous “Build Back Better” bill.
9. Crime will continue to rise and property values will start to sink in the major cities as the defunding of the police starts to take effect. Arrests will also go down as there will be fewer officers making them in the first place and those who remain will just cross the street or look the other way.
Accurate, I’m sorry to say.
10. New York will suffer especially as offices go unrented and Broadway and the other venues remain dark. When they do finally reopen, which MIGHT be just in time for Christmas 2021, attendance will be anemic, as fewer people will want to spend the money or take the risk. Unfortunately, no Giuliani will emerge to push DeBlasio’s far-left successor aside, as many NYers vote with their feet.
Accurate generally if not in every detail.
11. DC and PR statehood will also emerge in the House, but fall short, as neither of them actually want it.
Wrong, this issue appears to have gotten lost.
12. Attempts at rooting out white supremacy will start to be cast as a war on whiteness.
Not yet, at least not in the mainstream.
13. Pursuit of the militia will turn out to be a dud, as not enough of them have really done anything for criminal charges to stick.
Half accurate, although so far the major hits have been the J6 people.
14. A new assault weapons ban will emerge, but, like the one passed in 1994, will contain a 10-year sunset clause.
Wrong, as this issue also appears to have gotten lost.
15. Kamala Harris will become the glamor face of the administrations, but not really achieve much.
Half right. She has achieved nothing, but has been shunted into the wings.
16. The governors who pushed lockdown will ultimately pay for it at the ballot box, except for Cuomo, who, unlike his dad, WILL get a fourth term.
So far no major takedowns, although Cuomo did NOT get that fourth term nor get to complete his third, due to his inability to keep his hands to himself.
17. One or both houses of Congress will flip in 2022. Nancy Pelosi has already said this will be her last term as speaker.
Accurate, although the result was underwhelming.
18. Biden will become unpopular in his second year as it will become increasingly obvious that he is not up to the job.
Accurate, he was never going to be an FDR or even an Obama.
19. The media will try to prop Biden up, but few will buy it.
Accurate, this was easy.
20. Hollywood will continue to produce crap, but fewer will care, as theaters stay dark.
Accurate, and worse than I thought, as wokeism strangles original thought and an ill-conceived writers’ strike strangles original material.
The fact that I was more right than wrong is cold comfort at this point. One thing I didn’t see coming was this ridiculous attempt to start regulating appliances.
Perhaps, the director might suggest the Mike Pence Rule (previously known as the Billy Graham Rule) just to be absolutely sure.
Sexual assault has certainly undergone a massive redefinition in my lifetime. It used to mean a stranger attacking a woman physically and forcing himself upon her against her will and endangering her continued existence. Now it means a kiss on the lips or a hand on the waist. Is this really where attention should be focused? Is this misdirection? Is all this hoopla about little stuff a means to distract attention from what’s really being done to young women by guys out there in the dating world? I vaguely smell a rat.
Nope, it’s about women wanting all the power. They want to handpick their partners, destroy the men they don’t like with a pointed finger, kill their kids a day before birth, and push you out of your job, all the while looking fabulous, of course. 😀
But Steve, even guys seem to be on this bandwagon. Plenty of guys seem to be highly supportive of this … I don’t know what it is.
Because the women control the you-know-what and a lot of men would sell their own mothers out to get some.
Hah. Well, I’ve always gotten a kick out of the notion that women are powerless.
I don’t think it was ever appropriate to go about groping coworkers or attempting to stick one’s tongue down a subordinate’s throat. I think rhetoric has escalated as the actual problem has decreased because once something is no longer really much of a problem it takes a pretty squeaky wheel to get people to pay attention to what they aren’t interested in.
In the bigger picture, a great deal of the unhappiness of women probably has to do with being unhappy with the results of feminism. Some women wanted to be sexually promiscuous without consequences and now all women are expected to be sexually promiscuous. Some women wanted to be career women and now all women are expected to be career women. The women who wanted to be monogamous stay at home mom’s got screwed, but they can’t criticize the real root cause without being canceled. So they criticize the results through the feminist lens and their arguments end up sounding stupid. It would be better just to argue for what they really want, a revival of non-promiscuous traditional gender roles.
Something’s out of whack. Priorities are screwed up. You’re not bothered by it. I am. When punishments don’t seem to be fitting crimes, it’s not a good thing.
AND SPEAKING OF WHICH, how about the sentences being handed out to the January 6 participants? In Arizona, the maximum statutory sentence for second degree murder is eleven years. These rioters are being sentenced to multiples of that. What happened to the BLM rioters and antifa types? Were they ever detained? Charged? Tried? Convicted? Sentenced?
I guess the current trend to destroy people’s lives for “sexual assault” or “sexual harassment” just seems petty and vindictive and indicative of some underlying problem or agenda. Steve says it’s part of a power grab. I guess I’d just surmise it’s another front on the eternal battle of the sexes. Remember that? (When there were just two?) I guess it’s just hard to take it seriously.
If it’s unwanted, then, yes, it can be considered assault. My boss attempting a kiss on the lips is sexual harassment and, possibly, assault. The old gentleman at church that kisses my hand is quite another. In most situations, I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt. The trouble is that there’s no room for nuance anymore.
In the situation above, it’s a fictional setting: a play in which a wedding is about to take place between two consenting adults and the actor playing the fictional husband is being cautioned how not to touch the actress playing his fictional wife. I think there’s room for nuance there but the director is concerned that a hand around the waist is considered endorsing sexual harassment? By whom? The actress? The audience? If the actress can’t tell the difference between the actions of a performer in character and the actor out of character, she shouldn’t be acting. Neither should the audience be watching. Too much immaturity for anyone to enjoy the performance.
I’m reading “The Soul of Battle” by Victor Davis Hanson right now, a book which describes three generals that Hanson believes led truly democratic armies inspired by a noble cause: Epaminondas, who led the Thebans against the Spartans; Sherman, in his March to the Sea; and Patton against the Nazis.
I’m currently in the section on Sherman’s March to the Sea, and he describes the Southern slave economy at length. The most pertinent details, I thought, were the South’s defense for maintaining slavery, and what seemed to be the economic stagnation of the South largely due to reliance on slaves. This reminded me of when the podcast “The History of Rome” by Mike Duncan detailed the Roman use of slaves, and how bringing in vast populations of slaves displaced a great many low-skilled workers who then had to be on the grain dole in Rome or become slaves themselves. I believe history views the use of slaves in the Roman Empire as a mixed bag at best, and probably an economic hindrance overall.
Anyway, the general arguments for slavery were
1. Economic prosperity
2. The suitability of black Africans as slaves, as they were naturally inferior to white Caucasians
3. The nobility of taking care of slaves and their families from cradle to grave, especially contrasted against the hardship of wage labor in the industrialized North, which the South claimed made whites in the North worse off than slaves in the South
4. The slaves in the South were better off than the African tribes they were originally drawn out of
5. The slaves loved and revered their masters, and would never leave their masters even were they set free
Of course, each of these items was over time shown to be false (or in the case of #4, irrelevant). The economy of the South grossly lagged behind the economy of the North, and Hanson has spent some time explaining why the slave labor did not contribute to the economy anywhere to the degree the South claimed. The suitability of blacks to slavery and their vaunted inferiority was already being discredited in the North. The so-called nobility of the Southern plantation owners was belied by the squalor and uneducated state of the slaves. Whether or not conditions were worse in Africa was by no means any justification for enslaving people. And when given the chance of freedom, many, many, many slaves opted for freedom.
Now, I’ve not spent any time as of yet reading further on what the South argued in justification of slavery, but in just the pages I’ve read in this one book, I have received a much better insight into Southern thinking of the time. This leads to my question:
Can we truly maintain a staunch defense against slavery if we don’t learn what were the strongest arguments for slavery?
A corollary question might be: isn’t it a beneficial exercise to take a devil’s advocate position, and so isn’t it a good exercise for people to make their best defense of slavery?
I actually outlined a Midmorning Zone dialogue about slavery that addresses some of those points; it’s currently on the back burner. The purpose of the piece is to show that even when one side provides disingenuous arguments to justify a selfish cause that is unambiguously unethical, the reconciliation method is still the most effective approach to the situation. It peels away excuses and offers avenues of retreat for the unethical party, while demonstrating to observers just how indefensible the cause actually is. If the unethical party refuses to back down, they have fair warning for how others will respond.
I think it’s time we bring back the old-fashioned “take apart the other person’s argument piece by piece” technique that humans used to use before social media.
Ryan Harkins:
“Can we truly maintain a staunch defense against slavery if we don’t learn what were the strongest arguments for slavery?
“A corollary question might be: isn’t it a beneficial exercise to take a devil’s advocate position, and so isn’t it a good exercise for people to make their best defense of slavery?”
I don’t think it quite works that way. The problem with slavery (and I will just deal with slavery in the U.S. because “slavery” throughout history has had varied terms and conditions that could muddy things) is that it is fundamentally wrong. There really is no good defense to it.
Conceding that point, the experiences of particular slaves run the gamut of human experiences. Some slaves were taught to read; some slave owners were not physically cruel; some slave owners did not break up families; some slave owners never sold slaves (they only bought them); some slave owners did not allow their slaves to be beaten; some slaves were well-fed and well clothed; some slaves felt loyalty and affection toward their owners. And, then, of course, there is every brutal opposite to each of these examples.
Those instances are not really a defense to slavery. They simply show that, within a fundamentally evil social construct, there is a wide variety of human experiences. Some slave owners were otherwise nice people; some slaves were not miserable every waking moment of the day. The fundamental evil of slavery did not prevent slaves and owners from being individuals with their own unique personalities, virtues and vices.
If the people who want to teach “true history” actually knew “true history,” they would not be so gung-ho about tearing down monuments to Lee’ horse, much less Lee himself.
-Jut
I’m curious as to how Hanson categorized Sherman’s work/army as “truly democratic”.
By democratic armies, he means armies raised by democracies, not dictatorships, and so were saddled with certain concepts of personal freedom. Here is a link to a short essay that serves as something of a synopsis of his book.
Just to inject a little context, Hanson’s book was written in 1999, and that article is from 2000, so both are pre 9/11. Hanson talks about the Persian Gulf war which was still relatively recent and had not yet become the ‘First’ Gulf war.
Hanson is a truly excellent scholar and author. I haven’t read that book, but I may have to get it and read it.
One of the things he speaks of that really rings true is the propensity of democratic armies to be formed, perform their mission, and then quickly disband. Here we saw it after the Civil War, WWI, and WWII. I am pretty sure that was true of Britain after the Napoleonic wars, and certainly the world wars. I see inane questions posed on Quora from time to time — why didn’t we just take out the Soviet Union after World War II, or the like, and it occurs to me that Hanson’s thesis is a perfect answer. We went over to take out the Nazis and the Japanese. The Soviets were not part of that mission.
At any rate, it sounds like an excellent book. Hanson is a classicist and a military scholar, and more recently a political commentator (and an almond farmer in California). He does good work.
To supplement Ryan Harkins’ comment at 9:23 AM: sociologist Rodney Stark, among others, argues that “perhaps the greatest achievement of the Dark Ages was the creation of the first economies that depended primarily on nonhuman power. The Romans understood water power but could see no reason to exploit it, because there was no shortage of slaves to do needed tasks.” The Victory of Reason, p. 38.
Even though he uses the term “Dark Ages” in the quote above, he joins most recent historians in demonstrating that after the fall of the Roman Empire technological innovation actually increased. Examples of inventions during the so-called Dark Ages: water wheels, manufactured paper (as opposed to created by hand), windmills, the horse collar, horseshoes, the plow, fish farms, chimneys, etc.
I note we had another massive outbreak of comments in response to Jack’s post on his drive thru experience at Mickey D’s. Sixty comments. Well into the “there must be a troll at work” metric. As previously stated, I find it very interesting that outrageous numbers of comments are always indicative of commenters acting in bad faith. And the EA commentariat invariably tries to engage with these people when they have absolutely no interest in any sort of meaningful discussion. Their rhetorical favorite is simply a superior, passive aggressive “it isn’t what it is,” which might as well be Pee Wee Herman’s infantile “I know you are but what am I? Infinity!” And it’s the “infinity” part that generates the telltale high comment number. They never respond to a comment, they simply keep repeating themselves.
Just an observation about an interesting and recurrent phenomenon that annoys me and befouls the place. My advice: Do not engage.
I have read most of the comments in that post. Based on those – along with some other responses in other posts – it appears that Army Grog uses a response style very similar to the recently-departed Masked Avenger.
I wonder if they’re friends or acquaintances. Just an observation…
Nah. Style is too different. Grog will quote something from the comment she’s responding to (without any indication that it’s a quote) and then respond to that quote, often with non sequiturs or at least insufficient context to truly understand the argument being made.
In short, not a good debater and her argument boils down to “if you disagree with my premise, you shouldn’t have an opinion about the subject.”
Not worth debating and not smart enough to be Masked Avenger.
[From your host: I just got home from a the production of Trial by Jury to find that A Friend had posted yet another bootleg comment that I had to waste my time taking down. You have to admire his persistence—he now holds the record for both length of time posting comments post-banning and the number of comments. It’s an odd life’s distinction, to be sure, but a distinction nonetheless..]
“a lone dissenter. Who is then forced to explain himself or herself”
FORCED to explain themselves?
The very nerve!
There be DRAGONS
And speaking of people who argue in bad faith, Larry Tribe has been (very professorially) demolished by Jonathan Turley: https://jonathanturley.org/2023/09/08/ragefully-wrong-a-response-to-professor-laurence-tribe/
Ilya Somin posted this on the Volokh Conspiracy.
https://reason.com/volokh/2023/09/08/three-interviews-about-the-criminal-cases-against-trump-and-his-possible-disqualification-under-the-fourteenth-amendment/
Any comments?
The whole 14th Amendment thing is simply a DNC talking point intended to hobble Trump. It was enacted following the Civil War to keep Confederates out of politics. Pathetic. It just goes to show how organized, funded and powerful the DNC and its water carriers are.
As I have pointed out, why would not FJB be disqualified for aiding or comforting the Taliban?
“It was enacted following the Civil War to keep Confederates out of politics.”
And it failed. Alexander Stephens -the Vice-President of the Confederacy – was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1866 (though he wasn’t allowed to take his office). That didn’t stop him from being elected and serving in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1873-1882.
That’s interesting. The 14th Amendment is pretty vindictive. It says, “Okay. We defeated you and destroyed you and your economy. Welcome back to the United States, but we’re not going to let you send any adult males to participate in the governance of your states for the next twenty or so years.” Pretty close to a Treaty of Versailles kind of provision.
Another article worth commenting about.
https://nypost.com/2023/09/07/trump-admin-urged-desantis-to-enact-mask-mandates-letter-shows/
I await the news on how your next production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers goes, Jack.
Ha. I thought that show was creepy when I first saw the movie long, long ago. One great dance number that doesn’t justify the concept. Yuck.
Kamala Speaks Out On Potentially Taking Over For Biden
Dear Lord!
Well, you know, it is not a very high bar for a Vice President to realize that there is a potential to be required to take over for the President. It is not as acute a situation as FDR in 1945, but most folks with an IQ higher than a rutabaga realize Biden is not a lock to finish his term.
Here is an article by Ilya Somin worth commenting about
https://reason.com/podcast/2023/09/08/ilya-somin-should-libertarians-support-the-prosecutions-of-trump/
Good find, ME. Very provocative.