While searching for Pete Rose posts in preparation for this one, I ran across an ethics multi-issue post from February 11, 2020, shortly before the Wuhan virus messed with our economy, our democracy, our laws, our health, our social interactions, our culture, our health and our sanity (but it was racist to blame it on China. Don’t get me started….). I don’t remember writing it at all, so I was fascinated to read this:
I missed this when it came out in 2020…
Yesterday the video was brought to my attention by one of the jazz musicians who created it and who is recycling the thing again in anticipation of the 2024 election. I am long-time friends with a couple of the people involved in the video. They are kind, smart and rational about most things.
Observations:
Pete Rose died yesterday: he was 83. A documentary on Rose came out this year, but there was nothing new in it except some more interviews with Pete in which he proved, again, that he just didn’t have functioning ethics alarms. Honesty, integrity, responsibility, trustworthiness, fairness, and a lot more on the list of ethical values, baseball’s all time hit leader didn’t understand at all. If you had any doubts that Rose was a sociopath, his own words in that documentary should have banished them.
Rose was the subject of my second ethics essay online, at the old, finally gone forever, Ethics Scoreboard. Here, I wrote about Pete for the first time shortly after launching Ethics Alarms in 2010. The topic: the discovery that Rose had used a corked bat (that’s illegal in baseball) as a player. I wrote in part, beginning by dismissing the theory that corked bats don’t actually help batters so using one shouldn’t count as cheating…
One might be tempted to add “incompetent,” but we shall see.
That ridiculous photo above of Harris supposedly on the FEMA briefing is signature significance. Witness the serious, troubled look on her face, the pen, the pad of paper, as she listens intently while flying over the hurricane destruction.
Except she isn’t listening, because the earbud dangling from her ear isn’t attached to the phone. Well, but maybe she has the phone on speaker….but what kind of inept staff allows a staged photo like this to be so messed up? And what kind of qualified national leader isn’t alert enough to know it’s going to make her look like a dufus?
“I was just briefed by @FEMA_Deanne Criswell on the latest developments about the ongoing impacts of Hurricane Helene, Harris captioned this photo. “We also discussed our Administration’s continued actions to support emergency response and recovery. I also spoke with @NC_Governor Cooper about the ongoing rescue and recovery efforts in North Carolina. Our Administration will continue to stay in constant contact with state and local officials to ensure communities have the support and resources they need.” Oh, I don’t doubt she had those conversations. But that’s not a photo of her doing so, and she’s telling the public that it is while the evidence that it isn’t is there for anyone alert to see.
Problem: Judges getting adverse public scrutiny for not reporting potential conflicts of interest and avoiding the appearance of impropriety.
Solution: Lower the standards for conflicts of interest and the appearance of impropriety.
Problem solved!
Yecchh.
—Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, expressing his anxiety about this week’s debate with Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance.
I can’t bring myself to believe that this debate will have any impact on the election at all, and I have made up my mind pretty securely about both Vance and Walz, neither of whom were responsible choices to be “a heartbeat from the Presidency. ” At least Walz, unlike Vance, has some executive governing experience, and at least Vance isn’t a parody of a woke idiot. But Walz’s comment pings so many ethics alarms that attention must be paid.
Let’s see…
Scary. Newsbusters walked down a dark memory lane with this collection of the vitriol aimed at Trump and the prospect of Trump victory eight years ago:
I quit Twitter with all my accumulated thousands of followers after it became clear to me that the platform was a progressive propaganda organ that censored users and tweets it didn’t like, notably President Trump. I returned (here) as a show of support for Elon Musk, who bought the platform and (largely) eliminated its tendency to content-based censorship. This Ethics Quiz has special interest for me.
X, as Twitter is now called ( I miss the little birdie logo) suspended left- “journalist” Ken Klippenstein when he linked to an article of his that contained a hacked document with negative, private and otherwise provocative information about Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance. Klippenstein used to write for the crypto-Communist The Nation, and was a senior investigative reporter for the far-Left online news program “The Young Turks.” Needless to say, he has an agenda.
The 271-page dossier on Vance has been traced to a hack by Iran. Most media outlets refused to publish it, but Klippenstein, who has a substack to sell, grabbed the opportunity. Musk took to his own platform to decry the document as “one of the most egregious, evil doxxing actions we’ve ever seen.” He went on, “Presidential candidates are not speculatively in danger – there have already been two attempts on @realDonaldTrump’s life. Moreover, the doxxing included detailed information on the addresses of their children.” X explained that Klippenstein violated its policy against posting “unredacted private personal information,” including Vance’s physical addresses and part of his social security number.
Nice. Matt Yglesias is allegedly a journalist who has had many left-wing publications give him a platform. He also co-founded the relentlessly left-biased propaganda site Vox. Here’s a signature significance moment from Yglesias that I flagged in 2016, in which he said that lying to advance a policy or position is “the right thing to do.” Yes, he really did. Yglesias has had periodic attacks of integrity since, however. Occasionally.
In that tweet above, he asserts, from the position as a prominent journalist, a pure opinion as fact. Many readers inclined to be gulled by their own confirmation bias will immediately take it as fact. It is not fact.
I appended the title so that the many readers here who skip my baseball posts don’t skip this one entirely. It’s not mostly about baseball. But the introduction is.
You see, now it really gets hard for me. Grace, my wife of 43 years, dropped dead on Leap Year. March 1 is when baseball’s Spring Training becomes serious, and baseball is one of my most consuming passions. I taught Grace to love the game; during the seasons we watched the Red Sox almost every day (until they frustrated her too much, which happened frequently). Today, the 2024 season ends. It didn’t save me from being depressed, overwhelmed, guilty, angry and frustrated, but it sure helped a lot. The games also were virtually my only respite from work, as I try to resuscitate our, now my, struggling business after it was savaged by what I bitterly call “the Stupid Lockdown.” I’d watch a game with Spuds sprawled across my lap, then, when it ended, usually around 9:30 pm or so, I would head up to the office to go back to work, either in the throes of the joy of victory or the agony of defeat.
Starting tomorrow, I’ll have neither Grace nor the the Red Sox. Wish me luck.
Meanwhile, yesterday was an ethics milestone in Red Sox, baseball and sports history.
On September 28, 1941, the last day of Major League Baseball’s regular season, the Ted Williams became the first player since 1930 to hit .400 as well as quite probably the last player to do so as well. “I guess I’ll be satisfied with that thrill out there today,” he told the Boston Globe of his quest for .400. “I never wanted anything harder in my life.” He never wanted anything harder, but he refused to get it on a technicality. Going into the final day, a double-header, “The Splendid Splinter” as he was called by some writers sported a .399 average that had enough numerals after it to be rounded up to .400. The Red Sox manager, Joe Cronin, told Ted to sit out the last two games. They were meaningless (the Yankees had already clinched the pennant, just like they’ve already clinched the American League East title this year, and the games were meaningless to the Red Sox. Cronin told Williams that nobody would blame him for protecting his historic batting average.
But Ted Williams didn’t care about other people (this was something of a problem for him); it was meeting his own standards that mattered. He felt that “backing in” to a .400 average would be cowardly and would tarnish the achievement in his own eyes. So he risked his .400 average by playing both games…and got six hits in eight at-bats to raise his average to .406.
The ethics password for this weekend is “integrity.“
Meanwhile, in non-baseball ethics news…
