Citizenship

Biden’s Apology For Abusing the Press: Not Accepted!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments
"Sorry!"

“Sorry!”

In a classic scene from the “Animal House” toga party, the chaotic Bluto, played by John Belushi, encounters a pompous student strumming his guitar and singing a sappy folk song as co-eds swoon. Bluto suddenly seizes the guitar and smashes it to smithereens. “Sorry,” he shrugs.

This is about the level of effectiveness and sincerity achieved by Vice President Joe Biden’s office, as it apologized after taking a student photographer’s photographs of the Veep and destroying them.

From Poynter:

“Jeremy Barr, a reporter with the University of Maryland’s Capital News Service, was seated in a non-press section for the event, at which the vice president announced an anti-domestic violence initiative. Biden staffer Dana Rosenzweig approached Barr after the event and ordered him to delete photos.

“She said, ‘I need to see your camera right now.’” Barr said. The staffer called Barr’s presence in the non-press area an “unfair advantage” over the other members of the media at the event. The staffer then requested to watch as Barr deleted the photos from his camera to ensure his compliance, Barr said. After deleting the photos from the camera, the staffer asked Barr to show her his iPhone to make sure no photos were saved. Barr complied.” Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week, Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck Division: WSJ Blogger James Taranto

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

“It’s like a proponent of laws against hate speech standing on a street corner shouting racial slurs in order to “demonstrate how easy it is” to say offensive things under the First Amendment. Of course it’s ‘easy’ to do something that is perfectly legal and protected by the Constitution. That doesn’t mean you ought to do it, especially if you claim to believe it is wrong.”

—–Wall Street Journal blogger, pundit and wit James Taranto, describing the “stupid stunt”perpetrated  by Mark Kelly, the husband of  former Rep. Gaby Giffords, in which he purchased the kind of weapon he and his wife have been lobbying Congress to ban, a so-called “assault weapon,” in order to “demonstrate how easy it is to obtain” one.

At least Kelly didn’t break the law, like David Gregory, to show how easy it was to get an illegal magazine in Washington, D.C.

 

If this is the best argument you have...be quiet.

If this is the best argument you have…be quiet.

Is this hypocrisy? No, it’s not hypocrisy. Kelly’s act is reminiscent, though not as certifiably cretinous, of stunt pulled by the foolish Ronald Miller, who walked into his child’s school and announced that he was going to start shooting people, just to show that he could. Kelly proved nothing. To someone who believes that a law-abiding citizen who believes he needs an assault weapon to protect his family against home invaders, Rodney King-style riots or the breakdown of civilization (never mind what Joe Biden or Andrew Cuomo think he needs), Kelly’s purchase proved only that the system works: a law-abiding citizen can buy a legal gun. The Horror. To anti-gun crusaders, Kelly proved that a gun they think should be made illegal is legal—but presumably they already knew that. Kelly was trying to demonstrate that legal conduct should be made illegal because people can currently do it?

Okaaaaay… Continue reading →

More School Abuse of Students and Culture: The Deadly Cupcake Caper

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments
Wait...these are bad guys now?

Wait…these are bad guys now?

In Michigan, Schall Elementary School principal Susan Wright defended the latest example of attempted public school thought-control prompted by Sandy Hook hysteria, the seizing of 30 plastic toy soldiers (you’ll recall them as among the heroes in “Toy Story”) that the mother of a 9-year-old boy had placed on his home-made birthday cupcakes. She said in a statement,

“These are toys that were commonplace in the past. However, some parents prohibit all guns as toys. In light of that difference, the school offered to replace the soldiers with another item and the soldiers were returned home with the student. Living in a democratic society entails respect for opposing opinions. In the climate of recent events in schools we walk a delicate balance in teaching non-violence in our buildings and trying to ensure a safe, peaceful atmosphere.”

I will come to the point with uncharacteristic economy. Ms. Wright is a disgrace to her profession, a fearful, compliant, incompetent fool who is a danger to the development of the young minds placed in her charge. Let’s consider her outrageous “defense”: Continue reading →

“Beyond the Myth”: Disturbing and Revealing Lessons About More Than Pit Bulls

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Beyond the Myth

“Beyond the Myth” is a 2012 documentary that provides a vivid, troubling and often moving account of “breed specific legislation” in the U.S., which primarily involves states and municipalities banning “pit bull-like dogs,’ a.k.a. “vicious dogs,” though the dogs such legislation targets are usually not vicious and often are not even pit bulls.  If you are one of the misinformed who have been convinced by biased reports and public hysteria that pit bulls are any more dangerous or vicious than any other breed, you owe it to yourself, your children, and the dog owners in your community to watch this film, which is available on Netflix.

Long-time readers of Ethics Alarms know that the site has visited the issue of anti-pit bull cruelty and bigotry frequently, most recently here. For those who have read and absorbed what I have written and the references I provided, there will be much that is familiar in “Beyond the Myth,”; nevertheless, I found the documentary shocking. I had no idea how pit bull bans worked in cities like San Francisco and Miami, with Gestapo-like raids on private homes culminating in harmless and beloved family pets being confiscated and slated for death if a police officer concluded that they have “5 out of 8” physical traits identified with pit bulls. Nor was I aware of how many of these dogs were being euthanized—tens of thousands every year—for being born with a broad  head or a deep chest that meant they were legally branded as “vicious.”

The stories of the individual dog owners who have organized, lobbied, sued, and in some cases had to move out of their homes to protect a loving canine companion are also inspiring, if astounding. Wounded veterans have even had their service dogs taken from them. The most illuminating aspects of the documentary, however, are: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Michael Arrington

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

michaelarrington

Michael Arrington is a tech publisher and blogger who made a good amount of money selling his previous blog, Techcrunch. He bought a boat with some of it, a nice one, with state of the art electronics. On the day his new toy was to be delivered, he had to work through customs and Homeland Security paperwork, since the boat was built in Canada.  Something went wrong, something stupid.  He writes,

“My job was to show up and sign forms and then leave with Buddy (WA sales tax and registration fees come a week later). DHS takes documents supplied by the builder and creates a government form that includes basic information about the boat, including the price. The primary form, prepared by the government, had an error. The price was copied from the invoice, but DHS changed the currency from Canadian to U.S. dollars. It has language at the bottom with serious sounding statements that the information is true and correct, and a signature block.”

It’s serious all right. It is a government form, and signing it is a legal attest that the information is correct. Arrington continues, Continue reading →

Classroom Indoctrination Again: Enough! I Propose No-Tolerance

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments
"Now class, I'm not going to say this again---no essays about evil guns, or you'll be sorry."

“Now class, I’m not going to say this again—no essays about evil guns, or you’ll be sorry.”

Dewey Christian is an English teacher at Denton High School in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and on the evidence of this incident, one more example of how our children are being warped by arrogant bullies and fools under the pretense of public education. The teacher told students to write a few sentences about whatever topic they chose—“a fun experience,” one student said.  However, when two seniors turned in papers that referenced guns—the Horror!— Christian scolded and humiliated them in front of the class, and told them that they would receive zeros unless they chose a different topic.

Fired, that’s all—that’s what this teacher should and must be. Continue reading →

Manatee Reflections: How Can We Tell Right From Wrong When We Can’t Think Straight At All?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments
Interestingly, not the slowest participant in this situation...

Interestingly, not the slowest participant in this situation…

I think the greatest impediment to building an ethical culture is the relentless dumbing down of the culture, a process now driven as much by political factors as educational ones and Honey Boo-Boo. The last election showed that ours politicians fhave decisied that they only benefit from misleading and frightening the ignorant and logically impaired among us—all the better to persuade them to elect leaders not much smarter than they are, but probably more ruthless and dishonest. In so many corners of our society, there are no consequences for demonstrated intellectual incompetence.

The news media is a prime example. CNN’s Deborah Feyeric actually asked, on the air, whether the approaching asteroid last week was “the effect of, perhaps, global warming.” She is too ignorant to be on television: this is signature significance. I know science isn’t her usual beat, but nobody this incapable of basic logic should be interpreting news on the airwaves about anything. If she had announced the moon was made of cheese, or asked if anyone had ever found that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it could not have been any worse. CNN doesn’t care: she still has a job. Being jaw-droppingly stupid—the worse kind of stupid, so stupid you don’t even know how stupid you are—is no longer a bar to permanent employment in national media, in teaching, in business, in government.  Probably Feyeric’s bosses thought she asked a reasonable question. Continue reading →

Drone Ethics: The Policy and the Memo

/ Jack Marshall / 68 Comments
Hey, Fox News! INCOMING!!!

Hey, Fox News! INCOMING!!!

With the leak of the Obama Administration’s Justice Department memo laying out  alleged legal and Constitutional justification for targeted drone killings abroad, the ethical debate over this practice finally began in earnest. Back in October of 2011, I visited this topic in a post titled, “The Ethically Messy, Legally Muddled, Drone Killing of Anwar al-Awlaki,” who was an American citizen and also an al-Qaida leader and terrorist, and wrote…

“I am far less confident of a conclusion that the killing was legal than I am that the killing was ethical in a situation where traditional rules and considerations don’t fit the situation well, meaning that decision-makers must go outside the rules to find the right, meaning ethical, course of action.  And I’m even not 100% confident of that.”

This still accurately encompasses my view, although my confidence in the position has declined materially, in part because of the memo. However, my position in 2011 was based on the assumption, using the Bush Administration’s position, that the United States was engaged in a de facto war with al-Qaida, and as a tool of war, killer drones  are within ethical bounds by my analysis. The leaked memo, however, begins with the assumption that the drone strikes are not part of ongoing declared warfare, but rather a new variety of cross-border lethal intervention that has no legitimate statutory basis. I think that under those assumptions, targeting drone killings are illegal, unethical, and to the extent that they give the President of the United States the power to kill someone in any nation based on his assessment that person needs killing, ominous.

I’ll leave the legal analysis of the memo to others. For now, other than pointing readers to my earlier analysis of drone killings in the context of warfare, I just have some observations: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Melowese Richardson, Ohio Poll Worker

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments
Melowese Richardson

Melowese Richardson

Melowese Richardson, Ohio poll worker, doesn’t understand why she’s being investigated for voter fraud. Oh, she voted at least twice, no doubt about that, and she doesn’t deny it: According to Hamilton County records, Richardson’s absentee ballot was filed on Nov. 1, 2012 along with her signature. Later, she told an official she also voted at a precinct polling place because she was afraid her absentee ballot would not be counted in time. Double voting is something of a family tradition, for Richardson’s granddaughter, India Richardson, also cast two ballots in November, her first time as a voter. Melowese sees nothing wrong with any of this, or this either: absentee ballots for Montez Richardson, Joseph Jones and Markus Barron all came from Richardson’s Whetsel Avenue address, were received by the board the same time as Richardson’s, and the handwriting on all four of them was similar. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Dunce Meets Ethics Hero”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

John T., a reader whose final comment on Ethics Alarms is also the Comment of the Day, provided me with another example of the same phenomenon that manifested itself in some of the more extreme comments to the recent Applebee’s post. For many people who are incapable of coherent ethical analysis, the nature of conduct is assessed not according to the ethical or unethical nature of the conduct itself, but according to whether the author of the conduct is liked, admired, identified or sympathized with, especially in comparison to the individual, authority or entity holding that actor accountable for the unethical conduct involved. Thus supporters of the fired Applebee’s waitress who violated the terms of her employment, embarrassed her employer’s customer online, and used proprietary information to do it used all manner of irrelevant or  factually false arguments to make the case that she didn’t warrant punishment, and that it was Applebee’s that was acting wronfully—waitresses are underpaid; Applebee’s doesn’t treat employees well, the pastor was “stealing” by not leaving a tip, the pastor’s obnoxious message “abused” the server (even though the server wasn’t the one who publicized the pastor’s comments), and so on. Because commenters sympathized and identified with the waitress, they crashed through logical and ethical roadblocks to find her innocent of wrongdoing, and mistreated by a big, bad, heartless corporation. In other words, emotion and bias, not objectivity and ethical analysis, took over.

John T. engages in the same fallacious process to defend the 18-year old Xanax abuser who found herself insulting the wrong judge in Miami. His previous jaw-dropping comment described the woman’s horrible demeanor and attitude as “genuinely cooperative and friendly” (she was disrespectful, mocking and seemingly stoned), and opined that unauthorized possession of a controlled substance was a “bullshit charge.” I responded, half in jest,  that with that attitude, it was remarkable that he wasn’t in jail. I’ll be back at the end, but here is John T’s masterful rant, the Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Dunce Meets Ethics Hero: Continue reading →