Month: May 2016

“Yo, Barry, You Did It, My Nigga!”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Larry Wilmore

Wrong.

“Yo, Barry, You Did It, My Nigga!” This was “The Nightly Show’s” Larry Wilmore’s final salute to the President of the United States during an alleged comedy routine at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Here’s what’s wrong with it:

1. The comment was cynically calculated to cause an uproar, even at the cost of embarrassing the President and causing a racial incident. This is neither good hosting, nor ethical citizenship. Wilmore was only aiming at exploiting an opportunity to expand his rating, which aren’t so great.

2. It is disrespectful, no matter how one interprets the word. Barack Obama isn’t “Barack,” “Barry,” “Bro’,” or “Nigga” to Wilborn. He’s “Sir” or Mr. President. His job as M.C. didn’t permit that liberty.

3. It adds to a widespread and societally disruptive belief that Barack Obama is the black community’s President, and the black community has special privileges as a result. It certainly suggests that’s how black America views him. That’s not the legacy the President seeks, and thus the comment was uncomfortable for him.

4. Most white Americans and a lot of black ones do not agree that “nigger” and variations thereof are taboo when uttered by whites but benign when wielded by blacks. Why look, even Al Sharpton objected! “Many of us are against using the N-word period,” Sharpton told the LA Times. “But to say that to the President of the United States in front of the top people in media was at best in poor taste.”  “So we end the WHCD by touting the historical implications of 1st black president… and we use the N-word. Not cool,” tweeted  ABC producer Sarah Thomas, also an African-American.

5. The comment fed the racial divisiveness that has been the hallmark of Obama’s presidency. “Black Twitter,” as it is called, was full of African American celebrities and commentators making it clear that they didn’t care what white people thought. Mediaite’s resident race-baiter Tommy Christopher approvingly cited many of them, including his own.

I wonder who it was who convinced African-Americans that it was either wise, strategic, fair, reasonable or ethical to simultaneously express contempt for the opinions and feelings of whites while demanding hyper-sensitivity from whites about any word, innuendo, opinion or topic that could be considered the least bit uncomfortable for blacks?

6. “Barry” did what, exactly? What is “it”? Massively increasing the national debt? Dangerously dividing the nation? Undermining the rule of law, free speech and the system of checks and balances? Making a mockery of his promise to be transparent? Nurturing the anger, despair and cynicism that led to the rise of Donald Trump?

Barack Obama’s singular and historical accomplishment was being elected the first black President. Yes, he did that, but he did that almost eight years ago, and it’s old news. After that, his job was to be a good, fair, hard-working, effective, unifying and successful President of the United States, and his color was and is irrelevant to those tasks.  He hasn’t been any of those things, so what has he done? Finished his terms? That not a big accomplishment. I guess he created an environment in which a TV personality thought it was appropriate to call him a “Nigga” in public.

He did that, all right.

I’m not applauding.

Ethics Quiz: The Aborted No-Hitter

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

Friday night, Miami pitcher Adam Conley  was pitching a no-hitter against the Milwaukee Brewers with two outs in the eighth inning, meaning that he was just four outs away. A no-hitter—no hits, no runs, for an entire game—places a pitcher name in the  Hall of Fame. It makes him an instant part of sports history. In today’s hyper-celebrity culture, it means interviews and endorsements.

Moreover, the Marlins needed something to make their fans feel better. Dee Gordon, the team’s star second baseman, had just tested positive for steroids and was suspended for 80 games. Nonetheless, Marlins manager Don Mattingly lifted Conley because he had exceeded his pitch count. Though baseball paid little attention to the statistic for 70 years, today teams carefully monitor how many pitches a hurler throws, both to anticipate ineffectiveness, and to guard against injury.

In Conley’s case, he had never thrown more than a hundred pitches in a game, and had topped out at 116. To Mattingly and Marlins pitching coach Juan Nieves, that meant that even on the verge of immortality, Conley had to be removed. Conley was angry, though he said all the right things after the game. Still, knowing the alleged risk to his arm and career, he wanted to try to finish his masterpiece. (The Marlins blew the no-hitter and the shutout in the 9th, though still managed to win 5-3.)

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Was removing Conley “for his own good” when he wanted to have the chance at a no-hitter fair?

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: President Obama

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Safe Airlane

“Today, I want to update you on some important progress we’ve made to protect our communities from gun violence. As I said in January, these commonsense steps are not going to prevent every tragedy, but what if they prevented even one? We should be doing everything we can to save lives and spare families the pain and unimaginable loss too many Americans have endured.”

—- President Barack Obama, announcing new measures that his administration will pursue to help curb gun violence.

This is at least the second time, related to gun deaths, that President Obama has invoked the logically, practically, philosophically and ethically absurd “if only one life is saved” argument. President Obama isn’t as smart as his blindly loyal supporters think he is, and definitely not as smart as he thinks he is, but he must be smarter than that.

Yet he uses this ridiculous logic anyway. In Obama’s defense, his entire, nauseatingly inept administration has been rationalized on this basis, so it is a mindset that may be set in cement. Obamacare has allowed some Americans to get insurance that they desperately needed, so, the flawed logic goes, the fact that the legislation has also divided the country, caused millions to lose health care plans that they were satisfied with in favor of new plans they can’t afford, caused rates to skyrocket, suppressed hiring and done nothing to lower health care costs doesn’t alter the official conclusion that the policy is a success.

It isn’t just that the ends justify the means; the theory is that a single designated positive result justifies not only the means but other negative results too. True, prematurely withdrawing from Iraq caused the country to collapse and Isis to run amuck, but the United States withdrew, and that’s enough. Yes, the Education Department’s “Dear Colleague Letter” has caused male students to be unjustly tarred with unproved rape accusations, been the target of false charges and have had their educations disrupted without sufficient evidence or due process, but as long as some female sexual assault victims receive fair attention to their complaints that would not have occurred before, this gender-based persecution is acceptable collateral damage. Sure, Obama’s refusal to acknowledge that radical Islam is a terrorist threat have allowed irresponsible immigration and migrant policies to continue despite their existential risks, but what matters is that some, many–just one!—peaceful, law-abiding Muslims not be the victims of bigotry, fear and hate.

Obama’s latest “just one is enough” assertion is a direct call to the most naive, least aware and most cognitively impaired among us. If saving just one life were enough, then automobiles should be made of soft plastic and travel no more than a few miles an hour. Requiring airlines to use only airplanes that don’t fly, like the one pictured above, would surely save at least one life. Ships and boats never launched on water are very safe. Continue reading →

Where Do You Get The Idea That It’s OK To Insult My Dog?

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Rugby2

I was walking Rugby yesterday—that’s him above from a recent commercial photo-shoot–and ran into a young woman walking her West Highland Terrier. I like Westies, as does Rugby (but then, he also likes mail carriers, squirrels, my sister and once wagged his tail at a cockroach…), and I made some positive comments about the breed.

“Well, your dog certainly looks like he hasn’t missed many meals!” was her response. The ethicist programming blocked me from saying what first popped into my head, which was, “Well, neither do you, bitch,” and instead I attempted to enlighten her by saying, in a moderate tone,

“Actually, Rugby is an authentic, Jack Russell Terrier Association-certified Jack Russell, meaning that he is not the long-legged, faux monstrosity the AKC calls a “Parson Russell Terrier,” nor the much smaller toy-like version it calls the “Russell Terrier.” Jack Russell Terriers of the Irish, as in genuine variety, are certified by their personality and hunting traits, and not by looks alone. Thus they vary more in physical traits than AKC breeds, bred for show, and since the bulldog is part of the strange and wonderful alchemy that makes these dogs the bundles of joy they are, some Jacks, like Rugby and his still mourned predecessor Dickens, have a thick bulldog build, with a broad chest and stocky body. They are all muscle (“unlike your simpy terrier”–the ethicist filter blocked this too), and you may be surprised to learn, given the fact that he is at this moment acting more lively than your young dog, that Rugby is just short of 13 years-old, and thus just a bit heavier, but not much, than he was in his youth when the vet said he was as perfect a specimen of the breed as he has ever seen. Val Kilmer or Kirsty Alley he isn’t. He remains unslowed by time, and those meeting him for the first time often mistake him for a puppy, which is undoubtedly how he sees himself.”

She just walked on, hearing little of it.

Why do people think that making gratuitously critical comments about a stranger’s pet is any less rude and disrespectful than insulting a child or anything else that the individual obviously cares about? Continue reading →

Talia Jane, Public Jerk, Grabs Credit For Yelp’s Pay Raise

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments
She's baaaaaack!

She’s baaaaaack!

Remember the fifteen-minutes of infamy of Talia Jane, an entry-level Yelp employee who posted an article to the social media site Medium titled, An Open Letter To My CEO?    Cheekily addressed to “Jeremy” (Yelp Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Stoppleman), the letter/rant/ classic of arrogant entitlement was a long, snotty whine about her low compensation—you know, like all entry-level jobs—alleged abject poverty (which was quickly shown to be a lie), high Bay Area living expenses (because they were a secret until she moved there), company policies and the fact that Yelp creator Stoppleman was rich.

Jane was thoroughly shredded by every online commentator (including Ethics Alarms) over the age of 21 and not a Bernie Sanders supporter. The obnoxious screed showed a complete lack of personal responsibility for her own choices, and made her a strong candidate for Most Unattractive Job Candidate of 2016. My conclusion:

I wouldn’t trust Talia Jane to run my lemonade stand.

Hey, but she’s young, she made a mistake, and she’ll learn and grow through this misstep, understanding the error of her ways and going forward to become a fair, reasonable, ethical member of society, right?

Fat chance. I hesitated to pronounce her essay as signature significance, a misbegotten ethics botch of a magnitude that indicated the author was probably an incurable toxic jerk, because 25 is too early to write off even the most egregious offenders. She may learn yet, I suppose, but the most recent evidence is not encouraging. Continue reading →