U.S. Society

A Simone Biles Thought Experiment I Dare Her Apologists To Try…

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Womens soccer goalie

The New York Times writes of the U.S. Women’s Soccer team’s desperate-needed victory over the Netherlands in the Olympics:

“It was only afterward that Alyssa Naeher let down her guard. After she had dived to saved the penalty kick late in the game. After she had dived again to push aside the header in extra time. After she had turned away not one but two penalties in the shootout. Naeher’s teammates count on her to do her job as well as they do theirs every time they take the field. Better than they do even, since their mistakes have a tendency to wind up in the back of her net.

“In the quarterfinals of the Olympic tournament on Friday, facing a dangerous Netherlands attack, that had already happened twice. Now the United States needed Naeher to save them again. After the teams played a 2-2 tie, a penalty kick shootout would decide who would go to the semifinals, and who would go home. The Americans turned to Naeher. Save us, they said. Just like you have before. “There’s no one else I’d rather have in the net than her,” midfielder Rose Lavelle said later. “She’s saved us so many times.” And so Naeher, who had saved her teams in big games and small ones, in World Cups and friendlies, saved them again.”

Now imagine that Naeher suddenly announced when the game was a tie that she would not guard the goal in the shootout, but was quitting the game. “It’s been really stressful, this Olympic Games,” she says. “I think just as a whole, not having an audience, there are a lot of different variables going into it. It’s been a long week, it’s been a long Olympic process, it’s been a long year. So just a lot of different variables, and I think we’re just a little bit too stressed out. But we should be out here having fun, and sometimes that’s not the case. I truly do feel like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders at times.”

So she quits, just as her team is depending on her. The back-up goalie takes her place, and the American Women’s Soccer Team loses, and is out of the Olympics.

Would Naeher be hailed as a hero and a role model? Would her team mates say afterwards that they support her decision 100%?

There Goes My Head! The Latest On Simone Biles…

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

jackheadexplosion

The LA Times just blew up my head, which is my problem, and also made it mandatory to once again raise the increasingly aggravating matter of Simone Biles, the greatest, most courageous gymnast who ever quit on her team because the pressure just became too much. The latter is your problem because I assume you’re as sick of reading about Biles as I am sick of thinking about her.

In an article bemoaning how the failure of so many of America’s putative stars in the Tokyo Olympics has put “the Games in a deep hole with lots of digging to be done,” Times sportswriter David Wharton wrote,

“Biles could help. Though facing some detractors, she has received a wave of support on social media over the past 24 hours and, speaking with reporters, sounded as if she might compete in the all-around and individual events beginning later this week. ‘Just a lot of different variables and I think we’re just a little stressed out,” she said, adding that “we’re going to take it a day at a time.‘ Given the very personal yet very public circumstances of Biles’ withdrawal on Tuesday, [assistant professor of sports management at the University of New Haven Jason] Chung believes her return could become an even bigger story. “I could imagine it bringing more viewers because of the human-interest angle,” he said. “Having someone of her magnitude and ability struggling emotionally, people might be interested to see how she weathers the storm. “Also,” he said, “she could draw younger viewers who connect with that kind of authenticity.”

This passage made my head explode four or five times—it’s hard to count when your brains are on the ceiling.The last was the worst–AUTHENTICITY???? Paging Inigo Montoya:

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Comment Of The Day: “Gee, Jason Whitlock, What Do You REALLY Think About Simone Biles’ Quitting On The Olympics?”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Yes, I guess this is the sixth post related to the Simone Biles controversy. Isaac’s Comment of the Day elaborates on one of the many reasons this episode bothered me so much and continues to, especially as the excuses and rationalizations for Biles’ conduct appear to be taking over the “narrative” in the absence of what I consider persuasive facts and arguments. The next ugly shoe to drop, I predict, will be when the female American gymnast who won a gold in Tokyo gets endorsement contracts in preference to the “Greatest of All Time” who somehow couldn’t access that greatness when the spotlight was on, and chose not to try. The preference for the winner over the “hero” will be attributed to malign influences. Just wait.

Giving women appropriate power and influence in American culture has been generally beneficial to all, but the ascension of traditional female virtues has had the unfortunate effect of diluting some of the the very values that allowed the United States to come into existence and succeed over the centuries. The disastrous handling of the pandemic has been one example of how this development is not an unalloyed good, and the fact that Biles’ conduct is not merely greeted with sympathy, which is nice, but praise, which is offensive, is another.

Here is Isaac’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Gee, Jason Whitlock, What Do You REALLY Think About Simone Biles’ Quitting On The Olympics?”

***

America used to be associated with very masculine qualities: toughness, stoicism, risk-taking. This reputation did not exclude American women. Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Calamity Jane, Amelia Earhart.

It’s easy to point out the Generation X and millennials’ glaring lack of these qualities, but to me it’s their parents who steered America wrong. Specifically every boomer who jumped on the socialist bandwagon and participated in the 1960s and 70s revolutions against marriage, Christianity, monogamy, patriotism, sobriety, and hard work. The ones who think Woodstock was some kind of beautiful, transformative event. The ones who wax nostalgic about the “Summer of Love” when their poorly-raised grandkids turn chunks of Seattle into murder-dystopias. The generation that necessitated the invention of the term “latch-key kid” to describe their neglected children.

So I perused Simone Biles’ Wikipedia page, and, sure enough…in and out of foster care…abandoned by Mom…no Dad ever in the picture. Showed incredible talent that was her ticket to a secure future, only to be one of the gymnasts sexually exploited by serial abuser and boomer Larry Nassau. Diagnosed with ADHD; currently on medication. These are the symptoms of growing up in a world created by the values of the 60s and 70s. We can mock them for not knowing how to talk to girls, change a tire, be in a stable relationship, or cope with stress…but these are things people learn from their dads, their faith, and their stable community of neighbors, extended family, and church. Younger generations were not only not given those things; they were taught they didn’t need them.

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Friday Open Forum, As I Courageously Run Away

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I’m sorry, I just feel like the weight of the ethics world is on my shoulders, so I’m going to selflessly leave the ethics commentary to you. I have to think of my well-being first, after all. There is no “U” in team. No, that’s not quite right…

From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The “Are You Allowed To Criticize Simone Biles?” Decision Tree…

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Biles decision tree

I have shackled my arms to the wall, and despite a violent desire to join in the fun, I will leave the responses to the offensive “satirical” idiocy above, by some woke “Afro-Latino engineer, writer, and occasional Bruno Mars impersonator” named Carlos Greaves, to you. In the process, consider the degree of indoctrination, ethical confusion, and rationalization poisoning necessary for someone to 1) write this garbage, 2) think it’s worthy of publication except as evidence or societal rot, or 3) read it and think, “By George! What a humorous and perceptive take!”

If you are one of the latter, please post a comment and explain your thinking. Really. I beg of you. I’ll unshackle myself for that.

[Addendum, typed with my nose: If there was any lingering hesitation on my part that I need to add “Walk a mile in his/her shoes” to the Ethics Alarms Rationalization List, this obliterated it.]

Hump Day Ethics Harumphs

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

1. “And I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling courts!” Here’s another one of those damn courts requiring the government to follow the law. In the opinion here, Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massullo overturned the San Francisco Unified School District’s decision to remove the 1936 mural by Victor Arnautoff, titled “Life of Washington” from a local high school. (There were slaves pictured. Can’t have that!)

The board was required by law to conduct an environmental and historical review for removing the mural, but just chose to follow the demands of indignant students, despite a process being required by the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

“The Board and SFUSD failed in their primary duty to follow the requirements of the law,” Massullo wrote in her decision. “California, as a matter of long-standing public policy, places enormous value on its environmental and historical resources and the People are entitled to expect public officials to give more than lip-service to the laws designed to protect those resources.”

This reminded me of the recent irresponsible Times op-ed by Jamelle Bouie, who has a long rap sheet at Ethics Alarms. Bouie thinks the U.S. Supreme Court needs to be minimized and restrained, because of its nasty habit of interfering with democracy and the will of the public by making the government follow the law, like, say, the U.S. Constitution.

2. Wait, isn’t this systemic racism? And ageism? Classism? Ludditeism? QR codes, those bar codes you can have scanned off a cell phone, have emerged as a nearly unavoidable tech fixture thanks to the pandemic hysteria. Restaurants have adopted them, retailers like CVS and Foot Locker have added them to checkout registers, and they are turning up in retail packaging, direct mail, billboards, sporting events and TV advertisements. They also are a threat to privacy and online security. QR codes can store digital information like when, where and how often a scan occurs, and might open an app or a website that then tracks people’s personal information. But that’s an issue for another day.

I was prevented twice from being able to get a ticket to a baseball game because the Washington Nationals, forced by the D.C. government in its Wuhan panic mode, were required to only have non-paper, contact-less tickets. That meant I had to use my cell phone. I choose not to use cell phones when I’m not traveling. Moreover, how can the same people who decry the requirement of a photo ID as racist mandate systems that require smart phones, which are a whole lot more expensive that any ID? How about poor people? Seniors on a fixed budget? Seniors who can’t get the hang of apps and frankly resent having to do so?

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Wait…ONLY Black People?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

black people tweet

That’s a tweet that has been going around social media, as fatuous tweets often do.

My questions in response:

  • Why only black people? I try to smile at all people I encounter. Yesterday I waved at a black neighbor I have never met while walking Spuds—but not because he was black. He waved back.
  • Solidarity with what? The reason you smile at strangers is to express solidarity with the community, the nation, the human race. If my smile is supposed to mean “I believe you are an oppressed victim of this rotten racist nation and white people like me, and I’m with you, bro!” then to hell with it.
  • If you smile only at the blacks in a crowd, what are you saying to everyone else? Isn’t that pandering? Isn’t that insulting and condescending to the black being grinned at?
  • What if the response to your smile is a snub? How should you take that? [Relevant: this post.]

Monday Mid-Day Ethics Considerations: Megan Rapinoe, Harvard, Pelosi And Double Standards

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Thinker

1. I have some ethics observations on this thing that was sent out to white parents in the Highland Park area of Texas by a Black Lives Matter-affiliated group:

Sacrifice memo

Here they are:

  • As long as white individuals hesitate to push back on BLM’s outrageous assertions and demands, the group will continue to grow more audacious and arrogant
  • The logic of this demand can only make sense to someone who has no concept of right, wrong, and fairness. “We want you to handicap your own children in order to clear the way for our children, who can’t compete and who shouldn’t have to work especially hard to overcome obstacles that you and your children are not responsible for placing in their path.”
  • The screed is an excellent example of how the concept of equal opportunity has been warped into “equity,” meaning not just equality of results, which life never guarantees, but punitive measures to ensure advantages of  favored groups over those that are disfavored, aka whites and males.
  • The extension of the argument in the letter would require athletes fortunate to have advantages of strength, speed, and skill to pledge not to compete against those not so “privileged” as to be born with these advantages, and job applicants of superior talent, intelligence and character to refuse to place themselves in a position where they would be chosen for a job over less fortunate job-seekers.

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Comment Of The Day: “Cowardly, Culture-Betraying Grovel Of The Month: Karen Taylor Of Breakfast Cure”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I’ll answer the first query in Null Pointer’s excellent Comment of the Day on the great congee cultural appropriation brouhaha: “I’m not sure I understand why the woke mobs are throwing fits on Asian people’s behalf.”

There are two reasons. One is part of the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck. In order to tar President Trump as a racist before the 2020 election, the Axis of Unethical Conduct (the unholy and undemocratic “resistance,” Democrats and the news media alliance), claimed that what we knew pretty much then and now know almost certainly now, that the pandemic originated in China’s Wuhan province, nonetheless was racist to speak out loud because so many idiots were attacking Asian-Americans as a result of telling the truth. This was accompanied by absurd inflations of the actual number of such attacks without any evidence in most cases that the attacks there were had any nexus to calling the Chinese virus a Chinese virus.

Thrilled nonetheless to finally have a platform from which to cry “Victim!” like women, blacks and Hispanics, some Asian-American activist groups gleefully embraced the new discrimination fable, neatly sidestepping the inconvenient fact that a disproportional number of the attacks on Asians were carried out by African Americans.

The second reason the woke mobs are throwing fits on Asian people’s behalf is to avoid dealing honestly with the approaching reckoning for elite colleges and universities that are making Asian-Americans real victims of discrimination as the pursue unconstitutional affirmative action policies.

That’s why.

Here is Null Pointer’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Cowardly, Culture-Betraying Grovel Of The Month: Karen Taylor Of Breakfast Cure.”

***

I work almost exclusively with Asians, mostly from India. I have never, not once, ever heard any of my Indian coworkers say ANYTHING about cultural appropriation or condone any woke causes. On the contrary, they are almost all quite eager to share their cultural traditions and cuisine, and eager to learn about American culture and cuisine.

I’m not sure I understand why the woke mobs are throwing fits on Asian people’s behalf. I work almost exclusively with Asians, mostly from India. I have never, not once, ever heard any of my Indian coworkers say ANYTHING about cultural appropriation or condone any woke causes. On the contrary, they are almost all quite eager to share their cultural traditions and cuisine, and eager to learn about American culture and cuisine.

They put on little performances during the Hindu festivals to show off the dancing and food and fashions. They are always inviting me to go to Indian restaurants and explaining which part of India the different foods come from and how to eat them.

They also love going to the American holiday events and partaking in our traditions. When one company I worked for had a gingerbread house-making contest for Christmas, all my Indian coworkers went and happily made gingerbread houses and proudly showed them off. There were no tantrums about Christian holidays, white oppression, or anything else the Woke like to have fits about. Just fun and little houses made out of cookies.

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Saturday Ethics Discouragements, 7/24/2021: NPR, President Biden, Penn State, And The New York Yankees

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

1. Apparently NPR has a sense of humor. Last week’s NPR article, “Outrage As A Business Model: How Ben Shapiro Is Using Facebook To Build An Empire” actually complained that

“By only covering specific stories that bolster the conservative agenda (such as… polarizing ones about race and sexuality issues)… readers still come away from The Daily Wire’s content with the impression that Republican politicians can do little wrong and cancel culture is among the nation’s greatest threats.”

The fact that NPR only covers stories that bolster its progressive agenda or covers them in such a way that any conservative criticisms are obscured apparently never occurred to the taxpayer-funded operation that panders furiously to it’s upper-middle class majority Democrat audience. I speak as a former contributor who was banned from NPR for correctly explaining an aspect of sexual harassment that the host felt could be too easily used to defend President Trump…and told me exactly that.

Yet NPR tells its listeners that “experts worry” conservative websites may be “furthering polarization” in America.

These people are hilarious!

2. Now who can argue with that? Daily Caller reporter Shelby Talcott asked President Biden, “Are there people in the Democratic Party who want to defund the police?”

“Are there people in the Republican Party who think we’re sucking the blood out of kids?” Biden responded.

Good answer! For the record, police budgets have been slashed in more than 20 major cities with Democratic Party-run governments, including Minneapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Austin, Texas. Evidence of Democrats displaying vampire conduct toward children is, in contrast, sparse.

3. Nah, there’s no indoctrination in colleges and universities! Campus Reform reports that Penn State professor Sam Richards orders white students in front of the 700-student “SOC119: Race and Ethnic Relations” lecture so he can intimidate them into validating his anti-white theories. One exchange:

Prof.: “I just take the average white guy in class, whoever it is, it doesn’t really matter. Dude, this guy here. Stand up, bro. What’s your name, bro?”

Student: Russell.

Prof.: “Look at Russell, right here, it doesn’t matter what he does. If I match him up with a black guy in class, or a brown guy… who’s just like him, has the same GPA, looks like him, walks like him, talks like him, acts in a similar way…and we send them into the same jobs…Russell has a benefit of having white skin.”

With another student similarly called out in front of the class, James, Richard asked, pointing to a slide from Coca-Cola’s infamous woke training that read, “To be less white is to be less oppressive, be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive, be less ignorant, be more humble, listen, believe, break with party, break with white solidarity,” what the intent of the screed was.

“I think, you know, it’s more or less just recognizing the advantages you have in life,” James responded. “Whatever that may be, and not thinking yourself superior because of that.”

Prof.: “Awesome answer man.” [Unspoken but clear: “And best of all, now you won’t be harassed, shunned and attacked for expressing a non-conforming opinion!”]

Here’s the exchange with a third student put on the spot, Brian, using the same slide:

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