I was going to make a mean comment about St. Valentine being beheaded on this date in 270, but thought better of it. I associate the holiday with nothing but stress and trauma personally, but my mother took it very seriously. Val was beheaded, the story goes, for secretly performing marriages in Rome after the Emperor Claudius II banned the ceremony to keep citizens from using marriage as an excuse no to serve in his army.

The real ethics event of note, which I meant to note yesterday, was the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden in 1945. The “Florence of the Elbe” was reduced to ash and rubble, while about 25,000 Germans died horribly. Yet the attack accomplished little strategically; the Germans were close to surrender, and Dresden contributed little to the war effort. It was the European theater equivalent of dropping the second atom bomb on Nagasaki. The Dresden fire-bombing has been described a war crime as well as an act of pure vengeance, pay-back for the German bombing of Coventry in England. In that 1940 raid, 568 people were killed and another 863 badly injured, but the city was considered a cultural jewel, like Dresden. I have not researched the decision to bomb Dresden in any detail, but it always seemed strange to me that Eisenhower went to such lengths not to destroy priceless artistic treasures toward the end of the war, yet approved this.

1. Self-promotion Dept. In case there are any New Jersey lawyers reading who would like three hours of ethics credits as painlessly as possible, I’m doing a Zoom legal ethics seminar for the New Jersey bar on the 25th of this month with long-time partner Mike Messer. I write the songs, and he performs them. This is the all-Beatles program I have long wanted to do; each song covers one or more tough legal ethics issues, and they are all among my favorites: “I Saw Her Standing There,” “A Day in the Life,” “Come Together,” “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” “Here, There, and Everywhere,” “Let It Be,” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”

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I wrote the introduction to this now three part post more than a month ago. It ended with this:

[T]he ascendant progressive movement has taken Yoo’s Rationalization to new heights (or depths) in ways that George Orwell would marvel at. Abortion is about “choice,” not the forfeited lives of the unborn. Defunding the police and not enforcing laws promotes “justice.” Discrimination on the basis of race and gender advances equality.

Most frightening of all, however, is the current effort to make the public believe that opposing single party dictated infringements of personal liberty and the Constitution is a “threat to democracy.”

That will be the focus of the second half of this post.

I confess that the post at hand, that “second half,” presumes what many in the thrall of LeftThink today deny: that the narrative about Republicans and Donald Trump especially creating an existential threat to democracy if they gain power is pure, unsupported, unsupportable Big Lie propaganda, part of a dangerous and divisive last ditch strategy to use fear to somehow avoid the electoral thrashing Democrats have earned perhaps more  spectacularly than any party in U.S. history that had succeeded in gaining control of both the White House and Congress.

After all, it isn’t Republicans who are holding an unprecedented, prosecution-style, single party investigation aimed at justifying criminal charges against the previous President and elected officials who support him. It is not the Republicans who have gone to unprecedented lengths to chill dissent, as the Biden Administration has with it the threats of legal action by the Justice Department against parents who are too vigorous in their objections to public school indoctrination. Nor are Republicans the party now devoted to loosening, seriously and permanently, security measures that promote public trust in elections and to make ballot manipulation that is difficult to catch more easier to attempt.

Republicans haven’t advocated packing the Supreme Court to ensure a permanent advantage, or repeatedly advanced policies that violate Equal Protection and the Civil Rights laws for the objective of favoring certain groups over others. Republicans haven’t co-oped the management of Big Tech, social media and 98% of the news media to ensure that their opposition’s message is squelched and reported negatively while their agenda is spared criticism as well as public reporting of inconvenient facts.

How can the Left, even acknowledging their huge advantage in controlling information, hope to persuade the public that up is down, and that it is the GOP that threatens democracy while the reality is that the opposite is true? Continue reading →

[No graphic can express my mood today. The above comes closest... but I guess it’s politically incorrect. I am deeply, deeply sorry.]

Though it is extremely long and detailed, the Ethics Alarms account of the current Harvard sexual harassment controversy is still worth reading. Just thought I’d mention it. In general, there is an inverse relationship between the length of a post to the number of readers and comments it attracts, and I suspect this is one reason the form has largely degenerated into link farms and short takes that lend themselves to over-simplification and selective reporting. The damn thing also took me almost three hours to research and write, thinking the whole time, “Nobody’s going to read this”…

1. Tales of The Great Stupid”...the much anticipated and long-delayed Broadway revival of “The Music Man” (the first Broadway touring musical I ever saw), the Times review informs us, has suffered from many political correctness cuts to avoid “offense.” I knew the silly “Indian War Dance” presented by the “Wa Tan We” ladies was doomed, even though it is making fun of middle-aged society white women, but calling the scene cultural “appropriation” as the Times does is sillier than the bit. This, however, is proof of how woke-mad the theater community has become: in the dumb dance number “Shipoopi,” the refrain “The girl is hard to get…but you can win her yet” has been cleansed to read “the boy who’s seen the light…to treat a woman right.”

2. And how did we get so stupid, you may well ask? Just look at the plans in place to make us even dumber. The Wall Street Journal takes us “Inside the Woke Indoctrination Machine” via a hundred hours of leaked video from from the 108 workshops held virtually last year for the National Association of Independent Schools’ People of Color Conference. The NAIS sets standards for more than 1,600 independent schools in the U.S., driving their missions and influencing many school policies. The conference is NAIS’s flagship annual event for disseminating DEI [ Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] practices, which more than 6,000 practitioners, educators and administrators attended this year. The whole article is more frightening than “The Exorcist.” Here’s just one snippet of the indoctrination playbook:

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This is one of those ethics stories that is so convoluted and unresolved that it is impossible to delineate who the villains are, except that, as in the famous case of the human toe found in the plug of tobacco, res ipsa loquitur. Someone has done something wrong.

I’ll try to explain this mess in sequence, with what conclusions I can safely draw noted along the way.

1. May, 2020. The Harvard Crimson, the daily student paper, publishes the results of investigative reporting showing that the college’s esteemed Anthropology Dept. had a history of covering up sexual harassment allegations and incidents on the part of some of its most renowned professors. Among them was Prof. John Comaroff, then 75. The paper reported,

Three current female students told The Crimson this month that they are actively in communication with Harvard’s Title IX office regarding allegations against Comaroff. Last November, the department asked Comaroff not to use his office in the Tozzer Anthropology Building and removed him from an Anthropology course he was scheduled to teach, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Crimson….

In a May 26 emailed statement, Comaroff denied ever having engaged in sexual misconduct or retaliated against a student.

“I have not behaved inappropriately toward any Harvard student, nor ever engaged in professional retaliation. I am at a loss as to why such things should be alleged, let alone reported in The Crimson in the absence of any due process, if there is to be one,” he wrote. “For the record, I have not been banished from the Department of Anthropology, my office, or my teaching, nor informed of any formal charges.”

… [D]ozens of people who passed through the department over the last two decades told The Crimson that the problems women face there stretch beyond the allegations against individual professors.

Observations: Who are we supposed to believe? The reporters are students: are amateur journalists more or less trustworthy and ethical than professional journalists? The professor’s accusers were anonymous in the story. University cover-ups of faculty stars who prey on students are far from rare, and Harvard has had its share. That does not mean that this particular claim (two other anthropology professors were implicated in the article) is accurate.

2. August, 2020. Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Claudine Gay placed Anthropology and African and African-American Studies professor John L. Comaroff on paid administrative leave following the Crimson story, saying,

Due to the seriousness of these allegations, and in accordance with University and FAS policies, I write to announce that the FAS has placed Professor Comaroff on paid administrative leave, pending a full review of the facts and circumstances regarding the allegations that have been reported…

I believe that sexual harassment constitutes a form of discrimination that is both personally damaging for those who experience it and is an assault on our faculty’s fundamental commitments to equity and academic excellence.

Professor Comaroff continued to deny the allegations. “Today’s announcement is prejudicial to the fair determination of any claims against him, punitive without any factfinding, defamatory, and a violation of the Harvard University Sexual Harassment Policy and Proc[e]dure’s confidentiality rules,” he wrote.

Observations: In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, #MeToo and the Obama DOE “Dear Colleague” letter, universities operate using a guilty until proven innocent standard. This is unethical. As with any situation where someone is accused of wrongdoing, there has to be transparency and due process before any sanctions occur. This action by Gay was a punishment in and of itself.

3. January, 2022. Harvard placed Anthropology and African and African-American Studies professor John L. Comaroff  on unpaid administrative leave  after University investigations determined that he violated the school’s sexual harassment and professional conduct policies. He will be barred from teaching required courses and taking on any additional graduate student advisees through the next academic year, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Claudine Gay announced in an email.

The professor’s legal team responded  that a separate inquiry stemming from Title IX complaints found Comaroff responsible for a single incident of verbal sexual harassment “arising from a brief conversation during an office hour advising session, and that investigators found “no sexual or romantic intention.” The press release went on to state that

“Upon receipt of these results, Harvard opened a second, kangaroo court process – lacking the most elemental aspects of due process and artificially limited to a defective record – to reexamine conduct already thoroughly investigated in the Title IX process…This process resulted in an illegitimate finding that Professor Comaroff was responsible for alleged unprofessional (but entirely non-sexual) conduct in another office hours advising session. Even in the latter proceedings, the factfinder concluded that the alleged harm ‘may not have been intended.’”

Observations: Yes, he was on leave for more than a year as Harvard investigated.

In matters of sexual harassment, intentions are irrelevant. That spin makes me suspicious of the vociferous defense by Comaroff’s lawyers. Continue reading →

The egregious unforced errors indulged in by opinion piece writers, indeed by experts, because bias makes them stupid continues to amaze.

Today’s example: a Times op-ed (the paper now calls them “Opinions,” but it’s an op-ed) headlined “Joe Rogan Is a Drop in the Ocean of Medical Misinformation.” It is really a stalking horse for censorship, with quotes like,

Quackery won’t disappear by deplatforming or censoring people…instead, we need to prevent false or misleading health claims from reaching millions of people in the first place.

Wait, what? Don’t censor people, just prevent the public from having access to information “someone” deems “false or misleading?”  That’s one point at which I would have stopped reading if my job wasn’t to red flag such sinister double talk. I would have quit well before this though.

For example, the essay’s first paragraph describes as “misinformation” spread by Joe Rogan on his Spotify-hosted podcast “false and dubious health claims.”  Well are they false or are they dubious? Dubious means doubtful, but many theories and opinions that people doubt turn out to be correct.  The authors of this dubious screed are Vox’s “health reporter” (you know, Vox) and a professor who works with her on “the Global Commission on Evidence to Address Societal Challenges. Uh-oh. Here’s the Authentic Frontier Gibberish with which that dubious body describes itself: Continue reading →

Many readers have sent me excellent tips for posts of late, and the fact that I have not responded or sued them yet should not be interpreted as a lack of appreciation, interest or gratitude. I’ve been hit, as has happened more often of late, by the twin terrors of burgeoning ethics issues all over, and all manner of disasters getting in the way of the blog. I apologize. This too shall pass.

Today a friend who played a prominent role in the last of two productions I directed of Saul Levitt’s excellent ethics drama, “The Andersonville Trial” sent me this article from today’s Washington Post. For those who read it, my position is that Capt. Wirz, the defendant at the center of the post-Civil War war crimes trial that was the sole legal precedent for the Nuremberg Trials, was indeed a sacrificial offering to the public’s outrage over the photographically preserved horrors at that Confederate prison camp. The conditions at Andersonville were not Wirz’s fault or within his control to ameliorate; if anyone was to blame, it was Lincoln and Grant, who knew what would happen to captured Northern soldiers once prisoner exchanges were stopped.

1. “This is the tragedy of Obsessive Race and Group Identity Obsession (ORGIO) Won’t you help with a tax deductible gift to help the millions of suffering people like Jennifer?” NPR tells the vital stories of various people who have differing views about what color and shade of “thumbs up” emojis they and others should use in their social media posts. Like these…

Among its earth-shattering revelations is this:

Zara Rahman, a researcher and writer…argues that the skin tone emojis make white people confront their race as people of color often have to do….she [was confused] when someone who is white uses a brown emoji, so she asked some friends about it. “One friend who is white told me that it was because he felt that white people were over-represented in the space that he was using the emoji, so he wanted to kind of try and even the playing field,” Rahman said. “For me, it does signal a kind of a lack of awareness of your white privilege in many ways.”

For me, it signals that 1) the constant emphasis on race and color as the defining factor in all matters great and small is making people anxious and irrational, and 2) the public broadcasting is an unethical  waste of taxpayer money.

2. It doesn’t surprise me that the President didn’t explain this (you know how Joe is!), but the news media should have. The increase of 467,000 jobs indicated by the January jobs report trumpeted by Biden includes 768,000 new government employees on all levels hired between December 2021 and January 2022. Thus the jobs report showed a reduction in private employment of some 300,000 jobs. [Source: Washington Examiner] Continue reading →

To be accurate, I do not think there’s any “might” about it. Let’s all be grateful Judge John McBain of Jackson County, Michigan isn’t a black woman, or he might be on the Supreme Court before you know it.

Yesterday Ethics Alarms noted (Item #1) a reversal in Ohio of a case where a woman had been convicted of raping herself, or something, as a way to maximize the penalty for her revolting abuse of her own son, whom she forced to “rape” her with a foreign object. Incredibly, the appeals court had upheld the conviction despite the fact the law simply didn’t support it. (I didn’t mention this, but the prosecutors were unethical to indict her when the law as written didn’t apply.)

Something is apparently “going around.”

Judge McBain twice sentenced a defendant as if she had been found guilty of first-degree murder. Dawn Marie Dixon-Bey fatally stabbed her boyfriend on Valentine’s Day in 2015, but was acquitted of premeditated murder, and was only found guilty of second-degree murder by the jury. That meant that the judge could sentence her to as much as 20 years in prison, but no more according to sentencing guidelines. Verdict? What verdict?

Judge McBain behaved as if the jurors had found Dixon-Bey guilty of all charges. He said from the bench that she committed “a cold blooded, premeditated stabbing,” even though premeditation wasn’t proven. The first time McBain sentenced Dixon-Bey to 35 to 70 years in prison after saying she “brutally murdered” the victim “in cold blood,” the appeals court vacated the sentence. After it sent the case back to McBain for a sentence that complied with the limits for second degree murder, he sentenced her to 30 to 70 years in prison again.

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