The author is well-published law school professor Lara Bazelon, who often opines at Slate. I could, but I won’t, give Bazelon the benefit of the doubt, assuming that as a lawyer and advocate, the article is intentional hyperbole and intended to both spark debate and to assuage the conscience of other working moms. Lawyers, however, are not supposed to mislead or lie. If Bazelon doesn’t believe that she has picked her job over her kids, then she shouldn’t write it. If she does believe it, then she is rationalizing away a breach of duty.
There are millions of working mothers who have no choice other than to work when their children may need them, but Bazelon is not one of them. She writes, Continue reading →
1. Any ideas about what was going on here? I’m stumped. This is New Orleans public defender—that is, former New Orleans public defender—Ashley Crawford:
She began working for the Orleans Public Defenders last October, and since that time apparently handled over a hundred cases without having ever acquired a license to practice law. The Orleans Public Defenders said the bar certificate of good standing she presented to the office last fall when she was employed had been falsified, and Ashley used the bar number of another attorney. She’s fired now, and facing charges.
Crawford graduated from the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law in 2016, then clerked for a New Orleans judge beginning that fall. Judicial clerks are not required to pass the bar exam, though many do.
Why would she—would anyone—do this? Now she is facing criminal penalties, and will never be able to practice law legally. It should be far easier to pass the bar exam and be admitted properly than to fake having a law license. She also has caused havoc for the judicial system: any defendant convicted while being represented by Crawford has an automatic right to a new trial.
There’s a lesson, a tragedy, a made-for-TV movie here; I just wish I knew what the lesson is. Continue reading →
This week’s Open Forum was epic. All four major topics raised—children allowed to attempt dangerous challenges, Southern Democrats, Artificial Intelligence, and reparations for slavery, led to excellent, varied and provocative debates. I feel a bit guilty for co-opting the child exploitation thread with a full post; several of the comments in that thread were COTD quality, especially A.M. Golden’s at 8:12 am on the 20th.
The A.I. thread was one of the very best on any topic in the history of the blog. I started out trying to choose a Comment of the Day from that discussion, and after realizing that there was one great comment after another, considered re-publishing the whole sequence, but it is too long. I urge anyone who hasn’t done so already to read it all. The participants were adimagejim (who gets credit for opening the topic), Michael R, Steve Witherspoon, Alex, johnburger2013, and Bad Bob.
I chose the reparations thread to highlight the comments because the topic was recently the subject of a hearing on the Hill, and because I think the “debate” is and has always been intellectually dishonest on the part of “reparations” advocates, who, I suspect, know exactly how impossible their demands and proposals are. Nonetheless the news media treats the arguments with reverence, and are happy to assist when naysayers are accused of insensitivity and bigotry. The Comments of the Day that follow effectively show just how absurd—and unethical—the reparations case is.
1. Thank you, loyal commenters, for a yeoman job in yesterday’s Open Forum.
2. Confederate Statuary Ethics Train Wreck update. Now the historical airbrushers (all from Progressiveland, just in case you couldn’t guess) are going after Civil War recreations and commemorative events. The head of the Lake County Forest Preserve in Illinois declared that there would be no more annual Civil War Days event after next month’s edition, if he gets his way. He doesn’t think Confederate flags should ever be displayed, even in battle recreations. Besides, he wants the event to be retooled so that instead of commemorating the single most important period and struggle in U.S. history, it advances an understanding of climate change.
(Who are these people? How did they get this way? What do we do about them so the cultural damage they inflict is contained?)
The home-grown historical censor also said,
“This has nothing we want, nor should celebrate, nor re-enact. When southern states are being made to tear down every statute representing this racist, murdering chapter of our history, I can’t believe here in Lake County our own forest preserve is preserving and celebrating it every year, and with our tax dollars.”
This deliberately brain-dead approach to U.S. history is working (aided greatly by the atrocious neglect of American history in our schools), and by working I mean promoting ignorance so citizens can be more easily misled. The Wall Street Journal reported that visits to Civil War national battlefields are falling off. Over 10 million Americans visited Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh, Chickamauga/Chattanooga, and Vicksburg in 1970. They only had 3.1 million visitors last year.
That’s about as many tourists as visited the “Cheers” bar in Boston.
The way this trip is going, I have no confidence in getting more posts up, or, in fact, whether I will be attacked by rabid badgers or fall down an elevator shaft. So the prudent approach is to turn everything over to the co-pilots, you, and rely on the commentariatt here to keep the metaphorical ethics craft in the air and out of trouble.
Please stay on topic, be civil, and don’t be mean to Alizia. I won’t be back in my Alexandria office until around 8, and that’s only if the flight isn’t delayed, so who knows when I’ll see a keyboard again.
Former police officer Mohamed Noor was sentenced last week to spend 12 and a half years in a Minnesota prison for shooting Justine Ruszczyk, an unarmed woman he killed while on patrol in 2017. I don’t see how anyone could read the facts of the case and not conclude that Noor was guilty of negligent homicide. I don’t see how anyone could rationally complain that his sentence was excessive, either.
Ruszczyk, who was white—unfortunately this fact is relevant—and soon to be married, called 911 twice to report what she thought was a sexual assault going on in the alley behind her Minneapolis home. Officer Noor and his partner responded to investigate. Ruszczyk came out to the darkened alley to meet them, presumably to explain what she heard or saw, and was soon dead of a single shot, fired from the open patrol car window by Noor. At the trial, Noor said he feared for his life when he saw Ruszczyk approaching his cruiser and fired. “She could have had a weapon,” he said .
The reported crime, sexual assault, the officers were investigating did not involve a weapon. If Noor’srationale was enough to justify shooting Janet Ruszczyk, presumably an officer could justify shooting anyone, at any time.
Prosecutors argued that Noor acted unreasonably by firing at unknown figure out his window without shouting a warning, and that it amounted to third-degree murder. Well, of course it did. He was convicted by a jury in April . Twelve years for recklessly killing an unarmed woman who was trying to be a responsible citizen is not an unreasonable sentence, and is within the sentencing guidelines for the crime. Continue reading →
The Chicago Cubs ridiculous virtue signaling and capitulation to political correctness bullying is metaphorically coming home to roost.
Love it.
In May, as I wrote about here, the Cubs banned a fan for life because he made the ubiquitous “OK” sign behind a black broadcaster. Nobody had any basis to say with certainty what the fan meant, but after the Twitter mob demanded the fans head, the Cubs meekly complied. You see, the OK gesture might have meant, “My race is better than your race,” because a rumor was circulated online that “OK” is a white power symbol. It might have been trolling by someone who knew that the symbol would trigger social justice warriors. Or, you know, OK might have just meant “OK” as it as for almost 200 years.
I would have included a clip of “Triumph of the Will” here, but apparently such a film never existed…
Well, I can’t complain too much; it’s been a while since a news story propelled my brains through my skull to the ceiling. However, the trigger this time demonstrates that several developments are even worse than I thought—or believed they would get—such as…
The Left’s embrace of historical airbrushing and censorship as part of its strategy of controlling thought and knowledge.
Social media’s meat-axe approach to policing online content.
The perilous state of the First Amendment as both the Left and its allied media seek to control art as well as speech.
YouTube released new policies regarding “hate speech” yesterday to “reduce more hateful and supremacist content from YouTube.” Since the new policies almost immediately resulted in the removal of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Nazi propaganda epic “Triumph of the Will,” I can confidently conclude the the policies are far too broad, and also that those executing them have the perspective of the average person who has grown up in a cave, and the judgment of the PTA scold who wants to ban “Huckleberry Finn.” Continue reading →
U.S. WWII veterans from the United States attend a ceremony at Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial situated above Omaha Beach to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the D-Day, in Colleville-sur-Mer, France.
I have a special reason for being a devotee of D-Day: I may be here because my father missed it. He was supposed to be in the invasion, but as an observer, not a combatant. Dad never explained how he got that plum assignment, but before he had the honor, an idiot in his company blew part of my father’s foot apart while playing with a hand grenade nearby. (You’ll be happy to hear that said idiot advanced human evolution by blowing himself up in the process.) Thus Jack Sr. was in an army hospital on June 6, and had to wait for the Battle of the Bulge to be part of an iconic W.W. II conflict.
1. Somehow, I don’t think this is the society they thought they were fighting for…
At Rutherford High School in Bay County, Florida, a teacher wrote “WTF” on a student’s science homework. His mother complained, calling the vulgar acronym “inappropriate.”
Boy, what a prude.
I just saw another of the increasingly common TV ads where evoking a vulgar word is used for humorous value. One of the cell phone networks includes an exclamation of “Holy shirt!” (Get it? HAR!) when a father’s gray attire suddenly explodes into color as soon as the family upgrades its network. “What the Shirt” is also a trendy shirt company.
In a culture where casual public vulgarity is treated as normal and even clever, it is no surprise that alleged professionals often have no functioning ethics alarms regarding their language, or any sense of respect, etiquette, gentility or decorum. After all, when a newly elected Congresswoman thinks it’s appropriate to shout “We’re going to impeach the motherfucker!” and suffers no adverse consequences, what do we expect?
2. Somehow, I don’t think this is the society they thought they were fighting for…wait, didn’t I just write that?
Sueretta Emke complained that she was dining with her family at a Golden Corral in Erie, Pennsylvania, when the manager told her that her attire was inappropriate and that some customers had complained. Asked Emke said the manager couldn’t answer when she was asked what was so inappropriate about her outfit. It was a mystery!
For some reason the phrase “res ipsa loquitur” keeps coming to mind.
Call me crazy, but I doubt that if Ms. Emke’s croptop and Daisy Dukes had fit her more like this…
…anyone would have complained, or even if someone had, that the manager would have ejected her. She was being fat-shamed. On the other hand, even at a Golden Corral, diners should have enough respect for others to adopt at least minimum standards of appropriate attire. On the OTHER hand—Did you know that Edward Albee wrote a play called “The Man With Three Arms? It was not a success—unless restaurants have stated, publicized and displayed dress codes, it is unfair to arbitrarily discriminate against the unattractive exhibitionist and slobs while allowing the attractive ones to dine unmolested. Continue reading →
I guess that would be a too-short essay on an important topic with special contemporary relevance, so I am bound to say more. Nonetheless, I would be more comfortable with my fellow society members and more confident of the future of the the nation if the answer to the title query was universally accepted in absolute terms. For the acceptance of the principle of pre-crime is dangerous. It places less than a spiked mountain-climber’s boot on a slippery slope to totalitarianism, which is the real-life equivalent of the Devil in the scene above from “A Man For All Seasons,” both the play and the movie, based on the writings of Sir Thomas More, in which More emotionally refuses to arrest a man because of the evil he might do, before he has actually broken any laws:
More’s Wife: Arrest him!
Sir ThomasMore: For what?
Wife: He’s dangerous!
William Roper (More’s Son in Law): He’s a spy.
Margaret (More’s daughter): Father, that man’s bad.
More: There’s no law against that.
Roper: There is – God’s law.
More: Then God can arrest him.
Wife: While you talk, he’s gone.
More: And go he should, were he the Devil himself, until he broke the law.
Roper: So, now you’d give the Devil the benefit of law?
More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s. And if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
Few more profound and important thoughts have been so eloquently and powerfully presented in a motion picture as this scene from “A Man For All Seasons,” to which I will note (again) in passing, “Rotten Tomatoes” gives a lower score than “Birdman,”a fact that provides a disturbing snapshot of the state of our education, culture and priorities in 2019.
Both political parties have placed their feet on this slippery slope in the past. The essence of pre-crime is punishing a citizen for what he or she is, rather than for what he or she has done, on the theory that what an individual is makes that person “dangerous,” in the words of Mrs. More, for what they might do. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (and the Supreme Court that backed him) was responsible for probably the worst example of pre-crime in our history, when the United States, in full panic mode after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, imprisoned loyal Japanese-American citizens as a precautionary measure. Another panic, also not entirely groundless, led to a pre-crime mentality during the Red Scare and McCarthy episodes, seeking to punish Americans who belonged to the dreaded Communist Party, a nonetheless legal organization.
To be abundantly clear, I will define pre-crime as when the government removes a civil right, a Constitutional right, from a citizen, not as punishment for breaking a law, but based on what that individual believes, says, is or is understood to be. Continue reading →
Ethics Alarms 