“Jeopardy!,” the apparently eternal TV game show that has persevered even as its once difficult questions have become increasingly pitched to the less-than-astute, ended its 2023 with a surprise. Mayim Bialik, the actress who is also (for an actress) unusually credentialed educationally, announced this month that she has been let go as a host of “Jeopardy!” Since 2021, Bialik, who had previously portrayed “Big Bang Theory” head nerd Sheldon’s girlfriend on the series, had shared the role of host with legendary “Jeopardy!” champ Ken Jennings. Bialik was the more reliable and professional of the two, perhaps because of her long performing background. Jennings was at the center of far more gaffes and controversies, though Bialik had her share. This season, for example, she disallowed all three contestants’ answers of ”Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn” because she found their pronunciations of the Russian writer and dissident’s name insufficiently accurate.
Last week’s forum was the deadest ever, so I’m hoping that injecting some holiday cheer into this one will spark more dialogue. After all, if the wind, a lamb, a shepherd boy, a mighty king and people everywhere can have a productive conversation, Ethics Alarms readers should be able to bring some Goodness and Light too.
As some inspiration, I’m reposting below the Ethics Alarms entry about the origins of my favorite of the modern—“modern” as in “post World War II”—Christmas songs, first sung by my favorite Christmas minstrel.
Last night, Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment that guarantees the right to abortion. The tally wasn’t close: 2,186, 962 favored the measure, or 56.6%, while only 1,675, 72, or 43%, opposed putting a right to abortions in the state constitution.
The first point to understand is that this is not a rejection of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs over-ruling Roe v. Wade, but the exact result the Supreme Court ruled the Constitution intended. It is and always whould have been the states’ call: abortion is not a federal issue, and the national Constitution is silent on it, despite the political and ideological dishonesty of Roe. What Ohio did is exactly what the Supreme Court ruled it should do: let voters, not courts, decide the issue.
Logically, this decision should take abortion out of the 2024 election in Ohio, and if Republicans are smart <cough> that’s what they should say. “It’s in the constitution now, and we’ll follow the law. I still believe abortion is wrong in most cases, and I will work toward making that clear enough that Ohioans change the law, but right now, the decision has been made.”
I did not see this coming, but perhaps I should have. After all, they have been telling us that they hate whites, males, and Americans for years.
This has been an ugly month for Democrats and progressives, if anyone is paying attention and not soaked with denial. America’s campuses, after decades of indoctrination, are erupting with open anti-Semitism, and the Left’s captive media has spread terrorist propaganda. The Associated Press told its reporters not to call Hamas killers “terrorists” after they massacred civilians, raped women, and took a couple hundred hostages from Israel on October 7. The Voice of America issued instructions to avoid calling Hamas “terrorists.” On October 12, Yale’s campus newspaper censored what it called “unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men” from a pro-Israel article by a student. (Yale professor Nicholas Christakis asked, “Are the hostage-taking, murder of children in their beds, burning of people alive, and parading of nude captive women in the street also ‘unsubstantiated’?”)
After Cornell students posted messages to university websites sewing sentiments like “If i see a pig male jew i will stab you and slit your throat,” “eliminate jewish living from cornell campus,” and an especially ominous, “gonna shoot up 104 west,” the kosher dining hall on campus, the school boldly advised Jewish students to avoid that dining hall.
Behold the third in a series of Comments of the Day on the post about the woman who started screaming as her measure response to a speaker whose opinions she didn’t want to hear, and has ordered out of her “gayborhood.” This one is by Sarah D (the others are here, and here); the inspiration was the post, “Perplexed Ethics Thoughts On This Video…”:
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Assuming that this man is preaching peacefully on a street corner, even if he is stating things this woman disagrees with, and she came up and accosted him (perhaps not fair assumptions), her screaming like this seems to me to be res ipsa loquitor on the matter.
As for how we can engage people like that, well, I think what we need to do is treat them the way I treat my four year old when she engages in such behavior. However, I do not believe the law allows me to ask a person over the age of eighteen (I refuse to call this woman an adult) to stand in a corner, be grounded, scrub baseboards, or be spanked. If my eldest, still in single digits, acted like this, I’d never have to clean my house again.
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).
The viral video above supposedly shows a Nigerian pastor with the handle ‘Pastor Daniel’ entering the lions’ cage at a zoo to show that nothing can happen to a man of God, just like in the Bible story. “Pastor Daniel brought his church members to show them that nothing can happen to a man of God,” a Nigerian blogger wrote on Instagram. In Kenya, a local television station shared the video and it caught the attention of a member of the Kenyan parliament, Ronald Karauri. “I volunteer to take him to the Maasai Mara [national park] please, all expenses paid. We look for the lions and he can go walk with them,” he posted on Twitter/X.
Uh, no. The BBC investigated, and the video is from Somalia, while the episode shot took place in 2021 in the Somali capital, Mogadishu. The “pastor” was Mohamed Abdirahman Mohamed. He is a zookeeper and explained at the time that he raised the young lions that he is shown playing with.
Now, in 1991 a genuine emulator of the biblical Daniel, “Prophet Daniel Abodunrin,” actually did enter the lion enclosure at the University of Ibadan zoo in Nigeria. He was a real preacher, and invited his followers to watch him as he demonstrated how the power of faith can tame the savage beasts. After entering the lions’ den—it is believed a zookeeper let him in—Abodunrin chanted Bible verses while commanding communicating the big cats to be peaceful
German philosopher Immanuel Kant ( 1724 – 1804) was the all-time champ at rules-based ethics, concocting several useful formulations of what he called “the categorical imperative,”or the principle of absolute morality. All of them are, as absolutes, the starting points for hopelessly convoluted debates and “what ifs?,” but philosophy geeks love that stuff. For me, the main value of Kant’s absolutism as that they are useful for pinging ethics alarms.
Kant’s “Formula of Humanity” stated (in German, of course): “So act that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means,” or in the short version, “Never treat another human being as merely as means to an end.”
Abortion, for example, is an ethical controversy that Kant clarifies quickly: abortion rationalizers have long tried to duck the “Formula of Humanity” by denying that a fetus with human DNA created by humans that will grow to be a born and eventually a walking, talking, member of human society isn’t a human being at all, and thus killing it for the benefit of its mother isn’t using whatever it is as a means to an end.
You can get in the high weeds of Kant’s most famous rule here. For instance, Kant holds that it may be wrong for a person to treat himself or herself merely as a means: now there’s a metaphorical rabbit hole. But for the purposes of this post, let’s just look at two recent examples of people who probably can’t spell Kant, never mind recognize when they are defying him.
An inquirer to “The Ethicist,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, asked this week:
“A year ago, I was told I had a form of ovarian cancer and was given two to three years to live — five years, if I’m in the top quartile of patients. I nursed my husband through metastatic lung cancer for 15 months. It was horrific; I am hoping that God takes me early. My sister, whom I love very much, is part of a fundamentalist Christian church and is one of their top “prayer warriors.” As such, she calls me nearly every day and launches into long prayers asking God to send my cancer to the “foot of the cross.” She implores me to pray with her and says that if I just believe that God will cure me, he will.I grew up Catholic and have fallen away from the church. I believe God is bigger than what we can understand as human beings. I am a data-driven health care practitioner: I believe that everybody has to die of something, and this happens to be my fate. I’ve told her as tactfully as I can that her praying for me and expecting me to pray with her for my cure is upsetting to me. It makes me feel that if there is a God, he must really hate me; otherwise, he would have cured me. (She says that he wants to use me as a “messenger” to others and that it’s the Devil, not God, who gave this disease to me.)…
“What do I say to my sister without belittling her beliefs? I’ve told her that if she wants to pray for me, I would rather she do it on her own time and not ask me to participate. But she is persistent, thinking that she’s going to “save my soul” and my body at the same time. She disputes every reason that I give her and insists that what she is doing is helpful. But it’s not helpful; it sends me into a terrible depression.”
Ethics Alarms 