rationalizations

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?

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

“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.”

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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!

Continue reading →

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):

Continue reading →

Fairness, Justice, And Baseball No-Hitters

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

That’s Harvey Haddix about to throw a pitch above. The photo is from one of the most famous baseball games ever played: on May 26, 1959, Haddix, then a starting pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates pitched a perfect game—that’s no runs, hits, walks or errors, with nobody on the other team reaching base) for 12 innings against the Milwaukee Braves. It was the greatest pitching performance of all time, but because the Pirates didn’t score a run either, Haddix had to keep pitching into the 13th inning, where he lost the perfect game, the shutout and the game itself. As a result, he wasn’t even given credit for a no-hitter, which is normally when a pitcher throws nine-innings of hitless ball. That really bothered me as a kid; it made no sense.

In baseball, a no-hitter, with a perfect game being the ultimate no-hitter, has always been considered one of pinnacles of single game performance by a baseball player. A pitcher who throws one gets his name in the Hall of Fame; it’s a distinction that accents an entire career. Only the greatest pitchers throw more than one in a career; some of the very greatest, like Lefty Grove, Grover Cleveland Alexander, and Roger Clemens, never get one. (Cy Young, Nolan Ryan and Sandy Koufax, however, tossed three or more each. Johnny Vander Meer tossed two no-hitter in consecutive starts!) So being credited with a no-hitter is important; it matters.

Imagine then what it would feel like to be credited with pitching a major league no-hitter (or have your father or grandfather credited with one) and have it taken away. That’s what happened in 1991. Up until then, there had been no specific definition of no-hitter except the obvious, common sense one used by sportswriters, players, fans and baseball historians: a no-hitter was a baseball game that ended with one team having failed to get a hit. One of my favorite Commissioners of Baseball, however, Fay Vincent, the last one who wasn’t a toady for the baseball team owners (Vincent was fired for being independent, which up until then was the definition of his job), decided that the definition of no-hitter was too loose, among some other statistical anomalies. He put together a commission, and, with his influence, they redefined a no -hitter as a game that ended with one team getting no hits in at least nine innings.

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Let’s Play “What’s Wrong With This Guy?”!”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

There I was, thinking dark thoughts and moping about the horrible traffic here over the weekend, and along comes A.M. Golden to remind me that this blog has always sought to inspire quality rather than quantity, with this superb Comment of the Day on the post about the enterprising Mr. Clifford, who feels that IBM isn’t him paying him enough not to work for 30 years, Let’s Play “What’s Wrong With This Guy?”! Here it is; it even has a “Facts of Life” reference!

* * *

Stipulated: The plaintiff’s disability could be a legitimate one. We don’t know. That doesn’t really change my answer.

How did we get here?

The Deep Pockets Rationalization aka The Jo Polniaczek Excuse: Named for Nancy McKeon’s character on the ’80s show “The Facts of Life.” In one episode, Jo borrows a watch belonging to her frenemy, wealthy Blair Warner, without asking so she can time herself while taking an exam. On her way back, the watch is damaged when she jumps into a quick basketball game. She blows it off because Blair is wealthy and has a lot of watches.

The Deep Pockets Rationalization states that the person with the most money should pay even if not at fault. A guy driving a Hyundai hits a guy driving a BMW. The Hyundai driver tries to argue that the BMW driver should pay for everything because he has more money. A person trips in a store and tries to compel the business to pay even though she tripped because she wasn’t paying attention to what she was doing. Or a restaurant is pressured to pay for a disfigured child’s surgery after the family failed to extort money with false allegations against employees (Remember the KFC incident from a few years’ back?).

Continue reading →