U.S. Society

Pondering the Incompetent and Irresponsible Blatherings on “The View”…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

You might well ask why spending a second of one’s relatively short time on earth considering, much less listening to, the idiotic ladies of ABC’s (that’s Disney, remember: this is something else to blame Disney for) “The View” is anything but self-abuse. I forced myself to watch the outpouring of stupid punditry regarding the SCOTUS decision on the Axis disqualification plot, and have been sitting on a post since because I can’t muster a definitive answer. But right now I need something else to think about before I start another day of trying to put my head, heart, house, business and life back together, so let’s look at this mess, and come back to why at the end.

Easily the most brain-popping comment of the stupidity orgy came from Whoopi, who once was obviously the smartest person on “The View” panel, was when she said the unanimous Court had given Donald Trump “a rubber to put on and walk through the poo.” I’m not sure what that even means, but it’s a disgusting image, and all the ladies nodded with approval. Later she said that in ruling as it did, the current Court resembled “the pro-segregationist Supreme Court I grew up with.”

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The Google AI’s Values and Priorities: Scary (But Funny, I Guess…)

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The people who set up Google’s artificial intelligence bot “Gemini” had their biases and priorities exposed hilariously (including here) when it was discovered that the freshly-minted AI bot would not create a Causasion image, even going to the extremes of transforming historic white men like George Washington into blacks. Google quickly put out a an “Oopsie!” statement: no big deal here, just a little glitch! and everybody had a good laugh. Except the likelihood is that the event had signature significance. It means that right now, at least, we can’t trust AI, not a little bit. It also means we can’t trust Google, if we were ever foolish enough to do so in the first place.

Astronomer, computer expert, programmer, theoretician and professor Mario Juric announced on Twitter/X:

Sad—I suppose. Scary would be my word. This high-tech monster decides what we read; it also decides how easily people find Ethics Alarms, and my business services in ethics.

Elon Musk posted yesterday,

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Ethics Heroes: The Unanimous U.S. Supreme Court

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

I’m proud of them.

In its decision in Trump v. Anderson, just announced, the Court reversed the the Colorado Supreme Court’s indefensible decision to remove former President Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot on the grounds that he participated in an “insurrection.” “Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse.” That’s all that needed to be said, and if simplicity and pure law was what the Court needed to ensure a unanimous decision, then so be it. Ethics Alarms had previously stated that the SCOTUS ruling striking down the “lawfare”-inspired crack-brain theory (that a provision created specifically to deal with former participants in the Confederacy was properly applicable to Donald Trump because a mob of idiots stormed the U.S. Capitol in a tantrum over his loss in the 2020 election) should be unanimous, and mirabile dictu, it was. This ends all state efforts to keep Trump off the ballot.

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Will the Disastrous Results of The Great Stupid Result in Learning, So Behavior Changes, or Will the Fools Responsible Keep Trying To Govern On Dreams Rather Than Reality?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I’m afraid of the answer.

If I were really in a nasty state of mind—and I am mighty close—I could make this post and dozens covering the same territory a chain of Nelsons, as in,

The problem with that approach is that nothing’s funny about the phenomenon. In a ridiculous number of ways, across the culture and nation, states, cities and communities are being forced to reverse policies installed at Peak Stupid that were, or should have been, evidently moronic and certain to lead to disaster when they were devised. Nobody, at least not enough bodies, wanted to pay attention; virtue-signaling was more important to them. They really believed this, and I maintain, with all what’s left of my heart, that this was signature significance: anyone who embraced (or, going forward into the frightening future, embraces) this kind of policy approach is unfit to hold any position of influence and power.

To touch on a current Great Stupid debacle for just a second that I’m too sick and too covered in alligators to deal with in any detail right now, the Democratic Party’s determination to renominate Joe Biden for President, someone yesterday described the decision as the equivalent of the Titanic’s captain that night in 1912 backing up and sailing into the same iceberg again. I really like that analogy, and intend to use it whenever appropriate.

This topic could support a book, let’s just look at two recent examples:

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Briefly…On Timing and Trials

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I’m sorry. There was a lot to post on yesterday, and I was barely able to make it up to the office at all. I also had some client work to do, and that was really hard: my brain is in no shape to be scanning legal documents for ethics issues.

My friend is here, and yesterday it was just good having someone to talk to. (How Grace and I managed to raise a son as economic with the spoken word as Calvin Coolidge is a topic for the nature-nurture debate. One theory is that he could never get a word in edgewise.)

This is a segment from a larger post languishing on the drafting board. It’s amusing to read Trump-fearing pundits and analysts as they tie themselves in knots to try to avoid admitting that these are all—all of them—politically motivated prosecutions against Trump that would not be happening now if he didn’t threaten the Democrats’ grand plan. They don’t want to admit that they are desperate to see him convicted of something so it can swing enough votes to save Biden, but everything they write and say eventually leaks that obvious motive.

Here’s an example from yesterday. A Politico writer keeps saying “that that the public has a strong interest in a speedy trial, and indeed, a federal statute requires judges to set trial dates that account for “the best interest of the public.” He adds, disingenuously, that “Americans have repeatedly told pollsters — nearly two-thirds of them, including roughly one-third of Republicans — that they want to see a verdict in the case before the election.”

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A Few Random Thoughts Post Grace…[Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

  • Friends are a problem for me, always have been. Someone wrote that friends come in and out of your life like waiters at a diner, and that no doubt accurate description has always bothered me. For a long time, I prided myself on keeping in touch with friends from grammar school, high school, college—and eventually lost touch with more and more of them, feeling guilty about each one. At the same time, I’m uncomfortable with overt displays of friendship, even as I tear up at the finale of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” My father, who had exactly four close friends over his entire life (not counting his best friend, my mother) was the same way exactly. So I can blame him.
  • It’s hard to gauge heartfelt condolences from the pro forma variety, isn’t it? I’m hearing on Facebook from some people who have mostly ignored me for years. I know this is a ritual of civilization that is important for re-establishing our commonality and bonds as human beings. Yet it sure seems weird that it takes a tragedy to activate the impulse.
  • One of my oldest friends heard about Grace and announced that he was going to drive down from Connecticut to help me cope with everything unless I ordered him not to. So he’s coming. I have a few friends who are like that, just a few. I suppose nobody has too many more, friends who come to one’s aid because they want to and not because they feel obligated.
  • None of the above in any way diminishes my genuine gratitude for the lovely and caring condolences (and even flowers!) I have received   from many of you on EA and privately. I have only met a handful of you face-to-face, after all—and one of the few I ended up banning from the blog. You have no obligations to me: the fact that you would express what you have touches me greatly. I am on the cusp of descending into an all-time orgy of second-guessing and self-doubt, but so far, at least, you have kept me out of the abyss.

Added: I just had my first conversation discussing Grace’s passing with someone who should have felt close to her after a life-long, supposedly close family relationship. I might as well have been relaying a baseball score. By any normal calculus, my wife’s death should have affected this individual nearly as much as it does me. Yet in our conversation I’d guess 25% of her contribution was laughter. (I’m not that funny.)

None of this was exactly a surprise to me after many years of interactions with this woman, but it does give me some insight into Grace’s seemingly inexplicable insecurity and anxiety. It took a great deal of restraint for me to avoid asking, “What is wrong with you?” I know—defensive reactions, everybody deals with grief differently, blattily blah (as Grace used to say).

I really don’t think she cares. She’s a sociopath.

Friday Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I woke up all set to write about the pernicious effects of consequentialism, since I am kicking myself for not forcing Grace to go to the ER the night before she died. I was certain something was wrong, but not fatally wrong, and she was adamant that all she needed was a good night’s sleep. If she wasn’t better in the morning I had resolved to call the EMTs.

Right now, I’m too exhausted to write much more than that.

Grace Marshall, April 8,1952-February 29, 2024

/ Jack Marshall / 91 Comments

I woke up this morning to find that Grace, the love of my life, my partner, lover, best friend and more, had passed away during the night. I had no warning at all; she had been having some health issues but nothing that suggested that she was in mortal peril.

We were married for 43 years.

I had a scheduled legal ethics seminar, and, of course, taught it as planned. After all, it was about professionalism.

I may write some more about this, depending on how I feel as the day goes on.

Thinking About “The Box”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I recently re-watched “The Box,” which my wife and I had first seen more than a decade ago. It is a horror movie based on the 1970 short story “Button, Button” by Richard Matheson, one of the writers of the original “Twilight Zone,” and Matheson’s conceit, a mash-up of science fiction and ethics as his work often was, had been turned into an episode of one of the reboots of Rod Serling’s creation.

If I recall, I didn’t make it to the end of the film the first time, because the set-up was so annoying. A strange, disfigured man shows up at a couple’s door with a strange box in his hands. It consists of a red button under a locked glass dome that must be opened with a key. The man explains to the stunned wife (her husband is at work, getting bad news about his job) that they have been chosen to be the recipients of a gift. All they have to do is push the red button, and the man will return to hand over a brief case filled with a million dollars, which will be tax free. However, when the button is pushed, someone, somewhere in the world, will die. He assures the wife that they won’t know the doomed individual. They have only 24 hours to consider the offer, at the conclusion of which the man will return and take the box away to offer to someone else.

It is, obviously, an ethics hypothetical that has been posed in many different ways through the years. What bothered me originally, and worries me now, is that anyone I would care to have in my community would ever push the button. (As you can guess, one of the couple does—“Why not? It’s just a box…” and a chain reaction is launched that causes havoc.)

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Did Oscar Hammerstein Jr. Have an Ethics Problem?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

A series of random events have caused my mind to wander over to “Carousel,”the second musical by the legendary team of Richard Rodgers (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics), following their ground-breaking “Oklahoma!” The 1945 work was adapted from Ferenc Molnár’s 1909 play “Liliom,” and although it is a favorite of most critics (declared by TIME as the best musical of the 20th Century, for example, but what does TIME know?), its plot and characters become more troubling the longer one thinks about them. Rodgers said it was his favorite of his musicals with Oscar, and he was definitely in top form; I think his Overture to “Carousel” may be the best thing he ever wrote.

For the “hero” of the musical, Billy Bigelow, is a thug, a dolt, and a domestic abuser. I found the musical hard to take even as a kid for those reasons. When, in his justly famous song “My Boy Bill” after learning that he is going to be a father, Billy suddenly realizes that he might end up with a daughter instead (this only occurs to the big dummy two-third of the way through), his immediate conclusion is that he’ll rob and steal if that’s what it takes to raise her. Sure enough, that’s what he does: ultimately Billy gets himself mixed up in a dumb robbery scheme that goes sideways, and he is killed. The whole show is about his bad decisions and an ultimate opportunity given to him by God (or someone) to leave Purgatory (where everyone has to polish stars) and go back to Earth for a day to try to clean up the mess he’s made.

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