U.S. Society

Comment Of The Day (2) : “Perplexed Ethics Thoughts On This Video…”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Now comes the second of three Comments of the Day on the screaming inhabitant of a “gayborhood” and what her outburst means. (We now know this is not a 2023 episode, but that is irrelevant to the issues at hand.) True to his quixotic mission, Extradimensional Cephalopod weighed in with a formula to deal with such people civilly and effectively. I can picture him (it?) trying these methods out on adversaries like Robespierre, Joe McCarthy, Ted Kaczynski and Abie Hoffman: I’d pay to see it. Nonetheless, EC’s methods are worth considering, as EC’s prescriptions always are. This comment launched a substantial thread with much more commentary from “The Squid”: I highly recommend checking them out at the link.

Here is Extradimensional Cephalopod’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Perplexed Ethics Thoughts On This Video…”

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As it happens, I do have some tools that can help with a situation like this. For starters, both of these people are foolish, but probably not as cripplingly so as it may seem from this incident.

Relevant concepts:

Habits:
Street preacher believes gender/sexual/romantic nonconforming people are hurting themselves.
Person in the neighborhood is stressed when someone shows up in their neighborhood and tells people they need to conform, and thinks others will feel the same way.

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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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Comment Of The Day (1): “Perplexed Ethics Thoughts On This Video…”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Michael R authored the first of three Comments of the Day on this disturbing video, and I could easily add a few more: it was a terrific thread, and one that few other sites around the web could produce (if I do say so myself).

I must admit, as I have been featuring posts about my biases of late, that I have a massive bias against anyone who behaves like the woman above no matter what the provocation. It was suggested in the comments to the original post that this was staged. I considered that, and maybe it was, but in the end the ethics issues remain the same. Her conduct is still an accurate presentation of the reaction of the entire Woke World mob to one imagined offense after another, from Donald Trump’s election and Hillary’s defeat, to the replacement of swing vote Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court with Bret Kavanaugh, to the long-deserved reversal of Roe v. Wade and the rejection of affirmative action as the unconstitutional discrimination it always was. It is all hate, intolerance and emotional fury now, even from the office that is supposed to represent and serve us all….

That was as close to a Presidential primal scream as we are ever likely to hear. (Nope, I’m not letting that go. I will never let that go, and I will never forgive it.)

Here is Michael R’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Perplexed Ethics Thoughts On This Video…”

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This seems like the perfectly reasonable result of college campus culture from the last 30 years now demanding that society become a college campus. How many videos can you find of conservative speakers being shouted down by the dominant culture (the ‘tolerant people’) on college campuses? In how many cases was this tolerated by the administration, the police, the government?

After being trained by ‘higher education’ for decades that the way to deal with opinions that differ from the official orthodoxy is to shout them down, use bullhorns, and scream at them, why would you expect this not to happen?

This isn’t the only video of a woman doing this; it seems fairly common.

Here is how I see liberals dealing with heretical ideas in today’s society:

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Ethics Culture Notes

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Warning: the following range from depressing to disturbing…

1. I just listened to a slice of an old comedy routine from the early 60’s. The comic was Jack Carter (yechh!) and he was appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show, which was considered must-watch Sunday evening family fare for decades. Carter began by riffing on how much traveling stone-faced Ed did, and said, “Ed even did a special show in Africa, but you’ll never see it. They ate the camera man!” And this was in the middle of the civil rights movement, live, coast-to-coast. I think it’s fair to say that there has been quite a bit of progress in racial attitudes in the past 60 years, no matter what the race-hucksters would have America believe.

2. Wait…how did the Left manage to get so completely turned around on women’s rights? That was fast. After the Wisconsin Assembly passed transgender girls high school sports ban—almost certainly headed for a veto by the state’s woke governor—Democratic Assemblyman Dave Considine argued that parents concerned that their daughters could lose scholarships or a place on a sports team in college because of competition from biological males are being “selfish.” His message for the girls: If the transitioning males who are bigger, taller and stronger than you are winning, you just “need to work harder.” Other Democratic colleagues of this idiot compared banning biological males from girls’ sports to racial segregation.

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Ethics Hero Edward Blum Exposes BigLaw Ethics Dunces [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

[I had a major mix-up with this post, with a discarded draft going live by accident. My fault: I was rushing. It’s right now, I think…]

The American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER) is the group founded and run by conservative activist Edward Blum, now reviled by fans of “good discrimination”—you know, the kind that targets whites and Assians—because its efforts helped spark the Supreme Court to (finally) overturn affirmative action policies at colleges and universities. In August the group filed lawsuits against Perkins Coie and Morrison & Foerster, both major law firms, alleging that the law firms’ minority fellowships, which disqualify candidates who don’t have the right skin color, infringe on the Civil Rights Act of 1866 provision that forbids racial discrimination in contracts

“Excluding students from these esteemed fellowships because they are the wrong race is unfair, polarizing and illegal,” Blum told the news media. “Law firms that have racially exclusive programs should immediately make them available to all applicants, regardless of their race.”

Seattle-based Perkins Coie, with more than 1,200 attorneys in the United States and Asia, funded fellowships for first- and second-year law students who must be “of color,” LGBTQ+ in sexual orientation, or disabled. The first-year student program dated from 1991, and was supposed to create “legal communities that accurately reflect the rich diversity of our communities,” according to the firm’s website. Perkins added the second-year student fellowship program in 2020. The complaint argued, “Between two heterosexual, non-disabled applicants — one Black and one white — the latter cannot apply based solely on his race,” which violates Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.

Sure sounds like discrimination to me!

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ProPublica (aka. Progressives) Believe That Foster Parents Should Not Be Able To Legally Intervene To Stop Birth Parents From Regaining Custody Of Children Removed From Their Care. I Don’t.

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I’ll go farther than that. I don’t believe that parents who have had children removed from their care for neglect and being unfit parents should ever be allowed to regain custody, if the original removal was justified.

To consider and discuss the ethical issue, read this article, ProPublica’s “When Foster Parents Don’t Want to Give Back the Baby: In many states, adoption lawyers are pushing a new legal strategy that forces biological parents to compete for custody of their children.” It’s too long and detailed for me to summarize fairly, and make no mistake, it’s an excellent overview of the ethical dilemmas and conflicts involved even if the author’s bias is clear.

The author focuses on a particular conflict between birth parents and foster parents in Colorado while also revealing the different approaches taken by various states. I learned a lot: for example, having adopted our son Grant as an infant in Russia in 1995, I exhaled a long “whew!” after reading this:

“…It has become harder and harder to adopt a child, especially an infant, in the United States. Adoptions from abroad plummeted from 23,000 in 2004 to 1,500 last year, largely owing to stricter policies in Asia and elsewhere, and to a 2008 Hague Convention treaty designed to encourage adoptions within the country of origin and to reduce child trafficking. Domestically, as the stigma of single motherhood continues to wane, fewer young moms are voluntarily giving up their babies, and private adoption has, as a result, turned into an expensive waiting game. Fostering to adopt is now Plan C, but it, too, can be a long process, because the law requires that nearly all birth parents be given a chance before their rights are terminated. Intervening has emerged as a way for aspiring adopters to move things along and have more of a say in whether the birth family should be reunified.”

The article attempts to focus on what the author apparently believes is an especially sympathetic couple (above) trying to regain custody of a child placed in a foster home:

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Comment Of The Day: “Abortion Confusion Ethics: What Should We Call This?”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This story, which I was hoping would spark more discussion here than it has so far, would be an excellent starting point for a question in a presidential candidates debate, or indeed any debate regarding the proper status of abortion in the law and our societal ethics. Right now, the negligent killing of two fertilized eggs that a married couple regarded, with considerable justification, as “their babies” is treated with less seriousness than if someone had murdered the family’s puppy. What is a fertilized egg, a zygote, a fetus, an embryo, and a newborn baby? It can’t possibly be that their true nature as human beings (or not) with the right to be protected (or not) under the law is magically altered according to what the mother chooses to believe, or what a legislature decrees…can it?

Here is James Hodgson’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Abortion Confusion Ethics: What Should We Call This?”:

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Negligent homicide by the staff, and strict financial liability for the corporation, are evident here, in my view. I know this sounds harsh to some, but so is the killing of an unborn child.

Over the past decade, my wife and I caught several errors in prescription fulfillment in our own meager regimes of pharmaceuticals. This happened at three of our previous insurance-preferred pharmacies. It is also reported anecdotally by a number of people I know.

Fortunately for us, we detected the errors before taking any wrongly prescribed drugs, and we learned to double-check everything, every time. (These errors also gave us more motivation to improve our nutrition and fitness in order to escape prescription drugs altogether.)

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Quinn Mitchell, The Teenage Human Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Let’s not bury the ethics lede: If it is irresponsible to treat a teenage climate change fanatic as a serious authority on international policy, and it is, it is similarly irresponsible to bestow the status of a journalist on a 15-year-old.

Yet the New Hampshire Republican Party, reminding us that the GOP isn’t called “the Stupid Party” for nothing, invited 15-year-old Quinn Mitchell to a June 27 town hall in Hollis, N.H. for fading presidential aspirant Ron DeSantis, and gave the boy press credentials. Morons, and Ethics Foul #1. The justification was (officially) that the kid has a political commentary blog, and a podcast, and says he’s attended more than 80 presidential campaign events since he was 10. That’s nice (but weird), and Quinn is evidently precocious and might be a real journalist some day (which the way things are going, is like saying he might be a real Stegosaurus some day), but that does not make him a journalist now. Some flack had the brilliant idea that inviting and credentialing a young conservative would be cute and show Generation Whatever that Republicans are cool. That flack needs to be fired.

Of course Quinn doesn’t think he’s a fake journalist and not qualified to inject himself into the proceedings, so when DeSantis foolishly called on him (“Aw, isn’t that cute, let’s see what the little feller wants to know…”), Mitchell asked a “gotcha!” question: Did the Florida governor believe that former President Trump had violated the law on Jan. 6, 2021? Naturally, the unprepared DeSantis huminahumina-ed his way through dodging it, and the video “went viral.”

That question was Ethics Foul #2, but you can’t blame Mitchell. Asking questions with an underlying agenda is a standard unethical journalism habit now, and the teen has no reason to think this isn’t what journalists are supposed to do. That’s what they have been doing his entire life.

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Baseball Ethics: Is It Time To Stop Booing The Houston Astros? Hell No…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Tonight, the Texas Rangers and the Houston Astros, from the same American League Division and with the same regular season record (a modest 90-72), will begin playing the American League Championship Series to decide which team will represent the league in the World Series. If you’re a baseball fan or an ethics fan, you will root for the Rangers. The Astros are ethics villains, and among the worst ethics corrupting teams in all of professional sports history. They do not deserve to be forgiven, for the multiple blights they inflicted on the game are still causing tangible damage, and despite the exposure of the team’s rotten culture in 2019 ( exhaustively discussed on Ethics Alarms) they were never sufficiently punished, and the main perps in the team’s scheme have never adequately acknowledged that they did anything wrong.

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Leon Panetta, Poster Boy For “My Mind’s Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me With Facts”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I had a couple of rapid thoughts when I saw this revolting story. The first was remembering how that line in the title above was one of my father’s favorite mordantly humorous slogans, along with “He was right, dead right, as he sped along, but he’s just as dead as if he were wrong!” and the tale about feeling sad and hopeless, hearing a little voice saying, “Cheer up, things could be worse!” and then, sure enough, things got worse. The second was realizing that I occasionally, very rarely but still occasionally, miss important information by refusing to watch Fox News. A third was deciding that I had mistakenly judged Leon Panetta to be an honorable and trustworthy public servant.

In an interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, Panetta, who was Bill Clinton’s Swiss Army knife aide and Cabinet member notably as head of the CIA, was asked by Baier if he had any regrets about signing the infamous open letter from 51 former intelligence officials using their influence and presumed expertise to advance the cover-up scheme declaring the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation.

In a head-exploding display of chutzpah, Panetta announced that he had no regrets at all, and that he has seen no evidence that would make him change his mind. Gobsmacked, Baier said, “You don’t think it was real?” Panetta responded “I think disinformation is involved here.”

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