cruelty

Ethics Quiz: The Conundrum of the Crushed Crab

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“OH THE HUMANITY! I mean…well, you know what I mean…”

A good friend related this scene on Facebook, and asks if she is losing her mind:

She was shopping at the open air fish market on Maine Avenue in Washington, D.C. when a vendor, whose cart was full of live blue crabs, had an escape attempt. One of the crustaceans made a dash for freedom, only to be squashed by the wheel of the cart.  “I screamed and then burst into tears,” she wrote. “It was awful. I tried to save the little guy.”  Then she realized that people were laughing at the drama, thinking it was a comedy….laughing at the crab getting crushed and at my friend for being upset by it.

She wrote: “Now I know he was destined for a pot of boiling water. But somehow – seeing that little creature getting run over was just too much for me. I know someone was going to eat that crab – but do we have to be cruel?”

Your Post-Mothers Day Ethics Quiz for crab mothers everywhere:

Were the laughers cruel, or merely recognizing a funny scene when they saw one? Continue reading →

Internet Betrayal: The Dork, The Spreadsheet, and the E-mail Avenger

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

If someone sends you an obnoxious, arrogant, idiotic or otherwise embarrassing e-mail, the ethical thing to do is to tell the individual what’s wrong with it, and perhaps save them from future embarrassment. The principle is simple: The Golden Rule. When you send a private message to someone and pour out your heart, empty your skull, vent your spleen, or otherwise express things you probably should have slept on and moderated in the clear light of day, you don’t want your correspondent to use the internet as a weapon against you and introduce you to millions at your worst. It is a terrible, cruel, indefensible thing to do…to anyone. Continue reading →

Jimmy Kimmel Is Still An Evil, Child-Abusing Jerk, and Apparently I’m The Only One Who Notices

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I have written twice before about ABC late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel’s penchant for urging his viewers to inflict emotional distress on their trusting children, because Jimmy and other mean-spirited jerks get a big kick out of watching kids scream and cry following cruelty from their parents. As I wrote the last time Kimmel issued one of his “challenges,” which was to spoil Christmas for your kid by giving them  horrible gifts (like a half-eaten sandwich):

“Children are not props for Jimmy Kimmel’s sadistic amusement, and parents who are willing to use their children this way… are, to be blunt, rotten, despicable, and untrustworthy parents. Something important—Compassion? Kindness? Empathy? Loyalty? Responsibility? Love? — is absent in their parental make-up, and that void is being cynically exploited by Kimmel, who has crossed the threshold from arrested adolescent to full-fledged villain. Since Kimmel has twice been rewarded with positive publicity for egging on parents to harm their kids, what can we expect next from Jimmy?…There’s almost no limit to the great YouTube videos one can create when you’re willing to lie to your kids to upset them.”

Well, now we know. Jimmy asked parents to pre-chew their kids food and serve it to them, to see their horrified reactions. Last night, he showed the hysterically funny “winners.” One disgusted and enraged teenage girl, finally told by her folks that the prank was Jimmy Kimmel’s idea, said to the camera, resoundingly, “You suck, Jimmy!”

Indeed he does. Continue reading →

Is Cosmetic Surgery For Dogs Eth…Oh, For Heaven’s Sake! I Can’t Believe I Have To Ask!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

NPR’s gag current events quiz show “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” got gasps from its panelists, its audience and me this week when it discussed the supposedly growing trend of “canine plastic surgery”, including “face lifts for dogs.” WWDTM was, as is often the case, being a bit misleading in the interests of time and humor: the case that prompted the discussion was the story of a British couple who had spent thousands of dollars on wrinkle-reduction for their bloodhound, but it was not, as she show led us to believe, an effort to create a canine Joan Rivers. The dog had a rare medical condition in which it developed excessive skin folds that covered its eyes. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but sometimes it’s not as funny.

While researching the bloodhound story, however, I learned about “Neuticles”—

—fake testicles implanted in neutered dogs in order to…well, what, really? Continue reading →

School Insanity: A Warning From Canada…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Jessie Sansone and his trouble-making daughter

…And the warning is: the police and schools aren’t this crazy and irresponsible in the U.S. yet, but all the signs are present. From the news in Ontario:

Police arrested a Kitchener, Ont., father outside his daughter’s school because the four-year-old drew a picture of him holding a gun. Jessie Sansone told the Record newspaper that he was in shock when he was arrested Wednesday and taken to a police station for questioning over the drawing. He was also strip-searched.

“This is completely insane. My daughter drew a gun on a piece of paper at school,” he said.

Officials told the newspaper the move was necessary to ensure there were no guns accessible by children in the family’s home. They also said comments by Sansone’s daughter, Neaveh, that the man holding the gun in the picture was her dad and “he uses it to shoot bad guys and monsters,” was concerning.

Police also searched Sansone’s home while he was in custody. His wife and three children were taken to the police station, and the children were interviewed by Family and Children’s Services. Continue reading →

Obituary Ethics: The Anello Family Follies

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

What is there left to say about this? According to the Tampa Bay Times, the sibling who placed the obituary (guess which one) claimed that all he was doing was memorializing his mother’s own opinion regarding her children. Whether this is true or not, his conduct in composing such a petty and inappropriate obituary can’t be defended. Continue reading →

“King Lear” in Connecticutt

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

"Happy 98th birthday, Mom! Now get the hell out of my house."

Perhaps it is not fair to compare 71-year-old Peter Kantorowski to King Lear’s heartless  daughters Regan and Gonoril. After all, Peter says that his 98-year-old mom, Mary, is welcome to stay with him and his wife at their home, but she refuses. Still, Kanterowski, like the Lear girls, is trying to evict an aged parent from her residence after she had signed the property over to him. And even Regan and Goneril didn’t serve their father the King with an eviction notice on his birthday…but that’s what Peter’s gift was to his mother last December.

According to Probate Court records, in 1996 Mary Kantorowski and her husband, John transferred their small, yellow Cape Cod-style house to a trust administered by eldest son Peter on the condition that Mary could live there until her death, and that upon her death the house would go to Peter and his younger brother, Jack. In July of 2005, Peter quitclaimed the house from that trust to another he and his wife set up, giving him ownership, he says, without the prior conditions. A retired taxidermist, Kantorowski swears he is trying to evict his mother from the home she has lived in since 1953 for her own good. “She would be better off living with people her own age,” he told the Connecticut Post.

Well at least he doesn’t want to stuff her. Continue reading →

A Lesson From Georgia: Schools Too Stupid To Be Ethical Are Also Too Stupid To Be Trusted To Teach

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Handy Tip: Don't trust this man to educate your children.

Rick Jones, proprietor of Curmudgeon Central,  launched his Curmie Award last year, “honoring” educational professionals who embarrass their profession. Rick discovered a  Curmie-worthy story that he blogs on here, from the Beaver Ridge Elementary School in Norcross, GA. A teacher gave her third-grade class a Monty Pythonesque math test in which all the questions revolved around slavery:

  • “Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?”
  • “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?”
  •  “Frederick had 6 baskets full of cotton. If each basket held 5 pounds, how many pounds did he have all together?”

Moron.

Naturally the school got an earful from parents, and naturally the school, which had no possible justification for such wretched judgement on its teacher’s part, apologized and backtracked. It’s not enough. Why are such incompetent idiots hired to teach anything more sentient than a poodle? How can a parent trust a school that allows teachers like this in the front door? If your child is taught by a moron—and technical definitions aside, that is not an unfair or uncivil description of a teacher who thinks it’s reasonable to give the question, “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?” to a third-grader, your child’s likelihood of growing up moronic is vastly increased.

And yet, as Richard Dreyfus’s character says to Quint the shark-hunter as they compare scars in “Jaws,” “I got that beat.”In fact, Rick, I got that beat in Georgia. Continue reading →

Stop Cruelty To Children—Or To Put It Another Way, Stop Jimmy Kimmel

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Bulletin to Jimmy Kimmel: Enough is enough, you sadistic jerk.

Also known as "Jimmy Kimmel Cruel!" and "Jimmy Kimmel Sadistic!"

Flush with his “success” of persuading his most irresponsible viewers to make their own children cry by lying to them about eating all their Halloween candy and then posting the videos of their kids’ emotional distress on YouTube, ABC late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel has told the same warped people to traumatize their children again, this time by granting the kids the special treat of opening a Christmas gift early, but having a terrible gift (like a half-eaten sandwich) inside. The emotional reactions of the children thus deceived are also, per Kimmel’s directive, videotaped for posterity  to inspire mirth on the part of  his similarly warped viewers who don’t have children (and thank God for that), because, as we all know, disappointing kids at Christmastime is fun.

This has got to stop. It doesn’t matter if some, like Mediate’s Jon Bershad , think this is “the cruelest, funniest joke ever,” and others, like the Huffington Post’s reviewer, think the pranked children’s misery is “hilarious.” Children are not props for Jimmy Kimmel’s sadistic amusement, and parents who are willing to use their children this way, intentionally spoiling their Christmas anticipation for the entertainment of sadistic strangers, are, to be blunt, rotten, despicable, and untrustworthy parents. Something important—Compassion? Kindness? Empathy? Loyalty? Responsibility? Love? — is absent in their parental make-up, and that void is being cynically exploited by Kimmel, who has crossed the threshold from arrested adolescent to full-fledged villain. Continue reading →

Letting Homes Burn in Obion County: Re-send the Memo

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

"I'll pay the $75 now."

Just in time for Christmas, we have the heart-warming story—or just plain “warming”—of the South Fulton (Tennessee) Fire Department once again standing by as someone’s home burns down.  Ethics Alarms wrote about this  outfit doing the same thing in 2010, following Obion County policy: pay the yearly $75 fire department fee, or be prepared to put out your own damn fires.

In 2010, it was the home of a cheapskate named Gene Cranick, who, like the people who can afford health insurance but don’t buy it anyway, figured that his  community would still do the right thing if the worst happened, so he gambled to save the money.  The South Fulton Fire Department did the right thing, all right, at least according to Obion County officials. They let his house go up in flames.

This time, it was mobile home owner Vicky Bell whose dumb gamble backfired.  Continue reading →