Childhood and children

Ethics Quiz: The “Incestuous” Candidacy

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Troy Jackson, the latest un-democratically selected candidate being offered to the public by Maine Democrats, is the Great White Male Hope for the unprincipled party as it tries to take over the U.S. Senate “by any means necessary.” You will recall that he became a necessary means after much-heralded lying, Nazi woman-abuser Graham Platner was revealed to be…well, a lying, Nazi woman-abuser. Oopsie!

Jackson has little in his record or character to suggest fitness to serve as a U.S. Senator, but what conservative critics are focusing their fire on is this, as the New York Post reports:

“Maine Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson is in a long-term relationship with his high school sweetheart — who is also his second cousin, according to a new report. Jackson, 58, and Lana Pelletier share two adult sons and the same great-grandparents, according to Thursday’s report by independent journalist Steve Robinson, who notes that such relationships are both legal under state law and not uncommon in the rural North Maine Woods region, near the Canadian border.While Jackson, a onetime logger and the former president of the Maine State Senate, has described Pelletier as his wife in the past, locals tell Robinson the couple has never been legally married.

“Jackson grew up in the village of Allagash (population 237 as of the 2020 census) and attended nearby Fort Kent High School with Pelletier.According to geneological records unearthed by Robinson, Jackson’s maternal grandmother — Albertine Pelletier O’Leary — and Pelletier’s paternal grandfather — Louis A. Pelletier Sr. — were siblings, making Jackson’s mother, Colleen McBreairty, and Pelletier’s father, Louis Jr., first cousins.Since 1985, Maine law has prohibited marriages to an individual’s parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren, siblings, nieces, nephews, aunts, or uncles.”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of this Weekend:

Is this a legitimate campaign issue?

Legal Insurrection concludes, “All Maine Democrats had to do after Platner dropped out was find a normal person to take his place. It’s amazing that such a simple task was a challenge.” The conservative site reposts many contemptuous tweets, such as conservative pundit Jim Treacher’s…

OUT: Third Reich

IN: Second cousins

and Stephen L. Miller’s “The plan? We convince them to drop an abusive Nazi and then replace him with someone married to his own cousin.”

My view? I find this the kind of right wing “gotcha!”pearl-clutching that loses conservatives credibility. It’s mainly (Mainely?) Ick rather than ethics. He didn’t marry his cousin, he sort-of married his second cousin, which isn’t illegal incest in Maine or as far as I can find, anywhere else. Franklin D. Roosevely married and had children with his distant cousin (you’ll notice that they had the same last names). Thomas Jefferson and John Adams married third cousins; John and Abigail’s line was eventually stuffed with geniuses and high achievers. I have a long-time friend (well, she used to be a friend until Trump Derangement caused her to cut me off, and I was a particularly good and generous friend…grrrrrr!) who chose her first cousin as her third husband, which my late wife found disgusting. They were past the children stage; I found it interesting but hardly scandalous.

Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Indiana Fever Coach Stephanie White

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“I don’t know that I would say that I’m educated enough from a scientific standpoint.I don’t ever believe that exclusion is an answer. I just don’t. I do think when we think about various levels of sport, various governing bodies of sport and things that go into that, like I said, I’m not, I’m not educated enough at the different levels. I know growing up, I played with the boys all the time.”

—–WNBA’s Indiana Fever coach Stephanie White, asked to expound on the controversy around her star guard, Sophie Cunningham, who has aroused the ire of transgender activists by stating her opinion that young girls in sports should not be made to compete against biological men.

What a pusillanimous, ignorant, disingenuous statement. White would have been better of to simply state that her policy is not to comment on matters that do not concern the WNBA or her job as coach. Her statement is on the same offensive level as woke Justice Jackson saying that she can’t define what a woman is.

How “educated” does one have to be to look at this…

or this..

….and conclude, “You know, that doesn’t look fair to me” ? How hard is that?

It’s hard for Wilson because, unlike Cunningham, she’s afraid of the vengeance of the radical left and its woke enforcers. Cunningham is a role model for young women who take seriously the feminist credo of not behaving passively, fearfully and compliantly or avoiding the role of a leader because that’s how ladies are expected to behave. She said regarding her trans-females in sports opinion when recently interviewed about the attacks on her for standing up for women and reality, “I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense.”

Ah, but do you have the scientific training to have common sense?

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Time For My Cultural Literacy Check…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I believe, and have believed for as long as I can remember—Shut up, I remember more than most people—that everyone in our society has an ethical obligation to know as much as possible about the society and culture we live in. This takes time and effort, as well as humility. For the young, it means showing an interest in what had transpired before they were born, if it had a significant effect on history and culture.

I have related here my interaction with a professional woman, ten years my junior, who revealed that she didn’t know who Jackie Robinson was. I told her that was inexcusable, and sent her to some sources. A lawyer I worked with at one point, even younger, couldn’t come within 70 years of the dates of the Civil War, despite graduating with honors from Cornell and being an associate at Skadden Arps.

The case was made powerfully in the Eighties by J.D. Hirsch in his best-seller “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know,” and he updated his book several times. His main declaration was that without a shared cultural knowledge, communication and understanding between generations becomes impossible, and society’s connective tissue is eventually degraded and destroyed. Analogies and metaphors no longer work; patterns are no longer detected; “presentism” becomes epidemic. Jackie Robinson was on Hirsch’s list; so were John Wayne, Charlie Chaplin, Sen. Joe McCarthy, Marilyn Monroe, James Watson, Will Rogers, Elvis Presley and Fred Astaire.

Older generations have obligations too. As a child who watched more television than anyone I know (or knew), I became convinced that TV was an essential cultural literacy tool. My parents, one a lawyer and Harvard College grad and the other a career Harvard administrator, had many friends who boasted of either never watching TV or only deigning to watch PBS. Even when I was ten, I regarded them as arrogant and foolish, which they were. They didn’t see the Sixties coming, or comprehend the culture that was its catalyst when it fell on then like a rock squishing Wile E. Coyote.

I acknowledge that keeping up with current culture, while in some respects easier than it used to be due to technology, is overwhelming, and to some extent even impossible. We have many parallel cultures trying to coexist today, and some are antithetical to each other. At very least, I believe, all of us have to try to keep abreast of popular culture, which includes important societal developments that drive that relentless engine.

Last week EA expressed disgust that Sen. Jim Clyburn had revealed that he only recently became aware of ChatGPT. He’s 80: it’s no excuse. It would be almost as inexcusable if Clyburn announced that he didn’t know who Taylor Swift is. President Trump was recently dragged in social media for apparently conflating a kids’ TV host from the Fifties with Eighties star Paul Reubens, aka. Peewee Herman. At least Trump is aware of Peewee’s existence; that fulfills his cultural literacy obligation.

Five years ago, I wrote a discouraged post about how my cultural literacy commitment was failing, Confession Of A Life Competence Failure. I am obviously over-due for an audit, so I went to the same source for a pop quiz: WeSmirch, a web aggregator of celebrity news. In 2021, I regarded my performance as a failure, writing in part,

“It was horrifying. I never heard of most of these people. Those I have heard of seem completely irrelevant to me. Almost all of the important people in these stories seem to be morons, famous for being famous, illiterate, notable mostly for being rich. The so-called “news,” breathlessly shouted from various headlines, seemed less than inconsequential. And yet this is what a rising generation cares about. Here is a typical headline from this morning: “Vanessa Morgan’s son is called River.” Who is Vanessa Morgan? Who cares what her son is named? It turns out that she is an actress on “Riverdale,” a TV show based on the comic book whose appeal I never understood (but I read the damn thing so I knew what my friends were reading). My score was 15 celebrity names recognized, with 17 complete mysteries. My conclusion: “When all the celebrities are strangers, I will have reached the dreaded stage of my uncle, who got the Beatles mixed up with the Rolling Stones, and the codgers today who talk about the internet like it’s some new-fangled fad. And at that point, I will be useless.”

Let’s see what my score is today. The “celebrities”…

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Another “Nah, Universities and Colleges Don’t Indoctrinate Students!” Smoking Gun

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

[Note: Flushed with unexpected good health, I promised yesterday to post on the unraveling Fauci scandal. 1) I wasn’t quite as recovered from the previous day’s cold, especially energy-wise, as I thought I was, and 2) I realized that today would be the more appropriate day for that post given that the arrogant Ethics Villain is testifying before Congress and Sen. Rand Paul would be, as the saying goes, “tearing him a new one.” Fauci gets his EA excoriation next, I promise.]

Just as a depressing number of people, either captured by the fascists of the Left or intimidated by them, deny that the Axis news media manipulates, censors and distorts facts and events to gain their ideological allies power “by any means necessary,” so do similar victims refuse to acknowledge the ideological capture of our educational institutions, with a few exceptions. My own two almae matres (Miss Rounds would never forgive me for writing “alma maters”) are prominent and despicable examples: Harvard College and Georgetown University Law Center, as I have documented extensively on EA.

Now comes a particularly egregious example of this dangerous phenomenon from Mt. Holyoke, one of the cluster of woke private colleges in northern Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont along with Amherst, Williams, Smith, Wellesley, Dartmouth and Bennington.

Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts mandates that student organization leaders complete Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training, and that they must develop “anti-racist plans” before the college administration will recognized them and allow them to hold sanctioned events. Without proof that an organization will be a full participant in promoting the Left’s anti-white, anti-male, anti-straight discrimination agenda, an organization will not be eligible for college funding. Chess club, drama club, Young Republicans, football team…it doesn’t matter: all the leaders of student groups must complete the required training before receiving official recognition from the college.

After a minimum of two student officers complete the training, each organization must create or update an “anti-racist plan.” Seriously? Did I just accidentally type the plot of a dystopian science fiction novel, like “1984” in reverse? I can’t believe I’m writing this.

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The Revolting Shiloh Hendrix Case

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

The last time I wrote about this Minnesota ethics train wreck more than a year ago, I began with “Yecchh! Pooey!” I would now like to add, “Ick! Barf!” I hate this story.

The latest revolting development is that a Minnesota jury convicted Shiloh Hendrix of a single charge of misdemeanor disorderly conduct last week for repeatedly calling a black man who confronted and filmed her at a Rochester playground “nigger.” Hendrix also directed the slur at an 8-year-old black boy who had been going through her purse.

Because Hendrix’s speech was the conduct underlying the disorderly conduct charge according toMinnesota law, we have a controversy over whether using “nigger” as this awful woman did falls within the narrow “fighting words” exception to speech protected under the First Amendment.

The six-person jury returned its verdict after four days of testimony in Olmsted County District Court, finding Hendrix, 37, guilty on the count involving using “nigger” in her exchanges with videographer Sharmake Omar. She was not found guilty on the count involving the child. The full sentence: a stayed 90-day jail sentence, supervised probation, 200 hours of community service and a $1,000 fine.

We are told Hendrix did not speak before sentencing. Good.

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Ethics Quiz: The Professional Bimbo’s Late Hit

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Courtney Stodden, a reality show star for about 15 years and with her career sagging, decided this week to accuse “Seinfeld” star Jason Alexander of abusive and exploitive behavior towards a “child” based on a sketch they performed together in 2012. The two were in a Funny or Die sketch where Alexander played a self-help guru and relationship coach. Stodden wore an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny small-as-it-could-be bikini as Alexander cracked jokes about her feminine assets.

At one point in the web video episode, Alexander rubbed an iPhone over her chest. “I was 17 years old in this photo,” Stodden wrote on Instagram. “The older I get, the more impossible this is to understand. During this comedy sketch, Jason Alexander repeatedly rubbed his phone across my breasts while saying there was ‘no signal’ in my head but ‘plenty of signal’ in my chest.” Jason was 53 at the time and co- writer of the sketch.

“Later in the sketch,” Stodden continued, “he joked that when I turned 18 he’d like to take me behind the couch and ‘have his way’ with me. IMDb credits him as one of the writers of the episode. As an adult, that fact has become harder—not easier—for me to understand. I was a minor. I didn’t have the legal power to decide whether I wanted to participate. The contracts were signed by adults. The paycheck went to Doug [her husband]. The production moved forward. I was the only child in the room. I felt so alone. Looking back now, I don’t see comedy. I see a 17-year-old girl whose body became part of an adult joke. People still say, ‘You chose to be there.’ Legally, I couldn’t make those decisions for myself. That’s the point. I can’t change what happened to me but I can ask myself: How did so many adults look at a minor and decide this was acceptable? That’s exactly why I speak out today. Children deserve laws that protect them. They shouldn’t have to become adults before realizing the law should have protected them all along.”

Alexander, not wishing to be cancelled over an offense from 14-year-old skit that nobody remembers, groveled an apology. “Looking back at the comedy sketch in which Ms. Stodden and I participated in 2012, I completely agree that it was inappropriate and I truly regret it,” he said. “But more importantly, I am deeply sorry for any harm or distress it has caused Ms. Stodden. I offer her my sincerest apologies.”

And now, as Paul Harvey would say, “The rest of the story!”

As an introduction, here is Courtney at what I guess she would call “her peak”:

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National Anthem Ethics: Mini-Drama At Wrigley Field

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The ethics in the now viral incident at the start of a Chicago Cubs baseball game are clear as a mountain stream. A Gen Z slug was ignoring the National Anthem, a Vietnam vet sitting behind him took offense and demanded that he stand, and when the kid resisted, gave him a sharp slap “upside the head.” Then the young fan finally stood up.

The online debate is contrived. Of course…

  • …the young fan was being disrespectful and deserved the rebuke
  • …he was also being ignorant, forgetting that there are a lot of veterans who take loyalty and reverence to the nation they served very seriously; my father would have said something to him
  • …he still had a right to sit if he chose to, though doing so was unethical,
  • …hitting the kid was indefensible, even if the contact was light and more symbolic than serious, and
  • …the young fan showed good judgment by capitulating and not allowing the conflict to escalate.

Further observations…

1. To his credit, the slapper says that he regrets the slap.

2. He also says he and the kid shared a beer at the game. That speaks well of the young man. It is also very typical of the kind of human comradery I have witnessed at baseball games many times over the years. Everyone there has a bond with everyone else—they are baseball fans and usually fans of the same team.

3. Lots of the critics of the veteran remind us that the slap was battery. No, it wasn’t assault: assault is when the victim is placed in fearful anticipation of unwelcome contact; battery is the contact itself. Since the slappee was hit from behind and didn’t see it coming, there was no assault, just battery.

4. Though technically a tort and a crime, the chances of either getting substantive legal redress is about zero. De minimis non curat lex.

5. If the slapper was the kid’s father, mother, or sibling, we never would have heard about the episode

5. Questions: would the veteran have handled the situation the same way if the kid had been black? Female? A Muslim? My guess: no, no, and no.

6. If the kid was with a group of peers, would he have stood? Would the vet have confronted him if he were with friends?

7. Would a black fan have behaved the same as the white kid? Maybe. If not, however, the incident would be characterized as a racial clash by the media.

A “Kaufman” For People Magazine

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

As it doesn’t come up that often, once again I must review what the Ethics Alarms “Kaufman” designation signifies. I hand out the award for alleged ethics violation or other news stories so unremarkable and trivial that they are literally not worth talking about or thinking about, except to note how foolish it was to raise the matter in the first place. From the EA glossary:

“George S. Kaufman  was a celebrated wit and playwright (“The Man Who Came To Dinner”, “You Can’t Take It With You”, and many more, usually in tandem with Moss Hart),  and he moonlighted as a panelist on the  early TV  show, “This is Show Business,” which often featured a celebrity who would consult the panel members about a personal problem. On one show, singer Eddie Fisher ( father of Carrie and Isla, husband of Debbie Reynolds and, scandalously, adulterous lover and eventual pre-Richard Burton spouse of Elizabeth Taylor) wanted advice from the panel because desirable women refused to go out with him because of his youth. Kaufman ‘s unsympathetic reply:

“Mr. Fisher, on Mount Wilson there is a telescope that can magnify the most distant stars to twenty-four times the magnification of any previous telescope. This remarkable instrument was unsurpassed in the world of astronomy until the development and construction of the Mount Palomar telescope.  The Mount Palomar telescope is an even more remarkable instrument of magnification. Owing to advances and improvements in optical technology, it is capable of magnifying the stars to four times the magnification and resolution of the Mount Wilson telescope. Mr. Fisher, if you could somehow put the Mount Wilson telescope inside the Mount Palomar telescope, you still wouldn’t be able to see my interest in your problem.”

A “Kaufman” is awarded when someone, usually in the news media, makes a big deal about something so trivial and unremarkable that it demands apathy. We are all familiar with fake news, and one of its more annoying sub-categories are stories that are presented and framed as news that aren’t news at all. People Magazine just came out with a doozy, as “Hazel” used to say on the long-running sitcom that nobody but me remembers: “Mom Defends Decision to Give Her Daughter an Unconventional Name: ‘It Just Felt Perfect’ (Exclusive)”

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Ben Franklin’s Curse

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The House this week passed a measure, the Sunshine Protection Act, that would set America’s clocks to daylight saving time permanently once it clears the Senate and is signed into law by the President. The bill itself raises no ethics issues at all: it is the reactions to it and the reasons, real and alleged, for those reactions that ping ethics alarms.

The headline is tongue-in-cheek, incidentally. Most of my life I heard that Daylight Savings Time was Ben Franklin’s idea. Ben was an amazingly prolific innovator and out-of-the-box thinker, but he was not the originator of the practice, so we can neither blame him nor praise him. Another myth is that DST was implemented for the benefit of farmers. Actually, farmers have been one of the strongest opponents of DST because the factors that influence farming schedules, like dairy cattle’s readiness to be milked, are dictated by the sun, so clocks going back and forth just complicates things. In general, Retailers, sports, and tourism interests like daylight saving, while agricultural and evening-entertainment interests do not.

Personally, I just want one time in place all year, because the changeover is traumatic for me whenever it happens. I have a long list of screw-ups, missed deadlines and meetings on my record. I bet no year has ever passed without one.

Like so many policies, the Daylight Savings Time tradition has had and continues to have all manner of unintended consequences, and those are controversial too. There is some data that shows that crime and accidents are reduced by DST, but precise causation issues make such data inherently dubious. A 2017 analysis of 44 studies concluded that DST leads to electricity savings of 0.3%, but we now know, or should, we can’t trust studies because we can’t trust the reseachers who perform them. Ditto for a 2017 study in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics that estimated that “the transition into DST caused over 30 deaths at a social cost of $275 million annually,” primarily by increasing sleep deprivation. Another study claimed that hospitals see a 24% increase in heart attacks and a 6% increase in fatal crashes each year when the time changes.

President Trump has advocated permanent Daylight Savings Time, so that’s enough for the Axis of Unethical Conduct to oppose it. Predictably, the Washington Post rushed to publish “Why standard time is better for your health than daylight saving time: A proposed bill would make daylight saving time permanent. But standard time is actually better for your body, according to science.”

According to science! Even the Post’s readers tended to agree that this take was hooey. A typical reaction:

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The Ethicist Seems To Be Running Out Of Ethics Questions…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

How is that possible? I’ve got, as Jimmy Durante used to say, “a million of ’em” and would be happy to let Kwame Anthony Appiah, the NYU philosophy prof, take a shot at a few of them in guest columns so I could get them off my list.

Today the best he could come up with was this, which I’ve redacted, from “Name Withheld”:

“I am the mother of two adult children. Their father and I divorced when they were both under 10…they were close to him until their teens…During college, they cut ties with him altogether…He is self-absorbed and has sometimes been verbally abusive…Once brilliant, he now seems to hover somewhere between brilliance and madness. I sometimes receive dozens of manic messages from him in a row about his anger toward the children, his plans to live forever, rebirth, interstellar travel and other subjects. He is also homebound, in precarious health and in his mid-60s…I have encouraged my children to reconnect with him…My younger child has professed to be “not ready.” I respect that. Still, I worry that he will die and that the children will live with regret….My children know he has health problems, but I’m not sure they fully grasp that death can come suddenly.They will, of course, make their own decisions. But I wonder …Should I encourage them to see their father, so that they do not later regret staying away? Or should I keep my fears about time running out to myself?”

Wait: Where’s the ethics issue? There is none. This is “Dear Abby” or “Ann Landers” stuff. I have nothing against advice columns, but supposedly “The Ethicist” column is supposed to be about, you know, ethics.

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