Research and Scholarship

A New Zenith For The Great Stupid! Now We’re Told To Use A Roman Emperor’s “Preferred Pronouns”…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Hello! My name is Elagabalus, and my pronouns are She, Her, and “Nutcase”…

Boy, every time I think The Great Stupid has peaked, something like this arrives…

The North Hertfordshire Museum has decreed that the 3rd-century AD Roman emperor Elagabalus should be referred to as “she” to be sensitive to his pronoun preferences.

The museum in Hitchin, England owns a coin minted during the reign of Elagabalus and includes it in LGBT-themed displays. (Don’t ask me why a museum has LGBT-themed displays). Because the Roman historian Cassius Di wrote that Elagabalus was “termed wife, mistress and queen, ” told one lover, “Call me not Lord, for I am a Lady,” and allegedly inquired about how he could be outfitted with female charms, the museum is persuaded that he would consider himself “transgender” in 2023. (As well as really, really dead.) Prior to this Great Stupid brainstorm by the museum, historians have assumed that Dio was just smearing the predecessor of his patron, Emperor Severus Alexander, who gained power after the mad Elagabalus, was assassinated.

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Yes, “Free Speech Is In Trouble,” But Let’s Be Clear About Why And Who’s Responsible

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“538” founder and exile Nate Silver is now opining on substack and doing very well, thank-you, but he still is an infuriatingly biased progressive pretending to be objective. His topic in “Free Speech Is In Trouble” is the 2024 (?) college free speech rankings from a College Pulse/ FIRE survey of over 55,000 undergraduates across a wide range of colleges and universities. The results are pretty clear and ambiguous: most self-identified progressive students don’t believe in free speech and want those who don’t conform to woke ideology silenced or intimidated. This poses a serious threat to the culture and democracy.

See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? But Nate, being Nate, repeatedly buries the lede and distracts from that conclusion. Oh, he says it, sort of, many times, but it’s always stated in an equivocal manner bordering on deceitful.

At the top, Silver says, “And after seeing the latest polling on what college students think about free speech, I don’t concern over “cancel culture” or the erosion of free speech norms is just some moral panic. In fact, I think people are neglecting how quick and broad the shifts have been, especially on the left.”

Not “especially” on the Left, Nate: on the Left—you know, your team. He says, as a summary of the results,”College students aren’t very enthusiastic about free speech. In particular, that’s true for liberal or left-wing students, who are at best inconsistent in their support of free speech and have very little tolerance for controversial speech they disagree with. ” Why state a generality that isn’t true? It isn’t “college students,” it’s progressive, woke students who have little commitment to free speech. “But this looks like a major generational shift from when college campuses were hotbeds of advocacy for free speech, particularly on the left,” he says a bit later. It’s not a generational shift, it’s an ideological shift and a values shift, on the Left.

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The New York Times Legal Expert Doesn’t Understand The Constitution

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Well that’s a kick in the head! Actually, the expert in question is Linda Greenhouse, the Supreme Court reporter for The Times from 1978 to 2008 and once a regular participant in those Sunday Morning network “round tables” when a talk show wanted to pretend it had a balanced and non-partisan array. Greenhouse is a strongly left-biased Democrat legal analyst, often a dishonest one, and her latest column for the Times proves again that it is propaganda and woke advocacy, not legal enlightenment, that she serves.

Once again, I wish “A Friend,” formerly our resident Times apologist, was still allowed here so I could read his tortured defense of the paper for printing this sinister crap.

Do read “Will the Supreme Court Toss Out a Gun Law Meant to Protect Women?” I wouldn’t bother to quote it if the Times didn’t make you pay for the privilege of rolling your eyes, but I will, a bit. The headline says it all, though, and by “all” I mean anti-rights, anti-due process totalitarian cant. You know, Democratic Party/progressive/ “Do Something!” stuff.

If the Constitution contains an enumerated right in its Bill of Rights, the fact that a law directly violating that right may, in the eyes of some, have some beneficial effects is irrelevant unless there is a massive, existential justification for an exception. Otherwise, the law is unconstitutional. Current progressives and Democrats don’t believe that, or rather, object to the principle. The believe that if speech “hurts” someone by making them feel bad, expresses taboo opinions or makes a sanctified group member feel “unsafe,” laws blocking or punishing that speech shouldn’t be seen as a First Amendment violation, though, in fact, they are. If the right to a fair trial has to be ignored to make sure that a cop whose knee inadvertently triggered nationwide riots and DEI craziness ends up in prison for life, well, reasons the Left, you gotta break some eggs to make a metaphorical omelette, the eggs being the Bill of Rights.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, following SCOTUS’s long-delayed and essential 2022 ruling in Bruen that the Second Amendment means what it says and is about the human right to bear arms and not militias, declared a federal law unconstitutional that prohibited a person subject to a court-issued restraining order for domestic violence from owning a gun. It was and is obviously the right decision except to anti-gun zealots who believe in pre-crime laws, red flag laws, and anything along the slippery slope to outright Second Amendment repeal. The Supreme Court is obviously going to uphold the Fifth Circuit, because its ruling was correct. The only question is whether any of the three far-left ladies on the Court will have the integrity to follow the law. I have some hope for Justice Kagan.

But to read Greenhouse, one would think, and by “one” I mean a typical American who doesn’t read SCOTUS opinions, couldn’t name five of the first ten Amendments and doesn’t comprehend what the Supreme Court’s job is, that the fact that an invalid law has good intentions should be sufficient reason to let it stand. (I doubt the law at issue even had good intentions.)

What the law allows in domestic abuse restraining orders is for judges to issue them solely on the testimony of the complainant, and that act will ban an individual from exercising his right to bear arms. Evidentiary standards are minimal; judges are inclined to grant requests for restraining orders because if there is violence against a complainant after the judge finds no cause—moral luck lurks! —the judge is going to be crucified. The other party doesn’t have a right to be present at the hearing, so the result of the law struck down would be that individuals could lose a core enumerated right without due process of law, based solely on the word of an adverse party.

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So: When Does The Supreme Court Get Its Apology From The Dobbs Hysterics?

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Statistics based on research by the Guttmacher Institute seem to indicate that legal abortions increased slightly in the United States in the first six months of 2023 compared with 2020. The assumption is that states with more permissive abortion laws absorbed patients traveling from states with more restrictive laws, and access to abortion pills increased.

Thus the feminist and progressive narrative that Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision last year created a “Handmaiden’s Tale” hellscape where women were compelled to give birth to children they did not want was, as those inclined to be rational realized, inflammatory propaganda designed to support unhinged attacks on the six Justices in the Dobbs majority. The lie also proved to be a useful Democratic Party election weapon.

As Justice Alito stated clearly in his opinion, the ruling over-turning Roe v. Wade was not a pro- or anti-abortion ruling, but a necessary decision to uphold core Constitutional principles while striking down a badly reasoned precedent. The Constitution does not include a right to abortion, and the Founders would have been horrified at the very thought. Nor is abortion a proper matter for a national law, other than a Constitutional amendment.

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I’m Shocked…SHOCKED!… To Learn That DEI Policies Harm Black And Hispanic Students!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Back when the Great Stupid was really picking up steam in 2020, the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD), the second largest school district in California with over 106,000 students, announced that it would be overhauling how students will be evaluated as part of a larger “a larger effort to combat racism.” The school board voted unanimously to eliminate yearly grade averages. Meeting deadlines for assignments and classroom behavior would not affect academic grades. The district decided to de-emphasize discipline and penalties for cheating.

This crack-brain approach to education, essentially rejecting everything that had been learned over centuries about how students learn, was justified as way to eliminate the accumulated deficits of “systemic racism.” Soon “Diversity Equity Inclusion” budgets exploded and almost every school system jumped on board the latest fad. This was reparations, not education; no respectable research supported the theory that holding minority kids to lesser standards would help them succeed, but never mind: Fact Don’t Matter to ideologues and race-hustlers.

Now come Jay P. Greene and Madison Marino of the Heritage Foundation’s Center on Education Policy with a study suggesting that black and Hispanic students had “significantly greater learning loss during the pandemic in the school guided by diversity officers than those schooled in districts without one.” Minority students lost more ground than their white classmates, especially in math, the researchers found. “Racial achievement gaps went from bad to worse in these districts.” Of course they did: having an official directing policy who insists that black and Hispanic students not be held to the same standards of behavior or academic achievement as other students—must combat that structural racism!—was guaranteed to undermine minority student success.

The news gets worse: nearly half of the school districts with at least 15,000 students employ a chief diversity or equity officer, and the number is 89% for districts with more than 100,000 students, the study found.

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Saturday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, Oct. 7, 2023: It’s Not Like The Old Saturday Morning Cartoons, But It Will Have To Do…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Some upsetting ethics episodes, like a Democratic Congressman behaving like a 7th grade jerk, lying about it, and being supported by his party and the news media, and this story, sufficiently monopolized my time and thoughts this week that quite a few issues and stories that need exposing risk being left behind…so here we are.

And I find myself wishing there was some Saturday morning adult TV equivalent to the old array of Saturday morning entertainment shows for kids that used to begin my weekends when I was just a sprout. Those shows above were actually a later generation’s (inferior) options. For me, my Saturday mornings were affirmatively weird, including non-cartoon fare like Andy Devine’s show (“Twang your magic twanger, Froggie!”), Ventriloquist Paul Winchell with his dummies Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smith (why Edgar Bergen didn’t sue, I’ll never know) , lisping vaudevillian Pinkie Lee (“Hello, it’s me! My name is Pinky Lee! With a checkered hat and a checkered coat, a funny tickle in my throat, and a silly laugh like a billy goat…”) and of course, “The Howdy Doody Show.” Cheap Hanna-Barbara cartoons were just starting to take over: “The Adventures of Ruff and Reddy” was the camel’s nose in the tent.

Well, maybe I’ll see if I can get early morning Saturday ethics entertainment up on Ethics Alarms for adults and ethics-minded teens needing stimulation. I guarantee it will be better than “The Banana Splits.”

1. Trick or Treat! Where to begin? Well, Halloween has become a frolic for The Great Stupid in recent years, and 2023’s scary days are starting off in a similar vein. In my increasingly silly state of Massachusetts (which is considering killing Columbus Day and replacing it with “Indigenous Peoples Day”) the Northboro Public Schools sent a letter to parents this week noting that students aren’t allowed to wear costumes to school for Halloween and the traditional parade through the hallways was canceled. Why? Oh, come on, it’s easy. DEI! The banning of the Halloween fun will supposedly advance the district’s “core values of equity and inclusion.” How, nobody would say. Instead of costumes and a parade, the school district told parents that students would participate in a “Fall-themed spirit day.” Catchy! I feel more inclusive already. Still, nobody really explained why not letting kids dress up in costumes one day a year advances “diversity, equity and inclusion.” One knee-jerk woke parent quizzed about it ventured, “There is the money aspect: Not everyone can afford a Halloween costume.” BUZZZZZZZ! Wrong, Equity Face. Great Halloween costumes require creativity, not money. Schools are supposed to cultivate creativity. Dumb, woke, incompetent people are running public schools, and the result is going to be more dumb, woke, incompetent citizens.

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The Best Summary Of The Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck And Its Many Villains Yet, From City Journal

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

And, as a bonus, a satisfying validation of Ethics Alarms’ decision to always refer to the “Wuhan virus” rather than “Covid.”

James Meigs, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the former editor of Popular Mechanics has written a thorough, fair and objective account of the entire pandemic fiasco, which the Axis of Unethical Conduct still is trying to deny. Here’s his final paragraph:

When scientists craft their scientific conclusions to political ends, they are no longer practicing science. They have entered the political fray. They shouldn’t be surprised when the public begins suspecting political motives behind their other claims, as well. Public health officials let political concerns and institutional biases influence their statements and policies throughout the pandemic. And the media eagerly served as handmaiden to these efforts. Americans started the Covid-19 pandemic ready to make enormous sacrifices to protect their own health and that of others. But our political leaders, health officials, and media squandered that trust through years of capricious policies and calculated dishonesty. It could take a generation or more to win it back.

The essay is long, but essential reading for any informed American. I recommend sending it to all of your smug progressive friends, especially any of the mug-using persuasion, and even more-so to the idiots still wearing masks while alone in their cars.

Literally none of the information included in the article is new to me, nor should it be news to anyone who has read Ethics Alarms over the past three years. (The tag “Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck” will take you to almost all of the posts on the subject.) However, relatively few members of the public read City Journal, (which is routinely superb), much less Ethics Alarms. As I read this piece I was infuriated all over again, not just at being reminded of how the nation came to cripple itself economically, financially, educationally and socially ( never mind how it came to wreck my personal business and financial security), but because this wasn’t written by the “investigative journalists” of the New York Times or Washington Post and featured as a front page story.

Here is another memorable selection from the article, also a depressing one:

The Covid-era collapse in ethical standards in science, government, and journalism might have brought a period of re-examination and reflection. For example, Watergate, 9/11, and the 2008 financial crisis all led to major investigations and reforms. So far, however, the pandemic’s polarized battle lines remain intact. Rather than re-examine their mistakes, in fact, some elite institutions seem eager to institutionalize the excesses of the period. In August, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study titled “Communication of COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media by Physicians in the US.” The JAMA study examined various Covid claims made by several dozen doctors with large social media followings and bemoaned “the absence of federal laws regulating medical misinformation on social media platforms.” It suggested that doctors who propagate misinformation should be subject to “legal and professional recourse.”

What were the types of misinformation that might require such a heavy-handed response? The study quoted some extreme anti-vaccination theories and other far-out claims. But many of the topics it flagged as “misinformation” fell well within the range of normal scientific or political discourse. The authors wrote, for example: “Many physicians focused on negative consequences related to children and mask mandates in schools, claiming that masks interfered with social development.” The JAMA authors also objected to the assertion that health officials “censored information that challenged government messaging.” Of course, as the Facebook and Twitter documents showed—and the U.S. 5th Circuit recently concluded—that’s exactly what the government did. Finally, the JAMA study flagged as misinformation the claim that Covid-19 originated from a Chinese laboratory, which, it limply objects, “contradicted scientific evidence at the time.” Imagine if the JAMA authors had their way and medical experts were professionally and legally enjoined from contradicting the scientific consensus on major health questions. Without the ability to challenge popular viewpoints, scientists can’t advance our state of knowledge. In such a world, the germ theory of disease might still be dismissed as misinformation; doctors might still be relying on leeches and neglecting to wash their hands.

Read it all. Circulate widely.

The ‘Great Stupid’ Woke Mug That’s Even Worse Than The ‘Great Stupid’ Woke Lawn Signs

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

This embarrassing thing has over 5,000 “likes” on Facebook, including many from friends of mine who I will henceforth have a hard time looking in the eye.

The mug, which is available free of charge “for a limited time only,” annoys me more than the “In this house we believe” signs with their fatuous virtue-signaling, generalizations (“Love is Love”) and rationalizations (“No Human Being Is Illegal”). because the game it plays is more sinister and confusing to the intellectually handicapped. It is a political propaganda device that deliberately uses false equivalencies in order to ridicule and denigrate legitimate dissent from current progressive cant.

The smug mug’s three statements of the obvious (“The Earth is not flat,” “Chemtrails aren’t a thing” and “We’ve been to the moon”) contradict fringe wacko conspiracy theories that don’t require debunking, since only a tiny and insignificant percentage of the public believes in them or ever has, and almost all of that group breathe through their mouths. However, mixed in among those topics as if they are in the same category are reductive generalizations about two public policy issues involving serious and valid controversies. That’s dirty pool, and worse, the statements aspire to end debates that they don’t even fairly reference.

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Surveying The Left’s Three Desperate Reactions To The Biden Presidency Implosion

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

1. President Biden? Who’s that?

In order to go on covering other issues and stories in which aspects of the Biden mess would normally require a reference, the mainstream media instead just pretends there’s nothing there. Thus it can continue to run attacks on Donald Trump for “defying democratic norms,” being a threat to “lock up” his opposition if elected, and “lying” even when the current president, their client, continues to engage in all three.

Today the New York Times sent me a lament from columnist Amanda Taub headlined, “The Litany of #MeToo News Continues. Is Anything Really Changing? It can appear as though society is no closer to a future in which women can go about their ordinary lives without being harassed, assaulted and coerced into silence.” She begins with Russell Brand, but goes on to discuss how “each time a powerful man is held accountable for sexual misconduct, it seems like progress. And yet, when the allegations reveal a similar pattern of institutional actions that allowed the abuse to go on for years, and they provoke the same reactions of denial and victim-blaming, it can appear as though society is no closer to a future in which women can go about their ordinary lives without being harassed, assaulted and coerced into silence.”

Huh! I wonder why that’s happening? Could it be that the “fish rots from the head down”? Could it be that #MeToo has beclowned itself because by making it obvious that only conservatives and Republicans were in any peril of #MeToo consequences, and that powerful male Democrats could continue their harassing ways with either impunity or minor consequences? How can a serious analysts write about patterns “of institutional actions that allowed the abuse to go on for years,” and not mention any of this…

???? The President of the United States has been a serial and unapologetic groper, sniffer and cop-a-feel specialist for decades. Leaders set the standard for their organizations; Presidents set the standards for U.S. society. Biden was also accused of sexual assault by a former Senate staffer. If you want an explanation for why #MeToo has deteriorated, look no further than this White House.

But Biden’s enablers and agents want us to look away from there.

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Comment Of The Day (2): “Observations On The Revived Claim That Google ‘Steered 6 Million Votes’ to Biden in 2020”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

For the second Comment of the Day on the controversial assertion that Google helped rig the 2020 election (a “completely baseless” claim, you understand), we turn to Curmie. “What?” you well may say. “Curmie has his own column in Ethics Alarms! What is this, the Curmie Show?” In the absence of what I consider a sufficient number rational, civil and well-articulated opinions on EA from the left side of the political and ideological spectrum, Curmie’s takes, often but not always dissenting from the main post, are not just welcome and appreciated but also treasured. I’m hoping that maybe the angry progressives, proto-trolls and one-note social justice warriors who visit here will read and learn from Curmie’s works. Then they wouldn’t have to get banned and then keep sneaking in quickly-trashed comments arguing that the mainstream media isn’t really biased, just to pick a wild hypothetical out of the air.

Besides, Curmie almost never has a typo…

You can read even more Curmie on his blog, here, where he cross-posts his EA contributions as well as thoughts on non-ethics topics. This is his Comment on the Day on “Observations On The Revived Claim That Google “Steered 6 Million Votes” to Biden in 2020”:

***

I find this interesting for a variety of reasons.

First, there’s nothing new here. Epstein’s analysis came in the immediate aftermath of the ‘20 election. Reportage from then is all over (wait for it) Google. So why is it a stand-alone story now? I could understand it as background for a subsequent critique, but that doesn’t seem to be happening, at least not yet.

It’s also purely speculative. We’re not talking about changing people’s votes after the fact, or adding or subtracting votes directly. This is about changing voters’ perception of who is the better candidate prior to their voting, and there is no conceivable way of determining the extent to which Google’s alleged manipulation affected voters’ choices. We can speculate, but it starts getting really mushy when we start suggesting numbers. Of course, virtually every part of society is engulfed in a quantification fetish, so I suppose that part is understandable.

Even assuming the allegations have a foundation, we’re looking at a phenomenon that’s been played out innumerable times by media from every political perspective. The “everybody does it” excuse may be unethical, but the fact remains that yes, everybody does it, which makes this a little less newsworthy. I’ve often referenced the year I spent in England working on my MA. You knew that what you read in the Guardian was filtered through a liberal lens, and what you read in the Telegraph was through a conservative one. But you also knew that both papers maintained integrity. We can’t say the same for any outlet, left or right, in the US in the 2020s.

It’s also true that anecdotal evidence is often misleading. I have no doubt that Jack’s blog posts are “buried” by Google, but there are multiple possible reasons for that, including good old capitalistic amorality: somebody else paid them to move their site higher on the list.

I also tried a little experiment this morning. With Jack’s permission, I have also posted things I wrote for the “Curmie’s Conjectures” series here on my own blog, as well. So I copied the title of one of those essays and plugged it into Google. The post on Ethics Alarms came up #1. The one on Curmudgeon Central, with precisely the same title, didn’t appear at all. That’s hardly evidence that conservative perspectives are being silenced at the expense of liberal ones!

I wouldn’t take on faith an assertion by PJ Media that NBA centers tend to be tall, but Epstein is a far more complicated and therefore interesting individual. His training is in psychology rather than quantitative analysis or marketing. This doesn’t discredit his critique of Google, but if the right is going to grant him omniscience, I await their agreement with him in the area of his actual specialization: for example, his claims that bisexuality is the natural norm for humans and most people claim to be straight due to social pressure rather than their lived experience.

It’s perfectly possible to be really good at one thing and really awful at another. But if Epstein is brilliant, then he’s brilliant; if he’s a wackadoodle, then he’s a wackadoodle. ‘Tis a tangled web out there, whether or not anyone is practicing to deceive. (Apologies to Sir Walter Scott.)