quotas

Ethics Hero: Ice Cube…Adult

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Ice Cube

The Academy Awards nominations flap has been gradually acquiring Ethics Train Wreck Status. Naturally, since it involves race (black artists didn’t get their quota this year, whatever that quota is–it’s a secret quota, but clearly zero isn’t it) and thus an opportunity for him to get some publicity, Al Sharpton weighed in with sputtering outrage, calling for a boycott of the Oscars. Then Spike Lee announced a personal boycott, making no sense in the process, rapidlly followed by Jada Pinkett Smith, who really made no sense, writing,

“Begging for acknowledgment or even asking diminishes dignity and diminishes power. And we are a dignified people. And we are powerful. Let’s not forget it. So let’s let the Academy do them, with all grace and love. And let’s do us.”

Gibberish. What is throwing a tantrum and boycotting your industry and profession as it honors itself and your colleagues’ art because  the people you really care about—those of the right color, you know— didn’t get a nomination, if it isn’t demanding recognition, which is as pathetic as asking or begging for it, just more obnoxious?

Next her husband, Will Smith, who looks like a poor sport by doing so, followed her lead, muttering inappropriate platitudes. He said, “There is a position that we hold in this community, and if we’re not part of the solution, we’re part of the problem.” If you say so, Will. Causing racial division in your profession and sabotaging its big self-promotion night is part of what solution, now?

In ethics train wrecks, all passengers live to regret it. Over at Fox News, panelist and former “Clueless” actress Stacey Dash suggested that black actors had nothing to complain about as long as they participated in blacks-only honors, like the BET Awards, and the NAACP Image awards. What was that supposed to mean? That Oscar should be all-white, since there are all-black awards? Is this a plug for separate but equal? Her argument was incoherent, so naturally Donald Trump endorsed it, saying, and I quote, “Blah, blah, blah, blah…” Among the blahs, he noted,

“So over there — the whites don’t get any nominations, or don’t get — and I thought it was an amazing interview, actually. I never even thought of it from that standpoint. But with all of that being said, it would certainly be nice if everybody could be represented properly…”

Trenchant analysis, you moron.  Continue reading →

How Unethical Is Spike Lee’s Oscar Boycott?

/ Jack Marshall / 55 Comments

SpikeLee

Short answer: Incredibly unethical.

Spike Lee, ground-breaking black director, social commentator, Knicks fan and hot-head, announced that he’s boycotting the Oscars because its 2016 nominations list did not meet diversity mandates, and posted this rant/manifesto on Instagram:

“Again. I Would Like To Thank President Cheryl Boone Isaacs And The Board Of Governors Of The Academy Of Motion Pictures Arts And Sciences For Awarding Me an Honorary Oscar This Past November. I Am Most Appreciative. However My Wife, Mrs. Tonya Lewis Lee And I Will Not Be Attending The Oscar Ceremony This Coming February. We Cannot Support It And Mean No Disrespect To My Friends, Host Chris Rock and Producer Reggie Hudlin, President Isaacs And The Academy. But, How Is It Possible For The 2nd Consecutive Year All 20 Contenders Under The Actor Category Are White? And Let’s Not Even Get Into The Other Branches. 40 White Actors In 2 Years And No Flava At All. We Can’t Act?! WTF!! It’s No Coincidence I’m Writing This As We Celebrate The 30th Anniversary Of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s Birthday. Dr. King Said “There Comes A Time When One Must Take A Position That Is Neither Safe, Nor Politic, Nor Popular But He Must Take It Because Conscience Tells Him It’s Right”. For Too Many Years When The Oscars Nominations Are Revealed, My Office Phone Rings Off The Hook With The Media Asking Me My Opinion About The Lack Of African-Americans And This Year Was No Different. For Once, (Maybe) I Would Like The Media To Ask All The White Nominees And Studio Heads How They Feel About Another All White Ballot. If Someone Has Addressed This And I Missed It Then I Stand Mistaken. As I See It, The Academy Awards Is Not Where The “Real” Battle Is. It’s In The Executive Office Of The Hollywood Studios And TV And Cable Networks. This Is Where The Gate Keepers Decide What Gets Made And What Gets Jettisoned To “Turnaround” Or Scrap Heap. This Is What’s Important. The Gate Keepers. Those With “The Green Light” Vote….”

Now let me list as many of the ways Lee’s boycott is unethical (I may stray into why it is stupid as well),  as I can before my fingers get tired and nausea overwhelms me: Continue reading →

Dear Linda: There Is Nothing Racist, Biased, Disrespectful, Harmful, Wrong Or Unethical About This Drawing. Get Help. Quickly. And Not To Lay A Guilt Trip On You Or Anything, But It’s People Like You Who Make Donald Trump Popular

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

office party

The Washington Post recently accompanied a feature about office Christmas parties with the above illustration. Sharp-eyed reader Linda Franklin thuse felt that she had to lambaste the paper for its diversity blindness in today’s “Free For All” extension to the usual Letters to the Editor section. Admittedly, “Free For All” is where the Post stows its pedants and cranks. There was a letter today complaining that a penguin story had a photo of the wrong species of penguin. Another guy, who just missed having a post written here about him, chided the Post for letting “global-warming deniers” off as  being called mere “skeptics,” because according to Skeptical Inquirer magazine,  “skeptic is an honored term that should be reserved for those who are guided by scientific evidence,” and the Associated Press “will no longer use the term skeptics for those who reject the findings of climate science.” That’s right, you ass, tar with the equivalent of Holocaust denial those who reasonably and properly cry foul at those who claim certainty in the notoriously speculative climate science field and who don’t believe current research on the subject justifies such nonsensical and self-destructive policy decisions as blocking the Keystone Pipeline.

But I digress. Franklin’s letter is a societal warning that the obsession with group identification, quotas and diversity can lead to societal insanity. in other words, Linda is contagious.

“There was a significant fault in the illustration accompanying “Significant bother,” Linda began.

Having seen the drawing and immediately gone to work with her abacus, she determined that that 20 people who have some skin color indicated (on their faces, hands or back of their necks) and four in the foreground who are bluish. (“That’s funny, they don’t look Bluish!” I thought that joke was funny when I saw “Yellow Submarine,” and I still do. No, I never grew up. Linda, I’m sure, thinks this means I’m an anti-Semite.) Of the 24 people who are meant to be at an office party, she calculated, “only two men are obviously African American, one blue woman might be African-American, one woman is probably Asian and one person has gray hair.”

Linda is outraged, and probably wrote her missive with tears streaming down her cheeks. “Is this really a fair way to depict the employees of an office?” she cries. Continue reading →

More Nascent Totalitarianism In Middle School And College

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

voting

Does anybody care except the occasional blog? More specifically, has any Presidential candidate condemned these incidents?

At Everett Middle School in the Mission District in San Francisco:

Principal Lena Van Haren decided to withhold the results of the school’s Oct. 9 student council election for more than a week, because she felt the results weren’t diverse enough. She said that the school community needed to figure out how to have a more representative government. There were no Latino or black candidates chosen for the top four spots.“This is complex, but as a parent and a principal, I truly believe it behooves us to be thoughtful about our next steps here so that we can have a diverse student council that is truly representative of all voices at Everett,” she told parents in an e-mail Thursday.

They reacted furiously, indignantly and correctly, accusing her of tampering with a fair and free election. Her response was unethical, dishonest, rationalized, and idiotic.

“We paused to have a conversation. [You withheld the results.] I never, ever said we wouldn’t share the results or they weren’t good enough. [If they were good enough, why the need for a “conversation”?] This is middle school. It’s not a presidential election. [ It was supposedly an election for the student leadership of the school, and thus as close to a Presidential election as a middle school gets. What’s your point, that its OK to manipulate elections for lesser offices?] It was not about hurting democracy or putting diversity over democracy. [ Funny, it sure looked like that’s exactly what it was about.]

Then she said that she wanted to wait until there was a plan created with student input to increase diversity among student leaders, perhaps by adding positions.

The students apparently paid no attention to race and ethnicity in their voting. That’s the objective, isn’t it? The principal want to perpetuate group identification and divisions, even if the students have educated themselves to understand that neither should matter. Adding positions to make it easier to have token “diversity” makes a sham out of any election. What other brilliant solutions does this principal have? Special representatives of every race and ethnic group? Quotas? Giving minority groups bonus votes? Forcing minorities to run for the council? Forcing whites not to?

Schools have elections to teach them about democracy. This principal is teaching them that democracy and the will of voters must meet progressive agendas, or it is “wrong.” She’s also teaching them to lie. Withholding results sent a message that the students had done something wrong by not considering race and ethnicity as qualifications for office that should take precedence over skill and demonstrated ability. Her denials were obvious and made no sense.

This how the extreme leftist educational establishment indoctrinates students to progressively weaken our democracy. Responsible parents should not accept [Correction note: The “not” was inadvertently omitted in the initial post.]such transparently dishonest excuses for it. If this could happen, the entire school and school system needs to be overhauled.

At Wesleyan University… Continue reading →

A Woman On The $10 Bill, Because Pandering To The Democratic “Base” Is One Thing The Obama Administration Can Do Competently

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Hillary-Money

I guess they couldn’t announce that they were putting Hillary on the $10 bill as the first female President because she isn’t dead. This also ruled out such equally worthy possibilities as Sandra Fluke, Gabrielle Giffords, Mattress Girl, Caitlyn Jenner and, of course, Michelle.

Yesterday’s announcement by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew was inevitable the second a feminist started lobbying for it. Never mind that that her effort was ignorant and self-refuting: the list she generated of women proposed as potential faces on the currency contained none whose historical contributions to the nation come within miles of the achievements of Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, George, Tom, Abe and Ben. Some of the women—Patsy Mink?—are footnotes at best, one (Margaret Sanger) balanced her leadership of the birth control movement with ugly advocacy of white supremacy and eugenics,  and one of the most qualified candidates, Abigail Adams, didn’t make the list at all.

In a year in which President Obama’s party is trying to justify running a corrupt, unqualified, untrusted candidate for President on the sole justification that she has a vagina, nothing was going to stop his administration from putting someone on a bill for the same “reason,” as well as the other reasons, affirmative action, cynical group identification politics, and trying to deflect attention from this crew’s utter incompetence in matters of national interest and substance.

For example, the week has been filled with the jaw-dropping story of how the Office of Personnel Management was hacked by China as a result of utter, unforgivable management incompetence. You know, like the utter, unforgivable management incompetence (or worse) at Justice, HHS, the Secret Service, the IRS, the Veterans Administration, Homeland Security, the TSA, Hillary’s State Department and others—I don’t want to rub it in by running the whole list. You can read about the OPM calamity here, here, here , here and here for a start, then watch this to clear your palatte, as in throwing up. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Rationalization #30 (“It’s a bad law/stupid rule”) Chronicles: Vijay Chokalingam’s Affirmative Action Fraud”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
On the bright side, Dr. Nick improves the diversity of the medical profession...

On the bright side, Dr. Nick improves the diversity of the medical profession…

Joed68 comes through with his second Comment of the Day, this one in reaction to the post here on Mindy Kaling’s brother and his proud confession that he gamed an affirmative action program to gain admission to medical school years ago.

Allowing skin color to enable a less deserving applicant to vault over a more deserving one in college is one thing—still ethically dubious, but defensible in the abstract—and letting low-lights into elite training for professions with life and death responsibilities is another. The only explanations I can mount for those who indignantly defend affirmative action in the latter (such as CNN’s Jeff Young, quoted in the post) is that they are in thrall of the ends justifies the means mentality currently infecting much of Progressive World, or they don’t know how difficult it is to become a doctor. The first malady is beyond remedy; joed68’s submission addresses the second.

Here is his Comment of the Day on the post “Rationalization #30 (“It’s a bad law/stupid rule”) Chronicles: Vijay Chokalingam’s Affirmative Action Fraud”:

Continue reading →

Rationalization #30 (“It’s a bad law/stupid rule”) Chronicles: Vijay Chokalingam’s Affirmative Action Fraud

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Affirmative Action

Actress Mindy Kaling, whom you might know from the sitcom she created and now stars in called “The Mindy Project,” has a brother who has exploited both his relationship to his famous sister and an ethically indefensible fraud to gain some momentary fame and perhaps a book deal. Vijay Chokalingam has revealed that 17 years ago he gained acceptance to St. Louis University’s School of Medicine by falsely representing himself as an African-American.

On his new website, Almost Black, Chokalingam explains,

In my junior year of college, I realized that I didn’t have the grades or test scores to get into medical school, at least not as an Indian-American. Still, I was determined to become a doctor and I knew that admission standards for certain minorities under affirmative action were, let’s say… less stringent? So, I shaved my head, trimmed my long Indian eyelashes, and applied to medical school as a black man. My change in appearance was so startling that my own fraternity brothers didn’t recognize me at first. I even joined the Organization of Black Students and started using my embarrassing middle name that I had hidden from all of my friends since I was a 9 years old.

Vijay the Indian-American frat boy become Jojo the African American Affirmative Action applicant to medical school….I became a serious contender at some of the greatest medical schools in America, including Harvard, Wash U, UPenn, Case Western, and Columbia. In all, I interviewed at eleven prestigious medical schools in 9 major cities across America, while posing a black man.

Continue reading →

Monetary Affirmative Action: “Women On 20s”

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments
Patsy Mink, almost certainly one of the 100,000 most significant Americans in our history.

Patsy Mink, almost certainly one of the 100,000 most significant Americans in our history.

Barbara Ortiz Howard was interviewed on CBS this morning, talking about her effort to put a female face on our money. The thrust of her argument distills down into simple math: there are a lot of women, so the money should reflect that. We are now in the realm of affirmative action, and this was a sitting duck for the effort. There is no criteria for being on currency, just death. It’s an honor, of course, and as an honor, should be taken seriously, though its hard to argue that the current slate of faces reflects any objective evaluation. Salmon P. Chase? Kennedy’s undistinguished three years in office didn’t earn him his place on the 5o cent piece; getting shot did.

I can’t work up much indignation over the campaign being played out on Howard’s website, Women on 20’s. Like all efforts to impose quotas and encourage group identification, the effort is devisive, and the site’s candidates to replace Andrew Jackson could serve as a primer on how affirmative action can have the perverse effect of diminishing the credibility and integrity of an accomplishment. Whatever one thinks about Jackson, he had a tremendous impact on the nation and its political culture, was a transformative national leader, and a historical figure of great significance. Quick: name the major legislative accomplishments of Patsy Mink, Shirley Chisolm and Barbara Jordan for example. Jackson towers over them in importance to the nation’s growth and long-term success. That doesn’t mean he has to be on a bill, but nobody will be able to argue again that being so honored means anything more than that a powerful constituency caught an accommodating Democratic President when he needed to bump a poll number. Continue reading →

The Destructive, Useful, Unethical Presumption of Bigotry, Part 2: The Oscar “Snub”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

selma-4

For the second time in nearly two decades, and for the first time since 1998, the Oscars will be awarded to only white acting nominees. This, then, if you listen to the caterwauling race-baiters, is because Hollywood is racist. The Academy’s voters just hid it well since 1998, that’s all. Does that make any sense to you?

There are few more infuriating and transparently illogical examples of an unfair slapping down of the race card than looking for bigotry in the notoriously arbitrary, bias-soaked, essentially meaningless choices for “best” in the various Academy Award movie-making categories. Yet the race card sharks were up to the task.  Naturally, the authority on the subject was Al Sharpton, he whose own performance quality on his MSNBC TV show is so amateurish that it would be shut out in any community theater awards.

“In the time of Staten Island and Ferguson, to have one of the most shutout Oscar nights in recent memory is something that is incongruous,” Sharpton told The Daily News. Wait, what??? Incongruous is the assertion that the nominations for film-making excellence should be influenced in any way by how many blacks are killed resisting arrest. Anyone who finds that to be a logical argument for why more black actors should have been nominated for Oscars is useless to any rational discussion of the issue. I want a show of hands. Continue reading →

The Supreme Court Delivers An Ethical Opinion On Democracy, Affirmative Action, and Fairness

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments
Good work, SCOTUS!

Good work, SCOTUS!

In SCHUETTE, ATTORNEY GENERAL OF MICHIGAN v COALITION TO DEFEND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, INTEGRATION AND IMMIGRATION RIGHTS AND FIGHT FOR EQUALITY BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY, the U.S. Supreme Court just affirmed, 6-2, Michigan’s right to ban state affirmative action programs. The decision was narrow, not taking up the issue of affirmative action itself, but rather affirming the right of the citizens of the state to ban it at the ballot box.

You should read the decision  here, and not let journalists distort it for you.  My favorite quotes: Continue reading →