The photo above carries the caption: “Metropolis parking utilizing AI to create drive in drive out parking without the need for a ticket and validation. This lot is at 236 S. Los Angeles in Little Tokyo in Downtown Los Angeles.” Here’s my caption: “Metropolis parking can bite me.”
And did, come to think of it.
Great: one more thing I wish I didn’t have to worry about…
The New York Times has an article up [Gift link!] titled “Why Airline Pilots Feel Pushed to Hide Their Mental Illness.” Wait—there are mentally ill people flying planes? Yikes. But of course there are…depending on what is called a “mental illness” at any given time.
In the Denzel Washington film “Flight,” the actor plays an excellent pilot who is an alcoholic and cocaine abuser. He saves a plane full of passengers from doom by executing a brilliant but risky mid-air maneuver, then has to cover up the fact that he was drunk when he did it. I haven’t checked lately to see if alcoholism is current classified as a mental problem, but having had extensive experience in the area, I have concluded that it is a physical problem with profound effects on mental and emotional stability, so I really don’t care if it’s technically a mental illness or not. Alcoholics and recovering alcoholics should not be piloting aircraft.
Isn’t that an easy call? The same call should apply to bi-polar individuals, chronic depressives, OCD sufferers…but how far down the list do we go? It’s been estimated that as much as 20% of successful individuals, high-performers, are sociopaths. I don’t think I want to know how many airline pilots are narcissists. Once upon a time, homosexuality was considered a mental illness. Next up: transsexual pilots.
One of the many promised posts that I have failed to complete was a full list of the many varieties of “fake news.” I am sorry about that; indeed, I apologize for all of the supposed follow-ups I recklessly announce and never get to. (I know everyone is sick of my bemoaning the fact that I can’t make a living with an ethics blog, and how charging for commentary via substack et. al. would undermine my mission, so I won’t elaborate on THAT again…but boy, could I use a staff). One of the sub-categories of fake news is what I call fake non-news, when major Axis news organizations deliberately bury or hide news stories that would harm The Cause, (or Causes), like turning the U.S. into a European-style socialist nanny state, ensuring that Democrats run the nation in perpetuity, advancing expensive and futile climate-change policies, or cancelling the Second Amendment.
Surely many examples of this breach of journalism ethics leap to mind: Joe Biden’s dementia, Hunter Biden’s laptop, Hillary Clinton’s campaign seeding the Russian Collusion hoax, the Wuhan lab leak source of the pandemic, Biden’s Senate staffer who accused him of rape, and more. There is another one making its non-visibility clear now: This story…
It’s an email variety I have come to dread, though EA has received very few of them over the 15 years of this blog’s existence.
“We are reaching out on behalf of our client,” the missive read, “regarding the URL posting mentioned below. We kindly request [its] removal… [Our client] has experienced significant distress and negative consequences in both his personal and professional life. The damage caused by this article has affected his relationships, employment opportunities, and overall well-being….”
The article at issue was posted in 2012. Naturally, I didn’t remember it. I reviewed the post and found it well-sourced and reasonably stated. (Gee, I wasn’t as swashbuckling back then!) The episode I had focused on from an ethics perspective indeed had some embarrassing features: it involved a dentist who had dismissed an assistant because her pulchritude was causing domestic problems at home. (I’ve been watching “Bombshell,” the movie about the sexual harassment scandal at Fox News. The story I posted on would be the equivalent of one of the Fox News blondes suing because she had been fired in the wake of rumors that she had slept her way to a prime time show when nothing of the kind occurred. )
Guest Post by Steve Witherspoon
[My first reaction to this passionate guest post was “Gee, how do you really feel, Steve?” My second was “The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the host.” My third is: I wouldn’t laugh yet. One of my oldest friends is visiting D.C. to meet his new grandson, birthed by the wife of his former daughter, now son. When I went to the memorial service of a former thoroughly Irish Catholic boss from the streets of Brooklyn, I discovered that two of his three sons, all of whom I knew as children, are now middle aged women, and seemingly very happy about it. A close member of my immediate family is “transitioning.” Whatever it is that’s going on here, its getting dig in like a tick.]
I have raised the question in an earlier essay titled, What’s Considered Normal, where I looked into the differences between what is considered to be “normal” and “abnormal”. You can read the arguments presented in the entire post if you like, but I’ll briefly summarize some of the details as I go along in this essay.
I think it’s extremely important that everyone understands the core of an argument based on the words used and how those words are defined. So with that in mind, let’s start by presenting some generally accepted “norms”.
NORMAL
ABNORMAL
Deviating from what is normal or usual.
Not normal, average, typical, or usual.
Something that is abnormal is out of the ordinary, or not typical
ENABLING
Dysfunctional: Deviating from the norms of social behavior in a way regarded as bad.
Delusional: Characterized by or holding false beliefs or judgments about reality that are held despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, typically as a symptom of a mental condition.
Now that we have the terms settled, on to the core of this essay…
An easy “Nelson.”
A British jury last week convicted Lydia Mugambe of forcing a young Ugandan woman to work as her slave after tricking her into coming to the U.K.
Mugambe, studying for a doctorate in law at the University of Oxford when she got into the slave business, is a high court judge in Uganda (DING!),a criminal tribunal judge at the United Nations (DING!), and previous Human Rights Fellow (DING!) at Columbia University (DINGDINGDINGDINGDING!—Is Columbia having a bad month or what?)
Mugambe’s passionate social justice activism for “gender-based justice” (DING!) previously earned her the People’s Choice Gavel Award from Women’s Link Worldwide (DING!). In 2022 Mugambe also won the Vera Chirwa Human Rights Award of the University of Pretoria, South Africa (of course DING!) , for her work to ensure gender-based justice in Africa.
Kamala Harris lost the election because she was an empty suit, DEI Vice-President who tried to fake her way to the finish line while running one of the most incompetent campaigns in American Presidential history. There’s no mystery. It didn’t help that she was inextricably linked to the worst administration ever, slowly being revealed as a four year fraud on the American public. What’s the mystery? The constant, futile and insulting efforts we keep hearing by apologists for the Harris debacle are continuations of the denial and the “it isn’t what it is” gaslighting that has been the standard operating procedure for the Axis of Unethical Conduct since 2016.
Now comes Amie Parnes at The Hill to explain the real reason the Worst Presidential Candidate Ever lost to Donald Trump. President Biden kept insisting that “there be no daylight” between the policies of his adminsitration and what Harris advocated on the stump, in interviews, and in the statments of her surrogates: “Almost everywhere she went, Harris walked among former Biden aides who sought to defend his presidency. Her campaign was run by a former White House deputy chief of staff…and a phalanx of department heads who had served Biden until the previous month.”
2012’s “The Company You Keep” was the last film directed by Robert Redford, which tells you something. Redford is an excellent director but often not a commercially popular one: this movie, about aging Sixties radicals and their slow-dawning realization (or not) that their “movement” was ethically and logically flawed did not do well at the box office, and after his previous ethics movie (“The Conspirator,” which I posted about here) bombed, Redford’s days of getting studios to bet on his work were over.
“The Company You Keep” is not as good as “The Conspirator,” but it is surprisingly relevant in 2025 as we watch the American Left struggling with its hypocrisy, foolish utopianism and increasingly obvious hatred for its own country. Redford plays a former Weatherman (“The Weathermen” was the violent faction of the Students for Democratic Action) who has been in hiding in plain sight since a domestic terrorism action by the group turned fatal. When his long-standing alternate identity as a prominent lawyer is outed by an idealistic young journalist, Redford goes on the run. In the process he encounters former fellow-revolutionaries, some of whom still burn for the cause.
The first post today already has me dreading what is to come, and, believe it or not, the next one is even more stupid than that one.
Help me out here by adding some challenging, enlightening, erudite discussions on the finer points of ethics while I stand over here wondering what the world is coming to, and trying to avoid the most likely answer…
See? The Washington Post still has some uses! A recent sort-of, kind-of, tongue-in-cheek essay by Rick Reilly raised an issue that has gnawed at my consciousness for a long time, namely the practice of scattering a loved one’s cremated remains in public places. A brief summary of my gut reaction: “Ick!”
Reilly writes in part,
Can you stop scattering your dearly departed’s ashes all over my favorite golf course? I want to play Pebble Beach, not your grandpa….Oh, and please stop littering your labradoodle’s ashes on the beach near my house. (A) Cremated remains include tiny fragments of bone and teeth and God knows what else, (B) I run there — barefoot, dammit — and (C) It’s illegal for dogs to be on the beach, whether on a leash or in a Folgers can. In fact, this obsession with unauthorized scattering of dead things all over America’s prettiest places needs to perish, too. Our most famous ballyards deal with these messes all the time….How many Cubs base runners have slipped rounding people’s uncles?
That’s pretty much the flavor of the whole piece, but as it coincides with a bias of mine—I think scattering ashes is pagan nonsense and stupid—it has the ring of truth. (And Tom Cruise sure didn’t love getting covered with the stuff in “War of the Worlds.”) The author concludes,
…3.2 million people die every year in America, and, according to the National Funeral Directors Association, 62 percent ask to be cremated. That’s more than double the rate 20 years ago. And nearly half say they “would prefer to have their remains scattered in a sentimental place.” Which would mean nearly a million incinerated Americans annually coating the sequoias at Yosemite and choking the loons on Golden Pond and sprinkling the churros of Santa Monica. It’s just bad taste.
Is it “ick,” unethical, or a perfectly loving and spiritual practice? As usual with the ethics quizzes here, I have my mind open at least a crack.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Ethics Alarms 