Anyone?
I don’t like being shouted at by cartoon characters. Even if they had a valid point, my response to this kind of assaultive advocacy is, has ever been, and always will be…
Bite me.
Ethics Dunces
Who Would Have Suspected That A Group Of Judges With An Average Age of 62 Would Not Be Competent At Cyber-Security?
I jest, of course.
Who couldn’t see this coming—years ago? A decade ago?
Long before the leak of Justice Alito’s draft opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court justices often used personal email accounts instead of secure servers designed to protect sensitive information. Security lapses by the justices apparently were routine, making the embarrassing and public-trust-wounding leak all but inevitable while also rendering an effective investigation difficult as well.
Supreme Court employees used printers that didn’t produce logs. They were able to print sensitive documents off-site without tracking. So-called “burn bags” containing materials that needed to be shredded were left open and unattended in hallways. Employees could remove documents, including draft opinions, from the SCOTUS building Continue reading
Observations On The Cardinal Local School District’s Abrupt Cancellation Of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” [Expanded]
Let’s get one thing settled right off the metaphorical bat: the Cardinal Local School District is run by a bunch of incompetents and ethics dunces. However one thinks this fiasco could and should have been handled, they made the worst possible mess of it possible.
On January 25, 2023, the school board for the district (in Middlefield, Ohio) killed a student production of the 2005 Tony-winning Broadway musical “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” citing as a justification their assessment that it was “vulgar.”The show is, as that date would suggest, 18 years old now, and has been performed all over the world as well as at many high schools. Its artistic pedigree is impeccable: the lyrics and music is by William Finn (“Falsettos”) and the original production was directed by Stephen Sondheim collaborator James Lapine. The show is excellent theatrical training for students as it involves improvisation.
Presumably the “vulgar” accusation arises from “Chip’s Lament,” a controversial song in which one of the young characters blames his failure in the competition on an embarrassing erection. Here are the lyrics:
Fritos! M&M’s? Oreos. All for one dollar!
It is tradition
that the person eliminated from the competition,
is fair game for derision,
especially the Alpha-Male,
who will sell goodies at the bake sale.
Anyone for brownies?
Anyone for chocolate chips?
Anyone for anything that isn’t dated?
How could I have been eliminated?
You wanna know how?
You wanna know how?
You wanna know WHY?
My unfortunate erection
Is destroying my perfection
It is my recollection that everything I once did
I did perfectly.
LAST YEAR’S CHAMP, DEFEATED!
Because of
Marigold Coneybear
Because there’s something and not a thing between us
I don’t blame my brain but I do blame my penis.
My unfortunate protuberance,
seems to have its own exuberance.
Anyone for M&M’s?
Delicious and appropriate!
Anyone for Chewy Goobers?
Inexpensive…
Anyone for buying the SHIT that I’m selling
because my stiffie has ruined my spelling.
ERECTION!
ERECTION!
MY UNFORTUNATE ERECTION!
WHY?
Is ruining my life
Is ruining my world
Is ruining my
Ruining Ruining Ruining
My Life
MY LIFE
Adulthood brings its own peculiar rejection
Which is why I’m selling this PTA
Confection
It will ruin your complexion
All because of my unfortunate
Erection
Oh God!
Following accusations in the wake of its decision, the Cardinal School District denied that the move was made because the musical includes two gay parents. Jesus also makes a comic appearance in the show. (He also appears rather prominently in “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which is frequently performed in high schools.) If that had anything to do with the show’s demise, this school district is a danger to intelligent life on earth.
Points: Continue reading
And There It Is, The Smoking Gun! A Pulitzer-Winning Journalist Declares That His Biased Partisan Opinion Is “Fact”
This is a fact: most of today’s journalists really think like this, being arrogant, self-inflated, ignorant and incompetent hacks who believe “journalism” means advancing the “greater good” through their craft, the “greater good as defined, of course, by them..
During a National Press Club panel last month supposedly on the journalistic challenges of covering extremism—meaning “How do we make sure as many Democrats are elected as possible, since that is the party 98% of us support?”, Wesley Lowery, the former Washington Post reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism for his coverage of the Ferguson race riots, told his fawning audience,
“We have one political party that traffics in the same talking points as white supremacists, be it on immigration, be it on Muslims, be it on any number of issues, where the mainstream political rhetoric could be written by avowed racists…I’ll be honest, I don’t think very much about the mantle of neutrality. It’s either raining outside or it’s not raining outside. I’m not particularly interested in sounding neutral about which it is….[The Republican Party] is a mix of nativism, of anti-urbanism, of anti-cosmopolitanism, a fear of immigrants. It’s the exact same things that drove the Klan movement of the 1920s. But to say that in public—the way that Newsbusters is going to headline the write-up of this panel is going to be that I compared Donald Trump to the Klan. Right? Now this is a literal true factual description. How can we understand our moment if we are not allowed to make any comparison or add any context?”
Saturday In The Great Stupid Continues: The “Waiting For Godot” Catch-22
I love this dispatch from The Great Stupid! It has everything…
- It involves a theater production…
- It’s woke academia at its worst…
- Copyright and artistic integrity principles are at issue..
- Diversity, Equity and Inclusion mania is at its core…
- It’s another “It isn’t what it is” (Yoo’s Rationalization) classic….
- It didn’t happen here, but I could easily see it happening here, and…
- It’s really, really, really stupid.
A bit of background: Samuel Beckett, the late Irish novelist and playwright of Theater of the Absurd fame ,best known for his minimalist drama and “Waiting For Godot” in particular, was a cantankerous old coot who didn’t trust directors (with good cause, say I), and directed them in his texts to change neither lines nor character, or risk legal action. Edward Albee was similarly strict on this point, having seen what happens to plays in the public domain (like Shakespeare’s works) when far less talented “artists” decide to make them “relevant.” So if you are going to produce a Beckett play, it’s Beckett’s way or the metaphorical highway.
Oisín Moyne, a fellow countryman of Beckett, was directing “Waiting for Godot” in the Netherlands and auditioned only men for the all-male cast of characters, as he was legally and artistically obligated to do. the college production been in rehearsals since November and was due to be presented at the University of Groningen’s Usva student cultural center in March. (Don’t ask me how or why it would take more than three months to rehearse this play, which primarily involves two guys sitting around talking, but never mind.) Continue reading
From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: This Isn’t Diversity. This Isn’t Inclusion. This Isn’t LGBTQ Respect…
This is cruel and stupid.
And unethical.
The organizers of an international figure skating event in Finland last week decided to show their oneness with the times, known at Ethics Alarms as “The Great Stupid,” by featuring Markku-Pekka Antikainen in the opening ceremony of the ISU European Figure Skating Championships. Antikainen is a 59-year-old man who at age 50 decided to “transition” and become a female figure skater. He would have been just as successful aspiring to be a bunch of carrots. His skating name, which he will presumably use when he is featured in “Disney on Ice” (can you really say with confidence that that won’t happen?), is Minna-Maaria Antikainen. Continue reading
Law Prof. Ethics Rule: Don’t Say Anything To A Student That You Wouldn’t Say Over An Open Mic…
Oops! Law professor Daniel Capra, an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, responded to a student complaint that he spoke too quickly in his lectures and international students were having trouble keeping up with a foreign language. Capra dismissed the compliant and and dismissed the students’ problems following hm as “assumption of risk.” Then, after the student walked away, he said, “Fuck!”
His class was being recorded, and a nearby microphone was live. Of course, the episode is being given maximal attention, life today being what it is. Above the Law gleefully weighed in, so did Law.com. Aditi Thakur, president of Columbia Law’s student senate, released a statement announcing that the student senate is “deeply alarmed” by Capra’s conduct. Gillian Lester, the dean of Columbia Law, said that she has told Capra that his “language, and the disrespectful attitude it conveyed, were unacceptable.” She also told students that she wanted to “express my own sorrow about this incident.” Sorrow!
Capra is also a professor at the Fordham University School of Law, so Matthew Diller, the dean there, had to pile on, saying, “His conduct was not consistent with his reputation as a teacher and scholar over many years or the spirit of inclusiveness and care for others that is at the heart of a Fordham education.”
Gee, Could Massachusetts Democrats Come Up With A MORE Unethical Bill?
[You know, writing this blog of late has made me feel like I’m Uma Thurman in “Kill Bill I,” fighting O-Ren Ishii’s (Lucy Liu) personal army, The Crazy 88’s. The ethics stories just get worse and worse, especially from the world of government and politics, and they keep on coming. The mission of this blog is to, in some small way, try to encourage ethical analysis and sensitivity in the culture of a nation uniquely dependent on it, and all I see is the ethics in our culture, especially in the professions (which exist to be trusted) and our institutions (all of them) deteriorating rapidly and seemingly deliberately. The effort feels hopeless. Maybe a better analogy than The Bride’s mass battle in “Kill Bill I” is Viking king Ragnar (Ernest Borgnine) fighting gleefully and futilely in a pit full of hungry wolves in “The Vikings.” After all, Uma wins her fight. But Ethics Alarms is not directed by Quentin Tarantino.
What prompts these musings? This item from the State of my birth: Massachusetts Democrats have offered a bill giving prison inmates reduced sentences when they donate their kidneys and bone marrow. State Reps. Carlos Gonzalez and Judith Garcia came up with this monstrosity, which aims to create “The Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Program” within the Massachusetts Department of Corrections. Prisoners would be able to shave between 60 days to a year off their sentences.
Talk about killing bills—I’d love that bill as a hypothetical in an ethics class, though I would think it might be too easy for anyone old enough to vote. In The Guardian’s story, we read that the bill “has raised ethical concerns.” YA THINK??? Continue reading
When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring Because They Were Installed Upside-Down And Backwards…
There’s not a lot one can say about this astounding story or that needs to be said, but it still must be told because the head-exploding incident demonstrates just how completely ethically inert some alleged adults in authority can be. From there we must consider how our culture is failing if anyone could be raised in it for 22 years and do what Arlisha Boykins did.
That’s her above, taking a free throw in a basketball game. That game was being played by the Churchland High JV team, on which the players were 13-to 15-year-old girls. Arlisha was the assistant coach of that team—as I noted, she’s 22-years old—and when one of her team’s players who is 13 had to miss a game, Boykins masqueraded as her, wearing the player’s uniform and taking her place on the court for a January 21 contest.
On The Plus Side, At Least There’s No Reason To Hold Any Illusions That American Journalists Will Even Try To Be Ethical Journalists In The Foreseeable Future…
It looks like honking will do as much good as anything else.
Former executive editor for The Washington Post Leonard Downie Jr. and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward interviewed over 75 media leaders to assess how the industry views the concept of “objectivity.”
The message they got was that objectivity was over-rated, and what really matters is diversity. Sure, that makes sense. Not really, but it was predictable. Journalists, Downey and Heyward were told, should include their own beliefs, biases, and experiences to convey “truth.” Journalistic objectivity was either unrealistic or undesirable.
“Objectivity has got to go,” said Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle. “It’s objective by whose standard? … That standard seems to be White, educated, and fairly wealthy,” said Kathleen Carroll, former executive editor at the Associated Press. USA Today editor-in-chief Nicole Carroll said that she allows reporters to write about their own experiences, so long as the stories aren’t “too biased.”
[That’s signature significance for editorial incompetence. Any bias is too biased.] Continue reading
