Character

Confession of Faithless Fan

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The 2012 Red Sox season

I’ve been meaning to write this post for more than a month, almost two., for it has been that long since I have watched a Boston Red Sox game, or indeed any baseball game at all. This, I knew, was complete abdication of everything I believe about loyalty, courage, faithfulness and gratitude, yet I could not force myself to meet my own standards, and I am ashamed.

For I hate sports fans like that, feckless, fair weather, Sunday soldiers who root loudly for their team when things are good, and who defect to the booers and the doubters when the tides of fortune turn. I have been the most loyal and faithful of Boston baseball fans since my childhood. I watched or listened to every game when the team was annually awful, from 1962-1966, and yet got reserved seats for the final series of the 1967 season a year in advance, because I thought, absurdly, that the team might be in a pennant race. (And I was right!) I endured team collapses and disappointments in many seasons since—all the famous ones, and others that only a dedicated lifelong fan would remember.

What happened to me this year? Continue reading →

Well, There Goes Elizabeth Warren’s Legal Ethicist Vote! (UPDATED)

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

On the positive side for Prof. Warren, at least she may be able to  truthfully say that in Massachusetts, she’s more Cherokee than lawyer…

As thoroughly researched by Cornell Law Professor ( and conservative blogger) William Jacobson, Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren practiced law in her Cambridge, Massachusetts office for more than a decade without ever being licensed to practice law in that state. His findings are here. Continue reading →

Ethics Heroes: Papa Roach

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Ethics Alarms’ 2011 Commenter of the Year tgt, who found this story and passed it on, asks,

“How is a horrible stoner rock band more ethical than everyone in politics?”

It’s a great, if sorrowful, question.

A.V. Club has a feature (which could be called “Start a Feud”) in which it asks a rock performer what song he or she hates, and why.  Jenn Wasner, one half of the Baltimore indie-folk duo Wye Oak (“a blend of Southern culture and Northern sensibilities…”) submitted to this invitation to get in trouble, and fingered the song in the video above, “Scars,” by Papa Roach.

Criticizing the work of other artists in the same field is unprofessional at best, gratuitously unkind and disrespectful. Papa Roach’s members would have been within their rights to fire back something less than complimentary in defense, at very least the observation that ethical musicians don’t take gratuitous shots at one another. What the band did however, was this: it sent Wasner flowers. Wasner was convinced it was some kind of diabolical trap, and tweeted as much. The band tweeted back: Continue reading →

Cruelty and the Comers: At a Certain Point, Being Nice Just Makes It Worse

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Meet the Comers

The nauseating news story of the week comes from L.A., where 18-year-old Mitch Comer was seen looking emaciated and confused in a downtown Greyhound bus station. A hundred pounds and 5’3″ tall, the boy seemed lost, and a security guard questioned him. Comer explained that he had just arrived from Georgia, where he had been imprisoned in his parents’ basement since his father pulled him out of an 8th grade class four years ago. Then, on his 18th birthday, they released the boy, and his stepfather took Mitch to the bus station, where they had a touching goodbye

“The story we got was that the stepfather took the kid to the bus depot, said ‘Here’s $200, here’s a list of the homeless shelters in Los Angeles, you’re a man now and don’t come back,'” said LAPD Commander Andrew Smith. This won Paul and Sheila Comer, who live in an affluent Georgia suburb, child abuse and false imprisonment charges as well as a nomination as 2012’s Monstrous Parents of the Year. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: You Now Know That Your Neighbors Are Irredeemable Creeps—Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

“Now that you are all grown up, I want to tell you about the Duffs, and you can decide what to do…”

And you think you have rotten neighbors! Meet the Duffs.

Scott and Roxanne Duff of Leechburg, Pennsylvania found their neighbor’s Golden Retriever and new Rottweiler puppy  wandering in their yard. They called the police, who said to describe the dogs and hand them over to a local animal shelter. They finally returned the Golden to the owners, who lived on the same street, but told the police and the owners that the puppy had run away. Actually, the Duffs were in the process of trying to sell the Rotty on Craig’s List.

The next day, the owner of the dogs called police to say he had heard that the puppy was still at the Duffs’ house, as someone reported seeing it in their yard. Police inquired, only to be told, “Puppy? What puppy?”  Eventually the Dastardly Duffs confessed to selling the dog for $50. The puppy was duly retrieved from a Pittsburgh woman who police said was unaware of the theft, and reunited with its owner. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Lindsay Lohan

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

So, Lindsay, you really are a “mean girl,” eh? Good to know.

I have been sympathetic to Lindsay Lohan, a tragic example of a child star who has been programmed by an abnormal upbringing and awful parents to be self-destructive and irresponsible. However, Lohan has just signaled that she is also a mean-spirited jerk. Fellow child star Amanda Bynes, once frequently cited as an example of a performing tot who grew up normal, has had a bizarre string of hit-and-run accidents and appears to be dealing with some substance abuse issues. Bynes is facing charges, and has lost her license to drive. So is Lindsay, who has been in and out of court, jail and lawyers’ offices repeatedly over the last several years over everything from drunk driving to violating probation to grand theft, empathetic?  Hardly. Here was her recent tweet regarding Bynes’ problems:

Continue reading →

THIS is Hindsight Bias, So You’ll Know a Jerk When You Hear One

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I haven’t watched a Red Sox game for over a month now; more on that soon. I do check on the game results however, and observed with interest that Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine, currently being dressed for the guillotine by New England sportswriters who want him punished for a miserable season in which his own work has been outstanding, is being criticized today in a textbook example of hindsight bias at work. I am flagging it for any of you who might want to explain the phenomenon to the next jerk who criticizes you for a reasonable choice you made not knowing how it would turn out, based on the jerk’s knowledge of how it in fact did turn out.

My least favorite personal run-in with hindsight bias was the time I lost a poker hand—and a lot of money– in Vegas despite having four of a kind in a game of seven card stud. The old man sitting next to me looking pathetic also had four of a kind, and in a higher denomination, the odds of two four of a kind hands appearing in the same deal in a non-wild card game being approximately six-gazillion to one. Naturally, I was betting the limit until the old man called my hand—he said later that he felt sorry for me. When he revealed that he had my four sevens beat with his four %$#@%$*& tens, it caused a genuine uproar in the casino, and the dealer said that he had never seen the like in eight years on the job.

“You should have known he had you beat,” said the ass sitting on my right. That’s hindsight bias. And so is this. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Dana Balicki, Proud OWS Protester

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“There’s tens of millions of dollars spent protecting the perimeter so we’re shaking something up.”

—-Dana Balicki, Occupy Wall Street protester, on today’s “birthday” protest of about 1000 nostalgic OWS types that resulted in almost 150 arrests and a disruption of traffic and commuter travel, but, as ever, nothing coherent, useful or productive.

Well said.

Yes, this is Occupy in a nutshell: happily wasting the publics money despite rising deficits at all levels of government, inconveniencing honest people trying to make a living, and annoying as many  as possible without having anything constructive to contribute to the nation’s policy debates or to offer as practical solutions to its intensifying problems.

A year ago, I summed up the efforts of this irresponsible, arrogant, lazy, destructive group, and was too kind.

But 100% correct.

_________________________

Source: Wall Street Journal

Writers Writing About Ethics, Without Any

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Sorry, can’t use you.

Writer Joe Konrath has written one of those blog posts about ethics that makes me want to defenestrate myself, a post that expounds on rationalizations as a substitute for ethical analysis because he is incapable of the latter, arriving at fatuous and misleading conclusions. Naturally his post was picked up and expounded upon by another blogger, Ben Galley, who has even launched an ethics-challenged website called Ethiks to promote similar ethics rot.

Both writers are holding forth about recent scandals in the publishing world, involving so-called “sock puppetry,” where a writer anonymously praises his own books on-line or trashes the work of competitors, and writers paying for positive reviews. Both are also laboring under juvenile ethical delusions, and obnoxiously so, among them:  that “everybody does it” is a valid excuse for cheating, that the fact that a critic of unethical behavior might engage in such behavior himself under certain conditions invalidates the ethical criticism, and that unethical people insisting that unethical conduct isn’t puts such conduct in a “grey area.” None of these is true; none of these is remotely true.

The ethically-clueless tenor of both posts can be gleaned from this section, by Galley:

“Ethics in life are a grey area. No less in the book industry. To borrow JA’s analogy, the claim of “I would never kill” goes out of the window pretty quickly when protecting your family against a murderous intruder. The line of ethics is never a straight one, often zig-zagging through a charcoal no-man’s land of right and wrong. The question is this: Where does the line lie for you? It’s nothing less than personal. Some people simply shrug at the thought of sock-puppetry. Others go a shade of red and grit their teeth. Sadly, we can write all the codes and edicts we like, the point is that not everyone will a) agree, nor b) abide.”

Let me see: wrong, wrong, irrelevant, wrong, not necessarily, no it isn’t, NO, it REALLY ISN’T, and so what?

Most ethical questions are not gray at all: these definitely aren’t. They are clear as clear can be. “Sock puppetry” is dishonest and unfair. An author paying for positive reviews, and a critic accepting payment from an author to review his work, is blatantly dishonest and a conflict of interest. There is no “gray” about it; they are just wrong. Anyone who draws the “line” anywhere else is wrong too. It doesn’t matter whether everyone agrees: those who don’t agree are unethical. So are those who can’t “abide.” Their unethical conduct doesn’t alter right and wrong.

Konrath’s piece wastes our time with a long argument claiming that unless one is as pure as the driven snow, not only can’t you call unethical conduct what it is,  the fact that you can’t calls into question whether the unethical conduct is really unethical at all. Here’s his “quiz,” which Konrath presents triumphantly as if it is a real brain-buster, when anyone with a modicum of honesty, decency and common sense should be able to score 100% without straining a neuron.

Here it is, with my answers in bold: Continue reading →

The Egypt and Libya Embassy Attacks: So, Are We Going To Have An “Everybody Make An Insulting Film About Muhammad Day” Now?

/ Jack Marshall / 60 Comments

Why not? It’s your right!

“We went into this knowing this was probably going to happen,” said Steve Klein, a consultant on Nakoula Basseley Nakoula’s anti-Islam, Muhammad-bashing film. The film is apparently the reason two U.S. embassies were attacked yesterday, resulting in the death of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya and others. That was the “this” Klein was referring to. Nakoula and his Isreali backers set out to make a film that denigrates both Islam and its prophet, knowing what the response in Muslim nations has been to such things, as well as the deaths caused by podunk bigot pastor Terry Jones, with his Quran-burning stunts.

Now people are dead, the Arab world is inflamed, and the perpetual tinderbox known as the Middle East is ready to ignite. The online film has had almost no audience yet, but don’t worry: international violence was probably part of the marketing plan. Maybe Nakoula will be really lucky, and have his First Amendment-protected agitprop start World War III, and he can take his place in history next to Gavrilo Princip, in the coveted “Insignificant Jerks Who Started World Wars” category.

Indeed, as an American citizen, Nakoula has a sacred right to make any movie he wants, write any book, draw any cartoon, burn any book. Americans have a sacred right to be irresponsible, and thanks to electronic communication, they can now be irresponsible on a grand scale, disrupting diplomacy, inciting international unrest, fanning racial, ethnic, international and religious discord. That means that sometimes an exercise of  the right of free speech can be legal, cherished, and terribly wrong. Among those times are when you know that shooting off your metaphorical mouth has a strong probability of getting people other than you killed.

I agree that there is something amiss when “The Book of Mormon” is winning accolades on Broadway, knowing well that if the satirical musical targeted Islam instead of Mormonism the Great White Way might be running red with blood. I agree that it reeks of a double standard when columnists like Charles M. Blow can tweet about Mitt Romney’s “magic underwear” but American Muslims are immune from similar indignities because, well, they might kill us. This elevates instability, intolerance and lack of respect for human life to an asset, and that is itself intolerable—but what is the solution? Charles Krauthammer, condemning our Egypt embassy’s conciliatory response to the mob attack on it  yesterday, said that our response should be “Go to hell.” In this he was endorsing the response of the Everybody Draw Muhammad Day crowd, which decided that an organized, mass insult to Islam was the intelligent response to one Islamic terrorist intimidating Comedy Central into censoring South Park. Their reasoning: “You can’t kill us all.”

They can kill our Ambassador, though, can’t they?

Since there is no justification for hateful, intentional denigration of anybody’s religion, there should be a bright line between caving to Islamic threats over satire and humor, which is disgraceful and un-American, and not setting out to agitate the Arab street with calculated insults, which is the domain of Jones and Nakoula. The latter is flagrantly irresponsible and reckless, and should not be condoned or excused, Constitutionally protected though it is. Nakoula, it was reported, was in hiding for his life.

If so, good.

“We went into this knowing this was probably going to happen,” said his colleague. Having to fear for one’s life seems like a fair punishment for someone who knew his hateful, rinky-dink movie might get other people killed and cause mass violence, and made it anyway.

___________________

Sources:

Graphic:  No Short Corners

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.