“bias makes you stupid”

Wait, How Can Rebeca F. Rothstein Still Be Employed As A Middle School Teacher? Why Are Parents Allowing Her To Warp Their Children? I Don’t Understand This At All…[Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

This story is incomprehensible.

Rebeca F. Rothstein apparently still works at North Bethesda Middle School in the Montgomery County School District despite posting on social media that “‘as a teacher I wish we could do more with our students like teach anti-racism and how to be kind people. Does anyone else feel like… we can skip the math, skip the science, like we’ll do that next year. Maybe this year we focus on teaching our youth how to be anti-racist.” Elsewhere she posted about providing “Marxist literature” to her students. “Fuck capitalism,” she wrote, and in another post shared that she was “tired after a long day of indoctrinating students.” In a video she put on TikTok, Rothstein said,

“I had to un-brainwash myself from capitalism in order to fall in love with socialism and communism. If everyone had the same amount of money, then money wouldn’t be worth anything.”

Wow. I sure want a teacher with that kind of keen insight teaching our next generation!

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Observations On A Telling Exchange In A New York Times Opinion Column…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The column is a weekly feature on the Times opinion pages. Snarky progressive shill Gail Collins supposedly debates pseudo-conservative pundit Bret Stephens (who has called for the repeal of the Second Amendment) on various issues of the day. It is written as a spontaneous conversation, which it obviously is not: I detest the format, which is inherently deceptive. Ted Kennedy and Orin Hatch used to have a radio spot where they would debate an issue “from the right and left.” The two were obviously reading from an agreed-upon script, and not very convincingly. It insulted listeners’ intelligence, as this column insults Times readers. Here’s how today’s installment begins:

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In Virginia, More Evidence Of Gross Public Education Incompetence

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Here is what Al Gore might call an “inconvenient truth,” except that this really is truth, while Al’s was propaganda: there is no valid reason for any responsible parent to entrust the mind and future of a child with the kinds of teachers, administrators and “experts” currently being produced by the U.S. education sector.

What you see above is one more piece of damning evidence.It is a recent test question in an advanced placement (AP) government course in Fairfax County, Virginia’s largest school district, one of the largest in the country, and just a short drive from my home. The question challenged students to choose an “accurate comparison of liberals versus conservatives,” giving them multiple choices.

It sure stumped me. After all, the difference between liberals and conservatives lie in belief systems and ideological orientation, not occupations and demographic categories. However, this basic fact appears to have escaped the creators of the question. (The “correct” answer, at least according to the dimwits who devised the thing, is “C.”)

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Ethics Conundrum: Is Teaching That Communism Is Evil History or Indoctrination?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

All of the turmoil over public school indoctrination of students regarding such matters as climate change, systemic racism and LGBTQ normalization naturally raises the question of whether there are legitimate topics for indoctrination in the United States. Should students be taught, for example, that democracy is good? That the Bill of Rights are crucial to the united States’ culture? That capitalism works/

What about teaching students that Communism, at least in its execution, is a dangerous and deadly ideology? Is that a fact?

I was prompted to consider this issue after reading NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd’s characteristically inarticulate objections to Gov. DeSantis signing a bill last May designating November 10 to be set aside for teaching Florida students at all grade levels “about the evils of communist regimes throughout history.”

“I don’t know if DeSantis is going to be talking to swing voters, here’s like one of the things he said in Vegas yesterday; take a listen to this,” Todd like said prior to playing like a clip of the Republican touting his program. “You know, …it’s sort of like, look, being a Floridian, I sort of know what he’s trying to play there and all of that. I went to Florida public schools we were taught this: It was called history. It just seems like a weird politicizing—you know he’s going out of his way to politicize something.”

Isn’t it amazing that NBC has employed an individual presiding over an iconic news show who speaks that way on live TV?

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What A Happy Coinkydink! In A DEI-Obsessed Year, The Most Deserving Artists For Oscars Just Happened To Be Asian And Black!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The 2023 Academy Awards seemed determined to test just how gullible and naive movie fans are. Integrity? What’s integrity? Just as complaints about the dearth of “enough” Oscar nominations being bestowed on African-American actors and designer magically resulted in “historic” numbers of awards to blacks in subsequent years, recent publicized complaints about how “Asian actors have been underrepresented” in the awards just happened to be addressed by “historic” numbers of Asian winners in multiple categories at the 2023 Oscars.

All because they were the “best,” of course. What, you don’t trust Hollywood?

Yes, yes, I’m sure they were all “deserving.” Well, all but Jamie Lee Curtis as “Best Supporting Actress,” perhaps, since her award was pretty obviously that hoary Oscar tradition, a well-liked veteran performer nearing the end of the line getting a prize for participation and good sportsmanship having little to do with the performance. (See: James Coburn, Hellen Hayes, George Burns, Don Ameche, etc.). But seriously, how long can the Oscars maintain the charade that its nominations and awards are anything more than calculated political virtue-signaling calibrated to match the progressive obsession of the moment after this?

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Ethics Quote Of The Week: Blogger-Law Prof. Glenn Reynolds, The “Instapundit”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“ETHICISTS GENERALLY HAVE LITTLE TO OFFER, AND THAT INCLUDES ASTROPHYSICISTS ACTING AS ETHICISTS”

—Conservative blogger and pundit Professor Glenn Reynolds, reacting to the “Ars Technica” post, “Are we ethically ready to set up shop in space?”

I agree with Reynolds completely, and the article that prompted his dismissal of my field (except in rare cases, hence “generally”) deserved it.

It begins (the author is Diana Gittig, who “received her B.A. in Biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania, and then a Ph.D. in Cell Biology and Genetics from Cornell,”and “is a freelance science writer and editor in New York’):

Off-Earth will amaze you: On nearly every page, it will have your jaw dropping in response to mind-blowing revelations and your head nodding vigorously in sudden recognition of some of your own half-realized thoughts (assuming you think about things like settling space). It will also have your head shaking sadly in resignation at the many immense challenges author Erika Nesvold describes. But the amazement will win out. Off-Earth: Ethical Questions and Quandaries for Living in Outer Space is really, really good…

The chapter headings, all of them questions, give a great indication of the issues she highlights in the book. Should we even settle space? Why? Who gets to go? How will property rights be distributed and finite resources be allocated? Do we need to protect the environment in space? How will we do that? What happens when someone breaks the rules or needs medical care? What if that person is the only one who can fix the water purifier? Underlying all of these questions, as yet unaddressed by any public or private institution currently shooting rockets into the air: who gets to decide?

Many of these issues have been dealt with, extensively, in fiction. But Nesvolt doesn’t really mention these works except to caution against the risk of taking them as prophecy.

Had it not triggered my bullshit alarm so thoroughly, I might have stopped reading there. Wait: this brilliant author supposedly explores the ethical hypotheticals that have been exhaustively examined by over a century of science fiction writers in literature, movies and TV without mentioning them? That’s unethical! It’s incompetent, irresponsible, unfair and disrespectful: the book is discredited as a trustworthy source of ethics analysis at the outset.

It is the final paragraph of the brilliant reviewer of the allegedly brilliant astrophyicist-ethicist’s revelations, however, that conclusively proves Reynold’s assessment is spot on. Ready?

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And The Award For “Most Ethical Decision Made For The Worst Possible Reason” Goes To…The Oscars!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has intruded via satellite at the Cannes and Venice film festivals, the Berlin Film Festival last month, the Grammy Awards, the Golden Globes, and even the New York Stock Exchange’s Opening Bell. Yet the most overtly and tastelessly political of all the awards shows, the Academy Awards about to be broadcast on ABC this coming Sunday (sadly, I have sock drawer duties) rejected Zelenskyy’s overtures to appear for the second straight year.

Good. It is an award show about movies, and it is inappropriate and an abuse of trust to use the audience’s interest in films to lobby them for any political interests; Heaven knows Hollywood and its artists do too much of that as it is. I’m sure Sean Penn is disappointed; at the Golden Globes in January, the part-time actor/full-time activist Sean Penn introduced Zelenskyy, who again made a plea for public and financial support for his war against Russia.

Next they’ll be showing him on the Jumbotron during the seventh inning stretch at Fenway Park. To hell with that. I hope Ukraine beats Putin flat and that the Russians finally send him to Elba, but I don’t need to find the Ukrainian president’s hand in my pocket at every turn, and the Biden administration is tossing money away like its confetti as it is.

So the Oscars have done the ethical thing two years running, which might be a record. However, Ethics Alarms can only provide the acclaim of one hand clapping at best. The principle here is that ethical conduct is ethical conduct no matter how mixed, venal, stupid or the product of unethical reasoning the impetus for that conduct is. Still, when ethical conduct comes about in warped ways through the ethically-obtuse calculations of the ethically-handicapped, praise has to be restrained.

I’m presuming that the Oscars have rejected Zelenskyy this year for the same reason it did last year…do you know what that was?

Variety reports that its sources say that the show’s producers felt that Ukraine is too white, and that Hollywood has ignored many wars over the years that affected “people of color.”

An Unethical Quote Spectacular!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

There are a lot of really unethical people saying some astounding things lately. Such as…

1. Incompetent Elected Official Of the Month Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX), who completely beclowned herself in the The House Weaponization Subcommittee examination of Twitter Files heralds Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger. She was determined to discredit them for daring to reveal the efforts by her party and its allies to bury the Hunter Biden laptop story and censor critics, and apparently did no research into te topic of the hearings at all, announcing that she didn’t know what “a substack” was and showing complete ignorance regarding Bari Weiss. (Ah, if only she read Ethics Alarms!) Meanwhile, all of a sudden Democrats oppose journalists’ desire to protect their sources.

2. Not included in the video above was an offensive question by serial unethical House hack Debbie Wasserman Schulz, the former DNC chair who rigged the 2016 primaries for Hillary Clinton. She accused Matt Taibbi of profiting from authoring the “Twitter Files” reports, implying that he was motivated by persoanl profit, saying: “After the ‘Twitter Files,’ your followers doubled … I imagine your Substack readership … increased significantly because of the work that you did for Elon Musk.”

These people really lash out when they’re exposed, don’t they?

3. Over to the Republican side: Jenna Ellis, one of President Trump’s lawyers in the post-election push to have the results examined, admitted in Colorado Bar disciplinary proceedings that she deliberately engaged in the following misrepresentations “for selfish reasons”:

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Disney Continues Its Transformation Into The Great Stupid’s Cultural Corrupter

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Disney’s animated/live action feature “Song of the South” (1946) is, to say the least, not a metaphorical hill worth dying on. The animated sections are excellent, but Walt, for reasons known best to him, decided to ignore good advice from various members of the black community who advised him not to use the movie to romanticize plantation life, with happy slaves singing away in the Land of Cotton where old times are not forgotten. “Song of the South’s” version of the Old South makes “Gone With The Wind” seem like the “1619 Project” by comparison; shame on Walt, who spoiled any chance of Joel Chandler Harris’s American folk tales being preserved in our culture.

Of course, Walt’s lapse of judgment doesn’t mean, or shouldn’t mean, that people who want to see the movie (and the screen legacy of African-American actor James Baskett, who deserves to be remembered) ought to be prevented from doing so. 21st Century Corporate Disney, however, has fully embraced the paternalistic view that big media companies and the government know best, so “Song of the South” has been treated like those photos of old Soviet leaders who fell out of favor: erased, banished. Nope, sorry, can’t see it, folks: it will make you racist, or if you are properly woke, cause an aneurysm, or something.

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Further Musings On The Tucker Carlson Car In The Capitol Riot Aftermath Ethics Train Wreck [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Having read more in the last 24 hours about this fiasco layered on a fiasco, I have reached the following conclusions:

1. I was right: Speaker McCarthy choosing Tucker Carlson as the vehicle to educate the public regarding the bias and slanted coverage of the January 6 Capitol rioting was a truly incompetent decision. If Rush Limbaugh weren’t dead, it was the equivalent of that, giving all of the Trump Deranged, progressive brain-washed and dishonest propagandists all they needed to spin the security footage into incoherence. Carlson is a proven liar and a cynical, untrustworthy charlatan who can’t even be trusted to believe in what he says on national TV. McCarthy walked into a cognitive dissonance perfect storm: if you wanted to ensure that no one who already hadn’t swallowed the “resistance”/Democratic Party/mainstream media (aka The Axis of Unethical Conduct) “insurrection” narrative would dismiss the new video, that was the way to do it.

2. Sure enough: Carlson and the Republicans are being widely accused of trying to excuse the riot, which was inexcusable. Chuck Schumer’s lie—on the Senate floor— that Carlson claimed the attack on the Capitol was not violent has more currency with those who don’t watch Fox News than anything Carlson said, and those who do watch Fox News already had concluded that the insurrection narrative was garbage. What is essential to begin clearing away the deception and corruption this episode epitomizes is to find someone whom the non-Fox News watchers will trust to carry the message. Handing the job to Carlson was simply dumb—but about what I expect of Kevin McCarthy.

3. The Big Lie is not that the 2020 election was stolen, but that the riot was an “insurrection.” Schumer and the Axis are using a Big Lie while accusing their adversaries of using a Big Lie. You have to admire the audacity: the 2020 election was a lot closer to “stolen” than the riot was to an insurrection.

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