Literature

Well, I Finally Saw “The Odyssey,” Kind Of, And I Have Some Ethics Observations, PART I [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Let me begin with a few critical observations, some with ethical overtones.

First of all, “The Odyssey” stinks.** It isn’t a massive, A-bomb of a movie, like “Snow White,” but its quality has to be measured in contrast to a) the embarrassing number of critical raves by people who are supposedly watching movies for a living, and b) the movie’s undeserved box office success. Hollywood is excited that Christopher Nolan’s latest over-praised film is getting people to leave their TV screens for the audience experience, and they should be. It is tragic that the draw isn’t a great movie. Or a good one. Or even a meh one.

I went into the theater with a completely open mind. I love both “The Illiad” and “The Odyssey.” I love classic spectacles, and many reviews told me I would see one worthy of the great Cecil B. DeMille. I have no bias against Nolan or for him. I do not understand his critical sanctification.

In full disclosure, I must reveal that I did not see the whole movie. At almost exactly the half-way mark (90 minutes), my female companion, a private tutor who knew Homer’s version well and whom I had invited to see the film after she complained that none of her friends would see it with her, turned to me (I thought she was asleep) and said, “I have to get up early tomorrow, and this is terrible. Let me know how bad it is from here.” And I said: “I’m coming with you.” As a director and performer, I caught several media reviewers publishing full reviews of a show of mine when they had left mid-way and not revealed this in their review. That’s unethical: I got one of them fired for doing it. In this instance, I will issue a disclaimer: It is possible that the second half of “The Odyssey” redeems the first half. If so, out of the hundreds of films I have seen over my life, it would be the first movie that accomplished that feat after such a soporific, pompous, annoying beginning. It would be like “The Terror of Tiny Town” suddenly turning into “High Noon.”

My second point is that, to my surprise, there is nothing overtly political (or “woke”) about Nolan’s film at all, which means that confirmation bias warped the perceptions of both the Left and the Right on a grand scale. All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye. I would add “politics ruins everything” in 2026, but the film hit the screen ruined, and politics isn’t what ruined it.

On to the ethical and quasi-ethical observations…

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Rep. Brandon Gill Exposes and Embarrasses The Woke Propagandist Who Runs The Smithsonian: GOOD!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

These exchanges are hard to watch unless you enjoy watching dishonest, woke propagandists being publicly exposed as the disgraces to their professions and the enemies of democracy that they are.

When the White House announced that it was reviewing Smithsonian exhibits for left-wing bias about a year ago, I wrote here (in part):

“There can be little question that the current curators of the Smithsonian museums have used their positions to promote woke agenda items and to manipulate the exhibits to try to indoctrinate museum visitors. Most of what the Federalist flagged as well as the White House’s items are genuinely objectionable…For example, Ibram X. Kendi is a race-hustler, and his presence anywhere in the museums is signature significance.

“Does the Pride Flag have genuine historical significance? I suppose so. But emphasizing Ben Franklin’s early slave-holding stinks of the “1619 Project”: by the time that he was a Founder, Ben had become a vocal foe of slavery.

“I believe that a nation’s museums should err on the side of emphasizing the positive aspect of its history and culture, but that’s easier to say than to execute. Substituting one extreme bias for another is not a solution. But as I wrote in the previous post on this topic, I think finding an ethical balance will be a futile exercise.”

In a previous post, I had written,

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Return To “The Odyssey”: Ethics-wise This Is All I Can Say Now, So I Guess I’m Going To Have To See The Damn Thing…[EXPANDED]

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Above is Ben Shapiro’s podcast review of the movie conservative commentators and pundits declared woke and offensive long before it was released. Many also circulated false information to support their position, resulting in this Ethics Alarms post from May, which, thanks to a reminder from Ethics Alarms “gotcha!” master Neil Dorr, I returned to yesterday with a correction. All the reviews are out now, and the majority of them are raves, which doesn’t prove anything in my metaphorical book. (“The Crying Game” got raves. “Don’t Look Now!” got raves. “The Substance” got raves.) I do find Shapiro’s review above brave and encouraging, however. He’s a well known conservative activist and commentator and the creator of the Daily Wire, and still pronounced the film to be a) excellent and b) largely conservative in its perspective. Ben gets ethics bonus points for not following the herd.

Tangent: Ben does not get points for his delivery. Cowabunga, how can someone be peddling a podcast without taking the time to learn how to speak distinctly and clearly? Shapiro doesn’t open his mouth sufficiently when he speaks, he places his voice in his sinuses, and he speaks way, way too fast. I could make Ben three times as effective in a two-hour coaching session. Why doesn’t someone tell him? I found listening to his review excruciating.

But I digress. Christopher Nolan is a cult director who is intermittently daring and regarded as an auteur rather than an ideologue. His initially fame flowed from his Batman films, which posed provocative ethics scenarios. Personally, I thought “Dunkirk” was an inexcusable botch of an important historical film topic, and I haven’t forgiven him for it yet. I was still thrilled to learn that he was tackling Homer’s second-best story, however. “The Odyssey” has long been obscured by Virgil’s rip-off starring Odysseus mimic Ulysses along with stop-action films confounding “Odyssey” with the voyages of Sinbad.

Shapiro isn’t the only conservative critic to undermine the Right’s narrative that the movie is more woke propaganda: Christian Toto, the rightish Hollywood critic, also praised the movie. On the other side, several reliably progressive publications have slammed it. TIME’s critic called the movie an “eye-glazing dud of a movie.” The Economist—not that I care what that Eurocentric leftist pseudo-intellectual rag says about anything,  called Nolan’s film “a very silly adaptation of “The Odyssey”, and was particularly annoyed by the imposition of modern attitudes and conduct on the story. Anachronisms bother me too, but they are so frequent in period films that I tend to give them a pass unless they are really intrusive.

I now have enough information to make some ethics calls before I see the film. I have only paid money to see three films in a theater since Grace died, a) because I am in cash-flow hell, b) because I hate seeing movies alone and c) because seeing virtue-signaling Northern Virginia audiences wearing masks makes me crazy. I will see “The Odyssey,” however.

Ethics points:

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Remember The Battle of Gettysburg

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Today is July 1, which is always treated across the United States as the gateway to a long weekend and the Fourth of July, and little more. This year, it is the run up to the 250th Anniversary of out nation’s founding. July 1 is also, however, the anniversary of the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the most important and most deadly battle of the many important and deadly conflicts in the American Civil War. The two American armies that clashed in the Pennsylvania town sustained more than 50,000 casualties on the Gettysburg battlefield, which may be the saddest and noblest place in America. It is also reputed to be the most haunted, which considering the number of souls lost between July 1 and 3 in 1863, shouldn’t surprise anyone.

[Digression: The Gettysburg Hotel is allegedly haunted, and the proprietors designate specific rooms as haunted. The rent for those rooms is less than the other rooms because, I was told when I called to inquire regarding reservations, “guests tend not to stay the whole night in those rooms.]

Our 250th celebration is an appropriate time to remember Gettysburg, because it is one of those landmark events in American history that could have so easily turned out differently, and if it had, we would never have made to the Centennial, never mind the 250th. The fact that the North prevailed was due to a confluence of random events, the essence of moral luck.

If you have not made at least one pilgrimage to the battlefield, you owe it to yourself, to your family, and to the memory of the combatants, to go. You need not swelter in July. Gettysburg is just as inspiring in the Spring or Fall.

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You Know That Ridiculous “100 Best Vocalists” List? The Guardian says “Hold My Beer….”

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Well yes, John, I’d say that’s a fair and accurate assessment.

Read the Guardian’s explanation of how they got this list. It’s even worse than the list itself, but it does explain the bias creating this mess with this single phrase: “Atwood’s horribly prescient The Handmaid’s Tale.” Prescient? I guess I missed the U.S. turning women into involuntary full-time baby machines.

This is a DEI list, and not a very smart or informed one. No Mark Twain, because “Huckleberry Finn” has been cancelled. Jack London was too much of a toxic masculine writer for these weenies, I guess. “Treasure Island” is too full of men and boys too. “The Three Musketeers” is nowhere to be found; nor is “The Count of Monte Christo.” The women in “Ivanhoe” are too girly. But knee jerk political correctness kicked three of the very best novels, all written by women, off the list: “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Gone With The Wind,” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” almost certainly the most influential and important American novel ever written. Humor is pretty much verboten, unless it’s anti-war humor (“Catch 22”). P.G. Wodehouse wrote the funniest novels of all time: the problem with including him would be picking which were the best. Yes, ancient odd-ball novel “Tristram Shandy” is on the list: I challenge anyone to claim it has even half the outright belly laughs of Wodehouse at his best.

Not including Tolkien is inexplicable (and I don’t even like his writing); similarly, the greatest novels that engage children while reaching adults as well were cut: “Wind in the Willows,” Watership Down,” and especially the two Lewis Carroll classics, “Alice in Wonderland” and “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” both among the cleverest, most original, most quoted and influential novels in the English Language.

Meanwhile, one entry on the list, “The Turn of the Screw,” isn’t even a novel. I thought the vocalist list was absurd because it was lazy and ignorant, but “The Hundred Best Novels of All Time” is even worse, because it is overtly political. “Never has such a list been more needed,” The Guardian says. Why would incompetent, biased, misleading lists ever be “needed?” Amusingly, the explanation of this thing starts with the correct assessment in its very first sentence: “[C]ompiling a list of the greatest novels of all time is an impossible task.”

Here is the stupid list. Go crazy…

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Ethics Alarms Encore: “Aesop’s Unethical and Misleading Fable: The North Wind and the Sun”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

north-wind-and-the-sun-story-oil-painting

[ Like the hillbilly who pledged to take a bath every week whether he needed it or not, this is a post from 2011 that I vow to re-post every ten years whether I need to or not. It is the mystery post of Ethics Alarms: a throw-away essay on a slow ethics day that is one of a handful that accumulates new views regularly. (Another post in this category is here, but that is a bit more understandable.) I was moved to do another re-post because an episode of “Mad Men,” which I am finally watching (and glad, because it is an excellent ethics series) had a character using Aesop’s Worst Fable Ever to explain advertising philosophy.  I wrote the original post talking with my late wife  how Aesop’s Fables were joining Mother Goose stories,  Edward Lear limericks and American folk songs in the Discarded Bin of our culture. I then stumbled upon a fable I had never read or heard about.  To my surprise the post attracted intense criticism from fans of the story; I even had to ban a commenter who got hysterical about it. Apparently there are a lot of Sun-worshipers out there. Anyway, here it is again.]

Today, by happenstance, I heard an Aesop’s Fable that I had never encountered before recited on the radio. Like all Aesop’s Fables, at least in its modern re-telling, this one had a moral attached , and is also a statement of ethical values. Unlike most of the fables, however, it doesn’t make its case. It is, in fact, an intellectually dishonest, indeed an unethical, fable.

It is called “The North Wind and the Sun,” and in most sources reads like this:

“The North Wind and the Sun disputed as to which was the most powerful, and agreed that he should be declared the victor who could first strip a wayfaring man of his clothes. The North Wind first tried his power and blew with all his might, but the keener his blasts, the closer the Traveler wrapped his cloak around him, until at last, resigning all hope of victory, the Wind called upon the Sun to see what he could do. The Sun suddenly shone out with all his warmth. The Traveler no sooner felt his genial rays than he took off one garment after another, and at last, fairly overcome with heat, undressed and bathed in a stream that lay in his path.”

The moral of the fable is variously stated as “Persuasion is better than Force” , or “Gentleness and kind persuasion win where force and bluster fail.”

The fable proves neither. In reality, it is a vivid example of dishonest argument, using euphemisms and false characterizations to “prove” a proposition that an advocate is biased toward from the outset. Continue reading →

Take Mark Zuckerberg, Add A.I., and the Result…[Link Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Unethical conduct, of course!

Lawyer-novelist Scott Turow has joined publishers Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage in a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, its CEO and founder. The complaint, filed this week in in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, claims that Meta and Zuckerberg illegally appropriated millions of copyrighted works to train Meta’s A.I. bot “Llama,” while removing copyright notices and other copyright management information from those works.

The lawsuit is hardly the first of its kind. Writers have brought lawsuits against other tech companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI for the same illegal and unethical process. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion last year to writers whose books it had used, without permission or payment, to train its A.I. program.

Amusingly, one star witness for the plaintiffs is Llama itself. Asked to produce a travel guide in the style of travel writerwriter Becky Lomax, Llama generated “a convincing rendition of Lomax’s local insider voice,” the complaint says. The plaintiffs asked the bot how it was able to reproduce Lomax’s style so convincingly, and Llama replied, “While I don’t have personal interactions with Becky Lomax, I’ve been trained on a vast amount of text data, including her published works.”

Well thank you for your candor, Llama. A whistleblower bot! What will they think of next?

A.I. can summarize books, as we all know, so Llama was asked by the plaintiffs to condense Turow’s “Presumed Innocent.” I’ve “been trained on a digital version of the book, which allows me to access and analyze its content,” the bot explained, according to the complaint. The suit alleges that “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement.”

They should ask Llama about that too.

Maybe the bot should be re-named “Rat.”

“A.I. is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training A.I. on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use,” a Meta spokesman said. “We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”

The plaintiffs say that Meta’s A.I. program threatens the livelihoods of writers and publishers. The technology can quickly produce A.I.-generated copycat books. Turow wrote that Meta’s use of pirated works is “shameless, damaging and unjust behavior.” “I find it distressing and infuriating that one of the top-10 richest corporations in the world knowingly used pirated copies of my books, and thousands of other authors, to train Llama, which can and has produced competing material, including works supposedly in my style,” Turow wrote.

Stay tuned.

Comment of the Day: “Ethics and Human Nature Observations on Ethics Mega-Dunce Jurickson Profar”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The recent post about a highly-paid baseball player recently being suspended for the entire next season after being caught using forbidden PEDs (performance-enhancing drugs) inspired a fascinating comment by Ryan Harkins that examined an entirely separate aspect of the incident than any I had considered.

There is another angle on the case that I missed too. I had focused on how foolish it was for a player who had already achieved a guaranteed contract to risk it by cheating; so far, offender Jurickson Profar has forfeited over $20 million. But in today’s Athletic, Brittany Ghiroli observes that even though he has been revealed to be a cheat and that the one outstanding season he had that caused the Atlanta Braves to sign him to a three-year, $42 million guaranteed contract was likely the result of “juicing,” Profar still will receive all of his salary for the final year of his contract, $15 million. She writes in part, regarding why players risk taking steroids in the first place, what she has been told by other players:

“Guys didn’t take performance-enhancing drugs thinking they were risking their careers. Many of them did it so they could have careers — so they could elevate their stats, sign a big multiyear deal and set themselves and their families up for life. Sure, there was a risk of getting caught and forfeiting some pay. But baseball contracts are guaranteed. So as long as they didn’t get caught three times, teams were on the hook to pay them. Big risk, big reward. And until that reward goes away, the risk will always be worth it to certain players.”

Her solution, which she says the players union will never allow, is to make a rule that being caught using steroids allows a team to cancel the rest of a players’ contract.

Ryan’s focus is on human nature’s trap that may have snagged Profar after he had won his rich contract. Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics and Human Nature Observations on Ethics Mega-Dunce Jurickson Profar”:

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From The Ethics Alarms Archives: “What Is Wrong Is That We Do Not Ask What Is Right.”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I stumbled across this post from 2022 by accident, but feel like it is a good time to repost it. It sparks recall of one of the histories’s great thinkers, G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) G.K. slaughtered Clarence Darrow in an Oxford debate over the existence of God—Darrow took the negative position, naturally, an assertion that he had won debates maintaining many times. After the debacle, Darrow commented, in essence, “My hat’s off to him. He was better prepared and won fair and square.” He was thinking, I believe, “Holy cats! This guy is smarter than me!” Chesterton, sadly, is mostly known today by Americans because of the PBS series dramatizing his “Father Brown” mysteries, stories Chesterton published as a lark. He was much more than second-rate Arthur Conan Doyle.

I also am moved to repost this because it was the sole guest post offered by my late wife, best friend, business partner and inspiration, Grace Bowen Marshall, who suddenly perished this month in 2024. She occasionally commented here, but her real love was literature, especially British literature. In her introduction she wrote in part,

“The first chapter of his 1910 book “What’s Wrong With The World” was a ‘bright-light’ experience for me. Though hopelessly outdated in some 21st century factual respects, it is considered to be one of his more interesting works because Chesterton examines the human thought process and how it affects the outcomes of different kinds of problems, reminiscent of the “observer effect.” G.K. was, in 1910, much more trusting of science and medicine than we are now, e.g., and did not address 21st century thought-process issues like the scientists’ tendency to do something simply because they can without considering if they should. Here is an excerpt from G.K. Chesterton’s “What’s Wrong With The World.”

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Comment of the Day: “On Lincoln’s Favorite Poem, and the Poems’ We Memorize…”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

What a joy to wake up this morning not only to a spectacular Comment of the Day, but also to a note from an MIA commenter who was last seen in these parts almost nine years ago! I welcome Lisa Smith back to Ethics Alarms with a well-deserved Comment of the Day honor, for her note on the post, “On Lincoln’s Favorite Poem, and the Poems’ We Memorize…”

(I couldn’t resist leading this off with one of two brilliant Charles Addams cartoon about “The Raven.” The other has Poe pondering as a raven, perching over his door, says, “Occasionally.”)

***

I don’t know – Poe’s Raven has one of my favorite lines; it isn’t at all profound, but it is profoundly delightful to speak and to allow to roll over the brain like a cool river. I memorized the entire poem when I was a teen in the late 70’s and can still recite it. (But for the life of me, I can’t remember the “new” neighbor’s names, even though they have been here five or six years. Their dog is Annie. My priorities are laid bare, I suppose.)

“And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain thrills me, fills me with fantastic terrors never felt before.”

There may be errors in there. I write it from memory alone. [JM: Pretty close! “And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain, thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before”]

Poetry makes equals of us all. From Bukowski to Shakespeare. They speak to each person in their own way.

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