competition

The Westminster Dog Show and the Benign Lie

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Tonight is the finale of the Westminster Dog Show. The show is always entertaining if you are dog lover and educational whether you are or not—what the heck is a Plott?–but it is also a strange epitome of what human beings will accept as fair and reasonable because of tradition alone. The pretense that the judging at this stage of the show, after the best of the individual breeds have been selected, is anything but deluded arbitrariness presented as scientific expertise is astounding, because so many intelligent people not only accept it, but accept it with good humor and certitude.

A Scottish Deerhound

The American Kennel Club has exacting standards for each breed, and its judges are well-trained and knowledgeable to be sure. The Group competitions and climactic Best of Show determination, however, are blatant exercises in the suspension of disbelief. It is a true apples vs. oranges extravaganza that the owners, crowd and commentators treat with the solemnity of a major Supreme Court ruling, yet has no more real meaning than a series of coin flips. Last night, for example, a Scottish deerhound, one of my favorite breeds, won the Hound Group. This meant that the Group’s judge determined, in a matter of minutes, that the winning deerhound was a better deerhound than the best long-haired dachshund was a long-haired dachshund. How? What does that even mean? Continue reading →

The Dilemma of the Legless High School Pitcher

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Seemingly an inspirational movie in the making, Anthony Burruto is a student at Dr. Phillips High School in Orlando, Florida. He has been playing baseball since he was 8 years old, despite the inconvenience of having both of his legs amputated when he was an infant. He plays the game on prosthetic legs that are all he has ever known, and does it well as a pitcher who can throw a mean curve and a fastball that has been clocked at 80 mph. This is Anthony’s sophomore year, and his goal was to play on Dr. Phillips High varsity baseball team this spring.

After two days of try-outs, Coach Mike Bradley cut him. Anthony’s metal legs, adept as he was at using them, made him too slow off the pitching mound when he had to field a bunt, said the coach, and teams would take advantage of his inability to jump off the mound quickly.

Sorry, kid.  Continue reading →

Unethical Website: Hillbuzz

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Hillbuzz is the right wing website leading the charge to get Bristol Palin, who can’t dance a lick, voted as the best celebrity dancer on TV’s  “Dancing With The Stars” because, illogically enough, the site’s operators like her mother. Makes sense to me! Actually, it only makes sense in that I am familiar with how self-absorbed political fanatics on the Right and Left think, which is often inherently unethical. In this case, Hillbuzz thinks it’s reasonable to louse up the fun of a dancing competition and turn it into an expression of Tea Party power. Continue reading →

Halloween Ethics! Facebook Ethics! Political Ethics! Blackface Ethics! It’s Tennessee’s Aunt Jemima Affair, the Ethics Controversy That Has Everything!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It’s just after Halloween, and followers of the ethics wars know what that means: somewhere, somebody is in trouble for their choice of costume.

Actually, in this case it’s someone in trouble for her choice of someone in costume to pose with: Tennessee Republican state Rep. Terri Lynn Weaver posted a picture on the Internet of her standing with her pastor, who had dressed up as Aunt Jemima—of syrup fame and black stereotype infamy— for some Halloween festivities. Her caption to the photo:

“Aunt Jemima, you is so sweet.”

Weaver has apologized, swearing that when she posed for the picture with her pastor, she did not know the photo would upset anybody. “It was fun, done in innocence. My friend is dressed up as syrup. He wife was going to be a pancake,” said Weaver. “I never intended to offend anyone. I took the picture off my Facebook. I apologize if it ever meant to offend anyone.”  Weaver,who apparently has lived in a cave since 1957,  also said she was not aware that Aunt Jemima represented black stereotypes to many people, and was unaware that wearing blackface was also considered offensive to the vast majority of Americans. Yes, she really did. (Note: I know Aunt Jemima as a brand of pancake mix; I did not think the logo  gracee any syrup containers. I assumed Weaver confused confused the good Aunt with her white rival. Mrs. Butterworth, who is a syrup brand. Aunt Jemima obviously hangs out with pancakes, so the pastor’s wife was on firm ground, no matter what. But thanks to a syrup-minded reader, I have been set straight: there is Aunt Jemima syrup, too)

State Sen. Thelma Harper, an African-American, said she and members of the Black Caucus want to put Harper before the House Ethics Committee.“This is what we have had to live with, making a mockery of being black and copying the language that Aunt Jemima used,” said Harper.

This controversy has everything! Halloween ethics! Blackface ethics! Facebook ethics! Political ethics! Syrup ethics!

Let’s go through them, shall we? Continue reading →

The Democrats’ Fake Tea Party Candidate

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Gamesmanship or cheating? In everything from baseball to trial litigation that involved competition and adversaries, there is a large gray area where the distinction between clever tactics and dishonest manipulation is a source of continuing controversy. No arena is so rich with a tradition of dubious maneuvers as the political one, and when a campaign season is especially intense, as this one is, there are certain to be strategems that cross the line.

When the mysterious Alvin Greene won the South Carolina Democratic primary to run against Republican Jim DeMint, some Democrats cried foul, claiming that the Forrest Gumpish Greene (though Forrest never was charged with showing pornography to a student, or they cut that sequence out of the movie) was a Republican plant. Not a shred of evidence ever surfaced to support that accusation (the unsubstantiated accusation is itself an old campaign trick), and it never made much sense, either. Greene barely campaigned and his unfitness for office was blatantly obvious if anyone had bothered to pay attention to him; if he was a plant, he was a spectacularly bad one.

The decoy candidate device is being used this campaign cycle however, and it is being used, ironically enough, by Democrats, marking another instance of the useful principle that the people who are most suspicious of cheating are often the ones who are most likely to cheat.  Continue reading →

Deriliction of Duty at the MLB All-Star Game.

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

This week’s Major League Baseball All-Star Game got the lowest TV ratings in the history of the so-called “mid-summer classic,” which proves that Lincoln was right: you just can’t fool all the people all of the time—even when they are baseball fans. The All-Star Game was originally devised as a dream competition in which the best players from the American and National League would play a game that was hard-fought and full of the spectacular exploits of the best players alive. For decades it was like that, too, until sky-rocketing salaries and America’s culture of celebrity turned a large proportion of the players into egomaniacal, self-promoting monsters. Continue reading →

Basketball Ethics: A Writer Advocates Violence on the Court

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

To the credit of the Boston Celtics and their coaching staff, the team won its N.B.A. semi-final series against the Orlando Magic without resorting to thuggery. That is because they ignored the advice of Boston Herald sportswriter Ron Borges, who wrote a column in Friday’s edition urging the team to physically assault, and conceivably injure, the Magic’s on-court enforcer, Dwight Howard.

No doubt about it: Howard is a very dirty player, and in the relaxed enforcement atmosphere that the N.B.A. allows its refs to adopt during the play-offs, he had gone beyond dirty to abusive. Borges’ recommendation? Mug him. Hurt him. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: ABC News

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Watching the ethical standards of the major network news department crumble away is like watching a sand castle  on the beach disintegrate with each new wave. There really is no resistance, or hope. It is just a matter of time.

Thus the announcement that ABC News paid $200,000 to Casey Anthony, the Florida woman who is accused of killing her two-year-old daughter, Caylee, comes as not so much of a surprise as just a further peak at the inevitable. Critics are pointing with outrage to the fact that ABC announced that it is cutting hundreds of jobs, as if this is somehow hypocritical. In truth, they are two sides of the same coin. Journalistic ethics have always been the most fragile of professional ethics systems, more dependent on success than principle. When there was limited competition, the networks could burnish their images by conforming to ethical standards and making sure everyone knew it. Now, however, web-based news, blogs and cable news networks are carving up their pie. Most of the consumers of news don’t care about ethics, and the National Enquirer, which has always practiced checkbook journalism, is up for a Pulitzer. Continue reading →

Ethics Train Wreck: Step-Dancing, Racism, and Coke

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I missed this story last week. I am almost sorry it came to my attention.

February 20 witnessed the national finals of the Sprite Step Off competition in Atlanta, billed as “the largest Greek stepping competition ever.” I never heard of “step-dancing,” but that is apparently because I’m not black. It is a lively type of dancing favored by black fraternities and sororities. Although the performance by the all-white Zeta Tau Alpha team from the University of Arkansas—the only white team in the competition—received uproarious applause, mixed with amazement on the part of the almost all-black crowd that a white team could master the art, the cheers turned to jeers when they were announced as the winners.  Although few disputed that the Zeta team had been one of the very best, angry e-mails and on-line protests from African Americans began building into a tidal wave. There were accusations of “cultural theft,” and the general message was that a white team should not have been declared the winner in a step-dancing competition. That was a black tradition, and only bias could explain the white team’s success. Most of the protests came from people who had not seen the performances. Continue reading →