Ethics Dunces

Clearly, #MeToo Never Quite Got Its Message Across

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Baltimore judge Kevin M. Wilson is facing an ethics hearing in May after a female lawyer accused him of inappropriate and unwelcome touching at a bar association event at the Maryland Club in May of last year. Thecomplaining victim says that when she stopped at a table where Wilson and another judge were seated, she felt Wilson’s hand rub her leg up and down. Two lawyers witnessed this, as well as hearing the complainant tell Wilson that his behavior was inappropriate. The judge moved his hand away, but then, also allegedly, put his hand back on the attorney’s leg, moved his hand up under her skirt, and touched her buttocks.

The event was called “Join Our District Court Judges for Practice Tips on Tap,” so I guess maybe Wilson was just…tapping. 

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Ethics Hero Elon Musk vs. Ethics Villain Disney

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Elon Musk is weird, impulsive, sometimes hypocritical and often infuriating. He is also a national treasure: a true Ethics Hero in the culture wars.

Back in 2021, Disney fired Gina Carano, one of the stars of the Disney+ series “The Mandalorian” because her social media posts were insufficiently supportive of the progressive cant Disney is obsessed with (to its financial and cultural sorrow). The triggering tweet was one in which Carano, a conservative (can’t have that in Hollywood!) compared Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish propaganda to efforts by the political left to demonize people based on their political beliefs. Proving her point, Disney canned her, explaining, falsely, that her “social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

Carano is now suing Disney and Lucasfilms. Her complaint can be read here. She is suing under California law, which states that
“No employer shall make, adopt, or enforce any rule, regulation, or policy: (a) Forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office. (b) Controlling or directing, or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees.”

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Normalizing Theft

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Since we began the day with a dead canary in the mine of democracy, here’s another. That video shows a thief rampaging through an Apple Store in Emeryville, north of Oakland (where Woke Kindergarten romps). Nobody tries to stop him. Nobody even appears alarmed by him. He escapes by running right by a police car.

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Should the World “Stand By”UNRWA? Of Course Not…

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, is losing support and funding for a very good reason. Israel’s intelligence alleges that at least six UNRWA employees infiltrated Israel on October 7, including two who may have helped kidnap Israeli civilians to be taken as hostage. Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Britain’s TalkTV, “UNRWA is perforated with Hamas.”

Last week, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said 12 UNRWA employees were implicated in the Hamas attacks. Of those, “nine were immediately identified and terminated,” one is “confirmed dead,” and “the identity of the two others is being clarified.” In response at least 15 countries, including the United States, have announced a halt to payments to UNRWA, pending further investigations. Officials have expressed fears that UNRWA could run out of money, endangering its humanitarian efforts in Gaza.

Too bad. That consequence should have been considered before allowing terrorism supporting U.N. employees to work for the organization.

The New York Times published an opinion piece by the foreign minister of Norway, one of the nations holding fast to its funding commitments. Espen Barth Eide argues that “we should not collectively punish millions of people for the alleged deeds of a few.”

I may have to fashion that time-honored excuse into a rationalization for the list. We read and hear versions of that entreaty constantly: it is a call to avoid just consequences for unethically run, untrustworthy organizations, agencies, societies, cultures and businesses. The only rational response to that argument is “Sorry. The organization is at fault, not those who make a reasonable and rational decision in response to it.”

No one should give funds to any organization that has proved itself untrustworthy, and UNRWA has. Apologists for the agency keep talking about “alleged misconduct,” but the U.N. acted quickly in firing twelve of the accused Hamas agents in the organization, almost certainly because the allegations were true. UNRWA obviously didn’t properly oversee its activities or properly vet its employees. The agency has has the same leadership responsible for this inexcusable botch; there is no way at this point for nation donors to have confidence that their money won’t be re-channeled into fighting Israel or other illicit projects.

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Ethics Dunce: National Public Radio

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

…or maybe I’m the Ethics Dunce: I assume that NPR’s management cares whether half the country sees it as progressive cant parrot and a water-carrier for the Democratic Party. Maybe they don’t; maybe they have assumed deplorables don’t listen to “Marketplace” and “Fresh Air,” and certainly don’t contribute much during radiothons. I know I don’t touch the local NPR stations (there are two of them) ever since the “Car Talk” guys ended up in the garage for good and after I was dumped as NPR’s ethics guy because I was insufficiently critical of Donald Trump.

Where was I? Oh, right….National Public Radio appointed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who had to hustle to scrub her social media record after the announcement because she periodically issued intemperate woke garbage in the past. Among the gems tracked down by reporter Shannon Thaler at the New York Post,

  • “Trump is a racist.”
  • “I mean, sure, looting is counter-productive. But it is hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property”
  • “white silence is complicity”
  • “I grew up feeling superior (hah, how white of me) because I was from New England and my part of the country didn’t have slaves, or so I’d been taught.”

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Ethics Dunce (Still!): Harvard University

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

face

It’s quite possible, I think, that Harvard’s ethics rot is so entrenched and endemic that it can never be fixed, even by Barack Obama.

Here’s the latest revolting development. Harvard’s Interim President Alan Garber announced in an email that Professor of Jewish History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Derek Penslar will co-chair its new anti-Semitism task force, established to deal with the concerns of students, faculty, donors, elected officials and the public at large over demonstrations on the Harvard campus calling for the elimination of Israel and the murder of Jews.

Penslar is, shall we say, not the ideal candidate to encourage trust in the task force’s dedication to its task. He signed a letter in August accusing Israel of running a “regime of apartheid,” stating in part, “Without equal rights for all, whether in one state, two states, or in some other political framework, there is always a danger of dictatorship. There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it.” He has also said on more than pone occasion that the problem of anti-Semitism at Harvard is being exaggerated, while quickly pairing it with Islamophobia. “Yes, we have a problem with antisemitism at Harvard, just like we have a problem with Islamophobia and how students converse with each other,” Penslar said this month. “The problems are real. But outsiders took a very real problem and proceeded to exaggerate its scope.” Jewish Insider reported that Penslar told the Harvard Crimson in late December that the amount of media focus on anti-Semitism at Harvard has “obscured the vulnerability of pro-Palestinian students, who have faced harassment by actors outside of the University and verbal abuse on and near campus.”

Being “Pro-Palestinian” is the exact equivalent of advocating the killing of Jews, and will be until the official mission of Hamas and other Palestinian groups is altered to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.

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A Boomerang For Republicans In New Hampshire [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

OperationChaosII

You may recall that Rush Limbaugh was lambasted in the non-conservative media when in March of 2008  he launched Operation Chaos.  Rush directed his zombie followers to vote in Democratic primaries for Hillary Clinton to stop Barack Obama from clinching the Democratic nomination early and to maximize the chances of a messy Democratic nominating convention. In 2016, Rush declared Operation Chaos, The Sequel open for business.   He instructed the Dittoheads to vote for socialist Bernie Sanders, whom none of them would consider voting for in a real election even if someone was pulling their fingernails out with pliers to make them Bernie Bros.  Instapundit, Newsbusters and other rightward sites cheered Operation Chaos II on.  As Ethics Alarms concluded at the time, “Conservatives are no more ethical than progressives, it’s just that their lack of ethics expresses itself in different ways.”

Or the same ways, in some cases. Trump Derangement, after all, justifies anything and everything, so Democrats in New Hampshire pulled off their own version of Operation Chaos (and didn’t even give credit to Rush, since departed to that Big Talk Show in the Sky, for their inspiration).

Exit polls in the New Hampshire primary indicated that  70% of Nikki Haley’s votes came from from non-Republicans who, at least one analyst surmised,  had no intention of voting for her in a general election. They would be Biden voters, presumably, and some said so. More non-Republicans voted for Haley, in fact, than Republicans. (Also, Haley got more votes than the President did, but you had to write in Joe’s name, so that may not mean much.) Haley received a paltry 40,938 Republican votes compared to Trump’s 172,202, but the Left’s version of Rush’s unethical stunt allowed the mainstream media to spin the results into a “Trump is weaker than he thought” narrative.

In 2016, I wrote that “Rush’s steaming pile of depraved Machiavellianism is not worth my composing a new brief against it.” Then, I reprinted part of what I had written  about Operation Chaos the first time. For the sequel, I substituted Bernie for Hillary. This time, I’ll use Nikki Haley, and I also have to replace “Republicans” with “Democrats” and strike the references to conservative pundits like Mark Levin who were cheering on Rush’s stunt.

And yes indeed, it is satisfying that the GOP and conservatives were hoisted by Rush Limbaugh’s stinky, unethical old petard. Continue reading →

Unethical Quotes of the Month: The University of North Carolina’s Faculty Council

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This is not an encouraging situation.

Last week, the University of North Carolina’s Faculty Council met to consider, among other matters, a resolution condemning anti-Semitism on school’s campus. An on-campus event in November included a speaker who said, referring to the barbaric terrorist attack on Israeli civilians, that “October 7 was for many of us from the region a beautiful day.” No one at the event did or said anything to reject that sentiment. The proposed resolution stated, “We strongly condemn the antisemitic statements made during a Unity roundtable event No Peace Without Justice held on November 28, 2023.”

That wouldn’t seem too difficult to agree with or too controversial, would it? Yet the resolution failed to pass. The Faculty Council voted 32-29, with six abstentions, to table the resolution for the foreseeable future. Here are some of the most striking comments made by those who objected to the resolution:

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From the “Res Ipsa Loquitur” Files…Ethics Dunces: Parents Who Allow Their Daughters To Be Subjected to THIS

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

That’s Henry Hanlon, apparently a male basketball player who “identifies” as female. Clearly, it’s good for his ego. (Can’t tell who I’m talking about in the photo? Guess!)

The San Francisco Waldorf high school girls basketball team is on a roll, thanks to its court domination by team captain Henry Hanlon. No, he doesn’t even bother to carry a female name. California’s Interscholastic Federation (CIF) established “Gender Identity Participation” rule in 2013, and it is bats.“All students should have the opportunity to participate in CIF athletics and/or activities in a manner that is consistent with their gender identity,” the policy states. As CIF’s Associate Executive Director Brian Seymour explains, “All of our athletes, all the eligible athletes, are afforded the opportunity to compete with the gender they feel most comfortable with.” Oh. I can see where a high school athlete might be “most comfortable” with a fanciful gender ID that allows him to feel like the Harlem Globetrotters playing against their eternal patsies, the Washington Generals.

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Look! Here’s a Performing Ethics Dunce Who’s Even More Unprofessional Than Madonna!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Ethics Alarms commented on Madonna’s inexcusable two-hour tardy appearance at her concert (item #4) without realizing that The Grand Ol’ Opry could have said “Hold my beer!” The Nashville shrine to Country Music officially apologized to fans and audience members after four-time Grammy Award nominee Elle King disgraced the venue and herself with a vulgar and drunken performance on an evening last week that was supposed to honor Dolly Parton. “We deeply regret and apologize for the language that was used during last night’s second Opry performance,” the Opry wrote on X/Twitter over the weekend. That was an understatement of what happened.

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