Around the World

Being Fair To Imane Khelif

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I sure am glad I had the sense (for a change) to wait a while before writing about what is likely to be the most lasting ethics controversy of the 2024 Paris Olympics. The initial hysteria in the conservative media didn’t add up. My prize for the worst headline goes to the conservative sports blog Outkick: “Olympic Boxer Pretending To Be A Woman Pummels Opponent in 26 Seconds, Making Her Cry.” Nice.

What happened to launch this mess was an Olympic women’s boxing march pitting Algerian Imane Khelif and Italian boxer Angela Carini against each other. After 46 seconds Carini quit, something that almost never happens in in Olympic boxing. She didn’t shake Khelif’s hand after the referee raised it, then sank to her knees, weeping. She told reporters that she quit because of the pain from those opening punches from her opponent, saying that she has never been hit so hard in her life. Instantly, critic made the episode part of the trans women in sports controversy, a la Lia Thomas et al. That was simply wrong, careless, sloppy and unethical. Here is how the conservative commentary collective PJ Media described the scene:

On Thursday, the Olympics put on a disgraceful show, pitting a man with XY chromosomes against a biological woman. Algeria’s Imane Khelif won the 16 welterweight bout over Italy’s Angela Carini after pummeling his opponent’s head over and over again. After having her head slammed by the biological male for 46 seconds, Carini was done. She removed herself from the match and then crumbled to the mat in tears. Everyone who watched saw that the Italian boxer was no match for the Algerian, who had been disqualified from previous competitions for testing positive for male chromosomes. 

Wrong. Imane Khelif is not a biological man, but intersex, meaning that the proper analogy for her dilemma in Olympic competition is the intersex runner, Caster Semenya, whom I most recently discussed last fall. Here is how that post ended…

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Open Forum: Go For the Ethics Gold!

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Ugh. I always forget that the Olympics inevitably sparks lots of ethics controversies that I have to cover here despite finding the spectacle boring, corrupt and annoying. So I’m bound to miss some juicy issues—like this one, Australian swimming coach Bret Hawke accusing the Chinese team of cheating because a swimmer’s performance in the pool was “not humanly possible.” They used to say that about the four minute mile, if I recall. Or is this just more “Don’t trust China; China is asshole” stuff?

You don’t have to write about Olympics ethics, of course. But the starting pistol is loaded…

Olympics Ethics Quiz: The Sexist Commentator

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The Horror.

Bob Ballard is a veteran sports announcer with the BBC who has reported on sports since the mid- 1980s. He’s been involved in covering several Olympic games. However, a wan sexist joke he uttered that would have been standard fair on sitcoms in the 1960s got him sacked from the Paris Olympics broadcast.

After the women’s 4×100 meter freestyle relay that ended with a gold for Team Australia, Ballard felt compelled to comment on the team’s delay leaving the Paris Aquatic Centre. “Well, the women just finishing off. You know what women are like, hanging around, doing their makeup,” Ballard said. Immediately his female broadcasting partner Lizzie Simmonds, a former Olympian and his Eurosport co-host, struck. “Outrageous, Bob,” she said. “Some of the men are doing that as well.” Ballard laughed.

Eurosport, which distributes the Olympic broadcast in Europe (owned by the same company that now owns CNN) confirmed that the comment caused Ballard’s Olympics to be terminated. “We can confirm that Bob Ballard has been removed from our commentary roster with immediate effect,” it said in a statement this week.

Take THAT, insufficiently female athlete-extolling pig at the Parity Olympics!

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Was Ballard’s dismissal, fair, proportional and just?

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Before Offering Second Thoughts J.D. Vance’s “Childless Cat Ladies” Controversy, These Relevant Horror Stories:

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I was literally in the middle of a preparing a post about the cultural sickness J.D. Vance was allegedly trying (and failing miserably) to focus public attention on when he mocked “childless cat ladies” dictating U.S. policies when these two awful stories came across my screen.

In the first, I learned that Parker Scholtes, 2, was found dead in her parents’ Honda SUV parked outside their home in the Tucson suburb of Marana. Her father, an irresponsible man-child named Christopher Scholtes, had left the baby “to nap,” that is, to broil, for more than three hours on July 9. He said he left her in the car with the air conditioner on (like a good dad, or his warped idea of one), but got involved playing PlayStation video games and didn’t check on her until three hours had gone by. He confessed to police that he knew the car’s engine would automatically shut off after 30 minutes, but just got, you know, carried away and lost track of time. You know how it flies by when you’re having fun.

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Flagrant Virtue-Signaling of the Year: CEO of Olympic Broadcasting Services Yiannis Exarchos

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I’m sure glad I ignore the Olympics as the corrupt, greed-infested fiasco it had been for decades, because if I gave a rip, the Paris Olympics would have my head exploding more frequently than Old Faithful blows. The whole enterprise appears to be run by silly, incompetent, unethical bureaucrats and con artists.

Here’s a particularly nauseating example: the CEO of Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) Yiannis Exarchos decided to burnish his woke creds by telling reporters in Paris that his organization updated its guidelines for camera operators, most of whom are men, to inveigh against “sexist” portrayals of female athletes at the 2024 Summer Olympics. “Unfortunately, in some events they are still being filmed in a way that you can identify that stereotypes and sexism remains, even from the way in which some camera operators are framing differently men and women athletes,” Exarchos said, making no sense at all. “Women athletes are not there because they are more attractive or sexy or whatever. They are there because they are elite athletes.” Exarchos said that the problem primarily stems from “unconscious bias,” which leads to camera operators and TV editors favoring more close-up shots of women than of men.

Oh, shut the HELL up! TV editors favor more close-up shots of women than men because women are more attractive than men, the demographics of Olympic viewing for many events slants male, and there is nothing offensive or disrespectful about showing Olympic athletes like this German sprinter,

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Light-Hearted Ribbing or Taunting? The Pineapple Pizza

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Whatever else they may be, the Paris Olympics are definitely….strange.

Hong Kong (is that China or not? I can’t quite figure it out…) won a razor-thin fencing Gold over Italy, 15-14. There was a bitter dispute over the final, decisive point: referees replayed the video three times, and each competitor was convinced he had won. Cheung Ka Long of Hong Kong was ultimately declared the victor, and became the first athlete from Hong Kong to win two Olympic gold medals. He’s historic, see, so that must mean he deserved to win.

The Italian Fencing Federation, meanwhile, said it would file a formal complaint over what it called “unacceptable refereeing.” “Filippo Macchi is the real winner,” Paolo Azzi, the federation’s president, wrote on social media. “He was denied the gold he deserved.”

The New York Times immediately declared that the claim the fencing gold was stolen is “baseless.” (Kidding!)

To slap back at Italy, Pizza Hut’s Hong Kong and Macao branch announced that it is offering free pineapple toppings on its pizzas, a desecration of the dish that, understandable, Italians consider blasphemy. I think it’s funny, but maybe not. Italy truly feels it was robbed. Is the pineapple pizza ploy more like taunting than good-natured joshing? Is Hong Kong disrespectfully rubbing in the pain of a close defeat, or sending a message of “Come on, let’s laugh and be friends!”?

If I ran a Chinese restaurant chain in Italy, I’d announce new menu items like Peking duck with tomato sauce.

Revisiting the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

My sister recorded the whole thing, and invited me over to view it. I would say it’s unwatchable—she agrees—but we did do our best, focusing on the main features of the opening that have caused controversy. This was in the wake of yesterday’s obviously PR-generated non-apology apology from Paris Olympics “organizer” Anne Descamps (whatever that’s supposed to mean):

“Clearly there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group. On the contrary, I think Thomas Jolly did try to intend to celebrate community tolerance. We believe this ambition was achieved, if people have taken any offense, we of course are really sorry.”

Should I add that to the Apology Scale as a perfect example of Apology #9? That’s “Deceitful apologies, in which the wording of the apology is crafted to appear apologetic when it is not (“if my words offended, I am sorry”). But I’m not even sure the statement appears apologetic. “Clearly there was never an intention”— that’s a lie, since clearly many, many people believe that was the intention. The “apology” begins by insulting those who were offended. Then again we have the risible “community intolerance” claim. If someone could show me how that mess possibly communicated anything coherent, much less “community tolerance,” I will be eternally grateful.

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Meet Sara Morris, the Running Fick [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I referred to someone as a fick last week, and realized Ethics Alarms hadn’t exposed any of that particularly loathsome breed recently. Upon checking, I discovered that the last official Ethics Alarms fick was designated way back in 2021. It was Bennett Madison, a columnist at the now (thankfully) defunct Gawker site. He had openly boasted about deceiving advice columnists and their trusting readers in his article titled, “Help! I Couldn’t Stop Writing Fake Dear Prudence Letters That Got Published.”

Sara Morris says, “Hold my beer!”

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About That Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony…

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

A bizarre sequence in the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony has created instant anger, controversy and, of course, social media controversy. At one point, a group of drag performers, transsexuals performers costumes to look like something in that range created a tableau that seemed to evoke a very weird version of the Last Supper. Many critics, including Elon Musk, declared the number blasphemous and an intentional insult to Christians. The organizers, cowards and liars as such functionaries tend to be when controversy strikes, claimed that any resemblance to The Last Supper was unintentional, and this was supposed to comment on “the absurdity of violence against human beings” because a giant platter with a representation of the Greek God Dionysus had the drag Last Supper as its backdrop, or perhaps representing the menu at the Last Supper. See?

Oh.

Okaaaay.

You got that? Do you believe it?

Was it ethical to include this spectacle in televised, live entertainment seen all over the world? This seems like a good opportunity to use one of the ethics decision-making models. Let’s roll out the “TWELVE QUESTIONS TOWARD ETHICAL DECISION-MAKING,” adapted from Harvard Business School Professor Laura Nash’ s 1981 Harvard Business Review article, “Ethics without the Sermon.” (The ceremony also included this…

…an image of a famous French queen holding her own severed head. Someone else can figure that one out. At least it wasn’t Kathy Griffin).

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Incompetent Elected Official and Ethics Dunce: VP Kamala Harris (Surprise!)

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This shouldn’t be hard to grasp: incompetence really does matter in a President, as does trust.

Kamala Harris had a private discussion with Benjamin Netanyahu, a head of state. Diplomacy 101 dictates that when sensitive matters are discussed, neither party to such discussion reveals the details of what is said, nor does either party make statements after the meeting that undermine either the relationship between the two individuals, nor their respective nations, nor the interests and objectives of those nations.

This isn’t hard, nor should it be.

But for Kamala Harris, it is. This is a problem.

Having met with the Israel Prime Minister, Harris initially said that the U.S. has an “unwavering commitment” to Israel, its right to exist and its security. She called Hamas a “brutal terrorist organization.” Then she said,

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