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Morning Ethics Warm-Up: 6/23/17

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

1. When I am forced to be away from Ethics Alarms for a long time, as was the case yesterday, it often renews my musings about whether I respond too much to reader comments. Everyone generally does just fine when I’m silent, and sometimes I find that fascinating and unexpected new topics have not only sprung from whatever ethics fertilizer I left behind,  but have grown and flourished like bamboo.

Unfortunately, I have also noticed that there have been a lot ( as in “too many”) of extended arguments between commenters that not only extend beyond reasonable limits, but also explode into personal attacks. I admit that Ethics Alarms is, for a moderated blog, unusually tolerant of this phenomenon. One reason for that is that sometimes such epic confrontations are both entertaining and enlightening, as when liberal commenter and Ethics Alarms immortal tgt and uber-conservative commenter Steven J. Pilling engaged in the Ethics Alarms equivalent of the Lincoln Douglas debates, only occasionally snapping and calling each other names.

However, while the occasional emotional outbursts are excusable, they should be rare. Reprimanding a commenter for  commenting style and habits is certainly fair, but doing it repeatedly is boring; and I want to remind everyone that while it is often frustrating, allowing someone to have the last word is not capitulation, especially when that last word is not particularly persuasive.

We also owe ourselves and everyone else self-awareness. When a commenter finds himself or herself repeatedly embroiled in long, heated exchanges, that commenter should consider the possibility that he or she is the problem.

The general principle is that we should strive to have all comments contain substance that advances the discussion. “You’re an asshole” is occasionally justified (when a comment has objectively revealed a commenter to be an asshole, and even then is not mandatory), but rarely.

2. When President Trump issued his trolling tweet about James Comey and the possibility that there were “tapes” of their conversations, I wrote that it was the President’s dumbest tweet to date. (I think he has made worse ones since, but at this point any tweet by the President is evidence of crippling stubbornness, impulsiveness and bad judgment). I did not think that what was obviously a bluff without substance would still be considered a headline-worthy issue many weeks later. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up: 6/16/17

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

1. It looks like Bill Cosby is going to be acquitted, and probably rightly so, though probably for the wrong reason: bias. The jury is deadlocked, and I’d bet my head that one or more hold-outs just can’t accept the fact that that nice Cliff Huxtable would do those horrible things unless the victim consented somehow. Cheat on his wife. maybe. But not that.

Celebrity defendants whose public images are benign begin criminal trials with automatic unreasonable doubt built-in; this is part of the reason O.J. and Robert Blake (“Baretta”) avoided murder convictions. Celebrities with less sterling reputations are not so fortunate: had Bill Cosby been the one who shot a woman he barely knew at his home under strange circumstances, he would have probably been acquitted. Unfortunately for Phil Spector, the pop record producer had a well-established reputation for being nuts. The reasons Cosby can be acquitted for just reasons is that the victim is on record calling and chatting with him dozens of times after she was drugged and sexually assaulted, and because only one of the 50 or so Cosby victims was allowed to testify to show a pattern of behavior. The standard of  proven  guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is intentionally difficult to meet. There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that Cosby is guilty, and his eventual acquittal won’t change my certainty. Nonetheless, those attacking the verdict and the jurors will be wrong, just as they were with O.J. and Casey Anthony.

2. One more thing regarding Cosby: yesterday I heard a CNN anchor who was about to interview another Cosby victim describe the woman as someone who has accused Bill Cosby of “inappropriate conduct.” The host caught herself, sort of, by adding, after a pause, “to say the least.” The woman claimed she had been raped. Even the anchor couldn’t bring herself to attach to dear, funny, sweet Cos such a heinous crime, so she engaged in craven equivocation. “Inappropriate conduct”?  Belching at the dinner table is inappropriate conduct. Drugging trusting young women and raping them is entirely different.

This is CNN.

 I regard a broadcast news journalist stating that Bill Cosby has been accused of “inappropriate conduct” misleading, incompetent, and fake news. Continue reading →

From The “When Ethics Alarms Are Devoured By Hysteria And Partisan Hate” Files: Jezebel Readers React To The JetBlue Harassment Of Ivanka Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

love-hateHere are some comments reacting to the JetBlue incident from Jezebel, the feminist website. These are not the outliers. These are typical. I’ve checked some of the other progressive sites.  At Talking Points Memo, the consensus seems to be that it’s “fake news.” So far, the vast majority of the coverage is from conservative sites. Most of the left partisan sites don’t report embarrassing conduct by their compatriots if they can avoid it….or perhaps they just don’t want to inspire comments like these.

Jezebel’s blogger set the tone by invoking the “Tit for Tat” and “They had it coming” rationalizations with this coda to the post:

Given Donald Trump’s unabashed love of heckling people in front of a crowd—he singled out NBC reporter Katy Tur so many times she had to get Secret Service protection—I’m just surprised the administration didn’t give Lasner’s husband a cabinet seat right then and there.

From the comments…

I know i’m supposed to feel bad for Ivanka, but I can’t. Fuck her. Fuck her husband. They are going to make billions off the american taxpayer and have no shame or remorse or anything resembling human emotions. I might feel the slightest bit of pity for the kids, except then I remember they’re all fucking rich and will get whatever their bratty asses demand for their entire lives. So i guess i’ll save my concern for the millions of men and women of various races, creeds and sexual orientations whose lives will begin to become progressively worse on January 20th.

***

She knew exactly what she was doing and what the potential outcomes were from flying commercial. Part of me thinks Bannon set this up so this exact incident would occur and everyone would feel sorry for lil Vanky.

***

FUCK THAT NOISE.

If I saw a Trumpsatzgruppen member on a flight, I would be in jail right now, b/c I would not shut the fuck up about it the entire flight.

***

Seriously. Let’s not forget:

— At last count, 838 products in Ivanka Trump’s line, and not a single one made in the US.

— She’s already used her father’s position to further her business by selling dresses and jewelry, and she’s sat in on meetings with leaders of countries in which her business stands to benefit.

— It took more than a year for employees at her company to convince her to establish a maternity policy; she told one employee that when she had her baby, she was only out of the office for a week (she neglected to mention her in-home nanny when explaining this).

— For several months now she’s posted a job on her site for a Freelance Graphic Designer, a full-time job, Monday through Friday, 9-6. But as freelance, this person will not receive any benefits, including healthcare and maternity leave; and the contract is month to month, allowing Ivanka Trump’s company to cut that person loose at any time with zero notice. That’s some fine job creation right there.

In short, fuck Ivanka Trump. She’s a hypocrite just like her father, and while I would try to find a way of doing it without getting kicked off a plane, I’d have no problem telling her so.

***

Yeah the French should have just said “This cake is really good, don’t upset the Queen.” Or the people of Boston should have just drank the tea and asked politely to not be taxed. Fuck the trumps, they should be called out at every opportunity.

***

Going high hasn’t worked for us since what – 2000? i am sick of it. i am sick of us having to be the reasonable, rational ones. fuck all of that. they go low and they win. they go low and they obstruct a president for an entire 8 years. it is time to go low.

***

Fuck her and her three small children.

KABOOM! Did A School Really Try To Brainwash A Second Grader? [UPDATED]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

kaboom-red

The comments to a perfectly sane article about the value of teaching logic and critical thinking in elementary school are fascinating, terrifying, aggravating and all too typical in some ways. For example, it takes just 25 comments or so before some of the participants start calling each other names based on their assumed political views. The entire thread is enlightening reading, but the most provocative part is the discussion sparked by this comment:

If you teach your kids logic they’ll have conflicts with their teachers lol. I know because all of mine have had issues and it should not be this way. My youngest corrected a teacher in the 2nd grade because she was teaching something wrong. My daughter ended up going to ISS(in school suspension). I was called and they said while your daughter was correct, she cannot correct a teacher. They had put my daughter in ISS and wrote on the whiteboard 4=eight and as soon as my daughter agreed with that statement she could go back to class. She was in ISS all day. I was proud of my daughter and disgusted with everyone that would treat a 2nd grade little girl the way they treated her. Was glad that she wasn’t in that school very long.

This is also the source of the KABOOM!, as you can see. North Korean brain-washing methods have apparently penetrated some parts of the American teaching establishment. My head exploded in protest, but I can’t say I’m surprised.

Some random observations, and then I’ll leave the reactions to you: Continue reading →

Revelations From The John Oliver Video Post: What I Have Learned

/ Jack Marshall / 83 Comments

light-bulb PREFACE: I have just returned from a crazy three day odyssey that had me lecturing on Massachusetts legal ethics in Boston, Washington, D.C. legal ethics in the nation’s capital, and, professional ethics, legal ethics and accounting ethics in Tucson, Arizona. Keeping pace with ethics developments was even more difficult than it usually is when I’m on the road, because I had almost no time in between flights, meetings and various hassles to get to a newspaper, surf the web, or watch TV. And my browser kept crashing.

I wrote the John Oliver post, frankly, as low-hanging fruit. His performance was vile and hateful, barely funny, self-indulgent, and disrespectful in a damaging way, and I didn’t think, and still don’t, that there should be much disagreement on that assessment. I expected the usual “lighten up,” “he was only joking “[he was NOT only joking], and “he has right to free speech” comments, because I always get those any time I point out that a comedian has been unfair and irresponsible. I did not expect,for the post to get more single day traffic than all but one previous Ethics Alarms entry, and so many comments, many of which with troubling social and political significance. I returned to my office to find more comments waiting for moderation than have ever been there at one time, and I apologize for that: I try to get them cleared withing hours if not minutes. Of course, a disproportionate number of them were garbled nonsense, or just invective with no point whatsoever. They didn’t make it.

I also had some tough calls, with repetitious comments that misrepresented the post, made irrelevant or factually mistaken assertions, and also were abusive. I fear that I may have been inconsistent, and perhaps less tolerant than usual, and I’m not referring to the occasional comment I allowed to be published just to show the kind of comments that weren’t being posted. The problem is that this site is a intended to be a colloquy, and poor quality comments just make the threads hard to read, and also undermine the site.

I may have to be more ruthless in moderating comments in the future. I’m thinking about it.

Ethics is all about processing new information. Here are some useful things I learned, or re-learned, from the reaction to the post, “Ethics Dunce: HBO’s John Oliver”….

1. Otherwise reasonable, fair, smart people really do think that Donald Trump justifies unethical conduct and that makes it okay. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “The Barefoot Contessa and the Compassion Bullies: An Ethics Drama”

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Angry-Blogger

I haven’t made one of the spammed Ethics Alarms hate comments a Comment of the Day for a while, but this one really asked for it. The commenter, who calls herself Sarah Bradley but isn’t, was spitting vitriol over a five-year old Ethics Alarms post that I remember well, the story about a mother’s attempt to shame and bully a cooking show star, Ina Garten, who politely turned down her sick son’s “Make A Wish Foundation” request that she hold a special live cooking exhibition just for him.  The mother  used her blog to call down the web Furies on the chef’s head, and I, as you may notice that I often do, pointed out that the conventional wisdom that the chef deserved the abuse was ethically obtuse, writing in part…

Garten’s refusal was not wrong, and it was not justification for criticism. There are many legitimate reasons for her choosing not to give Enzo an audience, including just not wanting to do it. Do all of us have an obligation to do a favor for a stranger simply because they asked for it? No. Do we have an obligation to do the favor if the stranger is sick? Young? Old? Dying? No, no, no and no. Accept any other answer, and we are declaring that whenever the Make-a-Wish Foundation delivers a request, it is really a demand, backed by the threat of public humiliation….dictatorship of the desperate, attack of the compassion bullies.

Would I make Enzo’s wish come true, under almost any circumstances? Yes. Ina Garten doesn’t have to. Would most celebrities? Yes…and Ina Garten still doesn’t have to. Being kind and generous is ethical, but saying no when there is no ethical duty to say yes is not unethical. If Enzo is making a request, then the request can be refused. If its isn’t really a request, but an order, Enzo has no right to issue it. There is a duty to rescue. There is a duty to confront and report wrongdoing. But a duty to comply with the random desires of sick children? Absolutely not.

I wish all of my posts were as clear and well-argued as that one. Yet “Sarah” thought it was deserving of an abusive, ethics- and logic- free attack, because she reasons like about 85% of the commenters on most blogs and news aggregating sites. There no objective logic, no balancing of interests, no understanding of values, no ability to distinguish rationalizations from ethical analysis, no ability to see a complex situation from multiple perspectives, no objectivity. All there is to support “Sarah’s” indignation and fury is knee-jerk emotion and pre-digested platitudes. She is typical of the average member of the public who has never been trained in logic or ethics, doesn’t understand why that’s a handicap, and who allows their lizard brain to guide them through life, making society and the culture a mine field for the rest of us.

I didn’t get into the ethics field to help people like Sarah, because people like Sarah are too far gone to help. I’m an ethicist to try to help people, and their kids, and anyone they may have an influence upon, to avoid becoming like her. When you can’t think any clearer than Sarah, you are incompetent at life, and others will suffer.

Here is Sarah Bradley’s Comment of the Day, on the post, The Barefoot Contessa and the Compassion Bullies: An Ethics Drama: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Above The Law

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

silence

The legal news, commentary and gossip site Above the Law—Ethics Alarms uses it a s a source for legal ethics issues from time to time, usually to disagree with its writers—has announced that it is banning comments on the site. This has become an increasing trend on-line. The argument for doing this is always the same, with variations: they don’t add value, they too often are vulgar or abusive, they just aren’t as good as the used to be. Here’s ATL today:

“Today the comments are not what they once were. Although occasionally insightful or funny, ATL comments nowadays are generally fewer in number, not very substantive (often just inside jokes among the commentariat), yet still often offensive. They also represent a very small percentage of our total traffic (as we can tell because of the click required to access them)”

The site also comforts itself that increasingly “everybody does it”:

“What we do know is that the decline in comment quality is not unique to ATL. As noted by Wired, NiemanLab, and Digiday, numerous websites have eliminated their comments sections in recent years, largely because they felt that the comments were not adding sufficient value and that discussion had migrated to social media.”

Yes, I’ve noticed all that high-quality, nuanced commentary on Twitter.

What’s going on here? Continue reading →

How To Get Banned From Ethics Alarms: A Case Study

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

get-out

I just spammed nine attempted comments from a would-be participant here calling himself by the confidence-inspiring name of “Muh.” As sometimes happens, he discovered us and began posting comments everywhere. Here is a representative sample:

1. On the “Frontrunners” post: “The funniest part about Ted Cruz is that he pretends he’s an outsider and the rubes fall for it. But one look at his resume and you can see this guy is as well connected as anyone. If only everyone who ever met him didn’t hate him, he’d probably already be President!”

Why it was rejected: This is a pure political comment, with no ethics content whatsoever. That’s not what this blog is here for. Go to Mediaite, the Daily Kos, or Politico for gratuitous, cynical, fact-free candidate-bashing.

2. Comment on the same post: “This article, well you can see where the author seems to be. You want to talk about these three, and you leave off Ted Cruz who’s basically talked about nuking the Middle East? Give me a break.”

Why it was rejected: Accusing me of pro-Cruz bias, or pro-anyone bias, based on this or any post is unjustified. I chose those three because they are far and away the front-runners, and for no other reason. I have not shied away from ctiticizing Ted Cruz. If a commenter is going to accuse me of bias, he or she had better check the blog archive first. And Cruz said no such thing.

“Give me a break” is in the class of other disapproved rhetoric such as “LOL!” and arguments beginning with “Uh…” Continue reading →

“When The Ethics Alarms Don’t Sound” Files: Auschwitz

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

auschwitz-showers

From The Jerusalem Post:

Israeli tourists who arrived at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland on Sunday expressed shock and outrage over what appeared to be the placement of showers near the entrance to the site. Asked about the outcry, a spokesman for the Auschwitz memorial told The Jerusalem Post that “no showers were placed at the parking lot of the museum.” “Because of the heat wave in Poland, sprinklers which cool the air were placed near the entrance to the museum. They are located near the area where – in the open sun and without any possibility of hiding in the shade – a queue of people who collect the entry cards to the memorial site is formed. “Among visitors there are many people who come from countries where such high temperatures as we have this summer in Poland do not occur. We have noticed cases of fainting among people. Therefore we must do everything possible to minimize the risks connected with the heat and high temperatures and take care of the safety of health of our visitors. The sprinklers are installed on the days of highest temperatures and removed with the temperature drops.”

“As a Jew who has lost so many relatives in the Holocaust, they looked like the showers that the Jews were forced to take before entering the gas chambers,” Meir Bulka, 48, told the Post . According to Bulka, he was not the only one deeply disturbed by this unusual scene. “All the Israelis felt this was very distasteful,” he said. “Someone called it a ‘Holocaust gimmick.’” Bulka decided to do something proactive about the situation rather than let it go. He went to the main office and asked the management for an explanation to the strange scene.

“The management decided that it was a good way to cool people off on a very hot day,” Bulka said.

There is something very wrong when those in charge of the Auschwitz historical site decide to erect nozzles misting water downwards at visitors outside the notorious death camp and nobody in involved in the decision detects the obvious problem. Whether the problem is with the administrators, the post-WWII generations, non-Jews, or something else, like Europe and the world, I am not sure. I do know that ethics alarms should have been ringing loudly. Did they malfunction? Or are they not installed?

Clues to what is wrong are suggested by the comments made by Ann Althouse’s readers to this story. I’m still trying to figure them out. Her audience is, I presume, ideologically-mixed, tilting to the left, and on the young side, since she is a law professor and many students read her posts. Is the utter insensitivity bordering on hostility to Jewish sensitivity on the little, insignificant matter of the Holocaust displayed here  attributable to ignorance (an excuse the Polish curators of the museum cannot claim), callousness, distance from the events memorialized, antipathy to Israel or anti-Semitism?

Here are 17 out of the 20 comments so far: Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Month: Popehat Lawyer/Blogger Ken White

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Dept_Of_Justice_USF“That’s your justice system, and mine: a consequence of our culture of servility towards to police and prosecutors.”

—Former prosecutor, current lawyer, and epic blogger Ken White, summing up the outrageous misconduct of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in its attempt to subpoena Reason’s commenter’s identities for potential prosecution, specifically the use of a gag order to prevent the publication from communicating.

Ken White has been following this story, which is a frightening example of how power can be, and is perverted in a supposed democracy that respects a free press. The short version (you can read the posts about this here and here, which link to Ken’s more intense and thorough commentary) is that libertarian publication Reason found itself ordered to reveal the identities of some mean commenters on its website who made obviously hyperbolic and facetious “threats” about a judge, including suggesting that she be Steve Buscemied…

Woodchipper foot

 

Continue reading →