U.S. Society

“Election-Deniers!”

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Apparently the latest deceptive slur on those who question the integrity of the 2020 election—which had less than any Presidential election in this century plus at least 40 years back in the previous one—is “election denier.” Nice. I found it ironic that just as an esteemed commenter here has been trying mightily in good faith to argue that the New York Times is not a constant purveyor of partisan propaganda, the paper headlines a front-page story, “Election Deniers Seek State Posts To Certify Votes,” a slimy and misleading header by any standard. Following in the muddy footsteps of the climate change fanatics, using “denier” to characterize those who oppose the Left’s cant, the Times headline plays a despicable cognitive dissonance game. “Denier,” until the climate change mob started using it, had previously only applied to the deniers of the Holocaust–fascists, anti-Semites, and morons. Thus, by extension, “deniers” in any context is similarly damning—and that’s the idea.

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Stop Making Me Defend President Biden!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

At this point, President Biden has no choice, ethically or practically, other than to keep his promise to nominate a black woman to fill the Supreme Court vacancy. By all means, he deserves criticism for making such a promise, but that was done quite a while ago, when he was in full pander mode during the 2020 Democratic Presidential primaries. Breaking a pledge is never ethical, unless conditions have changed sufficiently to make the keeping of the pledge materially different from what was anticipated at the time, or if keeping the promise would be illegal.

It is often forgotten that President Reagan pledged to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court, and many liberal pundits at the time predicted that he would renege on that promise. He didn’t. It was a different kind of pledge than Biden’s however. There was a fairly deep pool of qualified women to choose from particularly if he dipped into the group of qualified female lawyers and academics. The lack of any woman ever sitting on the Court since the 18th Century had become an embarrassment. It wasn’t a matter of making the Court “look like America,” it was whether the Court could credibly look like a gentleman’s club. Continue reading →

And The Civility Slide Continues…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Don’t tell me this is funny. It’s not funny, as Jack Nicholson says in “Few Good Men.” It’s tragic.

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) , in his annual State of the State address, felt it necessary to further degrade public respect in elected leaders by telling Bette Midler to kiss his dog’s ass—OK, he said “hiney.” What a genteel gesture.

At the tail of an hour-long address, Justice lifted his bulldog and displayed “Babydog’s” anus et al. to say to the critics of Sen. Joe Manshin who denigrated his state while savaging him for not following in lockstep to the Lockstep Party,

They never believed in West Virginia that we could do it. They told every bad joke in the world about us. And so from that standpoint, Babydog tells Bette Midler and all those out there, kiss her hiney.

What a clod. There’s nothing like giving support to the dolts like Midler who resort to stereotypes and ad hominem attacks to make their ignorant political arguments by behaving just as crudely as the bigots expect.

This doesn’t help.

Let’s have a pool on who will be the first elected official to tell critics, “Suck my dick!”

My money’s on a female.

Catching Up: Professional Ethics And The Challenger Disaster

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Because of non-ethical matters in the Marshall household, I missed posting about the January 28 anniversary of the Challenger disaster, as it is labeled among the thousands of Ethics Alarms tags. I have written about and alluded to the completely avoidable explosion of the Space Shuttle in 1986 many times (you can check here), and there may be no other incident that so perfectly encapsulates the complexities of professional ethics, especially in a bureaucracy. In 2016, I offered an ethics quiz on the topic.

In 2020, Netflix presented an excellent, if extremely upsetting, docudrama on how the fiasco unfolded, “The Challenger Disaster.”

I have used the tragedy in my legal ethics continuing legal education courses to force attendees to consider what might make them decide to breach legal ethics and place their careers at risk when an organizational client is hell-bent on what the lawyer knows, or thinks he or she knows, will be disastrous. Legal ethics rules are different from engineering ethics, though the latter has caught up considerably since the Space Shuttle explosion, and in part because of it. However, I view the ethics conflict in parallel situations in both professions the same, as well as situations in medicine, organized religion, the military, and government. When would, and should, professionals decide to do everything in their power to stop the consequences of a terrible decision when it is outside their role and authority to do so?

In my legal ethics seminars, a majority of lawyers ultimately say they would have done “whatever it took” to stop the Challenger’s launch, whatever the consequences, if they knew what the engineers knew. They said they would go to the news media, or chain themselves to the rocket if necessary. Of course, saying it and doing it are very different things.

Here is the most recent incarnation of my Challenger disaster legal ethics question, which I presented to government lawyers a year ago. What would you answer? It is called “The Launch.”

***

In 1986, Roger Boisjoly was a booster rocket engineer at Morton Thiokol, the NASA contractor that, infamously, manufactured the faulty O-ring that was installed in the Space Shuttle Challenger, and that caused it to explode. Six months before the Challenger disaster, he wrote a memo to his bosses at Thiokol predicting “a catastrophe of the highest order” involving “loss of human life.” He had identified a flaw in the elastic seals at the joints of the multi-stage booster rockets: they tended to stiffen and unseal in cold weather.  NASA’s shuttle launch schedule included winter lift-offs, and Boisjoly warned his company that sending the Shuttle into space at low temperatures was too risky. On January 27, 1986, the day before the scheduled launch of the Challenger, Boisjoly argued for hours with NASA officials to persuade NASA to delay the launch, only to be over-ruled, first by NASA, then by Thiokol, which deferred to its client. Another engineer, Bob Ebeling, joined Boisjoly and begged for the launch to be postponed, only to be overruled.

That night, Ebeling told his wife, Darlene, “It’s going to blow up.”

Question 1:  Should one or both of the engineers have “blown the whistle”?

  1. They did.
  2. Only the engineer who was sure that it would be a disaster.
  3. No, that’s not their role, their decision, or their call.
  4. After the explosion, but not before.
  5. I have another answer.

 Question 2: How are the ethical obligations in such a situation different for government lawyers than engineers?

  1. Government lawyers have to disclose when human life is threatened, engineers don’t.
  2. Engineers have to disclose when human life is involved, government lawyers don’t.
  3. Lawyers get kicked out of their profession for blowing whistles, engineers just get blackballed.
  4. There is no difference.
  5. I have another answer.

Comment Of The Day: Ethics Quiz: Celebrity Post Retirement Photos

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Mermaidmary99 has a strange relationship with Ethics Alarms: about half of her comments get sent straight to spam by WordPress for no apparent reason. This is perplexing for her and me, since she so often has an original and perceptive opinion to share. This Comment of the Day is an example, and yes, I found it in the spam collection.

The Ethics Quiz asked readers, “Is it ethical to take unflattering photos of former performers and celebrities and publicize them expressly to invite cruel comments and ridicule?” It was sparked by two things: the emergence of the first photograph of former movie star Bridget Fonda, daughter of Peter, niece of Jane, grand-daughter of Henry, in twelve years. Last time the public saw her, Fonda looked more of less like she did in Quentin Tarentino’s “Jackie Brown,” above; the other was my wife’s complaint, after her recent stay in the hospital (a bad scare, but all is fine), that the nurses kept telling her she was beautiful (which she is) and she refuses to believe it, insisting that the years have not been kind. I thought the new photo of the considerably younger Mrs. Elfman would help her put things into perspective. (My wife’s answer: “I bet those nurses would tell her she’s beautiful too!”)

Here is mermaidmary99’s rescued Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Quiz: Celebrity Post Retirement Photos.”

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Who judges if it’s unflattering?

My dad would look at [the recent photo] and see a miraculous, beautiful human being with trillions of cells working in perfect intelligence allowing us to see her standing. He’s also would be keenly aware that he too is a miracle, a person with 10 to the 30th power of different viruses inside him, trillions of bacteria and fungi, and cells with 200-8000 mitochondria in each one, working non-stop. Continue reading →

Oh, Please, Tell Me Again About How The New York Times Isn’t Manipulating The News To Save The Democrats…

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Today’s right column, above the fold headline in the New York Times: Economy in 2021 Surged by 5.7%, Best In Decades. All that was missing was the exclamation point. “The economic lift was largely provided by vaccination efforts, cheap credit conditions put in place by the Federal Reserve and a fresh round of federal aid to households and businesses,” the story deceitfully “explained.” Note that these are all positive factors that the Biden Administration can take credit for, or at least try.

Is the American public that stupid? The economy “surged’ in percentage terms because it was starting from a point of unprecedented ruin, substantially put in motion by Democrat-led shutdowns of the schools and much of the economy. Emphasizing the percentage increase is a deliberate tactic to mislead the mathematically challenged. One could trumpet a drug that “increases cognitive ability by 300%” if one doesn’t mention that its test subjects were suffering from closed head injuries. Many, many paragraphs into the story, we are told that the “economy has recovered almost 19 million of the 22 million jobs lost near the peak of virus-induced suspensions in activity in 2020.” Oh. So the “surge” still hasn’t brought the economy back to what it was after almost four years of the Trump administration policies—which the Times never praised, only slammed.

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Ethics Respite, 1/27/2022: The “Boy Do I Hate Emergency Rooms!” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

On the other hand, I love having a fire department half-a-block away…

I did finally work out that the spelling of February isn’t unethical, as I had long concluded. I thought the month’s name had been intentionally spelled in such a way to either guarantee that it would be mispronounced, or, as in my case, never spelled correctly on the first try. The Romans called it Februarius, from Februare, “to purify,” and februum , a means of purification or an instrument used to purify. Apparently there was a mid-month freak-out festival, Lupercalia, that was supposed to purify the rest of the year. For a while, around 1200 A.D., maybe because it was so hard to pronounce those two r’s so close together, the month was called Feverer or Feverell from the Old French Feverier. But the Latin made a comeback, damn it.

Having the month contain an extra day every four years, however, is unethical.

1. Legal, not unethical under the legal ethics rules, but still unethical, and also stupid….Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wants his office to prosecute election law violations, but unfortunately,The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has held that only local DAs can prosecute such offenses also under the Texas Constitution. It’s a pretty basic separation of powers issue. Paxton filed a motion to reconsider what was an adverse 8-1 ruling, and the motion is still pending. Paxton has also urged the public via conservative media outlets to contact the 8 members to pressure them to reverse their opinion. Many have done so by phone and email, with some threats included, of course. The Texas Justices are elected.

There is a rule that prohibits public comments having substantial potential to prejudice court proceedings, and the standard rule prohibiting ex parte communications directly or by third parties. Naturally, some Democratic-tilting law professors are telling the media that Paxton siccing the public on the court is a professional ethics violation. But it is not.

The tactic doesn’t speak well for Paxton, and is one more reason not to have elected judges. I also object to public figures miseducating the already ignorant public into thinking of judges as just another kind of legislator. (See the Comment of the Day.) However, the First Amendment is a complete defense, except for the threats, of course, if they are “true” threats.

There’s no law requiring free speech to be used responsibly.

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Emergency Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I’m sorry…this Open Forum is either a day early or a week late, but either way, I’m counting on readers to keep the ethics fires burning for a while as I deal with a family emergency. I’m hoping it’s better than it looks; in any event, it’s going to be complicated getting a post up for a yet-to-be-determined period.

Thanks for helping out.

Observations On Justice Breyer’s Retirement

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

Justice Stephen Breyer, at 83 the oldest member of the Supreme Court’s left wing, will retire from the Court at the end of the 2021-22 term.

Observations:

  • Good. Unlike Justices Scalia and Ginsberg, he is not waiting for the Grim Reaper to remove him from the job. 83 was pushing his luck as it was. This was the ethical and responsible thing to do.
  • Was Breyer pushed into retirement by Democrats, who want Biden to be able to appoint a 27 year-old socialist ideologue hostile to gun rights, free speech and any restrictions on abortion and affirmative action? It doesn’t matter. At worst, he’s doing the right and responsible thing for some unethical reasons. It’s still right and responsible.
  • Now we’ll see how ethical and responsible President Biden is. A choice that would make the most people happy would be to re-nominate Merrick Garland. He’s a lousy Attorney General; his record indicates that he’d be a rational progressive on SCOTUS, and it would right an undeniable wrong, though a legal one, in canceling Mitch McConnell’s boycott of his nomination six years ago.
  • I doubt the President will do that. He’s probably locked into nominating a black woman, whether or not there is one currently on the bench who is qualified or trustworthy, rather than the most qualified candidate. All of the (legitimate) objections to Clarence Thomas’s appointment by President Bush the First will apply, just from a different end of the ideological spectrum.

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Pointer: JutGory

Ethics Shadows At Dusk, 1/25/2022: The Meming Of The President

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I hate political memes as a rule, and thus was awash with self-loathing when the one above, which somehow I had never seen before, made me laugh out loud in light of yesterday’s Steve Doocy incident. I hate political memes for the same reason I don’t like political cartoons: they are almost always over-simplified, and aim for bias, stereotyping and emotion rather than making valid points. Trump was memed and made a caricature of himself as unfairly as any President, extending all the way to the “Trump Baby” balloon. It is healthy for a nation to be able to joke about its leaders, but relentlessly diminishing them is self-destructive. I think the public would have united behind Obama in a crisis; we saw the public unite behind Bush, even with the unusually denigrating ridicule he was subjected to. The nation, led by a permanently hostile media, would not have united behind Trump in a crisis, and I doubt that it would unite now behind Biden. Eventually, the mockery affects the office itself.

This week I saw this sticker on a gas pump for the first time (in Northern Virginia).

In addition to its obvious failures on all fronts, this Presidency is dying a death of a thousand cuts.

Therefore I was surprised to see the latest Gallup poll findings that 60% of American surveyed regard Biden as “intelligent,” the same percentage that find him “likable.” I guess relative: do they find him as or more intelligent than they are? I suppose that’s possible, maybe even accurate. Or is it just the old line, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you President?” in action? I’ve seen a lot of Presidents, and I know the other ones pretty well. I’ve never seen a President who seemed as clearly intellectually deficient as Biden is now; he’s obviously been suffering from some kind of age-related cognitive decline for years, and he was never that bright to begin with. It was inexcusably unethical for any family, party or Biden himself to allow someone with his mental issues to be installed in the most difficult job in the country. At this point, is Biden the least intelligent President we have ever had? I’d say it’s a good bet, as frightening as that is to accept. The bottom group in my estimation would include Joe, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding, Harry Truman, and Gerald Ford. None were probably below average, although I wonder about Harding and today’s version of Biden.

The only saving grace is that the correlation between great Presidents (or great leaders in general) and superior intelligence is strikingly weak.

1. And speaking of “Old Viginny,” a state tax on plastic bags went into effect this month. It’s 5 cents to get a plastic bag to carry your purchases, easily a 500% mark-up over the retail cost of each bag. This was another legacy of mercifully retired Gov. Northam (D) who turned into a salivating far-Left ideologue to save himself from the woke mob when photos of him surfaced either in blackface or in KKK garb—it was hard to tell which. The tax is more useless climate change virtue-signaling, regressive, and just the perfect thing to inflict on Virginians when food and drug prices are skyrocketing (the bill was passed before “I did that!” stickers were a twinkle in Republican eyes.)

In addition, the arrival of the new tax was badly publicized, and most stores didn’t bother to warn their customers. Nor do most of them have alternatives on hand. CVS, of course, which is run by fools and incompetents, just sprung the charge on people: I watched one elderly woman with about a dozen items look helplessly as the clerk asked, “Do you want a bag for these?”

We have a lot of plastic bags hoarded for Spuds-droppings and other uses: my wife said that we should bring a bunch to the CVS and hand them out. And that’s what we will do!

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