Author: Jack Marshall

Curmie’s Conjectures: Incompetence and Arrogance of Olympian Proportions

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

by Curmie

[This is Jack: With this welcome column by the indefatigable Curmie, I think I can safely say that Ethics Alarms has finally put all of the ethics controversies arising from the 2024 Paris Olympic Games to bed, yes?

I sure hope so. Let’s see: we had the Opening Ceremony “Last Supper” thing, the “don’t photograph beautiful and sexy female athletes so they look beautiful and sexy” silliness, the announcer who was sacked for evoking a mild female stereotype that is sort-of accurate, the intersex boxer thing, the Australian breakdancer, and now Curmie examines the bitter women’s gymnastics scoring controversy over mini-points that are completely subjective anyway.

I am truly grateful, because I was going to have to post on this if he didn’t. And if I needed any more validation of my position that the Olympics are a bad, corrupt joke and not worth my time (I don’t), Curmie just supplied it.]

The three women you see pictured at the top of the page currently stand in the third (i.e., bronze medal), fourth, and fifth positions in the Olympics final in the women’s floor exercise. You see them from top to bottom in their relative positions as I write this; whether those will be the final final rankings remains to be seen.

Anyway, from the top down we see Romania’s Ana Bărbosu and Sabrina Maneca-Voinea, and the US’s Jordan Chiles.  Each of them has reason to believe that she—and she alone—should be the bronze medalist.  But a series of judges’ fuck-ups (apologies for the language, but there is no other adequate term) have resulted in a brouhaha that makes clear that whatever the NCAA or FIFA may do, the IOC isn’t going to give up its title as Most Corrupt and Incompetent Sports Organization without a fight.  But wait!  Who’s that coming up on the outside?  It’s the Tribunal Arbitral du Sport (Court of Arbitration for Sport), or TAS,  staking their claim, and they’re backing it up with hubristic posturing!  It’s coming down to the wire, and it’s anybody’s race!

I have already made clear  my distaste for sports which rely on the subjective opinions of judges rather than on some objective criterion.  Yes, referees can make mistakes, but at least we know that the team that scores the most points will win, as will the swimmer who touches the wall first or whoever throws the thing the farthest.  In these events, it’s clear: the US won a gold medal in the 100m sprint because a photograph made it clear that Noah Lyles’s torso crossed the finish line .005 seconds before Kishane Thompson’s did.  The US women’s basketball team also narrowly won gold, beating the French team by a single point because on the last play of the game the home team’s player had her toe on the three-point line instead of just outside it.

Those close finishes seem more arbitrary when there’s no objective way of distinguishing between the performances.  It’s also true that gymnastics is second only to figure skating in terms of judges giving credit to established stars just because they’re established. 

But let’s assume for the moment that the judges’ votes in the floor exercise, though subjective, were both informed and honest.  If you were to ask a dozen experts which of the three women discussed here was the “best,” I’m betting that all three would get at least two votes apiece, but ultimately that’s irrelevant to the current situation.

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Note To CNN’s Race-Baiters: There Are So, So Many Reasons Not To Respect Kamala Harris…Stop Attributing It To Her Race

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

A conclave of fools, knaves and ethics dunces on a CNN panel illustrated how Democrats and the news media are going to try to elect Kamala Harris: keep the conversation entirely on vilifying her opposition and concentrating on irrelevant trivia…like how to pronounce her name.

It serves CNN’s purposes to feature the worst and the dimmest of Republicans whenever possible: this time its choice was Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina. She’s on my list of 25 most embarrassing members of Congress. Mace either set out to troll professional race-baiter Vanderbilt University professor Michael Eric Dyson by intentionally mispronouncing Kamala Harris’s first name or got confused; first she said the name correctly (with the accent on the first syllable), then reversed herself and said it the way that apparently drives the woke crazy, with the accent on the second syllable. (I sometimes forget which is the right way myself—luckily I’m usually typing her name rather than saying it). Democratic strategist Keith Boykin corrected her, and Mace defiantly said, “I will say Kamala’s name any way that I want to.”

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Ethics Dunce Couple: Newlyweds Nova and Reemo Styles

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Yecchh.

This couple really and truly charged their wedding guests $333 per head to attend their wedding. You know, to help pay for tasteful accoutrements like that lovely wedding dress. An astounding 60 friends and relatives out of the 350 Nova and Reemo Styles invited paid the price, which I guess means that venal people have friends who don’t object to venality. Or that ethics dunces have friends who can’t recognize despicable conduct when they see it.

If some alleged friends of mine asked for $333 dollars for the honor of witnessing their wedding, I would send a lovely wedding cake with “Bite Me!” lovingly written on the top.

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Unethical Quote of the Week: A Random Democrat Washington Post Reader

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“Sick and tired of all this nonsense. She is a Democrat and will govern like a Democrat and that is good enough for me. Some polices will be a little too far left for a few and some will be a little too centrist for others, but you can guarantee that she will uphold democratic norms and try and govern to make the lives of ALL Americans better, whilst behaving with the decency becoming of the office. Everything else is just window dressing and noise.”

—A highly rated comment on the Washington Post article, “Harris’s policies have shifted and are still taking shape”.

I was torn whether to include the Post reader’s name or not. It’s public, so I could justify it, and I have focused on unethical commenters elsewhere before while using their names. This time, I decided that the individual doesn’t matter. It’s the message; it obviously is how lots of (unethical, ignorant, foolish) people think, and that’s what matters.

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It’s Time For The Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

It is sometimes a mistake to revisit what you thought was perfection. I’m a long-time admirer of the “Back to the Future” trilogy, which I view as the pinnacle of original, careful, creative, professional scripting and direction. I’ve seen all three films many times, but this week I started watching them again after at least a decade.

This time, for some reason, I noticed logical fallacies and holes in the plot (and time travel logic) that had never registered on me before. (No, I’m not talking about Marty’s cute girlfriend being inexplicably replaced by Elizabeth Shue, never to be seen again.) It didn’t diminish my enjoyment or admiration for the trilogy (I regard “Back to the Future 2” as by far the best middle installment of any film trio), but it was disappointing. Mostly, I was disappointed in myself for taking so long to pick up on the flaws.

But I digress. Let’s see what ethics controversies you can unpack today.

Ethics Dunce: “Emmy Award-Winning Reporter” Jake Hamilton

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Former teen starlet Blake Lively (yes, that’s really her original name) has done better than most negotiating the transition from Hollywood ingenue to mature actress, but as she approaches the perilous territory of 40 (she’s 36) the social media mob is trying to “cancel” her for what has been called “insensitive” responses to questions by Hollywood reporter and podcaster Jake Hamilton.

Lively is making the rounds to promote her latest project, the film It Ends With Us alongside her costar, Brandon Sklenar (who appears to be a stereotypical dim bulb actor, like Joey in “Friends.”) The movie, adapted from Colleen Hoover’s novel of the same name, is the tale of a woman who is in an abusive relationship—domestic abuse, an ugly topic that Hollywood has visited relatively rarely. (I’m squeamish about watching dramatic portrayals of it myself, and most violence on-screen doesn’t faze me.)

Hamilton asked Lively at one point,

“For people who see this movie and relate to the topics of this movie on a deeply personal level, they’re really going to want to talk to you. This movie is going to affect people and they’re going to want to tell you about their life.  So if someone understands the themes of this movie and comes across you in public and they want to really talk to you, what’s the best way for them to be able to talk to you about this? How would you recommend they go about it?”

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Curmie’s Conjectures: Breaking News

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

by Curmie

[This is Jack: It was bound to happen: Curmie and I decided to write posts on the same topic: my discourse on the Awful Aussie Breaker was posted earlier today. It’s not fair, really. Curmie is a lot more elegant a writer than I am. Enjoy his take: I did.]

When I was an undergrad, I wrote a fair number of theatre reviews for the college newspaper.  One show I reviewed was a student-written revue-style piece that had everything from original songs to vulgar humor (the central shtick was that we should solve the energy crisis by harvesting buffalo farts for the methane).  One segment I praised was a hilarious parody of a pretentious modern dance piece.  There was one problem, though.  The choreographer/dancer in question wasn’t pleased; he didn’t think it was a parody.  Oops.

That incident was called to mind this week when I learned that Rachael Gunn, a 36-year-old Australian college professor with a PhD in cultural studies, has become an internet sensation by placing last in the breaking (formerly known as break-dancing) competition at the Olympics.  Competing as B-girl Raygun (don’t blame her for that part; such noms de guerre are apparently required of competitors) she went through a series of maneuvers looking like a cross between a demented inchworm and flounder flopping on the deck of a fishing vessel.  What it certainly was not was anything that could reasonably be described as a demonstration of strength, balance, or skill of any description.

There are a lot of questions here, not the least of which being what the hell breaking is doing as an Olympic event (I refuse to call it a “sport”).  Like Jack, apparently, I have always despised the notion of “sports” in which the winners are determined by judges rather than by who got the most points or crossed the finish line first or whatever other objective criteria might be employed.  This aversion is amplified when original moves are encouraged if not required.  If a gymnast, diver, or figure skater does one more spin than anyone else has ever done or does it in a different position than it’s ever been done, that’s obviously harder and can be reasonably rewarded.  But breaking has no apparent guidelines other than what each individual judge thinks is cool (or whatever term is currently in vogue).  Gunn says all her routines were original.  We can only hope so.

All of this, of course, is an extension of a belief that any activity that requires any measure of athleticism ought to be a sport.  Hence artistic (formerly “synchronized”) swimming, skateboarding, rhythmic gymnastics, breaking, etc. appear as Summer Olympic sports.  I’m not here to suggest that these events don’t require a combination of strength, precision, stamina, timing, and agility.  Of course they do!  So does ballet.  So does roofing a house.  I’m just not interested in seeing how many style points are deducted for using more nails than necessary or having a little caulk spill out of the gun.

Anyway, revenons à nos moutons…  Gunn was, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty awful.  Could I do her routine?  Not now, no.  But I’m pretty sure I could have when I was her age, and that puts her well beneath the status of an elite athlete.  So what’s going on here?  Well, she apparently won the qualifying tournament for Oceania (I really don’t want to see who came in second), and she’s represented Australia at the world championships three years in a row, so she’s at the Olympics fair and square.  There is a qualifying time in, say, a track event (I have a former student who placed second in the Olympic trials in a middle-distance race, but missed the qualifying time by a fraction of a second), but if you’re the best your nation or geographical area has to offer, you get to go, and it’s difficult to establish a qualifying standard if there’s nothing objective about the decision-making.

So, what’s going on?  Well, there’s the post on X that calls her a “grievance studies scholar” and claims she has argued that “breaking’s institutionalization via the Olympics will place breaking more firmly within this sporting nation’s hegemonic settler-colonial structures that rely upon racialized and gendered hierarchies.”  Speaking as a PhD in the humanities, I respond, “Huh?”

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Lest We Forget…Ethics Dunce and Probable Ethics Villain: Dr. Rachel Gunn, a.k.a “RayGun”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

For some reason, YouTube still has no clean, complete video of the infamous “breaking” performance that embarrassed the Paris Olympic games. (TikTok has one of the better ones, but I can’t embed TikTok.)

EA columnist Curmie flagged this ludicrousness for me [his analysis is here], knowing that my sock drawer problems precluded me from watching any of the goings on in Gay Paree. I didn’t know what to write about Gunn, having already expressed my belief that the dancing component of the Olympics was a breach of integrity and a betrayal of the mission of the Games. I didn’t specifically delve into the addition this time of “breaking,” aka breakdancing, which appears to me to be one more example of woke virtue-signaling in The Great Stupid, a kind of Olympics event reparations for blacks. (Why not clog dancing? Square-dancing? Russian squat-dancing? Tap-dancing? I hear that ballroom dancing may not be far off…)

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Incident At Harris Teeter

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I just returned from a shopping run for necessities (coffee, milk, peanut butter, dog chews, paper plates…) on a day that I have no time for it, but today is senior discount day, and ten bucks is ten bucks.

Having finished my pathetic widower’s mission, I was in the parking lot unloading my cart while thinking about other things, like how horrible the Red Sox loss was last night, the seminar materials deadline I have today, how I am still such a mess that hearing the sappy finale to “A Chorus Line” (“What I Did For Love”) in the car choked me up.

I was almost done when I noticed that a woman was patiently (and quietly) waiting for me to get my grocery cart out of the way so she could park in the space next to me. “Sorry! Sorry!” I shouted as I moved the cart. After she got out of her car, I went over to her and said, “I am so so sorry for making you wait like that! I was just zoned out and didn’t realize you were there.”

She said, “Sir, the fact that you just apologized made my day. Usually people who do something like that just ignore you; they never apologize. Of course you’re forgiven, but also thank-you, for restoring some of my faith in the human race.”

And she smiled.

Sometimes this ethics stuff pays off…

There is hope.

From the “NOW You Tell Me?” Files: Another Research “Oopsie!

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Here we have another one of these stories that should be waved obnoxiously in anyone’s face who lectures you about blindly “following the science.”

For decades—really as long as I can remember—researchers have been telling us that moderate consumption of alcohol was not just safe but in fact beneficial. This wonderful news was welcomed by those who “needed a drink” after a hard day, or self-medicated with a glass of wine (or good scotch) before bedtime, or who tended to have just a bit more than a moderate amount of alcohol now, then, or frequently, but who’s counting?

Along comes a report from the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, that appeared a week ago in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs published by the Center of Alcohol & Substance Use Studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey. It announced, in essence, “Oopsie! All of us trained scientific researchers made just a teeny mistake in our previous studies on this topic, repeatedly, over and over, and for half a century or more!”

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