Gender and Sex

Incompetent Headline Of The Week: “Report: Joe Biden Realized His Mistake With Kamala Harris Very Early On” (Red State)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I’m sorry, but I can’t resist.

What’s “early” is a case like this? Anyone who watched and listened to and watched Harris during the Democratic Presidential debates could tell in an instant that she was a dolt, and obviously unqualified to run for President or be one, which means she has no business running for or being Vice-President either. The headline is the equivalent of “Early on as he attempted to shave using his power mower, he realized his mistake.”

What are we supposed to conclude from that statement? Admiration for Joe that he was so quick to pick up on what was wrong with his entirely race and gender-based pick for a running mate? That’s not quick. Someone who is competent, has good judgment and knows which end of the trumpet to blow on doesn’t make an epic mistake like picking Harris to be a heartbeat from the Oval Office.

I saw this story and couldn’t restrain myself.

Carry on…

Comment Of The Day: “A Language Ethics Quiz: Regarding ‘Groomer’”

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

And now an important word from Mrs. Q that I wish could be circulated and read far and wide, on the post, A Language Ethics Quiz: Regarding “Groomer.” (I’ve just got to find a way to get more readers here. I’m sorry, Mrs. Q. You deserve better.)

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Gays Against Groomers is not a conservative group at all. The people in GAG are mostly gay or trans and stand against sexually inappropriate indoctrination of youth as well as against modifying the bodies of kids in the name of gender theory. This group has been denied services from several companies including payment processing and merchandise makers.

GAG’s crime, of course, isn’t that they’re “conservative” but that these renegade gays and trans citizens aren’t going along. In the world of progressivism, not knowing your place as a minority is even worse than being conservative. This is why people call GAG an “anti-gay transphobic hate group”— which of course makes no dang sense.

The Department of Justice has used the word Groomer for years. I read some of the DOJ’s reports on school grooming by teachers and other staff. This has been an unsaid issue for decades. The difference now is that the grooming is more diffuse in schools and done by woke staff who don’t see any issues down the road with exposing kids, including LGBT kids, to sex and gender identity concepts that are not age appropriate and that should be discussed with parents first.

Yes, this is grooming because such exposure seeks to eliminate innocence and circumvent parental moral teaching.

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A Language Ethics Quiz: Regarding “Groomer”

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Conservatives have been using the word “groomer” this year to describe advocates of teaching school children (as young as third grade in some cases) about LGTBQ sexual practices and relationships, while presenting them in a positive light. Targets of the word have ranged from defiant LGTBQ teachers exposed by The Libs of TikTok, to libraries promoting drag readings for kids, to the advocates for “gender-affirming therapy” for teens and younger without parental approval, to Disney’s recent obsession with injecting gay sexual issues into its films and TV offerings.

R.L. Stoller objects. He says he is a “child liberation theologian” (?), and a child and survivor advocate with “a Masters in Child Protection”—okey-dokey, let’s take that as genuine authority arguendo. He objects to the use of “groomer” in the current trend, writing in part,

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Dictionary Ethics: Thanks, Cambridge, But I’ll Ask Billy Joel Next Time…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I was going to make this an Ethics Quiz, but decided that the verdict was pretty clear.

Conservative media and blogs have been fulminating over the Cambridge Dictionary’s decision to add a definition of woman—perhaps to help out Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose answer at her conformation hearing that she wasn’t a “biologist” and thus couldn’t define “woman” will haunt her forever (good!)—that jibes with woke fantasies. Now, along with the standard definition of woman as “An adult female human being,” we are stuck with (at least if we consult the Cambridge Dictionary, which I don’t) “An adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.”

At a basic level, the publication is getting criticism it doesn’t deserve. Dictionaries follow language use trends, they don’t lead them. My language maven friends often complain about the loss of useful distinctions in the English language when they become erased by such frequent sloppy use that even dictionaries endorse the misuse. But in language, unlike in ethics, “everybody does it” is usually decisive. I find the distinction between “that” and “which” useful, but many dictionaries have given up and define the words as interchangeable. Nonetheless, I will continue to honor the distinction, just as I will not use the Cambridge alternate definition of “woman. I will acknowledge that many people, perhaps not enough to justify the definition but apparently enough for this one dictionary, do use the new meaning—which to me means “If you say you’re a duck and quack like a duck, that’s literally enough to make you a duck.”

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Unethical Tweet(s) Of The Month And Ethics Dunce, Res Ipsa Loquitur Division: Jessica Valenti

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

What more needs to be said about a) a woman who would tweet this ethically-deranged nonsense, and b) a society in which substantial numbers of people think she’s worth paying attention to? Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: CNN Contributor Van Jones

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Van was speaking of the Brittany Griner prisoner trade with Russia…

“This is huge. First of all, that’s a decade-defining image when you saw her wife sitting there, Kamala Harris was there, president is there, such a human image, and yet it just shows this president got it done. He cared enough about this individual person to get her home. It was shocking for young Americans to see an icon like that snatched, locked up, treated like garbage and nine years, ten years for bringing some cannabis oil, medically prescribed. So these are decade-defining images. I guarantee you there will be young people 10, 20, 30 years from now who will remember this moment because she is an icon. It’s really, really extraordinary. And people are talking about this other guy. He’s so terrible. Look, there’s a lot of terrible people in the world, a lot of terrible people in Russia. What you can’t allow to happen is have a black female icon treated like garbage and America do nothing about it. Something was done about it, and people are going to be proud of that.”

—Race-obsessed pundit Van Jones, once Barack Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar,” blathering on to try to justify President Biden trading an arrogant, dumb, America-bashing athlete who defied State Department travel warnings for money and got caught with illegal drugs in Russia, for an international arms dealer and terrorism purveyor, Viktor Bout, who is a good bet to kill lots of people with his skills.

That’s a little long for an Unethical Quote, but the full thing is necessary to give a proper sense of just how ethically obtuse, factually-nonsensical and outright stupid the quote is. Van Jones has proved over the past that he is not incapable of perceptive analysis, but he persists in outburst like this one, usually conscening race, that make him one of the epitomes of the Ethics Alarms motto, “Bias Makes You Stupid. Jones is smarter than this quote makes him sound, so we must assume that he knows what he’s saying is garbage, but he’s saying it on CNN anyway.

Ethics Strike One.

  • “Decade defining image?” Stop insulting our intelligence. Griner will be completely forgotten as soon as she quits basketball, and only lightly remembered before that. How many people remember Bo Bergdahl now?

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Ethics Quiz: The Milking Class Gaffe

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The photo above was taken in a Plains state elementary school in the early 1950s, and depicts a cow-milking exercise. It is, obviously, one of those “Oops!” unfortunate—but funny!—shots that ended up in a local newspaper somewhere because nobody noticed the problem until it was too late.

A Facebook friend posted it on the social media platform for “a chuckle”, and it was clear that the reaction was…restrained.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is tougher than it may seem…

Is posting that photo unethical, as it will be legitimately offensive to some, or is it innocently funny, and only objectionable to the political correctness scolds?

I thought it was funny when I saw it. I also thought my friend would get a fair amount of flack. But the more I think about the factors involved, the more uncertain I am of the answer to the quiz question…

  • Is posting the photo in a public forum a Golden Rule breach? Obviously the photo embarrasses the teacher who, as my freind wrote, “probably wishes she had been standing for the photo.” My friend, however, was a professional performer, in a field where being able to laugh at moments that would humiliate normal people is essential.
  • Based on the period of the photo, it is certain that the teacher by now must be either dead or too old to care about an old newspaper clipping. Does that take the Golden Rule off the table.
  • It is more likely that the children shown might be embarrassed by the photo, or were when it was originally published. Does that matter? Was showing it more unethical then than now, when parents (unethically, even though “everybody does it”) post videos of their children in embarrassing (but funny!) situations constantly?
  • Some people thought  the photo was very funny, and appreciated seeing it. It brightened their day! Is that enough to make showing the picture ethical? What formula should we use to determine whether utilitarian analysis justifies an action where the benefits are tangible and the “harm” is ephemeral? If the photo brightened one viewer’s day, isn’t that enough?
  • One critic of the photo sniffed, “Photoshopped!” If so, and I note that there is always someone who will try to discredit any photo they object to as photoshopped whether it was or not, does it matter to the question at hand. If it’s funny, it’s funny. Or, since it is theoretically funnier if genuine, does being photoshopped change the utilitarian analysis? Should it?
  • Can showing the photo be justified as a social statement and attempt at a course correction, echoing the common lament that the culture is becoming humor adverse thanks to woke-poisoning, and it is a serious problem?

Comment Of The Day: “Dispatches From The Great Stupid, “D.E.I.” Division: This Story From The Washington Post Was Not A Joke…”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

In addition to perfectly encapsulating the insanity of our times and being unintentionally hilarious, the Washington Post headline, “‘Shark Week’ lacks diversity, overrepresents men named Mike, scientists say” also did society a favor by triggering Chris Marschner’s Comment of the Day.

He has a lot of interesting observations here, as well as revelations about something I know absolutely nothing about, sea exploration, that wasn’t explained in old re-runs of “Sea Hunt.”

Here is Chris’s Comment of the Day on the EA post about the dumbest serious headline of the year...

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Have any of the researchers currently studying the number of times white males are showcased on these series actually pitched an idea to Discovery? I don’t think Discovery Channel calls guys named Mike to do a show for them about sharks. The only Mike that I am aware of on the series is Mike Rowe who has developed a number of programs for the Discovery Channel, most notably Dirty Jobs. I suppose because I don’t see a lot of women cleaning hog pens or standing next to a blast furnace that too is discriminatory. What that Mike has done for making non-white collar jobs desirable and dignified is what most of us should aspire to emulate.

Yes, most of the shows do focus on the shark’s hunting behavior but the attacks showcased are not about attacks on humans but on prey species. Nothing captures the viewer like an 8-foot, 2000 pound Great White breach the surface as it hunts a seal (or a replica of one). The replicas are scientific instruments that take various measurements such as bite force and jaw size. When the focus is on the hunting behaviors of other pelagic species, the focus on speed and tactics. As a diver, I want to know as much about the behavior of certain species that I may encounter in the wild. One of my most favorite dives was a wreck called the Proteus where I had the privilege of swimming with over three dozen 6-8 foot Sand Tiger sharks. When I tell people about my diving, I often hear women claim they would not attempt to dive with sharks. Men probably think the same but are less inclined to admit it.

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Ethics Observations On The Britney Griner Trade

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

 Brittney Griner, the  U.S.-hating WNBA star who was sentenced to nine years in a Russian prison for violating Russian drug laws charges was traded to the U.S for international arms dealer Viktor Bout, an international criminal who was serving a 25 year sentence. Meanwhile, retired U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, also imprisoned in Russia and for nearly four years, remains there. He was convicted on espionage charges that the U.S. has called false, which doesn’t mean they are false, of course.

Observations:

  • You knew this was going to be the result, didn’t you? It was as certain as anything in foreign relations could be. Griner is black, a female and a lesbian as well as a sports celebrity who parrots progressive anti-American ideology. Biden might appoint her to the Supreme Court: she ticks all the right boxes.
  • The Biden Administration wasn’t wrong to seek her release. Russia had deliberately throw its metaphorical book at her; bu U.S. standards, her sentence was cruel and unusual. Our government is duty bound to try to rescue its citizens when foreign governments abuse them.
  • In baseball terms, this trade was like a team trading a superstar pitcher to its major divisional rival for a third-string catcher and a bag of stale peanuts. Griner has no national security or diplomatic use whatsoever; her sole value is political, as the Democrats will apparently do anything to pander to the three constituent groups Griner belongs to. Here’s a description of Bout, in contrast:

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Arrogant, Deluded And Ignorant Is No Way To Go Through Life, Jennifer Lawrence…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Jennifer Lawrence is a charismatic, versatile, talented movie star, but someone misled her into believing that everything that pops into her head is worth saying, and it isn’t. In this case, it wasn’t just banal or gratuitous progressive blather points, but a wildly false and disrespectful over-praising of her own significance at the expense of actresses that she ought to be honoring rather than insulting.

In a recent interview with Variety magazine, the star of the “Hunger Games” movies (beginning in 2012), “Silver Lining Playbook” and other films said,

“I remember when I was doing ‘Hunger Games,’ nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn’t work. We were told … girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead.”

If you don’t know your film history, don’t make statements about film history. It makes one look like a conceited fool, as the social media mob rushed to inform Lawrence. Continue reading →