U.S. Society

Sunday Ethics Notes, 9/29/2021, And Does Ethics Analysis That Nobody Reads In The Forest Make Any Difference?

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Tree falls no sound

Don’t mind me, it’s just that I’ve been feeling like I’m wasting my time lately….

1. Please stop sending me links to whatever perpetually disgusting and hypocritical HBO comic Bill Maher has said because he appears to be courageously buck woke cant and the boring partisan spin of almost every other TV comedian. Now he’s criticizing progressives because he’s smart enough to figure out (though they haven’t) that they completely beclowned themselves by hitching their credibility to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The King of Smug isn’t nearly as smart as he thinks he is, but he’s smart enough to see that the smarter rats will soon be fleeing the sinking ship. It doesn’t matter: Maher was one of the most vicious hate-mongers against President Trump and Republicans; he also advocated wrecking the economy to get rid of a President he didn’t like. Maher isn’t really a brave iconoclast, he just plays one on TV. I doubt that he has any principles that he wouldn’t discard without blinking, if it brought him some publicity and lengthened his already inexplicably long career as a public asshole.

2. Now, that doesn’t mean that Bill’s assessment isn’t correct for once, just that he aided and abetted those who stuck the country with Joe and Kamala and is therefore ethically estopped from flip-flopping now. Every single institution and individual who was part of this reckless, cynical and transparently irresponsible fiasco should be mocked, shamed, harangued and humiliated until death, especially the voters. Charles Cooke, a conservative NeverTrumper with the similarly Trump-bashing National Review, has written a very accurate essay on exactly what Democrats did, “that, in a desperate attempt to remove President Trump from office, the Democrats tailored themselves a straitjacket from which they will struggle mightily to escape.” They also stuck the United States and its citizens with a President and a Vice-President they knew were unfit for office so the party could gain power, placing the nation and its welfare at risk. Just like Bill Maher stating that wrecking the economy and putting Americans out of work was “worth it” if it resulted in Trump’s defeat, the Democrats (and the news media, but I repeat myself) decided it was worth it to place the nation’s fate for four years in the hands of what Cooke calls, in an understatement, “a pair of losers.” And they knew that was what they were doing. It is one of the worst betrayals of trust any American political party has ever engaged in.

Continue reading →

Ethics Flea Market, 8/28/21: An Atheist Chaplain And Other Exotica [With Missing Link!]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

flea market

1. As with the Giuliani suspension, I have grave doubts whether this ruling is apolitical. Judge Parker, a Michigan federal district judge, issued a 110-page order sanctioning Trump lawyers Lin Wood, Sidney Powell, and others for their filing and advocacy of a federal lawsuit that was one of several law suits alleging fraud and illegality in the handling of the 2020 election. The full opinion here, but lawyer Bruce Faughan has done a neat cut and paste job to produce a Reader’s Digest condensed version:

[A]ttorneys have an obligation to the judiciary, their profession, and the public (i) to conduct some degree of due diligence before presenting allegations as truth; (ii) to advance only tenable claims; and (iii) to proceed with a lawsuit in good faith and based on a proper purpose. Attorneys also have an obligation to dismiss a lawsuit when it becomes clear that the requested relief is unavailable.

For purposes of Rule 11, an attorney who is knowingly listed as counsel on a pleading, written motion, or other paper “expressly authorize[d] the signing, filing, submitting or later advocating of the offending paper” and “shares responsibility with the signer, filer, submitter, or advocate.” In this age of electronic filing, it is frivolous to argue that an electronic signature on a pleading or motion is insufficient to subject the attorney to the court’s jurisdiction if the attorney violates the jurisdiction’s rules of professional conduct or a federal rule or statute establishing the standards of practice.

Even if there are sanctions available under statutes or specific federal rules of procedure, . . . the ‘inherent authority’ of the court is an independent basis for sanctioning bad faith conduct in litigation. To award attorneys’ fees under this “bad faith exception,” a district court must find that (i) “the claims advanced were meritless”; (ii) “counsel knew or should have known this”; and (iii) “the motive for filing the suit was for an improper purpose such as harassment.” When invoking its inherent authority to sanction, “[a] court must, of course, . . . comply with the mandates of due process, both in determining that the requisite bad faith exists and in assessing fees.”

[L]itigants and attorneys cannot come to federal court asserting that certain acts violate the law based only upon an opportunity for—or counsel and the litigant’s suspicions of—a violation. The rule[s] continues to require litigants to ‘stop-and-think’ before initially making legal or factual contentions.

[A]n “empty-head” but “pure-heart” does not justify lodging patently unsupported factual assertions. And the good or bad faith nature of actions or submissions is not what determines whether sanctions are warranted under Rule 11(b)(3). Inferences must be reasonable and come from facts proven, not speculation or conjecture. Pursuant to their duties as officers of the court, attorneys typically do not offer factual allegations that have no hope of passing as evidentiary support at any stage of the litigation. Substituting another lawyer’s judgment for one’s own does not constitute reasonable inquiry.”

As an initial matter, an affiant’s subjective belief that an event occurred does not constitute evidence that the event in fact occurred. Plaintiffs are not entitled to rely on the discovery process to mine for evidence that never existed in the first instance. Attorneys are not journalists. It is not acceptable to support a lawsuit with opinions, which counsel herself claims no reasonable person would accept as fact and which were “inexact,” “exaggerate[ed],” and “hyperbole.” Nor is it acceptable to use the federal judiciary as a political forum to satisfy one’s political agenda. Such behavior by an attorney in a court of law has consequences.

An attorney’s right to free speech while litigating an action “is extremely circumscribed.” Something does not become plausible simply because it is repeated many times by many people. An attorney who willingly continues to assert claims doomed to fail . . . must be deemed to be acting with an improper motive.

The nation’s courts . . . are reserved for hearing legitimate causes of action. Individuals may have a right (within certain bounds) to disseminate allegations of fraud unsupported by law or fact in the public sphere. But attorneys cannot exploit their privilege and access to the judicial process to do the same. And when an attorney has done so, sanctions are in order. Here’s why. America’s civil litigation system affords individuals the privilege to file a lawsuit to allege a violation of law. Individuals, however, must litigate within the established parameters for filing a claim. Such parameters are set forth in statutes, rules of civil procedure, local court rules, and professional rules of responsibility and ethics. Every attorney who files a claim on behalf of a client is charged with the obligation to know these statutes and rules, as well as the law allegedly violated.

Continue reading →

Ethics Verdict: “Surrenderer-In-Chief” Is Unethical And Inexcusable

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Yes, the newly-released video makes many fair and legitimate points. Yes, Donald Trump has every reason to feel that this is tit-for-tat and “what goes around comes around” after the way his Presidency was ruthlessly undermined and sabotaged with the assistance of leaders of the Democratic Party.

Yes, he fights back and that is admirable, though responsible leaders know where to draw the line and Trump does not (and never has). Yes, Joe Biden and Democrats have virtually asked for this, and in many respects deserve it. Nobody should trust Biden or his party (or its current leaders) ever again. Yes it serves Joe Biden—Hillary Clinton—Nancy Pelosi—Chuck Schumer—Kamala Harris right, they and all of the liars and enablers in the news media who told the public that Joe Biden was a competent, able, trustworthy leader when he was not.

None of that matters. No President can function and do his job as leader of the United States if former Presidents second guess him, attack him and seek to turn the public against him while he is serving his term and is not running for office.

Continue reading →

No, No, NO, Biden Must NOT “Go”: Biden Must Stay, And All Responsible For Putting Him In The White House Must Be Made Accountable

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Joe confused

Over at the Spectator, conservative pundit Dominic Green writes in a piece titled Biden Must Go,

“If Trump had confused his Vice President with a ‘general’ or fumbled with his cue cards because he couldn’t match a scripted question to a scripted answer, as Biden did at his press conference on Thursday; or shown the bizarre callousness and failure of short-term memory in his ‘That was four days ago, five days ago!’ outburst; or spontaneously abandoned the policy of strategic ambiguity on Taiwan in an interview with ABC, as Biden did with George Stephanopoulos on Thursday, the psychiatrists would be lining up outside the cable stations to explain why the 25th Amendment needed to be deployed now. It’s that simple. The buck really does stop with the President. The world has always seen Biden’s incapacity, and now the American people can see it too. He carries direct responsibility for a disaster so undeniable that even a partisan media can no longer deny it. He can neither speak truthfully nor accurately. Not so much the emperor with no clothes, as Lear’s fool on the heath, naked and shivering as the kingdom comes to the ‘great confusion’.”

Oh no you don’t! “The resistance,” progressives, Democrats and the news media can’t be let off that easy. It is essential to restoring the nation’s principles and the integrity of the political process that Joe Biden remain in office to do all the damage and inflict all the embarrassment on the nation he will undoubtedly can and will. It will be painful for him to be sure: good. He was irresponsible and unethical to allow himself to be used by his party when he knew—and I’m sure he knows—that he had become a shadow of his already mediocre self. It will be even more painful for his party and its supporters, which will not be able to blame anyone but themselves for the disaster at the border, the stuttering response to the latest virus strains, the exploding national debt, the creeping inflation and the disgraceful embrace of racial discrimination. And, of course, it will be painful for the public, and again I say, good. They were dupes, fools and incompetent citizens. They deserve to suffer. There are consequences to being lazy, gullible, biased and stupid. They are about to learn them. Hard.The Democrats and media tried to brainwash America with the dangerous idea that when we elect a President that enough people don’t like and the news media decides to destroy, there are constitutional ways to ignore elections and get rid of him. There are not. Impeachment, contrary to the undemocratic plots endorsed by Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters and the rest, requires actual “high crimes and misdemeanors,” not mean tweets, contrived violations of dead letter provisions and conduct routinely engaged in by other Presidents that are suddenly repurposed into “crimes” to avoid the trouble of defeating an incumbent at the polls.

Continue reading →

Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

Ominous mob

Not to jinx it, but I notice that nobody has ever abused an open forum. Not all of the entries are classics, but none are emotional, ill-informed, ethics-tone deaf jabbering either. This is because the commenters who avail themselves of the weekly open fora are serious and thoughtful.

I obsess about the decline in Ethics Alarms traffic, but the blog has never had a more distinguished, perceptive and passionate commentariat—and you know, that’s what I was looking for when I started this project. I wish we had more progressives of the open-minded sub-species participating, but I assume they would all have their heads under bags right now anyway.

Start your engines…

Evening Ethics, 8/19/2021: Those Were The Days…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Ah, those heady days when the U.S. felt ethically justified in toppling governments it didn’t approve of, and “nation building” was still considered practical and virtuous. Today marks the anniversary of the U.S. overthrowing the government of Premier Mohammad Mosaddeq and reinstalling the Shah of Iran in 1953, The Shah was a torturing, oppressive autocrat, but he was our torturing, oppressive autocrat for 26 years, a dependable anti-Communist ally of the United States until a revolution ended his rule in 1979. You should know the rest. Wonder why Iranians aren’t crazy about the U.S.? Today is one big reason. Also on the ethics regrets list is the release of the West Memphis Three on this date in 2011. I wrote about that one here. An excerpt:

“In an ethical system, prosecutors would have made certain the wrongfully convicted men were freed, without any further adversary action. But this was not an ethical system. Instead, prosecutors insisted on a bizarre plea deal in which the Memphis Three agreed to take an Alford plea, a strange, dishonest and much criticized guilty plea in which a defendant essentially lies to avoid an otherwise unavoidable unjust punishment. With an Alford plea,  the prisoner or defendant asserts he or she is innocent, but acknowledges that the prosecution has sufficient evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and thus acknowledges legal, though not actual, guilt.   Prosecutors insisted that all three men plead “guilty” in this fashion in order to agree to release them with time served. The judge accepted the deal. Now Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley are free, their lives all but ruined by 18 lost years, thanks to a rotten system. The news media for the most part didn’t bother to explain why the terms of their release was just one more gratuitous assault on their existence by Arkansas legal hacks.”

I’m sorry today reminded me of this case. It still upsets me to think about it.

1. Here’s evidence that the current complaints of antiracism propagandists is a crock: Denzel Washington. I’ve been watching a lot of his movies lately, and a comparison with Sidney Poitier is unavoidable. Poitier was the ground-breaker, the black man who became a genuine movie star in a majority white market, and more than that, did it by holding up the racism and discrimination in American culture for all to see. Nonetheless, he was limited by his race. Poitier always played character’s whose race was central to their roles in the plot. He never played a villain: like many stars, like John Wayne, Cary Grant and Clark Gable, he regarded his career as a continuous work exploring a particular archetype in all of its facets. For Poitier, it was that of the outstanding black man as an outsider in American society. In Poitier’s amazing year of 1967, he was in three hit movies: “In the Heat of the Night,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?,” and “To Sir, With Love.” All three featured Poitier as a black man thrust into a biased white environment, and gradually earning respect and some measure of equality. Today the #1 black star is Denzel, and he doesn’t have to play such sanctimonious roles. Race plays a part in many of his movies; he has even played black civil rights activists, like Malcolm X and Hurricane Carter. Washington, however, in part because of Poitier’s work, often plays parts that were written for white actors, and nobody cares. He isn’t afraid to play flawed characters and even brutal ones, like in “The Equalizer.” Washington’s success, and the versatility and range he is allowed to explore in his movies, would have been impossible in Poitier’s prime years. His body of work is proof of how far American attitudes toward race have advances and how unfair and dishonest the Black Lives Matter/ Critical Race Theory narrative is holding that the Jim Crow culture still rules America.

Denzel is also better than Poitier, although it is fair to say that Poitier never had the option of being as versatile as Washington. If Sidney Poitier is cinema’s Jackie Robinson, Denzel Washington is its Willie Mays.

Continue reading →

Dr. Fauci’s Totalitarian Quote Shows Why We Cannot Trust Experts Or Those Who Rely On Them With Public Policy Power

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

ben-franklin

That’s a paraphrase; what Ben really said was “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” More than two centuries later, his words remain prescient and wise.

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s words below, in contrast, words should bring chills to the bones of any civically educated American:

“Put aside all of these issues of concern about liberties and personal liberties and realize we have a common enemy…”

Yes, that statement has a context, but it also has a dark and frightening history. The call to put aside “concern about liberties and personal liberties” in order to battle a “common enemy” has been used for centuries in the pursuit of evil agendas. It has been exploited by supposedly benevolent leaders to seize dictatorial powers for short-term emergencies, and those powers somehow never were surrendered. This is why Obama’s ruthless aide Rahm Emanuel said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Sometimes the common enemy really is one, and sometimes the aspiring totalitarian party manufactures a useful target of public fear and hate, like “the Jews.” Sometimes the enemy is real, but the danger posed by it is hyped, as with the Red Scare. For four years, progressives, Democrats and the news media used a series of Big Lies to portray President Trump as a “common enemy” of democracy, even as they used the false narrative as an excuse to weaken the Constitution, freedom of speech, due process, equal protection under law and the integrity of elections.

Here is Fauci’s whole quote:

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Jason Valentine, MD

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Doctors sign

Valentine, a physician at Diagnostic and Medical Clinic Infirmary Health in Mobile, Alabama., posted that photo on Facebook this week. If the Alabama medical board has any integrity whatsoever, he will be cited for an ethical violation. If I were in charge, I’d suspend his license. Id’ revoke his license. He should not be trusted.

The Washington Post article about Valentine’s unethical stand concentrates on the problem unvaccinated citizens (and non-citizens) are causing in the nation’s effort to get past the pandemic. All of it is irrelevant. So are Valentine’s various explanations for his position, like “[C]ovid is a miserable way to die and I can’t watch them die like that,” and “We do not yet have any great treatments for severe disease, but we do have great prevention with vaccines. Unfortunately, many have declined to take the vaccine, and some end up severely ill or dead. I cannot and will not force anyone to take the vaccine, but I also cannot continue to watch my patients suffer and die from an eminently preventable disease.”

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Sunday Ethics Picnic, 8/15/2021: Afghanistan Accountability And Suicide Ethics”

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

This Comment of the Day, by new commenter David C, is more emotional than most EA COTDs, but the topic is an emotional one: suicide. Checking the web on the topic, there are so many essays and articles about why suicide is not a “selfish act” that I sense a politically correct mandate at work. Depression is a serious illness that is stigmatized, depressed people commit suicide in large numbers, ergo criticizing suicide is a cruel attack on victims who deserve only sympathy and empathy.

I will accept a rebuke for writing in the post that “suicide has been accurately called the most selfish human act of all.” I should not have written “accurately,” and I apologize and retract it. It is an act the is often selfish, unless we want to absolved suicides from all responsibility for their actions, which seems to be David’s orientation.

I am not entire inexperienced in the area of depression and suicide. I served on an NIH task force on the former, and have had a roommate and three first cousins kill themselves. One cousin threw himself from an overpass and fell through the window of a passing truck. Selfish? The truck driver could not continue driving after experiencing that trauma. His brother deliberately drown himself in front of his former fiancee as she watched helplessly. Selfish? Often…not always…suicide is an intentional act of aggression and hostility toward society. The harm these acts do to family and others is extreme: I’ve seen it. Do note that the post comment upon was about grandstanding suicides for effect, involving people hurling themselves off a prominent public attraction. David’s argument seems to be “they are sick,” so they can’t be blamed—none of them.

I also believe that sanctifying suicide makes it more common by making it more acceptable. Once, when it was considered a crime and a sin, society looked on suicide as a shameful act. As with addiction, sex outside of marriage and unwed pregnancy, removing the element of shame also increased conduct that has serious societal drawbacks.I think its fair to say that killing oneself has serious societal drawbacks, and that if potential suicides were encouraged to give serious thought to how their deaths would affect others, they might seek less violent solutions to their very real problems. Or should be take the position that the depressed are not capable of being ethical, and we should not expect them to be?

Here is David C’s Comment of the Day on the post, Sunday Ethics Picnic, 8/15/2021: Afghanistan Accountability And Suicide.

***

I have avidly followed your blog for well over 2 years now. Occasionally I feel let down by some of your remarks on mental health, but perhaps my expectations are unreasonable as it is not your wheelhouse. The pandemic has shown us many things but chief among them is that every person’s mental health can be vulnerable in the right circumstances. I know this is very complicated issue but I feel equipped to make some points.

Yes it is a myth that talking about suicide will plant and germinate the idea in a person’s head. Hotlines are more accessible than ever with smartphones. Whether people avail themselves of hotlines is one question, and whether they help is another, but it is always better to be aware of the existence of the resources that are out there. And yes, as far as I know there is research that suggests that if people are fixated for whatever reason on a certain means of suicide, they will not turn to another method if access to that method is removed.

To tar the act wholesale as selfish in my eyes tends to be a facile dismissal of what is a profoundly complex matter. And if that accusation is launched one could certainly charge those who demand the person in pain remain alive as equally “selfish” at least. After all, isn’t it easy to ask other people to endure pain that you don’t experience? Not to mention when it comes to such an issue of such great sensitivity I don’t find such language to be helpful and conducive to anything positive. We need to be talk openly, and in many cases it is just dead inaccurate. And as someone with a mountain of experience in crisis intervention, I can tell you why: in many cases these people are convinced, literally convinced that their families, friends, society, the WORLD is better off without their presence. Selfish…what a word to describe them! And whether you think their thinking is misguided or distorted or whatever doesn’t matter (even if it may be) because what matters is what they believe at the time of their action. I have no doubt you can appreciate that.

Continue reading →