Ethics Dunces

Salon Asks: “When Is A Leak Ethical?” NEVER. That’s When.

/ Jack Marshall / 58 Comments

Ethically challenged left-wing website Salon somehow found an ethically challenged law professor, Cassandra Burke Robertson, to justify the leaks in the Trump Administration. Robertson,  despite being a Distinguished Research Scholar and the Director of the Center for Professional Ethics at Case Western Reserve Law School, advocates unethical and sanctionable conduct in a jaw-dropping post, “When is a leak ethical?”

Here, professor, I’ll fix your misleading and dishonest article for you: It’s NEVER ethical to leak.

Never.

She begins by noting “I am a scholar of legal ethics who has studied ethical decision-making in the political sphere.” Wow, that’s amazing….since she apparently is hopelessly confused about both, or just pandering to Salon’s pro-“resistance” readers.

Robertson writes:

“Undoubtedly, leaking classified information violates the law. For some individuals, such as lawyers, leaking unclassified but still confidential information may also violate the rules of professional conduct.”

1. It is always unethical to break the law, unless one is engaging in civil disobedience and willing to accept the consequences of that legal breach. By definition, leakers do not do this, but act anonymously. Thus leakers of classified information, lawyers or not, are always unethical, as well as criminal.

2. Lawyers may not reveal confidences of their clients, except in specified circumstances.  Here is D.C. ‘s rule (my bolding): Continue reading →

Sought: An Ethical Reason Why This Professor Should Not Be Fired Immediately, And Never Hired For A Teaching Position Again, Anywhere

/ Jack Marshall / 137 Comments

 

Meanwhile, for Trinity College, the countdown has started.

After Professor Johnny Eric Williams, associate professor of sociology at Trinity College in Hartford, approvingly posted a Medium article titled “Let Them Fucking Die” on Facebook, he went on to endorse the article’s thesis ( potential rescuers like those who helped Rep. Steve Scalise should let imperiled white people die as a form of combating white supremacy) in his own Facebook posts:

The Medium article concluded with this advice regarding one’s responsibilities as a citizen and a human being when a white person is in mortal peril… Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up: 6/23/17

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

1. When I am forced to be away from Ethics Alarms for a long time, as was the case yesterday, it often renews my musings about whether I respond too much to reader comments. Everyone generally does just fine when I’m silent, and sometimes I find that fascinating and unexpected new topics have not only sprung from whatever ethics fertilizer I left behind,  but have grown and flourished like bamboo.

Unfortunately, I have also noticed that there have been a lot ( as in “too many”) of extended arguments between commenters that not only extend beyond reasonable limits, but also explode into personal attacks. I admit that Ethics Alarms is, for a moderated blog, unusually tolerant of this phenomenon. One reason for that is that sometimes such epic confrontations are both entertaining and enlightening, as when liberal commenter and Ethics Alarms immortal tgt and uber-conservative commenter Steven J. Pilling engaged in the Ethics Alarms equivalent of the Lincoln Douglas debates, only occasionally snapping and calling each other names.

However, while the occasional emotional outbursts are excusable, they should be rare. Reprimanding a commenter for  commenting style and habits is certainly fair, but doing it repeatedly is boring; and I want to remind everyone that while it is often frustrating, allowing someone to have the last word is not capitulation, especially when that last word is not particularly persuasive.

We also owe ourselves and everyone else self-awareness. When a commenter finds himself or herself repeatedly embroiled in long, heated exchanges, that commenter should consider the possibility that he or she is the problem.

The general principle is that we should strive to have all comments contain substance that advances the discussion. “You’re an asshole” is occasionally justified (when a comment has objectively revealed a commenter to be an asshole, and even then is not mandatory), but rarely.

2. When President Trump issued his trolling tweet about James Comey and the possibility that there were “tapes” of their conversations, I wrote that it was the President’s dumbest tweet to date. (I think he has made worse ones since, but at this point any tweet by the President is evidence of crippling stubbornness, impulsiveness and bad judgment). I did not think that what was obviously a bluff without substance would still be considered a headline-worthy issue many weeks later. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up: 6/22/17

/ Jack Marshall / 59 Comments

1.  I’m trying to get this up while I prepare for a new legal ethics seminar, teaming once again with the brilliant D.C. actor Paul Morella who has toured the country in the Clarence Darrow one-man-show he and I collaborated on more than a decade ago, using Darrow’s career and courtroom oratory to analyze modern legal ethics.  Readers here have encountered a lot of those Darrow-related discussions already. For once, I’m grateful most lawyers don’t frequent this blog.

2. This now viral photo of the faces of CNN’s talking heads and analysts at the moment they realized that the Democrats had lost the Georgia Sixth District special House election that was hyped to be the beginning of a surge to the Left rejecting Donald Trump…

…and this one…

…are more than just gags. They are smoking gun evidence of the stunning lack of professionalism in journalism, and especially CNN. If there was any sensitivity or commitment to ethics on that set or in that production chain of command, every one of these arrogant hacks would have been told, “I want poker faces up there at all times. Objective and fair news reporting includes body language and facial expressions. Your attitudes warp your reporting. If anything about your demeanor betrays your personal preferences or political biases, you’re getting suspended. Got that? This isn’t a cheerleading squad.

3.  This warrants its own post, but today will be a squeeze, so I’ll focus on the astounding chutzpah of  that race’s loser here and now. Losing Georgia Six Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff was interviewed by NPR’s Rachel Martin, and this exchange resulted: Continue reading →

California “Ethics”

/ Jack Marshall / 77 Comments

California is not only rapidly exiting mainstream U.S. culture, it is forging its own distorted and unethical version of right and wrong.

Three alarming examples:

1. Forging ahead with single payer, and reality be damned.

The Sacramento Bee  pointed out that by replacing current state-run health programs with a single-payer system, the state would still need to come up with an additional $200 billion annually.This year’s state budget in California is about $180 billion. Yes, implementing a single-payer health care system would require doubling California’s current tax burden.

Oh, never mind! The state Senate voted 23 to 14 this month in favor of SB 562, a single-payer proposal that would guarantee universal health care to all Californians. “What we did today was really approve the concept of a single-payer system in California,” declared state Senator Ricardo Lara following the vote.

No, what they did was reaffirm the fact that progressive cant refuses to yield in the face of cold, hard facts, math, reason and common sense. The cheerleading from the Left is mind-numbing. Writes the Nation: “If health care is a right—and it is—the only honest response to the current crisis is the single-payer “Medicare for All” reform that would bring the United States in line with humane and responsible countries worldwide.”

Well, let’s see: health care is NOT a right except in Left-Wing Fantasyland, and all of those “humane and responsible countries” have crushing tax burdens, reduced liberty, economic instability, crushing debt and completely different values, priorities and responsibilities than those of the United States.

Ethics is only ethical when it is practical and practicable in the real world. The ethical response to the fact that single-payer doubles the state budget is to say, “Oh. Well, obviously we can’t do that, then. On to plan B.”

2. That minimum wage increase that Gov. Brown said was based on principle rather than economics? Yeah, about that…

Continue reading →

New York Times: ‘Now That The Supreme Court Has Ruled That Our Position Was Progressive Censorious Jack-Boot Political Correctness Enforcement, We Didn’t Mean It’

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

 

How can anyone take the New York Times seriously anymore as an objective source of commentary, reporting and analysis?

Here is a hilarious section from today’s editorial celebrating the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Matal v. Tam as a victory for free speech:

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said the law violates a “bedrock First Amendment principle: Speech may not be banned on the ground that it expresses ideas that offend.” That’s the right call. The First Amendment bars the government from discriminating among speakers based on their viewpoints. In this case, the Trademark Office did that by blocking only registrations for trademarks it determined to have negative connotations. …The decision is likely to help the Washington Redskins, who lost their trademark protections in 2014 after years of complaints from Native American groups. At the time, this page supported the Trademark Office’s decision, and we still regard the Redskins name as offensive. Based on this case, however, we’ve since reconsidered our underlying position.

Really? When did the Times reconsider that “underlying position”? It reconsidered it only when the Supreme Court made it crystal clear that the government’s attempt to bully the Redskins into changing their name was a neon-bright, obvious First Amendment breach that any non-partisanship-addled person of moderate intelligence should be able to discern, thus constituting an embarrassment for a renowned First Amendment-protected entity—the Times—that couldn’t discern it, or that didn’t have the integrity to oppose its ideological allies by stating the inconvenient truth.

The Times endorsed the underlying position that the government could dictate what was “acceptable” speech because Harry Reid’s Democrats and the Obama Administration were doing the dictating on behalf of a core Democratic Party constituency and the progressives that constitute the Times’s readership.

What a cynical, biased, dishonest, corrupt and untrustworthy news source the New York Times has become.

From The “Why We Can’t Trust The News Media” Files: The Megyn Kelly- Alex Jones Interview Fiasco

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Here is the sequence of events:

1. Newly minted NBC “star” Megyn Kelly announced that she would be interviewing infamous right wing political troll and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on a segment of her new show.

Jones is a fringe media figure and a proven liar, but he has been cited positively by President Trump, and has successfully caused some wide-spread comtoversy and offense, such as when he claimed that the Newtown massacre was a hoax. There is nothing wrong with interviewing such figures; indeed, it is important to interview them. provided ethical journalism standards apply.

Unfortunately, as this episode demonstrates, journalists no longer know what those standards are.

2. In order to persuade Jones to agree to the interview, Kelly promised him—Jones had a tape—that he would be treated fairly. Note: when you tell someone they will be treated fairly in order to have him trust you, your definition of “fair” must be his definition of “fair.”  If he is thinking, “Ah! She will be neutral rather than adversarial, and will not be looking for gotchas!,” but she meant, “It’s fair that I fillet you like a trout, you bastard!” then the interview subject has been deceived.

3. The parents of the victims of the Newtown shooting, as well as their sympathizers and allies, protested the interview, as I wrote about here, saying that NBC was giving Jones a platform. Sympathy and grief are not excuses for censorship. The fact that the parents hate Jones suggests that they shouldn’t watch him be interviewed. They should not seek to interfere with my right to see how he presents himself, and companies (like J.P Morgan) that responded to the threatened boycott by pulling their ads told me that they will go as the winds blow, no matter how totalitarian the direction it might be.

Good to know. To hell with them.

4. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, speaking of progressives with muddled values,  wanted NBC to pull the segment.. The NBC affiliate in Hartford refused to air the episode because the “wounds of that day that have yet to heal.”

Yes, by all means, journalists should never report news or do stories that might upset anyone.

5. Showing the integrity of a sneak-thief, NBC and Kelly furiously re-cut the interview and added a segment in which some Newtown parents could attack Jones.

6. Before the interview aired, Alex Jones released audiotape showing how egregiously Kelly misled him.

7. The interview aired last night, and reviewers were satisfied that Kelly was “tough enough” with Jones, and signaled with her voice, facial expressions, tone and questions that she thought he was scum. “Short of waterboarding him,” one critic wrote, “I don’t know what more Kelly could have done to expose Jones’ dark methods.”

Ugh.

Ethics Observations: Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: Gateway Pundit’s Lucian Wintrich

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“On Friday, June 16, 2017, Laura Loomer, a patriot activist and journalist, took the stage at Shakespeare in the Park’s performance of “Julius Caesar”, a performance where liberals applaud as President Trump’s assassination is shown in full bloody detail. Laura was arrested for speaking out against this performance.”

Lucian Wintrich on the right wing blog Gateway Pundit, describing the disruption of the Shakespeare in the Park “Julius Caesar “production

What makes a blog post especially unethical? Oh, many things: misstatement of facts, ignorant analysis, sensationalism, incompetence, not being able to distinguish right from wrong and good from bad, appeal to bias and stupidity. Wintrich’s post, absurdly called “Proud Conservative Woman Was Arrested Friday at Trump Assassination Play – Help Pay Her Legal Fees *HERE*!” has all of this and more.

The conservative woman, along with her conservative male partner in attempted censorship, has nothing to be proud of. She’s proud of emulating the leftist crypto-fascist students who have been using intimidation and riots to prevent conservatives from speaking? She’s not a patriot, since patriots don’t intentionally ignore core American principles like freedom of expression and speech whenever they feel like it. The word Wintrich is looking for in his limited vocabulary is “hypocrite.”

She was also not arrested for “speaking out” against this performance. This can only be a lie, or Wintrich is too stupid to be allowed to put his shoes on by himself. You cannot be arrested in the U.S. for “speaking out,” and nobody ever is. He is trying to inflame the stupid and ignorant, or he is stupid and ignorant. Laura, the jerk, was arrested for interrupting a theatrical performance that she had absolutely no right or justification to disrupt. Just so there is no mistaking his dishonest, inflammatory and ignorant description as entirely deliberate, Wintrich, the hack, repeats it, writing,

“The left keeps calling President Trump a fascist dictator, but speaking out against assassinating a Democratically elected President apparently gets you arrested in New York City.”

Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up: 6/18/2017

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

1. After I criticized Prof. Glenn Reynolds for  his “tit for tat” reaction to the conservatives who disrupted the Central Park production of “Julius Caesar,” I noticed that he had posted a more moderate, ethical and responsible reaction to the same event, writing,

“I’d rather live in a world where this sort of thing wasn’t done at all. But it’s not clear that we’re better off living in a world where it’s done all the time, but only by lefties.”

Muuuch better, professor. Thank-you.

2.

This photo of a “teacher of the Year” being ostentatiously gay in a White House photo with the President was originally posted at the Huffington Post with the headline, “Gay Teacher Photobombs Trump With Fan.” Fake news, but never mind: the photo went viral with the teacher, Nikos Giannopoulos, being hailed for making a disrespectful gesture of defiance, since the LGBT community is committed to the narrative that the President is anti-gay. (He isn’t, but facts and the narratives of “the resistance” are not correlated.)

This account was unfair to both Giannopoulos and the President. I was ready to make him an Ethics Dunce—when you are a guest, you don’t set out to embarrass your host, President or not—until I checked the story. In an NPR interview, the teacher was asked about the President’s reaction to the fan, and replied,

In other words, both the teacher and Trump behaved impeccably, and the President displayed no hostility to a gay pride salute at all. Under no circumstances, however, can anything this President does or says be presented in a positive light. He’ll never be impeached that way. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Right-wing activists Jack Posobiec and Laura Loomer, Plus The Instapundit And Anyone Who Applauds Them.

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

Jack Posobiec and Laura Loomer, adopting the censorious and antispeech tactics of those they despise,  disrupted yesterday’s evening showing of the  Shakespeare in the Park production of “Julius Caesar” that features a graphic assassination of  a President Donald Trump version of Caesar.

Loomer rushed the stage shouting that the scene was an “act of political violence against the right,” and said the play was “unacceptable.” The play was briefly halted, and the crowd appropriately jeered as Loomer was taken away by security. Then Posobiec stood up and shouted, “You are all Goebbels! Goebbels would be proud!” He also also shouted that the blood of wounded Republican Congressman Steve Scalise was on the audience’s hands.

A play is free speech and performance art, in this case, political performance art. The actors have a right to present the play, and the audience has a right to watch it. Nobody has a right to disrupt the performance, no matter what the subject matter is, and no matter what the motives of the disrupters may be.

Jack Posobiec and Laura Loomer are hypocrites. Glenn Reynolds, law professor and USA Today columnist, disgraced himself by writing,

“Is this dumb? Yeah, but that never stopped lefties and now they’re getting to see what it feels like to have your hair pulled.”

…thus endorsing a pure tit for tat, mob ethics, “you do it to us so we’ll do it to you” ethics death-spiral. A law professor. He should be ashamed of himself, especially as the Instapundit, an icon of the Right, a status I have seen him abuse too often already. Continue reading →