Month: April 2021

Post-Seminar Ethics Smorgasbord,2/22/21: Based on #4, I Think The End May Be Near…

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Just finished a two-hour legal ethics seminar that theoretically was attended by 100 lawyers. Since only two of them asked any questions, the rest might have been asleep for all I know. BOY i hate teaching on Zoom…

1. Good! Bradley Gayton,the Coca-Cola general Counsel responsible for the unethical–but woke!—extortion demand that all of Coke’s law firm’s lawyers had to meet diversity quotas among its lawyers or else has resigned, which means he was fired. Here’s Bradley:

From this I discern that Coke heard from its law firms that this arm-twisting was bad business, bad law and bad ethics, which it was. I have sympathy for the guy: he has been brainwashed into believing that race hucksterism and the diversity racket was ascendant, and wildly over-estimated just how crazy things were. Yet. In this way minority hires are being set-up to fail., but by their alleged allies.

2. I oppose organized boycotts as unethical, but if I didn’t, boy would I be organizing them against Mountain Dew, AT&T, Beats, Nike, Walmart, Rimowa, GMC and Blaze Pizza. All of these pay NBA super-star LeBron James to be their spokesman. James, not to put too fine a point on it, is an irresponsible, hate-mongering racist asshole. With nearly 50 million followers on Twitter, most of them either African-American or morons (because following the inane blatherings of any celebrity is proof of an empty life and a cranial vacuum) James essentially put a hit out on the officer who probably saved the life of one young woman by shooting the other one who was preparing to stab her. If the officer, whose photo James tweeted out with the sinister words, “You’re next!,” is not attacked or killed it will be by way of moral luck, and nothing else.

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Who Is Surprised To Hear That “Propaganda Causes People To Grossly Overstate Police Killings of Blacks”?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Who? Well, probably your friends on social media who think you’re a racist because you point out that Black Lives Matter is spreading lies and hate.

I read with interest this feature yesterday in my New York Times: “Few Charges, Fewer Convictions: The Chauvin Trial and the History of Police Violence.”

It covered two full pages—you know, it was important—and was pure propaganda: deliberately misleading, contoured to make a political argument under the guise of news analysis. I classify the reporters, Aidan Gardiner and Rebecca Halleck, as ethics villains, along with whatever editor gave a green light to publish this deliberate deceit.

It begins,

For many observers, the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged in George Floyd’s death, has felt like the culmination of years of outrage and grief over police killings of Black people in America. Video of the arrest that led to Mr. Floyd’s death inspired demonstrations that touched every corner of the country last summer, with protesters demanding justice for Mr. Floyd.

The Times reviewed dozens of similar cases in which encounters between Black people and police ended fatally. Though many cases prompted public outrage, that did not always translate to criminal indictments. In some cases, police officers were shown to have responded lawfully. In others, charges were dropped or plea agreements were reached. Some have resulted in civil settlements. But very few have resulted in convictions at trial.

These cases offer valuable points of comparison about what issues — video evidence, drug use, whether the person who died was armed — proved decisive in each outcome and what consequences, if any, officers faced. Even as the trial has unfolded, several events, including the killing of Daunte Wright just a few miles from Minneapolis, have provided a grim reminder that Mr. Floyd’s death is one in a decades-long history of fatal encounters.

Then we get a list of cases where blacks died as a result of police action. The facts of the cases are summarized briefly, often leaving out important facts. We are told, for example, the Eric Garner was “confronted” by police but not that he resisted arrest, nor that he weighed over 300 pounds. The Times reporters don’t deem it significant that Mike Brown tried to take away the officer’s gun, or that he was shot while charging the cop. In the case of Tamir Rice, the Cleveland 12-year-old shot while playing with a realistic toy gun that had its red tip removed, the article says that “a 911 caller reported seeing a person with a gun but said that it was ‘probably fake’ and that the person was ‘probably a juvenile,'” but does not add the crucial detail that these statements were not relayed to the officer.

I know most of the cases mentioned in the piece; for those I do not, I assume that I am being similarly misled. The Times isn’t reporting or doing legitimate analysis; this is advocacy, and unethical advocacy. Facts that would undermine the political agenda of the reporters, and by extension, the Times, are omitted. That is lying by omission.

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Wednesday Wrap-Up For A Post-Chauvin Trial America, 2/21/21 [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I guess I have to come clean: I thought I had posted this before noon. Guess not. So a Morning Warm-Up became a late night wrap up…

1. The trial was a sporting event? I did not know that! ESPN included the Chauvin guilty verdict in its list of important sports news today. Apparently, it’s sports news because a lot of athletes are going to shoot off their mouths about it, spreading ignorance far and wide.

2. Deranged Quote of the Day: “Where are the disabled, queer, poor, gender diverse, dogs of colour and single-parent dog families in Bluey’s Brisbane?” That comes from ABC Everyday’s Beverley Wang. The Disney+ program, we are told :

….is the award-winning, mega-hit animated series about the Heelers, a family of dog-shaped humans — parents Bandit and Chilli, four-year-old Bingo, and six-year-old Bluey — who live in a gorgeous Queenslander with city views, perched on a lush hilltop in sunny Brisbane.

The only way to handle people who poison minds and the the culture with ideas like this is to be merciless, and slap them down with the classic reaction of “Sidney Wang”:

Being nice just enables them.

3. From the False Narrative files: Yahoo! News correspondent Jon Ward authored a piece of counter-factual propaganda headlined, “Chauvin’s guilty verdict is a major milestone in America’s reckoning with racial justice.”  As I have tried to point out repeatedly, there is no evidence that George Floyd’s fate would have been any different if he had been white, Asian-American or a Smurf. None. NONE. There is no evidence that Chauvin was a racist, or that race played any part in his brutal treatment of Floyd. The fact that activists, politicians and the journalists seized on the symbolic imagery of a white cop’s knee on a black man’s neck and exploited it shamelessly doesn’t change the facts. This was not a racial incident. If the jury convicted Chauvin thinking that it was, then they were misled.

Ward’s essay is a good starting place for anyone who wants to understand  how far journalism has sunk.

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Ethics Reflections And Questions On The Chauvin Verdict, Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Part 1 is here. As I expected, there was a lot of dubious as well as perceptive commentary after the verdict, and some related events with ethics implications.

1. I’d comment on this, but Ann doesn’t allow comments any more...The only note Althouse had on the verdict was a detached, “I’m sure that is an immense relief to many, many people.” Not to me. I’m not relieved when the justice system allows itself to be dictated to by mobs. Nor am I relieved when racial significance is illicitly attached to a non-racial episode so activists can lie about it.

2. The reason why there was no reason to be “relieved” arrived quickly, in the form of the Democrat reaction to the police shooting of 15-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio. Body camera footage showed Ma’Khia charging at another young woman apparently preparing to stab her with a knife. Attorney Ben Crump, looking for the next black family he can represent and the next white police officer he can demonize in the press, referred to Ma’Khia as “unarmed” in a tweet. “Squad” member Ayanna Pressley tweeted, “Black girls deserve girlhood — uninterrupted. Black girls deserve to grow up and become women” —apparently even if they kill other black girls on the way to growing up. Senator Sherrod Brown disgracefully tweeted, “While the verdict was being read in the Derek Chauvin trial, Columbus police shot and killed a sixteen-year-old girl. Her name was Ma’Khia Bryant. She should be alive right now.”

Naturally, BLM protests erupted in Columbus. When Ethics Alarms says “Facts Don’t Matter,” I’m not being cute. The push to brand virtually any law enforcement action against black lawbreakers as racist and an example of police misconduct will gather power with each perceived victory. The effort to bully elected officials and juries into discarding due process and sound policy to accomplish this will not stop or weaken until enough Americans have the courage to brave accusations of racism and say “Enough.”

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Unethical Quote Of The Month (And A Candidate For Ugliest Statement By An Elected Official For All Eternity): Speaker Of The House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“Thank you George Floyd for sacrificing your life for justice. For being there to call out to your mom — how heartbreaking was that? — to call out for your mom, ‘I can’t breathe.’” But because of you and because of thousands, millions of people around the world who came out for justice, your name will always be synonymous with justice.”

—Nancy Pelosi, apparently trying to kill as many people as possible by making their heads explode.

I know I promised to save all of today’s Derek Chauvin verdict-related notes for Part 2 of this morning’s post, but the sheer awfulness of Pelosi’s words, the astounding tone-deafness, the massive stupidity it must require to think for a millisecond that such a sentiment is anything but revolting, and the ick!–yecchh!–gag!–ACK!–pitui! pandering and shamelessness a human being would have to possess to vomit up such a statement demands a free-standing rebuke.

Those flames are for you, Nancy.

Apparently enough people on the “Let’s hang Derek Chauvin from a sour apples tree!” side of the matter were similarly horrified by Pelosi’s latest that we cannot say that her quote fairly stands for the moral, ethical and intellectual rot of the entire Democratic Party and progressive movement. That’s small mitigation. This woman has been leading the Democrats forever (or it seems that way), and such a sentiment is signature significance. If you think something like this, never mind say it out loud, never mind say if for for public consumption, you are not qualified to hold public office. For years we have seen public figures, professionals and celebrities cancelled for less. Much less.

And if you’re capable of saying something this stupid, you’re not qualified to eat with anything sharper than a spoon.

To begin with the obvious, it isn’t a sacrifice when someone has no choice in what happens to him or her. Way, way down the scale of those who cannot be thanked for a sacrifice are those who are victims of crimes or the negligent acts of others.

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Ethics Reflections And Questions On The Chauvin Verdict, Part I

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

I haven’t read much commentary on yesterday’s verdict yet. I’m assuming that I’ll have more observations later in the day.

1. Ultimately, it appears that the jury just decided that it wasn’t worth it to acquit Derek Chauvin even if there was reasonable doubt. That’s sad, but the calculation can be defended on utilitarian grounds, meaning that, ironically, the arguably unethical decision to discard the law, individual rights, a fair trial and the integrity of the justice system might have been an ethical decision because it will cause less harm in the long and short run. In other words, it can be defended as a decision in which ethics won and the law lost.

I’m not saying that I would defend it that way, but I acknowledge the argument as respectable.

2. It is important to remember that cases where verdicts were based on emotion, human nature, and sociopolitical dynamics rather than the evidence and strict adherence to the law have occurred periodically, and will continue to do so.

The Nuremberg Trials were travesties from a legal standpoint, and the verdicts “ethical” only in the sense that a formal, solemn statement that some conduct is so heinous that civilization has an obligation to reject it was deemed more important than such niceties as avoiding hypocrisy or respecting the law’s aversion to ex-post facto legal penalties. The trial of the alleged conspirators to murder Lincoln was as rigged as a trial can be. This isn’t an “it happens all the time” excuse for the Chauvin trial, but a reminder that the Chauvin case isn’t the cataclysmic scar on the justice system that many will claim it is.

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As The Chauvin Jury Finds The Defendant Guilty As They Were Ordered To Do, The President And Rep. Waters Deny That They Said What They Said

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

But when Yogi Berra denied that he said what he said, it was funny..

In Minneapolis, the jury found Derek Chauvin guilty of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter in his role in the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020.

It would be a defensible verdict if he had received a fair trial, and the jury didn’t fear that they would spark national riots, property destruction and death if they found reasonable doubt. It would have been more defensible if the otherwise competent judge hadn’t botched his obligation to sequester the jury when another Minnesota police officer shot a black man, and riots did occur, with more on the horizon.

It is not a fair trial when a nationally known Congresswoman and the President of the United States publicly declare that, in the words of the Congresswoman, a defendant is “guilty, guilty guilty!”

So now, after polluting the trial and the verdict, both the President and the Congresswoman are engaging in a wretched display of “I didn’t really say what I obviously said and meant to say.”

Yogi Berra this ain’t.

First, here’s Maxine’s hilarious “translation” of what she meant when she told some potential rioters, ““We’ve got to stay in the streets, and we’ve got to demand justice,” Waters said. “I am hopeful that we will get a verdict that says, ‘guilty, guilty, guilty,’ and if we don’t, we cannot go away. We’ve got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.”

“I wanted to be there kind of as Auntie Maxine, to show them that not only do I love them and I support them, but they can count on me to be there with them at this terrible time in all of our lives,” Waters said in her own defense. But she is not their aunt. She is an elected official of the United States of America, and is sworn to uphold the Constitution, which means, among other things, not using her position to urge members of the public to break the law, and not using her influence to deny an American citizen a fair trial.

In another interview, she tried rationalizations instead of masquerade:

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Unethical And Intolerable: Waters, Babbitt, Sicknick, Part 2.

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The late Paul Harvey’s iconic “the rest of the story” isn’t quite as ugly as this story itself, which I wrote about here. It does, however, put a cap on one more disgusting example of the news media deliberately engaging in fake news reporting to advance a partisan agenda.

Let’s use CNN’s report, since we know if there was any way out, any way to spin the story and keep the false narrative going, the network of Fredo, Don Lemon and the atrocious Brian Stelter would try it. Nope, though the medical examiner did his best:

US Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick suffered strokes and died of natural causes one day after responding to the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, Washington DC’s chief medical examiner has determined.The medical examiner, Francisco Diaz, didn’t note any evidence that Sicknick had an allergic reaction to chemical spray or list any internal or external injuries, according to The Washington Post, which first reported the ruling. Still, Diaz told the newspaper that “all that transpired” on January 6 “played a role in his condition.”The ruling all but ensures that the Justice Department won’t be able to pursue homicide charges in Sicknick’s death. In March, two men — Julian Elie Khater, 32, of Pennsylvania, and George Pierre Tanios, 39, of West Virginia — were arrested and charged with assaulting Sicknick.

The reason they can’t be prosecuted is that there is no evidence that Sicknick’s death was connected to the January 6 riots in any way. There never was. Diaz’s gratuitous claim that “all that transpired played a role in his condition” is just face-saving hackery.

What does that even mean? “Played a role”? Either something that happened at the Capitol killed him or it didn’t. Did Sicknick die of a broken heart to see America’s house sullied by an angry mob? HOW did the events “play a role”? Diaz doesn’t say, meaning he’s engaging in irresponsible speculation to give the lying journalists something to cling to. The statement breaks down to “post hoc ergo propter hoc“—a logical fallacy so well-known and ancient that it’s in Latin: “After this, ergo because of this.” There is no reason to believe that Sicknick would not have died if nothing had happened at the Capitol.

Note also that CNN is sticking with “insurrection,” a description it has not applied to any of the far more violent and lengthy takeovers of government buildings during the George Floyd Freakout. We learned this week that with even a half-competent response from the Capitol police, the gang of idiots would never have made it inside the Capitol. They had no firearms; they were a mob of about 300; they had as much chance of taking over the government or having any substantive impact whatsoever as Shirley Temple had to be an Olympic powerlifting gold medalist.

But never mind that: this is business as usual for all of the mainstream news media. The AUC memo went out that January 6 was an “insurrection” because that was going to be the way they finally “got” Donald Trump: accuse him of plotting “a violent uprising against the government,” and the memo never was retracted. Sicknick’s death at the hands of the rebels was a key part of the fiction, so it was repeated over and over, even in the Senate trial by the House prosecution as fact. The Biden Administration and Democrats were accomplices: they took the nauseatingly cynical step of staging a Capitol Rotunda viewing of Sicknick’s casket, which made the lie that “he died defending his country” vivid and dramatic (and cheapened the honor, which only a handful of ordinary citizens have been awarded).

When the “they hit him over the head with a fire extinguisher” tale didn’t pan out, they went with the “He died because they sprayed him with bear spray,” or he was caught in a bear spray crossfire, or something. Yes, the President of the United Sates plotted an insurrection that would take over the nation using bear spray and fire extinguishers. Diabolical!

As the substack reporter did when the Sicknick story first started falling apart, Glenn Greenwald has given us the best dose of undiluted contempt for how it was handled, writing yesterday in part,

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 4/20/2021: The Unabomber Really Was Right, You Know….

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Crazy, but right. I first wrote about that inconvenient fact here. This year has driven the horror home more than ever. His point was that we were allowing technology to control our lives, constrict our liberties, and poison our values and culture, while giving aspiring dictators tools to dominate us. Here are some of my recent experiences:

  • A friend, a season ticket holder, gave me tickets to a Washington Nationals game, except that D.C., being in the grip of a Wuhan hysteric, won’t allow the Nats to give out printed tickets. Thus, in order to “access” my tickets, I had to log in to the MLB website as a first step, then download an app to my smart phone, which would then allow my phone to accept the virtual tickets. But MLB wouldn’t accept my password, and wouldn’t allow me to change it either. I called the Nats, but nobody was there—everyone was working from their computers. Finally I was called back by a nice guy who tried to walk me through the system. He gave me a password, but my phone wouldn’t connect with the app. Then he started to explain an alternate method which involved registering with eBay. I thanked him, but told him to give the tickets back to my friend. I had spent over an hour just trying to get the things that once could be faxed to me in five minutes, or sent by mail. To hell with it.
  • Then, last night, my sister took me to a game. The Nats make you order food or drink from your smart phone. You have to order food or drink, because you are only allowed to take off your damn mask—outside, with nobody within ten feet of you—if you are eating or drinking, so everyone is holding a water bottle under their chin the whole game. You download an app, and you get a menu on the phone, see? Then you order, and a text comes to tell you where to pick up the stuff. You can’t pay using money, because the Nats want to keep us “safe.” I found out that there were a couple of places around the park where you could buy food the old, bad, low-tech complicated way: “Give me a dog and a beer—thanks—here’s money…bye!” Most Nats staff, however, had no idea where those places were.
  • Speaking of systemic racism, not to mention classism and ageism: What are the likely consequences of making all aspects of life dependent on owning a smart phone?
  • My wife had been waiting for the promised email from the Virginia Health Department with a link to the way to schedule a second Wuhan vaccine. It never came. After spending over a hour in a phone queue, she was told that a computer had garbled her email address. Oh.

1. Thanks Maxine! Thanks , journalists! Thanks, Democrats! Thanks, Black Lives Matter! How can a nation maintain a justice system and preserve due process and the rights of the accused when this happens? From USA Today:

A group of people vandalized the former Northern California home of an expert witness who testified for the defense in the murder trial of Derek Chauvin, police said, throwing a pig’s head on the front porch and blood splatter on the house.

The incident occurred in Santa Rosa, California, where retired police officer Barry Brodd once lived and worked. Brodd testified last week in Chauvin’s trial, saying the former Minneapolis police officer was “justified” in his use of force against George Floyd, who died in police custody last May.

The Santa Rosa Police Department said Brodd no longer lives at the residence nor in California, but “it appears the suspects in this vandalism were targeting Mr. Brodd for his testimony.”

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