Around the World

The Kiss

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

This topic was unwittingly recommended by my younger sister, a reliably liberal Democrat who, to my knowledge, has never read Ethics Alarms once in its 23 years of existence. (Don’t you think that’s strange? I think that’s strange, but I refuse to let it bother me. Much….). She had to tell me about the eruption of an international women’s rights, #MeToo, “sexual assault” cancel culture controversy in the wake of Spain’s first Women’s World Cup championship because I pay as little attention to soccer, international or otherwise, as humanly possible.

Shortly after the championship game’s final whistle, Luis Rubiales, the head of Spain’s Soccer Federation, joined the jubilant on-field celebration, and at the award ceremony, Rubiales took midfielder Jennifer Hermoso’s head in both his hands and…kissed her on the lips!!!!

Searching for relevance and headlines now that her own soccer career is mercifully over, woke activist Megan Rapinoe told The Athletic that the kiss reflected “the deep level of misogyny and sexism in the federation. It made me think of how much we are required to endure.” (I don’t know about the “we” part in Rapinoe’s case: I think an over-excited soccer official would be more likely to spontaneously kiss a scorpion.) Everybody piled on. Spanish soccer coach Jorge Vilda ripped Rubiales, saying in part “I regret deeply that the victory of Spanish women’s football has been harmed by the inappropriate behavior that our, until now, top leader, Luis Rubiales, has carried out.” Eleven members of the Spanish women’s team coaching staff tendered their resignations over the weekend, expressing “their firm and categorical condemnation of Luis Rubiales’ behavior towards Jenni Hermoso.” 81 Spanish players, including all 23 World champions, vowed to go on strike and refuse to play until Rubiales is removed from his position. FIFA, the international soccer organization, suspended Rubiales from all football-related activity for 90 days pending an investigation—yeah, maybe he secretly planned the kiss weeks in advance, for example). The Spanish government publicly supported the decision.

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: A French Town’s Solution To Excessive Speeding In An Intersection

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The town is Bauné, near Angers, home to 1,700 people. But because of its location at the crossroads between two departmental roads, roughly 2,300 cars pass through Bauné and reach speeds of over 60 mph even though the town’s signs at the intersection demand far lower velocity. So in order to get drivers to slow down, some genius had the brainstorm of using the intentionally confounding road markings above, and local authorities agreed to adopt the strategy.

Confused drivers are slowing down, all right. Other effective solutions would have been having blinding strobe lights flashing at drivers or insult-spewing mimes throwing water balloons at windshields.

Here’s an aerial view of the mess:

The International Chess Federation Doesn’t Understand Its Own Game, Biology, And Who Knows What Else…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Funny, I thought chess players were supposed to be intelligent—observant, capable of long-term planning, adept at strategy, those kinds of things.

That’s one more stereotype to discard. The people who run international chess competitions have just outed themselves as morons. The International Chess Federation, or FIDE just banned transgender women from competing in men’s chess tournaments and stripped trans men of women’s chess titles they won. The body revealed its guidelines for transgender competitors this week, thus highlighting its long-running idiocy.

Okay, fine: defining the gender of chess players by their chromosomes would be a solution to a problem if there were a problem, but there isn’t. There is no reason to segregate female and male chess players except ancient prejudice and ignorance—well that, and if it is decided that the fewer little chess players conceived, the better.

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Death On K2 And The Duty To Rescue

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The AP story and ensuing controversy about Norwegian climber Kristin Harila and her decision, along with many other mountaineers, to leave a climbing companion dying in the snow on K2 immediately rang a metaphorical bell: Haven’t we discussed this issue before on Ethics Alarms? Indeed we have.

Back in 2011, I reposted a 2006 essay from the old (but still useful) EA predecessor The Ethics Scoreboard about the death of 34-year-old David Sharp on Mount Everest, after over 40 other climbers walked past him on their trek to the famous peak. It concluded,

The significance of the David Sharp tragedy is not that the mountaineers did the wrong thing. Of course they did the wrong thing. Nor is it that they are callous or unethical people, for they are probably no more so than you or I. The importance of the story is that it vividly shows how difficult it can be to make even obvious ethical choices when powerful non-ethical considerations are in our sights. Every one of us has a goal or a dream or a desire that could make us walk by a dying man. It is our responsibility to recognize what those goals, dreams and desires are, and to force ourselves not to forget about right and wrong as we approach them.

Harila was on K2 to set a record, and she did: along with her Sherpa guide, Tenjin, they became the world’s fastest climbers by getting to the top of the world’s second highest peak, scaling the world’s 14 highest mountains in 92 days. But of course that mission had nothing to do with her decision to leave Mohammad Hassan, a Pakistani porter and father of three, to die after he slipped and fell off the narrow path to the summit. The Norwegian climber told The Associated Press on Sunday that “in the snowy condition we had up there that day, it wouldn’t be possible to carry him down.”

It was impossible! All righty then, case closed!

Drone footage showed dozens of climbers pushing past Hassan to reach the mountain peak, the path to which was unusually crowded that day (July 27), because it was the last day of the season for a possible ascent. The nerve of that guy losing it all up by falling!

Austrian climber Wilhelm Steindl, who shot the drone footage after he had abandoned the climb because of bad weather, told the AP that more could have been done to save Hassan. “Everyone would have had to turn back to bring the injured person back down to the valley. I don’t want to kind of directly blame anybody, I’m just saying there was no rescue operation initiated and that’s really very, very tragic because that’s actually the most normal thing one would do in a situation like that.”

Well, to be fair, it isn’t. What might have changed the way the climbers reacted would have been a strong leader with the personal magnetism and persuasive skills to reorient the climbers from pursuing powerful non-ethical considerations to embracing an ethical one. No doubt about it, trying to get the injured man down the mountain involved sacrifice and risk, and might not even succeed. There is, however, an ethical duty to try. A life was at stake.

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Ethics Quiz: Paying Ransom For Hostages

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“Ransom” is one of several Mel Gibson movies that constitutes a guilty pleasure. A remake of an old Glenn Ford film (also pretty good), “Ransom” is about a multi-millionaire whose young son is abducted, and after initially setting out to pay the ransom, decided to turn the tables on the kidnappers and offer the same amount as a bounty on them. I thought about “Ransom” when I read this yesterday:

The United States and Iran have reached an agreement to win the freedom of five imprisoned Americans in exchange for several jailed Iranians and eventual access to about $6 billion in Iranian oil revenue…

As a first step in the agreement, which comes after more than two years of quiet negotiations, Iran has released into house arrest five Iranian American dual citizens, according to officials at the State Department and the National Security Council…when the Americans are allowed to return to the United States, the Biden administration will release a handful of Iranian nationals serving prison sentences for violating sanctions on Iran. The United States will also transfer nearly $6 billion of Iran’s assets in South Korea, putting the funds into an account in the central bank of Qatar…the account will be controlled by the government of Qatar and regulated so Iran can gain access to the money only to pay vendors for humanitarian purchases such as medicine and food.

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Porsche’s Woke “Mistake”

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

How did censorship, airbrushing history and “it isn’t what it is” become hallmarks of progressivism? A discussion for another time…

For the nonce, consider Porsche, which airbrushed away the famous Portuguese statue of Jesus Christ that overlooks the capital of Lisbon in a promotional video celebrating 60 years of its iconic 911 model. For some reason, many people had a problem with that.

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: “The State of Certainty And Reliability of Climate Change Forecasts And Analysis”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Here is yet another Comment of the Day regarding climate science, junk science, propaganda…you know: “Climate change.” It is also yet another excellent entry by Sarah B. Here is her Comment of the Day on the post, “From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The State of Certainty And Reliability of Climate Change Forecasts And Analysis” but it applies equally well to this one (from today), this one, and this one too:

Many people who question anthropogenic global climate change have good reason to do so. Here are a few of the facts that make believing the anthropogenicity of climate change difficult for me.

This “hottest days ever” claim has been shown to be mostly false. For example, the Rome data point was from a model, not actual data. Indeed, while the temperature measured was almost two degrees Celsius below what the high was claimed to be, that high was under previous highs from the last few decades recorded in Rome. The actual temperature of the day in question was 40C, measured at the Urbe airport, not 41.8. Rome’s highest temperature ever recorded is not 40.8C as claimed, but instead 42C. This high temperature was recorded at the Ponte di Nona bus station in 2005.

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Rep. Omar’s Dumb Tweet (Continued…)

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I was so tempted to headline this post with the res ipsa loquitur tag, but didn’t at the last minute. The reason: I was convinced that as obvious as the scientific and logical nonsense her tweet represented should be, a lot of usually intelligent people wouldn’t allow themselves to see it, because, as Ethics Alarms notes repeatedly, “bias makes you stupid.” The post’s comments turned out to be a marvelous example of that.

One persistent defender of Omar insisted that it was crucial that I had checked the alleged authority for her gaffe before criticizing her. It happens that I did, but I didn’t need to. Nobody did: that’s the whole point. If the woman had the requisite number of brain cells to rub together to start a bonfire, she would have known what emerged from her keyboard when she typed that was hilariously silly with the application of basic critical thinking skills.

Recently, Major League Baseball teams broke the record for the most runs scored in all games on a single day. It was remarkable, because the record was more than a century old: the day occurred in the 19th century. All of the articles about this event specified the day. If, as Omar’s ignorant tweet claimed, the Earth had broken its previous record for “hottest day in 120,000 years,” there would be a day from 120,000 years ago that held the broken record. No source mentioned such a day, however, because there are no daily records of the Earth’s weather—daily temperature is weather, not climate—from 120,000 years ago or even a thousand years ago (though we know Pompeii got pretty damn hot when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.) Estimates of global climate in the periods before records were kept depend on “proxy data.” Here is a chart explaining what proxy data can tell scientist about distant climates:

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Comment Of The Day: “From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The State of Certainty And Reliability of Climate Change Forecasts And Analysis”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Ah, how I love it when readers send in superb and informative Comments of the Day when I am strapped for time and have ProEthics deadlines to meet! This post in particular has generated several COTD-worthy responses. I may re-post them all.

But first, here’s Michael R.’s Comment of the Day on “From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The State of Certainty And Reliability of Climate Change Forecasts And Analysis”:

***

One of my big problems with the whole ‘climate change’ agenda is that the people who are pushing it don’t believe it, either. If they believed it, they would push agendas that would further the goal of counteracting global warming, but they don’t. They push agendas that are outrageously expensive, damaging to the economy and the well-being of people, and don’t do much, if anything, about the warming of the planet.

(1) Electric vehicles. This is an easy one. The demand to eliminate cars and trucks and replace them with electric vehicles is a high-profile and telling example. First of all, electric vehicles are not capable of replacing many of our vehicles, such as semis. Secondly, we probably lack the resources to replace even most of our cars (alone) with electric vehicles, especially since we oddly won’t allow the mining required to obtain the materials. Thirdly, of electric grid is completely incapable of powering this massive addition to the electric load, especially since we are making it more unreliable with renewables. Most importantly, however, THEY DON’T REDUCE CO2 emissions significantly or at all. Their increased energy involved in production and the battery replacement cycle makes them worse or marginally better than today’s gasoline powered cars (depending on your assumptions). For my use, my gasoline powered cars are better for the environment.

(2) Meat. There is a big push to eliminate meat from our diets for ‘global warming’. However, anyone with half a brain realizes that the ‘fake meat’ they are creating takes vastly more energy to produce than a cow does. Lets take a large vat of rhizobium and extract a few hundred milligrams of leg-hemoglobin so we can make our soybean patty taste like meat? Sure, that’s so much more efficient than a cow or chicken. Of course, a lot of our beef is grown on western grazing lands where you are ONLY allowed to graze cattle. Removing the cows from that land, without opening it up to other agriculture (as the Biden administration has done) only reduces the amount of food produced, increasing the world starvation we are facing.

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The State of Certainty And Reliability of Climate Change Forecasts And Analysis

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Since some EA commenters have chosen to send their credibility to die on the metaphorical hill of Rep. Omar’s ridiculous climate change tweet of last week, I felt this paired set of reports made an important point. Amazingly, so far at least, these irreconcilable contradictions—and this is far from the only one in the climate change “settled science” debate—- don’t seem to shake the faith of climate change fanatics even a little bit.

Which itself is useful information….