Comment of the Day
Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Quiz: What Is The Ethical Response To This…?”
I have been remiss in not including prolific commenter Steve Witherspoon’s blog among the Ethics Alarms links, an error I will remedy today when I wake up sufficiently. You’ll be introduced to his site in his latest Comment of the Day, which sets out to answer a question that increasingly perplexes me, regarding how narcissistic lunatic race-hucksters like Ashleigh Shackelford (above) became regarded by American corporations and other organizations as competent trainers of their members or employees to set their beliefs and attitudes “straight.”
Here it is, on the post, Ethics Quiz: What Is The Ethical Response To This…?
“At what point did elements in our society start being receptive to what she does and says, and why did this happen?”
Here is my answer in part…
“When you have one stupid person ranting in public it’s easy for the public to shrug it off and explain it away to others as “it’s just a wacko”, but what happens when that wacko’s rantings become mainstream and there are hoards of stupid people publicly parroting the same irrational emotionally driven nonsense…”
I wrote that June 17, 2019 in my blog post Apathy Fertilizes A Breeding Ground For Stupidity after watching what has happened and realizing that societal apathy from rational thinking people across our society was wide-spread, and people just hid away under their rocks focusing on their own lives, actively ignoring what’s been going on around them and thinking thoughts like “just ignore the wacko’s, they’ll go away”, “don’t get involved”, “I don’t want to be sued”, “I won’t want to be canceled”. People have forgotten what the word “enable” means. Continue reading
Comment(s) Of The Day: “The Insidious News Media Disinformation Campaign”
Soon after I designated Diego Garcia’s comment on this post a Comment of the Day, I realized that it had to have the context of the Chris Marschner comment that Diego was responding to in order to be appreciated. So this is another rare tag team Comment of the Day on the post, “The Insidious News Media Disinformation Campaign.” I’ll have a brief comment at the end of the two COTDs.
First, Chris:
What exactly was the purpose of our involvement in Viet Nam? I know what we were told that it was to stem the rise of Communism in the world where countries in Asia would fall like dominoes if we did not intervene. If Communism will collapse upon itself because it is inherently flawed why do we need to hurry it along by killing people? You don’t win hearts and minds with coercion.
Wasn’t it learned that General Westmoreland falsified data to show we were actually winning when in fact we were mired down in a quagmire that only benefitted the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about?
Maybe we were all duped. Maybe we are still being duped. Maybe we were all seen as suckers by Kennedy and Johnson. Maybe politicians and the public have been being duped for years by guys with scrambled eggs on their hats and stars on their epaulettes whose retirement plans include running Lockheed Martin or Boeing or just sitting on boards as they collect millions for a few days work because of what they know about defense contracts.
Maybe the smart parents were the ones that spirited their 19 year old’s off to Canada or paid their way to college and then on to Canada. I have no idea. However, those who served did so as patriots but even patriots can be suckered by politicians. I got suckered by Romney and McCain. I thought they were honest brokers of information until Trump forced them to expose themselves. I learned that integrity takes a back seat when someone challenges their power.
Why are we still in Afghanistan after nearly 20 years? Why is it that modern warfare lasts for generations while a poorly resourced rag tag bunch kicked the British ass in far less time? How could we defeat two enemies, forcing them to unconditionally surrender at the same time in roughly the equivalent of one presidential cycle? Could it be that the wars prior to Korea were existential imperative while today profits from equipment and expended munitions help keep the defense industries highly profitable? One has to ask, with all the budget hikes to improve the military’s readiness along with the positive changes in services for veterans, why do all these Generals have an ax to grind with the President who sees war as wasteful. Could it be that their business is war and part of their mission is to keep the public believing that these never ending wars are beneficial because it keeps them all in business. Tell me General’s Mattis and Kelly, which wars did you win to make you both experts on ending war?
If I recall correctly John Kerry told school kids to work hard and study because if they don’t they will wind up in Iraq. Maybe, just maybe Kerry and Trump have something in common. They can see when war is a gross waste of blood and treasure. They just have different ways of stating it.
Diego Garcia replied,
Comment Of The Day: “My Name Is Jack, I Am Not A Racist, And All Of You Are A Disgrace To The Nation.”
Well, you knew this, by Steve-O-in NJ, would be a Comment of the Day. I virtually begged for someone to issue a manifesto in response to my post. There were at least six likely candidates among the regulars here, but if I had to bet, my money would have been on Steve. Here is his COTD on “My Name Is Jack, I Am Not A Racist, And All Of You Are A Disgrace To The Nation.”
Oh–in a blog with a more diverse commentariat, I could count on at least one rebuttal. I hereby pledge that any reasonably articulate one will have Comment of the Day status.
My name is Steven, and I am a conservative and a Republican. I’ve been a Republican since I was 18 and never once considered walking away.
I believe Europe and the Europeans got to where they are because they learned to be better at navigation, exploration, and warfare than others, no other reasons.
I believe Christopher Columbus was a brave navigator who sailed where no one else dared to go, and that without his opening the way between old world and new, the United States would not have come to be, and the world would be the poorer for it.
I believe that George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and FDR were the right men at the right time to deal with the biggest crises this country found itself in, and lesser men might well have failed, and we’d be worse off for it.
I believe that the Founding Fathers got it right, and that their work doesn’t deserve to be discarded because men two centuries ago did not measure up to the values of less than two decades ago.
I believe that the conquest of the frontier was inevitable, as is always the case when a more developed society meets a less developed one. Continue reading
Comment Of The Day: “I’ll Try To Stop This From Being A Rant, But I’m Not Promising Anything…” AND “Lazy Sunday Afternoon Ethics, 8/30/2020: A Letter, A Slapdown, A Poll, Sherlock Holmes, And A Dinosaur Walk Into An Ethics Post…,” Item #2, Mayor Wheeler’s Letter
Steve-O-In NJ has struck again with another of his long form comments, easily snagging another Comment of the Day. It is also a first here: the comment covers two Ethics Alarms posts. To be technical about it, the second was posted after Steve’s comment went up, but it includes a long section that directly applies to the late post…which I wrote before I read what follows. This Comment of the Day is, as a classic TV commercial for Certs used to chant for almost 40 years, “Two! Two! Two comments in one!”
Confused? Don’t be, just read and enjoy Steve-O-In NJ‘s Comment of the Day on the posts, “I’ll Try To Stop This From Being A Rant, But I’m Not Promising Anything…” and “Lazy Sunday Afternoon Ethics, 8/30/2020: A Letter, A Slapdown, A Poll, Sherlock Holmes, And A Dinosaur Walk Into An Ethics Post…,” Item #2, Mayor Wheeler’s Letter.
This is the year we were stripped of a lot of the things that we liked and that were important to us, and expected to like it. The message rings loud and clear that if you aren’t woke, there is no place for you in this brave new world. The thing is, like Obamacare, it was predicated upon and sold to us with lies, half-truths, and omissions, which a lot of our fellow Americans have bought, hook line and sinker. Obamacare was as much about power as it was about putting healthcare on the national stage and giving people greater access. The Democrats and the left knew it, and that’s why they used procedural chicanery, promises to the now-dead Senator Spector that they had no intention of keeping from the get-go, and lies and half-truths to the general public to get it passed – without even saying what was in it. It was a power grab, plain and simple.
The left tried for a cultural power grab three years ago, with the assault on Confederate monuments, which they tried to parlay into attacks on other areas of history. Unfortunately for them, it kind of petered out before it could really go anywhere, NYC made it clear it wasn’t going to stand for attacks on public art, and the next thing you knew, we were in the holiday season and no one was thinking about fighting over statues and what they stood for anymore. The first of the year passed, and the mayor of NYC said he was moving one statue and that was it. There was still a dislike of police, but they still met with grudging respect…mostly. The days of assassinating police or declaring them enemies were over. I think I should really say that they were over for that period of time. The plans for a cultural and political power grab never really went away. They just went on standby, waiting for the right time for them to be revived. Even though there were other police shootings and errors, it just never seemed to be the right time. Besides, the economy was doing well, and most people were too busy making money to bother. Then came the pandemic, which put a huge amount of people out of work, so they’d be available for protesting/rioting. All they needed was the spark to set this off. George Floyd was it. This was it, the spark to light the flame of white hatred and make a revolutionary break with the past. It stopped being about Floyd in two days. Meantime, though, the liberal DA and other authorities, who might have had a chance to tamp this down by saying hey, we don’t have all the facts, said nothing instead. Inwardly these mayors and governors were dancing with glee at the chance to proclaim a new cultural revolution and destroy conservative America forever. The same mayors and governors who ticketed Hasidic Jews for burying their dead and moms for walking in parks told the police to use a light touch or stand down completely from protests that quickly became riots. They wanted to be helpless, anything to make the president look either incompetent (if he did nothing) or heavy-handed (if he did). Meantime this movement either forced local leadership into embarrassing humiliation like foot-washing, pulled them into their own orbit, or overwhelmed them. Continue reading
Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Escape, 8/24/2020: The “Not Watching The GOP Convention” Edition.” Item #3, Fetal Research Ban
Bioethics is perhaps the most murky area of ethics of all. I am grateful for Chris Marschner’s Comment of the Day taking on the task of making the counter-argument to yesterday’s post highlighting Professor Turley’s objections (and mine) to the Human Fetal Tissue Research Ethics Advisory Board, appointed by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar, voting to block 13 out of 14 applications for fetal tissue research. Chris makes as good a case as can be made in defense of the decisions, but I don’t think he has much to work with; as I suggested in the post, this is an uncharacteristically easy call. I’ll return at the end to explain why; in the meantime, here is Chris Marschner’s Comment Of The Day on Item #3 in the post, “Ethics Escape. 8/24/2020: The “Not Watching The GOP Convention” Edition:
Before I go any farther, I believe that fetal tissue is crucial to research. With that said, I can see an argument in favor of the Board’s decision to deny access to such tissues. [Commenter Ryan Harkins] and I may agree with Turley that such reasearch use of fetal tissue does not incentivize women to have abortions. However ,I do believe it incentivizes sellers of such tissues. Such sales make a commodity of aborted fetal tissues and the of other human tissue donations; this is not some far-fetched fear. Do we want to be like China, which forcibly removes kidneys so that others can have a transplant?
Imagine a society that becomes insensitive to the concept of the sanctity of life. It is not outside the realm of possibility that we could begin to allow doctors to withhold life saving but costly treatments in order hasten the demise of a potential donor. For example: assume we have a 28 year old MVA victim with severe head trauma. His intercranial pressure has exceeded 30 for weeks and doctors have told the family that it is unlikely that he will ever recover significantly. After 3 weeks in the ICU the medical costs have risen to about $275,000. Are we at the point that we are going to say, “Let’s stop throwing good money after bad. The guy is an organ donor and he is a match for a person in need.” Are we willing to let doctors or insurers make that call to take the patient off the vent so he can become a heart donor? I certainly hope not. Continue reading
Comment Of The Day: “Lazy Saturday Ethics Diversions, 8/22/2020: Hypocrisy Again,” Item #3 (Goodyear Saga Cont.)
[I originally had a video clip here that perfectly illustrated, satirically, the craven instincts of corporate America as it grovels to Black Lives Matter. It is a from a classic “Simpsons” episode, “Deep Space Homer,” in which Kent Brockman, the idiot Springfield news anchor whose intellect makes Ted Baxter seem like Tim Russert, mistakenly comes to believe that the Earth is about to be conquered by giant ants. He immediately pivots to sucking up to the ants in his broadcasts. Then, just before posting the clip, I thought, wait, is someone going to accuse me of comparing African Americans to insects, when I’m accurately comparing our jelly-spined corporate leaders to a cowardly fool? And I chickened out. Now I’m disgusted with myself. Thus is life in cancel-culture America]
***
Long, long ago, in a galaxy far away, I remember I offered a competition here for the most obnoxious, cloying, blatantly pandering corporate statement in reaction to the George Floyd Freakout. This followed so closely on the heels of a corporate rush to exploit the pandemic with obnoxious, cloying, blatantly pandering messages ( “In these specail/difficult/ stressful times…”) that I realized, too late, that I was risking my sanity. Many, many readers sent entries my way (thank you), and I slogged through them all, even though all but a handful read like they were written by the same cheap bot that had created the pandemic-licking garbage
I used to work for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and got to know a lot of CEO ans their top lieutenants. I left that career chapter convinced that the negative public image of corporations and the people who ran them was shallow and mistaken. The rush of many of the same companies I worked to embrace racist, violent, Marxist Black Lives Matter has erased all of the. These companies and their management are themselves shallow and mistaken, and worse. They are virtually traitors to American ideals—those stories about American industrialists sucking up to Hitler no longer seem incredible as they once did—; they are cowardly; they are venal, and they are stupid, stupid, stupid.
Unfortunately, so many of them have adopted this despicable strategy that we can’t even punish them by switching loyalties to their competitors. And the reverse is true: these corporations are deliberately throwing in with the forces of indoctrination, censorship and suppression. Where I live, in Northern Virginia, I have seen dozens of Black Lives Matter signs, and many more Biden 2020 signs. I have not seen a single Trump sign, and it is because people are afraid of having their homes vandalized and their kids being called racists at school. This un-American, anti-American environment of fear is what the powerful, influential corporate sector has decided that it is in their scrimey, greedy, stock option-protecting, collaborationist interests to support. I will not forgive them for that. I always knew corporations were untrustworthy, of course, but I never thought they were this untrustworthy.
Good to know.
Thus I am not ready to let the Goodyear episode go quite yet. Fortunately, Glenn Logan is on one of his periodic rolls. Here is his Comment of the Day, the second in a row, on Item #3 in the post, “Lazy Saturday Ethics Diversions, 8/22/2020: Hypocrisy Again.“
[Oh: the “best” corporate pander to Black Lives Matter was easily the short-lived, but immortally bone-headed, “Popeyes is nothing without Black lives,”]
Jack wrote:
3. Does Goodyear win the “Trying to Be On All Sides At Once Without Consequences” prize in the corporate division?
They have a lot of company who just did it smarter, in my opinion. But having said that, here’s an observation:
I understand corporate impulses to place themselves on the (please forgive me for this) “right side of history.” During my whole life, we have seen corporate virtue signaling, mostly on television but occasionally in print.
With the advent of social media, a lot of things have changed for the worse when it comes to corporations and social issues. In the instant case, it seems corporations have acknowledged, and to some extent embraced, the unethical Black Lives Matter trope, “Silence is violence.” Certainly, activists on all sides of the debate spend a lot of time raising social issues at corporate leadership, and engaging in various levels of complaints or even boycotts at their expense — in common vernacular, “calling them out.”
I think most Americans with functional cerebra not terminally infected with the passions of the moment would prefer to see corporations stay out of divisive social issues and do what they are best at — produce products or services for our consumption and engage in social issues, especially and mostly at their local level, quietly and competently. The problem is, because so much of our private conversation has become nationalized through social media, a comparatively small number of voices can have a disproportionate impact on corporate behavior, especially when amplified by a media invested in one side of the argument. Continue reading
Comment Of The Day: “The Hypocrisy And Dishonesty Of The Democratic National Convention Apparently Made Rose McGowan’s Head Explode”
Glenn Logan took on the macro-issue of broad-brush political pronouncements in his Comment of the Day, which was only touched upon in the original post. That concerned activist Rose McGowran’s angry tweets,
I wrote in part that
“we see the limitations of Twitter…its advantage is that it is the only way to communicate with a large—far, far too large—proportion of the American public, which is unlikely if not unable to read anything serious that has more words than a combination of three or four bumperstickers…McGowan’s assertions are “right,” is a general, meat-axe way, but they aren’t arguments. They are the ” this just is” pronouncements of someone who won’t countenance an argument, and, in most cases, isn’t capable of making one. That’s Black Lives Matter. That’s “the resistance.” That’s Maxine Waters and MSNBC….
Glenn took off from there in his Comment of the Day on the post, “The Hypocrisy And Dishonesty Of The Democratic National Convention Apparently Made Rose McGowan’s Head Explode”…
Too right, and that list is so long the full one would require a bigger blog.
What interests me is how often we all engage in these kind of broad-brush arguments that reject any aspect of nuance. Some Democrats have, to varying degrees, addressed many or even all of the ends she thinks are desirable. So have some Republicans.
The intractable problems of society cannot be solved by pronouncements, either of solutions or failures. That’s why they remain intractable. Black people most notably have refused to participate in extracting their “people” from poverty, crime, dependency and negative perceptions. “Brown” people is not a race or even a thing, and claiming they may be characterized in the same way as blacks renders the statement absurd. Each racial group has unique problems relating to their culture, their perception by our society, and their willingness to integrate into America.
I find it interesting that the Democrats completely ignore “yellow” people as if they never had the struggles of other minority populations — a risible idea that has infected the Democrat identity-politics groupthink. But the Asians have shown how to fight all the problems blacks and some other races have suffered through for generations — by willingly assimilating into America.
The fact that black people haven’t embraced this idea despite living here longer than Asians is a big part of why so little progress has been made. Now, blacks want new, government-enforced segregation policies created to further alienate them from America. Can there be any doubt as to how this new demand will work out if implemented?
“Police brutality?” The vast majority of police are professionals and behave that way. But to Rose, who has only a proverbial hammer, there are nothing but nails in blue. Continue reading
Comment Of The Day: “Goodyear’s ‘No Tolerance’ Policy Is Cowardly, Unethical, And Wrong, And The President’s Response Was Worse”
Commenter Steve Witherspoon has colorfully expressed the Ethics Alarms position regarding President Trump’s “punching down” with his direct attack on Goodyear Tires and Rubber for endorsing Black Lives Matter attire in the workplace while banning MAGA hats. In a comment to the recent Goodyear post, he wrote in part,
I absolutely HATE the way President Trump punches down like this from the Oval Office, it’s unpresidential! This is where his unethical loose cannon mouth gets him into trouble. Calling for a boycott from the office of the President of the United States is inappropriate….President Trump, shut the hell up and stop punching down; let the consumers make their own choices and speak with their dollars in the manner in which they choose.
Michael R, in his Comment of the Day on the post, “Goodyear’s ‘No Tolerance’ Policy Is Cowardly, Unethical, And Wrong, And The President’s Response Was Worse,” makes his case to the contrary:
When someone is acting unethically towards you, what should you do? What if there is no actual, ethical recourse for you because EVERYONE around you is acting unethically? Do you just accept it or do you fight back anyway? The press and the DNC are pushing a murderous agenda. Didn’t Andrew Cuomo kill 4x+ as many New Yorkers as the 9/11 terrorists? How many lives have been lost and businesses destroyed by their actions in the recent ‘peaceful protests’? What about their calls for perpetual lockdowns and states of emergency? Gangs of people are setting up roadblocks to harass and attack people. They are intimidating any local official that dares oppose them. They are demanding people turn over their houses. They are teaching elementary school children that all white people are racist. The press’ 1619 project teaches that this country is ONLY about slavery and uniquely so. What happens if their Marxist agenda succeeds? Continue reading
Comment Of The Day: “Open Forum On Zoom Day!” (Mail-In Voting Thread)
As veteran visitors know, there is little that thrills me more than when a commenter tackles a topic that I know I need to write about, saving me the trouble of researching and writing a post. Thus I am grateful to Chris Marschner (as well as others who discussed the issue on yesterday’s Open Forum) for this Comment of the Day on the annoying mail-in voting controversy, which, I venture, the Democrats are using to give them an automatic excuse to challenge the results of November’s elections, or, in the alternative, to be able to claim that the President is “refusing to accept the results of the election” should he lose in the midst of dubious handling of the mail.
The USPS has been in a state of progressive rot for decades, one the internet made it almost, but not quite, obsolete. The service bleeds money, is progressively more unreliable, and now is an extremely expensive operation that the nation can’t afford. Our local post office was closed years ago. I literally cannot remember the last time anyone in the house got a personal letter. (The closest was the various official correspondence from the pathetic Ethics Alarms commenter who sued me, demanding $100,000 for defamation.) Christmas cards, junk mails, government mail, and bills, along with the occasional check if it is lucky enough to be delivered at all. To suddenly demand that the U.S. mail must be used to facilitate voting in a crucial, perhaps existential election like the upcoming one is so cynical or foolish—Hanlon’s Razor again—that it boggles the mind (if one has a mind) that anyone would fall for it.
We are, unfortunately, in the era of Facts Don’t Matter.
For some time, the USPS has epitomized the slogan, “Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.” If the U.S. relies on the mail for this election, it will simply be “Can’t live with it.”
Here is Chris Marschner’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Open Forum On Zoom Day!”:
Between 2011 and 2016 200,000 mailboxes were moved. Those getting the vapors over logistical decisions on mailbox placement are using a normal activity and concocting an unfounded conspiracy theory.
Lest we not forget, states run elections. Why does the federal government have to pay for a choice pushed by the party that believes it can make political hay from demanding it? Nothing stops people from requesting an absentee ballot. I intend to vote in person as I did in the primary. Voting in person is no more dangerous than going to WalMart.
Back to the mail: All boxes are subject to be moved if they get an average of only 25 pieces each day. If poor people are sending lots of mail then they will get more boxes. If they don’t send mail then they can hand their mail to a postal employee. I am getting tired of the argument that poor people have no choices other than the one that makes them do something else. If a low income person works, take the ballot and put it in with the business mail or in the outgoing slot. If they don’t work, then wait for the carrier and give it directly to them. Failing this, if they are so concerned about being disenfranchised they can get off their ass and walk or take a bus to a post office. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 
The Kohn Family.
Here is Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day, an interesting perspective on the issue of parents opposing their children being treated for dwarfism when the parents are afflicted with the same disability, taking off from the post, “There’s Nothing Wrong With “Dwarf Pride,” But When It Means Making Sure Your Kids Don’t Grow, It’s Unethical”: