Burge’s tweet above was in response to the episode described by ultra-woke UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky in the statement below (you can view Chemerinsky’s damning Ethics Alarms dossier here).
Gee what a surprise.
Education
On the Dumbing Down of Scrabble
I was going to make this story an ethics quiz, but thought better of it. After all, there’s nothing unethical about Scrabble (now owned by Mattel) spinning off “Moron Scrabble.” Okay, the exciting Scrabble mutation is called “Scrabble Together.” Nonetheless, I find it hard to resist the feeling that this is a Great Stupid event.
The Mattel statements didn’t help. Ray Adler, vice-president and global head of games at Mattel, said: “Scrabble has truly stood the test of time as one of the most popular board games in history, and we want to ensure the game continues to be inclusive for all players.”
Oh-oh. Inclusive. Next we can expect “DEI Scrabble,” where minority players get twice as many points for their words as those privileged white, male players.
“For anyone who’s ever thought ‘word games aren’t for me'” Adler addled, “or felt a little intimidated by the classic game, Scrabble Together mode is an ideal option.” If someone is intimidated by Scrabble, she has more serious problems than new rules can solve.
Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tx)
When we last looked in on the astoundingly dim-witted, ignorant, unqualified Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee here at Ethics Alarms, she was setting out to violate the Constitution with her brain-dead on arrival (BDOA) Leading Against White Supremacy Act, which has to be read to be believed. A junior high school civics class could use the thing as a final exam: “Please explain why the U.S. Supreme Court would declare this proposed law unconstitutional.” In the same post in which I discussed that monstrosity, Lee’s invention, I wrote of her self-evident intellectual caliber,
She’s a fanatic supporter of reparations for slavery; she’s a knee-jerk race-baiter (any criticism of President Barack Obama, a serial bungler, was racist in her view). She’s one of those not very bright people who speak assertively and defiantly because they are laboring under the delusion that they are intelligent, thus fooling others who aren’t very smart either.
Lee once mixed up Wikileaks and Wikipedia in an interview. She has complained that the naming of storms is racist, because the names are “too white,” but we know that if we gave hurricanes names like “LaShonda” to hurricanes, she’d complain that blacks were being deliberately compared to destructive forces.
A Popeye: I Just Have to Say This Regarding the Coverage of the Solar Eclipse
I’ve been wrestling with myself over whether to post on this topic, especially after I obviously annoyed my very nice next-door neighbors by making my sentiments known yesterday while they were out on the front yard enthusing over Northern Virginia’s not-quite total eclipse view and offering me magic glasses. But as Popeye so eloquently said often, “It’s all I can stand, cuz I can’t stands no more!”
The ethical issue is a common one raised here: journalism is obligated to make the public better informed, not dumber. The media’s breathless, silly, pseudo-pagan coverage of the eclipse in Indiana yesterday on every news network was, in my view, insulting and horrifying, or should have been.
If you took their outbursts seriously, who knows what else you’ll believe?
Trump Derangement Audit, Celebrity Division: Jenifer Lewis
This is already shaping up as “Trump Derangement Monday,” and it isn’t even noon yet. Steve-O-in NJ has a Comment of the Day on the way after revealing a disturbing anti-Trump rant from a previously distinguished lawyer. The lawyer’s Trump-Deranged, Democratic National Committee-endorsed talking points may be slightly more disturbing than the crazed claims “Blackish” actress Jenifer Lewis made when she sat down with Zerlina Maxwell, host of the radio show ‘Mornings With Zerlina’ on SiriusXM, but only because lawyers are supposed to be more responsible and reliable than show business celebrities.
These People Are Passionate, Mean Well, Care Deeply About the Environment and Mother Earth, and Have No Idea What They Are Talking About…
Sometimes, only Sidney Wang will do…
Christina Khalil is the Green Party candidate for U.S. Senator in New Jersey. Here is her campaign bio that sits on her website:
Christina Anna Khalil (she/her/hers) is a native of New Jersey, and she grew up in foster care where she overcame many trials and tribulations throughout her childhood and adult life. Christina has her B.A. in psychology and her Master’s in Social Work both from Ramapo College, which were both major accomplishments for her, and Christina believes that one of the true keys to freedom lies in education. In her free time Christina has avidly volunteered for community organizations doing important work, such as (BCLA) Bergen County LGBTQ+ Alliance. While obtaining her Master’s Degree, Christina worked on the front lines during the height of the pandemic at a medical detox facility and never quit school, while also volunteering at Hackensack High School. While working in the medical and substance abuse field, Christina noticed that our current elected leaders appeared detached from the reality of the current struggles that citizens of New Jersey face and made a vow to herself that when it was her time to step up and work towards change, she would do just that.
Christina’s leadership and resiliency are unmatched, and she is the leader that New Jersey needs to fight to make the New Jersey citizens’ quality of life better.
Impressive! What a pity she’s an idiot. Here’s proof, her tweet yesterday:
Yes, the Green Party has nominated someone who thinks climate change causes earthquakes. Her biography claims that “our current elected leaders appeared detached from the reality.” One can’t get much more detached from reality than believing the movement of tectonic plates in the Earth’s crust are affected by the climate. This woman has a Master’s Degree, and has the critical thinking skills of a pangolin. Score another one for America education.
She exemplifies the people advising Joe Biden, arguing for the banning of gas stoves, air conditioning and gasoline-powered cars while wasting billions of dollars in the process. Some New Jersey residents will vote for her, maybe thousands. How such people get through the day without stabbing themselves in the eye with forks is a mystery.
Here’s Christina…
…she looks nice enough, though I think I see the sky shining through her eyes from the back of her head. She is truly a dolt, and it is unethical for dolts to run for elective office.
Note: WordPress says I should tag this post “art,” “poetry” and “music.” So apparently their bot is affected by climate change too…
Ethics Observations on “the Rest of the Story” Regarding “At Princeton, Students Feel ‘Unsafe’ in the Company of a Conservative Professor
Commenter Dr. Emilio Lizardo revealed this morning in the comments to “At Princeton, Students Feel “Unsafe” in the Company of a Conservative Professor” that the policy at issue had already been reversed by the time I wrote about it:
“By April 2, the policy was reversed after an intervention from the club’s Graduate Board. In the seven days in between, debate over the policy rose from the club’s private GroupMe to the headlines of national right-wing publications. Club leadership maintains that the reversal was not due to national media scrutiny.”
So Ethics Alarms can’t claim even a smidgen of credit for the reversal. Nonetheless, the lesson here, as we have already seen elsewhere, is that when organizations and institutions install discriminatory and self-evidently unethical procedures and policies in the name of wokeness, political correctness, aspiring fascism of the far left, DEI or other perversions of core American principles and are quickly exposed, assailed and embarrassed, they usually back down. (Usually.)
A further lesson is that the organizations and institutions know that what they are doing is indefensible except from the “by any means necessary” perspective driving the Left in its crusade to re-make America. They know it, but they try anyway, hoping that any single instance will fly under the metaphorical radar long enough to become institutionalized. When they get caught, their reaction is, “OK, too soon. We’ll hold off on this one for now.”
Their assumption, and it is, frighteningly, probably correct, that the current DEI, Black Lives Matter, open borders, climate change hysteria, anti-free speech…freedom of association…equal treatment under the law and due process wack-a-mole contest it has forced our society into playing will inevitably result in a slow, steady ratcheting-up of anti-democratic practices that become accepted as norms. This is how the public education system became an indoctrination process. It is how the initially admirable goals of affirmative action became the racist practice of “diversity, equity and inclusion.” It is how journalism in the US. became partisan propaganda.
The fact that only conservative publications and news sources treated the Princeton story as “fit to print” and necessary illumination to stop democracy from “dying in darkness” is also significant. This doesn’t mean that the story wasn’t important or objectively worth reporting on. The conduct of the mainstream media in ignoring it proves that its purpose is not to keep the public informed, but to assist the Far Left in laying waste to America’s traditional interpretation of democracy. The Princeton story is important, and the fact that only conservative sources publicized it (only Fox News among the news networks picked it up) doesn’t prove their bias. It proves the sinister, deliberate complicity of the mainstream media as it attempts to keep Americans from realizing what is going on right under their noses until it is too late.
The Princetonian wrote that a debate over the policy arose only after “headlines of national right-wing publications” exposed it. If the story sparked a debate, it means it was a story worth reporting. The MSM didn’t report on the story because the Far Left doesn’t want any debate. In an honest debate they lose, just as they lose on abortion, illegal immigration, and so many other issues. If they felt they could win on the merits, then they would want debate. Instead, their media tries to bury the facts. This isn’t a conservative “conspiracy theory.” It is reality.
Finally, the club’s claim that “the reversal was not due to national media scrutiny” is another damning piece of evidence. Gaslighting, denial, “Jumbo”-ism and “It isn’t what it is” (Yoo’s Rationalization,” #64) mania have become such reflex tools of the Left that comparisons with “1984” are unavoidable. The border is secure. Bidenomics is a success. Inflation isn’t a problem. The President didn’t extol the “Transgender Day of Visibility” on Easter. He’s as sharp as a tack. The Trump prosecutions aren’t political. January 6 was an insurrection. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
The Princeton student club episode is an important one for American to understand. They can only understand it if they know about it.
Boy I wish I knew how to get the readership here back on the rising curve it seemed to be on in 2016...
At Princeton, Students Feel “Unsafe” in the Company of a Conservative Professor
I don’t understand this at all.
For the second time today, I nearly duplicated a post I had already written. Princeton hasn’t been in the “Great Stupid” news lately as much as its Ivy League competitors, so my first headline was almost identical to this one from three years ago. Cornell, as we now know, has lost its collective mind. Columbia has been beyond redemption for a while now. The University of Pennsylvania’s president said essentially the same stuff before the Senate about whether anti-Semitsim on campus was acceptable depending on “context” as Harvard’s president, and was fired before Claudine Gay was. Yale, you will recall, has so disgraced itself that some judges announced last year that they will no longer accept clerks from Yale’s law school. (I don’t know what’s wrong with Dartmouth: apparently they just study and drink up there in the New Hampshire boondocks.)
Princeton, however, is apparently graduating complete weenies, a true embarrassment for a school whose mascot is a tiger. Princeton student Matthew Wilson revealed in an op-ed published in The Daily Princetonian, that after he brought a professor as a guest to lunch at one of Princeton’s social clubs, the club changed its visitors rule. Now, any student guests who aren’t relatives or friends will “henceforth not be permitted to enter the club during its ‘hours of food service operations’ without prior approval from undergraduate officers, club staff, and the alumni Board of Governors.”
Why the change, you may ask, as Wilson did. The policy was changed because the presence of the prof, who is one of Princeton’s lone conservatives, “made members feel unsafe.” Wait, is the professor rabid, a known serial killer, infected with ebola or prone to attack strangers? No, it’s just that his beliefs make the students feel unsafe. At an institution that once was dediacted to exposing young minds to a whole range of ideas and theories.
I confess, though this is not the first time I have encountered the fatuous “safe spaces” argument, I don’t understand it at all. This is not what “safe” means. Nobody is harmed or endangered by hearing opinions one disagrees with, so one can’t possibly be threatened by someone who is merely in the same room who isn’t saying anything directed you at all.
“The simple fact that they had to eat lunch in the same building as him — a respected professor at this university who many Charter students have taken classes with and even praised — was too much to handle,” Wilson wrote. “It was a grave error for [the club’s] leadership to bend to the demands of a few students who couldn’t stomach the possibility of being within shouting distance of someone whose views challenge their own,” Wilson continued.
Why should he, or anyone, even have to write this?
Yet Another University President Validates My Son’s Decision Not to Attend College…(Corrected)
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) tried to speak at the University of Maryland at the end of last month on the topic of “Democracy, Autocracy and the Threat to Reason in the 21st Century.” He was not permitted to get into the text of his speech, however. Raskin is one of the foolish Hamas-enabling, having-their-cake-and-eating-it-too Democrats who wants to make Israel stop its existentially necessary war effort to end the “violence and pervasive suffering in Gaza” and “provide for a massive surge in humanitarian aid”—to the region the U.S. is supposedly supporting the Israeli attacks on. Brilliant!…but I digress.
“Progress in history requires not just reasoning, which is certainly necessary, but it’s not sufficient, because it also requires the addition of the pro-social emotions, as the psychologists call it, of solidarity, empathy, love and the political virtues of justice and equality and freedom,” Raskin began. Then pro-Palestine protesters began shouting at Raskin, accusing him of being “complicit in genocide.” You know: morons. Student morons.
The progressive congressman pleaded with the pro-Hamas mob to have a dialogue with him rather than “heckling,” and that tactic worked as well as it always does. Raskin stopped his speech, pivoting to a spontaneous question and answer format, but the protesters’ chants and jeers made that approach impossible too.
University of Maryland President Darryll Pines (seen grinning above) stepped in and declared the event over as Raskin was effectively silenced. Pines then issued a disgraceful statement to the media, representing the shouting down of a member of Congress as a good thing, either because he was terrified of criticizing the far left on his campus, or because he’s an unethical fool. I suspect the latter.
Ethics Quiz: Harvard’s Human Skin-Bound Book
As if it doesn’t have enough to worry about, Harvard University announced yesterday that its copy of Arsène Houssaye’s “Des Destinées de L’Ame,” or “The Destiny of Souls” had been stripped of the very feature that made it unusual enough to be worth collecting. The book (above) had been bound in human skin, just like the book in “The Evil Dead” movies. Its first owner, Dr. Ludovic Bouland, a French doctor, had inserted in the volume a handwritten note saying that “a book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering.” The alumnus who gave the book to Harvard in 1934, the American diplomat (and the famous hat family heir) John B. Stetson, had informed the Houghton Library (Harvard’s rare book collection), that Bouland had taken the skin from an unknown woman who died in a French psychiatric hospital.
Harvard removed the binding and said it would be exploring options for “a final respectful disposition of these human remains.” “After careful study, stakeholder engagement, and consideration, Harvard Library and the Harvard Museum Collections Returns Committee concluded that the human remains used in the book’s binding no longer belong in the Harvard Library collections, due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history,” the university’s statement read.
Incidentally, the word for binding books in human skin is anthropodermic bibliopegy.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Ethics Alarms 