This was sent to me by Harvard late Sunday night.
Somehow, I doubt that the dangers of ultra-processed foods are really the top priorities in Cambridge right now….
Month: December 2023
Bias Makes “Saturday Night Live” Stupid And Unfunny
The outrageous performances of the three “context” obsessed college presidents teed up satirical possibilities like few other public events. The skit virtually wrote itself. The day of SNL’s latest episode, one of the three, UPenn’s Liz Magill, stepped down in disgrace. So handed this rich and easy topic for parody and high comedy, what did SNL’s writers choose to ridicule?
Why, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), whose sharp questioning and refusal to accept non-answers led all three officials to unmask leftist academia’s ethics rot, what Bishop Robert Barron described as their “Collapse of Moral Reasoning.” Instead of performing the clarifying function that effective and objective satire can provide (and that SNL has provided in the past, if you have a good memory), the show defaulted to circling the progressive wagons. The theme of it’s satire was “Republicans pounce!” as if there is nothing amiss when the leaders of three prestigious universities make legalistic arguments to justify allowing Jewish students to be targeted and threatened on their campuses.
Ethics And The 700 Million Dollar Baseball Player
In Mike Flanagan’s latest horror epic, the Poe mash-up in which “The Fall of the House of Usher” is repurposed into a nightmare scenario for the Sackler family of Oxycontin infamy, the avenging demon named Verna, who sometimes appears as a raven, lectures a soon-to-be victim on the evils of greed:
So much money. One of my favorite things about human beings. Starvation, poverty, disease, you could fix all that, just with money. And you don’t. I mean, if you took just a little bit of time off the vanity voyages, pleasure cruising, billionaire space race, hell, you stopped making movies and TV for one year and you spent that money on what you really need, you could solve it all. With some to spare.
Yes, Verna is a communist and deluded, but it was impossible to read about the $700 million ten-year contract the Los Angeles Dodgers just gave baseball free agent Shohei Ohtani without that speech creeping into my thoughts. $700 million dollars?
UPenn’s President And Board Chair Resigns After Congress Debacle…Now What?
There were two major stories with ethics implications that arrived last evening after I had closed down Ethics Alarms for the night. Both involved institutions that involve lifetime connections for me. I’d prefer to write about the astounding $700,000,000 contract baseball’s biggest star Shohei Otahni signed—and will—but first I must again deal with another Harvard issue.
Late yesterday,the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, resigned, and the school’s chairman of the board followed with his own resignation a couple of hours later. Magill was one of three elite college presidents who embarrassed themselves and their employers with offensive, legalistic answers to pointed questions from Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) regarding their school’s tolerance of anti-Semitism on their campus in the wake of the October Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, and their weak responses to demonstrations on their campuses that could fairly be called threatening to Jewish students.
UPenn’s situation became critical when alumnus Ross Stevens announced that he was withdrawing a gift worth around $100 million. That would be a significant loss even for Harvard, whose endowment exceeds the treasuries of many nations. The resignation immediately focused attention on Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president of just a couple of months, whose responses to Stefanik’s withering cross-examination in the Congressional hearing were extremely similar to Magill’s. The resignation of all three women was called for in an unusual letter signed by 72 members of Congress, many of them Democrats.
MIT President Sally A. Kornbluth, the third inept president, had performed slightly better than her two counterparts at the Ivy League schools, though not by much. MIT leadership quickly gave her a public vote of confidence, reflecting, I think, the school’s calculation that its non-humanities and non-social sciences focus as well as its traditional position as only the second most famous university in Cambridge, Mass. would allow the controversy there to calm down sufficiently so it could get back to what the institution really cares about: technology, ones and zeros, and engineering. It is a cynical response, but a safe one.
Ethics Notes On The Final GOP Imaginary Presidential Candidates Debate
The Republican National Committee announced yesterday that it would be holding no more primary debates. It’s about time. The debates presented nothing, literally nothing, more than dart boards for Democrats and progressive pundits to aim at. Few watched the things other than desperate NeverTrumpers. If Donald Trump had participated, the four events might have been consequential. It would have been ethical and responsible of Trump to stand on the same stage as his competition and allow them to challenge him, but it also would have been stupid. He could only lose by taking that chance.
To celebrate the demise of this completely pointless exercise, Ethics Alarms offers a few observations on the final installment.
1. It began with a lie. Moderator Megyn Kelly: “On stage tonight, four candidates all vying to become their party’s nominee and given the state of affairs in our political system right now, one of you might very well do it.”
2. Ronald Reagan memorably said that it was a “commandment” that Republicans “shalt not” speak ill of any fellow Republican. RR was astute: these kind of scorpions-in-a-bottle displays only weaken the party and give aid and comfort to Democrats. Reagan’s “11th Commandment” seems especially relevant because a full half of the debaters last week were only there to troll the other Republicans on stage and, in bitter Chris Christie’s case, Donald Trump too. Neither the disgraced former New Jersey governor nor class clown Vivek Ramaswamy have a slice of an iota of a scintilla of a micro-chance of getting the Republican nomination, so they are wasting time, diverting attention, and indulging their egos to the detriment of everyone else.
3.Nikki Haley, sadly, is a weasel. Ramaswamy accurately characterized her bone-headed suggestion that anonymous statements and aliases should be forbidden on social media, and Haley denied it, then changed the subject. She could have simply said that she was wrong. That would have been refreshing. She can’t be trusted.
When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: An NFL Coach’s Pep Talk Invokes 9-11 Terrorist Teamwork For Inspiration
Apparently all of the pro-terrorism vibes coming from the American Left these days prompted someone to finally reveal that Sean McDermott, head coach of the NFL’s Buffalo Bills, told his players at the 2019 training camp to emulate the teamwork of the plane hijackers who brought down the Twin Towers and bombed the Pentagon. After all, he explained, they “were all able to get on the same page to orchestrate attacks to perfection.” The coach led his player through the exercise of considering that daunting obstacles the attackers faced. “What tactics do you think they used to come together?” he asked.
I wonder why he didn’t use the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor instead. The Japanese really did a terrific job in achieving their mission. Or the way Santa Ana carried out the pre-dawn massacre of the men in the Alamo: that was quite a well-executed plan too. Come to think of it, I’d save that one until he has a coaching job in Dallas or Houston…
Ethics Quotes Of The Month: Andrew Sullivan, Victor Davis Hanson, And Me
Before I get to the known and celebrated intellectual pundits, let me begin with what I wrote about Harvard in January of 2021. It is my blog, after all, and people kept telling me I had “drunk the Kool-Aid” and slavishly followed the Fox News narratives. In fact, I have correctly documented the abandonment of ethics by journalists and educators as they chose to become full-time propagandists and allies for the extreme progressive mission to dismantle American values and liberties. I had warned about how far Harvard was straying from its original mission for years before this, but the passage has a nice ring to it this morning:
“Harvard, beginning approximately during the regime of the previous president, Drew Faust, has been infested with serious ethics rot, and it continues to progress. I have documented some, but far from all, of the most disturbing aspects of this process, like the University’s practice of discriminating against Asian-American applicants (as well as whites, of course), which they are now defending in court. What is supposed to be the role model for the entire higher education system in the United States continues to give credence and respectability to unethical practices and values, spreading its own affliction to other institutions far and wide. Worst of all, it is indoctrinating its students to be anti-American, anti-individual rights, anti-Western civilization and culture allies of the radical Left, while attempting to demonize opposing views on campus and off.”
I’ll admit that I didn’t foresee the passive acceptance of anti-Jewish, genocidal hate on Harvard’s campus (Jews are the oppressors now, see, and non-traditionally cast as theNorth America-stealing whites, with Palestinians and Hamas playing the roles of Native Americans), but those who have followed the Harvard saga on Ethics Alarms were better prepared for this revelation than most. I announced in 2021 that I was boycotting my big class reunion in 2022 and wrote why in Harvard’s published compendium of class member updates. Mine was the only such protest: I suppose my reward is that I don’t have to wear a paper bag over my head now.
Andrew Sullivan, the natural conservative who tries so hard to be acceptable to the Left because that’s where all of his LGTBQ friends reside, delivered his ethics quotes in a substack essay, “The Day The Empress’ Clothes Fell Off.” He begins,
Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck Update, Woke Universities’ Hypocrisy Exposed: Addendum
As I assumed it would, the uproar over the three college presidents’ embarrassing testimony regarding anti-Semitism has continued, and presumably will continue for quite a while. I want to highlight a few developments that I came upon after writing the earlier post.
- Harvard president Claudine Gay issued a mewling apology to her campus.“I am sorry,” Gay said in an interview with The Crimson.“Words matter. When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret.” Yes, she really talks like this.
“I got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures,” Gay went on to say in the interview. “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged. Substantively, I failed to convey what is my truth.”
I’ve been writing a few posts lately examining my biases. One bias I don’t intend to overcome is the strong wave of nausea I experience when anyone talks about their “truth.” The rhetoric smacks of ethics relativism, and, in the immortal words of the iconic New Yorker cartoon, “I say it’s spinach, and I say to hell with it.” Continue reading
Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck Update: Woke Universities’ Hypocrisy Exposed
The backlash and debate over the ridiculously inept responses by the presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania regarding anti-Semitic demonstrations on their campus touches on too many ethics issues for me to organize coherently right now, especially since I have been inundated by emails and phone calls from many people with diverse and perceptive thoughts about the matter. I’m going to devote this post to individual items related to the college leaders’ disgrace.
1. A core ethics conflict is the question of when campus demonstrations and speech cross a line into speech that undermines the educational mission of a school. A college is not required by the Constitution to permit all speech; the Supreme Court has been clear that when speech begins to interfere with the educational functions of a school, it can be disciplined and curtailed. The problem all three school presidents encountered is that their universities’ past record of restricting (or allowing to be restricted) conservative speech and speakers on campus made their stand appear to be that anti-Semitic speech on campus was tolerable even when it creates a hostile living and studying environment for Jewish students. As the prosecutorial Congresswoman pointed out while grilling the three women, racist sloganeering on campus would be swiftly shut down as harassment on their campuses. How can the double standard be justified? Answer: it can’t be.
Friday Open Ethics Forum!
I would think that the forum should be roiling today. It will also give me some time to finish a post about the aftermath of the humiliating performance by the three college presidents before Congress this week..
Ethics Alarms 