fairness

The “Immaculate Inning” Conundrum: A Fairness And Integrity Challenge

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Yes, this perplexing ethics issue arises in baseball, but the principles it involves are applicable in other contexts. Attention should be paid.

Although there is no official definition, an immaculate inning in baseball occurs in baseball when a pitcher strikes out all three batters he faces in one inning throwing only nine pitches. This has only happened 114 times in Major League history, and been done by just 104 pitchers. The first immaculate inning was thrown by John Clarkson of the Boston Beaneaters against the Philadelphia Quakers on June 4, 1889. No-hitters, which automatically get a pitcher’s name in the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, are three times more common that immaculate innings. Throwing an immaculate inning is a career landmark for any pitcher.

A week ago, Tampa Bay Rays reliever Robert Stephenson threw nine pitches to three Cleveland Indi—I’m sorry, Guardians batters and struck them all out on three pitches each. But whether or not this constituted an immaculate inning is still being debated. Within the controversy is a welter of ethics lessons and problems.

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Ethics Villain: Rudy Giuliani Accuser Noelle Dunphy

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

What a terrible human being.

I don’t mean Rudy Giuliani. Maybe the former mayor of New York City really did harass and “sexually assault” Noelle Dunphy, seen above with Rudy, after he hired her (she says) in January 2019 when the old prosecutor was 75 years old. Even if that is true—and, frankly, no man over 60 these days is likely to be able to avoid committing legal harassment, as in creating a “hostile work environment,” working closely with a young woman who is looking for offenses to protest (See: Joe Biden, the late George H.W. Bush, and too many others to count.)—Giuliani is at least partially the victim here. Use the wrong word and it’s pervasive sexism; touch a shoulder without consent and it is “assault.” Yes, there is no excuse for men of any age not to keep up with the evolution of ethics in this area and others, but kindness, compassion and the Golden Rule dictate a reaction other than lying in wait for an opportunity to exact revenge or worse, exploit a past relationship for current personal gain.

Rudy is currently under attack from all sides, primarily as part of an organized effort to punish the allies of Donald Trump, particularly the lawyers. Already named as a co-conspirator in the latest indictment of Trump, Giuliani is in the process of being disbarred in the District of Columbia on the theory that he “helped destabilize our democracy” and “done lasting damage” to the oath to support the U.S. Constitution that he had sworn when he was admitted to the bar. [No further comment from me: I have a conflict in this matter] Dunphy or her lawyer decided that this was the perfect time to pounce, with Giuliani already being savaged in the news media like anyone who doesn’t publicly reject Trump. So she not only chose now to sue him, she also included embarrassing quotes the old man made when he thought the two were alone and his comments were private.

She was, you see, secretly recording him.

And thus we have today’s New York Times headline, “Giuliani Maligns Jews and Women in Transcript Filed in Harassment Case.” What was the comment that “maligns Jews”? This:

“Jews! They want to go through that freaking Passover all the time. Man, oh, man. Get over the Passover. It was like 3,000 years ago. OK, the Red Sea parted. Big deal. Not the first time that happened.” Says the Times, “In another portion, he engaged in a derisive discussion of the size of Jewish men’s genitals.”

Sexism? “In another transcript, Mr. Giuliani says that he is physically aroused by Ms. Dunphy’s intelligence, adding, ‘I’d never think about a girl being smart. If you told me a girl was smart, I would often think she’s not attractive.'”

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On Lady Gaga’s Frenchies: Not Surprisingly, Criminals Don’t Comprehend “The Unclean Hands Doctrine” [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

[In the original version of this post I confused readers by forgetting to erase pieces of the source article that I had pasted to the draft to save me the time of jumping back and forth between screens. My fault. Then I compounded the problem by leaving out the link. Fixed. It was all my fault; can’t blame WordPress this time.]

What a moron.

But then if criminals were smart, we’d be in even more trouble than we are…

Lady Gaga promised to pay a $500,0000 reward for the return of her two kidnapped French Bulldogs Gustav and Koji (two of the three above: sorry, I don’t know which). The pop icon’s dogwalker was shot and injured during the theft. Emulating the plot twist in the Mel Gibson thriller “Ransom,” however, one of the participants in the kidnapping scheme decided to collect the reward, arguing that because Gaga had said she would pay for the dogs’ return “no questions asked,” she was obligated even to pay someone who was involved in the crime.

Seeking the outlandish reward, Jennifer McBride was arrested when she turned in the dogs at a police station. She pleaded no contest to knowingly receiving stolen property and was sentenced to probation. I suppose the scheme was to have her collect the reward and split it with the dognappers.

After Lady Gaga warbled, “You’ve got to be kidding!’ when McBride asked for the money, McBride sued her for breach of contract.

Uh, no.

In rejecting the claim, Judge Hollie J. Fujie of Los Angeles Superior Court cited the ancient “unclean hands doctrine,” which holds that a litigant cannot benefit from a situation he or she deliberately helped to bring about by illegal or unethical conduct.

“The unclean hands doctrine demands that a plaintiff act fairly in the matter for which he seeks a remedy,” Fujie wrote, adding that the UHD “is an equitable rationale for refusing a plaintiff relief where principles of fairness dictate that the plaintiff should not recover, regardless of the merits of their claim.”

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From The Ethics Alarms Mail Bag: The Case Of The Abandoned Beanie Babies

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Now and then people contact EA privately for some ethics guidance, which I usually supply free of charge. Yesterday an inquirer spun this tale:

Her neighbor decided to clean house, and get rid of all of her now grown and out children’s abandoned toys. Among these were dozens and dozens of Beanie Babies, the toy fad of the Nineties. My inquirer said that neighborhood parents and pre-schoolers were just scooping the things up, and so she asked her neighbor if she could have three, two for her granddaughter, now 4, and one for as a future stocking-stuffer. Receiving a positive response, she chose three that she thought a little girl would like.

She swears it didn’t occur to her at the time that Beanie Babies are collectibles, but when she got home, she was moved to investigate. She was shocked at what some of the old stuffed animals are worth, and was particularly shocked to see that one of the BB’s she had chosen at random and that appeared to be in mint condition is considered rare and valued at $70,000. Her question: what is the ethical course to pursue at this point?

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Fairness, Justice, And Baseball No-Hitters

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

That’s Harvey Haddix about to throw a pitch above. The photo is from one of the most famous baseball games ever played: on May 26, 1959, Haddix, then a starting pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates pitched a perfect game—that’s no runs, hits, walks or errors, with nobody on the other team reaching base) for 12 innings against the Milwaukee Braves. It was the greatest pitching performance of all time, but because the Pirates didn’t score a run either, Haddix had to keep pitching into the 13th inning, where he lost the perfect game, the shutout and the game itself. As a result, he wasn’t even given credit for a no-hitter, which is normally when a pitcher throws nine-innings of hitless ball. That really bothered me as a kid; it made no sense.

In baseball, a no-hitter, with a perfect game being the ultimate no-hitter, has always been considered one of pinnacles of single game performance by a baseball player. A pitcher who throws one gets his name in the Hall of Fame; it’s a distinction that accents an entire career. Only the greatest pitchers throw more than one in a career; some of the very greatest, like Lefty Grove, Grover Cleveland Alexander, and Roger Clemens, never get one. (Cy Young, Nolan Ryan and Sandy Koufax, however, tossed three or more each. Johnny Vander Meer tossed two no-hitter in consecutive starts!) So being credited with a no-hitter is important; it matters.

Imagine then what it would feel like to be credited with pitching a major league no-hitter (or have your father or grandfather credited with one) and have it taken away. That’s what happened in 1991. Up until then, there had been no specific definition of no-hitter except the obvious, common sense one used by sportswriters, players, fans and baseball historians: a no-hitter was a baseball game that ended with one team having failed to get a hit. One of my favorite Commissioners of Baseball, however, Fay Vincent, the last one who wasn’t a toady for the baseball team owners (Vincent was fired for being independent, which up until then was the definition of his job), decided that the definition of no-hitter was too loose, among some other statistical anomalies. He put together a commission, and, with his influence, they redefined a no -hitter as a game that ended with one team getting no hits in at least nine innings.

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Twitter Is Being Attacked For Loosening Its Hateful Conduct Policy. Twitter Shouldn’t Have A Hateful Conduct Policy [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

It is increasingly obvious that the progressive critics of Elon Musk’s efforts to make Twitter a neutral platform that encourages and facilitates communication and dialogue never wanted free speech. They wanted speech that they approved of and that advanced their agendas. The pre-Musk iteration of Twitter pleased them: conservatives breached the slanted rules and enforcement of them; those using ad hominem attacks against the “right” targets and “for the greater good” knew they had a free pass.

In the Bizarro World of “DEI,” fairness isn’t equitable, equal treatment isn’t fair, and free speech isn’t “safe.”

The latest example of this attitude came as Twitter modified its “Hateful Conduct Policy” this month. The prohibitions on “Slurs and Tropes” no longer includes “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” Deadnaming is when one intentionally (or unintentionally) uses a transgender individual’s pre-transitioning name, as in calling Caitlin Jenner “Bruce.”

This reasonable and ethical removal of a restriction ripe for abuse by speech censors and WrongThink police has now been labelled proof of Twitter’s approval of transphobia. In fact, it should mark the beginning of the elimination of the “Hateful Conduct Policy” entirely.

At the threshold, the very title of the section wounds free speech goals: it supports the Totalitarian Left’s position that mere speech is conduct that makes certain groups and individuals “unsafe,” and that the “hate speech” label, which cannot be defined sufficiently precisely not to be abused as a standard, describes expression that is not protected by the First Amendment.

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Well, There’s Some Good News: The NYT’s Marxist Tendencies Are Showing But Its Readers Are Unsympathetic

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The New York Times went all out with a feature about how food delivery drivers were being exploited and under-rewarded. The headline: “$388 in Sushi. Just a $20 Tip: The Brutal Math of Uber Eats and DoorDash.”

The assumption of reporter Mark Abramson is that the more the food costs, the more the tip should be, presumably because anyone who can afford $388 for sushi should share the wealth. But a delivery driver does exactly the same amount of work for the sushi order as a he would for 20 bucks worth of egg rolls. Why is he entitled to the same level of tip as a waiter or waitress who ideally contributes to a pleasurable dining experience?

Well, he isn’t. And though the Times readers are as woke as they come, this bit of working class hero victimization propaganda was too tough to swallow. Some examples…

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New Rule! Only White, Straight Men Need To Be Civil

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Last week, a looming $30 million budget shortfall prompted NPR to eliminate 10% of its staff across all its departments.  It killed several podcasts and so far, 84 employees are gone; more will follow.

One of the podcasts sent into the archives was “Louder Than A Riot,” which explored how hip-hop’s “Black women and queer folk have dealt with the same oppression [hip-hop] was built to escape.” So after getting the bad news, “Louder Than A Riot’s” staff took to Twitter and accused NPR of bias in its layoff decisions:

What support for that did the angry staff have? Oh, none. But NPR is a nest of progressives who don’t believe in ethics, so playing the discrimination card was a reflex, and Facts Don’t Matter. As it turned out, NPR did engage in discrimination, but the “good’ kind:  the layoffs had been  “structured in a way” so they would not disproportionately affect people of color and other marginalized groups. In other words, skin color and sexual proclivities were used to decide who to fire, and being white and non-LGTBQ was held against employees.

That’s unethical.

Also illegal.

Also “Diversity Equity and Inclusion” exemplified. Continue reading →

Stop Making Me Defend Hillary Clinton!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Hillary Clinton is being skewered on social media for the above promotional video promoting her upcoming Columbia U. course “Inside the Situation Room.” Clinton was brought onto the faculty to co-teach the offering, which is open by application only to students attending the university’s School of International and Public Affairs and undergraduates from Columbia College, Barnard College, and the university’s School of General Studies.

Some of the criticism is in line with that of Glenn Greenwald and other Clinton adversaries who regard her as a warmonger. “The US official who has urged more wars than anyone over the last 3 decades with the possible exception of John Bolton – including Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now Ukraine – is teaching Columbia students a class called ‘Foreign-Policy Decision-Making.’ And boy they’re excited!” Greenwald tweeted. The rest of the brickbats are aimed at the video itself, which the Blaze described as “cringy.”

Oh, it’s that, all right. But both critiques are unfair, at least regarding Hillary. Regardless of what Clinton’s policies and proclivities were, she certainly has sufficient background in the field of international diplomacy and foreign policy decision-making to provide students with useful perspective. The press release about the course promises that students will learn “how to analyze and understand the complex interplay between individual psychology, domestic politics, public opinion, bureaucracy, the international environment, and other factors which feed into decisions about foreign policy,” including the “use of force, signaling and perception, intelligence and its analysis, the deployment of other instruments of statecraft, and more.” Hillary is qualified to provide guidance and the benefit of her experience on all of that. I’d take the course, just as I took the negotiation seminar taught by Adrian Fisher, who was the principle U.S. negotiator of the SALT Treaty.

The critique of the goofy video is certainly called for, but Hillary is innocent. She didn’t write, direct or conceive the stupid thing: that’s on the university. Nor is her the quality of her performance being fairly knocked: she’s a lot better than her stiff co-instructor, who has the ineffable air of a bad community theater actress about her. Helen Mirren couldn’t make that script work; I think Hillary was a good sport to do the video, lame as it was. She had just joined the faculty, and she was being cooperative, collegial, and willing to spoof herself to boost student interest.

Well, good for her. I came away from that video liking her more than I did before seeing it.

Ethics Heroes: The Mid Vermont Christian School Girls Basketball Team [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The Mid Vermont Christian School girls basketball team, the Eagles, were set to play against the Long Trail Mountain Lions in the fourth game of state championship tournament playoffs last week. But the Eagles forfeited the game and lost their place in the tournament, taking the position it was unfair and unsafe for a high school girls team to have to play against a team with a biological male on its squad.

Which, of course, it was and is.

[That’s another trans member of a women’s basketball team above, but illustrative of the problem…don’t you think?]

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