Gender and Sex

On Bill Cosby’s Get-Out-Of-Jail-Forever Card…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Bill Cosby4

The Pennsylvania State Supreme Court has overturned Bill Cosby’s sex assault conviction, and the 83-year-old comedian/Jello pudding salesman/serial rapist will be released from prison with no chance of his having to go back, according to the ruling vacating his conviction issued yesterday.

Is that justice? Well, it’s a kind of justice, but only for Cosby. Pennsylvania’s highest court overturned his conviction because a previous prosecutor had granted him immunity from prosecution in order to force the Coz to admit to some of his criminal sexual activity. Cosby could not use the Fifth Amendment nor lie without risking perjury charges, so he made several incriminating statements on the record. These should not have been used to convict him later, but a different prosecutor determined that his office was not bound by the previous deal. But it was. Because Cosby’s statements were improperly used against him, the conviction was based on inadmissible evidence. This new ruling bars any retrial in the case.

Much as Bill Cosby deserves to rot in prison, upon reading the opinion, I see no way to criticize the decision. Even bad people have to be prosecuted and convicted the right way, and Cosby, who is about as bad as one can get, was not. I’m sure there is some reason why Cosby’s lawyer wasn’t able to block the use of his client’s damning but unusable testimony before Cosby had to spend time in jail, but so far, I can’t find it.

If a sociopathic predator like Bill Cosby can be freed on the basis of an unfair trial—and he can and should be—so can and should a brutal cop like Derk Chauvin, whose trial was also unfair, though for very different reasons. We shall see how far the integrity of the justice system goes.

Nobody is going to riot over Bill Cosby going free. That, I fear, might be the critical difference.

KABOOM! The New York Times Op-Ed Page Is Trying To Kill Me (And, Apparently, The USA)

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

jackheadexplosion

Once again, we have an opinion piece that an objective, serious newspaper that respects it readers and is committed to the idea of promoting good government and a responsible citizenry would read upon submission and say, politely holding back giggles, “Come on! We can’t print this: it’s ridiculous.” Not only that, but the author, Christina Greer, is actually employed by a university to pass along her brand of “reasoning” and “analysis” to innocent, unsuspecting students, who pay for the privilege. She’s an associate professor of political science at Fordham.

I hate beginning the day with dire thoughts of hurling myself into a woodchipper in despair. It’s been happening a lot lately.

This is the title: “Dear Kamala Harris: It’s a Trap!” And this is its thesis: Mean, possibly sexist and racist President Biden is setting up the Vice-President to fail by giving her really hard assignments that she isn’t qualified to pull off, and this is likely to adversely affect her chances of being elected President. No, I’m serious: I wouldn’t make that up. I couldn’t make that up. Prof. Greer really argues that in an essay that tries to turn so many basic premises of political and social reality on their metaphorical heads, it made MY head blow up. [Once again, much gratitude is due to reader Steve Witherspoon, who constructed that GIF.)

Here is the crux of her argument:

“Addressing the root causes of migration is one of several jobs President Biden has handed Ms. Harris, who had no deep expertise with Latin America issues or the decades-long quandary of federal immigration reform. He has also asked her to lead the administration’s voting-rights efforts, which are in a filibuster limbo. According to The Times, he has her working on combating vaccine hesitancy and fighting for policing reform, too, among other uphill battles….

“Ms. Harris, at this point, can’t seem to win for trying. She is a historic yet inexperienced vice president who is taking on work that can easily backfire as so many people sit in judgment, with critics sniping (especially right-wing commentators) and allies spinning (like with official statements about “success”).

“And all the while, the clock is ticking. Most political observers think that if Mr. Biden decides not to run for re-election in 2024 (when he will be 81), Ms. Harris most definitely will. He had to know that in choosing her as his vice president, he was making her his heir apparent. But based on how things look now, her work as his No. 2 could end up being baggage more than a boon. Mr. Biden and his team aren’t giving her chances to get some wins and more experience on her ledger. Rather, it’s the hardest of the hard stuff.”

The translation for “historic but inexperienced” is “unqualified.” Being a historic VP is just box-checking. It doesn’t get the job done, and there is no excuse for making “historic” a candidate’s only asset, which is definitely the case with Kamala. (Electing a wombat, a coma victim, or a lawn chair would also be historic.) Harris has no executive experience. She was a prosecutor, and a pretty bad one, who rose in California politics by sleeping with a powerful pol. Joe Biden chose her as his running mate because his party had painted itself into a corner and decided that it was more important that he have a female, sort-of black running mate than someone actually qulaified to be President. She prevailed because the alternatives—Stacey Abrams was the least horrible of her competition— were even worse than she was. She was chosen entirely for her lack of a y chromosome and her skin shade, even though it was clear, or should have been, that Biden would be the most fragile President elected since an irresponsible FDR ran for a fourth term knowing he was a goner.

I shouldn’t have to explain this to a political science professor, but being President of the United States is hard. Being delegated difficult aspects of it is an opportunity for a competent VP to show that she is capable of handling the challenge, and any individual in the position of Vice-President should relish the chance. If the Vice-President isn’t up to any task under the President’s list of responsibilities, then she wasn’t qualified to be in the job in the first place. I cannot imagine Greer’s complaint being made on behalf of Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Adlai Stevenson, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, George H.W., Bush, Al Gore, Dick Cheney and many other previous VPs; it would be an insult. She appears to think that the objective is to sneak an unqualified, certified screw-up into the White House for the same reason she was allowed to run for Vice President, to be “historic.” Somehow, I think most Americans would like a little more reason to place the fate of their nation into a leader’s hands.

Having pre-exploded my head with her basic premise, I was spared later eruptions when Greer suggested that giving poor Kamala tough jobs to handle shows how racist and sexist we all are. Look at this sophistry:

“This country has yet to have an honest conversation and reflection on the ways in which race and gender play out in electoral politics. There are voters who look at Ms. Harris and immediately believe she is unqualified for the job because of her gender, her immigrant parents and the color of her skin. Republicans tend to say the quiet part loud, but if we are being honest, far too many Democrats would never be able to vote for a Black woman at the top of the ticket, no matter how qualified.”

Uh, Professor? Harris isn’t qualified, and your essay makes that clear, not that it already wasn’t obvious. So this is all obfuscation and misdirection. What your essay argues is that voters should favor a candidate who isn’t qualified just because of her gender and color—which is idiotic. Greer blathers on,

“Many white liberals like racial and gender equality in theory but get a little gun-shy when asked to make room at the table for others on a long list of issues — school integration, housing, homelessness, incarceration, policing and executive leadership among them. And for those of you scoffing, ask yourself why you can list almost every major and minor flaw of Hillary Clinton, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, Maxine Waters and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to name just a few. Many liberals struggle with issues of gender and race in practice; they may not admit to having a problem with Ms. Harris per se, but many still expect her to conform to certain standards and judge her harshly when she struggles on issues that are difficult to begin with.”

Boy, I’m sure lucky my brains were all over the ceiling before I read THAT paragraph. I can list the major flaws—we don’t need to get to the minor flaws— of Hillary Clinton, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, Maxine Waters and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who all have thick files on Ethics Alarms) because I pay attention. Hillary is the best of that terrible group, and she was a candidate for President only because of her husband, ran arguably the worst campaign in American history, and had been a notable failure as Secretary of State.

The nonsense continues; read the rest if you dare. Two final points:

  • If you found yourself guessing the author’s race, you would be right. And articles like this do no favors for the cause of “diversity and inclusion.” The essay, to be blunt, is incompetent and biased, with a female, black scholar making a self-evidently foolish argument driven by her own loyalties. Academics have to be better than that, and if they aren’t, the raise a rebuttable presumption that they were hired for reasons that have nothing to do with their skills, erudition, or the “content of their character.”
  • Hilariously, Ezra Klein, whom we recently visited as he inflicted his own biased distortion of reality on Times readers, found Greer’s analysis spot on, tweeting, “This seems right. Kamala Harris will probably be the Democratic nominee in 24 or 28. Biden’s team should be giving her portfolios that make it likelier she’ll win. Instead they’re giving her impossible problems that will likely become liabilities.”

I’m in a “How could this happen?” mood today, I guess. How did progressives get this stupid and confused? I really can’t understand it. Nobody would have written an op-ed like Greer’s ten years ago. If someone did, it would have never been published, and if the thing were published, it would have been mocked mercilessly across the political spectrum.

Sunrise Ethics Serenade, June 30, 2021: Rot, Tragedy, Justice, Arrogance, And Irony

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

DC Sunrise2

1. Evidence that The Great Stupid was upon us in 2019 if only we had been paying attention...My wife, a World War II history buff, was watching the ending credits most recent movie version of “Midway”(2019) when I heard her emit the sound of a wounded animal. This message had flashed across the screen:

“The film is dedicated to the American and Japanese sailors who fought at Midway. The sea remembers its own.”

What…The…Hell? Those Japanese sailors wouldn’t have had to fight at all if their nation hadn’t killed 3,000 American servicemen is a sneak attack six months earlier. Since when do American films salute those who killed Americans? Now I have to check and see whether there was a tribute at the end of “Flight 93” commemorating the brave Al Qida terrorists who died trying to crash a plane into the Capitol.

Equally disturbing is that I recall no mention at all of “Midway’s” offensive coda in reviews of the film, and could find only one mention of it online. I know, I know, American film studios are desperate to pander to foreign markets. That’s not a good enough reason for that disgusting suck-up to a ruthless and racist enemy.

2. This reminds me of my ethical objection to “bucket lists”...Susan Montoya, 65, an assistant principal at Georgia O’Keefe Elementary School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, died when the hot air balloon she was riding in hit power lines and crashed. It was reported that the ride was an item on her “bucket list.” I don’t know who first came up with the idea that human life was just a collection of enumerated experiences and accomplishments like getting a merit badge, or how it became popular, but it’s a narcissistic and wasteful mindset. If you can’t think of anything more productive to do with your life than to treat it like a grocery list, you’ve missed the point.

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Ethics Heroes: The New York Yankees

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

bat girl

Now you know, if you know anything about me, that the headline above was not easy for me to write. Fair, however is fair.

Gwen Goldman was 10-years-old in 1961 when she wrote to her favorite baseball team and said that she wanted to be the Yankees’ batgirl. She got a response, too, from the Yankees GM Roy Hamey. His answer, on a letter with the Yankee logo that Gwen framed and hangs in her home today, was that baseball wasn’t for girls. “In a game dominated by men a young lady such as yourself would feel out of place in a dugout,” he wrote in part. “I am sure you can understand.”

This year, her adult daughter Abby emailed a photo of the letter to the team, and current Yankees GM Brian Cashman saw it. Last week, on the 60th anniversary of Hamey’s original letter, Cashman contacted Gwen Goldman to tell her that she would finally be able to achieve her dream of being a batgirl for her beloved Yankees. And so it was that yesterday night she was the honorary batgirl for the Yankees in their game against the Los Angeles Angels. It was part of the team’s HOPE Week, a tradition the Yankees started in 2009 to promote acts of goodwill that could provide hope and encouragement to others.

“This dream of 60 years that didn’t happen is happening,” Goldman said before her big night. “It’s thanks to Abby, starting it going, and to the Yankees organization for being at the forefront of believing about breaking down those gender barriers. The letter Brian Cashman wrote to me [that’s the one in her left hand, above] , it’s just beautiful and speaks a lot to who they are as an organization, trying to do what’s right. … I picked the right team to be a fan of, didn’t I?”

Well, no, Gwen, it’s the wrong team, but this time they did the right thing.

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Once Again The Courts Step In To Prevent Woke Discrimination

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

believe all survivors

Say what you will about the Trump Education Department, the fact that it reversed the anti-due process bullying of the Obama administration, which threatened colleges and universities that did not use a presumption of guilt to investigate accusations of campus sexual harassment and assault, was laudable and ethical. Now the Biden administration is in the process of reversing the reversal, as it once again embraces a “believe all women” context for such cases. (Well, “believe all women” except in cases where the Governor of New York and the president of the United States aren’t involved—but that’s another story.)

Fortunately, we have the courts, which are being kept especially busy as the progressives in power try to run roughshod over that damnably inconvenient Constitution thingy. This month the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the disingenuous argument by the University of Minnesota that they weren’t stacking the deck against accused male football players due to their gender, but rather tilting the process toward their accusers because the school was biased against all students accused of sexual misconduct. Riiiight, the Court concluded:

“The district court concluded that a university’s bias in favor of the victims of sexual assault does not establish a reasonable inference of bias against male students, citing Doe v. University of St. Thomas, 240 F. Supp. 3d 984, 991 (D. Minn. 2017). While the circumstances here also give rise to a plausible inference of bias in favor of sexual assault victims rather than against males, “[s]ex discrimination need not be the only plausible explanation or even the most plausible explanation for a Title IX claim to proceed.” Schwake, 967 F.3d at 948; see Columbia Univ., 831 F.3d at 57. Thus, we reverse the district court’s dismissal of the Does’ Title IX discrimination claims.“

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Oh, No! I’m INDOCTRINATED!!!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Hypnotist

Propaganda works; that one of the main reasons that having a national news media that does little else in its “reporting” is so dangerous and destructive. Naturally, planting slanted, shades, manipulated and biased versions of facts and reality in the minds of trusting citizens (not to mention children) works best on trusting, badly educated, pliant and gullible minds, especially those inclined toward conformity. Thanks primarily to my habitually skeptical and iconoclastic father, I am anything but inclined toward conformity, and I’m proud of that, though it has caused me much pain and inconvenience over the course of my life. That proclivity also kept me from wasting money and brain cells on pot, led me to cross student picket lines when the SDS tried to shut down my college classes, and is the reason why I cannot be embarrassed by old photos of me with hair to my shoulders, wearing pink-tinted John Lennon spectacles and a tie-dyed shirt and flashing the peace sign. There isn’t one. It’s also the reason I used my law degree to get a job running a health care organization and to become an ethicist.

So you can imagine my horror to discover that the relentless pounding on the news media, along with other segments of the culture, on the bonkers, deceptive and unethical concept that any activity that doesn’t end up neatly aligned with racial and ethnic demographics must be considered an example of systemic racism or bias is seeping into my consciousness despite my determined resistance to it. First, I read a feature in yesterday’s New York Times Business Section under “Personal Finance” in which the Times published a set of college application essays “on money and life.” Let’s ignore for the purposes of this post the fact that all five of the essays featured were endorsing the mandated woke agenda: a condemnation of unwanted sexual attention in public, a lament about the need to conserve money, a celebration of a stay-at-home mother who rejected the role, an ode to day care, and a swipe at a lack of caring in America and the fact that “sometimes the color of my skin speaks before I can.” They were all extremely, suspiciously, even, well written and interesting. But I was immediately distracted by the weird demographics. Four out of the five were women. Only one of the five wasn’t “of color.” Surely, this distribution was intentional. What did it indicate? A bias by the Times against whites and men? I found myself checking on the identity of the Times reporter, Ron Lieber. Yup, he’s white and Jewish. Did he feel he had to tilt his article way from men and white lest he be accused of sexism and not being sufficiently “antiracist?”

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Ethics Heroes: The US Conference of Catholic Bishops

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Bishops

It is unusual to call an organization’s decision to follow its own rules heroic, but I have low expectations of the Roman Catholic Church. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops voted 168-55 to draft a document on “Eucharistic coherence,” because the Church has been anything but coherent regarding the status of allegedly devout Catholics who support abortion.

Catholics are forbidden from participating in the ritual of the Eucharist if they are in a state of sin. Abortion is considered a very serious sin in the Catholic Church, which holds that life begins at conception. Thus a public figure, indeed an elected official, indeed a President, who openly supports abortion cannot take holy communion, because he is endorsing and enabling a serious sin. This isn’t hard. The much publicized “controversy” over the Bishops’ decision to follow their own Church’s ancient rules ( and those of the New Testament: “Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body. For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep.” — 1 Corinthians 11:27-30 ) resembles the current controversy in baseball over the MLB decision to enforce the hundred-year-old rule against pitchers doctoring the ball.

I know, everything reminds me of baseball, which has played a much greater role in my life than religion. But this is the same situation at its essence. The Catholic Church ducked, weaved and looked the other way while many U.S. politicians professed their belief in Catholicism as they openly and directly contradicted and actively undermined the Church’s core beliefs. They sought to have the benefit of appealing to the religious while simultaneously advocating a practice that their own Church condemns.

The New York Times—my wife keeps asking me why we pay 80 bucks a month for this shameless propaganda device, and I am running out of reasons—says that the Bishops’ vote is a “move to target a president, who regularly attends Mass and has spent a lifetime steeped in Christian rituals and practices, is striking coming from leaders of the president’s own faith, particularly after many conservative Catholics turned a blind eye to the sexual improprieties of former President Donald J. Trump because they supported his political agenda.”

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Glenn Greenwald Is Now Apparently A Traitor Because He Calls Out Journalists And Democrats On Their Lies

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Pulse massacre

Even before he quit The Intercept, the investigative news organization that he helped found, in protest of its refusal to report the Hunter Biden laptop story so it wouldn’t hurt Joe Biden’s prospects in the 2020 election, journalist Glenn Greenwald was calling out the mainstream media for flagrant dishonesty and partisan reporting during the Trump administration. Greenwald, who is a non-partisan critic and a libertarian muckraker, is now being accused of being a “traitor” by progressives because he’s doing what reporters used to regard as their duty. How dare a journalist deliberately undermine a false narrative being advanced by the news media for “the greater good”?

His recent exposé shows why Greenwald is an ethics hero as well as a possible savior of his profession, which looks like it is going down for the proverbial third time.

Since it is “Pride Month”—yes, we have a special month celebrating how people have sex and who they have sex with—politicians decided to use the approaching five year anniversary of the PULSE massacre in Orlando to grandstand about LGBTQ hate crimes, and, by extension, those evil conservatives who clearly hate gays and transsexuals. Omar Mateen shot and killed 49 people on July 22, 2016 at an Orlando gay nightclub, so the narrative has become that Mateen, was motivated by anti-LGBT hate. This is simply untrue; it isn’t even a matter of controversy. Mateen was an Islamic terrorist, and his motive was to punish innocent Americans for President Obama’s bombing campaigns in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. He made that undeniable in what he wrote and said. He probably didn’t even know PULSE had a gay clientele. All evidence shows that he chose PULSE at random.

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Tuesday Afternoon Ethics Tunes, 6/8/21: The Mean Fundraiser, And More

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Quite a while ago—I’m afraid to check—I asked readers to submit nominees for popular songs with an ethics theme or lesson. Lorne Greene’s one hit recording ( his vocal version of the “Bonanza” song did not fly off the shelves) was “Ringo,” a pretty blatant rip-off of Jimmy Dean’s “Big John,” was one of the first on the list. I received quite a few suggested songs but events overtook me, and I never finished the project. It is in a growing list of promised future content that I have yet to deliver, including missing parts to multi-part posts. I apologize to readers for all of them, but I also intend to make good on all of them, though the ethics songs compilation is understandably low priority. I was happy to finally finish the Ethics Guide to “Miracle on 34th Street” after it languished for a year. The top priorities on the catch-up list right now are Part II of Three Ethics Metaphors: The Rise, The Presidency And The Fall Of Donald J. Trump—that will be on the “Animal House” parade plot metaphor for Trump’s election—and, of course, the long-delayed Part III of The Pandemic Creates A Classic And Difficult Ethics Conflict, But The Resolution Is Clear.

Back to Lorne: I met him once, on a Santa Monica beach. He was in swimming trunks, and with his family, extremely friendly, tanned and wearing his hairpiece, which was fantastic. Like several other stars I have met in person, Greene was so strikingly attractive that he would make anyone turn their heads on a street even if you had no idea who he was. Unlike most of the others, he appeared to be a genuinely nice guy.

1. Proud to be off Twitter, Reason #569: After Twitter received notice of its noncompliance with India’s information technology laws, demanding that the company remove content critical of the government’s handling of the pandemic and about farmers’ protests, including tweets by journalists, activists and politicians, Twitter pulled itself up to its full metaphorical height, puffed itself up like blowfish, and protested in part, “We are concerned by recent events regarding our employees in India and the potential threat to freedom of expression for the people we serve.”

Twitter actually said that it cares about freedom of expression! Then, last week, after Nigeria blocked Twitter, it had the gall to tweet…

Twitter Nigeria

This, from the platform that censored the Hunter Biden laptop story and banned President Trump. The Hanlon’s Razor question of whether these are bad people or just stupid people now becomes irrelevant. It’s unethical to operate a powerful communications platform when you are so stupid.

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Ethics Dunce: Yahoo! Sportswriter Shalise Manza Young

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Naomi-Osaka interview

The withdrawal of female tennis star Naomi Osaka from the French Open because she wasn’t allowed to ignore rules all the other players were forced to play by has inspired a revealing amount of criticism…of the concept that stars should have to abide by the same rules and laws as everybody else. Since this is a massive ethics blind spot that defies persuasive advocacy, I’ve been somewhat surprised that so many commentators and athletes have been willing to put such an unethical position in print.

I shouldn’t have been, I guess. Osaka (predictably) played the victim, suddenly revealed that she suffered from depression (the old reliable “I’m not bad, I’m sick!” ploy satirized in “Officer Krupke”), and she had the triple benefit of being Asian, Black and female, the “Get Out Of Accountability Free” hat trick (that’s hockey, but you get the point) in the Age of The Great Stupid.

I was originally going to dedicate this post to the fatuous commentary of New York Times columnist Kurt Streeter, to whom all sports is about race, on l’affaire Osaka. “Using social media posts, first last Wednesday then on Monday, Osaka called out one of the most traditional practices in major sports: the obligatory news conference, vital to reporters seeking insight for their stories, but long regarded by many elite athletes as a plank walk. After monumental wins and difficult losses, Osaka has giggled and reflected through news conferences and also dissolved into tears. In Paris, she said she wanted nothing to do with the gatherings because they had exacted a steep emotional toll,” he wrote. “She sent a message with significant weight: The days of the Grand Slam tournaments and the huge media machine behind them holding all of the clout are done. In a predominantly white, ritual-bound sport, a smoothstroking young woman of Black and Asian descent, her confidence still evolving on and off the court, holds the power. Get used to it.”

Get used to what? Star athletes (and politicians, and other celebrities) thinking that if they are successful enough and popular enough, they get to break rules and get away with it? We’re used to that. But the point is that she doesn’t have the power. Tennis authorities fining her and threatening to kick her out of upcoming tournaments proved it. So she threw a tantrum, quit, took her ball and went home, and that’s admirable to Streeter, or anyone else? Well, but, you see, “it is impossible to know the depth of Osaka’s internal anguish” as “the rare champion of color in a tennis world dominated by fans, officials and a press corps that is overwhelmingly white.” Oh, gag me with a spoon. I’d be willing to suffer a lot of internal anguish in an enterprise I could make over 50 million dollars in a year, as Osaka has. Who wouldn’t?

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