Character

Comment Of The Day: “Using Personality Testing For Anything But Party Games Is Unethical”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I was very pleased that the post on personality testing triggered the lively discussion it did. The topic is a long-time source of irritation to me. Reducing the infinite variety and complexity of human character to any test should obviously set off ethics alarms, and making life-changing decisions based on such lazy short-cuts to assessing character is a bright-line Golden Rule breach. Anyone who wants to start understanding my character should read all of the posts on Ethics Alarms, and even then should prepare to be surprised.

Before I get to Sarah B.’s Comment of the Day, let me relay the link to Extradimensional Cephalopod‘s website and its basic mindsets section in his Foundational Toolbox for Life.

I’ve combined two of Sarah’s comments here, because they are closely related and I couldn’t choose between them. Here is her Comment of the Day on the post, “Using Personality Testing For Anything But Party Games Is Unethical”…

***

I know a manager who believes strongly in personality testing, and focuses heavily on the Clifton Strengths profile. He has convinced everyone that it is the way to go and has every one of his employees list their five strengths in order on their work emails, just like some places want preferred pronouns. Everyone I have talked to about this seems totally bought into it. I volunteer here, and thus don’t have to have my Clifton profile done, but when I was introduced to my supervisor (T), he introduced himself as a strategist, which means that he knows how to get from point A to point B in the best possible way, but has a weakness with communication, so we should just all do what he says without question, because he knows better than we do and he doesn’t have time to communicate. If you want someone who is good at communicating, talk to person H. Another of my supervisors (D), introduced herself with her main strength, the ability to think out her problems very well, but as a down side, she must have time to think, so don’t bring her a problem and expect a solution that week. She needs quiet time to work it out.

This is not a way to introduce yourselves, in my opinion. Frankly, I’d rather be known for who I am and let you determine what you think my strengths and weaknesses are, rather than a self reported test that gives me, however accurately, an assessment of those things I am strong at and tells me to make them stronger. I’d rather work to be a well rounded person. I’d also rather think of myself, not as a combination of personality traits, but as a whole person, a person who may have strengths and weaknesses, but who can work to overcome weaknesses and may let certain strengths founder as a choice.

Even if strengths are good things to have, we have to work on our weaknesses too. Frankly, T lets his “strength” in strategizing be an excuse for acting like a controlling jackass. If something doesn’t work perfectly, he blames it all on others, and says we didn’t listen enough. He cannot handle changing conditions, because they throw off his plan, so he gets stressed and pushes people badly. I have nearly quit because of him, but am too stubborn and want the experience for later in life. D uses her “strength” as an excuse to not organize or prepare for anything, all with the excuse that she didn’t have adequate time to think through the problem. If a problem arises needing a quick solution, she shuts down totally, claiming that there is nothing to be done, and won’t accept anyone else’s solution to the problem. We go from about to do our work to completely cancelling our work in moments.

Continue reading →

Reflections On The First Stupid, Virtue-Signaling Lawn Sign Of Spring….

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

obxoxious sign

For the second time this week I find myself grafting substantial sections of an archived Ethics Alarms post to a new one. (I promise not to make a habit of it.) The occasion is the appearance on one of my Alexandria, Virginia neighbors’ lawn the idiotic sign above. Once again I was seized with the desire to ring the house’s doorbell and cross examine the residents. Can they explain and justify what’s on that sign? I am almost certain that they cannot, just as my other neighbor who STILL displays a medieval suit of armor next to a 5 x 4 hand-made, painted wooden sign reading BLACK LIVES MATTER in block letters could not justify that obnoxious lawn ornament, since it is, after all, more indefensible than ever now that the movement it stands for has been exposed as cynical hustle.

In 2021, New York Times’ woke propaganda agent Amanda Hess was given a rare slot on her paper’s front page to opine on the sign above, which was apparently the beginning of the the viral Announce to your neighbors that you’re a smug, simple-minded idiot!” epidemic. Ethics Alarms has had several posts about similar signs, but I did not realize that I had missed Patient Zero.

Hess’s analysis by turns informed readers that the sign has “curious power” (to make me detest the homeowner?); that the mottoes are “progressive maxims” (so progressives really are that facile and shallow!), that “Donald Trump is out of office…But nevertheless, this sign has persisted” (Oh! It’s all Trump’s fault?), that the sign is “directed at the adults in the room, reminding them of their own mission” (Really? Open borders? Man-boy love? Anti-white discrimination? Marxism? Why is a sign aimed at adults so naive and childish? ), that it is “the epitome of virtue signaling: an actual sign enumerating the owner’s virtues. There is something refreshing, actually, about the straightforwardness of that.” (There is something refreshing about smug idiots placing signs on their laws that say, “I am a smug idiot”?).

I learned other things from that article:

Continue reading →

Remember The Alamo Today, March 6, When The Fort Fell, And Entered American Lore And Legend Forever.

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I regard the siege of the Alamo one of the signature ethics events in U.S. history, both for what it was and what it came to represent. There have been many posts on the subject as well as many references to the Alamo in other posts, all of which are accessible here.

Today, March 6, marks the fall of the converted mission. Ethics Alarms has two pieces from its archives to present:

I. Last year, Texan and Ethics Alarms stalwart Michael West’s provided Ethics Alarms readers with a day by day account of the Alamo’s the final days, March 5 and March 6.  Here it is:

March 5, 1836

After the previous day’s war council (on March 4), Santa Anna was content that his glorious assault would occur. But evidently, according to several reliable Mexican sources, a civilian woman from the town, who had retreated to the Alamo with the Texans, made it out of the Alamo during the night and gave dire information to the Mexicans. Evidently the Texan garrison was increasingly despondent. According to the lady who escaped, Travis and the garrison had discussed their options and one of the more forceful arguments made was that they should consider surrender.

Santa Anna wanted none of this, and accelerated his assault time-table (which he hadn’t necessarily meant for the 6th of March but for the 7th or even the 8th).

The Mexican soldiers would have received their orders in the morning and spent the rest of the day making preparations. There was little physically they had to do other than check the locks of their muskets, ensure they had the requisite number of extra flints (which would occasionally break in battle – testing the coolness of even the most experienced soldier), or assist in the production of several ladders Santa Anna had commanded each battalion to have prepared.

No, most of the preparation would have been mental. A deeply Catholic people, the Mexican soldiers would have spent their energies on prayer and confession. New soldiers would have been nervous about how they would perform under fire, simultaneously trying to hide their nerves from the experienced soldiers, who would have recognized the unique challenge before them. Almost none had been asked to climb tall walls after traversing several hundred yards under fire against an enemy who had, in the previous 12 days, proven that their rifled muskets out-ranged the standard Mexican issue musket by nearly 300%Some of Santa Anna’s soldiers were eager to get into the fight – to uphold the honor of the Mexican nation against, not only rebels, but rebels seemingly motivated by pro-American attitudes. Some of Santa Anna’s soldiers had been farmers pressed into service only months before, who would have had a partially begrudging attitude and were mostly  leaning towards “let’s get this over with so I can get home.” Some of the dictator’s soldiers were convicts for whom the upcoming bloodshed was just one more act of brutality to endure in an already brutal and brutalized life. For a large number of the soldiers, for whom soldiering was life, this would be a terror that they  knew would be expected of them. Regardless of their motivations, there would be no getting out of the upcoming ordeal and every single one of them would be in the same peril  when a Texan cannon roared out at their formation.

Set to wake up at midnight to begin movements to their attack positions, the  few soldiers could fall asleep would have tried to do so by twilight.

Inside the Alamo, evening would draw a miserable day to a close. Earlier that day, according to Enrique Esparza, aged 8 (who’s father, Gregorio, was fighting with the Texans), the faeful courier entered the Alamo with news that despite  all the hopeful reports, no immediate help was on its way. Travis would have discussed with the men their options – a break-out attempt in case of a successful assault would be their best recourse. A break out during the day would be impossible and one at night would be extremely risky. Whatever was said, it appears all but perhaps one of the men decided to stay

For the Texans, sleep would come quickly that evening. For the first time in 12 days, Santa Anna’s cannons didn’t create chaos inside the compound. It was silent. There could be no doubt that the defenders knew what this meant, but they were exhausted. They would have kept watch and pure anxiety might have boosted their necessary alertness. Nonetheless, they began succumbing to sleep deprivation and may have been deep in dreams of life after the war – or perhaps of life before the war.

Before collapsing in whatever position suited rest, most would have reviewed their plans in their minds of how to get out once they’d done what they could to slow or halt the Mexican advance. No shame in that: when a battle is clearly lost and standing your position doesn’t buy anyone else on the battlefield any opportunity to turn the tide, there’s no principle of warfare that requires that a soldier  die on principle.

Most would have recognized that with San Antonio immediately to the west, and several Mexican artillery batteries to the north and south, the east would be the best direction to break out for should the situation so demand. That was also where the gathering Texan army could be found, eventually.

Right after dusk, Travis dispatched the final courier on yet another appeal for assistance. Then, as in each night during the siege , Travis assigned several men outpost duty beyond the walls of the Alamo to provide an early warning before turning the watch over to another officer.

He hoped to get a little bit of sleep himself.

March 6, 1836: The End

Continue reading →

As If One George Santos Wasn’t Too Many GOP Fakes In Congress, Now There Are Two…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

…that we know of.

Rep. Andrew Ogles (R-Tenn.) acknowledged yesterday that he “misstated” the degree he had received from Middle Tennessee State University when he told voters that he received a degree in international relations. Ogles said his degree was actually for “liberal studies,” a general education degree typically for those who cannot settle on a major. He claims that the mistake was inadvertent, and he just forgot his major.

Sure, Andy.

That baloney might be palatable if he hadn’t been shown to have falsified so many other aspects of his résumé. For example…

Continue reading →

The Rest Of The Story: Manny’s Opt-Out (Corrected)

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

After a post and a Comment of the Day on San Diego Padres third baseman Manny Machado’s announcement that he would be opting out of his 10 year, 300 million dollar contract after next season to seek more money that he won’t even notice, it has been reported that Machado has agreed to a contract upgrade that will now pay him $35 million a year for eleven years.

Whew! Now he’ll finally be able to afford those custom-built, nuclear powered, gold-plated android models of the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame’s 342 members that he covets, and still have enough pin money to buy the Bolshoi Ballet.

So Manny’s announcement that he would opt out—he wasn’t ambiguous about it, he said that was a fact—was just a bargaining ploy. A lie. I said I detested this guy. I should have known.

When someone has tried such tactics on me, they learned that my response always is, “Fine, it’s settled then. Bye!” Eventually the word gets around, and nobody tries it any more. That’s what the Padres should have done. People keep using unethical tactics because their victims let them, and so they work.

Congratulations, Manny! You have your extra 5 million a year. May you choke on it.

Baseball Ethics Dunce: San Diego Padres Third Baseman Manny Machado

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

 

This isn’t so much about baseball ethics as values, and how our sports “heroes” corrupt ours.

I suppose I am obligated to confess that I detest Manny Machado. I haven’t watched him much since he moved to San Diego, but when he was with the Baltimore Orioles, he was one of the dirtiest players I’ve ever seen. He also wrecked the career of Dustin Pedroia, the star Red Sox second baseman whose values are the direct opposite of Machado’s, with an illegal slide.

Machado just announced that he plans on opting out of the remainder of his contract following the 2023 season, as the terms of his current deal allows. When Machado signed his current 10-year, $300 million agreement with San Diego ahead of the 2019 season, it was among the top three player contracts in MLB history. Now, however, 30 million dollars a year isn’t enough for Manny. You see, a few high-profile free agents have signed for more this off season, so this means, according to player agents’ Bizarro World logic, that Manny is being underpaid.

Continue reading →

On Andrea Mitchell’s Anti-DeSantis Lie And Aftermath: A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Classic

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Was I dreaming, or was Andrea Mitchell once a relatively trustworthy journalist? Was it working at MSNBC that rotted her professionalism away completely, as with poor Chris Matthews?

Because this is disgusting.

Last week, on her pompously titeled show “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Mitchell asked Kamala Harris, “What does Governor Ron Desantis not know about black history and the black experience when he says that slavery and the aftermath of slavery should not be taught to Florida schoolchildren?” Florida’s governor never said that, not has he advocated that, nor has any other Republican official or pundit not now residing in a padded cell. That’s a deliberately dishonest Democratic, anti-DeSantis, pro-Critical Race Theory talking point designed for consumption by lazy, gullible and uninformed citizens.

Harris might have won a bit of respect had she corrected Mitchell, but she’s an unethical hack too, so naturally she acted as if it was a fair question.Or she didn’t know it was nonsense: with Harris its hard to tell.

DeSantis’s press secretary was on the job, tweeting,

Indeed it does. From the  state requirements,  guidelines DeSantis supported and approved: Continue reading →

Presidents Day Hangover, Jimmy Carter Edition: A Popeye, A KABOOM! And An Epic Comment Of The Day. Part II, Comment Of The Day On The Carter Presidency

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Here is Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day:

***

Well, I have plenty to say about Carter, and this I will post the moment they announce his death.

I have only very vague recollections of the Carter administration, since I was a kid in single digits at the time. Two things stick out in my memory, though.

One was myself and my brother, also a young kid at the time, bickering in the beltless back seat of a 70s-vintage chartreuse VW beetle while mom sat in line on Paterson Plank Road thirty cars back from the gas station, waiting for gas so scarce it had to be de facto rationed. This car, purchased as a cheap second vehicle (and frequently made fun of by my classmates) had no air conditioning and that line did not move more than five miles an hour, so it was not possible to use the wind to cool off. There was nothing for us kids to do but swelter and nothing for the adults to do but seethe at the fact that Jimmy Carter’s policies regarding the Middle East and the Persian Gulf had landed us in this pickle, and no relief was in sight. The flip side of that was a bitterly cold winter where we set the heat to 65 degrees because that was all we could afford. His answer? Put on a sweater and turn those extra lights off. It’s one thing to try to do more with less in wartime when you face a designated and (hopefully) beatable threat. It’s another to have a diminished lifestyle because the man elected to lead this country was not doing his job anywhere near as well as he could have and should have been.

The other thing that sticks out in my memory was the daily number. No, not the lottery number, we were never fortunate enough to guess that, and not the Sesame Street number of the day either, although for a while that decade that still reached this house on the fat, bunny-eared television in the living room opposite the period covered sofas (featuring a weird pattern of circles in squares in black, off-white, and ginger orange), on which you had to change the seven or so channels manually.

I’m talking about the number that appeared daily behind the anchors on whatever network you got your news on, as they solemnly intoned that today was whatever day it was that the 52 diplomats and other hostages continued to be held in Iran. It ultimately reached 444 days, a full year plus 79 days, counted out day by excruciating day, each of which there was more and more of a feeling that our country, and by extension, we ourselves, could do nothing but wring our hands in anguish and powerlessness. Oh, there was one attempt to rescue them, Operation Eagle Claw, which never even left the staging area due to mechanical issues. Even the withdrawal was a disaster, leaving 5 US airmen and 3 marines dead. It was one of the lowest points in American military history, equaled perhaps only by the failed mission into Bolshevik Russia to kill the Communist serpent in the cradle, of which then-president Wilson said, “the tragedy was that it cost lives even to fail as badly as they did.” It was also the nail that closed the coffin on this utter failure of a presidency. Ironically, Carter has now become the president to escape the actual coffin the longest of any, although the last three presidents to die all made it well into their 90s.

Frankly, he is someone who, under normal circumstances, wouldn’t even have been considered as a candidate, leave alone been elected. He is someone who SHOULDN’T have been considered or elected under ANY circumstances. He was a once-failed, once-elected governor who was supposedly a civil rights idealist, but who tried to please both the civil rights Democrats and the still-powerful old-school southern Democrats. He engaged in symbolic measures like putting up pictures of prominent black Georgians in the state capitol, but opposed race-integration busing and did not hesitate to sign a revised death penalty statute that addressed the then-liberal SCOTUS’ issues with the existing statute in Gregg v. Georgia, which came damn close to throwing the penalty out nationwide. Of course, he later said that he regretted doing that and his position had “evolved,” which is Democrat-speak for flip-flopping. He was not well-known outside of Georgia.

What most folks don’t know is that he made a presidential bid in 1972, trying to use the same triangulation tactics between the civil rights left and more conservative right, that he had used as governor. That bid did not get very far, and the Democratic ticket that year was George McGovern and Thomas Eagleton, which went down in the second biggest defeat the Democratic party suffered in a presidential election, surpassed only by Ronald Reagan’s 49-1 near-clean sweep of the entire country in 1984. Just as John Kasich later planned to do after the catastrophic defeat of the GOP that failed to materialize in 2016, Carter swiftly made a move to “pick up the pieces” and move into the frontrunner slot for 1976. Although he did not succeed in an attempt to become chairman of the Democratic Governors’ Association, he did become chairman of both the Democratic National Committee’s congressional and gubernatorial campaigns. Ironically, he warned AGAINST politicizing the Watergate hearings, but a bit more on that later.

His recognition when he announced his candidacy for president a second time was 2%. The better-known Democrats scoffed and said, “Jimmy who?” Conventional wisdom was that he was a regional candidate who would have limited appeal outside the south. However, Carter had two factors working in his favor in the political perfect storm that was the United States political scene in 1976. One was the aforementioned regionalism. Normally, that would have worked against him, as it would have against any candidate in a country where the Northeast, the South, the Great Plains, the Southwest, and the West Coast were all VERY different in many ways. However, he happened to arrive as a Washington outsider just as the country’s trust of Washington and established politicians, as well as of the GOP, was at arguably the lowest point it ever reached due to Richard Nixon’s unnecessary overreach that led to all that followed. In the wake of Watergate and Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon to “close the book” on that episode and move forward, an outsider who promised never to lie to the American people looked like an attractive option. He looked especially so when matched against a man who had never been elected as president or vice-president, whose main act was pardoning Nixon, and whom the media played up as an oafish klutz (when in reality he was a college football all-star AND Phi Beta Kappa) by emphasizing a slip, a golf stroke gone awry, and a tennis serve gone wrong, any of which could have happened to anyone.

Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Tiger’s Sexist, Juvenile Gag

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Once again, we enter the weird realm of offensive or arguably offensive jokes that become public through accident, eavesdropping or betrayal. In such cases, the audience most certain to be offended by the joke learns of it despite the intent of the jokester.

The all-time champion in this category was Nixon/Ford Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz. At the 1976  Republican National Convention (which nominated President Ford, ultimately defeated by Jimmy Carter), Pat Boone asked Butz, then in a three-way conversation with Boone and John Dean, why the party of Abraham Lincoln couldn’t attract the support of more blacks. Butz, who may have been drunk, answered, “Because coloreds only want three things. You know what they want? I’ll tell you what coloreds want. It’s three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit. That’s all!”

As Otter told Flounder, Butz had “fucked up.” He trusted John Dean, who was at the convention as a reporter for “Rolling Stone.” Dean repeated the joke in his published story, and  the uproar forced Butz to resign.

The Tiger Woods incident isn’t anywhere near as bad as the Butz episode, but it raised some of the same issues.During the first round of tlat week’s Genesis Invitational at Riviera Country Club on February 16, 2023, in Pacific Palisades, California, Woods out-drove friend and competitor Justin Thomas. As they walked way from the tee, Woods surreptitiously (he thought) handed Thomas a tampon, a hoary guy-gag meaning “You play like a girl.” But cameras caught the exchange (above), and though Thomas appeared to be amused, others were not. Veteran female sportswriter Christine Brennan’s reaction was typical, as she wrote in part,

I’m guessing most of the millions of fathers and mothers who support their athletic daughters probably have long since retired all their juvenile pranks that were intended to demean the ability of those girls they love and for whom they spend so much time cheering. 

But not our Tiger. 

No, he employed basic misogyny to insult his good friend Thomas, a knee-slapper of a dig against female athletes: You hit the ball like a girl!…

[W]hen the biggest name in the sport’s history is giddily spreading misogyny down the fairway, it might just confirm a woman’s suspicions about golf and send her to any one of the scores of other sports she can play for the rest of her life without running into a dude playing a juvenile tampon joke.

Woods sort of apologized… Continue reading →

I Am Sorry That Senator Fetterman Is Clinically Depressed But My Sympathy Is Limited

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

ABC News reports:

Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman on Wednesday checked himself into a Washington hospital “to receive treatment for clinical depression,” his chief of staff said on Thursday. “While John has experienced depression off and on throughout his life, it only became severe in recent weeks,” Adam Jentleson said in a statement.

Jentleson said that Fetterman was evaluated on Monday by Congress’ attending physician, Dr. Brian P. Monahan, who “recommended inpatient care” at Walter Reed hospital. “John agreed, and he is receiving treatment on a voluntary basis.” “After examining John, the doctors at Walter Reed told us that John is getting the care he needs, and will soon be back to himself,” Jentleson said.

This comes shortly after Fetterman had been hospitalized for “light-headedness.” So, so predictably, the Democratic propaganda agents in the mainstream media are spinning this “time to pay the piper” story as a good thing. “Fetterman draws praise for getting help  for depression” cheered the AP. “John Fetterman is openly discussing his treatment for depression. Few politicians do,” gushed Vox. Wow! Isn’t it wonderful that this guy is unable to do his job, after anyone who questioned his fitness during the campaign  was attacked as being “ablest”?

The announcement raised other questions. Clinical depression is a serious condition: Fetterman never revealed to voters that he experienced depression off and on throughout his life. That information was relevant to voters’ decision, but his office only revealed it now to lessen suspicions that the current problem was related to his stroke. But just last week, the same spokesman blamed his previous hospitalization on the stroke, saying, Continue reading →