integrity

How Unethical Is Spike Lee’s Oscar Boycott?

/ Jack Marshall / 55 Comments

SpikeLee

Short answer: Incredibly unethical.

Spike Lee, ground-breaking black director, social commentator, Knicks fan and hot-head, announced that he’s boycotting the Oscars because its 2016 nominations list did not meet diversity mandates, and posted this rant/manifesto on Instagram:

“Again. I Would Like To Thank President Cheryl Boone Isaacs And The Board Of Governors Of The Academy Of Motion Pictures Arts And Sciences For Awarding Me an Honorary Oscar This Past November. I Am Most Appreciative. However My Wife, Mrs. Tonya Lewis Lee And I Will Not Be Attending The Oscar Ceremony This Coming February. We Cannot Support It And Mean No Disrespect To My Friends, Host Chris Rock and Producer Reggie Hudlin, President Isaacs And The Academy. But, How Is It Possible For The 2nd Consecutive Year All 20 Contenders Under The Actor Category Are White? And Let’s Not Even Get Into The Other Branches. 40 White Actors In 2 Years And No Flava At All. We Can’t Act?! WTF!! It’s No Coincidence I’m Writing This As We Celebrate The 30th Anniversary Of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s Birthday. Dr. King Said “There Comes A Time When One Must Take A Position That Is Neither Safe, Nor Politic, Nor Popular But He Must Take It Because Conscience Tells Him It’s Right”. For Too Many Years When The Oscars Nominations Are Revealed, My Office Phone Rings Off The Hook With The Media Asking Me My Opinion About The Lack Of African-Americans And This Year Was No Different. For Once, (Maybe) I Would Like The Media To Ask All The White Nominees And Studio Heads How They Feel About Another All White Ballot. If Someone Has Addressed This And I Missed It Then I Stand Mistaken. As I See It, The Academy Awards Is Not Where The “Real” Battle Is. It’s In The Executive Office Of The Hollywood Studios And TV And Cable Networks. This Is Where The Gate Keepers Decide What Gets Made And What Gets Jettisoned To “Turnaround” Or Scrap Heap. This Is What’s Important. The Gate Keepers. Those With “The Green Light” Vote….”

Now let me list as many of the ways Lee’s boycott is unethical (I may stray into why it is stupid as well),  as I can before my fingers get tired and nausea overwhelms me: Continue reading →

Diversity vs. Integrity: The 2016 Oscar Nominations

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

All white Oscars

When I began to watch the televised announcement of the Oscar nominations, I was prepared for a wave of minority nominations. After all, the Academy for Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences was lambasted last year for the absence of African American nominees, and with the Academy stuffed with knee-jerk, left-wing, Democratic donors, I assumed that last year’s criticism would prompt the voters to place an affirmative action thumb hard on every scale. To my amazement, I was wrong! For the second year in a row, all 20 nominees in the acting category were white. The only  nonwhite nominee was for Best Director (Alejandro G. Iñárritu).

This tells me that the Academy Awards, though they may be influenced by so many biases that the final awards—except in rare cases where a performance was so outstanding that nobody could argue with the choice without looking silly—are meaningless as credible determinations of merit, have integrity. They are not “fixed.” The Academy, whose chair is a black woman, would have loved to have a large, or even a small group of black nominees to be able to show more  diversity. The awards, however, are supposed to be based on artistic merit, not EEOC targets. It looks like the Academy’s members voted that way. Good for them.

Oh, naturally, Chris Rock (the Oscar night host—do you really think the Academy would have engaged his services if it didn’t want and assume plenty of black nominees?) has been launching verbal grenades, and Al Sharpton, the renowned film auteur, is calling for a boycott (“when the only tool you have is a hammer…”).  In the end, however, the complaint of black activists is self-defeating and hypocritical Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Petula Dvorak (And Introducing The New Ethics Alarms Term, “Dvorak”

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments
Congratualtions, Petula! Now you're a word---I mean, in addition to "Idiot"...

Congratulations, Petula! Now you’re a word—I mean, in addition to “Idiot”…

Washington Post Metro columnist Petula Dvorak just modeled hypocrisy, stupidity and willful complicity with irresponsible public policy and exploitation. Her sole justification is “everybody’s doing it.” She apparently thinks this is funny. It’s not. It’s typical human conduct, but there’s nothing funny about it. It’s tragic.

In a column yesterday titled, “I despise lotteries, but I bought four Powerball tickets anyway,” Dvorak, who has been justly scorned on Ethics Alarms for ethics idiocy before, goes to great length to describe what is wrong with state lotteries–they are corrupt, they prey on the poor, they are regressive taxes that substitute for real taxes that would require political courage, they promote gambling addictions—even going so far as to call them “evil.” Then she cheerily tells us that she couldn’t help participating in the current lottery craze, because just think of all the things she could buy if she won a gizzillion dollars!

Dvorak apparently believes that by acting irrationally and irresponsibly and thus supporting what she claims to revile, she can make a more powerful point about how seductive lotteries can be. Or she’s an idiot. Wait–the two are not mutually exclusive.

It’s not complicated, Petula, not at all. When you identify a system,  an enterprise or a movement that is harmful and corrupt, don’t support it, participate in it or strengthen it. That’s all. Every ethical system dictates that result. If you think, indeed, as your column proves, you know, that state lotteries are corrupting, cowardly scams, don’t play them. If you know that pro football makes billions by inducing healthy young men to destroy their brains, don’t watch pro football. If you know that illegal drugs ravage the poor, destroy livesm businesses and families don’t use illegal drugs.  If you know that American politics are corrupt, stop supporting corrupt politicians.

There are so many societal evils that could be eradicated or significantly weakened if those who understand what is wrong about them just had the integrity, personal responsibility, courage and determination to reject them unequivocally, and show others with less certitude and resolve that it is possible and right. Continue reading →

Epilogue: The Boo-Boo Hoax, Blues Blindness, and Trust

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments
The comments on the boo-boo hoax post have me so upset that I can't see this...

The comments on the boo-boo hoax post have me so upset that I can’t see this…

Every now and then, and it is never on a post that I am especially keen on or that I expect to catch fire, a link to an Ethics Alarms essay is suddenly being clicked on by a lot of people who have no interest in ethics, but a particular interest in a topic I happened to stumble into, as I am wont to do. Usually these waves of traffic contribute nothing of substance to our ethics colloquy, produce no new regular readers, and  they depress me, as did the so-called “Instalanche” of a few years back when Glenn Reynolds deigned to link to a post.  A bigger group of nasty right wing jerks I have never encountered before or since: I lost a bit of respect for Professor Reynolds that day (His avid followers maintained it was ethical to spread a web rumor that Harry Reid was a pederast in retribution for Reid’s “Romney hasn’t paid taxes” lie. It’s not.)

The current ‘-lanche’ has arrived courtesy of my post of a couple days back about an unlabeled hoax study published by The Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, a (formerly) respectable scientific journal. Of the few new readers who have commented, most have distinguished themselves by making the typical threadbare rationalization used for all web hoaxes, to wit:  “Anyone who didn’t figure out it was a gag isn’t as smart as I am.” If these people typify the ethical acumen of scholarly journal readers, we have trouble my friends, right here in River City.

See, Brilliant Advanced Degree-holders, the problem with respectable journals (if there are such things) publishing inside jokes without proper labeling is that the false studies are read and believed by journalists, who spread the misinformation like an oil slick over the culture and public consciousness. It doesn’t matter if you got a chuckle out of it; what matters is that a lot of people were made to believe false information, and it is the purveyors of that false information, not the oh so gullible and ignorant victims of it, who are at fault. Continue reading →

Most Encouraging Statement Suggesting That There May Be Justice After All: Former U.S. Attorney General Joe DiGenova

/ Jack Marshall / 53 Comments

Hope-Dove-Flying

Former U.S. Attorney Joe DiGenova had this to say on Laura Ingraham’s radio show, speaking  about the FBI’s investigation into Hillary’s intentional mishandling of confidential State Department e-mails—you know, those “stupid e-mails” that nobody cares about:

“They have reached a critical mass in their investigation of the Secretary and all of her senior staff. And, it’s going to come to a head, I would suggest, in the next 60 days…It’s going to be a very complex matter for the Department of Justice, but they’re not going to be able to walk away from it. They are now at over 1,200 classified emails. And, that’s just for the ones we know about from the State Department. That does not include the ones that the FBI is, in fact, recovering from her hard drives. …I believe that the evidence that the FBI is compiling will be so compelling that, unless [Attorney General Loretta Lynch] agrees to the charges, there will be a massive revolt inside the FBI, which she will not be able to survive as an Attorney General.  It will be like Watergate. It will be unbelievable.”

Sounds almost too good to be true, doesn’t it?  Yet DiGenova is far from a being a loon, a partisan hitman, or one to spin wild theories. He also should know a bit about how the internal workings of the various competing agencies under Justice work. [Full disclosure: I’ve met Joe, and chatted with him a bit, though this was quite a while back. Did you know he is a trained singer? A good one, too.]

I cannot begin to describe how marvelous it will be for the integrity of our government and justice system if Joe’s analysis is proven correct. I don’t even have to consider how much I would enjoy the screams of indignation of the Clinton Corrupted. This scenario is what the Clintons, the Democrats, the DNC, Clintons’ disgraceful mews media defenders and Hillary’s see-no-evil supporters sooooo richly deserve that if it ever comes to pass, Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus might just spontaneously echo from the cosmos, or at least John Kiley’s organ version that he played that immortal night, the best of my life, when Carlton Fisk hit that Game #6 winning home run off the Fenway foulpole, so many years ago.

Let us hope.

__________________

Pointer and Source: Don Surber

 

New Rule For 2016: Elected Officials, Politician And Presidential Candidates Will Be Accountable For What They Say, Not What They “Meant To Say”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments
You know that quote time machine that politicians keep using? It doesn't exist. Stop letting them act as if it does.

You know that quote time machine that politicians keep using? It doesn’t exist. Stop letting them act as if it does.

We have a growing mass of public figures in politics and government who increasingly communicate in sloppy, vague, hyperbolic and ambiguous language and assume that they can wait and see how the public reacts to it before they, their spokespersons, defenders, enablers or friendly pundits need to clarify what they “really meant.”

Well, the hell with that.

Communication precision is more crucial than ever in the new, technology-driven public media, when tweets can be circulated to millions within minutes, and on-camera statements live on YouTube forever. This habit of allowing influential figures to spout lies, nonsense , smoking gun revelations about their character and worse and then insist on a do-over when they are called on the obvious meaning of their own words must stop. Among other things, it appears to be killing the little switch in the brains of these people that is supposed to stop human beings from saying stupid things before they say them. That switch goes by the name Prudence, which  encompasses common sense, respect, responsibility, restraint, honesty in communication, and more. We should want our leaders to have that switch working perfectly. Unfortunately, most of our most prominent leaders and would-be leaders appear not to have a functioning switch at all. Continue reading →

Unethical Tweet Of The Month: Carly Fiorina

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

carly tweetThe above New Year’s Day tweet was issued by Republican Presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina, now campaigning in Iowa for February’s caucuses, as Stanford and Iowa prepared to do battle in the Rose Bowl. (It was a rout: Iowa got clobbered.)

Fiorina is a  Stanford alum, and the tweet backfired, it seemed, with many on Twitter finding the tweet revealing, and not at all in a good way.

Are there any plausible translations of the tweet that reflect well on Carly’s character? Let’s see: Continue reading →

The Washington Post Drops Its Resident Op-Ed Socialist. Good.

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Workers Unite

The Washington Post has jettisoned Harold Meyerson, who has been the leftest of the leftists on the Washington Post op-ed pages for about 13 years…not surprising, as he also serves as editor at large for The American Prospect. Mayerson, according to his last column, was told that he was a goner because he was losing readers and because his columns were repetitious, which they certainly were. How many times, after all, can one read “Workers Unite!”?  From Occupy Wall Street to BlackLivesMatter, there was no revolt of the oppressed and downtrodden that Meyerson didn’t support, nor any standard issue socialist/progressive position that he did not wholeheartedly embrace.

The Post has other kneejerk leftists among their pundits, a disproportionate number in fact (this was also part of the Post’s motivation to let Meyerson go), but I found Meyerson more infuriating than the others because he seemed so much more intelligent than his positions and statements would suggest. He was the epitome of an opinion journalist whose opinions seemed to be calibrated to achieve a grander agenda, rather than honest expressions of truth or even what he really believed. He is a columnist in the Saul Alinsky tradition of liberalism, willing to bend truth for the greater good, to win converts for the Great Worker Rebellion, or whatever it would be.

No newspaper should employ a journalist who is willing to deceive its readers, even on the pretense of saving the world.

Continue reading →

What’s More Unethical Than A Web Hoax? How About A Scientific Journal Hoax?

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

mom-kiss

The Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, a respected scientific journal, published a supposedly peer-reviewed study in its current issue finding that kisses from mommy are not an effective way of remedying children’s boo-boos. Several news outlets fell for the hoax, including The Daily Caller.

“Maternal kisses are not effective in alleviating minor childhood injuries (boo-boos): a randomized, controlled and blinded study“ described the results of research allegedly conducted on 943 pairs of toddlers and their mothers and designed to determine whether a kiss from a child’s mother after a minor injury significantly reduced the child’s distress.

There were plenty of red flags in the study beyond its ridiculous subject matter. For example, the “researchers” wrote that they intentionally constructed scenarios in which children would hurt themselves. In one scenario, the authors claimed that they placed chocolate in an area where a child would bump his head trying to reach the chocolate. In another, they said that the researchers placed a child’s favorite object behind a heated coil so the child would burn herself trying to access the object. Continue reading →

Professionalism Tales: The Hilarious Prosecutor

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Clown lawyerDeputy District Attorney Robert Alan Murray is a funny guy. Having apparently decided that it was too obvious to tell an arrested kid that he would be summarily shot, which is always a gas—you should see their faces!—and a bit too risky to put a whoopie cushion on a judge’s chair behind the bench—those old fogies have no sense of humor—the young California prosecutor hit on the brilliant idea of altering the transcript of the police interrogation of a Spanish-speaking defendant who was charged with lewd or lascivious acts with a child younger than 14 years old.

Murray, the dickens, added this wacky exchange to the transcript:

Officer: “You’re so guilty, you child molester.”

Suspect: “I know. I’m just glad she’s not pregnant like her mother.”

He kills me, he just kills me! Inexplicably, though, the assistant public defender complained about the altered transcript, told a judge, and the judge dismissed all charges against the accused child molester.Who would have guessed the public defender would use the gag to defend his client? What a party pooper. Continue reading →