Month: March 2015

Iran Letter Ethics Q and A: Senate Heroes, Blame, Trust And Captain Queeg

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Question:  Are the seven GOP Senators who did not sign the Iran letter Ethics Heroes?

Answer: I almost designated them as such, but that would have been a mistake. There are too many non-heroic and even unethical reasons Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) and Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), and Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), Senate Foreign Relations Chairman might have chosen to refuse to go along with their colleagues. Based on the explanations I’ve read, that seems to be the case. Collins, for example, says that she didn’t think the letter would work. Wrong answer: the reason to reject the letter is because it’s a flat-out violation of legislative limits imposed on the Constitution. Similarly, Flake says that he didn’t think the letter was necessary, whatever that means. It is also likely that some of the seven felt they could have their cake and eat it too: they want the letter to undermine U.S. diplomacy, but don’t want to take the criticism that goes with signing it.

Question: Do I blame President Obama for the letter?

Answer: A friend who is such a knee-jerking Obama enabler and excuser that it’s a miracle he can walk posted yesterday’s  Thirteen Ethics Observations On The GOP’s Letter To Iran on his Facebook page, and one of his knee-jerking friends wrote, “Typical: blame Obama.” I did not and do not blame Obama for the fact that the Republican Senators engaged in a foolish, dangerous and bright-line violation of the separation of powers, and anyone who could read the post otherwise is so deranged by bias that their faculties are impaired…or they just aren’t very bright.

I did write, and it is true, that the President shares significant responsibility for the poisonous and dysfunctional relations with the Congress that led to this fiasco. He is at the top of the government; it’s ultimately his job to make the government and the system work. Obama and his enablers reject accountability at every turn, but the unavoidable facts are that he is in charge, he took the job voluntarily, and whatever doesn’t work, including the government itself, is on his record. He never made a good faith, sincere, dedicated effort to work with the Republicans in Congress; he never worked to develop the negotiation, compromise, horse-trading, cajoling, quid pro quo skills that successful, competent Presidents have used to deal with the same levels of political opposition that he has found impossible to cope with. He took no steps to build trust in Congress, and engaged in serial conduct that was guaranteed to destroy trust, and has.

Finally, his illegal immigration executive order (the illegal accurately modifies both “immigration” and “order”) and his unilateral alterations to his own, incompetent and sloppy, health care law showed exactly the same contempt for constitutional limits as the Senate letter.

Obama is not to blame for the letter. He is absolutely and ultimately accountable for the conditions that prompted the letter and the decision to send it.

Question: Is there an ethical justification for sending the letter? Continue reading →

Sooner Ethics Quiz: Abuse Free Speech Rights, Or Ignore Them?

/ Jack Marshall / 63 Comments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpNeHMlJiD4

David Boren, the president of the University of Oklahoma, announced that two students would be expelled from the school for leading a racist chant that was preserved on a video and went viral on YouTube. The video shows tuxedo-clad men from the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity  on a bus chanting :

There will never be a nigger at SAE
There will never be a nigger at SAE
You can hang him from a tree
But he’ll never sign with me
There will never be a nigger at SAE

Who would want to be in a house with these assholes?

 The national fraternity apologized and closed the OU chapter. That was a proper response. (Tell me again what’s good about fraternities.) First Amendment specialist Eugene Volokh, however, pointed out on his blog that the expulsion was unconstitutional:

First, racist speech is constitutionally protected, just as is expression of other contemptible ideas; and universities may not discipline students based on their speech. That has been the unanimous view of courts that have considered campus speech codes and other campus speech restrictions …The same, of course, is true for fraternity speech, racist or otherwise…Likewise, speech doesn’t lose its constitutional protection just because it refers to violence — “You can hang him from a tree,” “the capitalists will be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes,” “by any means necessary” with pictures of guns, “apostates from Islam should be killed.”

To be sure, in specific situations, such speech might fall within a First Amendment exception. One example is if it is likely to be perceived as a “true threat” of violence (e.g., saying “apostates from Islam will be killed” or “we’ll hang you from a tree” to a particular person who will likely perceive it as expressing the speaker’s intention to kill him); but that’s not the situation here, where the speech wouldn’t have been taken by any listener as a threat against him or her. Another is if it intended to solicit a criminal act, or to create a conspiracy to commit a criminal act, but, vile as the “hang him from a tree” is, neither of these exceptions are applicable here, either.

Hey, Oklahoma…Rodgers and Hammerstein just called. They’re officially changing the name of the musical and the song to “North Dakota!”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz:

Which is the greater ethics breach: the students abusing their First Amendment rights, or the University of Oklahoma violating them?

Continue reading →

No Judgment At Planet Fitness

/ Jack Marshall / 316 Comments
They mean what they say!

They mean what they say!

In Midland, Michigan, a Planet Fitness gym revoked a woman’s membership because she complained that a man—actually a man who identifies as a woman— was in the woman’s locker room.

Company officials explained that she violated its “no judgment zone” policy. Planet Fitness  policy also states members and guests may use all gym facilities based on their self-reported gender identity.

Fine.

It’s their business, and they can make whatever silly and irresponsible rules they want. If they want to make members dress like chickens, wear noodles on their heads and speak only pig latin, that’s their choice. The establishments Planet Fitness wants to run, apparently, are ones where a woman can go into the ladies locker room and run into some hairy, naked guy with his dong hanging out, and she gets dinged because she objects, not knowing that he is really all girl at his creamy nougat center.

Okaaaaay…. Eventually Planet Fitness will have a membership that is all trans, all blind, or all pathologically politically correct, or perhaps have no establishments at all. When the company says “no judgment,” it really means it, because this shows a ludicrous lack of judgment. But ethical! The policies were all communicated to all members, so the woman violated the “don’t react negatively to the showboating trans individual in the ladies locker room who shows no respect or consideration for others who might not be quite ready for a full frontal” policy, and has no defense, except offensive normalcy.

Clearly “Men” and “Ladies” labels on locker rooms and bathrooms are no longer unambiguous or effective.

What do you think about “Penis” and “No Penis” signs? I think that solves the problem, especially in places where there’s no judgment.

 

Hillary’s Secret E-Mails: An Invaluable Ethics Litmus Test

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

finney_newday

All civic minded citizens should encourage as many individuals—public, private, elected, celebrities, media figures, reporters and pundits—to discuss the issues and significance of the Clinton e-mail scandal. It is a marvelous litmus test to unerringly reveal whether the individual understands basic ethical principles like integrity, honesty, responsibility and trust, as well as his or her reliance on intellectually and ethically bankrupt rationalizations like “Everybody does it,” “It’s not the worst thing,” “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” and others, or, just as disturbing, whether the individual is willing to reject basic ethical principles in a misguided effort to defend a public figure unworthy of the sacrifice, like Hillary Clinton. Keep this public debate going. Before it has run its course, we may have outed thousands, hundreds of thousands, who we will know cannot themselves be trusted.

It takes all my will and civility reserves not to say that this is an IQ test as well. I keep reading comments on blogs and Facebook by people who really seem to be unable to fathom why it should matter when the individual who leads our official dealings with foreign governments mysteriously chooses to take dominion over all her official communications, allowing her to destroy them at will, when such conduct violates the policies and directives of the administration of which she is a member, her own department, and common sense, despite incurring security risks, despite questions over her foundation soliciting contributions from foreign governments while she was in a position to have such contributions warp national policy, when the individual involved, was well as her husband, has a history of skirting laws, obfuscation and mendacity. “This is just more manufactured Hillary-bashing!” Seriously? I know the Clintons pay people to say this, but really believing it requires total corruption or life-threatening brain lesions.

As an example of how this issue exposes a lack of honesty and integrity the way those blue light things show traces of blood on “CSI,” let’s examine the CNN transcript of yesterday’s segment on “New Day,” which featured a “point-counterpoint” style debate on the Clinton e-mails featuring former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer and former Hillary press secretary (and current Media Matters partisan warrior) Karen Finney.

This pairing is manipulation by CNN, by the way. Nobody but hacks, liars and fools honestly defends Clinton’s conduct here, and many non-partisan commentators can articulate clearly exactly what’s wrong with it. Placing a presumed partisan like Fleischer opposite Finney cleverly and unethically suggests that this is one more political dust-up without substance, where there’s no real dispute, just a red/blue divide. That may be what CNN wishes were true, but this issue is not partisan, and shouldn’t be presented as such. The Washington Post, which has, like most of the print media, been pretty straight on this issue, played to the partisan spin by saying,

“Instead of a fresh chapter in which Clinton came into her own, her time as the country’s top diplomat now threatens to remind voters of what some people dislike about her — a tendency toward secrecy and defensiveness, along with the whiff of scandal that clouded the presidency of her husband, Bill Clinton.”

Wait, there are people who like secrecy and scandal? Are they called Democrats, perhaps? Clinton supporters? What an idiotic way to frame Hillary’s problem.

It’s not complicated: the issues involve trust and the character of a potential President.

Now here is the CNN transcript, with my comments in bold: Continue reading →

Thirteen Ethics Observations On The GOP’s Letter To Iran

/ Jack Marshall / 61 Comments

Letter to IranFrom the Washington Post:

“An already heated battle between the White House and Republicans over negotiations to curtail Iran’s nuclear program grew more tense Monday when 47 Republican senators sent a letter to Iran designed to kill any potential deal.

The White House responded by accusing the Republicans of conspiring with Iranian hard-liners, who oppose the delicate negotiations, and suggesting that their goal was to push the United States into a military conflict.”

Observations:

1. The letter cannot be defended as anything other than an effort to sabotage sensitive international negotiations. As such, it is direct interference with the President’s ability to do his job. The fact that Republicans, like Israel, have abundant evidence that President Obama is likely to do that job, in this case, badly and even dangerously is no justification for this unethical, unconstitutional, arrogant and offensive act. The American people elected Obama president, and with that came the authority to conduct foreign affairs and oversee negotiations with foreign governments. The letter is wrong in every way.

2. It does not matter, and should not matter, to any American whether or not they believe that a breakdown in negotiations with Iran would be preferable and safer than the kind of deal this President is likely to produce. It does not matter. The letter is per se a breach of the separation of powers, and as precedent, endangers the nation’s entire governance structure.

3. Anyone who defends this atrocious, reckless and unprofessional conduct is fully embracing “the ends justifies the means” as a principle of democratic government.

4. If he was not aware of it and did not approve it, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell is obligated to condemn this action, and punish all signatories,  stripping them of committee assignments related to foreign affairs.

5. He won’t. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month (and most idiotic, too!): Two Unnamed American Tourists

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

“We did not imagine it was something so serious!”

––One of two young California women, ages 21 and 25 , after being arrested by Roman authorities for carving their initials “J” and “N” about four inches high into a wall of the Colosseum.

Get this guy a ticket to Rome. I've got a little job for him....

Get this guy a ticket to Rome. I’ve got a little job for him….

Naturally, as is the current practice among morons everywhere, they posed for a selfie with their “artwork.”

Well, you have to sympathize with them: why would anyone get upset over a couple of letters  carved into a 2,085-year-old irreplaceable iconic architectural structure?

I find myself unable to discern the upbringing, education and cultural conditioning that would produce two adults from our nation capable of such a pointless, stupid, destructive act against history, art and civilization.

I am similarly incapable of arriving at an appropriate punishment that recognizes the enormity of their crime and their proven worthlessness to society that does not resemble the screenplay of “Saw.”

Would it be too cruel to pass a law that allows the U.S. to just revoke the citizenship of people like this?

Ethics Observations On The Selma Celebration “Gotcha’s!”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Selma redux

1. The big controversy as of this morning involved the New York Times front page photo, which managed to be cropped exactly at the point where former President Bush could have been seen. Given the Times’ proclivities, conservative blogs and Fox News presumed the snub was intentional. If it had been intentional, that would have indeed been disrespectful and unethical photojournalism. The Times explanation, however, seems reasonable. It tells us something, though, that nobody at the Times saw this coming. I think it’s incompetence born of bias. “Where’s Bush?” “He was too far down the line, so the photo looks lousy if he’s included.” “Damn. Well, put a note in explaining that.” Bias makes us stupid, and the fact that no Times editor had this conversation is, in fact, stupid.

2. If the NAACP was setting the place cards, and I assume they were, then Bush should have been second row center, and not an MSNBC demagogue and race-hustler who owes the U.S. back taxes. Talk about biased and stupid. The NAACP claims it wants to be a unifying force in the country, but it doesn’t. It promotes divisiveness,and intentionally. It’s good for business.

3. A graceful, fair, respectful and competent President of the United States would have insisted that his immediate predecessor be in a position of prominence, as part of the message that this event was an important part of the history of America and all Americans. It would have been the right thing to do. Bush would have done the same for him. But we do not have a graceful, fair, respectful and competent President. We have an arrogant, petty, self-absorbed and divisive one.

4. …who can, on occasion, rise to give an excellent speech, which he did. Continue reading →

Why The Sweet Briar College Fight Matters

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

sweet-briar-collegeEthics Alarms has been besieged by interest in the threatened Sweet Briar College closing, with the recent post on the topic already the third most viewed essay in the history of the blog. I was surprised; I shouldn’t have been. From an ethics and societal perspective, what the controversy stands for is as important as any covered here. It is also central to the nation itself.

When a business fails, the casualties include ambitions, opportunities, dreams, financial resources, community assets, and jobs. That is serious and tragic. Non profit organizations, however, exist to turn ideas into reality, to strengthen them, bolster them, and prove that they deserve to survive and flourish. The death of Sweet Briar will also mean the loss of ambitions, opportunities, dreams, financial resources, community assets, and jobs. Far more important, however, is that it will mean the death of an idea, or at very least the serious wounding of one.

This is why non profit boards should not be, as they so frequently are, merely comfortable curriculum vitae-stuffers  and networking forums for prominent dilettantes. Non profit boards are stewards of ideas, and they must also be willing and able to be warriors in defense of those ideas, if an idea is imperiled. It is not a job for the faint of heart, and the consequences of failure, or, as in the case of Sweet Briar, fearful and premature capitulation, are catastrophic, not just for the organization, institution and its constituents, but the entire U.S. culture.

Sweet Briar exists to nurture a particularly vital idea, the mission of training young women… Continue reading →

“House of Cards” Ethics: Why Should We Believe TV Journalists and Pundits Have Any Integrity When They Don’t Value It Themselves?

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
Safer interviews "President Frank Underwood." Morley, Morely, Morely...

Safer interviews “President Frank Underwood.” Morley, Morely, Morely…

The third season of “House of Cards,” a Netflix series about the corruption in Washington, continues to corrupt real Washington journalists and talking heads. On the third season  episode I just watched, “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” was drawn into this alternate universe (or Hell) and George, along with regular panel members Donna Brazile and Matthew Dowd, rendered trenchant if predictable opinions about fictional President Frank Underwood with exactly as much passion and certitude as they do when they aren’t just playing themselves, but being professional analysts whose job it is to objectively enlighten the TV news audience. With that, they joined CNN’s John King ,Candy Crowley,and Carol Costello, Soledad O’Brien, now with Al Jazeera America, NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Fox’ Sean Hannity, CBS’s Morley Safer of “60 Minutes,”  and Matt Bai as “House of Cards” journalist/actors. I’m sure I missed a few. The mystery is why none of these journalists (and whatever Sean Hannity and Brazile are) don’t hear ethics alarms ringing when invited to sully their already dubious credibility (they are in the news media, after all), by showing themselves reporting and commenting on fiction exactly the way they are seen reporting on reality. Brian Rooney, a media critic who writes “The Rooney Report,” states succinctly what’s the matter with this:

“The trouble with journalists appearing as themselves in entertainment is that the public already has difficulty discerning fact from fiction in the news. Reporters and news organizations survive on truth and trust. Readers and viewers need to believe what they are told so they can make informed decisions. When real reporters allow themselves to be part of fiction, the trust is shattered. They do it with a wink, like they are in on the joke, but it costs them their credibility.”

Well, it would cost them credibility, if they had any. Continue reading →

How Listening To Democrats Spin Shamefully To Excuse Hillary Clinton Makes Me Think Of Sir Thomas More…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Today’s Sunday Morning spectacle of Democrat spin-meisters using deceitful rationalizations to make the untenable case that Hillary Clinton’s  violating her own agency’s policies to allow her the power to redact and hide her communications as needed prompts in me, in addition to disgust, a reflection on my favorite ethics drama and film. To paraphrase but slightly one of the more memorable lines from Robert Bolt’s play and screen play, “A Man For All Seasons,” delivered by the doomed martyr Sir Thomas Moore:

“It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for Hillary Clinton?”