Comment of the Day

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

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Before I present Tom P.’s Comment of the Day, one of several excellent reader reactions to the post, indulge me as I respond in detail to a slur on me by the now-banned commenter who claimed that associating transgender individuals with a “problem” evoked a fascist mindset and the genocidal intent of Hitler’s “final solution.” It was this repeatedly nasty commenter’s doubling down on his accusation that finally moved me to ban him after multiple warnings from me and his repeated defiance of appropriate discourse here.

The guy was a relentless progressive troll, though a relatively smart one, and fair debate was not on his agenda. What has become a routine tactic among such partisans here and elsewhere is to attempt to constrain language in order to make coherent arguments against Leftist cant more difficult, and also to play cognitive dissonance games by attaching sinister and discredited figures, positions and rhetoric to legitimate discourse that the ideologues don’t want to deal with fairly, or can’t.

Of course I wasn’t thinking of “the Jewish Problem,” as it was characterized by Hitler and his minions when I titled the post “Ethics Musings On The Transgender Problem,” but even if that abuse of the term “problem” had popped into my mind, it wouldn’t have dissuaded me. One dishonest and dastardly use of language for propaganda purposes cannot and should not restrict the legitimate use of the same words by others.

Germany had no “Jewish problem.” Germany’s Jewish community was among the most productive, loyal and successful ethnic groups in the nation. Hitler slandered these innocent citizens with the false claim that their religion, race and culture made them a threat to civilization, and did so with the specific goal of creating popular supports tor exterminating them. This history, I was told, meant that anyone assessing any group of any kind as a “problem” is unethical.

This is all part of the now familiar race-baiting, dog-whistling, political correctness “gotcha!” strategy used by various interest groups on the left to stifle legitimate discussion and to brand adversaries as unfit for the public square. I won’t play. If I was going to criticize the title of that post, it would be on the basis that the headline suggested that the problem discussed in the essay, the difficulty of determining whether trangenderism should be regarded as abnormal, was the only “transgender problem.” There are, of course, many. Problem: How do we ethically integrate true transgender individuals into gender-segregated sports? Problem: How does society simultaneously eliminate the stigma attached to individuals coping with serious gender identity issues without encouraging gender confusion among the young? There are others.

As for the blanket assertion that it is unethical to designate any group as a problem as far as public policy and ethical treatment goes, I reject it completely. Too many groups pose serious and difficult problems for society to mention them all, but some that come to my mind immediately, remembering that even problematic groups have members who present possible solutions to the problems or who may make valuable contributions to it, are:

  • Illegal immigrants.
  • Corporations
  • Koran-obeying Muslims
  • Unmarried parents
  • Black Lives Matters members and supporters
  • Trump supporters
  • Ideologues
  • Racists
  • Billionaires
  • The homeless
  • Alcoholics
  • Drug addicts, users and peddlers
  • Ignorant citizens
  • Stupid people.
  • Sexual predators
  • Incels
  • White supremacists
  • Journalists
  • Teachers, professors and school administrators…

I could go on and on. The fact that I regard these and other groups as creating problems (perhaps it would have been better have used “challenge” rather than “problem”….but it was only a headline) for American society today does not mean that I advocate wiping them off the face of the earth.

Here is Tom P.’s Comment of the Day on the post “Ethics Musings On The Transgender Problem”…

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The whole furor surrounding transgenderism is multifaceted. This is true of virtually all polarizing issues. Pick any polarizing issue and within the pro and con camps, you will find the following subcamps: radical activists, passionate true believers, opportunists, virtue signaling supporters, go-a-longs to get-a-longs, and casual non-vocal supporters. Continue reading →

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

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

This provocative Comment of the Day by Null Pointer is at least three distinct discourses in one. I will eschew me usual introductory framing attempts and leave what will, I hope, be a rich and diverse discussion to the comments to the Comment, on the post, “Ethics Musings On The Transgender Problem”…

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I would refer to homosexuality as normal but atypical. Before the LGBTQ+ activist brigade went bat guano crazy, I considered transgenderism to be the same, biologically based but extremely atypical, even more so than homosexuality. Then the crazy people started screaming from the roof tops about gender being a social construct, completely divorced from biology, and began preaching the merits of gender fluidity along with a host of other “genders” for which the definitions sound like the were written by someone experiencing an LSD induced hallucinogen state.

I still think there are a small minority of people with atypical brain biology who are legitimately transgender. I think there is a much larger cohort of people with personality disorders who need Jesus. Those people have appointed themselves spokespeople for the transgender community. It is never a good idea to let obnoxious, crazy people be your the face of your community. Narcissistic personality disorder is not endearing. Histrionic personality disorder does not lend itself to coherent argument. Brainwashing people’s children into “changing” their gender against the parents’ will or sparking mass hysteria events in teenage girls and autistic young people is not beneficial to society in the slightest. Anarchists and authoritarians are the only communities benefiting from this mess. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day On The Unethical Political Squeeze On Non-Profits And Foundations [Open Forum]

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Veteran commenter Humble Talent contributed a needed post on an important issue that Ethics Alarms has negligently ignored: the efforts by ideologically drive governments to control the charitable activities of non-profit organizations. The phenomenon extends well beyond the aspect HT discusses: I encountered it with my non-profit theater company. We stubbornly refused to allow grant money to determine our artistic choices, but most theaters were not so resolute. Companies that choose trendy progressive ideology-advancing plays and that cast according to thinly disguised minority group quotas get the money, and letting money drive are leads to bad art: it’s one of many reasons I decided to close the American Century Theater’s doors.

Humble’s Comment of the Day, from this Open Forum, is a cautionary tale. Here it is:

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I’m on the board of a Community Foundation associated with The Community Foundations of Canada (CFC). The CFC recently had a change in leadership after a wave of retirements, and the new leadership is, not to put too fine a point on it, insufferably woke. Every meeting is predicated by a litany of talk about personal privilege and land declarations. Every new initiative includes language about anti-racism or the importance of DIE. It’s creating issues.

Community foundations operate endowment funds. We take in dollars from our donors, invest them wisely, steward the money, and disburse the proceeds net our expenses into our community. We are non-profits, so we’re tax exempt, and that’s wonderful, but it comes with some requirements: Regardless of how well the market does, we are required by law to disburse at least 3.5% of our funds back into the market on an annual basis. That’s referred to as the “Disbursement Quota” or DQ. We’ve always done better than that. Our positions are public, and we disburse on average 4.5% going back to the community (it varies a little) and budget a .75% management fee for overhead (mostly staff), which we’re never over. Depending on by how much we beat budget, we treat the difference as a kind of emergency fund for out-of-cycle disbursements (we recently hired a translator for the middle school from that pool). We fund investments to the local hospital, the schools, the golf course, the local theatre, the museum, kids sports, social groups, the Salvation Army… The list goes on. In an average year we’ll have maybe 50 requests and depending on the specific asks and our capacity, about 2/3 of them will get at least partially funded.

This, we are told, is not enough. We are hoarding treasure, we are told. We are underserving our communities, we are told. Regardless of how the donors directed their funds, we should ignore their wishes and find some brown people to give money to, we are told… Perhaps not so directly, but I shit you not, that’s the spirit of that has been said. Last year, the government of Canada bandied the idea about of raising the DQ from 3.5% to 5%, or even 10%. In response, the CFC, who is supposed to represent us, said: “Yes please Mr. Government, please pillage our funds. Please fund your short term political aspirations out of our funds and destroy what community-minded people have spent a lifetime building.”

I kid, of course, they didn’t say that. What they said was, and I quote:

“The disbursement quota was created to make sure charities were moving resources to address societal needs. Many conversations around the disbursement quota have been debating percentages. Should it be 3.5%? 5%? 10%?

These conversations tend to be reductive and risk being a distraction at a moment when the federal government can play a critical role in better enabling philanthropic organizations to meet the needs of their communities now and into the future.” Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “The Mark Of A Totalitarian: Michael Moore’s ‘Replacement’ For The Second Amendment”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I assumed Michael Moore’s epic idiocy in the form of a “new amendment” would provoke some lively responses. Among the liveliest was this Comment of the Day from one of longest running active commenter (and one of few I’ve had the pleasure to meet face-to-face, Tim LeVier.

Tim makes the timely observation that Moore doesn’t understand what a “right” is in American tradition, and indeed there’s a lot of that going around. Part of the Left’s fury over not only the SCOTUS opinion reaffirming the Second Amendment but its long-overdue erasure of the imaginary “right to abortion.” Numerous ideological scholars are now attacking the Founders and their Constitution as archaic because they didn’t understand the more expansive concept of “rights” favored by progressives. They want recognition of a right to make a living wage, a right to have a home, a right to have enough food, and so on, ad infinitem. That inflated concept of “rights” is the predominant one in socialist and communist societies. They don’t work, you know. Usually the nations gulled into either system fail spectacularly. However, all those “rights” sound great in theory: the problem is that all require an efficient, trustworthy government that won’t abuse the almost limitless power maintaining such a society requires. Isn’t there an old saying about that? I seem to remember one.

The first stirrings of serious socialist aspirations in high places emanated from none other than President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who always had a dangerous measure of dictatorial aspirations in his soul. In his famous Four Freedoms speech, he endorsed loose talk about “Freedom from Fear” and “Freedom from Want” to accompany the basic First Amendment rights of free speech and freedom the worship. “Freedom from Fear” sums up Moore’s insidious “28th Amendment” and “Freedom from Want” is an open invitation to the nanny state., or worse. FDR was pandering when he launched this irresponsible rhetoric, at a time when poverty was rampant, there was an unhealthy and growing popular attachment to Communism, and when he was also rallying support for a war against Nazi Germany. Calling these universal freedoms that all people possess—in other words, rights— was metaphorically playing with dynamite that could blow up democracy.

It still is.

Here is Tim LeVier’s Comment of the Day on the post, “The Mark Of A Totalitarian: Michael Moore’s “Replacement” For The Second Amendment.”

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Too bad he doesn’t understand what a “right” is. You have a right to exist and create safe conditions for yourself, but you do not have a “right” to protection. If we had a “right to protection”, the Uvalde police officers would be on death row at this moment. No. Police a.k.a. the government, is for maintaining the peace if possible, but restoring peace and cleaning up after tragedy is more correct to their mission. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Quiz: Grandstanding Or Justice?”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I didn’t provide my answer to the ethics quiz about the propriety of charging and trying the woman whose accusation against 14-year-old Emmett Till resulted in his infamous lynching in 1955. Jim Hodgson’s Comment of the Day nicely explains what it would be, though.

I also heard an interesting angle from my lawyer sister that is probably worth a full post. What Carolyn Bryant Donham said in 1955 would be literally nothing today. It was only in the warped Jim Crow culture of 1950s Mississippi that a woman false claiming a black teen touched and flirted with her could lead to violence, or could be considered provocation for a violent crime. How do you justify prosecuting someone 67 years later for an act that would no longer be considered a crime?

Here is Jim’s post, in response to “Ethics Quiz: Grandstanding Or Justice?”…

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My answer to the ethics quiz is that no, she should not be prosecuted. It just isn’t feasible to achieve any fair degree of justice at this point.

As a retired deputy sheriff, the first thing that struck me as odd in the news reports that I read concerning this “discovery” was the clear implication that the “lost” warrant itself was somehow a bar to her being arrested and prosecuted at some time during the past 67 years. It may be news to many people, but paper warrants get lost (or at least temporarily “misplaced”) with some regularity. In my state, any officer of the court with knowledge of the original warrant could have asked for the warrant to be re-issued by the same court that issued the original. In my state this is referred to as issuing an “alias warrant” or an “alias writ.” Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day (on) “Comment Of The Day: ‘Sunday Morning Ethics Warm-Up… Dobbs Freakout Edition”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Mrs. Q has gifted Ethics Alarms with another trenchant post. I almost framed it in her currently dormant (but still open!) column for Ethics Alarms, but I know Q is a perfectionist, and even though the comments she dashes off put most of us to shame, she would want a column entry to be carefully massaged.

Here is Mrs. Q’s Comment of the Day, in response to this post, and the Roe demise generally:

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“We seek power and equality in society, and then we continually play the victim”.

Agreed. I saw a meme the other day (yes memes are reductionist) that captured a part of this whole debacle. It said something about being able to wear a mask for two years but not being able to wear a condom for 48 seconds. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Sunday Morning Ethics Warm-Up After A Cold, Cold Saturday, 6/26/2022: Dobbs Freakout Edition”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Here is another epic Comment of the Day on the Dobbs freakout, this one by mermaidmary99, whose best comments are nearly always sent to SPAM by WordPress. Yet she persists….

Here it is, and may I say…

Wow.

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As a woman, what guts me is that the safest place for a baby to be isn’t, and the person who above all others should advocate for that baby’s life and protect it, instead is upset they can’t kill it at will, for any reason whatsoever, including their own irresponsibility and stupidity.

Hearing my fellow “sisters” complaining that they can’t “exercise their RIGHT” (and have others pay for it) is one of the sickest, ANTI-SCIENCE, anti-nature, things I have ever seen.

And, for a party committed to science, Democrats have huge blinders on with this one.

So huge their religion that condemns abortions is IGNORED as well! Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Note On The Final Dobbs Opinion”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

It’s abortion ethics overload here again, and with it, an embarrassment of rich Comments of the Day on the topic. Several more are on the way; I just picked Humble Talent’s comment first because I located it first. As with all of the excellent posts on the topic, part of my concern is to keep the focus on ethics rather than politics. The ethics and politics collide unavoidably on this issue, however, particularly on the special role of the Supreme Court in a democracy.

This vital detail appears to be what the Dobbs critics (as well as the previously hysterical decriers of last week’s decision upholding the second Amendment either never learned in school or deliberately ignore when a decision comes down that they don’t like.

SCOTUS exists to make sure that our government operates within the boundaries of its founding documents and that its constitutional laws are clear, consistent, and within settled norms. It is not a “democratic institution,” but the part of the government plan designed to ensure that the democratic institutions within the other two branches don’t allow popular will and pressures to abuse the core principles that nation was founded to embody.

The furious attacks on the Court for doing exactly what it exists to do are dangerous and corrosive. When I was just a little bitty ethicist, it was the Right that engaged in this practice in response to the Warren Court’s judicial activism. That court, stocked with some of the finest judicial minds of the 20th Century (Black, Harlan, Brennan, Stewart), used the power of the bench to make some crucial course corrections, notably Brown v. Board of Education. Though some of its opinions were literally legislating (composing the Miranda Warning is an egregious example), the Warren Court was the bright side of activism, but also demonstrated the dangers of the slippery slope. For the Burger Court with succeeded it was neither as strong in judicial wisdom nor as prudent in its choice of perilous territory. The Roe decision was the result, a badly reasoned opinion by one of the Court’s most glaring mediocrities (appointed by Richard Nixon), Harry Blackmun. The majority opinion manufactured a Constitutional right that didn’t exist, its members giddy from the exhilaration of Sixties-era rebellion. It snatched the issue of abortion away from the legislatures and the voters who elect them. Roe was an abuse of SCOTUS power, but because the opinion was popular, especially with women—though not with lawyers capable of evaluating it objectively—there were not many opportunities to overturn it. Soon it seemed to have lasted so long that Court tradition would guarantee its survival. Since abortion was now a “right,” though a manufactured one, abortion fans saw no need to fight for what should have been their objective all along: a national law.

That was a serious miscalculation. Ethically, this is the Burger Court’s fault: while we should have been debating a difficult and complex societal problem, women’s rights activists felt it was enough to blur the issue with lazy, deceitful talk of “choice,” making abortion foes out to be male chauvinist pigs who wanted women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. Ethics evolves, however, and the sheer weight of millions and millions of post-Roe aborted nascent human beings, combined with the realization that there was more being killed than just a “clump of cells,” inevitably led the Court to reconsider a terrible opinion. In the meantime, the American Left had increasingly sought to rely on liberal judges to accomplish what could not be achieved with an increasingly conservative citizenry. In other words, they abandoned democracy as their favored means of societal change. That was unethical, but to be fair, the abuse of judicial power tempted them.

Here is Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Note On The Final Dobbs Opinion.

The ethical principle involved is “competence,” as well as accountability, arrogance, hubris, and hypocrisy.

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Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Protest Ethics: From The Self-Immolation School Of Outrage, But Even Dumber”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Let this be a lesson to me: even what seems to be an obvious case of someone applying emotion, bias and ignorance when informed consideration is called for should not be dismissed out of hand without, well, informed consideration.

This Comment of the Day by Sarah B. was a consensus smash hit with Ethics Alarms commentariat, because she is experienced and knowledgeable on the topic, and educated us all.

Here is her comment on “Protest Ethics: From The Self-Immolation School Of Outrage, But Even Dumber”…

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I was an engineer at a refinery. Now as a woman, my boss’s boss thought that I was incompetent (and was known to say that women should be in a home making her man happy instead of in an engineering department) and spent an inordinate amount of time trying to teach me mostly stuff I already knew. However, one day, his lecture was on the financials of the refining world and it rocked my whole world view. I’ll share it to emphasize the stupidity of this man and his protest.

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: On The Passing Of A Beloved Dog

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Spuds lobbied hard for this post by Joel Mundt on Friday’s Open Form to be a Comment of the Day, but I didn’t take much persuading. Joel began by wondering if it was sufficiently related to ethics to belong on Ethics Alarms at all, but he needn’t have worried. His story is reminiscent of the experience of a close family member of mine, who relatively late in life discovered the transformative power of unconditional love as only a dog can bestow. It changed her perspective profoundly, making her kinder, more patient, more optimistic and empathetic….and best of all, happier. The experience made ethics alarms surface that had been buried deeply for most of her life.

That’s Bailey, whom you will soon learn about, above. I hope Joel is all right with my publishing the photo, which he kindly sent along when I wondered what a Shar Pei/Whippet would look like. If you are a dog lover and have not already encountered it, I also recommend that you read The Oatmeal’s classic, “My Dog, the Paradox.” It is relevant, and you will see why.

Here is Joel Mundt’s Comment of the Day, his reflections on the passing of Bailey, his dog.

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This afternoon, we said goodbye to Bailey, our fifteen-year-old Shar Pei/Whippet mix. She was happy, sociable, and a good eater up to the end, but her liver issues (either Cushing’s or cancer or a combination of both) could not be overcome. Her bad liver numbers went up 50% between March ’21 and March ’22, then went up another 50% (and into the red zone) in the ensuing five weeks. So as April ended, we made the difficult decision – if her health and demeanor held – to give her five more weeks.

Bailey was my first pet, and honesty compels me to admit that I did not initially want her. When our son called in April of 2019 and asked if we could take her, my first answer was absolutely not. But some contemplation and prayer changed my mind…well, really, my heart. Had we not taken her, our son would have been left in the untenable position of having to put her down, and we didn’t think it was time. So we drove to Phoenix three weeks later and brought her home. And to say that she has been a joy would be a gross understatement. Continue reading →