History

Ethics Dunce: Facebook

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

facebook-big-brotherLet us be clear that Facebook is not engaged in “censorship,” properly defined. Nor does Facebook infringe on the First Amendment by limiting, even severely, irrationally or based on political bias, what a user may post. Facebook can set whatever conditions for use of its services that it chooses. Facebook isn’t the government.

It should, however, set fair and reasonable conditions, and be capable of enforcing them without bias and in an even-handed fashion—if it wants to be the ethical entity it claims to be. This would also seem to be in the company’s best interest. If I think Facebook is going to swoop down and cancel my account because I dare to disagree with political correctness sanctioned by the Facebook management, I have better uses for my time. So do you.

Thus it is puzzling to read that Facebook purged the account of Natural News for posting this:

Gandhi quote

Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “What’s Next for the Alisal Union School District…John Dillinger High School?”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The second Comment of the Day on my post about a Salinas, California school district choosing to name an elementary school after an executed thief and murderer from that state’s colorful past is an unusual one. When I was first presented with J.S.’s comment protesting what he took as a false assertion that Mr. Dillinger was a killer in addition to being an epic bank-robber, I took him to be Dillinger fetishist, like the warped souls who are obsessed with villains like Billy the Kid and Charles Manson. I was wrong: as he explains here, he is a Dillinger family member, and has a valid reason for insisting that the original Public Enemy #1 is only condemned for the (many) crimes he actually committed. Here is S.S’s  heartfelt Comment of the Day, on the post “What’s Next for the Alisal Union School District…John Dillinger High School?”: Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “What’s Next for the Alisal Union School District…John Dillinger High School?”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment
Dillinger. Such a pleasant looking fellow!

Dillinger. Such a pleasant looking fellow!

This is the first of two informative Comments of the Day regarding this post. 49erDweet is correct, of course: the decision to honor Tiburcio Vasquez is a disgrace, and the comment shows that it is even more outrageous and irresponsible than I thought. I have read some of the claims on the web that Vasquez was “framed,” and that he didn’t commit the crimes attributed to him. None of them offer any proof other than the fact that mainstream scholars and historians, which naturally are biased against Mexicans, chronicled his activities, and none explain this mystery: if Vasquez didn’t commit all those crimes, what the heck did he do that was so remarkable? The only reason he is famous is because of his crimes. If he really was innocent, then he was a non-entity.

Here is 49erDweet’s Comment of the Day on the post, “What’s Next for the Alisal Union School District…John Dillinger High School?”:

“The Alisal school district’s area is directly adjacent to mine but in the same community, so I’m a tiny bit familiar with the issue. I’ve disbelievingly read most of the few published responses of a couple of their board members and their superintendent. For some reason the other board members haven’t been available.
From what I’ve read it’s apparent the individuals involved, all of whom have Hispanic surnames, believe the available published history concerning California is biased and untrue, and Vasquez should be considered a popular hero in the same vein as was Robin Hood. For the crimes he committed against his own people, which they believe were minor, they readily forgive him. And to their way of thinking he’s a folk hero who should be idolized.

“I believe this is sad, bad community leadership, obviously a major ethics fail, and is more than passingly ironic because the area they represent is one of the major Mexican prison gang battlefields currently in crisis in California. They are preparing to hold up a killer, thief, robber and rapist as a person their future students should emulate. Which, for a gang area, should build up the prison population and a much shorter than normal life expectancy.

“My heart breaks for the students who will be negatively impacted by this dreadful decision.”

What’s Next for the Alisal Union School District…John Dillinger High School?

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

OK, so he was hanged for murder. Nobody's perfect.

OK, so he was hanged for murder. Nobody’s perfect.

According to the University of Southern California historical archives, Tiburcio Vasquez (1835- 1875) was California’s second most notorious bandit. At the age of 14 he stabbed a constable, then embarked on a life of crime. He became the leader of his own gang, which ranged up and down central and southern California, robbing and killing. Vasquez was convicted of horse-stealing and sentenced to San Quentin prison in 1857, escaped, stole more horses, and was finally released in 1863, after playing a role in four prison breaks that resulted in the deaths of twenty inmates. For the next ten years he and his gang committed a string of burglaries, robberies and murders in the San Benito County area, finally ending with his capture in 1874. Convicted of two murders of the six attributed to him, Vadquez was sentenced to death, and executed by hanging the next year. Shortly before the noose was placed around his neck, Vasquez dictated an explanation for his actions:

“A spirit of hatred and revenge took possession of me. I had numerous fights in defense of what I believed to be my rights and those of my countrymen. I believed we were unjustly deprived of the social rights that belonged to us.”

I know what you must be thinking: “What a perfect historical figure for the Mexican-American community to honor by naming an elementary school him!” Continue reading →

I Guess Remembering “The Maine” Is Out of the Question

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments
Hey, Matt: What was this? Anybody?

Hey, Matt: What was this? Hello? Anybody?

I was going to write a depressing post about how neither the Washington Post nor CNN, nor the Today Show (though I missed some of it, and can’t be completely sure) bothered to mention Pearl Harbor this morning, on the anniversary of the day when a sneak air attack by Japan nearly destroyed the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor at Oahu, Hawaii. 2,335 U.S. servicemen and sixty-eight civilians died in the attack, as 1,178 soldiers and civilians were wounded. The tragedy launched U.S. participation in World War II, which took another 416,000 American lives among the horrendous 60 million killed in that conflict. Naturally, none of this was deemed worthy of mention by our journalistic establishment, or perhaps they just forgot. After all, the Grammy nominations were announced last night.

Then I caught this exchange among Harold Reynolds, Ken Rosenthal, and host Matt Vasgersian on the MLB Network’s live off-season show, Studio K, leading into a story about the Philadelphia Phillies obtaining outfielder Ben Revere in a trade yesterday: Continue reading →

The Ethics Attic: Notes From Around The Web

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

messy attic

[I’m still feeling lousy, so in an effort to conserve some energy while keeping the torch high, I’m presenting a few links that the ethics-minded might enjoy visiting. Normally I would write about some of these, so consider yourselves lucky.]

  • Historian Paul Finkleman delivers that harshest verdict yet on the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson regarding civil rights and slavery. You should then read David G. Post’s splendid contra essay here. (The last two sentences in Finkleman’s op-ed are pretty much indefensible.)
  • A fascinating reflection, inspired by the movie “Lincoln,” on Utilitarianism and “the ends justifies the means.”
  • In fact, the program is a benign one, but considering the issue raised in my last post, it is hard to imagine more perfect symbolism for the American public trading self-sufficiency for government protection than the trade described here.
  • If you missed the recent George Will column, a frightening one, about the assaults of free speech and thought around the campuses of American universities, you have another chance to read it, here.
  • I only recently learned that 3-D copiers are a reality, and Dr. Chris MacDonald, on his always excellent Business Ethics Blog, has some insight on their ethical implications here.
  • Once again this year, I have an essay in The 2013 Hardball Times Baseball Annual, and publisher Dave Studenmund references my analysis of the Stephen Strasburg affair here.
  • Finally, thanks to Mary Wright on the HR Gazette for posting the Ethics Alarms Apology Scale.

In the Wake Of The BP Disaster, Another Andersonville Trial

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments
Someone has to be held responsible, even if nobody is to blame.

Someone has to be held responsible, even if nobody is to blame.

I don’t know about you, but I was certainly surprised to discover that in the view of the Justice Department, two men I had never heard of, Robert Kaluza and Donald Vidrine, were the ones responsible for the April 20, 2010 explosion of a BP oil rig that caused millions of barrels of oil to leak into the Gulf of Mexico for months, polluting the waters and the shores and causing billions of dollars of damages. That is the clear implication of the decision to prosecute the two rig  supervisors for manslaughter in the deaths of the eleven BP workers who perished in the blast.

Obviously, this makes no sense at all. Other government authorities have treated the BP spill as resulting from a complex series of errors, misjudgments, and regulatory violations on the part of several companies and their management teams. The allocation of responsibilities and damages will take years to unravel. How then can Kaluza and Vidrine, who are accused of disregarding abnormally high pressure readings that according to the government should have alerted them to the danger of a  blowout at BP’s Macondo well, be the ones facing criminal charges and prison time? How can this be fair, just, or even possible?

It isn’t fair or just. It is possible because it is easier to finger the two middle-managers who inherited the flawed well equipment that was a ticking time bomb than to put a whole company, or many companies, behind bars. As the F.B.I. agent investigating the theft of the Declaration of Independence keeps telling Nicholas Cage’s treasure hunter in the Dan Brown rip-off  movie “American Treasure,” “Somebody has to go to jail.” Kaluza and Vidrine may be the designated villains for the BP spill. Their only crime was one of moral luck: they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, the final links in a tangled chain of incompetence, corruption and miscalculations. Continue reading →

Jack’s Anti-Political Correctness, Political Bloodsport and Contrived Offense Crusade: Progress Report

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

As I noted earlier, I am in New Mexico talking to journalists here about the Pat Rogers affair. You can sample one of the fruits of my labors here, a story in the Santa Fe New Mexican. It’s pretty accurate, as press interviews go, though the last quote was botched. I didn’t say that I was a “Greek American conservative Democrat with an anti-war war hero father,” but that my diverse views were the product of “a Greek American conservative Democrat mother and  an anti-war war hero father.” [ UPDATE: This has been corrected.]

If you’ve missed the various posts on this issue, you can find them here, here and here.

One odd note: during my meeting with several reporters from the paper, one of them suggested that making a joke about Custer’s Last Stand was like making a joke about the Holocaust. I let it pass, but the comment seems bizarre to me. Custer, after all, got himself and his men killed, and it was his opposition that was the object of genocide, not the cavalry. Why would ridiculing Custer offend Native Americans?

Putting My Mouth Where My Blog Is

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I’m on the way to New Mexico today, to speak to the news media there and to try to build some consensus—New Mexico is as good a place to start as any—that using faux indignation over manufactured political correctness offenses is no way to run a political system, community, society or culture. It is, in fact, a cynical and despicable practice  used by special interest groups and unscrupulous politicians to stifle legitimate debate, or, as in the case that inspired my trip, to unfairly tar the character and reputation of a political adversary. The victim in the New Mexico incident was attorney Pat Rogers, who saw his obviously satirical e-mail intentionally twisted by partisan foes who almost certainly knew its real meaning into being represented in the press as a gratuitous racist slur—which it was not. I wrote about this here, and a similar incident, with parties reversed in Washington state, here.

What am I going to tell the various interviews and reporters I speak with over the next few days? I will tell them that political blood sport has got to stop. That the effort to discredit political positions by seeking ways to demonize their advocates is unethical and wrong. That contrived accusations of racism (or sexism, homophobia, or any other form of bigotry) should not be aided and abetted by the media or tolerated by the public. I will also assert that political warriors on the right or left who intentionally choose to misinterpret innocent expressions of irony, satire or humor as racist attacks both diminish the charge of true bigotry when it is justified, and expose themselves as polluters of our culture and national cohesion.

I don’t know Pat Rogers well; we have only met once. But I know who he represents: those who have been harmed as collateral damage in a hyper-partisan environment encouraged by Washington, D.C. and cheered on by the vilest members of the blogosphere, to the detriment of our sense of community, decency, and trust. My efforts, whatever they are, will be modest at best, and, in all likelihood, inconsequential. But you never know.

Wish me luck.

To The Un-American Secessionists

/ Jack Marshall / 170 Comments

Led by Texans, the White House is being deluged with petitions from all around the nation asking that various states be allowed to secede from the U.S. because the prospect of another four years of President Obama is so heinous. My immediate reaction is that this proves that conservatives are lazier than progressives, whose solution to a similar disappointment with parties reversed in 2004 was to pack up and move to Canada, or at least to make noises about it.  Conservatives apparently want to stay at home and leave the U.S.too. How convenient.

In 2004, when liberals and Democrats were acting like spoiled brats, I posted the following essay entitled “Escape to Canada and the Ethics of Democracy.” I think it is instructive to re-publish this post unedited to clarify what is wrong with the conservative tantrum of 2012. Oh, I could have changed “left” to “right,” Canada to Texas and Bush to Obama and Alec Baldwin to Ted Nugent, but it hardly seemed necessary, for my diagnosis and conclusions are exactly the same, just with a different group. It also seems prudent to leave the essay in its original form to remind smug liberals like Jon Stewart, now having a ball mocking Republicans, that Democrats disgraced themselves in a similar manner not that long ago. Being a hysteric, an alarmist, a bad citizen and a poor loser isn’t confined to members of one partisan group—it just seems that way at the moment. Now the conservatives are the silly people who are rejecting the principles of self-government that they were fervently  lecturing us about, because, you see, those principles didn’t work out their way…this time.

Here is “Escape to Canada and the Ethics of Democracy,” from The Ethics Scoreboard on November 17, 2004: Continue reading →