cruelty

And While We’re On The Subject Of Adults Exploiting And Warping Toddlers, Let’s Talk “Toddlers & Tiaras”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Wait! I’ve got an even better idea! How about having toddlers in fake boobs and butt pads FIGHTING EACH OTHER!!!

Bill Verst has asked a Kentucky court to grant him sole custody of his daughter Maddy Verst, now 6, who gained infamy on TLC’s vile reality show“Toddlers & Tiaras” when her mother had her appear in a kiddie beauty pageant dressed as Dolly Parton, with a padded bra and butt pads.

Good. I hope he wins.

This is nothing short of child abuse, and represents exploitation of the very young for an adult’s own (sick) gratification. It may not be quite as despicable as having toddlers duke it out at day care, but it’s close. A court-appointed psychologist agreed with Verst that his estranged wife’s sexualization of their daughter showed she was an unfit parent, and recommended that a judge make Verst the girl’s sole custodial parent.

I’m sure it will not surprise you to hear that Maddy’s Mom, Lindsey Jackson, doesn’t get it. She told reporters, Continue reading →

Toddler Fight Club: The Monsters Among Us

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“And in this corner, standing 20 inches and weighing 18 pounds…”

There was a joke in an old “I Love Lucy” episode in which Lucy misunderstood a reference to “three-year-olds” in a story about horse racing, and announced in horror, “They’re racing little girls at Churchill Downs!”

Well, this is worse, and it’s no joke.

From CBS in Philadelphia:

“According to Dover Police, three employees from the Hands of Our Future Daycare in Delaware were arrested after a cell phone video showed employees watching and encouraging two 3-year-olds fight each other. Tiana Harris, 19, Lisa Parker, 47, and Estefania Myers, 21, were charged with Assault, Endangering the Welfare of a Child, Reckless Endangering and Conspiracy for the incident, which occurred in March of 2012 and was captured on cell phone video. In the video, police say one child can be heard crying and yelling, ‘He’s pinching me,’ while a daycare worker responds, ‘No pinching, only punching.’” Continue reading →

And You Think YOU Have An Abusive Boss!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Count your blessings, Homer? Your boss isn’t so bad after all!

We must place the word “alleged” in front of all of this, for it is just a law suit at this point, but if the outrageous conduct described in the complaint made by Albert Sultan against his former boss, Manhattan real estate broker Jack Terzi, is even close to true, Terzi may be the Tin Standard against which all other abusive employers should be judged.

Sultan says in his 15-page lawsuit that he was hired by Terzi in 2009, shortly after Terzi started his real estate business. After three years of Terzi’s reign of terror, Sultan says, he became “emotionally distraught,  humiliated and embarrassed” by “systematic and continuous unlawful harassment” at the hands of his tyrannical and abusive boss, who, among other things…

  • Made him perform personal tasks not in his job description, such as parking Terzi’s car and bringing him coffee.
  • Required him to work a 60-hour week, including 26 Sundays annually, with no sick days or vacation.
  • Cheated him out of six months salary and commissions worth $129,320.

Wait! I haven’t gotten to the juicy stuff yet! Continue reading →

The Pasco School District (Florida) Flunks Its “Cone of Shame” Lesson

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Isn’t this hilarious? The student looks just like that funny animated dog!

Laurie Bailey-Cutkomp is, among other things that I will enumerate as we go, a  science teacher who until recently was employed at Zephyrhills High School in Dade County.  The Pasco School District fired her for devising and employing a unique form of punishment for misbehaving students: she placed them in a wide plastic collar of the sort used by veterinarians to keep dogs from licking their stitched up wounds, what the talking dogs in Disney’s  animated film “Up” amusingly called “the Cone of Shame.” But they were dogs, and they were animated. The Cone of Shame isn’t funny on kids, except maybe to Ms. Bailey-Cutkomp.

Then the same school district that fired her, following negotiations and a settlement agreement, allowed another school in the same district, Middle School, to hire her to teach science there.

Oh, darn…my head just exploded all over my computer screen! There…it’s wiped off now. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Tucson Bully Adam M. Smith

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

“I’m a nice guy, by the way.”

—– Adam M. Smith, ex-CFO at Vante, a Tucson medical supplies manufacturer, in the middle of a two-and-a-half minute abusive dressing down of a Chick-fil-A drive-in employee, which he filmed himself and placed on YouTube.

No more Mr. Nice Guy.

Mr. Smith isn’t a nice guy, you see. He’s a vile bully and a jerk, who thinks it appropriate to embarrass and abuse an innocent employee of a restaurant because he happens not to agree with the politics and moral positions of the company’s owner. Whatever his cause may be (I almost wrote “beef,” which would have been inappropriate for a chicken place), there can be no excuse for his choosing as the target of his indignation a minimum wage clerk who has no control, power or influence over the situation, the issue, the controversy or anything, other than getting Smith his order, which in this case was a cup of water. He made her his captive audience for verbal abuse, ignored her objections when she said she didn’t want to be filmed, and generally took the ethical principles of fairness,respect, kindness, proportion, caring, compassion and reciprocity and tore them into little bits to throw in her face. He cannot claim some utilitarian justification , because attacking this poor young woman could logically accomplish nothing positive whatsoever. Continue reading →

Worst Sequel Ever: “Cheer Your Rapist II”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The Penn State disease is not restricted to colleges.  Now there comes a lawsuit showing how ugly it is when the contagion hits a high school.

The Southern Columbia Tigers are a real high school football power in Pennsylvania, and naturally the Southern Columbia Area School District and Southern Columbia Area High School Principal James A. Becker wouldn’t do anything to change that…like, for example, barring two rapists from playing on the team when they were so good at scoring the legal way, as well as…well, you know.

A law suit filed by “C.S.” in Federal Court alleges that the school district and high school principal protected two star student athletes after it had been proven in court that they had sexually assaulted the girl, a student at the school as well. From the complaint: Continue reading →

No, THIS Is An Irresponsible Parent

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“MOM???”

Mistie Atkinson, 32, was sentenced to jail for four years and eight months b in Napa County Superior Court, California this week. After police caught her and her 16-year-old son naked together in a motel room, investigators discovered a sex video, made by Mistie, of her giving her own son oral sex. Mom had no contact with her son for 15 years, then tracked him down on Facebook and began sending him sexually provocative photographs.

This is known as “Not only corrupting a minor, but guaranteeing that his psychiatry bill will approach the national debt.”

Naturally Mistie, who has a disturbingly loose grip on concepts like right, wrong,  boundaries, impulse control, fairness, adulthood and personal responsibility, says that she should not have been charged with incest because the attraction between the two was “genetic.”

The one generous and responsible thing Mistie had done for her son his whole life was to keep him as far away from the toxic influences of her warped, self-centered and destructive character as possible. Then she couldn’t even do that.

 

 

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Facts and Graphic: Daily Mail

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.

 

Silver Lining To A Homicide

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Ah, those school memories!

In South Dakota,  73-year-old Carl Ericsson rang an old high school classmate’s doorbell in January and shot him dead.

Why? Norman Johnson had forced his killer to wear a jock strap on his head in a high school locker room when they were both boys almost 60 years ago. Ericsson hadn’t seen or talk to Johnson in decades, but the humiliation apparently festered. A successful family man now in retirement, Ericsson had battled emotional illness in recent years, and suddenly decided to settle the score of an old grudge.

This was a senseless death and a tragedy that scars two families. Still, I think the tale of how a victim of bullying suddenly got horrible revenge on his tormenter six decades later is s story that should be told early and often in the schools.

It may make some would-be bullies think twice before that atomic wedgie, the embarrassing photo, or the mean Facebook post.

And Mitt?

Watch out.

[NOTE: when this article was first posted, the end portion of the ABC story I linked to above and below was inadvertently copied into it after my last line. That was unintentional. Since I am both a lousy speller, a lousy typist and a computer maladroit, I sometimes copy a portion of the story I am basing a post upon into the body of the post, for easy reference, and occasionally to cut and paste names like “Ericsson” that I just know I’m going to misspell at least once. When I do that, I usually remember to delete it. And when I don’t usually Tim Levier catches it before now. My apologies to ABC, the AP, and you.]

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Pointer: Fark

Facts and Graphic: ABC

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 →

Ethics Dunce: Francesca Eastwood

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“Go ahead, make me ashamed I spawned you.”

Stipulated: you have every right in the world to dispose of of your personal belongings as you see fit.

Also stipulated: if you intentionally buy a steak dinner, eat half of it in front of a homeless woman and her infant, and feed what you didn’t finish to a stray dog as she looks on, salivating, you are a cruel, unsympathetic, sadistic creep.

With so many Americans  jobless or in financial distress, with charities short of funds and government social services facing budget cut-backs, to buy a $100,000 alligator handbag and then destroy it for “art”—-as Francesca Eastwood, Clint’s daughter, recently did—is hardly better than the steak dinner stunt. It’s even an insult to the alligator. Essentially this was an eloquent statement that Francesca would prefer to throw her money away than help people with it, people for whom a hundred grand is three years of family income.

That tells us all we need or want to know about Clint’s spoiled little girl.

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Facts: Telegraph

Graphic: Wn

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.