Cable news, the New york press and the blogosphere are singing the praises of Big Apple cabbie Zubiru Jalloh, who, when he discovered that an absent-minded passenger, John James, had left a bag containing about $100,000 worth of jewelry in his back seat (“Doh!”) of his cab, rescued the bag from the next passenger, took it home for safekeeping, and eventually got it back to its rightful owner. Continue reading
U.S. Society
The Problem With Multi-Culturalism
One of many abominations we can blame on Jimmy Carter is the United States’ blessedly half-hearted embrace of multi-culturalism, which Jimmy and his acolytes believed was enlightenment from Europe when in fact it was a disease. This was linked to the ethical value of tolerance, which was in turn used to bludgeon into submission anyone who committed the politically incorrect crime of criticizing conduct that was antithetical to American values engaged in by citizens from other nations.
Civilization needs standards, and culture is the setting of standards, ethical and otherwise. Multi-culturalism is a compact oxymoron that makes society’s standards schizophrenic, impeding efficiency, fairness, and consensus about right and wrong. “Tolerance” requires acceptance of the intolerable, or in its most common permutation here, tolerating the intolerable practices that progressives would like to see established here, while somehow reasoning that other practices that progressives don’t admire shouldn’t qualify for “tolerance.” Continue reading
Ugly Consequentialism: The Daily Beast Backs Perez Hilton
I am developing a real dislike for the Daily Beast. Tina Brown’s slick news aggregating website has gone out of its way to slander innocent dog breeds, features self-promoting hypocrites like John Avlon, and generally displays the ethical instincts of Piers Morgan, which is to say, none. Today it gave us an update on Serene Branson, who was mocked by blogger Perez Hilton and others for having an obvious, and frightening, on-air neurological event that caused her to be unable to speak coherently. Entitled “Line-Flubbing Grammys Reporter Fine”—trivializing as “line-flubbing” what was clearly nothing of the sort; people don’t get checked out by physicians for flubbing lines—the Daily Beast’s commentary noted that paramedic could find nothing wrong, so “Laugh away.”
This is the ugly face of consequentialism, judging the ethical nature of conduct based on what happens afterwards. Perez Hilton’s cruel amusement at a reporter finding that she cannot form intelligible speech is now retroactively fine and dandy, because Branson hasn’t—so far—keeled over or gone blind. So laugh, jerks, laugh…until she does keel over, tomorrow, or next week, or next month, in which case the ridicule becomes unacceptible to The Daily Beast.
Another human being who is panic-stricken as her body turns on her is not funny, and it is a sign of callousness and a deficit of compassion to laugh at the sight of it, whether or not the apparent catastrophe turns out to be minor after all. But the Daily Beast is proving that it is a playpen, occupied by reporters, columnists and editors with the ethical sophistication of gradeschoolers.
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UPDATE 2/15/11 (From AOL News):
“Despite Branson’s insistence that she’s fine, doctors who have examined the now heavily circulated footage of the incident continue to express concerns.
“This is what we call a class neurological event,” Dr. Keith Black, director of the Neurosurgical Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, told NBC’s ‘Today’ show. “She was obviously aware that she was having difficulty.”
According to Black, Branson’s episode was likely the result of a transient ischemic attack, essentially a “blockage in blood flow going to the brain,” or a “mini-seizure located in the language area.”
The New York Post also spoke to doctors who viewed the tape, and they said that Branson’s garbled speech could have resulted from “aphasia, which affects the ability to articulate, and that it could have been brought on by a mini-stroke, a tumor or a circulatory issue.”
Ethics Dunce: Blogger Perez Hilton
There is snarky, and there is vicious and cruel. Perez Hilton, the over-the-top celebrity blogger who always amasses enough points to be in the running for Media Creep of the Year, hit rock bottom over the weekend, showing a level of humanity, empathy and caring we identify with the people who ridicule ALS sufferers and terminal cancer patients, and who find watching heart attacks and strokes amusing.
“MUST WATCH!!!” “Grammy Reporter Fail!” wrote Hilton, about a frightening video showing CBS reporter Serene Branson suddenly finding herself unable to speak coherently on the air as she reported on the Grammys, and obviously experiencing some kind of neurological episode that was a lot more serious than being “tongue-tied.”
“Someone call an exorcist!” joked the blogger, who called Branson’s cisis “HIGHlarious.”
[This post originally included the video footage, but CBS has pulled it.] Branson gets a few words out, then you can see the fear and panic that starts to come into the young woman’s expression as she realizes that her thoughts are no longer being formed into words. She utters a stream of jibberish very reminiscent of the sounds made by the swimmer at the beginning of “Jaws” who is being attacked by a Great White shark, and then the station cuts her off. If watching another human being in peril and terror is “HIGHlarious” to you, “Ethics Dunce” is an understatement.
Hilton quickly pulled his first post on the incident when it began drawing fire, and so far, doctors haven’t been able to determine what caused the incident…so Hilton obviously thinks he’s in the clear.
He’s not. Even if we never know what happened to Branson, she was frightened and something bad was obviously happening to her. I’m sure she’s still terrified, and should be: my law school room mate, last year, had a mysterious episode that seemed like a stroke, but the doctors found nothing, and sent him home. Two days later, he dropped dead.
Yuk it up, Perez.
Jerk.
Are GOP Leaders Obligated to Condemn Doubters of Obama’s Birth and Beliefs?
No.
But NBC’s David Gregory thinks so. Here was his exchange with Republican Speaker John Boehner on “Meet the Press” yesterday: Continue reading
Child Abuse, Animal Abuse: Why We Must Judge
Ignorance, fear and a lack of inherent respect for living things is a disastrous combination, as demonstrated by a horrible story out of Toombs County, Georgia.
At the end of January, animal rescue personnel were alerted that Alice, a 6-year old dog, was living in a 5’x8′ box, constructed of wooden boards and tin. The only sunlight that the dog could receive came through the slats and the chicken wire that covered the box from above.
Her food–mostly white bread, buns, and the occasional table scrap, was dropped in from above, as was her water. The floor of the box was caked with years of feces and urine.
The owner of the home told the rescuers that the Alice had been placed in this box because she was one of “those mean kind of dogs.” A pit bull. Continue reading
Comment of the Day: “Dr. Phil’s Child-Abusing Mom”
I don’t want to pick on Cara, who made this comment in reply to my response to her earlier comment that objected to the original post referring to forcing a seven-year-old child to drink hot sauce and making him stand in a cold shower as punishment as “abuse.” That comment had such gems as “screaming is not necessarily an indication of abuse, some children just can not express themselves” and “depending on how you look at it, all disciplinary methods could be called abusive.” Her follow-up message, even more than her first, shows how people can come to excuse, rationalize and eventually accept truly terrible and cruel conduct, by others and eventually themselves. Rationalization cripples the ethics alarms, and eventually, as in Cara’s reasoning, we are excusing evil, and condemning those who stand against it, arguing, as she does here, that they have no standing to judge others, since everybody makes mistakes.
The comment makes a better case than anything I have written thus far for the importance of us all to engage in constant efforts to perfect our ethical sensitivity, to improve our ethics alarms, and to be vigilant against facile rationalizations.
Here’s a challenge: How many rationalizations can you count being used here? I find at least six, and perhaps as many as eight.
Here is the comment, by Cara, on “Dr. Phil’s Child-Abusing Mom”: Continue reading
The Dilemma of the Legless High School Pitcher
Seemingly an inspirational movie in the making, Anthony Burruto is a student at Dr. Phillips High School in Orlando, Florida. He has been playing baseball since he was 8 years old, despite the inconvenience of having both of his legs amputated when he was an infant. He plays the game on prosthetic legs that are all he has ever known, and does it well as a pitcher who can throw a mean curve and a fastball that has been clocked at 80 mph. This is Anthony’s sophomore year, and his goal was to play on Dr. Phillips High varsity baseball team this spring.
After two days of try-outs, Coach Mike Bradley cut him. Anthony’s metal legs, adept as he was at using them, made him too slow off the pitching mound when he had to field a bunt, said the coach, and teams would take advantage of his inability to jump off the mound quickly.
Sorry, kid. Continue reading
Comment of the Day: “Ronbo” on His Own Previous “Frivolous Complaint of the Month”
Ron Barbour, Tea Party warrior, has a priceless post on his website in response to Ethics Alarms’ flagging of his letter “demanding” that the Secret Service arrest the director of the Missoula “Mikado” for updating “The Lord High Executioner’s” gag list of societal irritants to include Sarah Palin.
I would normally post highlights at this point, but everyone should check out his website to see the face of hateful extremism first hand, and how it burns up IQ points like kindling. This is political activism mutated into a total war mentality, where fairness to the perceived enemy is translated as proof of alliance with the enemy. Ron thinks I am a Leftist, which is tied only with “New York Yankee fan” as the thing I have most seldom been accused of being.
Don’t miss this…you will find it here.
National Anthem Ethics
Pop songbird Christina Aguilera has been ridiculed and condemned in every forum imaginable for botching the lyrics of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl. The last time a performer got this kind of abuse for a National Anthem performance (not counting Roseanne Barr’s infamous crotch-grabbing, off-key screeching of the anthem to begin a San Diego Padres game, which was not so much a performance as a clinical demonstration of what boorishness looks and sounds like) was when the late Robert Goulet massacred the lyrics before a national radio audience to introduce the Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston Heavyweight Championship fight. The incident haunted Goulet the rest of his life, although he was a good sport about it.
As with Goulet (he was Canadian, for heaven’s sake!), the condemnation of Aguilera is not merely unfair, but ignorant. Continue reading
