shunning

Unethical App of the Year: BuyPartisan

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments
The un-American app at work. Just what we need...more help at being divided.

The un-American app at work. Just what we need…more help at being divided.

One thing we can be sure of in our capitalistic, entrepreneurial culture: if there’s toxic conduct that somebody can make a buck out of facilitating, someone will.

BuyPartisan is a new smartphone app and the inspiration of app developer Spend Consciously. It allows users to receive an instant ideological score on every product, designating the manufacturer or service provider as virtuous or evil, or, as this sick, hyper-partisan, hyper-polarized, disintegrating culture would have it, Republican or Democratic, conservative or liberal.  After the self-righteous, hating-the-other-side-of-the-political-spectrum user scans the bar code on products with his or her phone camera, BuyPartisan (Get it???) accesses campaign finance data and analyzes contributions from the company’s board of directors, CEO, employees and PACs. This allows the happy, political aparthied-loving app user to stick it to any company that doesn’t comport with the user’s narrow, but absolutely right beyond question, view of the world.

Yecch. I want an app that tells me who uses this app, so I can avoid them whenever possible. Continue reading →

Comment of The Day (Public Service Message Division): “Wanetta Gibson Is Even Worse Than We Thought”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
Wait a second...I'm getting my rifle...

Wait a second…I’m getting my rifle…

We haven’t had one of these in a while, and I’m feeling like having a good fish-shoot in the ol’ barrel, so here we go….

Apparently there has been another development in the Wanetta Gibson saga—I know this because the last post about this horrible woman is suddenly getting traffic again—and this has moved one Terrance Skerrette—I sure hope there’s just one— to enter one of those periodic comments I receive here that serves as a public service announcement for the ethically-challenged. You know the kind—Saturday Night Live parodies of such spots used to be a staple:

“Hello. I’m Jack Marshall, and this is Terrance. Terrance was raised in an environment that left him with an inability to understand ethics. That’s right–he will go through life justifying horrendous conduct by using rationalizations, hideous logic, and warped values. Will you help Terrance? No, he can’t be helped by treatment, but perhaps, if you give generously, we can provide him with a comfortable shack in the forest and plenty of food, so he can live comfortably without infecting anyone else with his hopeless ethical ignorance and dangerous excuses for terrible conduct. Please send your generous contributions to “Help Terrance,” care of Ethics Alarms. Thank you. Terrance would thank you too, but he probably thinks you are evil.”

Continue reading →

Wanetta Gibson Is Even Worse Than We Thought

/ Jack Marshall / 74 Comments
How do you treat a monster like Wanetta?

How do you treat a monster like Wanetta?

Of Wanetta Gibson, the woman who sent innocent high school football star Brian Banks to prison for five years for a rape he didn’t commit, collected $750,000 by continuing her lie in a lawsuit against the high school where she and Banks were both students, and then sought forgiveness from him in prison while refusing to exonerate him to prosecutors because she didn’t want to give back the money, I wrote:

“There are not sufficient laws, nor words in the dictionary, nor public shaming, shunning and condemnation to do justice to the likes of Wanetta Gibson. She ruined a young man’s life and stole $1.5 million in the process. She can recant, apologize, say that she found God, weep, express regret and anything else, and it should not insulate her from societal rejection. No one should hire her. No bank should give her a loan or a credit card. No taxpayer should have to contribute to her health insurance or food stamps. No one should befriend her. Absolutely no one should forgive her, consort with her or trust her. The kind of organized hatred that was manufactured against George Zimmerman is appropriate in her case. The Golden Rule? If I behaved like Wanetta Gibson, I would deserve everything I have described, and more.”

And you know what? I think I was too easy on her. Continue reading →

On Tolerance, Religious Freedom, and “Ain’t No Homos Gonna Make It To Heaven”

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

It is generally true, as the indignant members of Greensburg, Indiana’s Apostolic Truth Tabernacle Church say, that what they include in their church’s services is nobody’s business, and the fact that the congregation loudly applauded the horrific spectacle of a 3-year-old boy singing the hate anthem, “Ain’t no homos gonna make it to heaven!”would have never bothered a soul if it hadn’t been videorecorded and placed on YouTube. At this point, however, that no longer matters. The cat is out of the bag, the horse has left the barn and the beans are spilled, and now millions of Americans know that this church teaches hate, indoctrinates young and vulnerable children with its poison, and sows the seeds of prejudice and the active deprivation of American citizens of their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Since millions of people know this now, a critical number of them will go out of their way to make life in this country a living hell for members of that church and the church itself by demonstrating at every turn that we don’t want churches like that in America, or people like that in America. They aren’t good for society, they cause positive harm without any compensating benefits, and they need to change their ways or suffer the consequences. And to that I say: Good. Go to it. Continue reading →

Condemning Wanetta Gibson

/ Jack Marshall / 179 Comments

There’s no treatment harsh enough for Wanetta Gibson

Hardly a week goes by when I don’t receive a nasty and haughty message attacking me for harshly judging the unethical conduct of another. “Who are you to judge?,” the critic will write. “Are you so perfect? Have you never made a mistake? How can you know what was going on in that person’s life, or how bad she (or he) feels? What right do you have to find fault with someone else?” My answer, if I bother to send one, seldom varies. I tell these correspondents that all of us have a duty to judge others so that we are qualified to judge ourselves, to make certain that societal standards are carefully considered and vetted, and to identify conduct that we believe is destructive to society. Refusing to judge others makes it easy for the predators around us to take advantage of our ethical laziness, and people get hurt as a result.

And in those dark moments late at night, after a difficult day when my confidence is at low ebb, as I begin to doubt the purpose of my life and question my own values, I think about people like the horrible Wanetta Gibson.

From the New York Daily News: Continue reading →

Hate Thy Neighbor: the Cranston Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Cranston, Rhode Island resident Edward Jimmis, it is fair to say, is an idiot.

That’s okay. There are a lot of idiots, and they do very well. Many of them, perhaps a majority, are even in Congress. Now, when the constituents of a Congressional districts represented by an idiot get tired of the idiocy, they have a very effective remedy. They can vote the idiot out of office, and this is fair, ethical, and effective, though not exercised nearly as often as it should be. What is the ethical response, however, when you discover that your neighbor is not only an idiot, but an especially hateful and uncivil idiot? This is the challenge facing the neighbors of Edward Jimmis. They may not have the right answer. Continue reading →

Misogyny Ethics: Bill Maher Calls Sarah Palin a “Dumb Twat” as Progressives Cheer and Feminists Fall Silent

/ Jack Marshall / 56 Comments

As long as we are on the topic of shunning and consequences (see previous post):

Is HBO comic/political commentator/arrogant jerk Bill Maher stooping to outright misogyny in his gratuitous ridicule of Sarah Palin going to have any consequences at all?

On his cable show “Real Time” this week, Maher’s usual name-calling took a sharp turn into the despicable with this:

MAHER: Oh, and did you hear this? [Laughs] Sarah Palin finally heard what happened in Japan……and she’s demanding that we invade “Tsunami.” I mean, she says, “These Tsunamians will not get away with this.”  Oh speaking of dumb twats, did you…

[Audience hilarity and applause]

MAHER: Oh, you’re right, yeah I let the cat out the bag on that one, huh folks?”

…………………………………………………………

That last line was a “pussy joke,” for those of you too genteel to appreciate Bill Maher’s “wit.” Continue reading →

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 →

Liar of the Week: Mike Huckabee, as He Fails The Integrity Test

/ Jack Marshall / 47 Comments

A Mike Huckabee advisor?

…and also the courage test.

Speaking unpopular truths and backing down once they prove unpopular is worse than what most politicians do, which is to avoid speaking the truth at all. In Huckabee’s case, he compounded the villainy by not only backing down, but by absurdly lying about what he had said, despite the fact that his words were recorded and his meaning was clear as a bell.

Huckabee, in case you don’t follow the remarks of former state governors under the delusion that he can they can be  elected President, had criticized Oscar winner Natalie Portman’s proud single mother-to-be act, saying, Continue reading →

Where We Miss Morality: The Unmarried Mothers Disaster

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

USA Today included an editorial yesterday about the explosion of births to unmarried mothers in America that has exacerbated many societal problems. It’s a stunning story : in 1960,  the figure was 5.3%; by 1970, in the teeth of the cultural upheaval launched in the late 60’s, it had  more than doubled to 10.7%.   In 2009, 41% of children born in the USA were born to unmarried mothers,  including a frightening 73% of non-Hispanic black children.  The editorial suggested that reversing the trend is a priority, but was short on ideas for how to address it. Notably absent was the method of social control that had served the United States well since 1776, and had been effective world-wide since the institution of marriage: calling it wrong. Continue reading →