The Internet

Ethics Quiz: Al Roker’s Unethical Selfie And Malfunctioning Ethics Alarm

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Roker-selfie

The question here is a simple one.

On the scene of the devastating flooding in South Carolina, Today Show weather man Al Roker tweeted a selfie of him and  NBC colleagues beaming happily in front of a collapsed highway and a trapped car, with the caption “My crew and I getting ready to report on East Coast flooding from S. Carolina on @NBCNightlyNews with Kate Snow.”

Yes, after many complained on social media about the discordant juxtaposition of cheerful self-promotion and tragedy, Roker apologized, but not before.  The basic question is “What the hell is the matter with these people?“, or as today’s Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz asks,

Is Roker’s insensitivity signature significance of a malfunctioning ethics alarm, or just an excusable one-time mistake?

Continue reading →

“Who Are You Calling A Nut?” And Other Ethics Issues In The Community College Shooting Aftermath (Parts I-VI)

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

mr__peanut_s_cane_gun_I. A good friend, who is a nice man so I chose not to upset him by explaining why he sounds like an idiot, announced on Facebook that he wasn’t reading any more “gun nut” posts. Hmmmm. I wonder what he thinks a “gun nut” is? Is a gun nut a teacher who punishes a student for pointing his finger like a gun, or who prevents a deaf child from signing his name, Gunner? Or is it someone who believes that the Second Amendment, which wasn’t second by accident, should be followed? Is it someone who keeps saying that laws need to be passed that will stop shootings like the one in Oregon, but who either has no realistic proposals to suggest or who suggest measures that wouldn’t have affected that shooting at all? Isn’t it nutty to engage in magical thinking? I think so.

II. I also think it’s nutty, not to mention hypocritical, to decry the lack of “civil debate” regarding gun policy and then call anyone who doesn’t want guns melted down by government order “nuts.”  Actually it’s worse than that: pundits, politicians and anti-gun advocates are increasingly equating  opposition to gun regulations advanced using false arguments, dubious logic, ad hominem attacks and deceitful statistics with insanity and intractable evil. Frankly, I resent it. I’m not opposed to sensible gun regulations, but my job is to oppose false arguments, dubious logic, ad hominem attacks and deceitful statistics, as well as to make sure that they don’t succeed lest “the ends justify the means” become a social norm.

III. Speaking of hypocritical, Mike Huckabee and others have been quite properly criticized (by me, for example) by claiming that since the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage is “wrong,” it shouldn’t be followed. Yet the most vociferous defenders of that SCOTUS decision simultaneously advocate anti-gun measures that are forbidden by the Court’s decisions interpreting the Second Amendment….because, you see, “it’s wrong.” Continue reading →

Observations on the Great Baseball Game Sorority Selfie-Shaming Affair

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Screen-Shot-selfie girls

I was going to skip this one as too stupid even for my intrigue, but the combination of baseball, selfies, privacy, the generation gap, The Golden Rule, cultural rot…and those pictures above… is too much to resist.

In a now viral video clip, about a dozen comely members of the Alpha Chi Omega sorority attending the Arizona Diamondbacks-Colorado Rockies game this week were put on camera to serve as fodder for TV broadcasters Steve Berthiaume’s and Bob Brenly’s ridicule. The reason they were on camera is that it was an unusually attractive bevy of maidens, and that they were engaged in something that could best be called a selfie orgy. It went on and on as the announcers snickered, saying things like…

“Do you have to make faces when you take selfies?”

“Wait, one more now. Better angle. Oh, check it. Did that come out OK?”

“Here’s my first bite of the churro. Here’s my second bite of the churro.”

“That’s the best one of the 365 pictures I’ve taken of myself today!”

“Welcome to parenting in 2015!”

“Every girl in the picture is locked into her phone. Every single one is dialed in. They’re all just completely transfixed by the technology.

“‘Help us, please! Somebody help us!'”

As the internet weighed in, the girls found themselves being defended by most commentators, at least by most commentators under 40.

Observations: Continue reading →

Send in the Clones: Hillary Clinton’s Hilarious Fake Spontaneous Supporters

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments
"Here at the Clinton Foundation Paid Mouthpiece Cloning Facility, we are building for the future..."

“Here at the Clinton Foundation Paid Mouthpiece Cloning Facility, we are building for the future…”

Mediaite sarcastically points out that “in a massive coincidence, every single Hillary Clinton staffer and surrogate who watched the Democratic presidential candidate’s Meet the Press interview [Sunday] had the exact same thoughts, sometimes using identical language.”  On MSNBC, Willie Geist and Chuck Todd, who handled the interview,  joked about it.

“Everyone who is remotely a part of the campaign tweeted out simultaneously that it’s time to move on,” said NBC’s Willie Geist. “I saw that!” a grinning Todd said.“That was a little ham-handed….Especially when it’s exactly the same, right? It’s clear somebody cut and paste from the email, from whatever email.”

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! How hilarious! All of those guests that MSNBC and NBC and the rest have on to give their honest, objective, expert opinion on Clinton’s misconduct, machinations and lies are reading from scripts provided by Hillary’s campaign! That’s so funny! And the news media present them as if they are presenting independent opinions and are trustworthy! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Here are the tweets in question: Continue reading →

It Looks Like Ahmed’s “Cool Clock” Was A Hoax After All. Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 62 Comments

Ah, Barack, Barack, Barack.  I keep telling you that responsible leaders don’t inject themselves into local matters and trivial issues, warping attention and priorities, politicizing issues that shouldn’t be political, making things worse. But your learning curve is still, on this as regarding so much else, flatter than a Jeb Bush’s poll numbers. Why? Why?

It is increasingly looking like Ahmed Mohamed didn’t build a clock after all. Whatever he brought with him to school, it shouldn’t have gotten him arrested, and whatever got him arrested, it shouldn’t have gotten him a White House invitation when so many other worse examples of school abuse of kids, some spurred by your own excessive rhetoric about guns, didn’t even cause a momentary hitch in Obama’s golf swing. As it stands now, what may have been a  dishonest stunt by a smart Muslim kid has paid off big time, and either the kid is trapped in a lie that keeps getting worse, or enjoying the fact that he is making a lot of people look like  fools, including the President of the United States. This is increasingly looking a real life version of the famous Simpsons episode in which Bart’s practical joke involving an imaginary child named “Timmy” who has fallen down a well causes a media frenzy that traps Bart.

Ahmed is a child: his conduct can be forgiven. The adults in the episode, however, shouldn’t be.

Let’s catch up with the narrative, which I last visited here. It always looked like an example of confirmation bias gone wild, with just another example of school administrators showing no judgment and being cruel to students  appropriated by Democrats, progressives and the media to serve their agenda of framing legitimate distrust of radical Islam as racism and bigotry. Now, however, it appears that all of them were taken in by a stunt of the sort that most of us, if we think back, can recall from one or more of our own classmates: the faked science project. Continue reading →

Even If You Don’t Like The Naked Teacher Principle, I Don’t See How You Can Oppose The Online Porn Star Teacher Principle, As In “The MelodyXXXTune Saga”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments
Porn Star Teacher

“Look Honey! I found some videos of Carol’s nice band teacher on the intern—OH MY GOD!!!!!

As you may know, Ethics Alarms does its best to catalogue examples of the Naked Teacher Principle and all its related variations.  The NTP  holds that teachers who allow naked photos of themselves to become available to their sub-college level students over the internet may not credibly claim to be mistreated when their schools no longer wish to employ them. The elusive element is where the line should be drawn. Naked pictures from 25 years earlier? Non-naked pictures that are still sexually provocative? Is the line drawn before or after my personal favorite, the male teacher who is photographed painting canvases using his naked derriere and gonads as brushes, but with a bag over his head?

Wherever the line belongs, I expect no argument over Ethics Alarms’ conclusion that Kristin Sundman, formerly an assistant band teacher at Roosevelt High School in Kent, Ohio but also known as porn performer MelodyXXXTune, misses the cut. Under her web porn name, Kristin could be found on videos engaging in all sorts of activities that students should not be associating with their teachers and authority figures, like frolicking naked in a shower, masturbating and performing oral sex. If a teacher wants to moonlight in a field like this, she has an obligation to alert her school administrators so the school does not become embarrassed, get sued, or become the object of an investigation. Of course, informing the school will usually mean that the teacher won’t be teaching, but that’s a choice the school has the right to make.

To her credit, the 8 year veteran resigned shortly after the discovery of her second career got her placed on administrative leave.

There are reasonable exceptions to the Naked Teacher Principle, but if there are any to its sister Online Porn Star Teacher Principle, I don’t have the imagination to envision what it would be.

Good luck, Kristin.

____________________________

Pointer: Fred

Facts: New York Daily News

The Ridiculous, Sad, But Somehow Not Very Surprising Tale Of The Plagiarizing College Vice-President In Charge Of Plagiarism

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

WheelockThis may be why cheating among  high school and college students is out of control.

Shirley Malone-Fenner, Wheelock College’s vice-president in charge of academic affairs for the Boston based college, resigned today.  The reason: though her responsibilities included oversight of the investigation and discipline of students accused of  academic plagiarism, Malone-Fenner’s welcome-back letter to the faculty last month…was plagiarized.

The inspiring four-page letter from Malone-Fenner contained at least six passages from the letter Harvard’s president Drew Faust wrote to her returning faculty in 2007. Experienced plagiarists, however—and who has more experience with plagiarism than a college’s academic affairs authority?— knows that it is better to mix sources, so the  letter also contained verbatim and barely altered phrases, sentences, and passages from  a 2004 welcome letter from the president of Rutgers University, as well as sections of  a 2010 letter from the president of the University of the Pacific in California.

A suspicious Wheelock professor ran Malone-Fenner’s letter through software the school uses to detect student plagiarism, discovering the damning parallels. The faculty subsequently called for her metaphorical head.

That head didn’t help matters by dreaming up pathetic explanations like this one, which she gave to the Boston Globe:

“In preparing my message, I reviewed many letters from other institutions and used words from others’ welcoming messages without attribution. What I intended to share is quite simple — I am excited about working with each member of the faculty to make this a most successful year.”

Translation: “Crap, you got me.”

What does what she was “trying to do” and how “excited” she was about it have to do with the fact that she obviously and unethically tried to pass off the words of others as her own? I bet many of the students she has nailed for plagiarism have come up with better excuses than that. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce (And Also Political Correctness Bully And Self-Righteous Jerk): British Barrister Charlotte Proudman

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

lawyers Linked In

And I don’t think her photo’s all that “stunning,” either. Happy now, Charlotte? And what are you smirking about?

On the left is Alexander Carter-Silk, 57, the head of Brown Rudnick’s intellectual property group in Europe. He had received a LinkedIn request from human rights lawyer Charlotte Proudman, 27, on the right. He responded positively with the friendly comment that he was “delighted to connect,”,adding “I appreciate that this is probably horrendously politically incorrect but that is a stunning picture !!!” as well as “You definitely win the prize for the best Linked in picture I have ever seen.”

The Horror. For this arguably excessive degree of praise for her posted image, Proudman decided that Carter-Silk must be shamed world-wide. She responded with this A-Bomb rebuke, and shared it on Twitter:

Twitter rebuke

Naturally, Carter-Silk was immediately torn to shreds by a feminist social media mob. Continue reading →

Ethics Bulletin! Hillary Apologizes! And It’s Pathetic!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments
I just can't bear to put up another Hillary photo, and the graphics for "fake apologies" are all memes, so here's an adorable bull dog puppy.

I just can’t bear to put up another Hillary photo, and the graphics for “fake apologies” are all memes, so here’s an adorable bull dog puppy.

I really, really wanted to be through with Hillary Clinton today…this week…as long as possible. You’ve got to believe me!

Then comes this breathless announcement from ABC News: Hillary finally apologized!

Of course, when you have said repeatedly that there was nothing to apologize for, and you aren’t going to apologize, see no reason to apologize, because you did nothing wrong, and it was allowed, and lots of others had done similarly without anyone making a fuss, and the whole thing is nonsense, and made up by Fox News and Republicans, and then you apologize because you can’t stop the criticism and your advisors are saying “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, HILLARY, THE MEDIA IS  BEGGING YOU TO APOLOGIZE AND MAYBE IF YOU GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT WE CAN BURY THIS!!!!,” what kind of apology is it?

An insincere apology. A desperate apology. A cynical, dishonest, Machiavellian apology, containing no contrition, humility, acknowledgement of wrongdoing, remorse or acceptance of consequences. In other words, not an apology at all. Just another tactic,

Is anyone really fooled by this? If you are, what’s the matter with you?

Even by fake apology standards, this was awful. Clinton said (my comments in Hillary Soul Black):

“I do think I could have and should have done a better job answering questions earlier.

You mean better as in not using one rationalization after another, lying , falsely claiming that the e-mails of the Secretary of State contained no classified information before you adopted the Clintonian “no e-mails marked as classified?” Or better as in doing a better job lying?

“I really didn’t perhaps appreciate the need to do that.

Because Clintons never appreciate the need to tell the truth unless they are about to be exposed. Because Hillary is only running for President—why would she appreciate the need to be transparent and honest to the public? Why, though, was the alternative to doing a better job answering questions sending out one smirking, talking-point programmed surrogate after another to say that the issue was a sham? Why didn’t she appreciate the need not to do that?

“What I had done was allowed, it was above board.

In other words, she still refuses to admit she did anything wrong! What’s she apologizing for?  And no, it was not above board, because it was a secret private server specifically designed to keep Clinton’s communications hidden when she wanted them to be. “Above board” means “in open sight; without tricks, concealment, or disguise.” Her handling of the e-mails  was the opposite of “above board” by definition. Continue reading →

Ethical Quote Of The Month: PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

pbs-logo-in-black

“One would have to lean way over backwards to give her the benefit of the doubt that she was simply shedding light on the administration’s view of portions of Netanyahu’s arguments. But to personalize it by saying, “Take that, Bibi” is, in my book, inexcusable for an experienced journalist who is the co-anchor of a nightly news program watched by millions of people over the course of any week.”

—PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler, giving no quarter and making no rationalizations to slam PBS news host Gwen Ifill for her” “Take that, Bibi” taunt via Twitter.

Bravo.

Note that he also is saying that Ifill’s defense is a lie. As indeed it was. Later, as you can read, he makes it clear that he believes that Ifill is too experienced to make the mistake she claims she made. She made a different mistake: letting her bias rule her judgment and professionalism.

What do you know, a real, honest ombudsman who doesn’t view his job as spinning for his bosses!

I wonder why the New York Times can’t find one.