Month: December 2023

Ethics Hero: Edelson Law Firm Founder Jay Edelson

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The large plaintiffs’ law firm Edelson PC announced that it will boycott recruiting events at Harvard Law School as a consequence of Harvard University president Claudine Gay’s Congressional testimony shrugging off campus antisemitism as “free speech,” followed by Harvard’s subsequent endorsement of Gay’s leadership. The firm informed Harvard Law’s career services office in a letter that announced the firm will skip the upcoming January law school recruitment as well Harvard’s larger on-campus interviewing event in August, when major firms do their hiring of summer associates.

Firm founder and CEO Jay Edelson explained, “This is not about Harvard law students. This is about the leadership of Harvard and how much of a megaphone it has on the world stage. They should use that megaphone responsibly.” Edelson added, “I understand that this is not going to be as relevant to them than if Skadden Arps pulled out, but I’m hoping they start seeing that even the liberal firms think this is well past a line.”

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files….

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This supercut of Democrats and their mainstream media minions (well, and Liz Cheney, of course) flogging Big Lie #3 ( “Trump Is A Fascist/Hitler/Dictator/Monster”) is a really funny, or, if you are a member of the Democratic Party, sad. If someone you know thinks it’s genuinely scary, however, try to get them some help.

Behold…

Interesting! FireFox, my browser, is blocking this video from posting, though embed codes just like it have always worked. I’m sorry, you’ll just have to go here to see what this post is about:

https://news.grabien.com/story-media-warn-if-trump-s-re-elected-every-bad-thing-they-can-possibly-ima

Incidentally, that once responsible, respected Presidential historian who keeps showing up is Michael Beschloss, whose EA dossier is here.

Ethics List Update, 12/15/23

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

It is stressful and irritating to have so many ethics stories dancing in my head like sugarplums, so I’m going to indulge myself in a quick exercise to get them out there and make room for the incoming stampede….

1. Yes, Michelle Goldberg really is this clueless. The scary part is that there are so many like her. The most irritating Times opinion writer—-not the worst, now, there are worse than her, like Jamelle Bouie, Paul Krugman and the inimitable Charles Blow, but she’s the one who irritates me the most—put her name under an op-ed titled, “What’s Driving Former Progressives to the Right?” Gee, what a mystery! What could it be? “Liberals and leftists have lots of excellent policy ideas, but rarely articulate a plausible vision of the future,” she decides. What are those “excellent policy ideas”? Goldberg points to dismantling “capitalism, the carceral state, heteropatriarchy [and] the nuclear family” and concludes that doing these marvelous things are just too darn hard for the faint-hearted.

It’s easier to be conservative, see: “The right has an advantage in appealing to dislocated and atomized people: It doesn’t have to provide a compelling view of the future. All it needs is a romantic conception of the past, to which it can offer the false promise of return. When people are scared and full of despair, “let’s go back to the way things were” is a potent message, especially for those with memories of happier times.”

Yeah, that must be it, Michelle.

It couldn’t possibly be that after assessing the state of the nation since 2008 and watching the collapse of the education system, rot in the cities, a rise in racial preferences, rampant inflation and an out-of-control national debt, chaos at the border, riots across the country launched by a Marxist scam group, the explosion of state-driven censorship efforts in the name of fighting “misinformation,” the transformation of journalism into a Leftist propaganda network, the return of anti-Semitism, the gradual destruction of women’s sports by trans-madness, and—there is a lot more—cutting to the chase, this…

…that some progressives have done what rational adults do when they find that something they really wanted to work doesn’t: they try something else.

Nah. It couldn’t be that...

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Look! Another Racial Casting Controversy!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I love this one: it involves one of my favorite actors and one of my favorite historical figures.

Denzel Washington has lapped Sydney Poitier as the most successful and, in my view, most versatile and best black Hollywood star in film history, so one would think his casting to portray any historical figure would be seen as a boon to that figure’s fans. In this case, you would be wrong. Denzel is playing the Carthaginian general Hannibal in a Netflix historical epic, and Le Monde reports that in Tunisia, Hannibal’s old stomping ground, Hannibal’s admirers are furious. The casting has even been debated in the Tunisian parliament. Tunisian MP Yassine Mami railed about “the risk of falsification of history” while calling on members to join him in “defending Tunisian identity”.

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After Harvard’s Wagon-Circling: This Will Not End Well….

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

While I was certain that Harvard would not have the integrity or guts to dump its albatross of a president having trapped the university in DEI Hell by selecting a black female social justice warrior in the first place, I have never held any illusions that this reflex circling of the progressive wagons and rote vote of confidence would do anything to slow Harvard’s demise. To be curt: the nation’s most prestigious university—for now—has a flat learning curve.

Isn’t that ironic.

Here are three updates on the ongoing Harvard debacle:

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The Story Of “Do You Hear What I Hear?”….And The Christmas Kick-Off Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Last week’s forum was the deadest ever, so I’m hoping that injecting some holiday cheer into this one will spark more dialogue. After all, if the wind, a lamb, a shepherd boy, a mighty king and people everywhere can have a productive conversation, Ethics Alarms readers should be able to bring some Goodness and Light too.

As some inspiration, I’m reposting below the Ethics Alarms entry about the origins of my favorite of the modern—“modern” as in “post World War II”—Christmas songs, first sung by my favorite Christmas minstrel.

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Ethics Quiz: Christmas Dancing At The White House

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Relax…today’s ethics quiz has nothing to do with whether Jill Biden’s Christmas video featuring the modern ballet troupe Dorrance Dance is your cup of eggnog.

Rather it is this…

Is it responsible and ethical for the White House to use the holidays to promote a politically radical, anti-police, anti-white, Marxist organization like Dorrance Dance?

For Dorrance Dance is an overtly and outspokenly Marxist dance company that even prominently displays a quote from Angela Davis on its website: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” The group advocates defunding the police across the country, and prominently endorses Black Lives Matters, another Marxist organization.

The group’s radical politics are a bit buried on its website behind standard aspirational artistic blather like “Our goal is to engage with audiences on a musical and emotional level, and to share the complex history and powerful legacy of this American art form throughout the country and the world.” Well, yes, that, and ending capitalism and the United States of America as we know it in order to achieve “racial justice.”

My answer to the quiz is that as long as the group keeps its politics out of its work for the White House, good luck to them. They were engaged—I hope—because of their dance artistry rather than their contempt for the United States. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Bidens had no idea what the group advocates.

Yes, it’s annoying that Dorrance Dance will undoubtedly use its White House gig as cognitive dissonance helium to elevate their public image into more positive territory than any organization connected to Angela Davis, Black Lives Matter and Karl Marx deserves. But if we chose our art based on the political sophistication and delusions of artists, we’d just end up with bad art.

A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Smoking Gun: An Insider Confirms The Ethics Rot At The New York Times And In American Journalism

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The bad news is that the platform for this powerful exposé is The Economist, which most Americans don’t read. Another problem is that the essay by former Times opinion editor James Bennet is prohibitively long: over 17,000 words. Nonetheless, everyone should read it, especially those who still hold on to the myth that “advocacy journalism” is journalism, that’s it’s healthy for our democracy, or that the New York Times can be trusted to convey facts rather than propaganda.

The piece is titled “When the New York Times lost its way,” and the author begins by focusing on the Senator Tom Cotton op-ed piece that he was forced to take down and that cost him his job. It is understandable that Bennet feels that way, but the fact that he would point to that episode and not many others that occurred before it shows his own blindness and bias. Apparently the Times announcing in late 2016 that it would henceforth frame the news to ensure that Hillary Clinton, or pushing the Hillary-seeded Russian collusion myth for two years didn’t qualify as signature significance of a corrupted paper, but pulling a conservative U.S. Senator’s op-ed because the Times staff disagreed with it does. Well, that one cost Benett his job, after all.

Ironically, Bennet’s biases enhance his credibility: in many ways he’s a classic Democratic, Trump-hating progressive, and yet he’s still blowing a very loud whistle on his colleagues. Is he a “disgruntled ex-employee”? Sure he is; Bennet is bitter and disillusioned, and maybe that’s why he felt it necessary to write such an exhaustive piece. Nonetheless, his argument is persuasive. If the Times was the newspaper it claims to be (and that Bennet shows it is not), it would have published his essay itself.

The article is here, and to encourage you to read it, I’ll point out some representative passages:

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Worst-Timed Fundraising Appeal Of The Decade…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The Crimson independently reviewed the published allegations. Though some are minor — consisting of passages that are similar or identical to Gay’s sources, lacking quotation marks but including citations — others are more substantial, including some paragraphs and sentences nearly identical to other work and lacking citations.

Some appear to violate Harvard’s current policies around plagiarism and academic integrity.

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Some semi-alert Harvard fundraiser decided to tweak this letter to emphasize supporting students rather than the institution itself. I rule that deceitful, but it’s such an obvious and pathetic ploy that the chances of it fooling anyone with an IQ above 80—most, though not all, Harvard alums probably can top 100— are slim.

This year-end fundraising appeal arrives in my mailbox the same week that the school’s leadership unanimously supported a president who embarrassed herself, the school and its alumni in a public forum. It comes after Harvard gave tacit approval to students threatening the welfare and educational opportunities of Jewish students by refusing to take any action against other students extolling terrorism targeting Jews, and espousing intafada and genocide. While a lesser Ivy League institution, UPenn, correctly dismissed its president who made almost exactly the same tone-deaf and cowardly statements before Congress that Harvard’s Claudine Gay did, saying that whether calls for the death of Jews constitutes harassment and a violation of the school’s conduct code depends on their “context,” Harvard’s governing body submitted an absurd-on-its-face endorsement of Gay, stating “Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.”

Yes, the most prestigious university in the U.S., among all its scholars and graduates, can’t find a better leader than one unable to explain the limits of free speech on campus, or do better under questioning than to repeat verbatim the canned answers provided by lawyers as if she were reciting “The Wreck of the Hesperus.”

Who believes that? What informed graduate not yet in the throes of senility doesn’t comprehend that the vote of confidence means, “We chose this woman because she was black and a DEI hun, and not having black alums and woke faculty rebel is more important to us than showing that we reject anti-Semitism and care sufficiently about maintaining Harvard’s reputation. “

If there was doubt that President Gay could do anything short of running naked with a bloody machete through Harvard Square and keep her job, she was also permitted to pilot “Back to the Future’s” Delorean and remove plagiarized sections of her nearly 30 year-old PhD dissertation, though it was in its illicit form when the document won her the doctorate. Although the Harvard Crimson has supported Gay (on the theory that Harvard should never do anything demanded by evil, racist Republicans) it also concluded in an investigation…

The Crimson independently reviewed the published allegations. Though some are minor — consisting of passages that are similar or identical to Gay’s sources, lacking quotation marks but including citations — others are more substantial, including some paragraphs and sentences nearly identical to other work and lacking citations.

Some appear to violate Harvard’s current policies around plagiarism and academic integrity.

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‘Fund Raising Appeals I Stopped Reading After Two Paragraphs’ Dept.: No, ProPublica, I’m Not Giving Money To Your Brand Of “Independent Journalism”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I subscribe to ProPublica because the group often does valuable investigative reporting, just as I subscribed to Glenn Greenwald this year even after he took my substack subscription money and then produced nothing for months because he was sick or something. (Not again, Glenn, Sorry.) However, I will not give money to organizations who lie to me. This is how the year-end appeal I just received from ProPublica begins:

It’s no secret that American democracy is in peril. The 2020 elections were unlike anything our country has seen before — election deniers, an insurrection and bad actors sowing disinformation shed a harsh light on the fragile state of our democracy. As a ProPublica reader, I know you’ve been aware of these growing threats for some time now.

ProPublica is no bystander when it comes to ensuring a transparent government, regardless of who is in power. As a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom, we believe that investigative journalism is one of the most powerful tools we have to ensure a healthy democracy…

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