The Internet

Ethics Quote Of The Week: My Friend Mark On Facebook, Politics, Community, And Fathers Day

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

wisdom

In my recent essay about my Facebook friends’ reactions and over-reactions to the Orlando shooting, I referred to one particular Facebook post and my critical response to it. As I suspected, knowing that poster and his character like I do, my friend Mark commented on the essay, and followed up with this statement on Facebook. I asked if he would grant me permission to quote him, and he did.

This is an extraordinarily ethical and thoughtful man, and this is how an ethical human being thinks when emotion and non-ethical considerations become the strongest.

This is what an ethics alarm ringing sounds like.

Having suffered a near-toxic overload of Facebook this week, I’m going to give the points to Facebook and withdraw from the game for a few days. I love being here and interacting with my friends, family, and especially with those who don’t necessarily share my beliefs. Argument can be fun and challenging.

But.

We need to start being more careful with each other, especially in times of sorrow like this last week. What we forget (and what I have learned recently in myself) is that these shootings traumatize the whole country in one way or another – whether a fear of a loss of rights and liberty on one side, or increasing fear for bodily safety in our every day lives on the other. Orlando becomes DC becomes Kansas becomes California becomes . . . When American citizens die, we are – or should be – all in this together. The poisonous dialog I’ve witnessed and, sadly, participated in or instigated this week shows that I, at least, had forgotten that.

Continue reading →

The NBA’s Integrity And Trust Problem Bites It In The Finals

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

NBA_2015_Finals_Game6

I don’t watch the NBA any more. The reason is that the games are so obviously subject to manipulation by bias that it is, well, not quite as dubious for legitimate sport as professional wrestling, but still too much so to be worth my time…or yours, frankly, but people spend time cheering for pro wrestlers too.

The problem is the referees, who have so much discretion in calling fouls that they can make the game turn out any way they choose. The fact that the NBA has such a huge home court advantage despite the fact that all courts are the same is also suspicious. Baseball, in contrast, with fields that vary materially in size and dimensions, has a very small home team edge. Biases, intentional or subconscious, control pro basketball, accounting for oddly frequent games decided in the last ten minutes, a propensity for allowing superstars to get away with infractions that lesser players do not, and seven game play-off series.

Sorry, I don’t like being a patsy, so I refuse to care.

There’s going to be a huge Game 7 of the NBA Finals  on ABC Sunday, because the underdog Cleveland Cavaliers beat the Golden State Warriors and denied them the NBA  Championship for the second straight game last Thursday night. Game Six’s exciting finish was greatly affected by the fact that Warriors uber-star  Steph Curry got ejected in the closing minutes of play after receiving a technical foul. Ayesha Curry, his wife, alleged a different kind of foul, tweeting…

ayesha-curry-tweet

Lots of other fans came to the same conclusion, though Ayesha was quickly informed by the league that they knew where her mother lived, or something, and she deleted the tweet.  Warriors’ head coach Steve Kerr wrote after the loss, “He gets six fouls on him; three were absolutely ridiculous.” Kerr knows that referees will usually move heaven and earth not to let a superstar foul out in regulation of a play-off game…unless, perhaps, there’s a good reason to let it happen. Continue reading →

From The Ethics Alarms Double Standard Files: A Brock Turner Sentence For A Predator Teacher, And Everyone Shrugs

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments
The predator teacher, who is much more deserving of a light sentence than Brock Turner, who should be killed, and the judge too, come to think of it...

The predator teacher, who is much more deserving of a light sentence than Brock Turner, who should be killed, and that judge too, come to think of it…

The lenient sentence Judge Aaron Persky handed to Stanford student Brock Turner for raping a drunken co-ed  enraged the social media and the public conscience, resulting in thousands of op-eds, protests from feminists and rape-culture activists, petitions, a recall effort, and most devastating of all, an Ethics Alarms post.

Last week, a 33-year old high school teacher named Lindsay Himmelspach pleaded guilty to repeatedly having sex with two minor students at the high school, and received the almost the identical sentence, from another California judge, as Turner. Himmelspach recieved three years probation and four months in jail.

I’m listening, but I hear no screams of outrage.

Huh.

The judge, Butte County Superior Court Judge James Reilley, administered the equivalent rap on the wrist that her Santa Clara colleague did on Turner because Himmelspach had no prior criminal record, she expressed remorse, and somehow he concluded that she’d never do such a thing again. (I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact the she is hot, and the judge was thinking, “Those lucky bastards!”) Indeed, the judge didn’t even require the predator teacher to register as a sex offender, at least not yet. He’s keeping an open mind, and will decide after a separate hearing.

Hello?

Social media?

Continue reading →

Facebook’s Sad, Ignorant, Compassionate, Irresponsible Post-Orlando Freakout

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

antigun cartoon

If I had the time and wanted to anger about two-thirds of my friends, I could go around Facebook and explain to them why their latest posted anti-gun meme, or latest simple-minded anti-gun cartoon, or furious rant against the NRA, Republicans and “gun nuts,” show them to be ignorant, hysterical, and irresponsible citizens. Maybe I’ll spend a day doing this and see what happens.

The culprits are everywhere, from all backgrounds. These aren’t just my actor friends, who tend to memorize lines with their brains and think with their hearts. It’s many of the lawyers I know too….also journalists, writers, policy-makers—all kinds. As they quote with approval partisan and ignorant anti-gun pundits, actors or elected officials, they also erupt with emotion, counting on a welter of “likes,” “loves” and crying faces from the friends, who uncritically cheer the sentiment without challenging the execrable law and logic. The process repeats over and over, like a rinse cycle, until the original posters are not only convinced that they are right, but that anyone who disagrees is an evil promoter of violence not worthy of human association. I have read, more than once, “If you disagree, keep your opinion to yourself, or I’ll unfriend you.”

I confess, I’ve resisted my natural instinct to take up those dares, because these people are in pain, and, frankly, temporarily deranged. Many of them are gay, an identify personally with the victims. I sympathize with that. They also have a right to their anti-gun opinions, but they are polluting an important debate and making any resolution impossible by being willfully ignorant, and rebelling in it. The lawyers are especially disgracing themselves. Again—it is irresponsible, and it is bad citizenship.

If I were going to be a Facebook vigilante and point out the serious flaws in the various anti-gun rants, my Facebook friends would find more notes like this one, which I left in response to a good friend’s rant against the head of the Gun Owners of America  blaming the Orlando shooting on “Gun Free Zones.”  My friend wrote…

“I’m willing to entertain just about any argument for gun rights, but this one is SHIT. I will not be convinced that on Sunday evening, even a few, trained, people violating the Gun Free Zone in a dimly lit club, with HUNDREDS of panicked, perhaps inebriated, people running in every direction for their lives, could get a “good shot” to take out the man responsible for this atrocity. I believe the result is called more deaths by “friendly fire.”

I responded in part…

The argument is that murderous shooters will be less likely to come to kill when there is a chance that someone will be armed. This is not “shit”…This is the oldest pro-gun/anti-gun divide of all: the criminals and terrorists aren’t the ones who will follow the gun regulations; law abiding citizens are. That should be obvious. I don’t believe for a moment that one can blame the massacre on ” Gun Free Zones.”…but the argument that a shooting occurred because an area wasn’t a Gun Free Zone is even more silly. Is a terrorist going to say, “Ooops! Can’t slaughter gays in that club—it’s a Gun Free Zone!” Of course not. Might a terrorist choose not to attack a venue where he knows that one or more people might be armed, rather than one where he knows the law-abiding victims will be defenseless? Maybe.

Your point of bias, and it’s a common one, is that the presence of a gun makes one unsafe. The presence of a maniac makes one unsafe. If you happen to have a gun, maybe you’re a bit safer. Agree or not, that isn’t “fucking insane.” What I do think is fucking insane is people allowing emotion to eat their brains all over Facebook. It doesn’t help.

It just doesn’t help.  This friend is rational and thoughtful, and I expect him to take my critique in the spirit in which it was offered.  I can’t always count on a reasonable response, however, such as from the friends have posted this meme:

Anti-Gun meme 1

Machine guns and automatic weapons are illegal. The meme goes along with the laments of those who believe that the Orlando shooter used an “assault rifle” or a military weapon in the shooting. When you point out that it was not an “assault weapon,” they just shrug the distinction off as an irrelevant detail, and this is a tell. All guns are indistinguishable to many of my friends. Guns are bad, that’s all. This undercuts the lie—and I am now convinced that it is a lie—that they don’t want to ban guns and repeal the Second Amendment.

Ken White wrote perceptively, as he usually does, on why this approach is both dishonest and counter-productive:

I support the argument that the United States should enact a total ban on civilians owning firearms.

Oh, I don’t support the ban. I support the argument.

I support the argument because it’s honest and specific. It doesn’t hide the ball, it doesn’t refuse to define terms, it doesn’t tell rely on telling people they are paranoid or stupid in their concerns about the scope of the ban. The argument proposes a particular solution and will require the advocate to defend it openly…There’s a very good reason to care about what you mean when you argue that “assault weapons” should be banned: the term is infinitely flexible. If you think it inherently means something specific, you haven’t bothered to inform yourself about the issue. “Assault weapon” means whatever the definers decide it should mean. Banning “assault weapons” is the gun version of banning “hate speech” or “disruptive protest” or “dangerous persons” or “interfering with a police officer” — it’s a blank check. And I don’t like handing out blank checks to the government to ban things and jail people…

A lot of my Facebook friends do, however. Here’s a link approvingly posted by a lawyer friend, saying in part.. Continue reading →

An Unethical Obituary Gets Social Media Raves

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Here is the obituary…

Singapore Obituary

The glaring ethics problem is that this was not written by Lye as a personal mea culpa and sincere acknowledgement of the deceased’s shortcomings and failures. It was composed by one of his sons, allegedly “based” on various conversations with his father in his final days. Continue reading →

The Stupidest Lies Of All

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Evil Dead hoax

What are the stupidest lies of all? Gilding the lily lies. Lies that accomplish nothing that the truth wouldn’t accomplish just as well. Gratuitous, lazy, pointless lies, that only serve to make the world more incredulous, cynical and distrusting.

Here is a  wonderful example, and the liars are the folks in Conservative Nation. After that San Jose, California, Trump rally where protesters attacked the Trumpites, the pro-Trump Conservative Nation tweeted out the fake picture above of an alleged Trump-supporting woman after her beating  by demonstrators. “Here’s what happened to female Trump supporter when she met ‘peaceful’ and ‘tolerant’ liberals” the tweet said, as if the genuine footage of the violence wasn’t enough.

But actor Bruce Campbell (a guilty pleasure of mine, I admit it) pointed out the truth. He tweeted,

Check your facts, folks. This is an actress named Samara Weaving from . This is a make-up test. Sad.

If you haven’t seen “Ash vs. The Evil Dead,” and unless you are a hard core, cult comedy-gore fan, I wouldn’t advise doing so, this is the cable series starring Campbell as he reprises his iconic role from the “Evil Dead” Trilogy, most famous for this classic sequence from “Evil Dead II,” in which hardware salesman Ash (Campbell), trapped in a cabin under assault by demons,  finds his right arm possessed and trying to kill him:

Okay, I’ve been waiting forever for an excuse to post this on Ethics Alarms. l love it.

Anyway, Bruce is right. This is sad. And dishonest.

And stupid.

Unethical Website Of The Month: NBCPolitics.Org

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments
This may be the editor of this web site. The evidence points that way...

This may be the editor of this web site. The evidence points that way…

NBCPolitics.org is a special variety of fake site. Its stories appear to be genuine—but since the site is unethical and a lie, you can’t assume every one is—and it does not appear to be attempting satire or to fool mainstream news sources. To be frank, I don’t know what the hell the site’s operators think they are doing.

Nonetheless, it is a fake site, an unethical one, and especially nasty. It is, to start with, stealing NBC’s logo and name, as well as the new stories it posts, which come from other sources, at least until the site posts its own fake story with the real ones. Don’t put it past them. You cannot trust a fake site.

NBCPolitics.Org is also written by illiterate morons. Here is a description of the site from one of the links:

This is a representing website for nbcnews.com only posting about politics from and outside the United States.All the article are used from big websites based on politics.Source information is included in every post.

Unless NBC has declined even beyond what watching MSNBC would have one believe, this is a smoking gun. So is the “About” page: Continue reading →

Unethical Tweet Of The Month: Emmet Rensin, Vox Editor

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Vox tweet

When “This Week’s” Michael Dougherty tweeted Rensin to ask what he believed were the limits of “legitimate” political violence, Rensin responded,

“Destroying property is legitimate. Shouting down is legitimate. Disruption of all events is legitimate. Murder isn’t.”

Whew! That’s a relief!

The Left will make Donald Trump President yet.

Oh–if Vox doesn’t terminate this fascist as ““deputy first person editor,” whatever the hell that is, there’s one more internet source that will go on my BANNED list. Rensin has a right to hold whatever anti-free speech, anti-democracy opinions he wants, but any website or news organization that would keep such a jerk in a position of influence and authority forfeits all respect and trust.

_______________________

Pointer: Hot Air

Update: “A Message From Katie Couric”… A Really Damning One

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments
But she's so cute! How can someone so cute be such a lying, untrustworthy weasel?

But she’s so cute! How can someone so cute be such a lying, untrustworthy weasel?

Katie Couric’s approval of intentionally deceptive editing in the anti-gun documentary “Under the Gun” (which Ethics Alarms discussed here) was and should be regarded as a definitive nail in her metaphorical coffin as a serious and trustworthy journalist. The revelation that she facilitated an unequivocal lie in the documentary, and her failure to acknowledge its unethical nature once it was exposed (instead, Couric endorsed the documentary-maker’s evasive non apology and said she was “very proud of the film” ), has no remedy other than to ignore Katie Couric forevermore. She’s a liberal agenda-driven hack who is not above distorting the truth to bolster policies she likes, in this case, banning guns. After this fiasco,there is no question about it.

CNN’s wishy-washy media ethics commentator Brian Stelter noted in a recent post about the incident that “an assortment of media critics and conservative writers” thought the documentary-maker’s fake apology that Couric rubber-stamped “was not sufficient.” Huh! Excuse me for being impertinent, but why is the practice of alleged journalists with national reputations using lies as a tool of advocacy a partisan issue?

Why are only “conservative writers” bothered when a documentary produced by Katie Couric intentionally uses a deceptive edit to make a group of gun owners look like fools who can’t come up with a response to a basic question about background checks? Why don’t liberal, moderate and honest writers protest as well? Are intentionally dishonest techniques all right with the latter group, as long as they have the purpose of destroying public support for the Bill of Rights?

The flagrant shredding of both documentary ethics and journalism ethics by long-time media darling Couric (who has always been as biased as a journalist can get) received some grudging attention from the non-conservative media, but nothing like the wave of indignation that would have followed a similar breach that made gun opponents look foolish in a documentary by, say, Britt Hume. Compare the treatment of Couric’s deception to the way the mainstream media attacked and discredited the hidden videos of Planned Parenthood ghouls talking about aborting fetuses like it had all the significance of clipping toenails.

Couric signaled, clearly and obviously, that she felt the uenthical edit was just fine, thank-you, when she allowed days to pass without any comment other than that she was “very proud of the film.”  That’s how she feels, folks. There’s no ambiguity or confusion. If she was sorry, or realized she screwed up, or didn’t believe that the scourge of gun violence didn’t have to be stopped “by any means necessary,” including deception, she would have issued a genuine mea culpa immediately. She didn’t.

This is called doing a “Dan Rather.”

Then Katie decided that it wasn’t working. Many of the same “conservative writers” who wouldn’t let NBC shrug off the fact that Brian Williams was a compulsive liar were writing that Couric’s career was toast, so she apparently huddled with her PR crisis gurus and released this on Monday, titled “A Message From Katie Couric”. Here’s the whole, wretched thing: Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz (Extra Credit!): The Sexist, Satirical, Stupid Sign

/ Jack Marshall / 68 Comments

Stupid sign

Ryan Sullivan, a Salinas High School math teacher, picketed Hillary Clinton’s campaign visit to Hartnell College in Salinas May 25 while holding a sign that said: “Hillary Clinton not fit to be President. President equals a man’s job.”

The sign, naturally, was photographed and quickly went viral on social media, where I encountered it. All of the respondents to the sign’s posting on social media pronounced Sullivan a vile, sexist fool who was unqualified to teach. There is a “fire Sullivan” hashtag on Twitter. I immediately guessed that the sign was probably intended as satire: it was just too stupid. Sure enough, satire is what Sullivan, with the social media screaming for his metaphorical head and to end his teaching career, claims the sign was. It was a joke! Don’t you get it?

He wrote,

“Disgusted by the statement on my sign? Good! I’m happy to hear you disagree with such outlandish statements.Unfortunately, I have several family and friends who express the point made on my sign (mostly behind closed doors), I wanted to bring their message into the public forum to show how ridiculously outdated it sounds in 2016. Glad to hear it bothered so many—opinions like that should.”

Of course, if Sullivan meant every word of the sign, he could still say the same thing, and if his job was on the line, he probably would. Sullivan reportedly wrote his thesis on the gender gap in high school mathematics classrooms to help teachers create a more equitable environment for students. Does that prove his sign was a joke?

Did he hand out his thesis at Hillary’s speech?

Your nearly impossible Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

What should the school do with this guy?

Continue reading →