Etiquette and manners

The “Other Woman” Scorned Asks The Ethicist: “Is It Ethical To Wreck the Bastard’s Marriage?”

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

I’m surprised she didn’t ask if she could cook his little girl’s bunny too, like Glenn Close did in “Fatal Attraction.”

It amazed me that someone like this reads a NYT column called “The Ethicist.” She’s sounds like she’s never heard of the concept. She writes,

Last summer, I was dating a man in our weekender community outside New York City who seemed like a wonderful guy. A month after we became intimate, he told me that he was married but that he had been separated from his wife for a year. He explained that the reason he has not gotten a divorce is that she has cancer and is on his health insurance. He said she had just had surgery and was recovering. Naturally I felt compassion and said I wouldn’t push him. Eventually, I ended the relationship, because I started feeling I wasn’t getting the full story. When I mentioned our relationship to a friend who also knows him, I learned that my instincts were correct. Apparently, he is very much still with his wife, and she is healthy. I am so shocked by this. Should I contact his wife and let her know this is what he is doing and saying? Given that they are both journalists, I would think veracity would be a priority.

Translation: “I hate this lying bastard and want to hurt him, and his wife too. That’s OK, right?”

Uh. no. I haven’t even read The Ethicist’s answer, but Prof. Appiah, for all his faults and weaknesses, surely can get this one right. Let’s see…

Yup. In a mealy-mouthed way, but he agrees.

President Trump Is Spot-On About Signers For The Deaf. Of Course He’s Going To Be Attacked For It.

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

All the headlines and articles about this ongoing example of political correctness and the tyranny of a minority in action are sneering and biased. “Sign language services ‘intrude’ on Trump’s ability to control his image, administration says,” is PBS’s intro. The President is right: there is no need or justification for a signer to be standing in view while the President of the United States is addressing the nation. None. Nada. Zilch. It is distracting, of course it is. I wrote this on the issue eight years ago. Just substitute President Trump’s name for Rick Scott, and that’s the bulk of my commentary today.

“Yesterday I watched Florida Governor Rick Scott give his pre-hurricane warnings, or tried to, since standing next to him was a signer for the deaf, gesticulating and making more elaborate faces than the late Robin Williams in the throes of a fit. I have mentioned this in the context of theatrical performances: as a small minority, the deaf should not be enabled by political correctness to undermine the best interests of the majority. What Scott was saying was important, and could have been adequately communicated to the deaf citizens present by the signer standing off camera. TV viewers could and should have been able to watch a text crawl following Scott’s speech, or closed captioning. Public speaking involves verbal and visual communications, and having a vivid distraction like a professional signer—many of whom feel it is their duty to add broad facial expressions to their translations—is unfair to both the speaker and his or her audience. This is one more example of a sympathetic minority bullying the majority to establish its power.”

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Awww! The Knucklehead Is Offended By the “R-Word”!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Good!

Tim Walz, the self-proclaimed knucklehead governor of woke-addled Minnesota, is complaining that mean people have been driving by his home and shouting “retard” out their windows. “This creates danger,” the censorship supporting governor said yesterday. “… I’ve never seen this before: people driving by my house and using the R-word in front of people. This is shameful, and I have yet to see an elected official — a Republican elected official — say you’re right, that’s shameful.”

“We know how these things go,” the hypocrite added. “It starts with taunts; they turn to violence.” Oh. You mean like you and your party calling Donald Trump Hitler, calling ICE agents Nazis, and Republican fascists? Funny, I don’t recall Walz making this argument after Trump had two assassination attempts against him and Charlie Kirk was shot dead during a speech.

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Comment of the Day: “Unethical Bank of the Month: Merrick Bank”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Diego Garcia entered an instructive description of an interaction with a bank on credit card matters that nicely illustrates a theme Ethics Alarms has been commenting on for quite a while. It is not exaggerated, because I have been enmeshed in dozens of these maddening experiences almost every month since my wife died last year. The practices are cruel, frustrating, time-consuming and hostile, and, I am convinced, often intentional. They are the product of multiple unethical conditions and practices, including incompetent management, needless technology complexity, sloth, poor hiring criteria, poor training, the public school system, lack of sufficient emphasis on English proficiency, corporate arrogance, outsourcing of jobs, inadequate staffing, and more. I also believe these systems and the factors creating them cause serious stress-related health problems among the public and even domestic and urban violence as well as mass shootings.

People have been conditioned to just shrug it all off as “how we live now.” We shouldn’t do that.

Here is Diego Garcia’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Unethical Bank of the Month: Merrick Bank”:

…I do have a recent BoA experience regarding account setups.

My sister has had a BoA credit card for something like 50 (!) years. She is very much not tech savvy, and is someone who always wants paper statements mailed to her.

On this card, she had made arrangements for her payment to be automatically drafted each month — the payment would be $150 or the statement balance, whichever was smaller. She had made this arrangement by phone as she never had set up an online account for this card. Well, a couple months ago they wrote her to say that they were cancelling this automatic payment and she would have to go online to set it back up.

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The Obligatory Joke Principle

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Today a Facebook friend who is addicted to posting about the most mundane and prosaic matters on her page. Today, the press had to be alerted to this revelation: “For some reason my phone no longer recognizes my thumb-print.” Talk about the problems of the privileged! I’m sure it’s Trump’s fault. She added, “Does anyone else have this problem?”

A comment read: “Yes. My phone doesn’t recognize your thumbprint either.”

I hope, if I had seen the query first, I would have issued the same mandatory response. When Fate, or God, or whoever is in charge of cosmic humor delivers to you through the mouth or text of an agent a slow, hanging curve-ball of a straight-line that begs to be knocked out of the metaphoric ballpark and you let it go by, you have violated a sacred obligation to the human race. It needs as much mirth and merriment as it can get, and if a perfect opportunity to get a laugh like that set-up goes unrealized—because of fear, lack of attention, witlessness or self-absorption—a grievous ethics offense had been committed. Shame. Shame.

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No, Rachel Maddow Did Not Demonstrate a Sudden Attack of Decency and Bi-Partisanship By Attending Dick Cheney’s Funeral

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Oh come on. Does anyone really believe this? Seriously?

Dishonest and frighteningly biased like the paper he works for, New York Times pundit Peter Baker actually had the gall to post this on “X”:

To which Sidney Wang quickly responded,

“Changed” since when? Maddow has been allied with the Trump-hating Cheneys and Bushes since at least 2015.

Maddow was invited to Chaney’s funeral, a gathering one wag described as a meeting of the “I Hate Trump” club, by Liz Cheney, who became a favorite of MSNBC’s talking heads once she voted for the second of Nancy Pelosi’s partisan impeachments against President Trump and was complicit in the rigged Star Chamber hearings on the so-called J-6 riots. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is an ancient proverb that has turned up in many cultures and in the mouths of many philosophers since the dawn of speech. It is simple Cognitive Dissonance Scale reality. Glenn Greenwald gets it, but then do Elmo and the cast of “Jackass!”, I bet:

It isn’t Maddow’s presence at the funeral but the absence of President Trump and Vice-President Vance that shows the collapse of professionalism, mutual respect, decency and decorum in today’s politics. Neither were invited to attend. Trump recklessly (and, as I have written before, stupidly) insulted the Bush-Cheney political machine when he was running for President in 2016, and it wreaked its revenge by abandoning the supposed conservative principles its members stood for to become bitter and fanatic NeverTrumpers. Dick Cheney and his daughter endorsed Kamala Harris, proving that personal vendettas were more important to them than the welfare of the nation. 

If Maddow’s smirking presence at the funeral showed how “politics have changed in America,”it only demonstrated that they have become more petty and and vicious, with its institutions being weakened and the public trust in its motives justly reduced to vapors.

Ethics Quiz of the Day: Mencken-Style Ad Hominem

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

At the Washiungton Free Beacon, columnist Andrew Stiles writes,

Jack Schlossberg, the sentient boat shoe and semi-employed TikTok user, is running for Congress in New York. It was bound to happen. The 32-year-old Democrat belongs to the Kennedy dynasty—that inexplicably beloved menagerie of goon-faced Habsburgian freaks, Nantucket douche bros, chronic alcoholics, and bloated sex pests. Schlossberg, a mentally deranged internet addict who cracks jokes about guzzling “Jew blood” and “male jizz,” has sought to inject the storied Kennedy brand with Gen Z flare.

That anti-Kennedy invective made me laugh out loud more than once. But is it fair commentary to mix in so much ad hominem invective in an opinion column if it is genuinely funny, at least to a substantial number of readers (or listeners)?

Famous (or infamous) journalist-pundit H.L. Mencken (1880-1956, above) excelled at this sort of thing; he may have even invented it. Here is part of his “obituary” for three-time (losing) Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan after he died shortly after he faced off against Clarence Darrow in Dayton, Tennessee in Tennessee v. Scopes aka, “Monkey Trial”:

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No Surprise: Prince Harry Is An Ethics Dunce, and Also an Idiot

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

On the superb Showtime series “Ray Donovan,” actor Dash Mihok played Ray’s sad, stupid, easily manipulated brother, “Bunchie.” I always thought self-exiled Prince Harry was disturbingly Bunchie-like in appearance and intellect, and he proved the latter resemblance spectacularly in recent weeks.

As I discussed in an earlier post, Prince Harry attended one of the World Series games in L.A. with he and his insufferable wife wearing blue-and-white Dodgers caps. Harry’s father, King Charles, is the official ruler of Canada, a part of the British Commonwealth, and given that the Dodgers’ opposition in baseball’s ultimate series was the Toronto Blue Jays, many Brits and Canadians were upset that a member of the royal family would publicly favor the American competitor over the Canadian one. Of course they were. Imagine the scandal if one of Trump’s sons ostentatiously cheered on a Russian athlete in the Olympics.

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Announcement: “Fuck” Has Been Officially Upgraded From Taboo Obscenity to Mainstream Colloquialism

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

This battle was lost long ago.

“Wheel of Fortune” has launched a new “What the Fun?” category because it implies “fuck.” The One Million Moms group is disgusted and outraged. “The once family-friendly ‘Wheel of Fortune’ game show is no more,” its site declared on October 30. “Unfortunately, the recently added puzzle category ‘What the Fun’ aims at a mature, modern audience with insinuated profanity making it no longer suitable for family viewing.”

“It is not the show it was with this implication of the f-word,” it continued. “Parents will have to explain to their children that the primetime program they were once allowed to watch is no longer a clean show.” The page included a link for a petition on which to pledge never to watch the show again unless the category is eliminated. More than 12,500 have signed.

Imagine a life so devoid of meaning and so full of discretionary time that one can organize a campaign to change a “Wheel of Fortune” category.

I have news for the conservative group, and by now it is old news. “Fuck” is now just acceptable naughtiness, and not the taboo obscenity it once was. Ditto “shit.” There are lots of reason why this has happened, and things like “What the Fun” are a big one.

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Ethical or Unethical Quote? President Trump on Nancy Pelosi:

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments


“Nancy Pelosi, the old and broken political hack who Impeached me twice and lost, is finally calling it ‘quits.’ She illegally made a fortune in the Stock Market, ripped off the American Public, and was a disaster for America. I’m glad to see the stench of Nancy Pelosi go!!!”

—President Donald Trump on Truth Social today, responding to the news that Ethics Villain Nancy Pelosi will not run for another term. (What do you really think, Mr. President?)

I was going to frame this as an Ethics Quiz, but thought better of it. Of course a U.S President shouldn’t stoop to this kind of rhetoric, even if everyone else is, about him. “Old and broken,” “hack” and “stench” cross the line into ad hominem, but then that’s Trump, unfortunately. The sentiment, however is deserved, which is why EA designated Pelosi as an Ethics Villain. She has been an unequivocally destructive force on the U.S. scene, from her irresponsible and unethical ushering of Obamacare through to passage without letting it be thoroughly vetted, to her ruinous impeachments (we no longer have a non-partisan impeachment option, thanks to her precedents) to her disgusting performance during Trump’s final State of the Union address in his last term, to the rigged “J-6” hearings. Trump is also correct about her insider trading, though she has the defense of “Everybody does it,” just not as effectively as she did.

Yes, Trump’s message is typical “tit-for-tat” after she called him a “vile creature” and the “worst thing on the face of the earth,” to which “hack” and “stench” seem mild insults in comparison. President still have an obligation to eschew such name-calling and “take the high road,” a principle that Trump either rejects or refuses to acknowledge.

On the other hand, as Captain Hook would never say, everything Trump said is true. So there’s that… Ann Althouse wrote that she was impressed that Trump didn’t slip any sexist rhetoric into his message.

And that, my friends, is called damning with faint praise.