Month: February 2021

Rep. Greene Has The Right To Her Opinions And the Right To Free Speech. But There Is No Right To Make Laws If You Are An Ignorant, Undisciplined Fool, And Republicans Have A Duty To Treat Her Accordingly

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

greene

House Democrats moved yesterday to strip GOP Georgia rep Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments if Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy refuses to do so. Mark this moment: House Democrats are right, and their demand is responsible. Greene is on the House education and budget committees, and she has amply demonstrated that she does not possess the judgment to serve om a PTA rummage sale committee.

If House Democrats being reasonable blows your mind, imagine: Mitch McConnell is also making sense. Calling Greene a “cancer for the Republican Party,” the GOP Senate leader said,

“Somebody who’s suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr.’s airplane is not living in reality.This has nothing to do with the challenges facing American families or the robust debates on substance that can strengthen our party.”

Gee, I hadn’t heard about the “Clintons killed John-John” plot! But the Greene theory that came out this week is even better. Eric Hananoki is an investigative reporter at “Media Matters,” which means he’s a partisan hack, but in this case he has found juicy evidence. In a November 17, 2018 Facebook post, since removed, Greene expressed support for the so-called Campfire Conspiracy, which holds that the deadly California wildfires were deliberately set by a cabal seeking to clear land for the high-speed railway, led by PG&E. Here is the whole post that Hananoki unearthed:

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Oppressing The Twitter Troll

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Twitter troll meme

Federal prosecutors accused Douglass Mackey, 31, described in news reports as a “Twitter Troll,”of coordinating with co-conspirators to spread misinformation on Twitter in 2016 that Hillary Clinton’s supporters could vote by sending a text message to a specific phone number.

Mackey was arrested a week ago in the first criminal case in the country alleging voter suppression through the use of false tweets.

Seth DuCharme, the acting United States attorney in Brooklyn, whose office is prosecuting the case, said, “With Mackey’s arrest, we serve notice that those who would subvert the democratic process in this manner cannot rely on the cloak of internet anonymity to evade responsibility for their crimes.” The alleged crime is a conspiracy to “oppress” or “intimidate” anyone from exercising a constitutional right, such as voting. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. Prosecutors allege that 4,900 really gullible and lazy Hillary Clinton supporters were fooled by Mackey’s scheme into trying to vote for her using a phone number publicized on social media. Mackey and his co-conspirators joked online about about tricking “dopey” liberals.

There is no question that what Mackey et al. did was unethical, dishonest, unfair and sinister. However, I find it hard to understand how he can be prosecuted while the deceptions of others whose efforts to mislead voters and either dissuade them from voting or get them to vote for a candidate they otherwise would not have were far more widespread and had far more impact on election results. My guess is that this charge is harassment, and harassment based on partisan intimidation.

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Bee Ethics: A Brief Addendum To Today’s Ethics Warm-Up…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

swarm-main

I meant to have this as the opening to today’s first post, but the painting of Joe hugging Kamala while dead anti-Trump icons looked down from heaven shorted out my brain.

I believe I may have discovered the beginning of American society’s ruinous capitulation to claims of being offended and organizational submission to contrived complaints of coded prejudice and bigotry. I found it, of all places, at the end of the terrible 1978 Irwin Allen (“The Poseidon Adventure;” “The Towering Inferno”) disaster movie “The Swarm.” For some reason, TCM devoted last night to famously bad movies, like John Wayne’s hilarious “The Conqueror,” in which the Duke played Genghis Kahn for producer Howard Hughes. Many critics said at the time it came out that “The Swarm” was the worst movie ever made; I don’t know how they could say that when the sequel to “The Exorcist,” “The Heretic,” came out just a year before. I don’t think “The Swarm” is even the worst big all-star cast movie ever made: I’d give that distinction to “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 2/2/21: Take It, Jimmy!

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

I’m resorting to the enthusiasm of Mr. Durante, an icon in my childhood home, because I sense readers are exhausted, or depressed, or moping, or something. Even my dog is a bad mood—he growled at me a couple of times, which is out of character. The traffic and comments on Ethics Alarms are way down; last month was especially bad, with views topping 4,000 only once. Is it anger? Fear? Submission? Surrender? The weather? Have the pods all been successfully delivered while we sleep? Well,

This is no time to stop working on creating a more ethical society, when totalitarianism is slowly creeping up from the muck…

1. And now for something completely…something. I wonder: what is the ethical reaction to this?

Montage

Or to the text that accompanies it in the Times, which includes passages like,

The final product is an example of a visual tradition in Black culture that usually circulates during two specific occasions: When a Black person ascends in society or dies. In this case, the moment came when Ms. Harris, was sworn in as the first woman and the first Black and South Asian person to ascend to the position of Vice President….It’s hard to pinpoint an exact time when these works began to merge into the mainstream, according to Aaron Bryant, a curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. But “they have been around for a long time,” he said. “Throughout art we have always celebrated folks that we see as heroes. They become a symbol of good conquering evil”…While some of these images are camp or cringe, Mr. Cheatham’s image of Ms. Harris was sincere. “What makes these images particularly Black is that they aren’t made for the white public, he said. “If you don’t get the reference, you’re not going to enjoy it,” Desus said. “They’re not made in a way that is for general consumption. There is definitely a hood angle to it in that they’ll do something that if you’re not from the hood you’ll take the whole memorial as blasphemous. It is like graffiti in that way.”

The painting above has been circulating briskly among African-Americans on social media, we are told.

Here were my first thoughts when I saw it:

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Ethics And Common Sense Win Out Over Law: SCOTUS Weakens “Qualified Immunity” [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The one constant recommendation by critics of police brutality and those trying to find ways to mitigate the problem without, you know, rioting, looting and burning every time a black man is killed by police is to eliminate or sharply curtail qualified immunity. Taylor v. Riojas, handed down in November by the Supreme Court in a 7-1 decision, might do just that.

A government officer sued for damages on a claim of violating the Constitution, such as violating an individual’s civil rights, must overcome the defendant’s claim of immunity. Judges (and Presidents) have absolute immunity for their conduct in the pursuit of their duties, no matter how outrageous or incompetent. Legislators cannot be sued for their decisions as lawmakers. Prosecutors cannot be sued for prosecuting. Other government officers, like police officers, have qualified immunity if they are sued for money damages for harming individuals in the course of their duties.

The Supreme Court has set up a tough standard for plaintiffs to meet in order to establish liability. Overcoming qualified immunity requires that the defendant officer acted in violation of law and Constitutional principles that any reasonable government official should know, and that the civil right allegedly breached has been established beyond question.

In a 2018 case, District of Columbia v. Wesby the Court stated:

“Existing law must have placed the constitutionality of the officer’s conduct ‘beyond debate.’ This demanding standard protects ‘all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.’ To be clearly established, a legal principle must have a sufficiently clear foundation in then-existing precedent. The rule must be ‘settled law,’ which means it is dictated by ‘controlling authority’ or ‘a robust consensus of cases of persuasive authority.’ It is not enough that the rule is suggested by then-existing precedent. The precedent must be clear enough that every reasonable official would interpret it to establish the particular rule the plaintiff seeks to apply.”

This extreme hurdle has proved nearly impossible to clear. From 1982 to 2020, the Court reviewed 30 qualified immunity cases. Plaintiffs prevailed in two.

Yet in the per curiam opinion issued last year (that means there are no signed majority opinion or concurring opinions) the Court signaled a major shift, and ruled that prison guards had no qualified immunity even though there was no precedent that would have alerted them that their conduct was illegal or unconstitutional.

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“I Just Know This Is Going To Be A Bad Week” Ethics Warm-Up, 2/1/2021.

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

nervous

One more thing to complain to WordPress about: on the home page, it says to “followers,” “You are following this blog, along with 3,167 other amazing people.” I just checked, and if you follow Ethics Alarms, there are 4,324 other amazing people doing so. So thanks to my hosting service, this ethics blog features fake news on its home page, and I have no control over it. I am assuming in this that WordPress isn’t making a judgment that only 3,167 of the regular readers here are amazing, and the rest aren’t. How could they do that? Is “amazing” in this context a compliment or an insult? Most of the people I think are amazing in ethical matters are not amazing in a good way. Shouldn’t my standards be the ones featured on my blog?

1. Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! I had been avoiding looking at the New York Times front page for January 14, being certain that it would annoy me no end. Yesterday I finally saw it, and it was worse than I imagined. The single word is IMPEACHED in what they call “Second coming” type, with each letter almost an inch high. The sub headline, in 1/3 inch bold type, says “Trump, After Inciting Rampage in Capitol, Is First President To Face 2nd Senate Trial.

The giant word can only be interpreted as celebratory, because it certainly wasn’t momentous news. The previous House impeachment was so inconsequential that it wasn’t even a campaign issue. The second, like the first was and is doomed to die in the Senate. President Trump was going to leave office before he could be removed. The Times might as well have headlined the story, “Democrats Have A Majority In The House.” Once the GOP lost its majority (surrendered is a better word, perhaps, as over 40 sitting Republican Congress members quit in a snit over a non-club member winning the White House, condemning the nation to Nancy Pelosi’s own “insurrection”), Trump’s eventual impeachment for something was a foregone conclusion, as was the fact that Democrats would keep trying no matter what. That’s the true import of the second impeachment: for the first time in history, a party began with the determination to impeach a POTUS from the other party, and was actively, desperately, unethically searching for an excuse to do it.

As for the rest of headline, stating that Trump “incited” the riot in the Capitol is a bright-line falsehood, as the emerging evidence continues to show.

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“Nipplegate” Revisited

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

nipplegate

Today is the anniversary of Nipplegate, which, you probably recall, is when Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake executed their juvenile plot to get cheap publicity by flashing her breast during the 2004 Super Bowl XXXVIII half-time show (back when I watched the Super Bowl in my ignorance of just how vile the NFL was) and began lying about it. By the time the dust cleared, the Federal Communications Commission had received 540,000 complaints about the incident. Viacom, CBS’ parent company, received the maximum fine the FCC could issue for such offenses, and paid $3.5 million to settle indecency complaints about the broadcast.

Ethics Alarms has featured two reflections on that incident. One was a rebuttal, an easy one, of pop culture pundit Emmanuel Hapsis’s ridiculous analysis, declaring the episode as exemplifying America’s “patriarchy,” “racism” and “sexism.” I wrote then, tongue piercing my cheek, that “obviously no white singers flashing ten-year-olds in TV land would be criticized, and no male singer who decided to let Mr. Wiggly make a guest appearance would be similarly pilloried.” I received a wave of really nasty comments on that one, highlighted by someone named Troy whom I honored, sort of, with a Comment of the Day in 2018. I’ll revisit it with pleasure now, since it’s short, funny and stupid. He wrote,

Madonna’s white ass has been showing her boobs, coochie and anything else that is of a sexual nature all through the late 80’s up until today…and though she got criticized for her antics, even pissing off the Catholic Church with her attention seeking ways, as soon as a black woman gets’ exposed by a this privileged white boy, then the whole white world screams OMG, OMG, hang her, nail her to the cross…blame her, blame her…this whole fiasco is reminiscent of how whites back in slavery times would lynch blacks for solely being black and then again in modern times how white people can cuss a police officer out, spit in their face, fight them and get taken to prison to cool off with only a slap on the wrist…but a black person get’s pulled over and by a white officer for having expired license plates or a busted tail light and they never make it to jail, they are taken straight to the morgue, because like what White Boy Privileged Justin did to Janet, it becomes a black issue and she was the only one who got blamed, black balled and even her apology was not enough for the privileged whites, she had to PAY and pay dearly. So for all those white privileged reading this article, and saying she does not deserve an apology, I GET IT, you all want her HANGED…It’s what you all believe to be punishment to the full extent for this black woman, who has NEVER, EVER been in any trouble, caused any drama and had been low-key, and private all of her life until that one millisecond to be torn to shreds by the white privileged…well for those of us who are WOKE, we see What Madonna has made a career of doing, Janet should get the death penalty. So white privileged of you all.

“Madonna’s white ass has been showing her boobs” might be my favorite phrase to appear on this site in ten years.

It’s also disturbing to realize that Troy could probably be elected to Congress today with that level of analysis. But I digress.

The unexpected reappearance of The Ethics Scoreboard online now gives me the opportunity to re-post the commentary there about “Nipplegate” written shortly after it all occurred. So, in commemoration of that ethics train wreck, and also because I wouldn’t change anything I wrote then, here is an encore, slightly edited, of “The Breast,” from February 11, 2004.

***

The Breast

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Ethics Hero: Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah)

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Mike Lee

It was generally lost between in the pandemic resurgence, the post-election controversies and the holidays, but in the final month of the generally awful year of 2020, a single Senator had the integrity and principle to at least delay one more effort to transform the United States of America into a Balkanized culture of competing identity groups.

Hispanics and their allies in Congress, and feminists and their allies have been trying to get approval for the creation of a National Museum of the American Latino and A National Women’s History Museum in Washington D.C. since around the beginning of the century. Last year, after the obligatory studies, commissions and reports, bipartisan bills authorizing the creation of the two proposed museums passed in the House. After all, it’s not as if the year’s budget deficit had blown the national debt up to dangerous levels or anything. Why not spend millions more on new structures honoring only segments of what was conceived as a single nation?

More specifically, why not suck up to two powerful voting blocs in an election year?

Because the Senate is similarly driven by political pandering and is almost as irresponsible as the House, it was assumed that the bills would pass by unanimous consent, a practice reserved for noncontroversial measures. Senators John Cornyn, Republican from Texas (lots of Hispanic-Americans there, coincidentally), and Bob Menendez, the Democrat from New Jersey who is himself Hispanic-American, introduced the legislation setting up the latest hyphenated American museum on the National Mall, and lauded the history and contributions of 60 million Americans, blattety-blah diversity, blattety-blah recognition. But Senator Lee, the Republican from Utah (where, also coincidentally, there are not so many Latinos), stopped the proposed new museums dead (though they will rise again) , as a single vote can do when unanimous consent is needed.

Lee said in part,

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