Well, something. Yes, hold on to your butts: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is imparting what she regards as wisdom. I was going to make this an Unethical Quote of the Week, then I decided that I didn’t know what it was, except disturbing. Here is what she ranted last night in a live stream; I’ll have some rueful comments at the end…
language
Curmie’s Conjectures: The Pedestrian Ways of the Wisconsin Supreme Court [Link Fixed!]
[Two Curmie’s Conjectures columns in a week! We are blessed. I was also thrilled to have this particular issue examined by a non-lawyer, because in many areas, legal training fogs clear thinking when it is supposed to do the opposite. Also, of the two options Curmie closes with, the majority of lawyers I’ve discussed this case with vote for the second.
Oh—Curmie had a standard pedestrian sign as his illustration for this post, but I saw another opportunity to use one of my all-time favorite Charles Addams cartoons, and went for it. I hope he doesn’t mind—JM]
I was tempted to call the recent decision by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in the case of Sojenhomer v. Egg Harbor a head-scratcher, but I fear that such an assessment might be a little too kind.
Sojenhomer LLC owns a brew pub/restaurant located along County Highway G in the village of Egg Harbor. They used a small portion of that land, .009 acres, for patron parking. The village, citing safety concerns, sought to put in a sidewalk where those parking spaces currently are. To do so, they sought to condemn that small area under eminent domain regulations.
The problem with their plan is that Wisconsin state law bars the use of condemnation to acquire property to establish or extend “a pedestrian way….” So the case boils down to whether or not a sidewalk is indeed “a pedestrian way.” The majority opinion, written by Justice Rebecca Frank Dallet, says no, to which I reply, “then what the hell is it?”
Curmie’s Conjectures: Book Reviews and the Warm Fuzzies
by Curmie
[This is Jack: I have to insert an introduction here. Curmie’s headline is fine, but it would come under the Ethics Alarms “Is We Getting Dumber?” or “Tales of the Great Stupid” banners if I had composed it. What he is describing is a culture-wide phenomenon that is far more insidious than its effects on scholarly book reviews alone. I also want to salute Curmie for slyly paying homage in his section about typos to one of my own most common and annoying typos. I know it was no coincidence.]
I published my first book review in an academic journal in 1991. In all, I’ve written about 30 reviews on a wide range of topics for about a dozen different publications. In some cases, I was only marginally qualified in the subdiscipline in question. In others, especially more recently, I’ve been a legitimate authority, as well as being a full Professor (or Professor emeritus) rather than a grad student or rather green Assistant Professor.
The process has changed significantly in recent years, the biggest change being the increased level of editorial scrutiny. A generation or more ago, I’d send in a review and it would be printed as written. That was back when I was an early-career scholar, at one point even without a terminal degree, often writing about topics on the periphery of my interests and expertise. My most recent reviews, when I was a senior scholar writing about subjects in my proverbial wheelhouse, went through three or four drafts before they were deemed publishable. Note: I didn’t become more ignorant or a worse writer in the interim.
Some of the changes came indirectly, no doubt, from the publishers rather than the editors: I received the same stupid comment—to include the chapter number rather than a descriptor like “longest” or “most interesting”—from book review editors from two different journals published by the same firm. Actually, one of those “corrections” wasn’t from the book review editor himself, but was a snarky comment from his grad assistant. You can imagine how much I appreciated being condescended to by a grad student. Other changes were just kind of dumb: one editor insisted that I change “whereas” to “while” (“whereas” was the better term).
But these are the kind of revisions at which one just shakes one’s head and shrugs. The ones that actually affect the argument are far more problematic. One author was writing about the production of a play by a female playwright from the 1950s. There’s no video footage (of course), and if literally anyone who saw that production is still alive, I think we could forgive them for not remembering many details. But the author decried the (alleged) sexism of the male newspaper reviewers who weren’t impressed with the production. Nothing they said, or at least nothing the author quoted, struck me as anything but a negative response to a poor performance.
Remember, they’re not talking about the play as written, but as performed, so the fact that the text isn’t bad (I’ve read it) doesn’t render the criticism of the acting and directing invalid. I said that in what amounted to my first draft, but was told that I needed to say that the allegations of sexism could have been true (well, duh!), but weren’t necessarily. In my view, declaring suspicions as fact, even if there’s some supporting evidence, might cut it as a blog piece, but it isn’t scholarship. But whatever…
In another review I suggested that the mere fact that male dramatists wrote plays with specific actresses—their “muses”—in mind for the leading roles doesn’t mean that those women should share authorship credit any more than Richard Burbage should get co-authorship credit for Shakespeare’s plays. I was ultimately able to make that point, but in a watered-down version.
More recently, I was asked to “tone down” a comment that several of the authors in what purported to be an interdisciplinary collection of essays were so committed to discipline-specific jargon, incredibly complex sentences, and sesquipedalian articulations (see what I did there?) that readers, even those well-versed in the subject matter—me, for example—would find those chapters unreasonably difficult read, and might be tempted to conclude that the authors were more interested in strutting their intellectuality than in enlightening the reader.
I stand by the analysis, but the editor was probably right to ask me to temper the cynicism. I did so, but I kept the rest in a slightly revised version. She seemed pleased, and told me she’d sent it off to press. When it appeared in print, only the comment about jargon remained… and the verb wasn’t changed from plural to singular. Sigh.
Perhaps the most telling episode was when I said that a book was extremely poorly edited and proofread. I’ve never written a book, but I have published several chapters in collections of scholarly essays. The process varies a little from publisher to publisher, but for one recent chapter I sent a draft to the book editor, who made editorial suggestions and proofread, and sent it back to me. I approved some of the changes he suggested and made my case for not changing other parts of the essay. After about three drafts, we both pronounced ourselves satisfied, and the essay went off to the series editor, who requested a couple of very minor changes. And then it went to the publisher. And then the professional proofreader. And then back to the publisher. And then back to me. At least five different people proofread that chapter, some of us several times.
It’s still almost inevitable that some typo will still sneak by. Of course, some publishers will cheat and rely on spellcheck, sometimes without even checking the final product. I once encountered a textbook that intended to reference the 19th century playwrights Henri Becque and Eugène Brieux, but rendered their surnames as Bisque and Brie—a nice lunch, perhaps, but hardly important dramatists.
But this book, published by a prominent academic press, was ridiculous. There were four and five typos on a single page, inconsistent formatting so it was impossible to tell when quoted material began and ended, at least two (that I caught) glaring malapropisms, and a number of instances of sentences or paragraphs so convoluted it was literally impossible to tell what was intended. We’re not talking “teh” for “the” or accidentally omitting the “l” in “public,” here.
I was insistent on making the point that the book was not yet ready to be published. A lot of the scholarship was really excellent, but the volume read like a first draft, neither edited nor proofread. Finally, the book review editor had to get permission from the journal’s editor-in-chief (!) for me to go ahead with that commentary.
So what’s going on, here? I can offer no firm conclusions, only speculations… “conjectures,” to coin a phrase.
Wait, This Was A Gang Rape? [Expanded]
From “The Ethicist” column: A perfect example of why capitulating to preferred-pronoun bullying is madness, sending human communication back to grunts and squeaks. Here’s the inquirer’s story:
I went on a date with someone, and we went back to their apartment. In the middle of sex, I caught this person, who uses they/them pronouns, recording me on their phone. For my safety, I chose to pretend I did not notice, as I did not want to be stranded in the middle of the night. In the morning, I confronted them, and they apologized and deleted the video. They said that was their first time recording someone during sex and a spur-of-the-moment decision, albeit a bad one.
When I arrived home I felt more dehumanized than angry, as if I were a sex toy. I told my friends what happened, and they were very upset, and urged me to file a police report. I dismissed this at first, but I looked online and found that capturing imagery of a person’s private parts without their consent, when there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, is a violation of state and federal laws.
I decided to contact my date and inform them of the gravity of their actions and told them never to do it again. I also decided that I didn’t want to press charges. I do not want to subject myself to a lengthy legal process, repeating and reliving this story over and over, as well as having to tell my family or put my life on hold. My friends are concerned that I don’t feel upset enough, and they assume that this was not my date’s first time recording someone, and will not be the last. They think I should file a police report to prevent my date from recording others in the future. I chose to assume that my date is a normal human being who made a stupid decision and does not necessarily deserve a criminal record because of it. By informing my date of the severity of their actions, they now know to never make that mistake again.
My friends don’t agree with my decision, despite understanding why I would not want to press charges. We all agree that it should not be my responsibility to prevent my date from committing future crimes, but they think I should do it anyway because it’s the right thing to do. I fear that they think less of me now because I am ‘‘protecting’’ my date by giving them the benefit of the doubt, and that I’m being selfish because I do not want to sacrifice myself to the legal system on the chance that my date is a morally reprehensible person who will continue to record people without their consent. — Name Withheld, San Diego
“The Ethicist” Is Persuaded By Pro-Abortion Double-Talk: 10 Observations
I find the latest query posed to The Ethicist to have such an ethically obvious answer as to be unworthy of publication, unless the objective was to demonstrate how weak and intellectually dishonest ethical the position of pro-abortion advocates is.
Here it is:
I’ve always supported a woman’s right to choose, not least because legal access to abortion once saved me from an untenable situation. I also believe that if a woman chooses to abort, her wish should supersede any opposition to it by the father. The physical, practical and emotional effects on a woman obliged to carry a child to term (and to care for it afterward) are, in my view, far more significant than they are for the father.
But what about the reverse? What about a case in which the father (in this case, my son) is adamantly opposed to having a child, but the woman (his ex-girlfriend) wants to keep the pregnancy? While it’s not relevant to the moral question, the pregnancy is shockingly unexpected given a medical issue of the father’s. And the couple’s relationship has almost no chance of success, even without a pregnancy. Given that the woman has neither a willing partner nor a job and is already responsible for a child from a previous relationship, her decision to continue with the pregnancy is viewed by most in her circle as reckless and certain to risk her already precarious mental health. Here, her right to choose to carry the child will have a profound impact on three (soon to be four) people and is likely to be very difficult for all.
Is it right to force someone to be a parent, even if in name only? Many people, me included, would say no if that person is a woman. Recent events have shown how fraught this issue is. And yet a man who does not wish to be, has never wanted to be and was told that his chances of ever being a parent were nil can find himself in a situation where his opposition carries no weight. While it’s evident that he will have financial obligations, what might his moral responsibility be?
What a god-awful, ethically-obtuse letter to be send for publication, never mind circulated by an ethicist! Let’s see:
The Pope Used A Word So Horrible That It’s Newsworthy, But Not So Newsworthy That Readers Can Be Told What The Word Is
I know I’ve written about this before, but it drives me crazy. It also shows how incompetent and infantile our hallowed institution of journalism has become.
Pope Francis, we were told in stories across the web, “has again used a homophobic term after apologizing last month for saying gay men should not be admitted to church seminaries because ‘there’s already too much f*****ry….he used of the word ‘frociaggine’, a vulgar Italian term roughly translating as ‘f*****ness’, on May 20 during a closed-door meeting with Italian bishops.
Wait…what does the word mean again? Nobody would print it. Using the word was so newsworthy everyone was writing about it, but our public censors refused to reveal it. What is “f*****ness? Why should I have to play “Wheel of Fortune” to learn the key elements of a news story? The New York Times refused to translate “frociaggine” into English, but the Italian word means nothing to me and most Americans. It sounds like some kind of ragu. All the Times would reveal was that it was an “anti-gay slur,” a “homophobic slur,” or just a “slur.” If the Times prints all the news that’s fit to print, then why won’t it print the key element of such fit news? Personally, I couldn’t care less what the Pope says, but I do object to having to visit multiple web sites to find out what should have been revealed in every published report.
Melinda Gates Demonstrates How Dangerous Rich People With Agendas and Hubris Can Be
Tons of discretionary cash allows “philanthropists,” who are frequently tunnel-visioned ideologues and aspiring authoritarians, to magnify their mistakes, misconceptions, biases and delusions into widespread catastrophes, all with the arrogance that luck and good fortune so often creates. Melinda Gates, Bill’s ex, has a couple billion dollars to play with thanks to marrying well and divorcing better, and her recent op-ed in the New York Times illustrates this principle.
There are so many ominous tells in Gates’s “The Enemies of Progress Play Offense. I Want to Help Even the Match” that I don’t have time to flag them all. The headline is one: doctrinaire progressives always equate their agenda items with “progress,” which is a word that implies beneficial change. That rhetorical trick has handicapped conservative thought and policy-making for centuries, though it is demonstrably false. Communism wasn’t “progress,” it was and has been a blight on civilization. The acceptance of promiscuous sex and having children out of wedlock wasn’t “progress;” the acceptance and legalization of recreational drugs isn’t “progress;” letting aliens stream over our borders largely without interference and consequences isn’t “progress;” using abortion as a primary means of birth control wasn’t “progress.” As obvious as these conclusions should be, the “change equals progress” fiction still works, which is why the Left still employs it regularly..
Her declaration to launch her new foundation vibrates with bias as well as bigotry. “We know” she writes, “that women’s political participation is associated with decreased corruption. That peace agreements are more durable when women are involved in writing them.” No, we don’t. That’s hoary anti-male propaganda (and “is associated with” screams “Weasel words!”)
Gates deplores “the Taliban takeover” that “has erased 20 years of progress for women and girls” without having the guts to risk the ire of her progressive audience by pointing out exactly who was responsible for abandoning women to the cruelty of the Taliban. She calls U.S. maternal mortality rates “unconscionable,” which implies wrongdoing. The Times link provided in the column suggests otherwise: the problem of high mortality rates in the U.S. is substantially the result of lifestyle choices available to mothers in a free society, including women in the U.S. delaying child birth past the healthiest time to have children.
Of course Gates doesn’t have the integrity to use plain language when it conveys unpleasant facts that undercut her advocacy: her cover-phrase for being able to kill a nascent human being is “reproductive rights,” neatly skipping the “right to grow and live” component of the issue. She also revels in pseudo-science, writing, “the number of teenage girls experiencing suicidal thoughts and persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness is at a decade high.” Sure, Melinda. Because of all the advances in mind-reading, I’m sure. How would one get that “number”?
And what kind of leader does Gates regard as a model for achieving her version of “progress”? “Recently, I offered 12 people whose work I admire their own $20 million grant-making fund to distribute as he or she sees fit,” Gates reveals. “That group….includes the former prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern.” Gates’ op-ed keeps referring to lost rights, yet one of her most admired people is the dictatorial former leader of New Zealand during the pandemic, who imposed draconian measures on her nation that crushed individual rights, while she sucked up to China, one of the world’s worst human rights offenders, in pursuit of economic benefits. China, of course, was responsible for the pandemic that Asdern used to expand her power to dictatorial levels.
Someone as arrogant and biased as Gates with two billion dollars to blow is like an ADD teen running amuck in a glass factory. Good luck, everyone!
“Justice-Impacted Individuals”? Seriously?
Even a bracing cup of Italian Roast in the morning can’t quite get your juices flowing and your mind ready for the day like a good old-fashioned head explosion! This is what triggered mine today:
Item: “Illinois is moving forward with a bill that would reclassify some “offenders” as “justice-impacted individuals“…House Bill 4409 changes the word ‘offender’ to ‘justice-impacted individuals.'”
The bill has passed both state houses, and awaits Democratic Gov. Pritzker’s signature. Don’t worry, though: he’s such a sober, rational, reasonable elected official that I’m sure he’ll veto this nonsense…
…right?
Well, At Least He Didn’t Get Shot: Observations On An Unethical Confrontation On All Sides
Reginald Burks’ vehicle was pulled over for speeding in Alabama last December as he was driving his two children to school. The officer told Burks that he had exceeded the speed limit, but when Burks asked how fast he was going, the officer said he wasn’t sure because his radar gun was broken. He told the motorist that he had used his cruise control to estimate the speed.
Burks replied that the officer “ was full of crap” because he didn’t believe the cop could clock a car’s speed by cruise control. The officer gave him the ticket anyway, and was standing stood in front of Burks’ car. Burks said he asked the officer “politely at least twice” to get out of the way; the officer told Burks to go around him.
So Burks said, “Get your ass out of the way, so I can take my kids to school. That’s why y’all underpaid because y’all act dumb!”
Oh, good one.
Burks has already paid more than $200 to resolve the speeding ticket. A judge, however, has ordered him to apologize to the police officer in writing, and Burks refuses, calling it compelled speech and a First Amendment violation. Judge Nicholas Bull of the Ozark Municipal Court in Alabama says he’ll put Burks in jail for up to 30 days if he continues to refuse to write the ordered mea culpa letter.
As EA”s periodic columnist Curmie might say, “Oh bloody hell!”
1. Let’s assume arguendo that Burks was speeding. With kids in the car, that is unacceptable—it’s unacceptable without kids in the car. Speeding justified the officer pulling the car over. If his radar gun was broken, depending on the speed, a ticket might be successfully challenged in court. Maybe the officer was just going to issue a warning…until the driver decided to argue with him.
2. It’s unethical to use the process as the punishment, which is what the cop would be doing if he knew cruise control pacing would not stand up in traffic court. (I have no idea if it would in Alabama: it wouldn’t in Alexandria.)
3. It’s bad citizenship to escalate a police stop by telling an officer he’s “full of crap.” Citizens should treat police with respect, even when they are mistaken, or even full of crap. Why is that such a difficult concept to grasp? Or teach children before they become adults (or juvenile delinquents)?
4. By standing in front of the car, the officer was engaging in conduct I have experienced myself: deliberately inconveniencing a driver to “teach him a lesson.” That conduct is also unethical and unprofessional. It is also daring a motorist to misbehave.
5. OK, the cop was being an asshole. It doesn’t matter: that doesn’t justify Burks’ shifting into full asshole mode himself. Police officers should be treated with respect and civility because of the institution and mission they represent.
6. What a dangerous lesson Burks was teaching his children! He should apologize to them.
7. Burks is correct, however: a judge has no power to demand that a citizen say or write anything. Burks is willing to spend money on lawyer fees and go to jail to fight for this principle. The sound of one hand clapping for that: the judge shouldn’t order him to apologize, but Burks should want to apologize voluntarily.
8. So should the police officer.
Did I neglect to mention that Burks is black and the officer is white? Silly me. Yet why should that change the analysis here?
My exit question: How many lives would be saved if black Americans resolved to obey police orders and instructions (let’s forget about obeying the law for now) without incivility, hostility and resistance regardless of the circumstances?
“DEI? What DEI?”
This is so typical that it’s mordantly amusing.
The diversity, equity, inclusion fad arising for no coherent reason out of the death of an overdosing small time hood under the knee of a bad cop in Minneapolis has rapidly iembarrassed itself and its adherents. The discriminatory and intellectually indefensible movement still managed to be profitable for a lot of scam-artist consultants while screwing up too many organizations to list in the process (but Disney quickly comes to mind). It inflicted flagrant incompetents like Kamala Harris, Karine Jean-Pierre, most of Biden’s Cabinet, deposed Harvard President Claudine Gay and so many more on our government and institutions. It produced absurd spectacles like the TV liquor commercial purporting to show a Boston bar’s patrons singing “Sweet Caroline,” the Boston Red Sox 7th inning anthem, with barely a white patron in sight. (When my family would go to Fenway Park, “Find a non-white fan” was a popular game, usually instigated by my mother.)
DEI is justly acquiring a toxic reputation, so the Left’s response is to change its name and start all over again. The plan is to use rhetorical deceit to disguise its intent and meaning while blurring the concept. Of course! DEI fouled itself faster than I expected, but sure, everyone should have seen this coming. Abortion is now “reproductive health.” Using drugs, surgery and indoctrination to turn biological boys into sort-of girls and biological girls into kind-of boys is now “gender-reaffirming care. The cover-word for illegal alaines became “undocumented workers,” then became “migrants,” and now it’s “visitors.” Now the acronym DEI is on the way out. Anti-DEI legislation is gaining traction in several states, and the racial, ethnic and gender preference industry is getting the message. No, it won’t stop advocating and facilitating discrimination against whites and males. The plan is to call the practice something else. After all, the trick has worked before.
Ethics Alarms 