U.S. Society

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/30: Memorial Day Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

That’s my Dad! Our family will be visiting his final destination (and my mother’s as well) at Arlington National Cemetery today. Major Jack Anderson Marshall, Sr. was a decorated war hero, a wounded veteran, and a man who hated war and guns but knew when they were necessary. World War II was the defining experience of his life, and his traumas, triumphs and travails in those years, which began for him before the U.S. entered the war (Dad signed up with the British to fight in Africa) crystalized an ethics code that he conveyed to his two children by example and through intense dinner-time discussions.

I think about him just about every day, so I don’t need this particular holiday for that purpose, but this particular Memorial Day reminds me that I still have to find time to get his fascinating and inspiring memoirs published, which have been languishing in my care since Dad died during a nap on December 1, 2009. (I can’t believe it’s been that long.)

My father was proud that he would rest at Arlington, and took me on periodic outings there in his eighties to “scout the neighborhood.” A Kentucky boy (and Boy Scout), Dad liked to say that he was going from Arlington, Massachusetts (where I grew up), to Arlington, Virginia, where my parents moved to be near their grandchildren, to Arlington National Cemetery. He loved the United States, Loved its history and culture, loved the military, and genuinely loved this holiday. He was one person I could say “Happy Memorial Day!” to and not feel a little goulish.

Happy Memorial Day, Dad.

And thank-you for your service.

1. A superb analysis of the Princeton and MIT ethics abuse of two distinguished professors has just been posted on his blog by Curmie. He provides context and details of the persecution of David Sabitini (MIT) and Jonathan Katz (Princeton), both of which were covered on Ethics Alarms but not nearly as well. I recommend it highly.

2. “Do something! Do something!” I was tempted to make this story a full post (and rant) as either an Unethical Quote of the Day or a mass Ethics Dunce. Before leaving the Uvalde church yesterday where he attended the obligatory service for the victims of yet another mass shooting , Biden encountered angry demonstrators gathered nearby, some of whom booed him as others chanted, “Do something! Do something!” The reason I didn’t make this a stand alone post is that I am applying some restraint in recognition that people in the grip of emotion say and do stupid things. Nonetheless, there are far too many Americans who, prodded by irresponsible politicians and pundits, are using “Do something!” as if it is a legitimate policy position. The chant is offensive, brain-dead, un-American and dangerous. We don’t run to the government to solve our problems, giving it an invitation to abuse its power. The President isn’t God, a King or a Magician, and making one feel omnipotent is suicidal for a democracy. Nor is demanding “something” fair or helpful.  Uvalde has some very specific problems that only its community can solve, like an incompetent, badly-led police force, teachers who leave school doors open that are supposed to be locked, and citizens who ignored one warning sign after another that an angry teen in their midst was potential menace. Meanwhile, telling aspiring totalitarians like the current crop of Democrats to “Do something!” in the midst of hysteria and exploitation is how democracies disappear. Felling insecure? Unsafe? Dissatisfied? Run to papa, have him kiss the boo-boo, trust him to make everything swell. Saying that to this regime is like sending the kid on the yellow inflatable raft out to play with the Great White Shark in “Jaws.” Continue reading →

One General Ethics Lesson From Uvalde: We All Have A Duty To Be Proactive Citizens [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

As with virtually all of the previous mass shootings (and Salvador Ramos’s mother’s infuriating statements notwithstanding), there were a plethora of ominous signs that this 18-year-old was a virtual ticking time bomb, and that he had gun violence on his mind. Yet nobody with that information did anything. Yes, hindsight bias is, as the saying goes, 20-20, and yes, the fact that the Uvalde killer went through with his stated fantasies and desires and murdered 19 children and two adults is moral luck of the bad variety, just as his doing nothing would have been moral luck of the fortunate variety. The point is that pro-active citizenship could have prevented the tragedy, as it could prevent many tragedies.

More such information will probably emerge but so far we know…

  • For days, Ramos had been telling one girl online in Germany that he had “a secret” that he would eventually reveal. When he said he was about to attack the elementary school, she was not sure if he was serious and did not make any effort to contact the police.

 

This is basic ethics decision-making: if you are wrong about one course of action and the worst consequence is sounding a false alarm, and the consequence of the alternate choice is that people die, the decision should be clear. The girl now says she regrets her decision. That and 20 cents, my father used to say, will buy her a ride on the subway. Continue reading →

What’s This? An Unemotional, Unbiased, Rational Analysis Of The Gun Debate In The Wake Of The Uvalde Shooting?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Indeed. Not surprisingly, it comes from the fertile mind of Prof. Eugene Volokh, proprietor of the esteemed legal scholarship blog The Volokh Conspiracy, now hanging out at Reason, after a brief residency at the Washington Post a long tenure as an independent site. Volokh takes his cue from the recent story, predictably buried by the mainstream media but fortuitously timed in the wake of the tragedy in Texas, of a gun-owning and legally-carrying woman in West Virginia who was attending a party when a man who began firing an AR-15-style rifle into the crowd. She drew her weapon and shot him dead before anyone was wounded.

Volokh asks,

Continue reading →

Dazed And Confused Ethics Phantasmagoria, 5/28/2022

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Almost nothing in this post makes sense to me, beginning with the video above on Disney+. “What’s going on here?” People are losing their minds, that’s what appears to be going on here. (Incidentally, I cancelled our Disney+ subscription. I did not realize that the “plus” stood for pro-gender identity crisis/pro drag queen propaganda. If that was going to be a theme, I believe Disney was obligated to inform me.

1. In a related vein: Mattel.

What is this? What the hell is a “transgender doll”? Is this “Ick” or unethical? Surely there aren’t a sufficient number of male-to-female trans kids in the market to make this new Barbie, modeled after excessively praised trans-gender actress Laverne Cox, profitable, even considering the weird Barbie collectors, who would snap up a T-Rex Barbie if there were one.

It appears to me, and don’t hold me to this in my current state of confusion, that Mattel is pandering to an unhealthy and an unethical cultural movement to make gender dysphoria both desirable and epidemic. That would be irresponsible, and thus unethical. Also profoundly stupid. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Update On The Uvalde Massacre Extension Of The Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck, Part 2: Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Breyer’s Self-Refuting Dissent”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

As it did eventually in the Parkland school shooting, the consideration of the accountability for the death toll of innocents in the Uvalde shooting has turned to the conduct of those charged with protecting the victims. It is a separate issue from the culpability of the shooter, whose conduct, intentions and ethical and moral bankruptcy remain the same regardless of the actions of those who helped or hindered it. It is also a separate issue from the question of what public policies might have realistically prevented the tragedy before it took place. It is germane, however, to the matters of government trust, accountability for the loss of life, and particularly the reasonableness of constructing a free society where citizens are entirely at the mercy of the competence, wisdom and character of government agents.

Especially because of the latter, some commentators appear to be trying to rationalize and even excuse the conduct of the police in Uvalde who, by their officials’ own admission, allowed the murderer to keep shooting while they prevented others from trying to intervene, while holding back themselves because they feared being shot.

Commenter Jim Hodgson, in this Comment of the Day on the post, “Update On The Uvalde Massacre Extension Of The Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck, Part 2…“:

***

I was the first supervisor of my previous agency’s SRO program, and I helped teach Active Shooter Response to all our law enforcement deputies for nearly fifteen years. Continue reading →

Friday Forum: Open All Weekend!

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I apologize for opening the doors late. Actual paying ethics business was coming in the metaphorical door today, for some reason.

Comments have been excellent all week. Keep it up!

Update On The Uvalde Massacre Extension Of The Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck, Part 2: Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Breyer’s Self-Refuting Dissent

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“…Insofar as the Framers focused at all on the tiny fraction of the population living in large cities, they would have been aware that these city dwellers were subject to firearm restrictions that their rural counterparts were not. They are unlikely then to have thought of a right to keep loaded handguns in homes to confront intruders in urban settings as central. And the subsequent development of modern urban police departments, by diminishing the need to keep loaded guns nearby in case of intruders, would have moved any such right even further away from the heart of the amendment’s more basic protective ends…”

—-Justice Breyer, dissenting in the 2008 landmark case of District of Columbia v. Heller, which held that the Second Amendment indeed protected as an enumerated right an individual’s right t”o possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.”

Brava to Ann Althouse, who recalled the passage above while discussing still more of the increasingly infuriating fact now emerging about the failure, incompetence and cowardice of the Uvalde, Texas police when a homicidal maniac began shooting kids in the Robb Elementary School.

I wrote, before seeing this, “The argument that citizens shouldn’t have access to guns isn’t supported by the alleged conduct by the police in this tragedy. In fact, the opposite is the case. If police won’t take risks to save endangered children and use their weapons, then citizens must have the tools to do the job the police won’t.”

Ann wrote, in response to the Times report that “when specially equipped federal immigration agents arrived at the elementary school…the local police at the scene would not allow them to go after the gunman…according to two officials briefed on the situation.”:

If the police don’t arrive and save us from violence, how can this event support the argument for restricting guns? This is the very situation that makes the most responsible people want to own guns. It reminds me of the summer of 2020, when there were riots, and the police stood down.

Or the Rodney King riots, where the LA police made local Korean businesses under siege fend for themselves.
 
Or Baltimore’s Freddy Gray riots, when the mayor also ordered police to “stand down.”
 
Other reports today on the complete police botch…

Children were calling for help, shots were being fired, kids were dying, and the Uvalde police were waiting for…something.

  • “Police admitted to a stunning string of failures — including driving right by the gunman — in responding to the Texas school shooting while children were being massacred inside, with the head of the state’s Department of Public Safety saying the time for making excuses about the botched response was over.”

Waiting to confront the shooter for nearly an hour was, NBC reports authorities as admitting, “the wrong decision.”

YA THINK????

It would be profoundly ironic if this horrific tragedy immediately seized upon by anti-gun zealots as exemplifying the need to remove individual gun rights emerged as a persuasive example of why they must be protected.

Update On The Uvalde Massacre Extension Of The Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck, Part 1

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

As Glenn Reynolds quips in such situations, “You’re going to need a bigger blog.”

The most depressing post-shooting development is that the Uvalde police completely abdicated their duty and allowed the maniac in an elementary school to keep shooting children. Texas DPS Lt. Chris Olivarez explained on CNN why police officers were reluctant to enter Robb Elementary School while the murders were going on. “They could have been shot. They could have been killed,” he said.

Oh. Well that explains it then. Of course, the police outnumbered the 18-year-old and presumably had more training, they could hear the shots, and being armed themselves, they still has a better chance at survival than the children , but, hey, look out for #1, right?

The shooter entered  Robb Elementary School through an open door , barricaded himself in a classroom and killed 19 children and two teachers. Nobody stood in his way. He had been outside the school for 12 minutes, firing at a funeral home across the street. The first 911 call was made at 11:30 am, and police didn’t arrive until 11:44. A Border Patrol tactical team finally entered the school almost an hour after Salvador Ramos had started shooting students, at around 12:40 p.m. They were able to get into the classroom and kill Ramos. Continue reading →

Mid-Afternoon Ethics Afterthoughts, 5/25/2022: The Wisdom Of Harry Lime

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to tag all of the upcoming unethical doings in the wake of the latest school shooting tragedy as part of the Sandy Hood Ethics Train Wreck, which also included the Newtown shooting freakout. They are all the same issue, with the same rhetoric, the same appeals to emotion, and many of the same players, dunces and villains. “History repeats itself, and that’s one of the things that’s wrong with history,” Clarence Darrow said.

It is particularly nauseating, in my view, to have to listen and read the “other countries don’t have this problem!” talking point. Yes, the United States is unique in a lot of ways. The major point of uniqueness is that the US allows its citizens unusual freedom, and thus attracts and has always attracted risk-takers, iconoclasts, eccentrics, nut-cases, heroes, those who resent authority, and many who think that the guarantee of liberty and the opportunity to succeed or fail is the same as a promise of success. This, in turn, means that among the unpleasant byproducts of our liberties is more violence and more crime (also more personal responsibility). “We have spawned a new race here-rougher simpler, more violent, more enterprising, and less refined. We’re a new nationality and we require a new nation,” Ben Franklin tells John Dickinson in “1776,” and while that is only a manufactured quote from various writings of Adams and Franklin, Ben was right, as usual. The Bill of Rights reflects the needs and aspirations of that “new race,” so does the Constitution’s emphasis on the right to bear arms, and so does the proclivity of that race to abuse our unusual treasure of rights. For human beings and nations, the greatest strengths are often the greatest flaws. We pay a large and sometimes bloody price for our liberties and ideals, but if one supports the American experiment and where it has brought us, the conclusion must be that the cost is worth it.

Not everyone is cut out to be an American. Those who don’t like the culture should consider relocating somewhere less stressful, and accept the reduced upside in exchange for a more sedate set of risks.

That’s the lesson of the clip above from “The Third Man” above, in the final speech of the film by Orson Wells as the mysterious rogue Harry Lime.

1.The pro-abortion signature significance keeps on coming! CNN’s Dana Bash to the Governor of Arkansas: “Arkansas already struggles to support vulnerable children. Nearly 1 in 4 children in Arkansas lives in poverty….Do you really think that your state is prepared to protect and care for even more children if abortion does become illegal there?”

Bash did not get the answer she apparently anticipated, which would have been something like, “No, you’re right, Dana. It makes mores sense to kill them. Thanks for setting me straight.”

Continue reading →