Month: February 2011

Lindsay’s Sad Lie

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Lindsay Lohan, when the future was bright

I’m still rooting for Lindsay Lohan to turn things around, so I didn’t want to make too big a deal over her recent tweet in connection with the 24-year-old’s latest drama, a felony charge for walking out of a jewelry store wearing an unpurchased necklace priced at $2,500. Being still on probation as she is, the downward-spiraling former child star is facing the possibility of serious prison time. The tweet said, in part,

“…I was not raised to lie, cheat or steal…!”

This is either self-delusion on an epic scale or one of the most brazen lies since Lindsay told police, when they found cocaine in the pocket of her jeans, that she wasn’t wearing her own pants…or perhaps since she told a judge that she couldn’t make her court appearance on a drunk driving charge, after flying off to the Cannes Film Festival shortly before she was due in court, because “her passport was stolen.” Continue reading →

The Problem With Multi-Culturalism

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

One of many abominations we can blame on Jimmy Carter is the United States’ blessedly half-hearted embrace of multi-culturalism, which Jimmy and his acolytes believed was enlightenment from Europe when in fact it was a disease. This was linked to the ethical value of tolerance, which was in turn used to bludgeon into submission anyone who committed the politically incorrect crime of criticizing conduct that was antithetical to American values engaged in by citizens from other nations.

Civilization needs standards, and culture is the setting of standards, ethical and otherwise. Multi-culturalism is a compact oxymoron that makes society’s standards schizophrenic, impeding efficiency, fairness, and consensus about right and wrong. “Tolerance” requires acceptance of the intolerable, or in its most common permutation here, tolerating the intolerable practices that progressives would like to see established here, while somehow reasoning that other practices that progressives don’t admire shouldn’t qualify for “tolerance.” Continue reading →

The Westminster Dog Show and the Benign Lie

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Tonight is the finale of the Westminster Dog Show. The show is always entertaining if you are dog lover and educational whether you are or not—what the heck is a Plott?–but it is also a strange epitome of what human beings will accept as fair and reasonable because of tradition alone. The pretense that the judging at this stage of the show, after the best of the individual breeds have been selected, is anything but deluded arbitrariness presented as scientific expertise is astounding, because so many intelligent people not only accept it, but accept it with good humor and certitude.

A Scottish Deerhound

The American Kennel Club has exacting standards for each breed, and its judges are well-trained and knowledgeable to be sure. The Group competitions and climactic Best of Show determination, however, are blatant exercises in the suspension of disbelief. It is a true apples vs. oranges extravaganza that the owners, crowd and commentators treat with the solemnity of a major Supreme Court ruling, yet has no more real meaning than a series of coin flips. Last night, for example, a Scottish deerhound, one of my favorite breeds, won the Hound Group. This meant that the Group’s judge determined, in a matter of minutes, that the winning deerhound was a better deerhound than the best long-haired dachshund was a long-haired dachshund. How? What does that even mean? Continue reading →

Ugly Consequentialism: The Daily Beast Backs Perez Hilton

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I am developing a real dislike for the Daily Beast. Tina Brown’s slick news aggregating website has gone out of its way to slander innocent dog breeds, features self-promoting hypocrites like John Avlon, and generally displays the ethical instincts of Piers Morgan, which is to say, none. Today it gave us an update on Serene Branson, who was mocked by blogger Perez Hilton and others for having an obvious, and frightening, on-air neurological event that caused her to be unable to speak coherently. Entitled “Line-Flubbing Grammys Reporter Fine”—trivializing as “line-flubbing” what was clearly nothing of the sort; people don’t get checked out by physicians for flubbing lines—the Daily Beast’s commentary noted that paramedic could find nothing wrong, so “Laugh away.”

This is the ugly face of consequentialism, judging the ethical nature of conduct based on what happens afterwards. Perez Hilton’s cruel amusement at a reporter finding that she cannot form intelligible speech is now retroactively fine and dandy, because Branson hasn’t—so far—keeled over or gone blind. So laugh, jerks, laugh…until she does keel over, tomorrow, or next week, or next month, in which case the ridicule becomes unacceptible to The Daily Beast.

Another human being who is panic-stricken as her body turns on her is not funny, and it is a sign of callousness and a deficit of compassion to laugh at the sight of it, whether or not the apparent catastrophe turns out to be minor after all. But the Daily Beast is proving that it is a playpen, occupied by reporters, columnists and editors with the ethical sophistication of gradeschoolers.

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UPDATE 2/15/11 (From AOL News):

“Despite Branson’s insistence that she’s fine, doctors who have examined the now heavily circulated footage of the incident continue to express concerns.

“This is what we call a class neurological event,” Dr. Keith Black, director of the Neurosurgical Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, told NBC’s ‘Today’ show. “She was obviously aware that she was having difficulty.”

According to Black, Branson’s episode was likely the result of a transient ischemic attack, essentially a “blockage in blood flow going to the brain,” or a “mini-seizure located in the language area.”

The New York Post also spoke to doctors who viewed the tape, and they said that Branson’s garbled speech could have resulted from “aphasia, which affects the ability to articulate, and that it could have been brought on by a mini-stroke, a tumor or a circulatory issue.”

Ethics Hero: New York Courts

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Bravo!

New York’s court officials have decided to bar New York’s elected judges from hearing cases involving lawyers and others who make major financial contributions to their campaigns. The New York Times reports that the new rule of the state court system will be announced this week by Jonathan Lippman, the state’s chief judge. “It is believed to be the most restrictive in the country, bluntly tackling an issue — money in judicial politics — that has drawn widespread attention,” said the paper.

The new rule decrees that “no case shall be assigned” by court administrators to a judge when the lawyers or any of the participants involved donated $2,500 or more in the preceding two years. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Blogger Perez Hilton

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

There is snarky, and there is vicious and cruel. Perez Hilton, the over-the-top celebrity blogger who always amasses enough points to be in the running for Media Creep of the Year, hit rock bottom over the weekend, showing a level of humanity, empathy and caring we identify with the people who ridicule  ALS sufferers and terminal cancer patients, and who find watching heart attacks and strokes amusing.

“MUST WATCH!!!” “Grammy Reporter Fail!” wrote Hilton, about a frightening video showing CBS reporter Serene Branson suddenly finding herself unable to speak coherently on the air as she reported on the Grammys, and obviously experiencing some kind of neurological episode that was a lot more serious than being “tongue-tied.”

“Someone call an exorcist!” joked the blogger, who called Branson’s cisis “HIGHlarious.”

[This post originally included the video footage, but CBS has pulled it.] Branson gets a few words out, then you can see the fear and panic that starts to come into the young woman’s expression as she realizes that her thoughts are no longer being formed into words. She utters a stream of jibberish  very reminiscent of the sounds made by the swimmer at the beginning of “Jaws” who is being attacked by a Great White shark, and then the station cuts her off. If watching another human being in peril and terror is “HIGHlarious” to you, “Ethics Dunce” is an understatement.

Hilton quickly pulled his first post on the incident when it began drawing fire, and so far, doctors haven’t been able to determine what caused the incident…so Hilton obviously thinks he’s in the clear.

He’s not. Even if we never know what happened to Branson, she was frightened and something bad was obviously happening to her. I’m sure she’s still terrified, and should be: my law school room mate, last year, had a mysterious episode that seemed like a stroke, but the doctors found nothing, and sent him home. Two days later, he dropped dead.

Yuk it up, Perez.

Jerk.

Are GOP Leaders Obligated to Condemn Doubters of Obama’s Birth and Beliefs?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

No.

But NBC’s David Gregory thinks so. Here was his exchange with Republican Speaker John Boehner on “Meet the Press” yesterday: Continue reading →

The Huffington Post Bloggers’ Lament

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

There is ethical indignation in Left-leaning Blogger Land, where Ariana Huffington’s Huffington Post just got $315 million to become part of AOL’s media stable.  The six-year-old  online news site supplements its staff of 2oo with an estimated 3000 volunteer bloggers of widely varying talent, reliability, and sanity. Those writers, who traded periodic contributions to “HuffPo” in exchange for more traffic and notoriety than they would have received in months of laboring, pajama-clad, on their own obscure sites, now are loudly complaining that they were exploited. Their unpaid labor built the site into a multi-million dollar asset, they cry, and yet Ariana is pocketing all of the profits. Where is the justice in that? There is talk of boycotts and mass defections. Continue reading →

Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln: Abe on Lawyer Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

John Steele, on his essential blog, the Legal Ethics Forum, had the wit and wisdom to post Abraham Lincoln’s “Notes for a Law Lecture” today in commemoration of Abe’s birthday. I had been looking for an appropriate post for the occasion, and I cannot improve on John’s selection.  Written around 1850, it is as excellent a statement of what lawyers should aspire to in 2011 as it was when Lincoln was practicing, and it also confirms our 16th President’s eloquence, clarity of thought, and instincts for good.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln.

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Abraham Lincoln’s Notes for a Law Lecture Continue reading →

Child Abuse, Animal Abuse: Why We Must Judge

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Ignorance, fear and a lack of inherent respect for living things is a disastrous combination, as demonstrated by a horrible story out of  Toombs County, Georgia.

At the end of January, animal rescue personnel were alerted that Alice, a 6-year old dog, was living in a 5’x8′ box, constructed of wooden boards and tin. The only sunlight that the dog could receive came through the slats and the chicken wire that covered the box from above.
Her food–mostly white bread, buns, and the occasional table scrap, was dropped in from above, as was her water. The floor of the box was caked with years of feces and urine.

The owner of the home told the rescuers that the Alice had been placed in this box because she was one of “those mean kind of dogs.” A pit bull. Continue reading →