U.S. Society

This Question to the Ethicist Sends Me to the Wood-chipper

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

[That would be my foot sticking out. I’m sure my good neighbor Ted would be willing to get me through…or any one of the thousands of people I’ve infuriated over the years.]

You can read Kwame Anthony Appiah’s answer to the most discouraging question he’s ever been asked (my description, not his) if you like. Essentially “The Ethicist” says (I’m counting here), “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and no!” As usual the New York Times “Ethicist ” is thorough, but he could have written his response in his sleep, as I could have, and if you’re reading an ethics blog, so could you.

Here’s the question, and hold on to your heads…

A close friend of many years whom I’ve always thought of as an extremely honest, ethical person recently confided in me that she shoplifts on a regular basis. She explained that she never steals from small or independently owned businesses, only from large companies, and only when no small business nearby carries the items she needs. She targets companies that are known to treat their employees badly, or that knowingly source their products from places where human rights are violated, or whose owners/C.E.O.s donate to ultraconservative, authoritarian-leaning candidates, etc.

My friend volunteers in her community and has worked her entire life for nonprofit antipoverty and human rights organizations. While she isn’t wealthy, she is able to afford the items she steals and believes that she is redistributing wealth; she says she keeps track of the value of what she’s stolen and donates an equal amount to charity. She thinks of her actions as civil disobedience and says she will accept the consequences if she’s caught.

When she told me, I thought, Stealing is wrong. But as we discussed it, I realized I was oversimplifying a complex moral issue. Is it wrong to steal food to feed your starving children? What if I stole a legally purchased gun from a person I knew was about to commit a mass shooting? Are those who bring office supplies home from their workplace also thieves? I find myself struggling with the question of whether an individual’s actions are morally defensible if they do more good than harm. — Name Withheld

Continue reading →

When JFK Called Ike: Will We Ever See the Like Again?

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

For some reason the Kennedy family waited a long time to release this recording; strange, because it reflects well on the sainted JFK. I just encountered it recently.

In the midst of the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962, President Kennedy called former President Eisenhower to brief him on the situation and extract any wisdom he could from his predecessor.

This is how our system is supposed to work, with leaders, officials and politicians interacting with each other respectfully and in the best interests of the nation. Ike and JFK were hardly pals: after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, White House staff reported hearing Eisenhower reaming out Kennedy from behind a closed door.

Nonetheless, this phone call shows two Presidents from opposing parties working together and showing each other the kind of courtesy and civility essential for productive cooperation. Our republic and our culture were healthier then, even as World War III loomed.

Comment of the Day: “Second Most Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Cal)”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Posting today has been a real chore, because I began it with a funeral and a Catholic Mass, both of which always exhaust me, and the old friends I saw there (most of them, anyway) looked so much older than the last time I saw them that I am afraid to look in the mirror.

That makes two reasons I’m grateful for Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Second Most Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Cal).” I’m exhausted, and the ethics issue he raises is a crucial one without an obvious solution.

Here it is:

***

The horrible thing about this conversation is that people like Lee have this nugget of truth, uncleverly hidden inside the fragrant package of their bullshit proposals, and that is that we need a plan going forward for labor. Workplace participation is going down, wages have been stagnant, cost of living is increasing, food back participation and foreclosure rates are rising… “Stock line goes up” be damned, the bottom seems to be falling out.

I don’t know what you realistically do about this. A “$50 minimum wage” seems like the kind of toddler thinking Democrats are good at: Address the problem by treating the most surface level of symptoms, realities of the market be damned.

Because the reality is that automation is already stealing jobs, and increasing the cost of labor just makes automation investment that much more appealing. That spirals into a situation where I think the average person is going to be unemployed.

And I don’t have the answer. This is a topic that keeps me up at night.

Frankly, I think that the decent into a laborless economy is unavoidable, it’s just a matter of time, regardless of whether or not we speed up the process with stupid policy. Right now, “Truck Driver” is the most common job in 29 out of the 50 states. As technology gets cheaper and as labor gets more expensive, eventually, I don’t think it’s impossible that in 20 years, self-driving vehicles will have made that job obsolete. What do you think that does to the market?

I think the fight that’s coming up is going to be whether we purposefully throttle innovation in order to preserve jobs, or we accept that the majority of people aren’t going to labor physically, and we start to conceptualize what that looks like. And again… Thoughts that keep me up: Even if we throttle our technology our adversaries won’t, so I don’t think that choice is viable, and I think the alternative is a deeply taxed, deeply controlled form of socialism. Which is obviously undesirable, but what else does capitalism look like when your average person owns nothing, and has no prospect to move forward with?

Friday Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

My sister, a rational liberal except on the topics of Donald Trump and Wuhan masks, now ends every phone conversation we have as it drifts into current affairs by exclaiming “Everything’s going to Hell! I can’t stand it!” and hanging up.

Speaking of damnation, did anyone take the time to watch the hearing yesterday (continuing today) on the Fani Willis conflict of interest allegations? Nothing happened that would justify an ethics post, although the episode again demonstrated that we have no news media organizations that can be trust to convey objectively any event with partisan implications.

Then there’s this from NBC: “Aides and allies close to former President Trump have discussed the former president giving the official Republican response to President Joe Biden’s March 7 State of the Union address…two of the sources said that Trump himself has discussed it, but both said he is leaning against the high-profile gig.” 

Why wouldn’t the GOP do that, and why in the world would Trump not want to? Normally, nobody pays much attention to the rebuttals, because, among other things, they aren’t rebuttals but rather per-determined speeches usually delivered by blah elected officials. A Trump response would be boffo political theater, especially since in another month Joe might be reciting nursery rhymes.

But these are the things going through my fevered brain right now.

Write about any ethics topic running through yours.

A Super-Woke Book and Wine Store Just Went Belly-Up: Good! It Deserved to Fail…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Isn’t that a friendly, young, diverse group? It’s the staff of Paradis Books and Bread in North Miami. Aww! Too bad. The place is closing, the cafe and wine bar announced. And that fate is entirely, completely, because those nice welcoming people are intolerant bigots, and proud of it. Their fate couldn’t happen to more deserving people.

I don’t know how I missed this story, and I apologize for that. The “nationally acclaimed” North Miami establishment (according to Axios…Seriously?) opened in 2021. Last year, it told Fox News commentator Gianno Caldwell, who had been meeting with friends at a table, that he was not welcome in the establishment because their “views did not align” with his. Caldwell was stunned (he’s a black conservative, as if that matters) and tweeted,

“I can’t believe what just happened. I met up with friends for breakfast at Paradis Books and Bread in North Miami & while we were having discussions about politics we were told by the owner that we were not welcomed there because we aren’t politically aligned. Outrageous.”

The owners gave their own spin to the episode, writing,

…”a group of people came in, ordered food, sat in the inside corner, and talked quite loudly for over an hour. A lot of what they were discussing was very troubling, specifically when talking about women in degrading ways as well as using eugenic arguments around their thoughts on Roe v. Wade… Once it was clear that they were finished with their meal, we told them that our views don’t align, and that the language they were using was unwelcome in our space.”

Caldwell disputed their characterization of his discussion with his friends to Sean Hannity on the air, saying,

Continue reading →

Conservative Pundits Flogging Rationalization #28 In Response To Losing George Santos’s Seat Show Why Nobody Trusts Either Party

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

That bit of res ipsa loquitur was vomited up by the disgusting George Santos after a Democrat won this week’s special election in New York’s 3rd Congressional District to replace him. Santos, you recall, had been elected to represent the district in 2022 despite having no qualifications whatsoever, because he lied about, almost literally, everything. It was a genuinely fraudulent victory, far beyond the typical campaign false promises, fake positions and embellishments the American public is used to. Republicans were as accountable as Santos for allowing such scum to run in the first place.

The Republican Party seldom does anything right, but kicking this creepy-crawly out of the House was one of the few times it has been ethical (and I’m including “competence” is that description) in recent years. Both parties are responsible for upholding the dignity and honor of government institutions, particularly Congress and the Presidency. Right now, I fell secure in saying that the current crop of House members is the least qualified, the least trustworthy and the least ethical by far, and that condition is dangerous. There are probably ten or more members who would greatly enhance the body by leaving it, but Santos was unquestionable the worst of the worst. (As I wrote in the last Santos post, Rep. Bowman, the Mad Alarmist, would probably be next on my list, “Bowman should be sanctioned, “but compared to Santos he’s John Quincy Adams.”)

Congress has to insist on standards, and a political party has to insist on standards. At least the GOP demonstrated that it has some. It’s about time.

Continue reading →

A Valentine’s Day Ethics Catastrophe

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

In large part because a large percentage of women rationalize the killing of human beings in their wombs as a “right,” and also because so many of them are programmed to be suckers for arguments like “They’re only seeking better lives for their children!” to excuse open borders,” “If this gun law only saves one life, it’s worth it,” and “All Joe Biden is guilty of is being a good father” (in response to undeniable evidence that the President enabled Hunter’s influence peddling), the women of the younger generations particularly are overwhelmingly woke, extremely progressive, and inclined to tear up when they hear “Imagine.” 

Hence a majority of Millenial and GenZ femmes, 54%, reported to pollsters cited by the New York Post that it is a “relationship red flag if a partner listens to ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ podcast.” or refuses to see the “Barbie” movie.

Well, I’ll go to any movie my wife wants to see, and had the same attitude when I was dating. And then came “Looking for Mr. Goodbar’….

Continue reading →

Observations on Being Forced to Watch Network and Cable TV

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

A lost remote (it’s got to be around here somewhere!) has trapped me in Direct TV for the last two days, and I noticed…

1. I saw yet another unclever, gratuitous example of those working in the once ascendant, now gutter-level medium of television (Edward R. Murrow would be so disappointed…) thinking that using code for “fuck” is hilarious and appealing. [This recurring topic was discussed again just about a week ago]

The local Fox channel was promoting the syndicated “Family Feud” show, itself now almost continuously obsessed with smutty questions and answers, with the catch phrase, “What the Feud!” Does the letter ‘F’ now automatically suggest “fuck?” Is the implication that “fuck” is intended, buried somewhere or barely implied intrinsically hilarious to the average TV audience? The depressing phenomnon reminds me of when my theater did a special performance of “Moby Dick Rehearsed” for middle-school kids and a lot of them couldn’t stop giggling and making wise-cracks every time an actor mentioned the whale—“Dick,” you know—or said “she blows.”

Continue reading →

More on the Hur Report, the President’s Brain, and the 25th Amendment

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

A lot more, in fact. I tried to figure out how to stitch all this together, but I’m resorting to bullet points:

  • Jonathan Turley issued an excellent blog post explaining why the 25th Amendment is highly unlikely to be successfully employed to send our declining President into retirement. Do read it, but the short version is that if a President is sufficiently compos mentis to object to his removal for being incapacitated (or has staff acting on his behalf to do it), the 25th Amendment’s elaborate procedures all but guarantee that the effort will fail because going forward would require a 2/3 majority in both Houses of Congress. The amendment contains significant safeguards against the 25th Amendment coup scenario that “the resistance” and Democrats were pushing when Trump was President.(I should have made this point back when Ethics Alarms was analyzing the dishonesty of 25th Amendment arguments by the Trump-Deranged during his term.) One particularly significant statement by Turley: “The various experts and pundits who called for Trump’s removal under the 25th Amendment are notably silent this week, even after [Biden’s] own Justice Department cited his diminished faculties as a reason for not charging him.”
  • Professor Alan Dershowitz, a progressive legal expert relegated to Fox News and other conservative platforms because he refuses to warp his analyses to “get” Trump,  harshly criticized Special Counsel Hur’s report on President Biden’s handling of classified documents as “unfair to both sides” yesterday. I believe his analysis is correct. He said in part,

Continue reading →

Incorrigible Harvard Professor Larry Lessig Strikes Again!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I love that photo of Lessig! As a director, if I wanted to stage a pose that screamed “pompous jerk,” that’s exactly what I would tell an actor to do.

But I digress…Prof. Lessig is an unusually unethical faculty presence even for Harvard, as Ethics Alarms has documented since 2015 . That is when he ran for the Democratic nomination for President promising to be a “referendum President” who would serve only as long as it took to pass the Citizens Equality Act of 2017, a potpouri of progressive agenda items of varying wackiness. Once he had persuaded Congress to pass that dog’s breakfast, Lessig would step down, and his Vice President would become President. And who did the esteemed government prof regard as qualified for that position? Oh, just Elizabeth Warren, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Robert Reich, Van Jones, Jon Stewart, Sheryl Sandberg, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley, and Joe Biden, among others.

What a great plan!

Continue reading →