Workplace

The Drag Queen School Principal Principle

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I was going to make this tale an ethics quiz, but decided that we’ve settled this issue before.

Dr. Shane Murnan had been the principal at John Glenn Elementary School in Oklahoma City since June. After he was hired, The Libs of TikTok revealed last September that he was an extracurricular drag queen, and placed photos of him as “Shantel Mandalay” on social media. Predictably, conservatives pounced and demanded that he be fired, while the school defended him. The uproar intensified, however, and Shantel was eventually placed on administrative leave.

Now he has resigned, finding that the scrutiny and criticism from social media and elsewhere is too much to bear.

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The Deceitful January Jobs Report

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

It seems increasingly apparent that the Democrats and Joe Biden’s election strategy, besides trying to convince the public that Donald Trump is the spawn of Hitler and Satan, is to lie, deceive and gaslight voters into believing that down is up, bad is good, and that Biden has done a wonderful job even though by all visible markers his administration has been a disastrous failure.

In the latest example, the January jobs report was hailed by Joe and his minions as more proof that the economy was not just good, but spectacular. Naturally, the news media carried the message. “January Jobs Report Was a Blowout. Disregard the Seasonal Noise” proclaimed Barrons. NPR, our Democratic Party mouthpiece, crowed, “The U.S. created an extraordinary number of jobs in January. Here’s a deeper look.” “U.S. employment soars by 353,000, stunning Wall Street,” said an obviously stunned MarketWatch. “Another shockingly good jobs report shows America’s economy is booming” said CNN. The New York Times joined the parade, as expected: “Blockbuster Jobs Report Backs Up Fed’s Patience as It Waits to Cut Rates.” NBC News was positively giddy: “The great American jobs machine keeps revving in an election year.”

My son, an auto mechanic who is, as far as I can tell, completely apolitical, had just recently conveyed a completely different picture. He says that everyone he knows is struggling financially, and that he personally had a disastrous month because he is largely paid by the hour. Few Northern Virginians were bringing their cars in to be serviced. “Nobody has any money,” he told me. He worked the fewest hours last month than any time since the pandemic lockdown. Apparently he wasn’t the only one.

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Ethics Dunce: National Public Radio

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

…or maybe I’m the Ethics Dunce: I assume that NPR’s management cares whether half the country sees it as progressive cant parrot and a water-carrier for the Democratic Party. Maybe they don’t; maybe they have assumed deplorables don’t listen to “Marketplace” and “Fresh Air,” and certainly don’t contribute much during radiothons. I know I don’t touch the local NPR stations (there are two of them) ever since the “Car Talk” guys ended up in the garage for good and after I was dumped as NPR’s ethics guy because I was insufficiently critical of Donald Trump.

Where was I? Oh, right….National Public Radio appointed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who had to hustle to scrub her social media record after the announcement because she periodically issued intemperate woke garbage in the past. Among the gems tracked down by reporter Shannon Thaler at the New York Post,

  • “Trump is a racist.”
  • “I mean, sure, looting is counter-productive. But it is hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property”
  • “white silence is complicity”
  • “I grew up feeling superior (hah, how white of me) because I was from New England and my part of the country didn’t have slaves, or so I’d been taught.”

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Ethics Dunce, Life Competence and Workplace Division: Brittany Pietsch

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

My first reaction was to have sympathy for Brittany Pietsch, the Cloudfare account executive who somehow thought recording her Zoomed firing and posting it on social media would be a good idea. Then I learned she was 27. That’s much too old to behave like she did, much less to be self-righteous about it. Her experience ended up on every social media platform and was covered by media outlets from the New York Post to the The Wall Street Journal, and now she is the official “poster girl” for deluded and entitled young workers who don’t get the capitalist system and the competitive workplace.

You can see her nine-minute clip here. If you don’t wince through it, you may need a refresher course in workplace ethics yourself. An at-will employee, Brittany argues with the HR staff who were assigned to dismiss her. Here’s a typical exchange:

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Comment of the Day: “Fani Willis Is Toast and Those Arguing That She Isn’t Are Revealing Their Own Ethics Problems”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The second Comment of the Day of the day emerges from the fertile mind of Humble Talent, who discusses the still popular use of the race card by diversity hires who have been in reality the beneficiary of racial bias, not victims of it. Here is his COTD on the post, “Fani Willis Is Toast and Those Arguing That She Isn’t Are Revealing Their Own Ethics Problems”:

***

There’s a Gordian knot here, and it’s one we’re going to continue fighting with for a very long time.

Fani Willis said in her statement: “First thing they say. Oh, she going to play the race card now? But no. God, isn’t it them who’s playing the race card when they only question one?”

There are competent black people in existence. This is so obvious that it shouldn’t need typing, but Democrats have been so interested in getting in representation regardless of the mediocrity of the candidates that it feels like every time a scandal like this asserts itself, we’re almost invariably criticizing a black person. More, because of the attention of the media, a disproportionate amount of attention gets placed on these cases.

It’s almost impossible not to label these people DEI hires. They tend to have light resumes, their conduct speaks for itself, and the moment they catch whiff of criticism, they reference their melanin and/or their sexual organs.

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“Confronting My Biases” Meets “The Ethicist”: The Webcam Model Son

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“The Ethicist,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, was oh so sensitive answering this query from a concerned parent:

….I have just found out that my [college age] son is a “model” on a pornographic streaming service. My initial reaction was shock, revulsion and shame. But the longer I think about it, the more I wonder, is there really anything immoral or otherwise wrong about what he is doing? He does it from the privacy of his home, alone, and seems to earn a substantial amount of money. If he likes what he does, is there any reason on my part to feel alarmed, ashamed, guilty or worried?

The NYU philosophy prof essentially says that nobody is being hurt by the son’s activities, so they cannot be called “wrong.” He then explains, as I cut through the verbiage…

“If we agree that your son’s camming isn’t wrong, what explains your initial sense of revulsion? Part of your response might arise from the familiar intrafamilial squeamishness about sexual disclosures. That response, then, may have been connected not with what he was doing but with you, as his parent, knowing about it….you can also have prudential concerns. How would his prospects be affected if word got out about his webcam gig? Livestreams can be recorded and uploaded. Even if you think that erotic livestreaming is neither wrong nor shameful, it’s natural, as a parent, to worry about how others might react…There’s nothing hypocritical about compartmentalizing a cam gig. Pretty much all cultures — and subcultures — have ideas about modesty, privacy and discretion, and so understandings about the contexts where erotic display or simply nudity is appropriate.”

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Incompetent? Irresponsible? Dishonest? Whatever This Was, It’s Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Look! Another example of IIPTDXTTNMIAFB (“Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.”)!

From the New York Times:

It took the Pentagon three and a half days to inform the White House that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III had been hospitalized on New Year’s Day following complications from an elective procedure, two U.S. officials said Saturday.

The extraordinary breach of protocol — Mr. Austin is in charge of the country’s 1.4 million active-duty military at a time when the wars in Gaza and Ukraine have dominated the American national security landscape — has baffled officials across the government, including at the Pentagon.

Senior defense officials say Mr. Austin did not inform them until Thursday that he had been admitted to the intensive care unit at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. The Pentagon then informed the White House.

The Pentagon’s belated notification, first reported by Politico, confounded White House officials, one Biden administration official said.

Meanwhile, conservatives “pounced”: “What possible motive could there be for doing this? Who knows? It didn’t make a lot of sense, but the Biden administration has an extensive record of covering up scandals, so it wasn’t exactly out of character for the Biden administration to cover something up,” wrote PJ media’s Matt Margolis. Other wags noted that hiding such health-related information about important government officials is the kind of thing China does.

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“Baseball Super-Agent Scott Boras Has Another Super-Conflict And There Is No Excuse For It,” The Sequel

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Sharp-eyed Ethics Alarms readers who pay attention to my baseball posts might recognize this one. It is like the most inexcusable lazy Hollywood franchise film, a sequel that is nearly identical to the original. I’m going to see how much of the post’s predecessor I can duplicate without having to change anything

Twelve years ago, Ethics Alarms began a post about baseball agents in general and Scott Boras in particular engaging in a flaming conflict of interest that harmed their player clients this way…

Baseball’s super-agent Scott Boras has his annual off-season conflict of interest problem, and as usual, neither Major League Baseball, nor the Players’ Union, nor the legal profession, not his trusting but foolish clients seem to care. Nevertheless, he is operating under circumstances that make it impossible for him to be fair to his clients.

I could have written that paragraph today. Nothing has changed. Literally nothing: as baseball general managers  huddle with player agents in baseball’s off-season and sign players to mind-blowing contracts, the unethical tolerance of players agents indulging in and profiting from a classic conflict of interest continues without protest or reform.

I may be the only one who cares about the issue. I first wrote about it here, on a baseball website. I carried on my campaign to Ethics Alarms, discussing the issue in 2010, 2011 (that’s where the linked quote above comes from), 2014, 2019, and in 2019 again,  and last year, in 2022. There is no publication or website that has covered the issue as thoroughly as this one, and the unethical nature of the practice is irrefutable. But I might as well be shouting in outer space, where no one can hear you scream. The conflict of interest, which is throbbingly obvious and easy to address, sits stinking up the game. Continue reading →

Believe It Or Not! The Best “Naked Teacher Principle” Variation Yet: The Porn Actor University Chancellor!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I was tipped off to this story, which I hereby designate a Ripley, yesterday, and regret not getting it up before the rest of the news media and blogosphere caught up.

The Universities of Wisconsin Board of Regents voted unanimously this week to fire longtime UW-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow. UW System President Jay Rothman said the university leadership had discovered “specific conduct”that caused harm to the university’s reputation. 

The “specific conduct” was appearing in online porn videos with his wife.

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Business Ethics Dunces: Best Buy and Geek Squad

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

No, they are not ready to help, or at least not yesterday, when I gave the Geek Squad at my local Best Buy an opportunity to live up to its claims on the Best Buy website.

ProEthics had an emergency yesterday. Grace’s laptop, from which she runs our business, wouldn’t start; we couldn’t get the power to go on. We know we need to replace it because it is old and has been having hiccups more frequently recently, but the end-of-year cash flow being what it is, were hoping to deal with the issue in January. My son has the magic touch regarding all forms of technology and anything mechanical, but he was at work, and I decided that we should deal with the crisis without interfering with his life. My neighbor has maintained a Geek Squad service contract for many years (though her computer needs do not involve a business), so I decided to give them a try. A corner of the local Best Buy is devoted to the computer repair and service company, which they acquired some time ago.

There was a bad omen at the start: two people were waiting, and no one was behind the counter. “She said she’ll be back in a minute,” one of the customers told me. As you know, almost every establishment, doctor’s office, restaurant and retail business is understaffed now, thanks to foolish minimum wage increases and businesses trying to keep costs down with epic inflation by hiring fewer employees. Customer service is virtually extinct. Best Buy, which once was notable for its plethora of employees on the floor who could answer questions and guide you through your visit, has now joined the trend.

When the Geek Squad staff member on counter duty returned, it was not a smiling man or a women professionally dressed in the Squad uniform pictured, but a strutting young lady with her hair in a durag with some kind of big bow on top. She had false eyelashes so thick and long that she appeared to be in party attire, with extreme make-up.

Well, heck….I decided that if Geek Squad felt she was a computer expert, she was a computer expert. I tried to explain my problem, including that my business relied on this laptop and that trying to get it working was crucial, but she cut me off saying, “Well let’s plug this in and see if it starts.” As I tried to say, “Yeah, it’s been plugged in all morning and it won’t…” she left the counter again, leaving me gaping like a fish. She returned in about five minutes, saw no sign of life and said, “It’s dead, sir. You need to buy a new computer. They’re over there…” She started to leave again. I said, “Wait. I told you this was an emergency. If I buy a new computer, I need you to transfer the data from this one.” “We can do that, but it’s going to take two to four days,” she said. “As I said, this is an emergency,” I replied. “Can’t you do the job faster than that?”

“Sir, we have our people working on other computers; that’s the fastest we can be,” she said dismissively, and left again. I was going to ask for assistance in sifting through the options, but didn’t have the chance. I took back the laptop and left.

Well, guess what? When my son got home from work, he took the laptop and returned it a few hours later. It’s working fine.

Well…

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