cell phones

The Sexting Persecution Of Cormega Copening

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

sexting

Charging kids with crimes for sexting themselves to a fully consenting fellow kid always seemed excessive and cruel to me. This story is the reductio ad absurdum that settles the matter.

In Fayetteville, North Carolina, 17-year-old Cormega Copening and his girlfriend Brianna Denson, also 17, began exchanging naked photos of themselves in text messages when they were 16. They were the only ones who saw the pictures, but someone somehow tipped off local authorities, who searched Copening’s phone and discovered them.

Copeling and Denson were charged with sexual exploitation. The Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office concluded that Denson had committed two felony sex crimes...against herself. A warrant cited her as both the adult perpetrator and the minor victim of two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, second-degree exploitation for making her photo and third-degree exploitation for having her own nude photo in her possession. A conviction could have put Denson in prison and would have required her to register as a sex offender for the rest of her life. Denson pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was given 12 months of probation.

Her sexting partner Copening, however, is still facing as much as ten years prison time for two counts of second-degree sexual exploitation and three counts of third-degree exploitation. As with Denson, the third-degree charges arise out of the pictures Copening had of himself.  That’s not the worst of the mind-twisting logic of this prosecution, however. North Carolina is one of two states in the country (the other: New York) that makes 16  the age of adulthood in the criminal system. The state’s consent laws consider anyone 16 and under a minor, but allows minors 16 or over to be charged as adults.

Gilbertian result: Copening is facing conviction, as an adult, for exploiting a minor—himself. Continue reading →

The Duty To Confront, Part One: A Starbucks Encounter

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

Starbucks

A friend on Facebook just posted this tale…

“Lady at Starbucks yelled at employee for serving old sandwiches marked 8/11. She was irate and insisted on seeing the manager. The manager told her that today was 8/11. Lady said “oh” and no apology for employee who was now in tears.”

And, apparently, nobody, including my friend, stepped in an demanded that the customer apologize.

Wrong.

We have a shared duty to keep up basic standards of ethics and decency. In this situation, and apology is mandatory, and if the woman, who had a valid reason to complain if she was right, didn’t have the sense, character or decency to do the right thing, she needed to be told, and even embarrassed.

Three incidents in my experiences come to mind…. Continue reading →

Hail Trump, King Of Signature Significance!

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Because Senator Lindsey Graham properly said that Donald Trump needed to stop acting like a jackass and should get out of the Presidential race, Trump gave out the Senator’s cell-phone number.

Of course he did.

I almost wrote a post yesterday about how some right-wing pundits apparently have no concept of right and wrong, crippling them in matters like the Donald Trump campaign. I listened in amazement–I actually had to pull off the road, so as not to crash—as Sean Hannity and another right-wing fool (I didn’t catch his name) went on and on about how if only Trump could avoid “mistakes” and “self-inflicted wounds” what a great candidate he would be, and how impugning the courage of a war hero like John McCain was such bad strategy, because it distracted from his message. These people really understand nothing, not ethics, not common sense, not character, and certainly not signature significance, even though Donald Trump is the living embodiment of the term.

Signature significance, which is used often here, means that a single instance of conduct can be so remarkable that it allows an accurate assessment of the character of the individual engaging in it. It comes from the world of baseball statistical analysis, and the example is a starting pitcher allowing no runs, striking out 15, not walking a batter and giving up less than five hits in a complete game, 9 inning performance. Doing this just once is enough evidence to conclude, decisively and validly, that the pitcher involved is a superior one. Why? The reason is that the history of baseball shows that literally no pitcher who isn’t great can pitch even one game that good.

In ethics, signature significance refers to an act so blatantly wrong and yet intentional that no ethical individual would ever do it, even once, or a statement showing such complete ethics ignorance that it alone justifies withholding trust from anyone who would say it, even once. Ethics dolts like Sean Hannity really think that public figures who have shown beyond all doubt that they don’t know what ethical behavior is will suddenly be able to act ethical if they just try a little harder.  Donald Trump is the perfect example of why that is ridiculous, yet here Hannity was, yesterday, applying that logic to Donald Trump.

Trump is the epitome of signature significance. Again and again he has done and said things that if they were the only thing we had ever heard about the man, it would be sufficient to conclude with near 100% confidence that this guy is 1) untrustworthy and/or 2) dumb as a brick. Continue reading →

KABOOM! The Dumbest, Most Unethical Broadway Audience Member Ever

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

exploding_head

This, among other reasons, is why I am leaving professional theater while I still have a head left.

In the middle of a performance recently, a Broadway audience member crawled up onto the realistic set of Broadway’s hit comedy, “Hand To God,” to charge  his cell phone using the realistic but non-working outlet on stage.

And yet there are people who oppose capital punishment….

The blog where I learned of this incident asks, “Sometimes, I wonder, is live theater is dying because the audiences are getting dumber every day?”

Yes.

______________________

Pointer: John Geoffrion

Cellphone Videos Of Stand-Up Comedy Routines Are Unethical: Ban Them

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

no cell phonesVulture features an interview with Chris Rock, on which he waxes forth on many topics.I don’t especially care what Chris Rock has to say about Ferguson, but I care a lot about his views on stand-up comedy, where he qualifies as an expert, and the disastrous effect unauthorized videos are having on his art.

Rock has walked off the stage in appearances when he couldn’t stop audience members from filming him, and for very good reasons. He doesn’t want untested, half-baked material to get out to the public via YouTube:

“There are a few guys good enough to write a perfect act and get onstage, but everybody else workshops it and workshops it, and it can get real messy. It can get downright offensive. Before everyone had a recording device and was wired like Sammy the Bull, you’d say something that went too far, and you’d go, ‘Oh, I went too far,’ and you would just brush it off. But if you think you don’t have room to make mistakes, it’s going to lead to safer, gooier stand-up. You can’t think the thoughts you want to think if you think you’re being watched.”

On Elahe Izadi’s Syle Blog in the Washington Post site, other comics voiced similar concerns. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Vigilante Cell Phone Police

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments
Say goodbye, cell phone!

Say goodbye, cell phone!

National Review blogger and theater critic Kevin Williamson raises an issue that especially interests me, as part of the management of a professional theater company. How far can an audience member ethically go to quite a persistently rude and disruptive spectator who insists on using her cell phone during a performance? Here’s how far Williamson went while viewing the musical Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 that a woman was in the process of ruining for him, after he complained to the management without success and received this series of responses from the woman:

“I asked her to turn it off. She answered: “So don’t look.” I asked her whether I had missed something during the very pointed announcements to please turn off your phones, perhaps a special exemption granted for her. She suggested that I should mind my own business.”

Williamson then grabbed the phone from her and hurled it against the wall. She slapped him, and complained. He, not she, was then escorted from the theater.

Let’s stipulate that hurling the phone was over the line. But let’s suppose that he had just confiscated the phone, walked into the lobby, and hidden it in a planter, promising to reveal the hiding place after the performance (having already failed to police the situation as was their duty, Williamson can not be blamed for bypassing management).

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz Question:

Is it ethical to confiscate the cell phone of a deliberately rude user during a theatrical performance, after appropriate warnings have been given and ignored? Continue reading →

The Folly and Threat of the Pew 13%

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

From the just-released Pew survey about American attitudes and practices regarding their mobile phones:

“Cell phones can help prevent unwanted personal interactions – 13% of cell owners pretended to be using their phone in order to avoid interacting with the people around them.”

For information and education of those 13% of cell phone owners, here is what I know about you because you engage in this practice:

  • You are rude.
  • You are disrespectful.
  • You are cowardly.
  • You are ignorant
  • You are a liar.

I am sure these same people will happily enter their opinions on blogs about what is and isn’t right about America, despite having avoided all but the most sanitized interaction with it—using pseudonyms to hide their identities, of course. They don’t want interaction, the mutual exchange of  opinions, or to have to deal with anyone who might shatter their ossified, unshakable view of the world with a different perspective. Continue reading →

Lesson of the Asian-Bashing UCLA Video: Shunning and Intolerance Work. Good.

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Alexandra Wallace...cultural critic, YouTube star, pariah, GONE

Alexandra Wallace, the UCLA student who created an obnoxious and offensive video stereotyping her Asian colleagues as gibberish-spouting boors,  announced that she was leaving the school as a result of “being ostracized” by “an entire community.”  Yes, I’d say that was the idea, and it is how cultures enforce its values. And it works.

Wallace picked the day of the Japanese tsunami to post her anti-Asian rant on YouTube, where it promptly went viral. It also made her an instant pariah on her campus, where over a third of all students are of Asian heritage, and the rest of them, unlike Alexandra, have at least a vague concept of mutual respect and decorum.

You can read a complete transcript of the three-minute diatribe here, but this shortened version gives a sense of what infuriated Asians, UCLA, and just about everyone else: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Crane Interiors in Woodbury, Tenn.

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

"Hi! I can't answer the phone now, but please leave a message!"

Teresa Danford’s son, Lance Cpl. Mark Rhyne, is deployed in Afghanistan, where he is only able to call home once or twice a month. He has been overseas for seven months. On Valentine’s Day, Teresa, an employee of Crane Interiors in Woodbury, Tennessee, received one of her son’s precious phone calls at her job, on her personal cell phone. She was promptly suspended for three days without pay, for Crane has a no cell phone call policy for employees. Her manager informed her that she would be fired if it ever happened again. Continue reading →

Ignorant Juror, Malfunctioning Jury, Dysfunctional Justice

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It was bound to happen, which is not to say that there is any excuse for it.  A juror during on a day off from trial, told the world via Facebook that she had already decided the defendant was guilty, writing that it was “gonna be fun to tell the defendant they’re guilty.” This statement, in addition to showing a disturbing lack of compassion and empathy, not to mention meanness, also was a violation of her duties as a juror. The trial wasn’t even finished, the jury hadn’t deliberated, and yet Hadley Jons, 20, had already decided on her vote and was bragging about it. Continue reading →