Alek O. Komarnitsky

A Christmas Story Redux: Alek and the Controllable Christmas Lights

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment
Go ahead! Try em!

Go ahead! Try em!

Christmas is right around the bend, so it is again time to celebrate Alek O. Komarnitsky and his creative, slightly wacky, Christmas lights extravaganza that he has transformed from a mildly unethical spoof to an act of charity and generosity.

Back in 2004, Alek received national attention for his whimsical holiday website that allowed people all over the world to turn his elaborate Christmas lights on and off from their home computers. Everyone had fun, which was clearly Alek’s design. Still, when it became known that his site was a hoax and that the lights going on and off were only an illusion, I weighed in (on The Ethics Scoreboard) with the opinion that perpetrating such a large-scale deception was wrong, no matter how well-intentioned and light-hearted. Alek took issue with my criticism, and we had a spirited e-mail debate.

Then, at a significant cost in time and money, Alek devised a way to really let people all over the world turn on his lights. He has done this ever since, and uses the site to raise money to cure Celiac disease. He writes: Continue reading →

Alek and the Amazing Controllable Christmas Lights

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I haven’t plugged my friend Alek O. Komarnitsky in quite a while, and since I’m having a hard time keeping up with all the abuse ( and repetitious rationalizations) from the NORML  crowd over on the “Distracted Driving…” thread, this is a good time to re-introduce him.

Back in 2004, Alek received national attention for his whimsical holiday website that allowed people all over the world to turn his elaborate Christmas lights on from their home computers. Everyone had fun, which was clearly Alek’s design. Still, when it became known that his site was a hoax and that the lights going on and off were only an illusion, I weighed in (on The Ethics Scoreboard) with the opinion that perpetrating such a large-scale deception was wrong, no matter how well-intentioned. Alek objected to my criticism, and we had a spirited e-mail debate.

Then, at a significant cost in time and money, Alek devised a way to really let people all over the world turn on his lights. He has done this ever since, and uses the site to raise money to cure Celiac disease. This year, he writes: Continue reading →

Heeding the Christmas Season Ethics Alarms

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Yes, it has come to this. The period between Thanksgiving and Christmas season is a pre-unethical condition, getting worse every year. (Pre-unethical conditions are situations that experience teaches us deserve early ethics alarms, since the stage is set for habitual bad conduct.) The financial stresses on the public and the business community in 2010 will only fuel the creeping tendency to ignore the moral and ethical values that are supposed to underlie the winter holidays—charity, gratitude, generosity, kindness, love, forgiveness, peace and hope—for the non-ethical considerations that traditionally battle them for supremacy: avarice, selfishness, greed, self-pity, and cynicism. Combine this with the ideological and political polarization in today’s America and the deterioration of mutual respect and civility, and the days approaching Christmas are likely to become an ethical nightmare…unless we work collectively to stop that from happening. Continue reading →