U.S. Society

Ethics Heroes: The Unanimous U.S. Supreme Court

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

I’m proud of them.

In its decision in Trump v. Anderson, just announced, the Court reversed the the Colorado Supreme Court’s indefensible decision to remove former President Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot on the grounds that he participated in an “insurrection.” “Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse.” That’s all that needed to be said, and if simplicity and pure law was what the Court needed to ensure a unanimous decision, then so be it. Ethics Alarms had previously stated that the SCOTUS ruling striking down the “lawfare”-inspired crack-brain theory (that a provision created specifically to deal with former participants in the Confederacy was properly applicable to Donald Trump because a mob of idiots stormed the U.S. Capitol in a tantrum over his loss in the 2020 election) should be unanimous, and mirabile dictu, it was. This ends all state efforts to keep Trump off the ballot.

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Will the Disastrous Results of The Great Stupid Result in Learning, So Behavior Changes, or Will the Fools Responsible Keep Trying To Govern On Dreams Rather Than Reality?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I’m afraid of the answer.

If I were really in a nasty state of mind—and I am mighty close—I could make this post and dozens covering the same territory a chain of Nelsons, as in,

The problem with that approach is that nothing’s funny about the phenomenon. In a ridiculous number of ways, across the culture and nation, states, cities and communities are being forced to reverse policies installed at Peak Stupid that were, or should have been, evidently moronic and certain to lead to disaster when they were devised. Nobody, at least not enough bodies, wanted to pay attention; virtue-signaling was more important to them. They really believed this, and I maintain, with all what’s left of my heart, that this was signature significance: anyone who embraced (or, going forward into the frightening future, embraces) this kind of policy approach is unfit to hold any position of influence and power.

To touch on a current Great Stupid debacle for just a second that I’m too sick and too covered in alligators to deal with in any detail right now, the Democratic Party’s determination to renominate Joe Biden for President, someone yesterday described the decision as the equivalent of the Titanic’s captain that night in 1912 backing up and sailing into the same iceberg again. I really like that analogy, and intend to use it whenever appropriate.

This topic could support a book, let’s just look at two recent examples:

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Briefly…On Timing and Trials

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I’m sorry. There was a lot to post on yesterday, and I was barely able to make it up to the office at all. I also had some client work to do, and that was really hard: my brain is in no shape to be scanning legal documents for ethics issues.

My friend is here, and yesterday it was just good having someone to talk to. (How Grace and I managed to raise a son as economic with the spoken word as Calvin Coolidge is a topic for the nature-nurture debate. One theory is that he could never get a word in edgewise.)

This is a segment from a larger post languishing on the drafting board. It’s amusing to read Trump-fearing pundits and analysts as they tie themselves in knots to try to avoid admitting that these are all—all of them—politically motivated prosecutions against Trump that would not be happening now if he didn’t threaten the Democrats’ grand plan. They don’t want to admit that they are desperate to see him convicted of something so it can swing enough votes to save Biden, but everything they write and say eventually leaks that obvious motive.

Here’s an example from yesterday. A Politico writer keeps saying “that that the public has a strong interest in a speedy trial, and indeed, a federal statute requires judges to set trial dates that account for “the best interest of the public.” He adds, disingenuously, that “Americans have repeatedly told pollsters — nearly two-thirds of them, including roughly one-third of Republicans — that they want to see a verdict in the case before the election.”

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A Few Random Thoughts Post Grace…[Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

  • Friends are a problem for me, always have been. Someone wrote that friends come in and out of your life like waiters at a diner, and that no doubt accurate description has always bothered me. For a long time, I prided myself on keeping in touch with friends from grammar school, high school, college—and eventually lost touch with more and more of them, feeling guilty about each one. At the same time, I’m uncomfortable with overt displays of friendship, even as I tear up at the finale of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” My father, who had exactly four close friends over his entire life (not counting his best friend, my mother) was the same way exactly. So I can blame him.
  • It’s hard to gauge heartfelt condolences from the pro forma variety, isn’t it? I’m hearing on Facebook from some people who have mostly ignored me for years. I know this is a ritual of civilization that is important for re-establishing our commonality and bonds as human beings. Yet it sure seems weird that it takes a tragedy to activate the impulse.
  • One of my oldest friends heard about Grace and announced that he was going to drive down from Connecticut to help me cope with everything unless I ordered him not to. So he’s coming. I have a few friends who are like that, just a few. I suppose nobody has too many more, friends who come to one’s aid because they want to and not because they feel obligated.
  • None of the above in any way diminishes my genuine gratitude for the lovely and caring condolences (and even flowers!) I have received   from many of you on EA and privately. I have only met a handful of you face-to-face, after all—and one of the few I ended up banning from the blog. You have no obligations to me: the fact that you would express what you have touches me greatly. I am on the cusp of descending into an all-time orgy of second-guessing and self-doubt, but so far, at least, you have kept me out of the abyss.

Added: I just had my first conversation discussing Grace’s passing with someone who should have felt close to her after a life-long, supposedly close family relationship. I might as well have been relaying a baseball score. By any normal calculus, my wife’s death should have affected this individual nearly as much as it does me. Yet in our conversation I’d guess 25% of her contribution was laughter. (I’m not that funny.)

None of this was exactly a surprise to me after many years of interactions with this woman, but it does give me some insight into Grace’s seemingly inexplicable insecurity and anxiety. It took a great deal of restraint for me to avoid asking, “What is wrong with you?” I know—defensive reactions, everybody deals with grief differently, blattily blah (as Grace used to say).

I really don’t think she cares. She’s a sociopath.

Friday Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I woke up all set to write about the pernicious effects of consequentialism, since I am kicking myself for not forcing Grace to go to the ER the night before she died. I was certain something was wrong, but not fatally wrong, and she was adamant that all she needed was a good night’s sleep. If she wasn’t better in the morning I had resolved to call the EMTs.

Right now, I’m too exhausted to write much more than that.

Grace Marshall, April 8,1952-February 29, 2024

/ Jack Marshall / 91 Comments

I woke up this morning to find that Grace, the love of my life, my partner, lover, best friend and more, had passed away during the night. I had no warning at all; she had been having some health issues but nothing that suggested that she was in mortal peril.

We were married for 43 years.

I had a scheduled legal ethics seminar, and, of course, taught it as planned. After all, it was about professionalism.

I may write some more about this, depending on how I feel as the day goes on.

Thinking About “The Box”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I recently re-watched “The Box,” which my wife and I had first seen more than a decade ago. It is a horror movie based on the 1970 short story “Button, Button” by Richard Matheson, one of the writers of the original “Twilight Zone,” and Matheson’s conceit, a mash-up of science fiction and ethics as his work often was, had been turned into an episode of one of the reboots of Rod Serling’s creation.

If I recall, I didn’t make it to the end of the film the first time, because the set-up was so annoying. A strange, disfigured man shows up at a couple’s door with a strange box in his hands. It consists of a red button under a locked glass dome that must be opened with a key. The man explains to the stunned wife (her husband is at work, getting bad news about his job) that they have been chosen to be the recipients of a gift. All they have to do is push the red button, and the man will return to hand over a brief case filled with a million dollars, which will be tax free. However, when the button is pushed, someone, somewhere in the world, will die. He assures the wife that they won’t know the doomed individual. They have only 24 hours to consider the offer, at the conclusion of which the man will return and take the box away to offer to someone else.

It is, obviously, an ethics hypothetical that has been posed in many different ways through the years. What bothered me originally, and worries me now, is that anyone I would care to have in my community would ever push the button. (As you can guess, one of the couple does—“Why not? It’s just a box…” and a chain reaction is launched that causes havoc.)

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Did Oscar Hammerstein Jr. Have an Ethics Problem?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

A series of random events have caused my mind to wander over to “Carousel,”the second musical by the legendary team of Richard Rodgers (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics), following their ground-breaking “Oklahoma!” The 1945 work was adapted from Ferenc Molnár’s 1909 play “Liliom,” and although it is a favorite of most critics (declared by TIME as the best musical of the 20th Century, for example, but what does TIME know?), its plot and characters become more troubling the longer one thinks about them. Rodgers said it was his favorite of his musicals with Oscar, and he was definitely in top form; I think his Overture to “Carousel” may be the best thing he ever wrote.

For the “hero” of the musical, Billy Bigelow, is a thug, a dolt, and a domestic abuser. I found the musical hard to take even as a kid for those reasons. When, in his justly famous song “My Boy Bill” after learning that he is going to be a father, Billy suddenly realizes that he might end up with a daughter instead (this only occurs to the big dummy two-third of the way through), his immediate conclusion is that he’ll rob and steal if that’s what it takes to raise her. Sure enough, that’s what he does: ultimately Billy gets himself mixed up in a dumb robbery scheme that goes sideways, and he is killed. The whole show is about his bad decisions and an ultimate opportunity given to him by God (or someone) to leave Purgatory (where everyone has to polish stars) and go back to Earth for a day to try to clean up the mess he’s made.

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Is It Too Much To Ask For Elected Officials, Journalists and Educators to Read, Understand and Respect the Constitution?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Apparently.

Sorry, W.E.B….

1. Politico national investigative correspondent Heidi Przybyla went on MSNBC (where reality goes to die) and smugly stated that an “extremist element” of Christian nationalists hold the nutty belief that rights “come from God” rather than the government. “They believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority, Przybyla said during her appearance on MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes.” “They don’t come from Congress. They don’t come from the Supreme Court. They come from God.”

This woman presumes to interpret political news for the public, and she doesn’t comprehend the Declaration of Independence or its activating document, the Constitution. Both are built on the philosophy of Locke and Rousseau that humans beings, by virtue of being alive, have intrinsic “unalienable rights,” and that governments may not take away those rights or infringe on them. It matters not whether “God,” “the Creator,” “Nature,” “Providence” or some other designation is used to describe the origin of those intrinsic rights, because the United States of America accepts the bedrock belief that government is limited in its ability to dictate to its constituents. Przybyla’s position, in addition to being stunningly ignorant, is the rejected concept that underlies monarchies and other totalitarian systems. Naturally Chris Hayes, poor man’s Rachel Maddow that he is, didn’t have the wit, guts or professionalism to point out to the reporter that she sounded like a complete ignoramus.

As an aside, I should probably post one of the “My Biases” essays about how quickly my respect for anyone plummets when they tell me that they watch MSNBC. The network will literally make you dumber the as you watch it. How anyone qualified to do something more challenging in life than running a bait shop could be so naive as to trust an alleged news source that employs Al Sharpton and Joy Reid is a constant mystery to me.

The question is, how many journalists, prominent pundits and U.S. citizens are just as addled as Przybyla? Remember, these are the people who are screaming about wanting to save democracy from Donald Trump, but they embrace Przybyla’s anti-democratic concept of human rights.

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Comment of the Day: “Ethics Dunce: The National MS Society”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

One would have a difficult time finding a more measured, considerate, honest and probing analysis of the preferred pronouns controversy than Ryan Harkins offers here. You certainly won’t get it from me: I drew a line in the sand (Remember the Alamo!) on this long ago, when I concluded that such rhetorical demands from various minority groups were cynical power plays designed to make everyone bend to their will or be branded one kind of bigot or another. Ryan’s reflections didn’t change my mind, but they did make me consider changing my mind.

Here is Ryan Harkins’ Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Dunce: The National MS Society”…

***

I have struggled with finding suitable reason to cave and use “preferred” pronouns. I can conceive of numerous reasons to reject them: using such pronouns is manipulative; using them is forcing division; using them is an effort to force the world to conform to an individual, rather than the individual accepting reality; or if none of those, using them is an effort to band-aid over and thus ignore serious issues.

I’ve been considering that maybe being willing to use someone’s preferred pronouns could be a measure of meeting them where they are. In Catholic apologetics and evangelization, that is one of the best tactics in seeking conversion. Walk with someone. Get to know him. Understand his problems. Genuinely care about him, because conversion is not a game where one keeps track of points, but where one is selflessly concerned about this person’s salvation. Furthermore, St. Paul tells us in 1 Cor 9: “To the Jew, I become a Jew, to win over the Jew. To the Greek, I become a Greek, to win over the Greek. To the weak, I become weak, to win over the weak. I become all things to all people so that by all means I might save some.”

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