Character

Encore: “Forgetting What We Know”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
Rosemary's director is more horrible than her baby...because he's real.

Rosemary’s director is more horrible than her baby…because he’s real.

I noted with horror that Roman Polanski has a new film out that is, as usual, garnering rave reviews. Polanski is a perpetual burr under my metaphorical saddle, and when he is out of the spotlight I am a happier person. One of the early reviews, under the heading “About the director,” describes him this way:

“Roman Polanski is a Polish film director, producer, writer and actor. Having made films in Poland, Britain, France and the USA, he is considered one of the few truly international filmmakers.”

This leaves out what I would argue are the most important parts of his biography, namely that he is a child rapist and a fugitive from the law of the United States. He is also an ethics corrupter on a grand scale. When his name once again made its unwelcome intrusion on my senses, I recalled that one of the very first posts on Ethics Alarms, on Halloween of 2009, was inspired by Polanski. I read it again last night, and reflected on how the blog recently passed its 1,000,000th page view since its launch that same month. I like it, and not many people read it at the time. With a few small edits, I decided to post it again.

Here it is:

Ethics evolves. It isn’t that what is right and wrong actually changes, but that human beings gradually learn, sometimes so slowly it can hardly be detected. For example, slavery was always wrong, but for centuries very few people who weren’t slaves understood that fact. There was never anything immoral about being born gay and living accordingly, but it has taken all of the collected experience of civilization to make this dawn on most of society. While we are learning, and even after we have learned, there are always those who not only lag behind but who work actively to undo the ethical progress we have made. We assume these individuals will come from the ranks of ideological conservatives, misapplying valid concepts like respect for tradition, suspicion of change for change’s sake, and a reliance on consistent standards, making them slow to accept new wisdom . Sometimes, however, the people who try to make us forget what we know come from the left side of the political spectrum, misusing values such as tolerance, freedom, empathy and fairness in the process. This is especially true when it comes to the topic of sex. Liberals fought so long and well to break down the long-established taboos about sex that many of them lost the ability to comprehend that unethical conduct can  involve sex in any way.

The most striking recent example is the bizarre defense of Roman Polanski, best known as the director of the horror classic, “Rosemary’s Baby.” Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Peggy Noonan

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

 “A fellow very friendly to the administration, a longtime supporter, cornered me at a holiday party recently to ask, with true perplexity: “How could any president put his entire reputation on the line with a program and not be on the phone every day pushing people and making sure it will work? Do you know of any president who wouldn’t do that?” I couldn’t think of one, and it’s the same question I’d been asking myself. The questioner had been the manager of a great institution, a high stakes 24/7 operation with a lot of moving parts. He knew Murphy’s law—if it can go wrong, it will. Managers—presidents—have to obsess, have to put the fear of God, as Mr. Obama says, into those below them in the line of authority. They don’t have to get down in the weeds every day but they have to know there are weeds, and that things get caught in them. It’s a leader’s job… to be skeptical that grand schemes will work as intended. You have to guide and goad and be careful. And this president wasn’t.”

—-Former Reagan muse and current pundit Peggy Noonan in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Low-Information Leadership.”

At least President Pierce had an excuse.

At least President Pierce had an excuse.

This is, of course, rank incompetence, but worse than that, it is arrogant, willful, shocking and frightening incompetence. It gives me no pleasure to say that I saw the signs of this years ago, for  years ago there was reason to be hopeful. Presidents learn, most of them, anyway. This one, without any experience to speak of in governing, management, leadership or even organizational process, not only hasn’t learned, but has never shown the slightest recognition that he has anything to learn. Continue reading →

The Five Truths Of Elan Gale’s Twitter Lie

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

"Diane"

The above photo is how “The Bachelor” producer Elan Hale chose to announce to the world that his Twitter tale about “Diane” the hysterical Thanksgiving traveler and his campaign to shame her was all a “joke.”  This is Diane! Har!

Truth #1:

Elan Gale is an asshole, and because he is shameless about it, he is also a fick.

Truth #2 Continue reading →

“Walking Dead” Leadership And Israel’s Iran Nightmare

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments
You call this "escapist entertainment?"

You call this “escapist entertainment?”

For some reason, last night’s “mid-season finale” (an oxymoron if I ever heard one) of AMC’s “The Walking Dead” caused me to think about what lies ahead in Iran-US-Israel relations. Can’t imagine what that reason is….

In this cataclysmic episode of the zombie apocalypse drama, the psychopathic character called “the Governor,” full of bloodlust and vengefulness and determined to press his conviction that the group of competing survivors “led” by Rick Grimes has no legal right to exist, confronted the alleged good guys’ leader in the abandoned prison they call home with an army, a tank and a demand that they surrender their shelter or die. Rick, who has repeatedly shown a flat learning curve in basic leadership skills and has already gotten many people killed by trusting the Governor rather than taking him out, despite ample evidence that the Guv is exactly as trustworthy as Vlad the Impaler or, say, Iran, engaged this murderous madman in a full-bore, Rodney King, “Can’t we all get along?” plea.

It was futile, of course, and only some lucky turns (an unlikely escape by the one individual who could turn the tide here, a well-aimed hand grenade there, and an unexpected rescue by sure-shot, gun-toting little girls elsewhere) prevented a bloody slaughter with the Governor’s objectives fully realized. Our feckless hero Rick, however, was obviously not willing to do what he had to do to prevent the carnage of an attack, and was going to depend on hope, passiveness and a refusal to be proactive to keep a proven predator at bay. Yet his approval percentage with his core constituency inexplicably still hovers in the 90s.

Ironically, Washington Post editor Fred Hiatt chose today to assemble his time-line of President Obama’s Rick-like handling of Syria, which you can read here. (Hiatt is a card-carrying liberal Democrat, like the rest of the Post’s editorial board.)

I wonder if they show “The Walking Dead” in Israel? It’s scary enough here, but I bet, given our President’s leadership similarities to Rick Grimes, it would be absolutely terrifying there.

 

Comment of the Day: “The Golden Rule Distortions”

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

bread

In a comment on the post about the various versions of the Golden Rule, including popular distortions of it, Isaac revisited the ever-popular “Les Misérables” scenario, in which a desperate man steals a loaf of bread to achieve a greater good. Is such law-breaking still unethical? I have consistently maintained that it is from society’s standpoint, if not from the perspective of the lawbreaker. The issue has arisen in the past in relation to illegal immigration.I think Isaac nails it.

Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, The Golden Rule Distortions: Continue reading →

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The Ethics Stories I’m Not Going To Write About

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

FlamingBirthdayCake1

I am often tempted to write one of those short, bullet point, stream-of-consciousness posts like some fool used to pay Larry King to write for his awful syndicated column, which included trenchant observations like, “For my money, there’s no better game show host than Bert Convy!” Such a post would take a lot less time, and I could cover more of the myriad ethics issues I encounter in my research every day that for one reason or another—the main one being I have to work for a living—never make it to the pages of Ethics Alarms. But it’s my birthday, dammit; I am one year closer to death, I miss my Dad (you too, Mom, but you picked a better day to die), and it’s pretty clear that I will have “epic underachiever” on my headstone where Jack Marshall, Sr’s reads “Silver Star,” so in lieu of any other celebration, I’m going to, just this once, use the bullet point format to note a bunch of the things I normally wouldn’t get around to writing about. Like: Continue reading →

The Golden Rule Distortions

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

golden-rule distortedA recent unpleasant visitor here sought to defend unethical conduct—or perhaps it is more accurate to say that she argued that no one was qualified to assess the conduct as unethical—by citing the hoary theory that only someone who has “walked in the shoes” of the wrongdoer in question may judge the ethical nature of his actions. This is a dodge, of course, and one which I need to add to the list of rationalizations. It is an appeal to purely subjective ethics, and ultimately no ethical standards at all, since if every individual is the only one who can judge his own or her own conduct (since each individual’s experiences are unique), then everyone is free to construct their own ethics rules that seem right from their self-centered perspective. The argument is also a convenient way to shut off dissenting voices: only the poor have standing to criticize the poor, only blacks can find fault with the acts of African-Americans, and since men can’t get pregnant, how dare they have any opinion at all on abortion?

But before I added this irritating trick to the Rationalizations List—I think it will be called “The Foreign Shoes Defense”—I realized that it is also another one of The Golden Rule distortions: flawed ethical arguments that seem logical to some because they are based on a warped version of the principle of reciprocity.

The Golden Rule, usually stated as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is frequently attributed to Jesus, but in fact it is much, much older, and is a basic ethical tenet, reciprocity, of most religions and many philosophies. Here are some examples; there are many, many more: Continue reading →

Ethics Verdicts On The Elan Gale vs. Crazy Woman In Seat 7A Air Battle

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

Update (12/3): This incident has been revealed as a hoax.

The ethical analysis stands.

Yes, this is stupid, but it is the day after Thanksgiving, I’m still hung over from l-tryptophan, and there are ethics lessons to be learned everywhere, even in disputes between crude TV producers and hysterics.

You can read the details of this story here and the live tweets it generated here—Gale, a reality TV producer, gave a blow-by-blow description over Twitter.

In brief:

  • A plane on its way to Phoenix was delayed on the ground and one of the passengers angrily and loudly protested to the flight attendants that she was going to miss Thanksgiving dinner and what were they going to do about it?
  • Gale, as well as the rest of the passengers (presumably) found her self-centered hysteria offensive and made his point by sending her a complimentary glass of wine, some little bottles of vodka, and this note:

Gale note

The woman was not amused, and sent him this in return… Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: NBA Coach Jason Kidd

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments
"Clean up on Court One!"

“Clean up on Court One!”

Needing a time out with his team trailing in a close NBA game with the L.A. Lakers, Brooklyn Nets coach Jason Kidd used a trick he had apparently learned as a player at the knee of another cheating coach. Kidd “accidentally on purpose” spilled his cup of Coke on the basketball court. Naturally, play had to be halted so the mess could be mopped up, giving Kidd that time-out he needed to set up the next play. (His Nets lost anyway. Good.)

Later, Kidd insisted that his spill was accidental.  “Cup slipped out of my hand I was getting Ty,” Kidd told reporters. “Sweaty palms. I was never good with the ball. In the heat of the battle, you’re trying to get guys in and out of the game, and the cup fell out of my hand.” Then video showed Kidd telling a player, “Hit me!” to force the spill. That sparked a $50,000 fine from the NBA, but no acknowledgment of wrongdoing by the coach. Later he admitted that he “probably” shouldn’t have done it, “it” being “cheating,” but that he was just trying to win the game. “It’s about trying to win and those guys in that locker room, and I tried to put those guys in a position to get a basket, a good look and we did,” he said. Continue reading →

Tip Shaming Fraud On The Web: NOW Do You See Why Applebee’s Was Right To Fire Its Vigilante Waitress?

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

bad-tip-fraud

At the beginning of the year, we had a real donnybrook on Ethics Alarms over my contention that Applebee’s correctly fired a waitress for web- shaming a customer who refused to tip another server on the grounds, as the customer wrote on her credit card receipt, that the automatic tip of 18% was excessive since she (a pastor as well as a jerk) gave God only 10%. The indignant waitress posted the receipt on Reddit, which led to locals recognizing the pastor’s handwriting and appropriate antipathy being directed her way. Since the waitress’s conduct was a clear violation of Applebee’s employment terms and because publicly shaming customers who exercise their right not to leave tips is a poor customer relations strategy, she was sacked. Subsequently the unapologetic waitress received a lot of sympathy, while equally misguided observers vowed to punish Applebee’s for not wanting to be known for having  waitresses on the payroll who are prone to misappropriate customer receipts and post them online to bring opprobrium down on the niggardly diners’ heads.

I think Applebee’s is looking prescient and wise right now. Ask Red Lobster, which did not fire Christina Jenkins, a 19-year-old African-American server at the Red Lobster restaurant in Franklin, Tennessee. Jenkins served a $44.53 order to Devin Barnes and his wife. Barnes wrote the word “none” by “tip, ” and, Jenkins claimed, wrote “Nigger” on the receipt as well.  Jenkins then posted a photo of the racist receipt on her Facebook page, writing, “This is what I got as a tip last night…so happy to live in the proud southern states. God Bless America, land of the free and home of the low class racists of Tennessee.” Going the Applebee’s vigilante one better, Jenkins allowed Barnes’ signature to be visible on the receipt.

The photo, and story, went viral on the web and the news media gobbled it up. Mr. and Mrs. Barnes denied that they would write such a thing (they didn’t tip because the order was a carry out), but nobody believed them. After all, everyone knows that white customers in southern states are likely to write “nigger” on receipts, just as everyone knows that sort-of white neighborhood watch members racially profile black kids in hoodies for carrying bags of Skittles. Jenkins, in contrast, was besieged with sympathy and cash contributions: the latest tally was $10,749. A handwriting expert hired by Barnes, however, proved that “nigger” was not written by the customers, but by the waitress herself. Now Jenkins and Red Lobster are being sued by the Barneses, who have been subjected to harassment and threats.

And that’s not all… Continue reading →