Etiquette and manners

Ethics Observations On The South Carolina Democratic Candidates Debate

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Debate transcript here.

1. The cynical effort to protect Hillary Clinton by scheduling debates at times when as few people as possible will watch them has officially become ludicrous, and also beyond denial. CNN’s alleged media watchdog Brian Stelter, in one of his occasional non-partisan episodes, grilled Debbie Wasserman Schultz on the strategy Sunday, and got a typical Wasserman Schultz-ish non answer, as she compared the TV rations with past debates and then mocked the Republican debates, which have been more conveniently scheduled and have garnered far more viewers. This time the tactic worked on me: my wife wanted to watch “Downton Abbey” (during the debate, one website wag on a post about the Democrats wrote, “Lady Crawley is losing the debate with Mrs Hughes and with The Hospital Board merger. Sad.”) Showtime was also running “The Godfather Epic,” which I had never seen, re-editing I and II together (but somehow differently from “The Godfather Saga.” I didn’t last to the end, so I assumed it also included III, and so wrote until a commenter put me straight), and then there was the football game. I had to watch the MSNBC re-run late into the night.

2. Several commenters claimed that Bernie was rude to Hillary, making funny faces, shouting. That’s Bernie, though, and here we go again: Hillary’s a feminist, but her supporters want to impose a double standard of how she is treated in the rough-and-tumble world of politics. This has, after all, been very effective from the race perspective insulating Barack Obama. If the Democrats dare to run such a corrupt candidate as Hillary, they will deserve Trump as the opposition, the one candidate who won’t pay any attention to media claims that he should pull his punches.

Nothing Bernie did during last night’s debate was nearly as outrageous as Joe Biden’s snorting, snickering, eye-rolling and constantly interrupting performance in the 2012 Vice-Presidential debate with Paul Ryan, as Martha Raddatz played “boxing referee who has taken a bribe” by ignoring it all. Well, but Ryan’s a guy, and a Republican , so he didn’t deserve common civility.

3. The central dishonesty in this debate and all of the Democratic debates is the inherent hypocrisy of simultaneously saying the economy is a mess and Wall Street is pulling the strings, while extolling the record of Barack Obama. Sanders is the most hypocritical, at one point proclaiming his pro-Obama bona fides as he runs a campaign calling for a revolution.  Here’s Sanders in his opening:

“As we look out at our country today, what the American people understand is we have an economy that’s rigged, that ordinary Americans are working longer hours for lower wages, 47 million people living in poverty, and almost all of the new income and wealth going to the top one percent….This campaign is about a political revolution to not only elect the president, but to transform this country….”

4.  Once again, all three candidates used cover words and vagueries to advocate “comprehensive immigration reform” without saying what that is. Nor did  NBC’s softball-tossing moderators, nor the candidates to each other, demand details and meanings. What “reforms”? Opening the borders? Making all illegal immigrants citizens? How long will illegal immigrant-pandering Democrats be allowed to get away with this? If they really are willing to sacrifice U.S. sovereignty, they have an obligation to say so, and clearly. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: RedState’s Moe Lane, Cheap Shot Artist

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

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Bernie Sanders, or most likely someone on his staff since I doubt that the Bern is a micro-manager, made his campaign look foolish by sending Wikipedia a DMCA take-down notice demanding that Wikipedia remove  images of Sanders campaign logos on its Sanders page, on the dubious grounds that such use was a violation of copyright law. More embarrassing than the specious copyright complaint is the rather obvious fact that a campaign should want Wikipedia to publicize everything about it. The complaint, to be blunt, was dumb. (The take-down notice was retracted in short order.)

Moe Lane is a fairly nasty right wing blogger, and he gleefully reported Sanders’ Shame, which is certainly fair game for critics. He could not, however, resist this cheap shot headline:

Bernie Sanders yells at Wikipedia, cloud over… campaign logos?

If you don’t get the reference, it’s this: Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “In Search Of A Tipping Point: Trump, The Microphone, And Thomas Dewey’s Ghost”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Trump mic

Ed Moser, a sound designer, technical director and all-around theater pro (he produced and designed sound for my recent staging of “Twelve Angry Men”…he’s also a friend), enlightens us with some insider observation relevant to Donald Trump’s recent denigration of a sound tech. It also reveals an unattractive side of an earlier GOP presidential candidate. Here is Ed’s Comment of the Day on the post, In Search Of A Tipping Point: Trump, The Microphone, And Thomas Dewey’s Ghost:

I have a friend who engineered the sound for a large church back when McCain was a candidate. He visited the church for a “town meeting”.

My friend locked all the unused gear away, and for the event distributed only freshly batteried hand held wireless mics for the event with screw on caps on the bottom. Such caps are specifically designed to prevent clumsy performers from accidentally touching the controls on the bottom of the mic– where one could turn the mic off, change the battery, or worst of all, change the frequency. Then color coded the mics with bright spike tape, so that while he was at the sound board he could instantly tell which mic/channel he was dealing with.

The plan was for McCain to give a speech, then take questions from the floor. Runners would carry one of three hand helds to the person with the query, so the question could be heard throughout the house. There was a fourth back up.

If all of this sounds pretty standard for people who know what they’re doing and have done many such events before: well, it is.

That evening, during the event, the question and answer session occurs. The first mic, it develops, is dead. A quick check reveals that ALL FOUR are dead. Irked at having to come the the edge of the stage and get close to an actual person to hear an actual question, or perhaps just trying to infuse humor at an awkward moment, McCain points to the back of the house, right at my friend, and says to the crowd, “Fire that guy!”

He gets a laugh. Except from my friend, of course.

Continue reading →

In Which We Visit The Daily Caller To See How Civil Discourse Is Proceeding On The Conservative Website…

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

zombie bar fight

Well…not too well, actually.

Here is a representative segment of the comments on a recent post, describing Fox News’s Megyn Kelly admonishing Debbie Wasserman Schultz for demeaning Gov. Nicki Haley as being chosen by the GOP to respond to the State Of the Union message purely because she’s a woman.  Kelly suggested this was major glass-house stone-throwing, perhaps because the anointed candidate Debbie wants to run for President has little positive to offer but her lady parts, and, though Megyn was too polite to say so, the same goes for Debbie, who heads  DNC despite being a an inarticulate, dishonest dolt. Debbie, of course, retorted with gibberish, deflections and lies, her sole implements of communication. Little of this seemed to concern Daily Caller readers.

For as usual on The Daily Caller, The Daily Beast, Mediaite, Politico and so many others, here’s what the comment thread turned into after only five sort-of relevant-comments…

How Censorship Takes Root: The Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association Bans Fun

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

high school fans

The Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association has commanded students at high school basketball games to stop taunting, mocking or teasing the opposition, which as I recall was the only reason one attends high school basketball games. The WIAA  has published a guide to sportsmanlike activities, and much of it is reasonable and wise. Not its specific prohibitions for fans, however. The content-specific bans are redolent of campus hate speech bans, but even sillier.They do teach future adult citizens the uses of censorship by authorities, however.

Maybe that’s the idea.

Here are the prohibitions on fan speech and conduct (1-23) and also athlete conduct (24-29) that are identified in the guide (I’ve rearranged them a bit), which means that schools not controlling such conduct sufficiently to satisfy their fun-hating overlords risk official sanctions. The inexcusably censorious prohibitions are in red. The overly strict or general prohibitions are in pink. Continue reading →

The Unethical Web-Shaming Destruction Of Holly Jones

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

kilroysFB.0

“I will never go back to this location for New Year’s Eve!!!” young Holly Jones ranted on an Indianapolis bar and restaurant’s Facebook page. “After the way we were treated when we spent $700+ and having our meal ruined by watching a dead person being wheeled out from an overdose my night has been ruined!” The angry post accused the evening’s restaurant manager of rudeness, the party’s waitress of profanity and the establishment itself of inattention.

After a sharp on-line rebuttal by the restaurant, the Web Furies were unleashed. Jones’ post became the latest web-shaming catalyst and an invitation to join a cyber-mob where fun could be had by all turning an ordinary jerk into a national villain. Lots of people signed up. The mob tracked down Jones and bombarded her own Facebook page with hate—she took the page down—then moved on to the salon where she worked as a hairdresser, threatening a boycott unless it fired Jones.

So it did.

These exercises in vicious web shaming can be ranked along an ethics spectrum. At the most unethical end is the destruction of Justine Sacco, who had her legitimate marketing career destroyed by social media’s  hysterical over-reaction to a self-deprecating, politically incorrect tweet. Now she works promoting a fantasy sports gambling website, a sleazy enterprise that entices chumps into losing serious cash with a business model derived from internet poker—she not only had her life derailed, she was corrupted too.

At the other end is Adam Smith, the one-time executive who wrecked his own career, with the help of another cyber-mob, by proudly posting a video of himself abusing an innocent Chic-fil-A  employee because Smith didn’t like her boss’s objections to gay marriage.  Somewhere between the two is Lindsay Stone, who lost her job by posting a photo showing her pretending–she later said— to scream at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier while flipping the bird at the “Silence and Respect” sign.

The distance between Smith and Jones is the difference between words and conduct. Smith’s video showed him abusing a young woman, and his posting of the video indicated that he saw nothing wrong with it. Jones, in contrast, did nothing, other than prove herself to be, at least at the moment she posted her rant, an utter jerk. Everyone along the spectrum, however, including Jones, were excessively and unjustly harmed by the web-shaming  campaign against them. Last I checked, Smith was unemployed and destitute three years after his episode of atrocious judgment.

In the current case, the cyber-mob forcing Holly’s employer to fire her is ethically worse, by far, than anything she can reasonably be accused of doing by posting her criticism of the restaurant. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Hillary Clinton (And By The Way, KABOOM!)

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

head exploding

“I was surprised that he used personal email account if he is at State.”

—Hillary Clinton, responding to a 2011 e-mail sent by senior aides  about a dispatch from John Godfrey, a State Department employee.

This wasn’t the most explosive of the Clinton e-mails revealed today by the court-ordered State Department release, but it’s the one that made my head explode. How long did Hillary claim that her using a private e-mail sever for official communications was “permitted,” that she did nothing wrong, that no State Department procedures or policies dictated otherwise, four years after she expressed surprise at the irregularity of Godfrey’s conduct? Hillary wasn’t just careless or clueless—she knew all along that using a personal e-mail account was wrong and risky. Why else would she be “surprised”? Who is surprised at employees doing what is allowed and appropriate? Continue reading →

Here’s What Was REALLY Wrong With Bill Cosby’s Sweater…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Cosby sweater

Washington Post fashion editor Robin Givhan set off a lively controversy by alleging that the “grandpa” sweater Bill Cosby wore to court was a calculated and manipulative ploy to gain public sympathy. “Bill Cosby’s perp walk was striking for its overwhelming lack of grace and power. It was an exploitation of our assumptions of fragile old age,” she wrote.  “It was the explicit manipulation of a studiously unattractive sweater.”

Was it? Lawyers often micro-manage a clients’ appearance in court; when it amounts to deception, I have written that it is unethical. Cosby’s attire seems hardly deceptive; after all, he is famous for his sweaters. There is even a pop song called Cosby’s Sweater. Ann Althouse agrees with Givhan that it was “a con,” but suggests that it’s an ethical con because “everybody does it.”

I don’t understand either Givhan’s logic or Althouse’s, and if Cosby’s lawyers talked him into this costume, they did him no favors. Cosby’s best armor against the verdict of public opinion is that Cliff Huxtable would never do the horrible things he’s being accused of.  There is no better, more benign, more appealing image of Bill Cosby than “TV Bill Cosby” as we fondly remember him. In court, he looked like a dirty old man, which is what he apparently is. Cliff Huxtable wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a sweater like that to court. (Bill would have also been well-advised to shave.) Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day (2): “The Strange Case Of The Unwanted Triplet”

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

infant

Beth’s  thoughtful Comment of the Day is only tangentially a comment on the Ethics Alarms post about the surrogate mother who balked at aborting one third of the triplets she was carrying. It was really a comment on a comment made to the author of the previous Comment of the Day on the same post, as J. Jonah Jameson described his own experience as a father who employed a surrogate. JJJ was asked why he chose the expensive and risky surrogate route rather than adoption. That question inspired Beth’s Comment of the Day.

Here it is; I’ll be back at the end.

“Why didn’t you adopt a child that needed a family?”

As a woman who battled infertility in the past, and have many friends who did the same, along with others who intentionally became single parents, used surrogates, or have or are trying to adopt a baby, let me say that this is the absolute worst question you can ever ask somebody going through this process. As you pointed out, you are not trying to be judgmental, but you should never ask this.

Continue reading →

Now THIS Is Sportsmanship! Bravo, Tennis Pro Jack Sock, Ethics Hero

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Even for tennis, this was exemplary sportsmanship.

Kansas City’s Jack Sock was playing hard-serving Lleyton Hewitt in the Hopman Cup in Perth, Australia. Hewitt, trailing 4-5 in the first set, smashed a serve past Sock that the linesman  called out.  Sock shocked Hewett and everyone else when he said to his opponent, “That was in, if you want to challenge.”  The crowd laughed; the umpire looked bemused, and Hewitt paused for a few seconds, then indeed challenged the call. Sure enough, the computer and camera showed that the serve was good, giving Hewett the point. He went on  from there to win that set and eventually the match.

I’m sure that Sock will consider his Ethics Alarms honor more than sufficient compensation. He seems like that kind of guy.

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Pointer: tgt