Ethics Observations on “the Rest of the Story” Regarding “At Princeton, Students Feel ‘Unsafe’ in the Company of a Conservative Professor

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Commenter Dr. Emilio Lizardo revealed this morning in the comments to “At Princeton, Students Feel “Unsafe” in the Company of a Conservative Professor” that the policy at issue had already been reversed by the time I wrote about it:

“By April 2, the policy was reversed after an intervention from the club’s Graduate Board. In the seven days in between, debate over the policy rose from the club’s private GroupMe to the headlines of national right-wing publications. Club leadership maintains that the reversal was not due to national media scrutiny.”

So Ethics Alarms can’t claim even a smidgen of credit for the reversal. Nonetheless, the lesson here, as we have already seen elsewhere, is that when organizations and institutions install discriminatory and self-evidently unethical procedures and policies in the name of wokeness, political correctness, aspiring fascism of the far left, DEI or other perversions of core American principles and are quickly exposed, assailed and embarrassed, they usually back down. (Usually.)

A further lesson is that the organizations and institutions know that what they are doing is indefensible except from the “by any means necessary” perspective driving the Left in its crusade to re-make America. They know it, but they try anyway, hoping that any single instance will fly under the metaphorical radar long enough to become institutionalized. When they get caught, their reaction is, “OK, too soon. We’ll hold off on this one for now.”

Their assumption, and it is, frighteningly, probably correct, that the current DEI, Black Lives Matter, open borders, climate change hysteria, anti-free speech…freedom of association…equal treatment under the law and due process wack-a-mole contest it has forced our society into playing will inevitably result in a slow, steady ratcheting-up of anti-democratic practices that become accepted as norms. This is how the public education system became an indoctrination process. It is how the initially admirable goals of affirmative action became the racist practice of “diversity, equity and inclusion.” It is how journalism in the US. became partisan propaganda.

The fact that only conservative publications and news sources treated the Princeton story as “fit to print” and necessary illumination to stop democracy from “dying in darkness” is also significant. This doesn’t mean that the story wasn’t important or objectively worth reporting on. The conduct of the mainstream media in ignoring it proves that its purpose is not to keep the public informed, but to assist the Far Left in laying waste to America’s traditional interpretation of democracy. The Princeton story is important, and the fact that only conservative sources publicized it (only Fox News among the news networks picked it up) doesn’t prove their bias. It proves the sinister, deliberate complicity of the mainstream media as it attempts to keep Americans from realizing what is going on right under their noses until it is too late.

The Princetonian wrote that a debate over the policy arose only after “headlines of national right-wing publications” exposed it. If the story sparked a debate, it means it was a story worth reporting. The MSM didn’t report on the story because the Far Left doesn’t want any debate. In an honest debate they lose, just as they lose on abortion, illegal immigration, and so many other issues. If they felt they could win on the merits, then they would want debate. Instead, their media tries to bury the facts. This isn’t a conservative “conspiracy theory.” It is reality.

Finally, the club’s claim that “the reversal was not due to national media scrutiny” is another damning piece of evidence. Gaslighting, denial, “Jumbo”-ism and “It isn’t what it is” (Yoo’s Rationalization,” #64) mania have become such reflex tools of the Left that comparisons with “1984” are unavoidable. The border is secure. Bidenomics is a success. Inflation isn’t a problem. The President didn’t extol the “Transgender Day of Visibility” on Easter. He’s as sharp as a tack. The Trump prosecutions aren’t political. January 6 was an insurrection. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

The Princeton student club episode is an important one for American to understand. They can only understand it if they know about it.

Boy I wish I knew how to get the readership here back on the rising curve it seemed to be on in 2016...

A Rueful Note From Your Host…

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I only got two posts up yesterday. That’s not acceptable, and I’m sorry. Ethics Alarms has a goal of registering four posts a day, come rain or shine, because even that level—it’s typically about 3,500 or more words a day, counting typos—doesn’t keep up. I don’t feel too badly when I can only manage three. Yesterday was a terrible day, beginning with the ordeal of having to deal with liars, incompetents and SOBs along with malicious technology as I tried to get an overdue waste water treatment bill handled. By the time what should have been a 15 minute process was over, it was after noon, Spuds was annoyed (I almost wrote “ticked” which has other meanings when a dog is the subject) and I was so furious and frustrated that I could hardly function.

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At Princeton, Students Feel “Unsafe” in the Company of a Conservative Professor

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I don’t understand this at all.

For the second time today, I nearly duplicated a post I had already written. Princeton hasn’t been in the “Great Stupid” news lately as much as its Ivy League competitors, so my first headline was almost identical to this one from three years ago. Cornell, as we now know, has lost its collective mind. Columbia has been beyond redemption for a while now. The University of Pennsylvania’s president said essentially the same stuff before the Senate about whether anti-Semitsim on campus was acceptable depending on “context” as Harvard’s president, and was fired before Claudine Gay was. Yale, you will recall, has so disgraced itself that some judges announced last year that they will no longer accept clerks from Yale’s law school. (I don’t know what’s wrong with Dartmouth: apparently they just study and drink up there in the New Hampshire boondocks.)

Princeton, however, is apparently graduating complete weenies, a true embarrassment for a school whose mascot is a tiger. Princeton student Matthew Wilson revealed in an op-ed published in The Daily Princetonian, that after he brought a professor as a guest to lunch at one of Princeton’s social clubs, the club changed its visitors rule. Now, any student guests who aren’t relatives or friends will “henceforth not be permitted to enter the club during its ‘hours of food service operations’ without prior approval from undergraduate officers, club staff, and the alumni Board of Governors.”

Why the change, you may ask, as Wilson did. The policy was changed because the presence of the prof, who is one of Princeton’s lone conservatives, “made members feel unsafe.” Wait, is the professor rabid, a known serial killer, infected with ebola or prone to attack strangers? No, it’s just that his beliefs make the students feel unsafe. At an institution that once was dediacted to exposing young minds to a whole range of ideas and theories.

I confess, though this is not the first time I have encountered the fatuous “safe spaces” argument, I don’t understand it at all. This is not what “safe” means. Nobody is harmed or endangered by hearing opinions one disagrees with, so one can’t possibly be threatened by someone who is merely in the same room who isn’t saying anything directed you at all.

“The simple fact that they had to eat lunch in the same building as him — a respected professor at this university who many Charter students have taken classes with and even praised — was too much to handle,” Wilson wrote. “It was a grave error for [the club’s] leadership to bend to the demands of a few students who couldn’t stomach the possibility of being within shouting distance of someone whose views challenge their own,” Wilson continued.

Why should he, or anyone, even have to write this?

This “Terrifying” Poll’s Results Doesn’t Surprise Me, But It Does Explain a Lot [UPDATED]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

[As Curmie was kind enough to remind me in the comments below, I wrote about this same poll when it was first reported in January. Then, however, I couldn’t find the actual poll results themselves, and that post mostly focused on that problem. I like this post better anyway…]

Well, polls. Still, Scott Rasmussen yesterday used a podcast appearance to call attention to the results of a provocative poll he took earlier this year, and they are, in one aspect, heartening to your friendly neighborhood ethicist (though I don’t believe them). What he called “terrifying” was another set of results.

What caused me to click was this: To the question “Would you rather have your candidate win by cheating or lose by playing fair?” just 7% of American polled said they would prefer their candidate to win by cheating, if that’s what it took. Rasmussen says that he wished the number was lower , but that it “isn’t bad.” Not bad? I think the number is astounding, and that it’s obvious that people were lying. A vast majority of American students, adults, workers and management cheats in myriad ways to achieve goals far less important than electing national leaders. More people voted for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump in 2016 despite undeniable evidence that the Democratic Party and Clinton had cheated to get her the nomination. Her then still popular hubby had even cheated on her, and she still went on the Today Show to cheat the public by blaming the Monica Lewinsky scandal on a conservative conspiracy when she knew the ugly story was true. 7%? Utter nonsense, whatever the reason.

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Yet Another University President Validates My Son’s Decision Not to Attend College…(Corrected)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) tried to speak at the University of Maryland at the end of last month on the topic of “Democracy, Autocracy and the Threat to Reason in the 21st Century.” He was not permitted to get into the text of his speech, however. Raskin is one of the foolish Hamas-enabling, having-their-cake-and-eating-it-too Democrats who wants to make Israel stop its existentially necessary war effort to end the “violence and pervasive suffering in Gaza” and “provide for a massive surge in humanitarian aid”—to the region the U.S. is supposedly supporting the Israeli attacks on. Brilliant!…but I digress.

“Progress in history requires not just reasoning, which is certainly necessary, but it’s not sufficient, because it also requires the addition of the pro-social emotions, as the psychologists call it, of solidarity, empathy, love and the political virtues of justice and equality and freedom,” Raskin began. Then pro-Palestine protesters began shouting at Raskin, accusing him of being “complicit in genocide.” You know: morons. Student morons.

The progressive congressman pleaded with the pro-Hamas mob to have a dialogue with him rather than “heckling,” and that tactic worked as well as it always does. Raskin stopped his speech, pivoting to a spontaneous question and answer format, but the protesters’ chants and jeers made that approach impossible too.

University of Maryland President Darryll Pines (seen grinning above) stepped in and declared the event over as Raskin was effectively silenced. Pines then issued a disgraceful statement to the media, representing the shouting down of a member of Congress as a good thing, either because he was terrified of criticizing the far left on his campus, or because he’s an unethical fool. I suspect the latter.

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A Tragedy in the Czech Republic Reveals the Pro-Abortion Hypocrisy

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

This is a terrible story, but from an ethical enlightenment and focus perspective, I am grateful for it.

A four months pregnant patient at a Prague’s Bulovka University Hospital received an unwanted abortion procedure when doctors got her confused with another woman. (Both patients were not native Czech speakers.) The woman who lost her baby was at the hospital for a routine check-up, but nurses, doctors, a gynecologist and an anesthesiologist all became convinced she was another patient seeking an abortion. They subjected their victim to a surgical cleaning of the uterus without her consent consent or knowledge. She miscarried following the procedure.

Prague police are treating the matter as a case of negligent “bodily harm.” Is that what it is? A woman losing her unborn child is the equivalent of her losing a kidney? Is the unwanted invasion of her body is the issue here, and not the death of whatever that thing is that their outrageous mistake killed?

One of the clearest pieces of evidence that the entire pro-abortion case is built on intellectual dishonesty is the weird and mystical convention that if a mother wants her unborn child to be regarded as a nascent human being, it is in the eyes of the law, in most states. Someone ripping the unborn baby out of the womb of its mother will be usually charged with a crime against two human beings, not one. But if a woman has been taught to regard a gestating fetus as a wart, a tumor or a “mass of cells,” killing it is no crime at all…just a “choice,” or “reproductive care.”

I want to read or hear an abortion activist, or anyone screaming about how the Supreme Court removed a woman’s “right” to control her own body when her body includes a genetically distinct human being, explain how the law should treat a situation like the atrocity in the Czech Republic. Was a child involved or not? Were two human beings harmed, or one?

Were the doctors and the hospital guilty of a negligent tort, as if they had amputated the wrong leg, or was this negligent homicide?

Ethics Hero: J.K. Rowling, or “Now THAT’S How to Practice Civil Disobedience!”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Scotland’s has passed a bonkers hate crime law that went into effect this week. It makes it a crime potentially punishable by up to seven years in prison to “stir up hatred” regarding age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and “variations in sex characteristics.” The law would be such a flagrant violation of the First Amendment in the U.S. that even Democrats would be embarrassed to vote for it, but Scotland, like the rest of the United Kingdom, has been hit particularly hard by The Great Stupid. (This would be a propitious time to say a silent but heartfelt “Thanks, guys!” to Tom, Ben, George, John and the rest of the much maligned Founders.)

Being is an especially good position to do so, J.K. Rowling, the “Harry Potter” author, has decided to lead the principled opposition to the unethical law. Yesterday, as the crime of “stirring up hatred” went into force, Rowling publicly defied it by listing a convicted rapist, several ex abusers and trans activists in a post on Twitter/”X,” asserting that they were all, in her view, men.

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Clueless or Dishonest? Another Questionable Judicial Pick Appears Headed to a Senate Rejection. Good.

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

President Joe Biden’s apparently radical nominee to the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Pakistani-American lawyer Adeel Abdullah Mangi, looks doomed after Senator Jacky Rosen of Nevada became the latest Democrat to publicly announce that she could not support him. Earlier, the other Nevada Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto had joined lame duck maverick Joe Manchin of West Virginia in opposing the nomination, a DEI pick if there ever was one.

In addition to having no judicial experience, Mangi supports two radical organizations that have signaled some rather alarming values, indeed he helps lead them, by serving on the advisory boards of Rutgers Law School’s Center for Security, Race, and Rights and the Alliance of Families for Justice.

The Rutgers center, which Mangi has contributed thousands to support, is under investigation by the Senate Judiciary Committee for hosting an event on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks featuring pro-terrorist Sami Al-Arian, who was convicted of providing material support to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The Center’s director, law professor Sahar Aziz, regularly enlivens his Twitter/”X” feed anti-Semitic rhetoric. Now, these issues could be addressed, explained and defended (though perhaps not successfully), but the aspiring judge used the excuse that he had no knowledge that either of these had occurred in the organization he serves in an advisory capacity when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) asked him about the group’s programming and Aziz’s anti-Semitism.

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Ignorant and Stupid Headline of the Year (So Far): Citizen Free Press

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“DEI comes for Romeo and Juliet”

As EA columnist Curmie likes to say, and I’m sure he will, “Oh bloody hell.”

Citizen Free Press has taken over the conservative news aggregator title from the once ubiquitous Drudge Report, after the latter went pseudo-woke and virulently Trump-Deranged. CFP is conservative and Trump-lovin’ all righ; it’s headline links are also frequently juvenile (“Nancy Pelosi should have kept her pie-hole shut!”). Now we know that nobody connected with the website 1) knows more about theater, drama and Shakespeare than the average Frisbee and 2) doesn’t know what DEI means despite constantly complaining about it.

The linked story tells us that a West End production of “Romeo and Juliet” in London will feature a white actor as Romeo and a black actress as Juliet.

Non-traditional casting has been flourishing in the theater at all levels since at least the 1970s, and creative casting and conceptions of “Romeo and Juliet” are among the most common and varied of theatrical practices. Casting a mixed race couple in that classic tragedy is almost as routine now as casting two white lovers. (I saw a production with that mix just last year). There have been professional versions with two men as R&J, two women, two “non-binaries.” There have been production in which the doomed lovers are played by septuagenarians. The Montegues and Capulets have been transported to China, the African Plains, the hillbilly Appalachians a la Hatfield and McCoys, and galaxies far, far away.

Some of these wild re-workings of the ancient script have been good and even great. Do the right-wing dufusses who run the site not know about the obscure musical called “West Side Story,” in which “Romeo,” aka “Tony” is white, and “Juliet,” or “Maria,” is Puerto Rican? That “DEI” version premiered in 1957.

To sum up: there is nothing “DEI” or even novel about mixed-race casting of “Romeo and Juliet,” or any Shakespeare play, for that matter.

Jeez, conservatives…you really have to get out more. Try to keep up. That was pathetic.

A TRIPLE Jumbo for Joe!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ok, we need a new rule, as Bill Maher likes to say.

Politicians who don’t have the integrity, energy, tech savvy or whatever else it takes to run their own social media accounts may not deny that what was posted in their names, with their permission, by their paid agents, are their true sentiments. I regard the practice of proxy tweeters and Instagrammers per se unethical anyway: the message says it’s from, say, “Joe Biden,” but it’s really from 22 year-old Ohio State grad Stanislaus “Blinky” Furbusher, a former circus geek whose uncle is a big Democratic donor, and whose opinion about anything would normally not get the national attention a typical Oakland A’s day game gets. That makes such a ghost-posted message a lie, flat out. Say what you will, and I have, about Donald Trump’s often stupid and obnoxious tweets, at least he’s the one who sends them, and he accepts full responsibility for them too. (And he knows how to send them, which admittedly isn’t much, but I bet Joe Biden hasn’t sent a tweet in his life.)

This is all by way of noting that when asked about the political and religious controversy about Biden proclaiming Easter Sunday “Transgender Day of Visibility” [Item #3] (the ridiculously named and conceived “day” pandering to the tiny minority represented by the “T’ in LGBTQ and dedicated to destroying women’s sports), the President, who doesn’t lie like Donald Trump and has a mind like a steel trap (we are told) denied that he had done it.

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