Reader John Owens supplies perspective and expertise on carnivals and local fairs in his Comment of the Day regarding the post “Ethics Quiz: The Peculiar Ethics of Carnival Games.” Here it is: Continue reading
Arts & Entertainment
Ethics Quiz: The Peculiar Ethics of Carnival Games
The AARP website has a post about rigged carnival games, a topic that I have always found intriguing from an ethics perspective. The games…The Basketball Shoot, The Balloon Dart Throw, The Ring Toss, The Milk Bottle Pyramid, The Duck Pond and the rest…are rigged, and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know they were rigged. It didn’t stop me from playing the silly things. A carnival is a state of mind, a flashback to the days of P.T. Barnum and flim-flam artists. An ethical carnival? Isn’t that an oxymoron? We eat terrible food, pay to go on disappointing rides, listen to barkers who we know are lying through their teeth, and play games that are scams in order to win cheesy prizes worth a fraction of what we paid out to win them and that we wouldn’t dream of buying outside a carnival anyway. That’s the carnival experience. It’s all unethical, and we consent to it.
Or is this just a rationalization? Is capitulation the proper ethical course, or should we carefully regulate carnival games, make sure all of the food is cholesterol-lite and sugar-free, and force the barkers to issue disclaimers and warnings like the recitations in TV drug commercials?
That’s your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz for the day, my friends:
Do traditional unethical practices become ethical in the culture of a carnival and similar environments, where the public voluntarily participates in and consents to its own victimization?
With cotton candy dancing in my head, corn dogs singing their siren song and images of the Wild Man of Borneo howling in my fevered brain, I have to confess that my inclination is to say, “Yes.”
And you?
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Spark: AARP
Graphic: Photolibra
Ethically Excusable Self-Promotion
I’m going to be a guest on NPR’s “Tell Me More” with Michel Martin this morning, participating in a discussion of the Chick-fil-A controversy on which I have commented here and here. “Check local listings,” as they say.
Regardless of whether I say anything significant (you never know; miracle happen), Michel is superb, and her voice is Debussy and Grieg to your ears.
For Ethics Dunce Madonna: the Concert Performer’s Eight Duties
In London, we had Bruce Springsteen, playing so long for his audience and fans that his performance went past the curfew. In Paris, we have Madonna, stiffing paying customers who paid top dollar (“top euro?”) with a 45 minute appearance that was late getting started because the Material Myron couldn’t bother to get to her own concert on time.
Pop and rock music fans have long been more tolerant of unprofessional performers than their parents and grandparents, and to some extent they have created a tradition of tolerance to this kind of blatant disrespect and arrogance that is self-perpetuating. The betrayed fans in Paris rioted over Madonna’s inexcusable conduct, which is a bit much, but still: she disappointed and robbed them. 45 minutes of a star attraction isn’t fair return on tickets that many patrons slept in the street to acquire. Madonna owes everyone a refund, and apology, and a pledge to honor her duties as a performer from now on. For the benefit of her and the shocking number of other singers and recording stars who disappoint and abuse paying concert-goers this way, here are what those duties are, and their underlying ethical foundations: Continue reading
Ethics Dunce: The Internal Revenue Service
Question:
What is the monetary value of something that can’t be sold?
Answer:
Nothing.
That’s an easy one.
So why is the IRS claiming that the heirs of the New York art dealer Ileana Sonnabend owe $29.2 million in taxes on an art work that U.S. prevents from ever being converted into cash? Continue reading
Justice for the Nicholas Brothers [Corrected (1/27/25)]
At the Sun Valley Lodge, there is a television station devoted to playing the 1941 film “Sun Valley Serenade” on a loop. It is a genuinely awful movie, starring John Payne of “Miracle on 34th Street” fame, Norwegian ice skater Sonia Henie, and Milton Berle, although it does show the famous ski resort in the days when guests used to be towed around the slopes on their skis by horses. Last time I was in Sun Valley to give a presentation, I watched about half the film in disconnected bites, since I never can sleep on such trips. This time I finally saw the whole thing. At about 3 AM, as Glenn Miller was leading his band in the longest version of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” in history, Fayard and Harold Nicholas suddenly flipped onto the screen, and Sun Valley Serenade briefly went from fatuous to immortal.
If your reflex response to that last sentence was “WHO??“, you are part of the reason for this post, and also in the vast and deprived majority of Americans. As I went among my future audience of lawyers and their spouses yesterday morning, happily informing them that the terrible movie playing around the clock in their rooms included the dance team called “the unforgettable Nicholas Brothers” in more than one tribute, I learned that none of them had any idea what I was talking about, and many of these individuals were old enough to have been able to see Fayard and Harold in a theater. The Nicholas Brothers were, you see, the greatest tap-dancers who ever lived, and the most amazing dance team that ever will be. Continue reading
Ethics Dunce: ABC’s Brian Ross
Now that I think about it, nobody gets shot in Pixar movies. I wonder if movies about violence vigilantes need to be regulated…
He just couldn’t help himself. Learning of the horrible Batman theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado, ABC reporter Brian Ross got on the air and reported a possible “tea party link” with the killer, James Holmes, and if you don’t think this sent a thrill up his leg, I have some gold mine shares to sell you. Anything to smear conservatives: why was he looking at tea party web pages, any more than PETA sites, or Parcheesi fan sites? Because, you see, the tea parties are violent—don’t you remember? They inspired that guy to shoot Gaby Giffords! Where else would you expect to find a madman killer?
It was fantasy, of course, and Ross and ABC duly apologized, but never mind: it worked. Confirmation bias is a sure thing. I was in a Food Court at LAX today, and heard someone at the table next to me eating similar unidentifiable swill say, “Did you hear? One of those tea party guys shot all those people!” I finally got to my room in Sun Valley (it was easier to get to Mongolia than Sun Valley) to check what she was talking about. So you see, Brian? Mission accomplished!
Others are politicizing the Aurora shooting in only slightly less outrageous ways, mostly with the sadly predictable rush of anti-gun advocates to point to the slaughter and say, “See? Guns bad.” Then comes the related cognitive dissonance trick, linking gun rights to automatic weapons to madmen and criminals using such weapons to the tragic deaths resulting from said use, hence Republicans and conservatives are really allied with killers and murderers, which gives us some insight into their true character.
I’m sure Brian Ross approves.
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Facts: Huffington Post
Graphic: Shout Omaha
London’s Curfew Fiasco: Sir Paul, The Boss, and Exception Ethics
It was the stuff of legends, the kind of moment that onlookers would cherish and tell their grandchildren about. American rock icon Bruce Springsteen was on a roll before a huge Hyde Park crowd, and suddenly he was joined on stage by Sir Paul McCartney. The two giants of rock and roll began spontaneously jamming, and then some bureaucrat who worked for the concert organizers pulled the plug, cutting off power because the concert was running over its permit allotment and a local sound curfew.
Good ethics can require knowing when rules and even laws should be stretched, amended, finessed, or even ignored. This takes some skill, of course, and some character. It is much easier, and certainly entails lower risk, to just go by the book, and permit no exceptions. It is also lazy, uncaring, and leads to needless fiascos like this one. Continue reading
Comment of the Day: “The Ice Child” and Staging Theft Ethics”
Arts blogger Jeremy Barker contributes a provocative counter-argument to my stance in the controversy over a D.C. based theater company that borrowed/adapted/stole an original production concept from a New York company without attribution or permission. My position was (and is) that no rule, principle or law designed to discourage such conduct could avoid suffocating legitimate adaptations, mutations and new uses of ideas devised by others, with devastating effects on creative expression. This is one of the great ethics controversies in the world of art, and I am glad to see it back in the ring.
Here is Jeremy’s Comment of the Day on my post, “The Ice Child” and Staging Theft Ethics.
“Jack–I just came across this piece and wanted to respond because I think, in quoting me, you ignore part of my argument, and I’m curious if you can clarify your perspective.
“Specifically, I feel like your caveated argument in favor of Factory 449 is based on the sense that it’s common practice to borrow such design or staging elements in text-based theater. I agree, it is. But if we were speaking of a specific author’s text, I think most commenters would have swung the other way. We tend to protect the playwright’s text in a different fashion than we do a design concept. A writer could be accused on plagiarism for either (a) imitating a distinctive plot, or (b) appropriating the same words. Yes, we can argue about what is an acceptable form of “referencing” (no one thinks Arthur Laurents wrote Romeo & Juliet, for instance) and what crosses the line. Often, this applies to how the text is used. But we understand and appreciate a playtext as a protected, distinctive thing.
“Indeed, I’d argue that this logic, which privileges the text, is the basis on which people in this thread are defending Factory 449′s appropriation. Since it wasn’t the same “play,” by which they mean “play text,” it’s not really the same thing, ergo, it’s not ripping someone off wholesale. Continue reading
Ethics Quiz: Which Weird Article Is More Unethical, the One About Practical Jokes Being Erotic, Or The Critique That Calls The Author Someone “Who Can’t Even Go To The Dentist Without Someone Asking Her Why There Are Dora the Explorer Underpants Caught In Her Second Row Of Teeth”?
“She put a gummy worm in my apple! That gets me so HOT!”
Fox News has a new feature on its website that focuses on relationships and romance. The style and beauty editor has authored a jaw dropping post entitled “10 Pranks That Will Spice Up Your Relationship,” with love-making advice like this:
“Put a small piece of masking tape on the bottom of his mouse, making sure it covers the trackball or optical sensor. Watch as he struggles to read his e-mail — and don’t forget to write “Gotcha!” on the tape.”
..or this:
“If your guy is shy but has a good sense of humor, take a picture of the toilet in your bathroom, then plug your digital camera into a computer or TV and load the picture onto your screen. When he comes out of the bathroom, start laughing and pointing. He will see the picture and think you saw him in there!”
Yes, she is an idiot. I don’t know what her love life has been like, but a significant other who keeps annoying me with crap like this is going to find herself laughing in an empty bed room pretty damn quick. Feeling similarly unimpressed by Milt’s idea of foreplay was humorist Seanbaby, who wrote a scathing article about her piece over at Cracked. A sample of his intentionally uncivil criticism: Continue reading
