“bias makes you stupid”

A Language Ethics Quiz: Regarding “Groomer”

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Conservatives have been using the word “groomer” this year to describe advocates of teaching school children (as young as third grade in some cases) about LGTBQ sexual practices and relationships, while presenting them in a positive light. Targets of the word have ranged from defiant LGTBQ teachers exposed by The Libs of TikTok, to libraries promoting drag readings for kids, to the advocates for “gender-affirming therapy” for teens and younger without parental approval, to Disney’s recent obsession with injecting gay sexual issues into its films and TV offerings.

R.L. Stoller objects. He says he is a “child liberation theologian” (?), and a child and survivor advocate with “a Masters in Child Protection”—okey-dokey, let’s take that as genuine authority arguendo. He objects to the use of “groomer” in the current trend, writing in part,

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Unethical Tweet(s) Of The Month And Ethics Dunce, Res Ipsa Loquitur Division: Jessica Valenti

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

What more needs to be said about a) a woman who would tweet this ethically-deranged nonsense, and b) a society in which substantial numbers of people think she’s worth paying attention to? Continue reading →

Further Ethics Observations On “The Twitter Files”

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

1. Wow. The mainstream media is really determined to die on this hill. It really believes that if it pretends that there is nothing sinister, undemocratic or dangerous about how a bunch of snotty, self-empowered progressives conspired—and succeeded!–to manipulate public opinion, access to information and public discourse to advance a partisan agenda, eventually everyone will forget about it as if it didn’t happen. This is exactly the approach it took with the Hunter Biden laptop story in the first place, and clearly, it has learned nothing and changed nothing. Bury, deny, and “It isn’t what it is” are still the tactics of choice. And they are certain that the public is, most of it anyway, lazy, apathetic, gullible and stupid.

That, they may be right about.

2. However, this unforgivable attempt to deny an important news event indicts the media as much as the Twitter files indict Twitter. I find it impossible to believe the virtually unanimous reaction to this story hasn’t been coordinated. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Month: Bari Weiss, Concluding Part 5 Of “The Twitter Files”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“Ultimately, the concerns about Twitter’s efforts to censor news about Hunter Biden’s laptop, blacklist disfavored views, and ban a president aren’t about the past choices of executives in a social media company. They’re about the power of a handful of people at a private company to influence the public discourse and democracy.”

Exactly.

I’ll have observations of my own tomorrow. For now, let me just post a readable version of the fifth Twitter stream to describe the unethical, destructive and despicable censorship and double standards that Twitter employees engaged in, a blatant and undeniable effort by people who had neither the acumen, judgment or objectivity to pursue their own agendas at the cost of open discussion, argument and dissent.

As before, you will have to go to the source to see the many fascinating attachments: Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: CNN Contributor Van Jones

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Van was speaking of the Brittany Griner prisoner trade with Russia…

“This is huge. First of all, that’s a decade-defining image when you saw her wife sitting there, Kamala Harris was there, president is there, such a human image, and yet it just shows this president got it done. He cared enough about this individual person to get her home. It was shocking for young Americans to see an icon like that snatched, locked up, treated like garbage and nine years, ten years for bringing some cannabis oil, medically prescribed. So these are decade-defining images. I guarantee you there will be young people 10, 20, 30 years from now who will remember this moment because she is an icon. It’s really, really extraordinary. And people are talking about this other guy. He’s so terrible. Look, there’s a lot of terrible people in the world, a lot of terrible people in Russia. What you can’t allow to happen is have a black female icon treated like garbage and America do nothing about it. Something was done about it, and people are going to be proud of that.”

—Race-obsessed pundit Van Jones, once Barack Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar,” blathering on to try to justify President Biden trading an arrogant, dumb, America-bashing athlete who defied State Department travel warnings for money and got caught with illegal drugs in Russia, for an international arms dealer and terrorism purveyor, Viktor Bout, who is a good bet to kill lots of people with his skills.

That’s a little long for an Unethical Quote, but the full thing is necessary to give a proper sense of just how ethically obtuse, factually-nonsensical and outright stupid the quote is. Van Jones has proved over the past that he is not incapable of perceptive analysis, but he persists in outburst like this one, usually conscening race, that make him one of the epitomes of the Ethics Alarms motto, “Bias Makes You Stupid. Jones is smarter than this quote makes him sound, so we must assume that he knows what he’s saying is garbage, but he’s saying it on CNN anyway.

Ethics Strike One.

  • “Decade defining image?” Stop insulting our intelligence. Griner will be completely forgotten as soon as she quits basketball, and only lightly remembered before that. How many people remember Bo Bergdahl now?

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More Twitter Revelations…Crickets Or Denials From The Complicit Mainstream Media And The Left’s Censorship Beneficiaries

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Keep it up, guys. With every effort to deny that what happened was what happened, the corrupted U.S. journalists and their employers erode public trust in their profession further, and with it their power. Eventually, there will be a breaking point and an ugly reckoning. Good. They have been asking for it. Yeah, keep up the gaslighting and denial. The fools really think they can bury the story. Even at Memeorandum, which is usually an objective news aggregator, the tweeted revelations by Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi are invisible. (Top story as I write this: a soccer reporter has died.) Very disappointing: I thought they were better than this. Still, the site’s bias is worth knowing about. I will not trust it as I have in the past.

Here’s a smoking gun: look at the transcript of an NPR interview with Newt Gingrich. Newt is unethical slime, but he’s very intelligent unethical slime, and when his personal agendas don’t interfere with his analysis, he is worth listening to. (I learned more in a private two hour seminar with young Newt when he was a Congressman than I learned in many full Government courses at Harvard.) Pay special attention to the NPR interviewer’s refusal to deal with reality that implicates NPR:

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Comment Of The Day: “Dispatches From The Great Stupid, “D.E.I.” Division: This Story From The Washington Post Was Not A Joke…”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

In addition to perfectly encapsulating the insanity of our times and being unintentionally hilarious, the Washington Post headline, “‘Shark Week’ lacks diversity, overrepresents men named Mike, scientists say” also did society a favor by triggering Chris Marschner’s Comment of the Day.

He has a lot of interesting observations here, as well as revelations about something I know absolutely nothing about, sea exploration, that wasn’t explained in old re-runs of “Sea Hunt.”

Here is Chris’s Comment of the Day on the EA post about the dumbest serious headline of the year...

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Have any of the researchers currently studying the number of times white males are showcased on these series actually pitched an idea to Discovery? I don’t think Discovery Channel calls guys named Mike to do a show for them about sharks. The only Mike that I am aware of on the series is Mike Rowe who has developed a number of programs for the Discovery Channel, most notably Dirty Jobs. I suppose because I don’t see a lot of women cleaning hog pens or standing next to a blast furnace that too is discriminatory. What that Mike has done for making non-white collar jobs desirable and dignified is what most of us should aspire to emulate.

Yes, most of the shows do focus on the shark’s hunting behavior but the attacks showcased are not about attacks on humans but on prey species. Nothing captures the viewer like an 8-foot, 2000 pound Great White breach the surface as it hunts a seal (or a replica of one). The replicas are scientific instruments that take various measurements such as bite force and jaw size. When the focus is on the hunting behaviors of other pelagic species, the focus on speed and tactics. As a diver, I want to know as much about the behavior of certain species that I may encounter in the wild. One of my most favorite dives was a wreck called the Proteus where I had the privilege of swimming with over three dozen 6-8 foot Sand Tiger sharks. When I tell people about my diving, I often hear women claim they would not attempt to dive with sharks. Men probably think the same but are less inclined to admit it.

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The Twitter Hunter Biden Laptop Censorship Proves Social Media’s Anti-Democracy Slant, And The Media’s Rush To Excuse It Proves Theirs

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

This was a test of integrity for the mainstream news media, and they, most predictably, flunked it, and outed themselves as the shamelessly unethical propaganda-spewing hacks they are. Depressing, but good to know, as if we didn’t know already.

As an exemplar of the whole, ugly, revolting effort to dismiss evidence that a biased and partisan Twitter staff deliberately buried a news story that might have harmed Joe Biden’s prospects of winning the 2016 election, Phillip Bump’s “analysis” in the Washington Post could hardly be more damning. Its very headline is an unethical rationalization and an appeal to consequentialism: “No, limiting the Hunter Biden laptop story didn’t cost Trump the election.”

Let’s just start with that, okay? Continue reading →

Dispatches From The Great Stupid, “D.E.I.” Division: This Story From The Washington Post Was Not A Joke…Well, Not Intended As One, Anyway

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Yes, sadly, it’s come to this.

Not only has the Left’s obsession with group identification, quotas and “diversity, equity and inclusion” reached peak madness, but the purveyors of this cult, including the mainstream media, are no longer capable of perceiving its excesses.

The article in yesterday’s Post was not a parody. The headline was not supposed to be funny. The tragically biased Post reporter responsible for this insanity is Daniel Wu, a reporting intern in the Post’s Metro section. Stanford University made him this way. And the editors who agreed to insult Post readers with it? Who knows what made them impervious to common sense? Well, let me take that back: “It’s the Great Stupid, Charlie Brown!”

The piece begins by describing the tragic circumstances of LisaWhitenack, now a biology professor at Allegheny College, a shark researcher who was tormented as a child she didn’t see many shark researchers on the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week” that looked like her. So she decided to study this dire and under-recognized phenomenon “Was “Shark Week” feeding audiences the wrong messages about sharks — and who studies them?” The Post continues,

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Ethics Heroes: The Baseball Hall of Fame Era Committee

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

A new 16-member committee was charged with voting on the Hall of Fame membership cases of eight select players who had failed to acquire the necessary number of votes in their years on the main Hall ballots, which are cast by, ugh, baseball’s sportswriters. The results of their deliberations were announced yesterday: of the seven, only one, former Blue Jays first baseman Fred McGriff received the required twelve votes. He is deserving beyond a doubt, but the bigger story and even better news from an ethics perspective is that Barry Bonds, the King of the Steroid Cheats, the game’s career and single season record-holder in home runs, was rejected again. Also seeing their otherwise Hall-worthy career achievements rejected were Bond’s fellow PED-tarnished colleagues Roger Clemens and Rafael Palmeiro, both of whom, like Bonds, received few votes from the committee members.

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