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KABOOM! United Air Lines. Unethical. Incompetent. Stupid. Insane. Unforgiveable. [UPDATED]

/ Jack Marshall / 121 Comments

Just read this, which goes with the video.

Quick summary: a United flight supervisor came on board a sold-out flight and demanded that four seated passengers leave the plane  so four United employees could take their seats. Four passengers were chosen at random, and one, an older man, refused. Police were called and he was beaten and forced off the plane.

Really.

It’s hard to type with all these brains from my head explosion on the keyboard, but…

1.  No business that treats customers like this deserves to stay in business.

2. Any solution would have been better. Anything. Charter a flight for the United employees. Pay 10,000 bucks per passenger as incentive. Offer a lifetime ticket. That the united employees couldn’t come up with a less abusive and disrupting solution shows terrible training, terrible judgment, and a terrible corporate culture.

3. I am stunned that no passenger, when the older man who refused to go began to be abused by the police, stepped forward to take his place. I would think that would be an obvious response. Can we all pledge here and now that before someone is dragged screaming of a flight we are on, we’ll step forward and give up our seats?

4. I have to travel a lot for my business, but I will move heaven and earth not to have anything to do with United.

5. The carrier should pay dearly for this.  It is inexcusable.

More accounts: New York Times, Hot Air, Vox, NPR, FOX6Now.com, The Gateway Pundit, neo-neocon, Boing Boing, View from the Wing, Raw Story, Fox News Insider, CBS Chicago, , Guns & Money, The Federalist, IJR, FOX31 Denver, AOL, Instapundit, Axios, Eschaton , Mediaite, The Ring of Fire Network, View from the Wing, BGR, Mashable, CBS Pittsburgh, The Daily Caller and Outside the Beltway

And this, from Hit and Run at Reason:

While United’s customer service policies in this case are clearly heinous and absurd, let’s not forget to also cast blame on the police officers who actually committed the brutality on United’s behalf. NPR reports that the cops attacking the man “appear to be wearing the uniforms of Chicago aviation police.”

While there may be something to be said for the ability for private businesses to summon the help of the police to remove people from their premises if they refuse to leave peacefully and their presence is unwanted, there is no excuse for the police to cooperate when the reason their presence is unwanted is not “causing a disturbance” or being violent or threatening to other customers, or stealing goods or services, or doing anything wrong at all, but rather wanting to peacefully use the service they legitimately paid for.

Shame on both United for calling the cops on a passenger to make the lives of their employees and business easier, and shame on the police for having any part of it.

[UPDATE: According to A.P., others may agree with the above; “Chicago aviation department says officer involved in dragging man off United flight placed on leave,” A.P. tweets.]

 

From The Ethics Alarms “What You Say Or Think In Private Is None Of Your Employer’s Business, Until It Isn’t Private Any More” Files: The Teachers’ Bar Game

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

teachers-at-a-bar

Akin to the Naked Teacher Principle is what this fiasco illustrates. If you allow conversations to make their way to the web and they insult or denigrate individuals who have to trust you or work with you in your employment, you cannot complain when your name is mud and your job is toast.

Some teachers and and staff employed by the Bangor Public Schools were relaxing at a local bar, and started playing a game  called “Fuck, Marry, or Kill.” The game challenges the players to name three celebrities they would marry, have intimate relations with or kill, but the educators decided to substitute students and other teachers for the celebrities.Some the students named as desired murder victims or sex partners were special needs students. What fun!

No ethics alarms sounded. Someone made a video, nobody grabbed the phone and stomped on , and the video ended up on YouTube.

Parents were not pleased. Continue reading →

For The Sixth Straight Year, Jimmy Kimmel Reminds Us That Child Abuse Is Hilarious

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I know I’ve already condemned Jimmy Kimmel, TV’s  most revolting and  successful fick , this year, and I wish that was enough. I don’t like even thinking about the man; it depresses me profoundly that a major network pays millions to such a miserable human being to be such a miserable human being. Jimmy is a proud ethics corrupter, an advocate of parents making their children cry so they can get a sliver of fame—infamy, really—on YouTube and Jimmy’s late night show on ABC. Disney owns ABC. Disney. Disney pays this smug, cruel man to urge parents to make their children miserable for big laughs.

Think about it.

I have to revisit this asshole-blight on the culture, however, because this morning I watched supposedly lovable News Babe Robin Meade on HLN this morning as she showed some of the segments from the video above and laughed hysterically, along with everyone in her studio. The idea, Jimmy’s idea, after he decided to scotch the concept of asking parents to punk their toddlers by telling them that grandma was dead (just speculating here), is for parents to tell their beloved children that Mom and Dad had eaten all of their Halloween candy, and record their reactions. It’s sooooo funny! The little kids wail! They weep! They fall on the ground in abject grief! Robin couldn’t stop laughing. Child abuse is so hilarious.

Jimmy has proven that.

He’s also proven that a shocking number of  parents and ABC viewers have the ethical instincts of the Marquis De Sade. Continue reading →

From The “The Ends Justifies The Means” Files, Election 2016 Tab: Why Does Hillary Clinton Think That It Is Responsible, Respectful And Fair To Intentionally Deceive Voters With Schemes Like This?

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

And why does the mainstream news media think it is ethical to let her get away with it?

A YouTuber named Spanglevision decided to do the job that the mainstream news media has resolved to forgo, checking up on a suspicious Hillary Clinton campaign moment that seemed to good to be true. 

At a Hillary Clinton town hall yesterday in Haverford, Pennsylvania, a 15 year old girl was supposedly chosen at random to ask a question of her own devising. She delivered a carefully worded query that she read from a script:

“Hi Madam Secretary.  I’m Brennan and I’m 15 years old.  At my school, body image is a really big issue for girls my age.  I see with my own eyes the damage Donald Trump does when he talks about women and how they look.  As the first female president how would you undo some of that damage and help girls understand that they’re so much more than just what they look like?”

Clinton responded,

“I’m so proud of you for asking that question. You are right — my opponent has just taken this concern to a new level of difficulty and meanness.  And, it’s shocking when women are called names and judged solely on the basis of physical attributes.* My opponent insulted Miss Universe. I mean, how do you get more acclaimed than that?  But, it wasn’t good enough. So we can’t take any of this seriously any more. We need to laugh at it. We need to refute it. We need to ignore it. And we need to stand up to it.”

Investigation yielded the fact that  that the “random” participant was child actress Brennan Leach Her father is Pennsylvania democratic State Senator Daylin Leach, a Hillary Clinton ally. Brennan has performed in her father’s campaign ads, and also in a commercial release: she has an entry in the Internet movie data base.  Thus it was a lie to present the girl as a randomly chosen questioner, and it was a lie to create the illusion that Clinton was answering a spontaneous question.

Then the news media took the falsely presented episode and spread the lie far and wide as truth.

As Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge illustrates, the fakery was presented as authentic by the New York Times….

https://static01.nyt.com/video/players/offsite/index.html?videoId=100000004690624

 

CNN, which gave us the video at the top of this post, and many others, including  The Washington Post, New York Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Cosmopolitan. Continue reading →

The “Lying Hillary” Smoking Gun Video

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dY77j6uBHI

I know it’s viral now, and perhaps not news. Indeed, the fact that Hillary Clinton is one of the most prolific, shameless, media-enabled and successful serial liars in United States political history is certainly not news, and is undeniable by anyone not yet corrupted by her scorched earth march to power. Nonetheless, this is an ethics blog, and one that has devoted an extensive effort, much criticized as obsessive, to document why the words “ethical” and “Hillary Clinton” must never be used in close proximity to each other. I have to post this.

Does it prove she is spectacularly untrustworthy? Of course it does. Does it prove she is unfit to be President? Yes, except in the horrible hypothetical circumstance that someone even more unfit is running against her, such as, oh, let’s pick someone that no sane and patriotic American would ever consider as a potential President, like Jessica Simps…no, worse, like Alec Baldwi…no, still not bad enough. Okay, let’s say..I know, I know, it’s ridiculous, but…Donald Trump. (I almost said Justin Bieber.)

The stunning thing about the video is that it isn’t nearly complete. For example,  it does not include that dozens, indeed hundreds, maybe thousands, of  instances when Clinton employed deceit, the family specialty. Of course, if it did, the video would be 13 hours long. Days, maybe.

I do have some questions and observations for Hillary Clinton supporters in light of the above. Continue reading →

Unethical Technology On The Way: Imagine What Breitbart Will Be Able To Do With THIS

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

The video above shows a still-in-development system called Face2Face (research paper here) created by researchers at Stanford, the Max Planck Institute and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. It would allow you to take YouTube video of anyone speaking, and to pair it with a standard webcam  video of someone else emoting while saying something entirely different. Thehe Face2Face system will synthesize a new video showing the originals speaker making the second speaker’s facial movements, including the interior of the mouth, so it looks like the original speaker is saying what the second speaker was.

Tech Crunch reports that the system isn’t quite ready for market yet. Gee, I can hardly wait. This “advance” has the potential of making video just as unreliable and untrustworthy as still photography is now. Web hoaxers, Ted Cruz’s marketing team, unscrupulous political websites like Breitbart and others will have a field day once Face2Face is perfected.

The justification for creating such technology is the same as the rationalizations behind cloning velociraptors in “Jurassic Park”: because we can, and because we can make money with it. Can any good come from Face2Face? It’s late and I’m not at my best, but it seems to me that the end results of having another tool for liars just means more lies, more cynicism, more misinformed people, and less trust.

Isn’t it irresponsible and inherently unethical to invent something like this?

“Justice for the Nicholas Brothers”…Again

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Sometimes it all seems worth it.

Yesterday, late at night, I received an e-mail from a music teacher at a Catholic elementary school in Connecticut. He had introduced his young students to great musicians of the past, such as Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, and arouse their admiration and excitement when he showed them videos of The Nicholas Brothers. Recently he came upon my post on Fayard and Harold from 2012, and felt compelled to write me agreeing with my lament that such miraculous performers could be so forgotten today because of their marginalization by the film industry and society. He wrote…

“We have most definitely talked of racism but I now want to read the class your article and get the feedback. Your article is succinct and eloquent.  Your article assessment is sadly true. My goal is not necessarily to revive the Nicholas Brothers:  it is to kindle in each of the kids in the class the spirit of excellence that each of us has and to let nothing stop us from reaching the top.”
To be honest, I had forgotten about my post about remembering the Nicholas Brothers. I checked: the post has only been read by about a thousand visitors since I wrote it; if my objective is to keep the legacy of these amazing dancers alive, it’s probably time for a re-post.

At the Sun Valley Lodge, there is a television station devoted to playing the 1941 film “Sun Valley Serenade” on a loop. It is a genuinely awful movie, starring John Payne of “Miracle on 34th Street” fame, Norwegian ice skater Sonia Henie, and Milton Berle, although it does show the famous ski resort in the days when guests used to be towed around the slopes on their skis by horses. Last time I was in Sun Valley to give a presentation, I watched about half the film in disconnected bites, since I never can sleep on such trips. This time I finally saw the whole thing. At about 3 AM, as Glenn Miller was leading his band in the longest version of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” in history, Fayard and Harold Nicholas suddenly flipped onto the screen, and “Sun Valley Serenade” briefly went from fatuous to immortal.

If your reflex response to that last sentence was “WHO??,” you are part of the reason for this post, and also in the vast and deprived majority of Americans. As I circulated among my future audience of lawyers and their spouses yesterday morning, happily informing them that the terrible movie playing around the clock in their rooms included the dance team called “the unforgettable Nicholas Brothers” in more than one tribute, I learned that none of them had any idea what I was talking about, and many of these individuals were old enough to have been able to see Fayard and Harold in a theater. The Nicholas Brothers were, you see, the greatest tap-dancers who ever lived, and the most amazing dance team that ever will be. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Memories Pizza Stunt

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Memories Pizza, you will recall, rushed to let everyone know that it supported Indiana’s short-lived “Let’s discriminate against gays” law, which Pope Francis would have approved of, apparently.  The poor, naive little establishment, which was about as likely to cater a gay wedding as a White House state dinner, became the immediate target of social justice warrior bullies, who nearly succeeded in running them out of business.

On September 25, 2015, comic Robin Trevino, a member of the gay theatrical ensemble GayCo, drove to Walkerton, Indiana, bought pizzas at  Memories Pizza, , and served Memories Pizza to all the guests at his September 26, 2015 same-sex wedding reception, then released a video to alert the world that Memories Pizza had unknowingly catered a gay wedding  after all.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Was it ethical to do this?

Continue reading →

Now THAT’S An Unethical Baseball Fan.

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

WARNING: Click “Cancel” when the clip is over, or you will see a series of unrelated videos of dubious motive. I’m sorry; this is the only YouTube version of the incident.

Let’s list the ways this fan proves he’s a jerk:

  • He doesn’t clear away so the player (Dodgers first baseman Adrian Gonzalez) can make the catch. Technically it isn’t interference if he doesn’t because the ball is officially out of the field of play. But good fan sportsmanship dictates that a fan, even of the other team, should allow the catch to be made.
  • He not only doesn’t clear away, he competes for the catch. This is a fan actively interfering with the game, and treating a souvenir as more important than the game it would be a souvenir of—which means he’s an idiot, as well.
  • Then, after the catch, this guy tries to wrestle the ball out of Gonzalez’s glove…to steal the ball, in fact. As long as a ball isn’t abandoned by a player, lands in the stands, or is tossed to a fan, it belongs to the MLB.
  • In the alternative, as some have argued in his defense, he may not have noticed that he was wrestling with a player in the heat of the moment. I don’t believe that for a second, but let’s say it’s true. Any fan who sits that close to the field in a baseball game is obligated to know what is happening every second. Obligated. This is the Steve Bartman Rule, and you don’t want this to happen...
  • After the incident (I think Gonzalez told him to let go or he’d be very sorry), the guy took a bow. This is the final qualification of a fick.
  • He embarrassed Red Sox fans everywhere. There is nothing wrong with wearing your favorite team’s hat in another team’s park (contrary to the assertion of sportswriter Craig Calcattera and some of his Boston-hating readers), but like any other badge of allegiance, if you are in public and wearing a Red Sox cap, you represent the fan base, Red Sox Nation, as it is called in Boston (unfortunately), and that means that acting like a jerk reflects on more than just you. I just had to point out to a guy on another site (who wrote, “Typical Sux fan”) that the commenter is a bigot.
  • He also embarrassed his girlfriend.

That’s seven, and preserved for posterity.

Oh, by the way, he was kicked out of the stadium.

Good.

Ethics Observations On Cincinnati’s Fountain Square Incident And Its Aftermath

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

At a Fourth of July concert in Cincinnati, police had to fight their way through a mob to rescue a white male who had been nearly beaten to death as the crowd made up primarily of African Americans and Hispanic-Americans mocked him. Here is a video of the scene, if it is still up: YouTube has removed it more than once.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CcMj29qdbM

Observations:

1. What kind of people act like this? How do they get this way?

2. There is a controversy over whether the incident should be investigated as a hate crime. Idiocy. Madness. The discussion itself shows how silly the entire hate crime concept is. Would a group of whites mocking a bleeding white man be any less offensive to community values than a group of blacks doing so?

3. It is especially silly, not to mention offensive, when the government applies the law in a biased fashion—but then, that was always its intent.  Here is law professor Jonathan Turley tripping over his metaphorical tongue to avoid stating the obvious:

“It is not clear if there was a racial component to the crime and I would not immediately expect a hate crime investigation in such a case. Various blogs however are arguing that the Administration and local officials often immediately pledge to pursue such cases involving a black victim and white officers or assailants as a possible hate crime. I have tended to caution that such early framing of cases can have a distortive or dysfunctional impact absent clear evidence of a racial motivation. For example, while some in this crowd may have been celebrating the fact that the victim was white, it does not mean that the original attack was racially motivated.”

Oh, come on, professor. Stop spinning. The Obama Administration, the Justice Department and local officials in many cities have displayed a hair-trigger readiness to automatically consider any incident a suspected “hate crime” where a white police officer is involved in harming a black victim, absent taunting, absent the kind of revolting evidence present in this case. It isn’t “early framing,” it is racial politics and pandering to the mob and the media. On what basis were George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson subjected to federal hate crime investigations, if this video won’t prompt one? Continue reading →