jerks

Almost An Ethics Quiz: The Comment In The Queue

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

temptation

I awoke this morning to a polite, well-written, credible comment—to an older post—that immediately sparked an ethical dilemma. Maybe you can help me out.

The comment reveals unpleasant personal details about the commenter’s past encounters with a blogger who has prompted some controversy on Ethics Alarms, episodes that mark the blogger as a jerk of the highest order. Indeed, I had already diagnosed Blogger X as a jerk, and written about it. This is difficult to explain without revealing the identity of the blogger—let’s just say that his writings that attracted my attention complained about a phenomenon that was far better explained, at least in his case, by his character than the causes his many posts attributed to it.

Normally, this would be an easy call. I have frequently removed similar ad hominem attacks on some of you (you didn’t know that, I bet!). Settling old scores is not what this site is for, and the comment in question would usually fail for being off-topic. There are two reasons I am considering approving the comment.

Continue reading →

Schindler’s Tweets And The Monster In The Mirror

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Shrek in the mirror

John Schindler is a former NSA officer, a professor at the Naval War College and a PhD who periodically holds forth on his various areas of expertise on the web. He also specializes in particularly obnoxious tweets in which he both insults anyone who questions or disagrees with him, and does so by referring to his own innate superiority as a scholar and an intellect. If he isn’t a complete jerk, he sure plays one convincingly.

Some wag noticed the trend, and created a website that contains nothing but Schindler’s most snotty tweets. Here is the puzzling part: Schindler, in yet another tweet, referred to it as “an ugly new defamation site against me.” Forget the complete lack of comprehension of what defamation is (Ken White at Popehat, an expert in that field of law, invoked Inigo Montoya of “The Princess Bride” in a tweet to the Professor saying “‘Defamation.’ You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”). My question is this: if Schindler thinks the website is ugly, and it contains only what he has written to others, why doesn’t that promote self-awareness, regret, remorse, and altered conduct? That is how it is supposed to work; I would think that is how it has to work. The idea behind the Golden Rule is to look at your conduct from another’s perspective, and if it strikes you as ugly and wrong, then you have learned something. So you change. Not this guy. Continue reading →

Another Day, Another Web Hoax: The Web Hoax Scale

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Fake Wolf

That mad wag, Jimmy Kimmel, is doing another victory lap. This time, the biggest jerk on late night TV managed to fool news services, panic families of Olympian athletes and insult Russia (not that that bothers me very much) by his latest internet gag—convincing American luge athlete Kate Hanson to relay, via Twitter, his fake video of what appeared to be a wolf roaming the halls of the Olympic Village accommodations. Any collateral damage is irrelevant to Kimmel, because his objective is to cause trouble, then mock everyone who was fooled for allowing the trouble to be caused, since if they weren’t so dumb, trusting and gullible—it’s all their fault, not his, you see—nothing would have happened. (Yes, Kate Hansen is a jerk too.)

Here is what this relatively harmless (as opposed to harmless, which no web hoax is) misrepresentation accomplished:

  • It took up thousands of valuable minutes of news broadcasts throughout yesterday which could have been used productively to educate the public about all manner of things they actually need to know about—what’s happening to Justin Carter, for example—remember him? Maybe a well-produced segment on why a teen shouldn’t be facing terrorism charges for an obvious joke he made on Facebook could spark some much-needed public outrage. Instead, serious news broadcast time, a finite resource, was used to further a prank.
  • It made the media a party to a lie. It doesn’t matter about what. It’s a lie.
  • It wasted the time, thought and energy of every person who talked about the wolf, expressed concern about it or thought about it.
  • It further increased cynicism and doubt about news reports, feeding the tendency to adopt conspiracy theories and fear of sinister manipulation. How do we know the moon landing wasn’t a Jimmy Kimmel hoax?

Most of all, this will encourage other, bigger, more reckless asses than even Kimmel to go further and further with their web hoaxes, because such pranks mean viral videos and fame, no matter what harm they cause. Continue reading →

Ethics Note To CNN’s Don Lemon: “Beyond A Reasonable Doubt” Is A Stringent Standard And The Jury Knows Best…And I’m Withdrawing My Endorsement For President

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments
Stop blaming the juries!

Stop blaming the juries!

Once again, a criminal trial with racial overtones has caused an outbreak of criticism over a jury verdict and the jury system, by those who have a professional obligation to know better.

This time, it’s the so-called “loud music case,” that just ended with the accused, Michael Dunn, convicted of four charges (three of attempted second-degree murder) with the fifth charge, first-degree murder, resulting in a jury stalemate. Dunn claimed that he acted in self-defense when he repeatedly fired a gun at an SUV containing four African-American teens in 2012, over an altercation regarding their playing music too loudly. One of those teens, unarmed 17-year-old Jordan Davis, was killed by his gunfire.

CNN news anchor Don Lemon, in a series of rants on his show and also on Twitter, announced to his audience that Dunn should be convicted of first degree murder, and that Lemon would be outraged if he was not. Continue reading →

What Do You Do With The Racist Frat House?

/ Jack Marshall / 51 Comments

Arizona frat party

Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity at the University of Arizona decided that hosting an African-American stereotype party on Martin Luther King Day was a cool idea, and soon thereafter posted photos of the bash on various social media, showing drunk students posing like rappers,wearing baggy pants around their knees and drinking liquor out of watermelon cups.  The college community was appropriately horrified, and many are calling for the fraternity to be expelled for the incident and the students who attended the party punished. The Detroit Free Press story about the incident is headlined, “Racism or Free Speech”? This is the equivalent of a headline saying “Stupidity or Freedom of the Press?” It’s both. That’s the conundrum. Continue reading →

Ethics Tales Of Three Governors, As Hope Slowly Dwindles

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

McAuliffe-Christie-Cuomo

The U.S.’s recent experiment with a Senator-President has been disheartening—persuasive words unhinged to action and actual principles. There was a remarkable example of this in the President’s NSA speech, in fact, in a quote that would have been the Ethics Quote of the Month had it not been so cynical coming from him. The President said…

“Given the unique power of the state, it is not enough for leaders to say: Trust us, we won’t abuse the data we collect. For history has too many examples when that trust has been breached. Our system of government is built on the premise that our liberty cannot depend on the good intentions of those in power; it depends on the law to constrain those in power.”

Wonderful! If only this had been uttered by a leader with credibility and integrity, rather than one who has shrugged off, firing no one, interference with the federal election process by the IRS, illegal spying by the NSA, and the intentional facilitation of illegal firearms coming into the murderous hands of drug cartels by his Justice Department, after bombing Libya illegally in defiance of law, selectively enforcing immigration laws, using drones to kill American citizens abroad without due process, making recess appointments when the Senate wasn’t in recess, and more recently, unconstitutionally amending the ACA on his own after it was signed into law.

This was all foretold, however. Community organizers and senators make speeches and inspire people, but unfortunately seldom have a clue how to actually govern unless, as Obama himself has wistfully noted, they have absolute power. This is why, in theory, at least, state governors, who at least have experience governing, now seem like a better recruitment field for the next occupant of the Oval Office. It sounds good in the abstract, but the recent news from the state houses  is like ice water in the face—-

Ethics Dunce: Law Professor Josh Blackman, Too Desperate To Take A Cheap Shot At Justice Scalia

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

Supreme Court Justice Scalia, though not quite to the absurd degree of Sarah Palin, is a conservative who inspires such visceral dislike from the residents of the American Left that he often inspires them to behave irrationally in their eagerness to express their contempt. Such was the case this week, when Scalia sharply rebuked a lawyer making his oral argument before the high tribunal in the case of Marvin Brandt Revocable Trust v. United States, a property rights dispute over the conversion of abandoned railroad rights of way into public trails. The advocate, Steven Lechner, was before Scalia and his colleagues for the first time, and began his argument by reading from his notes. This is not cool, and violates Supreme Court tradition, rules, and long-observed standards.

Tony Mauro, blogging at the Legal Times, explains: Continue reading →

The Fifth Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2013 (Part Three)

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

Jill-Greenberg

Unethical Artist Of The Year

Photographer Jill Greenberg, whose art requires parents to make their children cry. Runner-up: Peeping Tom photographer/artist Arne Svenson

Kaitlyn Hunt

False Allegation Of Anti-Gay Bigotry Of The Year

Kaitlyn Hunt’s parents, who spun a false tale of anti-gay prejudice to portray their sexual predator daughter as a victim after she was accused of statutory rape by the parents of her under-age target. Hunt’s parents even managed to suck the ACLU into their web and the liberal-leaning press portrayed her as a martyr to anti-gay bias. But Hunt’s lies ultimately caused her cover-story to unravel.

 Unethical Hoax Of The Year

Oberlin students Dylan Bleier and Matt Alden, aided and abetted by  Oberlin College and its president, Marvin Krislov. The two students, self-proclaimed progressives, posted a series of racist and anti-Semitic posters, graffiti and anonymous emails as “an experiment.” Krislov and Oberlin, after cancelling classes and engaging in campus-wide navel-gazing, continued to allow the media and the public believe that this was the work of racists on campus well after it had learned who the real miscreants were.  Runner-up: The horrible Meg Lanker-Simons, former University of Wyoming student (now admitted to law school—I don’t want to talk about it) who threatened herself with rape and used the bogus threat to show that her campus was violent and sexist.

Most Unethical Use of Social Media Continue reading →

The Five Truths Of Elan Gale’s Twitter Lie

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

"Diane"

The above photo is how “The Bachelor” producer Elan Hale chose to announce to the world that his Twitter tale about “Diane” the hysterical Thanksgiving traveler and his campaign to shame her was all a “joke.”  This is Diane! Har!

Truth #1:

Elan Gale is an asshole, and because he is shameless about it, he is also a fick.

Truth #2 Continue reading →

“How Dare Universities Charge Such High Tuition?” KABOOM!* #2 Is A Dud; The New Title is “Unethical Website Of The Month: Diversity Chronicle”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments
Okay, I confess: I'm not an ethicist or a lawyer. This is me.

Okay, I confess: I’m not an ethicist or a lawyer. This is me.

Today’s earlier post about the Georgetown Law Dean who filed an expert report in federal court that was partially copied from Wikipedia was titled “How Dare Universities Charge Such High Tuition?” KABOOM!* #1…” with the full intent of offering “How Dare Universities Charge Such High Tuition?” KABOOM!* #2 shortly thereafter.  My second, and messier,  head explosion was triggered by a news story more outrageous than the first: it involved two universities, and a tenured professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design retiring after 25 years with a final lecture to students in which he said,

“If you are a white male, you don’t deserve to live. You are a cancer, you’re a disease, white males have never contributed anything positive to the world! They only murder, exploit and oppress non-whites! At least a white woman can have sex with a black man and make a brown baby but what can a white male do? He’s good for nothing. Slavery, genocides against aboriginal peoples and massive land confiscation, the inquisition, the holocaust, white males are all to blame! You maintain your white male privilege only by oppressing, discriminating against and enslaving others.”

As you might imagine, I had quite a few points to make about this, including why a single student in the lecture hall, and not just those being told to commit suicide, didn’t arise from their seats, walk out, and register a protest with the school—-a bit like I would have hoped Barack Obama would have done when he heard his pal, Rev. Wright, spout racist and hateful rhetoric from the pulpit.

I have learned, from bitter experience, that whenever a story causes my jaw to hit the floor I should check several non-blog sources, and there were many of them that have proven reliable in the past carrying the story. All were members of the so-called “conservative media,” true, but the tendency of the mainstream media to intentionally ignore events that make their brethren warriors of the left look bad—like, say, the ugly and still unfolding IRS scandal that the Obama administration still claims is imaginary— is an annoying constant in my world…and yours, if you will acknowledge it.  Through dumb luck and dumb luck only, I checked one more source, and it saved me. The Blaze, Glenn Beck’s news and commentary site, had lapped its careless, inept competitors. The story of the professor’s farewell rant was a hoax, or satire, depending  on your point of view. Continue reading →