Month: February 2025

By Now, No Lawyer Should Be Excused For Making This Blunder

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Yesterday, Judge Kelly Rankin of the District of Wyoming issued an order to show cause in Wadsworth v. Walmart Inc. He noted that in a motion to the court, the plaintiffs counsel had cited nine cases:

1. Wyoming v. U.S. Department of Energy, 2006 WL 3801910 (D. Wyo. 2006);

2. Holland v. Keller, 2018 WL 2446162 (D. Wyo. 2018);

3. United States v. Hargrove, 2019 WL 2516279 (D. Wyo. 2019);

4. Meyer v. City of Cheyenne, 2017 WL 3461055 (D. Wyo. 2017);

5. U.S. v. Caraway, 534 F.3d 1290 (10th Cir. 2008);

6. Benson v. State of Wyoming, 2010 WL 4683851 (D. Wyo. 2010);

7. Smith v. United States, 2011 WL 2160468 (D. Wyo. 2011);

8. Woods v. BNSF Railway Co., 2016 WL 165971 (D. Wyo. 2016); and

9. Fitzgerald v. City of New York, 2018 WL 3037217 (S.D.N.Y. 2018).

The judge then stated that none of the cases exist except United States v. Caraway. The others were figments of ChatGPT’s vivid imagination.

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Doxxing, “Big Balls,” J.D. Vance and “The Racist Tweeter Principle”: A Tragi-Comedy With a Twist

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Like my old law school roomie who left “Gone With the Wind” at the intermission thinking it was over, I almost posted on this ethics mess too early. There were three acts, and there might be a fourth. I thought the ethics show was over after Act II.

Act I. The news media’s tantrum: Upon finding that Elon Musk and DOGE were serious about uncovering government waste, that he was employing some of his young computer nerds from SpaceX to do it, and that they had brought down USAID, a foreign aid, woke slush fund icon by exposing just how profligate and irresponsible it was, Katherine Long, a progressive reporter on the Wall Street Journal, targeted the young geniuses who may all be on the autistic spectrum (like Musk). One of them, a 19-year-old, she embarrassed by revealing that his social media handle when he was in high school was “Big Balls.” She also doxxed Marko Elez, writing that he was a “25-year-old who is part of a cadre of Elon Musk lieutenants deployed by the Department of Government Efficiency to scrutinize federal spending” and had published troubling social media posts like, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.” “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” he wrote on “Twitter/X” in September. Long revealed that his account declared, “Normalize Indian hate,” in the same month, expressing his disapproval of the large numbers of tech workers from India in Silicon Valley.

Ethics takeaway: Doxxing is unethical; so is using old social media posts to make a newly prominent figure a victim of the “cancel culture.”

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Guest Post: Debates We MUST Have As A Modern Culture

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

By Steve Witherspoon

[From your host: I’m thrilled that my request for guest ethics commentary on the current upheaval in Washington attracted an entry so quickly, and especially pleased that it arrived from Steve Witherspoon, who has contributed so much here over the years but who has been unjustly neglected in my Comments of the Day choices.]

I consider myself to be a consummate observer. I listen and observe the world around me and openly question why some people make certain choices that seem to me to be completely devoid of critical thinking and logic, delve into how choices can affect their lives and society around them, and how those choices can either damage or support our culture as a whole.

I devoted the theme of my blog (Society’s Building Blocks: Social Commentary Blog – Critically Thinking About Things That Change Our Society) to just such a perspective even though it appears that there’s almost no interest, but I’ll trudge on.

I chose “Debates We MUST Have As A Modern Culture” as the title because in a culture that has freedom of speech as a core foundation, without continuing open, reasonably civil debate regarding things that have changed and are changing in our culture, we tend to flail around with absurd anti-American culture ideals that are dominated by the completely closed minds of freedom suppressing totalitarians. We are then afflicted with cancel culture, speech suppression, and Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI), as well as willful rationalizations for open politically motivated Lawfare.

Let’s face it: when reasonably civil debates are tossed aside as a quaint ideal and people withdraw into their tunnel-visioned cultish cliques, bigotry ensues. Unchallenged, absurd groupthink takes hold and people become so gullible that they’ll believe just about anything they’re told that supports their bias without any critical thinking. They become ideologically-consumed parrots. This isolationist cultish groupthink has the power to completely destroy our culture, and that may be the goal of some of these cultish anti-Americans.

The United States of America is rapidly approaching 250 years old and there have been some turning points in our history that have redefined us and shifted our culture in very good and thoughtful ways. I personally believe that we are at another turning point and we are going to go through another cultural shift; I just don’t know how much of a shift we are going to see. What I do know is that this cultural shift needs to be based on thoughtful and well debated choices that are guided by our Constitution, general law and order, and how we want to present our country to the rest of the world. We need to honor our core foundations as we look to the future.

Let’s bring a little more focus and briefly list some of the current hot political topics that we must openly debate instead of simply tossing them aside as being unconstitutional, racist, genocide, apocalyptic, etc. Immigration law, law enforcement, self protection, firearms, birthright citizenship, when does individual human life begin thus giving that individual constitutional rights, protecting the environment, government overspending, and illegal drugs are just some of these.

We cannot continue to do things in the same way we’ve been doing them if we want any kind of real change.

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A “Ripley” For These Morons, A Life Competence Fail Defying Belief…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

23-year-old Ashton Jonathan Mann was arrested on one count of second-degree felony manslaughter and one third-degree felony charge related to firearms for for shooting his friend dead n the early hours of February 2nd. You see, Mann’s friend had boasted that he could dodge bullets. So Mann got a a gun, and with his friend’s assent, decided to test his claim. They thought they had unloaded it—see, the idea was that the guy who could dodge bullets would move before the trigger was pulled. But they missed one bullet that was still in the chamber.

It turned out that he couldn’t dodge a bullet after all. Told ya!

First responders were called to a home in Kearns, Utah to find a young man with a gunshot wound to the chest lying on the floor. He was pronounced dead at the hospital. The shooter waived his Miranda rights and told police that they decided to embark on this experiments after smoking pot for about eight hours. Marijuana is, of course, completely harmless and a benign recreational drug. For example, it facilitates the recreational activity, “Dodge that Bullet!”

As you know, everything remind me of something, and this story reminded me of the strange death of novelist William Burroughs’ wife.

Post 2024 Election Freak-Out Update…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

In brief: I just have a couple of minutes…

1. The “Elon Musk wasn’t elected” might be the stupidest rallying cry any party in U.S. political history has ever anchored itself to. I just heard Rep. Maxine Waters, whose corruption and dishonesty know no bounds, shouting about that. Do these people really not understand how their own government works? Are the Democrats trying to win the title of “The Stupid Party” from the GOP? One conservative pundit said he had a three letter rebuttal to the “Elon wasn’t elected” complaint: “EPA.” Or USAID. Or FBI. Is this really the best the Axis has right now? Wow. Also “Good.” Also..

2. Over on Facebook, somebody actually posted this and dozens of once- functioning human beings “liked” it: “Dismantling the government is the first step to fascism and totalitarianism.” There’s a two word rebuttal for this too: “Thomas Jefferson.”

Morons.

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Friday Open Forum, Also HELP!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Today is the anniversary of the Beatles arriving in New York to begin what was to be an epic ten-day tour of the U.S. in 1964, sending Beatlemania to new heights. There are few things that make me laugh out loud in pure joy these days—MSNBC freakouts cause rueful laughter if not my Nelson Muntz imitation—but one of them is when the Beatles Channel on Sirius/XM plays recordings of the Fab Four’s concerts from those days, with the teenage girls screaming their lungs out. It’s just so innocent, happy, wonderful….and weird. And we will never, never see the like again.

But “Help!” (Grace told me that she and her best friend went to the movie ten times) is up there for a different reason. I need it. It makes me feel a little better to read so many other bloggers, commentators, social media whizzes and pundits complaining that the opening Trump Presidency whirlwind has them overwhelmed and frustrated, but it doesn’t, you know, help. These are important issues that require ethical perspectives (since almost nobody else is supplying them), and I literally cannot afford to spend all my time on this for all the reasons regular readers here are used to me complaining about.

And this is an especially crucial month, not because I have a lot of paying work—-this is always a dead period for ProEthics—but because I have set this month aside to take care of many crucial administrative, business and personal tasks that I have accumulated while trying to keep a two-person operation functioning by myself and trying to ignore the Call of the Woodchipper. Yesterday I spent so much time researching, thinking about and writing about the topics here that I got nothing productive done on anything else.

Thorough, thoughtful, articulate discussions of current ethics event on the open forums do help, but what I really need right now is focused guest columns on the daily Trump vs. Axis War. EA has one excellent regular columnist now, the ineffable Curmie, but the political arena is not his favored field, and thank goodness for that. This month I need guest columns on the accelerating government/cultural/societal upheaval, and I need them quickly. I also want to be able to write about non-political matters without having to whiff on an ethics issue of importance thrown at me from the world of politics.

I will still have to edit these guest posts (lightly) and I can’t guarantee that every one will be published; if I decide that a submission isn’t what I need, I will ask that it go up on the next Forum. And you can consider it an audition for a regular gig, if an unpaid one.

My email, again, is jamproethics@verizon.net. Send your submissions to that address, and to all you frustrated banned commenters out there: Yes, you can have a guest column published too! You just have to make sure it doesn’t begin by calling me an asshole.

End of plea. Now, as Hedley Lamarr so memorably said, “Go do that voodoo that you do so weeeeeell!

“Reason” Thinks The “60 Minutes” Deceptive Edit of the Harris Interview Was Just Fine [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

It’s hard for me to use a publication as a news source after it does something this ethically obtuse. I often find Reason, the libertarian magazine and website, insightful and useful, especially since the Volokh Conspiracy hangs out there now. But the site has not one but two essays claiming that CBS and “60 Minutes” were “vindicated” by the unedited transcript of Harris’s infamous interview, and all I can say in response is, “What’s the matter with them?”

Well, not all I can say. In an earlier post I pointed out how egregiously CBS cherry-picked relatively coherent pieces of Harris’s typically garbled responses, indeed taking middle-of-the-answer sentences and then middle-of-the-sentence portions to make Harris sound less like the dim-witted empty suit than she is. Jacob Sullum frames his “It isn’t what it is ” piece by repeating Trump’s rant about how the editing was “illegal” and should lose CBS its license. Yawn. Gee, Trump exaggerates. He was nonetheless correct that it was attempted election interference and “fake news.”

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Today’s Sad and Desperate Argument From a Facebook Friend Who Once Was Too Smart To Post Something This Stupid…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Unbelievable.

That idiocy was posted by a lawyer, former law dean and law professor. How is this possible?

It is like saying that if you believe the French Revolution was a human and political disaster, you should have to explain why you object to each section of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.” It is like saying that it’s a cop-out to claim that “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Free” is a hateful call for the eradication of Israel, unless you explain: “What’s so bad about starting at the river? What’s so wrong about going to the seashore? What do you find so objectionable about freedom?”

Whoever thinks this meme is a devastating rebuttal of opposition to DEI as a social, employment, and organizational policy doesn’t comprehend a foundational principle of language, which is that words in particular contexts and combinations often mean something entirely different from what the words mean individually and in a vacuum.

Sure, diversity can be nice, but not as an enforced value, and not in every context. I don’t see anyone advocating more racially diverse NBA teams, for example. Most of the time diversity isn’t even an ethical value, just a feature that may or may not have benefits to a group. Equity, the only concept of the three that I see on my wall as one of the ethical values, means fairness. But fairness is extremely subjective, making it one of the more tricky ethical values, and when it is used as it is used in the context of the DEI Division of The Great Stupid, what it means is “equal outcomes for all.” That is Marxist Cloud Cuckoo Land garbage. Life doesn’t, shouldn’t and can’t work like that. There are winners and losers; enterprise, talent, diligence, intelligence and skill matters, as well as luck. Trying to fight that fact of existence is a fool’s errand, or, more often a con artist’s scam.

“Inclusion” is the weird one: what it means in context of the DEI movement is that all exclusion is malign and sinister, the result of deliberate discrimination on the basis of invidious factors. False.

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Ethics Dunce: Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC.)

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

During a House Oversight Committee meeting, Rep. Nancy Mace used the derogatory term “tranny” in discussing legislation aimed at various aspects of the contentions transgender issue. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, objected. “The gentlelady has used a phrase that is considered a slur in the LGBTQ community and the transgender community,” he said.

That is correct. Moreover, this is not a new development: “tranny” is an old slur, and unlike some terms that have been declared slurs after once being considered acceptable (I forget: is “queer” a slur now, or isn’t it?) that term for a transexual has always been used as an insult.

Nevertheless Mace, emulating the outburst that ended Dr. Laura’s radio career (Except that she said, “Nigger, nigger, nigger!”), spat back, “Tranny, tranny, tranny! I don’t really care. You want penises in women’s bathrooms, and I’m not gonna have it. No, thank you.”

For this illogical and needlessly uncivil response, Mace has been cheered by some conservative pundits. Now that’s transphobia and bigotry. “Tranny” is in the same ugly category as nigger, spic, gook, retard, fag, dyke, cunt, and other indisputably denigrating terms that have no redeeming feature. Their purpose is to demonstrate hatred and contempt for the group or individual being described. Such a purpose is per se unethical: disrespectful, unfair, cruel and uncivil.

Connolly replied, logically enough, “To me, a slur is a slur, and here in the committee, a level of decorum requires us to try consciously to avoid slurs.” He was right.

Connelly continued, “You just heard the gentlelady actually actively, robustly repeat it; and I would just ask the chairman that she be counseled that we ought not to be engaged — we can have debate and policy discussion without offending human beings who are fellow citizens. And so, I would ask as a parliamentary inquiry whether the use of that phrase is not, in fact, a violation of the decorum rules.”

Mace, putting in her entry for Asshole of the Year, refused to submit. “Mr. Chairman, I’m not going to be counseled by a man over men and women’s spaces or men who have mental health issues dressing as women.”

That response, like her previous one, made no sense, but still, some conservative pundits applauded. Matt Margolis, for example, argued that “tranny” isn’t really a slur. Bologna. I knew the word was a slur decades ago. He lionizes Mace for refusing to submit to a Democrats because, he claims, “everything” is a slur to progressives now. That might be a justifiable exaggeration in some cases, but not when a real, undeniable slur like “tranny” is involved. Connolly is 100% correct: there is no excuse for members of Congress to deliberately use terms that only exist to offend and marginalize minorities. To do so gives a license to citizens to behave hatefully, because our elected representatives are supposed to be role models and to exemplify the best conduct in public, not the worst.

I say this with full recognition that my ethics, decorum and civility standards for members of Congress is so alien to so many current members today that it is almost futile to keep insisting on it. Just watch the ridiculous spectacle House members and Senators made of themselves protesting against Elon Musk yesterday.

A civil, responsible elected official should be able to make her points without stooping to gutter slurs.

UPDATE to “Can Anyone Think of an Innocent, Ethical Explanation For USAID’s Giving $8.1 Million to Politico? Because I Can’t”: It’s Even Worse Than That…

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

At this point, my head is metaphorically spinning as new revelations about the money-laundering, journalism-bribery and astounding abuse of U.S. taxpayer funds just under a single bloated, unaccountable, Democratic ideologue-infested agency are coming out left and right, from credible sources and marginal ones, as the crumbling Axis denies, obfuscates, screams, threatens, and throws up dust. I confess: I don’t have the time or the skills to gather all of the information, vet it, and explain it. That’s not my job, either. I resent the fact—actually “resent” is not a strong enough word—that our most prominent journalists who should be informing the public regarding the USAID/Politico scandal are doing anything but.

Thus the thread on the post yesterday introducing the topic includes among the most recent of its 60 comments (as of this moment), a sincere reader offering this: “I just spent some time today since this hit the news on the USASPENDING site and confirmed Politico only received two awards, one for 20 thousand, the other for 24 thousand dollars from the USAID. So it does appear your post is wrong.”  No, what’s wrong is that the actual expenditures have been disguised, hidden, mis-labled, and been examined through so many disparate sources that it is impossible for even well-intentioned readers to answer the question, “What’s going on here?” The Axis propaganda media news site Mediate made the same claim as the commenter, quoting Politico’s management that the “subscription” support was as pure as the driven snow. As with the other “usual suspects” like CNN’s hack media ethics watchdog Brain Stelter, the current strategy is to pretend this is much ado about nothing. Stelter’s defense: Why isn’t DOGE going after waste in misspent funds in the Defense Department?

Who can you trust? Apparently nobody. And that’s dangerous and frightening. AND I have no idea what to do about it.

I would have once expected the Columbia Journalism Review to be a source that might give definitive intelligence on this matter. Here, after hundreds of words attacking Trump, Musk, and DOGE, it tells us,

$268 million [of the now frozen USAID funds] was earmarked to fund “independent media and the free flow of information” this year. In the recent past, USAID had boasted of supporting more than six thousand journalists, around seven hundred independent newsrooms, and nearly three hundred media-focused civil society groups in thirty or so countries…

Including ours? “Independent” journalism being funded by a U.S. agency with a political agenda is an oxymoron anywhere. What would U.S. pundits say if it learned that, say, Russia, Ukraine or Israel was sending funds to the New York Post or some of its reporters to encourage them to be “independent”?

Most of the revelations about the USAID-Politico connection have come from social media, requiring a click obsession to track the sources down, with the main reporting on the developments coming from sources like this New Jersey publication, which wrote yesterday in part,

Documents revealed that from 2024, under the Biden administration, Politico received approximately $9.6 million in funding over just over a year. This funding was distributed across various branches of the organization, though the exact purposes of these funds have not been publicly detailed by Politico or the government agencies involved….Political analysts and media watchdogs have been quick to comment on the implications of such funding. “The revelation of government funding to media outlets like Politico raises serious questions about editorial independence and the potential for conflicts of interest,” said media critic David Smith.  “[I]t’s a stark reminder of how governmental financial support can influence, or at least be perceived to influence, journalism.”

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