rationalizations

Ethics Dunce (And A Tie For Worst Apology Of The Week): Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO)

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

One of Donald Trump’s proteges, Rep. Lauren Boebert, behaved so outrageously at a a Denver theater last week during a performance of the Broadway musical “Beetlejuice,” that she was asked to leave by the theater managers. She was loud, sang along with the performers in places, got in arguments with audience members, was ostentatiously groped by her male companion, and perhaps most objectionably, vaped during the performance, which is what you see her (in the middle of the frame, second from the aisle) in the act of doing—see the little puff?— in the security camera shot above. She also took a selfie during the second act. As she and her date were ushered out, the distinguished member of Congress actually uttered the magic phrase I regard as signature significance for an insufferable celebrity jerk, “Do you know who I am?” and threatened consequences for the staff.

That’s not all. She had her office deny that she had been vaping, not realizing that security cameras memorialized it. And still that’s not all. Here is her head-exploding “apology” for acting like a 17-year old raised in a barn who had never been at a live theater show in her life:

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A Rationalization #22 Mitigation Of U.S. Progressive Racial Spoils: Canada Is Even Worse

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Rationalization #22, in my view the worst of the over 100 rationalizations on the list, is called “The Comparative Virtue Excuse,” or “It’s not the worst thing.” I immediately thought of it when I read the head-exploding account of how a father escaped jail time in Canada for incest that resulted in the birth of a disabled child who has been placed in foster care. The father admitted that he had regularly had sexual relations with his daughter since she was 19 or 20. Incest is typically punishable with a jail sentence of at least two years and as high as 14 years, but a majority of the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal decided last month that the father shouldn’t have to spend any time in jail at all, just two years of house arrest, with a monitor. That’s nice. He can even continue his loving relationship with his daughter under those rules.

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Officials And Leaders Who Conservatives Consider Essential Bulwarks Of Constitutional Government Really Have To Stop Relying On “The King’s Pass”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Take Clarence Thomas for example.

As with Donald Trump, who was the object of much rationalization here yesterday, Justice Thomas apparently is certain that conservative and Republican integrity don’t have the rigor to make him accountable for a truly staggering series of judicial ethics breaches. He is also apparently correct in this assumption.

Justice Thomas finally acknowledged publicly that he should have reported selling real estate at a suspicious profit to billionaire political donor Harlan Crow in 2014, a transaction disclosed by ProPublica earlier this year. The Crow company bought a string of properties for $133,363 from co-owners Thomas, his mother and the family of Thomas’ late brother, according to a state tax document and a deed. Conservative power-player Crow then owned the house where a Supreme Court Justice’s elderly mother was living—hey, no big deal!—and soon contractors began tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home. Although a federal disclosure law requires SCOTUS Justices and other officials to disclose the details of most real estate sales over $1,000, Thomas never deigned to mention this convenient and inherently suspicious transaction. You know, that “appearance of impropriety” thingy?

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Death On K2 And The Duty To Rescue

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The AP story and ensuing controversy about Norwegian climber Kristin Harila and her decision, along with many other mountaineers, to leave a climbing companion dying in the snow on K2 immediately rang a metaphorical bell: Haven’t we discussed this issue before on Ethics Alarms? Indeed we have.

Back in 2011, I reposted a 2006 essay from the old (but still useful) EA predecessor The Ethics Scoreboard about the death of 34-year-old David Sharp on Mount Everest, after over 40 other climbers walked past him on their trek to the famous peak. It concluded,

The significance of the David Sharp tragedy is not that the mountaineers did the wrong thing. Of course they did the wrong thing. Nor is it that they are callous or unethical people, for they are probably no more so than you or I. The importance of the story is that it vividly shows how difficult it can be to make even obvious ethical choices when powerful non-ethical considerations are in our sights. Every one of us has a goal or a dream or a desire that could make us walk by a dying man. It is our responsibility to recognize what those goals, dreams and desires are, and to force ourselves not to forget about right and wrong as we approach them.

Harila was on K2 to set a record, and she did: along with her Sherpa guide, Tenjin, they became the world’s fastest climbers by getting to the top of the world’s second highest peak, scaling the world’s 14 highest mountains in 92 days. But of course that mission had nothing to do with her decision to leave Mohammad Hassan, a Pakistani porter and father of three, to die after he slipped and fell off the narrow path to the summit. The Norwegian climber told The Associated Press on Sunday that “in the snowy condition we had up there that day, it wouldn’t be possible to carry him down.”

It was impossible! All righty then, case closed!

Drone footage showed dozens of climbers pushing past Hassan to reach the mountain peak, the path to which was unusually crowded that day (July 27), because it was the last day of the season for a possible ascent. The nerve of that guy losing it all up by falling!

Austrian climber Wilhelm Steindl, who shot the drone footage after he had abandoned the climb because of bad weather, told the AP that more could have been done to save Hassan. “Everyone would have had to turn back to bring the injured person back down to the valley. I don’t want to kind of directly blame anybody, I’m just saying there was no rescue operation initiated and that’s really very, very tragic because that’s actually the most normal thing one would do in a situation like that.”

Well, to be fair, it isn’t. What might have changed the way the climbers reacted would have been a strong leader with the personal magnetism and persuasive skills to reorient the climbers from pursuing powerful non-ethical considerations to embracing an ethical one. No doubt about it, trying to get the injured man down the mountain involved sacrifice and risk, and might not even succeed. There is, however, an ethical duty to try. A life was at stake.

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Comment Of The Day: “MAGA Loyalists: Do You REALLY Believe That Anyone Who Makes A Public Threat Like This Can Be Trusted To Be President?…”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I am proud to present an epic Comment of he Day by A M Golden on the post, “MAGA Loyalists: Do You REALLY Believe That Anyone Who Makes A Public Threat Like This Can Be Trusted To Be President? Because He Can’t…Ever.” It is wise, wide-raanging and nuanced, so I’m not going to waste your time with an introduction. Just read, think, and enjoy.

***

As the saying goes, “When someone tells you who they really are, believe them.” We have enough evidence to see with our own eyes and ears who Trump is and who he is not and that should not be relevant to who Joe Biden is and who he is not.

This entry, the previous one in the latest installment of the “Nation of Assholes” series and the one before that about Rudy Giuliani’s untrustworthy secret recorder have all coalesced in my mind this weekend as I have spent several days wearing myself out over planning for a pop-culture convention next week by following other conventions in other cities on social media to determine how the shows are accommodating the guests’ requirements under SAG-AFTRA’s strike rules and what that means for how I should approach any celebrity guest I wish to meet.

I get tired of holding the hands of new convention-goers who don’t understand the rules, ask for clarification and end up not following my advice. I get tired of veteran convention-goers who think they have the right to get around the rules. For entitled people who cut lines, who try to sweet-talk the guest into extra perks and who make little to no effort to ask polite, intelligent questions. They make everything harder on everyone else. Celebrities won’t want to attend these things if people don’t understand or respect boundaries. I have too many stories to recount of fans acting like inconsiderate asses and those stories are from before the pandemic.

We are already an entitled enough culture that treats celebrities like commodities, as if buying a movie ticket or following a TV program requires that anyone who appeared in the same owes us unlimited time, an autograph, a selfie, a kidney… One of the best things about the strike is that it’s finally becoming somewhat public knowledge that most actors aren’t millionaires.

We treat others like us even worse. Not only do we not put most of our fellow citizens on pedestals, but we don’t even afford them the basic respect of treating them the way we would want to be treated. As long as there’s something in it for us, I guess…

Somehow, qualities of character, such as honesty, integrity, patience, kindness, self-control (sorry, I think I wandered into the Fruits of the Spirit from the Bible) seem to have been lost very quickly. We are a mess as a culture and there’s a lot of blame to go around, not least because we have forgotten the Golden Rule.

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: The Congresswoman’s Prayer Breakfast Joke

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Outspoken freshman Congresswoman Nancy Mace, (R-SC), decided to throw away her prepared remarks and riff at the beginning of her speech at fellow South Carolinian Sen. Tim Scott’s prayer breakfast last week. That was her first mistake.

“When I woke up this morning at 7, I was getting picked up at 7:45, Patrick, my fiance, tried to pull me by my waist over this morning in bed. And I was like, ‘No, baby, we don’t got time for that this morning,'” Mace began. “I gotta get to the prayer breakfast, and I gotta be on time.”

Yes, there’s nothing better to warm up the crowd at a prayer breakfast like a pre-marital sex joke!

Seriously, how hard is it to avoid making comments about sex at a prayer breakfast? She probably embarrassed Sen. Scott thoroughly, who was metaphorically batting second behind the nookie narrative in her remarks as she praised him profusely. Scott is running for President, however futilely, and doesn’t need any silly but completely avoidable controversies. Mace also probably made Seacoast Church Pastor Greg Surratt a little uncomfortable, who had honored both her and Scott as a part of his congregation.

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“The Affair”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I’m recommending the Showtime series “The Affair,” now streaming its five seasons (the show ran in 53 episodes from 2014-2019), as a challenging and perceptive ethics show. Covering, as you might guess, a sexual and romantic affair involving two couples and their extended family, and the chaotic consequences the illicit relationship triggers, the “The Affair” reaches into relationship ethics, friendship ethics, marital ethics, parenting ethics, community ethics, legal ethics, academic ethics and artistic ethics, and probably more: I’m finally watching the whole thing after seeing the third and fourth seasons a few years ago. Wrapped up in those larger categories are questions involving honesty, loyalty, conflicts of interest, empathy, and abuse of power.

The one irritant in “The Affair” is the scarcity of genuinely ethical or admirable characters. The closest is probably the primary victim of the affair, the adulterous writer’s wife, played by Maura Tierney (of “ER” fame). One aspect of the show that will benefit many is how awful so many of the parents portrayed in the show are: if you question your parenting abilities, “The Affair” will restore your confidence. (So far, my favorite moment was when a grown daughter finally orders her incredibly over-bearing, toxic and manipulative mother out of her home, saying, curtly, “I hate you.”

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Of Local Radio, Law vs. Ethics, Ruthless Capitalism And “It Is What It Is”: The WOAS Saga

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

WOAS 88.5-FM is a high school radio station, one of only 200 remaining in the U.S., that has been broadcasting from the Ontonagon High School building in Michigan since 1978. It has only10 watts of broadcasting power, but is still one of only two radio stations in Ontonagon, on Michigan’s western Upper Peninsula. Not only does it provide some listening variety for the town, it also is a valuable educational and recreational vehicle for high school students. Two snack vending machines inside the school largely cover WOAS’s costs, and everyone is a volunteer. After school hours, members of the community volunteer their time as disc jockeys.

WOAS is a Class D station, the lowest FCC classification, covering low-power, noncommercial radio stations. These are considered too weak and disposable to warrant regulatory protection, so when unprotected” from other broadcasters, which can legally overpower its signal or simply apply to take over the station’s place on the dial. WHWL 95.7-FM, with10,000 times the broadcasting power of the school station, applied to the FCC to take over its frequency and place on the radio dial. The FCC said, “Sure! Go ahead!” granting a license for a new station on 88.5 FM, where WOAS lives. The high school radio station now has to find itself a frequency, which costs money, or go gently into that good night.

When the high school asked the radio giant why it chose its place on the radio dial to invade, the answer was classic Bill Clinton: it did it because it could. The big station said it needs to expand and FCC rules allow them to just take over. A consultant looked at available frequencies available to WHWL to add stations, and it deemed 88.5 FM “the best.”

The fact that a high school was currently operating from there was not, apparently, part of the equation, or considered at all.

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Ethics Dunces, Sociology Dunces, Law Enforcement Dunces…Whatever: The California Reparations Task Force

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Try a mind experiment: if California’s ridiculous and racist Reparations Task Force wanted to exacerbate racial tensions as much as humanly possible while also making African-Americans seem as toxic to society as a KKK Grand Dragon could imagine in a fever dream, what would it be doing differently that it is doing right now? We know that the group is already recommending that millions of dollars in taxpayer reparations for slavery be handed out to the state’s blacks, even though slavery never existed in the Golden State. But wait, there’s more!

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What About Whataboutism?

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The agreed-upon “resistance”/Democratic/mainstream media rebuttal of complaints that the Justice Department has fashioned a new set of standards for prosecution in order to neutralized Donald Trump is being met by smug accusations of “Whataboutism.” Whataboutism is one of the Ethics Alarms rationalizations on the list, and high up that list, at #2. Before I wrote this post, I checked what I had written, which was short and to the point:

The mongrel offspring of The Golden Rationalization and the Bible-based dodges a bit farther down the list, the “They’re Just as Bad” Excuse is both a rationalization and a distraction. As a rationalization, it posits the absurd argument that because there is other wrongdoing by others that is similar, as bad or worse than the unethical conduct under examination, the wrongdoer’s conduct shouldn’t be criticized or noticed. As a distraction, the excuse is a pathetic attempt to focus a critic’s attention elsewhere, by shouting, “Never mind me! Why aren’t you going after those guys?”

Moved by the current “Axis of Unethical Conduct’s distortion of the concept, I added the following to avoid future confusion (or corrupt rhetorical misappropriation):

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