“bias makes you stupid”

Ethics Dunce: Actor Martin Sheen, and Anyone Who Gives Him a Platform or Who Pays Attention To Anything He Says….

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

In Michael Crichton’s terrific 2004 novel “State of Fear,” never made into a movie because it makes a strong case that the purveyors of climate change hysteria are just ignorant hooey-mongers, a character modeled on Martin Sheen travels to a tropical island suing the United States for alleged climate change damages and is eaten by cannibals. I was reminded of this episode when I read excerpts from his “blistering anti-Trump speech” on MSNBC yesterday.

Sheen epitomizes the “Shut up and act!” Hollywood activists, except that he is more afflicted with the Dunning-Kruger than most. He is neither particularly bright or well-educated, and is one of those fascinating actors who is successful playing characters smarter than he is, whereupon he gets confused and thinks that he is the smart one.

This is how desperate MSNBC was yesterday to find someone able to thrill its Trump Deranged audience: they stooped to allowing Sheen to rant interview with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace. What possible enlightenment does Sheen offer anyone on any topic not related to acting (which has been his full occupation since he was a teenager) , and what possible credentials does he have (more than, say, someone you hit with a rock thrown randomly into a crowd) to opine on the Trump Presidency? Does Sheen know he just played a President? Does Wallace? Does MSNBC?

Here is what that sad, sick network thought was worth broadcasting:

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Ethics Alarms Encore: “Unethical (And Stupid) Columbus Day Quote of the Decade: Kamala Harris”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

[ This was last year’s Columbus Day post, and I decided that I couldn’t improve on it, so up it goes again. It is, after all, the proverbial two-bird stone: a straight reminder of how much we, and the world, owe to Chris, and how narrowly we avoided electing a pandering idiot as President. Another Columbus Day Ethics Alarms post worth visiting is this one, because it has the link to Stan Freeberg’s immortal Columbus riff on his “Stan Freeberg Presents the United States of America,” one of the most inspired pieces of musical satire ever.

But back to Columbus Day: its cancellation in some woke-lobotomized states (Indigenous Peoples Day) was part of the “America is evil and we should all be ashamed” cultural poison that the Mad Left has been trying to choke our society with for a long time. President Trump has more pressing challenges as he takes on the herculean task—it compares to Herc cleaning out the Augean Stables, the last and most disgusting of his Twelve Labors—of repairing our culture, but clarifying the significance of Columbus finding the New World is part of it. Let’s be clear: by any utilitarian analysis the European migration to North America was a very good thing indeed, probably inevitable, and beneficial to the entire world. Thank-you, than-you, thank you, Columbus. ]

“European explorers ushered in a wave of devastation, violence, stealing land, and widespread disease.”

—Kamala Harris in 2021, pandering to the “America is a blight on the Earth and the world would have been better without it” bloc in the Democratic Party  in a Columbus Day address.

Boy, what an idiot. Continue reading →

Riddle Me This: “Why Is The Guthrie Theater Like Stephen Colbert?”

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

In “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” Louis Carroll’s Mad Hatter asks Alice the riddle, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” One would think that the question in the headline above is equally obscure (the Guthrie, in Minneapolis, is one of the most respected and celebrated regional theaters in the country) but it has an answer. Like the Colbert late night show, which has since its inception sought to exclude anyone who isn’t woke, obsessed with progressive politics or, since 2015, Trump Deranged, the Guthrie now aims at entertaining only that same audience, except in its case only the wealthy, white, upper-middle class demographic within that audience, or others willing to sit still for relentless leftist propaganda and cant.

A recent audience member for The Guthrie’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Dolls House” wrote about his experience. “A Doll’s House” is about as moldy a feminist tract as there is (I once called the play the drama equivalent of Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” but much longer, and even more over-exposed (it was written in 1879, so its analogies with the real state of womanhood, especially in the U.S., have been increasingly forced as time goes by. (No, her husband did not stop Nora from having an abortion: she would never have dreamed of killing an unborn child.)

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Two Sets of “Ten Journalism Principles,” One Honest and Aspirational, the Other a Flaming Violation of Itself

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Bari Weiss, founder of the Free Press, has sold the four-year-old independent and emphatically non-woke news site to CBS’s parent company Paramount for a reported $150 million. She was also appointed as the new editor-in-chief of CBS News.

Weiss left the New York Times with a damning letter of resignation after not being able to tolerate the paper’s flagrant Democratic and progressive bias. This morning CNN said that she “claimed” it was biased, just as Uri Berliner “claimed” that NPR is biased and Christopher Columbus “claimed” the world wasn’t flat. The New York Times and NPR (AND CBS, AND ABC, AND NBC…) are screamingly and undeniably biased to the extent that they can’t be said to be practicing trustworthy journalism at all.

Reportedly the CBS staff is freaking out over Weiss’s “10 core journalistic values” for the network news division. That the CBS culture is steeped in “advocacy journalism,” aka propaganda distribution, is proven by the fact that they are objecting to what was once accepted and standard journalistic values:

1.Journalism that reports on the world as it actually is.
2. Journalism that is fair, fearless, and factual.
3. Journalism that respects our audience enough to tell the truth plainly — wherever it leads.
4. Journalism that makes sense of a noisy, confusing world.
5. Journalism that explains things clearly, without pretension or jargon.
6. Journalism that holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny.
7. Journalism that embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices so that the audience can contend with the best arguments on all sides of a debate.
8. Journalism that rushes toward the most interesting and important stories, regardless of their unpopularity.
9. Journalism that uses all of the tools of the digital era.
10. Journalism that understands that the best way to serve America is to endeavor to present the public with the facts, first and foremost.

The Horror.

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: A Trump Deranged Question For “The Ethicist”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I am still pondering whether to continue to take “The Ethicist,” Prof. Kwame Appiah seriously as he panders to the New York Times left-obsessed readers, but in this case I found a question submitted to the NYU philosophy prof revealing and worth pondering—not for what it expressed, but to raise the urgent question, “How do people get this way?” I am repeating this without reading Appiah’s response (the numbers are mine to make my brief analysis simpler):

“I’m an H.I.V.-positive gay man who is distraught with where the country is headed [1], so I am actively participating in protests. I have a liberal friend who lives in an overwhelmingly Trump-supporting small town and is married to a Trump supporter. She messages me often about her fears of what is going on [2] and seems equally distraught. I’ve shared with her how current politics could affect my life [3] and how, although I’m very aware of my privilege [4], I’m concerned about people who aren’t as privileged and how they could be affected.[5] But she doesn’t participate in protests [6] and doesn’t like to actively show her views except on social media.[7] There are protests in small towns close to her that could use her support. [8] Once, there was a B.L.M. protest in her town, but she had ceiling fans being installed. [9] She passed on another recent protest because she had a birthday party. She has never participated and I’m getting increasingly annoyed. [10] I think it’s important to show up. [11] I also know that everyone is different, so I’m trying to reconcile this. [12] She comes off to me as someone who’s comfortable in her life and doesn’t want to shake anything up [13], which is the height of hypocrisy to me. [14]

I feel like apathy is how we got here in the first place [15], and I’m really struggling with how and whether to keep people like this in my life.”

I wish I could be confident that “The Ethicist” chose this foolishness to show that there really are deranged people out there so watch out, but I doubt it. The short and pithy response to it should be “You’re an asshole. Seek help.” But how many of you know people who think like “Name Withheld”? The footnotes…

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Ethics Dunce: Ethics Villain, the National Football League

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

The headline raises an interesting question: can an ethics villain be an ethics dunce, since ethics villains by definition don’t care about ethics, so how can they be judged stupid for ignoring them? Ah well, a topic for another day. Ann Althouse would ask Grok to resolve the issue…if I ever start quoting AI here regularly, someone please come up behind me and bash in my head with a brick.

I’ve been putting off the National Football League announcing that its now iconic halftime show during the 2026 Super Bowl in Santa Clara will star Bad Bunny, a performer I was mercifully unaware of before the announcement. After all, I could write this post any time between now and February 9, 2026, the day after the national sports event that I will not watch again because the sport it involves is deadly.

Today, however, I am in a bad mood, so it’s time. The Super Bowl has evolved as cultural phenomenon that is one of the rare yearly American events that unifies the nation, families, races and commerce. It is supposed to be non-partisan, non-political, and G-rated so families can watch the game and its surrounding hoopla with their children. When Janet Jackson exposed a nipple during a halftime performance, you would have thought that she has performed a human sacrifice by the reaction in the news media.

But now it is 2025, the Great Stupid still stalks the land, Trump Derangement reigns in the corporate suites, and thus the National Football League, which happily pays its players to become brain-injured, has chosen as its star attraction during the Super Bowl half-time show…

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Trump Derangement and Professional Ethics Rot Update: The Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

As the American Bar Association amply demonstrates, the American legal profession is overwhelmingly left-leaning and left-biased, not because lawyers are especially informed or intelligent, but because they overwhelmingly graduate from law schools devoted to progressive indoctrination, with law journals that actively discriminate based on viewpoint bias. State and local bar associations are governed and staffed by similarly aligned individuals; reading these organizations’ flagship magazines is an exercise in wading through progressive propaganda. Fighting for the rights of “migrants.” Celebrations of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” White men are a minority among bar association presidents.

I belong to association of legal ethics lawyers, including ethics partners, professors, CLE ethics trainers, those who defend other lawyers accused of malpractice or professional misconduct. Most of the time, the topics discussed on the group’s listserv are interesting and pertinent to my practice (legal ethics experts don’t agree on much). Since 2016, however, the Democratic Party bias of the group and its attendant Trump derangement has increasingly raised its ugly metaphorical head. The conservatives on the list as well as those who realize the inappropriateness of political topics generally stay silent (those ethics referrals are lucrative, after all) until the screaming at the sky gets ridiculous, and the moderator steps in to remind everyone that the discussion is supposed to be confined to legal ethics.

I just renewed my membership, and almost immediately a topic titled “Desperate Times” popped up, launched by (of course) the California lawyers in the group. After waking up to another long post about how “we lawyers” needed to organize to fight all of these terrible policies, I replied,

“This topic has nothing to do with legal ethics, and reinforces my conclusion that the legal ethics profession, like so many others, has deteriorated into a partisan, biased, bubble-dwelling  cabal increasingly incapable of objective and trustworthy analysis. The furious effort to spin Fani Willis’s flagrantly unethical conduct was one of many dead canaries in the mine. Is this listserv moderated, or not?”

If you can’t trust ethicists to be objective and unbiased, who can you trust?

On Free Speech, The Supreme Court, and “Conversion Therapy”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

One of many Woke World freak-outs going on now is one over the strong signals the Supreme Court gave off during oral argument that it was going to overturn Colorado’s law banning so-called “conversion therapy” as unconstitutional. Naturally the progressive bloc on the court thinks the law is hunky-dory. Why would anyone not want to be gay?

One of the issue that came up in oral argument was whether there is any evidence that trying to talk someone out of being gay is harmful. There isn’t, but Court Dunce Sonia Sotamayor opined that “I don’t think the state has to provide a study to show that the advice is not sound,” comparing conversion therapy to a dietitian or counselor telling a client to do something that would harm their body. In other words, the banned therapy is just bad, and every right-thinking person knows it. This is consistent with Patton Oswalt’s certainty that whatever progressives favor must represent progress, hence opposing it is per se a problem. Progressives believe that being gay is just wonderful. That’s good enough for Sonia: treating someone for it is automatically harmful.

What an ongoing embarrassment she is.

Intelligent arguments came from, among others…

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Update on the Jay Jones Fiasco

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

As related here, Jay Jones is the (black, so he can do no wrong and accusing him of such is racism) Democratic candidate for Virginia Attorney General who through texts made it clear to a colleague that he believed that his adversaries deserved to be killed, and worse, that their children (“little fascists”) deserved to be killed as well.

To those who, like his desperate defenders, claim this was “just a mistake”—you know, like Joe Biden’s debate meltdown was “just a bad night”—I reply that Jones’ rants were signature significance. He wasn’t joking (compared to Jones’ “jokes,” Jimmy Kimmel’s Charley Kirk comments were comedy gold) and a normal, decent, trustworthy human being never even thinks about wanting his adversaries’ family members dead, much less communicates them to others. No, not even once.

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Ethics Test For Progressives and Democrats

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I had four ethics stories all lined up last night, and then this ugly episode forced its way to the front of the line. I hate that. Still, attention must be paid.

Zohran Mamdani, the presumed next New York City mayor based on polls and the fact that his only viable competition for the job had to resign as New York governor in disgrace, posted a statement on the anniversary of Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel. You can see it above.

To his credit, the “Democratic-Socialist” (that is, communist) was crystal clear about who and what he is, and honest observers from both sides of the partisan divide have not been reluctant to react with appropriate disgust. (The statement should not come as any surprise to anyone who has paid attention to Mamdani, the latest example of a charismatic politician emulating Andy Griffith in “A Face in the Crowd” (1957).

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