Attempted Government Halloween Censorship In Bristol Borough, Pa.

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Guess what the political affiliation of those responsible is. Come on, guess.

A homeowner in Bristol Borough, a suburb near Philadelphia, festooned his yard with a small graveyard, two scary scarecrows, and five mannequins hanging from a rope on a large tree. The “bodies” are wrapped in black plastic and circled with duct tape. At an Oct. 12 borough council meeting, Karla Scott complained about the display, calling the decorations are “very offensive, not just to the black people in the community, but the community as a whole.” Scott told reporters that her “mind went back to what my ancestors went through being hung from trees with nooses around their neck.”

Huh. Did her mind go back to when victims of lynchings were covered with black plastic and duct tape? Because there never was such a time. The decorations reminded me of this scene, the hanging of John Wilkes Booth’s conspirators in the Lincoln assassination.

But then I don’t make up history to advance social justice narratives [See: the “1619 Project”], I just study it.

Now government officials are visiting the house and pressuring the owner to remove the “offensive” display, even though there is no claim that there is anything illegal about it. He refuses. Council President Ralph DiGuiseppe says that the town will “continue” to do this. I wish I could find out the name of the owner because I would declare him an Ethics Hero: he has told officials that his Halloween decorations are staying up. No weenie he!

Says FIRE:

“This behavior by borough leadership and staff looks very much like jawboning, which is when government officials try to chill private citizens from exercising their constitutional rights through pressure or indirect threats.While Scott and other community members may prefer there be a rule to prevent such decorations, an ordinance banning “offensive” lawn displays would be dead on arrival, constitutionally speaking. It would be viewpoint discrimination and a direct violation of the First Amendment.”

The local NAACP chapter has weighed in on behalf of the censors because of course they have. Here’s another chance to show power and bend others to their will. It said in a statement on Facebook, “Something can be legally permissible and still be profoundly harmful.” The statement also called for “continued engagement by borough leadership and voluntary reconsideration of the display. This is not about restricting Halloween celebrations or freedom of expression. It is about historical awareness, empathy, and respect for our neighbors.”

Translation: “We want the government to bully the law abiding citizen into bowing to our contrived sensitivities.” Their position is precisely about restricting freedom of expression, and worse, using government power to do it.

The so far unnamed Halloween decorator now says that he might have considered removing the display then had officials not tried to pressure him into it but that now it’s “a matter of principle.”

Damn right.

Confronting My Biases #33: Not Liking When People Say “Like”

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

That’s Erin Andrews above. She’s a broadcast professional, a long-time sidelines reporter in NFL games. She a professional public communicator. Here she is on one of her recent podcasts:

“And then I’m like, ‘Wait, wait, fuck, what did he say about going for it?’ Because I never want to quote a coach and get it wrong, so I’m like, ‘Oh my god’…I’m fully fucking out of breath, which is inappropriate. Like, get it together, sister! In through the nose, out through the mouth. It was all because the ramp was so long. And I’m like, ‘Oh my god, how many people are watching … I’m so much better than that!”

And I’m like, “You sound like a moron, Erin, and this kind of illiterate blather just further embeds that toxic speech pattern in the next generation.”

Never mind the gratuitous “fucks,” that usage of “like” is worse than “um,” which was metaphorically beaten out of me as a child, and since I speak in public for a living, thanks, Mom, Dad, Miss Barrett, Mrs. Penwarden and the rest of my vigilent teachers. Are today’s teachers even trying to stop the “like” contagion? I doubt it: I bet they are infected themselves, and besides, they are too busy teaching kids to be communists.

My own daughter, after being taught by two articulate parents to speak grammatical and articulate English, now uses “like” every seven words, because that’s the kind of speech everyone around her all day uses. And I’m not about to correct a 32-year-old. Nonetheless, when I hear someone use “like” that way, my respect for them takes a nosedive, just as when I hear someone use “ain’t” or “we was” or “irregardless.” I can’t help it.

Frankly, I don’t want to.

From The “Res Ipsa Loquitur” Files:

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I am genuinely afraid to ask my Facebook friends if they find this tweet trenchant. It’s a perfect “Has bias made you stupid?” test.

Of course, none of the Brewers are illegal immigrants.

Details, details….

Democrats Cheat, Episode 72,679 (est.): The Alaska “Confuse the Voters!” Plot

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Cheating in elections isn’t just a traditional part of democracy, it is anti-democracy, totalitarian in fact. It is how bad people—yes, they are bad people— seek to gain power they don’t deserve (the fact that they will cheat proves that all by itself). Any candidate who tries to cheat is by definition untrustworthy, and any edition of a political party that supports such a candidate is untrustworthy as well. Both parties have unforgivable records of cheating behind them; perhaps the worst was Richard Nixon secretly sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks to improve his chances of willing the Presidency in 1968, but then he might have won the Presidency legitimately had not the Kennedy mob cheated so effectively in 1960.

Since 2015, the Democratic Party has raised cheating in elections to a core value, adopting the Radical Left’s traditional “by any means necessary” commandment. There hasn’t been a party so corrupt in this respect since the Republican Party of the Reconstruction Era. Long-time readers here may recall that when I realized how much cheating Democrats had engaged in to elect Hillary Clinton, I changed my stated intention to hold my nose, wear a gas mask and keep my gorge from rising as I voted for her over the GOP candidate, whom I had declared unfit for the Presidency in every respect. (I wrote in a name on the 2016 ballot: the man the Democrats had cheated out the White House in 2012.)

The New York Times yesterday exposed their usual heartthrobs with a full report on the brazen Democratic plot to steal a U.S. Senate seat in Alaska. It was so flagrant and outrageous that the Times decided they couldn’t spin or bury the incident without looking like the print version of MSNOW. They deserve no credit for this, and anyone who claims this proves the Times isn’t an “enemy of the people” should get a pie in the face. The Times knows it has to periodically pretend to be an objective and independent news source or it wouldn’t be able to fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. The paper’s staff is unethical, but it ain’t stupid.

The whole article is here (all Times links now get past the pay wall), but a few highlights are in order:

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Malcolm Gladwell Jumps The Shark

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I’ve enjoyed several of Malcolm Gladwell’s books, though their quality has been on a definite downward slope since “The Tipping Point.” But like so, so many other relatively intelligent people who have let political bubbles and partisan bias infect their brains, Malcolm finally capitulated to the progressive mob and decided to wade into fact-infested waters he wasn’t prepared for. Too bad.

Don’t you love it when non-lawyers, especially journalists, start criticizing Supreme Court decisions that they haven’t read carefully and can’t understand? That’s Gladwell’s new, pro-gun control screed “The American Way of Killing,” released last month. American law isn’t all Gladwell doesn’t understand: he’s clueless about American culture too (Malcolm is Canadian). In this interview with TIME, he says, “There’s no reason why the United States cannot have the same level of homicide as its Western European peers. It just chose a different direction.” That statement is ignorant and delusional, but I’m not writing about his unfamiliarity with U.S. roots, culture and history here. The issue at hand is guns.

In his book, Gladwell defaults to the hoary “1619 Project”-redolent claim that the Second Amendment was designed to protect Southern slave patrols, which would be quite a surprise to the Massachusetts delegation to the Constitutional Convention. That’s dumb, but he goes beyond that to attack the SCOTUS ruling that the right to bear arms is not restricted to militias but is an individual right. Gladwell compliant is its alleged reliance on an old English case from the 17th Century. He states that Court’s conclusion that the Founders believed there was a right to bear arms for self-defense was “bananas” because it used an old obscure precedent to interpret a law in the 20th Century. What Justices should use to address legal controversies is “common sense,” the British-Canadian intellectual without a whiff of legal comprehension intones.

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How Woke and Whacked-Out Is Harvard? This Woke and Whacked-Out…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I’m supposed to turn in my Harvard reunion report on my life since Old Ivy for the school’s “red book.” Last time, I devoted my essay to explaining why my alma mater was an embarrassment. This time, I’m tempted to skip the whole exercise. It’s futile.

Harvard Medical School held an absurd event called “the Pathology of Unruly Bodies.” A panel devoid of doctors or medical experts declared that anti-obesity drugs were part of an imperialistic “indoctrination” of society. Gee, I never thought of it that way! I never thought of it that way because it’s irredeemably stupid.

The panel included Da’Shaun L Harrison, who claims that GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic and Zepbound are weapons of “genocide” against fat people. [See this post from yesterday. “Genocide” no longer means genocide to the Left, so when Israel is accused of genocide, who knows what they mean?] It also includes Ethics Villain Roxane Gay, hilariously the occupant of Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. She’s also the “artist-in-residence”—whatever that means— at Harvard Medical School and has a column in the New York Times (of course she does!).

Gay (she’s the cousin of disgraced former Harvard University President Claudine Gay, which I did not know when she was in the process of proving what an unforgivable DEI selection she was) has called for the release of Luigi Mangione, the man whjo murdered the CEO of UnitedHealthcare two years ago. That alone should disqualify her from participation in any event that is supposed to enlighten young minds, but Harvard decided she was a font of wisdom.

In the panel discussion, Harrison argued that the companies offering the anti-obesity drugs are, well, let me quote her or him (I can’t figure out which so far, and frankly, I don’t care): “This practice of forcing people into manipulating and changing or shifting how they look is oftentimes about making bodies militarisable. Building up a military to defend an imperialist state…A lot of doctors, medical professionals and folks who collaborate with them — be it through the government or media — are advocating for atrocities that are directly impacting our citizens, but also citizens around the globe. It then becomes about creating this ideal body that you are always being pushed and pulled towards, as a way to represent this patriotism that is intended to indoctrinate one into the military, into the defense of the country.”

Okayyyy..Uh, what color is the sky on your planet, Da’Shaun?

Professor Turley comments, “The suggestion that weight loss drugs serve imperialist, militaristic goals is obviously bonkers. It is the kind of raving you would expect on a subway from someone wearing a handmade cardboard sign and a tin foil hat.”

Not to Harvard’s leaders and administrators, though! Maybe I’ll post this essay in the “red book.”

Oh.. I almost forgot. This is what Roxane Gay looks like…

I wonder why she’s convinced weight loss drugs are part of a right wing plot?

Hilarious. The New York Times Admits It Might Be a Little Bit Biased

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The confession is cynical and mordantly amusing. The Times really thinks its “transparency” will support the myth that the paper isn’t a partisan spin and propaganda organ for the Democratic Party. Well, it might be right. The Times is part of a long-running effort to make Americans stupid.

Josh Blackman, a law professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston and a frequent contributor to The Volokh Conspiracy, complained to the Times after he was described twice as a “conservative law professor” earlier this yera. He didn’t object to the conservative description, which is accurate, but that in the Times, a conservative expert or analyst is labelled as such but those quoted from the Left are just “professors.”

Blackman reviewed a New York Times database and found that the Times would routinely brand a conservative but rarely label a progressive, thus representing conservatives as “the other” while left-biased analysts and experts were just good old reliable, trustworthy authorities.

Or, as the freaks chant in “Freaks”: “One of us, one of us! We accept them, one of us!”

Patrick Healy, the Times’s assistant managing editor for trust and standards, acknowledged that Blackman had a valid point. “It can come off like The Times treats liberals as normal and conservatives as unique and worthy of labeling,” Healy told Blackman.

Oh, it “can come off” that way, can it? How big of Healy to concede that. It can come off that way because that’s how the Times reporters, pundits and editors think, how its readers think, and what the paper wants as many members of the public to think as well. All the better to elect those Democrats! [Here is another example of Healy’s weaseldom. Also here, in Item #7]

Healy said the Times needed to be more “discerning” about its labels going forward. Right. Its current practice helps observant readers like Blackman realize just how biased and manipulative the New York Times is. Can’t have that! Healy’s sort-of apology is a perfect Level 10 sinister and unethical apology on the EA Apology Scale:

10. An insincere and dishonest apology designed to allow the wrongdoer to escape accountability cheaply, and to deceive his or her victims into forgiveness and trust, so they are vulnerable to future wrongdoing.

It’s not a laughing matter.

Another Pit Bull Defamation Story From Ignorant Dog Bigots…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I have sworn to flag this every time it happens, which is too often. A popular conservative news aggregating website. “Not the Bee,” headlined its story, “The thing that never happens just happened again. Are we allowed to talk about it yet?” The “thing” was a dog attack that killed a 6-year-old child in Virginia, and the topic we are supposed to talk about is how pit bulls are deadly. The site has been stumping for “pit bull” bans for years. But the linked news story did not describe the dog involved a “pit bull” or even one of the six or seven dog breeds dog ignoramuses call “pit bulls.” That one said the dog was an American Bully, which is not one of the several breeds frequently lumped into the “pit bull” category.

Notice of Correction: I originally included a photo of what one source indicated was the dog involved. I learned from commenter mardybum that it was a stock photo. So we have no photos of the actual dog called a “pit bull” by “Not the Bee” and an American Bully elsewhere. Heck, reporters, police and others are so bad at identifying dog breeds, the dog could have been anything. A cocker spaniel. As long as the photos being used are stock photos unrelated to reality, I’ve replaced the one the post had before with my favorite pit bull photo, which better reflects the dogs’ personality.

Never mind. This is how the dogs get banned in many counties and countries—it was how my pit bull mix ended up on a three year Hell-journey among three abusive owners until Grace and I rescued him.

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Ethics Quiz: The Fit Exhibitionist Disney World Guests

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

In June 2025, TikTok fitness influencer [Full disclosure: I’m biased already] Nicole Arena attacked Walt Disney World after the theme park’s staff told her that she was not dressed appropriately for the family-friendly venue. She had to buy a cover-up T-shirt before they would allow her to get on a ride.

For some reason the controversy has surfaced again, which is good, because I love dress code ethics controversies. Most of my posts on the topic are here.

That’s a photo of the two at the park above, with Nicole’s full outfit in the inset. Apparently Disney’s employees didn’t raise any objections to her husband John Whitespot’s (!) outfit, which seems clearly discriminatory. He’s also a “fitness influencer”(see bias note above: Ditto, plus any full-grown man who wears his cap backwards is an idiot… ) and an inarticulate musclehead as well. “I couldn’t care less if someone thinks your outfit was inappropriate because we both know that neither one of us would feel comfortable or ok with anything that would expose you in any way,” John wrote, defending his wife.

Oh. What?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Was it fair for Disney to force Nicole to “cover up”?

The most on-point of my past dress code posts is probably this one, about the fitness model who was denied boarding on an American Airlines flight because she was dressed like this:

That’s a bit more extreme than Nicole’s garb, but the dress code issue is always about slippery slopes. In that post I summed up the problem this way:

Ah, dress codes! They are conduct rules put in place by businesses and institutions because some people have no manners, sense of place, consideration for others or respect, and these codes never, ever, work in the long run, because some people have no manners, sense of place, consideration for others or respect. Once upon a time, children, adults going out into public dressed with taste and modesty as an expression of respect to others, including strangers, that they might meet. The Sixties destroyed this cultural consensus by questioning manners, decorum, conformity, dignity, and respect for others, especially anybody over thirty. Do your own thing! Let it all hang out! Today, a half century later,  people nonchalantly wear flip-flops to the opera and church, while the obese passenger sitting next to you on an airplane may be wearing a tank-top, and hasn’t  bathed in a week.

I think changing cultural norms may take the issue out of the realm of ethics into the generation gap quagmire, but I’m not certain, hence the quiz. The Disney episode also reminded me of this recent post.

Ethics Dunces: The Reported 1/3 of American Jews Who Say They’ll Vote For Democrats

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

One of the many puzzling aspects of the upcoming mid-terms is that any voter of either the Jewish faith or who is of Jewish heritage is considering voting for a party that has flipped to open and almost full anti-Semitism. I don’t get it. I would ask some of my long-time Jewish friends about it if so many of them weren’t so Trump Deranged that they can barely utter any sounds other than a Frankenstinian, “Arrgagrhah!”

I just saw this on “X” (I guess its time for me to drop the “Twitter”):

…I know, polls. Still, based on my own group of friends, 30% seems too small. What (the hell) is the matter with these people? I know that many German Jews voted for Hitler too, but you know, live and learn (or die and learn). This is an ethnic group renowned for their wisdom and resilience; in other words, Jews are supposed to be smarter than this. What’s going on here?

Here’s the ad that just dropped in the Michigan Senate race for the Democratic candidate, Muslim Brotherhood supporter Abdul El-Sayed:

…Yes, those damn Jews are causing inflation! Funny, I though President Biden said that Republicans were the Nazis.

This seems like a propitious time to look in on a lamented ex-Ethics Alarms commenter, “Feminist, anti-racist, pro-fat” and cripplingly woke political cartoonist “Ampersand,” who was long one of the most articulate and engaging progressive commenters here until bias made him stupid, sadly the fate of most EA readers from his side of the ideological divide. That’s his latest creation above, and here is the main section of Amp’s explanation of it:

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