language

Observations on the Cincinnati Beatdown

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

While languishing in the hospital, this was the story that I felt most frustrated about not being able to post. Not that I could get a single, clear, spin-free account of what happened. In the aftermath of some Cincinnati event or festival or something, a black man and a white one got into a verbal altercation. The white guy seems to have uttered a racial slur, precipitating a brawl that was quickly joined by a mob of black youths who beat up the white guy and then turned their anger on a white woman who tried to intervene, knocking her unconscious and kicking her as she lay helpless on the ground. An estimated hundred bystanders, most or all of them black, stood by taking videos, laughing, and cheering the mob violence on. There was only one call to 911.

1. Almost all of the national coverage of this incident has been on Fox News. The New York Times, interestingly, hasn’t reported the story at all. The natural question has been raised: If a black man and woman had been attacked and beaten by a mob of young whites as 100 white bystanders cheered them on, there would be protests in the streets and calls for “justice.” Why the double standard?

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If the Only Value of Colleges Now Is Credentialing (Since They No Longer Educate) What Good Is a Credential With This Low A Bar To Obtain?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The answer is “Not much, if any.”

In a June 18 op-ed, Michael Torres, the policy director for the Classical Learning Test (CLT), revealed that in 2024 the College Board made sweeping changes to the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) to “dumb them down.”

Among the “improvements”: the Reading and Writing section of the test was shortened from between a required 500-750 words to 25-150 words, or approximately the length of a social media post. The College Board’s reasoning? The ability to read longer passages, it insists, is “not an essential prerequisite for college.”

The exam, the Board explains, now “operates more efficiently when choices about what test content to deliver are made in small rather than larger units.” This goal required, for example, eliminating passages from the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence to prevent the unfair penalizing of “students who might have struggled to connect with the subject matter.”

Yeah, you wouldn’t want to prevent a student who can’t comprehend our Founding documents from getting a college degree. Accordingly, the optional essay was also eliminated entirely, presumably because not being able to organize one’s thoughts and communicate them clearly is no longer a prerequisite for being regarded as intelligent, able, and wise.

Torres accused the College Board of “catering to students’ declining performance and social-media-induced attention-control issues.”

Ya think?

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Little League Ethics: A Bat Flip Controversy Goes To Court

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Little Leaguer Marco Rocco of Haddonfield, N.J., 12-years-old, hit a majestic home run in a Little League tournament game against a team from Harrison last week. Marco emulated what many big league players do in similar moments of triumph: he flipped his bat into the air to celebrate as he began to circle the bases. His homer put his team up 8-0 and a step closer to the Little League World Series.

But Marco was ejected from the game, and, by the Little League rules, the ejection included a one-game suspension for the next game too. Marco’s innocent bat flip meant he would would be barred from playing in a showdown against Elmora Township, with a the New Jersey state Little League title on the line. Marco’s father was told that in the umpire’s judgment, his son broke a rule that “At no time should ‘horseplay’ be permitted on the playing field.” No rule mentions bat-flipping.

So Mr. Rocco, who is a lawyer, filed a motion asking a New Jersey court for a temporary restraining order, and got it. The judge that Marco could play, in the next game, which took place yesterday, holding that “Little League is enjoined from enforcing its suspension.”

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Will the Unethical Appeals To Emotion Rationalizing Illegal Immigration Never Cease?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The metaphorically tear-flecked column in the Times screams, “We Will Regret Not Standing Up to This Venomous Cruelty.” [Gift link here!]

You know what the “venomous cruelty” is? Sending people who are in the U.S. illegally back to where they never should have left in the first place.

The author is Linda Greenhouse, a dyed-through-and through progressive who warps students at Yale Law School. She’s a legal journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize once, the Times tells us, not that this should mean anything after the Post and Times won awards for their false coverage of the Russian Collusion non-story and after “The 1619 Project’s” fake historian was rewarded for that political fantasy.

Greenhouse isn’t stupid, or at least shouldn’t be, with degrees from Harvard University, Yale University, Yale Law School, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Yet here she is, writing things like

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An Ethics Alarms “Bite Me!” Goes To Dr. Kirsten Viola Harrison!

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

The “Bite Me!”is an Ethics Alarms designation reserved for either an individual whose “response to being bullied, pressured and threatened into submissiveness is to say, “Do your worst. I believe in what I am doing, and I don’t grovel to mobs,” or as used several times here, to impugn the author of unethical conduct that demands the response, “Bite me!”

Dr. Kirsten Viola Harrison is a licensed psychologist and a “spiritual integration coach,” whatever the hell THAT means. She’s seeking her 15 minutes of faux fame by lecturing us about how people can unwittingly give off an “unapproachable energy,” thus sending out a “bad vibe.”

“Giving off a bad vibe’ means unintentionally projecting energy, through words, tone and body language, that others perceive as negative, inauthentic, or that make one appear unapproachable,” she explains. “It often triggers discomfort and mistrust, even when no harm is intended. Since our brains are wired to detect dissonance between what someone says and how they say it, the non-verbal signals which inform our emotional responses are exceedingly influential and powerful in shaping our interactions.”

Dr. Harrison has identified nine phrases she says can create these bad vibes if one isn’t careful. Gee, I wonder if “Bite me, you insufferable, over-credentialed fool!” is on the list? In her case, the “Bite Me!” is earned by abuse of authority and making gullible people stupid with New Age psychobabble. Here is her list, and my reactions.

1.”I’m Just Being Honest!”

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A Perfect Example of a “Trump Lie”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

On both MSNBC and CNN today, a big deal was made over the fact that President Trump said that “no other country” confers automatic citizenship on those born within its borders. They were both sneering so hard that I bet they needed a lip massage afterwards, “Of course, 33 nations have birthright citizenship,” said one, with the other making a similar statement.

No question about it, they are right and Trump was wrong. What he meant, however, was “No nations anywhere but the Americas have birthright citizenship, and we are the only major power in the world that does.” Or, “Almost no nations that know what the fuck they are doing have birthright citizenship.” Presidents shouldn’t be that careless, but Trump is, he refuses to change, he’s not going to, and nobody should pretend that they are shocked when he does.

Here’s the list, as represented in the chart above: Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Gambia, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Lesotho, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

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Yes, This Democratic Norm Should Not Be Breached…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Presidents of the United States should not say “fuck.” Ever. It doesn’t matter how “angry” they are.

Recalling this much linked post from a decade ago…an some of its offspring, like this, this, and this among others.

Ethicists, however, can say “fuck” when justified.

Fuck.

Popeye Time: I Am Finally Forced Into Responding To Woke Nonsense on Facebook…

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

A genuine, respected and dear friend re-posted this on Facebook:

Dr. Kristina Rizzotto created that thing; she is apparently a professional musician, so her doctorate isn’t in philosophy, public policy, law, or, clearly, linguistics. Shut up and play, Kristina.

Like Popeye, that was all I could stands ‘cuz I can’t stands no more, and I finally posted, after a good ten minutes of self-wrestling, this in response:

“Ugh. I don’t even want to wade into this, but come on. DEI is not the equivalent of three ethical virtues in a vacuum, and sure, diversity is nice; not not necessary or necessarily beneficial: the NBA doesn’t seek out white and Asian players to make it more “diverse,” because diversity doesn’t win basketball games. “Equity” means fairness, but the nation is built on equality of opportunity, not guaranteed equality of results, which is what “equity” means in the context of DEI. “Inclusion” is also nice, if it means the absence of deliberate arbitrary exclusion. If it means inclusion for the sake of inclusion, who said that’s virtuous or sensible? Who made that rule?

“Dr. Kristina is ducking the issue with intellectual dishonesty. Inclusion should be based on merit. Excluding anyone who would qualify for inclusion on merit, based on their sex, ethnicity, skin color, sexual orientation or physical characteristics is per se bias and illegal discrimination, and playing word games to deceive the inattentive and gullible into thinking otherwise is unconscionable. Similarly, black lives matter, but Black Lives Matter is a racist movement and a scam organization. Do better, Dr.”

I’m sure I’ll regret it.

It’s About Time: CNN Gets Called On Its “It Isn’t What It Is” Rhetorical Dishonesty and Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

and…

Good.

All ethical and aware Americans should treat their Axis-supporting friends, relatives and colleagues similarly. What both Miller and Hamill did was to label propaganda what it really was, and not allow it to falsely present itself as “journalism.”

I’ve Been Looking For an Excuse to Note the Passing of Harrison Ruffin Tyler, and I Finally Found One…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Harrison Tyler was the grandson of John Tyler, our tenth President of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” fame, who became President when William Henry Harrison died. When my late wife Grace and I were on our honeymoon, we met Harrison Tyler as we toured Sherwood Forest, the Tyler family home and plantation. He was still working as a chemical engineer at the time. I knew that Tyler had many offspring and was still spawning them in his 60s, but I found it astounding that his grandson was still among us. John Tyler was 63 when son Lyon Gardiner Tyler was born, and Lyon was 75 when Harrison was born.

The ethics connection popped up in Ann Althouse’s post about Harrison Tyler, who died on Memorial Day. She quoted from a biography of Tyler that called him a racist. One of Ann’s astute commenters criticized the label as injecting “a kind of modern commentary” into a biography of a 19th Century historical figure. Ann bristled at that, writing that the conduct so described was “out and proud racism” and asking, “You think that’s modern commentary”?

Another commenter slapped Ann down decisively. “The Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded utterance of the word racism was by a man named Richard Henry Pratt in 1902,” the commenter wrote. “Yes, I think labeling the mindset of an 1840’s person using a word that wasn’t in their vocabulary is an author’s intrusion.” Yet another commenter wrote, “Racism was the water people swam in back then.”

Bingo. At a time when blacks were almost universally believed to be an inferior sub-species of human, “racism” as we now define it didn’t exist. Calling a President in the 1840s a racist is like saying that physicians who practiced bleeding in the 18th century engaged in medical malpractice. It’s presentism.

I’m surprised Althouse fell into that trap.