Daily Life

Performers Making Random People Happy: This Is a Good Thing

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“In these troubled times,” as a weenie college president would put it today, we need to acknowledge the random acts that make life a little bit brighter for people, especially those acts that might file themselves permanently in an individual’s “thrills and fond memories” collection.

In the video above, the singer/songwriter known as Jewel (her real name is Jewel Kilcher) provided one of those random acts. At 49, she’s past her pop culture stardom prime by about two decades, transitioning into the “Masked Singer” contestant and “Star-Spangled Banner” stage. But she’s sold 30 million albums, and qualifies as a major singing star, if one whose fan base now mostly qualifies as middle-aged.

Jewel was recruited by the website “Funny or Die” for a stunt reminiscent of the old “Candid Camera” show. She agreed to submit to extensive make-up and wardrobe subterfuge to disguise herself, and to visit a Karaoke bar as a mousy, reluctant recruit to go on stage and sing some of her own songs. The results can be seen in the video. First the crowd is thrilled at the spectacle of an unlikely candidate revealing herself as a genuine talent, and later, when she revealed her true identity, joyful in the realization that a celebrity singer had given them an unexpected fun experience they could tell their friends and family about.

I love this kind of thing. Back in 2013, Ethics Alarms saluted Neil Diamond for spontaneously and for no compensation leading Red Sox fans in their nightly “Sweet Caroline” serenade. I have been consistently critical of Mandy Potenkin, but he has revealed in interviews that when a child recognizes him in public as “Inigo Montoya” from “The Princess Bride,” he leans down and whispers in the kid’s ear, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

Celebrities can abuse their unique status in our society, or they can employ it to bring a little joy into our hum drum lives, as Lena Lamont so memorably said…

Good for Jewel.

Awkward Situation Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I am beginning to think that I have been magically trapped in a “Mr. Bean” episode.

First I drive 30 miles for an appointment with my accountant, and he forgets about it. Then I am invited to lunch at a law firm, and when I arrive, the office is deserted, with computers on and lights blazing. The next week, I do a live/Zoom seminar that is going swimmingly when the whole system breaks down, leaving me soundless and video-less.

Yesterday, a neighbor invites me to “a little neighborhood gathering” celebrating Cinco de Mayo (it’s Greek Easter among my relatives) between 1 and 3 today. There will be food, I am told. I have not been invited to any neighborhood social gathering for at least ten years, so I resolve to show up, though that’s Spuds walking time and the Red Sox are playing the Twins.

I intended to drop by just to be neighborly and appreciative around 1:30, but I get a phone call from an old friend offering condolences, and I don’t reach the neighbor’s place until 2:30. When I come in the door, I see that everyone is listening to a presentation about…solar panels. I don’t know anyone, and no one is talking except the solar panel pitch man. I see a table with food, and I’m starving, but it’s in the middle of the room with the solar panel lecture. This goes on for 15 minutes, as I stand near the door watching the pitch for something holding no interest for me. Solar panels are a Cinco de Mayo thing, I surmise. Good to know. My hostess left me shortly after letting me in the door and got involved in the solar panel-fest. Spuds was waiting for a walk, the baseball game has started, and I was hungry.

The neighbor’s young son came in the door from playing outside, and I went out of it. I walked back home.

Was that wrong?

A New Ethics Alarm Goes Off!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I had dropped off Spuds for an emergency visit to the vet: one of his ears suddenly started swelling for no discernible reason. On the way out, I chatted with another concerned pet owner, who was sitting with her adorable aged Yorkie-Chihuahua mix (known as a “Chorkie”: that’s not her above, but it looks just like her—the dog, not the owner). We talked for quite a while, then I took my leave, after asking her dog’s name (April).

Half-way to my car in the parking lot, I started thinking, “That was rude. I talk to this nice, friendly woman for 15 minutes, ask her dog’s name, and never ask for hers or identify myself. I acted like she didn’t matter, and all I was really interested in was her dog. How dehumanizing and disrespectful.” Then I recalled all the other dog owners I know only by their dogs. (Everybody know Spuds.) One of them came by my house two days ago, knocked on the door, and gave me all the ingredients for tacos. “I know you’re having to cook for just one now after your wife’s death, and we had this left over,” she said. I had no idea who she was because she didn’t have her dog with her, a very old Sheltie named Lilly. Eventually I figured it out. (She pretty clearly doesn’t know my name either.)

Back to the vet’s…I turned around, went back into the pet hospital, and found the woman I had just left. “I came back to apologize,” I said. “I asked your dog’s name but never asked what yours was. I really did enjoy speaking with you. I’m Jack.” She smiled and said, “I’m Carla! You don’t need to apologize. That happens all the time!” “I know it does, and it shouldn’t,” I said as I left.

As I drove home, I found myself wondering if the fact that she was black helped trigger the alarm. It might have. Whatever the reason, that alarm is set now.

Comment of the Day: “Presumed Racism Raises Its Obnoxious Head at ‘Social Qs'”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

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.

Here it is, in response to “Presumed Racism Raises Its Obnoxious Head at ‘Social Qs”‘…

***

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. I would like more people to make a habit of doing all of the above.

Others’ values:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

Framing the situation constructively:

Continue reading →

Another Tale From Customer Service Hell!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

On top of everything else going wrong, my Direct TV reception started going on and off two days ago, alternating between no signal, intermittent signals, and stuttering signals. It started during an overcast night with occasional rain, but continued the next day, with clear skies but high winds. So I called customer service, found my way to tech support, and was on hold for 40 minutes, being told every five minutes that my estimated wait was 10 minutes, then told for another 15 minutes that it would be a five minute wait, and so on. There were 8 “30 second” waits.

The representative was nice, and told me that it sounded like they needed to check out the dish. This, he said, would cost $99 dollars. I asked why that was, since I paid for their service and wasn’t getting it, in addition to the fact that I had not been charged the last time someone had to adjust the dish. Whereupon he said, “Oh! Then there will be no charge.” And he set up the appointment.

What is that? A weenie test? A scam? If I hadn’t objected, I would have paid $99. Are we back to the Middle Easter bazaar, where no price is set and we have to haggle over everything?

What’s happening????

A Nelson For the “Get Trump!” Mob and a Lesson in Consequentialism

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I was teaching another legal ethics course today and had occasion to muse about what a foolish ethical system consequentialism is, as I have periodically discussed on EA. The short version is that deciding whether an action was right or wrong, ethical or unethical depending on what the eventual results flowing from it are is both foolish and illogical: an action can only be judged based on what is known at the time the action is taken. What occurs as a result of the action is vulnerable to chaos: once those metaphorical billions of billiard balls start rolling around on the theoretical infinite pool table, anything can happen and frequently does. People habitually say that a decision was “a mistake” or “wrong” when it was neither, just because the results of the decision were the opposite of what was intended.

Think of “The Simpsons'” master of mockery Nelson Muntz above as the spokesperson of the cosmos, and as Donald Trump as his unwitting agent. The previous, pre-Musk proprietors of Twitter, full allies that they were in the coordinated (and unethical) effort by the Axis of Unethical Conduct to bring Donald Trump to ruin for all time, kicked him off the ubiquitous social media platform for insisting that the 2020 election had been stolen, a plausible but unprovable thesis. (I quit Twitter in protest, as the move was totalitarian, reflecting the totalitarian drift of the entire political left—which has continued.) The Trump Haters and Trump Deranged cheered. Trump, given no outlet for his annoying but often effective outbursts, juvenile jibes, rants and trolling orgies, responded by setting up his own pseudo-Twitter platform, Truth Social. It was and is cheesy, but it did its main job, which was to provide the ex-President with a web platform from which he could not be censored or silenced.

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The Grandparents’ Betrayal

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

As often happens, some click-bait headline sucks me in and I find an interesting ethics topic as a result. This time, the headline was “Woman applauded for demanding parents get noses pierced before they can see granddaughter again.” What???

The story behind that unique description was a woman and her husband took her infant daughter to Mexico to visit her parents. The parents gave the one-year-old girl a pair of earrings for her first birthday, and Mom told them that she would hold on to the gift until her daughter was old enough to have her ears pierced. But when the American couple returned from meeting some friends after leaving the girl in the care of Grandma and Grandpa, they were informed that they “didn’t need to wait [until she was old enough] because they had taken her to get her ears pierced” already.

The couple was furious. The girl’s father said that they could never trust the grandparents alone with their daughter, but his wife announced that she would not take her or any future kids to see her parents in Mexico. The family checked out of their hotel and returned to the States.

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Normalizing Theft

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Since we began the day with a dead canary in the mine of democracy, here’s another. That video shows a thief rampaging through an Apple Store in Emeryville, north of Oakland (where Woke Kindergarten romps). Nobody tries to stop him. Nobody even appears alarmed by him. He escapes by running right by a police car.

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Apparently My Dog Thinks I’m Woke

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Times opinion editor Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer used a podcast to explain how the great political divide affects dogs. Training styles and methods can be as much about identity as efficacy, she has realized. “Are you imposing colonial concepts on your dogs? Are you harming their mental health? Is your style of training woke?”

Alicia’s rescue dog likes to chase joggers. “There are a few ways to deal with your dog having a jogger chasing problem,” she says. “And these solutions maybe fall into one of two camps, positive reinforcement training or balanced training. Positive training is a style of dog training that basically says, we’re not going to make your dog physically uncomfortable in order to get it to behave the way you want. So what it argues for doing is rewarding behavior you like, and basically managing your dog so that it can’t engage in behavior you don’t like, and just kind of ignoring it.”

Balanced training, however, or what I would call Skinnerian training, involves negative reinforcement. “If your dog is doing something that you don’t like,” Alicia explains, “to discourage that, we want to make it uncomfortable for the dog to do that. We want to give some kind of negative stimulus. Sometimes that might be a noise, or sometimes like a squirt of water to the face.”

“But sometimes it’s more physical discomfort than that. That means punishing your dog. And usually that punishment comes in the form of something called an e-collar, a tool that will give your dog an electricity stimulus.”

Continue reading →

Ethics Heroes: My Neighbors, Ted and Linda West

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The Wests have been our neighbors on the little cul-de-sac called Westminster Place in Alexandria, Virginia since Grace and I bought our home a week after getting engaged. They are the ultimate good neighbors in every respect. Today they really stepped up.

I have a year-long contract this year to do monthly legal ethics CLE presentations over Zoom for a national audience of lawyers in need of ethics credit. Today was the first of sixteen; with new material and a good impression to be made, I was a bit anxious. Scheduled for 9 am, the program occupied my attentions from 7 am on. Finally, I was ready.

A half hour before the program was scheduled to begin, power at the Marshall house went off. The problem could not be addressed by the power company for several hours. Desperate and panicked, I woke my neighbors (and their gigantic dog, Peaches) from a sound sleep, and asked 1) if one of them had a Zoom account (YES!) and 2) if I could use their computer to conduct my two-hour seminar.

And they said yes to that too. They made me a cup of coffee, set me up, and then fled the house, as most people tend to do when I start talking about legal ethics. I was ready seconds before the program’s scheduled start; it was very well received. Missing the first session in a series would have been disastrous. My neighbors had my back when I really needed them.

As I knew they would.