Month: July 2023

“Nah, Colleges Don’t Indoctrinate Students! It’s A Conspiracy Theory!” Brown Replies, “Hold My Beer!”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The Washington Examiner reports that 40% of Brown students now identify as LGTBQ+. The Brown Daily Herald’s 2023 Spring survey revealed that 38% of students, more than five times the national rate, no longer consider themselves “cis.” The gay and lesbian population has increased by 26% and the percentage of students identifying as bisexual has increased by…wait for it!… 232%. Just eleven years ago, in 2010, only 4% of Brown University students said they were not conventionally heterosexual. Now it’s 38%.

Commenting on this phenomenon at the Victory Girls blog, Lisa Carr writes in part,

The new “cool kids” now are changing their names every other day, along with changing their identities to anything contrary to their biological sex. Joe becomes Joelene who is dating Mary who wants to be known as “Mike”. Mary is nominated for Homecoming King while Joe is the Homecoming Queen; both in their gender-fluid and ambiguous outfits. And yes, they are probably still wearing those filthy, ugly masks because society told them to stay scared. (But alas, don’t be scared to cut off your genitalia.) This is the new cult. This is the trend we are seeing in colleges but I would argue that this seed is being planted as early as elementary school….This is no longer about loving and accepting all. This is about subtle conversion by suggestion.

Apparently a Brown professor, Dr. Lisa Littman, argued that campus culture and peer groups were pressuring students into such epiphanies regarding their true sexual identities, and got herself fired for it. Continue reading →

New York’s Governor Weighs In To Support “Pre-Crime”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“Pre-crime,” nicely eviscerated in the Spielberg-Tom Cruise film “Minority Report,” is now a popular concept among anti-Second Amendment activists. New York Governor Kathy Hochul (or, more likely, a ghost-writer with her approval) has issued an op-ed in the New York Times with the emotion-based headline, “The Supreme Court Case That Has Me Worried, for Survivors and for My State.” Anyone capable of reading it with their critical thinking skills activated should be able to recognize Hochul’s arguments as the deceptive and manipulative tactics they are.

Here we go…

Hochul: “…I’m so concerned about the outcome of an upcoming Supreme Court case, United States v. Rahimi, which next year will decide whether to uphold a gun safety law that protects survivors of domestic violence.”

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Small Victories: Relentless Ridicule Beats Back Ludicrous Wokeness At Brandeis

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

There is hope!

Brandeis University in Massachusetts published one of those “Oppressive Language” lists, telling students that phrases and words like “ladies and gentlemen,” “policeman,” “picnic,” “people of color,” “rule of thumb” (don’t ask me!) were offensive to somebody, and should be avoided. Also “Take a stab at it,” “trigger warning,” and “beating a dead horse” (Too violent!), and “African-American,” “long time no see,” “lending a deaf ear,” and “handicapped space”.”” (Identity based!) Other examples include “Homeless person, “powwow,” “picnic,” “freshman,”and “mentally ill.”Once the list was publicized, the mockery sent Brandeis’s way was relentless, as well as deserved, even though the taboo list eventually had a disclaimer that the web page “is not a university expectation, requirement or reflection of policy.”

That didn’t help. Making the university look especially silly as well as hypocritical was Campus Reform’s report in June 2021 that Brandeis was still using many of the phrases and terms on the BadSpeak list. “Freshman” and “picnic,” for example, were still turning up in articles, blogs, and department materials. The Brandeis University Teacher Education Program Handbook also used the term “rule of thumb!”

Campus Reform reported last week that Brandeis quietly took down the list.

In Which Your Host Loses His Oldest CLE Organization Client For Telling The Truth

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

I and my ethics training company just got cancelled by the Continuing Legal Education organization that was my very first client when we started ProEthics over 20 years ago. Our seminars have always received top evaluations from lawyer attendees; nos small achievement in the legal ethics field. They also have made our long-time partners a lot of money. We had never needed to re-negotiate our arrangement, and my state tour with a new legal ethics program was a yearly occurrence every fall. This year, however, we had heard nothing about future dates or requests for possible program ideas (I have introduced most of my musical legal ethics seminars with Mike Messer with this group), and it was getting a little late. Grace sent an inquiry to the long-time contact who has handled our programs, and got back a stunning, “We have decided not to use you this year” letter. One shocking realization was that it was clear from the letter that the decision had been made long ago. After two decades, the organization did not have the courtesy to let us know about their decision, or to discuss their concerns with me before making it.

Even more shocking was the reason given for our dismissal. Last year, as I faced very small in-person groups with most of the attendees watching via Zoom, I made a point of thanking and congratulating those who made the effort to come in person, and urging those who had not to remember that remote training is not as effective as in-person training, and that ethics in particular was a topic in which interaction and engagement were crucial, features that are difficult to impossible using Zoom. This, we were told in the letter, did “not respect those who work diligently within our own Distance Education Department to provide remote options for attorneys.”

I did not denigrate the staff at all; I didn’t even know the organization had a Distance Education Department. What my comments did do, and appropriately so, was to alert lawyers to something they need to know. CLE isn’t just for getting mandatory credits. It is supposed to make lawyers better. Most data indicates that remote training with Zoom or similar methods don’t do the job: they are convenient, and lawyers like them because they can rack up billable hours and write emails while turning off their video and pretending to pay attention. But just as with children whose learning crashed with the substitution of distance learning for live instruction, lawyers are cheating themselves, their clients and the profession by undergoing CLE Lite when they should be challenged in a classroom.

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The Des Moines Climate Change Propagandist Weatherman Is Quitting. He Should Have Been Fired.

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Poor KCCI-TV meteorologist Chris Gloninger is quitting because viewer criticism of his slots hyping climate change propaganda while he was supposed to be giving local weather reports became too unbearable. Well good, except that he should have been fired first.

“I started just connecting the dots between extreme weather and climate change, and then the volume of pushback started to increase quite dramatically,” he said in his interview with The Associated Press.

Except that’s not his job. He is a meteorologist, not a climate scientist, and isn’t qualified to “connect” the dots. Weather isn’t climate, and while climate change activists find ways to connect virtually any kind of weather to the climate change doom watch, that is not what people tune into weather reports to hear. For me, it’s in the same category as NFL players using games to protest social policy.

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Ethics Dunces, Sociology Dunces, Law Enforcement Dunces…Whatever: The California Reparations Task Force

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Try a mind experiment: if California’s ridiculous and racist Reparations Task Force wanted to exacerbate racial tensions as much as humanly possible while also making African-Americans seem as toxic to society as a KKK Grand Dragon could imagine in a fever dream, what would it be doing differently that it is doing right now? We know that the group is already recommending that millions of dollars in taxpayer reparations for slavery be handed out to the state’s blacks, even though slavery never existed in the Golden State. But wait, there’s more!

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I’m Baaaaack! (Here’s What Happened…)

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

For now, this will have to be just a quick note and an apology. Shortly before noon on Friday, I was writing a course summary for a monthly professionalism program I’ll be doing for lawyers next year when, literally out of a clear blue sky, lightening struck so near to our home in Alexandria that the house shook. Scared the hell out of me.

The crash was accompanied by a loud “snap” sound, and my computer screen went black. The internet modem also went dead: it was fried, and had to be replaced. I couldn’t start my PC (my laptop died a while ago, and I’ve been saving up to replace that). Comcast arrived to replace the modem Saturday afternoon, but the computer took longer: a part was damaged by the strike, and my son just installed the replacement. Fortunately, I didn’t lose any data.

This is the first time I’ve been online since Friday, and I obviously have a lot of catching up to do. I’m just thrilled I can get even a non-substantive post up today, so only one day was missed entirely.

Finally:

  • Many thanks to commenter E2. She knows my sister, and my sister passed along my disaster to her while relaying my request that she let everyone know that I wasn’t dead.
  • I’m so sorry.
  • Live every day to its fullest, because if a bolt of lightning can come out of a clear blue sky and fry my computer…well, you know the rest.
  • Thanks to everyone who added quality content here while I was frozen out. (Did any banned commenters take advantage of the sheriff being out of town? I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

Falsely Describing Bad Research To Advocate Irresponsible Policies Is No Way To Serve On The Supreme Court, Justice Jackson…[Corrected And Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

UPDATE: A critical Ethics Alarms reader informed me that in his view the text of this post was too similar to that of its main source, The Daily Signal, in an article by Jay Greene. Although I linked to the piece and also credited Greene with a quote, upon reviewing the post I agree that it included too many substantially similar sentences and phrasings. I apologize to the Daily Signal, Jay, and Ethics Alarms readers. I was using several articles in preparing the piece (including one from another source that was also extremely close to the Signal article), and for whatever reason, did not notice that I had leaned so heavily on Green’s phrasing. It has happened before over the past 13 years, though not often, and never with the intention to deceive. Thus I have revised the post; in the future, if anyone feels that an Ethics Alarms article does not properly credit sources or seems insufficiently original, the favored response is to alert me, rather than to accuse me in obnoxious terms of “plagiarism.”

Fans of affirmative action reacted to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s depressing defense of racial discrimination by praising her remarkably hypocritical dissent in the recent 6-3 decision by the Supreme Court declaring Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s admission policies unconstitutional. Those who believe that Justices should base their analyses on law rather than group loyalties were appropriately critical. Both, however missed some really ugly trees for the metaphorical forest, as Jackson injected false statistics into her dissent. They were, of course—we’re used to this phenomenon—uncritically accepted and used in subsequent media propaganda condemning the decision.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in part,

“Beyond campus, the diversity that UNC pursues for the betterment of its students and society is not a trendy slogan. It saves lives. For marginalized communities in North Carolina, it is critically important that UNC and other area institutions produce highly educated professionals of color. Research shows that Black physicians are more likely to accurately assess Black patients’ pain tolerance and treat them accordingly (including, for example, prescribing them appropriate amounts of pain medication). For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.”

Wow! Racial discrimination saves lives! The problem, or rather problems, are that as Jay Greene of the Daily Signal points out, 1) the claim that survival rates for black newborns double when they have black physicians attending is based on a misleading analysis 2) Even if the results of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study were as Justice Jackson claimed, they are unbelievable and 3) even if Jackson had described the results of the study accurately, and even if those results were credible, they still wouldn’t justify the use of racial preferences in medical school admissions.

Continue reading →

Fourth Of July Week Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

“We’re Number One! We’re Number One!”

Well, to be completely accurate, we’re all “[1]” right now for some reason. The whole blog, back to the beginning, now shows that as the screen name of every commenter, and my name is either missing entirely as author or, in some cases, “[1]” as well. I was first alerted around 5 am by Diego Garcia, and quickly contacted WordPress via an email to their “Happiness Engineers” (yes, they really call themselves that. I got a quick response from WP’s AI creature, who told me that I obviously had my settings wrong and gave me a dizzying sequence of things to click on buried several lawyers deep in the system.

“Oh no you don’t!” I replied. Okay, what I actually wrote back was “Bullshit. I haven’t changed any settings, and you’re not going to lay this off on me. You caused the problem, the problem is yours, and you need to fix it. I am not a software engineer, and I don’t work for WordPress or robots. This is WordPress’s responsibility, and I expect WordPress to do it.”

Then I went back to bed. I was welcomed, upon awakening, to this from the modestly named “Deity,” my Happiness Engineer, who swears he is a Real Boy:

“I appreciate your patience and apologize for the inconvenience you’ve been experiencing. Based on your description, it indeed seems like this issue is related to a known bug that’s currently affecting WordPress blogs.
I just wanted to reassure you that our top-notch technical team is actively working on resolving this issue as swiftly as possible. However, I can understand the importance of having this issue mitigated in the interim period.
In the meantime, as a workaround, you can use the following CSS code to overcome the problem: /* Make comment authors display properly*/.comment-meta .comment-author .fn { text-indent:0; }.comment-meta .comment-author .fn:after { display:none; }“

“Please be advised that this is a temporary solution until we implement a more permanent fix. Again, thank you very much for your understanding on the matter and I’m extremely grateful for your patience. We value your trust in WordPress and promise to keep you informed with updates as they happen.”

So the AI was spitting out bullshit, as usual, just as I surmised! Good to know.

Let’s not allow this to spoil the open forum. Please begin your entries today with your Ethics Alarms name.

But you’re all #[1] to me!



Comment Of The Day: “Flagrant Virtue-Signaling Of The Century: Ben & Jerry’s”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

There are more than the usual reasons to publish JutGory’s overview of the absurdity riddling Ben & Jerry’s fatuous July 4th Tweet exhorting the U.S. to “return” “stolen indigenous land” to the Native American tribes. The most unusual one is that WordPress has temporarily (I hope!) lost its damn mind, and has replaced all commenter names on the recent posts with the Borg-like “[1].” As a result, readers are unable to tell who wrote Jut’s comment, for which we should all be grateful.

The main one is that the oft-heard demand that the United States should return the nation to “the Indians” is historically, legally, ethically and realistically batty and ignorant, and drives me nuts every time I hear or read it. Jut concisely explains why it’s nuts historically and legally. He does not go into the aspect of the matter than is usually ignored by shallow thinkers like whoever wrote the Ben & Jerry tweet, which is that if the U.S. hadn’t been in possession of its current mainland North American territory in the 1940s, Nazi Germany would have overrun it and probably the world, and reduced the happy, innocent hunter-gatherers there to either slaves or ashes. Tragic as the current status of the tribes is today, it is a lot better than that. Similarly Hawaii, where there is no question that the residents were robbed of their islands, would have been conquered by the Japanese. If Secretary Seward had not bought Alaska from the Russians, all of us, including the Native Americans, might have been blasted into the Stone Age (where, admittedly, the tribes would have been more confortable than the Europeans) by the Soviets.

I am not exactly saying that Native Americans should be grateful they were over-run, but rather that, as JutGory correctly points out, you can’t turn back the clock.

Here is [1]’s…sorry, JutGory’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Flagrant Virtue-Signaling Of The Century: Ben & Jerry’s”:

***

Just another example of Twitter’s inability to facilitate an exploration of subtle thoughts.

Does the US exist on “stolen land”?

Sort of.

Apparently, Manhattan was purchased from indigenous people, just not the ones who “owned” the land. That would make the US a good faith purchaser for value.

But, really, that was a fraud perpetrated on the Dutch, or maybe the English. But, we got it from England fair and square in the Treaty of Paris. All of the original states were stolen from England.

We bought the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon. That was another big portion of the US.

And, the Mexican-American War, contrived as it may have been, was settled legally.

Then, there was Texas.

A huge portion of the US was obtained legally from other thieves.

Continue reading →