Comment of the Day

Comment Of The Day: “Saturday Ethics Warm-Up, Feb. 1, 2020: A New Month, Post Fake News Shame, And Impeachment Failure Freakout Edition”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Steve-O-From-NJ authored an epic Comment of the Day, checking in at nearly 1800 words, which may be a record–it will take too long to check. The question is, since it an analysis of the soon-to-be-a-really-bad-memory-that-both-parties-will-constantly -remind- us-of impeachment, or as it is known on Ethics Alarms, Plan S, the Trump Impeachment Ethics Train Wreck, and one more car in the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, is this an ethics post?

This was already on my mind, having read today another legal ethics blogger complaining that the impeachment debacle has forced her ethics blog into politics. Yeah, tell me about it.

Yes, it’s an ethics post. The impeachment was the culmination—for now–of what Ethics Alarms has been covering for three years as what I labelled early on as one of the most important and dangerous examples of unethical partisan conduct in decades. Steve-O hits many issues that have been extensively covered here from an ethics perspective, and, frankly, a summary right now is helpful. It also helps lay the foundation for a post I have been working on a while with his phrase–twice!–mixed motives.

Here is Steve-O-From-NJ‘s Comment of the Day on the post, “Saturday Ethics Warm-Up, Feb. 1, 2020: A New Month, Post Fake News Shame, And Impeachment Failure Freakout Edition.”

A few thoughts on the all but over impeachment:

After Friday’s vote, it’s all over but the formalities for the third impeachment and the second attempt at a soft coup by Congress against the president. It’s also the least legitimate of the three impeachments plus the one effort that never got to impeachment because the president resigned.

The Radical Republicans tried to push Andrew Johnson out of office because, as a Democrat and a southerner (he was from Tennessee), he was in the way of their harsh program of Reconstruction they wanted to impose on the South after the Civil War, so they essentially took a policy dispute up to eleven. Nixon oversaw criminal activities and lied repeatedly, so his trust was shot and he could no longer lead. Bill Clinton had a sleazy, but probably not impeachable, affair, but then perjured himself, which is a crime, to cover it up, a classic case of the coverup being worse than the act. The best the Democratic Party could come up with on this one was a phone call with, at best, mixed motives.

Nowhere in the Constitution or the other laws of this land does it say that the president or any other official must act totally selflessly at all times in the discharge of his duties, or he risks being impeached and removed from office. Nowhere does it say that, as chief diplomat of the United States, the president is not empowered to engage in political jiujitsu with other governments. Nowhere does it say that, as chief law enforcement officer of the United States, the president is not empowered to look into dealings by others with foreign governments that he has a question about. Most importantly, nowhere does it say that the president, or any other executive official, must defer to Congress, particularly to the House, in all things.

The Founding Fathers were very clear on the concept of separation of powers when they drew up the Constitution. They did not want any one official, or even one institution, making the laws and then prosecuting and punishing anyone accused of breaking the laws. They specifically did not want any of the three branches of government becoming more powerful than the others. That’s why it’s called checks and balances. The nation is still working out how that is supposed to work in every situation, but that’s the basic concept we all learned back around 3rd grade. They built in the power of impeachment to guard against gross abuses by corrupt officials, but they specifically rejected the idea of a parliamentary system where the legislature holds most of the power and can call a vote of no confidence in the government fairly easily.

They also specifically rejected the idea of one branch of government encroaching on the prerogatives of the others. Congress can pass all the laws it wants, but, unless the president signs them and later enforces them, they mean nothing. Congress can also do all the overseeing it wants, but, its power to demand testimony, documents, or anything else can be checked by the courts. That’s how it works. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Now THIS Is A Level 8 Apology!”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

In this concise but rich Comment of the Day, Isaac takes on the challenge of re-writing the wildly inadequate and unconvincing apology offered by the Catholic priest who was pressured to recant his negative comments about Islam in a Sunday service.

The apology offered three days later by the chastened priest, Fr.Nick VanDenBroeke:

My homily on immigration contained words that were hurtful to Muslims. I’m sorry for this. I realize now that my comments were not fully reflective of the Catholic Church’s teaching on Islam.

 

Here is Isaac’s alternative, his Comment of the Day on the post, “Now THIS Is A Level 8 Apology!”… Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “The Vital Concept Of Culture, Part I: Ignore It At Civilization’s Peril”

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

I apologize for not yet having completed and posted Part II, as was my intention, but happily, certified Ethics Alarms commenting ace Ryan Harkins entered a Comment of the Day that could have been Part II on its own.

Here is Ryan Harkins’ Comment of the Day on “The Vital Concept Of Culture, Part I: Ignore It At Civilization’s Peril”:

There’s a certain “you reap what you sow” in all of this. Western Civilization has spent the last few centuries slowly jettisoning classic understanding of morals and culture while embracing relativism, in which no one can absolutely say anything is right or wrong. From this new viewpoint of tolerance, we’ve bred a culture in which no one’s “truth” can be better than anyone else’s, and anyone who claims to know “truth” is a bigot. This opens the door to the idea of multiculturalism, where we celebrate this plurality of opinions because we want to show how good we are by accepting everyone else’s “truths”.

But what ultimately underlies this progression from classic values to utter chaos? I would posit that it is the ever-present temptation to redefine as “good” everything that “I want”. It is the grasping of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. All throughout history, we’ve undoubtedly had rationalizations for bad behavior. If someone says what we’re doing is wrong, we need to have an excuse that makes it not wrong. What the relativism of the modern age gives us is the perfect cover for all our immoral actions. I get to define what is right, because if you dare say what I’m doing is wrong, I barely have to defend myself. “That may be true for you, but it isn’t for me.” Or I can just accuse you of being a hater and walk away feeling justified. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 1/28/2020: Transcripts! Audacious Defense Lawyers! Canadian Defamation! “Bombshells”! [UPDATED]

/ Jack Marshall / 56 Comments

Good morning…

1. Here’s a typical unbiased New York Times front page headline regarding the impeachment trial (from last week):

“One One Side, Piles of Evidence, On the Other, Heaps of Scorn”

Here’s some more scorn: there is no evidence at all of impeachable offenses on  that pile, and scorn for the President is being treated as evidence.

2. This is astounding. (From johnburger, and thanks) Check out this.

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Open Forum!” Dating App Thread

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Same tradition, different groups…

This Comment of the Day alerted me to a despicable aspect of national polarization being sent into hyper-drive by the web. It concludes, “It’s terrible,” and I agree.

I was just defriended by someone else on Facebook. I know why. I’ve been pointing out  and dissecting the repetitive anti-Trump derangement when it turns up on my  timeline.  As usual, however, whoever this was didn’t have the guts and common courtesy to tell me that he or she was metaphorically slapping me in the face. Others, equally cowardly, just block my posts from their feed, or me from seeing theirs. Such individuals voluntarily create a bubble and actively seek to close off their minds. They should be ashamed of themselves, and when I get the chance, I’ll tell them so.

Here is Jeff Valentine’s Comment of the Day from the weekend’s Open Forum. It depressed me so much that I took this long to read it again. If you want to end up with a nation of armed camps, this is the way to do it.

Jack recently wrote about the tipping point where he may need to vote for Trump based on the Democrat’s various vile decisions.

I read it and wondered aloud, “What the Hell took you so long, Jack.” I was there within a year after the last election.

They really have disgusted me for the last three years.

It gets, actually, significantly worse. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere- my marriage fell apart. I am a full time custodial Dad, so I, out of necessity, use the awful apps for dating- Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Facebook Match. The number of women (and possibly men too- I don’t play for both teams as they say)- who say things like “Swipe left if you voted for Trump” or “Trumpsters Get Lost” or “Republicans need not apply” would appall you. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Open Forum,” Reality Show Thread

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

When I read  A.M. Golden’s Comment of the Day in yesterday’s Open Forum, I realized how long it has been since I wrote anything about TV reality shows, truly a center of popular culture ethics rot for decades now.  I have been remiss indeed. I had written about many of these monsters in the past, from “Survivor” and “The Apprentice,” to “The Bachelor” and the fat-to-fit shows, and the even more horrible “let’s watch these miserable D-list celebrities debase themselves on camera so we can feel superior” shows starring attention addicts like Anna Nicole Smith, Scott Baio, the Kardashians and Danny Bonaduce. 

I used to write a lot about “American Idol” when Simon Cowell was humiliating deluded contestants who shouldn’t have been allowed to sing in the shower, much less on national television. Criticizing these shows was almost too easy, like shooting celebrity fish in a barrel. I got sick of it, frankly.

A.M. did me a favor by flagging the return of two such shows. As he points out, they really are cruel and exploitative. Reality shows have coarsened our tastes and dulled our ethics alarms. Send them to Hell.

Here is A.M. Golden’s Comment of the Day on two re-booting reality shows. At the end, he asks, “Agree? Disagree?”

I could not agree more.

Two reality shows from the past are re-emerging far too soon with reboots.

The first is “The Biggest Loser”, a weight-loss game show that pushed overweight contestants to the limit with ridiculous and humiliating challenges, caused physical injuries that persist years later and pushed healthy eating on the air while pressuring the players to reduce their intake to unhealthy levels in order to show dramatic weight loss that was presented as being the result of one week’s work when it was often longer.

The reboot promises a more healthy environment. I’m not betting on it. Realistic weight loss is not exciting and boring does not bring in advertising dollars.

Because in any television show, it’s always about the dollars. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Quiz: Dying Dog Ethics”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

As usually is the case, today’s Open Forum generated several Comment of the Day contenders, and I will get to them in due course. I did not want too much time to lapse, however, before giving this lovely comment by JutGory its due. The topic was gratuitous and perhaps self-serving kindness to a dying dog who couldn’t possibly appreciate it’s details, or really have a “bucket list.”

Here is JutGory’s Comment of the Day on the post, Ethics Quiz: Dying Dog Ethics.

And, just because I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately, I’m dedicating Jut’s COTD to Rugby, our universally loved and loving Jack Russell Terrier who left us last summer.

This is complex, but I think your confusion, flumoxxation, etc., is the result of over-anthropomorphization on all fronts.

Is the dog being used? Sure. The dog is being anthropomorphized. That is not necessarily a bad thing.

Kant said that it was bad to abuse animals, not because of the harm that we did them, but because our abuse of them harmed us by (essentially) desensitizing us to abuse.

The flip side would seem to hold true. Being kind to animals is good, not because they are deserving of kindness, but because it makes us more kind. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “The Many Species Of Fake News”

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Few things make me happier than when a commenter relieves me of the duty of writing about a topic.

In 2017, after the New York Times published a spectacularly dishonest list of President Trump “lies” since his inauguration,  I wrote a post demonstrating just how outrageously the Times was warping the meaning of “lie,” and also applying a biased standard to Trump’s statements. I wrote,

In presenting this unethical project, the Times took unethical advantage of its readers’ confirmation bias. When the “Lie” list was printed, the Times made certain that it would require super-human dedication and extraordinary eyesight to read it, through the devices of listing every item and the Times commentary in horizontal sequence and in half the usual size type-face. (See above) This ensured that almost no readers would make the Herculean effort to read the whole thing , especially since the well-trained Times reader already “knows” that Donald Trump is a liar. In addition, the explosion of tiny words created the visceral response of “Wow! Look at all those lies!” which is exactly the effect the Times editors wanted.

But that isn’t reporting, and it isn’t journalism. The “list” was a page-size, visual, ad hominem attack. The Times wasn’t seeking close scrutiny of its list, nor was it interested in making any rebuttal easy or likely.

We have learned that the Times list was largely assembled from various fact-checker columns. That is a red flag, and explains many of the most embarrassing inclusions on the list. None of the fact-checkers are trustworthy. All of them are biased, Snopes and PolitiFact worst of all, and they consistently register opinions that the writer disagrees with as “false.” Many, many of the items on the Times list are in this category.

The entire exercise was an extension of #16 on the Fake News list, “Dishonest Factchecks. Here was a typical “lie” according to the Times, and its “proof”:

Jan. 21 “A reporter for Time magazine — and I have been on their cover 14 or 15 times. I think we have the all-time record in the history of Time magazine.”

Says the Times, “Trump was on the cover 11 times and Nixon appeared 55 times.”

Trump was making the general point that he had been on TIME’s cover a lot. He guessed that the number was 14 or 15; it was 11. That is what is known as a  non-material misrepresentation: it’s meaningless and harmless, and certainly not an intentional deception. (“Heh, heh…I’ll make those poor, gullible fools think I was on TIME”s cover 14 times when it was ONLY ELEVEN!! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!) Then he said he “thinks” that’s a record. When someone says “I think” it means the speaker is acknowledging that he may be wrong. But Trump is not accorded the usual leeway given to everyone else, including other elected officials.

When a list includes something this clearly contrived, that list has no credibility. I found going through the Times list annoying, then shocking, and finally infuriating. So when the Washington Post pulled the same stunt, I kept putting off giving it the same treatment that I did the Times’ exercise in lies about lying.

Thus I was thrilled to receive this Comment of the Day from stalwart Steve Witherspoon, on the post, The Many Species Of Fake News: Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Comment Of The Day: ‘Sunday Ethics Warm-Up, 1/12/2020′” (Economic Data Thread)

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This Comment Of The Day covers a wealth of ethics issues, including the ancient ethics debates over what is a fair share on societal wealth and who decides when someone has “enough” wealth. It also is an Ethics Alarms first: Chris Marschner’s Comment of the Day is on his own Comment of the Day!

And here it is, his Comment of the Day on his previous Comment of the Day on the post, “Sunday Ethics Warm-Up, 1/12/2020: Broken Ethics Alarms, An Ethics Conflict, And “Who Are You Going To Believe, Me Or Your Own Eyes?”

The point I was making was that people use economic data to illustrate all kinds of things. Typically they use charts and graphs to illustrate a point THEY want to make. The values within those charts and graphs need full examination before drawing a conclusion. For example, Reagan dropped the unemployment rate overnight by including the military in the labor force. In that case the number employed went up and the labor force went up as well. Given that the unemployment rate is the number unemployed/labor force if the denominator rises the UE rate falls.

Conversely, between 2008 and 2012 the unemployment rate showed a downward trend because the Labor force participation rate (LFPR) shrank and not because more people got jobs. People gave up looking for work so they were no longer treated as unemployed and the number of people working grew relative to the LFPR. Since 2016 the LFPR has been growing and the UE rate is dropping. That means that there are more people are working. That is a good thing because it puts upward pressure on wages.

For some, higher wages have overtaken what is known as an individual’s reservation wage. The reservation wage is the minimum amount needed to get a person to accept the offered job. Unfortunately, we have a great number of people whose true reservation wage has been distorted in both psychological and real terms. Reservation wages have been growing because of the growth in governmental income maintenance programs. Imagine how many will decide to live only on Yang’s guaranteed $12K a year. Couple that $1000 a month with housing assistance, food stamps, childcare, Medicare, and WIC you can live quite well on the dole. Oh I know, Yang says he would replace all those other programs to fund his guaranteed minimum income. Name a program that ever went away. We just layer one atop another.

These are not my opinions but well established facts and fundamental economic theory that is taught in first year Econ classes. I know because I taught those courses for 20 years. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Sunday Ethics Warm-Up, 1/12/2020: Broken Ethics Alarms, An Ethics Conflict, And ‘Who Are You Going To Believe, Me Or Your Own Eyes?”’

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

For today’s “Economics for Dummies” lecture, and we can only hope those in thrall to the “income inequality” hucksters running for President will somehow hear it, we have Chris Marschner. What inspired his discourse was this chart,

from #3 in the 1/12 Warm-Up, regarding Michael Bloomberg’s deliberately dishonest statement, “The U.S. economy is working just fine for people like me. But it is badly broken for the vast majority of Americans.”

Here is Chris Marschner’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Sunday Ethics Warm-Up, 1/12/2020: Broken Ethics Alarms, An Ethics Conflict, And “Who Are You Going To Believe, Me Or Your Own Eyes?”

One of the great fictions of economics lies in how data is portrayed. Growth rates are one of my favorite methods of telling lies. The wage growth rate above requires a bit of basic math and economics understanding to fully capture its relevance.

The lowest quartile or quintile will have substantially higher rates of growth even if all incomes rise at exactly the same amount. For example if someone making the highest limit of the lowest quartile (say $25,000) gets a $5000 raise that earners wage growth is 20%. As we move up the line, if the highest limit of the second quartile is $50,000 and a  $5,000 raise, that rate of increase is a mere 10%. As we move up the ladder the basis or denominator gets progressively larger and if the numerator – the raise – remains constant, the rate of growth falls. Most people know this or should know this. Continue reading →