Professions

A Psychic Ethics Train Wreck in Liberty County

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Surprise: her anonymous tip is not credible.

I have been remiss in not discussing a recent Ethics Train Wreck that occurred two weeks ago, a fiasco that occurred in Liberty County, about an hour from Houston, Texas.

A self-professed psychic who calls herself Angel called police and told them that she had a vision that a mass grave containing the dismembered bodies of children was on the property where Joe and Gena Bankson lived. She also described some of the features of the property. That was enough for the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office, which armed itself with a search warrant and cadaver-sniffing dogs and converged on the home,  along with a mob of reporters and two news helicopters. As the police dug holes, somebody jumped the gun, and soon cable news stations flashed alerts that up to 30 bodies had been found.

There were no bodies. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Ex-Washington Nationals Manager Jim Riggleman

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Jim Riggleman is a major league baseball manager of modest accomplishments, one of the forty or so men in the rotating pool that teams will use to fill manager vacancies with low-risk options rather than try someone promising but with little experience. He had a one-year contract with the hapless Washington Nationals that included a team option for a second, which the manager felt the team should pick up now, rather than at the end of the season.

Riggleman believed that he had some leverage. The Nationals have been surging since star third baseman Ryan Zimmerman has returned from an injury, and are, for the first time in the team’s  short time in Washington (they were once the Montreal Expos), flirting with a winning record more than half-way through the schedule. But as is often the case with players when a club option is involved, the Nationals saw no reason to make a decision on Riggleman’s contract until the season was over. A lot can happen in three months. General manager Mike Rizzo told Riggleman he would just have to wait. That’s what a team option is, after all. The team’s option. Continue reading →

The Offensive Battle Over “Seven in Heaven Way”

/ Jack Marshall / 113 Comments

"There goes Fred, getting all religious again...."

With some hesitation, I must re-open the issue of officious inter-meddlers and grievance-mongerers who get satisfaction and empowerment from claiming to be offended by things that could not possibly harm them or genuinely infringe on their rights. The atheists are at it again.

My position has been stated here and elsewhere many times: in the absence of genuine long or short term harm, the ethical human response to a symbolic grievance is to keep one’s response proportional to the offense, which sometimes means considering how many individuals will be made miserable in order to satisfy one individual or a small group, and letting it go. Forcing a university to change the long-standing name of its football team based on a dubious argument that the name is an offense to Native Americans when most Native Americans couldn’t care less, for example, is wrong. Forcing a school to stop teaching kindergarteners to sing “Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer” because a Jewish parent thinks the song promotes Christianity is wrong.

Now a group of New York City atheists is demanding that their city re-name a street that was dedicated to the memory of seven firefighters killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.  Continue reading →

More Civility Confusion: Jon Huntsman’s Announcement

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

 

"Oh, NO...not THAT!"

To listen to the contempt and outrage expressed by conservative critics of Jon Huntsman’s official presidential campaign kick-off yesterday, one might have thought that he had pledged to conduct his quest for the presidency in Arabic. No, what infuriated Rich and Sean and Mark and the rightward bloggers who adore them is that he pledged…to be civil. Huntsman said:

“Now let me say something about civility. For the sake of the younger generation, it concerns me that civility, humanity and respect are sometimes lost in our interactions as Americans. Our political debates today are corrosive and not reflective of the belief that Abe Lincoln espoused back in his day, that we are a great country because we are a good country. You know what I mean when I say that. We will conduct this campaign on the high road. I don’t think you need to run down someone’s reputation in order to run for the Office of President. Of course we’ll have our disagreements. That’s what campaigns are all about. But I want you to know that I respect my fellow Republican candidates. And I respect the President of the United States. He and I have a difference of opinion on how to help a country we both love. But the question each of us wants the voters to answer is who will be the better President; not who’s the better American.”

The horror… Continue reading →

NBC and the Death of Professional Broadcast News

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The flap over NBC’s unilateral decision to excise “God” from the Pledge of Allegiance (currently the catalyst for a somewhat off-topic debate in the comments to the Ethics Alarms post on the issue about the propriety of having God in the Pledge at all) points to the related problem of NBC’s gradual but persistent degradation on its news reporting and journalistic integrity over the last several years.  Happily, there is a blog devoted to just that, one of the many excellent ethics-related sites linked on the blogroll that nobody seems to use. It is called Nightly-Daily, where a fanatic Brian Williams foe named Norman Charles meticulously dissects NBC’s nightly news broadcasts to report on journalistic outrages. He finds them almost every night.

Regarding NBC’s U.S. Open coverage, the scene of NBC’s Pledge distortion, Charles wrote, Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Keith Olbermann

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Welcome back, Keith!

Keith Olbermann, the talented, arrogant, self-righteous progressive scold whose “Countdown” show on MSNBC managed to make Sean Hannity look fair and balanced, returned to the tube yesterday on Al Gore’s nascent, and apparently shameless, new TV news commentary channel, Current TV. Olbermann, who despite his rhetorical gifts is unwilling to brave dissent or ideological balance on his show (something that cannot be said, for example, of Fox News bloviator Bill O’Reilly or even Hannity), did manage to make himself seem reasonable by comparison by welcoming and fawning over guests Michael Moore and Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, neither of whom ever met a progressive agenda-bolstering lie they didn’t like.

But never mind: Keith locked up his Ethics Dunce by re-introducing his “Worst Person in the World” segment, which he had solemnly, if unnecessarily, jettisoned on MSNBC to demonstrate his new commitment to civility in the wake of Rep. Giffords’ shooting in Tucson. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: NBC

/ Jack Marshall / 82 Comments

You tell 'em, NBC...

NBC cut the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance in its lead-up to its coverage of the U.S. Open at Congressional Country Club in Washington, D.C., an audacious and inexcusable unilateral kowtow to political correctness. Why did the network do it? What gave them the idea that NBC has the right to redact the official Pledge, as passed by Congress? Who are the arrogant idiots who would dare to do such a thing, and think they could get away with it?

Nobody knows, or at least, nobody is saying. The NBC brass, watching Twitter burst into flames with fully justified criticism, issued a classic non-apology apology, saying, Continue reading →

The Chivalry Curse, the President, and the Dazzling Smile

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The Chair of the Democratic National Committee

The Republicans seldom look more silly—and politics seldom looks more cynical— than when the GOP complains that the media or liberal interest groups are ignoring conduct by a progressive politician that they would vociferously criticize if a conservative politician behaved similarly, even though the Republicans themselves see nothing wrong with the conduct, and would scream that the criticism was unfair if it was focused on a conservative. This is yet another of the funhouse mirror versions of the Golden Rule in action, being employed for a dubious “Gotcha!”: “Do Unto Others As You Would Do Unto Me, Even Though If You Did That Unto Me, I Would Condemn You For It.”

It is the game Republican women’s groups and  conservative pundits are playing now, because the National Organization for Women hasn’t rapped the knuckles of President Obama for calling Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D.-Fla.), the Democratic National Committee Chair, “cute.”

Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America (a conservative women’s organization), called out NOW on its double standard, and said,“Of all people who ought to be offended at President Obama’s statement it should be an ardent feminist like Wasserman-Schultz. Isn’t objectifying women by their looks a mortal sin among feminists?” Charlotte Hayes, a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, the conservative twin of NOW, argued, “If a conservative had said this, [NOW] might have gone quite crazy. The Democrats might have gone quite crazy and tried to have his head on a platter. I guess Democrats could get really mad because you say a woman has a charming smile.”

But, she added, “I’m not one of those people who gets mad if you said I have a charming smile. I would be flattered.”

For its part, NOW has said that it has more pressing matters than criticizing a major ally’s politically incorrect gaffe, much as it couldn’t be bothered to criticize Bill Maher for calling Sarah Palin a “dumb twat” or MSNBC’s Ed Schultz for describing conservative pundit and single mother Laura Ingraham as a “right wing slut.” The President and the woman with the cute smile, meanwhile, are ignoring the whole thing.
Here is the irony, and the problem: they are all wrong. Continue reading →

White House Mendacity on Libya

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The White House says this isn't "hostilities." Right.

I detest it when Presidents and their administration play self-evident language games to assert intellectually dishonest positions, whether it is Bill Clinton’s minions claiming blow-jobs aren’t “sex with that woman,” or Dick Cheney arguing that torturing prisoners by water-boarding technically isn’t torture.  Such deceit and mendacity by the representative of the Chief Executive or the President himself vastly increases public cynicism about our government and diminishes our democracy’s most precious and endangered asset, trust.

The Obama administration, despite its leader’s stirring words in the 2008 campaign, has already shown itself capable of outrageous misrepresentations, as when it reported “jobs saved” by the stimulus package using fictional Congressional districts and counting single jobs as multiple jobs “saved.” So we shouldn’t be surprise, only nauseated, when it tells Congress, as it did this week, that U.S. participation in the Libyan uprising doesn’t fall under War Powers Resolution. Continue reading →

Return to a Sore Subject

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

"Does anybody care?"

[NOTE: An unusually busy travel schedule combined with terrible hotel WiFi and a week that was already stuffed with juicy and provocative ethics stories resulted in my not fulfilling my duties very well the last three days, for which I apologize sincerely. I’m going to make every effort to catch up this weekend.]

Rep. Weiner resigned at last, noting that his district and its constituents deserved to have a fully functioning representative in Congress, and that he could no longer fulfill that role. True enough, though one has to ask (or at least I do): if the people of Queens and Brooklyn deserve better representation than a hard-working, if dishonest, obsessed and twisted, pariah can offer, what about the people of the 8th District of Arizona, who have a representative who can’t funtion in her post at all?

I was going to wait until the six-month mark in Gaby Giffords’ rehabilitation to raise this matter again, since that will mark a full 25% of the Congresswoman’s term that she has been unable to serve, but the combination of Weiner’s resignation and the news of Giffords being released from the hospital created too much dissonance for me to ignore. I fully expect that I will be writing some version of this post 18 months hence, after Rep. Giffords’ entire Congressional term has passed without her voting on a bill or answering a constituent’s letter. To quote the singing John Adams in “1776,”: “Is anybody there? Does anybody care?”

Reports from various medical personnel enthused that Giffords has made remarkable progress, and “seems” to understand “most’ of what is being said to her, though she still has trouble articulating responses. That is great progress for someone who has some of her brain blown away by a gunshot at close range, but it sure doesn’t sound like someone who is going to be making a persuasive argument on the House floor any time soon, or ever. So are we serious about this running the country stuff, or aren’t we? Continue reading →