political correctness

“Everyday Feminism,” Trigger Warnings, And The Duty Not To Be Stupid

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments
TRIGGER WARNING!!!

TRIGGER WARNING!!!

I have long posited the idea that we have a duty to be competent in the act of living, since incompetent members of society make the rest of us miserable. This means not rising beyond your own ability to be competent: an idiot who aspires to be Senator and who achieves his goal is not inspiring, but unethical.

Of course, people who don’t know they are stupid should be exempt from an unethical label: ironically, you can’t be an ethics dunce if you are truly a dunce. We also have a duty not to make our children, family members, friends, associates, fellow citizens and the culture dumber by reckless dissemination of idiocy.

Which brings us to this, from the earnest, apparently certifiably insane blog, Everyday Feminism. Trigger warnings, the recent progressive invention designed to shield overly sensitive members of our species from any idea, word, concept, thought, memory or theory that troubles them in any way lies right on the cusp of unethical, as it is at the threshold to censorship and thought control, as well as to stupidity itself. Everyday Feminism, however, charges over that line with hilarious excess. This could have easily been published by The Onion, but Everyday Feminism apparently means it.

The article was about triggering, so it had to have this warning:

This article discusses triggering in detail and mentions common topics of triggering (sexual assault, anxiety, health anxiety, depression, death, non-specific fears and phobias).

But the blog felt warning itself needed a trigger warning, and so it began with this:

Like this phenomenal article, Everyday Feminism definitely believes in giving people a heads up about material that might provoke our reader’s trauma. However, we use the phrase “content warning” instead of “trigger warning,” as the word “trigger” relies on and evokes violent weaponry imagery. This could be re-traumatizing for folks who have suffered military, police, and other forms of violence. So, while warnings are so necessary and the points in this article are right on, we strongly encourage the term “content warning” instead of “trigger warning.”

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Walmart CEO Doug McMillon

/ Jack Marshall / 50 Comments

White-Flag“We don’t want any of the merchandise that we sell to be offensive”

—-Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, explaining to FOX Business Network host Maria Bartiromo why the retail chain was pulling all Confederate flag-themed merchandise. In another interview, with CNN Money, McMillon said that “We just don’t want to sell products that make anyone uncomfortable.” The Walmart announcement tarted a stampede of many large retailers to dump the flags and items with the flag design.

And thus did the CEO of a major U.S. corporation wholeheartedly endorse the speech- and thought-suppressing ideology of political correctness bullies, “hate speech” censors, and progressive fascists.

This widespread capitulation to a wildly irrational reaction to a single tragedy authored by a single individual is, for Democrats and race-baiters, a masterpiece of cognitive dissonance manipulation, one that should be a terrific case study in future psychology classes.

Because Dylann Roof was photographed with a Confederate flag, and because his racist church massacre occurred in a state that has obnoxiously and irresponsibly insisted on flying that flag despite its legitimately offensive connotations to many of its citizens, the flag was linked to the murders so viscerally that to defend its display was regarded by the news media, pundits, bloggers and, consequently, public opinion, as tantamount to supporting the killer. Naturally, politicians and businesses ran for cover, and whatever their previous stances on the issue, instantly flip-flopped to declare the Confederate flags the equivalent of Nazi swastikas.

Well-played, speech police. I am in awe. Continue reading →

Wait, Should I Change The Name Of “The Niggardly Principles” To “The Pachycephalosaurus Principles”?

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Pachycephalosaurus

Are P.C. crazies attacking “Jurassic World” for using for the supposedly racist term “packies” in the film? Don’t these fools realize that their argument is even dumber than that of the illiterate clods who briefly got a D.C. government worker disciplined for using the word “niggardly” in a meeting?

Well, no, despite what you may have heard, nobody in the U.S. is that far gone. That hasn’t stopped conservative anti-P,C. warriors from falsely claiming otherwise, though.

“Packie” is a nickname used in the fictional dinosaur park for the Pachycephalosaurus, a dome-skulled creature that was also featured in “The Lost World,” the second “Jurassic Park” sequel. Exactly what else would you call them? Even by the standard of dinosaur names, this is a tough one, and a short, easily pronounceable monicker is both necessary and potentially life-saving. By the time someone has spit out, “Look out! There’s a charging Pachycephalosaurus coming right for you!,” you are mashed, believe me. What’s the alternative, “Phaloses”?  That has its own problems “Pachies” is the obvious and reasonable choice.

Yet because an escape of  these prehistoric things from their enclosures in the theme park causes  one character to shout, “The Packies are out of containment!,” Twitter users, commentators, political correctness fascists and insane people are seriously accusing the film of being “racist” in Great Britain, where “packie” is a racial slur for something or other: I really don’t care. It has nothing to do with the Pachycephalosaurus, dinosaurs, or “Jurassic World.”  Thus the Independent, echoing many Brits on social media, called the line “very racist.” That’s moronic, of course. Continue reading →

Now THIS Is A Witch Hunt! The Northwestern-Laura Kipnis Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Springfiled mob

I really tried to ignore this ridiculous story. Campus political correctness battles, like examples of public school teacher incompetence ( my head just exploded yesterday, so I refuse to write about THIS), are so common and so self-evidently whacked that the blog could easily be over-run by them. The lower education episodes are more important, I’ve concluded, because the victims are children who still might be saved from indoctrination and a life-wrecking warped concept of how authority should be wielded, and children must be protected from the kind of child abuse a lot of these episodes represent. In the college campus fiascos, much of the time, it is the students who are the initial culprits (remember, they are adults, supposedly), and the administrators are mostly the craven enablers. Initially, I thought this episode was just another example of runaway progressive fascism feeding on itself. And it is, but there is more to it than that.

To briefly summarize…Laura Kipnis is a Professor of Radio, TV and Film at Northwestern University. She wrote an entertaining article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about what she termed the ‘sexual paranoia’ on college campuses, including hers, and delivered observations about how these attitudes were strangling discourse and sane human interaction in society at large.

I wasn’t crazy about the article, because Kipnis, as I might expect from a theater prof, appears to know nothing about ethics at all. Her over-arching position is Old Sixties Berkeley: if it involves sex, chill out. I will bet my head that Kipnis was one of Bill Clinton’s defenders on the grounds that lying about sex isn’t lying, even when it’s under oath, even when it’s on TV, even when it’s to the American people’s face, even when you use your power and high office to support it. It’s sex, and sex is groovy. Who knows, she might also have defended John Edwards, and no, I have not had any respect for people like this since the Nineties. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Confused Ethics Observations On Caitlyn Jenner, Up and Down the Cognitive Dissonance Scale”

/ Jack Marshall / 71 Comments
"Yikes! Doc says I have to go back to the Seventies and make sure Caitlyn Jenner wins the Ladies Decathlon!"

“Yikes! Doc says I have to go back to 1976 and make sure Jenner wins the Ladies Decathlon!”

It is testimony to the passion, breadth and erudition of the readership here that when I miss an ethics angle to a story, it almost always is raised, and well, by someone else. Here is a wonderful example, johnburger’s ethical objection to the instant, inaccurate and unethical recasting of Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner as female, because Jenner has adopted another gender identity more than 30 years later. I’ll have a brief note in the end,

Here is johnburger’s Comment of the Day on the post, Confused Ethics Observations On Caitlyn Jenner, Up and Down the Cognitive Dissonance Scale: Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Officials Of The Month: The Connecticut State Senate

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

The Connecticut Senate this week approved a probably unconstitutional bill requiring all Connecticut colleges and universities to adopt the “yes, means yes” policy when it comes to sexual consent, similar to California’s cypto-fascist law. The bill dictates a completely unenforceable standard for sexual consent It was bi-partisan fascism, and passed 34-1. Sen. Joe Markley, R-Southington, was the lone vote against it.

According to the bill’s champion, Sen. Mae Flexer, D-Killingly,  it is “is redefining the definition of consent.” She explains that under the law, college students would be required to “say yes” or indicate nonverbally through “physical cues” that they are willing to have sex with another college student. And what “physical cues” would qualify? How about eye contact, and the kind of communications that we celebrate in the arts and literature? What about the “look of love” that Dusty Springfield sang about? Enough, Mae? How would schools enforce such a law? Cameras in every room? A panel of “physical cues” experts, watching every possible sexual encounter? Continue reading →

A Niggardly Principle Quiz: The Politically Incorrect Statue

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

Jesuit-Missionary-Pierre-Jean-De-Smet-slu

A  statue in the middle of the campus of Saint Louis University, a private Jesuit institution, depicted famous Jesuit missionary Pierre-Jean De Smet S.J. praying over two Native Americans dressed in traditional clothing. There had been increasingly intense demands from some faculty and student activists to remove the statue. Summarizing the objections, a student editorial recently argued that the statue sent an unacceptable message to Native Americans and others that

“You do not belong here if you do not submit to our culture and our religion…The statue of De Smet depicts a history of colonialism, imperialism, racism and of Christian and white supremacy.”

[ The editorial also said that “As the protests surrounding the deaths of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner have shown us, just because racist policies are off the books doesn’t mean that racism is no longer practiced.” I am trying not to allow that fatuous, counter-factual and ignorant statement cause me to regard the writer and his piece as unworthy of serious consideration.]

Naturally, as is almost always the case, the spineless, path-of-least-resistance driven administrators at the university capitulated, and moved the statue into some museum.  Note that this is a Jesuit university, and teaching is one of the primary things that the Jesuit order does.

De Smet was a remarkable individual who, far from imposing his beliefs on Native Americans, began his obsession with starting far West missions for the native tribes in the U.S. after the Salish and the neighboring Nez Perce sent four delegations to St. Louis, where he was stationed, to find a “black robe” to live among them. Continue reading →

Ethics Reflections On A Souvenir Wall Hanging

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments
Welcome to my world...

Welcome to my world…

“Can’t you ever stop thinking about ethics?” my wife said to me a few minutes ago. We were walking around historic Williamsburg, Virginia—I have seminar to teach in a couple hours—and I saw a ceramic wall hanging for sale at the charming Christmas store in the town square. It read…

IF WE CAN SEND A MAN TO THE MOON, WHY CAN’T WE SEND THEM ALL THERE?

Maybe it’s an old joke, but I hadn’t encountered it before. I thought it was kind of funny in a “this is a parody of over-the-top, ‘a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’ seventies feminism” way, but I find myself wondering…

-Would progressives consider this “eliminationist rhetoric?” Hate speech?

-If not, why not?

-Would a gender-reversed version of the joke be funny? Would feminists consider it offensive? Would such feminists defend the wall-hanging? Continue reading →

Memorial Ethics: Under Armour’s “Disrespect”

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments
Underarmor

The Horror…

Just in time for Memorial Day comes this depressing example of how timid and wan Americans have become when free speech and expression are under attack. This is how acceptance of the Universal Veto of the Officious Offended will reduce the U.S. to a barren, humorless, imagination-free culture dominated by political correctness bullies and exploitive self-anointed, power-seeking “victims.”

Under Armour advertised a “Band of Ballers” tee-shirt showing a silhouette of men in backwards baseball caps raising a basketball hoop in the iconic pose of the U.S. Marine Corps Memorial, in which combat weary soldiers are frozen in the act of raising an American flag after the Marine’s bloody victory at Iwo Jima.

There is nothing remotely wrong with this design. It is not disrespectful It is satire. It is a parody. It is using the status of the image to extol basketball; only a fool could read the image as an effort to denigrate veterans or the American flag. Personally, I think it’s clever, just as I like Charles Addams’ cartoon showing butchers wrestling with sausages in the pose of the famous statue of Laocoon and his sons being devoured by serpents…

Addams Cartoon

…or parodies of Washington crossing the Delaware, like this ad for HBO’s “Veep”… Continue reading →

Unethical Website Of The Month: GoFundMe

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments
GoFundMe thinks the 6th Amendment is heinous, apparently...

GoFundMe thinks the 6th Amendment is heinous, apparently…

A about a week ago, I designated the crowd-funding website GoFundMe an Ethics Dunce. Now it’s clear that it is worse than that. It’s an unethical website, period.

After the six Baltimore police officers were prematurely charged with serious crimes before the investigation into the death of Freddie Gray was complete, the Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police created a GoFundMe page for their defense. Less than an hour later, it was taken down, with GoFundMe citing the same dubious policy it used to cut off support for a bakery driven out of business by vengeful same-sex marriage supporters:

“‘Campaigns in defense of formal charges of heinous crimes’ are prohibited by our terms . . . GoFundMe cannot be used to benefit those who are charged with serious violations of the law.” Continue reading →