I guess you can figure out what my mood is like this morning…
Pass along some Christmas season cheer by providing brilliant, trenchant and timely ethics analysis. I’ll be here, reading and poisoning eggnog…
open forums
Friday Open Forum!
Last week’s forum was a dud, but it was a holiday week, so I have hopes that this one will be more lively. I’m counting on you, since the previous post was written with great difficulty after my head exploded from reading that Barack Obama told an audience that using the criminal justice system against political foes was “crossing a line.”
I’m still wiping blood, bits of skull and brain off my computer screen and keyboard…
Black Friday Open Forum
Sorry, this is up late for many reasons, but primarily because 1) I am blotto and exhausted after an emotional week, as well as dreading the next stage of Holiday Horrors, 2) I forgot it was Friday. I really did. Pathetic.
Let’s see what kind of new ethics topic you can come up with. If you’re really in a black mood, you might want to watch the tongue-in-cheek “Halloween”-inspired horror film “Thanksgiving,” in which a mysterious slasher disguised as a pilgrim creatively knocks off the people he (or she?) holds responsible for a Black Friday riot at a local retail store that resulted in the trampling deaths of several shoppers. Do I need to tell you what the maniac’s ultimate murder in a movie with that title is?
Trump Shakes Things Up! Friday Open Forum…
By the time you comment here (on what ever ethics matters move you), James Woods is like to have been nominated as Secretary of Transportation, and Hulk Hogan as Secretary of Commerce. Interesting times….
Jerry Lee Lewis was amazing, wasn’t he?
“Trump Derangement Friday” Open Forum
In truth, I’m hoping that here we can find fascinating ethics discussions that don’t involve the election at all, but maybe that’s expecting too much. Over at the asylum that once was my Facebook feed, several of my once rational friends appear to be genuinely investigating where to move, you know, like Spain or England, where there is less freedom of speech even than usual. Well, these people have turned into morons, and I’ll miss them, but moron are a burden in a democracy, so “Bye!”
The Project 25 hysteria was one of the Democrats’ more despicable gambits. I keep seeing that list above or similar ones posted as Trump’s agenda. The list is hilarious, and anyone who believes that’s what’s in the document thinks the Constitution was written by Donald Duck and begins, “There once was a man from Pawtucket….” The website of the exercise , essentially a brain-storming session among many conservative groups, is easy enough to check, but know, the Trump Deranged hysterics would rather use a phony meme designed to demonize the Right than discuss the real thing. They deserve to live in Spain.
There’s got to be something less stupid to discuss…..
“Hello Doomsday!”Month Open Forum
No matter what happens Tuesday, this is going to be a really bad month. I cannot imagine a scenario where it won’t be.
I wish I could say that I felt confident about my Presidential election prognosticating skills, but my record in recent years has been no better than that of a coin-flipper: I thought Romney would defeat Obama, who had shown himself to be a weak and feckless POTUS (and Mitt would have, if hee were not such a weenie); I was pretty certain we were going to be stuck with Hillary in 2016 too. I assumed that Biden would win in 2020 between Democratic cheating and the pandemic destruction of, well, just about everything, but I also expected Trump to end up as Herbert Hoover: the closeness of the election surprised me.
Pollsters, at this point, should just admit they have no idea what they are doing and give up. My faith in the American public and American political culture tells me that Trump should win, and would win handily if so many impressionable people hadn’t been brainwashed into believing he is Dracula while so many women are apparently more interested in killing unborn babies at will than the Bill of Rights and trivia like that. I still believe, or want to believe, that a Presidential campaign offering someone as obviously incompetent and dishonest as Kamala Harris cannot possibly prevail offering nothing but hatred and fear of the opposing candidate, especially after the debacle of Biden’s term. But maybe Abe Lincoln was wrong after all. If so, we are in very, very serious trouble.
In other more upbeat news, a poll of baseball fans in The Athletic showed that my view in this post is that of the majority as well:
Enough from me: now you’re on. I’ll be checking in periodically to spam the unauthorized comments of Denver Dave, A Friend, and any other banned commenters, so don’t take the bait if they show up.
Friday Open Forum, No-Election Zone
I am accepting the fact that the blog from here to election day is likely to be politics heavy, and I regret that. It can’t be helped. Kamala Harris and the Democrats are operating the most nauseatingly and dangerously unethical election campaign nationwide since the days of Jim Crow, and the Presidential campaign that has been inflicted on America by Harris is stunning in its cynicism, relying on Big Lies and ad hominem attacks exclusively. A supplement to that is that the campaign is also relying on unethical, indeed anti-democratic journalism.
For the much coveted “October Surprise” that is supposed to save Harris, the best the Axis news media could come up with was an alleged Trump inflammatory quote regarding a dead soldier, one that was not even attached to a named source and that was subsequently denied by both the family of the soldier and others who were supposedly witnesses to the statement, and another private quote by disgruntled former Trump aide John Kelly supposedly praising Adolf Hitler. Yes, its back to that: after 12 years, a Trump term in office in which he resembled Adolf not at all, after a four years of a Democratic Presidential term in which Kamala Harris’s party emulated totalitarian attitudes and tactics (and that witnessed as well a frightening rise in anti-Semitism, we’re back to this…
…because, shockingly, that’s literally all they’ve got. Harris’s disastrous CNN “town hall” made this undeniable among all but liars and fools: she wouldn’t or couldn’t answer straight questions, periodically slipping into untranslatable Kamala-speak when she wasn’t obviously reciting memorized talking points.
How could such a metaphorical empty suit get to this point, where she is one national mental breakdown from the White House? Easy: she was yanked onto the 2020 Democratic ticket only because of her color and genes, handed the top spot four years later without once offering herself to voters as a Presidential candidate based on her performance as VP—which was uninspiring (and I’m being kind)—and then selected Soviet-style without giving national convention delegates a choice. And this is supposed to be a party obsessed with “choices.” It is also the party now warning the public that their opponents are threats to democracy.
If it were not so depressing, and if it did not have a chance of working, this last-ditch strategy would be funny. It should also signal the end of the Democratic Party. But it isn’t, and it won’t.
Unfortunately, I’m going to have to write more about this; there is more of it than I have time for, frankly, but it’s important. You don’t have to, though. So don’t, not here.
Deal?
Friday Open Forum, Self-Loathing Edition
I’m still trying to decide how much to beat myself up after an epic botch yesterday. I completely whiffed on one of my monthly (and sometimes bi-monthly) legal ethics Zoom seminars after I forgot to set my alarm clock. This has been an exhausting and stressful week, as if follows the long-planned memorial event for my wife, who died on Leap Year. Old friends and colleagues that I hadn’t seen for many years came from all across the country over the long weekend, and I was left gratified but emotionally and physically exhausted. Then I had to hustle to catch up with work, including preparing for a complicated new musical ethics program in the evening on the 16th. Then things went crazy: I had emergency calls from clients, a surprise house guest whom I had to drive to the train station at 5 am the next morning, and assorted other crises. Despite having my scheduled seminar at 9 am, I lay my head down at 6 am with the intention of catching a couple of hours sleep, but didn’t set the alarm. I woke up at 10.
I spent all day yesterday still exhausted and furious at myself, and woke up no better. After almost 8 months, I still haven’t adjusted to living and working alone. Grace handled my schedule, served as my back-up, kept me alert to upcoming appointments and commitments, screened my calls and emails, and generally made it possible for me to be productive and creative as I juggle disparate tasks and multi-process compulsively without not falling flat on my metaphorical face. And I’m just not good at that stuff. I’m not good at living alone. When unexpected complications merged with my not being at top form mentally, emotionally and physically, I couldn’t navigate the perfect storm and let a lot of people down. It’s over, there’s nothing more I can do about it, but I’m not accepting my own apology.
Well, enough about me: please use this opportunity to discuss important things involving ethics, leadership….you know, the usual.
Friday Open Forum!
Tomorrow, eight months after my wife’s sudden death, is the memorial event that a good friend and my sister, among others, organized because I couldn’t face it…still can’t, truthfully. I have to speak, and I’m determined to do better than this weatherman, but I still don’t know what I’m going to say.
I still have social responsibilities as some friends are flying in from as far away as Seattle, so despite having a lot of work work pressing me and my Ethics Alarms duties, I’m going to be out of the office a lot today. I’m counting on the commentariat once again to provide stimulating ethics content.
I am very grateful for the terrific participants we have here.
Friday Open Forum!
This is one of the days I already have the topics lined up I want to post about, so try to do me a favor. While exploring ethics issues of your own choosing here, please don’t preempt me so I have to go looking for new topics unless you choose to write on one of the topics below in sufficient detail that I don’t have to. THAT I always appreciate. The looming posts are on:
- The school principle in Washington state who responded to someone scrawling a swastika on a campus wall by reminding parents that in some cultures the symbol “has deep historical and cultural significance in other parts of the world.”
- The hilarious response of the Harris campaign to the sudden focus on Tim Walz’s habit of lying his fool head off, nicely exposed in his debate with J.D. Vance.
- Ethics issues raised by AI’s ability to play Rich Little and convincingly imitate celebrity voices, and…
- President Biden’s bone-chilling response when asked “What do the states in the storm zone need — after what you saw today?” Biden said, in sum,”Which storm?”
Here is also a good place to note that I won a million dollar bet with myself that indefatigable New York Times apologist “A Friend” would respond to this post with along protest. Unfortunately “A Friend” got himself banned long ago by 1) violating the comment policies by telling me how to moderate EA and 2) eliminating any chance of being reinstated by defying the ban any time he feels like commenting, conduct that is disrespectful of the forum, and me. Here’s a tip: if you get banned, the proper and almost always successful response is “I’m sorry, I understand, and I promise to be good if you give me a second chance.”
I don’t read these unauthorized replies before sending them directly to Spam Hell, but in this case my eye caught just enough words in the first paragraph to see where the post was going: Because the Times included an op-ed critical of Walz in the same batch as M. Gessen advocating partisan bias and censorship by journalists, A Friend thinks that justifies the Times giving a regular platform to an opponent of ethical journalism and free speech. It doesn’t. There are more than one rationalizations on the list with commentary that explains that, as in the discussion of “Ethics Accounting.”
Ethics Alarms 