Month: December 2024

An Eternally Troubling Ethics Conundrum—at Least to Me

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist who teaches at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has authored a guest column for the New York Times that opens up, for the umpteenth time, an ethics topic that makes me uncomfortable. His subject is the cultural delusion shared by many in American society that rewarding effort is just as important as rewarding success, and perhaps moreso. He writes in part:

“….we’ve taken the practice of celebrating industriousness too far. We’ve gone from commending effort to treating it as an end in itself. We’ve taught a generation of kids that their worth is defined primarily by their work ethic. We’ve failed to remind them that working hard doesn’t guarantee doing a good job (let alone being a good person)…..[W]hat worries me most about valuing perseverance above all else: It can motivate people to stick with bad strategies instead of developing better ones…What counts is not sheer effort but the progress and performance that result. Motivation is only one of multiple variables in the achievement equation. Ability, opportunity and luck count, too. Yes, you can get better at anything, but you can’t be great at everything.” 

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Comments of the Day (In the Thread of the Month!): “Wait…So Everyone’s Been Lying To Me All These Years About What Angels Look Like?”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

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The commentariate on EA always surprises and delights me, and the response I got to an off the wall post inspired by an AP story about “biblically correct” angels was a perfect example. The resulting thread was a veritable primer on anglelology, with Ryan Harkins weighing in with three substantive posts and several others contributing valuable insight as well.

I don’t deserve you.

One more Christmas tradition that I left fallow this year—like almost all of them—in the absence of my wife was our Christmas Eve reading aloud of the children’s book “The Littlest Angel,” by Charles Tazwell. Grace loved the story so. She would always cry at the place where the Littlest Angel gives his most cherished possession, a simple wooden box where he kept his earthly treasures when he was a child on Earth, as his gift to the soon-to-be-born son of God:

“The Littlest Angel trembled as the box was opened, and there, before the Eyes of God and all His Heavenly Host, was what he offered to the Christ Child. And what was his gift to the Blessed Infant?

“Well, there was a butterfly with golden wings, captured one bright summer day on the high hills above Jerusalem, and a sky blue egg from a bird’s nest in the olive tree that stood to shade his mother’s kitchen door. Yes, and two white stones, found on a muddy river bank, where he and his friends had played like small brown beavers. And, at the bottom of the box, a limp, tooth-marked leather strap, once worn as a collar by his mongrel dog, who had died as he had lived, in absolute love and infinite devotion.”

Somehow, it doesn’t work quite as well if one is thinking of the Cherubim as having eyeballs all over his wings or three heads. But that’s just me…

Here are two of the many remarkable comments first from Ryan Harkins, and then from Sara B. on the post, “Wait…So Everyone’s Been Lying To Me All These Years About What Angels Look Like?” :

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(First, Ryan…)

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Ethics Observations on President Biden’s and President-Elect Donald Trump’s “Christmas Messages”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

That’s nice.

After taking to Truth Social on Christmas Day to be sarcastic about China and Panama ( “Merry Christmas to all, including to the wonderful soldiers of China, who are lovingly, but illegally, operating the Panama Canal (where we lost 38,000 people in its building 110 years ago), always making certain that the United States puts in Billions of Dollars in ‘repair’ money, but will have absolutely nothing to say about ‘anything,'”), troll Canada (“…Also, to Governor Justin Trudeau of Canada, whose Citizens’ Taxes are far too high, but if Canada was to become our 51st State, their Taxes would be cut by more than 60%, their businesses would immediately double in size, and they would be militarily protected like no other Country anywhere in the World. Likewise, to the people of Greenland, which is needed by the United States for National Security purposes and, who want the U.S. to be there, and we will!”), the President-Elect concluded with this:

That’s nice too.

Naturally, the Axis media contrasted Trump’s bluster with the official Christmas message from, supposedly, Joe and Jill. President Biden narrated a video tour of the White House that was posted on YouTube late on Christmas Eve. He urged Americans to set aside “all the noise and everything that divides us.” “We’re here on this Earth to care for one another, to love one another,” Biden says in a voiceover while the camera pans past the White House. Christmas decorations. “Too often we see each other as enemies, not as neighbors, not as fellow Americans,” he said. He urged Americans to find a moment of “quiet reflection” to remind themselves to treat each other with dignity and respect, to “live in the light” and remember there was more to unite than divide Americans. “We’re truly blessed to live in this nation,” he said.

Observations:

1. President Biden has some gall spouting a hypocritical message like that after calling Trump supporters “garbage” and heading the most intentionally divisive Presidential term in history culminating in the darkest Presidential campaign in history, in which one party called the other’s candidate the equivalent of Hitler and warned that he would end democracy. Too often “we” see each other as enemies? Wait, who was this guy?

Biden’s message is standard, insincere politician BS, and stinks of it. A chatbot could have written that stuff. Maybe a chatbot did. No one could hear such cliched pablum and think anything but “Yada yada, ramalama-ding-dong.”

2. It is Presidential, however. Dishonest, insulting, fatuous, infuriating, but still Presidential.

3. Trump’s message is not Presidential. It is gratuitously nasty, self-indulgent and inappropriate for a national leader’s message at Christmas. Does it have to be said that “Go to Hell” does not belong in a Christmas message not authored by the Babylon Bee or Ebenezer Scrooge?

4. Both messages are unethical. Trump’s message is inexcusable.

5. This does not bode well.

This New Law Won’t Help Joe’s Case Any…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

From the Daily Beast : “President Joe Biden signed 50 new bills into law in a Christmas Eve signing spree as he wraps his last month in office. Among the new laws includes legislation to fight child abuse at residential treatment facilities, fight hazing on college campuses, and a measure that finally designates the bald eagle as the national bird. Many of the bills signed by the outgoing Democratic president on Tuesday were bipartisan efforts—including the bill finally acknowledging the bald eagle. Although the iconic bird of prey is featured prominently on symbols, including the government’s official seal adopted in 1782, the U.S. did not have an official national bird. The efforts to make the bald eagle official were spearheaded by Preston Cook, the co-chair of the National Eagle Center in Minnesota, who first discovered that the country did not have a national bird, according to a Washington Post profile.”

Gee, thank God for President Biden! This might just be the little extra he needs to avoid being named the Worst President Ever in the upcoming Ethics Alarms resolution of its long inquiry into the question.

“Biden” also engaged in some hyper-partisanship when he vetoed the JUDGES Act, bipartisan legislation to create additional district court judgeships. The Senate passed the bill unanimously in August, and a bipartisan House majority finally did so as well in November. It would have created desperately needed 66 new district court seats over the next decade, based upon the recommendations of the Judicial Conference. The bill was endorsed by the Federal Bar Association and the Federal Judges Association. The White House issued a statement that translated means nothing more rational than “we don’t want new judges appointed by Donald Trump, so there.“

“S. 4199 would create new judgeships in States where Senators have sought to hold open existing judicial vacancies.  Those efforts to hold open vacancies suggest that concerns about judicial economy and caseload are not the true motivating force behind passage of this bill now,” the veto message stated in part. So nobody denies that the U.S. needs new judges, but Biden’s dark masters want the new positions to be created for the right motives. This is a slap at the Republican states that tried to slow down Biden’s waves of DEI appointments over the last six months.

But back to the phony national bird issue: if everyone knew the bald eagle was the de facto national bird since it was obviously the national symbol, being on the seal, on money, on flagpoles and ubiquitous for a couple of centuries, why does the species have to be the official national bird via Congress, the President, and brand new law? So many matters of real importance to try to accomplish before the end of the year: one would think that all is well.

Elon Musk’s “Wokepedia” Complaint Is Valid

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Above is pie chart reflecting the Wikipedia Foundation’s own report on how it spent its money over the past year. This arrives while every Wikipedia search is afflicted with drop-down pleas for contributions. In the categories listed above, the only ones that should be active concerns of the online search service are infrastructure and effectiveness. Equity and Inclusion are irrelevant to what people are seeking when they use Wikipedia; I’m not even sure what “safety” refers to. 29% of the budget was devoted to these dubious, discriminatory—but woke!—objectives.

Elon Musk has been issuing critical tweets about these priorities, with good reason. Wikipedia is both essential and inherently flawed and unreliable because of its vulnerability to bias and manipulation. To be a trustworthy source of information for online research, it must be closely monitored to identify agenda-driven entries and misleading statements motivated by partisan and ideological objectives. Quite simply, an organization that devoted to DEI cant cannot be trusted in this regard.

No one interested in improving Wikipedia’s accuracy and competence should give a single dollar in response to its constant pleas for money as long as almost a third of that dollar will be spend on dubious programs that, if anything, are likely to impair the service’s effectiveness rather than enhance it.

Praying For a Miracle This Christmas

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Well, several, really, but I feel that I must talk about this one. I was wrestling with whether to post anything but Christmas-related posts today, though I don’t have much else to do than work on Ethics Alarms. This compels me to comment as soon as possible.

During his keynote address at the Turning Point USA gathering three days ago, President-elect Donald Trump said, while assuring his audience that the U.S. was about to enter a new “Golden Age” under his leadership,

“There’s a spirit that we have now that we didn’t have just a short while ago. Sadly, we didn’t have. Who the hell can have spirit watching women get beat up in a boxing ring? I don’t think that’s spirit, right? We’re going to end that one quick! We’re going to end it very quickly. We’re going to end that one very quickly.”

I am resigned to Trump saying ridiculous and irresponsible things like that forever. The outburst is not a good sign. The Christmas miracle I’m hoping for (among others) is that somehow, some way, he will learn that he has to think before he speaks, just a little bit, and that someone will read the Constitution to him, explaining it along the way.

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Celebrating the 110th Anniversary of the Strange But Ethical “Christmas Truce”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

One of the weirdest events in world history took place on Christmas 1914, at the very beginning of the five year, pointless and stunningly destructive carnage of The Great War, what President Woodrow Wilson, right as usual, called “The War to End All Wars.”

World War I, as it was later called after the world war it caused succeeded it,  led to the deaths of more than 25 million people, and if anything was accomplished by this carnage, I have yet to read about it.

The much sentimentalized event was a spontaneous Christmas truce, as soldiers on opposing sides on the Western Front, defying orders from superiors, pretended the war didn’t exist and left their trenches, put their weapons and animus aside, sang carols,  shared food, buried their dead, and even played soccer against each other, as “The Christmas Truce” statue memorializes above.

The brass on both sides—this was a British and German phenomenon only—took steps to ensure that this would never happen again, and it never did.

It all began on Christmas Eve, when at 8:30 p.m. an officer of the Royal Irish Rifles reported to headquarters that “The Germans have illuminated their trenches, are singing songs and wishing us a Happy Xmas. Compliments are being exchanged but am nevertheless taking all military precautions.” The two sides progressed to serenading each other with Christmas carols, with the German combatants crooning  “Silent Night,” and the British adversaries responding with “The First Noel.“ The war diary of the Scots Guards reported that a private  “met a German Patrol and was given a glass of whisky and some cigars, and a message was sent back saying that if we didn’t fire at them, they would not fire at us.”

The same deal was struck spontaneously at other locales across the battlefield. Another British soldier reported that as Christmas Eve wound down into Christmas morning,  “all down our line of trenches there came to our ears a greeting unique in war: ‘English soldier, English soldier, a merry Christmas, a merry Christmas!’” He wrote in a letter home that he heard,

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Tales of “White Christmas”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I didn’t expect a white Christmas in Northern Virginia this morning, and there wasn’t one. It’s a good thing too: a snow-covered vista would have probably made me cry, and that’s been happening too often this holiday season. (My mother, who made up Christmas traditions and legends as an avocation, once told my sister and me that it was bad luck for the whole year to come if you cried on Christmas.) The song “White Christmas” is supposed to make you cry, however, or at least get a bit misty.

I co-wrote two Christmas revues for my late, lamented (by me, anyway) professional theater company in Arlington, Virginia, The American Century Theater. The most popular of the two was called “If Only In My Dreams,” taken from the lyrics of another wistful Christmas song, “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” by lyricist Kim Gannon and composer Walter Kent and introduced by Bing Crosby in 1943. The show was constructed around the letters written by GIs overseas during World War II to their families or  girlfriends as Christmas loomed, alternating those stories with narration and the popular Christmas songs of the period.

The most famous and important of these songs was, of course, “White Christmas.” Bing Crosby’s version was the best selling single record of all time for half a century. When Irving Berlin handed the song over to the musician who transcribed his melodies (Irv could not read music and composed by ear, just like another brilliant and prolific tune-smith, Paul McCartney), he  famously announced that he had written, not just the best song he had ever written, but the best song that anyone had ever written.  Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Month: Ken Wells

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“So imagine, instead of embracing the Great Satan narrative, we covered Trump—warts and all—as an extraordinary American political phenomenon perhaps not seen since the populist presidency of Andrew Jackson. Do not mistake this as a call to absolve Trump of any actual wrongdoing or to go soft on the reporting. Instead it is a plea to instill some sense of balance and fairness in the coverage. Surely, I’m not alone in believing this approach would have given readers and listeners a far more nuanced and valuable view of the American mood and Trump’s appeal and staying power—and perhaps helped to stanch the public’s corrosive loss of trust in our craft.  And at any rate, if the lopsided coverage of Trump was, in fact, a strategy to destroy him, well, it’s proved a huge flop. Trump won. Much of the media was or should be embarrassed.”

—–Retired Wall Street Journal editor Ken Wells in A Retro Proposal to Restore The Public’s Trust in Media,” his guest column in “Ethics and Journalism.”

The “retro proposal”? Journalists have become “blinded by their inability—or worse, unwillingness—to see past their biases. This is not journalism. It’s propagandism.” Therefore, he says, “I invite journalists to re-embrace our agnostic roots. We need to return to being the adults in the room, unabashedly reaffirm our role as the honest broker. No political party, business interest, government entity or activist group owns the truth. Everybody has a motive and an agenda, sources and leakers especially. Truth-tellers can sometimes lie and liars can sometimes tell the truth. Our job is to sort through the noise and bickering, the claims and counter-claims, the data and the chaff, to parse issues honestly without regard to whom it may offend or please or what the dominant narrative insists upon.”

I think Wells means what used to be called ethical, responsible journalism. Gee, what a concept!

Read it all, but here are a few more excerpts from an excellent essay:

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The 2024 Ethics Companion To “Miracle On 34th Street” [Updated, Expanded and with a New Introduction]

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

2024 Introduction

When I look back on what I wrote to introduce the greatest of all Christmas movies last year, I almost have to laugh, if I could laugh.

“What makes ‘Miracle on 34th Street” the most appropriate classic Christmas film for 2023 is its theme: the importance of conquering cynicism and  pessimism, and always keeping one’s mind and heart open to hope…. I know my year has been especially miserable on multiple fronts. Nonetheless, I remain, at heart, about 12 years old. The same things make me laugh; my level of optimism remains high; I believe in this nation’s miraculous ability to somehow get out of the fixes it gets itself into; I’m still a romantic, and, yes, I think with a little luck and one more starting pitcher, the Boston Red Sox can make it to the World Series next year. I am being constantly confronted with old friends, some much younger than me, who have suddenly decided to be old: they think old, they act old, and they seem to have given up the future as irrelevant. The Santa Claus myth represents faith in the possible, or rather the impossible. Yes, its easier when you are a child, but it is worth the fight to never lose the part of you that still believes in magic and miracles.”

What a joke on me. My wife died unexpectedly in February. Hidden financial horrors were uncovered that she had been hiding from me. My son decided he was trans; a lot of those friends who were acting old ended up acting dead, and rather convincingly. I lost my last connection to my mother’s family when Aunt Bea died at 96; my mentor and Most Unforgettable Person, Tom Donohue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, died as well; one of my closest lawyer clients died too. Another loss that I felt: Luis Taint, the Boston Red Sox pitcher who was at the center of some of my most cherished baseball memories, died this year. A big theatrical project I had been working on for six months was abruptly cancelled (the theater was condemned as structurally unsound). Worst of all, the Red Sox had a star-crossed, frustrating season: if there’s anything worse than watching baseball alone, it’s watching your team lose alone.

Indeed, I do, as Auntie Mame sang, “need a little Christmas,”  but it is very little indeed this year. Luckily for me, there’s a song for that: “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” from “Meet Me in St. Louis.”

So the Christmas movies are about it for me this holiday season. I’ve seen “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “White Christmas,” my favorite version of “A Christmas Carol,” “The Santa Clause,” and even “Holiday Inn.” (No, “Die Hard” and “Die Hard 2” are not “Christmas Movies.) “Elf” doesn’t make the cut; I suppose that I’ll see “A Christmas Story” eventually, though I am sick of it, and Grace’s complaints about Melinda Dillon’s hair haunt me. I will revisit “Home Alone” and “Home Alone 2.” I’m saving “Miracle on 34th Street” for tonight, Christmas Eve.

I confess, I believed n Santa Claus until I was 12. I didn’t want to give the fantasy up: I loved magic, and my parents always tried to make the season magical. (More of that later.) Grace and I tried to do the same with Grant, now “Samantha,” but he was a non-believer by the third grade. Is there anything more joyful to see than the look on a child’s face as he or she sees what Santa has delivered? Will anything feel that wonderful again?

“Miracle on 34th Street” is an ethics movie in part because its artists committed to telling a magical story and charming audiences by working as an ensemble selflessly and  efficiently. The director,  George Seaton also  wrote the screenplay, and it won him an Oscar. He cast his movie brilliantly, and making the correct but bold decision to stick with a matter-of-fact, realistic, unadorned style that keeps the story grounded in reality while it spins off into fantasy.

“Miracle on 34th Street” is about the importance of believing in good things, hopeful things, even impossible things. The movie reminds us that wonderful things can happen even when they seem impossible, and that life is better when we believe that every day of our lives. I’m trying.

One thing this film does well is to concentrate on the secular holiday without any allusions to the religious holy day, but not being obnoxious about it. “It’s a Wonderful Life” straddles the line very cleverly: it begins in heaven, after all. All the “A Christmas Carol” films include Bob Cratchit telling his wife that Tiny Tim mused about how his disability reminded people of Jesus’s miracles at Christmastime, and that’s Dickens’ only reference to Jesus in his story. On the offensive side is the Rankin-Bass animated “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”—I can’t believe they still show that thing—when the “stormy Christmas Eve” causes Santa to decide to “cancel Christmas.” I’d say that’s above Santa’s pay grade, wouldn’t you agree? It also suggests that Christmas is only about gifts and children. (Do parents today explain that the singing snowman who narrates the story is based on (and looks like) the real person who also sings the most memorable songs? They should. Burl Ives had a fascinating life and a varied career, and those kids will probably be hearing him sing “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” for the rest of theirs.

Last year I discussed the many remakes and the fact that they all fail to equal the original. I wonder why this, of all the Christmas classics, has inspired so many remakes. Nobody would dare remake “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I think it’s because the story connects with children as well as adults, and there is a sense that a black and white movie very obviously set in the 1940s seems too distant. 

Interestingly, all of the perennial Christmas movies have been made into stage musicals of varying success—“White Christmas,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “A Christmas Story,” “Elf”—- but “Miracle on 34th Street” flopped so badly when Meredith Willson [“The Music Man”] adapted it as “Here’s Love” on Broadway that nobody has tried again. The show included the song, “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” which Willson wrote long before the show was assembled, and it was still the best song in the weak score. At one point John Payne took over the part of Fred Gailey, reprising his role in the film. But as with all the movie remakes, the show missed Edmund Gwynn, the best Kris Kringle of them all.
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