Business & Commercial

Iconic Movie Hero Ethics: The Humiliation Of Indiana Jones

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

One upon a time, Hollywood showed respect to its greatest movie heroes. They deserved it, after all. We never had to see what became of Rick Blaine as he battled the Nazis. We never had to watch Scarlet chase Rhett. Nobody made as watch the plucky Hickory High School basketball team try to hold on to its title the next year after its miracle triumph. Hollywood got greedy (greedier), though, as imaginations ran out and audiences looked elsewhere for their entertainment. And thus the sublime ending of “Rocky” (“There ain’t gonna be no rematch!” “Don’t want one!”) was eroded and superseded by endless inferior sequels. “Star Wars” ended with a jubilant celebration of victory over the Empire and the characters happy, safe, and young, but studio finances dictated that it all had to be diluted with inferior and derivative prequels and sequels, with audiences being tortured by aging husks of Leia, Luke and Han Solo, instead of allowing them to be preserved in our memories as immortal, like legends should.

Now it’s Indiana Jones’ turn. Spielberg and Lucas already set up the perfect farewell for Indy in the third of the original trilogy, flawed as it was. We saw him ride off with his father and Marcus Brody into the sunset after drinking from the Holy Grail, which should have conferred eternal youth. Perfect!

They couldn’t let it go, though, or the studio couldn’t, or Spielberg’s alimony, or something. So we had to watch, many years later, an over-the-hill Indy in a jumping-the-shark fourth film that George Lucas signaled would stretch out the franchise ad infinitum by symbolically passing The Hat on to Indiana’s newly discovered son, the then young and promising Shia LaBeouf.

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Regarding KFC’s Cheesy Chicken Kristallnacht Promotion…In Germany!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Oopsie!

On the anniversary of Kristallnacht (“Reichspogromnacht” in Germany), the Nazi-organized attack on synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses in 1938 that marked the beginning of the Holocaust, the German app users of the international restaurant chain KFC received the message above, which translates to “It’s memorial day for Kristallnacht! Treat yourself with more tender cheese on your crispy chicken. Now at KFCheese!”

In the next message, KFC apologized for the “system error.” It was not the system’s fault, however, but the fault of the humans who put the task of sending out automated promotional messages entirely in the metaphorical hands of a machine, without human oversight. No human being, especially in Germany, would come up with the idea of celebrating a tragedy on the scale of Kristallnacht with a “cheesy chicken” promotion. What happened was that the system was programed to send out a promotion coordinated with every holiday and memorial on the calendar, and nobody bothered to make sure that such promotions would be appropriate for all of them.

Quick! Somebody check with KFC Japan to see if a fried chicken promotion is scheduled to commemorate the atom bomb falling on Hiroshima!

Fortunately, this episode of technology incompetence was only embarrassing and offensive. The next example of humans carelessly entrusting tasks and decisions to computers may not be so easy to fix. Technology is a monster if it is not tamed, trained, watched carefully and used with meticulous care. Not only that, the harm it can do if employed recklessly or cavalierly, or if supervised by those without the foresight and judgment to do so competently, is the stuff of science fiction horror movies. This is a cautionary tale, and attention must be paid.

If enough people pay attention and heed the lesson, KFC may have performed a great service in its incompetence.

That is a big if, however.

Ick Or Unethical? OK, It’s Just Icky, But There’s Something Deeply Disturbing About…”Tattoo Harvesting”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Ew.

Cleveland-based company Save My Ink Forever offers  the opportunity for clients to have their tattoos preserved as artworks after they pass away. Yes, their skin. Two words: Ed Gein.

We are trying to do this in the most dignified manner possible. To people, some of these things really are pieces of art,” mortician Kyle Sherwood said. “It gives that family another option and instead of having just the remains or the burial, we can still do that, they have actually a piece of their loved one. They are pieces of art, and it is just amazing the tattoos we get.” The preservation requires  a complex process that takes roughly three or four months. Once it’s done, clients a have a parchment-like artwork that requires no maintenance at all. They can frame it and hang it in the living room! They can make a lampshade out of it!

Save My Ink Forever works with funeral homes around the US, sending them special kits and video tutorials on how to remove the tattoos. The strips of skin are then shipped to Cleveland. Where else? Cleveland was the home of two of America’s most infamous serial killers: The Cleveland Torso Murderer, also known as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, and  Anthony Edward Sowell, known as the Cleveland Strangler. Save My Ink Forever won’t preserve face and genital tattoos, and has refused to process the skin art into book covers.

That, after all, would be in bad taste.

Ethics Hero: Non-Weenie Bride-To-be Christina Leonard

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

If only more Americans understood, as Christina Leonard obviously does, that this nation was founded to be the home of the free and the brave, not the refuge of weenies.

Christina Leonard of Revere, Mass. had booked 10 rooms in September for $169 a night, plus tax, at Home2 Suites by Hilton for her wedding in Foxboro next May. Then she received an email from the hotel (on Route 1 in Walpole, Mass.—I know it well) canceling her room block. It had just been announced that Taylor Swift will be performing at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro that same Spring weekend. The hotel manager told Christina over the phone that “they could charge up to $1,000 per room for this.”

Gouging, then! What a classy operation Hilton runs.

Christina remind the hotel that she has signed a contract and sent it back, but the sales manager told her—HA!— he never signed it. She reminded him that she has emails confirming the dates. If she were a lawyer, she would have pointed out that she relied on the agreement, and that the hotel caused her to rely on it. In reality, the Hilton didn’t have a legal leg to stand on, but companies will often attempt to bluff non-lawyers with fake technicalities like “we never signed the contract we agreed to.” They do this because it usually works….with weenies.

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Halloween Ethics And The Right To Bad Taste

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

We watch a lot of horror movies, but the inexplicably popular Netflix series “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” was too much for us, and the Marshalls bailed on the thing before the first episode was over. However, the show has spawned, among other troubling responses, the marketing of various Dahmer Halloween costumes.

Ew. That’s creepy, but then, Halloween is supposed to be creepy. What exactly is the taste distinction (oops, setting up a bad Jeffrey Dahmer joke there!) between portraying a real life monster like Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, the BTK killer or Ed Gein (the model for Norman Bates, among others) and movie murderers like Leatherface, Jason Voorhies, Michael Myers, the “Scream” slasher, and the Dahmer-like Hannibal Lector? I’ve seen Hitler and Osama bin Laden costumes; I once considered trick-or-treating as Jack the Ripper. If there’s a rule, I’ve never seen it explained. Is it that real scary people from history are taboo? Is there a statute of limitations? Jack the Ripper ripped almost a 140 years ago. That can’t be it: here are some living political figures (well, Rush is dead) whose faces are available online:

Adan Schiff? Nancy Pelosi? Dr. Fauci? I think I’d rather be Jeffey Dahmer, thanks, but that’s just me.

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“1776” Actress Sara Porkalob Is An Ethics Dunce And Should Be Fired

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The new, non-traditionally cast, “diversity”-pandering revival of “1776” is about to open on Broadway. Ethics Alarms already discussed it here: the production seems like a cynical, misguided, truly terrible idea that is likely to crash and burn, but as I wrote last month, “I hope the result is brilliant and illuminating.” I also wrote, “What I see, however, is a cynical abortion of a classic musical motivated by arrogance, ignorance, and greed.” In other words, the thing has a lot of self-inflicted problems standing in the way of critical and financial success, nicely symbolized by the photo above of an Asian-American woman playing slaveholding Continental Congress member Edward Rutledge singing “Molasses to Rum to Slaves” in the musical’s most dramatic scene. As a stage director and American history fanatic, I don’t see how having that song performed by someone who can’t evoke Rutledge in any way does anything but undermine the best song in the show. But hey, you never know.

One thing the radical production doesn’t need, however, is for that same performer to trash the production publicly. Here is “Rutledge,” Sara Porkalob, in an interview with Vulture’s Jason P. Frank:

“To me, the play is a relic. It is a dusty, old thing… On the inside, I’m cringing… I’m like, It’s okay. I wouldn’t have wanted it this way, but I am doing my job….[The direction] is horrible. I hate it… What I want to do with my time is make new works with collaborators…I feel like I’m going to work.”

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Baseball, The Play-Offs, And Integrity

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

If the New York Yankees lose to the Cleveland ‘What’s Their Names?’ —Oh, right, “Guardians”…I forgot—tonight, it will eliminate New York and mean that only one of the teams proven by the 162 game regular 2022 season to be the best in Major League Baseball will have survived the early rounds of the play-offs to have a chance at the World Series. Over the weekend the L.A. Dodgers, owners of a record-tying 111-51 record in winning the National League West, were eliminated by the San Diego Padres, who finished a distant second in that division, not even winning 90 games. It took just three defeats (out of four games played) to sink L.A. Before that, the Philadelphia Phillies, a team that had been so mediocre for the bulk of the season that its manager was fired, eliminated last year’s World Series Champions and the winner of the Phillies’ division (over a 100 game winning runner-up: Philadelphia was a distant third).

If the Yankees go down (I’m rooting for that to happen, but I shouldn’t be), only the Houston Astros of the five teams that were objectively baseball’s best will have a chance to make the World Series, and that’s an ethical disaster. The World Series was devised to decide the best baseball team in the game, and for about seven decades, that’s what it did. Unlike all the other professional sports teams that polluted their post-season with multiple play-off levels, baseball alone had integrity. The teams with the best records in the American and National Leagues met for the first and only time in a season at the very end, in a best of seven, winner take all series. The system was meaningful, it was exciting, and it had integrity. Continue reading →

Today’s Biased Mainstream Media 2022 Election Panic Exhibit A: The New York Times Flags A Conspiracy Theory [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I was going to post about this one days ago, got distracted, and then was reminded about again when I saw today’s Exhibit B (coming along soon).

As Ethics Alarms has been chronicling (incompletely to be sure), the mainstream media is as panicked as its client, the Democratic Party, about the likelihood that the multilateral disasters created by administration policies as well as the performance of progressive governors and big city mayors will lead to an epic rejection in the November mid-term elections. I expect the mainstream media, deep in the throes of a “Bias Makes You Stupid” attack, to cross even more journalism ethics lines than it has been and further undermines what’s left of its credibility as the big day approaches.

The major themes in this desperation assault on reality and public awareness seem to be…

  • …the Supreme Court letting legislatures decide how to regulate abortion is an attack on democracy.
  • …the Republicans tried to take over the government in 2021 with the Capitol riot, so the Democrats must be allowed to continue eliminating and punishing dissent in the name of freedom.
  • …Donald Trump and anyone who supports him is a Nazi, as President Biden clearly explained during his cool Adolf Hitler impression
  • …”It isn’t what it is” explains and excuses anti-white racial discrimination in public policy; the illegal immigration wave; inflation; the increase in crime, soaring gas prices, public treasury hand-outs to those who haven’t paid their college loans while the suckers who met their financial obligations are just patsies; the frightening politicizing of the Justice Department as a Leftist state policing tool; the sexualizing of  public school education and everything else that seems to be spinning out of control,and
  • ….all opposition efforts to criticize or condemn any or all of the above is “a conspiracy theory” or a “Big Lie”

Exhibit A is an example of the latter, and a pretty amusing one, if one can find the total rot of American journalism funny. Continue reading →

Easiest Question Of The Year: ‘When Will The NFL Put Player Safety First?’

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Of course the answer is “never.”

That question was asked in a tweet Emmanuel Acho, a former NFL linebacker and now a game analyst on Fox Sports. He had just watched Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa thrown to the field on his head so violently in a game last week that he lay contorted with his hands spasming in the manner associated with brain injuries. It was the second time within a week that Tagovailoa had apparently suffered a concussion: just five days earlier, in a game against the Buffalo Bills, he had to be helped to the sideline by trainers. Nonetheless, the Miami team doctor, supposedly following the NFL’s concussion protocols, okayed his returned to the field 30 minutes later. After the second game that saw the quarterback get hit on the head hard enough to require him to be helped off the field—this time via stretcher— Dolphins Coach Mike McDaniel told reporters that watching his quarterback look so hurt on the field was “an emotional moment,” but that he was relieved “that he didn’t have anything more serious than a concussion.”

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Today’s Untrustworthy and Unethical Social Media Platform: LinkedIn

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

From 2015 to 2019, LinkedIn randomly varied the proportion of weak and strong contacts suggested to users by its “People You May Know” algorithm, the company’s  system for recommending new connections to “link” to. Researchers at LinkedIn, M.I.T., Stanford and Harvard Business School then analyzed aggregate data from the tests in a study published this month in the “Science.”

In other words, users were used as virtual lab rats, subjected to changes in how the platform served their job-hunting and networking interests without their knowledge or consent. It would have been easy and ethical to alert users to this experiment and allow them to out out, but no. The New York Times, ethically inert as usual, writes, “Experts who study the societal impacts of computing said conducting long, large-scale experiments on people that could affect their job prospects, in ways that are invisible to them, raised questions about industry transparency and research oversight.”

Raised questions? What questions? Such secret experimenting is wrong, manipulative, arrogant, irresponsible and unethical. There is no uncertainty on that point. In a statement, LinkedIn now claims that it has “acted consistently with” the company’s user agreement, privacy policy and member settings. The privacy policy, while stating that LinkedIn uses members’ personal data for research purposes, does not reveal that the company will secretly play with  user’s contacts in ways that might result in career or life course changes. The company also, naturally, engaged in the now compulsory “It isn’t what it is” blather,  saying it used the latest, “non-invasive” social science techniques to answer important research questions “without any experimentation on members.”

Of course it was “experimentation on members.”

LinkedIn’s policy for outside researchers seeking to analyze company data states that those researchers will not be able to “experiment or perform tests on our members,” but no policy statement explicitly informs consumers that LinkedIn itself can experiment or perform tests on its members. “During the tests, people who clicked on the ‘People You May Know’ tool and looked at recommendations were assigned to different algorithmic paths,” the New York Times explains. ” Some of those ‘treatment variants,’ as the study called them, caused LinkedIn users to form more connections to people with whom they had only weak social ties. Other tweaks caused people to form fewer connections with weak ties.”

Then the Times adds, disingenuously, “Whether most LinkedIn members understand that they could be subject to experiments that may affect their job opportunities is unknown.” No, it’s just impossible to prove they didn’t know. LinkedIn knew damn well they didn’t know. I didn’t know, for example, not that I rely upon or trust LinkedIn in any way.

None of the social media platforms are trustworthy, and anyone who participates in them should just assume that they will abuse their power while deceiving users whenever they see profit in it. These are unethical Big Tech entities run by unethical, dishonest people. Interact with them accordingly, if you have to interact with them at all.