St. Paul

D-Day 75th Anniversary Ethics Warm-Up, June 6, 2019: Stumbling As We Try To Keep America Worthy Of Their Sacrifice [UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

U.S. WWII veterans from the United States attend a ceremony at Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial situated above Omaha Beach to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the D-Day, in Colleville-sur-Mer, France.

I have a special reason for being a devotee of D-Day: I may be here because my father missed it. He was supposed to be in the invasion, but as an observer, not a combatant. Dad never explained how he got that plum assignment, but before he had the honor, an idiot in his company blew part of my father’s foot apart while playing with a hand grenade nearby. (You’ll be happy to hear that said idiot advanced human evolution by blowing himself up in the process.) Thus Jack Sr. was in an army hospital on June 6, and had to wait for the Battle of the Bulge to be part of an iconic W.W. II conflict.

1. Somehow, I don’t think this is the society they thought they were fighting for…

At Rutherford High School in Bay County, Florida, a teacher  wrote “WTF” on a student’s science homework. His mother complained, calling the vulgar acronym “inappropriate.”

Boy, what a prude.

I just saw another of the increasingly common TV ads where evoking a vulgar word is used for humorous value.  One of the cell phone networks includes an exclamation of “Holy shirt!” (Get it? HAR!) when a father’s gray attire suddenly explodes into color as soon as the family upgrades its network.  “What the Shirt” is also a trendy shirt company.

In a culture where casual public vulgarity is treated as normal and even clever, it is no surprise that alleged professionals often have no functioning ethics alarms regarding their language, or any sense of respect, etiquette, gentility or decorum. After all, when a newly elected Congresswoman thinks it’s appropriate to shout “We’re going to impeach the motherfucker!” and suffers no adverse consequences, what do we expect?

2. Somehow, I don’t think this is the society they thought they were fighting for…wait, didn’t I just write that?

Sueretta Emke complained that she was dining with her family at a Golden Corral in Erie, Pennsylvania, when the manager told her that her attire was inappropriate and that some customers had complained. Asked Emke said the manager couldn’t answer when she was asked what was so inappropriate about her outfit. It was a mystery!

For some reason the phrase “res ipsa loquitur” keeps coming to mind.

Call me crazy, but I doubt that if  Ms. Emke’s croptop and Daisy Dukes had fit her more like this…

…anyone would have complained, or even if someone had, that the manager would have ejected her.  She was being fat-shamed. On the other hand, even at a Golden Corral, diners should have enough respect for others to adopt at least minimum standards of appropriate attire. On the OTHER hand—Did you know that Edward Albee wrote a play called “The Man With Three Arms? It was not a success—unless restaurants have stated, publicized and displayed  dress codes, it is unfair to arbitrarily discriminate against the unattractive exhibitionist and slobs while allowing the attractive ones to dine unmolested. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up: 6/24/17

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

This morning, my mind is occupied by one long-standing ethics issue, and the rest seem trivial in comparison. Let’s warm up by trying to find some way out of this mess.

The ethical problem seems increasingly beyond our ability to solve. Yesterday there was second mistrial in the retrial of Raymond M. Tensing, the former University of Cincinnati police officer who has been charged with the 2015 murder and voluntary manslaughter for fatally shooting Samuel DuBose, an unarmed motorist.  This is the third example of a police officer shooting a black man under questionable circumstances being found short of being criminally responsible in a week:

In St. Paul, police dashboard video showed Officer Jeronimo Yanez shoot into the car where Philando Castile was sitting with his fiancée and her daughter, and acquitted the officer. In that case, the officer appeared to have panicked after Castile reached into his pocket for his wallet after telling the officer, unasked, that he was carrying a firearm. In Milwaukee, jurors acquitted Officer Dominique Heaggan-Brown after watching frame by frame as he shot once at fleeing armed suspect, Sylville K. Smith, then fired a second time after Smith tossed the gun he was holding and lay on the ground. Now, in Cincinnati, jurors couldn’t agree on the proper culpability of Officer Tensing. He stopped  DuBose for a missing license plate, then asked him for his driver’s license. Instead of producing it, DuBose pulled the door closed with his left hand and restarted the car with his right hand. The officer reached into the car with his left arm, yelled “Stop!” twice, and used his right hand to fire his gun directly, into Mr. DuBose’s head, killing him.

What can we say about these scenarios, and many others? Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Angela Martin, As St. Paul Strangers Prevent A Suicide

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Angela Matin

Remember Raymond Zack?  In 2011, 50-year-old Raymond Zack waded into the surf at an Alameda, California beach and stood calmly in the 54-degree water, apparently waiting to die. His suicide took nearly an hour, but eventually he drowned, with no rescue attempts from any of the 75 San Franciscans, including firefighters, who gathered on the shore to watch the entire tragedy. I am so used to reading about bystanders allowing desperate people, sick, wounded or otherwise in peril, to perish because they “didn’t want to get involved” that a story like this one, the opposite of the Raymond Zack tragedy from St. Paul, Minnesota, comes as a shock.

How sad is that?

Motorist Angela Martin  saw a woman  climb onto a concrete wall and scale a chain-link fence above Interstate 94 in St. Paul, Minnesota. Martin could have continued driving, but she acted immediately, parking her car and calling 911. But she sensed there was no time to lose. Martin ran over to the woman, who  having climbed over chain-link fence was now clinging to it with her fingers above heavy highway traffic.

“ No, honey. Don’t do this,” she shouted. Martin told reporters that the distraught young woman kept repeating,  “My mom don’t love me. My mom don’t care for me.’”

“No, we love you, ” Martin told her. Martin reached through the links  and grabbed the woman’s shirt and  belt, just as the would-be suicide released her grip so she could fall to her death. Other motorists on the overpass saw the unfolding scene and came to Martin’s aid, and joined her in reaching through the fence to keep the woman from falling. Continue reading →

The Twin Cities, Cheating CitizensTo Balance Their Budgets

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I'm confused...I thought the police were supposed to arrest con artists, not be con artists!

Municipal governments are having a difficult time balancing budgets in these challenging economic conditions, but the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota have devised a surprisingly effective way to pick up oodles of extra cash.

Steal it.
From its citizens.

I’m not kidding. City records show that St. Paul, for example, has kept nearly a quarter-million dollars from impound lot auctions this year that should have properly gone to vehicle owners. But the law requires the car owners to ask for their money, and both St. Paul and Minneapolis do their level best to keep that information from trickling through all the documentation and red tape. The St. Paul Police Department, which runs the St. Paul impound lot, sends owners of impounded vehicles a certified letter shortly after their car is towed. The letter includes citations to one city ordinance and five state laws that govern the towing, impoundment and auction of vehicles. Car owners  have to look up the fifth state law cited and read that law’s fourth paragraph before learning of the right to a refund. And to do that, they have to know what they should be looking for—which the letter doesn’t tell them.

Cute, eh? Continue reading →

The Arizona Boycotts: Unethical and Unjustified

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Boulder, Boston, St. Paul, Austin, El Paso, Oakland and San Diego have all announced a boycott of Arizona, which stands condemned, in their view, of “violating basic American principles,” “Draconian law enforcement,” “promoting racism,” and “un-American measures.” All this, for announcing that the state is going to enforce a law long on the books that the Federal government stubbornly fails to enforce itself.

Almost all boycotts are unethical, and this one doesn’t come close to being fair or reasonable. Boycotts use economic power to bend others to the will of large groups that disagree with conduct or policy, bypassing such niceties as debate, argument, and rational persuasion. They can be effective, but they always depend on causing harm to third-parties, bystanders and others not directly involved in the decision that prompted the boycott, thus creating pressure on decision-makers to change direction based on considerations that have nothing whatsoever to do with the underlying controversy. It is a bullying tactic, and the only way it can pass ethical muster is if the reasons for it are clear, strong, virtuous, undeniable, and based on irrefutable logic that the boycott target is so wrong, and doing such harm, that this extreme measure is a utilitarian necessity. Continue reading →