“bias makes you stupid”

Unethical Tweet Of The Month: The Portland Police Bureau

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Portland tweet

There are many Ethics Alarms categories the tweet above would fit neatly into, like Ethics Dunce, Unethical Quote of the Week, evidence of The rampages of the Great Stupid, res ipsa loquitur, signature significance and others. I wonder if it is something else as well, like coherent civilization’s death rattle.

The Portland police felt constrained to issue that announcement after a police officer in Portland opened fire at a deranged man who charged him with a screwdriver. The man was shot dead in what all reports indicate was self-defense. This was apparently a “suicide by cop.” Quickly, at least 50 protesters converged at the Motel 6 where the episode occurred, and what looked like it could quickly turn into a violent riot was looming. The mob “began yelling, throwing items at officers, and attempting to interfere with the investigation,” Portland Police Bureau said. Videos showed many black-clad protesters chanting the anti-police phrase “Fuck 12.” A officer’s baton was grabbed as she was pulled toward the crowd; another protester sprayed an officer with pepper spray. One police car had its tires punctured and a window broken. Meanwhile, the Antifa distributed flyers calling the incident another example of racist police brutality against the black community.

So, acting quickly, the Portland police issued the tweet, assuring everyone that it was a white man who was killed. No worries! The nation was made just a little bit better and less racist. one more whitey down!

Naturally, the mob dispersed, and there was no more threatened violence.

The officer involved in the shooting was black. “Our officer encountered a very difficult and dynamic situation that no officer wants to face,” Police Chief Chuck Lovell said at the scene.“I want to assure the community that we’re committed to a full, thorough and complete investigation.”

Hey, never mind, Chuck! The guy was white! Nobody cares.

When an officer shot a black teen preparing to stab another young woman with a knife, there was a riot. When police shot an accused black rapist who was armed with a knife and preparing to drive off with his alleged victim’s children, there were riots. When a black man resisting arrest was shot after trying to fire a taser at an officer, there were riots. When a black man who had tried to take an officer’s weapon away while resisting arrest was fatally shot as he rushed the much smaller officer, there were riots. When a black woman was accidentally shot in the cross-fire between police and her boyfriend began the exchange of bullets, there were riots.

But once the crack Portland Police made it clear that it was only some sick white dude who was killed, all was well.

Rueful observations:

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Sunday Ethics Affirmation, 6/27/2021: “Life Is Unfair, Suck It Up” Edition [Cont.]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

[back to where we were before I was so rudely interrupted…by life, ironically enough…]

3. Baseball Ethics: Sticky stuff update! Baseball’s sudden emergency crack-down on pitchers using various versions of glue on the ball to make it go faster and be curvier caught its first cheater today: Seattle Mariners left-hander Héctor Santiago was ejected from today’s game against the White Sox by home plate umpire Phil Cuzzi after a between-innings foreign substance inspection. Santiago’s glove was confiscated. If the glove indeed shows the presence of a forbidden substance, the pitcher will be subject to a ten-day suspension under the terms of Major League Baseball’s new enforcement of the prohibition against ball doctoring. There is some skepitcism that the test will prove Santiago guilty, since it is believed that nobody could be so stupid as to try to keep using “sticky stuff” this week, knowing that they will be checked. On the other hand, Gerrit Cole, the 2019 Cy Young winner who has been widely suspected of being a “sticky stuff” addict, apparently went cold turkey. Today, against the Red Sox, his pitches were spinning much slower than usual, and he got clobbered, giving up 6 runs, 8 hits and 3 homer in just five innings. A coincidence, I’m sure…

4. Tales of The Great Stupid: Apparently the mainstream news media decided that this was just too embarrassing and might hurt the cause of mad wokism…because so far, it has managed to ignore it. A National Archives’ task force on racism determined that the structure, which houses the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights demonstrates “structural racism,” portraying the Founding Fathers and other “white men” too positively, since it “lauds wealthy White men in the nation’s founding while marginalizing BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and other People of Color], women, and other communities.” The report also calls for “trigger warnings” to be put in place with historical content to “forewarn audiences of content that may cause intense physiological and psychological symptoms.” Cassie Smedile, executive director of conservative group America Rising, called the report “the radical Left’s latest attempt to sow division and rewrite our history.” No, it’s the latest example of the progressive mainstream as it has metastasized to reject the idea of the United States of America. Blame Obama, who appointed National Archivist David Ferriero in 2009, and the Senate, which confirmed him, and President Trump, who didn’t have the foresight to fire him. He assembled and commissioned the task force, meaning he knew exactly what he would get. Ferriero claimed the task force was necessary in light of George Floyd’s death last year, the report notes. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense: an example of local police misconduct in Minneapolis without any demonstrable racial motive or animus mandates another trashing of Jefferson, Madison, Washington and the rest. [Pointer: A.S.]

Brilliant.

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Once Again The Courts Step In To Prevent Woke Discrimination

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

believe all survivors

Say what you will about the Trump Education Department, the fact that it reversed the anti-due process bullying of the Obama administration, which threatened colleges and universities that did not use a presumption of guilt to investigate accusations of campus sexual harassment and assault, was laudable and ethical. Now the Biden administration is in the process of reversing the reversal, as it once again embraces a “believe all women” context for such cases. (Well, “believe all women” except in cases where the Governor of New York and the president of the United States aren’t involved—but that’s another story.)

Fortunately, we have the courts, which are being kept especially busy as the progressives in power try to run roughshod over that damnably inconvenient Constitution thingy. This month the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the disingenuous argument by the University of Minnesota that they weren’t stacking the deck against accused male football players due to their gender, but rather tilting the process toward their accusers because the school was biased against all students accused of sexual misconduct. Riiiight, the Court concluded:

“The district court concluded that a university’s bias in favor of the victims of sexual assault does not establish a reasonable inference of bias against male students, citing Doe v. University of St. Thomas, 240 F. Supp. 3d 984, 991 (D. Minn. 2017). While the circumstances here also give rise to a plausible inference of bias in favor of sexual assault victims rather than against males, “[s]ex discrimination need not be the only plausible explanation or even the most plausible explanation for a Title IX claim to proceed.” Schwake, 967 F.3d at 948; see Columbia Univ., 831 F.3d at 57. Thus, we reverse the district court’s dismissal of the Does’ Title IX discrimination claims.“

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“Systemic Racism” Update

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I need a graphic for “The Great Stupid,” but until I get one, that clip above from Ed Wood’s masterpiece, “Plan Nine From Outer Space,” will have to do. I have to check back and find out which generous reader sent me this after I asked if there was a “Stupid, stupid!” equivalent of the “Madness! Madness!” clip from “Bridge Over The River Kwai.” That’s the immortal Dudley Manlove uttering those words, by the way. And that was his real name!

Update: Commenter Wallphone found the “Plan Nine” clip, and has my enduring gratitude.

Here are some especially annoying recent developments on the incoherent “systemic racism” front.

1. Philonase Floyd, the brother of the late, great,George Floyd, said, following the sentencing of Derek Chauvin, “I just want to reiterate: not just black lives matter, all lives matter.” Strangely, he was not immediately condemned as a racist or racially insensitive and forced to apologize like so many others who were hounded mercilessly for saying “all lives matter.” Of course, the explanation is that Floyd’s skin shade gives him license to say “all lives matter.”

I only want to know the rules, that’s all. That seems like a reasonable request. But the systemic racism scam is truly Calvinball.The rules are made up and changed according to whatever is expedient at the time. Incidentally, there is a politician named Calvin Ball who is the county executive of Howard County, Maryland. Guess his party and race. [Hint: He’s allowed to say “All lives matter.”]

2. There has to be some designation for the cowards and enablers of rising totalitarianism that accurately describes sniveling traitors to democracy like Charlette LeFevre and Philip Lipson, the directors of Capitol Hill Pride in Seattle. I was considering the “Winston Smith Award,” but that seems unfair to Orwell’s tragic hero.

The two sent a letter to the Seattle Human Rights Commission that said,

“It has come to our attention that an event called ‘Take B(l)ack Pride’ at the Jimi Hendrix public park June 26th is charging Whites only admission as reparations. We consider this reverse discrimination in its worse form and we feel we are being attacked for not supporting due to disparaging and hostile e-mails. We will never charge admission over the color of a person’s skin and we resent being attacked for standing in those values.”

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America Last: Good News And Bad News At The Same Time

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Reuters-Survey-Trust-In-Media-June-2021

As you can see in the chart above, a report released by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford and the University of Oxford found that out of 46 nations surveyed the US public ranks last in its trust of the news media at 29%. The study surveyed 92,000 news consumers in those countries. Finland finished first with a trust rate of 65%.

I doubt that Finland’s journalists deserve that much more trust, which is one reason the report is good news for the United States. I think it is highly likely that the journalists everywhere else suffer from the same arrogance, relative lack of intellectual depth, and hive-mind leanings as U.S. journalists. I think that the U.S. public’s lack of trust shows growing and essential understanding of the true nature of what has become a corrupt and dangerous false profession that does not serve the interests of the people as it is pledged to according to journalistic ethics, but its own. Nor do I believe the U.S. has the worst and most unethical journalists in the world—far from it, I suspect. The U.S. has the journalists with the most freedom, making it especially easy to do their job as dishonestly as they do; yet unlike in many of those nations, their government isn’t forcing American journalists to substitute spin, distortion and propaganda for the truth.

The U.S. public has, finally, had its blinders ripped off, and is no longer under the delusion that they are being informed by altruistic and dedicated pros who only seek to reveal the facts necessary for us to live our lives as we choose to. Knowledge is power, and while our news media is wielding their control over knowledge to transfer power to their political allies, the public, at least most of it, has acquired crucial knowledge to neutralize it: the knowledge that that are not trustworthy.

Unfortunately, the bad news aspect of the study’s finding is arguably worse than the good news is encouraging. Democracy cannot function without a trustworthy news media, or as the Founders called it, “press.” Journalism rot is an existential threat.

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Objective Take-Aways From Fiona Hill’s “Fire Alarm” Story

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Fiona Hill

I know how I missed this: I won’t watch CNN, and especially not the ridiculous Don Lemon, unless there’s the equivalent of a gun at my head. I finally caught wind of it when a New York Times’ hard left op-ed writers, Nick Kristoff (who is one of the few rational ones in that group) referenced the tale as if it is indisputable proof of President Trump’s awfulness. On June 16, Fiona Hill, once Trump’s top Russia adviser, told Don Lemon that she was so upset at how Trump’s 2018 press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin was proceeding that she looked for a fire alarm to pull and considered faking a medical emergency when she couldn’t find one, just to disrupt it. “I just thought, let’s cut this off and try to end it. I couldn’t come up with anything that just wouldn’t add to the terrible spectacle,” Hill said on “Don Lemon Tonight.”

The “terrible spectacle” she was trying to avoid was that Trump refused to support US intelligence conclusions that Russia had tried to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Her self-glorifying account—at least to Trump-haters—didn’t get much coverage beyond CNN: little from the mainstream media, none from the conservative media. I sense, however, based on Kristof’s use of it, that it is destined to be wielded by Democrats as a “this is how terrible it was to have Donald Trump as President” story evermore.

But what Hill’s grandstanding really reveals is something every different, which is how this President, unlike all those before him, was sabotaged actively and passively by members of his own staff and administration who didn’t like him, trust him, respect him, or believe that he was a legitimate President. The media-derided term for what Trump had to contend with was the “deep state,” which had a conspiratorial ring and allowed those who correctly reported what was flamingly obvious to be ridiculed as paranoid. That term, however, was misleading.

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What Its Fraudulent Anti-Gun Video Reveals About “Change the Ref”And Everyone Applauding it

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Change the Ref

The anti-gun group “Change the Ref” pretended to represent a fake school, “James Madison Academy,” when they invited former NRA president David Keene to give a speech at a graduation ceremony. He was told that he was participating in a rehearsal, as he addressed a stadium of empty chairs. Another gun rights advocate, John Lott Jr., also was lured into the trap by the same ruse.

In reality, the group was filming an anti-gun video. As Keene exhorted the imaginary students to revere the Second Amendment, the video added audio from 911 calls, and the sounds of terrified students during an active shooter episode (or simulations of them). Keene addressed empty chairs, 3,044 of them, allegedly representing children and teenagers who were shot and killed before they could graduate from high school, though he wasn’t told that. Just a rehearsal! After they provided the desired footage to be used against their cause, Keene and Lott were told that the ceremony was canceled.

Change the Ref was founded by Patricia and Manuel Oliver, parents of a boy killed in the Parkland, Florida, shooting. The video is called the “The Lost Class.” Powerful! Clever! Also dishonest, unfair, disrespectful, unforgivably unethical and one more thing: signature significance. A group that would do this is untrustworthy. Nothing it says or publishes can be trusted; none of its arguments can be taken at face value; none of its statistics or analysis can be relied upon by anyone. With this video and its abuse of Lott and Keene, Change the Ref exposes itself as practicing “by any means possible” warfare, not legitimate policy advocacy. It believes that the ends justify the means—their ends. It is a perfect match for the current progressive movement, which has taken an ominous turn to totalitarian strategies with its full embrace of Alinskyism.

Good to know.

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“Systemic Racism” Review

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Triangle-Chart-Racism

[Many thanks to Steve Witherspoon for the chart above!]

These stories are proliferating at such a rate that they could easily take over the blog, or worse, explode my head permanently. I can’t begin to cover them all, but my plan is to periodically gather them up in one post, like this one. The claim of systemic racism” has been a handy dandy way to exploit a low point in public embarrassment over some recent distorted and misrepresented incidents as well the undeniable legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in America. Now it is being pushed as a wedge to justify anti-white racism, double standards, restrictions on expression and speech, various forms of discrimination to benefit minority groups, power grabs in multiple institutions across society based on “reckoning” rather than merit or logic, the transformation of the education system into a propaganda indoctrination machine, and tangentially related “social justice” reforms, including creeping Marxism.

There are signs that the purveyors of the systemic racism narrative, including Critical Race Theory, are pushing rapidly toward a tipping point where public sympathy and tolerance will collapse, as well as indications that the ranks of citizens with the courage and civic responsibility to oppose this madness are growing. In both cases, however, it needs to happen faster.

Here are some recent highlights:

  • A large portion of the “systemic racism” brigade is steeped in hypocrisy, much as the #MeToo movement proved itself only offended by sexual harassment by public figures who proved useful in other respects. The Washington Free Beacon asked all 50 Democratic members of the Senate, as well as the Congressional Black Caucus and the NAACP, for for reactions to the weekend’s revelation that R.I. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, last heard cheering on the adoption of the Juneteenth national holiday, was still a member of Bailey’s Beach Club in Newport, a whites-only private club. None of them responded.

Unlike so much of what Democrats attribute to systemic racism, segregated private clubs are relics of systemic racism. One would think the Democratic Party would speak with one voice on this matter. Nope.

I don’t know how anyone can take a party, an organization or an elected official seriously who refused to hold its members and allies to the same standards it purports to care so deeply about. Continue reading →

A Non-Apology Apology From Ft. Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis That Is Such A Non-Apology That It Doesn’t Even Include “Apologize” Or “Sorry”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

-trantalis-gay-pride-stonewall-picture

The United States has a serious apology problem. People who should not be apologizing are doing so anyway, because they are intimidated by woke mobs and too cowardly to resist. Others, particularly elected officials, are refusing to apologize even when it is clear that an apology is owed. What’s going on here?

Weenies and assholes, essentially. “Townhall” political editor Guy Benson neatly summed up that dichotomy with a tweet:

Benson tweet

Ellie Kemper is an actress who did nothing wrong, but was forced into apologizing anyway (Ethics Alarms pronounced her a “prostrating weenie” here.) Whitehouse, the Democratic Rhode Island Senator and vocal “antiracism” shill, was exposed as a sickening hypocrite, and excused himself, apology-free, by explaining that the exclusive club he belongs to has remained white-only out of “long tradition.” Weenie, meet Asshole. Which of these invasive species does more damage is open to debate; personally, I vote for the weenies.

Ft. Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis is in the other category, and, like Whitehouse, spectacularly so.

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: American Bar Association President Patricia Lee Rufo

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Rufo

 

“The American Bar Association is deeply troubled by the recent proliferation of hate speech directed against members of the Jewish faith and at LGBTQ, Asian American and Muslim communities. Such hateful behavior, coming in the wake of attacks on African Americans and other groups, have serious consequences as studies show a correlation between exposure to hate speech and the increase in hate crimes. Hate speech also serves to legitimize intolerance, reinforce stereotypes and further discrimination. We must not let any messages of hatred be normalized if we hope to advance the rule of law to achieve an inclusive society.“

Patricia Lee Rufo, the 2021 president of the American Bar Association, in an official statement last week.

This is disgraceful, and in so many ways. Imagine: the head of the largest lawyers’ association in the country authored that collection of vagaries, buzz words and wokisms in a naked virtue-signaling exercise with no substantive value at all, but with significant sinister potential. Worse, nobody at the ABA had the guts or integrity to tell her, “Uh, Patricia, that’s just plain embarrassing. We can’t put our name on that!” Also…

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