A New, Seductive And Sinister Way To Be Unethical: Shoplifter Extortion For Profit

February 27, 2015February 28, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

If you are accused of shoplifting in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Boston, Dallas, Houston, San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, Atlanta, and a growing number of other cities, you may face an unexpected choice. If the store you were shopping in participates in a program operated by the Utah-based Corrective Education Company, you will be asked to choose between talking to the police, with the risk of being arrested, or leaving the store without facing law enforcement, after you sign an admission of guilt and agree to pay $320 to take an online anti-shop-lifting course.

What??

Slate informs us that about 20,000 people around the country have faced versions of this dilemma since CEC began operations, and chose option B—enriching CEC, and the stores as well. The interesting approach was started by two Harvard Business School graduates—that figures—and is sold as a win-win-win-win:

“It saves retailers time that they would have to spend dealing with the police; it frees up law enforcement resources that could be spent on higher priority cases; it reduces the likelihood that a shoplifter will come back to the store to steal again; and it gives second chances to offenders who would otherwise be saddled with a criminal record for life.”

Right.

It’s unethical you know. I wonder if the company knows? Continue reading →

Jackie Robinson West Little League Baseball Team Epilogue: Who Says “Cheaters Never Prosper”?

February 26, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

As described here, Chicago’s Jackie Robinson West Little League Baseball team was stripped of its U.S. title after Little League International found out–later than it should have— that the team’s adult leadership changed the district boundaries without permission to create what was really an all-star team. The championship, to be blunt, was won through cheating.

Since the team’s members were all African-Americans, Jesse Jackson and many of the parents immediately claimed that racism was behind the forfeit. If, however, a white team had been found to have prevailed over a black team by cheating and was allowed to keep its ill-gotten championship, Jackson would also scream racism. (This was a #11. on the Draft Ethics Alarms Race-Baiting Scale: Presumed Racism: Accusations of racism based on no other factors but the races of the individuals involved.) Jackson and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel then pressured the Little League to reverse its decision, essentially allowing cheating to be 100% successful, as it often is in politics. To its credit, the organization refused to bend.

Never mind: Emanuel is a veteran of the Obama administration, and also has a large black constituency to pander to. Thus he plans on giving the team championship rings at next month’s city council meeting. Emanuel found private donors to fund championship rings shortly after the Little League World Series. Each ring has the player’s name, jersey number and the number 42, in tribute to Jackie Robinson. On the inside of each ring, the legend, “Who says cheaters never prosper?” is engraved in script.

Just kidding about that last part. Continue reading →

Finalizing The Sadly Useful School Anti-Violence No-Tolerance Insanity Scale

February 25, 2015February 25, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Alas, the deadly pizza gun is only a #5 now…

In January 2013, I realized I had used “Now this is the worst example of insane no-tolerance school conduct that there can ever be!” multiple times, and that it was time to make some close calls. I asked readers to rank the following real examples of child abuse by schools, in which children of various ages were punished cruelly and excessively for harmless conduct that violated a poorly envisioned no-tolerance rule. This was the list:

1. Biting pizza into the shape of a gun.

2. Pointing a finger in the shape of a gun and saying “Bang!”

3. Threatening to shoot a student with a bubble gun.

4. A deaf child who makes the obvious sign-language symbol for gun, to “say” his own name, because his first name is “Hunter”

5. Expelling a student and bringing charges of criminal assault for shooting another student with a spitball through a straw

6. Accidentally bringing a paring knife to school in a lunch box

7. Drawing a picture of your father holding a gun

8. Playing with a LEGO figure carrying a LEGO automatic weapon

9. Drawing a picture of a gun

10. Writing a poem about the Newtown shooting.

I received a lot of responses on the blog, more off-site. I never published the final results, however, which also takes into consideration my own positions. Here, from most defensible to most insane, is the current order, and why each entry landed where it did: Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Pop Ethics Quiz: Welcoming Rev. Talbert Swan, Late Passenger On The Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck”

February 25, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 52 Comments

“OK, you can go, but we want everyone to know that the US Government thinks you’re a racist and a murderer.”

The Justice Department’s press release yesterday regarding the final rejection of a civil rights charge against George Zimmerman was despicable and unprofessional, political, as everything Holder’s department has done from the beginning, unethical,and an abuse of its power and influence.

Raising this issue adeptly is reader J. Houghton in his Comment of the Day on the post, Pop Ethics Quiz: Welcoming Rev. Talbert Swan, Late Passenger On The Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck. He ends with a question; I’ll return to answer it.

I am curious about the statement by Acting Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta that: “Our decision not to pursue federal charges does not condone the shooting that resulted in the death of Trayvon Martin and is based solely on the high legal standard applicable to these cases.” It seems almost like an unnecessary statement of the obvious, like, yes of course; this is a tragedy; mistakes were made; bad judgment happened; and somebody died needlessly. Of course, we all would hope that such tragedies “do not occur in the future” as the JD press release stated… ever! this is a most wonderful thought.

However, what exactly is it that the Justice Department does “not condone” ? Is it possible that General Gupta is suggesting that the Justice Department does not buy into the basic idea of shooting someone in self-defense if believed necessary to protect ones self, or perhaps she questions the basic idea of being legally allowed to carry a concealed handgun by permit for self-defense? Or is she questioning the wisdom of the Neighborhood Watch program which might encourage citizens to… God forbid… watch too closely the goings on in their neighborhoods? What exactly is it that the Justice Department does “not condone” in this particular case?

Not to say that the claim of “self-defense” is always justified… because it most assuredly is not. Nor am I defending in any way Zimmerman for the events that unfolded with very unfortunate results. But I am wondering about the chill this incredibly long and ultimately fruitless federal investigation might put on the fundamental right of self defense to protect ones self or others who might find themselves in the position of facing a real threat. Are citizens going to possibly face federal prosecution in the future for becoming “too involved” in the security of their own neighborhoods, or for protecting themselves or their neighbors if the unlawful aggressor and righteous defender in a specific incident happen to be of the “wrong” ethnicity or race?

Just asking…

Continue reading →

Pop Ethics Quiz: Welcoming Rev. Talbert Swan, Late Passenger On The Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck

February 22, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 59 Comments

Quick:

Name everything ethically and logically wrong with this meme.

While you’re making your list, I’ll explain.

It comes courtesy of Talbert Swan–website here, Facebook page here-— who tweeted it to his many followers, lots of whom then dutifully posted it on Facebook. Swan describes himself as a “public figure.” He is, we learn, an activist, pastor, author, radio talk show host, NAACP president, National Chaplain, Iota Phi Theta Fraternity, Inc. Assistant General Secretary of the Church Of God In Christ. He is also, on the evidence of circulating this meme, a divisive race-baiter who is ignorant of the law, ethics and logic.

Swan sent out this graphic offal with all the typical hashtags: #Trayvon…#MikeBrown…#Ferguson, #Blacklivesmatter and the rest. I would normally just ignore it—I see idiotic memes every day—but this one was posted with approval by a Facebook friend of mine who is objectively brilliant and educated, and justly respected by many, including me. His comment ended with “Case closed!”, and immediately dozens of people “liked” it, many of them undoubtedly then spreading the meme further to make others more ignorant and stupid too. This is affirmatively harmful. Since I know my friend is a good person, the ethics breach is that of responsibility, competence, fairness, and citizenship, the latter because I think promoting racial distrust is being a bad American.

Have you tallied up all the things wrong yet? Here’s my list: Continue reading →

Rudy’s Heresy

February 21, 2015February 23, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Hot on the heels of the Ethics Alarms Presidents Day celebration of the men who have held the office, which began with the premise that every one of them made a patriotic decision to attempt such a daunting job and deserves our respect and gratitude, comes Rudy Giuliani to accuse the current occupant of the office of not loving the United States of America. His accusation came not in a national address or an interview with CNN, mind you, but at a small, private dinner for nascent GOP Presidential hopeful Scott Walker. This sparked an over-the-top freakout by the mainstream media, which did everything from questioning Giuliani’s patriotism and sanity to accusing him of racism (but of course).

Then, because we all know Giuliani, who is neither a leader of the Republican Party nor currently an elected official, speaks for all Republicans, every Presidential contender had to answer the “when did you stop beating your wife” question of whether they also believed that the President didn’t “love” the U.S. Rudy was interviewed and re-interviewed to clarify his remarks, leading him to “explain” that he wasn’t impugning Obama’s patriotism, but would not apologize, and to speculate that Obama’s upbringing and past associations had produced a socialist/communist sensibility. Rudy also said that the President had rejected American “exceptionalism,” and that this was ominous.

Finally, in what was a foolish, unnecessary—but sadly typical for this President—“I am not a crook” moment, Obama felt it was necessary to rebut the former New York Mayor by declaring in a speech that he did love America.

Ick, yuck, uck, petooie, bleh, gag, yechhh.

What an ugly and destructive controversy.

Observations from the ethics perch: Continue reading →

Refining The Race-Baiting Scale (“The Knight Scale”)

February 20, 2015June 23, 2023 / Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

I am slowly updating and expanding the resources on Ethics Alarms, including adding some of the tools that I have initiated on the blog but never put on the home page to accompany the much-used Rationalization List and the Apology Scale. I thought one of these was a race-baiting scale, as I referred to one, dubbed “The Knight Scale,” here and here. I discovered, however, that I had just given numbers to a few examples of race-baiting along least bad-to-worst spectrum without specifying specific varieties of race-baiting for each.

This was a major failing, and I apologize. Race-baiting has been one of the primary features of public discourse embedded in our culture by having a black President, was well as one with so many unscrupulous race-obsessed supporters and so much evidence of incompetence and dishonesty to try to defend. Its widespread use, tacitly approved if not orchestrated by the White House, has also contributed to the vastly deteriorating race-relations in the U.S., along with the racial distrust and anger fueling it. I have stated, and strongly believe, that this will be, above all else, Barack Obama’s legacy. The tragedy this represents cannot be over-stated.

I am offering now and belatedly a revised Race-Baiting Scale, running from 1, the least offensive and significant form of race baiting, to 11, the worst and most unethical. Two notes: 1) All entries are based on the assumption that no actual racist or bigoted conduct has occurred, and 2) It is stipulated that all actual racist conduct or bias is unethical and should be called out and condemned.

The Race-Baiting Scale

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Jillian Michaels

February 20, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

There’s no boor like a celebrity boor.

Especially a strong celebrity boor.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that the ex-trainer for TV’s unethical reality show “The Biggest Loser” visited the Northern Virginia locale of The Palm, an up-scale “go to be seen” D.C. steakhouse over the weekend.

She reportedly arrived at the restaurant around 8:30 p.m. and joined a couple in a booth. Witnesses told the Post that Michaels soon began speaking loudly and obscenely, using the vulgarities fuck and cunt repeatedly, as well as multiple variations. “She used the word ‘f—er’ in just about every variation — noun, verb, adjectives,”diner told the Post. When another patron finally went over to the table to complain, noting that she was glad she didn’t have her kids with her, Michaels ridiculed the complaint, saying, “It’s fucking ten o’clock!” Michaels said, according to the witnesses. Then one of her companions told the diner, also using vulgarities, to go listen to someone else’s conversation.

I am glad I wasn’t there. There would have been trouble. Continue reading →

A Presidents Day Celebration (PART 3): When The Going Got Tough

February 17, 2015February 18, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

The Presidents really get interesting now, as a political leadership culture in the U.S. matures, the stakes of failure become greater, and technology, labor upheaval, expanding big business and greater influence on world affairs transforms the Presidency into truly the toughest job on earth.

Grover Cleveland

Another one of my favorites, Cleveland was known for telling the truth ( he as called “Grover the Good”), but he participated in one of the most elaborate deceptions in Presidential history.

As explained in historian Matthew Algeo’s 2011 book, “The President Is a Sick Man,” President Cleveland noticed an odd bump on the roof of his mouth in the summer of 1893, shortly after he took office for the second time. (Cleveland is the only President with split terms, the hapless Republican Benjamin Harrison winning an electoral college victory that gave him four years as the bland filling in a Cleveland sandwich.) The bump was diagnosed as a life-threatening malignant tumor, and the remedy was removal. Cleveland believed that news of his diagnosis would send Wall Street and the country into a panic at a time when the economy was sliding into a depression anyway, and agreed to an ambitious and dangerous plan to have the surgery done in secret. The plan was for the President to announce he was taking a friend’s yacht on a four-day fishing trip from New York to his summer home in Cape Cod. Unknown to the press and the public was that the yacht had been transformed into a floating operating room, and a team of six surgeons were assembled and waiting.

The 90 minute procedure employed ether as the anesthesia, and the doctors removed the tumor, five teeth and a large part of the President’s upper left jawbone, all at sea. They also managed to extract the tumor through the President’s mouth while leaving no visible scar and without altering Cleveland’s walrus mustache. Talking on NPR in 2011, historian said,

“I talked to a couple of oral surgeons researching the book, and they still marvel at this operation: that they were able to do this on a moving boat; that they did it very quickly. A similar operation today would take several hours; they did it in 90 minutes.”

But the operation was a success. An artificial partial upper jaw made of rubber was installed to replace the missing bone, and Cleveland, who had the constitution of a moose, reappeared after four days looking hardy and most incredible of all, able to speak as clearly as ever. How did he heal so fast? Why wasn’t his speech effected? He endures doctors cutting out a large chuck of his mouth using 19th century surgical techniques and is back on the job in less than a week? No wonder nobody suspected the truth.

Then, two months later, Philadelphia Press reporter E.J. Edwards published a story about the surgery, thanks to one of the doctors anonymously breaching doctor-patient confidentiality. Cleveland, who in his first campaign for the White House had dealt with Republican accusations that he had fathered an illegitimate child by publicly admitting it, flatly denied Edwards’ story, and his aides launched a campaign to discredit the reporter. Grover the Good never lies, thought the public, so Edwards ended up where Brian Williams is now. His career and credibility were ruined.

Nobody outside of the participants knew about the operation and the President’s fake jaw until twenty-four years later, after all the other principals were dead except three witnesses. One of the surgeons decided to publish an article to prove that E.J. Edwards had been telling the truth after all.

This is a great ethics problem. Was it ethical for Cleveland to keep his health issues from the public? In this case, yes, I’d say so. Was it unethical for the doctor to break his ethical duty? Of course. Was Edwards ethical to report the story? Sure.

The tough question is: Was Cleveland ethical to deny the story and undermine the reporter’s credibility? I think it was a valid utilitarian move, and barely ethical: it was better for the nation to distrust one reporter than the President, especially when his secret was one he responsibly withheld, and his doctor unethically revealed. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Month: Talking Points Memo Blogger Alana Levinson

February 17, 2015February 17, 2015 / Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Now I’m wondering whether I’m a “bad liberal” to call him out. That means aligning myself with conservatives who love crying “double standard” on issues like this, not because they actually care about feminism, but to push their liberal media bias agenda.

—–Alana Levinson writing at Talking Points Memo about Joe Biden’s blatant “creepy uncle” sexual harassment at public events, and the news media’s failure to condemn it.

Wait, what?

Is this some kind of weird mutation of logic that only liberals and journalists understand, like the unique language identical twins make up for themselves?

Alana makes a strong case–it’s not hard to make, however—that Vice-President Biden routinely, publicly and shamelessly engages in the exact same conduct that gets employees and executives warned, sued and fired all over America as feminists cheer (as well as non-feminists with a brain, because the employees and executives should be warned, sued and fired). It’s called “abusing power and position to cop a feel.” Then she writes the quote above, which I don’t understand at all:

Sexual harassment is unethical, disrespectful of women, and illegal.

Liberals have been at the forefront, to their credit, of making this recognition a cultural sea change.

The Vice President of the United States regularly undermines this signature liberal and feminist achievement by flaunting his cluelessness and archaic sexism at public events, either because he’s not paying attention to his own party’s rhetoric (scary) or because he knows he can get away with it (disgusting).

So she’s being a bad liberal if she points out that this is wrong and needs to stop forthwith, and a good liberal to allow it continue, allow the Vice President to act as if women (and, ick, little girls)…

…are his personal fondle-toys while they silently endure public humiliation and silent discomfort? Continue reading →

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Quick:

Name everything ethically and logically wrong with this meme.

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The Race-Baiting Scale

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Grover Cleveland

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Now I’m wondering whether I’m a “bad liberal” to call him out. That means aligning myself with conservatives who love crying “double standard” on issues like this, not because they actually care about feminism, but to push their liberal media bias agenda.

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