1. Related to my comment yesterday (I expected to get flack, but it never arrived) about how female commenters on Ethics Alarms tend to raise objections to the occasional pitched battles and harsh argument styles here, while the male participants largely take it in stride: I just saw an old interview with famed film director John Huston, in which he said, “One of the best ways to become friends with a man is to fight him.”
I don’t think a woman’s ever said that…or thought it. To be fair, neither have I.
2. Speaking of things women don’t do: Taunting, mocking, gloating and generally being what used to known as a bad winner is obnoxious, mean, bad sportsmanship (or course), a Golden Rule violation and wrong. Fans think its entertaining, however, so the various pro sports leagues tend to permit such antics. Football has, as with most matters, encouraged the most unethical conduct of the sort, but now the NFL’s officials have decided that on-field taunting is “out of hand.”
The new NFL rule: You can be an asshole, just not too much of an asshole. The league told officials to strictly enforce taunting rules, with automatic ejections of players who get two taunting penalties in a game. The player may also be fined or suspended, or both, depending on the severity of his transgression.
The renewed effort to enforce taunting rules will target “baiting or taunting acts or words” and “abusive, threatening or insulting language or gestures” toward players, coaches and game officials, as defined by the N.F.L.’s unsportsmanlike conduct rules.
3. I suppose this could be an Ethics Quiz...I wrote about Dave Portnoy and Barstool Sports here. No doubt, this is a company built on guy-talk, locker room vulgarity, and pretty much the same stuff that got Donald Trump in trouble when his conversation with Billy Bush was recorded and leaked. A lot of people, yes, mostly men and sports fans, are entertained by the no-holds-barred banter and refusal to bow to political correctness. Yes, they may be Deplorables. But the company is a success and getting more successful; for example, Major League Baseball and Barstool Sports have had significant negotiations about having national midweek games on the site’s platforms. There is a market for political correctness and un-woke speech.
Barstool Sports has enough money, in fact, that it is sponsoring the Arizona Bowl. So because the company’s sports banter is unquestionably legal and functionally harmless, the Pima County Board of Supervisors voted this week to cancel all funding to the Arizona Bowl to ensure that it would not be sponsoring past conduct and statements of Barstool employees. That’s a $40 million punishment because the Arizona Bowl dared to allow itself to be sponsored by a company whose personnel “have faced accusations of racism and sexism in the past.”
“This game should celebrate and showcase our community, but I believe that many members of our community will not feel part of the event because of the actions and words of Barstool employees,” said District 1 Supervisor Rex Scott. “The Arizona Bowl can make its own decisions about its title sponsor, but county government must consider other factors in considering whether to associate itself with that decision.”
There sure are a lot of ways the government can censor speech.
4. Democrats float a talking point to weather the Cuomo scandal, and it’s dishonest, insulting and stupid. I thought this essay by some hack on the Leftist cyber-rag “The Bulwark ” was so brazenly dishonest that it wasn’t worth writing about. His gaslighting thesis: Democrats police their own and get rid of the bad apples, but the Republican Party doesn’t. How anyone can say that about the party that continued to lionize Bill Clinton after as blatant and example of sexual misconduct in the workplace we are likely to see short of a rape, AND proceeded to nominate his wife to run for President, knowing that she worked with Bill to intimidate and discredit his accusers—AND when that same party nominated for its next Presidential candidate who was accused of harassment and sexual assault by former staffer, all while photos of him groping, kissing, hugging and sniffing unconsenting females of various ages while the women undersatndably hesitated to shout, as my sister once did to a handsy uncle at a fmily gathering, “Do NOT touch me again!,” at the Vice-President of the united States—well, the mind boggles. Great policing, there, Democrats! Then there is the Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, Justin Fairfax, who has was accused by two women in 2019 of sexual assault. His defense was that both consented to whatever it was he did to them. Hmmm…that sounds familiar. Where were the “police”? Oh, wait, Fairfax is black, isn’t he? Never mind, the rules don’t apply to him….
Having dismissed the Bulwark nonsense as inconsequential, I learns that MSNBC, which really is shameless, brought on former Democratic California Rep. Katie Hill, forced to resign in 2019 because of a sexual relationship with a staffer. She has claimed to be a victim of sexual prudery because the staffer was female. Never mind. Now she says,that when it comes to sexual harassment allegations Democrats are held accountable while Republicans get to stay in power. “I think we see now, there is absolutely no comparison,” Hill said. “It’s not even an issue. It’s excused. It’s basically pushed under the rug.” So far under the rug that Hill had no credible examples of sexual harassing Republicans who were allowed to stay in power, and, naturally, the MSNBC host never asked her about Fairfax…oh, wait, I keep forgetting, he’s black, so he doesn’t count.
Ethics Alarms 
Jack…
I live in CA-25… and its worth noting that she has been ordered to pay her opponents legal fees in both of the cases that she has lost so far.. Its getting close to six figures now for both cases,
The local media here studiously avoids mentioning it…
4. The modern norm for political sexcapades was set in 1983, when Republican congressman Dan Crane and Democratic congressman Gerry Studds were both discovered to have have been boinking 17 year-old congressional pages. Both were censured by the House. Crane’s constituents did not reelect him, but Studds returned him to Washington for seven more terms.
Even today, Crane’s wikipedia article says he was censured “for having sex,” while Studds’s article says “he admitted to a consensual relationship.”
That’s because Studds’ intern was male, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Same situation, basically with Barney Frank. The newly minted “Democrats police their own” trope is based on the lie that they suddenly just changed their ways with Hill and Cuomo, and dishonest comparisons with Kavanaugh, with whom there’s no evidence of sexual misconduct at all, and Trump. That opinion piece compares Cuomo having to resign with overwhelming evidence of illegal conduct to the Deamocrats’ two phony impeachments failing.
Dan Crane also came from conservative southern Illinois (although he grew up in Chicago), while Gerry Studds represented hopelessly liberal Massachusetts. BTW, did you know he never used bookmarks?
He preferred to bend over the PAGES! 😀
Honk! Honk! Wocka! Wocka!
1. Maybe there are lots of men who agree that some pitched battles and harsh argument styles are over the top, but they aren’t confrontational enough to say so. Women who tell you that they don’t like the tone of a particular discussion are confronting you with something that displeases them, so they must have some confrontational impulses. Maybe it’s the less combative men who aren’t confrontational enough.
1. I feel seen. I met my best friend from middle and high school way back in the 90s at a a martial arts tournament. We were opponents on our first match for that day. And in case he reads it, remember that I won.
1- I’m not going to object to harsh arguments, it’s your playground. But I find falling back on that is actually counterproductive as it does more to convince me that one or both in the argument are wrong-headed. I’ve been exposed to the friendship through brawling from when I read a lot of Marvel comics and I never really got it as useful even as a trope. My comics friends never could explain why it seemed true for them.
I can take a stab at why women don’t usually believe fighting makes friends. Because the risks after losing are too high and the gain is too low when women usually have a fighting disadvantage. (Martial arts competitions are as specialized a subgroup as female marines)
Hardly a “playground.” Very unfair and demeaning characterization, MD. This is work, not play.
I think Lerner and Loewe knew it was dumb when they wrote Camelot. At one point before Lancelot is to battle 3 other knights Guinevere tells Arthur “He knocked you out and you woke up his bosom friend. Maybe he’ll knock them out and they’ll all take a house by the sea together.” 😀 Spoiler: that’s not how it plays, Lancelot topples all three knights, apparently killing one, but then is able to apparently bring him back, leading to him being hailed as miraculous. I think this is where Gary Gygax got the idea of giving the paladin (holy knight) class in Dungeons and Dragons the power to “lay on hands” and cure injuries.
1. I have to disagree, some of the women here are just as bad as if not worse than some of the men. I might add that are willing to move on after a fight, although I am not one of them, while women tend to hold grudges. Ah yes, John Huston, the original voice of Gandalf, way back in the 1970s when Rankin Bass, the company mostly known for stop-motion Christmas specials, tried its hand at bringing JRR tolkien’s “The Hobbit” to the small screen. He might well be a candidate for the most interesting man in the world, his biography includes some very colorful stuff, but I don’t see where fighting a man helps you get to know him. I have been in more fights than many, due to my Asperger’s making me a magnet for bullying, and I’ve never gotten to know the guys I’ve fought. On the contrary, they are usually the people I do not wish to get to know and who I would like out of my life as soon as possible. I have learned how to fight though. And a few of the guys I fought found out the hard way that I learned how to fight. I actually found that the most effective tactic in a fight, for me at least, was to smash someone’s head against the nearest hard surface as many times as I could. Unfortunately, I gave that up after my father, who was concerned about lawsuits, told me that if I ever smashed anyone’s head against anything again he would take me out back and smash my head against the brick side of the house until I died.
2. Trash talking has become part of the entertainment in professional sports. It used to only be the thing in sports entertainment like pro wrestling and marginal sports like roller derby which maybe you remember from the days of early cable and the Madison square Garden Network. Given that we are now into turning pro sports into a forum for wokeness, taunting and trash talk is really no big deal. Also, considering that we have already been through doing essentially nothing to football players who pretend to poop out a football and smack their wives around, and considering that we’ve already been through things like the XFL, where every team was named for evil, insanity, or criminal activity, I am reminded of the poet Virgil who wrote that the time was past for a certain kind of aid and a certain kind of defending. This is not going to stop that behavior, it might slow it down for a while.
3. Yep, and they’re going to keep discovering more and more. When you control the levers of government, there are hundreds of ways to give people a hard time if that is your intention. Of course, government’s role is not supposed to be giving people a hard time, but the woke movement has discovered that it is a very useful tool for enforcing their way of thinking. It kind of reminds me of the approach that the Colorado civil Rights Commission took with the bakery case, where they became the vessel for someone else’s hatred.
4. Dan McLaughlin made the point in National review that there is a long list of New York Democratic politicians who have been brought down by scandal, including the last three Democratic governors – okay, David Patterson wasn’t brought down by a scandal, but he had to scrap the idea of running for a full term because of a scandal. When so many of your own party run into these problems, I submit it’s not because you are doing a dandy job of policing your own people, it’s because you are doing a piss poor job of screening your people.
The Democratic party is fast on its way to becoming a solid mass of corruption and hypocrisy, it just happened to have the good luck to be opposed by Trump this past time out. It also has the ace in its pocket of abortion, which a lot of women will go to the edge of the Earth and off for and pull everyone they know with them.
Re: 4. This is an observation that one would think would occur to a lot of people. Why do the Democrats HAVE to do so much policing (not that they can be counted on to actually do it)?
To coin a phrase, “DUH!”
2. This proposed policy change is a complete non-starter in the current BLM/CRT environment. Sportsmanship is a white construct imposed upon ebullient players of color expressing their joy and their blackness. This is like disciplining slaves on the plantation! I suspect the players union will take the league to the NLRB or every fine will generate a grievance. And anyway, Charles Blow and Leon Pitts will be on this like white on rice. I wonder if the article about the proposed rule change isn’t a Babylon Bee article.
I really don’t know why you expected to get flack for your observation since the only logical counter argument to the observation you presented would be for someone to produce factual evidence that attempts to disprove your observation and that would be really hard to produce from a blog, such as this, even if the person attempting to disprove it had been part of this blog for many years. Even if someone else’s opinion might have differed, essentially your observation was irrefutable other than a someone stating something like “I disagree”.
But I have found lots of articles, essays and papers, from Vogue to SSRI, about the difference in brains by gender, and why women prefer “consensus building” discussions and take arguments personally. Why would a counter position have to use EA as a source?
Jack asked, “Why would a counter position have to use EA as a source?”
Because your observations was only about EA not the general population.
Well, I meant it as an observation about the general population! From my Reply to mermaidmary99, who appears to have really fled (which kind of ticks me off):
“Women, in my experience (though not in the case of my wife and sister!) don’t tolerate hard confrontation and bare knuckles debate, while men, in many cases, enjoy them.” Since my wife and sister don’t comment on Ethics Alarms, I thought this sufficiently signaled that I was making a general observation. I will be more specific in the future.
I’ve had bare-knuckle fights with at least two women here, as well as with at least three of the guys. That said, I don’t think those bare-knuckle fights achieved much beyond generating a lot of heat.
Jack,
Yes I think you’re correct that it was more general than I remembered and it was certainly more general than you wrote in your #1 statement above which literally states that it was talking about on EA.
Now I’m not sure what your original intent was in the other thread.
If this was a test to see if you could twist my memory of the previous comment, I think I failed the test.
How would that have been twisting anything? I literally wrote what I just quoted, that was what I said I expected flack for, and no one needed EA to make a counter argument.
It was the same. Note that the reaction I expected was to the original comment, not my description of it. I would have been clearer if I wrote “why” instead of “how”—as in “how it came to pass”…
Yeah, I don’t know how one can disagree with an observation. You can point out that some data might be missing, but other than that I don’t see much to produce flack. An observation is an observation. Unless the expectation was that some people would be upset over pointing out that gender differences possibly could exist on principle. Many people prefer to argue that there is no difference between men and women and that gender is a social construct. Personally, I think the biology is pretty clear that differences do exist. I have not observed many commenters on this particular blog arguing otherwise.