Month: October 2023

Oh NOW Biden Thinks That Giving Iran Access To Billions Will Spark Terrorism: A Barn Door Fallacy Classic!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Under the Federal Rules of Evidence, subsequent remedial actions taken by an alleged tortfeasor cannot be introduced at trial to prove a party’s negligence, wrongdoing or culpable conduct. It is considered unfairly prejudicial. But the Court of Public Opinion isn’t bound by the Federal Rules, and neither is Ethics Alarms. Now that Biden has said “Never mind!” to the earlier cash for hostages deal with Iran, I look forward to Sec. Blinken and paid liar Karine Jean-Pierre babbling their arguments for why the 6 billion dollars given back to Iran for “humanitarian” purposes couldn’t possibly be connected to the sneak terrorist attack and its aftermath by Hamas. The reversal of the utterly reckless and irresponsible deal is more eloquent that they can ever be, and thoroughly rebuts their spin.

This is the Barn Door Fallacy: a negligent party taking now pointless measures to prevent what its previous incompetence already caused. It is cynical grandstanding,but in this case, it is also an admission, Federal Rules of Evidence or not. Donald Trump was right, conservatives were right, multiple Middle East experts were right, and anyone familiar with why it was once supposed to be insane to exchange money for hostages were right, while Biden, Barack Obama and the entire Democratic Party along with its mainstream media propaganda mouthpieces were wrong.

Would Hamas have attacked if Trump had been President? I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the consequences widely predicted after Biden agreed to unfreezing billions in Iranian assets occurred, and he and his administration is accountable….which means they must be held accountable. They have blood on their hands.

If President Biden had any integrity or guts—he has neither—his position would be that Iran didn’t carry out the attacks, the released assets couldn’t possibly be connected to the carnage in Israel, U.S, policy was and is sound, and the deal stands.

Instead, the administration is saying “Oopsie! Guess we screwed up! Well, we’ll try to make it better. Sorry for all the blood and beheaded babies!”

If the Republican Party can’t clean out this gang of fools, it should disband and reorganize as a competitor for Cirque du Soleil.

Harvard Just Sent Me This Video. What Do You Think? Here’s What I Think…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

1. Words are cheap. Harvard, as I noted last month, has been singled out by The Fire as the worst university in the nation regarding free expression and free speech. Is Gay, as a newly installed president, just mouthing convenient platitudes, or will she make a genuine effort to reverse the culture at her institution? We shall see.

2. This episode exemplifies what Harvard’s version of open discourse is, or at least was just 8 months ago.

3. Gay’s lament for people trying to protect their families and just trying to survive is code for “those cruel Israelis will be injuring and killing civilians and children as they set out to wipe out Hamas.” The citizens of Gaza elected a terrorist organization to run their territory. They are not innocent in what has transpired. They are fully complicit. If they were so dedicated to their children, they would not have intentionally placed their fates in the hands of violent anti-Semitic extremists.

4. Now Harvard is opposing hate and division, perhaps because, finally, a lot of that hate is being focused on Harvard. As recently as its position in the affirmative action case before the Supreme Court, Harvard has been an enthusiastic force for division—racial, political, and more.

Wait, Is NYT Woke Propagandist Michelle Goldberg Finally Learning?

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I have given up reading Paul Krugman or Charles Blow in the Times op-ed pages since the Julie Principle applies: they are reliable dishonest left-wing hacks, and it’s silly to waste time criticizing them for doing what they will always do. I have almost reached that point with Michelle Goldberg, last vivisected here, but her column this week was interesting. She actually criticized her fellow travelers for siding with Hamas after the horrific sneak terror attack on Israel. Not only that, Goldberg, a knee-jerk wokester if there ever was one, was moved to question progressives generally, writing in The Massacre in Israel and the Need for a Decent Left,

“…the way keyboard radicals have condoned war crimes against Israelis has left many progressive Jews alienated from political communities they thought were their own.”

“Progressive Jews” like Goldberg. Funny, I just think of her as an integrity-challenged, progressive liar and fool. Anyway, she goes on in part,

Conservatives reading this might take a jaundiced satisfaction in what some surely view as naïve progressives getting their comeuppance. But part of what makes the depravity of the edgelord anti-imperialists so tragic is that a decent and functional left has rarely been more necessary… It is not just disgusting but self-defeating for vocal segments of the left to disavow those universal ideas about human rights, declaring instead that to those who are oppressed, even the most extreme violence is permitted….Perhaps such hideous dogmatism shouldn’t be surprising. The left has always attracted certain people who relish the struggle against oppression primarily for the way it licenses their own cruelty; they are one reason movements on the left so reliably produce embittered apostates. Plenty of leftists have long fetishized revolutionary violence in poor countries, perhaps as a way of coping with their own ineffectuality….

The most sympathetic reading of the online leftists playacting as the Baader-Meinhof Gang is that their nihilism is a function of despair. As Leifer pointed out, even before the killings in Israel, it was a grim time for the American left, as the elation of the Sanders campaign and the revolutionary hopes of the Black Lives Matter movement gave way to backlash and retrenchment. “When the left loses, it enters into a cycle of self-marginalization,” he said….On social media, some scholars and activists are repeating the line “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” suggesting that the homicidal spree we just saw in Israel is not a departure from their ideology but the embodiment of it. I suspect they will come to regret it if people take them at their word.

By valorizing terrorism, these voices on the left are effectively choosing to stop contending for power in a serious way — a slow and grinding process rife with setbacks — and indulge instead in messianic projection.

Well bless her heart. (“The revolutionary hopes of the Black Lives Matter movement”? You mean like discriminating against whites, replacing merit with racial spoils, using violence as a political tool, destroying urban law enforcement and, of course, making lots of money? Those hopes?)

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Friday Open Forum Time!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

And it’s about time, too. The last OF was unusually spare, and this has been a lively, if ugly seven days since.

Elucidate and illuminate!

[Notes on that clip: 1. The “Howdy Doody Time” theme was sung to the melody of “Ta-ra-ra-Boom-dee-ay,” one of many traditional American songs that kids used to be taught and now never are. I was going to write a musical revue containing songs like that (“There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” and “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here!” among others) for my old theater company, but for various reasons it never happened. They are all infinitely superior to “Imagine.” 2. You’ve heard that voice singing the creepy Rice Crispies march. before. Who is it, and what famous song did he sing?]

Unethical Architecture: A Chicago Convention Center Is A Bird Murdering Menace

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Was this really necessary?

According to the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors (CBCM), a volunteer conservation project dedicated to the protection of migratory birds, the dead bodies s of at least 1,000 small birds, including Tennessee warblers, hermit thrush, and American woodcocks were found around Chicago’s McCormick Place, the largest convention center in North America. Douglas Stotz, a conservation ecologist with the Chicago-based Field Museum, told NPR, “In one night we had a year’s worth of death.” Typically between 1,000 and 2,000 birds die each year from flying into the building, which is a bird-killer due to its thick, mostly glass walls. The number of deaths is probably much higher, because many birds continue to fly after suffering serious collision then die hours later, far from the scene of the crime.

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How Is Bringing Back Old TV Shows Unethical? Let Me Count The Ways…

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I had forgotten that “Frasier,” which graced the airwaves of network TV from from 1993 to 2004, was being brought back in a reboot on the Paramount+ streaming channel until I saw a promo for it yesterday. I was never a big fan of the original, though I appreciated its habit of frequently employing classic farce complete with slamming doors, so I was not and am not planning on tuning in to the zombie version. However, the disgusted review of the new “Frasier” by James Poniewozik in the New York Times reminded me of how icky these exercises always are are and how frequently the practice is resorted to now.

To be clear, I am not counting re-boots that involve completely recasting the show and simply slapping the old title on it to suck in suckers for a bait and switch. That practice is clearly unethical—it’s dishonest and disrespectful to the original and its key artists—but that isn’t what this post is about. Such rip-offs include the current “Hawaii 5-0” without Jack Lord and “Magnum P.I.” without Tom Selleck, the new, inferior “The Equalizer” (gender and color switched) as well as the infamous attempt to re-boot the original “Perry Mason” with, ugh, Monte Markham in place of Raymond Burr. No, I’m thinking about when a show that had been deemed to have run its course many years ago is revived with some of the same cast members, all older, less vigorous, and apparently desperate for work, and with lesser writers often peddling current biases. Poniewozik writes, in part,

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Ethics Dunce: The California State Government, But You Knew That.

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed Senate Bill 673 into law. The measure will create a missing child alert system for black children only. This is the guy who wants to be President.

NBC News reports, “The law, which will go into effect on Jan. 1, will allow the California Highway Patrol to activate the alert upon request from local law enforcement when a Black youth goes missing in the area.The Ebony Alert will utilize electronic highway signs and encourage use of radio, TV, social media and other systems to spread information about the missing persons’ alert. The Ebony Alert will be used for missing Black people aged 12 to 25.”

If a white child is missing, well, too bad, honky’s got their own alert. “California is taking bold and needed action to locate missing black children and black women in California,” Democratic state Sen. Steven Bradford said in a press release. “Our black children and young women are disproportionately represented on the lists of missing persons. This is heartbreaking and painful for so many families and a public crisis for our entire state.”

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Ethics Quiz: The Consequences For Endorsing Terrorism

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

The revolting response of students and other members of campus communities to the Hamas attack and subsequent barbarism inflicted on Israeli citizens has launched a full-fledged ethics train wreck:

  • Zareena Grewal, a professor of American Studies at Yale, tweeted out “There is no question who the oppressors are who the oppressed are. And somehow people are confused about this. White supremacy never stops being shocking to me.” Then she wrote,  “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity.”

  • Derron Borders, a diversity administrator at the Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management, wrote on Instagram in support of the Hamas terrorists who killed more than 900 people, “When you hear about Israel this morning and the resistance being launched by Palestinians, remember against all odds Palestinians are fighting for life, dignity, and freedom — alongside others doing the same — against settle colonization, imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, which the United States is the model.”

Meanwhile, the students in the 31 Harvard campus organizations that famously announced that Israel was fully responsible for all the violence erupting in and out of Gaza, are facing organized efforts to ensure they are punished:

  • Bill Ackman, the billionaire founder of hedge fund giant Pershing Square Capital Management, has demanded that Harvard release the names of the students who belong to the 31 organizations, so that corporations know not to hire them. “I have been asked by a number of CEOs if Harvard would release a list of the members of each of the Harvard organizations that have issued the letter assigning sole responsibility for Hamas’ heinous acts to Israel, so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members,” Ackman, a Harvard alum, wrote on “X.” “If, in fact, their members support the letter they have released, the names of the signatories should be made public so their views are publicly known. One should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing statements supporting the actions of terrorists, who, we now learn, have beheaded babies, among other inconceivably despicable acts.”  So far, at least a dozen company heads  have endorsed his campaign.
  • Two trucks circled Harvard Square yesterday with LED screens that flashed the names and photos of about a half dozen students known to be involved with the pro-Hamas groups.  The billboard trucks were funded by the conservative news group Accuracy in Media, showed the Harvard students under the words, “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites” and linked to a website, HarvardHatesJews.com, which directed users to send messages to Harvard’s board of trustees. “Tell them to take action against these despicable, hateful students,” the website states. “Each and every one of these students should be expelled and their student organizations should be kicked off campus.”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

What constitutes a fair and responsible response to the campus supporters of the Hamas terror attacks?

Two thoughts: 1) The consequences facing professors, administrators and students should be different, 2) College is a time to make mistakes.

The First Amendment’s principles and academic freedom must apply. I believe the primary negative consequences should fall on the institutions who hire fools like Borders, allow political ideologues like Grewal to indoctrinate students, and who are negligent in teaching their charges in history, ethics, and critical thinking.

Two Letters From Harvard

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

At least a lot of Harvard professors were sufficiently disgusted by 31 Harvard student groups attacking Israel for “making” Hamas launch a sneak terrorist attack and further engaging in objectively evil conduct—

—to issue this open letter, signed by about 160 professors (including Alan Dershowitz–twice!):

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“The Ethicist” Whiffs! An Expatriate With Dual Citizenship Asks If It’s Ethical To Vote In U.S. Elections, And

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

….Kwame Anthony Appiah, the New York Times ethics advice columnist, gives a rambling, barely-responsive and contradictory answer that only reaches the obvious conclusion after downing the issue in verbiage. The question:

I’m a dual Swedish and American citizen and have lived in Sweden for the past five years, with no plans on moving back to the United States. I have a Swedish husband, pay Swedish taxes and vote in Swedish elections.

I still maintain my American citizenship and file taxes in the United States every year. But I’ve made a choice not to vote in U.S. elections. Because I no longer live (or plan to live) in the States, I don’t think I should have a say in selecting its government.

I have expat friends who strongly disagree. They all vote and think that I should. What’s your take?

Easy, easy call. It is unethical to vote. Not living in the nation for five years, the inquirer cannot possibly be sufficiently aware of U.S. conditions, culture or public needs. Not intending to return to the U.S., the inquirer has no serious stake in the outcome of the election either. For the writer to vote in the U.S. would be like me being allowed to vote in Massachusetts elections when I haven’t lived there for years. The “expat” friends are wrong, and frankly, warped. I’ve had experience with Americans who are in the foreign service and seldom even visit the U.S. I found them to be culturally estranged from the nation I know, arrogant, detached, and biased. In fact, it is a serious problem that many of the people who represent the U.S. abroad no longer understand the nation they represent.

But I digress. Launching into long-winded equivocal academic mode, “The Ethicist” waxes on about whether one should have to pay taxes to have a vote, the wisdom of allowing people who aren’t citizens or have been convicted of a crime to vote, and “Does having made a contribution to your country over a period mean that you should be allowed to vote even after you’ve retired to another country?”, he finally proclaims, “A reasonable conclusion is that people granted the legal right to vote are morally free to exercise it.” Oh, shut up, man! The question wasn’t whether the inquirer had a right to vote or should have a right to vote. The question is whether it is ethical to vote under the conditions listed in the question!

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