The Internet

Ethics Dunce: Gary Chaplin

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Temper temper!!

When a job hunter sent a mass e-mail to 4000 potential employers and executive search firms in the United Kingdom, it was not the brightest move in the world.  It had one arguably useful result, however. The mass spamming inspired Gary Chaplin, an executive with one of the search firms, to demonstrate why developing the ethical habit of civility is not only the right thing to do and the smart thing to do, it is also the safe thing to do.

So annoyed was Chaplin by Manos Katsampoukas’s e-mail that he sent this in response:

“I think I speak for all 4000 people you have e-mailed when I say, “Thanks for your CV”—it’s nice to know you are taking this seriously and taking the time to make us feel special and unique. If you are not bright enough to learn how to ‘bcc’ and thus encourage cock-jockey retards to then spam everyone on the list…then please fuck off…you are too stupid to get a job, even in banking.”

Yes, this is bad.

Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Ken, Popehat Blogger

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

"You'll find what you're looking for over at Popehat!"

In the spirit of “Miracle on 34th Street,” in which a Macy’s Santa famously sends a shopper to its rival department store Gimbels (R.I.P.), I’d like to direct readers to run, not walk, over to Popehat, the witty and cantankerous blog that often covers similar territory as Ethics Alarms. There Ken, a practicing lawyer, has penned as strong an essay on ethical issues as you are likely to encounter. Writing about an unethical marketer’s outrageous tactics that included posing as a lawyer to intimidate bloggers, Ken powerfully expounds on the use of bogus lawsuit threats to stifle free speech and opinion on the web, and how to fight it.

This has been a continuing theme of his for a long time, to the point of qualifying as a crusade. It is a worthy crusade, and Ken, along with Popehat, is performing a public service with posts such as this one, colorfully entitled, in the Popehat fashion, “Junk Science And Marketeers and Legal Threats, Oh My!”

Good work, Ken.

Ethics Dunce: Alec Baldwin…and Anybody That Sympathizes Or Defends Him In Any Way, Shape or Form

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

"I'm a certified jerk, AND I play one on TV!"

Like Ashton Kutcher and Charlie Sheen, Alec Baldwin is a mega-jerk actor who plays mega-jerks superbly.  Designating him as an Ethics Dunce is like shooting fish in a barrel. Still, there is a material difference between portraying a fictional jerk that people laugh at and behaving like one in real life without apology. Baldwin’s stunt on an American Airlines flight yesterday and his subsequent comments about it mark him as a very special breed of self-entitled jerk, and should, in a culture that understands that admiring jerks is the equivalent of endorsing their warped values, lead to his decline in popularity.

We shall see.

Baldwin was quite properly tossed off an American Airlines flight when he repeatedly defied a flight attendant’s request, then command, that he turn off his iPad, on which he was playing a game. The actor, like the arrested development case he apparently is, retired with his game to the plane’s bathroom, slamming the door, and also verbally abused the attendants. Continue reading →

Bachmann and Elijah

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

"Psst! My mom is gay and doesn't need fixing. What's 'gay'?"

Rep. Michele Bachmann’s views on homosexuality are antediluvian and ignorant. Almost anything that causes her discomfort as a result of her bigotry is to be fervently desired. Almost anything. One exception is a mother using her child as a weapon against her in a war he doesn’t understand.

In the video conveniently taken by a friend of 8-year-old Elijah’s mother and subsequently posted on YouTube, the child reluctantly, after much prodding, whispers “My mom is gay and she doesn’t need fixing” in the strange Minnesota Congresswoman’s ear. If it makes some people happy to believe that Elijah did this on his own, I suppose that’s a plus; this makes two plusses when added to Bachmann’s probable pique. Sorry, it’s not enough. I know it wouldn’t create a viral video if Elijah’s mother delivered her sentiment herself, but that’s just too bad: children are not puppets, props or trained terriers, and using them to deliver political messages is unethical—unfair, irresponsible, a breach of trust, and an abuse of power. Placing a child’s programmed act on Youtube, where it will haunt him forever, just adds to the offense,

Elijah’s message was inaccurate. His mother does need fixing, just not in the way Michele Bachmann thinks she does.

 

Ethics Quiz: The Conundrum of the Imaginary Editor

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

The above staff bio is featured on  VibrantNation.com, a website styled as “the leading online community for Baby Boomer women – the place where they connect and support each other on issues unique to life after 50.” The “composite staff member” known as Susan Lee Ward even has her by-line on some articles.

Your Ethics Quiz Question:

Is featuring an imaginary editor on a website unethical if it is fully disclosed? Or is it just batty?

The problem is one that has come up before: does disclosing something as an untruth cleanse it of its unethical characteristics? After all, there is no Susan Lee Ward, yet she is listed as an editor. That picture can’t possibly be her, because there is no “her.” Anyone who doesn’t read staff bios will in fact be deceived–and how often do you read website staff bios? Heck, people still write me angry e-mails saying that they don’t know who is writing all these ethics essays.

As usual, this comes down to a matter of trust. Are we less likely to trust a website that posts the bio and picture of a staff member who doesn’t exist? Or are we more likely to trust a website that tells us that it has invented an editor? OR are we less likely to trust a website that says it has invented a website for new-agey reasons that don’t really make much sense? When a publication uses fake editors, I wonder who or what they are trying to hide.

My reluctant call on this one: I don’t distrust the site because it has invented an editor. It has made a good faith effort to be transparent.

I distrust the site because inventing an editor for the stated reasons tells me that the real staff is insane.

[Thanks to Health News Review for finding this.]

Ethics Dunce: Sports Grid Blogger Dan Fogarty

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Civility is doomed. Civilization is doomed. Propriety is doomed.

What's the concerned father of the injured cheerleader thinking about? Why, what any cool dad would think about---how good her butt looks!

And Taylor Young, a cheerleader for the Michigan State Spartans, may well be doomed, as it is impossible to tell how badly her character, values and common sense have been warped by being brought up in a household containing her father, Charles. After Young took a hard fall during the halftime show in a game against Florida State, requiring her to receive medical attention (she was OK), her father posted this astounding Facebook comment, which, naturally, has gone viral:

“I’m glad to see your booty isn’t gettin big ….. no one likes a chick with a big butt ….. love you.”

Idiotic? Check. Sexist? Check. Insulting to women? Check. Embarrassing to his daughter? Double check. Demonstrating a stunning lack of understanding of the internet? Check. Displaying a disturbing tendency to sexualize his own daughter?

Check, and Yuck.

But to Dan Fogarty, writing on Sports Grid, this offensive post proves that Young is a “cool Dad,” and Young goes on to cite other “experts” who believe this is “quite possibly the funniest ‘Dad Moment’ in Facebook history.”

Really? Is this really the current state of the culture? A father makes salacious comments about his daughter’s “booty,” suggests that “chicks” without similar booty quality are unloved and unlovable, and that’s cool?

If Fogarty is in step with the culture and I’m not, 1) then American society is coarsening faster than I thought, and 2) which way to Mars?

My condolences to Taylor Young for the boorish conduct of her father, and if she sees nothing wrong with it either, she has my intense condolences—because she has been severely damaged.

As, perhaps, have we all, if Fogarty is right.

OK, So the Vengeful Tattoo Artist Story Is A Web Hoax. It’s Still A Great Ethics Topic.

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This comment was received on the post about the tattoo artist who tricked his cheating girlfriend into letting him draw a steaming pile of manure on her back:

"Never mind!" Wait, Emily---not so fast!

“You are all dumb. This is fake and I called it fake the first time I saw it. And guess what? The Smoking Gun did a little research and concluded that it is also fake. There appears to be no such person with the “victim’s” name in existence and nobody with the guy’s name. Further, the photo of the girl with the tattoo was first found as a submission on a blog about 18 months ago for “worst tattoo of the day”. And, further, they contacted the court in the jurisdiction where this allegedly happened and there has not been and is not any lawsuit filed with the names of either person nor about a tattoo like this. In other words, the story was made up on a website to generate hits and google ad generation (they’ve done this type of thing before).

Sort of makes all the arguments up above pointless.”

Since whoever this charming individual is didn’t include a name or a valid website, I deleted his comment, and since he had to be obnoxious while delivering this information, I’m not thanking him. But he was right, and his information was correct: the story is probably a hoax. The Smoking Gun did some digging, and exposes the deception here.

The commenter is also wrong, in several ways. Nobody is dumb. Web hoaxes are despicable and hard to catch, and especially hard for a site like Ethics Alarms to catch, a one-man, unfunded operation that is not a news source. I’m glad the commenter is puffed up with pride because he wasn’t fooled; the fact is, somebody somewhere refuses to believe every story, from moon landings to Elvis’s death. Sometimes they are right. I’m not impressed.

Mostly, however, he is wrong about the arguments generated by the story being pointless. Continue reading →

The SAT Cheating Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Over at Curmudgeon Central, Rick Jones appropriately eviscerates the Educational Testing Service for its role—the role being negligent facilitator–in an unfolding scandal involving students cheating on their SATs by having surrogates take their tests. 20 people have been arrested thus far as either the fake test-taker of the fraudulent scholar paying for said test-taker, and Rick’s guess that there must be a hundred times the ETS’s estimate of 150 incidents of cheating on the SATs  is extremely conservative. The problem is that the SATs are taken under incredibly lax  security, and Rick reveals something I never would have suspected: if someone is caught cheating after the SAT service investigates, he or she is given a refund and allowed to take the test again—and no college is ever notified! Rick writes…

“…in a just universe, the cretinous yahoos at the CB/ETS who decided on this policy would lose their jobs, have “unethical moron” branded into their foreheads, and be publicly pilloried. Preferably literally.” Continue reading →

Abuse of Government Power+ School Administrator Cowardice = Student Persecution

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Enemy of the State.

Emma Sullivan, an 18-year-old high school senior at Fairway, Kansas’s Shawnee Mission East High School,  went with her class on a field trip to the Capitol and heard Gov. Sam Brownback speak. She tweeted her reactions to her Twitter followers, writing, “just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot”.

The part about making mean comments to the Governor was a lie, but on a scale of believability and damage done, not an especially momentous one. It was adults who turned this unremarkable student tweet into an ethics train wreck in three neat, unforgivable steps.

1. First, some over-zealous hack on the Brownback’s staff saw the tweet and complained to an administrator in the school district. This is a First Degree Ethics Foul. Nothing in Sullivan’s tweet brings it within his, the governor’s or the government’s legitimate concerns. For the staffer to complain was petty, vindictive and mean-spirited. Every second he spent on his vendetta was a waste of taxpayer dollars. Worst of all, he was bringing the power of the government to bear on a teenager for doing nothing more than expressing her opinion, which is that Governor Brownback sucks. I’m sure there have been foreign dictators who would punish a teen for doing no more than telling friends that she doesn’t like him, but I would have thought that someone who works in one of the United States governments would instinctively know that this kind of bullying mind-control isn’t allowed here. I was wrong. Brownback does suck, at least at picking staff. Continue reading →

Unethical Website of the Month: “Occupy Black Friday” Facebook Page

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

The  intellectual, logical and ethical deficiencies of the tiresome “Occupy” movement are on full outrageous display on “Occupy Black Friday,” a Facebook page that is part of the effort to harm large retailers by interfering with holiday shopping. Naturally, as with segments of the “Occupy” groups that have advocated or engaged in violence, used anti-Semitic rhetoric, broken laws and made ridiculous statements, defenders of the movement will dismiss this as an aberration, not representative of the principles of the “Occupiers” as a whole. This is the group’s genius, or something: by being infuriatingly vague, it avoids accountability.

But an organization is accountable for the events it sets in motion, and the harm that its pretensions wreak. The idea promoted by the group’s Facebook page is for mobs of Occupiers to swarm stores during their deep discount sales today, interfering with shoppers and bringing commerce to a halt:

“The idea is simple, hit the corporations that corrupt and control American politics where it hurts, their profits. Black Friday is the one day where the mega-corporations blatantly dictate our actions, they say “shop” and we shop! Pushing their ledgers from red to black. This Black Friday, we will boycott all of the corporations that corrupt our government, and put profits before people.”

The idea is simple minded. Continue reading →