U.S. Society

Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Yesterday was the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi attack on the Jewish community that launched the Holocaust. I found mention of the event rather muted compared to past years; maybe it was my imagination. However, it seems to me that the news media would have been doing its job to make a special point of reminding the public of “The Night of Broken Glass” (which would more accurately be called, “The Night of Brutalized Jews). May be then more Americans would understand why that catchy chant that begins “From the river to the sea” is just a bit more chilling to Jews than “Hey hey, ho ho, LBJ has got to go…”

But that’s just what I’m thinking about. What are YOU thinking about in the mad, mad, mad, mad world of ethics?

Ethics Dunce: North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls [Photo Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The North Carolina Code of Judicial Conduct differs little from the judicial codes of the other 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the federal judiciary. Among its edicts:

  • “A judge should …personally observe appropriate standards of conduct to ensure that the integrity and independence of the judiciary shall be preserved.” [Canon 1]
  • “A judge should respect and comply with the law and should conduct himself/herself at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.” [Canon 2]
  • “A judge may speak, write, lecture, teach, participate in cultural or historical activities, or otherwise engage in activities concerning the economic, educational, legal, or governmental system, or the administration of justice….if in doing so the judge does not cast substantial doubt on the judge’s capacity to decide impartially any issue that may come before the judge…”[Canon 4]

Despite all of these strictures, Justice Earls gave an interview to Law360 in which she suggested that the justice system is racially biased, citing the lack of racially diverse clerks, and suggested that white judges and other court personnel discriminate against black and female lawyers. She also stated that her conservative colleagues on the North Carolina Supreme Court are more concerned with advancing the conservative legal movement than with their duty to improve the court system. She specifically singled out her own court’s Chief Judge, citing him as an example of “the general antipathy towards seeing that racial issues matter in our justice system.”

These comments to the media violated all of those ethics provisions above, and arguably some others. A lawyer violates North Carolina ethics rules by impugning the integrity of a judge (NCRPC 8.2), and for a state Supreme Court Justice to do this is infinitely more damaging to the public’s respect for and trust of the justice system. After that interview, the Court launched an official investigation to determine whether she had violated the Judicial Code and undermined the judicial system.

Good.

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Ethics Hero (Surprise!): Hillary Clinton

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Hillary agreed to go on “The View,” a guaranteed friendly forum but also a den of morons, and, apparently off the cuff, gave a clear, coherent explanation for why the pro-Hamas postures of many in her own party are ignorant and ethically wrong. The only aspect of her explanation that I would fault is her not making it plain that Hamas “took over” Gaza because the population wanted it to., and thus she does not counter the fatuous “innocent Gazans” talking point.

I also give her credit for explaining why Barack Obama, worshipfully cited by peak idiot Sunny Hostin as if his despicable comments on the war were profound rather than fatuous and facile, was in fact full of it while nodding her head and pretending to agree with her ex-boss. She makes it clear (except maybe to the idiots she is talking to) that he is dead wrong. “We’re all accountable to history,” is brilliant doubletalk, absolutely meaningless but diplomatic.

Yes, yes, Hillary dutifully gives lip-service to a future “two-state solution.” It’s about on par with singing “Imagine,” annoying, but forgivable. There’s nothing wrong with saying you want impossible things, as long as you know they’re impossible.

Amidst The Madness And Rot, One Promise Of Hope…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Behold:

1. In Ohio, over 2 million voters put their approval on an official guarantee of abortion rights, deceptively defined in the language of the amendment as “reproductive medical treatment” as if that is the only feature of abortions that matters. This was done, paradoxically enough, even as the pro-Hamas demonstrations and rhetoric coast to coast evoke shadows of the Holocaust, and as the approved measure endorses the approximately one million human lives that will be destroyed by “reproductive medical treatment” this year.

Not one of those voters in Ohio could prevail in a genuine debate of the ethics of abortion. Meanwhile, millions more Ohioans who would profess to finding abortion immoral and unconscionable didn’t care enough about those million aborted lives to bother to vote.

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More Technology Ethics: Electric Planes

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This will, I assume, eventually be recognized as part of the Climate Change Hysteria Ethics Train Wreck.

The New York Times is all excited about the prospect of electric planes, and updates us on their progress. New experimental battery-powered airplanes are showing us “what aviation could look like years from now — one in which the skies are filled with aircraft that do not emit the greenhouse gases that are dangerously warming up the Earth.”

Of course, “modern batteries can support limited range and weight. As a result, the aircraft that they power can generally carry only a handful of passengers, or the equivalent load in cargo.” Not only that, but “widespread flights won’t be possible without expanded infrastructure like vertical landing and takeoff sites and public support” and “the cost of producing such aircraft will also be high to start, limiting their use to the well-heeled and to critical services like medical evacuations.”

Hey, that’s all right: the U.S. has money to spare on projects like this. It’s not like that 1 trillion dollars in interest the U.S. amasses yearly now, the single biggest item in the budget, is real money.

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Technology Ethics Fail: Self-Checkout

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

I am happy to say that I foresaw this mess the first time I encountered these things, in a local Home Depot, if I recall correctly. even if they worked reliably and were user friendly—and they don’t and aren’t—it was obvious from the very dawn of the era that they would allow retailers to reduce staff while making the shopping experience less pleasant for consumers. And so it has. But it wasn’t sold that way, and, as usual, much of the public was ovine in its acceptance. Sure, long checkout lines would be a thing of the past! Now you wouldn’t have to deal with the underlings who man the registers. Store employees would be free and able to answer inquiries! Wunderbar!

Right. You still have to wait in line. The checkout kiosks are persnickety if you, for example, fail to set a purchase down in the right spot. Scanning items doesn’t always work, and its easy to scanned an item more than once. Problems and glitches arise so frequently that counter staff are constantly called on to deal with them, meaning that customers who wisely eschewed the delightful self-checkout adventure are stranded in line. Heaven forfend that you try to self-checkout a product with some kind of purchase restriction. Meanwhile, a lot of self-checkout machines break down, and because it’s expensive to fix them, often sit useless for a while, causing more back-ups.

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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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Ethics Alarms Ethics: Struggling To Find “Balance” In The Ethical Breaches Of The Left And Right

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I’m going to try to make this a short scream of frustration and a call for help.

Nobody believes this, but I really try to search for examples of ethical misbehavior from the right side of the political spectrum and admirable ethical conduct from the Left. I do. The events and people determine what goes up on Ethics Alarms; I have no ideological agenda. However finding some semblance of balance started becoming difficult in 2016, as the “resistance”/Democratic Party/ mainstream media alliance began solidifying (that’s the “Axis of Unethical Conduct”), and Trump Derangement caused the Left (and others, like the Bill Kristol NeverTrumpers ) to lose all touch with restraint and decency to begin what has been called here the 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck. I saw that as a disastrous political and cultural development then, and I was right.

Because I (correctly) view this as a historically destructive development in not only American politics and institutions but our society and culture generally, this has led, unavoidably, though critics of EA refuse to accept that, to a disproportional amount of criticism of progressives and their captive institutions, like academia, scholarship, journalism, entertainment, law, medicine, and Big Tech among others.

The imbalance has become worse over the last several months, and now, with the Democratic Party revealing itself to be so infected by anti-Semitism, a dearth of integrity, hypocrisy and whatever the combination of panic, denial and rage is, the content here only promises to seem more unbalanced still.

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Ethics Dunce: NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles, And A Nelson

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Let me say at the outset that the NFL and, by extension, all of its teams are so thoroughly and constantly corrupt and unethical that its periodic examples of ethical obtuseness—other than paying its players to cripple themselves, which is ongoing—should probably be categorized under The Julie Principle, as in “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, pro football’s unethical, stop wond’ring why…” This episode is also part of the Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck, however, so it’s worthy of a post.

George Norcross, who is a prominent and wealth Democratic Party activist and power broker, hung a combined American and Israeli flag from his private box at the Eagle’s Lincoln Financial Field during the team’s against the Dallas Cowboys two days ago. Stadium security confronted Norcross over the flags and took him into custody after he refused to remove them. Then they took them down.

The Eagles cited its policy that “signs, banners or similar items that are obscene or indecent, unrelated to the event, potentially offensive to other patrons, that may block the views of other fans or that are otherwise considered dangerous or inappropriate by the Eagles are prohibited.”

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The New York Times Legal Expert Doesn’t Understand The Constitution

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Well that’s a kick in the head! Actually, the expert in question is Linda Greenhouse, the Supreme Court reporter for The Times from 1978 to 2008 and once a regular participant in those Sunday Morning network “round tables” when a talk show wanted to pretend it had a balanced and non-partisan array. Greenhouse is a strongly left-biased Democrat legal analyst, often a dishonest one, and her latest column for the Times proves again that it is propaganda and woke advocacy, not legal enlightenment, that she serves.

Once again, I wish “A Friend,” formerly our resident Times apologist, was still allowed here so I could read his tortured defense of the paper for printing this sinister crap.

Do read “Will the Supreme Court Toss Out a Gun Law Meant to Protect Women?” I wouldn’t bother to quote it if the Times didn’t make you pay for the privilege of rolling your eyes, but I will, a bit. The headline says it all, though, and by “all” I mean anti-rights, anti-due process totalitarian cant. You know, Democratic Party/progressive/ “Do Something!” stuff.

If the Constitution contains an enumerated right in its Bill of Rights, the fact that a law directly violating that right may, in the eyes of some, have some beneficial effects is irrelevant unless there is a massive, existential justification for an exception. Otherwise, the law is unconstitutional. Current progressives and Democrats don’t believe that, or rather, object to the principle. The believe that if speech “hurts” someone by making them feel bad, expresses taboo opinions or makes a sanctified group member feel “unsafe,” laws blocking or punishing that speech shouldn’t be seen as a First Amendment violation, though, in fact, they are. If the right to a fair trial has to be ignored to make sure that a cop whose knee inadvertently triggered nationwide riots and DEI craziness ends up in prison for life, well, reasons the Left, you gotta break some eggs to make a metaphorical omelette, the eggs being the Bill of Rights.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, following SCOTUS’s long-delayed and essential 2022 ruling in Bruen that the Second Amendment means what it says and is about the human right to bear arms and not militias, declared a federal law unconstitutional that prohibited a person subject to a court-issued restraining order for domestic violence from owning a gun. It was and is obviously the right decision except to anti-gun zealots who believe in pre-crime laws, red flag laws, and anything along the slippery slope to outright Second Amendment repeal. The Supreme Court is obviously going to uphold the Fifth Circuit, because its ruling was correct. The only question is whether any of the three far-left ladies on the Court will have the integrity to follow the law. I have some hope for Justice Kagan.

But to read Greenhouse, one would think, and by “one” I mean a typical American who doesn’t read SCOTUS opinions, couldn’t name five of the first ten Amendments and doesn’t comprehend what the Supreme Court’s job is, that the fact that an invalid law has good intentions should be sufficient reason to let it stand. (I doubt the law at issue even had good intentions.)

What the law allows in domestic abuse restraining orders is for judges to issue them solely on the testimony of the complainant, and that act will ban an individual from exercising his right to bear arms. Evidentiary standards are minimal; judges are inclined to grant requests for restraining orders because if there is violence against a complainant after the judge finds no cause—moral luck lurks! —the judge is going to be crucified. The other party doesn’t have a right to be present at the hearing, so the result of the law struck down would be that individuals could lose a core enumerated right without due process of law, based solely on the word of an adverse party.

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