Dispatches From The Trans Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

[ Rose’s breast-baring at the White House will serve as the regular graphic accompanying this topic in the future, because it perfectly symbolizes the attitide of these activists toward the public,

The Tran Ethics Train Wreck was made official back in February, and in retrospect Ethics Alarms should have designated it much earlier. An ethics train wreck is a continuing and evolving situation involving ethics issues and dilemmas that entice anyone becoming involved in them to end up looking foolish at best, misguided at worst, and in between, subject to anger and abuse. Latest developments:

  • The University of Wyoming’s Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority is being sued for allegedly changing the definition of ‘woman’ to accept a trans member, a biological male with equipment intact who is 6’2″ and 260lb. She has been accused of ogling her “sisters” with a full erection, among other issues. The suit alleges that the sorority’s leadership  bullied and intimidated member to accept Artemis Langford. The current and altered sorority rules only require  that a member “identify” as female. KKGs lawyers argue that the definition of “woman” has evolved since the sorority’s founding 150 years ago”The term (woman) is unquestionably open to many interpretations,” the sorority’s filing claimed. I question whether a law suit can prevail here, as clear as it seems that the complaining members were subjected to a bait-and switch. If they cannot get the sorority to agree to a policy they find tolerable, and if they really have been subjected to bullying, I suggest that they quit.

  • AMC Theaters  canceled screenings of a documentary film showcasing the experiences of de-transitioning transsexuals following an aggressive campaign by a group called the Queer Trans Project which sends “Build-a-Queer kits” to “transitioning” LGBTQ+ individuals. The kits include chest binders and tucking tape The online activist group encouraged protesters to send letters to AMC executives to block the screening of the documentary titled “No Way Back: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care.”  The film shares the stories of five young transsexuals regretting their decision to cross gender lines as well as critical commentary from medical experts. Once AMC announced that it would not show the film, the group posted: “We did it! Our community’s swift action is a testament to the power of advocacy and the importance of raising our voices against harmful content. Your collective efforts have made a significant impact, and the decision to pull No Way Back from AMC theaters is a step towards fostering a more inclusive and respectful environment. Thank you for your dedication and commitment to creating positive change.” AMC claims that the decision was based entirely on poor advance ticket sales.
    And absent leaked documents or emails, there is no way to determine which story is true, or if reality is some mixture of both. The activist group would try to take credit regardless the actual impact of its lobbying, and AMC would never admit to suppressing speech and art because of political pressure.

  • This doesn’t help: New Hampshire’s first transgender state representative, Stacie-Marie Laughton has been arrested and charged with multiple counts of distributing child sexual abuse images. Laughton’s girlfriend was also arrested on the same day on one count of sexual exploitation of children, and one count of distribution of child pornography. She was working at a daycare called Creative Minds and is accused of taking pictures of the children in her care. 

That’s quite a role-model you have there, Trans World! Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month (And Incompetent Elected Official): Vice-President Kamala Harris, Part 2: Harris Has Directly Violated California’s Legal Ethics Rules

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

There is another aspect of Kamala Harris’s attack on the Supreme Court majority on Dobbs that bears noting.

In most jurisdictions, a lawyer may not publicly impugn the integrity of a sitting judge, and certainly not a Supreme Court Justice.

Here is the relevant rule in California, one of the jurisdictions with the duty to oversee her conduct. California’s position is that a member of its bar is subject to California rules no matter when the lawyer violates them.

Rule 8.2 Judicial Officials – State Bar of California:

(a) A lawyer shall not make a statement of fact that the lawyer knows* to be false or with reckless disregard as to its truth or falsity concerning the qualifications or integrity of a judge or judicial officer, or of a candidate for election or appointment to judicial office.

Comment “To maintain the fair and independent administration of justice, lawyers should defend judges and courts unjustly criticized. Lawyers also are obligated to maintain the respect due to the courts of justice and judicial officers.”

If there is a California lawyer reading who wants to take a stand for the integrity of the ethics rules, a formal complaint to the would be apt and appropriate.

[The graphic above represents my assessment of the likelihood that the California Bar would ever enforce its rules against a good, abortion-loving Democrat for attacking the U.S. Supreme Court.]

Comment Of The Day: “The Rogan-Kennedy-Hotez Controversy: Is It Ever Unethical To Debate?”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I have a massive backlog of Comments of the Day from last week, so I’d better get cracking.

Here is Tom P.’s COTD on the post, “The Rogan-Kennedy-Hotez Controversy: Is It Ever Unethical To Debate?”

***

Except for scientific laws, irrefutable evidence-based outcomes, and scientific principles. i.e., gravity, laws of motion, combustion requires fuel, oxygen, an ignition source, etc. I don’t think there is such a thing as settled science. If settled science exists, what are the criteria that we should use to claim the science is settled? Who determines the science to be settled? Is there a mechanism to unsettle the science if someone comes up with new findings? The answers to my questions are the same. Don’t know. Labeling something as settled science is a condescending dodge.

I concede policies should not be crafted based on the debating skill of debaters. I also believe there should be peace on earth. People should not murder other people. Politicians should speak the truth and keep campaign promises. Now that we have that out of the way, what is the alternative to debating various scientific principles? Blind acceptance?

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Unethical Quote Of The Month (And Incompetent Elected Official): Vice-President Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

“How dare they?”

—Vice-President Kamala Harris on June 24 referring to the U.S. Supreme Court on the anniversary of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org. ruling that finally overturned Roe v. Wade.

This wasn’t the usual infantile babbling that characterizes most of Harris’s public appearances: Ethics Alarms has pledged to skip most of those in fealty to the Julie Principle. That quote is far worse, more significant and sinister. It’s so unethical and outrageous that I initially didn’t believe she could have been referring to the Supreme Court: most of the mainstream media accounts and even the edited videos left out the context of that outburst, so, giving the Vice-President of the United States the benefit of the doubt and assuming that surely, surely, she could not be framing a duly rendered majority ruling on the U.S. Constitution by the independent branch of the government charged with that duty by the Founders in such an ignorant, misleading and inflammatory manner.

She was, however. In fact, she had made the same fatuous, irresponsible and obnoxious statement before, a year ago, and is apparently so proud of her demagoguery that she deemed it worthy of an encore. I thought, and hoped, that her “How dare they?” was at least in the context she placed it in this past January, but no. (That is also an unethical and despicable bit of demogoguery, notable for Harris’s characterization of the famous statement in Thomas Jefferson’s masterpiece as “A promise we made in the Declaration of Independence that we are each endowed with the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Huh. Sounds funny. Isn’t there something missing there? Something that unborn Americans might think is important? I’m sure I’ll think of it in a minute…

But no. I could find no news report that placed this “How dare they?” in the context Harris placed it last week, but a video I can’t embed, available here on the Washington Post website, makes it clear.

In order to make such a dangerous statement, Harris has to also mislead the public into believing that, as she falsely said in January and periodically since, the United States Supreme Court “took away… a fundamental right, a basic freedom from the people of America.” Whatever one thinks should be the law or laws regarding abortion, it was never “a fundamental right, a basic freedom.” It was a Court-made right, and the Supreme Court isn’t empowered to make rights. “Fundamental rights” are the enumerated rights in the Bill of Rights and the subsequent amendments, passed by Congress and the states, in the Constitution. Roe was a bad, political, incompetent decision that most legal scholars, even those who favor abortion, admitted was wrongly decided. (If she ever had chosen to be candid about the issue, it is likely that even the sainted Ruth Bader Ginsburg recognized this.) Roe survived for so long because a parade of Justices lacked the votes and guts to overturn it.

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About This Exchange Between A Reporter Last Week And The White House’s Non-Historic, Non-Incompetent Paid Liar And The Later Response By The White House’s Historic, Incompetent Paid Liar…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

1. How can the White House not have a response prepared for this question?

2. How long can the mainstream media refuse to give this slowly exploding story the attention and coverage it obviously deserves?

3. It is true that everybody—I think literally everybody—knew that Joe Biden was lying when he said his son had “done nothing wrong” and when he said that he never discussed Hunter’s dealing with foreign governments with him. But is it possible that the President, his advisors and his party really think that they can duck the scandal with the Clinton “Deny, deny, deny!” formula?

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A Barn Door Fallacy Classic From California

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

California was the only U.S. jurisdiction that had no version of American Bar Association Rule 8.3, which reads in part, “A lawyer who knows that another lawyer has committed a violation of the Rules of Professional Conduct that raises a substantial question as to that lawyer’s honesty, trustworthiness or fitness as a lawyer in other respects, shall inform the appropriate professional authority.”

“Shall” means must, and thus, theoretically, a lawyer who does not report a lawyer for misconduct that amounts to a serious legal ethics violation is himself or herself committing such a violation as well. That’s the theory.

The California legal community has just gone through a spectacular scandal. Tom Girardi, a famous and much-acclaimed plaintiffs trial lawyer, was disbarred after it was discovered that he had defrauded many clients and illegally obtained millions of dollars in the process. The California bar’s investigation report was horrific: his corrupt activities were successful for so long in part because he recruited—and bribed—members of the State Bar leadership and the organization’s employees. Over a hundred lawsuits had been filed against Girardi by clients for misappropriation of funds, but his record with the Bar remained pristine.

Shortly after the ugly story broke, California began to take steps to add some form of 8.3 to its Rules of Professional Conduct governing the ethics of its members, a cynical and useless move designed to appear responsible. It was also an example of what Ethics Alarms calls “The Barn Door Fallacy,” a phenomenon most common today in the area of post-tragedy gun legislation. After a high-profile disaster, the response is to “do something” that supposedly would have prevented the disaster if it had been in place earlier. Usually, as in this case, the reality is that it would not.

Rule 8.3 is something of an illusion anyway. Bar associations are reluctant to second guess a member and punish him or her for their personal assessments of what kind of conduct constitutes “raising a substantial question as to that lawyer’s honesty, trustworthiness or fitness as a lawyer in other respects.” Stealing money from a client is definitely in that category, but proving that another lawyer “knows” about such conduct as opposed to “suspecting” it is not easy. Most bar counsel have no stomach for it, and prosecutions are absurdly rare.

The fact that 8.3 is called the “Snitch Rule” in the profession tells you how most lawyers feel about it. In general, lawyers tend to make ethics complaints to their bars about adversaries. Blowing the whistle on one’s own firm member, a powerful partner, a close colleague or a friend is rarer than—well, pick your metaphor, I’m not feeling clever today.

To see how the news out of California is even less than meets the eye, note how the state’s version of 8.3 is narrower than any other state. It reads,

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Ethics Observations On The LaGuardia Community College Graduation Incident

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

That video above is now the only YouTube available record of last week’s viral TikTok video showing Kadia Iman, a “social media influencer” and OnlyFans model who spiced up her graduation from LaGuardia Community College by forcibly taking the microphone from the school official announcing the graduates and using it to give her own defiant message. The video is also evidence that the representations made by Iman regarding the justifications for her behavior may not be exactly accurate.

In her own TikTok video of her attack, Iman is heard saying into the mic, “I want the mic! Let go! You didn’t let me get my moment!” Then she says “I’m graduating today. I don’t like how you snatched the mic out of my hand, so today is going to be all about me!”before dropping the mic and walking away. Later, she took to social media to explain why her “moment” was justified, saying,

“To everyone saying I should be embarrassed or I’ll never get a job … I’m a black woman in America. I am always in the right … u will not gaslight me into thinking I’m the bad guy. I did it for girls that look like me. Love u.”

She claimed that the white graduating students were given an opportunity to say their names, majors and a few other details while up on stage, but that she and other black students were not granted the same privilege by the white administrator, prompting Iman’s anger and violent reaction.

“Basically, what happened was I was walking on and we had to say our names before we get on the stage,” she said. “So I was saying my name and she literally — my name is long, obviously, I have like three syllables in my name. So, I didn’t even get to finish saying my name, and then the people that went before me, they all got to say their name, their major, and even extras,” Iman continued. “Me and another girl noticed that she was pulling down the mic super fast for some black people.”

“I’m not a problematic person, I don’t want to ruin no ones day, I don’t want to violate anybody, but that is what she did. She didn’t even let me finish speaking, she put the mic down and cut me off and that was the only chance I had to speak. I just feel that wasn’t right,” she concluded.

The school’s version, not surprisingly, is somewhat different.

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Hitler Quote Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The June newsletter for the Hamilton County, Indiana, chapter of Moms for Liberty included Adolf Hitler’s famous quote from a Nazi rally in 1935 on the front page: “He alone who owns the youth gains the future.” Since the group is opposing government indoctrination in the public schools, the substance of the quote was not inappropriate, but never mind: the agents and operatives supporting such indoctrination both freaked out and encouraged the public to freak out as well.

After all, the Southern Poverty Law Center, itself an extremist “hate group” by its own standards except that its hate is directed at conservative organizations and therefore is the acceptable variety, had designated the nonprofit Moms for Liberty as a hate organization in its annual Year in Hate & Extremism report for 2022, claiming that it advocates an “anti-student inclusion agenda.”

The Indianapolis Star pointed to the use of a Hitler quote as confirmation of the SPLC’s diagnosis, so the Moms for Liberty tried to explain, adding to its online version of the newsletter, “The quote from a horrific leader should put parents on alert. If the government has control over our children today they control our country’s future. We The People must be vigilant and protect children from an overreaching government.” When that didn’t calm the controversy, chapter chair Paige Miller posted an apology to Facebook.“We condemn Adolf Hitler’s actions and his dark place in human history. We should not have quoted him in our newsletter and we express our deepest apology,” she groveled.

The damage, of course, had been done.

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Harvard! Ethicists! Experts! What’s Not To Trust?

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

From Financial Times:

…Francesca Gino is one of HBS’s best-known behavioral scientists and author of Rebel Talent, a 2018 book with the subtitle “Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life”…[The ]high-profile expert on ethics and dishonesty is facing allegations of dishonesty in her own work and has taken administrative leave from Harvard Business School… Gino, whose work has been widely cited, including in the Financial Times, has been a professor of business administration at HBS since 2014. Her HBS profile was recently altered to indicate that she is on administrative leave. She did not respond to FT requests for comment via email and social media.

A Harvard Business School spokesman said: “We have no comment at this time.” A group of academics who compile the Data Colada blog about the evidence behind behavioural science has started publishing a series of posts in which they say they will detail “evidence of fraud in four academic papers” co-authored by Gino. “We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data,” they wrote in the first post of the series, which appeared on June 17.

See? She really is an expert in dishonesty!

That The Washington Post, New York Times And The Rest Of The MSM Refused To Report This Story Is More Significant Than The Story Itself [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I want to apologize in advance for the tone of this post. This issue makes me frightened, angry, frustrated and depressed. It is appropriate that I convey that, but this is not my favorite mode of expression.

Last month, Amazon blocked a Baltimore, Maryland-based Microsoft engineer named Brandon Jackson from accessing his “smart home” features. It disabled his Alexa and Echo Show, which managed his other smart devices. The justification for this intrusion was that an Amazon delivery driver thought he heard a racist remark from Jackson’s automated Eufy audio message when the driver rang the doorbell, which would have been odd indeed, since Jackson is black and he wasn’t at home at the time. The driver, good little Orwellian that he is, reported the imagined offense to Big Brother Amazon, which then exacted its revenge for Jackson’s WrongThink.

There was no racist comment. Jackson has multiple security cameras, and confirmed that fact, as did Amazon’s investigation. The Eufy doorbell had issued its programed response: “Excuse me, can I help you?” and the driver, walking away and wearing headphones, must have misinterpreted the message as “Bite me, you mocha-colored product of second-rate evolutionary processes!” or something similar. A completely understandable mistake on the driver’s part that resulted in Jackson’s Amazon account, his Alexa and Echo Show locking him out the next day. It took a week to undo it all.

Amazon confirmed the episode, and issued a statement promising that it was working to prevent similar incidents from happening in future. That’s nice. Everything is groovy, then!

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