Mary Milben, who sang what was perhaps the most over-produced National Anthem I’ve ever experienced last night at the GOP convention, is a freind and, I think it’s fair to say, a discovery of mine. I saw her play the title role in “Patience” with Georgetown Law Center’s Gilbert and Sullivan Society (which I founded as a first year law student), and, impressed, gave Mary her first professional theater roles at my now defunct but fondly remembered professional company in Arlington, Virginia, The American Century Theater. Since then she’s built an impressive international career; I’m thrilled for her, but not surprised. Mary tipped me off to her imminent appearance with a promotional email. That bombastic production wasn’t her choice, but to her credit, she had the pipes not to be swallowed by it.
I’m sure you can find ethics topics to discuss today….keep them on key, unlike that earlier Star-Spangled Banner rendition that was notable this week.
Ethics Alarms 
Ethical dilemma: I find myself feeling sorry for President Joe Biden who is being used by his ambitious courtiers. I feel like he should be able to walk on the beach in Rehoboth and write some phony memoirs. On the other hand I think of the ruinous policies he has allowed to be inflicted on the country and I don’t feel sorry for him. What is the right attitude?
Feel sorry for him.
He didn’t ask for his cognitive health to decline. During his lucid moments in 2020, he may have genuinely felt that he was up to snuff, could lead the country and that it was essential that he be the one to save us (Is that arrogant? Sure, but plenty of Presidents have felt the same way).
Now that he is in full spiral, he does what many people in his situation do, dig in the heels, insists everything is okay and otherwise behave like a child. Biden is in the full grip of the past and can’t leave it because that’s all he has left.
Now, you want to be angry at someone? Be angry at Dr. Jill. Be angry at Hunter. Be angry at the DNC, the White House staff, the Cabinet and anyone else who enabled this to happen and who is continually enabling this to happen.
Perhaps, you can be a little angry at Biden for not retiring when he started to slow down, but that was years ago and doesn’t change what’s happening now one bit.
This is where compassion is the ethical choice.
A woman was fired from her job as a Home Depot cashier for commenting on Facebook that she thought it too bad that the assassin wasn’t a better shooter. She was outed to her employer by right-wingers, and Home Depot thought her personal expression on Facebook was worthy of termination. To my brief analysis, this looks exactly like the cancel culture the left has fostered, but is coming from the right. Does anyone else see a major problem in this?
Can snitching ever be ethically justified?
I say this because my wife and I were struggling to differentiate “snitching” from appropriate reporting for our 10-year-old: what do you define as snitching?
I do, actually. It’s hard to fault employers as they don’t want to be associated with uncivil (or worse) opinions, but – while the First Amendment only applies to government restriction on speech – the spirit of the First Amendment is to respect speech, even if you don’t agree with it.
Now, of course, there are abhorrent opinions that warrant social distancing/ostracism.
What we’re experiencing is, essentially, a tit for tat situation. Conservatives decided that, if liberals wanted to play by cancel culture rules (what the Left calls “accountability”), they were free to do the same.
There’s a good way for firings like this to be avoided: don’t identify your workplace on social media.
What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I know tit for tat is not really ethical, but when you engage in unethical behavior for short-term gain that is easily replicated, you take the chance that it will come home to roost sooner rather than later. For seven years the left has been fostering cancel culture and turbocharged it in 2020 when it had the chance. Eventually the time was going to come when things were going to shift and some of its own tactics were going to be used against it.
A woman got fired from her job at a hospital in 2020 for raising her hand during clashing demonstrations in Nutley because someone said it looked like she was throwing a Nazi salute. Now another woman gets sacked for publicly saying she wishes a former president had been shot dead. Too damn bad. This is known as being burned by the fire you light.
Antifa and sympathizers kept saying that those who disagreed with them should be doxed, outed, and so on. Now it’s time to dox them, out them, and so on. I think when Trump is re-elected he should attempt in earnest to destroy these organizations, and call them a clear and present danger, domestic terrorists, insurrectionists, and so on. Let me be clear, I’m not advocating for death squads, extrajudicial killings, or anything like that (unless someone fights back, resists arrest, or holes up in a building somewhere and refuses to come out), but there is no reason not to arrest the extremists on the other side, order them held without bail, then hit them with every charge possible and ask for the stiffest possible sentence.
It’s dangerous to be a hanging judge for too long or too obviously or too unfairly. Eventually your day in the dock will follow and you will probably not have a way out. Robespierre chopped off heads for any reason or no reason until he got his own head chopped off. Francisco Lopez went to war with anyone and everyone until his own people abandoned him and he was speared to death like a fat fish. No one misses them, and no one will miss the 2020 crazy American left.
The problem I have with the tit-for-tat is that the cancel culture can be resisted by people, businesses, and governmental entities not being weenies. A business could say, “we understand that this person holds a culturally unfavored view, but it does not in any way impact their work.” And that should be the response, as long as that response is true. Even despicable people need to earn a living, and if businesses don’t hire them, then they end up on the government dole. Or are unable to get the necessary provisions for survival in any other ethical means, and that situation is far worse than having the opinion, bad as it is, that Trump needs to be assassinated.
I could justify tit-for-tat if there were no other means, and in which case I could even endorse escalation if it could be shown to end the back-and-forth quickly. But when it seems that the main reason cancel culture works is pusillanimity, I cannot endorse that tactic at all.
Was it that long ago that people who went on record with things like this got a visit from their local Secret Service agent?
If Democrats Want A New Nominee, They Need To Use The 25th Amendment – The Federalist
This is the really big story right now. The Democrats are saying Biden needs to get out of the race because he can’t win. No. Sorry gang. He needs to get out of the White House because an unelected cabal of careerists are running the country with no constitutional authority to do so while Joe has checked out. And it’s too damned bad Kamala Harris will become the acting president for six months.
The thing is that they are perfectly okay with an unelected cabal running the country…as long as that unelected cabal is pursuing what they want.
The unelected justices on the Supreme Court are a problem only when they overturn Roe v Wade, not when they decide for it.
Unelected family members are a problem in the Trump administration, but not when they are trying to rewrite the nation’s healthcare like Hillary Clinton in her husband’s administration.
And the Trump children are a threat but Jill Biden or, gasp, Hunter Biden acting as shadow president and chief of staff, respectively, that’s just hunky-dory! Remember when Trump children profiting from their closeness to Trump was a problem? Now, Hunter Biden, a known influence peddler, is Biden’s right-hand man. He’s not just a phone call away, he’s sitting next to him all the time!
“Hunter Biden, a known influence peddler, is Biden’s right-hand man. He’s not just a phone call away, he’s sitting next to him all the time!“
PWS
Kinda makes one long for Billy Carter.
The newest refrain from the left is now “it doesn’t matter, we’re voting to keep the people in his administration” as part of their “throw everything against the wall and hope something sticks” agenda.
I don’t know if this is in any way credible, since it comes from Newsmax, but their journalist Mark Halperin says he has sources that have informed him that Biden will definitely withdraw from the presidential race soon, perhaps Sunday. Supposedly a withdrawal speech has been drafted up for him, and he will not endorse Harris, but expect an open process at the convention.
Many others have been saying today that Halperin’s sources are wrong.
Getting back on my rant that software engineering should be treated as real engineering…
https://www.reuters.com/technology/global-cyber-outage-grounds-flights-hits-media-financial-telecoms-2024-07-19/
Summary: a security package by a supposedly specialist company received an automatic update that caused computers to go into a reboot loop. This software is used in computers that run critical systems like airline scheduling, so the effects were widespread.
Now that software is such a foundational element of our society, we need to figure out a way to ensure it does not break critical systems because someone made a mistake.
I’ve previously suggested licensing, in the style of professional engineers for civil and structural engineering. You have someone licensed and signing their name on every piece of shipped software that’s ultimately responsible for its quality. Teams of “drafters” help with writing the code, but in the end someone has to take up the responsibility. You will need insurance, maybe have it covered by the employer, and many changes to the way software is developed and distributed (although we do have some decent techniques from the aerospace industry).
For wider adoption, probably need to enforce liability, and current licenses pretty much shield the software make from that, so a law will have to come in to stop those from happening. Personally I hate that, but software companies have proven they are not up to the task.
Oh well, happy to take suggestions, because days like these make me pessimistic about my chosen profession.
I understand your point but I am also leery of establishing a new governmental oversight bureaucracy for something like this. I have lost a lot of faith that governments will be able to oversee and monitor an industry such as this without crippling it. Or without simply leaving us vulnerable to hackers and the like.
From my experience with software problems, these things are going to happen with or without the sort of changes you’re proposing (see Challenger, Apollo 13). These changes would allow assignment of blame and culpability, and assess liability.
However, I would wonder how much costs would go up when these companies have to have mammoth liability insurance. How much more are we willing to pay for airplane tickets, bank fees, security costs for jails and prisons?
It’s not a trivial issue and I don’t think solutions would be simple either.
I agree, but where do we want to draw the line? Flight software (my day job) is two-to-three orders of magnitude more costly per line of code than your run of the mill application. Conversely, when’s the last time a plane crashed because of a software fault?
My libertarian solution to this is that customers start negotiating liability for software purchases… but right now asking for that is the only guaranteed way to ensure the software company’s sales team will stop calling you. I’m pretty sure Crowdstrike will be able to not pay a cent in liability for this incident. They may lose customers or credit them for months of service, but they are not the ones paying for the downtime.
This will continue happening. When lives are lost, the heavy hand of government will step in. I’d rather have the industry do something before that happens.
Weren’t the two Boeing crashes essentially caused by software issues?
That’s my recollection of them, but I could be wrong.
The thing I relate to is milspec for companies building stuff for the military. I used to work for a company that made the guidance systems for the TOW2 anti-tank missiles.
The idea is that these systems (milspec) absolutely have to work when a soldier pulls the trigger, and they have to be rugged enough that soldiers generally won’t be able to break them lugging them around in the field.
I agree with the principles behind that. However, in practice, it also meant that every single change to a weapon system had to be designed and written up by the relevant engineer and then got sent up and down the chain of approvals and signoffs and whatnot that the system decided was needed.
Around that time was the kerfuffle about $700 toilets for DoD. My thought when I read about those was — if those are milspec toilets it is amazing they only cost $700 and not several times that. And it probably took six years from design proposal to letting the contract to build them.
That’s part of my frame of reference. If you work on flight software, I’m sure you can relate. Rightly so — no one wants the automatic pilot to fly the plane into a mountain.
I agree about Crowdstrike and its likely liability or lack thereof. But if they had to carry $100 billion in liability insurance, who could afford their product?
I too would much prefer the industry to find a solution before we have planes falling out of the sky or jail cells popping open en masse. I guess I’ll have to leave it to you youngsters to solve.
Yes, the two Boeing Max crashes were caused, in-part, by poorly conceived software. The planes did exactly what they were supposed to; there was no error caused by misfiring software.
I can get super-detailed, but I’ll wrap by saying the previous leg of the LionAir crash performed identically to the accident aircraft; the one that didn’t crash had a more competent flight crew.
Here is a meme woryh commenting about.
https://www.threads.net/@bluequeenresists1/post/C9m30AKx7eW
If you want a conspiracy theory, here it is. Blackrock shorted DJT by 12 million shares last Friday (~$400 million). Now, this week, in the face of tens of millions in losses because Trump didn’t die, they claim it was all a mistake. They claim they intended to short Trump by 1200 shares and are having the trade reversed so they don’t have to pay for the massive loss (why am I not able to do that?).
Oh, Blackrock had Thomas Crook in one of their ads.
The above it true, not a conspiracy theory. However, you can all write this conspiracy theory from the facts.
Shocking these coincidences. Can anyone find a better conspiracy theory for the Trump shooting?
The most unbelievable part of the entire story is that Blackrock puts in orders for $40,000 worth of something. That’s like the military saying that they bid contracts for a single roll of toilet paper.
Oh, and by the way, that really was a pretty good rendition of the National Anthem. Refreshing to hear after all the butchering of it.