The Internet

Christopher Fountain, Address Outing And The Golden Rule Distortion

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Here we go again.

If it's unethical to do it to Harry, it's unethical to do it to anyone.

If it’s unethical to do it to Harry, it’s unethical to do it to anyone.

In the pantheon of distortions of the Golden Rule–-“Do Unto Others What They Did Unto You;” “Do Unto Others What You Think They Would Do Unto You If You Gave Them The Chance;” “Do Unto Others Before They Do It Unto You,” “Do Unto Other As You Wish They Would Do Unto You Even Though You Deserve A Hell of a Lot Worse,” and many others—perhaps the most popular is “Do Unto Others What They Did Unto Others, or You.” This is the “Tit for Tat” rationalization, the invalid ethical theory that when someone does something wrong, it waives the ethical rule making it wrong if the conduct is applied to them. I discussed this in the post and the thread about the Right’s “Harry Reid is a pederast” meme, devised as retribution for Reid’s admittedly despicable assertion that Mitt Romney was a tax evader, as vivid a modern example of “Big Lie” politics as we are ever likely to see. I don’t want to repeat myself. You can review it here; this was the most viewed post on Ethics Alarms in 2012. Continue reading →

The Ethics of Christmas Shaming

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

Ethics Alarms participant Jeff Hibbert asks my reactions to this photo:

Blurry face boy

[The sign reads: “I have to take back my PS3 that I was getting for Christmas because I wasn’t grateful to receive a Captain America action figure (That I received from Church) so I’m going Christmas shopping for other kids with the refund money!”  The actual photo on the web shows the unblurred face of an unhappy boy, and that is how I originally posted it. However, after some prompting by Jeff, I concluded that I was adding to the boy’s plight by helping to publicize his identity. Ethics Alarms commenter texagg04 kindly provided this version, as well as three others that gave me some Christmas mirth by replacing the boy’s face with Bart Simpson’s, a smiley face, and most inspired of all, the face of recent Ethics Alarms’ subject John Dillinger.]

I can’t find any context for it, back-story, or the name of the family involved. (I’m glad about that last part, by the way.)  If it is what it appears to be, a young boy’s parents are subjecting him to rather harsh punishment for displaying inadequate gratitude for a gift he didn’t care for, by forcing him to return his favorite gift, a Play Station 3, and use the money to buy gifts for presumably needy children. Continue reading →

A Christmas Story Redux: Alek and the Controllable Christmas Lights

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment
Go ahead! Try em!

Go ahead! Try em!

Christmas is right around the bend, so it is again time to celebrate Alek O. Komarnitsky and his creative, slightly wacky, Christmas lights extravaganza that he has transformed from a mildly unethical spoof to an act of charity and generosity.

Back in 2004, Alek received national attention for his whimsical holiday website that allowed people all over the world to turn his elaborate Christmas lights on and off from their home computers. Everyone had fun, which was clearly Alek’s design. Still, when it became known that his site was a hoax and that the lights going on and off were only an illusion, I weighed in (on The Ethics Scoreboard) with the opinion that perpetrating such a large-scale deception was wrong, no matter how well-intentioned and light-hearted. Alek took issue with my criticism, and we had a spirited e-mail debate.

Then, at a significant cost in time and money, Alek devised a way to really let people all over the world turn on his lights. He has done this ever since, and uses the site to raise money to cure Celiac disease. He writes: Continue reading →

Hey Corey Clark, This Streisand Effect’s For You!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments
Remember Corey Clark? Neither do I.

Remember Corey Clark? Neither do I.

For those of you fortunate enough to have forgotten about Corey Clark: he had a brief fling with celebrity after he was kicked off American Idol in 2003 and later accused then-Idol judge Paula Abdul of secretly helping him advance in the show while they were having a clandestine, and obviously unethical, sexual relationship. He did this, class act that he is, two years later while he was promoting an album release.

I didn’t remember Corey Clark either, until a typical reputation-cleaner (that is, dishonest and threatening) called me on the phone yesterday, misrepresenting himself as working for Clark’s lawyer, and told me that Clark was engaged in litigation regarding “defamatory” material published about him. He said that a post on Ethics Alarms’ predecessor, The Ethics Scoreboard, had “defamed” Clark in 2005 by stating that he had been convicted of a felony, and this was a demand that I either retract that post or take it down.

This, is, of course, approaching the patented territory of Ken at Popehat, whose specialty is opposing creeps who try to censor opinion on the internet by threatening spurious but expensive litigation against bloggers. As I told Clark’s paid lackey, who spouted erroneous legal theories and had a rudimentary understanding of defamation at best, I was only recounting what I had read in published reports at the time. There could be no defamation, as 1) Clark was, at the time, a public figure, 2) I wrote what I thought was true and accurate and 3) there was no malice involved. He asked me for my source, prompting me to say that I would have been able to supply him with one and would have done so gladly if his employer’s client hadn’t waited seven years to bring the post to my attention. The Scoreboard has not been active since 2009. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Grand Hotel Dallas

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This is how it is done: the perfect way to handle organizational misconduct.

hotellobbysignConsumerist blew the whistle on the Grand Hotel in Dallas for blatantly attempting to bribe patrons into posting  favorable reviews of their stays there online. A reader had alerted the consumer hawk website to a sign displayed in the hotel’s lobby offering $3 to $5 to guests who wrote raves on travel sites like Expedia, Priceline, and others. The sign required “immediate proof of review,” said the bribe amount would vary according to the number of websites that posted it, and noted that all must be “positive, favorable” reviews” approved by mgmt.”

The web site soon learned that the whole scheme had never been “approved by mgmt.” The hotel’s representative sent this e-mail to Consumerist: Continue reading →

Lisa Long’s Unethical, Despicable Bargain: Betrayal For A Blog Post

/ Jack Marshall / 90 Comments
No silver for this mother's betrayal...just blogging fame..

No silver for this mother’s betrayal…just blogging fame..

I hope free-lance writer Lisa Long enjoys her brief notoriety as a result of her blog post on The Blue Review that was  re-published on the Huffington Post and  Gawker, guaranteeing millions of readers. That should be worth at least a few more published articles for her, and maybe even a cable interview or two. After all, it would be a pity  to deliberately and callously burden the life of her emotionally disturbed son and get nothing out of it at all.

One thing she is already getting as the result of her sensationally-titled essay “I am Adam Lanza’s Mother” is harsh criticism for making such a cynical and self-serving bargain. In her post, Long relates the harrowing tale of her life with her 13-year-old son, whose erratic behavior and emotional outbursts terrify and dismay her. In the most quoted portion of the post, she proclaims his equivalence to well-known serial killers:

“I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza’s mother. I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother. I am James Holmes’s mother. I am Jared Loughner’s mother. I am Seung-Hui Cho’s mother. And these boys—and their mothers—need help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.”

Gee, thanks Mom! Continue reading →

Unethical Quote, Conduct and Organization: The Hacking Collective Called “Anonymous,” No Matter How Despicable Its Targets Are

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment
I think the missing heads explain a LOT

I think the missing heads explain a LOT

I considered making Anonymous the subject of an ethics quiz, but there isn’t any genuine ethics question about the group that an ethical 7th grader shouldn’t be able to answer while playing a videogame.

It is an arrogant and  lawless group of vigilantes, and nobody ought to be confused into admiring it or applauding its actions because Anonymous has chosen adversaries even more revolting than it is. The fact that Anonymous is currently tormenting the Westboro Baptist Church, those homophobic religious fanatics who think harassing family members of fallen soldiers at funerals is a reasonable method of proclaiming  opposition to homosexuality, certainly triggers a positive response on the Cognitive Dissonance Scale, but that is visceral, not rational. Citizens do not forfeit their rights because you don’t approve of their conduct, even if their conduct is objectively offensive.

First, the unethical quote, from an email sent to a website by a representative:

“Just hacked Westboro’s site. Freedom of speech is one thing. But freedom to hate is another. A domain such as “godhatesfags.com should not exist despite rumblings of members picketing Sandy Hook. Those families have enough anguish to deal with.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: The ABA Journal

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments
"I just know we're forgetting something! "Effects"? No, that's not it..."Ethanol"? No, no..."Prosthetics"? Arrrgh! What IS it?

“I just know we’re forgetting something! “Effects”? No, that’s not it…”Ethanol”? No, no…”Prosthetics”? Arrrgh! What IS it?”

This is as disheartening and it is shocking. The American Bar Association Journal, the monthly magazine of the nation’s largest lawyer organization and in many ways the face of the legal profession in the United States, just announced its 6th Annual Blawg 1oo, its reader-chosen list of the best law-related blogs on the web. There are many excellent blogs honored, of course; indeed all of them are useful or entertaining. I’ve visited most of them, and some, like Popehat, the Legal Professions Blog, Above the Law, the Volokh Conspiracy, Scotus Blog,  the New York Personal Injury Law Blog, and Over-Lawyered, I check on several times a week. There is a remarkably wide range of blog topics covered, including superhero law, practicing law in China and zombies. Guess what’s not covered?

Legal ethics. Continue reading →

The Costs of Ignorance and Stupidity: Not Unfair, But Obvious

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
Now, if I were a psychic, I would have seen this argument coming...

Now, if I were a psychic, I would have seen this argument coming…

A rather uncontroversial Ethics Alarms post from September is suddenly getting bombarded with links from Reddit, heaven knows why. This was the article where I took The Learning Channel to task for building a reality show around a psychic (a.k.a “fraud”) and advertising it as if her abilities were real (Irresponsible TLC, Promoting Ignorance and Fraud). I appreciate the traffic when Reddit focuses on a post, but the experience is usually annoying. Reddit readers never make comments here, but make snarky, often ill-informed snipes on their own site, where it’s too much trouble to set them straight.

One of the Reddit critics of the Ethics Alarms post had a complaint that surprised me. He wrote…

“For an article about yelling at someone who makes unverified claims, it sure starts off with a doozy.

‘Public ignorance and stupidity costs the nation billions of dollars, kills untold people in the hundreds of thousands, vastly increases crime and unemployment, and generally makes life far less productive, safe and enjoyable for the minority that are not ignorant and stupid, as well as for those who are.'”

It never occurred to me that anyone would find that statement “unsubstantiated,” or even debatable. To begin with, it is obviously an opinion, though there are few opinions I am more certain about than this one. It is also not remotely like the assertion of a psychic that she communicates with the dead, which isn’t just an unsubstantiated claim, but an outright lie. Continue reading →

Yahoo Flunks A Confirmation Bias Test

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
Just as you always suspected: THIS is the average Fox News viewer.

Just as you always suspected: THIS is the average Fox News viewer.

Be honest now: If you were a news editor and this press release came across your desk, what would you think? What would you do?

Birmingham, Alabama (PRWEB)

December 04, 2012

The results of a 4 year study show that Americans who obtain their news from Fox News channel have an average IQ of 80, which represents a 20 point deficit when compared to the U.S. national average of 100. IQ, or intelligence quotient, is the international standard of assessing intelligence. Researchers at The Intelligence Institute, a conservative non-profit group, tested 5,000 people using a series of tests that measure everything from cognitive aptitude to common sense and found that people who identified themselves as Fox News viewers and ‘conservative’ had, on average, significantly lower intelligent quotients. Fox Viewers represented 2,650 members of the test group.

One test involved showing subjects a series of images and measuring their vitals, namely pulse rate and blood pressure. The self-identified conservatives’ vitals increased over 35% when shown complex or shocking images. The image that caused the most stress was a poorly edited picture of President Obama standing next to a “ghostly” image of a child holding a tarantula. Test subjects who received their news from other outlets or reported they do not watch the news scored an average IQ of 104, compared to 80 for Fox News viewers. Continue reading →