Rights

Ethics Quiz: The Innocent-Until-Proven-Guilty College Basketball Star

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Illinois guard Terrence Shannon Jr. 23, was arrested in Lawrence, Kansas on Dec. 28 and charged with rape. While he visited Lawrence last September, he grabbed a woman and sexually assaulted her at a bar, or so the woman claimed to police. The Illini suspended Shannon following his arrest, but the player’s attorney requested a temporary restraining order against the school this month to force Illinois to let him resume playing basketball. A federal judge granted the request on January 19.

Shannon has been playing with the basketball team ever since. Last week, playing against Northwestern in his first road game since the arrest, he was taunted by fans chanting “No means no!” and “Guilty!”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is this: Continue reading →

More Evidence California Doesn’t Get That First Amendment Thingy…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

It’s not the only one, but still…

Assembly Bill 1831, introduced by California Assemblyman Marc Berman (D–Palo Alto) this month, would expand the state’s definition of child pornography to include “representations of real or fictitious persons generated through use of artificially intelligent software or computer-generated means, who are, or who a reasonable person would regard as being, real persons under 18 years of age, engaging in or simulating sexual conduct.”

Does Berman comprehend why the possession of child pornography is a crime in the first place? Clearly not. Somebody please explain to him that the criminal element in child porn is the abuse of living children required to make it. The theory, which I have always considered something of a stretch but can accept the ethical argument it embodies from a utilitarian perspective, is that those who purchase or otherwise show a proactive fondness for such “art” in effect aid, abet, encourage and make possible the continuation of the criminal abuse and trafficking of minors. It is not that such photos, films and videos cause one to commit criminal acts on children. That presumption slides down a slippery slope that would justify banning everything from Mickey Spillane novels to “The Walking Dead.”

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Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Oklahoma State Senator: Nathan Dahm, (R-Broken Arrow)

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Senator Dahm has introduced Senate Bill 1837, the “Common Sense Freedom of Press Control Act.” Here are its main provisions:

“Each individual reporter, producer, writer, editor, or any other employee involved in the production of content distributed by a media outlet is hereby required to:

a. complete a criminal background check conducted by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation,
b. receive a license as prescribed by the Corporation Commission as provided in subsection C of this section,
c. complete a propaganda-free safety training course of no less than eight (8) hours as prescribed by the State Department of Education, which shall be developed in coordination with PragerU,
d. provide proof of liability insurance no less than One Million Dollars ($1,000,000.00), and
e. submit to quarterly drug testing for illicit substances to be administered by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation”

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Now THAT’s an Incompetent Lawyer! “Now What?” Asks His Death Row Inmate Client…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Joseph Gamboa, marked for execution in Texas, is petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to save his life. His argument is that a court-appointed lawyer was so inept that he killed his chance to challenge his murder conviction in federal court. The Supreme Court is will examine this week whether justice was done in Gamboa’s case even though his attorney made one botch after another. Indeed, he could hardly have done worse if he had the Ghostbusters’ lawyer (Rick Moranis) from “Ghostbusters 2.”

Gamboa was convicted and sentenced to death in 2007 for two murders during a robbery, but he swears that he is innocent. His court-appointed lawyer, John J. Ritenour Jr., met with Gamboa only once, the condemned man argues in his SCOTUS brief, then filed a habeas petition. At that single meeting, Gamboa says he brought documents that indicated prosecutors withheld potentially exculpatory evidence (a Brady violation!) that another man had committed the killings. Ritenour did not take the documents, Gamboa’s brief says. In a sworn statement, Gamboa stated that “Mr. Ritenour told me that he had read the state court record in my case and believed I was guilty.”

It took Ritenour almost a year to filed the habeus corpus petition, and it was a hack job. The petition was cut-and-pasted from an earlier one for another client, even repeating the same typos and grammatical errors. It even featured the name of the other client, Obie Weather, where the lawyer hadn’t quite finished proof-reading. Nor was the document signed by Gamboa, a requirement. Gamboa says that the petition did not include any of the arguments they had discussed…understandable, since the document was basically copied from a different case.

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Will Someone Please Explain To Me Why A School Board Would Settle This Case?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The settlement was for the defendant school board to pay the grand total of $101 toformer student Brielle Penkoski three years after she was sent home from the Livingston Academy public high school (in Tennessee) for wearing the shirt above. Not surprisingly, the mainstream media hasn’t carried this story, as damages that tiny are considered symbolic at best. However, the fact that the defendant paid at all is symbolic, and from my viewpoint, it symbolizes a misreading of the First Amendment.

Yeah, yeah, the settlement came with the typical boilerplate language stating that the result comes “without acknowledgement of wrongdoing on the part of any party or the agents or employees of any party, which wrongdoing is expressly denied.” But Christian Right publications and websites are cheering the result—the school board will also pay the plaintiff’s attorney’s fees and costs—as vindication.

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After Harvard’s Wagon-Circling: This Will Not End Well….

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

While I was certain that Harvard would not have the integrity or guts to dump its albatross of a president having trapped the university in DEI Hell by selecting a black female social justice warrior in the first place, I have never held any illusions that this reflex circling of the progressive wagons and rote vote of confidence would do anything to slow Harvard’s demise. To be curt: the nation’s most prestigious university—for now—has a flat learning curve.

Isn’t that ironic.

Here are three updates on the ongoing Harvard debacle:

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The Cognitive Dissonance Scale And Jobs Lost After Hamas-Israel War Outbursts On Social Media

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The scenario has been a theme this week. Someone shoots off his or her metaphorical mouth showing ignorance and probable anti-Semitic bias in a social media post designed for public consumption, and loses a job when the employer decides that it doesn’t want to lose business from those who might wonder, “Why do they hire people like that?”

It is not a First Amendment issue. It is a an irresponsible employee issue. Hollywood has been especially busy. Spyglass, the company that owns the “Scream” film franchise, fired actress Melissa Barrera from the upcoming “Scream VII” (There are going to be seven of these?) after she posted standard issue “genocide/innocent Gazans/ cruel Israel messages. “THIS IS GENOCIDE & ETHNIC CLEANSING,” she concluded.

1) No, it isn’t, and 2) You really don’t understand the Cognitive Dissonance Scale, do you?

It’s really quite simple, Melissa…

For the vast majority of Americans who pay attention and aren’t intersectional fanatics, supporting the Palestinian-Hamas “From the river to the sea” mission is at the bottom of the scale. People who want to see movies must regard the films and its stars above zero, ideally quite a bit above. If that film or its stars associate themselves with a deeply negative point of view or conduct, that connection (think of being tied to an anchor) drags the positive attitudes down, meaning fewer tickets sold, and in turn fewer profits.

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How DEI Is Systemic Racism: A Case Study

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion ideology essentially addresses “systemic racism” by enforcing and advocating systemic racism. It would be difficult to envision a scenario that better illustrates this than the scandal now being revealed at the University of Washington, where the Department of Psychology hired a black candidate for a professor position despite the hiring committee’s assessment that an Asian applicant and a white one had superior qualifications, with the white candidate rated the strongest of the group.

The decision violated a university policy barring discrimination on the basis of race and sex, as well as the law banning affirmative action practices—that is, racial discrimination for “good” reasons— in the state of Washington. An investigation was launched after a whistleblower complained about the process, and the resulting report by the university’s Complaint Investigation & Resolution Office found that the psychology department distorted its hiring process to give the black applicant an assistant professor’s position titled “Diversity in Development,” though it had ranked a white academic first out of 84 applicants.

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Regarding The Ohio Right To Abortion Amendment

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Last night, Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment that guarantees the right to abortion. The tally wasn’t close: 2,186, 962 favored the measure, or 56.6%, while only 1,675, 72, or 43%, opposed putting a right to abortions in the state constitution.

The first point to understand is that this is not a rejection of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs over-ruling Roe v. Wade, but the exact result the Supreme Court ruled the Constitution intended. It is and always whould have been the states’ call: abortion is not a federal issue, and the national Constitution is silent on it, despite the political and ideological dishonesty of Roe. What Ohio did is exactly what the Supreme Court ruled it should do: let voters, not courts, decide the issue.

Logically, this decision should take abortion out of the 2024 election in Ohio, and if Republicans are smart <cough> that’s what they should say. “It’s in the constitution now, and we’ll follow the law. I still believe abortion is wrong in most cases, and I will work toward making that clear enough that Ohioans change the law, but right now, the decision has been made.”

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Yes, “Free Speech Is In Trouble,” But Let’s Be Clear About Why And Who’s Responsible

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“538” founder and exile Nate Silver is now opining on substack and doing very well, thank-you, but he still is an infuriatingly biased progressive pretending to be objective. His topic in “Free Speech Is In Trouble” is the 2024 (?) college free speech rankings from a College Pulse/ FIRE survey of over 55,000 undergraduates across a wide range of colleges and universities. The results are pretty clear and ambiguous: most self-identified progressive students don’t believe in free speech and want those who don’t conform to woke ideology silenced or intimidated. This poses a serious threat to the culture and democracy.

See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? But Nate, being Nate, repeatedly buries the lede and distracts from that conclusion. Oh, he says it, sort of, many times, but it’s always stated in an equivocal manner bordering on deceitful.

At the top, Silver says, “And after seeing the latest polling on what college students think about free speech, I don’t concern over “cancel culture” or the erosion of free speech norms is just some moral panic. In fact, I think people are neglecting how quick and broad the shifts have been, especially on the left.”

Not “especially” on the Left, Nate: on the Left—you know, your team. He says, as a summary of the results,”College students aren’t very enthusiastic about free speech. In particular, that’s true for liberal or left-wing students, who are at best inconsistent in their support of free speech and have very little tolerance for controversial speech they disagree with. ” Why state a generality that isn’t true? It isn’t “college students,” it’s progressive, woke students who have little commitment to free speech. “But this looks like a major generational shift from when college campuses were hotbeds of advocacy for free speech, particularly on the left,” he says a bit later. It’s not a generational shift, it’s an ideological shift and a values shift, on the Left.

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