The Internet

Law And Ethics Notes

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

ethics and law

I’m desperately trying to meet a course materials deadline so my brain is stuck on law right now. Here are are few items of general interest:

1. As expected, the Supreme Court passed on the various cases involving the election, ruling them moot, which indeed they are. Thomas and Alito dissented, with Gorsuch joining with Alito, on the grounds that it would be prudent to take up the issues involved in those cases now, to avoid a repeat in the next election.

Justice Thomas wrote:

“The Constitution gives to each state legislature authority to determine the ‘Manner’ of federal elections,” Yet both before and after the 2020 election, nonlegislative officials in various States took it upon themselves to set the rules instead. As a result, we received an unusually high number of petitions and emergency applications contesting those changes.”

Thomas argued that the cases Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Veronica DeGraffenreid (2021) and Jake Corman v. Pennsylvania Democratic Party (2021) presented “a clear example” of election law issues that the Supreme Court should settle, writing

“The Pennsylvania Legislature established an unambiguous deadline for receiving mail-in ballots: 8 p.m. on election day. Dissatisfied, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extended that deadline by three days. That decision to rewrite the rules seems to have affected too few ballots to change the outcome of any federal election. But that may not be the case in the future. These cases provide us with an ideal opportunity to address just what authority nonlegislative officials have to set election rules, and to do so well before the next election cycle. The refusal to do so is inexplicable.”

Oh, I can explain it. The Court doesn’t want to inject a destabilizing element into what is already dangerously widespread suspicion about the election. An opinion that said, in essence, “This was illegal, and some illicit votes were allowed to count that shouldn’t, probably not enough to change the results, but at this point, who knows?” would not be helpful or wise.

2. If you think a lawyer looking like a cat at a hearing is bad, or appearing before a judge on Zoom in pajamas, or a professor being on mute for two hours while lecturing remotely, consider this: Peruvian defense lawyer Héctor Cipriano Paredes Robles was taking part in a virtual hearing when his video feed began to show him stripping naked, and engaging in enthusiastic sex with a naked woman.The judge, John Chahua Torres, tried to alert Robles that the hearing participants could see him and his partner’s multiple positions on the live feed, but the lawyer was, uh, busy.

“We are witnessing obscene acts which represent a violation of public decency and are aggravated by the fact they are being recorded nationally!” Judge Torres said.

Good point.

Continue reading →

George Washington’s Birthday Ethics Warm-Up, 2/22/21: Happy Birthday, George! We’re Sorry Your Country Has Become Populated With So Many Ignorant, Ungrateful Fools…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

portrait_of_george_washington

If there is any American whose birthday should be a national holiday, it is George Washington, born this day in 1732 in Westmoreland County, Virginia, the first of six children of Augustine and Mary Ball Washington. If I have to tell you the reasons he was “the essential man” in American history, well, I guess you’re the product of our current public school system, a recent college graduate, a Democrat, a Black Lives Matter enthusiast, or something. There is no rational excuse for every American, yes, even African-Americans, to not be grateful for this day. Martin Luther King is now the only individual to have a national holiday dedicated to his honor, while Washington’s memory was dumped into a hodge-podge of lesser figures including Franklin Pierce, William Henry Harrison and now, Donald Trump. King is worthy of his day, but to honor King over Washington is as good an example of “putting the cart before the horse” as one could find. Shame on us. True, George is not lacking honors, with the capital city named for him, a towering monument, cities and towns in many states, Mt. Rushmore, and his image on both the most-used bill and coin. Nonetheless he earned all of it, and this date should be a holiday.

On The Ethics Alarms home page, you will see to your right a link to the list of ethical habits some historians believe made Washington the remarkably trustworthy and ethical man he was, ultimately leading his fellow Founders to choose him, and not one the many more brilliant, learned and accomplished among them, to take on the crucial challenge of creating the American Presidency. Directed to do so by his father, young Washington copied out by hand and committed to memory a list called “110 Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.”  It was  based on a document compiled by French Jesuits in 1595; neither the authors nor the English translator and adapter are known today. The elder Washington was following the teachings of Aristotle—another Dead White Man whom most Americans alive today couldn’t tell you Jack S-word about— who held that principles and values began as being externally imposed by authority (morals) and eventually became internalized as character. As I wrote when I first posted them here,

The theory certainly worked with George Washington. Those ethics alarms installed by his father stayed in working order throughout his life. It was said that Washington was known to quote the rules when appropriate, and never forgot them. They did not teach him to be a gifted leader he became, but they helped to make him a trustworthy one.

Would that readers would access that list more often. And politicians. And lawyers. And educators…

1. How ignorant and ungrateful? THIS ignorant and ungrateful…

Continue reading →

From The “Bias Makes You Stupid”—But Funny!— Files, The Unethical Tweet Of The Week: Daily Beast Editor Justin Baragona

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

googly eyes

No, actually it appears that this editor of a progressive website is so steeped in confirmation bias that he made thatabsurd accusation without checking because Carlton is an eeeeevil conservative, and there is nothing he won’t stoop to in order to make the Right’s foes look bad. Literally.

You see, that’s Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s real face. Her eyes bug out all the time; it was one of the first things I noticed about her. Imagine, an editor in the journalism profession tweets out a completely false assertion without doing the minimal amount of verification, which would have been watching the woman in any interview, or perusing the photos on Google. If Baragona had the requisite amount of shame, fairness and decency, he would apologize to Tucker, apologize to AOC for saying she has googly eyes (she does, but it’s not polite to say so), and take a leave of absence without pay for making the Daily Beast look like the hack cyber-rag it is.

Nah, he couldn’t even manage the apology part. He pulled the tweet, and wrote,

lame retraction

And this, gentle reader, is how a website joins Breitbart, The Gateway Pundit, The Smoking Gun, and a couple of others on the Ethics Alarms Untrustworthy Sources List.

At least the Daily Beast gave me a good and hardy laugh on the way to oblivion.

Now the evil Toon played by Christopher Lloyd in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit/” REALLY had googly eyes.…

Googly eyes

_____________________

Pointer: Twitchy

Valentine’s Day Ethics Warm-Up: “Ya Gotta Love Ethics!”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

valentines-day-hearts-9

I’m going to see if I can get through this entire post without mentioning yesterday’s acquittal of Donald Trump. There’s a whole other post around the corner for that. Let’s see.

I was sorely tempted to post the simple word “Good!” to my Facebook feed, but resisted the temptation. All it would have accomplished was to trigger some genuinely, or at least formerly, nice and reasonable people….who have nonetheless been smug, abusive, irrational, nasty, obsessed, hateful and harmful to the culture and society since November 2016. And as much as the Duke in “McClintock!” is an inspiration…

…I won’t. At least, not right now.

1, And the audacious hypocrisy continues! To a ridiculous and childish extent, too. Here’s Dr. Jill Biden’s kindergarten-style, “do as we say not as we do,” signaling-virtue-while-not-actually-engaging-in-it White House lawn display.

Biden diaplay

How nauseating.

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Oppressing The Twitter Troll”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

censorship cartoon

This is Glenn Logan’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Oppressing The Twitter Troll”:

I always like to look at the law, and at the charges, to see if they are particularized and actually allege a violation.It seems to me the particular law at issue is 18 U.S. Code § 241 – Conspiracy against rights. The relevant text would seem to be paragraph 1:

“If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same; orIf two or more persons go in disguise on the highway, or on the premises of another, with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege so secured—“

What the government is alleging here, apparently, is essentially a conspiracy to cyber-bully. Attempting to convince others to vote a certain way or not to vote at all is called “electioneering” and is not only legal in the United States, but protected speech under the First Amendment, as well as widely practiced by all political parties 24-7-365, legally and peacefully. The law criminalizing conspiracies to deprive persons of rights was passed during the civil rights era and was plainly directed at the Klu Klux Klan and similar organizations.

As we all know, those groups would intimidate voters of all races, but primarily black people and their sympathizers, by burning crosses, lynchings, threats, and other violent actions to suppress or affect voting against the groups’ interests. Most of their methods were illegal under state and federal law to begin with, but the law in this case provided an additional tool to attack those who plannedlawless actions against the rights of others as well as those who carried them out. It is a bit like the Civil RICO laws, which were primarily aimed at those who directed corrupt mob actions but almost never participated in overt criminal activity.

Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 2/3/21: Cold Day Reflections [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Shining Frozen

1. Wait, what? Ann Althouse revealed this week that she doesn’t read all of the paragraphs in articles she blogs about. She was caught doing this is a post I didn’t read, since it involved her weird concern about the sounds ice makes in a glass. The law professor had asked a question that was answered in the article, but Ann didn’t read that far.

I have found that blogging inherently requires doing opinion and analysis with less than all the facts, or, in the alternative, writing only an article a day. The Ethics Scoreboard, now online, was an ethics website, not a blog, and I spent easily three times the research and consideration on each post that I do now on Ethics Alarms. I also had a webmaster who caught most typos. I eventually decided to switch to blog, because I couldn’t come close to covering the field in only a post a day (if even that), and because I wanted to have an ethics forum with participation from commenters. I sympathize with Ann: blogging is time consuming even if you write as quickly as I do. Then you have the proofing, tagging and administrative stuff. I can see why she would get in the habit of skimming articles.

But it’s still reckless, and guarantees mistakes and an erosion of trust. To her credit, she admitted that she does this in her post, but didn’t seem to say that she was about to change.

Continue reading →

It’s A Shame That Twitter Is Such A Deliberate Enabler Of Single Party Rule, A Hypocritical Speech Censor And An Enemy Of Democracy, Because There Is A Lot You Can Still Learn There….

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

evil_twitter_bird

1. For example, you can learn that CNN is just as untrustworthy as Twitter is….

CNN tweet3

Only occasionally I wish I had the complete absence of a life necessary to hang around Twitter and make trenchant, witty and withering responses to something like that tweet, which show either an epic lack of self-awareness by the tweeter, or a deep, deep belief that its consumers are complete idiots. I vote for the latter.

Here are some of the responses:

  • “It’s a show where they just run the @CNN logo for the hour”
  • “It’ll be a useless conversation if you fail to examine the role of @CNN in fueling and sustaining the division for ratings and profits”
  • “Any final shred of CNN sense of self-awareness was apparently surgically removed years ago.”
  • “Your fucking network, that’s what!”
  • “Here’s a good place to start: CNN covered up the mass killing of thousands of NY seniors because it has an anchor who is brother to sociopath.”

2. You can learn that many conservatives don’t comprehend the concept of “ethics”…

Continue reading →

Is It Ethical For Responsible Americans To Remain On Facebook?

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Facebook-Censorship

There was some sort of good news but also seriously ominous news regarding Facebook’s increasingly brazen efforts to distort public debate and to use its power to restrict free speech. Unfortunately, the good news wasn’t nearly good enough, and the rest might just be the proverbial straw that breaks the metaphorical camel’s back, at least for me.

On the slightly positive side was that the giant social media platform has reversed several instances of content removal after review by the company’s “independent” (I am not convinced how independent it is) oversight body. Facebook’s new 20-member Oversight Board released its first verdicts yesterday, and overturned four of five censorship decisions. Facebook is now allowed seven days to restore the banned content.

But why does it take seven days? It doesn’t really: this is a stall. With time sensitive material, the license just compounds the harm.

Now the board will decide whether to keep former President Trump’s page banned permanently. That should tell us whether the review system is legitimate or a sham with a purely political agenda, for there can be no justification for blocking the words, views and opinions of any prominent national leader, particularly a President, and particularly particularly one who is routinely savaged with twisted accusations every day by the news media and every second by other Facebook users. The Oversight Board will issue a decision in the next 90 days as the ban continues. It’s a another transparent stall. This isn’t a hard call, and if it is for anyone, then that is signature significance for disqualifying bias.

Continue reading →

GameStop Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

Guest Post by Andrew Nelson and Rich in Ct, with a note by Humble Talent

GameStop

[I would say that finance is among my worst topics along with soccer and calculus. My request for clarification on the current GameStop controversy and its ethics implications attracted helpful responses, and I am combining them into one collaborative post. First, Andrew:]

Gamestop, a publicly traded company, was seen as undervalued by some users of an internet forum, in this case, a reddit forum called r/wallstreetbets. That same stock was seen as on the brink of collapse by a hedge fund management group, Melvin Capital, who decided to short sell….

_______________________

Here Humble Talent clarifies:

A short sell is when someone, usually a broker, is holding stock in a company they think is overvalued. They owe their client X number of shares, regardless of the price. So if you have 100 shares of Game Stop stock at $4, and you think it’s going to $2, you sell at $4 and then rebuy the stock at $2, pocketing the difference and letting your client swallow the loss. It’s a loss they would have swallowed one way or the other, so they’re not really hurt, per se. Basically, you’re betting that a stock will go down in value. If the stock instead increases in value, you lose the difference. I think it breaks a fundamental fiduciary duty and should be illegal, but it’s where we are.

So what happened here was that a lot of people thought Game Stop was overvalued, it was listed at approximately what I said it was, between $3 and $4 per share. Short sellers were banking on it decreasing in value, so they sold all their client’s shares. Now that there’s been a ridiculous noise buy on these stocks, and they’ve *increased* in value 1000% (real number) instead of decreasing 50% (expectation) the firms that short sold the stock are going to have to find stock to buy to make their client’s portfolios whole. Which means that they will have to buy thousands of shares back at $400 when they sold them at $4, instead of $2, which they expected to. That 2000% difference over all those shares represents tens of millions of dollars, just on the Game Stop shares.

Basically, a bunch of unethical portfolio managers got their paws slammed hard in the cookie jars of their client’s portfolios, and it’s magnificent.

_______________________

….Whether through intent or accident, these two groups converged on Gamestop at roughly the same time.Regardless of original intent, the users of the reddit forum got more and more people to buy into that stock, causing the price per share to inflate drastically. It’s sitting at over $400 per share when I last checked. A similar situation is happening with AMC stock, though with less drastic inflation.

Continue reading →

In This Week’s Very Special Episode of “The Conways”….

/ Jack Marshall / 54 Comments

Claudia and Kellyanne

When we last left the lovable and unpredictable Conways, Kellyanne Conway, Counselor to President Trump, announced that she was exiting her White House post to focus on her family after her 16-year-old daughter, Claudia, claimed she was seeking emancipation from her parents over alleged “trauma and abuse.” At the same time, George Conway, the D.C. lawyer who repeatedly embarrassed his wife by attacking her boss and helping to create the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, quit his role with the group, also to deal with the family crisis.

In this week’s Very Special episode, a topless photo of Claudia was posted on Mom Kellyanne’s Twitter account using Twitter’s recently launched Fleets feature, which deletes posts after a 24-hour period. The Fleet was captured by many Twitter users anyway. Claudia then posted videos on TikTok, her favorite milieu (they are now deleted but also captured by others and reposted) confirming that the nude picture was authentic. Claudia speculated, “I’m assuming my mom took a picture of it to use against me one day and then somebody hacked her or something. I’m literally at a loss for words. If you see it, report it.” In one of the TikTok videos, Claudia Conway said that “nobody would ever have any photo like that, ever. So, Kellyanne, you’re going to fucking jail.”

Yesterday, Claudia announced that she and her mother will be “taking a break from social media” and will work on their relationship adding, “I know that my mom would never, ever post anything to hurt me like that intentionally, and I do believe she was hacked…… Please do not incite hate or violence on my family. Please, no threats, no calls to authorities. I love my mom and she loves me.”

Forgive me if I am skeptical that a daughter who just this month again said her parents abused her authored that voluntarily.

Observations:

Continue reading →