Ethics Dunces

The Fifth Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2013 (Part Three)

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

Jill-Greenberg

Unethical Artist Of The Year

Photographer Jill Greenberg, whose art requires parents to make their children cry. Runner-up: Peeping Tom photographer/artist Arne Svenson

Kaitlyn Hunt

False Allegation Of Anti-Gay Bigotry Of The Year

Kaitlyn Hunt’s parents, who spun a false tale of anti-gay prejudice to portray their sexual predator daughter as a victim after she was accused of statutory rape by the parents of her under-age target. Hunt’s parents even managed to suck the ACLU into their web and the liberal-leaning press portrayed her as a martyr to anti-gay bias. But Hunt’s lies ultimately caused her cover-story to unravel.

 Unethical Hoax Of The Year

Oberlin students Dylan Bleier and Matt Alden, aided and abetted by  Oberlin College and its president, Marvin Krislov. The two students, self-proclaimed progressives, posted a series of racist and anti-Semitic posters, graffiti and anonymous emails as “an experiment.” Krislov and Oberlin, after cancelling classes and engaging in campus-wide navel-gazing, continued to allow the media and the public believe that this was the work of racists on campus well after it had learned who the real miscreants were.  Runner-up: The horrible Meg Lanker-Simons, former University of Wyoming student (now admitted to law school—I don’t want to talk about it) who threatened herself with rape and used the bogus threat to show that her campus was violent and sexist.

Most Unethical Use of Social Media Continue reading →

The Fifth Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2013 (Part Two of Three)

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Snowden

The Ethics Alarms review of a truly disheartening year in ethics continues with fallen heroes, ficks, fools and follies with Part Two of the 2013 Worst of Ethics awards….and there’s one last section to come. Be afraid..be very afraid:

Fallen Hero of the Year

Edward Snowden, whose claim to civil disobedience was marred by his unwillingness to accept the consequences of his actions, whose pose as a whistle-blower was ruined by the disclosure that he took his job with the intention of exposing national secrets, and whose status as a freedom-defending patriot lies in ruins as he seeks harbor with not only America’s enemy, but a human rights-crushing enemy at that. The NSA’s over-reach and mismanagement is a scandal, but Snowden proved that he is no hero.

Unmitigated Gall of  The Year

Minnesota divorce lawyer Thomas P. Lowes not only violated the bar’s ethics rules by having sex with his female  client…he also billed her his hourly fee for the time they spent having sex , a breach of the legal profession’s rule against “unreasonable fees.” Yes, he was suspended. But for not long enough…

Jumbo Of The Year

(Awarded To The Most Futile And Obvious Lie)

Jumbo film

“Now, if you had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that plan, what we said was you can keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.”

—–President Obama

2013 Conflicts of Interest of the Year Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: ESPN Blogger David Schoenfield

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments
...reason is emotion, and emotion is reason...

…reason is emotion, and emotion is reason…

Every year about this time, a large group of baseball writers, not to mention fans, expose their ethics and analytical deficiencies by making terrible arguments for admitting steroid-using stars of note into baseball’s Hall of Fame. The voting for the Hall is going on now, you see, and this year a bumper crop of candidates were either proven steroid users or reasonably suspected of being so.

Also every year at this time, I pick one of those ethically-challenged writers as an Ethics Dunce. This year, the winner is ESPN’s David Schoenfield, by virtue of a sentence near the end of a recent post in support of Frank Thomas and Edgar Martinez, neither of whom are on the Performance Enhancing Drug suspicion list, as Hall of Fame candidates. Schoenfield wrote,

“The PED disagreements are all about emotion (“Cheaters!”) versus reason (“It was part of the game in that era, we don’t know who did what, etc.”).

Talk about a big, fat, hanging curveball over the heart of the plate! Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Steve Martin (Coward, Too)

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Life imitates art.

Shame on Steve Martin. He is a comedian. He tweets jokes. He tweeted a joke that was not racist in the least. (Everything that comments humorously on cultural quirks isn’t racist.) The political correctness bullies jumped on him too, because they nailed Phil Robertson and destroyed Justine Sacco. Martin, a novelist, a playwright, a TV writer, a comic and an actor, should have the integrity to stand up to this suffocating and unethical phenomenon. He has the stature to make a difference. He doesn’t have that integrity. He took the path of least resistance. He is a coward. He groveled. He apologized. The Blaze headlined that he “had to apologize,” No he didn’t. What he had to do was show some principle and strength of character when being manipulated and unfairly attacked, and he wasn’t up to the task.

By giving them what they crave, Steve Martin made the censors, bullies, cyber mobs and political correctness dictators more powerful, and hungrier still.

Without champions who will fight for free thought and expression, we will lose them. Martin and people of his intelligence and credibility have an obligation to be such champions, and he failed us all.

__________________________________

Spark and Pointer: The Blaze

Ethics Dunces (“Duck Dynasty” vs Political Correctness Division): Republicans

/ Jack Marshall / 50 Comments

freedomofspeechLet us be clear: Phil Robertson’s comments about gay Americans in “Gentleman’s Quarterly” were, as matter of fact, profoundly insulting to a large group of citizens who do not deserve to be insulted and have every reason to feel attacked and offended.

That does not mean that the position Phil Robertson holds, which is an unfortunate ancient remnant of traditional religion-based morality that will only be addressed by time, education, patience and dialogue, should be suppressed, declared taboo, or made the basis of job-related sanctions when it is part of the reality of those in his culture, and he is the star of a reality show based on that culture.

Thus the principles of tolerance, diversity, freedom of thought, expression and religious belief can and should be properly defended by raising objections to A&E’s quick capitulation to the pressures of political correctness.

That does not mean that it is appropriate, considerate, reasonable or smart for public officials like Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to declare their support for Robertson himself and his retrograde and destructive beliefs. Calling an entire group of law-abiding Americans “sinners” because one’s religion has chosen to ignore the advances in knowledge of the past century is not the mark of “a great citizen,” to quote Jindal. It is the mark of a sadly misled and ignorant citizen, who nonetheless is representative of another large group of Americans who have the right to express their outmoded views without sanctions even if they are dead, dead wrong. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Actress Jennifer Lawrence

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Walters and Lawrence

Jennifer Lawrence is a young break-out movie star. She’s talented and charismatic. Now she need to learn that people pay attention to what celebrities think and say, too much so, in most cases, and she either needs to improve her knowledge base to say, 7th Grade level, exercise judgment by not spouting irresponsible and ignorant opinions as if the national media was a typical blog comment thread, or shut up about anything weightier than what it is like to work with her co-stars and what she eats on location.

I point this out because, in a regrettable instance of the aged fool interviewing a newly-minted one, Barbara Walters—who just told Piers Morgan, on the topic of Barack Obama,  that “We thought that he was going to be – I shouldn’t say this at Christmastime, but – the next Messiah“—-interviewed Lawrence for Barbara’s upcoming  “Most Fascinating People of 2013” TV special, and Jennifer opined,

“I just think it should be illegal to call somebody fat on TV. If we’re regulating cigarettes and sex and cuss words because of the effect it has on our younger generation, why aren’t we regulating things like calling people fat?” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Dallas Cowboys Wide Receiver Dez Bryant

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Bryant quits

The NFL appears to be having a collective values breakdown. First the Miami Dolphins lose two players in an alleged bullying scandal, and last Sunday, star Cowboy wide receiver Dez Bryant walked off the field with more than a minute left to play in the game. After Dallas quarterback Tony Romo threw the last of his two second-half interceptions to virtually ensure a humiliating come-back defeat at the hands of the Green Bay Packers, cameras followed Bryant as he left his team for the locker room with 1:21 remaining on the clock. Later, he apologized and explained his actions by tweeting:

“I walked back to the locker room because I was emotional…it had nothing to do with my teammates we had it…We fought and didn’t finish”

Oh. What?

That’s no explanation. To reporters, he said that he didn’t want the cameras catching him crying. On the professionalism scale, this is minus 1000. He’s emotional? So what? Suck it up! He doesn’t like to lose? Who does? He couldn’t take it any more? Tough—he’s paid to take it, and damn well too. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: University of Alabama Student NewsPaper Editor Maizie Bryant

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Ala Cartoon

I hate to criticize the ethical instincts of a college student, but Maizie Bryant’s school obviously isn’t doing its job regarding ethics instruction, so it is up to the rest of us.

Last week, following the epic and shocking finish to the Alabama Auburn football game—Auburn’s Chris Davis turned defeat into victory by grabbing an ill-advised Alabama field goal attempt with one second left and running it back 109 yards for a game-winning touchdown—the University of Alabama’s cartoonist drew the cartoon above. The message to anyone familiar with the devices of satire  and sarcasm was obvious: this was intended as mockery for the perceived tendency of the President’s critics to blame all misfortunes and problems on Obama. I think it’s a misguided cartoon, in that the message–the “joke”— follows the persistent defensive spin of the Obama Administration, its protective media and the President himself that critics unfairly hold him responsible for those matters  for which he is accountable and should be. (If the cartoon was going to be accurate, it would have shown the President attributing Alabama’s loss to George W. Bush.) Whatever its virtues and deficits, however, one thing the cartoon was not is racist.

How could it be racist? It is not racist to criticize Obama even for those things he is not responsible for—such criticism goes with the office. And the cartoon does exactly the opposite anyway. There is nothing whatsoever racial about the drawing. Anyone who perceives racism in this cartoon is

1. Unable to comprehend satire.

2. Unable to comprehend cartoons.

3. Race-baiting, and/or

4. Nuts. Continue reading →

The Ethics Stories I’m Not Going To Write About

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

FlamingBirthdayCake1

I am often tempted to write one of those short, bullet point, stream-of-consciousness posts like some fool used to pay Larry King to write for his awful syndicated column, which included trenchant observations like, “For my money, there’s no better game show host than Bert Convy!” Such a post would take a lot less time, and I could cover more of the myriad ethics issues I encounter in my research every day that for one reason or another—the main one being I have to work for a living—never make it to the pages of Ethics Alarms. But it’s my birthday, dammit; I am one year closer to death, I miss my Dad (you too, Mom, but you picked a better day to die), and it’s pretty clear that I will have “epic underachiever” on my headstone where Jack Marshall, Sr’s reads “Silver Star,” so in lieu of any other celebration, I’m going to, just this once, use the bullet point format to note a bunch of the things I normally wouldn’t get around to writing about. Like: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: NFL Football Fans

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

FOOTBALL FANSIn response to a question in a newly released CNN poll, a majority of football fans responded that the fact that the NFL intentionally withheld from its players evidence that repeated  concussions were inevitable despite the supposed protection provided by equipment, and that this would lead in many cases to devastating premature cognitive damage to players which would leave them disabled, depressed, violent, demented and/or suicidal until their early deaths didn’t trouble them at all, as long as they got their weekly Sunday football fix.

All right, that’s unfair. The results actually just showed that only 36% of respondents think that the NFL’s handling of the concussion issue has caused them to view the pro football league less favorably. No, on second thought, it’s not unfair at all.

I’m sure the NFL honchos who are determined to keep their billion dollar profit machine purring away, powered by the game’s consumption of the minds and bodies of young men lured by a short-term bonanza of fame and bucks, are whooping it up in their park Avenue suites. Yup, they did it! They have successfully converted much of America into crass, blood-thirsty sadists who are only different in degree from the Romans who cheered on Nero’s various bloodsports. Continue reading →