Author: Jack Marshall

Addendum To “Return of the Faithless Legislator”: What If…?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I’m hesitant to put this in print, but the idea has kept me awake much of the night. I meant to mention the idea in yesterday’s post about state legislators flipping their party affiliations after an election, but but, as too often happens, I was rushing because I had other responsibilities to fulfill and left it out.

I wouldn’t call this post an Ethics Quiz; I’d say it’s a thought experiment. Here it is:

What if Donald Trump either announced that he was no longer a Republican, or threatened to do so?

There is nothing stopping him from switching parties, or declaring that he is President under the banner of his own party, whether he called it “MAGA” or something else. The Constitution didn’t have a word about parties, and the Founders generally thought they were something to avoid. Trump could even cloak his radical decision in the spirit of the Founders. “I am not a President for Republicans or Democrats, but for all Americans!” he could say in the announcement, a national address. What would happen? The mind boggles, or at least mine does. Here are some thoughts and questions…

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Final 2024 Ethics Round-Up, 12/29/24: Of Jawbreakers, ‘Thinflation,’ Weasel Words and Prison Sex

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

(You’re going to have to wait until the end to learn who that is in the photo above….)

I’ve been trying to figure out an ethics angle for the best news story I saw today; the best I can come up with is “life incompetence.” The headline was “Woman Breaks Jaw After Biting into Jawbreaker Candy.” Apparently Canadian student Javeria Wasim wondered if someone could bite through a giant jawbreaker, and took it on as a challeng. She barely made a dent in the candy when she felt a pop followed by piercing pain in her lower jaw. Yup, it was a jawbreaker, all right! She had fractured her mandible in two places and also loosened her top and lower front teeth. Now her jaw is wired shut.

1. You’ve noticed “shrinkflation,” but have you picked up on ‘thinflation’? It appears that clothing manufacturers are using thinner, lighter fabric for such staples as T-shirts and chinos. “Pretty much everything is lighter and thinner,” Sean Cormier, a professor of textiles at the Fashion Institute of Technology, told Slate. He said chinos that used to weigh 8 ounces per square yard of fabric might be only 6 ounces today.

“It’s a trend in the industry, and not one that’s sustainable, because obviously the thinner the garment, it’s not going to last as long,” Cormier says. Two decades ago a T-shirt might have weighed 8 to 10 ounces per square yard of fabric. Today, experts report, it’s half that. Clothing doesn’t last as long as it used to, fabrics are generally thinner, and the quality of clothing has decreased. Not the prices, however. The garments also don’t have as much “covering power,” meaning that not only wet T-shirts but the dry ones too are revealing.

2. Apparently some people have a problem with this statement. Not me! An Illinois homeowner’s surveillance camera detected motion on the side of the home and he spotted two masked men. After instructing his wife to seek cover, he grabbed his gun. Then he shot shot and killed Jorge Nestevan Flores-Toledo, a 27-year-old from Mexico with a long criminal record. The second man, an illegal immigrant, aka. “a visitor” skedaddled but was tracked down by K9 dogs and arrested a few blocks away. Manatee County Sheriff Rick Wells said, in describing the incident, “This is the state of Florida. If you want to break into someone’s home, you should expect to be shot.” I don’t see why you shouldn’t expect to be shot when you want to break into anyone’s home in any state.

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Oh No, Not This Again: Return of the Faithless Legislator

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Broward County Rep. Hillary Cassel announced yesterday that she will leave the Democratic Party and join the GOP, becoming the second state lawmaker to do so this month. Hillsborough County Rep. Susan Valdés also announced this month that she had joined the Republicans.

Ethics Alarms has covered, and deplored, this behavior before. Doing what Cassel and Valdés have done is unethical, and the identities of the political parties involved don’t matter. By doing this, the two women have committed a fraud on the electorate. Democrats voted for them based in part on their status as members of their party. Their election victories were achieved by misrepresentation. Cassel, ran unopposed for her second term in November; if she had flipped before the election in a timely fashion, she may well have had opposition. Her rationalization for this unethical reversal, as posted on “X”:

Aww, that’s nice. The ethical way to handle a sudden epiphany when one has been elected by the partisans of one party and now suddenly wants to join the opposition is to resign, and run again under the new banner so voters have not been deceived and know who and what they are voting for. This was how former Texas U.S. Senator Phil Gramm handled the problem when he changed parties from Democrat to Republican as a Congressman. He resigned, then ran for his vacated seat and won again. Perfect.

As for the Florida Republicans, good luck with these two converts. They are as trustworthy as the husband who marries the second wife he was cheating with during the first marriage.

Chess Ethics: The International Chess Federation Makes “Professionalism” Look Ridiculous [Updated!]

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Did the world go nuts last week and I missed it? Curmie just sent me this crazy story, and I though it was a gag.

For those of you who don’t follow international chess (that is, all of you), the wonderfully named Magnus Carlsen is a five-time world chess champion from Norway. He has held the No. 1 position in the FIDE world chess rankings since July 1, 2011, indisputably making him one of the greatest chess players of all-time, right next to household names like Raul Capablanca, Ruy Lopez, and Emanuel Lasker. Yesterday he was kicked out of the World Rapid and Blitz Chess Championships in New York after chess’s governing body FIDE barred the Norwegian from participating in the tournament.

Why? He was wearing bluejeans.

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In a Fascinating Though Risky Experiment, NY Gov. Kathy Hochul Decides To Test If Anything Can Make Voters Reject The Democratic Party

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I confess, I don’t know what to call this post, how to define NY Gov. Kathy Hochul at this point, or how to explain American citizens who would put up with her.

She’s had quite an exciting December. On the same day and just two hours after a psychopathic illegal immigrant set a sleeping woman on fire in a New York City subway train, Hochel sent out this…

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Ethics Dunce: Elon Musk

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Ugh.

Elon, Elon, Elon….

Elon Musk apparently became annoyed at some Republican critics for criticizing him over his endorsement of H-1B visas, a work program that allows U.S companies to hire highly skilled non-Americans. So he stripped them of their “blue check” verification on their Twitter/”X” profiles

Laura Loomer, New York Young Republican Club president Gavin Wax, InfoWars host Owen Shroyer, and other far-right figures found that their verification badges had vanished on December 27 after they knocked Musk (and his DOGE co-captain Vivek Ramaswamy) for supporting the hiring of foreign-born engineers over their U.S. counterparts.

Former GOP Congressman and NeverTrumper Adam Kinzinger wrote in part, “So @elonmusk stripped the blue check because someone hurt his feelings?…If you love him great, but don’t pretend he’s for free speech.”

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 16: Those Harris-Walz Bitter-Ender Lawn Signs

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

There are still a lot of Harris-Walz lawn signs up in my neighborhood. I find the one above, the “obviously” sign, especially obnoxious, and I know the nice people who have been displaying that thing now for almost four months. I am trying mightily not to think, “What jerks these people are,” even though they brought me some leftover taco fixings right after my wife died.

I remember a lot of bitter-enders keeping their Gore-Lieberman lawn signs and bumper stickers displayed in 2000 after the Great Hanging Chad Recount and Gore’s appropriate (if short-lived) concession. That was also obnoxious, though at least somewhat understandable given the false narrative being hammered at by the biased left wing news media that Gore had really won the popular vote in Florida and that a partisan Supreme Court had unethically handed the Republicans the Presidency. But today’s out-of-date signs, apparently aiming at virtue-signaling to like-minded deluded progressives, have no plausible justification whatsoever. And what virtues do they think a sign like that signals?

When I saw the one above this morning walking Spuds around my mostly “blue” Alexandria, Virginia neighborhood, my mind immediately flashed to an entry yesterday on The New Neo’s blog, “What was Kamala thinking?” The post began by quoting this story:

Teamsters President Sean O’Brien….discussed his union’s historic decision not to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in nearly 30 years. O’Brien said Harris finally agreed to sit with the Teasmsters for a roundtable after President Biden dropped out of the race, just to only answer a quarter of their 16 questions. Other candidates, including Trump, answered them all. “On the fourth question, one of her operatives or one of her staff slips a note in front of me — ‘This will be the last question.’ And it was 20 minutes earlier than the time it was going to end,” O’Brien told [Tucker] Carlson. “And her declaration on the way out was, ‘I’m going to win with you or without you,’’ he recalled.”

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Post Christmas Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

This is my last chance to air Arthur Fielder’s terrific Christmas medley, culminating in a counterpoint arrangement of my choice for the greatest of al the Christmas Carols with the most ubiquitous secular seasonal song of them all. Grace and I would put this on and blast it on Christmas morning.

There’s a lot in the ethics world to discuss that I have failed to get to. It’s up to you to remedy my inadequacies.

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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