Ethics Heroes

Ethics Hero: George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

I almost included this in yesterday’s ethics warm-up, but realized that the point was too important not to have the focus of an entire post.

During the Post 2016 Election Ethics Train Wreck that threatens the stability of the United States and its future as a functioning democracy,  Prof. Turley has been one of the select few to meet the qualifications laid out by Rudyard Kipling in my late father’s favorite poem “If.” He has managed to keep his head while all about him, especially in academia, his realm, but also most professionals, have been losing theirs, mostly in response to crushing peer pressure, unsupported conventional wisdom, and partisan bias.

It’s remarkable how much easier it is to analyze complex problems accurately when one can maintain sufficient objectivity and remove, and can overcome bias and resist the lure of rationalizations. In The Hill, Turley demonstrates the benefits of his integrity with a sharp and accurate post—it happens to be consistent with my own conclusions of more than a year’s duration, but I don’t have to hang out in a faculty lounge—explaining the dynamics of the unprecedented efforts by the FBI and the Justice Department to undermine the Trump Presidency before it even began.

Turley’s article begins by mentioning  the New York Times “bombshell” about the FBI launching an investigation of whether the President of the United States was a Russian asset…

However, the real benefit of the investigative story may not be the original suspicion, but rather how it could explain the course that both sides have taken into our current quagmire. What if there were no collusion or conspiracy but simple cognitive bias on both sides, where the actions of one seemed to confirm precisely the suspicions of the other?

Let me focus the professor’s words here. There are all kinds of cognitive bias, and several may be at work. However, the main one is clearly confirmation bias, the human tendency to interpret information in ways that confirm what we believe already. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Arby’s!

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Why don’t businesses do this kind of thing all the time?

A 97-year-old  World War II veteran who calls himself “Mr. Doug” has been eating lunch, by himself, at an Arby’s in Chandler, Arizona almost every day.

An employee asked him why he was such a regular. The veteran told him that he has no family, and that he always has the same thing at the fast food restaurant because it is one of the rare meals that doesn’t upset his stomach.

The Arby’s staff took a collection and bought Mr. Doug a $200 gift card, and even gave him their phone numbers, so if he can’t get to Arby’s they will deliver lunch to him. Then corporate headquarters learned about the staff’s kindness, and went one better: It  announced that Mr. Doug could eat at Arby’s free of charge for the rest of his life.

My WWII vet Dad would have been 97 this year. Unfortunately, he hated Arby’s.

A suggested modified slogan for the company, which I’m sure Ving Rhames could deliver with gusto:

“Arby’s! We have THE ETHICS!”

Ethics Hero: Artist Shepard Fairey

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Wait a minute…doesn’t Ava look a bit like Tojo?

I’m so tempted to post this story as a late response to my virtue-signaling Facebook friend who fatuously argued that political correctness was just about “not being an asshole.” this is, of course, another example of partisans using denial to avoid facing inconvenient facts.

Because some delicate flowers complained that the mural above, by artist Beau Stanton, offended them and made them feel unsafe because the rays emanating from the head—of actress Ava Gardner, for God’s sake— reminded them of the Japanese imperial battle flag, the L.A. school district agreed to paint over it. The mural is located at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Koreatown, which is part of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Koreans have not forgiven Japan for its atrocities during World War II, which is understandable. Projecting that on a mural portraying Ava Garder is not.

The school district’s senior regional administrator, Roberto Martinez, compared the Stanton mural to Confederate statues and argues that the value of the art doesn’t outweigh the “offense” to people. Pssst…Facebook friend! He’s the asshole! He’s also too dumb and biased to be a trustworthy educator!

Now artist Shepard Fairey, who painted THIS mural… Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: The New York Yankees

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

(Boy, do I hate having to post this.)

Aging Yankee starting pitcher CC Sabathia was ejected from his final start of the 2018 season for intentionally throwing at and hitting an opposing batter. This meant Sabathia would fall a couple of innings short of  pitching his 155th inning for the year, which would have triggered a half-million dollar bonus bonus. Not the CC needs the money: the not-quite-Hall of Fame caliber hurler has already earned about a quarter of a billion dollars plying his trade, and he’s still in his thirties.

Nonetheless, the Yankees decided that CC has been a loyal and exemplary employee, so they decided not to be technical about the bonus provision, and gave him the $500,000 anyway.

This is pure gratitude and generosity, and much as I detest the New York Yankees, attention must be paid. The Yankees have no reason to try to suck up to CC, who is already signed for next season and who is probably going to retire after it. They are simply signaling that they appreciate what Sabathia has done for them, the city and Yankee fans, and acknowledging that he lost those last few innings “protecting his team mates,” according to the ancient, often stupid, unwritten rules of baseball.

Still, a half-million bucks is one hell of a Christmas bonus.

 

Ethics Hero: The Florida Senate

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Let us take a moment out of our hectic holiday schedule to say thanks to the Florida State Senate, which loudly and visibly re-affirmed ist rejection of one of my least favorite workplace traditions: the fake resignation.

 Broward County’s embattled supervisor of elections Brenda Snipes announced that she would resign her post effective January 4, announcing her departure after the November midterm elections had exposed, not for the first time, that she was a blithering incompetent who should have been fired long ago.  But then Governor–and Senator-Elect— Rick Scott suspended her late last month, citing “misfeasance, incompetence and neglect of duty.  Snipes announced that she was rescinding her decision to step down.

The Florida Senate has the authority to remove an official from office or reinstate them under the state’s constitution, but  the upper chamber’s general counsel, in a memo, determined that Snipes tried to take back her decision too late and that her resignation was permanent. Senate President Bill Galvano sent a memo to members last week confirming that her “Never mind!” was a non-starter.

Good.

This has nothing to do with Snipes’ well-established ineptitude. I’ve had personal experiences with “I quit!”/”I was just upset, I didn’t mean it!” in multiple settings. Every single time I have told the regretful employee, who was inevitably trying to use a resignation for leverage, “Sorry. Resignations are final.” In every such case, the employee was shocked, acting as if they had been fired with out cause. No, they had been in essence fired for cause, or more accurately, not re-hired because of their reliability, character and conduct. I have also replied to threats to quit, as in “If you don’t do it my way, then I resign!,” with a curt. “Fine. I won’t, and I want your resignation on my desk.”

Let’s call it “The Snipes Rule.” If you quit a job,  and you want it back, you have the same standing as any other candidate for your old position, except only you showed the dishonesty and bad judgment to quit when you either didn’t mean in, or hadn’t thought it through. That puts you at the end of the line.

“I wish you well in your future endeavors.”

 

Ethics Hero: Bob Cousy

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I was thinking of adding “Boston Celtics and pro basketball legend” to the title, but I depressed myself thinking it was necessary, which of course it is. When Bob Cousy retired, in 1962, there wasn’t a more famous NBA star alive. Now, not only is the play-making wizard who led the Boston Celtics through the beginning of their unparalleled dynasty unrecognizable to most Americans, so is the kind of basketball he played, before it was all dunking and styling by pituitary cases.

But I digress.

In the newly published book “Last Pass” by Gary Pomeranz,  Cousy, the Hall of Fame Boston Celtics captain who led the team to its first six championships, opened up about his relationship with Bill Russell, the great, enigmatic, difficult, defensive genius  who was the center on Cousy’s teams, and on many Celtics championship teams thereafter. Russell was the first back superstar in sports-crazy, perpetually racist Boston,  and as he reaches 90, Cousy is reflecting on what he did, and what he didn’t do, as the white superstar on a team whose brilliant black center was often the target of racists. In the Boston suburb of Reading, vandals once broke into Russell’s home, spray-painted racist graffiti on walls and defecated on his bed. The Cooz, as he was called, is remembered as being  ahead of his time as an NBA player in his sensitivity to race and civil rights. Still, Cousy blames himself for not having done enough, and for not having understood the depth of prejudice Russell faced as an African-American in Boston. Cousy told the historian that he wants to make amends. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Glenn Greenwald

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I’m not exactly a fan of lawyer/muckraker/journalist Glenn Greenwald, but I’m getting there. Greenwald certainly has an ideological agenda, and it informs both his choice of topics and the slant of his reporting. However, in an age where the mainstream journalism establishment has made the tragic decision to be largely  a propaganda organization for its one favored political party, and has willfully misinformed the American public in pursuit of that party’s interests, primarily power, Greenwald stands out for his non-partisan approach, his consistent standards, his integrity, and most of all of late, his refusal to participate in counter-factual condemnations of President Trump for conduct that the news media has either shrugged away or tolerated in the past from other Presidents.

Greewald’s latest broadside against the hypocrisy comes in gloriously unrestrained The Intercept piece about the attacks on President Trump for his attitude toward the , Trump’s Amoral Saudi Statement Is a Pure Expression of Decades-Old “U.S. Values” and Foreign Policy Orthodoxies.

The title is true beyond question; I pointed out the same fact here, writing in part regarding the Khashoggi murder and the New York Times editorial calling the Trump administration’s policy response “a guide to how they might increase their standing in the eyes of the American president as well as how far they can go in crushing domestic critics without raising American ire”:

The question of how far the U.S. should go in pursuing its own interests while excusing unethical or immoral acts by foreign governments is an enduring one the stretches at least back to the United States alliance with Stalin in World War II. Outside of the fact that [ the Khashoggi murder] involves a journalist, however, the Trump “guide,” even stated in deliberately pejorative terms, seems to me to vary not one bit from the standards used by previous administrations, including the Obama Administration. China…Cuba…Iran…and yes, the Saudis, who have overseen state-sanctioned brutality and human rights outrages affecting whole classes of people, not just one journalist, for a long as anyone can remember.

Trump’s “new blueprint,” it seems to me, varies from the old blueprint not one bit. Whether the old blue-print is necessary or defensive is another issue.

Well, that was comparatively nothin’ from me as an ethics rebuke, a pea-shooter compared to Greenwald’s  tour-de force. His conclusion is uncompromising and irrefutable: Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 11/20/18: Sad Scam, Old Movie, New Rules, Idiotic Emails, And Dead Dinner

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Good Morning…

Items of note…

1. The Johnny Bobbitt scam story continues...That heartwarming story I highlighted in an Ethics Hero post last year continues to deteriorate. Kate McClure, who conspired with homeless vet Bobbitt to persuade old softies to give over $400,000 to a GoFundMe campaign apparently blames her complicit boyfriend for the debacle.  In a recording shared with “Good Morning America”  by her lawyers, McClure is heard telling her now ex- ( I assume he’s now an ex…) Mark D’Amico,  “You started the whole fucking thing, you did everything! I had no part in any of this, and I’m the one fucking taking the fall!”

I don’t understand the reasoning of people who make this kind of argument. McClure went on TV to tell her phony story, which was about her getting stranded and being rescued by Bobbitt. How can she accuse D’Amico of “starting the whole thing”? Even if the plot was his idea, all she had to do was say “no.” “He made me do it” was always a lame excuse, and when women use it to duck accountability today it is lamer than ever. Did D’Amico hold a gun to her head? Have her parents bound and gagged as hostages? Absent those forms of coercion or something equivalent, she has no argument for avoiding accountability.

2.  “Sixteen Candles” ethics: Why didn’t anyone show this scene during the Kavanaugh hearings?  Since I’ve been wiped out with my Three Year Killer Cold, I’ve been watching all sorts of strange things on TV. Late last night it was the John Hughes 1984 classic “Sixteen Candles,” now a special target of the Officially Offended and the Political Correctness Police. Ah, those golden, halycon days when a film could get laughs with a goofy Chinese character named Long Duc Dong who could be introduced with a gong sound  every time he appeared and who inexplicably dived out of a tree shouting (in Japanese) “Bonzai!”  Cringe-producing though it is, the film still provides valuable cultural perspective.

I had forgotten the scene in which awkward, scrawny, horny young teen Anthony Michael Hall jumps Molly Ringwald not once but twice in rapid succession, misunderstanding, somehow, her friendly demeanor as a come-on. She effortlessly pushes him away both times, he is abashed, she shrugs it off, and they continue talking. Hall’s actions nonetheless would be described by many today as a sexual assault, when in the film they were originally intended to represent—and did— a typical embarrassing experiment as a maturing child explores sexual norms.

I imagine that the “attempted rape” described by Dr. Blasey Ford might well have looked just as ridiculous if it had been filmed. I also imagined Ringwald’s character, now flushed with progressive fervor and “woke,” deciding decades later to reframe the absurd encounter all those decades ago as something it was not, and crashing a now mature Anthony Michael Hall’s reputation and career to the applause of the progressive echo chamber.

Anthony Michael Hall is just three years younger than Brett Kavanaugh. Here is what he looks like now, and how he appeared when he covered Molly Ringwald like an octopus in “Sixteen Candles.” . The time frame of the film is approximately the same as the alleged Kavanaugh-Ford incident.

How can anyone seriously—not just seriously, but self-righteously and angrily— argue that the conduct of the child in a completely different cultural context is relevant to the trustworthiness of the adult? Continue reading →

Sunday Morning Ethics Warm-Up After The Red Sox Complete An Unprecedented Late Inning Comeback In The World Series HAHAHAHAHA!, 10/28/18: Obama’s “Norms”, Goodbye Apu, #MeToo Hypocrisy, And “Roshomon,” Chicago-Style

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Focus, Jack, focus!

1. Not the World Series, ETHICS! And speaking of ethics…

  • What kind of lie is this? Rich Hill, the Dodgers starting pitcher last night who almost unhittable, said in an interview that he “liked” his team’s chances of winning the Series despite being behind 3 games to 1. World Series history and basic math says that the chances are “slim.” He likes the slim chances? Does he really like them? Does he believe liking them means they are more likely to break his way?

Is he just lying to buck up his team and its fans, when he really doesn’t “like” the chances at all, not being, you know, an idiot? Does that make it a “good lie”?

  • The Fox World Series broadcast team of Joe Buck and John Smoltz is incompetent. In a potentially game-changing play in which the Boston catcher’s throw attempting to complete a home-to-first double-play sailed past first, allowing the game’s first run to score, the two alleged experts said that there was no interference. Wrong. There was interference, and it was obvious: Bellinger, the Dodgers runner, was on the infield grass rather than the yard-wide running lane to the right of the baseline, which exists precisely for plays like that, when the catcher needs a lane to throw unimpeded to first base to get the out.  It should have been called runner’s interference, completing a double-play and ending the inning without a run scoring. Instead, the run scored on the errant throw from Boston catcher Vasquez, and the next batter, Yasiel Puig, hit a three-run homer to give L.A. a 4-0 lead. There was no discussion of the rules and issues involved.

But after the game, over at the MLB cable channel, former Yankees manager Joe Girardi and baseball analyst Harold Reynolds graphically illustrated that the interference should have been called. This is what the Fox broadcasters are paid for: to explain the nuances of the rules and the game to the average World Series viewer, whose baseball acumen is rudimentary. The umpires missed the play, even though as Reynold pointed out, it was called many times during the season. Umpires are reluctant to call interference of any kind during the post-season, because it’s messy, and guarantees controversy and an on-field arguments.

  • For an unusual first ball ceremony, former Red Sox-Oakland Hall of Fame pitcher Dennis Eckersley (Now an ace Boston TV color man, known New England-wide as “Eck”) threw a pitch to ex-Dodgers catcher Steve Yeager as Kirk Gibson stood in the batters box. Gibson, you should recall, hit the famous “The Natural” home run off Eckersley to win Game #1 of the 1988 World Series, after limping to the plate as a pinch-hitter in the bottom of the 9th inning. How many ex-players would voluntarily re-enact their worst moment on the field on national TV? Imagine Ralph Branca throwing a ceremonial first pitch to Bobby Thompson.

Eck personifies humility and exemplary sportsmanship.

  • Trump Tweets, Baseball Division. This made me laugh out loud, I have to admit. During the game, the President criticized Dodgers manager Dave Roberts decision to replace Hill with his first baseball tweet:

“It is amazing how a manager takes out a pitcher who is loose & dominating through almost 7 innings, Rich Hill of Dodgers, and brings in nervous reliever(s) who get shellacked. 4 run lead gone. Managers do it all the time, big mistake!”

I wish the President would confine all of his tweeting to second-guessing managers and coaches. It’s obnoxious, but harmless. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, presented with the tweet during his post-game press conference, handed it ethically and well. Steely-faced, he asked, “The President said that?” and responded, sufficiently respectfully, “I’m happy he was tuning in and watching the game. I don’t know how many Dodgers games he’s watched. I don’t think he was privy to the conversation. That’s one man’s opinion.”  Roberts was referring to the fact that Hill told him that he might be getting fatigued. Nonetheless, lots of people other than the President questioned Robert’s decision.

It is pure hindsight bias, of course, as well as consequentialism. If the Dodger bullpen had held a late-inning  4-run lead as every previous World Series bullpen had, nobody would be criticizing Roberts.

2. The confiscated handicapped van. [Pointer: Michael Ejercito] Andrea Santiago’s $15,000 van with a customized wheelchair lift was confiscated  by the City of Chicago as an abandoned vehicle. She has polio and multiple sclerosis, and the family claims the vehicle was parked legally and obviously not abandoned. This is a Roshomon situation, for the accounts of the city and the family are irreconcilable. Chicago’s Department of Streets & Sanitation sent this statement: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Red Sox Rightfielder Mookie Betts

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I guess in fairness I owe the Red Sox this one, after yesterday’s post.

Mookie Betts, the young Red Sox star widely assumed to be the American League MVP once the votes are tallied, had three hits in Game 2 of the World Series this week, and after the game, joined his cousin delivering food to the homeless outside the Boston Public Library. Betts did not summon reporters and photographers to the scene, in the immortal tradition of Babe Ruth, who always seemed to have a scribe nearby when he promised a sick kid at the hospital a home run that day. In the Boston tradition of Ted Williams, who regularly visited juvenile cancer patients without fanfare, Mookie did his charity work anonymously, wearing a hoodie so he would not be recognized. Someone recognized him nonetheless—this was Boston, after all, and Mookie is especially recognizable, so the local media got the story anyway.

Mookie seems too good to be true: he’s always modest and humble, he’s polite, he’s astoundingly talented, he’s nice, and he’s so  cute. I’m afraid to hope he’ll stay that way; Boston has had other lovable young stars who gradually became insufferable as their fame and paychecks increased (see Clemens, Roger). Mookie seems like the real thing, but you never know. For now, at least, he’s a terrific role model, not just for young baseball fans, but for other players and celebrities, present and future.