“bias makes you stupid”

I May Be Overly Judgmental, But I Think A School Board Member Should Know What Racism Is….

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

White school board member Mike Martin read an article toward the end of a three-hour meeting of the Wilson School Board in Pennsylvania that claimed, among other things, that blacks are easily offended and adverse to “correction” when asked to pull up their pants or turn down their music.

“I think sometimes we’re afraid to discipline a group because of the recourse or their position or it might offend them, and I think that brings problems that I know that we’ve been talking about, you know, rowdiness in classrooms and discipline in classrooms because we’re afraid to take that next step,” Wilson said after reading the article, which was apparently written by a black author.

It did not go over well. When informed that the attitudes displayed in the article were racist, Martin professed shock and innocence. He told reporters after the meeting blew up,

I really did not think I was being racist. I apologize for how it came across. As horrible as it sounds, it wasn’t meant to be a horrible statement and I need to fix it….I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feeling, if it came across that way I have to apologize. I have to step to the plate. I’m really sorry that this thing blossomed into what it manifested into…Most people that really know me know that I don’t have a racist bone in my body…I know some people think I’m a closet racist and I have to live with that.

Someone explain to this guy that when one publicly and approvingly reads a document that attributes negative attitudes and offensive conduct to an entire race, that’s racism by definition.

Then someone explain to him that idiots shouldn’t serve on school boards.

Ethics Dunces: Fetterman Voters

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Exit polls are showing that the reason John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for the open Senate seat in Pennsylvania, won his race against “Dr. Oz” despite not being able to speak clearly or understand English without technical assistance was that they were inspired and impressed by the fact that he continued his campaign after a stroke, and even by his willingness to debate his opponent when he had obviously not recovered.

Naturally, the New York Times frames this depressing logic in Democratic-Spinnese:

Rather than seeing his difficult recovery and uneven debate performance as evidence of lack of fitness for office — as Mr. Fetterman’s Republican opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, tried to frame it — voters said they found Mr. Fetterman relatable, even an inspiration. His personal revitalization, however incomplete, echoed a promise he campaigned on — the resurgence of Pennsylvania communities that feel left behind

Ugh. Fettermman’s debate performance wasn’t “uneven,” it was disastrous and frightening, probably the worst debate display by a candidate for national office in history. Oz didn’t need to “frame it” as evidence of lack of fitness to serve in the Senate; it was definitive proof of lack of fitness. Anyone who couldn’t figure that out didn’t know what Senators do.

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A Non-Election Day Ethics Special! An Ethics Test For Baseball Hall Of Fame Voters

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The major League Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown released its eight-player Contemporary Baseball Era ballot yesterday, as part of its revamped enshrinement process. A 16-person committee including of Hall of Fame players, baseball executives and veteran sportswriters will vote on the candidates at baseball’s winter meetings in December. A player must receive 12 votes to be elected.

All of the eight players failed to get enough votes through the regular voting process. The players on the list, limited to distinguished players who made their greatest contributions from 1980 to the present era, include…

  • Barry Bonds
  • Roger Clemens
  • Curt Schilling
  • Albert Belle
  • Don Mattingly
  • Fred McGriff
  • Dale Murphy, and
  • Rafael Palmeiro.

A clearer ethics test for the voters would be hard to imagine. The threshold question is whether last year’s admission to the Hall of Red Six icon David Ortiz, who once tested positive for an unidentified performance enhancing drug according to test results that were illegally leaked, will be regarded as sufficient precedent to admit Bonds, Clemens, and or Palmeiro. That Bonds was a long-time steroid cheat who did great damage to the game is undeniable. The evidence against Clemens is weaker, but still damning. Palmeiro had the distinction of going before Congress and proclaiming that steroids were the bane of the game and he would never sully himself by using them, and quickly thereafter testing positive himself. None of those three should be admitted to the Hall, and the presence of current Hall of Fame members, I hope, may ensure that they are not. Continue reading →

Andrew Sullivan Makes An Ethics Case For Throwing Out The Democrats

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Because he writes so well and because he is an accomplished critical thinker, iconic blogging pioneer Andrew Sullivan’s opinion pieces are always worth reading even when he’s completely wrong. True, bias sometimes makes Andrew stupid, which shows the awesome power of bias because he’s definitely not stupid. Sullivan’s devotion to gayness is one source of emotionalism for him; another is his blind hatred of Donald Trump, which to my eye seems to be of the George Will/Bill Kristol variety: Sullivan thinks Trump is an unmannerly low-life too vulgar for him to agree with. I think Sullivan may be terrified of cognitive dissonance self-destruction if he admits to agreeing with Trump on most substantive issues, which he does.

In his latest substack newsletter, Sullivan spins his topic a bit to avoid alienating his mostly left-leaning readership, calling it “Will Biden And The Dems Finally Get It? Their far-left record has made the far right more electable.” Oh, see? The real problem with the Biden policy fiascos is that they will let the evil far right gain power. Shame on you, Andrew. Have the guts and integrity to be clear about what you are really saying…which is this:

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Ethics Sarcasm Of The Month: Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“I wonder which “national party” is expressing this anxiety to The Washington Post — which party relied on Twitter moderation to protect its interests in the run-up to the elections….” 

—-“Fiercely neutral” but increasingly annoyed blogger Ann Althouse, commenting on the Washington Post’s report that “Devastating cuts to Twitter’s workforce on Friday, four days before the midterm elections, are fueling anxieties among political campaigns and election offices that have counted on the social network’s staff to help them combat violent threats and viral lies…”

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! The Post’s spin is brazenly self-indicting: I wonder how many readers are so insulated and brain-washed that they don’t notice…or can’t.

Recently the official Democrat campaign desperation talking point that “democracy is on the ballot” has been repeated over and over again from President Biden down the line, and tweeted and retweeted as well. That’s a viral lie, or course: democracy is the ballot, and “democracy is on the ballot” is Democratic aspiring totalitarian code for the head-spinning assertion, “if you vote for any party other than ours, you’re destroying the Republic.”

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Unethical Pro-Abortion Quote Of The Year: Actress Ann Hathaway

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“…Abortion can be another word for mercy.”

—Actress Anne Hathaway, revealing her ethical deficits and intellectual limitations while appearing on “The View”

Oh, hell. I’ve always liked Ann Hathaway. Now I have to continue liking her despite knowing she’s a brain-dead, self-awareness-lacking, ethics dummy.

Just so I’m not accused of misrepresenting Hathaway’s moronic and offensive claim, here is her full sentence:

“[In] my own personal experience with abortion and I don’t think we talk about this enough, abortion can be another word for mercy. We don’t know. We don’t know. We know that no two pregnancies are alike, and it follows that no two lives are alike, it follows that no two conceptions are alike. So how can we have a law, how can we have a point of view on this that says we must treat everything the same?”

Someone can only make such an absurd statement by refusing to acknowledge what an abortion is, and that two lives are involved, not just one. If she were arguing for abortion when a fetus is hopelessly deformed or certain to have devastating maladies, that’s a legitimate ethical debate to have. Abortion then might be described as merciful. (But some advocate aborting Down Syndrome babies as similarly “merciful.”) Hathaway wasn’t considering the unborn at all, however. In her warped (but too common) view, it is mercy for the mother to allow her kill the child for her own benefit.

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Baseball Ethics: Dusty’s Lament [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Houston Astros manager Dusty Baker, who absent an epic upset by the inferior Phillies is about to cap off his long and illustrious baseball career with a World Series championship, blundered into a rare (for him) and foolish outburst sparked by the news that there are no “American-born black players” competing in the World Series. You see, there are black players, a lot of them, on the Astros and Phillies, and many of them are American citizens, but they were born south of that almost non-existent U.S. border, so I guess they don’t count. So Dusty dusted off his racial resentment, and announced in response to being informed about this carefully layered statistic, “Nah, don’t tell me that. That’s terrible for the state of the game. Wow! Terrible. “Quote me. I am ashamed of the game.”

And I’m ashamed of you, Dusty. That’s an ignorant and unfair comment. It’s not as if baseball wouldn’t sign a trained squid to a mega-million dollar contract if he hit like Aaron Judge, the assumed American League Most Valuable Player this season. (Incidentally, Judge is biracial, and would be counted as black if he decided to “identify” as such.) Is Dusty ashamed of Judge? There are many reasons the percentage of black players has fallen in recent decades. The 2022 percentage of African-Americans was about 7%, or half the proportion in the population generally. The main reason for this is not any racial discrimination by baseball, but because of the choices made by black athletes and social forces affecting them.

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Update: The Axis Of Unethical Conduct’s 2022 Mid-Term Elections Freak-Out

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I’d like to know who was the genius that suggested “The evil, fascist Republicans who want to destroy democracy caused the violent attack by a whack-job on Nancy Pelosi’s husband with their hateful rhetoric must be stopped by any means necessary” would be a smart and persuasive argument to turn the Red Tide and pull off an upset on November 8. Then I’d like to have those among the “resistance,” Democrats, and mainstream media—that’s the Ethics Alarms Axis of Unethical Conduct—- who reacted with, “Hey! That’s brilliant!” explain their reasoning before checking themselves into a hospital, because they’re the ones who are acting like they have been hit in the skull with a hammer.

Can they really not detect the obvious hypocrisy and self-contradictory reasoning of this strategy? Apparently not. Yet it was Democratic Senate Majority Leader who pointed the way to an eventual assassination attempt on Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh by shouting, “I want to tell you, Justice Kavanaugh and Justice Gorsuch, you have unleashed a whirlwind, and you will pay the price.You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions!” Then just this month, Nancy Pelosi told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that she would have attacked President Trump on January 6, 2021 if he had come to the Capitol “I would have punched him out. I said I would have punched him out. I would have gone to jail. And I would have been happy to do so.”

Because Republicans, and especially Trump, are evil and dangerous, you see. And they engage in hateful rhetoric that incites their supporters (of which Paul Pelosi’s attacker was not one by all indications) to take violent action! As Olsen Johnson so wisely observed,

Here are some recent examples of the commentary arising from that parallel universe:

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Paging The ACLU! But Will They Answer?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Another integrity test for the biased and rotting American Civil Liberties Union. According to their long-standing mission, coming to the defense of two students being prosecuted for saying bad word would be automatic. So far, though, not a peep. Will the ACLU stand up for the Bill of Rights when the breach is so clear?

I’m not holding my breath.

In Houma, Louisiana, Two high school students have been arrested and accused of hate crimes after video circulated on social media of them using the term “nigger” on the high school grounds. Their words were not directed at any individual, yet they face charges of inciting a riot, hate crimes, and cyberbullying.

You can’t do this, you know. The government can’t punish anyone criminally for mere words, and it doesn’t matter what they are. OK, you have my obligatory agreement that “nigger” is a haeful epithet (when used as an epithet) and it’s use cannot be condoned and shouldn’t be encouraged or ignored, yadayada, but if that’s the reason almost nobody is pointing out the more essential truth that the Constitution protects us from sanctions by the government for ugly, mean, hateful or controversial speech, a lttle emedial instruction on core civil liberties is greatly neededd.

Yoooo Hooo! ACLU-hooo! Where the hell are you-hoo?

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Unethical (And Ominous) Quote Of The Month: 600 “Members Of The Writing, Publishing, And Broader Literary Community”[Link Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“As members of the writing, publishing, and broader literary community of the United States, we care deeply about freedom of speech. We also believe it is imperative that publishers uphold their dedication to freedom of speech with a duty of care. We recognize that harm is done to a democracy not only in the form of censorship, but also in the form of assault on inalienable human rights. As such, we are calling on Penguin Random House to recognize its own history and corporate responsibility commitments by reevaluating its decision to move forward with publishing Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s forthcoming book….”

—Signatories (600 and rising) from the world of publishing in an open letter titled “We Dissent,” demanding that Penguin Random House refuse to publish a book by Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Here is the whole, head-exploding, censorious thing, an “it isn’t what it is” (Yoo’s Rationalization again!) classic that could have been composed by the lackeys of “1984’s” Big Brother: Continue reading →