Ethics Alarms Award Nominee

Ethics Quiz: The Syracuse Kiss Cam Ban

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Kiss cam

The Syracuse University Carrier Dome kiss cam was taken out of service over the weekend and was not in operation during  the Syracuse-Central Michigan University football game, apparently because a letter to the editor  on Syracuse.com expressed the opinion that it encouraged sexual assault. So-called kiss cams are a tradition in some stadiums in which the scoreboard camera pans the crowd and picks out a couple who find themselves being displayed over or under a banner that encourages/demands that they kiss as the crowd roars. Typically, they do, laugh, and life goes on.

Yes, it’s stupid.

Letter writer Steve Port described watching two kiss cam scenes in which women didn’t seem to want to be kissed, but nearby men kissed them anyway as the crowd cheered.  He said such a practice condones and encourages “sexual assault and a sense of male entitlement, at best. And they are an actual instance of assault, at worst…No one has the right to forcefully touch someone be it a hug, a kiss or a violent rape.”

Well, I certainly agree that rape cam is a bad idea.

Port argued that “the Syracuse University student government, the chancellor, the athletic director, etc. review what happened last weekend and seriously consider the ramifications of what they are encouraging.” Spooked by the letter and the online response to it, the Syracuse administration discontinued the gimmick. One letter is all it took. “We are taking the time to assess the concerns expressed in the letter to the editor. We discussed this with POMCO, the sponsor, and they supported that approach,” Sue Edson, executive senior associate athletics director for communications, said in an email.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is the kiss cam a provocation to sexual assault and a sense of male entitlement and therefore unethical?

Continue reading →

Even If You Don’t Like The Naked Teacher Principle, I Don’t See How You Can Oppose The Online Porn Star Teacher Principle, As In “The MelodyXXXTune Saga”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments
Porn Star Teacher

“Look Honey! I found some videos of Carol’s nice band teacher on the intern—OH MY GOD!!!!!

As you may know, Ethics Alarms does its best to catalogue examples of the Naked Teacher Principle and all its related variations.  The NTP  holds that teachers who allow naked photos of themselves to become available to their sub-college level students over the internet may not credibly claim to be mistreated when their schools no longer wish to employ them. The elusive element is where the line should be drawn. Naked pictures from 25 years earlier? Non-naked pictures that are still sexually provocative? Is the line drawn before or after my personal favorite, the male teacher who is photographed painting canvases using his naked derriere and gonads as brushes, but with a bag over his head?

Wherever the line belongs, I expect no argument over Ethics Alarms’ conclusion that Kristin Sundman, formerly an assistant band teacher at Roosevelt High School in Kent, Ohio but also known as porn performer MelodyXXXTune, misses the cut. Under her web porn name, Kristin could be found on videos engaging in all sorts of activities that students should not be associating with their teachers and authority figures, like frolicking naked in a shower, masturbating and performing oral sex. If a teacher wants to moonlight in a field like this, she has an obligation to alert her school administrators so the school does not become embarrassed, get sued, or become the object of an investigation. Of course, informing the school will usually mean that the teacher won’t be teaching, but that’s a choice the school has the right to make.

To her credit, the 8 year veteran resigned shortly after the discovery of her second career got her placed on administrative leave.

There are reasonable exceptions to the Naked Teacher Principle, but if there are any to its sister Online Porn Star Teacher Principle, I don’t have the imagination to envision what it would be.

Good luck, Kristin.

____________________________

Pointer: Fred

Facts: New York Daily News

Ethics Quote Of The Month: George Will, On The Pope’s Visit

/ Jack Marshall / 54 Comments
Hi Pope Francis! I couldn't care less what you think about global warming, air conditioning, gay marriage, redistribution of wealth or world peace, but have a great time on your trip!"

Hi Pope Francis! I couldn’t care less what you think about global warming, air conditioning, gay marriage, redistribution of wealth or world peace, but have a great time on your trip!”

“Francis’s fact-free flamboyance reduces him to a shepherd whose selectively reverent flock, genuflecting only at green altars, is tiny relative to the publicity it receives from media otherwise disdainful of his church. Secular people with anti-Catholic agendas drain his prestige, a dwindling asset, into promotion of policies inimical to the most vulnerable people and unrelated to what once was the papacy’s very different salvific mission. He stands against modernity, rationality, science and, ultimately, the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources. Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their nation’s premises.”

—–Columnist George Will, appropriately cutting through the hypocrisy and hype surrounding Pope Francis’s visit, as well as his irrelevant policy advocacy for which he possesses neither the credibility nor the authority to receive the attention it will receive.

Thank you, George.

Oh, there are lots of wonderful and much-needed statements in Will’s piece; I could have justified making the whole column a Quote Of The Month. This one might be even better:

“In his June encyclical and elsewhere, Francis lectures about our responsibilities, but neglects the duty to be as intelligent as one can be. This man who says “the Church does not presume to settle scientific questions” proceeds as though everything about which he declaims is settled, from imperiled plankton to air conditioning being among humanity’s “harmful habits.” The church that thought it was settled science that Galileo was heretical should be attentive to all evidence.”

Bingo. I have had to reschedule two seminars in Washington, D.C. because the Pope is literally shutting down the city. Why? Why should any aspect of our lives as Americans grind to a halt because a man who claims a divine wisdom that most of the American public does not attribute to him (and should not) presumes to lecture us?  He is pontificating (literally!) regarding matters that neither his own background nor the position he occupies provides legitimate reason to regard him as having sufficient expertise, perspective, or moral standing beyond the humblest blogger or citizen toting a sign.

Most galling of all, why isn’t the exploitation of the Pope’s archaic influence by progressive activists who spend the rest of the year mocking Christianity discredited in the news media as the cynical exercise it is?

“Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their nation’s premises.”

Exactly.

 

Entry For “Unethical Headline Of The Year”: Mother Jones

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
mother-jones-3

The real “Mother Jones”

A headline is a declarative statement, and ethical headlines are factual—not teases, not bait and switches, not lies, not deceit, but factual. Misleading headlines have become increasingly common on the web (click-bait, you know), and if this one from Mother Jones is any indication, the election season is going to be ugly as well as confusing.

The headline is “Republicans Hate Planned Parenthood but Want to Put One of Its Backers on the $10 Bill,” and it is quite an achievement: almost every word is a lie or intentionally misleading.

Let’s begin with “Republicans,” who, according to the headline, both “hate” Planned Parenthood and “want” to put a Planned Parenthood “backer” on the ten. “Republicans” implies all Republicans. Do all Republicans “hate” Planned Parenthood? Gee, I am married to a Republican who served on the board of the local  organization affiliate. There are many Republicans who oppose one of Planned Parenthood’s signature activities, abortion, but that does not mean all Republicans hate Planned Parenthood. Many headline writers, including the one that wrote this one, are lying, manipulative partisan hacks, but a headline that said, “Headline Writers Are Lying, Manipulative Partisan Hacks” would be unfair and misleading.

As for the second part of the sentence, which states Republicans want to put one of Planned Parenthood’s “backers” on the ten dollar bill, it is even more inaccurate regarding Republicans. The article under the headline refers only to the CNN candidate’s debate, and only to three of the eleven Republicans on the stage. Since eight of the Republicans did NOT choose to place the “backer’s” face on the ten, using the article’s own deceitful employment of the term “Republicans,” the article could also be titled “Republicans Hate Planned Parenthood And Don’t Want to Put One of Its Backers on the $10 Bill.” That, of course, wouldn’t convey the impression that Republicans have no integrity, are hypocritical and ignorant, which was really the purpose of the headline and the article. A headline, however, that is less accurate than the opposite of the headline is a really misleading headline. Res ipsa loquitor! Fairer and more honest still would have been a version of the headline that read “Three Republicans Want to Put One of Planned Parenthood’s Backers On The $10 Bill,” but even that would be misleading.

Oh, I’ve just gotten started, for this is some terrible headline. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Donald Trump’s 2nd Amendment Position Paper

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

constitution_gun

“The Second Amendment to our Constitution is clear. The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed upon. Period.”

—The first sentence of “Protecting Our Second Amendment Rights Will Make America Great Again ...Donald J. Trump on the Right to Keep and Bear Arms,” released today.

You can debate the various policy ideas in this typically simplistic approach to a complicated problem; that’s not my purpose. My purpose is to point out that a position paper on the Second Amendment that begins by misstating that amendment while saying the amendment is “clear” cannot and should not be taken seriously. Nor should its author.

Is he stupid, and not know that it is ludicrous to state what is not the text of the amendment with the emphatic “Period” ? Is he ignorant, and unaware of the wording of actual amendment that he proceeds to say “is America’s first freedom”? Or is he lying, using a false version of the Second Amendment to mislead his many followers who either haven’t read the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, or can’t read at all?

The Second Amendment may be many things, but clear is one thing nobody with any knowledge of the subject believes it is. It is not clear. It is, by far, the least clear of all the amendments, and that is why it is still controversial after centuries. The fake Second Amendment that Trump’s position paper uses is clear; too bad that’s not the real one. If the Second Amendment read “The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed upon,” it would be clear, and opponents of gun ownership wouldn’t have any argument except to insist that we repeal  it.  The real Amendment, however, reads,

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

That could mean the same thing, or it might not. It would seem it was intended to mean something else, otherwise why wasn’t it worded as in the Trump version? The seas of ink that have been spilled over the interpretation of that strangely constructed sentence could flood Texas, and educated, thoughtful people who are honest, erudite and not simpleminded (unlike Trump) have written provocatively on the subject, often disagreeing, as in.. Continue reading →

A Final Post Debate Observation: Cognitive Dissonance And The Welch Effect

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Rand Paul23I’m literally the only one writing about this—which is to say that everyone else is wrong— so I might as well wrap it up.

You will recall that I predicted (and hoped) that one of the candidates in the CNN debate on Wednesday would have the wit, historical perspective and guts to prepare a Joseph Welch take-down of Donald Trump, as it is an excellent way of shining harsh light on a bully and ethics miscreant. This is how lawyer Joseph Welch ended the reign of terror of Sen. Joe McCarthy on live TV in the medium’s “Golden Age,” and McCarthy was bigger and more deadly game than The Donald.

I wrote:

Will the same tactic work on Trump? It should: it would have worked in the first debate. Now, it may not, because many Welches will not be as effective as a single one, and I would not be surprised if several of Trump’s competitors will have a Welchism rehearsed. It also won’t work if the wrong Welch jumps in first, or if he blows his delivery. (Welch was quite an actor.) We shall see. If someone doesn’t at least try it, none of these 15 non-Trumps are  smart enough to be President.

Well, the Welch moment came almost immediately, as the first candidate with an opening to deliver it took his shot: Sen. Rand Paul. As I wrote in my follow-up piece yesterday, it wasn’t completely Welch-worthy, but it stung:

The Joseph Welch moment that I predicted occurred, though it was a wan and, as I feared, an incompetent version.  The Welch-wannabe was Rand Paul, and he directly referenced Trump’s “sophomoric” personal attacks, saying…

“Do we want someone with that kind of character, that kind of careless language to be negotiating with Putin? Do we want someone like that to be negotiating with Iran? I think really there is sophomoric a quality that is entertaining about Mr. Trump, but I am worried. I’m very concerned about having him in charge of the nuclear weapons because I think his response, his real response to attack people on their appearance, short, tall, fat, ugly. My goodness, that happened in junior high. Are we not way above that? Would we not all be worried to have someone like that in charge of the nuclear arsenal?”

…First, a Welch retort has to be delivered with withering contempt, not snotty combativeness. Second, the deliverer has to talk directly to the target; this is key. Not “he,” Senator. “YOU.” Third, whether or not the question was about the temperament of the man with his finger on the button, the danger of having a leader who behaves like Trump goes far beyond that….Still, Welch’s tactic worked a bit. Trump’s rejoinder, essentially “You’re ugly, too!”, got what sounded like awkward laughter, and Donald Trump, who is an entertainer, and who, like most experienced performers, can sense what an audience is feeling, was very subdued the rest of the debate.

What happened is that while the whole bucket of water didn’t land on the Wicked Trump, enough splashed on him to slow him down. When Fiorina delivered a mini-Welch later and Trump simpered his submissive “she’s got a beautiful face, and she’s a beautiful woman” line, he was still melting. She, more than anyone else, jumped in the vacuum left by Trump’s “shrinkage.” Continue reading →

Ahmed Mohamed, Justin Carter, And White House Priorities

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments
Wrongly accused Texas kid on the left goes to the White House; wrongly accused Texas kid on the right goes to jail. Explain.

Wrongly accused Texas kid on the left goes to the White House; wrongly accused Texas kid on the right goes to jail. Explain.

Let us stipulate that Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old Texas high school student who was the latest victim of public school cruelty, police incompetence, child abuse, and school-attack hysteria, resulting in an arrest for the Kafka crime of making a “hoax bomb”—that is, a thing that isn’t a bomb and the maker didn’t say was a bomb, but some idiot teacher thought looked like a bomb, and thus assuming  it must have been intended to make idiot teachers think it was a bomb even though even the idiot teachers knew it wasn’t— deserves every kindness and compensatory trip, photo op, meeting and accolade imaginable as a societal apology for being treated like a mad bomber by unethical adults no more qualified to teach the young than they are to fly to Gibralta using their arms as wings.

BUT…

…So do all the other teens (and younger) who have been treated this badly or worse in recent years—the kids punished for gun-shaped pizza and pastries….or the students who were punished after taking weapons away from fellow students and turning them over to teachers, only to find that they were the caught in the Catch 22 of  “no tolerance” madness, seeded in part by the fear-mongering inflicted on our society by President Obama and his political allies.

Like Ahmed, Justin Carter particularly warranted high-level official mea culpas—remember him? He was another Texas teen who languished in jail for months because he made a joke on Facebook about school shootings. Nobody lifted a finger to help him, because, you see, he wasn’t one of the favored minorities to this administration. Don’t you dare argue that the distinction is that Justin made his “terroristic” comments in the context of a computer game, while Ahmed’s home-made clock was proof of special talents. Typical kids deserve fair treatment as much as budding geniuses.

Don’t

You

Dare.

In a 2013 post titled, If Only Justin Carter Were Black…Or Muslim…, I wrote Continue reading →

Another Day, Another Demonstration That Donald Trump Lacks The Character To Be A Crossing Guard, Much Less A World Leader. When Do His Supporters Become Sufficiently Embarrassed?

/ Jack Marshall / 58 Comments

The exchange  (from CNN, with my comments):

Questioner (in Trump T-shirt): We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims. You know our current president is one. You know he’s not even an American.

 Trump (chuckling): We need this question. This is the first question.

Questioner (Who appears to be the human incarnation of “The Family Guy”): Anyway, we have training camps growing where they want to kill us. That’s my question: When can we get rid of them?”

Trump: We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things. You know, a lot of people are saying that and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening. We’re going to be looking at that and many other things.

This is a character test that John McCain passed in 2008, when he sharply interrupted and corrected a woman who stated in a question that Obama was a Muslim, and that Bill Clinton aced by reprimanding a Truther during a post-9-11 appearance. Not Trump. He let a scurrilous accusation stand as well as the bigoted assertion that we should “get rid” of all Muslims. He displayed, as he often does, cowardice, common cause with bigots, and later, dishonesty, as he allowed his campaign to explain he “hadn’t heard the question.”

How pusillanimous, how low, how measly and pathetic. Yeccch, pooey, ick ick ick retch.

Of course, this is just throwing chum in the water for Democrats. How many Republicans will prove that they have the integrity and decency that this slime of a man so proudly lacks?  Let’s keep score.

What Do We Do About Steve Rannazzisi?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Comedian Steve Rannazzisi is in the midst of his 7th seasons starring on the popular TV show,“The League;” he has a one-hour special coming up on Comedy Central, and is increasingly in demand for commercial endorsements. How did he distinguish himself among the large pack of similarly young, edgy stand-up comics? Well, he’s good—but them a lot of them are good. He is, however, the only one who has a harrowing tale of being a survivor of the 9/11/2001 Twin Towers attack. For more than a decade he has been telling interviewers about his narrow escape, how he was working at Merrill Lynch’s offices on the 54th floor of the South Tower when the first plane struck the North Tower, and how he rushed  out of the building and into the street just before the second hijacked  plane slammed into the tower he just left. That was an epiphanal moment for Rannazzisi, he has said, and realizing that every second of life was precious and that he was saved for something more important than pushing paper, Rannazzisi quit his conventional day job to pursue a career as a comic.

That back story made Rannazzisi seem uniquely human, appealing, and on a mission. It wouldn’t have boosted his career if he didn’t have the talent to capitalize on it, but he did. To some extent, all of his success has been built on the foundation of the Twin Towers’ fall, so his fans and employers have a dilemma to face: he was lying. The New York Times checked out his account, and determined that the comedian had been working in Midtown on 9-11, never was employed by Merrill Lynch (which had no offices in either tower), and has been lying all these years. This week, Rannazzisi confessed and apologized, saying in part,

“I was not at the Trade Center on that day. I don’t know why I said this. This was inexcusable. I am truly, truly sorry….For many years, more than anything.I have wished that, with silence, I could somehow erase a story told by an immature young man. It only made me more ashamed. How could I tell my children to be honest when I hadn’t come clean about this? It was profoundly disrespectful to those who perished and those who lost loved ones. The stupidity and guilt I have felt for many years has not abated. It was an early taste of having a public persona, and I made a terrible mistake. All I can ask is for forgiveness.”

(Excellent apology: Level One on the Apology Scale.)

Now what? Continue reading →

The Ethics Verdict On Rep. Polis’s Apology For Recommending That Students Be Expelled For Sexual Assaults They Probably Didn’t Commit

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments
Apparently the demon Pazuzu and the Congressman from Boulder agree!

Apparently the demon Pazuzu and the Congressman from Boulder agree!

My rule: if you say something clearly and unequivocally with all the available evidence and defend it later in another forum, all your subsequent apology means is “Gee, I didn’t expect to get in so much trouble for that. I guess I better apologize and pretend I didn’t realize what I was doing.”

Rep. Polis of Colorado, a Democrat and clearly no student of American justice, inherited the wind with his statements in a Congressional hearing suggesting that the already manifestly unjust “predominance of the evidence standard” that the Obama administration forced on universities (you know, so women could get as many male students punished as sexual predators as possible) was too fair. First he said…

“I mean, if I was running [a college] I might say ‘well, you know, even if there’s a 20 or 30 percent chance that it happened I wouldn’t want … I would want to remove this individual. Why shouldn’t a private institution, in the interest in promoting a safe environment, use an even lower standard than a preponderance of evidence, like even a reasonable likeliness standard?”

Then he said…

“I mean, if there’s 10 people that have been accused and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, seems better to get rid of all 10 people. We’re not talking about depriving them of life or liberty, we’re talking about their transfer to another university.”

Later, interviewed over the phone by Reason well after the hearing, Polis was unambiguous, and extensively defended his statements in the hearing, with no equivocation or doubt. Ah, but he did not expect so many publications, pundits, bloggers and ethicists to have such an adverse reaction to, you know, discarding due process, fairness, and basic principles of justice just to make the Democratic Party’s man-hating feminist base happy. So he apologized.

Absurdly.

He began with the Full Pazuzu: Continue reading →