stupidity

Ethics Quiz: “How To Gratuitously Offend Millions of People and Prove Yourself To Be An Ignorant Jackass in 140 Characters or Less” By Travis Okulski

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Gawker editor tweet

Presumably I don’t have to explain why the tweet above, sent out by Gawker writer and editor Travis Okulski, and eventually deleted by him after someone drilled into his skull and planted some sense there, is cruel, disrespectful, callous, ignorant, offensive and wrong.

Here’s your Ethics Quiz, and it requires you to use the previous post, which you can find either beneath this one, or here:

Would you fire Okulski if he worked for you?

The question would be easy if I asked if Gawker should fire him, since that website is shameless and largely behaves as if ethics were a unicorn or the Kraken, a mythical creature only suckers and fools believe in.

Would you give him another chance, or would you conclude that any ass who would even think this can’t be trusted to brush his teeth in the morning?

I’m very curious.

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Pointer: Fox News

Ethics Quiz: Developing A School Anti-Violence No-Tolerance Insanity Scale

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments
More deadly than a spit-ball? Less threatening than a pizza?

More deadly than a spit-ball? Less threatening than a pizza?

The latest example of mind-numbing school no-tolerance hysteria comes from rural Pennsylvania, where a kindergarten student has been suspended for threatening to shoot another student with a pink Hello Kitty bubble gun. I confess that I have nothing new to say about this idiotic and cruel incident that I haven’t said before about, say, the school principal who attempted to punish a 4th grader in 2010 for playing with a LEGO figure who was carrying a two-inch LEGO “gun”:

“The ethical duty being violated here, along with the ethical values of fairness, prudence, proportion and respect, is competence. A school administrator who does something like this is not competent, and any school system that gives such a person responsibility for the education of young children is also incompetent.”

…Or about the school administrators that punished a 10-year-old who had bitten a slice of pizza into the shape of a gun, an incident that admittedly sent me over the edge when I wrote:

“This is the Apocalypse, the bottom of the barrel. This disgraces teachers, schools, administrators, the U.S. educational system, America and the human race. Incompetence, unfairness, abuse of power, irresponsible behavior and stupidity, all flowing from a system that has lost its way and is in despair. We are officially in the Twilight Zone, Bizarro World, Cloud Cuckoo Land, and Oz, all to the detriment of our poor students, needing an education, and encountering only rigidity, cowardice and foolishness.”

In the wake of Newtown, however, with supposedly responsible elected officials running around making absurd statements about how we have to choose between the Second Amendment and “saving our children,” the entrenched no-tolerance fanaticism in the schools has become more virulent and widespread, though it could not have become more damaging, irresponsible or stupid than the pizza episode. Continue reading →

Is Ronald Miller An Ethics Dunce? How Unethical Is Really, Really Stupid?

/ Jack Marshall / 51 Comments
Is stupidity a defense for unethical conduct?

Is stupidity a defense for unethical conduct?

The news report from Texas about a father posing as an armed intruder to test the security of his son’s school once again raises the thorny problem of how to distinguish ethically obtuse and dumb as a brick. From U.S. News and NBC:

Officials say Ronald Miller was unarmed Wednesday when he told a school greeter outside Celina (Texas) Elementary School that he had a gun… The greeter froze in panic when Miller said he was a gunman and his target was inside, Celina Independent School District Superintendent Donny O’Dell told NBCDFW.com. Miller was then able to walk into the school and entered the office. “He told them that he is a shooter and ‘you’re dead, and you’re dead,'” O’Dell [said.] Never showing a weapon, Miller then reportedly revealed his stunt was a test of school safety and he wanted to talk to the principal. School staffers knew Miller, who was a father of a student, and police were not called until he left the school, The Dallas Morning News reported. He was arrested Wednesday evening and is being held in lieu of $75,000 bail…”

Is Miller so stupid he doesn’t know why this is wrong? It is “the ends justifies the means” thinking personified: he was willing to risk a panic, scare school workers sick, possibly set off a violent incident (what if, as the NRA fervently wishes were the case in all schools, someone in the principal’s office was carrying a gun and decided the safest thing was to shoot Miller before he started his rampage?), and undermine what little rational trust there is left in schools these days, all to prove absolutely nothing, other than the fact that parents aren’t high on the list of suspected school shooters, since no parent has ever been one. Continue reading →

The East Harlem Lockdown Drill: Is Stupid Unethical?

/ Jack Marshall / 64 Comments

paris-puppet-show-children

I was tempted to make this jaw-dropping incident an Ethics Quiz, but my mind is unalterably made up. While mistakes are not unethical, staggering stupidity on the part of professionals is, even if one of the consequences of that stupidity is the good faith belief that a cruel and irresponsible act is the right thing to do.

Less than a week after the Sandy Hook shootings, Greer Phillips, the principal in East Harlem’s P.S. 79 decided that this was the perfect time to conduct an unscheduled, unannounced lockdown drill. Not a fire drill. A “a stranger with a gun who might kill everybody is in the school!” drill.

Brilliant!

Thus at 10 am on December 18, a woman’s voice came over the Horan School’s loudspeaker and announced in shaky tones that there was a “shooter” or “intruder” in the building, and that teachers needed to “get out, get out, lockdown!”

Did I mention that the school serves students with special needs like autism, severe emotional disabilities, cerebral palsy and other disorders? Boy, I bet they were fooled! What a great drill! I mean, it scared the piss out of the teachers; imagine how those students must have felt! Continue reading →

“Should CNN Fire Piers Morgan?” It Should, But It Can’t.

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
If only.

If only.

In the wake of the tsunami of criticism directed at CNN talk show host Piers Morgan for his anti-gun rantings, particularly during his interview with Gun Owners of America president Larry Pratt, Slate posted a Quora response to the question, “Should CNN Fire Piers Morgan?” from internet entrepreneur Mark Rogowski, who begins his answer (summary: “no”) with the rejoinder, “For what? For having an opinion?”

No, Morgan should be fired for allowing his opinion to lure him into thoroughly rude, unprofessional, abusive and inappropriate interview practices, which a major news network like CNN shouldn’t permit, endorse, tolerate or risk recurring. That’s why. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Month: 34,812 Americans*

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“British Citizen and CNN television host Piers Morgan is engaged in a hostile attack against the U.S. Constitution by targeting the Second Amendment. We demand that Mr. Morgan be deported immediately for his effort to undermine the Bill of Rights and for exploiting his position as a national network television host to stage attacks against the rights of American citizens.”

—- The language on a petition posted at whitehouse.gov and signed by 34,812 American citizens,* asking the Obama Administration to deport Piers Morgan.

brainless-empty-open-head-screamingYou can’t get much more ignorant, hypocritical and dumb than this, can you? A talk show host criticizes the Second Amendment, and these fools think the appropriate remedy for “his effort to undermine the Bill of Rights” is for the government to punish him with deportation, thus violating the First Amendment, from the Bill of Rights.

Passionate, engaged, and completely incapable of rational thought: what a frightening combination.

* UPDATE, 12/26/2012  The number is now over 75,000, and still rising. If every American who can’t see that this petition represents an absurd contradiction signs it, we’re looking at about 200,000,000 people, maybe more. This would probably spell doom for Morgan’s show, as it would mean that the only people conceivably dumb enough to watch him want him deported.

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Pointer: Drudge

Introducing “The Marmion Award” and Its 2012 Honorees, Lavera Irene Hammond-Jackson and Stella Hammond-Jackson

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments
Don't be so gloomy, Sir Walter! Here, let me cheer you up by telling you about the tangled web woven by the

Don’t be so gloomy, Sir Walter! Here, let me cheer you up by telling you about the tangled web woven by the Hammond-Jacksons!

I may never award this particular prize again, but a spectacular episode of incompetent mendacity like this needs to be immortalized. The Marmion Award is named in honor of “Marmion,” the long epic poem by novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). The work is best known for its lines:

Oh! what a tangled web we weave

When first we practice to deceive!

A Palmer too! No wonder why.

I felt rebuked beneath his eye.

I don’t know what Palmer has to do with it, but the reasons for the award will be immediately apparent when one reads the hilarious and deadpan Oconee County Sheriff’s Office account of the shoplifting arrest of a mother-daughter team at a Walmart’s in Oconee County, South Carolina. While it is refreshing, in an era when so many teens are estranged from their parents and reject their values, to see a mother and daughter so close in interests and ambitions, I cannot help reflect on how the daughter in this case never had a fighting chance to join the ranks of honest, respectable, productive members of society, since her mother has obviously raised her to be a shameless thief and a liar, and by the evidence of this report, succeeded in her goal. The report also shows, unfortunately, that a proud mentor’s offspring is unlikely to become a convincing liar if her mother and teacher is this inept at it herself.

Here is the report, reprinted in the Oconee Patch. I want to thank the patch, Fark, which flagged it, the Oconee County Sheriff’s Office, which preserved it for posterity, and especially the Hammond-Jacksons for giving me, in my depressed holiday state, the best laugh I’ve had in a long, long time.  Continue reading →

The SyFy Channel, Settting A New Low In Political Correctness Censorship

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This is so incomprehensibly stupid that I hardly know how to react to it.

The SyFy Channel, as is its wont, was running a movie this morning that has nothing to do with science fiction, John Landis’s  odd horror/comedy “An American Werewolf in London,” from 1981. When the two doomed hikers visit a gloomy pub in the English countryside, one of the locals tells a joke:

“Here now, let me finish!  So halfway over the ocean the  engines run low on petrol so  they have to lighten the plane.  So they heave out all the baggage, but it’s still too heavy.  So they chuck out the seats, but it’s still too heavy!  Finally this Froggy steps up and shouts “Viva la France” and leaps out.  Then an Englishman steps up and shouts `God  save the Queen!’ and leaps out.  But the plane is still  too heavy.  So the Yank  delegate from Texas steps up,  shouts, `Remember the Alamo!’ and chucks out the Mexican!”

I’ve always liked that joke myself, but whether you like it or not, SyFy decided that your delicate ears shouldn’t be sullied by the punchline. In the edited version the channel showed, the last sentence could only be heard this way:

“So the Yank  delegate from Texas steps up,  shouts, `Remember the Alamo!’ and [ ?].” Continue reading →

The Costs of Ignorance and Stupidity: Not Unfair, But Obvious

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
Now, if I were a psychic, I would have seen this argument coming...

Now, if I were a psychic, I would have seen this argument coming…

A rather uncontroversial Ethics Alarms post from September is suddenly getting bombarded with links from Reddit, heaven knows why. This was the article where I took The Learning Channel to task for building a reality show around a psychic (a.k.a “fraud”) and advertising it as if her abilities were real (Irresponsible TLC, Promoting Ignorance and Fraud). I appreciate the traffic when Reddit focuses on a post, but the experience is usually annoying. Reddit readers never make comments here, but make snarky, often ill-informed snipes on their own site, where it’s too much trouble to set them straight.

One of the Reddit critics of the Ethics Alarms post had a complaint that surprised me. He wrote…

“For an article about yelling at someone who makes unverified claims, it sure starts off with a doozy.

‘Public ignorance and stupidity costs the nation billions of dollars, kills untold people in the hundreds of thousands, vastly increases crime and unemployment, and generally makes life far less productive, safe and enjoyable for the minority that are not ignorant and stupid, as well as for those who are.'”

It never occurred to me that anyone would find that statement “unsubstantiated,” or even debatable. To begin with, it is obviously an opinion, though there are few opinions I am more certain about than this one. It is also not remotely like the assertion of a psychic that she communicates with the dead, which isn’t just an unsubstantiated claim, but an outright lie. Continue reading →

The 8 Useful Ethics Tips From “The Tale of the Well-Meaning Kidnapper”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments
Luis Trinidad, safe but confused

Luis Trinidad, safe but confused

Ethics Tip #1: If you are this stupid and irresponsible, it’s unethical to have children

A Bristol, Connecticut man parked his car outside a store with the doors unlocked, the motor running, and his two-year-old son in the back seat.

Ethics Tip #2: When you witness child endangerment, make sure rescuing the child does not require breaking the law, unless there are no other options to save the child. Calling the police is usually another option.

Outraged by the father’s irresponsible conduct, a citizen who happened to pass by the car, 24-year-old Devon Mills, decided to take matters into his own hands.

Ethics Tip #3: When you hear yourself saying, “This guy needs to be taught a lesson,” stop and think things through: that may be true, but you may not be the appropriate deliverer of the lesson, and the statement is an invitation to overstep one’s authority.

Mills decided that it would serve the father of the child and owner of the car right if he got scared out of his wits. Continue reading →