Comment of the Day: “Regarding the ‘Substack Supports Nazis’ Controversy”

January 17, 2024 / Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Joel Mundt makes an interesting comparison (that never occurred to me) regarding the movement by Substack writers to force the platform to ban its small contingent of white supremacists and Nazis. His Comment of the Day also shows that COTD does not have to approach “War and Peace” length to be worthy. Here’s Joel, on the post,“Regarding the ‘Substack Supports Nazis’ Controversy” :

***

This year, a Satanist group put an occult display – I believe it was Baphomet – in our state capitol building, which caused no small amount of consternation among the solid conservative majority in the state. There were calls to tear it down, remove it…all kinds of stuff.

Our governor, a Republican, gave what I thought was a pretty good response: “Like many Iowans, I find the Satanic Temple’s display in the Capitol absolutely objectionable. In a free society, the best response to objectionable speech is more speech, and I encourage all those of faith to join me today in praying over the Capitol and recognizing the nativity scene that will be on display – the true reason for the season.”

Substack has some objectionable content on it…its own version of Baphomet? Don’t eliminate it. Don’t censor it. Don’t force it elsewhere. Objectionable speech should be countered with more speech. Logical arguments and cogent thinking are what give people the chance to understand why some ideas are bad when compared to other ideas. Forcing silence just makes the banished ideas more enticing. Want your children to be white supremacists?…just do what the Left does and attempt to kill the point of view without debate. That will make it super-attractive to juvenile minds that don’t know better. People who simply want to eliminate talk of white supremacy and Hitler and Nazis are those that are probably too stupid to rationally counter it.

Maybe that’s why the Left wants to silence so many different topics.

***

[For the rest of the story regarding that Satanist display, it’s here. JM]

Comment of the Day: “Army Policy Is Apparently That Its Prosecutors Must ‘Believe All Women’”

January 10, 2024 / Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

As I thought it might, the post about the Army’s head sexual assault prosecutor being fired because a decade’s old email suggested that defense attorneys would have to fight hard for the rights of accused servicemen being targeted by politicians “with an agenda” quickly attracted intense commentary. (Oddly, or perhaps not, the story has been largely ignored by mainstream media. My mining of obscure legal ethics sources has its benefits.) No commentary was more illuminating or useful than this, the Comment of the Day by 77Zoomie, on the post, “Army Policy Is Apparently That Its Prosecutors Must ‘Believe All Women’”…

***

Some thoughts from someone who has both prosecuted and defended sexual assault cases in military courts.

Although it is a difficult concept for most civilian attorneys to grasp, the military justice system that was put in place in the early 1950s (as the Uniform Code of Military Justice) Is designed to accomplish two, sometimes contradictory, tasks. The first is to provide constitutional due process to service members accused of any of a specific list of crimes delineated by the UCMJ. Military defense counsel are obviously crucial in this process because they are frequently the only individuals with the capability to adequately overcome the tremendous advantage possessed by the prosecution on a military installation. Prosecution authority rests ultimately in a series of commanders at various levels. These individuals have unlimited resources at their disposal, including the ability to select potential jurors and to influence proceedings in any one of a thousand different ways, some obvious but most not. Military defense attorneys are generally removed from the formal chain of command so that local commanders cannot affect the career of a zealous defense counsel working to protect the interests of her client.

Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Its Post-Harvard President Firing Tantrum Shows That The Left Is Even More Corrupt Than We Thought! Part II: Claudine Gay’s Disgusting NYT Op-Ed”

January 5, 2024 / Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I owe Tom P. this Comment of the Day. In the post, I asked EA readers to check out the Times’ readers’ reactions, because I dreaded reading them. He was the first to provide an overview. I am most grateful.

It is not surprising, but still discouraging, that the early responses were positive to Gay’s truly awful attempt to shift the blame for her rapid demise as Harvard’s president to the critics and “racial stereotypes,” as well as implying what Hillary Clinton would call a “vast right wing conspiracy.” I cannot conceive of any good faith examination of the events leading to Gay’s resignation leading to the conclusion that anyone was responsible for her forced exit other than her, and to a lesser extent, the Harvard Corporation that elevated her, enabled her, and tried to cover for her, ultimately making a bad situation worse. Every attempt to defend Gay has fallen into three categories, and often all three: ignoring the facts (which Gay does in her Times op-ed), excusing plagiarism and endorsing the untenable double standard of holding students to a more exacting standard of integrity than Harvard’s faculty, deans, and president; race-baiting, which is particularly hard to justify under these facts when Gay’s race (and gender) have been the Golden Tickets that got her the job in the first place, and a “we can’t let them win!” rationalization. None of the four is rational or worthy of respect.

Tom’s survey, however, is encouraging. It suggest that all the metaphorical dust being thrown in the eyes of the public by Gay, progressives, pundits and the media, isn’t going to be sufficient to fool enough of the people enough of the time, as Honest Abe might put it.

Here is Tom P.’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Its Post-Harvard President Firing Tantrum Shows That The Left Is Even More Corrupt Than We Thought! Part II: Claudine Gay’s Disgusting NYT Op-Ed”...

***

Per your request, below are my observations of NY Times readers’ comments.

Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Scary and Unethical Reactions to the Hamas-Israel War on the Left and Right”

January 1, 2024 / Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day was almost the last comment on this blog in 2023, and is an appropriate first COTD in 2024. I called it the “Comment of the Year” in my initial response, and though I haven’t done the homework to go back through all the year’s Comments of the Day to make that an official decision, his opus is certainly worthy of that honor.

Don’t waste your time with my introduction: Steve’s post is long, but both perceptive and a useful guide to some of what lies ahead.

Here is Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Scary and Unethical Reactions to the Hamas-Israel War on the Left and Right.”

***

You don’t understand anti-Semitism?

You don’t give yourself enough credit. There isn’t that much to understand about it. It’s simple hatred of “the other,”especially “the other” who does well.

Throughout their 4,000 years or more of history, the Jewish people have always been “the other.” In ancient days they were “the other” because they worshiped one god while almost all the other people of the Middle East worshiped several. In the days of the Greek and Roman empires they were “the other” because they refused to assimilate the way many conquered peoples did. The Greeks tried to impose their own culture on the Jews and got the Maccabean revolt for trying. The Romans tried to take the Jews into the firm the way they’d taken many others in. They were never fully successful, and after one revolt too many the Romans dispersed them, creating the province of Palestine.

In Christian Europe they were “the other” partly because of their different faith, partly because they were closed off from most professions and closed themselves off socially. In the Muslim Ottoman Empire they were “the other” for the same reasons. The majority never likes “the other” much, and it did not help that one of the few businesses the Jews were allowed to engage in was moneylending. Moneylenders are not well liked. It did not help either that the Jews were usually merchants and moneylenders who did better than the European non-noble classes or the Muslims, who were mostly farmers and small shopkeepers.

Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: Nikki Haley’s Answer To ‘What Caused The Civil War?’

December 30, 2023 / Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This choice was tough: yesterday’s post on Nikki Haley’s bone-headed and tone -deaf answer to the soft-ball question about the cause of the American Civil War sparked several COTD-worthy observations, but I chose this one, by Chris Marschner, to represent the field. Haley’s gaffe, along with her typically weaselly attempt to wiggle out of it, is looking like that rare breed these days, a botched public statement that actually has “legs” and does serious harm to a candidate’s prospects, like President Gerald Ford’s assertion in a debate that Poland wasn’t an Iron Curtain country, or Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” statement. Naturally some on the Right rushed to Haley’s defense, as with this WSJ piece, and critics on the Left “pounced,” as with historian Heather Cox Richardson’s substack piece that called Haley’s answer “the death knell of the Republican Party.” ( This is known as “wishcraft.”) To me, this was just one more instance of Haley proving that she is untrustworthy and excessively calculating to ever believe. In some respects she’s the opposite of Trump, who is, mostly correctly, regarded as an authentic character who believes what he says, at least when he says it. Like the vast majority of politicians, Haley appears to believe what she thinks the most people want her to believe, until she discovers that they don’t.

I’ll say here that I think Chris is too easy on Haley. To answer that question without even mentioning slavery is incomprehensible, especially in 2023, when an entire political party has bet all its chips on racial grievances, “a threat to democracy” by racist fascists, and Trump Derangement. Any minimally educated and aware politician should be able to say, succinctly: “There were three primary causes: slavery, states’ rights, and to preserve the union. Next question.”

Here is Chris’s Comment of the Day on the post, “When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: Nikki Haley’s Answer To ‘What Caused The Civil War?’”…

***

South Carolina the first state to secede from the union did so on December 20, 1860. The rationale for secession was the fear that the institution of slavery was being threatened by the federal government. There was no blood spilled until the decision to preserve the union was made a year later.

According to Historytoday.com, “The American Civil War was fought to preserve the Union. There had long been tensions between the rights of the states under the constitution and those of the federal government, so much so that South Carolina and the administration in Washington almost came to blows over the issue of tariffs in the 1830s. It was slavery, however, that brought matters to breaking point.”

The Civil war began in April of 1861 when Abraham Lincoln ordered that Fort Sumter, under the command of U.S. Major Robert Anderson who occupied the still under construction fort during the approximate 15 month standoff between Union forces and the South Carolina militia, be resupplied with fresh troops and “humanitarian aid”. Naturally this was seen as an encroachment by U.S. troops on sovereign ground by the South Carolina Governor. Nonetheless, Lincoln sent the ship called the Star of the West with 200 troops and supplies to resupply the fort. When it arrived in Charleston harbor it was driven back to sea by the militia.

Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Now Here’s A Scary Poll Result…”

December 21, 2023 / Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Ethics Alarms post regarding the Harvard-Harris poll showing that Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 had wildly diverging beliefs from the rest of the population in supporting “woke values and victim culture” ended with the plaintive query, “Now what?”

Michael R, in his Comment of the Day to “Now Here’s A Scary Poll Result…,” answered the question thusly:

***

Hmm… So, maybe you CAN’T allow people who hate this country and what it stands for teach the children. Maybe you CAN’T let them control the media including the news. Maybe you CAN’T let them be hired by the government and take over the 4th branch. We have allowed this for 50 years and now we are surprised by the results.

Who could have predicted this would be the outcome?

Of course, everyone with a brain predicted this at least since the 1970’s. Now, the problem is what to do about it? You can’t fix the education system.

You can’t hire teachers that aren’t fixated on spreading the woke mind virus because the people doing the hiring only hire people who have appropriate brain washing.
You can’t become a teacher if you don’t support the woke mind virus because the education faculties will throw you out otherwise.
Even if the faculty don’t want to throw you out, the professional standards call for DEI, pronoun usage, etc. It is a requirement of the program that you believe these things.
If you don’t pledge allegiance to the woke agenda, you don’t meet the requirements of the teacher ed program. Even if that is ignored, the accreditation body would remove the department’s accreditation if they allowed an outsider to become a teacher.
Even if you somehow overcame that, the teacher’s union would eliminate any teacher hired who didn’t conform.

There are a couple obvious options.

Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “The Harvard President’s New Scandal: Now The Only Way Gay Can Prove She’s Fit To Lead The University Is To Leave It”

December 20, 2023 / Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Wow, those 7 days went by fast! I had flagged this memorable comment by JutGory as a Comment of the Day on the 13th, fully intending to get it up every single day since then, and my plans kept getting derailed (because this is how everything has been going since October around here). Fortunately, this particular entry is timeless, another example of one of my favorite kinds of reader comment, a personal reminiscence with an ethics kick. Also fortunately, the disgrace of Harvard president Claudine Gay, the matter that inspired Jut, is still reverberating. Still, I apologize for my delay.

Here is JutGory’s Comment of the Day on the post, “The Harvard President’s New Scandal: Now The Only Way Gay Can Prove She’s Fit To Lead The University Is To Leave It”:

***

I am not sure what to think of allegations of plagiarism.

I am probably both stupid and smart in this regard.

I attended St. John’s College. Plagiarism was hardly an issue. Everything you wrote was supposed to be original. If you wrote about Plato, it did not matter if you failed to attribute criticisms to Aristotle.

No one would plagiarize Aquinas when criticizing Aristotle.

If you plagiarized Plotinus in commenting on Plato, who would know?

The idea was not to research things, it was to think things.

(Amusingly, I attributed to Jesus a quote that was actually one of Rabbi Hillel. Who knew?)

Going into grad school in Philosophy, I was delightfully amused when my Logic Professor was surprised at my course essay. He expected a “book report” sort of essay, while I gave him an original response to the the work. I did not cite anything. Why should I? The thoughts came out of my head, and my name was on the front page of the paper.

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Romanian Flag Ethics, or ‘Who Cares About Chad?’”

December 13, 2023 / Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“Unhinged” is a Russell Crowe horror movie about a woman in a bad mood one morning who honks angrily at the driver of a car in front of her when a light turns green at an intersection. Unfortunately for her, she finds out that she has triggered a lunatic who decides to ruin her life as revenge for her impulsive honk. In the background to this Very Special Comment of the Day, I am the equivalent of the woman, and the author, “Stacey’s Friend Chad” is Russell Crowe, if the Russell Crowe character waited over six years to decide to go on his rampage.

Welcome to my world. I woke up this morning to not one but six posts scattered around Ethics Alarms by a commenter whose first comment had him banned from Ethics Alarms on this post, a tongue-in-cheek bit of fluff that I wrote in 2017 after reading about a flag dispute between Romania and Chad. Two commenters didn’t appreciate my whimsy (out of over 40 comments—I’ll take that ratio any day), one of whom was writing from Romania to defend his country, and another who launched into diatribe about my “dishonesty.”

Normally such a comment wouldn’t get out of moderation, but I was in a bad mood that day for some reason, and posted the comment just so I could abuse the jerk for all to see. That was stupid and unethical. I’ve done it a couple of times, and even warn commenters about my occasional outbursts in the Comment Policies above, but still, reading what I wrote in 2017 is embarrassing. This is my penance: that banned commenter returned with a vengeance this morning, and it is all my fault. Thus for the second time I’m posting one of his attack comments instead of sending it to spam hell immediately (which is where the other five comments are now.)

I’m hoping I remember this episode the next time I’m tempted to call a commenter a “butt-head.” Here you go…

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: Regarding The Ohio Right To Abortion Amendment [Corrected]

November 10, 2023November 10, 2023 / Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

In HBO’s “Six Feet Under,” a character in the midst of trying to persuade his fiance to abort their unplanned pregnancy is visited in a nightmare by his three previous aborted offspring at the age they would have been if they had been permitted to live…

I have another abortion-related post gnawing on the inside of my skull, but just as I was about to get the thing down in print, I remembered Ryan Harkin’s deft comment from two days ago, responding to Here’s Johnny’s argument that “given that we concede to government the right, in limited circumstances, to end innocent human life when a greater good is perceived (by some), why cannot we cede that right to women, in limited circumstances when a greater good is perceived?“ I had been prepared to point out that Kant (as usual, dismissing special circumstances) holds that it is never ethically acceptable to sacrifice a life “for the greater good,” and that the aborted human life would certainly have a different perspective on that conclusion. Ryan Harkins, however, had more and better to say, and did, in this Comment of the Day on “Regarding the Ohio Right to Abortion Amendment”:

[Notice of Correction: For some reason, I attributed this COTD to Null Pointer, who promptly alerted me to the mistake. My apologies to Ryan.]

***

In general, the answer to this is that government and individuals have different roles. Government exists to set the boundaries, enforce the boundaries, and exact penalties for the failure to comply with those boundaries regarding interpersonal interaction. Individuals cede that responsibility to the government so that there is an agreed upon entity to handle those interpersonal disputes, for otherwise everything becomes vigilante justice. Whoever is stronger wins.

The view of government we have is that because the strong and the powerful can impinge on the rights of weaker individuals, government intervenes to protect the rights of the weak. I know there are other forms of government out there, ones that favor the strong and crush the weak, or favor the clan at the expense of outsiders, and so on. But here we formed a government of the people, by the people, for the people, with the thought that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, which include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We profess that the government exists to ensure that the enumerated rights of the weak are protected against the strong. To turn and delegate the decision making to the individual returns the power to the strong to crush the weak as they see fit. It is anathema to what our nation stands for.

Continue reading →

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: