Question:
What is the monetary value of something that can’t be sold?
Answer:
Nothing.
That’s an easy one.
So why is the IRS claiming that the heirs of the New York art dealer Ileana Sonnabend owe $29.2 million in taxes on an art work that U.S. prevents from ever being converted into cash? Continue reading
The Penn State disease is not restricted to colleges. Now there comes a lawsuit showing how ugly it is when the contagion hits a high school.
The Southern Columbia Tigers are a real high school football power in Pennsylvania, and naturally the Southern Columbia Area School District and Southern Columbia Area High School Principal James A. Becker wouldn’t do anything to change that…like, for example, barring two rapists from playing on the team when they were so good at scoring the legal way, as well as…well, you know.
A law suit filed by “C.S.” in Federal Court alleges that the school district and high school principal protected two star student athletes after it had been proven in court that they had sexually assaulted the girl, a student at the school as well. From the complaint: Continue reading
Savanah Dietrich, teen rape victim facing charges for refusing to protect the privacy of her rapists,
One of the Ethics Alarms principles that many find infuriating is my position that violating the law is inherently unethical. Like all rules, this one doesn’t make sense in all cases, and one of them has surfaced in Louisville, Kentucky.
Savanah Dietrich, a 17-year-old rape victim, was infuriated when her teenaged rapists managed to negotiate a lenient plea bargain for sexually assaulting her and circulating pictures of the incident to friends. She took to Twitter, named them and described what they did to her, despite being under a confidentiality order from the judge in the case. Her attackers were juveniles, and the court records were sealed. Now Dietrich is facing a jail sentence longer than her rapists, because their attorneys have asked a Jefferson District Court judge to hold her in contempt. Continue reading
At the Sun Valley Lodge, there is a television station devoted to playing the 1941 film “Sun Valley Serenade” on a loop. It is a genuinely awful movie, starring John Payne of “Miracle on 34th Street” fame, Norwegian ice skater Sonia Henie, and Milton Berle, although it does show the famous ski resort in the days when guests used to be towed around the slopes on their skis by horses. Last time I was in Sun Valley to give a presentation, I watched about half the film in disconnected bites, since I never can sleep on such trips. This time I finally saw the whole thing. At about 3 AM, as Glenn Miller was leading his band in the longest version of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” in history, Fayard and Harold Nicholas suddenly flipped onto the screen, and Sun Valley Serenade briefly went from fatuous to immortal.
If your reflex response to that last sentence was “WHO??“, you are part of the reason for this post, and also in the vast and deprived majority of Americans. As I went among my future audience of lawyers and their spouses yesterday morning, happily informing them that the terrible movie playing around the clock in their rooms included the dance team called “the unforgettable Nicholas Brothers” in more than one tribute, I learned that none of them had any idea what I was talking about, and many of these individuals were old enough to have been able to see Fayard and Harold in a theater. The Nicholas Brothers were, you see, the greatest tap-dancers who ever lived, and the most amazing dance team that ever will be. Continue reading
Now that I think about it, nobody gets shot in Pixar movies. I wonder if movies about violence vigilantes need to be regulated…
He just couldn’t help himself. Learning of the horrible Batman theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado, ABC reporter Brian Ross got on the air and reported a possible “tea party link” with the killer, James Holmes, and if you don’t think this sent a thrill up his leg, I have some gold mine shares to sell you. Anything to smear conservatives: why was he looking at tea party web pages, any more than PETA sites, or Parcheesi fan sites? Because, you see, the tea parties are violent—don’t you remember? They inspired that guy to shoot Gaby Giffords! Where else would you expect to find a madman killer?
It was fantasy, of course, and Ross and ABC duly apologized, but never mind: it worked. Confirmation bias is a sure thing. I was in a Food Court at LAX today, and heard someone at the table next to me eating similar unidentifiable swill say, “Did you hear? One of those tea party guys shot all those people!” I finally got to my room in Sun Valley (it was easier to get to Mongolia than Sun Valley) to check what she was talking about. So you see, Brian? Mission accomplished!
Others are politicizing the Aurora shooting in only slightly less outrageous ways, mostly with the sadly predictable rush of anti-gun advocates to point to the slaughter and say, “See? Guns bad.” Then comes the related cognitive dissonance trick, linking gun rights to automatic weapons to madmen and criminals using such weapons to the tragic deaths resulting from said use, hence Republicans and conservatives are really allied with killers and murderers, which gives us some insight into their true character.
I’m sure Brian Ross approves.
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Facts: Huffington Post
Graphic: Shout Omaha
It’s good to have the old maverick doing what he does best.
“Bachmann!”
Rep. Michele Bachmann, Minnesota’s shame, used her oxymoronic presence on the House Intelligence Committee to argue in a June letter to the State Department and a letter this week to fellow Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison, that Huma Abedin, the top aide of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, may be a security risk because Abedin’s late father, mother, and brother had or have connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. Abedin’s position, Bachmann suggested ominously, ‘‘affords her routine access to the secretary and policy-making.’’ Her letter to Ellison was signed by five other Republicans: Reps. Trent Franks of Arizona, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Thomas Rooney of Florida and Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia.
Sen McCain angrily took to the Senate floor to call this example of ethnic profiling and Muslim bigotry what it is: Continue reading
Arts blogger Jeremy Barker contributes a provocative counter-argument to my stance in the controversy over a D.C. based theater company that borrowed/adapted/stole an original production concept from a New York company without attribution or permission. My position was (and is) that no rule, principle or law designed to discourage such conduct could avoid suffocating legitimate adaptations, mutations and new uses of ideas devised by others, with devastating effects on creative expression. This is one of the great ethics controversies in the world of art, and I am glad to see it back in the ring.
Here is Jeremy’s Comment of the Day on my post, “The Ice Child” and Staging Theft Ethics.
“Jack–I just came across this piece and wanted to respond because I think, in quoting me, you ignore part of my argument, and I’m curious if you can clarify your perspective.
“Specifically, I feel like your caveated argument in favor of Factory 449 is based on the sense that it’s common practice to borrow such design or staging elements in text-based theater. I agree, it is. But if we were speaking of a specific author’s text, I think most commenters would have swung the other way. We tend to protect the playwright’s text in a different fashion than we do a design concept. A writer could be accused on plagiarism for either (a) imitating a distinctive plot, or (b) appropriating the same words. Yes, we can argue about what is an acceptable form of “referencing” (no one thinks Arthur Laurents wrote Romeo & Juliet, for instance) and what crosses the line. Often, this applies to how the text is used. But we understand and appreciate a playtext as a protected, distinctive thing.
“Indeed, I’d argue that this logic, which privileges the text, is the basis on which people in this thread are defending Factory 449′s appropriation. Since it wasn’t the same “play,” by which they mean “play text,” it’s not really the same thing, ergo, it’s not ripping someone off wholesale. Continue reading
Yes, I think posting this photo is a lousy thing to do to your dog, too.
The stories come out routinely, and the opposing opinions are predictable. A boorish date dumps a woman via arrogant e-mail, which is promptly forwarded to thousands, making him a national laughing stock and pariah. A movie star sends an angry and mean-spirited message to his teenage daughter, who places it in the hands of the celebrity-devouring media…which then use it to savage the star’s reputation. A Harvard law student takes an e-mail sent by a friend and fellow-student as a follow-up to a contentious discussion about race, and forwards it to minority advocates on campus, who then condemn the “friend” as a racist. A model live-tweets her encounter with the married actor sitting next to her on a flight, as he engages in awkward flirtation. In each case, defenders of the punitive distributor of the embarrassing communication argue that the victim deserved it, while critics of the conduct insist that it is a betrayal of privacy and trust.
We need to decide, as a culture, whether we believe that reasonable expectations of privacy should be respected or not; indeed, whether they should survive or not. Those who endorse, defend and encourage the kind of conduct in these incidents and many more are, whether they realize it or not, fouling the nest of our national culture and community, making not just privacy, but also friendship and intimacy, almost impossible. Continue reading
“OH, you mean the one with the word “Column” at the beginning?”
—-Jon Dawson, alleged columnist for the Kinston Free Press, in snotty response to my query regarding his fake story that prompted my recent post, “Ethics Train Wreck in a Little Tea Pot.” I asked if his story was a hoax.
Yeah, you’re right…if I had seen the photo first, I might have been more suspicious….
I guess his answer means yes. I also guess somebody ought to tell all the other local news and city beat columnists around the country that the heading “column” by their names is supposed to be understood as “Don’t believe a thing I say.” Someone should also let national writers like E.J. Dionne, Robert Samuelson, Kathleen Parker, John Avlon, Andrew Sullivan…anyone with a column, really…that their brand of punditry and journalism is supposed to be assumed to be satirical and tongue-in-cheek, because “column” gives proper notice that the “facts” the column contains are likely to be hooey.
Back when I lived in Boston, there was a city beat columnist I enjoyed and read often. He was clever and funny, and his specialty was local Boston stories. His name is Mike Barnacle. He’s not in Boston any more: they ran him out of town for making up stories or embellishing them with phony facts. (He is now seen on MSNBC, where facts are beside the point.) I thought they were a bit rough on Mike in Boston, and I wonder why he didn’t inform his paper that the fact that he wrote a “column” gave him leave to test the gullibility of his readers every day. Continue reading
Take ’em or leave ’em.
The Miami Herald reports that Robert Maurius Reno, a younger brother of former U.S Attorney General Janet Reno has died. In lieu of flowers, the family is asking friends to give to the Obama campaign –“even if they are Republicans.”
Wrong. Ethics foul.
I know that the Obama campaign has been promoting its tasteless brainstorm of encouraging wedding invitees and birthday celebrants to give money to the campaign rather than a gift, but this is emotional extortion. A citizen has a right to his or her own political activity, and short of using logic, facts and the power of persuasion to prompt a shift in loyalties, it is an abuse of the power of friendship and a misuse of sympathy to exploit a death to make someone give support to a cause, a party or a candidate that he or she would normally oppose.
If a family can compel Republicans to give to the campaign of a Democratic candidate, then it can use a family death to make an anti-abortion advocate give to Planned Parenthood, an Orthodox Jew contribute to Hamas, and a Red Sox fan buy a season ticket to watch the Yankees. This turns a generous and normal desire to show respect for the deceased and support for the grieving family into a trap to make mourners choose between violating their core beliefs and rejecting the wishes of the family.
The device is unfair, unmannerly, offensive and crude, and places politics over friendship and good taste. So is Obama’s birthday and wedding registry scheme, but that only crossed an ethical line, while this obliterates it. Republican or Democrat, if you’re going to try this strong-arm tactic on me, don’t expect to see me at the funeral.
Or anywhere, for that matter. And I might just give double to the other side.
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Pointer: James Taranto
Facts: Miami Herald
Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at jamproethics@verizon.net.
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