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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (129749)	12/15/2000 3:15:06 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1571061

This seems to be a tough one. A wrong is a wrong no matter whether its been caught or not. This statement is true but not directly logically related to the football situation we were describing. Stepping out of bounds at the one was the thing "caught or not", and it is not a wrong in the moral sense of the word. What you are arguing as wrong is one step removed from that. Not revealing the knowledge that someone stepped out at the one. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the situation I described was one where you suspected that your running back had stepped out at the one, not when you where certain. In a practical sense you couldn't challenge the call (and would risk losing your job if you could and did), because in the last two minutes there are no challenges from the sidelines. Also because of the fact that it might be argued that it is different then an election or other "real world" issue. DBs technically commit pass interference on almost every pass play but they don't do in flagrantly and they do it in such a way that it will not be called (some WRs like Michael Irvin returned the favor pushing around small DBs). Interior line-man hold on almost every play but they don't grab on the outside and they usually don't get caught. Are they cheating? To a certain extent in sports (and perhaps in other areas of life), there are unwritten rules. The rule says you can not grab the defensive tackle's jersey, but the unwritten rule says you can as long as you grab towards the middle instead of the outside and you don't hold on too long. Bribing officials, poisoning the other teams Gatorade, having some one hit your opponent at a figure skating competition in the knee; these types of things violate the rules and the "unwritten rules", and rightfully are considered cheating (and can even result in prosecution), but some other things are murkier. That having been said if I was sure that I stepped out at the one in a pick up game I would call it even if the other team didn't see it, but that is probably because in a pick up game their are no refs. Arguably in a real game one of the unwritten rules is that you technical rule violations on the field if you can recognizing that the refs will try to catch you. The other team will be doing the same and there will probably be as many bad calls against you as for you on the average. In this election there where "bad calls" for Bush (like the poorly designed voting system in some counties that favored Gore), as well as "bad calls" for Gore (like the networks calling the election inaccurately for Gore before FL voting had closed, despite the fact that they said they would not announce a winner in a state before voting was closed for that state). If I was in an election like this and there was one clear cut and rectifiable call that went in my favor while I knew it should have gone to the other side, and it would have been enough to make the other guy win rather then me, and there were no other complicating factors, or things that I saw as bad calls against me then I would concede that I lost. However neither candidate faced such a situation here. The whole thing was a mess, and there is no one decisive an obviously bad "call", that threw the election from any obvious "real winner" to someone else. Tim