In the middle of an already lively and substantive discussion on this recent post, an occasional, undistinguished commenter added this to an already snarky entry:

“I also love how this blog comment section is essentially the same 5 people talking to themselves. Remember tgt and Charles? Ah those were the days. Now Old Bill responds to himself.”

Since the comment was what I often refer to, being baseball obsessed, as a hanging curve-ball right over the plate (For the sadly baseball ignorant, that means a stupid statement too inviting to resist knocking out of the park), I performed a quick survey of the readers who had issued substantive comments over the past two days and listed them, eventually reaching a count of over 20, and ended my retort with,

“DAMN! You’re right! Just 5 commenters! And they can’t count, either…”

Note that I chose irony rather than invective. My first instinct was to write, “You can bite me, asshole. That’s a lie, and an unfair swipe at both a respected veteran commenter here and my project.”

However, since that exchange, I have become more annoyed by it by the hour. If I had just waited a day for my quick survey, the count of regular commenters would have swelled to over 30: I had forgotten Arthur in Maine, Gamereg, Ohwhatfunitis, Humble Talent, Heres Johnny, and more. In fact, after doing some checking into the archives, Ethics Alarms has never had a more erudite, serious, engaged and enlightening group of regular commenters. It is perhaps what I am most proud of after starting the blog 16 years ago.

So the commenter was not merely stating a falsehood—that she could have disproved as easily as I did—just to be nasty. She also was gratuitously insulting a specific commenter while denigrating the other serious (unlike her) participants here.

Looking back over her dossier, this commenter’s main themes are that 1) she doesn’t like the blog but reads it anyway, and 2) she dislikes the President intensely. Most of her participation consists of jumping in to agree with any other criticism of me or a post, or “sealioning.” A tone of condescension is unmistakable in most of her comments, but as her snark above shows, she is a long time lurker. tgt hasn’t shown up here since the Obama Administration, and Charles Green self-banned more than eight years ago. She first graced us with her open presence in March of this year.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is..

Should I ban this jerk?

One other detail that is tending me to vote “yes.” My response made her look like a fool, and the honorable and respectable thing to do then would have been to reply with, if not an apology, at least an “Okay, you got me!” She’s been silent. 

Let’s skip, for the nonce, the fact that it is disturbing that we have a President who issues statements that read like the have been written by a character out of “Mean Girls.” (We knew that.) And that he never should have endorsed an unqualified, not-to-bright, emotionally unstable zealot like Georgia Rep Marjorie Taylor-Greene in the first place. Or that he should have jettisoned his ill-considered support for Greene many times earlier, when she emitted one of her many earth-shatteringly stupid remarks even by Trump standards.

What matters is that he has finally condemned her, she deserves to be condemned, she needs not to be in a position of power or influence because she is a human “loose cannon on deck” that cannot be trusted, and any words or action that bring us closer to seeing her out of elected office is manifestly to be applauded, regardless of the motivations behind it.

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I had not encountered “The Dignity Index” before today. You can imagine why it would catch my interest, as Ethics Alarms has presented several such scales, including The Knight Scale, The Apology Scale, The Protest Ethics Check List, and others.

The Dignity Index is the creation of UNITE, an organization founded in 2018 “to find ways to help ease divisions in the country.” The Index, say its creators, is based on these contentions:

• “Contempt causes division; dignity eases division.”
• “If we put a spotlight on dignity and contempt, we will use more dignity and less contempt.”
• “If we show Americans how they can help ease our divisions, they will jump on it.”

The Index was publicized in Utah during the 2022 mid-term elections, with UNITE scoring political speech with the numerical values on each level. “The Index was seen as reliable, fair, and intuitive,” we are told. By whom? Its creators? The score-keepers? “Voters from opposite ends of the spectrum were able to agree on scores” UNITE says. All voters? Some voters? (I am suspicious of that kind of vague validation.) “The media covered the Index eagerly on TV, newspapers, and radio.” I bet they did.  

UNITE says that it has identified three findings that “give us confidence the Index”:

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Well, having posted one brief ethics note not typically worthy of a full post, here are some more that just popped up…

1. On season two of “Broadchurch,” a quirky Netflix British drama that ran three seasons, there is an exchange in which a criminal defense attorney (that is, a barrister) in an intense and controversial trial excoriates her assistant by saying, “If you were doing your job, we’d have a chance at getting our client off!”

That is unethical and a false characterization of the defense’s job. It is also, I fear, what most people think the defense is trying to do.

A defense attorney’s job in a criminal trial is to ensure that the prosecution proves the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in the assessment of the jury. It is not to get a guilty criminal “off.” It’s a subtle distinction but a crucial one. Every defendant deserves a fair trial, which means a competent, vigorous defense, so that if he or she is ultimately found guilty, due process has been served.

The defense attorney’s mission is to make the prosecution fulfill its mission. When the prosecution’s argument fails because the defense demonstrated that the case wasn’t clearly presented or strong enough, that is entirely the prosecution’s fault. If, despite a vigorous and zealous defense a defendant is convicted by a competent jury, the ethical defense attorney should feel satisfied. An attorney who is elated that she got a guilty defendant “off” is in the wrong profession. She did her job, but the prosecution didn’t, and the result, while the right one, is nothing to celebrate.

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The lab where I go to get my bloodwork, Sunrise Labs in Arlington, Virginia on Carlin Springs Road, has a spare, gray waiting room. There is only a single decoration: a framed color photograph of gravestones.

I kid you not, as Jack Paar used to say.

I have referenced the parable of “The Dishonest Waiter” here several times after first encountering it in the film, “Denial.” The point is that when a waiter gives you the wrong change it can be presumed to be a simple innocent mistake, but when all of the waiter’s “mistakes” go in one direction, to his own financial benefit, one can no longer give such a waiter the benefit of the doubt: he’s dishonest, and those weren’t mistakes. Ethics Alarms finds the Axis news media as a perfect equivalent of the Dishonest Waiter now: all of their “mistakes” go to the disadvantage of Donald Trump and his party. Those who insist, “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias,” I fear, are as dishonest as the metaphorical waiter.

Our Dishonest Waiters has been a busy bee lately. A few examples among many more…

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Governor J.B. Pritzker attacked school choice and said its supporters "can F*CK ALL THE WAY OFF."

He went to private school.
He sent his kids to private school. pic.twitter.com/YKusZRFN9k

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) November 11, 2025

Imagine: this dishonest, repulsive* man really thinks he has a shot at the White House.

Meanwhile, Gov. Pritzker’s remarks neatly remind people to read Ethics Alarms:

1. Democrats want to make sure that parents have no choice but to submit their children’s vulnerable minds to radical, anti-American propaganda. As discussed here…

2. Here, on October 22, we discussed how prominent Democrats routinely demand that the “little people” eschew conduct that they happily engage in while appearing to see no irony or hypocrisy in their doing so. Of course, this is a hallmark of Communism and socialism, which the current leaders of the Democratic Party are currently promoting. As school choice advocate Corey de Anglelis correctly notes, Pritzker sent his children to private school.

3. “They want to punish teachers for telling the truth.” As debated here, “telling the truth” in our educational institutions means suffocating independent thought with Leftist cant, narratives and propaganda.

4. Here EA recently pondered what the Democratic Party calls “supporting” trans individuals. Of course, there are many posts, over many years, holding that our primary schools schools should not be promoting any sexual orientations or conduct whatsoever.

5. Finding himself devoid of valid arguments, Pritzker follows the current fad of his flailing, tantrum-addicted party, and continues the coarsening of public discourse by resorting to “fuck.”

Boy, Democrats have some terrible, unethical governors! Which do you think is the worst of the batch? J.D. Pritzker (Ill.)? Kathy Hochul (NY)? Tim Walz (Minn.)? Gavin Newsom (Cal.)? Gretchen Witmer (Mich.)?

Tough choice.

__________

* I am not using “repulsive” as an ad hominem insult, but simply making a factual observation. Since the arrival of TV, no credible Presidential candidate has ended up on a ballot who was morbidly obese (like Taft) or whose face could stop a clock (like Lincoln). Running in his party, Pritzker is also handicapped by being white, heterosexual, and male. The guy is deluded.

Another metaphorical shoe dropped in what promises to be a veritable centipede-level shoe shower as the major league sports leagues finally get what they asked for by greedily getting into bed with online gambling interests. Let’s’ count those shoes, shall we?

In this 2023 post, I wrote in part,

The theory is that players make so much money that they won’t be tempted to engage in the addictive activity their own teams are promoting with the general public. It is a stupid, naive and ignorant theory. Rich gamblers don’t gamble for the money. Athletes, moreover, are not generally known for their intellectual acumen, ability to resist temptation, or skill at navigating mixed and contradictory messages.

Sports leagues can’t have it both ways. They can’t make millions off of gambling, and simultaneously insist that players gambling threatens the integrity of the game. If the team owners really cared about the integrity of the game and wanted to avoid the betting and game-fixing scandals that surely are coming (baseball will have a team in Las Vegas next year, and Moe Green is licking his metaphorical chops), it would stick to the policy that sports and gambling is a volatile mixture that must be avoided.

This will not end well. You can bet on it.

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