Comment of the Day

Comment(s) Of The Day: “Not This Issue Again! Arrest These Parents For Child Endangerment, Please…”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

My position on parents endangering young children by seeking “all-time youngest” records for them and forcing them into unnecessarily dangerous recreational activities the kids can’t possibly understand or consent to is, I fear, unalterable. (Above is the 1996 wreck of the plane piloted by 7-year-old Jessica Dubroff, whose parents had her attempting to become the youngest trainee pilot to fly a light aircraft across the United States. Local, national, and international news media cheered on Dubroff’s story until she, her training pilot and her father died in the crash. )

However outdoors enthusiast Sarah B. mounted as strong a case against my position as I can imagine, in two successive comments combined here as Sarah B.’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Not This Issue Again! Arrest These Parents For Child Endangerment, Please…”:

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I think there may be a misunderstanding on how Wyoming papers handle kid stories which I think changes a few things.

In small towns like most of Wyoming (not the urban hell that is Casper, Cheyenne, or Laramie), a story with a kid gets written long before a story about Bud Light and Dylan Mulvaney. I made the front page of our local paper at least a half dozen times as a kid, and made the paper dozens of times. Every year, the middle school and high school band/choir concerts would make the front page the day after they were held. If you consider that we did three concerts a semester for each of band and choir in high school, and two concerts a semester for each of middle school band and choir, that is ten days where the kids make the front page each school year. The high school homecoming royalty would make the front page on Thursday after the Wednesday reveal, the parade would always make front page on Friday, the game on Saturday, with the dance making page two. Prom was front page material. When four kids from our school got the best scholarship to the University of Wyoming one year, we made the front page. Every semester honor roll for every level of school made about third page. Placing in a math competition, debate competition, etc would always get a name in the paper, usually a picture too, and often on the front page. High school sports covered the front page every week.

I say this to emphasize my belief that this shouldn’t be considered as bad as you think. Newspapers gush over “youngest” this and “oldest” that. It makes people read the paper. National news is a page six or eight item and international news, like a war between Ukraine and Russia, is usually found below the fold on the comics page, under the Sudoku and Dear Abby.

People want the stories with the kids. Front page news is preferred to have a picture of a kid. A kid doing something good, like winning the coupon for a free pizza at the drawing at the library book fair, is a great front page story. Getting to the top of Devil’s Tower is just as good, and should be considered with the same gravity.

This is just standard newspaper fodder, nothing to get so excited about.

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Comment Of The Day: “Flagrant Virtue-Signaling Of The Century: Ben & Jerry’s”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

There are more than the usual reasons to publish JutGory’s overview of the absurdity riddling Ben & Jerry’s fatuous July 4th Tweet exhorting the U.S. to “return” “stolen indigenous land” to the Native American tribes. The most unusual one is that WordPress has temporarily (I hope!) lost its damn mind, and has replaced all commenter names on the recent posts with the Borg-like “[1].” As a result, readers are unable to tell who wrote Jut’s comment, for which we should all be grateful.

The main one is that the oft-heard demand that the United States should return the nation to “the Indians” is historically, legally, ethically and realistically batty and ignorant, and drives me nuts every time I hear or read it. Jut concisely explains why it’s nuts historically and legally. He does not go into the aspect of the matter than is usually ignored by shallow thinkers like whoever wrote the Ben & Jerry tweet, which is that if the U.S. hadn’t been in possession of its current mainland North American territory in the 1940s, Nazi Germany would have overrun it and probably the world, and reduced the happy, innocent hunter-gatherers there to either slaves or ashes. Tragic as the current status of the tribes is today, it is a lot better than that. Similarly Hawaii, where there is no question that the residents were robbed of their islands, would have been conquered by the Japanese. If Secretary Seward had not bought Alaska from the Russians, all of us, including the Native Americans, might have been blasted into the Stone Age (where, admittedly, the tribes would have been more confortable than the Europeans) by the Soviets.

I am not exactly saying that Native Americans should be grateful they were over-run, but rather that, as JutGory correctly points out, you can’t turn back the clock.

Here is [1]’s…sorry, JutGory’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Flagrant Virtue-Signaling Of The Century: Ben & Jerry’s”:

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Just another example of Twitter’s inability to facilitate an exploration of subtle thoughts.

Does the US exist on “stolen land”?

Sort of.

Apparently, Manhattan was purchased from indigenous people, just not the ones who “owned” the land. That would make the US a good faith purchaser for value.

But, really, that was a fraud perpetrated on the Dutch, or maybe the English. But, we got it from England fair and square in the Treaty of Paris. All of the original states were stolen from England.

We bought the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon. That was another big portion of the US.

And, the Mexican-American War, contrived as it may have been, was settled legally.

Then, there was Texas.

A huge portion of the US was obtained legally from other thieves.

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Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Quotes For The Fourth: On Liberty, Freedom, and Democracy” (Parts 1 &2)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Tom P‘s Comment of the Day on the 4th of July begins by noting that “if the principles depicted in the above quotes were taught in our schools and supported by the populous,” many of today’s most contentious issues would not be the battle grounds they are. I think that’s right. Unfortunately, not only are the vast majority of those quotes not taught, almost none of the speakers and writers who issued them could be identified by the average citizen. The second group is a bit more challenging, but minimally educated Americans should at least know Clarence Darrow, Daniel Webster, George Orwell and William O.Douglas. Do they? I doubt it. I supposed it would be too much to add Thomas Sowell to the “must recognize” list. I hope, but am far from sure, that Thomas Jefferson’s famous opening to the Declaration of Independence would be known to all, but then Joe Biden, President of the United States, recently confused it with the Constitution, so I have my doubts.

In Part 1, I would say that basic civic and cultural literacy mandates recognition of the names and significance of Presidents Adams, Lincoln, Carter, and Wilson, Ben Franklin, Herman Melville, John Marshall (if I do say so myself), yes and George Bernard Shaw and Jimmy Durante too, dammit!

Here is Tom P’s Comment of the Day on the posts, “Ethics Quotes For The Fourth: On Liberty, Freedom, and Democracy” (Parts 1 &2):

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If the principles depicted in the above quotes were taught in our schools and supported by the populous, there would be no necessity for cramming LGBTQ propaganda down everyone’s throat. Affirmative Action, DEI, Critical Race Theory, and the 1619 project; none of these divisive concepts could gain any serious traction. The liberty-stealing, totalitarian progressive movement would have been stillborn.

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Comment Of The Day: “About This Exchange Between A Reporter Last Week And The White House’s Non-Historic, Non-Incompetent Paid Liar And The Later Response By The White House’s Historic, Incompetent Paid Liar…”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

There are unmistakable signs that the mainstream news media, that is, the propaganda arm of the progressive Borg and the Democratic Party, may be ready to report on the Biden family influence-peddling scandal that they have been burying for years. The reason seems to be that they have decided that Biden is a Dead President Walking, and the sooner he can be LBJed and forced to withdraw from the 2024 Presidential race, the more likely it is that the “resistance”/ Democrats/MSM’s “Get Trump!” efforts will finally succeed. Yesterday, the White House Counsel issued this fascinating bit of subterfuge:

“As we have said many times before, the President was not in business with his son. As we have also said many times before, the Justice Department makes decisions in its criminal investigations independently, and in this case, the White House has not been involved. As the President has said, he loves his son and is proud of him accepting responsibility for his actions and is proud of what he is doing to rebuild his life.”

Wow, hanging a straw man and moving the goalposts at the same time! When was the issue ever Joe “being in business with his son?” The question is and remains the degree to which the President was aware of Hunter’s influence peddling schemes in which Joe was a necessary participant, when he learned about them, if he facilitated them (out of love, naturally) and whether he has been lying about all of it.

Here is Steve-O-in NJ’s reflections on the matter, raised in the post, “About This Exchange Between A Reporter Last Week And The White House’s Non-Historic, Non-Incompetent Paid Liar …”

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It pays to be the king, doesn’t it? Queen Elizabeth, may she rest in peace, used to say the best approach is “never complain, never explain.” She could do it too, because she didn’t answer to anyone. Democrats in office have a tendency to believe that they answer to no one, and given that Biden supposedly got the most votes of any president to date, more popular even than his old boss, why should they think otherwise? The thing is, it’s one thing for Buckingham Palace issue a statement saying that his majesty is done discussing a wayward, publicity seeking second son, it’s quite another to simply refuse to address obvious corrupt dealings and tell the press to pipe down.

1. It’s not a matter of incompetence for the White House not to have an answer prepared for this question. It’s a matter of the White House refusing to answer this question until the media gets the point, and moves on.

2. …And until the public gets the message that this issue is over and moves on to re-electing our most incompetent president yet, making sure we keep dangerous demagogues out of the White House.

3. It worked for Bill, didn’t it? Deny until you can no longer deny, then trickle information out so slowly that the media and the public forget about it, then say it’s a closed issue and you have important work to do, so let’s move on, already.

4. Turley is absolutely right, but his being right has no more value than classmates who see the class bully beating up the least popular member of the class. No one is going to do anything about it. .

6. If you wonder what they would have said you can always go over to Democratic underground or the Daily Kos. Same effect without having to put up with garbage from blue Kool-Aid drinkers and Bidenbots who display all the intelligence of a slug.

7. It looks like the nation dodged a bullet. McConnell did the wrong thing by refusing to grant a hearing to a nominee, and he did it for the wrong reasons by trying to shaft the sitting president, but in the end, he got the right result, which was keeping a partisan hack off the Supreme Court. Frankly, Obama has no one but himself to blame. He was the one who refused to build the relationships with members of Congress from the other party that he needed in order to work effectively with them and get important things done. He was the one who looked down his nose at the other party and characterized them as the enemy. He was also the one who was not able to persuade the notorious RBG not to step down while the stepping was good, so she died just in the nick of time so that she could be replaced by (horrors!) a conservative woman. In effect, it’s as much his fault as anyone else’s that Roe v Wade is history. Chuck the Schmuck helped set the precedent, though, when he said that the Senate should basically declare judicial nominations closed when there were 18 months still to go in George W. Bush’s second term.

It really all boils down to one political party having to eat the bitter herbs of their previous errors.

That said, all of this has a chance, maybe even a very good chance, of blowing up in the Democratic Party’s face. Maybe it gets to the point where the media can’t ignore it, or maybe someone in the mainstream media grows a backbone. Maybe someone at Fox gets in touch with a contact like Woodward and Bernstein. It’s a race between this fuse finally reaching the keg of TNT and the next election, and no one really knows how long this fuse is. I hope it goes kablooey before this nation can be deceived into giving this senile old puppet and his masters a second chance, but we’ll see.

Comment Of The Day: “The Rogan-Kennedy-Hotez Controversy: Is It Ever Unethical To Debate?”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I have a massive backlog of Comments of the Day from last week, so I’d better get cracking.

Here is Tom P.’s COTD on the post, “The Rogan-Kennedy-Hotez Controversy: Is It Ever Unethical To Debate?”

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Except for scientific laws, irrefutable evidence-based outcomes, and scientific principles. i.e., gravity, laws of motion, combustion requires fuel, oxygen, an ignition source, etc. I don’t think there is such a thing as settled science. If settled science exists, what are the criteria that we should use to claim the science is settled? Who determines the science to be settled? Is there a mechanism to unsettle the science if someone comes up with new findings? The answers to my questions are the same. Don’t know. Labeling something as settled science is a condescending dodge.

I concede policies should not be crafted based on the debating skill of debaters. I also believe there should be peace on earth. People should not murder other people. Politicians should speak the truth and keep campaign promises. Now that we have that out of the way, what is the alternative to debating various scientific principles? Blind acceptance?

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Comment Of The Day: “Res Ipsa Loquitur, But Here Are Some Ethics Observations Anyway”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I don’t typically re-post the graphic used in the original essay for Comments of the Day, but in this case I’m making an exception. I think this photo should be circulated far and wide. If I were a GOP strategist, I’d make sure that as many campaign ads and videos as possible included it, because the episode illustrates so clearly both the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party and the current Left’s lack of respect for the nation and its institutions. I might add the abject stupidity of those in charge at the White House. How hard could it be to know this might happen?

Here is Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Res Ipsa Loquitur, But Here Are Some Ethics Observations Anyway”…

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What I found interesting about this was two left-leaning bubbles interacting here.

The centrist liberals are still in this bubble that likes to pretend that everyone on the right still shudders while clutching their bibles at the mere thought of someone committing the sin of sodomy. They don’t see the excesses, or they pretend they aren’t there, so they can continue pretending that none of the criticism sent the soup group’s way is legitimate. This episode dragged them kicking and screaming closer to reality, because something they could not ignore brushed against their bubble. This wasn’t some French feminist group protesting tit laws, this was a White House guest, on the White House lawn, posting unapologetically to social media.

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Comment Of The Day: “Comment Of The Day: The Philosophy Prof’s “Animal House” Ethics Quiz, Part 2”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The recent post about the parole prospects of one of Manson’s remote-control murderers wasn’t the only one to spark several Comment of the Day-worthy responses. The ethics quiz about the ethics professor’s sting to catch cheaters also was a catalyst for outstanding feedback.

Here is Sarah B’s Comment of the Day on Michael R‘s COTD on Parts 1 and 2 of “The Philosophy Prof’s “Animal House” Ethics Quiz.”

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First, let it be stated that I am in NO way agreeing that cheating is a good thing. However, there is an addendum to make on this wonderful comment.

Professors sometimes make it impossible not to cheat. I am thinking back to my undergraduate years in chemical engineering. We would have a 17-18 hour average class-load each semester and if you couldn’t keep up, you tended to get a lot of scorn from the faculty. Four years was the expectation, not five, though many people went the five route to stay somewhat sane. Each of the 3 hour classes would give 20-40 hour of homework a week. Lab write-ups would require at least 20 hours too.

We routinely made fun of students in other colleges who complained about having to write a forty-page paper for their midterm or final. We turned in 5-8 of those a week, all covered in detailed calculations. Homework was worth as much or more than the tests. So…most of us made deals with our fellow students. “I’ll do problems 1 and 2 from Dr. A, 3 and 4 from Dr. B, 5-7 of Dr. C’s, and 10-12 of Dr. D’s. I’ll write up the first third of the P Chem lab report, the second third for the O Chem lab report, and final third of the Units Ops lab report. Sunday night, we’ll get together and each of us will trade answers and copy work.”

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Comment Of The Day: “An Ethics Alarms D-Day Mission…”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Michael, whose whole family is very dear to me, occasionally contributes a thoughtful comment here and this time brought me to tears with this Comment of the Day, his D-Day-inspired remembrances of his visits to Normandy. Those are some of his photos above: EA is honored to post both them and the post they represent.

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Went to the beaches, yet again (been many times and always took guests who visited when we lived in France). I remain impressed by the outpouring of positive feelings from the residents of Normandy.

Although generations change, the memories are kept alive in the families. That is, no doubt, why the headstones at the American Cemetery have American and French flags planted by volunteers from the region.

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An Ethics Alarms Comment Of The Day Spectacular: “Ethics Quiz: The Rehabilitated Manson Cult Murderer”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

It’s a conundrum: the more comments a post attracts, the more optimistic I am that I’m not wasting my time. But once the number of comments tops about 20, the chances of them being read diminishes rapidly. Generally I am a poor judge of which posts will generate the most dialogue; this time, I wasn’t surprised. The question of whether one of the Manson cult murders should be paroled raises ethics issues general and specific, including some that have caused arguments for centuries. Not only has it sparked 87 comments to date, the topic inspired so many Comment of the Day-worthy posts that if I posted them individually they would swallow the blog.

So, in order both to facilitate reading the highlights of the discussion and to give the best of the best exposure to a larger audience, what follows are the Comments of the Day by on the post “Ethics Quiz: The Rehabilitated Manson Cult Murderer,” by Steve-O-in NJ, Steve Witherspoon, Humble Talent, Ryan Harkins, Tim Levier, Alicia, Extradiminsional Cephalopod and Tom P. though I recommend reading all 87, even if they include two esteemed EA commenters taking shots at each other like the Earps and the Clantons. (You might want to read the original post, too.)

First up is Steve-O-in NJ:

Life in prison should mean life in prison. Some crimes are just so bad that the person who committed them should never be allowed to rejoin society. I think Charles Manson is the most undeserving recipient of the mercy that came with the temporary abolition of the death penalty whoever existed. I also think his followers, who, young as they might have been, we’re still old enough to be responsible for their actions deserved the same fate.

Don’t get me wrong, 54 years in prison is a damn long time. It’s longer than I’ve been alive, and the idea of spending all that time staring at concrete is very unpleasant. However, the families of those victims who were butchered should not have to see this person walking around free. Too often the victims and their families get forgotten in all of this. The victims here did not a thing. It isn’t as though they had bad blood with the offenders or had done something to the offenders. This is a case of someone who is as close to evil as any human ever was working his spell over other humans who let him work his spell on them and using that control to destroy lives who he really had nothing to do with and no reason to destroy. This is also a case of individuals who could still tell the difference between right and wrong choosing to go as wrong as any human possibly could. I say let this woman rot in prison for the rest of her days, I believe she should only be released if she is in the throes of a terminal disease and doesn’t have very long to live. Then by all means, release her to die.

Now Steve Witherspoon…

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Comment Of The Day: “Depressing Ethics Notes From The Education Apocalypse, Part I”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

In his Comment of the Day on today’s post about various graduation-related ethics stories, JutGory provides a veritable feast of delicious ethics morsels. It all began when he sent me an email suggesting as an ethics quiz candidate the story involving the student who had ChatGPT write the speech he submitted for approval to high school officials, intending all the while to sandbag them and deliver a different speech he knew they would never approve. I gratefully used the item but not as a quiz, judging it too easy: the Ethics Alarms position would be that using artificial intelligence to write anything one is supposed to write unassisted is unethical. Jut followed up with this COTD teeming with related ethics conundrums.

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When I submitted #4, I asked if it might be an ethics quiz whether using ChatGPT to write the address.

You asked if I was being tongue in cheek.

The answer was not entirely. When I sent the e-mail, I had not finished thinking about the issues. Here were things I was mulling over:

1) Having AI write a speech for you is not as bad as a lawyer using it to write a brief.

2) It is certainly not as bad as the bait and switch in the other ethics breach he committed.

3) It was still deceptive to propose a speech you had no intention of giving; so was the wrong thing committed in the proposal of the speech, or in the drafting itself, or both?

4) It would not be plagiarism to give the speech because you are not really copying anyone.

5) This reminded me of the ownership issue of the photo taken by the monkey (you covered this); if you put in the parameters to ChatGPT, how much of the product can you claim as your own (because ChatGPT can’t really copyright it (Can it? Does it?)?

6) It also reminded me of the artist who entered an AI painting into a competition (again, covered here) and there were no restrictions on such submissions in the contest.

After I sent the e-mail, I concluded it was wrong but primarily based upon the dishonesty. Actually using ChatGPT to draft an address raises some of these other issues and the answer fits somewhere in the middle of that mess that I laid out.

Follow up question: would it be even worse if he had ChatGPT draft his negative address, as well? Does he get any credit for actually writing the address he gave? (That’s a little tongue in cheek, but still an appropriate question in this context.)

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I’m baaaack….to offer my answers to the (let’s see) eight enumerated issues and the two follow-up questions at the end:

1. Rationalization #22.

2. Ditto.

3. Using any speech to deceive was the ethical breach, regardless of how it was written.

4. I agree. It’s not plagiarism, just as submitting a paper sold by a term paper mill isn’t plagiarism.

5. I expect this issue to be litigated sooner or later.

6. I wrote about that one, too. In that case, the program used can fairly be called just an artist’s tool, absent either a rule that prohibited it, though an ethical entrant would have checked with organizers before submitting the art for a prize. In this case, there is no question (is there?) that the student knew a speech written by a bot would be rejected.

7. No. The substituted speech was unethical from the first word: it couldn’t be made more or less unethical by the means of its production. I suppose the content could have made the speech more unethical, if, say, it were obscene or racist, or revealed national security secrets.

8. No. You don’t get credit for not doing something unethical.