Robo-Umps Are Officially In Major League Baseball, and It’s An Ethical Development

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Finally, Major League Baseball has conceded that with technology available to call balls and strikes accurately, it makes no sense to permit bad calls by human umpires to change the results of at-bats, games, careers and even whole seasons. In 2026 the “ABS” system will be in play, adding integrity, accuracy and, yes, strategy to the game. Good. It’s about time.

I’ve been advocating computerized ball and strike calls at least since 2017, when I wrote,

In the top of the eighth inning of a crucial Dodgers-Cubs NLDS game, Dodger batter Curtis Granderson struck out. The pitch hit the dirt, and Cubs catcher Willson Contreras, as the rules require when a strike isn’t caught cleanly, tagged Gunderson for the final out of the inning. Granderson argued to home plate umpire Jim Wolf that his bat had made slight contact with the ball. It didn’t. The replay showed that his bat missed the ball by at least four inches. Nonetheless Wolf, after conferring with the other umpires agreed that the ball was a foul tip. Gunderson’s at bat was still alive….

After the game, Wolf watched the video and told reporters that he had indeed, as everyone already knew, blown the call.

As it happened, his embarrassing and needless botch didn’t matter. Gunderson struck out anyway. That, however, is just moral luck. The call and the umpire’s refusal to reverse it was just as inexcusable whether it resulted in ten Dodger runs or nothing. The point is that such a call could have changed the game, and the series. If it had, the screams from Chicago fans and anyone who cares about the integrity of the game would have persisted and intensified until baseball abandoned its archaic rationalization that “human error is part of the baseball,” and made use of available technology to make sure such a fiasco can’t happen.

This scenario will occur. Human beings being what they are, however, it won’t play out until a championship has been lost after a strike three right down the middle of the plate is called a ball by a fallible human umpire, and then the lucky batter hits a game-winning, walk-off grand slam on the next pitch. Then, after the horse has not only fled but trampled the barn-owner’s children, Major League Baseball will put a lock on the door.

The barn door, however, is wide open now, and the lock is available.

Two years later, I complained about this foolish attitude by the baseball powers- that-be again, writing,

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Obesrvations on Gavin Newsom’s Unethical Quote of the Week

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Listen above to Newsom, the incompetent governor of California, as he engagingly insults a roomful of African Americans. Promoting his Presidential campaign-launching memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry,” Newsom was asked about his dyslexia and his personal experiences that voters could relate to (the old “he understands people like me” trope that Bill Clinton exploited so well). He responded by describing his struggles with dyslexia and somehow managed to sound like he regarded his low SAT scores as a badge of honor, telling the almost all black audience: “I’m like you. I’m no better than you.”

Already there are many discussions of this—what was it? A gaffe? A canny bit of self-deprecation? Smoking gun patronizing?—on the web and social media. To me, and I admit I’m mired in confirmation bias when I look at anything Newsom does through the lens of his frightening EA dossier—I mean, just look at that mess!— I classify the remark as pure res ipsa loquitur: the thing speaks for itself. Newsom blundered into expressing the attitude progressives and Democrats have had toward American blacks for decades. They believe that it is a voting bloc that is easily fooled and exploited, and, as a group, gullible and not too swift on the uptake. That’s Newsom, and that’s the Democratic Party that he wants to lead.

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Happy Birthday, George Washington From Ethics Alarms, And Thank Your Dad For Us Too…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

It’s George Washington’s birthday. Nine years ago I wrote, in one of my annual posts on perhaps our most important President (George Will calls him “the Indispensable Man) that something has gone seriously wrong when one’s blog has 287 posts on Donald Trump and only six about Washington. I don’t even want to think about what the count is now, but here is another one in George’s column.

George Washington’s father Augustine had at one time or another run across a list of 110 virtues that young men should adopt and practice in order to be become civil, respectful and honorable members of polite society. He made George, and presumably all his sons (he had six of them) copy them by hand to aid in memorizing the list. George, at least, dutifully committed to memory “110 Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,”  which was  based on a document composed by French Jesuits in 1595; neither the author nor the English translator and adapter are known today. The elder Washington was following the theory of Aristotle, who held that principles and values began as being externally imposed by authority (morals) and eventually became internalized as character.

Those ethics alarms installed by his father stayed in working order throughout George’s remarkable life. It was said that Washington was known to quote the rules when appropriate, and never forgot them. They did not teach him to be the gifted leader he became, but they helped to make him a trustworthy one.

The list has been available on Ethics Alarms under Rule Book since its beginnings in 2009. By all means read the whole list; I have used it often in ethics seminars but haven’t referred to it here for too long. The 90 rules omitted in the list below contain some gems too, and many that raise curiosity about what exactly the author was thinking of. For example, I find #2. “When in company, put not your hands to any part of the body not usually discovered” and #3. “Show nothing to your friend that may affright him” intriguing.

Below are my 20 favorite entries from the list that helped make George George, therefore helped George make America America:

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From Georgia State, A Woke Indoctrination Smoking Gun

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Rob Jenkins, a tenured associate professor of English at Georgia State University, recently wrote at Campus Reform about his interaction with a “gender studies” professor who took umbrage at his January op-ed criticizing Georgia’s university system for its “public syllabi head-fake.”

His point was that many professors hide their course’s political and social agendas behind sketchy course syllabi released publicly that don’t accurately represent what is being taught. In response, the state’s Board of Regents declared that instead of merely filling in a template with selected information, now faculty at public universities must publish the entire syllabi that they distribute to students.

Prof. Jenkins was pleased, but received an email from a colleague who described herself as a “gender studies professor.” She grilled him on why he put “transgender” in scare quotes, and what he thought were appropriate topics “in classes that discuss gender, sexuality, identity, and racial politics.” Jenkins answered that he puts “transgender’ in quotation marks because he believes people can’t change their sex and that the whole fad is manufactured. He also said that he doesn’t believe any topic is appropriate for classes that discuss gender, sexuality, identity, and racial politics because he thinks “gender studies” are a phony discipline that should not be taught at all.

The female professor didn’t like that, She accused Jenkins of promoting “right-wing” ideology and implied that he would be biased against LGBTQ students in his classroom. Jenkins wrote that her assumption is demonstrably false; I would add that it tells me that the “gender studies” prof is biased against students in her classroom who don’t toe the progressive line.People who can’t tolerate dissenting opinions and whom bias has made stupid usually assume everyone else is the same way.

Then, Jenkins writes, he discovered his woke critic wasn’t a “gender studies professor,” but a “history professor teaching mostly sophomore-level survey courses.” She just turned her history courses into propaganda on “gender, sexuality, identity, and race politics.”

“That’s exactly the sort of thing the state’s public syllabi policy is intended to expose: professors using their classroom to advance a political agenda that has, at best, a tenuous connection to the subject matter,” Jenkins writes. But how many state colleges around the country allow and facilitate woke ideological propaganda? How many glassy-eyed, brainwashed, doctrinaire progressives lurk on faculties, seeing the indoctrination of our rising generations as their sacred duty?

My guess: far too many. A daunting number. For society, the culture and our nation, a crushing number.

Updates On “The Great Stupid”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Let’s start our review of just how dumb our population, society and culture have become since The Great Stupid spread its dark wings over the land with the book covers above. The book, current on sale and display at Barnes and Noble among other stores, is called “Mona’s Eyes,” referring to the “Mona Lisa,” perhaps the best known and most famous painting of all, by Leonardo Da Vinci. But the publisher allowed the eyes being used on the cover jacket to be those of a completely different woman in a different painting by another famous painter. Those eyes belong to “The Girl With A Pearl Earring, by Vermeer.

Morons.

There is a silver lining here, however. In mocking that cover, “Instapundit’s” Ed Driscoll quoted a minor Ethics Alarms post from 2023 on a book about Pearl Harbor with a cover graphic showing German planes attacking our navy on December 7, 1941. I clicked on the link and was amazed to find myself reading my own post, which I had completely forgotten about. In the resulting phenomenon known as an Insta-lanch (this is EA’s third), that post got over 3,600 views (and counting) after only being read about 500 times in three years.

Meanwhile:

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Comment of the Day: “No, Washington Post Editors, THIS Is What Stephen Colbert’s Spat With CBS Is REALLY About…”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Glenn Logan, once a prolific blogger himself, is an EA veteran who periodically shows his talent for forceful commentary, as in his Comment of the Day finishing off the Washington Post editors with a rhetorical haymaker after I had softened up the miscreants a bit. I admire Glenn’s precision in pointing out just how disingenuous the paper’s protest over the FCC’s revitalization of the Equal Time rule, which would never have been necessary if TV “entertainment” hadn’t devolve into single party propaganda.

Here’s Glenn’s Comment of the Day on the post, “No, Washington Post Editors, THIS Is What Stephen Colbert’s Spat With CBS Is REALLY About…”

***

Consider this:

“The government shouldn’t be dictating the political content of late-night television — or of any other entertainment Americans choose to consume. But that’s exactly what the equal-time rule does. It is rooted in an entirely different technological landscape; in the early 20th century, scarce radio frequencies meant that the means of mass communication were limited. That’s why Congress saw fit to try to mandate that all candidates got a hearing.”

First of all, in its “explanation” of the Equal Time rule, the Post deliberately muddles the intent of Congress in passing it. Congress wisely (omg, did I actually write that??) thought that it would be in the public interest to prevent networks from supporting only one side of the public debate on the publicly-owned broadcast spectrum. That spectrum, last time I checked, is still publicly owned, CBS is still a lessee and the subject broadcast was supposed to air on broadcast television.

For a Leftist outlet like the Post, fairness is supposed to be perhaps the most cherished touchstone of any debate, yet because reminding its audience of the two fundamental motivations for the FCC rule — fairness and the public interest — would undermine its argument, the post just glosses over them altogether and argues by implication that freedom of entertainment choice is the most important thing.

Again, it is with sadness that I observe many people, perhaps even a majority, are so unfamiliar with the concept of critical thinking that they will accept this editorial as holy writ. But make no mistake — this was a malicious, deliberately partisan and utterly facile argument, and the Post knows it.

Verdict: Deliberately and intentionally unethical.

Unethical Quote of the Day, (Also Stupid): Theater Critic Nuveen Kumar

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“But I don’t think it’s necessarily antiwoke to tell an all-white story or to relegate nonwhite characters to the margins, if that’s where they fit the creative intentions.”

—Former Washington Post theater critic Naveen Kumar in the paper’s “Whitewashing ‘Wuthering Heights.'”

Oh, well that’s really big of the critic, don’t you think? How generous of him! He is willing to concede that a director might still be regarded as a good person if he or she doesn’t cast actors “of color” (you know, like the critic) to play characters written as white, visualized by the playwright as white, in a story obviously about white people!

Yes, this fatuous, offensive statement came late in an essay that was already obnoxious, with the biased and reductive headline, “Whitewashing ‘Wuthering Heights’.” [Gift link!] The Post post was defending, sort-of -but- not-really, Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” film, in which Heathcliffe, Emily Bronte’s hormonal romantic anti-hero, is played…

…by a white actor. Never mind that previous film adaptations have cast Heathcliff as white, notably the classic starring Lawrence Olivier in the role, probably because he was the best actor alive at the time.

Yes, it is true that the ethnicity of Heathcliff has always been a matter of debate: with Bronte describing him as “dark-skinned,” a “gypsy,” and a “little Lascar,” a term for South Asian sailors. The idea is that he is an outsider and at the bottom of the social ladder; that certainly would justify casting a black, Indian or other non-white actor, but certainly doesn’t mean he has to be played that way. (I would not think that casting Heathcliff as Swedish would work, but you never know: I could see one of the Skarsgaard boys pulling it off.)

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Ethics Quiz: Oh No, Not Legalized Prostitution Again…

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

In Colorado, a bill that would decriminalize prostitution statewide is moving through the legislature. Its sponsor, member of the Party of Terrible Ideas (at least lately) Sen. Nick Hinrichsen, argues that the measure “would improve safety and health outcomes for sex workers.” More about that presently.

Senate Bill 26-097 would eliminate criminal penalties for consensual commercial sexual activity between adults, repealing existing laws against prostitution, soliciting for prostitution, keeping a place of prostitution and patronizing a prostitute. Pimping would remain illegal.

Commenter JutGory flagged the story for me and the commentariate with a post on yesterday’s Friday Open Forum, where it sparked some lively and thoughtful responses. I decided that the issue was complex and contentious enough to move the discussion here, under its own banner via an ethics quiz.

I recognize that quizzing on this topic is a departure for Ethics Alarms. Ethics quizzes are usually prompted by ethics close calls, dilemmas and conflicts where I lack my usual certitude about their ethical standing. That’s not the case with legalized prostitution. Way back in 2009, I began a post,

“A stimulating ethics alarm drill surfaced over at Freakonomics, where Stephen Dubner challenged the site’s  readers to help him compile a list of goods, services and activities that one can legally give away or perform gratis, but that  when money changes hands, the transactions become illegal. It is a provocative exercise, especially when one ponders why the addition of  money should change the nature of the act from benign to objectionable in the view of culture, society, or government. It is even more revealing to expand the list to include uses of money that may not create illegality, but which change an act from ethical to unethical.

Sometimes commerce turns the act wrongful only for the individual do the paying. Sometimes only the individual accepting the cash becomes unethical.  Money doesn’t corrupt these transactions for the same reasons in all cases. I see three distinct categories:

1.Abuses of economic power: situations where an individual or organization uses money to coerce or induce people to do something that is bad for them, those to whom they have duties, or society, such as prostitution…“

I stated thatwith prostitution, both the payer and the payee were engaging in unethical conduct. And they are.

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From The Ethics Alarms Archives: “What Is Wrong Is That We Do Not Ask What Is Right.”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I stumbled across this post from 2022 by accident, but feel like it is a good time to repost it. It sparks recall of one of the histories’s great thinkers, G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) G.K. slaughtered Clarence Darrow in an Oxford debate over the existence of God—Darrow took the negative position, naturally, an assertion that he had won debates maintaining many times. After the debacle, Darrow commented, in essence, “My hat’s off to him. He was better prepared and won fair and square.” He was thinking, I believe, “Holy cats! This guy is smarter than me!” Chesterton, sadly, is mostly known today by Americans because of the PBS series dramatizing his “Father Brown” mysteries, stories Chesterton published as a lark. He was much more than second-rate Arthur Conan Doyle.

I also am moved to repost this because it was the sole guest post offered by my late wife, best friend, business partner and inspiration, Grace Bowen Marshall, who suddenly perished this month in 2024. She occasionally commented here, but her real love was literature, especially British literature. In her introduction she wrote in part,

“The first chapter of his 1910 book “What’s Wrong With The World” was a ‘bright-light’ experience for me. Though hopelessly outdated in some 21st century factual respects, it is considered to be one of his more interesting works because Chesterton examines the human thought process and how it affects the outcomes of different kinds of problems, reminiscent of the “observer effect.” G.K. was, in 1910, much more trusting of science and medicine than we are now, e.g., and did not address 21st century thought-process issues like the scientists’ tendency to do something simply because they can without considering if they should. Here is an excerpt from G.K. Chesterton’s “What’s Wrong With The World.”

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Will the Supreme Court Get An Apology From The Axis And The Trump Deranged? Nah. Of Course Not.

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Remember former Perkins Coie lawyer Bradley Datt, the ex-Perkins Coie litigator whose post-Charlie Kirk assassination Facebook Facebook entry began, “Charlie Kirk got famous as one of America’s leading spreaders of hatred, misinformation and intolerance.The current political moment—where an extremist Supreme Court and feckless Republican Congress are enabling a Republican president to become a tyrant…”? The firm correctly fired the jerk, but such worthies as Unethical Website “Above the Law” and a lot of my Trump Deranged Facebook friends endorsed his “extremist Supreme Court” and “tyrant” analysis.

The U.S. Supreme Court just confirmed a major constitutional limitation on presidential power by striking down the sweeping tariffs that President Donald Trump imposed in a series of executive orders. By a vote of 6-3, the justices ruled that the tariffs exceed the powers given to the President by Congress under a 1977 law providing him the authority to regulate commerce during national emergencies created by foreign threats.

The opinion is here; analysis is everywhere, but what I care about right now is that when the centerpiece of the President’s economic program and foreign trade policy was before the Supreme Court, the alleged “radical” Justices did not rubber stamp it and did not “bend a knee,” but rather, as they are sworn to do, followed the law and the Constitution and ruled that President Trump had exceeded his powers. Three of the supposedly “radical” justices (if you’re not willing to distort the law in the direction the Axis favors, you’re radical), Roberts, Gorsuch and Barrett, joined with the three lock-step progressive DEI Justices (a black woman, a lesbian, and the “Wise Latina”). They are the ones who apparently make up their hive mind on cases before they even read the briefs based on what Democrats want, to foil the Republican POTUS. Fortunately, the other six Justices have some integrity

Because, you see, Trump isn’t a “king,” and the system works, just as the balance of power among the branches of government is supposed to.