“bias makes you stupid”

More Big Brother “Whack-A-Mole”: The Woke Censors Come For Jeeves And Bertie

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

The good news is, as we are periodically reminded, this isn’t the U.K. (Thank-you, George, Tom, John, Paul and Ben!). The bad news is that the totalitarian virus embedded in The Great Stupid is contagious, and far greater threat to civilization than any pandemic. Great Britain has reached a level of unethical literary censorship—for the greater good, to eradicate “WrongThink,” you know—that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

I thought the effort by British publishers to re-write the works of Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming was just a temporary outbreak, and that the miscreants had received so much ridicule and criticism that the madness had been contained. As is so often the case, I was tragically wrong. Now these ethics villains have come for…I can’t believe I am writing this…P.G. Wodehouse.

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Great Moments In Unethical Polling Manipulation: Grinnell College On “Gender-Affirming Care”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

We should expect activists, politicians and journalists to engage in rampant deceit in their use of language to confuse and mislead the public. The abortion debate, a complex and ethically crucial societal controversy that requires clarity and honesty, has been just about permanently distorted by the routine use of deliberately deceptive cover-terms “pro-choice” and “pro-life.” One should we able to rely on educational and research institutions to be careful to avoid this malady, but as polls prove repeatedly, we can’t.

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San Francisco Spin, Brought To You By The Great Stupid: “Since Bob Lee Wasn’t Murdered By A Drug Addict, Homeless Person Or Coddled Criminal, The City Is Safe After All, So There!”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

It’s come to this.

San Francisco is one of many irrationally woke cities falling apart in chunks because of “social justice” policies that encourage crime, make responsible citizenship difficult, and devastate local businesses. “The City by the Bay” is a particularly depressing case study in the nationwide phenomenon, with the city’s most storied locations marred by human feces, discarded drug paraphernalia, and obstreperously entitled homeless. Meanwhile, businesses are fleeing because shoplifting has become epidemic.

When Bob Lee, the former chief technology officer of Square and one of the founders of Cash App, was stabbed to death ten days ago, his high-profile murder was pointed to by social media critics and conservative pundits as more evidence of San Francisco’s decline as its culture embraces progressive cant over the lessons of civilization. Ah, but this week a rival tech entrepreneur was arrested for the murder, prompting the city’s defenders–and the defenders of its bonkers policies— to launch into one of the most bizarre victory laps ever conceived.

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The “Get Trump!” Plan Has Officially Abandoned All Restraint

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The Washington Post revealed that it isn’t just state prosecutors like Alvin Bragg who are determined to find something, anything, to use to convict Donald Trump, it is federal prosecutors too. The Post story also makes it clear that not only are the gloves off, so is any pretense of rationality.

The federal prosecutors still looking for ways to claim Trump was trying to mount an “insurrection” on January 6, 2021 have now begun seeking documents related to his fundraising after the 2020 election. Somebody apparently had a brilliant idea: “Hey! The news media keeps saying that Trump’s claims that the election was stolen are “baseless,” so why can’t we say that Trump or scammed donors by using false claims about voter fraud to raise money?” So that’s the latest Hail Mary. It might be the most ridiculous and dishonest yet.

This latest “Get Trump!” miasma focuses on money raised during the period between Nov. 3, 2020, and the end of Trump’s time in office on Jan. 20, 2021, with prosecutors looking at whether anyone associated with the fundraising operation violated the wire fraud laws, which make it illegal to make false representations over email to swindle people. The Post’s anonymous (of course!) sources say that special counsel Jack Smith’s office has sent subpoenas to Trump advisers and former campaign aides, Republican operatives and other consultants involved in the 2020 presidential campaign, some of these figures have already testified in front of a Washington grand jury. The idea, apparently, is to find communications proving that Trump, his allies allies and advisers were privately admitting that Biden’s election was beyond reproach, while stirring up passionate supporters with appeals using the voter-fraud claims to generate more than $200 million in donations.

Please. Seriously? We are now going to use a fraudulent claims basis to prosecute political fundraising messages? THAT will work out well.

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Ethics Dunce, Rabbi and “Rolling Stone” Columnist Jay Michaelson Provides A Depressing Lesson In How “Bias Makes You Stupid”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Was this really so hard an episode to respond to competently?

As discussed in this post, the Dalai Lama got himself videoed while pressuring a young boy to kiss him (on the lips) and asking the boy to <cough> suck the holy man’s tongue. Too bad Peter Graves is dead: he could play the Dalai Lama in a movie…

“Joey…would you like to suck my tongue?” was apparently cut. But I digress.

On “CNN Tonight” panel this week, and host Alisyn Camerota asked Michaelson to comment on the disturbing video. Ethics Aalrms frozen solid, the rabbi answered,

“The Dalai Lama is a very playful human being. And we may see this in a weird, kind of gross, sexualized way, but this is about as sexual as a bowl of plain rice. There is nothing sexual … or erotic happening in this encounter. Tibetan culture just has different boundaries…[the tongue] is what we kiss with, it’s sexualized … it’s not seen that way in Tibetan culture. This is a part of the body. It’s something playful….The apology was in order. This was clearly something that was at best, you know, insensitive to how this would be seen by a large swath of the world population. [But]“the Dalai Lama is one of my spiritual heroes. I have met him. Being in his presence is really one of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in my life. And the aura of loving kindness that he has is evident, even here where he’s being playful in a way that in Western culture would certainly be inappropriate.”

Since the rabbi wasn’t defending Joe Biden, Camerota felt free to actually practice journalism and challenge this spin, saying, “the boy doesn’t want to” kiss the Dalai Lama or suck his tongue,” and adding that the Dalai Lama is “taking the boy’s head … just sort of reading the body language here. I’ll take your word for it that it seemed differently there culturally, but the boy doesn’t seem to be wanting to participate in this.”

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A”What’s Going On Here?” Special: Bud Light’s Promotion of Dylan Mulvaney

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney, a self-promoting trans-girl who for some reason is an internet “influencer,” posted a video last week promoting the brand’s Easy Carry Contest, in which participants must demonstrate how many cans Budweiser’s worst brew they can carry to win $15,000. Bud Light had sent Mulvaney a  commemorative can featuring an illustration of the Ex-Man’s face with a message congratulating her on “365 days of girlhood.”

Then all hell broke loose. Conservatives are calling for a boycott of Bud Light. Kid Rock posted a video of himself wearing a MAGA baseball cap, shooting up a case of Bud Light and saying, “Fuck Bud Light, and fuck Anheuser-Busch!”

“What’s going on here?”

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And While We’re On The Subject Of Historical Airbrushing, THIS…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Minnesota, which has a lot of explaining to do after inflicting the George Floyd Freakout and The Great Stupid on the nation that have collectively killed thousands, devastated major cities, exacerbated racial tensions and divided public opinion almost to the breaking point, is apparently now trying to recast the whole mess as an act of God, or something.

Of course, if this is the plan, the news media will lead the way. In the above tweet, KARE , the Minneapolis NBC affiliate serving the Twin Cities area refers to the 2020 George Floyd riots that destroyed businesses and devastated large sections of Minneapolis as “the 2020 fires.”

David Strom had a trenchant observation regarding such “journalism” yesterday, noting that,

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Open Forum, But An Abyss Is Not Exactly The Kind Of Opening I’m Looking For…

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

Let’s keep the specific discussions about the Clarence Thomas ethics scandal under the appropriate post today. However, if anyone wants to talk about that larger ethical issues raised by reaction to it here, please do so, because I’d love someone to explain why it isn’t powerful evidence that I’ve been wasting my time. That’s how I feel right now, frankly. And Ethics Alarms takes up too much time in my life if it’s not going to enhance the cause of ethics.

This is not a blog about politics. There is no way to avoid politics, and the area is obviously a rich one for ethics analysis. However, the thesis at Ethics Alarms is that that society rots if ethical considerations are discarded for practical and strategic ones. Meanwhile, the trend in not only politics but journalism, scholarship, law and education, yes, even ethics has been exactly in that direction since I started this project in 2009. I don’t expect this blog to have major impact by itself: I’m not THAT deluded. I have seen, in my weird and eccentric life path, however, examples where my obsessions have had impact beyond my little corner of reality. (See Item #1 here, for example.)

Naively, I assumed that regular members of the commentariat here would agree with what I view as an automatic verdict: Thomas has besmirched the integrity of the Court, called his own judgment and trustworthiness into question, and must resign, consequences be damned. Instead, I am reading substantial support for Thomas, which amounts to a position that judicial ethics don’t matter. In fact, I cannot imagine a profession in which they matter more.

Well, I’ve written too much already here: this is your space and your agenda.

But I am morose. Just thought you should know…

“Apparently Donald Trump Is A Ham Sandwich,” Continued: Prof. Turley Weighs In, Among Others

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

I’ve been looking for commentary by legal and ethics experts I trust that defend Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Donald Trump, now that the thing is in black and white. (Speaking of White: old Popehat blogger Ken White was one of the first I checked. The former Ethics Alarms Award-winner as best ethics blogger has so far avoided the topic, I suspect because he regards explaining why an indictment of someone he obviously detests is a lot of hooey with the same eagerness he applies to having sex with a horseshoe crab.) In the earlier post today, Ethics Alarms looked at Andrew McCarthy’s analysis, which was searing in its contempt for Bragg’s efforts. Later, I discovered that one of the Washington Post’s worst knee-jerk progressive members of its editorial board, Ruth Marcus, wrote,

…the indictment unsealed on Tuesday is disturbingly unilluminating, and the theory on which it rests is debatable at best, unnervingly flimsy at worst.That is a scary situation when it comes to the first criminal charges ever lodged against a former president.

Then she almost immediately demonstrated why I hold her in such contempt by adding,

I’m not saying prosecutors will lose this case. They could well win, and I hope they do, because a failure to secure a conviction will only inflame Trump and his supporters in their claims that the criminal justice system is being weaponized against them.

Got that? She hopes Bragg wins a bad case and Trump is convicted because Trump and his supporters will have evidence to support the “claim” that the criminal justice system is being weaponized against them. Somebody explain to Marcus, a lawyer, though it always astonished me that she is, that ethical lawyers don’t want defendants to be convicted on bogus charges no matter who they are.

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Apparently Donald Trump Is A Ham Sandwich [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

Of course, we’ve known for decades that the man was a ham. Yesterday, however, unethical prosecutor Alvin Bragg provided decisive evidence that the former POTUS is also a ham sandwich, with an abusive grand jury indictment that perfectly embodied the old saw (first coined by former Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals Sol Wachtler) that district attorneys could get grand juries to “indict a ham sandwich.”

When the breathlessly anticipated indictment finally came down from the grand jury (here is the indictment), it fulfilled the worst predictions of critics.

“Oh, we have to wait to see the indictment” was the mantra from Bragg’s defenders, and that was sort-of true. However, we already knew that this was a bad case: the statute of limitations has lapsed, Bragg has no jurisdiction to enforce federal law, the act of paying for a non-disclosure is not a crime, the claim that the pay-off was really a campaign contribution is based on circumstantial evidence at best, the key witness is Michael Cohen, one of the sleaziest lawyers in the professions long line of sleazy lawyers and convicted perjeror, and both the Justice Department and Bragg himself had already decided it was too weak to prosecute, at least to prosecute ethically. Moreover, Bragg’s “statement of facts” before the indictment (which you can read here), made the case sound just as weak as many suspected it was.

When we learned that there were 34 counts, we thought, or at least I did, “Wow! Bragg must have a lot more to pin on Trump than Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen!”

Uh, no.

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