Lately, Ethics Alarms has been pretty much all about the Kavanaugh confirmation shit show, and I’m just sick of writing about it, so as a change of pace, I’d like to revisit one of Jack Marshall’s posts from January of 2016, and especially one of his responses to a comment that has stuck with me as an example of Jack at his worst.

In the post itself, Jack took on Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, who argued that Latino candidates Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz should do more to support “undocumented immigrants.” That’s a phrase that always sets Jack off:

Those who engage in illegal immigration are immigrants, and because their manner of immigration is illegal, they are illegal immigrants. Those who insist on calling them merely immigrants are lying; those who favor euphemisms like “undocumented workers” are engaging in intentional deceit.

Aside from the logical incoherence of accusing people of lying for calling them “immigrants” right after Jack himself calls them “immigrants” — which we can probably put down to hasty writing — there are plenty of legitimate things you can say about immigrants which are true for legal and illegal immigrants alike. Furthermore, it’s entirely accurate to refer to these people as “undocumented” immigrants because, in fact, it is precisely their lack of documents that sets them apart from other immigrants and makes them illegal. And it’s hardly deceitful, because everybody understands this.

I think Jack doesn’t like “undocumented” because it doesn’t carry the same stigma that “illegal” does. Jack is on team “What part of illegal don’t you understand?” and he regards coming here illegally as the one unforgivable sin.

This is a convenient rhetorical crutch for Jack — arguing that once some conduct is outlawed it becomes irredeemably unethical — which he uses it to avoid having to argue for the law itself. I don’t understand how anyone who is familiar with history and seen our elections could possibly believe that our legislatures consist of people who produce only ethical laws deserving obedience — slavery being the canonical counterexample — but it’s an assumption Jack relies on all the time.

In the comments, Pieter van Megchelen challenges Jack on this point:

[…] I fail to understand how ‘illegal’ means the same as ‘unethical’ or ‘immoral’. I can imagine many morally valid reasons to break the law of a country, especially if you perceive that law as unjust or even unethical. […]

Breaking the law has many (other) ethical aspects, I might endangers others, etcetera, but I have always been taught that legality and morality are essentially different categories. What is illegal may be morally right, and what is legal may be morally abject (I know you agree with the last part of this sentence).

Of course, the ultimate ‘proof’ of the first half of this thesis is in historical extremes: there were laws against homosexuality in most countries, there have been laws against Jews and other groups, laws against abortion have endangered women’s lives, etc. Rumour has it that in Iran, it’s even forbidden to smile outside. If that is true, is it immoral to smile in the streets?

Jack’s response is alternately authoritarian and idiotic.

A citizen is ethically obligated to follow a nation’s laws as part of the social contract with that country. If he violates a law on principle, he is ethically obligated to voluntarily accept the consequences.

Jack is thinking of civil disobedience, where the goal is to protest an unjust law by flagrantly breaking it in a highly visible manner. But that only works when the punishment is not too severe. It makes no sense to break the law to make a statement, and then allow yourself to be silenced by a long prison sentence. The demonstrators who staged the Boston Tea Party wore disguises because they did not want to get caught.

Furthermore, protest is not the only reason good people break laws. Sometimes obedience to the law is harmful to society. The “conductors” who ran the Underground Railroad that helped slaves escape to the North didn’t “voluntarily accept the consequences” by turning themselves in to the authorities. Instead they operated in secret for many years, freeing thousands of people from misery.

Moreover, from a utilitarian standpoint, it is the consequences of a bad law that make it bad. Years ago, many states had laws against sodomy which were enforced mostly against gay people. The harm from such laws did not come from their mere existence in the criminal code. The harm came from the fact that police enforced these laws by dragging gay people away in handcuffs and locking them in cages. By Jack’s argument, people who engaged in sodomy should have “accepted the consequences,” presumably by turning themselves in at the nearest police station.

Just violating laws when it’s convenient or beneficial fails the Kantian test: if that were a universal standards, civilization would collapse.

Any idea will fail the “What if everybody did that?” test if you generalize it in the most stupid way possible. “Dance parties are unethical because if everyone danced all the time, no one would harvest the crops, and we would all starve to death!”

Jack is attacking a straw man by supposing that opponents of current immigration laws are arguing in favor of violating all laws. The appropriate generalization is that they think everybody should be allowed to violate immigration laws, which is a very different proposition.

(As a libertarian, I would consider an even wider generalization. Foreigners coming here to live normal lives — working, making friends, raising families — aren’t hurting anyone, so undocumented immigration is a crime without a victim, and it’s far from the only one. Applying the Kantian test, we should then imagine what would happen to our civilization if everyone was willing to break all laws against victimless crimes. Personally, I think it would be wonderful.)

Illegal aliens are violating the obligation to obey the laws of other countries, and worse, won’t accept the consequences. There is no ethical argument that supports this, just emotional ones.

I’ve never understood what Jack means by calling these arguments “emotional.” I think maybe he’s just tired of hearing sad stories about immigrants dragged away from their lives by the authorities, and he regards these as emotional appeals. And I guess that’s what they are. But they are also evidence of the enormous harm caused by these laws. Take any of those sad stores and multiply it by a few tens of thousands, and you have some idea of the scale of harm caused by immigration enforcement.

What I rarely ever hear from Jack is the argument in favor of these laws, other than the fact that they are laws, which is the rhetorical equivalent of might makes right. Winning the legislative battle doesn’t mean your side is right, only that your side is powerful.

Not to niggle, but saying breaking laws isn’t immoral is absurd, because morality is established by rules and laws. Breaking laws is by definition immoral.

Not to nitpick, but this is completely backward. Morality is not established by law. If law is the ultimate determinant of right and wrong, then by what principles should we determine what the law should be? If law is the ultimate determinant of right and wrong, how could we ever advocate changing the law? Ideally, the law must be crafted to serve morality. And here in the real world, where laws are created by imperfect people following imperfect processes, the law and morality are often at odds, sometimes in ways that justify defiance of the law.

Yes, in Iran, it’s immoral to smile in the street.

God, Jack is such an authoritarian bootlicker.

First of all, to use one of Jack’s favorite phrases, res ipsa loquitur, “the thing speaks for itself.” A law against smiling is too fucking stupid to be taken seriously. Everybody should just ignore it.

Second, you can’t talk about the immorality of disobeying Iranian law without taking into account what kind of government Iran has. It’s one thing to argue for a norm of obedience to the laws of a republican democracy like we have in the U.S., but it’s crazy to expect that of people in a country like Iran, which is at least partially under the control of a theocratic dictatorship. It is not a free country. By the American standard — “of the people, by the people, for the people” — it doesn’t even have a legitimate government. It’s absurd to think there is any ethical duty to obey these laws just because autocrats with guns say you should.

(Note: I’m pretty sure that the the Iranian law against smiling is a myth. On the other hand, the Gasht-e Ershad really do try to enforce equally vile and stupid rules on how women can dress in public.)

I really don’t understand what’s going through Jack’s mind when he writes stuff like this. Maybe it’s a hazard of his day job as a professional ethics trainer. In that role, he can’t very well advise his clients to break the rules. He has to take things like laws and professional ethics codes as given. He can’t tell someone, “That law uses a bogus public safety justification to protect politically powerful business interests, so there’s nothing wrong with disobeying it.” Not even when, in a case such as Louisiana’s florist licensing law, there’s nothing wrong with disobeying it.

But that’s the wrong approach to ethical thinking when discussing issues of public policy. In fact, saying “the authorities have ruled and it’s unethical to disobey them” isn’t ethics at all. It’s the abdication of ethics in favor of power.

Time to round up a few of the things Jack Marshall has been talking about this past week or so.

Authoritarianism

On Wednesday, Jack started out with what he considers to be a mock definition of authoritarianism as he imagine’s it’s defined by Andrew Sullivan, or maybe the “New York Book Review” (whatever that is) or maybe the New York Times or the liberals or…I don’t know, the paragraph is a total muddle and doesn’t have any links… Anyway, he writes this:

The definition: Authoritarianism is when a President you don’t like exerts strong leadership within his powers to accomplish policy goals you disagree with. When a President you do like stretches and exceeds his Constitutional powers to achieve policy goals you approve of, that’s not authoritarianism. That’s great leadership.

Jack’s mocking definition implies that a President who “exerts strong leadership within his powers” somehow can’t be authoritarian, as if legal authority can’t be used to suppress freedom.

It’s Really About Ethics In Supreme Court Nominations

Later, Jack wrote about the woman who accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her in high school. As I write this, the story is a horrible mess that keeps getting worse, and I have no way of knowing who, if anyone, is telling the actual truth. Jack, to his credit, also recognizes that he doesn’t know who’s telling the truth, so he assumes for the sake of argument that she’s not lying. And then he continues his habit of attacking #MeToo victims by attacking her for complaining now:

I had pretty much concluded that Christine Blasey Ford was contemptible based on her willingness to impugn a public servant’s integrity, derail what should be an orderly and fair political process, and manipulate the U.S. Supreme Court’s membership using a three decades old allegation that involved, at worst, teenage misconduct.

The pearl clutching about impugning “a public servant’s integrity” is just weird. And for the record, Ford is not the one derailing the process. The Senate Judiciary Committee is doing that. Senator Feinstein, in particular, has a lot to answer for in her bungling and manipulative use of Ford’s accusations.

That doesn’t stop Jack from turning the insanity up to eleven:

In fact, it seems clear that she chose her course of action knowing that she could harm Brett Kavanaugh the same way. If the allegation was politically motivated, as I strongly suspect it was, she is unethical and despicable. If the motive was late vengeance for a teenager’s indiscretion, she is unethical and despicable.

Imagine someone you may have harmed when you were an immature teen. That individual never calls you to account, privately or officially. She never urges you to apologize, accept responsibility, or make amends, or gives you an opportunity to do so.

Hey ladies, Jack the Professional Ethicist says: If a man sexually assaults you, you owe him the courtesy of explaining what he did wrong, so that he can apologize and try to make amends. If you fail to do that in a timely manner, then aren’t you the one who’s really the problem? Shouldn’t you be asking yourself, “Have I done everything I can to help my attempted rapist become the best version of himself?”

First Ford attempted to harm Kavanaugh anonymously. Then, when that wasn’t going to work, she announced her accusation in the news media.

That’s a disingenuous account of what happened. Ford told her story in a letter to the Judiciary committee weeks ago, requesting that it be kept confidential. When Feinstein blabbed and the story began to leak to the media, she took responsibility for it under her real name.

What is being ignored by all those rationalizing Ford’s actions is that that the harm to alleged wrongdoers is magnified and multiplied the longer a victim delays calling for accountability.

That’s demonstrably false in this case, given that no one has charged Kavanaugh with a crime. The passage of time almost always works in favor of the accused, as evidence is destroyed, memories fade, and statutes of limitations run out. If this had come out when they were both students, it could have done a lot more damage. Of course, we’d never have heard about it, since people with criminal records don’t usually get to be federal judges.

It also creates the equivalent of ethics toxic waste. In a just society, nobody is pronounced guilty until guilt is proven, and nobody is publicly accused unless the offense is provable. A prosecutor who knows that there isn’t evidence to convict someone of an offense is violating prosecutoral ethics to bring charges.

No charges have been filed against anyone, and there are no prosecutors involved in this mess. Jack is trying so make some kind of analogy to criminal procedure, but he’s getting it wrong: Even by analogy, Christine Ford is not acting as a prosecutor. She’s a witness. She has no obligation to prove anything to anyone. She just has to testify to the truth as she understands and remembers it.

If Kavanaugh did what he is alleged to have done, he should still have the right to deal with the consequences, accept punishment if any, and be able to get on with his life, set a straight course, and prove his character and values as an adult. Wouldn’t anyone want that opportunity? Shouldn’t any 17-year-old miscreant have that opportunity? As I have already noted, Ford’s conduct is an anti-Golden Rule monstrosity.

This situation is not primarily about Kavanaugh’s rights or Kavanaugh’s due process. It’s about filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court with someone who will do a good job. The Senators who will make the decision have the right to hear from anybody they think will have something to say that could inform their decision.

In any case, Jack had a lot more to say about some of the other women involved:

Today competition arose for Ford in the “Most Unethical Non-Senator To Board The Brett Kavanaugh Nomination Ethics Train Wreck” pageant. Cristina Miranda King, a former classmate of Ford’s, decided to grab 15 minutes of undeserved fame by recalling that she “heard” about the incident.

[…]

Stuff you hear about in high school when you don’t know the participants or details is called gossip. It isn’t even hearsay.

It was just a comment she was sharing with friends on facebook. When the story went wide in the media, she clarified that she didn’t have any reliable information about the alleged incident.

Now 900 more unethical women, all alumnae of the Holton-Arms School, the private school for girls in Bethesda, Maryland Where Christine Met Brett, signed an open letter, voicing their support for Ford even though they don’t know her. She’s a woman, you see, and of course one who is impugning a man 30 years late, so she must be telling the truth. “Dr. Blasey Ford’s experience is all too consistent with stories we heard and lived while attending Holton,” they write. This convinces me that Holton Arms graduates a lot of bigoted idiots incapable of critical thought. These women have no valid reason to believe or disbelieve Ford with such certainty. Because they know that students have been assaulted at Holton Arms, this means that Ford must have been assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh? I dare anyone to support this “reasoning.” X must be guilty of conduct Y, because other people like X have been guilty of the same conduct.

Unethical women, as far as the eye can see…

That’s just one post. Jack has gone on and on all week about this. I’m just too tired to write it up.

Kaepernick Kunundrum

Almost anybody who bothers to learn about Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem knows that he’s doing to protest racism and especially police mistreatment of people of color. Except Jack, who makes a tiresome pretense of not understanding:

Kaepernick, distinguished for his incoherent on field protest during the national anthem, instantly setting off the NFL’s version of #MeToo, as in “I want make my own pointless, annoying protest that I can’t adequately explain!,”

Sibling Quiz

Apparently, all six of Republican Congressman Paul Gosar’s brothers and sisters have spoken out in favor of his opponent, Democrat David Brill. Jack offers this item up as an ethics quiz about the siblings. When you see his list of possible responses, it’s not hard to figure out which way Jack is leaning:

Unethical. Family disagreements should not be exploited for political agendas.

Unethical. This is a pure Golden Rule breach.

Unethical. It’s an appeal to authority, as if they have any special expertise or credibility.

Unethical. It’s a cruel thing to do to a family member, and indefensible.

Ethical. They care more about liberal policy items than they do about him, and that’s OK.

Jack makes his position clear in the comments.

The vast, vast majority of ethical humanity would regard turning on a family members and trying to lose him his job absent any criminal activity but based purely on political disagreements as obviously wrong. The only possible counter argument is that their policy agenda is so crucial and ineffably right that it justifies the conduct.

Jack has often shown that he has very little respect for policy analysis. For example, he says it’s wrong to support politicians who make unethical choices in their personal lives (e.g. Bill Clinton) just because you like their policies. That’s kind of a weird ethics calculation, because their personal lives only affect a few people but their policies can affect millions.

That last response on the quiz is also a bit of a tell, because Jack specifically refers to “liberal” policy. Jack takes this attitude when the polices in question are liberal. He’s been much more tolerant of Trump’s personal choices, probably because Jack likes his policies. I can’t prove it, but I doubt that Jack would have written this same quiz if it was about a Democratic candidate being attacked by his pro-life siblings. I think he would be arguing that they were fulfilling their civic responsibilities. 

Finally, there’s some context:

In an interview earlier this month with Vice News Tonight , Gosar floated the theory, propagated previously by fringe personalities like Alex Jones, that billionaire George Soros somehow instigated or bankrolled the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who converged on Charlottesville.

Gosar also raised the false accusation that Soros, an 87-year-old investor and Holocaust survivor, “turned in his own people to the Nazis” in Hungary.

Gosar’s brother David told Phoenix New Times on Friday, “At what point do you draw the line in your family?”

Exactly. When someone around you is saying or doing things you profoundly disagree with, at some point you have to distance yourself from them to avoid appearing complicit. Even if they’re family.

Word Salad

Finally, on Monday, in a nearly incoherent post, Jack lets rip:

I have been criticized, and this blog has been attacked, for taking the position that the “resistance’s” effort to undermine democracy, weaken or national institutions, and move U.S. society toward increasingly totalitarian values and methods as a radical response to the election of Donald Trump is by far the most important and threatening ethics development in the culture. To paraphrase William Saroyan, I’m right and everyone else is wrong. The Kavanaugh fiasco proves it, and the latest smear tactic proves it further.

“Totalitarian values and methods.” Sure. We all remember that one time Stalin publicized a woman’s accusations of attempted rape against a powerful judge, who consequently endured the terrifying prospect of having to remain a powerful judge. The horror. The horror. The horror.

Jack had a lot to say last week about the Serena Williams incident at the U.S. Open, but since I’m not interested in Serena Williams, the U.S. Open, or sports ethics in general, I have nothing to say. I also have nothing to say about Mark Knight’s editorial cartoon about the incident. Or any of Jack’s other posts about Serena Williams. Nor will I make more than a passing mention of Jack’s tiresome pretense of not understanding why players are kneeling during the Anthem at football games.

Later in the week, Jack touched on some science-related issues, starting on Wednesday, when he wrote about a report put out by something called the Center for WorkLife Law that examines bias in the legal workplace. Jack’s not impressed by the study.

At least the New York Times headline, for once, was accurate., at least the online version: “Lawyers Say They Face Persistent Racial and Gender Bias at Work.” Yup, that’s what the survey showed. What it didn’t show is that there really is such discrimination, how much there is, or how it manifests itself. Here’s part of the executive summary:

Prove-It-Again. Women of color, white women, and men of color reported that they have to go “above and beyond” to get the same recognition and respect as their colleagues.

• Women of color reported PIA bias at a higher level than any other group, 35 percentage points higher than white men.
• White women and men of color also reported high levels of PIA bias, 25 percentage points higher than white men.
• Women of color reported that they are held to higher standards than their colleagues at a level 32 percentage points higher than white men.

This demonstrates, at least within the reliability of the survey, that minorities and women perceive that they are being discriminated against more than white males.

Jack is correct about the general nature of the study. It’s not a statistical smoking gun, it is based on self-reports by employees, and it is based on subjective perceptions. However, Jack slightly mischaracterizes the study when he says it is about perceptions of discrimination. From what I can figure out from the executive summary (the main report is hidden behind an expensive ABA paywall), the perceptions are actually about behavior and actions which can reveal discrimination. This is a subtle distinction, and I can’t really blame Jack for missing it.

A survey about perceptions of discrimination might ask lawyers a direct question like “Are women in your firm more likely to be the target of personal insults by their bosses?” The results would then be reported directly from the responses. E.g. “49% of lawyers report that women in their firms are more likely to be the targets of personal insults by their bosses.”

The survey under discussion uses a different approach. It would ask lawyers a question about specific behavior, such as “Have you been the target of personal insults by your boss?” The answers of men and women could then be compared. E.g. “49% of women report being the targets of personal insults by their bosses, verses 28% of men.” That’s a more powerful conclusion, because it compares women’s reported perceptions of their treatment against men’s own reported perceptions of their own treatment.

The quoted example above falls into the latter category, as do other questions mentioned in the executive summary. Obviously, there’s still room for bias in any survey this subjective, but it’s not as bad as Jack claims.

That’s a useless result. We have seen and read, for example, how various African American activists and celebrities like Charles M. Blow and Ta’ nahisi Coates teach their sons that police are racists, and that they must fear them. As a result, they interpret all interactions with police through this prism. One doesn’t have to be a research ethicist to conclude that this warps their perception.

Oh, geez, I can’t even with this… Does Jack really think black people wouldn’t worry about racist cops if they weren’t being deceived by race-baiting activists and celebrities?

In other science news, on Friday Jack attacked the Milken study on the death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane María. I addressed the Milken study in detail in an earlier post.

On Sunday, Jack brought up the Kavanaugh hearing and the accusations of sexual misconduct coming from one of his former high-school classmates. Unsurprisingly, Jack thinks her accusation is unethical.

2. The accusation was over 30 years old, meaning that all aspects of it, including the recollections of the alleged participants, would be inherently untrustworthy. This is why we have statutes of limitations. UNFAIR, and IRRESPONSIBLE.

There is no statute of limitations on Senate hearings for Supreme Court nominees. It’s up to the Senators to weigh the value of her testimony

3. The accusation was, and still is, unsubstantiated by anyone else. UNFAIR, and IRRESPONSIBLE.

This isn’t a civil suit. Substantiating her claims is not really her responsibility.

4. The accusation was made against a distinguished public servant and family man with no documented blemishes on his record or character as an adult, stemming from an alleged incident that occurred, if it occurred, while he was a minor. UNFAIR

And? And?

Look, it wasn’t an “alleged” incident to her. She knows what she believes happened. So unless we’re sure she’s lying, there’s nothing unethical about saying things she believes to be true.

5. No complaint had been made against Kavanaugh by the accuser at any time in the intervening years, until his nomination by President Trump became a political rallying point for the Left. IRRESPONSIBLE.

I’m really tired of this argument, from Jack and everyone else who makes it. You say she should have complained earlier? Well then, in what forum should she have made her complaint? In 1982 she was a 15-year-old high-school girl attending a party with boys and drinking and no parents, and she may have been drinking herself. From her point of view, admitting any of that to her parents or school authorities or the police would just get her in trouble, making the whole incident even worse.

And once a few years went by, telling her parents or the school wouldn’t do any good, and telling the police after so long probably wouldn’t help either. There’d be no one she could tell that would be able to do anything about it…until the nation’s political engines presented her with an opportunity to get revenge. Kavanaugh’s nomination is the first time in decades she’s been able to tell her story to someone who could make it matter.

On Monday, Jack again touched on the Kavanaugh hearing, and Jack’s outrageous response deserves note:

Apparently the Trump administration has decided to pander to the worst of #MeToo fanaticism. I just heard Kellyanne Conway say “This woman should not be insulted, and not be ignored.”

Yes, she should be. She should be insulted because she has interjected herself into a Supreme Court confirmation based on a distant memory she cannot prove, denigrating a veteran professional based on alleged conduct that he may have engaged in as a minor

I can’t see any way Jack’s response is ethical.

Jack started the week with a bang, as he tore into… wait, let me check my notes… Senator John McCain’s funeral, which he describes as “a perfect example of hypocrisy for the ages.”

It was undeniably uncivil to dis-invite the President of the United States from what would otherwise be a display of unified and bi-partisan Washington community respect for a departed public servant. That was an insult, and intended as one.

Maybe, but it was also a courtesy to McCain’s family and friends. I certainly wouldn’t want President Trump at my funeral, because I love my family and wouldn’t want to subject them to that. It’s arguable that McCain also did Trump a favor, because you know that if Trump was there he would have said some stupid shit.

Jack likes rules, so here’s a rule that applies: Don’t invite a clown to perform at a funeral.*

Insults are not civil. The retort to this is that the President was not civil to McCain, which is true. However, if the professional duty of civility is waived by another’s breach of it, then there is no such duty.

Correct. There is no such duty. This is not like a customer service situation, where employees are supposed to remain unilaterally polite even to the rudest of customers. Civility is a two-way street. If you don’t give it, you have no right to claim it from others. Trump is reaping what he has sown.

McCain’s own daughter launched the proceedings with her own uncivil rant, saying in part, “We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness—the real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly, nor the opportunistic appropriation of those who lived lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served.” Later, she added, “The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again, because America was always great.”

Defending her father at his funeral? What a bitch! Why wasn’t she thinking more about Donald Trump’s feelings!

In addition to being uncivil […] the attacks on the President, like Meagan McCain’s, were cowardly. The man (and the office) being savaged wasn’t present, and the crowd was united in its hostility to the target. George Washington’s 110 Rules of Civility cover that kind of conduct neatly:

89. Speak not evil of the absent, for it is unjust.

I guess by the time Washington got to number 89 he was just padding out the list, because that makes no sense. It’s an impossibly restrictive standard. Also, I’m no historian, but I’m pretty sure Washington had some nasty things to say about King George. And if Jack is really concerned about speaking ill of the absent, why is he calling Meagan McCain a coward when she’d not around? For that matter, Jack also criticizes Senator McCain, who is about as absent as it gets.

Seriously though, I don’t know what Washington meant when he wrote this, but the usual social rule about not speaking ill of someone behind their back is an admonition against spreading rumors that they won’t know about therefore cannot attempt to counter if they are untrue. That’s not relevant here because Meagan McCain was’t passing around rumors. She was expressing an opinion. And she wasn’t saying this behind Trump’s back. She spoke in public, in front of the news media, where Trump could easily find out about it and respond.

On Tuesday, Jack complains about this passage from a story about the family of 15-year-old Jordan Edwards, after a police officer was sentenced to 15 years in prison for killing him:

Edwards also acknowledged that before the start of the murder trial she was pessimistic about the prosecution’s chances, after watching police shooting cases like those involving Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castille, Clinton Allen, Alton Sterling, Terence Crutcher and others.

Jack objects, not without some merit, to the article’s grouping together of those cases.

Michael Brown attacked a police officer and was shot.

That’s a fair description, given what we know. But Jack doesn’t stop there.

Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy, died as the result of a series of mistakes by all involved, at the hands of a police officer who never should have been allowed to carry a gun. Rice’s death was negligence, not murder.

Tamir Rice was innocent, and he was shot dead by a police officer, and no one was ever charged for killing him. Jack’s remark about it being negligence changes nothing. No one was charged with negligence either. It’s not hard to see how this would make someone worry that a child shot dead by a police officer might not receive justice.

Philadro Castile, a black motorist who insisted on reaching into his pocket for his license after announcing to a panicky officer that he was carrying a gun, was shot after the officer screamed, “Don’t pull it out!” more than once. I don’t think any jury would guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in that fact pattern, and the officer’s jury didn’t.

This is a bit disingenuous. For one thing, you wouldn’t know from Jack’s description that after the officer screamed “Don’t pull it out!”, Castile did not, in fact, pull out his gun. Jack also omits the salient fact that the officer also asked Castile for his driver’s license and registration. In other words, he told Castile to get something he’d have to reach for, and then shot him for reaching for something. This is bad police work and arguably a criminally bad shooting.

Jack also has this to say:

I honestly don’t know what the right approach is to sentencing police officers who kill citizens without justification or cause in the throes of panic, bad judgment, poor training, or tragic error. I believe that the perilous job police officers perform should be a mitigating factor in sentencing.

Which contrasts disturbingly with his next post, about some people who encountered a moose near a bike path and accidentally frightened it into a body of water, where it drowned:

This is a pointless, tragic, negligent killing of an innocent animal. No photograph is worth the life of a vole, much less a moose, yet too many human beings are so addicted to recording the images of their oh so fascinating lives that they disconnect the ethics alarms and common sense alerts that should tell them instinctively that…

• Intruding on nature threatens and harms it.
• Reality is not best experienced through a camera lens.
• Nobody else can enjoy a natural scene when human beings insist on imposing on it.
• The welfare of the wildlife should be the first consideration, not an afterthought.

What is an appropriate practical punishment for tourists who do things like this? Fines are not enough, and I guess public flogging is excessive.

These people didn’t intrude on nature. They were in their community. The moose was the intruder. That’s not the moose’s fault — moose will be moose — but Jack wants these people punished for not understanding the risk of a situation they stumbled into by accident.

On the other hand, when a trained police officer working for by the community deliberately inserts himself into a situation where he unnecessarily shoots someone, Jack is all “Eh…I don’t know…it’s complicated…there are mitigating circumstances…”

I doubt Jack literally thinks Moose Lives Matter more than black lives, but the juxtaposition of those posts is food for thought.

On Thursday, Jack wrote about the an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times by a member of the Trump administration who claims that Trump’s staff are managing him like a toddler to keep him from screwing things up real bad.

If the op-ed is not a hoax, and if there are, as the writer says, highly placed members of the Trump Administration who are pretending to be loyal government employees but who are actually trying to undermine the President and his policies from within, then the assertions by conservatives and Trump supporters of the existence of a “deep state,” much mocked by the news media and Democrats, have been accurate all along.

Not even close. The “deep state” refers to career bureaucrats who are so well entrenched that pretty much just keep doing what they’re doing no matter who is president. The author of the op-ed, and everyone he refers to, are the “best people” that Trump picked to be in his administration. This is a problem he brought on himself.

In his Friday morning round-up, Jack took on Twentieth Century Fox for removing actor Wilder Striegel’s scenes from the new version of Predator after actress Olivia Munn discovered he was a registered sex offender. He had served six months in jail on charges of risk of injury to a child and enticing a minor by computer in connection with a 14-year-old girl.

Jack’s response is a thing of beauty:

This reminds me of the scene in Ship of Fools when a passenger is exiled from the captain’s table on a German ship because a Nazi complains that he is Jewish.

I did not see that coming. I know Jack supports the War on Drugs, but he must have been smoking something to think it was appropriate to compare this situation to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. 

I don’t like the way we treat sex offenders in this country. The registration requirements and living restrictions are draconian, yet there is little evidence that sex offender registration reduces crime rates. But not wanting a registered sex offender to appear in your big studio film does not make you Hitler.

I know some registered sex offenders. One of them is a good friend, and a terrific human being in all respects that I have observed. I would cast him in a play I was directing, and in fact have. If an actress objected, or anyone else, my response would be the same as it would to a performer who complained that he or she had discovered that my friend was part black, Muslim, or a transsexual.

On the other hand, if she discovered that one of the performers had been brought to American illegally by his parents when he was eight, Jack would probably want her to call ICE on him.

On Saturday, Jack posted from his business trip to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and the second item is 100% classic Jack. He’s angry about an article listing countries where you would probably enjoy retirement more than in the United States, based on something called the 2017 Global Retirement Index.

The entire attitude underlying this article, “16 countries where you can retire ‘happier’ than in the US.” is selfish and irresponsible. You are an American citizen and this is a participatory democracy. I don’t care if you’re retired; you still have a lifetime obligation to contribute to society, your community, and the nation.

No. No you don’t. Nobody owns you like a piece of fucking property. And you certainly aren’t owned by the government. You’re free people and you can do what you want.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a guy who gets so angry over people coming here from other countries would also get angry over people leaving. This is just Jack showing his ugly totalitarian streak. It’s values like this that make me think it’s a waste of time to leave comments on his posts.

Jack also writes about some unexpected encounters he had with transgender people on his trip. Don’t worry, it’s more amusing than horrifying.

At our hotel in Ft. Lauderdale, a convention of either transvestites, transgender individuals, or some combination of the two dominated the hotel. The organization was “Himmaher”…I think I’m spelling it right.

He’s not spelling it right. The first entry Google finds for the word “”Himmaher” — and I had to force a literal search — is Jack’s post.

I’m just guessing, but I think Jack must have been staying at the Riverside Hotel in Ft. Lauderdale, which from September 6 through 8 was hosting the Southern Comfort Transgender Conference. The conference occupies four of the hotels’s conference rooms: The New River room, Abeona room, Merritt room, and…the Himarshee room. I’m guessing Jack saw or heard that last room and thought it sounded like some kind of transgender reference. It’s actually the Native American name for a nearby river. (Jack has sort of corrected this in his post since.)

I had several illuminating encounters. I don’t know that this is true of all such people, but the members of this association or club all seemed to want to make any non-club member they saw as uncomfortable as possible. Yes, that’s unethical.

Yes, that must be what they were up to. They’re freaking the squares. It’s the only possible explanation for a convention of hundreds of transgender people walking around looking like they are transgender people.

But what these people seemed to be seeking was imposed ethics zugswang. If you looked directly at them, the response was a chip-on-the-shoulder, “Go ahead and stare, honey: never seen a freak before?” If you appeared to be avoiding staring—I regard a six-foot ex-male standing in the middle of a hotel lobby in a wig, skimpy bathing suit, 6 inch heels and speaking loudly in a base voice as parading a psychological problem or ten, and deserving the same social courtesy I would offer to a Tourette’s victim or a hebephrenic—then the individual decided to make it a project to get you to stare, as if your failure to provide the attention they craved was an insult.

So it’s all a trap, you see. Transgender people are trying to make you feel guilty for not starting at them, but when you look at them, they snark at you. Don’t say Jack hasn’t warned you!

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*Unless, of course, the deceased and/or close family and friends are actual clowns, in which case a sketch suitable for the somber occasion may be appropriate. Windypundit does not discriminate against clowns. We are less tolerant of fools.

In Monday’s roundup, Jack quotes with approval Steven Mintz complaining about incivility:

Civility is about more than just politeness. It is about disagreeing without disrespect, seeking common ground as a starting point for dialogue about differences, listening past one’s preconceptions, and teaching others to do the same. Indeed, “civility represents a long tradition of moral virtues essential to democracy. Virtues like empathy, humility, integrity, honesty, and respect for others are ideals of democratic engagement.” Without civility a society can morph into verbal, accusatory, offensive verbal attacks on one another which is the way things are headed in the U.S.

Jack contrasts this with a recent take on civility by Ann Althouse:

Calls for civility are always bullshit, because the real motivation is political advantage. Usually, the civility-demander is trying to get opponents tone it down and not take advantage of whatever hot passion and energy they’ve got on their side.

Sometimes though, the civility-demander wants a faction of his own side to rein it in, because it might scare the moderates and interfere with the message that we are the sane, reasonable, smart people. When that happens, you can get some in fighting, with the supposedly uncivil people insisting that now is not the time to be civil. These people are calling bullshit.

For the record, I can certainly see the value of civility in communicating values and ideas, and when calls for civility arise from within a faction, as Althouse describes in her second quoted paragraph above, I think they are worth listening to. But when the call for you to be civil comes from an opponent, it’s almost always a self-serving tactic. It’s almost always bullshit.

Calls for civility are a cousin of calls for “unity,” and they are bullshit for the same reasons. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say something like, “In these troubled times, we need to be unified…and therefore I am withdrawing my position and will be supporting the opposition’s plan.”

That never happens. Whenever someone calls for “unity,” they are almost always trying to consolidate their power by calling for their opponents to surrender. Calls for civility directed against one’s opponents are just a variation on that theme. They are a cheap trick to gain advantage in an argument.

In a piece responding to Chuck Todd’s claim that popular distrust of the press is due to conservative attacks, Jack responds as if Todd had completely denied the existence of media bias. It’s a subtle difference, but one that serves Jack’s purposes in making the media look stupid and drawing attention away from his own attacks on he media. But the real fun part is this Trump-like declaration of superiority:

What? My business and training include detecting bias, and there is no reasonable, factual argument that the news media isn’t biased. 

Heh.

On Wednesday, and not for the first time, Jack expressed his distrust of Google. That’s because Senator Chuck Schumer suggested renaming the Russell Senate Office Building after John McCain, and shortly thereafter it started showing up as the McCain Senate Office Building on Google Maps.

But it’s not Google’s role to lobby for the change, or worse, to make it unilaterally, as it did today on Google Maps. This was especially bad—but helpful!– timing for the giant tech company, as it is under fire for political bias by the President, who tweeted that the search engine was “rigged,” and Congress, and Google’s CEO just refused to be questioned on the Hill. These companies, like Facebook, Amazon and Twitter, are arrogant beyond all measure, drunk with their growing power, and ethically inert. You can regard this episode as just a funny glitch if you like.

I think it’s an inadvertent warning.

Google explained what happened in a piece that Jack actually links to:

By early afternoon, the error was fixed, and all queries for “McCain Senate Office Building” in Google maps were redirected to Russell. A Google spokesperson suggested the change was prompted by user suggestions.

“We empower people to contribute their local knowledge to the map, but we recognize that there may be occasional inaccuracies or premature changes suggested by users. When this happens, we work to address as quickly as possible,” the spokesperson said in a statement to CNN.

Someone pointed this out in the comments, but Jack wasn’t having any of it:

Sounds like lame excuse to me.

That’s not an excuse. That’s literally how Google works. A big part of Google’s business model is sifting through information provided by other people to find useful information. When you do a Google search, just about everything in the non-sponsored results was written by people all over the internet and selected by Google’s algorithms, based on other content from people all over the internet. It’s automated crowd-sourcing of information. Yes, it can and has been gamed, but most of the time it does a pretty good job at teasing information out of the cacophony of the web.

So I can “suggest” that the Capitol be called “Das Kapital and the White House Be renamed The Fright House” and it will just fly right through? I doubt that.

Probably not. But if you pick a less famous building and get a few hundred other people to go along, then yeah, probably.

With great power comes great responsibility. The people who own and operate the big tech companies are not responsible enough, diligent enough, smart enough or ethical enough to control the power they have. This shows that we are foolish to trust them to the degree we do.

Speak for yourself, Jack. Some of us take the time to learn about the tools we use. Besides, what’s the alternative that is actually better? 

By Friday, Jack was also mad at Wikipedia because he felt the entry on Bruce Ohr was tainted by liberal anti-Trump bias, since it did not comport with Jack’s deep suspicion of the FBI and the Mueller investigation. That post has been edited hundreds of times by dozens of people, with more of the same in the commentary on the Talk tab, and somehow Jack thinks there is something called “Wikipedia” that made it partisan.

Jack also writes about Stanford’s policy of forcing students with mental health issues to take a leave of absence:

Stanford’s website says that a leave may be encouraged or required for a student whose psychiatric, psychological or medical condition “jeopardizes the life or safety of self or others, or whose actions significantly disrupt the activities of the university community.” I don’t see how anyone can argue with that.

The part about jeopardizing others or being disruptive to others seems entirely reasonable. But that’s not what the suit is about, as Jack himself explains:

A lawsuit is challenging the practice of universities of sending students who admit suicidal tendencies home rather than trying to help them on campus. The class action suit accuses Stanford of accusing the university of discriminating against students with mental health issues by coercing them into taking leaves of absence, rather than trying to meet their needs on campus.

Somewhat surprisingly, Jack disagrees with the lawsuit:

Bad law suit, and bad theory. If there is one thing the past several years have made clear, colleges and universities perform horribly one they start trying to do anything other than teaching—and they don’t even do that so well, in too many cases. Students with serious emotional and mental problems should be put into the hands of professionals, and such decisions should be the responsibility of the family, not educators.

This is so wrong, on so many levels.

First of all, when somebody in your community comes to you for help, you should try to help them if you can. That’s just the compassionate thing to do. And even if you can’t help them, what you don’t do is kick them out of the community.

(There are exceptional situations, of course, such as when somebody’s mental health problems could harm the community. These situations are rare, but they do happen. There are also “communities” that are not substantial enough or too special-purpose be able to offer the right kind of help.)

Second, some of these students are depressed and anxious and reporting suicidal thoughts. Now I’m not a mental health professional, but I’m pretty sure that what you don’t do when a suicidal person asks for help is stress the living fuck out of them by unnecessarily thwarting one of their major life goals.

Third, it’s possible that the student’s family situation is the cause of their problems, and forcing them back into that situation would exacerbate the problem.

Fourth, Jack says students with mental and emotional problems should be put into the hands of professionals. Well, Stanford’s department of Counseling and Psychological Services has a staff of three dozen people, including psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers. Stanford has professionals.

Fifth, given that Stanford offers these services to students, they are obligated to provide them when students meet the requirements for receiving them.

Sixth, Jack takes the position that colleges and universities are too incompetent to do anything that’s not teaching. But the course of action he defends, kicking the students out, is an example of exactly that kind of incompetence.

• Jack: Colleges and universities are too incompetent to help a student with mental health problems.
• Also Jack: Colleges and universities are totally competent to decide that a student’s mental health problems would improve if they were forced to leave.

Seventh, Jack’s position is disrespectful of the students’ abilities to make their own choices. The students in question are not so mentally ill as to be incompetent. If they want to quit school and go home, they can. If the school’s mental health counseling service really believes the students’ mental health would benefit from a leave of absence, they can counsel the students to take one.

Finally, on Sunday, Jack takes one of his commenters to task for accusing him of writing more about politics than ethics. Jack refutes this with numerical statistics. I’m inclined to agree with Jack here, especially since I’ve begun writing these round-up pieces. I’m responding to a lot fewer of his posts than I thought I would, because most of his posts are about sports or showbiz, and many of the rest are not about heavily politicized issues.

Ross’s comment also reminded me that I need to add the “so called ethicist” and “self-anointed ethicist” to the magic phrases that can get a commenter banned.

I’m probably guilty of that. I am generally suspicious of people who call themselves ethicists because it comes across as an attempt to put lipstick on busybodyism. (I’m a busybody on this blog, but I don’t pretend otherwise.) Also, some ethicists have truly stupid and sometimes horrifying views.

In addition, I don’t think it’s entirely fair for Jack to complain about being called a “self-anointed” ethicist, when his bio page on his professional website lists no specific training in ethics, no certifications in ethics, and no membership in professional ethics organizations (although he is a member to two bar organizations which presumably have ethics codes). Although perhaps Jack is just objecting the the connotations of “self-annointed” and would be okay with alternatives such as “self-described.”

That’s not to say that Jack is a fraud. People ask for his opinions on ethical issues, and they ask him to teach ethical issues to others, and they pay him enough to make a living, so he’s definitely a professional ethicist.