Comment of the Day

Comment of the Day: Friday Open Forum [Tariffs Thread]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

That’s the New York Times graph this morning showing stock markets since President Trump’s inauguration. The lowest line (in orange) is Japan; the next lowest line is the U.S. The reason for all of those declines are believed to be Trump’s tariff policies.

A commenter last week asked why Ethics Alarms hadn’t discussed Trump’s tariffs. My response was, 1) I didn’t see them as an ethical issue and 2) I wasn’t informed sufficiently on the topic to opine on it. Veteran EA commentator Chris Marschner said, “Hold my beer!” The post below is the result: you van review the whole thread, which includes more from Chris, here.

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I don’t know if this is an ethics angle per se but the tariff objections illustrate without question America’s unwillingness to suffer any short term discomfort in order to obtain long term security. I keep hearing that Trump is a narcissist such that he has this inappropriate sense of sense but one of the clinical signs of narcissistic behavior is a sense of entitlement. The minute anything Trump does causes some immediate discomfort or loss many in the public feel they are entitled to what they had before.

A large percentage of the stock market gains are illusory because much of that growth was driven by inflated profits and subsequently inflated stock prices. Consumer and producer prices rise before costs are actually incurred because labor costs are negotiated on longer term contracts as are so many of our commodities. The Biden administration fueled those inflated profits – and he said as much in a speech in the port of Baltimore – when he poured 2 trillion dollars into the economy with too few goods to buy. Employment gains in the last 4 years were in large measure government jobs that produce intangibles whose values are only measured in terms of their employment.

People need to realize that the algorithms used by traders are driving much of the sell off because tariffs are deemed to be anti-growth. What the buy/sell programs are not factoring in is the 6 trillion dollars worth of investment commitment which will revitalize our semi-conductor industry and other strategic industries. We have to buy spare avionics parts for our military and the base materials for our medicines from our political adversary who has a 100 year plan to dominate the globe.

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Comment of the Day: “Unethical Quote of the Week: Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY)”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Humble Talent Comment of the Day Day continues with a stand-out post in a stand-out thread, which you can and should read here if you missed it. Here is HT’s second featured Comment of the Day on the post, “Unethical Quote of the Week: Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY)”:

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“The left tends to have more anxiety disorders”

Complete non-sequitur, but I’ve always been fascinated by this. It’s true: People who self-identify as being left of center on the political spectrum also tend to disproportionately report all varieties of mental illness. And when I say disproportionately, I mean disproportionately… The numbers change based on the type of mental illness and the methodology, but they all point the same way: The more extreme to the left you are, the worse your mental health is, and the further to the right you go, those issues are less reported. My impression is that mental illness rates of extreme progressives tracks at about 150% of average.

Thing is, everyone seems to have an opinion on why that is.

The low hanging fruit would be if there was a reporting problem; If people right of center were more loathe to report mental illness because of social stigma, that might account for some this. The problem with that argument is that the single largest classification of mental illness is depression, and if you look at happiness studies, they tend to find the same correlations. As an example: Both the mental health disparity and happiness disparity is strongest among young women in low income brackets. All that leads me to believe that while there might be some amount of reporting bias, the reality is probably that conservatives are generally happier people, that probably has positive mental health outcomes, and following that, I think the disparity is real.

Once you arrive there, the question becomes: 1) Does holding progressive values degrade your mental wellness? Or 2) are mentally unwell people more drawn towards progressivism?

I think the answer is probably “both”.

  1. I think that progressives tend to care about big issues that they can’t control. Climate Change, The War in Ukraine, Palestine… They view these as existential problems, which means that their temperature, their stress on these issues is always high, and to make it worse, these issues are also entirely outside of their control. Caring deeply about things that aren’t going the way you’d prefer them to while simultaneously being incapable of effecting change can’t be good for your mental health.
  2. Progressives seem to value victimhood… They’d balk at that, but the reality is that you have people in the progressive movement who fake their victimhood because it has social currency. People caught faking victimhood are treated similarly to how the right treats people who have stolen valor. As a general rule, they’re more welcoming, more affirming, and more enabling, to people with disabilities, and so I don’t think it should surprise that when someone is faced with some kind of mental health issue, the might tend to gravitate towards the group with arms wide open.

So uh…. Be conservative. It’s good for your health.

Comment of the Day: “Enough Trivia and Silly Stuff: This Is Incompetence That Can’t Be Ignored”

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

This story has been officially designated an Ethics Train Wreck, and I may have to post further on it yet. Once again, we are at the infuriating point where it is impossible to get an un-spun, un-distorted, straightforward explanation of what the issues are, with most conservative news sources downplaying the episode and most Axis sources gleefully “pouncing.” Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has hardly been candid, with the White House Paid Liar being particularly egregious in that respect.

The Humble Talent Comment of the Day that follows is the first of two I will post today. HT has been on fire: these is his observations regarding the post, “Enough Trivia and Silly Stuff: This Is Incompetence That Can’t Be Ignored”:

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While I generally agree with the flow of the commentariat here, I think there is a massive difference between what Hillary Clinton did, and what Pete Hegseth did, and that progressives are ethically estopped from being smug about this. I’ve shifted even more on this since the hearing yesterday.

First off, I think it’s helpful to articulate what people actually did:

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Comment of the Day: A Spammed Commenter…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

…who shall remain nameless.

This:

“Experience the future of companionship with an AI girlfriend chatbot. Designed to listen engage and respond with intelligence and warmth this virtual partner offers meaningful conversations, emotional support, and personalized interactions. Whether you seek a friend a confidante or just casual chats this ai girlfriend chatbot companion is always there for you anytime anywhere. Enjoy a unique ever-evolving connection powered by artificial intelligence.”

I think a blow-up doll is more ethical. The product is as perilous as crack or heroin, and destined to cripple and manipulate vulnerable, lonely people, like, say, me. It is the logical and inevitable next step from 800 sex chat phone lines. They can’t be made illegal; someone will undoubtedly argue that AI girlfriend chatbots can be therapeutic and even, on balance, capable of accomplishing more good than bad.

Sure. As for me, I’m reminded of this post from 2017: The Unibomber Had A Point.

Res ipsa loquitur.

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Verdict: Justified, Necessary, and Ethical”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This refreshing Comment of the Day by EA Ace AM Golden concludes with a trenchant point: Why does someone need to be reading Ethics Alarms or doing their own research to be properly informed of the context of a news event rather than misled by selective reporting?

I should have included the historical precedents for the recent Trump White House decision to exercise its own discretion over what news organizations and other news sources should be included in briefings, but my point was that it didn’t matter what the “precedent” was because today’s news media and the unethical way they have covered this particular President have no valid precedents. However, AM’s perfectly illustrated point is equally important: as usual, the news media is framing anything Trump does as a “threat to democracy” rather than giving the public the information it needs to make up their own minds.

Once I read AM’s COTD, I was even more disgusted with the New York Times than I usually am. Pure deceit: the piece says that it’s a “decades long” precedent to not pick and choose among news organizations, see, so if AM’s precedents are waved in the Times editors’ smug faces, they can say, “Well, those examples were still many decades ago, so what we wrote is correct!”

But even if the Times reporters and lazy editors had been aware of the precedents AM reveals (I’d bet anything that they didn’t bother to check), they still wouldn’t have mentioned them because Trump is following the examples of two revered figures, one of them on Mt. Rushmore and the other unanimously regarded as our greatest President in the last hundred years.

And just to preempt the usual excuse that self-banned Times defender “A Friend” would typically post until I sent the comment to Spam Hell, those Times readers who are the reliable epitome of erudition, fairness and oversight saving the biased Times from itself, I checked all the nearly 2000 comments to the news story. Most agreed that Trump is an aspiring dictator, but not a single one mentioned the Roosevelts.

Here is AM Golden’s illuminating Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Verdict: Justified, Necessary, and Ethical”…

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Comment of the Day: “More Re-Branding Ethics: ‘What is This “Boy Scouts” of Which You Speak’?”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Brad Davidson. the father of two Eagle Scouts and a silver award Girl Scout, wrote this Comment of the Day to defend the re-named Boy Scouts of America. now “Scouting America,” from a critical post here from May, 2024. Despite the criticism, I was very pleased to see his passionate, well-argued rebuttal. As I noted in the original essay, Jack Marshall Sr. regarded the organization as his savior, because the Boy Scouts gave him structure and a support network when he was a fatherless only-child growing up in Kentucky during the Depression. Dad would have been crushed if he had lived long enough to watch the Bot Scouts staggering under the terrible publicity it suffered in the wake of its child molestation scandal and the subsequent lawsuits that drove it into bankruptcy.

Since Brad mentions it more than once, I must pause briefly to to defend my use of the term “rot” to describe the Scouts ( I never used the terms “ethics rot,” “ethical tot” or “moral rot.”) I hold that any organization that has many episodes of adults in authority criminally molesting children under its auspices—and the Scouts had almost 93,000 claims across all 50 states and the District of Columbia when the organization went into Chapter 11—by definition has allowed its culture to fall apart in metaphorical chunks. The Boy Scouts induced families to entrust its sons to their care, and then did not adequately execute that care. Such widespread criminal activity cannot exist without an organization’s leadership engaging in contrived ignorance. The fact that other organizations were equally negligent is not a defense.

Here is Brad Davidson’s Comment of the Day on the post, “More Re-Branding Ethics: ‘“’What is This ‘Boy Scouts’ of Which You Speak?’” I combined his comment on EA with a subsequent email he sent me off-site, with his permission.

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You have made some claims about Scouting that are just that–claims, not based in reality. “Decades of ethical rot” is a claim, and I see no proof, other than you hate the name change.

I was a Cub Scout and then a Boy Scout (and then Scouts BSA) leader for 12 years, and have 2 sons who are Eagle Scouts. My daughter was in Girl Scouts, and I was a leader for that group as well but took a back seat to two women who really ran the group. My role was more of the “get ’em outdoors” role for the girls.

First, I am not sure what the “ethical rot” entails. Was it un-banning homosexual scoutmasters and scouts? Scouting is not the place for sexual education nor sexual encounters; we don’t care what you do outside of scouting, provided it is legal and has no influence on your scouting experience. This is the real world, scouting goes up to 18, and there are times when boys or adults get in legal trouble, and we had to make a judgement call–but again, if it involved sex, other than criminal sexual activity, none of it is our business. “Morally straight” gives us an opportunity to talk about personal relationships in general, but we are guys who take kids camping, not sexual educators.

Second, GSA and BSA are not related organizations. They actually compete, and from my point of view, don’t like each other. Scouting America (the new name) is part of an international scouting movement; it was not founded here in America, nor is it headquartered here. The global scout movement is overwhelmingly co-ed. We were one of the ONLY scouting organizations that had limits on female participation. We ended this in large part because, frankly, it’s hard for families to join and have the girls not involved. My daughter did a LOT of homework at scout meetings, and wished she could have gone camping instead of selling cookies.

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Comment of the Day: “Interestingly, Being an Idiot Does Not, In The Eyes Of The Florida Bar, Make One Unfit To Practice Law”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

This Comment of the Day from the stellar Harkins household—this is from Ryan Harkins–was just posted three days ago and it seems like eons. It responds to another one of my arguments that sufficient demonstrations of stupidity by lawyers even outside the practice of law should be grounds for disbarment—a suspension isn’t enough, because such a lawyer will not become smarter after a professional “time out.” I think the first time I suggested this reform to legal discipline was when “The View’s” token lawyer, racist Sunny Hostin, suggested that eclipses and earthquakes were caused by climate change. It upsets me just think about the fact that this idiot has a law degree.

Here is Ryan’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Interestingly, Being an Idiot Does Not, In The Eyes Of The Florida Bar, Make One Unfit To Practice Law”…

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A basic and important rule of gun safety, perhaps the preeminent rule, is that you should never point a gun at anything you don’t intend to shoot. Playing around with a gun in the fashion that Medina did shows a disturbing lack of gun safety in particular, but of the principal normalization of deviance in particular.

To delve into a little bit of brain science, in following the cognitive-emotive-behavioral model, we start with a desire. Perhaps in Medina’s case, it was simply to have fun. But how would he possibly conclude pulling the trigger of an unloaded gun is fun?

There are a large variety of ways we can try to satisfy our desires. In the case of hunger, we could seek satiation from a myriad of venues. In the case seeking stress relief, we could seek out a movie, a game, exercise, or any of a host of other options. But there are options we can choose from that are unhealthy, dangerous, or even illegal. When presented with all these options, our brains experience a byplay between thought and feeling. Does this option satisfy? The emotions clamor for a particular avenue, and cognition weighs the risks and benefits. If I eat a salad, I might not feel satiated, but if I eat a Hardee’s Monster Burger, I’ll be consuming far too many calories. But the salad may not be very tasty, and the Monster Burger is delicious. Whichever way I choose, my brain will record the success or failure of the endeavor, and the next time I am hungry, I will have a precedent to fall back on. They byplay between cognition and emotion in subsequent encounters proceeds much more quickly. The Monster Burger was indeed delicious, filled me up, and I didn’t seem to suffer any negative consequences. So the next time, my brain is patterned to lean toward the Monster Burger because of the positive experience.

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Comment of the Day: “Justice for the Nicholas Brothers” [UPDATED]

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This was another dreary Saturday (almost all Saturdays have been dreary since Grace died, to be honest) until Ethics Alarms provided a triple treat. A new commenter debuted with a Comment of the Day, and I always love that. Better yet, the comment arrived on an old post, one from July of 2012. I also love that, as it shows that these poor rhetorical exercises with too many typos don’t always vanish like random pebbles thrown into the surf, but sometimes provide amusement and perspective to readers months and even years later, giving hope that my existence has some meaning after all.

Best of all, however, is that Kevin Hall’s Comment of the Day focuses much deserved attention on the amazing Nicholas Brothers, probably the greatest tap dancers who ever lived, whose memory is tragically faint because of the racism that restricted their careers. That number above, from a film that was seen almost exclusively by black audiences when it was released, is perhaps the most famous film performance by Harold and Fayard Nicholas, and it is certainly characteristic of their amazing style, but there are others. There is also a website dedicated to their lives and artistry. I feel about the Nicholas Brothers a bit like King Arthur does about the legend of Camelot as he expresses it in the final song in that Lerner and Lowe musical…

Ask every person if he’s heard the story
And tell it strong and clear if he has not…

Here is Kevin Hall’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Justice for the Nicholas Brothers.” I can’t resist some brief comments at the end…

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Comment of the Day: “Inauguration Prelude Ethics Round-Up, 1/18/25”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I woke up this morning to a much-appreciated gift from Steve-O-in-NJ, a well-researched, n excellent Inauguration Day prelude post that touches on several issues, but mostly the political history of outgoing POTUS Biden. In that sense, it is also a Comment of the Day on the final installment of the EA inquiry on The Worst President Ever, to which Steve-O already contributed an epic supplement.

Two notes before I hand the metaphorical floor over to Steve: 1) How I love it when there is a Comment of the Day covering ground that I was expecting to have to cover myself on a Sunday morning! 2) I am grateful to AM Golden for asking in a comment about whether Trump has any company as a “businessman,” which I responded to last night and that seems to have prompted Steve’s opus. The quick answer is that nobody on the list of 45 men could be called a businessman/entrepreneur/mogul except Trump. As Steve points out, Harry Truman had a modest haberdashery store [above] before going into politics, but for him to be compared to Trump as a businessman he would have had to own Brooks Brothers and Men’s Warehouse. 3)The survey of Presidential occupations and those of their fathers was a large section of my honors thesis, which could have been called “How to Become President of the United States.” In summarizing the facts, Steve omitted #17, Andrew Johnson, who may have the most astounding background story of all. Johnson is usually referred to as a tailor, but his pre-White House occupation could be arguably called “slave,” as he was an indentured servant who was literally owned until he ran away. It was a cruel twist of fate that his public image, such that he has one at all, is dominated by his disastrous tenure as President when his life story is perhaps the most amazing rise to power in in our history. He also shares with #47 an amazing comeback, being elected to the U.S. Senate as the final act in his public career.

Here is Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day on the post,“Inauguration Prelude Ethics Round-Up, 1/18/25” :

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I actually was looking up how many presidents have been exclusively politicians their entire professional lives, and the number is comparatively few. Most of them have had at least some other profession before entering the world of politics.

Most (31) have been in the military in some capacity at some point, and 12 (Washington, Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, Pierce, Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, and of course Eisenhower) have been generals, albeit some “in name only.” Many were lawyers, judges, or bureaucrats, but there were also such diverse jobs as mining engineer, farmer, haberdasher, land surveyor, actor, teacher, executive, and publisher. Arguably Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt might qualify as polymaths, since both could do multiple things well.

Pure politicians, the Presidents who spent their entire professional lives or close to it in elective office, have been relatively few. FDR almost was, but his political career was derailed for a time by the illness that left him wheelchair-bound. LBJ comes close, since he taught only briefly before getting into politics, and left only briefly to serve in the Navy in WW2. JFK definitely was, since he came out of the Navy, spent something like a year and a half as a “special correspondent” for Hearst Newspapers, then ran for the House and never looked back. Bill Clinton has often been described as never having a “real job” outside of politics.

Biden was also pretty much purely a politician. He came out of law school, spent about a year in private practice, then possibly less than a year as a public defender (the history is murky, and he only “rediscovered” it when he needed social justice creds in 2020) before he ran for his first office and never looked back until the four years between being Obama’s vice president and running himself, during which he “wrote” a memoir and was an “honorary professor” at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Comment of the Day: “The Worst President Ever? Part 6: The Final Field”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Steve-O-in NJ contributed a well-reasoned and researched resolution of the Ethics Alarms series “The Worst President Ever?” after the penultimate installment, which I posted last month. At the time, I still wasn’t certain how the Wilson-Biden contest would come out, and since (spoiler!) his analysis came down to the same final two, I resolved to hold this obvious Comment of the Day until I had finished my final installment, which went up (finally!) last night. Steve’ alternate analysis is excellent, as all of Steve-O’s historical epics are.

Here is Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day on “The Worst President Ever? Part 6: The Final Field.”

An interesting list, certainly. I believe that if you asked 100 people who the worst presidents were and why, you’d probably get 100 answers that would all differ at least slightly, although some common threads would run through them, and you’d get one group from conservative folks and another from liberal folks. I’m not sure I 100% agree with this list, but it’s the list you’ve given us to work with, so here are my thoughts:

Franklin Pierce – Had a life-long problem with alcohol, to the point where other military officers (yes, believe it or not he is one of the ten presidents who was a general) called him the “hero of many a well-fought bottle.” Tragic family history, and let grief and drink paralyze his single term in office.

James Buchanan – Took almost no steps to stop the Civil War from happening. Started to dislike the office to the point where he told Lincoln that if Lincoln was as happy upon assuming the presidency as he was upon leaving it, he was a happy man indeed.

Andrew Johnson – Never meant to be president, put on the ticket because he was a Democrat and a southerner. Couldn’t control the radical Republicans. Was impeached (probably unfairly) and came the closest any president ever came to removal from office. Also had the hardest act of all to follow.

Woodrow Wilson – Biggest racist ever to sit in the White House. Also probably one of the 3 or 4 most arrogant presidents. Led us into WW1 when we might not have needed to go, then alienated the world with his attempt to impose his own morality. Also alienated most of his political allies back home and was a willing participant in hiding that he had had a debilitating stroke from the country.

Richard Nixon – Popular president who didn’t trust his own popularity to take him past the finish line and overreached, then tried to cover it up.

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