Workplace

Here’s Controversial Ethics Position: Universities Shouldn’t Employ Professors Who Advocate Murder

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

In 2020, Prof Erik Loomis, a far, far Left radical (not that there’s anything wrong with that) who teaches at the University of Rhode Island, was discussing the murder of Aaron “Jay” Danielson, a member of the right-wing group Patriot Prayer who perished during rioting in Portland, Oregon. In a September blog post titled “Why was Michael Reinoehl killed?” (Reinoehl is the man suspected of fatally shooting Danielson; he was killed as federal authorities tried to arrest him), Loomis responded to a commenter who had limited sympathy for Reinoehl because he (probably) had shot Danielson by writing,

He killed a fascist. I see nothing wrong with it, at least from a moral perspective…tactically, that’s a different story. But you could say the same thing about John Brown.”

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Comment of the Day: “Another “Great Stupid” Milestone: Mayor Adams’ Plan To Stop Shoplifting”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

An April 28 post on “Homeroom,” the official blog of the Department of Education (ED) called on schools to remove the criminal background question from admissions. The post exhorted “institutions across the country” to “re-examine their admissions and student service policies and holistically determine how they can better serve and support current and formerly incarcerated students.” We call on you to ban the box,” it concluded.

“Ban the box” refers to a campaign started by the civil rights group “All of Us or None” in 2004. “The campaign challenges the stereotypes of people with conviction histories by asking employers to choose their best candidates based on job skills and qualifications, not past convictions,” the campaign’s website explains. The fallacy of that characterization should be apparent: it assumes that a criminal conviction doesn’t reveal anything about an individual’s character, ethics, trustworthiness or values, as if committing a crime is just something that happens to people, like catching the flu. On the other side of the argument is the principle that a citizen can “pay his or her debt to society,” and once that debt is paid, the metaphorical slate is cleared.

Ryan Harkins wrestles with these issues in his Comment of the Day on the post, “Another “Great Stupid” Milestone: Mayor Adams’ Plan To Stop Shoplifting”:

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One thing that seems to be a common theme in decriminalization is the notion that people will just do the right thing if their situations weren’t dire. If people are shoplifting, it isn’t because they think they deserve stuff for free, or get a thrill out of thieving, or think theft is no big deal. No, they have to be shoplifting because that is the only way to acquire what they need. If they can just be shown there are alternatives, if they can just be instructed in the right behavior, and perhaps even the circumstances that is forcing them to steal are mitigated, that’s the true means of decreasing crime. Surely the last thing we want to do is give someone a black mark that will just make his circumstances worse and thereby drive him into even more crime, because then he really doesn’t have any choice but to shoplift. Who would give him the time of day if people knew he had a criminal record?

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Ethics Observations On The Shemy Schembechler Firing

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

What a mess.

Glenn ‘Shemy’ Schembechler, son of legendary Wolverines football coach Bo Schembechler, the winningest coach in Michigan football history who took the Wolverines to 10 Rose Bowls, was was hired as the University of Michigan’s assistant director of recruiting on May 17. Three says later he was fired (well, “forced to resign”). His demise was caused by his habit of “liking” controversial tweets on Twitter.

A statement from the school attributed Schembechler’s forced resignation to social media activity that “caused concern and pain for individuals in our community.” Here’s one of those “liked tweets,” in a Twitter tiff over a quote from Thomas Sowell:

Ethics Observations:

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Comment Of The Day: “Let’s Play “What’s Wrong With This Guy?”!”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

There I was, thinking dark thoughts and moping about the horrible traffic here over the weekend, and along comes A.M. Golden to remind me that this blog has always sought to inspire quality rather than quantity, with this superb Comment of the Day on the post about the enterprising Mr. Clifford, who feels that IBM isn’t him paying him enough not to work for 30 years, Let’s Play “What’s Wrong With This Guy?”! Here it is; it even has a “Facts of Life” reference!

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Stipulated: The plaintiff’s disability could be a legitimate one. We don’t know. That doesn’t really change my answer.

How did we get here?

The Deep Pockets Rationalization aka The Jo Polniaczek Excuse: Named for Nancy McKeon’s character on the ’80s show “The Facts of Life.” In one episode, Jo borrows a watch belonging to her frenemy, wealthy Blair Warner, without asking so she can time herself while taking an exam. On her way back, the watch is damaged when she jumps into a quick basketball game. She blows it off because Blair is wealthy and has a lot of watches.

The Deep Pockets Rationalization states that the person with the most money should pay even if not at fault. A guy driving a Hyundai hits a guy driving a BMW. The Hyundai driver tries to argue that the BMW driver should pay for everything because he has more money. A person trips in a store and tries to compel the business to pay even though she tripped because she wasn’t paying attention to what she was doing. Or a restaurant is pressured to pay for a disfigured child’s surgery after the family failed to extort money with false allegations against employees (Remember the KFC incident from a few years’ back?).

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Unethical Website Of The Month: “The Anarchist”

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

“The Anarchist”is the website of a hate-based Toronto coffee shop of the same name. Ironically, Ethics Alarms just learned of the site’s existence as it announced the demise of the business. (Good!) The shop anointed itself as “an anti-capitalist cafe, shop and radical community space on stolen land”—yes, the owners are delusional. It was a “pay what you choose” establishment designed to spit in the metaphorical eye of evil Capitalism. Of course it went belly-up, though the fact that the carzy project lasted even a year is impressive, sort of, in the same way Brian Stelter getting hired is impressive.

Here are some highlights from the website:

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Push-Up Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I don’t know why this took so long…

The Washington Post reports that there is a movement afoot to stop allowing young women to substitute so-called “girls’ push-ups” (with the knees on the floor) for the actual toes-on-the-ground exercise while males are still required to do the real thing. The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), which provides guidelines for exercise testing by fitness and medical professionals, still uses the modified push-up to assess women’s upper-body strength in its latest exercise testing textbook, published in 2021. Male strength is measured in part using the full push-up.

But Melanie Adams, a professor of exercise science at Keene State College in New Hampshire, told the Post that based on a 2022 study of female college students and push-ups that she led, the assumption that women could only do the weenie version was unwarranted. Some female college students could perform more than 20 full push-ups in succession, a total many men can’t match. Because the root exercise builds strong, important muscles in the upper-body and core, however, starting boys on real push-ups while girls are told to use the inferior version gives males a head start on superior strength that women will have a hard time overcoming.

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More Reasons Why Fox Was Ethically Obligated To Fire Tucker Carlson

/ Jack Marshall / 64 Comments

The outpouring of conservative support for Tucker Carlson is quite nauseating, and shows an unfortunate infestation of bad judgment and ethics corruption when the necessary conduct is to recognize that an ideological ally is neither trustworthy nor honest.

One report yesterday, pointing to the Fox News’ ratings crashing with Carlson’s exit, noted that younger Fox News viewers had led the stampede. Carlson is a demagogue with dubious motives, and the young are especially vulnerable to demagogues. I regard it as unethical for a news organization to put demagogues on the air for exactly that reason. (Glenn Beck is vociferously defending Carlson. Of course he is. Demagogues stick together.)

Let’s move on from the demagoguery, however, and focus on the Carlson text message published by the New York Times earlier this week (I am about two days behind in my Times spelunking). The message was sent to one of Carlson’s producers after the January. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol:

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Hollywood Writers Fear That AI Might Replace Them. Tough!

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

The first Hollywood strike in 15 years began today, as talks with the studios broke down and the economic pressures of the streaming era sent unionized TV and film writers to picket for better pay. The strike has shut down most late-night talk shows, so it is already benefiting society. “No contracts, no content!” sign-carrying members of the Writers Guild of America chant outside various office buildings in Manhattan and L.A. The last writer’s strike shut down the industry for 100 days and helped send California into a recession.

As usual, the strike is about money. But far down the list of objectives for its contract negotiations under a section titled “Professional Standards and Protection in the Employment of Writers,” the union says it wants to “regulate use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies.”

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Who Do You Trust, CNN Or Don Lemon? (Hint: It’s A Trick Question)

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Here is how Don Lemon announced his firing from CNN on Twitter…

Here was CNN’s response:

Lemon is an incorrigibly unprofessional and biased pseudo-journalist who has one of the most damning and extensive Ethics Alarms dossiers extant. he’s thrown tantrums, made up fake history, lied, peddled fake news and appeared drunk on the air. I think my favorite inexcusable babbling self-indulgence by Don was this, but I easily could have missed one, or dozens. Anyone that believes anything Don Lemon says, writes, publishes or tweets is dangerously gullible.

CNN, meanwhile, kept Lemon on the air in a high-profile, prime-time slot despite his lack of integrity and journalism competence, because it viewed him as an attractive messenger for its steady diet of biased, slanted and occasionally fabricated news stories serving its management’s partisan objectives. CNN is a little less trustworthy than Fox News, and a little more trustworthy than MSNBC, or, to be brief, completely untrustworthy.

The answer to the question posed in the headline is “Neither.”

The Tucker Carlson Firing Aftermath

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Tucker Carlson behaved in a manner that would get any employee fired from any organization with two atoms of integrity and professionalism to rub together unless the organization was completely in thrall to The King’s Pass. It is really as simple as that; this isn’t hard. Nevertheless, pundits, politicians and hack journalists on both sides of the ideological divide set out to misrepresent the event in order to promote their own world views, confusing the American public when they should be illuminating a basic ethics and life competence issue.

Let’s see...why not start with one of the biggest hacks out there, CNN’s former fake journalism ethics watchdog and veteran Fox News-a-phobe, Brian Stelter? “Why Tucker Carlson’s Exit From Fox News Looks Like an Execution” is the title of his analysis in “Vanity Fair,” itself now a nest of progressive propaganda merchants (but Stelter lowers the net ethics quotient anyway).  The answer to Stelter’s question is, he offers, this: “He’s not being given a chance to say goodbye. It is technically possible, I suppose, that Carlson turned down a chance to sign off on his own terms. But my 20 years of experience covering cable news suggests otherwise.”

Wow. This guy is really something. Completely inept and intellectually dishonest, Stelter has to begin an article by reminding readers how special he is. Of course Carlson wasn’t given a chance to give a last broadcast. He was fired for cause. When you are fired for cause, security ushers you out of the building. Your bosses don’t give you anything but a severance package—maybe—and ten minutes to put your stuff in a cardboard box. Allowing a likely bitter and angry demagogue like Carlson to “say good bye” is like the Charles Addams cartoon where a guy arrested for making obscene phone calls is allowed to make his one call and he makes another obscene one. What Fox did with Carlson wasn’t “an execution.” It was a standard firing.

Over at the New Republic, long-time leftist hysteric Michael Tomasky (whose biased news analysis helped drive me away from The Daily Beast) writes in “Why Fox News Is Going to Get Worse—a Lot Worse” that Carlson is certain to be replaced by someone who is “more trolly, more racist, more pro-Putin, and just all-around more outrageous than Carlson.” Tomasky is just using Carlson’s demise as an excuse to attack Fox News when it has done the right and responsible thing for once, and at significant cost: its value dipped a billion dollars on the news of the firing. In the process, he repeats the Big Lies that the Left wielded against Carlson in its efforts to silence him, because censoring opposition is how Big Blue rolls these days; it’s so much more effective than trying to win a debate with facts and logic.

Carlson’s not “racist,” but the playbook demands that anyone who questions color-based, George Floyd Freakout policies must be a racist. Tucker’s not “pro-Putin,” he’s anti-US involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war, a defensible position. Carlson, moreover, was far less outrageous than the jerk he replaced, Bill O’Reilly, so why does Tomasky assume Carlson’s replacement will be worse than he was?

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