Ethics Dunces

When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: How Could A Company Not Realize This Was Sexual Harassment?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The mind boggles; my mind, anyway. S&S Activewear, according to a lawsuit, proposed as a class action in 2020 by a group of former employees, pumped loud, “sexually graphic, violently misogynistic music” through at least five speakers across a large warehouse. Artists like Eminem and Lil Wayne were heard performing rap and hip-hop employing vulgar language, often with lyrics that described violence towards women.

One song cited was Eminem’s 2000 hit “Stan,” about an obsessed fan taking the rap star’s music so literally that he kills his pregnant girlfriend and himself by driving off a bridge. Well all righty then! Management shrugged off complaints about this junk being played in the Nevada warehouse according to the suit, in defiance of the company’s own sexual harassment policy. This fostered a hostile work environment environment where employees shared porn videos and made inappropriate remarks and gestures towards female employees. The suit claimed that the company’s HR manager told at least one woman to just ignore the music.

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Ethics Dunce: Gov. Ron DeSantis

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Yecchh.

This hacky, dishonest attack ad undermines the one major advantage Gov. DeSantis should have over Donald Trump in their approaching battle for the GOP nomination: DeSantis doesn’t behave like he’s 10 years old. Allowing this photo to appear in the ad is particularly irresponsible…

…as it is a bad fake. If a candidate will allow fake photos to be used to mislead the public, what else will he lie about? This one is particularly stupid, because it shouldn’t be hard to legitimately criticize Donald Trump on myriad issues; creating false images to trigger junior high “Ew!” reactions is wildly unprofessional. Why is DeSantis relying on people who think this is legitimate advocacy?

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Ethics Alarms Challenge! Provide A Sincere, Persuasive Ethical Argument Why This Isn’t An Epic Example Of ‘The Great Stupid’

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

(Yes, it made my head explode.)

Hot on the heels of the news this week that owners of the 1,921-room Hilton San Francisco Union Square, San Francisco’s largest hotel, occupying an entire city block, is being abandoned by its owners because that woke city has become such a hopeless hell-hole that they can’t see the convention and tourism business rebounding comes New York City’s health officials installing the city’s first free drug paraphernalia vending machine in Brooklyn. It features all sorts of goodies for users and addicts, like crack pipes, “Safer Sniffing” kits, drug testing kits and the anti-overdose medication Naloxone. The vending machine also has hygiene kits for the special problems addicts face (like cracked lips) and safe sex kits. Anyone with a New York City ZIP code can claim any of the contents for no charge. The Brooklyn vending machine is the first of four machines that will be installed in neighborhoods that were hit hardest by the opioid crisis.

Wow, what a great idea. I think it’s a great idea. Don’t you think it’s a great idea?

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Ethics Dunce: Ireland

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Boy, if Ireland thought they had mad cows before….

Ireland’s government is reportedly seriously considering plans to destroy 200,000 cows to meet its mandatory climate change targets from the nutsy-cuckoo European Union. Farmers will be offered financial inducements participate in the bovine holocaust. Thus the collateral damage of net zero emissions insanity, a sub-category of The Great Stupid, is extending to cows, just as AOC wants it to in her “Green New Deal.”

There shouldn’t be a lot to argue about here: killing 200,000 Irish cows now will have exactly no effect on the climate even if the most apocalyptic and hysterical scientific models are correct. It’s like the Biden and Obama killing pipelines: it’s just climate change theater and virtue-signaling, except that the pipeline decisions just killed jobs and brain cells of rational people thinking about them.

And yes, in this case, just seriously considering such an obviously wasteful policy is sufficient to justify Ethics Dunce honors even if ultimately rationality prevails. Even pondering such idiocy is signature significance, as when grandpa says, “Yeah, I was thinking about flapping my arms and flying out the window to visit Neverland, but decided it was too far away.” You call the rest home and double quick, even if Gramps had seemed lucid before.

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Trump-Related Ethics Notes…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

1. Geraldo Rivera is an Ethics Dunce (but we knew that). Geraldo actually tweeted this nonsense: “Biden pardoning Trump-the way Ford pardoned Nixon- IS a good idea. This clemency to include inciting the violence of January 6th, the Mar-a-Lago documents case & any other federal allegation. Clemency would require a pledge by Trump that he will no longer seek the presidency.”

Ugh. A quid pro quo pardon is called a “bribe.” This one would be even more direct than when Bill Clinton pardoned fugitive Marc Rich in exchange for Rich’s ex-wife giving a fortune to Bill’s library. In addition, the metaphorical ship has sailed as far as Biden pardoning Trump is concerned. The time to do it—and I once thought that it would be a unifying and wise move by Biden—was before any indictments or court decisions came down. Now, such an action would be widely regarded as government elites agreeing across party lines to place themselves above the law.

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Ethics Dunce: Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy [Link Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

There is no way not to take yesterday’s public warning from the nation’s top health official as ominous, indeed sinister. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy expounded on the risks of social media to children and teens, citing possible “harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” The remarkable 19-page advisory, begins by acknowledging that the effects of social media on adolescent mental health are not well understood, and even that social media can be beneficial to “some users.” It then goes on to argue ,“There are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”

And thus the U.S. Surgeon General lays the groundwork for government censorship, despite admitting that there is insufficient hard data to support his conclusions. Parental supervision is not enough for this government, as we have already seen in multiple settings. After all, “it takes a village,” the village that one side of the current culture wars is trying to define includes treating words and expression as “harm” from which people must be kept “safe.” Predictably, the near-completely compliant national news media is behind such government appropriation of parental authority, in this as well as other matters.

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Ethics Dunce: Ty Cobb (No, This Is NOT A Baseball Post)

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

That stylish-looking gentleman above is Ty Cobb III, a descendant of the iconic baseball player, himself a rather infamous ethics dunce. I never quite figured out Ty III’s relationship to Ty the First, but that is neither here nor there. I wish I didn’t have to write this post: I know Ty a bit, for we were in the same class at Harvard (where he already was sporting that handlebar mustache), and I knew many of his friends a lot better than I knew him. He is a nice guy, a funny guy, and by all accounts a terrific lawyer. He may have been the best lawyer ever associated with Donald Trump: Ty joined the White House staff to manage legal matters surrounding the Mueller investigation—yes, the Russian collusion scam run by the Democrats, the FBI, and the news media. He reported directly to Trump, and he was extensively quoted during the media frenzy over that disgusting set-up.

On May 2, 2018, Cobb announced that he was retiring as White House special counsel, and later that year, said that he did not think the Mueller investigation was a “witch hunt,” later saying in an ABC News interview on March 5, 2019, that he thought Mueller was “an American hero.” I almost blew my ethics whistle then; I didn’t: I should have. As a lawyer the public identified with President Trump (though his client was the office, not the man), Ty’s apparent vouching for the investigation was bound to be taken by the public (and certainly the news media) as a hint that someone on the inside with legal expertise knew Trump was guilty. I know I looked at it that way.

Now he’s done it again. Cobb told the news media that the “feds are coming fast” for Trump, and predicted that the investigation into the his alleged mishandling of classified documents will land him in prison. Spewing his opinions like an oil gusher, Cobb said,

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Another “Great Stupid” Milestone: Mayor Adams’ Plan To Stop Shoplifting

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

If you are not fully informed in Ethics Alarms lore, the term “The Great Stupid” for the ridiculous period Western Civilization is trying to survive came from a lucky conversation your host had many decades ago with futurist Herman Kahn, then generally regarded as the smartest man alive. One of the topics we discussed was the Sixties, and Herman observed that throughout history there have been periods where whole cultures suddenly forgot the lessons of the past. This resulted in what in retrospect looked like extended periods of stupidity, with people and governments engaging in destructive conduct and embracing wildly foolish policies until they re-learned what they had forgotten, usually after catastrophic results. I am quite confident that Mr Kahn would agree that this is just such a period.

New York City mayors have been major players in the most recent descent of stupidity across the land, and while Mayor Eric Adams couldn’t be a worse mayor than his predecessor if he just lay on his office rug twitching, he certainly tries. Recently, as his city (like so many Democrat-run metropolises) grapples with an exploding crime rate, Adams announced the following plan to deal with rampant shoplifting:

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Miller Lite Surpasses Bud Lite’s Self-Immolating Beer Ad With One That’s Even More Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

By now it should be clear what was wrong with the Bud Light promotion featuring silly biological male drag queen Dylan Mulvaney,. First of all, it was incompetent: alienating your core market to score political correctness points with  groups that don’t care about your product is idiotic. It was also irresponsible: investors in the company don’t own stock to be part of political grandstanding, they want to make money, and a company has an obligation not to undermine that objective. It was disrespectful too: making one’s product into a symbol of one side of a culture wars skirmish forces consumers to take sides, and is a slap in the face to consumers who don’t happen to agree with the company’s stance.

None of this was difficult to figure out, but a smug female marketing VP decided to use her job to advance her own political beliefs rather than to do what she was hired to do: sell beer.  This, of course, should have meant a bonanza for the competitors of Bud Lite; if Bud’s sales were going to implode (and they have, down about 25% with no relief in sight), light beer-lovers (weird as they may be) had to go somewhere. But even before the “Drink Bud Lite, show your support for self-identifying women with penises” campaign, Miller Lite had issued the smugly woke video above during Women’s History Month. It’s worse than the Bud Lite ad, even though it won’t lose as many loyal customers:

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Ethics Dunce: The American Bar Association

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

What do you call an esteemed legal organization that willfully encourages its members to violate its own ethics rules? There are two acceptable answers: 1) An Ethics Dunce, and 2) The American Bar Association.

That is a screenshot above of an email that arrived yesterday.

“Congratulations on Your 2023 nomination,” it began. “This year marks our 9 year anniversary of “Recognizing Excellence in the Practice of Law™”. Our Selection Committee is hereby extending to you an invitation to join this elite group¹.  Accept your invitation and join by May 23rd, and your name will be included in our roster announcements published in “The National Law Journal” and the Sunday “The New York Times” print edition on May 28th. Please note that only 56 spots remain available. Less than 1% of lawyers in the United States are recognized as Lawyers of Distinction.”

I am many things, but a “lawyer of distinction” I am not. I haven’t practiced law for more than a decade; legal ethics is not the practice of law. Lawyers of Distinction is, to cut to the chase, a scam, and one that is used by lawyers to deceive clients. For the National Law Journal to provide cover for the unethical advertising scheme is bad, but a while back the ABA included an advertisement for “Lawyers of Distinction” in the ABA Journal. The ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct, followed by most jurisdictions, specifically forbids misleading and deceptive advertising, which a lawyer announcing that he or she was “chosen” as a “lawyer of distinction” definitely is. The association attracted a lot of criticism for running the ad, and may not have sunk so low again: I don’t know, because I no longer receive the ABA Journal, but once was enough for me.

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