Etiquette and manners

Ethics Dunce: Fashion Model Melissa Stetten

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Hideous.

We have covered this territory before: the unethical conduct of the cruel and arrogant conversant or correspondent who publicizes private communication over the internet in order to embarrass someone whose only offense was social awkwardness or a moment of bad judgment, and whose biggest mistake was trusting a heartless jerk.  It is the Golden Rule breach of breaches, and is social misconduct that shows a serious deficit in kindness, fairness and decency.

Model Melissa Stetten, however, takes the cake, except that models aren’t allowed to have cake. Flying in First Class  from New York to Los Angeles, Stetten found herself next to actor Brian Presley, who was apparently rendered weak-kneed and stupid in the proximity of such beauty, plus he was a little drunk. His flirtatious chit-chat was both awkward and  pompous, so Stetten, who, like most models, undoubtedly has the conversational skills of Dorothy Parker, decided to  live-tweet their conversation to her 30,000 followers.

Brian Presley, naturally, was humilated. His wife was probably furious with him. His fans now know him as a dork who trots out the lamest pick-up lines ever devised. He also, apparently, was in the midst of an alcoholic relapse, so naturally Stetten mocked him for that too in her tweets. (Her entire performance is available on the web; I’m not going to circulate it. Unlike the New York Timse, jI don’t believe that just because I have access to information  I should magnify the harm it can do by helping to circulate it.) Continue reading →

More Respect For The President, Please.

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Now if Redd Foxx were President, that would be different…

I thought the lack of respect his political opponents showed to Bill Clinton was shocking, and dangerous. I thought the escalation in this respect deficit Democrats displayed in their treatment of President Bush was worse. And I think the disrespect shown to President Obama by Republicans and partisan media critics is worse yet. In all three cases, the unjustified lack of respect resulted and is resulting in absurd distortions and accusations. A case in point:

The conservative blogosphere is convincing itself that President Obama made….a blowjob joke. Here is the “smoking gun”, from a fundraising event hosted by Ellen DeGeneres, attended by many gays:

“I want to thank my wonderful friend who accepts a little bit of teasing about Michelle beating her in pushups — (laughter) — but I think she claims Michelle didn’t go all the way down. (Laughter.) That’s what I heard. I just want to set the record straight — Michelle outdoes me in pushups as well. (Laughter.) So she shouldn’t feel bad. She’s an extraordinary talent and she’s just a dear, dear friend — Ellen DeGeneres. Give Ellen a big round of applause…”

The usually rational Ann Althouse polls her readers on the question of whether Obama was being intentionally suggestive, and an amazing 42% voted that he was.

Obama was not making a blowjob joke. Presidents do not make blowjob jokes in public, no matter what the audience is. Cultured men with manners and common sense do not make blowjob jokes in public, and President Obama is certainly that. I cannot think of any President who would be so careless as to utter a crude joke of that sort before an audience. LBJ comes the closest…maybe Lincoln? But never. Never. It would be disrespectful of the office, and a major, pointless political gaffe.

People are willing, indeed eager, to believe such things of President Obama because they refuse to accord him the basic respect any occupant of the Oval Office deserves, and needs. They need to get a grip. This isn’t healthy for the nation, and Obama’s critics look like fools when they show such abysmal regard for the country’s elected leader, and dirty-minded fools at that.

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Source: Ann Althouse

Graphic: Biography

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

Graduation Ethics: the Cheering Mom and the Jerk’s Advantage

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Stipulated: for police to arrest proud South Carolina mother Shannon Cooper for loudly cheering during her daughter’s high school graduation over the weekend  was excessive, unreasonable, and stupid.  The graduation crowd  had been asked to hold their cheering until all students’ names had been called, and warned relatives of the graduates that they would be removed from the facility if they disobeyed the rule. As some parents inevitably do at every graduation, Cooper ignored the reasonable request, but this time, the defiant parent paid a steep price. Police charged her with disorderly conduct and placed her in a detention center.

Let me also make this clear, however: Cooper behaved like a selfish jerk. She is being showered with sympathy now, cast as Innocent Parent Abused For Being Proud of Her Baby, but that’s not who she is. She is the theater audience member who ignores the request to turn off her cell phone, and disrupts the actors and the audience when it rings, and the movie audience member who chats loudly during the show. She is the pet owner who doesn’t clean up after her Great Dane at the dog park. She is the able-bodied shopper who parks in  a handicapped parking space to run into the store “for just a minute.” She is the person who breaks into line, who brings 30 items to the “15 items only” checkout station, who takes more than her share of free food at events. She is, in short, the kind of person who doesn’t believe reasonable rules apply to her, and who constantly challenges the rest of us to “make a big deal” out of relatively minor demonstrations of contempt for everyone she comes into contact with. Continue reading →

The Ethics Verdict on the Chris Hayes Apology

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

To be fair, while Chris Hayes is ill-informed, ungrateful and arrogant, at least he’s incoherent.

As anyone could have predicted, MSNBC host Chris Hayes had to issue an apology after his fatuous and inarticulate comments about Memorial Day. If you were lucky enough to miss them, here they are:

“I think it’s interesting because I think it is very difficult to talk about the war dead and the fallen without invoking valor, without invoking the words “heroes.” Why do I feel so [uncomfortable] about the word “hero”? I feel comfortable — uncomfortable — about the word because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. Um, and, I don’t want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that’s fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism: hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I’m wrong about that.’

With so many interesting, thoughtful, perceptive and provocative statements being written and uttered every day that vanish forever, never to be repeated or published, it is cruel irony to confer immortality on cretinism like that, but I digress. My commentary on Hayes’ statement is here. His apology was pre-ordained, because he insulted so many, so deeply, so pointlessly and so arrogantly, at the worst possible time, that a national outcry was guaranteed, and the eventual directive, “Apologize or pack!” from his MSNBC overlords was a forgone conclusion.

As forced apologies go, how did Hayes’ rank? Continue reading →

Anderson Cooper vs. “Human Barbie”: A Double-cross Masquerading As Integrity

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Sarah Burge, a.k.a “Human Barbie,” who actually contains more plastic than Plastic Barbie, who, come to think of it,  is quite possibly a better human being than “Human Barbie.” It’s complicated.

One of the wonderful things about the Internet is that somewhere out there is always someone who has seen through the fog of lies, spin, misrepresentations and conventional wisdom, and is writing about it. The first trick, of course, is finding such individuals, who may be part of the spin and confusion the very next day. The next one is getting the truth to as many people as possible.

When I heard that Anderson Cooper had kicked the plastic-surgery mutant named Sarah Burge off his show on the air, I was ready to give him an Ethics Hero award. Not only has Burge, who is known as “Human Barbie”, * indulged her pathological obsession with plastic surgery to spend almost a half-million dollars making herself look like the iconic Mattel doll, she is trying to make sure her daughters are similarly afflicted. She told Cooper she wants to botox her 15-year-old daughter, and she is setting up a trust for her 7-year-old so she can start mutilating herself when she turns 18.

Suddenly Cooper stopped the interview, saying, “I gotta be honest, I gotta just stop. I’m sorry. I try to be really polite to all my guests, but I just think you’re dreadful. I honestly don’t want to talk to you anymore.” Continue reading →

The Significance of “Pow Wow Chow”

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Great title, by the way….

There is mostly bad ethics news for Elizabeth Warren fans from the re-discovery of the 1984 cookbook she contributed to called “Pow Wow Chow,” but some good news too. The good news is that the 28 year-old cook book, edited by her cousin and listing the current Harvard professor and Democratic Senate contender as a contributor named “Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee,” shows that Warren didn’t just concoct her claims of Cherokee heritage to achieve minority status to help her get faculty jobs through university diversity hiring policies. Oh, she intentionally employed her dubious heritage credentials to get that edge, no doubt about it. But the cookbook shows that though she was only 1/32 Native American by the most generous calculations and was assuming that lineage on the basis of hearsay alone, Elizabeth Warren really had convinced herself that she is a Cherokee, and probably believes it to this day. Hence her obsession with being able to call herself a Native American appears less opportunistic and more, well, nuts. [ Note: for a thorough though excessively sympathetic review of Warren’s claims, read this, in The Atlantic.]

In fact, it looks like a severe case of Sixties Liberal Delusion Syndrome, also known as Billy Jack Disease. Warren talks and writes like a stereotype campus liberal, and like her Sixties campus forbears, she must have figured out in early adulthood that kinship with oppressed minorities is the antidote to white guilt and the ticket to a perpetual state of self-righteousness and victimization. If my diagnosis is correct,  Warren’s lockstep liberal mindset seized upon her family lore about American Indian heritage, and installed it as a cornerstone of her self-image as a foe of the capitalist, white-dominated American power structure. I am sorry I doubted her; I now think it is likely that she has long thought of herself as a true Cherokee. True, I think that is ridiculous; I think extending that attenuated minority identification into a resume enhancement, allowing her to displace more deserving candidates, is indefensible; and I think her obsession calls her judgement and stability into question. But at least she wasn’t lying. About that.

Yes, this is the good news.

The bad news is that Warren’s contributions to the cookbook appear to be misrepresented and stolen. Continue reading →

Editor, Plagiarist and Ethics Dunce Extraordinaire Robert Ripley Meets His Worst Nightmare…

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

….and that nightmare is Duane Lester, a hard-working, honest, courageous, organized and determined blogger who wasn’t going to let a newspaper rip him off and get away with it. Lester researched and posted an original local news story, a true scoop, and days letter was shocked to find that a local paper, the Oregon Times Observer, had lifted his entire post and put it on the paper’s front page, without credit, permission, or attribution. Shocked and unprepared for such flagrant and shameless appropriation of his labors, he researched the issue, wrote a letter, and then visited the paper to demand payment. Brilliantly, he also brought along a friend with a video camera.

The whole story, as well as the enlightening and satisfying confrontation between the Blogger and the Word Thief, is on the resulting video. There is a lot to see here.

Continue reading →

Chris Matthews Gets A Lesson On The Golden Rule

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Don’t forget…Cliff almost WON Jeopardy!

Chris Matthews, the MSNBC “Hardball” host, has frequently mocked Sarah Palin’s knowledge and intelligence, and often used an iconic TV game show to do it. Such as:

  • “Is this [vice presidential debate] about her brain power?… Do you think cute will beat brains?…Do you think she’d do better on the questions on Jeopardy! or the interview they do during a half-time?…My suspicion is that she has the same lack of intellectual curiosity that the President of the United States has right now and that is scary!”
  • “They find these empty vessels who know nothing about the world! Nothing about foreign policy! Who immediately begin to spout the neo-con line. I read her book — it’s full of that crap….It’s unbelievable how little this woman knows!…Don’t put her on Jeopardy!” Continue reading →

Credit Ethics: New Ethics Alarms Policy

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The sound of my palm belatedly smacking my expansive forehead

What will heretofore be referred to as “The Mary Frances Prevost Affair” has its silver lining. Watching another blogger incorporate the main body of my blog post into her own by-lined essay without credit or attribution has caused me to do a lot of thinking about the inadequacy of credit and attribution in the blogosphere  generally, with a relatively  few exceptions. Most of these are blogs written by academics who hold to the standards of their profession rather than the much looser practices of the internet. It also caused me to wake up to the inadequacy of my own attribution practices on Ethics Alarms. I have never taken an entire post from another source and represented it as my own, but I have frequently taken a factual account of a story from another website that itself was essentially  republishing, for example, an AP story, put the facts in my own words, sometimes with a stray phrase remaining, and not credited either source. I have often derived information in a post from multiple news sources but only linked to the one that I felt related the event the most thoroughly and clearly. Another writer’s work has sometimes sparked an idea for a post that was substantially different, and I have not credited the source of that spark.

All of this is common practice in blogging, but it is still wrong, and sloppiness is always a slippery slope. In the wake of “The Mary Frances Prevost Affair,” a colleague alerted me that I had included one complete sentence and part of another in an Ethics Alarms post that were identical to the post of another writer on the same subject. I didn’t even recall using the source, but upon going over my notes, I found that the earlier post had supplied me with the bulk of the facts I relied upon, though not the analysis of them. . I immediately contacted the author to apologize, and he was gracious and understanding. Nonetheless, this should never happen, especially on an ethics blog.

Therefore, as of today, Ethics Alarms will maintain a strict policy of crediting all sources that go into the inspiration, research and writing of the posts here. Links in the body of the text will be either be for informational purposes only, such as when I make a gratuitous cultural reference that nobody under the age of 50 is likely to recognize, or to back up direct quotes. At the end of each post, there will be credits and/or links listed, when appropriate, in some or all of the following categories: Continue reading →

The Plagiarist Strikes Back!

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

Move along, Atticus. Nothing to see here, and I wouldn't want you to barf.

Well, some of you called it. I was a sap. I expected better.

Mary Frances Prevost, the California criminal law attorney who substantially expropriated an Ethics Alarms post and placed her name on it, responded to my request for an explanation, and failing that, an apology, a retraction, and proper credit, with this (on her Facebook page), in which she said, in part:

“I received a histrionic run-on-sentence email from someone named “Jack Marshall” today accusing me of committing crimes, threatening to report me to my bar association(s), the Inns of Court, and essentially spend your days and nights harassing me.” I have also viewed a a highly unethical rant published purportedly by you on a blog suggesting strongly that I have engaged in unethical conduct throughout the entire course of my career. I have counseled with one of the country’s premiere ethics attorneys. Here’s the result: 1) accusing me of a crime is defamation per se and unethical; 2) suggesting that my entire law practice has been based on unethical conduct is defamatory and unethical. I maintained copies both of your email and blog. It is clear that you are hell bent on engaging in systematic harassment and unethical conduct, the likes of which can, and most likely will, develop into a lawsuit unless rescinded forthwith. It is clear you have little to do in your life besides sent me emails accusing me of crimes, and writing poorly written blog posts accusing me of immoral behavior. Interesting how one making such claims, engages in most egregious conduct himself….But the sheer amount of energy really suggests something more: a lack of work; too much time; off your meds. I suggest you take a look inward and remove your defamatory and unethical blog post regarding me. Indeed, you should come clean on your blog. You’ve practiced law only two weeks before giving up. Yet, your resume suggests far more experience. I think you should rethink what you’ve done.”

Now how do you like that? Continue reading →