Ethics Observations On The House Passage Of H.R.5 (The Parents Bill of Rights)

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

In a 213 – 208 vote, the House approved the Parents Bill of Rights, which would require school districts to post their curriculum online, allowing parents to review the materials. It has many other provisions, none of which unreasonably burden schools, and all of which are aimed at letting parents know what their children are being taught, what speakers are addressing their classes, what books and publications they will have access to, and what special needs and problems are arising that parents should be aware of.

I have read the entire text of H.R. 5, as should you, as should every parent. If there is anything in the bill that is excessive or that forces schools and teachers to compromise their duties as educators, I would be eternally grateful for someone to point it out to me.

The conventional wisdom is the bill will not pass the Senate to become law (I would dare Joe Biden to veto it). I find that astounding, just as I find it astounding, and damning, and signature significance for a party that obeys the dictates of its powerful constituencies, in this case, the teachers unions, to the detriment of the public at large. It is equally astounding that not one single Democratic House member voted for a bill that as far as I can see only establishes by law an obligation to inform parents of what parents want to know, out to know and have every right to know about the content of their children’s education.

Additional points:

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Stop Making Me Defend Hillary Clinton!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Hillary Clinton is being skewered on social media for the above promotional video promoting her upcoming Columbia U. course “Inside the Situation Room.” Clinton was brought onto the faculty to co-teach the offering, which is open by application only to students attending the university’s School of International and Public Affairs and undergraduates from Columbia College, Barnard College, and the university’s School of General Studies.

Some of the criticism is in line with that of Glenn Greenwald and other Clinton adversaries who regard her as a warmonger. “The US official who has urged more wars than anyone over the last 3 decades with the possible exception of John Bolton – including Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now Ukraine – is teaching Columbia students a class called ‘Foreign-Policy Decision-Making.’ And boy they’re excited!” Greenwald tweeted. The rest of the brickbats are aimed at the video itself, which the Blaze described as “cringy.”

Oh, it’s that, all right. But both critiques are unfair, at least regarding Hillary. Regardless of what Clinton’s policies and proclivities were, she certainly has sufficient background in the field of international diplomacy and foreign policy decision-making to provide students with useful perspective. The press release about the course promises that students will learn “how to analyze and understand the complex interplay between individual psychology, domestic politics, public opinion, bureaucracy, the international environment, and other factors which feed into decisions about foreign policy,” including the “use of force, signaling and perception, intelligence and its analysis, the deployment of other instruments of statecraft, and more.” Hillary is qualified to provide guidance and the benefit of her experience on all of that. I’d take the course, just as I took the negotiation seminar taught by Adrian Fisher, who was the principle U.S. negotiator of the SALT Treaty.

The critique of the goofy video is certainly called for, but Hillary is innocent. She didn’t write, direct or conceive the stupid thing: that’s on the university. Nor is her the quality of her performance being fairly knocked: she’s a lot better than her stiff co-instructor, who has the ineffable air of a bad community theater actress about her. Helen Mirren couldn’t make that script work; I think Hillary was a good sport to do the video, lame as it was. She had just joined the faculty, and she was being cooperative, collegial, and willing to spoof herself to boost student interest.

Well, good for her. I came away from that video liking her more than I did before seeing it.

Stop Making Me Defend DEI Deans!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I am unshakeable in my belief that “DEI” is deceitful way of reframing institutional racism to make it seem benign, and that all positions in business, government and academia devoted to enabling this racket need to be abolished before the damage to society in irreversible. Nonetheless, recent implied criticism aimed at MIT’s DEI deans (why in the world would the school need six?) is unfair.

College Fix reports that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will host a scholarly debate on the value, or lack of it, of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, with a panel of invited scholars debating the question: “Should academic DEI programs be abolished?”

The story also notes that MIT’s own “highly paid” diversity, equity and inclusion deans declined invitations to attend. The debate, which is scheduled for April 4, will be moderated by Nadine Strossen, past president of the American Civil Liberties Union, back when the organization was non-partisan and cared about the First Amendment.

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Comment Of The Day: “Stanford’s Disgraceful DEI Dean Throws Down The Guntlet…NOW Will Stanford Fire Her?”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

EA has featured a lot of posts about the Stanford Law shout-down of a conservative federal judge and the school’s “DEI” dean’s complicity in making certain that he did not get a fair opportunity to deliver his remarks. It is, I believe, quite possibly a tipping point regarding many important cultural issues, including Leftist censorship, the decline of higher education ethics and academic freedom, the corruption of the legal profession, and most of all, the toxic influence of the “diversity/equity/inclusion” cult to undermine core societal values in the U.S. The mainstream news media is doing its best to keep the story and its implications far from the consciousness of the average member of the public.

Glenn Logan has offered a helpful Comment of the Day which analyzes Stanford Law School Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach’s defiant and telling op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Glenn is one of many experienced bloggers in the Ethics Alarms commentariat, and at times like these it shows.

Here is Glenn’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Stanford’s Disgraceful DEI Dean Throws Down The Guntlet…NOW Will Stanford Fire Her?”

***

Steinbach wrote: “Regardless of where you stand politically, none of this heated exchange was helpful for civil discourse or productive dialogue.“

True, but only because one side decided the right way to deal with debating controversial issues was to make sure that the other side of the debate could not be heard without wading through repeated ad hominem attacks and invective.

At no point does Steinbach recognize that the students were driving the lack of civility. It is also true that the judge’s remarks at certain points crossed the line, but he was under constant attack to the point that he was unable to deliver a coherent presentation. Steinbach either does not recognize these facts, or is okay with them. Based on her prepared remarks, the latter seems to be the betting favorite.

So how can this possibly square with her implied desire for civil discourse? Easy — discourse can only be civil when it’s hers, or she agrees with it, or it is had on her terms.

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Ethics Quiz: Michelangelo Porn

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Oh, let’s start out this rainy weekend (here in Northern Virginia, at least) with an ethics quiz on a theme that will be recurring on Ethics Alarms today if all goes as planned (which it seldom does).

Tallahassee (Florida) Classical School principal Hope Carrasquilla was given a choice between being fired or resigning following complaints by parents over a recent art lesson in the charter school that included Michelangelo’s famous “David” statue and his Sistine Chapel “Creation of Adam” fresco painting.

After all, pee-pees were involved.

The stated mission of the Tallahassee Classical School is “training the minds and improving the hearts of young people through a content-rich classical education in the liberal arts and sciences, with instruction in the principles of moral character and civic virtue.” The school also maintains that “reform of American public education, to be successful and good, must be built on a foundation of classical liberal arts learning.” Presumably parents who enrolled their children in the school were aware of this orientation.

Moreover, it is fair to say that “David” is just about as iconic a symbol of the classical arts as one could name, with perhaps the Venus de Milo being the only competition. Yet after three parents complained about their 6th graders being exposed to images of “David” (and the naked Adam in the Sistine Chapel painting), the school’s principal was forced out.

Conservative Hillsdale College provides the curriculum, training, and resources for the school as well as for other public schools through Hillsdale’s K-12 support. This was not an example of parents rising up against an extreme left-wing curriculum. Yet one of the parents famously denounced “David” as “pornography.”

Your Ethics Alarms Fine Arts Ethics Quiz of the Day is….

Is it inappropriate and irresponsible to display “David” in an art course for Sixth Graders?

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Central Connecticut State University May Not Be Stanford, But Its Anti-Speech Mobs Are Exactly The Same

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Candace Owens’ documentary exposé on Black Lives Matter was released last Fall. “The Greatest Lie Ever Sold” also challenges the mainstream media narratives surrounding the death of George Floyd, so you will not be shocked–shocked!—to learn that it has received minimal attention from the news media. Discussing, never mind showing, the utter corruption of the cynical, racist movement that corporations, whole industries and major cities bowed down before in abject submission is a perfect excuse in for Woke World—-and that includes most journalists and editors—to metaphorically kill the messenger. I’m abashed to admit that I had never heard of the film before this week.

And so it came to pass that when The Daily Wire-produced documentary was screened at Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) earlier this month, the film was shut down by a Stanford Law-style student mob. Conservative Hollywood blogger Christian Toto quotes the account of a CCSU professor who related what happened when the film began to play on the screen:

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Stanford’s Disgraceful DEI Dean Throws Down The Guntlet…NOW Will Stanford Fire Her?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Well this clarifies things!

Stanford Law School Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach, currently on well-earned disciplinary leave after her revolting handling of a law student effort to use the “heckler’s veto” to silence a Federal court judge invited to speak to a student group, has decided to challenge the Stanford dean and the school’s president by claiming that she was right to side with the disruptive students. Her defense relies on the currently popular diversity/equity/inclusion cant that free speech can be harmful, and must be “balanced” with DEI objectives.

Her message was relayed in a defiant (and dishonest) op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, ominously titled, “Diversity and Free Speech Can Coexist at Stanford We have to stop blaming, start listening, and ask ourselves: Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

The title itself signals Steinbach’s anti-speech point of view. The irritating metaphor “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” in this case means “Is freedom of speech worth the trouble?” That’s the calling card of an aspiring ideological censor and a totalitarian, giving off the stench of “safe spaces” and criminalized hate speech. She, and the op-ed that follows, advocates suppressing opinions and speech that she disagrees with, or in the world of the woke, that is “dangerous” and “wrong,” “wrong” meaning “not what we want to hear.”

First, however, Steinbach had to frame her argument in a lie. She describes the confrontation between Judge Duncan and an organized mob of protesters as merely a “heated exchange,” and “a verbal sparring match,” writing that “some protesters heckled the judge and peppered him with questions and comments” which the judge “answered in turn.” There is video of the event, and that’s not what was going on. Duncan was prevented from giving his prepared remarks, the students who came to hear them were prevented from doing so, and Duncan, far from answering questions, was reduced to calling out the students for their atrocious behavior.

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Open Forum, Spring Training Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Here’s your chance to get in rhetorical shape for the ethics rigors ahead in what promises to be a challenging summer.

Baseball’s Spring Training has just six days to go, but it also is the only part of the 2023 season prep with genuine full-team workouts. This is because so many players participated in the World Baseball Tournament on teams ranging from Israel and Australia to Cuba and South Korea. In the finals, the Japanese team won it all this week in a close 3-2 win over the United States. Mike Trout, the best player on Earth, struck out with the tying run on base.

Meanwhile, MLB issued a bunch of rule adjustments embarrassingly—ridiculously, really– late, because, as is often the case when new rules and laws are passed, the people passing them didn’t think through all of the ramifications and unintended consequences of the changes they were making.

One piece of good news for MLB is that the institution of a time limitation on how long pitchers could take to throw the ball to the plate and limits on batters stepping out of the box to fiddle with their batting gloves or whatever cut more than 20 minutes of dead time out of the average game. That’s a lot, and infuriating, because the wasted time could have and should have been curtailed long ago without having to use a pitch clock.

But enough of baseball—the Red Sox will be fine, incidentally, don’t believe what you hear—it’s time to

Play Ethics!

“Nah, There’s No Big Tech Bias!” Google’s AI ChatBot Provides A Smoking Gun

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I think the first appearance of the ironic refrain, “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” in an Ethics Alarms headline was in 2018. Since then, I’ve used it dozens of times, and easily could have justified using the sarcastic refrain hundreds, indeed thousands of time since. Even though the evidence of sinister, relentless, intentional and unethical biased reporting by the mainstream media is manifest and continuing daily, its allies (and naive “useful idiot” defenders) continue to argue that declaring that it is what it is constitutes a conservative “conspiracy theory. In doing so, they aid and abet the attempted destruction of American democracy.

The mainstream media’s perceived role as propaganda and deception merchants for the Left is reinforced by similar efforts by social media, the entertainment industry, and Big Tech, though the latter’s machinations are a bit more difficult to nail down. Google, a prime villain, has so many ways to slant public discourse and hamstring non-compliant voices, one main way being through the alignment of search results through its mysterious algorithms. Google’s latest innovation, however, unintentionally provides a window into the biases of the people behind the tech.

Google’s just launched an Artificial Intelligence chatbot called “Bard” as a competitor of ChatGPT, which had been getting lots of publicity lately. Bard’s screaming progressive/Democratic bias quickly revealed itself when conservative users ran some basic tests.

“Not the Bee’s” tech specialist Neo submitted two identical questions to Bard:

The answer to the first question:

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On Joe Biden’s Judicial Nominations: They’re Called “Diversity Nominees” And Some Of Them Couldn’t Judge A Dog Show

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“Goodness gracious,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said before being rushed to the hospital, not because of this though it surely didn’t help, “Is this the caliber of legal expert with which President Biden is filling the federal bench for lifetime appointments? Is the bar for merit and excellence really set this low?”

Why yes, Mitch! It is the caliber, because skill, experience, and demonstrated qualifications are no more the Biden administrations priorities in naming federal judges than they were in Joe’s choice of Vice-President, Cabinet members or White House press secretary. Already, we have seen absurd spectacles like Judge Charnelle Bjelkengren, nominated to serve as a U.S. District Court Judge in the Eastern District of Washington, and according to shameless partisan hack Sen. Patty Murray, very qualified for the job and “truly exceptional,” proving unable to explain under questioning the contents of the fifth or second articles of the Constitution—you know, that old thingy that district judges are supposed to know and understand?

Lucky for her, along comes another Biden nominee, U.S. Magistrate Judge S. Kato Crews, also nominated to be a U.S. district judge, to make sure Charnelle doesn’t feel too bad. During his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing this week, Crews (above, left) was asked by Senator Kennedy (above, right) who also was the one who stumped Bjelkengren, to describe a Brady motion and the landmark Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland.

Crews could not. He had no idea what either were, saying that as he recalled Brady was a Second Amendment case! KABOOM! He was getting the crucial landmark decision, a staple of first year law school criminal law, mixed up with the so-called Brady Law, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (Pub.L. 103–159, 107 Stat. 1536, enacted November 30, 1993), which mandated federal background checks on firearm purchasers in the U.S.,and imposed a five-day waiting period on purchases. It has nothing to do with Brady v. Maryland.

At least he didn’t get Brady mixed up with “The Brady Bunch.”

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