Childhood and children

Comment of the Day: “Fat-Shaming Ethics”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I have such a strong visceral reaction to this provocative Comment of the Day, a personal account by Joel Mundt, that I’m going to eschew my usual introduction and let you make your own judgments without any influence by me. Here it is, in reaction to “Fat-Shaming Ethics” and the lively comments it has generated so far…

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I’m going slightly off-topic, and I apologize in advance…

I’m of the opinion that shaming is, to a degree, a good thing. In my opinion, it’s a form of non-physical discipline that emphasizes embarrassment and plays on an individual’s need to be liked and to be more like the collective. It’s a way to manipulate desired behavior using something of a “group intervention.”

A perfect example of this is…well…me. As an elementary student, I had a reputation of being really smart, but also talking out-of-turn an awful lot in class, which was disruptive. My 5th-grade teacher, Mrs. Crooks, sought me out and purposely got my name on her class list. Nobody wanted her as their 5th-grade teacher…she had a terrifying reputation among younger students. I didn’t know it until years later, but she had talked to my parents ahead of time, explaining that I would be her student, and she would break me of my disruptive ways.

And she did her best! I was punished in the most imaginative ways for speaking out of turn, like being ordered to walk around classroom without making a sound for 10 minutes while she taught the other students, or playing the part of the “silent i” in front of the class when learning to spell words like “receive”. She was modestly effective…until the day of “the sign”. I was talking out of turn yet again and Mrs. Crooks told me – in front of the class – that my punishment was to write the words “I’m a big mouth” on a piece of paper, then glue it to a piece of cardboard she gave me with a string in it, then wear it around my neck…outside during our lunch recess with the entire school.

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Unethical Quote of the Week: The Columbia Law Review

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I gave a legal ethics seminar 90 minutes after finding my wife dead, and these infants are too traumatized to take their exams because of a “horrific time on campus” and their “level of distress”:

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Fevered Musings on Abortion, Love Canal, and the Broken Ethics Alarms of American Women

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

(This may end up as more of a rueful observation than a post.)

Last night I watched PBS’s “American Experience’ because it was late, my satellite package has amazingly few channels that aren’t commercial junk (No TCM for example, and I miss it) and no baseball games were on. It was a new episode about the Love Canal protests during the Carter Administration, something I hadn’t thought about for a long time.

It was the first toxic waste dump scandal—PBS was celebrating “Earth Day”—- and a landmark in the environmental movement: one can get some sense of the kind of things going on from “Ellen Brockovich,” about a another community poisoned by chemical manufacturers. That account focuses on the legal battles, but Poisoned Ground: The Tragedy at Love Canal centers on the local activists, mostly housewives and mothers, who organized, protested and kept the pressure on local, New York State and national government officials to fix the deadly problem, something the bureaucrats seemed either unwilling or unable to do.

One feature of the tale I had forgotten: the furious women briefly held two EPA officials hostage, and released them promising a response that would make that crime “look like Sesame Street” if President Carter didn’t meet their demands for action in 24 hours. And Carter capitulated to the threat! It doesn’t matter that the women were right about the various governments’ foot-dragging and irresponsible handling of the crisis: a competent President should never reward threats from people breaking the law. Jimmy just didn’t understand the Presidency at all, the first of four such Presidents to wound the U.S. from 1976 to 2024.

That wasn’t my main epiphany, however. It was this: In the late 1970’s, before the feminist movement took hold, so-called ordinary women, mostly mothers, became intense and dedicated activists fighting for the lives, health and futures, of their babies and children, as well as their unborn children because the Love Canal pollution was causing miscarriages and spontaneous abortions. The women were heroic, and the public and news media were drawn to them because they projected moral and ethical standing by fighting to save lives.

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Curmie’s Conjectures: Why There’s a Teacher Shortage, Exhibit A

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

by Curmie

I’ve promised two essays that are indeed partially written; I could finish one of them in 20 minutes or so if I could just concentrate, but something else always seems to come up.  So let me try yet a different topic.

One of my friends and former students (we’ll call him L for the purposes of this post) teaches theatre in a public school.  He recently posted on Facebook about a confrontation he’d had with the father of one of his students.  The boy had failed to do three significant assignments, and, curiously enough, his grade reflected that fact.

Ah, but you see, the lad is an athlete, and a failing grade made him academically ineligible.  So Dad screams for “about 15 minutes.”  My friend responded like this: “I want him to be able to play […], too. I understand how important it is for him to have that outlet. But if I want lights on in my house, I gotta pay bills. If I wanna drive a car, I gotta pay to put gas in the car. So, if _______ wants to play […] then he’s gonna need to stop being lazy and do what is required in this class. Not to mention the other three classes he is failing.” 

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Comment of the Day: “A Tragedy in the Czech Republic Reveals the Pro-Abortion Hypocrisy”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

This excellent Comment of the Day (which I happen to agree with completely, though that is never a requirement for COTDs) was sparked by a statement by esteemed EA squid, Extradimensional Cephalopod. This seem like a propitious time to salute EC, who is very thoughtful on this classic ethics conflict issue, for alerting me to a Zoom debate on abortion held by his group, Braver Angels (“leading the nation’s largest cross-partisan, volunteer-led movement to bridge the partisan divide…”).

Here is jeffguinn’s Comment of the Day on the post, “A Tragedy in the Czech Republic Reveals the Pro-Abortion Hypocrisy,” which appeared here on April 10:

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Extradimensional Cephalopod said: It sounds like you’re presupposing the existence of a person who is killed in that situation. I think it’s simple enough to understand that people live in human brains, and if a human body hasn’t developed a brain, that means a person cannot yet have started to live in that body. Does that make sense? 

Presuming the concept of personhood is morally relevant, then it makes sense. That presumption is the entire basis upon which the pro-choice point of view rests. 

Accept as presented the assumption that personhood is an objectively definable state before which there is no ethical alarm set off by choosing an abortion.

Even granting without dissent that most essential assumption gains nothing.

Existence preceding personhood — the interval between achieving that status and conception — still has precisely two ways of ending: natural cause, or homicide. There is no other option.

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On the Dumbing Down of Scrabble

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I was going to make this story an ethics quiz, but thought better of it. After all, there’s nothing unethical about Scrabble (now owned by Mattel) spinning off “Moron Scrabble.” Okay, the exciting Scrabble mutation is called “Scrabble Together.” Nonetheless, I find it hard to resist the feeling that this is a Great Stupid event.

The Mattel statements didn’t help. Ray Adler, vice-president and global head of games at Mattel, said: “Scrabble has truly stood the test of time as one of the most popular board games in history, and we want to ensure the game continues to be inclusive for all players.”

Oh-oh. Inclusive. Next we can expect “DEI Scrabble,” where minority players get twice as many points for their words as those privileged white, male players.

“For anyone who’s ever thought ‘word games aren’t for me'” Adler addled, “or felt a little intimidated by the classic game, Scrabble Together mode is an ideal option.” If someone is intimidated by Scrabble, she has more serious problems than new rules can solve.

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A Tragedy in the Czech Republic Reveals the Pro-Abortion Hypocrisy

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

This is a terrible story, but from an ethical enlightenment and focus perspective, I am grateful for it.

A four months pregnant patient at a Prague’s Bulovka University Hospital received an unwanted abortion procedure when doctors got her confused with another woman. (Both patients were not native Czech speakers.) The woman who lost her baby was at the hospital for a routine check-up, but nurses, doctors, a gynecologist and an anesthesiologist all became convinced she was another patient seeking an abortion. They subjected their victim to a surgical cleaning of the uterus without her consent consent or knowledge. She miscarried following the procedure.

Prague police are treating the matter as a case of negligent “bodily harm.” Is that what it is? A woman losing her unborn child is the equivalent of her losing a kidney? Is the unwanted invasion of her body is the issue here, and not the death of whatever that thing is that their outrageous mistake killed?

One of the clearest pieces of evidence that the entire pro-abortion case is built on intellectual dishonesty is the weird and mystical convention that if a mother wants her unborn child to be regarded as a nascent human being, it is in the eyes of the law, in most states. Someone ripping the unborn baby out of the womb of its mother will be usually charged with a crime against two human beings, not one. But if a woman has been taught to regard a gestating fetus as a wart, a tumor or a “mass of cells,” killing it is no crime at all…just a “choice,” or “reproductive care.”

I want to read or hear an abortion activist, or anyone screaming about how the Supreme Court removed a woman’s “right” to control her own body when her body includes a genetically distinct human being, explain how the law should treat a situation like the atrocity in the Czech Republic. Was a child involved or not? Were two human beings harmed, or one?

Were the doctors and the hospital guilty of a negligent tort, as if they had amputated the wrong leg, or was this negligent homicide?

Fixing This Problem Requires Leaping Onto a Slippery Slope: Should We?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Nicholas Kristof has sounded the alarm on the growing problem of artificial intelligence deepfakes on line. I must admit, I was unaware of the extent of the phenomenon, which is atrocious. He writes in part,

[D]eepfake nude videos and photos …humiliate celebrities and unknown children alike. One recent study found that 98 percent of deepfake videos online were pornographic and that 99 percent of those targeted were women or girls…Companies make money by selling advertising and premium subscriptions for websites hosting fake sex videos of famous female actresses, singers, influencers, princesses and politicians. Google directs traffic to these graphic videos, and victims have little recourse.

Sometimes the victims are underage girls….While there have always been doctored images, artificial intelligence makes the process much easier. With just a single good image of a person’s face, it is now possible in just half an hour to make a 60-second sex video of that person. Those videos can then be posted on general pornographic websites for anyone to see, or on specialized sites for deepfakes.

The videos there are graphic and sometimes sadistic, depicting women tied up as they are raped or urinated on, for example. One site offers categories including “rape” (472 items), “crying” (655) and “degradation” (822)….In addition, there are the “nudify” or “undressing” websites and apps …“Undress on a click!” one urges. These overwhelmingly target women and girls; some are not even capable of generating a naked male. A British study of child sexual images produced by artificial intelligence reported that 99.6 percent were of girls, most commonly between 7 and 13 years old.

Yikes. These images don’t qualify as child porn, because the laws against that are based on the actual abuse of the children in the photos. With the deepfakes, no children have been physically harmed. Right now, there are no laws directed at what Kristof is describing. He also links to two websites on the topic started by young women victimized with altered photos and deepfaked videos of them being spread on line: My image My choice, and AI Heeelp!

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Another Example of Why the Death Penalty Is Necessary

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

My go-to case for defending the death penalty is the Cheshire home invasion, though the surviving Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is an equally strong, indeed I would say irrefutable case. I now have another one.

Read with care.

Kristel Candelario left on a summer vacation in Puerto Rico with a male friend, leaving her 16 month daughter Jailyn alone in a playpen with a few bottles of milk. The neighbor’s doorbell camera recorded the baby’s anguished screams as she suffered from abandonment and separation, hunger and dehydration. After a few days at the beach and another stopover in Detroit, Jailyn’s mother returned tp her Cleveland home to find her daughter dead, though she had the gall to call 911 in a panic. She’d been gone for about 10 days. I wonder what she expected to find.

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Ethics Dunce: Don Surber

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Don Surber is a former journalist and current conservative pundit whose blog and substack I occasionally peruse, usually without too much alarm. However, he has issued a substack essay that, if I had to summarize in three words my objections to it and any culture wars guerilla who cited him as authority would be, “This doesn’t help.” A longer version follows.

Surber’s piece is called “In praise of ties” and carries the subheading, “They helped build a society that we are destroying.” If Glenn Reynolds had not endorsed the link, I would have stopped reading right there. I know ties are going to be used as a metaphor for the decline of elegance, respect, adulthood, civility, dignity, elan and eclat, blattity-blah, but still. Don’t insult my intelligence. This is the equivalent of “In praise of stovepipe hats,” “In praise of spats,” “In praise of derbies” or “In praise of bustles.” These are all fashions, and fashions rise and fall like steam and autumn leaves. We get used to them, if they hang around long enough, and yes, sometimes their demise are linked to cultural factors that have little to do with fashion. Nonetheless, longing for a time when men wore ties as a matter of societal conformity makes one seem like Grandpa Simpson, screaming at clouds. Worse, in fact.

Surber writes, “Chuck Berry always wore a tie. Gas station attendants wore them. You could trust your car to the man who wore the star because he had a tie on. Men wore ties to ballgames because men were civilized. Ties were important because they gave a sense of authority but ties also showed that a man wants to belong in society. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others.”

Sure, Don. I always thought those pictures of men wearing ties at baseball games were ridiculous. Ted Williams, one of my father’s heroes whom he passed on to me, famously refused to wear a tie: he had a very long neck and didn’t think ties looked good on him. Ben was right, but when the tie as a symbol of wanting to appear formal and serious wane—it hasn’t waned completely —then people will adopt other ways of “dressing to please.” It is the way of the world, and there is nothing about these transitions to lament.

But Surber was just getting started. Here he is at full speed:

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