U.S. Society

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 2/17/2022: Let’s Celebrate Aaron Burr Never Became President Day!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Those who like to maintain that the Founders were infallible and the Constitution flawless would do well to remember this date, when the U.S. narrowly averted a disaster entirely made possible by bone-headed drafting of our road-map to a republic. On February 17, 1801, Thomas Jefferson was elected the third president of the United States, the first peaceful transfer of power from one political party in our history, as Jefferson’s fledgling Democratic-Republicans upset the Federalists of Washington, Adams and Hamilton. It was a close call, however, because Jefferson was nearly defeated by hos own Vice-President, the sinister Aaron Burr (That’s him on the left above.)Though Jefferson and Burr ran on the same ticket, the Constitution required state elector votes for both men to be counted separately. As a result, Jefferson and Burr emerged from the process tied at 73 electoral votes apiece, while the sitting President, John Adams, came in third at 65 votes. This sent the final vote to the House of Representatives. Of course, if Burr weren’t a sociopathic cur, he could have solved the botch by simply withdrawing from the Presidential race since nobody voted for him to be President. The Federalist-controlled House of Representatives, meanwhile, was happy to see Jefferson enmeshed in the controversy, and were delighted in the dealock  In the end it was Federalist Alexander Hamilton who saved the day and the nation, as he persuaded the House to vote against Burr, whom he called unfit. (This moment of high principle—Jefferson and Hamilton were far from pals–led to the duel with Burr in 1804 that resulted in Hamilton’s death.)  As for the ridiculously incompetent voting system, it was cleared up by the 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804. The fact that the first version didn’t inflict Aaron Burr on the still-vulnerable United States, however, was pure moral luck.

1. “Best Excuse for Unethical Conduct” of the Month: Bruce Lee, a Chicago ticket broker, was convicted of fraudulently selling tickets to White Sox games and  sentenced to prison this week. The  federal judge rejected his defense that he had actually helped the team, because it wasn’t going fill those seats anyway and the fans who bought his fake tickets spent money on food, drink, and souvenirs. The judge called the argument that nobody was harmed “delusional,” and saying that it was important to make the point to others who might try similar schemes that getting caught would have negative consequences.

The judge must be a Republican, since that line of reasoning appears to be taboo on the other side of the aisle regarding “minor” crimes. Continue reading →

“Hmmm…The ‘Threat To Democracy’ Theme Doesn’t Seem To Be Working. Guess It’s Time To Go Back To “Anyone Who Opposes Us Is An Evil Racist Trying To Preserve Racist Systems In This Racist Country…”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Hot on the heels of New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ quick default to the routine Democratic Party playbook racism defense comes the utterly predictable response of Board of Supervisors President Shamann Walton to the public voting three uber-woke members of the San Francisco school board out of office this week in the city’s first successful recall election in nearly 40 years. School board president Gabriela López and members Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga are out after more than 70% of voters rejected each of them.

Like parents in so many other municipalities, parents in San Francisco—yes, even there!—showed that they were mad as hell about school closures and seeing political correctness and leftist indoctrination rule their children’s education, and they weren’t going to take it any more. The real reason, though, according to Walton, was that Donald Trump, racism, and “closet Republicans” with “conservative values” have corrupted the city.

“Trump’s election and bold prejudice brought a lot of that out, even in our Democratic and liberal city,” Walton told the news media. “There are a lot of people who do not want people of color making decisions in leadership, even though the voters said that is what they want.”

Yes, no one can legitimately conclude that the decisions and policies made by elected “people of color” in a particular situation are just wrong because they don’t work. People of color only make the right decisions, sayeth Shamann Walton, a person of color himself. Believing otherwise is proof positive of racism, and besides, Donald Trump.

We’ll see how this strategy—denying basic respect to those with opposing views and instead declaring opponents’ motives to be based on racial hatred rather than legitimate differences of philosophy— works for flailing Democrats in the coming months.

After all, it’s worked so far.

The Curse Of The Great Stupid: This Woman Was A Journalist At The New York Times, Received A Pulitzer Prize For Fake History, And Now Indoctrinates Students As A Howard U. Professor

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

If what’s ethically objectionable about Howard Journalism professor Nikole Hannah-Jones isn’t immediately obvious, you’re probably already beyond hope.

Hannah-Jones was furious at MSNBC covering an example of serial shoplifting because it undercuts the argument for reduced policing and law enforcement . “This drumbeat for continued mass incarceration is really horrific to watch,” said the major force behind the racist propaganda screed “The 1619 Project.”  “A person stealing steak is not national news, and there have always been thefts from stores. This is how you legitimize the carceral state,” she tweeted indignantly.

This woman pretended to be a journalist. She is now a tenured journalism professor. That is the level of her quality of thought and reasoning. She is advocating keeping facts and destructive national trends from the public because they disprove a far-left narrative that is contrary to history, facts and common sense. As always with Hannah-Jones, she leads with dishonesty: MSNBC did not show the video of a brazen shoplifting incident in the middle of an epidemic of such crimes because of the item stolen. Then she resorts to the hoariest of rationalizations—‘This isn’t new’ (“Everybody does it!”), plus another lie: everybody hadn’t shoplifted as frequently and destructively before cities like San Francisco decided not to enforce the laws against it. In fact, the kind of shoplifting, including “smash and grab” mobs, we saw in 2021 were unprecedented.

Finally, she declares that showing the truth will undermine the movement to stop “over-incarceration,” which means that it is unjust to have disproportionate numbers of imprisoned members of a group just because members of the group  commit a disproportionate amount of crimes. This is the “disparate impact” theory at its least defensible.

The professor has a right to flog whatever idiotic leftist talking points she chooses, but people of good faith have a similar right to point, laugh, and demand that institutions we entrust with informing and educating the public do not celebrate, empower or enable an advocate of deceiving the public to achieve her radical ideological ends.

In related news, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Crazytown) whose mind is made up regarding the wisdom of defunding the police and reality will not dissuade her, tweeted

With a mandate to end police brutality, why oppose redirecting money from racist policing into social programs proven to save Black lives? Our movement for racial justice helped deliver the White House & Congress. We won’t stop until we get justice.

As with Hannah-Jones, this is dishonesty squared with a deceitful cherry on top. There has always been a mandate “to end police brutality,” but what the wild-eyed activists like Bush and Hannah-Jones call “brutality” is often the act of law enforcement itself. (Sixties radicals were taught to scream “Police brutality!” when they were physically dragged from property where they were trespassing.) Bush, like Hannah-Jones, regards enforcing the law when black criminals are involved as “racist.” The assault on policing is costing lives, not saving them, with blacks being disproportionately the victims.

Finally, claiming that the BLM rioting in the summer of 2020 and demands to defund the police “helped deliver the White House & Congress” is pure fantasy.  Both were among the reasons President Trump outperformed the polls predicting a Democratic landslide, as well as why Republicans narrowed the Democratic majority in the House.

Facts literally don’t matter to ethics corrupters like Hannah-Jones and Bush. Those who support, employ or vote for such individuals are complicit in the damage they inflict on society.

 

Ethics Hero (“Socking It To Georgetown University” Div.) #1: Student Jessica Costescu

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

No weenie she.

Costescu is a junior at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and the president of the Network of Enlightened Women chapter on campus. Her parents fled communism in Romania. She has been shocked and disturbed by the growing hostility to free speech, and indeed to freedom itself, that she has encountered at what is supposed to be an elite and distinguished institution of high learning in our nation’s capital.

As a vocal conservative, she has been threatened “so much so that [she] now fear[s] to speak freely and voice [her] conservative beliefs.” She reports that she has been cyber-bullied by other students “in such a menacing way” that she is “afraid to engage online, or even during class” with her “left-leaning peers.”

However, instead of hiding, or, as is the response sought by such tactics, conforming, Jessica wrote about her experiences on the conservative website College Fix, not anonymously but under her own name, not pathetically but in defiance. She writes in part, Continue reading →

Ethics Clean-Up On Aisle Tuesday, 2/15/2022: And What A Mess It Is…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

1. There were three interesting developments on the legal front today with ethics implications:

  • Royal slime-ball Prince Andrew, already shunned by the Royal Family, agreed today to pay an undisclosed sum to a victim of Jefferey Epstein’s sexcapades who accused the younger brother of Prince Charles of sexually abusing her when she was a minor. David Boies, showing his versatility after representing Harvey Weinstein, is the lawyer for  Prince Andrew’s accuser Virginia Giuffre. The amount of the out-of-court settlement will be not disclosed, Boies revealed.  Giuffre sued the Duke of York in August 2021, claiming that he abused her on multiple occasions in 2001 when she was a 17-year-old victim of the sex trafficking ring Epstein ran for decades. Of course, a settlement doesn’t mean that Andrew is guilty. Then again,

  • The New York Times was found by a jury not to have defamed  Sarah Palin when it maliciously accused her of inciting murder with her campaign map. The jury didn’t know it, but the judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, had already announced that he would dismiss Palin’s complaint regardless of what they decided, as a matter of law. “We’ve reached the same bottom line … but it’s on different grounds,” the Judge said upon hearing their verdict. “You decided the facts; I decided the law. As it turns out, they’re both in agreement in this case.”

Too bad, but both the jury and the judge were right. The problem wasn’t malice despite the Times’ absurd claim that no malice was intended, a key element of the standard for finding defamation when the media attacks a public figure. The problem was that the editorial in question was still opinion, even though it stated Palin’s guilt as a fact. Had the same statement been in an alleged news story, it would have been a different matter.

  • Insurers for the bankrupt Remington Arms Company and its subsidiaries agreed to pay the Sandy Hook Elementrary School families the maximum amount of damages available to them, $73 million. The settlement deal will also allow them to release thousands of documents that the plaintiffs obtained in discovery. A settlement isn’t precedent, and both sides had good reason to be wary of a trial. The victims in the Sandy Hook massacre raised the possibility of a jury persuaded more by emotion than law. Still, he unbroken record of attempts to find gun manufacturers liable for shootings made going to trial a risk for the anti-gun forces. As is typical, both sides claimed that they were pleased with the deal.

Continue reading →

Update On The Alleged Clinton Spying Scandal: “What’s Going On Here?” We Still Don’t Know Thanks To The Untrustworthy News Media…And That Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

So…did “Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign “pay” an internet company to ‘infiltrate”’ servers at Trump Tower and the White House in order to link Donald Trump to Russia”? as the conservative New York Post reported one hour into February 13? That report was quickly picked up and expanded on by other news sources, notably Fox News, but only the so-called “conservative media.” Ethics Alarms reported on that depressing phenomenon the same day, noting,

If you only follow the mainstream media, meaning only those outlets that are directly doing everything they can, every day, in every way, to bolster Democratic Party narratives, progressive agendas and the prospects of minimizing the public’s support of the Republican Party, you are learning about this for the first time. If, however, you also check the conservative news and commentary sources that perform a service with their own biases by preventing the ongoing betrayal of public trust by the mainstream media from completely deceiving the nation, then you know about this breaking story already….As of right now, there are not enough facts and details to analyze the ethical implications of the story itself. However, there can be no doubt that a similar breaking story that implicated Republicans, and especially Donald Trump, would be screaming out from headlines and broadcasts from all the mainstream news sources. Thus there is sufficient evidence to conclude that this is one more striking example of the degree to which the news media is, as that crazy President Trump said years ago in perhaps his most perceptive moment, “the enemy of the people.”

Yesterday, nearly two days after the story was broken by those evil conservative news organizations, the New York Times against assumed its role as the gang-leader of the biased mainstream media, and finally mentioned the story. Its spin: ‘There goes that mains stream media conspiracy machine again!” Continue reading →

Monday Ethics Review, 2/14/2022: St. Valentine’s Day Edition.

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

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.”

Continue reading →

Will The Audacious “It Isn’t What it is” Propaganda Assault By The American Left Succeed?, Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Taking off from Part 1 (which took off from this), let’s review some (only some) of the anti-democratic conduct of the Democrats, their Congress and their President.

  • We saw President Biden withdraw troops from Afghanistan without consultation with Congress and in opposition to the military, abandoning thousand of U.S. citizens in the process.

  • We have seen the individual liberty-defying mask and vaccine mandates in Democratic states and cities.
  • We have witnesses attempts at the state and national level to discriminate against one racial group in such benefits as Small Business assistance and pandemic remedies.
  • We have watched the Senate Majority leader directly threaten the Supreme Court if it fails to support Democratic Party policies and positions.
  • We have seen the escalating air-brushing of history, to eliminate references to individuals and ideas that the party in power opposes.
  • We have seen Democrats and their allied professions and institution attempt to discriminate against religious groups, using the pandemic to ban their activities while favoring gatherings of similar size when they supported leftist activism.
  • We have seen concerted efforts to disarm law-abiding citizens, including removing the right to bear arms from those judged mentally or emotionally ill, both historical tactics of totalitarian governments.
  • We have seen the effort to corrupt the criminal justice system and the Rule of Law by demonizing and presuming the guilt of police officers, conservative protesters and others (like Kyle Rittenhouse) based on  skin color and political preferences.
  • We have seen an endorsement of mob rule, with “defund the police” being advocated across the country, radical progressive prosecutors refusing to prosecute crimes “of need,” and police being turned into targets by more than six years of demonizing by the Left.
  • We have seen an unprecedented attack on the Constitution and various amendments, with the goal of undoing protections wisely placed in the documents by the Founders. Among the targets: the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the Due Process Clause, the Equal Protection Clause, the amendment process (so the dead-letter Equal Rights. Amendment can pass after the deadline for adoption has passed), the Electoral College, the composition of the Senate, and more.
  • We witnessed the Democratic party embracing a Marxist, anti-American, anti-White, violent and corrupt organization, Black Lives Matter.
  • We are watching that same party continue to support a program of anti-American, pro-Left indoctrination in the public schools.
  • We are seeing the deliberate promotion of class divisions and hostility, while the Democratic Party pursues radical ideological goals such as the devaluing of citizenship, the elimination of meritocracy and the pursuit of excellence,  and
  • Perhaps most glaring of all, we witnessed, for the first time in our history, not just one but two contrived impeachments based not on the kinds of “high crimes” prescribed by the Constitution, but on the simple fact that one party had a House majority  that it abused to attempt to remove an elected President it despised, plus
  • …so, so much more that represents a gross weakening of democracy and its values by the conduct and rhetoric of Democrats. The four year effort to cripple Donald Trump’s Presidency by withholding the basic, crucial, core aura of respect and deference to the office that every other President was bequeathed by his predecessors is, in my view, the worst of these, which is why Ethics Alarms has laboriously tracked it with the tag “2016 Ethics Post-Election Train Wreck.”

This has all occurred in plain sight, so for Democrats and progressives to pick this moment in history to declare Republicans as an existential threat to democracy is Jumbo-level audacity. Is this gaslighting the result of desperation, idiocy, delusion, or “It’s so crazy, it just might work”? Continue reading →

Will The Audacious “It Isn’t What it is” Propaganda Assault By The American Left Succeed?, Part I

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

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 →

Saturday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 2/12/2022: Sports, Education, CNN And Broadway

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

[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:

Continue reading →