Professions

Ethics Quiz: The “Inappropriate Dance” [Updated and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Maybe this one should be titled, “Tell Me What I’m Missing.”

Buhach Colony High School (California) principal Robert Nunes was placed on administrative this week after a video of an obviously planned and choreographed bit of foolery with the basketball team’s mascot “went viral.” It was a pep rally. Mascots (which I hate, but that’s another issue) frequently do these kind of routines, and bringing authority figures into the gag is standard fare, giving the human butts of the giant costumed things a chance to appear more human, show they are good sports, yada yada. I’ve seen baseball managers get in to faux fistfights with these escapees from a Disneyland parade. The crowd generally loves it, the morons. Big deal.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is is fair to suspend a high school principal for that routine above?

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Comment of the Day: “Accountability? What’s Accountability? Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle Still Has Her Job…”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I have neglected Comments of the Day of late I know, and I am sorry about that. There have been many excellent comments, and also many I have not had time to read carefully: the responses to the “What do you believe?” post alone generated many strong COTD candidates (and they are still coming in).

I might as well start with a comment I said I would post under the designation three weeks ago, and whiffed: Michael R.’s brief arguing that the Secret Service’s epic botch in Pennsylvania that only avoided getting Donald Trump killed by the intervention of moral luck was no accident.

Is the EA post that inspired Michael moot? After all, Kim Cheatle finally resigned after the indignity of having Congress members of both parties tell her to. However, the information that has been drip, drip, dripping out about the near-assassination has not disproved Michael’s thesis; if anything it bolsters his argument.

Ultimately, the question, as it so frequently does in the Age of the Great Stupid, comes down to Hanlon’s Razor: Is it intentional malice, or is it incompetence? The COTD concludes, “To cling to an incredibly unlikely incompetence argument in light of a much more likely explanation is only required if you don’t want to acknowledge something you are unwilling to accept.”

Maybe, but I will still cling even while admitting that other recent Hanlon’s Razor mysteries that have been popping up (“Did Democrats and the media just miss the fact that Joe Biden was a proto-vegetable because they are lazy, biased and inept, or did they deliberately participate in a conspiracy to deceive the American people ‘to save democracy’?” is one obvious example) demand the malice label.

Here’s Michael R’s Comment on the Day on the post, “Accountability? What’s Accountability? Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle Still Has Her Job, and Only the Prominence of a Confederacy of Ethics Dunces Can Explain That.”

***

You have to make a lot of hand wringing arguments to state:

(1) They didn’t put snipers on the roof that THEY identified as a threat.

(2) They didn’t secure the building despite the threat of the roof.

(3) They didn’t notice the guy on the roof despite the fact that the crowd had been taking pictures of him for 25+ minutes.

(4) They let a 20 year old kid drive up, unload a ladder, climb onto the roof spread out his blanket, assemble the rifle and take 7 or 8 shots accidentally. That is the most generous assessment. If THEY left the ladder to the roof there for access, it is worse.

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Medical Ethics Dunce: Dr. Peter McCollough

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Bandy Lee wasn’t the only alleged medical expert to pronounce then-President Donald Trump mentally disabled (so that one of the Axis plots to remove him from office without having to go through that annoying democratic election thingy could be activated) without actually examining him, but she was the one who exploited her unethical conduct the most effectively to get repeated gigs on MSNBC.

Finally Yale fired her, as she was habitually and noisily breaching basic professional ethics including the so-called “Goldwater Rule,” installed by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 to prohibit members from offering psychological opinions about individuals they had not personally examined.

Please note that the rule didn’t make what Lee and others did unethical: it was unethical with or without the rule. It is unfair, presumptuous and an abuse of position and authority to diagnose non-patients from afar, particularly in a political context where such fake medical verdicts can be used as partisan weapons.

Yet there was cardiologist Dr. Peter McCollough yesterday, giving an interview on the web’s “Breanna Morello Show” and diagnosing Joe Biden with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s while opining that both may be the result of a bad reaction to the Covid vaccines. Before diagnosing the President, he explained that he wouldn’t give a diagnosis because doing so would be unethical, and then immediately diagnosed him.

Nice.

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No, Doctors, “Do No Harm” Does Not Mean “Make Anti-Israel/Gaza War Statements in Your Hospital”…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

We knew, or should have, that the medical profession was not immune from the ethics rot brought upon us by the advent of The George Floyd Freakout, the 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck, The Great Stupid (and its DEI sub-cult) and the rest. Here is a throbbing example.

At the University of California, San Francisco, one of the nation’s most respected medical schools and teaching hospitals, medical students and doctors have been protesting the war in Gaza. Chants of “intifada, intifada, long live intifada!” could be heard by patients in their hospital rooms at the U.C.S.F. Medical Center. It doesn’t really matter what the chants were: they could bebeen “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” (one of my personal favorites.) Medical personnel should never promote political views in a hospital. Why isn’t that obvious?

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Comment of the Day : Ethics Quote of the Month: Banned EA Commenter “David” (1)

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

How ironic! A post spawned by a banned trolling commenter who called your host a “Trump-supporting fascist” generated excellent commentary and two outstanding Comments of the Day. Thus a disruptive and unethical visitor here actually helped to enrich the discussion and enlighten participants. I know I learned some things from Sarah B.’s excellent Comment of the Day on the post, the first of the two earning the honor.

Here it is, on “Ethics Quote of the Month: Banned EA Commenter ‘David’”…

***

While I cannot answer for lawyers, there are plenty of Trump deranged engineers, and we sure get trained in logic, critical-thinking, and evaluation of consequences of our thought processes. This training does not inoculate us from our own biases. Indeed, biases manage to short circuit the training.

Jack is fond of saying biases make us stupid, and certainly today’s society proves it. I cannot tell you how frustrated I get when a trained engineer tells me that electric cars will solve all our problems. No one with the training I went through should say that electric cars are a universal solution. They should be able to calculate life cycle pollution, understand vehicle weight issues with roadways, realize the limitations of battery technology, mineral scarcity, and electrical grid load. However, by the time we get our intensive training in logic, critical thinking, and more, we have also been inundated in “global climate change” mass hysteria. The biases I saw my fellows come out with was amazing, even as I was standing there with the damn numbers.

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Ethics Dunce and Legal Ethics Dunce: The Connecticut Bar Association

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

This is concerning, but, frighteningly enough, not surprising. As Ethics Alarms has noted many times, the legal profession has been among the critical institutions most thoroughly corrupted, indeed lobotomized, by partisan bias and Trump Derangement. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I am also getting reports from various quarters about the deep corruption in many state bar associations. This is especially problematic for me, as bar associations are a significant market for my ethics training services (if they ares sufficiently corrupt, such organizations tend to say “We don’t need no stinkin’ ethics training!”). Well, the Connecticut Bar is in the minority of bar associations that have never sought my wisdom, so I am unencumbered by conflicts of interest.

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A.I. Ethics Update: Nothing Has Changed!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Oh, there have been lots more incidents and scandals involving artificial intelligence bots doing crazy things, or going rogue, or making fools of people who relied on them. But the ethics hasn’t changed. It’s still the ethics that should be applied to all new and shiny technology, but never is.

We don’t yet understand this technology. We cannot trust it, and we need to go slow, be careful, be patient. We won’t. We never do.

Above is a result someone got and posted after asking Google’s Gemini AI the ridiculous question, “Are there snakes at thesis defenses?” The fact that generative artificial intelligence ever goes bats and makes up stuff like that is sufficient reason not to trust it, any more than you would trust an employee who said or wrote something like that when he wasn’t kidding around. Or a child.

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Note to the “Wise Latina”: There’s No Crying on the Supreme Court!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“There are days that I’ve come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried. There have been those days. And there are likely to be more.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, speaking at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, where she was being honored….for what, I can’t imagine.

Awww! Poor Sonja! What’s she crying about? That she’s obviously over her head on the Supreme Court with actual legal scholars and experts who can make persuasive arguments about what the law is and what the Constitution means instead of just relying on warm, fuzzy feelings and mandatory progressive sentiment? That mean old conservatives aren’t buying her “But…but…it would be nicer if we decided this way” routine?

Did Sandra Day O’Connor, when she was in the minority on a liberal majority court, ever say she just went into her office and wept when a SCOTUS vote didn’t go her way? Did Ruth Bader Ginsburg, when she was on the losing end of a 5-4 ruling? Did Scalia? No, but this Justice not only weeps over her defeats, she thinks its something to be proud of.

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A Critical Addendum to the Left’s Alito Flag Freakout

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I had already decided to shut down my commentary for the day (judging from the traffic, I see that a lot of people are starting their Memorial Day Weekend early) when I saw a fascinating note on The Volokh Conspiracy, and I just can’t let it pass, since it puts the two posts (here and here) about the “Get Alito!” flag fixation in proper perspective.

Josh Blackman, a regular contributor to VC, a constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston, and the president of the Harlan Institute, reminded readers about something that occured the day after election day in 2016, November 9. The Supreme Court was in session, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wore the jabot she only sported when dissenting from a majority opinion. Ginsberg herself had explained her sly fashion messaging in in 2014:

but in this case there was nothing to dissent from other than the obvious: Donald Trump, whom Ginsburg had called “a faker” before the election, had defeated Hillary Clinton. The Associated Press got the message and reported on it.

Unlike the Alito flags, there is no question about who was making the political statement regarding President Trump: it was Justice Ginsburg. Nobody fooled her into wearing that collar. A relative didn’t wear it, she did. Nor was the symbolism of the collar in question: Ginsberg herself had said exactly what it meant. This was a far less ambiguous and far more serious display of bias by a SCOTUS justice than the contrived flag outrage, yet no Republicans in Congress exploited the incident to call for Ginsburg to recuse herself from future cases, or to move for a Congressional censure.

Ah, but Ginsburg was a news media favorite, female, progressive, Democrat and cute in her casual and repeated crossing of the lines of judicial propriety. I have to check, but I don’t recall the members of my legal ethics expert association registering any problem with Ginsberg’s open protest of Trump’s election, while the listserv has been roiling over Alito’s flags all week, with Ginsberg-adoring female members being particularly indignant.

At the last second I deleted a comment I was ready to make yesterday after following the hypocritical thread. It read, “I’m sorry, but the partisan bias and hypocrisy being displayed here by alleged legal ethics scholars isn’t just depressing, it’s disgusting.”

Blackman concluded, “I have a very, very difficult time taking the outrage over the Alitos’ flags seriously. The Justices routinely convey messages through their words and deeds. Who gets to decide what is an appearance of impropriety? People who are inclined to despise the conservative Justices will draw the worst possible inferences from all of their acts….These people are loathe to co-exist with anything they disagree with, so will take umbrage at the slightest sleights.”

In contrast, I take it very seriously. The Double standard harshly demonstrates how little integrity and honesty exists even among our most trusted professionals.

Oh-Oh! Now It Seems That TWO Historical Flags Someone Else Has Used As Free Speech Were Seen Flying Over a Justice Alito Residence! Clearly, This Violates the “Obscure Flags” Section in the Judicial Code of Ethics….

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The contrived Justice Alito flags controversy has exactly one valid use: it shows that the panicked Axis has lost all sense of proportion and self-preservation, that its ethics alarms are deader than Generalissimo Franco, and that between now and November nothing can be ruled out, from violent uprisings to horrified leftist wackos tearing off their clothes, painting themselves mauve and running amuck coast to coast while shouting dirty limericks. Good to know.

Here’s the New York Times, which launched the previous “Bad flag, BAD flag! “scoop (as of this moment, the Times has published nine—NINE!—articles about the flags):

Last summer, two years after an upside-down American flag was flown outside the Virginia home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., another provocative symbol was displayed at his vacation house in New Jersey, according to interviews and photographs.

This time, it was the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which, like the inverted U.S. flag, was carried by rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Also known as the Pine Tree flag, it dates back to the Revolutionary War, but largely fell into obscurity until recent years and is now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the “Stop the Steal” campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.

Three photographs obtained by The New York Times, along with accounts from a half-dozen neighbors and passers-by, show that the Appeal to Heaven flag was aloft at the Alito home on Long Beach Island in July and September of 2023. A Google Street View image from late August also shows the flag.

In two words, so what?

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