“Jellybean”
Yes, he really did: best-selling British crime novelist R J Ellory actually went on Amazon, and using fake names like “Jellybean” and “Nicodemus Jones,” wrote rave reviews of his own books . In one review, he called one of his novels a “modern masterpiece” and wrote that it “just stopped me dead in my tracks.”
How embarrassing. Sales a little soft lately, R J? He also used fake identities to post negative reviews of his rivals’ works. Continue reading
Reader Yardley’s observation on the endless back and forth between a peculiar commenter and her critics here is worthy of Comment of the Day status, if only to make us pause to consider why we are arguing, and what we are really arguing about. Here is his observation on the Most Entertaining Ethics Alarms Discussion Ever…
“I can’t help but wonder what the value of such debates are once the primary points and counter points have been stated, and restated; then restated once again ad nauseum. I don’t have the answer of course, but it has got my wheels spinning. Maybe there’s merit in it, or maybe it’s about flexing our egos, or maybe it’s a sort of meme warfare… ideas battling it out for control over our brains. Certainly, it is entertainment! The most I can say is that the spectacle of it all somehow subtracts from content. Worse yet, at a certain point those on the rational side of the argument only serve to give status to the mistaken party. When a clash of ideas turns into a Hundred Years’ War, even the winners get a bloody nose.”
________________________________
Graphic: XKCD
Ethics Alarms now pauses in gratitude to give a stunned and admiration-filled salute to all the participants in the still perking comment donnybrook that has followed what I thought initially would be a minor, fairly obvious post about the ethics of vegetarians hosting a wedding reception and imposing a strict vegetarian menu despite the protests of their parents that some guests would be uncomfortable. Triggered by a first-time visitor, her unique perspective and her sometimes cloying way of expressing it, what erupted has been a 375+ comment multi-party debate that had everything: wild analogies, accusations, counter-accusations, common sense, enlightenment, gibberish, creativity, hypocrisy, Eastern philosophy, tangents, 60’s nostalgia, humor (intentional and not), at least two terms I had never encountered before but will cherish forever—“deepity” and “wackaloon” —-and even some ethics. In addition to provocateur livvy1234, who has registered more than80 comments so far and enough words to comprise a novella, key combatants include Joe Fowler, Karla Marie Robinette, Brian, deery, Elizabeth I, Michael, Libby Torgeson, Joy, Jan Chapman…but especially tgt, the Ethics Alarms 2011 Commenter of the Year, who really has justified his title with gusto this time.
Thanks, everybody. What fun.
“You say OIHO, and I say OHIO…Let’s call the whole thing off!”
This is, even now, but a mini-train wreck, not even an H-O size train wreck, but more like a wreck involving those wooden Thomas the Tank Engine models, maybe between Percy and Duncan. Still, it’s depressing, and shows how far our political system and the media have sunk.
President Obama was campaigning in Ohio, and got conned into being part of a cheerleading-style array spelling out OHIO, except that he was in the wrong position, and ended up as the H in “OIHO.” This may have been legitimate fodder for Jon Stewart on a slow day, but otherwise was completely meaningless, and not worth the time it took to write or talk about it. Never mind, though: the conservative blogs and talk show mockers were out in force, pointing out that while the liberal media ridiculed Dan Quayle for misspelling “potato” and Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin for any number of ridiculous statements, they readily excused Mr. Perfect because in their eyes he can do no wrong. Continue reading
“Don’t smile at me, you inconsiderate fool! Do you know what time it is? Why should I accept your wares before they were scheduled to arrive? I need my sleep, not that blue-collar peasant like you could comprehend that! Mark my words, your employer will hear of this outrage; now get back into your pathetic truck and only return when it is convenient for me!”
We don’t see this kind of unethical conduct that often, so it is worthy of note.
A consumer named Richard wrote to Consumerist to complain that his order from Amazon, which he ordered on a Friday and was scheduled for three-day delivery, arrived in only one day, on Saturday morning. Naturally, he was outraged:
“Imagine my surprise to be woken up out of a sound sleep at 8am by the incessant ringing of my door bell .. probably 10 times. I’m thinking something bad happened. I jump up go to answer the door and find out it’s just OnTrac delivering my $23 package from Amazon! As much as I might appreciate getting something 2 days early, I (and my neighbors) appreciate our sleep even more. I called Amazon and the CSR was sympathetic but could do nothing but leave “feedback” with OnTrac. So fair warning… unless you need an early morning wake up call, don’t order from Amazon… because just because the order says Monday, doesn’t mean you won’t get someone leaning on your door buzzer until you give in and answer it, no matter the time of day.”
Not to leave you in suspense, Richard is what an old poker-playing buddy used to call a “jerkola.” I wonder what other examples of efficient service aggravate him. Does he get angry when repair men arrive at the start of the day, rather than making you wait all day at home wondering if they’ll arrive at all? Does he complain when airplanes arrive at their destination early? When Verizon doesn’t make you wait forever to talk to a real person after negotiating your way through phone-tree hell? How about the Department of Motor vehicles—does Richard get ticked off when they call his number before he need another shave? Continue reading
Who is “Melky Cabrera” really?
Melky Cabrera shocked Major League Baseball by getting caught mid-season using banned metabolic steroids, it’s true. It is also true that this marks him for all time as a cheater, and something of an idiot, since the penalties for PED (performance enhancing drug) use are devastating to a baseball player’s reputation and wallet, and because, unlike when Barry Bonds was breaking records and racking up MVP trophies while being juiced, the game has belatedly decided that it isn’t going to let games, championships and records be distorted by chemical means.
Melky, however, is special among baseball’s cheaters. Only he, as far as we know, decided to attempt an elaborate internet deception to try to duck responsibility after he had been caught.
Actress Jodie Foster was moved to write a passionate essay for The Daily Beast by the firestorm of gossip, rumor and harsh criticism surrounding the romantic triangle involving “Twilight” star Kristin Stewart, her live-in boyfriend and “Twilight” heart-throb Robert Pattinson, and a 40-year-old film director caught on video smooching with Stewart. Foster is, as we all know, a former child star, like Stewart, who co-starred with Jodie in “Panic Room” when the 20-something “Twilight” idol was just 11. In her piece, Foster eloquently (even though she went to Yale) condemns the fishbowl life that celebrities have to endure today in the social media, and expresses the belief that parents do their children no favors when they push them to early Hollywood stardom.
“I’ve said it before and I will say it again,” she writes, “if I were a young actor today I would quit before I started. If I had to grow up in this media culture, I don’t think I could survive it emotionally. I would only hope that someone who loved me, really loved me, would put their arm around me and lead me away to safety.”
I have been privileged to know former child actor Paul Petersen, a truly great man who has tirelessly and passionately worked to alert the public to the inherent abuse of child stardom in Hollywood, and to make the industry more sensitive and humane to its youngest participants. It was Paul who alerted me to Foster’s commentary.
You can read it here.
Is it “Oops!”, “Damn!” or “Better luck next time”?
I once had a dear friend in the DC theater community who committed an industry taboo when he mounted a play before, rather than after, obtaining the performing rights. His company was in the red, and his intent was to get some advance sales to pay the licensing fees that he otherwise couldn’t afford. It was a desperate, foolish scheme and an unethical one, as he readily admitted, and my friend paid dearly for it, as he was fired as the head of the theater company he had founded, and rendered a pariah in the community. What always infuriated him, however, was the instant condemnation and pious pronouncements he received from his peers in the theater world. “I know for a fact that everyone of them either would have done the same thing or had done the same thing, or worse, to keep their theaters running,” he told me. “I was wrong and I know I was wrong, but for them to act as if I am some kind of a monster when I know they are really thinking, ‘Yikes! I better be more careful, that could have been me!’ is driving me crazy.”
I wonder if disgraced CNN host and Time writer Fareed Zakaria is thinking the same thing as his colleagues in the news media and assorted web commentators are describing him as a plagiarist and an untrustworthy fraud in the wake of his suspension for lifting a paragraph from another writer’s work and putting it in his own Time essay without attribution. After the parallel passages were flagged on the conservative website Newsbusters (you didn’t think he would have been outed by a liberal site, did you—or that Newsbusters would have been looking for plagiarism from a rightward journalist?) both Time and CNN suspended Zakaria indefinitely.
This was the appropriate response. Zakaria is an opinion journalist, or a pundit: the idea that he is surreptitiously cribbing from others undermines his credibility substantially and perhaps fatally. That is not an entirely fair description of what Zakaria did, however. What he engaged in was “scraping,” the web-age technique where an author cuts and pastes a passage or more from another work and uses it as the foundation for a portion of a supposedly original article. When the passage in question is substantive, contains the ideas and conclusions of the author whose work is being scraped, or is the product of another writer’s research, that is indeed plagiarism. When the passage being scraped is something the borrowing author could have written himself, however, it is more accurately described as lazy. It is still wrong, but it does not necessarily rise to the level of intellectual theft that can reasonably justify calling the author untrustworthy. Continue reading
“Look, a monkey! Must be racist.”
Two recent incidents at the London Olympics—really, really stupid incidents—-caused me to wonder anew what it must be like to be black in this country, and to despair. I’m not referring to discrimination, exactly. I think a better term would be “unhealthy obsession.” To be black in America is to be automatically a subject of controversy and conflict, and I assume this is a crushing, almost irreducible burden that makes daily life, happiness and sanity infinitely more difficult for African-Americans than for any other group. It appears that the culture, the media, the public, interest groups and government just won’t ever leave them alone to just live.
Here is U.S.tennis star Serena Williams, and she has just won a Gold Medal in singles tennis. Williams, whose passion and effervescence is almost as attractive as her athleticism, does a little happy dance. Not too much of one—nobody could accuse her of preening or taunting like NFL players after a touchdown. And yet she is criticized anyway, by Fox Sports among others, because what looked like just a happy dance to me was really a version of the “Crip Walk,” a hip-hop move adopted by the notorious L.A. street gang, the Crips, about 40 years ago. Since Serena is black, some saw this as a poorly-timed reference to drug-dealing killers, or even glorification of gang culture. Three seconds of a little jig, and suddenly the Olympics is the site of a race incident—and this is an ethics alarm that should never have gone off.
Or should it? The “Crip Walk” is considered so provocative in some neighborhoods that schools have banned it. From that perspective, maybe critics have a point; it might have been irresponsible for an African-American athlete from L.A. to do the move. Williams—I love you, Serena!—brushed off the controversy by saying, simply, “I don’t care.” Still, a pure moment of an athlete’s joy in victory was marred, because the victor happened to be black. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms just isn’t constructed for large waves of angry commenters, as are occasionally generated when I touch on some interest group third rail. I try to respond to as many coherent comments as possible, but when too many of them arrive on the same topic, my “civilized colloquy on ethics” model breaks down, and I find myself spending too much time writing dangerously hasty responses to trolls, fanatics, web terrorists and others who have as much interest in ethics as I have in stamp collecting. I also have to individually green light every new commenter, and this alone takes up time that could be better spent researching and writing new posts.
Legendary conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds generously linked to my recent post on the “Harry Reid is a pederast” campaign online, and that’s generally a good thing, one that most bloggers would give their right arm for,since his blog Instapundit is one of the most popular (and professional) on the web. This, in turn, triggered the so-called “Instalanche” at Ethics Alarms, which has resulted in this blog getting the equivalent of two weeks of typical traffic in 24 hours. Sadly, the vast majority of the comments following the Instalanche are examples of the kind of thinking this blog was established to combat, and as a whole, the group is a graphic example of why political discourse, and indeed the political system itself is so toxic and dysfunctional. This is no knock on Prof. Reynolds, whose blog I read most days, and who is almost always rational and fair. It is a knock on the majority of his readers (not all) who chose to leave comments here.
The comments were, in addition to being non-ethical in nature, brain-meltingly repetitious in their fallacies and themes. It’s bad enough having more comments than I can keep up with; having to read nearly identical sentiments over and over again is more than I can stand. And since it is clear that most of the commenters aren’t bothering to read the thread, never mind the links in the posts they are railing about or the rest of the blog, this is not going to cease anytime soon. Yes, I know that most of this breed of commenter doesn’t want a response, because their comments are seldom thought through or carefully crafted, and they are shocked to have their sloppy reasoning called so. (Then they accuse me of ad hominem attacks.) Too bad. This isn’t a bulletin board or a graffiti wall.
So I’m no longer going to answer individually the vast majority of the comments on the post in question, “Funny! But Wrong: The “Harry Reid Is A Pederast” Rumor,” just as most of you will not have the time, stomach or stamina to wade through all the comments to it. What I offer for the convenience of everyone concerned, but mostly me, is this, a directory of the most common comments from the current Instalanche, and my answers to them. I will direct all future commenters on the original post here, and the odds are that they will find their reply waiting for them. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 