Thank you for the kind words about my blogging. I do try to understand where other people are coming from, including Jack, but I often have a hard time of it. I write slower than Jack, which does give me time to clean up the tone.

I admit I don’t understand Jack’s approach to ethical analysis, so your description sounds as good as anything, if perhaps a bit harsh. I don’t know if he’s a Bush/Cheney fan, but he really does seem to despise Obama. Also, he doesn’t seem to believe in much modern-day racism, so he tends to regard accusations of racism as dishonest.

One of the biggest differences between us, however, is that we are discussing things from different perspectives. He’s talking ethics, whereas I’m talking about policy. He’s talking right and wrong, I’m talking about incentives and enforcement. So I try to take into account the effectiveness and cost of enforcing ethical standards in society. I’m also very skeptical of the ability of the institutions of law enforcement to live up to a higher standard than the society from which they are formed.

Consequently, Jack probably sees me as too permissive, especially by his standards. E.g. I don’t want police to throw people in jail for smoking pot, but I tend not to give much thought to whether or not people should smoke pot. Jack, on the other hand, thinks it’s bad for people to smoke pot, and he’s willing to throw some of them in jail to stop them. I see that as a bit authoritarian.

That said, Jack tries to behave civilly toward me, and I try to do likewise…although what passes for civility in blogging can be a bit rough if you’re not used to it.

Jack’s position is clearly that Michael Brown’s shooting was justified and not at all racist, and no amount of white-officer-shooting-black-citizen incidents would convince him otherwise because… well, Jack Geer. His response to your fair criticisms is, as usual, to double down, since to admit that he erred in any respect would imply that he is not infalliably right (for evidence of this, consider his tactics when confronted on his “ethical” allegations regarding April Fools’ Day pranks).

Jack’s “ethics” are not moral principles; instead, they are ill-defined, blunt instruments of his own design which he uses to bludgeon those that do not agree with his right-wing, backwater, dyed-in-the-wool, blind-to-his-own-massive-hypocrisy and double standards, Southern Dixiecrat-qua-Republican sensibilities, whether it relates to blaming Obama for everything under the sun, worshipping at the altar of George W. Bush/Dick Cheney, refusing to acknowledge any evidence for racism, individual or systemic, beyond an out-and-out admission of such (though he is more than happy to imply ill-will to anyone he dislikes in the absence of any statement or evidence or to excoriate opponents based on ad hominems and innuendo, rather than engaging their substantial arguments. That he is clueless about many topics he rails about (including the law, in most respects, based on his body of work, rather than his alleged qualifications) never seems to stop him from handing down judgment from on high, likely while foaming at the mouth, if his use of ad hominem and personal attacks and baseless vitriol in lieu of substantive engagement are any indication. His column makes people dumber for reading it, suggesting to them that ethics is merely a reflection of how much one agrees/disagrees with the politics of the speaker and the issue, rather than a detailed, principled analysis of differing perspectives and moral issues. His reasoning (if you can call it that) is facile and superficial and is based on little more than whether he likes the end result, in which case it is ethical regardless of how spurious the means or morally bankrupt the actor.

If Jack is a fair arbiter of ethical issues (as he claims to be), then I am the Pope of Greenwich Village. I am sure he will call me unethical for this, which I will gladly accept, given his propensity to be utterly wrong about such things.