U.S. Society

Breaking In Baseball Ethics: A New Asshole Of The Year Candidate!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

judge1

The new contender is a New York Yankees baseball player. A really big one.

I find this unbelievable, but apparently it is true. Tonight’s game between the Red Sox and Yankees was postponed after three Yankee players, Aaron Judge, Gio Urshela, and Kyle Higashioka tested positive for the Wuhan virus in the Yankee clubhouse. Judge was on the American League All-Star team that played (and won) two days ago, and wasn’t vaccinated. Now they are testing all of the All-Star team players who came into contact with him, and that means that every team in the league was potentially placed in peril. Indeed, the whole season could be in peril.

I don’t understand how MLB allowed a non-vaccinated player to play in the game, or be in the dugout. I don’t understand how anyone in Judge’s position could be so foolish and irresponsible as not to be vaccinated at this point. And Judge is supposed to be one of the nicest, most admirable professional athletes in captivity.

Except that he is apparently an asshole.

Well, as many a Fenway Park crowd has said over the decades, as uncivil as it may be, “Yankees suck.”

Mid-Day Ethics Mop-Up, 7/15/2021: Trump Derangement, Wikipedia, And Fact-Checking

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

mop

  1. Today’s bit of Trump Derangement comes from a new book by The Post’s Carol Leonnig, which claims that Gen. Mark A. Milley feared that President Trump would attempt a coup to say in power after his defeat in the 2020 election. Writes the Post, in a typical peive of inexcuably misleading journalism, “It recounts that Milley was deeply alarmed by Trump’s recruitment of supporters to descend on the Capitol on Jan. 6, which culminated in the violent insurrection attempt.” All this tells us is that Milley was (or is) more than a little hysterical, and that the various Big Lies about Trump pushed by the Post and others, along with the military brass’s understandable dislike of their Commander in Chief, caused more than just social media wackos to go off the deep end. How exactly was a bunch of Trump fans armed with little but their own indignation going to pull off a coup? The idea was and is ridiculous, but it shows just how deep contempt for Trump and the willingness to suspend logic and common sense where his conduct is involved goes. The story is, essentially, “X lost his mind and feared that Trump would do something that it would have been certifiably insane, so this means that Trump was planning to do it.”

Like a game of “telephone,” the story becomes sillier the more it circulates. Matthew Chapman at leftist fringe site Raw Story has a version of the story that is headlined,  “This is a Reichstag moment’: General Milley legitimately feared Trump would launch a ‘coup.'” Legitimately!

Wow.

2. What do you do about Wikipedia? It is the world’s fifth largest website, pulling in an estimated 6.1 billion followers per month and serves as the primary reference source for quick information on almost any topic in the world. [Aside: I don’t have a Wikipedia entry, though there are links to various essay I have written. The con artist who swindled ProEthics out of $30,000 when we were getting started has an entry. I am clearly doing something wrong…] The online encyclopaedia put all other published encyclopedias out of business, and it may be the “most read reference work in history.” Once the site was supposedly committed to neutrality, but according to Larry Sanger, one of Wiki’s founders, that ideal was abandoned after 2009. Since then he says (and I’ve noticed) it has become increasingly partisan. He now describes his baby as “broken beyond repair”:

“You can’t cite the Daily Mail at all. You can’t cite Fox News on socio-political issues either. It’s banned. So what does that mean? It means that if a controversy does not appear in the mainstream center-Left media, then it’s not going to appear on Wikipedia..There are companies like Wiki PR, where paid writers and editors will go in and change articles. Maybe there’s some way to make such a system work, but not if the players who are involved and who are being paid are not identified by name — they actually are supposed to be identified by name and say ‘we represent this firm’ if they are officially registered with some sort of Wikipedia editing firm. But they don’t have to do that…”

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Noon Ethics Munchies, 7/14/2021: On Cuba, Big Lies, Roy Moore, and More [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Munchies

1. The President gets a cheap shot...Commenting on Joe Biden’s generally hysterical speech about “voter suppression,” “Bonchie” writes on the conservative blog Red State,

“Of note here is that Biden is channeling Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels by using the phrase “big lie” to disparage Republicans who have concerns about the 2020 election. Yet, despite the phrase’s murderous, anti-Semitic past, the president seems to have no problem saying it repeatedly. In doing so, he echoed CNN’s Jake Tapper and others who have also been fond of the phrase.”

There is nothing wrong with using the phrase or the description. The device was championed by both Goebbels and Hitler, and is an accurate description of a propaganda tactic, an unethical but powerful one, used by both the Right and the Left. Whether the description is used fairly in any particular case is a separate issue. “Big Lies” is a very accurate description of the assault by the “resistance”/Democratic Party/mainstream media against Donald Trump—can you think of a better one?—which is why Ethics Alarms used it here and elsewhere.

What would be fair to note is that Biden has often been an eager employer of Goebbels’ favorite trick himself…as noted in this post.

2. Does anyone understand why Democrats are trying to downplay the current Cuban protests against the Communist government? This makes no sense to me. Thousands of anti-regime protesters took to the streets across the island over the weekend, waving American flags and chanting “Freedom!” and anti-government slogans. Cuba has been a repressive Communist regime since Fidel Castro pulled his bait and switch with the U.S. in 1959, but the most extreme elements in the Democratic Party, the proto-Marxists, have always thrown Cuba metaphorical kisses, like Michael Moore. Barack Obama reversed decades of U.S. policy by opening relations with Cuba without requiring any human rights concessions in return. One would think an outbreak of democracy on the island would be viewed as a good thing, but Biden’s paid liar, Jen Psaki, absurdly explained that the reason for the protests was “concern about rising COVID cases, deaths, and medicine shortages” rather than political oppression.

While Republicans have immediately announced their support for the Cuban people, Reps. Bobby Rush (D., Ill.), Steve Cohen (D., Tenn.), Barbara Lee (D., Calif.), Gwen Moore (D., Wis.) and the more 70 members of Congress, including “The Squad,” of course, signed a letter asking Biden to lift Trump sanctions Cuba in March. They have not had any comment on the demonstrations so far.

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Ethics Hot Topics, 7/13/2021: A Date That Will Live In Ethics Infamy

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

1. Black Lives Matter…This is truly a date that will live in ethics infamy, or should: on July 13, 2013, the acquittal of George Zimmerman, accused of murdering Trayvon Martin in 2012, prompted Oakland, California resident Alicia Garza to post a message on Facebook containing the phrase “Black lives matter.” Garza said she felt “a deep sense of grief” after Zimmerman was acquitted (as he should have been and had to be based on the evidence.) She said she was further saddened that many people to blamed the victim, Martin, and not the “disease” of racism.

As has marked the soon to emerge Black Lives Matter movement, facts didn’t matter to Garza. Martin was the aggressor, and was the only one of the two parties involved who made race-related comments prior to the confrontation. Zimmerman shot Martin in self-defense, and the prosecution’s own investigator testified to that fact. Never mind: Patrice Cullors, a Los Angeles community organizer and friend of Garza’s, read her post and replied with the first instance of #BlackLivesMatter, which quickly “went viral.” Garza, Cullors and fellow activist Opal Tometi built a network of community organizers and racial justice activists using the clever but misleading name Black Lives Matter, and the phrase and the hashtag were used by grassroots activists and protests all across the country, many of them based on false narratives implying racism where no evidence of it existed, as in the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, George Floyd and others. It is now a powerful and profitable, if intellectually dishonest and divisive, force in American culture and politics. The damage the movement has already done is incalculable; the damage it will do is frighteningly uncertain.

I note that in the description of the movement on the allegedly objective History.com is that it is “simple and clear in its demand for Black dignity.” That’s laughable (but then, historians) since the name is anything but clear, and deliberately so. It stands as a false accusation against American society and non-black citizens that black lives do not matter to the rest of the population except the woke, and thus has spurred the attack on the nation’s legitimacy by purveyors of Critical Race Theory and the “1619 Project.” The seemingly benign slogan deftly avoids contradiction and makes dissent perilous (“What, you don’t think black lives matter, you racist?“) while being used to justify Marxism, censorship, reparations, race-based hiring, promotions and benefits, and other discriminatory activities and policies.

2. In a related July 13 note, this was also the date, in 2015, when Sandra Bland was found hanged in her cell. Bland’s name is also among those used as a BLM rallying cry, and like so many of the others, that is based on a presumption of racism and other facts unproven. On July 10, 2015, Texas State Trooper Brian Encinia pulled over 28-year-old Bland, an African American, for failing to signal a lane change. She refused to cooperate; he was unprofessional. The officer arrested her and took her to a nearby jail. Several days later, she was found dead, and an autopsy concluded she had hanged herself with a plastic bag.

Of course, Bland’s family and friends suspected that the official report of her suicide was a cover-up, because police are racists. But Bland was a police confrontation waiting to happen. She considered herself a Black Lives Matter activist, writing in one social media post, “In the news that we’ve seen as of late, you could stand there, surrender to the cops, and still be killed.” That’s ironic, because if she had just accepted the minor traffic stop without fighting with the officer, she might be alive today. Bland had at least ten previous traffic-related encounters with police in Illinois and Texas; she had been charged five times for driving without insurance, four times for speeding, and once each for driving while intoxicated and drug possession. Her last conviction was for shoplifting, and she owed $7,579 in unpaid fines at the time of her death. Encina was fired, and Bland’s family received the obligatory wrongful death settlement, in this case almost $2 million.

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An Analysis Of How The Government, The Resistance And The News Media Forfeited The Trust of The American People

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Image: Pro-Trump Protesters Gather At State Capitols Across The Nation On Day Of Electoral College Ratification

I wish it were my analysis, although every component of it (I think) has been covered here in the past, most of them several times.

One of those elements is the complete betrayal of the American public and our democracy by the news media. President Trump was excoriated and condemned for his pronouncement of the mainstream media as the”enemy of the people,” typical meat-axe rhetoric for him in an area that calls for more nuance and restraint by a President, but he was generally right, and Ethics Alarms declared him so. Similarly, he decried the weaponization of “fake news,” an accusation which was undeniable, yet people of good will and intelligence (well, they were once anyway) denied it, no matter how many instances occurred before or afterwards.

Last week a Rasmussen poll—it’s a conservative outfit: the other pollsters wouldn’t dare ask the questions—reported that 58% of likely voters agree with the “enemy of the people” assessment. It’s amazing and disturbing that the figure isn’t much higher. Who are the 23% who told Rasmussen they “strongly disagreed” with that description? What are they? Idiots? Saboteurs? Relatives of journalists? Or just progressives covering for their allies in a hostile takeover of the culture and nation?

But as I said, this was just one element. The tweeted epic by “Martymade,” apparently a podcaster whose real name is Daryl Cooper, covers far more than that. He wrote this in a series of 36 tweets on July 8, making it essentially unreadable by people like me (especially people like me who have quit Twitter), but managed to “go viral” nonetheless. Tucker Carlson read it all on Fox, but of course it’s not Fox News viewers who need to consider the analysis, but everyone else.

Here is the whole thing, made possible by an innovative new app called Threadreader. It is long, but it needs to be long. It is also clear, and true; I cleaned it up a little for readers here:

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Why Is Banning The Teaching Of Critical Race Theory In Schools Ethically Justifiable When Banning The Teaching Of Evolution Is Not?

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Critical Race ban

On this, the 96th anniversary of the beginning of the Scopes Trial in 1925, let’s consider attorney Clarence Darrow’s opening statement. Here is the crux of it:

“…Along comes somebody who says ‘we have got to believe it as I believe it. It is a crime to know more than I know.’ And they publish a law to inhibit learning. This law says that it shall be a criminal offense to teach in the public schools any account of the origin of man that is in conflict with the divine account in the Bible. It makes the Bible the yardstick to measure every man’s intellect, to measure every man’s intelligence and to measure every man’s learning. Are your mathematics good? Turn to Elijah 1:2. Is your philosophy good? See II Samuel 3. Is your astronomy good? See Genesis 2:7. Is your chemistry good? See – well, chemistry, see Deuteronomy 3:6, or anything that tells about brimstone. Every bit of knowledge that the mind has must be submitted to a religious test. It is a travesty upon language, it is a travesty upon justice, it is a travesty upon the constitution to say that any citizen of Tennessee can be deprived of his rights by a legislative body in the face of the constitution.

“Of course, I used to hear when I was a boy you could lead a horse to water, but you could not make him drink water. I could lead a man to water, but I could not make him drink, either. And you can close your eyes and you won’t see, cannot see, refuse to open your eyes – stick your fingers in your ears and you cannot hear – if you want to. But your life and my life and the life of every American citizen depends after all upon the tolerance and forbearance of his fellow man. If men are not tolerant, if men cannot respect each other’s opinions, if men cannot live and let live, then no man’s life is safe, no man’s life is safe.

“Here is a country made up of Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotch, German, Europeans, Asiatics, Africans, men of every sort and men of every creed and men of every scientific belief. Who is going to begin this sorting out and say, “I shall measure you; I know you are a fool, or worse; I know and I have read a creed telling what I know and I will make people go to Heaven even if they don’t want to go with me. I will make them do it.” Where is the man that is wise enough to do this?

“If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private school, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it from the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always they are feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until, with flying banners and beating drums, we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted torches to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.“

As mentioned in the post earlier today, the issue of whether a state could ban the teaching of evolution was never settled in Scopes, but many years later in the Supreme Court case of Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), which struck down a state law that criminalized the teaching of evolution in public schools. Epperson, however, was narrowly decided on the basis that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits a state from requiring, in the words of the majority opinion, “that teaching and learning must be tailored to the principles or prohibitions of any religious sect or dogma.” It was not based on freedom of speech, or as Darrow termed it, “freedom of thought.” The Theory of Evolution and “Critical Race Theory” are both theories, though one is based in scientific research and the other is a product of scholarly analysis. Though the latter seems to carry the heft of religious faith in some quarters, freedom of religion is not the issue where banning critical race theory is involved. Nor, realistically speaking, is freedom of speech as Darrow describes it.

School districts, which are agents of the government, have a recognized right to oversee the content of what is taught in the public schools, within reason, and when the purpose is defensible. Teachers are not free to teach whatever they choose, though their controversial choices cannot be made criminal, just grounds for dismissal. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals made this clear in Evans-Marshall v. Bd of Ed of Tipp City Exempted Village Sch Dist. (6th Cir. 2010), a case involving a high school English teacher who was fired for using classroom assignments and materials without following the appropriate steps for approval. The court stated, “Even to the extent academic freedom, as a constitutional rule, could somehow apply to primary and secondary schools, that does not insulate a teacher’s curricular and pedagogical choices from the school board’s oversight.”

School districts still can’t define a curriculum so narrowly that it violates students’ constitutional rights. In Board of Island Trees v. Pico (U.S. 1982), the U.S. Supreme Court held that the school district could not remove books from the school library without a legitimate pedagogical reason, because doing so violated students’ free speech rights of access to information.  Districts and schools are also limited to what they can require children to study, though most cases in this realm again involve religion. However, once school districts and schools have defined a legally permissible curriculum, courts will give them broad discretion to implement it even over community and parental objections. For example:

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The Alderman’s Post

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Hughes-at-his-typewriter

Guest Column by Steve Witherspoon

Recently I was led to the Facebook profile of a local Alder for the City of Madison, WI to leave him a message related to a vote that was cast on an entirely different subject. After I left the message I scrolled through his profile page to read some of the posts. On July 2, 2021 this Alder posted the following statement on Facebook followed by a link to a video that contained the 1936 poem “Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes.

The Alderman wrote,

“As I age, I become more aware and misinformed at the same time. I used to celebrate the 4th with fantastical, flag waving, fervor and fireworks. Now, I use it as a day of mourning and reflection.  While our republic is relatively young, the insidious histories of attempted genocide against BIPOC people, here at home, and around the world, forever stains the collective soul of this nation.”

The Hughes poem followed:

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Comment Of The Day: “The Ethics Of The Government’s Planned Door-To-Door Vaccination Campaign”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

vaccine protest

A nice “Bite me!” Comment of the Day by Demeter on the post, “The Ethics Of The Government’s Planned Door-To-Door Vaccination Campaign”:

I have gotten to date: a phone call, numerous post cards, and a text message, along with emails from my insurance company and… of course, FB announcements. If people are unaware of vaccines, their purpose, safety, etc… a knock on the door likely will not matter. Actually, it makes me want to dig in my heels to NOT do this.

I feel like there’s medical discrimination at play. Never have I ever been convinced to “do the right thing” with lotteries, scholarships for kids, phone calls asking me to schedule an appointment, a postcard, and now door to door. Umm, Fuck you. No.

I was considering it. Now “they” can leave me alone or see me in a courtroom. Translation: You would be better off shutting your stupid mouths and letting me work through the information, IN MY OWN TIME. If I die, I die. It’s my choice. You’re vaccinated so what do you care what I do? Or are they saying they don’t work as claimed? Pick one people, you can’t have both.

Side note: our history is full of amazing and epic scientific breakthroughs of things that turned out not to be safe, that we thought were, and and ended up killing thousands or more. Tell you what, Biden: Go back to the lab (you have a cancer cure so this should be simple!), create an airborne vaccine—I’m sure nothing could possibly go wrong—and you’d get your wish to have everyone vaccinated for the greater good.

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Waning Thursday Ethics Afterthoughts, 7/8/21: Liberty Bell Crack Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Liberty Bell

The Fourth of July and the Declaration of Independence have taken undeserved (and ignorant) abuse and disrespect this year, so I’ll extend the celebration a bit with the recognition of this date in 1776, when the 2,000-pound copper-and-tin “Liberty Bell” rang out from the tower of the Pennsylvania State House (now known as Independence Hall) in Philadelphia, so citizens could come and hear the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence, and know that their new nation had been conceived. Four days earlier, the Decalarationhad been adopted by the Continental Congress delegates, but the the public reading had to wait until the Declaration of Independence returned from the printer on July 8.

In April 1775, the bell had been rung to announce the battles of Lexington and Concord. After its most famous ringing on July 8, 1776, the British advanced on Philadelphia in the fall of 1777 caused the bell to be removed from the city and hidden to save it from being melted down by the British. After the British defeat in 1781, the bell was returned to Philadelphia, which served as the nation’s capital from 1790 to 1800. It was tolled annually to celebrate George Washington’s birthday on February 22 and the Fourth of July. The name “Liberty Bell” wasn’t used until an 1839 poem about abolishing slavery.

Contrary to public belief, the famous crack in the bell, rendering it useless except as a symbol, did not occur during its most famous swing and ring, but while tolling to mark the funeral of Chief Justice John Marshall, in 1835. Sounding a bit off but still used for another decade, the bell was still used until 1846 when the crack got worse while ringing out to mark George’s birthday that year. It was retired after that.

I learned about the crack when the Disneyland TV show’s “Ballad of Davy Crockett” epic reached the episode accompanied by the verse that went,

He went off to Congress an’ served a spell
Fixin’ up the Govern’ments an’ laws as well
Took over Washin’ton so we heered tell
An’ patched up the crack in the Liberty Bell
Davy, Davy Crockett, seein’ his duty clear!

1. I just noticed that Tom Cruise violated the ethics rules in “The Firm.” In the film of John Grisham’s legal thriller, Tom Cruise’s character Mitch McDeere works mightily to avoid disbarment by solving his dilemma (his firm is a Mafia ally) without violating the Rules of Professional Conduct. But Mitch has already engaged in a serious ethics breach by engaging in the unauthorized practice of law. He gives legal advice [Notice of Correction: I erroneously wrote “ethics advice” by mistake when this was posted.] advice to a big client of his firm before he has passed the Tennessee Bar exam and been sworn in. That’s practicing law, and he can’t do that.

Maybe he hadn’t gotten to that part of the Tennessee Rules of Professional Conduct while he was studying for the exam…

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