lies

Funny, Clever, Convenient, And Wrong: Housebites

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“Your dirty pans, sir…just as you ordered them!”

Normally I wouldn’t post about the practices of a U.K. company, since there are already too many U.S. stories involving ethics for me to keep up with. The innovation added to the world of deception by Housebites, however, has United States written all over it, and I predict it will travel across the pond in about a minute and a half.

The British company will not only cook and deliver a gourmet meal to order for your dinner party or romantic evening…it will deliver dirty pots and pans, to give your claims of hard labor in the kitchen that extra believability. From the company’s press release:

“Housebites.com, the takeaway service that delivers restaurant quality food has today announced a service called ‘pretend you cooked’ that allows customers to pretend they have slaved away at a hot stove more convincingly by delivering dirty pans alongside the food. Cooked by a professional chef and delivered to your door, Housebites main courses cost on average between £10 and £12, and now for an additional £5, customers can request the pans used to cook them for added authenticity. Collection of the pans is then arranged as easily as the original delivery slot.”

How nice. Continue reading →

Now THAT’S An Unethical Excuse!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“My dog ate my brother.”

There is misconduct that suggests that an individual’s normal ethics alarms malfunctioned. There is misconduct that indicates that an individual has no ethics alarms. (An aside: I have just about concluded that model/vicious tweeter Melissa Stetten is in this category. She’s really proud of herself for humiliating a doofus actor who was trying to impress her, judging from her narcissistic website, and accepting accolades from fans who appear to be just as ethically warped as she is. This makes her a fick.) Finally there is misconduct so irresponsible and completely devoid of its impact on others that it is convincing proof that nothing exists between the individual’s ears at all—a conscience, common sense, gray matter.

This is a tale of that last variety of misconduct. Continue reading →

Anything Goes: Campaign by Rumor and Slander in the Wisconsin Recall

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Wait…who’s “Dan”?

Combining  confirmation bias, whereby any uncomplimentary rumor about one’s enemy is assumed to be true, with “ends justify the means” political warfare philosophy, can banish all fairness and honesty from political campaigns. Spreading slanderous falsehoods about candidates for office is as old as the United States, but the internet and social networking sites, along with the increasingly irresponsible news media, allow the unethical tactic to be more effective, and sinister, than ever.

Now, fearing that the vengeance of the public unions, as orchestrated by the Democratic Party, is going to fall short in tomorrow’s recall election in Wisconsin, the foes of Governor Scott Walker grabbed a manufactured smear about Walker fathering a love child 24 years ago, and have made every effort to make it viral. An anti-Walker website called the Wisconsin Citizens Media Co-op [“a group of citizen journalists who began covering the Wisconsin Uprising in February, 2011. We came from different walks of life, different professional backgrounds and different parts of the state to document the dismantling of democratic process and tradition taking place in our state under the right wing onslaught of the Scott Walker regime”] recounted a second-hand story by an anti-Walker  classmate of the governor, who purported to have inside knowledge about his efforts to cover-up his impregnation of her roommate while he was running for class president (yes, this is another school days smear, like the Romney prep school episode. If you can’t beat ’em as adults, beat ’em as kids. That seems to be the current philosophy in both political camps. Phew!). Continue reading →

“Pass the Trash” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

School superintendents included.

Nancy Sebring was hired to be the new Omaha, Nebraska school superintendent and was scheduled to move into her position on July 1, having been hired in April.  Meanwhile, she was finishing up as outgoing Superintendent of Schools in Des Moines, Iowa. When Sebring suddenly resigned her Iowa post, which she had held for six years, on May 10, she and Des Moines school board president Teree Caldwell-Johnson explained that Sebring had stepped down early so she could attend to pressing family affairs before moving to Nebraska.

The real reason, however, was that Sebring had resigned as an alternative to being fired. The school board had discovered that she had used the school’s computer system to send more than forty e-mails to a man with whom she was having an adulterous affair, many of them sexually explicit. The e-mail trail began shortly before she announced her new job, and continued until she was forced to resign. Now Omaha knows about the e-mails too, thanks to a newspaper report. Sebring’s new job has ended before it started, and Omaha is desperately behind in finding a school superintendent. Continue reading →

Now Boarding the Trayvon Martin-Goerge Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck…George Zimmerman!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Well, why not?

It’s been running over him again and again since the beginning; he might as well buy a ticket!

Not so fast, George!

This epic ethics train wreck, which has already engulfed the news media, civil rights activists, defense attorneys, prosecutors, bloggers, pundits, members of Congress, Barney Frank, Spike Lee, the Congressional Black Caucus, President Obama, Martin’s mother, and maybe even you, just picked up George Zimmerman.

Zimmerman just had his bail revoked because he and his wife misled the court at the bail hearing, claiming they had minimal financial resources when in fact a fund for Zimmerman’s defense had already raked in $135,000. As a result, the original bail was set at a minimum level. Now Zimmerman has to turn himself in to authorities again, and whether he can get bail a second time is in doubt.

Lying to a judge is always stupid and wrong, but this instance is spectacularly so. Zimmerman’s account of what happened on the fateful night that he shot Trayvon Martin is likely to be a key aspect of his defense on second degree murder charges, and having the fact that he already lied to the court once in the case isn’t going to help his credibility with the jury. It doesn’t make him a murderer, of  course. It does make him less convincing when he denies that he is a murderer.

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Facts: Associated Press

Graphic: Now Public

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

Why We Shouldn’t Elect Liars

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

You can’t tell from the picture, but Senator Kirk’s pants are on fire.

It took a great deal of restraint for me not to write a post after reading the Daily Beast’s Micahel Tomasky’s infuriating essay about the “media witch hunt” against Elizabeth Warren. If there ever was a piece destined to send me over the edge, that was it: not only did Tomasky express indignation that anyone would use Warren’s pose as a minority to impugn her integrity, but he ridiculed concern over her plagiarism as well. Here, however, was the capper: he compared criticism of Warren to the attacks on Bill Clinton during the Monica fiasco, writing,

“The situations are in fact almost precisely the same. You had then a press pack that had decided that whether Bill Clinton was telling the truth about Monica was a question on which the fate of the republic hinged. The press became self-righteously consumed with its search for The Truth. Meanwhile, outside the Beltway, and outside of Wingnuttia (it existed then, just at about half of its current GDP), nobody cared what the truth was. The media kept producing revelations; surely, now, swore Maureen Dowd and Michael Kelly, America will see this man for the reprobate he is! America looked, yawned, told the press to start acting like grownups, and continued to approve of the job Clinton was doing as president at rates near 70 percent and to oppose impeachment at similar levels.” Continue reading →

Newark Mayor Cory Booker Recants

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Don’t feel bad, Mayor. Galileo understands.

When, I wonder, will the political parties realize that having spokespersons with proven credibility and integrity, who will speak the truth and not embrace cynical, misleading talking points, can only help the parties’ causes? Based on the sad Corey Booker episode, I’m guessing the answer is “Never.”

The Obama campaign, taking its cue from New Gingrich (which itself is disturbing), put out what can only be called an anti-capitalism ad, condemning Mitt Romney’s leadership of  Bain Capital, a private investment firm that acquires companies, streamlines and repairs them to make them profitable, or liquidates them if they are not. The ad relies on breath-taking ignorance of how investment and business creation works, but fits nicely into the Occupy Wall Street mythology. For a President trying, theoretically, to get the economy humming again, it was a stunning example of campaign deceit.

Cory Booker is Newark’s Democratic mayor, a devoted Obama supporter, and like his state’s Republican Governor Chris Cristie, remarkably willing to tell the truth, for someone in his field. On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Booker pronounced the Bain ad “nauseating”:

“If you look at the totality of Bain Capital’s record, they’ve done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses. And this [the ad], to me, I’m very uncomfortable with….I have to just say, from a very personal level, I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity. I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people are investing in companies like Bain Capital.” Continue reading →

Web Hoaxes: Not Funny, Always Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

P.T. Barnum’s “Fiji Mermaid:. At least in 1842,. it wasn’t on the web.

Ethics Alarms is swearing off “angry ex-boyfriend/girlfriend takes cruel outrageous revenge” stories, no matter how juicy the ethics lesson may be. First it was the tattoo artist who defaced his ex’s back with a huge and ugly drawing of steaming dog excrement that was fantasy masquerading as news, and now it’s the Polish dentist scorned…remember? The one who pulled out her cheating boyfriend’s teeth? Yes, it seems that horror story was a hoax too.

A lot of people who should know better think that web hoaxes are funny and hoaxers are clever. I regard them as the ethical equivalent of  chefs and waiters who spit in restaurant customers’ food. The web creates—a web!—of information and communication across nations and cultures, and poisoning that web with bogus stories creates a chain of unpredictable harm. At very least, hoaxes make every trusting source that passes along the lie an unwitting accomplice in a despicable act. It harms long-nurtured relationships of mutual trust between those who post on blogs and websites and those who read them. Continue reading →

The Curse of the Honest Vice-President and the Evolving President

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

“EEEK! The President is EVOLVING!!!”

Vice-President Joe Biden sent Washington, D.C.’s pundits into a tizzy when he told  NBC’s “Meet the Press” last Sunday that he was“absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage. It is amazing, when Biden has lapped all previous Vice Presidents in goofs, mistakes, outrageous statements and embarrassments that this statement—honest, reasonable and forthright—should be regarded as a serious blunder. What did he do wrong this time? As Dana Milbank of the Washington Post put it, Biden “committing the classic Washington gaffe of accidentally speaking the truth.”

And why is it a gaffe for this Vice President to tell the truth by stating his support for a position strongly favored by the majority of Democrats, and increasingly the public as a whole? Why would Biden be off message by embracing a core cause of the gay, lesbian and transgendered community, which is overwhelmingly in the Obama camp? The answer is that he has embarrassed the President by calling attention to the fact that President Obama has conspicuously avoided making such a clear and unequivocal statement on the issue, because he wants to avoid being open, honest, direct and truthful about his views on gay marriage until after the election. Continue reading →

“Show Boat” Ethics: Defining Deceit

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

I frequently discuss the concept of deceit in ethics seminars, and my favorite example, which I have also used on Ethics Alarms, is the famous “Does your dog bite?” gag from “The Pink Panther Strikes Again!” This morning I was reminded of an even better example, though not so funny, while watching Turner Movie Classics. TMC was showing the 1936 Hollywood adaptation of “Showboat,” the black-and-white version directed by James Whale of “Frankenstein” fame, that is richer and more faithful to the original Oscar Hammerstein-Jerome Kern Broadway musical than the later, color version starring Ava Gardner, Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel. Continue reading →