September and October 2024 are going down in the ProEthics annals as the busiest months since the pandemic freakout and among the busiest months of ethics consulting I’ve had ever. What this means, I do not know, but today, once again, I have legal training session that will occupy my attentions this morning. Thus I am opening the weekly free-for-all a day early.
The big news, but with no details yet, is that New York City Mayor Eric Adams is about to be indicted. I expected this, not necessarily with Adams but with one or more of the horrible crop of arrogant, autocratic Democrat mayors who run so many of our major cities. They have a collective chip on their shoulders the size of El Capitan, most of them are “of color” and determined to make up for lost time and opportunity. I expect more of this: the Democratic Party has spawned a culture of corruption that is dangerous and increasingly difficult to hide.
Speaking of a culture of corruption, Paul Pelosi once again read tea leaves or something and guessed what the Feds were about to do to Visa, so he dumped $500,000 in the company’s stock two months before the company was sued for anti-competitive business practices. He has done a lot of this investment management magic since his wife has been a power in Congress. The X account “Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker” flagged the trade when the Department of Justice filed its lawsuit against Visa, alleging that the company maintained an illegal monopoly over the U.S. debit card market.
Nothing to see here, move along…
But I digress. The ethics topics are up to you.
Ethics Alarms 
Helene develops an eye as it aims at Florida
Head line at CNN.
Is it unethical to print headlines which are not literal, which personify a natural phenomenon?
No, not really? It’s how we communicate.
Yes? The news should be fact based and literal.
I feel that the degree of looseness of our usage of words in news reporting indicates a culture’s underlying commitment to truth, possibly even conditions people to depend on narrative rather than facts.
I’m pretty sure this sort of language in hurricane reportage has been around at least since TV weather people became ubiquitous in the ’50s and ’60s. Until ten or twenty years ago, hurricanes were only given female names by the guys who worked in hurricane forecasting, mostly at the University of Miami’s National Hurricane Center, headed up by John Hope, the father of Joe and Tommy Hope who played basketball in high school with my brother and me. A really smart guy, Mr. Hope had trained with the guy who invented hurricane forecasting while following the (“Labor Day?”) hurricane that crushed eastern Long Island and coastal Rhode Island in the late ’30s. He had successfully predicted the storm’s path and intensity from his lab in D.C.
It’s just anthropomorphism. I think the weather guys do it in part because hurricanes are not completely predictable and seemingly have minds of their own.
Any commemts on the recent trend of doctors denying health care for fear of running afoul of state anti-abortion laws?
It may warrant its own blog post.
This is why care should be taken to make certain that exceptions to these laws are clearly stated and are unambiguous. I oppose abortion, but states that are willing to make exceptions to bans need to write their laws so that doctors don’t err on the side of caution when treating their patients.
It is looking to me like some doctors are refusing the procedures so they can use it as an excuse to challenge the law. In other words, the exception is there and they can do what needs to be done, but they are using the law as an excuse to cause harm to patients to advance their political goals. There have been a few in Texas that were on our local news that clearly could have been performed under the law (there was an ectopic pregancy), but the physicians refused and contacted the media about their refusal.
Those physicians put their patients’ lives at risk to score political points. Termination of ectopic pregnancies is clearly defined as NOT an abortion under the Texas laws.
That is exactly what I concluded, as well. They are trying to get anti-abortion laws reversed, and that gives them headlines to justify such changes. I’m curious why the deaths associated with legal abortions aren’t so publicized: the various chemical means of doing so have significant complication rates and more than a few fatalities associated with them, but to find out even that much, I had to slog through several websites.
That is exactly what I concluded, as well. They are trying to get anti-abortion laws reversed, and that gives them headlines to justify such changes. I’m curious why the deaths associated with legal abortions aren’t so publicized: the various chemical means of doing so have significant complication rates and more than a few fatalities associated with them, but to find out even that much, I had to slog through several websites.
Since we’re on the subject of abortion…
The Democratic challenger in our US House district (Lanon Baccam) is running an ad in which he recounts his wife’s stillborn second child. He transitions to criticizing the position his opponent (the incumbent) took on Iowa’s heartbeat law – essentially “abortion is legal until a heartbeat is detectable.” Baccam states that, under this law, Iowa women are forced to carry “unviable pregnancies” to term, sort of linking his wife’s experience of stillbirth to abortion. The ad finishes with Baccam stating that women should always have control of their bodies…the standard pro-abortion tack.
This ad strikes me as wrong…not just because I’m strongly against abortion, but more because it seems to twist an unrelated situation – stillbirth – and try to tie it to abortion. I’m no medical expert, but it seems that his wife’s pregnancy was viable until it wasn’t. If that’s true, then what is meant by the “unviable pregnancies” that Iowa women are forced to carry? Is he subtlety referring to unborn babies with potential birth defects, but are not at risk of dying in the womb?
I’d love to hear some thoughts on this. I wish I could link the actual advertisement, but I can’t find in anywhere…not even on his YT channel.
The relentless and countless “Republicans are coming after our reproductive rights!” television commercials are not a good look for Democrat women who are apparently an extremely and enthusiastically bloodthirsty group.
Based on the ads, Baccam appears to be running strictly on abortion and Project 2025.
He should rather be highlighting the economy, inflation, massive job creation, consumer food and fuel prices, interest rates, and immigration. You know, the things HIS party is proud of.
I wonder if he opposed vaccine mandates.
The Dems abandoned “My Body My Choice”
My wife’s first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. The second one was deemed unviable at 9 weeks or so. Last year, I took that unviable pregnancy to get his driver’s license. The OB was shocked that not only did the unviable-by-all-medical-textbooks pregnancy not terminate, but our son had no health issues. he doesn’t even have any allergies. Of course, he also had never had a couple who refused to terminate an obviously, most certainly, clear as day, all the literature says so unviable pregnancy. Every hormone test indicated that that pregnancy was unviable and after 5 months or so, the OB stopped doing them because we still refused to terminate the pregnancy.
Never trust the doctor when they say a pregnancy is unviable.
If you didn’t connect the dots, imagine how many people followed their doctor’s advice and killed children who would have been just fine.
The doctor was also shocked that we refused to screen for Down’s syndrome, etc.
Remarkably, our son and daughter-in-law’s OB/GYN wanted to terminate her pregnancy, having deemed the pregnancy somehow defective. They got a second opinion. The pregnancy is now the starting right guard on the Libertyville Wildcats JV football team in Chicago. He wants to go to the U.S. Military academy and is, among other things, a self-taught expert on WWII German armaments. He was big when he was born and is currently 6’2″ and thick.
Wow! Thanks for sharing that. It’s a wonderful story, though I’m sorry to hear you lost your first child. That was helpful because it answered my question. Pregnancies can be labelled “unviable” early on, but that doesn’t mean they are. So aborting them strictly on that information is at least as perilous as attempting to carry the unborn child to term.
To be fair, that does seem to circle back to, “You better get this right doc, or the law is coming for you!” Hence a doctor could be motivated to refuse to abort a “nonviable” pregnancy. This and rape pregnancies are the areas where I sympathize with the pro-choice side.
But in my case, the OB did ‘get it right’ according to medicine and the law. The test results were exactly what indicate an nonviable pregnancy. If we had terminated the pregnancy, it would have been considered a D&C, not an abortion. No one would have known that the pregnancy was just fine. There would have been no legal repercussions possible. We would have gone about our lives never knowing that there was really nothing wrong with the pregnancy.
Even with the new abortion restrictions in my state, there would be nothing legally wrong with terminating that pregnancy.
However, to your point, knowing what I know now, I think maybe doctors SHOULD be hesitant to abort a pregnancy based on ‘nonviability’. If the baby dies and the heartbeat stops, the pregnancy then can be terminated even in ‘Heartbeat Bill’ states. That is what we were actually expecting to happen. We assumed the doctor was right and this pregnancy would also result in a miscarriage, but we were going to go ahead a wait out the few months with a nonviable pregnancy on the off-chance that the doctor was wrong. The thought of killing our child while he was still alive was just too much. When the heartbeat stayed strong and the baby grew, we knew we had made the right choice.
A Harris apologist/spokesperson, er, I mean, MSNBC host, Stephnie Ruhl:
“And one could watch that [softball MSNBC interview] and say, well, she [Harris] didn’t give a clear, direct answer. That’s OK, because we are not talking about clear or direct issues.”
Wow! I guess it depends upon what the meaning of ‘answer’ is!” We’re evidently in a post-factual era. After all, all we need is a Mommala. The country just needs a cheerleader and mental health guru in chief. “I’m okay, you’re okay!” Works for me! I’ll vote for THAT!
” … most of them are ‘of color'”
That may be true, but it is gratuitous. If there is a reason race is important, then go ahead and say it.
The use of ‘most’ brings to mind the reporting on Israel’s response to the terrorist attack last October. Many reports said that most of those killed by Israel were women and children, which was true, so far as we know. But, it also was true that most were men and children, and that most were men and women. So, why ‘women and children’? My view is that it was a biased attempt to portray Israel’s response as evil.
And so, why “most of them are of color”? I could only speculate, which I won’t do here.
I think it’s a third world thing. In the third world, the government is simply a pinata politicians whack with their sticks to make the money fall out and into their bottomless pockets. In Africa, it’s called, “getting over.” And they get caught because they’re not very sophisticated about it, being, as they are, new to the heights to which they’ve been elevated. They don’t cover their tracks the way the Pelosis and Clintons and Bidens so expertly do.
I can’t speak for Jack either but I thought he made it pretty clear:
“They have a collective chip on their shoulders the size of El Capitan, most of them are “of color” and determined to make up for lost time and opportunity.”
I infer from this sentence and Jack’s other writings that the Democratic Party has created a cultural phenomenon that causes black people to feel cheated by society and justifies them doing whatever it takes to make up for the lack of “privilege” that our horribly racist society fails to give them.
Or you could just assume the worst.
I said it. In politics and many other pursuits where black were excluded for so long, they enter with a “catch-up” mentality, and a “you got yours, now we get ours.” This was what made Marion Barry, mayor of DC. while I was living there, more popular with his base the more corrupt he appeared. The attitude obviously applies to reverse racism; also to reluctance to prosecute crimes when a disproportionate number of the mayor’s voting base is involved.
It’s a well-documented cultural phenomenon, and almost unavoidable when an excluded minority breaks through, driven by rationalizations. No, I don’t think it was a coincidence that the first female black Senator was corrupt. Or that Maxine Waters has been shady, or that Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, “lived large” while his fans rooted him on.
And yes, this reflex undermines the goal of racial justice and comity.
I find it extremely interesting that the FBI and DOJ are going after Eric Adams, a black guy presumably in good standing with the left. But maybe he’s not. Maybe he’s too conservative. Why is he being thrown under the bus? Is he expendable for some reason? Is he being prosecuted by Garland as a PR stunt in order to create the impression the DOJ is a non-partisan operation that will go after politicians of any stripe or color? (Hah! That’s a good one!) Is Eric Adams being taken out because he constituted some sort of threat to the Biden/Harris operatives that are running the country?
Eric Adams has complained long and loud about the illegal immigration crisis that is destroying NYC. He is being silenced. Now, I am not saying he isn’t guilty of all this stuff, I’m just saying that if he wasn’t complaining about the border crisis destroying his city, he wouldn’t be under investigation.
“Better stay on the reservation, boy.”
I’m not ready to buy into that theory on this case yet. Damian Williams (U.S. attorney for southern NY) is an early Biden appointee, but seems to have even-handedly pursued corruption cases regardless of party, including going after democrats like Bob Menendez and the former NY Lt. Governor. The Adams case is pretty serious, not just a few free lunches, or something.
Seems like an unusual number of democrat pols have been caught in recent years taking foreign bribes, harboring Chinese moles, etc.
Nothing has been done about Tiffany Henyard yet, so I won’t hold my breath on that.
Looks like somebody has at least taken a stab at Henyard
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2024/09/26/dolton-mayor-henyards-appointments-blocked-by-cook-county-judge/
I get your point. But, in my two careers, I had a lot of interaction with people from other ethnic groups, and I can’t recall any adult who exhibited that attitude. I did among a relative handful of high school students. Maybe that attitude is more prevalent among politicians, but I’ve had very little interaction in that realm, and, when it comes to politics, I sure don’t believe everything I read.
Perfectly reasonable. But remember, when blacks were systemically prevented from holding political power, white city “bosses’ were the norm—patronage, bribes, crooked police, favored tribes. Sometimes they were mayors, sometimes they were power brokers behind the mayors, like Roscoe Conkling and Boss Tweed in NY. The black political culture is generations behind the white equivalent, and is going through the same stages, often with a sense of entitlement. These aren’t typical members of those communities. They are the leaders, the bullies, the ruthless and the street smart.
Politics these days is an occupation that isn’t necessarily known for overall honesty, and thrives on grievance. I’d say race hustlers are one of the lowest forms of these creatures. There’s no longer as much call for white racists as there was, but there still seems to be more acceptance of black politicians who overtly play the racial grievance game. Maybe the ones who rely on that to get ahead are inherently more dishonest.
I can’t speak for our host, but I do suspect that it has something to do with the DEI process that seems to emphasize a person’s race, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference/identity over merit when it comes to high-ranking office.
If the most important thing when putting someone in charge is who they sleep with, what body parts they sport or how much melanin they have in their skin, then you run the risk that the person in question is lacking not only experience and competence, but also integrity.
It’s almost as if some of these hires think that they have inherited a spoils system and that they have a right to put their hands in the kitty due to the perception that straight white males always do that, get away with it and that this is just compensation for historical inequalities.
Yes. A spoils system. White people just “HAVE”. And “having” is the solution. Not realizing that there are layers and facets to aquiring and maintaining. This is one of the core principles of which I regularly warn my children.
The SEC would look VERY hard at your average Joe if he happened to drop half a million in stock at a company right before an investigation was announced, especially if he had access to someone working for the government.
Why does the SEC ignore Congress and their families when it comes to insider trading? Serious question.
They’ll get their funding cut and lose their jobs and pensions?
Because insider trading by Congress was legal (until recently?). I can’t remember if they passed a rule against it after Pelosi stepped down as speaker.
I don’t know if the ads are running nationwide, but there is a particular Kamala one here (Georgia) featuring a purported school teacher expounding on her resentment that she supposedly pays more taxes than billionaires, and that Trump is only for the rich. This is a trope debunked years ago, even by left-leaning sources. Isn’t it Republican who are supposed to be divisive? Will any pundits or Kamala interviewers question this tactic or its veracity?
All the DNC commercials are rife with lies, er, tropes. They are singing to the choir and simply trying to increase turnout among the loyalists.
I don’t know if they have always been this bad, but the ads for Democratic candidates in the DC area are astoundingly dishonest. The GOP ads are mostly about inflation and illegal immigration. Larry Hogan will make sure the Senate passes a “national pregnancy monitoring” law! Who knew? How stupid do you have be to believe that??? Well, Tim Walz is telling rallies that, and it’s 100% a lie, based on the “The GOP is Ruled by the Heritage Foundation” lie merged with pro-abortion mania. There’s nothing in Project 2025 about government pregnancy monitoring, not has Trump endorsed the idea , which is insane.
Let us not forget who told women what to do with their bodies using an Emergency Temporary Standard from OSHA.
One of Lanon Baccam’s ads here in Iowa suggests that “his opponent’s plan” (Project 2025, of course) requires “forced reporting of miscarriages and abortions”…which is effectively the “national pregnancy monitoring” to which you refer.
Which side demanded that restaurants refuse to serve customers who did not have proof of taking one vaccine?
Mrs. OB just received an email from HHS wherein Joe Biden tells her all the wonderful things he and Kamala Harris have done regarding Medicare via their misnamed legislation such as the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Act. It’s not an email paid for by the Harris Walz campaign. It clearly states it’s from HHS. As Mrs. OB stated, “It’s as if the Harris Walz campaign purchased Medicare’s email list, for free! Isn’t that illegal? Aren’t government agencies supposed to refrain from partisan activities?”
Wow!
Well, in the 2016 election, IRS employees worked on Hillary Clinton’s campaign at work while being paid by the US government. This was considered OK. We also have the US government unions endorsing candidates. The USPS worker’s union has endorsed Harris. So, they endorsed Harris and are then allowed to handle ballots unattended?
I got that email too, although I’d deleted it without reading after I looked at the title (“A Message from President Biden on Medicare Open Enrollment”).
When you look at the end credits, this is what it says:
*sigh*
I see these messages and my first thought is, where the heck is the money coming from to pay for this? Then I remember that, of course, the government just creates it out of thin air.
DG, yes, the passage you reproduced is breathtaking, non? I believe it’s The Hatch Act that criminalizes government employees politicking while on the clock and using government resources to do so. If this isn’t a prima facie case of a Hatch Act violation, I’ll eat my hat.
I was at an event this evening where someone brought up reparations, and it inspired me to streamline my framing of the situation.
People object to reparations based on ethnicity or ancestral status because of issues of fairness and logistical practicality. My take on the situation is this:
We know that it’s possible to make laws and policies that cause disproportionate economic harm to members of certain ethnic groups without explicitly referring to ethnicity at all.
With that in mind, why can’t we make laws and policies that don’t explicitly refer to ethnicity, but which disproportionately help ethnic groups that are still experiencing the impacts from the harmful policies? Such policies would help anyone who meets the criteria; it’s just that most of those people would be from ethnic groups most impacted by biased policies.
For example, we can identify areas missing key infrastructure and facilities (e.g. from redlining) and set those up. We can arrange grocery stores in food deserts and make sure people have access to local banking facilities, decently funded schools, et cetera.
Am I missing something?
Yes. You’re missing most government programs don’t work. People need to figure out how to better themselves by themselves. Another government handout won’t cut it. If you’re waiting for someone to do what needs to be done, you’re doomed.
Government programs don’t work because they’re out of touch with the people and because they don’t use constructive principles to look at the situation as a whole and over time. If stakeholders are part of the process of designing and implementing the program, it’s more likely to give people what they need.
What people need isn’t a handout; it’s an environment that is structured to facilitate their development rather than inhibiting it and cutting them off from resources as past programs have done.
Does that make sense?
If “we” can identify where a grocery store needs to go, then “we” don’t need the government involved.
Entrepreneurs build grocery stores.
The government creates a $1 trillion program to build grocery stores that includes $275 billion for Ukraine, $475 billion for sustainable, climate-change-mandate solar panels in North Dakota, and $249 billion for aid to the African sub-continent. Then when Republicans in the House kill it, they are blamed for perpetuating “racist food deserts” and hurting minorities.
Do I have that about right?
No thank you.
In my ideal society, the economy and the government would be mostly separate. The former addresses the liability of scarcity and the latter addresses the liability of conflict. (Then there’s academia that addresses disaster and culture that addresses stagnation.)
Ordinarily, I would hope that entrepreneurs would see economic opportunity in encouraging the development of poor neighborhoods, but human entrepreneurs are constrained by relatively narrow time horizons. They can’t do much if they can’t prove it could pay off massively within a few years. In the present day, sometimes the government, in its capacity for building trust, has to deliberately invest resources in projects to increase human health and trust in the long term.
That said, as you point out, in the present day human governments are not very good at increasing human health and trust, because the human constituents do not know how to hold governments accountable for competently and honestly implementing constructive principles. That’s what I’m working to fix.
But our government – in its current state – doesn’t exist to “address the liability of conflict.” It has conflict in the asset column on the balance sheet, and the goal is to perpetuate it.
If you’re working to fix this, well and good. But you’re going to need the assistance of a proverbial tsunami that rolls in and razes the place ahead of you if you want any legitimate chance of success.
On the contrary, when it comes to civilization, overhaul is easier than recovering from destruction. The latter is stressful and creates conditions that make it difficult for people to think constructively.
What if food deserts exist because the communities wrecked what grocery stores attempted to serve them?
That is a good point. I did indeed consider stores leaving because of theft. In that case, constructive people of the same ethnicity (for the trust factor) will need to influence the people in the food desert to change their culture in tandem with the additional food resources. How does that sound?
Sounds great. Why aren’t they doing that?
Who says they aren’t? Mentoring organizations exist for this exact purpose.
If it’s occurring organically in a response to a market need, is there a needed role for government? Or will government only flummox things?
A competent market will create prosperity, but not necessarily safety, vitality, or harmony. Companies have incentives to betray trust if they can get away with it. They might get away with betraying trust if they can risk the long-term health of society through pollution or harmful products without anyone noticing or understanding what’s happening, if they get people addicted to consumer culture, or if the people they’re betraying don’t have significant power or resources to push back.
The prosperity that our market system creates often involves exploitation: the extraction of value from people who are kept in positions without alternative options that are both desirable and realistic. Part of fixing exploitation calls for strong civic engagement to help people create better options for themselves. However, we also need some form of governmental process for setting and enforcing boundaries. The wealth created from exploitation grants some people great monetary power and an incentive to maintain that exploitation. They will create systems that undermine people’s power unless we coordinate to enforce limits on what they can and cannot do.
Societies need a competent government of some kind to maintain the trust that leads to harmony. Or, to put it another way, whatever system we have for maintaining trust by agreeing on and enforcing rules and agreements is our government. Whether it’s effective for the purpose of maintaining trust is a separate question, and depends on how well humans understand and implement the constructive principle of ethics.
If humans prefer a more influential government and can make it work, great. If they prefer a less influential government and can make it work, also great. Right now, many humans in the United States want the government to play the role of setting up good options for people. If you’d prefer that that role be separated from the “laws and enforcement” aspect of the government and assigned to civil societies on the local level, I think that may be a very good idea. I’d still file it under “government” because the primary goal is to build trust through empowering people, but the methods would be through investing in infrastructure and education rather than through enforcing public order. Having separate and independent local institutions would give people more fine control over what initiatives their tax dollars and donations get spent on.
How does that sound?
On Ukraine:
With Zelensky politicking for more support, we have Ukraine back in the headlines. A lot of disagreement is said to exist about what should be done. A lot of people are under the impression that Republicans are against supporting Ukraine based primarily on a fringe of skeptics, despite most Republicans voting for the various aid packages. The odd fringe of Democrat skeptics never seems to lead to casting doubt on their support of the effort. As for Presidential policies most people argue against a caricature they have of Trump- a caricature primarily formed by left wing media as Trump has said nothing more specific that “I’ll have the war ended” – which can come about via a wide range of methods, but the left insists it means forcing Ukraine to surrender.
But if the Left’s *actual* desire is for Ukrainian victory, then people need to seriously ask themselves, what has the left wing actually done for Ukrainian victory? Or is the left’s desire really just to feel good about doing something? Or is there really actually a cynical less attractive geopolitical goal here.
So far, the aid packages have amounted to little more than giving Ukraine enough to just slowly wither on the vine. That’s an atrocious and treacherous strategy to pursue.
As a course of action it ONLY fits the goal of “we’re fine with Russia taking the Donbas, we’re fine with Ukraine leaning to the West, *BUT* we want both Russia and Ukraine to enter the 2030s as broken and powerless shells of themselves as long as Russia ends up with a stable post-Putin regime – we absolutely do not want to destabilize Russia”. Avoiding a destabilized Russia is a fair geopolitical goal but does that override stopping and reversing an expansionist Russia?
This would be some seriously cynical geopolitical realpolitik at play.
Even if that’s NOT the goal, I think it’s fair to characterize the current administration/Congressional approach as “trickling in enough aid to look like we’re doing something but to not give Ukraine a winning advantage”. Don’t let anyone on the Left claim they are “for” Ukrainian victory. If we want Ukraine to win, we can’t act as limitedly as we have- give them freedom of action and more resources!!
If, however, we do not at all have the stomach to risk Russian ‘escalation’ and will only continue this die-on-the-vine trickle of support- then frankly negotiating an end to this is the ethically correct route to go.
There are a handful of general options-
1) we get directly involved
2) we get way more aggressive in our materiel support
3) we continue this trickle
4) we try to negotiate an end
5) we cut out totally and let Ukraine’s fate be up to them
Option 5 will not, or I should say “must not”, happen because this will be too big of a hit to prestige of NATO and the United States. Regardless of no direct involvement, this is a NATO supported confrontation against NATO’s enemy, and therefore is a competition between NATO and Russia.
Option 1 will not happen unless Russian action is directed against us or a NATO member. We do not currently have the domestic or political will to physically go into Ukraine and support their military. So, unless Russia ups the ante, this will not happen.
Option 3 (which is what I consider us to be doing) is a lethargic limbo that will grind away the only resource we are not supplying – the Ukrainian will to fight in the long term future. As their will to fight grinds down – a victory becomes even less likely even if support increases. This option, that we’re doggedly committed to increases the likelihood as time goes on that options 2 or 4 not only will have to happen, but will have to happen on increasingly *unfavorable terms*.
Knowing this future this leaves us entirely with options 2 or 4.
I want to tangent for a minute: the political debate is one where my 5 categories are squishy enough that the average pro-Ukrainian democrat will say “we aren’t doing option 3, we ARE doing option 2 and Ukraine WILL win this, give it time!” or “we are somewhere between option 2 and 3, but laggard Republicans are preventing us from full on option 2”. Whereas, I don’t really know what Republicans WOULD be willing to support of the options because everything is skewed by tribalism and this is seen as Biden’s effort. I do know, from past Republican attitudes towards conflict is that if we are to engage then engage far enough to guarantee a win or don’t engage all. So, part of Republican skepticism may derive from the notion that we’re just pissing into the wind if we aren’t going to go “whole hog”. Tangent complete.
Now it looks like the current trajectory of caution towards the preserving the “stability” of a Putin regime means we’ll never get close to allowing Ukraine to do what it has to do to *win* (which requires defeating some of Putin’s non-negotiables) means that whether it is spoken openly or not-As a current country- we *are* willing to settle for an end that doesn’t involve Ukrainian territorial reunification nor does it involve a genuine humbling of Russian self-image.
So, if we aren’t going to shift towards Option 2, then we will HAVE to switch to option 4. And does this final option come after another couple 100,000 guys on both sides die? Or do we recognize this sooner and get Russia and Ukraine at a negotiating table?
That’s not my preference- I hate being hawkish now that I’m not in the military- but option 2 from above is my preference – that is we give Ukraine exponentially more support than we have been and humble Russian imperialism.
But as it sits- if we’re not going to give Ukraine what it needs to win- then a forced negotiation SOONER while the West and Ukraine have more relative leverage is the next most ethical choice. But prolonging this “wither on the vine” route is awful.
That being said – when Trump says “I’ll have this war ended” and progressives cry “You mean you’ll FORCE Ukraine to surrender”, barring the fact that we have no idea what Trump means when he says that, IF Trump does mean he’ll bring the belligerent parties to the table – then the progressives need to know that, unless we wildly increase support for Ukraine, that the negotiating table is the ONLY remaining ethical option.
Michael,
An excellent analysis of the situation. I too feel that #3 is what the Biden administration has been doing, basically giving Ukraine enough aid for it to lose slowly but not what it needs to win.
What I have not ever seen is Biden coming out and actually stating that 1)He wants Ukraine to win, as well as 2)Stating what he feels is the U.S. strategic interest in this war and what our goals are.
All Biden’s ever said is ‘Putin can’t be allowed to get away with this’ or something along those lines.
—————
It is a pattern with this administration. They have acted similarly with Iran. The administration seems to fear ‘escalation’ so much that they are willing to let the bad guys win. And that would be the ‘bad guys’ as the administration defines them.
It is really a lot like Chamberlain leading up to Munich. The difference is that Chamberlain did eventually wake up and developed a spine. It sadly happened too late to prevent another world war.
—————
Trump keeps saying we are closer than ever to WWIII, and we’re not sure exactly what he means by that. But it doesn’t mean he is wrong.
Bullies will attack perceived weakness. They respect strrength.
BINGO
Here us a tweet worth commenting about
https://x.com/nataliegwinters/status/1838750987491635497?t=n0TWU-DEW7VvEylIbNBI_g&s=19