I was tempted to make this another Res Ipsa Loquitur post.
Jeez, will somebody tell her? Nobody wants to hear anyone shouting and screaming like that into a microphone, but it is especially unappealing when a woman does it. It’s shrill, its undignified, and it’s ugly. Her voice cracks, and she’s acting unhinged.
I posted about the impediments to women getting elected President in November of 2025 after the New York Times Gail Collin’s wrote a column titled, “Where, oh Where, Will the First Female President Come From?” The lament would have been more plaintive if she hadn’t been reacting to Kamala Harris’s defeat, which was less due to the candidate being female than it was due to her being a cackling, incoherent idiot.
I wrote in part,
“The first female President is likely to come from a new template of female leadership that does not require that a credible female leader seem as unfeminine as possible and fit the male stereotypes of what a President looks like. That process will take time. Women have not been drawn to politics long enough or in substantial numbers until relatively recently. The talent pool still isn’t very large or deep. Men have a lead of a couple of centuries. Of course, it will only take one break-through female leader to change the template quickly and permanently. It’s too bad that Sigourney Weaver wasn’t interested in politics.”
In the first installment of what I fear will be a long-running series, I focused on all the high-ranking women in government who had disgraced themselves recently, including three female members of Trump’s Cabinet. I ended that post by writing, “I have theories about why our system and culture doesn’t produce competent and trustworthy female leaders in sufficient numbers, as well as why those it does produce tend to be corrupt and incompetent power-abusers. I will leave those theories for another day.”
Those theories are still for another day, but the fact that so many female politicians are wretched public speakers who don’t know how to modulate their voices, where to place it in their heads (think chest, ladies), and the basics of presentation, is a major impediment.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the first widely used artificial intelligence bot, was quizzed by “Newsbusters” researchers between August 26 and August 27 regarding how great a threat President Trump is to democracy, referencing a core Axis of Unethical Conduct talking point. ChatGPT rated Trump on par with the worst dictators in history. Asked to rate how much of a threat Trump poses on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the maximum threat and 1 being no threat, the bot rated Trump a frightening 9, explaining, “I don’t give [him] a 10/10 because the United States still has substantial institutional checks—courts, states, Congress, civil society, independent media, and elections—and those checks have successfully constrained Trump at important moments.” Oh. But the only world leader ChatGPT rated a 10 was Adolph Hitler.
In a comment to Fox News Digital on the experiment, an OpenAI spokesperson did not dispute the results and agreed that something is amiss. “ChatGPT is designed to be objective by default. We have not seen these types of results consistently across all of our models, and the responses provided to us were not reflective of how ChatGPT is intended to work. This shouldn’t happen and is not how the model is trained to behave.”
I was glad to see the often rogue Democrat/Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinima leave Congress and my ethics scrutiny because she was a one-woman EA spelling landmine: I always wanted to spell her first name “Krysten” and her last name “Cinema.” But a federal judge last week cleared the way for a the wife of a man she had been having an affair with while she was a U.S. Senator to litigate a North Carolina “homewrecker” lawsuit against her.
Good.
To be fair, Ethics Alarms had extolled Sinema a couple times in the past, most recently in 2021, when I wrote:
“Totalitarianism takes a hit! Is it fatal? Senator Krysten Sinema (D-Az) is suddenly evil in the eyes of progressives hoping to ram through SCOTUS packing, gun restrictions, D.C. statehood, HR One and other measures designed to make the US a one party, European-style nanny state until the stars turn cold. She announced that she is unalterably opposed to eliminating the filibuster, meaning that it’s probably here to stay, at least for a while. The ethical response to this development would be for the two parties to stop insisting on extreme positions, and work toward compromises, as our system was designed to foster. Nah.”
Nonetheless, Sinema carried on a sexual affair with her bodyguard (heh!), leading to his divorce. Sinema’s lawyers had asked U.S. District Judge David A. Bragdon to toss the suit, arguing she had no meaningful ties to North Carolina and had conducted her affair with Matthew Ammel entirely in other states. Bragdon, rejected that account in a 13-page order.
Two “the rest of the story” items to kick things off:
As we all hoped would be the case, MLB reprimanded umpire Doug Eddings for telling rookie St. Louis Cardinals rookie reliever Hancel Rincon to straighten his cap and to “Grow the hell up!” Eddings issued an apology. EA covered the episode here. But last night, as many suggested, many Cardinals wore their caps askew as a visual rebuke to Eddings, who was the umpire at third base. Interestingly, some of the Colorado Rockies had their caps tilted as well. Eddings claimed that he admonished Rincon because a Rockies batter, Hunter Goodman, flagged the rakish angle of the young pitcher’s headgear. Goodman, however denies that he said anything.
See? I said this was an ethics train wreck!
In this post, EA discussed the absurd controversy involving “Stars and Stripes” staff maintaining that they were “independent” of the Pentagon. In a 24-page ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden turned down the entreaty by the newspaper’s publisher, editor-in-chief and Middle East reporter to stay their firings while a lawsuit challenging the terminations as First Amendment violations works its way through the court system. McFadden found the government probably did not violate their First Amendment rights by firing them. I think their claim came perilously close to being a frivolous suit. If it were to prevail, no reporter or journalist could be fired by a government publication for an inflammatory or anti-American output because it could be framed as “censorship.” Editor-in-chief Erik Slavin and reporter Lara Korte told CBS in an interview that they “worked for Stars and Stripes, “not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policymaker.” They were asserting total independence and autonomy, despite being a Pentagon publication and funded by tax-payers.
Meanwhile…
1. The NFL is increasingly ridiculous, and I continue to wonder when it’s core audience will just say, “Enough already! Bye!” The league’s woke virtue signaling and DEI embrace is obnoxious, but its recent decision that football needs screamingly fey male cheerleaders boggles the mind. Look at this guy:
What the hell? I find female NFL cheerleaders an embarrassment, but this…any idea what the NFL is going for here or why? Tim O’Brien writes in part,
“I mean, who in the world asked for this? What market research told the NFL that what it really needed to do was complement all that toxic masculinity during the game with this? Seriously, are gay men a viable market for the NFL? How big is that market? Perhaps even more pointedly, as a percentage, how many not just gay men, but flaming gay men, watch the NFL on Sundays? Are we missing something? …[T]he NFL continues to find ways to alienate me and the millions of others who tune in because all we want to do is watch good football, see a little patriotism, and get a dose of a high-energy, traditional game-day atmosphere, nothing more….All of it is telling me the NFL no longer wants or needs people like me as fans. I’m cool with that, but if I have one message for the league, it’s this: “Be careful what you wish for.”
The NFL is already the most unethical sports league in existence (after the WNBA, of course). More on that tomorrow.
2. Speaking of the WNBA, ESPN’s headline was “Cathy Engelbert, who oversaw WNBA boom, to retire as commissioner.” It could well have read, “Cathy Engelbert, who proved completely incapable of leading the WNBA as it found itself immersed in racial and gender controversies, is running away. Good.” “Over the years, it has been amazing to watch WNBA players thrive and lead the massive cultural surge around women’s sports,” Engelbert said in a statement. “I retire knowing we have built something bigger, stronger and more enduring than we could have imagined. I am grateful to the WNBA and NBA team owners and staff, players, investors, fans and the powerhouse league office staff, who believed in what this league could become. I retire with immense gratitude and tremendous optimism for the future of the WNBA, with the best yet to come.”
Englebert is an accountant, and served as the CEO of Deloitte. She was brought in to develop the WNBA as a business, but had no skills or orientation that qualified her to deal with the league’s image and public relations problems. It took some gall for her to talk about the surge in “women’s sports” as so many of her league’s coaches speak as if they don’t know what a woman is.
Players and coaches have described her as “negligent.” One player said that the WNBA had the “worst leadership in the world.” From my observations, this was a severely limited leader who saw her job in the narrowest possible terms. She was hired to cut business deals and make money for the owners. She was good at that. Meanwhile, under her stewardship the WNBA has acquired the reputation of being dominated by lesbian thugs who resent the few white heterosexuals in their midst.
Maybe the WNBA should acquire the NFL’s gay cheerleaders…
I could teach a conflicts of interest course based on lessons spewing out from the recently-canned NFL reporter’s certitude that she did nothing wrong despite being caught canoodling with one of the sports figures she was charged with covering….objectively, independently. You know. Like all the other journalists do. <cough!>
Dianna Russini was the senior NFL reporter for The Athletic, which serves as the New York Times’ sports pages. She resigned last week after photographs “surfaced” of her hand-holding with and embracing Mike Vrabel, the head coach of the New England Patriots.
“While I can’t share the details of our investigation into Dianna’s conduct,” Steven Ginsberg, executive editor of The Athletic wrote to his staff, “I want to emphasize that the leadership of The Athletic has taken this matter seriously from the moment we learned about it.”
The publication’s editorial guidelines demand that its journalists avoid conflicts of interest or the appearance of a conflict. This is standard stuff, even though such prohibitions are too often weakly enforced, if at all. Remember Nina Totenberg reporting on Supreme Court decisions while she socialized with her pal, Justice Ginsberg? That violated NPR’s ethics code. Naturally, the brass ignored the breach.
I have a backlog of significant and interesting ethics developments so I’ll be posting a multi-issue collection a bit later today. This latest example of the disgusting bias of the news media as it tries to rig the mid-terms against Republicans so the Democrats can “stand up to Trump”—meaning obstruct his performance of his job with multiple impeachments in the House—is worthy of a solo call-out.
The obvious inference a reader is supposed to take from that headline is that all those people in Nepal were killed because of Evil Donald Trump. This reflects back to the Axis theme when DOGE started cutting funds that had nothing to do with the USA: “People will die!” It was a stupid appeal to emotion even to the extent that it was true: The United States isn’t responsible for the lives of everyone in the world. Incredibly, the same progressives who want the U.S. to pay to save lives everywhere in the world (you can’t get much more remote than Nepal) also are trying to make the National Debt a Democratic issue. The two positions are completely incompatible, but never mind. The party thinks the public is stupid, and issues messages accordingly. Or Democrats are stupid. Or both.
An ethically clueless woman asked the New York Times advice columnist “The Ethicist,” aka. NYU’s Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy prof, an even more ethically clueless question than his usual inquirers.
She said that a friend of her teenage daughter obviously has a serious drinking problem, passing out, falling down and urinating on herself. Should Mom alert the girl’s parents?
“…Her parents, however, are known to be very strict, and the girls fear that telling them will result in severe punishment rather than support, or that it will ruin their friend’s trust completely.As a parent, my instinct is clear: If this were my daughter, I would want to know so I could intervene before something catastrophic happens. But I worry about blowing up this girl’s home life or driving her behavior further underground if her parents react punitively rather than therapeutically. Do I have a moral obligation to inform her parents, even if it might mean harsh consequences for her? Or does my duty lie in guiding the teenagers on how to handle this among themselves?”
What a moron.
Oh no, clearly your duty is to wait until this girl dies, or lets untreated alcoholism ruin her life, because you wouldn’t want her to stop trusting her friends like your daughter! Not only that, but we all know that the ascendant Left doesn’t believe in harsh consequences for anything, not even murdering one’s children. By all means, leave the girl’s fate in the hands of a bunch of teenage girls! They are renowned for solving complex problems with impeccable judgment. Look at this from the drunk girl’s perspective, ideally after about four shots of bourbon.
The woman actually employs the Golden Rule, which is ideally suited for ethics issues like this, then tries to talk herself out of the right response because of toxic empathy. Buried in The Ethicist’s typically wordy response (he has a column to fill, after all) is this definitive point:
“It’s hard to see how she can get the assistance she requires without her parents knowing.”
Things are not as simple as the Babylon Bee would have us think. Ethics Alarms already posted two essays on this case, here and here. The latter, a Comment of the Day by Tim Levier, concluded by describing the protesters and demonstrators thusly:
The Protestors / Defenders / Supporters – Providing financial and material support to someone with whom they have no prior connection.
These people are deranged and one has to question where they came from and who has time to commit to such folly at a time when everyone and their mother is complaining about the cost of things. Why would anyone protest due process? She’s making her case in a court of law and the fair process will play out resulting in a judgment. This isn’t an area for “opinions” and to influence an outcome. Its meddlesome and the act of a narcissist that believes in one’s own “greatness” or “importance” over that of an impartial judicial institution.
Clancy’s trial, presumably the first of two (at least), ended in a mistrial yesterday due to a hung jury. A single juror, widely believed to be one of the three men on the 12 juror panel, was apparently refusing to budge from his unshakable belief that the woman who has confessed to murdering her three children is guilty of murder. I dunno, that seems like a defensible verdict to me, but I wasn’t in the courtroom during the trial.
But I digress. Here are recent ethics-related developments and observations:
Baseball has been doing a bang-up job lately validating my baseball ethics posts. My conviction is that the game is and has always been a cultural ethics microcosm, revealing and clarifying ethical dilemmas and conflicts with applications far removed from the game itself. Yesterday there was another example.
Behold…
During the sixth inning of the St. Louis Cardinals’ 7-6 victory over the Colorado Rockies last night, Cardinals rookie reliever Hancel Rincon, making his first appearance in a big league came, wore his cap rakishly askew. Rincon was pitching to Rockies batter Cole Carrigg when home-plate umpire Doug Eddings decided to react to the query of the previous Rockies batter, who had asked Eddings, “Hey, can he wear his hat like that?”
Batters since the dawn of baseball time have tried to find ways to wage psychological warfare against pitchers; EA had an earlier example this season, here. This one worked: the comment inspired Eddings to join the fashion police. Eddings halted the game, motioned to Cardinals catcher Leo Bernal, and told Rincon to fix his cap, punctuating the request with “Grow the fuck up!” Rincon complied. Three pitchers later, Carrigg hit an inside-the-park home run and Rincon exited the game shortly thereafter.
Later in the inning, Cardinals manager Oli Marmol was ejected from the game by Eddings. Marmol explained: “We have a kid making his debut, and in between an at-bat, he tells him that he needs to fix his hat and, ‘The kid’s not going to wear his hat like that on my field.’ Last I checked, this is Coors Field, so I took issue with it.” Not only did Eddings eject Marmol, but he also called a pitch-clock violation that gave Rockies designated hitter Troy Johnston a 1-0 count to start his at-bat against the new Cardinal pitcher. That was not a valid use of the rule, but umpires think they are God sometimes. It’s tradition!
“And then the pitch violation while I’m out there having a discussion, that’s also stupid, in my opinion,” Marmol said later. “So there’s a lot of moving parts to that one. At the end of the day, I thought they handled it poorly, and I’d like an explanation at some point.”
I like Ryan Reynolds. Terrible Green Lantern, lousy in the remake of “The Amityville Horror,” but he radiates likability and good humor, and that’s a gift. I especially liked his performance in “Woman in Gold.” But Ryan, who has a new movie out, is being roasted on conservative media and by social media Maga-ites, because of his recent statement about the 1980s.
“Mayday” is Reynolds’ first major movie since “Deadpool & Wolverine” (a disappointment, from my perspective) over two years ago. It’s set as the Cold War was ending thanks to Ronald Reagan, and Reynolds stars as a U.S. Navy pilot who, trapped behind enemy lines, forms a friendship with an eccentric ex-KGB agent (Kenneth Branagh) who loves ’80s American culture. Reynolds told an interviewer that the warm nostalgia surrounding the decade, embodied in shows like “Stranger Things,” misrepresents the turbulent nature of the era:
“When you get far enough away from a time period that’s quite distinct, there’s always a lovely feeling associated with it, almost like you pave over all the trauma with puppy dogs and ice cream. The 80s was a brutal, brutal time for people. It was a fucking mess and people forget that…It was a tremendous strife. Socio political tensions everywhere. We were still pretty fresh off a Cuban missile crisis, which was only 15-20 years before. It’s a tumultuous period, but you look back at it now and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. ‘Top Gun.’ Cocaine!’ Like, ‘No!’ It was really scary.”
The mockery has been flying thick and fast. Much of it is unfair and deliberately misrepresents what Reynolds said. Here’s “Not the Bee”:
Ethics Alarms 