We don’t get much hockey ethics on Ethics Alarms, and it is one of the sports i don’t pay much attention tp despite going to a high school that was considered a hockey power in the ice-crazy Boston area. Arthur in Maine, another, more typical New Englander, does know the sport, and in this Comment of the Day on the post, “DeSantis, The NHL, And The Duty To Confront,” he gives us valuable perspective on why hockey, perhaps more than most sports, has a legitimate need to seek more “diversity.”
Incidentally, I couldn’t name the teams affiliated with more than half those logos. I bet Arthur could identify them all.
***
I have rather mixed feelings on this one… because as baseball and the Red Sox are to you, Jack, hockey and the Bruins are to me.
Hockey was the only team sport I played growing up (and I was terrible at it). But I did love it. At the time, you basically stood no chance of advancing in the game if you weren’t Canadian, preferably Quebecois. That’s largely because only Canada had made the investment into developing young players, starting around age four and moving up with organized league play from there. (Apropos of nothing, the first black player to reach the NHL was Canadian Willie O’Ree, who played for the Bruins in 1958 and again in 1961, though most of his long career was spent in the minors).
Let me stipulate that as a matter of both law and ethics, I consider DeSantis to be on very firm ground here. But it’s also worth noting that hockey has made a long and concerted effort to bring more people into the fold. It arguably started when Europeans and Russians were recognized as terrific players (those nations had development programs) and started receiving NHL contracts. Although the players are still mostly white, black players are no longer a curiosity and have proven some of the best players in the past decade (most of them are Canadian by birth). Today, there are practicing Muslims and players of Asian heritage in the league. Any player who has the skills and the heart to play at the NHL level has a shot at a contract (side note: some European players have a little trouble adjusting to the NHL game, because although North American rinks are roughly the same length as European ones, they’re considerably narrower).
It goes beyond that. In addition to active youth hockey programs all over the northern hemisphere, there’s remarkable development of girls’ and womens’ hockey as well, with serious collegiate programs, world championships and Olympic competition. There are programs for paraplegics and amputees. All in all, hockey as a sport – and it’s been an international effort – has become far more diverse and inclusive, and that process started long before any of the current wokeness. One could argue that it’s merely because this is good for business. I have a friend with two girls in middle school, both of whom are extremely active (and reasonably talented) players. Both know there’s no chance they’ll ever play in the NHL, but that doesn’t stop them from playing their hearts out now (and screaming their heads off when Dad takes them up to see the Bruins, where he lays out big $$ for tickets, refreshments and fooferaw – and that doesn’t touch what he pays each year for equipment and ice time for his girls).
During the Colorado Avalanche–New York Islanders game last night in the first period, Avalanche star defenseman Cale Makar had the puck behind his team’s net while being pursued by Islanders forward Mathew Barzal. Makar fell, and looked like that Barzal tripped Makar, so a penalty was called, which would give Colorado a one-player advantage. But when the referee blew his whistle, Makar waved at him to indicate it wasn’t a penalty after all. After briefly conferring the referees retracted the penalty.
This literally never happens in hockey, nor basketball, nor pro football, not Major League Baseball. A player telling a referee or umpire that a call benefiting his team was wrong? That’s not how the professional sports roll. The assumption is that eventually the bad calls even out. If you don’t accept gifts, your team will suffer in the long run.
Barzal’s reaction: “I honestly didn’t even know he waved it off until I saw it after. I thought the ref just made the call but, yeah, good sportsmanship on his part, not taking that. I don’t know if I would have done the same, to be honest with you.” Continue reading →
This morning, instead of the usual grainy 1930’s movies TCM usually shows before noon, it was featuring “Casablanca” for some reason. It’s a good thing, because the recent news had me heading for the bridge. As usual, the legendary singing duel at Ric’s between the Nazis and the French put me in a defiant mood, so I decided it was a good time to bring back the incredible Mirielle Mathiue and one of her signature performances of “La Marseillaise.” I’m a big fan of “The Star Spangled Banner,” but as inspiring national anthems go, this is the gold standard.
Now I feel better, and will at least until I finish this post.
1. You want racial conflict? This is how you get racial conflict. One benefit of the warm-up format is that I can write as little as possible about things that would make me up-chuck if I had to compose full posts about them. Following on the “systemic racism” myth, Oakland, California is launching a guaranteed income experiment called Oakland Resilient Families. 600 families in the city will receive $500-a-month payments over the next 18 months “to eliminate racial wealth inequalities.” Oakland’s guaranteed income program is only for low-income black, indigenous, and people of color, or BIPOC, families.
Whites cannot apply. If Oakland’s whites are poor, they have no excuses. They are just lazy, useless losers, I guess.
Families must apply online in the coming weeks and months in order to enter a pool of potential recipients, from which eligible families will be randomly selected to receive the cash payments.
I don’t have to explain what’s unethical about this, do I? Or what’s stupid about it? Or irresponsible?
That hilarious novelty song, a big hit in the same year Kennedy was shot, is now too politically incorrect to play in the U.S. Is it also song non grata Down Under?
1. Unethical Headline of the Day. From the Washington Freebeacon, a conservative news site: Dem Megadonor, Gun-Control Activist Harvey Weinstein Convicted on Rape Charges. This unethical device is used a lot now, though seldom this flagrantly. It’s Cognitive Dissonance Scale gamesmanship, attempting to smear positions that the headline-writer opposes by linking them to conduct that they have no relationship to. There is no logical reason why gun control or the Democrats should be implicated in a headline to Weinstein’s rape conviction. I’m not even sure the connection belongs in the news story at all.
2. Gee, I wonder why the President doesn’t trust his intelligence specialists. The Russian collusion conspiracy theory flared up again among the Trump Deranged after Shelby Pierson, the official in the intelligence community charged with election security, apparently botched her briefing to Congress.
Three national security officials told CNN that the briefer falsely (wrongly, mistakenly) said that Russia was planning to help Trump win re-election:
The US intelligence community has assessed that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election and has separately assessed that Russia views Trump as a leader they can work with. But the US does not have evidence that Russia’s interference this cycle is aimed at reelecting Trump, the officials said. “The intelligence doesn’t say that,” one senior national security official told CNN. “A more reasonable interpretation of the intelligence is not that they have a preference, it’s a step short of that. It’s more that they understand the President is someone they can work with, he’s a dealmaker.”
Since this comes from CNN, otherwise known as Bash The President Central, it cannot be dismissed as administration spin. My Facebook Friends reacted to the original story with utter glee, gloating that they knew Russia viewed Trump as a Russian asset.
If Trump fired her, and I wouldn’t blame him, he’ll be accused of a “purge.” Continue reading →
(On the way to lovely Annapolis, MD to present my Clarence Darrow legal ethics program, along with D.C. actor Paul Morella, the real star of the day and the best Clarence Darrow portrayer alive. Paul starred in my 2000 original one-man show about the iconic lawyer-rogue, and has been performing it for lawyer groups and bar associations ever since.)
1 Déjà vu!I would write a full post about this, but you can essentially go to all the football head trauma essays, search and replace NFL with NHL, and you’ll pretty much have it. The New York Times reports on a 53 year old ex-pro hockey player whose brain yielded evidence of CTE, and evidence is mounting the the violent sport is doing damage to players similar to what the NFL denied for so long. Right now, the National Hockey League is denying it too:
To the N.H.L. and its commissioner, Gary Bettman, the diagnosis is likely to be the latest piece of evidence to dismiss or combat. Even as links build a chain bridging the sport to C.T.E., the degenerative brain disease associated with repetitive head trauma, and some of the game’s most revered names push the league to take a more open-minded approach, the N.H.L. has denied any connection between long-term brain damage and hits to the head.
The N.F.L. did the same, for many years, until the evidence became too overwhelming, the numbers too much to counter with plausible deniability. Facing a huge class-action lawsuit, the N.F.L. eventually admitted to the connection and agreed to a roughly $1 billion settlement with former players. (That has not kept the sides from continuing to fight over the payouts, amid accusations of fraud and intimidation.) The N.H.L., following the N.F.L.’s strategy of about a decade ago, still contests any role in the burgeoning science of C.T.E., in the courts of law and of public opinion.
What’s going on here? Violent pro sports are popular and profitable, so they will continue maiming players and devastating their families until the public finally refuses to have blood on its hands. It will take a while, and many lives will be destroyed, but in the end, football and hockey are going to have to be responsible, and also held responsible for the carnage their greed has caused.
2. Yeah, I’m being unfair and partisan when I accuse progressives of being hostile to free speech and diversity of views… A hip-hop and R&B radio station in Detroit has announced that it won’t play Kanye West’s music. The alleged justification was the rapper’s dumb remarks about slavery. On “TMZ Live,” West said,
“When you hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years? That sounds like a choice. Like, you were there for 400 years and it’s all of you all? You know, it’s like we’re mentally in prison. I like the word prison ’cause slavery goes too — too direct to the idea of blacks.”
That’s pretty stupid for sure, but hardly any more stupid than the kinds of things West has been saying his whole career as his fans cheered him on. He’s welcome to hijack a telethons to say, for example, that President Bush intentionally let blacks die after Katrina, but this goes too far. (Someone please explain to me exactly what he thought he was saying, if you have time.) Continue reading →
1. “The Rifleman” and “Fix the problem.” I recently was interviewed by a graduate student in organizational leadership and ethics. One thing we discussed was how popular culture in America once dedicated itself to teaching ethical values and ethics problem-solving, especially in shows aimed at young audiences. This is not so true any more; indeed, popular culture models unethical conduct at least as often today.
I told my interviewer about recently watching an episode of “The Rifleman,” the early ’60s TV Western about a single father raising his young son while being called upon to use his skill with a rifle to fight for civilization in the harsh frontier. In the episode, hero Lucas McCain (played by the under-rated Chuck Connors) had to deal with an old friend, now an infamous outlaw, who had come to town. (The ethical conflict between personal loyalty and an individual’s duty to society was a frequent theme in Westerns.) Lucas was a part-time deputy, and at the climax of the episode, his friend-gone-bad is prepared to ride out of town to escape arrest for his latest crime. Lucas tells him not to leave, and that if he tries to escape, Lucas will have to let his custom-made rifle settle the matter, as usual. (Peace-loving Lucas somehow managed to kill over a hundred men during the run of the series.) Smirking, his friend (Richard Anderson, later known as the genius behind “The Six Million Dollar Man”), says that he knows his old friend is bluffing. For Lucas owes him a lifetime debt: he once saved “The Rifleman’s” life. You’re a good man and a fair man, the villain says. “You won’t shoot me. I know you.” Then he mounts his horse , and with a smiling glance back at “The Rifleman,” who is seemingly paralyzed by the ethical conflict, starts to depart. Now his back is all Lucas has to shoot at, doubling the dilemma. You never shoot a man in the back, an ethical principle that the two officers who killed Stephon Clark somehow missed. We see McCain look at his deadly rifle, then again at the receding horseman. Then, suddenly, he hurls his rifle, knocking his friend off his horse. The stunned man is arrested by the sheriff, and says, lamely, as he’s led away. “I knew you wouldn’t shoot me.”
I love this episode. It teaches that we have to seek the best solution available when we face ethics conflicts, and that this often requires rejecting the binary option presented to us, and finding a way to fix the problem.
Of course, it helped that Chuck Connors used to play for the Dodgers, and could hurl that rifle with the accuracy of Sandy Koufax.
2. Here we go again! Now that anti-gun hysteria is again “in,” thanks to the cynical use of some Parkland students to carry the anti-Second Amendment message without having to accept the accountability adults do when they make ignorant, dishonest, and illogical arguments in public, teachers and school administrators are back to chilling free speech and expression by abusing their students with absurd “no-tolerance” enforcement. At North Carolina’s Roseboro-Salemburg Middle School, for example, a 13-year-old boy in the seventh grade was suspended for two days for drawing a stick figure holding a gun.
I drew pictures like this—well, I was little better at it—well into my teens. It’s a picture. It isn’t a threat. It isn’t anything sinister, except to hysterics and fanatics without a sense of perspective or proportion—you know, the kind of people who shouldn’t be trusted to mold young minds. “Due to everything happening in the nation, we’re just being extra vigilant about all issues of safety,” said Sampson County Schools’ Superintendent Eric Bracy, an idiot. How does punishing a boy for a drawing make anyone safer? It makes all of us less safe, by pushing us one step closer to government censorship of speech and thought.
Then we have Zach Cassidento, a high school senior at Amity High Regional School in Connecticut who was suspended and arrested —arrested!—for posting a picture of his birthday gift, an Airsoft gun, on Snapchat. He was not charged, but was suspended for a day from school….for posting, outside of school, on his personal account, the picture of an entirely legal toy gun (It shoots plastic pellets: my son has several of them).
The people who do this kind of thing to children in violation of their rights as Americans are the same people who cheer on David Hogg while signing factually and legally ridiculous petitions. They should not be permitted to teach, and this kind of conduct ought to be punished.
Where is the ACLU? For the organization not to attack these abuses is an abdication of the organization’s mission. Continue reading →
Canadian country music star Brett Kissel was supposed to sing the U.S. and Canadian national anthems before Game 3 of the NHL play-offs between the Anaheim Ducks and Edmonton Oilers over the weekend, but his microphone malfunctioned. He couldn’t be heard.
The estimated crowd of 18000 took over, and sang both national anthems. They really belted out “The Star Spangled Banner” too. Now that’s being a good neighbor.
Would a US crowd so enthusiastically croon “O Canada”?
Let me see: What epic event would justify an elected leader, public figure and inherent role model intentionally doing his best to undermine beleaguered efforts by parents, teachers, employers, Federal regulators and ethics blog authors to protect the vital cultural values of civility and respect from the onslaught of the boorish, inconsiderate and inarticulate who would make obscenity part of everyday discourse?
Occasionally, public figures like Joe Biden (but he has…well, you know…issues) have accidentally tossed f-bombs into unwilling ears canals, but never before has an elected official set out to do so. It is irresponsible, and demonstrates how America is increasingly electing children to high office. If the Mayor of L.A. thinks that a hockey game victory provides a sufficient pass to issue officially sanctioned vulgarity to America, what chance do parents and teachers have when they try to instill manners—that is, routine respect for those we interact with— into their young charges? Answer: less of a chance than they had before Mayor Garcetti opened his smug, pandering, dirty mouth. Continue reading →
I am depressed today, for it is increasingly likely that I am wasting my life.
I began writing about ethics on-line after being stunned by the letters to the editor and calls to C-Span, not to mention the articles in the press, regarding President Clinton’s conduct in the Monica Lewinsky affair. The commentary was virtually ethics-free, and I realized that the vast majority of the American public had no idea how to apply ethical analysis to an event or problem. Their judgment regarding who was right and who was wrong appeared to be based entirely on rationalizations, biases, and non-ethical considerations.If they liked Clinton, he did nothing wrong. If they opposed his policies, he was scum. Objectivity and fair analysis only occasionally surfaced in the discussion at all, and the media coverage, if anything, was worse.
Now I’ve been doing this for almost a decade, and the verdict is clear: nothing has changed. In fact, the situation may have worsened. The sad proof at hand is the public’s reaction to The Tale of the One-in-a –Million-Hockey-Shot Scam, a feel-good story from last month that just turned sour. Continue reading →
Ethics Alarms 
I have rather mixed feelings on this one… because as baseball and the Red Sox are to you, Jack, hockey and the Bruins are to me.
Hockey was the only team sport I played growing up (and I was terrible at it). But I did love it. At the time, you basically stood no chance of advancing in the game if you weren’t Canadian, preferably Quebecois. That’s largely because only Canada had made the investment into developing young players, starting around age four and moving up with organized league play from there. (Apropos of nothing, the first black player to reach the NHL was Canadian Willie O’Ree, who played for the Bruins in 1958 and again in 1961, though most of his long career was spent in the minors).
Let me stipulate that as a matter of both law and ethics, I consider DeSantis to be on very firm ground here. But it’s also worth noting that hockey has made a long and concerted effort to bring more people into the fold. It arguably started when Europeans and Russians were recognized as terrific players (those nations had development programs) and started receiving NHL contracts. Although the players are still mostly white, black players are no longer a curiosity and have proven some of the best players in the past decade (most of them are Canadian by birth). Today, there are practicing Muslims and players of Asian heritage in the league. Any player who has the skills and the heart to play at the NHL level has a shot at a contract (side note: some European players have a little trouble adjusting to the NHL game, because although North American rinks are roughly the same length as European ones, they’re considerably narrower).
It goes beyond that. In addition to active youth hockey programs all over the northern hemisphere, there’s remarkable development of girls’ and womens’ hockey as well, with serious collegiate programs, world championships and Olympic competition. There are programs for paraplegics and amputees. All in all, hockey as a sport – and it’s been an international effort – has become far more diverse and inclusive, and that process started long before any of the current wokeness. One could argue that it’s merely because this is good for business. I have a friend with two girls in middle school, both of whom are extremely active (and reasonably talented) players. Both know there’s no chance they’ll ever play in the NHL, but that doesn’t stop them from playing their hearts out now (and screaming their heads off when Dad takes them up to see the Bruins, where he lays out big $$ for tickets, refreshments and fooferaw – and that doesn’t touch what he pays each year for equipment and ice time for his girls).