Pick your poison!
Your Ethic Quiz question for the weekend: Which of these is the most unethical choice to speak at a University?
Your choices:
A. Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, the over-the-top trashy break-out star of the bottom-of-the barrel cable reality show “Jersey Shore,” hired for $32,000 by Rutgers University to address students. Continue reading
Jeff Hibbert sets a record for pithy and concise with his comment on the Ethics Quiz about the company that will pay your mortgage if you’ll let them turn your home into a billboard. Besides, it made me laugh, and I needed a laugh.
“Eventually, everything flat will have advertising on it. This is why I think a flat stomach is overrated.”
Masterpiece Theater presents....
I hate to belabor this, but I’m going to anyway: those who argue that PBS must receive taxpayer funding because it fills a void in quality programming that will not appear anywhere else are either lying, because they know this isn’t true, or never watch PBS, which means they are also lying by asserting something they have no knowledge of.
Last night, my local PBS station featured a two-hour program (it was a repeat of a 2004 PBS special) featuring commercial TV trash quiz show host Wink Martindale giving fake questions to a panel of Rip Taylor (see photo), the bread-ball and confetti hurling prop comedian from the Sixties and Seventies, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Dr. Phil’s forerunner who was a favorite guest of the late Merv Griffin, and Brett Somers, a Phyllis Diller-light comedienne best known for being Jack Klugman’s wife and as a regular panelist on the Seventies version of “The Match Game.” Continue reading
Liz's last laugh
Screen legend Elizabeth Taylor, who drove husbands, producers, directors and co-stars to distraction by her habit of being late to appointments. meetings and film sets, played a joke on her mourners when she arranged to be “late for her own funeral,” scheduling it to start 15 minutes after the announced time.
Anyone who plans a joke for their own funeral generally has my respect and approval. This one, however, is ambiguous as well as funny. Tardiness is disrespectful to those who have to endure it, and often is a sign of arrogance and lack of empathy. Movie stars like Taylor who keep crews and actors on the set fray tempers, inflate budgets and undermine shooting schedules. Being habitually late is being habitually unethical. Continue reading
The Ninth Circuit declined the opportunity to reconsider its controversial (and wrong) decision earlier this year that declared the Stolen Valor Act unconstitutional. That means that according to the Ninth Circuit, pretending to have won a Purple Heart or a Silver Star is protected speech, and Congress’s law making it a felony to wear such a medal when you haven’t done anything to deserve it is an infringement of free speech. I discussed this issue here.
This post, however, is about some interesting dicta in this week’s decision, courtesy of the Ninth Circuit’s most colorful jurist, Judge Alex Kozinski. The Judge has flip-flopped on this question now twice—he was against the Act, then for it, then against it again. But this time around, he graced us with some provocative thoughts about why lying isn’t always wrong. He wrote: Continue reading
Rehire Charlie Sheen?! What could CBS be thinking?
Barry Bonds goes on trial for perjury today. He is one of our society’s prime corrupters. Bonds cheated, lied, broke the law and helped drag major league baseball’s integrity into the depths, all with the objectives of breaking records by players better and more honest than he, and becoming rich and famous. He accomplished all of these things, with no appreciable negative consequences; as of now, his career and life carry the lesson that cheating works, and anyone who lets things like rules, laws, or ethics stand in the way of success is a fool. Perhaps the trial will change that. I can dream.
Now CBS has stepped up to be a prime corporate ethics corrupter. Reportedly, it is negotiating with Charlie Sheen to get him back on the air, either in his now defunct show “Two and a Half Men,” or in something else. Continue reading
As long as we are on the topic of shunning and consequences (see previous post):
Is HBO comic/political commentator/arrogant jerk Bill Maher stooping to outright misogyny in his gratuitous ridicule of Sarah Palin going to have any consequences at all?
On his cable show “Real Time” this week, Maher’s usual name-calling took a sharp turn into the despicable with this:
MAHER: Oh, and did you hear this? [Laughs] Sarah Palin finally heard what happened in Japan……and she’s demanding that we invade “Tsunami.” I mean, she says, “These Tsunamians will not get away with this.” Oh speaking of dumb twats, did you…
[Audience hilarity and applause]
MAHER: Oh, you’re right, yeah I let the cat out the bag on that one, huh folks?”
…………………………………………………………
That last line was a “pussy joke,” for those of you too genteel to appreciate Bill Maher’s “wit.” Continue reading
Mayor Trivial T. Spineless
He was, without question, the best mayor Fort Wayne, Indiana has ever had. When he first took office, he consolidated city departments launched construction of Fort Wayne’s massive underground sewage system and built the city sewage treatment plant, which is used to this day, seventy years later. When W.W. II came, he held war materials drives, upgraded city equipment and services, and broke ground for was is now Fort Wayne International Airport. and lowered city tax rates. In his last term, he opened up a major area of the town for development by elevating the railroad tracks. And he kept taxes low.
For 21 years beginning in 1934, this dedicated public servant was only not mayor for three years: he died at his post in 1954. And the people of Ft. Wayne haven’t forgotten him. This year, when city officials asked its citizens to vote on whose name the new government center should bear, the response was overwhelming. Ten times more people again voted for the former mayor they had always voted for while he was alive than for anyone or anything else (the runner-up choice was “Thunderdome”).
The current mayor, however, has decided not follow the results of the poll. He thinks the name would be inappropriate. You see, the famous leader that the people of Fort Wayne want to honor was named Harry Baals.
The current mayor’s name? Trivial T. Spineless. Continue reading
Ethics critic. Really.
If you know “Cracked” at all, you probably remember its as Mad Magazine’s not-quite-as-funny competitor in the juvenile humor magazine market. But yesterday’s rip-off humor rag is today’s clever website, and this week it unveiled a clever and useful article about the various ways print journalists slant the news. I have written about many of them, but Cracked writer C. Corville has done a thorough, perceptive, and entertaining job, identifying a couple I had missed. And she’s right.
Cracked’s “6 Subtle Ways The News Media Disguises Bullshit As Fact” are, in reverse order:
6. Weasel Words
5. Implying Without Saying
4. Burying Inconvenient Facts
3. Biased Photos
2. The Active Voice
1. Guessing the Motives Instead of Reporting the Facts
Excellent work. I recommend it highly.
Tough quiz today, ethics fans. Be on your toes!
Our quiz for today: Who most deserved to be fired—Glenn Beck, Gilbert Gottfried (the voice of the Aflac duck), neither, or both?
The Mad Prophet of Fox, Glenn Beck returned to his radio program with this reflection:
“I’m not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes. I’m not not saying that either… but there’s a message being sent. And that is, ‘Hey, you know that stuff we’re doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it.’ I’m just saying.”
Yes, Glenn Beck said that the devastation of Japan just may be a message from God. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 