You’re up, ’cause I’m down….
Open Forum, December Dawns Opinion Party Edition
You’re up, ’cause I’m down….
Author: Jack Marshall
Ethics Dunce: Elon Musk
I’ve never seen this before: the Ethics Alarms Ethics Hero of the Year making an Ethics Dunce of himself the same month I awarded him the honor. Depressing. Not entirely surprising in Elon Musk’s case, but depressing.
In the catalyzing development, Kanje West (or “Ye”) has set out to also make Ethics Alarms look foolish by awarding Donald Trump its 2022 “Asshole of the Year” award. West, who is disqualified from that distinction because he is clearly mentally ill, decided to visit Alex Jones and babble on about how much he liked Hitler, who had done some “good things.” Being roundly condemned for this revolting opinion wasn’t enough for the allegedly genius rapper: he then posted the design above on his recently restored Twitter account, a Nazi swastika entwined with the Star of Israel.
Quick like a bunny, Musk tweeted,
“I tried my best. Despite that, he again violated our rule against incitement to violence. Account will be suspended.”
I assume that Musk’s reaction was impulsive, because he constantly is impulsive. However, he had stated that he is a free-speech absolutist within reasonable parameters, and condemned the arbitrary, left-biased moderation policies of the previous Twitter regime. He did not “try his best”; Musk’s principles broke down the first time they were seriously challenged. West did not violate the rule against incitement to violence; in fact, I would not be surprised if he posted the ambiguous symbol to see if Musk could control himself. Continue reading
It’s Called Sacrificing Individual Rights For “The Greater Good.” Jefferson Would Hate It, And So Should Any Ethical American
Yet this is what progressives and Democrats increasingly argue for to solve problems.
Exhibit #1: David Brooks
It hard to believe that David Brooks was once considered to be a conservative. Spend enough time in the New York Times culture, apparently, at least if your character, principles and integrity are as weak as David’s seem to be, and you will emerge from your chrysalis as a new, collectivist, proto-totalitarian.
Here’s Brooks on PBS talking about what he’d like to see installed to address gun violence:
President Biden spoke about red flagging, that you would find somebody you think is potentially dangerous, and we would be able to — authorities would be able to go in and take guns away.
That would take a gigantic cultural shift in this country, a revamping of the way we think about privacy, a revamping of the way we think about the role government plays in protecting the common good. I think it’d be something I think would be good not only for — to head off shootings, but good to live in a society where we cared more intimately about each other.
And I would be willing to give up certain privacies for that to happen. But, for many Americans, that would just be a massive cultural shift to regard community and regard our common good more frankly, in a European style. I think it would benefit our society in a whole range of areas, but it’s hard to see that kind of culture change to a society that’s been pretty individualistic for a long, long time.
Observe what “conservative” pundit Brooks is advocating here. The government decides someone is “dangerous” and can then take away Second Amendment rights. What would stop the government from taking other rights away that it might believe are “dangerous” in the hands of someone it fears? This is pre-crime. This is open-ended government control over individual liberty based on subjective standards. And David Brooks says he’d “be willing to give up certain privacies for that to happen,” because he knows that he would probably not be a target of such government oppression. After all, he’s now on the “right’ side.
The United States, he says, is “pretty individualistic,” meaning too individualistic, by European standards. Yet the United States of America was created expressly to reject the limitations on individualism placed on its citizens by European cultures and governments.
It’s Asshole vs. Jerk vs. Troll, And May The…No, Let’s Hope They All Lose
It now appears that the controversial dinner former President Trump had with suddenly radioactive wacko Kanye West and racist, sexist, proto-fascist Nick Fuentes was a diabolical trap set by the “deliberately offensive former Breitbart editor, alt-right cheer-leader, misogynist and professional troll Milo Yiannopoulos, whom Ethics Alarms foolishly assumed was kicked to the curb for good (and I do mean good) when a tape surfaced of him making light of pederasty in an interview. Milo lost a book deal and his star status on the Conservative Creep Speaking circuit as a consequence. In declaring his professional demise, I wrote (in 2017), “Society and political discourse will be better off and more ethical without Milo’s hateful bile polluting them. That is a good thing.”
What do I know? Milo got himself hired as a staffer by Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, herself an Ethics Alarms designated waste of space. Ethics Alarms, 2021: “This, my friends, is a crazy person, and no party can ignore or tolerate a House member who embodies the worst and most fevered stereotypes spread by that party’s opposition. Rep. Greene…needs to be marginalized and isolated in Congress so that not only can she do as little damage as possible, but so that when she says ridiculous and offensive things, nobody can say that this loose cannon speaks for the party.”
Milo, who is also apparently “Ye’s” Presidential campaign manager (of course he is!), takes full responsibility for setting up the dinner that has even former Trump lackeys calling the hopeful Presidential candidate a fool for hosting. Milo:
Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 12/1/22: Getting December Off To An Unethical Start…[Corrected]
I’m preparing the annual Ethics Alarms Christmas music post, and thus thinking about holiday songs and performances. I think my top three performances in this realm of all time would be, first, Judy Garland’s rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in “Meet Me in St. Louis,” then Bing Crosby’s recording of “Do You Hear What I Hear?,” and Harry’s contribution to the Christmas canon above. I had a long drive last week and listened to the Sirius “Christmas Traditions” station. It’s depressing—I know I’ve mentioned this before—everyone you hear is dead. That can’t be a good thing for getting people into the Christmas spirit. I started playing a game: how many songs with dead singers would play before a currently living singer would show up? Fourteen songs went by, and then jazz artist Nancy Wilson popped up. Oooh! I was pretty sure she was still alive! Nope. I checked; Nancy checked out in 2018. The one living singer who has been played repeatedly so far is Johnny Mathis. He’s 87.
Hang in there, Johnny.
1. It’s really kind of amazing…these people flagrantly display their double standards and cynicism, and pay no price for it. Integrity? What integrity? House Democrats just picked a new leader in the House, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi stpping down (finally!) at the end of this term. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) is the new power. Apparently the fact that he has been an outspoken “election denier” in the past (at least that’s what Democrats call it when Republicans question an election’s legitimacy) and Jeffries has been tapped immediately after the party made “election denial” a litmus test for fascism going into the midterm elections doesn’t bother anyone at all. Jeffries repeatedly denied the results of the 2016 presidential election, claiming that it was illegitimate and stolen.
“The more we learn about 2016 election the more ILLEGITIMATE it becomes,” Jeffries tweeted in 2018, referencing Trump defeating Hillary Clinton. “America deserves to know whether we have a FAKE President in the Oval Office.” In 2020, he called out Trump, saying, “history will never accept you as a legitimate President.” That the Republican Party couldn’t wipe the metaphorical floor with these liars and incompetents last month shows its rank incompetence. No wonder Democrats don’t even try to hide their hypocrisy.
ABC Is Upset That Twitter Is Ending Its “Covid 19 Misinformation” Censorship Policy. ABC Should Shut Up And Address Its Own Misinformation
The report from ABC News is rife with significance and illumination. Sayeth the network, a bulwark of the biased mainstream media propaganda machine, in its headline, “Twitter ends enforcement of COVID misinformation policy: Twitter is no longer enforcing its policy against misinformation about COVID-19.”
If one had to choose a single topic about which it is ridiculous and hypocritical for the news media to complain about alleged “misinformation,” I can’t imagine a more perfect one than the pandemic. The ABC story is unintentionally hilarious in its resolute refusal to acknowledge reality, thus qualifying as misinformation, disinformation, or perhaps just “typical unethical journalism deception” itself. ABC’s self-own is also useful, as it provides one more example, as if more were necessary, of how desperately the Axis of Evil (you know by now, I hope: “the resistance”/ Democratic Party/ mainstream media” anti-democracy team) needs to see Elon Musks mission to rescue free speech and the dissemination of non-conforming opinions and embargoed information fail.
Some highlights:
More Evidence Of Ethics Rot In The Legal Profession
The combination of The Great Stupid washing over the land, woke indoctrination and bullying, and the politicization of everything has perhaps taken its greatest toll on the trustworthiness of the professions. One after another has succumbed to ethics rot to an extent that one would have been unimaginable. The legal profession has been especially ravaged.
A depressing and horrifying op-ed in the Wall Street Journal told the first-hand account of how the writer was fired from her law firm, Hogan Lovells, for daring to express an opinion that was not deemed compliant with current progressive cant. She wrote in part,
After the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade in June, global law firm Hogan Lovells organized an online conference call for female employees. As a retired equity partner still actively serving clients, I was invited to participate in what was billed as a “safe space” for women at the firm to discuss the decision. It might have been a safe space for some, but it wasn’t safe for me.
Everyone else who spoke on the call was unanimous in her anger and outrage about Dobbs. I spoke up to offer a different view. I noted that many jurists and commentators believed Roe had been wrongly decided. I said that the court was right to remand the issue to the states. I added that I thought abortion-rights advocates had brought much of the pushback against Roe on themselves by pushing for extreme policies. I referred to numerous reports of disproportionately high rates of abortion in the black community, which some have called a form of genocide. I said I thought this was tragic.
The outrage was immediate. The next speaker called me a racist and demanded that I leave the meeting. Other participants said they “lost their ability to breathe” on hearing my comments. After more of the same, I hung up.
Someone made a formal complaint to the firm. Later that day, Hogan Lovells suspended my contracts, cut off my contact with clients, removed me from email and document systems, and emailed all U.S. personnel saying that a forum participant had made “anti-Black comments” and was suspended pending an investigation. The firm also released a statement to the legal website Above the Law bemoaning the devastating impact my views had on participants in the forum—most of whom were lawyers participating in a call convened expressly for the purpose of discussing a controversial legal and political topic. Someone leaked my name to the press.
Best of Ethics Award 2022, Best Ethics TV Show: “The Good Fight”
Ethics TV shows, once, long ago, a major segment of popular television fare, are an endangered species. When I last gave out this award six years ago, the winner was the zombie apocalypse AMC hit “The Walking Dead.” Eventually TWD itself became a zombie; if I had named a winner of the award in recent years, based on what I saw, it probably would have been old standby and previous champion “Blue Bloods” on CBS, or as I call it, “The Conflict of Interest Family.” To the great credit of Tom Selleck and the writers, it’s still a strong ethics show in its 13th season; brave too (imagine: in 2022, a pro-police drama about a devout Catholic family that meets for Sunday dinner every week!). But I’ve found—finally–a better one.
And if I had been more alert, I would have found it six years ago. The show is “The Good Fight,” a spin-off of “The Good Wife” which Ethics Alarms discussed frequently during its run. I was a bit jaded after “The Good Wife,” because, as good legal series often do if they go on too long, it began resorting to outlandish plot devices as new ideas became harder to come by. Maybe that’s why I was so late checking in on “The Good Fight.” The series picks up the story of Christine Baranski’s character in “The Good Wife,” and streams on Paramount Plus, which I only recently subscribed to. This is the show’s final season, its sixth, but I’m starting from the beginning.
If the next five season raised no ethics issues at all—an impossibility with ethics-obsessed creator-writers Robert and Michelle King in charge—“The Good Fight” would still be the smartest and most sophisticated legal ethics drama since “The Defenders.” You can watch it here.
There are a lot of legal dramas on streaming services right now: “The Lincoln Lawyer,” “The Firm” (based on the John Grisham novel and film, with Grisham producing), “Partner Track,” “Extraordinary Attorney Woo,” the now-completed “Better Call Saul,” and the extremely entertaining if over-the-top drama “Goliath,” starring Bill Bob Thornton as an alcoholic, depressive, idealistic litigator. If I had to recommend one over the rest, “The Good Fight” would be my choice.
“You’re The Dog”
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto—how I miss his blog!— famously wrote of accusations that something was a “racist dog whistle”:
“The thing we adore about these dog-whistle kerfuffles is that the people who react to the whistle always assume it’s intended for somebody else. The whole point of the metaphor is that if you can hear the whistle, you’re the dog.”
Bingo. In the last week we have seen two particularly vivid examples of this phenomenon. The most recent is peak Great Stupid: the World Health Organization announced that it will begin referring to monkeypox as “mpox.” Why? Well, there were complaints that its name constituted “racist and stigmatizing language.” Yes, all it takes to make WHO jump is complaints from morons, or perhaps power-seeking activists who want to see how easily they can bend organizations to their will, just to prove they can. Continue reading
Baseball Super-Agent Scott Boras Has Another Super-Conflict And There Is No Excuse For It
Eleven years ago, Ethics Alarms began a post about baseball agents in general and Scott Boras in particular engaging in a flaming conflict of interest that harmed their player clients this way…
Baseball’s super-agent Scott Boras has his annual off-season conflict of interest problem, and as usual, neither Major League Baseball, nor the Players’ Union, nor the legal profession, not his trusting but foolish clients seem to care. Nevertheless, he is operating under circumstances that make it impossible for him to be fair to his clients.
I could have written that paragraph today. Nothing has changed. Literally nothing: as baseball general managers get ready for the 2022 winter meetings where, among other things, they huddle with player agents and sign players to mind-blowing contracts, the unethical tolerance of players agents indulging in and profiting from a classic conflict of interest continues without protest or reform.
I may be the only one who cares about the issue. I first wrote about it here, on a baseball website. I carried on my campaign to Ethics Alarms, discussing the issue in 2010, 2011 (that’s where the linked quote above comes from), 2014, 2019, and in 2019 again, There is no publication or website that has covered the issue and thoroughly as this one, and the unethical nature of the practice is irrefutable. I might as well be shouting in outer space, where no one can hear you scream. Continue reading
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