recklessness

Thirteen Ethics Observations On The GOP’s Letter To Iran

/ Jack Marshall / 61 Comments

Letter to IranFrom the Washington Post:

“An already heated battle between the White House and Republicans over negotiations to curtail Iran’s nuclear program grew more tense Monday when 47 Republican senators sent a letter to Iran designed to kill any potential deal.

The White House responded by accusing the Republicans of conspiring with Iranian hard-liners, who oppose the delicate negotiations, and suggesting that their goal was to push the United States into a military conflict.”

Observations:

1. The letter cannot be defended as anything other than an effort to sabotage sensitive international negotiations. As such, it is direct interference with the President’s ability to do his job. The fact that Republicans, like Israel, have abundant evidence that President Obama is likely to do that job, in this case, badly and even dangerously is no justification for this unethical, unconstitutional, arrogant and offensive act. The American people elected Obama president, and with that came the authority to conduct foreign affairs and oversee negotiations with foreign governments. The letter is wrong in every way.

2. It does not matter, and should not matter, to any American whether or not they believe that a breakdown in negotiations with Iran would be preferable and safer than the kind of deal this President is likely to produce. It does not matter. The letter is per se a breach of the separation of powers, and as precedent, endangers the nation’s entire governance structure.

3. Anyone who defends this atrocious, reckless and unprofessional conduct is fully embracing “the ends justifies the means” as a principle of democratic government.

4. If he was not aware of it and did not approve it, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell is obligated to condemn this action, and punish all signatories,  stripping them of committee assignments related to foreign affairs.

5. He won’t. Continue reading →

Hillary Clinton and the E-mails: A Case Study In Ethics Corruption

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

corrupted

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a couple of days now, but haven’t had the heart. Frankly, I am really sick of having to make the same point about the Clintons over and over again—they never learn, and will never change—knowing that so many people will just immediately turn off their brains and run for the rationalizations dispensary any time dishonesty, hypocrisy, deceit or misconduct by one of them is uncovered.

This happens, you see, because the Clinton are perhaps the most prominent among a particular harmful species of individual in our culture, the ethics corrupter. Ethics corrupters are popular, powerful, successful and famous people who, because they are popular, powerful, successful and famous, many citizens conclude that they must also be good and wise, and therefor trustworthy. Since they are (many believe) good and wise, what they choose to do must also be good, and when they are accused of doing wrong, even when the evidence is unavoidable that they have done wrong, there can be only two explanations to those vulnerable to correuption. The first is that the evidence, no matter how strong, cannot be believed, and those wielding it are in fact enemies of right, good, honesty and fairness. The second is that if these good and wise people did it, then what they did cannot be wrong, or can be justified, usually by “the ends justify the means.”

Thus by gaining the trust and admiration of good people, usually through clever use of dishonesty, deception and manipulation, ethics corrupters set their admirers and supporters up to have their own values weakened or destroyed. Richard Nixon caused honest people to defend the covering up of crimes. Charlie Rangel caused people with integrity to support accepting bribes. Bill Clinton made feminists excuse exactly the kind of sexual harassment they persuaded Clinton to sign a law prohibiting, and inspired lawyers to excuse perjury because “everybody lies about sex.” Lance Armstrong made parents who once taught their children not to cheat to defend cheating, because he had a foundation with a noble cause. Brian Williams and Bill O’Reilly made TV viewers excuse lying by journalists.

Ethics corrupters make their supporters worse parents, friends, employees, employers and human beings; in turn, those corrupted supporters make society less ethical and more cynical as well. These are genuine cultural polluters; indeed, they are cultural pollution.

Hillary Clinton is an ethics corrupter, and the response to the revelations of her use of exclusively personal e-mails proves it beyond the shadow of a doubt.

There is no benign interpretation of her conduct regarding her State Department e-mails. It was not a mistake; one cannot claim that it was accidental. Since it was intentional, there must have been a purpose, and the only conceivable purposes are unethical ones. According to the 2009 National Archives and Records Administration regulations in effect when Clinton took office, “Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system.”  With a private e-mail account and only using that for official correspondence, Clinton did not have a system that ensured such preservation. She, not the system, determined what would be preserved. Anything not preserved or left on her private account would not be subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Is there any explanation for having a private account only, an justification that is simultaneously responsible, plausible and does not suggest that Clinton wanted to control which of her communications could come before the public and the press?

No.
Continue reading →

Hillary’s E-mail Ethics Breach: The Only Questions Are 1) “How Can Anyone Trust Her?” and 2) “Is there Nothing Her Supporters Won’t Excuse?”

/ Jack Marshall / 51 Comments

hillary-clinton-pointing2The ethics issue here is very straightforward and uncontroversial. As the New York Times put it:

“Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record. Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.”

I don’t know why the Times says “may have violated.” Her exclusive use of personal e-mail does violate the rules, and in fact the law, as the Times correctly states in the final sentence. Moreover:

1. This is a blatant example of Clinton again refusing to abide by rules and laws other officials are required to abide by. As the Washington Post notes, it was intentional: Clinton’s personal account was established on the same day that Clinton began her confirmation hearings to be Secretary of State., and the expiration on the domain is shortly after the 2016 election. Continue reading →

AGAIN: Irresponsible Gun Owners Must Be Charged

/ Jack Marshall / 80 Comments
"...but since this is a .357 magnum, the most powerful handgun on Earth, and will blow your head clean OFF.... I think I'll go shopping with my little boy with this in the holster, unfastened, and bullet in the chamber!"

“…but since this is a .357 magnum, the most powerful handgun on Earth, and will blow your head clean OFF…. I think I’ll go shopping with my little boy with this in the holster, unfastened, and bullet in the chamber!”

CBS informs us that in Wassila, Alaska, where you know who dwells, a 4-year-old boy was shot in the leg Saturday on a public sidewalkwhen his mother’s .357-caliber handgun fell out of its holster, struck the pavement on its hammer and fired.

No one has been charged, we are told.

Well, that’s cretinous, and as a society, our law enforcement has to send more responsible messages than that.

Again, as I noted here and here and here, all since the dawn of 2015, the fact that the child or an innocent bystander wasn’t killed by this reckless and stupid gunowner was pure chance, moral luck. As far as her conduct goes, there is no difference. She is the equivalent of a drunk and speeding driver. This isn’t an accident that “can happen to anyone.” This can happen to idiotic gun owners who don’t know basic gun safety and allow guns to be in the close vicinity of children. Why was her holster unfastened? Why did the gun have a bullet in the chamber? Why wasn’t she aware that what she was doing might make the gun fall? Why did she feel she had to carry a cannon of a hand-gun with her on a weekend outing to beautiful downtown Wasilla?

Charge her, prosecute her, throw her in jail, take away her gun privileges, and have child protection services investigate the home.

This has got to stop.

[But don’t call her a gun owner. She isn’t a real gun owner. Real gun owners don’t act like this. To call her a gun owner gives her dignity that she doesn’t deserve, and promotes bigotry against true gun owners, who by definition are responsible, peaceful, and observe gun safety principles at all times. If you don’t believe me, just ask the President. He understands. This is how he thinks, after all.]

Ethics Quiz: Honoring The Dead and Deadly Team Mate

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Taveras

When they take the field in Spring Training and for the rest of the 2015 baseball season, the St. Louis Cardinals will be wearing a memorial patch reading “OT” in honor of outfielder Oscar Taveras, the 22-year-old budding star outfielder who died in a car crash in his native Dominican Republic last October. Such mourning patches have become common since 1972, when the Pittsburgh Pirates moved beyond the traditional black armband to a personalized patch following the tragic death of the team’s Hall of Fame outfielder Roberto Clemente in a plane crash, as he was flying humanitarian aid to Nicaragua.

Taveras, however, unlike Clemente, died in an act of reckless stupidity that took not only his own life but that of his 18-year-old girlfriend, Edilia Arvelo, as well. Toxicology tests showed that his blood alcohol level was five times the legal limit before the crash. situation is more complex because toxicology tests showed that his blood alcohol level at the time of his death was five times the legal limit. Moreover, Taveras’, also was killed in the crash. If Taveras had lived and Arvelo alone had died, he would have been prosecuted for manslaughter.

And thus your first Ethics Alarms Baseball Ethics Quiz of 2015 is this:

Is it ethical for the Cardinals to publicly honor Taveras with a uniform patch?

Continue reading →

One More Time As A Child Finds A Gun And Kills: Prosecute the Parents

/ Jack Marshall / 99 Comments

DSC_1306

This time the locale was Elmo, Missouri, and it was a five-year old pulling the trigger. The victim was a 9-month-old boy, but it’s basically the same tragic, stupid story….just like in the Idaho Walmart, where the two-year-old shot his mother, or the Albuquerque motel room where another toddler shot both of his parents, who were just lucky and lived. (They have been charged with child abuse. Good.) A gun owner negligently, recklessly, criminally leaves a firearm, loaded, where  young children are and a tragedy results.

Alexis Widerholt, the mother of the children, called 911, and when emergency crews arrived they found that her the baby had been shot in the skull with a .22-caliber magnum revolver.

Somebody has to go to jail for this, maybe several people. Authorities say the gun belongs to a relative, but not the mother. If she knew the gun was in the house, she’s accountable. Anyone responsible for putting the loaded gun where a kid might find it is accountable. Charge them with manslaughter, convict them, send them away. Unless the mother didn’t know about the gun (she originally told the police it was a paint gun, either out of panic, confusion, or ignorance), she needs to lose the right to parent them, at least for a while. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Daily Beast Editor Justin Miller

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

“Fuck you…”

—-Daily Beast editor Justin Miller, in a tweet to U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky) Miller was irate that Paul blamed media bias on the uproar over his irresponsible and foolish comments regarding mandatory vaccination. The tweet continued: “Today I am getting my booster vaccine. Wonder how the liberal media will misreport this.”

After Paul’s office pronounced the tweet “unacceptable,” Miller deleted the tweet, and apologized, telling Politico, “I replied from my personal account to what I felt was spin after Senator Paul said factually incorrect things about vaccines. It would’ve been better to respond with facts than an obscenity, and I deleted the tweet so it wouldn’t reflect on the Beast. I’m sorry for the insult.”

Observations:

1. Did Miller personally apologize to Paul? There is no indication that he did. This, therefore, is not an apology to the person directly aggrieved. We are seeing more and more of this: “I am sorry, Politico, that I behaved wrongly toward X.” That’s lazy, deceptive and cowardly.

2. A respectable, professional news organization would fire Miller, apology or not. In fact, any organization would fire a high placed executive who delivered a public “fuck you” to an elected official, and should. It is outrageously unprofessional conduct. It reflects badly on the organization. It shows miserable judgment, and makes trust all but impossible. I cannot think of a single job I ever held, in academia, in associations or in the non-profit sector where a tweet like that to a member, donor or customer, never mind a member of Congress (or, heaven forbid, a judge), wouldn’t have gotten me fired so fast the words “I’m sorry” would have been completed after I was locked out of the building, and rightly so. Continue reading →

Rand Paul, Anti-Vaxxing and Signature Significance

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments
"Got it, Senator. NEXT!!!"

“Got it, Senator. NEXT!!!”

It would be nice if a genuine, rational libertarian candidate could be part of the national political debate. The problem is that there are no genuine, rational libertarians. To be genuine, a libertarian has to decide on his or her policy positions based on the dictates of the ideology, which is backwards: as a leader, rather than a professor or theorist, one must figure out what is going to work, and what you wish would work or what a pre-determined formula says should work are not germane to the issue. For proof of the flaw in the latter approach, all we have to do is consider the past seven years.

Thus libertarians are prone to saying things like, “The United States should never have entered World War II.” This has been a staple of Rand Paul’s deluded father, Ron Paul, and properly places pure libertarianism with pacifism, also known as Cloud Cuckoo Land. The Berrigans used to say the same thing, you know. I believe it was Philip who said that nobody tried passive resistance to defeat Hitler, so we’ll never know if it would have worked. When you say things like this for public consumption, you forfeit the privilege of being taken seriously. It is signature significance: your judgment can’t be trusted.

For me, Rand Paul’s libertarian moment of signature significance was when he questioned the need for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, essentially saying that the nation would have been just fine allowing people like Lester Maddox to chase African-Americans out of his restaurant with an axe handle, or bus drivers to force Rosa Parks to sit in the back of the bus until change occurred naturally, you know, like after the race war. Such statements are not isolated instances of momentary madness; they are markers of serious ethical and cognitive problems, and it was inevitable that the source of that opinion would have more of the same, and perhaps worse. Continue reading →

Wait–What Idiot Thought We Wanted A Sequel To The Idaho Walmart Shooting?

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments
Does this graphic look familiar? It should: I used it only a month ago, and for the exact same reason.

Does this graphic look familiar? It should: I used it only a month ago, and for the exact same reason.

From the Washington Post:

“A toddler reaching for an iPod in his mother’s purse grabbed a loaded gun instead before shooting both his parents in an Albuquerque motel room on Saturday, according to news reports. Police said the bullet hit the father in the buttock and the mother, who is eight months pregnant, in her right shoulder, but did not strike a 2-year-old child who was also in the room, according to Fox News.”

Gee, I guess Monique Villescas and John Reynolds, the lucky parents in this near tragedy, were so amused at the death of Veronica Jean Rutledge at the hands of her toddler that they just couldn’t resist trying the old “let’s leave a loaded gun where a small child can reach it” trick themselves. Or, I suppose, they might just be irresponsible fools.

Observations:

1. Two of these incidents in a little more than a month ?! What are the odds that Rutledge and these boobs were the only Americans leaving loaded guns within the reach of young children? Continue reading →

Irresponsible Gun Ownership and Consequences

/ Jack Marshall / 58 Comments

smoking-gun

Here we go again:

A 15-year-old boy  shot and killed his younger brother during a game of “cops and robbers” using what they thought was an unloaded handgun. The boy called police to their home in Eagan, Minnesota, and told them he had shot his brother, who was pronounced dead at the scene. Though police said the facts would be presented to the Dakota County Attorney’s Office for review, but no one is in custody and no charges are expected.

Investigators say the boys found their father’s 9mm handgun, which had been hidden unloaded, with a magazine holding cartridges nearby. At some point, the handgun was loaded by one of the boys, and assuming it had been unloaded, the brothers  began to chase each other in a game of “cops and robbers.” police said. The 15-year-old unintentionally fired,  striking his brother in the chest.

The father should be arrested and charged with negligent homicide. Continue reading →