Month: February 2012

Old Testament Treatment For The Miramonte Elementary School Culture

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

It could be worse; at least no teachers have been turned into pillars of salt.

Following the discovery that two Miramonte Elementary School teachers, Mark Berndt and Martin Springer,  allegedly engaged  in lewd activity with students, Los Angeles Unified School District made the brave decision to replace all teachers and staff, with everyone being re-assigned. Predictably, there have been protests and criticism. The basic argument: it is excessive and unfair. The good teachers, whoever they were, weren’t at fault.

Yes, they were; at least, they were responsible, and share accountability for a culture they were part of. The school district’s decision correctly assumes that when two members of a relatively small teaching staff abuse young children over a long period, something is rotten at the school beyond those teachers. Oversight is lax, administrators are looking the other way, teachers are protecting colleagues or refusing to acknowledge the implications of what they see or hear. There is a substantial chance that the Miramonte Elementary School didn’t just have some proverbial bad apples, but that it had created a culture that encouraged apples to go bad. There can be no certainty that Berndt and Springer were the only abusers on the staff, and the safety of children is at stake. Clear out the school, and wipe out the culture; have new personnel from top to bottom. It is easier to start over with a rotten culture than to try to fix it: this was God’s attitude in the Old Testament, and He had a point. The difference is that He killed off corrupt cultures with floods and fire, or just made them wander in the desert for generations.  Luckily, this isn’t Congress, Wall Street, Hollywood, or Rupert Murdoch’s empire. You can start all over with a school. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero Emeritus: Roger Boisjoly (1938-2012)

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Roger Boisjoly’s death was originally just reported locally when he died in Utah last month at the age of 73. Only now is the media reminding the public of Boisjoly’s life, his tragic role in a national tragedy, and how he tried and failed to avert it.

In 1986, Boisjoly was a booster rocket engineer at Morton Thiokol, the NASA contractor that, infamously, manufactured the faulty O-ring that was installed in the Space Shuttle Challenger, and that caused it to explode. Six months before the Challenger disaster, he wrote a memo to his bosses at Thiokol predicting”a catastrophe of the highest order” involving “loss of human life.” He had identified a flaw in the elastic seals at the joints of the multi-stage booster rockets: they tended to stiffen and unseal in cold weather.  NASA’s shuttle launch schedule included winter lift-offs, and Boisjoly  warned his company that send the Shuttle into space at low temperatures was too risky. On January 27, 1986, the day before the scheduled launch of the Challenger, Boisjoly and his colleague Allan J. McDonald argued for hours with NASA officials to persuade NASA to delay the launch, only to be over-ruled, first by NASA, then by Thiokol, which deferred to its client.

And the next day, on a clear and beautiful morning, the Shuttle’s rocket exploded after take-off, killing the crew of seven and mortally wounding the space program. Continue reading →

An Ethical, Effective, and Ironic Counter-Protest

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Hey, thanks guys! Keep it up!

The OWS protesters could learn a thing or 2, 456 from the clever students at Missouri’s Clayton High School. You see,  protests don’t have to be obnoxious and pointless, if organizers have their wits about them and a clear objective in mind.

After Fred Phelps’ vicious, hateful, and Constitutionally-protected Westboro Baptist Church announced that it planned to take a break from disturbing family funerals for fallen American soldiers who perished for their country in order to demonstrate against Clayton High’s  Gay-Straight Alliance, the student leaders of the Alliance  organized what they call a “Phelps-a-Thon.” Donors are pledging to give money to the Gay-Straight Alliance’s human rights initiatives for every minute the Phelpsians are chanting and waiving their homophobic signs and placards.

Voila! The longer they demonstrate against gays, the more money they raise for gay rights, thus damning themselves to be slowly cut up into little shreds  by sadistic demon high-school cafeteria workers wielding dull vegetable peelers, then reassembled by cubist jokesters, and forced to watch re-runs of RuPaul’s reality show for all eternity, or whatever happens to horrid people like them in Hell.

Peaceful, effective, lucrative, pointed, simple, and funny. You can’t have a more ethical protest than that!

[Thanks to Jeff Hibbert for the tip!]

Forget About “Minority Report”—The Sure Fire Way To Stop Pre-Crime Is To Round Up Newt Gingrich Supporters

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Forget those psychics in the pool, Tom! All you need to identify pre-criminals is to check Newt Gingrich's donor list!

All right, maybe that’s a little extreme. Still, in America today we have a putative Presidential candidate who is virtually carrying a billboard stating, “I am dishonest! I am a narcissist! I am angry, mean and vindictive! I am incapable of shame, and I have the self-control and judgment of a mad scientist from an old Vincent Price movie!“, and yet people still call up talk shows and say, “Why isn’t everyone backing Newt?”

Why? WHY? Well, how about this, from CNN:

“As recently as last week, Newt Gingrich’s communications director has been criticized by editors on Wikipedia for dozens of edits he has made and requested in defense of his candidate. While some of the changes were minor, Joe DeSantis has removed or asked to remove factual references to Gingrich’s three marriages as well as mentions of ethics charges brought against him while he served as speaker of the House. These efforts continued as recently as Monday.”

That’s right: Newt Gingrich has his staff trying to re-write the more distasteful episodes in his history—all the better to fool you with. This is the candidate remember, who now says he is the one running on “principles.” What principle would Stalin-style censorship come under, Newt?

Oh, never mind—we know the answer. Win at any cost. The ends justify the means.

Back to the title: perhaps they aren’t slam-dunk future criminals, but at this point, I really do believe that individuals continuing to support Newt Gingrich after he began the campaign with a certifiable character deficit and has managed to show with every passing week that it was even worse than his worst critics could have imagined really do create a prima facie case that they are unethical by nature. There just is no other plausible explanation.

 

 

Nipping A Terrible Idea In the Bud

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

God bless America.

In policy debates over contentious issues like abortion, national health care, and capital punishment, a common argument, brandished like a flag , is that the United States is out of step with the rest of the world. My reflex reaction to that claim, when I can resist the impulse to say, “Good!”, is to point out that the rest of the world has never lacked for enthusiasms for terrible ideas, and the United States, by going in its own direction, has often been unique, innovative, and right.

Still, a bad idea abroad will inevitably inspire some enterprising social architect here to propose it, and a legislator to try to make it law. Thus, when possible, it is wise to try to identify and reject the most sinister examples of Europe being Europe before anyone here starts trying to play “me too.” In the case of Europe’s current push to create a so-called “right to be forgotten” on the internet, some very effective critics are on the case. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Judge Barbara Jaffe

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Yes, it's true this teacher wrote on Facebook that she wished her fifth grade students DEAD, but the comment was only meant for her friends to see, and hey, just because she hates them doesn't mean she can't teach them...so it's OK. Right, Judge?

New York Judge Barbara Jaffe disagrees with me on the issue I discussed here regarding Natalie Munroe, the elementary school teacher who still has her job despite professing her contempt and dislike for her elementary students and their parents on her blog. Thanks to Jaffe, Christine Rubino, whose online comments about her students were infinitely worse, has won a court challenge to her firing from her job teaching at PS 203 in Brooklyn, New York. The judge is wrong, and I am right. The judge is also a fool.

Imagine: last March,  the day after a 12-year-old Harlem schoolgirl drowned during a class trip to a Long Island beach, Rubino posted a vicious rant about her fifth-graders on her Facebook page. “After today,” she wrote, ” I’m thinking the beach is a good trip for my class. I hate their guts.”

A Facebook friend quickly asked, “Wouldn’t you throw a life jacket to little Kwami?” Kwami was the child who drowned. The 38-year teacher replied: “No I wouldn’t for a million dollars.” Continue reading →

Presenting: The Amazing Law Suit Where Everyone Is Unethical!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Twenty-eight-year-old Xuedan “Diana” Wang agreed to be an unpaid intern  at Harper’s Bazaar magazine, in order to build her resume and gain experience in a tough job market.  She worked up to 55 hours per week, and presumably got what she bargained for in exchange for her labor. Now, however, she is seeking full compensation for her time, arguing that the Hearst Corp, which owns Harper’s Bazaar, violated the federal Fair Labor Standards Act by letting her work for nothing. Her lawyers are also seeking class action status for her suit, which could eventually include hundreds of interns.

A high-profile class action suit on this issue is welcome, because for-profit companies using unpaid interns is an almost always unethical practice that is so easily and frequently abused that it needs to be banned. I wrote about this in 2010, when the Huffington Post’s management had the gall to auction off unpaid intern positions for up to $9,000–making interns pay them to be allowed to work for nothing. About the considerably less offensive practice of just having unpaid interns rather than making them pay for the privilege, I wrote… Continue reading →

JFK, Ethics Corrupter

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

The new memoir by Mimi Alford, the former White House intern whom President Kennedy made his sex toy (though not his only one), hardly comes as a surprise to anyone who didn’t accept the fabricated, idealized version of JFK sold to the public by the likes of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Chris Matthews. Still, her account of Kennedy’s revolting conduct is infuriating, because it continues his corruption of American ethics and leadership standards, the real legacy of his presidency.

Kennedy was a thoroughly fraudulent human being, a cynical and arrogant leader who used soaring prose about freedom, aspiration and the human spirit while masquerading as a devoted father and husband, betraying his wife, abusing his power for selfish personal gratification, and in the process, putting his country at risk during the height of the Cold War. Only moral luck, combined with the failure of a complicit media to tell the public what they really had a right to know—that their President was a sexist, reckless, ruthless, SOB—allowed Kennedy to escape with his myth intact long enough to be regarded as a heroic figure. Now, as the truth relentlessly emerges, the product of his devoted image-makers collides with the ugliness of JFK’s behavior, creating cognitive dissonance of the most destructive sort.  After all, if the great John F. Kennedy abused drugs in the White House, used his office and power to lure employees into illicit sexual relationships, degraded and pimped-out women devoted to him, and did all of this with the full knowledge that it would bring down his administration and his party if anyone ever revealed his secrets, then this must mean that character doesn’t matter in our leaders, that we should tolerate a wide range of misconduct, and that the abuse of the power of the President is just a traditional perk. Continue reading →

The Ethics Question That Is Driving Me Crazy

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I don’t like to poach advice columnist questions unless the columnist makes a mess of the answer. This is an exception, however. It is an ethics question like no other I have ever encountered, the ethics equivalent of Monty Python’s “killer joke.” It is driving me crazy.

The question came to Ariel Kaminer, the writer of the New York Times ethics advice column, “The Ethicist.” Kaminer is typically all over the map, and often makes simple ethics problems more complicated than they are, when she isn’t getting them wrong entirely. “The Ethicist” didn’t get this question wrong entirely, but she did write a long explanation that missed what was really remarkable about the question. The only answer that was absolutely required would have been, “WHAT???”

Here’s the jaw-dropping question, from a student:

“My school charged a dollar for students to bet, or “predict,” which team would win the Super Bowl. It was $1 for one team, and if you won, you would get a candy bar. If you bet $3, you could choose both teams and guarantee your candy bar. Is this legal or even morally right?”

 WHAT???

The school (Where is this school?) is not only promoting gambling, it is promoting crooked gambling, or, if you prefer, attempting outright theft. It is encouraging students to spend a dollar on a 50% chance to win something that costs about a dollar! In addition to being a scam, the school is either… Continue reading →

Ethics Hero, “Even A Stopped Ethics Alarm Clock Will Be Right Twice A Day” Division: Bill Maher

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Whenever shameless ideologues of any stripe graciously or grudgingly take positions against his or her camp’s official cant, they should be applauded or otherwise encouraged in the faint hope that they will prompt honesty and fairness from others of similar rigidity. Thus it is that I am forced to award the relentlessly uncivil, unfair and unethical comic Bill Maher, host of a rigged public affairs/ satire panel show on HBO, this Ethics Hero award.

Maher joined the small but growing group of pundits and politicians willing to admit that the Occupy movement they had  foolishly hailed as a legitimate exercise of the vox populi is an embarrassment, saying on his latest show  (in his trademarked gross fashion),

“…And as I watch them on the news now I find myself almost agreeing with Newt Gingrich. Like, you know what – get a job. Only because, you know, the people who originally started, I think they went home and now it’s just these anarchist stragglers. And this is the problem when you, you know, when your movement involves sleeping over in the park. You wind up attracting the people who were sleeping over in the park anyway. And I think that’s where we are now with the Occupy movement. They did a great job bringing the issue of income and equality to the fore, but now it’s just a bunch of douchebags who think throwing a chair through the Starbucks window is going to bring on the revolution.” Continue reading →