“bias makes you stupid”

The Drudge Report’s Lying Headline, And Related Attacks On The USA On Independence Day 2022

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I wanted to keep all of today’s posts positive and appropriately celebratory of the official birthday of the greatest country on earth. It’s impossible, unless I just pretend “it isn’t what it is” out there, and I am distraught.

Let’s start with the shock headline that bannered the Drudge Report last night. Here is what it looked like:

GALLUP SHOCK: ONLY 38% PROUD TO BE AMERICAN

The information is pure clickbait of the worst kind. The headline on the linked Gallup article is “Record-Low 38% Extremely Proud to Be American” (my emphasis). The piece goes on to say that an additional 27% were “very” proud to be Americans, making the “extremely/very proud” number 65%. In fact, only 4% of those surveyed said they were not proud to be Americans.

I found that part of the poll surprising. Not surprisingly, Democrats lead the not-very-proud group, and since the party’s entire thrust recently has been to try to transform the nation into a European-style socialist nanny state while denigrating the U.S. as racist to its core. I would have expected the un-proud, as in “ashamed,” to be much higher. Continue reading →

Pre-Independence Day Ethics Warm-Up, July 3, 2022: What Might Have Been [Broken Link Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Typically, Ethics Alarms has highlighted July 3 with reflections on the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, for which the 3rd was the dramatic last and decisive day. I know it must be hard to believe, but I do get tired of writing the same things over and over again, an occupational hazard of being an ethicist during a mass ethics breakdown in our democracy and among the increasingly corrupt people we have put in power to protect it. I still can’t ignore Pickett’s futile charge and Custer’s charge as well, so I direct you to last year’s post on both events and their ethics implications.

However, this year I am introducing the July 3 warm-up with another crucial anniversary, one that may have had even more impact on the history of the United States, its prospects and its values than Gettysburg. July 2, 1776 is when the Continental Congress finally agreed to take the leap and forge a new nation (John Adams thought the 2nd would be the day we celebrated) and July 4, 1776 was the date the document was signed. But in-between those more noted dates the Continental Congress began debating and editing Jefferson’s draft Declaration, eventually making 86 edits that cut the length by about a fourth. 

Because the Declaration of Independence is the mission statement of America, framing and sometimes compelling what followed, especially the Constitution, the editing decisions of July 3, 1776 affected our laws and culture in many ways that are unimaginable after more than 200 years. You can read the original here. It is this deleted paragraph, however, that most inspires reflections on what might have been (and what might not):

“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”

Now on to the present day’s ethics concerns...

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End Of Week Ethics Wrap-Up, July 1, 2022: Freakouts, Freakouts Everywhere….[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Prelude: Why is the President of the United States attacking the Supreme Court in Madrid? His comments about a judicial body deliberating on the Constitution is not only wildly inappropriate for a President speaking abroad, his words were either calculated to make ignorant Americans even more ignorant about what the Court is, or show that he doesn’t understand himself (or no longer does). Biden called the Dobbs decision “outrageous behavior.” A SCOTUS ruling isn’t “behavior”; even Dred Scott wasn’t “behavior.” These are scholarly judicial analyses. Then he accused the Court of being “the one thing that has been destabilizing” to the nation. The Supreme Court? Upholding the Constitution is maintaining the foundation of the democracy: how is that destabilizing? Holding political show trials to try to find something that the previous President can be jailed for is destabilizing. Threatening parents who challenge indoctrinating school boards is destabilizing. Not enforcing U.S. laws at the border is destabilizing. Attacking the Supreme Court is destabilizing.

Then Biden said that Dobbs was “essentially challenging the right to privacy.” No it wasn’t, but let’s reflect back on an earlier incoherent and dim-witted statement Biden made about abortion after the Alito opinion leaked:

“I mean, so the idea that we’re going to make a judgment that is going to say no one can make a judgment to choose to abort a child based upon a decision by the Supreme Courts, I think goes way overboard.

Of course, the decision didn’t say, in May or now, that “no one can make a judgement to have an abortion.” I think Biden was and is shooting off his mouth without reading the opinion. But never mind that: he said “abort a child.” Not only does he approve of abortion, but regards it as killing a child, and must think that “privacy” includes virtual infanticide. Oh, I know, he doesn’t know what he thinks: he used to claim that there was no right to abortion. But if he’s that muddled on the issue, and he is, what business does he have impugning the decision of SCOTUS justices wrestling with difficult topic—in Spain—at all?

1. Oh, why not? Here are some more Dobbs freakouts:

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“The Cassidy Hutchinson Fiasco”…Addendum

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Lest I be accused of minimizing the Cassidy Hutchinson testimony before the House January 6 Star Chamber this week, I direct EA readers to to this National Review article by the usually fair and perceptive Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor. He calls the testimony “devastating” and inveighs, “Things will not be the same after this.“

I don’t know what he thinks isn’t going to be the same; maybe you can enlighten me. Are there really people out there who will be surprised that Trump threw tantrums, objects and ketchup bottles, or that when he was angry and excited, he was irrational? Does McCarthy really not know that many Presidents, in private, with staff, in meetings, and similarly dealing with the most stressful jobs imaginable, have behaved outrageously, except that in their case did not have dozens of leakers, disloyal aides and other staff and others determined to undermine them as well as an almost unanimously hostile press to publicize rumors, gossip, suspicions and facts indiscriminately? Really? Presidents, as a group, are not normal or emotionally healthy: if they were, they wouldn’t have sought the Presidency or achieved it. Is Trump worse than most, or even all in this regard? Maybe, probably; why do you think Ethics Alarms kept repeating for over a year that he must never be elected? Does McCarthy not know the history of the Type A CEO personality in this country? About Henry Ford employing a guy whose sole job was to chop the desks of fired Ford Executive into kindling so they would know they had been fired? Nevertheless, the fact that Trump acted and talked like anyone paying attention knew he would act and talk doesn’t mean he committed crimes.

Furthermore, once again we are getting “Trump wanted to do X” and “Trump said Y” while his staff and the Secret Service obstructed him when his stated desires were extreme, rash, an abuse of power, or just plain nuts. The staff did their jobs, in other words, just like dozens of Presidential staffs have done in other administrations. I’m impressed, in fact: Trump, thanks to the most competent old hands in the Washington swamp being bullied away or scared off for fear of becoming pariahs and not getting invited to swank Capital Hill wine parties, had a distinctly sub-par batch of advisors. They came through when they had to. Good for them. They were far from the first to stop a POTUS from doing stupid or reckless things.

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The Jan. 6 House Witch Hunt Just Gets Worse And Worse As The MSM Cheers: The Cassidy Hutchinson Fiasco

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

This is a “Bias Makes You Stupid” spectacular. It’s kind of sad, really. The Democrats, the NeverTrump Republicans and the disgraced news media hate Donald Trump so, so much that they have allowed confirmation bias and desperation make total fools of them all. Oh, the American who are dim, gullible, ignorant or just as warped by hate and bias won’t notice, but it’s still a tragic spectacle.

I’m not watching the hearings; sock drawer emergency, you know. I didn’t learn about 23-year-old, Cassidy Hutchinson, the aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, testifying before the single-minded, hyper-partisan “Get Trump” “commission” until I was snagged by the title of a column in Commentary by my old friend (acquaintance, really) John Podhoretz, its editor. The title was “Trump Is In Deep, Deep, Deep, Deep Trouble.” John—I love ya, man, but—is a true NeverTrumper, and he was positively giddy over what he saw as damning revelations from Cassidy under oath. “If what she has testified to, sworn under oath, is not countered or contradicted by Meadows or Trump’s White House counsel Pat Cippolone,” he wrote, “then there is a credible criminal case that Trump violated the law in ways not dealt with by the second impeachment, and from which he would not be shielded by executive privilege…she has reported directly on things that went on inside the White House and around the Oval Office on January 5 and January 6 that go beyond the merely circumstantial.”

I read John’ piece, and I couldn’t imagine what he thought was so explosive. Most of her testimony, as far as I can see, is hearsay. John informed his readers,”You’re going to hear people call this ‘hearsay.’ It is not hearsay. It is direct testimony of contemporaneous things said in Hutchinson’s earshot about events that were taking place while she was listening.”

John is a smart guy, but he isn’t a lawyer, and most of what Cassidy testified to is hearsay. It is hearsay whenever one person’s account of what a second person said is used to prove that what the second person said is true. It doesn’t matter if the speaker she is quoting was describing events “contemporaneous” ti when she was listening. It still doesn’t prove what she heard others say was true. For example, Podhoretz writes, “She reported Meadows saying of the chant to hang Vice President Mike Pence that Trump “doesn’t want to do anything,” and that “he thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”

A. So what? and B. That doesn’t prove Trump felt or thought or even said anything of the kind, and isn’t evidence, except of what Meadows said he thought Trump thought. Maybe.

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Ethics Dunce, “Shut Up And Sing” Division: Halsey

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I was surprise to learn that this will be the second Ethics Alarms post involving the pop singer Halsey, the first coming in 2018. It involved her claim that hotels failing to have free little bottles of shampoo and conditioner that were good for guests who didn’t have “white people hair” was a “microaggression.” Now she’s in the ethics crosshairs because she decided to treat her captive concert audience three days ago in Phoenix to a rant about abortion rights, saying in part (angrily, of course), that audience members…

…should be sharing stories about how you’ve benefited from abortion somehow….The truth is that my heart breaks looking out into this audience, because I see so many people … who deserve the right to health care that they need. Who deserve the right to choose themselves in a situation where there is a choice….some of the people I’m looking at right now are going to need an abortion one day, and you deserve that. Whether it’s a life-threatening situation, or it’s not, you deserve it. And here in Arizona, you guys gotta promise me that you’re gonna do that work so that the person to the left of you and to the right of you has that right for the rest of their lives.

Got it. She’s an inarticulate moron. Then she told any dissenters in the throng,

If you don’t like it, you can go home right now. I don’t care. If you don’t like it, I don’t know why you came to a Halsey concert.

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Once Again, An Analysis Of A SCOTUS Decision Is Distorted By Emotion And Ignorance

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

This is a problem. And I’m just talking now about the previous SCOTUS ruling that launched a freak-out yesterday. As you probably know by now, the leaked SCOTUS ruling rebuffing Roe v. Wade is no longer a leak.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to strike down a restrictive “needs-based” concealed carry laws in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.  Even though Justice Thomas’s majority opinion was tight and clear as well as consistent with SCOTUS precedent as well as, of course, the Bill of Rights, such worthies as President Biden claimed that, in the President’s words, the ruling contradicted “common sense and the Constitution.”

What are the odds that Joe read the opinion before declaring that? I’d say “none.” Making such a statement while carrying the presumed authority of President without knowing what the Court’s analysis was is completely unethical and an abuse of position.

David Harsanyi, writing at RealClearPolitics, accurately writes,

The modern left doesn’t even bother pretending they believe the Supreme Court has a responsibility to act as a separate branch of government and adjudicate the constitutionality of law. Rather than even ostensibly offering legal reasons for their ire, Democrats simply demand the Supreme Court uphold public sentiment (or, rather what they claim is public sentiment), even though SCOTUS exists to ignore those pressures. The fact that that attitude has congealed as the norm in one of our major political parties does not bode well for the future of the Republic.

It is particularly disheartening that the three liberal justices in their dissent stooped to fueling this distortion of the Court’s role. Their arguments were almost all irrelevant to the  constitutional issues and the Court’s previous rulings regarding the Second Amendment. Instead, Sotomayor, Breyer and Kagan took the low road of evoking recent shootings and incidents of gun violence as if current events should permit the limiting of explicit Constitutional rights. 

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PM Ethics Pie, 6/23/2022: Guns, Mostly

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

On this date in 1972, the eventual ethics train wreck known as Title IX was passed. Its stated purpose was to prohibit sexual desecration on federally funded campuses, but since most of that discrimination was against women, the law was eventually weaponized to be an anti-male measure, notably by the Obama administration and its pressure on schools to employ a presumed guilty approach to student accusations of sexual harassment and assault. Title IX or something like it was clearly needed, but the law stands as a useful example of how, when a failure of ethics makes it necessary for law to step in, the law too often mucks things up.

1. Pop Ethics Quiz!

That’s a fantastic duo-costume at a cos-play convention: Peter Pan and his shadow! But is it offensive? Isn’t that “blackface”? If not, why not? Of course it isn’t supposed to evoke minstrel shows or be denigrating to blacks, but neither was Laurence Olivier’s make-up to play Othello on film. Define the rule for me. Continue reading →

I Lost On This Issue, But I Was Right

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The New York Times tells us today, “Psychosis, Addiction, Chronic Vomiting: As Weed Becomes More Potent, Teens Are Getting Sick.”

Gee.

Who could have predicted such a thing?

Some of the more intense discussions on Ethics Alarms, primarily with libertarians, arose from the unshakable position here that the government’s capitulation to marijuana legalization efforts would accomplish nothing but short and long-term damage to vulnerable populations, the young, and the nation generally. I saw the writing on the cultural wall long ago, when arrogant elites in entertainment, politics, journalism and other spheres declared pot “cool,” and my college associates began seeking to sit around bleary-eyed and moronic to actually having interesting discussions and doing things.

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