consent

Ethics Dunces: Boston Red Sox Players

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

owens pole

Yesterday, while watching the Boston Red Sox game on NESN as I always do EVEN WHEN THE TEAM STINKS, like this year, because no summer soldier I, team broadcasters Don Orsillo and Jerry Remy pointed out that Sox rookie Henry Owens was watching the game while being taped to a pole, with his mouth taped shut as well.

This is old-fashioned baseball rookie hazing, as Remy explained (also opining that he thought it was stupid when he played and is stupid now). The theory is that this makes rookies part of the team, builds cohesion and spirit, and yada yada yada, all the same phony rationalizations that jerks have used to excuse hazing cruelty and sadism in fraternities, the military, cults and sports teams for eons. The Owens stunt was relatively mild (and mercifully short), but the practice of hazing is still institutionalized bullying, uncivilized, and, as Remy said, stupid.

Sports team players are home town heroes, and role models too. How many kids will be humiliated, tortured, injured or even killed because the Boston Red Sox thought it was funny to immobilize a 6’6″ rookie pitcher by taping him to a pole on live TV, thus teaching him that no matter how  good he may be at pitching (and Owens is going to be really good), he’s at the bottom of the pecking order until he “earns” decent treatment and respect. “In my experience, the guys who really liked hazing the rookies were the players who couldn’t play,” noted Jerry, a Sox regular in the Eighties.  They were sadistic bullies, in other words, making up for their own inadequacies by abusing others.

You can say that Owens consented, and that’s like arguing that Monica consented when the President of the United States wanted her to emulate a Bourbon Street hooker. Owens could refuse, and be regarded as a bad team mate, leading to a year or more of cut shoelaces, shredded uniforms, insulting messages on his locker and worse “jokes.” Or he could quit baseball and sell Slurpees rather than make a gazillion dollars. He had to submit, and had to smile about it.

So he did.

Even baseball players need to be better at ethics chess than this, and calculate the likely consequences of their conduct. Hazing is unethical, and glamorizing, modeling and trivializing it on TV is irresponsible.

And stupid.

NO NO NO Children, Buzzfeed: You May NOT Do This, For It Is Creepy And Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
An unethical cascade...

An unethical cascade…

Before we commence, I do want to thank all of you are keeping me away from Hillary and Trump with more horrible ethics stories than I can keep up with.

Now that I’ve got that over with:

In what warped, sick universe is this kind of thing considered ethical?

Gad. It’s a veritable unethical cascade:

First, high school students takes surreptitious photos of their teachers while they should be, you know, getting educated…

Second, the students post the photos, which have not been consented to by the teachers, on Instagram…

Third, the students add salacious or otherwise provocative comments about the teachers as objects of their lust…

Fourth, the bottom-feeding website BuzzFeed picks up the photos and puts them in a feature called “13 Really Hot Teachers That Will Have You Begging For Detention.”…

How unethical is this? Let me count the ways… Continue reading →

Tragic, Corrupted, Complicit Camille Cosby

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
Camile Cosby: author, psychologist, corrupt accomplice to a sexual predator

Camile Cosby: author, psychologist, corrupt accomplice to a sexual predator

Apparently Bill Cosby’s wife Camille is telling confidantes that she believes all the woman drugged by her husband consented to sex, and that he is being unfairly treated by the news media as well as being unfairly accused by…what is it now, 40 women? I haven’t checked in the last few days.

She also admits that she always knew about her husband’s “infidelities,” and accepted them. Translation: she accepted creature comforts, status and money to enable her husband’s wrongdoing.

That this is a very old, ugly tradition that includes mothers who allow their husbands to sexually abuse their children, and even more horrific examples where wives look the other way while husbands kidnap and murder. In Mrs. Cosby’s case, she has made a deal with the devil, accepting the benefits of a spouse’s wealth and celebrity in exchange for placing her conscience in deep freeze. She has been covering up for her husband, lying by her silence, and sometimes lying out loud, as when she said last year , “He is the man you thought you knew.”

Did you think you knew that that the man who played Cliff Huxstable and wrote books about ethics cheated on his wife and had sex with young women under the influence of the drugs that he gave them? Well, actually I did: maybe Camille was referring to me.

Camille Crosby allowed and enabled Bill to engage in these activities, which were wrong no matter how they are interpreted: Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Officials Of The Month: The Connecticut State Senate

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

The Connecticut Senate this week approved a probably unconstitutional bill requiring all Connecticut colleges and universities to adopt the “yes, means yes” policy when it comes to sexual consent, similar to California’s cypto-fascist law. The bill dictates a completely unenforceable standard for sexual consent It was bi-partisan fascism, and passed 34-1. Sen. Joe Markley, R-Southington, was the lone vote against it.

According to the bill’s champion, Sen. Mae Flexer, D-Killingly,  it is “is redefining the definition of consent.” She explains that under the law, college students would be required to “say yes” or indicate nonverbally through “physical cues” that they are willing to have sex with another college student. And what “physical cues” would qualify? How about eye contact, and the kind of communications that we celebrate in the arts and literature? What about the “look of love” that Dusty Springfield sang about? Enough, Mae? How would schools enforce such a law? Cameras in every room? A panel of “physical cues” experts, watching every possible sexual encounter? Continue reading →

Legal But Not Ethical: Sex With A Demented Spouse

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Rayhons

In Iowa, a jury has found longtime Iowa state lawmaker Henry Rayhons not guilty of sexually abusing his wife by having sex with her at a nursing home. A doctor had told Rayhons that she had advanced Alzheimer’s disease. and was  no longer mentally capable of consenting to sex.

At the trial, Assistant Attorney General Tyler Buller told jurors  that Donna Rayhons’ Alzheimer’s disease had worsened in the months before last May’s alleged incident of unconsented sexual intercourse by her husband. She had washed her hands in dirty toilet water, Buller said, forgotten how to eat a hamburger and thought her first husband was still alive. Dr. John Brady later testified that Donna Rayhons had severe dementia, and thus any positive reaction to her husband’s physical advances could be termed a “primal response” at best. Brady testified that Donna Rayhons’ cognitive capacity had declined dramatically in the months leading up to the alleged offense. He explained that she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s based on several tests, including  a standard cognitive procedure in which patients are asked simple questions. By  May, Brady said, Donna Rayhons scored a zero on that test, and any score below eight indicates severe impairment, he said.

On his blog, the Volokh Conspiracy, Prof. Eugene Volokh makes a valiant effort to justify, excuse, or perhaps be compassionate regarding a man having sex with his wife after she has forgotten who he is or even what sex is. He argues, Continue reading →

The Unethical French Animator, the Mammalian Duck, Dysfunctional Ethics Alarms

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

“Oggy and the Cockroaches” is a French animated comedy series produced by Xilam and Gaumont Film Company. Its future on the Nickelodeon children’s TV cartoon channel NickToons is in doubt, however, after the channel was thrust into an unwanted controversy by an unknown French cartoonist’s practical joke.

A recent episode that aired on NickToons featured a brief view of a framed wall hanging showing a cartoon female duck sporting a pair of bikini briefs, sunglasses and bouffant hair-do, and most significantly, naked torpedoesque breasts of a variety more familiar to afficionados of “Fritz the Cat” than the target audience of eight-year-olds. Naturally, the station was deluged with complaints from parents.

The NickToons  website now appears to have removed the show from both its schedule and its homepage. Good start. It should also end any relationship it may have with Xilam and Gaumont.

I know cartoonists are not known for an excess of maturity, but a network needs to be able to reside a modicum of trust in its contractors, suppliers and partners. If an animator would think it’s funny to slip a topless, sexy duck into a kid’s show, then who is to say the next “joke” won’t be a giant talking penis or Adolf Hitler having sex with a cow?

Far more disturbing than the prank itself are the rationalizations and justifications being offered for it in online comments to the story and in social media: Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “The President’s Irresponsible And Untrue ‘One in Five Women Are Raped’ Claim”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

numbers_statistics_stats

Rich (in CT) adds a superb and learned enhancement to the day’s post about President Obama’s dubious rape claims during the Grammy Awards.  It raises a question I hadn’t considered before: is part of the problem that researchers are as clumsy in their understanding of language as liberal arts types are in their use of statistics and numbers? The word “rape” has meaning; this is no place for Humpty Dumpty’s habit of using words to mean whatever one pleases. [“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”—― Lewis Carroll, “Through the Looking Glass” ] Rich writes, “This data is important, as mental health and sexual disease propagation is affected by such contact, even if the traditional criteria imaged for “rape” is not met. ” I’ll concede that the data is important, but shouldn’t important data be clearly and accurately described? The data isn’t about rape! It’s about a variety of conduct linked by the researchers that they chose to call “rape,” knowing, presumably, that people who never read the data will take the misleading “rape” description and use it to confuse, persuade, deceive, and engage in scaremongering for political gain.

Rich writes that “not enough evidence is given to suggest that either study is unethical in and of itself.” Isn’t using vague, overly broad and misleading terminology for a study that is going to be made public intrinsically unethical—irresponsible, incompetent, untrustworthy?

Here is Rich (in CT)’s enlightening Comment of the Day on the post “The President’s Irresponsible And Untrue ‘One in Five Women Are Raped’ Claim”: Continue reading →

The President’s Irresponsible And Untrue “One in Five Women Are Raped” Claim

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

In a video that aired during the Grammy Awards on Feb. 8, President Obama stated, as President of the United States and a certifiable hero to the kind of citizens who watch the Grammy Awards, this:

“Right now, nearly one in five women in America has been a victim of rape or attempted rape.”

Let’s begin with the fact that this is false, or at least, there is no reason to believe it is true, or even close to true. (More about this in a minute.) Was the President’s statement a lie? We can’t tell. If the President believes that rape is so common that 20% of all women are raped, then what he said is not a lie (a false statement knowingly made by the speaker in order to deceive), which leads to some uncomplimentary conclusions:

a. He has a remarkably low opinion of his own nation and culture…but then we knew that, didn’t we?

b. He believes what he is told without challenging it or examining an assertions’ origin, methodology and assumptions. Really? This guy is supposed to be brilliant. I would think such a jaw-dropping and frightening statistic would mandate some examination, but see a.

c.  Why hasn’t this been a major focus of his administration? Isn’t the President alarmed about this? Why is the Attorney General running around the country holding the hands of parents of dead kids who attack police officers and fighting attempts to make voters prove who they are at the polls if women are being raped like The U.S. is the Congo? Why is the Presidentusing his time to make faces on videos to sell Obamacare? Isn’t this clearly a reason to make one of his “I will not rest” speeches, in this case not resting until the rape frequency in the Land of the Free is lower than that of a Columbia ghetto? He believes 20% of the women in the country under his stewardship  being raped in their lifetimes doesn’t rate mentioning in his “if wishes were horses” State of the Union, and relegates this horrendous health and crime emergency to…the Grammys?

If Obama doesn’t know if the stat is true, but said it anyway, then he was irresponsible. He’s President of the United States; people believe him, even after the shattered pledge of transparency and “If you like  your health care plan…” and the “red line” and all the rest. He can not fairly, honestly, ethically state that something is true when he doesn’t know whether it is true or not. That is a lie, then: not the statistic itself, but the implication that he believes it.

Or he knows the statement is false, and made it to deceive, because the ends justifies the means.

In the discussion following last week’s post about the persistence of the false narrative that Bush’s 2000 electoral vote victory was “stolen,” I briefly referenced the now mostly abandoned fake “1 in five” statistic  on campus rape, the one that prompted the 2014 Unethical Quote of the Year from Senator Claire McCaskill when it was debunked. This prompted blog warrior Liberal Dan to re-state the President’s proposition, since he is one of those people who continue to believe the President despite all evidence to the contrary. “One in 5 women are raped,” he wrote, unequivocally, linking to a 2011 New York Times study.

I wish I had the time and space to muse about what it says about an intelligent American when a stat like that one, whether it is used by the Times, the President, or Lena Dunham, doesn’t set off his or her ethics alarms, Fake-Stat-O-Meter and bullshit buzzer. This is what happens, though, when the President makes a factual assertion. I knew the stat was crap; I just don’t have the time to prove it’s crap to people who want to believe it. I assumed someone would pretty quickly, and sure enough, the Washington Post’s hard-working, liberal-biased but diligently trying to compensate Fact-checker Glenn Kessler came through.

In his Washington Post column today, Kessler gives us the results of his research into Obama’s lazy/irresponsible/dishonest claim. His findings? Continue reading →

Rape, Consent, and the Unconscious Lover

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

unconscious

Maybe Republicans should just keep their mouths shut whenever rape is being discussed. You know, just to be on the safe side.

Utah is considering legislation designed to protect the incapacitated from having to prove they did not consent to sex. The bill, an amended version of current law, was introduced after a 2013 case in which a man was charged with raping an unconscious neighbor on her porch. Republican state Representative Brian Greene prominently stepped into the Todd (“Legitimate Rape”) Akin Zone when he questioned the measure as too broad, saying,

“If an individual has sex with their wife while she is unconscious … a prosecutor could then charge that spouse with rape, theoretically. That makes sense in a first date scenario, but to me, not where people have a history of years of sexual activity.”

This, as you might imagine, ignited quite a bit of criticism. Greene appeared to be saying that it was okay to have sex with your spouse if he or she were unconscious. (He later issued a classic non-apology apology. I rate it a #7 on the Ethics Alarms Apology Scale) Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Someone Explain To Senator Tillis That It’s Unethical To Make People Sick On Principle”

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

hand-washing

Refusing to rest on his laurels, recently crowned Ethics Alarms “Commenter of the Year” texagg04 delivers a helpful, clarifying, erudite examination of the balancing process brought into play with the regulation of businesses for health and safety reasons. Here is his Comment of the Day on the post “Someone Explain To Senator Tillis That It’s Unethical To Make People Sick On Principle”:

Let’s unpackage this.

Purchasing Products and Services

When we buy a product or service, we don’t just buy the end result. We buy a long string of tasks leading up to that final product and sometimes we buy even more things than just the final product*. In this instance, that doesn’t just mean the food on your plate, as tasks, upon deep consideration are actually HUMONGOUS things that are composed of the Time necessary to complete, Material either used up in preparation or as a component of the end item, Personnel Knowledge needed to perform, Equipment which facilitates, and Space needed to complete the task.. You don’t purchase just the food. You purchase the time and care EACH employee puts into the process. From Day 1, you purchase the time a procurer makes a deal with a vendor OR personally hand selects the ingredients of your meal. You purchase the time and quality of the food storage in the pantry/refrigerator. You purchase the chef’s level of knowledge. You purchase the time he devotes to ensuring the burners are a certain temperature. You purchase the manager’s level of knowledge in keeping things efficient and cost effective. You purchase EACH AND EVERY action the server takes that could affect the final, tangible product or service. Continue reading →