I’m training a new Clarence Darrow for my legal ethics seminar employing many of Darrow’s Greatest Hits, and met him at his apartment in Arlington, VA. There is usually street parking which now is a absurdly 1) expensive and 2) automated, but as we all should know by now, the Unabomber was right, and we are slaves to gratuitous technology.

I had to park in an open space, then, instead of easily depositing a fre coins in a meter, had to walk half-a-block to the nearest parking station (and half a block away from my destination). Then I pushed a start button, plugged in my credit card, and pushed the maximum time allowed, 2 hours. I was informed that my “payment was complete” ($9.85!) and was to take the ticket the station would print and walk back to my car, get back in it, put the ticket on the dashboard visible through the window, and voila! A longer, more complicated, more expensive parking process, made so by the wonders of technology!

But no ticket came out. It churned, and it churned, then a red message flashed saying “Out of Order! Please go to another station.”

Oh no you don’t! The machine said my payment had already been accepted. I was not going to meekly allow this stupid system to make me pay TWO exorbitant fees for parking once. Nor was I going to abandon the space, which is what I saw another driver do when confronted with the same malfunctioning station.

Assuming that getting a sledge hammer and destroying the parking stations is out of the question, what ethical solution to the problem would you employ?

I’ll tell you what I did in the comments eventually. (Hint: It worked!)

Ethic Alarms has frequently used Superman Comics’ Bizarro World analogy to discuss the problem arising when a culture is so warped and so confused that normal ethical principles have no applicability. When one is in a culture where white is black, up is down and crazy is sane, it makes no sense to act according to traditional ethical values. They won’t work there.

The best and most ethical response to a Bizarro World culture is to follow the sage advice of the Amityville House and “Get OUT!” A common example of this problem is in the workplace, when one realizes that the culture is corrupt, incompetent and devoid of ethical considerations. The choices an ethical employee has are to remain in the organization and be corrupted by it, to devote oneself to changing the organization, which is often futile, or to quit.

The latest dispatch from uber-woke Oregon makes it clear that the Amityville House’s solution may be the only one remaining. The new session for the Oregon House of Representatives was opened by a performance by two black drag queens this week because it’s Pride Month, and that means that professionalism, dignity and decorum must be sacrificed because….well, just because. Democratic Rep. Travis Nelson (D, of course), the first openly LGBTQ+ African American Oregon legislator—he’s historic, so he can do no wrong!— invited Isaiah Esquire and Aqua Flora to perform for the session’s opening ceremony. The House speaker, also being a Democrat, didn’t have the integrity to tell him, “You are out of your mind! Absolutely not!” So the result was this:

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Juneteenth is our first, and one hopes, last DEI holiday. The idea of having national holidays contrived to celebrate particular racial, ethnic and gender groups in an outburst of white male guilt is anti-American to the core and profoundly offensive. True, Rationalization #22 (“There are worse things.”) provides some solace; the holiday is hardly the worst thing that the national freakout over a drug-addicted black thug resisting arrest in Minneapolis and running into the wrong cop inflicted on the U.S. But the year Biden’s autopen established it, 2021, speaks volumes.

Meanwhile….

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