Gee, Who Could Have Ever Predicted That Marijuana Use Would Become a Problem? Me, For One…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I really try not to get emotional over ethics stories, but the current Editorial Board declaration in the New York Times headlined, “It’s Time for America to Admit That It Has a Marijuana Problem” makes me want to run screaming naked into Route 395.

The U.S. had a marijuana problem a half century ago, when an earlier wave of The Great Stupid washed over the land and all manner of important lessons a healthy and functioning society needed to remember and institutionalize were deliberately tossed away because a lot of passionate, anti-establishment assholes were sure that they knew better than anyone “over 30.” I fought this destructive development from college, when I watched one of my room mates suffer short term memory loss from getting stoned morning and night; in law school, when the student running my lightboard for a production of “Iolanthe” erased all the light cues that we had taken six hours to set up because he was higher than the moons of Jupiter, all the way onto this blog. I put up with the mockery of classmates and dorm mates over the fact that I would not “try” pot (“It’s illegal” wasn’t a winning argument, so I settled on “It’s stupid and destructive.”). I drew a line in the sand with my addiction-prone wife, a former pot-head who was already an alcoholic. My fellow lawyers quickly learned not to get stoned around me because they knew I regarded buying and selling pot when it was illegal grounds for reporting them to bar authorities and respected my integrity enough to have reasonable doubts that I might not pretend that I didn’t know what I knew.

I carried the battle onto Ethics Alarms as the relentless pro-stoner propaganda was heading to victory, resulting in the legalization of the drug, the inevitable result of which the assholes who edit the New York Times have the gall now to tell us “Oopsie!” about after being a significant part of the mob mentality that inflicted it on the public, probably forever.

Back in 2011, I drafted a post that I never finished titled, “To My Friends the Pot-Heads: I Know. I’ve Heard It All Before.” It began:

“I take a deep breath every time I feel it necessary to wade into the morass of the Big Ethical Controversies, because I know it invites long and fruitless debates with entrenched culture warriors with agendas, ossified opinions, and contempt for anyone who disagrees with them. War, abortion, religion, prostitution, drugs, torture, gay marriage…there are a lot of them, and all are marked by a large mass of people who have decided that they are right about the issue, and anyone disagreeing with them is stupid, evil, biased, or all three. Contrary to what a goodly proportion of commenters here will write whichever position I take, I approach all of these issues and others exactly the same way. I look at the differing opinions on the matter from respectable sources, examine the research, if it is relevant, examine lessons of history and the signals from American culture, consider personal experience if any, and apply various ethical systems to an analysis. No ethical system works equally well on all problems, and while I generally dislike absolutist reasoning and prefer a utilitarian approach, sometimes this will vary according to a hierarchy of ethical priorities as I understand and align them. Am I always right? Of course not. In many of these issues, there is no right, or right is so unsatisfactory—due to the unpleasant encroachment of reality— that I understand and respect the refusal of some to accept it. There are some of these mega-issues where I am particularly confident of my position, usually because I have never heard a persuasive argument on the other side that wasn’t built on rationalizations or abstract principles divorced from real world considerations. My conviction that same-sex marriage should be a basic human right is in this category. So is my opposition, on ethical grounds, for legalizing recreational drugs.”

Instead of finishing and posting that essay, I posted this one, which used as a departure point a Sunday ABC News “Great Debate” on hot-point issues of the period featuring conservatives Rep. Paul Ryan and columnist George Will against Democratic and gay Congressman Barney Frank and Clinton’s former communist Labor Secretary Robert Reich. [Looking back, it is interesting how all four of these men went on to show their dearth of character and integrity. Ryan proved to be a spineless weenie, rising to Speaker of the House but never having the guts to fight for the conservative principles he supposedly championed. Frank never accepted responsibility for the 2008 crash his insistence on loosening mortgage lending practices helped seed, preferring to blame Bush because he knew the biased news media would back him up. Will disgraced himself by abandoning the principles he built his career on in order to register his disgust that a vulgarian like Donald Trump would dare to become President. Reich was already a far left demagogue, so at least his later conduct wasn’t a departure. I wrote in part,

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Catching Up With “The Lincoln Lawyer” Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

In this limited series of as yet undetermined length, I’ll be examining the legal ethics issues raised by the Netflix limited series of as yet undetermined length based on the Michael Connelly character, fed through the filter of the ubiquitous David Kelley.

I’m not going in strict order chronological order because why should I? This issue is a rich one, and arrived in Season 3 of the show. A prostitute whom Mickey had advised and had testified to help a client in Season 2 turned up dead, and he agreed to represent the man, her cyber pimp, accused of killing her before he realized she was the victim. Mickey liked and sympathized with the victim; whether he was officially her lawyer is a bit vague, but she seemed to think of him that way.

Can a lawyer represent a defendant accused of killing a lawyer’s client? Sure enough, this has happened; there’s even a Supreme Court case about it.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald Thinks Mayor Brandon Johnson Is Brilliant. I Think He’s an Unethical Lying Idiot…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Fitzgerald didn’t know Chicago’s incompetent and dishonest Democratic mayor (the latest one, Brandon Johnson), but nonetheless: anyone who witnessed Johnson’s recent example of holding two opposed ideas in what he optimistically calls his mind must conclude that 1) Johnson is far from brilliant, being an advocate of the “My mind’s made up, don’t confuse me with facts” school of logic; 2) the Mayor believes that Democrats are dummies, which on the topic at hand, illegal immigration and law enforcement, is a good bet, and 3) Fitzgerald wasn’t all that swift either.

Mayor Brandon Johnson went on MSNOW’s “The Weekend” yesterday to opine on President Trump’s remarks to reporters at the White House that Trump’s actions had lowered crime in the Windy City. “We just had numbers from Chicago where Chicago crime has gone down pretty good,” the President said, ungrammatically. Wrong, said Johnson. “Where ICE and federal agents were present, we actually saw an increase in violence. In other words, the tension and the chaos that federal agents bring to cities in America, it actually is counter-productive.” 

Then, seconds later, he said, “Yes, we saw a 30 % reduction in homicides, shooting, shooting victims, all down.”

Johnson did not explain that the so-called increase in violence due to I.C.E. being present was entirely due to illegal interference with and attacks against the federal immigration officers from Chicagoans interfering with law enforcement as a result of being incited by elected officials like Illinois Governor Pritzger and others calling I.C.E agents Nazis, Gestapo, and “occupiers.” Johnson had claimed Trump “literally declared war on American cities.” Literally! Ah, how I remember POTUS signing that declaration of war in the Oval Office….

The likelihood that removing criminal illegal aliens from Johnson’s “sanctuary city” while clearly sending a message that the jig was up, in stark contrast to the previous administration’s policies, had something to do with the reduction in violent crime never occurred to the Mayor. Yet in 2024, Chicago earned the title of America’s homicide leader for the 13th year in a row. 

Naturally, nobody at NSNOW cared to point out that Johnson’s argument was self-refuting, or even ask him if he was a Fitzgerald fan. And so they all beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past…

Catching Up With “The Lincoln Lawyer” Part 1

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Netflix’s “The Lincoln Lawyer” series has dropped its fourth season. This gave me an excuse to revisit the first three seasons of the legal show, based on the Matthew McConaughey film, itself based on Michael Connelly novels, about sketchy a Los Angeles criminal defense attorney whose office usthe backseat of a chauffeur-driven Lincoln town car. The series—it’s Netflix after all—has DEI’ed the movie, with Micky Haller, the central character, being transformed into a Mexican-American who speaks Spanish frequently (though not as often as Bad Bunny) and is played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, a Mexican actor who only plays Hispanic roles when he appears in U.S. movies and TV shows. He was, for example, the gratuitous Hispanic father in the ostentatiously “diverse” “Jurassic World” franchise addition last year (the worst of them all, in my opinion). That is not to say he isn’t an appealing, intelligent, entertaining leading man in “The Lincoln Lawyer.”

The show makes a point of highlighting legal ethics dilemmas, as Mickey habitually tightropes along ethical lines to zealously represent his clients. A fellow legal ethicist thinks the show is unusually good in this realm. I’m not quite so enthusiastic. I will examine some of the legal ethics dilemmas that surfaced in the first two seasons over the next couple days.

Today’s featured problem:

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The N.F.L. Is Helping Chuck Klosterman’s Prediction Come True [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

I was going to get this up before the Super Bowl, but it turns out that the issue was further crystalized by the game itself. As happens approximately 50% of the time with this annual spectacle, the game was a yawn, and much of the news coming out of the contest involved the NFL’s deliberate transformation of what was once considered a unifying family cultural event, like Fourth of July fireworks, into a partisan, progressive statement about how America sucks, with expensive TV ads extolling capitalism and patriotism at the same time. That’s message whiplash, and ethically irresponsible.

As the New York Times explained, without criticism, the NFL took a hard turn Left when it put Barack Obama pal Jay-Z, the rap star and impresario, in charge of the Super Bowl halftime show after the 2018 Super Bowl had triggered anger from fans over players “taking a knee” during the National Anthem. The Times, spinning as usual, says that the kneeling was intended to “draw attention to police brutality and social justice issues.”

As Ethics Alarms pointed out at the time, none of the kneelers, including its cynical originator, over-the-hill quarterback Colin Kaepernick, ever explained coherently what they were kneeling about. What “police brutality”? Oh, you know, Mike Brown, whom Black Lives Matters still says was “murdered” on its website. What social justice issues? Oh, you know: it’s time for white people to be discriminated against to make up for slavery. The left-turn was a greed-induced mass virtue signal to blacks, clueless young fans, and Democrats. (It helped that President Trump vociferously attacked Kaepernick and Co., so the kneeling appealed to the Trump Deranged too. (See Dissonance Scale, Cognitive)

The Times:

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Ethics Observations on the President’s Response to His Obamas-As-Apes Post

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

 REPORTER: “Mr. President, you frequently criticize Joe Biden for not knowing what is going on in his name. This racist video that was posted is on your social media.”

 PRESIDENT TRUMP: “I know what’s going on a hell of a lot better than you do! You don’t know what’s going on! I know what’s going on.  No, Joe Biden didn’t have a clue, but we know everything. And when you look at what’s happening with our economy, think of it, we’re way years ahead of schedule. We have thousands and thousands of businesses being built right now, so Joe Biden had no clue. If Joe Biden were elected or if Kamala were elected, we wouldn’t have country right now. We won the election because of minority voters.”

 REPORTER: “Does this post maybe hurt Republicans with, you know, Black voters after the…”

  PRESIDENT TRUMP: “You know, I was, look, we did criminal justice reform. I did the historically Black colleges and universities. I got them funded. Nobody has been, and that’s why I got a tremendous, the highest vote with male Black voters that they’ve seen in many, many decades. I’ve done great with them. Black voters have been great to me. I’ve been great them. Black voters has been great me. I’ve been great to them.  And I am, by the way, the least racist president you’ve had in a long time, as far as I’m concerned. We have — I’ve had a great relationship. Think of what I’ve done. Criminal justice reform. Nobody else could do it. Obama couldn’t do it, nobody could do. Clinton couldn’t. They actually went the other way. They went into a very bad thing for African American people, Black people. They went to a — they did very bad things. I did very good things. But criminal justice reform, and then I funded the universities, which nobody else was willing to do. They were going every year, they’d come back to Washington and they’d be begging for money, begging. I got to be friendly with some of the heads of the schools and they would come back and they would literally tell me they’re forcing us to beg. I’m the one that got them long-term financing and more than they were looking for.  So there’s nobody that’s done more. And I think maybe more than anything else was criminal justice reform. They’ve been trying to get it for years. And I’m the one that got it done, so nobody can tell me about that.”

 “That somebody posts, the staffer posts, you know, posts. And I knew it was all about, if you take a look at that, and see the whole thing, it was a small section at the very end. But that was about fraudulent elections, which we have, a lot of them. We’re gonna get it stopped. And I liked the beginning, I saw it, and just passed it on.”

Observations:

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Chess Ethics, From Ben Franklin

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Today is Super Bowl Sunday, as you know unless you live in a cave. I quit watching all football after the CTE scandal made it clear to me that this is a deadly sport and that the people who make money by paying young men millions to cripple themselves are ethics villains who deserve to spend eternity standing in a boiling lake of guacamole.

I was never that jazzed about football as a game anyway, and knew that the NFL was the most ethics-free sports organization in existence even as the NCAA worked hard to catch up. In addition to being a mob game on the field and off, it requires no intellectual engagement at all and the values it teaches are few. Later today I will post on Chuck Klosterman’s recent claims that the game is doomed, to which I will only note now by writing, “Good!”

I like all games and most sports. I believe that there are seven special games that everyone should learn to play because they all require special skills that are useful in other spheres of life, and teach ethical values as well. Those are, in no special order,

  • Go
  • Poker
  • Bridge
  • Diplomacy
  • Dungeons and Dragons
  • Scrabble, and 
  • Chess

I will save what each offers us ethically for another essay or six. However the last, which arguably should be first, is the immediate topic here. They used to teach chess in Soviet schools; perhaps they do still. It’s a wise policy. If Americans spent the time they spend watching football playing chess instead, this would be a far healthier country with infinitely stronger critical thinking and life competence skills.

I recently learned that our smartest, quirkiest and most versatile Founder, Benjamin Franklin, was a chess enthusiast. Ben was the ultimate polymath and didn’t have the time or dedication to master a single pursuit that is necessary to become a great chess player. Heck, I don’t understand how he had time and energy to accomplish 25% of what he did in his life. Nevertheless, Ben did take the time to write down his thoughts about the game in the following essay, in which he proposes principles of chess ethics.

I offer it to you now as an alternative to gathering black marks on your soul by supporting the NFL and its sponsors today. Here’s Ben…

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Stanford Student Elsa Johnson

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“This should be the real message of the story: Stanford must reform its disability accommodation system so it is fair, helping only those who need it most. At the same time, the university should encourage students to live up to the greatest human attributes: hard work, honesty, perseverance and excellence. As things stand, it’s teaching us the worst lesson of all: cheaters always prosper while the good get punished.”

—Elsa Johnson, the Stanford student who wrote about how students there contrive “disabilities” to gain advantageous accommodations from the school.

This was the conclusion of “I exposed Stanford’s disability racket. I was stunned by the reaction on campus.” Ethics Alarms discussed Johnson’s original essay here. In her follow-up, she claims that the reaction to her “whistle-blowing” article (my term, not hers) were generally positive, that her fellow students were glad she exposed a culture on campus that encouraged students to cheat. She wrote in part,

“I braced for the worst — but when the story broke, I was floored.The piece did go viral, but the response was overwhelmingly positive. I was flooded with messages of support. “Was that your article on disability at Stanford?” a recent grad from Stanford’s Business School texted me. “THANK YOU for writing it and the courage to include your own story among the examples. I came straight from the army to Stanford and was initially deeply uncomfortable with the ‘gaming’ of the system I saw, for disabilities and other issues. And by the time I graduated two years later, I found myself playing some of those games. I didn’t know if I had lost a part of myself and my integrity, or if this was simply the real world I had to navigate.”

I am considerably cheered by that response, if indeed it was the general response and not one cherry-picked to make an interesting follow-up. I confess that I have my doubts.

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“The Ethicist’s” Tender Feelings for Law-Breaking Neighbors and Illegal Immigrants

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Maybe someone needs to check Prof. Attiah’s citizenship status…

A New York Times reader (and you know what that usually means…) writes to “The Ethicist”…

“About a year ago, a very nice family moved into the rental home next door. We have shared food and invited them to our pool in the summer, and we always exchange greetings from yard to yard. About six months ago, the father’s auto-shop location apparently became unavailable. He and his mechanics now work on cars in their yard and driveway. At times, 15 cars line their driveway and fill the front yard, in obvious states of repair — hoods up, engines removed. This “shade tree” business practice is illegal in our city, and the number of cars and the manner in which they are parked violates city codes. We and our neighbors worry it’s driving down the property value of adjacent homes, and we plan to sell within a few years.

I’m uncomfortable raising this with the family because I doubt they can do much without losing income. Moving to a new garage would obviously be costly. And if I talk to them and the outcome is unsatisfactory, I’d be the obvious culprit for any report to the city. Our friendly terms would disappear.

I’m also reluctant to report because the family is from Venezuela. (They mentioned having green cards, though I never asked.) I’m afraid that even a code violation could draw attention from ICE, which has an aggressive, unpleasant presence in my city. Thoughts?”

Yeah, I have some thoughts:

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BREAKING: DEI Bias Eats The A.P.’s Brains

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Why would the Associate Press feel the world needs this “news” when Savannah Guthrie’s mother is still missing?

The Associated Press is troubled that there are so many white athletes at the Winter Olympics. No, it really offered a new story that says this. No I am NOT kidding. The apparently woke-mad Chris Nisi complains in “Europe’s rising diversity is not reflected at the Winter Olympics. Culture plays a big role” [Note: “Culture plays a big role”= “Bulletin: Water is Wet.”]…

Immigration from Africa and the Middle East has transformed the demographics of Europe in recent decades. And while the growing diversity is reflected in many sports such as soccer — Sweden’s men’s national team has several Black players including Liverpool striker Alexander Isak — it hasn’t made a dent in winter sports…At the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, Sweden is sending a team made up almost exclusively of ethnically Swedish athletes, with NHL player Mika Zibanejad, whose father is from Iran, a rare exception. That hardly reflects the diversity of the Nordic country: About 2 million of its 10 million residents were born abroad, about half of them in Asia or Africa, according to national statistics agency SCB.

The lack of athletes of color at the Winter Olympics — and in winter sports in general — has been a recurring theme in the U.S., which is sending one of its most diverse teams to the Games. It hasn’t gotten the same attention in Europe.

The Olympic rosters of France, Germany, Switzerland and other European winter sports nations look a lot like Sweden’s: overwhelmingly white and lacking the immigrant representation seen in their soccer or basketball teams…”

 

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