Many readers have sent me excellent tips for posts of late, and the fact that I have not responded or sued them yet should not be interpreted as a lack of appreciation, interest or gratitude. I’ve been hit, as has happened more often of late, by the twin terrors of burgeoning ethics issues all over, and all manner of disasters getting in the way of the blog. I apologize. This too shall pass.

Today a friend who played a prominent role in the last of two productions I directed of Saul Levitt’s excellent ethics drama, “The Andersonville Trial” sent me this article from today’s Washington Post. For those who read it, my position is that Capt. Wirz, the defendant at the center of the post-Civil War war crimes trial that was the sole legal precedent for the Nuremberg Trials, was indeed a sacrificial offering to the public’s outrage over the photographically preserved horrors at that Confederate prison camp. The conditions at Andersonville were not Wirz’s fault or within his control to ameliorate; if anyone was to blame, it was Lincoln and Grant, who knew what would happen to captured Northern soldiers once prisoner exchanges were stopped.

1. “This is the tragedy of Obsessive Race and Group Identity Obsession (ORGIO) Won’t you help with a tax deductible gift to help the millions of suffering people like Jennifer?” NPR tells the vital stories of various people who have differing views about what color and shade of “thumbs up” emojis they and others should use in their social media posts. Like these…

Among its earth-shattering revelations is this:

Zara Rahman, a researcher and writer…argues that the skin tone emojis make white people confront their race as people of color often have to do….she [was confused] when someone who is white uses a brown emoji, so she asked some friends about it. “One friend who is white told me that it was because he felt that white people were over-represented in the space that he was using the emoji, so he wanted to kind of try and even the playing field,” Rahman said. “For me, it does signal a kind of a lack of awareness of your white privilege in many ways.”

For me, it signals that 1) the constant emphasis on race and color as the defining factor in all matters great and small is making people anxious and irrational, and 2) the public broadcasting is an unethical  waste of taxpayer money.

2. It doesn’t surprise me that the President didn’t explain this (you know how Joe is!), but the news media should have. The increase of 467,000 jobs indicated by the January jobs report trumpeted by Biden includes 768,000 new government employees on all levels hired between December 2021 and January 2022. Thus the jobs report showed a reduction in private employment of some 300,000 jobs. [Source: Washington Examiner] Continue reading →

To be accurate, I do not think there’s any “might” about it. Let’s all be grateful Judge John McBain of Jackson County, Michigan isn’t a black woman, or he might be on the Supreme Court before you know it.

Yesterday Ethics Alarms noted (Item #1) a reversal in Ohio of a case where a woman had been convicted of raping herself, or something, as a way to maximize the penalty for her revolting abuse of her own son, whom she forced to “rape” her with a foreign object. Incredibly, the appeals court had upheld the conviction despite the fact the law simply didn’t support it. (I didn’t mention this, but the prosecutors were unethical to indict her when the law as written didn’t apply.)

Something is apparently “going around.”

Judge McBain twice sentenced a defendant as if she had been found guilty of first-degree murder. Dawn Marie Dixon-Bey fatally stabbed her boyfriend on Valentine’s Day in 2015, but was acquitted of premeditated murder, and was only found guilty of second-degree murder by the jury. That meant that the judge could sentence her to as much as 20 years in prison, but no more according to sentencing guidelines. Verdict? What verdict?

Judge McBain behaved as if the jurors had found Dixon-Bey guilty of all charges. He said from the bench that she committed “a cold blooded, premeditated stabbing,” even though premeditation wasn’t proven. The first time McBain sentenced Dixon-Bey to 35 to 70 years in prison after saying she “brutally murdered” the victim “in cold blood,” the appeals court vacated the sentence. After it sent the case back to McBain for a sentence that complied with the limits for second degree murder, he sentenced her to 30 to 70 years in prison again.

Continue reading →

1. It’s called ‘the law,’ you ignoramuses.  In Ohio, Miranda Smith, a true sicko, was charged with rape involving a two-year-old child, Her conviction was reversed by The Ohio Supreme Court after an appeals court had upheld the trial court. The grounds for the reversal was that her (disgusting and horrible) conduct, which she admitted to, “only” constituted gross sexual imposition under Ohio law. Gross sexual imposition is a lesser charge, and might result in less punishment, though not if the sentencing judge has his head screwed on right.

What did the woman do? Oh, Smith had her two-year-old son insert a ‘sex toy” into her vagina, took a video of the act and sent it to her boyfriend. (Now there’s something you don’t see every day.) How the trial and appeals court allowed a conviction for rape to stand, I’ll never know. The statute defines what the child was made to do as a sex act, but its should be obvious that one can’t be charged with raping oneself. Whatever it was that this mother did to her child, it wasn’t rape. “The state asks us to … conclude that Ohio law requires only an act of insertion and that it does not matter whether it is the victim or the defendant who does the inserting. In other words, the state is essentially asking us to rewrite R.C. 2907.02(A)(1)(b) to make the statute fit the facts of this case. We cannot do that, though.” Oh, I can think of at least one SCOTUS justice who would probably argue that doing exactly that is what “feels” just. Naturally, the “Think of the children! mob” went bonkers. Consider these arguments from activists:

It’s this focus on the language of the law rather than the impact the crime had on the child that troubles those who advocate for rape and sex crime survivors.

Amy Dudley is the director of the only accredited rape crisis center in Montgomery and Preble counties, the YWCA Dayton’s Center for Survivors of Sexual Violence. She said the fact that a defendant’s arguments seemed to matter more in this supreme court case than the long-term impact to the child is why laws need to change.

“If we can say that a 2-year-old was complicit in (Smith’s) sexual conduct, what does that say for older survivors?” Dudley said, after reviewing the case and watching oral arguments.

YWCA Dayton’s CSSV focuses on adult survivors, but Dudley said research supports the fact that child sex crime survivors feel effects far into adulthood, and having to relive trauma or come to terms with it later in life can cause even more issues than the initial abuse.

“They’re becoming these unhealthy adults with mental health issues and other issues that sometimes aren’t addressed,” Dudley said. “(For adult survivors) if the law wasn’t there to protect this child in this case, when will it?”

Seeing a person’s sentence minimized in a crime of this type is something that could have impacts on the entire process of helping survivors, Dudley said. That’s why it’s important that the justice system turn toward a “survivor focus” while giving everyone involved the rights they are owed.

This is the kind of “justice” the ascendant mindset of the totalitarian woke would inflict on us. The actual law doesn’t matter, what matters is giving people what they are “owed,” whether the law used to do it applies or not. Continue reading →