An Erie woman, dismayed that she had been picked to serve as a juror in a weapons case, audibly harrumphed the worst curse word of them all, then huffed and puffed her way to her seat in the jury box. Erie County President Judge Ernest J. DiSantis was having none of it. When apprised of the outburst by the lawyers on the case, DiSantis came to the courtroom and called the woman, Kathleen Port, in front of the bench.
Port was off the jury, for start, DiSantis said. “But we are not done,” he said. DiSantis held Port in contempt of court and fined her $500 for the improper behavior. “You are totally out of line,” he said….Jury service is a duty of citizenship, he said.
“It is inconvenient at times,” he said.
Good.
That’s one less juror who will go on ABC to prove that her vote was meaningless and that she had no idea what she was doing.
(Watch this after you’ve read the post. Kind of like dessert..)
The ethical considerations one should review when pondering whether to engage in webshaming nicely evaporate when the subject has chosen, though unwittingly, to webshame herself. Thus Ethics Alarms has no qualms about presenting for your consideration, revulsion, and rejection if she ever applies for a job from you, one Taylor Chapman, a 27-year-old woman who lives in the vicinity of Fort Lauderdale. She eagerly and proudly posted to her Facebook page the phone-video above, of her abusing an impeccable Dunkin’ Donuts employee, annoying a customer, and making serial statements with signature significance—no decent human being would utter even one of these appalling comments in public unless suffering from a brain trauma or extreme intoxication.
Chapman was angry because she and her friends had not received a receipt along with their large drive-thru order, and angrily (and abusively, based on Chapman’s manner, but we can only guess) demanded to receive their order free of charge, as Dunkin’ Donuts now promises as part of a service pledge. The employee handling the order apparently did not know how to proceed, and told the group that they would have to come by the store and see her manager the next day.
[An aside:That’s not good customer service, DD. If you make a guarantee that is supposed to mean anything, you have an obligation to train employees how to deliver on it. Telling customers who have not received the promised service that they have to come back to the establishment another day to receive what they are owed is unreasonable and a bait-and switch. I would have said to forget it. I would have written a letter. I would not have done what Chapman did, and I don’t know anyone who would.]
What Chapman did was to return the next day and demand her free order, tossing obscenities at the extraordinarily polite and unflappable employee (his name is Abid Adar, and you should send him flowers) on duty while she recorded the encounter as if it were a health department sting. Continue reading →
“How do I rebut your argument? Here’s how, you, brain-damaged Hell-spawn!”
David Plouffe at least has done something useful, if not ethical.
We get a lot of accusations here—aimed at me and also between warring commenters—of using ad hominem attacks. Ad hominem attacks are indeed unethical, not because of the negative descriptions of the target they involve, which may well be accurate and fair, but because they are a dishonest and unfair debate tactic. The motive behind a true ad hominem attack is to avoid dealing with the substance of what an adversary claims, argues or asserts by attacking the person, character or background of the adversary. The intention is to avoid the implications of a fact or illuminating opinion by asserting: “This person is bad, so don’t listen to what he has to say.” It is a logical fallacy, of course. Whether an individual is bad or not doesn’t change the facts; a bad person may have performed a brilliant analysis, uncovered the wisdom of the ages, or uncovered the key perception that solves enduring mysteries. It is unethical for one seeking to rebut the argument to attack the arguer as if it’s the same thing. When successful, ad hominem attacks deflect the real debate and turn it into a debate about something else, focusing on the original speaker, now feeling the need to defend his honor rather than his position. Continue reading →
“Thank you, counselors. We will proceed to fucking closing statements.”
I just saw a local Boston TV ad for Ace Tickets. The slogan at the end was “Sit your Ace down!” So clever! Just throw gratuitous vulgarity into a commercial during a baseball game, doubtlessly viewed by many children, because it’s inherently amusing. The message is that vulgarity is cool, clever and acceptable. Other messages in the media, both in advertising and in pop culture, convey the same permissive standards regarding obscenity. Over on the Drudge Report, a much-admired news aggregator for political junkies, especially on the right, no mention of Anthony Weiner’s annoying candidacy for Mayor of New York is made without a cheap “weiner” joke. Today, Drudge noted that Weiner was “inching up” in the polls. Get it?HAR! Just under that “gag,” the news that men favored Weiner in polling was headlined “Male Enhancement.” Soooo witty! The U.S. is being transformed into one huge junior high school. After growing up in such a vulgar, undignified, sleazy environment, the next generation won’t be prone to inadvertently use words like “fuck” and “shit” in public forums such as live award shows and TV interviews, like our current politicians, newscasters and celebrities. They’ll just use them intentionally, all the time. Won’t that be cool? I’m sure David Letterman thinks so. Cool Dave had A.J. Clemente, he of uttering “fucking shit” on the airways in his debut as a news anchor, as a guest on his show. Dave suggested to A.J. that his ex-bosses were jerks to fire him. Good point Dave! A.J. was just ahead of his time. In a decade or so, “fucking shit” may be the sign-off of the next generation’s Walter Cronkite.
Abused and Abuser. Someone please tell Katy Perry which is which.
Pop singing star Katy Perry registered an ethically responsible objection via Twitter regarding the Chief Keef song “Hate Being Sober.” She wrote,
“Just heard a new song on the radio called ‘I hate being sober’ I now have serious doubt for the world.”
Me too, Katy. The artist responsible for this paean to intoxication, however, took offense, and decided to rebut Katy’s tweet with an obscene, abusive, misogynist attack:
“Dat bitch Katy Perry Can Suck Skin Off Of my Dick Ill Smack The Shit out her”
Thus chastened (or intimidated?), Perry apologized to him, writing that she really liked the song, and wasn’t “a hater”: Continue reading →
The station is not being too harsh. The station is upholding correct professional standards, and removing an unprofessional employee whom they do not trust and have no reason to trust. The episode showed him to be careless, reckless and, obviously, subject to obscene outbursts, which only are appropriate if you are David Ortiz. Ah, but some of the good citizens of Bismarck, displaying the same entrenched ethics cluelessness that led to the nomination of the ridiculous Mark Sanford, ex-Romeo governor, to lose a GOP House seat in South Carolina, don’t comprehend accountability, trustworthiness or responsibility, because to them, the only values that matter are forgiveness and compassion. The technical terms for such people are “patsies” and “marks.” They would cripple society, business and government with their mindless, deadly niceness. Examples: Continue reading →
Apparently April is officially “Let’s Make The U.S. Permanently Vulgar and Uncivil Month.”
We’ve had a University of Maryland sorority lovely ream out her charges with a rant that would, in the words of Henry Higgins, “make a sailor blush.” Kmart launched a potty-minded commercial based entirely on the hilarious similarity between the phrase “ship my pants” and “shit my pants,” including two happy seniors boasting how they “shipped our pants.” In Bismarck, North Dakota, a local station’s brand new anchor man’s very first words to the audience were “…fucking shit!” because he didn’t know his mic was live. And, of course, given the honor of representing his team during the Boston Red Sox’s pre-game ceremony honoring the heroes of the past week in their terror-besieged city, slugger David Ortiz told 35,000+ spectators, including many children, and a large TV audience, also including young children, watching the event, “This is our fucking city!” He was then unanimously praised for his passion.
Not to be left out of this full-throated endorsement of public incivility and locker room banter as the new normal, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski sent out a tweet for those wondering how Ortiz’s outburst would be received by the FCC, which has previously threatened fines of networks that didn’t take sufficient precautions against live obscenities. He wrote,
“David Ortiz spoke from the heart at today’s Red Sox game. I stand with Big Papi and the people of Boston – Julius.” Continue reading →
A newspaper columnist and an ESPN commentator both reaped the wild wind last month after statements in a column and on a televised panel that many, including me, took as irresponsible, unprofessional and worse. I wrote here about the column, a diatribe in Iowa’s Des Moines register by veteran Donald Kaul against guns, gun owners, the NRA and any politician who supported them. The panelist was ESPN’s Rob Parker, whom I didn’t write about simply because his racist rant against Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin was so obviously wrong that there was nothing much to say about it. If you missed it, African American Parker questioned Griffin’s bona fides as a black man because, among other offenses, he appeared to be a Republican and has a white girlfriend. I would have had a lot to write about ethical double standards if ESPN hadn’t finally fired Parker after suspending him, but he was let go yesterday.
Both Kaul and Parker now claim they were misunderstood, and thus treated unfairly. Kaul, who has been backed by his paper in an editorial, claimed in a recent column that his universally derided piece was obviously satire, and implying that anyone who didn’t catch the twinkle in his eye is illiterate:
“Gun owners seemed particularly upset at the suggestion that Boehner and McConnell be dragged [ by “a Chevy pickup truck… around a parking lot until they saw the light on gun control” ].The tactic, which dates back to the days of lynch mobs, became a more modern nightmare in the wake of the 1998 dragging murder of James Byrd by white supremacists in Texas. Many of the people I heard from said I should be arrested for threatening federal officials, and one said he had personally reported me to the FBI. Let me say this about that: That wasn’t a suggestion to be taken literally. I don’t believe Boehner and McConnell should be dragged. I was using it as a metaphor for making politicians pay a price for their inability to confront the gun lobby. It’s a literary device.
“Think of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” written 200 years ago, in which he suggested that the Irish famine could be relieved if babies of poor families were confiscated at 12 months and sold to rich people, who could eat them. Swift, an Irishman, didn’t mean that literally. It was a satiric device to underline the misery that had been visited on the Irish by their English landlords. So too with my dragging of the Republican leaders.”
Yes, this hateful hack just compared himself to Jonathan Swift.
Parker, meanwhile, takes a different route: he tries that old stand-by, “it was taken out of context.” He told an interviewer he was shocked at the uproar his comments caused, saying,
“I mean, looking back at some of the comments, I can see how some people can take it out of context and run with it, but the response, and what happened over the past 30 days and everything was just shocking.”
Really. Well, here is the video of Parker’s attack on RG III. Tell me in what context such remarks would be considered appropriate, and not racist and mind-blowingly stupid:
Your Ethics Quiz Question:
Which of the two defenses, Kaul’s “It was satire!” or Parker’s “It was taken out of context!” is more unethical, unethical in this case meaning, “a pathetic lie and an insult to the intelligence of everyone who hears or reads it”? Continue reading →
The 2012 Ethics Alarms Awards for the Worst in Ethics continues (you can catch up with Part I here, and the Best is here), and yes, it gets worse…
Worst Friend and Relative
Lori Stilley, who faked cancer to get sympathy, favors, parties and money from those who cared about her.
Most Unethical Advice
Emily Yoffe,Slate’s “Dear Prudence,” wins for a year of bad advice in kinky situations, the bottom of the barrel being when she advised a daughter who observed her mother illegally filling out her invalid grandparents’ 2012 absentee ballots to reflect the mother’s electoral preferences to do nothing about this combination of elder abuse and voter fraud.
During the Ethics Alarms debates on various threads here about the response to the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, the ever-reasonable commenter Ampersand wrote,
“I think that if you want a responsible discourse, you should seek out intelligent opposition and highlight it, rather than exclusively highlighting what you see as stupid and unethical opposition.”
I agree that this is usually a good course. The current public policy debate, however, isn’t being led or dominated by intelligent opposition to gun possession, but by emotion-driven, often hateful and hysterical diatribes from activists, demagogues and journalists who have decided that this, of all issues, is one that excuses them of their ethical obligation to be objective and to give views they don’t agree with due respect and fair analysis. Thus it is important to highlight the worst examples of these, not only because they are the most blatantly unethical (“Ethics Alarms,” you know) but also because it is dangerous to allow them to slant the discussion without calling attention to what’s wrong with them.
This brings us to the recent rant of Des Moines Register columnist Donald Kaul. Kaul is an extreme progressive, which is hunky dory, and he is respected as a serious commentator from that side of the ideological spectrum. He also writes for a newspaper with a tradition of serious and professional reporting. He is not Dave Barry, Chris Rock, Ann Coulter or even Lawrence O’Donnell: he is not a jester, a performance artist, or a shameless firebrand. Many reasonable people take what he says t0 heart.
Thus it is worthy of note that such a professional opinion journalist believes that it is appropriate to write a column that says things like this: Continue reading →
From the Erie Times News:
Ethics Alarms 