We all knew this was coming, as sure as God made little green idiots. Nonetheless, it poses an ethics conundrum. Several, in fact.
First,though: “What’s going on here?” What’s going on is that once again, someone has figured out a way to profit from human desperation, sadness, and gullibility, or, as P.T. Barnum once said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” P.T. was being conservative in his estimate.
For just $1.99 per minute, or $49.99 for 45 minutes (what a deal!) anyone can have a spiritual conversation with a digital avatar of Jesus Christ, whose appearance is modeled on actor Jonathon Roumie’s portrayal on the TV show “The Chosen.” This courtesy of the Just Like Me website, which explains, “Jesus AI is an artificial intelligence tool designed to offer comfort, encouragement, and timeless wisdom inspired by teachings of love, compassion, forgiveness, and personal growth. It is not Jesus Christ himself, nor does it possess divine authority.”
We can cross off dishonesty from the list of possible ethics breaches, I guess. But historians and anthropologists believe that Jesus probably looked like this…
I know this particular bias is probably indefensible. I know how I’m supposed to feel. I just don’t. A little help here?
Remember Shannon Elizabeth? I’d place her in the same category as Andrea Dromm, Michelle Johnson and Pam Austin, three earlier sexy, attractive starlets who had brief moments of B-level film success before they were pushed into obscurity by younger Hollywood “It” girls. It’s a cruel business, and especially cruel for young women whose main assets are their assets and not the potential to play Medea.
Shannon Elizabeth gained 10 minutes of stardom playing the sex kitten in the raunchy hit “American Pie”: that was her peak. “America Pie II” is where that photo above comes from, and professionally it was all downhill after that…a few forgettable flops, a TV series that was cancelled in its first season, nothing since 2006. Her Wikipedia page describes her as an “activist,” a professional poker player, and an actress. Her major recent accomplishment seems to be being named “one of the leading celebrity poker players”20 years ago.
I find all this ineffably sad, but that’s not the topic today. It is this: at the age of 52, Shannon just filed for divorce and announced that she was opening an Only Fans account, where horny middle-aged men can pay to see her ta-tas, and presumably other things.
“I’ve spent my entire career working in Hollywood, where other people controlled the narrative and the outcome of my career. This new chapter is about changing that, showing off a more sexy side no one has seen, and being closer to my fans,” Elizabeth told PEOPLE . “I’m choosing OnlyFans because it allows me to connect directly with my audience, create on my own terms, and just be free. I really do think this is the future.”
Fans can subscribe to her page starting today. Let me translate what her statement says to me.
“I have never developed any special skills and have the intellectual life of a salmon. My career was based entirely on my looks, my marriage went to hell, and I couldn’t write a book or host a podcast on a bet. Yeah, I’ve got some money saved up, but I’m addicted to being looked at. I’ve slid all the way down the usual greased poll of fading B-level celebrity: reality shows, Dancing with the Stars, so now it’s come to this. I know forty and fifty year-old men will pay to see me naked because they liked ‘American Pie.’ At least that’s something.”
The Rest of the Story: After picking up frozen entrees at Trader Joe’s yesterday, this afternoon I went to Harris Teeter’s for staples, like coffee and soft drinks. And guess what! The same woman who hit me up yesterday flashed her “I am poor with children and they are hungry…” card at me again, and a second woman, using what looked like the a copy of the same card, stopped me a bit later! I reported both of them and got them kicked out of the store. I should have told them, “The ice section is right over there…”
Also:
1. Memories! Last night I re-watched “Swing Time,” my favorite of the Fred & Ginger movie musicals (directed by George Stevens before filming the death camps in Europe during World War II convinced him that he didn’t want to make comedies any more) and was jarred into a reminiscence when Fred started doing his homage to Bill “Bojangles’ Robinson, one of his tap-dancing mentors. I remembered how in 2018 I wrote a serious ethics post about how Astaire’s blackface number “Bojangles of Broadway” was an example of using black make-up as simply make-up, and not as a racial slur. When I poste it on my Facebook page, Facebook banned Ethics Alarms, with any link to it causing a post to be taken down, for over two years. At the time, a lot of my views were coming from Facebook, and the censorship was harmful. So no, I don’t forget, and won’t forgive, Woke World for its suppression of speech, opinions and ideas as practiced by Big Tech and the social media giants through to the end of the Biden administration, and yes, that experience taught me that the “liberal” side of the ideological spectrum wasn’t liberal at all. Here’s that post.
Now watch me get banned again…
2. Some Democrats are really talking about impeaching President Trump because he said that he would wipe out Iran’s civilization. Why would anyone take this party seriously? I’ve been trying to think of what Trump’s variation on Teddy Roosevelt’s most famous quote, “Speak softly but carry a big stick” would be, not that TR always spoke softly by any means. “Speak like a madman and keep them guessing?”
I wonder if I can create a mass tort claim against the people responsible for episodes like this. Behold:
1. On March 28, I received a threatening letter from First Source, LLC, a debt collector. It alleged that I had an account with something called AfterPay U.S., which I have never heard of, for $750, that I never spent, for something that I still have no idea what it was. The letter also said that I now only owed $590.64, since I had paid $187.50, which I have not. My bank doesn’t thinks so either.
2. I called First Source, which …Hallelujah!…has an automated system that got me to a human being almost immediately. That human being was Rhea. She was cordial and professional, and did not constantly read from a script. She heard me out, and said that she would initiate a fraud investigation. I didn’t have to do anything more.
3. Yesterday I received two cheerful emails from AfterPay. Both involved alerting me that I had changed my email associated with my imaginary account. I hadn’t done anything regarding AfterPay, because I still don’t know what the hell it does other than charge people for stuff they never bought, and my email has been the same for 20 years. “Please log into your AfterPay account to view these changes. If this information is incorrect, please update so we have the most up to date information for you,” “Shiara” of Customer Support informed me. “Have a great day.”
Bite me, Shaira.
4. This morning I called FirstSource back to ask what’s going on. But instead of Rhea, I reached Michael, who appeared to be an idiot. As I tried to explain what had happened, he kept reading disclaimers and asking me for the same information I had already given to Rhea and that was already in my file, since it was repeated in the letter FirstSource had sent me. I told him, “I have a simple question you need to answer,” and he replied, “I can’t answer it because you keep interrupting me!” “No,” I said, “I keep asking you to stop reading a script that I have heard already, and to talk to me like a human being, and listen to what I am trying to tell you.” He hung up.
5. I called back and got Michael again. He acted as if we hadn’t just spoken second earlier. He read the same script, an asked me for the same information: my full name, my date of birth, my mailing address, and my “reference number.” It was literally de ja vu: a near exact replay of our previous conversation. This time, he said, “We have closed your account, so you will have to contact AfterPay.” Progress! He then gave me a phone number.
Here I was at Trader Joe’s, doing a quick grocery run after a Zoom seminar, when a small, dark, middle-aged woman woman speaking some variation of English stops me. “Please, sir.” she says, and flashes a card with words written on it. “I am poor and hungry and have children,” it says.
That’s a first: a panhandler in a grocery store. I told her to wait a second and I dug in my wallet to find six bucks, which I gave to her. Then she showed me a basket of some kind of consumables. “Buy food?” she said. What, did she take credit cards?
I shook my head and left. But by the time I got to check-out, the scenario bothered me. Trader Joe’s has a hippie vibe, even a cultish vibe, so maybe panhandlers are welcome, but an in-store competitor seemed a bit over the line. I ultimately decided to blow the whistle on her, and told the store manager on duty that someone was peddling their own commodities in the store. My reasoning: if Trader Joe’s wants to allow that sort of thing out of fatal empathy, it’s their choice. But they at least should know about it.
I half expected the manager to say, “Oh, that’s just Gladys. She’s harmless.”
This ethics decision-making episode fell into my Golden Rule basket. If I was the store owner, I would want to know about Gladys, or whatever her real name was.
Last year, almost a year ago, I posted this commentary about the Allied Injury Group’s TV ad that embodied all of the horrors the legal profession used for a century to ban lawyer marketing and advertising (thus forgetting about the First Amendment thingy, you know, just like today’s progressives..). In the process, I managed to make an unethical mistake, mislabeling the slimy law firm involved and calling it the Allied Law Group, a non-slimy law firm that was none too pleased. I apologized profusely to the representative of that firm who called to ream me out and made the correction pronto.
The main thrust of the original post was that the ads seemed to present the silly character giving the pitch as a lawyer, and no matter how unlikely that seemed it was a bright line ethics violation as misleading advertising.
This morning I saw the firms’ new add, which dropped at the end of March. That notice, with chase lights running around “not a lawyer,” appeared a few second in.
Good. We ethicists have to take our meager victories, however rare, to maintain our sanity.
I’ve had it. Some day, before I die, I am hoping against hope that just one month will see all of my online bill-paying take place smoothly and without my having to spend 30 minutes to an hour negotiating a terrible, non-user friendly system, usually made more frustrating by a well-meaning, polite, but nearly incomprehensible non-English speaker. I just went through one of these nightmare experiences with Merrick Bank, which I am forced to deal with because I use its credit card for certain minor expenses. Almost every month, there is some kind of snafu, forcing me to grit my teeth and call customer service. Here is what happened this time:
Tyler Kepner wrote today that any baseball fan looking for optimism about next season, which is currently imperiled by a looming player strike or owner lock-out over the lack of a collective bargaining agreement, can look to the results of an under-reported rule change for hope that MLB and the union can find creative compromise solutions that work.
That’s nice, I thought. Wait—WHAT under-reported rule change?
For many years before the 2022 collective bargaining agreement between players and the owners, it was standard practice for a team to keep a promising rookie in the minors until after the date passed that would have given the player credit for a year of MLB service. Since young players are bound to their signing teams for a set number of seasons before they have arbitration rights and finally free agent rights, that extra year of control teams got by leaving a minor league stud in the minors was worth millions to the team who owned him. Never mind that it made the team keeping a potential star down less competitive and gave the team’s fans a lesser product. Never mind that it cheated a rising star out of contract that recognized his true worth: it was all about the team’s money.
But in 2022, a new rule was negotiated to discourage service-time manipulation. If a player finishes first or second in Rookie of the Year voting, he gets a full year of service time no matter how much time he spent on the roster. If such a player wins Rookie of the Year or finishes in the top three for MVP or Cy Young before becoming eligible for arbitration, his team receives an extra draft pick.
There have been only four days of games in the 2026 season so far, and several rookies who in past years would have still been languishing in the minor leagues as they teams played the “he needs a little more seasoning” game came out of the gate blazing. In the first weekend (three or four games for every team), rookies batted .309, compared to .226 for veteran players! They also hit 15 homers with a .622 slugging percentage and a 1.008 OPS. Those are all records since 1900 through every team’s first three games.
The games were better. The teams were better. The rookies weren’t being manipulated by the teams, and the teams have a chance to benefit too. This was a smart and fair compromise that epitomizes exemplary ethics at work: everybody wins.
As a lawyer who has scrupulously avoided joining the American Bar Association (except when a discounted membership allowed me to feel more comfortable when the ABA invited me to speak about ethics at a convention), I found the recent resolution calling for the repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, (“PLCAA”), 15 U.S.C. §§ 7901–7903, consistent with what I now expect of the nation’s largest legal trade association. Over the last several decades years, the ABA has moved steadily leftward on the ideological spectrum, and signs that bias had made it stupid began turning up as early as 1987, when four members of the association’s special committee evaluating Supreme Court nominees found the extremely well-qualified Robert Bork, nominated by President Ronald Reagan, unqualified purely because of his conservative judicial philosophy. This gave Senate Democrats the ammunition they need to reject Bork, thus beginning the destruction of a crucial “democratic norm” that Presidents should be able to choose SCOTUS justices as long as they were sufficiently qualified and experienced.
You can read Resolution 604 here. Ten states (New York, California, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, and Washington…do you see a pattern?) have enacted “Firearm Industry Responsibility Acts,” and the ABA, being properly woke, is calling for a national version. The resolution purports to be concerned about a “small percentage” of “irresponsible” gun manufacturers who violate consumer protection or engage in deceptive trade practices, and wants the gun industry’s unique immunity from product liability lawsuits to be narrowed and reformed.
Because the latest resolution begins its arguments with the usual scaremongering statistics compiled by anti-Second Amendment activists—“Approximately 46,000 Americans are killed by a gun every year—approximately 125 people every day,” I find the resolution to be disingenuous, a “camel’s nose in the tent” tactic to make gun manufacturers so vulnerable to lawsuits that the business becomes untenable, and guns become so expensive that the right to bear arms is illusory.
Ethics Alarms had flagged CNN’s incompetence and bias too often already this week: it was getting boring. Then the network, damn them, forced me to write about its crummy ethics again, by posting that ludicrous protest above.
Ethics Alarms 