fairness

How I Boarded The “Richard Jewell” Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It is unusual to see an ethics train wreck continue to  roll along to the extent that it affects the movie about the ethics train wreck, but that was what happened with the Richard Jewell saga. Remember the definition of an ethics train wreck: an episode in which virtually everyone who becomes involved in it, however tangentially, becomes entangled in ethics mistakes and misconduct. The  “Richard Jewell” Ethics Train Wreck (or the Richard Jewell Ethics Train Wreck) even yanked me on board.

I’ve already written about the film, directed by Clint Eastwood and a 2019 holiday bomb (no pun intended). My focus then was on the single unethical feature of the screenplay, its unfair portrayal of the real-life Atlanta-Constitution reporter, the late Kathy Scruggs, who broke the FBI leak that the security guard who had become a national celebrity by detecting the deadly pipe bomb that had exploded at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics  was suspected of making the bomb himself. Though film reviewers usually register few rejections when films smear the deceased in pursuit of a more compelling narrative, “Richard Jewell’s” claim that Scruggs traded sex for the leak walked into the #MeToo buzzsaw, and on that basis alone, Clint’s movie was trashed  by reviewers and pundits alike.

Me Too, and I hadn’t seen it. I wrote in part,

I strongly doubt the average viewer passed on the film because it may have been unfair to a dead reporter. Who had the genius idea that releasing a film about the press’s abuse of a strange, sad, fat man played by an unknown actor would be a Christmas season hit? I had no interest in seeing the movie, and I’m an admirer of Eastwood and will cheer on any further proof of how rotten our journalism has become, but why pay to see the news media falsely try to destroy a security guard in 1996 when the same institution has been trying to destroy the President of the United States for three years?… So the news media was incompetent and vicious to Richard Jewell? That’s supposed to get me to the movie theater?

Nevertheless, let me be clear: I hate what the movie did to Kathy Scruggs, just as I detest it every time an individuals can’t defend themselves are lied about in a movie, misleading audiences and scarring their reputations….

Unless Eastwood had strong evidence that the reporter was trading sex for information, he should not have used her name. He owes the Scruggs family an apology, and I’m glad his movie is tanking.

Gee, the seats on the “Richard Jewell” Ethics Train Wreck are so comfy, and the fare on the snack car is excellent! Continue reading →

No, There’s Nothing Unethical About Performing Holograms Of Dead Singers…

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

…as long as they don’t materially misrepresent the performer or the performance. They may be icky, but they aren’t unethical. This is in ethical contrast with the Ethics Alarms position on zombie performers in films, as examined here several times, most recently upon the unveiling of zombie James Dean.

The issue has arisen because a holograph of Whitney Houston, mercifully in a form before her physical and vocal decline due to drug abuse, is touring the country. Here’s a review of one of the performances; Zombie Whitney will make her debut in the US soon. Big plus: she doesn’t have to worry about the Wuhan virus, just holograms of the Wuhan virus. Fans have been less than ecstatic, as much because of the quality of the image as the ickiness of the concept. Here’s part of one review: Continue reading →

“This Is Chris. Like So Many Journalists, He Suffers From Crippling Trump Derangement Syndrome, And Researchers Are Desperately Searching For The Cure. Won’t You Help?”

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

President  Trump addressed the nation once again  this morning on the latest developments with the Wuhan virus pandemic. At the White House briefing,   the President brought the public up to date on additional measures the federal government is taking to minimize the illness’s spread. He also said that he had taken a COVID-19 test himself after being near to at least one individual who tested positive for the illness. Ann Althouse, who tries mightily to be fair to Trump, opined that the conference was “quite good…in content and tone.” I saw the video, and agree: it was certainly the best of his briefings on the virus so far.

But you see, Los Angeles Time White House reporter  Chris Megerian couldn’t report that the President was clear, and that matters seemed as well in hand as possible. Like—what’s your guess, 90%? 95%?  99%?— of journalists in the mainstream media, Megarian entered the room presuming that the President would fall short, and was determined to find something in his words or demeanor that his readers would view in a negative light, with his professional assistance, of course. So what did he find?

This… Continue reading →

No, It’s Not “Cheating” Or Unfair For The DNC To Keep Tulsi Gabbard Out Of Upcoming Debates.

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The conservative media is trolling the Democrats over their likely exclusion of Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard from the upcoming Democratic candidates debates. They say that since Gabbard won a single delegate in the primary election in American Samoa (for heaven’s sake), this should get her an invitation to the next televised debate under the rules set out by the DNC. (I haven’t checked the rules, so I’m assuming they are being accurately represented. Since I don’t believe it matters what the rules say, I’m not going to take the time to check.)

DNC communications director Xochitl Hinojosa squished Tulsi’s hopes with this tweet:

Continue reading →

“Thank God It’s Friday!” Ethics Amen, 2/28/2020: Will Women Give Up Sports? Does Joe Biden Know What “Arrest” Means? Do Kids Really Think Sitting In The Car Is Fun?, And Other Important Questions…

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Amen to THAT…

1. Conservatism and nostalgia gone nuts...In the category of posts I don’t understand at all, right-ward blogger/pundit Megan Fox put up something called “8 Fun (and Possibly Dangerous) Activities Enjoyed by Past Generations That Today’s Kids Will Never Experience.” She said in her introduction of the paean to the good ol’ days, “Children are more coddled and protected than ever in 2019. For kids, it’s oppressive. I know mine listen to my stories of summers full of freedom and independence, running around the neighborhood all day until dark, with wide-eyed envy. These days, kids are hardly free to do anything we could back in generations past.”

But look what she chose…

  • “Play all day with no adult supervision, roaming neighborhoods and friends’ houses until dark”

We let out son do this, and I would do it today. There’s nothing stopping you. I’d strongly suggest waiting until the child is at least 10, though.

  • Ride in cars without seatbelts.

I don’t see how anyone can be nostalgic about something that got kids killed, abd what was so much fun about riding without seat belts anyway?

  • “The joy of phone calls” 

Okay, texting is more popular. But I see kids on the phone all the time (A school is almost next to our house.). If a kid really thinks phoning is a “joy,’ nothing is stopping her.

  • ” Lawn darts, rusty slides, dangerous park equipment”

Says Fox,

“At our neighborhood park, the slide was so high that it would make your stomach drop half way up the ladder…..  Nobody’s mommy came with them to the park. It was a sanctuary…Parks have been sanitized and de-riskified with padded ground and plastic, twisty slides that are so slow it seems pointless to even use them….Everything is super safe, and yet everyone’s mother is hovering. It makes no sense.”

There’s also a park just like the one she described within view of our house, yes, with moms (actually nannies) all around. The kids there seem to be having a lot of fun anyway.  All I remember from our local playground was coming home injured, sometimes badly. The only time I was ever beat up as a child was at that playground, because there were no adults around. What fun!

  • Hanging out at the mall in packs of 11- to 15-year-olds

Good riddance.

  • Buying cigarettes for a family member

What? Why is this  on the list?

  • Sitting in the car for up to an hour while Mom grocery shops

This is also a “What?” My parents never did that to us, and I don’t know why any responsible parent would. “Oh yes, we all did this,” says Fox.  “Back when I was a kid it was completely normal to have a parking lot full of kids in cars waiting for parents. No one thought this was a crime or weird at all. And we loved it!” She must be from Mars.

  • Babysitting

Babysitting was (and still is) a way to make money. Anyone who thought it was “fun” was weird.

Posts like this are among the reasons why conservatives have a bad reputation. Continue reading →

Oh-oh…Ethics Quote Of The Week: Joe Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

“My name’s Joe Biden, I’m a Democratic candidate for the United States senate—if you like what you see, help out, if not, vote for the other Biden”

Democratic candidate and gaffe grandmaster Joe Biden, speaking today, before tonight’s South Carolina debate,  to a South Carolina campaign crowd.

It isn’t that Biden’s statement has anything to do with ethics, whatever he was saying.  It’s that his bizarre pronouncement raises an immediate ethics issue. If we were playing “Ethics Password,” the announcer would say in hushed tones, “The password is fairness.” What is fair to Biden here, and how can I get past my biases to decide? I have believed for more than a decade that Biden is an idiot-savant with surprising political skills; I don’t believe you can say ridiculous and nonsensical things as often as he has for so long and not be inherently untrustworthy and more than a little addled. I also have found his demeanor, appearance and increasing tendency to speak in  gibberish of late evidence of precipitously declining faculties from a height that was never all that impressive to begin with.

And yet I am in favor of  giving any politician, disk jockey or improv comic the benefit of the doubt, because I know the perils of speaking extemporaneously from first-hand experience. Thus the question is, how eager should we be to shrug off this latest jaw-dropper from Biden as the natural and forgivable result of flying around the country and its inevitable “If this is Tuesday, it must be Saginaw” confusion? Is it just a particularly egregious example of wacky old Joe being wacky old Joe, and thus an occurrence where the Julie Principle is in play, or, in the worst case, is this latest head-scratcher so close to the former VP showing up nude with a duck on his head that an intervention is called for?

Help me out here.

 

Introducing Rationalization 38B: Excessive Accountability, or “He’s Suffered Enough.”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

This is a new 38B, requiring the old one, Joe Biden’s Inoculation or “I don’t deny that I do this!”, to be relabeled 38C. I was tempted to call it “The Lost Rationalization,” because while Ethics Alarms has frequently rejected the argument that he, she or they have “suffered enough,” and even called it a rationalization, it never made its way onto the Rationalizations List.

“He’s suffered enough” is a very close relative of #38 A.“Mercy For Miscreants”:

The theory behind this sub-rationalization is that it is only fair to assign a criticism quota to groups and individuals: at a certain point, no more criticism is allowed, because nobody should have to be criticized that much. It is so darn mean to keep heaping abuse on someone, even if they deserve it.

But while 38 A focuses on criticism, 38 B is about limiting punishment. The “he’s suffered enough” rationalization has arisen most notably in the tragic cases where a parent has negligently allowed an infant or small child to perish in a locked car. Local prosecution of such individuals is strikingly inconsistent, and when no legal consequences follow, the justification is usually Rationalization 38 B.

What I wrote the first time I analyzed these cases, in the 2010 post  Ethics, Punishment and the Dead Child in the Back Seat thatI also quoted extensively here, encompassed a thorough description of the rationalization. (I also re-posted yet another essay on this topic from 2014 just last July).

Upon checking, I discovered that in yet another post from 2012, I referred to “he’s suffered enough” as a common rationalization without putting it in the list. Reviewing that post and the earlier one, I have arrived at this description of the latest rationalization. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Quiz: Plot E”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The quiz about the American military cemetery of shame in France provoked many varying opinions, none more eloquently expressed than this Comment of the Day by JutGory.

I only post quizzes when I am at least somewhat unsure of the ethics call. My position in the post was in response to the blogger’s argument in favor of giving the graves headstones, which I felt was unpersuasive. I’m not sure Jut has changed my mind, but his points are much, much better.

Here is JutGory’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Quiz: Plot E”: Continue reading →

Oh, No! Not The Seat Reclining Ethics Debate Again!

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

I saw Ann Althouse’s post about a seat reclining dust-up on American Airlines, and immediately decided that the issue wasn’t worth posting about, since in my view, the ethical choice is clear. Then the issue exploded all over cable news and the web, so here I am. It would be so much easier if more people read Ethics Alarms.

A woman had posted on Twitter mid-flight:

She attached the video. Many of Ann’s commenters opined that the woman was a “jackhole” herself (for some reason I’ve never liked that term) for videotaping him and sending his face hither and yon rather than having a civilized discussion with him. How the flight attendant could justify siding with a jerk who was punching a seat, I cannot fathom. Now “Wendi” says she is considering suing American.

I addressed this issue in 2014, in the context of a product called “The Knee Defender,” which a jackhole could install to prevent the seat in front of you on a plane from reclining. I was pretty ticked off about it, too. In fact, I got on a roll: Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Plot E

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

The Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial is an American military cemetery in northern France consisting of four main burial plots, labeled A, B, C and D, containing the remains of 6,012 service personnel who died during World War II.

There is also a secret Plot E. It lies about a hundred yards away from the cemetery, and  contains the remains of 96 American soldiers who were executed by hanging or firing squad for serious crimes committed during or shortly after World War II. Collectively, they were responsible for the murders of 26 American soldiers and the murder or rapes of 71 British, French, German, Italian, Polish and Algerian civilians.

Plot E was established in 1949 to contain the remains of what the Graves Registration call “the dishonored dead.” It was deliberately hidden from view,  surrounded by hedges and located in a forest. Officially, Plot E does not exist. The plot  is not mentioned on the cemetery’s website or in any maps brochures.

The dead have small flat stone markers the size of index cards: no names, just sequential numbers engraved in black. Individual graves are supposed to be impossible to identify. It was not until 2009 that a Freedom of Information request obtained the full list of those buried in Plot E, and the names can now be found on-line, most notably on Wikipedia. One name of note is Louis Till (that’s his marker above) , the father of the 14 year old Chicago teen lynched for “looking at a white woman” while visiting Mississippi.

Darren Smith, Jonathan Turley’s weekend blogger on Res Ipsa Loquitur, argues regarding the strange and cruel burial ground:

[I]n addition to what is at least in my view a human right to a proper and named burial, a historical aspect is sacrificed in the anonymous enumeration of the dead whose history becomes lost to oblivion…[A]t what point does the punishment end? In the case of death of a convicted person is the sentencing extended to eternity through the erasure of the convicted from the human consciousness? Must they fall into oblivion? We would be rather callous to think that these men did not have children, parents, or siblings and were erasable…

[Former Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War Robert] McNamara lamented how [ General ] Curtis LeMay proposed that if their side lost the war, they would be tried as war criminals. “And we were”, according to McNamara “acting like war criminals” in area bombing Japanese cities. The justification to this is of course based on one’s perspective and certainly which side of the pond they were born upon. Yet there was a great amount of evil done at that time, but it was often the leaders and policy makers who justified such actions who are honored with their own large memorials. Yet these ninety-six Dishonored Dead are ordinary soldiers, [have] no right to be named, it seems. Or perhaps these Dishonored Dead present a topic of a perpetual embarrassment to the American Military or government, one that is best forgotten. It is a hard pill to swallow that among the millions who served honorably, there were at least a hundred who acted with evil intent and greatly unbecoming a professional soldier. Yet given the aging population of those serving, I very much doubt that any living military personnel of WWII today can truly argue they suffer any affront resultant from the naming of these men. Seventy years ago, yes–today I think time has healed that wound.

We would not pardon these men’s crimes by granting them a proper burial, with name and epitaph afforded all other soldiers. But they at least deserve to be known.

Do they?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz is…

Is there a valid and persuasive ethical reason to provide marked graves and accessible burial sites for the executed residents of Plot E?

Continue reading →