Author: Jack Marshall

Ethics Observations On The Democratic Reckoning: Part II

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Youngkin-Wins

Additional Observations (Part I is here):

1. Is there any more useless and dishonest profession than professional political polling? 538 came closest to predicting the actual margin between Youngkin and McAuliffe going into yesterday, but only because it included Fox News’ outlier poll showing Youngkin 8 points ahead. Even then, the margin was 100% larger than 538’s average, 2% over .9%. Fox’s shocking call emerged after several conservative pundits complained that the network’s past polling always over-counted progressives….a coincience, I’m sure. I knew that Youngkin was going to win by the desperate way McAuliffe was campaigning in the last two weeks, with flagrant lies, shrill ads and an absurd obsession with Trump. Youngkin, meanwhile, looked and sounded like a candidate who was getting good news from the field. Internal polling is intelligence and tends to be more accurate, but the stuff the newspapers and TV shows publicize are shot through with bias and hidden agendas–Will this get more of “our” voters to the polls? Will this discourage the deplorables?

2. Hanlon’s Razor alert. Answering questions from reporters at the climate change summit, President Biden actually said that he saw nothing suggesting that “how I’m doing” would have any effect on how his party’s candidates fared at the polls. Was he lying, or have his IQ points dropped into single digits? Nah, those soaring gas prices, inflation, mask mandates, and supply chain interruptions overseen by a proud daddy who left his post, and all the Americans left to fend for themselves against the Taliban didn’t influence voters! Why wouldn’t they vote in more members of the same party responsible for it all?

3. The talking point that Critical Race Theory is a myth and isn’t taught in the public schools is such an audacious and insulting lie when the evidence to the contrary is everywhere. The “1619 Project” is taught in schools all over the country, and is rooted in critical race theory ideology. On the Virginia Department of Education website, “Critical Race Theory in Education” is highlighted as a “best practice” and the site’s definitions of “racism,” “white supremacy,” and “education equity” are derived from CRT. Outgoing Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s public education officials openly endorsed the anti-white, “Racist America” theory as an “important analytic tool” to “further spur developments in education.” Yet McAuliffe claimed in the last days of the campaign that CRT was just a “racist dog whistle” used to panic those bigoted Republican voters.

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Ethics Observations On The Democratic Reckoning: Part I

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

Youngkin wns

Last night, a Republican no one ever heard of a year ago won the right to occupy the Governor’s Mansion in Virginia, which Joe Biden had won by 10 percentage points less than a year ago. A Democratic incumbent governor generally assumed to be a shoo-in for re-election in New Jersey until recently was trailing his Republican challenger in a race too close to call. Back to “Ol’ Virginy,” Republicans also took the Lt. Governor and Attorney General slots. Minneapolis’s referendum seeking to replace the police department with an Orwellian “Department of Public Safety” was soundly defeated.

Good. The Democrats were begging for a rebuke like this, and they got it. A better example of what George Will, back when I respected him, called “condign justice” could hardly be imagined. More ominous still for Joe Biden’s party, it is difficult to see how the carnage of last night doesn’t make an epic wipe-out in the 2022 mid-terms in 2022 a near certainty, except that Republicans are fully capable of lousing up a sure thing.

While all this was going on, those objective, professional, unbiased analysts on MSNBC, CNN and just about everywhere else but the jubilant Fox News were freaking out; presumably the pundits and reporters in the Post and the Times will be emulating them. They were all complicit in the Democratic wipe-out, refusing to report just how bad the Biden Presidency has been for the first ten months (with the occasional exception, like the Afghanistan debacle), continuing to bash Donald Trump as if he was still tweeting, and generally insulting any American who wasn’t ready to do their his or her impression of Winston Smith.

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Comment Of The Day: “More On The Obama-Springsteen Exchange, Since Apparently Its Significance Isn’t Sinking In…”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Since the mainstream media and the blogosphere seems to be paying little attention, I think Ethics Alarms can be forgiven for doing its best to try to keep what is being buried by apathy above ground a little longer…

Here is Curmie’s Comment of the Day on the post, “More On The Obama-Springsteen Exchange, Since Apparently Its Significance Isn’t Sinking In…”:

***

I suspect there aren’t too many regular readers of this blog who actually lowered their opinion (as opposed to having it confirmed) of Obama and Springsteen as a result of this exchange, but I’m one.

I actually see this as the flip side of some of the antics of James O’Keefe and his lot: that by exaggerating a real problem beyond recognition, he loses the opportunity to actually make an important point. Imagine if instead of the quotation you cite, he’d said “But most of your audiences were primarily white. And they loved Clarence when he was onstage, but if some of them had run into him in a bar [note past tense!], things might have been very different.”

That would be a true statement, worthy of consideration by all of us. No, not all white Springsteen fans, but some; not certainty of the response, but plausibility; and not the n-word, at least spoken aloud–but perhaps a tension, a distancing that ought not to be there and is worthy of addressing.

That Obama, with something of a reputation as a wordsmith, would say something so profoundly stupid and insulting is indeed deeply problematic. Does this one incident legitimately characterize him as an anti-white racist? Perhaps not… but perhaps so.

As for Springsteen–certainly the working class persona he tries to exude felt a lot more authentic back in ’70s, when it was authentic. I haven’t paid a lot of attention to his more recent stuff, but I still consider myself a fan of the music he wrote and performed a generation or so ago. I’m a bigger fan, though, of the late Warren Zevon. In one of my favorite songs of his, we get this:

“They say, ‘Everything’s alright.’
They say, ‘Better days are near.’
They tell us, ‘These are the good times.’
But they don’t live around here.
Billy and Christie don’t,
And Bruce and Patti don’t.
They don’t live around here.”

What Warren said.

Election Ethics In Northern Virginia [UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Virginia Voting-

I just got back from voting. The Marshalls are lucky: we can see the school where our polling place is from our breakfast room window. And yet one of our neighbors, who could walk over to vote in less than 5 minutes, told me yesterday that he mailed in his ballot.

He also voted early. Early voting appeals to knee-jerk partisans, and encourages blind and ill-informed voting. That is especially true in contests like the Virginia Governor’s race, where Terry McAuliffe did or said something almost every day that further illustrated what a bottom-feeding example of the worst of American politics he is.

Yesterday, for example, McAuliffe lied outright (again) describing a Glenn Youngkin (his GOP opponent)-Trump event that didn’t exist. “Guess how Glenn Youngkin is finishing his campaign?” McAuliffe told the crowd at his final rally. “He is doing an event with Donald Trump here in Virginia!” No, Trump wasn’t in Virginia and he never campaigned with Youngkin, though McAuliffe spent the final weeks of the campaign pretending that the two were conjoined twins.

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More On The Obama-Springsteen Exchange, Since Apparently Its Significance Isn’t Sinking In…

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Obama Boss

I don’t understand why the recent televised comments by Barack Obama about white citizens haven’t been a major news story. I don’t understand why it isn’t the topic of dozens of columns and commentary pieces in newspapers, on broadcast news outlets, and on the web. There have been few comments about the episode here, and most of those have consisted of virtual shrugs: ‘Oh, as usual, the Obama worshipers and the news media will just look the other way, because he can do no wrong in their eyes.’ End of issue, apparently.

On the site that first publicized the exchange during CBS Sunday Morning, RealClearPolitics,there are no comments at all as I write this. None. A post called “Pét-Nats Are Champagne’s Funkier Cousin. Are They Here to Stay?.” also posted yesterday, has 29, and I have no idea what the hell its about. I know what the Ethics Alarms post is about, though. The former President of the United States looked upon as the most respected leader of the Democratic Party and who received about 98% of the black vote when he ran for President revealed himself as an anti-white bigot.

What he said on CBS to his new pal, Bruce Springsteen, was signature significance: nobody who isn’t an anti-while bigot says it or thinks it. Let me refresh your memory: Obama said to “The Boss,” speaking about a black E Street Band musician that Springsteen admired, “But most of your audiences were primarily white. And they can love Clarence when he’s onstage, but if they ran into him in a bar, suddenly…the n-word comes out.”

Do you know what Obama’s statement reminded me of? It recalled a line from “12 Angry Men,” when Juror 10 says, asserting that it only stands to reason the the young defendant, who is a member of an unstated minority group, killed his father, the victim in the murder trial,

“Look, these people are lushing it up and fighting all the time, and if somebody gets killed, so somebody
gets killed…they don’t care. Oh, there are some good things about ’em too. Look, I’m the first
one to say that!”

Juror 10 is the repulsive, stereotypical bigot on the jury.

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Ethics Wreckage, 11/1/2021: Moral Stains, And More

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Wreck2

1. Stop making me defend President Biden! President Joe Biden apparently fell asleep during today’s opening sessions at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland. Naturally, the conservative media and bloggers are having a ball mocking “Sleepy Joe.” It’s unfair. I wonder how many of the critics have had anything close to the killing schedule Presidents have, with constant travel and stress, time zone changes and everything else they have to deal with. Much younger Presidents than Biden have nodded off during meetings. I dozed off myself briefly at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce briefing, and I was 29 at the time.

2. Bingo, Ann Althouse! Ann reviews a stream of consciousness blatherfest by Speaker Nancy Pelosi that read,

“So again, the transformative agenda, the president was knowledgeable. I mean, he knows chapter [inaudible 00:04:20] because he wrote this, he campaigned on this. He spoke to this in his state of the union address. I told him last night, on phone last night, but today in front of our colleagues, that when he gave that state of the union address, we were sitting behind him, the vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris, and the speaker of the House, me. And people said, “How did it feel? How did it feel? The two women.” I said, “Well, that was exciting and historic.” What was really exciting is the speech the president made about women, not about two women, but America’s women, and what would happen with this progressive agenda that he was putting forth. At the same time, we’re moving forward with BIF, a once in a century chance to rebuild the infrastructure that past the Senate a while back. The BIF has good things and it has missing things. And of course, the fact that we have the reconciliation… Let me not call it that anymore, let’s call it the Build Back Better legislation is essential because that’s where we have the major investment in climate. Although there is some in the BIF. Roads, bridges, water systems, crumbling. Some water systems are over 100 years made of, and our colleagues talked about their own experiences in their own communities, some made of bricks and wood. That’s a nice water system, right?”

Quoth Ann: “If Trump spoke with that level of coherence, he would have been derided as a blithering idiot.”

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Unethical Quote Of The Year: Barack Obama, And I Still Am Amazed He Would Say This Out Loud

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Obama and Springstein

“But most of your audiences were primarily white. And they can love Clarence when he’s onstage, but if they ran into him in a bar, suddenly…the n-word comes out.”

—-Former President Barack Obama, talking with Bruce Springsteen on CBS Sunday Morning about the rock star’s partnership with the  E Street Band’s late black saxophonist Clarence Clemons.

And there it is. That’s how Barack Obama, just like his racist wife, thinks of white people like me. When “they” see a black man at a bar, even a famous musician like Clemons, they just can’t restrain themselves. The “n-word”—that’s nigger, you know—“comes out.”

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Comment Of The Day: “The New York Times Uses Its Sunday Front Page To Extol Progressive Virtue-Signaling Lawn Signs…”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

obxoxious sign

Here is Extradimensional Cephalopod’s Comment of the Day on the post, “The New York Times Uses Its Sunday Front Page To Extol Progressive Virtue-Signaling Lawn Signs…”:

***

Here’s the first problem: with the exception of “kindness is everything,” these statements are vacuous. Each one is trivially true when read as written. For most intents and purposes, nobody in their right mind is going to disagree with the statements’ literal interpretations, even though some of them are normative (subjective value judgments) rather than descriptive (objective observations).

The second problem is that many humans are blurred-brains who haven’t developed the ability to use or recognize critical reasoning, so they skip directly from a vacuous statement to, “and therefore I’m right that we should do this thing, and if you don’t agree then you’re stupid and evil, QED.” Whether or not I agree with their conclusion is irrelevant, because they’ve demonstrated their reasoning process is not to be trusted.

This process is how we get things like moral certitudes and “objective scientific truth.” I need to start giving humans lessons on existential epistemology (and charging for it).

First off, moral certitudes don’t exist, but that’s not the same thing as saying that there is no right or wrong. In place of objective morality, I submit the constructive virtue of ethics, which I approach as follows.

People want things, but physical reality limits our ability to get everyone everything they want. There are different things we can choose to do in response to those limitations, so that more people can get more of what they want. There are also principles that help us make choices that are more constructive for society. When we abide by those principles, the choices we make are not only sustainable over time, but even get more and more of us more and more of what we want. That’s what makes ethics a constructive virtue. The choice isn’t “right or wrong” so much as it’s figuring out which options and principles are most constructive in the short and long terms, by its effects and by the precedent it sets.

Secondly, objective scientific facts are a myth, but that’s not the same thing as saying that all statements are equally true. The process (and mindset) of science is about saying, “We did this experiment and this was the result. Here’s the simplest hypothesis that’s consistent with this result, and here are some other hypotheses which we think are also fairly likely.”

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Ethics Observations On President Biden’s Crashing Poll Numbers [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

todd-poll

The mainstream news media and progressive gaslighting aficionados were shocked–-shocked!—when habitually left-biased and incompetent NBC talking head Chuck Todd went on Democratic propaganda organ MSNBC and revealed that the most recent NBC poll showed public trust and regard for President Biden and Democrats plummeting like Icarus.

What was shocking wasn’t that Biden was polling horribly, but that he was polling so horribly that MSNBC would report it. Not only are polls unrelaible at best, they are manipulated to confuse and mislead the public by left-biased media contractors (only the Fox News polling is showing Terry McAuliffe trailing Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, for example, which he is, and badly). Moreover, the news media routinely buries or misrepresents polls that carry bad portents for Democrats.

The poll found that 42% of U.S. adults surveyed approved of Biden’s job performance and 54% disapproved, despite a 49%-48% split as recently as August. The survey was conducted jointly by Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies.

Observations:

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Ethics Tricks And Treats, 10/31/2021: Kendri Traps Himself, A Good Man Dies, And More “Let’s Go Brandon!” Follies [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Trick or treat

Jerry Remy died over the weekend. Unless you’re a Red Sox fan, you may not have heard of Remy, but he was a Boston icon by the time he died at the age of 68. I was trying to come up with an ethics theme to justify writing a post about him: I can’t, in fairness. He was just a normal guy who got to live his dream, some would say: a Boston kid (Fall River, to be accurate) who grew up, like me, loving the home town team with all of its drama and disappointments, and was talented enough to play for it, after being traded by the Angels to the Sox in 1976. Then Remy became part of Sox lore, the frustrating parts, as his team battled the New York Yankees in their most repulsive incarnation for primacy in the late ’70s, always falling short. In the most famous and tragic of those near misses, Yankee shortstop Bucky Dent’s cheap home run became the decisive blow in a single play-off tie-breaker in 1978, making Dent a a Yankee immortal. Only moral luck prevented the hero of that historic game from being Remy. In the bottom of the 9th with the Red Sox trailing by one run, Remy hit a blast to right field that Yankee outfielder Lou Piniella lost in the sun. It landed in front of him and bounced to his left: Piniella threw his glove up in blind desperation, and the ball, somehow, landed in it. Lou later told Remy that he never saw it until it was in his grip. Had that ball gotten by him, Rick Burleson would have scored the tying run from first, and Remy would have had an easy triple. He might even have had an inside-the-park homer, winning the game, the division championship, and immortality for getting the biggest hit in Red Sox history.

Remy’s knees gave out eventually, like many second basemen before base runners were forbidden from breaking up potential double-plays with hard slides. He eventually became the Sox cable broadcast color man for 34 years, until he left the booth in August to battle lung cancer. Remy was warm, informative, candid, modest and funny, all while describing himself as a mediocre hitter who felt honored to play on a team with stars like Jim Rice and Carl Yastrzemski. He also kept doing his job, despite more than his share of tragedy and pain. His oldest son was a drug addict, and murdered his girlfriend in a steroid rage. He is serving life without parole in prison; Jerry and his wife took on shared custody of their infant granddaughter. Remy’s battle with lung cancer began in 2008; he kept fighting off multiple recurrences with operations, radiation and chemo, and it kept coming back. He battled depression as well, and spoke and wrote about the illness, inspiring and comforting many who shared that often crippling condition.

Jerry’s last appearance on a baseball field was, appropriately, when he threw out the ceremonial first pitch on October 4 for another one game play-off with the Yankees, who had ended the season tied with Boston, just as in 1978. I knew he was through: he looked pale and weak, but Remy beamed at the huge ovation he received from the Fenway Park crowd as he lobbed the ball to his frequent NESN broadcast partner and fellow member of that tragic 1978 team, Dennis Eckersley. This time, the Red Sox beat the Yankees.

Jerry Remy made a lot of people happy during his life, was respected and loved by those who knew him and worked with him, and kept fighting his way through what chaos threw at him, becoming a better, kinder, nicer human being in the process. That’s a pretty good legacy, better than many greater baseball players. I know he made me happy lots of times, and did so while he must have been suffering.

Good for you, Jerry. Good job at life. I’ll miss you, and so will everyone else. The more good, hard working, courageous human beings we have around, the better it is for everyone.

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