ignorance

DOUBLE KABOOM!! Ignorant, Abusive And Incompetent: How Much More Evidence Do We Need That Our Educators And Schools Are Untrustworthy?

/ Jack Marshall / 47 Comments

double KABOOM

I’m sorry to endanger the integrity of your head—mine may never be reassembled, by the looks of things—but here are two recent high school horror stories, one in Texas and one in Arizona, and they do not even involve sexual predators or kids being suspended for pretending to shoot someone with a finger gun.

I. The Two Dollar Bill

Two dollar bill

I’m going to just summarize this stunningly stupid story, and you can read the details here. 13-year-old eighth grader Danesiah Neal, a student  at Fort Bend Independent School District’s Christa McAuliffe Middle School, attempted to pay for her lunch one day with a two-dollar bill given to her by her grandmother. The lunch lady had never seen a $2 bill, so she alerted the school administrators, who called the police. THEY had apparently never seen a $2 bill, and told the girl that she was being investigated for counterfeiting, a felony, as the school allowed this idiocy to unfold. They called the grandmother, and told her she was under investigation too.

A campus officer traced the bill to where granny got it, a 7-11, and then cleverly traced the bill to…THE BANK, which informed these officious, incompetent morons that the two is a genuine piece of currency, and has been in circulation since 1862. Continue reading →

Where Do You Get The Idea That It’s OK To Insult My Dog?

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Rugby2

I was walking Rugby yesterday—that’s him above from a recent commercial photo-shoot–and ran into a young woman walking her West Highland Terrier. I like Westies, as does Rugby (but then, he also likes mail carriers, squirrels, my sister and once wagged his tail at a cockroach…), and I made some positive comments about the breed.

“Well, your dog certainly looks like he hasn’t missed many meals!” was her response. The ethicist programming blocked me from saying what first popped into my head, which was, “Well, neither do you, bitch,” and instead I attempted to enlighten her by saying, in a moderate tone,

“Actually, Rugby is an authentic, Jack Russell Terrier Association-certified Jack Russell, meaning that he is not the long-legged, faux monstrosity the AKC calls a “Parson Russell Terrier,” nor the much smaller toy-like version it calls the “Russell Terrier.” Jack Russell Terriers of the Irish, as in genuine variety, are certified by their personality and hunting traits, and not by looks alone. Thus they vary more in physical traits than AKC breeds, bred for show, and since the bulldog is part of the strange and wonderful alchemy that makes these dogs the bundles of joy they are, some Jacks, like Rugby and his still mourned predecessor Dickens, have a thick bulldog build, with a broad chest and stocky body. They are all muscle (“unlike your simpy terrier”–the ethicist filter blocked this too), and you may be surprised to learn, given the fact that he is at this moment acting more lively than your young dog, that Rugby is just short of 13 years-old, and thus just a bit heavier, but not much, than he was in his youth when the vet said he was as perfect a specimen of the breed as he has ever seen. Val Kilmer or Kirsty Alley he isn’t. He remains unslowed by time, and those meeting him for the first time often mistake him for a puppy, which is undoubtedly how he sees himself.”

She just walked on, hearing little of it.

Why do people think that making gratuitously critical comments about a stranger’s pet is any less rude and disrespectful than insulting a child or anything else that the individual obviously cares about? Continue reading →

Fairness Quandary In Britain: What To Do With A Dog That Ate His Master?

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments
No photo of Buster is available, but this is a Staffordshire Bull Terrier, and if this image fills you with fear and revulsion, you're an idiot, at least when it comes to dogs.

No photo of Buster is available, but this is a Staffordshire Bull Terrier, and if this image fills you with fear and revulsion, you’re dangerously ignorant, at least when it comes to dogs.

In Waterloo, England last September, a Staffordshire Bull Terrier named Buster (or Butch…he apparently answered to both names, much in the way I answer to my wife when she calls me “Jack” or “You Idiot”…) found himself in a situation reminiscent of the infamous 1972 Andes plane crash that forced its survivors to resort to cannibalism. His master died suddenly, leaving the dog trapped in the apartment without access to sustenance. After an undetermined amount of time and increasing desperation, Buster  decided “Oh, the hell with it” and ate a sufficient amount of his best friend to stay alive..

I know—“Ick.” Buster may well have felt the same way. Once police had made the grisly discovery, however, Buster found himself in big trouble even though he was was in an emaciated state that suggested that he didn’t do this for fun. The police claimed he was a danger to the community, and the deceased’s family made it clear that it wanted Buster to be put down. Dog lovers and animal rights groups insisted that Buster was a victim of circumstance and that absent evidence that he had plotted to convert his live master into a feast, there was no precedent for blaming the victim in such a case.

After all, those passengers who survived in the Andes by eating the bodies of their less-fortunate companions were not executed. They appeared on talk shows.

Why the different attitude? Well, let’s see: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Guardian Journalist Mona Chalabi

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments
But Mona, doesn't you correcting people who correct people's grammar and calling them purveyors of white privilege make you an ANTI-grammar snob?

But Mona, doesn’t you correcting people who correct people’s grammar and calling them purveyors of white privilege make you an ANTI-grammar snob?

This won’t take long. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

Mona Chalabi, a  journalist for the British tabloid “The Guardian,” has asserted that correcting someone’s grammar (and presumably word use, sentence structure and other aspects of effective communication) is racist.

“Grammar snobs are patronizing, pretentious, and just plain wrong, ” she says. “It doesn’t take much to see the power imbalance when it comes to grammar snobbery. The people pointing out he mistakes are more likely to be older, wealthier, whiter, or just plain academic than the people they’re treating with condescension. All too often, it’s a way to silence people, and that’s particularly offensive when it’s someone who might already be struggling to speak up.”

Of course, correcting anyone to humiliate them, embarrass them, or make them hesitant to speak is cruel and wrong, as would be slapping them in the face and shouting, “Shut up, fool!”  Neither of these, or other examples of bad manners and disrespectful treatment, is the conduct that Chalabi is condemning as a demonstration of white privilege, however. (Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, frequently quips, “White privilege—is there anything it can’t do?”) No, she is saying that the simple act of one human being pointing out to another that they have made a verbal mistake that may embarrass the speaker in the future makes the person offering the correction a “grammar snob,” and is unethical.

To the contrary, correcting anyone’s mistakes in speaking, when done with discretion and proper attention to the speaker’s feelings, is a gift, an act of social kindness and even a social obligation. Expressing oneself in a manner that causes others to conclude, possibly correctly, that you do not know correct meanings, grammar, construction and etiquette is a serious life handicap and an obstacle to success. A listener may conclude that you are badly educated, do not read, do not listen to those who speak to you correctly sufficiently to learn from them, are ignorant, are not very bright, or worse, know how to communicate but don’t have enough respect for the rest of the world to make an effort to do so. Unlike concluding such unflattering things about a stranger or casual acquaintance based on an accent or verbal regionalism, making judgments based on poor communication skills is not prejudice or bias. Communication is a vital life skill and occupational tool. Every individual has an obligation to master these as early as possible, certainly by young adulthood. Believing one has done this and being wrong is a dangerous and potentially tragic situation. Continue reading →

Observations On Donald Trump’s Harriet Tubman Comments

/ Jack Marshall / 94 Comments

Harriet.Tubman 20

Don’t worry. Despite Donald Trump’s supposed “new leaf” that has him trying act and sound “presidential,” he’s going to continue to say ignorant, stupid and offensive things, because he really doesn’t know what is “presidential,” or ignorant, stupid and offensive, for that matter.

Today’s example was his off-the-cuff commentary about Harriet Tubman replacing President Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill.Trump said:

“I think Harriet Tubman is fantastic. I would love to leave Andrew Jackson and see if we can come up with another denomination. Maybe we do the $2 bill or another bill. I don’t like seeing it. Yes, I think it’s pure political correctness. He’s been on the bill for many, many years and really represented somebody that was really very important to this country.”

Observations:

1. Ethics Alarms offers this competence and responsibility-based rule for public figures, especially those running for President of the United States.

If you can’t say something that is constructive, coherent and adds substance to the discussion, keep your opinion to yourself.

Of course, that would mean Trump would seldom get to say anything. Still, this statement was completely gratuitous, vapid, clumsy and wrong. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month—But Awfully Revelatory, If You Have The Integrity To Accept What It Means—California Gov. Jerry Brown

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

0404_NWS_LDN-L-BROWN-DC

“Economically, minimum wages may not make sense. But morally, socially, and politically they make every sense because it binds the community together to make sure parents can take care of their kids.”

—–Governor Jerry Brown on April 4, as he signed into law a phased state-wide increase in the minimum wage to $15 dollars an hour.

As Commentary wrote in reaction to this jaw-dropping admission following an irresponsible act, “Good intentions have always inoculated the left against criticisms of the consequences of their policy preferences.” This has become a culture-wide, self-destructive malady during the Obama administration, led by the President. Lately, Obama has become increasingly open about it, as when the President killed the Keystone pipeline citing climate change concerns while admitting that doing so would have no likely effect on climate change, but most of his “signature policies” are similar. The Iran deal bids fair to leave Israel as a smoldering wasteland, and the Iranian government has gone out of its way to demonstrate that it cannot be trusted while already violating, as even Obama admits, the “spirit” of the deal, but God Bless Obama for trying to restrain its nuclear ambitions.

The Affordable Care Act is failing in virtually every respect, fulfilling most of the dire predictions of its opponents, but this is still an “achievement” because, and it’s true, more Americans are insured than before. Obama’s Education Department’s sincere—I’ve no doubt about it—effort to make women feel supported and safe on college campuses seeded extensive due process abuse and discrimination against male students, and the most-gender divided campus community since the Seventies. His civil rights policies and rhetoric have created the worst racial divide since the early 1960’s. The intentions in all of these cases were, at least arguably, impeccable and admirable, and apparently for committed progressives, it is that, and not that the policies in pursuit of Panglossian goals have been societally disastrous, that matters.

The mass insanity of raising the minimum wage is the apotheosis of this mania. Note that I am trying to attribute the best possible motives with this: I have read many conservative writers who believe that the left knows the policy will be catastrophic economically, but because it will be politically useful in the short-term, they don’t care about the long-range consequences. Admittedly, statements like Brown’s makes this difficult for me not to agree with them, except that it is usually considered stupid to tell voters that what you are doing makes no sense.

To state what should be obvious, if  large minimum wage increases don’t make sense economically, that means they are bad policy, incompetent, and thus unethical. And we know–know—that they do not make sense economically.

Here’s economist Robert Samuelson: Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Idaho State Representative Pete Nielsen (R-Mountain Home)

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments
Now, do I think Pete doesn't look too bright only because I know he isn't too bright? I think so...

Now, do I think Pete doesn’t look too bright only because I know he isn’t too bright? I think so…

There are two reasons to deride Rep. Nielsen. First, by his own words he is marked as an idiot unworthy not only off high office but of public trust, and second, he either has  been paying no attention to epic, infamous, well-publicized catastrophes in his own party, or doesn’t have a brain pan of sufficient depth to comprehend them.

Surely you remember Todd Akin, the Missouri GOP Senate candidate in 2012, who blew his party’s chances of taking a eminently winnable seat from the horrible Claire McCaskill by uttering this nonsense on the issue of whether rape-caused pregnancies should be an exception to abortion restrictions:

“It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down…”

He was ridiculed, he was attacked, he was mocked, and from all parties and ideologies, for his magical theory that a woman’s body knows the difference between “legitimate rape” and the nice kind of sexual intercourse. (Oddly, none of those “doctors” ever came forward, perhaps because they were wearing diapers and had turnips sticking out of their ears. Somehow, Pete Nielsen missed all of that, and so during a debate in the Idaho Legislature on bill that would require women seeking abortions to be given a list of providers of free ultrasounds, when it was noted that the measure makes no exception for victims of rape or incest, he piped up with this:

“Now, I’m of the understanding that in many cases of rape it does not involve any pregnancy because of the trauma of the incident. That may be true with incest a little bit.”

Now, if he had been immediately pelted with wadded up papers, soda cans and other things by his  horrified colleagues, may be would have had the sense to stop digging, but, being an idiot, he didn’t. Asked how he knew this absolute non-medical non-fact as reliable as the theory that you can catch AIDS from a toilet seat, Nielsen said, “That’s information that I’ve had through the years. Whether it’s totally accurate or not, I don’t know. “I read a lot of information. I have read it several times. … Being a father of five girls, I’ve explored this a lot.”

Wait, what? Never mind, I don’t want to think about that last part. Continue reading →

Yes Indeed, Elite College Grads Can Still Be Civically Incompetent Fools

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments
They have been rumored, and caught in dubious, fuzzy photos, but does an intelligent, rational Donald Trump supporter really exist? The quest continues...

They have been rumored, and caught in dubious, fuzzy photos, but does an intelligent, rational Donald Trump supporter really exist? The quest continues…

In my constant quest to find someone, anyone, who can defend their support of Donald Trump with a substantive argument rather than the emotional, nonsensical rationalizations I have heard and read so far, I came upon  a USA Today essay by “Weekly Standard” contributing right-winger Charlotte Allen—she is kind of like Ann Coulter, but not funny— called “Why a Stanford grad joined the Trump revolt.” I was momentarily thrilled, then my hopes were immediately dashed. The answer to the headline’s question is simply “Because graduates of prestigious schools can be just as irresponsible and ignorant as anyone else.” Her pathetic essay proves it.

To begin with, appeal to authority is a lazy debate fallacy (“Proposition X is valid because Authority A says so”—you know, like “bats are blind because Neil De Grasse Tyson says so”…), but appealing to your own authority is ridiculous. “I went to Stanford, and I voted for Donald Trump. So did my husband. He went to Yale,” Allen begins. The required response: Who the hell cares? The only people who think a degree means you are smart are dumb people, some of whom have impressive degrees themselves.

Now, the essay could have been so dazzling in its pro-Trump logic that it simultaneously redeemed Trump supporters and the two schools the piece embarrasses. It was not.

The essay begins with the boot-strapping argument that it isn’t ignorant and irresponsible to vote for Trump because in Massachusetts a lot of educated people voted for him. “Low-information voter” doesn’t mean uneducated voter, however. It means people who aren’t paying attention, or who filter out information they don’t want to hear, or who are informed in some areas but get their political news from partisan websites and cable stations.  Continue reading →

An Ethics Alarms Audit: Who Or What Is At Fault For The Rise Of Donald Trump?

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

I have intentionally avoided most of the many articles that have used the unsettling rise of Donald Trump as a Presidential contender to attack their favorite targets—talk radio, Republicans, Obama, the Tea Party, the “elites,” the news media, reality TV…it’s a long list. One of the few I did read was this one, by Peggy Noonan. Its main thesis:

“The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment—another word for the protected—nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance. Mr. Trump came from that…What marks this political moment, in Europe and the U.S., is the rise of the unprotected. It is the rise of people who don’t have all that much against those who’ve been given many blessings and seem to believe they have them not because they’re fortunate but because they’re better….This is a terrible feature of our age—that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens. And a country really can’t continue this way.”

Yup. That’s how populist uprisings always start, and Noonan properly diagnosed this one. Still, it was neither pre-ordained nor necessary that the individual such a movement would unite around had to be such a dangerous, unstable and unworthy one, or that the citizens supporting him would display such complete absence of logic and responsibility.

Reading the debates between Trump supporters and detractors on various websites, I am reminded of the classic “Simpsons” episode where Springfield split into two warring factions, the Mensa group, and the anti-Mensa group. The latter was characterized by angry stupidity, and if a member made a logical and coherent argument against the astute and educated opposition, he would be instantly ejected with the cry, “You’re one of them!”

Herman Kahn, the futurist, used to say that even the best plans, organizations, and systems could be unsettled by “the 2% contingency of bad management or bad luck.” The United States has been very fortunate in its approximately 250 years’ experiment. Bismarck famously said that “There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America,” and at times it has seemed that way. When the nation’s management failed, the U.S. has been astoundingly lucky. When it has been unlucky, brilliant leaders have been on hand to manage the problem. The Trump phenomenon illustrates the fact of existence that luck eventually runs out: so far, bad luck and bad management have joined forces to produce the threat of a Donald Trump presidency.

There are many people, groups and institutions responsible for Trump getting this far, and it is dishonest, incompetent and unfair to blame one without identifying the rest. Each was arguably essential to the chaotic mix, and thus nothing and no one deserves to be cited as “the” cause.

Here, in rough but not definitive particular order, are the main miscreants. I’ve limited myself to eleven, but the list could easily be longer.
 Continue reading →

Twitter Makes Us Stupid, Twitter Makes Neil deGrasse Tyson Look Stupid, Twitter Allows Neil deGrasse Tyson To Make His Fans Stupid

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

bats

Great.

Twitter is a wonderful medium for people who can only digest simple thoughts, as well as for those whose full powers of observation and analysis can be expressed in 140 characters. For everyone else, the social media device is an invitation to emote with inadequate thought, and to demonstrate undesirable character traits like arrogance, carelessness, recklessness and poor judgment.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, for better or worse, currently fills the niche of Pop Culture Smart Person, or PCSP. This is a role that has genuine cultural value, and has fallen in the past to such figures as Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Bill Nye and Stephen Jay Gould, among others. Smart people accepted by the broader culture can do more to help banish bad ideas, myths and biases than years of formal education, but they must wield their power with care, guard their credibility and appearance of integrity, and most of all, not abuse the trust of their fans.

In these matters, Tyson is a most irresponsible PCSP.  He ventures into partisan politics too frequently, is a media attention addict, and worst of all, he is addicted to Twitter, where he regularly tweets factoids barely worthy of a bubble gum wrapper and makes jokes that display his sophomoric sense of humor—for example, “If you removed all arteries, veins and capillaries from your body and laid them end to end, you’d die.” Steven Wright, he isn’t.

Those tweets are just embarrassing. However, it is affirmatively damaging when a man recognized as being educated and wise issues outright false scientific facts, like he did with a recent tweet announcing,

“If Batman wants so badly to be a bat, he might be more intriguing if (like Marvel’s Daredevil) he were also blind, like a Bat.”

Continue reading →