fairness

Ethics Quiz: “Don’t Eat The Daisies” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I’m trying to take a breather from the Syrian refugees, President Obama, Presidential candidates and rampaging college students, and an ethics issue from a 1960 Doris Day comedy is as far away as I can get.

In “Don’t Eat the Daisies,” a movie loosely (very loosely) based on the humorous mommy anecdote best seller by Jean Kerr, wife of then New York Times  theater critic Walter Kerr, newly appointed prime drama critic Larry McKay (David Niven), his lovely wife Kate (Doris), their four rambunctious kids, their sheep dog and their wise-cracking house-keeper (Patsy Kelly)—yes, this was essentially the “Brady Bunch” without the girls—move to the country. Doris gets roped into the annual musical (for charity, natch) of the very amateur Hooten Holler Players. They ask the Larry for a play they could use, and he isn’t very helpful, so Doris calls up Alfred North, an old friend of the couple and a successful novelist played by Richard Haydn, best known as the sneaky Max in “The Sound of Music,” who has just had his first Broadway play skewered by McKay (Integrity! Integrity!). He is secretly seething and seeking revenge. The betrayed playwright siezes his chance: he sends Doris an obscure, terrible Foriegn Legion melodrama by an unknown author, and the Hooten Holler players turn it into a musical spoof.

Days before its ready to open, after all the tickets have been sold, Doris asks David to watch a rehearsal. He immediately recognizes the plot and some particularly awful lines: he wrote the  play under a pseudonym! “BWAHAHAHAH!” laughs Max, or rather Alfred. Larry’s  onetime friend, now relentless foe, has set the critic up for humiliation and professional doom, for other New York critics have been tipped off that the play getting its world premiere by the Hooten Holler Players is in fact the creation of the hypercritical critic himself. Once this abysmal mess is seen and taken apart by the critic’s rivals, his judgment will never be taken seriously again.

Niven demands that the production be cancelled, and forbids the Players to perform his work. Doris, who stars in the play, begs him to reconsider: the humble theater group will be ruined, and the charity will lose much needed support. The critic explodes: why does she care more about the amateur theater group than her husband’s career? She tells him that his theatrical power and fame has made him petty and mean. Their marriage seems ready to disintegrate.

Your retro-Hollywood Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is..

What’s going on here, and what do you do about it?

Continue reading →

When A President’s Words Are So Unethical There Is An Obligation To Condemn Them…And Him

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

obama-angryI have previously referenced President Obama’s outrageous—and I know I may use outrageous hyperbolically at times, but this really was outrageous—twice in recent posts without focusing on it specifically. However, since I believe it might be the single most petulant, unfair, dishonest, un-Presidential public statement ever uttered by any U.S. Chief Executive—certainly abroad—attention must be paid. Obama’s statement reflects directly on his character and leadership.

It is signature significance regarding Obama’s arrogance and narcissism, and more important for those analyzing what went so horribly wrong in his quest for “Hope and Change,” it is decisive evidence rebutting the default excuse offered by Obama’s unshakable supporters that he has been the innocent victim of a Republican Congress that would not work with him. It is the President’s duty to work with Congress, which means that while individual members may say impolitic things about him, it is counter-productive and incompetent for the President to issue blanket insults to the opposition party that he must negotiate with. Every effective President has understood this. Obama has never understood it, and the nation has suffered as a result.

It must have felt good for Obama to say, in a press conference in France…

“These are the same folks who suggested they’re so tough that just talk to Putin or staring down ISIL [will work] … but they’re scared of widows and orphans… First they were worried the press was too tough on them in the debates, now they’re worried about 3-year old orphans. That doesn’t sound very tough to me.”

A competent President knows when his personal, inner asshole must be switched to silent, however. Such a statement would set off an ethics screening alarm in the brain of any non-totalitarian leader—you know, the kind who doesn’t have to care what anyone else thinks—while it was still being composed  and before it vomited out of the mouth….anyone but Obama, apparently. This really is going rogue, and nothing Sarah Palin ever said in public was as inappropriate, in part because she wasn’t the President at the time and could afford to mouth off.

Let’s identify  the internal ethical breaches here as well as the macro one, which is that Obama was in a foreign country, and it is always wrong to use a foreign stage to attack other elected officials from the U.S. (He has done this before.) Moreover, Obama’s political opposition was not the topic at hand nor what he was supposed to be focusing on. Paris and France had just suffered a devastating tragedy at the hands of ISIS terrorists, but what Obama was really upset about was that his refugee resettlement plan was being attacked at home. This wasn’t about him, in other words, but with pathological narcissists, everything is about them.

As for the statement itself.. Continue reading →

Message To An Unethical Teacher: Children Are Not Your Guinea Pigs

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments
No LEGOS for YOU!

No LEGOS for YOU!

Fire this teacher now.

Karen Keller, a kindergarten teacher at Captain Johnston Blakely Elementary on Bainbridge Island, Washington, think it is her role to use 5 year olds for her own social science experiment. She’s wrong. But then, she’s wrong about so much, and so arrogant about it. If she is allowed to continue her abusive manipulation of her young charges without being stopped, reprimanded, or given a pink slip, the negligent parents of her victims must carry the blame. Every now and then a teacher will go power mad and run amuck—I had one of those. There is no excuse for not acting quickly before someone gets hurt.

Keller has decided that it is her mission in life to combat what some studies show to be lower spatial and math skills development among girls as a group, as compared to boys. Thus she has decided to forbid boys from playing with LEGOS during the “unstructured play period” of 40 minutes that the kindergarten day includes. Keller told a local paper that it drove her crazy  that the girls wanted to play with dolls while boys flocked to the plastic building system, so she decided to take action to erase those gender-based proclivities. “Until girls get it into their system that building is cool, building is ‘what I want to do’ — I want to protect that.”

Want to fire her yet?

How about this statement…

“I always tell the boys, ‘You’re going to have a turn’ — and I’m like, ‘Yeah, when hell freezes over’ in my head,” she said. “I tell them, ‘You’ll have a turn’ because I don’t want them to feel bad.”

Now do you want to fire her? Continue reading →

On Immigration, Speech Suppression, War, Terrorism, Police and More, It’s Cultural Death By Compassion Poisoning

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Think of the children!Compassion is a wonderful thing. A nation cannot govern or even survive, however, using compassion as its guiding ethical principle. The United States currently seems hell bent on disproving this fact, and is well on the way to confirming it. It is too bad that this is true, and we should all agree that it’s  a damn shame that you can’t run a successful democracy without periodically inflicting pain, creating suffering and harming some human beings in order that many more can live in peace and pursue their lawful ambitions and desires. Nonetheless, that is an immutable fact of existence. Government policy that attempts to deny it is not merely incompetent and naive, but ultimately suicidal. A culture that elevates compassion above all other values like responsibility, accountability, prudence, process and proportion is betting everything on the inherent goodness and rationality of humanity. History tells us it’s a losing bet.

When I woke up to the horrible news of the Paris attacks, and after I had finished simultaneous laughing and crying about the fact that President Obama picked yesterday to proclaim that the threat of ISIS had been “contained,” it suddenly occurred to me that the majority of the crises this nation struggles with today are  linked by the same cultural and leadership malady. The United States increasingly is unwilling to accept the reality that governance is utilitarian, and that punishment, deterrence, sacrifice, pain, retaliation and accountability are indispensable tools that must be used and used unapologetically. The alternative is chaos, and chaos is what we are facing.

An impressive number of these crises have been in the news this week: Continue reading →

One Ethics Observation On The Fox Business-WSJ Republican Candidates’ Debate.

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

debate GOP

That was  professional,  unbiased, fair debate moderation.

Maria Bartiromo, Gerard Baker and Neil Cavuto made it look easy.

This should be a template for all future debates in either party, and between the eventual nominees.

And bravo to Neil Cavuto for his mild, pointed and well-deserved shot at his predecessors at CNBC in closing For once, a debate was about the candidates and not the moderators.

May it always be thus.

Ben Carson’s Stories

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

ben-carson

The prevailing political foofaraw right now involves Ben Carson’s account, in his 1990 autobiography, regarding a phantom “offer” to attend West Point. Before some analysis, a word or two..

Ben Carson has no business running for President. His supporters are irresponsible and deluded. I was just on WGAN (Maine) on Arthur King’s show, and Carson was discussed. A Carson supporting caller took issue with my statement that he was flat out unqualified for office whatever had been said to him about West Point, and protested that he was a brilliant surgeon, and successfully managed his surgical team. We ran out of time, and I didn’t get to say, “So what?” Is Ned Yost a potential President because he successfully managed a baseball team to a World Series victory? Yost’s training and experience have as much correlation to political leadership as Carson’s, and arguably more. Carson has no qualifications for high office. He is easily the least qualified candidate in either field, with no management experience, no political talents, weak speaking skills, negligible presence, irrelevant education and training, and terrible political instincts. You could throw a rutabaga  into a crowd and have a good chance of hitting someone who would be a more promising President.

Wrote J. Christian Adams succinctly about the current controversy,

“[T]he incident reveals a recurring and perhaps unrecoverable trait of candidate Carson.  He just doesn’t seem to know what he is talking about, whether it be Cuba, the Voting Rights Act, or how West Point works.”

Yes, and that too.

So if this typical example of the news media blowing a relatively minor incident out of proportion because a Republican poses a threat to Democratic domination should result in Carson’s demise, good. Something has to. It is wrong, another example the double standard we are all used to; and the news media should be called on it hard. Still, if it ends the embarrassing distraction that is Ben Carson, I’m not weeping. The ends don’t justify unethical means, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy the ends anyway.

Let us pretend that Carson is a competent, qualified and deserving candidate for President, just to try to strip the bias away. How significant and serious are Carson’s various misrepresentations?

These all arise from what Carson wrote about his youth and early years in 1990, 25 years ago, when running for President wasn’t a twinkle in his eye. He…heck, we can’t pretend, because a competent candidate would be smart and experienced enough to say,

“You know, I didn’t expect anyone to read the book, I wrote most of it off the top of my head, my memory was faulty, I didn’t check the facts and I should have. The West Point story is typical. To me, it sounded like I was being told that I could get into West Point if I wanted to, and that I wouldn’t have to pay tuition, which to me meant a scholarship. I wasn’t trying to fool anybody then or now. I’m sorry. I’ve learned a lot in 25 years. I know most of our personal memories are distorted over time, and cannot be relied upon; mistakes like these turn up to varying degrees in all personal accounts. Bill Clinton says he remembered lots of church burning in Arkansas when he was growing up. Hillary Clinton said she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, who didn’t become famous for climbing Mount Everest until six years after was born. The difference between my memory flawa and theirs was that mine can’t be attributed to political dissembling. Next question.”

If he had said that, then his other statements that didn’t check out could be explained the same way, and reasonably so. Instead, Carson and his defenders are denying, accusing, double-talking and parsing words like the Clintons. This is foolish because

I) Carson’s not as practiced at it as the Clintons,

2) …The truth is always better, and,

3) Unlike when the Clintons lie, most of the news media are looking for justifications to destroy him as it did Herman Cain. Reporters do not want to not be fair or reasonable with Carson, and certainly not complicit in deception as regularly is for Hillary. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Whining”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments
(Pssst! John! JOHN! You're not running! )

(Pssst! John! JOHN! You’re not running! )

The resilient and provocative Charles Green offers a challenge to the underlying point in “Whining,” the recent post about efforts by some (but not all) members of the news media to pooh-pooh Republican objections to what they (and I ) regarded as outrageous disrespect and bias displayed by the CNBC panel in the recent Republican debate.

I have a five word rebuttal and bit more afterwards, but for now, here is Charlie’s Comment of the Day on the Ethics Alarms Post, “Whining.” Continue reading →

“Justice for the Nicholas Brothers”…Again

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Sometimes it all seems worth it.

Yesterday, late at night, I received an e-mail from a music teacher at a Catholic elementary school in Connecticut. He had introduced his young students to great musicians of the past, such as Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, and arouse their admiration and excitement when he showed them videos of The Nicholas Brothers. Recently he came upon my post on Fayard and Harold from 2012, and felt compelled to write me agreeing with my lament that such miraculous performers could be so forgotten today because of their marginalization by the film industry and society. He wrote…

“We have most definitely talked of racism but I now want to read the class your article and get the feedback. Your article is succinct and eloquent.  Your article assessment is sadly true. My goal is not necessarily to revive the Nicholas Brothers:  it is to kindle in each of the kids in the class the spirit of excellence that each of us has and to let nothing stop us from reaching the top.”
To be honest, I had forgotten about my post about remembering the Nicholas Brothers. I checked: the post has only been read by about a thousand visitors since I wrote it; if my objective is to keep the legacy of these amazing dancers alive, it’s probably time for a re-post.

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 circulated 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 →

Beating The Naked Teacher Principle: The Provocatively Clad Bodybuilding Teacher Principle.

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

min jensen

It is important to remember that the The Naked Teacher Principle   doesn’t state that pre-college teachers who allow themselves to be seen on the internet in states of undress likely to arouse the lust of their students should and must be fired—though most of them should be—but that they have no legitimate complaint if they are. Teachers who must command respect, serve as role models, and of course, teach, should not permit themselves to become pin-ups and peep-show stars for their students. At very least, they owe their employers and their students’ parents advance notice.

Mindy Jensen, a Utah middle school teacher,  has a second (or perhaps first) career as a bikini model and fitness competitor. She came under the  cloud of The Naked Teacher Principle the usual way: a student was surfing the web and cried out: “Holy crap! That’s my teacher, and she’s HOT!”  The news (and images) spread around the community and student body quickly. Parents called the Instagram photos “pornographic” and demanded that Jensen be dismissed. The school gave her an ultimatum: take down the photos, make her account private, or get sacked.

Jensen made the Instagram account private, then changed her mind. . Explaining her decision, Jensen told ABC Utah,  “Why am I taking this picture off, I get comments and messages that it’s inspirational to them and these women like my story. If I put it to private, it’s not going to reach these people that might need and understand me.”

The school has since backed down,  opting instead to hold training sessions for  parents on teaching kid to be careful on the Web—you know, like avoiding hot photos of their teachers. (Good luck with THAT.)

I think several features of this episode on The Naked Teacher Principle spectrum led to this result. In 2014, in this post about whether the NTP applies to non-teaching bodybuilding mothers, I raised the issue of bodybuilding teachers on the web, and posited this photo as an example for discussion: Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Unethical Website of the Month: Dogsbite.Org”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

staffordshire

Ethics Alarms is about ethics. It is about what is right, wrong and how to decide which. Here, we go where the facts, ethical systems, valuable and logic take us, as convoluted as the process may be. There is no other cause, here. occasionally I have pointed out a developing case of ethics perverted, and  by dint of timing or good fortune, it has had some tangible effect. The Sweet Brier College rescue was such an example, I am told. There have been others.

The cruel and ignorant persecution of dog breeds grouped under the category of “pit bulls’ and the “dangerous breed” litigation that has been passed by hysterics bullying craven legislators is another ethics issue that Ethics Alarms has tried to alert the public about for years. I am not an activist however; the idea of labeling something as wrong is meant as education. If it also engages activism, that is a bonus. Activism in pursuit of a more ethical society is an unequivocal good, much to be desired by us all. In addition to spur much needed activism, the dog breed bias story is also unusually relevant to other issues: racism, genocide, ignorance, government over-reach, gun control, profiling, fear-mongering, misinformation, cowardice among elected officials…it’s a long list. There will be more about this issue in coming months.

New commenter sadingo advances the issue with a discussion of pit bull banning in Great Britain. Here is his Comment of the Day on the post Unethical Website Of The Month: DogsBite.org.: Continue reading →