The Great Stupid

Flagrant Virtue-Signaling of the Year: CEO of Olympic Broadcasting Services Yiannis Exarchos

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I’m sure glad I ignore the Olympics as the corrupt, greed-infested fiasco it had been for decades, because if I gave a rip, the Paris Olympics would have my head exploding more frequently than Old Faithful blows. The whole enterprise appears to be run by silly, incompetent, unethical bureaucrats and con artists.

Here’s a particularly nauseating example: the CEO of Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) Yiannis Exarchos decided to burnish his woke creds by telling reporters in Paris that his organization updated its guidelines for camera operators, most of whom are men, to inveigh against “sexist” portrayals of female athletes at the 2024 Summer Olympics. “Unfortunately, in some events they are still being filmed in a way that you can identify that stereotypes and sexism remains, even from the way in which some camera operators are framing differently men and women athletes,” Exarchos said, making no sense at all. “Women athletes are not there because they are more attractive or sexy or whatever. They are there because they are elite athletes.” Exarchos said that the problem primarily stems from “unconscious bias,” which leads to camera operators and TV editors favoring more close-up shots of women than of men.

Oh, shut the HELL up! TV editors favor more close-up shots of women than men because women are more attractive than men, the demographics of Olympic viewing for many events slants male, and there is nothing offensive or disrespectful about showing Olympic athletes like this German sprinter,

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Is “The Great Stupid” Finally Receding? There Is Hope: From Harvard!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

What a freak Ethel Merman was! She was 68 when she performed that madly optimistic Anthony Newley-Leslie Bricusse song, one of my all-time favorites (Newley sang it better).

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced that it will stop requiring a diversity, inclusion, and belonging statement as part of its faculty hiring process. Dean of Faculty Affairs and Planning Nina Zipser announced that the change was made because existing requirements were “too narrow in the information they attempted to gather” and potentially confusing for international candidates. Sure. This is a face-saving explanation, because Harvard’s DEI obsession has lost the staggering school alumni support, donations, prestige and credibility, and also because DEI is a fad that couldn’t stand up to long term scrutiny.

It’s also discriminatory.

And stupid.

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Weird Tales of “The Great Stupid,” Beauty Pageant Division

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Sara Milliken, 23, was named “Miss Alabama” when she was selected by judges as the #1 beauty in the regional semi-finals of the National American Miss pageant. I find myself at a loss to explain or analyze this. Beauty pageants were always odd, and in 2024 they are anachronistic ghosts of long-dead cultural attitudes and tastes that never made much sense.

So end them, for heaven’s sake. If they have to stoop to stunts like calling a morbidly obese woman the most beautiful woman on the stage, what’s the point?

In response to Sara’s victory and the entirely predictable tsunami of ridicule it has attracted on social media, various apologists have raved about Sarah’s “inner beauty.” Okay, then call them “inner beauty pageants,” have all the contestants wear burlap sacks instead of gowns, ban make-up and styled hair—heck, maybe tell contestants they can’t bathe for a moth—and stop pretending that by any American cultural norm or standard a grossly obese young woman heading for a heart attack before she’s 40 is “beautiful.” And exactly what message does this silly result send to young women? Traditional beauty pageants were condemned for promoting eating disorders. What does this kind of pageant promote?

The political-correctness mandates suffocating the news media into ludicrousness was on special display with this story. The Daily Mail’s intellectually dishonest reporting was typical: Sarah was a “plus-size”winner. (Sarah is eye-poppingly fat, making Lizzo seem trim.) Social media commenters who criticized her weight were “trolls.” (They were legitimately questioning the result of the “beauty” contest.)

Scoring in the pageant, as explained on its website, is based on “personality, confidence and communication.” “Braces, glasses, skin problems, varying heights, weights and appearances, are all a part of creating the special and unique individual that you are and that we want to celebrate,’ the website states. It might as well have included “major birth defects” and lizard people.

Got it. This is a personality contest, and the organizers and sponsors are falsely packaging it in the guise of a beauty pageant in an audacious bait and switch. That’s unethical, and all involved deserve every bit of criticism they get.

Ethics Dunce: University of California at Santa Cruz

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Yes, morons.

Just think: these are the people who run the high-priced institutions that are supposed to teach our rising generations critical thinking, logic and life skills.

Would you let this happen?

The University of California at Santa Cruz hired Amanda Reiterman to teach two 120-student lecture classes on classical texts and Greek history. Reiterman who holds a Ph.D. and has taught as a part-time lecturer at the university since 2020, was paid to design the course, do the lectures, and plan the discussion sessions. She recommended a former student of hers who had just earned her bachelor’s degree to be hired as her teaching assistant. Administrators began the hiring process and copied Reiterman…causing her to discover that thanks to a 2022 strike settlement after 48,000 graduate students, postdocs, and researchers in the University of California system walked off thee job to win pay increases and expanded benefits, many teaching assistants are earning more than lecturers, and in some cases, like this one, more than their supervisors and the instructors in their own classes. When Reiterman learned that her teaching assistant would earn $3,236 per month, $300 more than her own monthly pay, she quit. It was not about the money, she told the Chronicle of Higher Education, but the principle. “I felt like I could not teach a class under those circumstances.” Reiterman dropped out as instructor for one class and arranged to teach another class in a different department with fewer students and no teaching assistant.

Brava! No weenie she.

Why did no ethics alarms ring for these administrators? I suspect that when your entire sense of fairness and equity is being mangled and distorted by compensatory benefit theories and DEI cant, little matters like paying a subordinate more than a supervisor with far more experience and credentials just doesn’t resonate the way it once would have, before The Great Stupid spread its dark bat-wings across the horizon, blotting out the sun.

Decades ago, running a foundation where my supervisor negotiated salaries after I decided on who to hire, my first male staff member extracted a higher salary than his equivalent female member on my staff, who had been there longer. I immediately pointed this out to my boss, who agreed to raise the salaries of the women on the staff to the same level. I didn’t even have to argue with him: he knew immediately that it was the only just course.

It’s so disheartening. One has to fight, working in my field, not to conclude, “Not only is a majority of the public cripplingly stupid, ignorant and ethically obtuse, a frightening percentage of those who run our private and public organizations and institutions are also stupid, ignorant and ethically obtuse.” That way despair and madness lies.

But is it true?

___________________

Pointer: TaxProf Blog

Amazing Tales of “The Great Stupid”: the DEI Graduation Announcer

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Res ipsa loquitur. There is no excuse for this. Of course some of the names would give anyone trouble. But Thomas (at Thomas Jefferson University)? Elizabeth?

This was so bad the school issued an apology, though its explanation doesn’t pass the giggle test:

At a certain point, the DEI farce will reach an inevitable tipping point. Too many people are lazy, dumb, timid and gullible, but not enough are THAT lazy, dumb, timid and gullible to put up with clownish displays like the one Thomas Jefferson University inflicted on its nursing school graduates.

Ethics Hero: J.K. Rowling, or “Now THAT’S How to Practice Civil Disobedience!”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Scotland’s has passed a bonkers hate crime law that went into effect this week. It makes it a crime potentially punishable by up to seven years in prison to “stir up hatred” regarding age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and “variations in sex characteristics.” The law would be such a flagrant violation of the First Amendment in the U.S. that even Democrats would be embarrassed to vote for it, but Scotland, like the rest of the United Kingdom, has been hit particularly hard by The Great Stupid. (This would be a propitious time to say a silent but heartfelt “Thanks, guys!” to Tom, Ben, George, John and the rest of the much maligned Founders.)

Being is an especially good position to do so, J.K. Rowling, the “Harry Potter” author, has decided to lead the principled opposition to the unethical law. Yesterday, as the crime of “stirring up hatred” went into force, Rowling publicly defied it by listing a convicted rapist, several ex abusers and trans activists in a post on Twitter/”X,” asserting that they were all, in her view, men.

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Yet Another Amazing Story From “The Great Stupid”: The Fat-Shamed Pig!

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

We began this day with head-exploding stories from the Weird, Woke and Wonderful, so we might as well end with another. This one is genuinely funny; indeed it made me laugh out loud twice, something I haven’t been able to do for four weeks. Thank you, silly, humorless hyper-sensitive people!

As a special bonus, it involves a baseball team, and today is MLB’s Opening Day!

The St. Paul Saints announced the name for the baby pig that will deliver baseballs and provide refreshments for umpires during the first half of the 2024 season. This is a tradition for the minor league team, which has had many baseball pigs as mascots over thirty years. The Saints recently began using two pigs per season,because they grow so fast. This time, the fan submission included f a masterpiece of topical swine-naming: “Ozempig.” Here’s the announcement:

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It’s Not Nice to Make My Head Explode First Thing in the Morning….

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Here’s the Great Stupid attack I woke up to:

  • That idiocy above, with our useless and silly Secretary of Education saying the underpasses built too low for vehicles like trucks and buses to get through were obviously designed to keep buses carrying black students to the beach from getting through.
  • The ADL declaring that the term “100%” is racist:
  • From the Washington Free Beacon: “The United States’ top intelligence agency wants to ban its spies from using “biased language,” including the terms “radical Islamists” and “jihadist,” saying these words “are hurtful to Muslim-Americans and detrimentally impact our efforts as they bolster extremist rhetoric,” according to a language guide published internally. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which is responsible for handling the country’s spy apparatus, seeks to ban a range of common terms because it says they offend Muslims and foment racism against employees. In addition to terms describing Islamic terrorists, ODNI instructs employees to avoid phrases such as “blacklisted,” “cakewalk,” “brown bag,” “grandfathered,” and “sanity check.”

“Didn’t Earn It”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I hadn’t seen or heard the derisive (but accurate!) nickname for DEI, as in “diversity, equity and inclusion” until I saw the Scott Adams “X” post above. I think he’s right. When a quick, pointed and accurate characterization makes people slap their foreheads and think, “Wait, why have I been willing to accept this nonsense?,” it can move metaphorical mountains.

The DEI fad has already been destructive to the economy, the workforce, society and its institutions beyond all imagining, making it one of the more damaging outgrowths of “The Great Stupid,” which really got rolling when its Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse equivalent (the fourth horse was a scratch, thank goodness) began galloping together in 2020. They were the George Floyd Freakout, the Black Lives Matter Scam, and the Wuhan Virus Panic, and together they brought virtue-signaling overdrive, progressive preening and an attack on core American and ethical values, not to mention civilization.

DEI , like the slogan “black lives matter,” was another ingenious manipulation of language to trap the slow of thought and the weak of character into going along with a movement that was intrinsically dishonest and unfair. Who could be against such benign concepts as diversity, equity and inclusion? But the objective was and is obliterating the cultural acceptance of merit as the aspirational basis of the American ideal. Along the way, the DEI industry itself emerged as an engine of waste and carnage with mostly underwhelming and undeserving drivers at the controls, as Harvard University demonstrated for us spectacularly.

Oh, we know how this will go: “Didn’t Earn It” will be roundly attacked a racist slur. Long screeds will be published to dispute “the lie”: the beneficiaries of DEI did earn it, the public will be told, just as anyone with ancestors on distant branches of the family tree who were victims of slavery at least a century and a half ago “earned” million of dollars in reparations today. (That response will anchor DEI to an absolutely indefensible policy goal: perfect.) Eventually, because this is what the dishonest and relentless far Left does, it will come up with another moniker, because DEI will finally have the aura of stench about it that it should—you know, just as “illegal aliens” became “undocumented workers” and are now “migrants” (or “visitors”), “performing major surgery on minors because they have been encouraged to believe they are the ‘wrong’ sex” became “gender-affirming care,” and the classic, “aborting the innocent unborn” was recast as “a woman’s choice.”

Never mind. “Didn’t Earn It” is an ethical tool to combat an unethical practice and ideology that is wasting financial and human resources.

I recommend using it.

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Pointer: Instapundit

Is This Temple University Announcement Peak DEI Stupid? We Can Hope…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“Students who identify as diverse in some way.”

!!!!

How can someone pay tuition to be educated by an institution that would publish something that ridiculous? How could qualified administrators read that and not throw themselves into a wood-chipper? How could anyone even think such nonsense and not realize that something had gone seriously wrong with their internal wiring?

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