The Great Stupid

A “Great Stupid”-George Floyd Freakout Mash-up Classic! The Fentanyl Overdose Death Of A Black Perp In Minnesota Will Result In A Name Change For Scott’s Oriole

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I’m not kidding.

This story has convinced me that the obsessions of the woke-infected have no limits. Hold on to your skulls…

The American Ornithological Society announced yesterday that it will remove human names from the common names for birds to create “a more inclusive environment for people of diverse backgrounds interested in bird-watching.” It is expected that around 80 birds in the U.S. and Canada will be renamed, the announcement says.

Wait, what?

It seems that this political correctness movement among bird brains began in 2018, when a college student named Robert Driver proposed renaming the McKown’s longspur, a small bird in the Central United States was named for John P. McKown, who collected the first specimen of the species in 1851. Ah, but Driver’s research revealed that McKown was insufficiently psychic about what causes would be deemed acceptable in a hundred years or so, and thus he fought Native American in the Seminole Indian in 1856, then participated in an expedition against Mormons in Utah in 1858, and worst of all, became general in the Confederate Army. Driver’s crusade was rejected at the time, because…well, it was stupid, to be blunt. The bird was named for McKown because McKown first spotted and identified it. His politics, positions on Indian relations and military exploits have exactly nothing to do with that distinction. 99.99% of people who hear the name “McKown’s longspur” don’t know or care who McKown was, or what he did in the Seminole War, nor should they. Driver—I’ll have to check to see what wokeness indoctrination factory he got his degree from—was just a bit ahead of his time. His ilk hadn’t started toppling Thomas Jefferson statues yet.

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I’m Shocked…SHOCKED!… To Learn That DEI Policies Harm Black And Hispanic Students!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Back when the Great Stupid was really picking up steam in 2020, the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD), the second largest school district in California with over 106,000 students, announced that it would be overhauling how students will be evaluated as part of a larger “a larger effort to combat racism.” The school board voted unanimously to eliminate yearly grade averages. Meeting deadlines for assignments and classroom behavior would not affect academic grades. The district decided to de-emphasize discipline and penalties for cheating.

This crack-brain approach to education, essentially rejecting everything that had been learned over centuries about how students learn, was justified as way to eliminate the accumulated deficits of “systemic racism.” Soon “Diversity Equity Inclusion” budgets exploded and almost every school system jumped on board the latest fad. This was reparations, not education; no respectable research supported the theory that holding minority kids to lesser standards would help them succeed, but never mind: Fact Don’t Matter to ideologues and race-hustlers.

Now come Jay P. Greene and Madison Marino of the Heritage Foundation’s Center on Education Policy with a study suggesting that black and Hispanic students had “significantly greater learning loss during the pandemic in the school guided by diversity officers than those schooled in districts without one.” Minority students lost more ground than their white classmates, especially in math, the researchers found. “Racial achievement gaps went from bad to worse in these districts.” Of course they did: having an official directing policy who insists that black and Hispanic students not be held to the same standards of behavior or academic achievement as other students—must combat that structural racism!—was guaranteed to undermine minority student success.

The news gets worse: nearly half of the school districts with at least 15,000 students employ a chief diversity or equity officer, and the number is 89% for districts with more than 100,000 students, the study found.

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The ‘Great Stupid’ Woke Mug That’s Even Worse Than The ‘Great Stupid’ Woke Lawn Signs

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

This embarrassing thing has over 5,000 “likes” on Facebook, including many from friends of mine who I will henceforth have a hard time looking in the eye.

The mug, which is available free of charge “for a limited time only,” annoys me more than the “In this house we believe” signs with their fatuous virtue-signaling, generalizations (“Love is Love”) and rationalizations (“No Human Being Is Illegal”). because the game it plays is more sinister and confusing to the intellectually handicapped. It is a political propaganda device that deliberately uses false equivalencies in order to ridicule and denigrate legitimate dissent from current progressive cant.

The smug mug’s three statements of the obvious (“The Earth is not flat,” “Chemtrails aren’t a thing” and “We’ve been to the moon”) contradict fringe wacko conspiracy theories that don’t require debunking, since only a tiny and insignificant percentage of the public believes in them or ever has, and almost all of that group breathe through their mouths. However, mixed in among those topics as if they are in the same category are reductive generalizations about two public policy issues involving serious and valid controversies. That’s dirty pool, and worse, the statements aspire to end debates that they don’t even fairly reference.

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A “Ripley” For The New Republic! The Great Stupid Meets Trump Derangement!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Incredibly, amazingly, this appeal by the New Republic is not a joke or a Babylon Bee parody. I checked. I couldn’t believe it myself.

Ready?

Wow, what an all-star team! Trump’s really in trouble now!

A Rationalization #22 Mitigation Of U.S. Progressive Racial Spoils: Canada Is Even Worse

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Rationalization #22, in my view the worst of the over 100 rationalizations on the list, is called “The Comparative Virtue Excuse,” or “It’s not the worst thing.” I immediately thought of it when I read the head-exploding account of how a father escaped jail time in Canada for incest that resulted in the birth of a disabled child who has been placed in foster care. The father admitted that he had regularly had sexual relations with his daughter since she was 19 or 20. Incest is typically punishable with a jail sentence of at least two years and as high as 14 years, but a majority of the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal decided last month that the father shouldn’t have to spend any time in jail at all, just two years of house arrest, with a monitor. That’s nice. He can even continue his loving relationship with his daughter under those rules.

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A “Great Stupid” Mash-Up! Ethics Hero And Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: San Mateo County Supervisor David Canepa…And Some Related Comments Of The Day [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I never expected to see those two categories in the same post, did you?

But it has come to this: San Mateo County Supervisor David Canepa told reporters this week that he regretted his vocal support of California’s Prop 47, which voters passed in 2014, which reduced certain thefts and drug possession crimes from felonies to misdemeanors if the value of the stolen goods was less than $950. This, amazingly, led to an explosion in retail crime and other social pathologies, with videos on social media showing looters casually walking out of stores with merchandise. Some prominent retail locations in San Francisco, LA and other cities have closed in response.

This was all part of the progressive-Democratic response to “over-incarceration,” with politicians like Joe Biden, California Governor Gavin Gavin Newsom, and mercifully retired NYC mayor Bill De Blasio, among others. The Retail Federation reported retail shrink across the U.S. reached nearly $100 billion in losses in 2022.

Gee, what a brilliant idea Prop 47 was !

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More Weird Tales Of “The Great Stupid”: Martha Stewart Abuses An Iceberg

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Mock away. The climate change fanatics are truly bananas.

Lifestyle media icon Martha Stewart was vacationing on a cruise around Greenland and posted a photograph of a cocktail chilled by ice she said had been chipped off an iceberg. “End of the first zodiac cruise from @swanhelleniccruises into a very beautiful fjord on the east coast of Greenland,” she wrote in the post. “We actually captured a small iceberg for our cocktails tonight.” Wait a sec—Marlon would like a word…

Stewart was immediately scorched on social media because using ice from an iceberg is promoting global warming, or cruelty to icebergs, or anti-Semitic (“Iceberg, Goldberg, what’s the difference?”) or something. “Wealthy white people drinking their iceberg cocktails while the planet is in flames is a bit tone deaf,” wrote a typical hysteric. “Please don’t use an endangered whale or seal to make any elitist meals like you did with the disappearing iceberg,” wrote another. You know: morons.

Martha is no weenie: She followed up by posting a photograph of an iceberg and wrote, “Pleated iceberg. Perfect for cocktails!”

Perfect response, too.

I would have been tempted to post a photo of me eating a polar bear steak.

More Weird Tales Of “The Great Stupid”: One “Jewface” Casting Controversy Wasn’t Stupid Enough; Woke World Insists On Another One

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The most recent nut-ball casting ethics lunacy that finds something anti-Semitic about prosthetic noses makes my brain hurt. It is such fanatic political correctness and woke “gotcha!” extremism that led to this recent post, in which I mused about owing vile radio talk show host Michael Savage an apology for condemning his claim years ago that liberalism is a mental disease.

Everything I wrote about the complaints that casting eminent non-Jewish actor Bradley Cooper as composer Leonard Bernstein and having him wear make-up (including a fake nose) to look more like Bernstein applies to the wacko criticism of casting Helen Mirren as Golda Meir in “Golda” (that’s Hellen on the right above) and having her outfitted with a big nose. In fact, you could just read the Bernstein post substituting “Golda Meir” for “Leonard Bernstein” and “Helen Mirren” for “Bradley Cooper.” In fairness, Mirren requires more make-up than Cooper because she is an attractive woman, and Golda was anything but (big nose notwithstanding, Lenny was a handsome man), and it would take a prosthetic nose to make almost any actress be a credible Golda Meir on screen. Mirren is perhaps the most distinguished actress in her age range right now, and a complex and historic figure like Meir deserves no less for her film biography. Never mind, though: what matters in these days of woke madness isn’t good acting or good movies, but racial, ethnic and gender spoils, all executed with the integrity of Calvinball.

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Ethics Alarms Challenge! Provide A Sincere, Persuasive Ethical Argument Why This Isn’t An Epic Example Of ‘The Great Stupid’

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

(Yes, it made my head explode.)

Hot on the heels of the news this week that owners of the 1,921-room Hilton San Francisco Union Square, San Francisco’s largest hotel, occupying an entire city block, is being abandoned by its owners because that woke city has become such a hopeless hell-hole that they can’t see the convention and tourism business rebounding comes New York City’s health officials installing the city’s first free drug paraphernalia vending machine in Brooklyn. It features all sorts of goodies for users and addicts, like crack pipes, “Safer Sniffing” kits, drug testing kits and the anti-overdose medication Naloxone. The vending machine also has hygiene kits for the special problems addicts face (like cracked lips) and safe sex kits. Anyone with a New York City ZIP code can claim any of the contents for no charge. The Brooklyn vending machine is the first of four machines that will be installed in neighborhoods that were hit hardest by the opioid crisis.

Wow, what a great idea. I think it’s a great idea. Don’t you think it’s a great idea?

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Another “Great Stupid” Milestone: Mayor Adams’ Plan To Stop Shoplifting

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

If you are not fully informed in Ethics Alarms lore, the term “The Great Stupid” for the ridiculous period Western Civilization is trying to survive came from a lucky conversation your host had many decades ago with futurist Herman Kahn, then generally regarded as the smartest man alive. One of the topics we discussed was the Sixties, and Herman observed that throughout history there have been periods where whole cultures suddenly forgot the lessons of the past. This resulted in what in retrospect looked like extended periods of stupidity, with people and governments engaging in destructive conduct and embracing wildly foolish policies until they re-learned what they had forgotten, usually after catastrophic results. I am quite confident that Mr Kahn would agree that this is just such a period.

New York City mayors have been major players in the most recent descent of stupidity across the land, and while Mayor Eric Adams couldn’t be a worse mayor than his predecessor if he just lay on his office rug twitching, he certainly tries. Recently, as his city (like so many Democrat-run metropolises) grapples with an exploding crime rate, Adams announced the following plan to deal with rampant shoplifting:

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