Ethics Hero: Orioles Catcher James McCann, No Weenie He!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Wow.

Blue Jays rookie pitcher Yariel Rodríguez threw a first-inning 95 mph fastball that hit Baltimore Orioles back-up catcher James McCann directly in the face. Blood gushed from his nose and mouth, and he immediately dropped to the ground. Team trainer Brian Ebel began providing treatment at the plate, but McCann got to his feet, still bleeding, and went to first base. O’s manager Brandon Hyde summoned him to the dugout while the Jays were replacing their wild pitcher, but McCann was adamant that he could continue. It was the first game of a doubleheader, and McCann didn’t want the O’s young star catcher, Adley Rutschman, to have to catch both games, an invitation to injury.

“I felt like if I could get the blood to stop flowing then I could stay in the game, and that was what I was able to do,” McCann said. When play resumed, McCann went back to first, wearing a fresh, unbloodied jersey.

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Unethical Film and Theater Reviewer Bias, Part I: “Straight People Can’t Act”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Film and theater reviewer biases and politics have always been a blight on the field: the late, absurdly worshiped New Yorker reviewer Pauline Kael would pan terrific John Wayne movies just because he had supported Barry Goldwater. It’s hard to watch a revival of “Hair” (or the stunningly bad film version) without wondering, “What were those reviewers raving about, with that faux rock music and the trite book?” Why, peace, pot and love, baby! ” Hair” was against the war in Vietnam, so it had to be at least as good as “Oklahoma!”

Now, of course, in the era of the Great Stupid, explaining what Big Brother’s tastes in the arts require is a job requirement for film and theater reviewer who are paid in real money rather than free passes. In a New York Times column about how “outdated” classic musicals (that is, insufficiently woke) can be salvaged by appropriately sensitive directors, for example, readers were informed by an “expert” that only gay actors can convincingly play gay characters.

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Ethics Dunce: University of Houston Law Professor Renee Knake Jefferson

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I have resolved to be more vigilant in calling ethics fouls on the various repeat ethical transgressions that proliferate in our society and political discourse. I wrote about some of them here; I just encountered another in an alleged legal ethics news letter. An alleged legal ethics newsletter that I have to pay for. Uh-uh, I’m not letting that pass. I was already triggered because I saw another TV commercial where two people were playing chess and the board was set up wrong. As soon as I see it again and note the product, I will out the company here. For so I have sworn.

Renee (Newman) Knake Jefferson is, she tells us, a law professor and an award-winning author. She “regularly consults on matters related to lawyer/judicial ethics and the first amendment and lawyer speech.” Jefferson holds the Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics at the University of Houston Law Center where she teaches ethics, constitutional law, and a writing seminar on gender, power, law, and leadership. Based on these credentials and the fact that a lot of the legal ethics blogs have been going defunct lately, I decided to subscribe to her weekly Legal Ethics Roundup at substack which promised to keep me up to date on significant developments in the field.

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Baseball’s Unethical Trade Deadline

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Let’s take a break from the election to focus on the things that really matter.

Like baseball.

Baseball’s Unethical Season is upon us. The trade deadline is tomorrow at 6 pm. It means that several teams…fewer this year than usual, but still…will announce to their fans that they won’t be trying to win any more, that hope is lost, and that they will put on the field from now on even worse squads than the ones that got them to this point.

This is because they have decided to trade or sell off many of their best players, especially veterans with big contracts or who will be free agents after the season, for unproven prospects. Those teams will “tank” for the foreseeable future, meaning accumulate losses so they can get high draft picks.

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Monday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 7/29/24

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

That sappy John Denver song is just one of the ones that has choked me up when I’ve stumbled across it while listening to the radio in my car. I feel like I’ve let all of my friends and colleagues down; everyone has been so caring and supportive, I’ve been taken out for dinner, friends I haven’t heard from for years have called me just to see how I am. Yet I can’t say that I’m one bit better today than I was March first, a day after finding my body wife and the love of my life dead and staring on our sofa. I had a terrible nightmare about Grace two days ago. And the songs are the worst: songs I remember from our wedding, our first dance at the reception (“Wonderland by Night”), the song I sang for Grace that night (“Let a Woman in Your Life” from “My Fair Lady”) songs I recall from when we were dating, “Another You,” which moved me to end our six month separation, even “The Way We Were.” I’m literally afraid to turn on the radio. Meanwhile, I can’t imagine anything more boring and tedious than having someone constantly expressing their pain at something that happened almost half a year ago, so I don’t want to talk about how miserable I am, and yet talking would help. A little.

Please excuse that self-indulgent introduction.

1. Is Google really burying Trump searches? That’s the latest conspiracy theory. I don’t trust Google, and I have no doubt that Big Tech is mostly all-in concerning forcing Kamala Harris down the nation’s metaphorical throat. Still, this seems like a software glitch to me. So “assassination attempt on Tru…” doesn’t produce “Trump” in the autofill, but Truman. (Was there an assassination attempt on Truman? I missed that.) Why is anyone paying attention to autofill? Learn to search better: “Trump assassination” immediately pulls up all the news stories. There is so much genuinely sinister manipulation of information going on, it’s foolish to try to manufacture any.

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Revisiting the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

My sister recorded the whole thing, and invited me over to view it. I would say it’s unwatchable—she agrees—but we did do our best, focusing on the main features of the opening that have caused controversy. This was in the wake of yesterday’s obviously PR-generated non-apology apology from Paris Olympics “organizer” Anne Descamps (whatever that’s supposed to mean):

“Clearly there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group. On the contrary, I think Thomas Jolly did try to intend to celebrate community tolerance. We believe this ambition was achieved, if people have taken any offense, we of course are really sorry.”

Should I add that to the Apology Scale as a perfect example of Apology #9? That’s “Deceitful apologies, in which the wording of the apology is crafted to appear apologetic when it is not (“if my words offended, I am sorry”). But I’m not even sure the statement appears apologetic. “Clearly there was never an intention”— that’s a lie, since clearly many, many people believe that was the intention. The “apology” begins by insulting those who were offended. Then again we have the risible “community intolerance” claim. If someone could show me how that mess possibly communicated anything coherent, much less “community tolerance,” I will be eternally grateful.

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Ethics Villain: Ex-J.D. Vance Friend Sofia Nelson

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“Villain” is the best I can muster right now. I really can’t find the right word for someone who would do what Sofia Nelson did, or who would be able to look at themselves in the mirror after she did it.

Nelson, a close friend of J.D. Vance’s in law school and for many years thereafter, sent about 90 of the emails and text messages they exchanged from 2014 through 2017 to The New York Times. Nelson is gay or a trans-male or a trans-female, or something, I couldn’t possibly care less. Nor will I read the Times’ article about what its partisan “Slime Trump and Vance!” posse found in the emails thus far. All that matters from an ethics perspective is the throbbing betrayal of trust represented by anyone the sharing past private communications with a media outlet without obtaining consent and permission from the other party to the exchanges. It’s revolting that the Times would accept such stuff: this is a National Enquirer level story. Trump’s running mate once wrote “Love you” to a guy who is now a chick! Ew! Does that mean Vance is gay, not that there’s anything wrong with that?

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Curmie’s Conjectures: “Curse You, Red Baron!”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

by Curmie

[This is Jack: Almost as if in response to my secret wish, Curmie has submitted a column designed to turn our attention away from politics, division, culture wars and the rest, instead focusing his analysis on pizza ads. Makes me hungry for more…but not more Red Baron pizza. I’ve been eating a lot of frozen pizza since Grace died, and have placed Red Baron on my blacklist. Yechh. DiGiorno, Frescetta and Trader Joe’s offerings are far superior. ]

I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m a little starved for something, anything, other than politics.  The thought that anyone would vote for either of the likely contenders for the presidency (as opposed to against the alternative) is chilling.  So I’ve been casting about, looking for something else to write about.  This may not be much, but at least it’s something.  And I did sort of open the door for this kind of post last Christmas season with an analysis of ads for Monopoly.

Red Baron (the pizza company, not Snoopy’s antagonist, but why pass up an opportunity like this?) has released a trio of new commercials, all connected to the joys of sharing.  They’re not going to convince my wife and me to buy their product—we’ve tried it and found the gustatory difference between it and cardboard to be insignificant (your mileage may vary), but that doesn’t mean their commercials are similarly boring.

Indeed, “Baddie Librarians,” in which two stereotypically bespectacled (complete with glasses chains) older women naughtily share a pizza intended for a single person, is trite but at least reasonably cute.  “Hipsters” is even more fun, as sharing a delicious pizza leads to sharing of a different sort: one character “shares” that he’s tired of being hip, another (her name is Willow, of course) admits that she doesn’t even know what her neck tattoo means, the pizza is described as “way better than kale” (I’ll grant that much), and kombucha is called “garbage water.”  It’s not laugh-out-loud funny, but at least it brings a smile.

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Ethics Observations on J.D. Vance’s “Childless Cat Ladies” Controversy

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The Axis of Unethical Conduct “pounced” on newly nominated Trump running mate J.D. Vance this week over a “re-surfaced” video in which Vance said that the country is being run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” The comment was made in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson when Vance was beginning his ultimately successful campaign for the Senate.

Observations:

1. Gee, just the GOP needs—TWO candidates who lack functioning filters between their brains and their mouths.

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Meet Sara Morris, the Running Fick [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I referred to someone as a fick last week, and realized Ethics Alarms hadn’t exposed any of that particularly loathsome breed recently. Upon checking, I discovered that the last official Ethics Alarms fick was designated way back in 2021. It was Bennett Madison, a columnist at the now (thankfully) defunct Gawker site. He had openly boasted about deceiving advice columnists and their trusting readers in his article titled, “Help! I Couldn’t Stop Writing Fake Dear Prudence Letters That Got Published.”

Sara Morris says, “Hold my beer!”

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