Sports

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 6/22/2022: Let’s Hit The Ground Running!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

1. It’s a joke!!! That tweet is just the tip of the moronic iceberg for Republican Senate candidate in Missouri Eric Greitens. In a new fundraising video for his U.S. Senate campaign released this week, Greitens, a former Missouri governor who resigned before he could be impeached on multiple grounds including sexual assault, holds a pump-action shotgun and introduces himself as a Navy SEAL. (He is not a Seal: he resigned shortly before announcing his Senate run this year.) The video then shows him with a group of men in tactical gear hunting “RINOs”—Republicans who are not conservative enough for his tastes. He says, “Join the MAGA crew! Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country!”

And Sarah Palin was once accused of inciting murder by having little gun-sights on a campaign map!

Predictably, the irresponsible ad is being used by the mainstream news media and Democrats to characterize all conservatives and Republicans while hyping more anti-gun hysteria. Here’s CNN:

Some of history’s leading fascist movements used the strategy of armed volunteer militias intimidating, threatening and attacking political opponents. And the implications of Greitens’ ad are stunning: Line up behind the most extreme right-wing policies — and implicitly behind former President Donald Trump — or be hunted down by armed, jackbooted thugs.

Right. The implications of Greitens’ ad are that he’s a liar and an asshole, and that he is only slightly more fit to serve in the Senate than Herschel Walker, who defines the bottom of the bottom of the barrel… but presumably Missouri voters know that already. The ad and Greitens himself are metaphorical albatrosses around the GOP’s neck, but the party hung them there. He has been endorsed by several GOP luminaries, though so far, not by Trump.

2. Poll check: President Biden’s latest Civiqs approval rating hit 32%, with 56% disapproving of Joe. Again I ask: Who are those 32% that approve of Biden? What is it they approve of? What democracy can function if fully a third of the electorate have the IQs of flatworms and are happy to see the country rot?

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Ethics Hero: FINA (The International Swimming Federation)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Now do cycling, weightlifting, wrestling and running.

The world governing body for swimming voted to bar transgender women from the highest levels of women’s international competition, bringing expertise, authority and common sense to a debate that had been distorted by the Mad Left’s inexplicable commitment to radical transexual ideology.

FINA administers international competitions in water sports, and now definitively prohibits transgender women from competing unless they began medical treatments to suppress production of testosterone before going through one of the early stages of puberty, or by age 12, whichever occurred later. This is now one of the strictest rules against transgender participation in international sports, and with any luck and some courage elsewhere, it will have the necessary effect on other sports as well. Going through male puberty gives transgender women a massive physical advantage over most athletes born female, as the pool exploits of University of Pennsylvania’s unethical swimming champion Lia Thomas made obvious. Continue reading →

George Washington University Insults The Nation’s History

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Of course, we have seen this coming for a long time, and I will be surprised if the creeping, craven effort to erase George Washington and the legacy of the Founders from the school that now bears his name will stop; it may even accelerate.

The George Washington University Board of Trustees finally decided to discontinue the use of the school’s “Colonials” moniker based on the recommendation of —believe it or not—the “Special Committee on the Colonials Moniker.” In case you have the historical literacy of a horseshoe crab, before what is now the United States of America won its independence, it was made up of colonies, and its occupants fighting for their nascent nation were often called “colonials” because that’s what they were. These colonials were completely responsible today for the United States’ existence and everything it has achieved. The leader of the army of colonials was George Washington, and the first President of the radical new nation established by those colonials was that same great man. Thus to conclude that referring to various teams and groups associated with the educational institution named in his honor as Colonials is anything but descriptive, justified, and an honor is, to be blunt, bats.

However a gross majority of the people running the institutes of higher education in the U.S. are shallow, fearful, pandering fools, and GW’s leaders are clearly in that group. Here is the revolting statement by Board Chair Grace Speights: Continue reading →

Wait, When Did Georgetown Law Center Take Over The Washington NFL Team?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Very puzzling. The Washington “Commanders” (previously the Redskins) are punishing an assistant coach because he dared to express an opinion on social media that his boss and employers don’t agree with, since it is not sufficiently in line with the George Floyd Freakout, The Great Stupid, and the Democratic Party’s show trial strategy to somehow stave off disaster for Joe and Company in the November mid-terms. In this, the NFL franchise is emulating it’s city’s most prominent law school, Georgetown Law Center, which only recently finished driving away a non-conforming law professor who dared to opine that limiting the pool of potential Supreme Court Justices by race and gender was not the wise way to find the best judge available.

To paraphrase Dana above, “What’s going on here?”

Nothing good, that’s for sure. Just another unethical effort by a business entity to strongarm employees into supporting one particular party and ideology, or at least to intimidate them sufficiently that they stifle their dissenting views. There is literally no possible justification for the Redsk…I mean “Commanders” actions. Continue reading →

Good. Now Do Female Gymnasts, Swimmers, Child Models And Actors

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The international governing body for figure skating, the International Skating Union, announced yesterday that it will gradually raise the minimum age for Olympic-level competition from 15 to 17.  Thus no skaters younger than 17 will be allowed to compete in the 2026 Milano Cortino Games.

The body suddenly figured out that there  young athletes competing in sports at a high level faced unacceptable risks, not merely physical injuries due to their immature physiques, but also “psychological injuries” which can have devastating effects on their mental, cognitive, and emotional health in the short and long term. Of course, they knew this before, and didn’t care as long as child champions brought revenue and visibility. But the ugly scandal resulting from Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva’s positive doping test at the last Winter Olympic Games in the Nation That Shall Not Be Named mandated a Barn Door Fallacy reaction. Valieva was given a child’s pass that allowed her to compete unfairly against adults, became the center of controversy, and crumbled under the criticism and scrutiny. Ethics Alarms discussed the matter here and elsewhere.
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Ethics Dunce, And That’s Not The Half Of It: ESPN Host Sarah Spain

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Yesterday, Ethics Alarms noted the fact that the Tampa Bay Rays had decided to brand themselves during “Pride Month” as LGTBQ boosters with yet another rainbow themed patch meant to go on player uniforms, and that five players had chosen to duck the pandering. Around the same time I was writing the post, ESPN hostess (I bet she hates being called that rather than “host.” Tough.) Sarah Spain went on a rant in which she called the Rays players who decided not to go along to get along “bigots.”

Nice. Also Stupid. Also unethical.

“[This] is what tends to happen when frivolous class isn’t affected by things. That religious exemption BS is used in sports and otherwise also allows for people to be denied health care, jobs, apartments, children, prescriptions, all sorts of rights. We have to stop tiptoeing around it because we’re trying to protect people who are trying to be bigoted from asking for them to be exempt from it, when the very people that they are bigoted against are suffering the consequences you say trying to be bigoted.”

Wait, this woman’s a host and the best she can do off-script is that gibberish? I could talk better than that after a closed head injury.

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Note To Gov. DeSantis: The Tampa Bay Rays Are Not The Same As Disney

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I defended Gov. Ron DeSantis’s cancellation of Disney’s long-standing special status with the state of Florida, because, ethically, partners shouldn’t publicly attack partners without consequences, and because Disney’s privilege of self-government was in great part a product of the company bolstering core American values and a family-friendly culture. No, I pointed out more than once, this was not a case of a corporation being singled out to be punished for a political position the state opposed, but a situation where special benefits could no longer be justified if Disney was no longer going to hold up its end of the original mutually-beneficial deal of yore, which could be reasonably seen as “You don’t meddle in our business, and we won’t meddle in yours.” Moreover, giving Disney special benefits that other theme parks in the state didn’t have could not be justified as fair and reasonable any longer.

It now appears that I may have been giving Gov. DeSantis more credit than he deserved, and that his slap at Disney was, at least in part, an example of a state government punishing a company for a political position it had every right to hold, state, and act upon. Yesterday we learned that DeSantis intends to veto a $35 million bill for Florida to pay for a Pasco County facility that would serve as for the Tampa Bay Rays’ spring training home. The reason is, apparently, the baseball team’s public message above.

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Tales Of The Great Stupid, Baseball Division: Incredibly, The Josh Donaldson /Tim Anderson/”Jackie” Fiasco Gets Worse

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Unbelievable.

In Act One of this fiasco, covered here, narcissist African-American star White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson implied that Yankee third-baseman Josh Donaldson called him a racist slur—which turned out to be “Jackie,” a slur never before recognized as such. (My late mother used to call me “Jackie.” I can never forgive her… ) You see, Anderson had referred to himself as the current day Jackie Robinson in an interview a few years back, an example of hubris that would have gotten him eaten by a three-headed something if he was in a Greek myth, and Donaldson chose to rub it in when Anderson was tagged out at third. Deserved mockery is not racism, but Anderson’s manager, Tony LaRussa, claimed it was. Tony can read the room: today any criticism of a prominent black American is “racism.”

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Ethics Dunce: Major League Baseball, As Usual

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The alternate headline would be “Now THIS is pandering!”

As discussed here, White Sox star shortstop Tim Anderson, an African-American, cried “Racism!” because Yankee third baseman Josh Donaldson mockingly called him “Jackie” during the last game between the teams, nearly provoking a “bench-emptying on-field brawl,” as it is typically called, that, also typically, never involved any actual fighting. By “Jackie” Donaldson was sarcastically referencing an ill-considered interview Anderson once gave in which he immodestly compared himself to the color-line shattering Hall of Famer. Needless to say (I hope) calling a black player “Jackie” after he has made an ass of himself by such a self-glorifying comparison isn’t racist. The proper term is “well-deserved.”

I wrote in the post, “Baseball has been a full participant in The Great Stupid, so don’t bet against it punishing Donaldson for “sarcasm that heightens racial sensitivities,” or something.” Bingo! That’s exactly what MLB did, setting a new high (low?) for weenie-ism and race pandering.

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Oh, Fine: Now Baseball Players Are Looking For Excuses To Cry Racism

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Today’s contrived controversy shows what a bang-up job Barack Obama and race-baiting progressives have done “improving” race relations in the U.S.

A week ago, black White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson and white Yankee third baseman Josh Donaldson got into a small confrontation when the latter appeared to push Anderson off third base, prompting Anderson to shoving Donaldson in return and the two exchanging words. Coaches got between the two before anything further occurred. The two crossed paths again today twice, in the seventh inning after Donaldson walked and was forced at second on a double play ball. Anderson turned and seemed to say something to Donaldson, who seemed to be laughing as he ran back to the dugout. Earlier, in the fifth, Anderson had run toward the Yankee at home plate as benches emptied.

What was going on? Anderson claimed that Donaldson had directed a “racist comment” his way. The accusation was picked up by White Sox manager Tony La Russa and White Sox catcher Yasmani Grandal. For once, the news media told us what the “racist comment” was.

Guess.

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