As frequent vistors here know, I would argue that competent citizens should be sufficiently aware of cultural history to know who Bill Russell, Bob Feller and Bob Gibson are at very least. The elderly female contestant was alive and conscious while Bob Gibson and Bill Russell were active and frequently in the news. Surely someone presuming to appear as a contestant on “Jeopardy!” should have this level of U.S. sports history knowledge.
But perhaps you disagree…
The video above tells the whole story.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:
My ethics alarms just don’t ring very loudly on this incident. Maybe yours do.
A pregame trivia video before a Michigan State football game included a photo of Adolf Hitler on the Spartan Stadium scoreboard. (The question asked where Der Fuhrer was born.)
Though I have seen no record of whether there were complaints, the school felt it necessary to issue a profuse apology:
Really? Displaying a photograph of a historical figure who appears in hundreds of movies, is spoofed in multiple comedies and film classics, as part of a bland trivia question (It’s not like the question was about the Final Solution) requires an apology and results in a contract cancellation?
Your Ethics Alarms “Please explain this to the ethicist” Ethics Question of the Day is…
That pleasant-looking chap above is Tyree Smith of Bridgeport, Connecticut. In 2013, he killed a homeless man and ate his brain and eyeballs. (After that appetizer, he went to Subway.) Smith was found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity, and committed to a state psychiatric hospital for 60 years. Just ten years after Tyree’s bold gourmet adventures, however, the state Psychiatric Security Review Board has ruled that Smith is ready to be transitioned back into the community.
So he’s out.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:
The report on Smith’s release said in part: “He denied experiencing cravings but stated that if they were to arise, he would reach out to his hospital and community supports and providers.”
Oh. I feel much better now.
The stained glass windows in the National Cathedral show different scenes from American history. Someone made the dunderheaded decision when the cathedral was being designed to have windows honoring Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which seemed, in a setting with limited opportunities to highlight American heroes, an odd choice even back when the structure was opened to the public.
After a gunman shot and killed nine Black worshipers at a church in South Carolina in 2015 and the movement began to ban all things Confederate, the cathedral management decided that Stonewall and Lee had to go. Six years after the glass’s removal in 2017, National Cathedral has unveiled their replacement, which you can see above. The new windows , titled Now and Forever, show black protesters holding protest signs bearing the words “No,” “Not,” “Fairness” and “No foul play.”
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Guess which beauty won the Miss Zimbabwe title! It was 21-year-old Brooke Bruk-Jackson, the only white woman among the contestants.
Brooke was crowned Miss Universe Zimbabwe, and will represent the African nation at the next Miss Universe pageant. Reportedly fewer than 1% of the African nation’s population is white. Her victory has upset many residents of Zimbabwe. “All those beautiful melanated women, and you telling me the European woman won a contest for Black people?” one outraged X-user tweeted.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is….
This is a bit of a trick question. In a normal competition, the answer would be easy: if she won, she won. Beauty contests, however, are like dog shows: they are completely arbitrary and subjective contests pretending to be objective. It’s a Bizarro Wotld ethics problem: such competitions are phony (that is, unethical) anyway. They have no integrity; how can they have an ethical or unethical result?
Since any result is tainted by the inherent lie that it is based on objective criteria, isn’t this an ethics zugzwang situation? Choosing the only white woman in the competition has the appearance of bias and discrimination; so too does not choosing a competitor because she’s white, if her “objective” qualities would have made her Miss Zimbabwe if she were the “right” color.
If I were a judge, recognizing that beauty contests are absurd and that the criteria is hopelessly subjective, I would avoid choosing the only white contestant because it would raise all of these questions. If a black contestant were crowned Miss Zimbabwe, nobody would blink a metaphorical eye. Now Brooke is a target of hate mail and death threats, the pageant is under attack, the black population feels insulted, and everyone is miserable.
Good job, everybody!
I did not see this coming at all. Obviously, neither did Oprah Winfrey.
On August 31, Winfrey and Dwayne Johnson united on their Instagram and TikTok accounts to promote their People’s Fund of Maui, which they had co-launched with a combined $10 million donation. The fund would support the victims of the Maui wildfires, and O joined with The Rock to call on the public for more contributions. The following accompanied their joint video, shot in Hawaii, naturally:
Touchy-touchy!
During his a match at the US Open yesterday, German player Alexander Zverev complained that he heard a fan sing out, “Deutschland über alles!” Zverev went to umpire James Keothavong and said, “He just said the most famous Hitler phrase there is in this world, it’s unacceptable. This is unbelievable.”
The phrase, which translates to “Germany above all,” has been removed from the German national anthem, which is sung to melody composed by Haydn, (NOT Handel. as was initially posted). The original lyrics were written way back in 1800, but “Deutschland über alles” is associated with Hitler, the Nazis, the Holocaust, WW II, all sorts of bad things. It’s a casualty of the cognitive dissonance scale.
In response to the above point, an obvious one, made by GOP Presiential hopeful Nikki Haley, Jemele Hill actually wrote this…
“So part of the reason racism is such a terrible sickness in this country is because politicians like this know they can rally a certain base with the fear of OH MY GOD A BLACK WOMAN MIGHT BE PRESIDENT IF YOU DON’T VOTE FOR ME. Then we want to act all surprised when the most hateful part of the base decides they need to act out on their feelings of hatred.”
Jemele Hill is a professional and shameless race-baiter, but one might think that even she might see just a hint of another reason, other than race, why a rational voter would not want to see Kamala Harris in the White House. Harris is an unqualified, babbling, incompetent fool. (Her Ethics Alarms dossier is here.) Unlike other fools in Washington D.C., she isn’t even good at hiding it. This is why she polls as the most unpopular Vice-President in U.S. history. Haley’s point has bite because the “certain base” she is trying to rally is the portion of the population that thinks Presidents should actually be able to do the job, and that mere x chromosomes and skin shade alone—the reasons Harris was selected to be Joe’s shaddow—aren’t enough. Her message is not how Hill characterized it, but rather, “OH MY GOD A BABBLING MORONIC PHONY MIGHT BE PRESIDENT IF YOU DON’T VOTE FOR ME.”
Ethics Alarms 