hypocrisy

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 1/7/19: Fleeing The US, Exploiting The Golden Globes, Spinning The Shutdown, And More

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Best wishes for an ethical week ahead!

1. They just can’t help themselves. Golden Globe hosts Andy Samberg and Sandra Oh went out of their way before the show to sell the idea that last night’s Golden Globes Awards would avoid political grandstanding, but sure enough, there was Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical winner Christian Bale, who plays Dick Cheney in “Vice,” accepting his honor by saying that he was “cornering the market on charisma-free a—holes … What do we think, Mitch McConnell next?” [Pointer: Zoltar Speaks!]

If I were the producer or on the Golden Globes board, I’d ban him from future ceremonies. Bale, who is probably the best actor still acting now that Daniel Day-Lewis has retired, was just virtue-signaling to the left-biased Hollywood crowd, and willing to annoy a lot of his audience to do it. There’s nothing productive or profound about calling two public servants, one of them retired, “a-holes” on national television; it’s just uncivil and rude. Not only that, but Bale is a genuine hypocrite: Less than a month ago, the actor spoke glowingly about Cheney, telling Fox News, “He was a wonderful family man — he’s a great dad, he’s an avid reader, he has a brain like a vice and he constantly reads history.” It sounds to me like Bale cuts his opinions and words to fit the audience he’s addressing.

2.  From the Ethics Alarms “How Dare You Make Me Act Like A Jackass?” Files: The mainstream media has been using a Gallup poll showing that 16% of Americans polled say they want to leave the country as an indictment of President Trump. The spin is based on the narrative that anything negative is Trump’s fault, and anything positive that occurs is dumb luck, a late result of Barack Obama’s brilliance, or because Trump’s real objectives were foiled. In truth, the uptick in citizens saying they want to leave is a direct result of non-stop anti-American propaganda, in the schools, the colleges, in the news media, and from activists who pretend that the nation is an oppressive, autocratic, Fascist Hell where every woman is at risk of being raped, white supremacy is rampant, and African Americans are hunted down and shot on the streets for “living while black.” This state of mind has been seeded and cultivated entirely by “the resistance” and the ideologues who created it.

As several others have pointed out, Gallup’s summary that “a record number of Americans want to leave the U.S.” is fake news, and in multiple ways. There is no “number,” just a percentage of the group Gallup polled. That percentage, moreover, represents the alleged pollees who say they want to leave the U.S., not the ones who really want to, which would be demonstrated by some proactive steps to accomplish that objective. Women, under-30s and the poorest Americans make up the bulk of the 6% jump from the 10% of Americans who said they wanted to flee while Obama was President. I  attribute the result to 1) the despicable, constant fear-mongering by Democrats, as in the ridiculous claims that Brett Kavanaugh would send the nation’s women into “A Handmaiden’s Tale”-style sexual slavery; 2) the general civic ignorance of millennials, too many of whom who get their knowledge of national affairs from Stephen Colbert and social media, and who have been conditioned to think that trading liberty for nanny state socialism would be a rational trade;  3) the false narrative, pushed by the news media,  that President Trump is a racist; and 4) the fact that it is traditionally the progressives who threaten to leave the country whenever the Democrats aren’t in power, not conservatives when their star is waning. (Why is that?)

Ethical and civically literate Americans recognize that they are responsible for changing their nation for the better, whatever “better” is. Leaving is a cowardly and unpatriotic act, and my position is that if someone thinks losing an election is justification to leave for foreign shores, the U.S., its society and its politics are better off without them.

Bye!

Continue reading →

WOW! New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Scores TWO “Ethics Dunce” Designations In A Single Day!

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Yes, it appears that the freshman New York House member bids fair to become the Babe Ruth of Ethics Dunces, blowing away the previous record-holder for Ethics Dunce designations, Bill Clinton, and all other contenders. This is her second Ethics Dunce in a single day, something no other public figure has ever accomplished. Her first is here.

On December 22, the media darling issued  successive tweets, signaling her virtue,

 Next time we have a gov shutdown, Congressional salaries should be furloughed as well. It’s completely unacceptable that members of Congress can force a government shutdown on partisan lines & then have Congressional salaries exempt from that decision….(Spoiler alert: most members of Congress are already wealthy!) Speaking as a working class member-elect, I think it’s only fair. It would also cause members who actually depend on their salary to think twice about leadership and take a shutdown vote more seriously.
Five N.Y. members of Congress are giving up their salaries until the government re-opens: U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY-13); U.S. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY-18); U.S. Rep. Max Rose (D-NY-11), who will donate any pay during the time; U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY-01); and U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY-21). So has U.S. Rep. Dr. Mark Green (R-TN), who sent a letter U.S. House of Representative’s Chief Administrative Officer, Philip Kiko, requesting his salary be suspended until a deal is reached and the partial government shutdown ends, as The Tennessee Star reported. Green voted to fund the border wall.Ocasio-Cortez? She has not refused her paycheck. The New York Post reported on Thursday that Oscasio-Cortez ran away when asked about her salary: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

I anticipate a whole bushel of these awards in the next two years, since the young, callow, naive and broadly ignorant “new face of the Democratic Party” possesses the unfortunate combination of a non-stop mouth,  poor education, certitude of her own brilliance, a seal-clapping rookery of blindly fawning supporters who swoon at any of her doctrinaire pronouncements, and a Mainstream media that hasn’t yet figured out that publishing her every word is doing Ocasio-Cortez no favors.

This example could stand as a template for an Ethics Dunce- mandating performance. Showing that she has the back of her equally cocky and clueless colleague, freshman Congress woman Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, lately infamous for gleefully crowing, “We’re going to impeach the motherfucker!” to a “resistance” crowd after she was sworn in, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted,

“Republican hypocrisy at its finest: saying that Trump admitting to sexual assault on tape is just ‘locker room talk,’ but scandalizing themselves into faux-outrage when my sis says a curse word in a bar. GOP lost entitlement to policing women’s behavior a long time ago. Next.”

This is both unethical and cretinous. Let us count the ways: Continue reading →

“Immoral And Ineffective”

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Hmmm. I have now, in a single day, heard two Congressional Democrats, in the course of discussing the so-called government shut down, describe the Trump border wall as “immoral and ineffective.” Does this mean that the phrase is an official, focus group tested Democratic talking point now, issued to the troops to be relentlessly repeated over and over again to end debates rather than illuminate them? I assume so, and thus it joins “comprehensive immigration reform,” “sensible gun laws,” and others. If I am right, it is a remarkably dishonest catch phrase. It’s also internally hypocritical.

Simply put, if the wall is ineffective, why is it immoral? And if the wall is immoral, why is being ineffective an indictment of it?

Arguing in the alternative like this is a red flag that signals that the advocate just wants to defeat the proposition, and doesn’t care how he or she does it.  The device originated in the legal profession, as a strategy to advance several competing and often mutually exclusive arguments with the goal of showing that regardless of interpretation there is no viable conclusion other than the advocate’s. Most often, the trick is used in criminal law: My client didn’t know the victim, and if he did, he was too far away that night to kill him, and even if he was the last one to see the victim alive, the evidence against him is circumstantial. In criminal law, the approach is justifiable, for the accused must be convicted beyond a reasonable doubt, and any doubt will do. The criminal defense lawyer isn’t seeking justice, or the best result for the community, just the best result for his client, as his (or her) clients defines it. It’s a better device to use in court briefs to other lawyers and judges than to a jury, who are likely to think, “Wait, does this lawyer care what the truth is?” The answer to that question is, of course, “no,” as long as the end result serves the interests of the lawyer’s client. If the client is Jack the Ripper, and the lawyer  arguing in the alternative allows him to escape conviction to kill again, the lawyer did the job required by his or her profession. The consequences of freeing the client literally is not the lawyer’s concern: if it is, then he or she is in the wrong profession. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 12/29/18: ‘Infuriating Stuff I Wish I Didn’t Have To Know About Or Write About’ Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

Screaming from mountain tops does no good, I know, but this is the life I have chosen…

Good Morning.

(My beautiful Christmas tree is drooping already, despite meticulous care. (Did you know that in Philadelphia it’s called a “Holiday Tree”? Did you know they had gone mad in Philadelphia?) I’ve had some last until February first. Not this one, I fear.)

1. Like most of the journalism establishment here, only less subtle about it.  Der Spiegel reporter Claas Relotius was exposed this month to be that publication’s version of Stephen Glass, a star journalist who just made stuff up. He, however, made stuff up to play to anti-Trump sentiments abroad, writing multiple stories to show how bigoted and backward the town of Fergus Falls, Minnesota was, explaining why it went for President Trump in the 2106 election.

The New York Times story on the hoax shows how Relotius could have accomplished the same mission using just spin, slanted framing and old fashioned bias. Read the thing: it just drips with thinly veiled contempt for Trump voters, and the President, of course. “The election results speak for themselves,” says the Times, knowing how the typical times reader will take that. The Times reporters reveal that the town isn’t full of racist yahoos as if that is news in itself.

2. Can’t let this pass, unfortunately. President Trump and first lady Melania Trump were taking calls from young children wondering about Santa’s whereabouts on Christmas Eve, as part of the NORAD Santa tracker (which I think is a waste of money no matter what it costs, and an example of the government being involved where it should not be), and had  this conversation  with 7-year-old Collman Lloyd which was videoed on both sides;

Collman told the President about the Santa visit preparations underway at the Lloyd household, saying “Probably put out some cookies and then we’re hanging out with our friends, so that’s pretty much all.”

The President: “Well that’s very good. You just have a good time.”

Collman: “Yes, sir.”

The President: “Are you still a believer in Santa?”

Collman: “Yes, sir.”

Trump: “Because at seven it’s marginal, right?” 

Collman: “Yes, sir.”

The trivial exchange triggered more Trump-bashing and a ridiculous amount of negative commentary. This approaches blind hate at a pathological level. The focus of the attacks were that the President’s “marginal” line supposedly destroyed the girl’s belief in Santa Clause. Ugh.

  • She later said that she had no idea what “marginal” meant. We  all know Trump can’t talk: this is Julie Principle territory. The only way one assumes that his intent was to shatter the girl’s innocent faith is if one thinks the President is a monster…which is what the news media wants the public to think.
  • If I had to guess, I would say that he was noting that not all of her friends did believe in Santa—which is, studies say, true. My son was a skeptic at 6. I. in contrast, believed in St. Nick until I was 28…
  • Collman also said that what the Evil Scrooge Trump said didn’t cause her not to believe in Santa, though this could be called moral luck.
  • Even at seven, a personal exchange with the President of the United States would have meant so much more to me than any dents in my Santa Claus beliefs that I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Of course, when I was seven it was the norm that all citizens respected and honored the President, because that was whom our democracy chose to lead us.

Continue reading →

‘Twas Two Nights Before Christmas Sunday Ethics Warm-Up, 12/23/18: Ho-Ho-Hypocrisy

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Merry Christmas!

1. Yes, Merry Christmas, dammit. Those responsible for that moment of doubt and ethical uncertainty every time I encountered a stranger on my just completed Ethics Rock Extreme road trip to New Brunswick, New Jersey deserve to be entombed alive in peppermint and plum pudding.  The greeting simply says, “I wish you to be joyful and happy in a season where people are a little less selfish and a little more ethical: I’m not trying to indoctrinate you into Christianity!” Much of this completely unnecessary addition to holiday stress is due to to jerks—yes, I think the word is fair—like Julia Ioffe, the author of  “Please don’t wish me ‘Merry Christmas’/It’s impolite and alienating to assume I follow your religion.”

I thought Charles Dickens slam-dunked that nonsense definitively in “A Christmas Carol,” followed by almost all the Christmas movies that make the same obvious point except to deliberate holiday wet-blankets like Ioffe. No, jerk, the greeting is an expression of cultural unity among human beings, and the celebration of values that need have not be restricted to religious Christmas holiday because this is also a secular tradition as well. As soon as I get this post up, I’m going to re-post the Ethics Alarms Christmas commentary.

Somebody send it to Julia.

2. 2018 Hypocrisy Award, locked up! It doesn’t matter if you are happy or disappointed to see President Trump pull U.S. troops out of Syria and Afghanistan; you should still be able to marvel at the blatant, shameless, pandering, hateful and, really, laughable—if the cultural fad of denigrating the President of the United States regardless of what he does wasn’t so destructive and wrong— hypocrisy by news media Trump-haters, among others. Glenn Greenwald, who sees the world from a leftward perspective but maintains his integrity, called out MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who could be the symbol of the whole nauseating. He tweeted,

The most bizarre aspect of Rachel Maddow’s deep anger over troop withdrawal from Syria is that she wrote an entire book in 2012 denouncing illegal US Endless War without congressional approval – exactly what Syria is. I interviewed her about it here: Funny: citing that interview I did of Maddow’s book on the evils of Endless War without Congressional approval reminded me that she asked me to blurb that book, which I did. Here’s what I said – so ironic in light of her anger over Syria troop withdrawal

This upset Glenn’s loyal progressive followers, one of whom sent this fascinating retort:

“The most bizarre aspect of Glenn Greenwald’s inexplicable credibility is his ability to appear as first an advocate and then an opponent of almost everyone and everything. Can’t choose one perspective.”

See? To people like this—the commenter’s handle is IstandwithMaxine, which pretty much explains everything—is that they have been brainwashed to believe that is is bizarre unless adopts a single  view—theirs. of course, otherwise you are evil–and never alters it or admits that it may need re-thinking when that view leads to dead ends, disasters and pitfalls, no matter what new information arises. Someone like Greenwald, who tries to apply the same standards of analysis and ethical judgment to all regardless of whether it advances an ideology, is just untrustworthy, a traitor.

This cartoon has been circulating online. It is 100% fair and accurate regarding Trump’s critics self-indicting reaction: Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 12/20/18: I Promise, I’m Looking Hard For Uplifting Ethics Stories For The Holidays. And Failing….

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Good morning!

(If I don’t get the lights on the tree  today, I’m hurling myself into a pit of rabid reindeer…)

1. Open Forum report: Another intense, varied, and impressive performance by the Ethics Alarms crew in my absence yesterday. 23 different commenters raised and debated the following issues, many of which I haven’t touched yet, because I am wholly inadequate to my task. Among them:

  • The ethics of fighting a specious criminal charge,
  • Texas’ school districts for making employees sign a pledge not to boycott or advocate against Israel?
  • The bump stock ban
  • The plea deal of Jacob Walter Anderson
  • “The Innocent Man”
  • The Xmas package-snatcher trap.
  •  Stepha Velednitsky
  • “Without Precedent: Chief Justice John Marshall and His Times” by Joel Richard Paul.
  • The yellow vest protests and the meager US coverage of them
  • Prada Monkey
  • Trump’s decision to  pull out of Syria

2.  Favorite dishonest and manipulative note out of many in the 12/18  Times:   Reporters Carl Hulse and Julie Davis write in“Tennessee Senator, A Proven Deal-Maker, Won’t Seek Re-election”…

Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee and one of the last bridges to bipartisanship in the Senate, announced on Monday that he would not seek re-election in 2020…His decision to leave is more evidence that Washington has become less attractive to legislators interested in steering a middle course on seemingly intractable issues such as education and health care….

Fake news, and deliberate distortion. In fact, Alexander’s decision may have nothing to do with the job becoming “less attractive to legislators interested in steering a middle course,” and his own words, meaning his own stated reason for leaving, don’t suggest that at all. Alexander is 78. In 2020, he would be 80, meaning that by the end of a new term he would be 86, or sick, or dead. “I’ve had my turn,”  Alexander is quoted as saying. “Everything comes to an end sometime, and it is good to know when that should be.” He also said that he wants to leave the Senate “at the top of my game.”

The current U.S. news media is untrustworthy, dishonest, incompetent and despicable, and frankly, I am beginning to regard anyone who continues to deny this the same way. Continue reading →

Christmas Questions For A Thoroughly Confused Culture

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

In “A Christmas Kiss,” the 2011 Hallmark-style Christmas movie (that premiered on the Ion channel, but really would have been right at home on the Hallmark channel, or for that matter, the Crap Channel), Wendy Walton is an aspiring interior designer. One night, while preparing to go out with her roommates in glitter makeup,  she encounters an impossibly handsome, formally-dressed stranger in the elevator. When the elevator stalls and seems unstable, Wendy is thrown into the stranger’s arms….or perhaps grabs him for support, or in fear.  The elevator starts moving again, and he impulsively embraces her and gives  her a passionate, romantic kiss.  They part without her learning his name, and Wendy breathlessly tells her roommates about her magical encounter with the handsome stranger.

2018 questions:

1 Was the kiss sexual assault? Wendy did not consent to it. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, December 19, 2018: Facebook’s Lies, Hillary’s Letter, Harvard’s Defenders, And Kavanaugh’s Victory

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Good Morning!

1. Open Forum today! As soon as this post is up, I’ll open a forum for readers here to raise their own suggestions for ethics topics and to offer their commentary without me getting in the way. The last one was a spectacular success, attracting over a hundred comments, generating many fascinating threads, and producing three Comments of the Day so far. Just keep the topics on ethics, don’t get distracted by tangents and bickering, and keep it civil.

The immediate motivation for today’s forum is that I have to prepare for and deliver an annual end of year ethics CLE seminar at the D.C. bar. If you’re in the vicinity and need the credits, or just want a lively ethics workout, come on by and say hello. Here are the details:

Date: December 19, 2018

Event start time :1:30 PMEvent end time:4:45 PM

Venue:D.C. Bar: 901 4th ST NW, Washington, DC 20001-2776

Credit: 3.0 Ethics Credit Hours, including 3 hours of professionalism for those states with such requirement.

Description: Widespread discord in our current culture places unusual stress on professional ethics, and unfortunately, the legal profession is not immune. The past year saw many legal professionals, including famous names in the law, make questionable decisions and breach legal ethics standards, providing both cautionary tales and fodder for analysis. This challenging and interactive class will explore important developments and looming perils that every lawyer should be ready to face.

Topics include:

• Direct adversity vs. “general adversity,” and whether it matters
• Sexual harassment as a legal ethics problem, and the profession’s vulnerability to “The King’s Pass”
• Defying a client for the client’s own good
• Fees, referrals and gaming the rules for fun and profit
• Professional responsibility vs. legal ethics
• The increasing threat to law firm independence and integrity
• The technology ethics earthquake

..and more!

Faculty: Jack Marshall, Pro Ethics Ltd.
Fee: $89 D.C. Bar Communities Members; $99 D.C. Bar Members; $109 Government Attorneys; $129 Others

2. Meanwhile, here are Facebook’s “standards”… As Ethics Alarms posts continue to be blocked on Facebook in various ways, including by “community standards” that for some reason reject the ethics of “Miracle on 34th Street,” the social media behemoth’s own standards are coming into focus: From CNBC: Continue reading →

Flashback: Revisiting January 15, 2017, When I Was Horribly, Depressingly Right.

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

There are so many posts here that I forget I wrote many of them, and definitely forget exactly what I wrote in them. I do check old posts when I stumble upon them to see how I assess Past Me as kind of an integrity check. It is remarkable, or maybe its an indictment, that I still agree with myself 99% of the time, no matter how much time has passed. As is often the case when an old post comes back into view, it was a new comment—nothing substantive– that unearthed this one, a post on the topic tagged as the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck here.

Two years ago I was getting complaints that I was spending too much time and print writing about the progressive/Democratic Party/ news media/”resistance” efforts to ensure the failure and rejection of Donald Trump as President before his administration even got started. I had been writing about the dangerous divisiveness and government dysfunction that this conduct would inevitably lead to if it didn’t stop for just two months. I wrote this post in response to those complaints.

Incredibly, shockingly, depressingly, dangerously, nothing has improved. Indeed, it has gotten worse. A lot has happened: impeachment plans A though O have been floated, advocated and pursued. The news media has been transformed into a virtual vigilante arm of “the resistance.” It is also one of the many democratic institutions that has been weakened, losing public trust and deserving to do so. Meanwhile, Ethics Alarms, in great part because it has refused to capitulate to this culturally suicidal madness, has lost readership and support. The problem is that opposing the broad-based effort to destroy an elected President regardless of the deep wounds it inflicts on democracy and society is seen by the deranged as endorsing the persona, character, methods and all of the policies of Trump himself—seen as, or cynically and dishonestly characterized as such to avoid confronting my analysis. (Hello, Facebook!)

Reading this post after everything that has happened since, I can only wish I was as right every day as I was on the day I wrote this, and I also wish that I had been wrong.

I recommend that you read it too. I may break in here and there. I will not take back a single word.

It is titled, Apologia: I’m Sorry. I’m Sorry That The Left Is Behaving So Unethically, And I’m REALLY Sorry I Have to Keep Writing About It.

Ethics Alarms is intended to be a pan-ethics colloquy on our efforts to set ethical standards in our society, using, for the most part, current events and controversies to apply ethics analysis to dilemmas, conflicts and gray areas as they arise. Silly me: I really thought that once the election was over, I could shove political ethics back into the pack, and get back to more balanced and diverse commentary. I did not expect the Left—is there a better word for progressives, Democrats, Hollywood, academia, artists and the mainstream media?—to behave so abominably and irresponsibly for such an extended period.

Because I believe with all my heart  that this mob-tantrum is doing far more damage to the nation and society than unethical IKEA ads, incompetent judges and even sexual predator 6th grade teachers, I have to chronicle this awful national ethics phenomenon at the expense of other topics. I am thoroughly sick of it. I feel like Keith Olbermann, who quit his first non-sports news commentary job because couldn’t stand reporting on the Monica Lewinsky scandal every night. And believe me, I don’t like feeling like Keith Olbermann.

This is the major ethics story of the month, the year, and maybe the decade. A coalition of ideologically inflexible groups are deliberately seeking to undermine a duly elected President of the United States, and to destabilize the United States government, because their candidate—and a terrible, corrupt, incompetent candidate she was—somehow managed to lose. They are doing this in full knowledge that their actions directly contradict their leaders’ statements before the election. You know, like this one… Continue reading →