Transgendered (Male) Athletes in Women Sports

While the 2026 World Cup was underway in North America, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling, which is to say, a judgment rationally argued, siding with member-states that did not permit “Y chromosome” students in public schools to play in on “XX chromosome” sports teams. Not being a writer who fecklessly evades controversial topics for fear of turning away some readers, I will attempt to tackle the jurisprudence and ethics of male athletes who self-identify as women playing in women sports such as American football in public schools.

The full essay is at "Transgendered (Male) Athletes in Women Sports."

Don't Look Up

The film, Don’t Look Up, is a most interesting film not only for how it relates science to political economy, but also in that images of wildlife—Nature, as it were—are interspersed throughout the movie, and it is Nature, rather than our circumscribed, petty, and yet economically successful species, that continues on after a large comet hits Earth and our species is wiped out. In fact, that impact-event in the movie cancels out the one that really happened 66 million years ago by returning dinosaurs to dominance. The last scene in the movie shows some of the political and economic elite waking up in their spaceship and landing on Earth more than 200,000 years in the future only to be eaten by dinosaurs that look "cute." two of those stupid people had been in charge both in the White House and in business before the comet hits, whereas the two principal astronomer-scientists who warn of the coming comet are repeatedly relegated and dismissed by the political and economic elite until the president realizes how she can use them politically—albeit just until the political winds turn again and comet-denial is more useful politically to the president. Does this sound familiar?  

The full essay is at "Don't Look Up."

Deflating Bloated Self-Entitlement in Retail: Barnes and Noble at Yale

Atrocious human-resources management, even regarding in-store employees of a sub-contractor, can easily be understood to detract from repeat customers; a refusal to hold such employees accountable can be a reflection of a sordid managerial attitude towards customers, especially in relation to employees. In cases in which the refusal is explicitly stated to an already-offended customer, the slogan, “adds insult to injury” is applicable, with disastrous effects in terms of repeat business, and thus revenue. That management is in some cases so bad reflects on the primitive condition of the “science” of management in business schools. That a case in point occurred in Yale’s (Barnes and Noble) bookstore, not far from Yale’s School of Management, suggests the sheer distance between the “science” and practice of management.

The full essay is at "Bloated Self-Entitlement in Retail."

Enjoy Your Holiday: On the Weaponization of Kindness

In Europe, the word holiday can refer to what in America is called a vacation, which of course can occur whether or not the vacation falls on a national holiday. Regarding the latter, the official designation of a holiday by a government renders the holiday valid anywhere in the country’s territory. This does not mean that very resident or even citizen is duty-bound to pay any attention to a given national holiday, but deciding not to celebrating a holiday does not thereby mean that it is not legitimate and thus valid. Deliberately acting out from the instinctual urge of passive aggression by refusing even to say the name of a national holiday in public discourse, as if a personal decision not to celebrate a national holiday eviscerates it on the national calendar can be viewed as a case of hyperextended projection from a personal dislike to the personal desire to cancel the national holiday, as if a personal dislike could nullify a national law or proclamation. Behind the passive aggression is none other than selfishness, which implies loving oneself over loving God. Theological (rather than psychological) self-love renders the world as a projection of the self, including its narrowly circumscribed (to private benefits only) interests. Hence, the unrestrained ego leaps from its own dislike to being entitled to unilaterally, as a private actor, nullify an officially designated national holiday as null and void. I contend that Nietzsche’s philosophy can shed some light on this modern phenomenon concerning Christmas, an official U.S. holiday. Kindness as actually passive aggression is tailor-made for Nietzsche’s eviscerating scalpel, which he wielded to expose the power-aggrandizement being exercised under the disguise of the moral injunction of Thou Shalt Not! 

The full essay is at "Enjoy Your Holiday."

Lolita

In being able to engage an audience both visually and audibly, and to do so at close range—something we don’t get from watching a play on a distant stage—the medium of film is capable of resonating with, challenging, and rebounding from both heart and mind. That is to say, the medium can engage us at a comparatively deep level and even touch us profoundly. The medium can tug at our ethical strings and even provoke uncomfortable thoughts and feelings precisely because sound and image can conjoin at close range such that we are brought closer to an ethical harm than is likely in our own daily experiences. Some ethical harms, such as that in a young woman not being able to stop a rape by an older man abusing a stark power differential, may simply be too horrific up close to experience even vicariously. A filmmaker can use devices, whether photographic, audio, or narrative, to moderate our exposure without sacrificing the depth at which the harm and its sordid scenario can reach in us. Such exposure to ethical problems or even to situations in which the ethical verdict is debatable can give to an audience a better realization of the ethical dimension of the human condition and improve our ability to render ethical judgements on specific issues and generally. Writ large, the medium of film can do these things for a society, reflecting and even provoking it with just enough directness to be palatable and grasped. The genre of science fiction in particular has been used to serve this purpose. Even by contrasting an original film with its remake decades later, a society’s changing nature can be glimpsed by an audience, especially as censorship guidelines are loosened as per changing social mores and ethical sensibilities of a society. The fictional film, Lolita (1962), and its remake, Lolita (1997), provide us with an excellent case study not only of changes in twentieth-century American society, but also of how powerful the medium of film can be in its treatment of the ethical dimension of the human condition.

The full essay is at "Lolita."

The University of California at Berkeley

In visiting a university even for a short period of time, a surprisingly deep grasp of its dominant organizational culture's mentality is possible, especially if it is foreign to the outsider's perspective and yet draws on  instinctual urges whose imprints one has previously seen. It is perhaps human, all too human to relish sending harsh messages to outsiders, albeit indirectly because cowardness and self-illusion are included with the appetite for blood. This can be so at a university even if scholarly visitors are among the targets. The primitive instinctual urge to aggressively harm people by reminding them unnecessarily that they are not in the tribe can have sufficient power to overcome other contending urges to characterize the very culture of an organization. I will argue that the University of California at Berkeley can be characterized as such. For I witnessed this triumphant urge in rather  obvious behavior of some faculty and administrators. I came rather quickly during my visit to grasp the nature and roots of the favorite blood-sport of enough rude faculty members to get a picture of those primped  up, intellectually stunted "scholars" at that heavily passive aggressive university. The message of exclusion for taxpayers visiting the campus and scholars invited to give a lecture there, I being neither, was made clear to me by a student employee at the main library,  which tellingly is closed on Saturdays even during the semesters: Even if a visitor on the large campus does not have an umbrella and rain is pouring down, the university's shuttle buses are only for students, faculty, and staff. The student enjoyed his power to say no to me; I could not detect even the slightest tone of shame in representing such an inhospitable institutional host. Bad air! Instead, the he relished the firmness in the power to say no, which is to say, to exclude. In contrast, the campus shuttles at Yale, ironically a private university, transport anyone around campus! So much for California being easy-going. So much for UC Berkeley sporting intellectually curious and passionate scholars in search of new ideas from visitors. Rather, Nietzsche’s new birds of prey, whose spite naturally issues out from deep ressentement, populate the faculty and their bosses. So much for even common courtesy and gratitude to California taxpayers and distinguished professors from other universities invited to deliver a lecture; if you are walking around campus or walk out of a library and get wet, tough luck! Public is apparently below even common. 

The full essay is at "The University of California." 

Medium Cool

In Medium Cool (1969), John Cassellis, a cameraman, maintains a medium-cool level of emotion even in the midst of the socio-political turmoil in Chicago during 1968 until he learns that his station manager had been allowing the FBI access to the news footage. The film can be interpreted as providing a justification for his lack of trust in American law enforcement even as the need for law and order is made clear from the ubiquity of the human instinctual urge of aggression. For the film shows not only the extent of violence, but also its engrained nature in our species. By implication, the viewer is left to conclude that that law enforcement is necessary in a civilized society.  Yet this can only be a necessary evil, for the last few scenes of the film show just how likely discretion is to be abused. The atrocious and one-sided police violence during the peaceful protests outside of the Democratic National Convention make it clear that if given the legal authority to use weapons, human beings may abuse such discretion if too weak to restrain their own personal passions and, albeit less common, even their psychological pathologies.

The full essay is at "Medium Cool."

Far from Heaven

The film, Far from Heaven (2002), centers around a woman whose husband turns out to be gay. That this is set in 1957-1958 in socialite Connecticut is all the more telling, as the Caucasian woman finds her groundskeeper, who is a Black man, to be “beautiful.” The film is arguably a remake, or at least informed by, the film All that Heaven Allows (1955), in which a widow begins dating a younger, muscular man who tends to her trees. Although race and homosexuality are not issues in this earlier film (which, after all, was made in the 1950s), that a woman who socializes with friends who belong to a country club in New England would dare to date a younger man of a lower economic class—albeit not as low as the woman’s son and friends stereotypically suppose—was scandalous enough in the 1950s to furnish a tantalizing plot. That a filmmaker in 2002 could get away with portraying an interracial extra-marital sexual interest and a gay or bisexual husband having anonymous sex with men (even showing the husband kissing one of the men), whereas a filmmaker in 1955 would not have been able to get away with including such taboos (much less making them central), says something about the cultural trajectory of western civilization temporally.

The full essay is at "Far from Heaven."

Wall Street

Oliver Stone’s film, Wall Street (1987) was filmed in the midst of U.S. President Reagan’s push for financial deregulation. As a MBA student at the time, I volunteered to help a professor with his paper on financial deregulation. The theory behind why the NASD (the National Association of Securities Dealers) could self-regulate its members seemed solid enough to this idealistic youngster (i.e., me); I had yet to witness human nature in the field, and over decades. Similar to Marx overlooking the human need for economic compensation as an incentive to work on a daily basis (though I overlook it too in posting free essays online), I was blind to human nature in that I did not see that the NASD itself would protect even its most sordid members so to safeguard the reputation of the profession and, even more realistically, stick up for other “members” of the “club.” The Newtonian-like automatic mechanism whereby industry self-regulation would work was too beautiful to let human nature interfere. Similarly, when I worked in public accounting, I saw the “check mark” indicating that, “as per comptroller, discrepancy resolved,” was just one of several technical points in conducting an audit. The illusion of technique as somehow objective in the business world can shield practitioners from the ethical content. In case you’re wondering how this relates to Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, the antagonist Gordon Gekko is the poster child for greed, and thus the reason why the public should not rely on industry self-regulation to police Wall Street. Bud Fox goes headlong into being Gekko’s insider-trading protégé, easily ignoring conscience personified by Lou Mannheim even though he and Bud work in the same brokerage office. In Freudian terms, the id easily defeats the superego. It’s not even a close fight.

The full essay is at "Wall Street."

Valley of Peace

In Valley of Peace (1956), a Black American pilot and two Slovenian children head towards a valley in which the boy’s uncle lives—a valley of peace. In military terms, the valley has been designated as a “no-man’s” land, which means it is off limits to both the Nazi army and that of the Slovenian partisans.  As such, the peace of the valley is something more down to earth than the Biblical Garden of Eden. Even so, this ideal is a leitmotif in the film. For one thing, the two children repeatedly characterize that valley as not just where the boy’s uncle lives, but also as a utopia. I contend that the film makes a theological statement regarding the fallen world and the Garden of Eden. While only implicit, this statement is still more central to the film than is the significance of the race of the American pilot. I turn first to the fact that the American pilot who survives parachuting from a shot-up plane is Black. 

The full essay is at "Valley of Peace."