This is such a horrible Christmas story that even my fecund imagination couldn’t devise an appropriate graphic for it, yet attention should be paid.
On December 23 in Cave Spring, Arkansas, a family’s dog attacked and killed a four-day old infant girl. The dog bit the baby’s head, fatally injuring the infant’s skull. When I read the story, my second thought after the obvious first one was “Now watch: this will be called another pit bull attack.” Amazingly, it wasn’t: the dog was a Siberian Husky. That didn’t stop the news media from attaching alleged pit bull horror stories to this one, like the attack by two Staffordshire terriers, one of several breeds called pit bulls, that killed two small children and injured their mother in October. I did learn something from the various articles: 32% of all fatalities from dog bites in the U.S. are children 4 years-old and under. Continue reading →
Jeremiah Johnson, a 12-year-old running back from Fort Worth, Texas, is already 5-foot-11 and weighs 198 pounds. He has facial hair (the tattoo is fake—he just wanted to look older), and all of his photos look photoshopped, but that’s a real child in that picture.
Dallas Dragons Elite Academy (DEA) team won the 2022 Youth National Championships in Miami—big surprise there—and he was selected as the Most Valuable Player in the division, which is even less of a surprise.
The ethics conundrum is: what do you do about a mutant like Jeremiah?
As it was his job,to keep schools safe from all forms of harm, “the clowns who continually disrupt our classrooms, our assemblies, with their bad behavior” had to change, Ivey said, and he pledges to be active in executing that change:
“Our teachers are distracted, they can’t do their jobs anymore, they’re spending more time dealing with children disrupting their class than they are in teaching those that came there to learn….As a result, we are losing teachers in mass order. Teachers that can no longer take having their class disrupted by these clowns. We are losing those that came here to passionately teach our students, that are passionate about teaching others.”
Ivey pointed to “the failure of school discipline policy” in Brevard County allowing a minority of students to repeatedly engage in class violence, disrupting lessons while attacking teachers physically and verbally. The sheriff said that teachers and principals were “handcuffed” regarding discipline, with excessive bureaucratic obstacles rendering the process to request disciplinary action slow, burdensome and ineffective. Continue reading →
And now an important word from Mrs. Q that I wish could be circulated and read far and wide, on the post, A Language Ethics Quiz: Regarding “Groomer.” (I’ve just got to find a way to get more readers here. I’m sorry, Mrs. Q. You deserve better.)
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Gays Against Groomers is not a conservative group at all. The people in GAG are mostly gay or trans and stand against sexually inappropriate indoctrination of youth as well as against modifying the bodies of kids in the name of gender theory. This group has been denied services from several companies including payment processing and merchandise makers.
GAG’s crime, of course, isn’t that they’re “conservative” but that these renegade gays and trans citizens aren’t going along. In the world of progressivism, not knowing your place as a minority is even worse than being conservative. This is why people call GAG an “anti-gay transphobic hate group”— which of course makes no dang sense.
The Department of Justice has used the word Groomer for years. I read some of the DOJ’s reports on school grooming by teachers and other staff. This has been an unsaid issue for decades. The difference now is that the grooming is more diffuse in schools and done by woke staff who don’t see any issues down the road with exposing kids, including LGBT kids, to sex and gender identity concepts that are not age appropriate and that should be discussed with parents first.
Yes, this is grooming because such exposure seeks to eliminate innocence and circumvent parental moral teaching.
Conservatives have been using the word “groomer” this year to describe advocates of teaching school children (as young as third grade in some cases) about LGTBQ sexual practices and relationships, while presenting them in a positive light. Targets of the word have ranged from defiant LGTBQ teachers exposed by The Libs of TikTok, to libraries promoting drag readings for kids, to the advocates for “gender-affirming therapy” for teens and younger without parental approval, to Disney’s recent obsession with injecting gay sexual issues into its films and TV offerings.
R.L. Stoller objects. He says he is a “child liberation theologian” (?), and a child and survivor advocate with “a Masters in Child Protection”—okey-dokey, let’s take that as genuine authority arguendo. He objects to the use of “groomer” in the current trend, writing in part,
For some reason I’ve been getting accounts of a lot of overseas ethics controversies of late, like the German hospital patient who shut off her roommate’s oxygen machine because it was “too noisy.” The source of this ethics quiz is the UK, where a frustrated mother argues on a parenting site that it was selfish for a childless colleague to compete with her for a day off on Christmas, because she was a mother.
“Ok I feel terrible about this,” the indignant mom wrote in a thread on UK-based parenting site Mumsnet, as she explained that their manager told the two women to work out their conflict themselves, and let him know their solution. Continue reading →
The photo above was taken in a Plains state elementary school in the early 1950s, and depicts a cow-milking exercise. It is, obviously, one of those “Oops!” unfortunate—but funny!—shots that ended up in a local newspaper somewhere because nobody noticed the problem until it was too late.
A Facebook friend posted it on the social media platform for “a chuckle”, and it was clear that the reaction was…restrained.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Dayis tougher than it may seem…
Is posting that photo unethical, as it will be legitimately offensive to some, or is it innocently funny, and only objectionable to the political correctness scolds?
I thought it was funny when I saw it. I also thought my friend would get a fair amount of flack. But the more I think about the factors involved, the more uncertain I am of the answer to the quiz question…
Is posting the photo in a public forum a Golden Rule breach? Obviously the photo embarrasses the teacher who, as my freind wrote, “probably wishes she had been standing for the photo.” My friend, however, was a professional performer, in a field where being able to laugh at moments that would humiliate normal people is essential.
Based on the period of the photo, it is certain that the teacher by now must be either dead or too old to care about an old newspaper clipping. Does that take the Golden Rule off the table.
It is more likely that the children shown might be embarrassed by the photo, or were when it was originally published. Does that matter? Was showing it more unethical then than now, when parents (unethically, even though “everybody does it”) post videos of their children in embarrassing (but funny!) situations constantly?
Some people thought the photo was very funny, and appreciated seeing it. It brightened their day! Is that enough to make showing the picture ethical? What formula should we use to determine whether utilitarian analysis justifies an action where the benefits are tangible and the “harm” is ephemeral? If the photo brightened one viewer’s day, isn’t that enough?
One critic of the photo sniffed, “Photoshopped!” If so, and I note that there is always someone who will try to discredit any photo they object to as photoshopped whether it was or not, does it matter to the question at hand. If it’s funny, it’s funny. Or, since it is theoretically funnier if genuine, does being photoshopped change the utilitarian analysis? Should it?
Can showing the photo be justified as a social statement and attempt at a course correction, echoing the common lament that the culture is becoming humor adverse thanks to woke-poisoning, and it is a serious problem?
The New York Times has an article about the competition to create a new Christmas music standard, or at least a hit song for streaming. The piece’s “Rules of the Game:
No. 1: The public prefers the old classics, and isn’t too interested in new songs.
No. 2: Singers shouldn’t wander too far from the melody.
No. 3: “You can’t be too corny at Christmas. You totally get a free pass.”
Corny is fine, but what about creepy?
D. Dark Christmas Songs
1. Traditional Carols
The problem with “The Carol of the Bells” isn’t the lyrics, it’s the music. The thing is affirmatively creepy; my mother hated it, and compared the tune to “The Hall of the Mountain King.” No other Christmas music has been so frequently used darkly. It came, then, as no surprise when the TV horror mini-series “Nos4A2,” based on a novel by Stephen King’s son, used the carol as its theme music. The show is the tale of a damned man who kidnaps children and takes them to “Christmasland” where they are kids forever, and also become little vampires. The music, which is by a Ukrainian composer, is unquestionably ominous. Why it has remained in the Christmas canon is a mystery to me.
Another carol in a minor key is “We Three Kings,” which contains this cheerful lyric in Verse 4, sung by Balthazar:
Myrrh is mine; its bitter perfume Breathes a life of gathering gloom;— Sorrowing, sighing, Bleeding, dying, Sealed in the stone-cold tomb
Merry Christmas!
And why would you give that stuff to a baby?
I’m going to call “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” a traditional carol since its lyrics are more than a century old. It’s not creepy, but it is a sad song, and sadder still when one knows its origins.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem titled “Christmas Bells” on Christmas Day, December 25, 1863. He was in despair: his son had been wounded fighting for the Union the month before, and the poet feared he would die. The author of “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “Evangeline” and other famous poems also was still mourning his second wife, who had died horribly in a fire two years earlier. He was not in a good state of mind when he wrote,
…unless, of course, we should have compassion and empathy for unapologetic, self-destructive idiots like Anaya Peterson.
Peterson is a mother of five and—KABOOM!—a law student, but nonetheless thought it would be a good idea to get her eyes tattooed. After all, Australian model Amber Luke tattooed her eyes a vivid blue and only went blind for three weeks! That was good enough for Peterson, whose seven-year-old daughter cautioned her that the procedure was too risky. “What if you go blind?” the kid asked? Oh pshaw, Mom answered; adults know best.
Now it looks as if Mother may go blind after all. “I don’t have 20/20 vision anymore. From a distance, I can’t see features on faces,” Peterson told the media. “If I didn’t have my eyeballs tattooed, I wouldn’t be having this problem. Even today I woke up with more floaters in my eyes. And that is dangerous.” Continue reading →
In a seventh grade English class at St. Charles Borromeo Catholic School in Port Charlotte, Florida, the teacher was presenting Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer,” using an uncensored version, which is to say, “Tom Sawyer.” The classic novel, like its larger, more ambitious cousin “Huckleberry Finn,” uses the now taboo “n-word” in a society today that should be too sophisticated and wise by now not to know that declaring words taboo is ethically and intellectually indefensible. One African-American community website’s news report on the incident states, “Anyone who has read an unedited version of those books know how racially insensitive they were.” Well:
Any one who has only read an “unedited”, meaning bowldlerized, version of “Tom Sawyer” hasn’t read “Tom Sawyer,” and
Great literature isn’t supposed to be “racially sensitive”; it’s supposed to be enlightening.
The issue of watering down language that some may find offensive in literature is well-considered in this essay.
As described in the letter above, when members of the class read the book out loud and the word “nigger” was uttered, the students began “acting up,” laughing, making comments, and generally acting like undisciplined 7th graders, which they were. When the teacher could not calm them down, she improvised a creative but risky solution: having the children repeat the word over and over again. The idea, obviously (though not sufficiently obvious for any of the media reports to figure out) was to rob the “taboo” word of power by repetition. It’s an old linguistic trick that kids should be familiar with (i know I was): when any word is repeated enough, it becomes just a sound, which is all any word is. (This device becomes the climax of the excellent horror film “Pontypool,” in which something causes the English language to become deadly, destroying everyone’s brains.) Continue reading →
Ethics Alarms 
Gays Against Groomers is not a conservative group at all. The people in GAG are mostly gay or trans and stand against sexually inappropriate indoctrination of youth as well as against modifying the bodies of kids in the name of gender theory. This group has been denied services from several companies including payment processing and merchandise makers.
GAG’s crime, of course, isn’t that they’re “conservative” but that these renegade gays and trans citizens aren’t going along. In the world of progressivism, not knowing your place as a minority is even worse than being conservative. This is why people call GAG an “anti-gay transphobic hate group”— which of course makes no dang sense.
The Department of Justice has used the word Groomer for years. I read some of the DOJ’s reports on school grooming by teachers and other staff. This has been an unsaid issue for decades. The difference now is that the grooming is more diffuse in schools and done by woke staff who don’t see any issues down the road with exposing kids, including LGBT kids, to sex and gender identity concepts that are not age appropriate and that should be discussed with parents first.
Yes, this is grooming because such exposure seeks to eliminate innocence and circumvent parental moral teaching.
Continue reading →