Education

Trans Ethics Train Wreck Update: Why Is All This This Happening? [With A Bonus Comment Of The Day On “Hogwarts Legacy”]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Among the many things I don’t understand about the increasingly bizarre trans-advocacy bullying and propaganda is the ideological divide. Why are Democrats and progressives supporting this manifestly bonkers—and unethical—effort to defy reality?

Some of the latest “revoltin’ developments”:

1. The unhinged fury at J.K. Rowling for not falling in with the pro-trans guerillas.

Today is the release date for Hogwarts Legacy, the most highly anticipated video game of 2023. But many trans-fans are conflicted about the game because of supposedly transphobic comments made  about transgender people by J.K. Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter, Hogwarts, and the whole empire.  Conveniently, EA Comment-Master Humble Talent registered a report on today’s Open Forum. In his Comment of the Day, slightly shortened here (read it all at the link) HT writes,

[P]rogressives hate JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, feminist icon, and TERF extraordinaire. It’s not like Rowling is particularly offensive….The problem isn’t that she’s offensive, the problem is that she’s a traitor. Worse, she’s a traitor that they helped prop up, she has “Fuck You” levels of money, and nothing they do can actually cancel her, because again… She’s independently wealthy, isn’t particularly offensive, and doesn’t care what they think.

Her offense, such that it is, is a less than enthusiastic endorsement of the trans agenda. She has no problems using pronouns, she tries, generally, to be polite, but sometimes uses a variation of the TERF maxim of “there are very few places where gender actually matters anymore, but where it does, it matters a lot” and doesn’t put much stock in the idea of trans women in women’s sport, and feels that trans women shouldn’t be in women’s prisons or abuse shelters, off the top of my head.

Trans people, not very well adjusted to reality to begin with, are so used to getting their way when they whine on Twitter that they’re not dealing very well with the idea that Warner Brothers would continue to risk their ire by further developing the Harry Potter Franchise, which in some very unclear way involving assumed royalties benefits Rowling, the newest iteration of which is “Hogwarts Legacy.”

…It’s fairly obvious that the developers were acutely aware that they were going to be under a DEI microscope, so there is a LOT of representation in the game. This isn’t a huge departure from the source material, there was a lot of representation there too… Rowling is, after all, progressive….

Very early on in the game, you meet the Potterverse’s first trans character: Sirona Ryan. Trans people apparently don’t think that pandering was enough, because Sirona starts with Sir, and that’s an obvious slight.

Because of course it is. The developers going out of their way to try to cleanse the franchise of the filth of its creator by shoehorning in as much DEI as possible is just cover so that they could name their first trans character Manlina McBeefcake to squick the trans people they’re not actually pandering to. Because that makes sense.

Which is the theme here… Nothing is enough. They’re bound and determined to hate it. Which is why the success of the game seems to feel like pure rock salt in the open wound of their entire existence. It’s a good game with a very popular franchise released at a time when there aren’t any other new releases worth note on the market.

So…. What do you do when something you hate is succeeding and you’re really unused to the market not giving a damn about your displeasure? You melt down. The fireworks over this have been some of the most entertaining terminally online bullshit I’ve seen in my life. Brigades of trans people and their allies are joining Twitch streams of people playing HL and cramming their chats with bile, article after article after article written by progressives whining belligerently over the market’s apathy to their discomfort, but most interestingly, because it’s new: Someone coded a website that would log whenever someone streamed HL and compiled it in a searchable database, so trans people could know who to boycott…. Which was basically everyone, so it’s not exactly effective.

Any and all of this would have been derided by the same people doing it as targeted harassment and bullying if they were the target of what they’re doing to others, and they’re doing it without a spark of self awareness. Which lends more credit, I think, to my prevailing theory of: These people don’t actually care about targeted harassment, bullying, or any other professed principle. They’re consistently unhappy people and their single last joy in life is bitching with the intent of depriving other people of the joy they are incapable of feeling.

2. More Lia Thomas ethics rot… Continue reading →

Observations On The Cardinal Local School District’s Abrupt Cancellation Of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Let’s get one thing settled right off the metaphorical bat: the Cardinal Local School District is run by a bunch of incompetents and ethics dunces. However one thinks this fiasco could and should have been handled, they made the worst possible mess of it possible.

On January 25, 2023, the school board for the district (in Middlefield, Ohio) killed  a student production of the 2005 Tony-winning Broadway musical “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” citing as a justification their assessment  that it was “vulgar.”The show is, as that date would suggest, 18 years old now, and has been performed all over the world as well as at many high schools. Its artistic pedigree is impeccable: the lyrics and music is by William Finn (“Falsettos”) and the original production was directed by Stephen Sondheim collaborator James Lapine. The show is excellent theatrical training for students as it involves improvisation.

Presumably the “vulgar” accusation arises from “Chip’s Lament,” a controversial song in which one of the young characters blames his failure in the competition on an embarrassing erection. Here are the lyrics:

Fritos! M&M’s? Oreos. All for one dollar!
It is tradition
that the person eliminated from the competition,
is fair game for derision,
especially the Alpha-Male,
who will sell goodies at the bake sale.
Anyone for brownies?
Anyone for chocolate chips?
Anyone for anything that isn’t dated?
How could I have been eliminated?
You wanna know how?
You wanna know how?
You wanna know WHY?
My unfortunate erection
Is destroying my perfection
It is my recollection that everything I once did
I did perfectly.
LAST YEAR’S CHAMP, DEFEATED!
Because of
Marigold Coneybear
Because there’s something and not a thing between us
I don’t blame my brain but I do blame my penis.
My unfortunate protuberance,
seems to have its own exuberance.
Anyone for M&M’s?
Delicious and appropriate!
Anyone for Chewy Goobers?
Inexpensive…
Anyone for buying the SHIT that I’m selling
because my stiffie has ruined my spelling.
ERECTION!
ERECTION!
MY UNFORTUNATE ERECTION!
WHY?
Is ruining my life
Is ruining my world
Is ruining my
Ruining Ruining Ruining
My Life
MY LIFE
Adulthood brings its own peculiar rejection
Which is why I’m selling this PTA
Confection
It will ruin your complexion
All because of my unfortunate
Erection
Oh God!

Following accusations in the wake of its decision, the Cardinal School District denied that the move was made because the musical includes two gay parents. Jesus also makes a comic appearance in the show. (He also appears rather prominently in “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which is frequently performed in high schools.) If that had anything to do with the show’s demise, this school district is a danger to intelligent life on earth.

Points: Continue reading →

Plumbing The Depths Of The Great Stupid: I Usually Don’t Continue Reading Articles That Start With First Sentences Like This One, Missing Out On Hilarious Race-Obsessed Delusions…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Before we delve into the substance of the article at issue, let me express my gratitude to author David Kaufman for giving me another opportunity to post a brilliant cartoon by one of my heroes, New Yorker satirist/philosopher/humorist Charles Addams. If you read here often, you have seen his work highlighted periodically because it is so often appropriate. In this case, that cartoon above, which made me laugh out loud when I first saw it as a high school student, immediately leapt to mind when I read that Kaufman believes the little white figures in the “walk/don’t walk” traffic lights represent white people.

Did anyone, at the New Yorker, among its readers, among the millions of people who have seen that creepy but very funny drawing in the best-selling collections of Addams’ mordant humor think for a second that it had anything to do with race? No, because it didn’t, doesn’t, and until quite recently, before The Great Stupid spread hate, fear, darkness and toxic cretinism over the land, nobody would be so woke-mad and brainwashed to see racism in everything that they would come to such a bonkers conclusion. Continue reading →

Law Prof. Ethics Rule: Don’t Say Anything To A Student That You Wouldn’t Say Over An Open Mic…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Oops! Law professor Daniel Capra, an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, responded to a student complaint that he spoke too quickly in his lectures and international students were having trouble keeping up with a foreign language. Capra dismissed the compliant and and dismissed the students’ problems following hm as “assumption of risk.” Then, after the student walked away, he said, “Fuck!”

His class was being recorded, and a nearby microphone was live. Of course, the episode is being given maximal attention, life today being what it is. Above the Law gleefully weighed in, so did Law.com. Aditi Thakur, president of Columbia Law’s student senate, released a statement announcing that the student senate is “deeply alarmed” by Capra’s conduct. Gillian Lester, the dean of Columbia Law, said that she has told Capra that his “language, and the disrespectful attitude it conveyed, were unacceptable.” She also told students that she wanted to “express my own sorrow about this incident.” Sorrow!

Capra is also a professor at the Fordham University School of Law, so Matthew Diller, the dean there, had to pile on, saying, “His conduct was not consistent with his reputation as a teacher and scholar over many years or the spirit of inclusiveness and care for others that is at the heart of a Fordham education.”

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Ethics Quote Of The Week: Victor Davis Hanson

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“[W]hen everything becomes racist, then nothing in particular can be racist.”

—Revered conservative scholar and pundit Victor Davis Hanson in his column prompted by the absurd progressive calms that the beating death of young Tyre Nichols by five black police officers was caused by “white supremacy” and “systemic racism.”

Hanson’s piece “Race Everywhere” neatly supports my observation in the previous post that it is time to retire February ‘s designation as “Black History Month” (though “Hot Breakfast Month” can stay). His thesis:

In sum, class, not race, remains the best litmus test of being underprivileged in America. It is no longer synonymous with race.  No wonder the identity politics industry now strains to attach prefixes such as “systemic” or “implicit” to “racism,” or “micro” to “aggression,” purportedly to ferret out bias that otherwise is not apparent. Pause to reflect that America is the only successful multiracial constitutional republic in history.To survive in an increasingly dysfunctional and hostile world abroad, the unique idea of the United States requires concord.  But national cohesion is only possible through citizens subordinating their tribal interests to a common culture. Only then do they cease being automatons of warring tribes and collectives. 

Hanson includes many examples of the fact-immune push to elevate the black race above all others in the U.S. while deliberately reversing our national and societal progress away from segregation and racial hostility, as well as why the movement is neither rational nor responsible. Three that I was aware of include,

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring Because They Were Installed Upside-Down And Backwards…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

There’s not a lot one can say about this astounding story or that needs to be said, but it still must be told because the head-exploding incident demonstrates just how completely ethically inert some alleged adults in authority can be. From there we must consider how our culture is failing if anyone could be raised in it for 22 years and do what Arlisha Boykins did.

That’s her above, taking a free throw in a basketball game. That game was being played by the Churchland High JV team, on which the players were 13-to 15-year-old girls. Arlisha was the assistant coach of that team—as I noted, she’s 22-years old—and when one of her team’s players who is 13 had to miss a game, Boykins masqueraded as her, wearing the player’s uniform and taking her place on the court for a January 21 contest.

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring…Or Were Never Installed: The Caring Asst. Principal

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

First of all, has Ms. Harvey (idiot/idiot/idiot’s) been fired yet? Why not? At least the principal reacted quickly, sending out this: Continue reading →

How Far Have Our Universities Traveled Into Thought Control Territory? This Far: Stanford Wants To Punish A Student For Reading A Politically Incorrect Historical Document

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

A while back, one of this blog’s self-exiled commenters told me that he left because I had become more hostile to the Left in recent years, in contrast to my position when Ethics Alarms started in 2010. He’s right, of course. In 2010, this story would have been unimaginable. My standards haven’t changed. But one whole side of the political spectrum has been abandoning ethics and core American principles with increasing arrogance, aggressiveness and ruthlessness.

I am in shock over this latest episode.

After a photo of a Stanford student reading Adolf Hitler’s autobiography “Mein Kampf” circulated on campus, The Stanford Daily revealed that administrators were working with the students involved to “address” the incident. Two campus rabbis emailed Jewish students saying administrators “are in ongoing conversation with the individuals involved, who are committed to and actively engaged in a process of reckoning and sincere repair.”

Reckoning—for reading something? “Repair”? Is that the strong stench of re-education I feel in my nostrils? Continue reading →

Why Our Culture Needs Old Movies

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Typical of the free-association manner in which my brain works, a fatuous essay by a New York Times pundit about a subject he doesn’t understand (but I do)–performing—excavated an ethics memory from my childhood that hadn’t sparked a neuron in decades.

Frank Bruni, for some reason, felt it was necessary to re-hash the ancient debate over whether a movie star is really a skilled “actor,” and can be deserving of an Oscar over “real” actors. Naturally, his target was Tom Cruise and his performance in “Top Gun: Maverick,” the most popular and successful movie of the year. I don’t feel like arguing with Bruni over this; I’ve had the debate too many times. (No, Cruise isn’t going to get an Oscar for this sequel, but he has given Oscar-worthy performances before, because nobody can play Tom Cruise as well as he can). I’ll just give the short version: if an actor plays a part better than any other actor could, it is irrelevant that he can’t play any other part. As a director, I’ll cast a charismatic one-trick pony who is perfect for a particular role over a brilliant, versatile artist who could play Hamlet to cheers every time.

But that is neither here nor there. Here is there: Bruni’s discourse made me think of Spencer Tracy, a movie star and superb actor who had a wonderfully dismissive view of his own field, and then “Edison the Man,” the 1940 biopic, starring Tracy, about Thomas Edison. It was a black and white film that my father made a point of having me see. That film sparked my early interest in Edison, American inventors, technology and extraordinary people through history.

One scene in the movie, however, made a special impression. Edison and his research lab have been laboring on the creation of a practical incandescent light bulb day and night for months. Finally they think they have the right design, and the tungsten filament bulb to be tested is carefully assembled. The new bulb is handed to Jimmy, a teen who does odd jobs at the laboratory, and he dashes across the facility to give it to Edison. In his excitement, Jimmy trips and falls, smashing the precious bulb. Edison’s crew is furious; Edison reproaches the lad. Jimmy is devastated and inconsolable. When Edison’s men finally craft a replacement bulb, Edison calls for Jimmy and give him custody of the bulb, and asks him again to carry it to its destination on the other side of the building. Jimmy, striding carefully and slowly this time, completes his historic task.

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Ethics Hero And 2022 Ethics Alarms Award For Most Ethical Website Of The Year: Legal Insurrection

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The instances of schools and other institutions violating core American principles in pursuit of the correct radical woke agenda—which I would summarize as obliterating the unique ethical culture of the United States of America while an apathetic public shrugs with its metaphorical finger up its nose and the biased mainstream media provides cover—are proliferating with frightening speed. The only remedy is rapid action, exposure, and sufficient condemnation to make these dreadful revolutionaries back down and either give up or regroup, to be slapped down again another day. That was what Prof. William Jacobsen’s courageous blog Legal Insurrection did when the Providence, Rhode Island, Public School District attempted two measures that were discriminatory—you know, the “good” kind of discrimination.

The District tried to inflict an “Educators of Color Meet Up” program in which white educators were excluded from attending by the explicit terms of the announcement and a sign up form that listed only non-white races and ethnicities. The Legal Insurrection Foundations sent a letter to the planned venue for the event, putting the owners on notice of the non-discrimination provisions of the Rhode Island Public Accommodations law. The school district moved its location and changed its sign up form and event description after being exposed,

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