Georgetown Law Center Finally Reinstated Ilya Shapiro. Big Whoop! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Yesterday, after a 122-day punitive investigation into a 45-word tweet, Georgetown University Law Center finally reinstated Ilya Shapiro as the senior lecturer and executive director for the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. It should not take a four-month investigation to reinstate a faculty member for clearly-protected political expression, even had his controversial tweet not been self-evidently true, which it was. But that’s Georgetown for you.
Way back in January, Ethics Alarms first reported on this embarrassment to my law school alma mater and former employer. Following President Biden’s woke-pandering pledge to appoint a black woman to fill a looming vacancy on the Supreme Court, Shapiro issued a sharp tweet opining that restricting the choice of justices by race and gender was not the best way to identify the most qualified or experienced jurist. For this he was called a racist by the Law Center’s dean, and suspended. I followed the episode (with disgust) in several posts: exploring the unethical conduct of Dean Treanor, regarding a letter of protest signed by many law school professors (but none from GULC); on the alumni and student protest led by Luke Bunting; and cheering Federal Judge Ho’s support for Shapiro in an address at the law school.

Ethics Clean-Up On Aisle Thursday, 6/2/2022: An All-Stupid Tag Team Event!

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

What a mess!

I watched the controversial Netflix Ricky Gervais special. I find Gervais funny but tiresome after a while, and a lot of the jokes are cheap: taking dumb tweets from his detractors and highlighting what’s dumb about them is the epitome of low-hanging fruit, for example. Are his jokes about trans individuals hateful and “dangerous”? If you claim to be woman and have a penis, I think at very least you are obligated to appreciate the opportunity for ironic and absurdist humor, and Gervais’s mockery of the pronouns battle is both funny and illuminating.

His most provocative comment is at the very end, as he defends humor in general against the assault of the offended. He’s a joke absolutist, which I question ethically, but his tale about he and his brother making a pact that if they ever thought of a remark that was funny, they would say it, “win, lose or draw,’ with no self-censorship has me intrigued. His reasoning is that humor serves as a balm for humanity, and there is a net loss if fear of one person’s negative reaction kills an unborn joke that might cheer, and uplift the spirits of others. At it core, this is a utilitarian argument.

1. When the only tool you have is a hammer... NYC City Councilwoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, who represents neighborhoods in Brooklyn, shot off this tweet:

What a bigot! What an idiot! She was so sure a white guy did the killing that she tweeted this without even checking, and sure enough, he was black. She’s the epitome of the current knee-jerk strategy of her party in response to virtually everything now. (Did I mention her party? Did I need to?)

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I Think We Can Safely Conclude That This Was Unethical…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In Brazil, a culture where respect for women is comparable to the U. S. in the early 19th Century, Gabriel Coelho forced Tayane Caldas, his 18-year-old ex-girlfriend, into his car as she was walking home from school.  He drove her to his home, and the 20-year-old Coelho then tattooed his full name on the girl’s face, as you can see above. Coelho claims that Tayane consented.

So I guess she wants to get back together with him…

Actually, that seems unlikely. For one thing, she had requested and received two restraining orders against Coelho, one in 2021 and another this year.  Still, Tayane’s mother had to encourage her daughter to press charges against her ex-boyfriend, as she was initially inclined to simply hide her new face tattoo with make-up. The fact that she even was thinking this way shows how primitive female self-esteem can be in Brazil.

Gabriel Coelho is under arrest, though his father backs his ridiculous defense that she consented to be branded. Of course he does. Men like Gabriel don’t turn out believing women are property without a role model.

If The Last Post (About Emerson College Promoting Anti-White Racism) Bothered You, Samuel L. Jackson Has A Suggestion Before You Read This One…[UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

In Illinois, Oak Park and River Forest High School administrators will now require teachers to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students. Let me repeat that…

Oak Park and River Forest High School administrators will now require teachers to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students.

This is called “Transformative Education Professional Development & Grading.” It’s transformative, all right. It is a great way to transform black students into societal cripples who cannot master what many behavioral scientists believe are the most crucial skills for life success, because they are given an institutional pass.

This ridiculous and divisive concept is, of course, yet another effort to eliminate persistent discrepancies between racial groups by pretending that they are caused by racism, and lowering standards so everyone has an equally low bar to clear.  OPRF will order its teachers to exclude from their grading assessments variables it says disproportionately hurt the grades of black students, like for missing class, misbehaving in school or failing to turn in  assignments. This will, you know—don’t they know?—set up black students to skip work, misbehave in other settings, and fail to complete their assigned jobs and tasks. Continue reading →

The Popular Culture Embraces Emerson College As Emerson College Embraces Anti-White Racism

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

As frequent readers here know, I frequently hear more ethics alarms in seemingly small things than in the major stories everyone else is talking about. This is one of those situations.

Boston’s Emerson College [full disclosure: my aunt got her speech degree there) is being promoted in the 4th season of Netflix’s cult fantasy/horror series “Stranger Things.” One of the shows heroines, Nancy Wheeler (played by Natalia Dyer), ostentatiously wears an Emerson T-shirt: she’s attending the liberal arts college in the 1980s, where the Stephen King-referencing show takes place. Now Emerson is cool. Copies of the shirt are being sold to support the victims’ families in Uvalde.

Emerson College is an enthusiastic agent of anti-white racist ideology that indoctrinates its students accordingly.

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A New Tale Of The Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck: The Home Test Cheating Algorithm

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Will there ever be any appropriate consequences for the Machiavellian politicians, incompetent health professionals, irresponsible teachers and fear-mongering journalists who collectively pushed the United States into a foolish, destructive and reckless lockdown in response to the Wuhan virus and its relatives? The harm inflicted on the nation, its culture and the public has been , and continues to be, catastrophic. In comparison to so many of the disastrous results of this deep self-inflicted wound, the travails of a young student unjustly accused of cheating doesn’t seem that consequential. What it demonstrates, however, is how many victims of the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck we don’t know about. I’m sure there are millions.

In truth, we know there are millions. For example, millions of people were forced to take bar exams, tests and quizzes alone at home on their laptops. Such conditions are not conducive to trustworthy or even meaningful tests, but never mind: the education community was willing to sacrifice learning for fear and bad science. Then there was the special bonus of getting rid of President Trump by knee-capping the economy.

At least remote proctoring companies boomed, offering web browser extensions that “detect keystrokes and cursor movements, collect audio from a computer’s microphone, and record the screen and the feed from a computer’s camera, bringing surveillance methods used by law enforcement, employers and domestic abusers into an academic setting.” Of course, as we learned in “War Games,” handing over critical tasks requiring judgments to machines has its drawbacks.

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Waiting For The Cool Cool Cool Of The Evening Ethics Breezes, 6/1/22: Hinckley, Depp, Wedding Snubs And Gun-Phobics

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I refused to do a post on the epicly stupid Johnny Depp/Amber Heard defamation trial (which I call the “Deppamation trial,”), but now that the verdict is in, I have some passing observations. If you haven’t heard, the jury vindicated Depp, awarding him Depp $15 million that due to a cap on Virginia’s punitive damages, will end up being only $10,350,000. Heard got an unsatisfying two million based on one of her allegations against Depp. Meanwhile:

  • In a healthy society, nobody would care. The media publicity the trial received, blotting out information on genuinely important events, is unforgivable. These are both sick narcissists, and Depp’s lawsuit was reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s insane defamation suit that ended up putting him in jail. Depp was revealed as a vicious creep, and Heard, whose fame depends on her association with Depp, was shown to be worse. Heard will lose money, but Depp, who actually is talented, now has the career prospects going forward of Kevin Spacey or Bill Cosby. But as he has hinted, he doesn’t care, as long as he stuck it to the former love of his life.
  • On Headline News this morning, they spent ten minutes analyzing this trial compared to 15 seconds on the Sussmann verdict.
  • If 10% of the fools that followed this idiocy spent the time reading Roe v. Wade, the Alito leaked draft, and District of Columbia v. Heller, instead, our society would have taken a major step toward responsible citizenship.

Yecchh.

1. I’m sure you will all be thrilled to hear that John Hinckley has been cleared to be a free man as of June 15. I know Jody Foster must be thrilled. I accept the conclusion that Hinckley was delusional when he shot Ronald Reagan, press secretary Jim Brady (inflicting permanent brain damage, a police officer and a Secret Service agent. Nevertheless, I believe that an assassin or would be assassin that inflicts such harm on the nation should never see the light of day again, no matter how mentally healthy treatment may render him. An assassin even crazier than Hinckley robbed the nation of President James Garfield, who might have been one of the great ones. We hanged him. I’m glad. Reagan was never the same after he was shot, and the least Hinckley should pay in compensation is his freedom.

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“Oh, That Wouldn’t Happen Here!” Wanna Bet?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

People always tell me they watch the BBC because it isn’t biased like American broadcast news. It must be the British accents: the BBC is relentlessly, overwhelmingly left-biased. This is a socialist nation that is smothered in political correctness. It’s at least as untrustworthy as any US news source.

Here’s a case in point: the BBC changed the testimony of a rape victim who referred to her alleged rapist as “him.” That was a reasonable choice on her part, because, well, because of the rapist’s “part.” Never mind: Facts Don’t Matter in jolly old England either: the victim’s words were changed to avoid “misgendering” the rapist in an article on the BBC website, which replaced every reference to “he” or “him” with “they” or “them.”

Wait—was it a gang rape? The BBC said in response to the episode was, “Our only intention when deciding on language is to make things as clear as possible for audiences.” Now that’s hilarious! In what universe is calling a single person “them” and “they” clearer than calling a rapist who did the deed with an attached male sex organ “he” and “him”?

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California Makes Its Values Depressingly Clear: Minority Privilege Over Children’s Lives

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Forget it, Jake, it’s California Town.

Two days after the Uvalde shooting, as all of California Democrats, progressives and anti-gun zealots were metaphorically screaming “Murderers!” at those who aren’t willing to gut the Second Amendment to pretend that various restrictions would stop evil lunatics like Ramos, the California State Senate voted to end a legal requirement that students who threaten violence against school officials be reported.

The old law mandated that whenever a school official was “attacked, assaulted, or physically threatened by any pupil,” staff must “promptly report the incident to specified law enforcement authorities.”

Gone. So, for example, the teacher in that screenshot above, taken from a video of an in-class assault, would not be obligated to report it. How odd that the state would eliminate such a restriction as the question rages over how so many people aware that the Uvalde shooter was an anti-social, gun-obsessed menace never alerted authorities. What could possibly be California’s thinking?

Oh, come on. It’s easy! I guessed—that proves it’s easy. The ACLU’s statement on why it supports the repeal tells all:

Decades of research show the long-term harm to young people of even minimal contact with the juvenile or criminal legal systems. Once students make contact with law enforcement, they are less likely to graduate high school and more likely to wind up in jail or prison. These harms fall disproportionately on students from marginalized groups: Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students, as well as students with disabilities, are disproportionately referred to law enforcement, cited, and arrested.

Taking the photo above as an example, that student is merely the victim of centuries of systemic racism, and justifiably enraged by a racist white supremacist culture. Reporting him just compounds the injustice.

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