Ethics Dunces

The NFL Has No Problem With A Player On The Field Pronouncing the Entire Nation Racist, But Won’t Tolerate A Player Pretending To Shoot A Bow And Arrow. Please Explain.

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

nfl-bowarrow

The explanation is simple. The National Football League has no values, just assorted and unrelated reactions dictated by money, expediency, fear of activist groups, and stupidity.

This was the most recent example:

Washington Redskins cornerback Josh Norman was flagged after his  fourth-quarter interception Sunday  in a win over the Browns. He pretended to shoot an arrow from a mimed bow–veteran MLB relief pitcher Fernando Rodney has done this after every save his entire career–and was penalized for the unsportsmanlike foul of ” shooting a bow and arrow,” as announced by the ref. Fox analyst Mike Pereira explained to the TV audience that “Shooting a bow and arrow is just like simulating shooting guns. It’s a foul and it’s not allowed.”

The NFL refused to allow the Dallas Cowboys to commemorate the Dallas officers shot in a Black Lives Matter fueled massacre of police. Then it announced its support of the ridiculous Colin Kaepernick’s grandstanding protest of the National Anthem because, he says, “the United States systematically oppresses African-Americans.”  Next, it submits the name of Darren Sharper—one of those oppressed African Americans, by the way— as a nominee for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He is serving 20 years in prison for drugging and raping women. Now it deems a bow-and-arrow gesture as so offensive to the sport that it requires a major game penalty.

Meanwhile, the league still officially denies that the concussions it routinely inflicts on its players are the cause of their brain damage when they cease to be able to function and slide into depression and dementia in middle age.

Those who continue to support the NFL knowing all of this (you put money in the league’s coffers by just watching the games) are allowing their own values and their children’s to be compromised and corrupted in exchange for a few visceral thrills.

 

Ethics Dunce: Kanye West

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

kanye-west-meadows-2016

I need a new designation for people like Kanye West, and am open to suggestions. Noting that in any specific episode that West is an ethics dunce is entirely superfluous and stating what was undeniable and generally known long ago. This is a man who accused George W. Bush of wanting to see black citizens suffer in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and did so on national TV. This is a man who interrupted a fellow entertainer’s acceptance speech for an industry award to announce to the world that she didn’t deserve it. This is a man who has inflicted the names “North” and “Saint” on his helpless children. He, like Donald Trump (whom I would vote for as President over Kanye West, so don’t say I’m #NeverTrump), belongs to that rare but growing class of celebrities for whom  civil descriptions are inadequate. Only labels like “asshole” come close to describing them. In the West’s extreme case, even that is an insult to assholes.

West gave us another view of his near total ethics vacuum when he abruptly ended his October 2 performance at the Meadows Festival in Queens, New York City. He had just learned that his wife, Kim Kardashian, was robbed at gunpoint in her Paris hotel room. West, who was headlining the festival, went onstage (late, as usual) at a little after 8:45 p.m. He was scheduled to perform until 10 p.m., but walked off the stage at 9:40, halfway through the song “Heartless,” announcing, “I’m sorry, family emergency, I have to stop the show.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Northern Michigan University

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments
"...but just shut the hell up abut it, or we'll have to suspend you. Love, The Administration"

“…but just shut the hell up about it, or we’ll have to suspend you.
Love, The Administration”

Episodes like this, coming out of the wreckage we call higher education, raise at least three troubling questions:

1. If universities are this ignorant of the principle of free speech, why is anyone surprised that our younger generations are so willing to sacrifice it for political ends?

2. How can institutions run by administrators this immune to basic ethical decision-making reasoning be trusted to competently educate their students?

3. How many equally outrageous policies do schools inflict on their students that we don’t hear about?

Northern Michigan University installed threatens students with discipline if they share suicidal thoughts with other students.

FIRE, as usual, is on the case, and has written to the school to explain to them why this is abusive and a flagrant First Amendment violation. One student who had received a warning about her discussing about her suicidal feelings with her friends on campus, and was told not to have such conversations. She asked for clarification from Associate Dean of Students Mary Brundage, writing,

Just to clarify, the email said that if I spoke to students about it that it would create a distraction—which could create disciplinary action against me. . . . I was also wondering if I respond to concerned people, is that enough to get me in trouble? I do not want to worry others by not responding and I do not want to have the possibility of getting expelled by reaching out to my friends during this emotionally trying time and I see the possibility of misunderstanding or getting more concerned.

Continue reading →

Horrified Observations On Libertarian Presidential Candidate Gary Johnson’s Latest Disgrace

/ Jack Marshall / 58 Comments

As you can see in the video above [Trigger warning: if seeing a former governor who presumed to place himself before the nation as a qualified leader making an epic fool of himself on live television upsets you, as it does me—heck, those sitcom episodes when characters try to do stand-up and bomb horribly, like Cliff did on “Cheers” make me leave the room—don’t watch it. I mean it.], Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, the designated “none of the above” for voters who believe Donald Trump has nothing to offer but chaos and Hillary Clinton is more untrustworthy than Richard Nixon (both correct assessments), went on “Hardball” with Chris Matthews and made Sara Palin look like Henry Kissinger, and Rick Perry seem like Carl Sagan.

During the interview on MSNBC yesterday, Chris Matthews asked Johnson, who sat beside his running mate, former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld,”Who’s your favorite foreign leader?”  “Name one foreign leader that you respect and look up to,” Matthews asked. “Anybody.” Johnson looked like he had been asked for the dewpoint of feldspar.

“Mine was Shimon Peres,” V.P. Weld offered unhelpfully, picking the former Israeli leader who just died from a stroke. “I’m talking about living,” Matthews shot back, focusing on Johnson.

“Anywhere. Any continent. Canada, Mexico, Europe, over there, Asia, South America, Africa: Name a foreign leader that you respect,” Matthews said as Johnson continued to freeze. “I guess I’m having an Aleppo moment,” Johnson said, pathetically.

“But I’m giving you the whole world!” Matthews said. “Anybody in the world you like. Anybody. Pick any leader!”

“The former president of Mexico,”  was the best Johnson could come up with. Whichever one he meant, by the way, he’s massive crook,  like all Mexican presidents.

“Which one?” Matthews pressed.

“I’m having a brain freeze,” Johnson whined,

as Weld began going through the list  of recent Mexican presidents.

“Fox! Thank you!” Johnson said when he finally heard the name of former Mexican president Vicente Fox, who Johnson probably vaguely recalled from the evident mush he calls a brain because Fox had just made the news by mocking Donald Trump’s debate performance.

Strike Three. Strikes one and two were doubles off the Green Monster by comparison.

Good lord.

Observations:

  • “How does somebody think there going to run for President and be this ignorant? Completely ignorant?” asked Joe Scarborough on “Morning Joe,” today. “He could not name a leader — living or dead — past or present! My children can answer those questions!”

Good points all. The answer is that Johnson is uninformed. Johnson is lazy. Johnson clutches under pressure. Johnson is not taking his own candidacy seriously. Johnson is a joke, but the proper response to it is weeping. At a time when the two parties have completely failed their responsibility to the American people by presenting unfit, untrustworthy candidates that the majority of the nation dislike, and the need for a viable third party option has never  been greater, does Johnson study like a monk, prepare like a champion, and devote himself to being able to dazzle even the most skeptical voter with his expertise and mastery of issues? No! He apparently decides to boycott newspaper and TV news, and devote himself to Pokemon Go, or something. Surely he’s been doing something?

Diligence, responsibility, competence, respect for the nation and the public: Johnson has flunked all of these, spectacularly and beyond defending. Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Officials Of The Month: The Charlotte City Council

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

ziannaoliphant

Awww!

 9-year-old Zianna Oliphant spoke at a Charlotte City Council meeting about race, police violence, and reform. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and, of course, the video “went viral.” She has kept talking, expert on urban governance and law enforcement that she is, since she earned her fifteen minutes of fame. “I was just feeling like what the police are doing to us, just because of our skin, is not right,” the fourth-grader told NBC.

Of course, she knows absolutely nothing about the issues involved. She has no idea whether what happened to Keith Lamont Scott was ” done to us, just because of our skin” or done to him, because he threatened a police officer. (It was done to him, by a black cop, who, if he was doing it because of the color of Zianna’s skin needs to be put on a suicide watch.)

All Zianna knows is what she has been taught, and based on what she said, she has been indoctrinated by her family and community into be a police-fearing, anti-white racist. Now that this is happening to the black children of Charlotte and elsewhere is important information that should be part of the discussion, but that’s not how her statements are being used. She is being exploited by adults who know that their opinions become more persuasive coming out of the mouths of babes, and she is being accorded undeserved  moral authority because she is young and innocent. Zianna also has a fourth grade education and maybe six years of life experience. Wow.

What can such an individual contribute to a public policy debate so complex that elected officials, scholars and public policy experts don’t know how to proceed? Nothing. N-O-T-H-I-N-G. A nine year-old girl, even the most brilliant nine-year-old girl who has ever lived, is useless. A City Council that would waste deliberation and consideration of  critical issues on the testimony of children, however moving,  should just hand in their resignations en masse. They are incompetent and a disgrace.

In the alternative, Charlotte should give voting privileges to anyone over the age of five. Maybe they will. Continue reading →

The Warped Values Of NFL Fans

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

nfl-poll

Yahoo Sports posted an infographic on polling results regardingthe ongoing national anthem protests following the example of  San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Part of it shows that 44 percent of NFL fans would likely stop watching NFL games if more players protest the movement.

This suggests that 44% of NFL fans have more  ethical objections to a sport that panders to hypocritical, Black Lives Matter-supporting dim bulbs like Kaepernick than to the fact that the same sport pays young men to cripple themselves while raking in billions and denying that there is a “causal link” between the concussions it routinely inflicts on players and the debilitating brain disease that is being found in autopsies of more former NFL players than not.

This month a class-action lawsuit was filed against Pop Warner, the nation’s largest youth football league. It alleges that the organization knowingly put its young players in danger by ignoring the risks of head trauma. The complaint also accuses USA Football, the youth football arm of the N.F.L. that  creates football helmet safety standards, of failing to protect football-playing kids from the long-term consequences of repeated head hits, while ignoring medical research (as described in the documentary “League of Denial” and the film “Concussion”) that has raised serious concern about whether football is a safe sport, especially for children.

The suit was filed in federal court in California by Kimberly Archie and Jo Cornell, whose sons played football as youngsters and were found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE, a neurological condition linked to repeated blows to the heads. In March, Pop Warner settled a lawsuit with a family whose son played Pop Warner football and later committed suicide. He was found to have CTE. Continue reading →

Unethical Mother Of The Month: Feminist Writer Jodi Allard

/ Jack Marshall / 50 Comments
Send two of these to Ms. Allard's sons. Maybe add, "by my mother."

Send two of these to Ms. Allard’s sons. Maybe add, “by my mother.”

There’s nothing quite like using a nationally followed publication to declare your own sons misogynist, insensitive pigs because they have not properly absorbed the feminist cant they have apparently been fed their whole lives. Jodi got her revenge by publicly attacking them in a Washington Post column.

Allard writes in part…

I never imagined I would raise boys who would become men like these. Men who deny rape culture, or who turn a blind eye to sexism. Men who tell me I’m being too sensitive or that I don’t understand what teenage boys are like. “You don’t speak out about this stuff, mom,” they tell me with a sigh. “It’s just not what teenagers do.”My sons are right about that much. Teenage boys, by and large, don’t speak out about slut-shaming or rape culture. They don’t call each other out when they make sexist jokes or objectify women. It’s too uncomfortable to separate themselves from the pack so they continue to at least dip their toes into toxic masculinity. In their discomfort with action, they remain passive, and their passivity perpetuates the same broken system that sentenced Brock Turner to only six months in jail…No matter how often my sons remind me that they are good men, they don’t understand that being “good” is an action. You don’t earn the honor by simply shaking your head when you hear about Turner and other rapists being given lenient sentences. You earn it by acting to end rape culture, and by doing it even when it’s awkward and uncomfortable as hell.

The rest of her column proceeds accordingly. One of her sons, we learned in a previous article, is clinically depressed and has been suicidal in the past. I bet being called out by his mother in a newspaper read and quoted coast to coast is just what the doctor ordered. Both sons are teenagers—minors. To their mother, however, they are just convenient symbols of woman-abusing mankind, and fair game for shame and denigration. Continue reading →

Why It’s Unethical For Journalists To “Fact Check” Donald Trump—Especially CNN Journalists

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Donald Trump

In Donald Trump’s meaningless statement yesterday, which was covered by the news media as if it was the revelation of the millennium, he  officially conceded that Barack Obama is a natural born U.S. citizen. He also used the silly media attention to drag out his announcement into a long campaign infomercial for which he didn’t have to pay a cent. Nice, and it serves the broadcast media right for giving any significance to a five-year-long trolling exercise.

Trump used the phony controversy over President Obama’s birth certificate to get publicity five years ago, because he is shameless. That’s all. Did he really think Obama was born in Kenya? Oh, who knows? He is an idiot, after all. Then again, he is a skilled professional troll. Whether he believed it or not, Trump used the issue to get attention then, and now has used his 180 degree reversal to get attention now. Obviously nothing has changed that would justify this flip-flop if he believed what he insisted was true for five years. A more transparently cynical and insincere retraction I cannot conceive. Who cares what Trump says he believes at any point, about anything?

But I digress. What really seemed to enrage the journalists who have embraced Rationalizations #28. The Revolutionary’s Excuse: “These are not ordinary times,” and #31. The Troublesome Luxury: “Ethics is a luxury we can’t afford right now” to anoint themselves as full-time volunteer members of the Hillary for President campaign, was that Trump said this:

“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it.”

Quoth the thoroughly partisan news media,

“ARRGH!!!!:

Continue reading →

Thanks For The Memories, Greta Friedman: This Encore’s For You!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

kiss

I was puzzled about why an old 2012 Ethics Alarms post was suddenly getting heavy traffic today, and until I read that GretaFriedman had died. She was the nurse famously kissed by a never-identified celebrating sailor on V-J Day, frozen in history forever thanks to a now iconic  Life magazine photograph.  I had written about Greta, that moment, and the determination of a lot of tunnel-visioned feminists and sexual-terrorists to turn what was a beautiful thing into something ugly and sinister in the distorted world they see through their shit-tinted glasses. The post was called “The Times Square Kiss, and Feminist Blogs’ Fanatic Crime Against Joy.”

I’m always a bit nervous when I go back and read old posts I’ve forgotten about; I’m afraid I won’t agree with them, but thankfully, I usually do. I do in this case. In fact, I really like the post, and am proud of it. On the theory that most current Ethics Alarms readers haven’t seen it before, I’m reposting today, in honor of Greta:

The blog posts at issue make me angry. Usually it is silly to be angry about mere opinions, I know. However, the opinion registered by “Lori” on the blog Feministing, taking her cue from another feminist blogger, is a symptom, a symptom of the scourge of pernicious, political-correctness zealots, who refuse to recognize the important distinctions between malice and human beings being human, and seek to wipe out that distinction by distortion, sophistry, historical revisionism and bullying. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Libertarian Presidential Candidate Gary Johnson

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments
The Marx Brothers: Groucho, Zeppo, Harpo, Chico, and Aleppo

The Marx Brothers: Groucho, Zeppo, Harpo, Chico, and Aleppo

The Presidential nominee of the party whose convention featured a fat naked guy running around on stage found himself being the focus of the news this week, and not in a good way. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”—you know, that astute, objective news commentary show with a co-host who says Hillary Clinton is, like “awesome!”— there was this  exchange between Libertarian Party candidate, Gov. Gary Johnson and one of the show’s panelists, Mike Barnicle:

Barnicle: “What would you do if you were elected about Aleppo?”

Johnson: “About…?”

Barnicle: “Aleppo”

Johnson: “And what is Aleppo?”

Barnicle: “You’re kidding.”

Johnson: “No.”

Barnicle explained that Aleppo is a once thriving city in Syria that is ground zero for the country’s civil war. Johnson replied, “Got it,” and provided the wisdom that “With regard to Syria I do think it’s a mess.”

He elaborated, but as CNN’s Frida Ghitis wrote, ” Who cares what Johnson thinks about Syria now? He knows nothing about it. His opinion is meaningless.”

Well, not exactly meaningless. What his failure to have an informed opinion on a major foreign policy crisis like Syria means is that Gary Johnson is lazy, lacks seriousness, and is failing his duty to he party and the nation, which is to provide a realistic, responsible, genuine alternative to the candidates of the two major parties, both of whom are spectacularly unfit to serve, unfit for office, and embarrassments to the democratic process who call into serious question the long term viability of both our form of government and the nation itself.

Did I sugar-coat that too much? Continue reading →