After a 16-year-old Florida boy lost a black belt taekwondo match, he bowed to his opponent, shook his hand ...and then kicked him in the face. The blow knocked his surprised adversary’s front teeth out.
The sore loser was booked on a felony assault charge. The sore winner ended up in the hospital.
National taekwondo organizers are reportedly considering serious sanctions, including banning the suspect from the sport for life.
I think that’s a reasonable response.
What? Is there something wrong?
There is not a lot to say about the graphic above, other than:
- It is crude.
- It is funny.
- It is intentional.
- It is inappropriate for a general audience newspaper
- A competent editor should have caught it, and
- The graphic artist needs a warning and a reprimand.
The media, its staff, celebrities and assorted vulgarians and boors seem to be determined to make public square America as uncivil as a locker room, as crude as a peep show, and as juvenile as a junior high school farting contest. Professionals, including USA Today editors and publishers, can either do their duty and discourage this intentional rudeness in their products and services, or shrug it away. Similarly, our culture needs to decide if we are going to just define our deviancy down some more, and accept gratuitous sexual innuendo that will gradually make the whole population into a bunch of snickering Beavises. Continue reading
The Ronald Ayers saga raises the intriguing, Weiner-esque ethical issue of whether a college professor being creepy is sufficient reason to fire him.
The former economics professor was fired by the University of Texas for viewing pornography on an office computer, which the University’s policies forbade. The chain of facts has the ring of Kafka: 1) a student claims he hears “sexual noises” emanating from Ayers’ office, which 2) is considered sufficient provocation (the professor denied the accusation that he was not “master of his domain” at work) for the school to search his computer, which 3) uncovers evidence that he looked at some pornographic sites, and 4) also that he searched for the term “teen,” which 5) the university deems sufficient to indicate that he was searching for child pornography, so 6) they fired him, after three decades and tenure on the faculty.
University records say Ayers at first denied the allegations that he viewed pornography, but when confronted with a printout of his computer records, admitted that it may have happened “at the end of a long work day.” Ayers later told administrators seeing the porn was for “academic research.”
Uh-huh… Continue reading
Is Joe Scarborough the new Arthur Godfrey, as in "nice guy" revealed as "unethical creep"?
“It’s always upsetting when one of your heroes turns out to be an unethical creep.”
— Ethicist and business ethics professor Bob Stone on his blog “Ethics Bob,” expressing his disappointment in the conduct of MSNBC talk show host Joe Scarborough, who persuaded guest and colleague Mark Halperin to “go for it” when Halperin suggested that his description of President Obama’s press conference was not appropriate for public broadcast, and then did nothing to accept responsibility for the uproar when Halperin referred to Obama as “kind of a dick.” Halperin was suspended indefinitely by MSNBC, following a complaint from the White House.
Bob had expressed hope, in a comment to the Ethics Alarms criticism of Scarborough’s role in the incident, that Scarborough would do the right thing by the next day. He did not. And Bob is correct: this is proof positive that Scarborough is an unethical, cowardly creep.
What should “Morning Joe” have done? Several things: Continue reading
The accuser of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former IMF head who has been devastated by her sensational rape charge, now admits that parts of her original account of the incident and an earlier accusation of rape she made to seek asylum in the U.S. were false.
The Altantic’s Megan McArdle sums up the Ethics Train Wreck thusly:
“There are two possibilities here, neither of them good:
1) A woman with an unsavory past, who has done desperate things to get out of terrible economic conditions, was raped by a prominent figure, and he’s going to get away with it because of her history.
2) A serial cad had consensual sex with a chambermaid, and she attempted to destroy him with a false rape allegation for personal gain. And because of the presumption that women don’t lie about rape, she has succeeded in destroying him . . . though not so much in the personal gain part. To quote Ray Donovan, ‘Where do I go to get my reputation back?'” Continue reading
“A New Brunswick businessman has filed suit in federal court, charging New Brunswick Mayor James Cahill is holding up approval of his liquor license for a new high end sports bar because he doesn’t like the bar’s proposed name — Buck Foston’s. Larry Blatterfein, who has owned the Knight Club, a bar on Easton Avenue, for 30 years, charges Cahill is violating his first amendment constitutional right to free speech by holding up the transfer of a second liquor license to Blatterfein from another restaurant in town.”
The story goes on to say that the mayor denies the accusation, that the name has nothing to do with the planned establishment’s problems. Maybe not. Continue reading
Coincidentally, the previous VICE President was frequently called a "Dick"
Time Magazine editor Mark Halperin, a frequent contributer to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program, took one more chunk out of the tradition of gentility and civility in public discourse, not to mention broadcast journalism, by referring to the President of the United States as “a dick” Thursday morning. He was promptly suspended by the network, which was also the scene of Ed Schultz referring to conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham as a “right wing slut.”
Obviously the inhibitions supposedly bred into Americans about vulgar language in inappropriate places—like live TV—are crumbling fast, along with the tradition of respect for the office of President. What is more interesting about the incident, however, is how Halperin was egged into his gaffe by co-host Joe Scarborough, with an assist from Mika Brzezinski. Scarborough then took no responsibility for the incident at all. Continue reading
By joining PETZ, you can help prevent needless zombie misery...
People for the Ethical Treatment of Zombies (PETZ) is now officially accepting members.
The watchdog organization flags inappropriate zombie jokes from celebrities, advocates humane treatment of the living dead ( “Keep your zombie well-refrigerated…Reattach any limbs that have fallen off immediately…Brush your zombie’s remaining teeth regularly…”), boycotts companies that test their products on zombies (who are not capable of informed consent), companies such as KFC, Sephora, and Men’s Warehouse, and publish recipes for the zombie palate.
PETZ is also lobbying for the passage “Proposition Z,” which would “amend the California Constitution to include all persons resurrected in the State of California, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are residents of California. The State shall not make or enforce any law, which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of other residents of the State; nor shall the State deprive any infected person of life, un-dead life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any infected person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
This could be a joke, but then I think a lot of PETA’s initiatives are equally ridiculous, and they are serious.
You never know.
"Are you Michele Bachman?"
With only four well-chosen words, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace accomplished several objectives Sunday, all of them in the best tradition of ethical, objective, responsible journalism.
The words were “Are you a flake?,” posed to Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who is running for President. The question…
1. Properly forced a conservative darling to address her most striking weakness, belying Fox’s well-deserved reputation for bias toward figures its viewers admire…
2. Was a near-perfect example of the “off-the-wall” question technique, which has exposed more than one pretender to high office (Hello, Mike Dukakis!) as less than desirable.
3. Simultaneously gave Bachmann an opportunity to show how quick she could think on her feet while demonstrating important leadership traits like self-awareness, humor, wit, and grace, or, in the alternative, demonstrate the opposite.
How did she do? Well. Judge for yourself: Continue reading
When a judge acts like this, there's a problem with the court.
In the story linked here, you can read about the controversy between a liberal, female justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court who says that a conservative, male justice attempted to choke her, and the male justice, who claims she attacked him. There is more outrageous behavior described as well, including threats, and epithets like “bitch” being used.
I don’t care who did what, or what the facts are.
The conduct of the whole Wisconsin Supreme Court is a disgrace. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 