Character

James Lipton: Proud To Be A Pimp

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments
James Lipton, circa. 1951

James Lipton, circa. 1951

James Lipton, he of the most pompous interview show in the universe, Inside the Actor’s Studio, has decided to celebrate that franchise’s 250th episode by cheerily revealing that he worked as a pimp in Paris in the 1950’s. This was apparently legal there and then, and Lipton, he tells us, was out of a job, so why not earn your money by recruiting desperate women into accepting cash to have sex with strangers, and take a cut of their proceeds for your trouble?

Lipton tells Parade:

“I had to be okayed by the underworld; otherwise they would’ve found me floating in the Seine.The great bordellos were still flourishing in those days before the sheriff of Paris, a woman, closed them down. It was a different time.”

Oh…you mean there was a time when dealing with organized crime was good? There was a time when it was admirable to trap innocent young waifs into the sex trade because of their poverty? To facilitate adultery and infidelity? To tell women who they had to have sex with, and accept a percentage of their fees for doing so? There was a time when doing all of this didn’t mean you were an exploitive, venal, amoral, low life?

I don’t think so. I don’t think there has ever been such a time, no matter what France may think. Continue reading →

No Surprise: Michele Bachman Lies On Her Way Out The Door

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments
I won't have Michele Bachmann to kick around any more. Good.

I won’t have Michele Bachmann to kick around any more. Good.

Tea Party advocate and history-addled Congresswoman Michele Bachmann suddenly announced that she will not be running for re-election in 2014, and everyone knows why: she is the object of serious investigations regarding financial improprieties and violations of election laws during her run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. She was also facing a rematch against the same opponent she barely defeated last year. Rather than destroy her brand by losing in an overwhelmingly Republican district (Romney took it easily), Bachmann made the reasonable career decision to leave voluntarily before she was fired.

She didn’t have to lie about it, though. That’s just the way she is. Continue reading →

The IRS Scandal Choice: Contrived Ignorance By The President Or Incompetentence By White House Counsel

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments
Unethical lawyer, or ethical pawn in an unethical plan.

Unethical lawyer, or ethical pawn in an unethical plan.

Media reports tell us that White House Counsel Kathy Ruemmler was told on April 24 that the IRS had improperly targeted tea party and other conservative groups, according to an Inspector General audit. She did not tell her client, President Obama, about the fact. [ UPDATE: Law professor and esteemed legal ethics authority Richard Zitrin correctly points out that Ruemmler’s client is the office of the President, not the President himself. So far, I have yet to be convinced that this changes the analysis below.]

There is no way to spin this that doesn’t look bad for either Ruemmler, Obama, or both. The news media has been typically inept in explaining this ethical point. If Ruemmler, on her own, decided to withhold the information to “protect” the President, she was violating her ethical duties, as well  as her duties to the President, his office, and the country. If she was following his directive in keeping him in the dark, then President Obama is guilty of the ethical misconduct of contrived ignorance, a device that is almost always accompanied by knowledge of wrongdoing and irresponsible leadership. Which was it? Continue reading →

“Who Cares?” Ethics: The Key Question…Was This Employee Fired?

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

During a Kansas City Royals broadcast this week, the following graphic was displayed for the TV audience:

Mistake Screen

It has the following mistakes: Continue reading →

My Father, Memorial Day, and Reflections

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Jack Marshall Sr Army portrait

[In the last few years of his life, my father used to take my sister and me on a pilgrimage to Arlington National Cemetery on the Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend. He was always strangely jolly about it, though appropriately reverent. We always visited the oddly inadequate Battle of the Bulge memorial, where my dad would usually tell us one new story of his horrible experiences in that conflict that he had previously suppressed. We always paid our respects to the humble grave of Audie Murphy, World War II’s most decorated American soldier. We did NOT visit the grave of my dad’s own father, whose betrayal of his mother he would never forgive, though my grandfather, a veteran of the First World War, was also buried at Arlington. Mostly we just walked around the beautiful surroundings, with Dad periodically admiring some grand monument and suggesting, tongue in cheek, that he wouldn’t mind being under something like that some day. Continue reading →

Rick Curl, The University Of Maryland, Penn State, and Moral Luck

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

The Rick Curl case is the ethics alarm that won’t stop ringing.

Could Joe be the rule rather than the exception?

Could Joe be the rule rather than the exception?

I’ve written about it twice, both times focusing on the devil’s deal made by the victim and her family, who allowed Curl, a renowned D.D. area swimming coach, to get away with sexually molesting a 13-year female swimmer under his supervision and escape either official detection or legal punishment for decades, as the victim’s family decided to accept $150,000 in hush money/ extortion/ settlement from the rapist-coach instead. Curl went on his happy coaching, and maybe child-molesting way—we don’t know if there were other victims or other pay-offs—even to the Olympics, until the girl he molested, Kelley Currin, had a belated attack of conscience at 40 and finally told authorities about what a trusted coach in close contact with girls on a daily basis had done to her, leading to Curl’s arrest last year.

Rick Curl was sentenced to seven years in prison for child sexual abuse at a hearing this week. At that hearing, we learned for the first time that the University of Maryland had been informed about the abuse more than 25 years ago, and probably knew about it before that. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: An Ex-Nurse With Something In Her Craw

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

angry-womanSeemingly nice and good people still fall prey to habitually unethical thinking. This was illustrated to me vividly just now when I heard a call fielded by Rush Limbaugh while I was driving to the cleaners. Today, like every Friday, was a free-for-all in Rush’s domain: callers get to pick the topic.

A middle-aged woman called Rush to announce that something was “stuck in her craw,” namely, that former NFL players with serious cognitive disabilities were suing the NFL, because they had not known the extent of damage the repeated head trauma their football careers entailed would cause them later in life. She was indignant because, we learned, she had suffered a concussion when she was a nurse (due to a violent patient), and now, years later and well into retirement, she suffered vertigo and the loss of the use of one arm as a consequence of that injury.

She said. in essence, “These football players were paid millions to bang heads, and they are complaining. I wasn’t paid millions, and I didn’t agree to get hit on the head. All I did was help people as a nurse, and nobody’s going to pay me for my disability.”

“So you don’t support the NFL players being compensated?”Rush asked.

“No! They got their millions. Why should they get more when people like me get nothing?”

And there you have it. This is what passes for fairness among a large number of our neighbors, colleagues, relatives and friends, even though it makes no sense, has no relationship to fairness, and is as mean and self-centered as a the revenge of a four-year-old.  The attitude is also at the root of a great deal of political advocacy. The underlying thought: if I have to suffer, it is unfair that everybody doesn’t have to suffer too.

This is ethics fatally tainted by non-ethical and unethical motivations like jealousy, envy, bitterness, anger, bias, hate and frustration. It is the exact reverse of the truly ethical impulse, which is “I don’t want anyone to have to go through what I have.” From that misbegotten vantage point, it metastasizes into thorough bile and illogic: Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: CNN’s Jake Tapper

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“Even if you side with this president over those of us in the media who challenge him in his administration, it is important to remember the precedent these actions set going forward, perhaps when it’s not your guy in the White House.”

–—Jake Tapper, former ABC reporter turned CNN headliner, warning knee-jerk Obama defenders that there are rather significant risks in supporting leaders and their governments when they obstruct basic rights, just because you like their policies and don’t like the citizens who are being mistreated.

Martin Niemöller said it better, but some people need the reminder...

Martin Niemöller said it better, but some people need the reminder…

I’m not especially enamored of  Tapper’s quote, and the fact that such a statement is noteworthy coming from a major news media figure is depressing. Tapper introduced his warning by admitting that he was biased himself, “but.”  I suppose admitting a presumably leftward bias is worthy of praise for transparency’s sake—and Tapper has copped to being biased before—yet it also reminds us how truly untrustworthy our supposed bulwark against tyranny (that is, the news media)  is, siding as it does with the party currently in charge with such consistency.

His is also not truly an ethical statement, as it relies on a non-ethical argument, the equivalent of “Hey, we probably shouldn’t kill that guy, because then his gang will be coming after us.” There’s no ethics at all in Tapper’s argument, except that the conduct he’s attempting to encourage, responsible citizenship and the refusal to tolerate the abuse of power, is more ethical than the alternative, which is what we’ve been seeing for almost five years. The Golden Rule, in other words, in not “Do unto others because if you don’t it’s very possible that the soon the others may be doing the same thing to you.” Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal)

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments
I'm so disgusted with Nancy Pelosi that I can't tolerate seeing her face on the blog, so I'm posting a picture of one of my favorite animals, an Okapi...which would, by the way, be a likely improvement in over Pelosi.in Congress.

I’m so disgusted with Nancy Pelosi that I can’t tolerate seeing her face on the blog, so I’m posting a picture of one of my favorite animals, an Okapi…which would, by the way, be a likely improvement in over Pelosi in Congress.

Count the dishonest, idiotic, misleading, unethical statements in this jaw-dropping interview exchange. I count eight. I may have missed one or two, because I was vomiting by the end:

REPORTER: Since the IRS happened on President Obama’s watch, how much of a hit — or do you think at all Democrats will take a hit on the IRS in the 2014 midterms?

REP. NANCY PELOSI:  Well, you said it happened under his watch. (1) It happened under the appointment of the head of the IRS, who was appointed by President Bush. His length of stay extended into President Obama’s stay.  I think that points to the fact — (2) why is this a politicized issue?  We all are concerned about how the IRS does what it’s supposed to do but does not do it in a selective way. I said before what they did was wrong. The Inspector General has said over and over(3)  it is not illegal.  The committee wants to challenge the Inspector General on his findings, so that will unfold. But again (4) the IRS is an independent agency.  (????)  So the inference to be drawn happened on his watch is that it happened on his watch the way some other cabinet agency of government would. (5)  No, this is an independent agency is headed up by a Bush appointee. What they did was wrong. We have to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Selective review. We don’t like it on our side or their side. It has no place.

REPORTER: Doesn’t the buck stop with him? Should he have known about these things but he said he didn’t know about any of this? Continue reading →

David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) On Being An Ethical Adult

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

David_Foster_Wallace

The late author David Foster Wallace—who committed suicide in 2008, the victim of depression— gave a wise, inspiring, ethically-astute  commencement address to the graduating class at Kenyon College in 2005. The speech was later published as a book in 2009 under the title “This Is Water.” It was recently made into a vivid video, and has been viral on the internet. You can see it here, at least for a while.

If the video sends anyone to Wallace’s other works, it has done good; if it causes people to ponder what ethics really means, for that is what Wallace was talking about, it had done better. Apparently the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust is in the process of ordering that this video be taken down as copyright infringement, which if his words belong to the Trust, is their right. I wish they wouldn’t; I think letting Wallace’s eloquent life lesson reach as many people as possible, especially young people, would be both ethical and consistent with the values and aspirations of Wallace himself, but it is not my decision to make. I am a little conflicted about sending you to the link, in fact, if the piece was, in effect, stolen. I am applying utilitarian balancing here.

You can also read his speech, presumably legally, here, where it was republished upon his death. The essence of it is in this passage:

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the “rat race” – the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”

__________________________

Pointer: Tim LeVier

Sources: Upworthy, The Guardian

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.