Childhood and children

Ethics Villains: Carron J. Phillips And The Woke Activism Website That Employs Him [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This is what Woke World has become in the Age of the Great Stupid, as the George Floyd Ethics Train Wreck continues to run amuck. It is, essentially, a race-baiting bully. (Among other revolting things.)

Carron J. Phillips, a writer for the recently resurrected website Deadspin, which wasn’t reliable in its original form as an internet tabloid, decided to use this photo of a young Kansas City Chiefs fan sitting in the stands…

…to justify the headline,

The “native headdress” complaint ignored the fact that the NFL team’s name is “The Chiefs” and that fans have been showing their support like this…

…for decades. And, of course, that the target of Phillips and Deadspin is a little boy who we now know was 5-years-old. But wait! There’s more! After Carron posted that photo on X with a link to his despicable article, X-users responded with this…

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 4: People Who Are Still Wearing Masks

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I can say right up front that I’m not getting over this one.

I am a bit less hostile if the mask-wearer is elderly, as I can imagine that they might be seriously immuno-compromised. But when I see a family with young children and they are all masked, I can only think “child abuse” and “morons.” Indeed, I am tempted to ask them what the hell they think they are doing.

Today, in Northern Virginia, I still see teens walking alone outside wearing masks. I still see clerks at my CVS wearing masks, often working side-by-side with maskless co-workers. Most of the masks I’m seeing now are not the medical-grade masks that might have some small value in preventing infection: they are primarily plain old cloth masks or paper masks, as in “useless.”

The mask-wearers are, I am certain, almost 100% woke, virtue-signaling knee-jerk progressives who would happily elect Kamala Harris as President if given the chance. Wearing the things is a political statement as much as anything else. I perceive the masked as gullible to government propaganda and media scare-mongering for political advantage. I view them as fearful, lazy and apathetic individuals who have completely rejected core American character traits, like risk-taking, autonomy and independence.

Perhaps most important of all, I view the wearing of masks now as a deliberate signal that the individual does not want to interact with me, the community or society. I can’t read their expressions; when they talk, it is muffled and I have trouble hearing them. For me, they might as well be wearing paper bags over their heads.

I believe the masked among us are eroding the vital inter-relationships, human contact and communication that makes society enjoyable and productive.

No, I’m not getting over this bias.

I’m not even sure it is a bias.

It Appears That SCOTUS’s Dobbs Decision Saved 30,000 Lives So Far

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

How does one make an ethics case that this is a bad thing?

A new study by economists at Georgia Tech and Middlebury College, published by the nonprofit Institute of Labor Economic, indicates that in states with significant limits on abortions or outright bans, births have increased. One of the study’s researchers, Caitlin Myers, went on NPR’s “All Things Considered” to discuss the results as if they were describing the Johnstown flood.

I found this genuinely mind-boggling. The exchange demonstrates how ethics rot can set in so decisively that even the most hard-wired and socially beneficial ethics alarms don’t work at all. Abortion supporters are so vehement in their love of the [procedure that prematurely ends nascent life in the womb that they are apparently willing to ignore all other issues in order to (try to follow, now…) punish Republicans who were responsible for getting a President elected who appointed Justices to the Supreme Court who were finally willing to over-rule a decision, Roe v. Wade, that most legal scholars, even those who defend abortion, conceded was poorly reasoned and wrongly decided.

Myers says at the end of the interview,

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Comment Of The Day: “What Do You Conclude From This Woman’s Head-Exploding Rant?”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Do you know what I am thankful for? I’m thankful for the engaged, wise,, articulate and loyal group of commenters Ethics Alarms has. Thank-you. You all make every day an adventure and a revelation. And you make me laugh.

For a vivid example, I awoke this morning to this Comment of the Day from Rob Thompson, who doesn’t weigh in here often—the last time was four years ago—but makes his contributions count. Here are his thoughts on this the likely roots of this horrifying and annoying video and its likely roots, which I apologize for having to post again but the discussion can’t be fully appreciated without it.

This is Robert Thompson’s Comment of the Day on the post, “What Do You Conclude From This Woman’s Head-Exploding Rant?”…and have a wonderful, warm Thanksgiving, everyone.

***

Her video typifies what we see every day. Many high school students follow this mentality of “I wasn’t taught this” placing the onus on the educational system. And while this has merit, it isn’t the only problem.

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The Rest Of The Story: The Mother Of That Six-Year-Old Who Shot His Teacher Is In Prison. GOOD!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

But some conservative pundits have a problem with that.

Ethics Alarms covered the revolting tale of the Newport News, Virginia second-grader who shot his teacher in a January post. The position here is and has always been that when children get their hands on guns and shoot anyone, including themselves, parents who own the guns should be held strictly responsible, and should go to jail. Amusingly, some commenters here thought I was jumping to conclusions assuming that parents were at fault in the Newport News case. “What happened to waiting for facts before making a judgement?” caviled one. MIA Ethics Alarms gadfly P.M. Lawrence (where have you been, P.M.?) offered several unlikely scenarios that didn’t involve parental misconduct. I was confident that Occam’s Razor applied, and that this was res ipsa loquitor: if a second grader shoots his teacher, the parents of that second grader are almost certainly at fault.

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Fairfax County Public Schools Join The Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck In Damning Fashion

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Fairfax County, just a short trip from my home in Alexandria, Virginia, is supposed to be one of the elite public school systems in America. Consider that, as you ponder this story.

Above is a photo taken of two Fairfax High School students during a meeting of the county’s Langley High School Muslim Students Association, in which they hold up a crude drawing in which the stars on the American flag are replaced with swastikas, and the message “Free Palestine!” is written in between the squiggly stripes. This took place on school property, in a sanctioned extra-curricular activity. [Supplementary questions I’d like to see answered: 1) Why are there religion-segregated activities in a high school? Isn’t allowing that inherently divisive? 2) Where is the faculty advisor?] An Asian American student leaked the photo to the public on social media, thus allowing the community to see what a bang-up job Langley was doing educating its young charges. The inflammatory image inspired pro-Palestine ( that is, pro-Hamas) students to stage a “walkout” on November 10, as students chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Rep. Tlaib’s lie to the contrary, that slogan is a call for Israel to be wiped off the map.

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The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Yeah, Thanks Lincoln Center, But I Think I’ll Skip “Jungle Book Reimagined”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Surely there are still some live theater production that are not arm-twusting agitprop and woke propaganda. Surely.

The production is described on the Lincoln Center website as a “rethinking of the Rudyard Kipling classic ‘The Jungle Book'” that “updates the original’s colonizer-centric perspective.” More specifically, the New York Times review tells us,

“Instead of a boy raised by wolves, Mowgli is a refugee girl separated from her family as sea levels surge. She is adopted by animals who have formed a peaceable kingdom in a city that humans have left behind. Many familiar characters appear, slightly altered. Baloo the bear is now a bear who was forced to dance by humans before escaping the humiliation. The Bandar-log monkeys are now former lab specimens, still traumatized by being experimented on but longing to replace their former masters. Kaa the python is dangerous and hypnotizing but also hung up on memories of captivity in a zoo.”

Gee-what-fun. Can a Disney version be far behind?

The New York Times Opinion Editor Sympathizes With This Formula For Analyzing The Issues In the Hamas-Israel War: Emotion, Emotion, Emotion

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

And ignore facts, history common sense and reality. Like so much of the Hamas-Israel Ethics Trian Wreck, this car has value unrelated to the war itself. Now we can understand why the Times op-eds are the way they are.

The Times just published a column by a recent edition to its stable of extreme woke pundits. Lydia Polgreen opines, in “This Photograph Demands an Answer,” that the news media should bombard the public with photographs that will flood readers’ minds with emotion, making rational, objective analysis difficult or impossible.

Many people may want to look away, to see the world as they prefer to see it. But what should we see when we see war? What should war demand all of us to see and understand? Given my experience in war zones, it is a rare thing for a violent image to stop me in my tracks. But I believe that this is an image that demands to be seen….And so I ask you to look at these children. They are not asleep. They are dead. They will not be part of the future. But know this: The children in the morgue photo could be any children. They could be Sudanese children caught in the crossfire between two feuding generals in Khartoum. They could be Syrian children crushed under Bashar al-Assad’s bombs. They could be Turkish children who died in their beds when a shoddily constructed apartment block collapsed upon them in an earthquake. They could be Ukrainian children slain by Russian shells. They could be Israeli children slaughtered in a kibbutz by Hamas. They could be American schoolchildren gunned down in a mass shooting. These children are ours.

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Today’s Unethical NYT Headline: “Democrats, No Longer Squeamish on Abortion, Lean Into Searing Personal Ads”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

What an infuriating, despicable headline, though the story is equally bad. If abortion supporters—yes, it’s the Democratic Party exploiting the issue—weren’t “squeamish” about what they so indignantly and self-righteously support they wouldn’t have spent the past 70 years trying to figure out ways to avoid directly admitting what they are advocating. “Baby? What baby?”

The argument for abortion, that is, terminating a developing unique human life distinct from that of its mother before it can grow to be born and go on to experience life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, has been, and still is, deliberately clouded by misleadng rhetoric about “choice” and “reproductive care,” the current dodge. Wait, how is that other human life in the equation assisted with his or her “reproduction”? Is it “care” to have that life’s own chances of reproducing taken away from it?

And what choice does the victim of an abortion have?

If Democrats weren’t “squeamish” about having to deal with those questions, they wouldn’t be trying (and, tragically, thanks to the abysmal level of attention, critical thought and ethical competence of the average American, largely succeeding) to avoid them.

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Comment Of The Day: Regarding The Ohio Right To Abortion Amendment [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

In HBO’s “Six Feet Under,” a character in the midst of trying to persuade his fiance to abort their unplanned pregnancy is visited in a nightmare by his three previous aborted offspring at the age they would have been if they had been permitted to live…

I have another abortion-related post gnawing on the inside of my skull, but just as I was about to get the thing down in print, I remembered Ryan Harkin’s deft comment from two days ago, responding to Here’s Johnny’s argument that “given that we concede to government the right, in limited circumstances, to end innocent human life when a greater good is perceived (by some), why cannot we cede that right to women, in limited circumstances when a greater good is perceived?“ I had been prepared to point out that Kant (as usual, dismissing special circumstances) holds that it is never ethically acceptable to sacrifice a life “for the greater good,” and that the aborted human life would certainly have a different perspective on that conclusion. Ryan Harkins, however, had more and better to say, and did, in this Comment of the Day on “Regarding the Ohio Right to Abortion Amendment”:

[Notice of Correction: For some reason, I attributed this COTD to Null Pointer, who promptly alerted me to the mistake. My apologies to Ryan.]

***

In general, the answer to this is that government and individuals have different roles. Government exists to set the boundaries, enforce the boundaries, and exact penalties for the failure to comply with those boundaries regarding interpersonal interaction. Individuals cede that responsibility to the government so that there is an agreed upon entity to handle those interpersonal disputes, for otherwise everything becomes vigilante justice. Whoever is stronger wins.

The view of government we have is that because the strong and the powerful can impinge on the rights of weaker individuals, government intervenes to protect the rights of the weak. I know there are other forms of government out there, ones that favor the strong and crush the weak, or favor the clan at the expense of outsiders, and so on. But here we formed a government of the people, by the people, for the people, with the thought that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, which include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We profess that the government exists to ensure that the enumerated rights of the weak are protected against the strong. To turn and delegate the decision making to the individual returns the power to the strong to crush the weak as they see fit. It is anathema to what our nation stands for.

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