Guest Post

Curmie’s Conjectures— Punk’s Guide to Ethics, Part II: Strategies

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

by Curmie

The title for this two-part edition of Curmie’s Conjectures refers to a song by the Irish punk band the Boomtown Rats, “Don’t Believe What You Read,” which includes not only the title admonition but also lines like “I know most what I read will be a lot of lies / But you learn really fast to read between the lines.”  Part I of this exercise attempted to suggest something of the parameters of the problem.  As Jack suggested in his introduction to that piece, it’s not an exhaustive list of the various forms of journalistic chicanery, but I hope it served as a representative sample.

Here in Part II, I’ll attempt the daunting task of examining strategies to “read between the lines” and come at least a little closer to the truth of what happened in a given situation.  So, what to do?  How do we determine if that less-than-objective source we’re reading actually has this one story right, especially if it’s the only source about a particular story?  Boy, do I wish there was an easy answer to this one.  That said…

The most effective means of ascertaining the truth, of course, is to get different perspectives on the issue.  I think I’ve mentioned both here and on my own blog that when I was in England doing my MA (at the time “Don’t Believe What You Read” was released, as it happens), I’d alternate between reading the Telegraph, which leaned right, and the Guardian, which leaned left.  If the former said “X but Y,” thereby suggesting that Y was the more important point, the latter would likely say “Y but X.”  But whichever paper you read, you’d know that X and Y, though perhaps seemingly in opposition, were both true, and both worth knowing about. 

Of course, both the Telegraph and the Guardian were, whatever their political perspectives, both reputable news sources.  That’s a statement that would be difficult to make about many of the most prominent news media in this country in the 2020s.  Equally importantly, as suggested in Part I, the problem is often that we hear only from one perspective. 

There are three possibilities for why this should occur.  One, which is (alas!) probably the least likely, is that both X and Y editors make an honest decision that a story is or is not newsworthy.  Or X media outlet knowingly runs with a story that is either grossly distorted or fabricated altogether.  Or outlet Y, knowing the story casts their team in an unfavorable light, ignores it, hoping it will just go away.  At some point it becomes untenable to try to ferret out the true motives; the truth of the story may be a little easier to discern, although there are no guarantees.

Continue reading →

Curmie’s Conjectures— Punk’s Guide to Ethics, Part I: The Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

by Curmie

[I am particularly grateful for this installment of Curmie’s Conjectures because it assuages my guilt a bit. As longtime readers here know, I occasionally promise posts that never show up, or do, but so long after the promise that it’s embarrassing. Years ago, I promised a post defining and examining all journalistic tricks that I classify as “fake news,” and I use the term broadly to include misleading headlines, burying the lede, omitting key information that undermines the writer’s agenda, poisoning the well and other techniques. I started the thing, got frustrated and overwhelmed, and never finished it. Here Curmie doesn’t exactly present what I intended, but he touches on much of it, and as an extra bonus, he wrote it more elegantly than I would have (as usual). JM.]

I doubt that this blog has ever before turned to punk rock for ethics advice, but Boomtown Rats composer/frontman (and Live Aid impresario) Bob Geldof had it right in a song that’s probably more relevant today than it was 40+ years ago: “Don’t Believe What You Read.”  Well, not uncritically, at least.  At our host’s suggestion, I’m about to enter the fraught territory of trying to decide if a story published by an obviously biased media outlet might, this time, just be accurate. 

It’s difficult of late to find a news source that only leans in one direction or the other, rather than proselytizing for the cause.  The news networks and major newspapers have carved out their market shares based on feeding their viewers and readers what they want to be fed.  Whether the advent of Fox News was a trigger or a reaction is up to individual interpretation, but there’s absolutely no doubt that we’re now in an era in which news as reported is determined largely by editorial positioning, rather than the other way around.

It’s inevitable that, to steal a line from another of my favorite musicians, Paul Simon, “a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.”  Fighting our own biases is not made easier by the knowledge that learning from experience and confirmation bias are opposite sides of the same coin.  If a story appears only on Fox News and the Drudge Report, or only on AlterNet and MSNBC, there’s an excellent chance that the indignation is feigned and the actual events are something of a nothing-burger.

But “usually” is not “always.”  As a society, we’re well aware of the tale of the boy who cried wolf and the miraculous last-second basket from well past half-court.  We nod and smile at the suggestion that stopped clocks are right twice a day. 

There are a few variations on the theme of biased journalism.  The first, editorializing in a news story, is generally the easiest to spot and the easiest to counteract.  If there are words like “communist,” “Nazi,” or “un-American” to describe a US politician, or phrases like “unborn children” or “reproductive freedom,” you’re reading an editorial, whether the article identifies itself as such or not.  There’s nothing wrong with editorializing; it’s what I do here and on my own blog, after all.  But I also try to not to suggest that what I write is completely objective.

Another variation on the theme, and a personal pet peeve, is what I call a Schrödinger sentence, because it is simultaneously true and not true.  For example, I’ve seen a whole lot of conservative commentary on this blog that “progressives want X.”  (“X” in this context, of course, has nothing to do with what Elon Musk renamed Twitter.)  True, there are enough progressives who advocate for X to make the noun plural, but I’m a progressive, and I’m a big fan of not-X.  The implication—or, rather, one possible implication—of the sentence is that in order to be a progressive, one must want X.  That is no more true than suggesting that all conservatives believe in Jewish space lasers.  And I really resent being told what I believe.

Continue reading →

Guest Column: Shoplifting Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

by Sarah B.

[Introduction: This excellent post by Sarah B, who has a history of them, posed a dilemma. It was originally posted in this week’s Open Forum, but the comment easily could have been a Comment of the Day on two recent posts, “Irony: The Washington Post Telling CVS How To Handle Rampant Shoplifting,” and “Technology Ethics Fail: Self-Checkout.”

In the end, I decided to publish it as a guest post, as Sarah herself told us up front what she was commenting on, writing, “This article, about a woman who wrote a piece for the newspaper anonymously about how and why she shoplifts, is worth discussing,” referring to “I’m a middle-class shoplifter – and here’s why I’m happy to confess it” in the UK’s Independent. Proving once again that valuable insights can be obtained from idiotic essays, Sarah’s post is far, far, FAR superior to the article that apparently spawned it. The explanation of “anonymous” about why she’s apparently “happy” about being a shoplifter was so devoid of either logic or ethics comprehension that it made my phantom hair hurt. Among her fatuous excuses and rationalizations were “It’s easy, so it’s the stores’ fault,” “I don’t even see it as shoplifting” (#64 on the rationalizations list, “It isn’t what it is”), “I’m owed it,” and #22, the worst rationalization of all, “It’s not the worst thing,” because she “would only do this in a supermarket chain, rather than any family-run small business.” People like the author make me want to chuck my business and profession and become a pimp or something. Why do I spend so much time on ethics when so many people think like this? Fortunately, Sarah had a different and more constructive reaction.—JM.]

***

First, there is no doubt that her actions are unethical, and while we could just analyze this as a “name the rationalizations”, I also think that a deep dive into the article can show many things about our society and make for a good discussion. There are options for discussing how she doesn’t shoplift because she has to, but does it to decrease the prices of expensive alternatives instead of paying for what she wants. However, I want to look at how I think we could combat her “how-to guide”.

This seems to me to be a great case study in “locks keep an honest man honest.” The author admits that much of her stealing is predicated on the app-shopping and self-checkout philosophy of big stores. My main proposal, after looking at this, is to somehow return to the “good old days” of customer service.

Continue reading →

Curmie’s Conjectures: Eye Black Is Not Blackface. Duh.

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

by Curmie

[It turns out that Curmie and I were writing about the same issue more or less simultaneously. Shortly after I posted “The Great Stupid: Child Abuse Edition,” Curmie sent me this installment of his  periodic column, expressing concern that it was redundant. It’s not, and I’m putting up Curmie’s take for several reasons: 1) I love his writing and style; 2) he approaches the incident from some different angles than I did; 3) I believe this incident is an important one that involves many critical ethics problems: the public school disaster; hypersensitivity to racial offense, real or imagined; the indoctrination and intimidation of children; and more. The plight of J.A. is not just the metaphorical canary dying in the mine, but strong evidence of just how badly our society’s air is poisoned. It is worth more than one post. Finally, I especially want this essay read after Curmie commented recently that he disagreed with my analysis on “countless” topics. In fact, I find that his values and ethical navigation equipment are closely aligned with mine. If they weren’t, he couldn’t have dissected this story so expertly.—JM.]

***

A few days ago, I commented on Jack’s post on the high school principal in Sherman, Texas who declared that the musical Oklahoma! contains “mature adult themes, profane language, and sexual content” “would come in third place in a battle of wits with a sack of hair and an anvil.”

I hereby retract that characterization.  It appears that Sherman Principal Scott Johnson was merely a good soldier, enforcing the dictates of a superintendent and school board that can’t decide if the Victorian age was a little too permissive.  So… Johnson appears capable of giving that anvil a run for its money. 

The good news is that the international attention this case received resulted first in a decision to re-instate the original student cast but in a shortened “kids” version of the musical that would have cut the solo from Max Hightower, the trans student at the center of the controversy, and finally—when the students and parents wouldn’t accept that utterly stupid “compromise” or the notion that Oklahoma!, of all plays, ought to be bowdlerized—a return to the original version with the students the director cast.

More to the present point, when compared to Jeff Luna, the principal at Muirland Middle School in La Jolla, California, even the folks who did make the idiotic decisions that led to the kerfuffle would appear to embody all the best attributes of Solomon, Socrates, Confucius, Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci rolled into one.  We do sorta know what Ado Annie means when she laments her inability to “say no,” after all.

I was about to say that what Luna did surpasses credulity, but, alas, it does not.  There are a lot of adjectives that do apply—”boneheaded,” “irrational,” and “unconstitutional” come to mind—but unfortunately “unbelievable” has no place on the list.

Last month, a Muirland 8th-grader identified as J.A. attended a high school football game, looking like he does in the photo above.  That is, he wore eye black, just as he’s seen countless football players (and not a few baseball players) do; I won’t bother you with the literally dozens of photos of players of all races doing so.  Now, whether eye black has any direct practicality is a matter for debate.  It started as a means of keeping glare out of the eyes.  I have no idea whether it actually does that, and even if it does, it doesn’t require the amount used by J.A.  But that, of course, is irrelevant.

Continue reading →

An Ethics Obituary For Mitt Romney

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Guest Post by Steve-O-in NJ.

[This is a comment posted by Steve-O in response to the post, “KABOOM! I Have To Take Back Every Positive Thing I Ever Said About Mitt Romney.” Properly it would be a Comment of the Day, but I decided that in both theme and length it deserved to be a free-standing guest post. I know comments are usually written with less precision than the authors might apply if they knew they were going to be highlighted—I know my comments are—so I did edit Steve’s work a bit, not substantively, and I hope he approves. JM]

I don’t know if this is even worth talking about very much, since Romney is headed toward the door and will exit as an also-ran. In his day, he amassed quite an impressive resume, certainly much more impressive than Barack Obama’s. He did a reasonably good job as governor of Massachusetts. That’s why it strikes me as odd that he did not run an effective presidential campaign, nor did he seem to grasp that campaigning on the national stage in 2012 was very different than campaigning 20, 10, or even 5 years before that.

The other side had one goal, and they stuck relentlessly to it: destroy Mitt Romney, by all means fair or foul. Positive campaigning has been pretty much dead since the days of Bush the Elder. It’s negative campaigning that moves the numbers, and Romney didn’t seem to grasp that. He tried to run a gentlemanly campaign when the other side and the media were prepared to fight as dirty as possible. This country didn’t give a damn about his resume or his plan for fixing the economy, at least not enough. They wanted things to be better, but Mitt just couldn’t make his case.

Continue reading →

“Curmie’s Conjectures”: The Revenge of the Wackadoodles

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

by Curmie

One of my favorite lines from the late singer/songwriter Warren Zevon is “Just when you thought it was safe to be bored / Trouble waiting to happen.”  That lyric came to mind when I happened across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Hamline President Goes on the Offensive.”Well, that lyric and one of my most oft-used phrases, “Oh, bloody hell!”. 

This rather lengthy article—over 3000 words—deserves to be read in its entirety, even if it involves a registration process for free access to a limited number of articles per month, but I’ll try to hit the highlights here.  The author is Mark Berkson, the Chair of the Religion Department at Hamline University.  His was for a very long while the only voice, or at least the only audible one, on the Hamline campus to come to the defense of erstwhile adjunct art history professor Erika López Prater as she was being railroaded by the school’s administration on absurd charges of Islamophobia.

You may recall the incident.  Jack first wrote about it here; my take came a little later, here.  Dr. López Prater was teaching a course in global art history, in which she showed images of a couple of paintings depicting the prophet Muhammad.  Recognizing that there are some strains of Islam in which viewing such images is regarded as idolatrous, she made it clear both in the course syllabus and on the day of the lecture in question that students who chose not to look at those particular photos were free not to do so, without penalty.

Ah, but that left too little room for victimhood.  So student Aram Wedatalla blithely ignored those warnings and (gasp!) saw those images… or at least she says she did, which is not necessarily the same thing.  Wounded to the core by her own sloth and/or recklessness, she then howled to the student newspaper and, urged on by Nur Mood, the Assistant Director of Social Justice Programs and Strategic Relations (also the advisor to the Muslim Student Association, of which Wedatalla was president), to the administration.  The banner was then raised high by one David Everett, the Associate Vice President of Inclusive Excellence.  (Those folks at Hamline sure do like their pretentious job titles, don’t they?)

Anyway, Everett proclaimed in an email sent to literally everyone at Hamline that López Prater  had been “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”  To be fair, he didn’t identify her by name, but there weren’t a lot of folks teaching global art history.  Everett was just getting warmed up.  He subsequently co-authored, or at least jointly signed, a statement with university president Fayneese Miller that “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.”  Not at any university worthy of the name, it shouldn’t.  Anyway, López Prater was de facto fired, because destroying the careers of scholars for even imaginary offenses has become a blood sport for administrators (and, in public colleges, for politicians).

Continue reading →

“Curmie’s Conjectures”: Curmie Doesn’t Like Being Lied To, Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

by Curmie

It would seem that prevarication has supplanted baseball as the national pastime.  Name a politician you’d trust to tell you the truth if a lie would be more convenient.  I can’t, and if there’s one out there, it sure as hell isn’t one of the frontrunners in the next Presidential election.

My most recent post concerned getting lied to by the post office, and their subsequent bewilderment that I didn’t appreciate their mendacity.  It’s not just those with ties to the government, though.  Companies feel the need to get in on the act, too.  So, here’s Part II of my rant.

We’ve been in our current house a little over 22 years.  The garage door opener wasn’t new when we moved in.  A few days ago, the chain snapped.  So I went to the local Lowe’s, checked out the possibilities, came home and discussed the options with my wife, and ordered a new opener online.  So far, so good. 

Continue reading →

“Curmie’s Conjectures”: Curmie Doesn’t Like Being Lied To, Part I

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

by Curmie

Jack’s posts about his experiences at local CVS, 7-11 and McDonald’s outlets have emboldened me to discuss my own recent dealings with respect to a couple of recent purchases.  I’ve experienced two separate incidents over the past few days.  What they share is not simply that someone failed to provide a service they were obligated to provide, but that they lied about it and showed literally no remorse for having done so.

So… here’s incident #1; more next time.

Although I’m retired from teaching, my university has a provision that <i>emeritus</i> faculty are entitled to an office if one is available, and one is.  Because I’m still doing some academic writing, I’m grateful for the workspace, the use of a computer, access to a printer and scanner, etc.  We’re now back in the building we occupied from the time I came here until the summer of 2020, when we were displaced to across campus while renovations and expansions were happening to our “home.”  (We were told we had to move out by the end of May 2020 or we couldn’t move back in the fall of 2021; we couldn’t move in at all until August of this year, and the building won’t really be ready for at least another few months.  But that’s a rant for another day.)

The problems are two-fold.  First, my new office is less than half as big as the one I moved out of three years ago.  Second, it was designed by an idiot, or, more likely, a committee of idiots.  The desk, made of cheap but heavy material, is far too big for an office of that size.  There are permanently mounted cabinets above the desk, but no place for files.  I could go on.  The biggest annoyance is that the offices on my side of the hallway (the smaller ones, with windows offering a view of the convenience store across the street) got only a single bookcase.  I seriously doubt that whoever decided that has ever as much as met a faculty member in the humanities, let alone listened to one.

Continue reading →

“Curmie’s Conjectures”: Donald Trump Has No Convictions, But He Has No Convictions

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

by Curmie

[Notes from your host: 1) Curmie and I did not coordinate our posts, and 2) as usual, his erudition puts me to shame.]

***

I’m currently in the process of moving into a new office which is far too small to accommodate my collection of books, even after I gave away over 1000 of them.  One of the volumes I still haven’t figured out what to do with is my Penguin paperback copy of Thucydides’ “History of the Peloponnesian War,” purchased over 40 years ago for a course I took in grad school.

Coming across that volume triggered a memory of struggling with one of that book’s most famous sections, the Stasis in Corcyra.  It wasn’t that the passages in question were too confusing.  Rather, it was that word “stasis”; no one would describe the civil war on the island of Corcyra in 427 BCE as static. 

A little digging (well, actually more than a little, as these were the days before the internet) revealed that virtually all English translations of those passages of Thucydides had simply adopted a cognate of the Greek word στάσις (stásis), meaning roughly “that which is stood up.”  So something firmly placed and unchanging would be static, or in a state of stasis.  But the word also carried the meaning of “standing up against,” in the sense of resisting authority.  So the insurrection on Corcyra was, in fact, an act of stasis.

These linguistic constructions, known as contranyms, auto-antonyms, or “Janus words” (among other locutions) are not uncommon.  We all understand that a peer might be a member of the English nobility or an equal, or that “it’s all downhill from there” might mean that the system is in decline or that the hard part is over and we can coast to the finish line.

I’m not sure if there’s a word for the variation on the theme that forms the title of this essay: the two meanings of the term are not in direct contradiction, but they lead to pretty close to opposite conclusions.  What I find interesting is that both definitions can apply simultaneously. 

That is, “having no convictions” can mean lacking a system of guiding principles, especially one involving a moral compass or an ethical center. It can also mean that the subject has never been convicted of a crime.  I’d argue that Donald Trump fits both descriptions rather well. 

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Reflections from the Echo Chamber

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

by JutGory

A repetitive, if not constant, topic here is whether or not this blog is a right-wing echo chamber that is inhospitable to left-wing or progressive commenters.  With the recent hit and run by A Friend and a short visit from Ryan Pell, the topic again was front and center for a brief moment.  While one of my recent comments about that suggested that progressives had greater difficulty staying here because they were less inclined than conservatives to follow the rules.  Some of those comments can be found here:

Comment Of The Day: “First Open Forum Of August!”

I am not sure if that was completely right, but likely not entirely wrong.  It is certainly not fair to say conservatives are ethical and liberals-progressives are not.  There are ample counter-examples posted on this blog on both points.  Then, an alternate explanation occurred to me.  The reason why liberal/progressives do not seem to last long here may be because they are not here to discuss ethics; they are here to discuss politics. The topics, while overlapping, are different.  Politics presents arguments to win, and facts to spin.  We all have “our side,” and the goal of politics is for your side to prevail.

Continue reading →