This will, I assume, eventually be recognized as part of the Climate Change Hysteria Ethics Train Wreck.
The New York Times is all excited about the prospect of electric planes, and updates us on their progress. New experimental battery-powered airplanes are showing us “what aviation could look like years from now — one in which the skies are filled with aircraft that do not emit the greenhouse gases that are dangerously warming up the Earth.”
Of course, “modern batteries can support limited range and weight. As a result, the aircraft that they power can generally carry only a handful of passengers, or the equivalent load in cargo.” Not only that, but “widespread flights won’t be possible without expanded infrastructure like vertical landing and takeoff sites and public support” and “the cost of producing such aircraft will also be high to start, limiting their use to the well-heeled and to critical services like medical evacuations.”
Hey, that’s all right: the U.S. has money to spare on projects like this. It’s not like that 1 trillion dollars in interest the U.S. amasses yearly now, the single biggest item in the budget, is real money.
I am happy to say that I foresaw this mess the first time I encountered these things, in a local Home Depot, if I recall correctly. even if they worked reliably and were user friendly—and they don’t and aren’t—it was obvious from the very dawn of the era that they would allow retailers to reduce staff while making the shopping experience less pleasant for consumers. And so it has. But it wasn’t sold that way, and, as usual, much of the public was ovine in its acceptance. Sure, long checkout lines would be a thing of the past! Now you wouldn’t have to deal with the underlings who man the registers. Store employees would be free and able to answer inquiries! Wunderbar!
Right. You still have to wait in line. The checkout kiosks are persnickety if you, for example, fail to set a purchase down in the right spot. Scanning items doesn’t always work, and its easy to scanned an item more than once. Problems and glitches arise so frequently that counter staff are constantly called on to deal with them, meaning that customers who wisely eschewed the delightful self-checkout adventure are stranded in line. Heaven forfend that you try to self-checkout a product with some kind of purchase restriction. Meanwhile, a lot of self-checkout machines break down, and because it’s expensive to fix them, often sit useless for a while, causing more back-ups.
Last night, Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment that guarantees the right to abortion. The tally wasn’t close: 2,186, 962 favored the measure, or 56.6%, while only 1,675, 72, or 43%, opposed putting a right to abortions in the state constitution.
The first point to understand is that this is not a rejection of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs over-ruling Roe v. Wade, but the exact result the Supreme Court ruled the Constitution intended. It is and always whould have been the states’ call: abortion is not a federal issue, and the national Constitution is silent on it, despite the political and ideological dishonesty of Roe. What Ohio did is exactly what the Supreme Court ruled it should do: let voters, not courts, decide the issue.
Logically, this decision should take abortion out of the 2024 election in Ohio, and if Republicans are smart <cough> that’s what they should say. “It’s in the constitution now, and we’ll follow the law. I still believe abortion is wrong in most cases, and I will work toward making that clear enough that Ohioans change the law, but right now, the decision has been made.”
In Sherman, Texas, the local high school declared that senior Max Hightower, who has been a member of the school’s theater group all four years, is ineligible to play the part of Curley, the male lead in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical “Oklahoma!” despite the fact that he won the part in auditions fairly and squarely. The part is being taken away from him, or her, or “them,” because, as he was told by the principal (evidently an idiot miscast as an educator) that a new school policy dictates that student “actors and actresses could only play a role that was the same gender they were assigned at birth.” Max is a young trans male, a girl who “identifies” as male, and presumably has taken no steps to acquire male genitalia.
All aspects of this debacle are so stupid it makes my teeth hurt.
1. There is nothing about casting a female in a male role, a male in a female role, a heterosexual in a gay role (or vice-versa), a black actor as a white character…and so on, ad infinitum, that is inherently wrong or right, for that matter. If a school is going to have a drama program, it should be competent enough regarding theater to know, practice and teach that. A production does what its artistic directors believe is necessary to make the show work as drama, comedy, or entertainment.
2. A penis is not necessary equipment for playing the male lead in “Oklahoma!” Curley thinks with his penis, but he never shows it. A policy requiring any actor to actually possess features the character he or she portrays demonstrates abject ignorance of what drama is. Needless to say, except perhaps to the morons who run this school, Curley is also a lot older than a high school senior, lives in the Oklahoma territory, and ideally can sing like Gordon MacRae above. No high school performer is strictly well-cast as Curley by those criteria, or as a character in any classic musical with the exception of shows like “Grease,’ “West Side Story” and “Bye-Bye Birdie.” Without some version of so-called “non-traditional casting,” high school musicals, which have been a rich and beneficial part of the school experience for more than a century, would be impossible.
When the high school theater group in Arlington (Mass.) High School put on “Oliver!” in the early 1970s (my sister played Nancy, the tragic female lead), the part of the Artful Dodger, a male, pre-teen role, was taken by female senior. She was terrific. In Sherman, her casting would have violated policy.
3. There are potential copyright issues when a director actually tries to change the gender of a character as written by the author. That’s not what was being done here. By sheer coincidence, I saw a school production of “Romeo and Juliet” last week in which Romeo was played by a female. The show was not turned into a lesbian romance (though this has been done many times, and that works too): the part was played as male, and it worked just fine. The Rodgers and Hammerstein organization is appropriately flexible with casting variations: in recent Broadway revivals, the villain Judd, written as a white character, was played by a black man, and the comic female part of Ado Annie, the local flirt, was played by a woman in a wheelchair.
4. I could make an argument for a school policy requiring shows to be cast based on artistic considerations only, and not to make political points, but it would not be a good argument. It is impossible to separate art from politics and social commentary. High school actors need to learn that, too. Such a policy would also be impossible to enforce coherently—especially by fools like the Sherman high school principle, who can’t grok this theater thingy.
5. Also needless to say, except to people who run that high school and victims of closed head injuries, theater is not like athletic competitions. Being a female who identifies as a male or the other way around confers no unfair advantage on an actor. Presumably confusion on this rather basic point is what led to the ridiculous policy and the abuse of Max.
Oh, it gets worse. The Stupid is strong with this community. In a statement, the school district said the production is being postponed, writing,
….”It was brought to the District’s attention that the current production contained mature adult themes, profane language, and sexual content. Unfortunately, all aspects of the production need to be reviewed, including content, stage production/props, and casting to ensure that the production is appropriate for the high school stage.”because of “sexual content and profanity.”
Perfect. Some busy-body escapee from a Mennonite compound complained about the script to a bunch of illiterates who never have seen “Oklahoma!” Cultural illiterates should not be involved in educating children. “Oklahoma!” was judged G-rated fair when it premiered in 1943, and has been performed without controversy by high schools, colleges and community theaters ever since. The “sexual content” is called romance, like in “Romeo and Juliet”,” ” (which is a lot more sexually provocative than “Oklahoma!”) and if there’s profanity in the show, it consists of some cowboy saying “dang.” (All right, all right, Ado Annie’s song “I’m just a girl who can’t say no” is suggestive, but of nothing that a normal high school student isn’t very familiar with already.) Today, high schools have to worry about musicals containing words like “shit” and “fuck,” and these Neanderthals are investigating “Oklahoma!”?
Then the district makes things as clear as mud by adding, “There is no policy on how students are assigned to roles. As it relates to this particular production, the sex of the role as identified in the script will be used when casting. Because the nature and subject matter of productions vary, the District is not inclined to apply this criteria to all future productions.”
Oh.
WHAT???
Meanwhile, Max’s parents say they are going to fight to get Max back into the role. Good. But if this fiasco is sufficient to turn off Max and a lot of his fellow students to theater generally, I wouldn’t be surprised.
I’m going to try to make this a short scream of frustration and a call for help.
Nobody believes this, but I really try to search for examples of ethical misbehavior from the right side of the political spectrum and admirable ethical conduct from the Left. I do. The events and people determine what goes up on Ethics Alarms; I have no ideological agenda. However finding some semblance of balance started becoming difficult in 2016, as the “resistance”/Democratic Party/ mainstream media alliance began solidifying (that’s the “Axis of Unethical Conduct”), and Trump Derangement caused the Left (and others, like the Bill Kristol NeverTrumpers ) to lose all touch with restraint and decency to begin what has been called here the 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck. I saw that as a disastrous political and cultural development then, and I was right.
Because I (correctly) view this as a historically destructive development in not only American politics and institutions but our society and culture generally, this has led, unavoidably, though critics of EA refuse to accept that, to a disproportional amount of criticism of progressives and their captive institutions, like academia, scholarship, journalism, entertainment, law, medicine, and Big Tech among others.
The imbalance has become worse over the last several months, and now, with the Democratic Party revealing itself to be so infected by anti-Semitism, a dearth of integrity, hypocrisy and whatever the combination of panic, denial and rage is, the content here only promises to seem more unbalanced still.
This day got derailed early and never got back on track, so this post is as scattered as I am.
1. I just voted. Though only two contests were on the ballot here in Alexandria, and I know nothing about any of the candidates, I voted for an Independent and a Republican solely because I am convinced that the Democratic Party is now completely untrustworthy, and that anyone running under its banner does so despite undeniable evidence that he or she is consorting with villains. That said, the spectacle of democracy in action always chokes me up a little. Does that make me a sap?
2. Reader Sarah was kind enough to inform me that I used the word “censorious” incorrectly in the previous post. Indeed I had: inspired by First Amendment blogger Ken White, who coined the phrase “censorious asshat” when discussing those who sued or otherwise bullied those who posted unpopular opinions on the web, I always assumed that the word described “someone with a fondness for censorship.” It doesn’t.
3. Life competence lesson: keep engaging, you may learn something. Charmed by a CNN headline that I’m certain will make this coming weekend’s compendium by Power Line, I posted “An Arizona golf course is under attack from a squadron of pig-like creatures” on Facebook. I found the use of “squadron” especially alarming, and even listed the collective nouns for pigs, swine, hogs, boars and feral pigs to show that “squadron” wasn’t among them. But Facebook Friend, old theater collaborator and occasional Ethics Alarms participant Greg Wiggins did his due diligence research, and informed me that the collective noun for this particular pig-like creature, the Javelina, is indeed “squadron.”
At least in the view of the New York Times SCOTUS reporter Adam Liptak, the course of the Supreme Court oral argument in United States v. Rahimi indicates that the Court is likely to over-rule the Fifth Circuit and let the law discussed her in this post stand. Just call me “Fredo”: I was certain that the Court would agree that the law is unconstitutional, and I’m still certain it should be so ruled.
Based on the story, the Justices are persuaded by the fact that Rahimi, after the law was imposed on him, proved he was in fact a danger to society and should not have access to a gun.
Let me say at the outset that the NFL and, by extension, all of its teams are so thoroughly and constantly corrupt and unethical that its periodic examples of ethical obtuseness—other than paying its players to cripple themselves, which is ongoing—should probably be categorized under The Julie Principle, as in “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, pro football’s unethical, stop wond’ring why…” This episode is also part of the Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck, however, so it’s worthy of a post.
George Norcross, who is a prominent and wealth Democratic Party activist and power broker, hung a combined American and Israeli flag from his private box at the Eagle’s Lincoln Financial Field during the team’s against the Dallas Cowboys two days ago. Stadium security confronted Norcross over the flags and took him into custody after he refused to remove them. Then they took them down.
The Eagles cited its policy that “signs, banners or similar items that are obscene or indecent, unrelated to the event, potentially offensive to other patrons, that may block the views of other fans or that are otherwise considered dangerous or inappropriate by the Eagles are prohibited.”
Yes, it’s come to this! In the town of Tangerhütte, about 2 hours east of Berlin, Germany, a daycare center that for decades has been named in honor of the most famous child murdered during the Holocaust in World War II, is removing Anne’s name.The Anne Frank Daycare Center will become the “World Explorers Daycare Center” because…wait for it!…the name makes some “migrant” parents feel “uncomfortable.” It isn’t welcoming enough, or something, now that Israel is at war with Gaza.
The daycare center’s director explains that the change from the center’s current name is now troubling “parents with migrant backgrounds” who complained that they found it “challenging” to explain Anne’s story to their children. Of course, the whole idea behind such honors is that succeeding generations remember important stories, like we remember the complex tragedy of the Civil War with statues of its many flawed participants…wait. Oops! Never mind.
City officials now insist the renaming is necessary “to celebrate the diversity” of the children attending the daycare center, as explained by Andreas Brohm, the mayor. Because of the large number of Hamas supporters in the town, Anne Frank no longer aligns with the “new focus on diversity,” Brohm said. Despite Germany’s strong support for Israel as part of its penance for launching the Holocaust under He Who Must Not Be Named, respecting diversity—Kill the Jews/ Don’t kill the Jews: Diversity! Equity! Inclusion!—elevates the feelings of many parents about the current name above “the global political situation.”
[I]f her name comes off the daycare, where does it stop? How many schools all over the world carry her name? A lot. And how quickly will that change if the local population decides that having a school named after Anne Frank sends the “wrong” message about “diversity, equity, and inclusion”? Where does this end? Given the amount of ugly anti-Semitism we have seen this weekend, and what is promised to come, I am not sure where it ends.And I’m not sure that the West has the backbone to stop it, either.
Oh, I’m absolutely sure it doesn’t! After all, a life-time petty hood died of a drug overdose under the knee of a Minnesota cop three years ago, so of course Anne Frank’s name has to go. Come on! It makes perfect sense!
The Great Stupid is all-powerful, and its reach is infinite…
“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.
Ethics Alarms 