Ethics Dunces

“March Comes In” Monday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 3/3/25

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

March 1 was the 395 day anniversary of my wife’s sudden and unexpected death on Leap Year, 2024. I want to thank everyone who has been so kind , tolerant and supportive here. To be honest, it seems like yesterday that I found her lifeless body. I still have nightmares, anxiety, attacks of regret and sudden sadness when something triggers a memory, and almost anything can, from my dog to movies to songs, like this one, which for no reason at all suddenly started going through what I laughingly call “my mind”….

Anyway…thanks.

Meanwhile…

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Ethics Alarms Generally Ignores Michael Moore But a Quote This Unethical and Cretinous Warrants an Exception…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“Who’s really being removed by ICE tonight? The child who would’ve discovered the cure for cancer in 2046? The 9th grade nerd who would’ve stopped that asteroid that’s gonna hit us in 2032? Do we care?”

Yes, activist communist and has-been documentary-maker Michael Moore really and truly made that head-explodingly stupid argument, my candidate for the most ridiculous rationalization for allowing illegal immigrants into the U.S. yet, even topping the “But that poem on the Statue of Liberty!” excuse.

It is so stupid that the theory would be a valuable diagnostic tool on IQ tests. If someone checks the “Sounds good to me!” box, that test-taker’s cognitive ability should automatically be judged as “dangerously impaired.”

As we have explained here many times, consequentialism is the ethical theory for dolts, the concept that a decision or action is right or wrong depending on what happens as a result of it. Moore is saying that an action is unethical or wrong if anything good might have happen if a different choice had be made. I hesitate to give this walking, talking ethics corrupter credit, but he just has to be smarter than to believe that. As usual, Moore is trying to con the dimmer members of the public, a large contingent among Americans who still pay attention to him.

One wag on social media responded to Moore’s insulting question with “Now do abortion.”

Bingo.

Trump’s Pete Rose Pardon: Not the Most Unethical Pardon, Just the Dumbest

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Above you see the President with a photo of the late, great, baseball slimeball doing the Nazi salute like Elon Musk, which I’m sure is what endears him to Trump.

Kidding!

Not kidding: between their various pardons, I’m pretty sure Presidents Biden and Trump have so degraded the status of the Presidential clemency power that it will never recover. Once, such pardons conveyed ethical values and legitimate justifications for a President’s compassion. This thobbingly stupid pardon should make the gesture an embarrassment forevermore.

Here is the President’s asinine, even by his standards, Truth Social post:

Ugh. Fisking this crap is too easy but noxious, like shooting dead rats in a barrel…

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Ethics Dunce: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (and Further Observations on the Oval Office Fiasco) [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 80 Comments

I worked for many years for a fascinating man, a brilliant negotiation specialist and consultant, Richard Halpern. My first thought yesterday after watching the astounding argument that broke out among the President, Vice-President Vance and Ukrainian president Zelenskyy was, “Boy, I wish Rich was still here to analyze what went wrong.” Rich died in 2009, but I learned enough about the art of negotiation from working with and observing him to be confident in how he would have reacted to what occurred on live television yesterday. My thoughts also reached back across the decades to the seminar I took on negotiation in law school with Adrian Fisher, then Dean of Georgetown Law Center after a career as a top arms control negotiator for the United States.

Both Richard Halpern and Adrian Fisher would have agreed that Zelenskyy was incompetent. I would add that he behaved like a deluded fool who had come to believe his fawning press notices.

First, Zelenskyy did not sufficiently research his negotiation partners, their preferences, their character, and their “hot buttons” that should never be pressed without sound reasons. Second, he did not properly prepare to insulate his own hot buttons from making him behave against his country’s best interests. Third, he did not comprehend why he was in the Oval office and what was expected of him.

Finally, he did not understand that as a supplicant nation seeking critical aid from the United States, he was not on a level playing field, particularly since he was in the U.S., on the President’s home turf. His job was to be respectful, compliant and non-confrontational no matter what occurred or was said.

The previous press conference with a foreign leader that President Trump had completed just the day before should have served as a guide. Keir Starmer was content to stay in the background and barely speak while the President rambled on in his inimitable fashion, and Great Britain has accumulated far more credits and greater good will with the U.S. than Ukraine. One commenter said that yesterday Zelenskyy failed to “read the room.” It was far worse than that: he failed to read the room, whom he was talking to, why he was there, and what he had to accomplish.

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But Why Did They Have To Kill the Dog? [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

[Skip to the end for more details released after the post first went up.]

I woke up this morning to the disheartening news that one of my all-time favorite screen actors, Gene Hackman, had died. He was 95 and had been retired for twenty years, so the news was not exactly shocking. However, the details of what police found in Hackman’s Santa Fe, N.M., home indicate a larger tragedy: along with the actor, police found he wife, Betsy Arakawa and a German Shepherd.

Since the police have stated that there were no signs of “foul play,” meaning that the group did not appear to have been murdered, and that there was no immediate evidence of a murder-suicide scenario, as when actor Gig Young was found dead after murdering his young wife, the scene still strongly hints of a suicide pact. Elderly couples do this here and there; some even think that it is romantic. (James Stewart’s last movie, made-for-TV, was co-starring with Bette Davis as an elderly couple who decide to kill themselves in the interests of avoiding pain, misery and expense.) Mrs. Hackman, Betsy Arakawa, was only 64, but who knows? Maybe she had just been diagnosed with dementia or some other dread disease. Maybe the duel suicides were her idea.

But why kill the dog?

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The Resurrection Church Oakland (PCA) held this event last week.

In related news, spectacularly unethical Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis sent an angry letter to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee today. She is furious that the committee is quite appropriately investigating the degree to which her part of the “Get Trump!” lawfare last year was orchestrated and coordinated with the Biden Administration.

“Rather than honor and uphold the oath you took, you have chosen to expend your time attempting to bully me, which is a complete waste of your time,” Willis wrote. “Might I suggest that instead of attempting to disrupt this office’s work protecting the people of Fulton County, that you celebrate Black History Month by visiting children in your district to teach them about the many contributions African Americans have made to this country—including those who have advanced democracy by successfully advocating that this nation live up to its ideals that everyone is equal before the law and everyone has the right to have their voice heard through exercising their right to vote. That would be a much more productive use of your time.”

___________________

Pointer: Not The Bee.

Behold! A Fascinating Visit To The Mind of a Trump Derangement Sufferer

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

This was just reposted by a very astute and generally learned lawyer friend (who, I should mention, is a retired USAID employee who never returned to the land of her birth except for visits and who has lived abroad for decades). I could write about this screed for pages, but I’ll leave it to you.

I will only observe that Ethics Alarms commented critically on many of the incidents and statements listed when they occurred, while others are framed according to Axis media narratives (look at the sources) or are the kind of exaggerations and hyperboles that Trump critics call “lies” when he engages in the same techniques.

I will also observe that making this statement without considering who and what this admittedly flawed leader is opposing and the demonstrated values and conduct of the alternative is hypocritical, deliberately misleading, or, ironically, stupid.

Rachel Maddow’s Self-Indicting Message on MSNBC’s Firing Joy Reid

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

As EA noted in last night’s post, MSNBC finally fired Joy Reid and ended her nightly racist, unhinged rants on the network. For this it deserves no special credit or plaudits, for Reid was objectively terrible, getting worse as her Trump Derangement raged, and should have been fired years ago….for this head-exploding incident, for example.

On yesterday’s episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show,” Maddow told us all we should need to know…. about Maddow…with this outburst:

“Joy Reid’s show “The ReidOut” ended tonight. And Joy is not taking a different job in the network. She is leaving the network altogether and that is very, very, very hard to take. I am 51 years old. I have been gainfully employed since I was 12. And I have had so many different types of jobs you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But in all the jobs that I have had, in all of the years I have been alive, there is no colleague for whom I have had more affection and more respect than Joy Reid. I love everything about her. I have learned so much from her. I have so much more to learn from her. I do not want to lose her as a colleague here at MSNBC, and personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door. It is not my call and I understand that, but that’s what I think. I will tell you, it is also unnerving to see that on a network where we’ve got two—count them, two—non-white hosts in prime time, both of our non-white hosts in prime time are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend, and that feels worse than bad no matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible. And I do not defend it.”

All righty then! There we have it: a full-throated endorsement of racial quotas, discrimination in hiring and career advancement, and double standards. For a special bonus, Maddow endorsed the practices and conduct of an unethical and untrustworthy former colleague, which means that Maddow is unfit to appear on any respectable news organization’s broadcasts.

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The YouGov. Poll: Maybe Americans Are Just Too Stupid and Unethical For Democracy to Survive After All…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

All research indicates that the majority of Americans, not having the IQ’s of Pet Rocks, recognize that our bloated government is corrupt, inept and wasteful. Pew Research polling concluded that 56% of Americans felt that way last year. “Nearly 2/3 of Americans fear that our government is run by corrupt officials, stated another survey. In January, A.P.-NORC researchers found that 70% of Americans believe corruption in the federal government is a serious problem.

Despite these beliefs, only 39 % of Americans polled gave DOGE a “favorable” rating in the latest The Economist/YouGov poll, with”unfavorable” at 36%, and the human slugs who chose “don’t know” came in at a whopping 25%. Another poll this month found only 49% approving DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts.

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Municipal Government Ethics Follies [Clarified]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Do you think the Federal and state governments have major ethics culture problems? Municipal governments say “Hold my beer!”

1. The city with the deadest ethics alarms in the U.S.? It might be Quincy, Florida…

Quincy hired Robert Nixon as its city manager. Now Quincy Commissioner Beverly Nash has called on the city commission to terminate Nixon, alleging the city violated its own guidelines and possibly state law by hiring him. Why, you well may ask?

Nixon had pleaded guilty to charges of embezzling government funds and served 21 months in prison. The 2010 criminal case was brought after Nixon and an accomplice schemed to pocket $134,000 in federal Housing and Urban Development grant money meant for Tallahassee-area small businesses. Nixon was the director of Florida A&M University’s urban policy institute when he stole from a grant fund-holding account at Florida A&M Federal Credit Union, where his co-defendant was president. The two tried to disguise withdrawals as consulting and administrative fees. They got caught red-handed.

Quincy has a population of about 8,000 and is located at the center of Gadsden County. “Technically we have gone astray and violated our own policies and procedures,” Nash said during a city commission meeting. “When adherence to policy slowly erodes, what is left? Wrong becomes right. The lines and boundaries are missing and blurred.”

The controversy is bogged down in a technical debate over whether or not it is illegal for Quincy to hire a convicted felon who has not had his right to hold official office restored. You can read the details of that irrelevancy here. It doesn’t matter whether Quincy can hire someone who had embezzled government fund as its city manager. Whether the city can or not, it is incompetent, irresponsible and stupid to do so. This is signature significance on metaphorical steroids. Nixon, predictably, is full of talk about redemption and second chances. “I had a debt to society and I paid it. I think it’s important that there is a pathway forward for people with felonies who want a second chance,” Nixon says. Sure there is a pathway: that path begins somewhere the felon does not have opportunities to steal his employer’s money.

The reality is this: nobody who is trustworthy embezzles government funds once or ever. Maybe a city could justify hiring a contrite former embezzler as its city manager after every candidate in the country who has not embezzled cash perishes from some China-planted ethics plague. Absent that unlikely scenario, the hiring is indefensible.

Here’s my favorite part of this astounding story: The Quincy city attorney was one of Nixon’s defense lawyers in the embezzlement case.

2. Oh no, flags again…

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