Costescu is a junior at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and the president of the Network of Enlightened Women chapter on campus. Her parents fled communism in Romania. She has been shocked and disturbed by the growing hostility to free speech, and indeed to freedom itself, that she has encountered at what is supposed to be an elite and distinguished institution of high learning in our nation’s capital.
As a vocal conservative, she has been threatened “so much so that [she] now fear[s] to speak freely and voice [her] conservative beliefs.” She reports that she has been cyber-bullied by other students “in such a menacing way” that she is “afraid to engage online, or even during class” with her “left-leaning peers.”
However, instead of hiding, or, as is the response sought by such tactics, conforming, Jessica wrote about her experiences on the conservative website College Fix, not anonymously but under her own name, not pathetically but in defiance. She writes in part, Continue reading →
1. There were three interesting developments on the legal front today with ethics implications:
Royal slime-ball Prince Andrew, already shunned by the Royal Family, agreed today to pay an undisclosed sum to a victim of Jefferey Epstein’s sexcapades who accused the younger brother of Prince Charles of sexually abusing her when she was a minor. David Boies, showing his versatility after representing Harvey Weinstein, is the lawyer for Prince Andrew’s accuser Virginia Giuffre. The amount of the out-of-court settlement will be not disclosed, Boies revealed. Giuffre sued the Duke of York in August 2021, claiming that he abused her on multiple occasions in 2001 when she was a 17-year-old victim of the sex trafficking ring Epstein ran for decades. Of course, a settlement doesn’t mean that Andrew is guilty. Then again,
The New York Timeswas found by a jury not to have defamed Sarah Palin when it maliciously accused her of inciting murder with her campaign map. The jury didn’t know it, but the judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, had already announced that he would dismiss Palin’s complaint regardless of what they decided, as a matter of law. “We’ve reached the same bottom line … but it’s on different grounds,” the Judge said upon hearing their verdict. “You decided the facts; I decided the law. As it turns out, they’re both in agreement in this case.”
Too bad, but both the jury and the judge were right. The problem wasn’t malice despite the Times’ absurd claim that no malice was intended, a key element of the standard for finding defamation when the media attacks a public figure. The problem was that the editorial in question was still opinion, even though it stated Palin’s guilt as a fact. Had the same statement been in an alleged news story, it would have been a different matter.
Insurers for the bankrupt Remington Arms Company and its subsidiaries agreed to pay the Sandy Hook Elementrary School families the maximum amount of damages available to them, $73 million. The settlement deal will also allow them to release thousands of documents that the plaintiffs obtained in discovery. A settlement isn’t precedent, and both sides had good reason to be wary of a trial. The victims in the Sandy Hook massacre raised the possibility of a jury persuaded more by emotion than law. Still, he unbroken record of attempts to find gun manufacturers liable for shootings made going to trial a risk for the anti-gun forces. As is typical, both sides claimed that they were pleased with the deal.
I suppose it should not be a surprise that these most unethical of all Olympiads (since the Olympics should never have been held in this totalitarian, ethics-free nation to begin with) would feature the most unethical decision imaginable. If I cared one whit about the disgusting charade in China and who wins what, I might really be upset. As it is, I’m just going to point out, dispassionate, the ethics rot on display.
Fifteen-year-old Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva tested positive for trimetazidine, a banned substance that improves athletic performance, in the urine sample that Valieva submitted at the Russian national championship on Christmas. The drug, known as TMZ, is a heart medication that can increase endurance. But the result was not confirmed and relayed to Russian officials or to her for more than six weeks. Russia’s antidoping agency said it learned of the failed test on February 7. On that day, the teen led the Russians to a gold medal in the team event.
Let’s stop right there. She tested positive for a banned substance, and that should have stopped her from competing in the Olympics. It doesn’t matter why the test results were delayed (the Russians cheat, and have always cheated). It doesn’t matter whose fault it was. Valieva was ineligible, and whenever it was discovered that she was ineligible, the only fair and ethical response was to disqualify her. This also meant that her team would be disqualified, because a disqualified skater helped it win the team event.
Ethics can be hard, but this conclusion isn’t hard. It is obvious and irrefutable. Because she shouldn’t have been competing at all, and would not have been had either someone in Russia not cheated or was incredibly incompetent, the skater had no right to be skating, and any athlete or athlete who would have won had she not been illicitly permitted in the Games has been treated unfairly, robbed, cheated, pick your term.
That ought to have been the immediate decision. Instead, Olympic “arbitrators” (Arbitrators are supposed to have impeccable ethics alarms, and not the ethical instincts of Hillary Clinton. Who are these fools?) ruled that Valieva not only wouldn’t be disqualified but could continue competing, but that any medals in any event in which she places the top three will not be awarded. The question of who wins what medal, and whether Valieva wins any, will wait until after her doping case is definitively settled, which may take months.
We’re still waiting to see if Georgetown University Law Center, my disgraceful alma mater, will fire scholar Ilya Shapiro for expressing doubts that limiting the pool of Supreme Court nominees using factors that have absolutely nothing to do with judicial competence, experience or acumen is the best way to get the optimum Court. The statements condemning Shapiro by GULC’s Dean have been indefensible, consisting of woke virtue-signaling and speech-chilling posturing. It worked: none of the law school’s faculty have had the courage or integrity to oppose him, essentially abandoning their support for academic freedom.
This caused me to wonder in the Law Center would be similarly hostile to philosopher Stephen Kershnar of the State University of New York at Fredonia if he were instead a GULC faculty member. Kershnar, you might have read, gave a recent interview about “sexual taboos” on the philosophy podcast Brain in a Vat.The politically conservative Libs of TikTok posted a video about it and social media went metaphorically berserk. Kershnar expressed doubt that adults having sex with minors is necessarily wrong, and raised some hypotheticals and examples to make his point. Grandmothers in some cultures fellate baby boys to soothe colic, for example. Kershner also opined that the harm to children and teens who engage in sex with adults has not been established, and he made a terrible Rationalization #22 (“It’s not the worst thing”) argument that children participate in a number of activities besides sex that they don’t fully “understand” and which aren’t generally considered to be harmful. He also posed thought experiments, like…
H. Res. 919 is the latest Hail Mary pass by the Democratic Party to try to somehow salvage the upcoming 2022 mid-term elections, widely expected to be a crushing defeat for the party, progressives, and their ongoing plan to convert the United States of America into European-style nanny state, socialist nation—and a single party one, if possible. The bill was introduced by Rep. Al Green (D-Texas),arguably the most race-obsessed, hyper-partisan member of Congress. It was Green who began introducing motions to impeach Donald Trump within months of his inauguration. H. Res. 919 declares an “unconditional war on racism,” and would establish a new Cabinet-level federal agency called the “Department of Reconciliation.” If that sounds Orwellian to you, that’s because it is. The full title of Green’s pro-racism antiracist bill is “Declaring an unconditional war on racism and invidious discrimination and providing the establishment of a Department of Reconciliation charged with eliminating racism and invidious discrimination.” Catchy! Continue reading →
So…did “Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign “pay” an internet company to ‘infiltrate”’ servers at Trump Tower and the White House in order to link Donald Trump to Russia”? as the conservative New York Post reported one hour into February 13? That report was quickly picked up and expanded on by other news sources, notably Fox News, but only the so-called “conservative media.” Ethics Alarms reported on that depressing phenomenon the same day, noting,
If you only follow the mainstream media, meaning only those outlets that are directly doing everything they can, every day, in every way, to bolster Democratic Party narratives, progressive agendas and the prospects of minimizing the public’s support of the Republican Party, you are learning about this for the first time. If, however, you also check the conservative news and commentary sources that perform a service with their own biases by preventing the ongoing betrayal of public trust by the mainstream media from completely deceiving the nation, then you know about this breaking story already….As of right now, there are not enough facts and details to analyze the ethical implications of the story itself. However, there can be no doubt that a similar breaking story that implicated Republicans, and especially Donald Trump, would be screaming out from headlines and broadcasts from all the mainstream news sources. Thus there is sufficient evidence to conclude that this is one more striking example of the degree to which the news media is, as that crazy President Trump said years ago in perhaps his most perceptive moment, “the enemy of the people.”
Yesterday, nearly two days after the story was broken by those evil conservative news organizations, the New York Times against assumed its role as the gang-leader of the biased mainstream media, and finally mentioned the story. Its spin: ‘There goes that mains stream media conspiracy machine again!” Continue reading →
I was going to make a mean comment about St. Valentine being beheaded on this date in 270, but thought better of it. I associate the holiday with nothing but stress and trauma personally, but my mother took it very seriously. Val was beheaded, the story goes, for secretly performing marriages in Rome after the Emperor Claudius II banned the ceremony to keep citizens from using marriage as an excuse no to serve in his army.
The real ethics event of note, which I meant to note yesterday, was the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden in 1945. The “Florence of the Elbe” was reduced to ash and rubble, while about 25,000 Germans died horribly. Yet the attack accomplished little strategically; the Germans were close to surrender, and Dresden contributed little to the war effort. It was the European theater equivalent of dropping the second atom bomb on Nagasaki. The Dresden fire-bombing has been described a war crime as well as an act of pure vengeance, pay-back for the German bombing of Coventry in England. In that 1940 raid, 568 people were killed and another 863 badly injured, but the city was considered a cultural jewel, like Dresden. I have not researched the decision to bomb Dresden in any detail, but it always seemed strange to me that Eisenhower went to such lengths not to destroy priceless artistic treasures toward the end of the war, yet approved this.
Self-promotion Dept. In case there are any New Jersey lawyers reading who would like three hours of ethics credits as painlessly as possible, I’m doing a Zoom legal ethics seminar for the New Jersey bar on the 25th of this month with long-time partner Mike Messer. I write the songs, and he performs them. This is the all-Beatles program I have long wanted to do; each song covers one or more tough legal ethics issues, and they are all among my favorites: “I Saw Her Standing There,” “A Day in the Life,” “Come Together,” “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” “Here, There, and Everywhere,” “Let It Be,” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”
Taking off from Part 1 (which took off from this), let’s review some (only some) of the anti-democratic conduct of the Democrats, their Congress and their President.
We saw President Biden withdraw troops from Afghanistan without consultation with Congress and in opposition to the military, abandoning thousand of U.S. citizens in the process.
We have seen the individual liberty-defying mask and vaccine mandates in Democratic states and cities.
We have witnesses attempts at the state and national level to discriminate against one racial group in such benefits as Small Business assistance and pandemic remedies.
We have watched the Senate Majority leader directly threaten the Supreme Court if it fails to support Democratic Party policies and positions.
We have seen the escalating air-brushing of history, to eliminate references to individuals and ideas that the party in power opposes.
We have seen Democrats and their allied professions and institution attempt to discriminate against religious groups, using the pandemic to ban their activities while favoring gatherings of similar size when they supported leftist activism.
We have seen concerted efforts to disarm law-abiding citizens, including removing the right to bear arms from those judged mentally or emotionally ill, both historical tactics of totalitarian governments.
We have seen the effort to corrupt the criminal justice system and the Rule of Law by demonizing and presuming the guilt of police officers, conservative protesters and others (like Kyle Rittenhouse) based on skin color and political preferences.
We have seen an endorsement of mob rule, with “defund the police” being advocated across the country, radical progressive prosecutors refusing to prosecute crimes “of need,” and police being turned into targets by more than six years of demonizing by the Left.
We have seen an unprecedented attack on the Constitution and various amendments, with the goal of undoing protections wisely placed in the documents by the Founders. Among the targets: the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the Due Process Clause, the Equal Protection Clause, the amendment process (so the dead-letter Equal Rights. Amendment can pass after the deadline for adoption has passed), the Electoral College, the composition of the Senate, and more.
We witnessed the Democratic party embracing a Marxist, anti-American, anti-White, violent and corrupt organization, Black Lives Matter.
We are watching that same party continue to support a program of anti-American, pro-Left indoctrination in the public schools.
We are seeing the deliberate promotion of class divisions and hostility, while the Democratic Party pursues radical ideological goals such as the devaluing of citizenship, the elimination of meritocracy and the pursuit of excellence, and
Perhaps most glaring of all, we witnessed, for the first time in our history, not just one but two contrived impeachments based not on the kinds of “high crimes” prescribed by the Constitution, but on the simple fact that one party had a House majority that it abused to attempt to remove an elected President it despised, plus
…so, so much more that represents a gross weakening of democracy and its values by the conduct and rhetoric of Democrats. The four year effort to cripple Donald Trump’s Presidency by withholding the basic, crucial, core aura of respect and deference to the office that every other President was bequeathed by his predecessors is, in my view, the worst of these, which is why Ethics Alarms has laboriously tracked it with the tag “2016 Ethics Post-Election Train Wreck.”
This has all occurred in plain sight, so for Democrats and progressives to pick this moment in history to declare Republicans as an existential threat to democracy is Jumbo-level audacity. Is this gaslighting the result of desperation, idiocy, delusion, or “It’s so crazy, it just might work”? Continue reading →
Stephanie Selby was the subject of “A Very Young Dancer,” photographer Jill Krementz’s best selling 1976 book that inspired a generation of would-be ballerinas and future dance stars. When Stephanie, only 10, was chosen for the lead role of Marie in “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,” Krementz decided to make her the star of her planned book. She followed Stephanie for a year, taking photos and notes, and produced a fascinating behind-the-scenes portrait. Stephanie became an instant celebrity and role model for thousands of other “very young dancers.” She appeared on the “Today” show and a one-hour “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” Christmas special, while getting an avalanche of fan mail.
But Stephanie was emotionally fragile, and her periodic outbursts resulted in her being told to leave her dancing school at 13. Increasingly plagued by clinical depression, she found it difficult to find a stable place in life. The expectations created by the book and her sense of failure for not meeting them were part of her burden. A 2011 interview produced the reporter’s observation that “Stephanie acknowledges that she might have had troubles in life regardless of her association with ballet and the book but says her experience as a child no doubt contributed to her depression later in life.”
I wrote the introduction to this now three part post more than a month ago. It ended with this:
[T]he ascendant progressive movement has taken Yoo’s Rationalization to new heights (or depths) in ways that George Orwell would marvel at. Abortion is about “choice,” not the forfeited lives of the unborn. Defunding the police and not enforcing laws promotes “justice.” Discrimination on the basis of race and gender advances equality.
Most frightening of all, however, is the current effort to make the public believe that opposing single party dictated infringements of personal liberty and the Constitution is a “threat to democracy.”
That will be the focus of the second half of this post.
I confess that the post at hand, that “second half,” presumes what many in the thrall of LeftThink today deny: that the narrative about Republicans and Donald Trump especially creating an existential threat to democracy if they gain power is pure, unsupported, unsupportable Big Lie propaganda, part of a dangerous and divisive last ditch strategy to use fear to somehow avoid the electoral thrashing Democrats have earned perhaps more spectacularly than any party in U.S. history that had succeeded in gaining control of both the White House and Congress.
After all, it isn’t Republicans who are holding an unprecedented, prosecution-style, single party investigation aimed at justifying criminal charges against the previous President and elected officials who support him. It is not the Republicans who have gone to unprecedented lengths to chill dissent, as the Biden Administration has with it the threats of legal action by the Justice Department against parents who are too vigorous in their objections to public school indoctrination. Nor are Republicans the party now devoted to loosening, seriously and permanently, security measures that promote public trust in elections and to make ballot manipulation that is difficult to catch more easier to attempt.
Republicans haven’t advocated packing the Supreme Court to ensure a permanent advantage, or repeatedly advanced policies that violate Equal Protection and the Civil Rights laws for the objective of favoring certain groups over others. Republicans haven’t co-oped the management of Big Tech, social media and 98% of the news media to ensure that their opposition’s message is squelched and reported negatively while their agenda is spared criticism as well as public reporting of inconvenient facts.
How can the Left, even acknowledging their huge advantage in controlling information, hope to persuade the public that up is down, and that it is the GOP that threatens democracy while the reality is that the opposite is true? Continue reading →
Ethics Alarms 