Business & Commercial

Two From The Ethics Alarms “I Don’t Understand This At All” Files…Part I: The Birthday Party Freakout

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

[Part 2 is here…]

Kevin Berling had been working at a medical laboratory, Gravity Diagnostics in Covington, Kentucky for about 10 months when he asked the office manager not to throw him a birthday party because he had a social anxiety disorder. He was freaked out because he had learned that his co-workers had planned a little lunchtime celebration with a cake and gag gifts in the break room. When the party went on as planned, Berling decided to hide in his car and have lunch there.

The next day, Kevin had what he called a panic attack during a meeting with two superiors, who expressed concerns about his behavior. His demeanor, they said later, frightened the supervisors, who sent him home and followed the company’s “workplace violence policy,” de-escalating the situation, removing his access to his office, and sending out security reminders to ensure he could not re-enter the building. Three days later he was fired on the stated grounds that Berling posed a threat to his co-workers’ safety.

 Berling sued the company for disability discrimination and won, with the  concluding that he had been discriminated against because of “a disability.” He was awarded $150,000 in lost wages and benefits and $300,000 for suffering, embarrassment and loss of self-esteem. Continue reading →

Disney And The LGTBQ Activism Ethics Train Wreck: A Prelude [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

I have been intending to examine the Disney empire’s misbegotten entry into the battle over Florida’s recently passed “Parental Rights in Education” law for weeks, but postponed the project because it is too complicated to do correctly without involving other complex issues that are closely related to it. Unfortunately, these issues have proliferated during the delay.

For example, Florida is threatening to remove Disney’s special status that allowed it to operate Disney World as an autonomous municipal government because of the company’s political action. Is that kind of punishment for a political opposition ethical? Should Disney have such special status, regardless of why it is being threatened with its removal? If the special status should be removed anyway, does it matter if it is done in response to political speech?

Here’s another: Republicans in Congress are threatening to end Disney’s copyright on Mickey Mouse, also in response to its LBGTQ activism. But that copyright should have ended decades ago, and its artificial endurance has stifled creative works blocked by thousands of other drawn-out copyrights that aren’t Disney. Now I am dealing with copyright law policy, the importance of Disney to the culture, and what, if anything, the government should do to–what? Reward it? Strengthen it? Direct it? Control it?

The Disney LGTBQ advocacy issue also involves, as virtually every issue does now, media ethics, as almost all outlets other than Fox have a clear pro-LGTBQ bias. The New York Times reporter assigned to covering Disney and the Florida law controversy is Brooks Barnes, and he can’t be trusted. In an earlier story last month, the reporter wrote,

Earlier in the week, Mr. Chapek, the company’s chief executive, botched an internal email to Disney employees. He was seeking to explain Disney’s public silence on anti-L.G.B.T.Q. legislation in Florida that activists have labeled the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

Continue reading →

The Freakout To Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Law, Not The Law Itself, Will Send LGBTQ Acceptance Backwards

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

There is nothing discriminatory, bigoted, ant-gay, anti-trans or unethical in the “Parental Rights in Education Bill’ signed into law by Florida Governor Jim DeSantis. Have you read it, or just relied on the hysterical and dishonest characterizations of the bill by the news media and woke activists like the three Oscar co-hosts, who chanted “Gay, gay,gay, gay!’ like four-year-olds in supposed bold and hilarious defiance of what progressives have been calling the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

Read the law. It doesn’t prohibit saying “gay” at all (the word doesn’t appear in the law), and as unfortunately vague as the wording sometimes is, no fair interpretation would find that it inhibits free speech.

Here is the closest wording in the bill to an “anti-LGBTQ” provision, in Section 3, page 4:

3. Classroom instruction by school personnel or third  parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur  in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.

The Horror. Only the most committed and unhinged gay activist could find that provision problematic, and the fact that so many progressives do is signature significance: they lave lost touch with common sense and reality. The law isn’t anti-gay, it’s pro-parent (and student). Any parents who really think their 4-8 year olds need to be trained in human sexuality are welcome to do it themselves. I would not want my child introduced to those topic by kindergarten through third grade teachers, even if I had the opportunity to closely examine the teachers’ qualifications for doing so and the way it would be done. This is not their job, and no, I wouldn’t trust them to take it on if it were. They have a hard enough time teaching language, arts, math, science and history. I don’t trust them to teach ethics. Continue reading →

First Vice-Presidents And Supreme Court Justices, And Now NFL Offensive Assistant Coaches

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The NFL’s near-complete dearth of ethics alarms is approaching comedic levels, if such a thing could be funny. This week the league that makes billions by paying young men to get a brain disease commanded all 32 NFL teams to hire a minority offensive assistant coach for the 2022 season, as, you’ve got it, another phase of the league’s “diversity” efforts.

The coach can be “a female or a member of an ethnic or racial minority,” according to the policy adopted by NFL owners during their annual meeting, and will be paid from a league-wide fund. That’s because they will all be tokens, you see, hired for PR purposes and to avoid lawsuits, so they really aren’t team hires. The new minority coaches “must work closely with the head coach and the offensive staff, with the goal of increasing minority participation in the pool of offensive coaches” that eventually produces the most sought-after candidates for head-coaching positions. In other words, they must receive remedial training because they would not have been hired based on their experience or demonstrated skills.

“It’s a recognition that at the moment, when you look at stepping stones for a head coach, they are the coordinator positions,” said Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney II, the chairman of the NFL Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee. “We clearly have a trend where coaches are coming from the offensive side of the ball in recent years, and we clearly do not have as many minorities in the offensive coordinator [job].” A quota, he means.

And that’s what counts, not putting the best football team on the field. Or something.

In addition to the offensive assistant coach mandate, the new policies in “diversity” also added women to the language of the Rooney Rule at all levels. It will now read that women and/or people of color can satisfy the old Rooney Rule requirement to interview two external minorities for top positions, including head coach. Women are not required to be interviewed, but they are now included in the fulfillment process. It is possible that a team could interview two white women for an open head coach position to satisfy the Rooney Rule, and then make a hire without ever interviewing a person of color.

Why no “differently-abled” coaches? How about blind coaches? Gay coaches? Mentally ill coaches? Little people. Non-English speakers. Mentally-challenged. Surely a trans assistant coach would be historic. Can Lia Thomas play football? Continue reading →

From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Social Media Integrity In A Nutshell

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

From the Facebook community standards: “We remove content that glorifies violence or celebrates the suffering or humiliation of others…”

Required addition: “…except when its violence we approve of or that sufficient number of our users will cheer.”

As I noted in the previous post: the Big Tech leaders are untrustworthy people. The fact that they wield so much power and influence over American beliefs and attitudes is terrifying.

Ethics Dunce And Dead Ethics Alarms Don’t Begin To Describe This Admission By The Duck Duck Go CEO

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Wow.

What an idiot.

Those who use Duck Duck Go do so (or did so) because the search engine was deemed more trustworthy than Google, the high-tech monster that breaches user privacy regularly and lies about it, as well as plays games with its search algorithms to bolster its ideological agenda, all while actively engaging in censorship with its wholly owned platform, YouTube.

Now Duck Duck Go’s CEO, Gabriel Weinberg, actually boasts about manipulating search results to “highlight” what the company, in its vast and unquestioned wisdom, deems “quality” information, while burying links to what it calls disinformation.

Only dead ethics alarms could explain why he thinks this is a positive revelation. He is admitting that his platform engages in censorship, and does not support free expression, dissenting opinions, or controversial views. As a mass of critical Twitter commenters pointed out, by what divine guidance does he or his underlings know what is “disinformation”? The arrogance is staggering. What does “associated” mean? It is an open ended generality to allow silencing by association. But that’s not all:

  • Weinberg is madly virtue-signaling, presuming that Russia-hate will lead his search engine’s users to applaud a confession that Duck Duck Go will manipulate results when it feels like it, because rigging searches will only hurt “bad people.” I don’t trust Big Tech execs to decide who are bad people; too many of them are bad people. Nobody should.
  • It is more proof (on top of thousands of years of human folly)  that those with power can’t resist abusing that power.
  • His admission of the practice, and the practice itself, is gross incompetence. All Duck Duck Go had going for it was an image of trust. No one can trust a company run by someone who says, openly and without shame, “We manipulate our searches because we know best!” It is signature significance: no ethical executive would approve of  such a policy.

The company’s board should fire Weinberg immediately, and if it doesn’t, its members are as unethical, irresponsible and dim-witted as he is.

Is This The Most Unethical Job In The World That Isn’t Illegal?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Carolina Lekker, a Playboy model, says that she charges women up to $2,000 to approach their boyfriends on social media to test how faithful they really are.

She approaches unsuspecting men whose spouses or lovers suspect of being potentially unfaithful using Instagram and other social media platforms. After  enticing exchanges, she invites them to meet with her, and if they do, they are busted. Lekker then keeps the money and exposes their perfidy to their partner. If they resist their charms and prove their faithfulness, she returns the fee to the client.

Nice. (Incidentally, this is similar to the plot of Netflix’s “Clickbait,” on which I still have not managed to arrange the promised Zoom colloquy.) Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The All-Black Sports Platform

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Yes, this is really an Andscape graphic. What does it mean? I have no idea…

The New York Times (uncritically)reports:

“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.” That quote, from Maya Angelou, inspired The Undefeated, an ESPN media platform that, from its start in 2016, has helped shape the national conversation by exploring the intersection of race, sports and culture from a Black point of view. On Monday, ESPN said it would rebrand and expand the operation, which will now go by the name … Andscape…

“It’s time to talk about Black and everything,” Raina Kelley, Andscape’s editor in chief, said in a phone interview. “Far beyond just sports and athletes.” She continued: “How do you be an individual as a Black person in America with your own unique set of interests, some of which are bound together by melanin, but not all of them? And how do you feel whole? We wanted to create a space where Black people could be Black people: Black led, Black P.O.V., absolutely. But also where there were no definitions and no rules about what being Black meant, what you had to talk about.”

Continue reading →

Signature Significance: With Its Orwellian”Guide To To Language, Narrative, And Concepts,” The American Medical Association Has Joined The Ranks Of Leftist Propaganda And Indoctrination Organs. NOW WHAT?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

I’m sorry about the rambling headline, but I couldn’t find a short way to summarize just how bad this is.

It is fair to say that we can confidently add the AMA to the ABA and the ACLU as organizations that have decided to abandon their organizational missions to join the ideological assault on the United States, its values, and what our society once agreed upon as democratic and pluralistic priorities. “Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts,” recently approved and released and reading like a high school Junior Marxist Club manifesto, officially injects far Left cant into medical practice, where it does not belong and never has. Doctors are professionals, and as such have a duty to serve the public good using their special skills and knowledge. Being a doctor of medicine, we have learned, imbues one with no special policy expertise, historical perspective of political acumen whatsoever. Consider, just as a sampling, former Senator Bill Frist, Howard Dean, Ben Carson, Rand Paul (most of the time , fortunately retired Virginia Governor Ralph Northam , and, of course, Dr. Fauci.

Continue reading →

The “Sub-Minimum Wage” Debate

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I confess, I was completely unaware of this issue, or the fact that we even have a so-called “sub-minimum wage.” Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act allows individuals with Down Syndrome or other intellectual or developmental disabilities to take certain specially regulated jobs at less than the minimum wage. The usual “raise the minimum wage” crowd wants the exception eliminated, and many states are preparing to do so. Advocates for the disabled and Down Syndrome individuals argue that it is important to keep the sub-minimum wage.

I don’t understand this controversy at all.

Opponents of eliminating the sub-minimum wage argue that it will cause many Down Syndrome individuals to lose their jobs. Of course it will, but how is this different from the fate of all the minimally skilled workers without technical disabilities who lose their jobs when the regular minimum wage is raised? Why is their plight less urgent than that of the disabled? If it is acknowledged that a sub-minimum wage keeps those who cannot perform at a level worth the minimum wage in the work force, why limit that rationale to the genetically disadvantaged?

But the opponents of killing the sub-minimum wage rely on the worst possible arguments to support keeping it. Here’s the “Dissenting Statement and Rebuttal of Commissioner Gail L. Heriot in Report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: Subminimum Wages: Impact on the Civil Rights of People with Disabilities. (September 17, 2020).” Heriot, one of the few conservatives on the Commission, writes,

Section 14(c) was adopted in 1938 at the same time as the first federal
minimum wage. Back then it was believed—no doubt correctly—that a federal  minimum wage would cause many disabled persons to become unemployable. An exception was thus created.

(There is also a time-limited exception for youth employment.)

Why wasn’t it also believed that the same principle would apply to every other individual, handicapped or not, who was unable to perform a job worth the minimum wage? Isn’t the assumption that Down Syndrome sufferers are less employable than than the ordinary lazy, poorly educated, unmotivated and none-too-bright American low-skilled worker simple bigotry? My experience with Down Syndrome workers is that they are often better at their jobs than their non-Down peers—harder working, more polite, more reliable. If a sub-minimum wage makes sense, then a minimum wage makes no sense. Continue reading →