History

Afternoon Ethics Clean-up, 7/5/2021: July Fifth Weirdness And “Justice”

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Celebrating July 5th as a federal holiday is affirmatively strange, because not much good happened on this date. Ted Williams died on July 5, 2002, for example. In 1852, Frederick Douglass picked this date to give his “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” anti-America speech to the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, laying the groundwork for anti-America movements in the black community ever since. On this date in 1921, baseball began unraveling the worst scandal in U.S. professional sports, as it concluded that the 1919 World Series had been fixed by gamblers bribing the key players on the Chicago White Sox, aka “The Black Sox.” It was also the date, in 1865, that a military tribunal convicted David Herold, George Atzerodt, Lewis Payne, Mary Surratt, Michael O’Laughlin, Edward Spangler, Samuel Arnold and Dr. Samuel Mudd of “maliciously, unlawfully, and traitorously” conspiring with John Wilkes Booth and others to assassinate President Lincoln on April 14, 1865, and planning to kill General Grant, Vice President Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward. It was one of the most unfair trials in U.S. history, despite the fact that all of the alleged conspirators were probably guilty. Herold, Atzerodt, Payne, and Surratt were executed [above].

In short, it’s not a good date for ethics.

So far…

1 Ethics Alarms has a new Ethics Villain to keep tabs on. David Cole, the ACLU Legal Director who made an ass of himself and attacked his organization’s own client by criticizing a SCOTUS decision that followed the ACLU’s position, was the main authority in a New York Times review of the Court’s just completed term. Here’s nice Cole quote: “The new court is definitely conservative, but that doesn’t mean it is necessarily hostile to civil liberties. It protected many liberties that conservatives favor, including religious liberty, property rights, free speech, the privacy of the home and the right of the wealthy to donate to charities anonymously.”

No partisan bias there! Wait, David, just what are the rights that the progressive justices protect?

2. Speaking of SCOTUS, Steve-O-in NJ asked for my opinion of this idiotic essay in The Week: “The case for ending judicial review.” It reminded me that I never finished the Ethics Alarms compendium of fake news categories, of which this is one: Fantasy Controversies. This kind of essay might as well be “The case for eliminating sex,” “The case for using flatulence to fly to the moon” or “The case for a cheese-based economy.” There is no way for Congress to stop the Court from overruling laws—Separation of Powers exemplified— it finds unconstitutional short of a Constitutional amendment, which is fantasy itself. At the end of the essay, the author concludes, ‘Well, maybe it’s not such a good idea after all.’

It is unethical to waste readers’ time.

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The Comment Of The Day Trifecta Continues, With P.M. Lawrence’s Further Observations On Custer’s Clash With J.E.B. Stuart in “July 3: Pickett’s Charge, Custer’s First Stand, Ethics And Leadership”…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Ethics Alarms has readers all over the globe and several regular non-American commenters as well. Their perceptions are always interesting and sometimes enlightening in ways the USA-steeped commentariat here would be challenged to duplicate. P.M. Lawrence is one of our esteemed foreign correspondents, and in this Comment of the Day on my post on the epic events of July 3, 1863 in a little shoe-making town in Pennsylvania…

As I mentioned in comments to earlier posts on this topic at this site, it is entirely possible that Lee planned Pickett’s Charge to work in conjunction with the attack on the rear. This follows from precedents in military history, of which Lee would have been well aware from his experience as an instructor. In particular, Gettysburg was an “encounter battle”, brought about by a less than planned encounter; when that happens, the major risk is that whoever withdraws first suffers a terrible pursuit of the sort Napoleon showed the world – so both try to fight it out, following the logic of game theory’s “prisoner’s dilemma”, “tragedy of the commons”, or “money auction”. (At least Lee was able to fight long and hard enough to thwart that worst possible outcome, and he may well have known that and been trying for that at the time, at least once victory was unlikely.)

Back to the precedents: Lee may well have modeled his tactics (not strategy) on Oudenarde, which was also an encounter battle; when that started, Marlborough realised his predicament early on and detached a Dutch flying column to march around the fighting to attack the French reinforcements in flank hours later, before those could reach and feed the fight that Marlborough was also feeding all along (in Grant’s phrase), a feeding which Marlborough had to do to keep everything in play until the Dutch blow fell.

However, to the best of my knowledge Lee never claimed later that he had been trying to do this, even though the similarities to precedents are striking.

By the way, U.S. culture has so changed its concepts and terminology that “honor” does not mean what honour now means in British English or other European languages, or what it meant in the U.S.A. of that era. I would venture to suggest that U.S.A.-ians do not now have access to this concept at all, what with language now steering them to a different concept entirely. Think how you could now access the old meaning of “gay”, if you even wished to. It’s the sort of thing Orwell brought out in “1984”. (Hint: police lying to suspects is not honourable – and anyone who argues otherwise is invoking different concepts, which is the point I am trying to highlight.)

Also by the way, it is an old precept that “the secret of military discipline is that the soldiers should be more scared of the sergeants than of the enemy”, which may have been at work here. It may be found in the writings of Montaigne and of Frederick the Great, with “officers” substituting for “sergeants” (the term “officers” also covers N.C.O.s in many continental European languages).

Comment Of The Day: “Independence Day Ethics Fireworks, July 4th, 2021: ‘The Stars And Stripes Forever,’ And Other Matters”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Happy Birthday, America

This Comment of the Day on today’s Fourth of July post, by Steve-O-in NJ, needs no introduction. Neither does he, as the Ethics Alarms leader in Comments of the Day with more than 30 before this one.

Today we celebrate the birthday of the United States, well, some of us do, anyway.

Some say that today means nothing, because the actions of men more than two centuries ago do not match up with the opinions of people not even two years ago. Others say that today never meant a thing, because this nation is a bad nation that’s just happened to get it right once or twice. Thank God this generation is finally getting it right, and we’re finally moving past the past 245 years, they say. We can’t go back and change the results of the elections in 2016, 2000, and 1980, we can’t go back and convince Teddy Roosevelt not to run in 1912, we can’t go back and stop Congress from declaring war on Spain in 1898, we can’t go back and prevent the Civil War, and we can’t go back and convince the Founding Fathers to abolish slavery right out of the gate in 1787, they say. We can’t go back and make cooler heads prevail in 1775, or stop the arrival of slaves in 1619, or make Columbus turn back, they say. However, we the people of today can break with all of that, and move forward with a new nation, unfettered by that past. None of it means a thing. It’s tainted.

I seem to remember a man born Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot, saying it was now Year Zero and everything before was nullified. You can look up what happened there. I also seem to remember a man born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, later called Lenin, saying everything that came before was tainted and needed to be erased. You can look up what happened there too. Before that a revolutionary parliament that included such luminaries as Maximilien Robespierre declared it to be Year One of a new age, with the months of the year renamed completely and weeks of seven days replaced by weeks of ten. You can also look up what happened there.

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July 3: Pickett’s Charge, Custer’s First Stand, Ethics And Leadership

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Picketts-Charge--330-to-345-pm-landscape

[I started to write a new post and while doing my research discovered that I would basically be repeating what I posted last year. Thus I am re-posting that July 3 Gettysburg essay as well as the one I attached to it, but with several substantive additions.]

July 3  was the final day of the pivotal Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, reaching its bloody climax in General Robert E. Lee’s desperate  gamble on a massed assault on the Union center. In history it has come to be known as Pickett’s Charge, after the leader of the Division that was slaughtered during it.

At about 2:00 pm this day in 1863, near the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg,  Lee launched his audacious stratagem to pull victory from the jaws of defeat in the pivotal battle of the American Civil War.  The Napoleonic assault on the entrenched Union position on Cemetery Ridge, with a “copse of trees” at its center, was the only such attack in the entire war, a march into artillery and rifle fire across an open field and over fences. When my father, the old soldier, saw the battlefield  for the first time in his eighties, he became visibly upset because, he said, he could visualize the killing field. He was astounded that Lee would order such a reckless assault.

The battle lasted less than an hour. Union forces suffered 1,500 casualties,, while at least 1,123 Confederates were killed on the battlefield, 4,019 were wounded, and nearly 4000 Rebel soldiers were captured. Pickett’s Charge would go down in history as one of the worst military blunders of all time.

At Ethics Alarms, it stands for several ethics-related  concepts. One is moral luck: although Pickett’s Charge has long been regarded by historians and scholars as a disastrous mistake by Lee, and in retrospect seems like a rash decision, it could have succeeded if the vicissitudes of chance had broken the Confederacy’s way.  Then the maneuver would be cited today as another example of Lee’s brilliance, in whatever remained of the United States of America, if indeed it did remain. This is the essence of moral luck; unpredictable factors completely beyond the control of an individual or other agency determine whether a decision or action are wise or foolish, ethical or unethical.

Pickett’s Charge has been discussed on Ethics Alarms as a vivid example, perhaps the best, of how successful leaders and others become so used to discounting the opinions and criticism of others that they lose the ability to accept the possibility that they can be wrong. This delusion is related to #14 on the Rationalizations list,  Self-validating Virtue. We see the trap in many professions and contexts, and its victims have been among some of America’s greatest. Those who succeed by being bold and seeing possibilities lesser peers cannot perceive often lose respect and regard for anyone’s authority or opinion but their own.

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 7/2/2021: Remembering The Epic Second Day Of The Battle Of Gettysburg

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Little Round Top

On July 2, 1863, during the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg with the fate of the Union and the United States hanging in the balance, Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia tried to break through the line of General George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac at Cemetery Ridge, Culp’s Hill and Little Round Top. More than once that day, only luck and chaos prevented July 2 from marking the end of the nation as we know it, and from preserving slavery at least a little longer.

All accounts of the battle on July 2 are full of the word “confusion.” Robert E. Lee ordered Lieutenant General James Longstreet to attack by moving his troops up the Federal left flank while General A.P. Hill’s corps threatened the center of the Union line. If coordinated properly, General George Gordon Meade wouldn’t be able to move his troops to reinforce the Union left, where Lee instructed Lieutenant General Richard S. Ewell to make diversionary attacks and launch an all-out assault if possible. Lee’s plan, if successful, would force the Union army to surrender the positions it held on the high ground south of Gettysburg after the first day of the battle, and the entire Civil War might have been won by the South in a day.

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Noonish Ethics Battles, 7/1/2021: “Remember Gettysburg” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Gettysburg

July 1 marks the first day of the epic Battle of Gettysburg, which could fairly be celebrated as the beginning of the end for the Confederacy and slavery. Like so many pivotal moments in our history, this one came about by random chance, with Lee’s army and the newly installed Gen. Meade’s Army of the Potomac stumbling into each other in a Pennsylvania country town in 1863. For three days, a bloody and complicated battle engulfed the area, with so many ethics lessons in the process that I fear I won’t be able to cover all of them this week. [ Guest posts on the topic will be welcome!] I am hoping to visit the battlefield again this year—this week will be tough, unfortunately. I will definitely find time this week to watch Ted Turner’s excellent and even-handed film about the battle, highlighted for me by the performances of Jeff Daniels as Joshua Chamberlain, Tom Berrenger as Longstreet, and the late Richard Jordan as General Lewis Armistead, as well as the dramatization of Picket’s Charge, and the score by Randy Edelman.

1. Baseball sexual misconduct notes…A restraining order was taken out against Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer, last year’s National League Cy Young winner. Bauer is a sportswriter favorite for his outspoken social media presence and progressive politics, so this will be a blow to the sportswriting woke. The woman making the allegations had what started as a consensual relationship with the pitcher, but in a 67-page document, alleges that Bauer assaulted her on two different occasions, punching her in the face, vagina, and buttocks, sticking his fingers down her throat, and strangling her to the point where she lost consciousness twice, an experience she said she did not consent to. After the second choking episode, the woman awoke to find Bauer punching her in the head and face, inflicting serious injuries. She contacted police, and there is now an active investigation of Bauer by the Pasadena, California police department. If any of her account is true, Bauer faces serious discipline from baseball, which has been (finally) cracking down on domestic abuse by players in recent years.

Also yesterday, MLB suspended the former New York Mets general manager Jared Porter at least the end of the 2022 season.   Porter was fired from the Mets in January after an ESPN investigation revealed that he had harassed a female reporter in 2016 when he worked for the Cubs.

Craig Calcaterra, the lawyer sports pundit, supplied the facts here, and I am grateful for that. I would love to subscribe to his substack newsletter, but every issue I read includes Craig’s apparently incurable progressive bias where it doesn’t belong, and I’m just not paying for that. This time, for example, he cites the Bauer, Porter, and Bill Cosby stories to justify the proposition that “we believe [women] when they say what happened to them,” a stunning thing for a lawyer to say. How Kirsten Gillibrand of him! Later, as if this belongs in a baseball news letter, Craig cheers the death of Donald Rumsfeld as an architect of an “Illegal and immoral” war.

All war is immoral to some extent, but the Iraq War, while in hindsight a mistake, was not illegal except in left-wing talking points. Craig should know better, and maybe he does, but in any event, foreign policy and international law are not his areas of expertise. The degree to which wokism has rotted his brain also shows up in his inclusion of an insulting trigger warning before his account of the Bauer allegations: “Warning: the following contains allegations of sexual assault and violence that may be difficult to read.” Oh for heaven’s sake: “Finnegan’s Wake” is difficult to read. News is life: stop treating adults like children.

You can subscribe to Craig’s excellent baseball observations and juvenile political commentary here.

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Sunrise Ethics Serenade, June 30, 2021: Rot, Tragedy, Justice, Arrogance, And Irony

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

DC Sunrise2

1. Evidence that The Great Stupid was upon us in 2019 if only we had been paying attention...My wife, a World War II history buff, was watching the ending credits most recent movie version of “Midway”(2019) when I heard her emit the sound of a wounded animal. This message had flashed across the screen:

“The film is dedicated to the American and Japanese sailors who fought at Midway. The sea remembers its own.”

What…The…Hell? Those Japanese sailors wouldn’t have had to fight at all if their nation hadn’t killed 3,000 American servicemen is a sneak attack six months earlier. Since when do American films salute those who killed Americans? Now I have to check and see whether there was a tribute at the end of “Flight 93” commemorating the brave Al Qida terrorists who died trying to crash a plane into the Capitol.

Equally disturbing is that I recall no mention at all of “Midway’s” offensive coda in reviews of the film, and could find only one mention of it online. I know, I know, American film studios are desperate to pander to foreign markets. That’s not a good enough reason for that disgusting suck-up to a ruthless and racist enemy.

2. This reminds me of my ethical objection to “bucket lists”...Susan Montoya, 65, an assistant principal at Georgia O’Keefe Elementary School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, died when the hot air balloon she was riding in hit power lines and crashed. It was reported that the ride was an item on her “bucket list.” I don’t know who first came up with the idea that human life was just a collection of enumerated experiences and accomplishments like getting a merit badge, or how it became popular, but it’s a narcissistic and wasteful mindset. If you can’t think of anything more productive to do with your life than to treat it like a grocery list, you’ve missed the point.

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More Terrifying Tales Of The Great Stupid, Academic Division

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The predictable appeal of racist “antiracism” cant to the world of scholarship and academia in the wake of the fraudulent George Floyd Freakout is producing amusing or frightening results, depending on one’s regard for higher education and resistance to despair.

Today’s sample of Authentic Frontier Gibberish, for example, comes from “Confronting “White Feminism” in the Victorian Literature Classroom,” recently published in the scholarly journal, “Nineteenth Century Gender Studies.” The author is University of California Professor Lana Dalley, who complains that Victorian feminists are “problematic” [There’s that word again!] because they promote “white feminism.” In other words, social commentators and writers of over a hundred years ago don’t seem to reflect the current approved woke perspective of 2021. This is, apparently, a surprise. Here’s her first paragraph, an AFG classic:

“The transition to virtual learning in Spring and Fall 2020 intersected with international protests for racial justice and, more locally, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong’s call to “undiscipline Victorian Studies” by “interrogat[ing] and challeng[ing] our field’s marked resistance to centering racial logic” (370).(1) More specifically, they call for “illuminat[ing] how race and racial difference subtend our [Victorianists’] most cherished objects of study, our most familiar historical and theoretical frameworks, our most engrained scholarly protocols, and the very demographics of our field” (370). Since then, numerous virtual roundtables and panels have convened to discuss critical approaches to race within Victorian studies and to ponder the relevance of contemporary social justice movements to a field whose borders are historically drawn. This essay emerged from one such panel and offers practical suggestions for reframing pedagogical approaches to Victorian feminist discourses in order to “center[] racial logic” and “illuminate how race and racial difference subtend” those discourses.(2) Its suggestions are certainly not meant to be exhaustive, but simply to offer one set of practices for making the Victorian literature classroom more responsive to contemporary conversations about race and gender.”

Now who can argue with that?

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 6/21/2021: Happy Birthday U.S. Constitution! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Constitution signing

On this day in 1788, habitually cantankerous New Hampshire became the ninth and last required state to ratify the Constitution of the United States and make it the law of the land. December 7 of 1787 had seen Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Connecticut quickly signed the document. But Congress had voted that at least 9 of the 13 former colonies had to sign on before the document was considered adopted. New Hampshire, Massachusetts and the remaining states opposed the document, as it failed to reserve sufficient powers to the states and did not protect individual rights like freedom of speech, religion,the press, and the right to bear arms. In February of 1788, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and other states agreed to ratify the document with the promise that necessary amendments would be developed and proposed. The Constitution was ratified based on the compromise by Massachusetts, Maryland and South Carolina, making 8. New Hampshire made nine. The first Congress under the new Constitution adopted 10 amendments, the Bill of Rights, and sent them to the states for ratification. Rhode Island, which opposed federal control of currency and was critical of compromise on slavery, was the last hold-out; the U.S. government had to threaten to sever commercial relations with the state to force it to sign on. Finally, on May 29, 1790, Rhode Island voted to become the last of the original 13 colonies to join the United States of America.

Today the U.S. Constitution is the oldest written constitution in operation in the world, and the only one predicated on ethical principles, thanks to the Bill of Rights.

I would have preferred to see Constitution Day made a national holiday over “Juneteenth,” since it was the principles laid out in the Constitution, along with the Declaration of Independence, that eventually led to the elimination of slavery, and the document has been the backbone of our republic’s epic success in other respects as well.

1. “Larry Vaughn Day”? I regret not noting yesterday that it was the anniversary of the release of “Jaws,” a milestone in American cultural history. It is also an ethics movie, and one that pops into my mind often, since the irresponsible conduct of the weaselly mayor of Amity, Larry Vaughn (Played by Murray Hamilton, who made a career of portraying human weasels), remains SOP for so many elected officials, locally and nationally, and also the leadership of corporations, associations, industries, sports, universities and <cough> religious organizations. Ethics Alarms has a Larry Vaughn tag, and I should have used it in dozens more articles than I have. He is the perfect symbol of leadership that, in the words of Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) will always “ignore this particular problem until it swims up and bites you in the ass.”

The U.S. could benefit greatly from a “Larry Vaughn Day” on June 20 in which every elected official and organizational leader be required to watch “Jaws.”

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Further Reflections On “Juneteenth”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Guest Post by Michael West

My summary observations of something that is more complex than most people make it out to be:

The Fourth of July must always be the preeminent holiday in the American “liturgy”. Even for the slaves whose lives were spent in a state of legalized kidnapping, it was their Independence Day also even while they didn’t enjoy the reality of it. Yet I understand some arguments, such as those who perpetuate Frederick Douglass’s observations on Independence Day. But frankly, anyone espousing that attitude *still* are anti-American.

BUT, it should surely be acknowledged that even while Independence Day was for ALL Americans (even those who in reality didn’t enjoy its blessings), there were those who in reality didn’t enjoy its blessings. And an end to their legalized kidnapping, finally realizing the values of the Declaration, SHOULD be celebrated.

Now, whether that celebration ought to be “Juneteenth”, or the ratification of the 13th Amendment (January 31, 1865), or the Emancipation Proclamation (January 1, 1863), or the defeat of the Confederacy, I don’t know. Still, it is appropriate for the U.S. to honor such a momentous event that all Americans should be grateful for.

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