U.S. Society

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 9/20/23: It’s Time…

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Is this the date that marked the beginning of the slippery slope to total gender confusion in sports and American society generally? On September 20, 1973, in asuper-hyped “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match stunt, leading women’s pro Billie Jean King, 29 and in her prime, defeated retired tennis pro Bobby Riggs, 55, proving absolutely nothing. Riggs, essentially a hustler at that stage of his athletic career and an anomalous trick-shot artist and soft-hitter even when he was a competitive player, picked a hot period in the women’s rights movement to exploit by boasting that women were inferior and claiming that even at his age he could the best female players. After the #1 female pro at the time, Aussie Margaret Court, managed to lose to Riggs in their exhibition match, Billie Jean came to rescue the honor of her sex and her sport. Witnessed by over more spectators at the Houston Astrodome and 50 million TV viewers worldwide, King beat Riggs 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. The reaction should have been “So what?”: any 29-year-old male pro would have mopped the Court with King, and she undoubtedly knew it. When a high school soccer team made up of boys easily defeated the women’s Olympic squad, which has been almost as obnoxious as Riggs, few called it a decisive rebuttal of women’s equality in sports. Decades after the Riggs-King sham, women’s pro tennis mega-champ Serena Williams admitted that she would have been an also-ran on the men’s tour. Yet now we have a woke-sanctioned political correctness myth that there’s nothing unfair about this…

…biological males thrashing female competitors in track, cycling, swimming, powerlifting and other sports where size, strength and being saturated with male hormones makes a difference. Thanks, Billie Jean! I’m sure Bobby Riggs is cackling in Hell.

Now let’s get some current ethics matters off the runway…

1. Remember this weird story [discussed here, #3] from 2021? Danish artist Jens Haaning, who was commissioned by the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark to recreate two of his previous works, 2010’s “An Average Danish Annual Income” and “An Average Austrian Annual Income,” which used actual cash to show the average incomes of the two countries. Haaning was given $84,000 by the museum to use in the new art works. Instead, he sent them two blank canvasses he titled “Take the Money and Run,” raising unanswerable questions about the nature of art, and modern art particularly. Is a blank canvas “art” in the right context? Is a joke “art”? Unamused, a Copenhagen court this week ordered Haaning to refund the money, minus his fee for creating the two blank canvas masterpieces.

2. And it begins….Harvard is already trying out ways to discriminate on the basis of race in its admissions without violating the recent SCOTUS decision declaring affirmative action illegal. Harvard has changed its supplemental essay questions from one optional open-ended essay and two optional short essays to a series of five required short essays, each with a 200-word limit. The student newspaper, The Crimson, criticized the limit as inherently discriminatory, because “shortening the essays has a disparate impact that falls heaviest on those from marginalized backgrounds. Learning to package yourself within a shorter amount of space is a product of advanced education; longer essays more equitably allow applicants to discuss their experiences in full, particularly if they are from non-traditional backgrounds and require more space to elaborate on nuanced qualifications.” Really? I would think that a longer essay is more challenging than a short one. But I’m sure a minimum word limit would have been found to be racist too.

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Dear Hysterical Climate Change Protesters: Demanding Impossible Things Is Unethical…And Stupid

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I just couldn’t decide what graphic to use to introduce this ridiculous story, this photo from The “March to End Fossil Fuels” in Manhattan over the weekend…

…or this video from the Ethics Alarms clip archive:

I must say, I’m leaning toward the video. The protesters are morons.

It is impossible to “end fossil fuels” until there are practical, affordable, effective substitutes for fossil fuels in the myriad ways civilization depends on it. These and similar protests, fueled by cynical politicians trying to expand their power (and totalitarian agendas) and insufficiently educated and rational members of the public indoctrinated by media propaganda and fear-mongering, are the equivalent of infantile tantrums. End war! End hunger! End poverty! End inequality! End gun violence! End prejudice! My mother refused to accept that she had to die at some point, but at least she didn’t take to the streets to demand an end to mortality.

Morons.

Morons!

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Once Again, Our Leaders Inflict “The King’s Pass” On Our Culture…Well, A Variation: “The Slob’s Pass”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has directed the chamber’s sergeant at arms to end the centuries-old rule requiring male U.S. Senators to wear a suit and tie on the Senate floor, with members of the upper house to wear modest business attire. This move was clearly made by Schumer to relieve pressure on Frankensteinian Senator John Fetterman (D-Pa), who has been violating the Senate Dress code and appearing in shorts, T-shirts, and hooded sweatshirts since he returned from a hospitalization for depression. He had been criticized and mocked as a result—as he should be.

The King’s Pass, Rationalization #11 on the List, is a corrosively backwards reaction by organizations to unethical conduct that violates organization norms and values, the value in this case being “respect”—respect for the institution, respect for the public, respect for the United States of America. If the organization’s (company’s, institution’s, industry’s, government’s, sports team’s…etc.) member who is breaching norms, rules, laws and values is deemed sufficiently powerful, important or popular, the rules and norms are not enforced when the King’s Pass strikes. When the most prominent member of a hierarchy is allowed to violate standards of conduct, the conduct of those of lower status will deteriorate in response: this is what “the fish rots from the head down” means, with the head in this case being a brain-damaged one.

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How Public Ignorance Grows: Two Case Studies

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

People who don’t adequately research what they write about as pundits, experts or authorities spread their own biases, ignorance and misconceptions like a virus-infected audience member coughing in a crowded theater. Two annoying examples of the phenomenon have surfaced in the last week, but the phenomenon is widespread and frequent.

Here was a collaborative effort: “The World’s Fair beats the hell out of Disney…” is the link currently displayed on the conservative news aggregator Citizens Free Press. That link takes you to an essay by Randy Tatano called “Bring back the World’s Fair.”

“Sadly, time machines don’t exist, or I’d transport you back a few decades to a wonderful tradition this country has abandoned: the World’s Fair,” Tatano writes. “This piece of Americana sadly made its last appearance in New Orleans in 1984. The event moved every few years from one major city to another, and there was always something new to experience….I was fortunate enough to grow up a 30-minute drive from the 1964-65 World’s Fair in New York. It ran from April to October both years, and we made plenty of visits. Combining entertaining rides with a time travel element, it blew away anything you could experience in Orlando…The fair was so big there was an actual cable car called the “Swiss Sky Ride” which took you airborne from one end of the fair to another…It’s been almost 40 years since the last World’s Fair. I find it sad that an entire generation never got to experience one and wonder if we’ll ever see such an amazing event again.”

Tatiano bashes Disney several times in his article, but I found myself wondering, “Has this guy been to Walt Disney World?” and “Did no one tell him that the 1964 World’s Fair was substantially a preview of Walt’s last great project?” About half the New York World’s Fair major attractions Tatiano nostalgically marvels at were designed by Disney engineers and transferred to the new theme park as soon as the New York World’s Fair closed. He doesn’t mention others Disney contributions, like the G.E. “Carousel of Progress” and the audio-animatronic Abe Lincoln, who starred at the Illinois state pavilion. The experience at Flushing Meadows in Queens in 1964-65 didn’t “blow away anything you could experience in Orlando,” it was exactly what Disney World visitors a couple of years later experienced in Orlando: I was at the ’64 World’s Fair, and the similarities were the first thing that struck me when I finally got to Disney’s mega-park ten years later.

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A “When You Keep Hearing ‘Racist Dog-Whistles, You’re The Dog” Classic: All Those “Racist” State Flags

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Jason Patterson, an African American artist who is obsessed with flags and who apparently can sniff out racism that normal people don’t notice, managed to convince the Washington Post to validate his hysterical assessment that the seven state flags pictured above (on a field of “The Stars and Bars” flags) are all secretly sending anti-black, racist, pro-slavery and pro-Confederate messages. He thinks they all should be removed, even though (I’m estimating here) not one American in 10,000 would detect any such messages at all. This is the weird state of mind that has led to statue-toppling across the country, movements to end the honoring of essential Founders like Washington, Jefferson and Madison, and, at its silliest, the elimination of “Turkey in the Straw” as the tinkly tune played by ice cream trucks. It’s fair to describe Patterson as obsessed and unhealthily so, making the Post’s effort to spread his paranoia unethical and irresponsible.

Here’s a summary of Patterson’s flag-o-phobia:

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Comment Of The Day: “That Bomb ‘Finger Gun’ Should Have Never Been Made At All: How Did We End Up With ‘Finger Gun 4’??”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m pretty sure EA has touched on the topic of anti-male student discrimination by teachers in grade school, but not recently and not often enough, because it is a serious cultural and societal problem. The Atlantic wrote about “The War Against Boys” in 2000 before it became a complete propaganda vehicle for radical wokism—I wonder if such an essay would get published today?

2000—let’s see, that was right around the time my wife and I started becoming aware of how normal little boys were being expected to act like good little girls in school, as our authority-resisting, intrepid and energetic son was being routinely abused by boy-hating teachers to such an extent that he was permanently alienated from formal education. The finger gun nonsense is symptomatic of the trend, and crella makes the connection in this, the Comment of the Day on the post, “That Bomb ‘Finger Gun’ Should Have Never Been Made At All: How Did We End Up With ‘Finger Gun 4’??”

Here it is….

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A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Addendum To The Democratic Porn-For-Pay Virginia House Candidate Story

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Several news media sources have now reported that the Associated Press was informed about Susanna Gibson and her husband selling sexual perversions-on-demand via videos on the public porn site Chaturbate. A candidate for a state legislature seeking compensation for letting an audience see her urinate, perhaps on said husband (just to pick one possible videoed activity) is obviously both newsworthy and of legitimate interest to voters (despite the absurd line of defense now taken by Gibson, her defenders and her party), but the AP’s editors deliberately refused to report on it. Instead, the AP alerted Gibson that the secret of the videos was out, so she could take them down, which she did. This was on September 5.

The outlet then waited until September 12, after the scandal had been reported by others, including the Washington Post, to report it as news. Nice.

Observations:

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More On Susanna Gibson, The Democratic Porn-For-Pay Virginia House Candidate

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This story, which exploded my head, got very little commentary on Ethics Alarms last week, which surprised me. Maybe I wasn’t sufficiently clear: sex workers, prostitutes and whack jobs have run for state legislatures from time immemorial, but they are usually considered fringe campaigns and publicity stunts (you know, like Donald Trump’s campaign in 2015) and considered barely worth discussing by reporters. But the Democratic Party in Virginia is actively defending Gibson, really and truly saying that Gibson’s conduct online is just fine because no law was broken. This stance magnifies the possibility that the entire party has 1) lost its collective mind and 2) now has the comprehension of ethics, civics, society and public service of the average muskrat.

Now Gibson, who, if you haven’t read the post, has engaged in graphic sex acts with her husband in videos for the porn site Chaturbate even as she in running to be a Virginia lawmaker, is being enthusiastically defended by her party, despite the fact that the fun couple was offering to take requests for their porn performances in exchange for money. “Y’all can watch me pee if you tip me and some tokens,” Gibson can be heard saying in one graphic videos. “Again, I’m raising money for a good cause.”

I thought the fact that Gibson and her party were actually claiming that Republicans and the media were engaging in illegal “revenge porn” and somehow doing something wrong by alerting the public that a candidate was misrepresenting her character, activities and kinks in her campaign material was sufficient to ping ethics alarms, but maybe not. So let’s drill down more deeply into the muck:

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Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun,This Forum Makes Two In A Week, Not Just One!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I want to thank everyone who pitched in to make the emergency Open Forum earlier this week as lively and interesting as it was. Now don’t rest on your laurels, though: as usual, there’s a lot out there in the ethics trees and underbrush to chew on…

What ever happened to the Doublemint Twins? I worry that they ended up like this…

That Bomb “Finger Gun” Should Have Never Been Made At All: How Did We End Up With “Finger Gun 4”??

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The first stunned Ethics Alarms story about a cabal of idiots with education degrees persecuting a little boy for making a crude imaginary gun out of his fingers was in 2013, just as the Post Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck got rolling and the anti-gun hysterics were going off the rails (to which they, obviously, have never quite returned). I wrote of the first incident, which was in Montgomery County,

The NBC story concentrates on  “whether the boy understands the implications of the gesture.” What implications of the gesture? That he is about to shoot bullets out of his finger? That he intends to kill someone with all the firepower an unarmed 6-year-old can muster? That he is making a mimed reference to a Connecticut school massacre he probably doesn’t know a thing about? Why should it matter what his “intent is? It’s a hand gesture! It isn’t vulgar or threatening except to silly phobics in the school system.

I concluded that it was child abuse by the school, and that “such irrational fearfulness, bad judgment, panic, disregard for the sensibilities of the young, lack of proportion and brain dysfunction forfeits all right to trust, and such fools must not be allowed to have power over young bodies and minds.”

But the finger gun lunatics struck again the next year, as Ohio crazies punished a 10-year-old boy for wielding an imaginary gun without a license. This time I figured out what was really going on—political and cultural woke indoctrination— writing in part,

The radical gun-hating progressives who disproportionately occupy administrative positions in the schools are willing to endure some ridicule as well as to victimize some children if it helps make guns and gun-related play less attractive, thus pointing to a Nirvana where the NRA is a shadow of its former self, and the only ones who own guns are criminals, the police and the government….Is public school political indoctrination more sinister than the proliferation incompetent teachers and administrators? Yes.

I also should have realized that this was the dawning of The Great Stupid.

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