Ethics Quotes

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Actress Glenn Close

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“Nixon was pardoned, and the gut punch to our body politic turned into a festering cynicism about our leaders, which has only grown in the years since. Nixon should have been held accountable. And so should Donald Trump. Another gut punch may prove fatal.”

—-Esteemed actress Glenn Close, who was raised in a cult, whose only jobs have involved performing before and after college (where she majored in theater), and who has no more expertise or authority on these issues than anyone else, including my favorite Harris Teeter check-out clerk, in a letter to the editor  that was given op-ed opinion status by the New York Times….because, you see, she’s a great actress, so of course her opinion is special.

Boy, am I sick of writing versions of this post.

Hollywood “resistance” culture and cant notwithstanding, there are no parallels between President Richard Nixon and President Donald Trump, other than the fact that most journalists hated both of them. Even in that respect, there are material differences: the journalists who hated Nixon at least made a pass at objective reporting, though they were thrilled when he provided them with an opportunity to attack. As has been documented here so often that even I’m bored with it, the tactics of the resistance/Democratic Party/ mainstream media regarding Trump was to assume he had committed heinous acts, and to see their task as removing him from office (or making sure he never again runs for office) by searching for some justification. This was the strategy that led to the two weak and unconstitutional impeachments and that produced the list of Big Lies fed to the public throughout Trump’s term in office (and after). It is an unethical and sinister strategy, and the approach of various prosecutors—“Let’s search for something we can get this guy on!” is a breach of legal and prosecutorial ethics as well.

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Unethical Quote Of The Week: Former Head Of Twitter’s Office of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

CENSORSHIP IS SPEECH

“Unrestricted free speech, paradoxically, results in less speech, not more.”

—-Yoel Roth, the former head of Twitter’s Office of Trust and Safety, testifying before the the House Oversight Committee.

Imagine: Twitter had someone who thinks like that running its content review operation.

Free speech may result in less speech in a setting where participants are required to defend their positions and opinions, and cannot claim the comforting protection of an ideological echo chamber. Roth was unable to distinguish between manner of speech, which requires moderation, and censoring speech for content, which is what Twitter did to please and placate its progressive users.

First, Roth said that “Twitter found that users were unhappy with the company’s approach to content moderation and that this … dissatisfaction drove people away from the service. This has consequences for what we mean by free speech on social media.” Then he said, “Again and again, we saw the speech of a small number of abusive users drive away countless others.”

Which was it, abusive speech, or content? As we have learned from watching student-driven censorship on college campuses, speech that counters leftist cant and challenges progressive positions is “unsafe” and thus abusive. A free society must have free speech, and that means that members of that society need to learn to communicate and accept that the marketplace of ideas is challenging, intense, and even frightening.

Roth literally said that Twitter believed you have to destroy free speech in order to save it—and he didn’t even realize how Orwellian that is.

And There It Is, The Smoking Gun! A Pulitzer-Winning Journalist Declares That His Biased Partisan Opinion Is “Fact”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

This is a fact: most of today’s journalists really think like this, being arrogant, self-inflated, ignorant and incompetent hacks who believe “journalism” means advancing the “greater good” through their craft, the “greater good as defined, of course, by them..

During a National Press Club panel last month supposedly on the journalistic challenges of covering extremism—meaning “How do we make sure as many Democrats are elected as possible, since that is the party 98% of us support?”, Wesley Lowery, the former Washington Post reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism for his coverage of the Ferguson race riots, told his fawning audience,

“We have one political party that traffics in the same talking points as white supremacists, be it on immigration, be it on Muslims, be it on any number of issues, where the mainstream political rhetoric could be written by avowed racists…I’ll be honest, I don’t think very much about the mantle of neutrality. It’s either raining outside or it’s not raining outside. I’m not particularly interested in sounding neutral about which it is….[The Republican Party] is a mix of nativism, of anti-urbanism, of anti-cosmopolitanism, a fear of immigrants. It’s the exact same things that drove the Klan movement of the 1920s. But to say that in public—the way that Newsbusters is going to headline the write-up of this panel is going to be that I compared Donald Trump to the Klan. Right? Now this is a literal true factual description. How can we understand our moment if we are not allowed to make any comparison or add any context?”

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Law Prof. Ethics Rule: Don’t Say Anything To A Student That You Wouldn’t Say Over An Open Mic…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Oops! Law professor Daniel Capra, an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, responded to a student complaint that he spoke too quickly in his lectures and international students were having trouble keeping up with a foreign language. Capra dismissed the compliant and and dismissed the students’ problems following hm as “assumption of risk.” Then, after the student walked away, he said, “Fuck!”

His class was being recorded, and a nearby microphone was live. Of course, the episode is being given maximal attention, life today being what it is. Above the Law gleefully weighed in, so did Law.com. Aditi Thakur, president of Columbia Law’s student senate, released a statement announcing that the student senate is “deeply alarmed” by Capra’s conduct. Gillian Lester, the dean of Columbia Law, said that she has told Capra that his “language, and the disrespectful attitude it conveyed, were unacceptable.” She also told students that she wanted to “express my own sorrow about this incident.” Sorrow!

Capra is also a professor at the Fordham University School of Law, so Matthew Diller, the dean there, had to pile on, saying, “His conduct was not consistent with his reputation as a teacher and scholar over many years or the spirit of inclusiveness and care for others that is at the heart of a Fordham education.”

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Ethics Quote Of The Week: Victor Davis Hanson

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“[W]hen everything becomes racist, then nothing in particular can be racist.”

—Revered conservative scholar and pundit Victor Davis Hanson in his column prompted by the absurd progressive calms that the beating death of young Tyre Nichols by five black police officers was caused by “white supremacy” and “systemic racism.”

Hanson’s piece “Race Everywhere” neatly supports my observation in the previous post that it is time to retire February ‘s designation as “Black History Month” (though “Hot Breakfast Month” can stay). His thesis:

In sum, class, not race, remains the best litmus test of being underprivileged in America. It is no longer synonymous with race.  No wonder the identity politics industry now strains to attach prefixes such as “systemic” or “implicit” to “racism,” or “micro” to “aggression,” purportedly to ferret out bias that otherwise is not apparent. Pause to reflect that America is the only successful multiracial constitutional republic in history.To survive in an increasingly dysfunctional and hostile world abroad, the unique idea of the United States requires concord.  But national cohesion is only possible through citizens subordinating their tribal interests to a common culture. Only then do they cease being automatons of warring tribes and collectives. 

Hanson includes many examples of the fact-immune push to elevate the black race above all others in the U.S. while deliberately reversing our national and societal progress away from segregation and racial hostility, as well as why the movement is neither rational nor responsible. Three that I was aware of include,

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Unethical Quote Of The Week: Karine Jean-Pierre

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“Ed — Ed — Ed, I am — we don’t need — we don’t need to have this. We work very well together… You don’t need to be contentious with me here, Ed.”

—-White House paid-liar Karine Jean-Pierre in a press briefing session yesterday, expressing her shock that a non-Fox mainstream media reporter would be so boorish as to ask her a tough question.

Redolent of the some of the same issues surrounding the inept Secretary of Transportation (who would surely have been sacked long ago if he were not gay and in a cute same-sex marriage), press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was obviously hired because she’s black, an immigrant, and a lesbian who is also in a same-sex marriage. Against all odds, she is even worse at her job than Pete Buttigieg is at his. It’s impossible to hide: she is frequently unprepared, she sometimes reads from the wrong crib notes, she can’t pronounce key words and phrases (Like that toughie, “Nobel Prize”), she gets petulant when she’s challenged, and is almost as incoherent as the President and Vice-President. Worst of all for a paid liar, she sometimes reveals inconvenient truths.

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: Rep. Ilhan Omar

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“I think it would be [hypocritical] for [Speaker McCarthy] to remove, you know, the first African-born on the subcommittee on Africa on the Foreign Affairs Committee, where I’ve had the opportunity to not only represent my constituents but the voice of so many people who have never had a voice on the Foreign Affairs Committee.”

—Rep. Omar (D-Minn), playing the race card, as usual.

I take no stand at this point regarding the tit-for-tat move of Speaker Kevin McCarthy to pull Omar from the the Foreign Affairs Committee, presumably because of her frequent anti-Semitic outbursts. The Democratic House had kicked Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene off the Budget and as well as the  Education and Labor Committees in February 2021 over her comments pushing conspiracy theories about Jews. McCarthy is simply applying the standards Nancy Pelosi established. (Both Greene and Omar are unethical Congresswomen who embarrass the institution as well as the districts that elected them.)

However, Omar’s claim that “historic” officials (translation: some combination of black, foreign-born, female, Muslim, gay or trans) should be held to different (translation: lower) standards of conduct than others is, while wholly predictable,  unethical by definition, as well as self-serving, discriminatory, and nauseating.

But that’s Rep. Omar.

And her party.

And the progressives who make up most of the membership of that party.

And the various tribal groups they cluster in.

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“We will never compromise our principles. House Democrats will always put American values over autocracy. Benevolence over bigotry. The constitution over the cult. Democracy over demagogues. Economic opportunity over extremism. Freedom over fascism. Governing over gaslighting. Hopefulness over hatred. Inclusion over isolation. Justice over judicial overreach. Knowledge over Kangaroo courts. Liberty over limitation…..”

—-New Democrat Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries following Republican Kevin McCarthy’s election as   Speaker of the House

 Is this the greatest gaslighting speech of all time? I can’t imagine a more blatant one. Let’s see: Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Month (Alleged): Damar Hamlin

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“Did we win?”

Damar Hamlin, the Buffalo Bills safety who suffered a near-fatal heart attack during a Monday Night Football NFL game this week, after two days in intensive care and still breathing with the help of a ventilator, in a scribbled a note shortly after regaining consciousness.

Well, it’s a great story. In the spirit of the old newspaperman at the end of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” [“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”], I’m going to assume it’s true, though I have grave doubts. For one thing, it’s hearsay; for another, the account comes through the NFL publicity staff, and the NFL’s any-staff has no ethics credibility at all. But the quote is possibly true, and it certainly conveys an ethical lesson: Put your “team,” whatever it may be, above your own concerns; care about whether your misfortune in pursuit of a shared goal interfered with that goal rather than focusing only on your own welfare. There really have been documented instances where an athlete did give the equivalent quote following a serious injury. Continue reading →

Great, Trump’s First Unethical Quote Of The Month Of 2023

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“It wasn’t my fault that the Republicans didn’t live up to expectations in the MidTerms. I was 233-20! It was the “abortion issue,” poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on No Exceptions, even in the case of Rape, Incest, or Life of the Mother, that lost large numbers of Voters. Also, the people that pushed so hard, for decades, against abortion, got their wish from the US Supreme Court, & just plain disappeared, not to be seen again. Plus, Mitch stupid $’s!”

Donald Trump, scoring a rare (even for him) unethical Trifecta on Truth Social

No, Trump’s Ethics Quote of the Week yesterday was in a different category: Ethics Alarms “Ethics Quotes” are reserved for statements that raise ethical issues (in that case, is it responsible for a former President to express himself like an 8th grade playground bully?) but are not per se unethical in themselves. His latest is an unethical quote, and remarkably so.

It begins with a whiny, Bart Simpsonesque “I didn’t do it!” lament; this was typical of  Trump as President (to be fair, also Biden and Obama) as he habitually refused to accept responsibility when his actions backfired, but wanted all the accolades when his policies worked. (Incidentally, this is a common CEO mindset. My boss at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce once said that may job was to make him look good: when I did well, he would take credit, when i failed, it was all on me.) Trump is being substantially blamed for the failure of the “Red Wave” to materialize, and rightly so. His incessant complaining about the 2020 election allowed Democrats to make the mid-terms about him rather than their own miserable management, and his endorsements helped inflict enough weak Senate candidates on the GOP—like Herschel Walker and Dr. Oz—in winnable races that what should have been a new Republican Senate stayed Blue. Trump wasn’t solely at fault, but he shares a large chunk of the blame. Next eh engages in deceit, a specialty: many of the candidates he endorsed won, nut most were in safe districts where they would have prevailed anyway. Those 20 losses were mostly winnable races, and crucial ones that could have been won if Trump had just kept his trap shut for two years. Continue reading →