Family

Curmie’s Conjectures: Why There’s a Teacher Shortage, Exhibit A

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

by Curmie

I’ve promised two essays that are indeed partially written; I could finish one of them in 20 minutes or so if I could just concentrate, but something else always seems to come up.  So let me try yet a different topic.

One of my friends and former students (we’ll call him L for the purposes of this post) teaches theatre in a public school.  He recently posted on Facebook about a confrontation he’d had with the father of one of his students.  The boy had failed to do three significant assignments, and, curiously enough, his grade reflected that fact.

Ah, but you see, the lad is an athlete, and a failing grade made him academically ineligible.  So Dad screams for “about 15 minutes.”  My friend responded like this: “I want him to be able to play […], too. I understand how important it is for him to have that outlet. But if I want lights on in my house, I gotta pay bills. If I wanna drive a car, I gotta pay to put gas in the car. So, if _______ wants to play […] then he’s gonna need to stop being lazy and do what is required in this class. Not to mention the other three classes he is failing.” 

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Presumed Racism Raises Its Obnoxious Head at “Social Qs”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Philip Galanes’ stultifyingly woke advice column in the New York Times has been off my metaphorical radar screen since I dumped the print version of the paper, but somehow (I don’t recall why) this recent inquiry is an exception. Here was the inquirer’s question:

My wife and I attended my nephew’s wedding 18 months ago. He and his wife are now expecting a baby, and I was looking forward to meeting my newest relative. The problem: At their wedding, group pictures of our extended family were taken before my wife and I realized it. When we asked the photographer why we had been overlooked, he only reiterated that pictures had already been taken. My wife, a woman of color, believes that racism may be the reason for our exclusion. She wants nothing to do with my nephew or his family again. I understand her feelings, but I’d like to restart these relationships. My wife doesn’t want me to broach the subject. Thoughts?

Yecchh.

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Ethics Quiz: The RBG Awards

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

This quiz could be fairly paraphrased, if in vulgar fashion, as “Who’s the asshole?“

Established in 2019, the RBG Leadership Award is supposed to honor “trailblazing” men and women of distinction, with “distinction” having a rather broad and vaguely defined meaning, as the pronouncements of officials connected with the awards made clear. “Justice Ginsburg became an icon by bravely pursuing her own path and prevailing against the odds,” said Brendan V. Sullivan, Jr., chair of the RBG Award. “The honorees reflect the integrity and achievement that defined Justice Ginsburg’s career and legend.” “Justice Ginsburg was a legal entrepreneur who innovated and took risks in ways that rewarded us all,” said Matthew Umhofer, president of the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation, which administers the awards. “In a world that sought to define and limit her, she found ways to challenge and change the system, armed with nothing more than a brilliant mind and a powerful pen. Her impact transcended the law, and society is better off for it.” “Such is the spirit that defines the honorees of the RBG Award,” adds the award’s website.

This year, it was decided that the awards, which were originally limited to women of distinction (because Ginsburg was an iconic feminist and women’s rights advocate), should be awarded to men as well. “Justice Ginsburg fought not only for women but for everyone,” said Julie Opperman, Chair of the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation. “Going forward, to embrace the fullness of Justice Ginsburg’s legacy, we honor both women and men who have changed the world by doing what they do best.” 

[Can you see what’s coming? Diversity-obsessed progressives were set up to be hoisted on their own petard!]

When this years’ honorees were announced, it is fair to say that the late Justice Ginsburg’s family flipped out. The awards went to…

ELON MUSK – Entrepreneurship
SYLVESTER STALLONE – Cultural Icon
MARTHA STEWART – Industry Leadership 
MICHAEL MILKEN – Philanthropy
RUPERT MURDOCH – Media Mogul

…and the family’s and assorted Ginsburg admirers’ collective heads exploded. Jane C. Ginsburg, a law professor at Columbia University, said the choice of winners this year was “an affront to the memory of our mother.” “The justice’s family wish to make clear that they do not support using their mother’s name to celebrate this year’s slate of awardees, and that the justice’s family has no affiliation with and does not endorse these awards,” she said.

Trevor W. Morrison, a former dean of New York University School of Law and one of the justice’s former law clerks, condemned the choices in a letter addressed to the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation. “Justice Ginsburg had an abiding commitment to careful, rigorous analysis and to fair-minded engagement with people of opposing views,” he said “It is difficult to see how the decision to bestow the R.B.G. Award on this year’s slate reflects any appreciation for — or even awareness of — these dimensions of the justice’s legacy.” Shana Knizhnik, an author of “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, ” spat out, “Honoring Elon Musk, who uses his platform to promote anti-feminist and anti-L.G.B.T.Q. sentiments, and Rupert Murdoch, who has used his immense power to undermine democracy, dishonors what Justice Ginsburg spent her career standing for.”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Who is being unethical (unfair, disrespectful, incompetent irresponsible and/or breaching trust), the administrators of the awards, the critics of the awards, neither, or both?

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The Grandparents’ Betrayal

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

As often happens, some click-bait headline sucks me in and I find an interesting ethics topic as a result. This time, the headline was “Woman applauded for demanding parents get noses pierced before they can see granddaughter again.” What???

The story behind that unique description was a woman and her husband took her infant daughter to Mexico to visit her parents. The parents gave the one-year-old girl a pair of earrings for her first birthday, and Mom told them that she would hold on to the gift until her daughter was old enough to have her ears pierced. But when the American couple returned from meeting some friends after leaving the girl in the care of Grandma and Grandpa, they were informed that they “didn’t need to wait [until she was old enough] because they had taken her to get her ears pierced” already.

The couple was furious. The girl’s father said that they could never trust the grandparents alone with their daughter, but his wife announced that she would not take her or any future kids to see her parents in Mexico. The family checked out of their hotel and returned to the States.

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On Shaking Trust: Trivial Episode, Useful Lesson

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

My gut reaction to the latest Royal scandal in Great Britain was dismissive: so a snapshot of Princess Catherine was photoshopped: the Horror. But this was just a bi-product of my long-standing lack of interest in the UK’s peculiar institution and a hangover from so many of my female acquaintances reacting to the death of Princess Diana as if their own families had suffered the equivalent of the Cheshire home invasion. The current episode is important for the ethics lesson it teaches, although you would think that this particular lesson would have been learned by the Windsors a long time ago. Did the royal family not watch “The Crown”?

The Prince and Princess of Windsor released the first official photo of Catherine since her abdominal surgery two months ago, a Mother’s Day snapshot allagedly taken by Prince William. Somehow the couple didn’t consider the modern reality that digital sleuths are everywhere, and quickly those annoying common troublemakers discovered that tell-tale signs of photo manipulation were afoot. You can see the various smoking guns above.

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Speaking of Wills (I’m Searching for One Now)…”The Ethicist” Wants a Word

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Well, the world here at Westminster Place is getting grimmer and more desperate by the second, so I’m escaping to my office for a nonce to see if a break helps. As it happens, our old friend “The Ethicist,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, had a recent exchange involving death-related matters, and I didn’t care much for his analysis.

But what do I know? I couldn’t even figure out that my wife needed to go to the hospital regardless of what her protestations when in fact she was dying…

But I digress. A questioner asked the Times Magazine’s resident ethics advice columnist (and the fourth to hold The Ethicist title) whether his plan of “giving half of my inheritance to my brother without telling him of his exclusion from [their father’s] will, sparing him any additional hurt feelings,” would be ethical. Mad Dad is 90, the inquiring son is the executor of the father’s will, and he has seen that his brother has been cut out..

His question concludes, “Would this be ethical, or does the need for truth override my plan? To be clear, I would not lie. This would be more a misdirection by omission.”

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How Greedy Parents Pimp Out Their Daughters on the Web

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Those are some of the comments that the New York Times found on Instagram in response to the photo of a pretty nine-year-old girl posing in a bikini. Her parents posted the photo to attract attention, and they are not as rare as you might think. In one of the investigative reporting projects that periodically justifies the Times’ existence, the paper found many juvenile “Instagram influencers” whose accounts are managed by their parents. “Although the site prohibits children under 13, parents can open so-called mom-run accounts for them, and they can live on even when the girls become teenagers,” the story reports. “But what often starts as a parent’s effort to jump-start a child’s modeling career, or win favors from clothing brands, can quickly descend into a dark underworld dominated by adult men, many of whom openly admit on other platforms to being sexually attracted to children.”

Ethics Alarms has long taken the position that parents posting revealing, embarrassing or provocative photos of their children on the web without a child’s informed consent (and children cannot give informed consent) is per se unethical, and that was before even considering this disgusting phenomenon.

The Times examined thousands of such accounts with parents operating the sale of their daughters’ photos, exclusive chat sessions and even offering their girls’ worn leotards and cheerleading outfits to followers. It’s profitable, for the parents, and the girls don’t understand the implications of what they have been thrust into. Some customers—pedophiles—- spend thousands of dollars nurturing the underage relationships. A demographics firm hired by the Times found 32 million connections to male followers on the 5,000 accounts examined by the paper.

This is all ethics rot, an unforeseen consequence of the World Wide Web colliding with the same unethical instincts that prompt parents to guide their young children into modeling, acting, gymnastics and other sports for their vicarious pleasure and profits. Here is the worst news in the piece:

“The troubling interactions on Instagram come as social media companies increasingly dominate the cultural landscape and the internet is seen as a career path of its own. Nearly one in three preteens lists influencing as a career goal, and 11 percent of those born in Generation Z, between 1997 and 2012, describe themselves as influencers. The so-called creator economy surpasses $250 billion worldwide, according to Goldman Sachs, with U.S. brands spending more than $5 billion a year on influencers.”

What the Times found is not an internet problem but an irresponsible, incompetent, greedy and abusive parent problem that has been around as long as there have been families. Social media only is giving it a new and revolting place to thrive. I was especially annoyed by the response of one of the mother/pimps whose daughter has been promoted on the web from a young age. “But she’s been doing this so long now,” the mother says. “Her numbers are so big. What do we do? Just stop it and walk away?”

Yes, you stupid, stupid woman. Just stop it.

Do read the whole piece. It is long and horrifying. This link lets you avoid the paywall.

Ethics Dunces: The Chicago Bulls and Their Fans

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

That went well, don’t you think?

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 →

“Confronting My Biases” Meets “The Ethicist”: The Webcam Model Son

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“The Ethicist,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, was oh so sensitive answering this query from a concerned parent:

….I have just found out that my [college age] son is a “model” on a pornographic streaming service. My initial reaction was shock, revulsion and shame. But the longer I think about it, the more I wonder, is there really anything immoral or otherwise wrong about what he is doing? He does it from the privacy of his home, alone, and seems to earn a substantial amount of money. If he likes what he does, is there any reason on my part to feel alarmed, ashamed, guilty or worried?

The NYU philosophy prof essentially says that nobody is being hurt by the son’s activities, so they cannot be called “wrong.” He then explains, as I cut through the verbiage…

“If we agree that your son’s camming isn’t wrong, what explains your initial sense of revulsion? Part of your response might arise from the familiar intrafamilial squeamishness about sexual disclosures. That response, then, may have been connected not with what he was doing but with you, as his parent, knowing about it….you can also have prudential concerns. How would his prospects be affected if word got out about his webcam gig? Livestreams can be recorded and uploaded. Even if you think that erotic livestreaming is neither wrong nor shameful, it’s natural, as a parent, to worry about how others might react…There’s nothing hypocritical about compartmentalizing a cam gig. Pretty much all cultures — and subcultures — have ideas about modesty, privacy and discretion, and so understandings about the contexts where erotic display or simply nudity is appropriate.”

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 6: Pot Users

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The status of marijuana in the U.S. is a mess, with the drug still being illegal under federal law and the states slowly sliding down the slippery slope to legalization, because they see revenue in it. The confusion is going to get worse before it gets better. Ohio was the only state to legalize marijuana for “recreational use” last year. The Kentucky General Assembly legalized medical marijuana this year, but patients will have to wait until 2025 for the program to kick in. Voters in Oklahoma rejected the legalization of recreational marijuana in last March, and Hoosiers voted against legal marijuana in Indiana in early April.

The Department of Health and Human Services sent its latest findings on marijuana to the Drug Enforcement Administration, recommending that it be reclassified as a Schedule III drug. That classification would mean that the substance has a “moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.” However, I wouldn’t trust the now thoroughly woke HHS to do an unbiased study on the topic, since the most stoned American are progressives and Democrats. Throughout the last few years, there have been various studies suggesting that the drug is not as harmless as its proponents have been claiming it is, and there is enough evidence of heavy use of pot causing long-term cognitive problems to tell me that we still don’t know what lurks in the genie’s bottle.

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