“bias makes you stupid”

I Just Thought Of A Possible Ethical Justification For Another Silly “No Kings” Protest Today…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I have made it clear with several posts, including this one, in June, and this one, in October, that I yield to no one in my contempt for the “screaming at the sky” “No Kings” demonstrations. From the June post:

We don’t have a king, and Donald Trump doesn’t act like one. If he did (or could), all the obstructionist, partisan judges we have seen over-reaching to block his legitimate policies would be in prison, without heads, or on the lam. The anti-democratic citizens (and illegals) demonstrating yesterday are not the supporters of our elected President and our system that elected him, but those who still refuse to accept that election (or his first one, for that matter).

Nevertheless, a lot of my good friends, formerly thoughtful, rational people, are either participating in the latest iteration of this…well, let me hand over the floor to Otter for a moment…

A futile and stupid gesture! But three of them (or is it four)? I have measured these protests against the Ethics Alarms Protest Ethics Checklist and found the “No Kings” tantrums to be 0 for 12:

1. Is this protest just and necessary?

2. Is the primary motive for the protest unclear, personal, selfish, too broad, or narrow?

3. Is the means of protest appropriate to the objective?

4. Is there a significant chance that it will achieve an ethical objective or contribute to doing so?

5. What will this protest cost, and who will have to pay the bill?

6. Will the individuals or organizations that are the targets of the protest also be the ones who will most powerfully feel its effects?

7. Will innocent people be adversely affected by this action? (If so, how many?)

8. Is there a significant possibility that anyone will be hurt or harmed? (if so, how seriously? How many people?)

9. Are the protesters prepared to take full responsibility for the consequences of the protest?

10. Would an objective person feel that the protest is fair, reasonable, and proportional to its goal?

11. What is the likelihood that the protest will be remembered as important, coherent, useful, effective and influential?

12. Could the same resources, energy and time be more productively used toward achieving the same goals, or better ones?

However, I am considering whether the checklist is missing a possible redeeming feature of not only these protests but other protests as well. There is the possible #13:

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Morning Ethics Nausea: Four Offenses

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

1. The Great Stupid won’t go down with out a fight! Especially in California. The University of Southern California canceled a debate among candidates for governor less than 24 hours before it was supposed to take place this week. The reason was that there weren’t any non-white candidates. I kept seeing that in headlines and couldn’t believe it. I just assumed it was right-wing spin, and really dumb spin at that.

Nope. Eight Democrats and two Republicans are currently leading a typically huge field running in the Golden State June 2 primary. The debate was scheduled to include the six candidates who were leading in the polls, plus an extra Democrat, the Mayor of San Jose, who has been raising a lot of money for his campaign lately. If he had been black or Latino, that may have saved the debate, but he’s just another white guy. Students objected, and the school, being run by cowards and woke weenies like most universities today, chickened out.

The controversies over who got a place on the stage “have created a significant distraction from the issues that matter to voters,” the university said. And so rather than hold a debate that would help voters distinguish between the candidates who currently have a chance to win and maybe teach students something, the fact that none of the candidates are “of color” means that there won’t be a debate at all.

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Dear Fox News: Stop Running Interference For the President.

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The accusations from the Axis media that Fox News deliberately avoided informing its audience about President Trump’s bitter and triumphant Truth Social post, “Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!” are not quite accurate, but close enough for what passes as journalism on those platforms now.

The Fox News website and that of local affiliates published articles that explicitly included President Trump’s widely criticized outburst that was generally considered in the “too soon!” category, but the initial reports on the air ignored it. Fox News mentioned the death of the leader of the contrived “Russiagate” scandal at least six times on TV without ever quoting Trump’s remarks and the resulting backlash. The televised segments on Fox & Friends and elsewhere featured more traditional post-mortem tributes from figures like former President George W. Bush. I happened to see periodic commentator Brit Hume criticize Trump’s whack at Mueller as pointless ugliness that “doesn’t help,” but that was more than a day after the episode occurred.

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The Cowardice and Obstinacy of the Trump Deranged: A Depressing Case Study From Facebook (I Despair)

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

This is a “rest of the story” post but I don’t need Paul Harvey. That image is how I feel right now.

The story began when I posted this meme…

…that had been endorsed on Facebook by a dear friend, a religious and smart woman, whom I have known for decades in many capacities. Naturally the thing attracted the usual “likes” and “loves” on the platform despite being, as you can see, moronic, dishonest, arrogant and offensive. I posted a very brief summary in reply admonishing my friend for spreading ignorance. I got a disappointing response from her suggesting that I wasn’t “caring” enough, which is emotional blackmail, and several other really stupid replies from her pals, including one that said she hoped I was “comfortable with” my “lies.”

I had challenged the Ethics Alarms commentariate to dive into a thorough fisking of the meme, as I was not in the mood. As evidenced by his subsequent Comment of the Day post, Ryan Harkins responded with an ethics tour-de-force that was civil, thorough and devastating.

I decided to confront my friend and her bubble by posting Ryan’s masterpiece along with a long, also civil and measured, introduction as a further response to the stupid meme. I waited to see how the Bubble would respond. I waited to see how my friend would respond. Was there a rational, substantive retort to Ryan’s work?

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From the EA Trump Derangement Files: [UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 53 Comments

The above ahistorical, moronic and infuriating cartoon was posted by a long-time friend and—believe it or not!—a tenured history professor at Georgetown. I am reaching the end of my patience with once smart people deliberately making less-educated people stupid, and for the second time this week (the first was prompted by this Facebook meme) I couldn’t wrestle my fingers to the floor fast enough and responded to my Trump Deranged freind, “Now, you KNOW this is untrue. I know it’s untrue, and I know you know it’s untrue.”

And this is Trump Derangement! People who actually have the education, wit and critical thinking skills to reject false framing and imaginary facts, yet who nonetheless betray their own principles and integrity in order to attack the President. I’m hoping Steve-O-in NJ will gift us with one of his excellent historical retrospectives about how the United States was, at great risk to FDR, aiding Europe in fighting the Germans well before Pearl Harbor, and what the U.S. sacrificed in lives and treasure to indeed rescue Europe as well as that civilization thingy. We also rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan and have been bolstering European military defenses ever since.

It’s bad enough for a UK cartoonist to issue that crap, but for a U.S. historian to endorse it? Truly despicable. OK, for me, long friendship plus Trump Derangement and aging brain cells equals forgiveness.

Barely.

UPDATE: There is hope! My old friend the professor reacted to my mild rebuke with a “thumbs up.”

The EA “Imagine” Award Goes To Pope Leo, Who Should Put A Bag Over His Head…

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

How I wish he had sung it! That would have been funny and maybe entertaining. Otherwise this kind of pronouncement is 100% useless and insulting, while making too many people dumber.

Speaking to executives and staff from Italy’s ITA Airways, the first U.S. Pope proved he could be as fatuous as other Popes by saying, “No one should have to fear that threats of death and destruction might come from the sky. After the tragic experiences of the 20th century, aerial bombings should have been banned forever. Yet they still exist … this is not progress; it is regression!”

Well, if we could have the marshmallow world John Lennon imagined, “nothing to live of die for” and no countries or religion, that might be slightly less ludicrous, but only slightly. Now that I’ve roused those banished brain cells where I store “Imagine,” let me take a few minutes to run “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” in my mind to cleanse it.

There! Much better!

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Boy, That Double Standard Became A Thing So Fast I Didn’t Even Notice…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

During the #MeToo phase of “The Great Stupid” and even before, the Woke and Wonderful were lecturing men that to take any pro-active romantic action that involved touching required express consent, otherwise a mere impulsive kiss would constitute sexual assault. So now Clark Gable, Richard Gere, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and the rest are sexual predators because they didn’t say “please.”

I am watching the (excellent) series “The Madison,” and, as I had noticed in another Taylor Sheridan vehicle “Landman,” in an awkward moment of sexual tension between a man and a woman who were virtual strangers, it was the woman who instigated the surprise, passionate kiss.

That’s all right, see. If a man kisses the woman, it’s assault and battery, but the other way around it’s exciting, romantic and natural.

Got it.

Assholes.

MSNOW Revives Axis “Presidential Removal Plan E” In the Dumbest Way Possible, Raising the Need For a Similar “Incompetent Journalist Removal Plan”

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

It should be clear by now that MSNOW, previously MSNBC, exists only to misinform the public and make Americans more ignorant and divided than they already are. When I learn that a friend gets his or her news from this entirely propaganda-obsessed network, I conclude, reluctantly that this friend is now an idiot, and I will have to confine our conversations to, oh, movie trivia or something.

As I peruse three news cable channels during the day, hoping to learn something either about the world or the ongoing deterioration of U.S. journalism ethics, there are certain faces that repel me like opposite pole of a magnet. Brian Stelter on CNN. Hannity on Fox News. Literally everyone on MSNOW, of course, but Jonathan Capehart is particularly prone to saying really stupid things as if they were worth listening to.

On “The Weekend” this week, Capehart set a new low even for him. He was so horrified by the President making the quip about surprise and Pearl Harbor in front of the Japanese Prime Minister—standard fare for Trump, who enjoys doing and saying quiet parts out loud and doesn’t care who is offended—that he railed,

“I sometimes wonder, why are we not having a 25th Amendment conversation about this president?Because a comment like that, if it had come out of the mouth of President Biden, we would have been in rolling coverage about how Republicans on the Hill think that he should be removed from office for talking to an ally like that, and making that comment in response to a question from a Japanese journalist.”

I know I could spend all my time on Ethics Alarms pointing out the astoundingly flagrant bias and Trump Derangement displayed by members of the Axis media, but Capehart’s idiocy in this instance is epic. Let’s see…

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An Ethics Quote of the Week From President Trump, and an Ethics Hero Award for Steve Witherspoon (Yes, That Steve Witherspoon!)

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I went to bed last night having decided that the first post here today would be about President Trump’s blunt, characteristic, in-your-face reaction to the death of Robert Mueller, who led the cynical and destructive Axis of Unethical Conduct effort to cripple Trump’s first term with a contrived, partisan plot based on false accusations that he and his campaign “colluded” with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. The quote, an ethics quote because of the natural debate it fosters, an unethical quote because it intentionally breaches societal norms that dictate being respectful of the dead in the immediate aftermath of their deaths and a President should always model the best behavior for the public, and an ethical quote because it is true, was..

“Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”

It’s not a close call whether this was an ethical thing to state in public, which Trump did on Truth Social. It wasn’t, and isn’t for many reasons. It is gratuitously cruel to Mueller’s family for POTUS to say such a thing immediately after their loved one’s death. It accomplishes nothing but relieve Trump of some of his apparently inexhaustable back-up of bile. It makes the Trump Deranged hate him even more than they already do, which qualifies as deliberately being divisive, something else leaders should never do. And it accomplishes nothing positive. Such an act does, however, take another step in making this Ethics Alarms 2015 post look as wise and prophetic as it was.

“See? I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everybody says!”

Before I sat down to compose a post that would have essentially said what I did in far fewer words above, I decided to check whether Ann Althouse, the red-pilled Madison Wisconsin retired law professor/bloggress had posted on the quote for her followers. She had, briefly. But what did I discover in the comments to her post was that the topic had provoked none other than our own Steve Witherspoon into not only doing battle with the vocal Trump Deranged and Mueller defenders (in truth defenders of the anti-Trump plot Mueller knowingly participated in) but being allowed to do so by Althouse!

Ann carefully moderates her commenters, and seldom allows an extended back-and-forth between commenters, a policy that Ethics Alarms, obviously, does not embrace. Steve (who was frequently derided on EA along with Steve-O-in NJ by self-banned Ethics Alarms troll “A Friend”) was measured, fair, polite, balanced, ethical and relentless as he was swarmed by Trump-Deranged attackers like the “The Birds” going after Tippy Hedren in the attic. Unlike Tippy however, Steve knew what he was getting into.

He was courageous, and he was right. Meanwhile, his adversaries’ comments were weak and illogical; the main defense of Mueller was that he was a decorated Vietnam veteran. This is rationalization #21, Ethics Accounting, or “I’ve earned this”/ “I made up for that,” as regular readers here know.

Here’s the full transcript of Steve’s interactions regarding Trump’s quote. I will have occasional asides in brackets.

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From the Ethics Alarms “Res Ipsa Loquitur” Files…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Let me moderate that: the above comparison of Variety headlines about deceased artists (over two articles by the same writer) “speaks for itself” in that it vividly demonstrates the familiar biases and double standards warping values and analysis in the news media, progressive bubbles, and the realm of entertainment especially.

But allow me to add a few observations:

1. No artist’s political participation or views should “overshadow” his or her legacy, reputation or success in a creative field. I know I have written about this often, perhaps too often, but it seems to be a concept most people have a hard time accepting. I hold that the same principle applies just as strongly to an artist’s personal life and character. Our most brilliant comedians and comic actors, for example, with a few exceptions, were terrible human beings when they were not performing.

2. Chuck Norris was nowhere near as outspoken as Reiner regarding politics; he also was a lesser star in Hollywood’s firmament. His was a narrow genre, and one mostly favored by conservatives. Like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, his public stance on many issues was consistent with what one would expect from one of his characters. I have found that in such cases, the public opinions are frequently part of the artist’s calculated myth-making.

3. As I have noted before, I love many of Reiner’s films and regard him as, if anything, an under-rated director. He also made some of the most idiotic statements about political matters that I have ever heard or read, including from brain-damaged social media users. (Riener’s Ethics Alarms dossier is embarrassing. EA has never mentioned Norris except with this post.) That doesn’t change my assessment of his achievements as an artist any more than the certifiably demented pronouncements and rants by Robert DiNiro, Bette Midler, and Morgan Freeman (among many others) cause me to enjoy their talents less.

4. The fact that so many progressives seem unable to function this way is, in a word, sad. It also is strong evidence that the left side of the ideological divide is emotionally ill.

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Pointer: Chris Martz