Government & Politics

Comment Of The Day: “First Vice-Presidents And Supreme Court Justices, And Now NFL Offensive Assistant Coaches”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Existentialist warrior and unique Ethics Alarms commenter Extradimensional Cephalopod’s Comment of the Day on the post about the NFL’s requirement that all teams hire a “minority” assistant offensive coach in the pursuit of “diversity, equity and inclusion” marked the first mention here of the Matthew Effect, often loosely summarized to explain why, as the song says, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

Here it is; the triggering post is “First Vice-Presidents And Supreme Court Justices, And Now NFL Offensive Assistant Coaches.”

***

Although I agree with most of the sentiment, I should clarify something about this point: Jack wrote:

“In other words, they must receive remedial training because they would not have been hired based on their experience or demonstrated skills.”

Highly competitive fields such as sports, entertainment, business…–okay, basically all fields on this inhospitable planet–are subject to the Matthew effect. . With multiple stages of competition, extra opportunities early on lead to exponentially more opportunities at each subsequent stage, due to the greater experience and exposure attracting more mentors and benefactors.

If you’ve read Freakonomics, you may be familiar with how hockey players’ birthdays are all around the same time of year. Based on the birthdate cutoffs for when they started school, they would have been the oldest students and therefore the biggest and strongest, and therefore they received preferential treatment from coaches looking to build competitive teams. Each year their greater experience and skill due to the previous year’s preferential treatment led to more preferential treatment, et cetera. These advantages added up over the years until they became professional athletes.

If we assume that a person’s minority status prevented them from getting any breaks early on, it makes sense that people would want to give them preferential treatment after the fact to make up for it. Those people would not assume that their current lack of skill represents an innate lack of talent. Continue reading →

Andrew Sullivan Finally Can’t Take It Any More: Ethics Quote Of The Day

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“This is the poisonous heart of CRT: that white people, by virtue of merely existing, are all morally problematic and always will be. Even if all the systems have been repealed. Even if you’d never racially discriminate yourself. Even if you spent your life fighting racism. That is why Bond called the Abolitionist movement indistinguishable in terms of its racism from the KKK! Why? Because whites are only ever whites…Absorb that for a moment. This foul race essentialism, this view of white Americans as a single, undifferentiated blob of hate existing through the centuries as a force for the oppression of non-whites is simply the inverse of the old racism. It’s replacing hatred of blacks with hatred of whites; it’s replacing discrimination against blacks with discrimination against whites and Asians and others. It’s being used to make even more money for rich white people, to provide some elite whites with a weapon to destroy their career rivals, and to help build a new racial spoils system that leaves any notion of colorblindness or individual rights behind.”

—Blogger Andrew Sullivan, after being metaphorically mugged on comic Jon Stewart’s new TV show on an episode titled “The Problem With White People,” where Stewart and another guest called him a white supremacist.

If Sullivan’s substack newsletter were Ethics Alarms, his intense post called “The Trouble With Jon Stewart” would be tagged as a “Popeye,” as in “That’s all I can stands, ‘cuz I can’t stands no more!”

Andrew is at heart a moderate conservative and an intellectual. He started playing a progressive on TV when he decided to elevate being gay above all of his other priorities and values, but he wore the mask uncomfortably. A wonderful writer, Sullivan had never aimed both barrels of his solid knowledge and logic at the George Floyd Freakout and the resulting rush to embrace anti-white racism in the schools, private sector and government, but apparently his mugging at the hands of Stewart, and especially Stewart’s woke guest Lisa Bond, a white woman who runs an organization called Race2Dinner that charges other white women $2,500 per dinner to be harangued for their racism, was a tipping point.  (You gotta admire her entrepreneurial brilliance for that one! P.T. Barnum would be proud of her.)

As Bruce Willis would have said to Sullivan in the actor’s better days, “Welcome to the party, pal!” Continue reading →

The Freakout To Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Law, Not The Law Itself, Will Send LGBTQ Acceptance Backwards

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

There is nothing discriminatory, bigoted, ant-gay, anti-trans or unethical in the “Parental Rights in Education Bill’ signed into law by Florida Governor Jim DeSantis. Have you read it, or just relied on the hysterical and dishonest characterizations of the bill by the news media and woke activists like the three Oscar co-hosts, who chanted “Gay, gay,gay, gay!’ like four-year-olds in supposed bold and hilarious defiance of what progressives have been calling the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

Read the law. It doesn’t prohibit saying “gay” at all (the word doesn’t appear in the law), and as unfortunately vague as the wording sometimes is, no fair interpretation would find that it inhibits free speech.

Here is the closest wording in the bill to an “anti-LGBTQ” provision, in Section 3, page 4:

3. Classroom instruction by school personnel or third  parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur  in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.

The Horror. Only the most committed and unhinged gay activist could find that provision problematic, and the fact that so many progressives do is signature significance: they lave lost touch with common sense and reality. The law isn’t anti-gay, it’s pro-parent (and student). Any parents who really think their 4-8 year olds need to be trained in human sexuality are welcome to do it themselves. I would not want my child introduced to those topic by kindergarten through third grade teachers, even if I had the opportunity to closely examine the teachers’ qualifications for doing so and the way it would be done. This is not their job, and no, I wouldn’t trust them to take it on if it were. They have a hard enough time teaching language, arts, math, science and history. I don’t trust them to teach ethics. Continue reading →

“Rob Reiner, Are You That Smart?’

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Yes, Rob Reiner, son of the late, great Carl and director of some of my favorite movies (“The Princess Bride,” “Stand By Me”…) as well as a serviceable character actor when he’s got good material, and one of the most combative and seemingly immune from reality of all Hollywood progressives, tweeted that today.

I was, earlier today as I watched the chaos at the border start exploding again,  saw the latest price of coffee at the CVS, and reflected on Joe Biden’s sage recommendation to deal with the gas prices that he is at least partly responsible for (get a $60,000 electric car) going to again express my amazement on Ethics Alarms regarding the people on my Facebook feed, in polls, and a few other locales where Facts Don’t Matter, who still adamantly claim that President Biden is doing a wonderful job. At what? What is it they are so pleased with? The crime? The inflation? The worsening societal divisions? The government’s embrace of sexualizing and racializing education below the age of 12? His government using agents in the private sector to chill free speech and the freedom of association?  The looming nuclear war? The mask mandates? The casual racial and sexual discrimination? The exploding national debt? Something else? Which?

And then I saw “The Meathead’s” tweet, as well as the 52.7 “loves” it attracted, and all I could think of was poor Dana..

This is April 1. The tweet would be a deft April Fool’s joke, except that the tweeter is  Reiner, who never says a cross word about any Democrat (except Senators Manshin and Sinema, whom he views as traitors), especially Joe Biden. Do those “loves” come from people who think he’s being satirical, and thus slyly critical? Do they come from people who actually agree that Biden is having a successful—SUCCESSFUL??—Presidency? (You know…Morons.)

All I could hear was Wilford Brimley’s voice echoing through my brain, in his iconic scene from “Absence of Malice”: “Mr. Gallagher, are you that smart?” Except in this case, it’s “Mr. Reiner.” Is he so smart that he sent off this tweet knowing that could plausibly claim it was an April Fools joke if someone made the easy case that the tweet was idiotic, and made many of the people who read it even dumber than they are, yet at the same time he could pander to the hopelessly biased knee-jerk partisans in Hollywood and elsewhere who will cheer anything Biden does, thus maintaining Carl’s son’s woke credentials?

Could he possibly be that smart?

I don’t think so. I think he’s a deluded, Trump-deranged, fool.

The Herschel Walker Fake Credentials Scandal: Beyond The Fact That It’s Lying, Why Do Public Figures Do This?

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I don’t understand this kind of thing at all.

CNN did a deep dive into the educational boasts of Trump-backed Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker, the former NFL star and college running back legend, and discovered that he had been inflating his scholarly achievements to a ridiculous degree. He has said for years (and had the claim on his campaign website) that he graduated in the top 1% of his class at the University of Georgia. Nope. He was a B student or worse. He didn’t even graduate, though that’s the norm for pro athletes. Continue reading →

“Transgender Day of Visibility” Ethics Duncery

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Did you know yesterday was “Transgender Day of Visibility”? That’s funny, it seemed to me that this tiny minority in the U.S. has been disproportionately visible for years. Here’s the Presidents’ obsequious pander:

“To everyone celebrating Transgender Day of Visibility, I want you to know your president sees you, Jill, Kamala, Doug, our entire administration sees you for who you are. On this day and every day, we recognize the resilience, strength, and joy of transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people. We celebrate the activism and determination that have fueled the fight for transgender equality. We acknowledge the adversity and discrimination that the transgender community continues to face across our nation and around the world. Like never before, they are sharing their stories in books and magazines; breaking glass ceilings of representation on television and movie screens; enlisting — once again — to serve proudly and openly in our military; getting elected and making policy at every level of government; and running businesses, curing diseases, and serving our communities in countless other ways. Despite this progress, transgender Americans continue to face discrimination, harassment, and barriers to opportunity…I call upon all Americans to join us in lifting up the lives and voices of transgender people throughout our Nation and to work toward eliminating discrimination against all transgender, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary people — and all people.”

Continue reading →

Observations On The Unethical Tweet Of The Month

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I wasn’t exaggerating when I noted in the morning ethics horrors round-up today that March, 2022 was an ethics catastrophe speeding up, if anything, in the month’s waning hours.

The above revolting tweet was authored by Kychelle Del Rosario, a fourth-year medical student at Wake Forest School of Medicine. In answer to a tweet by someone complaining about “transphobia,” the future doctor—you know, “First, Do No Harm”?—appeared to admit—with pride!—that she deliberately caused pain and discomfort to a patient because he had mocked her (obnoxious) “preferred pronoun” pin. Then, when her despicable tweet was seen, circulated and justly condemned on social media, she courageously deleted the evidence in an attempted cover-up.

Continue reading →

Maryland Leaps On The Deadly Abortion Slippery Slope

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

When you think about it, this shouldn’t surprise us, as horrible and unethical as it is. The steps from abortion, to late-term abortion, to legal infanticide have always been smaller than abortion advocates have been willing to admit.

In one of the efforts underway in several Democratic-controlled legislatures to protect abortion rights if the Supreme Court alters or strikes down Roe v. Wade, Maryland is considering Senate Bill 669. The bill’s language states, in addition to protecting abortions themselves from prosecution, that no person can be investigated or charged for “experiencing a miscarriage, perinatal death related to failure to act, or stillbirth.”

The perinatal period consists of “the period shortly before and after birth, from the 20th to 29th week of gestation to one to four weeks after birth.” Mark Tapscott concludes,

In other words, it’s anywhere up to four weeks after the birth of the child you and your sexual partner conceived, and you decide you really don’t want the child, hey, no problem, just don’t feed it, don’t get medical care, don’t do a thing. Eventually, the child will die.

And that, under the meaning of the bill’s text, is OK.

The bill, which Tapscott believes is certain to pass and withstand a veto by Maryland’s Republican governor, also bans any investigations into perinatal infant death while creating the private right the right to sue for civil damages if one is investigated for causing a perinatal death through neglect. Continue reading →

First Vice-Presidents And Supreme Court Justices, And Now NFL Offensive Assistant Coaches

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The NFL’s near-complete dearth of ethics alarms is approaching comedic levels, if such a thing could be funny. This week the league that makes billions by paying young men to get a brain disease commanded all 32 NFL teams to hire a minority offensive assistant coach for the 2022 season, as, you’ve got it, another phase of the league’s “diversity” efforts.

The coach can be “a female or a member of an ethnic or racial minority,” according to the policy adopted by NFL owners during their annual meeting, and will be paid from a league-wide fund. That’s because they will all be tokens, you see, hired for PR purposes and to avoid lawsuits, so they really aren’t team hires. The new minority coaches “must work closely with the head coach and the offensive staff, with the goal of increasing minority participation in the pool of offensive coaches” that eventually produces the most sought-after candidates for head-coaching positions. In other words, they must receive remedial training because they would not have been hired based on their experience or demonstrated skills.

“It’s a recognition that at the moment, when you look at stepping stones for a head coach, they are the coordinator positions,” said Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney II, the chairman of the NFL Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee. “We clearly have a trend where coaches are coming from the offensive side of the ball in recent years, and we clearly do not have as many minorities in the offensive coordinator [job].” A quota, he means.

And that’s what counts, not putting the best football team on the field. Or something.

In addition to the offensive assistant coach mandate, the new policies in “diversity” also added women to the language of the Rooney Rule at all levels. It will now read that women and/or people of color can satisfy the old Rooney Rule requirement to interview two external minorities for top positions, including head coach. Women are not required to be interviewed, but they are now included in the fulfillment process. It is possible that a team could interview two white women for an open head coach position to satisfy the Rooney Rule, and then make a hire without ever interviewing a person of color.

Why no “differently-abled” coaches? How about blind coaches? Gay coaches? Mentally ill coaches? Little people. Non-English speakers. Mentally-challenged. Surely a trans assistant coach would be historic. Can Lia Thomas play football? Continue reading →

Tuesday Ethics Afterthoughts, 3/29/2022: A Cheat Sheet, Mask Mayhem, And More

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

(THERE IS NO GOOD GRAPHIC FOR “AFTERTHOUGHTS”)

The 29th is another of those ill-starred days in U.S. ethics, topped off in 1973 by the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, the half-way war that was an ethics train wreck for decades. Two years earlier, on the same date, Lt. William L. Calley was found guilty of premeditated murder by a U.S. Army court-martial at Fort Benning, Georgia. Calley, a platoon leader, had led his men in a massacre of Vietnamese civilians including women and children on March 16, 1968. Ten years before Calley’s conviction, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of espionage for their role in passing atomic secrets to the Soviets during and after World War II. They were executed in 1953, a flashpoint in the schism between the American Left and Right that still is a sore point. (Ethel appears to have been a genuine villain.)

1. I thought this was a hoax. It’s not, unfortunately: someone got a photo of the cheat cheat for “talking points” that President Biden was holding when he massacred his explanation for his Russian regime change outburst in an exchange with Peter Doocy.

This does not fill me with confidence. You? The ethical value at issue is competence.

2. The propaganda and misinformation continues. Though some recently departed here could never grasp it, honest and trustworthy newspapers shouldn’t be publishing falsity and partisan propaganda in house opinion pieces. That’s when the opinion is offered using misleading or incomplete facts—deceit–and the New York Times does it almost every day. I can’t trust a group of editors who permit that. Examples:

It’s incredible how quickly we’ve normalized the fact that the last president tried to retain power despite losing the election and that a mob he incited stormed the Capitol. Many people took part in the effort to overturn the election — among them, we recently learned, the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice, who hasn’t even recused himself in cases about the attempted coup.

The President in question wanted to challenge the results of an election he believed was the result of illegal manipulation, and as President, he had a duty to do that. I know Krugman isn’t a lawyer, but incitement is a term of art and a crime, and Trump did not “incite a mob” by addressing a crowd. Saying Justice Thomas “hasn’t even” recused himself because of the completely legal communications of his wife falsely implies that doing so is required or the justification for him to do so is undeniable. It isn’t. Editors should not allow such deliberately confusing and misleading opinion material Continue reading →