Marketing and Advertising

Ethics Hero Vs. Unethical Website and Scammer: Marc Randazza Takes Aim At The Contemptible “Is Anybody Down” and “The Takedown Lawyer”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Go get em, Marc!

First Amendment lawyer Marc Randazza is a genuine Ethics Hero. I speak from personal experience: when a cyber-bully was trying to use a threatened libel lawsuit to force me to remove a posted opinion he didn’t like, Marc (thoughtfully referred by Ken at Popehat), generously offered his time and advice…and Marc does this all the time. Right now he has a different mission: exposing a revolting cyberscam and hounding the perpetrators into retreat. His target is the website “Is Anybody Down,” and a more disgusting web enterprise would be hard to imagine, and its parasitic creation, the “Takedown Lawyer.”

I’ll let Marc explain why he has “Is Anybody Down” on his hit list:

“Here’s their business plan:

  • Step one: Register the domain name “isanybodydown.com”
  • Step two: Get ahold of nude photos of people who never consented to having their photos published.
  • Step three:Publish them, along with their names, home towns, and links to their facebook profiles.

So now how do you “profit?” Well, openly saying “I’ll take down the photo for $250,” would probably create some legal issues for you. So, instead, you create a fake lawyer persona and say “I am an internet lawyer, named David Blade, III, and I’ll get your pics down for $250.” Continue reading →

Forget Balancing: Lance Armstrong Is a Villain

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

A constant conundrum faced by every culture is how it should categorize significant individuals whose positive contributions to society and civilization are marred by other acts that range from the unethical to the despicable. How much bad can a great man do and still be called “great”? How much wrong can a good woman engage in and still fairly be remembered as “good”? Can one wonderful act erase a lifetime of bad conduct? Are some bad acts so terrible that nothing can compensate for them? Every real human being is going to yield to some temptations, make some bad choices, be selfish, be cruel, lie, or worse. If we insist that all our heroes have an unblemished record in every aspect of their lives, we simply forfeit our heroes.

One reaction to this persistent dilemma is that we tend to be reluctant to look under the rock of a heroes accomplishments for fear that we will be disillusioned, or once the rock is lifted, we will attempt to rationalize into invisibility the ugly things we find there, or insist that they don’t matter. Of course they matter. It matters that Thomas Jefferson, who gave this nation its beating heart, didn’t pay his debts, cheated his friends and refused to live up to his own ideals. It matters that Clarence Darrow, who saved over a hundred men from execution, was a terrible father and husband and an unethical lawyer. It matters that Arthur Miller, whose plays dramatized the plight of the aging worker and the dangers of political persecution, rejected his mentally-challenged son, leaving him institutionalized and without contact from his father, though he knew who his father was. Charles Lindbergh, Jackie Kennedy, Diane Fossey, Thomas Edison, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Ted Kennedy, Pete Rose, Lillian Hellman, Walter Cronkite, Hillary Clinton—the list of the great, near-great, lionized and admired who behaved less than admirably or worse in significant ways can circle the globe. In assessing their character, as well as whether their lives deserve to be regarded as positive or negative influences on their society, fellow citizens and civilization, all we can do is apply a complex balancing formula, with factors in their lives weighted according to ethical principles, experience and our own priorities.

The question of how this balance should be applied has been raised in recent weeks in the wake of the final verdict on Lance Armstrong’s cycling career, which was decisively removed from the categories of “alleged misconduct,” “controversies,”and definitely “witch hunts” for all time as mountains of documentation, lab tests, and testimony moved it squarely into the categories of “outrageous cheating’, “criminal activity”, “corruption” and “fraud.” Continue reading →

“Mitt Romney — He’s Not One Of Us”

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

“I’m Barack Obama, and I approved this message.”

I must admit that I could not devote my full attention to last night’s final Presidential debate. I had just seen the latest from President Obama’s attack machine, a television spot approved by Barack Obama, that concludes with the legend, “Mitt Romney—He’s Not One of Us.”  It is an unfair, shocking, miserable, indefensible, dangerous argument to be employed by any party, any candidate, in any race for any office in the United States, at any time in the nation’s history. For it to be employed with the approval of a President of the United States, and this President in particular, should be cause for mourning, but also anger.

If I thought that President Obama was actively involved in releasing this disgrace to his campaign and the ideals he claims to represent, I would have no difficulty concluding that it alone disqualifies him for a second term. I don’t believe that. Perhaps I won’t let myself believe that. One of Obamas myriad weaknesses as a leader, however, is that he tolerates unethical, incompetent and untrustworthy staff and advisors. He trusted his campaign advisors, and they betrayed his trust. Still, he is accountable. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Reebok

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Of course it’s for publicity.

The woman is 6’2″. OK, she’s only 5’1″, but still: that’s one big shoe..

Sure it’s marketing. Certainly it contributes to Reebok’s prestige and good will, and will help sell its shoes.

Never mind. There are many ways that the athletic sportswear company could have promoted itself without helping someone who desperately needed it. Instead, it made three free custom pairs of size 24, 10E sneakers for Igor Vovkovinskiy, the tallest man in the U.S. He was suffering, and now he can walk without pain.

The 7’8″ Rochester, Minnesota man had undergone 16 foot surgeries in six years because he could not find shoes that fit his giant feet.  Reebok heard about his plight and decided to help him. The special shoes took months to manufacture, and each pair would have cost about $15,000 if Igor had to pay for them. In fact, he was taking contributions to help him afford pain-free footwear. Now, he says, he can finally walk again

Capitalism doesn’t have to be ruthless and cold. It just needs to be creative, and pay attention. It is possible to maximize profit and still do good for people along the way, sometimes with the very same act.

Good for Reebok, and good for Igor Vovkovinskiy. Capitalism at its best.

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Facts : New York Daily News

Graphic: Star Tribune

Funny! But Wrong: The Democratic National Committee’s Fake Romney Site

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Unethical.

Don’t tell me I have no sense of humor. I get it, and it’s clever. Kind of fun, too. But just because a form of dirty campaigning is funny doesn’t change the basic principles it violates. Putting out a fake version of a political opponent’s supporter, poster, flyer, campaign material, web address, Twitter feed or website in order to trick people into either believing that the opposition campaign’s campaign or candidate is saying or doing something they are not really saying or doing for any purpose, including satire, crosses ethical lines into unethical campaign tactics territory. In a word, it’s cheating. It is unfair, deceptive and dishonest, but mostly, it is irresponsible, because it opens the door to far worse things, like sending obnoxious plants carrying racist signs to the other party’s rallies, robocalls making outrageous statements on behalf of the opposition, or putting the Obamaphone lady in fake Obama ads.

It has been a despicable campaign, and this Democratic National Committee fake Romney website not only makes it worse, it creates a slippery slope that leads right to the sewer.

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Pointer: Althouse

Ken Blackwell’s Obamaphone Smear: Yes, Ohio, A Black Man CAN Make Racist Ad

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Proving that a black man can do anything a white man can, like making a racist anti-Obama ad!

There are three things wrong with Ken Blackwell’s anti-Obama attack ad, courtesy of the Tea Party Victory Fund, which the former Cincinnati mayor and former Ohio Secretary of State leads:

1. It focuses on the Obamaphone, which is not an Obama give-away program, but an old program that has always offered free cell phones to the poor under certain conditions. Thus it is misleading and dishonest.

2. It stars the “Obamaphone Lady,” one of the ignorant and embarrassing Obama supporters captured on video by James O’Keefe clones to stereotype Obama supporters as fools. Yes, she’s a particularly appalling idiot. Both parties have plenty of them, however, and using any idiot to mock the candidate he or she supports is the epitome of cheap-shot, unethical politics. In this regard, the ad, like the video, is unfair and irresponsible.

3. The particular idiot chosen for this exercise is black, used to criticize a black President, whose strongest support comes from the black community. As a result, the ad is racist and offensive. Continue reading →

A Trivial Attack Ad That Reveals Untrustworthiness

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

All is lost now…

The Obama campaign’s new creation is a 30-second spot that opens with shots of Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay and other business villains. “Criminals. Gluttons of greed,” intones the ad’s solemn narrator. “And the evil genius who towered over them? One man has the guts to speak his name.”  Then the ad cuts to Mitt Romney, pulling two words out of his debate comments (the words that came before them were, “I love..”), saying “Big Bird….Big Bird…Big Bird”

B.B. then appears in a montage of Sesame Street clips, as the narrator says,  “Yellow. A menace to our economy. Mitt Romney knows it’s not Wall Street you have to worry about. It’s Sesame Street. Mitt Romney, taking on our enemies no matter where they nest.”

It’s an epically stupid ad, if for no other reason that it recruits a non-profit organization’s symbol into a partisan political attack ad, without that organization’s permission. The Children’s Television Workshop has officially  “requested” that the Obama campaign remove it. The ad is far worse than that, however: Continue reading →

Writers Writing About Ethics, Without Any

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Sorry, can’t use you.

Writer Joe Konrath has written one of those blog posts about ethics that makes me want to defenestrate myself, a post that expounds on rationalizations as a substitute for ethical analysis because he is incapable of the latter, arriving at fatuous and misleading conclusions. Naturally his post was picked up and expounded upon by another blogger, Ben Galley, who has even launched an ethics-challenged website called Ethiks to promote similar ethics rot.

Both writers are holding forth about recent scandals in the publishing world, involving so-called “sock puppetry,” where a writer anonymously praises his own books on-line or trashes the work of competitors, and writers paying for positive reviews. Both are also laboring under juvenile ethical delusions, and obnoxiously so, among them:  that “everybody does it” is a valid excuse for cheating, that the fact that a critic of unethical behavior might engage in such behavior himself under certain conditions invalidates the ethical criticism, and that unethical people insisting that unethical conduct isn’t puts such conduct in a “grey area.” None of these is true; none of these is remotely true.

The ethically-clueless tenor of both posts can be gleaned from this section, by Galley:

“Ethics in life are a grey area. No less in the book industry. To borrow JA’s analogy, the claim of “I would never kill” goes out of the window pretty quickly when protecting your family against a murderous intruder. The line of ethics is never a straight one, often zig-zagging through a charcoal no-man’s land of right and wrong. The question is this: Where does the line lie for you? It’s nothing less than personal. Some people simply shrug at the thought of sock-puppetry. Others go a shade of red and grit their teeth. Sadly, we can write all the codes and edicts we like, the point is that not everyone will a) agree, nor b) abide.”

Let me see: wrong, wrong, irrelevant, wrong, not necessarily, no it isn’t, NO, it REALLY ISN’T, and so what?

Most ethical questions are not gray at all: these definitely aren’t. They are clear as clear can be. “Sock puppetry” is dishonest and unfair. An author paying for positive reviews, and a critic accepting payment from an author to review his work, is blatantly dishonest and a conflict of interest. There is no “gray” about it; they are just wrong. Anyone who draws the “line” anywhere else is wrong too. It doesn’t matter whether everyone agrees: those who don’t agree are unethical. So are those who can’t “abide.” Their unethical conduct doesn’t alter right and wrong.

Konrath’s piece wastes our time with a long argument claiming that unless one is as pure as the driven snow, not only can’t you call unethical conduct what it is,  the fact that you can’t calls into question whether the unethical conduct is really unethical at all. Here’s his “quiz,” which Konrath presents triumphantly as if it is a real brain-buster, when anyone with a modicum of honesty, decency and common sense should be able to score 100% without straining a neuron.

Here it is, with my answers in bold: Continue reading →

“Marion Berry’s Dirty Asian Summer Punch” and Attacks on Free Speech From The Left

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The United States’ has to be vigilant in protecting its unique Bill of Rights from dilution, degradation and manipulation. Once the threats came from the political right, as with the Red-baiting tactics of Sen. Joe McCarthy. Now it more typically comes from the kinder, gentler, more hypocritical political left, often in the form of threats to “hate speech,” a term that can mean pretty much whatever the kinder, gentler censor wants it to mean, and is especially handy to stifle dissent.

This First Amendment assault was on view yesterday on MSNBC, as PR loud mouth Donny Deutch, columnist Mike Barnicle and University of Pennsylvania professor Anthea Butler all agreed that the makers of the anti-Muslim video now being used as an excuse to attack embassies should be indicted. Uh, no. Making a movie cannot be a crime in the U.S.: this was what Citizens United was all about, and the principle is called “Freedom of Speech.” But bigger brains than Donny’s are trying to chip away at the right that makes America America, using the ever-popular “everybody does it” rationalization to argue that European nations prosecute those who “hurt religious feelings”, in the immortal words of our Cairo Embassy, so it must be the right thing to do.

Scared yet? If not read this post, and this, from the Volokh Conspiracy, on the arguments for limiting Free Speech being made by Prof. Peter Spiro and former Yale Dean Harold Koh, the latter now working in the Obama State Department.

Or just watch how much the bureaucrats in our nation’s capital respects the First Amendment. Or understand satire. Continue reading →

Unethical Packaging, and Silly Too: Domino’s “Carbon Free” Sugar For Suckers

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

You would think that the sugar people, Domino, would know this about their product: sugar contains carbon. Sucrose, the technical name for table sugar,  has the chemical formula C12H22O11. That C stands for “carbon.” Take the carbon out of sugar, and you pretty much have water.

And yet here is Domino advertising certified carbon-free sugar, which is like bias-free MSNBC or greed-free Wall Street. It’s impossible. But some people will fall for anything, especially if it sounds “green.”

I know—what they mean is that growing the sugar doesn’t emit carbon into the atmosphere, but that doesn’t make the sugar itself “carbon-free,” I don’t squirt blood into the atmosphere, but I’m not “blood-free.”  Maybe this is an election year ploy, and Domino has concluded that since the public is hearing so much dishonest nonsense around the clock, they can slip this one by. Whatever their excuse, we should resent being treated like idiots.

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Pointer: Volokh

Source: WUWT

Graphic: Irregular Times