In considering your response, consider the exigencies of the situation. Who has a duty to act? What can the police do? Was the police leadership obligated to send such a letter, or will it do more harm than good? Doesn’t the letter essentially invite “mostly peaceful” demonstrators to take over the streets?
If lives are threatened, is it ethical for police to defy the cities prohibition on crowd control? What should concerned citizens do? Should they organize private security forces? Continue reading →
The Barn Door Fallacy is one of the most striking example of persistent human and bureaucratic incompetence, as well as one of the most destructive.
It is just as illogical as the old saw it is named after, yet the reflex reaction to almost every accident, tragedy or chaotic event is to immediately adopt extreme measures that are deemed necessary to prevent what has already happened. This occurs despite the fact that most such events were in situations already operating with known risks and virtual certainty that the disaster that eventually prompts the Barn Door response would occur. Nevertheless, taking reasonable measures to prevent the catastrophe is somehow never recognized until after the bodies stack up, and then being reasonable is no longer an option.
Examples of this phenomenon, a triumph of incompetence, emotion and fear of responsibility over responsibility and reason, abound: the aftermath to 9/11, the over-reaction to the Oklahoma City bombing; the end of airship travel after the spectacular explosion of the Hindenburg, the death of nuclear power in the wake of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The pandemic will undoubtedly lead to some manifestation of the Barn Door Fallacy. It even infects sports: all it took was a televised career-threatening injury to a franchise star catcher to make Major League Baseball drastically alter the rule regarding collisions at home plate, and a freak accident breaking the leg of a player in a take-out slide at second base during post-season play-offs to prompt MLB to ban a routine aspect of the game—and an exciting one— practiced and accepted for over a hundred years. Continue reading →
Bulgaria has a holiday called “July Morning” that celebrates freedom, friendship, and love of life.
Maybe I’ll move to Bulgaria…
1. I cannot believe this doesn’t alienate more people than it pleases. I watched the Red Sox-Orioles game last night to open the Strangest Baseball Season Ever in Boston, and would have enjoyed it completely ( the Sox won 13-2) had I not had to constantly avert my eyes from the Red Sox management’s ostentatious virtue signaling, if you can call it that, since pandering to Black Lives Matter is far from virtuous.
Not only was the special BLM MLB logo at the back of the pitcher’s mound (BLM MLB is a palindrome!), but the full Black Lives Matter name was emblazoned on a banner, about 250 feet long, across the empty bleachers.
I’d love to know how many Red Sox executives, or if any of them, actually know what the “movement” the team is pimping for intends. My guess is that the decision to promote BLM was a cynical go along to get along decision that had nothing to do with substance, but rather was made in fear and expediency.
2. On the Fox News harassment accuser. The sexual harassment lawsuit filed against Tucker Carlson by Cathy Areu now appears to have fatal flaws. Continue reading →
“As defined by bestselling author Ibram X Kendi, anti-racism involves supporting policies and ideas that level racial disparities of outcome, while racism refers to any explanation of disparity that points toward black responsibility rather than white racism. This redefinition of racism from identifiable prejudice to disparity of outcomes represents the expansion of a propriety into what Antonio Gramsci calls a cultural hegemony: a power construct that cuts reality down to size and squashes any voice that questions its moral authority. While suggesting that black Americans bear some responsibility for their own outcomes was once considered merely in poor taste, it is now considered racist and therefore utterly beyond the pale in progressive circles.…If we are truly concerned with remedying the tragedy of racism and taking steps toward a society that views our racial identities as insignificant, we need to let the past be past. We can accept the reality of historical racism without creating an identity out of it that keeps us eternally suspicious of each other. We cannot change our past, but we can change how we make sense of it as we move towards an increasingly multi-ethnic future.”
After Gabe Kapler opened the kneeling gates, and the sickening green light from Major League Baseball allowing, indeed encouraging, player to parade their social, political and partisan views on the baseball field, I assumed that my home town team, the Boston Red Sox, would buy a first-class ticket on the Woke Train, nauseating many in the process. The Boston franchise has been awash with guilt since it was more than a decade late in breaking the color line, finally promoting journeyman infielder Pumpsie Green to the Show after every other team had added at least one black player. In addition, we must never forget that this is Massachusetts, where citizens continued to elect Ted Kennedy to the Senate knowing full well that he lied his head off while ducking accountability in a clear-cut case of manslaughter. I love it dearly, but the Bay State is the land of symbolic liberalism at any price, appropriate or not.
Thus it was not a shock to see the Red Sox unveil a massive pro-Black Lives Matter billboard this week. The 250-foot thing is adjacent to Fenway Park, and facing out to the Massachusetts Turnpike. The huge sign reads “Black Lives Matter,” with the team’s logo at the end. The billboard includes the URL of the Red Sox Foundation website, where Red Sox President and CEO Sam Kennedy has a statement titled, “Social Justice, Equity and Inclusion.” It is illogical, virtue-signaling pandering. You know: the usual. Continue reading →
I bet Michael, when he submitted this Comment of the Day, had a feeling I’d groove on it. After all, it’s about a President, I’m a Presidents nut, and he ends up agreeing with me, which is always welcome.
He also raises and interesting question that was not considered in the post. If we judged Presidents on a racism scale that weighted their attitudes according to how they compared to the culture and predominant beliefs of the day, which Presidents would come out looking best? That’s how baseball stat analysts judge players across eras, and it makes sense: players are compared to league averages while they were playing, and then the stats are adjusted accordingly. For example, Carl Yastrzemski’s .301 average in 1968 was more impressive, and represented better hitting in his offensive context, than Lou Gehrig’s .354 mark in 1936, when ten players hit at least .350.
Analyzed that way, Woodrow Wilson comes out as the most racist President, more than the slaveholders. Jefferson, despite being a slaveholder, looks relatively good in the context of his times. So, I think, does Teddy Roosevelt, unapologetic white supremacist that he undoubtedly was.
Only slightly more disgusting than this truncated season’s use of the abortion of an extra-inning rule that will put a runner on second base to begin extra innings in tie games are MLB’s “social justice promoting” regulations for players.
It makes me physically ill just having to post them.
Baseball announced guidelines today allowing players “to support social justice and diversity and inclusion” on the field—also on their own, but I don’t case waht players choose to do a private citizens, as long as they don’t abuse their postions as baseball palyers. “MLB supports the players’ need to express themselves,” we are told.
Yes, the NFL and NBA have poisoned baseball.
Players have no need to express themselves politically on the field, and should not be allowed to do so. But Major League Baseball, as it has been most of its existence, is run by venal fools, and they are terrified by the players union. The announcement of the green light for players to be overtly political while the game allows promotion of the racist organization sparking violent riots and vandalism across the country just happened to be announced almost simultaneously with an expanded play-offs format. Continue reading →
This moment in “Field of Dreams” was how I started off my baseball and culture presentation this week. Ironically, the speech has always irritated me, because of its stagey blocking, and because it is a speech that sounds like a speech, and is essentially right out of the book the film was based on. In the novel, “Shoeless Joe,”,the “Terrence Mann” character played by James Earl Jones was real life (and then, still living) recluse author J.D. Salinger. I dislike the speech, but the scene always moves me, for a personal reason.
As Terrance Mann stands, giving his speech, the ghostly players of the past silently assemble behind him in Ray Kinsella’s (Kevin Costner, of course) magic corn field. One of the players behind him has been identified in the film as Smokey Joe Wood, a 30 game winner with the World Champion 1912 Boston Red Sox. Just a few years before the film was made, I had been in the Fenway Park grandstands as Smoky Joe, feeble, in his mid-nineties and in a wheel chair shortly before his death, barely threw out—more like dropped—the first pitch at a Red Sox Old Timer’s game, to a standing ovation. And here he was, in that corn field, but young and vital again.
Gets me every time….
1. Ethics query: is it ethical to perform “Piggies”? I just caught an old concert clip in which George Harrison and Eric Clapton performed the obnoxious pseudo-Marxist ditty “Piggies” (from the White Album) to thunderous applause.
[Notice of correction: I originally wrote that “Piggies” was a Lennon composition. All these years I assumed it was, heavy-handed and juvenile politics that it was. I am stunned that the song was George Harrison’s doing; I thought better of him.]
This was well after the Manson murders: I had never heard anyone perform the song in decades. Admittedly, it is just moral luck that a madman seized upon the White Album Beatles songs as his inspiration to mastermind the slaughters of Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and her house guests, as well as supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary the following night. However, “Piggies” was the one song referenced directly in both murders. It is not inconceivable that if the White Album had omitted that song—no great loss, either–at least the LaBianca murders might not have taken place. I know I can’t hear the song without picturing carnage, and it seems to me singing the song is like a celebration of Manson’s work. I wouldn’t ban it; I don’t believe in banning anything. I just think it’s bad taste to play it or perform it.
Is that inconsistent with my objection to “canceling” “Dixie,” “My Mammy,” “Rockabye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” “Oh Susanna!” and other songs that are redolent of the Old South? I would argue that those songs have the virtue of being great tunes and important cultural touchpoints…in other words, works of musical art that justify themselves. “Piggies,” in contrast, is musical junk, like about 20% of the White Album filler. Continue reading →
“We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed, they’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has.”
—-Joe Biden at a virtual town meeting yesterday, giving a novel version of American history.
Where to begin? I suppose it’s obligatory to point out, again, that the now routine assertion that President Trump is a racist is based on distortions, innuendo and outright lies. The Democratic Party/”resistance”/mainstream media axis doesn’t even bother to try to support the claim any more, because, I explained here, this is a a Big Lie strategy, pure Hitler/Goebbels, from the same source, ironically, of the Big Lie (it’s #3 on the list) that the President is like Hitler. Joe’s Big Lie yesterday is #4. It probably should be #1, since it was formulated from the moment Trump, in announcing his candidacy, said, very clearly, that a lot of illegal immigrants from Mexico were dangerous criminals. That is undeniably true, but it was reported, and has come to be believed, that he said all Mexicans were dangerous criminals.
I’m not going to rehash why Big Lie #4 is a lie; in you haven’t figured it out, please go to the link. However, it is amazing what happens when you ask anyone, even the most articulate and intelligent Trump basher, how they conclude Trump is a racist. They just can’t do it without resorting to misrepresentations and distortions, then bubble over with rage when you point them out.
Joe Biden, as we all know, isn’t articulate or intelligent, and never has been. Now, sadly, he is existing in the twilight world of some kind of mental deterioration. As an aside, I wonder how the news media and those who would vote against President Trump if whoever was running against him “shot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue” are going to rationalize Joe’s increasingly garbled pronouncements. “Be fair. That’s just Joe being Joe. You know, he’s senile!”? “OK, he’s lost it, but at least he’s not a racist”? Incidentally, Joe’s statement describing Barack Obama as “clean” back when Biden had all of his marbles, which were never abundant to begin with, was a more reliable marker of racism than anything Donald Trump has said in public in his long career. Continue reading →
During a violent storm here in Alexandra, with the internet going in and out, my wife and I gave up and watched “Spotlight” again, an ethics movie, and a genuinely heroic story about journalists doing their jobs, informing the public, exposing popular institutions. Those were the days. The ending speech, where the Boston Globe’s editor talks in high-minded terms about the reason journalism is worth the effort, made me physically nauseous. The profession he described is virtually unrecognizable from what I see on CNN, Fox News, NPR, the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Almost immediately after, I read a column in the Times from two days ago, in the Arts section. It’s a periodic feature by John Williams where he interviews an author, “5 Things About Your Book.” This time he was talking to Larry Tye, whose biography of Joe McCarthy has just been published. The cut line read that Larry Tye “discusses his biography of that American bully, and an eerie echo.”
Having read the Times for the last four years and watched with admiration how it can toss gratuitous insults and sinister innuendoes about President Trump in any context no matter how remote, from book reviews to cooking columns to fashion essays. I was certain what the “eerie echo” would be. Joe McCarthy was a bad guy, so the article would show how much Donald Trump is like Joe McCarthy.
For the nonce, I will ignore that salient fact that it is “the resistance,” the Democrats and the anti-Trump media, which is to say, the media, that have been using relentless McCarthyite tactics against the President from before he was elected.
So where was this eerie echo of Trump in the life of “Tail-gunner Joe”? Here’s Tye’s shocking illumination of that question:
I knew there was a general link between Senator McCarthy and President Trump, but I didn’t realize how eerily echoing it was.
Huh? What “general connection”? The Senator died in 1957, when Trump was 10. How can you have a “general connection” with someone who isn’t in your family, you never met, and whom you didn’t know anything about at all until well after he died?
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of The Week:
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