Author: Jack Marshall

The 10th Big Lie Of The Resistance, And More…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The Ethics Alarms accounting of the Big Lies weaponized by the “resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media in order to, in the uncomfortably direct words of Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.), “eliminate” Donald Trump, stopped before the 2020 election with “Big Lie #9: “Trump’s Mishandling Of The Pandemic Killed People.” (That oft-repeated whopper now looks even more outrageous than the other eight.) I have been meaning to add the obvious #10, “Trump is an Insurrectionist” for years now, and should have as that counter-factual, law- and language-defying slur has appeared daily in the media and was the focus of the Democratic House’s kangaroo court “investigation” into the January 6 riot at the Capitol.

What finally spurred me to action was a typically fatuous essay in New York Magazine’s “Intelligencer” column, “Melania Trump Adds Awkward Touch to Rosalynn Carter Funeral.” (Doesn’t a column with that name have some obligation to present intelligent commentary?).

The article was just another of the millions of installments of the Left’s mantra since the 2016 election: Donald Trump does not deserve the base-line respect, honor, fairness and decency that every other President has been automatically granted by virtue of simply holding the office. The truth is that Melania Trump was quite appropriately included among those honoring former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, she was invited, and there was nothing “awkward” about it. That her husband at various times has said uncomplimentary things about several of his predecessors made her presence no more “awkward” than the presence of Michelle Obama, whose husband broke previous established standards of White House decorum by repeatedly criticizing his immediate predecessor, President Bush. Then came the last snarky paragraph, “There’s no clear answer here; it seems we’re going to debate whether the Trumps should be included every time there’s a high-profile political event,” Margaret Hartmann wrote. “Unfortunately, Emily Post doesn’t cover what to do when the former president is a boorish insurrectionist.”

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A Teachers’ Union Reveals What It Is, Suddenly Decides To Take It All Back And Pretend It Didn’t Mean It

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

…thus raising the immediate question of whether parents and particularly Jews are as dumb as the teachers apparently think they are. We shall see.

The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers passed a resolution on Oct. 25th to “condemn the role our [America] government plays in supporting the system of Israeli occupation and apartheid, which lies at the root of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.” In addition, the resolution demanded that Minnesota lawmakers repeal the state’s anti-BDS legislation. 

Not surprisingly, there was a massive negative reaction to the October resolution because it revealed that a majority of the teachers in the union were..

  • Anti-Semitic.
  • Ignorant
  • Completely in thrall to anti-white, anti-democratic ideology
  • Excessively concerned with woke politics than with education, and
  • Not sufficiently trustworthy to be teaching children.
  • Missing basic ethics alarms.

Oopsie! The Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas sent a letter signed by over 800 citizens to interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox and the MPS school board protesting in part,

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You Know The Headline On The Previous Post? Forget It. Denver Just Proved That The Great Stupid Has Civilization By The Throat [Revised]

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Well that was certainly a short-lived ray of hope! Just as some states are realizing that one idiotic woke education policy is ruinous and needs to be reversed, Denver has come up with something infinitely worse.

Get ready for “language justice.”

The Denver school district is adopting a “language justice” policy as a “long term goal.” This astoundingly stupid movement encourages non-English speaking conceivably to the extent of allowing students to use their native language in school. Teaching English to non-English speakers, you see, is oppressive and rooted in racism.

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I Found It! Actual Evidence That The Great Stupid May Be Receding At Last…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I have frequently mentioned the long discussion I was lucky enough to have with futurist Herman Kahn, due to a scheduling snafu at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that had us waiting for over an hour for a meeting that never occurred. One of his most vivid observations was that societies periodically forget why certain practices, traditions and policies exist because they have been around so long, so the societies temporarily abandon them, only to learn to their sorrow why the jettisoned practices had endured.

This observation led to Ethics Alarms christening the current explosion of destructive wokism “The Great Stupid.” One of its mutations, the de-fund the police fad and its attendant nonsense like “restorative justice,” decriminalization” and “anti-incarceration,” has already led to widespread crime and urban rot just as anyone would have predicted without opposition a decade ago. Now states and cities are finally turning on the equally stupid education policy, inflicted on the American mind by the Obama administration, that disruptive, misbehaving and habitually violent students need to be coddled and tolerated rather than disciplined.

Usually it is a particularly egregious incident that spurs lawmakers to action. In Kentucky, a superintendent who yielded to pressure and returned a suspended student to class who had a ‘kill list’ naming other students he was going to kill sparked the legislature to approve stricter punishments for disruptive students. The new law directs that students can be suspended or expelled from school for many kinds of misconduct, including “willful disobedience or defiance of the authority of the teachers or administrators”; using profanity; assaulting another student or a member of the school staff; threatening violence; using alcohol or drugs or defacing school property. The law also requires schools to expel students for at least a year who threaten violence or bring a weapon to school. Arizona, Florida, Nevada and West Virginia have passed similar laws, while Nebraska, North Carolina and Texas are considering them.

I know, I know: none of those states are the ones that have been totally engulfed by the Great Stupid, like poor California, Maryland, Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York and others. Well, they’re a little slow, you know, but they finally realized that civilization needs police and they are gradually learning the open borders don’t work. Right now, they are distracted by so many of their most progressive citizens advocating killing Jews. I think they’ll come around eventually.

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Ethics Villains: Carron J. Phillips And The Woke Activism Website That Employs Him [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This is what Woke World has become in the Age of the Great Stupid, as the George Floyd Ethics Train Wreck continues to run amuck. It is, essentially, a race-baiting bully. (Among other revolting things.)

Carron J. Phillips, a writer for the recently resurrected website Deadspin, which wasn’t reliable in its original form as an internet tabloid, decided to use this photo of a young Kansas City Chiefs fan sitting in the stands…

…to justify the headline,

The “native headdress” complaint ignored the fact that the NFL team’s name is “The Chiefs” and that fans have been showing their support like this…

…for decades. And, of course, that the target of Phillips and Deadspin is a little boy who we now know was 5-years-old. But wait! There’s more! After Carron posted that photo on X with a link to his despicable article, X-users responded with this…

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Oh Look, Another Artificial Intelligence Scandal…With More Undoubtedly On The Way

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Sports Illustrated writer Drew Ortiz (shown above) doesn’t exist. An investigation showed that he had no social media presence and no publishing history. His profile photo published in the magazine is for sale on a website that sells A.I.-generated headshots; he is described as a “neutral white young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes.”

A whistleblower involved with the S.I. scam told the website Futurism that the magazine’s content is now riddled with fake authors. “At the bottom [of the page] there would be a photo of a person and some fake description of them like, ‘oh, John lives in Houston, Texas. He loves yard games and hanging out with his dog, Sam.’ Stuff like that,” the anonymous source told the tech website. Another source involved in the Sports Illustrated content creation revealed that least some of the articles were written by bots as well. “The content is absolutely AI-generated,”  he or she said, “no matter how much they say that it’s not.”

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From Trump Crony Roger Stone, New Vistas In Shameless Deceit

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The fact that Roger Stone supports Donald Trump and that Trump regards him as a friend, advisor and ally is almost enough, all by itself, to justify refusing to vote for Trump no matter who or what he runs against next. Stone, about the slimiest denizen in a scum-filled profession that includes such slimy practitioners as Dick Morris and Lanny Davis (that is, political consultants and operatives), stooped to a new low by calling the wife of Trump rival Ron DeSantis a “cunt” in the coded Twitter/X message above.

I did not know, prior to this incident, about the social media-speak “SeeUNextTuesday,” which means “cunt” like “Let’s go Brandon!” means “Fuck Joe Biden.” It’s pretty obvious, once you think about it, and gutter-level political rhetoric (though HBO allowed Bill Maher to use the term outright when GOP women were the target.). Stone, however, human fungus that he is, added to his ethics foul by denying that he called Casey DeSantis a “cunt,” tweeting ““NOT what I said! Typical @mediate smear.” (The mostly left-leaning political website had stated that “Stone Calls Casey DeSantis a C***,” though it wasn’t the only news source reporting the slur.)

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The Strategy For Avoiding Accountability For Inflation Under Biden: Obfuscate, Confound, And Lie

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This is not, I think you will agree, an ethical course of action.

In the McLaughlin & Associates national survey represented above, 84% of likely voters said inflation and higher costs have adversely affected their lives. 46% said they were “struggling to make ends meet.”A recent NBC News poll found only 38% of voters on the national level approve of President Biden’s handling of the economy. A New York Times/Sienna College poll conducted last month found 52% of registered voters in key swing states had a poor view of the economy.

The White House and Democratic propaganda merchants approach to this is to claim that the silly public just doesn’t understand how wonderful everything is, including prices. Thus the White House released cheery press releases and social media posts patting itself on its metaphorical back because the average cost of the feast was down approximately 4.5% compared to last year according to the American Farm Bureau’s annual survey. That meant that a typical Thanksgiving meal of 12 classic dishes for a feast of 10 would average $61.17 a diner, compared to last year’s record high average of $64.05. Big whoop.

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Vanity Fair’s Subliminal Woke Mind Programming Experiment

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Nah, the mainstream media isn’t a woke propaganda machine! That’s just a conservative conspiracy theory.

Sure.

Subliminal advertising in movies and on TV began in the Fifties with things like this..

…being flashed before viewers’ eyes in fractions of a second. As a result, in 1958, the National Association of Broadcasters banned subliminal ads in 1958. The FTC views such ads as inherently deceptive and therefore illegal. If you look really closely at that screenshot, it says “Try racial justice” in faint grayscale letters.

Sharp-eyed Ann Althouse gets credit for finding this, which she posted and then, being Ann, ignored the real issues the stunt raises in order to go off track about the lyrics of “Try a Little Tenderness,” among other things.

Ooops, gotta run…I’ll have more to say in the comments…

Guest Column: Shoplifting Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

by Sarah B.

[Introduction: This excellent post by Sarah B, who has a history of them, posed a dilemma. It was originally posted in this week’s Open Forum, but the comment easily could have been a Comment of the Day on two recent posts, “Irony: The Washington Post Telling CVS How To Handle Rampant Shoplifting,” and “Technology Ethics Fail: Self-Checkout.”

In the end, I decided to publish it as a guest post, as Sarah herself told us up front what she was commenting on, writing, “This article, about a woman who wrote a piece for the newspaper anonymously about how and why she shoplifts, is worth discussing,” referring to “I’m a middle-class shoplifter – and here’s why I’m happy to confess it” in the UK’s Independent. Proving once again that valuable insights can be obtained from idiotic essays, Sarah’s post is far, far, FAR superior to the article that apparently spawned it. The explanation of “anonymous” about why she’s apparently “happy” about being a shoplifter was so devoid of either logic or ethics comprehension that it made my phantom hair hurt. Among her fatuous excuses and rationalizations were “It’s easy, so it’s the stores’ fault,” “I don’t even see it as shoplifting” (#64 on the rationalizations list, “It isn’t what it is”), “I’m owed it,” and #22, the worst rationalization of all, “It’s not the worst thing,” because she “would only do this in a supermarket chain, rather than any family-run small business.” People like the author make me want to chuck my business and profession and become a pimp or something. Why do I spend so much time on ethics when so many people think like this? Fortunately, Sarah had a different and more constructive reaction.—JM.]

***

First, there is no doubt that her actions are unethical, and while we could just analyze this as a “name the rationalizations”, I also think that a deep dive into the article can show many things about our society and make for a good discussion. There are options for discussing how she doesn’t shoplift because she has to, but does it to decrease the prices of expensive alternatives instead of paying for what she wants. However, I want to look at how I think we could combat her “how-to guide”.

This seems to me to be a great case study in “locks keep an honest man honest.” The author admits that much of her stealing is predicated on the app-shopping and self-checkout philosophy of big stores. My main proposal, after looking at this, is to somehow return to the “good old days” of customer service.

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