Popular Culture

Unethical Website: The Brittany Murphy Foundation

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

This is strange in so many ways, not the least of which being that TMZ, the generally worthless celebrity gossip website, is responsible for blowing the whistle.

Actress Brittany Murphy, best known for her break-out role as the cool-girl wannabe in “Clueless,” collapsed and died in the shower in December, another apparent victim of too much stress, too many diets, and too many prescription drugs in her system. “The Brittany Murphy Foundation,” set up by her family and husband, Simon Monjack, began soliciting contributions on its website in January, supposedly for arts education for children. TMZ received a tip that something was amiss, did some investigation, and discovered that no such foundation had been registered with either the IRS or the State of California. Continue reading →

Stats, Polar Bears, and “Truth by Repetition”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

When I did marketing for a company that created annuities for the recipients of large court damages, I was armed with alarming statistics I had gleaned from the annuity industry’s publications.  Half of the recipients of large lump sum settlements or damages from personal injury and medical negligence lawsuits had dissipated all of the funds (usually calculated to last a lifetime) within two years or less. More than 75% had blown through all the cash, often millions of dollars, within five years. These figures were accepted as fact everywhere,  and we used them profitably to persuade plaintiffs, lawyers and courts to approve annuity arrangements that would parcel out the funds over the years, keeping the money safe from needy relatives and spending sprees. Then, one day, I decided to track down the studies that were the sources of the statistics I was using.

There weren’t any. I discovered a circular trail, with various sources quoting each other. Continue reading →

Unethical Website, the Sequel

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The Special Olympics, now in the business of censoring the English language, has applied technology to the task with a new website, http://www.rwordcounter.org. The site allows one to enter a URL and have the site immediately searched for the offending words “retard,” and “retarded,” sort of like little teeny versions of Big Brother’s thought-police rifling through your closets and under your mattresses for bootleg copies of The Bible or Paradise Lost. Then, once the website under surveillance passes the Special Olympics Appropriate Senstitivity and Inoffensive Expression Test, it can proudly display a banner that proclaims it Clean.

Too bad the website itself is unethical, for two reasons:

1. Its purpose violates the ethical values of autonomy, fairness, tolerance, equity, openness, process, respect, and American citizenship, and

2. It is incompetent and a fraud: the damn thing doesn’t work, or at least didn’t the two times I tried it on Ethics Alarms. Apparently I could make a terrible joke here about who must have designed the site, and it would still tell me that my site was “r-word free.” I am thinking the joke, however, and hope that when the folks at the Special Olympics devise a way to detect that, as I’m certain they would love to do, their R-Word Brain Purging Unit works just as well.

After the Tebow Ad

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The Super Bowl ad featuring Tim Tebow and his mother that caused so much angst and controversy before it aired turned out to be mild, understated and forgettable. Now we know why CBS felt it could use the spot to move away from its long-time ban on issue advertising during the NFL’s big game. We also know that the actual ad made the argument by abortion rights groups that the ad would be inappropriately “divisive” for an American sports ritual designed to bring us together seem even more ridiculous than it was—no mean trick.

In the ad, Quarterback Tebow and his mother never did tell the story of his birth after Pam Tebow had been counseled to terminate her pregnancy. You had to go to a website to read about it. Indeed, had the various advocacy groups that opposed the ad just kept their collective rage to themselves, few viewers would know about the pro-life aspects of the Tebow story. All of the ad’s work was done before it ran, thank to the pre-Super Bowl sputtering of NARAL, NOW, and their colleagues. Continue reading →

NPR Shows How Bad Opinions Get Made

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist at Duke University who struck gold with his Malcolm Gladwell-esque airplane book, Predictably Irrational. The book discussed his work in human behavior and how apparently irrelevant or minor factors affect our behaviors in significant and surprising  ways. I like the book, and I like Professor Ariely, but I now suspect him of using the American public as his guinea pigs for Best Seller #2,  and of rigging the experiments in the process. Continue reading →

Wising Up to The Cognitive Dissonance Game

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Wade Rathke, ACORN’s founder, is using his blog to attack James O’Keefe, whose bizarre pimp-and-prostitute charade exposed the culture of corruption in the organization he created. O’Keefe, who was arrested for trying another sting on a U.S. Senator, certainly deserves criticism. But it is safe to say that Rathke’s purpose is a little different than that of most pundits, for O’Keefe’s stunt hurt his baby. Rathke’s intent, other than  revenge, is to use the power of cognitive dissonance to make ACORN’s ethical failings seem less serious by making making O’Keefe look worse. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: School Principal Evelyn Matroianni

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Reading news stories about cruel, power-abusing, or judgement-deficient teachers and school administrators is like eating potato chips, I’ve discovered. Once you start, it’s hard to stop. Luckily for my waistline and cholesterol levels, eventually potato chip bags become empty. Unfortunately, the supply of terrible tales of student abuse appears to be bottomless.

In Staten Island,  9-year-old Patrick Timoney, a fourth-grader at PS 52, South Beach, was observed by his school principal playing with LEGOs during his lunch period.  One of the LEGO action figures was carrying what appeared to be a toy automatic weapon. The principal,  Evelyn Matroianni took Patrick, crying and frightened, into her office, and called the boy’s mother. She told her that she considered the toy a violation of the no-tolerance rule prohibiting guns and gun replicas, and that she was going to confirm this with a security administrator from the city Department of Education. Continue reading →

Comedy Ethics, Censorship, and Culture

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

(The current uproar over the use of  various versions of the word “retarded” by Rahm Emanuel and Rush Limbaugh seems to warrant a reprint, slightly revised, of the following essay on ethics and comedy, a January 2008 post on The Ethics Scoreboard. The word “retard” also came in for criticism in a comic context last year, with its use in the Ben Stiller comedy “Tropic Thunder.” Of course, comedy is one thing, and gratuitous cruelty is another. In either case, the issue is the use of a word, not the word itself. As discussed in the previous post, it is appropriate for any group to promote sensitivity and to encourage civility. It is unethical to try to bully others into censoring their speech by trying to “ban” words, phrases or ideas. )

Here is the essay:

Comedy Ethics

“Saturday Night Live” has, not for the first time in its three decade run, ignited an ethics controversy with politically incorrect humor. Was SNL ensemble member Fred Armison’s impression of  New York Governor David Paterson, who is blind, including as it did a wandering eye and featuring slapstick disorientation, legitimate satire or, as Paterson and advocates for the blind have claimed, a cruel catalyst for discrimination against the sight-challenged?
It is not an easy call, though the opposing sides of the argument probably think it should be. And it raises long-standing questions about the balance between ethics and humor. Continue reading →

Unethical Website: www.r-word.org

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, criticized for using the word “retarded’ during a private meeting last summer, has told advocates for the mentally disabled that he will join their campaign to help end the use of the word.

I’m sure he will. Emanuel, like too many politicians, is willing to throw Freedom of Speech and thought under the bus if it gets him out of hot water with the politically correct. But while the efforts of the Special Olympics to “end the r-word,” as its website http://www.r-word.org  puts it, are understandable and well-intentioned, they couldn’t be more wrong. Or dangerous. Continue reading →

More Outrageous Elementary School Abuse

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

An elementary school secretary, Jennifer Carter, has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor child abuse charge stemming from an October incident in which she bound an unruly 6-year-old child’s hands and covered the child’s mouth with masking tape.

The student’s mother has filed a  $500,000 lawsuit against the Denver Public Schools.

My thoughts on this have been adequately expressed in previous posts here, and here.

I will only add this: before the internet, such local incidents of child abuse by teachers and administrators seldom received national exposure. Now they do, and because they do, there is real cause for alarm. Too many individuals of wretched judgment and cruel instincts, who make Miss Hannigan look like Mr. Chips by comparison, are being hired by our school systems, and too many children are being terrorized as a result, It is time to stop canonizing teachers and instead to look more critically at the serious deficiencies in hiring, training, and oversight. Thanks to the fact that student abuse is now hard to hide, parents should be on notice. There is a real problem with discipline in our school, and but this time it isn’t the kids.