Comment Of The Day: “Stanford’s Disgraceful DEI Dean Throws Down The Guntlet…NOW Will Stanford Fire Her?”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

EA has featured a lot of posts about the Stanford Law shout-down of a conservative federal judge and the school’s “DEI” dean’s complicity in making certain that he did not get a fair opportunity to deliver his remarks. It is, I believe, quite possibly a tipping point regarding many important cultural issues, including Leftist censorship, the decline of higher education ethics and academic freedom, the corruption of the legal profession, and most of all, the toxic influence of the “diversity/equity/inclusion” cult to undermine core societal values in the U.S. The mainstream news media is doing its best to keep the story and its implications far from the consciousness of the average member of the public.

Glenn Logan has offered a helpful Comment of the Day which analyzes Stanford Law School Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach’s defiant and telling op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Glenn is one of many experienced bloggers in the Ethics Alarms commentariat, and at times like these it shows.

Here is Glenn’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Stanford’s Disgraceful DEI Dean Throws Down The Guntlet…NOW Will Stanford Fire Her?”

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Steinbach wrote: “Regardless of where you stand politically, none of this heated exchange was helpful for civil discourse or productive dialogue.“

True, but only because one side decided the right way to deal with debating controversial issues was to make sure that the other side of the debate could not be heard without wading through repeated ad hominem attacks and invective.

At no point does Steinbach recognize that the students were driving the lack of civility. It is also true that the judge’s remarks at certain points crossed the line, but he was under constant attack to the point that he was unable to deliver a coherent presentation. Steinbach either does not recognize these facts, or is okay with them. Based on her prepared remarks, the latter seems to be the betting favorite.

So how can this possibly square with her implied desire for civil discourse? Easy — discourse can only be civil when it’s hers, or she agrees with it, or it is had on her terms.

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Ethics Quiz: Michelangelo Porn

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Oh, let’s start out this rainy weekend (here in Northern Virginia, at least) with an ethics quiz on a theme that will be recurring on Ethics Alarms today if all goes as planned (which it seldom does).

Tallahassee (Florida) Classical School principal Hope Carrasquilla was given a choice between being fired or resigning following complaints by parents over a recent art lesson in the charter school that included Michelangelo’s famous “David” statue and his Sistine Chapel “Creation of Adam” fresco painting.

After all, pee-pees were involved.

The stated mission of the Tallahassee Classical School is “training the minds and improving the hearts of young people through a content-rich classical education in the liberal arts and sciences, with instruction in the principles of moral character and civic virtue.” The school also maintains that “reform of American public education, to be successful and good, must be built on a foundation of classical liberal arts learning.” Presumably parents who enrolled their children in the school were aware of this orientation.

Moreover, it is fair to say that “David” is just about as iconic a symbol of the classical arts as one could name, with perhaps the Venus de Milo being the only competition. Yet after three parents complained about their 6th graders being exposed to images of “David” (and the naked Adam in the Sistine Chapel painting), the school’s principal was forced out.

Conservative Hillsdale College provides the curriculum, training, and resources for the school as well as for other public schools through Hillsdale’s K-12 support. This was not an example of parents rising up against an extreme left-wing curriculum. Yet one of the parents famously denounced “David” as “pornography.”

Your Ethics Alarms Fine Arts Ethics Quiz of the Day is….

Is it inappropriate and irresponsible to display “David” in an art course for Sixth Graders?

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Central Connecticut State University May Not Be Stanford, But Its Anti-Speech Mobs Are Exactly The Same

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Candace Owens’ documentary exposé on Black Lives Matter was released last Fall. “The Greatest Lie Ever Sold” also challenges the mainstream media narratives surrounding the death of George Floyd, so you will not be shocked–shocked!—to learn that it has received minimal attention from the news media. Discussing, never mind showing, the utter corruption of the cynical, racist movement that corporations, whole industries and major cities bowed down before in abject submission is a perfect excuse in for Woke World—-and that includes most journalists and editors—to metaphorically kill the messenger. I’m abashed to admit that I had never heard of the film before this week.

And so it came to pass that when The Daily Wire-produced documentary was screened at Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) earlier this month, the film was shut down by a Stanford Law-style student mob. Conservative Hollywood blogger Christian Toto quotes the account of a CCSU professor who related what happened when the film began to play on the screen:

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Stanford’s Disgraceful DEI Dean Throws Down The Guntlet…NOW Will Stanford Fire Her?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Well this clarifies things!

Stanford Law School Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach, currently on well-earned disciplinary leave after her revolting handling of a law student effort to use the “heckler’s veto” to silence a Federal court judge invited to speak to a student group, has decided to challenge the Stanford dean and the school’s president by claiming that she was right to side with the disruptive students. Her defense relies on the currently popular diversity/equity/inclusion cant that free speech can be harmful, and must be “balanced” with DEI objectives.

Her message was relayed in a defiant (and dishonest) op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, ominously titled, “Diversity and Free Speech Can Coexist at Stanford We have to stop blaming, start listening, and ask ourselves: Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

The title itself signals Steinbach’s anti-speech point of view. The irritating metaphor “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” in this case means “Is freedom of speech worth the trouble?” That’s the calling card of an aspiring ideological censor and a totalitarian, giving off the stench of “safe spaces” and criminalized hate speech. She, and the op-ed that follows, advocates suppressing opinions and speech that she disagrees with, or in the world of the woke, that is “dangerous” and “wrong,” “wrong” meaning “not what we want to hear.”

First, however, Steinbach had to frame her argument in a lie. She describes the confrontation between Judge Duncan and an organized mob of protesters as merely a “heated exchange,” and “a verbal sparring match,” writing that “some protesters heckled the judge and peppered him with questions and comments” which the judge “answered in turn.” There is video of the event, and that’s not what was going on. Duncan was prevented from giving his prepared remarks, the students who came to hear them were prevented from doing so, and Duncan, far from answering questions, was reduced to calling out the students for their atrocious behavior.

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Open Forum, Spring Training Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Here’s your chance to get in rhetorical shape for the ethics rigors ahead in what promises to be a challenging summer.

Baseball’s Spring Training has just six days to go, but it also is the only part of the 2023 season prep with genuine full-team workouts. This is because so many players participated in the World Baseball Tournament on teams ranging from Israel and Australia to Cuba and South Korea. In the finals, the Japanese team won it all this week in a close 3-2 win over the United States. Mike Trout, the best player on Earth, struck out with the tying run on base.

Meanwhile, MLB issued a bunch of rule adjustments embarrassingly—ridiculously, really– late, because, as is often the case when new rules and laws are passed, the people passing them didn’t think through all of the ramifications and unintended consequences of the changes they were making.

One piece of good news for MLB is that the institution of a time limitation on how long pitchers could take to throw the ball to the plate and limits on batters stepping out of the box to fiddle with their batting gloves or whatever cut more than 20 minutes of dead time out of the average game. That’s a lot, and infuriating, because the wasted time could have and should have been curtailed long ago without having to use a pitch clock.

But enough of baseball—the Red Sox will be fine, incidentally, don’t believe what you hear—it’s time to

Play Ethics!

“Nah, There’s No Big Tech Bias!” Google’s AI ChatBot Provides A Smoking Gun

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I think the first appearance of the ironic refrain, “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” in an Ethics Alarms headline was in 2018. Since then, I’ve used it dozens of times, and easily could have justified using the sarcastic refrain hundreds, indeed thousands of time since. Even though the evidence of sinister, relentless, intentional and unethical biased reporting by the mainstream media is manifest and continuing daily, its allies (and naive “useful idiot” defenders) continue to argue that declaring that it is what it is constitutes a conservative “conspiracy theory. In doing so, they aid and abet the attempted destruction of American democracy.

The mainstream media’s perceived role as propaganda and deception merchants for the Left is reinforced by similar efforts by social media, the entertainment industry, and Big Tech, though the latter’s machinations are a bit more difficult to nail down. Google, a prime villain, has so many ways to slant public discourse and hamstring non-compliant voices, one main way being through the alignment of search results through its mysterious algorithms. Google’s latest innovation, however, unintentionally provides a window into the biases of the people behind the tech.

Google’s just launched an Artificial Intelligence chatbot called “Bard” as a competitor of ChatGPT, which had been getting lots of publicity lately. Bard’s screaming progressive/Democratic bias quickly revealed itself when conservative users ran some basic tests.

“Not the Bee’s” tech specialist Neo submitted two identical questions to Bard:

The answer to the first question:

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On Joe Biden’s Judicial Nominations: They’re Called “Diversity Nominees” And Some Of Them Couldn’t Judge A Dog Show

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“Goodness gracious,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said before being rushed to the hospital, not because of this though it surely didn’t help, “Is this the caliber of legal expert with which President Biden is filling the federal bench for lifetime appointments? Is the bar for merit and excellence really set this low?”

Why yes, Mitch! It is the caliber, because skill, experience, and demonstrated qualifications are no more the Biden administrations priorities in naming federal judges than they were in Joe’s choice of Vice-President, Cabinet members or White House press secretary. Already, we have seen absurd spectacles like Judge Charnelle Bjelkengren, nominated to serve as a U.S. District Court Judge in the Eastern District of Washington, and according to shameless partisan hack Sen. Patty Murray, very qualified for the job and “truly exceptional,” proving unable to explain under questioning the contents of the fifth or second articles of the Constitution—you know, that old thingy that district judges are supposed to know and understand?

Lucky for her, along comes another Biden nominee, U.S. Magistrate Judge S. Kato Crews, also nominated to be a U.S. district judge, to make sure Charnelle doesn’t feel too bad. During his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing this week, Crews (above, left) was asked by Senator Kennedy (above, right) who also was the one who stumped Bjelkengren, to describe a Brady motion and the landmark Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland.

Crews could not. He had no idea what either were, saying that as he recalled Brady was a Second Amendment case! KABOOM! He was getting the crucial landmark decision, a staple of first year law school criminal law, mixed up with the so-called Brady Law, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (Pub.L. 103–159, 107 Stat. 1536, enacted November 30, 1993), which mandated federal background checks on firearm purchasers in the U.S.,and imposed a five-day waiting period on purchases. It has nothing to do with Brady v. Maryland.

At least he didn’t get Brady mixed up with “The Brady Bunch.”

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Ethics Hero: Stanford Law Dean Jenny Martinez

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Faced with a stark choice that other major law school deans (like the Georgetown Law Center’s Dean William Trainor) have botched during The Great Stupid, Stanford’s dean courageously chose the values of free speech, academic freedom and pluralism over the currently more popular progressive law student fad of censorship, mandatory wokism, and totalitarian tactics. She’s undoubtedly expecting a protest from her fetal lawyers, and surely will get it.

Responding to the school’s national embarrassment when a mob of students shut down the speech of an invited federal district court judge whose opinions they didn’t like—aided and abetted by the school’s “DEI” dean—Stanford’s Jenny Martinez announced yesterday that the students involved as well as the rest of the student body will attend a mandatory half-day training course on “freedom of speech and the norms of the legal profession.”

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Parody Ethics: What Is This Case Doing At The Supreme Court? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Well, KABOOM! There goes my head.

Absurdly, Jack Daniel’s, the largest American whiskey manufacturer, sued VIP Products, one of the principle American dog toy manufacturer (Spuds loves their toys) over a parody plastic squeaky toy modeled on Jack Daniel’s bottles. (Spud likes a squeaky toy that looks like a Coor beer bottle). On the dog toy, as you can see, instead of describing “Old No. 7 Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey” manufactured by “Jack Daniel’s,” the toy is “Bad Spaniel,” “Old No. 2 on your Tennessee carpet.”

Oral argument at the Supreme Court was yesterday. Finding a likelihood that consumers would confuse the “Bad Spaniels” toy with Jack Daniel’s, the trial court ruled in favor of the liquor company and barred VIP from continuing to manufacture the parody toy, ruling, believe it or not, that that consumers would confuse the “Bad Spaniels” toy with Jack Daniel’s whiskey. Yeah, I always have that problem, mixing up dog toys with liquor bottles. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reversed on both counts, because the trial court’s theory was…well, let Sidney Wang explain:

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: Lawyer Jerry Goldfeder

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“You know, it’s not a slam-dunk. But I think that survives a motion to dismiss, and then let the jury decide.”

—-Jerry H. Goldfeder, a special counsel at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP and an  expert in New York state election law, to the New York Times regarding Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg’s supposedly imminent indictment and prosecution of former President Donald Trump.

That is an flat-out unethical endorsement of prosecutorial abuse of power, for not only a lawyer, but a lawyer in a major Manhattan law firm, being quoted as authority in the New York Times, uncritically, of course.

An ethical prosecutor does not bring a case unless he or she is certain that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The issue isn’t whether the prosecution will prevail, but whether the prosecutor has sufficient evidence to justify it prevailing with an objective and fair jury. Surviving a motion to dismiss is not an ethical standard; it’s the bottom-of-the-barrel standard. The judge agreeing that the case has no merit at all as a matter of law, is not the equivalent of holding that the case should not be brought by an ethical prosecutor. “Hey, who knows if the guy is guilty or if we have the evidence to convict? Let’s just get it in front of a jury and see what they think!”

Unspoken in this case: “After all, the point is to make Trump look bad, right? If we can get a conviction, it’s frosting on the cake.”

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