meanness

Lesson of the Asian-Bashing UCLA Video: Shunning and Intolerance Work. Good.

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Alexandra Wallace...cultural critic, YouTube star, pariah, GONE

Alexandra Wallace, the UCLA student who created an obnoxious and offensive video stereotyping her Asian colleagues as gibberish-spouting boors,  announced that she was leaving the school as a result of “being ostracized” by “an entire community.”  Yes, I’d say that was the idea, and it is how cultures enforce its values. And it works.

Wallace picked the day of the Japanese tsunami to post her anti-Asian rant on YouTube, where it promptly went viral. It also made her an instant pariah on her campus, where over a third of all students are of Asian heritage, and the rest of them, unlike Alexandra, have at least a vague concept of mutual respect and decorum.

You can read a complete transcript of the three-minute diatribe here, but this shortened version gives a sense of what infuriated Asians, UCLA, and just about everyone else: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Crane Interiors in Woodbury, Tenn.

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

"Hi! I can't answer the phone now, but please leave a message!"

Teresa Danford’s son, Lance Cpl. Mark Rhyne, is deployed in Afghanistan, where he is only able to call home once or twice a month. He has been overseas for seven months. On Valentine’s Day, Teresa, an employee of Crane Interiors in Woodbury, Tennessee, received one of her son’s precious phone calls at her job, on her personal cell phone. She was promptly suspended for three days without pay, for Crane has a no cell phone call policy for employees. Her manager informed her that she would be fired if it ever happened again. Continue reading →

Ugly Consequentialism: The Daily Beast Backs Perez Hilton

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I am developing a real dislike for the Daily Beast. Tina Brown’s slick news aggregating website has gone out of its way to slander innocent dog breeds, features self-promoting hypocrites like John Avlon, and generally displays the ethical instincts of Piers Morgan, which is to say, none. Today it gave us an update on Serene Branson, who was mocked by blogger Perez Hilton and others for having an obvious, and frightening, on-air neurological event that caused her to be unable to speak coherently. Entitled “Line-Flubbing Grammys Reporter Fine”—trivializing as “line-flubbing” what was clearly nothing of the sort; people don’t get checked out by physicians for flubbing lines—the Daily Beast’s commentary noted that paramedic could find nothing wrong, so “Laugh away.”

This is the ugly face of consequentialism, judging the ethical nature of conduct based on what happens afterwards. Perez Hilton’s cruel amusement at a reporter finding that she cannot form intelligible speech is now retroactively fine and dandy, because Branson hasn’t—so far—keeled over or gone blind. So laugh, jerks, laugh…until she does keel over, tomorrow, or next week, or next month, in which case the ridicule becomes unacceptible to The Daily Beast.

Another human being who is panic-stricken as her body turns on her is not funny, and it is a sign of callousness and a deficit of compassion to laugh at the sight of it, whether or not the apparent catastrophe turns out to be minor after all. But the Daily Beast is proving that it is a playpen, occupied by reporters, columnists and editors with the ethical sophistication of gradeschoolers.

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UPDATE 2/15/11 (From AOL News):

“Despite Branson’s insistence that she’s fine, doctors who have examined the now heavily circulated footage of the incident continue to express concerns.

“This is what we call a class neurological event,” Dr. Keith Black, director of the Neurosurgical Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, told NBC’s ‘Today’ show. “She was obviously aware that she was having difficulty.”

According to Black, Branson’s episode was likely the result of a transient ischemic attack, essentially a “blockage in blood flow going to the brain,” or a “mini-seizure located in the language area.”

The New York Post also spoke to doctors who viewed the tape, and they said that Branson’s garbled speech could have resulted from “aphasia, which affects the ability to articulate, and that it could have been brought on by a mini-stroke, a tumor or a circulatory issue.”

Ethics Dunce: Blogger Perez Hilton

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

There is snarky, and there is vicious and cruel. Perez Hilton, the over-the-top celebrity blogger who always amasses enough points to be in the running for Media Creep of the Year, hit rock bottom over the weekend, showing a level of humanity, empathy and caring we identify with the people who ridicule  ALS sufferers and terminal cancer patients, and who find watching heart attacks and strokes amusing.

“MUST WATCH!!!” “Grammy Reporter Fail!” wrote Hilton, about a frightening video showing CBS reporter Serene Branson suddenly finding herself unable to speak coherently on the air as she reported on the Grammys, and obviously experiencing some kind of neurological episode that was a lot more serious than being “tongue-tied.”

“Someone call an exorcist!” joked the blogger, who called Branson’s cisis “HIGHlarious.”

[This post originally included the video footage, but CBS has pulled it.] Branson gets a few words out, then you can see the fear and panic that starts to come into the young woman’s expression as she realizes that her thoughts are no longer being formed into words. She utters a stream of jibberish  very reminiscent of the sounds made by the swimmer at the beginning of “Jaws” who is being attacked by a Great White shark, and then the station cuts her off. If watching another human being in peril and terror is “HIGHlarious” to you, “Ethics Dunce” is an understatement.

Hilton quickly pulled his first post on the incident when it began drawing fire, and so far, doctors haven’t been able to determine what caused the incident…so Hilton obviously thinks he’s in the clear.

He’s not. Even if we never know what happened to Branson, she was frightened and something bad was obviously happening to her. I’m sure she’s still terrified, and should be: my law school room mate, last year, had a mysterious episode that seemed like a stroke, but the doctors found nothing, and sent him home. Two days later, he dropped dead.

Yuk it up, Perez.

Jerk.

The Status of Dismissed Gay Troops: An Ethics Test For The GOP

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Stars and Stripes reports that a group of House Democrats has proposed that troops  dismissed under the now repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell” law should be able to apply for honorable discharge status if it had been initially denied to them, thus permitting them to receive veterans benefits. Continue reading →

Ethics Train Wreck Report: Lessons, Ethical and Otherwise, of the Missoula “Mikado” Mess

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Much of my weekend was occupied by reading, writing, thinking, and talking about the bizarre controversy over a community theater production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado,” which, by a series of misunderstandings, misdeeds, hypocrisies and journalistic malpractice, has created much anger and unhappiness for no legitimate reason at all. If you are late to the story and want to catch up, you can do so here, here, here, and here.

For the first and perhaps only time I can honestly say that Ethics Alarms is the most reliable source on a story. There may be plenty of ethicists who are more knowledgeable, scholarly, prudent and experienced than I am regarding ethics theory, but none of them knows this topic—Gilbert and Sullivan and “The Mikado”, like I do. I have 50 years experience performing, directing, studying, parodying and laughing at the works of these Victorian geniuses. The second I read the astoundingly wrong-headed interpretation being attached to the Missoula Community Theatre’s inclusion of Sarah Palin in Ko-Ko’s famous song “I’ve Got a Little List,” I surmised exactly what was going on, and my assessment has been confirmed by everything that has come to light since.

I will summarize what we now know in brief (well, briefer than reading all the posts) form:

Continue reading →

Keith Olbermann: An Ethics Cautionary Tale

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

At the risk of being accused of proving the old proverb that when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, let me offer the observation that the apparently acrimonious departure of Keith Olbermann from MSNBC, despite being the cable channel’s biggest star, is a cautionary tale about ethics.

The lesson: the absence of respect for the opinions of others, accompanied by a lack of humility and a surplus of contempt for fairness and civility, will doom even intelligent, talented and hard-working individuals to inevitable failure, because they cannot be trusted, not by employers, not by colleagues, not by friends.

This is why ethical values are valued: they are essential to individual success, because they contribute to societal and social success. This is, I believe, the fourth time an Olbermann show has ended like this, and like Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day,” he is doomed to repeat the pattern until he learns how to be a more caring, more trustworthy human being.

I hope he makes it. Keith Olbermann has the ability to help make this a better country, instead of a nastier, meaner, more divided one. I hope he gets another chance, and that this   time, he figures out how to use his abundant talents to do it.

Mailbag: Why Different Ethical Standards for Food and Theater Critics?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“Dear Mr. Marshall: Don’t you find it odd that in one post you condemn theater critics for coming to review a play uninvited, yet slam a restaurant owner who exposes the identity of a restaurant critic trying to review his establishment surreptitiously? Why are consumers served by secret food reviews, but not by secret show reviews? This is why people hate people like you.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Red Medicine Owner Noah Ellis

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Red Medicine is a Beverley Hills restaurant; Noah Ellis is the owner. S. Irene Virbila is the Los Angeles Times restaurant critic, who, like most U.S. food critics, works at staying anonymous, which she had successfully done for sixteen years. Not being recognized served the needs of diners, who want to know what the food and service is likely to be at an eating establishment when the customer isn’t preparing to write a critique that can make the difference between a restaurant’s long-term success or failure.

Last week, Noah Ellis intentionally destroyed Virbila’s ability to perform this service, or at least made it more difficult. Continue reading →

Why We Have Unethical Elected Officials, A Continuing Inquiry: Part 1– Spitzer’s Standards

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Eliot Spitzer, CNN commentator and New York political veteran, endorsed fellow Democrat Andrew Cuomo in his quest to be New York’s governor.  Then he said:

“The problem that Andrew has is that everybody knows that behind the scenes, he is the dirtiest, nastiest political player out there, and that is his reputation from years in Washington. He had brass knuckles, and he played hardball. He has a lot of enemies out there. Nobody’s been willing to stand up to him.”

Eliot Spitzer thus officially confirms his belief that being nasty and dirty, and everything that implies (such as lack of integrity and fairness, ruthlessness, dishonesty, deceit, vindictiveness, and meanness, as well as a Machiavellian approach to governing)  justifies the trust of the people of New York. Continue reading →