In the middle of an already lively and substantive discussion on this recent post, an occasional, undistinguished commenter added this to an already snarky entry:

“I also love how this blog comment section is essentially the same 5 people talking to themselves. Remember tgt and Charles? Ah those were the days. Now Old Bill responds to himself.”

Since the comment was what I often refer to, being baseball obsessed, as a hanging curve-ball right over the plate (For the sadly baseball ignorant, that means a stupid statement too inviting to resist knocking out of the park), I performed a quick survey of the readers who had issued substantive comments over the past two days and listed them, eventually reaching a count of over 20, and ended my retort with,

“DAMN! You’re right! Just 5 commenters! And they can’t count, either…”

Note that I chose irony rather than invective. My first instinct was to write, “You can bite me, asshole. That’s a lie, and an unfair swipe at both a respected veteran commenter here and my project.”

However, since that exchange, I have become more annoyed by it by the hour. If I had just waited a day for my quick survey, the count of regular commenters would have swelled to over 30: I had forgotten Arthur in Maine, Gamereg, Ohwhatfunitis, Humble Talent, Heres Johnny, and more. In fact, after doing some checking into the archives, Ethics Alarms has never had a more erudite, serious, engaged and enlightening group of regular commenters. It is perhaps what I am most proud of after starting the blog 16 years ago.

So the commenter was not merely stating a falsehood—that she could have disproved as easily as I did—just to be nasty. She also was gratuitously insulting a specific commenter while denigrating the other serious (unlike her) participants here.

Looking back over her dossier, this commenter’s main themes are that 1) she doesn’t like the blog but reads it anyway, and 2) she dislikes the President intensely. Most of her participation consists of jumping in to agree with any other criticism of me or a post, or “sealioning.” A tone of condescension is unmistakable in most of her comments, but as her snark above shows, she is a long time lurker. tgt hasn’t shown up here since the Obama Administration, and Charles Green self-banned more than eight years ago. She first graced us with her open presence in March of this year.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is..

Should I ban this jerk?

One other detail that is tending me to vote “yes.” My response made her look like a fool, and the honorable and respectable thing to do then would have been to reply with, if not an apology, at least an “Okay, you got me!” She’s been silent. 

Let’s skip, for the nonce, the fact that it is disturbing that we have a President who issues statements that read like the have been written by a character out of “Mean Girls.” (We knew that.) And that he never should have endorsed an unqualified, not-to-bright, emotionally unstable zealot like Georgia Rep Marjorie Taylor-Greene in the first place. Or that he should have jettisoned his ill-considered support for Greene many times earlier, when she emitted one of her many earth-shatteringly stupid remarks even by Trump standards.

What matters is that he has finally condemned her, she deserves to be condemned, she needs not to be in a position of power or influence because she is a human “loose cannon on deck” that cannot be trusted, and any words or action that bring us closer to seeing her out of elected office is manifestly to be applauded, regardless of the motivations behind it.

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I had not encountered “The Dignity Index” before today. You can imagine why it would catch my interest, as Ethics Alarms has presented several such scales, including The Knight Scale, The Apology Scale, The Protest Ethics Check List, and others.

The Dignity Index is the creation of UNITE, an organization founded in 2018 “to find ways to help ease divisions in the country.” The Index, say its creators, is based on these contentions:

• “Contempt causes division; dignity eases division.”
• “If we put a spotlight on dignity and contempt, we will use more dignity and less contempt.”
• “If we show Americans how they can help ease our divisions, they will jump on it.”

The Index was publicized in Utah during the 2022 mid-term elections, with UNITE scoring political speech with the numerical values on each level. “The Index was seen as reliable, fair, and intuitive,” we are told. By whom? Its creators? The score-keepers? “Voters from opposite ends of the spectrum were able to agree on scores” UNITE says. All voters? Some voters? (I am suspicious of that kind of vague validation.) “The media covered the Index eagerly on TV, newspapers, and radio.” I bet they did.  

UNITE says that it has identified three findings that “give us confidence the Index”:

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Well, having posted one brief ethics note not typically worthy of a full post, here are some more that just popped up…

1. On season two of “Broadchurch,” a quirky Netflix British drama that ran three seasons, there is an exchange in which a criminal defense attorney (that is, a barrister) in an intense and controversial trial excoriates her assistant by saying, “If you were doing your job, we’d have a chance at getting our client off!”

That is unethical and a false characterization of the defense’s job. It is also, I fear, what most people think the defense is trying to do.

A defense attorney’s job in a criminal trial is to ensure that the prosecution proves the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in the assessment of the jury. It is not to get a guilty criminal “off.” It’s a subtle distinction but a crucial one. Every defendant deserves a fair trial, which means a competent, vigorous defense, so that if he or she is ultimately found guilty, due process has been served.

The defense attorney’s mission is to make the prosecution fulfill its mission. When the prosecution’s argument fails because the defense demonstrated that the case wasn’t clearly presented or strong enough, that is entirely the prosecution’s fault. If, despite a vigorous and zealous defense a defendant is convicted by a competent jury, the ethical defense attorney should feel satisfied. An attorney who is elated that she got a guilty defendant “off” is in the wrong profession. She did her job, but the prosecution didn’t, and the result, while the right one, is nothing to celebrate.

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The lab where I go to get my bloodwork, Sunrise Labs in Arlington, Virginia on Carlin Springs Road, has a spare, gray waiting room. There is only a single decoration: a framed color photograph of gravestones.

I kid you not, as Jack Paar used to say.