1. When ethics alarms were never installed...The question here is not whether this was unethical. Of course it was. The question is how such an episode could happen anywhere in this country. Eight high school football coaches at McKinley Senior High School in Canton, Ohio have been placed on paid leave after apparently forcing a 17-year-old player, a Hebrew Israelite whose faith forbids the consumption of pork, to eat a pepperoni pizza in front of the team as punishment for skipping a practice. The family is suing the school district for violating the student’s First Amendment rights.
The head football coach, Marcus Wattley, allegedly told the boy that if he didn’t eat the pizza, his team mates would be punished. I don’t comprehend this. How can someone live in the U.S. and think forcing a child to violate his faith is anything but abuse? How does someone like Wattley get hired by a public school and entrusted with the welfare of children? Why would any high school have eight assistant football coaches?
If the facts are confirmed in an investigation, more than the coaches should be fired and, one hopes, prosecuted. The principal and other administrators should also be canned. [Pointer: JutGory]
2. Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias…The dozens of ways the mainstream media warps the news and manipulates public opinion becomes oppressive once you are sensitized to it. The headline in the Times two days ago, for example, was “GOP Challenges Teaching of Racism’s Scope.” That headline presumes as fact that “Critical Race Theory” and the “1619 Project” fairly and accurately convey “racism’s scope.” “GOP Challenges What It Calls Anti-White, Anti-America Indoctrination In the Schools” would be a neutral headline. Later in the same article, the news story refers to President Trump’s “racist comments, ” which is just a continuation of a narrative build on a media-fueled Big Lie. President Trump made many insensitive, provocative and politically incorrect comments. None were “racist.”
Well, I’m thankful it’s Friday, at least: what an awful week, culminating in an inexplicably sleepless night. Oh—that’s two out of the three things I’ve received reader complaints about in the last few days—yes, EA has a complaint desk: my occasional use of CAPS, bolding and italics for tone and emphasis, and the inclusion of “personal stuff.” The third is that I reply to comments too much, or so some critics think.
Now, hoping to prompt a complaint that I shouldn’t taint the purity of an open forum by mentioning a topic, I’ll point out this, since I’m going back to bed and may not be in any shape to get back here for a long time: today’s headlines about the U.S. government finally admitting that it has no idea what a lot of the UFOs are is infuriating. THAT’s something that Congress should investigate; not the potential flying saucers themselves, but how the policy of lying to the public about them, calling them swamp gas, domestic aircraft and hallucinations and generally gaslighting the American people, was allowed to continue for decades. Who approved that? Who allowed it to continue? What news organizations assisted in the cover-up? Is there any wonder that the public doesn’t trust our institutions, and that conspiracy theories abound? This was a conspiracy, one that the military and every President from Ike to Trump—that’s twelve!— allowed to continue. Give Joe some credit on this one.
Now feel free to ignore me , and write about the ethics issues you want to.
The withdrawal of female tennis star Naomi Osaka from the French Open because she wasn’t allowed to ignore rules all the other players were forced to play by has inspired a revealing amount of criticism…of the concept that stars should have to abide by the same rules and laws as everybody else. Since this is a massive ethics blind spot that defies persuasive advocacy, I’ve been somewhat surprised that so many commentators and athletes have been willing to put such an unethical position in print.
I shouldn’t have been, I guess. Osaka (predictably) played the victim, suddenly revealed that she suffered from depression (the old reliable “I’m not bad, I’m sick!” ploy satirized in “Officer Krupke”), and she had the triple benefit of being Asian, Black and female, the “Get Out Of Accountability Free” hat trick (that’s hockey, but you get the point) in the Age of The Great Stupid.
I was originally going to dedicate this post to the fatuous commentary of New York Times columnist Kurt Streeter, to whom all sports is about race, on l’affaire Osaka. “Using social media posts, first last Wednesday then on Monday, Osaka called out one of the most traditional practices in major sports: the obligatory news conference, vital to reporters seeking insight for their stories, but long regarded by many elite athletes as a plank walk. After monumental wins and difficult losses, Osaka has giggled and reflected through news conferences and also dissolved into tears. In Paris, she said she wanted nothing to do with the gatherings because they had exacted a steep emotional toll,” he wrote. “She sent a message with significant weight: The days of the Grand Slam tournaments and the huge media machine behind them holding all of the clout are done. In a predominantly white, ritual-bound sport, a smoothstroking young woman of Black and Asian descent, her confidence still evolving on and off the court, holds the power. Get used to it.”
Get used to what? Star athletes (and politicians, and other celebrities) thinking that if they are successful enough and popular enough, they get to break rules and get away with it? We’re used to that. But the point is that she doesn’t have the power. Tennis authorities fining her and threatening to kick her out of upcoming tournaments proved it. So she threw a tantrum, quit, took her ball and went home, and that’s admirable to Streeter, or anyone else? Well, but, you see, “it is impossible to know the depth of Osaka’s internal anguish” as “the rare champion of color in a tennis world dominated by fans, officials and a press corps that is overwhelmingly white.” Oh, gag me with a spoon. I’d be willing to suffer a lot of internal anguish in an enterprise I could make over 50 million dollars in a year, as Osaka has. Who wouldn’t?
On Ethics Alarms yesterday, the controversy involving the current top female pro tennis star, Japan’s Naomi Osaka, was relegated to the morning warm-up rather than a stand-alone post. If you were not following EA yesterday, here’s a quick summary:
Citing her annoyance with repetitious questions from the news media that undermined her confidence, the 23-year old announced that she would violate the 2021 official Grand Slam rulebook, which requires players to participate in post-match news conferences. Violations result in fines of up to $20,000, but since Osaka made over 55 million dollars last year alone, more than all but the most elite U.S. professional athletes, this fine would be like a late fee at the library to normal people. I wrote in part,
“This is literally an example of a star announcing that rules are for lesser mortals. Verdict: Ethics Dunce. The reason Osaka makes so much money is that athletes are paid heroes and entertainers, and submitting to the idiocy of reporters is part of their job. Fines obviously aren’t enough: a tennis player who refuses to fulfill her obligations to the sport should be banned from competing until she does.“
Yesterday, after winning her first round match at the French Open, Osaka was fined (but only $15,000), and tennis officials proved that they read Ethics Alarms (I jest) and told Osaka that continuing her boycott of the media would result in her being suspended from the current tournament and others. Good. The organization had no other choice, unless it wanted to directly endorse the King’s Pass (Rationalization #11). If Osaka was allowed to snub the media with minimal consequences (for her), then no other player would feel obligated to cooperate either. Rennae Stubbs, a former player who is now a coach and ESPN analyst, stated the obvious while most of the players and former players were expressing sympathy for Osaka: “You cannot allow a player to have an unfair advantage by not doing post-match press. It’s time consuming, so if one player is not doing that and others are, that is not equal.”
It will be interesting to see if the news media discusses the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 any more this May 31 than it has in the past. Discussing this horrible mass murder of blacks in Oklahoma over Memorial Day weekend has always been seen as sufficiently tasteless that the story has suffered the equivalent of a historical airbrushing. When did you first learn about it? I didn’t encounter the episode in elementary school, high school, college or law school. I was 50, and furiously researching the life of Clarence Darrow so I could churn out a one man show (that was already in rehearsal) after Leslie Nielsen pulled the rights we had paid for on the Darrow show performed on Broadway by Henry Fonda. I was looking for the context of Darrow’s epic closing argument in the Sweet case (1925), in which he referenced examples of white mob violence against blacks. That was my introduction to the tragedy. How was this possible? I was and am a voracious consumer of American history, movies, and television. Yet the facts of the Tulsa Race Massacre never entered my consciousness.
Here’s one useful resource…there are many others available online. A brief summary: After World War I, Tulsa’s African American community was notable for its affluence. The Greenwood District was known as “Black Wall Street.”But on May 30, 1921, an incident between a white woman and a black man on an elevator—nobody knows exactly what happened—was reported in the Tulsa newspapers as an attempted rape. The young African-American, Dick Rowland, had been arrested, and members of the community believed that he might be lynched. When an angry white mob gathered in front of the courthouse, a group of over 70 back men, some of them World War I veterans with weapons, confronted them. A gun went off in a struggled, and chaos descended on Greenwood. A white mob of thousands overran the Greenwood District, shooting unarmed black citizens in the streets. It burned an area of some 35 city blocks, and more than 1,200 houses, numerous businesses, a school, a hospital and a dozen churches. It is estimated that 300 people were killed in the rampage, though official counts at the time were much lower. 300 is the same death toll as the 1871 Chicago fire. I knew about that tragedy by the time I was 8.
1. IIPTDXTTNMIAFB! That’s short for “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden…”, introduced here. The current example: during a speech at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Langley,Virginia two days ago, President Biden began spontaneously complimenting a pre-teen girl who had joined her parents and two older brothers on the stage after her mother had introduced Biden to the crowd. Biden said, inappropriately and creepily, “ I love those barrettes in your hair, man. I tell you what, look at her. She looks like she’s 19 years old sitting there like a little lady with her legs crossed.” Republicans pounced, as the MSM cliche goes whenever Democrats are legitimately criticized. The episode was barely mentioned by the media dedicated to propping up Biden—that is, almost all of it—at all. IIPTDXTTNMIAFB…and President Trump didn’t even have a photographically preserved series of encounters like this:
2. AHHHH! It’s a virus ! Get a gun!!! The headline on the front page of the NYT website yesterday read, “Pandemic Fuels Surge in U.S. Gun Sales ‘Unlike Anything We’ve Ever Seen.'” Incredible. People bought guns for the first time because rioting was going on all over the country, and in many places the police were doing little or nothing to stop it. Buildings were burning and being looted; citizens were being threatened. Who gets a gun to fight a pandemic? (There was never any threat of the kind of civic breakdown from the virus like that portrayed in the movie “Contagion.” Toilet paper riots?)
The degree to which the Times—the “paper of record’!—continues to distort reality to mislead the public and warp public opinion is astounding. Later in the same article, the Times said, “While gun sales have been climbing for decades — they often spike in election years and after high-profile crimes — Americans have been on an unusual, prolonged buying spree fueled by the coronavirus pandemic, the protests last summer and the fears they both stoked.”
Ghost Ethics! I just watched an Amanda Seyfried Netflix movie called “Things Heard And Seen,” which I recommend neither seeing nor hearing. What I got out of it—spoiler alert, if indeed a crummy movie can be spoiled—is that ghost ethics are a little bit “problematic” as Prof. Turley would say. The spooks don’t quite get the “Fix the problem before it’s too late” obligation. In this movie, the benign ghost of a murdered woman who had been the original owner of an old house bought by an ambitious, sociopathic college professor takes the professor’s victimized wife under her spectral wing, knows that the husband is up to no good, but only does anything proactive to get rid of the husband after the monster has killed F. Murray Abraham (who still looks like Salieri!), run a woman who was on to him off the road, putting her in a coma, and finally chopped up lovely Amanda, who plays the wife, with an ax. THEN the ghost drags the husband to Hell, which we know the ghost knew was going to be his fate before Amanda got the Lizzy Borden treatment.
Talk about locking the barn door after the horse is gone…
1. Isn’t it good to know that news readers all over the world are just as ignorant and incompetent as ours are? Bill Shakespeare, the first man to get a pandemic vaccine, died last week of non-virus causes. A Spanish newscaster, Noelia Novillo, as photos of the Bard’s namesake flashed on the screen, announced the story this way:
‘We’ve got news that has stunned all of us given the greatness of this man. We’re talking about William Shakespeare and his death. We’ll let you know how and why it happened.As we all know, he’s one of the most important writers in the English language – for me the master. Here he is. He was the first man to get the coronavirus vaccine. He’s died in England at the age of 81.”
No word yet regarding whether the station fired this ignoramus. Why bother? She’ll just get a job at CNN…
2. Speaking of locking barn doors…actually more like locking the cellar door after the horse has escaped from the barn…Southwest Airlines announced yesterday that it will not resume alcohol service in June as previously announced, because a woman attacked a flight attendant on a recent Southwest flight in an incident that had nothing to do with alcohol consumption.
Ethics Alarms is so fond of the practice of punishing innocent members of the public for the isolated conduct of a single wrong-doer (Should I call it “The Chauvin Solution”?) and this is even worse. There is no nexus between the incident and Southwest’s response at all, except the unproven theory that if passengers have become unusually cranky during the pandemic (with Southwest insisting that passengers re-mask between sips of Coke), they’ll be even crankier once they’ve had a few little bottles.
I’ll be visiting the Major (and Mom) at Arlington National Cemetery this weekend.
1. Well, let’s start the morning and end the week with evidence of progress…Mickey Callaway, the former manager of the New York Mets and recently fired pitching coach of the California Angels, has seen his baseball career implode because of what appears to be a habit of harrassing women in his workplace, which is Major League Baseball. Callaway, who has been banned from the game at least through 2022 after an investigation of the complaints made by more than five women, released a statement that is as close to a Level One apology on the Ethics Alarms Apology Scale as one is likely to see. That’s this one:
“An apology motivated by the realization that one’s past conduct was unjust, unfair, and wrong, constituting an unequivocal admission of wrongdoing as well as regret, remorse and contrition, as part of a sincere effort to make amends and seek forgiveness.“
Here’s Callaway’s version:
“My family and I fully support MLB’s strong stance against harassment and discrimination and are grateful to the Commissioner and his office for their thorough investigation. I apologize to the women who shared with investigators any interaction that made them feel uncomfortable. To be clear, I never intended to make anyone feel this way and didn’t understand that these interactions might do that or violate MLB policies. However, those are my own blind spots, and I take responsibility for the consequences.In my 25 years in professional baseball I have never taken for granted the privilege of being even a small part of this great game of ours. To say I regret my past poor choices would be an understatement. I remain hopeful that I can return to baseball when eligible at the conclusion of next season, but for now, I plan to work on my own shortcomings and repairing any damage I have caused with my colleagues and, particularly, my family.”
Joe Biden could have made that exact apology, without the baseball reference, of course. He never had to.
2. Incompetent question, perfect answer:
Those are eye-roll emojis. Monica also gets points for brevity. She just missed tying author Victor Hugo for the record for shortest published message, in his case, a telegram to his publisher regarding the fate of his submitted manuscript for “Les Miserables.” Hugo wrote “?“. The publisher replied, “!“.
I won’t even take away ethics points from Monica for pandering to the Worst of the Woke by listing her preferred pronouns.
I periodically am asked why I insist on referring to the pandemic virus, which unquestionably originated in China, almost certainly in the Wuhan province, and was allowed to spread world-wide in part by cover-up activities by the Chinese government, “The Wuhan virus.” After all, the edict came down from our politically-correct betters that this term was “racist,” despite the fact that it conveyed useful and accurate information that the technical term “COVID” does not.
I typically reply that I call it the Wuhan virus because that’s where it came from, and virtually every other virus has been named for its place of origin (sometimes inaccurately). I also do so in defiance of the open scheme among the news media to try to advance the Big Lie that President Trump was being racist by using the term when the news media itself had employed it before deciding this was one more opportunity to undermine Trump’s Presidency.
In addition, I furiously reject the proposition that because idiots and assholes react to truthful statements by behaving unjustly, violently and stupidly, as with the still relatively few who have attacked or abused Asian-Americans using the same cretinous rationale as those who killed dachshunds during World War I, anyone should shade the truth or avoid stating a fact. I reject the Asshole’s Veto, in other words.
There is also this motivating me: China is an international villain, and nobody should pretend otherwise or make any effort to excuse or disguise that nation’s true nature. Moreover, I am not running for office, and have succeeded in making anyone trying to justify the ban on calling a Chinese virus a Chinese virus look like the race-baiting tool that he or she is.
The entire effort to label as racist any statement, theory or belief that China bears responsibility for the virus that has killed millions and savaged the world economy would not have occurred with such fervor if it were not fueled by anti-Trump hatred and bias. Now the inconvenient truth that the virus may have originated in a Wuhan lab is exposing the despicable censorship effort for what it is, so its purveyors are desperately trying avoid the opprobrium they richly deserve.
1. Priorities! Major League Baseball has placed Angels pitching coach Mickey Callaway on its ineligible list through at least the 2022 season, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred announced. The league made the decision after investigating Callaway for sexual sexual harassment allegations reaching back several years, with several female sporstwriters among the alelged victims. The Angels fired Callaway this afternoon. Opines a major baseball news site: “Callaway is facing a year-plus ban, and it seems hard to believe any MLB team will hire him when he’s eligible to return.”
Hmmmm…
Alex Cora was suspended and fired as manager by the Boston Red Sox after a one-year suspension, then immediately hired back by the team. All he did was play a major role in devising a cheating scheme for one team, the Houston Astros, that extended through the play-offs and World Series, then oversaw a second team, Boston, that was found to have engaged in cheating, though less extensively, the next season. Cora’s cheating scheme with Astros was unprecedented, and cost two other professionals their jobs and the Astros millions in fines,while seriously scarring the integrity of the game. The conduct Callaway engaged in has been routine among professional athletes for decades, though in his case it was apparently 1) a bit more extreme than the norm and 2) “unwelcome.” After all, he was just a coach. So far, nobody has accused a player making more than $10 million a year of making sexual advances that were “unwelcome.’
I’m sure many readers here feel that I am obsessed with this issue and are tired of my attempts to cut through the fog machine’s belches, but this is an ethics blog—a tiny, increasingly ignored ethics blog that is opposing the full force of a lying news media, a cynical Democratic Party, Machiavellian activists and dead-eyed corporate executives who just want to avoid controversy, and everywhere else, “Good Germans,” cowards who know the George Floyd Freakout narrative is based on falsehoods, but who just want to get along by going along.
So if I have to be a bit repetitious, so be it. There have to be a few oases of truth on the web.
Here are some excerpts from this morning front page story in the Times, insufferably headlined “The First Time The World Stopped And Noticed.” (Noticed what? That a drugged-out career criminal died on the streets as a direct result of his own persistent irresponsible behavior? That Minneapolis had a sadistic, mean cop who should have been kicked out of policing long ago? That a single, perhaps avoidable tragedy occurred in a city as the end result of a confluence of unrelated circumstances, the type of event that happens, has happened and will happen thousands of times every day across the country?)
“The crowds that gathered in Minneapolis and elsewhere reflected on what has changed, and what has not, in America since Mr. Floyd was murdered by a police officer.” The Times should know better, and I’m sure it does, but just doesn’t care. Until Derek Chauvin’s appeals are exhausted and he loses them—not at all a foregone conclusion—it is not factual to say he “murdered” George Floyd. On the facts, I still don’t see how it can be claimed that he murdered Floyd, since murder requires the element of intent. At most, the episode was negligent homicide, which is not “murder.” But referring to Floyd’s death as a murder became part of the false narrative from the second cell phone photos of the incident hit the internet, and it has hardened into “fact” in the minds of most Americans.
“Mr. Floyd’s daughter Gianna was invited to appear at an Atlanta rally titled, “My Daddy Changed the World.” Her Daddy changed nothing. He broke a law, resisted arrest, took drugs that might have killed him, and then had the manner of his death exploited, resulting in many deaths, billions in damage to communities, and mass disinformation.
“The battle for the soul of America,” [President Biden] continued, “has been a constant push and pull between the American ideal that we’re all created equal and the harsh reality that racism has long torn us apart.” This is shameless grandstanding for the rubes. All evidence indicates that Derek Chauvin was an equal opportunity bully. Nobody has been able to show he was a racist. Once again, this is the propaganda of presumed racism. If Chauvin were black and Floyd were white, and every other detail was identical to what happened in Minneapolis a year ago, nobody outside of Floyd’s family and friends would know his name. The incident had nothing to teach abut racism, except that it is a powerful and abused word currently being abused by demagogues and power-seekers.
“Speaking after the meeting, one of Mr. Floyd’s brothers, Philonise Floyd, pushed for more action on Capitol Hill. ‘If you can make federal laws to protect the bird which is the bald eagle, then you can make federal laws to protect people of color,’ he said.” Such an idiotic and offensive analogy is not worthy of publication, except to show how emotion rather than reason has dominated the entire fiasco. “People of color” are not an endangered species, and the greatest threat to their welfare is their own conduct, as in the case of George Floyd. Nobody is hunting them, but the paranoia that statement like this creates does lead to the dangerous tendency among blacks to resist lawful police authority.
“In New York, demonstrators said that the killing of Mr. Floyd had energized the Black Lives Matter movement that began after the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, but that the country still had a long way to go.” Now there’s a good analogy: Trayvon Martin’s death also had nothing to do with racism, his killer was portrayed as a racist murderer of an innocent, politicians deliberately misrepresented the facts, and politically motivated prosecutors brought excessive charges. In that case, justice prevailed, however.
Ethics Alarms 