Ethics Alarms Reflections: “The Ethics of Commemorating Hiroshima,” And Other Thoughts

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

There probably isn’t a more explosive ethics event, literally or figuratively, than the dropping of the first atom bomb on Hiroshima on this date in 1945.

My father attributed this date to the fact of my existence. Dad had received word that he was to be part of the first wave invasion force to take the Japan mainland, and estimated casualties were as high as 1 million. He said that he had fully expected to be killed. But on August 6, in 1945, the Enola Gay changed all of that. I suppose you could say that I have a strong bias in favor of President Truman’s decision.

Hiroshima was one of the first historical topics I wrote about on this blog. Ethics Alarms had been around for less than a year in 2010, when I wrote this post, “The Ethics of Commemorating Hiroshima”:

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Ethics Villain William Treanor, Georgetown Law Center Dean

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I hate to pick on Georgetown’s Dean: I knew three of his predecessors well, was good friends with two of them, and I took a class from a fourth. However, Treanor, the current dean, has been substantially responsible for my estrangement from my legal alma mater (and where I worked for seven years, creating the school’s capital fund and launching its alumni magazine, among other adventures), my boycott of my class reunions, and the current position of my framed diploma, once proudly displayed, now on the floor, front to the wall.

The section from his Dean’s column in the current issue of that aforementioned magazine (GULC eventually dumped the title the original version carried, “Res Ipsa Loquitur”) signals that an unethical course is being plotted by Treanor. A creature of Yale Law School, traditionally the most political and ideologically biased of major U.S. law schools (Treanor transferred there from Harvard Law because Harvard wasn’t liberal enough), the Dean’s column attains pure demagoguery in that passage, the guts of the text.

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “More On Nichelle Nichols: Regarding Althouse’s Misguided Snark”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

This Comment of the Day by Tom P (who has been on a roll of late) is one of those “in case you missed it…” COTDs. Here he is on the ever-green topic of attacks on past conduct of others by those residing in the present, as raised in by the post, “More On Nichelle Nichols: Regarding Althouse’s Misguided Snark”…in case you missed it:

***

The thing about the past is that it is past. The past serves only two purposes. One role is to bring pleasure in the present as you remember past enjoyable episodes of your life. The second is as a guide toward future action. No matter how hard you try, the past cannot be changed or undone. Althouse’s  protestations serve no purpose. Slavery has been abolished for a few years now and all slaves and slaveholders are dead. The original producers of Star Trek are dead or no longer in business. There are no living aggrieved parties nor remedies available to them if they were alive.

Continue reading →

How Much Sympathy Is Owed To Brittany Griner?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Brittany Griner, the WNBA superstar, has finally been sentenced by a Russian court for illegal drug possession. Absent the intervention of other agents and factors, she will serve nine years and six months in a Russian prison. She’s already been detained in the country since her arrest in February. It is obvious, however, that the tale is far from over.

The announcement of the tought sentence prompted President Biden to emit a typical bit of futile grandstanding, as he tweeted, “…Russia is wrongfully detaining Brittney. It’s unacceptable, and I call on Russia to release her immediately so she can be with her wife, loved ones, friends, and teammates.” It is pretty hard to be more blatantly futile, disingenuous and incompetent in a tweet than that. Biden doesn’t know that she was “wrongfully detained;” all indications are that she violated Russian law. “It’s unacceptable” implies that the United States won’t accept it, but as Biden well knows, the U.S. can’t and won’t do anything to force Griner’s release. Calling on a foreign nation to ignore its laws and law enforcement system to give an arrogant foreign violator a Get Out of Jail Free card is about as serious as ordering a foreign country to use Pig Latin, but that’s our Joe: talks tough, looks pathetic. The last part of the manifesto is especially silly. If being reunited with friends and family were a justification for releasing convicted criminals, then we should empty our own prisons. (To be fair, that is what a lot of Joe’s supporters want to see happen…a lot of Democratic district attorneys, too.)

Continue reading →

Open Forum! Abuse Me!

/ Jack Marshall / 50 Comments

Welcome to my world! Here is what greeted me this morning: a virtuoso hate rant from some student or faculty member at the University of Akron:

Ay, Cracker Jack! You spelled “border” wrong, you ethnonationalist, neoconservatice, warmongering, cop-calling pussy. We will flood this country one way or another, and no stupid fucking wall is going to stop us. I use my bullshit millions, generated by zero effort and a fuckton of capital gains, to fucking fly pregnant refugee women here on workers visas, and I buy them a legal path to citizenship once the anchor babies are delivered by various local obstetricians. Your little one vote every other year isn’t going to do shit to stop me and my rich ass, militant progressive friends from fucking over rich wite people and shoveling Black and Brown folks into the fucking voting booths. Suck my dick, you pretentious coward in centrist’s clothing.

It’s no wonder you didn’t even mention Trump’s two most egregious serial crimes: mass housing discrimination and multiple sexual assaults. But it makes sense. You support the same shit. You just don’t like his lack of decorum and politeness. Because you would love if the non-puritanical shit gets swept under the rug. You favored a Bush or Reagan world…where genocide, war crimes, mass incarceration and racist economics are passed off as “Trade Deals, Fighting Terror, Stopping Crime & The Free Market”. Trump wants “Caligula” and you’d rather have “Handmaid’s Tale”, you pathetic, heliophobic bootlicking bitch’s bitch.

No amount of moral grandstanding against Trump–in favor of some other puppet of a billionaire with lobbyist strings, mind you––will ever make you seem like a man whose partner is faithful. Your wife, if you miraculously have one, fucks and sucks every dick darker than tumbleweed that she can get her hands on. Now get your head out of your undoubtedly flabby ass and your “nonpartisan” pigs out of my way, so we, the men of color in your favorite cuckold pornos, can finally fight hand-to-hand with the Klan that you pretend to disavow. [Mic Drop]

Observations:

  • I did NOT spell border wrong in the post this landed on, but I often do; I also frequently misspell “receive,” “Michael” and some other things wrong as well, when I’m not making typos. Note the this comment misspelled “white,” unless “wite” is a thing now.
  • The screen name was “SEEYOUNEXTTUESDAY.” Is that a threat?
  • The screed is not unskilled. I can’t tell if the writer really is deranged, is parodying derangement, or thinks this is what I expect from the deranged.
  • I love starting my day by reading stuff like this. It happens more often than you would think.
  • That’s a still from “Billions.” The show’s prosecutor protagonist, played by the wonderful Paul Giamatti (“John Adams,” and former Commissioner of Baseball Bart Giamatti’s son), has an S&M kink.
  • No, the comment is NOT getting through moderation…

But I digress.

Sorry

This is your shot to write about whatever you want to, as long as it’s ethics.

A Baseball Integrity And Competence Ethics Train Wreck! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

…and, I’m ashamed to say, I got pulled into it myself.

I miss one Red Sox game—I thought yesterday’s contest between the Sox and Astros in Houston was a night game, but it was played in the afternoon—and this was my punishment. Writing about Karine Jean-Pierre’s idiotic statement that the Supreme Court, charged with interpreting the Constitution, issued an “unconstitutional” ruling in Dobbs, I noted in a comment,

[T]hat’s not what unconstitutional means, as SCOTUS uses it, and how SCOTUS uses it is what matters. SCOTUS said that Roe was a misinterpretation of the Constitution, which is not the same as saying the decision was unconstitutional. Unconstitutional would mean that SCOTUS was exceeding Constitutional authority to make the decision.

And this is what makes her statement incompetent and pernicious. She’s not a lawyer, she doesn’t understand those distinctions, and she’s ensuring that much of the public now is confused too.

If an umpire makes a wrong call, out when a player was safe, one can argue that the call was wrong, was inept, was bad. One cannot say the umpire violated the rules, however, because the umpire is empowered to make those decisions.

Little did I know, because I had not seen the game, that it contained an umpire’s call that did violate the rules, and that an umpire is NOT empowered to make.

Continue reading →

Afternoon Ethics Warm-Up On A Day That Needs No Warming, 8/4/22: Pronouns And Other Confusions

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Scattered thoughts, because my brain is melting...

  • Showtime’s “Billions” is my new favorite ethics show, especially since it includes such a heavy dose of legal ethics dilemmas. One irritation, though, is the way every character routinely and casually refers to Taylor Mason, the nonbinary arch-enemy of ruthless hedge fund trader Bobby Axelrod (Damien Lewis), as “they” without hesitation or question because “they” demand it. Much of the time the use of the plural pronoun renders the dialogue incomprehensible: are they (meaning the real they, the ones talking) referring to Mason, or to Mason’s company, or the company’s employees? It is impossible to tell much of the time. I do not believe for a second that  lock-step compliance with pronoun dictates would be so universal in non-woke areas like commodity transaction policing or hedge funds. This is New York City, not California. The show’s writers are both virtue-signaling and indoctrinating. I resent it.
  • Modern art is a scam, isn’t it? This…

…is a pickle stuck on the ceiling. Titled “Pickle,” the “thought-provoking artwork” is the work of Australian artist Matthew Griffin. It is now on display at the Michael Lett Gallery in Auckland., and consists of that ketchup-smeared pickle slice, attached to the ceiling of the art gallery. It’s price tag is  10,000 New Zealand dollars, or $6,200 American.

  • Beyoncé, good little woke soldier of censorship that she is, dutifully removed the “ablest slur” spaz from one of her songs after some contrived offense police complained. Now Monica Lewinsky wants Beyoncé to airbrush her 2014 song “Partition,” because it includes the one-time White House intern’s name as a synonym for a certain sexual act (but not sex! Bill said it didn’t count as sex!). Just think of all the songs that will have to be rewritten when the Left’s purge of “hurtful” lyrics, if “hurtful” means anything the hypersensitive, the power-playing, and the Orwellian linguists focus on.

1. Speaking of pronouns...this is an actual opening to a CNN story: Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Luxury Slave Quarters

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

First Hitler’s watch, and now this!

Wynton Yates, a black lawyer from New Orleans, posted a TikTok video last week expressing his outrage that Airbnb was listing the “Panther Burn Cottage” at Belmont Plantation in Mississippi as a luxury bed-and-breakfast rental. The remodeled structure was described as an “1830s slave cabin” that had also been used as a “tenant sharecroppers cabin” before being converted.

“How is this okay in somebody’s mind to rent this out — a place where human beings were kept as slaves — rent this out as a bed and breakfast?” Yates asked in the video. Naturally the social media mobs reacted like Pavlov’s dogs to a bell, and, also naturally, Airbnb groveled an apology and took down the listing.

Thus does cowardice and conflict avoidance create dubious cultural standards.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is it unethical to rent out or stay in a structure that was once used as slave quarters?

Continue reading →

Most Incompetent White House Press Secretary Ever!

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

There is no longer any doubt; indeed, this conclusion seemed unavoidable almost from the beginning of Karine Jean-Pierre’s tenure as President Biden’s paid liar. It was clear immediately that she, like so many other Biden Administration hires, was chosen to check off tribal boxes—female (check); black (check); lesbian (check)—and actual skill and qualifications were afterthoughts, if considered as factors at all. However, the bar for this position is lying-on-the-ground low; there was always a substantial chance that Jean-Pierre might prove barely capable at her job by pure luck, or charm, or something.

Nope. She’s the champ, and I can’t see any future White House spokesperson being worse unless one just froze in front of the cameras and twitched. What clinched it? This statement Jean-Pierre made yesterday:

“There has been an urgency from this President from day one, when the Supreme Court made this extreme decision to take away a constitutional right, it was an unconstitutional action by them.”

Wow. Even allowing for political hyperbole, stating that a Supreme Court ruling is unconstitutional is moronic, making every listener inclined to trust the President and his spokesperson instantly dumber. Continue reading →

Now THIS Is An Unethical Lawyer…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

And yet he’s running to be elected judge!

No, I don’t understand this at all.

Matthew Leveridge, the commonwealth’s attorney for Russell and Wayne counties in Kentucky, should have been disbarred.  He admitted to impregnating a criminal defendant, Latisha Sartain, whom he prosecuted for drug trafficking in 2011. A motion filed on Sartain’s behalf in 2014 alleged that Leveridge filed a motion to revoke her five-year pretrial diversion agreement after she ended their relationship and revealed her pregnancy to Leveridge’s wife. For some reason, this didn’t result in any bar discipline, or an episode of “Law and Order.”  But wait! There’s more! Continue reading →