Ethics Dunces

Three Case Studies In Ethics Obtuseness: The Sheriff, His Victim, And The Hollywood Loudmouth

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Hear-No-Evil-See-No-Evil-Speak-No-Evil

These Ethics Dunces  don’t get it, and probably never will.

There is nothing quite as frustrating as the ethics offender who receives a clarion lesson in response to the wrongful conduct, and completely misses the point:

Case Study #1 : Alec Baldwin

The serial loudmouth actor, who alternates between banal progressive nostrums and outbreaks of public violence, verbal abuse and denigrating slurs, was inexplicably addressing a gathering of ServiceSource International Inc. employees in the aftermath of his suspension by MSNBC for calling a photographer a “cocksucking fag” and getting caught on video in the process (the network was trying to make sure the actor understood that it was harmful to have one of its show hosts denigrate a strong demographic slice of their viewing audience, and that in the future he should confine his outbreaks of vile language to calling for conservatives to be defecated in and upon). ServiceSource CEO Michael Smerklo, having already booked Baldwin, said that Baldwin’s  insult to  gays created  one of the toughest decisions in his career. Hmmm… pay Alec Baldwin lots of money to impart his wisdom to a tech firm’s employees, or spend the money on something more worthwhile, like, say Cheetos. Wow. What a quandary. And why did the CEO think that Baldwin’s wisdom was worth imparting? CBS says: Continue reading →

Maryland’s Ethics Dunce State Senator, Len Bias, And Statue Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments
The late Len Bias. No hero he.

The late Len Bias. No hero he.

Maryland State Sen. Victor R. Ramirez (D-Prince George’s County) has introduced a bill to designate state funds to erect a statue of Len Bias, a former University of Maryland basketball star, at Northwestern High School in Hyattsville, Md. Bias, a graduate of the school, died in 1986 of cocaine intoxication less than two days after he was drafted s by the NBA’s Boston Celtics, shocking the area and the nation. Ramirez’s efforts, as well as a recent decision to name another local high school after President Obama, is causing the Prince George’s County Education Board to revise and formalize its policy for such honors as statues and building names. Will an African-American kid who cut off his promising life as it was just beginning with a self-administered drug overdose be deemed worthy of immortalization, to serve as inspiration for future generations of black youth? Stay tuned.

The Stupid is strong in this one...

“Len Bias was a student athlete in Prince George’s,” Sen. Ramirez argues. “He moved the University of Maryland basketball program to new heights. He and Michael Jordan were the two best college players at that time, until he tragically died. . . . We can learn something from everything. The nation learned a lot from this unfortunate incident.” Well, if learning “a lot” from someone’s demise is the criteria for honoring them with a heroic statue, that opens up all kinds of possibilities. Good thinking, Senator! A statue of Richard Nixon reminds us that power corrupts, certainly a valuable lesson for all. A statue of Benedict Arnold teaches us the dangers of pride, and how a sense of entitlement can lead to tragic choices. And what could be more illuminating than a statue of Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter? Maybe even one showing him mowing down those kids—such a powerful statement about gun abuse, and the failures of the mental health system! In fact, what would really be appropriate is naming a public school after him.

By the end of his life, Len Bias was no hero or role model, and he deserves no honor for knowingly breaking drug laws and getting himself killed while disappointing legions of fans and supporters. Erecting a statue to Bias would be just one more step in society’s capitulation to the seductive, and destructive, appeal of the drug culture, and the elimination of the vitally important societal stigma attached to recreational drug use. What Bias did was willful, ignorant, irresponsible and illegal, and even if that last is removed for his young admirers, the first three remain.

The County Board of Education is now going to debate the appropriateness of making a hero out of a  drug abuser and a 21 year old cocaine casualty. If they have to discuss it to answer that question, they all need to be replaced, not that the pathetic performance of their schools isn’t reason enough for that. Len Bias’s death wasn’t “a tragic incident.” A car crash is a tragic incident. Bias died because, like so many young people in Prince George’s County and elsewhere, he deliberately engaged in dangerous conduct that he knew was forbidden, and learned, the hard way, why.

Placing a triumphal statue in front of a high school is no way to discourage deadly attitudes like the one that got Bias killed…unless the design of the proposed statue shows the young man at the exact moment his heart seized and his eyes rolled back in his head.

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Facts and Graphic: Washington Post

Source: The Nation

The Ethics Duncehood Of WaPo Blogger Eric Wemple, And Martin Bashir’s Forced Apology For, Uh, Saying That Someone Should Defecate In Sarah Palin’s Mouth

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

When is an apparent #1 class apology not good enough? Well, in the case of the matter at hand, there are two reasons.

The apology in question came from Martin Bashir, who, as I mentioned in a previous post, used his MSNBC show to suggest that Sarah Palin’s overblown analogy between the financial burden on future generations created by U.S. debt and actual slavery warranted her having to submit to someone expelling excrement into her mouth, and urinating on her as well. He really did say this. On the air. Carefully and deliberately.

See? Yet suddenly, after the weekend, Bashir was contrite, and delivered as elegant and sincere-sounding apology as one could imagine:

“I wanted to take this opportunity to say sorry to Mrs. Palin and to also offer an unreserved apology to her friends and family, her supporters, our viewers, and anyone who may have heard what I said. My words were wholly unacceptable. They were neither accurate, nor fair. They were unworthy of anyone who would claim to have an interest in politics, and they have brought shame upon my friends and colleagues at this network, none of whom were responsible for the things that I said. I deeply regret what I said, and that I have learned a sober lesson in these last few days. That the politics of vitriol and destruction is a miserable place to be, and a miserable person to become. And I promise that I will take the opportunity to learn from this experience.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: 33% of the U.S. Public

/ Jack Marshall / 77 Comments

Gumbies

Today’s headlines shout out that the public’s faith and trust in President Obama has turned sharply down.  From ABC:

“The president’s job approval rating has fallen to 42 percent in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, down 13 percentage points this year and 6 points in the past month to match the lowest of his presidency. Fifty-five percent disapprove, a record. And 70 percent say the country’s headed seriously off on the wrong track – up 13 points since May to the most in two years.Other ratings of the president’s performance have tumbled as well. He’s at career lows for being a strong leader, understanding the problems of average Americans and being honest and trustworthy – numerically under water on each of these (a first for the latter two). His rating for strong leadership is down by 15 points this year and a vast 31 points below its peak shortly after he took office. In a new gauge, just 41 percent rate him as a good manager; 56 percent think not.”

Wow. Not only that, but a whopping 63% of the public—“by nearly 2-1, 63-33 percent”—disapprove of Obama’s handling of implementation of the new health care law! And…wait, what???

33% of the public approves of the implementation of Obamacare? Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Alec Baldwin’s Employer, Whomever It May Be; Currently, This Means MSNBC President Phil Griffin

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments
When MSNBC journalists attack!

When MSNBC journalists attack!

How is it that the old saw goes? “Fool me once, shame on you; Fool me twice, shame on me; Fool me 3,256 times, I’m an idiot”? Something like that.

Actor Alec Baldwin has proven by his actions and words, over and over again and beyond a reasonable doubt, that he is a foul-mouthed, hair-pin tempered bully with poor impulse control and the flattest of learning curves. I could list the impressive number of incidents that he has been involved in making that statement beyond debate, from a leaked phone voice message of him verbally abusing his daughter, to his tirade against a airplane stewardess who dared to ask him to abide by the rules of the air and stop playing a game on his Iphone, to obnoxious tweets that have led him to suspend his account more than once. Lately, his specialty has been hurling anti-gay slurs at photographers. Baldwin has been in the public eye for decades, and knows how celebrity works, but either doesn’t care, or can’t help himself. He has also paired his atrocious behavior with the outspoken progressive tirades and half-baked opinions of a man who is nowhere as smart as he seems to think he is.

The latter, of course, has saved his career from one way ticket to Mel Gibsonville. As gay conservative-turned-liberal blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote after Baldwin’s latest fiasco, Continue reading →

Jimmy Kimmel, Child Abuse, And Signature Significance

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments
In Jimmy's defense, Japan thought "Kill the Chinese!" was funny too...

In Jimmy’s defense, Japan thought “Kill the Chinese!” was funny too…

What a surprise—Jimmy Kimmel did something despicable involving children.

This time, the smug and unethical-to-his-very-DNA ABC late night host may have also triggered an ethics train wreck. Perhaps at last the network and his tasteless, enabling viewers will finally conclude what has been obvious for years—that Jimmy is a cultural corrupter whose miserable methods and values should be rejected, condemned, and sent packing to an obscure corner of table TV!

Nah.

Kimmel’s latest hilarious stunt aired on Oct. 16, in a segment called “Kids Table,” where Funny Uncle Jimmy asks small children who have no idea what is going on or  that a creepy middle-aged man is luring them into saying things that will haunt them on Youtube until the day they die to comment on issues of the day. This time, Mirthful Machiavellian Jimmy caught comedy gold: when he asked a six-year-old how the U.S. could solve the $1.3 trillion trade imbalance, the giggling answer came back, “Kill everyone in China!”

Nice. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Virginia Democratic Lieutenant Governor Candidate Ralph Northam

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Democratic Party candidate Ralph Northam cannot possibly lose the Virginia Lieutenant Governor race today; in fact, he should win by a landslide. His Republican opponent, African-American minister E. W. Jackson, is so conservative he makes his running mate, gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli, look like Saul Alinsky, and I’m only exaggerating a little bit. From the pulpit, he has made statements that sound like they were ghosted by Pat Robertson in one of his crazy moods, like when he seemed to be suggesting that children with birth defects were being punished for their parents sins. Jackson doesn’t believe in evolution, thinks that government programs have done more harm to blacks than slavery, and could fairly be described as homophobic.

Still, he is a citizen, a candidate and a human being, so when he offered his hand to his soon-to-be victorious opponent Northam following a TV debate, there was only one decent, civil, ethical, statesmanlike response for Northam: take it, and shake it. That is traditional, civilized, and polite, and for Northam to do what he chose to do instead—ignore Jackson and his hand and snub the Republican, refusing even to look him in the eye—on live TV, no less!— shows him to be an arrogant, unmannered, uncivil jerk of the breed that has brought American politics, government and discourse to a new low. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Columbia, South Carolina Police Chief Ruben Santiago

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments
The face of police power abuse in Columbia, S.C.

The face of police power abuse in Columbia, S.C.

If our culture did a minimally competent job communicating the essential right of free speech in the United States, people like Ruben Santiago wouldn’t think as the do—as they do being best described as ignorantly, censoriously, arrogantly and stupidly. Both the Left and the Right are to blame for the message not getting out to the public, and, consequently, members of the public who acquire governmental authority: the government can’t threaten you or harm you for mere speech…the Left through its attempts at political correctness, mind control and indoctrination in the schools, the Right in its efforts to use laws to curb expression involving sex and violence in the arts and entertainment.

In Columbia,Police Chief Ruben Santiago took to the Columbia Police Department Facebook page to announce that his officers had seized  $40,000 in marijuana from an apartment after a successful drug investigation. Citizen Brandon Whitmer, on his own page, took note of the arrest and opined, “maybe (police) should arrest the people shooting people in 5 points instead of worrying about a stoner that’s not bothering anyone. It’ll be legal here one day anyway.” Santiago replied ominously to Whitmer, saying, “(W)e have arrested all of the violent offenders in Five points. Thank you for sharing your views and giving us reasonable suspicion to believe you might be a criminal, we will work on finding you.”

Somebody  in the department with a working knowledge of the Constitution quickly got that post deleted, but Santiago defended it in a double-down post, writing, Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Keisha Thomas

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Keisha Thomas

It is never too late to recognize an Ethics Hero, and thanks to a recent retrospective by the BBC, Ethics Alarms can salute Keisha Thomas, who 17 years ago exhibited both courage and other outstanding ethical values like kindness, sacrifice, responsibility, empathy and valor, by coming to the rescue of a man who would never have done the same for her.

In 1996, Keshia Thomas was just 18. The Ku Klux Klan held a rally in her home town, Ann Arbor, Michigan, then as now a college town and a bastion of liberalism. Predictably and as planned by the KKK, plenty of local protesters gathered to jeer the white robed marchers and to show their contempt.Thomas stood with a group of anti-KKK demonstrators on the other side of a security fence, as police in riot gear positioned themselves between the angry demonstrators and the Klan members. One of the anti-Klan counter-demonstrators spotted a white, middle-aged man with an SS tattoo on his arm and wearing a Confederate flag T-shirt  standing among the spectators.  “There’s a Klansman in the crowd!”  she shouted into her megaphone, and a group of protesters began to chase him, shouting threats and “Kill the Nazi!” He was knocked to the ground, and the group, now a mob, began kicking him and hitting him with wooden bases of their placards.

Thomas, an African-American girl still in high school, came to his rescue. She forced herself between the mob and their victim, fell to her knees, draped herself over him and became his shield, saving the stranger from serious injury. Continue reading →

Strange Tales Of The Ethically Clueless 1%: When A Birthday Gift Is Worse Than No Gift At All

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments
"Oh, thank you, kind sir!"

“Oh, thank you, kind sir!”

The title of Ethics Dunce doesn’t do Fort Wayne Newspapers CEO Mike Christman justice.

In order to “celebrate” his employees’ birthdays, and, of course, recognize his loyal staff’s value, hard work, industry and loyalty, he gives each member of his corporate family a small token of his  appreciation on his or her birthday, and I do mean small token: a $1.25 token that can be used to buy a soda or a snack at a company vending machine.

How condescending, demeaning, disrespectful, insulting and, of course, cheap: the equivalent of a pat on the head. In the Gilded Age, rich men would occasionally drop nickles on the street for the street urchins to pick up. John D. Rockefeller was the most famous practitioner of this form of low-level charity, though he would use dimes. During the Depression, though he was still a billionaire, he switched to nickels. (Nickels in the Great Depression were worth a lot more than $1.25 today.) His beneficiaries were children, however. Continue reading →