Being surrounded by raging, reflecting pool-obsessed people seems to be driving everyone around them nuts as well.
A 47-year-old woman was playing pickleball with a man on May 31 at 10 a.m. when they had an argument over who was supposed to get the ball. Subsequent to the game and the dispute, the woman, a registered nurse, jumped between her adversary and her son, who were arguing over the game and the man’s behavior. She then began throttling the man on the head and face with her racket, ostensibly to “protect her son.” She was charged with using “a weapon that can cause serious bodily injury or death,” which is a felony.
It’s crazy out there and getting crazier. Be careful. If pickleball isn’t safe, what is?
Meanwhile:
1. The rest of the story: As I expected but was hoping to be wrong, the 90% woke members of the legal ethics listserv responded to the same hypothesis I posted here with insults, ridicule, denial and ignorance. I particularly upset the mob when I told an angry California lawyer that he comments on alcoholism indicated that she didn’t know what she was talking about, because she didn’t. (She kept referring to “recovered alcoholics” as if the illness can be cured. It can’t, and everyone educated about the disease, including sufferers, know it.) Another wrote that I was “insulting” and “discriminatory” for even raising the topic, and that she wanted me banned from the listserv. (As we know, censorship is the last refuge of those who are out of facts.) I wasn’t banned, but the group’s president contacted me last night and warned me that I had been “disrespectful” because, for example, I pronounced a group of ethicists metaphorically sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting “Nananana I can’t hear you!” damning. So now the list can insult me and denigrate my position while I am effectively silenced…and that’s what they are doing. The freak-out is because alcoholic lawyers are victims, see, and need to be protected like all other “differently-abled” people. The fact, and it is a fact, that an alcoholic lawyer who does not duly inform clients of their enhanced risks when they retain him is setting those clients up for a potential disaster doesn’t trouble these hypocrites one bit. The myth is that the ethics rules exists to protect the public. They really protect lawyers by creating the illusion that the legal establishment polices its members.
I’ll keep monitoring the listserv to track emerging legal ethics issues, but I’m through trying to stimulate discussion or commenting there.The Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers is overwhelmingly partisan, biased, dominated by California lawyers, and hostile to non-conforming positions.
2. Oh…if you are wondering, alcoholic surgeons are similarly handled in kid-glove ways that reflect denial by the medical profession and that put patients at an unnecessary risk. As with alcoholic lawyers, it is considered cruel and unfeeling to hold that an alcoholic surgeon should not be permitted to practice without being tested for alcohol before every procedure if not being removed from that role completely. If you read carefully, this page makes it clear why alcoholics pose an inherent risk in sensitive jobs: “most addicted physicians have high levels of denial and are usually not receptive to interventions from colleagues.” In other words, they try to cover-up their disability and will often lie. As with all enabling groups like my legal ethics colleagues, the medical professionals deliberately blur the issue by lumping alcoholism in with other addictions. This is in the same class as confounding illegal immigration with immigration, has similar motivations.
Ethics Alarms 
I know this is a stereotype, but in my experience with nurses (knowing multiple personally and just general experience) and the plethora of Tik Tok videos and such that nurses have posted, I am surprised not at all by this.
“Nurse Ratched, I presume?”
#3: I might bet the trigger for Starmer’s pressured removal was still not the general predation of islamists in Britain, but the Henry Nowak case
Were the pickleball brawlers partners???
No! Singles pickleball.
I’m just confused then. The only disagreements I’ve seen over whose ball it was to get are between partners.
Between opponents the rules are pretty clear about who gets the ball.
Were they arguing about a wild hit over a fence or something?
I have no idea whatsoever. I didn’t understand the “who gets the ball” issue and the accounts didn’t make that clear.
Wait. Pickleball has “who gets the balls” rules? Huh. Who knew?
jvb
I mean, in regular play, you get the ball on your side of the net. After a play is done, society says you get the ball on your side of the net.
Sure. But that is just common decency and good sports . . . erm . . . person . . . ship.
jvb
She was counting on the fact that as a nurse she could respond to any injury the victim may sustain.
When people show you who they really are, believe them.
Oh no.
Not Tucker.
Hope I rolled my eyes hard enough for yall to hear.
About point 2, are alcoholic doctors protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act? Same about alcoholic lawyers. My understanding is that under ADA airlines cannot fire alcoholic pilots but have to accommodate “recovering” pilots rather than fire them. Same holds for ship captains. The captain of the Exxon Valdez during the 1989 oil spill, struggled with alcoholism prior to the disaster. While he had previously received treatment for alcohol abuse, documents revealed he had been drinking heavily in waterfront bars just hours before the ship ran aground.
I think that ADA has warped ethics regarding alcoholism as it has created “Damned if you don’t, damned if you do” scenarios; in those type of scenarios ethics has takes a backseat to legal calculations regarding minimizing the financial exposure due to lawsuits, accidents etc.
I almost found myself in a pickleball incident last week. Was stopped in traffic as I was waiting for the person in front of me to turn left into a driveway. A young woman rear-ends me. We get out, see that each other are okay. I call police, she calls her mom. Mom shows up first and starts yelling at me like I did something wrong. Says her husbands a cop and she’s calling her lawyer.
I’m like…lady, I just want the police report so I can file with the insurance. You don’t need to be here.
Cop made it worse when he showed up. Apparently, she wasn’t lying about her husband. The cop wasn’t him, but was a family friend. Even went up and hugged her. Fortunately, the daughter stated the truth. That could have gotten ugly fast.
I’ve been thinking recently about that quote…. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
There are things I don’t understand. And when I come across one, I try to figure it out.
I asked myself “How does an internal combustion engine work?” I didn’t know, I assume most people don’t. Fuel is mixed with air in the cylinder, then compressed and ignited by the spark plug, and the resulting explosion provides mechanical force to the piston. But even if they don’t know it now, it’s still a relatively simple enough concept that a person could ask the question, go to Google, and get a passable answer…. Or just listen to me.
But there are more complex questions. I barely understand how a computer works. Coding makes sense to me, but the actual mechanics of how data is stored and accessed flummoxes me. I get the basics about binary and bits, but I think the scale and scope of how many switches there are, how small they are, how often they move and the speed in which they relay breaks down in my cognition. The precision is incredible. The number of moving parts behind the blinking of the cursor that marks where I’m typing is humbling.
If I was the last man at the end of the world, with enough time, material, tools and manuals, I could probably figure out how to mill an engine and refine fuel… Computers would be lost to humanity. I like to think that I’m a relatively intelligent, moderately curious individual, but there are things that are still magic out there for me. “It’s because that’s why”, as Bobby Finn would say. But maybe it’s not important for me to be able to grasp that magic, or be able to replicate it, maybe it’s good enough for me to do what I’m good at, let engineers do what they’re good at, and bask in the results.
The problems are that this scales, and that there are things out there that are slightly more controversial than the inner workings of a computer chip, but still above the cognition levels of a material portion of the population. We saw that with vaccines… It’s possible to ask questions like “What is a vaccine?”, “What are the risks associated with taking a vaccine?”, “Is there a benefit for me to take this vaccine?” or “What’s the story behind Ivermectin?” and find fairly digestible, honest answers. But people weren’t doing that exercise, and I can’t tell whether it was because they were incapable or lazy, but the result for either would be the same. This isn’t even just a shot at anti-vaxxers (although it’s that too); The people way out over their skis lying to people out of a combination of fear and authoritarianism were doing the exact same thing: They didn’t know what they were talking about, they weren’t seeking answers to the questions, they were either just straight up making shit up, or listening to people who were.
And once you see that pattern, the replication happens again and again and again… Right now the one that’s really bothering me, and has been for a couple of years, are the economic arguments. These are my bread and butter, so it’s the most in my face, but there are others. Recessions, inflation, cost of living, tariffs, demand, supply… All of these things are important, they are all relatively understandable. But as opposed to asking the questions and understanding what the forces in play are, how they interact with policy, and why some things might work better than others, I find that people are settling into a familiar pattern of behavior where they separate among partisan lines, and shout the most extreme versions of a set of bumper-stickery policy slogans at each other. And it’s frustrating, because the institutions, the experts, the computer engineers, from my chip example… They seem just as captured as anyone else. I don’t know whether the honest actors can’t find a platform, or there’s none left, but it’s like we can’t live in a shared reality with other people because sometimes reality will disadvantage our position, and the tribal politics is more important than truth.
I am bone weary of the constant, petty shittiness. If we can’t figure out a way to live in reality, if we can’t be curious enough to seek truth and accept the reality of what that truth is… We’re fucked. There is a reliability crisis… We can’t control that people who lie to us end up in positions of power, but we need to stop believing the people who lie to us, once they’ve been proven to be liars. We need to stop rewarding them for their grifts. We need to hold them accountable. We need to ask questions and do our level best to seek answers. Otherwise, eventually, the competent experts will die out, they’ll be replaced by people that can’t do the thing, and we’ll lose it.
I know this isn’t really your point but…
Refining fuel, if you don’t care about the EPA or OSHA is pretty simple. Just don’t breathe your fumes. If you want to refine fuel the way we do today, one man can’t do it on his own. Frankly, instead of studying the ICE, diesel is a better engine to study as the diesel engine runs on different principles and if it’s an older diesel engine, can run on more fuels than diesel, as long as you are reasonably mechanically savvy and don’t mind occasionally fixing parts. If you are considering trying to refine your own fuel for fun, I caution against it as the refining process is quite hazardous, and if you make too many mistakes, that internal combustion engine will rather quickly become an external combustion engine and kinetically disassemble.
I think it is actually very difficult to learn about the vast numbers of things we take for granted. Nearly everything has been politicized. I know of people in a variety of fields who have been silenced for saying the “incorrect” thing.
You point to vaccinations as an area where people could study. A nurse of my acquaintance, whom I trust very much, gave me some things to read about the new formulations on certain specific (not all) vaccines. When asking questions about it, since I don’t just want to jump on the anti-vax bandwagon and need more data to make an educated decision, I was either told, “well, it’s your choice” or “if you don’t, you are a horrible human being”. Privately, one of the “well it’s your choice” people said she has the same questions and doesn’t have answers, but could get fired if she doesn’t push the vaccines. How am I to get information on this problem if no one will talk to me about what may not be related facts? I eventually just went with my gut and hope it was the right choice.
Very few experts are worth trusting anymore because for any position you hold and quote experts for, I can find equally qualified folks that hold the exact opposite opinion. Therefore, I agree with your conclusion, we are screwed, but disagree that curiosity and acceptance of answers is helpful to society as a whole, because for so many things, it is nearly impossible to find the right answer and too many people have begun to get in the way of finding that answer.
Sarah wrote ” . . . if you make too many mistakes, that internal combustion engine will rather quickly become an external combustion engine and kinetically disassemble.”
That is the funniest thing I have read in a while. I am stealing ” . . . kinetically disassemble.” Yes, I am.
jvb
I sincerely hope it never comes to that, but if it does, I’ll keep that in mind.
As to the rest. I don’t know. During the pandemic, we did the best we could with what we knew at the time. I was reading constantly, there was precious else to do, and while I didn’t get everything right, I am thoroughly proud of how accurate what I was writing at the time ended up being. I don’t feel like it was impossible, or even particularly difficult, to find the information I needed, but your mileage may vary.
But we’re also five years out from the peak, and it’s amazing to me how many people who were just dead wrong continue to believe things that are not true. They never asked the questions, they never sought the answers, they never held the people who misled them accountable. And worse is that they followed some of those people from that topic to others, in this stupid spiral of being perpetually behind the curve on damn near everything. The number of people who look to people like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, or Brett Weinstein for cues is depressing.
I would add Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg and whole cast of The View (whose* view, by the way?), Jim Acosta, Rachel Maddow and her wannabe look-alike Chris Hayes (I have wanted to throttle that sniveling little prick since the first time I watched him), Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski to that list of repellent individuals.
jvb
*Ed. Note: For some reason, that doesn’t look right. Why can’t this author wrap his feeble, Dr. Pepper deprived brain around proper grammar rules? Aughghghghghghghgh!!!
“The myth is that the ethics rules exist to protect the public. They really protect lawyers by creating the illusion that the legal establishment polices its members.”
I learned this in spades. I sued my former firm to recoup my “buy-in” when I left the firm for another situation that would give me more control of my practice. Ultimately, the Arizona Supreme Court decided firms being able to protect themselves was more important than letting individual lawyers who actually do the clients’ work find situations where they could best serve their clients’ interests. I think most judges are biased in favor of large firms. The judges seem to think the large firms maintain standards in the profession. To which I would answer, “Yes and no,” but they sure watch out for their pockets.