respect

Occupy Brain Pans

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Allow me to translate: "Duh!"

The latest, dumbest and most telling of the endless Occupy group protests occurs today, as 111 Occupy Wall Street spin-offs across the country engage in “Occupy the Courts,” a protest to mark two years since the 2010 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which held that the government cannot ban organizational spending on political campaigns. Move to Amend, the group that is sponsoring the protests, says that the goal is to build support for a constitutional amendment that would abolish corporate constitutional rights, such as the right to free speech, and declaring that political campaign spending is not a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.

If I were optimistic and naive, I would assume that this nonsense would finally shame the imprudent members of the media, Democratic Party and Obama administration who cynically hitched their wagons to the Occupy Wall Street anvil, hoping that eventually the groups would do or say something that justified all the attention and expense lavished on them. Instead, the Occupy movement has featured rapes, robberies, beatings, riots, obscenity, anti-Semites, homeless hangers-on, demonstrators defecating on cars, a woman placing her baby on railroad tracks, another child being abandoned to shiver in a tent, a pseudo-bomb being thrown at the White House, a demonstrator shooting a rifle at the White House, violated permits, squalor, disease and rats….all while the news media showed its stripes by maintaining with a straight face that this display was no different or worse than the comparatively dignified, focused and streamlined Tea Party demonstrations. Nonetheless, the facilitators of this embarrassment in the annals of civil protest seem determined to keep the faith until it blows up into a genuine tragedy or slinks away. If Occupy the Courts won’t convince the pols and journalists that they made an epic mistake, nothing will. But at least it settles the matter. These people have no idea, none, what they are doing. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Disclosing Information We have A Right To Know But May Not Want To Know

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Travel blogger Margie Goldsmith has a provocative post about a nightmare flight she experienced on American Airlines. You can read it here. The plane had one problem after another, all of which were

How much about what's happening in that cockpit do we really want to know?

described in terrifying detail by the captain, who cheerily informed them that:

  • The plane’s hydraulic system was leaking and had to be repaired
  • During the delay, the pilot was going to watch a video about how to take off from that airport, which was especially tricky.
  • The new plane the passengers were later moved to had been really foul-smelling, and needed to be completely cleaned and deodorized
  • The new plane’s hatch wouldn’t close properly, and..
  • They finally sealed it with duct tape, and were going to fly that way.

Goldsmith ends her story with this: “The next time I’m on a delayed flight and the Captain does not announce the reason for the hold-up, I think I’m going to be one happy passenger.”

Your Ethics Quiz for today poses this question:

“Is it more ethical for an airline pilot to detail all the problems an airplane is having in the interest of candor and full disclosure, or should he or she just deal with the problems and not increase passengers’ anxiety over matters that they neither understand nor can do anything about?” Continue reading →

Recent Race Card Rankings: Trying Out The Knight Scale

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I can see Michael Moore from here!

Ethics Alarms recently proposed the Knight Scale, a way to rank attempts to play the race card or otherwise accuse politicians, satirists, writers, pundits and others of racism in order to silence them, ruin their credibility, or score cheap political points in the media. The Knight Scale was made possible by blogger Christopher Knight, who somehow managed to find a cartoonist’s substitution of Michelle Obama for Marie Antoinette ( as a commentary on the First Lady’s ill-timed–some say—taste for lavish parties and social activities) in a famous painting. Despite the fact that the French queen was not, to my knowledge, black, Knight somehow found this to be blatant racism, thereby establishing the tippity-top of the Knight Scale: you just can’t come up with a more far-fetched, unfair, factually indefensible accusation of racism than that. With that outrageous complaint as a 10, the most outrageous, where would other, necessarily lesser bogus racism claims rank?

Let’s look at last week. From here on, we can count on an ever-increasing number of Knight Scale candidates, since an African-American President  presents such an irresistible temptation for unscrupulous race-baiters, and the entire Obama Administration is seemingly conditioned to cry race bias whenever criticism get hot, so consider this a trial run: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: George Stephanopoulos

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

ABC News presents: "This Week with Bud Abbott"

Today George Stephanopoulos began “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” his Sunday ABC current events show, with 15 minutes of a pointless, irrelevant, unfunny interview with Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, who, in the proud tradition of Pat Paulsen, is again running a fake presidential campaign.Such stunts have always been about cheap publicity, ratings and entertainment, and have as much pertinence to public affairs and national politics as Taylor Swift’s recipe for chili. For ABC News to devote a full 25% of its weekly overview to this nonsense is disrespectful to viewers, who do not tune in to George, Paul Krugman, Peggy Noonan and the rest for yuks. I know how to find Colbert, who is a talented satirist and an engaging performer, when I’m in the mood for him. For Stephanopoulos to waste my time with his failed audition as the next Bud Abbott—his attempt to riff with Colbert was painful to watch, and essentially killed the comic’s act—was  a breach of journalistic integrity and responsibility, not to mention comedy malpractice.Does the New York Times, just for the heck of it and for funsies, spontaneously devote a quarter of its front page to knock-knock jokes, because it’s their paper, and what the hell? No, because it has a job to do, and people depend on the Times to do it. Continue reading →

The Admirable Mr. Sondheim

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

And an ethical hat it is, too!

Readers who are not interested in the art of lyric writing and the mechanics of constructing a Broadway musical should probably avoid the second and final installment of Stephen Sondheim’s chronicle of his creative life, “Look, I Made a Hat.”  They will be missing something important nonetheless: a rare example of truly ethical memoirs.

As in his first volume, “Finishing the Hat,” America’s pre-eminent composer-lyricist for the stage reveals himself as a gentleman, an adult, and a thoroughly ethical human being, and does so not by proclaiming his virtues, but by demonstrating them in his writing. He is not uncritical, but always fair and kind. He accepts personal responsibility for projects that failed, and is generous with giving credit for projects that were successful. There is no false modesty in Sondheim about his own skills and achievements, but neither does he seem to overvalue them or seek his reader’s admiration by blowing his own horn.

The line Sondheim walks in both books is fine, and he walks it finely. For example, I initially thought his decision to only criticize the techniques of other lyricists who are dead was a cowardly one, but upon reading both books it is clear that the decision was motivated by kindness. Sondheim takes the craft of lyric-writing very seriously, and his integrity would not allow him to censor a critical observation regarding a colleague’s work when he believed the criticism was illuminating and had merit. Realizing how hurtful a critique from someone of his reputation and accomplishments could be, Sondheim restricted his frank and (mostly)  fair assessments to writers beyond wounding. If Jerry Herman isn’t grateful, he should be. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Julio Diaz

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

[This story, from National Public Radio’s Storycorps, is three years old. But an Ethics Hero is an Ethics Hero whether Ethics Alarms recognizes him or not, and this is a Dickensian tale if there ever was one, about a man whose ethical instinct are so impeccable that they make me feel terribly inadequate. Ethics Alarms reader and commenter Tim LeVier brought it to my attention….thanks, Tim, once again.]

In February of 2008, 31-year-old social worker Julio Diaz, as he often does,  ended his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early so he could have dinner  at his favorite diner. Diaz was walking toward the subway stairs when a teenage boy with a knife stopped him and demanded his wallet.

“Here you go,” said Diaz.  As the teen walked away, Diaz added, on an impulse, “Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you’re going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.” The mugger was stunned. “He asked me, ‘Why are you doing this?'” Diaz’s reply: “Listen, if you’re willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars,  you must really need the money. I was going to get dinner and if you want to join me,  you’re more than welcome.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce:The Baseball Writers Association of America

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

"Well, yes, there was THAT, but what really matters is that he was one hell of an assistant coach!"

The high-profile Sandusky/Paterno/Penn State child molestation scandal has shaken the foundation of the sports world, and in the process, given resolve to past victims of child abuse to identify their molesters. The most recent example is veteran Philadelphia sportswriter Bill Conlin, who abruptly resigned from his job as a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News when he learned that four adults had come forward to accuse him of molesting them when they were children in the 1970s. This created am immediate crisis for the Baseball Writers Association of America, who had this year bestowed its highest honor on Conlin, the J.G. Spink Award. It never looks good when the person you have declared to represent the best of your profession is revealed as drug-dealer, a serial killer, a foreign agent, or a child molester.

Here’s how the BBWAA dealt with the matter on its website, in this “official statement”: Continue reading →

The Loudon County Courthouse Christmas Display Fiasco: Anatomy of an Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

Believe it or not, this is a train wreck.

In Loudon County, Virginia, the county board didn’t want to let Christmas displays on the courthouse lawn go down without a fight. Once upon a time a community could put up Santa and his sleigh without a militant anti-religion or non-Christian group threatening law suits, but no longer, especially in a community so close to Attorney Central, Washington, D.C.  Other communities have gotten away with pan-religious displays—a pretty silly solution, I think, since Christmas is a Christian and secular holiday but has exactly nothing to do with Islam, Buddhism or the others—but again, once atheists organized and pressed the issue that the state supporting all religion was tantamount to promoting a religion, “inclusive” displays must be open to groups actively hostile to the religious displayers. Can we guess what will happen in such an environment? Yes? Well, the Loudon County board couldn’t.

A sensible board-appointed citizen group, the Courthouse Grounds and Facilities Committee, recommended in December 2009 that the county ban courthouse displays. The board rejected the committee’s request.  In July 2010,  the committee again requested a ban be put in place on courthouse lawn displays. The board, in its infinite wisdom, decided that anyone could put up displays on the lawn with ten spots open on a first-come, first-serve basis, pending county approval.

Yes, this was bound to turn out well, pull the community together, and promote the good feelings of the holiday season! Thus we reached Stage One in our ethics train wreck: official incompetence. The board’s actions lit the fuse of a cultural bomb, and only a Christmas miracle could have kept it from detonating.

So the displays were duly allotted thusly:

You can see two nativity scenes, the predictable Flying Spaghetti Monster display ridiculing all religion, the atheist display, and other benign additions. Hmmmm...but what, pray tell, is the “Santa cross?” Oh, just this… Continue reading →

Occupy Manny

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Sing it, Manny! "You load 16 tons, and what do you get? Another day older and a pro-rated 20 million dollars a year.."

I admit it: Manny Ramirez’s existence is a constant irritant to me. I regard him as epitomizing the worst tendencies of professional sports stars, and the attitudes of the most conscience-free who walk among us who make/ society and the culture a little bit worse every day. I was thrilled when his baseball career came to an appropriately sordid end, with his being caught using performance enhancing drugs and retiring o avoid having to serve his suspension, and nauseated when he announced the end of his retirement a few weeks ago, hoping to lure some addled team owner into paying him a million dollars or so to hit home runs and loaf.

Now, thanks to the research skills of baseball blogger Craig Calcaterra, my morning began by learning that Manny is also akin to the recording stars, Hollywood actors, rich politicians and toadying business executives who have tried to pass themselves off as Occupy Wall Street’s virtuous and harshly exploited 99% despite all reason and evidence to the contrary. In an interview in Spanish, Manny was explaining that he might have to travel to Japan to play ball again, and said,“Somos un obrero y donde quiera que haya trabajo hay que ir a trabajar;” in English: “We are the working class and must go where there is work.”

“Working class!” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Sports Grid Blogger Dan Fogarty

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Civility is doomed. Civilization is doomed. Propriety is doomed.

What's the concerned father of the injured cheerleader thinking about? Why, what any cool dad would think about---how good her butt looks!

And Taylor Young, a cheerleader for the Michigan State Spartans, may well be doomed, as it is impossible to tell how badly her character, values and common sense have been warped by being brought up in a household containing her father, Charles. After Young took a hard fall during the halftime show in a game against Florida State, requiring her to receive medical attention (she was OK), her father posted this astounding Facebook comment, which, naturally, has gone viral:

“I’m glad to see your booty isn’t gettin big ….. no one likes a chick with a big butt ….. love you.”

Idiotic? Check. Sexist? Check. Insulting to women? Check. Embarrassing to his daughter? Double check. Demonstrating a stunning lack of understanding of the internet? Check. Displaying a disturbing tendency to sexualize his own daughter?

Check, and Yuck.

But to Dan Fogarty, writing on Sports Grid, this offensive post proves that Young is a “cool Dad,” and Young goes on to cite other “experts” who believe this is “quite possibly the funniest ‘Dad Moment’ in Facebook history.”

Really? Is this really the current state of the culture? A father makes salacious comments about his daughter’s “booty,” suggests that “chicks” without similar booty quality are unloved and unlovable, and that’s cool?

If Fogarty is in step with the culture and I’m not, 1) then American society is coarsening faster than I thought, and 2) which way to Mars?

My condolences to Taylor Young for the boorish conduct of her father, and if she sees nothing wrong with it either, she has my intense condolences—because she has been severely damaged.

As, perhaps, have we all, if Fogarty is right.