This was weird; I wonder if The Ethicist (his friends call him Kwame Anthony Appiah, or just “Professor”) just felt like slapping down someone despicable. When I read the creepy question posed, I immediately thought, “Who needs an ethicist to answer this?”
“Name Withheld” (that guy writes an awful lot of questions to The Ethicist) wrote in part,
“History repeats itself. That’s one of the things wrong with history.” —Clarence Darrow.
2024’s tasteless 1968 impression—if it had to imitate a year in American history, why would it choose that one?—continued yesterday with a Democratic President, beset by a divided party, campus protests and bad polls (okay, the galloping dementia angle is new) suddenly abandoned his reelection campaign just weeks before the convention that was prepared to make him the nominee by acclamation.
Here is the letter that was posted on social media yesterday afternoon:
Good.
Late, but it was the only ethical course.
Now what?
Chaya Raichik, the industrious conservative gadfly who infuriates the Left by posting the most ridiculous and self-indicting TikTok videos by unhinged progressives, definitely has a nasty side. Exposing public figures, celebrities, local officials, scholars, professors, teachers, corporate execs, prominent athletes, “influencers,” Hollywood stars and would-be activists is an admirable (and useful) pursuit—after all, they post the stuff that makes them look ridiculous or sinister and know that what they say gets noticed. Such statements also often demonstrate why they should not continue in their chosen professions. Siccing the social media mob on a typical working American who posts something dumb on Facebook is very different. It is cruel.
Recently Raichik’s Libs of TikTok account has expanded its target range to private Facebook posts that included ugly comments on the near assassination of Donald Trump. (I could point her to some by my Trump-Deranged friends.) “To bad they weren’t a better shooter!!!!!” was the witty if ungrammatical retort Darcy Waldron Pinckney posted on Facebook to her modest number of FB friends. She worked at Home Depot, but not after the influential anti-woke warrior launched her (also misspelled) “quip” into cyberspace hyperdrive. A week ago, Raichik posted a screenshot of Pinckney’s comment with her photo (above) and wrote, “Hi @HomeDepot! Are you aware that you employ people who call for political violence and the ass*ss*nat*on of Presidents? Any comment?”
Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, has joined the large cadre of fools who seem to seriously believe former President Donald Trump has a strong similarity to Adolf Hitler. After the assassination attempt on July 13, Caraballo posted on Twitter/”X”: “Trump is going to use this as his Reichstag moment to crack down when he’s elected.” See?
Andrew Sullivan, at war with himself, is a fascinating case study. He’s a devout Catholic gay conservative, raised and schooled in Great Britain, and obviously brilliant. Everywhere he has written and opined has seen his cognitive dissonance on display: his friends and colleagues are mostly progressives, many of the knee-jerk variety, and he longs to be accepted and loved by them. Andrew also has too much integrity for that, much of the time anyway. He edited The New Republic after contributing articles most notably on the topic of AIDS and gays in America, but that publication’s turned on him, rebelling when he found scientific and intellectual value in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve,” the theory of which was (and is) officially condemned as politically incorrect and inherently racist. Sullivan, temperamentally inclined to keep an open mind, became a pariah in his own magazine. Later he wrote for The New York Times Magazine but was fired, because his tendency to call out progressives and the Times itself on intellectual dishonesty and bias annoyed Times editor Howell Raines. Sullivan’s whole career has been like this; one of the most influential bloggers when blogging was all the rage, these days he makes money and waves with his substack newsletter, “The Weekly Dish.”
Sullivan writes like a dream, and when he is good, he is very, very good indeed. Ethics Alarms has highlighted several of his essays in the past (most recently last December) and will doubtlessly do so again.
Yesterday I found myself reading Andrew’s latest essay without knowing who wrote it (don’t ask me how that happened). I almost quit reading after a few paragraphs. Oh, great, another diatribe by a Trump-Deranged conservative like David Frum, I thought to myself.
Yikes. That was Joe Biden on a Zoom call July 13th with a group of “concerned” Democratic House members. (“concerned” is the consensus word adopted by the mainstream news media to mean “panicked that the public now knows what their party —and we—knew all along and deliberately hid from the American people.” )
The President was addressing Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), a retired Army Ranger who was awarded a Bronze Star. This alarming quote was just revealed to the Washington Post by one of the participants on the call, which was recorded. It was presumably released now, almost a week later, because Biden hasn’t yet yielded to pressure and entreaties from the party to announce his withdrawal as a candidate for re-election in November. The Post’s headline for its report on the call and its significance: “Behind the scenes as Joe Biden lost control of the Democratic Party.”
[That meme above is from today’s unusually funny collection of headlines, memes and cartoons in Power Line’s weekly collection. The “sloped roof” gags are especially good.]
Observations:
That’s “Rust Red Hills” (1930), by Georgia O’Keeffe above. Does it seem “conservative” to you? Does “conservative” even seem like a word that can be relevant to such a painting?
Welcome to the weird court petition filed by Valparaiso University in Indiana. The school wants to be able to get around the terms of a large testamentary gift that it happily accepted in 1953. Percy Sloan donated millions of dollars and hundreds of fine art works in honor of his father, Junius R. Sloan, a famous artist in the Hudson River School. His will directed that any art acquired with the funds must be “exclusively by American artists preferably of American subjects” and “of the general character known as conservative and of any period of American art.” The University wants to sell some of the most valuable paintings it purchased with Sloan’s bequest, including the one above, to fund the construction of new dormitories.
Here I am still fighting off multiple crises personal, professional and financial arising from my wife’s sudden death, and trying to actually earn money, no easy task in the field of ethics unless one is unethical, which so many of my more successful colleagues are. Unfortunately, I have no discipline. I am behind on several deadlines that will keep me working into the wee hours this weekend, and yet emanations from the twin ethics train wrecks that are Biden’s debate melt-down and Trump’s near-miss assassination attempt keep dragging me back to Ethics Alarms.
Like this one: sources are reporting that the President is “seething” at Nancy Pelosi, who is widely believed to be behind the wave of House Democrats calling for Biden to step down as the presumptive nominee. California Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a close ally of Pelosi—figures—released a letter calling for Biden to step aside. House Democrats close to Pelosi, attributed today’s new defections, especially Lofgren’s letter to Biden,to the former speaker. Biden regarded Pelosi as an ally. He trusted her.
Well, something. Yes, hold on to your butts: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is imparting what she regards as wisdom. I was going to make this an Unethical Quote of the Week, then I decided that I didn’t know what it was, except disturbing. Here is what she ranted last night in a live stream; I’ll have some rueful comments at the end…
Ethics Alarms 