Capitalism

Baseball Ethics: The Evil, and All-American, LA Dodgers

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I know, 50% of you will skip this one…and I pity you.

Today is a big crazy day for baseball fans: it is the MLB trade deadline, when those teams that feel they have a chance at post-season glory and World Series immortality will try to acquire significant reinforcements from the teams that have given up hope. The latter teams will dump contracts while trying to acquire younger, cheaper players, many still confined to the minor leagues, so “Wait until next year!” has a chance of coming true for their disappointed fans.

The event has become important since baseball emulated the other professional sports by diluting the importance of the regular season by increasing the number of teams that can qualify for the play-offs. As I have written in the past, I detest this development, which is a deformed offspring on the free agent system. After today, the 30 teams will have split into mostly non-competitive pushovers playing out the last two months without hope and much superior teams “going for the gold.”

The biggest star and the most valuable player in these annual sweepstakes is Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal, the consensus choice as the Best Starting Pitcher in Captivity. Skubal has won the AL Cy Young Award two straight years. It is his free agent year, and the Tigers know his asking price to re-sign in beyond their resources. The team had to trade him now, and almost every team with a ghost of a chance to get to the World Series would love to have him. Who traded for him yesterday? Shockingly the one team that didn’t need him: the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Dodgers have won the World Series two years in a row, they are locks to win their division again, they have the most money and the largest payroll in the game, and basically have a team of All-Stars without Skubal. The trade reignited a protest in the sports media and on barstools that the Dodgers were unethically greedy and “ruining baseball” by monopolizing talent, emulating the New York Yankees dominance during baseball’s first century. (The classic 1950s musical “Damn Yankees” was adapted from the novel, “The Year the Yankees Lost The Pennant.”) My view: Nonsense. AOC, Bernie and Mayor Mamdani like that argument, because they are communists. The Dodgers have succeeded because they are well-run and make smart decisions, including making many that benefit fans at the sacrifice of the bottom line. Baseball, alone among team sports, promotes individualism, exceptionalism, and capitalist values. Teams are not are not limited regarding their payrolls, and players are not limited regarding how much money they demand to play. Furthermore, baseball has traditionally benefited by having teams playing the role of The Evil Empire. It’s like the villains in professional wrestling.

[Full disclosure: My feelings on the matter might be influenced a tiny bit by the fact that the Boston Red Sox, currently on a historic winning streak that pulled them out of today’s class of pathetic white flag-waivers into the mob of hopeful “buyers” (23 wins in the last 26 games) swept the Evil Dodgers in a three game series in LA, winning last night 8-4.]

Unethical Tweet of the Month: This Is Why You Can’t Have An Intelligent Discussion With These People…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

You have to truly be a blind ideologue to proudly post something this blazingly stupid on social media.

Let’s begin with the pairing of a trans pride flag with the Palestinian flag…the poster is irony-challenged. Jade then pronounces conservatives incurious, a contention that she doesn’t bother to support. I, for one, am curious how dedicated progressives continue to maintain scientific, legal and economic nonsense despite year after year of being embarrassed by their policies.

Then the tweet really gets rolling. Thoughtful people and ethicists believe abortion is “bad” because it involves ending a human life for the convenience of another human who is more powerful. The act would still be the same—homicide—if the Bible had no perspective on the matter at all. Similarly, we don’t believe theft is wrong because the Ten Commandments say so, but because civilization couldn’t exist if it weren’t prohibited.

It is something of an accomplishment that each of the three declarations is more moronic than the one before. “Immigrants are bad because Fox News said so” is a masterpiece of dishonesty and confusion. First of all, no one among conservatives says “immigration is bad.” Presumably Jade means illegal immigrants, but is so addled by the deceitful rhetoric of the Axis of Unethical Conduct that she doesn’t know the difference. I’m surprised she isn’t curious about that.

No, illegal immigrants are bad because they are breaking the law, and breaking the law is almost always bad by definition. Fox News doesn’t need to say so: statutes say so, court opinions say so, experience and common sense says so, Kant says so, Dostoevsky says so, and Hammurabi says so.

And yet the last line still wins the Ignoramus Blue Ribbon. Capitalism is good, not because Ronald Reagan said so, but because capitalism has, over the last 250 years, made the United States of America the richest, most productive, most influential and most creative nation on Earth, with the highest standard of living, the most innovation and the greatest number of contributions to civilization over that period.

You can’t argue with someone who posts nonsense like this. Well, you can, but I won’t. Jade complains about conservatives being incurious, but is so doctrinaire that she doesn’t have enough curiosity herself to check facts and history to find out if she knows what the hell she is talking about.

And she doesn’t.

Comment Of The Day: “Monday Mid-Day Ethics Considerations: Megan Rapinoe, Harvard, Pelosi And Double Standards,” Item #1, “The College Pledge”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Dallas Justice NOW

A few quick notes on “the College Pledge” are in order. It is the work of something called Dallas Justice Now which claims to be “a member-driven project of activists, researchers, and local leaders dedicated to making our city more just.” Yesterday the rumor was rampant that its threatening “pledge” demanding that white Dallas parents agree not to let their children apply for admission to elite institutions so black and brown kids could have an open field to obtain an Ivy League degree was a conservative “false flag” operation. This does not appear to be the case, and the increasingly unhinged Far Left, which is now just “the Left,” hardly needs any assistance in appearing menacing and racist.

The version of the pledge that I posted yesterday was not the full document, which included the implied threat that those who did not sign would be outed and ostracized, and the miserable device of introducing a false dichotomy: “Will you take the college pledge?” can be answered only with “I am a racist hypocrite.” and “I agree.” That’s rather funny, since the whole exercise is an example of anti-white racist hypocrisy.

I have searched, and apparently no mainstream national media news source finds this attempt to intimidate white Americans in the Dallas area newsworthy.

Here is Michael West’s Comment of the Day on the “College Pledge” item in “Monday Mid-Day Ethics Considerations…”

***

The vast majority of wealth is *multi-generational*. Yes, America is replete with the starry examples of rags-to-riches stories, but even those are generally isolated exceptions. For the rest of those who have significant wealth, it is mostly because the generation before them made tiny sacrifices in their lives that they didn’t have to make. Those sacrifices were essentially investments in and for their children that paid off in dividends worth VASTLY more than the sacrifice.

Continue reading →

Insomnia Thoughts On Tip-Baiting, And A Poll

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Pop quiz: What does Grover Cleveland have to do with the Wuhan virus?

Unfortunately, this is how my mind works…

Something about last night’s post on the despicable practice of tip-baiting to lure financially desperate Americans to go grocery shopping for the tippers bothered me, and I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. The thought that I was missing something kept churning in what I laughably call my brain (my wife calls it an ourdated hard drive that has never been cleaned of junk, cookies and malware and is going to crash any day now). It kept me awake tonight: I’m at my keyboard out of desperation. Weirdly enough, I kept thinking about the Civil War. Why was that? There had to be an ethics connection somewhere.

Ah HA! Got it. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 1/2/2020: A Rich Assortment Of Jerks And Assholes To Begin The Year.

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

 It’s finally Getting Back To Normal Day!

I don’t know about you, but I feel like everything’s been one big, holiday/stress/disruption blur since I enlivened Thanksgiving dinner by keeling over. There should be  law preventing Christmas and New Years from falling on Wednesdays, which effectively kills two full weeks. I’m behind on everything, and I don’t know what I could have done to avoid it…

1. Sigh. This is what we have to look forward to in 2020…Ezra Klein, the Left-biased Washington Post journalist who founded Vox, which he then staffed with all Left-biased journalists, tweeted out the link a nine-month-old Post article stating as fact that counties hosting Trump rallies saw massive spikes in hate crimes compared to counties that didn’t host Trump rallies. By Wednesday afternoon, Klein’s tweet had been re-tweeted  more than 7,000 times and had more than 14,000 likes. It also polluted many Facebook feeds.

Klein didn’t tell his 2.5 million followers  that the article relied on a study that had been debunked months ago by  Harvard University researchers Matthew Lilley and Brian Wheaton.  “The study is wrong, and yet journalists ran with it anyway,” they revealed in in Reason magazine four months ago. That’s four. 4. IV. F-O-U-R.

Lilley and Wheaton tried to replicate the original study—if a study is valid, you can do that.  They discovered that “adding a simple statistical control for county population to the original analysis causes the estimated effect of Trump rallies on reported hate crimes to vanish. “Given how little scrutiny was required to reveal the flaws in the thesis that Trump rallies cause hate incidents, one cannot help but wonder whether its viral status was aided by journalists predisposed to believe its message,” the researchers noted.

Ya think?

Klein’s tweet is still up. It’s false and inflammatory, but it advances one of the key Big Lies (that would be #4), so he is running with it anyway. Do you wonder why those on opposite sides of the partisan divide have different views of reality? This kind of thing is a primary reason.

Enemy of the people.

2. The first “I don’t understand this story at ALL” of 2020:

 In July 2018, Michael J. Reynolds. a New York City police officer, was in Nashville for a three-night bachelor-party trip with six other officers. At one point in the festivities,  Reynolds, who is white, kicked in a black woman’s door in a drunken rage, threatening her (“I’ll break every bone in your neck…”) and her sons while calling them “niggers” and showering them with obscenities. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to 15 days in jail with three years’ probation after pleading no contest to four misdemeanors, court records show. Nevertheless, he remains an employee of the N.Y.P.D. More than 10,000 people signed an online petition demanding his dismissal and supporting the woman whose home he invaded.

Theories? Never mind unions, due process and mandatory investigations: the incident took place a full year and a half ago. There is no excuse for this. Reynolds apologized and said that he was so drunk he doesn’t remember the episode. Oh! Then that’s OK, Officer! Let’s all forget the whole thing!

As it habitually does, the New York Times reached a false analogy, writing,

The case of Officer Reynolds is again focusing scrutiny on the pace of the Police Department’s disciplinary process. In a prominent example of how it can drag on, five years passed before Officer Daniel Pantaleo, whose use of a prohibited chokehold contributed to the 2014 death in police custody of Eric Garner, was fired and stripped of his pension benefits in August.

Ridiculous. There were legitimate issues involved in Pantaleo’s case that made the proper discipline in his case complicated and controversial. There are no reasons for controversy here. Continue reading →

Ethics Observations Upon Watching “Ford v. Ferrari”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

My son is an auto tech and car enthusiast as well as a lover of speed (sufficiently to get him in trouble), so when he told me that I should see “Ford v Ferrari” and that he loved it, it was no surprise. I knew nothing about the film other than its title: no reviews, no background. My son said he would eagerly see it again, and was our guide as my wife and I attended a New Year’s Day afternoon showing (which was packed, incidentally.)

To get the basics out of the way up front, “Ford v Ferrari” is a wonderful movie. It immediately takes its place as one of the great sports movies of all time (with “Rocky,” The Natural,” “Hoosiers,” “The Bad News Bears,” “Sea Biscuit,” and a few others we could argue about), but it is also just a great movie. Christian Bale is astonishing, as usual, and the rest of the cast is uniformly excellent, as is the direction, film editing and screenplay. It is the best film I have see this year, easily leaving such critic’s favorites as “The Irishman” and “Once Upon A Time in Hollywood” in the dust.  That, however, is beside the point….

Observations: Continue reading →

Monday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 8/26/2019: Bad Business And Bad Businesses

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Whoa! A morning surprise!

As I commented on yesterday’s warm-up, traffic on Ethics Alarms was discouraging slow all weekend, which, as some of you know, makes me re-evaluate my priorities and ponder throwing myself into the shredder. Then, I discover, at some point last night the Mitch McConnell post was linked someplace that has a much bigger audience than I have, and just like that, the blog got more visitors in a couple of hours as the weekend weekended than it had in the previous two days. As is usually the case, it is impossible to find out where the referrals are coming from (except I know they aren’t from Facebook!), virtually none of the new visitors are commenting, and the temporary avalanche spawns few new followers, if any. I never know when this is going to happen, and it almost never occurs with the essays I am most proud of or consider especially important.

1. Of course they booed. They’re NFL football fans. This means they have the ethics of army ants. Andrew Luck, the star quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts, stunned the sport with his unexpected decision to retire from the NFL, even though he is only 29 and completed a stellar campaign in 2018. The reason: he doesn’t want to end up crippled or a vegetable from the abuse his body and brain have absorbed and will continue to the longer he stays on the field. not having them anymore after the way fans in Indianapolis treated him after the  on Saturday.

As Luck began to make his way off the field following the 27-17 loss in the Colts’ preseason game against the Bears, fans at Lucas Oil Stadium started to boo their former quarterback because the news of Luck’s retirement broke during the fourth quarter of the game. Of course they booed. Anyone who watches the NFL and supports an NFL team by purchasing tickets, merchandise, or inflating league ratings by watching the games on TV has signaled that they are perfectly happy to encourage young men to ruin their bodies and minds for their selfish entertainment, safe in their seats or on their living room sofas.

2. More on the Left’s undemocratic effort to stifle free speech and opposition to its agenda…Tucker Carlson—I am not a fan, you will recall—returned to his Fox News show after a vacation that seemed more like a retreat from fire to find that the Media Matters-led sponsor boycott  of his show had taken more chunks out of his sponsor base.  Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Robert F. Smith [UPDATED]

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

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If your reaction upon seeing the headline above was “WHO?” then it is fair to say, is it not, that that the mainstream news media has not sufficiently publicized the news made by Smith of late to permeate your consciousness. After you have read about him, it would be prudent to ponder why this might be.

The reason Smith is an Ethics Hero is this: He was the  Morehouse College  class of 2019 Commencement speaker, and after receiving his honorary degree, announced that he would pay off the entire class’s student debt.

The gift to the all-male, “historically black” college in Atlanta appears to to be worth about $40 million, and will affect nearly 400 students. It is the  largest individual donation to a historically black college or university. [ Not to inject a sour note, but if previously racially exclusive white colleges cannot continue their discriminatory ways by designating themselves “historically white colleges,” then the “historically black college” dodge to encourage and justify racial discrimination in both admissions and institutional marketing ought to be retired permanently. The so-designated colleges now have a collective student body that is about 22% white. ] Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day from The 4/10 Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This is a Comment of the Day by Michael R. on what amounts  to a provocative stand-alone post by JimHodgson. He wrote,

Yesterday I taught an ethics course for a group of thirty corrections officers at a local sheriff’s office detention facility, and will teach the same class tomorrow for a second group. The attendees ranged from veteran staff, with ten or more years of service, to recent hires just out of basic training. Ages ranged from early 20s to mid 50s. Due to medical/surgical issues I have recently been “out of the saddle” as a trainer for two years and had not taught this particular course for nearly four years. As we discussed ethical considerations in the corrections context, I was struck repeatedly by one thing: The older, more experienced officers, who one might have expected to be quite jaded about their role, duties, and in their outlook toward professional / occupational ethical issues, were instead the most thoughtful and consistent in their ethical logic as we dissected various scenarios and case studies involving the application of ethics -or the lack thereof, and they displayed the greatest understanding of ethical concepts and principles. Conversely, the younger and less experienced officers’ reasoning was tilted toward ethical contingencies and excuse-making, and in some cases the idea that “what is acceptable to my peers is ethical.” As I always do, I posed Michael Josephson’s somewhat rhetorical question, “How many times do you get to lie before you are a liar?” To my consternation, some of the younger people seemed to think that the answer could be quantified!

Of course, I have no delusions that any instruction by me can correct an adult’s ethical deficiencies, but I always endeavor to at least provide a fairly comprehensive summary of ethical decision-making principles and processes, the legal and ethical duties of the job, the standards of the institution, and the likely consequences for failing to meet those ethical and legal standards. Based on their responses, I was not encouraged about the future of many of those younger officers. I recalled my own daughter’s experiences with “character education” in school, and our many related discussions about character and ethics, and wondered if these young officers hadn’t shared that educational experience, being of about the same age. If so, I saw little residual evidence of it.

This particular detention facility is seriously overcrowded (nearly 25% over designed capacity), chronically understaffed (no staff positions added since the facility was at 60% of capacity), and has about a 40% annual staff turnover (mainly newer hires leaving for better-paying, less stressful jobs). A round of retirements about five years ago decimated the ranks of the most experienced staff. Over 50% of staff have less than four years experience. The corrections officer’s duties include a multitude of low-visibility discretionary decisions that often involve the use of coercive authority, and making ethical decisions is essential.

Here was Michael R.’s Comment of the Day in response: Continue reading →

Let’s Boycott Companies That Don’t Have The Guts To Stand Up Against Boycotts

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The novel “A Confederacy of Dunces” comes to mind.

WalMart has an online open market where third party sellers can offer merchandise to the public. Good! That’s a public service. It’s like a farmer’s market, online. Aspiring entrepreneurs can get started. Consumers can find products that they might not have known about.

One of its third party sellers offered a T-shirt with the message, “Impeach 45.” Oh, fine. It’s a moronic sentiment, and an ignorant sentiment, but so is “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” “Abolish ICE,” “What would Jesus do?,” “Bush lied and people died,” and “Go Yankees!” Personally, I think any messages on clothing is prima facie evidence that the wearer is intellectually deficient.Imagine someone who walked around saying “Give peace a chance” all day long. You’d have to commit him. Wearing a T-shirt with messages on it is basically like that. Nonetheless, if people want to parade around wearing some slogan, virtue-signaling to fellow “resistance” members and Maxine Waters fans, that’s their dumb choice. This is America. We get to make dumb choices. And I, for one, am grateful when idiots label themselves. Continue reading →