“bias makes you stupid”

BREAKING! I Was Hoaxed Again! “Behold Portland’s Holiday Thing! (How Progressives Get This Way and Can They Be Cured?)” Is Officially Retracted

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

UPDATE!

Well this is all I needed on a busy day that just included me re-injuring my leg after being pulled off my feet by Spuds. The post below is based on a hoax, and damn the hoaxers to hell. Spreading false stories on the web is unethical, and satire sites are obligated to signal when a post is intended as parody. A few notes:

1. Thanks to the crack EA commentariate for flagging this.

2. The fake story is still up on the usually reliable conservative commentary site Victory Girls, which linked to the fake story I used.

The VG Naughty List: Just A Few

3. I was fooled because first, none of the quotes sounded unlikely given what we have heard and witnessed in Portland in the recent past, and

4. I had never seen a “butt plug” before.I apologize to Ethics Alarms readers and the City of Portland. I try to be careful, but this time I was fooled.

5. Apparently the hoax was inspired by Portland’s city officials this year referring to their annual tree lighting event as just “the tree” or “winter tree,” deliberately omitting the word “Christmas.” Typical dumb Portland wokeness at work: if the hoaxers had only made it clear what they were spoofing, I’d call it a successful and well-deserved satire.

6. I apologize to all, including the City of Portland, for my error.

***

I missed this, which happened about a week ago, in part because I view Portland as a lost cause. You know those zombie apocalypse movies where the survivors will say, sadly, “Boston’s gone, San Diego’s gone”? Portland’s gone, and has been for a long time. I would say it’s Patient Zero for Trump Derangement, woke insanity, anti-Americanism and The Great Stupid, except there are so many other candidates: New York City, California, Minnesota. None of them, however, have descended so far into incompetent cultural madness as Portland, as exemplified by the Christmas, sorry, Holiday Thing the city unveiled this month.

Portland officially replaced its traditional Christmas tree—to be fair, it’s so hard to find evergreen trees in Oregon these days—with that whatever it is above. Officials described the holiday display as “bold,” “inclusive,” and “a meaningful departure from tree-based expectations.”

How far gone do you have to be to utter the words “tree-based expectations” without feeling ridiculous?

City leaders, presumably the same ones who let Black Lives Matter take over parts of the city five year sago, explained the traditional Christmas tree ultimately failed to reflect Portland’s “evolving” relationship with holidays. Thus the “inclusive” replacement, officials said, is intentionally ambiguous, streamlined, and designed to invite interpretation.

I, for example, interpret it as “meaningless, joyless crap.”

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Gee, Who Couldn’t See This Coming? Oh, Right: Just About Everybody…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Except me.

It used to be that I could count on a tsunami of comments and clicks when I aired my unalterable conviction that pot, weed, cannabis, marijuana, what ever you want to call the junk, was a blight on civilization, that legalizing it would be a big net loss on society, and that the elite advocates for legalization were selfish, irresponsible creeps who wanted their little highs at the cost of kids, the poor, and the less-than-bright harming themselves, their families, their employers and their future prospects. Once the states started giving up after the culture had pushed them into the mendacity that the drug was as harmless as Junior Mints, I gave up too. I was right, they were wrong, the embrace of stoned kids and adults would be one more malady in a nation where we have too many already, but the metaphorical genie was out of its bottle and there is stuffing it back in.

At this point in my life, the whole subject just ticks me off.

Now comes “expert” Aaron E. Caroll to explain that yes, well, we really did legalize grass before we really knew what the hell we were doing. [Gift link!] Huh! Who would have thought it? He writes,

“…we should acknowledge that policy moved faster than the evidence on public health effects. The challenge is whether we are willing to adjust course when we encounter unintended consequences…”

I wouldn’t call consequences that were completely predictable and likely “unintended.” The spoiled grown-up (sort of) college kids who just wanted their bongs had plenty of people—like me—telling them that siding with Cheech and Chong was irresponsible and reckless, but they didn’t care about kids, the workplace, side-effects, any of it. Next he writes in part,

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Holly Mathnerd Is Right that Effective Gun Control Is Impossible Without Govt. Gun Confiscation by Force, But Doesn’t Everyone Know That?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Right on cue, the Brown mass shooting was instantly the inspiration for the usual gang of anti-Second Amendment zealots, utopians,”Imagine” fans, fact-phobic progressives and nascent totalitarians (funny how they hang out together…huh!) to again scream for “common sense gun control.” Joe Biden did it, or whoever was standing near him barely moving their lips or pretending to drink a glass of water.

Last week, quirky, smart, logic-obsessed substacker Holly Mathnerd issued a typically thoughtful essay called “The Reality of Nationwide Gun Control…the math behind the policy.” Holly gifted me with a subscription to her blog a while back as a gesture of professional courtesy so I pass her analysis on to you. I have written essentially this exact post on Ethics Alarms before and long ago, however, and probably more than once. My reaction to Holly’s work is, “Yes, of course. Why do we keep having to explain this?” Her delivery is a lot less abrasive than mine, so if that helps, great.

Gun control is also on my list of policy objectives that I view as unethical because they are impossible, and arguing for them is 1) a waste of time, 2) misleads the slow of wit into thinking they aren’t impossible when they are, 3) constitute virtue-signaling and 4) would be terrible mistakes even if they weren’t impossible. Read Holly’s whole argument, but the short version is…

If “nationwide gun control” is going to mean anything more than a slogan, it has to be defined in operational terms. Not aspirations. Not values. Mechanics. Logistics. Physical Reality. What specific actions actual humans would have to take with their human bodies in the material world.

In a country with roughly 450 million privately held firearms already in circulation, nationwide gun control cannot mean preventing future purchases alone. Even a total ban on new sales would leave hundreds of millions of existing weapons untouched for decades. So the policy people are implicitly calling for is not regulation at the margin, but the systematic reduction of the existing stock of guns. That requires locating them.

There is no way to meaningfully restrict, reclaim, or eliminate privately owned firearms without first knowing who has them and where they are. Which means a comprehensive national registry: mandatory disclosure of ownership, backed by penalties for noncompliance, with mechanisms for verification. Anything less is symbolic. Once a registry exists, enforcement becomes unavoidable. Some people will comply. Many will not. Some will be confused, some distrustful, some quietly resistant.

That resistance is not an edge case; it is a certainty at this scale. At that point, enforcement ceases to be abstract. It becomes door-to-door. This is the moment where “nationwide gun control” stops sounding like a policy preference and starts sounding like a domestic enforcement regime. Warrants. Searches. Seizures. Follow-ups. Informants. Penalties for concealment. Escalation when compliance is refused.

There is no clean or frictionless version of this process, and no serious proposal pretends otherwise once you spell it out.

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Most Unethical Substack Essay of the Month: David Hirsch

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I know this guy (not the guy in the picture: that’s Ben Stiller as “Mr. Furious” in “Mystery Men”), an opinionated retired lawyer convinced of his own intellectual superiority. I was still surprised at the bias and incompetence of his recent substack post titled “Trump: Death by Yesbuts.” Yet because it is another manifestation of extreme Trump Derangement, my Trump Deranged Facebook friend, another retired lawyer whose intellect is to Mr. Hirsch’s as Elon Musk’s is to a sea sponge, actually linked to this thing approvingly on Facebook. It is to weep. Is stupidity contagious now? Do we need a vaccine?

The author signals his incompetence and ethical vacuum in his very first paragraph by mocking jurors in a hung jury who told him, “Of course there was a reasonable doubt, but he was guilty.” We are not even told which side the jurors voted for, a factor rather crucial to making sense out of his analogy. That statement by itself would be consistent in the mouths of any of the jurors in Reginald Rose’s “Twelve Angry Men” who finally acquit the almost certainly guilty accused because the prosecution didn’t sufficiently prove the case against him. It was very reasonable for any juror to conclude that the kid committed the murder but that nonetheless, he was not proven guilty in court. In fact, this was my conclusion after watching the whole O.J. Simpson trial.

The rest of the article quickly devolves into standard anti-Trump distortions, name-calling and bias, as well as the familiar narrative discussed in my previous post. Hirsch writes,

Back in 2017, [Trump] told the Conservative Police Action Conference that “Nobody loves the First Amendment more than me.” But, he added, “The fake news doesn’t tell the truth. It doesn’t represent the people. It never will represent the people. We’re going to do something about it.”

In other words, “Yes, but….” “Freedom of speech” is a great phrase but the speech better not say bad things about me!

False translation, but then bias makes you stupid. Fake news doesn’t serve the people. Fake news is a blight on democracy, and it is very important to do something about it. Trump was not talking about news “saying bad things,” he was talking about the deliberate manipulation of facts for partisan gain.

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Rob Reiner’s Legacy, Part II: Madness

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Major Tipton is an appropriate host to this post, because, like the main character in the movie the Major memorably closes with that word, Rob Reiner was a good man turned in-side out ethically and rationally by powerful influences he was unable to resist. In Part I of this series inspired by the great director’s terrible death along with his wife at the hands of their son, I explained why I felt that Reiner’s decent into extreme and often humiliating Leftist cant should not diminish our regard for him as an artist, and why his political activism is best seen as a cautionary tale about how bias, implanted by one’s culture, can make one stupid unless eternal vigilance and self-examination are regularly applied.

To illustrate the extent of Rob Reiner’s deterioration inflicted on him by the Hollywood progressive culture, I am re-posting two essays from the Ethics Alarms archives, one from 2022, and the final post involving Reiner before the sad ones today.

First up, From The “Res Ipsa Loquitur”Files: Rob Reiner Provides A “Bias Makes You Stupid” Case Study (8/27/2022):

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Rob Reiner’s Legacy, Part I: The Artist

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Great movies. Classic movies. Movies that will have people laughing, crying and thinking for decades, and maybe centuries. That’s his legacy.

Reiner, a brilliant director and entertaining comic character actor died horribly with his wife last night, apparently murdered by their troubled son. Rob Reiner is the second Hollywood great whose end this year will always cast a shadow over his brilliant career, Gene Hackman being the other. It is so unfair when this happens, and it happens too often. I can’t watch Natalie Wood in a movie, not even “Miracle on 34th Street, ” without wondering if her husband Robert Wagner (I try not think about him at all) drowned her; I can’t watch Phillip Seymour Hoffman, one of the best actors in my lifetime, in any of his performances without my mind flashing back to his death from binging on heroin after seemingly conquering that addiction. Maybe it’s just me: I hope so.

I also hope conservative pundits and bloggers display more compassion, humanity and common sense than progressives and Democrats did when activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Reiner was an artist first and foremost, but he used his celebrity and resources to play at being a progressive activist and was really, really, really bad at it. Everyone will be doing him a great favor if they just ignore that embarrassing part of his life. Remember him for “THis is Spinal Tap,” “Stand by Me,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “The Princess Bride,” “A Few Good Men,” or one of his other films. Don’t let his Leftist craziness diminish your respect for his artistry. I regard his addiction to extreme progressive cant the equivalent of Hoffman’s addiction to heroin, or Spencer Tracy’s alcoholism.

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Prof. Turley Calls “False Light” on House Democrats Sleazy Epstein Photos Smear

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I hate that I am tempted to write this every day now, often several times a day, but how can anyone of good character and admirable values continue to support a political party, whatever its claimed beliefs are, that behaves this way?

Yesterday EA discussed the desperate Democratic Party tactic of picking 19 photos (out of thousands) that showed a young Donald Trump (and other progressive hate-objects, like Alan Dershowitz and Steve Bannon) in the company of sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein when he was known as just another billionaire on the celebrity party circuit or in the company of unidentified women. These were described in some of the Axis media as “bombshell” and “explosive” photos, though it is unclear when and where most of the photos were taken, many of them had been publicly released before, and none of them suggested any criminal, illicit or even unethical activity.

Despite that, political hack Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) had the gall to say, “These disturbing photos raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world. We will not rest until the American people get the truth.”

He might as well have added, “And we won’t stop lying about this phony Epstein scandal either until we Get Trump!”

Today Professor Jonathan Turley, a one-time Democrat who is obviously disgusted with Democrats, pointed out that what his former party has done with the photos is a classic example of a tort known as “false light,” where true photos are presented in a misleading and harmful way to damage a reputation or otherwise harm an individual via innuendo . It is essentially photographic deceit. He writes,

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An Inquirer Asks, “How Can I Stop My Wife From Badgering Our Friends About Climate Change?” How About….

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

…showing her that her hysteria is based on lies, bad stats, politicized “science” and hooey?

I admit it, that headline sucked me in to reading “Social Q’s,” a Times advice column that puts wokeness over wisdom, causing me to put it on the EA blacklist.

“My wife has become an eco-warrior,” a married weenie writes. “She has strong feelings about the environment and other people’s carbon footprints. She challenges our friends repeatedly about their lifestyle choices. I agree with her in principle, but I can’t support her moral outrage. …Help!“

Predictably, the column’s proprietor, Phillip Galanes, begins by saying, “I would begin by praising her, rightfully, for her commitment to an important issue.” I’ll fix it for him: “an important issue that nobody really knows much about, especially indoctrinated progressives who are passionate about what their bubble-mates are passionate about regardless of facts.”

Much better.

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So It’s Guilt By Association, Then? That’s It? Really, Democrats? Wow. Five Questions….

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

With great hoopla, Democrats have released photographs from the Dark Ages showing a young Donald Trump and other personages of note at social gatherings in the company of Jeffrey Epstein. “It’s unclear when all of these pictures were taken,” says NBC News. It also notes, “They do not appear to show illegal activity by these individuals,” and that Trump, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Steve Bannon and Woody Allen, among others, appeared among 19 photos out of more than 95,000 photos in the infamous Epstein Files.

Based on this, House Oversight Committee ranking member Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) actually said, he really did, “It is time to end this White House cover-up and bring justice to the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and his powerful friends.These disturbing photos raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world. We will not rest until the American people get the truth. The Department of Justice must release all the files, NOW.”

Why are those photographs “disturbing” except to someone who has already decided that they suggest something that isn’t in the photographs? [Q 1]

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: A Democratic House Member Says White Children Should Be Taught To Feel Guilty About Their Skin Color

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

What this says about her party and its ideological moorings is obvious. So is what it tells us about anyone who would vote for someone like this to have any power or influence over our society. We have had the “gotcha!” privilege debate here extensively in the 20-teens, and it was insufficiently slapped down to prevent the DEI and “presumed racism” pathogens.

The ethics mystery is why anyone white swallows this crap? I can see the advantages to minorities, since they can, by accepting it, absolve themselves of all failures, misdeeds and shortcomings. However, whites (and men) who fall for this argument are agreeing to be metaphorically hobbled, like Kunta Kinte in “Roots.” Worse, they are endorsing the hobbling of their children too.

I get why extreme, ruthless, unethical progressives push such garbage: it’s a means to an end, and the end is power. I do not understand why anyone privileged with a functioning brain and critical thinking skills tolerates officials like Stalker, never mind actually voting for her.