Disney clearly “can’t win for losing,” as a saying I’ve never understood goes. At Disneyland Paris, a couple invaded a stage in the park reserved for performances so the guy could propose to his love with a castle in the background. A Disney cast member then interrupted the romantic moment, snatched the engagement ring, and motioned the couple and guests to leave the forbidden area.
There is some controversy over whether the couple had received permission for the stunt (from someone not authorized to grant it)—an Ethics Alarms principle holds that all public wedding proposals are stunts, and unethical ones—but the intervening Disney employee was undoubtedly correct that the couple and the witnesses were breaking park rules.
Good. Perfect. I love it. Condign justice exemplified!
And cheers are due for the young woman for having the courage to say no. Maybe now this selfish and unfair grandstanding stunt, yet another disgusting outgrowth of the cell phone revolution ,will start to die out. Nobody should feel sorry for the jerk who was rejected, but we should all sympathize with the woman whom he embarrassed. She ducked a metaphorical bullet, though.
The so far unnamed creep popped the question in front of a crowd of fans at a Worcester (Mass.) Red Sox home game on Thursday. The scene was also broadcast to the entire park on a giant screen. The allegedly romantic gesture prompted cheers until the stunned object of the proposal put her hands over her mouth and shook her head “no.” “I have to go,” she said, and left the scene with him still on one knee. For the second time this week, “The Simpsons'” Nelson Muntz’s trademark response is called for:
Naturally, since nothing can be trusted these days, there are theories that the whole thing was staged. Family members of the couple were in the crowd, however. It appears to have been a genuine fiasco, not a fake one.
Let the episode be a lesson to any other abusive suitors who think it’s acceptable to make a private moment public to force a desired outcome.
[You will find other EA stories about unethical marriage proposals here.]
1. So we can’t trust Intel, either. Good to know. Last May, Intel released a patch for a group of security vulnerabilities researchers had found in the company’s computer processors. Intel implied that all the problems were solved. The official public message from Intel was “everything is fixed,” said Cristiano Giuffrida, a professor of computer science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and one of the researchers who first reported the vulnerabilities. “And we knew that was not accurate.”
Indeed, the software patch meant to fix the processor problem addressed only some of the issues the researchers had identified. A second patch, publicly disclosed by the company last week, finally fixed all of the vulnerabilities Intel had said were fixed in May…six months after the company said that all was well.
2. So they finally bullied the NFL into re-considering Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick, the mediocre NFL quarterback whose political grandstanding before games made him an albatross for the league and any team foolish enough to employ him, has had woke “fans,” who couldn’t care less about football but who loved his race-bating and police-bashing protests, claiming that he was “blackballed” from pro football for exercising his right of free speech.
This was never true—let a grocery store clerk try that argument when he’s fired for making political demonstrations during store hours—but never mind: Kaepernick was styled as a martyr anyway. Why the NFL capitulated to bogus complaints and gave the player a showcase for NFL scouts, I cannot fathom. He’s 36, hasn’t played for three years, and wasn’t that good in 2016. If no team signs him, the NFL will be told again that it is racist and oppressive. If a team does sign him, the message will be that enough agitation can force an organization to elevate politics above its legitimate priorities.
3. This is why our politician aren’t civil, collaborative, respectful and ethical: the public doesn’t want them to be. Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Minority Leader,praised Representative Peter King, the long time Long Island Republican House member who announced his retirement this week, by tweeting warm words on Twitter. “I will miss him in Congress & value his friendship,” the effusive message concluded.
For this once-standard professional reaction to a fellow Congress member’s retirement, Schumer was roundly attacked by Democrats and progressives on social media. To his credit, despite more than 10,000 mostly negative replies and even calls for his resignation, Schumer neither apologized for his tribute to a colleague nor took down the tweet. Continue reading →
The Ethics Alarms rule, hinted at in other posts, is that anyone who issues a marriage proposal in public, putting unethical pressure on his or her loved one to accept, should be rejected on the spot. The act is unfair, disrespectful, and signature significance for a jerk and a bully who is unlikely to be a pleasant life partner. This goes for sports stadium TV screen proposals, but Weiss’s version is especially bad: the coast-to-coast live TV proposal.
It was unethical in other respects as well. The Emmys aren’t license for any winner to hijack the show and divert it for his or her own personal objectives. Making an acceptance speech into political rant is wrong, but the recent culture of award shows has ratified the obnoxious practice: that’s why the ratings for awards shows are falling like ripe apples in October. In Weiss’s case, there was also the hypocrisy factor. He has produced and directed 18 Tonys telecasts for CBS, and is known “as an unforgiving stickler when it comes to keeping acceptance speeches to the allotted 45 seconds.” One theater exec told Page Six that “every year, Glenn gives this pompous speech to all the nominees, lecturing everyone about how the clock starts the second your name is called and that going long is unfair to your fellow nominees because it eats time for everyone whose categories come later in the evening. Leave it to him to completely flout his own rule in order to grab as much attention as humanly possible for him and his girlfriend.”
1. The number of pundits, talking heads and formally respectable citizens on social media who have implied, suggested or come outright and said that Rep. Steve Scalise deserved to be shot because of the political positions he espouses should be an ethics alarms trigger for progressives and Democrats, but so far has not been. MSNBC’s Joy Reid:
“[I]t’s a delicate thing because everybody is wishing the congressman well and hoping that he recovers, but Steve Scalise has a history that we’ve all been forced to sort of ignore on race,” Reid said. “He did come to leadership after some controversy over attending a white nationalist event, which he says he didn’t know what it was.
He also co-sponsored a bill to amend the Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman. He voted for the House healthcare bill, which as you said would gut health care for millions of people, including three million children, and he co-sponsored a bill to repeal the ban on semi-automatic weapons.
Because he is in jeopardy and everybody is pulling for him, are we required in a moral sense to put that aside at the moment?”
What? What’s a “delicate thing?” Absolutely opposing and condemning people shooting elected officials they disagree with is a delicate thing? It’s not a delicate thing at all. It is an ethically mandatory thing. Reid, and all the seriously ethics-deficient people on Facebook calling Scalise’s shooting “karma” are rationalizing assassination and violence, using weasel words. They are beneath contempt at this point in their lives, and need to be told so, repeatedly, until they get some help. They are directly validating violence as a legitimate political tactic.
2. It will be very difficult to convince me that the horrific increase in opioid addiction and related deaths is not at least partially fueled by the surrender of the culture to the pro-pot lobby. I have long predicted this would happen once the government gave its blessing to recreational drug use on any level. The logical jump from “using this drug that incapacitates you and makes you unproductive, stupid, and a burden on society is just fine,” to “using this drug that makes you even more unproductive and might kill you is a crime because it’s bad for society” is too great for a lot of people, and we already knew that. Never mind: the well-to-do pot heads will never admit they were wrong, and this is an especially vicious genie that will not be tricked back into its bottle.
In Ohio, romantic Kyle Stump, 23, painted:“Michelle Marry Me. I Love You” and a heart—Awwwww!—- in red letters on the side of a building in the city-owned shopping mall at Lake Sheffield, Ohio. His proposal covered 30 feet of wall space.
His girl friend Michelle Astorino still missed it until Stump took her to the building one night with a flashlight. She said “yes,” the fool. Then police arrested him based on a tip, and matched the handwriting on the wall to a form Stump had filled out in 2012.
Did you know they tried to catch Jack The Ripper the same way? But I digress.
Stump pleaded no contest to the misdemeanor charge of criminal mischief and was sentenced to 60 days in jail with a $500 fine. The jail term was suspended as was most of the fine, but Romeo will have to pay $332 to sandblast the wall clean, and has to perform 80 hours of community service.
“They don’t have to be so hard on me,” Stump complained to the media. If I were the judge, that comment would be enough to make me reinstate the jail time and the full fine.
He says the legal setback means he’ll have to buy an engagement ring on an installment plan. Did I already say “Awwww!”?
“We’ve basically just brushed it off and are excited about our engagement,” Michelle told “Inside Edition.” “It’s still a crime, we understand that, but, I mean, it’s not that serious.”
No, you moron, in fact defacing public property or any property is very serious, and it doesn’t matter if you’re defacing it with “Hitler Rocks!” or “Give Peace A Chance.” It’s destruction of property, wastes scarce public funds, shows disrespect to your neighbors and community, and proves your honey-bunny has the basic ethics comprehension of a terrier.
Is this really what we are going to put up with now—city police departments so desperate for love (and not to have their members picked off by snipers) that they start pandering to citizens in idiotic ways? That’s not the way to earn anyone’s respect and trust. It is, however, a good way to lose it.
Three NYPD officers from the 101st Precinct in Far Rockaway cops pulled over the car being driven by Yehuda Coriat, 22, with his 20-year-old girlfriend, Sorah Oppen as a passenger. The police accused the couple of transporting weapons and drugs in the car.
This is wrong, wrong, wrong; an especially horrible example of the “Awww!” Factor, in which conduct that makes sentimental souls get all gooey inside is mistaken for ethical conduct. Continue reading →
People who stage elaborate public ambush proposals of marriage in sports stadiums, using airplanes and other instrumentalities are inherently unethical, as well as narcissistic jerks who warrant embarrassing rejections but never get them. This figures, since the women have been dating these tools and are usually jerks themselves. Few such stunts are quite as audacious in their jerkishness as that planned and executed by Vidal Valladares, 24, who shut down the Gulf Freeway, one of the busiest thoroughfares in Houston, to propose to Michelle Wycoff, 23, in the middle of the highway. The Houston Chronicle, local TV station KTRK and other media outlets treated the stunt with a sympathetic “Awww!”—Ain’t love grand? Who could criticize these love birds, who, but for the vagueries of moral luck, could have caused one or more accidents and death and destruction, hopefully just to them and not innocent commuters, but you never know.
Reportedly traffic was stopped for less than a minute as Valladares got down on bended knee to propose (to his ex-wife whom he divorced in June) while the automobiles waited. “I never really thought about causing an accident,” Valladares told a local paper. “I thought about my girlfriend.”
Awww!
How romantic!
You’re an idiot.
The Harris County District Attorney’s Office is charging the couple with “obstruction of highway, a Class B misdemeanor.
You may have heard about this guy: he took his girlfriend up in his private plane, and pretended that the plane was about to crash as part of his set-up to propose to her. As he supposedly tried to get the plane under control to save their lives, Thompson told Carlie Kennedy to read from an emergency protocol explaining how to pull the plane out of a dive. “I genuinely did believe that we were going to die,” Kennedy told ABC News. “I felt like our lives depended on me making it through that checklist.” Then, as she read through the list, it slowly dawned that it was actually an marriage proposal leading up to the final bullet point: “Will you marry me?” She turned to the smiling pilot, who was holding a ring. She said yes.
And then they crashed.
No, not really. And I suppose this sadistic narcissist has found a perfect mate, a naive victim who will doubtless enjoy all the hell he puts her through for his own amusement. It was a pretty good test, when you think about it. What better way to let your intended know exactly what she’s getting into, and to find out whether she’ll tolerate despicable treatment and outrageous conduct with a smile and a kiss?
Good luck, Carlie, and I mean that sincerely. Your husband to be is an Ethics Dunce, an especially cruel one, and you’re an idiot.
Ethics Alarms 