The Great Stupid

Our Unprofessional Professionals, Our Inexpert Experts: The Ethicist And The Economist

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

One of the most disturbing aspects of the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck was the ugly spectacle of once esteemed professions deciding en masse to ditch their integrity in order to join the “Get Trump!” mob with the cool kids. Historians, lawyers, judges, psychiatrists, scholars, civil libertarians, journalists, educators…yes, and ethicists—all these groups disgraced themselves and breached the one, overarching mandate for those who supposedly labor for the public good: be trustworthy. Then came The Great Stupid, compounding the damage to society and the culture by showing “experts” to be equally unreliable, burdened as they were by crippling bias, political agendas, and flawed skills and assumptions.

Two recent examples highlighted this trend. First up, the ethicist.

Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a professor at Duke Law School, is co-director of the Center for Sports Law & Policy and a senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. She authored a jaw-droppingly lame op-ed for the Washington Post headlined, “Yes, Kamila Valieva should be skating in Beijing.” There isn’t a single valid ethical principle behind her entire, constructed-for-sentimentalists argument.

Her first sentence would normally make me quit reading any opinion piece: “Russian Kamila Valieva is the best figure skater on the planet, she is gorgeous to watch perform and she should be skating in Beijing.” This is the equivalent of “Barry Bonds is a great player and we should ignore the fact that’s he’s a steroid cheat.” An ethicist is openly elevating the most obvious non-ethical consideration seasoned with personal bias, that the author thinks she is “gorgeous” on the ice, over the clear ethical consideration that the skater broke the rules, and had they been enforced, she wouldn’t be at the Olympics at all.

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The Curse Of The Great Stupid: This Woman Was A Journalist At The New York Times, Received A Pulitzer Prize For Fake History, And Now Indoctrinates Students As A Howard U. Professor

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

If what’s ethically objectionable about Howard Journalism professor Nikole Hannah-Jones isn’t immediately obvious, you’re probably already beyond hope.

Hannah-Jones was furious at MSNBC covering an example of serial shoplifting because it undercuts the argument for reduced policing and law enforcement . “This drumbeat for continued mass incarceration is really horrific to watch,” said the major force behind the racist propaganda screed “The 1619 Project.”  “A person stealing steak is not national news, and there have always been thefts from stores. This is how you legitimize the carceral state,” she tweeted indignantly.

This woman pretended to be a journalist. She is now a tenured journalism professor. That is the level of her quality of thought and reasoning. She is advocating keeping facts and destructive national trends from the public because they disprove a far-left narrative that is contrary to history, facts and common sense. As always with Hannah-Jones, she leads with dishonesty: MSNBC did not show the video of a brazen shoplifting incident in the middle of an epidemic of such crimes because of the item stolen. Then she resorts to the hoariest of rationalizations—‘This isn’t new’ (“Everybody does it!”), plus another lie: everybody hadn’t shoplifted as frequently and destructively before cities like San Francisco decided not to enforce the laws against it. In fact, the kind of shoplifting, including “smash and grab” mobs, we saw in 2021 were unprecedented.

Finally, she declares that showing the truth will undermine the movement to stop “over-incarceration,” which means that it is unjust to have disproportionate numbers of imprisoned members of a group just because members of the group  commit a disproportionate amount of crimes. This is the “disparate impact” theory at its least defensible.

The professor has a right to flog whatever idiotic leftist talking points she chooses, but people of good faith have a similar right to point, laugh, and demand that institutions we entrust with informing and educating the public do not celebrate, empower or enable an advocate of deceiving the public to achieve her radical ideological ends.

In related news, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Crazytown) whose mind is made up regarding the wisdom of defunding the police and reality will not dissuade her, tweeted

With a mandate to end police brutality, why oppose redirecting money from racist policing into social programs proven to save Black lives? Our movement for racial justice helped deliver the White House & Congress. We won’t stop until we get justice.

As with Hannah-Jones, this is dishonesty squared with a deceitful cherry on top. There has always been a mandate “to end police brutality,” but what the wild-eyed activists like Bush and Hannah-Jones call “brutality” is often the act of law enforcement itself. (Sixties radicals were taught to scream “Police brutality!” when they were physically dragged from property where they were trespassing.) Bush, like Hannah-Jones, regards enforcing the law when black criminals are involved as “racist.” The assault on policing is costing lives, not saving them, with blacks being disproportionately the victims.

Finally, claiming that the BLM rioting in the summer of 2020 and demands to defund the police “helped deliver the White House & Congress” is pure fantasy.  Both were among the reasons President Trump outperformed the polls predicting a Democratic landslide, as well as why Republicans narrowed the Democratic majority in the House.

Facts literally don’t matter to ethics corrupters like Hannah-Jones and Bush. Those who support, employ or vote for such individuals are complicit in the damage they inflict on society.

 

“Equity Snowplowing” May Be On Its Way To Boston

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

This may represent The Great Stupid at its zenith. That’s good news, right? Maybe it can’t get any worse from here. Maybe this means the fever is about to break.

In my old home town (sort of) of Boston, Massachusetts, they were expecting about three feet of snow yesterday. Mayor Michelle Wu, a wildly left wing fanatic who became the celebrated first Asian-American female mayor of the city, thus embodying the Joe Biden Progressive Theory of Merit: race and gender is all you need to be qualified, has signaled that the eternal Boston snow problem might be solved because Tiffany Chu will be her new chief of staff.

Chu is an advocate of “equity snowplowing,” another terrible off-shoot of the court-driven concept of “disparate impact.” She explains her passion this way:

It’s about snow-clearing and if the concept of snow-clearing can be sexist and the answer is, yes, wholeheartedly! In 2012 a number of cities in Sweden adopted a gender-equal plowing strategy where, actually, first pedestrian cycle lanes were cleared, especially near schools and day-care centers and then later on major streets. What they discovered was that [the previous] societal practice actually disadvantaged women because they were the ones who were more likely to walk and travel with children while men who are predominantly working and commuting benefited from those major corridors being plowed first. There was actually a gender equity panel or committee in Sweden where they did some data analysis and discovered that 79% of the pedestrian injuries had occurred during winter. Of that 79%, 69% were women, two-thirds of which were individuals slipping on ice.”

Do I really have to comment on something this self-evidently idiotic and irresponsible? Sidney Wang (above) isn’t enough? Oh, all right…

Comments:

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Comment Of The Day: “More From The Bulging ‘It Isn’t What It Is’ File! Unethical Quote Of The Week: Washington Post Deputy Editorial Page Editor Ruth Marcus

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

With today’s Comment of the Day, Jim Hodgson weighs in on bad analogies as well as related matters. Bad analogies are a frequent topic here, and The Great Stupid may represent the zenith of bad analogies in our culture—at least I hope and pray it is.

My father, who, like me, was a lawyer who seldom practiced law, maintained that “everyone” should get a law degree, because the kind of critical thinking that law school teaches is no longer available in most colleges. (Once it was taught in grade school). One concept legal arguments rely on constantly are analogies. This is why I found Ruth Marcus employing such a wretched and irredeemable one in the Washington Post so depressing and infuriating. Striking down a vaccine mandate not supported by the law is inconsistent with the Court running its own operations with requirements that those who come into contact with the mostly high-risk Justices have to take very precaution is hypocritical? How? Why? Marcus is a Harvard Law School grad: she was taught better reasoning than that.

I see terrible analogies everywhere. Comparing Donald Trump to Hitler was ridiculous, but comparing the January 6 riot ( when “our government was almost overthrown last year by a guy wearing a Viking hat and speedos,” as Marco Rubio deftly put it) to Pearl Harbor was more ridiculous still, and the Vice President did that, more than once. Was making that idiotic analogy worse than the President calling limits on mail-in balloting the equivalent of Jim Crow laws? Or worse than claiming that enforcing the nation’s borders is “racism”? Actually, this might be a fun parlor game: “The Worst Analogy.”

Here is Jim Hodgson’s Comment of the Day on the post, “More From The Bulging “It Isn’t What It Is” File! Unethical Quote Of The Week: Washington Post Deputy Editorial Page Editor Ruth Marcus”…

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Misleading analogies and false equivalencies are among the favored tools of today’s “journalists.” The Progressive Left and the media (but I repeat myself) have a clear agenda and it isn’t good for the republic. Forty years ago, I railed against the (comparatively mild) bias of news anchors; nowadays they look almost Fox News-ish by comparison.

Marcus and her ilk aren’t really trying to convince “searchers for the truth,” they are merely reinforcing the beliefs and attitudes of those in the “woke bubble” and reaching out only to the easily swayed. I spend a few hours most days reading a variety of news sources online, trying to get an accurate and more complete view of national and world events and issues than I find from any single source. I know not everyone makes this effort, and I regularly refer friends and family to articles and sources (including E.A.) that I think will improve their understanding of issues and events. Continue reading →

P.M. Ethics Dispatches, 1/11/2022

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

We have to keep baseball ethics alive even if baseball itself is in a state of suspension: the owner and players are, for the first time in decades, arguing about how to divide up their billions, everything from roster size to minimum salaries are on the table, and as of now, the two sides aren’t even talking with the season just a couple of months away. One of the issues to be settled is whether the National League will finally capitulate and adopt the designated hitter rule, which was accepted in the American League on this date in 1973, a day which many traditionalist fans then and now regard as an unforgivable scar on the integrity of the game. Baseball has always been celebrated for its equity and balance: as it was envisioned, every player on the field had to both hit and play defense. The DH, which is a batter who never uses a glove, also allowed the pitcher to be a defense-only specialist, never picking up a bat which, advocates of the new rule argued, was a result much to be wished, since the vast majority of hurlers are only slightly better at hitting the ball than your fat old uncle Curt who played semi-pro ball in his twenties. All these decades years later, the National League and its fans have stubbornly maintained that the DH was a vile, utilitarian gimmick spurred by non-ethical considerations, mainly greed. When the rule was adopted, American League attendance lagged behind the NL, which also was winning most of the All Star games, in part because that league had embraced black stars far more rapidly than “the junior league.” The DH, the theory went, would make games more exciting, with more offense, while eliminating all the .168 batters in the ninth spot in every line-up.

I had a letter published in Sports Illustrated in 1973 explaining why I opposed the DH as a Boston Red Sox fan. Since then, I have grudgingly come to accept the benefits of the rule: it gave the Sox David Ortiz, allowed Carl Yastrzemski to play a few more years, and let American League fans see such all-time greats as Hank Aaron at the plate after they could no longer play the field. It was a breach of the game’s integrity, but it worked.

1. At least that’s fixed. The Supreme Court issued a corrected transcript of the oral arguments in the Biden vaccine mandate case, and it now accurately records Justice Gorsuch as saying he believes the seasonal flu kills “hundreds…thousands of people every year.” The original version wrongly quoted him as saying hundreds of thousands, which allowed those desperately trying to defend the outrageously wrong assertions by Justice Sotomayor regarding the Wuhan virus to point to Gorsuch and claim, “See? Conservatives are just as bad!” Prime among these was the steadily deteriorating Elie Mystal at “The Nation,” who, typically for him, refused to accept the correction. Sotomayor is one of the all-time worst Supreme Court justices, though she will be valuable as a constant reminder of the perils of affirmative action. Her jurisprudence makes the much maligned Clarence Thomas look like Louis Brandeis by comparison. Continue reading →

Ugh. The Great Stupid Snags “The Ethicist”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Not only is Kwame Anthony Appiah the most trustworthy and competent of all those who have authored the New York Times Magazine’s “The Ethicist” advice column, he’s also the only one who could be called a true ethicist, as he teaches philosophy at N.Y.U. Thus it is with great disappointment and sadness that I must report that “The Ethicist” has fallen victim to the dreaded Woke Virus, which, has, in the Times’ own lexicon, been “raging” through the paper for quite some time, poisoning its judgment, and as bias does, making its employees stupid.

Given Appiah’s assignment, which is to hand out ethical advice regarding various dilemmas and conflicts posed by correspondents, I would have thought that both he and the Times would have insisted that he practice social distancing and wear a Hazmat suit when visiting the office—maybe even eschew reading the paper. I guess not.

In this week’s column, a reader presented her problem thusly:

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Comment Of The Day: “Council Rock Elementary School, ‘Jingle Bells,’ And When Something Trivial Demands A Strong Response (Part One)”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The infuriating/ridiculous/frightening saga of an elementary school in Brighton, New York deciding to ban “Jingle Bells” inspired several superb posts, none better than the Comment of the Day by Charles Abbott. Mr. Abbott lives in Brighton, and provided much insight regarding this weird episode, which I wrote about here and here. And here is Charles’ Comment of the Day:

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Brighton is a suburb of Rochester NY. Rochester NY is about half way between Buffalo and Syracuse in the western part of New York State.

Brighton is a prosperous suburb, mostly inhabited by households in the upper middle class or professional classes. The suburb of Brighton is contiguous to the City of Rochester. The Brighton Central School District student performance consistently ranks among the 10 best school districts in all of New York State. This has a lot to do with the characteristics of the households who live there, as well as the quality of the teachers and the curriculum.

It’s worth mentioning that a Brighton zip code, 14618, is possibly the “most Jewish” zip code in New York State west of the Hudson River Valley. I live in 14618–offhand I can think of 5 synagogues within a 2 miles of my rhouse–two of them are pretty large by local standards. A Jewish friend of mine pointed out to me that I actually live within an “eruv” (look it up–it was news to me!). I mention this because observers have long noted the tendency of Jewish Americans to lean liberal or Left. The most conservative suburb of Rochester is probably Greece, NY to the NW of Rochester. Brighton tends to be a liberal suburb–upper middle class and liberal–perhaps smugly liberal. Continue reading →

What Is The Appropriate Response To These Companies?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Target puppy

With crime rates soaring in many cities and “smash and garb” raids disrupting large retailers, companies like Home Depot, Nordstom’s and Target are calling on communities to increase policing. By “like,” I mean companies that previously hailed Black Lives Matter and other anti-policing organizations,, festooned their stores, ads and websites with endorsements of BLM as it vilified law enforcement and called for “defunding” the police, and gave large grants to it and other “social justice” movements seeking to reduce police protection of communities across the nation.

It was all part of “The Big Pander” sub-division of The Great Stupid, itself fueled by the George Floyd Freakout, because it makes perfect sense to decide that a single brutal police incident proves that all police are racist menaces. The fake history “1619 Project” and offshoots of Critical Race Theory also were bolstered by these corporations’ cynical virtue-signaling, at a time when catering to criminals is seen as a virtue.

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Casting Ethics And The Great Stupid: So William F. Buckley Was Black…I Did Not Know That!

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Buckley Vidal play

“The Best of Enemies” is a stage adaptation of the film about the 1968 TV face-offs between arch-conservative pundit William F. Buckley and acerbic liberal author and wit Gore Vidal that climaxed with Buckley threatening to punch Vidal is the face. I haven’t seen it (which is now playing in London’s West End) or the film: I was lucky enough to see the original, live. Buckley was fascinating (and often hilarious); Vidal was the perfect iconoclast (I even had a correspondence with him briefly!), so I assume both play and film are at least entertaining. That’s not the issue at hand, however.

The issue is casting ethics. My position as a director and also from the ethics perspective is that a production’s obligations are to the audience and the work being presented, and everything else is subordinate at best. That does not mean that I am opposed to so-called “non-traditional casting;” indeed, I support it (and have done a lot of it as a director) when it benefits the play or musical. When funky casting accomplishes nothing but making activists happy or ticking off woke boxes at the expense of the show’s effectiveness, that’s unethical, plain and simple.

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Weird Tales Of The Great Stupid! Tonight’s Episode: “The Apologetic Gynecologist”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Weird Tales

Gynecologist Ryan Stewart announced that he is redesigning his office, and inquired on Twitter, “I’m asking women. How would you design/optimize a visit to the gynecologist’s office?” Terrified, he realized soon after that he had uttered the unwoke, offensive, excluding word…wait for it…”women.” My God, who in this enlightened age would trust a gynecologist who says “women”? So after being properly chastened on social media, Dr. Steward grovelled in a tweet, 

“Folks have [correctly] pointed out that I [incorrectly] said ‘women’ when what I should have said was ‘folks who may need gynecologic care,’ Stewart tweeted. “I named the practice with this in mind @midwestpelvis, but I find that I still have a lot of internalized/implicit bias.”

He needs to read his own website.  Ryanstewart.com,  informs readers,”Dr. Ryan Stewart is a fellowship trained pelvic surgeon specializing in treatment of women with pelvic organ prolapse, urinary incontinence, and pelvic floor dysfunction.” 

As the Crystals might sing,

“He’s a weenie and he’ll never ever be any good
He’s a weenie ’cause he has to talk like woke people would
And even though it makes no sense and he looks like a jackass
He’ll say anything to grovel for all their love…”
 
Seriously, when will normal Americab with self respect and functioning cerebrums wake up, slap themselves in the forehead, and say, “What? I can’t associate myself with these terrified, pathetic, weak-minded people! They’re nuts! They’re creating a police state of the self-deluded! I don’t want to live in a country that’s so sensitive and frightened of words that a gynocologist has to apologize for saying “women”! Have I encouraged this insanity by tolerating it? WHAT HAVE I DONE???“
 
Cue Major Clipton:

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Source: The Blaze