Popular Culture

The Gaby Rodriguez Virus—Hoax Your Friends For Fame and Profit—Spreads

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Be careful! If you catch the virus, you might lie to your family that you’re going to die, and write a book about it!

High school senior Gaby Rodriquez got fame, a book, a movie deal and awards, not to mention an A for her school project, by traumatizing her family and friends with an extended pregnancy hoax. It was inevitable that when such blatantly unethical and destructive conduct is hailed as “courageous” by media pundits and pays off in speaking fees and book contracts as well, other ambitious liars would try the same trick. Sure enough, a young straight male Christian decided to hoax his friends and family by telling them he was gay.

It’s worth lying to everyone who cares about you and trusts you for a book deal, right? Timothy Kurek’s experience posing as gay for a year is the basis of his “Jesus In Drag” coming out this fall. The Today show should slobber all over this one, and I’m sure Timothy will become a familiar butt on the couches of Ellen, Dave, Jimmy and others. And, like Gaby Rodriguez, he will be hailed for his “courage” to exploit the trust of his family and to betray his friends so he could use their discomfort as book material. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Jenny McCarthy Body Count

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Sure, bet your kid’s life on the wisdom of Jenny McCarthy. Makes sense to me!

From The Jenny McCarthy Body Count:

“In June 2007 Jenny McCarthy began promoting anti-vaccination rhetoric. Because of her celebrity status she has appeared on several television shows and has published multiple books advising parents not to vaccinate their children. This has led to an increase in the number of vaccine preventable illnesses as well as an increase in the number of vaccine preventable deaths. Jenny McCarthy has a body count attached to her name. This website will publish the total number of vaccine preventable illnesses and vaccine preventable deaths that have happened in the United States since June 2007 when she began publicly speaking out against vaccines.

“Is Jenny McCarthy directly responsible for every vaccine preventable illness and every vaccine preventable death listed here? No. However, as the unofficial spokesperson for the United States anti-vaccination movement she may be indirectly responsible for at least some of these illnesses and deaths and even one vaccine preventable illness or vaccine preventable death is too many.”

You can visit the Jenny McCarthy Body Count, which stands at 888 preventable deaths as of May 31, 2012, here.

Your Ethics Quiz is simple: Is the website fair?

My answer: sure.

McCarthy is an engaging, attractive, well-meaning woman and semi-talented comic actress who has misused her celebrity, as many celebrities do and have, to exert more influence over the public and media than her experience, education, intelligence, wisdom and expertise justify. Are the various television programs, media outlets and hysteria-peddlers also accountable for giving someone with McCarthy’s thin credentials and outsize influence a platform to frighten and mislead the many members of the public who are even more ignorant than she is? Absolutely. Does that reduce McCarthy’s culpability for spreading misinformation that leads to potentially deadly neglect of the health needs of children? Not one bit.

Using the Jenny McCarthy Body Count to call attention to the foolishness of anti- vaccine hysteria is a clever idea, and if it keeps even one parent from being misled by the medical nonsense pushed McCarthy and her allies. it is performing a public service.

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Pointer: Instapundit

Facts: Jenny McCarthy Body Count

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.

How Consequentialism Leads To Bad Ethics: An Illustration

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Tgt passes along this cartoon by Zach Weiner. He knew why I would like it: I am often railing about the misuse of consequentialism, justifying an act as ethical after it has produced desirable results. This fallacy bolsters “the ends justify the means” reasoning and makes every act, even clearly wrongful ones, theoretically redeemable in retrospect, after the results are in (although, of course, all the results are never in. That’s Chaos for you!)  The defense of torture by Bush administration defenders on the grounds that it may have uncovered valuable intelligence is the most recent example. Had the unconstitutional imprisonment of Japanese-American citizens in World War II  prevented some Japanese undercover plot by imbedded traitors, undoubtedly that fact would be used to justify an unjustifiable and disgraceful breach of American law and values. Looking backward creates this ethical distortion.

It is equally infuriating, to me at least, when good and ethical decisions are judged, usually by the media or by political pundits, as “wrong” or ” mistakes” because of bad results that could not have been foreseen when the decision was made or the act undertaken.

Weiner’s cartoon nicely marks the logical flaws in backward ethics, for those for whom the word “backward” is an insufficient clue.

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Spark and Pointer: tgt

Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

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.

 

The Fojol Bros., Innocent of Racism, Political Correctness Victims

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

In its advanced stages, 21st century political correctness becomes a kind of delusional illness, causing sufferers to interpret  benign, harmless and even socially healthy conduct as offensive and sinister. An outbreak of this variety of political correctness is in full flower in Washington, D.C., where more than the usual number of officious defenders of that which needs no defending are trying to gin up public outrage against a creative, fun, and successful small business enterprise, Fojol Bros.

The company sends food trucks around downtown D.C. and serves strangely named hybrid ethnic dishes inspired by Indian, Ethiopian and Thai cuisines. The Fojol employees who hand out the delicious fare wear turbans, robes and fake mustaches,  claim to hail from  “Merlindia” and “Benethiopia,” and go by names like “Kipoto.” This was once called “theater” and “fantasy,” no more offensive than Disney employees in Frontierland dressing in cowboy and saloon girl garb and calling themselves “Tex” and “Lilly.” Now some are calling it “offensive,” because too many people have forgotten what offensive is. Continue reading →

Hurray for the “O!” in “The Star Spangled Banner,” And The Man Who Put It There

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Wild Bill Hagy, on the job

When the Washington Nationals hosted the Baltimore Orioles in an interleague baseball game, many Orioles fans attended to root for their team, the long-diminishes but suddenly (and, I fear, temporarily) resurgent O’s from Charm City. Nobody who has attended Orioles games in Camden Yards was surprised that the Orioles fans shouted out a loud “O!” as the National Anthem reached its climax, in the line, “Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave?” They have been doing this, joyfully and with full-throated enthusiasm, for over four decades.

Washington Post sportswriter Mike Wise to his keyboard to express his annoyance and indignation. Calling the O’s fans who engage in the traditional shout “cretins,” Wise wrote,

“…By claiming the lyrics, if only for a moment, you fundamentally undermine the idea that the song was written to unite instead of divide. A national anthem is a national anthem, not a convenient vehicle for one’s immense pride in his or her team.”

Allow me to retort!

Baloney. Continue reading →

Chris Matthews Gets A Lesson On The Golden Rule

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Don’t forget…Cliff almost WON Jeopardy!

Chris Matthews, the MSNBC “Hardball” host, has frequently mocked Sarah Palin’s knowledge and intelligence, and often used an iconic TV game show to do it. Such as:

  • “Is this [vice presidential debate] about her brain power?… Do you think cute will beat brains?…Do you think she’d do better on the questions on Jeopardy! or the interview they do during a half-time?…My suspicion is that she has the same lack of intellectual curiosity that the President of the United States has right now and that is scary!”
  • “They find these empty vessels who know nothing about the world! Nothing about foreign policy! Who immediately begin to spout the neo-con line. I read her book — it’s full of that crap….It’s unbelievable how little this woman knows!…Don’t put her on Jeopardy!” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: The Daily Beast

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Does this look like a Panamanian fisherman to you?

The American public is cynical and mean-spirited enough, I think. It doesn’t need any more shoves in that direction from the crass hipsters at The Daily Beast.

Tina Brown’s site, recently named as the Web’s top news agregator, noted the follow-up to a story highlighted on Ethics Alarms, the stranded fishermen who were ignored by a passing cruise ship even though its passengers had alerted the crew. Two of the fishermen subsequently died; one of the survivors is suing Princess Cruises. The Beast intro to the story began this way:

“One U.S. cruise line has a litigious Robinson Crusoe on its hands.”

The story is sub-headlined: “Wilson!”, a reference to Tom Hanks’ volleyball companion in the film “Castaway,” who meets his end at sea.* Continue reading →

Is Buzz Bissenger Right? Should College Football Be Banned? Is He KIDDING? Of Course It Should. And Everybody Knows It.

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Scholars all, I’m sure.

Not for the first time, sportswriter and commentator Buzz Bissinger has everybody buzzing about one of his frank opinion pieces, this one launched in the Wall Street Journal. His provocative title: “Why College Football Should Be Banned.”

Bissinger deserves credit for being willing to bite the hands that feed him: he is the author of “Friday Night Lights,” and many of Bissinger fans, at least up to now, tend to be football fans too. His article, however, is also one of those periodic slaps in the face of cultural apathy that occasionally causes a shift, as when Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a little novel that alerted a lot of people to the obvious fact that a system in which human beings were bought, sold, and bred like cattle might not be consistent with civilized morality. It doesn’t take a genius, a revolutionary or a careful analyst to conclude that big time college football is corrupt and corrupting to the core. It only takes a willingness to brush aside rationalizations and face the truth.

Here are the arguments Bissinger presents to support his thesis:

  1. Football has nothing to do with academics.
  2. It is a distraction from both the purpose of higher education and attention to the serious problems facing the university system.
  3. With college tuition reaching outrageous levels and the college loan system teetering, university expenditures on pricey football programs are unconscionable.
  4. The major beneficiaries from college football are the NFL, which uses it as its minor league system at minimal cost; pathetic alumni, who wrap their self-esteem up with the fortunes of their alma mater’s football fortunes; and obscenely-compensated football coaches.
  5. Football programs, contrary to what the public might think, often lose money and become a drag on tuition funds.
  6. Colleges like Maryland have cut other varsity sports (eight of them, in Maryland’s case) to allow it to pay for football.
  7. The representation that the athletes are students is largely a sham, with many of them failing to graduate and the majority spending minimal time on substantive course study.
  8. The athletes are exploited.
  9. The game entails serious health effects, primarily head trauma, that are only now being recognized.

I’m sure we can come up with a #10, too. Oh! I have one: Penn State. We were just given a front row seat to a frightening display of how even a “model” football program could warp the priorities and ethical values of an entire campus culture.

Of course Bissinger’s attack has college football supporters scrambling into a defense formation. What can they come up with? Not much, but it’s a fascinating study of how rationalizations rush into voids caused by the lack of substantive arguments. One college football-hyping blog’s first response was this: Continue reading →

More On The Ethics Of Watching Football From Malcolm Gladwell

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

And NO,Malcolm is NOT Art Garfunkle's son!

I don’t generally post “See? Someone famous and respectable agrees with me!” links, because 1) somebody agreeing with me doesn’t validate my argument, 2) I’m trying to promote ethical awareness and analysis skills, not to be “right,” and most of all, 3) if I did, I’d feel I had to hide when the famous someone is Glenn Beck, Joy Behar, Ozzie Ozbourne or Dinky, the Pet Rock.

However, I found the comments of Malcolm Gladwell on the topic of football interesting, and I link to them here. Gladwell is the author of “The Tipping Point,” and like Jacque Barzun, Bill James, George Will, Judge Richard Posner, blogger Rick Jones and some other perceptive thinkers I admire, always worth paying attention to, even when he’s wrong. I had suggested that the increasing evidence that football-related head injuries were routinely crippling players implicated the ethics of being a football fan here, and have periodically revisited the issue on this blog  and as a guest on Michel Martin’s NPR show, “Tell Me More.” As a result, I have received a good amount of hate mail from football fans, telling me that I’m a baseball-biased idiot. I may be that, but I don’t think Gladwell is. I think that he ( and I) may be right: ethics and insurance premiums may eventually  send football the way of pro boxing.

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Spark: WTVR.com, on Ray Easterling’s recent suicide.

Source: Slate

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.

My Field of Dreams

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Yesterday, an Off-Broadway musical closed that I launched on its remarkable run nearly 12 years ago. The show had productions in four states, D.C. and London; it had over 450 performances; it became the cornerstone of one very talented (and very nice) actor’s career, and an important opportunity for several others. It gave a dear friend immense pleasure, satisfaction and recognition in the final decade of his life, and probably saved my theater company from bankruptcy. Most important of all, perhaps, is that it entertained thousands of people. If I got bopped by a trolley tomorrow, the show would undoubtedly stand as one of the major accomplishments of my entire strange, eclectic, under-achieving life.

And yet…feeling good about the unlikely saga of the show, now that it has finally (probably—it has risen from the dead before) seen its last audience, takes considerable effort for me, and has from the beginning. My satisfaction is more intellectual than emotional, because I know that I personally benefited less from the show in tangible ways in proportion to my contribution to it than anyone else involved. Although I restructured the script, re-wrote, added and cut lines, wrote new lyrics to one song and added two others to the show, including the finale, I’m not credited as a co-auther. I own no part of the property, and never received a dime in compensation. Those closely connected with the original production know all of this, but the extent of my role in the creation and success of the show has been invisible to audiences for over a decade. Continue reading →