Month: June 2024

Wait, Does Trump Read Ethics Alarms?

/ Jack Marshall / 95 Comments

He essentially used almost the exact same “kill line” on Biden that I recommended:

“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence; I don’t think he knows what he said either.”

Of course, it’s a pretty obvious one, but at least he or someone on his team is alert.

And no, I am not watching this nadir in our democracy’s history. Someone who had read my post called me up to tell me about it.

Looking around the web and social media, it appears that the Axis will have a tough time spinning this. From S.E. Cupp, one of CNN’s token conservatives who hates Trump:

“OOOOOOKE—lahoma Where The Fools Want Bibles In the Schools…”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Morons.

Just as the Far Left plays into the worst conservative stereotypes about them with demands like abortion right up to birth and open borders, the Far Right parodies itself with Constitution-defying laws like Louisiana’s requiring the Ten Commendments to be displayed in public school classrooms. Now Oklahoma says, “Hold my beer!”with the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters announcing in a memo today that every Oklahoma school must teach students the Bible the 2024-2025 school year. “The Bible is an indispensable historical and cultural touchstone,” Walters said in a press release unveiling the mandate. “Without basic knowledge of it, Oklahoma students are unable to properly contextualize the foundation of our nation which is why Oklahoma educational standards provide for its instruction. This is not merely an educational directive but a crucial step in ensuring our students grasp the core values and historical context of our country.”

There is no chance, none, zip, nada, that this obviously religiously motivated law will stand up to judicial scrutiny. This is pure grandstanding.

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Yeah, I Think It’s Fair To Say That Tricking a Guy into Having Sex-Change Surgery So You Can Marry the New Her and Gain Control of Her Family’s Property is Unethical….

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

As weird as things have gotten in the U.S., much weirder stuff goes on abroad, and I ignore most of it. This story, however, requires that attention be paid.

Mujahid, a 20-year-old from Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh–that’s India—claims a hospital staff performed a sex change operation on him without his consent. A man named Omprakash, the alleged victim claims, had been harassing him for years and deceived him into believing that he was suffering from a serious medical condition. He then offered to take him to Mansoorpur hospital, where he was sedated and then operated on. “He brought me here, and the next morning I had an operation. When I regained consciousness, I was told that I had been changed from a boy to a girl!” a sobbing Mujahid told NDTV reporters. “When I woke up, Omprakash told me that I am a woman now and that he would take me to Lucknow to marry me. He threatened to kill my father if I resisted.”

Yeah, definitely unethical, in my expert opinion.

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Observations On Tucker Carlson’s Brilliant Take-Down of an Unethical Journalist

/ Jack Marshall / 89 Comments

I was looking for another version of this video not linked to “End Wokeness,” or “Holy shit!” because what’s good about it has nothing to do with “wokeness.” I couldn’t find one quickly enough, so there it is.

Watch the clip.

Observations:

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“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Anti-Semitism…”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias” is a tag here, representing the sarcastic like EA uses periodically to mock the stubborn gaslighters who insist against overwhelming evidence that we have a benign, honest, objective journalistic establishment when we do not, much to the nation’s despond. Sometimes the metaphorical smoking guns are more choking than others. (One of the reasons I will not be watching tonight’s “debate” is because I fully expect the smoke to be especially thick.)

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Quick Note: Commenter Banning Alert [Expanded and Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

“Not a Lawyer” has been banned. Don’t reply to any of his comments if he tries to sneak one in.

After arguing relentlessly, snottily and obnoxiously about what is a justified impeachment, this guy revealed in his last post—and by that I do mean last— that he doesn’t even know what an impeachment is, writing that “no Presidents have been impeached.”

Hell, I knew about that common misconception by the historically and constitutionally ignorant when I started giving my U.S. Presidents presentation in Miss Barrett’s fifth grade class at the age of 9. Since the House has impeached Presidents three times since 1996, there is no excuse for a responsible, educated citizen not to know that an impeachment is like an indictment, and no President has been found guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” though Johnson survived by one vote in the Senate, and Nixon would have certainly been convicted. There is even less excuse for someone so uniformed to come here and argue with me about what’s an ethical impeachment. Yeah, I’m ticked off.

Believe it or not, my time is valuable. If you’re going to argue, do your homework, which at a bare minimum means knowing the basics of what you’re arguing about.

***

UPDATE: Not a Lawyer has been reinstated, as you can see in the comments below.

I am taking his explanation as sincere, and since he is Not a Lawyer, I have some confidence that he’s not just skillfully writing what he thinks will be be persuasive. I’ve reversed bans before, but not often, because the vast majority of those exiled react like the recently banned commenter who replied, “Fuck you, you Trump supporting fascist!”” Welcome home, Not a Lawyer. Your slate is clean.

Ethical Quote of the Week: Nate Silver

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

All of the below, from his web newsletter “The Silver Bulletin,” in which Silver reveals what his current system of handicapping elections currently foretells regarding the 2024 election. Nate is supposed to be part of the Left’s pro-Democrat, pro-progressive, pro-Biden propaganda machine, so his usual allies are furious with him for “following the science. He writes in part, explaining the results above,

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 11: People Who Knock On My Door

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Unlike a lot of the biases in this series, I know this bias is irrational, neighborly and unfair. However, I just can’t shake it. My first instinct, always, when I hear a knock on the door (I disconnected the door bell long ago when it kept going off on its own) is some mixture of anger, annoyance, and dread.

The bias became full blown when a large female Alzheimer patient startled Grace and I awake one morning shortly after we were married by banging on our front door while roaring angry gibberish. It turned out she had wandered off from a facility and thought she lived here. Four police officers had a hard time corralling her. Long before that, though, my mother had poisoned me against the whole concept of surprise visitors: she distrusted them. Then there was that mentally ill guy with an old Weimeraner on a leash who would knock on our door in Arlington, Mass. still thinking he was an air raid warden and that it was World War II. I remember that he had clear blue eyes, dead eyes, like a zombie. This was before I had ever encountered Jehovah’s Witnesses, kids selling magazines to pay for a trip to Disney World, and Comcast salesmen.

And before I had watched so many home-invasion movies.

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Science? No, Fearmongering, As a Deliberate Catalyst For Totalitarianism

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

If I had the time and inclination, I could locate dozens of trenchant quotes from Orwell and others making the same crucial point: fear is the enemy of liberty, and that aspiring dictators recognize that a population in fear of its safety will inevitably bargain away the freedoms and the autonomy of themselves and others. “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery” was the way Thomas Jefferson put it, although usually in Latin. The idea behind America and its crucial unique rebellious character was that as a people we are worthy of democracy because we have the guts and fortitude to resist the siren song of peaceful security. Hence Ben Franklin’s much-quoted, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” FDR, clever and cynical, inveighed against the dangers of fear (“We have nothing to fear but fear itself!”) even as he made brilliant use of fear to make himself the nearest thing to a dictator the U.S. has ever had.

The progressives who visit Ethics Alarms freaked out yesterday over a post in which I referenced the current mutated U.S. Left’s increasingly blatant drift toward totalitarianism…you know,

There was more traffic on that post than there has been on any post here not linked by some mega-site like “Instapundit.” The truth hurts. Ironically, I just stumbled upon an example of our now thoroughly corrupted scientific establishment wielding the tactic of fearmongering by the device of arguing that the public is denying the truth, with the truth being, “EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE! THE WORST EVER! WE’RE DOOMED IF THE SMART PEOPLE DON’T RESCUE US! FAST!“

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There Is Hope and Justice…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Well, some, anyway…

Jamaal Bowman (that’s him caught on video setting off a false fire alarm to halt a House vote) lost the House District 16 primary in New York to a veteran Democrat who knows the difference between a fire alarm and and a door. The average IQ of the House just went up several points. The assumption is that it was his aggressive support for Gaza and Hamas against Israel that sunk him; if so, his loss is an example of voters doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. The man is ignorant, dishonest, and dumb as a shingle.

To temper one’s joy at this development, I must note that Lauren Boebert, one of the more embarrassing members of the House from the other side of the aisle, won her primary in Colorado’s 4th District.

Meanwhile, in the special hypocrisy category, John Avlon won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. House in New York’s 1st Congressional District. Avlon, a former CNN commentator and a columnist for The Daily Beast for years, was an early target of Ethics Alarms for his promotion of a “No Labels” movement, which was really a “Democrats who want to pretend they aren’t partisan who use labels like ‘wingnuts’ against conservatives while accusing them of engaging in name-calling.” He’s a phony, but, to look on the bright side, he’s smarter than Boebert and Bowman would be if you soldered their two brains together. And, true to form, he was happy to take the label of “Democrat,” when it suited his purposes, not that his “No Labels” posturing fooled anyone.