Month: June 2021

America Last: Good News And Bad News At The Same Time

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Reuters-Survey-Trust-In-Media-June-2021

As you can see in the chart above, a report released by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford and the University of Oxford found that out of 46 nations surveyed the US public ranks last in its trust of the news media at 29%. The study surveyed 92,000 news consumers in those countries. Finland finished first with a trust rate of 65%.

I doubt that Finland’s journalists deserve that much more trust, which is one reason the report is good news for the United States. I think it is highly likely that the journalists everywhere else suffer from the same arrogance, relative lack of intellectual depth, and hive-mind leanings as U.S. journalists. I think that the U.S. public’s lack of trust shows growing and essential understanding of the true nature of what has become a corrupt and dangerous false profession that does not serve the interests of the people as it is pledged to according to journalistic ethics, but its own. Nor do I believe the U.S. has the worst and most unethical journalists in the world—far from it, I suspect. The U.S. has the journalists with the most freedom, making it especially easy to do their job as dishonestly as they do; yet unlike in many of those nations, their government isn’t forcing American journalists to substitute spin, distortion and propaganda for the truth.

The U.S. public has, finally, had its blinders ripped off, and is no longer under the delusion that they are being informed by altruistic and dedicated pros who only seek to reveal the facts necessary for us to live our lives as we choose to. Knowledge is power, and while our news media is wielding their control over knowledge to transfer power to their political allies, the public, at least most of it, has acquired crucial knowledge to neutralize it: the knowledge that that are not trustworthy.

Unfortunately, the bad news aspect of the study’s finding is arguably worse than the good news is encouraging. Democracy cannot function without a trustworthy news media, or as the Founders called it, “press.” Journalism rot is an existential threat.

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Objective Take-Aways From Fiona Hill’s “Fire Alarm” Story

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Fiona Hill

I know how I missed this: I won’t watch CNN, and especially not the ridiculous Don Lemon, unless there’s the equivalent of a gun at my head. I finally caught wind of it when a New York Times’ hard left op-ed writers, Nick Kristoff (who is one of the few rational ones in that group) referenced the tale as if it is indisputable proof of President Trump’s awfulness. On June 16, Fiona Hill, once Trump’s top Russia adviser, told Don Lemon that she was so upset at how Trump’s 2018 press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin was proceeding that she looked for a fire alarm to pull and considered faking a medical emergency when she couldn’t find one, just to disrupt it. “I just thought, let’s cut this off and try to end it. I couldn’t come up with anything that just wouldn’t add to the terrible spectacle,” Hill said on “Don Lemon Tonight.”

The “terrible spectacle” she was trying to avoid was that Trump refused to support US intelligence conclusions that Russia had tried to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Her self-glorifying account—at least to Trump-haters—didn’t get much coverage beyond CNN: little from the mainstream media, none from the conservative media. I sense, however, based on Kristof’s use of it, that it is destined to be wielded by Democrats as a “this is how terrible it was to have Donald Trump as President” story evermore.

But what Hill’s grandstanding really reveals is something every different, which is how this President, unlike all those before him, was sabotaged actively and passively by members of his own staff and administration who didn’t like him, trust him, respect him, or believe that he was a legitimate President. The media-derided term for what Trump had to contend with was the “deep state,” which had a conspiratorial ring and allowed those who correctly reported what was flamingly obvious to be ridiculed as paranoid. That term, however, was misleading.

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What Its Fraudulent Anti-Gun Video Reveals About “Change the Ref”And Everyone Applauding it

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Change the Ref

The anti-gun group “Change the Ref” pretended to represent a fake school, “James Madison Academy,” when they invited former NRA president David Keene to give a speech at a graduation ceremony. He was told that he was participating in a rehearsal, as he addressed a stadium of empty chairs. Another gun rights advocate, John Lott Jr., also was lured into the trap by the same ruse.

In reality, the group was filming an anti-gun video. As Keene exhorted the imaginary students to revere the Second Amendment, the video added audio from 911 calls, and the sounds of terrified students during an active shooter episode (or simulations of them). Keene addressed empty chairs, 3,044 of them, allegedly representing children and teenagers who were shot and killed before they could graduate from high school, though he wasn’t told that. Just a rehearsal! After they provided the desired footage to be used against their cause, Keene and Lott were told that the ceremony was canceled.

Change the Ref was founded by Patricia and Manuel Oliver, parents of a boy killed in the Parkland, Florida, shooting. The video is called the “The Lost Class.” Powerful! Clever! Also dishonest, unfair, disrespectful, unforgivably unethical and one more thing: signature significance. A group that would do this is untrustworthy. Nothing it says or publishes can be trusted; none of its arguments can be taken at face value; none of its statistics or analysis can be relied upon by anyone. With this video and its abuse of Lott and Keene, Change the Ref exposes itself as practicing “by any means possible” warfare, not legitimate policy advocacy. It believes that the ends justify the means—their ends. It is a perfect match for the current progressive movement, which has taken an ominous turn to totalitarian strategies with its full embrace of Alinskyism.

Good to know.

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Ethics Quiz: Britney Spears’ Conservatorship

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

In 2008, a court placed pop super-star Britney Spears under a conservatorship led by her father, Jamie Spears, and attorney Andrew Wallet, giving them complete control of her assets after a series of incidents indicating that Britney suffered from various emotional problems and might be a danger to her children, herself, and most importantly, perhaps, her earning potential. The conservatorship has continued all of this time, and so has Spears’ performing and recording career along with her supplemental income as a professional celebrity. (She received a then-record salary of $15 million to be a panel judge on the American version of “X-Factor, for example.) For many years, apparently, Spears has been trying to end the conservatorship, and this week there was a court hearing on her request.

I’m going to stray from the usual practice in Ethics Alarms Ethics Quizzes by asking the question before the facts you need to base your answer on. The “facts” are contained in the now 39-year-old Britney Spears’ statement to the court, which she delivered over the phone. The question is this:

Is it ethical for Spears to be forced to continue under the control of her father?

A couple of points to consider was you read the transcript:

  • Spears’ children are now in their late teens, unlike when their welfare was a major consideration in granting the conservatorship.
  • She has been handled much like a performing monkey, working almost constantly, and not having control of her own funds.
  • Many who have seen her perform live report that she appears drugged or robotic.
  • While there is little doubt that Spears is not mentally or emotionally well, many, maybe even most, successful artists lie somewhere between madness and sanity, but they are seldom “normal.” Many have personal lives that spiral out of control, sometimes fatally. Many could be called dangers to themselves

How much do we value personal liberty and the freedom to live our own lives in the United States of America? Is making an artist like Britney Spears a virtual prisoner and robbing her of agency and autonomy necessarily better for her than allowing the singer to make her own choices, even bad ones?

Bill James once made an observation about the Hall of Fame baseball pitcher Rube Waddell (1876 – 1914) that stuck with me. James concluded from his study of Waddell that he was what we would call today “mentally challenged.” It wasn’t just that he was an out-of-control drunk to his dying day; he couldn’t take care of himself. His managers handled his money and doled it out as Rube needed. If he heard a fire engine go by the ball park, he was likely to leave the dugout and chase it if he wasn’t stopped. He sometimes missed a start because he was fishing or playing marbles with kids. Once he disappeared for days during spring training, and was found leading a parade down the main street of Jacksonville, Florida. Opposing players placed rubber snakes on the field to upset him, and he lost one game because an opposing manager had told him he has a puppy to give him and Rube kept thinking about the dog while he was pitching. Yet he had great physical gifts. James wrote that today someone like Waddell would be institutionalized, but in his era, he was left alone (to a point) to do what he wanted to do, and live his life. James asked which, in the end, is the kinder, more ethical approach by society.

Now here’s Britney:

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Ethics Observations On The Cruz-Hirono Exchange During The Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Here is the full exchange. Do watch it all:

I could justly call this a case of res ipsa loquitur, requiring no further explication, but let’s be clear about what was going on.

Senator Hirono stated that her objection to the doctrine of Constitutional originalism was not based on law or theory, but on the fact that cases like Roe v. Wade, which made abortion a right, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same sex marriage, would not have been decided as they were had the Supreme Court majority used an originalism standard. That is, obviously, a purely consequentialist argument: if the results of applying a principle do not yield what she favors, then she does not believe the principle should be applied. It is an “ends justifies the means” position, and that is antithetical to the rule of law, as we have discussed on Ethics Alarms often. If the law is enforced by judges according to a floating standard whereby a principle is valid when a desirable result will arise from applying it, and invalid when an authority prefers a different result, then the law has no integrity, and the system becomes arbitrary and chaotic.

Senator Cruz, after his questioning of the Biden judicial nominee who tried to dance his way through Cruz’s implications that he was not consistent in his judicial philosophy, then referenced Sen. Hirono’s unambiguous explanation about why she opposed originalism: decisions she likes would have come out the other way. She responded by accusing Cruz of “mansplaining” and mischaracterizing what she said. When Cruz reasonably tried to ask exactly how he had mischaracterized her statement, the Democrats furiously attempted to block his response. When that failed, and Cruz asked directly whether she had said what she said, Hirono babbled incoherently, finally said “No.”

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Ethics Nightmares, 6/23-24/21

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I’m up at 3:30 am writing an ethics post because a nightmare woke me up. I don’t want to talk about it…

1. Breaking! American citizens are not as stupid as progressives think they are! At least in this instance…the first wave in the Democratic Party’s unethical push to eliminate safeguards agaiants fraudulent voting was the campaign during the Obama administration to label voter ID requirements as “racist’ and “voter suppression.” The argument that it made sense not to require voters to present the same level of identification necessary to rent a car, cash a check or get on an airplane when the integrity of our elections is involved was intellectually dishonest, but the with the degree to which the news media carried the message for their favorite party, I assumed this particular brainwashing exercise was a success. But in the wake of the failure of that party’s attempted take-down of election security last week, the Monmouth University Poll revealed that 80% of the public, approve of voter ID. I know, polls. But that’s a pretty convincing margin:

Even Democrats favor ID, though not by a large enough margin to generate any respect. The big surprise was that Monmouth shows whites splitting 77/21 in favor of ID and nonwhites favoring the measure even more strongly, at 84/13.

The American Left, wherein the One-Worlders dwell, always like to cite the United States’ failure to emulate European governments—which the U.S. decided at its origin not to follow by design—as an argument for various measures like banning capital punishment, nanny states, , and gun ownership restrictions, but have been adamantly mute on the fact that 46 of 47 European countries require government-issued photo ID to vote. The one exception has been Great Britain (although not Northern Ireland), and last month Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government said it would make photo IDs mandatory in response to a Royal Commission report.

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No Good Guys Or Innocent Victims In The Tucker Carlson-New York Times Spat

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Carlson 3

Apparently the New York Times got tired of Tucker Carlson’s two faces, so media reporter Ben Smith did a hit piece on the Fox News star. He revealed that Tucker, despite his oft-expressed disdain for the mainstream media and its reporters, “spends his time when he’s not denouncing the liberal media trading gossip with them. He’s the go-to guy for sometimes-unflattering stories about Donald J. Trump and for coverage of the internal politics of Fox News (not to mention stories about Mr. Carlson himself).” Smith adds, “I won’t talk here about any off-the-record conversations I may have had with him. But 16 other journalists (none from The Times; it would put my colleagues in a weird position if I asked them) told me on background that he has been, as three of them put it, ‘a great source.’”

In other words, Carlson is a hypocritical double agent. condemning the mainstream media on his TV show and doing favors for them behind the scenes. One especially nauseating tale is how Tucker related a private conversation with President Trump that made Carlson look good and Trump look foolish for an coming book by the Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender, “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.” Since only two people were on the line, and Trump didn’t reveal it, Carlson is the only possible source. But the whole article is nauseating, including the casual way all the participants excuse such “double games” as business as usual. Everybody does it, you see, so it’s OK. “It’s so unknown in the general public how much he plays both sides,” one reporter for a prominent publication who gets dirt from Carlson regularly told Smith. Another Washington journalist explained how Carlson benefits by assisting the same reporters he says he “hates,” saying, “If you open yourself up as a resource to mainstream media reporters, you don’t even have to ask them to go soft on you.”

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“Systemic Racism” Review

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Triangle-Chart-Racism

[Many thanks to Steve Witherspoon for the chart above!]

These stories are proliferating at such a rate that they could easily take over the blog, or worse, explode my head permanently. I can’t begin to cover them all, but my plan is to periodically gather them up in one post, like this one. The claim of systemic racism” has been a handy dandy way to exploit a low point in public embarrassment over some recent distorted and misrepresented incidents as well the undeniable legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in America. Now it is being pushed as a wedge to justify anti-white racism, double standards, restrictions on expression and speech, various forms of discrimination to benefit minority groups, power grabs in multiple institutions across society based on “reckoning” rather than merit or logic, the transformation of the education system into a propaganda indoctrination machine, and tangentially related “social justice” reforms, including creeping Marxism.

There are signs that the purveyors of the systemic racism narrative, including Critical Race Theory, are pushing rapidly toward a tipping point where public sympathy and tolerance will collapse, as well as indications that the ranks of citizens with the courage and civic responsibility to oppose this madness are growing. In both cases, however, it needs to happen faster.

Here are some recent highlights:

  • A large portion of the “systemic racism” brigade is steeped in hypocrisy, much as the #MeToo movement proved itself only offended by sexual harassment by public figures who proved useful in other respects. The Washington Free Beacon asked all 50 Democratic members of the Senate, as well as the Congressional Black Caucus and the NAACP, for for reactions to the weekend’s revelation that R.I. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, last heard cheering on the adoption of the Juneteenth national holiday, was still a member of Bailey’s Beach Club in Newport, a whites-only private club. None of them responded.

Unlike so much of what Democrats attribute to systemic racism, segregated private clubs are relics of systemic racism. One would think the Democratic Party would speak with one voice on this matter. Nope.

I don’t know how anyone can take a party, an organization or an elected official seriously who refused to hold its members and allies to the same standards it purports to care so deeply about. Continue reading →

More Terrifying Tales Of The Great Stupid, Academic Division

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The predictable appeal of racist “antiracism” cant to the world of scholarship and academia in the wake of the fraudulent George Floyd Freakout is producing amusing or frightening results, depending on one’s regard for higher education and resistance to despair.

Today’s sample of Authentic Frontier Gibberish, for example, comes from “Confronting “White Feminism” in the Victorian Literature Classroom,” recently published in the scholarly journal, “Nineteenth Century Gender Studies.” The author is University of California Professor Lana Dalley, who complains that Victorian feminists are “problematic” [There’s that word again!] because they promote “white feminism.” In other words, social commentators and writers of over a hundred years ago don’t seem to reflect the current approved woke perspective of 2021. This is, apparently, a surprise. Here’s her first paragraph, an AFG classic:

“The transition to virtual learning in Spring and Fall 2020 intersected with international protests for racial justice and, more locally, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong’s call to “undiscipline Victorian Studies” by “interrogat[ing] and challeng[ing] our field’s marked resistance to centering racial logic” (370).(1) More specifically, they call for “illuminat[ing] how race and racial difference subtend our [Victorianists’] most cherished objects of study, our most familiar historical and theoretical frameworks, our most engrained scholarly protocols, and the very demographics of our field” (370). Since then, numerous virtual roundtables and panels have convened to discuss critical approaches to race within Victorian studies and to ponder the relevance of contemporary social justice movements to a field whose borders are historically drawn. This essay emerged from one such panel and offers practical suggestions for reframing pedagogical approaches to Victorian feminist discourses in order to “center[] racial logic” and “illuminate how race and racial difference subtend” those discourses.(2) Its suggestions are certainly not meant to be exhaustive, but simply to offer one set of practices for making the Victorian literature classroom more responsive to contemporary conversations about race and gender.”

Now who can argue with that?

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A Non-Apology Apology From Ft. Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis That Is Such A Non-Apology That It Doesn’t Even Include “Apologize” Or “Sorry”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

-trantalis-gay-pride-stonewall-picture

The United States has a serious apology problem. People who should not be apologizing are doing so anyway, because they are intimidated by woke mobs and too cowardly to resist. Others, particularly elected officials, are refusing to apologize even when it is clear that an apology is owed. What’s going on here?

Weenies and assholes, essentially. “Townhall” political editor Guy Benson neatly summed up that dichotomy with a tweet:

Benson tweet

Ellie Kemper is an actress who did nothing wrong, but was forced into apologizing anyway (Ethics Alarms pronounced her a “prostrating weenie” here.) Whitehouse, the Democratic Rhode Island Senator and vocal “antiracism” shill, was exposed as a sickening hypocrite, and excused himself, apology-free, by explaining that the exclusive club he belongs to has remained white-only out of “long tradition.” Weenie, meet Asshole. Which of these invasive species does more damage is open to debate; personally, I vote for the weenies.

Ft. Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis is in the other category, and, like Whitehouse, spectacularly so.

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