From The “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished” Files…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Among the other horrible unintended consequences of the destructive response to the Wuhan virus pandemic is that it has made professionals lazy. I just completed my first legal ethics seminar in front of a live out-of-town audience in more than two years, and only my fourth with participants I could look at and talk to in that time. I am told that lawyers like the convenience of getting their Continuing Legal Education credits using Zoom, from the comfort of their homes or offices.

In the program two days ago, for example, ten lawyers attended by coming to the classroom, but over 190 watched remotely.

Well, as our children found out over the past two years of panic and fearmongering, remote learning doesn’t work. I know that many of those seminar attendees out in Zoomland are doing billable work, or playing with their dogs, or otherwise not giving the topic their full attention. Legal ethics is essential for a self-policing profession like the law, and ethics is hard; being an ethical lawyer takes practice. In trainings, that means being tested with tough questioning by the instructor ( that is, me). Now, however, most lawyers want to exert the least effort possible while getting their mandatory credits, meaning that they are not taking their responsibilities seriously. Many will suffer for this. More importantly, clients will suffer.

In this vein, I praised the attorneys who eschewed Zoom the past two days, and told them that I would reward each them of the with a gratis hour’s worth of ethics consultation over the next twelve months. I charge $390 an hour, so if the time is used, it will more than cover their fee for the seminar.

I then learned that two of the Zoom attendees complained bitterly to the state sponsors. They hadn’t known that I would be handing out that bonus, they said; if they had, they said they would have come in person too. There’s a flaw in this reasoning: I don’t receive the fees for the session, and the sponsoring group wasn’t giving out the free hours. It was a spontaneous gesture on my part.

Nonetheless, I agreed to let the sponsor tell the angry Zoomers that they could have a free hour too, even though they hadn’t earned it.

Baseball Ethics: Let Aaron Judge Hit! [Updated!]

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Yankees slugger Aaron Judge hit his 60th home this season last week. Now Judge leads the majors in home runs, runs, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS, total bases, WAR and several other statistical categories. Judge is hitting .316/.419/.703  with 60 home runs, 128 RBI, 123 runs, 16 stolen bases and 9.7 WAR (that’s “wins above a replacement player”). The 60 homers tie him with Babe Ruth for the long-standing so-called “154 game season record,” and put him one behind Roger Maris for the American League season record for homers, 61 (set by Maris in ’61, and celebrated in Billy Crystal’s excellent film, “61”).

61 represents another landmark, though, a more important one. It is the most home runs hit by a Major League Player who was not jacked-up on steroids. The list ahead of Maris reads, Continue reading →

Clarence Thomas Gets A Rare “Double Dunce,” Ethical And Political

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I really don’t comprehend how this can happen with someone like Justice Clarence Thomas. Donald Trump, sure. But Thomas is smarter than this.

Between 2003 and 2007, Ginni Thomas, the Justice’s controversial wife and a hard-Right activist, earned $686,589 from the Heritage Foundation, according to a Common Cause review of the foundation’s IRS records. Yet Justice Thomas failed to note the income in his Supreme Court financial disclosure forms for those years. He checked a box labeled “none” where “spousal non-investment income” is supposed to be disclosed.

Federal judges are bound by law to disclose the source of spousal income, meaning that if the information found by Common Cause is accurate, Thomas did not comply with the law. SCOTUS justices are supposed to obey the law, even more than everybody else, in some respects. Legal ethics expert Steven Lubet (I used his legal ethics textbook when I taught the subject at American University!) says that a failure to disclose spousal income by a federal judge “is not a crime of any sort, but there is a potential civil penalty” for it. “I am not aware of a single case of a judge being penalized simply for this,” the professor says.

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Georgia Republican Senate Candidate Herschel Walker

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“You know, he without sin cast the first stone. Does my opponent believe in redemption, being a pastor? That’s what’s so funny. And I say that because I’m not gonna get into what happened with him in his past. I want him to do—what’s going on with his policy. He’s talking about something I was a part of over 15 years ago, maybe even longer.”

—Republican U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker, quoting Jesus from John 8:7 while ducking a question about allegations of his past domestic abuse.

Atlanta-based magazine Rolling Out asked Walker about domestic abuse allegations that occurred between 2001 and 2008. In Walker’s primary race against Georgia Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, a campaign ad posted online claimed that police reports and court records from 2001 to 2008 indicated that Walker had “a history of physically abusive and extremely threatening behavior” involving his ex-wife, Cynthia Grossman who was   married to the former NFL star from 1983 to 2002. The question is a fair one, since earlier this month, Walker released his own campaign attack ad claiming that his opponent in the Senate race, Democrat Ralph Warnock “hit his wife with his car,” was “accused of neglecting his small children” and “ran from the process server” who tried to serve him court papers. Continue reading →

The Apparent Democratic Party Strategy To Stave Off November Defeat: Lie Their Heads Off

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The problem is that this plan depends on the full collaboration of the mainstream media, and cracks are appearing in that previously reliable alliance.

During a Democratic National Committee event, president Biden once again indulged some of his favorite pieces of misinformation (Did you know that Donald Trump lied all the time?). Biden said that gas prices have fallen by “$1.30 a gallon,” with the average now being “less than $2.99” in 41 states and the District of Columbia. He also said that the current unemployment rate of 3.7% is the lowest it has been in over half a century.

CNN, in the midst of a course correction (as in “maybe we should go back to actual journalism a bit”) debunked both statements. “Biden’s claim about average gasoline prices was false, as the White House acknowledged by correcting the official transcript after CNN inquired about the claim on Friday afternoon,” CNN reported. “In fact, zero states have an average price under $2.99 per gallon, figures from GasBuddy and the American Automobile Association show. As the correction notes, Biden got a key digit wrong: 41 states and the District of Columbia have an average price under $3.99, not $2.99….“But the price of gas is one of the most important numbers in politics. Even if the President made an inadvertent error this time, his incorrect remark was televised live on CNN and MSNBC.”

Later, Biden changed his story to say that “a few” states had average gas prices under $3. That was also a lie.

Continue reading →

Confirmed: Sen. Klobuchar Is An Untrustworthy Hack

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

When I was challenged to name a woman I would feel comfortable seeing elected President and stated that there were none, two of my less-than-completely deranged progressive female associates pronounced their approval of Amy Klobuchar, proving my point. During the 2019 and 2020 candidates debates and in many settings before and since, Klobuchar had proven herself a pandering, dissembling light-weight, and her statement today on MSNBC was just another example. Behold:

“We just did something about climate change for the first time in decades. That’s why we have to win this as that hurricane bears down on Florida. We have to win in the midterms.”

How stupid does she think the public is (to be fair, MSNBC viewers are special), or, in the alternative, how stupid is she? The Democrats have done nothing “about” climate change, or taken a single step that will affect the global climate one iota, just spent a large amount of money as climate change virtue-signalling.  In focusing on hurricanes Klobuchar  has chosen a perfect example of the weakness of climate science: we have been told for many years that man-made climate change would lead to a dramatic increase in deadly hurricanes, and it simply hasn’t happened. Why? Because science isn’t as good at predicting the long-term results of global warming as climate hysterics, hucksters and patsies claim.

Klobuchar’s statement is signature significance for someone who shouldn’t be allowed to advance beyond the Senate.

Next candidate?

Some “Splainin’ To Do”…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I just returned from my first out-of-D.C. ethics presentation in more than two years. This, and the necessary preparation for it is why Ethics Alarms has been uncharacteristically devoid of new content for about 24 hours, though the commentariat, as usual, have admirably kept the ethics fires burning.

Before I make some ethics-related observations on features of the trip and the engagement, this: Are there really people out there who are primed to complain that references to Desi Arnaz’s famous catch phrase (as Ricky Riccardo on “I Love Lucy”), “Lucy, you have some ‘splainin’ to do!” are markers of bigotry and racism? They can bite me, because these are the individuals who fit Jacques Brel’s description of “them” is his famous quote, cited before here: “If you leave it up to them, they’ll crochet the world the color of goose shit.”

Continue reading →

Week Launching Ethics Dispatches, 9/26/2022:

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

  • Much gratitude to the commenters who responded to my appeal for a lively Open Forum after previous September Fridays had yielded wan participation.  It’s now at 51 posts and rising; more importantly, the posts are provocative and useful. Thanks.
  • Today marks the anniversary of the first televised debate between Presidential candidates in 1960. Such debates, with all their flaws, are a boost for effective democracy, but the exaggerated belief that optics rather than substance caused the single Nixon-Kennedy debate to lose the election for Nixon put the feature on ice for 16 years. Beginning with the 1976 Ford-Carter debate, it can be argued that Presidential debates have been decisive in tilting elections more often than not: Ford’s claim that Poland wasn’t an Iron Curtain country, Carter’s obviously dishonest tale about his nuclear weapons chat with Amy, Dukakis shrugging off the hypothetical murder and rape of his wife, President Bush check his watch as if the chore of having to campaign bored him, Al Gore’s bizarre debating performance…and more recently, President Trump’s botching of one debate against an obviously handicapped opponent and his foolish rejection of another. The questions posed to Kennedy and Nixon were objective and fair: if only that element could be restored somehow, televised debates could be the unequivocal boon to democracy they should be.
  • A baseball note: Over the weekend, Albert Pujols hit his 699th and 700th home runs, joining Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth as the only sluggers in U.S. baseball history to do so. (All right, Barry Bonds reached 700 too, but he cheated.) This is the first time in ten years that Albert has performed to a degree that justified his contracts, and that’s mostly because he is only being paid $2.5 million as a part-time DH by the Cardinals, his original team. That the prospect of achieving a major milestone inspired Pujols to a level of performance most assumed were gone forever doesn’t excuse his hanging on long after his predecessor greats would have said, “I quit. I’m embarrassing myself.” To be fair, none of them were guaranteed $30 million per season, either.

1. Oh yeah, this is the ethical problem the NFL should be concerned about. Apparently in the NFL, rookies are expected to foot the bill for a luxury dinner for their teammates, with the tabs reaching as high as $50,000 with tips.

In June, veteran NFL player Torrey Smith tweeted, “Dudes come into the league with no financial literacy and real problems but folks think 50k dinners are cool! NAH!” Now the league, players, fans and commentators are engaged in ethics soul-searching. Is the tradition just a ritual of team bonding, or a form of hazing that can have damaging financial consequences?

Gee, what a tough question! It’s obviously hazing. It’s bullying. It’s robbery. It’s unethical.

Next question…

Continue reading →

Today’s Untrustworthy and Unethical Social Media Platform: LinkedIn

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

From 2015 to 2019, LinkedIn randomly varied the proportion of weak and strong contacts suggested to users by its “People You May Know” algorithm, the company’s  system for recommending new connections to “link” to. Researchers at LinkedIn, M.I.T., Stanford and Harvard Business School then analyzed aggregate data from the tests in a study published this month in the “Science.”

In other words, users were used as virtual lab rats, subjected to changes in how the platform served their job-hunting and networking interests without their knowledge or consent. It would have been easy and ethical to alert users to this experiment and allow them to out out, but no. The New York Times, ethically inert as usual, writes, “Experts who study the societal impacts of computing said conducting long, large-scale experiments on people that could affect their job prospects, in ways that are invisible to them, raised questions about industry transparency and research oversight.”

Raised questions? What questions? Such secret experimenting is wrong, manipulative, arrogant, irresponsible and unethical. There is no uncertainty on that point. In a statement, LinkedIn now claims that it has “acted consistently with” the company’s user agreement, privacy policy and member settings. The privacy policy, while stating that LinkedIn uses members’ personal data for research purposes, does not reveal that the company will secretly play with  user’s contacts in ways that might result in career or life course changes. The company also, naturally, engaged in the now compulsory “It isn’t what it is” blather,  saying it used the latest, “non-invasive” social science techniques to answer important research questions “without any experimentation on members.”

Of course it was “experimentation on members.”

LinkedIn’s policy for outside researchers seeking to analyze company data states that those researchers will not be able to “experiment or perform tests on our members,” but no policy statement explicitly informs consumers that LinkedIn itself can experiment or perform tests on its members. “During the tests, people who clicked on the ‘People You May Know’ tool and looked at recommendations were assigned to different algorithmic paths,” the New York Times explains. ” Some of those ‘treatment variants,’ as the study called them, caused LinkedIn users to form more connections to people with whom they had only weak social ties. Other tweaks caused people to form fewer connections with weak ties.”

Then the Times adds, disingenuously, “Whether most LinkedIn members understand that they could be subject to experiments that may affect their job opportunities is unknown.” No, it’s just impossible to prove they didn’t know. LinkedIn knew damn well they didn’t know. I didn’t know, for example, not that I rely upon or trust LinkedIn in any way.

None of the social media platforms are trustworthy, and anyone who participates in them should just assume that they will abuse their power while deceiving users whenever they see profit in it. These are unethical Big Tech entities run by unethical, dishonest people. Interact with them accordingly, if you have to interact with them at all.

Comment Of The Day: NetChoice LLC v. Paxton (Item #4 In “Sunday Consequential Ethics Epiphanies, 9/18/2022”)

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I am enmeshed in a disagreement with esteemed and long-time Ethics Alarms commenter Chris Marschner regarding Texas’ HB 20 signed into law last year. It prohibits social media platforms with over 50 million monthly U.S. users from censoring posts based political positions and viewpoints. To my surprise (although considering the Court, maybe it shouldn’t have been) the Fifth Circuit helding that the right to free speech didn’t include the right to censor speech, a privately-owned platform. That opinion is here. I wrote that I didn’t understand the opinion at all, meaning that while I find the way social media platforms employ bias and partisan favoritism to censor posts using double standards profoundly unethical, I also think the Texas law is screamingly unconstitutional, and is likely to be held to be so by the U.S. Supreme Court. However, I understand the opinion better than I did thanks to Chris’s advocacy.

Here is his Comment of the Day on Item #4 of the post, “Sunday Consequential Ethics Epiphanies, 9/18/2022: On Incompetence, Diversity, Censorship And More..”

***

You and I are in complete agreement on the issue of viewpoint discrimination. I will counter that the service provided is not free. It is true that monetary compensation is not used but the Users barter for the service by providing valuable personal data and rights to the content they post online on an ongoing basis.

While Facebook does not sell users data directly it does so indirectly by serving as a middleman using its algorithm to serve up targeted advertising. That is the foundation of the business model from which the service derives its income.

One might argue that the perceived value of this trade is lopsided in favor of the user because of the billions of dollars needed to create and maintain the platform while all the user exchanges for access is giving the Service intelligence about the User. The problem with that argument is that it only appears lopsided because until the business model was developed the user has no individual means to collect financial compensation for them being subjected to an endless barrage of advertisements. Through this business model Users obtain an exchange of value by creating a social media account. In a sense, Facebook, et al serves as a medium of exchange which is the primary defining characteristic of money. Continue reading →