U.S. Society

Case Study:”When Ethics Fail, The Law Steps In”— The 2023 Major League Baseball Season

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

After the Arizona Diamondbacks win tonight, everything but the World Series will has been settled in the 2023 MLB season. (The Texas Rangers had already defeated the cheatin’ Houston Astros for the American League pennant, thus proving that the Baseball Gods read Ethics Alarms.) The season will be most noted in history notable for the fact that several game-changing new rules were introduced, all designed to cut down on dead time and speed up the games, which had gradually stretched out to an average of more than three hours.

MLB had tinkered around the edges of the rules in recent years in an effort to fix the dragging games problem. It (finally) banned one-batter mid-inning pitching changes, a curse visited on baseball by a combination of statistics-obsessed managers and the rise of left-handed pitching specialists, by requiring relief pitchers to face a minimum of three batters. It also made intentional walks automatic, with batters being sent to first with pitchers actually having to throw four balls outside the strike zone (that one shaved about 3 seconds off the average game time, maybe).

These new rules had little measurable effect, however, so for 2023, baseball dropped The Big One by instituting a pitch clock that limited the time pitchers had to throw a pitch to 15 seconds with the bases empty and 20 seconds with runners on base. Rules were attached limiting the number of time-outs a batter could call during his at-bats to one and requiring batters to step up to the plate when a pitcher was ready to throw the ball, thus ending psychological stalling tactics. Baseball had always taken pride in the fact that it was the one major sport without time limits, but that virtue had become a liability as players increasingly abused the privilege. Another rule stopped more tactical abuse: pitchers had begun throwing alleged pick-off throws to first base sometimes for no apparent reason, again, stalling to compose themselves are to unsettle the batter. Starting in 2023, a pitcher got three shots at trying to pick-off a baserunner, and if the third failed, the runner advanced to the next base anyway.

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Housekeeping Note…

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Yikes. I just rescued seven comments from spam, a few of which were first-time commenters. That shouldn’t happen, and I’ll pursue it with WordPress. A few were a couple of weeks old. Please, if your comment doesn’t post, email me. I hate to see comments lost. This was a record.

I apologize to all.

Ethics Dunces, Incompetent Elected Officials, And Aspiring Totalitarians: Anti-Free Speech And Free Thought Congressional Republicans; Ethics Hero: Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.)

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

1. The Fox News headline reads, “Democrat blocks Hawley’s resolution to condemn antisemitism on college campuses.” That’s not exactly fair and balanced. The gist of the headline, of course, is to make it sound like Democrats enable anti-Semitism. BAD Fox! BAD. That Democrat is Maryland Senator Chris Van Holland, and he wasn’t blocking a generic Senate resolution condemning anti-Semitism, which like a resolution condemning police brutality, would be virtue-signaling with little significance. This was something else.

Conservative Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri called upon all of his colleagues to give unanimous consent on his resolution condemning Hamas, pledging support of Israel, confirming that nation’s “right to exits” and condemning the pro-Palestinian statements and demonstrations by student groups on college campuses. It is clear, however, that what the resolution was really targeting are students. Hawley’s resolution begins with the usual list of “Whereas’s,” with nine of the thirteen referring directly to student reaction to the October 7 Hamas attack.

“Almost as disturbing as the facts of these terrible attacks themselves is the response of some people in this country. On our college campuses in this country who promptly took to the streets, to the courtyards of these campuses, the airwaves, to broadcast their support for this genocide against the people of Israel,”said Hawley on the floor introducing his resolution. “Students at Ohio State praised the heroic resistance in Gaza. Heroic — it’s now heroic to massacre Jews in cold blood. It’s now heroic to try and carry out a genocide against Jewish people. Calling for the death of Jewish people is not just another opinion. Calling for the genocide, celebrating the genocide of Jewish babies is not just another opinion. Celebrating the assaults on Jewish people in this country is not just another opinion, and the Senate should be clear and stand with moral clarity and say ‘this is wrong.'”

Ringing words, except that the same kind of argument could be raised against students opposing the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision or in support of affirmative action. Hawley’s resolution should give pause to anyone under the delusion that only Democrats are hostile to free speech and expression when it doesn’t please them.

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An Ethics Obituary For Mitt Romney

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Guest Post by Steve-O-in NJ.

[This is a comment posted by Steve-O in response to the post, “KABOOM! I Have To Take Back Every Positive Thing I Ever Said About Mitt Romney.” Properly it would be a Comment of the Day, but I decided that in both theme and length it deserved to be a free-standing guest post. I know comments are usually written with less precision than the authors might apply if they knew they were going to be highlighted—I know my comments are—so I did edit Steve’s work a bit, not substantively, and I hope he approves. JM]

I don’t know if this is even worth talking about very much, since Romney is headed toward the door and will exit as an also-ran. In his day, he amassed quite an impressive resume, certainly much more impressive than Barack Obama’s. He did a reasonably good job as governor of Massachusetts. That’s why it strikes me as odd that he did not run an effective presidential campaign, nor did he seem to grasp that campaigning on the national stage in 2012 was very different than campaigning 20, 10, or even 5 years before that.

The other side had one goal, and they stuck relentlessly to it: destroy Mitt Romney, by all means fair or foul. Positive campaigning has been pretty much dead since the days of Bush the Elder. It’s negative campaigning that moves the numbers, and Romney didn’t seem to grasp that. He tried to run a gentlemanly campaign when the other side and the media were prepared to fight as dirty as possible. This country didn’t give a damn about his resume or his plan for fixing the economy, at least not enough. They wanted things to be better, but Mitt just couldn’t make his case.

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Comment Of The Day (3): “Perplexed Ethics Thoughts On This Video…”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Behold the third in a series of Comments of the Day on the post about the woman who started screaming as her measure response to a speaker whose opinions she didn’t want to hear, and has ordered out of her “gayborhood.” This one is by Sarah D (the others are here, and here); the inspiration was the post, “Perplexed Ethics Thoughts On This Video…”:

***

Assuming that this man is preaching peacefully on a street corner, even if he is stating things this woman disagrees with, and she came up and accosted him (perhaps not fair assumptions), her screaming like this seems to me to be res ipsa loquitor on the matter.

As for how we can engage people like that, well, I think what we need to do is treat them the way I treat my four year old when she engages in such behavior. However, I do not believe the law allows me to ask a person over the age of eighteen (I refuse to call this woman an adult) to stand in a corner, be grounded, scrub baseboards, or be spanked. If my eldest, still in single digits, acted like this, I’d never have to clean my house again.

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Hamas-Israel War Ethics Train Wreck Update: The Left’s Mask Falls Away…Part 1: Preface

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

…revealing the virulent anti-Jewish bigotry beneath.

I suppose I sort of understand how so many progressives and Democrats get seduced by the “Palestinians are oppressed people” myth, and go from there to virulent anti-Semitism, or more accurately, Jew Hate. Leftism is an ideology that routinely ignores facts and history to reach convenient conclusions: the history of the Israel-Palastinian conflict does not support the narrative, so either the knee-jerks deliberately remain ignorant (contrived ignorance, which is unethical) or just pretend what has happened didn’t. The Left also likes bad analogies, and since “oppressed groups,” real or imagined, form the heart of the progressive coalition, sloppy thinking and bad history make the Jews (that is, Israel) the equivalents of those evil whites, and the Palestinians stand-ins for blacks, Native Americans, women, and LGTBQ+ victims, though Arabs are no less “white” than Israelis are. The intersectionality obsession makes one stupid, and this is a prime example.

The history is complicated, but the ethics reality is clear: the Palestinians have refused to accept that the nation of Israel is a legitimate nation and have rejected multiple opportunities to be granted a separate sovereign state if it would reject that hateful and hostile position and act accordingly. They have now relied on violence and terrorism for multiple generations to the point that its entrenched hatred can probably never be fixed, and so Israel’s refusal to trust the residents of Gaza–who elected a terrorist organization as their government—is fair, responsible and a matter of self-preservation.

The Palestinians, in short, blew it. They have oppressed themselves. Blindly supporting their position—which has automatically meant supporting violence against Jews—can only be explained by three things, individually or in various combinations: bigotry against Jews, ignorance, or cynical political posturing.

When I was growing up (and before I had researched the history), I assumed that anti-Semitism was entirely the obsession of the political Right. There were the Nazis, of course, and the American Nazi Party. Jews were primary targets of the Red Scare and McCarthyism, and associated with Communism, the Right’s boogeyman. The KKK hated Jews; so did the John Birch Society. Later, I found out how much anti-Jewish sentiment infected the administration of the Democratic Party’s most revered President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and FDR himself. Though the reliably Democrat-voting Jewish community soft-pedaled the truth, it is now clear that many thousands of Jewish Holocaust victims would have survived if there were not so many powerful anti-Jew voices with Roosevelt’s ear. Oh, there were plenty of Republican anti-Semites in office too, make no mistake about that. But the narrative assumes that conservatives are bigots.

I have long been fascinated that no Democratic Presidential candidate has been Jewish. The only ethnic Jew to run was a Republican, Barry Goldwater, whose grandparents were both Jewish though his parents raised him as an Episcopalian. Democrats have ostentatiously nominated the first female candidate and the first black candidate, but have never nominated a Presidential candidate from the group that has been as influential on U.S. politics as either. The closest any Jew has come to the Democratic nomination was Bernie Sanders, and the party rigged the process to make sure he couldn’t prevail over Hillary Clinton. All of this could be mere happenstance, but watching so many Democrats and progressives react to a terror attack on Israel by arguing that it was justified and seeking to deny Israel its necessary response, I have to wonder. The degree of hostility towards Jews and Israel in the bastions of progressive advocacy—the educational establishment and journalism—as well as the Democratic Party itself has become blazingly apparent since the Hamas attack.

As to that revelation, good. The truth is out, the mask is off. In Part 2, I’ll review exactly how ugly what we now can see is, and some of the reactions to it.

KABOOM! I Have To Take Back Every Positive Thing I Ever Said About Mitt Romney

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

It was only yesterday that I wrote, in a post discussing the newly revealed court transcripts that show Shoeless Joe Jackson lying his head off under oath, “Don’t you love it when new evidence is discovered that casts new light old historical controversies, or better yet, show that the popular version of history is dead wrong?” Well, I don’t love it when such evidence reveals me to be a gullible dupe. That’s what the new evidence of Mitt Romney’s new tell-all book has done.

I would buy a book about organizing sock drawers before I’d purchase “Romney: A Reckoning,” the retiring Utah Senator’s even-all-scores tell-all book written with Mitt’s full cooperation by a friendly pro-Mitt journalist. The book’s existence shows Romney to be an Ethics Dunce: it is unprofessional and a betrayal of trust for government officials to participate in the creation of such books while their colleagues and associates are still active, as Ethics Alarms has explained repeatedly. Bill Barr recently did the same thing; I’m sure Donald Trump will, if he ever ends his public career before Hades comes out of the ground in his iron chariot pulled by fire-breathing stallions and pulls him into the Underworld forever.

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“When Is The Best Apology The Worst Apology?”….The Sequel

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The silver lining in the horrible Hamas-Israel war, as I’ve already noted, is that it seems to causing a lot of people, groups, institutions and media outlets to expose their ethics void, their anti-Jewish bigotry, and, well, the fact that they are blots on decent society. I’ll expand on this theme later today, but for now, another asshole has emulated Mika Tosca, the associate professor with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who issued a pure Jew-Hate social media rant, and then claimed that she didn’t mean it in a mendacious apology.

The post about Tosca applies 100% to this bigot, Beverly Hills doctor Andrew Thierry, who was a apparently trying to top Mika and began by writing on on Instagram that “Zionists are gynocidal, demonic, greedy, pedophilic retards,” and followed that nice sentiment up with the two messages above. ExpertMRI fired Thierry—of course they did–and he then deleted his Hitleresque messages and had the gall to issue this gaslighting apology:

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Ethics Quiz: Remember The Ex-Bank Robber Law Professor?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This is weird.

So…there I was last night, teaching an evening CLE legal ethics seminar centering on the career and lawyering of Clarence Darrow (I co-edited a book on this, remember, and wrote a one-man Darrow show for actor Paul Morella, who’s been performing it around the country for 20 years), and discussing the importance of character in the practice of law. In one segment, I asked the class to vote on whether various applicants for bar membership were “fit,” all of whom, like disgraced journalist Stephen Glass, I have discussed here. One of those unusual lawyers in my poll was Shon Hopwood, who served more than a decade in federal prison for bank robbery, became a “jailhouse lawyer,” went to law school after his release, passed the D.C. bar exam, was admitted to practice, and became a professor at my old alma mater, Georgetown Law Center.

I wrote a post about Hopwood in 2017, an Ethics Quiz in fact, meaning that he now has the distinction of being the only person to be the subject of an Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz twice. Though the question was, “Should a convicted bank robber be teaching law students?,” I was unusually adamant in my position: “Hell no.” I wrote in part,

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Enemy Of The People: “Journalists” Promote A Hamas Propaganda Lie

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Breaking! Yet this was entirely fake news..and ABC wasn’t the only major news organization reporting it as fact.

Before we go into that, however, here’s one more disgusting tidbit related to the fake news, widely disseminated by our incompetent news media, that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza killing 500 Palestinians. Long after it had been decisively proven that a) Israel had absolutely nothing to with any such bombing, 2) no 500 people were killed and 2) the rocket that landed outside the hospital in Gaza was a misfire by Hamas itself, Rep. Rashida Tlaib of the “Squad” told a pro-Hamas rally outside the Capitol today that Israel bombed the hospital. She even broke down in tears over the fictional tragedy. When will the Democratic Party take punitive action against Tlaib for her pro-terrorist conduct as a virtual agent of Hamas? If it doesn’t (and it won’t) when will voters take the responsible course?

Video evidence showed that a rocket was fired from Gaza, exploded mid-air, and then fell down onto the hospital grounds, but Hamas reported the fake story anyway. By early today, more proof had turned up, notably an intercepted conversation between jihadists admitting that a rocket had misfired near the hospital and caused the damage. Video showed no craters, and no massive damage. The hospital itself was not hit because the rocket fell into the parking lot. What damage there was—some burning cars— appears to have been from by burning rocket fuel. The report that 500 people were killed was a fabrication. There were some deaths in the parking lot.

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