Month: August 2012

Integrity Failure: Rubio and Obama Show How Unserious Our Leaders Are About Taxes

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“The Hopeless Dawn” by Frank Bramley (1888) This is what this story makes me feel like….

If you pay attention, and most American won’t, the evidence that our elected leaders are not serious about being consistent, responsible, or even governing competently is delivered every day in packages large and small. The most recent depressing example was the bi-partisan tag-team of Sen. Marco Rubio and President Obama backing tax-exempt status for medal-winners on the U.S. Olympic team.

Sen. Rubio concocted his Olympic Tax Elimination Act on the theory that “athletes representing our nation overseas in the Olympics shouldn’t have to worry about an extra tax bill waiting for them back at home.” This is spin and nonsense. There is no “extra tax bill,” any more than there is an “extra tax bill” when your boss gives you a bonus for job well done. It’s just a regular, old-fashioned,  tax bill for income, that’s all. Medal-winning Olympic athletes get bonus payments from the U.S. Olympic team. Is their income—that’s what it is, just income—-somehow less fair to tax than your income? No, of course not. Rubio’s  “representing our nation overseas” justification for special treatment is naked and offensive pandering. How about people who represent our nation here, in the United States? They don’t get to travel to London, all expenses paid, like the pampered athletes—why are they less deserving of a tax break? Or why isn’t Rubio arguing, then, that all federal employees who work abroad shouldn’t be taxed? What is his logic, exactly? Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Men’s Breast Stroke Olymipic Gold Medal Winner Cameron van der Burgh

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“If you’re not doing it, you’re falling behind. It’s not obviously – shall we say – the moral thing to do, but I’m not willing to sacrifice my personal performance and four years of hard work for someone that is willing to do it and get away with it.”

—– South African Olympic swimmer Cameron van der Burgh, admitting that he cheated in his gold medal winning race because, you understand, everybody else cheats too.

Yechhh.

Maybe they won’t notice…

The commercialism is blatant, the nationalism is sickening, the warping of the lives of the young athletes as they prepare for the Games is disturbing. The one constant that has made the Olympics worth our attention is the opportunity to see great athletes in fair and intense competition with the most capable rivals in the world, and to see the best of the best triumph in the various sports by dint of superior effort, skill, training and character.

Who wants to see who the most effective cheater is? If you do, what’s the matter with you? The most disturbing aspect of van der Burgh’s admission is that there was no shame in it. He matter-of-factly explained that he cheated, how he cheated and why, and apparently believes that this doesn’t diminish his victory at all. And, also apparently, he’s right. Despite the fact that a gold medal winner blandly declaring that he cheated robs the Olympics of any pretense of integrity, it appears unlikely that anything will happen to the swimmer or his prize.

See? Cheating works!

And nobody cares!

Well, if the Olympics are going to stand for the cultural standard that cheating is acceptable as long as enough competitors do it, I have better things to do with my time, like making dust bunny sculptures under my bed. Just about everything we see and read about these days is corrupting and cynicism-producing; if the Olympics are just going to add one more toxic lesson to the array, what good are they? What’s the point?

Higher, faster, sneakier?

Wonderful.

_____________________________________

Pointer: Rick Jones

Facts: NBC

Graphic: Deviant Art

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

 

Worst Apology of the Month: First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs, Mississippi

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

A prominent member of the First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs, Miss.

It’s time to add a new Ethics Alarms category— the Worst Apology. Apologies seem to be flying around faster than usual as campaign season intensifies, though some individuals who desperately need to apologize—like, say, Harry Reid, are not.

I’ll be using the Ethics Alarms Apology Scale to rank the rotten apologies in our future. Ironically, the first winner in the category is a rare form of putrid apology that doesn’t even appear on the scale. The lowest ranking on the scale is a 10 ( “An insincere and dishonest apology designed to allow the wrongdoer to escape accountability cheaply, and to deceive his or her victims into forgiveness and trust, so they are vulnerable to future wrongdoing”), but the recent apology by the First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs, Miss. pulls an 11. Continue reading →

Quest for Fairness: What Will It Take For America To Treat Blacks Like Regular Human Beings?

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

“Look, a monkey! Must be racist.”

Two recent incidents at the London Olympics—really, really stupid incidents—-caused me to wonder anew what it must be like to be black in this country, and to despair. I’m not referring to discrimination, exactly.  I think a better term would be  “unhealthy obsession.” To be black in America is to be automatically a subject of controversy and conflict, and I assume this is a crushing, almost irreducible burden that makes daily life, happiness and sanity infinitely more difficult for African-Americans than for any other  group. It appears that the culture, the media, the public, interest groups and government just won’t ever leave them alone to just live.

Here is U.S.tennis star Serena Williams, and she has just won a Gold Medal in singles tennis. Williams, whose passion and effervescence is almost as attractive as her athleticism, does a little happy dance. Not too much of one—nobody could accuse her of preening or taunting like NFL players after a touchdown. And yet she is criticized anyway, by Fox Sports among others, because what looked like just a happy dance to me was really a version of the “Crip Walk,” a hip-hop move adopted by the notorious L.A. street gang, the Crips, about 40 years ago. Since Serena is black, some saw this as a poorly-timed reference to drug-dealing killers, or even glorification of gang culture. Three seconds of a little jig, and suddenly the Olympics is the site of a race incident—and this is an ethics alarm that should never have gone off.

Or should it? The “Crip Walk” is considered so provocative in some neighborhoods that schools have banned it. From that perspective, maybe critics have a point; it might have been irresponsible for an African-American athlete from L.A. to do the move.  Williams—I love you, Serena!—brushed off the controversy by saying, simply, “I don’t care.” Still, a pure moment of an athlete’s joy in victory was marred, because the victor happened to be black. Continue reading →

Randy Cohen’s Scofflaw Cycling: How Did THIS Guy Ever Get To Be Called “The Ethicist”?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Stop means “stop,’ unless Randy decides it means “yield”—after all, he knows best.

Randy Cohen was the original author of the New York Times Magazine’s column “The Ethicist.” During his tenure he made a name for himself with lively and sometimes witty prose, and on Ethics Alarms, at least, a disturbing tendency to rationalize clearly unethical conduct when it suited his political agenda, which was unapologetically left of center. In one notorious example, he told a student whose wealthy and famous father was paying her college tuition that it would be ethical for her to cash a partial tuition refund check she received from the university to her mother and stepfather, who believed that the father had not paid his fair share of child support. Cash that check, advised Cohen….“You are entitled to this money not because he is successful while you struggle. Such rough justice would also encourage you to sneak into his house, swipe his sofa and sell it on some kind of furniture black market. That would be stealing; this is merely claiming what he owes you.”  Of course, this is also stealing: cashing a check not intended for you because you believe it should be used to settle a disputed debt between the owner and someone else is not honest or fair, regardless of the merits of that belief. But Randy is a class warrior: as “The Ethicist,” he routinely took the position that it was “ethical” for people to use dubious means to get an edge on the evil rich, which in his world apparently means anyone richer than him.

I don’t know what Cohen has been doing since the Times sacked him; it isn’t practicing ethics, as he didn’t do this before his tenure, and confessed when he left the job that writing about ethics didn’t make him practice ethics while he was “The Ethicist” either, something I found and still find incomprehensible. Now, he tells us in a recent Times piece, the Ex-Ethicist is riding around New York City on his bicycle, running stop signs and red lights.

He tells us, moreover, that this is ethical, though it is certainly illegal. “I roll through a red light if and only if no pedestrian is in the crosswalk and no car is in the intersection — that is, if it will not endanger myself or anybody else, ” Cohen says. “To put it another way, I treat red lights and stop signs as if they were yield signs. A fundamental concern of ethics is the effect of our actions on others. My actions harm no one. This moral reasoning may not sway the police officer writing me a ticket, but it would pass the test of Kant’s categorical imperative: I think all cyclists could — and should — ride like me.”

This is arrogant, fatuous, reckless and wrong. But that’s Randy.

Even Coehn’s reading of Kant is wrong. The categorical imperative says that an action is ethical only if it could be the universal rule without harm, and this, despite Cohen’s rationalizations, could not. Who says the cyclist’s judgment of when it is safe to run a red light or stop sign is correct or reasonable in every instance? Why couldn’t motorists also use this same justification for running red lights at will? Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “The Absurdly Warped Priorities of the Incompetent Boy Scouts of America”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Bill, a frequent commenter here whom I am proud to call my friend, contributes this story to the recent post about the Boy Scouts and their negligent handling of pedophiles in the leadership. Here is his Comment of the Day on The Absurdly Warped Priorities of the Incompetent Boy Scouts of America.

“When I was ten years old a man tried to snatch my little brother, who was then seven, off the street. The only thing that stopped this from happening was that the two gay men who lived next store saw it happening, ran out into the street, grabbed my baby brother and apprehended the married pedophile who tried to snatch him. They also gave him a pretty good ass-whipping in the process, as they were both bodybuilders.

“A while later another neighbor asked my father how he could stand living next to those two “faggots” my fathers response was, ‘If it wasn’t for those two men, my youngest son would have been raped and most likely dead. Don’t ever call them faggots in my presence again or question their manhood.’”

“The BSA needs to come into the 21st century and recognize that homosexuality doesn’t equal being a pedophile . That’s is an ignorant and outdated belief and by continuing to follow it they are putting their members at risk.”

Ethics Hero: Richard Cohen

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

It’s more effective to compare Harry Reid to “Godfather II’s” Sen Pat Geary than to claim he’s a pederast. It takes some wit to do that, however…

I used to find Richard Cohen to be the most infuriating of knee-jerk liberal columnists, until the Washington Post added writers like Eugene Robinson and E.J. Dionne who make Cohen seem fair and balanced by comparison. And he, unlike them, also is occasionally capable of a noble bi-partisan moment, such as today’s column calling Harry Reid what he is for his Mitt Romney smear, claiming that an anonymous source from Bain Capital told him that Mitt Romney was a tax cheat.

This, sad little right-wing warriors, is how dirty politicians like Reid get their just desserts, not by mass name-calling and scrawling “Harry Reid is a poo-poo head” on your blogs. Pundits and other prominent voices on Reid’s own side don’t want to associate with him, and suddenly exhibit rare candor and honesty. A liberal writer like Cohen wounds Reid more than a million vindictive posts about his fictional pederasty. This is the system working properly, as it occasionally does. What a shame for conservatives that so many of their number exposed themselves as enthusiastic gutter-dwellers because they wouldn’t wait for a truth-telling liberal like Cohen to get to his keyboard.

Some highlights of Cohen’s terrific take-down of the Senate Majority Leader, nicely titled, “Harry Reid’s Gutter Politics”..

  • “In “The Godfather Part II,” a senator from Nevada is portrayed as corrupt. His name is Pat Geary. In real life, a senator from Nevada is a jerk. His name is Harry Reid.”
  • “Whether such a source exists, really, is beside the point. It could be that someone did indeed tell Reid that Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. Journalists get that sort of tip all the time, and their responsibility is (1) to check it out and (2) identify the source. Reid has not done the latter and apparently has not done the former, either. The truth is that Reid doesn’t really care if the charge is true or not.”
  • “He contributes to bad feelings, gridlock and the sense — nay, the reality — that everything is done for political advantage.”
  • “He is the face of the Democratic Party in the Senate and the ally of President Obama. Yet, not a single Democrat has had the spine to rebuke Reid.”
  • “…Reid has managed to draw both his party and his president into the gutter with him. When Reid accuses the Republicans of being overly partisan, he now lacks all credibility. For a long time it’s been difficult to believe anything he says. Now, it’s impossible.”
  • “As for Obama, he is tarnished by this episode. The fresh new face that promised us all a different kind of politics is suddenly looking cheesy. The soaring rhetoric that Obama used in his first campaign has come to ground in the mud of Harry Reid’s latter-day McCarthyism.”

That’s showing how it’s done, Mr. Cohen.

Bravo.

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Source: Richard Cohen

 

The Absurdly Warped Priorities of the Incompetent Boy Scouts of America

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

“Follow me into those bushes, boys! You won’t need your pants.”

The Boy Scouts of America, who recently re-affirmed its policy of refusing to accept homosexuals into its ranks because to do so would supposedly undermine the organization’s moral values, have been unconscionably lax in protecting its young participants from child molesters in its ranks.

From the Los Angeles Times:

“A Los Angeles Times review of more than 1,200 files dating from 1970 to 1991 found more than 125 cases across the country in which men allegedly continued to molest Scouts after the organization was first presented with detailed allegations of abusive behavior. Predators slipped back into the program by falsifying personal information or skirting the registration process. Others were able to jump from troop to troop around the country thanks to clerical errors, computer glitches or the Scouts’ failure to check the blacklist.In some cases, officials failed to document reports of abuse in the first place, letting offenders stay in the organization until new allegations surfaced. In others, officials documented abuse but merely suspended the accused leader or allowed him to continue working with boys while on “probation.” In at least 50 cases, the Boy Scouts expelled suspected abusers, only to discover later that they had reentered the program and were accused of molesting again.” Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Progressoverpeace’s “Fool’s Golden Rule”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“There is nothing more ethical and fair than reciprocity.”

—- Conservative web pundit “progressoverpeace,” one of the approximately 300 commenters who attempted to make the ethically impossible argument that spreading the falsehood on the internet that “Harry Reid is a pederast (or pedophile)” is “ethical and fair” in opposition to my post, Funny! But Wrong: “The Harry Reid is a Pederast” Rumor.

This is, of course, a profoundly unethical distortion of the real ethical principle of reciprocity, as embodied by the Golden Rule and its many similar ethical systems from various cultures, philosophies and faiths. The Golden Rule is benign, and urges prospective and aspirational reciprocity, advising us to treat others as we would want to be treated ourselves, were we in the other individual’s circumstances. Progressoverpeace—let’s call him “Pop”—embraces a punitive form of reciprocity—I’ll dub it the Fool’s Golden Rule— that endorses retribution, and precludes generosity, kindness, forbearance, perspective, peace—and civilization.

Pop’s “reciprocity” holds that once someone has treated another human being badly, it is ethical for that person to treat him or her just as badly in the same manner, presumably on the false assumption that this will teach him better “ethics.” Of course, what it is more likely to teach him was that he was correct to mistreat that individual in the first place. Such warped reciprocity seeds a perpetual cycle of hatred and escalating feuds, because it begins a cycle that can never stop short of death, terror, or surrender. Continue reading →

A Directory of Answers For the “Instalanche” on “Funny! But Wrong: The “Harry Reid Is A Pederast” Rumor”

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Ethics Alarms just isn’t constructed for large waves of angry commenters, as are occasionally generated when I touch on some interest group third rail. I try to respond to as many coherent comments as possible, but when too many of them arrive on the same topic, my “civilized colloquy on ethics” model breaks down, and I find myself spending too much time writing dangerously hasty responses to trolls, fanatics, web terrorists and others who have as much interest in ethics as I have in stamp collecting. I also have to individually green light every new commenter, and this alone takes up time that could be better spent researching and writing new posts.

Legendary conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds generously linked to my recent post on the “Harry Reid is a pederast” campaign online, and that’s generally a good thing, one that most bloggers would give their right arm for,since his blog Instapundit is one of the most popular (and professional) on the web. This, in turn, triggered the so-called “Instalanche” at Ethics Alarms, which has resulted in this blog getting the equivalent of two weeks of typical traffic in 24 hours. Sadly, the vast majority of the comments following the Instalanche are examples of the kind of thinking this blog was established to combat, and as a whole, the group is a graphic example of why political discourse, and indeed the political system itself is so toxic and dysfunctional. This is no knock on Prof. Reynolds, whose blog I read most days, and who is almost always rational and fair. It is a knock on the majority of his readers (not all) who chose to leave comments here.

The comments were, in addition to being non-ethical in nature, brain-meltingly repetitious in their fallacies and themes. It’s bad enough having more comments than I can keep up with; having to read nearly identical sentiments over and over again is more than I can stand. And since it is clear that most of the commenters aren’t  bothering to read the thread, never mind the links in the posts they are railing about or the rest of the blog, this is not going to cease anytime soon. Yes, I know that most of this breed of commenter doesn’t want a response, because their comments are seldom thought through or carefully crafted, and they are shocked to have their sloppy reasoning called so. (Then they accuse me of ad hominem attacks.) Too bad. This isn’t a bulletin board or a graffiti wall.

So I’m no longer going to answer individually the vast majority of the comments on the post in question, “Funny! But Wrong: The “Harry Reid Is A Pederast” Rumor,” just as most of you will not have the time, stomach or stamina to wade through all the comments to it. What I offer for the convenience of everyone concerned, but mostly me, is this, a directory of the most common comments from the current Instalanche, and my answers to them. I will direct all future commenters on the original post here, and the odds are that they will find their reply waiting for them. Continue reading →