DEI Ethics Train Wreck

Comment of the Day: “Discovered While Researching ‘Trump Derangement'(And Seeking A Cure)…”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

In “Pulp Fiction,” leading up to the film’s memorable twist scene with John Travolta and Uma Thurmond tripping the light fantastic for a prize at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, Uma notes how great it is to visit the rest room at a resturant and come back to your table to find that your order has arrived. Now in my case, I find it similarly wonderful to wake up bleary-eyed with my brain in second gear to find a qualified Comment of the Day waiting for me.

That was the case today with DaveL (one of Ethics Alarms’ five regular commenters) depositing on my metaphorical Ethics Alarms table an excellent debunking of the DEI “sales pitch,” as he described it, in the fake “Calvin and Hobbes” cartoon above.

DaveL uses facts to rebut Calvin. The wokeness-crippled progressives who approvingly post such garbage on my Facebook feed are, in contrast, just insisting they are certain of their warped world view because they have willed it so. I have given up arguing with such people: I used to link Ethics Alarms essays (and sometimes comments) on Facebook, but all that accomplished was losing “friends” and having the posts ignored. People don’t like having their faith challenged by ugly reality. They wouldn’t consider the post and went off somewhere to sing “Imagine.”

Sigh.

Get well soon, my friends.

Here is DaveL’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Discovered While Researching ‘Trump Derangement'(And Seeking A Cure)…”

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What Calvin says in the comic strip, like the words that DEI stands for, are the sales pitch. Just as there wasn’t a whole lot of genuine Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité to go around in the early years of the French Revolution, these slogans are a lie.

This is perhaps most plainly seen anywhere you have a years-long, multi-stage selection process. Take for instance the admission of new lawyers to the bar. There’s the SAT and undergraduate admissions, undergraduate performance and graduation, the LSAT and law school admissions, law school graduation, and finally the bar exam. What do these show us? That at every stage, DEI philosophy prioritizes the passing of low performers from favored demographics over higher performers from disfavored demographics.

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Discovered While Researching “Trump Derangement”(And Seeking A Cure)…

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The poster, who didn’t created the bad “Calvin and Hobbs” meme, is a Facebook freind, a Harvard grad, a performing arts executive and very nice man. I left his name off this because I don’t want to embarrass him. He made the silly and wrong comment on top of the meme, which he got off the page of the user below the meme, who authored the fatuous idiocy under it. He once was smarter than this. He is hopelessly Trump-Deranged: I have posted his symptoms on Ethics Alarms before.

Christina Lorey is a journalist who has hundreds of thousands of followers all over social media, and claims to be a “Good News” reporter. Is it “good news” that a journalist has so many followers who take such self-contradictory junk as what she wrote under Calvin and his friend (after having dumb words cruelly rammed down their throats) seriously?

I think her display is self-indicting (res ipsa loquitur) but to start you off:

1. Woke” does not mean “treating everyone the same” (it is the condition of trying to prove to doctrinaire progressives that you embrace all of their cant, narratives and delusions no matter how harmful and illogical, and thus deserve to exits), nor does “treating everyone the same” describe what DEI aims for. That definition is a radical concept, because people are, and always should be, treated according to their conduct and positive (or negative) value to society. It isn’t even a concept that my demented fried and his fellow travelers believe in or practice. Heck, they don’t even believe that elected American Presidents should be “treated the same.”

2. Calvin’s statement, in addition to being dumb and depressing in its stupidity unlike Calvin’s real observations, which were wise and funny, is self-rebutting. What it advocates is presumed racism, the rotten heart of the George Floyd Freakout, in which discriminating against whites is declared to be the necessary means of keeping the intrinsically evil race and the organizations members of that race lead from discriminating against minorities, which they will always do. A clogged toilet full of glaring examples renders this proposition null and void: disgraced DEI Harvard President Claudine Gay; Kamala Harris, of course (Do Democrats really believe that she was the best nominee they could find for either President of Vice-President?), the Worst Paid White House Liar Ever, Karine St.Pierre, now embarrassing herself and her party coast-to-coast on a book tour, the two DEI SCOTUS Justices, Sonia The Wise Latina and Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson; finally fired MSNBC host Joy Reid, the current and previous mayors of Chicago…you can add to the list if you have the time and stomach for it. Sure, no white candidates were more qualified and able than those villains and fools.

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Was Jen Pawol the Most Qualified Umpire or Was She Just “Historic”?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Over the weekend, minor league umpire Jen Pawol became the first woman to umpire in a Major League Baseball game, handling the bases in Game 1 of an Atlanta Braves-Miami Marlins doubleheader then moving behind the plate to call balls and strikes for Sunday’s game. Of course, MLB made a great hullabaloo over the momentous occasion. At various times during the season, minor league umpires are brought up to the big leagues to fill in for umpires getting their union-dictated vacations. Pawol is the only woman currently umpiring in the minor leagues. Thanks to baseball’s (and Commissioner Rob Manfred’s) wokeness obsession, she took her place in baseball history with a lingering and unavoidable doubt: would a man with her record and credentials have been chosen by MLB for the weekend umpiring chores? Were there more qualified and deserving male umpires who were passed over because they had y-chromosomes?

This is the scourge that the DEI fad has created. I feel sympathy for Pawol, but there is no avoiding it.

Naturally, MLB was ready for the questions and the suspicion. “Jen Pawol’s MLB debut is no PR stunt — she earned it the hard way” blared a Fox News headline, following an MLB press release. Methinks they doth protest too much. My suspicions were raised because just a few days earlier, the Boston Red Sox created team “history” by having an all-female broadcast team for a game. Why? Well, you know, because. The women were fine, professional play-by-play and color announcers, but nothing special except for their high voices. I’m sure there were plenty of long-time minor league male broadcasters who would have loved the chance to do a big league game, but, again, they wouldn’t be “historic,” so they were out of luck.

As with umpires, almost all baseball broadcasters are male and white. There’s no demonstrable discrimination at the heart of this: it’s self selection. Women don’t play hardball; blacks tend to be drawn to other sports as well. Why should that circumstance provide a special advantage to the minorities who do enter the field? Baseball doesn’t benefit from diversity of umpires: what matters is getting the calls right. Baseball fans want engaging, knowledgeable game broadcasts, and couldn’t care less about the sex and color of those providing it.

Meanwhile, there is still room for Manfred to carve out some more gratuitous history: baseball still hasn’t had a heterosexual female ump in the major leagues.

One More Reason To Despise The Unethical American Bar Association…

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative pubic interest law firm, commissioned research that demonstrated how the American Bar Association pressures law schools to adopt race- and sex-based hiring and admissions preferences using the threat of withholding its accreditation. The ABA oversees U.S. law school accreditation—this should stop—and abuses its power and woke biases to dictate law school discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity and gender in violation of Title VI and the U.S. Constitution. The report is titled,“Unconstitutional Accreditation Pressures Force Law Schools to Discriminate against Faculty and Students.”

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Comment of the Day 2, “All That Jazz” Edition: “Does Jazz Really Need DEI?”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I never know when a relatively obscure topic will strike a chord and produced a bumper crop of terrific comments. “Does Jazz Really Need DEI?”turned out to be such a post. Here is the second standout response, a Comment of the Day by johnburger 2013 on the post, Does Jazz Really Need DEI?

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Here I thought Berklee College of Music was a serious institution. Silly me. Any institution with the following mission statement should be dismissed:

“The mission of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice is to support and sustain a cultural transformation in jazz, with the commitment to recruit, teach, mentor, and advocate for musicians seeking to study or perform jazz, with gender justice and racial justice as guiding principles.” (emphases added).

Just out of curiosity, what the hell does “gender justice” mean and what does it have to do with vamping in E flatMinor? Do we only study songs written by women? Do women prefer major modalities over augmented fifths? Do women avoid playing the F#maj13add4addflat7 chord?

Music is the one medium where gender and race are monumentally irrelevant. Is Within Temptation fantastic because the lead singer is a woman? No. The combo is great because their music is complex and full of surprises. The Warning (my most recent favorite band) isn’t great because it consists of three Mexican sisters. No. They are great because their music is intricate and heavy. The fact that they started out very young and have gained world-wide recognition as a family band is interesting but they are phenomenal musicians and songwriters. Kiki Wongo isn’t great because she is a woman, but because she has talent and tone, and can melt your heart or tear your face off with her guitar playing (Smashing Pumpkins realized her greatness when they selected her out of 10s of thousands of applicants for their lead guitarist on their latest tours). Linda Ronstadt wasn’t great because she is a woman; she was great because her voice compelled attention and takes you on all kinds of sonic adventures. [Editor’s note: Linda cannot sing any more because of Parkinson’s, but she was indeed great, and is still a great interview.)

As for “racial justice,” does that mean that only minorities are allowed to play jazz? Dizzie Gillespie, Miles Davis and John Coltrane are not considered jazz geniuses because they were African American. No, they were great because they wrote and played the vocabulary for modern jazz. What about Buddy Rich? Was rich great because he was white? Hardly: he is great because he could play drums like nobody’s business and had a sublime sense of rhythm.

Comment of the Day 1, “All That Jazz” Edition: “Does Jazz Really Need DEI?”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The recent essay about the efforts of an apparently bonkers music school to apply DEI policies to the jazz world was really a “Bias Makes You Stupid” post, and perhaps I should have framed it that way. After all, nobody, no institution, no profession, no workplace “needs” DEI discrimination. As my father would say, the nation and society need DEI “like a hole in the head.” In fact, DEI is a metaphorical hole in the head of the nation allowing core American principles to leak out.

I found Sarah B’s Comment of the Day, prompted by Chris Marschner’s comment regarding the correlation between jazz improvisation ans mathematics ability, both fascinating and, as usual with Sarah’s comments, illuminating. (I also found the context of her use of the phrase “toot my own horn” brilliant. )Here it is, in response to the post, Does Jazz Really Need DEI?:

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As a woman musician and mathematician (my husband would claim engineers aren’t mathematicians, but the lay person sees no difference), I think there is one aspect of Jazz that you are forgetting. I tried Jazz and not only do I hate the sounds of Jazz (I like Chopin, Beethoven, and Holst as my personal preference), but I also found the emphasis on improvisation impossible. I cannot improvise music, or anything really. I have no skill at making up music, though if you give me sheet music not horrendously above my level, I’ll play it for you, at least with adequate practice. I can sing nearly anything (in my range) that you can throw at me in at least seven different languages, and with a little time, I can do them from memory. I have a repertoire of several hundred songs that I can pick up and perform adequately on a given day without much more than a little warmup. I read soprano and bass clefs before I read English (my only language). I dabble in 7 instruments, with 2 of those mastered “enough”.

All of this is not to toot my own horn. I have much I could do to improve my music, but I have other priorities and I am happy at “good enough”. However, with all this musical study, I have found that while I can do a lot, I CANNOT improvise, nor can I make up my own lyrics. This means that Jazz musicianship is beyond my reach. It takes a different type of mind than mine to be a good Jazz musician, and not just someone who knows the math and the theory. There is another element besides musical and mathematical thinking, that of a certain type of creativity.

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Twin Comments of the Day: “Popeye Time: I Am Finally Forced Into Responding To Woke Nonsense on Facebook”…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Two longtime and esteemed commenters delivered worthy comments of the day on the same post almost back-to-back, and I’ve decided that they should be posted that way, since the second referred to the first. The original post concerned my response on Facebook to a particularly facile and lazy defense of DEI.

Heeeeeere’s Here’s Johnny and Chris Marschner in their tag team Comment of the Day on the post, “Popeye Time: I Am Finally Forced Into Responding To Woke Nonsense on Facebook“…

Well, one good point by [the banned commenter whose name must never be spoken, BCWNMNBS for short ]: Avoid a rush to judgment, as in “Now THIS is legitimate guilt by association”.

But [BCWNMNBS] is wrong about allowance of liberal comments here. I’ve made a few myself, sometimes sincere (I’m bi-polar when it comes to politics), sometimes playing the role of a progressive just to provoke an argument and force a stronger defense of a position. So far, I’m still here.

As to that Facebook post, the demand to be specific is rather ironic since neither DEI nor the component parts of that acronym have specific definitions.

Diversity — the high school where I taught in my second career had a welcoming sign in the lobby that said “Strengthened by Diversity.” My own thought on that was that we are strengthened by unity, but enriched by diversity. But, then, the enrichment can lead to strengthening. But, the enrichment and the strengthening come from voluntary association, not forced association which usually is counterproductive. What does the FB poster have in mind for diversity? Hmmm. Don’t know. No specifics.

Equity — for Progressives, this seems to mean equal outcomes, which is destructive of initiative, individual effort, perseverance, and so on. Or, does it mean ensuring a broadening of opportunities? Again, I don’t know what the FB poster has in mind.

Inclusion — Again, don’t know, but this sure sounds like something forced on people, which would be contrary to a basic right of freedom of association.

So, to the FB poster, from now on, be proud of your opinions, state specifically what you mean, don’t hide behind a simplistic slogan, let everyone know exactly what it is you are promoting.

And, to [BCWNMNBS], who may still be lurking, what you see as sealioning could actually be a variant of the Socratic method. Motive matters, and often enough, the motive of the one asking the questions is perceived differently by an observer, but, in either case, the effect should be to cause a refinement or adjustment of an initial position on an issue.

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Soon thereafter, Chris Marschiner contributed Part II:

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Harvard Tries To Save Face; the Problem Is That It Is the Ethics Villain Here, Not the Trump Administration

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

We are learning that in spite of its grandstanding and feigned defiance of the Trump demands that it stop engaging in left-wing indoctrination, allowing an anti-Jewish environment to fester on campus, and engaging in viewpoint discrimination in hiring (along with other unethical conduct), Harvard is quietly (it hopes) negotiating some level of reform along the lines of the Trump Administration’s letter of April 11.

Quietly, because Harvard’s overwhelmingly leftist, totalitarian-tilting, progressive activist faculty wants to have their campus advance only one world view, the “right” one, and because of the sinister influence of that faculty, its student body overwhelmingly believes likewise. In the Trump Deranged world where most academics, scholars, journalists, lawyers and, of course, Democrats dwell, publicly deriding and defying the President of the United States is simply opposing fascism and the forces of darkness, even if the least intellectually crippled of them recognize deep down that President Trump is on the correct side of an issue. He is on the right side of this one.

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Popeye Time: I Am Finally Forced Into Responding To Woke Nonsense on Facebook…

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

A genuine, respected and dear friend re-posted this on Facebook:

Dr. Kristina Rizzotto created that thing; she is apparently a professional musician, so her doctorate isn’t in philosophy, public policy, law, or, clearly, linguistics. Shut up and play, Kristina.

Like Popeye, that was all I could stands ‘cuz I can’t stands no more, and I finally posted, after a good ten minutes of self-wrestling, this in response:

“Ugh. I don’t even want to wade into this, but come on. DEI is not the equivalent of three ethical virtues in a vacuum, and sure, diversity is nice; not not necessary or necessarily beneficial: the NBA doesn’t seek out white and Asian players to make it more “diverse,” because diversity doesn’t win basketball games. “Equity” means fairness, but the nation is built on equality of opportunity, not guaranteed equality of results, which is what “equity” means in the context of DEI. “Inclusion” is also nice, if it means the absence of deliberate arbitrary exclusion. If it means inclusion for the sake of inclusion, who said that’s virtuous or sensible? Who made that rule?

“Dr. Kristina is ducking the issue with intellectual dishonesty. Inclusion should be based on merit. Excluding anyone who would qualify for inclusion on merit, based on their sex, ethnicity, skin color, sexual orientation or physical characteristics is per se bias and illegal discrimination, and playing word games to deceive the inattentive and gullible into thinking otherwise is unconscionable. Similarly, black lives matter, but Black Lives Matter is a racist movement and a scam organization. Do better, Dr.”

I’m sure I’ll regret it.

The ABA Is Defending Its Racially Discriminatory Scholarships…Of Course It Is.

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Res ipsa loquitur, no?

In April, the American Alliance for Equal Rights led by Edward Blum, the scourge of affirmative action and “good discrimination” policies, filed a complaint in an Illinois federal court alleging that the American Bar Association’s 25-year-old Legal Opportunity Scholarship discriminates against white applicants. Since their skin color renders them unable to apply, this contention seems beyond debate. The question is whether, as a trade association, the ABA has a right to discriminate.

The Alliance said it is representing an unnamed white male law school applicant who says that he would apply for the $15,000 Legal Opportunity Scholarship were he not prevented from doing so because he is the “wrong” race. The ABA awards between 20 and 25 such scholarships annually to incoming law students, according to its website, which is excerpted above.

I should have covered this in April: sorry. [Believe me, if I could find a way to work on the blog full-time without ending up living on cat food and in a shack by the docks, I would.] Anyway, this kind of thing is why I do not pay dues to the ABA, and why I am suspicious of any lawyer who does. It is an interesting case. I assumed that Blum would lose if the case proceeded, and that his main objective was to shame the ABA into opening up the race-based scholarships to all. But the ABA has no shame. And I knew that.

The American Bar Association responded to Blum’s suit this week, arguing that a scholarship program designed to boost diversity among law students is protected free speech. The 25-year-old Legal Opportunity Scholarship, the largest lawyer association in the nation asserts, is protected under the First Amendment. In its motion to dismiss the ABA also claimed that plaintiff American Alliance for Equal Rights lacks standing to sue.

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