Sorry.
The post about Britney Griner being caught betting on her own team’s games was improvidently posted. It was based on an entry on a suspicious website that I should have investigated further than I did.
I’ve been caught before, though not recently. This time it was confirmation bias that got me: I think Griner is a grifter and Ethics Villain, and was obviously (note the title) predisposed to believe the worst. As several commenter have noted, the report I was relying on didn’t make sense, but it was also, as web hoaxes often are, not sufficiently clever to tip me off that it was intended as satire. As Ethics Alarms has stated repeatedly, false stories on teh web should be flagged as such or are unethical. And despicable. I hate them to pieces.
So, here come the apologies: I apologize to Britney, readers here, the WNBA and anyone who was fooled by my carelessness and stupidity. I had an unusually busy morning, was distracted and tired from a bad night, and should have waited until I was in a more competent state of mind.
Let that be a lesson to me. And you. And everyone.
%$!@#$!
I‘m leaving the post up below, as, to quote Paul Newman (as Doug Roberts, the architect) at the end of “The Towering Inferno,” “kind of a shrine to all the bullshit in the world.”
***
Britney Griner, the anti-American WNBA star who made the Biden Administration give Russia an international criminal (an illegal arms dealer whose nickname is “The Merchant of Death”) in order to save her from her own stupidity and recklessness, is now accused of betting on her own team’s basketball games.
Griner placed “several sizable wagers” on Phoenix Mercury games over the past two seasons according to a Vegas sportsbook employee named Art Tubolls. He noticed “a suspicious number of bets placed by someone who looks suspiciously like Britney Griner, except wearing a mustache and calling herself ‘Rick Slamson.’”
WNBA Ethics Manager Josephine Barron todl the news media,“We’re looking into whether or not she purposely fixed the scores,” adding that Griner could be banned for life if the allegations are true. The bets were disturbing. One wager read, “Mercury will lose by 7 because I’m taking the night off and pretending to have a groin injury.” Another bet was for $1,000 on “Caitlin Clark to drop 30 and break ankles.”
Right now Griner’s fans and allies are in the spin and denial stage, but it doesn’t look good for her, and anyone who is shocked—shocked!—hasn’t been paying attention. On the way to creating an international incident, she knowingly defied a State Department warning not to travel to Russia, doing so for money, although she was hardly destitute. She carried with her substances that she knew were illegal in Russia, and that she knew carried serious criminal penalties. Her explanations and excuses after she was caught breaking the law in Russia strained credulity: for example, a U.S. doctor has no authority to waive Russian drug laws, but Griner tried to use a letter from her physician justifying medical marijuana use by the athlete to get around her illegal possession charges. Then she sought diplomatic rescue from the nation she had condemned a racist while serving as a Black Lives Matter advocate. Griner is just not very bright, and there is a strong link between inadequate intelligence and unethical conduct. The link becomes stronger with wealth and celebrity.
Griner is, in short, a proven jerk, much like Pete Rose, baseball’s poster boy for forbidden gambling. The gambling allegations regarding the WNBA star, if true, just prove that she’s an even bigger jerk than I originally thought.
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Pointer: JutGory
Ethics Alarms 