“bias makes you stupid”

Further Musings On The Tucker Carlson Car In The Capitol Riot Aftermath Ethics Train Wreck [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Having read more in the last 24 hours about this fiasco layered on a fiasco, I have reached the following conclusions:

1. I was right: Speaker McCarthy choosing Tucker Carlson as the vehicle to educate the public regarding the bias and slanted coverage of the January 6 Capitol rioting was a truly incompetent decision. If Rush Limbaugh weren’t dead, it was the equivalent of that, giving all of the Trump Deranged, progressive brain-washed and dishonest propagandists all they needed to spin the security footage into incoherence. Carlson is a proven liar and a cynical, untrustworthy charlatan who can’t even be trusted to believe in what he says on national TV. McCarthy walked into a cognitive dissonance perfect storm: if you wanted to ensure that no one who already hadn’t swallowed the “resistance”/Democratic Party/mainstream media (aka The Axis of Unethical Conduct) “insurrection” narrative would dismiss the new video, that was the way to do it.

2. Sure enough: Carlson and the Republicans are being widely accused of trying to excuse the riot, which was inexcusable. Chuck Schumer’s lie—on the Senate floor— that Carlson claimed the attack on the Capitol was not violent has more currency with those who don’t watch Fox News than anything Carlson said, and those who do watch Fox News already had concluded that the insurrection narrative was garbage. What is essential to begin clearing away the deception and corruption this episode epitomizes is to find someone whom the non-Fox News watchers will trust to carry the message. Handing the job to Carlson was simply dumb—but about what I expect of Kevin McCarthy.

3. The Big Lie is not that the 2020 election was stolen, but that the riot was an “insurrection.” Schumer and the Axis are using a Big Lie while accusing their adversaries of using a Big Lie. You have to admire the audacity: the 2020 election was a lot closer to “stolen” than the riot was to an insurrection.

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month And Early Front-Runner For 2023 “Asshole Of The Year”: Art Critic Jerry Saltz

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This is signature significance. I shouldn’t have to point out that such a public declaration of bigotry, hypocrisy and ethics duncery is signature significance for an utter asshole, so I’ll just add that it is also signature significance for anyone who reads Saltz’s Instagram post whose immediate reaction isn’t, “Wow. What an asshole.”

To be fair, Saltz is an art critic for New York Magazine. I personally think art critics are worthless, even more worthless than drama critics and movie critics, but as art critics go, he could still be as reliable and trustworthy as any despite this “I am a hateful idiot!” announcement. Stephen King has made an ass of himself repeatedly during his own descent into Trump Derangement; he’s still the best horror novelist around. Mark Ruffalo’s a fine actor; Rob Reiner might even still be a terrific director; presumably Bette Midler can still sing. If I don’t hold artists’ flawed character and Swiss Cheese brains against their art, I certainly am not going to going to let a blathering critic wildly out of his lane convince me that his astuteness in a dubious pursuit like art criticism is undermined….unless, of course, when he’s judging the art of a Republican. Based on that Instagram outburst, I presume Saltz can never again review the creation of a registered Republican.

Continue reading →

Stop Making Me Defend Ticketmaster (And Louis Farrakhan)!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Ugh.

Next to the totalitarian, censorship-obsessed, indoctrination-pushing ideology of current American progressives, the inability of American conservatives to observe basic intellectual integrity and avoid disqualifying themselves as trustworthy defenders of democratic principles may be the greatest threat to the U.S.’s existence as a free republic.

The Washington Free Beacon, often a helpful source of conservative analysis, apparently thinks that everyone, especially members of Congress should be condemning Ticketmaster because it sold tickets to a Louis Farrakhan event:

The ticketing giant hated by Taylor Swift fans and everyone else who has ever tried to buy concert tickets is now under fire from Jewish activists for selling tickets to a Louis Farrakhan event in which the minister defended Adolf Hitler and predicted another Holocaust against Jews. But many of Ticketmaster’s biggest critics on Capitol Hill don’t seem to care.

Ticketmaster, which charges service fees on each ticket it sells, raked in money selling tickets to Farrakhan’s annual Saviours’ Day conference in Chicago last weekend. During his speech at the event, Farrakhan assailed the “stranglehold that Jews have on this government” and claimed “Jewish power is what has all of our people of knowledge and wisdom and talent afraid.”

The event was met with crickets on Capitol Hill, with almost no one in Congress speaking out against Ticketmaster for making money off of the Farrakhan event. The reaction is a stark contrast to lawmakers’ response when Ticketmaster bungled sales last year for Taylor Swift’s much-anticipated concert tour. That fiasco was in the news cycle for weeks and led to a Department of Justice investigation as well as a Senate hearing. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say Ticketmaster and its parent company, LiveNation, have a monopoly over the ticket industry, leading to price-gouging and a failure to crack down on automated scalping.

“Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, it’s merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in [sic],” wrote Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) in a Twitter post in November. Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) and Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) called on the Department of Justice to investigate. None of their offices responded to a request for comment on Ticketmaster’s Farrakhan sales.

Only Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.)—who also spoke out about the Taylor Swift debacle—weighed in on the Farrakhan controversy when contacted by the Washington Free Beacon.

“It is extremely concerning that Ticketmaster is choosing to use its platform to elevate and promote a well-known anti-Semite. The targeting of the Jewish people has gone on far too long and must stop,” she said.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R., Wash.), a Ticketmaster critic who serves as the chairwoman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, also sent a  comment after this story was published.

“Anti-Semitism has no place in America,” said McMorris Rodgers. “Ticketmaster should be completely transparent on why it chose to profit off of Farrakhan’s abhorrent history of hatred and violent threats of genocide against the Jewish people.”

The author is Alana Goodman. Naturally, Republicans (and conservative websites and pundits) took the bait. Democrats don’t like democracy, Republicans are dumb as eels. Morons. Ethics dunces. Hypocrites.

Continue reading →

Reflections On The First Stupid, Virtue-Signaling Lawn Sign Of Spring….

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

obxoxious sign

For the second time this week I find myself grafting substantial sections of an archived Ethics Alarms post to a new one. (I promise not to make a habit of it.) The occasion is the appearance on one of my Alexandria, Virginia neighbors’ lawn the idiotic sign above. Once again I was seized with the desire to ring the house’s doorbell and cross examine the residents. Can they explain and justify what’s on that sign? I am almost certain that they cannot, just as my other neighbor who STILL displays a medieval suit of armor next to a 5 x 4 hand-made, painted wooden sign reading BLACK LIVES MATTER in block letters could not justify that obnoxious lawn ornament, since it is, after all, more indefensible than ever now that the movement it stands for has been exposed as cynical hustle.

In 2021, New York Times’ woke propaganda agent Amanda Hess was given a rare slot on her paper’s front page to opine on the sign above, which was apparently the beginning of the the viral Announce to your neighbors that you’re a smug, simple-minded idiot!” epidemic. Ethics Alarms has had several posts about similar signs, but I did not realize that I had missed Patient Zero.

Hess’s analysis by turns informed readers that the sign has “curious power” (to make me detest the homeowner?); that the mottoes are “progressive maxims” (so progressives really are that facile and shallow!), that “Donald Trump is out of office…But nevertheless, this sign has persisted” (Oh! It’s all Trump’s fault?), that the sign is “directed at the adults in the room, reminding them of their own mission” (Really? Open borders? Man-boy love? Anti-white discrimination? Marxism? Why is a sign aimed at adults so naive and childish? ), that it is “the epitome of virtue signaling: an actual sign enumerating the owner’s virtues. There is something refreshing, actually, about the straightforwardness of that.” (There is something refreshing about smug idiots placing signs on their laws that say, “I am a smug idiot”?).

I learned other things from that article:

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: Jill Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“Ridiculous…“We would never even discuss something like that. How many 30-year-olds could travel to Poland, get on the train? Go nine more hours, go to Ukraine, meet with President  Zelensky? So, look at the man. Look what he’s doing. Look what he continues to do each and every day.”

—First Lady Jill Biden, after being asked during a CNN interview about Nikki Haley’s proposal that politicians over the age of 75 undergo mental competency testing.

In related news, Lance Armstrong declared that testing competitive cyclists for doping is “ridiculous,” and O.J. Simpson opined that DNA technology was “ridiculous.”

Fortunately, all we need to do to determine the competency of First Ladies is to analyze a cretinous answer like that one to a flamingly easy question. We are looking, Jill. And it’s not pretty. The words the First Lady was searching for were not “ridiculous,” but responsible, necessary, and “a matter of common sens

The United States has already courted disaster with Presidents continuing in office after their mental faculties have been damaged or declined. President Pierce was impaired by grief, crippling depression and alcoholism during his single term in office, which occurred at a crucial point in the deadly run-up to the Civil War. Woodrow Wilson infamously remained President after being crippled by a major stroke. There is evidence that President Reagan’s cognitive stability was declining during his presidency.

As for Jill’s human meal-ticket, no modern President has shown so many signs of mental decline and confusion, and this frightening development has come after a career in public office unmarked by intellectual acuity at its zenith. Every responsible Presidential candidate should be required to pledge to take such competency tests on a regular basis and agree to resign from office once a thorough, non-partisan diagnosis confirmed by multiple physicians concludes that there is significant cognitive decline.

Continue reading →

Idaho Student Massacre Ethics…And A “Hate Speech” Issue

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Issue I: The Banned Subreddit. Above you see a posted photo of some sick fan-girls’s shrine to University of Idaho student massacre suspect Bryan Kohberger. On the massive social media site Reddit, a “subreddit” titled “Brynation” emerged after Kohberger’s arrest late last year for the murders of University of Idaho students Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin. The Reddit group, which included women professing to be infatuated with the accused killer as well as amateur sleuths who maintained that he was innocent, had grown to more than 500 members before it was banned from the platform for allegedly violating Reddit’s Moderator Code of Conduct. As is typical with such social media bans, Reddit didn’t specify the exact offense.

Reddit can ban whatever and whoever it chooses; the question is when it is ethical to do so. There are too many arguably sick subreddits to list, including many involving fetishes, which the common phenomenon of women being smitten by murderers certainly is. At this point, Bryan Kohberger is presumed innocent in the eyes of the law. I just heard an “expert” opine that social media outlets have an “obligation” to control and minimize “hate speech” on their platforms, which he defined as speech that could provoke violence or “harm” individuals, and cited Reddit’s action as an example of responsible social media management. The Fox News interviewer just nodded like one of those plastic dogs people used to put in the rear windows of their cars.

How is chatting online about an accused murderer “hate speech”? The expert’s fatuous (but popular!) position demonstrates exactly what’s unethical about the anti-“hate speech” movement on the Left: the term literally can mean any speech the censors don’t like, disagree with, or find “icky.” The participants in the banned subreddit were not doing anything likely to result in violence: has anyone ever become a serial killer to be more attractive to women? Thinking isn’t dangerous; talking on line about one’s thoughts isn’t dangerous either, or unethical.

In a purported democracy, the culture should lean hard in the direction of free expression, with all expression given a strong presumption of legitimacy. People like Fox’s “expert” do the opposite, and are working to shift our culture toward concepts of GoodThink and BadThink, with the distinctions being dictated by powerful corporations, Big Tech, social media, the news media, educational institutions and, of course, the government.

Weird people have rights too.

Continue reading →

Ethics Mash-Up! Cross Today’s Post On Unethical Laws With The Post On Tolerated Cheating And You Get…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

…the Minnesota District Court ruling that biological males must be allowed to compete in women’s powerlifting competitions if they “identify” as female. (The posts referenced above are here and here).

The decision, which declared USA Powerlifting’s 2019 policy barring biological men from competing against women illegal in the state a violation of the Minnesota Human Rights Act. That it is, because the Minnesota Human Rights Act is unethical in its treatment of the transgender issue, not to mention bats. The ruling requires USA Powerlifting to amend its policy to allow transgender people to compete along with other members of their self-identities sex. As a result, female power-lifters who didn’t have the advantage of going through puberty as males are going to be squashed in competition with newly minted ex-men. If ever there was a sport where allowing transexual competitors was unconscionable, this is it.

But Minnesota is right up there (down there?) with California, Washington, Oregon, New York and Vermont when it comes to placing woke ideology over reality.

Continue reading →

Ethics Heroes: The Mid Vermont Christian School Girls Basketball Team [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The Mid Vermont Christian School girls basketball team, the Eagles, were set to play against the Long Trail Mountain Lions in the fourth game of state championship tournament playoffs last week. But the Eagles forfeited the game and lost their place in the tournament, taking the position it was unfair and unsafe for a high school girls team to have to play against a team with a biological male on its squad.

Which, of course, it was and is.

[That’s another trans member of a women’s basketball team above, but illustrative of the problem…don’t you think?]

Continue reading →

If It Is Unethical For CNN To Continue Putting Don Lemon On The Air, What Do You Call ABC Allowing “The View” To Rot Brains Daily?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Yes, that was fake Republican Ana Navarro spreading the word that blacks and Hispanics get sent to jail for years for stealing a pack of cigarettes. “The View” is the most-viewed news and talk program in daytime television, and is run by the ABC News division. The ABC News division is permitting outright, flagrant false information to be communicated to its dim and ignorant audience by this coven of fools. They make Don Lemon look like Edward R. Murrow.

ABC, do recall, is owned by Disney. Continue reading →

“The Great Stupid” Across The Pond: We Helped Save Roald Dahl’s Children’s Books From The Censors; Now They’re Coming For OO7

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

…who might soon be called “008” to soothe readers offended by the number seven. Seven deadly sins, seven dwarves, that creepy Morgan Freeman movie with Gwinneth Paltrow’s head in a box…it’s a touchy number, you have to admit.

I’d like to think in some tiny way Ethics Alarms helped spread the news of the despicable bowdlerizing of Dahl’s classics that resulted in his publisher backing down and adopting the New Coke solution to a fiasco: the anti-authors’ rights business announced over the weekend that it will henceforth offer “Dahl Classic” along with the vandalized “New Dahl.” Yeah, let’s see which sells more copies. There was hardly time to pop the champagne, however: we then learned that Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels are being re-written for “modern readers“to omit alleged “racist language” and “racial references.” The censored novels will be published in April to mark the 70 years since “Casino Royale,” the first in the series, was published.

There’s nothing quite like honoring an author by defacing his most famous works. At least they’re leaving “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” alone. I think.

The indefensible conduct comes after Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, which owns the rights to Fleming’s work, commissioned a review by “sensitivity readers.” The British really don’t get that freedom of speech and expression thingy, do they? Neither does the rest of the world beyond our shores and porous borders. Now watch: U.S. progressives will argue that once again, the United States is out of step with its betters by not censoring literature and movies with the same wild abandon that it pulls down statues.

The disclaimer accompanying Fleming’s reissued novels, echoing Dahl’s publisher Puffin, will read: “This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace. A number of updates have been made in this edition, while keeping as close as possible to the original text and the period in which it is set.”

If Ian Fleming “might be considered offensive” to the political correctness police, imagine what’s going to happen to Mark Twain.

Continue reading →