Character

Why Bob Laterza, It Profits A Man Nothing To Reveal Himself As An Ethics Dunce To The Whole World, But For A Lousy 15 Minutes Of Fame?

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Congratulations are due to South Shore Little League manager Bob Laterza. He got his name prominently mentioned in the sports media by verbally attacking baseball mega-star Aaron Judge, immediately setting off a controversy.

Judge’s Yankees played the Detroit Tigers in the MLB Little League Classic at Williamsport, Pa. The Staten Island Little League coach slammed the Shrek-like slugger afterwards, telling the media,“How about turning around or wave to New York and the kids that think you’re a hero? They are the ones who pay your salary.” Laterza alleged that Judge ignored his young players as they shouted his name from 10 feet away.

That’s Judge in the photo above, wearing the 99 jersey in the middle of a mob of admirers at the event.

The only reason the coach’s grandstanding was considered news is that his target was Judge, not only the best player alive this season but also renowned as a model baseball citizen and one of the nicest people ever to play the game, even if he does play for the Yankees. Judge signed autographs and posed for pictures with many Little Leaguers from the various teams attending the game. Laterza criticism was the ultimate cheap shot, acquiring some pitiful publicity for himself by assailing a major celebrity.

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.

Judge refused to respond to Laterza’s accusations. It is that kind of abuse from entitled fans and others who believe that baseball stars owe them every second of their time that has prompted many players to announce that they won’t engage with anyone, sign autographs or anything else.

Never mind though. Bob got his name in the sports section.

Chess Ethics: Yeah, My Expert Opinion Is That Trying To Poison Your Opponent Is Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

I could be wrong…

Amina Abakarova, a 40-year-old female chess player and chess coach from the Russian Republic of Dagestan, poisoned another female player during a chess tournament in Makhachkala. This is unethical, cheating, and really poor sportsmanship.

Surveillance footage from the Dagestan Classical Chess Championship showed Abakarova spreading a substance later identified as mercury on the chess board and pieces that she knew would be touched by a rival, Umayganat Osmanova. CCTV footage revealed Abakarova walking to the table where Osmanova was about to play a match and smearing something on the chess board and pieces. See?

Osmanova began to experience nausea and dizziness just 30 minutes later after she began play on the poisoned board. She noticed that some foreign substance was on the pieces and suspended the game before she was too seriously affected, but she still had to be hospitalized.

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Curmie’s Conjectures: Incompetence and Arrogance of Olympian Proportions

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

by Curmie

[This is Jack: With this welcome column by the indefatigable Curmie, I think I can safely say that Ethics Alarms has finally put all of the ethics controversies arising from the 2024 Paris Olympic Games to bed, yes?

I sure hope so. Let’s see: we had the Opening Ceremony “Last Supper” thing, the “don’t photograph beautiful and sexy female athletes so they look beautiful and sexy” silliness, the announcer who was sacked for evoking a mild female stereotype that is sort-of accurate, the intersex boxer thing, the Australian breakdancer, and now Curmie examines the bitter women’s gymnastics scoring controversy over mini-points that are completely subjective anyway.

I am truly grateful, because I was going to have to post on this if he didn’t. And if I needed any more validation of my position that the Olympics are a bad, corrupt joke and not worth my time (I don’t), Curmie just supplied it.]

The three women you see pictured at the top of the page currently stand in the third (i.e., bronze medal), fourth, and fifth positions in the Olympics final in the women’s floor exercise. You see them from top to bottom in their relative positions as I write this; whether those will be the final final rankings remains to be seen.

Anyway, from the top down we see Romania’s Ana Bărbosu and Sabrina Maneca-Voinea, and the US’s Jordan Chiles.  Each of them has reason to believe that she—and she alone—should be the bronze medalist.  But a series of judges’ fuck-ups (apologies for the language, but there is no other adequate term) have resulted in a brouhaha that makes clear that whatever the NCAA or FIFA may do, the IOC isn’t going to give up its title as Most Corrupt and Incompetent Sports Organization without a fight.  But wait!  Who’s that coming up on the outside?  It’s the Tribunal Arbitral du Sport (Court of Arbitration for Sport), or TAS,  staking their claim, and they’re backing it up with hubristic posturing!  It’s coming down to the wire, and it’s anybody’s race!

I have already made clear  my distaste for sports which rely on the subjective opinions of judges rather than on some objective criterion.  Yes, referees can make mistakes, but at least we know that the team that scores the most points will win, as will the swimmer who touches the wall first or whoever throws the thing the farthest.  In these events, it’s clear: the US won a gold medal in the 100m sprint because a photograph made it clear that Noah Lyles’s torso crossed the finish line .005 seconds before Kishane Thompson’s did.  The US women’s basketball team also narrowly won gold, beating the French team by a single point because on the last play of the game the home team’s player had her toe on the three-point line instead of just outside it.

Those close finishes seem more arbitrary when there’s no objective way of distinguishing between the performances.  It’s also true that gymnastics is second only to figure skating in terms of judges giving credit to established stars just because they’re established. 

But let’s assume for the moment that the judges’ votes in the floor exercise, though subjective, were both informed and honest.  If you were to ask a dozen experts which of the three women discussed here was the “best,” I’m betting that all three would get at least two votes apiece, but ultimately that’s irrelevant to the current situation.

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Ethics Dunce Couple: Newlyweds Nova and Reemo Styles

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Yecchh.

This couple really and truly charged their wedding guests $333 per head to attend their wedding. You know, to help pay for tasteful accoutrements like that lovely wedding dress. An astounding 60 friends and relatives out of the 350 Nova and Reemo Styles invited paid the price, which I guess means that venal people have friends who don’t object to venality. Or that ethics dunces have friends who can’t recognize despicable conduct when they see it.

If some alleged friends of mine asked for $333 dollars for the honor of witnessing their wedding, I would send a lovely wedding cake with “Bite Me!” lovingly written on the top.

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Curmie’s Conjectures: Breaking News

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

by Curmie

[This is Jack: It was bound to happen: Curmie and I decided to write posts on the same topic: my discourse on the Awful Aussie Breaker was posted earlier today. It’s not fair, really. Curmie is a lot more elegant a writer than I am. Enjoy his take: I did.]

When I was an undergrad, I wrote a fair number of theatre reviews for the college newspaper.  One show I reviewed was a student-written revue-style piece that had everything from original songs to vulgar humor (the central shtick was that we should solve the energy crisis by harvesting buffalo farts for the methane).  One segment I praised was a hilarious parody of a pretentious modern dance piece.  There was one problem, though.  The choreographer/dancer in question wasn’t pleased; he didn’t think it was a parody.  Oops.

That incident was called to mind this week when I learned that Rachael Gunn, a 36-year-old Australian college professor with a PhD in cultural studies, has become an internet sensation by placing last in the breaking (formerly known as break-dancing) competition at the Olympics.  Competing as B-girl Raygun (don’t blame her for that part; such noms de guerre are apparently required of competitors) she went through a series of maneuvers looking like a cross between a demented inchworm and flounder flopping on the deck of a fishing vessel.  What it certainly was not was anything that could reasonably be described as a demonstration of strength, balance, or skill of any description.

There are a lot of questions here, not the least of which being what the hell breaking is doing as an Olympic event (I refuse to call it a “sport”).  Like Jack, apparently, I have always despised the notion of “sports” in which the winners are determined by judges rather than by who got the most points or crossed the finish line first or whatever other objective criteria might be employed.  This aversion is amplified when original moves are encouraged if not required.  If a gymnast, diver, or figure skater does one more spin than anyone else has ever done or does it in a different position than it’s ever been done, that’s obviously harder and can be reasonably rewarded.  But breaking has no apparent guidelines other than what each individual judge thinks is cool (or whatever term is currently in vogue).  Gunn says all her routines were original.  We can only hope so.

All of this, of course, is an extension of a belief that any activity that requires any measure of athleticism ought to be a sport.  Hence artistic (formerly “synchronized”) swimming, skateboarding, rhythmic gymnastics, breaking, etc. appear as Summer Olympic sports.  I’m not here to suggest that these events don’t require a combination of strength, precision, stamina, timing, and agility.  Of course they do!  So does ballet.  So does roofing a house.  I’m just not interested in seeing how many style points are deducted for using more nails than necessary or having a little caulk spill out of the gun.

Anyway, revenons à nos moutons…  Gunn was, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty awful.  Could I do her routine?  Not now, no.  But I’m pretty sure I could have when I was her age, and that puts her well beneath the status of an elite athlete.  So what’s going on here?  Well, she apparently won the qualifying tournament for Oceania (I really don’t want to see who came in second), and she’s represented Australia at the world championships three years in a row, so she’s at the Olympics fair and square.  There is a qualifying time in, say, a track event (I have a former student who placed second in the Olympic trials in a middle-distance race, but missed the qualifying time by a fraction of a second), but if you’re the best your nation or geographical area has to offer, you get to go, and it’s difficult to establish a qualifying standard if there’s nothing objective about the decision-making.

So, what’s going on?  Well, there’s the post on X that calls her a “grievance studies scholar” and claims she has argued that “breaking’s institutionalization via the Olympics will place breaking more firmly within this sporting nation’s hegemonic settler-colonial structures that rely upon racialized and gendered hierarchies.”  Speaking as a PhD in the humanities, I respond, “Huh?”

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Lest We Forget…Ethics Dunce and Probable Ethics Villain: Dr. Rachel Gunn, a.k.a “RayGun”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

For some reason, YouTube still has no clean, complete video of the infamous “breaking” performance that embarrassed the Paris Olympic games. (TikTok has one of the better ones, but I can’t embed TikTok.)

EA columnist Curmie flagged this ludicrousness for me [his analysis is here], knowing that my sock drawer problems precluded me from watching any of the goings on in Gay Paree. I didn’t know what to write about Gunn, having already expressed my belief that the dancing component of the Olympics was a breach of integrity and a betrayal of the mission of the Games. I didn’t specifically delve into the addition this time of “breaking,” aka breakdancing, which appears to me to be one more example of woke virtue-signaling in The Great Stupid, a kind of Olympics event reparations for blacks. (Why not clog dancing? Square-dancing? Russian squat-dancing? Tap-dancing? I hear that ballroom dancing may not be far off…)

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About That Tim Walz DUI…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

In 1995, when he was 31, Tim Walz, then a high school football coach and teacher in Alliance, Nebraska, was pulled over by a Nebraska state trooper for driving 96 miles per hour in a 55 m.p.h. zone. There was alcohol on the future Minnesota governor’s and pandemic Nazi’s breath and after Walz failed a field sobriety test and breath test, he was arrested and charged with speeding and driving while intoxicated.

Does it matter? Not the arrest or the drunk driving, in my view, not a single incident so many decades ago. I don’t know anyone who could not have been charged with driving while over the alcohol limit at one point in their lives or another: whether someone gets caught at this frequent violation is largely a matter of moral luck. Tempting fate repeatedly this way—moral luck can also get people killed—and driving while intoxicated when one is in a position of trust and authority is another matter.

By all accounts, Walz was properly accountable and remorseful. He agreed to plead to a reduced charge of reckless driving, a misdemeanor, and paid a $200 fine. He duly reported the incident to his Alliance High School principal, quit his extracurricular activities including the coaching, and offered to resign from his teaching job.

All good. The story just “resurfaced” as they say now, and “Republicans pounced.” I can’t blame them: the tale of George W. Bush’s DUI was held and played by the Democrats as an October Surprise-in-the-hole, and may have cost Bush the popular vote majority in the 2000 Presidential election. Nonetheless, the verdict here is that Walz’s DUI incident itself is irrelevant to his fitness as a potential Vice-President.

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CNN and Brianna Keilar Give a Symposium on How the News Media Tries to Rig Elections

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Incredibly and against all odds, the mainstream media is demonstrating that it is even more biased and determined to swing the 2024 election to the Democrats than they were in 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020. Not only that, but its propagandists are being more obvious about it.

As a case study, let us examine CNN’s handling of the Tim Walz scandal. Walz has been falsely representing himself to the public as a combat veteran for many years and in many ways. In addition, he abandoned the leadership of the troops he had trained with as soon as they were ordered to deploy in Iraq. This isn’t even a matter of serious dispute, yet the Harris ticket’s promoters in the news media, aka “almost all of it,” have been furiously spinning, obfuscating and ignoring inconvenient facts. Under different circumstances (such as, say, a VP nominee on a Republican ticket), the news media would be all over this story like Jaws on Pippin. It would be a daily feeding frenzy.

In the past few days, more of Walz’s former almost-comrades-in-arms have come forward to condemn Walz’s conduct and character. For example, the chaplain of Walz’s field artillery regiment said there was no excuse for the him to have abandoned his National Guard unit before a critical deployment. “In our world, to drop out after a WARNORD [warning order] is issued is cowardly, especially for a senior enlisted guy,” retired Capt. Corey Bjertness, now a pastor in Horace, North Dakota, told the New York Post. This wasn’t even newsworthy to most news sources: it might take public attention away from the fact that Trump keeps claiming Harris is misrepresenting the sizes of her rally crowds.

CNN’s spin debacle regarding Walz’s “stolen valor” was special, however.

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“It Can’t Happen Here” Item: Belgium Bans Jews From A Competition Because, Well, They Are Jews

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

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.”

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Congratulations to Elon Musk, Who Earns a Golden “Bite Me!”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

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.”

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