There’s nothing quite like a flaming tooth-ache to spark an early-morning post…
1. Corporate incompetence, Indian-style: The Cleveland Indians knee-jerked themselves out of their history, traditions and name by somehow concluding that the Black Lives Matter rioting obligated them to abandon “Indians” just because the NFL Washington Redskins had capitulated to political correctness thuggery. Like all of baseball and most of professional sports, the team decided that signaling progressive virtue was more important than their fans. And like the Redskins, the team prepared to to go through the 2021 season without a new name…just nothing, as in “Cleveland Baseball Club,” or something similarly generic. Because of the unseemly, unnecessary and unplanned rush, the Cleveland Whatsis-es also made it difficult to come up with a new name. Changing a team name is a large and expensive mess, because the name and logo are on everything from the team’s merchandise to websites, sponsorship deals, and the ballpark. Trademarks are needed to protect them. “Advice for anyone doing any product: Before you make it public, file,” Andrew Skale, a San Diego-based trademark attorney told the New York Times.
“The U.S. trademark office offers this kind of unique ability to file when you haven’t started using it, so take advantage of that,” Skale said. “Because I’ve seen when people that have issued news releases about new products and haven’t filed yet, and then they have problems later because some idiots decided to squat on them.” Or maybe not such idiots. Because of the Ex-Indians moral panic, many of the names the team could have chosen based on its history and culture will be now be expensive.Trademarks were filed by squatters after Cleveland’s first announcement for “Cleveland Baseball Team” (from someone in Georgia), “Cleveland Baseball Club” (from a company in Ohio), “Cleveland Guardians” (from someone in New York), Cleveland Rockers (from someone in California), Cleveland Natives and Cleveland Warriors (though even the Ex-Indian aren’t so stupid as to wade back into Native American controversies again), and most of all, the Cleveland Spiders, which has been an early favorite. That was the name of the team. That was the name of the team for ten years, 1889-1899, when baseball players looked like this…
The No-names are fighting some of these filings, because the Trademark Office tends to disfavor squatters. It all could have been avoided, though, if the team hadn’t wushed to be woke, thus joining The Great Stupid.
I wonder if “Spider McBaseballfaces” has been taken…
2. The legacy of an embedded unethical culture...This what 70 years of Communism, an unethical, deceptive and cruelly Machiavellian system of economics and government, and did to Russia. It’s ethics are thoroughly rotted. One example has been in sports, where nearly five years since Russia’s state-sponsored cheating program was revealed, investigators have uncovered one scandal after another. In this case, the investigators from track and field’s Athletics Integrity Unit last month published the full details of a scandal involving a made-up hospital, showing how brazen Russia has been in its efforts to obstruct anti-doping investigations. The scandal latest has led to the resignation of the entire board of Russia’s track and field federation, but that’s not going to change anything. Ethics has no place in the Russian culture, just as it doesn’t in China, Iran, and most of Africa. When nations reach that point, the road back is long, hard, and maybe hopeless.
The U.S. ignores this truth at its peril.
3. Somebody is trying to educate the public about media bias...Commenter Gamereg pointed me to Media Bias/Fact Check, a website that is trying mightily to flag media bias. The fact that I never heard of it indicates that the effort has a long way to go to achieve its mission, but the site is impressive. I’ll be adding it today to the Ethics Alarms links.
The impetus for the site’s being introduced to us was its decision that the Washington Post’s amazingly inept fake news tale of the Trump call to the Georgia election investigator, complete with fake damning quotes, justified removing the Post from its “High in factual reporting” category. Ya think?
I’ve already found several instances where the site has stumbled in its ratings; for example, it is delusional to list the Associated Press and especially the infamously biased PolitiFact in its “Least Biased” category. Nevertheless, the effort should be appreciated and encouraged.
4. It’s not just that John Kerry is an idiot, he’s such an arrogant idiot..and so typical of the current Democratic Party leadership. The Tennessee Star reported that Kerry was photographed a fellow traveler in First Class on a flight from Boston to Washington, D.C. not wearing a mask while reading, thus violating both federally-mandated airline policy and the Biden administration unconstitutional edicts. See?
This has been a persistent pattern by our Virtuous Progressive Rulers since the beginning of the pandemic.
Fox News tracked down the passenger who took the photo, who wished to remain anonymous out of the quite reasonable fear that he would be found floating dead in the reflecting pool or at least be banned from Twitter, who had a tart response ready:
“I salute our Very Special Presidential Envoy for Climate for not flying private, but instead flying first class commercial with the rest of us common folk. And while he can’t bring himself to follow his own party’s mask restrictions, we should cut him some slack.Being an elite hypocrite is hard work!”
Kerry, of course, denied everything, claiming that he only dropped the mask for a second. That is, he had been in compliance with the mask order before he was against it.
Personally, I would believe a complete stranger over Kerry. A complete stranger has the benefit of the doubt.
5. The Grammys. I had to rely on reports for this, since of all the awards shows, the Grammy’s leads in “broadcasts I would rather chew off my foot than watch,” but I have it on good authority that the Song of the Year was H.E.R.’s “I Can’t Breathe.” Lyrics:
Starting a war, screaming, “Peace” at the same time
All the corruption, injustice, the same crimes
Always a problem if we do or don’t fight
And we die, we don’t have the same right.
What is a gun to a man that surrenders?
What’s it gonna take for someone to defend her?
If we all agree that we’re equal as people
Then why can’t we see what is evil?I can’t breathe
You’re taking my life from me
I can’t breathe
Will anyone fight for me?How do we cope when we don’t love each other?
Where is the hope and the empathy? (Yeah)
How do we judge off the color?
The structure was made to make us the enemy (yeah)
Prayin’ for change ’cause the pain makes you tender
All of the names you refuse to remember
Was somebody’s brother, friend
Or a son to a mother that’s crying, singingI can’t breathe
You’re taking my life from me
I can’t breathe
Will anyone fight for me? (Yeah)
Will anyone fight for me?Trying times all the time
Destruction of minds, bodies, and human rights
Stripped of bloodlines, whipped and confined
This is the American pride
It’s justifying a genocide
Romanticizing the theft and bloodshed
That made America the land of the free
To take a black life, land of the free
To bring a gun to a peaceful fight for civil rights
You are desensitized to pulling triggers on innocent lives
Because that’s how we got here in the first place
These wounds sink deeper than the bullet
Your entitled hands could ever reach
Generations and generations of pain, fear, and anxiety
Equality is walking without intuition
Saying the protector and the killer is wearing the same uniform
The revolution is not televised
Media perception is forced down the throats of closed minds
So it’s lies in the headlines
And generations of supremacy resulting in your ignorant, privileged eyes
We breathe the same and we bleed the same
But still, we don’t see the same
Be thankful we are God-fearing
Because we do not seek revenge
We seek justice, we are past fear
We are fed up eating your shit
Because you think your so-called “Black friend”
Validates your wokeness and erases your racism
That kind of uncomfortable conversation
Is too hard for your trust-fund pockets to swallow
To swallow the strange fruit hanging from my family tree
Because of your audacity
To say all men are created equal in the eyes of God
But disparage a man based on the color of his skin
Do not say you do not see color
When you see us, see us
We can’t breathe
It is a racist, anti-white, anti-America screed based on a false narrative about an incident that did not involve race.
The song of the year indeed.
Ethics Alarms 
1. “The Indianapolis Star” recently declared that it would no longer refer to our minor-league baseball team, the Indians, by its name or to any high school or college team names that were offensive. They would just be known as “Indianapolis Minor League-Baseball Team” or by the school’s name. A blatant attempt to pressure the teams into caving, I think.
2. Russia’s long history, even prior to Communism, was one of oppression and corruption. It’s been in cultural rot for centuries and may never be able to truly recover because its citizens seem unwilling or unable to demand better.
3. We’ll give it some time. I recall that C.R.E.W started off fairly balanced before it capitulated, as well. I hope this one proves to have more mettle.
4. That’s a pretty clear photo for a guy rushing to grab his mask after dropping it, isn’t it?
“Ethics has no place in the Russian culture, just as it doesn’t in China, Iran, and most of Africa.” That is because it never did. I am sure that the left has figured out that our concept of ethics is rooted in Western European civilization and Christianity and so needs to be cancelled in the name of multiculturalism.
Any update on the Pandemic Creates a Classic and Difficult Ethics Conflict?
We have a domestic example in Chicago, as my longtime Usenet ally, Christopher Charles Morton, points out.
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/chicago-three-big-reasons-why-murder-city-usa-is-so-unsafe/#comment-2836333
Our state has a bill proposing a $25,000 fine per month after June 2022 to high schools with the mascot “Indians, warriors, etc.”
We have one nearby the “Patriots” and “Pirates” I wonder if they’ll be next or amended and included in this state bill.
Well, my guess is that the Patriots and Pirates won’t be included for the same reason. I think this whole thing is a trap to erase Indians from the collective memory. First, you get rid of any mention on sports teams. No more Seminoles, but the Irish are OK. Then, any consumer products have to be removed from the market. As this moves on, the names take on forbidden quality, people will blush or look away if spoken. To say “I drive a Jeep Cherokee” or even “I live in Cherokee County” will be virtually uttering a racial slur. At that point Indian names will be removed from all geographic entities. In the history books, all such groups will be merged into the “Great BIPO Alliance” composing the 90% of the world’s population that has been oppressed by Europeans for all of history.
Sure, it is a slippery-slope argument. However, what slippery-slope argument involving the left has not come true in the last 50 years?
That doesn’t bode well for my Cherokee Purple tomatoes and/or Cherokee Red lettuce…
🎶 Cherokee Purple will return (will return, will return….)
Heh, good one! I remember listening to that on the a.m. radio strapped to the handlebars of my newspaper delivery bike.
FWIW, that’s ONE tasty cultivar, and unfortunately a favorite with the dastardly chipmunks that carve out a noticeable portion of my otherwise substantial yield.
Re #3: While I appreciate credit for the reminder, this isn’t the first time you blogged about it:
https://ethicsalarms.com/2018/02/01/how-the-fact-checkers-cheat-a-case-study/
Oh-oh. Time for the “home”…
5. Racism seems to be cool again, so long as it is racism against white people.
https://verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/whiteness-is-a-pandemic-1846494770
The Root seems to be calling for white genocide.
And Twitter fund that such a message was consistent with “community standards”
Julius Streicher is dead.
Streicherism lives on.
I wonder how this name thing will play out with other things. I went to Miami Elementary School and Tecumseh Middle School. Normally when you name something after a group or someone it is used to honor them. I don’t see this stopping with sports teams.
1. Hopefully my Atlanta Braves resist the pressure. If they cave, I’ll have to be done with baseball just like I am with football and basketball. I’m sure “Angels” will eventually offend the atheists and “Mariners” will cause issues with those who fear water. PETA will go after the “Dolphins”…
…which comedian said “You can’t fix stupid…?”
1/5: I wonder if the New Yorker magazine is looking into replacing its iconic mascot characature of a monocled, top-hatted, obviously socially “superior” white man, with something less demeaning?
4:. Unless Kerry has trouble moving his lips while he reads with a mask on, he’s obviously lying.