open forums

Fourth Of July Week Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

“We’re Number One! We’re Number One!”

Well, to be completely accurate, we’re all “[1]” right now for some reason. The whole blog, back to the beginning, now shows that as the screen name of every commenter, and my name is either missing entirely as author or, in some cases, “[1]” as well. I was first alerted around 5 am by Diego Garcia, and quickly contacted WordPress via an email to their “Happiness Engineers” (yes, they really call themselves that. I got a quick response from WP’s AI creature, who told me that I obviously had my settings wrong and gave me a dizzying sequence of things to click on buried several lawyers deep in the system.

“Oh no you don’t!” I replied. Okay, what I actually wrote back was “Bullshit. I haven’t changed any settings, and you’re not going to lay this off on me. You caused the problem, the problem is yours, and you need to fix it. I am not a software engineer, and I don’t work for WordPress or robots. This is WordPress’s responsibility, and I expect WordPress to do it.”

Then I went back to bed. I was welcomed, upon awakening, to this from the modestly named “Deity,” my Happiness Engineer, who swears he is a Real Boy:

“I appreciate your patience and apologize for the inconvenience you’ve been experiencing. Based on your description, it indeed seems like this issue is related to a known bug that’s currently affecting WordPress blogs.
I just wanted to reassure you that our top-notch technical team is actively working on resolving this issue as swiftly as possible. However, I can understand the importance of having this issue mitigated in the interim period.
In the meantime, as a workaround, you can use the following CSS code to overcome the problem: /* Make comment authors display properly*/.comment-meta .comment-author .fn { text-indent:0; }.comment-meta .comment-author .fn:after { display:none; }“

“Please be advised that this is a temporary solution until we implement a more permanent fix. Again, thank you very much for your understanding on the matter and I’m extremely grateful for your patience. We value your trust in WordPress and promise to keep you informed with updates as they happen.”

So the AI was spitting out bullshit, as usual, just as I surmised! Good to know.

Let’s not allow this to spoil the open forum. Please begin your entries today with your Ethics Alarms name.

But you’re all #[1] to me!



Open Forum: Raiders Of The Lost Ethics Stories

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

More than the usual number of major or potentially major ethics tales swirling around that Ethics Alarms hasn’t gotten around to (yet), and having been chastised yesterday by a veteran commenter for “all this e-ink on Bud Light” (marketing is one of my many past and present occupations and special interests, so bite me), I am even more interested than usual in what issues the commentariat wants to discuss.

I think my favorite news item that I’m not going to write about is the Mississippi state Senator who says it’s time to revive the old Confederate-themed state flag. I’ll just mention that by pure coincidence, Grace and I re-watched “Mississippi Burning” last night.

I wonder if that senator has seen it?

(And no, I will not be seeing an 80-year-old Harrison Form reprise Indiana Jones. I care about the integrity of the character even if he and Disney don’t.)

Open Ethics Forum…Can You Find Something To Talk About Besides Trump? Please?

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

On Mediaite this morning–that’s the useful if still left-biased news media headline aggregator–there are 38 main stories and 17 of them involve Donald Trump. Quite a few also involve ethics issues, unless you consider the man’s very existence in our world an ethics issue, I have to deal with sorting this out every single day: if I give the constant tsunami of ethics issues raised by this persistent celebrity from Hell the attention and analysis they require, the blog ends up being as much about politics as ethics. Worse, the Trump Deranged apparently can’t process the concept that people can be unethical themselves and still have a right to be treated fairly, so any post delving into that situation, which has been an ongoing ethics scandal since at least 2016 (The 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck) is immediately attacked as “supporting” Trump. This, in turn, leads to a repetitive scenario like the one we saw twice this week, with two new and prolific single issue commenters flogging their hatred of the man refusing to move on to other topics, getting antagonistic, and forcing me to ban them.

Of course, non-Trump ethics news hasn’t been great lately either. Yesterday, I had to decide if this story—“Penn State professor arrested for having sex with dog”—was worthy of a post. I decided against it, even though I had a great line to use: “His horrified colleagues finally learned what he really meant when he told them, “I’ll be in the lab…”

Over to you, Clarence…

Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

I can’t imagine what ethics matters you’ll talk about today, as there is so much to choose from. Me, I’d be sorely tempted to draw an analogy between the now completely partisan Justice Department indicting the primary threat to Democratic power for conduct identical to what their own President has engaged in, essentially throwing jet fuel on what is already a highly combustible political division, and irresponsible flea-circus entrepreneurs reintroducing dinosaurs into the food chain.

But you know me: everything reminds me of baseball, old movies, or dinosaurs…

‘Live From Ethics Alarms, It’s FRIDAY OPEN FORUM!’

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

On a rainy June 1st in1975, President Gerald Ford slipped while walking down the Air Force One boarding stairs after landing in Salzburg. The caught-on-camera incident became a PR problem for an already controversial and unelected President seeking a full term the old fashioned way. The writers for newly-minted late night satirical skit comedy show on NBC, Saturday Night Live, know comedy gold when they saw it, turned Ford’s alleged clumsiness into a signature gag, with break-out show star Chevy Chase playing Ford and including elaborate pratfalls in many of the SNL “cold opens.”

Exactly 43 years after Ford’s fall, Joe Biden, who makes Ford look like one of the Flying Wallendas by comparison, took a Chevy Chase-like face plant on stage at the U.S. Air Force Academy graduation ceremony in Colorado yesterday. This poses an immediate integrity test for SNL, or would, if the show had not completely abandoned integrity when it decided to leave Barack Obama essentially unscathed for eight years. If I were producing SNL, I’d bring back Chevy and have him introduced as Biden in the cold open…and that would be enough (and it would be all that would be realistically possible, as Chase ruined his back by all those falls as Ford.

What are the odds? I’m not curious enough to watch the show, as I have not since it became a full-time Democratic Party attack machine, but Joe’s tumble had me thinking about it.

But I digress. There is plenty in the ethics jungle to talk about, so get to it.

Last May 2023 Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I had one last chance to use the cheery song from “Camelot” again, so I took it. The 2023 revival of that show opened to near unanimous pans from critics in April (ironically); the book had been over-hauled by “The West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin, and arrived with black knights of the Round Table among other panders to the woke Broadway crowd. It also arrived without Julie Andrews and Richard Burton, which was the real killer: the original “Camelot” had iconic stars, lovely stars, spectacle, and a really bad book (unlike the classic book it was based on, “The Once and Future King” by T.H. White. It also had a wistful title song that was turned into the valedictory of the Kennedy Presidency, ending with “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot!“

In Sorkin’s version, Guenevere refers to the song as “dumb” and, later, as “that stupid song about the weather.” Nice.

Cheer me up with fascinating ethics observations, please:

Open Forum, Searching For Something Better

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

What a depressing week.

I think the cap might have been right before bedtime last night, when I finally checked out what strange tangents Ann Althouse had been on lately. For some reason she had tracked down an article at Metafilter about Nate Silver’s being separated from his creation, 538, and a reader comment that said he had been guilty of “bothsideism.”

Nate is far from an Ethics Alarms favorite, as when he is not analyzing sports he uses the alleged neutrality of his statistical models to mask an obvious left-leaning bias. However, the flat assertion that he didn’t slant his analysis enough for the Leftist totalitarians out there is genuinely frightening. It also echoes the ethics rot emanating from this recent post. I’ve encountered the term “bothsideism” periodically and mentally noted its absurdity, but now I realize that a frightening proportion of the public, academics and especially journalists really do believe that thoughtfully considering multiple points of view and perspective is wrong.

As they sing in “Sweet Charity”: There’s gotta be something better than this.

Please try to find it.

Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

It sure seems like lots of ethics stuff is swirling around today, and I have no idea where I’ll be going with it at this point.

I’m counting on you to help sort it all out…

Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The participation of two Trump-obsessed newcomers, one now banned and the other self-suspended, swelled last week’s Forum to one of the most active ever. This has been an equally momentous week in the ethics universe if not more so: I’ll be interested to see if we can get both quality and quantity this time around.

On your mark….get set…

GO!