Regarding “Woke”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I’ve been meaning to deal with this major example of progressive rhetorical legerdemain for some time, and like so many of my aspirations, it had fallen prey to my short attention span and disorganization. Today AM Golden, in reviewing “Old Indy” or whatever the movie is called, asserted that it wasn’t “woke” but said the meaning of that word was elusive.

It really isn’t. “Woke” began in ebonics (the politically-correct term for careless and defiant bad English embraced by the urban African-American community is apparently now “African-American Vernacular English” or AAVE, yet another example of the Left’s “it isn’t what it is” addiction. AAVE is just poor grammar that makes the speaker sound uneducated) and described someone who had seen the light (Hallelujah!) about racial injustice and how the United States is intrinsically racist. Rev. Wright, Barack Obama’s mentor, was preaching “wokeness” when he told his congregation “God damn America!”

Gradually white progressives appropriated the term and made it more general, so that while Black Lives Matter could claim the mantle of “wokeness” for a while (until its real nature as a Marxist, manipulative scam started dawning on sufficient numbers of observers), “woke” came to mean the enlightened realization that the entire progressive agenda, from abortion on demand to reparations to trans-athletes clobbering biological females in sports to income redistribution to crippling the economy while pretending we are preventing a climate change Armageddon to letting illegal immigrants swarm across our borders without consequences to declaring shop-lifting a non-crime to eliminating voter identity requirements to making “hate speech” a crime.…I can go on like this forever, but I’ll stop now…are all “on the right side of history” and undebatable, correct, good and virtuous, and anyone who dissents is, well,

…what Joe said.

Continue reading →

Joy Reid, Harvard, Althouse, And Affirmative Action

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Straining to engage in her trademark “cruel neutrality,” esteemed blogger Ann Althouse stepped up to defend MSNBC’s Joy Reid and stepped in it, as the idiom goes, in the process. Ann defended Reid, claiming that she never said or implied that she was admitted to Harvard because of affirmative action.

“I think Ramaswamy is distorting (or, less likely, not hearing and understanding),” Ann wrote in part. “…She says she got high grades and test scores in high school, but she wouldn’t have thought to try for Harvard if Harvard hadn’t come out to her small, majority-black town and recruited. She was strongly encouraged to apply. The Supreme Court hasn’t changed the power of schools to recruit in places like hers. Reid never says her scores and grades wouldn’t have been enough if she were not black.”

Uncharacteristically, Althouse didn’t do her homework. In the MSNBC segment, Reid was basically regurgitating her blog post saying the same things, and that was headlined, “I got into Harvard because of affirmative action. Some of my classmates got in for their wealth.”

Continue reading →

“Curmie’s Conjectures”: Another Case from Yale, This One with a Twist

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

by Curmie

I had a post about half-written, talking about the fact that SCOTUS justices are nominated and confirmed (or not) primarily for their adherence to certain political principles rather than for their integrity, judgment, legal expertise, or temperament. 

‘Twas not ever thus.  In my lifetime, five SCOTUS Justices were confirmed by a voice vote and three others received all 100% of the votes. Another seven received at least 80% of the votes.  But of the current members of SCOTUS, only Chief Justice Roberts received majority support from Senators of both parties… and that was by a single vote.  Justice Thomas, who’s been around the longest, is the only currently-serving member of the Supreme Court to have been confirmed by a Senate controlled by the party not in the White House at the time.

This, I was about to argue, makes the process depressingly predictable: liberals over here, conservatives over there, with Roberts as the closest thing to an unreliable vote for “his side.”  I was getting around to talking about the allegations against Justice Alito: did he really do something wrong, or is furor mostly partisan in nature?  Answer to both questions: yes. 

But then, despite the predictable split in the two Affirmative Action cases, we also see Gorsuch writing a scathing dissent on Arizona v. Navajo Nation, Barrett and Kavanaugh voting with the liberal bloc on Moore v. Harper, and Jack saying pretty much what I would have said about the Alito case.  I may want to return to the general outline of my half-written essay at some point in the future… but the timing isn’t right, now.

So let me go off in a different direction and talk about a faculty member dismissed from an elite university for her political statements.  The headline on the FIRE article begins “Yale shreds faculty rights to rid itself of professor…”  Certainly we’ve seen a fair amount of that kind of fare here on Ethics Alarms.  What’s different is what follows in that title: “…who called Trump mentally unstable.”  Well, that sure goes against the whole “universities are cesspools of Woke indoctrination” mantra, doesn’t it?

Continue reading →

Monday Ethics Catch-Up, 7/3/2023: More SCOTUS Ethics Alarms

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

July 3 is a major date in U.S. history, slammed as it is between the epic significance of July 2 and 4 in the birth of our nation, and representing the crucial final day in the battle of Gettysburg, which in retrospect we can see as the critical moment when that nation was preserved as one.

Pickett’s Charge and the too little noted role of Gen. George Armstrong Custer have many ethics lessons to teach: the annually re-posted Ethics Alarms essay on those topics are here.

1. Get woke, go broke, and make someone else pay the price…Disney has been taking multiple hits as a result of its current mouse-eared masters determination to take sides in the culture wars, a one way ratchet that as Bud Light and Target (among others) have discovered, there is no way to backtrack or repent. Now it appears that its latest summer blockbuster attempt, “Indiana Jones and the Graying Temples of Doom” or whatever the misbegotten project is being called, is having approximately the same level of audience interest as, say, a sequel to “Body Heat” featuring the now 200 pound Kathleen Turner. When the most positive movie reviews say, “It really isn’t as bad as everyone expected,” you know there’s a problem. So how is Disney fixing the problem? By gutting the other businesses it owns! ESPN and National Geographic are the latest victims. Meanwhile, there are no signs that Walt’s wounded cultural icon is retreating to the neutral position it should have maintained all along.

2. Gaslighting from the Times (again). The more I think about the Times headline, “With Supreme Court Decision, College Admissions Could Become More Subjective,” the worse it seems. Is the Times telling us that using the color of an applicant’s skin as a determinant was being “objective”? Is it implying that anyone is arguing that deciding among many more qualified applicants than Harvard can hold (that’s why God made Yale!) is possible without considerable subjectivity? This is one more example of how the SCOTUS decision is being distorted in order to mislead the 99% of American who either won’t read the decision or won’t understand it if they do. It’s really a pretty simple ruling. Colleges can make their choices on the basis of many subjective judgments, but U.S. law and the Constitution forbid discriminating on the basis of race.

Continue reading →

Pro Sports’ Stunning Hypocrisy On Gambling

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

From ESPN:

“Isaiah Rodgers and Rashod Berry of the Indianapolis Colts and free agent Demetrius Taylor were suspended indefinitely — through at least the 2023 season — for betting on NFL games last season. In addition, Tennessee Titans offensive tackle Nicholas Petit-Frere was suspended six games for betting on other sports at the workplace. The four suspensions were announced Thursday by the NFL. The Colts subsequently announced that both Rodgers and Berry have been waived as a consequence of their suspensions. “The integrity of the game is of the utmost importance,” general manager Chris Ballard said in a statement. “As an organization we will continue to educate our players, coaches, and staff on the policies in place and the significant consequences that may occur with violations.”

Meanwhile, while watching the Boston Red Sox play the Toronto Blue Jays yesterday, I noticed that about 75% of the commercials were promoting on-line betting on baseball games, including that baseball game. At one point the Red Sox play-by-play announcer read the over-under odds on the game’s total runs and other odds. Several of the gambling ads featured David Ortiz, the Red Sox icon who is about to be inducted into the Hall of Fame.

Continue reading →

Soledad O’Brien’s Unethical, Useful Affirmative Action Tweet, And Related Matters…[Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Gee, it’s nice to have the smug, biased, poisonous Soledad O’Brien to kick around again. The unethical broadcast journalist of color who left her news show-hosting role with CNN in 2013 to cash in with podcasting and other syndicated ventures that spared the general American public by keeping her toxic influence limited, sent that outrageous tweet above in response to an Asian American women’s expressed satisfaction that college applicants who looked like her could no longer be legally handicapped when they apply to educational institutions.

It’s reassuring to know O’Brien hasn’t changed; after all, so little seems reliable or permanent any more. Her offensive and obnoxious tweet also neatly illustrates one important side benefit of the Supreme Court’s opinion last week striking down racially biased admissions policies, aka “affirmative action,” at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The reactions to the ruling during the Woke World freakout are revealing so much about so many of its ethics dunces and villains. We should all be grateful.

Continue reading →

“They’re Here!!!” How Do People Get This Way, And Why Do They Now Think It’s To Their Benefit To Display Their Malady?

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

I usually keep a watchful eye on advice columns, especially “The Ethicist,” Carolyn Hax and a few others, but have been a bit lax of late. Thus I missed this astounding letter sent to “Ask Amy,” which was bought to my attention by loyal reader and frequent commenter Jeff.

Hold on to your heads or erect signs nearby warning others that they are in a potential head-explosion zone…

Continue reading →

The Merchant Checkout Scam

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Well, I feel like an idiot.

PetsMart asks me to contribute a few bucks to dog rescue organizations when I check out. Oh sure, why not? 7-11 has a jar where you can drop change to help Jerry’s Kids, or what ever that organization goes by these days. Hell, I’ll throw in some coins, at least when the jar hasn’t been stolen. These “oh, by the way, as long as you’re here” fundraising asks are so common—“Would you like to ’round up’ today, sir?”—and routine that I usually accede to them, and most of the time, don’t really know what I have contributed to.

That ends now.

Haggen, with 2,200 stores in 34 states and one of the grocery store chains owned by Albertsons Companies, including Safeway, Shaw’s, Vons, and Randalls, asks customers during checkout to donate to a pool of organizations promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.” How many customers know what they are supporting? How many think DEI is just the acronym for the latest dread disease, like “COPD”? How many think about what they are giving money to when they are solicited in the middle of a basic transaction that one is seeking to complete as quickly as possible?

Continue reading →

On The Trail Of The Great Stupid…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

These signs were allegedly posted yesterday in response to the Supreme Court’s hay trick yesterday. If genuine—and who knows?—‘s staff the owner of the establishment is a medical miracle, apparently living without a brain. As simultaneous virtue-signaling and IQ 80 signaling, this is special. Let’s see: the Supreme Court did not rule that businesses can discriminate. How will the store’s staff identify “Trump supporters”? How often does a church walk in a store to buy anything? Do churches even fly flags? I’ve never seen one.

Bias makes you stupid, but it can’t make someone this stupid unless he or she is well on the way already.

Celebrities Abusing Free Speech, Case # 708,666,213,45 (Since 2017): WNBA Player Natasha Cloud

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

(Of course, the number in the title above is just an estimate. It might be more.)

The first ethics problem with celebrities mouthing off in public about matters they know nothing about is that they have an undeservedly out-sized metaphorical megaphone. The second problem is that foolish adults and immature kids think that someone being rich and famous means that that they possess special skills and powers of perception beyond whatever expertise it was that made them that way. It’s the “they must be smarter than I am, because they’re richer/more famous/more successful than I am” fallacy. The third problem is that so many celebrities in this category believe their own hype, and really do think their opinion is more valid than the average guy on a bar stool.

The fourth ethics problem is that the news media reports what these Dunning-Kruger Syndrome victims say, which is the journalistic equivalent of spraying deadly viruses via aerosol cans in a crowded stadium.

Today’s example of this ugly, persistent, and probably unpreventable phenomenon is the WNBA Washington Mystics Natasha Cloud, who is generously called a “star” in most reports. (She’s averaged 7.5 points a game.) I question whether any WNBA player qualifies as a star, but that’s just me.) She’s been shooting off her mouth since May, when she told the Philadelphia Inquirer :

Continue reading →