jerks

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 →

Graduation Ethics: the Cheering Mom and the Jerk’s Advantage

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Stipulated: for police to arrest proud South Carolina mother Shannon Cooper for loudly cheering during her daughter’s high school graduation over the weekend  was excessive, unreasonable, and stupid.  The graduation crowd  had been asked to hold their cheering until all students’ names had been called, and warned relatives of the graduates that they would be removed from the facility if they disobeyed the rule. As some parents inevitably do at every graduation, Cooper ignored the reasonable request, but this time, the defiant parent paid a steep price. Police charged her with disorderly conduct and placed her in a detention center.

Let me also make this clear, however: Cooper behaved like a selfish jerk. She is being showered with sympathy now, cast as Innocent Parent Abused For Being Proud of Her Baby, but that’s not who she is. She is the theater audience member who ignores the request to turn off her cell phone, and disrupts the actors and the audience when it rings, and the movie audience member who chats loudly during the show. She is the pet owner who doesn’t clean up after her Great Dane at the dog park. She is the able-bodied shopper who parks in  a handicapped parking space to run into the store “for just a minute.” She is the person who breaks into line, who brings 30 items to the “15 items only” checkout station, who takes more than her share of free food at events. She is, in short, the kind of person who doesn’t believe reasonable rules apply to her, and who constantly challenges the rest of us to “make a big deal” out of relatively minor demonstrations of contempt for everyone she comes into contact with. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Laurie Penny

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Laurie Penny, in an alternate universe America where we don't bother about trivial things, like saving pompous, ungrateful British journalists.

Laurie Penny was the woman saved from being flattened by a New York cab this week by none other than Ryan Gosling, the dashing actor and and celebrity heart-throb who has already been honored here for his willingness to come to the rescue of others in peril. He pulled her back as the British journalist was about to step off the curb in Manhattan without looking, right in the path of a speeding vehicle.

The celebrity and gossip media went bonkers over this, as you might imagine. After all, a typical headline for this crude segment of the media is that Tia Tequila got a new tattoo or that a Kardashian broke a nail. Let’s see…what’s today’s buzz? Ex-child star Amanda Bynes was bailed out if jail following her DUI arrest, and Heidi Klum filed for divorce. But the attention being paid to Gosling’s good deed just annoys Penny, and, she says, is proof that America is trivial and misguided. In a piece authored for the gossip site Gawker, entitled, “Ryan Gosling Saved Me From a Speeding Car But There’s War In the Middle East So Everyone Calm Down,” Penny exposes herself as the kind of person Gosling might live to regret rescuing. Continue reading →

How Extreme Ideology Makes You An Insufferable, Mean-Spirited Jerk: Case Study…William Ayers

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Thank you for your service, and of course you can board the airplane before I do. By the way, Bill Ayers says you don't work.

Barack Obama’s friend Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, the now retired terrorists, found their way to Occupy Wall Street yesterday, which figures, and these murderous Sixties socialists were welcomed as heroes by the OWS crowd, which figures even more.

In the course of their joint rant about how doomed and terrible the United States is, Ayers, who apparently resented not being in the first group to board a recent commercial flight by virtue of his first class ticket, posed this question:

“We’ve got a militarized society and its become so common sense that, getting on the airplane coming out here, the first thing they said was let all the, uhh, let all the ya know, uniformed military get on first and thank you for your service.  And I said as I always do: let’s let the teachers and nurses get on first and thank them for their service.  I mean, why is it that everything military has got to be good and everything that has to do with actual work, real work, not jobs, real work for people, that stuff gets discouraged and marginalized?” 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 →

What A Race! It’s A Thrill A Minute With Roseanne Barr Lapping Spike Lee As The Biggest Celebrity Dunce in The Trayvon Martin Ethics Train Wreck!

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

An earlier classy career high for Roseanne...mocking the National Anthem.

And you thought Spike Lee had established an unapproachable low point in celebrity, self-indulgent, arrogant irresponsibility by trying to tweet George Zimmerman’s address (all the better to get him killed), and inadvertently siccing the sickos on an elderly Florida couple who were minding their own business? How charmingly naive of you! For remember, no matter how ignorant and unethical a celebrity may be, there are always, always, bigger, more ethically clueless jerks and fools with an entry in Wikipedia and an itch to get back in the limelight.

A celebrity like…Roseanne Barr! She lapped Spike’s mean-spirited Twitter idiocy in his own chosen medium by… Continue reading →

American Idol Ethics, Group Day, 2012

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Johnny Keyser

American Idol’s Group Day is the one stretch of the show that is more reality show than competition, and it usually delivers the best ethics dramas of the season. Last year, for example, the Group Day chaos—all the Idol wannabes have to form combos and rehearse an a capella number in harmony, often fighting, crying or collapsing in the process—produced a moment of courage and character when Scotty McCreery, the eventual winning Idol, stepped up and took full responsibility for the rotten conduct of his group, which had tossed out another young man at the last minute to take McCreery in.

This year there were ethics heroes and dunces, but mostly dunces. A real gem was the awful stage mother of competitor Brielle Von Hugel, who was filmed in rehearsals complaining how weak a singer her daughter’s fellow group member Kyle Crews was. After Crews crashed and burned in the performance, and was the only member of the group cut, Mrs. Von Hugel was shown insincerely telling him what a “good voice” he had. Kudos to Idol’s director for immediately re-running her backstage slamming of the kid’s voice in the previous episode. Continue reading →

And May The Best Man Win

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

As of 1:20 AM, Newt Gingrich had not congratulated Mitt Romney on his Florida Primary win (clobbering Newt), nor did he offer the traditional congratulations to the winner in his concession speech.

I’ll grant Newt this: it isn’t as if he’s pretending to be what he’s not…gracious, fair, respectful, polite, humble, classy. I guess that represents a certain kind of integrity…the integrity to be a jerk, and to be open and unapologetic about it.

The Third Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2011 (Part 2)

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The 2011 Ethics Alarms Awards for the worst in ethics continues (you can catch up with Part I here) with the large and depressing…

 Shameless Bad Character Division

Jerk (defined as an individual who habitually places his personal benefit and ego gratification above the welfare of everyone and everything else) of the Year: Donald Trump

The Dennis Rodman Award, (Awarded to a professional athlete for a career and lifetime of  behaving like a jerk): Jose Canseco. Jose’s done it all, from being baseball’s Typhoid Mary of steroids, to getting arrested for various assaults, to writing a series of tell-all books designed to rat out the very players he corrupted, not as a service to his sport, but as revenge for it rejecting him. In 2011, he hit a new low, accepting money to appear in a celebrity boxing match (the 21st Century version of becoming a circus geek to pay the bills) and sending his less-talented, equally dim-witted, identical twin brother Ozzie to perform instead, hoping to fool the fools who hired him. This, of course, was fraud. It takes quite a jerk to take this award from Manny Ramirez, who became eligible in 2011, but Jose was up to the task.

Asshole (defined as an individual who intentionally and maliciously causes pain and harm to others because he can) of the Year: Rev. Terry Jones, the publicity-seeking leader of a tiny rural church, who caused riots and deaths abroad and ramped up political tensions between America and Muslim nations by threatening to burn, and finally burning, the Koran as a demonstration of contempt for Muslims and the Islamic faith. Continue reading →

Thank you, Donald Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I can't bear to post another picture of Donald Trump, so I'm using this cute Jack Russell puppy's photo instead. I would also vote for the puppy for President before I would vote for Donald Trump.

I had been having misgivings about annointing Donald Trump the Ethics Alarms Jerk of the Year last spring, since so many strong contenders emerged as the year went on—Rev. Terry Jones, Alec Baldwin, Newt, Leroy Fick, of course, and others. Trump, however, took matters in hand, and locked up his award with a flourish by announcing yesterday that he had forsaken the Republican Party and was seriously considering a third party run  for the presidency. For reaffirming my original assessment, thank-you, Donald Trump.  For everything else, curses are more appropriate.

The man is totally without shame. Two weeks ago, he was fully prepared to be the moderator of a GOP candidates debate…a blatant and outrageous conflict of interest for anyone who had the faintest glimmer of a presidential bid still in what passes for his mind. When all but the equally shameless Newt Gingrich and the desperate Rick Santorum declined to be Trump’s props, he withdrew as moderator, and now this. Is he running for President out of spite? I suppose that would be more admirable than his earlier fake pass at a run, which was evidently designed to pump up ratings for his reality show. This public buffoon is willing to distort the democratic process and throw a monkey wrench into an extraordinarily important national election on a whim, a lark, or a hissy fit. Continue reading →