Gender and Sex

Paging Moral Luck! Paging Moral Luck!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Judge S. Kato Crews, a progressive appointee by President Biden to the U.S. District Court in Colorado, refused to allow an injunction against the San Jose State women’s volleyball team from including a biologically male “transwoman” (above) to compete with the team in a women’s volleyball conference tournament this week. He ruled that appellate and Supreme Court precedents clearly establish that the protections of Title IX and the 14th Amendment apply to transgender individuals.

A key factor in the decision seems to be that the plaintiffs, which are the other colleges in San Jose State’s conference, a current co-captain of the San Jose team, other former players and the recently-suspended assistant coach, should have filed the suit earlier. The conference’s transgender participation policy has been in effect since 2022 and four conference opponents and one non-conference opponent forfeited games against San Jose State beginning in September.

“The rush to litigate these complex issues now over a mandatory injunction,” Crews ruled, “places too a heavy burden on the defendants”—the Mountain West Conference and its commissioner, two administrators at San Jose State, the school’s head volleyball coach and the board of trustees of the California State University System. That’s a reasonable judicial call under most circumstances, but the judge and the entire pro-trans movement in the U.S. is now at the mercy of moral luck. That is the annoying life reality that random occurrences out of the control of decision-makers have a way of retroactively defining a decision as either prudent and wise or reckless and wrong. Crews’ decision neatly tees up the perfect conditions for moral luck to settle the trans athletes in women’s sports controversy

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Comment of the Day: “Apt Analogy of the Month: Jaguar’s Suicidal Ad=Kamala Harris’s Campaign”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The various issues being discussed around Jaguar’s weird, woke-pandering, car-less video ad have been covered twice at Ethics Alarms, initially here. The always trenchant EA comment whiz Mrs. Q issued this emphatic Comment of the Day explaining “What’s going on here?” from her perspective, and as ever, she doesn’t mince words. Here its is, on the post, “Apt Analogy of the Month: Jaguar’s Suicidal Ad=Kamala Harris’s Campaign”….

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“Like most adverts now, this is a story of rich white heterosexuals selling stuff to other rich white heterosexuals, using images of multi-ethnic, pansexual, differently abled humans in order to appear progressive, without actually doing or changing anything…“

Recently, it was mentioned on this blog that furries were accepted by the “LGBTQ community.” First off there is no such thing as community here. Most gays can’t stand bisexuals and most trans don’t like gays. But let’s get to the real shit here.

The people who always have and always will sign off on supposed “edgy” lifestyles and content like this has always been what my wife and I refer to as the elite, bored, rich, and white. Ever heard of the term “academic lesbian?” Learn about it and the picture starts to become clear.

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Apt Analogy of the Month: Jaguar’s Suicidal Ad=Kamala Harris’s Campaign

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Ann Althouse gets the pointer for finding this: Giles Coren of the London Times wrote in “I take Jaguar’s woeful woke rebrand personally/From heritage British cars to classroom lessons, there’s always one demographic under attack — the middle classes” …

“And Jaguar’s answer to the crapness of a car they can no longer persuade middle-aged, middle-class, professional family men to buy? Improve the car? Persuade the men? Or, wait, try to sell it instead to anorexic, teenage, intersex manga fans of colour, because they might just be stupid enough to fall for it? Except the ad’s not for them, is it? Like most adverts now, this is a story of rich white heterosexuals selling stuff to other rich white heterosexuals, using images of multi-ethnic, pansexual, differently abled humans in order to appear progressive, without actually doing or changing anything…. The ads stand for NOTHING…. They are born of a contempt for the middle of society, which is conceived at the top with the imagined complicity of the bottom. It’s pure Kamala Harris. It’s ‘joy.’ It is the sort of thing that got Trump elected: a small number of ivory tower wokeists alienating the middle class and pushing nice people further and further to the right.”

Bingo! What a perfect analogy: they should show the Jaguar silliness on talking head shows every time a progressive propagandist says Trump won because of sexism and racism, or because the voters are stupid. Would anyone smart buy a Jaguar based on that ad? (EA posted on it last week.)

Meanwhile, the meme-makers and parodists have been having a ball mocking the thing, while Jaguar’s managing director, Rawdon Glover, has described criticism of its incompetent marketing campaign as “vile hatred and intolerance,” saying that its message has been lost in “a blaze of intolerance.” Sounds exactly like Rob Reiner, The View, and all of my bitter Facebook friends, doesn’t he? Jaguar is a corporate hypocrite as well: it has been pointed out that most obvious transsexual model in the ad was cut out of the version showing in the Middle East.

For your early Sunday viewing pleasure, here are a couple of the parodies I could embed. (There’s another one where a rampaging jaguar attacks the models.) But the real ad is funnier than any parody, especially when one considers that its makers thought it would sell luxury cars.

Trans-Mania Loses Disney But Gains…Jaguar?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

What’s going on here?

A couple of things, I think. The two ethics issues are trustworthiness and competence.

Apparently Jaguar has decided that it is within the mission of a car manufacturer to promote transsexuals and other forms of dubious sexuality. Or maybe clowns, based on the characters above that inhabit the company’s very strange ad. Have you seen it? No?

Here you go….

That’s right, no mention of driving, cars, or anything related to transportation. This is a cognitive dissonance scale maneuver for someone seeking a ridiculously narrow market. The ad says “being sexually ambiguous is cool.” Is it? I don’t think so; I think being sexually ambiguous is a problem. Like many minorities with problems, I understand the urge to insist that the problem is really an advantage and a badge of honor, something to take pride in, but why is Jaguar making that argument at the expense of promoting their product?

The ad is propaganda tinged with virtue-signalling for those who think extreme advocacy for marginal sexual identities is virtuous. I don’t regard it as virtuous. I regard this ad as a company abusing its influence by presuming to indoctrinate the public to achieve an interest group’s agenda. Meanwhile, the ad is incompetent advertising, since it doesn’t promote the product the company is supposed to be selling.

At least when Bud Light decided to promote transsexuals while marketing beer, the beer was somewhere in evidence. For all we know after watching that Jaguar ad, the new Jaguar looks like a Stanley Steamer.

And the Great Stupid is still rolling on…

Ethics Quiz: The Offensive Compliment

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

This quiz comes from the latest inquiry to “The Ethicist.” I disagree with much of Prof. Appiah’s answer, as I often have lately, but I do concede that the question is worthy of a serious ponder.

On their way out a restaurant, a family group was interrupted by a stranger who had also dined there. He said to the inquirer’s comely daughter-in-law, “With all due respect, you are very attractive.” The inquirer rebuked him saying, “That is wholly inappropriate, sir.” The inquiry continued,

“My cousin snapped at me that it was only a compliment. My sister got mad at me for upsetting my cousin. My daughter-in-law appreciated my reaction but said that she has had “way creepier men say way creepier things to her.” I responded to them all that a stranger has no business commenting on the looks of a person, good or bad, and that this man would never have said a word if any man had been standing with us. Who is right?”

Before I give you The Ethicist’s answer and mine,

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is….

“Are spontaneous  compliments on a stranger’s appearance per se unethical?”

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Weenie of the Week: Disney [Pointer Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Is it too much to ask Disney to at least have the courage of its oppressively woke convictions?

An episode of the new Disney animated show “Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur” that centered on a transgender character was pulled from the series and there are no plans to broadcast it.

The Disney Channel will not show the episode in 2025 apparently because of its LGBTQ storyline, which involves a transgender character named Brooklyn who is on the girl’s volleyball team and faces discrimination from the opposing team’s coach. The evil coach uses a magic key to lock Brooklyn and her teammates in the girl’s locker room so they can’t play. Brooklyn, who wears pride-themed kneepads and has a “Trans is beautiful” sticker on her water bottle, tells her team mates, “I’m trans, my very existence breaks Greer’s rules.”

Although Disney claims that the timing of the cancellation notice is a coincidence, it seems that all of the artists involved in creating the episode believe that the Presidential election results motivated the decision. Emmy Cicirega, a storyboard artist, wrote on X, “Disney should be ashamed of themselves for canning this episode. You don’t get to approve approve approve something and then destroy it at the last minute, shattering the crew’s hard work and hopes.” Another animator tweeted, “If an episode got this far, it was approved multiple times by multiple divisions, only to suddenly be struck down at the last second? Total breakdown of process and spitting on your team’s careful/thoughtful work…The action being preemptive makes it so much worse to me. The absolute cowardice and second guessing when actually this is when this content is needed most.”

Disney denies it all, but why should anyone trust Disney these days? It does seem spectacularly stupid to self-censor a work of art because of a Presidential election and a close one at that. It seems just as stupid to pull an episode that everyone will think became too controversial because of Trump’s win. If Disney believes as fervently in its all-in support of LGBTQ issues as its much maligned output in recent years suggests, then the company should show some integrity and guts, stick to its metaphorical guns, and tell Brooklyn’s story. One thing you could count on Walt for: if he had a vision, he didn’t care whose ire it aroused. Like all great artists, innovators and creators, if where he was going was into a headwind, he wouldn’t turn back. The decision to red pencil Brooklyn’s story reeks of a company without principles just trying to go where the winds seem to be blowing. Weenies.

Now watch everyone blame the lost episode of “Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur” on Trump.

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Pointer: Willem Reese [This is a correction: I initially credited JutGory for the tip, who quickly disavowed. EA apologizes to all concerned.]

Three Arrogant Pundits, One Crippling Delusion

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

The delusion is that the American people are stupid.

I easily could have written “hundreds of pundits” instead of three, but these three, CNN’s Michael Smerconish, often said to be the most fair and objective of CNN’s talking heads, which tells you something, the New York Times’ David Brooks, once an arrogant, pseudo-intellectual neocon conservative and now a fully indoctrinated Stockholm Syndrome progressive rationalizer, and Times guest Trump-basher Roger Rosenblatt, a writer of some note.

I read about Smerconish last night, and his assertion irritated me the most of all. His theory about why Harris lost and Trump won was based on what he calls “The Boomerang Effect,” “I don’t want it all distilled into this one sound bite or conclusion, but at the top of my list, I’ll say it that way … It’s like a parenting lesson. The more that you tell people what they can’t do, what’s intolerable, you must not do this, you should not do this, the more they’re going to rebel,” Smerconish said. “Maybe they would have ultimately come to their own conclusion and rejected Donald Trump. I don’t know. But I think that the constant browbeating and the combination of the media influence and the four indictments, one conviction, and showing that god-awful joke from Madison Square Garden a week in advance of the election on a loop — and I felt it, and I said it.” He went on, “I can’t sit here, Aiden, telling you, well, this is the way I called the election, but I definitely felt the potential for a boomerang effect, and I think that came true. I really do.”

Translation: “The American people are like children, and we superior intellects in the news media must lead them in such a way that the poor, ignorant, foolish dears think they are coming to their own conclusions.”

I was immediately reminded of song from the musical “The Fantastiks,” in which two father muse about the complexities of parenting. It’s called “Don’t Say No.” Sample lyrics:

“Why did the kids put beans in their ears?
No one can hear with beans in their ears.
After a while the reason appears.
They did it cause we said no.”

It never occurred to Smerconish, or any of the myriad other pundits who bias has made so stupid that they are useless, that the public, or enough of them to prove Abe right again, voted after correctly evaluating the issues, the choices offered to them and alternative courses for the nation going forward. No, they only voted for Trump because the Axis propaganda was too aggressive. After all, voting for Hitler is like putting beans in your ears.

Next up we have David Brooks. I’m sick of reading Brooks, who masks a simplistic view of politics with psychobabble that some might take and complex analysis. I have to give Ann Althouse a pointer for flagging his column titled ““Why We Got It So Wrong.” Ann writes, “If you were “so wrong” before, why would I look to you for right answers now?” Heh. She says she just skimmed it. I read the whole thing.

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Dear Ashli: You Do Know That What You Are Advocating Is Pure Bigotry, Right?

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The self-indicting that is arising from the 2024 Election Freakout has nicely exposed the hypocrisy behind the progressive masks of decency and virtue. Let’s listen to Ashli, the lovely young thing above, who has enthusiastically embraced the South Korean “4B Movement.”  The name ‘4B’ comes from the Korean words for four ‘Nos’: no heterosexual sex, no marriage, no children, and no relationships, all starting with the letter ‘b.’ Her journey is described in a revealing piece in the Daily Mail.

The brutal murder of a woman in a subway station by a man who reportedly said he was ‘sick of being ignored by women.’ sparked the ptotest by many Korean women against all men. That seems fair and logical. No, in fact it makes no sense at all, but it does to Ashli.  “Out of this tragedy, a wave of female anger turned into action. Women took control of their lives,” she writes. I’ve come to the conclusion that men can be dangerous. That’s why, two years ago at the age of 34, I chose to disengage from men entirely.

She gives her reasons. “I knew so many women who were hurt by the men they loved and trusted. Men they vowed to love and who vowed to love them. Men they slept next to at night.” Then, “the overturning of Roe cemented everything I already knew. Five justices—four of them men—decided we didn’t deserve control over our own bodies. The new MAGA Republican Party, with its hyper-masculine, power-hungry grip, cheered it on.”

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Comment of the Day: “Wait, WHAT??? Unethical Quote of the Month: NPR CEO Katherine Maher”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Let me begin by thanking commenter Edward for tracking down the source of the Maher quote, which at the time I posted I could not track, and my source, Elon Musk, didn’t help any by not bothering to include it in his post. It is the Ted Talk above, made when Maher was CEO at Wikipedia.

Not to leave you in any unnecessary suspense, I hate her talk with the fury of a thousand typhoons. Any time I hear the “you have your truth and I have mine” New Age blather, I tune out, spit three times, and have a stiff drink. It is a cornerstone of woke ideology and subjective ethics, and I say to hell with it.

Nonetheless, Extradimensional Cephalopod does his usual meticulously fair and open-minded response, this time to my question of whether the statement, “I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done,” could be justified. He does as good a job as I can imagine anyone doing, but I’m not buying. Before realizing I should post this as a COTD, I replied to EC’s post on the original essay’s thread; I’ll re-post it following his (its?) Comment of the Day on the post, “Wait, WHAT??? Unethical Quote of the Month: NPR CEO Katherine Maher”…

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“…what possible context could justify it?”

I can’t guarantee that Maher meant what she said in a benign sense, but such a sense does indeed exist.

Allow me to rephrase the statement in question:

Before: “I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”

After: “I think our obsession with forcing everyone to agree with our interpretations of the available evidence interfered with us finding enough relevant points of agreement that we could establish mutually acceptable approaches on important issues.”

The confusion lies in the conflation of “truth” to mean three different things:

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Abortion Schmabortion: Women Are Finally Getting The Right To Play Professional Baseball! Rejoice!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This is way, way, way overdue. The Women’s Pro Baseball League (WPBL) announced that it plans to play during the summer of 2026.

League founder Justine Siegal, the first woman coach employed by a Major League Baseball team, and lawyer Keith Steinco World Series-winning manager Cito Gaston and Japan Women’s Baseball League pitcher Ayami Sato to join them in the venture. Good.

Ever since the Penny Marshall-directed film “A League of Their Own,” based on the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which operated from 1943 to 1954. I have wondered why women haven’t had a professional baseball league since then. It is not a sport that requires great strength or size. Unlike basketball or football, I could conceive of an occasional female player making it to the major leagues, especially pitchers.

The problem has always been that talented female Little League players get redirected into softball because that’s the presumed path. There are no college women’s baseball teams; hardball has been a dead end for women. Maybe not any more.

WPBL needs to land a national television deal ahead of its inaugural season to be viable: I think that this can happen. (Suggestion: It should talk Tom Hanks into managing one of the teams.) The league intends to have a full season, playoffs and a championship, with six teams initially participating. If there is one in the Baltimore-Washington area, I’ll be in the stands.

“The Women’s Pro Baseball League is here for all the girls and women who dream of a place to showcase their talents and play the game they love,” Siegal said in the WPBL’s press relaese.“We have been waiting over 70 years for a professional baseball league we can call our own. Our time is now.”

Take THAT, “Handmaiden’s Tale”!