Category Archives: ethics

Misplaced Understanding

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A woman wrote to a financial advisor with the following problem. She had just linked up with an old high school woman chum and the two were having lunch together; the writer, at least, having a good time catching up on things with her apparently reconnected-with friend. When the check for the lunch came, this happened:

Since this was not a “date” it should have been assumed we would split the bill, right? I never carried cash (still don’t) and pulled out my Amex card to pay my half. To my complete surprise, she stood up and declared (I will NEVER forget this), “Oh, thank you so much for paying! It was great to see you!” and out the door she went.

What to do, she asked the financial advisor, especially now that the incident is in her past but she’s having trouble putting it behind her.

The advisor led off with this:

Your friend could have genuinely believed that you were picking up the tab. It may have been presumptuous, but it could have been a misunderstanding; her mistake was to jump to conclusions prematurely in good faith.

He had this, too:

Your friend sounds like a good egg. [She’s a teacher, and that’s hard.] For all our analysis and reflecting on past matters of financial etiquette, I have a feeling that if we met our respective friends again [the advisor had a similar experience], neither of them would even remember.

No, and no. The first is just rationalization for the subsequent advice. The advisor ignored the fact that the “friend” exited the conversation, the table, and the restaurant as soon as she made her “thanks.” Had the other woman truly misunderstood the treat vice dutch nature of the get together, she would have remained, engaging in further conversation while the credit card was taken away then returned a short time later with the receipt to be signed. Then the two would have left the restaurant together.

Too, of course neither of the two “friends” would remember; they’re the ones who skated.

Here, the woman’s “friend” knew exactly what she was doing; that’s why she didn’t tarry after her words of thanks.

My own advice: forgive the boorishness, but don’t forget it. Evaluate the potentially rebudding relationship, and make a conscious assessment of whether continuing the relationship is worth the other woman’s boorishness. If there’s to be another shared lunch, decide in advance whether the woman will pay; it will be a dutch treat; or the other woman will pay that time, it being, in a way, her turn.

“Pinned”

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Pinned? Really? As universities start to pay lip service to acting concretely against the bigotries and ideological indoctrination rampant on their campuses, there’s this comment by a news writer that lies at the core of the universities’ problem.

University leaders, pinned between liberal faculty and the Trump administration, are quietly trying to make friends in Washington amid widespread concerns about research budgets, student aid, and the White House’s quest to push academia to the right.

How is it possible that university leaders can be pinned between faculty—liberal or otherwise—and the Trump—or any other—administration?

The long and short of it is that it isn’t possible for such pinning to occur. Unfortunately, the “pinning” does exist, but it’s university managers who feel pinned; there are no to almost none actual leaders in today’s university administrations.

Faculty has no business being involved in the administration of a college or university; they’re employees of the institution, nothing more—and nothing less—than that. University managers who choose not to act as if they’re in charge, which they should be enforcing, are self-selecting for termination. That includes members of the institution’s “governing” board. Faculty members who won’t act like the employees that they are also are self-selecting for termination.

Only when incumbents act within their roles can colleges and universities go back to being institutions of learning, teaching, and research instead of the institutions of limited speech, limited academic “freedom,” indoctrination, and bigotry that they are currently.

Donald Trump Bullies?

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Really? A letter writer in Wednesday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal thinks so. He credulously makes, though, a couple of critical mistakes that no rational, grown adult would make.

Today, Donald Trump’s “bullying” embodies the more contemporary meaning: the cowardly actions of one who seeks to harm or intimidate those he views as weak.

This is risible on its face. Bullies have only the power their putative victims choose to grant them, not a minim more. The cowardice is in those who make the decision to allow themselves to be bullied. Yes, that’s often a hard decision to make, but “hard” means “possible.” There’s no excuse for choosing wrongly here.

The letter writer’s other mistake centers on this—which he, in all seriousness, offers as an example of Trumpian bullying:

[T]he president has issued an executive order stripping security clearances from lawyers at Covington & Burling, who provided pro bono legal assistance to former special counsel Jack Smith. More recently, Ed Martin, interim US attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a letter to Georgetown Law School, demanding that it cease diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and warning that his office wouldn’t hire the school’s graduates unless it did so.
These actions violate the First Amendment’s protections of freedom of expression.

This is laughable beyond anything related to “bullying” or being “bullied.” There is no intrinsic free speech right, or any other right, to a security clearances—which grants the holder access (given a parallel and simultaneous need to know) to data involving national security. Neither Covington & Burling as an institution, nor any of its lawyers, have any such right. It’s not bullying to rescind the clearances of those entities and persons who no longer work for the government.

Neither is there any intrinsic free speech right—or any other 1st Amendment right or any other right sourced to any other clause or clauses of our Constitution—to a government job. The government, like any potential employer, has its own intrinsic right to determine for itself the qualifications required for a job and then to determine for itself who the best candidate(s) might be to be hired into that job.

Nor is there any such right held by Georgetown Law School to place its graduates into any particular job, including a government one.

Back to the bullying foolishness: if Georgetown managers feel bullied by this, that’s their conscious choice. It would be particularly easy, though, for these worthies to stand up to the alleged Trumpian bullying. The Federal government’s authority to enforce any demand, whether to desist from DEI efforts or anything else, extends only so far as Georgetown Law School takes in Federal dollars. The institution is under no obligation to take those dollars. The school’s managers could eliminate the pressures they’ve chosen to perceive simply by ceasing those acceptances rather than ceasing their DEI efforts.

Not an Excuse

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FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson has his lawyers in court asking the judge to delay an ongoing and longstanding suit against Amazon. The excuse is this:

Our resource constraints are severe[.]

Oh, wah. The convenience of the government is no excuse for this—or any—delay. Our Constitution requires a speedy and public trial, and that extends to civil trials, also, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, as this one surely does. There is nothing in either of those two Amendments, or anywhere else in our Constitution, that caveats any of our rights on what any Government personage decides is convenient to himself.

The FTC’s attempt is just another cynical attempt to drag out an intrinsically lousy suit in the hope that Amazon eventually will roll over and “settle.”

No. Amazon should refuse any sort of settlement other than a court declaratory ruling in Amazon’s favor, with legal and reputational damages awarded Amazon. In an ideal world, the judge either would so rule, or he would dismiss the case with prejudice (with costs awarded) and heavily fiscally sanction the FTC’s lawyers for seeking to extend so blatantly obvious a frivolous suit.

Couple Thoughts re Newsom and Progressive-Democrats

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California’s Progressive-Democrat governor, Gavin Newsom, is looking to improve his standing among Conservatives. He’s even taken to hosting right-leaning and extreme-right guests (vis., Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon, respectively) on his new podcast (which strikes me as nothing more than an attempt to manage his image).

As Newsom prepared to launch his new podcast, the governor told his team one of the themes he wanted to explore was how Republicans have been able to beat Democrats on messaging and win the White House.

What is the Progressive-Democratic Party doing, that it loses elections lately, and what must Party do to win. That seems to be Newsom’s thrust.

Then there’s this:

[Progressive-]Democrats are struggling to unite around a strategy to take on Trump and the GOP, which has complete control of power in Washington.

What is Party doing, that it loses elections to Trump and Trump supporters, and what must Party do to regain power in Washington.

Notice the common theme here. Newsom and Party, separately and together, are not the least bit interested in what’s good for our nation; neither is the least bit interested in looking to us average Americans and finding ways to satisfy our needs and wants.

Party—Newsom serves for the moment as Party’s canonical example of this theme—are interested only in its members holding high office and in holding personal political power.