fairness

The Great American Hindsight Hero

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Mark Wahlberg, awash in delusions of competence

Actor Mark Wahlberg has already apologized, but it’s too late: he has ascended into the Valhalla of Ethics Alarms icons, and henceforth those who repeat his offense will be referred to here, and undoubtedly elsewhere, as having “done a Wahlberg” or perhaps, for simplicity’s sake, “wahlberged.”

The act of proclaiming, after a disaster or misfortune, how an individual involved could have prevented the situation has always been infuriating. My father’s favorite term for the practice was “Monday morning quarterbacking,” and he despised it. Psychologists identify the roots of the phenomenon as hindsight bias, but it’s more pernicious than that. What Mark Wahlberg did, however, is worse still: not only second-guessing those involved, but announcing that he personally would have saved the day if he had been there. Mix Monday morning quarterbacking and hindsight bias, blend in a distorted belief in one’s own ability to handle difficult situations that caused others to fail, add the eagerness to blame someone and make them feel as guilty and incompetent as possible, and add dashes of arrogance, lack of empathy and unfairness, and you have it: a perfect Wahlberg soufflé! Continue reading →

The “I Have A Dream” Speech Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Dr. King's familiy says this was a "performance" not a speech. Funny: I thought he was just speaking the truth. I guess I was dreaming.

Take Martin Luther King Day, turn right at the “Stopping Online Piracy Act” (SOPA/ PIPA) protests, and you get to the ridiculous fact that you are breaking the law anytime you circulate a recording or video of the Martin Luther King’s immortal “I Have A Dream” speech.

Through a baroque combination of expediency, legal maneuvers, luck and greed, this vital part of American thought, rhetoric, culture and history is restricted by the copyright laws, and will not be in the public domain until 2037, or more than 70 years after King’s words were spoken in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Now, under SOPA/PIPA, if it passes, any educational website that includes a video of the King Video could be taken down by the Feds, but that’s a side issue. I am no expert on the bill, but you can brief yourself on what all the fuss is about here, here, here, and here, the bill itself. Similarly, if I tried to explain the legal process by which courts agreed that a critical chapter in American history should be unavailable to Americans unless they pay a fee, it would 1) bore you stiff, 2) confuse you, and 3) probably be wrong. So I recommend this post by Alex Pasternak over at Motherboard, who does a great job laying out the whole, tortuous, tragic story.

I’ll concentrate on the ethics train wreck feature, of which the basic elements are these: Continue reading →

Recent Race Card Rankings: Trying Out The Knight Scale

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I can see Michael Moore from here!

Ethics Alarms recently proposed the Knight Scale, a way to rank attempts to play the race card or otherwise accuse politicians, satirists, writers, pundits and others of racism in order to silence them, ruin their credibility, or score cheap political points in the media. The Knight Scale was made possible by blogger Christopher Knight, who somehow managed to find a cartoonist’s substitution of Michelle Obama for Marie Antoinette ( as a commentary on the First Lady’s ill-timed–some say—taste for lavish parties and social activities) in a famous painting. Despite the fact that the French queen was not, to my knowledge, black, Knight somehow found this to be blatant racism, thereby establishing the tippity-top of the Knight Scale: you just can’t come up with a more far-fetched, unfair, factually indefensible accusation of racism than that. With that outrageous complaint as a 10, the most outrageous, where would other, necessarily lesser bogus racism claims rank?

Let’s look at last week. From here on, we can count on an ever-increasing number of Knight Scale candidates, since an African-American President  presents such an irresistible temptation for unscrupulous race-baiters, and the entire Obama Administration is seemingly conditioned to cry race bias whenever criticism get hot, so consider this a trial run: Continue reading →

“Ask Amy” Tackles A Classic—And Misses

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Advice columnist Amy (of the syndicated column “Ask Amy”), was just asked one of those questions that every advice maven has to have in their files, with the perfect answer ready to go. If Amy had her answer prepared, it was  the wrong one.

The question was the deathless classic, “I just found out my husband has been having an affair with a married co-worker. Should I tell the other spouse?”

Amy gets it half right: she tells the reader that the other spouse has a right to know; that this is not a case of meddling because the reader is directly involved in the betrayal; and that not to make sure the other spouse learns the truth would now be abetting the deception. All true. BUT…

…Amy forgets the Golden Rule as it applies to the reader’s husband’s adulterous lover (yes, the rule still applies to busted wrongdoers) and the whistleblowers obligation to minimize needless harm. She tells the victimized wife to spill the beans to the victimized husband.

Wrong.

The adulterous wife deserves the opportunity to tell her husband herself. That would allow her to reveal the affair to her spouse with the least damage to the marriage, and providing that opportunity to her is kind and fair. Amy should have told her reader to contact her husband’s paramour and say this: “I will be calling your husband and telling him about your relationship with my husband in three days. You should tell him the truth yourself, and then all he needs to say to me when I call is, ‘Yes, she told me.’ But if you haven’t told him, he’ll hear it all from me.”

File it away, Amy, and get it right the next time.

Romney, Firing, Leadership, and Ethics Bob’s Lament

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Yes, yes, firing people is one thing Donald Trump does well too. Shut up.

Ethics Bob Stone sent in a comment late last night that I replied to, but that I think deserves more discussion, on several points. Responding to my Ethics Hero designation for Ron Paul for coming to his adversary’s defense over Romney’s now infamous remark about firing people, Bob wrote:

“…I think Romney’s “I like to fire people”–even taken IN context–displays an inner heartlessness. I know about creative destruction, and I myself have taken actions to lay off people, and even fired a couple face-to-face. I did what needed to be done. No apologies.

“But did I like it? I HATED it.

“Romney’s comment seems of a kind with his strapping the family dog on his car roof for a 500-mi trip, or his advocacy of breaking up families to deport the parent or child who’s illegal. Gingrich was right.”

There are several issues here, some minor. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Rep. Ron Paul

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

The identity of Mitt Romney's knight in shining armor was a surprise, but it shouldn't have been.

Ron Paul is, to engage in understatement, unusual, and often in a good way. How many politicians, for example, will actively defend their adversary in a campaign  right before a critical vote? Yet that’s what Ron Paul did, defending Mitt Romney, his main competition for the GOP presidential nomination, after Romney had blooped a line that will undoubtedly haunt him for a long time. “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me,” Romney had said. “You know, if someone doesn’t give me the good service I need, I want to say ‘You know, I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.” It was predictable that the line would be truncated and taken out of context, and it was…by the press, by Jon Huntsman, by Rick Perry. It will surely be used against Romney by President Obama, who has adopted the position that people should be able to hold on to jobs whether they do them well or not— Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano, for example. But Paul would have none of it, saying,

“I think this is just typical politics and they’re unfairly attacking him on that issue,” Paul said outside a polling place at Webster School in Manchester. “He never literally said what they say he said. They’re taking him way out of context.”

Paul also defended Romney’s history as CEO at Bain Capital, the subject of a new attack video by Newt Gingrich, as an example of the free market working properly. “You save companies, you save jobs when you reorganize companies that are going to go bankrupt,” Paul said. “They [the critics] don’t understand.” Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Is This Racism, or Just Business?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The Mother Jones headline is designed to provoke a gasp: George Lucas: Hollywood Didn’t Want To Fund My Film Because Of Its Black Cast.

The headline is literally accurate. Lucas tells the magazine that he had trouble finding backers for “Red Tails,” his upcoming film about the fabled Tuskegee airmen, because the studios told him that films without white protagonists didn’t draw a wide enough audience, especially overseas, to make his film a good investment for them. Presuming that the film-makers know their business—and presuming their real reason for rejecting Lucas was not that the movies he’s produced lately were god awful, —Lucas’s story raises this Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz Question, which you may answer if you dare:

Is a studio that refuses to fund a movie with an all-black cast engaging in racism, or just practicing business responsibly? Continue reading →

The Knight Scale

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I love extremes, especially the bottom of the barrel. Once we can agree on the worst of the worst, everything else can be ranked from there. I was once in a community theater production of “Sugar,” the stage musical version of “Some Like It Hot,” that was so hilariously messed-up that I was excited about it; I was certain that it would finally set the elusive rock bottom for the worst theatrical production of all time. For example, the actress playing the Marilyn Monroe part had gained about 40 pounds during rehearsals, and the actor playing the tap-dancing gangster was recovering from a heart attack, and could barely move. Sadly, the show was cancelled before it could open. I’ve seen a lot of dogs since then, but nothing close to the disaster that “Sugar” would have been.

<sigh>

This is why I am so grateful for Los Angeles Times blogger Christopher Knight’s demented post claiming that a satirical cartoon above (first published on the right-wing blog Gateway Pundit) is “baldly racist.” Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Sydney’s Expressive Yearbook Photo

/ Jack Marshall / 88 Comments

My high school was never like this.

The photo above, believe it or not, was submitted to the Durango (Colorado) High School Yearbook as the senior photo of one Sydney Spies. The yearbook staff rejected it as inappropriate, and young Sydney is crying foul, saying that her First Amendment rights have been violated. Opinions differ on what message her photo was intended to convey. Suffice it to say that “Well, it’s late! I think I’ll go finish my algebra homework, read the Wall Street Journal and turn in!” is not one of the popular options.

Your Question in this week’s Ethics Quiz: Which party is in the wrong here? Continue reading →

Comment of the Day on “The NAACP’s ‘Gotcha!’ Games”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

"GOTCHA!"

An exchange between a spirited newcomer to Ethics Alarms, Roger, and me led to this Comment of the Day by Proam [ whom I keep meaning to ask whether his screen name is pronounced “Proam, ” and in “foam,” or “Pro-Am” } Here is his complex take: I’ll have a response at the end. Proam’s Comment of the Day on “The NAACP’s “Gotcha!” Games” :

“My $.02: the NAACP’s and Roger’s objections to what Santorum said are valid “gotchas.”

“It matters neither what Santorum really meant, nor what is the sum of Santorum’s character and values (call that his “heart”). What he uttered (“blacks”), insofar as how it matters to certain recipients, is off-putting and alarming, regardless of its timing, place, vehemence, or other quality, and therefore must matter to all recipients. It was worse than “lazy;” it betrayed a lack of sensitivity that others have (and are justified and deserving in having) about a matter of justice. It only takes one word – even part of one word; even no words at all but some other fleeting sound or sight, like a raised eyebrow – for one to make oneself clear, even clearer than ever had been intended, or than ever could be communicated with many words. Continue reading →