In her Comment of the Day on the lament by female shark researchers that they are under-represented in their field (without any supporting evidence of how many aspiring but unfulfilled female shark researchers there are), Sarah B. neatly expresses how “diversity-equity-inclusion” based arguments for hiring create justifications for bias while supposedly addressing the problem of bias.
Women do have trouble in the hard sciences. This is true. HOWEVER if we act like whiny little bitches, no one will take us seriously when we need to be taken seriously. Do these DIE-obsessed women not understand that not only are they shooting themselves in the feet, but they are making it harder for all the rest of us?
Employer-Employee relations suffer. If I were hiring researchers, it would be hard to WANT to hire women given the current rules. As a woman I also have confidence issues, as I am uncertain if I was hired as anything more than a diversity hire. Am I really the best for a job, especially if I’m finding something about it very challenging? Is this simply a case of needing to step up and improve myself professionally, or am I just a check-box who is under-qualified and never expected or even capable of performing?
Finally the relationship with coworkers suffers. If my coworker is a diversity hire, they get paid about what I do, but I have to do their work which has me put in hours of unpaid overtime to keep my job while they float. This leads to hate and discontent. And as a potentially qualified person seen as a diversity hire, we need to work much harder than our coworkers with more results than our coworkers to get the basic respect because we start so far in negative territory on the Cognitive Dissonance scale.
As a further note, even if DIE had a point, trans and BIPOC rules have essentially neutered it because who can tell if Mike on “Shark Week” doesn’t identify as Michaela in its personal life and is 1/1024 BIPOC?
Women need to stand up against DIE hiring (yes I’m aware of the real acronym) and work to get jobs due to our qualifications, not our box-checking.
Both GOP House members now are recanting their votes the so-called Respect for Marriage Act, which passed the House with 47 Republicans voting with the unanimous Democratic throng. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, says his original vote was the result of “confusion” and because Speaker Nancy Pelosi “rushed” the bill through to the floor vote. Rep. Mario Diaz-Belart said yesterday,
“My record shows that I am a long-standing advocate against discrimination of all types. I, however, cannot support any effort that undermines religious liberties by failing to provide legitimate safeguards for faith-based organizations that object based on their deeply-held religious beliefs.”
What really happened is that conservatives on social media and in the punditry scorched the Republicans who voted for the measure, which is necessary, obvious, benign and a gift to the GOP if was capable of thinking straight, so now these two cowards are backing down and claiming that they didn’t mean it.
Look, the job of a House member is this simple: read a bill and decide if you support it or not. I can respect someone who votes for a bill and someone who votes against it, but doing what these two are doing is the equivalent of announcing, “I can’t do my job!”
Congress does not need incompetents, and it does not need weenies. It really doesn’t need incompetent weenies.
When Ethics Alarms first covered the case of a Christian website designer who was prosecuted for refusing to design a website celebrating a same sex wedding, I wrote at the top, “I will state up front that I am confident that this decision will get to the U.S. Supreme Court, and that if and when it does, it will be reversed.”
Now the case has indeed arrived at the Supreme Court. Its likely reversal (the website designer, a trial and a appeals court ruled, could not refuse to design a website celebrating a same-sex wedding) is being blamed by the LGBTQ suck-up media on all those evil conservatives who have invaded the Court since it ducked the matter of Christian baker Jack Phillips, who refused to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. SCOTUS decided in favor of Phillips on technical rather than substantive grounds, with a waffling majority opinion by Justice Kennedy, who specialized in such things. Kennedy is gone, but the reason the web designer is likely to win isn’t the change in the composition of the Court, but because the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was dead wrong when it ruled in 2021 that Lorie Smith and her company, 303 Creative, violated a Colorado law by refusing to create a website for a same sex union.
I wish I could say “I told you so,” but I didn’t, exactly. The last time Ethics Alarms discussed Sam Brinton, Energy Department’s chief of nuclear waste disposal, it was in an Ethics Quiz that asked,“Is it competent and responsible for someone like Sam to hold an executive position of trust in a Cabinet Department?” To this I added,
“Within this quiz are several other questions, like “Should an individual representing the administration, the Energy Department and the U.S. government be publicizing his kinky ways?” and “Is the judgment of an official who behaves in pubic like Sam inherently questionable?” and “Is there a Simulated Sex with Puppies Deputy Assistant Secretary Principle?”
Yes, one of Sam’s passions is simulated sex with puppies. But he’s just pretending.
I said I would reveal my answers after the commentariat weighed in, but I never did. Now comes the news that Brinton, who was hired by the administration in February, was filmed allegedly stealing a woman’s roller bag at the airport’s baggage claim area by security cameras on Sept. 16, according to a criminal complaint filed on Oct. 27. Security footage also showed Brinton taking the woman’s luggage from the baggage carousel and then removing the tags before leaving the scene at a “quick pace,” according to the complaint. Brinton initially told police that be grabbed the bag and no clothes or objects had been removed. Later he changed his story. The contents of the bag, valued at $2000, have not been found.
Another Comment of the Day from CD-VAPatriot, who has to cope with the increasingly annoying glitch at WordPress that cases in to spam certain commenters’ posts for no apparent reason.
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I think it all depends on one’s definition of “feminism.” I used to think the term simply meant that women were overall equal to men in terms of career opportunities, earning potential, deciding whether or not they wanted to get married and/or have kids, etc.. These days it seems that a lot of women I know feel that being a feminist means that “women are the SAME as men”. Well, forgive me for being a traitor to my gender (which yes I have been called) but I believe that there ARE significant differences between the sexes. Oh, and I’m also apparently a traitor and a woman-hater for being pro-life. (Who knew?)
As the female half of a boring old married, heterosexual couple who has been trying to get pregnant for over a decade, I really don’t think my hubby and I fit the “norm” anymore. We’ve noticed that in just the last decade, our friends and the couples we’ve met during that time have significantly changed their overall outlook quite a bit. Fewer couples are getting married: “who, like, needs a stupid piece of paper or like, some rando God to decide if our love is like, legit?”
In a seventh grade English class at St. Charles Borromeo Catholic School in Port Charlotte, Florida, the teacher was presenting Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer,” using an uncensored version, which is to say, “Tom Sawyer.” The classic novel, like its larger, more ambitious cousin “Huckleberry Finn,” uses the now taboo “n-word” in a society today that should be too sophisticated and wise by now not to know that declaring words taboo is ethically and intellectually indefensible. One African-American community website’s news report on the incident states, “Anyone who has read an unedited version of those books know how racially insensitive they were.” Well:
Any one who has only read an “unedited”, meaning bowldlerized, version of “Tom Sawyer” hasn’t read “Tom Sawyer,” and
Great literature isn’t supposed to be “racially sensitive”; it’s supposed to be enlightening.
The issue of watering down language that some may find offensive in literature is well-considered in this essay.
As described in the letter above, when members of the class read the book out loud and the word “nigger” was uttered, the students began “acting up,” laughing, making comments, and generally acting like undisciplined 7th graders, which they were. When the teacher could not calm them down, she improvised a creative but risky solution: having the children repeat the word over and over again. The idea, obviously (though not sufficiently obvious for any of the media reports to figure out) was to rob the “taboo” word of power by repetition. It’s an old linguistic trick that kids should be familiar with (i know I was): when any word is repeated enough, it becomes just a sound, which is all any word is. (This device becomes the climax of the excellent horror film “Pontypool,” in which something causes the English language to become deadly, destroying everyone’s brains.) Continue reading →
The public defenders for Anderson Lee Aldrich, the alleged perpetrator of the mass shooting at a Colorado Springs LGBTQ nightclub, said in a court filing obtained by a New York Times reporter that their client is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns.
Is it fair to say these revelations suggest that the rush to blame “anti-LGBTQ” rhetoric—you know, like ” we really shouldn’t allow people with penises to throttle biological women in competitive sports” and “drag queens are not appropriate library story-tellers for children,”hateful stuff like that—for the tragedy was a tad premature? Reckless even? Cynically exploitative, mayhap?
Why yes, I think it is fair.
Over at CNN, so crushed were the talking heads by the revelation that their usual conservative villification campaign would have to be more creative that they engaged in this desperate analysis:
ALISYN CAMEROTA: So, attorneys for the accused shooter, Anderson Lee Aldrich, say in new court filings tonight that the suspect now identifies as non binary. …They use they/them pronouns. And for the purposes of all formal filings will be addressed as Mx Aldrich….Joining me now CNN political commentator Errol Lewis, also back with me Al Franken and Joe Walsh. I don’t know what to say about that. I mean that’s not anything that we had heard from his background. People had been looking into his background, and I don’t know if anybody here–are you guys lawyers? I mean, you know, I don’t know what to say about that. That’s what he’s now saying.
ERROL LEWIS: It sounds like they’re trying to prepare a defense against a hate crimes charge. That’s the least of his problems, legally speaking. But it looks like they’re trying to build some kind of sympathy or at least confusion on the question of whether or not this was purely motivated by hate.
CAMEROTA: That is what it sounds like. We will wait to see.
“That is what it sounds like”? If you are an idiot, I guess: the “hate crime” enhancement is hardly a major concern when one has killed five and wounded 18. {Not to beat a dead horse, but Lewis’s statement perfectly embodies the utter stupidity of the “hate crime” blot on our criminal justice system. Sure, Errol, he might have shot all of those people out of mild pique.]
The increasingly unjust, unfair, harmful pandering to pseudo-transgender opportunists has got to eventually trigger a massive awakening in which Americans say, “Wait…what are we doing? This is crazy! Why have we allowed this to go on this long? Or at all?”
In the most recent debacle, Seattle Academy’s Aspen Hoffman, ranked 72nd in boys’ track as a freshman, transitioned to female, sort of, as a sophomore, was allowed to compete as girl, and suddenly started winning races.
Hoffman finished first in the 5,000 meter race, and broke Seattle Academy’s girls’ record with a time that would have achieved 48th place in the boys’ division. This is Barry Bonds-level cheating. It also shows how California derangement is infectious: both Washington and Oregon have lost their grip on reality, rationality, responsibility and ethics. When are their citizens going to stop being weenies and stop the madness? It’s their duty as citizens, after all.
Fifteen years ago, Washington state’s guidelines for transgender athletes held that male athletes had to undergo surgery and two years of hormone therapy before they could compete as females. Four years ago, the surgery mandate was lifted and only“documented testosterone suppression therapy” was required. Then, in 2021 as The Great Stupid raged, the state ruled that transgender athletes only had to “consistently express” a gender. Well, yes, that seems reasonable as far as it goes. You don’t want athletes saying, “I’m male!” “I’m female!” “I’m male!” “I’m female!” between races like Faye Dunaway between slaps in “Chinatown.” But then there’s the other matter—biological males have a huge advantage.
Is there any time in U.S. history other than the Age of the Great Stupid that this could have occurred?
NBC News reports that a fourth grader was summarily suspended from the Holly Hill School in Volusia County, Florida after he hugged a school counselor late last month and, the counselor alleged, ‘grabbed her left breast” in the process. elementary school. The child now faces a potential misdemeanor battery charge after she filed a complaint with police.
The counselor—I wonder what she’s qualified to counsel about? — doesn’t have to give her name, thanks to a Florida law that allows “crime victims”—you know, like elementary school counselors who are sexually assaulted by hormone-crazed 10-year-olds—can remain anonymous.
Has it really been so long? Ethics Alarms hasn’t had a Naked Teacher Principle outbreak in more than three years! Oh, we’ve had related ethics tales of a naked Congresswoman (Katie Hill), a Santa in a MAGA hat, a naked ex-Miss Kentucky teacher who’s an idiot. a too-sexy firefighter scandal, the unfairly fired naked nurse, and this year’s ridiculous Cross-Dressing Future Congressman Principle involving ex-GOP House member Madison Cawthorne. No authentic Naked Teacher Principle (NTP), however, which states that a secondary school teacher or administrator (or other role model for children) who allows pictures of himself or herself to be widely publicized, as on the web, showing the teacher naked or engaging in sexually provocative poses, cannot complain when he or she is dismissed by the school as a result.
Ethics Alarms 
Women do have trouble in the hard sciences. This is true. HOWEVER if we act like whiny little bitches, no one will take us seriously when we need to be taken seriously. Do these DIE-obsessed women not understand that not only are they shooting themselves in the feet, but they are making it harder for all the rest of us?
Employer-Employee relations suffer. If I were hiring researchers, it would be hard to WANT to hire women given the current rules. As a woman I also have confidence issues, as I am uncertain if I was hired as anything more than a diversity hire. Am I really the best for a job, especially if I’m finding something about it very challenging? Is this simply a case of needing to step up and improve myself professionally, or am I just a check-box who is under-qualified and never expected or even capable of performing?
Finally the relationship with coworkers suffers. If my coworker is a diversity hire, they get paid about what I do, but I have to do their work which has me put in hours of unpaid overtime to keep my job while they float. This leads to hate and discontent. And as a potentially qualified person seen as a diversity hire, we need to work much harder than our coworkers with more results than our coworkers to get the basic respect because we start so far in negative territory on the Cognitive Dissonance scale.
As a further note, even if DIE had a point, trans and BIPOC rules have essentially neutered it because who can tell if Mike on “Shark Week” doesn’t identify as Michaela in its personal life and is 1/1024 BIPOC?
Women need to stand up against DIE hiring (yes I’m aware of the real acronym) and work to get jobs due to our qualifications, not our box-checking.