Author: Jack Marshall

Elon Musk Is Not A Nice Guy, And A Legal Ethics Controversy Proves It

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The legal ethics world is all in a fluster over a recent controversy involving Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. This means that readers at Ethics Alarms should be flustering too.

This is the story: An SEC  attorney had interviewed  Musk during the agency’s investigation of the Tesla CEO’s 2018 tweet claiming to have secured funding to potentially take the electric-vehicle maker private. The claim proved to be false, resulting in a settlement that required Musk to resign and also to pay 20 million dollars in fines. In 2019, Musk’s personal lawyer called the managing partner at Cooley, LLP, and demanded that the firm fire the SEC lawyer, who had left the agency to become as associate at the large firm that handles Tesla’s business. The targeted lawyer had no connection to Tesla’s legal work at the firm; the sole reason for the demand was revenge. Musk wanted him to lose his job because he was angry about their interaction at the SEC. Continue reading →

Saturday Ethics Catch-Up, 1/15/2022: Everything Is Seemingly Spinning Out Of Control!

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Watch the spinning circles…you are getting sleepy…sslleeppyy! Now: you are ethical! And a fan of the Boston Red Sox!

Nothing? Well, it was worth a shot.

Today is pretty much a dud in ethics history, with the major exception that January 15 is the birthday of Martin Luther King. Not related to ethics but still a favorite historical landmark of mine, this date also marks the most inherently comic of all disasters, the 1919 Great Boston Molasses Flood, in which a huge tank at the United States Industrial Alcohol Company building burst and caused tons of hot molasses to sloooowly move through the heart of the city in an 8-foot wave, killing 21 people, knocking down buildings, and leaving an unimaginable sticky mess that took weeks to clean up.

Why no disaster movie has been made about the unique catastrophe is a mystery.

1. Here’s an unethical boast...transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, who was born and went through puberty as a male,”compares herself to Jackie Robinson,” according to another member of the University of Pennsylvania woman’s swim team, according to the Washington Examiner. “She said she is like the Jackie Robinson of trans sports.” This shows a flawed understanding of Robinson’s achievement. Lia would be closer to the mark if Jackie infiltrated the segregated sport of baseball by disguising himself as a white player, but even that’s not quite right, since it misses the unfair competition aspect of what Thomas is doing. She is more like the Barry Bonds of trans sports. Continue reading →

And Now For Something Completely Stupid: The Unethical Satire Of Joe Matthews

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Joe Mathews is co-president of the Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy. He has written an op-ed piece arguing that California should “abolish parenthood.” The usually astute people at Legal Insurrection (if someone can explain why  all of those annoying breaks are in the title, please do) apparently think he’s serious; I don’t, but it doesn’t matter. If your satire is so inept that nobody can tell it’s a joke, then it is more hoax than satire, a deliberate lie to make people feel dumb who believe it so you can mock them afterward for being gullible.

This thing by “California Joe,” as he calls himself on-line, is worse than that: in this environment of near-complete progressive derangement, his absurdist piece is like a flaming match tossed into a dry forest. That’s wildly irresponsible.

Joe will doubtlessly defend his satire as “Swiftian,” but there was never any danger that the English would start eating children to solve poverty, over-population and hunger. That’s because Jonathan Swift’s satire was funny, as competent satire is supposed to be, and because the British of his era were not insane. “California should abolish parenthood, in the name of equity” is not funny, and it is not far enough removed from other truly terrible, totalitarian ideas being advanced by Woke World that the author can be confident that his gag won’t find its way into a movement. Remember too, that the state taking children from parents has been a totalitarian strategy in the Third Reich, Soviet Russia, and Red China. Continue reading →

Yikes! I Better Finish “Will The Audacious ‘It Isn’t What it is’ Propaganda Assault By The American Left Succeed?” Quick Before The Answer Is Too Obvious To Bother With: The Democrats’ Amazing Filibuster Hypocrisy

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Wowie Zowie, Democratic “It isn’t what it is” grandstanding is reaching record heights faster than I can comment on them!

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), cementing her Ethics Hero credentials that (I admit) I doubted would stand up in June) delivered a speech yesterday in which she reiterated her  support for the filibuster, pretty much killing Democrat Party efforts to unilaterally change the rules to enable the party to ram through legislation that would federalize elections and permanently weaken their integrity. The filibuster is a long-standing procedural device that requires three-fifths of Senators to agree in order to advance toward a vote. It is very much a pro-democracy measure, instituted to prevent a bare Senate majority from passing important and controversial legislation without bi-partisan support. You can’t have a smaller Senate majority than Democrats do now, with a 50-50 split only enhanced by the Vice-President’s tie-breaking vote.

Sinema said that she personally supports both the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, but does not believe it is wise to kill the filibuster. “And while I continue to support these bills, I will not support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country,” Sinema said. “There’s no need for me to restate my longstanding support for the 60-vote threshold to pass legislation.” 

She did this despite President Biden’s disgraceful speech this week claiming that anyone who continues to support a filibuster to stop his party’s voting rights legislation is choosing to “stand on the side of George Wallace over Dr. King, Bull Connor over John Lewis, and Jefferson Davis over Abraham Lincoln.” It had to be one of the worst examples of race-baiting as an illicit political tool of recent memory, particularly since the claims that the legislation has any connection to race is fictional. It is not discriminatory to require voters to prove who they are at the polls. It is not “racist” to limit early voting. I would eliminate it entirely: the procedure encourages blind, knee-jerk, fact-free partisan voting over voter consideration of all relevant information during the campaign. It supports incompetent democracy. It is not racist to place limits on mail-in voting, vote-harvesting, or drop-boxes. It is responsible. Moreover, allowing such easily manipulated weaknesses in election controls encourages distrust in the final results.

It is profoundly disturbing that all but two Democratic Senators have the courage and respect for democracy to oppose the filibuster rule change, and apparently none will stand up for the integrity of elections. Meanwhile, Sinema is being called a racist and a foe of democracy for doing the right thing. Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Republican Virginia House Of Delegates Member Wren Williams

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Williams is concerned about what Virginia children are taught in schools, so he introduced House Bill No 781, “relating to public elementary and secondary schools; student citizenship skills; certain instructional policies prohibited, parental rights; disclosures; penalties; other remedies.”

Among the provisions offered by the patriotic Virginian is approval of public schools teaching “the founding documents,” including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, excerpts from the Federalist Papers, the writings of the Founding Fathers and Alexis de Tocqueville’s“Democracy in America” and “the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.”

You know, the guy standing next to Abe here:

Wait: are you sure you have the right Douglass/ Douglas, Wren? Might it be this Douglas…

Continue reading →

Authentic Frontier Gibberish Of The Year (So Far): Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Normally, I would be confident that a stunner like this would be a guaranteed winner, but, 1) this is Kamala Harris, and she frequently talks like English is a foreign languge and 2) her two most high-ranking Democrat colleagues, President Biden and Nancy Pelosi, are also likely to make no sense for extended periods, though in their cases…well, let’s just leave it at that.

On the Today show, Craig Melvin asked the eminently qualified Vice President—she’s “of color,”,female, and has a pulse—- whether it is time for the White House to try a new strategy to deal with the pandemic. This was Harris’s verbatim answer:

It is time for us to do what we have been doing and that time is every day. Every day it is time for us to agree that there are things and tools that are available to us to slow this thing down.

Now who can argue with that? Melvin, since he works for NBC and has no Continue reading →

Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Write about whatever you want, as long as it involves ethics, and I promise I won’t argue with you, thus bruising your delicate ego and sending you away in trauma.

But someone else might….

Good luck!

Ethics Alarms Mailbag! Those Pesky Atheists…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Yesterday’s post about the “After School Satan Club,” as expected, quickly prompted a lot of intense commentary. One esteemed commenter, recently maligned stated “No one has ever been able to satisfactorily explain to me why hating one religion makes you a hater but hating all religions makes you an intellectual.” After receiving positive feedback on that statement, the commenter later suggested that Ethics Alarms “provide a little bit more analytical view of things, since [the host] belongs to no religion but is also not hostile to religion generally.”

Sure.

As a threshold matter, hate is not conducive to ethics. Hate is an emotion, a strong bias, and bias makes you stupid, as we all presumably know, since that is a theme here. Since hate makes you stupid, one cannot say that hating religion, or anything, makes one an “intellectual,” of all things. There are some kinds of human conduct that justify hate: genocide, murder, torture. I would add betrayal, child abuse, totalitarianism, corruption by public servants, bigotry…there are things (and people) that it can be justifiable to hate (though Clarence Darrow’ nostrum to “hate the sin, never the sinner” is an ethical standard worth considering. Whether Darrow believed that, or practiced it, is open to debate. He was also an outspoken atheist, or as he called himself, an agnostic in the sense that there was no way to “know” for certain whether God existed or not. He was pretty sure of “not,” though.)

Taking “hate” out of the argument, there are still good reasons to rationally determine that certain religions, sects of those religions, or the organizations that support them, are unethical, and do more harm than good in the balance. I can think of three right now, but I have neither the time, space or inclination to get into a religion by religion debate. One is a world religion, one is a denomination of a world religion, and one is a scam.

Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On “The After-School Satan Club”

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

It’s difficult to know how to begin…

Let’s start with the unfortunate fact that this is not a hoax, a joke, or a parody. The Jane Addams elementary school in the Moline-Coal Valley School District—that’s Illinois—has approved an after-school club called “The Satan Club.” Here is the flyer requesting parental permission:

Note that it is sponsored by The Satanic Temple, which released this reassuring statement:

After School Satan Club does not attempt to convert children to any religious ideology. Instead, The Satanic Temple supports children to think for themselves. All After School Satan Clubs are based upon a uniform syllabus that emphasizes a scientific, rationalist, non-superstitious worldview.

There, that should put everyone’s mind at ease!

Now here is the school district’s statement:

The Moline-Coal Valley School District understands that there is concern and confusion over an upcoming after-school club at Jane Addams elementary.

The District would like to provide information on the situation. The Moline-Coal Valley School District and Board of Education have policies and administrative procedures in place which allow for community use of its publicly funded facilities outside the school day.

The district does not discriminate against any groups who wish to rent our facilities, including religious-affiliated groups. Religiously affiliated groups are among those allowed to rent our facilities for a fee.

The district has, in the past, approved these types of groups, one example being the Good News Club, which is an after-school child evangelism fellowship group. Flyers and promotional materials for these types of groups are approved for lobby posting or display only, and not for mass distribution.

Students or parents are then able to pick up the flyer from the lobby, if they so choose, which is aligned to District policy. Please note that the district must provide equal access to all groups and that students need parental permission to attend any after-school event. Our focus remains on student safety and student achievement.

Observations: Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I haven’t had time to finish the second part of this post, but Gabbard’s tweet regarding Biden’s stunningly unpresidential demagoguery in his public, hyper-partisan  tantrum this week keeps the topic properly warm. The President of the United States publicly labelled the opposing party as the equivalents of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy—in other words, racists and traitors. This is how the leader of the Democratic Party wants to “save democracy.”