Around the World

“Bias Makes You Stupid” Crossed With “Self-Anointed Virtue”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

A simple Ethics Dunce verdict doesn’t do justice to Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. There is so many things wrong with his New York Times column “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It” I may not have the time and patience to list them all. Here’s a gift link so you can analyze them yourself.

The major flaw in the piece is flagged by the headline: it’s a long appeal to authority, the writer’s own, but also other “experts.” “It’s true because we say it’s true.” He holds Israel guilty of genocide because he relies on his own analysis and he’s “been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century.” He’s also been marinating in the academic community’s intersectionalism bias and growing anti-Semitism for all those years. He needs to get out more.

It’s not just him, however. “A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide,” Bartov writes. Yeah, this is how the US started freaking out about climate change, how 50 national intelligence experts proved that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, and how the United States crippled its economy and the intellectual and social development of its children because experts kept lying about the Wuhan virus.

Sorry, I am no longer persuaded by “experts”; they have collectively proven incapable of objective analysis too many times. (Don’t get me started on legal ethics experts.) “So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International,” the author says, adding to his cherry-picked list of authorities who agree with him. “South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice,” Omar adds. Now there are three objective analysts!

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Nah, There’s No Anti-Israel, Anti-Jewish Mainstream Media Bias…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Britain’s media regulator (Great Britain doesn’t have a First Amendment, remember, so the government can punish dishonest, biased journalism. This is not a good thing…) said today it is investigating a BBC documentary about the dire fate of children in Gaza. The BBC removed the program, “Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone,” from its streaming service earlier this year after it was revealed that the 13-year-old narrator, “Abdullah,” is the son of Ayman Alyazouri, Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture.

Oh. Sounds fair and objective to me! The media reports says this information “emerged.” Translation: the BBC was caught. News programs purporting to be factual must not materially mislead the audience in Great Britain, or so they claim. Imagine if the U.S. had such a regulation and enforced it. There would be no broadcast news.

The independent production company that made the program didn’t share the background information regarding the father of the young narrator’s Hamas ties, claims the BBC. Hoyo Films, which produced the documentary, claims it didn’t “intentionally” mislead the BBC. The BBC meanwhile, was wonderfully trusting and incurious—you know, like good journalists are supposed to be. After all, it’s not like anyone is out to vilify Israel as it tries to survive while protecting its citizens from being raped, murdered and kidnapped by terrorists.

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There’s No Crying In Tennis!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Poland’s No. 8 seed Iga Świątek beat the U.S.’s 13th seed Amanda Anisimova 6-0, 6-0 in the Wimbledon women’s final yesterday. That’s a slaughter in tennis, ending Anisimova’s feel good story as an underdog in humilation.

Świątek is one one of the best players in the world; though this is Świątek’s first Wimbledon title it’s her sixth Grand Slam title. She was favored to win, but no one has won the Women’s finals 12 games to none in a Grand Slam tournament since 1988. Anisimova’s wipe-out is being attributed to nerves; if she were a male player, the explanation would be “choking.”

Worse, however, is that after the match Anisimova started weeping, covered her head with a towel and left the court. When she came back to a huge reception from the crowd, she was still sobbing. After receiving the runners-up’s plate at center court, she cried some more as she addressed the crowd.

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Architecture Ethics: If George Costanza Really Became An Architect…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

…he might have designed something like that bridge above, the Rail Over Bridge in Bhopal, India.

Central India’s Madhya Pradesh Government recently suspended the seven engineers responsible for the incompetent and dangerous design. Two construction companies have also been blacklisted, and small wonder. The bridge cost 200 million rupee ($2.3 million) and was announced 10 years ago to improve connectivity between Mahamai Ka Bagh, Pushpa Nagar, and the station area with New Bhopal. It was meant to eliminate long delays at railway crossings and shorten the commute for nearly three hundred thousand people.

VD Verma, the chief engineer on the project, claims that he and his team had no choice but to include the 90-degree turn because of land space and the presence of a metro station nearby. Of course he had a choice: tell officials that there was no way to build a safe bridge in the area available. Bhopal authorities are now trying to purchase more land, to allow the implementation of a safer turn. See, the idea is to do that before you build the bridge, not after.

I don’t understand how this could happen, do you? Nobody spoke up in either the planning or the construction stage to say, “Hey, wait a minute! You can’t have 90 degree turn on a bridge!”? Apparently these workers, so far unidentified, completed the bridge…

George, meanwhile, replied regarding his design,

A Perfect Example of a “Trump Lie”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

On both MSNBC and CNN today, a big deal was made over the fact that President Trump said that “no other country” confers automatic citizenship on those born within its borders. They were both sneering so hard that I bet they needed a lip massage afterwards, “Of course, 33 nations have birthright citizenship,” said one, with the other making a similar statement.

No question about it, they are right and Trump was wrong. What he meant, however, was “No nations anywhere but the Americas have birthright citizenship, and we are the only major power in the world that does.” Or, “Almost no nations that know what the fuck they are doing have birthright citizenship.” Presidents shouldn’t be that careless, but Trump is, he refuses to change, he’s not going to, and nobody should pretend that they are shocked when he does.

Here’s the list, as represented in the chart above: Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Gambia, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Lesotho, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

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Do You Have Any Clue Regarding Whether the US Bombing of the Iranian Nuclear Facilities Were Successful or Not? I Don’t.

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I just heard President Trump at his press conference, rambling as only he can, declare that the news outlets claiming his surprise bunker-busters attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was not as effective as the U.S. claimed were “losers” and liars. Meanwhile, a CNN article, followed by the New York Times, citing leaked classified documents, and thus unnamed sources of those illegally retrieved materials, announced that “Early US intel assessment suggests strikes on Iran did not destroy nuclear sites, sources say.” Reporters Natasha Bertrand, Katie Bo Lillis, and Zachary Cohen wrote that “the US military strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last weekend did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months, according to an early US intelligence assessment that was described by four people briefed on it.” It continued, “The assessment, which has not been previously reported, was produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm. It is based on a battle damage assessment conducted by US Central Command in the aftermath of the US strikes, one of the sources said.”

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Yes, This Democratic Norm Should Not Be Breached…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Presidents of the United States should not say “fuck.” Ever. It doesn’t matter how “angry” they are.

Recalling this much linked post from a decade ago…an some of its offspring, like this, this, and this among others.

Ethicists, however, can say “fuck” when justified.

Fuck.

The U.S. Bombing of Iran Is Not an Ethics Issue

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

It’s a leadership issue.

I generally don’t want to wander into policy debates unless there is a clear ethical component. Competence. Honesty. Responsibility. Results, as we discuss here so often, are usually the result of moral luck. All we can do, in situations involving high-level leadership decision-making, is evaluate what the basis of the decision was, and the process under which it was made. What happens after that is moral luck, chaos, essentially. As an ethicist, I try not to base my analysis on whether I agree with the decision or not from a policy or pragmatic perspective.

In military and foreign policy decisions, the absence of clear ethical standards are especially rife. There are some who regard any military action at all except in reaction to an attack on the U.S. as unethical, and sometimes not even in that circumstance. They are absolutists: war is wrong, killing is wrong, “think of the children,” and that’s all there is to it. Such people are useless except as necessary reminders that Sherman was right.

President Trump’s decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities is a matter of leadership, not ethics. Leaders lead, and are willing to make tough, often risky, decisions. The U.S. Presidency requires leadership, and strong leadership is not only preferable to weak leadership, it is what the majority of Americans has traditionally preferred. The Constitution clearly shows the Founders’ preference for a strong executive branch, particularly in the area of national defense. Yesterday, the President took advantage of the Constitution’s general approval of executive leadership when national security is involved.

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Naming Ethics: Your Children Can Suffer For Your Ignorance

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This one will be short, if not sweet.

A Reddit user shared this baby shower announcement on the sub-reddit devoted to terrible baby names, mostly absurd spellings….but this isn’t a spelling problem:

Yes, the parents are morons.

It seems that they didn’t know about the worst nuclear facility disaster in history, which rendered the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl a veritable ghost town in 1986, In some movies, it’s a zombie town. But the parents just thought it was a pretty name. You know, like “Treblinka.” Or “Malmedy.”

It is unknown at this point whether someone will back Mom and Dad into a corner, slap them silly, and tell them that they cannot stick an innocent child with that name, although naming a child “Chernobyl” is perfectly legal. It did prompt some inspired mockery on Reddit, though.

My favorite: “I guess it’s a nuclear family.”

Greta Thunberg Is Danny Bonaduce

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Now hear me out.

The National Review has a scalding—but more or less fair—-evisceration of Greta Thunberg, the past-her-pull-date former teen climate change activist. An excerpt:

You remember young Greta, right? The vinegar-rictused, Swedish ecological activist whom the media turned into a global celebrity back in 2018…Who can forget the climax of it all, the legendary comedy of Thunberg’s 2019 United Nations address? Visibly reading from a script and adopting actorly mannerisms — shrieking “HOW DARE YOU?” and bawling about “stolen dreams” and “stolen childhood” — Thunberg condemned the capitalist West for desecrating the hopes of neurotics like herself. “We’ll be watching you,” she warned icily…A neurodivergent teenage girl was granted supreme moral authority over mankind by adults desperate to weaponize her “vulnerability” to club the world into bending to the eco-socialist agenda pushed by her handlers. We were asked to take it all extremely seriously…Hungering for continued relevance, Thunberg responded by escalating her tactics, seeking arrest at anti-mining and anti-oil protests across Europe to garner headlines. But the media reaction was tepid, and the thrill was gone. It surprised me not the slightest bit when she instantly transitioned from environmental activism (old and busted) to pro-Palestinian activism (new and sexy with the kids these days) in the wake of the October 7 massacre. A year later, she was performatively arresting herself on podcast appearances to signal her solidarity with Hamas.

The bombardment ends with this: “As for myself, I couldn’t care less about Thunberg’s fate. If the Israeli Navy wants to hole her boat below the waterline as the French did to sink the Rainbow Warrior, then it’s no problem of mine. I don’t ever want to write about her again, and unless she escalates to suicide bombing, I intend not to. For as much as her astringent mien and unearned pretense make her a figure of comedy, I find her morally repulsive.”

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