Texas Ranger ace Yu Darvish, in addition to being the only Japanese-Iranian major league baseball player and an Abbot and Costello routine come to life (“Who won the game?” “Yu did!” “Who did? “Not Who, Yu!” “Me?” “Not you…Yu!” ), is apparently something of a trickster. In Saturday’s crucial game between the Rangers and the Oakland A’s, Darvish was facing A’s slugger Josh Donaldson, who had earlier in the season accused Darvish, a true flame-thrower, of being afraid to throw him his fastball. Darvish took up the challenge and as he prepared to throw his pitch to the Oakland thirdbaseman, shouted, “Fastball!” This, in the tine-honored traditions of the game, means that a pitcher is telling a batter that he can’t hit his best pitch, even when he knows what’s coming. It means, literally, “OK, hot shot, see if you can hit this, ’cause I’m throwing it right past you!”
The ruse didn’t work, for Donaldson got a hit. Still, Oakland’s dugout erupted, as the A’s expressed their belief that this was “bush league,” meaning an act consisting of unprofessional and unsporting conduct not specifically prohibited by the rules but nonetheless unfair and not worthy of big league players. Continue reading →
Prof. Reynolds, the iconic conservative bloggers who wields considerable influence in the right-leaning blogospehere and beyond, has frequently displayed a dismaying affection for the unethical response of “tit-for-tat.” Has seldom done so as blatantly, however, as in a post yesterday, linking to a National Review article about CUNY students shouting down General David Petraeus, who is now a lecturer there.
“I think right-leaning groups should similarly hound Hillary and other Obama Administration apparatchiks — including Obama himself, when he ventures onto campuses, both now and post-Presidency. The standard of behavior has been established. Let them live with it.”
Even giving Reynolds the benefit of the doubt and assuming that he is speaking tongue-in-cheek or hyperbolically, as he often does, this is an irresponsible statement if he doesn’t mean it, and an unethical one if he does. He is considered a sage and an opinion leader among many conservatives, and for such a prominent figure to expressly approve of the downward behavioral tail-spin that inevitably results when each competitor or adversary re-aligns ethical standards according to the unethical acts of the other is embracing all-out culture war and chaos, with no standards at all.
“They started it, so let’s give them a taste of their own medicine and see how they like it!” is street gang thinking, (Jets:“Well they began it!”Sharks:“Well they began it!”Both: “And w’ere the ones to stop it once and for all…tonight!”— “Quintet” from West Side Story) as far from ethics as one can get, and this is exactly what Professor Reynolds is endorsing. That ethically bankrupt approach, and the fact that our political system has been operating by it at least since 2000, accounts for today’s poisonous culture in Washington D.C. It has crippled both the Bush and Obama administrations, paralyzed the government and divided the public. If political and intellectual leaders embrace this reaction to misconduct in one setting, they are implicitly accepting it as a justifiable strategy, and it is not. It is a brutal, unethical strategy.
Students who interfere with invited speakers’ efforts to challenge or enlighten university audiences should be disciplined; it doesn’t matter whether the speaker is an ex U.S.general or Ilsa, Wolf of Dachau. Interfering with speech isn’t protected speech, nor is it ethical protest. That behavior isn’t a “standard of behavior,” it is a defiance of civilized standards. The President, Hillary Clinton and other targets of the right should be allowed to speak, listened to politely, and then confronted, if they are confronted, with civil and articulate rebuttals on the basis of their words and ideas. For a university professor to advise otherwise is unconscionable. For one who is respected and followed as extensively as Reynolds to write this defies reason.
When is a $765 million dollar law suit settlement “chump change”? This is when, reading the reactions to the NFL’s announcement last week of its agreement with former players who sued the league over crippling concussion injuries sustained while playing professional football:
It is inadequate when half of that will be ladled out over seventeen years, and all of it will be reduced by the lawyer’s fees, to be determined but unlikely to be less than a third. That means that each former player (or his heirs and family) will get, at most, $114, 000 or so.
It is inadequate when the league paying the damages will split the payment among its 32 franchises, making each responsible for paying $24 million over 20 years, which comes to about $1.2 million a year. Remember that projected NFL revenues this season are $10 billion, and the NFL gets more than $40 billion on top of that through 2022, thanks to media rights.
You see, Harold, this is your integrity on bias. Yes, I know it looks yummy…
Back in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, I exchanged some e-mails with Harold Meyerson, the left-est of the Post’s op-ed liberals. He had been condemning the Bush administration’s decision to go to war against Iraq—we were technically still at war with Iraq, since no peace terms had ever been agreed upon from the previous war, and Saddam was blatantly violating the terms of a cease-fire, but never mind—saying, among other things, that this was the first time in American history that the nation had embarked on a “war of choice” rather than necessity. This was a popular, and ignorant, “talking point” used by the anti-war critics at the time, and I was thoroughly sick of it being shouted in CNN debates without any objective participant protesting that it was a lie. I pointed out to the columnist that this was historical fantasy clothed as fact, and that he owed his readers better.
Most U.S. wars have been “wars of choice,” I wrote, and presumably Meyerson knew this. Arguably only the War of 1812, World War II and Afghanistan didn’t fit that description. The Revolution wasn’t a “war of choice”? Of course it was….most of the country would have been happy to stay subjects of the Crown. The Mexican War was not merely a “war of choice” but a war of “let’s trump up a reason to take away all this land belonging to Mexico” war. Lincoln certainly didn’t have to oppose the secession of the Southern states and start the Civil War; indeed, the best Constitutional analysis is that he was acting beyond his authority to do so.The Spanish-American War? World War 1? Korea? Vietnam? Granada? Desert Storm? What country was Meyerson talking about?
To my surprise, Meyerson replied, politely and, I thought, a bit sheepishly. Yes, he said, of course you are right, but this war is more of a war of choice than those were. Translation: “I oppose this war, and the party of this President, so I’ll say whatever is necessary to get people to agree with me, and I’ll convince myself in the process.” I’ve never taken a Meyerson column seriously since. His reasoning process, like so many on the ends of either side of the political spectrum, is to frame reality in the way that most comfortably supports his ideological objective, and then to allow that warped reality to become part of his own world view. I think this kind of thought process by confirmation bias should disqualify any infected media pundits from commentary, as much as habitual dishonesty, dementia or insanity.
Today, Meyerson once again shows how his biases rot his reasoning and integrity. Continue reading →
“Fox and Friends” represents the professional nadir of the Fox News broadcasting day, which is a little like being the worst Italian restaurant in Kuala Lampur. Nonetheless, even that misbegotten mutation of The Today Show should maintain some minimum standards, meaning that there needs to be some unprofessional conduct up with which it will not put—like, say, a host falling asleep on the air.
Yes, that’s what conservative, forever young, over-committed and sleep-deprived Tucker Carlson did on Saturday, and if Fox News wants to send the message that it actually believes in those bedrock conservative principles it blathers on about, like the work ethic, responsibility and respect, it needs to fire him, no excuses accepted. He should have been fired already. Continue reading →
Aniruddh Khachaturi an is from Mumbai, India, and has been in the U.S. for the past two years, studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon. For some reason his observations about what surprises him about American culture are newsworthy, according to Investors Daily, as opposed to, say, anyone else. They are thought-provoking, however, especially this : he is impressed with the nation’s “strong ethics”:
“…everyone has a lot of integrity. If someone cannot submit their completed assignment in time, they will turn in the assignment incomplete rather than asking for answers at the last minute. People take pride in their hard work and usually do not cheat. This is different from students from India and China as well as back home in India, where everyone collaborates to the extent that it can be categorized as cheating.”
I happen to think he is right, and that this is probably the reaction of most foreigners who spend much time here. Compared to almost everywhere else on the planet, the population of the U.S. is more ethical, and the U.S. culture is more concerned with ethical values, as one should expect in the only nation expressly founded as the expression of ethical ideals.
Nonetheless, our culture has shown alarming signs of growing more tolerant and even accepting of unethical conduct, and that is worthy of more than merely academic concern. Continue reading →
Pete Rose may have been a fool who gambled on baseball, but he never, ever, failed to run hard to first base.
The Washington Nationals’ blossoming star outfielder Bryce Harper provided a graphic lesson in the importance of these ethical values in the breach of them last night, when his lapse of character on the field contributed to a loss D.C.’s struggling major league baseball team could ill-afford.
The Nats have been one of the baseball season’s greatest disappointments. A team that had the best record of all last season and was widely favored to be a World Series contender, it has barely won more games than it has lost, and is hopelessly trailing the Atlanta Braves for the National League East championship. A wild card berth in this season’s play-offs also looked like a futile hope, until a recent winning streak and a flash of 2012 brilliance allowed fans to dream of a thrilling late-season comeback. It is possible, but time is running out, and every game counts. To have any chance, the Nats have to win games like last night’s against the sub-par Mets.
With the Mets leading 3-2, Washington had mounted a two-out rally, and had runners on first and second base. Harper, the team’s youngest, most exciting and most talented player was up at bat, but he bounced an easy ground ball to the Mets second baseman. Clearly disgusted with his failure to come though in the clutch, Harper merely jogged to first base. If he had run hard, which was his trademark last season when Harper’s energy and enthusiasm made him an instant fan favorite, he would have reached first base safely, loading the bases, for the fielder unexpectedly booted the ball. But because Harper was loafing, the second baseman had time to recover and throw to first for the out. It was the last chance the Nationals had to tie the score, and they lost a game that the team needed to win. Continue reading →
Who approved the playing of Aerosmith’s “Dude Looks Like A Lady” over photos of convicted Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning in uniform and in feminine make-up and garb? Fire him.
This isn’t professional, and it isn’t the proper role of journalists to mock the gender identity issues of public or private individuals. Fox is playing to the worst of its core conservative audience, the gay- and trans-hating troglodytes, and thus embraces bigotry as reasonable and humorous. Manning’s sexual problems are of tangential news value, and to the extent that they are, they should be treated with sensitivity and respect, with Fox’s goal being to educate its audience, not to play playground tease.
It would be impressive and appropriate if one of the more responsible, independent Fox on-air personalities—Shep Smith? Megyn? O’Reilly?—would chide their network for this. They should be embarrassed.
[The following is blurry, but perhaps that is for the best. It is the only full version of the performance at issue currently available on YouTube, and it may not be there for long. Watch at your own risk.]
To listen to the horrified reaction to Miley Cyrus’s relatively obscene performance at the nationally televised MTV Music Video awards (not so long ago, Miley was that cute tween Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel) , one would think that rock and pop stars intentionally crossing the established lines of symbolic pubic sexual decorum was unprecedented. The furious and shocked condemnations seemed to emanate from some parallel culture, like the alternate universe that implicitly exists on CBS’s updated Sherlock Holmes drama “Elementary” (Sherlock is a precariously recovering alcoholic and drug addict; Dr. Watson is a former Charlie’s Angel) where nobody ever heard of “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” Basil Rathbone or the dancing men cipher, because Arthur Conan Doyle never invented the character. ( The British updated Sherlock, uncreatively titled “Sherlock,” is so far superior to “Elementary” —which isn’t bad–that it’s unsettling.) Have Isadora Duncan, Josephine Baker, Sally Rand, Elvis, the Stones, Jim Morrison,, Madonna and Christina Aguilera been erased from the past by some music-hating cyborg from a dystrophy future where everyone sings like Matt Munro?
Gross simulated sexual display on television prime time has unethical elements, to be sure. It’s uncivil, to begin with, intentionally placing socially objectionable content before a lot of viewers who don’t want to see it. That’s a breach of respect, but a minor one in this context. Janet Jackson flashed a breast during the Superbowl half-time show, after all: the argument that this was a family event that shouldn’t have been unexpectedly transformed into a peep show was grounded in fact. This week, however, I heard earnest mothers protesting that their delicate pre-teens were watching the MTV awards and had the innocence cruelly seared out of them by the unexpected and horrifying sight of Miley twerking ( simulating sex while dancing—a brand new addition to the Oxford dictionary) on Robin Thicke, dressed as Beetlejuice. Those mothers, not to be excessively cruel myself, are idiots.
What did they expect to see? This is a live show populated by competing shameless self-promoting narcissists who know that the performer who says or does the most outrageous thing will win the publicity game, and be a topic of debate for days or even weeks. Miley won, that’s all. If a child saw something age-inappropriate, the parents can only blame themselves. This was roughly the equivalent of letting your kid watch “The Walking Dead” and complaining to AMC that the show’s violence is excessive for children. Ethics breach #1 is by any parent who allowed a child to watch this show while wanting to protect the child’s exposure to sexually provocative material. Irresponsible, incompetent, and stupid. Continue reading →
Better late than never, Ryan…I’d almost given up on you.
Ryan Braun, the 2011 National League MVP who was suspended for the rest of this season for his use of illicit performance enhancing drugs and accepted that suspension without protest or appeal, has released a statement admitting steroid use and apologizing to all, including the testing sample collector whom he had earlier implicitly accused of trying to frame him with a false positive.
I think this ranks as a #1 on the Ethics Alarms Apology Scale, and we don’t see those very often from public figures. That apology is defined as…
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.
Already, critics are taking pot-shots at Braun’s statement. This is, I believe, one reason people so seldom give full apologies: they are never accepted by so many angry pundits, who pick them to pieces. Baseball fans and others in the game have a lot of reasons to be furious with Braun, it is true. His genuine apology comes late, after a terrible one, and there is probably some truth to the theory that he or his PR advisors saw an opportunity to contrast his conduct with that of Alex Rodriquez, who is continuing to deny his PED use and is forcing steroid-hating fans and players to watch him play anyway, while he appeals and collects 5 figures in compensation per at bat. Braun is no Ethics Hero, for his options were limited. Nonetheless, I see nothing to criticize in his apology, and we want to see more apologies that rank at the top of the scale, we need to applaud them when they appear.
Ethics Alarms 