How ironic! A post spawned by a banned trolling commenter who called your host a “Trump-supporting fascist” generated excellent commentary and two outstanding Comments of the Day. Thus a disruptive and unethical visitor here actually helped to enrich the discussion and enlighten participants. I know I learned some things from Sarah B.’s excellent Comment of the Day on the post, the first of the two earning the honor.
While I cannot answer for lawyers, there are plenty of Trump deranged engineers, and we sure get trained in logic, critical-thinking, and evaluation of consequences of our thought processes. This training does not inoculate us from our own biases. Indeed, biases manage to short circuit the training.
Jack is fond of saying biases make us stupid, and certainly today’s society proves it. I cannot tell you how frustrated I get when a trained engineer tells me that electric cars will solve all our problems. No one with the training I went through should say that electric cars are a universal solution. They should be able to calculate life cycle pollution, understand vehicle weight issues with roadways, realize the limitations of battery technology, mineral scarcity, and electrical grid load. However, by the time we get our intensive training in logic, critical thinking, and more, we have also been inundated in “global climate change” mass hysteria. The biases I saw my fellows come out with was amazing, even as I was standing there with the damn numbers.
For some reason, the debate in the comments to the recent post about the proper use of “ad hominem” ended up about Rush Limbaugh, who has been dead for a while now. The issue was whether Rush’s referring to then-Georgetown Law Student Sandra Fluke, briefly a media star for her argument that birth control should be free, paid for by taxpayers, as a “slut” was an ad hominem attack or not. Ryan Harkins, in his Comment of the Day, decided to arbitrate the dispute, and did so with his usual logic and objectivity.
I do have a couple of points I want to make in this introduction to Ryan’s COTD. He admits that he never listened to Rush, and that’s a problem. As I kept emphasizing in the discussion in the comments, Rush Limbaugh was primarily an entertainer, though he was one with a political agenda and clear ideological orientation. (He was also was master of the slippery “clown nose on/clown nose off” device, like Jon Stewart.) I don’t think he can be fairly analyzed without that context. Ryan says that the use of slut has no place in “honest argumentation,” but Rush Limbaugh’s routines were no more intended as honest argumentation than a Lewis Black set or a Louie CK rant.
Nor can his work be fairly assessed second or third hand. There are several posts about Rush on Ethics Alarms; my wrap-up on his career and legacy is here.
I also neglected to mention in my lengthy exchange with jdkazoo123 that I did designate Rush’s “slut” comment about Fluke as “the worst of Rush.” That still doesn’t make it “ad hominem.” Limbaugh also apologized for that insult, something he didn’t often do, but it was pretty clearly a forced apology, though he said it was sincere. His show was losing sponsors over the controversy. Fluke refused to accept the apology.
Watching this exchange, I’ve had to consider a couple of things. First, I never listened to Rush, so I don’t know how his monologue progressed. But I would have to agree that throwing out the term “slut” would poison the well. Compare the following statements:
Which crucial American institution, our journalism or our education system, has deteriorated more?
This has become an ongoing inquiry at Ethics Alarms. My official participation in either has been sporadic and marginal—no, I don’t consider writing Ethics Alarms journalism—so I cherish commentary by genuine participants. Fortunately we have a lot of teachers, former and current, who weigh in here regularly. For a long time, one regular reader used EA as an assigned class resource. (If there are any journalists out there who visit this site, they haven’t revealed themselves).
As this Comment of the Day by jdkazoo123 demonstrates, insiders in a profession can identify problems with ethical implications that the rest of us on the outside looking in may never consider. Here it is, a reaction to the post, “Ethics Dunce: University of California at Santa Cruz.” ( I also recommend Ethics Alarms special correspondent Curmie’s response to the COTD at that link.)
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I agree it’s crazy, but there’s a deeper wrong embedded in the stupid wrong–the salary of adjuncts.
Adjuncts are now essential to the functioning of almost all large higher educational institutions, and most small and medium ones as well. The market is saturated with people with PhDs, and they won’t give up the dream of teaching college easily or quickly. This creates a surplus labor force that ostensibly leftwing admins exploit like robber barons. At the same time, a largely leftwing professoriate goes along with it, wringing their hands, gee what could we do?
It has been too long since a Comment of the Day featured Michael West’s commentary; maybe I take his almost always sharp and though-provoking observations for granted. He goes back to 2012, and has graced this blog with 16, 612 comments, many in the course of intense debate.
I genuinely feel for the public educators that are *just* trying to do their jobs and seeing parents fleeing to non-public options and are as frustrated as the parents are about the collapse of public education. A large component of my family are either educators or in direct support of educators and they all are frustrated. However, public education under command of the unions are just one more Democrat money laundering, politician-lobbying and vote-buying scheme as educational bureaucracies bloat like a beached whale.
See? An Ethics Alarms Comment of the Day does not have to be the length of an honors thesis to qualify for the honor.
This one, courtesy of A.M. Golden, resonated with me the second I read it. The post commented upon was about my discussion last night with a very dear friend—one of those relationships in which it doesn’t matter how long you are apart, it picks up, unchanged, from exactly where it was whether it’s after five minutes or 20 years—who was noticeably wary about expressing a clear opinion on the Hamas-Israel War Ethics Train Wreck in our conversation. Here’s the Comment of the Day, on the post, “A Careful Conversation With An Old Friend,” and I’ll elaborate after you read it….
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We’ve had more than one careful conversation with a family member here and there myself.
Isn’t it a shame that your Jewish friend felt he had to test the waters before expressing his opinion, though?
It’s like Russian dolls! Joel Mundt’s Comment of the Day on the uses of shaming spawned this profound Comment of the Day by Ryan Harkins on the evolution of shame, all triggered by the post, “Fat-Shaming Ethics”:
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I don’t believe we’ve removed shaming people from our cultural habits. Rather, what has shifted are the things by which we find shame. Out are failing grades, disruptive behavior, criminal record, sex out of wedlock, picking up a welfare check, impoliteness, slovenly appearances, and the like. In are being white, being conservative, using the wrong words, insisting on the reality of biological sex, being male, being trans-exclusive, insisting on merit, and the like.
Shame is the basic negative feedback that tells us we should not do something. While it can definitely be applied in harmful ways, I don’t think there is a way out of applying shame. Society cannot function if everything is permissible and even applauded. Our efforts, as [commenter] Old Bill has pointed out, to prevent anyone from feeling shame has made a culture that cannot tolerate even the slightest psychological discomfort, and which feels entitled to everything.
Discomfort prompts us to move. That is why negative reinforcement works. Taking a positive-reinforcement-only approach tries to lure people into moving because of being tempted by a nice reward. But the problem with that is that many people will find remaining in place more tolerable than putting forth the effort for the reward. Many people find the short term pleasure of doing what they want now more tempting than the long term pleasure of self-discipline, attainment, and success. In order to get moving, there has to be something that overpowers the temptation to stay put, and sometimes that something has to be sufficiently painful.
I have such a strong visceral reaction to this provocative Comment of the Day, a personal accountby Joel Mundt, that I’m going to eschew my usual introduction and let you make your own judgments without any influence by me. Here it is, in reaction to “Fat-Shaming Ethics” and the lively comments it has generated so far…
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I’m going slightly off-topic, and I apologize in advance…
I’m of the opinion that shaming is, to a degree, a good thing. In my opinion, it’s a form of non-physical discipline that emphasizes embarrassment and plays on an individual’s need to be liked and to be more like the collective. It’s a way to manipulate desired behavior using something of a “group intervention.”
A perfect example of this is…well…me. As an elementary student, I had a reputation of being really smart, but also talking out-of-turn an awful lot in class, which was disruptive. My 5th-grade teacher, Mrs. Crooks, sought me out and purposely got my name on her class list. Nobody wanted her as their 5th-grade teacher…she had a terrifying reputation among younger students. I didn’t know it until years later, but she had talked to my parents ahead of time, explaining that I would be her student, and she would break me of my disruptive ways.
And she did her best! I was punished in the most imaginative ways for speaking out of turn, like being ordered to walk around classroom without making a sound for 10 minutes while she taught the other students, or playing the part of the “silent i” in front of the class when learning to spell words like “receive”. She was modestly effective…until the day of “the sign”. I was talking out of turn yet again and Mrs. Crooks told me – in front of the class – that my punishment was to write the words “I’m a big mouth” on a piece of paper, then glue it to a piece of cardboard she gave me with a string in it, then wear it around my neck…outside during our lunch recess with the entire school.
Here is another one of Extradimensional Cephalopod‘s measured, rational, provocative and useful formula pieces. There’s a lot here: Hanlon’s Razor, marital advice, the flaws of presumed racism, weenyism…all in all, a top of the line Comment of the Day.
Alright, let’s break this down. Dealing with people acting unreasonable is what led me to learn deconstruction mindset. We can’t always take the easy way out by pretending people don’t exist. Sometimes we have to get constructive.
My values:
Racists should have their views challenged. If I ran into an actual racist doing actual racist things, I’d ask incisive questions to deconstruct their whole paradigm.
It’s more effective to assume a misunderstanding than malice. If it’s a misunderstanding, then it gets resolved normally with minimal fuss. If it’s malice, then the malicious people find themselves having to either spell out that they’re jerks or pretend to be incompetent, both of which have would tend to erode their arrogance. By assuming a misunderstanding we also get the opportunity to demonstrate that we are thoughtful and respectful people.
I would like more people to make a habit of doing all of the above.
Others’ values:
The inquirer’s wife doesn’t trust that other people might just have made mistakes instead of having ill will towards her. Perhaps due to past experiences, she has some reason to assume that they are more likely to be deliberately mistreating her.
She doesn’t want to make the effort to find out for certain if her assumptions about others are correct. She apparently has a habit of avoiding interacting with people she suspects may be racist, because of the painful possibility of having to deal with an actual racist.
This excellent Comment of the Day (which I happen to agree with completely, though that is never a requirement for COTDs) was sparked by a statement by esteemed EA squid, Extradimensional Cephalopod. This seem like a propitious time to salute EC, who is very thoughtful on this classic ethics conflict issue, for alerting me to a Zoom debate on abortion held by his group, Braver Angels (“leading the nation’s largest cross-partisan, volunteer-led movement to bridge the partisan divide…”).
Extradimensional Cephalopod said: It sounds like you’re presupposing the existence of a person who is killed in that situation. I think it’s simple enough to understand that people live in human brains, and if a human body hasn’t developed a brain, that means a person cannot yet have started to live in that body. Does that make sense?
Presuming the concept of personhood is morally relevant, then it makes sense. That presumption is the entire basis upon which the pro-choice point of view rests.
Accept as presented the assumption that personhood is an objectively definable state before which there is no ethical alarm set off by choosing an abortion.
Even granting without dissent that most essential assumption gains nothing.
Existence preceding personhood — the interval between achieving that status and conception — still has precisely two ways of ending: natural cause, or homicide. There is no other option.
As I noted in an earlier post today, extreme Trump Derangement rants are less tolerable from genuine professionals of whom the public reasonably expects better than from the Robert De Niro, Bette Midler, Jimmy Kimmel, Rob Reiner, and “The View”-type celebrity pundits who are loud of mouth, large of ego and megaphone, and short of wisdom. Thus the letter Steve-O-in NJ reveals and critiques in his Comment of the Day is particularly disturbing. As you will see, it is sloppy, miserably researched, steeped in emotion and bias, and, frankly, I’m embarrassed for my profession after reading it. That the writer, as he informs us by way of appealing to his own authority, was on short lists for a cabinet position either speaks to the incestuous nature of our political elite, or the frequency of age-triggered cognitive decline. And he wants this self-indicting swill widely circulated! The lack of self-awareness among the Trump Deranged is a source of wonder.
I also need to say that I have not recognized Steve’s often detailed, erudite and perceptive comments frequently enough. I attribute this to taking blessings for granted (one of my myriad flaws): so many of his posts are outstanding that I’m not sufficiently impressed by them any more. My fault, and my apologies to Steve.
Paul Grossman, supposedly a conservative, wrote the following, which should tell you all you need to know about Trump Derangement. He’s is a nationally known employment defense lawyer at Paul Hastings and a Republican. He has encouraged that it be shared.
“April 5, 2024TO:
My Friends and Acquaintances
FROM: Paul Grossman
SUBJECT: The Upcoming Presidential Election
In most elections, candidates differ in philosophical approach regarding how best to solve commonly appreciated issues and shared challenges such as the large federal deficit.In 2024, we are faced with a departure from this normal paradigm in which we can presuppose the integrity of the candidates and their desire for a better United States now and in the future.
For the first time in my lifetime, one of the two major candidates for President of the United States has proven himself to be not just unfit for office but affirmatively evil. I am a Republican. Until our former President came along, based on the issues, I voted for The Republican candidate for President. Ronald Reagan wanted me to run the Department of Labor forhim. I had serious hopes of being Mitt Romney’s Secretary of Labor. I would have happily voted for Nikki Haley over Biden, with whom I differ on numerous policy issues. But for the reasons set forth below, in this election differences in character are more important than the underlying policy issues.
Please vote. Sitting out this election is not a reasonable choice.Is the former President evil? Yes. There can be no doubt. Consider the following: He incited the January 6th riots. He refused to take action for hours that day while watching the riots on television. He has promised to pardon the convicted rioters despite the deaths and destruction they caused. He calls racists “good people.” He still claims the 2020 election was “stolen” – he lost it by 7 million votes. He calls his opponents demeaning nicknames – a tactic used by grade school bullies. He is a serial liar. His trade policy is protectionist – he ridicules serious economists. He has engaged frequently in unwanted sexual touching of females – as he put it in a recorded statement, he “grabs pussy.”
He has been found by a court to be guilty of sexual assault. He avoided military service; at a military cemetery he labeled those who served “suckers.” He initially denied the existence of the recent pandemic. He rejected medical evidence in relation to the recent pandemic and demeaned medical experts. He makes fun of climate change. He embraces nonsensical conspiracy theories.
[My problems with Biden include his age, immigration, the Afghanistan exit, unconditional sympathy for trade unions, overspending, and contentions the wealthy are not paying their “fair share” of taxes. But I must admit despite my reservations about Biden, the economy is doing quite well.]
[Donald Trump] makes fun of people with disabilities. He dehumanizes immigrants – all four of my grandparents were immigrants. Those who have worked most closely with the former President are unstinting in their assessments: He has been privately labeled a “moron” by his First Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson. He has been called dangerous by his former Secretary Of Defense, Mark Esper, who will not vote for him. He has been accused of undermining our NATO alliance by his former Secretary of Defense, James Mathis. His Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao resigned in protest of his January 6th related actions and inactions.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell called the January 6th mob violence a “failed insurrection.” He tried to bully his vice president to refuse to perform his vice presidential duty and certify the election results:Mike Pence, an honorable conservative, has announced he will not vote for the former President. He used to be pro-choice – he switched when he became a Republican and needed the evangelicals. He admires Putin and for good reason – both are evil and serial liars.
He could not care less about Ukraine’s heroic stand against Putin and Russia.Please join me in voting for the candidate who is a decent human being, and against the candidate who is evil.
Please forward this email to your circle of friends. I truly fear for our democracy if the evil candidate again becomes President. I think it possible, perhaps likely, that if elected in 2024, as the 2028 elections approach, despite the Constitution, he will do whatever he deems necessary to stay in power. Prominent conservatives including Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, and Lisa Murkowski have publicly announced they will not vote for the former President. It is not clear whether they will abstain. But an abstention or a vote for a candidate who has no chance makes it easier forthe evil candidate to win. Thank you for considering my views.”
Ethics Alarms 