An international Ultimate Frisbee competition for youths held in Ghent, Belgium last week was supposed to include some Jewish teams. Then an anti-Semitic vandal (was The Squad in town?) spray-painted “Boycott Israhell Now!” near the playing field, so the mayor of Ghent joined with the city’s police to inform the young Jewish Frisbee whizzes that not only were they banned from the event on the field, they couldn’t attend as spectators either. This was in the interests of “safety.”
The “Bite Me!” Award that Ethics Alarms hereby bestows on Elon Musk is the honorable and admirable version of the schizophrenic designation as opposed to the alternative handed to Ann Althouse in this recent post. To alleviate confusion, I will henceforth describe what Musk has earned with his tweet above as The Golden “Bite Me!,” which will be awarded here when an individual displays an inspiring level of defiance“in response to being bullied, pressured and threatened into submissiveness” by sending the unambiguous and fearless message, “Do your worst. I believe in what I am doing, and I don’t grovel to mobs.”
Be proud, Republicans!
How do creeps like this get elected? Never mind: the question is futile. “Incompetent” doesn’t quite do Holmberg justice, either.
Ray Holmberg, a powerful GOP state senator served in the North Dakota Senate for 45 years, representing Grand Forks. He resigned in 2022 as a consequence of his interesting and expensive hobby. He admitted in federal court yesterday that he liked to take trips to Europe so he could have sexual relations with children. “The boys rent at around $60 (sex is extra),” Holmberg wrote in an email to a friend using an alias. Good to know!
Holmberg traveled to Prague 14 times between 2011 and 2021 to purchase sex and other intimate contact with boys under 18. Some of the these trips were paid for with taxpayer money. Now that was just careless: I told you he was incompetent. Holmberge resigned after reaching the pinnacle of his power as North Dakota Senate Appropriations Committee chair because he was the target of a federal investigation into child pornography and traveling for sex with children.
A search of his home under a federal warrant had uncovered incriminating emails. The age of consent in the Czech Republic is 15, but U.S. law forbids travel for sex with adolescents under the age of 18 whether it is legal in the locale or not. What do you want to bet that U.S. libertarians think Holmberg is a victim of excessive government interference with personal liberties, since he broke no laws in his man-boy sex playground?
When an elected official is discovered to be this despicable, disgraceful and untrustworthy, the party that nominated him should have to suffer some kind of penalty, and a more serious one if it is determined that the party knew or should have known how bad its representative was. (Hi there, George Santos!) Maybe then parties will start taking their responsibilities to the public seriously.
A candidate for high state or national office should have to endure background checks as stringent as those one must undergo for positions requiring national security clearance.
There’s a gold medal right there if I ever saw one. (And shame on TCM for sticking in a promotion before Donald’s big finish.)
But seriously folks: is the Olympics about sports and athletic competition, or has become just a long TV variety show? The institution of “breaking” as an Olympic event is an ominous slippery slope that was already too slippery. The fact that an activity—like dancing—takes athletic ability still doesn’t mean it’s a competitive sport.
I became convinced that the dancing in the Olympics was one more reason I eschew the whole mess after reading a lament from a New York Times sports columnist titled, “Female Gymnasts Have to Dance. What if the Sport Actually Valued It?” I have a better idea: what if the Olympics just cut dancing the hell out the games entirely?
Special kudos are due to Canada’s Dalhousie University Medical School. It has gone beyond the at least marginally defensible statue-toppling fad on the U.S. Left that stripped much of the country of past art erected to honor Confederate war heroes and 18th-19th political figures who supported slavery. As a result, Dalhousie has managed to make the American case of The Great Stupid look relatively mild in comparison to our northern neighbors. I’m feeling better already!
The Dalhousie Dean of Medicine David Anderson—I will soon be removing my middle name from my official documents so it doesn’t remind me of this idiot— ordered the removal of the portraits of former deans because they were, not Confederates, not slave-holders, not racists, but old white men. Can’t have that! Ick.
I’m going to post the entirety of his mind-blowing message from last month in all its woke awfulness, because attention should be paid. Here you go, and hold on to your head…
The background: There has been violent rioting in Great Britain’s Rotherham, Middlesbrough, Bristol, Bolton and other parts of the country following a stabbing attack in which three children attending a dance class were killed. Rioters have trashed and looted shops, set fire to vehicles and attacked police officers.
ITV, the alternative to the venerable BBC that dominates British television, had an interview with Home Secretary Yvette Cooper about the deepening domestic crisis on its popular morning show, a “Today Show” rip-off, “Good Morning Britain.” And who was the hard-hitting, independent, unbiased journalist given the assignment of handling the interview yesterday?
Why, it was none other than veteran broadcaster, GMB host and former Labour chancellor Ed Balls….Cooper’s husband.
I sure am glad I had the sense (for a change) to wait a while before writing about what is likely to be the most lasting ethics controversy of the 2024 Paris Olympics. The initial hysteria in the conservative media didn’t add up. My prize for the worst headline goes to the conservative sports blog Outkick: “Olympic Boxer Pretending To Be A Woman Pummels Opponent in 26 Seconds, Making Her Cry.” Nice.
What happened to launch this mess was an Olympic women’s boxing march pitting Algerian Imane Khelif and Italian boxer Angela Carini against each other. After 46 seconds Carini quit, something that almost never happens in in Olympic boxing. She didn’t shake Khelif’s hand after the referee raised it, then sank to her knees, weeping. She told reporters that she quit because of the pain from those opening punches from her opponent, saying that she has never been hit so hard in her life. Instantly, critic made the episode part of the trans women in sports controversy, a la Lia Thomas et al. That was simply wrong, careless, sloppy and unethical. Here is how the conservative commentary collective PJ Media described the scene:
On Thursday, the Olympics put on a disgraceful show, pitting a man with XY chromosomes against a biological woman. Algeria’s Imane Khelif won the 16 welterweight bout over Italy’s Angela Carini after pummeling his opponent’s head over and over again. After having her head slammed by the biological male for 46 seconds, Carini was done. She removed herself from the match and then crumbled to the mat in tears. Everyone who watched saw that the Italian boxer was no match for the Algerian, who had been disqualified from previous competitions for testing positive for male chromosomes.
Wrong. Imane Khelif is not a biological man, but intersex, meaning that the proper analogy for her dilemma in Olympic competition is the intersex runner, Caster Semenya, whom I most recently discussed last fall. Here is how that post ended…
Ugh. I always forget that the Olympics inevitably sparks lots of ethics controversies that I have to cover here despite finding the spectacle boring, corrupt and annoying. So I’m bound to miss some juicy issues—like this one, Australian swimming coach Bret Hawke accusing the Chinese team of cheating because a swimmer’s performance in the pool was “not humanly possible.” They used to say that about the four minute mile, if I recall. Or is this just more “Don’t trust China; China is asshole” stuff?
You don’t have to write about Olympics ethics, of course. But the starting pistol is loaded…
The Horror.
Bob Ballard is a veteran sports announcer with the BBC who has reported on sports since the mid- 1980s. He’s been involved in covering several Olympic games. However, a wan sexist joke he uttered that would have been standard fair on sitcoms in the 1960s got him sacked from the Paris Olympics broadcast.
After the women’s 4×100 meter freestyle relay that ended with a gold for Team Australia, Ballard felt compelled to comment on the team’s delay leaving the Paris Aquatic Centre. “Well, the women just finishing off. You know what women are like, hanging around, doing their makeup,” Ballard said. Immediately his female broadcasting partner Lizzie Simmonds, a former Olympian and his Eurosport co-host, struck. “Outrageous, Bob,” she said. “Some of the men are doing that as well.” Ballard laughed.
Eurosport, which distributes the Olympic broadcast in Europe (owned by the same company that now owns CNN) confirmed that the comment caused Ballard’s Olympics to be terminated. “We can confirm that Bob Ballard has been removed from our commentary roster with immediate effect,” it said in a statement this week.
Take THAT, insufficiently female athlete-extolling pig at the Parity Olympics!
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
I was literally in the middle of a preparing a post about the cultural sickness J.D. Vance was allegedly trying (and failing miserably) to focus public attention on when he mocked “childless cat ladies” dictating U.S. policies when these two awful stories came across my screen.
In the first, I learned that Parker Scholtes, 2, was found dead in her parents’ Honda SUV parked outside their home in the Tucson suburb of Marana. Her father, an irresponsible man-child named Christopher Scholtes, had left the baby “to nap,” that is, to broil, for more than three hours on July 9. He said he left her in the car with the air conditioner on (like a good dad, or his warped idea of one), but got involved playing PlayStation video games and didn’t check on her until three hours had gone by. He confessed to police that he knew the car’s engine would automatically shut off after 30 minutes, but just got, you know, carried away and lost track of time. You know how it flies by when you’re having fun.
Ethics Alarms 