Bill Wolf’s Comment of the Day is four days old, and yet in light of subsequent developments, like this, this, this and this, it seems as fresh as new-fallen snow….
Here is Bill’s self-described rant/analysis sparked by “The Other Shoe Drops: How Will The MSM Deny Twitter’s Viewpoint Censorship Now?”:
In addition to perfectly encapsulating the insanity of our times and being unintentionally hilarious, the Washington Post headline, “‘Shark Week’ lacks diversity, overrepresents men named Mike, scientists say” also did society a favor by triggering Chris Marschner’s Comment of the Day.
He has a lot of interesting observations here, as well as revelations about something I know absolutely nothing about, sea exploration, that wasn’t explained in old re-runs of “Sea Hunt.”
Here is Chris’s Comment of the Day on the EA post about the dumbest serious headline of the year...
Have any of the researchers currently studying the number of times white males are showcased on these series actually pitched an idea to Discovery? I don’t think Discovery Channel calls guys named Mike to do a show for them about sharks. The only Mike that I am aware of on the series is Mike Rowe who has developed a number of programs for the Discovery Channel, most notably Dirty Jobs. I suppose because I don’t see a lot of women cleaning hog pens or standing next to a blast furnace that too is discriminatory. What that Mike has done for making non-white collar jobs desirable and dignified is what most of us should aspire to emulate.
Yes, most of the shows do focus on the shark’s hunting behavior but the attacks showcased are not about attacks on humans but on prey species. Nothing captures the viewer like an 8-foot, 2000 pound Great White breach the surface as it hunts a seal (or a replica of one). The replicas are scientific instruments that take various measurements such as bite force and jaw size. When the focus is on the hunting behaviors of other pelagic species, the focus on speed and tactics. As a diver, I want to know as much about the behavior of certain species that I may encounter in the wild. One of my most favorite dives was a wreck called the Proteus where I had the privilege of swimming with over three dozen 6-8 foot Sand Tiger sharks. When I tell people about my diving, I often hear women claim they would not attempt to dive with sharks. Men probably think the same but are less inclined to admit it.
In her Comment of the Day on the lament by female shark researchers that they are under-represented in their field (without any supporting evidence of how many aspiring but unfulfilled female shark researchers there are), Sarah B. neatly expresses how “diversity-equity-inclusion” based arguments for hiring create justifications for bias while supposedly addressing the problem of bias.
Here is Sarah B. on the post, “Dispatches From The Great Stupid, “D.E.I.” Division: This Story From The Washington Post Was Not A Joke…Well, Not Intended As One, Anyway”…
Women do have trouble in the hard sciences. This is true. HOWEVER if we act like whiny little bitches, no one will take us seriously when we need to be taken seriously. Do these DIE-obsessed women not understand that not only are they shooting themselves in the feet, but they are making it harder for all the rest of us?
Employer-Employee relations suffer. If I were hiring researchers, it would be hard to WANT to hire women given the current rules. As a woman I also have confidence issues, as I am uncertain if I was hired as anything more than a diversity hire. Am I really the best for a job, especially if I’m finding something about it very challenging? Is this simply a case of needing to step up and improve myself professionally, or am I just a check-box who is under-qualified and never expected or even capable of performing?
Finally the relationship with coworkers suffers. If my coworker is a diversity hire, they get paid about what I do, but I have to do their work which has me put in hours of unpaid overtime to keep my job while they float. This leads to hate and discontent. And as a potentially qualified person seen as a diversity hire, we need to work much harder than our coworkers with more results than our coworkers to get the basic respect because we start so far in negative territory on the Cognitive Dissonance scale.
As a further note, even if DIE had a point, trans and BIPOC rules have essentially neutered it because who can tell if Mike on “Shark Week” doesn’t identify as Michaela in its personal life and is 1/1024 BIPOC?
Women need to stand up against DIE hiring (yes I’m aware of the real acronym) and work to get jobs due to our qualifications, not our box-checking.
Another Comment of the Day from CD-VAPatriot, who has to cope with the increasingly annoying glitch at WordPress that cases in to spam certain commenters’ posts for no apparent reason.
I think it all depends on one’s definition of “feminism.” I used to think the term simply meant that women were overall equal to men in terms of career opportunities, earning potential, deciding whether or not they wanted to get married and/or have kids, etc.. These days it seems that a lot of women I know feel that being a feminist means that “women are the SAME as men”. Well, forgive me for being a traitor to my gender (which yes I have been called) but I believe that there ARE significant differences between the sexes. Oh, and I’m also apparently a traitor and a woman-hater for being pro-life. (Who knew?)
As the female half of a boring old married, heterosexual couple who has been trying to get pregnant for over a decade, I really don’t think my hubby and I fit the “norm” anymore. We’ve noticed that in just the last decade, our friends and the couples we’ve met during that time have significantly changed their overall outlook quite a bit. Fewer couples are getting married: “who, like, needs a stupid piece of paper or like, some rando God to decide if our love is like, legit?”
Here, a Comment of the Day by John Paul, is a story about a real life “Bailey Bros. Savings and Loan.” Enough said.
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Every year it seems like you post this and every year I find it inspirational. Last year was the first time I ever watched the movie. I think, it was a little fitting, because I found myself being a lot more sympatric to George and the Elder Bailey based on another project I started then. I would like to share a little bit about that and perhaps offer a different prospective on why George decided to stick around.
I serve as the president of the board for the local Fuller Center for Housing. We are a non-profit group whose goal is to provide affordable housing for low income people in the name of Christ and in the name of our founder Millard Fuller. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the man, I highly suggest you check out his story. It’s a good one.
By 29 he was a self-made millionaire, but his money and his commitment to his practice (lawyer) were tearing his family apart. His wife, thinking it was the end of their relationship, took his children and his kids to New York. He followed them, and after a long talk, they agreed to get their lives together and give away most of the money. In the following years they ended up on Koinonia Farm (another good story), Zaire (now the Congo), then came back to start one of the most successful housing movements in the United States: Habitat for Humanity. As of 2013, Habitat was the largest non-profit builder in the world and has helped more than 35 million people construct, rehabilitate, or preserve homes since 1976. Fuller Center, while different in name, has a similar mandate and purpose.
Well, what do we do? In some ways, we are a little bit like the Bailey Building and Loan. We act like the bank in the normal transaction between the people in need of housing and the builders who will build the housing. However, the biggest difference is we not only charge 0% interest on our loan, but we only charge for cost of the materials and contracted labor (we also do 80% of building). We have smaller projects we do as well; they might be home repairs such as roofs, bathrooms, ramps, or anything a person might need costing less than $5,000. Our motto is “Hand up, not hand out.” We are going to do everything we can to get you what you need, but in the end, we still expect you to pay for it. More than that, we expect you do put in a number of hours of what we call “Sweat equity” where you must help out with the home or other projects related to the program.
I learn something almost every day from the comments on Ethics Alarms. This Comment of the Day, by the peerless Mrs. Q, enlightened me regarding a phenomenon that had never registered on my consciousness.
Here it is…an observation on the post,“More ‘Good’ Segregation And Racial Discrimination On Progressive College Campuses”:
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“When exactly did racial segregation pass from the agendas of racists, bigots, white supremacists, KKK members and Jim Crow enthusiasts to the playbook of progressive black activists?”
I suspect, in the US at least, the origins of this phenomenon began when black slaves hunted other black slaves to get the “runaways” back on a particular plantation.
It’s not fun to talk about among blacks, but there has been, for hundreds of years, what Burgess Owens might define as a “royalty black class.” That class is allowed to “show” other blacks how they should be and what they should clamor for.
Blacks who don’t fall in line and believe they don’t need the benevolence of whites to prosper are today called ironically “house negros” or “Uncle Toms,” when actually it’s the Stacey Abrams of the world (doing the dirty work of white bigots) telling black men they’re too dumb to know how to discern propaganda and misinformation. Continue reading
Other Bill raised another aspect of Armistice Day ethics: is there such a thing as war ethics? Ethics Alarms has barely touched on the subject, as I absorbed the values of my father on this topic among so many others. He believed, like General Sherman, that war was such hell that the only ethical way to fight it was in a manner that would end it as quickly as possible. Dad supported the dropping of the first atom bomb (he was less certain about the second), admittedly with a bias: he was preparing to be part of the U.S. invasion force when Hiroshima was destroyed. He strongly felt that the Nuremberg Trials were hypocritical, and our many debates and arguments about that controversy led to my directing “The Andersonville Trial” twice and producing “Judgment at Nuremberg” at my late, lamented professional theater company. My father also thought the Geneva Convention was unenforceable, disingenuous, and naive.
Here is Other Bill’s Comment of the Week from this week’s Open Forum:
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Armistice Day has me thinking about war ethics. How’s that for an oxymoron? Russia has been getting crap for targeting civilian infrastructure, including apartment buildings and the electrical grid. There has been talk about the Russians destroying a dam to flood an area and deprive the Ukrainians of a river crossing.
What’s the deal? What did the U.S. destroy during shock and awe in Iraq? Other than regime change, why did the U.S. invade Iraq? During WWII, the Allied strategic bombing campaign, which included bombing cities, was intended in large part to “discomfit” the German populous, thereby reducing Germany’s industrial output (not to mention the firebombing of wooden Japanese cities, purporte ly to destroy dispersed manufacturing facilities). A famous British operation “busted” a dam and flooded large parts of the Ruhr flood plain.
My father, now in Arlington National Cemetery, would have really liked Steve-O-in NJ’s post. the second of this weekends’s Comment of the Week. The great irony of his life was, as he once mentioned, that he hated war, but had a natural aptitude for it. Jack Sr. never boasted about his many war exploits, forcing us to drag them (definitely not all, though) out of him over nearly 6 decades. Nevertheless, he was more proud of fighting the Nazis in Africa and Europe than of anything else in his life, except, perhaps, of being a good father, unlike his own father.
Dad used to imitate FDR’s famous “I …hate… war!” speech (“My wife Eleanor hates war…”) , which he felt was ponderous and insincere—The Roosevelts all liked war, he believed—and said more than once that anyone who didn’t hate war was a lunatic. (This was just one of the many reasons he detested General Patton). But my father never hesitated to display reminders of his participation in the victory over Hitler and his minions.
We had beautiful, brilliant red curtains separating our play room from the laundry area in our basement in Arlington, Mass.when my sister and I were kids; it wasn’t until long after I had moved to the Washington, D.C. area that I learned that my mother had cut them out of the giant Nazi flag my father had brought home as a trophy. He felt that using the red portion of the menacing flag as a cheerful decoration in the most humble part of his all-American home was a nice, final, private “Bite me!” to the evil losers.
Here are Steve-O’s reflections on Armistice Day, prompted by the introduction to this post…
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103 years ago, the guns finally fell silent at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, ending the greatest conflict to date, known as the Great War in Europe, as World War One here. The war that was supposed to end by Christmas 1914 had dragged on for more than four years, shaken civilization to its core, and thrown down no fewer than four empires, leaving chaos in their place. It had also killed six million and badly damaged a generation.
The world thought another war like this must not, could not ever happen again. In memory of what had happened, the allied nations proclaimed Armistice Day a year later, including the red poppy as the symbol of the fallen, the two minutes silence, and the continued hope for world peace.
Here’s the dirty little secret, though, the allied nations, weary of war and afraid of another one, turned their back on the problems left unresolved at the end of World War One. They made a few half-hearted attempts to deal with them, like the poorly organized Allied intervention in Russia to stop Communism before it took root, which accomplished nothing. For the most part, however, they either just looked the other way or threw up their hands. Turkey mopped up what was left of the Armenians and forced Greece into a population exchange that destroyed thousands more lives, and the allies just nodded. The Soviets attempted to conquer Poland, but they found themselves thrown back by a nation not inclined to give up the freedom it had just won under the leadership of the military and political genius Josef Pilsudski. France and the UK didn’t do or say anything. Ireland erupted in violence, and the UK all too quickly concluded a peace that left it embarrassed and Ireland bankrupt. Let’s also not forget the abandonment of the Finns, the Ethiopians, and the Austrians to tyrannical aggression. The major nations were too busy trying to come up with lofty promises and ways to prevent there from ever being a war again: the Washington Naval Treaty, signed with a smile by the Japanese and promptly violated, the Locarno Treaties, which were quickly ignored, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which supposedly outlawed war, and is still technically in effect, but which was ignored from its inception, and actually reads like a bad joke in hindsight.
I wasn’t even aware of the diesel shortage until I was alarmed by back-up White House paid liar John Kirby—he’s the competent one— was asked about it and he huminahumina-ed “I’ll have to get back to you on that.” This means, “Hey! That’s am embarrassing question; you’re supposed to be covering for us here, not causing trouble!” Then Tucker Carlson took up the topic as his scare of the day, but since I don’t trust him, I didn’t listen to it. Yes, I should have posted on the issue then: like so many of the current government fiascos, this one is about, most prominently, competence. The perils of running out of diesel fuel implicates at least four Cabinet Departments: Energy, Commerce, Transportation and Homeland Security. It is a big topic, and fortunately, a conscientious commenter, Sarah B., has done the research and analysis that I should have done.
Here is Sarah’s essential Comment of the Day regarding the diesel fuel problem, from the most recent Ethics Alarms open forum.
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I think we should talk about a topic near and dear to my heart: the looming crisis caused by the diesel shortage in our nation. I will say right out that I do not have a solution to this crisis, but instead, I want to discuss how we got here, and the issues that stand in the way of fixing it. Getting here was an ethical failure on many levels, most of which can be laid without much hesitation at the feet of our current President and his party, but not to the exclusion of Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc. I know this is long, but I’d love to start communication on this issue.
The first thing to know about the diesel shortage is that it isn’t just diesel. In refining terms, the shortage is of all distillates. Light and medium distillates include kerosene, heating oil, jet fuel, aviation fuel, and diesel. Each of these are competing products from similar oil breakdowns, so a shortage of one results in a shortage of all. Many of these products seem as though they are the same thing with different names, and to an extent they are. But the government regulates and licenses each one slightly differently with slightly different specifications on each product, so aviation fuel and jet fuel can both run an airplane, but depending on the airplane, one is legal, the other isn’t. The point, however, is that the diesel shortage extends beyond what we typically recognize as diesel usage.
What is the extent of this problem? Some sites note that we have a 25.9-day supply of diesel, which is the lowest point we’ve been, comparatively, in a very long time. Generally speaking we tend to want to run at about 35-40 days. More specifically, the diesel supply is at the lowest point this nation has ever seen coming into winter. Some pundits argue that we are fine, that we’ve seen years with similar shortages, but they are being either ignorant or disingenuous. The shortages they cite occurred in April of their respective years, such as 1925. April shortages are a different beast than October and November shortages. April is at the far end of the cold season; October is at the very beginning. April is at the tail end of most major southern refinery turnaround season, whereas October is just entering into turnaround season. In other words, a shortage in October is like have a food shortage right after harvest and going into the lean months, whereas a shortage in April is expected because we’ve just emerged from the lean months, but we expect new crops soon. And if the shortage is bad now, how bad will it be by April?
Confession: before I wrote the post that Curmie fashioned into his Comment of the Day, I emailed him the underlying story in advance, given his unofficial position as the Ethics Alarms dramaturg. I almost asked him to write a guest post on the head-exploding tale of a university banning a black playwright’s work about the civil rights movement because it has white characters using the word “nigger,” but I guessed, fortunately correctly, that he would provide a Comment of the Day on the topic whatever I wrote.
And do he did, very well indeed.
Here is Curmie’s Comment of the Day on “For Some Strange Reason, The Playwright Didn’t Think ‘N-Word’ Carried The Same Dramatic Punch…“
The first comment on this post, by JutGory, is especially apt. [ JutGory wrote: “The Woke Paradox: We must teach ‘real history’ even if it might hurt the feelings of white kids/We can’t teach ‘real history’ if it will hurt the feelings of black kids.”]
But, as someone who taught college-level theatre courses for over forty years and continues to do some scholarly writing in the field, I’d like to take the analysis a little further.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I have directed two plays which contain the word “nigger.” Both, Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Athol Fugard’s ”Master Harold”… and the boys, are widely anthologized and both are regarded as among the greatest works of 20th-century drama. The latter, which includes a particularly crude racist joke, is also unquestionably an anti-racist play, as Down in Mississippi appears to be (I confess I haven’t read it or seen it).
I was also asked by a recently-graduated black student a decade or so ago to play the role of a slave-owning plantation owner in a short film he had written and was directing. The character probably used the dreaded epithet at least a half dozen times in a four- or five-minute scene. I agreed to play the role, but for whatever reason the film shoot never happened.
My first question, unanswered by the linked article, is precisely who made the decision to cancel the performance. It certainly wasn’t the (black) playwright, who said that “maybe you should be less fragile. And try to listen to what your former generations are trying to teach you for the well good being of all of us,” and it’s unlikely to have been the theatre department, given that they were the ones who decided to produce the play to begin with.
Administrators above the level of department chair are almost never involved in the process of selecting a production season. But they will stick their noses into the process if there’s a potential controversy, even a fallacious one. We can reasonably surmise that it’s a dean, a vice president, or a president who is the Designated Weenie in this case. It certainly wasn’t the chairman of the Board of Trustees, Glenn O. Lewis, himself a black man, who points out that censorship is not a solution, and that “you don’t learn anything new until you get out of your comfort zone, and I think that is what Mr. Brown intended for this play to do.”
Ethics Alarms 
Okay. I acknowledge that this qualifies as a rant. However, rants can be cathartic.
The “Free Press” is failing us again or more accurately stated: continues to fail us. The US being the American people. “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. True, but who is casting that shroud of darkness upon the country?
Our Founding Fathers were aware of the might and necessity of the “power of the pen” as they set upon their task to form the country’s government. So much so that they felt it necessary to address it as a preeminent limitation of government’s power. But why did they feel so strongly of the need for a free press? Perhaps Thomas Paine said it best: “Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one. The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.”
Continue reading →