Thursday Ethics Warm-Up, 9/24/2020: It’s “Supreme Court Day”!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Literally!

On this day in 1789, The Judiciary Act of 1789 was passed by Congress and signed into law by President George Washington, thus establishing the Supreme Court of the United States. Notably, it was then designed as a tribunal made up of only six justices—an even number! (The Horror!)  President Washington quickly nominated John Jay to preside as Chief Justice, and John Rutledge, William Cushing, John Blair, Robert Harrison and James Wilson to be Associate Justices.  You should know Rutledge: he sings that cool song about slavery and the Triangle Trade  in “1776.”  You also should recall Wilson from that show—he’s the one slandered by being portrayed as a total weenie, which he most assuredly was not.  Two days later, the six appointments were confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

Nobody thought it was a big deal.

1. We knew the New York Times’ “1619 Project” was flagrant Black Lives Matter-inspired propaganda and based on lies, correct? Ethics Alarms discussed this when the Pulitzers honored the thing’s Liar in Chief, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who even admitted that it was really more about creating a useful “narrative” than accurately presenting history. Ben Crump, the serial race-hustler who gets huge damage settlements for family members of black victims of various tragedies by proclaiming the police and America as racist, cited  the “1619” project’s narrative yesterday while helping to incite riots. See? It works!

But the project is used in many school systems as “history,” and the central dishonesty was a problem, so the Times, without announcement or explanation, erased the central claim of the 1619 Project, which was that the year the first slaves were brought to Colonial Virginia was the “true founding” of the United States.

The  initial introduction to the Project, when it was rolled out in August 2019, stated that

The 1619 Project is a major initiative from the New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

Sometime this year, the text became,

The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.

The change was discovered after Hannah-Jones denied  last week that the project’s core thesis was what she and the Times  had said it was. It “does not argue that 1619 is our true founding,” she said. Well, not any more. Continue reading →

Not Illegal, “Just” Cynical And Unethical: The Bloomberg Florida Vote-Buying Scheme

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

As part of the Democratic Party’s commitment to “go high” in its pursuit of power, Michael Bloomberg is buying the votes of convicted Florida felons for Joe Biden.

Not technically, of course, but that’s exactly what he’s doing. After all, the ends justifies the means. Isn’t that what Mitch McConnell essentially said when he refused to let the Senate vote on…wait, that’s the Republicans. I’m getting my cynical, unethical parties mixed up.

Mike Bloomberg has pledged to pay off the debts of  felons in Florida who have recently been ruled ineligible to vote unless they pay the fines that are part of their punishment.  This is a generous action by Bloomberg, who is devoted to expanding the right to vote of all Americans…no, wait, I’m confused again. The Washington Post reported that only Black and Hispanic ex-felons in Florida will get the gifts, because they they are more likely to vote for Biden than whites.

Nice.

The revelation comes from a memo originally obtained by the Post which read in part, “We know to win Florida we will need to persuade, motivate and add new votes to the Biden column. This means we need to explore all avenues for finding the needed votes when so many votes are already determined.”  Apparently the former New York Mayor with the personal vendetta against the President only cares about the right to vote when it is exercised the way he wants. Of course, Joe Biden and the rest of the party are thrilled to have Bloomberg’s money purchasing votes to defeat that unethical Donald Trump, who will do anything to win.

Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz (R., Fla.), himself possessed of somewhat dubious ethics alarms, told Fox News that that Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody  might launch a criminal investigation of Bloomberg (actually the non-profit organization that he is funding) for vote purchasing. That looks like a stretch. The relevant law, Section 104.061, Corruptly influencing voting, states, Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: CNN’s Don Lemon

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“You know what we’re going to have to do?… You’re going to have to get rid of the electoral college….And if Joe Biden wins, Democrats can stack the courts and they can do that amendment and get it passed.”

—Don Lemon, juvenile CNN host, in another one of his increasingly frequent whiny rants, this one about how unfair the  Electoral College is.

Because Lemon was talking to the dumbest broadcast journalist on television,  Chris Cuomo, and because if Lemon’s colleague realized how ignorant this statement was—never a sure thing when Cuomo is involved—he might have decided that it was better to mislead CNN’s viewers than to point out that Lemon doesn’t know the U.S. Constitution from an anchovy, nobody corrected this howler.

Lemon apparently thinks the Supreme Court “passes” amendments, or something. He clearly doesn’t understand how amendments actually get passed, and why this particular amendment will never, never be passed. Since he doesn’t know what he is talking about, it is incompetent, irresponsible and unprofessional for him to talk about it. Journalists are supposed to enlighten, not make the public more misinformed than it already is, a condition that poses a danger to democracy without being made any worse.

It is also incompetent, irresponsible, nonprofessional, reckless and a breach of duty for CNN to allow someone who couldn’t pass junior high civics to pretend to be able to analyze the nation’s political scene. Continue reading →

The Breonna Taylor Non-Indictments [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

We’ll see just how much Facts Don’t Matter in the Breonna Taylor fiasco aftermath. I heard shameless race-huckster Ben Crump speaking on TV, and when he started blathering on about 1619, I changed the channel to a re-run of “The Andy Griffith Show.” As a friend says, memorably but grossly, “There is some shit I won’t eat.” The sentiment is apt here.

The Kentucky grand jury did not indict current and former police officers for the shooting death of Breonna Taylor, though her name has been prominently linked to that of George Floyd and others during the promotion of protests and rioting in the George Floyd Freakout. As with Floyd, there was no evidence of racism in the death of Taylor, other than the fact that the three cops involved are white and she was black. That’s enough for the presumption or racism to stick, as we have learned in other cases, thus “justifying” Crump’s pronouncements.

Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT, was sleeping in her apartment on March 13 when police officers Jonathan Mattingly, Myles Cosgrove  and Brett Hankison, operating with a no-knock warrant that was mistakenly processed, burst in. Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, thinking that the apartment was being invaded, shot at them, and they returned fire. Taylor was accidentally killed by a bullet from Cosgrove’s gun in the crossfire, and five other bullets struck her as well.

Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron held a  press conference after the grand jury’s decision was announced, explaining that because Walker fired first, Cosgrove and Mattingly were “justified in their use of force after having been fired upon.” The result was pre-ordained from the beginning unless prosecutors violated all ethical standards and pushed the jurors to indict the officers for Taylor’s death anyway as a sop to Black Lives Matters and an attempt to stem the violence likely to follow if the officers weren’t sacrificed to the mob.

I, legal experts, and anyone paying attention  doubted that the grand jury would or could return murder indictments on this set of facts. The 12 jurors did return three counts of wanton endangerment in the first degree against Officer Hankison for shooting his gun into the apartment next to Taylor’s, but that is unlikely to calm the fury of those who want to riot on general principles, if you can call “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!” a principle. Continue reading →

Noonish Ethics Quickies, 9/23/2020: Still More Weird Tales Of The Trump Deranged!

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

1. Senator Murkowski has the integrity of a shack made of cream cheese. She thought she could get cheap virtue signaling points by announcing that she would refuse to vote to confirm President Trump’s nomination to fill the SCOTUS vacancy, but now that it looks like her stand will be futile, she says she might vote to confirm after all. Throughout her nepotism-built career, Murkowski has repeatedly demonstrated that if you don’t like what she advocates, wait a minute. She’s untrustworthy, and the fact that Alaskans keep re-electing someone like her strongly suggests that they just don’t give a damn.

2.  A good friend just wrote on Facebook that 200,000 Americans would still be alive if Donald Trump wasn’t President. He really wrote this, and there was no joke attached. He cannot possibly believe that. What was he doing? Sucking up to his many Trump Deranged friends? Having a stroke? I was temped to respond, but decided to let it go. The post was embarrassing: even the average Trump Deranged citizen who now has the IQ of a winter squash could tell THAT claim is nonsense.

The social media narrative, echoed by the news media and Democrats, that somehow the deaths from the pandemic in the U.S. would be fewer, or far fewer, if only President Trump had “followed the science” and done something different that no one can quite identify, is , in my assessment, signature significance for either a fool or a liar. Every other day I mark a shift in the “scientific” consensus or some new theory, because the health community still doesn’t understand what it is dealing with.  The New York Times, simultaneously with pushing the “blood on his hands” Big Lie (that’s #9, if you’ve lost count), regularly includes items that contradict the narrative. On August 24, for example, it noted in a column in the Business Section–nicely buried!— that the CDC didn’t advocate wearing masks until April, after saying in January that wearing masks wasn’t necessary.

If Americans allow this ongoing and self-evident lie to influence their vote in November, they are as incompetent as the idiots, if there were any, who voted against Hillary Clinton because they believed that she was operating a child sex trafficking operation out of a D.C. pizza joint. Continue reading →

On Distributing The Wuhan Vaccine: An Old Ethics Dilemma With No Solution

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

I was waiting for this one.

Back when ventilators were the rage (before we found out that once you were on a ventilator, you were pretty much toast anyway–Science!), I had filed an article about the likelihood that Down Syndrome sufferers would be deemed unworthy of high priority when scarce equipment was being rationed. I never got around to writing about it, but I knew, like the giant swan in “Lohengrin,” the issue would be sailing by again. Sure enough, as the prospect of a Wuhan virus vaccine seems within view, the same basic question is being raised: if there aren’t enough vaccines for everyone, who gets the first shot  (pun intended)?

Well, there is no right answer to this one, unfortunately. All debates on the topic will become that popular game show, “Pick Your Favorite Ethical System!” or its successful spin-off, “What’s Fair Anyway?” That’s fun and all, but the debates are completely predictable.

The issue is essentially the same as the “meteor or asteroid about to hit the Earth” dilemma in movie like “Deep Impact,” where only a limited number of citizens can be sheltered as a potential extinction event looms. If you follow the Golden Rule or the John Rawls variation, you end up with survivors being chosen by lot, or pure chance. Kantian ethics also tends to reject any system that sacrifices one life for a “more valuable” one. Competent and rational public policy, however, has to take into consideration more factors than these over-simplified (and this appealing) ethical systems can.

Like it or not, a decision in the rationing of a vital resource problem has to come down to utilitarianism, or balancing. That means winners and losers, and the losers in such decisions always feel that the winners being favored is unfair. From their perspective, they are right. Policymakers, however, have a duty to society as a whole, and the long-term best interests of the whole population. Being human, they also have biases, and how they weigh the various factors involved in balancing interests inevitably is affected by their own agendas.

If the job of determining who got the vaccine first was delegated to Black Lives Matters, how do you think it would approach the problem? Continue reading →

I Hereby Declare An OPEN FORUM!

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Lots of reasons—I’m doing a three-hour Zoom legal ethics seminar for government lawyers in about an hour, I’ve been wrestling alligators for three days, and even WordPress has turned on me, showing readers a discarded paragraph in the last post that never showed up for me on two computers. It’s a good time for cooler heads to take over.

The usual ground rules apply: keep comments substantive and on topic, and make me proud.

I may be back if I have any enthusiasm left after 9 pm.

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 9/22/2020: Death, Ethics, And Rationalizations

/ Jack Marshall / 65 Comments

I just learned that my sweet, kind cousin Kathy has died as the result of several recently discovered brain tumors. I hadn’t seen her for decades, so in my mind she’s still 35, vibrant  and beautiful. I have to come to terms with the fact that we had no relationship at this point, but her loss still stings. She lived alone after her marriage with a real creep fell apart; never had children. Like all of the Coulourises (my mother’s side), family was so important to her. I could have picked up the phone.

1. I suppose today’s anniversary of Lincoln signing the  Emancipation Proclamationin 1862 has to be noted, but it was a strategic act, not an especially ethical one. After all, it exempted slaves in the border states, which allowed slavery  but had not joined the Confederacy. After the Union’s sort-of  victory at the Battle of Antietam earlier in the month,  Lincoln announced that enslaved people in areas still in rebellion within 100 days would be free. Then, on January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation, which declared “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebel states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”  Note that it freed no slaves that he had the power to free, but the maneuver successfully made the Civil War about human rights. Anti-slavery nations like Great Britain and France, which the Confederacy desperately wanted as allies,  couldn’t back the Confederacy after Lincoln made the war explicitly a statement against slavery.

2. Does Mitt Romney have any core principles at all?  If he does, I don’t know what they are. It has always been clear—I hope— that he is a pure pragmatist, doing whatever he thinks will work at any given time. Non-ideologues often make effective leaders: FDR was one. Lincoln too. Romney would hate this, but Donald Trump is like Romney in that regard. (So are Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.). Over in the Facebook hive, the Deranged are gnashing their teeth over Romney’s announcement that he’ll vote for a qualified nominee for SCOTUS. I guess they thought that he would be like John McCain, and be governed by spite. Sure, Romney voted for impeachment because it was meaningless except to give the President a poke in the eye. He is still a Senator from Utah, however. he’s not going to torpedo an effort to solidify a conservative majority on SCOTUS.

If he were a Senator representing Massachusetts, it would be a different tale.

3. Black Lives Matter quietly deleted the “what we believe” page on its website. You know, that was where the group said its mission is to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” to “dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work ‘double shifts’ so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work,” as well as “foster a queer-affirming network” by “freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual.” Maybe they were afraid all of those corporations, sports teams and politicians proclaiming their support might finally decide to read about what they were endorsing. Continue reading →

More Weird Tales Of The Trump-Deranged

/ Jack Marshall / 57 Comments

This one has an up-beat and even promising ending, but it still raises the question of what the hell has happened to these people to make them like this.

Leo Guinan learned that his parents  placed a pro-President Trump sign on their lawn, and since he believes that they don’t have the right to have political opinions that differ from his (after all, his self-description on Twitter tells us that he “uses his privilege to raise the voices of others,” so he we know he’s an official arbiter of truth and virtue) he decided to punish them, announcing in a Medium post that he had decreed that either they censor their political expression, or they couldn’t see their grandchildren.

In this he was emulating his favorite party, which as we know, is now threatening to hurt the nation in retribution for the President doing what the Constitution says he is supposed to do—nominate a judge to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. Loyal to a party of thugs, Guinan felt that it was incumbent upon him to behave like a thug.

Toward his parents.

Nice guy.

Before lowering the boom on Mom and Dad, Guinan had posted an earlier Medium masterpiece (BOY there’s a lot of crap on Medium!), an “open letter” to his folks explaining why they were abandoning Christian principles by supporting the Republican Party. The letter, to be kind, is pathological. The degree of blindness to one’s own biases required to write such garbage—and proudly publish it!—is staggering. When they study Trump Derangement and the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck in history and psychiatry classes—and they will, I promise you—this letter should be on the reading list. Despite the extravagant claims Guinan makes, there is no substantive argument in the thing at all—and that’s is typical. The Trump Deranged are heralds of wisdom and The Right Way because they just are, that’s all.

“I have done more research into these matters than you would believe,” he claims. I certainly don’t believe it, because if he really researched “these matters”  he would do more than parrot back social media bubble cant. “I have seen some shit, and I mean that very seriously.” That’s the closest Guinan comes to a factual assertion.  “If you would like to actually discuss any of the topics that Fox has been feeding you with an open mind, I will be happy to do so. And I will bring sources to back up my thoughts.” Talk is cheap, you fraud. I’ll discuss those topics with you, and also what MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post  and CNN have been feeding you, buddy. Bring it on. But it’s so much easier to bully your parents.

“Let’s say you decide to believe me, and we can go from there. I can help you find a selection of reasonable news sources,” he continued. I bet. Any guesses what those might be?  “Right now, the Republican party is something I have never seen. The level of corruption and simply evil people in some very powerful positions is something that quite literally resembles pre-WWII Germany,” he stated.

“Quite literally!” I’ll never forget Hitler how was  brokering peace deals for the Jews. And have you noticed how Trump’s brownshirts attack and intimidate…no, wait, that’s Black Lives Matter, endorsed by the Democratic Party

Guinan’s party is supporting riots and arson, and attempting to elevate one race over others. It is, as I mentioned, using threats to intimidate those who want to legally fill a SCOTUS seat; it has refused to accept the results of a Presidential election; it has employed Hitler’s Big Lie tactic as a primary tool, and Guinan concludes  Republicans are acting like Nazis! “I can help you find the historians who are quite clearly making these arguments.” Yes, so can I. You’re appealing to authority because you have no independent thoughts, and those historians have disgraced themselves.

Continue reading →

Ethics Warm-Up, 9/21/2020: The “Waiting To Hear What Democrats Will Threaten Next” Edition.

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Does anyone else find it remarkable that Democratic Party leaders aren’t the least concerned with how reasonable Americans might react to them talking like mobsters and thugs? Yesterday, Nancy Pelosi seemed to say that they might impeach the President if he nominates a judge to replace Justice Ginsburg. I suppose it’s comforting that the party is finally being open about the fact that it now regards impeachment as a pure partisan weapon, but how do you you threaten impeachment if a President fulfills his constitutional duties? For that matter, how can Democrats scream that the late Justice’s “dying wish” must be respected when it would require contradicting her statement about final year SCOTUS nominations: “The President is elected for four years, not three. So the powers that he has in year three continues into year four… and that’s how it should be”?

Well, it’s a rhetorical question, of course. Democrats have abandoned any pretense of consistency and integrity in their destructive anti-Trump mania. I thought this arch tweet was on point, but incomplete:

The list is much longer.

1. Love it. Princeton, engaged in BLM suck-up grandstanding, confessed that systemic racism is embedded there, so the Department of Education asked if Princeton doesn’t discriminate on the basis of race, as must be the case to continue recieveing federal funding.  The Education Department’s demand for an explanation got full huminahumina treatment in the statement Princeton issued in response. The excuse is that they aren’t at fault for the racism, since “everybody’s been doing it,” and at least Princeton acknowledges the problem.

Weak. Continue reading →