Ethics Dunces : Michigan State University Student Feminists

August 7, 2016August 7, 2016 / Jack Marshall / 122 Comments

Higher education progressives, students, professors and administrators alike, are seriously confused about ethics, and some basic principles like fairness, respect, equity, and competence, not to mention common sense. How did they come to such a state?

For various reasons, none of them reasonable, Michigan State University had maintained that gender segregation was appropriate in the student Union, and a study lounge there was designated for women only. Perhaps we can forgive the school’s initial judgment in this case, since the Union’s Women’s Lounge, located on the main floor of the MSU Union, debuted in 1925, just five years after women gained the right to vote.Men vastly outnumbered women then, and were looked upon as oddities, or perhaps temptation.

It is 2016, however, and women are demanding equality where it may already exist, and declaring gender discrimination where it may not, so the continued existence of the male excluding lounge was more than a bit anachronistic. After all, Harvard College just declared war on any male student who dared to belong to off-campus all-male clubs, since even freedom of association away from school is deeply offensive to the progressive values of Ivy League educators.

Then a University of Michigan-Flint professor named Mark Perry, filed a complaint to the Michigan Department of Civil Rights towards MSU alleging that the lounge violated federal anti-discrimination law, which it obviously does. Continue reading →

Unethical Website Of The Month: Daily Forest

August 5, 2016August 5, 2016 / Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

My dog didn’t make the list.

Daily Forest published one more of the ever-popular link-bait dog lists and slide shows. My sister sent it to me for the dog photos, which are lovely. the post was so incompetent, misleading and full of errors and anti-breed propaganda that I spent most of the slid show grimacing. Nobody connected with the post—the editor, the author, the site itself—knows anything about dogs. Thus it is a disservice to readers, the public and dogs to allow this misinformation and innuendo to be published. My rule: absent a take-down, a remedial post and an abject apology, this kind of unethical post flags an unethical, untrustworthy website.

The post was titled, “21 of the World’s Most Dangerous Dog Breeds.”

That’s misleading immediately. There are no “dangerous dog breeds.” There are individual dogs that are maladjusted, abused or trained to be aggressive. Individuals of large breeds are obviously more dangerous when they are maladjusted, abused or aggressive than say, tea-cup poodles, but that doesn’t make the breeds themselves “dangerous.” It is this sloppy and inaccurate characterization that has led to the deplorable “dangerous breed laws” in various states, cities and Great Britain, and the scare-mongering anti-dog zealots who persecute dogs and their owners.

The list itself is ridiculous. #2, naturally (behind boxers, about as loving and perfect a family dog as there is) is “pit bulls.” “Pit bulls,” as used here and elsewhere on the web, isn’t a breed, but a conglomeration of several very different breeds that people who are ignorant of breeds mix up. None of the breeds are dangerous, but here’s where the list signals its abject incompetence. The picture the site uses for pit bulls isn’t even one of the breeds lumped in with “pit bulls,” but this…

…a Corso Cano, the Italian mastiff. I recognized the breed immediately, being something of a mastiff-lover. This is the breed owned by Ray Donovan’s wife on the Showtime series “Ray Donovan.” It’s not a pit bull breed, because all of those breeds have terrier forebears. Anyone who thinks this is a “pit bull” doesn’t know a dachshund from a soccer ball, and has as much business writing or editing a post about dogs as Felix the Cat. Morons. The list even includes Corso Canos later on,and has a picture that is obviously of the same breed used under pit bull in the same post. Continue reading →

Ethically, Caster Semenya Points Us Directly To Gender-Free Sports Competition, And There Is No Ethical Way To Avoid It

August 3, 2016August 3, 2016 / Jack Marshall / 66 Comments

Ethics Alarms first mentioned female runner Caster Semenya in this essay , when the international sports community was debating the South African track champion’s fitness for competition. Caster, depending on who you believe, is either a woman, intersex, a woman with freakishly high levels of testosterone in her body, or a man who identifies as a woman. What is undeniable is that she is faster than most women, and maybe all of them, and her unique physical make-up, whatever you want to call it, gives her an advantage. Since the last Olympics, Caster has been forced to take drugs that inhibited her body’s production of testosterone.Then, in July 2015 , the Switzerland-based Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned the 2011 IAAF regulations that restricted testosterone levels in female athletes. They also suspended hyperandrogenism regulations for two years. Now Semenya will be able to compete as she is naturally, and because she will, she is widely expected to smoke the competition.

Is it fair to let her run? Is it fair not to let her run? After this year of controversy and confusion over gender, with boys and men “identifying as women” and transgender discrimination laws roiling the culture wars, this is a perfect time for an intersex champion. Then, presumably, all hell will break loose. A sports scientist tells The Guardian,

“I’m actually dreading the Olympics. People only want to hear a good story so when Semenya wins gold the South African media will go crazy. If she breaks the world record, which I think she will, it’ll be even crazier. You can lie and say: ‘Happy days. Let’s celebrate our golden girl’ – which the politicians and media want. Or you can be honest and principled and say: ‘Actually, there are many things we need to address.’ That’s very unpopular”

Society and sports have reached the point the ethical solution is obvious and unavoidable, and, unfortunately, brutal. If society is accepting the fact that a binary gender distribution is a myth, and there may be seven, ten, or dozens of gender variations along a spectrum, then integrity and consistency—and fairness—demands that gender distinctions in sport be eliminated as arbitrary. Continue reading →

Beauty Contest Ethics, Diversity Ethics, Bizarro Word Ethics: The Miss Teen America Pageant

August 1, 2016August 1, 2016 / Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Bizarro World Ethics is a useful if mind-melting concept. Since Superman Comics’ Bizarro World contains a backwards—literally—civilization in which everything is the opposite of the way it is on Earth, the ethics are necessarily backwards too. What is right, in a culture where the populace not only says hello for good-bye, but also eats the plates while throwing away the food? Can wrong be right in such a weird place? Does right become wrong? Or is the whole idea of ethics impossible in Bizarro World?

Beauty contests today are like Bizarro World. They are inherently anachronistic, embodying the correctly discredited concept that beauty equals virtue. They also are based on the fiction that beauty can be objectively qualified and compared with sufficient precision that a decision holing that gorgeous Contestant D, who is Asian and brunette, is objectively more beautiful than gorgeous black Contestant C, gorgeous Hispanic Contestant B, or gorgeous white Contestant A isn’t arbitrary and completely subjective. Bodybuilding competitions and dog shows have the same problem, as do the Academy Awards. For pure, obvious stupidity and dishonesty, however beauty contests beat them all. This is why the topic has inspired some terrific film satires, like “Smile,” “Drop Dead Gorgeous,” and even “Little Miss Sunshine.”

We all know—don’t we?—that beauty contests are really just excuses to give guys a chance to gawk at scantily dressed pulchritudinous women. This is what makes Miss Teen America the most icky of the breed: the contestants are scantily dressed women who consent to being lust-objects for men the age of the their fathers and grandfathers. What is ethics in such a spectacle? The whole enterprise is constructed of unethical components.

The Miss Teen USA pageant was pronounced ethical, for example, after announcing they would discontinue the swimsuit segment of the competition, replacing it with a parade of the contestants in athletic gear, because the swimsuits made the young women look like sex objects and eye candy. You know…not like this:

Muuuuch better. No dirty old man is going to be salivating at that.

But over the weekend all that good publicity for pretending to be about something other than rewarding lovely teens for being walking pin-ups on national television collapsed when this diverse. multi-color, multi-ethnic group of beauties..

…was narrowed down to these five finalists, the best of the best, the fairest of them all, after all the numerical scores were tallied and checked and double-checked:

This caused some unhappiness among the diversity police, as you might imagine. Tweeted super-model Chrissy Teigen, who looks like this..

“Wow how can we choose from such a diverse bunch”

Continue reading →

Leading Candidate For Most Unethical Opinion Column Of 2016: Daily Beast Editor Goldie Taylor

July 29, 2016July 29, 2016 / Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

How a major U.S. news and public affairs website can produce an article like Daily Beast Editor-At-Large Goldie Taylor’s is a fertile subject for inquiry, as is the question of how much the ignorant, un-American, values-warping assertions it contains are reinforced throughout our rising generations’ education and socialization. Those investigations must wait for another day, when I have the stomach for it.

For now, let’s just consider what Taylor wrote. It is titled “Six Baltimore Cops Killed Freddie Gray. The System Set Them Free,” an unethical headline that kindly warns us regarding the awfulness to come. No, six Baltimore cops did not kill Freddie Gray, as far as we, or the system, knows based on the evidence. That Taylor would state such an unproven and unprovable statement as fact immediately makes her guilty of disinformation, and shows that she is willfully ignorant of the principles of American justice, as well as too hateful and biased to comprehend them. Damn right the system set them free. That’s because in the Freddie Gray cases the system worked spectacularly well, despite the best efforts of an incompetent and biased prosecutor to make it do otherwise.

And that was just the title. The rest is infinitely worse: if you are feeling sturdy, read it all here. If not, the selected highlights (lowlights?) to follow will suffice.

Taylor wrote early on, Continue reading →

The New “Ben-Hur” And The Casting Ethics Double Standard

July 28, 2016 / Jack Marshall / 80 Comments

Thank-you, O producers of the new “Ben-Hur,” for so quickly after my post ridiculing the new politically correct casting ethics in Hollywood—according to Turner Movie Classics, it’s just soooo wrong to cast an Anglo Saxon like Charlton Heston as a Mexican, for example—-coming out with the official trailer proving that the new, enlightened casting ethics really only applies when it means it takes jobs away from white actors. Okay, just American white actors. Or something….actually, this casting ethics rules are kind of made up as things shake out.

Which was what I thought all along.

In the 1959 Ben-Hur (starring, ironically, White Guy Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur ), the plum part of Shiek Iderim was played by brilliant Welsh character actor Hugh Griffith, whose performance rightly won him an Academy Award. Yes, he wore dark make-up, because actors wear make-up. Ah, but these are enlightened days, and now we know, because it has been decreed by Ben Mankiewicz and the rest of the heralds of politically correct casting, that the casting of a master comic actor of unique gifts who was an audience favorite to play the sheik was insensitive and essentially racist, not to mention unfair to all of those unemployed but equally adept Arab actors qualified to play the part. So who plays the sheik in the new, improved, enlightened “Ben-Hur’?

Morgan Freeman.

Who looks as much like an Arab as Bruce Lee. Continue reading →

The Final Insult: The DNC Issues A Cynical, Evasive And Dishonest “Apology”

July 26, 2016July 26, 2016 / Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The DNC is offering one for free!

I have been asked why none of the various ethical horrors emerging from the Democratic Party ( as in rigging its nomination process), the Democratic National Committee (as in claiming, in spite of smoking-gun evidence, that Hillary Clinton won the nomination “fair and square”) and Hillary Clinton ( as in immediately hiring the ex-chair of the DNC after she had been dumped for overseeing the unethical nomination process manipulation) rated a KABOOM! label, which is reserved for unethical conduct so stunning that it causes my head to explode. The reason is simple. Being well-acquainted with the depth of Hillary Clinton’s corruption and her documented ability to corrupt others, I am immune to such episodes, which no longer can bring my brain to the necessary boil.

I must admit, however, that the DNC’s outrageous apology to “Senator Sanders, his supporters, and the entire Democratic Party” issued tonight (it’s Monday evening, the first night of the Democratic National Convention) nearly did it. My skull almost blew.

I’m sure there have been more deceitful, evasive, too-cute-by-half and insulting apologies by major institutions. Well maybe not. Anyone who accepts this slap in the face of accountability as anything better than a sham is either a fool, or complicit in the Democratic Party’s machinations.

Here is the “apology”:

According to the Ethics Alarms Apology Scale, this is both a Level 9 and a Level 10 apology, which is to say a stinking, steaming pile of excrement, and about as unethical as an apology can be. Continue reading →

More On The DNC E-Mail Scandal: Proposition Proved! An Unethical Organization, Seeking To Respond To The Revelation Of Corrupt Practices, Will Only Further Demonstrate The Depth Of Its Unethical Nature [Part 2]

July 25, 2016July 25, 2016 / Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

“Fair and square,” eh Donna?

[Items 1-5 are covered in the previous post, More On The DNC E-Mail Scandal: Proposition Proved! An Unethical Organization, Seeking To Respond To The Revelation Of Corrupt Practices, Will Only Further Demonstrate The Depth Of Its Unethical Nature,Part I]

6. Donald Trump remains, and will remain, the riskiest option for President in 2016, simply because he has no qualities and no experience that qualify him for high office, and many, many traits and habits that disqualify him absolutely. Nonetheless, not since Richard Nixon has a presidential candidate been more likely, if elected, to get enmeshed in scandals involving abuse of power and the violation of laws than Hillary Clinton. Democrats and anyone else who votes for her must understand this. Clinton’s lauditory statement about Wasserman Schultz is proof of it, as was her State Department e-mail scheme. She will encourage and support dishonest, undemocratic schemes in pursuit of her agenda. Nothing could be more certain.

7. The key question is this: How can Clinton herself, and not just the ex-DNC chair, not be held accountable for the nomination fix? Are Democrats satisfied with that result: she coordinates the rigging of the system, and completely benefits from the plot, achieving everything she sought, and the only one punished is an official who should have been fired long ago? Poignantly asks New York Times columnist Charles Blow, as reliable a Democratic Party apologist as walks the earth,

“What are those Democratic voters supposed to do who don’t trust the candidate, the party or the process, even if they view The Donald as the Devil?”

Continue reading →

More On The DNC E-Mail Scandal: Proposition Proved! An Unethical Organization, Seeking To Respond To The Revelation Of Corrupt Practices, Will Only Further Demonstrate The Depth Of Its Unethical Nature [PART 1]

July 25, 2016July 25, 2016 / Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“Hands up! Don’t shoot!”

Last week, the Republicans revealed to the world how untrustworthy it had become under the curse of Donald Trump during its ugly convention. The Democratic Party has, against all odds, still managed to equal them, proving beyond all doubt that it is equally untrustworthy—and equally loathsome—before its convention even started. Debating which party debased itself more is a ludicrous exercise—“more untrustworthy” is like “more pregnant”—but boy, it’s hard to conceive of more cynical, “We’re corrupt to the core and proud of it!” behavior than the Democratic Party’s reaction to the Wikileak-ed DNC e-mails.

Many of my progressive Facebook friends spent last week knocking themselves out gloating, and writing screeds beginning with “How can anyone look at themselves in the mirror and say they support the Republican Party?” If they have integrity—and most of them don’t, being thoroughly infected with partyism, bias, and Clinton Corruption–they will be asking their mirrors the same question, with the substitution of one key word.

Here is the unethical aftermath as it has unfolded so far, and what it revealed to anyone not in denial:

1. As I predicted, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was designated official scapegoat for the entire party’s primary season-wide cheat, as if she rigged the nomination all by herself, and nobody else knew. Indeed, the damning e-mails revealed that the whole DNC staff management was involved in an organization-wide plot to guarantee the nomination for Clinton, undermine Sanders, and lie to the nation that it was an open and fair process. If the staff knew, the party leaders knew. If the party leaders knew, Hillary Clinton knew….and anyone who argues that she didn’t know is either so dumb or so corrupt themselves that I wouldn’t recommend letting them house-sit for you.

My brain hurts from trying to come up with a suitably descriptive analogy. Is this like one of bullet-riddled Sonny Corleone’s assassins kissing his forehead and saying “There! Boo-boo all better?” Is it as if Major League Baseball’s response to the 1919 Black Sox scandal and its rigged World Series was to fire the corrupted team’s manager and let the players who took the bribes continue as if nothing happened? The best analogy is probably the most obvious one: Wasserman Schultz is a scapegoat in the traditional sense of the word, a symbolic living vessel let loose in the wilderness to atone for the sins of the people. Of course, that practice was cynical and idiotic, but understandably popular with everyone but the goat. Continue reading →

Observations On The Leaked DNC E-mails

July 24, 2016July 24, 2016 / Jack Marshall / 71 Comments

“Thanks for all your good work for me, Debbie! And thank the rest of the DNC staff too!”

1. In case you missed it—and there were a lot of people trying to make sure you did—the illegal hacking organization Wikileaks released nearly 20,000 stolen e-mails from the Democratic National Committee. It is, by any estimation, a scandal, and potentially a devastating one. You can read various takes on it from Heat Street, BuzzFeed, NPR, The Daily Beast, CNN, BizPac Review, Business Insider, The New York Observer, Fox News Insider, Associated Press, The Daily Caller, Mediaite, and the Associated Press. Among other things, the e-mails show that the Democratic National Committee was actively colluding to undermine Bernie Sanders and ensure that Hillary Clinton won the race to become the Democratic nominee. That means that the Democratic Party, while holding itself out as running a fair nomination process to be determined by primaries and voters while the party played neutral referee, was in fact cheating. It was fixing the competition. It lied to Democratic voters and the nation.

I think that’s a big deal.

2. Objective observers and commentators knew this was the orientation of the DNC long before the leaks, of course. It was obvious, or should have been, that the fix was in. The party tried to make sure that no real competition for Clinton emerged to challenge her for the nomination, despite her obvious weaknesses as a candidate and her self-evident corruption. All that Hillary had to overcome were a Star Wars cantina of token opposition: Sanders, an elderly socialist crackpot; Jim Webb, a conservative, sort-of-Democrat maverick with even less charm than Hillary; Martin O’Malley, a lightweight former governor with no policy positions that varied significantly from Clinton’s, and whatever the heck ex-Republican Lincoln Chafee was supposed to be. Even against this motley crew, Hillary might well have lost in a fair contest, just as she did to an unproven, inexperienced junior Senator from Illinois in 2008. But Clintons don’t do “fair,” and the DNC was willing to serve as her accomplice. Thus the party appointed Hillary-supporting “superdelegates,” including Hillary’s husband and many former Clinton appointees and previous enablers. Thus they held as many debates as possible on weekends and opposite major sporting events, so as few undecided people as possible would be exposed to the inevitable Clinton gaffes, lies, and awkward public persona.

2. There should be little sympathy for indignant Democrats who are shocked—-shocked!—that the leaked emails show that the DNC was trying to sabotage Sanders and push Clinton over the finish line. Hillary cheats. Everyone knows that. Everyone knew that before she announced her candidacy. She was cheating all along, just like she was lying about her State Department e-mails all along, and continues to lie about her Goldman Sachs speeches. Knowing all that, with an obligation to his conveniently adopted party and his principles to try to stop a manifestly unfit woman from gaining power, Bernie Sanders still refused to attack Clinton where she is least fit to be President: her character. All the pieces were there. If the Wikileaks leaks were necessary for Sanders and his supporters to figure out that they were the marks in a rigged game, they are too gullible and pathetic to be involved in politics. Continue reading →

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