Arts & Entertainment

My Challenge to Tom Selleck: I Dare You to Put This Story On “Blue Bloods”!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Let me summarize:

1. In the summer of 2022, approximately 10,000 NYPD officers took the exam to get promoted to sergeant—you know, the one they’re always talking about on “Bluebloods,” now heading into its 15th and final season, Tom Selleck’s paene to NYC’s men and women in blue. This was an unprecedented number because the pandemic lockdown had delayed the exam for two years. The exam was offered in four sessions over two days to accommodate the unusually large number.

2. An investigation from the City’s Department of Investigation has determined that about 1,200 of the cops who participated cheated.

3. Those officers brought cell phones with cameras into the exam and participated in group chats to help each other through the test. They discussed possible answers and offered advice to each other, with those who had already taken the exam on the first day helping out the officers taking the exam on the second day.

4. This, of course, was explicitly forbidden, as the officers were told to place their cell phones in plastic bags under their chairs. But more than10% violated that rule.

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Weird Tales of “The Great Stupid,” Beauty Pageant Division

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Sara Milliken, 23, was named “Miss Alabama” when she was selected by judges as the #1 beauty in the regional semi-finals of the National American Miss pageant. I find myself at a loss to explain or analyze this. Beauty pageants were always odd, and in 2024 they are anachronistic ghosts of long-dead cultural attitudes and tastes that never made much sense.

So end them, for heaven’s sake. If they have to stoop to stunts like calling a morbidly obese woman the most beautiful woman on the stage, what’s the point?

In response to Sara’s victory and the entirely predictable tsunami of ridicule it has attracted on social media, various apologists have raved about Sarah’s “inner beauty.” Okay, then call them “inner beauty pageants,” have all the contestants wear burlap sacks instead of gowns, ban make-up and styled hair—heck, maybe tell contestants they can’t bathe for a moth—and stop pretending that by any American cultural norm or standard a grossly obese young woman heading for a heart attack before she’s 40 is “beautiful.” And exactly what message does this silly result send to young women? Traditional beauty pageants were condemned for promoting eating disorders. What does this kind of pageant promote?

The political-correctness mandates suffocating the news media into ludicrousness was on special display with this story. The Daily Mail’s intellectually dishonest reporting was typical: Sarah was a “plus-size”winner. (Sarah is eye-poppingly fat, making Lizzo seem trim.) Social media commenters who criticized her weight were “trolls.” (They were legitimately questioning the result of the “beauty” contest.)

Scoring in the pageant, as explained on its website, is based on “personality, confidence and communication.” “Braces, glasses, skin problems, varying heights, weights and appearances, are all a part of creating the special and unique individual that you are and that we want to celebrate,’ the website states. It might as well have included “major birth defects” and lizard people.

Got it. This is a personality contest, and the organizers and sponsors are falsely packaging it in the guise of a beauty pageant in an audacious bait and switch. That’s unethical, and all involved deserve every bit of criticism they get.

A.I. Ethics Update: Nothing Has Changed!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Oh, there have been lots more incidents and scandals involving artificial intelligence bots doing crazy things, or going rogue, or making fools of people who relied on them. But the ethics hasn’t changed. It’s still the ethics that should be applied to all new and shiny technology, but never is.

We don’t yet understand this technology. We cannot trust it, and we need to go slow, be careful, be patient. We won’t. We never do.

Above is a result someone got and posted after asking Google’s Gemini AI the ridiculous question, “Are there snakes at thesis defenses?” The fact that generative artificial intelligence ever goes bats and makes up stuff like that is sufficient reason not to trust it, any more than you would trust an employee who said or wrote something like that when he wasn’t kidding around. Or a child.

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Stop Making Me Defend Robert DeNiro!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Robert DeNiro’s political rants about Donald Trump are crude, ad hominem attacks and a poor reflection on his character and intelligence, as I have noted more than once, most recently here. It doesn’t matter, however, how much of a jerk DeNiro is and how deluded he may be about the worth of his partisan opinions, at least as far as the legitimate plaudits he has earned for his acting (I don’t especially enjoy him as an actor, but I appreciate his talent and craft from a technical perspective) or other aspects of his life.

For example, DeNiro is apparently a generous contributor to charities. That’s nice. Among the non-profits he has given to are 46664, American Foundation for AIDS Research, Artists for Peace and Justice, Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Celebrity Fight Night Foundation, Elton John AIDS Foundation, FilmAid International, Film Foundation, Friars Foundation, STILLERSTRONG, Fulfillment Fund, HEART, Hearts of Gold, Hudson River Park Friends, LeBron James Family Foundation, Muhammad Ali Parkinson Center, Robert F Kennedy Memorial, and Stand Up To Cancer. The actor has a lot of money, but this is still an impressive array: a surprising number of stars of stage, screen and sports give very little to charity.

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A Proportionality Test That I Fear About Half the Nation Would Flunk

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

On the Josephson Institute’s Pillars of Character, one of the values comprising the fourth pillar, Fairness, is proportionality. Proportionality is essential to perspective, and understanding te need to maintain a broad perspective is essential to fairness, a core ethical value.

When I first started watching that video meme above, my immediate reaction was, “Oh, please. This is ridiculous. Then I saw the pay-off, and laughed out loud. I would have laughed just as hardily if the two men had been reversed.

Being unable to appreciate good-natured, puckish satire when it is aimed at your favorite politician, party, elected official, organization is a sign of a closed mind and an absence of proportionality and perspective. That video makes both candidates look silly, and that’s just fine.

If you can’t see the humor, I feel sorry for you. And I fear you. You have lost all perspective, and that leads to fanaticism.

Ethics Dunce: The Biden Campaign

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

This might be the easiest Ethics Dunce pick ever; at least I am certain that there couldn’t have been an easier one. When I heard which ever Democratic Party hack it was introduce Robert DeNiro as a featured speaker for the Biden campaign’s Trump Hate presser outside the Manhattan courthouse where this kangaroo kaper is inching to a conclusion, I thought, “No! They can’t be this crude, obvious and stupid. They just can’t be.”

They were, and they are.

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Authority Malpractice, Broadway Division [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Looking back over the nearly 17,000 posts here, I realize that the ethical issue of authority abuse has come up often, apparently because it drives me crazy. Experts and authorities, alleged, self-proclaimed or otherwise, are supposed to make everyone else better informed and smarter, not more ignorant and stupid. The “experts” that Ethics Alarms has fingered most frequently are pundits, politicians, historians (notably partisan Presidential historians like Jon Meacham, Michael Beschloss, and the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ) elected officials and baseball writers (with a special place reserved in Baseball Writer Hell for Tom Boswell).

One of the requirements for this sub-category on Ethics Alarms is that I personally know enough about the topic the expert is mangling to detect the authority abuse. Musical theater happens to be one of those topics on which I am qualified to speak and write with some credibility, so I was annoyed yesterday to hear Sirius/XM’s Broadway channel host Seth Rudetsky emit an inexcusable whopper.

Rudetsky is what is called an “industry star,” meaning that the Broadway community knows and appreciates his work though he is largely unknown to anyone outside that community except certifiable American musical nuts. He does have a little empire on Sirius, though, hosting and commenting upon about 50% of the content on the Broadway channel while apparently going out of his way to sound as screamingly gay as possible. (I believe this indulgence damages the popularity, cultural status and prospects of musical theater, but that’s a topic for another day).

Rudetsky styles himself as an “expert on Broadway history and trivia” (as it is phrased on his Wikipedia page), so I was gobsmacked when I heard him say, in his introduction to the “Annie Get Your Gun” duet “Old Fashioned Wedding,” that “there was this thing that Irving Berlin did” in his musicals where two characters would sing different songs and then Irving put the songs together, and they “fit.” Rudetsky recalled the “You’re Just in Love” duet in Berlin’s “Call Me Madam” (above) as an example, and said that “Old Fashioned Wedding” from the revival of “Annie Get Your Gun”was another instance of Berlin’s “thing.”

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The Late “Supersize Me” Documentarian Was a Big Fraud

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Documentaries can be informative, entertaining and influential, but the more I watch them and the more accessible they become through the streaming platforms, the more it is apparent that they are too often pure propaganda instruments and inherently untrustworthy. Almost no documentaries are made from a neutral or objective points of view. In today’s indoctrination-oriented educational system, they are increasingly weaponized to advance political agendas. Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” despite having many of its “truths” debunked and declared bad science, is still turning up in classrooms as if it weren’t the slick manipulative advocacy production it is. There is the despicable Michael Moore, of course, all of whose documentaries cheat with deceptive editing and politically slanted deceit. Even Ken Burns, whom I once admired, proved with his “The US and the Holocaust” that he could not be trusted. I’m a fool: he is affiliated with PBS. Of course he’s pushing a progressive agenda.

Documentaries should be watched with the presumption that they are dishonest, made from biased perspectives, and untrustworthy. Then it is the burden of the documentary to prove otherwise.

Morgan Spurlock died this week of cancer at the relatively young age of 53. He had one great idea for a gimmick documentary, pulled it off with humor and wit, and made himself famous and rich in the process. The idea became his Oscar-nominated 2004 film “Super Size Me,” documenting his physical deterioration as he ate nothing but McDonald’s fast food for 30 days. The movie followed Spurlock and his girlfriend throughout his Golden Arches orgy, with intermittent interviews with health experts and visits to his alarmed physician as he packed on 25 unhealthy pounds and found his liver function deteriorating. Naturally, many schools across the country couldn’t resist showing the film to gullible students. But the documentary, which earned more than $22 million at the box office, was entirely a scam. (Spurlock certainly left some clues: his production company was called “The Con.”) It was pretty obvious from the beginning, or should have been, that this was hardly a valid scientific experiment, but the same woke, anti-corporate dictators that cheered when Michael Bloomberg taxed jumbo sugary drinks in New York City were thrilled to pretend it was.

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Nope, Can’t Watch “Bridgerton’ and Respect Myself in the Morning

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

I was looking for a new series to stream, as the time it takes on the streaming services for me to choose a movie almost requires as much time as watching the movie. At least with a series, your choice is pre-determined for many sessions. “Bridgerton” has a new season (#3), and I had never tested it; Grace had it on her list for future viewing, because she was an English literature major and knew the Regency period in England well.

I had quite a bit of trepidation approaching “Bridgerton” because it’s another Shandaland production. I eventually baled on every Shonda Rhimes show I’ve ever sampled, including her flagship, “Grey’s Anatomy”: they are all over-heated soap operas with less nuance than “Dallas.”

But what the hell. I started Episode 1 last night and made it maybe a third of the way through. The production values were high, and the acting was Masterpiece Theater-level at least. It had only two gratuitous and vigorous coitus scenes, which is less than the average for a Shondaland production. I could not, however, stomach the African-Americans and British aristocrats-of-color wandering around early 19th Century English social scene.

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Not Exactly An Ethics Hero (Recovering Ethics Dunce, Maybe?): Comedy Central’s The Daily Show

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Look! The Daily Show is finally choosing to mercilessly mock not just absurd Democrats, but even absurd Democrats of color! See?

Well paint me blue and call me Smurphy! True, it only took almost four years, and a Republican with such rhetorical handicaps and brain fog would have been skewered weekly, indeed daily, by all of the Axis-allied comedy shows. Think of Dan Quayle, or David Letterman’s nightly mockery of George W. Bush, and Trump, of course. Late night TV has left a lot of big laughs on the metaphorical table, but it was worth it, the writers and comics concluded—“it” being to divide the nation, insult half of all potential viewers, and abandon their supposed mission of being as funny as possible without playing favorites, and politics be damned—to “get Trump” and make the world safe for Woke Fascism.

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