Comment of the Day

Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Quiz: Censorship At Northwest High”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Frequent commenter Here’s Johnny thanked me for choosing his analysis of the recent ethics quiz on school paper censorship as a Comment of the Day. Truly, the thanks goes in the other direction. Comments like his, which dig deeper into a story than my initial post has is a gift to Ethics Alarms and its readers. On the blog’s predecessor, The Ethics Scoreboard, I would generally post only a couple of times a week. Often that meant I could thoroughly research a topic before publishing (it also meant fewer typos, and almost no readers comments). I decided that a blog format that permitted covering more of the ethics landscape, which was (and is) vast and expanding, more quickly if less thoroughly was better suited to my mission. Nonetheless, as in this case, many of the ethics tales require more research, context and nuance than I have time to apply.

This commentariat is superb at filling the blanks. Indeed, for every Comment of the Day I post there are probably five that I could have posted. It is not so much of an honor for the commenter as a rescue for the blog. Most readers, I have found, don’t read comments to posts, for the same reason I usually don’t: on most sites the comments are useless, depressing, and horrifying. Ethics Alarms comments are, in contrast to all but a few other sites (Althouse comes to mind), are important supplements to the main essay, offering not merely a different perspective, but additional information as well

Heeeeeeeeere’s Here’s Johnny’s Comment of the Day on “Ethics Quiz: Censorship At Northwest High”…

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As is often the case, we are getting just part of the story and being asked to render an opinion based on incomplete information. Unless we dig a bit further, our decision would be either: it never is okay to shut down a high school newspaper, or, it is okay for administrators to shut down a high school newspaper.

In this case, one reason we are lacking information is that school and district officials seem unwilling to even talk about it. A columnist for “The Grand Island Independent” says he was hung up on by someone at the district about as soon as he said who he was. A couple of officials have commented, but they essentially are non-comments. Zach Mader, Northwest Public Schools board vice president, told “The Independent” he remembers talks of shutting down the student paper should the school district lose the ability to control what they find to be “inappropriate content.” The district superintendent would only say that it was an administrative decision. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Verdict: ‘Quiet Quitting’ Is Unethical. Next Question?”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

[The caption on perhaps my favorite Charles Addams cartoon reads, “We never could have done it without him.”]

I thought that the essay on “quiet quitting” would spark a good discussion, and when I think that, I’m usually wrong. This time I was right, and among the excellent comments was this Comment of the Day by Tim Hayes, who focuses on the crucial aspect of the issue that I barely touched on at all: the responsibilities of management.

Here is Tim’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Verdict: “Quiet Quitting” Is Unethical. Next Question?”…

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So, full disclosure, I hate the terminology and discussions around “quiet quitting”, both as a manager, and as an employee. Part of this is because it is unethical – but also part of it is because a lot of current discussions seem to be about deflections and doublespeak, and they just frankly aren’t doing anyone any good.

Some instances of quiet quitting are simply laziness on the part of the employee – this shouldn’t surprise us (I can make a strong argument that laziness when possible is actually a biological predisposition, and furthermore beneficial to societies when channeled appropriately), and while performing excellently is a virtue, and should be a path to success, it is not a necessity in all things. The American experiment, and indeed all civilizations (Western and Eastern), have gotten along just fine with the majority of individuals being mediocre – the trick has historically lay in defining mediocre as still sufficiently productive to support a society when the majority of its members are at that level, while allowing those who wish to perform exceptionally to do so. So, in the situation where quiet quitting is about laziness, the only major question to be answered is what constitutes acceptable levels of performance in the role at hand, and have those been adequately defined and communicated to the person in that role.

This is why I hate hearing the discussions as a manager – they almost always ignore that there is a failure of leadership/management in these cases. If I have someone who is performing the job as I’ve described it to them, and is actually meeting my set standards for acceptable levels of performance, yet their performance of their responsibilities is insufficient in some way, then it is axiomatic that I have failed to define as acceptable the levels of performance that are sufficient to fulfill my need. If, conversely, I have described acceptable levels of performance and the person is not meeting them, and so my business needs are not being met, than I am failing to hold this person to the standards I have set. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “The Little League Cotton Fiasco: Good Job, Everybody! Now U.S. Race Relations Are In Ethics Zugzwang!”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In the Ethics Alarms post about this horrible example of how broken our race-relations are (I believe that the death-spiral was set in motion by Barack Obama, but that’s a topic for another day, when I get to him in the “Worst Presidents’ series), I did not sufficiently focus on one of the most disgusting aspects of the story.

As is usually the case, a reader was ready to remedy the omission. Here is E2’s Comment of the Day on the post, “The Little League Cotton Fiasco: Good Job, Everybody! Now U.S. Race Relations Are In Ethics Zugzwang!”

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Did it occur to absolutely no one that these are kids and kids do silly things? Emulating a Little League star is basically an innocent thing: expecting these same kids to equate pseudo-cotton balls to slavery and racism is asking more than is fair for their age. These are kids!

So no children can no longer be children, apparently And it is clearly up to the progressives to instill — from birth, I guess — a deep sense of guilt about America’s checkered history. That there many inspiring and admirable aspects to our history  are conveniently forgotten or treated as subordinate to the moral and ethical missteps.

If a kid wore his grandad’s WWII medal would that make him a little warmonger?

Kids live in the day, not in history as adults record and interpret it. And they remain innocent for an astonishingly short period of time. Can’t the Left just allow children to enjoy being kids before they are indoctrinated, brain-washed and turned against their nation and fellow Americans?

I guess not, as long as there are nasty, ill-intentioned, ultra-negative progressive adults out there.

Comment of The Day: “Saturday Night Ethics Fever, 8/27/2022: Davy Crockett, and Other Ethics Stories…”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This is an epic Comment of the Day by Steve-O-in NJ, really about three in one, and since it is so long and worthy of pondering, I’m not going to be my usual verbose self in an introduction.

Here is Steve’s Comment of The Day on the post, “Saturday Night Ethics Fever, 8/27/2022: Davy Crockett, and Other Ethics Stories…”

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Just a few late thoughts from a long time student of history who doesn’t like the way its pages are turning now….

I wouldn’t worry so much about the rhetoric that the President and his underlings are flinging around at this point. What I would worry about is the actions that will follow.

I thought that a lot of the rhetoric about putting supporters and members of the previous administration in jail or removing them from public life was just that, rhetoric delivered by overheated partisan journalists who ultimately don’t get to make decisions or try to make their overheated rhetoric a reality. I sneered at Jennifer Rubin, who is nothing more than a partisan hack who let Trump derangement syndrome melt her brain. I lashed back out at Leonard Pitts, who might bark viciously, but is ultimately no more than a barking partisan dog. I thought that ultimately these people were just loudmouth extremists who had been given undeserved megaphones, and their talk would ultimately go nowhere, as the Democratic Party settled into actually governing and trying to deal with the problems that this nation is facing, and they are myriad.

The thing is, the Democratic Party never really settled into governing, because governing in the nation’s best interest was not their primary goal. It has not been for probably three decades. Their primary goal has been ultimate power. A majority of the Democratic Party now really believes that this nation would be better off as a one-party state, with them as that one party. However, their failure to govern is producing some less than stellar results, and I don’t need to tell you what they are because you’ve seen them. If they continued on the path they were headed down at the beginning of this year, they would have been doomed.

However, instead of tacking to the center and trying to come up with some solutions to the real problems we face, which I won’t list because we’ve already listed them several times, they’ve decided this is the time to move to eliminate the opposition. You can say that’s silly. You can say that could never happen here. You could say this is a special case because Trump is just such a threat to make this country slip off the path it was intended to follow. However, if you said those things, you would just be fooling yourself and trying to fool those around you. The fact is that this attempt to put one’s political opponent in jail is unprecedented. Continue reading →

It’s Comment Of The Day Sunday! First Up: COTD On “Stop Making Me Defend Eric Swalwell!”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Once again, I’m waaaay behind in posting deserving Comments of the Day, so this will be the first of several posted today. Long-time commenter Dwayne N. Zechman tackled the question of why the belief in Natural Law does not require belief in God, and did a superb job.

Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “Stop Making Me Defend Eric Swalwell!”:

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“The problem is how do you convey the idea that natural rights simply exist without suggesting a creator?”

The same way you convey the idea that GRAVITY simply exists without suggesting a creator. Or take your pick of any basic, unmoving truth that exists as a part of the existence of the Universe: Newton’s laws of motion, Conservation of Mass, Conservation of Energy, tidal forces, the way water almost uniquely expands when it freezes instead of contracts, the list goes on and on.

What all of these things have in common with mankind’s natural rights is that they undoubtedly exist, and that their existence is NOT the result of any human being anywhere making a decision that they should exist.

One can dive deeper into the actual reason and possibly conclude that there is a “Creator” of some sort or not, but it doesn’t change the basic tenet that such things do exist, have always existed, and will always exist–and no human decision, be it individual or collective, can change that. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Electric Cars And The Following The Science” Lie

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Come to Ethics Alarms for the mile-wide and inch deep reflections of the ethicist, stay for the enhancement, perspective and enlightening analysis by the readers who know what they are writing about.

Sarah B.’s superb Comment of the Day needs no more introduction, and besides, don’t read me on this topic when you should be reading her.

Here is her COTD on the post,”Electric Cars And The “Following The Science” Lie.”

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First, anyone who says “follow the science” has forgotten what science means. Science is a process that states a method for determining the most likely reason for something. Science requires us to observe a phenomenon, hypothesize about the phenomenon, posit a fair test of the hypothesis, complete the test several times with the same inputs, and compare the results of the tests with the observed phenomenon. The better correlated the test with reality, the better the hypothesis and the more likely it is to be true. Conversely, if you cannot replicate your test or your test or your test does not correlate well with reality, it is either time to scrap the test or the hypothesis.

Anthropogenic climate change is not science by the centuries old definition. The tests are mostly unable to be replicated, and the results have been proven false, time and again. To follow the science, it is time to scrap that hypothesis and move on.

Second, I was amazed to see such low requirements for electric cars to validate their “green” existence. Most studies I have read on this subject put the threshold far closer to 100,000 miles before even coming close. The best I have seen before this one puts us nearer to 75,000 miles than 25,000 miles.

Third, this study only deals with the formulation of the battery. If one considers where we are getting the energy, and as other commenters have noted, solar and wind are not nearly so clean as you would like to think. Heck, think of all the chemicals that need to go into making those panels, even though they cannot give us power 24/7/365 like burning fossil fuels. Life cycle analyses on electric cars, considering batteries, electricity, grid concerns, etc tend to push them to obscene mileage, well above expected battery life. In this instance, they are not unlike windmills, with an expected 30 year life and a 37-52 year payback period, sans government intervention.

Fourth, no one bothers, when discussing electric vehicle, to discuss the basic laws of thermodynamics. These laws are just like the laws of gravity, not caring whether or not you like them. They don’t care what is fair. They don’t care what is socially acceptable. They don’t care if they inconvenience some more than others, because if you are too stupid to get on the wrong side of these laws, you will pay the price. So, thermodynamics state that whenever one transforms matter to energy, or energy to another type of energy, or energy to matter, that there will be a loss in total energy. To take a simple example, we get most electricity by burning coal. The rock is in the ground. We have to spend energy to get it out of the ground and pulverized. Now we’ll start into some of the math. Coal is burned. The gas is used to make steam, the steam is used to turn a turbine that makes electricity. The gas is cleaned. This process has a maximum theoretical efficiency of around 45%. Most of the power plants run at about 33% because theoretical efficiency is not anywhere close to real world possiblity. So for every 100 units of energy the coal gives off, you get 33%.

Let’s now get some minor math happening for electric cars. I’m going to skip the big equations and use easily available numbers from reputable sites. For this exercise, we are going to assume that preparing coal for electric generation uses the same amount of energy as preparing gasoline for car consumption, as gasoline and coal are equivalent primary sources, but electricity is not a primary energy source unless you are hooking up your power lines to silk kites. Now, a car that gets gasoline loses 64-75% on inefficiencies and powering auxiliaries. So a car that was given 100 units of power from gasoline gets 25 units of power when all is said and done, with the WORST assumptions on gasoline cars. Continue reading →

Open Forum! Abuse Me!

/ Jack Marshall / 50 Comments

Welcome to my world! Here is what greeted me this morning: a virtuoso hate rant from some student or faculty member at the University of Akron:

Ay, Cracker Jack! You spelled “border” wrong, you ethnonationalist, neoconservatice, warmongering, cop-calling pussy. We will flood this country one way or another, and no stupid fucking wall is going to stop us. I use my bullshit millions, generated by zero effort and a fuckton of capital gains, to fucking fly pregnant refugee women here on workers visas, and I buy them a legal path to citizenship once the anchor babies are delivered by various local obstetricians. Your little one vote every other year isn’t going to do shit to stop me and my rich ass, militant progressive friends from fucking over rich wite people and shoveling Black and Brown folks into the fucking voting booths. Suck my dick, you pretentious coward in centrist’s clothing.

It’s no wonder you didn’t even mention Trump’s two most egregious serial crimes: mass housing discrimination and multiple sexual assaults. But it makes sense. You support the same shit. You just don’t like his lack of decorum and politeness. Because you would love if the non-puritanical shit gets swept under the rug. You favored a Bush or Reagan world…where genocide, war crimes, mass incarceration and racist economics are passed off as “Trade Deals, Fighting Terror, Stopping Crime & The Free Market”. Trump wants “Caligula” and you’d rather have “Handmaid’s Tale”, you pathetic, heliophobic bootlicking bitch’s bitch.

No amount of moral grandstanding against Trump–in favor of some other puppet of a billionaire with lobbyist strings, mind you––will ever make you seem like a man whose partner is faithful. Your wife, if you miraculously have one, fucks and sucks every dick darker than tumbleweed that she can get her hands on. Now get your head out of your undoubtedly flabby ass and your “nonpartisan” pigs out of my way, so we, the men of color in your favorite cuckold pornos, can finally fight hand-to-hand with the Klan that you pretend to disavow. [Mic Drop]

Observations:

  • I did NOT spell border wrong in the post this landed on, but I often do; I also frequently misspell “receive,” “Michael” and some other things wrong as well, when I’m not making typos. Note the this comment misspelled “white,” unless “wite” is a thing now.
  • The screen name was “SEEYOUNEXTTUESDAY.” Is that a threat?
  • The screed is not unskilled. I can’t tell if the writer really is deranged, is parodying derangement, or thinks this is what I expect from the deranged.
  • I love starting my day by reading stuff like this. It happens more often than you would think.
  • That’s a still from “Billions.” The show’s prosecutor protagonist, played by the wonderful Paul Giamatti (“John Adams,” and former Commissioner of Baseball Bart Giamatti’s son), has an S&M kink.
  • No, the comment is NOT getting through moderation…

But I digress.

Sorry

This is your shot to write about whatever you want to, as long as it’s ethics.

Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Quiz: Hitler’s Watch”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Once again, I have proven to be a lousy prognosticator when it comes to which posts will generate the liveliest discussions. The Ethics Quiz about the propriety of buying Adolf Hitler’s watch provoked many excellent comments and trenchant observations, and Steve-O-In NJ’s Comment of the Day is certainly among them.

Here it is…

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Something as unique and personal as Hitler’s watch probably belongs in a museum, but if a private person owns it, he has the right to sell it. My question is why would anyone want something like that and what would he do with it once he had it? Doesn’t that say something about the buyer? People collect all kinds of odd things, but collecting something like this is odder than most.

As a Roman Catholic, I was brought up on the idea that certain amounts of power remained within certain objects, especially physical remains. That’s why Church altars often hold holy relics, the more important the church, the more important the relics it holds. There was some serious fear when the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris had that fire a few years back that the crown of thorns, supposedly worn by Christ Himself, and the tunic of St Louis, worn by that saintly King on crusade, would be destroyed and with them the physical link to those personages. I don’t think the belief in relics and similar items is unique to Catholicism, I think it was around long before that. Supposedly the tree that Siddhartha achieved enlightenment under, the burning bush where Moses received his mission from God, and the three items that the sun goddess Amaterasu gave to the first emperor of Japan all exist still. You can see the first two if you are willing to travel, the three items are kept at the Great Ise Shrine in Japan and none but the appointed guardian clerics are allowed to see them.

I think that the human belief that after revered or reviled figures are no longer in this world that something of them remains and can be accessed via whatever physical links there are transcends modern religion and goes back to very early beliefs. The belief that certain symbols have certain power is also a very ancient belief, and why, to this day, we all seem to believe that the display of the cross will repulse a vampire or similar creature. Does any of this make logical sense? Not really, but we are humans, not Vulcans, and therefore the feelings associated with these beliefs remain part of us.

Those feelings can be played upon and amplified, of course, and a lot of individuals do just that, to harness them and hopefully lead others into doing as they say or making the leap from feeling to action. Symbols can serve as points to rally around or against and focusing points for causes. That’s why in the various crusades and jihads it was common for the victor to throw down symbols of the defeated.

Supposedly, in this modern era, we are supposed to have moved past giving these symbols inordinate amounts of power. However, certain political figures have found that rallying against certain symbols is a shortcut to power and mob rule. There is a certain level of dopamine rush that goes with feeling like you’re a righteous member of a righteous cause, and  another kind of  thrill that goes with destroying a symbol that someone says is bad. The problem is that, like any other kind of addiction, it becomes harder and harder to get the same amount of high with the same actions. Eventually you graduate to hurting and even killing others that you associate with whatever is opposed to your righteous cause.

There is nothing per se unethical about dealing in historical artifacts, whether they be associated with those were thought of as very good or those who are thought of as very evil. Any unethical actions lie within the use of those artifacts. Would I personally want to own some item that was personally possessed by a genocidal dictator? Not really. Do I have a problem with someone else owning such an item? No. Do I have a problem with such an item being displayed in a museum? No. Destroying the physical reminders of History is ultimately unhelpful.

Do I wonder what the owner or buyer of such an item is thinking? Yes. However, unless I actually discuss it with him, I don’t get to assume he’s a bad guy. Am I going to empower someone who claims victimhood to insist on the concealment or destruction of anything? No. I think the sanctification of victimhood ultimately leads to the pussification of society.

Comment Of The Day: “The Incredible Sabrina Caldwell Ethics Train Wreck”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Tom P. has contributed an inspiring and thoughtful Comment of The Day in response to the disturbing but ultimately uplifting story of how a Russian orphan, abused by her American adoptive parents, not only survived and thrived (that’s Sabrina today with her family, above), but did so without succumbing to bitterness and despair.

Tom’s first line in his comment is especially provocative, I think. When are “we given” that one life we have the opportunity to do with what we can? Isn’t it at the moment a unique genetic being comes into existence, with the living biochemical capacity to develop and grow if others don’t interfere for their own reasons to stop the process? If that is the case, and I do not see any way to deny it with intellectual honesty, how can abortion activists argue their position without dealing with the existence of two lives in the abortion equation, and not only the mother’s?

But the rest of Tom P.’s Comment of the Day on the two-part post, “The Incredible Sabrina Caldwell Ethics Train Wreck,” is equally thought-provoking. Here it is:

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We are each given but one life and it is up to us and only us how we choose to live it. In the United States at least, except for our genetics and eventually dying everything else is of our choosing. That is not to say that everything is within our control or that our choices come without consequences. Basically, regardless of the situation each of us can control the choice but not the outcome.

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Comment Of The Day: ‘Ethics Musings On The Transgender Problem'”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I always learn something when legendary Ethics Alarms commenter Mrs. Q rejoins the fray. This Comment of the Day, sparked by Null Pointer’s COTD on the post, “Ethics Musings On The Transgender Problem,” is especially enlightening and provocative.

I am also thrilled that the controversial T-Rex emoji, which Ethics Alarms discussed last week, has made it into a post!

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“You have one group of people using another group of people for likes and specialness without regard to the effects it has on the group being used.”

This is why more and more groups of gays are separating away from the whole LGBTQ+ industrial complex. For too long the T has been piggybacking on the struggles of the LGB’s when the two issues are totally different. Worse, now the same groups that once advocated for gay/bi equality, like the HRC and other pride groups, are redefining gay to mean “same-gender identity attraction” rather than same-sex attraction.” According to these new LBG groups, this is gay erasure because it takes biological sex out of the equation.

One of the most concerning things about this piggybacking is that now we see acceptance for gays dwindling because gays are being conflated with trans and it’s assumed gays are okay with transing kids or exposing them to kink and pervy drag queens, or letting men win in women’s sports. I’m already seeing articles about how gay marriage started all this and that if we get rid of marriage equality, somehow that will magically make the insanity of the radical trans activists go away.

Then you have those T radicals who say that gays who don’t want to be a part of the rainbow mafia are TERFS or “cisgender genital fetishists” or transphobes. Younger lesbians especially are getting the brunt of these assertions and are being pressured to sleep with men who claim to be lesbians, in a show of solidarity or overcoming their “sexual racism” and “unlearning their genital biases.” Any woman who dares to bring up this phenomenon is immediately labeled a TERF and the consequences aren’t always pretty. 🦖 Continue reading →