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 →
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 →
Uri Rafaeli owed $8.41 in unpaid property taxes. That’s eight dollars and change. The amount gradually increased to $285.81 from added interest, penalties and fees. Oakland County in Michigan confiscated and sold his property for $24,500, thenkept all proceeds above the past due amount. Meanwhile, Andre Ohanessian owed about $6,000 in unpaid taxes, interest, penalties and fees to the same Oakland County, and the county sold his property for $82,000. It kept all proceeds of that sale too.
Seems fair to me!
Kidding. Actually, that seems so wrong that I don’t understand how any public officials could do such a thing, or argue that it was defensible rather than obvious theft. The Michigan Supreme Court ruled last week that the takings clause in the state constitution prevents counties from selling homes for unpaid tax debts and keeping all surplus proceeds.
Part I of Steve-O-in-NJ’s Comment of the Day is here.
….For the last three months we’ve watched our cities be burned, our public art be torn apart and defaced, and this nation’s ordinary people be terrorized. Homes and businesses have been destroyed, ordinary folks have lost everything they worker for and saved, and, in some cases, whole zones of cities have been turned into new versions of previous “liberation army” states, ruled by warlords, patrolled by armed thugs, and with the ordinary people living there cut off from the outside world and at the mercy of these thugs. Now we are seeing organized destruction (Lafayette Park, Chicago) and organized attacks on law enforcement (Portland). Supposedly this started with demanding justice for George Floyd and protesting racial injustice. Two months after the officers involved were fired and charged, this shows no sign of stopping, or even of slowing down.
Downtown Minneapolis resembles Fallujah in the wake of the final breaking of the Iraqi resistance there, and New York, Chicago, LA, and a slew of lesser cities, none of which had the first thing to do with what happened in Minneapolis, aren’t far behind. Yet we’re still being told these are “peaceful protesters,” and the local and state governments either haven’t lifted a finger to stop this (New York), or have finally taken action, several days late and several dollars short, when the violence has gone too far or come to their doorstep (Atlanta, Seattle). I am not sure whether what was allowed to happen in Seattle was worse, or what’s going on now in Portland is worse, where the local authorities are accusing the Federal authorities, the only ones doing anything about 50 nights of violence, of being the bad guys.
We’ve been bombarded for months now about how sleeping or walking back from a party or carrying a legal weapon shouldn’t be a death sentence. It isn’t as simple as it’s phrased, but none of those things should have happened. However, there are a lot of other things that shouldn’t be death sentences: Continue reading →
1. Final plug, as the bat above (and in my hands) reminds me: If you are set up with Zoom (it’s free, you know), you still have time to register for the Smithsonian Associates program tomorrow evening (at 6:45 pm, EST) wherein I hold forth on how baseball has influenced American culture, values and history. Yes, it’s $35 bucks, but it goes to a good cause, and may help the Institute hire more competent employees who don’t peddle junk like the chart on “whiteness.” You’ll be able to ask questions, and I’m storing these experiences for the Ethics Alarms Zoom experience to come. Read all about it here…
The ideology of the racism-training industry …collapses all identity into racial categories. “It is crucial for white people to acknowledge and recognize our collective racial experience,” writes [ Robin DiAngelo, of temporary “White Fragility” fame,] whose teachings often encourage the formation of racial affinity groups. The program does not allow any end point for the process of racial consciousness. Racism is not a problem white people need to overcome in order to see people who look different as fully human — it is totalizing and inescapable. Of course, DiAngelo’s whites-only groups are not dreamed up in the same spirit as David Duke’s. The problem is that, at some point, the extremes begin to functionally resemble each other despite their mutual antipathy…. In some cases its ideas literally replicate anti-Black racism.”
Roenick, Lipinski and Weir. Wait…Johnny Weir is gay?
Ex- pro hockey star Jeremy Roenick has sued NBC Sports for wrongful termination, claiming the network discriminated against him as a heterosexual. At issue is his firing in February of this year for saying, during a Barstool Sports podcast called “Spittin’ Chiclets”, while discussing his wife and Kathryn Tappen, a coworker,
“I’m swimming with my wife and Kathryn, and they’ve got their bikinis on, and they look fuckin’ smokin. Ass and boobs everywhere. It’s great.”
I suppose I should mention by way of context that sports fans do not listen to ex-hockey players blather on “Barstool Sports” to be enlightened on the writings of Marcel Proust. Nonetheless, NBC quickly suspended Roenick, and though he issued an apology, his NBC supervisor, Sam Flood, subsequently informed him that he was fired.
[Notice of Correction:I originally wrote that Barstool Sports was an NBC production, It isn’t. So Roenick was fired for comments made when he was not under the auspices of NBC.]
What sparked the lawsuit now was the absence of any discipline levied by NBC sports after NBC Sports commentators Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir participated this May in a leering promotional video for the At-Home Variety Show on the Peacock streaming service, joined by “Pitch Perfect” actors Elizabeth Banks and John Michael Higgins. Continue reading →
Hello everybody! Welcome to “Liar or Idiot?” the popular ethics game show! Welcome panel! And here’s today’s challenge…
This is Ramsey BethAnn Bearse! Remember when she was Miss Kentucky in 2014?
Poor Ramsey—she’s 29 now— was sentenced to jail for two years after sending sending photos “of a sexual nature” to a middle school teen when she was working as a West Virginia school teacher. She told the court that it was all a big mistake.
“The young man’s name was listed next to my husband’s on my phone,” Bearse explained. “From there, he asked me for more and I panicked. I was afraid to not appease him. When he asked for more, I sent him more photos of me which led to him sending a photo of his privates.”
It could happen to anybody! But wait…why was a middle school student’s phone number on her speed dial? Something to think about, panel! Continue reading →
Speaking of gallimaufry, “A Heavy Dragoon” is one of the best Gilbert and Sullivan “list” songs, but you seldom hear it. Erudite is the listener who can identify all the historical figured named! The song is from “Patience,” the firs show I ever directed, and still one of my favorites. The singer in the clip above, Darrell Fancourt, played the part of the Mikado more times than anyone, and even dropped dead while playing the role.
1. In baseball history, it’s Moral Luck Day. On July 17, 1941, New York Yankees center fielder Joe DiMaggio didn’t get a hit against the Cleveland Indians, in great part due to a pait of great plays by Cleveland third baseman Ken Keltner, finally ending his historic 56-game hitting streak, the longest in MLB history then and now. Largely on the basis of the streak, though it helped that the Yankees won the pennant, DiMaggio was awarded the American League MVP award, despite the fact that Boston’s Ted Williams hit .406 that season, nearly 50 points higher than DiMaggio. In fact, Williams outhit the Yankee during the same 56-game period.
The end of The Yankee Clipper’s amazing streak was luck, and the streak itself was luck. All hitting streaks are. Baseball is the sport most governed by random chance, especially hitting: a well-hit ball can become an out if it happens to be hit within a fielder’s reach, and a ball barely touched by the bat can dribble down the baseline for a cheap hit. DiMaggio was undeniably a great hitter, but many players in baseball history were better; he just was lucky—good, but lucky—for a longer stretch of games than anyone else. Yet of all his many achievements, the 56 game streak in 1941 is the first thing baseball fans cite when assessing the greatness of Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio.
2. It isn’t what it is! Yesterday, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said that releasing prisoners onto the city’s streets to avoid their infection by the Wuhan virus in jail had made New York City safer, saying, “We now have fewer people in our jails than any time since World War II and we are safer for it and better for it.” De Blasio’s office announced that more than 1,500 inmates had been released from city jails in three weeks, reducing the number of prisoners to its lowest level in 70 years.
The problem is that his assertion is ludicrous. De Blasio’s boast that the prisoner release made the city safer defied the evidence of the results of the prisoner release the NYC Bail reform law required in January 2020. Of those who committed felonies that were no longer eligible for bail, 19.5% were re-arrested at least once after an initial non-bail eligible felony arrest, 1,798 of 9,227 individuals were re-arrested. 2020 recidivism resulted in 1,452 major crime arrests (murder, non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny, and grand larceny of a vehicle) vs. 681 in 2019. Meanwhile, shootings in the city were up 205% in June compared to a year earlier. Continue reading →
(Yes it’s unethical, but that photo just cracks me up.)
The United States Office of Government Ethics, which has the responsibility of “preventing conflicts of interest in the executive branch,” has among its guidelines ,
“Executive branch employees may not use their Government positions to suggest that the agency or any part of the executive branch endorses an organization (including a nonprofit organization), product, service, or person.”
The provision is clear, and I think obviously, necessary. Yet after anti-Trump zealots announced a boycott of Goya, the largest Hispanic-owned company in the U.S., after the company’s CEO Robert Unanue praisedPresident Donald Trump in a Rose Garden event last week, the First Family went to extraordinary—and unethical—lengths to support the “buycott” that conservative groups launched in response.
First, White House adviser Ivanka Trump posted a photo of herself holding a can of Goya black beans this week, captioning it, “If it’s Goya, it has to be good” along with the translation, “Si es Goya, tiene que ser bueno.”
1. This Morning’s Grovel: A white Seattle hairdresser apologized profusely for daring to wear dreadlocks. The key quote: “I have come to understand—far too belatedly—that my hairstyle is harmful.”
To lightly paraphrase Orwell: ‘She loved Big Brother.’
It’s hard to work up any sympathy for people like Irene—weak, ignorant, unwilling to stand up for basic human rights, like being able to wear your hair any damn way you want to. This is yet another of the one-way “rules” that are being delivered by edict as an alleged remedy for “systemic racism”: Blacks can do anything they want to, whites are severely limited. The hair rules: black women can straighten their hair, dye it blonde, adopt any style the choose as a method of self expression, but a white woman who chooses dreadlocks has “harmful hair.”
Those who won’t stand up for their own liberties deserve to lose them. Irene is a fool, and betraying the values of her country. Continue reading →
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of The Week:
Ethics Alarms 