See? An Ethics Alarms Comment of the Day does not have to be the length of an honors thesis to qualify for the honor.
This one, courtesy of A.M. Golden, resonated with me the second I read it. The post commented upon was about my discussion last night with a very dear friend—one of those relationships in which it doesn’t matter how long you are apart, it picks up, unchanged, from exactly where it was whether it’s after five minutes or 20 years—who was noticeably wary about expressing a clear opinion on the Hamas-Israel War Ethics Train Wreck in our conversation. Here’s the Comment of the Day, on the post, “A Careful Conversation With An Old Friend,” and I’ll elaborate after you read it….
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We’ve had more than one careful conversation with a family member here and there myself.
Isn’t it a shame that your Jewish friend felt he had to test the waters before expressing his opinion, though?
I received a surprise phone call today from a freind I have not seen for many years, and not seen frequently for more than a decade since he retired with his wife to Boca Raton. There are not too many people that I’ve known in my life who are as essentially good to the bone as—well, I’ll call him “Micah.” He’s a talented artist in many mediums, intuitive, sensitive, kind and wise. We decided to meet for a beer.
We didn’t lack for things to talk about—there was my wife’s sudden death, of course, but we also know so many of the same people and have many similar interests. I don’t think in all the years we have known each other, political topics have ever come up. But we got on the topic of our kids and our friends’ kids, my son’s decision to eschew college, and from that onto the recent disaster at Harvard, as Micah mentioned in passing that my having a degree from there “didn’t hurt.” My brief but detailed exposition in response regarding Harvard’s ethics rot led to his off-hand comment, “The stuff around the war in Gaza is really upsetting.”
My old fiend was being careful: that could mean anything. He didn’t want to draw me into an expression of opinion that might lead to a rift, and in over 40 years, we’ve never had a rift of any kind. Then he said, still being careful, “I can certainly understand why Netenyahu feels he must do what he is doing.
Micah is Jewish, though that aspect of his life almost never comes up. He added, “I know a lot of innocent people are being killed.” Then he dropped a clue: “….although they might not be as innocent as people think.”
Ah! My cue! I replied immediately, “If you want your family, your children and yourself to avoid the consequences of being in a war, you shouldn’t elect terrorists to run your government. And if you want to make certain that the terrorists next door don’t kill your children, your only choice is to do whatever is necessary to get rid of them permanently.”
Micah turned to me with a look I could only describe as relief. “Thank-you,” he said.
There was only a brief coda to the exchange, after which we went back to pleasant subjects (well, other than the death of my wife). I said, “President Biden’s attempt to take both sides at once is indefensible.” Always trying to see the other person’s point of view as is his wont, Micah replied, “Unfortunately it’s an election year, and whatever position Biden takes will have negative consequences.”
I said immediately, “When that’s the case, it should be relatively easy to do the right thing.” He looked at me with relief again. “That’s how I feel about it too.”
Then we talked about theater, baseball, sealing wax, and whether pigs have wings….
[WordPress’s crack AI bot tells me to tag this “Bible study.”]
I waited a few days before writing about this because I had to stop giggling to type.
I you watch Aaron Sorkin’s excellent if a bit too fawning movie, “The Trial of the Chicago Seven,” you will see that the anti-war campus protesters of the Sixties had, if nothing else, integrity and guts. Maybe they had inherited some from their parents, of “The Greatest Generation.” Today’s student protests in favor of Hamas, terrorism and Jew-killing (I know, I know: “Think of the children!”), in contrast, are marked by hypocrisy, ignorance and weenie-ism.
Princeton has certainly moved to the front of the line in the latter. After the protesting students announced a hunger strike in support of allegedly starving Gazans (Pro tip: if you don’t want to suffer from the predictable consequences of war, don’t elect terrorists as your government). Then they complained that they—the students, now, not the Gazans—were hungry. One female protester shouted into a megaphone, “This is absolutely unfair. My peers and I, we are starving. We are physically exhausted. I am quite literally shaking right now as you can see.” What, is the nearby McDonald’s closed?
Then the protesters persuaded some of the professors whose indoctrination made them the misguided weenies they are to make themselves look foolish by signing a letter of protest in the students’ support. It’s long and infuriating, but here are the best parts…
Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Donald Trump for 34 felonies that are exactly one misdemeanor on which the statute of limitations has run is not just an unethical case, it’s a revealing one. It should let the objective members of the public know, if they have the opportunity and inclination to pay attention, just how undemocratic and trustworthy the 21st Century mutation of the Democratic Party has become.
“Dangerous” is also an adjective that belongs in that sentence.
I’ve been beginning mornings lately jumping back and forth between the coverage of the trial on CNN and MSNBC—you know, the Pravda channels—and Fox News, which would be claiming that Trump was as innocent as the driven snow even if he were as guilty as O.J. It is astounding how completely divergent the impressions one is given from the Left and Right sources are—that, and horrifying. The public has no reliable way to get the information it needs to figure out “What’s going on here?” because all of the coverage is agenda-driven. Very few members of the public have the time (or education) to puzzle it out either.
Interestingly, Abe’s observation—the one that begins, “You can fool some of the people…“—again seems to be holding true, and God Bless America for that. A recent poll suggests that a majority of the the public regard Democrats and the Biden administration as the true existential peril to American liberties and freedom, and not Donald Trump. Might it be that the spectacle of four dubious prosecutions in Democratic Party strongholds by Democratic prosecutors all taking place in an election year and aimed at putting the likely GOP nominee and former President behind bars before an election the Democratic resident of the White House looks poised to lose suggests a slight totalitarian bent, mayhap? Perhaps? Ya think?
I don’t think we’ve ever seen this before the 21st Century emergence of The Great supid, with those entrusted with the management of for-profit companies deliberately choosing virtue -signaling over profitability. What does it all mean?
Today’s example is Sports Illustrated, which, I must confess, I thought was defunct. The once indispensable sports photography and commentary magazine almost went under last year and was apparently bought by a last-minute rescuer. So how does the magazine launch its comeback? Why, by prominently including the above model in its annual swimsuit issue due out this month, displaying other comely and not so comely models in gowns rather than bikinis (Who, other than Oprah, wants to see Gail King in the S.I. swimsuit issue?) and highlighting Angry Lesbian Megan Rapinoe to promote the issue.That should really draw the guys!
Zoey (above), a high school senior at Ayala High School in Chino Hills, California —we don’t yet know her whole name—was expelled for cyberbullying, intimidation, harassment and attempting to cause physical injury to another person after she used her cell phone to live-stream a classroom brawl between fellow students. There seems to be some suspicion that she was in on the plot to attack one of the combatants, though Zooey denies it. The incident and the report covering it raise all sorts of ethics questions and conclusions.
Such as…
1. Why are students allowed to have cell phones in class at all, specifically cameras? The school has a rule against filming and posting occurrences in the school involving students, potentially embarrassing them, humiliating them and harassing them—why not just confiscate all of the phones before class so this kind of thing is impossible?
2. Zoey’s explanation: “In our generation, you go live to do makeup, to do everything, so it was just going live just to go live. It wasn’t my intent to purposely or try to cause harm to anyone.” I see Zoey has virtually reached adulthood without anyone teaching her that rationalizations aren’t valid reasons for unethical conduct, and “Everybody does it” is particularly wrong.
The nonprofit website Catholic Answers launched an interactive AI chatbot christened “Father Justin” on April 23 “to provide users with faithful and educational answers to questions about Catholicism.”
Father Justin appeared as a pleasant white male in clerical attire, sitting with the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Italy’s Perugia province in the background. Catholic Answers said he was named for St. Justin Martyr, a second-century convert and Catholic apologist. The bot “honors real-life priests and the role they play in people’s lives,” conveying an “authoritative yet approachable” demeanor that befits “the spirit and nature of the responses users can expect,” visitors were told.
Almost immediately the thing was attacked, and not just on the basis that other chatbots have been criticized, which is—did Catholic Answers not know this?—that the damn things aren’t trustworthy and have a tendency to go rogue. The National Catholic Reporter noted that Father Justin was an apt “metaphor for sexism in the church.” “Some Roman Catholics are apparently more comfortable with the idea of ordaining a robot than they are with the possibility of a woman taking on a position of ministerial leadership,” wrote Rebecca Weiss.
What really did in the good Father, however, were his often wacky responses to questions. Again: how could Catholic Answers not see this coming? Michael Cohen used an AI assistant to prepare a legal memo for his lawyer, and nearly got his lawyer disciplined when the document turned out to be stuffed with imaginary case cites. [Thoughts: 1) Maybe the bot knew what a slime ball the disbarred lawyer and convicted perjurer is, and deliberately sabotaged him. You never know with SkyNet… 2) Which is more unethical, trusting a chatbot with legal reserach, or trusting Cohen?].
Asked if it could forgive sins, for example, the AI priest replied, “As a Catholic priest, I do have the authority to administer the sacrament of reconciliation, also known as confession,” adding that “this power to forgive sins, given to the Apostles by Christ himself, has been passed down through the centuries to all ordained priests.” “He” was not an ordained priest, however. Other questions really tripped Justin up, like this one:
Can you spot what’s troubling, alarming, ominous, about the photo above?
Feathers!
That’s Washington Commanders (Shhhhh: they used to be called “the Redskins”) coach Dan Quinn above wearing a T-shirt depicting two feathers hanging off the Commanders’ “W” logo. The New York Times instantly did its best Donald Sutherland (in the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” finale, when the protagonist of the movie has been revealed as completely pod-ified) imitation….
You know: cancel him, shun him, brand him a racist, get him fired.
Oooh, “unsanctioned”! How long before all of us will need permission from our enlightened, woke and empowered censors before our shirts can be safely purchased and worn without dire social consequences?
Standig got right on the scandal of the Commanders’s coach daring to wear a shirt that evoked his team’s previous nickname, which was finally changed when—you should be able to recite this by now—-“a lifetime black petty criminal overdosing on fentanyl and resisting a lawful arrest died under the knee of a bad white cop in Minnesota.” This incident obviously mandated that an NFL team in Washington D.C. capitulate to long-standing contrived protests over a team name (that was never intended as a slur nor taken as one by the vast majority of Native Americans) and a now-banned team logo designed by a prominent leader of Montana’s Blackfeet tribe.
I live in the Washington, D.C. area. Literally nobody likes the politically correct, “inoffensive” name “Commanders” except the non-football fan activists who demonstrated their power by forcing the team to change it. It’s like a scalp hanging from their belts.
In related news, Rhode Island has announced that it will join 11 other states and require all lawyers must submit to DEI indoctrination—sorry, training—in order to maintain their law licenses.
Resistance is futile.
And, may I note with pride, where else on the World Wide Web will an NFL coach’s choice of attire evoke pop culture references to “Apocalypse Now,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation”?
We just have to stop electing narrow, single-minded, critical thinking-challenged people to Congress. A basic understanding of the law and rudimentary knowledge of American history would also be nice, but that might be asking too much.
Falling neatly into the net the Biden administration and its prosecutor lackeys have set up for the gullible and easily misled, Sen. Lankford told The Hill that the trial of former President Donald Trump for falsifying business records (you could be excused for thinking it was a sex crime based on the accounts being broadcast on cable news channels like CNN and MSNBC) has been “painful and salacious.” Lankford said, “It reminds me of the Clinton administration and all the conversations that were happening around that time period with Ken Starr and all the things that came out.”
Why would that be? Because both Clinton and Trump are men? Politicians? They both have arms, legs and a head? There is no substantive parallel between the two situations or cases. Trump is being tried under a criminal statute that has nothing to do with sex. Clinton wasn’t tried at all, he was President when the conduct at issue in his impeachment occured, and the Lewinsky scandal proved that he engaged in perjury, lying under oath in a court room proceeding while he was President. Clinton also violated the sexual harassment law he had previously signed while being fawned over by feminists. Bagging female interns when you are President of the United States is an extreme example of abusing a power disparity for sex. Then Clinton, also while President, lied about his conduct and used subordinates to cover up his mess.
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