Comment of the Day: “Clark Gable, Loretta Young, and the Betrayal of Judy Lewis”

-judy-lewis

Ethics Alarms has had an influx of new readers lately (Thanks, “O’Reilly Factor”!) and many have been visiting and commenting on older posts that I hadn’t thought about for a long time. “Evangeline” found one of the saddest and strangest, my post in December of 2011 about the death of Judy Lewis, who was the love child of Hollywood legends Loretta Young and Clark Gable. Gable, the “King of Hollywood,” never acknowledged her as his daughter, and Young, who like Gable was married and afraid of harming her reputation, pretended to adopt the girl, never revealing to her that she was her real mother, and the top leading man in movies was her father. (Judy was a dead ringer for him, too, as you can see in the photo above.) You should read the original post, here.

Evangeline apparently knows her Golden Age of Hollywood history, and makes a case that I was too hard on “Rhett Butler.” I’ll be back at the end for a rebuttal. Here is her Comment of the Day on the post, “Clark Gable, Loretta Young, and the Betrayal of Judy Lewis.” Continue reading

Ten Lessons from the “Dog Wars” Debate

Wait! Calm down! This is a CARTOON dog.

The “Dog Wars” Android phone app is apparently down for the count, the victim of too many complaints, threats and accusations that it was evil and irresponsible and promotes real, live dog-fighting, even though almost nobody sane makes similar claims about other video games. As with the subject of most posts on Ethics Alarms, however, the ethics issue lingers on, whether or not the specific incident that sparked the commentary has been resolved.

The comments, often passionate, that this post elicited have been fascinating, and had much to teach, even when the comments themselves were dubious. Here are ten lessons from the debate over the game and the Ethics Alarms commentary about it.

1. Ethics alarms aren’t always right. So many comments about “Dog Wars”, here and around the web, consist of various versions of, “That’s just wrong!” Well, why is it “just wrong”? Continue reading