The Great Stupid

Pre-Independence Day Ethics Warm-Up, July 3, 2022: What Might Have Been [Broken Link Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Typically, Ethics Alarms has highlighted July 3 with reflections on the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, for which the 3rd was the dramatic last and decisive day. I know it must be hard to believe, but I do get tired of writing the same things over and over again, an occupational hazard of being an ethicist during a mass ethics breakdown in our democracy and among the increasingly corrupt people we have put in power to protect it. I still can’t ignore Pickett’s futile charge and Custer’s charge as well, so I direct you to last year’s post on both events and their ethics implications.

However, this year I am introducing the July 3 warm-up with another crucial anniversary, one that may have had even more impact on the history of the United States, its prospects and its values than Gettysburg. July 2, 1776 is when the Continental Congress finally agreed to take the leap and forge a new nation (John Adams thought the 2nd would be the day we celebrated) and July 4, 1776 was the date the document was signed. But in-between those more noted dates the Continental Congress began debating and editing Jefferson’s draft Declaration, eventually making 86 edits that cut the length by about a fourth. 

Because the Declaration of Independence is the mission statement of America, framing and sometimes compelling what followed, especially the Constitution, the editing decisions of July 3, 1776 affected our laws and culture in many ways that are unimaginable after more than 200 years. You can read the original here. It is this deleted paragraph, however, that most inspires reflections on what might have been (and what might not):

“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”

Now on to the present day’s ethics concerns...

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Starbucks, Rock Star Of The Great Stupid!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

A statement by virtue-signaling addict and Starbucks’s chief executive, Howard Schultz that the company is considering ending its open bathroom policy has provoked speculation in the conservative media and blogosphere that “The Great Stupid (my term, not theirs) is finally receding. Don’t count on it.

Before discussing Schultz’s sudden epiphany, let’s review, shall we? Ethics Alarms last visited this particularly deranged bit of progressive Kabuki four years ago under the heading, “The Tragedy Of The Commons Bites Starbucks (Good!).” I wrote in part,

Remember how Starbucks responded to being race-shamed when a Philadelphia store manager told two black men to either buy something or leave the store? It decreed that anyone could hang out at stores without having to be customers, and use the bathrooms too.  Any fool could predict that this policy would be disastrous….progressive! Compassionate! But disastrous. Now we learn:

A New York Post team investigated several Manhattan bathrooms and found that there wasn’t an open stall.

…A half-dozen toilets were locked or barricaded for no clear reason. Others were closed for prolonged “cleaning,” which an insider said was needed after extreme soiling caused by drug-using, incontinent vagrants.

“Letting everybody in has resulted in nobody getting in,” an employee at one branch fumed.

“Rest Room closed,” declared signs at 399 Seventh Ave. (entrance on West 32nd Street) and at a branch at Pearl Street and Maiden Lane. At 252 W. 31st St., the road to relief was blocked by garbage cans. Furniture and boxes formed a barrier at 61 W. 56th St.

A rope and traffic cones barred the way at 38 Park Row. When a desperate visitor asked if the loo would reopen any time soon, a barista directed him to a Dunkin’ Donuts nearby.

Why would the bathrooms need “prolonged cleaning”? Perhaps the experience of the Seattle shops provides an explanation:

Several Starbucks workers in Seattle say that they’re encountering hypodermic needles on the job nearly every day and that they’ve had to take antiviral medications to protect themselves from HIV and hepatitis.

Three employees at the coffee giant in northern Seattle told the local news station KIRO 7 that visitors would dispose of the needles in store restrooms, often in tampon-disposal boxes, and that workers would then come in contact with them while cleaning and were sometimes accidentally poked.

KIRO 7 said the three employees provided hospital, pharmacy, and insurance receipts showing that they took antiviral medications to protect against HIV and hepatitis after being poked by needles at work.

Providing extra safety training and prophylactic care for employees can be expensive. The extra costs could have been a contributing factor in a spate of recent layoffs.

Starbucks will lay off 350 corporate employees amid a broader effort to revamp its global operations even as the coffeehouse chain’s former top executive gears up for a 2020 presidential bid.

Chief Executive Officer Kevin Johnson announced the 5 percent reduction of Starbucks’ global workforce in a staff email on Tuesday, writing that the layoffs are “a result of work that has been eliminated, de-prioritized or shifting ways of working within the company.”

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Update: The Great Stupid Meets The Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

This really is like one of the old horror movies, but scarier, and real. I have no idea what to do about it. The sudden and, though no one wants to admit it, coincidental wave of shooting episodes last month (and bleeding into this one, literally) might as well have been part of a conspiracy to freak-out the American public and  cowardly lawmakers into surrendering the Constitutional right to bear arms in self-defense.

As always, our democracy’s Achilles heel is public ignorance, and the anti-gun news media and the usual demagogues have done a bang-up job this time around of both exploiting the ignorance and adding to it. It is especially ironic that the same side of the ideological spectrum taking aim at the First Amendment with its cynical attacks on “disinformation,””misinformation” and “hate speech” are engaging in all three daily, indeed almost hourly, in order to finally crush the Second Amendment rights of law abiding and responsible citizens—so the people who pay no attention to laws anyway will somehow be dissuaded from gun violence.

Good plan!

The escalated assualt is simultaneously dumb, intellectually dishonest and unethical…but effective. And it is coming from all directions all at once, like the fast zombies in “World War Z,” as long as we’re using horror film analogies. In my annoyed and fevered state, I can’t even organize all of it coherently, so I’m going to resort to bullet points for now:

  • As I predicted when the Uvalde shooting first was reported, the Barn Door Fallacy is in full swing. The shooter was 18, so banning gun sales to anyone under 21 is one of the most popular “Do something!” measures, because the law will go back in time and stop Ramos from murdering all those kids. That’s because he bought his guns; never mind that Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, was also under 21, and just took his mother’s guns to go on his rampage. Since the privileges and responsibilities of adulthood mostly attach when one turns 18, the sudden conclusion that 18-year-olds are dangerously irresponsible lacks integrity and consistency. Is there a line there, or not? Why there? Why are people allowed to vote for who makes laws when we think they can’t be trusted to obey them? What’s magic about 21? If two or three shooters are over 21 and under 25, will “Do something!” mean that the right to own a gun will be limited again?

The Stupid! It BURNSSSS!

  • The lies (disinformation/misinformation/lazy, careless or deliberate confusion of terms and deceit) make fair and informed debate impossible. Semi-automatic rifles are called automatic weapons, “AR-15-style” is used without clarification; “weapons of war” is scary and useful as a cognitive dissonance trigger but meaningless; “assault weapon” has no agreed-upon meaning, other than “bad.” Those who wield this fog of language literally don’t care about meanings and definitions…
  • …bringing us to “comprehensive background checks,” another “Do something” trope. What does “comprehensive” mean? Under U.S. law, federally licensed gun dealers, importers and manufacturers must run background checks for all sales to unlicensed buyers. The law bans firearm transfers to anyone convicted of a felony or committed to a mental institution. But a private seller without a federal license doesn’t need to meet the same requirement. “Comprehensive” apparently means making private sales involve background checks as well; it also could involve adding more—much more—details about a purchaser to “check.” Regarding the latter, you don’t have to be paranoid to wonder what those details could entail.
  • Regarding the former: how would (or could) a private gun transfer background check law be enforced? Such laws would place a serious burden on the seller. What if I had a cash emergency and wanted to sell my WWII German Luger to a collector friend who had always admired it? Getting the background check would take too much time for my urgent cash needs. I know and trust the collector. If he doesn’t pay, take my gun and shoot up a school, how would the government ever find out about the transaction? Unenforceable laws are deceptive, pretending to be something they are not—effective. That’s unethical.
  • In order to pursue the (batty) argument that its the guns and not the sociopathic, law-defying, violent and often crazy people who use them that are the problem, the anti-gun mob is denying that the mental health of shooters is a primary issue. (This goes along, strangely enough, with the “blood on their hands” attacks on Republicans, arguing that they have not supported significant spending on mental health treatment—which continues to be hit-and-miss no matter how much money we throw at it.) Here’s the LA Times:

Blaming mental illness for mass shootings inflicts a damaging stigma on the millions of people who suffer from clinical afflictions, the vast majority of whom are not violent. Extensive research shows the link between mental illness and violent behavior is small and not useful for predicting violent acts; people with diagnosable conditions such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder are in fact far more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violence.

This is Yoo’s Rationalization, “It isn’t what it is,” to the max. People who are not mentally ill do not shoot up schools. They do not go on shooting sprees that are certain to get them killed themselves. They do not shoot people “to get famous.” Mass shooters, like serial killers are, by definition, nuts. Laws are not likely to stop them.

  • And then we have “red flag” laws, which the public tends to like in polls because, as with so many of the “do something” measures, respondents have not thought about what they are or mean.  These are laws that the government could easily expand to remove rights from citizens who have done nothing illegal, or who have engaged in conduct in the past that has been dealt with and is over with. “Red flag laws” are pre-crime punishment, and should be ruled unconstitutional, though there is no guarantee they would be.
  • Polls that do nothing but sum up mass ignorance and manipulated uninformed opinion are being used as authorities. Mother Jones (I know, I know) got all excited about s new poll published by CBS News that “found” that “three quarters of Americans believe we can prevent mass shootings if we prioritize the goal of doing so.” In other words, “Do something!” How do we stop illegal gun violence? “Prioritize it!” Oh! More than climate change? “Well, maybe not more than climate change.” More than inflation? “Well, no, inflation is killing us.” More than fighting “systemic racism”? Oh, no, nothing’s more important than fighting that! More than abortion? “Are you kidding! That’s the most important of all!” So “doing something” about gun violence is, at best, fifth on our list of priorities, even from the perspective of the Left…which means it’s not going to be “prioritized.”
  • Meanwhile, the public is being fed lies by the President of the United States. “We should repeal the liability shield that often protects gun manufacturers from being sued for the death and destruction caused by their weapons,” Biden said in his hysterical “do something” speech last week. “They’re the only industry in this country that has that kind of immunity. Imagine. Imagine if the tobacco industry had been immune from being sued, where we’d be today. The gun industry’s special protections are outrageous. It must end.”

Ugh. Cigarettes are a consumer product that caused death and illness to uninformed users who had been deceived by manufacturers. If a driver uses a car to murder someone, can General Motors be sued? No. If someone beats in their wife’s brains with a baseball bat, can Hillerich and Bradsby be sued? No! Manufacturers are liable when their products are faulty and negligently produced. They are not liable, and should not be liable, when a purchaser uses the product illegally or negligently. All products have “that kind of immunity,” but when anti-gun zealots devised the idea of suing gun manufacturers anyway, a 2005 law called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), which shields gun companies from lawsuits based on the unlawful acts people commit using their products.

At the risk of repeating myself, “Ugh.” The Great Stupid and the Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck alliance is going to be much harder to fight off than Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolf Man.

More Scary Tales Of The Great Stupid: New York’s “Restorative Justice”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Indeed, Major Clifton. You can’t get much crazier (or stupid) than this.

As I have related here before, in my fortuitous accidental opportunity to chat privately with genius Herman Kahn many years ago, he observed that societies periodically suffer mass amnesia and forget why traditions, rules and policies that had existed for centuries exist. They then try something new that seems like a good idea at the time, only to be reminded it is, in fact, a terrible idea, and one that everyone once knew was a terrible idea, which is why it had been wisely dismissed centuries or even eons ago. This cycle is needlessly destructive, and those who trigger it are incompetent and irresponsible, usually choosing to adopt magical thinking over cold, hard reality because it supports their ideology. For some reason, or because of a cosmic practical joke, the United States is being tortured by such misbegotten inspirations. “Hey! Let’s just let anyone into the country who wants to come!” “Let’s defund the police!” “Let’s give up on stopping people from getting addicted to drugs!” “Let’s wear masks over the lower parts of our faces all the time, just to be safe! And make our kids do it too!” “Hey, why not spend as much money as we want even when we’re already deep in debt?” (I had to stop myself mid-list because the examples popping into my head were obviously going to keep coming.)

New York City has embraced one of the more ridiculous of the ideas arising out of magical thinking, societal amnesia and The Great Stupid: “restorative justice.” Part of an ambitious reform package created by former NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio (“Hey! Let’s take advice from one of New York City’s most disastrous failures ever!”), restorative justice is, like so many recent terrible ideas, a response to the uncomfortable results of cultural pathologies in the black community. In 2019, De Blasio announced the criminal justice revolution, which was, he explained, necessary because ““For far too long, this city’s answer to every societal problem was to throw people in jail. We lost generations to mass incarceration, mostly young men of color.” Yes, it was “disparate impact” again! Punishing criminals and enforcing laws had a disparate impact on black Americans, because they are still committing a disproportional number of serious and violent crimes. Solution: Stop punishing criminals and enforcing laws!

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And This Is What The Great Stupid Looks Like…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Deadspin, a dunder-headed, race-baiting, progressive foolishness blight on the web in its best days, posted that classic of Yoo’s Rationalization (“It isn’t what it is”) as its thoughtful response to the Buffalo mass shooting.

The photo was from the days following the George Floyd Freakout, as The Great Stupid began to spread over the land. Then, the NBA, like the other professional sports leagues, was falling all over itself to align with the half-baked political sensibilities of their black stars, in the NBA’s case, “their stars” period. Thus plastering the deceptively benign motto of the Marxist, racist, often violent scam movement on their game venues was the expedient thing to do, even if it wasn’t brave, helpful or ethical. Deadspin’s author of this brain-dead but woke tweet—is that redundant?—apparently thinks that there’s something sinister in the fact that millionaire athletes under contract as athlete/entertainers aren’t refusing to perform their jobs based on the predominant skin shade of the spectators who pay their salaries.

Of course, black fans were also entertained by the players. it is also important to note that the vast, vast, vast majority of professional athletes look like fools and children whenever they venture outside their extremely narrow range of knowledge and expertise. Using their barely literate, emotion- and peer pressure-driven analysis of current events as influence all but guarantees a grasp of complex issues and events as societally useful as those of Bette Midler, Joy Behar and Robert De Niro—you know: idiots.

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Comment Of The Day (1): “Today’s Dobbs Leak Freakout Developments And Observations”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Keeping up with the Supreme Court draft Alito opinion Freakout and the other ethics offal flying around has put me seriously behind in posting deserving Comments of the Day. There are two related to the May 5 Freakout post alone; this is the first of them, a neat summary of the state of affairs in Woke World.

Here is sooner 8728’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Today’s Dobbs Leak Freakout Developments And Observations”…

***

If you notice, the far left’s policies are always about removing responsibility for bad decisions. You had reckless sex? Get rid of the baby. You didn’t pay your rent because you smoked pot and lost your job? Unemployment benefits. You don’t want to go back to work because you have an irrational fear of COVID-19? Let’s keep paying your rent. You committed a crime (and you are a minority), no jail time or possibly even a fine.

The test is too hard? Lower the standards. You can’t speak proper English? Attack proper English as elitist. Your culture teaches that it’s okay to beat your wife? Don’t judge other cultures who are different than you? There’s a dumbing down going on in this country. [Host’s Note: This process is what Ethics Alarms refers to as “The Great Stupid.”] Continue reading →

A Mother’s Day Ethics Bouquet, 5/8/2022: For You, Mom, Even Though Ethics Wasn’t Your Long Suit…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

  • Don’t you think it’s odd that there isn’t a single really great song about mothers? There are lots of great father songs.
  • My mom, whom I think about every day and miss terribly, was wonderful in so many ways, but was almost as unethical as my father was ethical. It’s a tribute to his parenting that he communicated to my sister and me early on that this was just a quirk, and while mom had much to teach about love, loyalty and compassion, hers was not the ethical or moral compass to follow.
  • I just saw a man riding a real, honest-to-goodness velocipede in the church parking lot across from our house! I have never seen that in real life, only in photos and old movies.
  • The eighth of May, 1945, was  the day when German troops throughout Europe finally laid down their arms, and World War II, the worst catastrophe the modern world has ever suffered through, featuring the most unethical and cruel aggressors imaginable, finally came to an end. Evil easily could have triumphed; that it did not was as much a function of luck as anything else. This is always a day on which to draw a collective breath. Whew! That was a close one…

1. Funny, but stupid. This meme is fascinating.

It could easily be intended to mock the kind of hysterical distortions from the Left’s Supreme Court leak freakout—on that basis, I laughed when I saw it. However, it almost certainly IS one of those hysterical distortions, which reduce debate to an infantile level. I’m sure many progressives think it’s profound. [Pointer: Arthur in Maine] Continue reading →

Tales of The Great Stupid: The FAA And The Crash Video

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

One of the really, really bad ideas that has taken toxic root in Woke World, which includes the Biden administration, is that penalties and punishments are mean, and that the consequences of deliberate wrongdoing should be minimal even when the miscreant isn’t “of color.”

This will not, as they say, turn out well.

Last November, Trevor Jacob, a former Olympic snowboarder turned Youtube entrepreneur, crashed his small propeller airplane into the mountains of California’s Los Padres National Forest after the propeller stopped spinning. The exact moment when his plane’s propeller seized was caught on camera, as was his jump out of the airplane with a parachute. He used a selfie stick to film his descent. Three weeks later, Jacob posted a YouTube video titled “I Crashed My Plane.” It got over 2 million views. The video features Jacob narrating his brave trek out of the forest and his eventual rescue. “I’m just so happy to be alive!” Jacob exclaims at one point.

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The Great Stupid Marches On: Plant Name Political Correctness And The Wandering Jew

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Sometimes it all seems too much to bear. When I stumble upon something like this, I feel like smashing my head with a croquet mallet enough times to reduce my brain function to that of Margorie Taylor Greene or Cori Bush, and spending the rest of my days watching “Three’s Company” re-runs. Then I decide to write a post, and realize that once again, the most appropriate graphic is the “Blazing Saddles” “You know: morons” video clip. I could use that clip on ten posts a day now. More. Why do I bother writing this blog if insane ideological extremism is making the culture, society and public dumber by the second?

But I digress.

Let me tell you a story…

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Ethics Verdict: Non-Math Propaganda Does Not Belong In Math Textbooks

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

The New York Times reports that Florida has rejected 42 of 132 math textbooks proposed for use in public school classrooms because they “incorporate prohibited topics or unsolicited strategies” including social-emotional learning and critical race theory, according to the state’s Department of Education.

Good.

The tone of the Times article is framed to advance the “Wow, look at what radical conservative hate-mongering Neanderthals they have running the asylum in Florida, with that racist, transphobic Ron DeSantis as governor!” narrative. But this is only a partisan issue because one party’s core ideology, the Democratic Party, has, in “Happy Days” parlance, “jumped the shark,” or in my parlance, is in the process of sliding toward totalitarianism.

Here’s reporter Dana Goldstein’s second paragraph:

But Florida has a new law, which goes into effect in July, limiting the way that sexual orientation, gender identity and social-emotional skills are taught. Gov. Ron DeSantis is also expected to sign legislation, known as the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” prohibiting instruction that could prompt students to feel discomfort about a historical event because of their race, sex or national origin.

What does that have to do with a Department of Education deciding that mathematics textbooks should be entirely–not substantially, not mostly, but entirely, about mathematics? It doesn’t matter, or shouldn’t, what distractions, pet agendas, tangential advocacy or ideological indoctrination is in a math textbook. It doesn’t belong there. Standing for that rather simple and, I would think, obvious principle is not a partisan position, unless one party is interested, indeed invested, indeed determined to advance in something other than education. That something is indoctrination, and indoctrination of the young is essential for totalitarianism to grab a nation, culture, society and people by the throat. Continue reading →