Citizenship

Comment of the Day: “Unethical Quote of the Month: The Washington Post”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

militia

I don’t agree with everything in Michael’s  take-down of a comment by Eric R. to my post, “Unethical Quote of the Month: The Washington Post,” but as an example of the genre ( mastered on Ethics Alarms by the 2011 Commenter of the Year tgt and others), it’s a gem. The main point, that the Second Amendment has significant symbolic value as a right that reminds the government that the citizens of a democracy will not bare their throats to central power, is a crucial one, which I touched on in an earlier Ethics Alarms post. An armed insurrection against the government would be a catastrophe, of course. Still, while those Americans who believe that arming citizens against possible government tyranny trust too little, the citizens who argue that the government should be able to disarm the populace in the name of safety trust far too much.

I did remove one small non-substantive part of the post, because I really dislike mockery as a device on Ethics Alarms (the unedited comment is still under the original post.) I particularly think Michael’s identification of the reasons underlying the recent spate of mad dog killings is seriously off the mark. My own list, in order of influence would be…

  1. The difficulty of getting seriously disturbed individuals institutionalized, and the lack of places to keep and treat them.
  2. The availability of assault-type weapons to such disturbed individuals.
  3. The failure to enforce existing gun regulations
  4. The increasing difficulty and complexity of life generally, making it harder for those who are poor, poorly trained, not especially bright, or emotionally fragile to compete and succeed.
  5. The pervasive media, which creates false norms of success and happiness that are unachievable for most Americans.
  6. The culture of guns and violence, which is intensified by the entertainment media, but which is also a core American characteristic that isn’t going away.
  7. The publicity given to mass murderers by the news media.

But I digress.

Here is Michael’s tough Comment of the Day, to the post “Unethical Quote of the Month: The Washington Post”. The bold sections below are quotes from Eric’s comment: Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Month: The Washington Post

/ Jack Marshall / 50 Comments

“When will America choose to protect children instead of guns?”

—- The headline writer for the Washington Post, introducing columnist Petula Dvorak’s column this morning on the Newtown, Connecticut elementary school shooting, which took the lives of 26, including 20 children.

Newtown shooting

Presumably the Post’s headline writer was inspired to come up with that headline by the similar statement from Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, who was quoted in Dvorak’s essay. Edelman said,

“This latest terrible tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School is no fluke. It is a result of the senseless, immoral neglect of all of us as a nation to fail to protect children instead of guns and to speak out against the pervasive culture of violence. It is up to us to stop these preventable tragedies.”

This is not quite as irresponsible and dangerous as the Post’s headline, but it is close. The suggestion that greater safety and security compels and justifies abandoning the core rights that make the United States unique and free is the ticket to tyranny, benevolent or otherwise. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: The American Public

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments
Is this a great country, or what?

Is this a great country, or what?

No surprises here, but still:

A sickening  McClatchy poll released today shows that a majority of the U.S. public opposes all measures that are necessary to address the nation’s debt and deficit crisis, except increasing taxes on the rich…which, by itself will be of minimal assistance in addressing the long-term problem. Its advantage, of course, is that it involves no sacrifices from the vast majority of the public.

Such irresponsible, lazy, ignorant and foolish judgment by the public, of course, would not be an insuperable problem in a properly functioning republic, in which dedicated, informed, selfless and courageous public servants were willing to come together, compromise, and make difficult but necessary decisions that might be unpopular with their constituents. Or if the nation had elected a skilled and persuasive national leader who could persuade the public to reject narrow, short-term self-interest as patriots and Americans, for the benefit of future generations.

We don’t have those things, however, so the public’s lack of responsibility, knowledge and common sense is, if not fatal, a serious threat to the national welfare and long-term viability of the United States.

At least we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves, and perhaps the Founders, for foolishly entrusting a representative democracy to a people too ignorant and selfish to keep it working.

___________________________________

Facts: McClatchy

Graphic: It is future

The 8 Useful Ethics Tips From “The Tale of the Well-Meaning Kidnapper”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments
Luis Trinidad, safe but confused

Luis Trinidad, safe but confused

Ethics Tip #1: If you are this stupid and irresponsible, it’s unethical to have children

A Bristol, Connecticut man parked his car outside a store with the doors unlocked, the motor running, and his two-year-old son in the back seat.

Ethics Tip #2: When you witness child endangerment, make sure rescuing the child does not require breaking the law, unless there are no other options to save the child. Calling the police is usually another option.

Outraged by the father’s irresponsible conduct, a citizen who happened to pass by the car, 24-year-old Devon Mills, decided to take matters into his own hands.

Ethics Tip #3: When you hear yourself saying, “This guy needs to be taught a lesson,” stop and think things through: that may be true, but you may not be the appropriate deliverer of the lesson, and the statement is an invitation to overstep one’s authority.

Mills decided that it would serve the father of the child and owner of the car right if he got scared out of his wits. Continue reading →

I Guess Remembering “The Maine” Is Out of the Question

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments
Hey, Matt: What was this? Anybody?

Hey, Matt: What was this? Hello? Anybody?

I was going to write a depressing post about how neither the Washington Post nor CNN, nor the Today Show (though I missed some of it, and can’t be completely sure) bothered to mention Pearl Harbor this morning, on the anniversary of the day when a sneak air attack by Japan nearly destroyed the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor at Oahu, Hawaii. 2,335 U.S. servicemen and sixty-eight civilians died in the attack, as 1,178 soldiers and civilians were wounded. The tragedy launched U.S. participation in World War II, which took another 416,000 American lives among the horrendous 60 million killed in that conflict. Naturally, none of this was deemed worthy of mention by our journalistic establishment, or perhaps they just forgot. After all, the Grammy nominations were announced last night.

Then I caught this exchange among Harold Reynolds, Ken Rosenthal, and host Matt Vasgersian on the MLB Network’s live off-season show, Studio K, leading into a story about the Philadelphia Phillies obtaining outfielder Ben Revere in a trade yesterday: Continue reading →

The Messy Redemption Dilemma of Greg Hall

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment
Redemption is beautiful. And a lot rarer than we'd like it to be.

Redemption is beautiful. And a lot rarer than we’d like it to be.

Maryland belongs in the elite group of states—Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Alaska, D.C. of course, and a few others—where corruption at the local government level is the status quo, and seemingly will always be so. Thus what could have been a straightforward dilemma regarding the character requirements for public office—does a criminal past render a citizen unfit for appointment?—has been confounded by matters of comparative disqualification. Maryland State Delegate Tiffany Alston (D-Prince George’s County) took money out of her campaign funds to pay for her wedding expenses, and stole $800 from the General Assembly to pay an employee of her law firm. She cut a deal with prosecutors to avoid a trial, and, astoundingly, is arguing that since she thus avoided a “conviction” for a crime, under Maryland law she should be able to continue serving as delegate.

Alston is a current crook. Maryland Democrats decided to designate a past crook as her replacement: Greg Hall, who twenty years ago was a crack dealer, spent time in prison, and barely avoided a murder charge for the death of a thirteen-year-old boy killed in the cross-fire of a gun battle he was engaged in. Only in a state like Maryland would Hall be considered an upgrade over the current occupant of a legislative seat, and Maryland’s Democratic governor, Martin O’Malley, has so far refused to follow his party’s directive and seat Hall. The problem is that under the Maryland Constitution, O’Malley has no choice in the matter: it says that the governor shall appoint whomever the party designates to replace a delegate who has been removed. Now there will be two hearings, one to determine whether Alston is correct that she can remain in office because she hasn’t technically been “convicted” of crimes she has admitted to, and another to determine whether the governor can refuse to appoint a convicted felon to take her place. Continue reading →

The Inconvenient Truth About The Second Amendment and Freedom: The Deaths Are Worth It

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

carl-with-a-gun-The shocking murder-suicide of of the Kansas City Chiefs’ Jovan Belcher has once again unleashed the predictable rants against America’s “culture of guns” and renewed calls for tougher firearms laws. Yes, reasonable restrictions on firearms sales make sense, and the ready availability of guns to the unhinged, criminal and crazy in so many communities is indefensible. Nevertheless, the cries for the banning of hand-guns that follow these periodic and inevitable tragedies are essentially attacks on core national values, and they need to be recognized as such, because the day America decides that its citizens should not have access to guns will also be the day that its core liberties will be in serious peril.

Here is Kansas City sportswriter Jason Whitlock, in the wake of Belcher’s demise:

“Our current gun culture ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead. Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it… If Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.”

I don’t disagree with a single word of this. Yet everything Whitlock writes about guns can be also said about individual freedom itself. Continue reading →

The Despicable Non-Crime of Briana Augustenborg

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Alexander Jordan, 2002-2012

In US v. Alvarez, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the 9th Circuit’s ruling that the Stolen Valor Act, which made it illegal to claim military honors that one has not in fact received, was unconstitutional. There is, the courts say, a Constitutional, First Amendment right to lie. Fraud—using lies for monetary profit, is already a crime, the courts argue, and so is slander. Making up stories about yourself and others may be unwise, annoying, even hurtful. Still, it is protected speech; so sayeth a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, and it is now the law of the land.

This was a bad ruling, and I was surprised at it. Briana Augustenborg shows why.

One day this year she shared a story with a co-worker about a little 10-year-old boy she knew who was terminally ill with leukemia. The boy, Alex, was a big fan, she said, of Eagle Valley (Colorado) High School’s  football team. The colleague, a woman named Holly Sandoval, had a son that played on the team, and she offered to share the story with her son and get the team to sign a football for Alex. Continue reading →

To The Un-American Secessionists

/ Jack Marshall / 170 Comments

Led by Texans, the White House is being deluged with petitions from all around the nation asking that various states be allowed to secede from the U.S. because the prospect of another four years of President Obama is so heinous. My immediate reaction is that this proves that conservatives are lazier than progressives, whose solution to a similar disappointment with parties reversed in 2004 was to pack up and move to Canada, or at least to make noises about it.  Conservatives apparently want to stay at home and leave the U.S.too. How convenient.

In 2004, when liberals and Democrats were acting like spoiled brats, I posted the following essay entitled “Escape to Canada and the Ethics of Democracy.” I think it is instructive to re-publish this post unedited to clarify what is wrong with the conservative tantrum of 2012. Oh, I could have changed “left” to “right,” Canada to Texas and Bush to Obama and Alec Baldwin to Ted Nugent, but it hardly seemed necessary, for my diagnosis and conclusions are exactly the same, just with a different group. It also seems prudent to leave the essay in its original form to remind smug liberals like Jon Stewart, now having a ball mocking Republicans, that Democrats disgraced themselves in a similar manner not that long ago. Being a hysteric, an alarmist, a bad citizen and a poor loser isn’t confined to members of one partisan group—it just seems that way at the moment. Now the conservatives are the silly people who are rejecting the principles of self-government that they were fervently  lecturing us about, because, you see, those principles didn’t work out their way…this time.

Here is “Escape to Canada and the Ethics of Democracy,” from The Ethics Scoreboard on November 17, 2004: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Non-Voting Americans

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“Eh, what’s was the big deal?”

Amazingly, after all the ink spilled and  broadcast blather about how vital this election is to the future of the nation, it now appears that fewer eligible Americans cared enough to haul their butts to the polls than four years ago. Did anyone predict this? I sure didn’t. With an unusually stark choice and the intensifying of social media, I assumed that intensity levels would be higher, or certainly as high, as 2008.  The conservatives and Republicans in particular, who had all their heralds proclaiming death and destruction, forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together—I’m either quoting “Ghostbusters” now or Mark Levin—and uber-blogger Glenn Reynolds warning of the “broken glass factor,” with anti-Obama patriots so energized that they would be “crawling over broken glass” to reach the polls, flopped like a dead fish in Sonny Corleone’s lap. All the pundits are wondering how it is that a liberal President with low approval ratings and high unemployment could win the election in a nation that is supposedly “center right”?  What’s the mystery? Less than 60% of that public cared enough to participate in their own government! Who knows or cares what they believe or think–they can’t be bothered to do anything. If conservatives are horrified and angry, let them be horrified and angry at those who may have agreed with them but who abdicated their duty as Americans because they were too lazy to follow the issues, too illiterate to understand the positions, too complacent to work for change, too irresponsible to share the burden of self-government. Continue reading →