This…
…triggers you to issue this:
One word: Unbelievable.
My beloved Grace was a World War II history fanatic. She died on the day this spectacularly offensive memo was released. If she had been in perfect health and read the swill above, it very well might have killed her.
You might well ask why spending a second of one’s relatively short time on earth considering, much less listening to, the idiotic ladies of ABC’s (that’s Disney, remember: this is something else to blame Disney for) “The View” is anything but self-abuse. I forced myself to watch the outpouring of stupid punditry regarding the SCOTUS decision on the Axis disqualification plot, and have been sitting on a post since because I can’t muster a definitive answer. But right now I need something else to think about before I start another day of trying to put my head, heart, house, business and life back together, so let’s look at this mess, and come back to why at the end.
Easily the most brain-popping comment of the stupidity orgy came from Whoopi, who once was obviously the smartest person on “The View” panel, was when she said the unanimous Court had given Donald Trump “a rubber to put on and walk through the poo.” I’m not sure what that even means, but it’s a disgusting image, and all the ladies nodded with approval. Later she said that in ruling as it did, the current Court resembled “the pro-segregationist Supreme Court I grew up with.”
You may need some background on this Ethics Alarms distinction, which has not been discussed here since 2022…It all began fifteen-and-a-half years ago, when then rising starlet Lindsay Lohan got the first award on the old Ethics Scoreboard. Arrested for driving intoxicated and found with cocaine in her pants pocket, Lindsay told police that she wasn’t wearing her own pants, and had no responsibility for the coke contained in them. That stood as the “most brazen and manifestly ridiculous excuse ever” until 2012. That year, the drunken captain who piloted the Costa Concordia cruise ship onto the rocks and left his passengers to fend for themselves claimed that he left the capsizing vessel before his passengers because he “fell into a life boat.” He still missed his chance at the title because the same month, The Smoking Gun reported that in Wisconsin, police responding to a domestic abuse episode were told by the alleged attacker that his victim had really been beaten and nearly strangled to death by a ghost.
Then he was overthrown by Melissa Jenkins Johanson, 47, who drove her car down a footpath in Wales thinking it was a road because she was blind drunk, and who blamed her dog, which she swore was driving her car at the time.
Well, Mark Nakagawa is the new champion.
The people who set up Google’s artificial intelligence bot “Gemini” had their biases and priorities exposed hilariously (including here) when it was discovered that the freshly-minted AI bot would not create a Causasion image, even going to the extremes of transforming historic white men like George Washington into blacks. Google quickly put out a an “Oopsie!” statement: no big deal here, just a little glitch! and everybody had a good laugh. Except the likelihood is that the event had signature significance. It means that right now, at least, we can’t trust AI, not a little bit. It also means we can’t trust Google, if we were ever foolish enough to do so in the first place.
Astronomer, computer expert, programmer, theoretician and professor Mario Juric announced on Twitter/X:
Sad—I suppose. Scary would be my word. This high-tech monster decides what we read; it also decides how easily people find Ethics Alarms, and my business services in ethics.
Elon Musk posted yesterday,
All to see, that is, except those whose eyes have been so jaundiced by hate, indoctrination and lies that they are blind.
A 9-0 decision by an ideologically fractured U.S. Supreme Court, rejecting a cherished partisan fantasy devised to hold on to power that one party has empathically shown that it is unfit to possess, should logically result in frank admissions of error, bias, foolishness and confusion by those who insisted that the tactic thus condemned was correct, legal and wise. But today’s progressives are not logical, nor are they self-aware or particularly smart. The reactions from pundits, left-warped lawyers and others (what are the creatures on “The View”?) really should be viewed as a gift. They are telling us what they are, admitting what they are. It’s ironic: the first post of the day was titled, “Will the Disastrous Results of The Great Stupid Result in Learning, So Behavior Changes, or Will the Fools Responsible Keep Trying To Govern On Dreams Rather Than Reality?,” but it wasn’t about the Trump-Deranged learning from their absurd and intellectually indefensible embrace of the 14 Amendment Trump disqualification plot. The SCOTUS decision hadn’t come down yet. Nevertheless, the headline is apt in the aftermath of the decision and the Axis’s embarrassing tantrums. They won’t learn because they can’t learn, even though refusing to admit their mistakes makes them ridiculous, untrustworthy and unpersuasive.
Here are the kinds of people who have been running our government, journalism, entertainment, law schools and universities:
I’m proud of them.
In its decision in Trump v. Anderson, just announced, the Court reversed the the Colorado Supreme Court’s indefensible decision to remove former President Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot on the grounds that he participated in an “insurrection.” “Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse.” That’s all that needed to be said, and if simplicity and pure law was what the Court needed to ensure a unanimous decision, then so be it. Ethics Alarms had previously stated that the SCOTUS ruling striking down the “lawfare”-inspired crack-brain theory (that a provision created specifically to deal with former participants in the Confederacy was properly applicable to Donald Trump because a mob of idiots stormed the U.S. Capitol in a tantrum over his loss in the 2020 election) should be unanimous, and mirabile dictu, it was. This ends all state efforts to keep Trump off the ballot.
I’m afraid of the answer.
If I were really in a nasty state of mind—and I am mighty close—I could make this post and dozens covering the same territory a chain of Nelsons, as in,
The problem with that approach is that nothing’s funny about the phenomenon. In a ridiculous number of ways, across the culture and nation, states, cities and communities are being forced to reverse policies installed at Peak Stupid that were, or should have been, evidently moronic and certain to lead to disaster when they were devised. Nobody, at least not enough bodies, wanted to pay attention; virtue-signaling was more important to them. They really believed this, and I maintain, with all what’s left of my heart, that this was signature significance: anyone who embraced (or, going forward into the frightening future, embraces) this kind of policy approach is unfit to hold any position of influence and power.
To touch on a current Great Stupid debacle for just a second that I’m too sick and too covered in alligators to deal with in any detail right now, the Democratic Party’s determination to renominate Joe Biden for President, someone yesterday described the decision as the equivalent of the Titanic’s captain that night in 1912 backing up and sailing into the same iceberg again. I really like that analogy, and intend to use it whenever appropriate.
This topic could support a book, let’s just look at two recent examples:
Nikki isn’t the usual brand of ethics dunce, selected based upon a single episode of throbbing ethical duncery. She’s the other kind: someone who had proven that as a general proposition such core ethical values as honesty, integrity, respect and responsibility have not sufficiently settled in her cognitive process, and likely never will. She is, in a word, untrustworthy. Or, in crude terms, as I have framed the diagnosis before here, Haley is a weasel.
She has flip-flopped repeatedly regarding whether she is a Trump supporter or a Trump condemner. She purports to be a loyal Republican, but the only Republican Presidential candidate in decades who has shattered Ronald Reagan’s so-called 11th Commandment (“Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican”) more egregiously than Haley has been Donald Trump. Her ethical instincts are rotten: she was perplexed when a questioner insisted that she lay at least a portion of the blame for the Civil War on the question of slavery; she airily dismissed the principles of the First Amendment by advocating requirements for citizen use of social media. Haley can’t claim fair combat points, as she has been more uncivil than, again, any candidate since Trump. Of late she has been accomplishing nothing but bolstering the prospects of Joe Biden and the Democrats by launching attacks on Trump that could be turned into Biden ads by just changing the name on them.
She just had the audacity to crow about her sole primary victory, getting a majority of Republican votes among a pathetic showing of 2,000 in the District of Columbia. 2,000 is fewer than the population of charming Friday Harbor, Washington, which calls itself a town but is more accurately defined as a village.
Now, the former U.N. Ambassador says she no longer feels bound by a pledge made to the Republican National Committee that she would support the GOP presidential nominee. In an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” Haley reversed what she had said in July, that she would support Trump if he were the nominee “because I’m not going to have a President Kamala Harris.” Even though she signed a mandatory pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee as a condition of being allowed to participate in primary debates, she told “Meet the Press” today that she would not, because “the RNC is not the same RNC”—it’s now “Trump’s” RNC.
Oh.
That is legal, ethical and logical nonsense. She signed a pledge with an organization that has the same structure and the same organizing articles now as the day she signed. Nothing has happened that permits Haley to renege on a pledge. If she were a lawyer, violating a signed pledge likethat would be grounds for suspension, even disbarment. Of course, maybe she’ll flip-flop again. That’s what she does.
Haley isn’t a lawyer, but she’s also not credible public servant. She’s hanging around the nomination race hoping Trump’s legal problems, the unethical result of the Democratic party’s totalitarian tactics to oppose him, will work.
The last GOP candidate who embraced such disgusting conduct and unethical rhetoric was…Donald Trump.
Talk about becoming the thing you most hate…
Well, the world here at Westminster Place is getting grimmer and more desperate by the second, so I’m escaping to my office for a nonce to see if a break helps. As it happens, our old friend “The Ethicist,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, had a recent exchange involving death-related matters, and I didn’t care much for his analysis.
But what do I know? I couldn’t even figure out that my wife needed to go to the hospital regardless of what her protestations when in fact she was dying…
But I digress. A questioner asked the Times Magazine’s resident ethics advice columnist (and the fourth to hold The Ethicist title) whether his plan of “giving half of my inheritance to my brother without telling him of his exclusion from [their father’s] will, sparing him any additional hurt feelings,” would be ethical. Mad Dad is 90, the inquiring son is the executor of the father’s will, and he has seen that his brother has been cut out..
His question concludes, “Would this be ethical, or does the need for truth override my plan? To be clear, I would not lie. This would be more a misdirection by omission.”
I’m sorry. There was a lot to post on yesterday, and I was barely able to make it up to the office at all. I also had some client work to do, and that was really hard: my brain is in no shape to be scanning legal documents for ethics issues.
My friend is here, and yesterday it was just good having someone to talk to. (How Grace and I managed to raise a son as economic with the spoken word as Calvin Coolidge is a topic for the nature-nurture debate. One theory is that he could never get a word in edgewise.)
This is a segment from a larger post languishing on the drafting board. It’s amusing to read Trump-fearing pundits and analysts as they tie themselves in knots to try to avoid admitting that these are all—all of them—politically motivated prosecutions against Trump that would not be happening now if he didn’t threaten the Democrats’ grand plan. They don’t want to admit that they are desperate to see him convicted of something so it can swing enough votes to save Biden, but everything they write and say eventually leaks that obvious motive.
Here’s an example from yesterday. A Politico writer keeps saying “that that the public has a strong interest in a speedy trial, and indeed, a federal statute requires judges to set trial dates that account for “the best interest of the public.” He adds, disingenuously, that “Americans have repeatedly told pollsters — nearly two-thirds of them, including roughly one-third of Republicans — that they want to see a verdict in the case before the election.”
Ethics Alarms 