The Ethics Dunce post highlighting prominent lawyer and legal commentator Lara Bazelon’s op-ed celebrating her decision to place her career and the welfare of clients over the best interests of her own children didn’t attract a lot of commentary, but the comments that arrived were excellent and often moving, and readers related her dilemma to their own lives. There have been three Comments of the Day so far. I’m going to post them in the order in which they arrived.
About 8 ½ years ago, I became a father. As I looked down at my newborn son, I couldn’t help but note was how small he was. How beautiful he looked. How unprepared I was to be in this situation. It’s funny the way life teaches us lessons. For example, did you know an 18-month-old could lock you out of your house? Or that a 2-year-old could operate an elevator? How about a 3-year-old using deception to win a game of hide and seek? Maybe that a 4-year-old could teach himself to swim?
It hasn’t been easy taking care of my oldest. From the beginning of his life, he has always been too interested in what was going on to care about being held or even staying in one place. His confidence has given him a unique perspective on the world where everything is a new adventure. It seems that he always must be in the thick of things. But here I am, trying to keep up, increasingly more aware that I am falling further behind and time is running out. Continue reading →
1. Talk about a newspaper column that is exactly the opposite of the truth! The Times had an essay in its “Review” section this Sunday with a title that gave me a shock: “Want to Be Less Racist? Move to Hawaii”
The headline would have been more accurate if it read, “Want to live in the only state with lawful and open racial discrimination? Move to Hawaii!” Hawaii gives special benefits to residents with full or partial Native Hawaiian ancestry. There is a special Hawaiian registry program which verifies an individual’s Native Hawaiian ancestry, so the favored race can receive such goodies that are unavailable to other racial groups as buying land for a home at only $1 a year, low-interest loans, and admission for their children to the elite Kamehameha Schools.
Anecdotally, I can also state that the only time in my life that I felt I was the target of racial epithets was in college, when the Hawaiian contingent frequently derided me and my white room mates as “howlies,” a disparaging Island term reserved for anyone who is not a native Hawaiian. I will always remember my 6’5″ roommate Dave ending the practice by saying to the two main offenders, “If I ever hear that word from any of you again, I promise that I will shove you, Howie, directly up Reggie’s ass, head first. Are we clear on that?”
Dave never bluffed, and seldom joked. That was the last time we were called “howlies.”
2. Nike is not just scum, but cowardly, sniveling scum. Nike Inc. cancelled a U.S.A.-themed sneaker featuring the Betsy Ross American flag because Head NFL Kneeler Colin Kaepernick, a Nike endorser, told company officials that he and others felt that the historic flag is an offensive symbol because of its connection to an era of slavery.
The Air Max 1 USA had been designed for release in celebration of the July Fourth holiday, and scheduled to go on sale this week. The heel of the shoe featured a U.S. flag with 13 white stars in a circle, the original flag created during the American Revolution and known as the Betsy Ross flag.
This is yet another story among many exposing the ugliness at the heart of the “resistance” and the increasingly fascist American Left…and, as the night follows day, another story that the mainstream news media is attempting to minimize.
Andy Ngo, a conservative journalist and pundit with the emerging online opinion and news website Quillette, attended a Portland, Oregon “Him Too” rally over the weekend. “Him Too” is a counter #MeToo movement that focuses on false rape and sexual assault allegations. It was a small rally, with only a few dozen attending; heck, there are probably only a few dozen non knee-jerk progressives in Portland. The left-wing/Anfifa/Trump Hate mob that showed up as a counter-protest (aka. “organized effort to constrain free speech by intimidation”), however, was much larger.
That group generated masked thugs who attacked Ngo, a recognized anti-Muslim critic, a hate-crime skeptic and a foe of the Antifa itself. Proving his assessment correct, the Antifa beat him and threw what the news media is calling “milkshakes” at him, a description that is literally a lie designed to trivialize what occurred. Several of the missiles were cups full of quick-setting cement, not dairy products. Bloody and battered, Ngo began livestreaming on his phone after the attacks, and could be heard asking a police officer, “Where the hell were all of you?” He was admitted to a local hospital for treatment, and at last report, was still there.
While this was occurring, Portland’s finest did nothing to intervene; the police just watched, even as some of them were struck by eggs thrown by the Antifa and the Left’s counter-protesters threw trash cans, newspaper stands, and patio furniture into the streets. . Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, is also the police commissioner, so media accounts that he cannot be said to have encouraged this dereliction of duty are also partisan, misleading spin.
Wheeler avoided commenting on his police force’s disgraceful performance until yesterday, when he tweeted some insulting boilerplate:
But “we” didn’tstand against the violence, not when a journalist whose political positions are anathema to the hard left views of Wheeler’s city was in the process of being beaten. Note also that the Mayor slyly blames the victim, who, like the group that dared to rally against a popular progressive cause, “incited violence.”
The last two tweets concluded,
How hard is the “real time” decision to stop a mob from beating up a journalist? Continue reading →
In case you missed the facts of this instant ethics train wreck a legal case, here they are:
Marshae Jones, 27-years old, was five months pregnant when she attacked female co-worker, Ebony Jemison, 23, in the parking lot of a Dollar Store. The two had a long-standing and bitter rivalry over their romantic designs regarding a man who worked at the same company and who is apparently the father of the unborn child. Jones had Jemison pinned in her car while punching her repeatedly. In self defense, Jemison grabbed her gun and fired point blank at Marshae’s stomach. The car taking Jones to the hospital broke down, delaying a medical response. Paramedics eventually arrived, but the unborn child had been struck by the bullet, and died.
A grand juryindicted Jones for “initiating a fight knowing she was five months pregnant,” but chose not to indict Ebony Jemison, who fired the shot. Despite the confusing and incompetent reporting on the case, it is still not certain that prosecutors in Pleasant Grove, Alabama will ultimately prosecute Jones, who according to all reports wanted her baby. I doubt that they will. Lynneice Washington, the district attorney for part of Jefferson County, said last week that no decision had yet been made about whether to go to trial, file lesser charges against Jones, or dismiss the case altogether.
“Foremost, it should be stated that this is a truly tragic case,” her statement said. “We feel sympathy for the families involved, including Ms. Jones, who lost her unborn child.”
Observations:
1. The fact that Jemison was not charged should surprise no one, nor does it reasonably affect the ethical and legal issues at issue here. She was attacked. The law of self-defense almost universally allows the use of deadly force when the alternative is sustaining a serious beating. If one is attacked by a pregnant woman, the response to the attack does not have to be moderated because of the possible consequences to an unborn child. The responsibility for any adverse result to the fetus is completely the expectant mother’s.
3. Alabama law declares a fetus to have the rights of a person from the moment of conception. There is nothing unethical or unreasonable about such a law, whether or not you agree with it. The reverse law, that a fetus/embryo/unborn child has no rights until birth is also ethically and legally defensible. Both cause practical problems and ethical conflicts and dilemmas, as do any compromise positions.
4. As long as a jurisdiction allows abortions within Supreme Court guidelines, there is nothing unethical about the jurisdiction prosecuting someone other than the mother who kills a fetus, intentionally or through negligence. 38 states have laws that classify fetuses as victims in homicide or assault, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In Alabama, a “person” includes embryos and fetuses at any stage of development, and the state leads the nation in such prosecutions. Last year, Jessica Lindsey, 29, was sentenced to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to chemical endangerment for using heroin while pregnant. Raven West, a heroin addict who gave birth to a stillborn baby, received a five-year suspended sentence last year. And Alexandra Laird, who gave birth to two children who tested positive for heroin, received two suspended 10-year sentences and access to a treatment program, according to court records.
Regarding those three results: Good…Good…Good. I have no problem with them.
4. The question is, how different is a pregnant woman who starts a parking lot fist fight that precipitates sufficient violence to kill her unborn child from a woman who knowingly ingests toxic substances that harm or kill a fetus? I don’t see a material difference. If not, then why is it unreasonable to prosecute Jones?
5. It is amazing how deftly the same progressive advocates can turn on a dime and go from “Think of the children!” to “DON’T think of the children!” depending on what’s expedient at the time.
6. Although Alabama is currently challenging Roe v. Wade, this case has nothing to do with its defiant anti-abortion law. I see no reason to believe that Jones wouldn’t be charged under the same criminal statute a year ago or five years ago. This episode has just given pro-abortion advocates an opportunity to attack the state and make Jones into a martyr, though she was not seeking an abortion. At about 20 weeks pregnant, Jones was within the range where she could have had an abortion before the new law, so the feminist argument is, I guess, that if you can legally abort an unborn baby, you should also be able to get it shot without any consequences.
Nice.
7. The callousness with which the news media tries to spin stories related to the unborn is striking. Here’s the Washington Post:
“The 27-year-old was five months pregnant when she was involved in a fight that, authorities say, prompted a woman to fire a gun in self-defense. The bullet tore through Jones’s abdomen and caused a miscarriage.”
No, the bullet struck the unborn child and killed it. That’s not a “miscarriage.”
8. Whatever the outcome, Jones caused the death of her unborn child through outrageous, violent and uncivilized behavior, and warrants no sympathy whatsoever.
As always in such stories, her family says that Jones is a saint. Her mother calls her “a fun-loving mom, churchgoing, a hard-working lady,” insisting, “My child just doesn’t bother anybody.” Except, that is, a woman trying to make time with the father of Jones’ unborn child, in a parking lot, where she engages in a fist fight. Yeah, that Marshae is a responsible, model citizen! How could this happen to her?
9. Her lawyers say, absurdly,
“This young mother was shot in the stomach while five months pregnant and lost her baby as a result. She lost her home to a fire and lost her job. Now, for reasons that defy imagination, she faces an unprecedented legal action that subjects this victim of violence to further distress and harm.”
I know lawyers must defend their client’s zealously, but this is legal demagoguery. She was shot because of her own criminal actions. She was fired because she attacked a co-worker. She was a “victim of violence” necessitated by her own attack. I don’t know what the fire has to do with anything; the statement just as well might have said, “And she faces painful root canal work due to chronic tooth decay.” Talk about throwing in everything but the kitchen sink!
We haven’t had an Unethical Website Of The Month here since 2018! Once upon a time, I had at least one desiganted every month, over at the currently-down-but -will-get-back-on-line-as-soon-as-I fight-with-the-cheap-hosts Ethics Scoreboard. This is an area where reader tips would help a great deal.
The home page you see above is that of Joe Biden.info, the most trafficked Biden website on the web. Despite the glowing text and cheery photo, however, it is not a pro-Biden project, but a Biden attack site, concocted by Patrick Mauldin, a Republican political consultant and who makes videos and other digital content for President Trump’s re-election campaign. With his brother Ryan, Mauldin, he runs the Vici Media Group, a conservative consulting firm in Austin, Texas. (Mauldin has also set up parody campaign websites for at least three other Democratic candidates: “Millionaire Bernie,” “Elizabeth Warren for Chief,”and “Kamala Harris for Arresting the People.” These, however are different in kind, for nobody except an idiot would confuse them with actual campaign sites.)
Now, I read through the site, and you may well ask, “What’s unethical about it?” The answer is very basic: taking a domain name designed to fool people into thinking the site is something it is not is unethical, that’s all. It is also unethical—though legal—to take another individual’s or organization’s name to make a deceptive URL. In my view, this should be illegal, or treated like a copyright infringement: Joe should be able to send a letter demanding that website using his name in a deceptive fashion be taken down.
Under current law however, the site is legal though unethical. It is more transparent, in fact, than most parody sites. At the bottom of the first screen, and not buried deep in the site, we can see,
This site is political commentary and parody of Joe Biden’s Presidential campaign website. This is not Joe Biden’s actual website. It is intended for entertainment and political commentary only and is therefore protected under fair use. It is not paid for by any candidate, committee, organization, or PAC. It is a project BY AN American citizen FOR American citizens. Self-Funded.
And I’m not even referring to the Yankees beating the Red Sox 17-13 in the first MLB game ever played in Europe.
Also, much thanks to the many readers who sent their condolences to me and my family. It helped.
1. Keepin’ a-goin’! Believe it or not, having to say farewell to our sweet, vocal and witty Jack Russell terrier was not necessarily the worst part of our Saturday. This makes today another ethics challenge, that being the theme of the intentionally simple-minded poem used by comic actor Henry Gibson on “Laugh-In,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” and later as a country music song in Robert Altman’s “Nashville.”
The ditty was “Keep A-Goin,” and Gibson, unethically, left the impression that he had written it. He hadn’t: the poem was written Frank Lebby Stanton (1857-1927), now forgotten, and Henry (who died in 2009) bears some of the responsibility for that, though the poem was ripe for stealing since the copyright expired long ago.. The “Nashville” credits claim Gibson was the author of the song. Wrong. Here it is:
Ef you strike a thorn or rose, Keep a-goin’! Ef it hails, or ef it snows, Keep a-goin! ‘Taint no use to sit an’ whine, When the fish ain’t on yer line; Bait yer hook an’ keep a-tryin’— Keep a-goin’!
When the weather kills yer crop, Keep a-goin’! When you tumble from the top, Keep a-goin’! S’pose you’re out of every dime, Bein’ so ain’t any crime; Tell the world you’re feelin’ prime— Keep a-goin’!
When it looks like all is up, Keep a-goin’! Drain the sweetness from the cup, Keep a-goin’! See the wild birds on the wing, Hear the bells that sweetly ring, When you feel like sighin’ sing— Keep a-goin’!
Since around 4:30 pm yesterday, I have felt like doing absolutely nothing other than grieving and helping the rest of my family deal with the sadness that engulfs us. But, as another poet memorably said, I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.
In my one lucky private audience with genius and futurist Herman Kahn, he mused about how societies periodically forget important lessons of conduct that had been that absorbed by the culture over decades or even centuries. The result, he said, can be disastrous, even fatal to a civilization.
At the time he was talking about the Sixties-sparked cultural amnesia about the reasons sexual promiscuity and having children out of marriage were societal poison–forgetting THAT has worked out well, don’t you think? Yet I have thought about Kahn’s observation a lot lately, as for the second time in my life the nation I live in appears to be suffering from a cultural nervous breakdown.
As toxic as it is, the embrace of historical airbrushing is far from the most dangerous of the examples of this phenomenon that threaten the U.S. today, but it is one of the flagrant. Not for the first time, San Francisco is giving us a vivid demonstration of what happens when, as Herman put it, “whole cultures go stupid.” If the right lesson are learned before it is too late, maybe the ultimate effects will be positive.
I am not optimistic. After all, San Francisco’s peculiar version of social justice has led to a city culture that regards human feces on sidewalks and public places as acceptable. Continue reading →
“We should not be criminalizing mamas and babies trying to flee violence at home or trying to build a better future. We must pass comprehensive immigration reform that is in line with our values, creates a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants including our DREAMers, and protects our borders.”
—Massachusetts Senator and Democratic Party chief (no pun intended) demagogue Elizabeth Warren
I was excoriated on Facebook earlier this year for suggesting that Democrats and progressives now support open borders but just don’t have the guts to be honest about it. Of course, there is no other explanation for the behavior of the House and Democrats—as well as the news media that now works for them—regarding the illegal immigration issue except stealth institution of an open borders policy.
Thus, in a perverse way, we should all be grateful for Elizabeth Warren for revealing her considered calculation–she’s a Harvard prof, remember, so she must be smart—that a declaration of support for this suicidal policy is what the Democratic “base” craves.
However, the statement (more here) is so flagrantly self-contradictory and dishonest that it makes you want to plotz, as Woody Allen would say, and the fact that a law professor would endorse a Bizarro World system in which an act is illegal or not depending on one’s motive for breaking the law shows just how brazen, cynical and untrustworthy this woman is. The entire statement is calculated to both make people dumber and to exploit those who are critically impaired intellectually already.
How can the borders be protected if anyone can cross them without fear of consequences, and the U.S. has removed the law that sends a clear message, “Don’t do this!”? And how spectacularly dishonest must a politician be to use the transparently meaningless and deceptive cliché “comprehensive immigration reform” in this context? Continue reading →
You have to hand it to the Brits: I would have thought that it was impossible to come up with an abortion ruling that simultaneously violates the core principles of both pro- and anti-abortion advocates. Mostly, however, the ruling places one more slippery slope quiver among the anti-abortion movement’s metaphorical arrows. This is what can happen when unborn human life is accorded no respect whatsoever.
Yesterday, Justice Nathalie Lieven issued the ruling at the Court of Protection, which hears cases on issues relating to people who lack the mental capability to make decisions for themselves. She ordered an abortion for a mentally-disabled woman who is 22 weeks pregnant, although both she and her mother wanted the baby to be born. The judge said the decision was in the best interests of the woman, and, of course, the Court knows best. Presumably it did not think the abortion was in the best interests of the unborn child, which apparently was healthy and unimpaired.
But I’m just guessing at that.
The unidentified woman is in her 20s and reportedly has the mental capacity of a 6- to 9-year-old child. Nobody is certain how she became pregnant, but obviously that was not a determining factor in the decision, nor should it have been. The unborn child doesn’t care.
“I am acutely conscious of the fact that for the state to order a woman to have a termination where it appears that she doesn’t want it is an immense intrusion,” Justice Lieven said, but held that in the woman’s “best interests, not on society’s views of termination,” the baby must go. Wait, what? How is aborting a child that both the potential mother and her own mother want to have and care for in the woman’s best interests? Or anyone’s best interests, other than members of the “It’s no baby, its an invading clump of cells that you better kill fast before it grows anymore” cult? Continue reading →
1 Every President should be hesitant to go to war. It is amusing watching Democrats and the news media (B.I.R.M.*) trying to thread the needle and criticize the President for pulling back on the decision to retaliate against Iran with a military response, when the Left virtually always protests military action of any kind. It is particularly amusing since the whole Iran confrontation exposes how irresponsible, dishonest, cynical, and cowardly the “solution” to the Iran problem was that President Obama secretly engineered: the “Let’s give Iran billions of dollars back to cause terrorism and chaos throughout the world in exchange for a promise not to nuke Israel until I’m rich, retired, and can’t be expected to do anything about it” plan.
2. About the Massie case. Nobody took the bait and wrote about the Massie Trial in last week’s open forum, so allow me to explain why it’s relevant.
The legal and academic world is still reeling from Harvard’s punishing law school professor Ronald Sullivan for representing Harvey Weinstein, who, the supposedly educated student citizens of Harvard have apparently been taught to believe, doesn’t have a right to a fair trial and a zealous legal defense. In the Massie case, Clarence Darrow came out of retirement in 1932 to defend Grace Fortescue, a rich Southern heiress who had traveled to Hawaii in order to seek justice for her wild and unreliable daughter, who accused five Hawaiian men of raping her. The trial resulted in a mistrial due to a deadlocked jury, ramping up racial tensions between whites and native Hawaiians. Fortescue paid to have one of the native Hawaiians her daughter accused, Joe Kahahawa , kidnapped and brought to her home in Honolulu, where he was tortured and shot. Grace Fortescue, Thomas Massie, and Edward Lord. Deacon Jones were arrested at the scene and charged with murder. Darrow, 74 and long absent from the courtroom, agreed to defend Grace even though she was obviously guilty, a racist, and the kind of rich, privileged bully that he has spent his career opposing.
L to R: Clarence Darrow, Edward Lord, Deacon Jones, Sheriff Ross, Grace Fortescue, Thalia Massie, Thomas Massie, and George Leisure
Why would he do it? Two reasons, said Darrow: he had been wiped out by the Great Depression and needed the money (he was paid $30,000) and he had always wanted to visit Hawaii. Darrow, you see, knew that every defendant deserved the best possible defense, even rich racist murderers. Continue reading →
Ethics Alarms 