Apparently today WordPress stealth-altered the commenting software, or something. As Michael R. determined, you now have to select ‘Add Your Name’, then fill in your name and e-mail to a popup box in order to post. That used to be under the text box. (Thanks, Michael.)
I grovel at the feet of those of you who lost comments due to this change. I can’t comment on my own posts at all due to a long-standing glitch, so I have no way of knowing about these things. I think this change was an emergency response to a recent glut of spam attacks, which I have been aware of over the last week.
I would write “The Ethicist,” but I’m a better ethicist than he is, so I’m asking you.
I have a friend, a neighbor, who has been very kind and caring since my wife died in 2024. She’s about 20 years younger than I am, divorced, and desperately lonely. She’s also brilliant, politically obsessed, and furious at the world. Spuds likes her two dogs, and we all go to the nearby dog park together whenever our schedules mesh. She checks on me when she hasn’t heard from me for a while (which is annoying but still considerate). She sends me food; she invited me to have Christmas dinner with her and her then-boyfriend last year.
She is also as Trump Deranged as anyone I know, which is saying a lot. Her progressive mania is extreme: on Facebook and other social media she goes from one stream of furious posts on the latest leftist cause to another. Currently she is determined to have the seven men accused of sexual assault in the Cornell mess tried, convicted, and if possible, castrated.
My friend, like so many people I know infected with woke hysteria and Trump Hate, confidently rants to me about her obsessions because she assumes that nobody she likes and views as intelligent could possibly have any opinions different from hers. I’ve written about this phenomenon before. I just let her do it, because she needs to talk, and eventually I get her to move on to another subject, make her laugh, or try to get a word in edgewise that has nothing to do with politics.
For me, this is a pure Julie Principle situation: she’s a good and generous person, she’s intelligent, she needs a friend, she’s a great Scrabble player, and as long as she doesn’t try to run my life (which she is always on the verge of attempting), I’ll accept her quirks and obsessions and concentrate on what’s admirable about her, which is a lot.
However, she excises anyone from her life who doesn’t conform to her political beliefs. She is estranged from her family and both of her children. She recently told me that she made a list and that I am one of just 17 people she feels comfortable talking to. Somehow, she has concluded that I have the same political beliefs she does, which means, among other things, that she has never googled me or done any research online. I have a rather large cyber-footprint, including Ethics Alarms, of course. I know, with near certainty, that she would be crushed if she learned about my positions on many of the issues she feels passionate about, including the Cornell 7. When a dinner date recently told her he had voted for Donald Trump, she got up and walked out of the restaurant.
I feel like I am deceiving my freind, and yet I also don’t believe political views are relevant to personal relationships unless they are the basis of those relationships. I have many more than 17 friends, and the idea of ending a relationship because someone doesn’t agree with me about, well, anything is alien to my being.
Heck, I even have friends who are Yankee fans.
Is the most ethical course to continue to allow her to think I meet her self-harming extreme standards she demands of friends, or to be transparent, let her know more about me and guarantee that she will be angry, disillusioned, and cancel me as she has so many others?
This is a true ethics conflict, with valid ethical justifications on both sides of the question. Kindness or honesty? Inflicting pain in the cause of transparency for its own sake? My friend is incapable of embracing the Julie Principle.
The handling of Democratic Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico’s oddly-timed absence from the campaign trail in a close race is inherently suspicious. If an extreme left-biased Democrat propaganda machine like “The Daily Beast” is concerned, there is certainly enough “smoke” to make anyone with a memory ponder. The excuse for the candidate being AWOL without clear evidence of where has been that he has the flu and doesn’t want anyone to catch it. That’s thoughtful. It does seem a strange decision if Democrats really believe that flipping the Senate is crucial to “saving democracy,” which in Democrat-speak means knee-capping the Trump Presidency with more fake impeachments, packing the Supreme Court with Ketanji Brown Jackson clones, opening the borders, defunding police, letting trans-women crush the natural kind in sports, spreading anti-Semitism, further embedding “good discrimination” in the workplace and letting Iran continue with plans to nuke Israel as soon as possible.
Past extended unexplained absences do not make me sanguine that this one is as benign as the Axis narrative would have us believe:
Mitch McConnell vanished after a fall until we finally learned that he is too feeble to participate meaningfully in the Senate.
GOP Congressman Tom Kean’s hospitalization for depression this year was kept secret for 117 days. He finally disclosed the truth upon his return to the House floor.
Biden’s DEI Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was hospitalized for three days without even telling the White House. He should have been fired, but, you know, Biden was President. Austin said he was sorry.
The all-time champ, not counting Woodrow Wilson, was South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford going AWOL for six days, failing to answer calls from his staff, family, or the state’s security detail while his office lied that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail to “decompress.” He had actually secretly flown to Argentina to visit his soul mate mistress.
Of course, Biden’s brain was mostly absent for months (years?) while his staff and the Axis said he was “sharp as a tack.”
Here’s the New York Times story updating the mystery. Conservative outlets claim there is evidence that Talarico was undergoing treatment for some kind of mental or emotional issue. Best line: “The Eagleton has landed!” My Democrat friends, flush with similar confirmation bias, are certain there is “nothing to see here.”
Maybe they are right, but it sure seems like something is off. Where’s the transparency? And remember: Democrats cheat.
Last week the President signed off on the firing squad execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, the Muslim terrorist who killed 13 people on an Army post in Texas in 2009. Funny, I assumed he had been executed already: why I thought that, I do not know. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced that Hasan’s killing would be public. “People need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said. I think pretty much everyone is aware that there are serious consequences for murdering a lot of human beings, unless the killer is a mother and the victims are her own children, but I digress.
The Pentagon confirmed the plan to make the execution public, with the event streamed live. Predictably, many Americans are horrified at the prospect, including the usual suspects, progressives, capital punishment opponents and the Trump Deranged. The issue was lightly debated on yesterday’s EA Open Forum, with opinions varying. AM Golden wrote, “I guess I don’t want to watch someone die. Even if he deserves it. It’s not sport. It’s not entertainment.” Remy Boudreau said, “It really is a terrible idea.” Steve Witherspoon wrote in part that it “will give this terrorist the martyrdom that he wanted. Across the globe, those that support the actions of this terrorist will hail this terrorist as a martyr and use the execution video to actively promote their ideology.” JutGory: “I do not believe public executions, which were historically routine, is edifying to the average person. Quite the contrary, they feed baser instincts. I still don’t intend to tune in.” Michael West wrote, “Had Nidal Hasan been dealt with appropriately – within the year of his conviction for what he was quite obviously guilty of – a private execution would have been sufficient. I’m not a fan of the spectacle, but I’m open to being convinced that the spectacle has some ethical claim because of how long it has taken for justice to be enacted.”
Over on the all anti-Trump, all-pro-Democrat propaganda network MS NOW, host Stephanie Ruhle and correspondent Jonathan Lemire made those counter-arguments and more.
“We will see it here in the United States,” Lemire said, “but so will people around the globe, including our adversaries, including terror groups that would probably make good use of this kind of footage of America killing someone who accused of doing these things. It raises the terror threat, it raises security risks; but more than that, it degrades who we are as a country.”
The latter point is the reflex and empty lament I keep seeing on Facebook: “Is this who we are?”—whatever that means. It is a versatile, lazy default argument that fits anything the speaker thinks is repugnant. “Is this who we are—encouraging children to mutilate themselves and calling it “gender affirming care”? “Is this who we are—encouraging anti-Semitism and the destruction of Israel while supporting brutal terrorists?” “Is this who we are, a nation that kills over 1,230,000 unborn children each year and calls it “choice”?
As Jimmy Durante would say, I got a million of ’em! And as Tonto said in a memorable joke, “What do you mean we, white man?”
Ruhle even had the gall to send a plea to Trump to block the public execution. Why should a a President that Ruhle and her colleagues denigrate, lie about and refuse to extend even minimal respect to all day, every day care what she wants?
My assessment of the public execution is as follows:
1. It is not cruel and unusual punishment, contrary to what I heard one ignorant critic exclaim today. The shooting has been judicially approved as a valid execution method, and the public part of it isn’t a tangible aspect of the punishment anyway. The man is going to be killed: we’re worried that he might be embarrassed too? The 8th Amendment forbids “cruel and unusual” punishment: at worst, a public execution by ordinary means is just “unusual.”
2. Hassan has been a paraplegic since he was shot when being apprehended after his killing spree. Another critic found it especially cruel to execute Hasan because he is disabled (due to his own criminal conduct!) Wow. That ranks a Kauffmann.
3. If anyone doesn’t want to see it, nothing will force them to tune in. Anyone who does tune in just to complain afterwards has no credibility. The act itself is, at worst, “ick” rather than unethical. Hasan won’t die any more painfully or slowly in a public execution than in a private one. He’ll be just as dead whether the shooting is on TV or held at the bottom of a mine.
4. I do believe that the decision to hold a public execution is unethical because it’s incompetent and irresponsible. From a utilitarian perspective, its negative results, expected and unanticipated, far, far outweigh anything positive that can come from the spectacle. It is undeniable that terrorists, Muslims and anyone looking for another excuse to attack the Trump Administration will exploit the event to their advantage. The President is addicted to handing his adversaries huge metaphorical sticks to beat him with. This is another one, and to do it before mid-terms is just perverse. And stupid.
5. Trump still hasn’t learned the Cognitive Dissonance Scale principle. Firing squads are associated with dictators in the public mind. Good guys don’t kill bad guys that way, it’s the other way around. The most popular and viewed U.S. movies featuring firing squads all side with the executed: “The Firing Squad” (2024), “Paths of Glory” (1957), “Valkyrie” (2008), and “Jojo Rabbit” (2019). Trump already has been branded as the equivalent of Hitler; this won’t help. Of course, most of those outraged would be similarly inclined no matter what the Trump Administration decided to do with Hasan. One of the two vocal critics I encountered with Spuds at the dog park today was wearing a “RESIST” shirt and the other a shirt reading “KAMALA.”
6. I can see one ethical argument for the public execution, though it is not sufficient to carry the day. For a capital punishment advocate, watching an execution is, if not mandatory, a demonstration of good faith. It’s easy to advocate the State killing someone in the abstract, but the State represents all of us, and we share responsibility for what our government does. Giving citizens the opportunity to see and understand exactly what they say they want bolsters seriousness and integrity.
The results of this public execution may not be what its adherents expect.
ADDED: I also want to note that this is another relatively minor source of outrage, like the vast majority of what Trump’s critics bellow about. On the consequential list, I’d put it above the reflecting pool uproar but well short of Trump’s aborted deal with the IRS for a family slush fund.
Why are we hanging onto a relationship for which we should be actively separating ourselves?
Is it ethical to cling to something you know is more than dead, when it is demonstrably existentially dangerous?
What is this relationship that is so toxic? The intact 50 states comprising the United States. My proposition is: We must separate from states, leaders and groups actively attempting to destroy the U.S. Constitution and American culture before there is no Constitution left to protect us and a culture seeking to exterminate us.
The states themselves are rather obvious: California, New Mexico, Illinois, New York, Vermont, Connecticut, Washington, Delaware, New Jersey, Minnesota, and distinct portions of other states like western Oregon, northern and eastern Virginia, eastern Pennsylvania, southern lower Michigan, southeastern Wisconsin, plus the District of Columbia.
The leaders can be broadly described as Democratic Socialists, so-called democracy advocates, cultural cancers such as the “gender affirming care” and abortion-on-demand advocates. The names on this list are long, but they all subscribe to the Obama-imagined fundamental transformation of the US against those clinging to the Constitution, God and guns.
They have proven via political violence, poisonous policies, and social canceling that we are their targets. COVID policies experimentally divided the country into individualists and collectivists. Obedience was the metric / the crux of COVID policy. Even now, after proof being provided of the malicious nature of government policies during the period, the true believers call out individualists as deniers. Similarly issues like DEI, puberty blockers, climate change, court packing, electoral college elimination, unfettered immigration, no voter ID, history rewrites, endless lawfare, judicial overreach and trans activism are alive and very well among the places and people described above. Nearly everything they believe is intentionally malicious, not real, or so grossly exaggerated it is ludicrous.
The United States is not united. To expect us to somehow become united again is a fantasy. And yet our traditional notion of America of 50 United States persists…as we fervently hope this will go away once people come to their senses. These people and policies are not rational, nor will they ever be. Stop the delusion.
The more we cling to the self-deception the more opportunity those seeking to unravel the culture have to do terrible things, endangering everything we believe to be right, valuable, and sustainable as a society.
In the original colonies the sentiment was join or die. Now we must separate ourselves to survive and begin to thrive again in a society worth keeping.
Christoper Gallant, 37, is an openly gay military pilot, former air traffic controller and volunteer firefighter who is running against Rep. Nick LaLota, who represents New York’s First District, covering eastern Suffolk County. Photos “surfaced,” as they like to say, showing Gallant in an explicit ad campaign modeling leather bondage gear. In some of the photos he appears to be doing…stuff…with another man.
The photos originally appeared on the site of a bondage apparel company called Mr. S Leather about 15 or 16 years ago. In response to the photos entering the campaign conversation, Gallant’s lawyer said that the photographs “were taken during a private, consensual photo session involving Chris and his then-partner, with whom he was in a committed four-year relationship. Chris was also friends with the owner of Mr. S Leather, and the shoot was intended to be fun and personal, with the understanding that Mr. S could use select images in connection with certain products” and that Gallant “remains fully committed to his campaign and to earning the trust of the people he seeks to represent.”
Right. About that trust thingy—oh! I forgot to mention that Gallant is the Democratic Congressional candidate in the race! Did I have to?
“This is the Democratic congressional candidate for CD1,” the local GOP wrote on Facebook above the smaller photo above. “Is this who you want to represent us in Washington DC?” That’s certainly a fair question. I hold that there is an equivalent of EA’s recently revisited Naked Teacher Principle in play here, though I’m not sure what I would call it. A candidate who has allowed himself to be photographed like that gets no sympathy from me if that choice eventually costs him a job teaching in a public school, and the standards of character and role model fitness for a member of Congress should be a higher bar than the one required of teachers. Sadly, considering the current Congress, that is obviously not the case.
Today is the 30th anniversary of the debut of Fox News, a day that will live in infamy for the Totalitarian Left, much as Elon Musk’s rescue of Twitter is reviled. Americans under the age of about 50 never reflect upon what broadcast news was like before October 7, 1996, and most of them can’t imagine how crucial the conservative news network has been to our democracy.
The emergence of Fox News has had some unfortunate and unanticipated consequences too, but those who argue that the United States, its public, culture and society would be better off with no TV news options other than the liberal Democrat monopoly of reporting and opinions, which was the state of the medium before Rupert Murdoch’s daring innovation, is revealing their own bias.
The revolution may well have failed without Brit Hume, so today seems like an appropriate time to honor him. Hume started his career in national broadcast news with ABC—you know, the company that now calls “The View” a news program. In 1989, he became ABC’s chief White House correspondent and was prominent in that role until he quit in 1996 to join the new rebel network. A thorough professional, a recognizable face and a respected name, he instantly gave credibility and visibility to the Roger Ailes-led project.
Over the weekend and already this morning, this nice, peaceful ethics blog was the victim of harassment and attack from an embittered banned commenter. It’s far from the first time this has happened since 2009, when EA first spread its wings, but this one was unique in its persistence and idiocy. What kind of person spends his or her valuable time writing long, mostly coherent screeds to post where 1) they aren’t welcome and 2) where they will be dispatched to Spam Hell the second the proprietor, me, sees them? You can answer that question as well as I can, but the inescapable conclusion is that such conduct validates my judgment in banning them in the first place. Ethical people don’t act like that. Rational people don’t act like that. Ethics Alarms is for ethical, rational, and also smart people. For “Cassandra’s AI Agent,” one out of three isn’t good enough, and I’m starting to have doubts about the “smart” part.
Thanks to Steve Witherspoon, I finally learned how WordPress lets a blogger block a commenter. It would have been nice if WordPress itself made this information conveniently available or obvious: it’s buried several layers deep on my “Dashboard.” Oh, I’m sure there was a video with the information made available to me at some point many years ago. Silly me—I assumed that visitors to an ethics blog would respect the host’s rules, orders and requests, including the order to stay out of the comment threads. Most have, in fact, usually after an angry email or a single last word. Not “Cassandra,” however, and not the previous comment-bombing champ,”A Friend.”
The device of pretending to be a new commenter using a new email address is particularly obnoxious. “Cassandra’s AI Agent” is also in violation of EA rules by not sending me the real name behind the screen name. Come to think of it, so are many of you regular commenters out there: shame on you, and shame on me, for I have been lax in enforcing this requirement. If I had, we wouldn’t be debating whether CAA is Alizia Tyler or not. (I still vote “no.”)
But before we wave goodby to this pompous asshole, let me clarify, for the record, the delusions that seemingly led to the rage-fest. Many of them appear somewhere in the Comment Policies linked on the Home Page, and every aspiring commenter is obligated to read them. Nevertheless, I’ll risk being redundant.
The hits just keep on coming for the “Women are the victims of the patriarchy so let’s go socialist!” crowd. First we had the mother who murdered her three children (if women could just murder them before they were born, this would never happen!). That was a really good one, but its path to intersectionalism was complicated when the hold-out juror turned out to be black. Then, as usual, the Axis decided to take revenge by doxxing him, the social media mob decided to mug him, and the Axis media started lying.
Never mind! To the rescue came Tennessee, which botched the lethal injection that was supposed to kill a woman who had been on Death Row for decades. Other convicted murderers have had their lethal injections fail, but not women, and, most important of all, not before mid-terms. Christa Pike has been another toxic empathy bonanza for progressives, but just as it was really getting rolling, another she said-they said campus rape scandal burst into the headlines. “Jane Doe” is a much more appealing alleged victim to cheer despite the strong likelihood that she is setting out to (further) wreck the lives of young men whose primary offense may have been that they accepted her drunken and drugged offer of “free pussy.” Interestingly, every lawyer I’ve asked so far has agreed with me that it’s likely that the whole ethics train wreck was launched by an enterprising attorney who told “Jane,” “You know, if you sue, Cornell will probably just settle to avoid the bad publicity. You’ll get millions and I’ll get a third! What’s not to like? As for those guys you’ll have to accuse, fuck ’em. Oh, right! You already did!”
