Professions

Would Dennis Rodman Qualify for the Baseball Hall of Fame?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Dennis Rodman, out of uniform

Of course not. Dennis Rodman didn’t play baseball. He was a pro basketball player, and as of yesterday, an inductee into the NBA Hall of Fame for his exploits on a basketball court. There is no question that he is eminently qualified for admission to the NBA Hall of Fame, because the NBA Hall of Fame doesn’t care if players are thugs, drunks, scofflaws, deadbeat dads and couldn’t define sportsmanship with a dictionary as long as they can shoot, score, pass, dribble and block shots.

The Major League Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, however, requires that its members demonstrate “integrity, sportsmanship, (and) character,” in addition to outstanding achievements and a remarkable career record.  Because of the steroid era that has rendered a whole generation of players suspect for cheating, an expanding number of baseball greats face being excluded from the Hall because cheating by using substances that are illegal and banned in the sport while implicitly deceiving the public about the use is, by any rational definition, a material breach of integrity and sportsmanship.  The natural reaction by many sportswriters, as in other fields when reasonable standards are routinely violated, is to attack the standards. Why should a sport care about matters like integrity and character? Isn’t it the performance that counts, and winning? Continue reading →

The Disgrace of the Health Care Reform Debacle, Brought Into Focus

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Nice image. Unfortunately, the open book is "Catch 22"

“Some prominent academics have argued that the individual mandate is a clearly constitutional exercise of the federal government’s taxing power. Some of these same academics have argued that opponents of the individual mandate’s constitutionality are well outside the legal mainstream. Yet as of today, there has not been a single federal court — indeed, perhaps not even a single federal judge — who has accepted the taxing power argument. Not a one. And yet a half-dozen federal judges have found the mandate to be unconstitutional. So which arguments are outside of the mainstream again?”

Thus did Jonathan Adler, Case Western law professor and Director of the Center for Business Law and Regulation, chide the arrogant supporters of the health care reform act who dismissed as wackos and radicals critics who were alarmed at its intrusions onto personal freedom. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals’ rejection of the individual mandate, the provision requiring all adult citizens to buy private health insurance, is the most striking proof yet of the arrogant, unethical, dishonest, corrupt and incompetent manner in which the Democratic majority passed its version of health care reform. Continue reading →

Welcome to Carlos Zambrano’s Ethics Fun House!

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Carlos Zambrano, bludgeoning his career into submission

Carlos Zambrano is the supposed pitching ace of the Chicago Cubs, though after signing a monster multi-year contract for millions, he has shown himself to be inconsistent, over-rated, and nuts. Yesterday the flamboyant hurler gave up five home runs, seemingly attempted to bisect the Braves’ Chipper Jones with a fast ball, and got ejected from the game. Then the ethics fun started:

Ethics Fun #1: Carlos cleaned out his locker, told a Cubs trainer that he was retiring, and left the premises before the game was over. A Major League ethics whiff. Continue reading →

A Pause To Spew My Hatred of Spam

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

A typical day at Ethics Alarms!

One reason, not the only one, but one of them, that I was foiled trying to respond to a series of critical posts on an online forum was that fear of spam had caused the administrators to make it insanely difficult for me to post there—just another way for online spam to plague me. According to Akismet, WordPress’s excellent spam detection service, I now have reviewed and deleted over 45,000 pieces of spam since Ethics Alarms began. (I have to check the spam because occasionally it traps a genuine comment, kind of like dolphins getting caught in tuna nets.)

Let me be clear: I hate these people. I hate the people who send spam, the people who employ spam services, the people who write the deceitful, stupid spam messages, and the spamming outfits that make their grimy living off of it. There is no such thing as an ethical spammer or an ethical company that assists in spamming. By definition, spam is dishonest, as it pretends to offer content when there is none, and purports to represent genuine interest in the site, when it is only interesting in planting a link that will maximize a commercial site’s SEO.

Spam is not only dishonest, but it is insultingly dishonest, because it is so obvious. Continue reading →

Some Post Iowa Debate Ethics Awards

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Other than the fact that both would look crazy on the cover of Newsweek, how is Humpty Dumpty like Michele Bachman?

The GOP pre-Iowa straw poll presidential debate last night earned a few ethics awards, with many more to come as we get to know these pretenders better:

Journalistic Integrity Award: Chris Wallace, Fox news anchor and questioner.

Wallace continues to bring legitimate and fair journalistic practices to his job, and gets accused of being biased anyway. Or, as in this case, (and as when he shocked Michele Bachmann by asking her directly what everyone was implying, “Are you a flake?”), conservatives who expect softballs from Fox react with indignation that an assumed ally is asking a tough question. Wallace asked Newt Gingrich about his flailing campaign organization, and Gingrich angrily called it a “gotcha” question. That’s not a “gotcha,” Newt, and you know it. When most of a candidate’s  campaign staff, those who know him  best, have indicated that they don’t think he has a chance—or perhaps shouldn’t have a chance—by jumping ship, it is fair and responsible to ask a candidate to explain. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: The Senate and House Leadership

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The names are in.

As part of the pathetic, cynical and inadequate budget deal to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, Republicans and Democrats were called upon to assemble a bi-partisan “super committee” of twelve House members and Senators, chosen by the respective leaders from both parties, to come up with a way to close the deficit. Now that the S&P ratings downgrade has embarrassed the nation, destabilized foreign markets and sent an unambiguous message that the United States has to get serious about balancing the books and fast, have our political leaders responded to the challenge by choosing elected representatives of states and districts who have track records of collaboration, political courage, truthtelling and placing the best interests of the nation over narrow electoral fundraising and ideological objectives?

Naaa.

What, are you surprised? The leaders of the House and Senate have met our lowest expectations, and have chosen a hyper-partisan group to make up the super committee, guaranteeing that it will be super-contentious and super-ineffective. The degree to which this represents an abdication of their duties of leadership and responsible government is impossible to exaggerate. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Day: Ken, of Popehat

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“Listen to me: a law school calculated to make students feel good about themselves is as ridiculous as a Marine boot camp designed to make enlistees feel good about themselves. Law students, God help us, will one day be lawyers. When they are, nobody will care about their self-esteem. The prosecutors seeking to jail their clients will not be seeking to foster a sense of community. The opposing civil lawyers seeking to bankrupt their clients will not be promoting a culture of dignity and respect. Most law practice is about conflict. It’s a bloody, ugly street fight. Self-esteem borne of law-should-be-harmony is useless to clients. The only self-esteem useful to clients is self-esteem earned by hard work, determination, command of the subject matter, and the willingness to stand up to adversity. People who object to law professors being wickedly Socratic, and classmates being cutthroat, are missing the point. If you’re put off by a Socratic professor, Mr. Fluffy Bunny, a run-of-the-mill judge is going to make you soil yourself. If nasty, backstabbing classmates upset you, the first time you get into a nasty letter-writing campaign with an opposing counsel you’re going to have a breakdown. Law school is not a fucking spa day. It’s training to stand between your client and whatever the world throws at him.”

—– Ken, the astute lawyer/sage/Don Rickles of the libertarian social commentary website Popehat, excoriating the University of St. Thomas Law School for, among other things, extolling the values of self-esteem, collaboration, harmony and community among their students.

What Ken is really talking about is zealous representation, that once universally accepted bedrock of the  lawyer’s duty that has gradually fallen into disfavor with many academics and lawyers. Continue reading →

Dear Newsweek: We Can Figure Out That Michele Bachmann Is A Little Off Without The Crazy Photos, But Thanks For Your Concern.

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Holy Crap!

When I put up yesterday’s post about Nancy Pelosi’s excessive and uncivil accusations about Republicans, I went searching for an appropriate photo. I found one that I came this close to using, because it was angry, like the quote, and just a little bit deranged-looking. (Pelosi has a lot of photos out there that make her look quite mad.) I didn’t use it. I decided it wasn’t fair.

Of course, I have to try to be fair; I’m an ethicist, and this is an ethics blog. Journalists, however, don’t…wait, aren’t they supposed to be fair too?

Not in Tina Brown’s book, or rather magazine. Newsweek made the choice to be the MSNBC of pulp even before Brown took over, and now it is officially shameless. Because Newsweek, like its almost as moribund rival Time, once was a respected journalistic enterprise, some of Newsweek’s now non-operable reputation for integrity remains. It can still do damage with its cheap tricks. That’s why its wild-eyed cover photo of Michele Bachman is so despicable. Continue reading →

Major League Baseball, Forgivability, and List Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Unforgivable?*

Bleacher Reports is an enjoyable sports website, and it gives opportunities to aspiring writers and bloggers, some of whom are quite talented.  In addition to typical opinion pieces and reporting, the site has a fondness for lists, often trivial to the extreme, like “The 50 Ugliest Athletes of All Time.” The titles are all misnomers, because there is almost never any criteria given for the choices or their relative ranking. An accurate title would be, “The Fifty Athletes I Think Are The Ugliest.”  And of course, who cares? (Don Mossi, by the way, was the ugliest athlete ever, no matter what anybody says.)

A recent list, however did bother me. It is called “The Fifty Most Unforgivable Acts in Baseball History,“ and much of the problem with it lies in the title itself. If you are going to write about history, there is a duty perform diligent research, even for a silly online list. Misrepresentations online have a large probability of misleading people.  The title is a misrepresentation, like “The 50 Ugliest Athletes,” but unlike that list, there is some harm done. The list isn’t close to complete; it isn’t consistent; it isn’t well-researched. I’d bet that the author, Robert Knapel, wrote it off the top of his head.  Anyone who looked at the list and assumed, as the author represents, that these are truly the low points—“the dark side,” as the author puts it—of major league baseball would be seriously misinformed.

There are unequivocally, probably universally recognized incidents and events that are infinitely worse that most of the items on the list.  Just a  few samples: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce, Ethics Hero: Name Calling and One-Way Civility On the Left

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

John Boehner was just like this during debt ceiling negotiations. Well, sort-of. OK, he really wasn't like this at all, but I don't like him, so it's not uncivil for me to say he was.

The popular Democratic, progressive, liberal and news media (I know I’m being redundant here) slur for the Republican House and its Tea Party warriors during and after the budget ceiling debate was “terrorists,” suggesting an analogy between the GOP insisting on major expenditure cuts in the budget as a condition for raising the debt ceiling, and political and religious extremists who threaten to kill people if they don’t get their way. Needless to say, it’s a disgraceful, dishonest, illogical and slanderous comparison. Whether the GOP’s negotiating stance was fair, reasonable or right can be debated; that the intent of the strategy was to strengthen the nation’s financial health is not.

To many of the Republicans involved, incurring more debt without a guarantee of serious deficit and debt reduction in the future was more dangerous than allowing the nation to default on its obligations. Add to that the fact that many in the Tea Party  leadership believe that the consequences of not raising the debt ceiling was overblown, and it is clear: the Republicans were using their control over the immediate fate of something progressives  wanted more than conservatives as a bargaining chip in a political disagreement. It may have been irresponsible; it may have been a risk; it may have been a bluff. But it was not terrorism. It was politics. Hardball politics no doubt, but well within accepted standards

Oh, I forgot: there is another reason the Republicans weren’t acting like terrorists. They weren’t threatening to kill anybody, and they didn’t kill anybody. Continue reading →