Boy, that week went by fast…maybe because I was a worthless slug and got fewer posts up than my self-imposed minimum. On the plus side, that should leave more fascinating ethics issues for you to debate.
You’re on.
open forums
Open Forum!
By all means, talk about the President’s vaccine mandate if you want, or anything else ethics-related. I wish I had time to do a deep dive into the legality of such a move, and I wish the news media was competent enough to do one for me. I do like the question offered on several blogs about how Biden thinks that he can mandate vaccinations when he is on record saying that he can’t mandate masks.
Open Forum…
Since this is Texas Abortion Law Freakout Friday, I ask, though do not insist, that abortion related posts be entered on one of the specific entries here on that topic.
Friday Open Forum!
I’m doing a musical legal ethics program via Zoom, so I will be counting on the commentariat to keep things hopping here.
Open Forum!
Not to jinx it, but I notice that nobody has ever abused an open forum. Not all of the entries are classics, but none are emotional, ill-informed, ethics-tone deaf jabbering either. This is because the commenters who avail themselves of the weekly open fora are serious and thoughtful.
I obsess about the decline in Ethics Alarms traffic, but the blog has never had a more distinguished, perceptive and passionate commentariat—and you know, that’s what I was looking for when I started this project. I wish we had more progressives of the open-minded sub-species participating, but I assume they would all have their heads under bags right now anyway.
Start your engines…
It’s Time For The Ethics Alarms Friday Open Forum…OK, OK, PAST Time!
I completely forgot to open the metaphorical floor yesterday. How embarrassing.
Do make me stop beating myself up by making today’s ethics symposium one for the ages.
Friday Open Forum, As I Courageously Run Away
I’m sorry, I just feel like the weight of the ethics world is on my shoulders, so I’m going to selflessly leave the ethics commentary to you. I have to think of my well-being first, after all. There is no “U” in team. No, that’s not quite right…
I Hereby Grant Loyal Ethics Alarms Readers This Open Forum…
Sorry, I had to find some way to feature U.S. Grant this morning, in part because he died on this date in 1885, but mostly because my son was named after him, and I love Grant Viktor Bowen Marshall with all my heart. Grant is one of the most interesting and complex of Presidential personalities, as well as among our most ethical Presidents. Even in death he was ethical: he spent his last days furiously writing out his memoirs so his family could be cleared of debt by selling them. (The publisher was Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain.) Grant was in the process of dying in agony of throat cancer, but he not only wrote through the pain, he did a fine job of it. I’ve read most of the Presidential autobiographies, and if there is one as good, I haven’t encountered it yet.
I suppose by now everyone knows my favorite piece of Grant trivia: he was christened Hiram Ulysses Grant, but was embarrassed that his initials spelled out “hug” (Grant was fanatically modest, and wrote that his wife had never seen him naked), so he flipped his middle and first names so the initials spelled “uhg,” as if that’s an improvement. Then some careless clerk at West Point substituted an “S” for the “H,” and the young Grant recognized that “U.S. Grant” was a pretty cool name, and kept it. The “S” didn’t stand for anything except “Hiram,” but he got sick of explaining this, so settled on “Simpson.” This eventually made Grant one of two U.S. Presidents with a middle initial S that actually was meaningless: the other is Harry Truman. If a source prints Harry’s name with a period after the S, it’s a hack outfit. Wikipedia has the period, for example. No, Truman’s middle name was just “S”…
But I digress.
Start writing about your ethical issues, concerns and observations, please…
The “Hello, Friday! I Thought You’d Never Come!” Open Forum
I was looking for Robinson Crusoe and Friday illustrations, and boy, if they thought that Teddy Roosevelt statue that’s they’re taking down in New York City radiated white supremacy, they hadn’t checked out Daniel Defoe’s masterpiece lately. Is that novel ever read in school any more? (It’s a terrific novel, and one of my Dad’s favorites…and he read everything.) With “To Kill A Mockingbird” being banned in some schools, I wonder how much literature will be sacrificed to political correctness and The Great Stupid. And how many pop culture nuggets…I was alternately amused then shocked to hear the 1957 Australian goof “Tie Me Kangaroo Down” played on Sirius XM, for the song is hilarious as well as racially insensitive to the max with this verse (remember that the song purports to quote the last requests of an old Aussie stockman on his deathbed):
Let me Abos go loose, Bruce
Let me Abos go loose
They’re of no further use, Bruce
So let me Abos go loose!
I just checked:one of the lyrics websites excised that verse while claiming that it was printing the whole song.
But I digress. Write about anything you want, as long as it has an ethics theme…
This Week’s Open Forum…
Ethics Alarms 