Unethical Tweet Of The Month: Historian Michael Beschloss

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

When did formerly distinguished American Presidency historian Michael Beschloss turn into such a partisan, unethical hack? It was at least six years ago, when he went on TV and completely misrepresented American presidential history—his specialty!—to make excuses for Hillary Clinton losing to Donald Trump. Since then, he has just become more and more obviously a Democratic Party mouthpiece, and a thoroughly ridiculous one.

Sad, really. But it gets him paid gigs on CNN and MSNBC, so there’s that.

His tweet today shows that the more one channels Democratic Party talking points, the more totalitarian-minded one becomes. Who, exactly, is the “we” who “need to know” why there were members of Congress who were not enthusiastic about the Ukraine president’s lobbying for more support? I don’t recall any Republicans darkly suggesting that “we” need to know why so many members of Congress were staring frowning into space and refusing to applaud the President of the United States during President Trump’s 2020 State of the Union message. I guess Beschloss thinks another investigation is in order. All dissent from Democratic administration policies are inherently suspicious, right? Let’s make these likely disrupters of the greater good explain themselves, and be accountable for their non-conforming ways.

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From England, A Great Stupid Christmas

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Looking on the bright side, it’s heartening to know that after all these years, the United States is still less censorious than our cousins across the pond.

Two British radio stations ( Heart FM and Magic Radio; the BBC is said to be considering following their lead) have censored a line of Johnny Mathis’s song “When a Child Is Born” because of listener complaints that it is “racist.” On the recording of Mathis’s Christmas song that he introduced in the Seventies, the African-American singer speaks about the significance of Jesus’s birth:

And all this happens because the world is waiting–waiting for one child…black, white, yellow, no one knows. But a child that would grow up and turn tears to laughter, hate to love, war to peace, and everyone to everyone’s neighbor. And misery and suffering will be words to be forgotten forever.

What’s the racist part, you well may ask? It’s “yellow!”

“Black”‘s OK for blacks, thought they aren’t really black, and “white”‘s fine for whites, but “yellow” is racist. What is the vernacular for Asian skin-tone, then? Wait, is calling Donald Trump “orange” also racist? Who can keep up with these rules. much less the floating, ever flexible definition of “racist.” What an amazing word: it’s there anything it can’t do? It’s like duct tape or Silly Putty! A black singer speaking about how skin-color is irrelevant can be racist!

Amazing.

Unethical Asshole Of The Month: MSG Entertainment CEO James Dolan

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The Ethics Alarms 2022 Award for Asshole of the Year will be awarded to Donald Trump, natch, later today, and this episode involving the CEO of MSG Entertainment won’t threaten Trump’s honor. I could see Trump doing this. I could see Elon Musk doing it; indeed, he came close.

But James Dolan’s conduct is still pretty disgusting. Lawyer Kelly Conlon was accompanying her daughter and her daughter’s Girl Scout troop to a performance of the “Christmas Spectacular” show with the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall in New York City when a facial recognition system identified her in the lobby. After walking into the theater Conlon was flagged by security and told to leave because of she works for Davis, Saperstein & Salomon, a law firm representing clients in litigation against MSG, a large entertainment holding company overseeing live events at venues including Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, the Beacon Theater and the Hulu Theater. CEO Dolan has a policy of banning attorneys at any law firm that sues an MSG venues from attending MSG events.

Conlan isn’t alone in being harassed; another lawyer, Nicolette Landi, was on her way to Mariah Carey’s “Merry Christmas To All Show” at Madison Square Garden last week, when she was denied entry too. All the members of her law firm, Burns and Harris, had received letters banning them from events at all of MSG’s properties. Lawyer Larry Hutcher, a Knicks season ticket holder for nearly 50 years, also found himself on the blacklist because his firm, Davidoff Hutcher & Citron LLP, is in litigation against Dolan’s properties.

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An Ethics Incompleteness Principle Challenge: The Mutant Kid

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Jeremiah Johnson, a 12-year-old running back from Fort Worth, Texas, is already 5-foot-11 and weighs 198 pounds. He has facial hair (the tattoo is fake—he just wanted to look older), and all of his photos look photoshopped, but that’s a real child in that picture.

Dallas Dragons Elite Academy (DEA) team won the 2022 Youth National Championships in Miami—big surprise there—and he was selected as the Most Valuable Player in the division, which is even less of a surprise.

The ethics conundrum is: what do you do about a mutant like Jeremiah?

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The FBI’s Rationalization For Its Twitter Content Manipulation: “We Do This Kind Of Thing All The Time!”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Well alrighty then! All is well!

The Federal Bureau of Investigation  issued a supposedly exonerating statement today following the latest “Twitter Files” dump, which disclosed information detailing the FBI’s correspondence with Twitter in October 2020. Substack’sMatt Taibbi revealed that the agency warned the previous management at Twitter of a “hack-and-leak” by “state actors” surrounding the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop to influence the 2020 presidential election. The “Twitter Files” also revealed that the FBI and Twitter worked closely in the lead up to the election, with documents published this week showing that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million between October 2019 and February 2021 for  the expenses entailed by complying with the FBI’s demands/requests. The FBI also flagged certain tweets for Twitter to remove from the platform, the documents show, and FBI agents were  even employed at Twitter during this period.

If I were a publicity experts advising the FBI, my recommendation would be that no comment would be preferable to this statement, which is desperate and damning:

“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous detailing companies over multiple sectors and industries. As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

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Incompetent Headline Of The Week: “Report: Joe Biden Realized His Mistake With Kamala Harris Very Early On” (Red State)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I’m sorry, but I can’t resist.

What’s “early” is a case like this? Anyone who watched and listened to and watched Harris during the Democratic Presidential debates could tell in an instant that she was a dolt, and obviously unqualified to run for President or be one, which means she has no business running for or being Vice-President either. The headline is the equivalent of “Early on as he attempted to shave using his power mower, he realized his mistake.”

What are we supposed to conclude from that statement? Admiration for Joe that he was so quick to pick up on what was wrong with his entirely race and gender-based pick for a running mate? That’s not quick. Someone who is competent, has good judgment and knows which end of the trumpet to blow on doesn’t make an epic mistake like picking Harris to be a heartbeat from the Oval Office.

I saw this story and couldn’t restrain myself.

Carry on…

Stanford Goes Big Brother With A Newspeak List

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

That’s Isaac Asimov above, expressing his doubts that attempts at vocabulary restriction by totalitarians actually works.

I don’t think the ethical issue is whether efforts to “compress” language are successful. The issue is what the effort tells us about the people and institutions who make those efforts. The latest is Stanford University.

Stanford’s IT department released an list x of “harmful language” that it wants erased from the school’s websites, and, by extension, campus discourse.The list is an outgrowth of the “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative,” which aims to “eliminate” words that may be deemed “racist, violent, and biased.”

The IT department’s censorious document is a mess, a mixture of apples, oranges and passion fruit. Some of the words and phrases marked as unacceptable are rude and archaic. Others are completely innocent as well as useful, condemned because they might have been used somewhere, sometime, by someone in a derogatory context.

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Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Quiz Of The Day: ‘Gotcha!’ Or ‘Benefit Of The Doubt’?”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The recent ethics quiz about the apparent swastika pattern in the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle triggered many fascinating responses, none more so than curmie’s Comment of the Day. Here (again) is the provocative puzzle:

…and here is curmie’s COTD on the post, “Ethics Quiz Of The Day: ‘Gotcha!’ Or ‘Benefit Of The Doubt’?”:

***

This one is fascinating. Were I still in the classroom, I’d definitely be using it as an example of the way the postmodern idea of meaning being created by the receiver rather than the sender plays out in real life as well as in art per se.

There’s a little bit of Hanlon’s Razor, a little bit of Paul Simon’s line in “The Boxer” that “a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.” However we frame it, it seems to me that an individual’s response to this stimulus tells us more about the respondent than it does about the creator of the puzzle. I say this as neutrally as possible: there are those, like Steve Witherspoon, to whom “the white outlined swastika jumped off the page.” There are those, like P.M. Lawrence, who struggle to see the design even when knowing what to look for.

Two observations, both of them important. First, neither response is wrong, although they seem totally at odds. Second, I am not suggesting that an individual’s response is necessarily linked to an ideology or demographic. That is, having a positive or negative view of the NYT, leaning to the left or the right politically, being Jewish or not… any of all of these considerations might influence our reactions, but I’d be surprised if there aren’t a significant number of people from every combination of these factors on both sides of this issue. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 12/21/2022:Chilly Ethics…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

(I know that’s not a very holiday-cheery graphic, but it’s how this Jack feels—like Jack Nicholson playing Frozen Jack Torrance in “The Shining”—after walking Spuds this chilly morning…)

A few notes before we start in earnest…

  • Relatively few lawyers in the D.C. area (that I have talked with on the topic)seem to think Rudy Giuliani either should be disbarred or will be for, in the over-heated words of the D.C. Bar’s ethics prosecutor, “weaponizing his bar license.” Those who do see doom for Rudy seem to be in the  group of  hyper-partisan lawyers (bias makes you stupid!) who want to make it impossible for Donald Trump to get effective legal representation, which allies the attack on old Rudy with the recent referral to the Justice Department for prosecution of the former President from a transparently partisan “Get Trump!” investigation in the House.
  • Ed Larson, the Pulitzer-winning historian who collaborated with me on “The Essential Words and Writings of Clarence Darrow” (a great Christmas gift!) has just written a new book, “American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation.” It promises to be excellent, and a scholarly as well as fascinating tonic for “1619 Project” nonsense.
  • An unscientific survey: based on lawn decorations in Alexandria, Virginia, secular Christmas has now completely obliterated the religious holiday, and we have returned to the holiday’s pagan origins. I’ve been counting: inflatables of Will Farrell in “Elf” (8 to 1) and Chevy Chase being electrocuted in “Christmas Vacation” (4-1)  outnumber any references to Jesus’s birth…indeed, a single, lonely creche is the only hint of that event among over a hundred homes in my neighborhood. Snowmen dominate the lawn genre completely here. Back in my Arlington, Massachusetts days, it was common to see multiple manger scenes on every street and road.

1. Diversity follies…The Washington Post completely beclowned itself by allowing academic race-hustler Erika Edwards to author an op-ed titled “Why doesn’t Argentina have more Black players in the World Cup?” Apart from the obvious and correct answer, “Because the players the team has are the best players, and you don’t choose athletic team squads via affirmative action,” there is also the fact that the percentage of African-Argentinians in the country is 0.37%. Never mind: the Post allowed Edwards to imply the country was racially biased against blacks anyway. Said critic Ignacio Manuel García Medina,

Why is Argentina’s national team any more racist for not having any black players than Japan’s national team for having only Asians? Why is not Cameroon’s team racist for not having any whites, Latinos or Asians? The answer seems obvious: because The Washington Post is only interested in bombarding us with the white supremacist narrative that the left loves and exploits so much.The Washington Post‘s ridiculous article would prove that those who boast most about respect and tolerance for other cultures are actually the ones who look down on others. The readers of The Washington Post deserve much more than articles that pretend to be well-documented but think that soccer teams and countries should be like a Netflix movie.

Yup!

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Tales Of The Great Stupid: The Tweet Speaks For Itself

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Woods bills herself as a film and TV critic, and she is complaining about “cultural appropriation” by whites regarding a nonexistent, science fiction culture. Are the Avatar people (whatever they’re called: I don’t care) considered “of color” on their planet? Has “The Great Stupid” spread that far?

Woods made this head-exploding, antiwhite statement, was fabulously mocked for it, and because she didn’t have the wit or rhetorical skills to debate her critics on the merits of her assertion (there are none), she shut down comments on her tweet.

And I thought “The Simpsons” insisting that Dr. Hibbard, a black cartoon character, had to be voiced by an “actor of color” was bonkers. This is the equivalent of insisting that Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer needs to be voiced by a BIPOC actor in the old Rankin-Bass cartoon because deer are brown.

People like Kathia Woods—you know, morons—in sufficient volume and given a critical level of exposure, will eventually render the human race too dumb to survive, like the dodo.