Childhood and children

Ethics Quiz: The Children’s Fake Tattoos

/ Jack Marshall / 54 Comments

This story comes to Ethics Alarms from New Zealand, but if it’s there now, it will be here eventually.

New Zealand-based tattoo artist, Benjamin Lloyd, specializes in realistic airbrushed tattoos for children. They look like an actual tattoos, though they are only spray painted on.

The average age of his human canvases is six.

“The kids are so amazed. As soon as they get the tattoo it boosts their confidence,” Lloyd says. “The only bad thing is that they don’t want to take a shower afterward.”

Is that really “the only bad thing?”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is it responsible for parents to do this to their children?

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From The “Res Ipsa Loquitur” Files: How Unethical Is This?

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

I count three distinct ethics fouls, but there may be more. For example, is it ethical to have children if you’re this stupid?

___________________

Source: Not the Bee.

How Long Will Women, Parents And Feminists Tolerate This? [Photo Added]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I don’t understand the persistence of such a blatantly unethical situation at all. It is the apotheosis of “It isn’t what it is.” Any group, movement, elected official or individual who approves of such an obvious injustice should be branded as untrustworthy, whether it be due to intellectual deficiencies, dishonesty, delusion or cowardice.

Ricci Tres, a 29-year-old transgender woman, defeated 13-year-old Shiloh Catori, to win the $500 top prize in a women’s division of New York City street skateboarding competition. The real girl got $250. Four of the six finalists were under the age of 17, with the youngest being 10-year-old Juri Iikura, who came in fifth. Tres was the oldest contestant. Tres had previously failed to qualify for the Women’s Street USA Skateboarding National Championships in a bid to qualify for  the Olympics, but was rejected because of an excess of testosterone, according to The Daily Mail. Obviously, Tres is the victim of transphobia.

So she decided to beat some little girls and pick up an easy 500 bucks. It should cover shaving costs. Continue reading →

I Lost On This Issue, But I Was Right

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The New York Times tells us today, “Psychosis, Addiction, Chronic Vomiting: As Weed Becomes More Potent, Teens Are Getting Sick.”

Gee.

Who could have predicted such a thing?

Some of the more intense discussions on Ethics Alarms, primarily with libertarians, arose from the unshakable position here that the government’s capitulation to marijuana legalization efforts would accomplish nothing but short and long-term damage to vulnerable populations, the young, and the nation generally. I saw the writing on the cultural wall long ago, when arrogant elites in entertainment, politics, journalism and other spheres declared pot “cool,” and my college associates began seeking to sit around bleary-eyed and moronic to actually having interesting discussions and doing things.

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Ethics Hero: FINA (The International Swimming Federation)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Now do cycling, weightlifting, wrestling and running.

The world governing body for swimming voted to bar transgender women from the highest levels of women’s international competition, bringing expertise, authority and common sense to a debate that had been distorted by the Mad Left’s inexplicable commitment to radical transexual ideology.

FINA administers international competitions in water sports, and now definitively prohibits transgender women from competing unless they began medical treatments to suppress production of testosterone before going through one of the early stages of puberty, or by age 12, whichever occurred later. This is now one of the strictest rules against transgender participation in international sports, and with any luck and some courage elsewhere, it will have the necessary effect on other sports as well. Going through male puberty gives transgender women a massive physical advantage over most athletes born female, as the pool exploits of University of Pennsylvania’s unethical swimming champion Lia Thomas made obvious. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Flaviane Carvalho

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I love this story, and not just because it supports several Ethics Alarms principles, like the duty to confront, the duty to rescue, and the duty to fix the problem.

In Orlando on January 1, 2021, Mrs. Potato restaurant employee Flaviane Carvalho noticed that a young boy was sitting secluded from his parents and a a young girl. Carvalho said the boy was wearing a mask and hoodie as he sat at the table along with two adults and a young girl. She also noticed that he had a scratch in between in his eyebrows and wasn’t eating, even though food had been brought to the table. She asked the table if their food and drinks were all right, and when the one of the adults replied that the boy would eat his dinner at home, Carvalho said she began to think something was seriously wrong.

She did not decide to “minding her own business,” but instead decided that as a proactive and ethical member of society, this was her business. Carvalho stood behind the boy’s parents and held up a note asking the boy if he was OK. When the 11-year-old shook his head, she wrote a second note asking, “Do you need help?”  This time, the boy nodded yes. Carvalho called her boss and then called 911.

Police arrived and questioned the child, who told detectives he had suffered abuse at the hands of his stepfather, identified as Timothy Lee Wilson II.  Wilson was arrested at the restaurant, and the boy’s mother, Kristen Swann, was taken into custody on later that week after the boy made additional disclosures of alleged abuse.

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Good. Now Do Female Gymnasts, Swimmers, Child Models And Actors

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The international governing body for figure skating, the International Skating Union, announced yesterday that it will gradually raise the minimum age for Olympic-level competition from 15 to 17.  Thus no skaters younger than 17 will be allowed to compete in the 2026 Milano Cortino Games.

The body suddenly figured out that there  young athletes competing in sports at a high level faced unacceptable risks, not merely physical injuries due to their immature physiques, but also “psychological injuries” which can have devastating effects on their mental, cognitive, and emotional health in the short and long term. Of course, they knew this before, and didn’t care as long as child champions brought revenue and visibility. But the ugly scandal resulting from Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva’s positive doping test at the last Winter Olympic Games in the Nation That Shall Not Be Named mandated a Barn Door Fallacy reaction. Valieva was given a child’s pass that allowed her to compete unfairly against adults, became the center of controversy, and crumbled under the criticism and scrutiny. Ethics Alarms discussed the matter here and elsewhere.
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Ethics Quote Of The Month: Kim Phuc Phan Thi

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“I thought to myself, “I am a little girl. I am naked. Why did he take that picture? Why didn’t my parents protect me? Why did he print that photo? Why was I the only kid naked while my brothers and cousins in the photo had their clothes on?” I felt ugly and ashamed.”

—-Kim Phuc Phan Thi, the now 59 year-old woman (above). She was the screaming  9-year-old North Vietnamese girl shown in “The Terror of War”, the famous photograph by AP photographer Nick Uts showing her running naked and burned down a road after napalm was dropped on the village of Trảng Bàng in 1972.

I always  uncomfortable with that photograph from the moment I saw it, and thought it was cruel and unethical. Would the AP have published a similar photograph of a white American girl? I don’t know, but I don’t trust the Associated Press (or any press, at this point). It won Ut a Pulitzer Prize and helped energize the anti-Vietnam war effort in the U.S., but the photo (shown in the underlined link above) fails two basic ethics systems: Reciprocity, as in the Golden Rule, and Kant’s Categorical Imperative, which forbids using another human being as a means to an end. Can it be justified under Utilitarian principles, as a balancing of outcomes? Was the benefit of publishing the photo sufficient to make it ethical conduct, despite the harm it would do to an innocent child?

 Not on my scorecard.

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If The Last Post (About Emerson College Promoting Anti-White Racism) Bothered You, Samuel L. Jackson Has A Suggestion Before You Read This One…[UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

In Illinois, Oak Park and River Forest High School administrators will now require teachers to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students. Let me repeat that…

Oak Park and River Forest High School administrators will now require teachers to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students.

This is called “Transformative Education Professional Development & Grading.” It’s transformative, all right. It is a great way to transform black students into societal cripples who cannot master what many behavioral scientists believe are the most crucial skills for life success, because they are given an institutional pass.

This ridiculous and divisive concept is, of course, yet another effort to eliminate persistent discrepancies between racial groups by pretending that they are caused by racism, and lowering standards so everyone has an equally low bar to clear.  OPRF will order its teachers to exclude from their grading assessments variables it says disproportionately hurt the grades of black students, like for missing class, misbehaving in school or failing to turn in  assignments. This will, you know—don’t they know?—set up black students to skip work, misbehave in other settings, and fail to complete their assigned jobs and tasks. Continue reading →

California Makes Its Values Depressingly Clear: Minority Privilege Over Children’s Lives

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Forget it, Jake, it’s California Town.

Two days after the Uvalde shooting, as all of California Democrats, progressives and anti-gun zealots were metaphorically screaming “Murderers!” at those who aren’t willing to gut the Second Amendment to pretend that various restrictions would stop evil lunatics like Ramos, the California State Senate voted to end a legal requirement that students who threaten violence against school officials be reported.

The old law mandated that whenever a school official was “attacked, assaulted, or physically threatened by any pupil,” staff must “promptly report the incident to specified law enforcement authorities.”

Gone. So, for example, the teacher in that screenshot above, taken from a video of an in-class assault, would not be obligated to report it. How odd that the state would eliminate such a restriction as the question rages over how so many people aware that the Uvalde shooter was an anti-social, gun-obsessed menace never alerted authorities. What could possibly be California’s thinking?

Oh, come on. It’s easy! I guessed—that proves it’s easy. The ACLU’s statement on why it supports the repeal tells all:

Decades of research show the long-term harm to young people of even minimal contact with the juvenile or criminal legal systems. Once students make contact with law enforcement, they are less likely to graduate high school and more likely to wind up in jail or prison. These harms fall disproportionately on students from marginalized groups: Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students, as well as students with disabilities, are disproportionately referred to law enforcement, cited, and arrested.

Taking the photo above as an example, that student is merely the victim of centuries of systemic racism, and justifiably enraged by a racist white supremacist culture. Reporting him just compounds the injustice.

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