Ethics Alarms Award Nominee

Zeynep Tufekci Thinks We Should Trust Journalists To Protect Us From Mass Murderers Like Elliot Rodger, And Yet Restrain Themselves From “Protecting” Us From Other Things They Don’t Want Us To Know. And She Is A Fool.

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments
Zeynep Tufekci: so thoughtful, so gentle, so concerned, so dangerous, so terribly, terribly WRONG.

Zeynep Tufekci: so thoughtful, so gentle, so concerned, so dangerous, so terribly, terribly WRONG.

Zeynep Tufekci is a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, an assistant professor at the School of Information and Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, and a faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She wants  journalists to censor the news and information they publish for our own good, to protect us from mad killers like Elliot Rodger. Because she has surfaced again, as before, to spread her “solution” to mass killings, this well-meaning, sensitive, smug and utterly deluded academic is once again getting respectful quotes, interviews and nods of approval from the likes of The Atlantic, Vox and National Public Radio. Since the hysterics can’t seem to take down the Second Amendment, now they want to use the latest mass shooting (it was a stabbing too) to wound the principles underlying First.

I have been waiting for someone with more influence than me to point out how dangerous and wrong-headed her “solutions” are. So far, nothing. I guess I have to do it myself.

Tufekci laid out her plan in detail two years ago, and it is being resurrected now. In an article for the Atlantic, she opined that the media is complicit in mass murders like the Santa Barbara shooting, because such deranged killers are primarily seeking fame and publicity as they exit this cruel world in blood and bullets. For the sake of time and argument, let us accept her dubious premise that this is indeed the driving motive behind these incidents. (I am sure that this is the motive in some such cases; it is certainly not the motive in all of them, as with the University of Texas tower shooter Charles Whitman.)

Here were her five recommendations: Continue reading →

Unethical Ad Of The Month: Kurl-On Mattresses

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

A phenomenon I have never understood and will never understand is the destructive herd mentality in group decision-making. Yes, I know there is peer pressure and ass-kissing and strong motivation to go along with the crowd, but when an organization is considering something mind-blowingly stupid, including actions that should set off every ethics alarm within 20 miles, why is it that nobody, not a single person, steps up and says, “What??? Are you all insane? You can’t do this, and here’s why: it’s stupid! It’s obviously stupid. Think about it for ten seconds, and you’ll know it’s stupid, and will be a disaster for everyone.”

But nobody says it. So we get the Titanic without enough life boats, and Pickett’s Charge, and Lawn Darts and a sequel to “The Exorcist” featuring James Earl Jones dressed as a giant locust. On a slightly less epic scale, you get this mattress ad, by the Kurl-On company in India :

Mattress ad

Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: NBA Clippers Owner Donald Sterling (And Yes, I Mean It)

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments
When you think about it, the champion in this fight would almost have to be repulsive for a victory to mean anything.

When you think about it, the champion in this fight would almost have to be repulsive for a victory to mean anything.

The other shoe dropped, and however it may be intended, it’s an ethical shoe. Donald Sterling now says that he’ll refuse to pay the 2.5 million dollar fine levied on him by NBA Commissioner Silver and his fellow owners for what he said in his own bedroom.

Good. I was waiting for this, and hoping that would be his course of action. Ironically, a good, compliant, progressive billionaire, and one who was not, unlike Sterling, a repulsive asshole, who was nationally embarrassed as Sterling has been, would crawl quietly into a hole, periodically send out big checks and mea culpas to Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the NAACP, and in the process, take  big, bloody chunks out of our freedom to think and speak freely, and our personal privacy. Sterling is doing the right thing, although it is going to cause him to be even more vilified by the media and even more assailed as the personification of racism than he has been already—and that has already been disproportionate to his “crime.”

Fighting is also going to be expensive. Never mind. It is revolting to write it, or even think it, but he is fighting for all of us. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day #2: “Animal Ethics: Now THIS Is An Unethical Veterinarian”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Sid the dog

Rarely has a post generated as many defenders of the target of my critique as the recent Ethics Alarms commentary regarding the Fort Worth, Texas arrest of Dr. Lou Tierce, an aging veterinarian who, according to Jamie and Marian Harris, agreed to euthanize their dog Sid—that’s Sid above— based on Tierce’s diagnosis, but instead kept the dog caged in filthy and inhumane conditions for six months, until a whistleblower on his staff alerted the Harrises. 

Here is a portion of the arrest report, regarding another dog at the same clinic:

“The dog was lying on the floor twitching in pain with one leg missing, one leg dislocated and two dislocated shoulders. I then spoke to the suspect, Dr. Millard Lucien Tierce. He told me that the injured black and white collie was his dog. He said he had given water and food to the dog but had not given any medical treatment to the dog. He said he had not euthanized the dog even though in his professional opinion he knew it needed to be.

Dr. Morris, DVM, of the Fort Worth Animal Clinic, arrived on the scene and performed an evaluation of the dog. He informed me that in his professional opinion the animal was a victim of animal cruelty and the conditions of the clinic were deplorable.

Animal Cruelty Investigator R. Jacobs spoke to Dr. Millard Tierce. Tierce told him he knew the dog needed to be euthanized but he did not allow it. He signed over ownership of his dog to the Fort Worth Animal Control and the Fort Worth Animal Control took the dog to their facility.

On April 29, 2014, Dr. M.L. Morris, DVM examined the black and white border collie. Dr. Morris concluded that the dog was emaciated, had severe mouth disease, cataracts, abnormal overall health, non-ambulatory bottom of foot missing, had a degenerative neurological and untreatable disease and should have been euthanized when originally accepted for treatment. The dog was then euthanized by the city of Fort Animal Shelter.

Due to the aforementioned facts and information being related to me as a result of this investigation, I have reason to believe and do believe that Millard Lucien Tierce, did commit the offense of Cruelty to Non-Livestock Animals, against the laws of the State of Texas as set forth in the Penal Code; 42.092 (b)(l).”

Nonetheless, several loyal clients of Tierce’s clinic wrote to protest. They had entrusted their pets to him for many years, and he was clearly incapable of any kind of cruelty to Sid or any animal. The real villains were the Harrises. Or the tech who alerted them that their dog was still alive and being used for blood transfusions. Just wait, they assured me, when all the facts come out, this veterinarian from Hell will be exonerated. That the only way this could possibly occur would be for it to be proven that what the police thought was Sid was actually a hologram didn’t deter the doctor’s defenders at all.

Luckily, commenter Candy Roberts, a veterinary technician, put their arguments in perspective. Here is her much appreciated Comment of the Day on the post, Animal Ethics: Now THIS Is An Unethical Veterinarian: Continue reading →

Harvard’s Black Mass: An Ethics Problem With No Answer

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

 

Impossible.

Impossible.

P versus NP…the Hodge conjecture…the Riemann hypothesis…the Yang–Mills existence and mass gap The Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness. The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. These are some of the unsolved problems of mathematics, but they are child’s play compared to the unsolvable ethics dilemma concocted at Harvard College.

Is Harvard right to allow students to hold a historic recreation of a Black Mass? Is Harvard wrong? Is it unethical for the students to engage in the project? Is it gratuitously insulting to religion, particularly Catholicism? Does it even matter if it is?

To bring you up to date:

The Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club is planning to recreate a “satanic black mass” on campus next week, enacted by Satanic Temple, a New York-based, Satanist group that engages in outrageous displays to draw attention to First Amendment rights. “Our purpose is not to denigrate any religion or faith, which would be repugnant to our educational purposes, but instead to learn and experience the history of different cultural practices,” the HECSC said in a statement.

The statement lays the foundation for a hung jury in seeking an ethics verdict. Since the Black Mass was originally devised to denigrate the holy mass, saying that recreating the mass isn’t intended to denigrate religion is the kind of thing Captain Kirk used to say to evil, logic-bound computers to make smoke come out of their hard drives. “It-is-true-but- it’s-not-true-but-nothing-can-be-true-and-not-true–KABOOM!“ Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: Tina Brown

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“The Monica Lewinsky confessional in Vanity Fair brings back a torrent of unfond memories of the appalling cast of tabloid gargoyles who drove the scandal. Remember them? Treacherous thatched-roof-haired drag-queen Linda Tripp, with those dress-for-success shoulder pads? Cackling, fact-lacking hack Lucianne Goldberg, mealy-mouthed Pharisee Kenneth Starr—the whole buzzing swarm of legal, congressional and gossip industry flesh flies, feasting on the entrails. And, of course, hitting “send” on each new revelation that no one else would publish, the solitary, perfectly named Matt Drudge, operating in pallid obsession out of his sock-like apartment in Miami… They were the face of the future. The things that shocked us then—the illicitly taped conversations, the wholesale violations of elementary privacy, the globally broadcast sexual embarrassments, all the low-life disseminated malice—is now the communications industry as it operates every minute of every day.”

—-Daily Beast publisher Tina Brown, in an essay titled “How Monica Lewinsky Changed the Media”

Tina Brown, revealing the ugliness beneath...

Tina Brown, revealing the ugliness beneath…

This is an unethical statement for the ages. It launches an dishonestly titled piece with an unethical premise and unethical motives, virtually every phrase in it is despicable, and it reveals the dearth of admirable values not only within Brown, but within the millions of people who think like her, many of whom she and her cohorts corrupted.

In Abby Mann’s important drama, “Judgment at Nuremberg” (it had three forms of presentation: TV drama, film, and finally, stage), based on the third and final stage of the post World War II war crimes trials devoted to trying the Nazi judges, a vulnerable female witness and victim of Nazi justice is harshly cross-examined about an infamous case at the heart of the trials. Her humiliation is interrupted when one of the defendant judges (in the film, Bert Lancaster), stands to halt the inquisition, asking, “Are you going to do this again?”

The answer clearly coming from the Bill and Hillary Clinton Ethics Amnesia Team is clearly “Yes! It worked before, why not now?”

Monica was responsible for the whole impeachment train wreck, you see, and all that followed. That was Hillary’s position (once the original cover lie that it was all the fabrication of a vast right-wing conspiracy became unsustainable, with that stained dress and all), and as outrageous and audaciously despicable as it is, that it is still what the corrupt, corrupted and corrupting supporters of these two Machiavellian blights on our culture and politics are determined to make Americans believe, no matter how much bending of history, facts, logic, fairness, decency and responsibility it requires. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Judge Jeanine Howard (Who Is Also The Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month, An Ethics Dunce, And Pretty Much A Blight On The Justice System And American Society In General)

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

judge Howard

“There are rape cases that deserve life. There are rape cases that deserve 20 years. Every now and then you have one of those that deserve probation. This is one of those and I stand by it.”

—-Texas District Judge Jeanine Howard explaining her stunningly lenient sentence of probation and community service—“250 hours of community service at a rape crisis center” !—for a confessed rapist of a 14-year old girl at her school.

The sentence  was not merely lenient but probably illegal, and a it seems likely that the sentence will be altered by another judge. Nonetheless, this kind of result, based on the judge’s assessment that the victim was promiscuous and had been pregnant (which she denies) will certainly make other rape victims think twice before they report the crime. Bobby Villareal, executive director of the Dallas Area Rape Crisis  Center, told reporters…

“This is an example of why people don’t come forward and report their sexual assaults because they are not only victimized at the time but the continuing game of shame and blame. They are put on trial again in the judiciary and the media. The things that were said were outrageous and some of them were actually untrue that were reported.”

Judge Howard seemed to be making up the law and sentencing guidelines on the fly. The rapist, 20-year old Sir Young, never denied that he had raped the girl, or that she hadn’t strenuously told him to stop. “Consent is not an issue and it wasn’t an issue because he admitted he didn’t have her consent,”  prosecutor Andrea Moseley said. “When consent is not an issue, a victim’s past is never appropriate for comment. That’s my problem with it as a woman and as a prosecutor. I was certainly disappointed in the message I think it sends to the community.”

The community can send a message back, as Judge Howard is up for re-election in the fall, but it won’t be easy. A Democrat, she is running unopposed. Continue reading →

Animal Ethics: Now THIS Is An Unethical Veterinarian

/ Jack Marshall / 116 Comments
Believe it or not, Dean Jones was a NICE vet compared to Dr. Tierce...

Believe it or not, Dean Jones was a NICE vet compared to Dr. Tierce…

Yechh. This story reads like a sick version of “Beethoven,” which, as all you Charles Grodin fans will recall, featured a villainous veterinarian (Dean Jones, no longer cute) who stole pets to use for medical research.

In Fort Worth, Texas, Jamie and Marian Harris took their dog, a 5-year-old Leonberger named Sid, to the well-respected  Camp Bowie Animal Clinic, to be treated for what they thought was a minor health issue. After undergoing treatment,  Sid developed trouble walking and the veterinarian, Dr. Lou Tierce, told the Harrises that  their dog  had an untreatable spinal condition that would get worse, cause him increasing pain, and ultimately cripple him completely. The family was told the best option was to have Sid euthanized. The couple and their young son agreed, said their goodbyes and authorized the clinic to bury Sid on the vet’s farm.

Six months later, a veterinarian technician named Mary Brewer, who worked at Camp Bowie, contacted the Harrises to inform them that Sid was alive and being kept alive in a cage, surrounded by his urine and feces, so he could be used for blood transfusions to treat other dogs.
Continue reading →

All Aboard The Sterling Train Wreck: The Foolish, The Grandstanders, The Dishonest And The Irresponsible

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Hypocrites

The question is, which is which?

I’ll let you puzzle it out; I’ll be busy retching:

And now, the latest and deplorable passengers on this distasteful Ethics Train Wreck…

Sen. Harry Reid

Reid saluted NBA Commissioner Adam Silver for his “work to swiftly move to stamp out bigotry in its ranks,” as if that had any thing at all to do with what Silver was doing. Reid’s endorsement, however, places a high elected official’s stamp of approval on the proposition that those with unpopular ideas and biases should be punished and have their property taken away from them. Reid said that the league has set a new standard for how professional sports leagues should respond to racism. Of course, Sterling did nothing racist at all, not did he attempt to, or publicly announce such intent. The “new standard” that Reid is applauding is economic penalties for non-conforming beliefs. Finally, Reid attempted to make the absurd parallel to the Washington Redskins’ controversial name: “How long will the NFL continue to do nothing — zero — as one of its teams bears a name that inflicts so much pain on Native Americans?” Reid asked Continue reading →

Jim Ardis, Mayor of Peoria, Uses The Police To Crush A Social Media Critic, But Never Mind, It’s Not Important Because He’s Not Racist

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments
"OK, we know you have tweets in there! We're coming in..."

“OK, we know you have tweets in there! We’re coming in…”

This story is obviously trivial, because the news media doesn’t think it’s worth getting upset about. After all, it doesn’t involve race:

“PEORIA — Police searched a West Bluff house Tuesday and seized phones and computers in an effort to unmask the author of a parody Twitter account that purported to be Mayor Jim Ardis. The account — known as @Peoriamayor on the popular social media service that limits entries to 140 characters — already had been suspended for several weeks when up to seven plainclothes police officers executed a search warrant about 5:20 p.m. at 1220 N. University St. Three people at the home were taken to the Peoria Police Department for questioning. Two other residents were picked up at their places of employment and taken to the station, as well. One resident — 36-year-old Jacob L. Elliott — was booked into the Peoria County Jail on charges of possessing 30 to 500 grams of marijuana and possessing drug paraphernalia, but no arrests were made in connection with the Twitter account.”

The Twitter account was obviously a parody, if not an especially deft or clever one. After all, one would have to be a hopeless doofus, and an unusually dim one at that, to believe that the mayor of any city, even Toronto’s ridiculous Rob Ford, would happily tweet about his own drug use, crimes and corruption like the Twitter avatar of the Peoria mayor did.

Yet here was Mayor Ardis’s justification to reporters for his jaw-dropping abuse of power:

“I still maintain my right to protect my identity is my right. Are there no boundaries on what you can say, when you can say it, who you can say it to? You can’t say (those tweets) on behalf of me. That’s my problem. This guy took away my freedom of speech.”

Uh-huh. Show me a how “this guy” broke any law that justifies a police raid, you unbelievably arrogant, incompetent fascist.

Some observations: Continue reading →