Character

Bitter Harry: Famous Grandchildren Ethics #2

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Part I is here.

A London pub has announced that it will be selling a ‘Harry’s Bitter’ beer in response to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s tell-all Netflix documentary, “Harry and Meghan” as well as Prince Harry’s family dirty laundry opus, “Spare.” Well-played. For Diana and Charles’ youngest offspring is indeed Bitter Harry, and a weak and rotten Royal to boot.

Because the U.S. is in the throes of The Great Stupid, in part a hangover from the George Floyd Freakout, Harry and his gold-digger spouse Meghan are more popular here than in the UK. Some Americans just enjot seeing the Royal Family shat-upon; some are suckers for those who play the racism victim card, Meghan’s specialty (with Harry’s dog-like assistance), and some were so absurdly smitten with the late Princess Diana, herself often an unseemly publicity addict, that her sons can do no wrong in their eyes. Nonetheless, Harry’s exploitation of his family’s misplaced trust for cash and cheap celebrity is the mark of a royal asshole as well as one whose bitterness has rendered his ethics alarms useless.

What kind of person deliberately reveals—often with dark shading borne of dark agendas—private conversations and family secrets in a manner guaranteed to embarrass, insult and infuriate named relatives and stain the reputation of those who have expired? The answer is… a petty, untrustworthy person. Harry doesn’t need the money, but apparently he needs something else: revenge, probably. He evidently has adopted his late mother’s attitude toward the Royal Family, blames them for her demise, and is doing everything he and his wife can think of to cause them pain.

This is ironic, because the only reason anyone cares a twig for either Harry or his C-list actress wife is his membership in that family. Harry is the epitome of a celebrity who is famous without having done anything constructive, admirable, or praiseworthy. He doesn’t have to work; he was born with the metaphorical silver spoon, and nothing short of treason or murder could remove it—indeed, if British history is any guide, not even those things.

However, he has been relatively cut off, and his wife, at least, wants to make sure they have a bright future ahead of interviews with Jimmy Kimmel, guest spots on sitcoms and starring roles as infomercial pitch-nobles. Thus the plan is to tar King Charles, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, Prince William and the rest as racists and creeps, even if it makes Harry and Meghan look creepy too. Creepy celebrities do quite well here.

Maureen Dowd, amusingly snarky with a drop of illumination as usual, writes,

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The Navy Joan Saga: Famous Grandchildren Ethics #1

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Forget about the laptop and the influence peddling for the nonce, and let us all focus on Hunter Biden’s latest display of character, or rather the lack of it. Lunden Roberts, the mother of Hunter Biden’s 4-year-old love child (or one of them; you never know with this creep) wants to change  her daughter’s last name to Biden. Hunter has tried to avoid paying child support for her daughter—who is also his—after earlier denying paternity until he was forced by court order to submit his DNA for testing. He has reportedly never bothered to meet her. Yet the Black Sheep Biden is opposing the name change in court on the theory that it is not “in her best interests.”

Admittedly, the mother’s claim that the name “Biden” is “ synonymous with being well educated, successful, financially acute, and politically powerful” is subject to debate. Biden DNA automatically makes one a legitimate suspect for inherited idiocy. However, Hunter’s assertion is if she carries the Biden name she will never have a “peaceful existence.” I have some sympathy for that argument: as I noted in the item about Lisa Marie Presley’s oppressive life of unsought celebrity [#3], many children of famous people suffer terribly by living under the shadow of notoriety. However, I knew Elvis, Elvis was a freind of mine, and Hunter Biden is no Elvis. If my last name were Biden I’d be tempted to hide my head under a bag. Still, Turley, who is really disgusted by this latest Hunter story, is probably right when he writes that the child “is clearly better off with the Biden surname, particularly in establishing the very connection that Hunter, Joe, and Jill Biden seem committed to conceal or ignore.  Navy Joan is the grandchild of the 47th President of the United States. That alone makes the change beneficial. Navy Joan will be able to benefit from the cache of that connection in applying to college, seeking employment, and other pursuits. It also establishes (despite the efforts of the Bidens) that she is part of the family’s legacy.”

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DeSantis, The NHL, And The Duty To Confront (Link Fixed!)

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

When corporations, organizations, institutions or professions show that they don’t have functioning ethics alarms, it is incumbent upon those of us who do to sound those alarms for them. Loudly. Forcefully. In a timely fashion. That is the only way to preserve and strengthen an ethical culture.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis just demonstrated how this is done. Let’s pay attention, shall we?

The National Hockey League, like all of the professional sports keen to pander to what it sees as predominant social trends if it will mean better media coverage, announced that it will hold a job fair called  “Pathway to Hockey Summit” on February 2 during its 2023 All Star Game festivities in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The idea was to cater to and seeks to attract “diverse job seekers who are pursuing careers in hockey.” Naturally, the whitest of all sports decided that to virtue-signal properly and suck up to the Diversity Equity Inclusion Nazis, that meant that white men need not apply, well, except veterans. They were okay.

“Participants must be 18 years of age or older, based in the U.S., and identify as female, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic/Latino, Indigenous, LGBTQIA+, and/or a person with a disability. Veterans are also welcome and encouraged to attend,” the published event description stated.

Ah, but it was a Florida event, and Florida is governed by a mean, tough, white guy who insists that anyone under his watch must follow the Constitution. That’s Governor Ron DeSantis, whom the mainstream media is recently painting as “worse than Trump.” The governor’s press secretary released a public statement saying,

“Discrimination of any sort is not welcome in the state of Florida, and we do not abide by the woke notion that discrimination should be overlooked if applied in a politically popular manner or against a politically unpopular demographic. We are fighting all discrimination in our schools and our workplaces, and we will fight it in publicly accessible places of meeting or activity….[the NHL must] “immediately remove and denounce the discriminatory prohibitions it has imposed on attendance to the 2023 ‘Pathway to Hockey’ summit.”

And, of course, the limitations on the event were discrimination, though the kind that progressive revolutionaries, Marxists and Democrats believe is good discrimination—you know, like Harvard’s discrimination against white and Asian-American college applicants. Good, I tell you! But like most pandering businesses, organizations, institutions and professions, the National Hockey League can only move the metaphorical cultural needle in unethical directions if nobody pays attention and the majority of Americans shrug and decide, “Ah, so what? We have bigger problems.” At least, these blights on society and deniers of core American values are only inclined to take the risk if they are sure they can get away with it without paying a substantial price.

And thus it was that, faced with someone who was clearly not about to ignore their unethical conduct or let them get away with it, the National Hockey League immediately backed down. They didn’t even try to defend their discriminatory event. They were only sucking up to bigots for cash and compliments because they thought it would be easy. It’s not as if they thought it was right: the cynical, self-serving, none-too bright people who run the NHL, like the cynical, self-serving none-too bright people who run most things, unfortunately, don’t care about what is right and usually can’t figure out what that is without some forceful guidance anyway.

In a laughably dishonest statement,  the NHL has announced that the “original wording of the LinkedIn post associated with the event was not accurate.” “The Pathway to Hockey Summit is an informational and networking event designed to encourage all individuals to consider a career in our game – and, in particular, alert those who might not be familiar with hockey to the opportunities it offers,”  the NHL now says, after  deleting the original event posting last night. The job fair is open to anyone ages 18 and older.

That’s what they always intended, they say. If you believe that, did you know that hockey pucks taste like licorice?

The United States is in the dangerous cultural state it is now in because the public ignored ethics rot and powerful influences against our nation’s foundational principles in education, politics, journalism, academia, entertainment, and literature while those influences took hold over many decades. We left it to others to deal with, and the others we trusted were weak, apathetic and corrupt themselves. It is a principle of ethics that each of us has a duty to confront and oppose unethical actors when we can. It may be too late, and we may have waited too long.

We’ll never know unless we try, however.

Ethics Observations On The 2022 Gallup “Americans’ Ratings of Honesty and Ethics of Professions”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Here it is…

Those polled were asked, “Please tell me how you would rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in these different fields — very high, high, average, low or very low?” Continue reading →

Cowardly And Unethical College Administrators…Again

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

The ethics of this controversy are easy. How could Hamline College administrators screw it up so badly? That’s easy too.

An adjunct professor of art history at Hamline University (in Minnesota, where strange things are always happening), Erika López Prater, knew that Islam forbids depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, so before showing a 14th-century painting of Islam’s founder, she alerted any Muslim students taking her class through her course syllabus that images the Prophet Muhammad would be shown and studied in the course. She directed students with any concerns to contact her. No student did.

Before the class in which paintings of Muhammad were about to be shown, she again alerted students in case anyone felt they needed to leave. No student left. But after Dr. López Prater showed a painting featuring the prophet, a senior in the class complained to the administration. Then Muslim students who were not in the course argued that the class was an attack on their religion. Guess what?

Hamline officials told Dr. López Prater that she was out. Emails to students and faculty pronounced the episode “Islamophobic.” Hamline’s president, Fayneese S. Miller, co-signed an email saying that respect for the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.” Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Month (Alleged): Damar Hamlin

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“Did we win?”

Damar Hamlin, the Buffalo Bills safety who suffered a near-fatal heart attack during a Monday Night Football NFL game this week, after two days in intensive care and still breathing with the help of a ventilator, in a scribbled a note shortly after regaining consciousness.

Well, it’s a great story. In the spirit of the old newspaperman at the end of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” [“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”], I’m going to assume it’s true, though I have grave doubts. For one thing, it’s hearsay; for another, the account comes through the NFL publicity staff, and the NFL’s any-staff has no ethics credibility at all. But the quote is possibly true, and it certainly conveys an ethical lesson: Put your “team,” whatever it may be, above your own concerns; care about whether your misfortune in pursuit of a shared goal interfered with that goal rather than focusing only on your own welfare. There really have been documented instances where an athlete did give the equivalent quote following a serious injury. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Fake Status Devices

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The AcryPhone, created by eKod Works, is literally a piece of acrylic shaped to look like a smartphone. It has no screen, speakers, nor even an LED. What’s it for? Supposedly the fake is for cellphone addicts to wean themselves off addiction to their smartphones. Do you believe that? I don’t. I think that explanation is like the ad copy for those suspiciously shaped battery-powered “massagers” for women that have photos showing a model using it on her neck.

The Acryphone is a prop for insecure people who can’t afford a smartphone or the costs of its service, but who want to look like they can. One reason I am quite certain of this is another product from the same country (Japan) that you see on the right: Stone Watch, a fake smart watch that doesn’t even tell time. The Stone Watches are just glossy, black pieced of plastic with a silicone band so the wearer will look like he or she is using the current fad gadget.

You have a double Ethics Quiz of the Day, and the two questions are,

Is it ethical to pretend to use one of these props in public?

and

Is it ethical to manufacture and sell them?

My tentative answer: they are both visual lies, like a phony Tale diploma hanging on an office wall. Making and selling products that have no legitimate use other than to deceive is itself unethical.

But I am open to being convinced otherwise.

David Brooks, A Trump Derangement And “Bias Makes You Stupid” Case Study

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks should have that famous epitaph tattooed on his forehead.

He was once an independent, erudite, interesting essayist of conservative leanings. Then he accepted big bucks to be the New York Times’ token conservative pundit. Soon, after forced contact with Charles Blow, Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman, the Times version on the Stockholm Syndrome took over shortly before the election of Donald Trump, whom, to be fair, the tweedy and classist Brooks surely would have regarded as icky even before his re-education by the Times. Today’s model of David Brooks is incapable of objective analysis, He serves a neon-bright cautionary tale of what happens when bias eats away at one’s analytical abilities and credibility.

Take his latest column…please.

It is called “The Sad Tales of George Santos,” but it quickly devolves into one more gratuitous attack on Donald Trump. What it most reveals, however, is how far David Brooks has fallen.

Halfway through this mess, Brooks writes, after stating the obvious about Rep.-elect George Santos,

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Representative-Elect Santos Update: George Just Overtook The Field For The 2022 “Most Incompetent Elected Official Of The Year.” Wow.

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Rep. George Santos (R-NY) really accomplished something here. At virtually the last moment, he came from nowhere tho snatch the coveted Ethics Alarms Award for 2022’s Most Incompetent Elected Official from an amazingly credentialed group of hacks, liars and fools. There are Joe and Kamala, of course, each with multiple nominations here. All the big city mayors who have fiddled while wokism allowed crime to fester and spread. EA nominees for the honor: Brevard County (Florida) Sheriff Wayne Ivey, Oregon Governor Kate Brown, GOP Reps. Scott Perry and Mario Diaz-Belart, Rep. Swalwell, of course, Senator Dick Durbin (as usual), Virginia Delegate Elizabeth Guzman, Rep. Louise Frankel, the ridiculous Rep. Matt Gaetz, twirking Rhode Island. State Senator Tiara Mack, Rep. Mary Miller, Mass. State Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa (who was horrified that the courts would stop unconstitutional uses of federal power), Senate Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, and Virginia House Of Delegates Member Wren Williams.

But emulating the “Immaculate Reception” that made Franco Harris an NFL legend, the 1968 Harcad -Yale game 29-29 tie (when Harvard scored two touchdowns with less than a minute left) and Bobby Thompson’s home run (“The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!), Santos did the imposiible and made every one of his competitors look like Teddy Roosevelt. I posted last week about the emerging (and inexcusably late) discovery that many of the claims he made while running for office this year appeared to be false, concluding that he should resign his freshly won seat in Congress. Then Santos’ statements confirming the scandal, made after three days of thought, or the best he could do to approach thought, proved beyond challenge that he is even more of an ethics-free disgrace and menace to the public welfare than I initially thought.

“I am not a criminal,” Santos said during his interview with the New York Post, thus embracing Marion Barry’s infamous, “It it isn’t illegal, it’s not unethical” rationalization. “My sins here are embellishing my resumé,” he added, in a masterpiece of understatement. Since voters elect representatives based on their qualifications, “embellish” gives Santos too much credit. He HAD no credentials to embellish. He never graduated from college. He didn’t work at the prestigious Wall Street firms he claimed he had.

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“Keeping It Real” When “Real” Means “Selfish, Unprofessional Jerk”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I tried to find a straight video of  KWWL-TV’s Mark Woodley, its sports reporter, modeling unethical workplace conduct and a complete lack of professionalism in his emergency stint this week as a weather reporter. I couldn’t: every available clip compilation is presented like the CNN version above. Isn’t this cute and hilarious?

It isn’t either.  I can see that CNN’s talking heads might thinks so, since that network allows unprofessional conduct by the ‘talent” regularly, like Don Lemon getting bombed on the New Year Eve. Unless Woodley was told to be whiny prima donna as a publicity stunt and he might have been, given the state of journalism, broadcast and otherwise, in 2022, his attitude and ostentatious bitching should have guaranteed a suspension or worse.

When one is called upon by one’s employer or leader to fill in, do extra duties, help get through a crisis or emergency, or to be a team player and do what the team needs to have done, the  ethical and professional response is to do the best possible job you can with good cheer and without complaint. Woodley, who did the opposite, helped metastasize “quiet quitting” and many other forms of workplace societal rot.

This is how society becomes miserable in a Nation of Assholes. Continue reading →