Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 2/4/21: Hey! I Have Enemies!Charles Mackay Says That’s Great!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Enemies2

My brief post about “You Have No Enemies, the Charles Mackay poem that was a source of solace and inspiration for Margaret Thatcher, was the top Ethics Alarms article of 2020. It’s a good thing I learned about it, because Ethics Alarms Derangement Syndrome seems to be catching on. One self-banned commenter is now writing hate mail to my personal email spam account. Mark Draughn, who blogs at Windy Pundit and was once named an Ethics Alarms Commenter of the Year, now routinely posts “Jack Marshall is evil” screeds. There are others. Part of this, though not all, seems to stem from my adamant refusal to join the mob seeking to drive Donald Trump from office, and to insist that such ethical niceties like fairness, due process, objectivity, avoidance of bias and consistent standards should apply to him the way they had always applied to previous White House occupants.

For all I know, the would-be censors, vendetta-mongers and Trump Hate Posse is behind the otherwise inexplicable dive in traffic here since Christmas. Well, to quote my late, tragic college roommate Andy Kinkaid, a traumatized Viet Nam veteran whose response to problems great and small was always the same: “Fuck it, right?” One of the many invaluable lessons my father taught me early was never to back down when you believe you are right. He didn’t, and I don’t.

1. Feb. 4 is a major day for ethics, good and bad:

  • In 1974, Patty Hearst, the 19-year-old granddaughter of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst,was kidnapped by a real domestic terrorist group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and subsequently brainwashed into joining their cause, even to the extent of participating in an armed bank robbery. This was the first instance of the term “Stockholm Syndrome” being widely publicized, but the defense didn’t work. Good. “Tania,” as she called herself, was sentenced to seven years in prison and served 21 months before her sentence was commuted by President Carter. She later married her bodyguard, and ended up acting in John Waters films. She was pardoned by President Clinton in January 2001. Poor little, dumb little,  rich girl…
  • In 2004, Facebook launched—a day that will live in infamy.
  • Rosa Parks was born on this date in 1913.
  • In 1861, the slave-holding states met to form the Confederacy. Now THAT was an insurrection…
  • In 1789, George Washington was unanimously elected (by 69 Presidential electors) as the first President of the United States. Washington was a natural leader, wary of executive power, and a ethical to his bones. A worse choice could have sunk the fledgling nation. That Washington was so able was largely moral luck, but until recently, the United States had been extraordinarily lucky.
  • Feb. 4, 1945 saw the Yalta Conference, in which President Roosevelt and Churchill sold out Poland and laid the groundwork for the Iron Curtain in exchange for Stalin agreeing to join in the war against Japan.
  • And in 1983, singer Karen Carpenter died, the victim of an eating disorder brought on by the cruelty of conventions regarding women’s appearances in both the entertainment business and American society. She was 32.

2. Today the House will vote on whether to strip Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments because she is an unapologetic, conspiracy theory espousing embarrassment. Headline News this morning termed the vote a “struggle for the soul of the Republican Party.” That’s typical, and false. There are legitimate arguments for not punishing Greene. Most of the statements prompting her attempted censoring occurred before her election, and that’s a dangerous precedent to set. The Democrats’ motives are also suspect, since she has filed impeachment articles against President Biden, and is a vocal Trump supporter. The problem could have been mitigated if Minority House Leader Kevin McCarthy handled Greene as a matter of party discipline. He is a weenie, however, and a coward, terrified of a backlash from pro-Trump fanatics. Thus he will permit the entire House to demote an elected representative based on conduct the voters had a chance to consider.

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Cancelled For A Single Word

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

And spoken outside his home, to friends.

Country music superstar Morgan Wallen was suspended indefinitely by his record label and removed from hundreds of radio stations across the country yesterday. The reason? He was captured on camera saying “nigger.” TMZ posted a video this week showing Wallen loudly returning home with friends. A neighbor started recording the scene and the video included Wallen using the word. If you can tell the context of his words, please explain it to me. Was “nigger” meant as an insult, or was it used playfully? Was the target white or black? There is no evidence that he “hurled” the word, because that suggest that it was hurled at someone.

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The Ethics Alarms Rationalizations List Welcomes The Know-It-All’s Dodge, Or “I Knew This Would Happen”

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Obama

The Know-It-All’s Dodge has been hanging around waiting for me to add it to the Rationalizations List for a long time. I should have added it when President Barack Obama exploded my head with this exchange, in 2015, regarding his pathetic and disastrous handling of the Syrian civil war.

In an interview with CBS’s Steve Kroft, who had earlier in Obama’s administration stated outright that his questions to the President would not be confrontational ones, there was this:

KROFT: You have been talking a lot about the moderate opposition in Syria. It seems very hard to identify. And you talked about the frustrations of trying to find some and train them. You had a half-a-billion dollars from congress to train and equip 5,000, and at the end, according to the commander of CENTCOM, you got 50 people, most of whom are, are dead or deserted. He said you’ve got four or five left.

OBAMA: Steve, this is why I’ve been skeptical from the get-go about the notion that we were going to effectively create this proxy army inside of Syria.

KABOOM!

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From The Ethics Alarms Sarcasm Dept., Cross-Filed in “Unethical…But Funny!”: Yeah, THIS Sure Engenders Trust In The Competence Of State Law Enforcement

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Chucky

The Texas public safety department sent out an Amber Alert asking citizens to keep an eye out for Chucky, the homicidal possessed doll from the Child’s Play movies, who, it said, was a suspect in a kidnapping. The nonsensical message was blasted to people’s mobile phones three times.

It described the suspect as being called “Chucky” and described him as a 28-year-old with red, auburn hair, band blue eyes who stood at 3ft 1in tall and weighed 16lbs. He was wearing blue denim overalls, alarmed Texans were told with a multi-colored striped long sleeve shirt and was presumed armed with a large knife – matching his appearance in the films.

His race was listed as “Other: Doll.”

The department issued a statement saying: “This alert is a result of a test malfunction. We apologize for the confusion this may have caused and are diligently working to ensure this does not happen again.”

Oh, it’s a TEST malfunction! That’s OK then. “May have caused”? There’s no confusion: the Texas Safety Department is run by utter boobs. When a state department starts warning the public about fictional serial killers from horror movies, the best way to ensure it doesn’t happen again is to clean house.

I feel it necessary to post this song, from “Lil’ Abner”…

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 2/3/21: Cold Day Reflections [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Shining Frozen

1. Wait, what? Ann Althouse revealed this week that she doesn’t read all of the paragraphs in articles she blogs about. She was caught doing this is a post I didn’t read, since it involved her weird concern about the sounds ice makes in a glass. The law professor had asked a question that was answered in the article, but Ann didn’t read that far.

I have found that blogging inherently requires doing opinion and analysis with less than all the facts, or, in the alternative, writing only an article a day. The Ethics Scoreboard, now online, was an ethics website, not a blog, and I spent easily three times the research and consideration on each post that I do now on Ethics Alarms. I also had a webmaster who caught most typos. I eventually decided to switch to blog, because I couldn’t come close to covering the field in only a post a day (if even that), and because I wanted to have an ethics forum with participation from commenters. I sympathize with Ann: blogging is time consuming even if you write as quickly as I do. Then you have the proofing, tagging and administrative stuff. I can see why she would get in the habit of skimming articles.

But it’s still reckless, and guarantees mistakes and an erosion of trust. To her credit, she admitted that she does this in her post, but didn’t seem to say that she was about to change.

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Rep. Greene Has The Right To Her Opinions And the Right To Free Speech. But There Is No Right To Make Laws If You Are An Ignorant, Undisciplined Fool, And Republicans Have A Duty To Treat Her Accordingly

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

greene

House Democrats moved yesterday to strip GOP Georgia rep Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments if Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy refuses to do so. Mark this moment: House Democrats are right, and their demand is responsible. Greene is on the House education and budget committees, and she has amply demonstrated that she does not possess the judgment to serve om a PTA rummage sale committee.

If House Democrats being reasonable blows your mind, imagine: Mitch McConnell is also making sense. Calling Greene a “cancer for the Republican Party,” the GOP Senate leader said,

“Somebody who’s suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr.’s airplane is not living in reality.This has nothing to do with the challenges facing American families or the robust debates on substance that can strengthen our party.”

Gee, I hadn’t heard about the “Clintons killed John-John” plot! But the Greene theory that came out this week is even better. Eric Hananoki is an investigative reporter at “Media Matters,” which means he’s a partisan hack, but in this case he has found juicy evidence. In a November 17, 2018 Facebook post, since removed, Greene expressed support for the so-called Campfire Conspiracy, which holds that the deadly California wildfires were deliberately set by a cabal seeking to clear land for the high-speed railway, led by PG&E. Here is the whole post that Hananoki unearthed:

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Oppressing The Twitter Troll

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Twitter troll meme

Federal prosecutors accused Douglass Mackey, 31, described in news reports as a “Twitter Troll,”of coordinating with co-conspirators to spread misinformation on Twitter in 2016 that Hillary Clinton’s supporters could vote by sending a text message to a specific phone number.

Mackey was arrested a week ago in the first criminal case in the country alleging voter suppression through the use of false tweets.

Seth DuCharme, the acting United States attorney in Brooklyn, whose office is prosecuting the case, said, “With Mackey’s arrest, we serve notice that those who would subvert the democratic process in this manner cannot rely on the cloak of internet anonymity to evade responsibility for their crimes.” The alleged crime is a conspiracy to “oppress” or “intimidate” anyone from exercising a constitutional right, such as voting. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. Prosecutors allege that 4,900 really gullible and lazy Hillary Clinton supporters were fooled by Mackey’s scheme into trying to vote for her using a phone number publicized on social media. Mackey and his co-conspirators joked online about about tricking “dopey” liberals.

There is no question that what Mackey et al. did was unethical, dishonest, unfair and sinister. However, I find it hard to understand how he can be prosecuted while the deceptions of others whose efforts to mislead voters and either dissuade them from voting or get them to vote for a candidate they otherwise would not have were far more widespread and had far more impact on election results. My guess is that this charge is harassment, and harassment based on partisan intimidation.

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Bee Ethics: A Brief Addendum To Today’s Ethics Warm-Up…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

swarm-main

I meant to have this as the opening to today’s first post, but the painting of Joe hugging Kamala while dead anti-Trump icons looked down from heaven shorted out my brain.

I believe I may have discovered the beginning of American society’s ruinous capitulation to claims of being offended and organizational submission to contrived complaints of coded prejudice and bigotry. I found it, of all places, at the end of the terrible 1978 Irwin Allen (“The Poseidon Adventure;” “The Towering Inferno”) disaster movie “The Swarm.” For some reason, TCM devoted last night to famously bad movies, like John Wayne’s hilarious “The Conqueror,” in which the Duke played Genghis Kahn for producer Howard Hughes. Many critics said at the time it came out that “The Swarm” was the worst movie ever made; I don’t know how they could say that when the sequel to “The Exorcist,” “The Heretic,” came out just a year before. I don’t think “The Swarm” is even the worst big all-star cast movie ever made: I’d give that distinction to “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 2/2/21: Take It, Jimmy!

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

I’m resorting to the enthusiasm of Mr. Durante, an icon in my childhood home, because I sense readers are exhausted, or depressed, or moping, or something. Even my dog is a bad mood—he growled at me a couple of times, which is out of character. The traffic and comments on Ethics Alarms are way down; last month was especially bad, with views topping 4,000 only once. Is it anger? Fear? Submission? Surrender? The weather? Have the pods all been successfully delivered while we sleep? Well,

This is no time to stop working on creating a more ethical society, when totalitarianism is slowly creeping up from the muck…

1. And now for something completely…something. I wonder: what is the ethical reaction to this?

Montage

Or to the text that accompanies it in the Times, which includes passages like,

The final product is an example of a visual tradition in Black culture that usually circulates during two specific occasions: When a Black person ascends in society or dies. In this case, the moment came when Ms. Harris, was sworn in as the first woman and the first Black and South Asian person to ascend to the position of Vice President….It’s hard to pinpoint an exact time when these works began to merge into the mainstream, according to Aaron Bryant, a curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. But “they have been around for a long time,” he said. “Throughout art we have always celebrated folks that we see as heroes. They become a symbol of good conquering evil”…While some of these images are camp or cringe, Mr. Cheatham’s image of Ms. Harris was sincere. “What makes these images particularly Black is that they aren’t made for the white public, he said. “If you don’t get the reference, you’re not going to enjoy it,” Desus said. “They’re not made in a way that is for general consumption. There is definitely a hood angle to it in that they’ll do something that if you’re not from the hood you’ll take the whole memorial as blasphemous. It is like graffiti in that way.”

The painting above has been circulating briskly among African-Americans on social media, we are told.

Here were my first thoughts when I saw it:

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Ethics And Common Sense Win Out Over Law: SCOTUS Weakens “Qualified Immunity” [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The one constant recommendation by critics of police brutality and those trying to find ways to mitigate the problem without, you know, rioting, looting and burning every time a black man is killed by police is to eliminate or sharply curtail qualified immunity. Taylor v. Riojas, handed down in November by the Supreme Court in a 7-1 decision, might do just that.

A government officer sued for damages on a claim of violating the Constitution, such as violating an individual’s civil rights, must overcome the defendant’s claim of immunity. Judges (and Presidents) have absolute immunity for their conduct in the pursuit of their duties, no matter how outrageous or incompetent. Legislators cannot be sued for their decisions as lawmakers. Prosecutors cannot be sued for prosecuting. Other government officers, like police officers, have qualified immunity if they are sued for money damages for harming individuals in the course of their duties.

The Supreme Court has set up a tough standard for plaintiffs to meet in order to establish liability. Overcoming qualified immunity requires that the defendant officer acted in violation of law and Constitutional principles that any reasonable government official should know, and that the civil right allegedly breached has been established beyond question.

In a 2018 case, District of Columbia v. Wesby the Court stated:

“Existing law must have placed the constitutionality of the officer’s conduct ‘beyond debate.’ This demanding standard protects ‘all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.’ To be clearly established, a legal principle must have a sufficiently clear foundation in then-existing precedent. The rule must be ‘settled law,’ which means it is dictated by ‘controlling authority’ or ‘a robust consensus of cases of persuasive authority.’ It is not enough that the rule is suggested by then-existing precedent. The precedent must be clear enough that every reasonable official would interpret it to establish the particular rule the plaintiff seeks to apply.”

This extreme hurdle has proved nearly impossible to clear. From 1982 to 2020, the Court reviewed 30 qualified immunity cases. Plaintiffs prevailed in two.

Yet in the per curiam opinion issued last year (that means there are no signed majority opinion or concurring opinions) the Court signaled a major shift, and ruled that prison guards had no qualified immunity even though there was no precedent that would have alerted them that their conduct was illegal or unconstitutional.

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