The Internet

Comment of the Day: “Incompetent Elected Official of the Week: Sen. Claire McCaskill”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Karl Penny’s Comment of the Day is further reflection on the futile effort to turn back the tide of new technology, which Senator McCaskill apparently believes can be accomplished with a good marketing campaign, making her a candidate for institutionalization.  A prize for the first reader who identifies what a klepsydra was!

“Jack, sometimes I get a little nostalgic about older technologies, generally ones that figured so prominently in my youth, but have now gone the way of the klepsydra. I get nostalgic enough that, almost, for a moment, ideas like Sen. McCaskill’s seem to make sense, and a gleam comes to me eye, and I begin to think, “Yeah….” Then I remember that it’s daylight out, and however pleasant dreams can be, they’re just dreams.

“I also remember that there are reasons—good reasons—why I and millions of others adopted email, wrote documents on a computer, listened to music through an MP3, read my books on a Kindle, and played games on a computer. Truth to tell, most of us don’t really miss those older technologies, except in brief spurts. I have an old Olympia Portable typewriter in a closet. I must have typed a million documents on that thing, from my freshman year of high school through college. Letters, papers, notes, forms, checks (!) even. It was so indispensable, I took it with me most everywhere. Now, it just sits in that closet, and I hardly ever take it out even to look at. The last time it saw any use was last year, when a local high school was doing a play, and they needed an old manual typewriter as a prop. Now, it’s back in the closet.

“Sen, McCaskill may have successfully deluded herself, but I don’t think she’s going to delude much of anyone else, and thank heaven. But, if this is what passes for progressive thought among our elected leaders, then God help us all.”

Incompetent Elected Official of the Week: Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo)

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

This box of rocks also has an idea about how to save the Postal Service, and it's probably better than Sen. McCaskill's.

[ I know—I need some Republican IEOTWs. There have been a lot of Democrats lately. The problem is that the things presidential candidates say don’t qualify (Michele Bachmann’s claim that she could lwoer gas prices to $2 would have been a sure winner), and the Democrats have been unusually inept lately.]

From the New York Times, discussing the U.S. Post Office’s impending insolvency:

“An overarching trend that has fueled the Postal Service’s crisis — and reduced annual mail volume by 22 percent since 2006 — is that Americans are e-mailing, paying bills electronically and reading shopping catalogs and news online.

“Noting that some great books have been written based on letters sent by the Founding Fathers and by soldiers, Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, urged the postmaster general to run an advertising campaign urging Americans to send more letters to each other.

““There is something special about receiving a piece of first-class mail, knowing that it comes from someone you care about,” she said. “I really believe that if someone would begin to market the value of sending a written letter to someone you love, you might be surprised what it will do for your Christmas season.”

That’s brilliant, Claire: spend money the Post Office doesn’t have to urge more people to use an archaic method of communication they no longer use since it is slower, less reliable and more expensive than the alternative, because there’s “something special” about it! That’s going to turn everything around. Continue reading →

CREW and the Problem With Partisan “Non-Partisan Watchdog Groups”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

There is a new website called “CREW Exposed,” which is pretty brief and to the point: it highlights statistics showing the degree to which Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a government ethics watchdog that does not identify any partisan or ideological allegiances in its materials, concentrates its criticism, investigations, formal complaints and ethical exposes on Republicans and conservatives rather than Democrats and liberals at a ratio of about 5 to 1.

Continue reading →

How Can Anyone Justify Attacking Chaz Bono on “Dancing With the Stars”?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Apparently ABC’s message boards, e-mail inbox and phone messages have been over-flowing with “Dancing With the Stars” fans and others protesting the addition of Cher’s transgendered son to the slate of competitors. Why are they so upset, you ask?

That’s what I’d like to know. I have watched Chaz Bono in several interviews, and he impressed me as a smart, down-to-earth, articulate and thoroughly likable young man in every way. He is straightforward in answering the most delicate questions, and appears to have no other objective than to be happy and, if possible, to provide comfort, inspiration and hope for others who have gender confusion issues.

Now Chaz has been added to the cast of the upcoming installment of America’s favorite competition/reality show, which has always included an odd stew of American cultural figures, from tabloid targets to star athletes to nostalgia cases to reality show comets to novelty choices from the worlds of politics and media. He fits right in (tabloid target/nostalgia division) , and in many ways is an upgrade from the usual B and C-List denizens who usually do the dancing. What in the world is so objectionable about Chaz Bono? Continue reading →

Comment of the Day on “The Twins and the Amazing Hockey Shot: the Public Flunks Its Ethics Test…Badly”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Reader Jim Weaver came up with an especially deflating and insulting Comment of the Day by taking literally my lament, in the post about the twin winning, then being denied, a cash prize while masquerading as his brother, that I was disappointed that after almost a decade of my ethics commentary that the public was still ethically out to lunch.

His comment:

“Did you really think that this blog would make a difference in America’s ethics? Is that really why you write this thing? If so, then you should be depressed because you are sadly deluded. 99.99% of the country has never heard of you or read your blog.

“I thought you wrote it to get attention and to try to drum up business for your training company. Just exactly how many readers do you have anyway?” Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: What Was Unethical About ESPN’s Illustration To “What if Michael Vick Were White”?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

What if Michael Vick were a hippopotamus?

For your first Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz this September, we revisit ESPN’s controversial article by journalist Touré, who was assigned the task of engaging in the thought experiment,“What would have been different if Michael Vick were white?”

Vick, for all you football-challenged readers, is the current star quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles who just signed a $100 million contract with the team and another rich deal with Nike. A few short years ago, Vick was in prison, his NFL and endorsement contracts cancelled, his career seemingly over, because of his conviction on multiple counts of animal abuse charges and running a dog-fighting ring. Since his release, Vick has done all the right things in the public rehabilitation of his image, and his remarkable football talents did not erode in jail. When Vick was being prosecuted, a number of journalists and commentators who should have their brains put out to pasture asked if Vick, who was shown to have personally electrocuted and beaten to death some of his dogs, would have been treated less harshly by the law had he been white. The answer was and is no (or perhaps “no, you idiots”), just as it was for O.J. Simpson. Continue reading →

The Twins and the Amazing Hockey Shot: the Public Flunks Its Ethics Test…Badly

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Lets's face it: twins are trouble.

I am depressed today, for it is increasingly likely that I am wasting my life.

I began writing about ethics on-line after being stunned by the letters to the editor and calls to C-Span, not to mention the articles in the press, regarding President Clinton’s conduct in the Monica Lewinsky affair. The commentary was virtually ethics-free, and I realized that the vast majority of the American public had no idea how to apply ethical analysis to an event or problem. Their judgment regarding who was right and who was wrong appeared to be based entirely on rationalizations, biases, and non-ethical considerations.If they liked Clinton, he did nothing wrong. If they opposed his policies, he was scum. Objectivity and fair analysis only occasionally surfaced in the discussion at all, and the media coverage, if anything, was worse.

Now I’ve been doing this for almost a decade, and the verdict is clear: nothing has changed. In fact, the situation may have worsened. The sad proof at hand is the public’s reaction to The Tale of the One-in-a –Million-Hockey-Shot Scam, a feel-good story from last month that just turned sour. Continue reading →

Unethical Web Headline of the Month: The Huffington Post

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This photo has almost nothing to do with the subject of this story.

It wasn’t only HuffPo, to be fair. Every single news website that covered the story used the same misleading, sensational idea in its headline, but The Huffington Post’s version was the worst:

Anthony Stewart, 15-Year-Old From Syracuse, N.Y., Jailed For 7-Cent Robbery

Awww..poor Anthony! And what a mean judge! What did the mischievous tyke do, steal the change from the little bowl by the cash register at the Subway sandwich shop? Knock over a lemonade stand? No, actually, he did this: (From the CBS New website):

“Anthony Stewart was found guilty of first-degree robbery earlier this month for beating and kicking a 73-year-old man and robbing him of seven cents. Prosecutors say the victim was on his way to a store last December when the two teenagers ran up from behind, knocked him into a snow bank, then kicked and punched him. The two teens had handguns, which Stewart later admitted were BB guns, prosecutors said.”

Even though both the victim and Stewart’s partner in crime identified him, Anthony Stewart, unlike his accomplice, refused to plead guilty and insisted on a jury trial. He lost his gamble, and the judge, as judges are wont to do, penalized him for not admitting his guilt. The victim’s other attacker had been sentenced as a youthful offender, meaning the he will have his record sealed and won’t be labeled a felon, though he still will spend up to four years in a state juvenile facility. Stewart, however, didn’t get the youthful offender break, and will come out of prison two to six  years from now with a felony conviction on his permanent record.

“If you admitted like a man, then I would have sentenced you exactly as I did Mr. Ninham,” the judge told Stewart. “But you still denied committing a crime, despite a mountain of evidence.”

Let’s get this straight: the seven cents had nothing to do with the sentence, other than the fact that it changed the crime from a criminal assault to a robbery. I don’t know why these two dummies bothered to steal seven lousy cents, when they found that this was all the old man was carrying. Still, it established that they would have stolen whatever he had, whether it was 7 cents or  $7,000 dollars. Two teenagers, armed with weapons, beat a man and robbed him. It was a brutal attack, and the fact that they only got 7 cents out of it is moral luck and cosmic irony, but it doesn’t, and shouldn’t, make the criminals any more sympathetic.

So why did the Huffington Post (and CBS, and the New York Daily News, and Yahoo, and Newser, and Fox…) use a headline that made it sound like the American Justice system was doing its Kafka imitation, and a photo of the young African-American teen calculated to tug on our heartstrings and make Al Sharpton go bananas?

Because they lie, that’s why. Because they don’t care that lots of people just read their dishonest headlines and never finish the story, and then tell their family and friends about the insane judge who is ruining a boy’s life because he took 7 cents. Because all they care about is web traffic, and the journalistic ideals of factual and objective reporting are so dead, they wouldn’t even make it as zombies.

Even with the facts of the attack revealed (in the HuffPo article, seven paragraphs from the lead), an astounding number of commenters on the various sites took their cues from the headlines, and expressed horror and outrage. It was a white judge—racism must have been behind the sentence! The boy just made a mistake, and what harm did he do—after all, he only took 7 cents! Why should Anthony be penalized for making the system prove him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?

Fools all…but fools nourished by unscrupulous media like the Huffington Post. Anthony deserves every second of his sentence, and the felony record too. He participated in a violent and armed attack on an elderly man, and if he wanted mercy from the judge, he should have admitted his guilt. That’s the system.

Anthony’s asinine lawyer, who either gave him awful advice or failed miserably by not talking him out of pleading not guilty, fatuously told the judge,  “For 7 cents, now you’re making someone a felon for the rest of his life.”

No, he made himself a felon for the rest of his life, and it wasn’t “for seven cents.”

But don’t worry!  Anthony will be OK. I’m sure the Huffington Post will have a job for him.

5 Things PETA Doesn’t Understand About Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Stay classy, PETA.

PETA—People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals— has announced that it is starting a porn website to attract attention to the plight of animals. Over on his Business Ethics Blog, Chris McDonald asks whether this means that PETA has “jumped the shark.” More so than offering Octomom money to put a billboard on her lawn advocating spaying pets so they won’t have litters like hers? More so than complaining that Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog of Groundhog Day fame, should be replaced by a robot? I don’t think so. Besides, jumping a shark would be cruel to the shark.

The tunnel-visioned organization, well on its way to becoming a joke to the detriment of its abused animal constituency, has registered the domain name peta.xxx and plans to launch a pornography website in December that “draws attention to the plight of animals.” How will it do that, you ask? By using images of naked women performing  sex acts on men to attract viewers, and then making the audience observe graphic videos of animal abuse for the privilege of watching the graphic sex. “We try to use absolutely every outlet to stick up for animals,” says PETA spokesperson Lindsay Rajt, who adds that the organization wouldn’t use its “flashier tactics if we didn’t know they worked.”

Let’s put that right at the top of this list, entitled “5 Things PETA Doesn’t Understand About Ethics.” Continue reading →

Ethics Bob Opens An Ethics Can of Worms, All Named “Nike”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Ethics Bob opens an ethics can of worms with his latest post, “Is It Ethical For Nike To Make It’s Shoes $4 a Day?” Among the worms, some older than dirt:

  • If workers agree to work for a given price, is the company’s obligation to pay them more?
  • Should any company pay less than a living wage for full-time work, whether or not desperate workers assent?
  • Is it better for a company to pay fair wages and go out of business because it can’t compete with competitors who pay less, than to keep creating jobs, products and wealth for investors by keeping the business profitable?
  • Is a US company justified in using local standards of fairness when it is doing business in a foreign country, rather than America’s ethical standards?
  • Can a company wash its hands of the arrangements made by its foreign contractors, no matter how unjust or exploitive?
  • Is it not per se unethical for a company like Nike to pay millionaire athletes obscene amounts of money for mere endorsements while it pays only $4 a day to the workers who make their shoes?

You can, and should, read Bob’s post here, and then we can argue about the above questions for the rest of our lives.