Now there’s a well-reasoned, articulate, rational, persuasive argument! My rule of thumb is that when advocates have to descend into chanting, shouting and sloganeering, they have no legitimacy, and neither do their positions. (If a position’s advocates can’t do better than that, their position is a fantasy.) They have also forfeited respect and the right to be taken seriously.
Gender and Sex
Ethics Quote Of The Week: Prof. Glenn Reynolds
“If you need counseling over being “misgendered,” you’re too mentally fragile to handle the diplomatic interests of the United States. Get another job.”
—-Conservative law professor, pundit and blogger Glenn Reynolds, making the required observation on this ridiculous story:
Because the State Department has nothing more important to spend its money on, it is “testing a new feature that will provide users with the option to include their preferred pronouns in their Global Address List profile.” Unfortunately, do to human error, the feature went live, and many State Department employees had randomly assigned pronouns added to their profiles. Men were given female pronouns and vice versa, due to what was termed a “pronoun glitch.” Emails from colleagues suddenly included random pronouns, like, “She/her/hers” and “He/Him/His” in the “from” line. As Colonel Kurtz would say…
The State Department apologized profusely to those who were “triggered, and—I’m not kidding, now—is offering free therapy to “any employee who feels hurt or upset as a result of this unfortunate mistake,” according to an internal email that went out to employees on yesterday.
Miller Lite Surpasses Bud Lite’s Self-Immolating Beer Ad With One That’s Even More Unethical
By now it should be clear what was wrong with the Bud Light promotion featuring silly biological male drag queen Dylan Mulvaney,. First of all, it was incompetent: alienating your core market to score political correctness points with groups that don’t care about your product is idiotic. It was also irresponsible: investors in the company don’t own stock to be part of political grandstanding, they want to make money, and a company has an obligation not to undermine that objective. It was disrespectful too: making one’s product into a symbol of one side of a culture wars skirmish forces consumers to take sides, and is a slap in the face to consumers who don’t happen to agree with the company’s stance.
None of this was difficult to figure out, but a smug female marketing VP decided to use her job to advance her own political beliefs rather than to do what she was hired to do: sell beer. This, of course, should have meant a bonanza for the competitors of Bud Lite; if Bud’s sales were going to implode (and they have, down about 25% with no relief in sight), light beer-lovers (weird as they may be) had to go somewhere. But even before the “Drink Bud Lite, show your support for self-identifying women with penises” campaign, Miller Lite had issued the smugly woke video above during Women’s History Month. It’s worse than the Bud Lite ad, even though it won’t lose as many loyal customers:
Wait! Is THIS Peak Stupid In The Age Of The Great Stupid?
It’s a now-familiar tactic when minority groups seek attention and enhanced self-esteem: find a universally admired historical figure of note and claim that he or she was a member of that group. Abraham Lincoln was gay! Cleopatra was black! (That worked out well…) Jesus was gay AND black! Still, I didn’t see this coming, but the Great Stupid knows no bounds, apparently:
Worshipers at a Trinity College at Cambridge were treated to a sermon by Joshua Heath, currently seeking a PhD in theology. He argued that Christ takes on a transgender body in historical artwork, appearing both masculine and feminine in different paintings. As proof, he displayed Jean Malouel’s painting called “The Pieta,” in which the body of Christ is shown with blood running down his side. Heath noted that the blood coming down from the side wound of Christ to the groin in the painting “takes on a decidedly vaginal appearance.” “[I]f the body of Christ as these works suggest the body of all bodies, then his body is also the trans body,” Heath concluded.
Oh. So if someone paints a portrait of me a few centuries from now showing me with the head of an aardvark, that would be solid evidence that I had the head of an an aardvark? Good thinking there, Ace. Paintings of Jesus prove absolutely nothing, as the “Jesus was black” advocates correctly pointed out. The evidence indicates he was probably dark-skinned and swarthy, and less than five feet tall. But trans is “in,” so we now have to debate whether Christ “identified” as a woman.
The residents of Woke World are apparently incapable of saying, “That’s ridiculous” when an “in” group is the topic, so Michael Banner, the Dean and Director of Studies in Theology and Religious Studies at Trinity College felt it necessary to endorse Heath’s fantasy. He wrote in response to a complaint about the sermon that Heath’s “speculation was legitimate, whether or not you or I or anyone else disagrees with the interpretation.”
Can The Great Stupid get more stupid than this?
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Source: Campus Reform
Push-Up Ethics
I don’t know why this took so long…
The Washington Post reports that there is a movement afoot to stop allowing young women to substitute so-called “girls’ push-ups” (with the knees on the floor) for the actual toes-on-the-ground exercise while males are still required to do the real thing. The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), which provides guidelines for exercise testing by fitness and medical professionals, still uses the modified push-up to assess women’s upper-body strength in its latest exercise testing textbook, published in 2021. Male strength is measured in part using the full push-up.
But Melanie Adams, a professor of exercise science at Keene State College in New Hampshire, told the Post that based on a 2022 study of female college students and push-ups that she led, the assumption that women could only do the weenie version was unwarranted. Some female college students could perform more than 20 full push-ups in succession, a total many men can’t match. Because the root exercise builds strong, important muscles in the upper-body and core, however, starting boys on real push-ups while girls are told to use the inferior version gives males a head start on superior strength that women will have a hard time overcoming.
Observations On The Trump Defamation and Rape Civil Trial Verdict [Updated]
Former President Donald Trump has been found liable in the rape and defamation civil suit brought by Jean E. Carroll’s civil suit, and Carroll is to be awarded a total of $5 million in damages. This was not a criminal case, because the statute of limitations for rape had run: the alleged sexual assault occurred in 1995 or 1996.
A federal jury of six men and three women found that Carroll, now 79, had proved by a preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Trump sexually assaulted her in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan. The jury did not, however, find that Trump raped her, as she claims.
But because the former President on his Truth Social platform called her case “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie,” the jury also found that he had defamed the plaintiff. His lawyer said he would appeal; no witnesses were called on behalf of Trump’s defense.
The ex-President’s reaction was characteristic:
Ethics observations:
Weird Tales Of The Great Stupid: The Phony Women’s Poker Tournament
This whole story is so ridiculous on so many levels that it nicely encapsulates just how stupid The Great Stupid has become. Allow me to explain…
Dave Hughes, 70, entered what was advertised as an all-women poker tournament at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Florida and won $5,555. This somehow sparked outrage, but all-female poker tournaments are illegal in Florida, violating the state’s anti-discrimination laws. Any man could have entered, but for some reason, only he did. The other 82 players were female.
Final Ethics Observations On The Bud Light-Dylan Mulvaney Ethics Train Wreck
The last time EA visited the corporate cautionary tale was on April 23, here. Today’s post should be the end-point for this particular ethics matter, but you never know.
1. This isn’t going to blow over. Some commenters here and professional woke spinners in the news media tried to make the case that the backlash over Bud Light putting trans performance artist/influencer Dylan Mulvaney on a Bud Light can and featuring the camp figure in a promotion pandering to LGTBQ audiences was short-lived and a “nothingburger.” That has not been the case. Bud Light sales have fallen significantly for the third consecutive week. Beer Business Daily described the response to the campaign as a “shocking deterioration” of Bud Light’s market share. “We’ve never seen such a dramatic shift in national share in such a short period of time,” the newsletter said. Meanwhile, Bud Light’s biggest competitors like Coors Light and Miller Light are gaining consumers while Bud Light loses them.
So the immediate ethics breach here was competence. Corporations are supposed to use marketing to increase sales, profit and favorable views of their products—in fact, they are obligated to. Using marketing and messaging to endorse controversial political positions as self-conscious virtue-signaling is irresponsible, and, frankly, stunningly stupid. Pick your analogy: Bud Light featuring Jane Fonda on a can during the Vietnam war? How about Cindy Sheehan on a can during the Bush administration? It is amazing that Bud Light’s management was so estranged from the views of its own market.
2. It is not the job of corporations to try to change the views of its market.
Psst! When You’re This Estranged From Human, Societal And Cultural Norms And Standards, No Advice Columnist Can Save You
The New York Times “Ethicist” got a jaw-dropping inquiry this week:
Nearly a year ago, I began dating two friends — I’ll call them Rachel and Dave — who were already themselves in a relationship. We all had no experience with polyamory. The throuple ended fairly quickly, with no one being at fault; the other two continued to date but broke up not too long afterward. Since then, Rachel and Dave have dated on and off, Rachel and I were casually together and Dave and I have been close friends who sleep together occasionally. There have also been relationships with others outside this group. At times, we have all behaved badly, sleeping together behind the other’s back, knowing the knowledge would hurt the other. Strong emotions, love and pain have arisen on all sides.
Throughout the past year, as multiple complex situations arose, we have all wished for a model of behavior. Monogamy-centered media suggests that one should avoid dating a friend’s ex-partner. Is this correct? And if so, can this concept be universalized? Do Rachel and Dave get “priority,” in that they should be together and I should not pursue either, because they dated first? What do we owe to our romantic partners and friends when the situations are complex?
His advice doesn’t interest me; you can read it here if it interests you. My focus is on the inquirer, predictably signed in as “Name Withheld.”
Ethics Dunce: The United Nations
In a March report, three United Nations entities, the International Committee of Jurists (ICJ), UNAIDS and the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, stated,
“Sexual conduct involving persons below the domestically prescribed minimum age of consent to sex may be consensual in fact, if not in law. The enforcement of criminal law should reflect the rights and capacity of persons under 18 years of age to make decisions about engaging in consensual sexual conduct and their right to be heard in matters concerning them. Pursuant to their evolving capacities and progressive autonomy, persons under 18 years of age should participate in decisions affecting them, with due regard to their age, maturity, and best interests, and with specific attention to non-discrimination guarantees.”
The United Nations is deliberately endorsing the rationalizations used by every teacher that seduces a student, every sexual predator who rapes a boy, every religious cultist who takes a child bride, and every father who has incestuous relations with his teenage daughter. As with workplace sexual harassment,the only ethical system that works to prevent child sexual abuse is absolutism. That means no exceptions. An adult’s superior power and presumed authority must be presumed to render consent from a child under the age of 18 invalid. The “Love is Love” platitudes are simply slippery slopes to rampant molestation. This isn’t an issue that can be decided on a case by case basis.
Ethics Alarms 