“bias makes you stupid”

Latest Admittees To The “Do Something!” Hall Of Fame

/ Jack Marshall / 50 Comments

The consistently ridiculous U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared last week that the world has just ten years to reduce “global emissions” beyond what any reasonable or politically viable measures can accomplish, and if it doesn’t, heat waves, famines and infectious diseases could claim millions of additional lives by century’s end. Or maybe not. The IPCC is not at all embarrassed about all the other supposed deadlines politicized climate change “experts” have confidently predicted and that it has relayed with absurd certainty. It doubtless will spit out yet another doomsday prediction after this one has passed. (That U.N. warning on the right dates from 1989. The deadline: 2000.)

As plenty of rational, honest scientist have pointed out, “the world” is nowhere close to ready to dump fossil fuels. Alternative technologies and energy sources have not shown that they can achieves what the slick TV commercials claim and promise. All of the targets, some of them supposedly mandatory, established by national and state governments are cynical, manipulative grandstanding. The useless U.N., as is its wont, is aspiring to world dominance and influence it does not have and (I hope) never achieves.

If you have no options, a wise man once said, you have no problem, but the theoretical climate change Sword of Damocles has been a useful device for unethical politicians–incompetent, irresponsible, dishonest—to attract public support through demagoguery. Spurred on by the U.N. jeremiad, two New York Times readers nicely illustrated this bizarre phenomenon in heartfelt letters to the Times editors:

Continue reading →

Stanford’s Disgraceful DEI Dean Throws Down The Guntlet…NOW Will Stanford Fire Her?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Well this clarifies things!

Stanford Law School Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach, currently on well-earned disciplinary leave after her revolting handling of a law student effort to use the “heckler’s veto” to silence a Federal court judge invited to speak to a student group, has decided to challenge the Stanford dean and the school’s president by claiming that she was right to side with the disruptive students. Her defense relies on the currently popular diversity/equity/inclusion cant that free speech can be harmful, and must be “balanced” with DEI objectives.

Her message was relayed in a defiant (and dishonest) op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, ominously titled, “Diversity and Free Speech Can Coexist at Stanford We have to stop blaming, start listening, and ask ourselves: Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

The title itself signals Steinbach’s anti-speech point of view. The irritating metaphor “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” in this case means “Is freedom of speech worth the trouble?” That’s the calling card of an aspiring ideological censor and a totalitarian, giving off the stench of “safe spaces” and criminalized hate speech. She, and the op-ed that follows, advocates suppressing opinions and speech that she disagrees with, or in the world of the woke, that is “dangerous” and “wrong,” “wrong” meaning “not what we want to hear.”

First, however, Steinbach had to frame her argument in a lie. She describes the confrontation between Judge Duncan and an organized mob of protesters as merely a “heated exchange,” and “a verbal sparring match,” writing that “some protesters heckled the judge and peppered him with questions and comments” which the judge “answered in turn.” There is video of the event, and that’s not what was going on. Duncan was prevented from giving his prepared remarks, the students who came to hear them were prevented from doing so, and Duncan, far from answering questions, was reduced to calling out the students for their atrocious behavior.

Continue reading →

“Nah, There’s No Big Tech Bias!” Google’s AI ChatBot Provides A Smoking Gun

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I think the first appearance of the ironic refrain, “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” in an Ethics Alarms headline was in 2018. Since then, I’ve used it dozens of times, and easily could have justified using the sarcastic refrain hundreds, indeed thousands of time since. Even though the evidence of sinister, relentless, intentional and unethical biased reporting by the mainstream media is manifest and continuing daily, its allies (and naive “useful idiot” defenders) continue to argue that declaring that it is what it is constitutes a conservative “conspiracy theory. In doing so, they aid and abet the attempted destruction of American democracy.

The mainstream media’s perceived role as propaganda and deception merchants for the Left is reinforced by similar efforts by social media, the entertainment industry, and Big Tech, though the latter’s machinations are a bit more difficult to nail down. Google, a prime villain, has so many ways to slant public discourse and hamstring non-compliant voices, one main way being through the alignment of search results through its mysterious algorithms. Google’s latest innovation, however, unintentionally provides a window into the biases of the people behind the tech.

Google’s just launched an Artificial Intelligence chatbot called “Bard” as a competitor of ChatGPT, which had been getting lots of publicity lately. Bard’s screaming progressive/Democratic bias quickly revealed itself when conservative users ran some basic tests.

“Not the Bee’s” tech specialist Neo submitted two identical questions to Bard:

The answer to the first question:

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Lawyer Jerry Goldfeder

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“You know, it’s not a slam-dunk. But I think that survives a motion to dismiss, and then let the jury decide.”

—-Jerry H. Goldfeder, a special counsel at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP and an  expert in New York state election law, to the New York Times regarding Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg’s supposedly imminent indictment and prosecution of former President Donald Trump.

That is an flat-out unethical endorsement of prosecutorial abuse of power, for not only a lawyer, but a lawyer in a major Manhattan law firm, being quoted as authority in the New York Times, uncritically, of course.

An ethical prosecutor does not bring a case unless he or she is certain that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The issue isn’t whether the prosecution will prevail, but whether the prosecutor has sufficient evidence to justify it prevailing with an objective and fair jury. Surviving a motion to dismiss is not an ethical standard; it’s the bottom-of-the-barrel standard. The judge agreeing that the case has no merit at all as a matter of law, is not the equivalent of holding that the case should not be brought by an ethical prosecutor. “Hey, who knows if the guy is guilty or if we have the evidence to convict? Let’s just get it in front of a jury and see what they think!”

Unspoken in this case: “After all, the point is to make Trump look bad, right? If we can get a conviction, it’s frosting on the cake.”

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.”

Continue reading →

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:

Continue reading →

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:

Continue reading →

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 →