Newsweek Shocked – Shocked! To Find Racism Happening In Dress Codes

I nearly laughed myself silly over this recent piece at Newsweek.com:

Two black female students attending a charter school in Massachusetts were recently kicked off their sports teams and prohibited from attending a prom because they wore their hair in braids. The Mystic Valley Regional Charter School in Malden, about 9 miles from Boston, enforces a strict dress code preventing students from wearing their hair in any unnatural way, which includes braids.

Twin students Maya and Deanna Cook, African-American sophomores, told local news outlets they were first told to take their braids out two weeks ago by school officials. The girls’ adoptive mother, Colleen Cook, told Boston’s 25 News that she received a call from the school informing her that students weren’t allowed to wear “anything artificial or unnatural in their hair.”

“We told them there’s nothing wrong with their hair the way it is. Their hair is beautiful, there’s no correcting that needs to be done,” Colleen Cook said, adding that the hair policy seems to target only students of color, who wear their hair in braids or extensions reflecting their African-American culture.

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This is What Fascist Policing Looks Like: No Gay Men Abused In Chechnya

If you aren’t familiar with the systematic abuse of gay men by the government of Chechnya, you probably don’t live in Chechnya (or any other republic of Russia for that matter). The issue has been getting considerable coverage for years now. The situation has been sufficiently highlighted for sufficiently long that people in Russia are daring to protest Putin for his lack of intervention in the neighboring country. Putin, it should be noted, did not respond well to the criticism.

But what’s particularly frightening is not yet another example of Putin’s dictatorial opposition to any form of criticism or dissent. What’s particularly frightening is the statement that Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov gave to Interfax through a spokesperson:

“You cannot detain and persecute people who simply do not exist in the republic,” he told Interfax news agency.

“If there were such people in Chechnya, the law-enforcement organs wouldn’t need to have anything to do with them because their relatives would send them somewhere from which there is no returning.”

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Some Rapes Are Tuesday

I hope you read the recent post on Republican efforts to preserve the ability to commit rape after someone who previously consented to sexual activity revokes that consent, even when the activity includes things not covered by the original consent, such as violent force.

Some people will wonder how and why someone like Amy Guy, who by all accounts I’ve read sounds a very strong and capable person, could possibly offer any form of sexual consent to someone like Jonathan Wayne Guy, who had a history of acting abusively towards Amy Guy. For many, that history will understandably justify the fear of something horrific that might lead Amy Guy to minimize her risk by consenting, and, hopefully, by consenting help shape exactly what happens next. The hope is that, despite having sex only out of fear, exercising some agency can help make what happens next less traumatic than it might otherwise be.

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No means “don’t stop” … if you’re a Republican Senator in NC

This story, of course, deals with highly upsetting content, continue as you will.

In 1979 the NC state supreme court handed down a ruling that made it non-criminal to continue to act as if one had someone else’s sexual consent after that consent had been withdrawn. Worse? It did not matter if the rapist acted violently: if an encounter began with sexual consent, criminal law in NC would treat rape as consensual sex until whenever a rapist decided to stop raping. Prosecution would have to wait for the rapist to begin a separate, uniquely distinguishable act of sexual contact against a person without consent.

It was, in short, the Blue Balls theory of automatism. She was asking for it, writ in legalese alongside the ever popular, He’s a good guy, he just couldn’t help it.

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Jack Kingston: A Moral Blot on the Nation

Jack Kingston, a man whose moral compass must always point evil, made one of the most abominable statements I’ve ever heard on one of his regular appearances on Anderson Cooper’s 360. AC was speaking to his guests about Trump’s idiotic statements that 1) No one asks why the Civil War happened, 2) Andrew Jackson was very upset at what he saw going on with the civil war [despite being dead for 16 years], and 3) Andrew Jackson could have prevented the Civil War if his presidency had come later in US history, presumably close to 1860.

Instead of making the point that Trump was simply lying about 1 & 2, Cooper allowed the discussion to focus on 3. As a “what if” scenario about an alternate universe, Trump can’t be said to be lying, and here Kingston even made an effort to portray the President’s comments as something other than arrogant, ignorant twaddle. I’m disappointed, of course, that AC and the panel allowed this to become the focus, but that’s no more than I expect from cable news.

No, the bile flooded my mouth when during this discussion about whether or not some alternate-universe Andrew Jackson could have prevented the Civil War, I head this exchange:

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Talk About a Mediocre Ethicist

In the last post all about me, I mentioned that it might be possible for any mediocre ethicist to outdo anything I have accomplished. Recently I read all too many articles published by the Christian Courier, all of which, strangely, list Wayne Jackson as their author.

And? I stand corrected. I have found a Black Swan: at least one mediocre ethicist has no hope of outdoing me.

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For Your Enjoyment: A commenter makes me think

Comment filters here at Pervert Justice are set so that your first comment ever always goes to moderation. If approved, subsequent comments – even on different threads – are not moderated unless they trip the spam trap or certain specific content filters.

One of the best things about this is that I get to see all the commenters names, there’s never one that I miss because I don’t realize a commenter is new. Today that commenter is AbbeyCadabra, commenting on the thread I am 3 years old. I know everything.

AbbeyCadabra really made me think, though not about arcane topics like philately or feminism. No, the arcane which AbbeyCadabra woke from my memory is entirely different and entirely more fun. For your enjoyment, I provide a clip that never stops making me laugh, 40 years after I first saw it:

 

I particularly like, “AbbaCaPocus!” and the poor vampires stone-muffled “Hoh-kusss, Poh-kusss”. There must be something terribly Sadistic going on here at Pervert Justice.

I Have Been Slandered!

While I am well versed in ethics*1 and even considered an expert by some*2 in my area of specialization*3, I always, always, always go back to my sources when I write about ethics to make sure that I’m not misrepresenting the work of others by distorting it through the lens of what part of a topic or an author’s work seemed important to me. It’s also a good way to brush up on areas I tend to neglect. While I could open any number of books sitting on my shelves, it is frankly easier to open an internet source as I’m already writing on my computer. Thus, for topics where a sufficiently trustworthy source exists, I may very well skim a website to make sure that I’m not forgetting or misremembering anything important.

Often, that website is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Today it happens to be the SEP’s background page on Virtue Ethics. Imagine my surprise to read down and find myself defamed by this go-to internet resource on important philosophical topics.

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I’m 3 years old. I know everything.

So if you internet at all, you know about Reddit’s tradition of inviting on celebrities and Know-it-alls (and sometimes celebrity know-it-alls) for AMA sessions. If you internet at all lately, you may even know about the latest AMA to go viral. Too bad. I’m writing about it anyway.

Because Reddit is a sinkhole of evil, I’m going to source most of this from the best place on the internet for useless fluff: the Huffington Post (the Daily Mail and a few other places had coverage as well). According to HP, this all got started because Texas dad Matthew Clark found that his son Caleb tended to stick with the first answer he gave to any question, even if the question was 2+2 and the Caleb’s answer was 10. Find two pairs of two things? Have Caleb count the total? Didn’t matter.

Since Elon Musk thinks his thinky-thoughts can’t be wrong and he did a popular AMA, Matthew thought Caleb had all the necessary tools to be Reddit’s next font of wisdom.

And, in this case, we are all so glad he did.

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