Childhood and children

Woke Kindergarten

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I honestly thought this story was a parody when I first read about it. Horrifyingly, Woke Kindergarten is real: a genuine dead canary in the mine of U.S. culture. On the company’s website, it boasts, “Woke kindergarten is a global, abolitionist early childhood ecosystem & visionary creative portal supporting children, families, educators and organizations in their commitment to abolitionist early education and pro-Black and queer and trans liberation.” The babber on that page shouts, “Power to the little people!”, a direct call-out to Marx, and what that really means is “Power to radical anti-American ideology through the programming of its children.”

Claiming that the schools are more dedicated to indoctrinating children than in educating them is another one of those conservative conspiracy theories people catch from Fox News like the flu, I keep reading. The next time someone tells you that, send them the Woke Kindergarten link right after you respond, “Bite me, you useful idiot.”

Wandering through the site is like visiting Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, early education version. “Woke Words of the day” include “Ceasefire,” “Protest,” Strike,” “Abolish” and “Anti-Racist.” The kids are introduced to the wonders of censorship. How are children introduced to poetry, its meter, its rhyme schemes, its beauty? Here’s one of Woke Kindergarten’s “teachable poems”:

Sure, it doesn’t doesn’t scan and is incomprehensible, but there’s a leftist message in there somewhere. On most of the site, the communist aspirations are hardly hidden. “Lil’ Comrade Convos” is one section. Under “Woke Wonderings”, described as “unconventional questions rooted in liberatory thought” that teachers and parents are supposed to pose to 4 and 5-year olds, who, as we all know, are well equipped with the experience and critical thinking skills to evaluate them, we have these loaded queries…

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The Drag Queen School Principal Principle

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I was going to make this tale an ethics quiz, but decided that we’ve settled this issue before.

Dr. Shane Murnan had been the principal at John Glenn Elementary School in Oklahoma City since June. After he was hired, The Libs of TikTok revealed last September that he was an extracurricular drag queen, and placed photos of him as “Shantel Mandalay” on social media. Predictably, conservatives pounced and demanded that he be fired, while the school defended him. The uproar intensified, however, and Shantel was eventually placed on administrative leave.

Now he has resigned, finding that the scrutiny and criticism from social media and elsewhere is too much to bear.

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Nick Kristof’s Moral Preening Over Gaza

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof seems like a good man, a decent human being. He reminds me of many of the dedicated liberals I went to law school and college with, always gathering signatures to ban the bomb, end a war, fight pollution, cure cancer, save whales, get universal employment…you know the list. These are the people who tear up when they hear “Imagine.” They were classic liberals before the ethics rot of progressivism, and that’s Kristof too.

Today he issued a characteristic Kristof primal scream about the carnage in Gaza, and if there was ever a “Think of the children!” lament, this is it.

It is the fourth such column by Kristof since the Hamas attack, having earlier submitted “I’m Crying for All the Victims That Are Going to Suffer”, “We Are Overpaying the Price for a Sin We Didn’t Commit“, “We Must Not Kill Gazan Children to Try to Protect Israel’s Children.” The beating and bleeding heart of “What Can We Possibly Say to the Children of Gaza?” or, in another format, We Can’t Justify This Much Suffering, is in these sentences…

Over the years, I’ve covered many bloody wars and written scathingly about how governments in Russia, Sudan and Syria recklessly bombed civilians. This time, it’s different… as a taxpayer, I’m helping to pay for the bombs.

Gaza is also different from Syria and Ukraine, of course, in that Israel did not start this war. Instead, Israel was brutally attacked by Hamas in a rampage of murder, torture and rape. Any government would have struck back, and Hamas maximized the suffering of civilians by using them as human shields.

Yet military response is not a binary choice; it exists on a continuum. Israel, traumatized by the attack it suffered, elected to retaliate with 2,000-pound bombs, destroy entire neighborhoods and allow only a trickle of aid into the territory, which is now teetering on the brink of famine. The upshot is that this does not feel like a war on Hamas but rather a war on Gazans.

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“Indictment: The McMartin Trial,” An Ethics Movie That Seems Disturbingly Relevant Today

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

How I missed the 1995 HBO film “Indictment: the McMartin Trial” for almost 30 years, I don’t know, but I did. The Oliver Stone produced legal drama about the insane events surrounding what turned out to be the start of a nation-wide freak-out over supposed Satan worship and widespread child abuse at day-care centers is unusually accurate for a docudrama. For this reason it is also infuriating. How could this have happened even once?

In August of 1983, the mother of a 2-year-old boy phoned the Manhattan Beach (California) Police Dept. claiming that her son had been sexually abused at the family-run McMartin Pre-School. That accusation prompted a series of sensational and inflammatory reports from an unscrupulous broadcast journalist (or “journalist,” for short) at WABC-TV. It also prompted the police to contact other parents with children at the school to ask if their children had been molested. Those children were, in turn, interviewed by a crusading social worker named Kee MacFarlane, who used controversial techniques to persuade the young children that they had seen and experienced terrible things, escalating from sexual abuse to having to witness ritual rapes and human sacrifices. (This was one of the seminal cases in the psychiatry profession’s “implanted memories” scandal.)

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More Evidence California Doesn’t Get That First Amendment Thingy…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

It’s not the only one, but still…

Assembly Bill 1831, introduced by California Assemblyman Marc Berman (D–Palo Alto) this month, would expand the state’s definition of child pornography to include “representations of real or fictitious persons generated through use of artificially intelligent software or computer-generated means, who are, or who a reasonable person would regard as being, real persons under 18 years of age, engaging in or simulating sexual conduct.”

Does Berman comprehend why the possession of child pornography is a crime in the first place? Clearly not. Somebody please explain to him that the criminal element in child porn is the abuse of living children required to make it. The theory, which I have always considered something of a stretch but can accept the ethical argument it embodies from a utilitarian perspective, is that those who purchase or otherwise show a proactive fondness for such “art” in effect aid, abet, encourage and make possible the continuation of the criminal abuse and trafficking of minors. It is not that such photos, films and videos cause one to commit criminal acts on children. That presumption slides down a slippery slope that would justify banning everything from Mickey Spillane novels to “The Walking Dead.”

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Incompetent Toddler’s Birthday Party Entertainer of the Month….

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

It is safe to say the illusion was shattered.

This video is all over the web, but I couldn’t resist.

“Confronting My Biases” Meets “The Ethicist”: The Webcam Model Son

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“The Ethicist,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, was oh so sensitive answering this query from a concerned parent:

….I have just found out that my [college age] son is a “model” on a pornographic streaming service. My initial reaction was shock, revulsion and shame. But the longer I think about it, the more I wonder, is there really anything immoral or otherwise wrong about what he is doing? He does it from the privacy of his home, alone, and seems to earn a substantial amount of money. If he likes what he does, is there any reason on my part to feel alarmed, ashamed, guilty or worried?

The NYU philosophy prof essentially says that nobody is being hurt by the son’s activities, so they cannot be called “wrong.” He then explains, as I cut through the verbiage…

“If we agree that your son’s camming isn’t wrong, what explains your initial sense of revulsion? Part of your response might arise from the familiar intrafamilial squeamishness about sexual disclosures. That response, then, may have been connected not with what he was doing but with you, as his parent, knowing about it….you can also have prudential concerns. How would his prospects be affected if word got out about his webcam gig? Livestreams can be recorded and uploaded. Even if you think that erotic livestreaming is neither wrong nor shameful, it’s natural, as a parent, to worry about how others might react…There’s nothing hypocritical about compartmentalizing a cam gig. Pretty much all cultures — and subcultures — have ideas about modesty, privacy and discretion, and so understandings about the contexts where erotic display or simply nudity is appropriate.”

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Friday Forum Open For Business…

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Things are getting ugly out there. My favorite story that I haven’t written about yet is the New York City school that has kicked out the students so it can house illegal immigrants. The kids will he schooling over Zoom—and we all know how well that works. Guess how the MSM is reporting it, if it is reporting it at all? Media Matters called the play: “Right-wing media melt down over NYC using a public high school to shelter migrants overnight ” during a winter storm. “Republicans pounce!”

Oh…that’s lovely “Emily Pellegrini” above, the sensational digital model created with the assistance on an AI program. After just four months on Instagram, she has nearly 150,000 fans and is well on her way to being a web influencer. I think Natalie Portman should sue, especially since Emily may be a better actress than she is.

But I digress. See if you can find some of the beauty in ethics today.

Three Ethics Failures Almost Kill a 12-Year-Old and Make a Seven-Year-Old A Killer

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

My son, a gun-lover from an early age, collected airsoft gun replicas. They are very realistic, though they shoot plastic pellets, not bullets, except for their orange tips. Once I was approaching our house at night after walking the dog and found police surrounding our back-up car. A neighbor had reported someone appearing to hide guns in the back seat. After I explained that the “guns” were toys, my son gave the police their introduction to airsoft, showing off his whole collection. They were impressed.

In Monroe County Georgia, a seven-year-old picked up a real revolver thinking it was an airsoft replica, and shot his 12-year-old sister. Fortunately she was wounded but not killed, and a greater tragedy was averted. The pro-Second Amendment website “Bearing Arms” astutely identifies the two breaches in gun safety that led to the episode:

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Will Someone Please Explain To Me Why A School Board Would Settle This Case?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The settlement was for the defendant school board to pay the grand total of $101 toformer student Brielle Penkoski three years after she was sent home from the Livingston Academy public high school (in Tennessee) for wearing the shirt above. Not surprisingly, the mainstream media hasn’t carried this story, as damages that tiny are considered symbolic at best. However, the fact that the defendant paid at all is symbolic, and from my viewpoint, it symbolizes a misreading of the First Amendment.

Yeah, yeah, the settlement came with the typical boilerplate language stating that the result comes “without acknowledgement of wrongdoing on the part of any party or the agents or employees of any party, which wrongdoing is expressly denied.” But Christian Right publications and websites are cheering the result—the school board will also pay the plaintiff’s attorney’s fees and costs—as vindication.

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