Gender and Sex

From The News Media And Democrats, Another “It Isn’t What It Is” Orgy [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

There is no excuse for this, but apparently it works because the American people are generally as gullible as puppies, as lazy as Homer Simpson, and as irresponsible as eight-year olds with firecrackers. Democrats and their news media henchmen and henchwomen once again decided that it was prudent to gaslight the American people on the topic of abortion, where they have no logical or ethical legs to stand on, but never mind, it’s only about “choice,” after all.

During the first GOP candidates debate in Wisconsin, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Senator Tim Scott and former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson all agreed that, in DeSantis’s words,”the Democrats are trying to….allow abortion all the way up to the moment of birth.” That is unquestionably true, but most Americans don’t like the idea of killing viable babies in the womb—if that’s okay, why not wait until after a birth and decide then if you want to kill the little bugger?—so the troops were called out to deny reality. (This is the current Rationalization of the Century in Woke World: #64. Yoo’s Rationalization or “It isn’t what it is”)

Continue reading →

The International Chess Federation Doesn’t Understand Its Own Game, Biology, And Who Knows What Else…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Funny, I thought chess players were supposed to be intelligent—observant, capable of long-term planning, adept at strategy, those kinds of things.

That’s one more stereotype to discard. The people who run international chess competitions have just outed themselves as morons. The International Chess Federation, or FIDE just banned transgender women from competing in men’s chess tournaments and stripped trans men of women’s chess titles they won. The body revealed its guidelines for transgender competitors this week, thus highlighting its long-running idiocy.

Okay, fine: defining the gender of chess players by their chromosomes would be a solution to a problem if there were a problem, but there isn’t. There is no reason to segregate female and male chess players except ancient prejudice and ignorance—well that, and if it is decided that the fewer little chess players conceived, the better.

Continue reading →

Baseball Ethics Dunce For The Ages: Tampa Bay Rays Shortstop Wander Franco

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

What’s worse than Ethics Dunce? What Wander Franco, the Tampa Bay Rays sensational young shortstop, has done is so flagrantly destructive to himself and so ruinous to his team and family…and so obviously wrong and avoidable that “dunce” is an understatement.

If you don’t follow baseball, I need to tell you bit about Franco. At 22 years old, he is already in his third major league season. He plays shortstop, the most important and difficult defensive position besides pitcher and catcher, and his team, the Tampa Bay Rays, are a perennial powerhouse in the American League. He is handsome and built like a Greek statue: so clearly does everything about Franco scream “Superstar!” that the Rays took the almost unprecedented step of signing him to an eleven year contract before this season, before he has won a single batting title, Gold Glove or MVP award. He has already made just under $4 million dollars; the rest of his contract will pay him an estimated $176 million more, whereupon he will be eligible for another long-term contract as a free agent conservatively worth more than twice as much.

He has all of that before him, and that’s just the money. He is looking at being a community and national celebrity, a product spokesperson and endorser, a role model for the young, and a legend in his sport. And what did he do?

Continue reading →

Apparently Obama Is Gay: Does It Matter?

/ Jack Marshall / 68 Comments

“In regard to homosexuality, I must say that I believe this is an attempt to remove oneself from the present, a refusal perhaps to perpetuate the endless farce of earthly life. You see, I make love to men daily, but in the imagination,” Barack Obama, 21, wrote to ex-girlfriend Alex McNear in November 1982. The suddenly sensational 1982 letter resurfaced when Obama biographer David Garrow gave a provocative interview on his subject.

“My mind is androgynous to a great extent and I hope to make it more so until I can think in terms of people, not women as opposed to men,” Obama wrote. “But, in returning to the body, I see that I have been made a man, and physically in life, I choose to accept that contingency.”

Oh. Wait, what?

McNear dated Obama when they both attended Occidental College in Los Angeles. She redacted the revealing paragraphs, and the letter came to be owned by Emory University somehow. Emory guards the letter and doesn’t permit it to be photographed or removed. Garrow’s friend Harvey Klehr transcribed the long-hidden paragraphs by hand and sent them to the historian, who then included them in his Obama-fest,“Rising Star.”

What’s going on here?

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce (But We Knew That): The American Bar Association

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The ABA’s House of Delegates this week approved a resolution urging law schools to give either academic credit or monetary compensation to their students who serve as editors of law reviews or other academic journals. This is right in line with the logic that has college football and basketball plantations paying their student athletes, who already are getting scholarships and often diplomas they couldn’t justify based on their academic skills. Paying or otherwise compensating students who serve as law journal editors is just as reasonable, which is to say that it isn’t reasonable at all. In fact, the proposed practice, which some law schools already embrace, is unethical.

Reuters, in its news article about the ABA’s most recent intrusion into matters they ought to steer clear of, inadvertently explains why this concept is wrong-headed. It notes that these positions are “sought-after credentials that can bolster a law student’s job prospects.” Exactly, which means that students would gladly pay the law schools to get them. Being appointed as a law journal editor is its own reward: why should the recipients be paid for it too? Indeed, if the ABA’s reasoning applies, why only the editors? The other members of the law journals staffs are also providing valuable services to the school, its alumni, and the legal profession. They should be paid as well, or, to put it another way, none of the law journal staff should be paid, including the editors, just as student athletes shouldn’t be paid.

Continue reading →

KABOOM! How Can A Company—A CANDY Company No Less!—Possibly Think This Packaging Is Responsible?

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

Well, there goes my head again, and I really need it this weekend.

Hold on to yours: this really and truly is one of the “Pride” packages for Mars Inc.’s Skittles:

I don’t understand how this could happen in a major corpoation. In a pluralistic society, it is unethical for products and services to deliberately polarize the public, politically, socially, in any way whatsoever. True, the temptation for rainbow-colored Skittles to try to exploit the LGTBQ propaganda for marketing purposes must have been strong for some marketing execs with the cranial depth of a walnut shell, but the fact that sane parents don’t want their kids proselytized by their candy shouldn’t be that hard to grasp.

If the type is too small for you to read, the legends somewhere under the rainbow include “Joy is Resistance” and “Black Trans Lives Matter,” both of which are semi-incoherent, but the intent is clear. (Is the character with the sunglasses supposed to be in drag? What does “skate & live” mean? Is skating on the rainbow a metaphor for embracing an LGBTQ identity?)This is the equivalent of forced political speech, and the force is being applied to children. Holding that package sends an unintended message, weird as it is, and once that political message is associated with the brand, eating Skittles at all becomes a political act.

Continue reading →

Two Schadenfreude Treats!

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

1. The deified U.S. women’s soccer team lost to Sweden and exited the World Cup in the round of 16, its worst performance ever. Megan Rapinoe, the ostensible leader of the squad who made the team’s image at least as political as it was athletic, was substantially responsible for the loss, shanking a penalty kick that could have secured a victory.

Good.

U.S. soccer fans shouldn’t mourn the team’s defeat because this team never represented the United States honorably or respectfully. It has “taken a knee” during the National Anthem’s playing on foreign soil; this time, its members slouched, looked down, and behaved like 10-year-old jerks before a baseball game (“Take off your cap, Billy!“) while a few of the women mouthed the words. They compete in international tournaments as our representatives, and don’t have the option of wokey, anti-American self-indulgence. When asked about potentially accepting an invitation to be honored by at the White House when Trump was in residence, Rapinoe spoke for her team, spitting out, “I’m not going to the fucking White House!”

Continue reading →

“The Affair”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I’m recommending the Showtime series “The Affair,” now streaming its five seasons (the show ran in 53 episodes from 2014-2019), as a challenging and perceptive ethics show. Covering, as you might guess, a sexual and romantic affair involving two couples and their extended family, and the chaotic consequences the illicit relationship triggers, the “The Affair” reaches into relationship ethics, friendship ethics, marital ethics, parenting ethics, community ethics, legal ethics, academic ethics and artistic ethics, and probably more: I’m finally watching the whole thing after seeing the third and fourth seasons a few years ago. Wrapped up in those larger categories are questions involving honesty, loyalty, conflicts of interest, empathy, and abuse of power.

The one irritant in “The Affair” is the scarcity of genuinely ethical or admirable characters. The closest is probably the primary victim of the affair, the adulterous writer’s wife, played by Maura Tierney (of “ER” fame). One aspect of the show that will benefit many is how awful so many of the parents portrayed in the show are: if you question your parenting abilities, “The Affair” will restore your confidence. (So far, my favorite moment was when a grown daughter finally orders her incredibly over-bearing, toxic and manipulative mother out of her home, saying, curtly, “I hate you.”

Continue reading →

What Should Ethics Alarms Call Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene After Her Hunter Porn Stunt? Ethics Dunce? Incompetent Elected Official?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I choose “disgusting.” The GOP Georgia representative embarrasses me as an American. And she’s incompetent and unethical.

A member of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, Rep. Greene thought it was appropriate to use her allotted time during a hearing to display nude photographs of Hunter Biden in various situations that could not be put on non-porn television (except, in this case, C-Span, as in the photo above). A member of Congress was displaying graphic shots of the President’s son engaged in sexual acts with alleged prostitutes. “Here is proof Hunter Biden paid prostitutes through his law firm, OWASCO PC, and trafficked his victims across state lines in violation of the Mann Act,” she tweeted. “Not only that, IRS whistleblowers confirm Hunter Biden committed tax fraud by deducting payments to prostitutes from OWASCO’s taxes.”

The photos “proved” neither. In a trial, they would be excluded as prejudicial and irrelevant.

“Before we begin, I would like to let the committee and everyone watching at home know that parental discretion is advised,” Greene said. That was thoughtful. The obscene photos shed no light whatsoever on any of the matters regarding the President’s sad and corrupt son that are legitimate topics of Congressional attention: whether he engaged in influence peddling with foreign governments that benefited his father or influenced his actions, and whether he has been shielded from the legal consequences a non-Presidential family member would face who engaged in the same activities. Greene claimed the photos were important supporting evidence regarding a tax fraud coverup and special treatment that resulted in Hunter cutting a deal with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two minor tax crimes.

Oh. Huh?

Continue reading →

Apparently “Bite Me!” In Response To Woke Pseudo-Social Science Research Is Facism

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

Frequent commenter Other Bill gets credit for the headline as well as the pointer to a telling, if ridiculous, story.

Oregon State University researchers had circulated a survey regarding LGBTQ students in STEM to engineering undergrads. As described in the scholars’ paper, published in the Summer 2023 edition of the “Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies,” many of the students surveyed resented the questions about their gender as well as the premise of the research, and demonstrated their disapproval by entering gag and satirical responses to request for their gender and ethnicity.

Among the answers:

Continue reading →