Ethics Alarms Award Nominee

Ethics Take-Down Of The Year: UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments
Wait, wait---I think I have it. A Japanese production of "The Mikado" would be a racist appropriation of a racist appropriation, right?

Wait, wait—I think I have it. A Japanese production of “The Mikado” would be a racist appropriation of a racist appropriation, right?

Here is a 2014 year-end Ethics Alarms Award I’m giving out now, with no worries that I will regret it later.

Salon, the online progressive magazine, published a classic in the revolting genre of self-righteous anti-white racism, a pathological screed titled “Why I Can’t Stand White Belly-Dancers.” (Full disclosure: I can’t stand any belly-dancers). If that per se title doesn’t set off a liberal editor’s ethics alarms, something is seriously wrong, but then, this Salon, a where the literate deranged of the Left hang out to plot the Socialist Revival. The foolish author devotes her article to the crackpot theory that in a pluralistic, free society, it is unethical “appropriation” for whites to engage in art that arose out of a non-white culture:

“Women I have confronted about this have said, “But I have been dancing for 15 years! This is something I have built a huge community on.” These women are more interested in their investment in belly dancing than in questioning and examining how their appropriation of the art causes others harm. To them, I can only say, I’m sure there are people who have been unwittingly racist for 15 years. It’s not too late. Find another form of self-expression. Make sure you’re not appropriating someone else’s.”

Had I encountered this cold, I would have taken it as a conservative parody of minority race-bullying. But I have to restrain my impulse to heap abuse on the author, Randa Jarrar, “a feminist of color,” because Prof. Volokh slices her and her idiocy into tiny, delicious shreds as well or better than I ever could. Here’ s yummy sample (read it all here): Continue reading →

Darling Ellen’s Deceptive Tweet For Samsung

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
Taken completely spontaneously using a

Taken completely spontaneously using a Galaxy S5 by Samsung. Get yours today!

Ellen DeGeneris is adorable, and as ideal a public face to place on the image of gay acceptance and same-sex marriage as you could concoct in a marketing strategy meeting. She’s funny, she’s friendly, she’s nice: to be threatened in any way by Ellen is to be the epitome of an irrational homophobe.. Her accumulated good  largely insulated her from the negative criticism she earned with a shockingly inept performance as this year’s host of the Academy Awards ceremony. She didn’t exactly make one long for Seth (“We saw your boobs!”) McFarland, last year’s oppressive MC,but watching her—any experienced performer could see the signs of a comic who knew she was bombing and had no idea what to do about it—was uncomfortable when it wasn’t deadly boring.

The one routine that seemed successful was DeGeneris’s successful effort to create the “most re-tweeted tweet of all time,” which she accomplished by dragooning Bradley Cooper, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Lawrence  Lupita Nyong’o, Kevin Spacey and Jared Leto in to take a selfie with her. It garnered over 3 million retweets at last count. But it was a set-up. This was not just a fun party stunt with friends, which is how it was represented to the audience and indeed to the stars themselves. No, the selfie was part of a very pricey deal between the Academy and Samsung, which sells the recently enhanced Galaxy S5 Ellen used to take the picture.

From the Wall Street Journal: Continue reading →

KABOOM! “Discrimination In Portugal,” The Sequel

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

exploding_head

First I checked, double-checked and triple-checked to see if this was a hoax. Then, once I was confident that it was true, I allowed my head to explode.

The headline to today’s head-blasting post requires a bit of explanation.

As a senior at Arlington High School (Massachusetts), I was editorial editor of the school newspaper, The Arlington High Chronicle. I had to choose, edit and publish the best of the submissions from the staff, and usually wrote the lead editorial myself. Well, one week I was up against a deadline and had nothing to fill an empty space on the page except a dog’s breakfast of miserably written options. Desperate, I decided to turn the crisis into an opportunity. I took the worst of the articles, cut out each line, mixed them up in a bowl and picked them out at random. Then I retyped the incomprehensible result, adding capitals and punctuation, and headlined it “Discrimination in Portugal.” That was how it was published. I always suspected that nobody read the editorials; this was my chance to find out if my suspicions were correct.

Nobody said a word. The paper got one letter from a student saying that he disagreed with the piece, but other than that, there was no evidence that anyone noticed that one of the editorials was complete gibberish.

Now this, from Nature:

“The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.

“Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers.” Continue reading →

The Perfect # 22: Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

jogger-arrestedI’ll grant you that Ted Nugent’s asinine efforts to minimize the unethical nature  of his uncivil words about President Obama by tweeting his views on 44 “more offensive” forms of conduct were a pretty good example of my least favorite rationalization in action. That rationalization is #22, the Comparative Virtue Excuse, or “There are worse things.” (There are always worse things, of course.) Never mind: Ted is playing in the minor leagues. Art Acevedo, Austin’s excuse-master  police chief, really knows how to swing a #22.

A bystander took a video of Austin police detaining and ultimately arresting jogger Amanda Jo Stephen after she crossed an intersection at a red light and failed to obey orders from an officer after he saw her jaywalking, because she was wearing headphones and couldn’t hear him. My view: the police over-reacted and used excessive force (she pulled her arm away when the officer stopped her, and he treated is as resisting arrest), but wearing head phones that make it impossible for you to hear what is around you is 1) dangerous, 2) stupid and 3) obnoxious. Continue reading →

“Killer Karaoke” And Cultural Corruption

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

In “Ricky’s Hawaii Vacation.” a famous episode of “I Love Lucy,” the Riotous Redhead was so desperate to win tickets for her neighbors (Fred and Ethel, or course) to accompany her and husband Ricky to Hawaii that she agreed to appear on a sadistic radio quiz show, in which the host, Freddie Freeman—played by the immortal Frank Nelson of Jack Benny skit fame (“Yyyyeeeeeeessssssss???”)—tortured his contestants with various indignities before awarding prizes. This was funny at the time, because it was a wild exaggeration of current TV quiz show programming. It was also funny, as with all slapstick, because the mayhem being inflicted was, the audience knew, part of a comedy skit and not real. A real Freddie using a contestant’s desperation for a prize as an excuse to degrade and humiliate her would have been unacceptably cruel…in the 1950’s.

Now, however, we have True TV’s new reality/game show, “Killer Karaoke.” It is a reality/game/ comedy show of shocking sadistic glee, the result of more than a half century of incremental slippage in standards of decency and public tolerance for cruelty. Take that episode of “I Love Lucy” and take it through a journey that includes stops at “Beat the Clock,” “Truth or Consequences,” “Let’s Make a Deal,” “Scare Tactics,” “Wipe Out,” “Fear Factor,” “Survivor,” the worst of the “let’s watch a human train wreck as desperate ex-celebrities beg for exposure and pay-checks” reality shows, and nightmare futuristic sci-fi movies like “The Hunger Games” and “The Running Man,” and “Killer Karaoke” is what you get.  The show has been hailed by TV critics as “brilliant.” I admit: it is difficult to watch it without laughing. So why are those ethics alarms going off in my head? Continue reading →

Groupon Celebrates National Incompetence and Ignorance With A Presidents Day Double KABOOM!

/ Jack Marshall / 76 Comments

Hamilton-exploding_head2

The Ethics Alarms KABOOM!—a special designation for ethics-related stories that make my head explode—has a new variation, thanks to Groupon: the repeating KABOOM!, triggered by two related KABOOMs in the same episode. My head has been exploding repeatedly since I learned about this late last night.

Hold on to your craniums, for here is a Groupon press release sent out earlier this week, the first of the KABOOM! twins:

Groupon Celebrates

Presidents Day

by Honoring

Alexander Hamilton!

Commemorate a man historically powerful enough to be on money with $10 towards $40 on a local purchase while they last!

CHICAGO, Feb 14, 2014 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Starting tomorrow, Groupon ( http://www.groupon.com ) (NASDAQ: GRPN) will be kicking off Presidents Day weekend by giving customers 10 dollars off 40 dollars when they purchase a deal for any local business. The $10 bill, as everyone knows, features President Alexander Hamilton — undeniably one of our greatest presidents and most widely recognized for establishing the country’s financial system.

Beginning Saturday, Feb. 15 at 9 am CST, shoppers will be able to redeem this offer by using the promo code “10OFF40LOCAL”, which isn’t very catchy, but neither was President Hamilton’s famous saying, “Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of fifty.”

President Hamilton is best known for the fiscal sensibilities that led him to author economic policies, establish a national bank and control taxes. Customers can honor our money-minded commander-in-chief and find deals by searching Groupon.com for local deals all through President’s Day weekend. Promo codes are limited, and more information can be found at: https://www.groupon.com/faq#faqs:content-269

The emphasis is mine, and I’m paying for every bit of it, let me tell you. My head is doing a terrific Dante’s Peak impression as I type this.

But that’s not all: here comes Groupon’s KABOOM! #2. Is the company embarassed? Chagrined? Are heads rolling? Oh, noooo! For when an enterprising American, one of the few who received a competent fourth grade education, was kind enough to alert Groupon to its unforgivable gaffe, this is what he received in return:

GOUPON IDIOTIt would all be hilarious if it were not so ominous….and unethical. Continue reading →

Thank You, Washington Post “Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler For Being The Best Ethics Alarms Ethics Dunce EVER!

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

I must say, this is the sort of thing that makes the heart of an ethicist, or at least this ethicist’s, swell with joy as the strains of “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life At Last I Found You!” take control of his brain, and the song bursts, full-blown and soaring, from his lips…You’ll have to excuse me…

Glenn Kessler’s “Fact Checker” column in today’s Sunday Post is a cornucopia of wonderful topics, including…

  • The dishonest conduct of media “fact-checkers” in using their columns not to dispute facts but to take issue with opinions, usually on partisan grounds, with which they disagree.
  • The misuse of “lies” and “lying” to describe either mistakes or opinions, neither of which are lies.
  • People who lie themselves while accusing others of lies.
  • Fact-checkers who misstate facts while accusing others of misstating facts.
  • The common misunderstanding that “consent” makes a boss’s sexual relationship with his or her subordinate ethically acceptable.
  • Rand Paul!
  • Bill Clinton!
  • Rand Paul attacking Bill Clinton!
  • ANYONE defending Bill Clinton’s conduct involving Monica Lewinsky.
  • The news media’s already evident intent to defend against all attacks, direct or oblique, on the liberal establishment’s choice for President in 2016, Hillary “The First Enabler” Clinton.

It just doesn’t get much better than this.

Let us begin with the root of Kessler’s  column and his inspiration, this statement by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky): Continue reading →

Unethical Tweet of the Month: Actress Eva Longoria

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

 

Longoria tweet

Emilio Vicente, a gay illegal immigrant from Guatemala who is a candidate for  student body president at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is now facing a run-off after receiving 41.08 percent of the vote.

He may or may not have been helped in his quest for the position by the above unsolicited tweet by actress Eva Longoria of “Desperate Housewives” fame. As far as anyone knows, she has absolutely no connection to Vicente or Chapel Hill. However, she knows he will be a “great leader” and is inherently a better candidate and more qualified than opponent Andrew Powell, who has the damning and disqualifying characteristics of being white, straight, law abiding and an American citizen. Vicente, however, is supremely qualified to lead because he is Latino, gay and illegal.

This is pure, undeniable bigotry, but politically correct, left-endorsed bigotry, so Longoria, who was the Democratic Party’s embarrassing 2008 co-campaign chair-–“war on women,” don’t you know—will never be criticized for it by the morally superior progressive establishment,  though her tweet is as indefensible and un-American as it is legalistically stupid.

I am officially declaring war on racist, bigoted, stupid women….like Eva Longoria.

_________________________

Pointer: Chris Plante

Sources: Daily Caller, Campus Reform,

 

Rubin-Jackson Revisited: Gibbs’ Rules #6 and The Harmful Apology

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
Sam Rubin is no Jethro Gibbs. Unfortunately.

Sam Rubin is no Jethro Gibbs. Unfortunately.

Samuel Jackson’s reckless and unjustified attack on KTLA entertainment reporter Sam Rubin (which, incredibly, continues to be misrepresented by most of the news media, internet and social media) is an excellent example of how relatively trivial incidents can teach important ethics lessons. One of those lessons I did not discuss in the previous post about this episode involves the phenomenon of the gratuitous or needless apology.

To briefly recap: Rubin’s celebrity guest, Samuel L. Jackson, falsely and obnoxiously accused Rubin of confusing him with another black actor, Laurence Fishburne, thus asserting that Rubin 1) thought all blacks looked alike 2) was impliedly a bigot or racist as a result, 3) was  unprepared  for the interview, and 4) was unprofessional and should lose his job. Rubin apologized twice, first during Jackson’s unprovoked rant (for Rubin had not confused him with Fishburne, and it was Jackson who was confused and unprepared for the interview), and later, to everyone else, after headlines that his “racist mistake” had justly provoked Jackson were being repeated everywhere. Rubin said:

“We start right now with the beauty and the occasional pain of live television. First and foremost, I do know who Samuel L. Jackson is. I’ve interviewed him several times over the years, but never quite like the conversation we just had. I indicated to Samuel that I’d seen him during the Super Bowl, and he thought that I had confused him with the commercial Laurence Fishburne had done for a car company. Of course a “Captain America” ad had also run during the Super Bowl, but I immediately felt so dumb, I didn’t bring that up — and he gave me the shellacking that was well deserved. I pride myself on the fact — that unlike a lot of people who do this kind of work — more often than not, I really do know what I’m talking about. But I didn’t 30 minutes ago, and I’m really embarrassed about it, and I very much apologize to Samuel L. Jackson and anyone else who was offended for what was a very amateur mistake.”

This kind of apology, a coerced, false apology for conduct that warrants no apology, regret or forgiveness at all, does not appear on the Ethics Alarms Apology Scale, because while it looks and sounds like an apology, it is something else entirely. The Apology Scale ranks the intent, sincerity, honesty and effectiveness of apologies for actual wrongdoing or harm. The coerced and false apology is wrongdoing that causes harm, and is the product of wrongdoing itself. Continue reading →

Samuel L. Jackson Was Wrong and Behaved Like A Jerk: Why Is Sam Rubin The One Who Is Apologizing?

/ Jack Marshall / 64 Comments

Sam Rubin, entertainment reporter for KTLA in Los Angeles, is being ridiculed far and wide for “mistaking Samuel L. Jackson for Laurence Fishburne – while interviewing Jackson on live TV!”

Bulletin: That’s not what occurred.

Jackson was wrong, Rubin was correct, and Jackson’s long riff, funny as it was, about how white guys can’t tell black actors apart was both a cheap shot and viciously unfair. Rubin made no such mistake. Jackson owes him an apology. Watch this  trailer:

Did you see that black actor in two places in the video? That was Samuel L. Jackson, not Laurence Fishburne. That video di run during the Super Bowl, and was obviously what Rubin was referring to when he began his question with “You’re working for Marvel…” Marvel Comics, the creators of Captain America, in which Laurence Fishburne has no role. Continue reading →