Increasingly both the questions and the answers published by Kwame Anthony Appiah, the NYU philosopher professor who has been the caretaker of the New York Times Magazine’s “The Ethicist” advice column for more than a decade, show signs of ethics rot. This is why I haven’t been commenting on them as often, though the column is like a window into the warped minds of the Woke and Wonderful.

This month, for example, the previous three questions have been “Is It Wrong to Work for a Charity That’s Funded by a Questionable Source?” (the old “dirty money” trope), “Can I Ask My Brother to Have His Racist Prison Tattoo Removed?” (of course you can ask—you can ask him if he can fly to Mars by flapping his arms, but what someone chooses to wear on their skin or their body is none of your business, and removing a racist tattoo won’t make him any less racist…), and “A Homeless Person’s Pet Needed Help. Should I Have Tried to Buy It?” (The pet is there to give love and comfort to the homeless person. Butt out.)

But this week’s question prompts the Popeye in me (“It’s all I can takes ‘cuz I can’t takes no more!”) A woman who rents a storage unit (in a bad Los Angeles neighborhood) discovered that a man is living in the unit across from hers. This makes her uncomfortable (Ya think?) but she feels compelled to ask Kwame, “I Think Someone Is Living in the Storage Unit Next to Mine. What Should I Do?” We then get an exchange of what a friend calls “toxic empathy.” It’s all the U.S.’s fault, see, because we don’t take care of homeless people like—I kid you not—Norway. This supposed ethics expert’s advice: “Asking to move yourself, rather than trying to get him removed, is probably the most humane course, and the one most likely to preserve your peace of mind.”

Well, Kwame (in NYC) and “Anonymous” (In L.A.) certainly are doing their part to make those two cities the leftist hellholes they are becoming. Hey, it’s cruel to enforce laws! The most humane course is let people disobey laws that are inconvenient or get in the way of their needs. By all means, tilt policies to the benefit of the untrustworthy and irresponsible. It only lowers standards, conduct, well-being and safety for everyone, but that’s the goal of equity and inclusion, right?

Morons. How did so many Americans end up thinking this way? I am distraught.

Ironically, I am doing one of these collection posts not because I received TWO emails from the assembled today telling me that I write too many posts, but because of the reason I write as many as I do. I don’t have the time (or the resources) to accomplish my mission as it is, which is to focus ethical analysis on the ethics issues all around us that should be thought of in that context, but seldom are. Why aren’t they? The answer is that they are seldom analyzed in an ethics context because most of our journalists, pundits, educators, politicians, lawyers, and “experts” don’t think about ethics very often, and neither do most of our friends, relatives and colleagues.

Today I felt bombarded with ethics stories and questions, and suffered ethics brain lock that stopped me from doing some important paying consulting work and meeting looming deadlines. Tomorrow I have a Zoom ethics seminar to teach (I hate Zoom) for two hours smack dab in the middle of the day. I’d love to write full posts on all of these, but I can’t. So here are some short versions…

1. There is a long, excellent Comment of the Day by Sarah B that I intended to get up today. Tomorrow, Sarah. I promise.

2. The Murdough Murders. South Carolina’s high court today overturned the murder convictions against Alex Murdaugh, the disbarred, thieving lawyer a manipulated jury had found guilty of murdering his wife and one of his sons in one of those “sensational” trials. The State Supreme Court found that “shocking jury interference” by a court clerk who oversaw jurors during the 2023 trial meant that Mr. Murdaugh’s convictions had to be thrown out.

Ethics Alarms figured out that the trial and the verdict was a farce and said so in 2024, here.

The State says it will retry Murdaugh, which will cost the state millions and achieve nothing even if he is convicted of murder again, and he shouldn’t be. He is already serving a prison term (for financial crimes) that will amount to a life sentence. The State’s claimed motives for the two killings are bats, automatic reasonable doubt with a thinking jury.

That’s Ellen, now Eliot, Page above, the talented actress who decided to be surgically altered into male form, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But the 5’1″ delicate and frail trans performer was cast in director Christopher Nolan’s big budget version of Homer’s “Odyssey” as Achilles, one of the greatest of Greek mythology heroes, a badass so feared that his absence from the battlefield prolonged the Trojan War.

I have no idea why such a deliberately political and silly casting choice would be made (or allowed) but I don’t care. I only watched the movie where Bill Murray was cast as FDR because I wanted to see if he could pull it off (no, not even close), but casting Page as Achilles insults the audience’s intelligence. Now, there was a Greek hero in the Illiad whom Page might have played: Ajax the Lesser, a diminutive warrior with a Napoleon complex. But if Achilles is barely over five feet, then Ajax the Lesser would have to be a midget.

No, I’m not so much bothered by Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy. It is also stunt casting but she is exotic and gorgeous, and one could imagine the African’s unique beauty launching a thousand ships.

I love the Illiad and the Odyssey, and I’m open to new interpretations as long as they don’t defile the stories or make them ridiculous. I draw the line, however, at this.

I sure would have liked to have Curmie’s take here, but he’s off in a No Kings rally somewhere…

The Democrats are certainly tempting Republicans to repurpose that 1960 JFK campaign poster to impugn the wisdom of trusting any Democrats “as far as you could throw them,” in one of my father’s favorite phrases.

Item: Eileen Wang, the former mayor of Arcadia, a city within LA County, resigned after admitting to acting as an illegal foreign agent for China. Her federal plea deal was unsealed today. She worked with the People’s Republic of China to distribute propaganda with a fake news website between 2020 and 2022. She was elected to the Arcadia City Council in November 2022, then moved up to mayor. She faced a maximum of 10 years in prison, but the deal got her much less. I don’t know why she shouldn’t be shot. She’s a traitor.

She’s also a Democrat. Her fellow California Democrat, Eric Swalwell, had a sexual affair with a Chinese spy. Speaking of JFK, he also had an affair with a comely spy, in his case from Israel.

For some reason, I had a difficult time confirming Wang’s party. She’s a Democrat, of course, but most news reports omitted that fact. Were they covering up for their favorite party, or did they just assume any one paying attention could guess which party is more likely to sell out to China?

According to court documents, Wang worked with her then-fiancé, Yaoning “Mike” Sun, on a web site called “U.S. News Center,” supposedly a news source for Chinese Americans. The loving couple, however, were really taking marching orders from Beijing. They “executed directives” from the Chinese government to post pro-Chinese propaganda and reported back with data on how many views each story received, according to the plea agreement.

In one case, Wang was ordered to post a PRC-dictated essay denying the existence of genocide and forced labor in the Xinjiang region. “There is no genocide in Xinjiang; there is no such thing as ‘forced labor’ in any production activity, including cotton production. Spreading such rumor is to defame China, destroy Xinjiang’s safety and stability,” the mayor was told. Wang complied by publishing the required lies, and her handler wrote back, “So fast, thank you everyone.” Receiving praise for her work, Wang wrote back to her handler, “Thank you leader.”

The Wang story comes out just after Rep. Jayapal announced that she has been working with Cuba to undermine U.S. policy. The whole Democratic Party, meanwhile, is openly parroting Iranian propaganda and vocally hoping that the U.S. loses that war. All this, and the cheating and lying about redistricting too.

Would you buy a used car from this party?

Why???

For some time now, the biggest ethics issue facing the nation, and wow, there are a lot of them, has been the increasingly flagrant contempt for democracy and basic principles of ethics being exhibited by a single political party—guess which—in its drive to gain sufficient power to make over the government, principles, ideology, society and culture of the United States of America. The clues that party and its allies in the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance, Democrats and the nearly completely corrupt mainstream media) have been revealing have been increasingly obvious, most flagrant among them being projection—-accusing Republicans and President Trump of engaging in what his Machiavellian opponents are actually doing.

A private discussion this weekend including Democratic House members from Virginia and Congressional Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York was leaked to the New York Times by several participants. According to the Times, the participants expressed their fury at the Virginia Supreme Court, as if it was the bi-partisan majority of judges who were at fault for the election-rigging scheme the party had tried to inflict on Virginians. Part of the discussion centered on what the Times called “a bank-shot proposal to redraw the congressional lines anyway.”

I realized that I hadn’t included any of the crazed (and hypocritical) freakouts over Tennessee eliminating the Memphis district that had voted in one of the worst (white) Democratic members of Congress for years, Steve Cohen.

Here’s one especially silly example: Rep. Antonio Parkinson (D) demanded that Tennessee allow Memphis to “secede” because of the redistricting.“Let Memphis secede from the state of Tennessee!” he said.“Let my people go. I’m dead serious. If you’re constantly beating on us, let us out.”

Parkinson represents part of Shelby County, which includes Memphis.“This is about whether Memphis, a majority-Black economic engine for this state, is expected to continue contributing billions in tax revenue, culture, labor and commerce while being systematically stripped of political power.” Which it is presumed to exercise only by voting for black candidates? Are the Republicans in such areas being stripped of their political power? Should they have to give up their state citizenship because Democrats are throwing a tantrum?

Parkinson said that if the state’s elected officials no longer believe “the people of Memphis deserve the ability to choose a representative who reflects their community, then at least have the courage to say it plainly. Do not hide behind maps and procedure.” What does “reflect the community” mean?

Parkinson has called for the city to secede before. Are we going back to city states now?

What an idiot.

In items #1 and #3 of the previous post, EA notes the freakout of Democrats over their own failed gerrymandering in Virginia and Tennessee’s elimination of its “black district.” On CNN, a Democrat acted as if the recent spate of gerrymandering was brand new to 2026, somehow managing not to mention the long-gerrymandered states above. Listen to this head-exploding discussion yesterday, below. It is pointed out that this “racist” redistricting of Memphis will likely remove a long time white Rep. Steve Cohen and that his likely successor will be a black Republican woman. At around the 6:20 mark, there is a cut in the video. What is left out is when one member of the panel asks, “Is allowing a black woman to take the seat of a white man racist?” and a Democrat answers, “Actually yes!” (Why was that telling exchange excised?)

Earlier, a progressive hack on the panel explains that including blacks in majority white districts means that they will no longer “have a choice.” They will have the same choice every citizen has in elections, unless the presumption is that all blacks will only choose to vote for black candidates, meaning that blacks will naturally discriminate against whites. Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) is a spectacular hypocrite, saying that all members of both parties should be outraged now, while his party has benefited from the gerrymandering in the blue states above. Gerrymandering is terrible for Democracy, he says, but apparently that only concerns Suozzi when Democrats aren’t the only party doing it.

Yes, it is tit-for-tat, except that the Republicans finally woke up, first in Texas, and decided that the party was foolish to play a rigged game: nine blue states could legally gerrymander Republicans out of the House, but red states couldn’t respond in kind? Tit-for-tat is unethical, except when a short-term response in kind to unethical conduct can force a truce where the conduct is voluntarily eschewed by both sides. This is what the Republicans are doing now, and it is proof of that party’s irresponsible torpor that it didn’t do it years ago.

The problem is that I do not see what will bring this cycle to an end. The blonde hack on the panel demanding a constitutional amendment is grandstanding. That’s not going to happen.

The disinformation (or ignorance) the Democrats are flooding social media and the news with now is flagrant. Here’s Gavin Newsom:

“Yes or no, should noncitizens be able to vote?”

Spencer Pratt: No

Karen Bass: It depends

Nithya Raman: It depends

This should tell you everything you need to know. pic.twitter.com/0gZZmuZN5n

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 7, 2026

Note that the two fools who said “It depends” relied entirely on a variation of the Golden Rationalization, “Everybody does it.” Non-citizens should be able to vote in some cases because some localities allow it.