Category Archives: ethics

“The lady should always walk on the inside.”

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Like nearly all blanket, all-encompassing rules, this one is just dumba*. A letter writer recounted an anecdote from early in his relationship with his wife.

My wife and I were walking down 5th Ave. in Manhattan with her on the outside closer to the street while I was on the inside…. We passed a man who promptly chastised me: “The lady should always walk on the inside.”

The letter writer meekly complied, and he was wrong to do so; although, his error was not in his timidity in the face of the officious, self-important accoster.

When my wife and I go for our walks, significant parts of the walks are along a greenbelt frequented by bobcats and, occasionally, coyotes. The bobcats mostly leave humans alone, though they want watching with the same caution with which they watch us. Coyotes, though, are much more aggressive and often attack the humans they encounter.

When we’re along those greenbelts, we cross, and my wife walks on the outside, the street side, while I switch to the inside, the side toward the danger. That danger is small, but it’s larger than the danger from the street.

The letter writer should have similarly assessed the relative dangers and adjusted their walking sides accordingly. In an earlier time, the lady generally walked on the gentleman’s left so he could keep his sword hand free in order to draw promptly against a brigand. That sort of danger obtains today, also, even if it isn’t a sword that the gentleman, or the lady, is carrying.

A European Plan to Hold Open the Strait of Hormuz

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They’re finally getting around to talking about setting something up—after declining to help force it open in the first place. That would be too dangerous for fragile European militaries, they say. Might get poked in the nose. Or as French President Emmanuel Macron so carefully euphemistically put it,

…reopening the strait by force would be “unrealistic[.]”

What’s really interesting, though (as an aside, I do wonder why those nations have military establishments if they’re not intended to fight), is who has been invited to this diplomatic coffee klatch and who has not (of course the US has not, but that’s not the interesting part). They’ve invited the People’s Republic of China and India. But they’ve apparently chosen not to invite the Republic of Korea, Japan, or Australia, each of whom also has a serious interest in the free flow of cargo, oil, and natural gas through the Strait. Of course, they chose not to invite the Republic of China; that would offend the PRC, and Europe is much too fearful of the PRC to do anything that would even remotely hint at that.

Saudis Want Negotiations

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Saudia Arabia is worried that the Houthis, a terrorist client of Iran, will close the Bab al-Mandeb and thereby block Saudi oil shipments from leaving the southern end of the Red Sea enroute to India, Asia, and points east. They fear an Iranian push on the Houthis in response to President Donald Trump’s (R) move to block the Strait of Hormuz against Iranian oil leaving, ships entering with a view to loading up on Iranian oil, and ships exiting that have paid the Iranian protection money.

Never mind that ships leaving with non-Iranian oil or other cargo—including the Saudis’ oil—and that have not paid the protection vig are free of the Trumpian blockade.

Against all that, the Saudis want Trump to go back to negotiating with the Iranian terrorists. Negotiate, the Saudis want, anything, anything to keep the Bab al-Mandeb open. Please.

No. Trump’s blockade must stay in place, and the destruction of the IRGC’s small boat fleet must resume forthwith, along with the resumed destruction of Iranian missiles and rockets and their launchers, along with the destruction of Iran’s drone inventory, launchers, and ability to manufacture any weapons of any type. It’s not possible to have meaningful negotiations with terrorists.

If the Saudis really are that married to negotiations and attendant terrorist accommodations, let them reach their own accommodation with the Houthi terrorists. Alternatively, the Saudis could get serious about fighting and destroying the Houthis themselves in place of their years of desultory, perfunctory potshots at the occasional Houthi enclave.

Hungary’s Election

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The results of Hungary’s election last Sunday are pretty much in, and the upstart Tisza Party, led by Péter Magyar, has won a resounding victory, 53.6% of the votes compared with 37.8% for Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, with 98% of the votes counted. That puts Tisza on track for a better than two-thirds majority in the nation’s unicameral Parliament.

Some on the Left in the US and in Europe are calling that a defeat of a traitorous right-wing Orbán and his party. Others have a different take on the outcome:

Notre Dame College Republicans
@NDRepublicans
Orbán was just voted out democratically and conceded. Meanwhile countries like France, Germany, and Romania ban opposition candidates from running, cancel elections, and surveil parties for “extremism” if they oppose immigration.

Rasmus Jarlov @RasmusJarlov · 19h
This is the biggest and most needed defeat for traitor right in Europe in modern times. It is not a victory for the left. But a victory for sane conservatism that believes in democracy and does not ally with the enemies of Europe. This is what….

In the event, we’ll see. Magyar wasn’t very unifying in his victory speech:

Together we replaced the Orbán system. Together we liberated Hungary and took back our country. Those who commit the sin of dividing the nation must leave power.

Neither was Orbán:

What today means for our homeland, we do not know, time will tell. In any case, we will serve our homeland even in opposition.

It appears, though, that the Notre Dame Republicans have the better read. Divisive rhetoric, or not, this was a more democratically achieved election outcome than those of the so-liberal France and Germany and Romania.

In Which the Editors Get One Right

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors this time. Don’t expel him [California Progressive-Democrat Congressman Eric Swalwell] from Congress. Let California voters have their say, goes their subheadline.

Swalwell is about as unsavory a man, let alone a politician, as it gets this side of Tren de Aragua, and the sexual assault and rape charges being leveled against him are even worse. However, as the editors point out near the end of their editorial,

He deserves a chance to explain himself, while accusations alone shouldn’t be enough to drive an elected Representative out of office. ….
The [House] Ethics Committee can take up formal complaints, sift the evidence, and recommend an appropriate punishment.

That’s right. In our legal system, an accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a trial court. The legalism doesn’t apply to Congress; each house can expel its members for any reason at all, if two-thirds of its members can be persuaded to the expulsion. However, the principle underlying the legalism assuredly does apply to Congress, as it does to all of us citizens.

Let the House Ethics Committee do its investigation and recommend the punishment it deems fit, but short of expulsion. Let the matter also come to serious criminal trial, and if he’s convicted, the Ethics Committee then can revisit the matter and recommend expulsion—and the House then should vote unanimously for that expulsion.

All of that may have become moot, though: Swalwell announced Monday that he was resigning from Congress with immediate effect. Withal, my claim regarding presumption of innocence remains unbloodied and unbowed.