Professions

The Fourth Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Best of Ethics 2012

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

nonpartisan

One of the reasons there are always more negative stories than positive ones on Ethics Alarms is that ethical conduct is still much more common than unethical conduct, and thus has to be more spectacular to be worthy of comment. At least, that’s my rationalization this year….

Here are the 2011 Ethics Alarms Awards for the Best in Ethics:

Most Important Ethical Act of the Year:

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s public display of appreciation to President Obama for the rapid Federal response to Super Storm Sandy. Naturally, Christie was subsequently called a turncoat and blamed for Mitt Romney’s loss.

Outstanding Ethical Leadership

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Roberts’ decision to confound conventional wisdom and to vote to uphold the constitutionality of  the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, reaffirmed the ideological independence of the Court while giving due deference to the will of Congress. Roberts was derided by Republicans and conservatives, while liberals and Democrats patted themselves on the back, presuming that they had intimidated him into rejecting the so-called conservative wing of the Court by their (irresponsible, dishonest and unethical) accusations that the Court put politics ahead of law and justice. Roberts, in truth, just interpreted the law, which is what his duty required.

Heroes of the Year

Seniors at Lexington (Ky) Catholic High School. When a gay couple was told by school administrators that they were not welcome at their senior prom, a significant number of their classmates moved the prom to the parking lot, where a good time was had by all. Courage, respect, fairness and kindness. These seniors are ready for the real world, which needs them more than they need it. Continue reading →

When A Frivolous Defense Isn’t Frivolous, Or Why Ethical Lawyers Represent Unethical Clients

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments
Mr. Friedman, wasting time and money, and proud of it.

Mr. Frieman, wasting time and money, and proud of it.

I don’t know if Jonathan Frieman is an Occupy Oakland refugee, a failed lawyer, a scofflaw, a dummy or just a trouble-maker, but he decide to game a California “2 or more persons” car pool lane by  “sharing” his vehicle with corporate documents. Thus, when he was pulled over, he  handed the Highway Patrol officer incorporation papers that were in the passenger seat. Get it? The corporation is a “person,” legally, so there were two “people” in his car! The officer ticketed him anyway, since his defense was ridiculous. But funny! Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Are Musicals Reviewed By Ignoramuses?”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

WordPress, for only the second time in three years, was kind enough to include my recent post about Stephen Sondheim’s footnote lament that musicals were the only art form largely reviewed by incompetents. This has brought a lot of new visitors to Ethics Alarms, and I hope they are interested in ethics as well as musicals. One such new reader is a Prof. Ratigan, who apparently does some reviewing himself. Here is his Comment of the Day, on the Jan 3, 2013 post (Here’s something weird—last year’s Jan.3 post was also about Sondheim!) Are Musicals Reviewed By Ignoramuses?…

Two points. The first is the literacy issue. I think it’s interesting that it would appear that a good reviewer is either a novice or a master where everything in between is amateur. I’ve been reviewing movies for the past year (on a blog) and I’ve definitely felt that in my own stuff. The more movies I watched and connections I could draw, the more it became apparent how much I really needed to do to become proficient. I needed to read a lot more literature, read a lot more scripts, and watch a lot more movies. Otherwise, I would start to create a context but have a nagging feeling that the director/writer/actor (who are often scholars of film) might/probably know more than me and were doing something else. It seems that these musical reviewers aren’t expected to take the next step from reviewer to analyst. Continue reading →

The Fourth Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2012 (Part 2)

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

reid

The 2012 Ethics Alarms Awards for the Worst in Ethics continues (you can catch up with Part I here , and the Best is here), and yes, it gets worse…

Worst Friend and Relative

Lori Stilley, who faked cancer to get sympathy, favors, parties and money from those who cared about her.

Most Unethical Advice

Emily Yoffe, Slate’s “Dear Prudence,” wins for a year of bad advice in kinky situations, the bottom of the barrel being when she advised a daughter who observed her mother illegally filling out her invalid grandparents’ 2012 absentee ballots to reflect the mother’s electoral preferences to do nothing about this combination of elder abuse and voter fraud.

Shameless Bad Character Division Continue reading →

From Curmudgeon Central: The 2012 Curmie Results and “Legally Blonde” Redux

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

and-the-winner-is

The Curmie votes are in. This is Rick Jones’ annual prize awarded to educators who embarrass their (and his ) profession. Go to his blog, Curmudgeon Central, to see the winner and the vote totals. I don’t want to spoil the suspense.  Check out the nominations here if you haven’t already. A couple of observations, though: Continue reading →

The Fourth Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2012 (Part 1)

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Trayvon

Welcome to the Fourth  Annual Ethics Alarms Awards

Recognizing the Best and Worst of Ethics in 2012!

This is the first installment of the Worst. (Part 2 is here, the Best is here.)

2012 inspired over 1000 posts, and Ethics Alarms still missed a lot. And the last week of 2012 was sufficiently ethics packed that the Awards are late this year. My apologies.

In a depressingly unethical year, these were the low points:

Ethics Train Wreck of the Year

Was there ever any doubt? The Trayvon Martin- George Zimmerman fiasco, naturally, which is far from over. This year’s winner may be the worst ethics train wreck since Monica and Bill were dominating the news.  So far it has involved dubious, unprofessional or clearly unethical conduct by, among others, Martin’s parents, their lawyer, Zimmerman, his wife, the police, Zimmerman’s first set of lawyers, the prosecutor, the Congressional Black Caucus, NBC (which repeatedly broadcast an “accidentally” truncated tape of Zimmerman’s 911 call that made him sound racist), the rest of the broadcast media, conservative talk radio and bloggers (who decided their contribution would be to try to show that Martin deserved to be shot), Spike Lee, Rosie O’Donnell, the New Black Panthers, and President Obama, who ratcheted up the hate being focused on Zimmerman by implying that the killing as racially motivated, and by connecting himself to the victim. Runner-up: The 2012 Presidential campaign.

“Incompetent Elected Officials of the Year” Division Continue reading →

The East Harlem Lockdown Drill: Is Stupid Unethical?

/ Jack Marshall / 64 Comments

paris-puppet-show-children

I was tempted to make this jaw-dropping incident an Ethics Quiz, but my mind is unalterably made up. While mistakes are not unethical, staggering stupidity on the part of professionals is, even if one of the consequences of that stupidity is the good faith belief that a cruel and irresponsible act is the right thing to do.

Less than a week after the Sandy Hook shootings, Greer Phillips, the principal in East Harlem’s P.S. 79 decided that this was the perfect time to conduct an unscheduled, unannounced lockdown drill. Not a fire drill. A “a stranger with a gun who might kill everybody is in the school!” drill.

Brilliant!

Thus at 10 am on December 18, a woman’s voice came over the Horan School’s loudspeaker and announced in shaky tones that there was a “shooter” or “intruder” in the building, and that teachers needed to “get out, get out, lockdown!”

Did I mention that the school serves students with special needs like autism, severe emotional disabilities, cerebral palsy and other disorders? Boy, I bet they were fooled! What a great drill! I mean, it scared the piss out of the teachers; imagine how those students must have felt! Continue reading →

A Compliant, Law-abiding and Unethical Murder House Sale

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
Immaterial

Immaterial

We last considered the issue of realtors sneaking murder houses by trusting purchasers nearly two years ago, when Jon Benet Ramsey’s home and place of death came up for sale. We had a knock down, drag out argument about it too. My position: while it might be legal for a seller not to disclose that a home was the site of a murder or worse (and in most places it is), and while many regard sensitivity on such matters mere superstition not worthy of serious respect, the seller and the realtor have an ethical obligation to inform  potential buyers when the property for sale is a murder scene As I wrote in the conclusion to the post about the Ramsey home:

“The truth is still this: there is something about the $2,300,000 house that makes it undesirable to a lot of prospects, and that means that even if the law doesn’t require the seller to tell interested house-hunters the story of the little dead girl in the basement, fairness and the Golden Rule do.”

This applies to the case at hand, where Pennsylvania’s Superior Court recently ruled that a murder-suicide occurring in a home is not a “material defect” that requires disclosure in that home’s sale. While a murder-suicide occurring in a house might be “psychological damage” to the property or its reputation, the court said, realtors don’t have to disclose it. Continue reading →

Some Ethics Observations On A Ridiculous Sean Hannity Segment

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Last night, Fox New host and conservative radio talk show star Sean Hannity moderated what purported to be a debate on the topic of —guess what?— gun control on his cable TV show. The  guests were “civil rights attorney” Leo Terrell (I’ll explain the scare quotes in a second) and conservative lawyer Jay Sekulow. The two adversaries—and Hannity, who was hardly neutral—discussed The Journal News’ recent decision (Covered and criticized on Ethics Alarms) to publish the names and addresses of pistol permit holders in two New York Counties. The ensuing dialogue, if you can call it that, was painful to watch (but you’ll have to watch it to know what I’m referring to.)

Some observations on the miserable ethics of a nauseating episode: Continue reading →

Hollywood’s Ridiculous Hypocrisy on Guns

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments
"Say hello to my little friend! And while we're on the topic of guns, don't you think it's time to be sensible about gun control?"

“Say hello to my little friend! And while we’re on the topic of guns, don’t you think it’s time to be sensible about gun control?”

In a move stunningly unconscious to outrageous hypocrisy, the group “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” have posted a video on on its website and Youtube (of course), featuring an impressive array of solemn Hollywood celebrities chiding Americans for not doing something about guns “yesterday” and to “demand a plan” to end gun violence. The problem? Many of these same celebrities owe their presence on the video to Hollywood’s obsession with gun violence, without which they would be just anonymous pretty faces. They owe their mansions and private planes to that gun violence too, which they have happily, willfully and lucratively acted out in scores of violent films and television shows. How can they presume, given how they make their living, to lecture anyone on the topic of guns?

I have some theories. Many of them are dumb as bricks. Most of them are automatic co-signers of the manifesto for any cause branded as liberal, the Hollywood religion,and don’t bother to think about whether it is consistent with their life choices or not. Probably all of them, working every day in one of the most ethics-free, cut-throat, dishonest and hypocritical sub-cultures that has ever existed in the United States are completely numb to the concept of hypocrisy, as apparently are the mayors, who work in the culture of politics, which is only somewhat better. Continue reading →