This rueful Comment of the Day arrived like manna from Heaven. I was cogitating about how we hadn’t had an “echo chamber” complaint on Ethics Alarms in a while, especially if we don’t count “Marisa’s” immortal “five commenters” snark. My mind went to that issue in part because I was marveling on how conservative Jonathan Turley’s commentariate had become, though he has always been described as a liberal, Democrat law professor, as almost all of the are. Most of the progressive and Trump-Deranged comments on his posts are anonymous (which I don’t allow) and also usually don’t deal with the post, but just regurgitate anti-Trump taking points. Jonathan need start moderating his comments.
Ann Althouse’s blog has evolved similarly. The few resolute progressive regulars are well-known by name, like the infamous “Inga,” but the vast majority of the former U. of Wisconsin law prof are conservative, though Ann insists that she is “fiercely” non-ideological.
I attribute the lament of EA’s house contrarian below to three factors.
1 Since 2016, Democrats, progressives, “the Resistance” and the their captive institutions have gone bonkers, abandoned ethics, and as a result, the bulk of criticism here has been aimed at their words and conduct, and appropriately so. I am as sick of this as anyone else, but it’s sure not my fault, and as an objective analyst I can’t pretend it is other than it is in the pursuit of “balance.”
2. The courageous, idealistic but annoying stance of some here that all points of view deserve respect and debate is periodically bracing, but in the case of many issues the myth involves literal denial of reality for various and generally unethical reasons. Illegal immigration is not defensible, and laws should not be cancelled by disobedience rather than legislative action. Open borders are by definition suicidal. The mainstream news media is biased in favor of the Left, and clearly so. Banning guns is unwise as well as impossible. Hate speech is constitutionally protected (and so is same sex marriage). Israel has not only a right but an obligation to end Hamas. DEI is repackaged racial and gender discrimination. The Democrats’ pursuit of Donald Trump was politically motivated and has destroyed an important bulwark of our democracy. The Joe Biden senility cover-up was among the worst and most dangerous political scandals in U.S. history. I could go on; the point is that I didn’t arrive at these conclusions and others because of any party affiliation. I arrived at them through strict ethical analysis, legal principles, and historical perspective, adjusting for bias. This is a hard time to be a loyal Democrat or a committed progressive, because so many of your positions have been proven to be wrong, and so many of your leaders have been exposed as hypocrites and frauds. I’m just reacting to reality. I feel bad for you, just as I felt bad for my Republican friends when the Religious Right, Tom Delay and assorted crooks and knaves made the GOP impossible to defend in good conscience.
3. When I was a fellow at the Ethics Resource Center in Washington, D.C, I argued vigorously that the organization, which calls itself “a source of information and guidance for ethics and compliance professionals everywhere,” needed to take stands on national issues with ethical implications, including corporate misconduct. Their response taught me a lot about the field. The organization wouldn’t take a black and white stand even when it was an easy call because it was afraid to alienate potential donors, board members and political allies. I vowed then and I retake that vow now that I will never accept that limitation, that indeed I view it unethical to do so. In both the Ethics Scoreboard (RIP) and Ethics Alarms, I have always tried to spawn discussion and enlightenment by taking strong positions, sometimes, I admit, more strongly than my true opinion justified, because I don’t think wishy-washy posts encourage dissent.
I have more to say on this topic, but the intro to Here’s Johnny‘s Comment of the Day on the post, I Am Increasingly Reaching The Conclusion That We Can’t Trust Anyone, “Experts,” Researchers and Scientists Included: My Dan Ariely Disillusionmentis too long already. So Heeeeeeere’s Johnny!
Ethics Alarms 
This is not high school. Praise Allah! I went to high school and taught high school. High school kids are empty vessels. They know absolutely nothing. Some come from good home situations, other come from rough home situations. I’ve analogized the EA commentariat to a good undergraduate level discussion section. Super enjoyable. As much intellectual fun as I’ve had since graduating from college. Oftentimes, the EA commentariat migrates into intellectual combat, much like the practice of law. So what. People are competitive.
I truly miss the interaction with kids whose minds were much more questioning than assertive. Again, they were empty vessels and therefore receptive to anything because all you had to do was pour it in. Something I refused to do. Doing so would have been educational malpractice.
There is no doubt; we missed each other, mostly, and I still miss them, because they were willing to consider other viewpoints. I.e., they were readily manipulable. I taught English and The Old Testament. The only question I had to ask the kids was, “What’s the author saying?” The material could take it from there.
Sounds like we had very different teaching experiences, OB. I was fortunate in having a great deal of freedom in how I covered the essential learning objectives. Often enough, an ’empty vessel’ would come up with a perceptive and penetrating question, causing me to set aside the lesson plan as we examined the issue that now was on the kids’ minds.
Here’s Johnny wrote:
We raise a legitimate objection, and it is immediately dismissed so we can move on and lambaste the next blatherer.
This is called, “debate.” Not every objection is legitimate in the eyes of every person. And yes, sometimes those rejecting the objection are simply blinded to its legitimacy by bias.
But calling a debating point “legitimate” as if it were holy writ is not an ethical position — points must be defended, or they might be presumed invalid whatever their merits. And on any blog of this sort, there are going to be people who disagree with you because you are you, and their default position is opposition. Again, that’s part of it.
Your complaint here, in my view, is invalid on many levels but the most fundamental of which is the implication that you get to judge legitimacy and nobody may challenge your judgment. As your complaint clearly indicates, this strategy has virtually no chance here.
This is not high school. I truly miss the interaction with kids whose minds were much more questioning than assertive.
Having never taught, I will accept this premise as true for the sake of argument because of your experience. I’m sure it goes without saying, though, that this is a place for adults, and many adults have formed very strong opinions about the subjects at issue. Wishing they would show childlike curiosity is not only a strange position, but foolishly naive. No matter the merits of such a questioning attitude, the real world, and not just this limited window into it, makes your wish unlikely to be fulfilled.
So, I’m on a break from here. I’ll look in occasionally to decide if I’m on a break, or if I am retired from this site which now seems to me to be mostly, and fatally, one-sided.
It’s no bad thing to come and go, I know I do it a lot. There are lots of things I like to do, and debating on the Internet is not in the top three.
Having said that, your point about this place being fatally one-sided is, in my opinion, incorrect. Jack writes a number of observations that I disagree with, sometimes strongly. Most often, I don’t feel strongly enough about it to write anything because I know I will have to engage in a protracted debate, which is only fair. Bottom line — I am too lazy to defend my position, and on here you must; it is not optional.
But that’s just me. In my view, though, your claim that this place is one-sided is simply a biased position that ignores the facts, and in my opinion you are being thin-skinned and petulant in this comment. That is a poor combination for a current events/opinion blog.
Glenn, you have the patience of Job. As usual, you deserve a gold star.
Why, thank you sir!
This is not high school. I truly miss the interaction with kids whose minds were much more questioning than assertive.
My wife likes to remind me that when determining whether I’m truly funny and likeable, I do not get to count the people to whom I pay a salary.
It drastically affects my analysis, unfortunately.
‘immediately dismissed’ — well, I phrased that poorly, so that I didn’t say what I meant. My concern was about the pressure to move on to the next issue, and the next, some of which I saw as unethical blatherers not worth moving on to. My ‘legitimate objections’ (as I saw them) were not dismissed; countered would be the right word. Your comments rightly push me in the direction of reflection and self-analysis. Thank you, Glen.
“Israel has not only a right but an obligation to end Hamas.”
There are 7 millions Arabs and 7 millions of Jews (Israelis) within the present area comprising Israel. And no one of all of them is going anywhere. So, many Jews of the Diaspora, and some perhaps in Israel (certainly not many) begin to propose that the only solution for modern Israel is to incorporate everyone now in that land into one state. The corresponding example, if indeed it shall be referred to, is South Africa: forced by the international pressure of the entire world to end the apartheid arrangement — seen as ‘utterly evil’ and etc. — world-opinion brought it about. What I find curious is that such an idea, and such a solution, is immediately taken as ‘impossible’ and also as ridiculous right from the start. (The concept of a Jewish state is, naturally, deeply problematic, as is “Jewish identity’ based, strictly as it is, on race-identity.
(And I speak as one … though I definitely do not longer ‘identify’).
I am unsure who grants the *right* that you refer to, it certainly could not be the Supreme Being, yet you present it as an absolute from which there can be no detraction. I am not complaining about your certainty, just noticing. (It occurs to me that you might be speaking very limitedly of *Hamas* specifically but I rather imagine you are speaking of all opposition to Israel (?) and possibly the political solution I am outlining here.
The way that Israel has developed has certainly been strange and confusing, but beyond any question ethically complex and also involving criminality. And getting clear about right and wrong (about the entire project) is not anything easy. But there are some analyses (and by notable Israelis I should say) who examine the question of *rights* from an angle wider than the one you seem to take.
Presently, and according to varied analyzers, Israel is a deeply troubling problem and it has also deeply embroiled the US in extremely consequential ethical issues.
The right to self-defense is nearly universal.
Suppose Native Americans began launching rockets from reservations into nearby American towns and cities. Americans would be screaming for the U.S. government to stop them, right? Does the United States have the right to exist, even if, as Billie Eilish pointed out , we’re all on stolen land (and so is, apparently, Billie Eilish’s house)? Do we have the right to defend ourselves against terrorism, especially unremitting terrorism?
The nation of Israel has the right to exist. This is a right that most of its neighbors refuse to acknowledge and to which the U.N. only pays lip service. It abandoned the occupied territories for twenty years before the 10/7 attack by Hamas which has demonstrated that it will not stop attacking Israelis while, at the same time, courting world sympathy for the casualties it caused itself.
Had I followed the will of my tribe and heritage I’d be married to an ultra-Orthodox and possibly be living in a Haredi shtetl. Aren’t you glad that I rejected both race and such religious identity? 🙂
Not the place to discuss the problematics of Israel, my only point is that as an ethical and political problem it is certainly not as settled as Jack seems to think.
It is. Same principle as Pearl Harbor: you launch a deadly sneak attack on a sovereign state, you have started a war, and the war continues until the government/group/ individual who was responsible surrenders, is defeated and wiped out, or dead. Why the sneak attack was launched is 100% irrelevant ethically. And the fates of civilians/ womwn/children who perish or suffer as a result of a war so launched are 100% the responsibility of the aggressors. It IS simple.
Israel was by the virtue of its establishment and the crimes and displacements it carried out at the founding, forever in an untenable, and perhaps unsolvable position. I agree: it could not do other than to counter attack. But it is now stuck evermore in a type of historical trap that is oh-so-Judaic. (All-too-Judaic).
The problem of Israel is still there, more serious, less solved. It is in all of this that the problematic has not diminished.
And the whole issue of America being “Israel’s bitch” (not my term but one that is common) is in reased even more.
The nation of Israel has the right to exist. This is a right that most of its neighbors refuse to acknowledge and to which the U.N. only pays lip service. It abandoned the occupied territories for twenty years before the 10/7 attack by Hamas which has demonstrated that it will not stop attacking Israelis while, at the same time, courting world sympathy for the casualties it caused itself.
I submit this paragraph as an example for at the very least a potential example of what Here’sJohnny is protesting about: fixed positions, presented as absolutes, which seem to allow no alternative perspectives.
Good grief. You can’t really be serious, can you? How does any “fixed position, presented as an absolute” by our host (or by any of the five commenters here) in any way “seem to allow no alternative perspective?”
I have a brain that can form an alternative perspective if necessary, and fingers that can type it into WordPress and commit it to these pages, and by extension to the Internet. You have a brain as well. So does “Here’s Johnny”…and so does every other individual that comes here. Any position presented here – fixed or otherwise – can be challenged.
The real problem is this: in general, the Left is so secure in it’s delusion of ideological superiority that any challenge to it is considered “intolerance that allows no alternative perspective.” Why do you think 95% of the liberal commenters…no…99% have abandoned Ethics Alarms? Because of Jack’s inflexibility? Absolutely not. In most cases it was the liberal commenters who couldn’t stand anyone taking any form of conservative/Republican/pro-Trump stance on pretty much any issue. That behavior, right there, is the perfect definition of a “fixed position that seems to allow no alternative perspective.”
Good grief. You can’t really be serious, can you?
I am serious in respect to the specific issue I brought up.
The real problem is this: in general, the Left is so secure in it’s delusion of ideological superiority that any challenge to it is considered “intolerance that allows no alternative perspective.” Why do you think 95% of the liberal commenters…no…99% have abandoned Ethics Alarms? Because of Jack’s inflexibility? Absolutely not. In most cases it was the liberal commenters who couldn’t stand anyone taking any form of conservative/Republican/pro-Trump stance on pretty much any issue. That behavior, right there, is the perfect definition of a “fixed position that seems to allow no alternative perspective.”
The Left of the present time is, as far as my own research has uncovered, hardly comparable to the Left of just a few decades back. It requires numerous essays to define how far into bizarre, indefensible territory the present Left has gone. And I agree: their perspectives are ‘totalizing’. And when you do not agree, they cancel you ands try to do you maximum harm.
In many ways the present Right has adopted stances that are or were more in line with the former Left! One primary example is simply that the traditional Left has never been in favor of uncontrolled immigration because it weakened the position of the American worker and did harm to the ‘working family’. Fact.
My own view in regard to: “In most cases it was the liberal commenters who couldn’t stand anyone taking any form of conservative/Republican/pro-Trump stance on pretty much any issue“, I do not find it useful to remain fixed in the binary that you have established. Yes, the Left of the present is quite deranged (and the reasons for derangement are complex), but in no sense does this vindicate what you refer to as the “conservative/Republican/pro-Trump” faction. Put simply, if blatantly, Trump is a nut-case and a dangerous figure to place into him our trust. If one praises him one must do it with extreme care.
And most of the people he gathered around him may well be deranged in their own weird ways and end up doing ‘more harm than good’. Also, it was the Republican establishment — the WSJ class to use a convenient term — that ‘gutted’ US industries and sent the fabrication-centers to China and elsewhere. And they are the class that openly advocated for *open borders* because it is always in the interests of that class to have lots of cheap labor and employees easy to manipulate. So the analysis, the sober and sane analysis, as to how and why things have got the point they are now, and the social fabric begins to disintegrate: that requires an extremely careful analysis, not a partisan one.
I’m not talking about Trump, or Trumpian policies, or who supported illegal immigration when.
What I am doing is questioning your contention that assertions by Jack – or by the commenting universe here – somehow “seem to allow no alternative perspective.”
Try making a “conservative” perspective on Bluesky and see what happens. There is FAR more flexibility and willingness to discuss/debate here than there…and it’s not even close.
Regarding the Palestinians and Israel, there is no alternate perspective supported by fact and history. Israel didn’t take its territory, it was returned to them by a remorseful world that had allowed the Holocaust to happen…plus the world, being largely anti-Jew, liked the idea of having as many as possible in one place (in a dessert!) Lincoln was essentially in favor of a similar solution to the slave “problem.”
Sure, the Palestinians had a reason to be furious, but were the Jews supposed to reject the land? Go back to Germany and the other countries that had betrayed them? Then in 1948 the whole mess could have been resolved, but the Palestinians held their breath til they turned blue, rejected the state the UN offered them, and have spent almost 80 years making sure that hatred of Israel is so ingrained in their culture that they will NEVER accept that Israel has a right to exist.
That is completely the fault of Palestinian leadership. Not Israel. The only way the pro-Palestinian position is tenable is if one ignores what happened in 1948 and the inevitable results of the stupid, petulant,futile, destructive effort to poison its people with hatred of the Jews and to blame them for what they had guaranteed and within their grasp almost 80 years ago.
What I am doing is questioning your contention that assertions by Jack – or by the commenting universe here – somehow “seem to allow no alternative perspective.”
Try making a “conservative” perspective on Bluesky and see what happens. There is FAR more flexibility and willingness to discuss/debate here than there…and it’s not even close.
I only challenged or questioned one particular statement Jack has made: specifically about Israel. My view is that to understand the issue fully one must take a great deal more into consideration than merely “Hamas attacked” on that particular date and that Israel counter-attacked. He offered a sort of reduction and compared Hamas attack as like that of Japan on Pearl Harbor. Yes, it could be framed in that way, but that would be an ‘incomplete analysis’. (Etc. etc. but this is not the place for a detailing examination and Israel is almost too contentious a topic).
I do not know what BlueSky is, and I have no advantage in making comparisons (and note that in fact I subscribe to even more radical forms of conservatism than does Jack, at least in some areas).
So Jack’s assertion, which you thought was “present as absolutes” and “seemed to allow no alternative perspective,” can still be challenged or questioned…and you can offer your view (or alternative perspective) on the subject.
You’ve made my point. Thank you.
Long ago, Mrs. Zechman and I had a series of arguments where she accused me of “not being supportive” because I disagreed with her on something and wouldn’t just go along with what she was saying or suggesting.
This prompted the creation of yet another Dwayne-ism:
“If we disagree on something, I AM entitled to take my OWN side of the disagreement.”
I think that’s super-close to what’s happening here. Jack is the host presenting the news story that prompts the ethical discussion, but he’s also actively taking part in the discussion, more often than not taking a position and presenting his argument for it.
As such, he’s allowed to take his own side on the issue and doing so isn’t a declaration that argument is not allowed. On the contrary, he’s inviting the argument–but so too is he going to push back.
The push-back doesn’t make him a tyrant; it just means he’s right down here in the ring with us.
–Dwayne
While I appreciate the recognition of a COTD, and while I am loathe to question our host on such a designation, my perception is that this is a bit like the article that made the front page solely because of what a newspaper editor would call a slow news day.
Thank you, Jack.
Not at all, HJ. 1) There is never a slow news day in Ethics Land, and 2) it was a well-articulated point of view on an important issue for the blog.