“bias makes you stupid”

“Indictment: The McMartin Trial,” An Ethics Movie That Seems Disturbingly Relevant Today

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

How I missed the 1995 HBO film “Indictment: the McMartin Trial” for almost 30 years, I don’t know, but I did. The Oliver Stone produced legal drama about the insane events surrounding what turned out to be the start of a nation-wide freak-out over supposed Satan worship and widespread child abuse at day-care centers is unusually accurate for a docudrama. For this reason it is also infuriating. How could this have happened even once?

In August of 1983, the mother of a 2-year-old boy phoned the Manhattan Beach (California) Police Dept. claiming that her son had been sexually abused at the family-run McMartin Pre-School. That accusation prompted a series of sensational and inflammatory reports from an unscrupulous broadcast journalist (or “journalist,” for short) at WABC-TV. It also prompted the police to contact other parents with children at the school to ask if their children had been molested. Those children were, in turn, interviewed by a crusading social worker named Kee MacFarlane, who used controversial techniques to persuade the young children that they had seen and experienced terrible things, escalating from sexual abuse to having to witness ritual rapes and human sacrifices. (This was one of the seminal cases in the psychiatry profession’s “implanted memories” scandal.)

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Ethics Hero: EEOC Commissioner Andrea Lucas [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Well this was certainly refreshing and unexpected!

Donald Trump-knockoff billionaire Mark Cuban stated in gratuitous tweet that he has “never hired anyone based exclusively on race, gender, religion,” but that “race and gender can be part of the equation” because he believes “diversity is a competitive advantage.”

What virtue-signaling claptrap! What does that last part even mean? Does Harvard consider that its acceptance of diversity as a substitute for genuine credentials and ability has given the university a “competitive advantage” as it competes for the best students, faculty and donors? Yesterday, in addition to having it revealed that its top DEI officer is a DEI hire herself who rose to predominance with the assistance of bogus scholarship, a wealthy donor who last year gave the university $300,000,000 dollars announced that he was through. “Will America’s elite university get back to their roots of educating American children – young adults – to be the future leaders of our country or are they going to maintain being lost in the wilderness of microaggressions [and]a DEI agenda that seems to have no real endgame…?” Ken Griffin asked in response to being asked if he could be lured back as a donor. Continue reading →

The Rest of the Story: The Latest in the Alex Murdaugh Murder Trial Train Wreck Has Me Depressed About the American Justice System

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This is bad for me: after all, my profession is substantially involved with the justice system and the law. I keep learning things that make me increasingly cynical regarding the fairness, competence and integrity of the American justice system, and lately it has been

…right in the kisser. (I’ll have another horror story for you later today, if all goes according to plan.)

Yesterday, a judge refused to grant a new trial for Alex Murdaugh, the former South Carolina lawyer, now disbarred and convicted of murdering his wife and son. His defense team argued that a court clerk had improperly influenced the jurors in his case, which, if she did not, was only moral luck. I wrote about the unethical clerk here last Fall. Even before the allegations were made about the clerk, Rebecca Hill, signaling and sometimes prompting jurors that they needed to convict Murdaugh, the trial and his conviction looked like a travesty of justice.

Here is what I wrote about the case after the trial…

“Reviewing the astoundingly thin evidence, I do not understand why the trial judge didn’t throw out the jury’s verdict and declare Murdaugh acquitted because there was not enough to convict him beyond a reasonable doubt as a matter of law. There wasn’t. This was an example of a jury convicting a defendant of murder because they decided he was a bad guy and there were no other suspects. Alex Murdaugh lied repeatedly regarding the deaths of his wife and son and he was undeniably a thief and a sociopath—but prosecutors couldn’t and didn’t present much more than theories about whether he was the killer. Judges are understandably, reluctant to over-ride juries, but in this case it was necessary. If the Trump Deranged reasoning that the conclusion that someone is just an untrustworthy bounder is sufficient to assume guilt of criminal activity is becoming a cultural norm, our justice system is approaching a crisis, if it isn’t in one already.

The only motive that the prosecution could come up with for claiming Murdaugh was behind the double murder of his wife and son was that the lawyer thought he would be more leniently treated for the other crimes he was being charged with if juries and judges felt sorry for him as a result of their deaths. That’s just bonkers, and if I were a member of the jury, I’d regard the prosecution having to resort to such a theory as per se reasonable doubt. But as if that weren’t enough, Murdaugh’s trial was tainted by a fame- and fortune-seeking law clerk. (I recently wrote about the carnage triggered by another unethical law clerk scandal. What the hell’s going on out there?)

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Ethics Dunce: National Public Radio

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

…or maybe I’m the Ethics Dunce: I assume that NPR’s management cares whether half the country sees it as progressive cant parrot and a water-carrier for the Democratic Party. Maybe they don’t; maybe they have assumed deplorables don’t listen to “Marketplace” and “Fresh Air,” and certainly don’t contribute much during radiothons. I know I don’t touch the local NPR stations (there are two of them) ever since the “Car Talk” guys ended up in the garage for good and after I was dumped as NPR’s ethics guy because I was insufficiently critical of Donald Trump.

Where was I? Oh, right….National Public Radio appointed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who had to hustle to scrub her social media record after the announcement because she periodically issued intemperate woke garbage in the past. Among the gems tracked down by reporter Shannon Thaler at the New York Post,

  • “Trump is a racist.”
  • “I mean, sure, looting is counter-productive. But it is hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property”
  • “white silence is complicity”
  • “I grew up feeling superior (hah, how white of me) because I was from New England and my part of the country didn’t have slaves, or so I’d been taught.”

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Fox News Comic Greg Gutfeld

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“Everyone understands how bad the world would be without journalists because we haven’t had any for decades.”

—Fox News court jester Greg Gutfeld, justly mocking the whines of the Washington Post’s ridiculous Taylor Lorenz about the lay-offs in her profession, if it can be called that any more.

The rest of his rant is amusing and well-deserved, but that single sentence is enough to accurately describe the failure of Lorenz’s colleagues and peers, and the total lack of self-awareness displayed by this inexplicably employed hack, who, in a typical outburst last month, proclaimed that “Anyone who’s worked as a journalist at the [New York Times] knows that journalists there are absolutely allowed to loudly espouse political opinions, you just have to espouse the *right* political opinions. Right wing opinions are fine, left wing opinions are not.”

It’s Come To This: Snopes Spins Madly To Claim the President Doesn’t Look Ridiculous

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Presidents through the years have frequently allowed themselves to be photographed looking silly. My favorite example, which I first saw and giggled over at about the age of 10, is the famous shot above of dour Calvin Coolidge wearing an India headdress. Author Josh King wrote in “Dukakis and the Tank” that the first rule of political photo ops is “Never put anything on your head!” Before Coolidge put on the headdress while being named an honorary chief in Deadwood, South Dakota during a campaign stop in 1927, advisors told him he would “look funny.” “Well it’s good for people to laugh, isn’t it?” Coolidge replied.

I would like to think that President Biden had the same rationale for wearing his hard-hat backwards at a bar with some union construction workers…

…but I fear that in his current deteriorating mental state he could mistake Jill for a hat.

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Ethics Dunce (Still!): Harvard University

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

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It’s quite possible, I think, that Harvard’s ethics rot is so entrenched and endemic that it can never be fixed, even by Barack Obama.

Here’s the latest revolting development. Harvard’s Interim President Alan Garber announced in an email that Professor of Jewish History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Derek Penslar will co-chair its new anti-Semitism task force, established to deal with the concerns of students, faculty, donors, elected officials and the public at large over demonstrations on the Harvard campus calling for the elimination of Israel and the murder of Jews.

Penslar is, shall we say, not the ideal candidate to encourage trust in the task force’s dedication to its task. He signed a letter in August accusing Israel of running a “regime of apartheid,” stating in part, “Without equal rights for all, whether in one state, two states, or in some other political framework, there is always a danger of dictatorship. There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it.” He has also said on more than pone occasion that the problem of anti-Semitism at Harvard is being exaggerated, while quickly pairing it with Islamophobia. “Yes, we have a problem with antisemitism at Harvard, just like we have a problem with Islamophobia and how students converse with each other,” Penslar said this month. “The problems are real. But outsiders took a very real problem and proceeded to exaggerate its scope.” Jewish Insider reported that Penslar told the Harvard Crimson in late December that the amount of media focus on anti-Semitism at Harvard has “obscured the vulnerability of pro-Palestinian students, who have faced harassment by actors outside of the University and verbal abuse on and near campus.”

Being “Pro-Palestinian” is the exact equivalent of advocating the killing of Jews, and will be until the official mission of Hamas and other Palestinian groups is altered to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.

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How Bias Makes You Stupid: A Case Study

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I’ve written here quite a few times about the baseball pundit lawyer Craig Calcaterra, originally the author of an excellent baseball blog called “Shysterball.” Since then he’s apparently dumped law entirely, and is a full-time baseball analyst. Craig is a good guy, based on my many interactions with him over the years commenting on amd sometimes criticizing his work; he once called me “a handful,” which I take as a compliment. Now he makes his living on various paid newsletter platforms writing about one of my favorite topics.

I would dearly love to subscribe to Craig’s fascinating baseball musings, except for two thing. First, it’s awfully tight at the Marshall household since the pandemic wiped out 75% of our business, and second, Craig has increasingly marred the enjoyment he brings to baseball with metastasizing knee-jerk wokism. Yes, it has become worse since Donald Trump was elected.

Sadly, this hard left bias, which used to be undetectable, now frequently creeps into his baseball commentary, as when he opined that pitcher Josh Hader should have been fined or suspended from Major League Baseball because of some gay-bashing tweets he wrote to a handful of pimply faced friends when he was in high school. That’s ridiculous, of course, but it turned out to have signature significance. After that, Craig increasingly let his political obsessions creep into his view of baseball. Once he left NBC Sports for Substack, he indulged himself by including pure political punditry along with what people pay for, his baseball thoughts, in his newsletters. I know, I could just skip the progressive garbage, but it annoys me. Unlike his baseball instincts, these intrusions are emotional and logically sloppy.

Now Craig is pushing his newsletter to potential subscribers following his move to a new platform; sure enough, he is one of the Substack refugees who are boycotting that platform for not censoring a handful—okay, two handfuls—of neo-nazi and white supremacy extremists. (I wrote about this example of the new Left’s obsession with restricting ideas, speech and people they find “offensive” here.) For a while, he is sending out free samples of the new publication to people like me who have exchanged emails with him over the years. In today’s edition, he includes a deranged rant against “right wing politics” that perfectly illustrates how a progressive bias and hanging out in woke bubbles (lawyers, journalists) will poison even the best of minds.

Since he sent me that rant and I didn’t ask for it, I feel justified in reprinting the whole thing here, after which I will offer a few comments:

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Unethical Quotes of the Month: The University of North Carolina’s Faculty Council

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This is not an encouraging situation.

Last week, the University of North Carolina’s Faculty Council met to consider, among other matters, a resolution condemning anti-Semitism on school’s campus. An on-campus event in November included a speaker who said, referring to the barbaric terrorist attack on Israeli civilians, that “October 7 was for many of us from the region a beautiful day.” No one at the event did or said anything to reject that sentiment. The proposed resolution stated, “We strongly condemn the antisemitic statements made during a Unity roundtable event No Peace Without Justice held on November 28, 2023.”

That wouldn’t seem too difficult to agree with or too controversial, would it? Yet the resolution failed to pass. The Faculty Council voted 32-29, with six abstentions, to table the resolution for the foreseeable future. Here are some of the most striking comments made by those who objected to the resolution:

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The NY Times Promotes Big Lie #4 (“Trump Is A Racist/White Supremacist”) Again

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“Nah, there/s no mainstream media bias!’“

Despicable.

“Mocking Haley, Trump Adds to His Long History of Racist Attacks—The former president is again focusing on race and background as he campaigns against Nikki Haley in New Hampshire.” crowed the New York Times in what was allegedly a news report. The story is another installment of Big Lie #4 on The Big Lies Of The “Resistance” Directory, “Trump Is A Racist/White Supremacist.”

The fact that the Times is still doing this—that lie is one of the hoariest and most persistent in the whole ugly batch—means, quite simply, that the paper can’t be trusted. Simple as that. Its editorial policy is to lie about Donald Trump, and other things, of course, but if a news organization will lie about anything to forward an agenda, then it should never be trusted.

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