“bias makes you stupid”

A Perfect Explication Of The “2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck” By Someone Other Than Me

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Nicely timed to compliment yesterday’s post officially christening the Stormy Daniels-Donald Trump Prosecution Ethics Train Wreck as yet another extension of the horrifically destructive—and still rolling—-2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck is a post on a substack I had never heard of called “The Ivy Exile,” ironically a title I could use myself. It includes an excellent explanation of that most disastrous of all recent ethics train wrecks, though I have been attempting to explain it for seven long years.

Ethics Alarms’ intense concentration on the phenomenon, which I believe is the most dangerous and significant cultural ethics breakdown in American political history, exceeding even the Red Scare and the McCarthy Era, has been costly. So many people hate Donald Trump so much, or are so committed to the progressive excesses he has significantly curtailed, that they rejected this site because it has insisted, and will insist, that core ethical and democratic values must apply to all regardless of their character or perceived misconduct. The efforts by what I have branded the Axis of Unethical Conduct, the “resistance,” Democratic Party and mainstream media to scar and defile American tradition and process in order to undermine, punish and remove a duly elected President, and its disastrous influence on the public that has promoted bright-line legal and ethical breaches that would once have been unthinkable, have so polluted civic discourse and political culture that it may never recover.

Yet many previously rational and intelligent people, once followers of this blog as well as my social media contacts, reflexively chose to regard my insistence that ethics and democratic mandates must apply to Mr. Trump (as the prime offender the New York Times would say) exactly as they must to any other President, political figure, American or human being as evidence that I had become a MAGA fanatic, a “Trumpist” and/or a fascist.

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Exhibit A On Why “They/Them” Preferred Pronouns Must Be Mocked And Rejected Rather Than Respected

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Here is a really weird question posed to “The Ethicist,” offered not for the issue raised (which is not exactly a tough one) but for the manner in which it is presented. The bolding is mine:

When my father died, my family took photos of his body before he was cremated. The photos were of him at home, peaceful in bed; my mother wanted to tenderly remember him both in life and in his death. My partner at the time uploaded these photos to their computer, storing these and other images in their cloud server as we archived memories from the trip home to say goodbye to my father.

One evening later that year, my then-partner pulled up the photos and did a slide show of our trip for their family. When my partner got to the images of my father’s dead body, they went through every image instead of skipping over them. It was immensely painful, compounded by the fact that my father is a Black man and these images were being shown to an affluent white family. The race and class dynamics here were staggering — it felt as if this white family was viewing these images as entertainment. This was among the incidents that triggered my ending the relationship; my ex didn’t quite understand why this was inappropriate or painful.

As we were breaking up, I asked that they erase the images from their drive. Since that time, they’ve made a million excuses as to why they can’t erase the images — the drive is in storage, they’ve moved, etc. It’s now been nearly six years. Still, I am deeply disturbed by the lack of control I have over these images. Currently my ex lives in the U.K., and I live in the U.S. What is the correct course of action here? Do I let it go? Seek legal action? My great fear is that these images will circulate into the future without my or my family’s consent. — Name Withheld

Language is supposed to communicate, not be distorted to satisfy narcissistic eccentricities and grandstanding. Who or what “moved,” the ex-, her family, or the photos? The account is absurdly ambiguous, although if you pause long enough along the way and think hard, you probably can figure it out—except that human communication is not supposed to be like Rubik’s Cube.

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Great Moments In Totalitarian Hypocrisy: Stanford Law Students Who Proudly Shouted Down A Federal Judge Want Their Names And Images Removed From News Reports

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Of course they do!

This reminds me that one of the epiphanal moments in my philosophical development was when the fellow students at my college who took over a building, rifled though records, precipitated a riot and the shutting down of classes that I had every right to attend, included among their demands to allow the school to re-open their immunity from any discipline or adverse consequences whatsoever. At that moment I learned what kind of ethical principles revolutionaries respected: none. I never forgot that lesson, and nothing has occurred in the intervening years to alter my assessment.

Hilariously, the same students who posted the names and faces of the Stanford Federalist Society all over the school prior to disrupting its program featuring a conservative Federal judge’s remarks are now demanding anonymity from the Washington Free Beacon, the conservative news source that has thoroughly covered the law school’s disgrace. “They say we’ve violated their right to privacy by identifying them. You can’t make it up,” tweeted Aaron Sibarium, a Free Beacon reporter.

Well, you don’t have to make it up; the demand was completely predictable and in character with today’s mutant breed of progressive totalitarians.

The school’s chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, the far-left force behind the exercise in the Heckler’s Veto handled so atrociously by the Stanford staff papered the school’s hallways prior to U.S. Circuit Court Judge Kyle Duncan’s scheduled speech with the names and photographs of the Federalist Society’s board members. Nevertheless, when Sibarium quoted the group’s board members describing the censorship exercise as “Stanford Law School at its best” and named those board members, the board’s demanded that that the Beacon redact her name and those of her classmates. “You do not have our permission to reference or quote any portion of this email in a future piece,” she wrote.

Translation: “You do not have our permission to reveal that we behaved like bullies and assholes even though we have said that we are proud of behaving like bullies and assholes.”

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More Weird Tales From “The Great Stupid”: Neat Pantries Are Racist And Sexist!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Some of the Wokish opinion pieces being belched out of The Great Stupid are so outlandish they transcend being selected as Ethics Alarms “Unethical Quotes of the Month.” A truly deranged quote isn’t unethical so much as it is tragic, even one as brain-melting as this one, from “The Conversation,” a website which risibly claims to provide “academic rigor, journalistic flair.” Yeah, only academic rigor could produce an essay like “Pantry porn’ on TikTok and Instagram makes obsessively organized kitchens a new status symbol.”

Here’s the ‘money quote’, the section that proves beyond all doubt that the only reason to take the time to read this precious, arrogant clap-trap is to gain insight into just how crazy the victim-obsessed Left has become:

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Apparently Ron DeSantis Is Unfit To Be President Because Of The Way He Eats Pudding

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I really thought the New York Magazine article titled “Ron DeSantis Eating Pudding With His Fingers Will End His 2024 Bid” was a joke…even though it appeared in the section called “Intelligencer,” which past experience has taught me often contains the dumbest essays ever contrived by homo sapiens. But it wasn’t a joke. Margaret Hartmann, the senior editor for “Intelligencer” who wrote the thing was serious. Observe…

Ron DeSantis has been hit with a food-related accusation so weird it may end his 2024 presidential bid before it officially starts. The Daily Beast reports that according to two sources, the Florida governor once ate chocolate pudding with three fingers… I’m calling it now: This story will follow DeSantis like pudding sticks to fingers. The devil is in the details. The report doesn’t say DeSantis dipped a finger into his pudding sheepishly; he used three fingers, presumably as a scoop. And it’s established in the preceding paragraph that he regularly ate during meetings, “like a starving animal who has never eaten before… getting shit everywhere.” This paints a vivid picture of being trapped in a conference room with your boss as he shoves most of his hand into a pudding cup, scoops the goo into his mouth, licks his fingers, and goes back in for more, with chocolate still smeared around his lips. Disgusting!

Observations:

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This Tears It: Biden Supporters Are Forever Ethically Estopped From Complaining About Trump’s “Lies”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

The point at which Trump-Deranged, pro-Biden warriors could credibly claim that the current President is any less prone to uttering counter-factual fantasy than the previous one passed long before Joe Biden was elected, but it officially reached the absurdity level during Biden’s soft-ball  interview with actor Kal Penn, who was guest hosting “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central.

When Penn asked Biden about his “evolution” on same-sex marriage, the perpetually addled POTUS exploded informed and objective heads all over America with this self-evident fiction, saying that in 1960, when he was in high school, Biden was momentarily shocked to see two men kissing. He said that his dad turned to him and said, “Joey, it’s simple, they love each other,” and that Joe adopted that approach ever since. “Doesn’t matter whether it’s same-sex or a heterosexual couple, they should be able to be married,” Biden told Penn. “What is the problem? So, listen to your auntie and uncle, get married. Do it now.”

That was an utter and complete fabrication, though Penn didn’t challenge it, either because he doesn’t know enough about Biden to conduct a competent interview, or because he doesn’t have the guts to call out an obvious lie. Continue reading →

Wait, How Can Rebeca F. Rothstein Still Be Employed As A Middle School Teacher? Why Are Parents Allowing Her To Warp Their Children? I Don’t Understand This At All…[Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

This story is incomprehensible.

Rebeca F. Rothstein apparently still works at North Bethesda Middle School in the Montgomery County School District despite posting on social media that “‘as a teacher I wish we could do more with our students like teach anti-racism and how to be kind people. Does anyone else feel like… we can skip the math, skip the science, like we’ll do that next year. Maybe this year we focus on teaching our youth how to be anti-racist.” Elsewhere she posted about providing “Marxist literature” to her students. “Fuck capitalism,” she wrote, and in another post shared that she was “tired after a long day of indoctrinating students.” In a video she put on TikTok, Rothstein said,

“I had to un-brainwash myself from capitalism in order to fall in love with socialism and communism. If everyone had the same amount of money, then money wouldn’t be worth anything.”

Wow. I sure want a teacher with that kind of keen insight teaching our next generation!

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Observations On A Telling Exchange In A New York Times Opinion Column…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The column is a weekly feature on the Times opinion pages. Snarky progressive shill Gail Collins supposedly debates pseudo-conservative pundit Bret Stephens (who has called for the repeal of the Second Amendment) on various issues of the day. It is written as a spontaneous conversation, which it obviously is not: I detest the format, which is inherently deceptive. Ted Kennedy and Orin Hatch used to have a radio spot where they would debate an issue “from the right and left.” The two were obviously reading from an agreed-upon script, and not very convincingly. It insulted listeners’ intelligence, as this column insults Times readers. Here’s how today’s installment begins:

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In Virginia, More Evidence Of Gross Public Education Incompetence

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Here is what Al Gore might call an “inconvenient truth,” except that this really is truth, while Al’s was propaganda: there is no valid reason for any responsible parent to entrust the mind and future of a child with the kinds of teachers, administrators and “experts” currently being produced by the U.S. education sector.

What you see above is one more piece of damning evidence.It is a recent test question in an advanced placement (AP) government course in Fairfax County, Virginia’s largest school district, one of the largest in the country, and just a short drive from my home. The question challenged students to choose an “accurate comparison of liberals versus conservatives,” giving them multiple choices.

It sure stumped me. After all, the difference between liberals and conservatives lie in belief systems and ideological orientation, not occupations and demographic categories. However, this basic fact appears to have escaped the creators of the question. (The “correct” answer, at least according to the dimwits who devised the thing, is “C.”)

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Ethics Conundrum: Is Teaching That Communism Is Evil History or Indoctrination?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

All of the turmoil over public school indoctrination of students regarding such matters as climate change, systemic racism and LGBTQ normalization naturally raises the question of whether there are legitimate topics for indoctrination in the United States. Should students be taught, for example, that democracy is good? That the Bill of Rights are crucial to the united States’ culture? That capitalism works/

What about teaching students that Communism, at least in its execution, is a dangerous and deadly ideology? Is that a fact?

I was prompted to consider this issue after reading NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd’s characteristically inarticulate objections to Gov. DeSantis signing a bill last May designating November 10 to be set aside for teaching Florida students at all grade levels “about the evils of communist regimes throughout history.”

“I don’t know if DeSantis is going to be talking to swing voters, here’s like one of the things he said in Vegas yesterday; take a listen to this,” Todd like said prior to playing like a clip of the Republican touting his program. “You know, …it’s sort of like, look, being a Floridian, I sort of know what he’s trying to play there and all of that. I went to Florida public schools we were taught this: It was called history. It just seems like a weird politicizing—you know he’s going out of his way to politicize something.”

Isn’t it amazing that NBC has employed an individual presiding over an iconic news show who speaks that way on live TV?

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