Ethics Quotes

From The Ethics Alarms “These Really Are Terrible Human Beings” Files: Unethical Quote Of The Month: Bill Maher

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

“One way you get rid of Trump is a crashing economy, so please bring on the recession. Sorry if that hurts people, but it’s either root for a recession or lose your democracy.”

—-HBO’s Bill Maher, on his show “Real Time”…as his audience applauded, as usual.

Did any conservative, Republican or pundit root for the nation’s failure under Obama? The closest would be Rush Limbaugh’s infamous declaration that he wanted the new President to fail, which was more unpatriotic than I could tolerate, but even Rush didn’t go so far as to wish for the nation itself to be thrown into crisis. Maher is a repulsive individual, but he is not alone. We already discussed here how many members of the media appear to be rooting for the North Korean talks to fail. Other progressives openly wish for the President’s death: I could name some right here who have told me that in person. Lawyers. Professionals. Wishing for the death of not just another human being, but the President of the United States.

The attendant hysteria, fear-mongering, monomania and values distortion that have spawned the “resistance” have also apparently created a human mutation with lethal potential. Never before have there been mainstream American citizens who not only wished ill on the nation and neighbors, but who got cheered for it. The mutants are a threat to society and to sanity. Do not pretend they aren’t.

They may not be traitors, but they think like traitors. Continue reading →

Unethical (And Stupid) Quote Of The Month: Harvey Weinstein Defense Attorney Benjamin Brafman

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“Mr. Weinstein did not invent the casting couch in Hollywood”

—–Benjamin Brafman, Harvey Weinstein’s defense counsel, as Weinstein surrendered to authorities yesterday in Manhattan.

The whole quote, as Brafman addressed reporters:  “My job is not to defend behavior. My job is to defend something that is criminal behavior. Mr. Weinstein did not invent the casting couch in Hollywood. To the extent that there’s bad behavior in that industry, that is not what this is about. Bad behavior is not on trial in this case.”

Good luck with this boob, Harvey. To begin with, his job isn’t to defend any kind of behavior; his job is to defend his client.  The way the English language works is that “defending” criminal behavior means arguing that criminal behavior is just fine, thank you. Defending against charges of criminal behavior, in contrast, means that a lawyer is making a case that there was none. If a lawyer can’t speak with more care and precision than this, when addressing reporters he shouldn’t say anything at all.. He essentially just admitted that his client committed criminal behavior and bad behavior, while also leaving doubt as to whether he understood that criminal behavior was also bad.

That’s just the stupid and incompetent part of the statement. The stupid and unethical part, the Unethical Quote of the Month, is an invitation to play, “Name that rationalization!” What difference does it make whether or not Harvey invented the practice of using power over young women’s careers and aspiration to extort them into being their sex toys? Have you ever heard of a defense attorney arguing to jury, “Come on! My client didn’t invent serial killing! What’s everyone so upset about?”  This is a blatant “Everybody does it” excuse, and an especially offensive one. Weinstein’s lawyer just made his first impression on te public—you never get a second chance to make one, you know—and he presented himself as a man who shrugs off coerced sexual submissiveness in the workplace as just one of those quirky Tinseltown traditions. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: Texas Governor Greg Abbott

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“Not only did he want to commit the shooting, but he wanted to commit suicide after the shooting. He didn’t have the courage to commit suicide.”

—-Texas Governor Abbott (R) to reporters today, speaking of 17-year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis, the Santa Fe shooter.

The only question is whether this statement proves that Abbott is an idiot, or if he was just idiotically irresponsible on this occasion.

Kudos to Ann Althouse for the catch. She writes, “Whatever outrage you feel fired up or politically motivated to express, do not put that idea out there for young people to consume: Suicide is an act of courage.”

Exactly.

Choosing life, as well as choosing to accept the consequences of your actions, is usually the courageous choice. Does Abbott not know this, or was he just reaching for a cheap insult to use against a killer, and inadvertently stuck his foot in his mouth?

Someone should have asked him about the horrible suicide in New York City yesterday, when former Playboy Playmate Stephanie Adams jumped to her death from the top floor of the Gotham Hotel with her 7-year-old son in her arms. 

Governor Abbott must have really admired that.

Unethical Quote Of The Month: New Mexico Congressional Candidate Pat Davis (Guess What Party!)

/ Jack Marshall / 97 Comments

“Fuck the NRA!

—-Albuquerque City Council member Pat Davis, in a TV ad promoting his candidacy for Congress in the upcoming Democratic Party primary.

Nice.

That’s what we really need more of in the government: more incivility, vulgarity, cretinous rhetoric, and hate-mongering. Go Pat!

I suppose Davis is taking his cues from potty mouth DNC chair Tom Perez and putative Presidential candidate and California Senator Kamala Harris, both of whom have decided to jettison dignity and professionalism in pursuit of the rapidly devolving progressive base. These people are all ethics corrupters. I don’t care who they say to fuck, or what. If this their idea of leadership, they are a disgrace to the nation and whatever office they seek.

Of course Davis’s message is idiotic, regardless of his terminology. He says that the NRA’s ” pro-gun policies have resulted in dead children, dead mothers and dead fathers.”  If politicians like Davis want to repeal the right of citizens to own guns, then let them have the honesty and integrity to say so. Blaming the organization that is an advocate for the Second Amendment for crimes committed by those who abuse the right is intentionally dishonest as well as cowardly,  like blaming the ACLU for the proliferation of lowest common denominator demagogues who think “Fuck the NRA” is responsible political discourse and not merely the equivalent of a primal scream.

Ethical Quote Of The Month: Sarah Palin

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“I attribute a lot of what we’re hearing and reading regarding McCain’s statements to his ghostwriter or ghostwriters. I don’t know all the details of his condition right now. It happens to me also where people speak for me and a bell is rung, and you can’t un-ring the bell. I don’t know unless I heard it from Sen. McCain myself…In spite of everything that has erupted in these past days with his spokesperson – or perhaps he himself – saying that he regrets that they chose me to run on their ticket—despite all that, he has been my friend.”

—Sarah Palin, responding in an interview to the statement in Senator McCain’s new book that he regrets choosing her as his 2008 running mate.

As discussed in an earlier post, the ailing Senator’s slap at Palin was unfair, cruel and gratuitous. I cannot imagine a more restrained and gracious response than Palin’s, under the circumstances.

Instagram Busts A Lawyer’s Lie

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

New York-based lawyer Lina Franco had missed a November 23, 2016 filing deadline for a motion for class certification in a wage-and-hour law suit. Missing deadlines is a lawyer n0-no, and can get you sanctioned, sued, fired, or worse.  Luckily, Franco had an excuse, or so she thought.  She filed for an extension 16 days past the deadline, claiming that she had been forced to leave the country for the family emergency. She even submitted a flight itinerary showing she had flown from New York City to Mexico City on Thursday, November 21, and had remained there until December 8.

Let’s call this particular social media gaffe Ferris Bueller’s Mistake.  For Instagram photos from Franco’s public account indicated that she was in New York City and later Miami during that period. You know, like when Ferris turned up on TV at a ball game when he was supposedly sick in bed? Like that.  There was another teeny problem: November 21, 2016 was a Monday, not a Thursday, as the judge sanctioning Franco $10,000 pointed out in his ruling.

Franco now admits that she had gone to Mexico City earlier in November than she said, but that her mother’s medical diagnosis sent her “into a tailspin” causing her to miss the deadline and to submit the  false itinerary.

Now watch Instagram posts show up from Franco’s mother, with photos of her winning a seniors kickboxing tournament. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “The Good Faith Of The Justice Department”: Sure.

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

This Comment of the Day is short but provocative. I have had it in a pending file for a while. What triggered my determination to run it now was this tweet cum meme, courtesy of Instapundit, by Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule:

I considered making the profesor’s tweet an Ethics Quote of the Week. I considered using it in an Ethics Quiz: “Would it be ethical to post this on Facebook, knowing that it will convince none of the Trump Deranged among my friends and merely cause their already weakened heads to explode?” I hate memes, and wondered weather this was too close to one to post without hypocrisy. And yet: Prof. Vermeule is absolutely correct. His brief tweet neatly consolidates what Ethics Alarms has been covering since the 2016 election, and why I believe that the progressive/resistance/Democrat/mainstream media/ Deep State alliance”s unethical efforts to delegitimize and undermine this President is doing—and will continue to do—far more damage to the nation than the Presidency of Donald Trump, even if he lived down to his foes’ worst assumptions.

Here is Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day on the post, “The Good Faith Of The Justice Department”: Sure. Humble promised that he would have a lot more to say on the topic. I’m counting on it.

 Since the election of Trump, I have seen the brains of otherwise intelligent and competent people liquefy and trickle out their ears in real time.

One of the most interesting symptoms of that liquefaction has been the invention or re-invention of all sorts of professional rules, policies and laws, specifically and discreetly to the detriment of this administration. When something new happens, something that has a burden of proof so high that it has never before been breached…. The Resistance desperately wants that to be the result of an abnormal presidency… But in reality it’s the response that is abnormal… It’s the height of naivete to assume uncritically that this was done properly.

 

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Microsoft

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“By agreeing to these Terms, you’re agreeing that, when using the Services, you will follow these rules:

….

iv. Don’t publicly display or use the Services to share inappropriate content or material (involving, for example, nudity, bestiality, pornography, offensive language, graphic violence, or criminal activity).

b. Enforcement. If you violate these Terms, we may stop providing Services to you or we may close your Microsoft account. We may also block delivery of a communication (like email, file sharing or instant message) to or from the Services in an effort to enforce these Terms or we may remove or refuse to publish Your Content for any reason. When investigating alleged violations of these Terms, Microsoft reserves the right to review Your Content in order to resolve the issue. However, we cannot monitor the entire Services and make no attempt to do so.”

—-From the revised Microsoft Services Agreement.

I do not trust Microsoft to decide what is “offensive language” in my communications, or anyone else’s. Many people, for example, believe that it is offensive that I assert the duty of citizens to allow an elected President to do the job their fellow citizens exercised their rights to select him to do, and that they have an ethical obligation to treat him with the respect the office of the Presidency requires.

We are already seeing indefensible bias on the part of other big tech companies, such as Google, Twitter, Apple and Facebook, as they favor specific ideological and partisan positions and use their platforms to censor and manipulate public discourse. These are private companies and not constrained by the First Amendment or core ethical principles like fairness and respect for autonomy (and, as we all know, definitely not respect for privacy). The problem is that the big tech companies are ideologically monolithic, virtual monopolies, possess the power to constrain free expression and political speech while leaving no equivalent alternative, and are increasingly demonstrating the willingness to use it.

The big tech companies have proven that they are unethical, ruthless, lack integrity, politically-active and willing to abuse their huge and expanding power to advance their own agendas. At the same time, their products and services  have become essential to the daily lives, recreation and occupations of virtually all Americans. This is a dangerous combination.

They must be regulated as the public utilities they are, and the sooner the better.

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Journalist Matt Pearce

/ Jack Marshall / 134 Comments

“Journalism *is* activism in its most basic form. The entire basis for its ethical practice is the idea that a democracy requires an informed citizenry in order to function. Choosing what you want people to know is a form of activism, even if it’s not the march-and-protest kind.”

—-Matt Pearce, national correspondent for the LA Times, tweeting his support for the definition of journalism endorsed by Rebecca Schneid, co-editor in chief of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School newspaper, as Brian Stelter, CNN’s fake broadcast journalism ethicist, silently stood by, since it is mean and bad form to tell teenagers dictating national policy that they don’t know what they are talking about.

Choosing what you want people to know.

Choosing what you want people to know.

Choosing what you want people to know.

Choosing what you want people to know.

Nah, there’s no media bias!

Yup…

“Enemy of the people.”

Res ipsa loquitur.

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Lee Smith, Making It All Clear

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“Yet for its advocates, the questionable veracity of the Russiagate story seems much less important than what has become its real purpose—elite virtue-signaling. Buy into a storyline that turns FBI and CIA bureaucrats and their hand-puppets in the press into heroes while legitimizing the use of a vast surveillance apparatus for partisan purposes, and you’re in. Dissent, and you’re out, or worse—you’re defending Trump…In other words, there’s the truth, and then there’s what’s even more important—sticking it to Trump. Choose wrong, even inadvertently, …no matter how many times you deplore Trump, and you’ll be labeled a Trumpkin.”

—Lee Smith in his essay, “Who Believes in Russiagate?”

Later he adds,

“What unites [critics of Russiagate on the Left and the Right] obviously isn’t politics—rather, it’s the recognition that the Russiagate campaign represents an attack on American political and social institutions, an attack on our liberties, an attack on us. Russiagate is a conspiracy theory, weaponized by political operatives, much of the press, as well as high-level intelligence and law enforcement bureaucrats to legitimize an American election and protect their own interests, which coincide with those of the country’s larger professional and bureaucratic elite.”

You might wonder why I chose to highlight the first quote  rather than the second. The second tells me nothing I don’t know, or that readers of Ethics Alarms don’t know: I’ve made it a theme here since early in 2017. I learned something from the first quote, however. This is the phenomenon I have been experiencing on Facebook, where periodically pointing out unfair and intellectually dishonest attacks on President Trump and pointing out the news media’s horrific bias increasingly get me labelled as a Trump supporter, apologist or enabler. Meanwhile, I recently had a follow-up exchange  with NPR over my objections to Prof. Butler’s “Oh, come on!” outburst when I was correctly pointing out what was ethically dubious about late accusations of sexual harassment against political figures.  Oh, no, I was told. He wasn’t saying “Oh come on!” because I misrepresented sexual harassment law. He was saying that because he thought I was making excuses for Trump. Continue reading →