U.S. Society

Lawrence O’Donnell and the Missing Religious Bigotry Ethics Alarm at MSNBC

/ Jack Marshall / 47 Comments

Really?

Religious bigotry? Hey, whatever works!

Is this really how it is going to be? Are the media protectors of President Obama really going to stoop to anti-Mormon bigotry to attack Mitt Romney?  First New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow writes disparagingly about the Mormon “magic underpants” with nary a peep of  protest or discipline from his bosses at the New York Times, and now MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell spews out this last night as Romney’s three primary wins were being tallied:

“Mormonism was created by a guy in upstate New York in 1830 when he got caught having sex with the maid and explained to his wife that God told him to do it. Forty-eight wives later, Joseph Smith’s lifestyle was completely sanctified in the religion he invented to go with it. Which Mitt Romney says he believes.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Mirlande Wilson

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

"Share? Why should I share?"

Mirlande Wilson was part of a lottery pool formed in the Maryland McDonald’s where she works, and claims that she bought one of the three winning tickets that will split the $640 million dollar Mega Millions jackpot. But Wilson told the New York Post that although she did take part in the pool, she bought the winning ticket on her own and has no intention of splitting the winnings. A co-worker who took part in the pool dispute’s Wilson’s story and says Wilson was given additional money late Friday night to buy extra lottery tickets before the Mega Millions drawing.

Why are people like this? Yes, I know, greed…still: does winning a fortune have to turn people into utter, irredeemable jerks? Continue reading →

Why Does American Public Education Stink? The Answer: Incompetence, Stupidity, and Fear. The Proof: THIS…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Ah, that look that only a dedicated New York public school teacher can spark!!!

Over at Popehat, Ken has been on another roll, and his latest effort, as depressing and enraging as it is, is a real contribution to our understanding of the kind of entrenched foolishness, cowardice and incompetence in our nation’s public school administration that is gradually rendering the schools useless and our children uneducated.

Spurred by a New York Post story that seemed too horrible to be true, Ken set out to research the claim that the New York School system has compiled a long list of topics that are banned on student tests for a variety of reasons, prime among them that someone, somewhere, will be offended by them.  After some digging on the New York City Department of Education’s websites, what he found  was worse than how the Post had described it.

In an Appendix, he discovered a list of  test question topics “that would probably cause a selection to be deemed unacceptable by the New York City Department of Education… In general, a topic might be unacceptable for any of the following reasons:

  •   The topic could evoke unpleasant emotions in the students that might hamper their ability to take the remainder of the test in the optimal frame of mind.
  •     The topic is controversial among the adult population and might not be acceptable in a state-mandated testing situation.
  •     The topic has been ―done to death in standardized tests or textbooks and is thus overly familiar and/or boring to students.
  •     The topic will appear biased against (or toward) some group of people.

Using those criteria, and undoubtedly using astounding numbers of hours and taxpayer dollars, the Department came up with the following jaw-dropping list of banned test subjects. I’ll flag with red the taboos that are especially outrageous or idiotic, though perhaps I should note the two or three that might be appropriate. Continue reading →

George Zimmerman and the “Racial Profiling” Canard

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Racists, all of 'em.

On the frequently disgusting but reliably gripping CBS drama “Criminal Minds,” viewers quickly get accustomed to hearing the FBI profiler heroes alert police and public to be on the look-out for a “white, middle-aged man.” Why man? Easy: virtually all serial killers are male. Why white? Same thing: although a rare black serial killer comes along (the D.C. snipers were African-American), the vast majority of serial killers from Jack the Ripper onward have been Caucasian.

You know, I just don’t feel denigrated by the fictional FBI’s alert (the real FBI would do the same.) Telling the public that the individual butchering prostitutes or massacring families is the same race as I am isn’t bias, bigotry or racism, it’s logic. It is also, beyond question, racial profiling, which, under the right circumstances, makes sense, prevents crime, catches criminals, and isn’t unethical or racist in the least.

So effectively have civil rights advocates and the media managed to bias the public against rational racial profiling, however, that the phrase itself has become a synonym for racism. When you mangle and distort a descriptive term in this way, blurring the distinctions between phrases and concepts, the culture gets a lobotomy and forced aphasia. What is the term for a fair and legitimate conclusion that a particular crime in a particular area is more likely to be performed by one race than another? Right now, the term is racism. Continue reading →

Diversity Ethics: “The Ethicist” vs. The Diversity Bullies

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Here you are, Ariel—the perfect, diverse, five-person panel!

Ariel Kaminer, the New York Times’ author of “The Ethicist” column, is being pummeled by criticism by people other than me, for a change. Her offense? Let one of the critics, Kathleen Geier of the Washington Monthly, speak for herself:

“Ethicist columnist Ariel Kaminer has announced a contest inviting omnivores to write essays about why it is ethical to eat meat. The problem? The panel of luminaries she’s selected to judge the contest are ethicists Peter Singer and Andrew Light, food writers Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman, and novelist Jonathan Safer Foer. All, as you may notice, white dudes…for heaven’s sake, by now it should be second nature for every single person who’s in the position of hiring someone, or putting together a panel or committee, to make an effort to include women and people of color whenever possible. That’s just basic human decency.”

Then we have bioethicist Francis Keisling, who weighed in with an indignant protest to the Times ombudsman, writing in part,

“…Finally, what would we expect from the Times and its columnists and editors when a mistake is pointed out in plenty of time for it to be corrected? Does having a column in the Times mean never having to say you are sorry? Ms Kaminer knew no women of comparable stature to the men she chose. She has been clearly shown she was wrong and names provided. All she needed to do was to say woops, let me add three of four women, people of color etc. It would also seem something editors should step in and make happen.”

Welcome, Ariel, to the world of the diversity bullies! Continue reading →

First Amendment Ethics and the Conundrum of the Despicable Blogger

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Attack-blogger Crystal Cox---exercising her rights, jeopardizing yours.

One thing that the public just doesn’t understand about lawyers is that their job sometimes involves fighting for the most despicable people imaginable, because those despicable people have legal objectives they have a right to pursue as citizens, and because the principles underlying the fight are important, even if the particular clients—and often their objectives too–are blights on humanity.

Over at Popehat, Ken has chronicled a classic example, in which First Amendment specialist Eugene Volokh (he of the Volokh Conspiracy) and the Electronic Freedom Foundation are backing blogger Crystal Cox as she appeals a $2.5 million defamation judgment against her, in which an Oregon judge ruled that bloggers did not have the same protection against defamation claims under the First Amendment as journalists do. Cox, of whom I was blissfully unaware until Ken’s post, is clearly the kind of person who is a menace on the internet, lacking basic decency, fairness, scruples and common sense, and yet stimulated by the power that the medium provides her. The signature act that established this for me is revealed by Ken at the top of his post:

“Here’s the most important thing you need to know about blogger and “investigative journalist” Crystal Cox: when she got angry at First Amendment attorney Marc Randazza, she didn’t just register the domains marcrandazza.com and fuckmarcrandazza.com and marcrandazzasucks.com in order to attack him. She registered jenniferrandazza.com and nataliarandazza.com — the names of Randazza’s wife and three-year-old daughter.”

Yup, that’s enough, all right: signature significance. Is there any chance that an individual who would do this even once could be an ethical, reasonable, fair person?  No! Only an unethical creep would even consider such conduct; with a normal person, the ethics alarms would be ringing so loud that they would be paralyzing. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero Emeritus: National Guard Sergeant Dennis P. Weichel Jr. (1983 -2012)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

There are those who say that human beings are incapable of truly altruistic conduct, and that everything we do, no matter how outwardly generous and selfless, is in fact self-serving. There are others, and I am among them, who believe that human beings have natural ethical instincts that lead them to sacrifice for the benefit of society generally, those in peril, and those who are weaker than themselves, especially children. Those instincts can be nurtured by our culture or extinguished by it, but I believe that they are there in most of us….for a while, at least, sometimes weak or dormant, but there, nonetheless.

They were obviously there in Specialist Dennis P. Weichel Jr. of Providence, Rhode Island, a National Guardsman serving in an Afghan province east of Kabul. On March 22, he left the 16-ton gun truck he was riding in to disperse local children who were wandering in front of his heavily armored convoy, searching for treasure, the brass shell casings that could be melted down for other uses or be sold.  Suddenly a small girl saw a casing and ran into the path of one of the huge military vehicles. Weichel, a father of three, dashed to her, grabbed her, and threw her to safety unharmed. The gun truck struck the Guardsman instead, fatally injuring him.

Weichel was engaged to be married. He is the first member of the Rhode Island National Guard to die in Afghanistan.

Nothing can erase the tragedy of the U.S. serviceman who turned mass murderer in Afghanistan a month ago, and Weichel’s heroism is unlikely to change any hearts and minds there. That wasn’t Weichel’s objective anyway. He saw a young life in danger and acted, risking his own. It would be a better United States if all of us were raised to react as he did, and if our culture more unambiguously encouraged our best instincts rather than our worst ones. The cliché mouthed by politicians is that our military combat personnel are fighting for American values. Dennis Weichel demonstrated that they also carry American values with them, and in his case, he displayed the very finest.

Weichel was promoted posthumously from specialist to sergeant and awarded the Bronze Star, which is appropriate, and Rhode Island’s flags are being flown at half-mast. The honor he most deserves, however, is to be remembered and emulated by the rest of us.

Ethics Train Wreck Update: Martin-Zimmerman Reflections

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Is it only fair to show one version of the victim?

As the NAACP joined with Al Sharpton today to lead a protest of thousands in Sanford Florida, some notes on recent ethics carnage and confusion in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s shooting death:

  • Roslyn Brock, who chairs the national board of directors for the NAACP, perfectly illustrated  ignorance of the justice system and short-sightedness that has characterized this whole, sorry incident. “We come to make sense of this great tragedy and the entire world grieves with us,” she said . “When the Sanford police did not arrest George Zimmerman, they essentially placed the burden of proof on a dead young man who cannot speak for himself.” But of course, as every American should know, that is where the burden of proof lies. The alleged victim in a death is represented by the state, and it is the state that has the burden of proof of guilt as well as having the burden to justify an arrest. It is not Zimmerman’s responsibility to prove his innocence, though that is what the un-American process engineered by race-activists and the media has come to. Does the NAACP really want to take the position that there should be a presumption of guilt in criminal matters? Or just in circumstances where the victim is an African-American and the suspect is not?
  • While CNN has taken the lead in trying to present a balanced picture of the controversy, NBC, mostly through MSNBC, has thoroughly disgraced itself by essentially taking an advocacy position on Zimmerman’s guilt, even to the point of doctoring his 911 call to make it seem clear that this was a case of racial profiling. “This guy looks like he’s up to no good…He looks black.” is how Zimmerman’s 911 call was played on the  “Today Show” and relayed on MSNBC’s website. The actual conversation was this: Continue reading →

Sexual Predator Teachers: 1) Not Funny 2) Epidemic 3) Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Child rapist teachers! LOL!

Two nights ago, Tonight Show host Jay Leno included in his monologue a joke about Christine McCallum, the Brockton, Mass. teacher convicted of having sex with a 13-year-old boy over 300 times. Jay can make jokes about whatever he wants, but the fact that we are laughing about this kind of conduct by teachers rather than asking hard questions and insisting on some accountability for the schools shows how tolerant our society is of a supposedly essential institution and a once respectable profession that have both fallen into rot and ruin.

In 1996, when Mary Kay LeTourneau was revealed to have made an undereage student her lover and fathered a child by him, it was national news. For me, it was the first I had ever heard of a teacher abusing her power and profession to that extent. This month alone, March 2012, I have counted thirteen such cases making the local news across the country, including McCallum, and I’m sure I missed some. I’m also reasonably sure that for every one of these cases that get prosecuted, many more are covered up or never discovered at all. Continue reading →

A Facebook Suicide and the Duty To Rescue

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

One takeaway from Claire Lin's death: it's a good idea to have Facebook friends with character.

In Taiwan, a distraught young woman sent streaming photos* of her suicide attempt as she conversed with nine Facebook friends. Some urged her to stop, but none tried to contact police or rescue professionals as she asphyxiated herself with burning charcoal fumes. Yes, her attempt was successful. You can read the disturbing story of Claire Lin’s Facebook suicide here.

Would this happen in America? I wouldn’t be surprised. Sociologists are already weighing in with opinions about the isolation of social media and how the internet makes reality seem less real. I doubt that any of that was especially important in this incident. There have been so many other examples of people left to die with potential rescuers aplenty that were documented on Ethics Alarms and elsewhere, from the Mount Everest climbers who walked past their dying companion, to the more recent case of the Apple store employees who listened to a women get beaten to death in Maryland, that teach us that too many people have the natural inclination not to take affirmative action to help another in distress, and that the instinctive rescuers are the exception, not the rule.

Our culture should teach and reinforce the shared societal duty to come to the assistance of others in peril, but in fact it teaches the opposite. Most of us are told to mind our own business, to think of “Number One”, and  make reverse Golden Rule calculations to rationalize inaction (“He wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help me!”) We are taught to fear lawsuits, to wait for professionals (even if they aren’t coming), and to be fearful of making a bad situation worse. And, of course, we are conditioned to let the other person take the risk, so we can have our cake (not get involved) and eat it too ( see the situation resolved without anyone being harmed). And if we wait just a bit too long for that other person to do the right thing, we can always blame him (or her), saying, “I thought someone else would do it!” Continue reading →