U.S. Society

And Now For Something Completely Stupid! Will Somebody Please Explain To This Guy The Concept Of “Accountability”?

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

That’s Anthony Loffredo above. He used to look like the inset photo, but now he calls himself the “black alien,” having surgically removed his ears, nostrils and a few fingers so he could have claws. He also sharpened his teeth and dyed them purple, while getting tattooed from head to toe.

Hey, good luck to you, dude! Whatever floats your boat!

But now Tony has authored a complaint in the New York Post. He feels put-upon and discriminated against because restaurants refuse to serve him. They say he scares the customers.

Imagine that!

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Bill James Shows How To Maintain Trustworthiness

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The Bill James Baseball Handbook is full of useful facts, stats and analysis for baseball aficionados as usual this year. Bill hasn’t written as much this year as he has in the past, but his contributions are provocative, informative and sharp. James has been a major influence on my approach to ethics, even though he has devoted his considerable analytical skills to baseball, only occasionally crossing over to other realms (like true crime) with mixed results. Readers here encounter James’ concepts most frequently when I reference signature significance, but in a broad sense, reading his work over the years also heightened my appreciation of the dangers of confirmation bias and the importance of challenging conventional wisdom.

James has an unusual article in this year’s Handbook: an apology. In “OPS and Runs Scored,” he begins by saying he has “40-year-old egg on his face,” It was that long ago that the baseball stat world, in part because of James’ work, began lobbying for OPS to be the standard by which a batter’s effectiveness was measured. OPS is a stat that combines on-base percentage—how often a player reaches base via walk or hit (any being hit by a pitch), a statistic that logically is more revealing than a batting average—-and slugging percentage, which indicates power by dividing bases (a home run is four bases, a single just one) into at bats.

Bill explains that the OPS stat was sold as having an arithmetic relationship to runs scored, a straight-line relationship that meant that if a team increased it OPS by 10% it would score 10% more runs. The apology is based on the fact that James, he says, accepted this conclusion and advanced it himself like everyone else in the sabermetrics community—and the conclusion was wrong. He writes that he is very, very, very ashamed to admit that he never checked himself, but relied on what he was told. The claim was “completely wrong,” he writes. When he finally did check the relationship between OPS and runs score, he found that it was a geometric relationship, not arithmetic. If a team increases its OPS by 10% it won’t score 10% more runs. It will score 21% more runs. That’s a big difference. You have to square the OPS to get the right result in predicted runs scored.

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Facebook Suddenly Rediscovers The Democratic Principle Of Free Speech, And (Of Course), Rep. Schiff Objects

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Nick Clegg, Meta’s (that is, Facebook’s) president of global affairs, announced that Donald Trump’s Instagram and Facebook accounts would be reinstated after more than two years of being unethically banned from both platforms, while Twitter, as we now know, was doing likewise for partisan and ideological reasons. Trump was still President of the United States when Facebook censored him, and this late capitulation to what Meta must see as a slow shift in public perception doesn’t mitigate or erase that misconduct at all. We can’t trust these people, and they are very powerful. They helped, eagerly helped, advance a party’s anti-democratic agenda, and will undoubtedly try to find ways to do so again. But they can’t be effective propagandists if not enough people trust them. That’s why Clegg said,

“The public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying — the good, the bad and the ugly — so that they can make informed choices at the ballot boxBut that does not mean there are no limits to what people can say on our platform. When there is a clear risk of real world harm — a deliberately high bar for Meta to intervene in public discourse — we act.”

And who is Nick Clegg, or any Big Tech honcho, or anyone, frankly, to decide what mere words create a “risk of real world harm”—and is that “real world harm,” or “real world harm”? The guy can’t even avoid being ambiguous while explaining his company’s standards, and that’s no accident. Suppressing speech and political expression thrives in ambiguity.  Any speech that doesn’t cross the line into criminal fraud or incitement as defined in statutes does not cause either “real world harm,” or “real world harm.” The suppression of speech by biased, often ignorant, corrupt intermediaries does cause harm. But if the prevailing metaphorical winds shift again, Clegg and Meta/Facebook will censor Trump again, or any other perceived threat to the divine progressive agenda. Count on it. Continue reading →

Trust Technology To Solve Our Energy Conservation Problems, Do You? Consider Minnechaug Regional High School…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

 Minnechaug Regional High School near Springfield, Massachusetts, installed a state of the art  lighting system when it was built over a decade ago. The system was supposed to save money and energy. But on August 24, 2021, the software that ran the system broke down. Minnechaug is the only high school in its district and serves 1,200 students from the towns of Wilbraham and Hampden. The environmentally-conscious school board insisted on a “green lighting system” run on software installed by a company called 5th Light. It would automatically adjusting the lighting, saving electricity, money, and Boston from being under water.

But in August 2021, something went wrong, and the lighting system went into default. The default setting is “lights on.” The school tried to contact  Reflex Lighting only to discover that the company had been sold and resold several times since the high school was built. The current management of Reflex Lighting had a hard time locating anyone familiar with the high school’s lighting system. Many of the parts necessary for repairs had to be sent from China.

The consequence has been that the lights at the school have been blazing day and night to this day. That’s 18 months.

“We are very much aware this is costing taxpayers a significant amount of money,” Aaron Osborne, the assistant superintendent of finance at the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District. “And we have been doing everything we can to get this problem solved.”

Technology is far more complicated and subject to unexpected chaotic results than society’s leaders, managers and policy makers understand. This wasn’t an escaped T-Rex or SkyNet taking over the world, but the problem is the same: lazy assumptions about technology and insufficient attention to the danger of allowing cool tech to exceed the ability of human beings to operate it competently.

Strange Medical Ethics: A Personal Tale

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

My wife just completed a procedure for a blacked carotid artery, obviously a stroke risk. She had the same procedure two years ago on the other side of her neck. In the discussions with the surgeon, he emphasized that this was a serious condition and had been put off too long: the artery was 80-90% blocked.

“You have a choice,” he said. “I can take care of this side just like last time, and the problem will be gone.”

“Or you can take part in an NIH study that will use experimental drugs and treatment over the next five years. It’s your choice.”

I had to interject. “What do you recommend?” I asked. “It’s up to you,” he replied. I said, “You just said this is a serious problem that poses the risk of a debilitating stroke. You said that you could fix the problem next week, and it would be gone. Why would my wife choose to endure the condition for five years?”

“For the good of humanity,” he answered. Continue reading →

Clean-up On Aisle Ethics, 1/25/2023: “What The Buck?”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It’s come to this: as Hollywood has decided to prioritize extreme politics, political correctness and “diversity” over entertainment and even profits, and classic comedies like “Animal House,” “Airplane!,” “Tootsie,” “Blazing Saddles” and “The Bad New Bears” have been blacklisted,  Tinsel Town puts out films like “The Menu.” That 2022 film is allegedly a comedy in which Ralph Fiennes, as a bitter master chef who hosts gourmet dinners for the elite and wealthy at a secluded island, murders his guests as “dessert” by scattering Graham crackers around, clothing them in giant marshmallow jackets, placing milk chocolate hats on their heads, and setting everything, and them, on fire. Yes, human s’mores!

It got rave reviews from critics, too.

1. Not this again… Jackson Hewitt 2023 commercial for getting tax refund advances employs yet another juvenile “we cleverly used a dirty word without really saying it” trope that treats its audience like sniggering 11-year-olds, using “What the buck?” and “Buck yeah!” It would be slightly less objectionable if the ploy was original, but it’s not.

I don’t trust companies that have such a low opinion of their market, or, in the alternative, are run by dolts who would approve such a gutter-level campaign. Nobody should. Fuck Jackson Hewitt.

2.  The Baseball Hall of Fame announced the results of its voting yesterday, and ethics prevailed: steroid cheats and toxic assholes Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez both failed to get the necessary votes again. Good. The only player elected was Scott Rolen, who was a quality player and terrific fielder at third base over a long National League career, but one of the least famous players ever elected to the Hall of Fame. I firmly believe that being famous, which includes being considered the best player on one’s team and one of the best in the league, should be a mandatory criteria to get into Cooperstown. Many baseball writers—you know, morons—argue that baseball is too demanding of its Hall, with less than 1% of its players being considered sufficiently “great.” It should literally become the “Hall of Very Good,” said Ryan Spilborghs, a former MLB player who has his own show on the Siruis-XM baseball channel. His sole justification? The other pro sports are more lenient. That was it. “Everybody does it.” Continue reading →

Why Our Culture Needs Old Movies

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Typical of the free-association manner in which my brain works, a fatuous essay by a New York Times pundit about a subject he doesn’t understand (but I do)–performing—excavated an ethics memory from my childhood that hadn’t sparked a neuron in decades.

Frank Bruni, for some reason, felt it was necessary to re-hash the ancient debate over whether a movie star is really a skilled “actor,” and can be deserving of an Oscar over “real” actors. Naturally, his target was Tom Cruise and his performance in “Top Gun: Maverick,” the most popular and successful movie of the year. I don’t feel like arguing with Bruni over this; I’ve had the debate too many times. (No, Cruise isn’t going to get an Oscar for this sequel, but he has given Oscar-worthy performances before, because nobody can play Tom Cruise as well as he can). I’ll just give the short version: if an actor plays a part better than any other actor could, it is irrelevant that he can’t play any other part. As a director, I’ll cast a charismatic one-trick pony who is perfect for a particular role over a brilliant, versatile artist who could play Hamlet to cheers every time.

But that is neither here nor there. Here is there: Bruni’s discourse made me think of Spencer Tracy, a movie star and superb actor who had a wonderfully dismissive view of his own field, and then “Edison the Man,” the 1940 biopic, starring Tracy, about Thomas Edison. It was a black and white film that my father made a point of having me see. That film sparked my early interest in Edison, American inventors, technology and extraordinary people through history.

One scene in the movie, however, made a special impression. Edison and his research lab have been laboring on the creation of a practical incandescent light bulb day and night for months. Finally they think they have the right design, and the tungsten filament bulb to be tested is carefully assembled. The new bulb is handed to Jimmy, a teen who does odd jobs at the laboratory, and he dashes across the facility to give it to Edison. In his excitement, Jimmy trips and falls, smashing the precious bulb. Edison’s crew is furious; Edison reproaches the lad. Jimmy is devastated and inconsolable. When Edison’s men finally craft a replacement bulb, Edison calls for Jimmy and give him custody of the bulb, and asks him again to carry it to its destination on the other side of the building. Jimmy, striding carefully and slowly this time, completes his historic task.

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Comment Of The Day: “In The Dispute Over The Fate Of The Elgin Marbles, It Is Time For The Brits To Choose Ethics Over Law”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Last week, Ethics Alarms confidently presented the ethics verdict that it was high time—more than high time, in fact—for the British Museum to finally return the so-called “Elgin Marbles” to Greece. As the priceless art was literally ripped off the Parthenon, I didn’t think the question justified an ethics quiz. I still am unconvinced by the arguments that the Brits should hold on to their ill-gotten gains, but I am the grandson of a Spartan, after all. There were several excellent comments asserting ethical grounds for the British position; this one was outstanding.

Here is P.M.Lawrence’s epic tutorial, rebuttal, and Comment of the Day on the post, “In The Dispute Over The Fate Of The Elgin Marbles, It Is Time For The Brits To Choose Ethics Over Law”:

***

“In the early 1800s, Lord Elgin, a British aristocrat, shipped to England treasures of Greek antiquity that he had strip-mined from Greece, including the carved frieze panels that had decorated the Parthenon. Supposedly this was done with the permission of Turkey, which was then ruling Greece, which is like your home invaders giving neighbors permission to take the art off your walls…”

There is a little more to it than that:-

– On the legal maxim of “nemo dat quod non habet”, of course the Turks couldn’t convey title. But they didn’t, they offered a quitclaim, as it were; they removed themselves from obstructing.

– As regards any original owners, there simply weren’t any left. The last remaining ones were ended by rounds of persecution of pagans, centuries earlier.

– As far as any generic claims of common heritage of western civilisation go, and those claims only go for want of better (there being no direct heirs), what better place to put the items than in a museum furthering that common heritage? Are the British somehow less heirs of that than are the Graeculi? Particularly considering how much safer the items were in that museum(those not taken have suffered horribly from war, corrosion, and what not). And, of course, the very word “museum” proclaims that furthering that common heritage.

Now, none of that conveys title to the British Museum, but adverse possession in the years since does – adverse, in that no better claimant came forward. Just as today’s Greeks feel an understandable connection to these items, as they do to the Lions of St. Mark’s, so too do today’s British – and as today’s Venetians do to the Lions of St. Mark’s. They are as intertwined with the histories of each place as of the other.

The Solomonic solution would be to sand blast the items to the condition of those not taken if any effort to transfer them were ever made. But I expect the Sir Humphreys will loudly assert ownership while underhandedly arranging a loan in name only with no means of foreclosing, just as they have with foundational documents that ought to have remained in British archives. That would satisfy none but the Sir Humphreys.

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Sunday Morning Ethics Warm-Up: I Woke Up Feeling Like A King!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Unfortunately, the king I woke up feeling like is King Canute. I was reviewing the trends in the past ten years of ethics posts, and there is no question that the nation’s ethical bearings are worse, not better. Fewer people read the blog than five years ago.

Ethics blindness in national and political matters seems more advanced among my neighbors, colleagues, friends and relatives than ever before (although almost none of these read Ethics Alarms or have ever read it, which says something about me, though I’m not sure what,)This was a particularly depressing week from the ethics perspective, but then they’re all depressing. The unfolding Joe Biden document scandal kept getting worse, and rather than admit Biden’s hypocrisy and the dangerous double standards applied to Trump, partisans invested in a weak, corrupt, mentally deficient President shifted into denial mode. Evidence of Virginia schools deliberately sabotaging superior students in pursuit of “equal outcomes” for those who don’t do their homework, come to school stoned and disrupt classes kept on coming, and the DEI-converted dealt with the matter by denying it. A Democratic Congressional leader introduced legislation criminalizing not just speech, but thought. Facebook chilled MY speech because its bots didn’t understand what I posted.

The signs of rot were (are) everywhere, in matters large and small. I learned that a lawyer received professional discipline because a judge thought “Gadzooks!” was a dirty word, or something, reminding me that we rely on judges who have the same level of literacy as Michael Steele.

I received the always welcome “Bill James Baseball Handbook” for 2023, and a featured article by Joe Posnanski, much revered as an intellectual giant among sportswriters, demonstrated that the intellectual giant among sportswriters is as ethically inert as all the others. There were lots of outbursts like this one, by a much-honored African-American writer whose work has appeared in the The Atlantic, New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME, ESPN, NPR, CNN, and more:

It’s worth mentioning, I guess, that the way we use the tale of King Canute the Great  (985 to 1035) who was real king of England and a successful one, is unfair to him, making him out to be an idiot. If he did have his throne placed on the banks of the Thames and futilely demand that the rising tide subside (and there is some evidence that the incident really occurred), it was not because he was arrogant or a fool, as the typical telling of the story implies. As “the rest of the story” shows, as related in one of the earliest accounts ( by Henry of Huntingdon in his “Historia Anglorum”):

“But the sea carried on rising as usual without any reverence for his person, and soaked his feet and legs. Then he moving away said:  “All the inhabitants of the world should know that the power of kings is vain and trivial, and that none is worthy of the name of king but He whose command the heaven, earth and sea obey by eternal laws”.

The ones who should heed King Canute are the allegedly smart people like John Kerry (Sorry, I couldn’t write that without giggling) at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Continue reading →