weenies

Wait, This Was A Gang Rape? [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

From “The Ethicist” column: A perfect example of why capitulating to preferred-pronoun bullying is madness, sending human communication back to grunts and squeaks. Here’s the inquirer’s story:

I went on a date with someone, and we went back to their apartment. In the middle of sex, I caught this person, who uses they/them pronouns, recording me on their phone. For my safety, I chose to pretend I did not notice, as I did not want to be stranded in the middle of the night. In the morning, I confronted them, and they apologized and deleted the video. They said that was their first time recording someone during sex and a spur-of-the-moment decision, albeit a bad one.

When I arrived home I felt more dehumanized than angry, as if I were a sex toy. I told my friends what happened, and they were very upset, and urged me to file a police report. I dismissed this at first, but I looked online and found that capturing imagery of a person’s private parts without their consent, when there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, is a violation of state and federal laws.

I decided to contact my date and inform them of the gravity of their actions and told them never to do it again. I also decided that I didn’t want to press charges. I do not want to subject myself to a lengthy legal process, repeating and reliving this story over and over, as well as having to tell my family or put my life on hold. My friends are concerned that I don’t feel upset enough, and they assume that this was not my date’s first time recording someone, and will not be the last. They think I should file a police report to prevent my date from recording others in the future. I chose to assume that my date is a normal human being who made a stupid decision and does not necessarily deserve a criminal record because of it. By informing my date of the severity of their actions, they now know to never make that mistake again.

My friends don’t agree with my decision, despite understanding why I would not want to press charges. We all agree that it should not be my responsibility to prevent my date from committing future crimes, but they think I should do it anyway because it’s the right thing to do. I fear that they think less of me now because I am ‘‘protecting’’ my date by giving them the benefit of the doubt, and that I’m being selfish because I do not want to sacrifice myself to the legal system on the chance that my date is a morally reprehensible person who will continue to record people without their consent. — Name Withheld, San Diego

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Another Dead Canary in the U.S. Mine of Functioning Society…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

More of the accumulating evidence that our society’s standards and ethics are rotting from the head down…

Comedian George Lopez walked off the stage at Eagle Mountain Casino in Porterville, California mid-way through his stand-up set when hecklers and inebriated members of his audience made it impossible for him to continue in his judgment. (He oughta know, after all.)

The comic gave the group three chances to quiet down, and when they did not, put the microphone back on the stand, said, “That’s cool, thanks,” waved goodbye and walked out. It was not cool, of course, and Lopez accused the casino of failing to provide adequate security and management. “It’s the venue or casino’s job to provide a good experience for both the artist and the fans, but the casino failed in this regard. The audience was overserved and unruly, and the casino staff was unable to provide a safe and enjoyable experience for the artist and guests,” Lopez’s representative said. “George is not obligated to perform in an unsafe environment. He feels badly that those who came to see the show were unable to do so as a result.”

Indeed. I would think that goes without saying, which is our way of saying “res ipsa loquitur.” Naturally, however, as is the growing trend among those in positions of responsibility these days, the casino management refused to accept responsibility, blaming Lopez.

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Suggested Course For Princeton: “Campus Protesting For Weenies”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I waited a few days before writing about this because I had to stop giggling to type.

I you watch Aaron Sorkin’s excellent if a bit too fawning movie, “The Trial of the Chicago Seven,” you will see that the anti-war campus protesters of the Sixties had, if nothing else, integrity and guts. Maybe they had inherited some from their parents, of “The Greatest Generation.” Today’s student protests in favor of Hamas, terrorism and Jew-killing (I know, I know: “Think of the children!”), in contrast, are marked by hypocrisy, ignorance and weenie-ism.

Princeton has certainly moved to the front of the line in the latter. After the protesting students announced a hunger strike in support of allegedly starving Gazans (Pro tip: if you don’t want to suffer from the predictable consequences of war, don’t elect terrorists as your government). Then they complained that they—the students, now, not the Gazans—were hungry. One female protester shouted into a megaphone, “This is absolutely unfair. My peers and I, we are starving. We are physically exhausted. I am quite literally shaking right now as you can see.” What, is the nearby McDonald’s closed?

Then the protesters persuaded some of the professors whose indoctrination made them the misguided weenies they are to make themselves look foolish by signing a letter of protest in the students’ support. It’s long and infuriating, but here are the best parts…

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Unethical Quote of the Week: The Columbia Law Review

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I gave a legal ethics seminar 90 minutes after finding my wife dead, and these infants are too traumatized to take their exams because of a “horrific time on campus” and their “level of distress”:

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 5: The Speed Hump Weenies

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

For this continuing series examining the biases that make me stupid (or not), on the one month anniversary of the last installment, I want to take up the matter of drivers who slow to a crawl or even stop their vehicles entirely when they encounter a “speed hump” in the road.

This past week two such drivers almost caused my car to run into them. In recent years Northern Virginia has gone speed hump mad, putting the things virtually everywhere that isn’t a highway or a main thoroughfare. I don’t mind them, however, nearly as much as I mind the way some drivers seem to regard them as explosive devices. You can safely drive over a speed hump at a moderate velocity; your transmission or axles aren’t going to fall off if your car doesn’t slow down into single digits.

I confess: I regard drivers who freak out at speed humps as emblematic of creeping weenie-ism in the nation. I imagine such drivers as still wearing masks alone in their cars, spending nights shivering in terror over the certain doom that the world faces if we don’t start living like prehistoric cave dwellers, fearing to allow their kids to walk unaccompanied a few blocks home from school, and who want the U.S. to minimize the deployment of its military to tasks involving expanding LGBTQ rights and advancing the cause of diversity, equity and inclusion. I envision them applauding when some anti-gun fanatic shouts that it would be worth eliminating the Second Amendment “if it saved one life” and crippling the First so no feelings are ever hurt by unwelcome opinions.

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Political Cartoon Ethics: The Washington Post Apologizes For Being Mean To Terrorists

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Long-time readers here know that I believe political cartooning has outlived its usefulness, and now, not all the time but most of the time, such cartoons on editorial pages of newspapers are just excuses to make misleading generalizations with which the cartoonist, who typically has the political sophistication and depth of comprehension of your average rioter, grossly exaggerates one crude point, usually using gross stereotypes, in a manner that could only be amusing to a partisan. Political cartoonists virtually always rely on reader bias as their sharpest hook.

The cartoon above, by Las Vegas Review and Journal editorial cartoonist Michael Ramirez, was published in the Washington Post. I was shocked to see an editorial cartoon that a current day Republican would applaud. The Post’s grotesquely unfair, hyper-partisan (guess which party) political cartoons have been a regular feature of the paper since I was a child. For decades, Democrat ideologue Herb Block was regarded as brilliant by using such lazy cliches as portraying conservatives as cavemen and “big business” as a fat white guys puffing on cigars. Naturally, Block regularly won Pulitzer Prizes for this juvenile junk, which was usually about as objectively funny as a “Kick Me!” sign, like this witty example…

Later, a succession of Block’s successors at the Post were equally restrained; here’s how Tom Toles portrayed the President of the United States:

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The Weenie Mandate

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Elsewhere on Ethics Alarms are a few posts defending the decision by employers to fire employees who have physically intervened in attempted robberies, sometimes to the extent of capturing the thieves. Such individuals are usually hailed as heroes by the media and the public, and the stores that discipline them are assailed as heartless ingrates. The companies are on solid ground, ethically, legally and practically. Typically, there are policies in the employees handbook specifically laying out how robberies are to be handled. Physical intervention not only risks the would-be hero’s well-being, but the welfare of other employees as well. When a staffer’s amateur law-enforcement act goes well, it is still just moral luck.

Unfortunately, this sensible policy has had illicit relations with the “shoplifting should be a crime” mutants, and the result is one frightening deformed offspring. Thanks to woke brain rot seeping through San Francisco and other urban areas, viral videos show staff just standing by politely as people forage through store shelves, sometimes returning several times.

The woman above, Mary Ann Moreno, had worked at Circle K for 18 years. Moreno was behind the counter when Tyler Wimmer walked into the convenience store with a knife, and asked Mary if she would give him a pack of cigarettes for free. Moreno declined. When he grabbed a pack anyway, she instinctively reached out and touched him, then pulled away. Based on the surveillance tapes, the company fired her for violating the company’s “Don’t Chase or Confront Policy” regarding shoplifters and robbers. Moreno is now suing Circle K Stores Inc. Her attorney, Iris Halpern, said the footage clearly shows that Moreno acted in self-defense and made no real effort to stop or chase Wimmer. “Companies have not sufficiently thought through the nuance in these situations,” she says.

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Ethics Dunce And Weenie Of The Month: Scholar And Author Mary Eberstadt

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Bullies have a right to protest, but that right doesn’t extend to dragooning others into untruths—including the untruth that people who join a hateful mob have any intention of listening to a speaker in the first place. They don’t, and the rest of us are under no obligation to help them live that lie by playing along.

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Eberstadt, recently the writer of “Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics “was scheduled to give a speech about her book’s thesis at Furman University today. Prior to her scheduled appearance, the South Carolina campus was festooned with protest fliers. The online student newspaper accused Eberstadt of perpetuating “dangerous myths.” Letters denigrating Ebestadt’s character and demanding that credit for attending her speech be denied were sent to the university’s Cultural Life Program.

So she bailed out, ran away, and capitulated to the mob. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Eberstadt complained that though the odds of physical violence being inflicted on her if she appeared were low, they were not“not non-existent.” She defended her flight from conflict by writing in part,

Bullies have a right to protest, but that right doesn’t extend to dragooning others into untruths—including the untruth that people who join a hateful mob have any intention of listening to a speaker in the first place. They don’t, and the rest of us are under no obligation to help them live that lie by playing along.

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The Great Stupid Is Now Officially An Existential Threat To American Civilization, Because, As The Dodo Proved, Things Really Can Be Too Stupid To Live…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Morons. Everywhere I look, morons.

This isn’t funny any more, if it ever was. I was pondering whether reports that an organization called The Trans Cultural Mindfulness Alliance is demanding that Apple Music and Spotify remove the Aretha Franklin 1968 song “Natural Woman”  from their playlists because it “perpetuates multiple harmful anti-trans stereotypes,” since “there is no such thing as a ‘natural’ woman.” The group claims that the song “has helped inspire acts of harm against transgender women.” 

Really? I’d like to see the citations for that. I know I want to run amuck with a machete every time I hear “Imagine,” but Aretha never made me feel violent.

I couldn’t believe this story could be true, until I encountered this story, which is even dumber.

Last year, Mars Wrigley changed the shoes of some of its cartoon M&M’s characters that appear in TV ads. Conservatives were upset. Let me repeat that: some conservatives were upset because of a change in the design of anthropomorphic animated candies’ shoes. Tucker Carlson  criticized the character makeovers as “Woke M&M’s.” Slow news day, Tucker?

M&M’s marketers had  re-shod the green “female” M&M’s high heels with flats and replaced the intimidating brown “female” M&M’s stilettos for smaller heels.

 

Tucker pounced! “M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous,”  Carlson said on his show. “Until the moment when you wouldn’t want to have a drink with any one of them. That’s the goal. When you’re totally turned off, we’ve achieved equity. They’ve won.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Hamline University Administrators

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

This is how my mind works: a cowardly, foolish and irresponsible university does a double-backflip policy reversal after pandering to Muslim bullies on campus, and my mind immediately goes to Emily Litella’s SNL catchphrase, the U.S. News controversy over school rankings (which was supposed to be this morning’s  opening piece) and…Cracker Barrel. In fact, now that I think about it, it’s quite conceivable that the same   weenies who were running Cracker Barrel a while back are now in charge of Hamline, a small and evidently crummy Minnesota university.

Regarding Emily: after its obviously outrageous mistreatment of an adjunct art professor in response to an in-class controversy (described at Ethics Alarms earlier this month) properly attracted harsh criticism from all sides, the unjustly maligned and sacked teacher sued. Then Hamline folded like a tyro facing Amarillo Slim in Texas Hold’em. Hamline’s president, Fayneese S. Miller, had puffed herself up like a woke bullfrog to virtue-signal about how respect for the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.” In this case, “respect” meant ignoring the fact that some Muslim students were throwing a fit over an art teacher teaching art that some extreme sects of their religion think should be taboo (Some Muslims don’t like freedom of expression, and might kill you to prove it) even though the course instructor had given them ample warning and opportunity to avoid the Satanic spectacle of viewing this famous painting….

.After all, letting the inmates run the asylum is what a lot of wokey schools do these days. But once the notice of the lawsuit was received, and Hamline’s lawyers informed the school’s leadership that they were going to lose and lose big, Fayneese, together with the chair of the university’s board of trustees who was  probably holding a shiv to Miller’s kidney, litella-ed this pathetic retraction: Continue reading →