Comment of the Day

Comment of the Day: “Banning Thoughts, Positions and Ideas in Higher Education Is Unethical and Unconstitutional….But Is Cultural and Values Surrender the Only Alternative?”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Today became Frightening Mainstream Media Bias Saturday without my intention, so I’m going to shift gears to the other site of the massive Leftist societal and cultural manipulation, our conquered educational system. This Comment of the Day from one of EA’s resident authorities on the topic, will do quite nicely. Incidentally, I am a bit behind in my Comment of the Day posting. I’ll catch up, I promise.

In the meantime, here is Michael R.’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Banning Thoughts, Positions and Ideas in Higher Education Is Unethical and Unconstitutional….But Is Cultural and Values Surrender the Only Alternative?”…

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There is a solution, but it cannot be implemented because of the corruption of the judiciary. The state schools are clearly in violation of numerous discrimination laws and they should be held to account.

Boys are being discriminated in schools. Look at the current performance of boys vs. girls in GPA and test scores below.

Now compare this to the 1975 – 1995 figures here. This is clearly a Title IX violation.

It is claimed that 20% of elementary school teachers are male, but I haven’t seen that and I doubt you have either. The real number is probably closer to 95% female. I am pretty sure this is clear evidence of sex discrimination by the schools and needs to be remedied. The 4 elementary schools my son went to had no, zero, male employees. Not even a janitor was male. This is clearly sex discrimination and should be remedied immediately.

Surveys show that at least 65% of public schoolteachers are Democrats. In the universities, it is MUCH higher. This type of viewpoint discrimination should not be allowed in public schools and the states need to outlaw it. The problem is, if you allow Democrats to be hired and they are allowed to determine hiring, the place becomes all Democrat eventually because Democrats are a cult that puts cult loyalty before merit. The concept of merit is considered evil to them. A solution would be to exempt Republicans from the taxes that support the schools (“Here is my Republican Card. This entitles me to a 60% property tax discount and a 3% sales tax discount”) or state-paid tuition at the private school of their choice. Since the schools are partisan, only that party should be required to support the schools.

The college population has been majority female since 1973 or 1974 (depending on if you define it as 50/50 or percentage of the population. Women are currently 61% of college students. The number in many surveys is below 60%, but it has been above 60% for some time in my experience. This is a massive Title IX violation.

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Comment of the Day: On the I.C.E. Shooting Ethics Train Wreck ( “Friday Open Forum, Depicated To Major Tipton”)

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Ace EA commenter Ryan Harkins, as he often does, flags the ethics conflict in the current escalating controversy over President Trump’s mass deportations, a.k.a, “Enforcing the immigration laws after a rogue Presidency refused to do so for four years.” The point he raises is not only a valid one but an important one, not just regarding this issue but others. I’m going to append a fairly long addition to Ryan’s excellent work, but first of all, here is his Comment of the Day from “Friday Open Forum, Dedicated To Major Tipton…”:

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Here’s my concern about the situation we’re in. I would liken it to inconsistently disciplining your children. If you only irregularly discipline your child for a particular infraction, the child learns that most of the time, he can get away with that infraction. When that infraction is then punished, the child reactions disproportionately because he’s used to getting away with the infraction, and he believes that if he makes noncompliance painful enough, it will discourage further disciplinary action.

That seems to be the case we’re in with illegal immigrants. We’ve been very poor at enforcing our immigration laws, and so many said illegals and the communities around them grew complacent about the laws not being enforced. When the laws are enforced, it comes as a great shock, and the immediate reaction is to scream about how unfair it is. And to a certain extent, I do agree that it is unfair. It is unfair to cultivate the expectation that a law won’t be enforced, only to turn around and enforce it. But it is unfair because of cultivating that expectation, not because of the subsequent enforcement.

The significant problem is the whiplash effect of enforcement/non-enforcement depending upon who is in charge. We’ve run the gamut of no enforcement (even inviting in illegals), to soft enforcement, to promises of citizenship, to harsh enforcement. To anyone watching from outside the country, it is like dealing with a schizophrenic or someone suffering from multiple personality disorder. Worse, because we keep seesawing back and forth, the expectation right now is that by keeping up a defiant stance against the current administration, illegals and their allies can simply wait for the winds to change and go back to their lives as they’ve been.

I know this aspect of the situation glosses over the deliberate effort of radicals to the destabilize the nation, the outrage over the money spigots that are being closed, the efforts to import in reliable Democratic voters, and the genuine concerns over destabilizing families that had, admittedly against the law, put down roots and became productive members of their communities. But it is a serious problem that we seem to be lurching one direction, and then back the opposite way, with every swing of political power. This has been exacerbated by most policy changes coming from executive orders, which are easily undone, rather than congressional legislation, which is much harder to walk back.

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Comment of the Day: “In Which I Call Ann Althouse’s Expressed Hatred Of ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ & Raise My Hatred of the Bing Crosby-David Bowie Duet”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

In fairness, the spirit of Christmas, and because it’s just an excellent post that interprets the song in a fresh manner that I have never encountered, here is Dwayne Zechman’s rebuttal of the criticism by me and others of the popular Christmas song written by American composer Katherine Kennicott Davis in 1941. Did you know that the song was first recorded by the Trapp Family singers of “The Sound of Music” fame? That alone raises it a bit in my estimation. I also note that Dwayne, wisely does not defend the wretched lyrics in the David Bowie-Bing Crosby version. That would be impossible.

Here is Dwayne’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Comment of the Day: ‘In Which I Call Ann Althouse’s Expressed Hatred Of ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ & Raise My Hatred of the Bing Crosby-David Bowie Duet'”…

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I have to take issue with all the dunking on “The Little Drummer Boy” that I’m reading here. It’s a favorite of mine, and the reason has nothing to do with the ridiculous scenario.

The reason is that this song is a microcosmic allegory of the Christian experience.

I don’t normally speak of my faith and religious beliefs here. I’m a firm believer in the notion that Truth stands on its own; it doesn’t need the support of religion in order to be true. So this post is definitely a bit of a departure for me.

“Come, they told me.” “A newborn King to see”

This is how it begins. We learn from others about the Gospel of Jesus. We are encouraged to come along on the journey.

“Our finest gifts we bring” “to lay before the King”
“So to honor Him” “When we come”

We begin the journey and quickly learn that, to those who invited us on this journey, it’s a big deal. There are songs we may or may not have heard. There are responsive readings that we almost certainly don’t know. There are people here whose whole lives are dedicated to their faith and their church. Am I expected to do that too? What IS expected of me? What does Jesus actually want from me?

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Comment of the Day: “If A.I. Wrote a WAPO Op-Ed Piece to Set Us Up For a Take-Over By the Bots, This Is What It Would Be Like…”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Jon’s excellent comment began by marveling that the commentariate here at Ethics Alarms doesn’t seem to be vary interested in the artificial intelligence issue, which is the focus of TIME’s annual “Person of the Year” issue. See?

I immediately felt it was a Comment of the Day; now we’ll find out if this essay also inspires apathy and shrugs.

Here is Jon’s Comment of the Day on the post, “If A.I. Wrote a WAPO Op-Ed Piece to Set Us Up For a Take-Over By the Bots, This Is What It Would Be Like…”

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It’s interesting that this post has only garnered a couple of comments, and your previous AI post on the 7th didn’t get any. Not to oversell it, but AI may be the most important issue ever.  Already entry-level white collar jobs are disappearing.  I heard of a recent study that 13% of such jobs were gone, and that was published back in August. AI is being compared to the industrial revolution in terms of workforce displacement, but exponentially more disruptive since it’s taking place in the span of a few years rather than several decades. As if that’s not enough, there’s serious talk that we may be ushering in an extinction event for homo-sapiens.  On the plus side, though, my AI heavy stock portfolio is doing quite well, thank you.

My own experience with AI has been less than encouraging.  I really hadn’t made much use of it, but last week I was putting together a spreadsheet to project annual returns on some weekly stock market moves I was considering.  Creating the spreadsheet and then populating the data for about 20 stocks was going to take me the better part of an hour, and then updating the data in real time would be difficult.  It struck me that AI might do it better and more quickly than I could.

My first task was to determining which AI to use.  I figured I’d have to subscribe to one of them to get the job done decently and in a timely fashion, so I asked Google which AI was best for real-time data.  The answer both from the Google AI and various Reddit forums was that an AI model I hadn’t heard of, Perplexity, was superior when dealing with pulling information from the web in real time.  I found I could get a year-long free trial, so that’s what I went with.

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Comment of the Day: “Unethical Bank of the Month: Merrick Bank”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Diego Garcia entered an instructive description of an interaction with a bank on credit card matters that nicely illustrates a theme Ethics Alarms has been commenting on for quite a while. It is not exaggerated, because I have been enmeshed in dozens of these maddening experiences almost every month since my wife died last year. The practices are cruel, frustrating, time-consuming and hostile, and, I am convinced, often intentional. They are the product of multiple unethical conditions and practices, including incompetent management, needless technology complexity, sloth, poor hiring criteria, poor training, the public school system, lack of sufficient emphasis on English proficiency, corporate arrogance, outsourcing of jobs, inadequate staffing, and more. I also believe these systems and the factors creating them cause serious stress-related health problems among the public and even domestic and urban violence as well as mass shootings.

People have been conditioned to just shrug it all off as “how we live now.” We shouldn’t do that.

Here is Diego Garcia’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Unethical Bank of the Month: Merrick Bank”:

…I do have a recent BoA experience regarding account setups.

My sister has had a BoA credit card for something like 50 (!) years. She is very much not tech savvy, and is someone who always wants paper statements mailed to her.

On this card, she had made arrangements for her payment to be automatically drafted each month — the payment would be $150 or the statement balance, whichever was smaller. She had made this arrangement by phone as she never had set up an online account for this card. Well, a couple months ago they wrote her to say that they were cancelling this automatic payment and she would have to go online to set it back up.

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A.I.Comment of the Day: Grok on “No, Calling Out Somali-Americans For Their Unethical Conduct Isn’t ‘Racist’”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I hope this doesn’t become a habit, but Willem Reese quized AI bot “Grok,” Ann Althouse’s pal, on the matter at issue. His question: Do immigrants from some cultures, like Somalis, have relatively lower compatibility with American mores? How can large groups, like 80 people, get together to scam hundreds of millions of $?

Because the exchange between one of Ethics Alarms 5 regular commenters and the AI raises several ethical issues, including some regarding artificial intelligence, I feel the answer is worth pondering. Grok replied,

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Comment of the Day: “No, Calling Out Somali-Americans For Their Unethical Conduct Isn’t ‘Racist’”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The New York Times has a relatively fair explication of the astounding Somali scam in Minnesota, a perfect storm of the state allowing a “Somali diaspora” to become established there, too many products of a terrible culture, an intellectually lazy, woke culture in Minnsesota presided over by a knucklehead governor (Tim Walz, naturally), and an irresponsible immigration policy.

Best quotes:

1) “Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.”

2) “Minnesota’s fraud scandal stood out even in the context of rampant theft during the pandemic, when Americans stole tens of billions through unemployment benefits, business loans and other forms of aid, according to federal auditors.” [See how the Times tries to use an “Everybody does it!” framing to minimize focus on the Somalis?] 3) “Many Somali Americans in Minnesota say the fraud has damaged the reputation of their entire community, around 80,000 people, at a moment when their political and economic standing was on the rise.” [ Gee, they figured that out, did they?]

4) “Kayseh Magan, a Somali American who formerly worked as a fraud investigator for the Minnesota attorney general’s office, said elected officials in the state — and particularly those who were part of the state’s Democratic-led administration — were reluctant to take more assertive action in response to allegations in the Somali community.” […because it was a reliable voting bloc for Democrats.]

5) “As a trial in the meals fraud case was coming to a close last summer, an attempt to bribe a juror included an explicit insinuation about racism, prosecutors said. Several defendants in the trial were found to have arranged to send a bag containing $120,000 to a juror along with a note that read, ‘Why, why, why is it always people of color and immigrants prosecuted for the fault of other people?'” [Always the same playbook…]

6) “Dr. Samatar said that Somali refugees who came to the United States after their country’s civil war were raised in a culture in which stealing from the country’s dysfunctional and corrupt government was widespread. Minnesota, he said, proved susceptible to rampant fraud because it is “so tolerant, so open and so geared toward keeping an eye on the weak.”

Here is A M Golden’s Comment of the Day on the post, “No, Calling Out Somali-Americans For Their Unethical Conduct Isn’t ‘Racist’”…

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Comment of the Day: “Discovered While Researching ‘Trump Derangement'(And Seeking A Cure)…”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

In “Pulp Fiction,” leading up to the film’s memorable twist scene with John Travolta and Uma Thurmond tripping the light fantastic for a prize at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, Uma notes how great it is to visit the rest room at a resturant and come back to your table to find that your order has arrived. Now in my case, I find it similarly wonderful to wake up bleary-eyed with my brain in second gear to find a qualified Comment of the Day waiting for me.

That was the case today with DaveL (one of Ethics Alarms’ five regular commenters) depositing on my metaphorical Ethics Alarms table an excellent debunking of the DEI “sales pitch,” as he described it, in the fake “Calvin and Hobbes” cartoon above.

DaveL uses facts to rebut Calvin. The wokeness-crippled progressives who approvingly post such garbage on my Facebook feed are, in contrast, just insisting they are certain of their warped world view because they have willed it so. I have given up arguing with such people: I used to link Ethics Alarms essays (and sometimes comments) on Facebook, but all that accomplished was losing “friends” and having the posts ignored. People don’t like having their faith challenged by ugly reality. They wouldn’t consider the post and went off somewhere to sing “Imagine.”

Sigh.

Get well soon, my friends.

Here is DaveL’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Discovered While Researching ‘Trump Derangement'(And Seeking A Cure)…”

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What Calvin says in the comic strip, like the words that DEI stands for, are the sales pitch. Just as there wasn’t a whole lot of genuine Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité to go around in the early years of the French Revolution, these slogans are a lie.

This is perhaps most plainly seen anywhere you have a years-long, multi-stage selection process. Take for instance the admission of new lawyers to the bar. There’s the SAT and undergraduate admissions, undergraduate performance and graduation, the LSAT and law school admissions, law school graduation, and finally the bar exam. What do these show us? That at every stage, DEI philosophy prioritizes the passing of low performers from favored demographics over higher performers from disfavored demographics.

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Comment of the Day: Comment of the Day: “Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Zohran Mamdani”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Well this is embarrassing. Not only have I been four days late in posting Tom P’s Comment of the Day, I also left Tom out of last night’s comment of my own listing the “five commenters” that a bitter reader had claimed was the total commentariate here, as I counted up the names of recent commenters, missing at least three, including Tom. (The total is currently 25. You know, as in “five.” I didn’t even count EA comment bomber “A Friend,” since he’s the equivalent of an illegal immigrant here).

Here is Tom’s excellent and well-researched Comment of the Day on the post [ A COTD by Extradimensional Cephalopod] , “Comment of the Day: ‘Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Zohran Mamdani’”.…

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EC’s closing observation is spot on.

“I was hoping from what I’d heard about Mamdani earlier that he was standing up for legitimate concerns of the people regarding the government and the economy, but it sounds like he’s yet another politician pandering to people’s biases to seize power.”

Whatever label you pin on Mamdani, communist or socialist, is irrelevant. It has been said that the only difference between the two ideologies is the speed and number of bodies that pile up. Both systems are anti-capitalist and have no respect for individual property rights. Mamdani is using the same playbook that the Democrats have used since FDR. Buying votes with the promise of free stuff.

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Comment of the Day: “Comment of the Day: ‘Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Zohran Mamdani’”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Gee, we haven’t had a Comment of the Day on a Comment of the Day for quite while around here. This one was especially satisfying. Reacting to Extradimensional Cephalopod‘s discouraged coda to his COTD on Mayor-to-be Mamdani’s scary-stupid victory rant, Old Bill registered commentary that should have been already featured on or in every legitimate news source. Unfortunately, there are no legitimate news sources, and the fact that OB’s point has been so far almost completely ignored by the Axis media has been making me doubt my own sanity. Am I missing something? How is a President supposed to actually lower grocery prices after inflation he had no responsibility for hit 9% under his predecessor, particularly after less than a year in office? How dare the Democrats choose “affordability” as a rallying cry against Trump when the affordability crash happened on their watch? Do they think the public is that stupid? IS the public that stupid?

Please don’t tell me that you really can fool all of the people all of the time.

It was high time for Old Bill ( we once had several Bills among the commentariate, now all among the missing; maybe they are hanging out with A Friend, Curmie and Charles Green somewhere….) to have another Comment of the Day. He is among the most attentive and prolific commenters Ethics Alarms has, and we should be grateful for him. I certainly am.

Here is Old Bill’s Comment of the Day on “Comment of the Day: “Comment of the Day: ‘Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Zohran Mamdani.’” I know its mostly a quote, but it is the right quote, I hadn’t seen it, and maybe you haven’t either.

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“I was hoping from what I’d heard about Mamdani earlier that he was standing up for legitimate concerns of the people regarding the government and the economy.”

This is the “affordability” talking point Dems have surfaced and harped on over the last few months and during the off-year elections. Remember when everything was “income inequality” and everyone pretended they’d read Thomas Piketty’s book.

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