Month: April 2013

Let Me Explain It To You, Ruth: It Is All About Trust

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

zombies-anti-gun-560x335

Washington Post editorial writer Ruth Marcus gave us a jaw-droppingly arrogant and willfully obtuse lament yesterday. She is in despair. Why would such a sensible, unthreatening gun control measure as the Manchin-Toomey background check amendment fail to pass the Senate? Poor Ruth just can’t understand it. The Senators voting against the bill were so “impervious to logic.” It just didn’t make sense!

What is ruefully amusing and telling about Marcus’s “how dare anyone disagree with us?” rant is that her essay answers its own question.  It is stuffed full of the elements that completely justify Senators or anyone who respects gun-ownership, the Second Amendment and guns opposing any proposals at all that come out of the post-Sandy Hook exploitation campaign by Marcus and her political compadres. It all comes down to trust, Ruth, and you are one of those who is untrustworthy on the topic of guns. Your column proves it, just as President Obama’s petulant outburst of contempt against gun rights absolutists proves his untrustworthiness. Continue reading →

The Dilemma of the Oblivious Questioner

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments
"Where was I? Oh, right...so what you were saying about client perjury reminds me of a trial in the Boer War...well, it wasn't a trial exactly; that was what Churchill's cousin called it---wait, not Churchill's cousin...the other guy, the one who was such a good canasta player. Nobody plays canasta any more..."

“Where was I? Oh, right…so what you were saying about client perjury reminds me of a trial in the Boer War…well, it wasn’t a trial exactly; that was what Churchill’s cousin called it—wait, not Churchill’s cousin…the other guy…no, it was a girl, I misspoke… the one who was such a good canasta player. Nobody plays canasta any more…”

I launched a new legal ethics seminar today. This is always nerve-wracking, because it has to last exactly three hours, has to cover the topics I’ve included in the printed materials, and the programs are interactive, meaning that the degree of attendee participation is unpredictable. After I’ve done a program a couple of times, I usually have a good idea about which segments prompt a lot discussion and which don’t, so I can time my own comments accordingly. The first time, however, it is pure guesswork.

This one, a country-music themed program, was going to be tight, but was close to schedule until an elderly lawyer burdened with various medical paraphernalia raised his hand. I called on him by reflex, and then realized that he was the same attendee who had blathered on earlier in the program, telling an irrelevant and pointless anecdote that ate up five minutes. Sure enough, the second he got his hands on the mic he was off again, this time making an obscure and convoluted comparison between what I had been discussing and Japanese war crime trials, but it was even worse. He went on tangents; he forgot names; he backtracked; he never made any coherent point. Some people got up and left. It was easily a ten minute filibuster, and permanently killed any chance I had of covering all my material. He finally reached the end, never making clear what the story had to do with anything. I went on to the next segment.

Now I wonder if I handled the situation properly and made the right ethical call, which was to tolerate his clueless intrusion and not embarrass him by cutting him off. Continue reading →

Now THIS Is Incivility!

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

DormRoom1950sThe Delta Gamma sorority chapter at the University of Maryland has received some unwelcome publicity as a result of a leaked e-mail from one of the sorority’s executive board members, reprimanding the Gammas’ for not sufficiently participating in Greek Week activities with their “matchup” fraternity, Sigma Nu. The admonition was delivered in a vulgar, threatening and verbally violent rant containing, among its over 800 words, 4 stupids, 3 variations of ass–, as in “ass-wipe” and “ass-hat,” 5 shits, 2 cocks, 2 sucks, 3 goddamns, and no less than 42 variations of fuck. Gawker, which received the text of the rant, mercifully did not release the young woman’s name when it posted the thing, which is as it should be. No reason to destroy her reputation now. The odds are she’ll do it herself eventually.

I’ll post the whole message at the end, to spare your having to go to Gawker, but here are some brief observations: Continue reading →

Gabrielle Giffords:The Helpless Pawn On The Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments
Pawn

Ex-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords

 

James Taranto, the witty conservative commentator on the Wall Street Journal’s “Best of the Web” blog, properly takes aim at the New York Times op-ed supposedly authored by former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and shoots it full of holes, quite accurately finding the piece guilty of almost every ethical violation that has characterized the shameless, and deservedly unsuccessful, effort to exploit the Sandy Hook massacre for gun reform. “Giffords’s 900-word jeremiad should be included in every textbook of logic and political rhetoric, so rife is it with examples of fallacious reasoning and demagogic appeals,’ he writes, noting that she is a “practitioner of incivility and unreason.”  Some of Taranto’s indictments:

  • “The argumentum ad passiones, or appeal to emotion. She leads with this one: “Senators say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets. The fear that those children who survived the massacre must feel every time they remember their teachers stacking them into closets and bathrooms, whispering that they loved them, so that love would be the last thing the students heard if the gunman found them.” Continue reading →

Adding Insult To Injury: Critical Spam

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Spam2At least the old comment spam I have been inundated with for the last three years was usually complimentary, if vague and dumb. “Awesome revue! I will return to this weblog in the future, you can be assured of that!” Usually such a rave is attached to a post that is neither remarkable nor “a revue,” and the fact that 16 commenters, some with names like Britney Spears Nude, have exactly the same opinion usually raises suspicions, but hey, a compliment is a compliment. I feel bad sending such nice, appreciative readers to the spam bin with all the lista de email, but I do. (From today’s batch, this intriguing entry from “Graig”: “ierwa ciężkie spojrzenie. – Mówiłeś trochę? – spytał nerwowo. Nieewentualne, żeby nieco wiedział, pomyślał. Ale po co zaanonsował a figę owe? Czyżby? Arnold nie pył złych polityki. Po pro.” Who knows what hidden wisdom is in this missive? And who is “Arnold’?  It’s driving me mad!)

The latest trend, however, is to send nasty spam, on the theory , I suppose, that spam-blockers are set for fawning, and insults might slip through. I’ve received various forms of this comment in the last couple of weeks…

“The next time I read a blog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as significantly as this 1. I mean, I know it was my choice to read, but I basically thought youd have something fascinating to say. All I hear is often a bunch of whining about some thing that you simply could fix in case you werent too busy searching for attention.”

Again, this comment was attached to a completely inappropriate post for that reaction, in this case, my expression of amusement at the story, later shown to be a hoax, about a naked 500 lb. man sitting on the son of Fred Phelps, of Westboro Baptist Church infamy. With all the genuinely whiny posts I have, you would think  “Gesescuro” could find one (excuse me, “1”) of them, but never mind that: isn’t spamming my site and and making me waste my time screening hundreds of them every day (so a genuine comment isn’t inadvertently lost) enough?   Now I have to put up with insulting spam too?

Life is unfair, and the internet is worse.

Now that’s whining, Gesescuro.

The Internal Revenue Service’s Unethical Compassion

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

News Item (ABA Journal):

Too bad---if only your family tragedy had gotten more publicity, the IRS might have given a damn.

Too bad—if only your family tragedy had gotten more publicity, the IRS might have given a damn.

“After Monday’s fatal bombing near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, the Internal Revenue Service has announce that the April 15 income tax filing deadline will be extended by three months for those affected by the crime…”

Oh! Does this mean that the Internal Revenue Service has a new policy that grants penalty-free extensions to taxpayers who experienced a personal tragedy on or about April 15? Well, no, it doesn’t. Does it mean that all the other victims of crimes and tragedies across the nation will get similar compassionate treatment? No, it doesn’t mean this either. What it means is that someone—I wonder who?—is using a Federal Agency to make political hay and get positive publicity from journalists who are incapable of thought.

This is an ethics foul, a significant one, and I would think an obvious one as well. The government’s tax-collecting agency must display absolute integrity and consistency at all times, and must not be influenced or driven by politics or public relations. There are citizens across our land who had family members raped on April 15, or who were raped themselves; who had children or parents die, who were in horrible accidents, whose home or business burned down, who lost their jobs, or who were diagnosed with dread diseases that will change their lives forever. Why are the Boston victims receiving compassionate treatment,while  these citizens are not? You know why: because this was a high-profile tragedy, to which I say, so what? What is the ethical principle being articulated here that is worth sacrificing the IRS’s integrity? That high-profile victims deserve more compassion than other victims? No, the principle is that a government gets better PR brownie points by making beneficent gestures to well-publicized victims who are on TV than it does, say, to a tax-paying father whose kid was gunned down in a drive-by on tax day.

Well, it’s a cynical, sloppy, incoherent, irresponsible ad hoc principle that operates on a double standard, and is inherently unfair and unjust. It also necessarily raises the questions, how else does the IRS play favorites? What other political activities does the IRS perform for its masters?

That’s how trust in the government erodes, and the IRS is asking for it.

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Pointer and Facts: ABA Journal

 

Why The Gun Bill Deserved To Lose, and Why We Should All Be Glad It Did

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments
A bad day for Machiavelli is a good day for America.

A bad day for Machiavelli is a good day for America.

Consequentialism rules supreme in Washington, D.C.; that is the tragedy of our political system. If unethical conduct is perceived as having a positive outcome, few in D.C. will continue to condemn the means whereby those beneficial and lauded were achieved. Worse, the results will be seen as validating the tactics, moving them from the category of ethically objectionable into standard practice, and for both political parties

Thus we should all reluctantly cheer the likely demise of the Senate’s gun control bill yesterday. The compromise background check provision that failed wasn’t perfect, but it would have been an improvement over the current system. Nevertheless, the post-Sandy Hook tactics of gun control advocates, including the President and most of the media, have been so misleading, cynical, manipulative and offensive that their tactics needed to be discouraged by the only thing that has real influence in the nation’s Capital: embarrassing failure.

The tainted enterprise begins with the fact that it should not have been a priority at this time at all. Newtown did not signal a crisis; it was one event, and that particular bloody horse had left the barn. The supposedly urgent need to “prevent more Sandy Hooks” was imaginary, but it apparently served the President’s purpose of distracting attention from more genuinely pressing matters, notably the stalled employment situation and the need to find common ground with Republican on deficit and debt reduction. Meanwhile, the conditions in Syria have been deteriorating and North Korea is threatening nuclear war: why, at this time, was the President of the United states acting as if gun control was at the top of his agenda? It was irresponsible, placing political grandstanding above governing. In this context, Obama’s angry words yesterday about the bill’s defeat being caused by “politics” were stunningly hypocritical. The whole effort by his party was about nothing other than politics. Continue reading →

Integrity Check For Homeland Security: Profiling At The Boston Marathon Bombing

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments
...unless the government feels like it, in which case it's just fine. Got that?

…unless the government feels like it, in which case it’s just fine. Got that?

Shortly after the bombs went off in Boston, we were told that a “person of interest” was in custody and undergoing questioning. As detailed in a New Yorker piece, the young man who was apprehended and interrogated for five hours became a person of interest for one reason and one reason only: he “looked like a terrorist.” He was a Saudi national with a foreign name, and despite the fact that he was wounded in the blasts and acted no differently from any of the other horrified victims in the crowd, he was detained and his apartment was searched. Ultimately it was determined that he was innocent of wrongdoing, and he was released.

Oops! Never mind! Have a nice day!

Except I was under the impression that this practice, which is racial profiling beyond any question, was something this administration and the Dept. of Homeland Security rejected philosophically and practically. It is wrong, and it doesn’t work—or so those of us who are sick of going through invasive and time-consuming screenings at airports are told when we dare to suggest that there may be a better way than feeling up six-year-old girls and senile old men in wheelchairs. The conduct of agents and law enforcement officials in apprehending the young man for his garb, name and the color of his skin shows either that our government doesn’t really believe what it is telling us about profiling, or that it is willing to discard its human rights principles when the pressure is on. Which is it? I see no third explanation Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Marc Lamont Hill

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments
Marc Lamont Hill---biased journalist, honest man.

Marc Lamont Hill—biased journalist, honest man.

While much of the mainstream news media has been floating rationalizations and excuses for its failure to cover the Gosnell trial, a cynical process nicely dissected by James Taranto here, at least one liberal commentator has the integrity to admit the obvious. He is the Huffington Post’s Marc Lamont Hill, and on a live webcast, he said this:

“For what it’s worth, I do think that those of us on the left have made a decision not to cover this trial because we worry that it’ll compromise abortion rights. Whether you agree with abortion or not, I do think there’s a direct connection between the media’s failure to cover this and our own political commitments on the left. I think it’s a bad idea, I think it’s dangerous, but I think that’s the way it is.” Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Tom Hawking

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“It’s not the role of our media and our journalists to shield us from truth; it’s their job to confront us with it. In this respect, the plurality of imagery is both a blessing and a curse, because in the sort of panic that follows an event like yesterday’s bombing, anything could be real. But equally, it’s also the volume of images and coverage — graphic and otherwise — that help us get a clearer picture of reality than we ever did in the days when our opinion was shaped by one journalist and a few photographs.”

—- Tom Hawking in his essay “The Ethics of Disaster Photography in the Age of Social Media,” discussing the controversy over whether graphic images from catastrophes like the Boston Marathon bombing ought to be published by the mainstream media, or should be toned down, edited, or withheld altogether.

Boston Marathon ExplosionHawking’s conclusions are spot-on, and you should read the entire essay here. Obviously horrendous photographs shouldn’t be thrust in readers’ and viewers’ faces; we should all have the opportunity to avoid seeing images we know would upset us. ( I have not looked at any of the graphic images from Boston. The text descriptions are plenty for me, thanks.) Leaving it to editors and journalists to decide how much realism we can stand, however, is folly. To be blunt, there is no reason to trust them. One of the blessings of the web and social media is that the traditional media no longer have the power to withhold information based on their biased and paternalistic judgement, which they are thoroughly unqualified by intellect, education  to render.

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Source and Graphic: Flavorwire (Tom Hawking)

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.