That’s Henry Hanlon, apparently a male basketball player who “identifies” as female. Clearly, it’s good for his ego. (Can’t tell who I’m talking about in the photo? Guess!)
The San Francisco Waldorf high school girls basketball team is on a roll, thanks to its court domination by team captain Henry Hanlon. No, he doesn’t even bother to carry a female name. California’s Interscholastic Federation (CIF) established “Gender Identity Participation” rule in 2013, and it is bats.“All students should have the opportunity to participate in CIF athletics and/or activities in a manner that is consistent with their gender identity,” the policy states. As CIF’s Associate Executive Director Brian Seymour explains, “All of our athletes, all the eligible athletes, are afforded the opportunity to compete with the gender they feel most comfortable with.” Oh. I can see where a high school athlete might be “most comfortable” with a fanciful gender ID that allows him to feel like the Harlem Globetrotters playing against their eternal patsies, the Washington Generals.
Ethics Alarms commented on Madonna’s inexcusable two-hour tardy appearance at her concert (item #4) without realizing that The Grand Ol’ Opry could have said “Hold my beer!” The Nashville shrine to Country Music officially apologized to fans and audience members after four-time Grammy Award nominee Elle King disgraced the venue and herself with a vulgar and drunken performance on an evening last week that was supposed to honor Dolly Parton. “We deeply regret and apologize for the language that was used during last night’s second Opry performance,” the Opry wrote on X/Twitter over the weekend. That was an understatement of what happened.
My first reaction was to have sympathy for Brittany Pietsch, the Cloudfare account executive who somehow thought recording her Zoomed firing and posting it on social media would be a good idea. Then I learned she was 27. That’s much too old to behave like she did, much less to be self-righteous about it. Her experience ended up on every social media platform and was covered by media outlets from the New York Post to the The Wall Street Journal, and now she is the official “poster girl” for deluded and entitled young workers who don’t get the capitalist system and the competitive workplace.
You can see her nine-minute clip here. If you don’t wince through it, you may need a refresher course in workplace ethics yourself. An at-will employee, Brittany argues with the HR staff who were assigned to dismiss her. Here’s a typical exchange:
The NBA’s Chicago Bulls celebrated their “inaugural class” in the team’s new Ring of Honor ceremony during halftime of its game against the Golden State Warriors last week. The first Ring of Honor class included 13 men and the entire 1995-96 team, which went 72-10 and won the NBA championship. It didn’t help that the current Bulls gave up a season high in points in a 140-131 loss, but that was the least of the night’s low points.
The most popular and famous stars of that team, Michael Jordan, Scotty Pippen and Dennis Rodman, didn’t show up. The team wasn’t expecting them to, because all three declined, but it allowed the fans to believe otherwise, at least the fans who didn’t research the matter beforehand. Continue reading →
…or the politicians and untrustworthy elected officials who use both for unethical ends.
Further reinforcing his Ethics Alarms status as an Ethics Villain, the now retired Dr. Anthony Fauci blithely told lawmakers on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic this week that “social distancing guidelines”—warning the public to keep six feet apart from anyone else supposedly to limit the spread of the Wuhan virus — “sort of just appeared” without scientific input, and was “likely not based on scientific data.”
Oh! That’s nice! Schools remained closed well into 2021 substantially as a result of the social distancing guidelines that he stood by and allowed to be issued without scientific data. I was screamed at in several public places because I knew the social distancing edicts were garbage from the beginning, just like the “don’t touch your face!” nonsense and 95% of all masks. My sister has been a phobic about physical contact ever since March of 2020: she has yet to allow me into her house, and will only speak to me at my home ten feet away on the front yard. Research studies and other health officials pooh-poohed the social distancing mandates early on while media scaremongers—-after all, it was vital to wreck the Trump economy if he was going to be brought down—were quoting some “experts” saying that we should all wear masks and socially distance forever. Fortunately my pop culture addiction served me well: I recognized all of the CDC recommendations from the 2011 pandemic movie “Contagion.” They were exactly the same, proving to me that “social distancing” and the rest were just boiler plate “Do something!” measures off the CDC shelf. (They didn’t work in the film, either.)
The Julie Principle comes into play when an undesirable or annoying characteristic or behavior pattern in a person or organization appears to be hard-wired and part of their essence. In judging such a person or entity, it is useful to keep the lyrics of Julie’s song from “Show Boat” (“Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man O’ Mine,” lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein Jr., music by Jerome Kern) firmly in mind, when she sings…
Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly…I’ve gotta love that man til I dieCan’t help lovin’ that man of mine!
It comes into play when one is tempted to keep criticizing and calling attention to such individuals or organizations behaving in the same unethical way they always do when there is no chance, literally none, that they will, or will even want to, change their habits. Beneficiaries of the Julie Principle on Ethics Alarms in recent years have included Kamala Harris, who always babbles semi-incoherently, White House paid liar Karine Jean-Pierre, who is forever incompetent, New York Times anti-white bigot and Trump Derangement victim Charles M. Blow, and PETA, which is reliably ridiculous.
It is true that Donald Trump will always get the benefit of The Julie Principle here in one area: his characteristic oblique and stream of consciousness manner of communicating. However, as recent outbursts have vividly illustrated, he cannot be julied—yes, I just invented a verb—when he (relatively) clearly states his intentions, beliefs, or versions of reality. Attention must be paid.
A recent feature in the intermittently cretinous New York Magazine feature “The Intelligencer” by the thing’s demonstrably inept editor Margaret Hartman illustrates the problem. Here are what she ranked as “8 Awful Things Trump Said in Iowa.”
At one rally, Trump said, riffing on U.S. aircraft carrier technology, “Think of it, magnets. Now all I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets.” I can’t let that kind of ignorance go. That’s signature significance for someone who has inexcusable gaps in his basic knowledge, and who therefore cannot be trusted to make responsible and competent decisions. It also suggests the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Trump is ignorant and doesn’t know he’s ignorant, or he would not be broadcasting his ignorance in public.
In contrast, this quote: “First they say, ‘Sir, how do you do it? How do you wake up in the morning and put on your pants?’ And I say, ‘Well, I don’t think about it too much.’ I don’t want to think about it because if I think about it too much maybe I won’t want to do it, but I love it because we’re going to do something for this country that’s never been done before” is pure Trump Derangement fodder. He’s kidding around, but the dedicated “Get Trump!” bashers can’t resist treating such Trumpian flights of fancy as important. This is an example of why Trump critics are so biased that they can’t be trusted.
Hartman writes, “Trump claimed [the Civil War] — much like the Ukraine-Russia war and the Israel-Hamas war — could have been avoided entirely if we had a master dealmaker like him in the White House back in 1861.” Trump has opined thus before. It is mandatory left-wing cant that to even suggest that the Civil War could have or should have been avoided is evidence of racism, so naturally Hartman pounced. Trump is certainly dead wrong that Lincoln could have avoided the Civil War without just letting the Confederate states leave the Union, but the position that more competent Presidents than Lincoln’s immediate predecessors Pierce and Buchanan (both in the finals of the Ethics Alarms “Worst President” competition) might have been able to come up with a compromise that eased slavery out without a disastrous war is held by a small group of historians. It’s not an “awful” thing to say.
#5 on Hartman’s list is so bizarre that it qualifies as another example of her own Trump Derangement. Read it yourself. Apparently it’s “awful” that Trump objected to a Ron DeSantis campaign ad. This is so dumb that I don’t need the Julie Principle to ignore it. “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” works just fine.
Trump did nasty imitations of Biden, his speech issues and his confusion. Verdict:Pure Julie Principle. Hartman finds this disgusting and so do I, but that’s who this guy is, and anyone paying attention knows it. It’s not worth reporting or complaining about at this point.
Trump again mocked the late Senator John McCain’s physical disabilities while condemning his decisive vote that killed the attempted Obamacare repeal. That’s not Julie Principle stuff, that’s insanity. It broadcasts Trump’s flat, indeed declining, learning curve, and shows that a man who wants to be President is obsessed with grudges and revenge, which is scary. Trump’s attacks on McCain when the ex-prisoner of war was alive cost him support from many veterans. Mocking him now again is beneath what even I thought Trump was capable of. No Julie here.
“He glorified January 6 insurrectionists” writes Hartman.Anyone who calls the rioters “insurrectionists” forfeits the right to be taken seriously or trusted. Trump said they are being persecuted, which is true. He called the Biden-enabled stampede of illegals at the border an insurrection, which is sloppy hyperbole, but that’s typical Trump, and Julie Principle all the way.
The worst of Trump’s “awful things,” according to “The Intelligencer” was that when he touched on the recent school shooting in Iowa, he said,
“I want to send our support and our deepest sympathies to the victims and families touched by the terrible school shooting yesterday in Perry, Iowa.It’s just horrible, so surprising to see it here. But we have to get over it, we have to move forward.”
That’s Trump, through and through. It’s not Julie Principle territory, though. It’s worth pondering. He is right, after all, in the sense that these tragedies cannot be allowed to get in the way of facing immediate long term problems. This is a competent military leader’s attitude, as well as a typical CEO’s. Our current reaction as a culture is to turn particularly horrible tragedies into opportunities to appeal to emotion and signal our virtue: Trump doesn’t do virtue-signalling, and I regard that as one of his strengths much of the time. On the other side of the matter, effective leaders have to know when to play mourner -in-chief. This instance show that Trump can’t perform that function: if he had to announce the Challenger disaster as President, he would have said, “This is a terrible tragedy, but we can’t let it slow down our space exploration,” instead of quoting “High Flight,” as Ronald Reagan did. This is useful intelligence regarding Trump. Verdict: No Julie Principle pass.
The final tally: only three of Hartman’s “eight awful things” are worthy of special attention, and escape the Julie Principle’s pass.
***
A diversion: In that video clip from the MGM “Showboat,” Ava Gardner as Julie is being dubbed by singer Annette Warner, who was not credited. This was back in the day when studios dubbed actors routinely if they weren’t primarily singers; today, the pendulum has swung completely, so the voices of non-singers like Russell Crowe (in “Les Miserables”) are inflicted on audiences. The dubbing of “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine” was particularly unfair, for Gardner could sing, and worked hard on the song. She didn’t know until she say the movie that Warner had taken over her vocals.
Warren, I discovered researching the story, was still performing as recently as 2017, and is apparently still with us at the age of 101. Ava Gardner, born in the same year, has been dead for 33 years.
It took the Pentagon three and a half days to inform the White House that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III had been hospitalized on New Year’s Day following complications from an elective procedure, two U.S. officials said Saturday.
The extraordinary breach of protocol — Mr. Austin is in charge of the country’s 1.4 million active-duty military at a time when the wars in Gaza and Ukraine have dominated the American national security landscape — has baffled officials across the government, including at the Pentagon.
Senior defense officials say Mr. Austin did not inform them until Thursday that he had been admitted to the intensive care unit at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. The Pentagon then informed the White House.
The Pentagon’s belated notification, first reported by Politico, confounded White House officials, one Biden administration official said.
Meanwhile, conservatives “pounced”: “What possible motive could there be for doing this? Who knows? It didn’t make a lot of sense, but the Biden administration has an extensive record of covering up scandals, so it wasn’t exactly out of character for the Biden administration to cover something up,” wrote PJ media’s Matt Margolis. Other wags noted that hiding such health-related information about important government officials is the kind of thing China does.
The trouble with protesters, to cut to the chase, is that a large percentage of them in virtually every protest and demonstration don’t know what they are chanting about and are just happy mob participants. I remember when my college was shut down by a student strike my freshman year, several of my friends were happily raising their fists and carrying signs despite the fact that they weren’t interested or informed on the matter being protested. They all reassured me that they were involved to meet girls. Later, in my first job after law school, the PR director I worked with in D.C. seemed to be attending a protest or rally every weekend. When I remarked that she was unusually politically active for someone who never discussed politics at all, she assured me that she just enjoyed the energy of crowds…and found it a good way to meet guys.
Since yesterday was “Capitol Insurrection Day,” which I predict will be made a national holiday as soon as Democrats get control of Congress, it seems a propitious opportunity to ponder an equally stupid protest in Clifton, Bristol (Great Britain). A resident reported that his Tesla’s tires were deflated, and on the windshield was this message:
Other automobiles on his street were also victims of tire-deflating. The group behind the mass flattening calls itself “the Tyre Extinguishers.” ( The play on words would work better if the Brits spelled “fire” as “fyre.”)
The annoyed Tesla owner told reporters, “It’s ironic, because I was trying to do the right thing by buying an electric car. It’s ridiculous and inconvenient. I get why [climate activism] is happening, but I’m not seeing the point of this.”
The point he ought to derive from the incident is that most climate change protesters know almost nothing about climate science and related matters, like the full environmental effects of electric vehicles. They are passionately protesting what they don’t understand sufficiently to have an informed opinion about, and therefore shouldn’t influence anyone beyond persuading observers that they are passionate, unethical dolts and blights on society.
In a recent essay, Victor David Hanson concisely summarizes why the Left’s angry narrative that Claudine Gay was forced out as Harvard’s president because of racial discrimination is untenable and self-damning. He wrote in part,
…In the respective press releases from both Gay and the Harvard Corporation, racial animus was cited as a reason for her removal. Gay did not even refer to her failure to stop antisemitism on her campus or her own record of blatant plagiarism. Yet playing the race card reflects poorly on both and for a variety of reasons. One, Gay’s meager publication record — a mere eleven articles without a single published book of her own — had somehow earned her a prior Harvard full professorship and presidency. Such a thin resume leading to academic stardom is unprecedented.
Two, the University of Pennsylvania forced the resignation of its president, Liz Magill. She sat next to Gay during that now-infamous congressional hearing in which they both claimed they were unable to discipline blatant antisemitism on their campuses. Instead, both pleaded “free speech” and “context” considerations.
Such excuses were blatantly amoral and untrue. In truth, ivy-league campuses routinely sanction, punish, or remove staff, faculty, or students deemed culpable for speech or behavior deemed hurtful to protected minorities — except apparently white males and Jews. Yet Magill was immediately forced to resign, and Gay was not. Also noteworthy was Magill’s far more impressive and extensive administrative experience, along with a more prestigious scholarship that was free of even a suggestion of plagiarism.
Academia’s immediate firing of a white woman while trying desperately to save the career of a less qualified and ethically challenged Black woman will be seen not as a case of racial bias but more likely of racial preference.
And yet one after another of the prominent pundits, journalists and commentators immediately worked hard to spread the “Gay was a victim of systemic racism” narrative. In so doing, they discredited themselves and the ideology that warps their judgment and ethics.
Presidential candidate Cornel West, a former Harvard professor, wrote, “How sad but predictable that the same figures and forces enabling the ethnic cleansing and genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Gaza – Ackman, Blum, Summers and others – push out the first Black woman president of Harvard! This racism against both Palestinians and Black people is undeniable and despicable! I have experienced similar attacks from the same forces in academia with too many of my colleagues remaining silent! When big money dictates university policy and raw power dictates foreign policy, the moral bankruptcy of American education and democracy looms large! But we shall remain strong in our fight for Truth Justice Love!”
Al Sharpton told his MSNBC audience that the Harvard president’s resignation is an “attack” on “every Black woman” in US.
Mara Gay, one of several NYT’s race-baiters, told MSNBC that”This is really an attack on academic freedom … This is an attack on diversity. This is an attack on multiculturalism, & … I don’t have to say that they’re racist, because you can hear and see the racism in the attacks”
And here is yet another despicable example of an unethical backlash in reaction to Claudine Gay’s wholly deserved exit as president of Harvard University.
Billionaire hedge fund manager, major Harvard donor and Harvard alum Bill Ackman has been among the most outspoken critics of Gay, beginning with his disgust at the then-Harvard president’s infamous performance under questioning at a Congressional hearing. He was adamant that the subsequent plagiarism revelations mandated Gay’s resignation, and after she did resign earlier this week, he wrote on X that Gay should be fired from the faculty as well. “Students are forced to withdraw for much less,” Ackman tweeted. “Rewarding her with a highly paid faculty position sets a very bad precedent for academic integrity at Harvard.”
Is anyone seriously going to dispute that? The only argument can be that Harvard has allowed other professors to get away with plagiarism with no more than some embarrassment as their punishment. See my Ethics Scoreboard post The Plagiarizing Professor, and the weekly Standard’s Laurence Tribe and the problem of borrowed scholarship. (And don’t forget that my professor at Harvard for the American Presidency course was Doris Kearns, later Goodwin, who had a major plagiarism scandal after leaving the faculty.) In another post on the topic, I concluded, “Harvard …has a full-blown plagiarism problem among its faculty, and it is more than likely that it has extensive company among other prestigious universities. Institutions of higher education must unite and begin serious and extensive inquiries into the extent and the causes of a trend that threatens the integrity of scholarship and undermines the ethics of America’s students.”
Needless to say—well, apparently it does need saying because the “Everybody does it” excuse has been cited repeatedly in defense of Gay—the way to fix a faculty plagiarism problem is to stop tolerating plagiarism by members of the faculty.
But I digress. This post is about Business Insider. What BI broke as a scoop late yesterday was that its minions had uncovered evidence of plagiarism by Bill Ackman’s wife Neri Oxman, who was a tenured professor at MIT from 2017 to 2021. “Oxman plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation, Business Insider found, including at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation,” Business Insider crowed.
To which I respond, “So what?” Sure, shame on her, but why is that newsworthy? Oxman’s plagiarism has nothing to do with the president of Harvard. It has nothing to do with Harvard. It does not mitigate Gay’s misconduct in any way. It does not prove that Bill Ackman is a hypocrite: he’s not a scholar, nor an academic, and he presumably married his wife for reasons unrelated to scholarly attribution practices. At best, BI is engaging in obnoxious “whataboutism.” At worst, its slap at Ackman through his wife is like the plague of “swatting” going around lately. Ackman helped bring down Gay, so Business Insider sets out to disrupt Ackman’s family.
Nice.
Assholes.
Oxman addressed the question of her plagiarism on Twitter/X, and also revealed that she was blindsided by the Business Insider reporter, who contacted her yesterday and gave her little time to review his findings and respond before BI’s hit piece went up. She described the aspects of her dissertation that had attribution issues and involved quotes without quotation marks, said she regretted them, apologized to the authors involved, and said she would ask M.I.T. to allow her to make corrections where necessary. Her post is a completely reasonable response to BI’s findings, indeed exactly the kind of response Gay should have made, but didn’t and hasn’t.
But again, it doesn’t matter. Oxman isn’t the president of a university. She isn’t a university faculty member. She isn’t a candidate for political office, like Joe Biden was when he plagiarized a speech, or Elizabeth Warren was when it was revealed that she copied someone else’s recipes for her cook book, “Pow Wow Chow.” Oxman authored one scholarly product while a student that inadequately credited sources; Gay’s plagiarism was present in several separate works published as professor. Oxman was targeted by Business Insider to strike at her husband.
So this is the way its going to be, is it?
You can find my honors thesis on “The Great Man Theory and the American Presidency” in Widener Library, guys, and my book (with historian Ed Larson) can be purchased here. Go for it.
Ethics Alarms 