I think have mentioned here before the frustration of not having high-speed internet available where I live, in Alexandria, Virginia, ZIP 22305. unless I surrender to the horrors of Comcast, which I will not do. According to a source at Verizon, my carrier, the problem is that the City of Alexandria insists on what sound to me like kickbacks from the company in order to get approval to install the necessary hardware. There may be other reasons: I don’t care. I keep seeing Fios ads directed at my locality, and keep getting told that it is unavailable. This has significant business consequences for ProEthics and me. I would like to do have video commentary, and we don’t have the speed to upload one, to give just one example.
Yesterday, I received this email from Verizon:
Important service message for PRO ETHICS LTD: Fios is now available at your location.
There are service updates available for your business. Call us to find out about new service and product options. We want to make sure you’re getting the right service and value for your business. So, we reviewed your account and discovered that our latest product and service upgrades could help PRO ETHICS LTD increase efficiency and productivity. Call us today-we’ll take you through the available service options and give you a Firm Price Quote.
Call your Rep at 888.704.7905 or schedule an appointment.
Sincerely, Stephen E. Marinetto, Marketing Director, Verizon Business Markets
So informed, I called my “representative.” The results of my call? Continue reading →
1. Unethical in its simplicity. An esteemed commenter insists, “Any witnesses who allege that Kavanaugh assaulted them should be allowed to testify.” This is either naive (incompetent) or intellectually dishonest. The Democratic Party’s stated objective is to delay a confirmation vote until after the Fall election, in the Hail Mary hope that the Senate will flip to them. There should be no question that the party, now thoroughly corrupted by a mindset holding that anything—lies, character assassination, perjury, misrepresentation, defiling of due process—is justified if it will protect abortion rights and its own power, would manipulate such a rule for political benefit, would recruit an endless series of politically motivated accusers if it could accomplish the objective of running out the clock.
The “any witnesses” flaw was amply demonstrated by yesterday’s fiasco. “New Kavanaugh allegations!” my late TV news screamed. By this morning, the entire story had fallen apart, and yet that ridiculous account (an anonymous woman claimed she was assaulted on a boat in Newport by a drunken “Brett” and friend, so an anonymous man beat them up) added to the designed false impression that multiple, verified, credible witnesses were confirming that Brett Kavanaugh is, as that same esteemed commenter has suggested, a serial sexual predator.
A witness whose claims are raised in a timely manner (that is before hearings begin allowing time for investigation and a response from the accused), whose account meets minimum standards of plausibility, whose accusation involves conduct relevant to a nominee’s fitness to serve, and whose story did not occur so long ago that verification or rebuttal is impossible, should be allowed to testify.
Those qualifications eliminate all of Kavanaugh’s accusers, as well as Anita Hill. Continue reading →
On a day when Ethics Alarms finally passed its high-water mark for followers, I thought it appropriate to plug Fark, one of the legion of sources I check every day to find ethics topics. It’s a facetious news aggregation site that links to both serious and obscure stories with gag intros, like this week’s header on a story about a recent study on Alzheimers: “The number of Americans with Alzheimers is expected to double in the next 40 years. That’s horrible, but did you hear that the number of Americans with Alzheimers is expected to double in the next 40 years?”
My dad loved that joke, and the older he got, the more often he told it, and the more ticked off my mother would be. An all-Fark Warm-Up is a good way to avoid (mostly) politics for a while.
1. I have no sympathy for this guy. Is that unethical? This is Mark Cropp:
He has “Devast8” tattooed on his face. He says that his brother did it when they both were very drunk, as if he was a non-participant. “Once it was started, I thought, I can’t go back on it now,” he has said. “I wish I had stopped while the outline was there to be quite honest.” Good, Mark. This is progress.
Cropp has been complaining for a year that his face tattoo has kept him from being hired. Would you hire him? I wouldn’t. Such high-profile self-mutilation is signature significance for a person with terrible judgment and life skills, or, to be brief, an idiot. Would you hire someone with “I am an idiot” tattooed on his forehead? Same thing.
Apparently he has been arrested and is facing charges in New Zealand, where he lives. Psst! Mark! Don’t have “I am guilty!” tattooed on your face while you are awaiting trial.
2. No sympathy, Part 2. I also have almost no sympathy for Beverley Dodds, who once looked like this…
…until decades of slathering herself in Coca Cola and baby oil while sunbathing and broiling herself on tanning beds caused her to have to battlethe effects of skin cancer for two decades, and has the skin of a reptile. (You don’t want me to post a photo of her skin. Trust me.) Like Mark above, this is self-inflicted mutilation. How sorry should we feel for someone who hits themselves in the head with a hammer every day who complains of headaches? Few public health issues have been so thoroughly publicized as warnings about long-term skin damage from excessive exposure to the sun and tanning beds.
3. No sympathy, Part 3. 24-year-old Michael Vigeant of Hudson, New Hampshire, a Red Sox fan on his way home via subway from Yankee Stadium after the Sox had lost to the Yankees (they won the next night though, thus clinching the division, and eliminating New York. Go Red Sox!) died when he tried to climb on top of a moving Metro-North train and was electrocuted by overhead wires. The resulting chaos trapped hundreds of riders more than two hours. His brother did it too, but was luckier, and train personnel got him down. Michael touched a catenary wire and was electrocuted, said MTA officials.
Now watch his family try to sue the city. I put “Don’t try to subway surf on moving trains,” “Don’t get huge tattoos on your face” and “Don’t repeatedly broil your skin” in the same category: lessons an adult should learn and has an obligation to observe. Not doing so suggests a general responsibility and commons sense deficit that is a menace to everyone, not just them. Continue reading →
WordPress doesn’t let me embed any videos but those on YouTube, so you will have to click on the link to see Bill Clinton, being grilled on “The Today Show,” access a basket of rationalizations to minimize his wrongdoing in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Co-author James Patterson (Bill is the latest neophyte novelist Patterson is teaming with for one of his cookie-cutter thrillers) even jumps in to add one.
I think I’ll leave it at that, and challenge Ethics Alarms Readers to identify the rationalizations Bill grasps at here. NBC’s Craig Morton should be commended for asking the tough questions, and not lobbing the softballs Bill expected.
I thought a bit of rancor was appropriate for a Comment of the Day on this topic, which I’m sure some Ethics Alarms readers are getting sick to death of, the collapse of journalism ethics. I fight every day to find a balance between posting more evidence of this corrosive and wholly avoidable infection within our society, for more evidence appears daily, and leaving the issue alone for another day in order to examine different topics. But while in other areas of professional ethics I see sincere and genuine efforts to identify unethical conduct, address it, and reform it…Yes, even in politics…I see none in journalism. To the contrary, I see obstinate denial that there is a problem, especially from those who perceive themselves and their ideological agendas as benefiting from the increasingly egregious mainstream media bias. Until there is an acknowledgment of this problem and its seriousness within journalism itself, it will only continue to get worse, and our society and nation will get even sicker as a result.
CAN journalists legitimately try to hide their agendas from anyone with a functioning brain and ethical compass after they “cut loose” in 2016? The evidence of media bias has been getting bigger and bigger since 1992. The media’s running interference for Bill, attempt to swindle the voters in 2004 with a lie, and industry-wide push for Obama were all pretty damning pieces of evidence, but the open abandonment of objectivity in 2016 in an attempt to save this nation from itself irrevocably broke the scale. I think for a while they even had you [ Host’s note:That is, me] persuaded, though not consciously so, since your thinking moved through the idea that Hillary would do less damage than Trump before you decided that Hillary was also unworthy of your support.
It’s frankly time for the mainstream media to own up to the fact that it isn’t objective anymore and hasn’t been for some time, and that its job is to push the progressive agenda any way it can. It won’t though. Continue reading →
“Journalism *is* activism in its most basic form. The entire basis for its ethical practice is the idea that a democracy requires an informed citizenry in order to function. Choosing what you want people to know is a form of activism, even if it’s not the march-and-protest kind.”
—-Matt Pearce, national correspondent for the LA Times, tweeting his support for the definition of journalism endorsed by Rebecca Schneid, co-editor in chief of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School newspaper, as Brian Stelter, CNN’s fake broadcast journalism ethicist, silently stood by, since it is mean and bad form to tell teenagers dictating national policy that they don’t know what they are talking about.
By now you have heard the latest example of Outrage in the Air, the American Airlines flight attendant running amuck. A video of part of the incident was posted by a passenger, Surain Adyanthaya, who uploaded it to Facebook. Adyanthaya wrote about what she witnessed on Flight 591 from San Francisco International Airport to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, saying,
“OMG! AA Flight attendant violently took a stroller from a lady with her baby on my flight, hitting her and just missing the baby. Then he tried to fight a passenger who stood up for her.”
The basic facts of the episode have been confirmed by multiple passengers, and the altercation has been reported across the news media. Then there is the video. It does not show the stroller incident that Adyanthaya described, but it does show a female passenger standing at the front of the plane, sobbing uncontrollably as she holds her baby, as she says, “You can’t use violence with a baby.Just give me back my stroller, please.”
A male passenger seated near the front of the plane suddenly comes to the woman’s aid, saying, “No, I’m not going to sit here and watch this stuff.” He then stands up and demands to know the male flight attendant’s name. The flight attendant who grabbed the stroller appears, prompting the male passenger to warn him.
“Hey, bud, you do that to me, and I’ll knock you flat,” he says. “Hey, you stay out of this!” the flight attendant shouts back at him, pointing his finger at the passenger. He then steps forward, challenging the passenger. “Hit me,” the flight attendant says, motioning with his hands. “Come on, hit me! You don’t know what the story is!”
“I don’t care what the story is,” the defiant male passenger replies. “You almost hurt a baby.”
I think have mentioned here before the frustration of not having high-speed internet available where I live, in Alexandria, Virginia, ZIP 22305. unless I surrender to the horrors of Comcast, which I will not do. According to a source at Verizon, my carrier, the problem is that the City of Alexandria insists on what sound to me like kickbacks from the company in order to get approval to install the necessary hardware. There may be other reasons: I don’t care. I keep seeing Fios ads directed at my locality, and keep getting told that it is unavailable. This has significant business consequences for ProEthics and me. I would like to do have video commentary, and we don’t have the speed to upload one, to give just one example.
Noonish Ethics Warm-Up. 9/27/18: “You’re The Bad Guys,” Cont.
Hi!
1. Unethical in its simplicity. An esteemed commenter insists, “Any witnesses who allege that Kavanaugh assaulted them should be allowed to testify.” This is either naive (incompetent) or intellectually dishonest. The Democratic Party’s stated objective is to delay a confirmation vote until after the Fall election, in the Hail Mary hope that the Senate will flip to them. There should be no question that the party, now thoroughly corrupted by a mindset holding that anything—lies, character assassination, perjury, misrepresentation, defiling of due process—is justified if it will protect abortion rights and its own power, would manipulate such a rule for political benefit, would recruit an endless series of politically motivated accusers if it could accomplish the objective of running out the clock.
The “any witnesses” flaw was amply demonstrated by yesterday’s fiasco. “New Kavanaugh allegations!” my late TV news screamed. By this morning, the entire story had fallen apart, and yet that ridiculous account (an anonymous woman claimed she was assaulted on a boat in Newport by a drunken “Brett” and friend, so an anonymous man beat them up) added to the designed false impression that multiple, verified, credible witnesses were confirming that Brett Kavanaugh is, as that same esteemed commenter has suggested, a serial sexual predator.
A witness whose claims are raised in a timely manner (that is before hearings begin allowing time for investigation and a response from the accused), whose account meets minimum standards of plausibility, whose accusation involves conduct relevant to a nominee’s fitness to serve, and whose story did not occur so long ago that verification or rebuttal is impossible, should be allowed to testify.
Those qualifications eliminate all of Kavanaugh’s accusers, as well as Anita Hill. Continue reading →
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Filed under "bias makes you stupid", Character, Ethics Alarms Award Nominee, Ethics Dunces, Ethics Quotes, Ethics Train Wrecks, Gender and Sex, Government & Politics, Incompetent Elected Officials, Law & Law Enforcement, Rights
Tagged as "innocent until proven guilty", "the ends justify the means", #MeToo, 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, Anita Hill, bias, bigotry, Brett Kavanaugh Nomination Ethics Train Wreck, Christine Blasey Ford, commenters, Democrats, due process, Harvey Weinstein Ethics Train Wreck, hypocrisy, misandry, Paula Jones, res ipsa loquitur, Senator Diane Feinstein, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand