apologies

Ethics Hero: Jason Aldean, No Weenie He [Updated!]

/ Jack Marshall / 74 Comments

This is strange. Not only am I not a believer in one of John Wayne’s most quoted movie lines, I’m not especially enamored of Aldean’s latest hit song and the in-your-face message it conveys. However, in one key respect, I admire Aldean’s defiant speech before singing his song tthat has been the target of furious attacks across the progressive spectrum. Here’s what he said…

What makes it a heroic moment is that he didn’t apologize. Too many celebrities, public figures and athletes have grovelled for forgiveness when their words or opinions have prompted attacks on their character and efforts to, as the singer described them, “ruin their lives.” They do it because they fear losing jobs, money, friends and associates, because what we’re experiencing today is culture-wide McCarthyism of the Left. The objectives and the methods are similar, but the ubiquity and power of the electronic media make the threat to freedom of speech and democracy even more dire—and it was pretty scary there for a while in the Fifties.

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The White House Breast-Flashing Trans Activist Offers Authentic Frontier Gibberish And A Non-Apology Apology

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Ugh.

I wouldn’t expect the individual who thought this…

…was a reasonable or ethical way to behave at the White House or to thank President Biden for inviting her and other LGBTQ activists to attend a political suck-up event would be revealed as a smart, articulate, ethical force in civic discourse. That three-minute babble-fest above, however, is special. I’m not even certain what the transsexual’s intention was. I can determine what it communicated, however:

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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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I Don’t Know Exactly What This Story Signifies, But I’m Going To Write About It Anyway…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Actress Jamie Lee Curtis posted about her chairs on Instagram for some strange reason, and in so doing, revealed the creepy photograph she has hanging in her home. Conservatives, who have been in an art critic mood thanks to “The Embrace” were triggered. “Why does Jamie Lee Curtis have a picture of a naked child stuffed inside a suitcase on her wall,” said rightish broadcaster Stew Peters. “Strong Epstein vibes.” Right-wing activist Rogan O’Handley tweeted in part, “Hollywood has-been Jamie Lee Curtis posted …an extremely disturbing picture she has in her home of a child stuffed in a suitcase. We have serious questions.”

Curtis then took down the post and photo, explaining,

What’s going on here?

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Ethics Quiz: The Cartoonist’s Regret

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

                                        Hell’s video store

Sometimes Ethics Alarms is on these matters quicker than anyone; sometimes it takes a while. Two years ago, retired “Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson confessed that the above cartoon was the only one he could think of at the moment that he felt he should apologize for. He wrote,

Ace Ethics Alarms commenter JutGory alerted me to Larson’s lament, which had been recalled in this recent post on the site “Screen Rant.” I tended to find that the cartoonist’s apology reflected well on his  ethics alarms, as did the Screen Rant pundit, who wrote,

In the end, he put his ego aside and admitted he unfairly judged the movie and criticized it without ever seeing it. The Far Side creator sharing his mistake shows that even the most talented and self-aware cartoonists can accidentally cross a line without initially realizing it. Thankfully, after seeing the movie for himself, Gary Larson understood an apology was warranted for the Far Side comic.

Jut, however, has a different take. He wrote,

It was a joke that landed well because of popular sentiment at the time it was made. Thinking about it another way, what if he saw Ishtar at the time and liked it?  He could still make the same joke because it would resonate with the public.  It would still be funny. I guess the real question is whether comics are bound by the same rules as a critic.  A critic should know what it is criticizing.  A comic is going for a laugh.  And, to the extent it was an “unfair” joke (I am not sure it is, as the movie had a widely-known bad reputation), is an apology necessary.  Most jokes are “unfair” to some extent.  But, does that, in itself, require an apology.  From a critic, yes; from a comic, no.

Ooooo, I think I may have to agree with Jut.

Maybe.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Does Gary Larson have anything to apologize for?

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Ethics Quiz: The Return Of Sacheen Littlefeather

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Apparently the Oscars are looking hard for virtue-signaling opportunities.

In this instance, they had to travel back in time 50 years and decide to make amends for one of the more ludicrous examples of celebrity grandstanding in pop culture lore. Marlon Brando, a cinch to win the Best Actor statuette for “The Godfather” in 1973, decided to snub the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences, his Hollywood colleagues and the Oscars’ TV audience by sending an obscure, Native American actress named Sacheen Littlefeather to go to the podium when Marlon’s name was read and make a statement about the abuse of Indians at Hollywood’s hands while announcing that Brando was rejecting his honor in protest. You know, because “The Godfather” was all about Native American mobs, or something.

It was a complete non sequitur, and many suspected that the whole stunt had little to do with Native American portrayals in film (about which Brando had previously said nothing) and more to do with the famously weird actor’s desire to stick his thumb in the eye of the industry that had made him rich and famous. He might have just as well had his statuette rejected by Bozo the Clown; maybe it came down to a coin flip: heads, Sasheen (it was an Indian Head nickel), tails, Bozo.

The young woman’s appearance did not go over well. “Mr. Brando very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award,” Littlefeather said. “And the reasons for this being are the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry and on television in movie reruns, and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee.”  That was a reference to a protest a month earlier,when the American Indian Movement had occupied the South Dakota town of Wounded Knee, site of the infamous massacre, to protest Hollywood’s killing and..no wait, it was the U.S. government’s treatment of Native Americans that protest was about. What did it have to do with movies, Brando, and the Oscars?

Oh, nothing. Continue reading →

“Ignorant, Stupid And With Dead Ethics Alarms Is No Way To Stay In Business, Atlantic Sports Bar & Restaurant…”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

And now for something completely appalling! The Tiverton, Rhode Island eatery posted this meme to Facebook:

Now what?

What occurred after the meme went up was that a local talk radio host called to investigate. She says the restaurant owner told her that he thought the meme was funny and then cut off the call. The employee who posted the gag alleged that he didn’t know who the girl in the photo was.

After the post had been taken down by the restaurant, a contrite apology went up in its place:

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Apology Ethics: Proxy Apologies Don’t Count

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The apology, if you missed it, is for the First Lady comparing her Hispanic audience to “breakfast tacos.”

This is pretty basic, and I’m surprised that the First Lady and the White House doesn’t know it: an apology must come from the individual responsible for the words or conduct being apologized for. Isn’t that obvious?

A relay apology by a lackey is itself an insult. It says that the aggrieved parties aren’t deemed sufficiently important for the alleged apologizer to address directly. Jill Biden’s dodge reminded me of the Sid Caesar-inspired character in “My Favorite Year,” who would regularly abuse his staff and then order his secretary to “send the guy something from me…like a new set of tires.”

To call this a perfunctory, cheap apology is being too kind. It’s cowardly, arrogant, and obnoxious, failing all of the goals a sincere apology should strive for.

Wait, When Did Georgetown Law Center Take Over The Washington NFL Team?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Very puzzling. The Washington “Commanders” (previously the Redskins) are punishing an assistant coach because he dared to express an opinion on social media that his boss and employers don’t agree with, since it is not sufficiently in line with the George Floyd Freakout, The Great Stupid, and the Democratic Party’s show trial strategy to somehow stave off disaster for Joe and Company in the November mid-terms. In this, the NFL franchise is emulating it’s city’s most prominent law school, Georgetown Law Center, which only recently finished driving away a non-conforming law professor who dared to opine that limiting the pool of potential Supreme Court Justices by race and gender was not the wise way to find the best judge available.

To paraphrase Dana above, “What’s going on here?”

Nothing good, that’s for sure. Just another unethical effort by a business entity to strongarm employees into supporting one particular party and ideology, or at least to intimidate them sufficiently that they stifle their dissenting views. There is literally no possible justification for the Redsk…I mean “Commanders” actions. Continue reading →

Now We Have Will Smith’s “Real” Apology

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

First he slapped Chris Rock in full view of America and the world, tainting a once-iconic tradition that was already shaky. Then he returned to his seat in the theater, as if nothing had happened, and shouted an obscenity at his victim. After being allowed to remain at the scene of the crime (and massive exposure of his broken ethics alarms) though he had been asked to leave and refused, Will Smith triumphantly accepted the Oscar for Best Actor, using his speech to rationalize his conduct, never coming close to a genuine apology.

Then he partied the night away like any other self-obsessed Hollywood celebrity.

Last night, after issuing a pro forma Instagram “apology” that was wretched by any standard (It was a #6 at best and a #10 at worst on the Ethics Alarms Apology Scale), Smith took a third metaphorical swing at the contrition ball he had missed twice, and at least made contact.

He announced that he was resigning from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hands out the Oscars, in the course of this statement:

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