Workplace

Comment of the Day: “Stop Making Me Defend Shawn Gillis!”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Beginning with a quote from the post, Cees Van Barnevelt delves deeper into the issue. Her comment also reminded me of the Debrahlee Lorenzana affair, which I wrote about way back in 2010. [That’s Debrahlee above.] She was a Citibank employee fired because she was deemed to be dressing too “provocatively.” She sued and lost. The post discusses some ethics issues germane to Cees’ Comment of the Day on the post, “Stop Making Me Defend Shawn Gillis!”

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No, Gillis’s point, and he is accurate, is that many women at co-ed gyms dress to attract the male gaze while the official narrative is that they are just “expressing themselves.” “Observational humor” is supposed to reveal taboo truths.

Women at the gym may dress to attract the male gaze but not from every male. If the wrong man (unattractive to her) looks at her one second too long it may cause problems for him (complaints to gym management, public shaming).

Gym influencer Joey Swoll has many TikTok videos shaming women in tight clothes filming themselves, publishing the video at TikTok while shaming the men who walked into that video looking one second too long; these men might have looked wondering why somebody was filming at the gym!

At work you have a similar dynamic. Recently there was a TikTok generated trend of dressing up as an “Office Siren”, with women wearing clothes more suitable for a night club. This trend is getting people fired (e.g. dress code violations, risks for sexual harassment claims).

Shaming men for the “male gaze” and excusing women who dress inappropriately has undesirable social effects. Males are getting overly cautious around women, to protect themselves from creep shaming and claims of sexual harassment. At work this may mean that women have trouble receiving one-to-one mentoring from male colleagues who do not want to be alone with a women in one room. At the gym men do not volunteer to help a women who is stuck under gym equipment. A women gets a heart attack, and a man thinks twice about doing CPR or using an AED considering the potential for accusations. Men are getting afraid to ask a lady out in person, do to the potential for creep shaming and #MeToo accusations. You can lament about the dating crisis and the loneliness epidemic; shaming men for being and acting like males is one of the main causes.

Stop Making Me Defend Shawn Gillis!

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The wild—and increasingly weaponized—hypocrisy among alleged feminists is not to be borne, and I’m happy to flag it as the unethical—but woke!—cultural poison that it is.

Perpetually unfunny comic Shane Gillis was back for the third (or is it fourth?) time as a host of the now totally ideologically-captured Saturday Night Live last week. During his rambling monologue to begin the show, Gillis said, “I haven’t been to the gym in so long I didn’t know women just dress like whores now? Look, I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe it.” Gillis then went on to describe the ubiquitous tight short-shorts that dominate young women’s attire at the gym as featuring “wrinkles [that] go around the cheeks and all combine at the butthole,” adding, “You’re not allowed to look… because they are filming. I’m in the background of about 10 TikToks right now.”

The Hollywood Left’s explosion of fury, which sure sounds like mandatory feminist outrage from beta males to me, focuses on Gillis’s use of the word “whores”—I even saw it censored on Axis news sources as “wh*res.” Not to go back into the misty past, but as I will always remind readers here, Bill Maher called conservative women like Sarah Palin and others “cunts” and “twats” on his HBO show with nary a peep from feminists. Today, over a decade later, the same people who laughed at Bill’s hilarious misogyny want to cancel Gillis. Here’s Forbes virtue-signaling to the mob:

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“The Hader Gotcha” Returns: This Is Today’s Left. Face It.

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers hired Braiden Bell as their play-by-play announcer this month and then fired him on the same day. Why? He authored dumb and tasteless social media posts when he was 14- and 15-years-old. Got that? I hate to keep repeating this refrain, but this is today’s Left. This is Portland. This is the Democratic Party: bullies, hysterics, cruel intolerant ideologues. This is also what progressives who vote for a “blue wave” are endorsing, and what sane Americans who can’t be bothered to vote are enabling.

Ironically, I can’t blame the Portland Trail Blazers too much. This is the sick, warped environment in which they do business—Oregon, one of the most hopeless leftist states. This is the culture in which the team has to survive: a mob of ethics-free dogmatic jerks lacking fairness, proportion or empathy. Braiden Bell doesn’t matter to them; he is collateral damage.

“The Portland Trail Blazers have zero tolerance for racist, sexist, or harmful comments,” the team said in a cowardly social media statement announcing Bell’s dismissal. “Social media posts made by our recently announced play-by-play broadcaster are in clear violation of team and league policies, as well as our values and expectations. Therefore, we will not be moving forward with this broadcaster.”

Gee, did he once throw a crayon at his kindergarten teacher? The team surely doesn’t tolerate violence. Did he steal a kiss from a little girl in the second grade? Destroy him: sexual harassment is not acceptable!

I’m sorry, but this story on top of the feminist lynch mob trying to ruin the lives of the “Cornell 7,” the pro-abortion fanatics styling a mother who murdered her children as a martyr, the woke board who fired the non-profit exec for a hair style they viewed as “cultural appropriation,” and the principal who rigged a class election to elect her daughter and still kept her job has me in the foulest of moods. These are bad people who want to create a terrible, dysfunctional culture fueled by warped values.

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The Unethical, Inexcusable, Embarrassing Ambassador Guilfoyle [Updated and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Update: Guilfoyle has resigned. See below]

President Trump has “asked” the ludicrous Ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, to resign, says Katie Zacharia, the new White House Paid Liar.

Good, sort of. This political grifter should never have been appointed in the first place, and never should have been confirmed when she was. She was a solid bet to become a walking, talking black eye to the Trump Administration and the U.S. and sure enough, that’s what happened. Never mind! Appointing assorted incompetents, narcissists, liars, crooks and scumbags isn’t this President’s worst flaw, but it is a bad one. It is also one that he’s never going to shake.

It is true that sending incompetent, corrupt and persons of otherwise dubious character as ambassadors to nations that are allies and relatively stable is a tradition as old as Betsy Ross, but “Everybody Does It” is no excuse, especially when the practice ends up letting someone like Kimberly Guilfoyle represent the U.S. in anything more weighty than a pig-calling competition.

Her qualification for the job was that she is the former fiancée of Donald Trump Jr. She is also the former wife of Gavin Newsom, and I will eschew the temptation to expound on the significance of that. She’s a professional trophy wife.

Guilfoyle recently made headlines by asking Trump donor Eric Deters to wire $100,000 to her American Express account. “She was so desperate for that $100,000. It was a quid pro quo,” Deters said in an interview with NBC News. “She said I could ask her for anything and everything in Trump world. There was no request too big.”

Anything?? When an infamous bimbo like Guilfoyle says that…well, the imagination runs wild. My imagination, anyway. Too bad about the cosmetic surgery, Kim.

“We have asked Ambassador Guilfoyle to resign,” Zacharia said during her first briefing yesterday. “She has been a wonderful asset to the team, and we wish her well.” What a debut! Three lies in 21 words:

  • Being asked to resign by POTUS is being fired.
  • She has been a festering sore on “the team” and everyone knows it.
  • They wish she would sink into the earth and stay there.

So should we all.

***

This Kimberley’s resignation statement, posted on Twitter/X:

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And THIS Is How Growing Progressives Learn That Cheating Is Just Fine…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Arielle Curry, the principal of Washington Elementary School in Santa Barbara (she’s the one on the left) rigged the vote count in the student election results to elect two losers, including giving her own daughter the post of sixth-grade president. The principal was foiled by a whistleblower, put on administrative leave, and then, incredibly, allowed to resume her job.

Take that last part in slowly. This is the culture in schools. This is the culture in California.

In a letter to parents, Curry wrote that she ” led deliberations after the student votes were tallied that resulted in overriding the outcome of two positions.” She apologized “for allowing this practice to persist” while acknowledging that “our school’s process for selecting student officers lacks transparency and fairness.” She added, “I am committed to making this right moving forward.”

By resigning? Nothing else will do.That letter is all by itself justification for dismissal. What disgusting weasel rhetoric! Altering vote totals to benefit a family member is “deliberations”? She allowed a practice to persist by engaging in the practice…it wouldn’t have persisted if she didn’t engage in it. The school’s process for selecting student officers lacks transparency and fairness? No, she lacks transparency and fairness, also honesty, respect for students, shame, trustworthiness,accountability, and ethics generally.

There are tangible benefits in being elected a student officer at the gifted and talented education magnet school in Santa Barbara’s Mesa neighborhood. Student government members receive privileges like leaving class to attend meetings, while the president gets the opportunity to deliver the graduation speech at the end of the school year. The student body also helps select school activities, including themed events such as “Crazy Hat Day.” (Do they have a “Sociopath Principal Day”?

Cuury tried to steal these perks from deserving students and bestow them on her choices regardless of the election results. How can the school, the district, and the parents allow Curry to keep her job? What possible justification could they cite? (Don’t say it!)

“District officials confirmed the expected policy was for the actual vote totals to determine the winners” one news source says. Ya think? “The district expects that for student/ASB elections, the candidate with the most votes wins,” assistant superintendent for human resources John Becchio said. Really? Then why do you continue to employ a principal who doesn’t get the “most votes win” thingy?

Curry has worked in the Santa Barbara Unified School District for several years, previously serving as principal of Santa Barbara Junior High and as an assistant principal at Washington and Franklin elementary schools. This is how your young are being aculturated, America. These are the people shaping their conduct and values. Do you care? What are you going to do about it?

Me? I’m heading to the woodchipper…

Ethics Quiz: The Kitty Boo-Boo

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Cynthia ​Morgan, a school bus driver for Harford County Public Schools in Maryland for more than a decade, was alerted by an alarmed 10-year-old boy on board that there was an injured kitten by the side of the road. Yielding to the young student’s entreaties, Morgan stopped the bus on lightly-trafficked Heaps School Road in Pylesville and allowed the student to retrieve the kitten. The boy held the kitty in his lap until he was dropped off at school, whereupon the bus driver volunteered her lap for kitten-sitting for the rest of the route.

The incident got her fired. Morgan confirmed her dismissal to CBS News Baltimore and said she was devastated by the decision. The mother of the kitten rescuer says that her son would have been “devastated” if the cat has been left to fend for itself. “The fact that she was let go because of an act of kindness does really weigh on him,” she added. “That is unforgivable and cruel.”

Is it? Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Was it ethical—responsible, fair, competent and reasonable—to fire the bus driver for permitting the emergency woulded kitten intervention?

The community, not to mention the influential feline population, is rallying behind Morgan. A petition on Change.org calls for the bus driver to be reinstated. “Over the years, Cynthia has become more than just a bus driver to our children; she is someone they look forward to seeing every morning and afternoon,” one parent wrote. “Her kind and warm nature makes the pupils feel safe and comfortable.This is not just my personal sentiment – countless parents and students share the same view.”

Another told reporters, “Every year at the beginning of the school year she buys every child on the bus school supplies. She buys them gifts for Christmas, every holiday, birthdays; she gives them birthday cards, all out of her own pocket.”

In a meeting with district officials, Morgan defended her actions and insisted that she had not put the student or those remaining in her bus in any jeopardy. For its part, the school system is staying the course. “Certification and decertification are not always based on a single factor but often involve consideration of multiple circumstances and requirements,” the school district said in a statement. “Student safety remains our top priority, and all certification decisions are made with that responsibility in mind.”

That sounds like lawyer-dictated CYA to me. Of course the district would default to an “it was the final straw” stance. Still, maybe it was. A letter from district Transportation Director Danielle Bedsaul cited “multiple incidents” involving Morgan, some including “concerns regarding inappropriate interactions with students.” Was buying students gifts and supplies among those “inappropriate actions”?

Life Ethics, Professional Ethics, Family Ethics, Baseball Ethics: Paternity Leave During A Crisis

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This issue, which I feel strongly about and have so written, more than once, reared its ugly metaphorical head again this week.

The San Diego Padres were added to the National League in 1969. The team has been in two World Series, losing both quickly; the last time was in 1996. They have only made the National League Championship Series three times. The team closed the season hot, and faced the best team in baseball, at least based on their record, the Milwaukee Brewers, with high hopes. Among the team’s many stars (more, in fact, then Milwaukee) is Mason Miller, by consensus the best 9th inning relief pitcher (aka “closer”) in the game.

The Padres lost the first game of the five game series due to a fluke, as described here. They lost Game #2 as well, and faced elimination in Game #3. It was “all hands on deck,” the Alamo, Custer’s Last Stand. Nevertheless, before the game, Mason Miller chose to take paternity leave, a privilege the players won in a contract battle with owners in 2011.

My ethics analysis of this conduct begins with “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.” The entire season, 162 games, many millions of dollars, millions of fans, a city’s economy and community, players’ careers and income, managers’ and coaches’ jobs, team sponsors and more ride on which teams win in the post-season. My position is that Miller’s decision was selfish, irresponsible and a breach of duty. His team not only needed him, but depended on him. His wife’s pregnancy had had hit no crisis (I checked); she also had other support available. If I were a team mate or the management, I would conclude that Mason Miller could not be trusted. An employee who flees in a crisis is not a desirable employee, especially when the employee is paid $4 million dollars for eight months of service.

Moral Luck Alert! The Padres won the game without Miller, then lost the next one, ending their World Series quest.

Ethics Alarms hosted an intense debate on this exact topic in 2021. I wrote in part,

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The Naked Teacher Principle, Brought To You By “Only Fans” Again and Of Course [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

[Added: The comments to this post indicate that many don’t know what the exact Naked Teacher Principle is. My fault: I usually re-state it in the posts, and did not this time. The Principle states that a secondary school teacher or administrator (or other role model for children) who allows pictures of himself or herself to be widely publicized, as on the web, showing the teacher naked or engaging in sexually provocative poses, cannot complain when he or she is dismissed by the school as a result. It does not hold, and has never held, that such teachers must be dismissed or should be dismissed in all cases.]

That’s St. Louis substitute teacher Sheena Sittner above—trust me on this. Like some other teachers—and bet there are a lot more potential firees out there—she lost her job over having an OnlyFans account. It wasn’t the school that fired her but the agency that delivers substitute teachers that suspended her pending termination and that she must “refrain from contacting any school or districts.”

The enterprising educator follows July’s Naked Teacher Principle (NTP) star, Maris Nichols, 25, the married Georgia high school teacher who in addition to having sex with students is a provocative OnlyFans performer. Maris was being blackmailed by some of her students who discovered the OnlyFans channel she owns, operates, and uses to display her excellent Linda Lovelace impression, among, uh, other things.

It’s a theoretical argument that Nichols’ example, which provides one reason OnlyFans teachers have no defense to offer school boards once they are outed, doesn’t apply to a substitute teacher. Who would extort a substitute teacher for grades, when they don’t usually give out grades? Never mind, though: there are plenty of other reasons a school (and parents) might not want to have an amateur porn star guiding young impressionable minds. Do I have to go through them again? Here’s an idea: why don’t you review the EA archives on the subject? It will be entertaining, and I don’t have to write the same things I have posted dozens of times over many years.

Sheena does have a distinction that puts her in a sub-category: she’s a dim-witted rationalizing Naked Teacher. She’s been broadcasting X-rated content on OnlyFans along with her substitute teaching for the past two years, and says she knew it would probably be discovered eventually. “If teachers were paid better, women wouldn’t have to resort to online content creation,” Sittner said. “Sex sells.” Yeah, so do kidneys, crack and child trafficking. And, you know, women don’t have to resort to selling their body and dignity for the enjoyment of pervs: there are many other options. Moreover,the reasons one chooses to engage in a side-gig that is incompatible with holding a parent’s trust as a role model and a conveyor of societal values still don’t justify the conduct if it affects others and is inappropriate.

Maybe this is why she’s just a substitute teacher.

On Perpetual Immaturity and Facing A Life-Defining Moment

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Two thoughts on the first day of the MLB play-offs:

1. I am officially 12-years-old. (Most of my friends and associates know that, but it continues to amaze me.) Today I have critical client work to do involving huge amounts of money (for them, not me). I have several medical issues I need to attend to ASAP. I’m late getting my invoices out and I’m in cash-flow hell. But all I can think about is the Red Sox-Yankee game tonight. (8 PM, EST. on NBC)

This is the juvenile state of mind that led me to risk my job in 1978, when I walked out of a critical, high-level capital fundraising meeting at Georgetown, with all the brass present, saying, “I’m sorry, but the Red Sox and Yankees are playing a game in Fenway Park in an hour to decide the American League East, and I have to see it. Let me know what you all decide.” (That was the Bucky %$#@ Dent Game.) My wife-to-be Grace was at the meeting and was the only one smiling; everyone else looked like the audience in “The Producers” after “Springtime for Hitler.”

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Let’s Play “Wait, Was That Racist or Not?”!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“Hi there, everyone! It’s time to play the exciting ethics game that’s sweeping America: “Wait, Was That Ethical or Unethical?”! As you know, contestants are asked to decide whether an ambiguous statement or action was racist or not!

“Are you ready, contestants? Then let’s play, “Wait, Was That Racist or Wasn’t It?”! Introduce our subject for Round I, Johnny!”

“Sure thing, Jack! Meet Dixie Walker! Dixie was a star baseball player who died in 1982. He won a batting championship and a runs-batted-in title, and he played in two World Series and four All-Star Games. He is most remembered, however, not for his impressive exploits on the baseball field but as the player who led the campaign to keep Jackie Robinson from joining the Brooklyn Dodgers and integrating the game.

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