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

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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Unethical Film and Theater Reviewer Bias, Part I: “Straight People Can’t Act”

Film and theater reviewer biases and politics have always been a blight on the field: the late, absurdly worshiped New Yorker reviewer Pauline Kael would pan terrific John Wayne movies just because he had supported Barry Goldwater. It’s hard to watch a revival of “Hair” (or the stunningly bad film version) without wondering, “What were those reviewers raving about, with that faux rock music and the trite book?” Why, peace, pot and love, baby! ” Hair” was against the war in Vietnam, so it had to be at least as good as “Oklahoma!”

Now, of course, in the era of the Great Stupid, explaining what Big Brother’s tastes in the arts require is a job requirement for film and theater reviewer who are paid in real money rather than free passes. In a New York Times column about how “outdated” classic musicals (that is, insufficiently woke) can be salvaged by appropriately sensitive directors, for example, readers were informed by an “expert” that only gay actors can convincingly play gay characters.

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Ethics Observations on J.D. Vance’s “Childless Cat Ladies” Controversy

The Axis of Unethical Conduct “pounced” on newly nominated Trump running mate J.D. Vance this week over a “re-surfaced” video in which Vance said that the country is being run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” The comment was made in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson when Vance was beginning his ultimately successful campaign for the Senate.

Observations:

1. Gee, just the GOP needs—TWO candidates who lack functioning filters between their brains and their mouths.

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So Kamala Harris is “Exciting” Now? Fascinating.

I must confess, I have reached the point where the talking point memos going out to the Axis, its allies and useful idiots from the Democratic National Committee are so obvious that they are insulting. We have already been bombarded with the edicts from earlier memos: Trump is a “convicted felon” and a “threat to democracy.” If he’s elected, it will be our “last election” and “the end of American as we know it.” These memos are getting a bit frayed around the edges; the “threat to democracy” line is especially risible coming from a party that just chose a candidate for POTUS using no democratic tools whatsoever—no debates, no primaries, just a pre-rigged convention. This is the most Machiavellian choice of a Presidential candidate since a “smoke-filled room” produced a GOP Presidential candidate named Warren G. Harding—and didn’t that work out well! (To be fair to poor Warren, he was famously likable, which Harris is definitely not. Her staff had a 92% turnover in just three years; she is apparently roundly detested as a boss, almost as much as Donald Trump is.) These people really think Americans are idiots, and, sadly, they may be right. Since Joe Biden was kicked to the curb, I have heard double figures of delegates, Democratic officials and pundit describe the forced anointment of Kamala Harris as the party’s standard bearer in November described as either “exciting” or exhilarating.” This is only slightly more dishonest than the same people—and Harris—describing Joe Biden solving Rubik’s Cube blindfolded until they were shocked—shocked!—to discover that he was unable to maneuver through the complexities of Tic-Tac-Toe. For almost four years, the adjective to be most appropriately applied to Harris has been “embarrassing.”

Here at Ethics Alarms, I gave her a Julie Principle pass for the most part, meaning that I let dozens of absurd and dishonest, not to mention incomprehensible, statements by Harris go by without comment because it was obvious that—well, he’s how I put it before she was even sworn in, when she stole a Martin Luther King anecdote and claimed it was about her:

If, as many seem to assume, Harris is making stuff up to pander to the crowd, why fixate on this episode? We all know, or should, that the woman is shallow, has no core, and that saying whatever she thinks will endear herself to the most people at the moment is her defining characteristic. As Julie sang, “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly”: Kamala’s gotta make stuff up to pretend she’s something she’s not for the gullible, the naive, the hopeful and the blind. This latest example doesn’t tell us anything we already don’t know.

Even with that call to be merciful, Harris ended up with a hilariously long (and terrifying) EA dossier , especially for a Vice-President. I had a post in March of 2022 musing about whether she was the dumbest Vice-President ever, which Newt Gingrich had claimed. Kamala made my head explode a couple of months later when she said at some public appearance, “We will work together, and continue to work together, to address these issues, to tackle these challenges, and to work together as we continue to work operating from the new norms, rules, and agreements, that we will convene to work together…We will work together.” That time I summed up Harris this way:

Her existence as the #2 elected official in the United States is a profound embarrassment to the nation, the public and the democratic system. That such a clueless dolt was chosen purely because of her gender and race insults that gender and those ethnic communities unintentionally complicit in her creation.

That the news media refused to enlighten the public about just how incompetent she is proves its uselessness.

That Harris and her supporters have the astounding cheek to cry “racism” if criticism is aimed her way, when she routinely insults the public by presuming that first-grade level verbal pablum is good enough to feed them because she doesn’t have the capacity to offer anything better, impugns everyone responsible for her presence in place of someone minimally responsible and trustworthy.

Wait, when did she become “exciting” and “exhilarating”? How did I miss that? It must have been like “Charlie,” the now forgotten movie that earned Cliff Robertson an Oscar for playing a—oh, what’s the acceptable term now? To hell with it: in the movie he was referred to as “retarded”—man who suddenly became a genius after taking an experimental drug. Then his IQ starts slipping away—like Biden’s—and by the end of the movie he has the mind of a four-year-old and is playing on a swing.

Non-political junkies hadn’t paid any attention to Harris, who also looked “exciting” and “exhilarating” when the Axis media designated her its favorite to be the Democratic nominee at the head of the 2020 ticket in 2019. Then she started debating, and talking, and showing her smug and obnoxious personality. Her unimpressive background started coming out too, how she rose to prominence in California by being California political boss Willie Brown’s mistress, how she was a law-and-order, anti-woke prosecutor until she ran for Senator, and suddenly morphed into a radical progressive to get elected.

Harris’s candidacy didn’t even make it to 2020 because her polling sank to Titanic levels the more the public listened to her. The Democratic field was hardly a stellar batch (which is how Joe Biden ended up as the nominee), but Harris impressed less than such stars as Andrew Yang and Amy Klobuchar. Tulsi Gabbard mopped the metaphorical floor with Kamala in the pre-New Hampshire primary debate.

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Incompetent Elected Official of the…Let’s See Now…HOUR?: Taunton (Mass.) Mayor Shaunna O’Connell

She’s a Republican, incidentally. Ah, Taunton. Population: About 60,000. I remember it well from my Boston days. The city is famous for its dog-racing track. My Uncle Charlie, my mom’s youngest brother, a nice guy who blew his money on the greyhounds, went there often. And lost.

But I digress. Taunton Mayor Shaunna O’Connell was arrested and appeared in court to be arraigned on charges of charges of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and domestic assault and battery. Police arrested her after when her husband called police during a fight.

She hit him with a crowbar. Allegedly.

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Ethics Quiz: The Biden Campaign Model

This one fascinates me the more I think about it.

Above is the model at the Official Biden-Harris Campaign Store advertising the Biden-Harris T-shirt. There are three other models to be seen at the home site: a kind of wimpy male-of-indeterminate-color modeling a “Free on Wednesdays” T-shirt (I don’t know what that means), a butch-looking female model who might be a stand-in for Lia Thomas, and a chunky middle-aged bespectacled guy, also of-some-sort-of-color, holding a “Color-Changing Mug.” This is clearly a DEI campaign site: apparently white models need not apply. But the model above is strikingly unattractive as well as sexually ambiguous. Unless the marketing industry no longer operates according to the Cognitive Dissonance Scale, the idea in advertising is still to connect the product with positive images.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

What’s going in here?

I could see the same model being used in a satirical ad put out by the Trump campaign. Is this flagrant virtue signaling? (What’s the virtue?) Pandering to radical feminists? DEI madness? Gross incompetence?

Oh…here are two of the Trump campaign’s models:

Yeccchh.

“Platforming Ignorance!” What a Useful and Descriptive Term….

The term, which I had never heard before or at least had never focused on, is featured in an essay by Jonathan Tobin at the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) titled, “Candace Owens is a cautionary tale about platforming ignorance.” Indeed she is: I had written about how Owens has embarrassed conservatives by, as I put it last November, “being revealed as an ignoramus” by her embrace of Palestinina propganda after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. More recently I listed her as one of the political performance artists (Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Bill Maher, James Carville, Ann Coulter, yada yada) who cannot be trusted to provide genuine opinions because they calibrate what they say and write according to what they think will get them the most clicks, eyeballs, gigs, and cash. Clearly, I was giving Candace far too much credit.

She is a genuine, bona fide idiot, whose recent self-outing as a virulent anti-Semite ( the inspiration for the JNS piece) is just the tip of a really stupid iceberg. As conservative collective AG noted on “X,” Owens has recently declared that…

  • Israel was involved with 9/11
  • The earth may be flat
  • It’s absurd to believe dinosaurs roamed the earth and were killed by an asteroid
  • Macron’s wife is secretly a man
  • Jews were behind the Bolshevik revolution and it was secretly a genocide targeting Christians that was worse than the Holocaust
  • The Holocaust is either fake or severely exaggerated
  • The crimes of the allies in WWII and post-WWII were worse than anything the Nazis did
  • The deportation of ethnic Germans from the rest of Europe post-WWII was worse than The Holocaust
  • US dropped the bomb on Nagasaki to target Christians
  • Israel/AIPAC/Jews were secretly behind the JFK assassination
  • A secret cabal of Hollywood Jews were behind the death of Michael Jackson and people around him.

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Ethics Quiz: Harvard’s Honorary Degrees

Hmmmm.

Here are the distinguished individuals Harvard saw fit to award honorary degrees to at graduation this year. (I’m sure some of them, heck, maybe all, are very fine people) :

  • Gustavo Dudamel, music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, his home country, and music and artistic director-designate of the New York Philharmonic
  • Jennie Chin Hansen, immediate past chief executive of the American Geriatrics Society, and past president of AARP—a pioneer in care for the elderly.
  • Sylvester James Gates Jr., Clark Leadership Chair in Science and Distinguished University Professor and a University System of Maryland Regents Professor, a theoretical physicist who has worked on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory.
  • Joy Harjo, twenty-third Poet Laureate of the United States, 2019-2022, the author of 10 books of poetry (plus plays, children’s books, and two volumes of memoir), and a performing musician who played for many years with her band, Poetic Justice, and has produced seven albums.
  • Maria A. Ressa, co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 (with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov) for her brave, independent news coverage of her native Philippines.

(Former Harvard president Lawrence Bacow also got an honorary degree, but ex-Harvard presidents always do if they manage not to get fired for plagiarism, so he doesn’t count.)

Interesting. Out of five honorees, not one was a white American, not even a white woman, or a white LGTBQ warrior. A Venezuelan male, a female Filipino, Harjo is Native American, Gates is black, and Hansen is Asian American.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Week is…

Is there anything wrong with this roster?

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Yeah, I Think It’s Fair To Say That Tricking a Guy into Having Sex-Change Surgery So You Can Marry the New Her and Gain Control of Her Family’s Property is Unethical….

As weird as things have gotten in the U.S., much weirder stuff goes on abroad, and I ignore most of it. This story, however, requires that attention be paid.

Mujahid, a 20-year-old from Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh–that’s India—claims a hospital staff performed a sex change operation on him without his consent. A man named Omprakash, the alleged victim claims, had been harassing him for years and deceived him into believing that he was suffering from a serious medical condition. He then offered to take him to Mansoorpur hospital, where he was sedated and then operated on. “He brought me here, and the next morning I had an operation. When I regained consciousness, I was told that I had been changed from a boy to a girl!” a sobbing Mujahid told NDTV reporters. “When I woke up, Omprakash told me that I am a woman now and that he would take me to Lucknow to marry me. He threatened to kill my father if I resisted.”

Yeah, definitely unethical, in my expert opinion.

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: the Woke Shackles Tighten…

Jennifer Sey, once a competitive gymnast on the U.S. Women’s Olympic team, has launched a new clothing line focused on the threat to women’s sports by the woke-driven incursion of “transitioned” or “transitioning” biological males.

TikTok responded to her ad on that platform by banning he company from advertising with this:

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