Character

Let’s Play “Unethical, Obnoxious, Or Just Plain Stupid!”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

MC: Ready, contestants? For your first challenge, consider this latest controversial Truth Social post by former President (and soon to announce candidate for President in 2024) Donald Trump!

What do you say, contestants? Is this Unethical, Obnoxious, or Just Plain Stupid?

Our ethicist from Alexandia, Virginia is first to buzz in! Yes, Jack, what’s your answer?

JACK:  Wink, I say it’s all three. I’s unethical, because Trump is attacking rising conservatives in his own party for his own gain, or at least he perceives it that way. It’s disloyal, it’s irresponsible, and it can’t possibly benefit anyone but him. That kind of gratuitous attack is a Golden Rule violation, and it’s a Categorical Imperative breach as well: Trump is just using Virginia Governor Youngkin as a convenient prop to remind everyone how valuable (Trump thinks) he is as he senses hostility from Republicans after his attacks on Ron DeSantis.

The message is also obnoxious, though in a way Trump’s fans are used to: he’s boasting like a 10-year-old, taking credit for someone else’s achievements, and asserting, as usual, that everything is about him. The bit about Youngkin’s name sounding Chinese is off the charts; it’s arguably beneath a 10-year-old. I saw a pathetic defense of Trump’s message that claimed there was nothing in what Trump wrote that constituted an attack. Bias makes you stupid (not necessarily you, Wink, but this is something ethicists say, at least this ethicist): everyone knows what Trump thinks of China. If he had written “Sound Jewish, doesn’t it?” would there be any doubt about his intent? Continue reading →

Oh! Now After Eight Years Of Accusing A Renowned Law Professor And Lawyer Of Sexual Assault, You Now Think You “May Have Been Mistaken!” Sure, OK!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Wait, what?

Someone here has been very unethical, and probably criminal. I wonder who?

From the New York Times:

Virginia Giuffre, a victim of Jeffrey E. Epstein who for years maintained that the law professor Alan Dershowitz had sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager, settled a defamation lawsuit against Mr. Dershowitz on Tuesday and said that she might have “made a mistake” in accusing him.

In a joint statement announcing the settlement, Ms. Giuffre said, “I have long believed that I was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein to Alan Dershowitz. However, I was very young at the time, it was a very stressful and traumatic environment, and Mr. Dershowitz has from the beginning consistently denied these allegations.

“I now recognize I may have made a mistake in identifying Mr. Dershowitz,” her statement said.

The joint statement announced the end of litigation between Ms. Giuffre and Mr. Dershowitz — who had also sued her — as well as of two other lawsuits between Mr. Dershowitz and the lawyer David Boies that stemmed from Ms. Giuffre’s accusation….

The terms of Ms. Giuffre’s deal with Mr. Dershowitz were not immediately clear on Tuesday, though the statement and the court filing said that no payments were made by any of the parties.

I don’t understand this at all. Is there any doubt that there is a lot, including a secret, back room agreement, that we are not being told about? My mind is still a bit foggy, so I can’t recall all of the movies I have seen where crucial witnesses in mysteries, crimes and conspiracies making almost the exact same statement Virginia Giuffre is quoted as making, recanting previous accusations and assertions they appeared to be absolutely certain of but suddenly had second thoughts after finding their dog hanging from a tree, or a horse head in their bed, or receiving a third party check for a lot of money. But boy, there are a lot of them. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring And You’re A Drunk College Senior

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Sophia Rosing, 22, a University of Kentucky student, was drunk. Really drunk; drunl as a skunk, as the saying goes. As she tumbled into a campus dorm lobby, the student at the front desk, Kylah Spring, tried to stop her, because Rosing had not presented her ID. The besotted senior launched into tirade against Spring, physically attacking the young black woman while calling her a “bitch” and a “nigger,” the latter over 200 times.

When campus security arrived, Rosing kicked and bit the officers as they tried to place her under arrest. University Police were finally able to take Rosing into custody just before 4am. She was charged with public intoxication, assault and disorderly conduct.

The incident was, of course, videoed and posted on social media. Rosing is out on bail, but she will certainly face criminal penalties.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is….

Beyond the criminal penalties, what are fair, just and ethical consequences for Sophia Rosing now?

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A Non-Election Day Ethics Special! An Ethics Test For Baseball Hall Of Fame Voters

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The major League Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown released its eight-player Contemporary Baseball Era ballot yesterday, as part of its revamped enshrinement process. A 16-person committee including of Hall of Fame players, baseball executives and veteran sportswriters will vote on the candidates at baseball’s winter meetings in December. A player must receive 12 votes to be elected.

All of the eight players failed to get enough votes through the regular voting process. The players on the list, limited to distinguished players who made their greatest contributions from 1980 to the present era, include…

  • Barry Bonds
  • Roger Clemens
  • Curt Schilling
  • Albert Belle
  • Don Mattingly
  • Fred McGriff
  • Dale Murphy, and
  • Rafael Palmeiro.

A clearer ethics test for the voters would be hard to imagine. The threshold question is whether last year’s admission to the Hall of Red Six icon David Ortiz, who once tested positive for an unidentified performance enhancing drug according to test results that were illegally leaked, will be regarded as sufficient precedent to admit Bonds, Clemens, and or Palmeiro. That Bonds was a long-time steroid cheat who did great damage to the game is undeniable. The evidence against Clemens is weaker, but still damning. Palmeiro had the distinction of going before Congress and proclaiming that steroids were the bane of the game and he would never sully himself by using them, and quickly thereafter testing positive himself. None of those three should be admitted to the Hall, and the presence of current Hall of Fame members, I hope, may ensure that they are not. Continue reading →

Why There’s No Ethics “Dirty Dozen” This Election, And Those Wacky Shavers: Whatever The Truth Is, The Father Is Unethical And The Son Is Untrustworthy

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This story reminds me that I used to have a post every election cycle listing my “Dirty Dozen”—a list of 12 candidates for re-election or office that I deemed ethically unacceptable. The list would include, in addition to automatic honorees like Rep. Maxine Waters, such oddities as Rich Iott, whose candidacy foundered when it was discovered that he had an obsession with dressing up as an SS officer. Usually I made an effort to include an equal number f Democrats and Republicans—it wasn’t hard.

It wouldn’t be hard this time, either. What would be hard, indeed, I decided, impossible, would be to keep the list to just a dozen. To begin with, “The Squad” would take care of all of the Democratic slots right off the bat. Every one of them (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri) is an embarrassment: incompetent, blindly ideological, and anti-American to the core. There wouldn’t even be room for Waters, or Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Majority Whip (and hypocrite “election denier”) James Clyburn, or the ridiculous Stacey Abrams. Then we have Nancy Pelosi, who has crossed more ethics lines with each passing year, and the truly horrible Adam Schiff (D-Cal). I couldn’t fit John Fetterman onto the list, or any of the awful Democratic governors running for re-election—and if I tried, then there would be no room for the Republicans who should never hold political office, like Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), or (you knew this was coming) Herschel Walker, the creepy Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.), Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia, who compared the Capitol riot to a “normal tourist visit,” and Rep. Tom Massie (R-Ky) who thought this was an appropriate Christmas card…

Well, I could go on, but this is depressing me. The point is that there are far, far too many ridiculous, incompetent, unethical people making our laws for anyone to be able to trust the government….and I haven’t even drilled down to the state level, where it’s worse.

So meet the entertaining Shavers. Clyde Shavers, the Democratic candidate for Washington state’s 10th legislative district, claimed to be an officer serving on a nuclear submarine in the Navy for eight years. He wasn’t one. He also has claimed to be a lawyer. He isn’t a lawyer either; in fact, he doesn’t know what a lawyer is. On his website, Shavers writes,

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Ethics Hero: Non-Weenie Bride-To-be Christina Leonard

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

If only more Americans understood, as Christina Leonard obviously does, that this nation was founded to be the home of the free and the brave, not the refuge of weenies.

Christina Leonard of Revere, Mass. had booked 10 rooms in September for $169 a night, plus tax, at Home2 Suites by Hilton for her wedding in Foxboro next May. Then she received an email from the hotel (on Route 1 in Walpole, Mass.—I know it well) canceling her room block. It had just been announced that Taylor Swift will be performing at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro that same Spring weekend. The hotel manager told Christina over the phone that “they could charge up to $1,000 per room for this.”

Gouging, then! What a classy operation Hilton runs.

Christina remind the hotel that she has signed a contract and sent it back, but the sales manager told her—HA!— he never signed it. She reminded him that she has emails confirming the dates. If she were a lawyer, she would have pointed out that she relied on the agreement, and that the hotel caused her to rely on it. In reality, the Hilton didn’t have a legal leg to stand on, but companies will often attempt to bluff non-lawyers with fake technicalities like “we never signed the contract we agreed to.” They do this because it usually works….with weenies.

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Paging Mel Brooks! Madison, Wisconsin’s Halloween Hitler Costume Freak-Out

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I don’t understand this story at all. It represents a complete loss of perspective, human, societal and ethical. I do not know how we got to this place, but we need to get out of it, and the faster the better.

On Halloween, a man was seen in Madison, Wisconsin walking down state street dressed as Adolf Hitler. We are told that horrified onlookers called the police. Oh, fine. In a college town, more than one person, who would normally be the village idiot, thinks it is illegal to dress as a historical character. The police department felt it had to issue a statement explaining that wearing the costume did not “rise to the level of a prosecutable crime” and that the faux Nazi leader “engaged in protected freedoms of speech and expression.” The statement, however, also said that the act of such costuming  justified “fear and disgust” and was “troubling.”

Well, after Ethics Breach #1 in the episode, the ignorant fools calling the police, this was Ethics Breach #2. It is not the police department’s job or function to critique Halloween costumes, especially in Halloween. “Fear’??? This was too scary a costume for Halloween? Or does “fear” mean that the alarmists legitimately felt that they would be harmed by…what, looking at the guy? Were they afraid he would invade Poland? As an ethicist, I’m disgusted that the Madison police would validate hysterical feelings of disgust. The guy was wearing a costume on Halloween! It is not the police department’s business to announce how anyone else should feel about it. Continue reading →

Unethical Pro-Abortion Quote Of The Year: Actress Ann Hathaway

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“…Abortion can be another word for mercy.”

—Actress Anne Hathaway, revealing her ethical deficits and intellectual limitations while appearing on “The View”

Oh, hell. I’ve always liked Ann Hathaway. Now I have to continue liking her despite knowing she’s a brain-dead, self-awareness-lacking, ethics dummy.

Just so I’m not accused of misrepresenting Hathaway’s moronic and offensive claim, here is her full sentence:

“[In] my own personal experience with abortion and I don’t think we talk about this enough, abortion can be another word for mercy. We don’t know. We don’t know. We know that no two pregnancies are alike, and it follows that no two lives are alike, it follows that no two conceptions are alike. So how can we have a law, how can we have a point of view on this that says we must treat everything the same?”

Someone can only make such an absurd statement by refusing to acknowledge what an abortion is, and that two lives are involved, not just one. If she were arguing for abortion when a fetus is hopelessly deformed or certain to have devastating maladies, that’s a legitimate ethical debate to have. Abortion then might be described as merciful. (But some advocate aborting Down Syndrome babies as similarly “merciful.”) Hathaway wasn’t considering the unborn at all, however. In her warped (but too common) view, it is mercy for the mother to allow her kill the child for her own benefit.

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Ethics Dunce (At Least): ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I had become thoroughly sick of ESPN’s race-obsessed loud-mouth Stephen A. Smith long before I stopped watching the channel. Eventually I even eliminated it from our satellite package: ESPN, like everything Disney touches lately (except the Beatles), is unwatchable, and Smith is Exhibit A. His latest bit of gratuitous race-baiting would get him canned from any respectable network, but then there are no respectable networks. Naturally, he had to endorse Houston manager Dusty Baker’s biased and brain-dead assertion that Major League Baseball had some kind of vendetta against or racist avoidance of American-born black players (because foreign-born black players aren’t really black, or something). Just ponder this :

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“By Any Means Necessary”: The Final Stage In The Axis of Unethical Conduct’s 2022 Mid-Term Election Freak-Out Begins

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The frantic efforts of the news media, some Democrats (Rep. Jackie Speier tweeted: “While the motive is still unknown we know where this kind of violence is sanctioned and modeled.”) and ranting bloggers and tweeters like this guy to try to link the certifiable lunatic who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer to Republicans is just the beginning. Pop that metaphorical popcorn—between now and a week from Tuesday, this will get crazier by the day. Reality has set in. The piper must be paid, the chickens are coming home, the walls are closing in, the jig is up and there’s no way out. The vast majority of those active in the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance”/the Democratic Party/the mainstream media) are evidently going to thoroughly embarrass themselves and soil our political discourse by ensuring as much confusion, bitterness and division as their imagination, energy and ethics void will permit. It’s going to be ugly, perhaps historically ugly. In “1984” terms, those hungry rats are about to be let loose on these dunces and villains faces, and they will do or say anything, betray any individuals or principles, to avoid the horror. They are in the throes of Rationalization #31, The Troublesome Luxury or “Ethics is a luxury we can’t afford right now” nd #40. The Desperation Dodge or “I’ll do anything!”

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