I’m not happy about this, but there it is.
Back in October I wrote this post about how the boobs at Safeway managed to give me over $300 in food for my wife’s memorial event without charging me for it. I ruefully observed that as an ethicist I was obligated to go to the store and pay what I owed them despite the fact that the Safewayers were none the wiser: it was a classic example of “ethics is what you do when nobody’s watching.”
Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist who teaches at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has authored a guest column for the New York Times that opens up, for the umpteenth time, an ethics topic that makes me uncomfortable. His subject is the cultural delusion shared by many in American society that rewarding effort is just as important as rewarding success, and perhaps moreso. He writes in part:
“….we’ve taken the practice of celebrating industriousness too far. We’ve gone from commending effort to treating it as an end in itself. We’ve taught a generation of kids that their worth is defined primarily by their work ethic. We’ve failed to remind them that working hard doesn’t guarantee doing a good job (let alone being a good person)…..[W]hat worries me most about valuing perseverance above all else: It can motivate people to stick with bad strategies instead of developing better ones…What counts is not sheer effort but the progress and performance that result. Motivation is only one of multiple variables in the achievement equation. Ability, opportunity and luck count, too. Yes, you can get better at anything, but you can’t be great at everything.”
That’s nice.
After taking to Truth Social on Christmas Day to be sarcastic about China and Panama ( “Merry Christmas to all, including to the wonderful soldiers of China, who are lovingly, but illegally, operating the Panama Canal (where we lost 38,000 people in its building 110 years ago), always making certain that the United States puts in Billions of Dollars in ‘repair’ money, but will have absolutely nothing to say about ‘anything,'”), troll Canada (“…Also, to Governor Justin Trudeau of Canada, whose Citizens’ Taxes are far too high, but if Canada was to become our 51st State, their Taxes would be cut by more than 60%, their businesses would immediately double in size, and they would be militarily protected like no other Country anywhere in the World. Likewise, to the people of Greenland, which is needed by the United States for National Security purposes and, who want the U.S. to be there, and we will!”), the President-Elect concluded with this:
That’s nice too.
Naturally, the Axis media contrasted Trump’s bluster with the official Christmas message from, supposedly, Joe and Jill. President Biden narrated a video tour of the White House that was posted on YouTube late on Christmas Eve. He urged Americans to set aside “all the noise and everything that divides us.” “We’re here on this Earth to care for one another, to love one another,” Biden says in a voiceover while the camera pans past the White House. Christmas decorations. “Too often we see each other as enemies, not as neighbors, not as fellow Americans,” he said. He urged Americans to find a moment of “quiet reflection” to remind themselves to treat each other with dignity and respect, to “live in the light” and remember there was more to unite than divide Americans. “We’re truly blessed to live in this nation,” he said.
Observations:
1. President Biden has some gall spouting a hypocritical message like that after calling Trump supporters “garbage” and heading the most intentionally divisive Presidential term in history culminating in the darkest Presidential campaign in history, in which one party called the other’s candidate the equivalent of Hitler and warned that he would end democracy. Too often “we” see each other as enemies? Wait, who was this guy?
Biden’s message is standard, insincere politician BS, and stinks of it. A chatbot could have written that stuff. Maybe a chatbot did. No one could hear such cliched pablum and think anything but “Yada yada, ramalama-ding-dong.”
2. It is Presidential, however. Dishonest, insulting, fatuous, infuriating, but still Presidential.
3. Trump’s message is not Presidential. It is gratuitously nasty, self-indulgent and inappropriate for a national leader’s message at Christmas. Does it have to be said that “Go to Hell” does not belong in a Christmas message not authored by the Babylon Bee or Ebenezer Scrooge?
4. Both messages are unethical. Trump’s message is inexcusable.
5. This does not bode well.
From the Daily Beast : “President Joe Biden signed 50 new bills into law in a Christmas Eve signing spree as he wraps his last month in office. Among the new laws includes legislation to fight child abuse at residential treatment facilities, fight hazing on college campuses, and a measure that finally designates the bald eagle as the national bird. Many of the bills signed by the outgoing Democratic president on Tuesday were bipartisan efforts—including the bill finally acknowledging the bald eagle. Although the iconic bird of prey is featured prominently on symbols, including the government’s official seal adopted in 1782, the U.S. did not have an official national bird. The efforts to make the bald eagle official were spearheaded by Preston Cook, the co-chair of the National Eagle Center in Minnesota, who first discovered that the country did not have a national bird, according to a Washington Post profile.”
Gee, thank God for President Biden! This might just be the little extra he needs to avoid being named the Worst President Ever in the upcoming Ethics Alarms resolution of its long inquiry into the question.
“Biden” also engaged in some hyper-partisanship when he vetoed the JUDGES Act, bipartisan legislation to create additional district court judgeships. The Senate passed the bill unanimously in August, and a bipartisan House majority finally did so as well in November. It would have created desperately needed 66 new district court seats over the next decade, based upon the recommendations of the Judicial Conference. The bill was endorsed by the Federal Bar Association and the Federal Judges Association. The White House issued a statement that translated means nothing more rational than “we don’t want new judges appointed by Donald Trump, so there.“
“S. 4199 would create new judgeships in States where Senators have sought to hold open existing judicial vacancies. Those efforts to hold open vacancies suggest that concerns about judicial economy and caseload are not the true motivating force behind passage of this bill now,” the veto message stated in part. So nobody denies that the U.S. needs new judges, but Biden’s dark masters want the new positions to be created for the right motives. This is a slap at the Republican states that tried to slow down Biden’s waves of DEI appointments over the last six months.
But back to the phony national bird issue: if everyone knew the bald eagle was the de facto national bird since it was obviously the national symbol, being on the seal, on money, on flagpoles and ubiquitous for a couple of centuries, why does the species have to be the official national bird via Congress, the President, and brand new law? So many matters of real importance to try to accomplish before the end of the year: one would think that all is well.
Above is pie chart reflecting the Wikipedia Foundation’s own report on how it spent its money over the past year. This arrives while every Wikipedia search is afflicted with drop-down pleas for contributions. In the categories listed above, the only ones that should be active concerns of the online search service are infrastructure and effectiveness. Equity and Inclusion are irrelevant to what people are seeking when they use Wikipedia; I’m not even sure what “safety” refers to. 29% of the budget was devoted to these dubious, discriminatory—but woke!—objectives.
Elon Musk has been issuing critical tweets about these priorities, with good reason. Wikipedia is both essential and inherently flawed and unreliable because of its vulnerability to bias and manipulation. To be a trustworthy source of information for online research, it must be closely monitored to identify agenda-driven entries and misleading statements motivated by partisan and ideological objectives. Quite simply, an organization that devoted to DEI cant cannot be trusted in this regard.
No one interested in improving Wikipedia’s accuracy and competence should give a single dollar in response to its constant pleas for money as long as almost a third of that dollar will be spend on dubious programs that, if anything, are likely to impair the service’s effectiveness rather than enhance it.
Well, several, really, but I feel that I must talk about this one. I was wrestling with whether to post anything but Christmas-related posts today, though I don’t have much else to do than work on Ethics Alarms. This compels me to comment as soon as possible.
During his keynote address at the Turning Point USA gathering three days ago, President-elect Donald Trump said, while assuring his audience that the U.S. was about to enter a new “Golden Age” under his leadership,
“There’s a spirit that we have now that we didn’t have just a short while ago. Sadly, we didn’t have. Who the hell can have spirit watching women get beat up in a boxing ring? I don’t think that’s spirit, right? We’re going to end that one quick! We’re going to end it very quickly. We’re going to end that one very quickly.”
I am resigned to Trump saying ridiculous and irresponsible things like that forever. The outburst is not a good sign. The Christmas miracle I’m hoping for (among others) is that somehow, some way, he will learn that he has to think before he speaks, just a little bit, and that someone will read the Constitution to him, explaining it along the way.
I had been torn over whether to see “Nyad,” the acclaimed 2023 biopic about distance swimmer Diane Nyad’s quest to complete the first “unassisted swim” from Cuba to Florida. On the pro- side was that the two stars, Annette Bening and Jodie Foster are among my favorite actresses in Hollywood. On the anti- side is my long-time problems with Nyad herself, so I thought the movie might drive me crazy. I also suspected that the critical raves were based more on the progressive movie reviewer mob’s determination to extol a movie about a lesbian couple than the actual quality of the film.
It is an ethics movie, however, so last night I finally viewed it on Netflix. As I expected, both Bening and Foster are excellent, but Bening more than Foster: Jodie plays Nyad’s galpal pretty much like she’s Jodie Foster. Hardly a stretch. Bening, in contrast, is doing one of those against-type portrayals requiring a dramatic physical transformation that is always irresistible to critics and Oscar voters, like Robert DeNiro playing Jake Lamotta, or Chalize Theron playing serial killer Aileen Woronos.
It’s a stunt and not a completely successful one: the real Nyad was and is a beefy mesomorphic athlete, and Bening, despite filling out her usual long and lean frame a bit, doesn’t look like either a swimmer or an athlete. She is ultimately convincing, however, nonetheless. She also plays Nyad as a self-obsessed, narcissistic jerk, which she is.
by Curmie
[This is Jack: Yikes! I didn’t realize that EA had been Curmie-less for a full four months! The second Ethics Alarms featured columnist has been both busy and seeking respite from politics, which unfortunately has been disproportionately rampant here during the Presidential campaign drama and related horrors. I’m hoping Curmie can leads us out of the dark into the light. Welcome back, Curmie!]
I’m not sure if this is sufficiently ethics-related for this blog, but since Jack posted it, so be it.
I retired from full-time teaching in August of 2021. It was August instead of May because I was hoping—to no avail, as it turns out—to do one more iteration of a Study Abroad program in Ireland; the trip had already been postponed from the previous summer. I did teach one course per semester in the 2021-22 academic year, but then not at all for two years.
I assumed that I’d never be in a classroom again except for an occasional guest appearance to be, apparently, the local authority on absurdism. But then a colleague got a one-semester sabbatical to work on her book. It would be extremely unlikely to find someone who had both the ability to teach all the courses in question and the willingness to move to small-town East Texas for a one-semester gig at crappy pay. The powers-that-be then decided to try to staff those courses locally. I suspect I was the only available qualified person in a 75-mile radius, so I was asked if I’d teach Theatre History I and II this semester. I agreed.
There were a lot of changes for me, completely apart from the two-year hiatus. I’d taught both courses numerous times, but never in the same semester, and always on a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule; this time it was Tuesday/Thursday. Back in the days when I was the only person teaching these courses I could insist that one of the research papers be on a certain type of topic; that’s no longer a requirement. And I ditched the expensive anthology I’d used for years, switching to things that were available online. This also allowed me to choose the plays I wanted to teach instead of necessarily the ones in the anthology: critics may agree that the The Cherry Orchard is Anton Chekhov’s best play, for example, but there is absolutely no question that The Seagull is far more important to theatre history, so I used that.
Anyway… what caught my attention?
It says something, I don’t know what, that Reason, the libertarian magazine and website would choose a non-lawyer to rail against Donald Trump’s lawsuits against news organizations. Jacob Sullum exposes his ignorance when he says, repeatedly, that the suits are “plainly” and “patently” frivolous. Whatever they are, frivolous they are not. A suit is not frivolous under the legal ethics rules (3.1) unless it cannot possibly prevail if the court accepts new theories of how the law should be interpreted. Many said that Trump’s lawsuit against ABC was frivolous. As Nelson Muntz would say, “Ha ha!”
Trump filed a suit against CBS in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on October 31 in response to “60 Minutes'” deceptive editing of its Kamala Harris interview, claiming it violated that state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act and cost him “at least” $10 billion in damages. Trump filed another suit against The Des Moines Register this week claiming that the newspaper publicizing of an inaccurate—let’s say wildly inaccurate presidential poll violated Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act.
I think the Iowa suit is a stretch, and I don’t see how CBS’s “60 Minutes” cheat cost Trump $10 billion. But the Des Moines Register poll was incompetent and irresponsible (the veteran pollster responsible retired after the election) and the “60 Minutes” stunt was as blatant an example of a news organization slamming its fist on the metaphorical scale to get an election result it wanted as we have ever seen.
Metaphorically speaking of course.
Looking back, despite having a nightmarish year personally and in my business, Ethics Alarms has had an excellent year. The Fani Wallis scandal first broke early this year when it was revealed that she had hired her adulterous huggy-bear Nathan Wade as one of the prosecutors going after Donald Trump for allegedly trying to steal the 2020 election in Georgia. This was a transparently a political prosecution that Willis had not been shy about trumpeting. She then went on a couple of junkets with Wade in which he paid for their enjoyment and entertainment. I immediately stated here that the this created a conflict of interest as well as the appearance of impropriety, and that both Willis and Wade needed to be separated from the case.
Back in May, I included the sordid tale in a CLE ethics seminar for the D.C. Bar, noting also that Willis was incompetent by endangering a high profile prosecution by risking the backlash that in fact occurred when her relationship with Wade was revealed, and also breached her duty of communication by not consulting her client the County through its leadership, regarding her plans to employ a lawyer with no previous criminal law experience because he was sharing her bed. I told the class that the only way Willis or the County could extricate itself from this mess was by separating both Wade and Willis from the case. Eventually a judge ruled that Wade indeed had to go, after which he gave an interview that called into serious question not only his integrity but also his maturity and brain function.
Ethics Alarms 