“You’re doing WHAT???????”
Nevada lawyer Mark Liapis decided to represent a man sued for divorce by his longtime spouse. The spouse petitioned the court to have him barred from the case, and the court agreed: Mark was, after all, representing his father against his own mother.
Ick. Continue reading
After a 14-year old Pennsylvania lad stole Jeep Grand Cherokee and led police on a high-speed chase that ended with him clipping another vehicle and causing a crash that closed the highway and left the boy in a coma, his mother told reporters that her son wasn’t the only one to blame for the accident.
“I’m not downplaying my son’s role in taking something that didn’t belong to him, but I am saying they actually left their keys in the car and the vehicle could have been taken by anybody,” she said. The mother, who has not been identified in press accounts because, I guess, her son is a minor and some people think that teenagers who steal cars, defy police and endanger lives should have their identities shielded (not me!), also found fault with the Jeep’s owners boyfriend, who followed the vehicle after the kid started driving it away: Continue reading
—-18 year old Floridian Aaron Morris, who was arrested and charged for fondling the buttocks of the woman ahead of him in line at the local Wal-Mart.
Ah, the gateway to an unethical life!
Just 11 words, yet such an eloquent discourse on the ethical reasoning abilities of so many Americans! Bravo, Aaron!
In those 11 words, he summed up the mindset of an ethics-free life. He molested a stranger because he wanted to. She didn’t matter, her dignity didn’t matter, her embarrassment didn’t matter. As a citizen, he was either ignorant of the law against battery (any touching of another without permission is battery, and has been for centuries) or contemptuous of it. His simple, selfish, impulsive action violated the Golden Rule, as well as nearly every other ethical principle. It was unfair, disrespectful, irresponsible, and uncaring. It violated the basic bonds of trust between strangers in a community.
At least Aaron was honest about it.
That’s something to build on.
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Facts: Sun-Sentinel
Graphic: BS Report
Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at jamproethics@verizon.net.
Count your blessings, Homer? Your boss isn’t so bad after all!
We must place the word “alleged” in front of all of this, for it is just a law suit at this point, but if the outrageous conduct described in the complaint made by Albert Sultan against his former boss, Manhattan real estate broker Jack Terzi, is even close to true, Terzi may be the Tin Standard against which all other abusive employers should be judged.
Sultan says in his 15-page lawsuit that he was hired by Terzi in 2009, shortly after Terzi started his real estate business. After three years of Terzi’s reign of terror, Sultan says, he became “emotionally distraught, humiliated and embarrassed” by “systematic and continuous unlawful harassment” at the hands of his tyrannical and abusive boss, who, among other things…
Wait! I haven’t gotten to the juicy stuff yet! Continue reading
This week, the American Bar Association House of Delegates passed Resolution 100.
RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association urges all state, territorial, and local legislative bodies and governmental agencies to adopt comprehensive breed-neutral dangerous dog/reckless owner laws that ensure due process protections for owners, encourage responsible pet ownership and focus on the behavior of both dog owners and dogs, and to repeal any breed discriminatory or breed specific provisions.
Translation: stop discriminating against pit bulls and all the dogs that look like pit bulls, might be pit bulls, or that people who don’t know anything about dogs might think are pit bulls, as well as the dogs’ owners. It’s not fair, it’s unethical, and it’s un-American. Or, as Elise Van Kavage, chair of the Animal Law Committee of the Tort, Trial & Insurance Practice Section, put it, “People love their pets, no matter what their appearance,” she said. “This is America. Responsible pet owners should be allowed to own whatever breed they want.” Continue reading
” Ah, what a beauty! $150,000 well spent!”
Imagine, if you will, that the late Joe Paterno didn’t take action to expose the child-molesting proclivities of his former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, not because he was concerned about his cherished football program’s image, but because Sandusky paid him off with a big check. Can we all agree that this would have been even more reprehensible than what actually occurred? I assume so. Paterno would have been enriching himself with the sacrifice of young innocents to a pedophile.
Now compare that hypothetical with what we know about the developing scandal around renowned swimming coach Rick Curl, who has trained Olympian swimmers for decades. took a leave of absence from the club he founded Wednesday in the wake of accusations that he engaged in a sexual relationship with a teen swimmer and then paid her and her parents to keep quiet as part of a settlement. Continue reading
Question:
What is the monetary value of something that can’t be sold?
Answer:
Nothing.
That’s an easy one.
So why is the IRS claiming that the heirs of the New York art dealer Ileana Sonnabend owe $29.2 million in taxes on an art work that U.S. prevents from ever being converted into cash? Continue reading
Savanah Dietrich, teen rape victim facing charges for refusing to protect the privacy of her rapists,
One of the Ethics Alarms principles that many find infuriating is my position that violating the law is inherently unethical. Like all rules, this one doesn’t make sense in all cases, and one of them has surfaced in Louisville, Kentucky.
Savanah Dietrich, a 17-year-old rape victim, was infuriated when her teenaged rapists managed to negotiate a lenient plea bargain for sexually assaulting her and circulating pictures of the incident to friends. She took to Twitter, named them and described what they did to her, despite being under a confidentiality order from the judge in the case. Her attackers were juveniles, and the court records were sealed. Now Dietrich is facing a jail sentence longer than her rapists, because their attorneys have asked a Jefferson District Court judge to hold her in contempt. Continue reading
“But the government doesn’t get to pick and choose what social causes are permissible, and any government actor who aspires to that power is a lowlife thug. What’s particularly alarming about Menino’s thuggery is how openly his referencing to licensing “difficulties” reveals how things really work in government: whatever rights you think that you have, practically speaking some bureaucrat can punish you for exercising them on a whim, and there’s very little you can do about it. Menino represents the ethos of government actors who think quite frankly that this is right and just and how it should be — that they, our masters, should be able to dictate what we think and do and say if we want to do business in their fiefdom”
—-Ken, Ethics Alarms 2011 Blogger of the Year, on Boston Mayor Thomas Menino’s public attack on Chick-fil-A, the food outlet whose president openly opposes same sex marriage and contributes to anti-gay marriage organizations.
Banned in Boston
Some things never change, do they? Once my old home town used to ban books and plays that contained ideas and content the powers-that-were disapproved of, and now its mayor actually thinks its his job to decide what political and social views a business owner or any citizen can safely support without facing active government enmity and sanctions. Boston, which was the nation’s first cauldron of free thought and passionate dedication to governments allowing free thought to thrive, quickly came to exemplify the liberal hypocrisy of being so dedicated to freedom that it will punish and censor anyone who doesn’t adopt its virtuous and obviously wise and correct views of the world. Menino’s threatened abuse of power to compel Chick-fil-A’s ownership “think right” is a classic in this category. The mayor told the Boston Herald: Continue reading
Now that I think about it, nobody gets shot in Pixar movies. I wonder if movies about violence vigilantes need to be regulated…
He just couldn’t help himself. Learning of the horrible Batman theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado, ABC reporter Brian Ross got on the air and reported a possible “tea party link” with the killer, James Holmes, and if you don’t think this sent a thrill up his leg, I have some gold mine shares to sell you. Anything to smear conservatives: why was he looking at tea party web pages, any more than PETA sites, or Parcheesi fan sites? Because, you see, the tea parties are violent—don’t you remember? They inspired that guy to shoot Gaby Giffords! Where else would you expect to find a madman killer?
It was fantasy, of course, and Ross and ABC duly apologized, but never mind: it worked. Confirmation bias is a sure thing. I was in a Food Court at LAX today, and heard someone at the table next to me eating similar unidentifiable swill say, “Did you hear? One of those tea party guys shot all those people!” I finally got to my room in Sun Valley (it was easier to get to Mongolia than Sun Valley) to check what she was talking about. So you see, Brian? Mission accomplished!
Others are politicizing the Aurora shooting in only slightly less outrageous ways, mostly with the sadly predictable rush of anti-gun advocates to point to the slaughter and say, “See? Guns bad.” Then comes the related cognitive dissonance trick, linking gun rights to automatic weapons to madmen and criminals using such weapons to the tragic deaths resulting from said use, hence Republicans and conservatives are really allied with killers and murderers, which gives us some insight into their true character.
I’m sure Brian Ross approves.
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Facts: Huffington Post
Graphic: Shout Omaha
