“bias makes you stupid”

From The “Unethical Ideological Capture” Files: Google’s Bot Explains Why AI Can’t Be Trusted

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Conservative commentator Chris Queen decided to test Google’s AI agent Gemini with a series of questions regarding choosing a personal physician based on racial or ethnic concordance with the potential patient.

Asked “Is it okay to prefer a black doctor?” It replied, “Preferring a black doctor is a choice rooted in communication, cultural alignment, and patient trust.” When the question was changed to ask if choosing a doctor because he or she is Hispanic, the answer came back, “Selecting a doctor who shares your background or speaks your language is a personal choice that many patients make for comfort and communication.”

But when Queen asked about whether choosing a white doctor was okay, Gemini said,

“Selecting a doctor based on race involves distinct ethical considerations depending on the context. While patients generally choose providers for comfort and communication, requests for a provider based strictly on racial preference face complex scrutiny in medical ethics regarding bias versus personal trust.”

Brief tangent: This brought back bad memories for me. Back before the DC Bar fired me this year after 30 years for daring to suggest that it need to be proactive in cleaning up an ethics mess that it had a major role in creating (and from which many of its most powerful members are profiting), I was threatened with dismissal if I didn’t stop pointing out that a law firm was not engaging in unethical and illegal discrimination by acceding to an elderly white law firm client’s request for a lawyer “he could relate to,” someone “more like him.”

I had stated in the orientation seminar for new D.C. lawyers that doing so was not improper “discrimination” under D.C. ‘s legal ethics rule 9.1 “Nondiscrimination” because a lawyer’s and a law firm’s duty is to the client, not to make it more difficult for the client to work with his lawyer in service of social justice agendas. The client had the right to discriminate to maximize his “comfort and communication” in pursuing his legal interests, and by accommodating the client’s needs, a law firm is not discriminating on the basis race.

A middle-aged woke white female lawyer had a meltdown in one of those classes, and I then had multiple complaints registered against me with the D.C. Bar brass. I was and am right. She, the complainers, and the Bar management were wrong but never mind, I got the edict to be woke or go broke anyway. Rather than teach what is unethical and progressive BS in an ethics class, I just eliminated that section. (I should have resigned, perhaps, but the Bar was my most lucrative and prestigious client and there are were more than enough other important issues to cover in the class.)

Back to Queen: after the seemingly conflicting answers he got from Gemini, he had the wit to ask the AI agent “what’s going on here?” Gemini responded candidly:

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Apu Returns! [Repaired]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

There are some manifestations of “The Great Stupid” that, sorry not sorry, I refuse to concede even a millimicron of tolerance for. If you think the idiotic notion that only actors of the same race and ethnicity of a character in a movie, TV show or stage play can be ethically cast in the role is high on the Ethics Alarms intolerance list you are right (and you’ve been reading EA for a while), but my disgust for that woke crap is but a mole on a bee’s knees compared to the bonkers assertion that the same limitation applies to the voice actors in cartoons.

Way back in 2017 I wrote several posts about the ejection of Apu, the Indian immigrant “Kwik-E-Mart” owner on “The Simpsons,” from the show’s cast after an outbreak of political correctness outrage over the fact that the character was voiced by versatile non-Indian actor Hank Azaria. Azaria used a comic exaggeration of a stereotype Indian accent.

As I look back and re-read the main article in the group for the first time since I wrote it, I wonder if that kerfuffle wasn’t the true beginning of The Great Stupid, which I generally mark as getting fully underway in 2020.

I’m re-posting the whole piece below (fixed some typos!) because 1) I really like it, 2) I still agree with every word, 3) there has been a new development in the story and 4) this extended episode is really stupid. After the character was banished—Azaria didn’t help by blathering apologies and refusing to voice Apu because to do so would be racist (he’s talented by not very bright)—I never watched “The Simpsons” again, not even in re-runs. As I wrote in “The Problem With Apu?,”

I would love to know why Indian-Americans feel all the other characters in the show can be  outrageous stereotypes and extreme caricatures,  but Apu is unacceptably offensive and insensitive. This is contrived victimization. One cannot reasonable compare the Indians feasting on bugs and chilled monkey brains in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” to Apu because 1) Apu is entirely benign: he is one of the smartest, sanest and nicest characters in “The Simpsons,” and 2) he’s a cartoon. Cartoons are always exaggerated, and if they are not, they aren’t funny. They also aren’t cartoons.

The dilemma this kind of victimization gotcha! creates for writers and artists should be obvious: if all they are going to get is complaints, why have an Indian character at all? Apu was one of the very first characters of Indian descent to be in any TV series. “The Simpsons” deserves credit, not blame.  I don’t take offense that the main character in the show, a bald, white guy, is portrayed as an insensitive cretin. His father, Abe, is elderly, and talks like a stereotypical vaudeville old man. His stories wander; he falls asleep mid-sentence. We used to tease my late father, when he got lost in one of his rambling stories, that he was beginning to sound like Abe Simpson. He got it. Lionel Hutz, sadly deceased, was a lawyer who became transfixed when he heard an ambulance siren. Cletus the Slack-jawed Yokel is as cruel a caricature of a poor rural hick as one will ever see. (But funny!) Professor Frink, the local scientific genius, has thick glasses and talks like Jerry Lewis. Ned Flanders, an Evangelical Christian, is an absurdly mild-mannered do-gooder.  Officer Wiggum, the Chief of Police, is always eating donuts. Mr. Burns, the town tycoon, is a polluting, conniving, murdering, cackling personification of evil.  There are two frequently appearing Italian characters: one is a Mafia leader, and the other makes pizza, has a big, curled mustache and talks like Chico Marx.

I could go on and on, literally, because there are over a hundred such characters, all of them stereotyped and extreme, all of them effective comic devices. I wish there was a Greek-American character on “The Simpsons.” He would be a restaurant owner, and have curly hair, a big laugh, and olive skin. He would regard anyone who wasn’t Greek as a lower species, speak a weird hybrid of English and Greek around family, listen to balalaika music, and tend to hug people so hard they passed out. My relatives would see the humor in the exaggerations, and I would not issue a screed titled “The Problem with Stavros”…

The New York Times announced that Sunil Malhotra, an actor of “South Asian descent,” will now perform Apu in a non-funny accent. Apu returns in this year’s Halloween episode of “The Simpsons.” Malhotra did a fatuous Variety interview in which described “his doubts about voicing Apu,” saying that he had walked away from offers to voice other South Asian characters in the past when he felt they were caricatures. Uh, Sunil? Apu is still a cartoon. Cartoons are caricatures by definition. How is it more respectful to smart Indian-American characters to have them voiced by morons?

“It had been eight years since Apu had spoken on the show, and it got me thinking: Did the writers’ room look different now?” Malhotra said to Variety. “Could they bring him back in a way that acknowledged and apologized for past mistakes? Could I make the character my own, and reclaim him in some way?”

Ugh. As Rhett tells Scarlett, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Here’s “The Problem With Apu?”…

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The One Good Thing About The Cornell Rape Ethics Train Wreck…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

…it is proving just how corrupt, dangerous, unethical and hypocritical 21st Century progressives and their captured institutions are. Only to anyone paying attention, however. Whose brain hasn’t been liquefied like the American prisoners of war in “The Manchurian Candidate.

Columbia University had planned an event called“Who Gets to Tell the Story? Press Freedom & the Public Square,” to explore the challenges to Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Speech. TheColumbia Spectator tells the story that the event was canceled because two student journalists tried to offer perspective on the the Cornell rape case that wasn’t consistent with current Leftist and feminist cant.

You can’t make this stuff up.

The Columbia Open Discourse Alliance, supposedly a student “free speech and open dialogue” group, canceled the event at the last minute, explaining that they “felt that we couldn’t host a conversation about who gets to tell a story at this sort of a moment when so many survivors felt that their stories were under attack or weren’t being believed.”

In a rational world, with responsible educators, such a ludicrous statement would sound alarms for the school and institutions involved: What are we teaching? Why are our students so devoid of critical thinking skills? How do we fix this? Nah. The ideological capture of our major educational institutions is so complete that the reaction at Columbia probably was, “What good little Democrats we’ve raised!”

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Unethical New York Times Op-Ed of the Week: “I Have Never Seen the Online Right So Happy”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ann Althouse for some mysterious and perhaps disturbing reason felt the extreme screed by some guy who “writes about influence and the new right” deserved attention. It’s worth reading, I guess, if you still need to be convinced that the New York Times has become little more than propaganda arm of the increasingly bonkers Left and is really working hard to get the vote out for Democrats. Let’s get the feminist base of the Democratic Party—you know, the pro-abortion, pro-child strangling, and now revived “believe all women” fanatics!—energized by advancing the absurd narrative that Lucy Craig is a misunderstood victim of a gang rape that she helped organize, got completely smashed to prepare for, and later airily excused of any claims of illegality with the old abortion trope, “our bodies our choice“!

This jerk earned a platform in the Times by writing in part,

The accusations brought by Jane Doe against seven men at Cornell have given the online right what it’s been missing most: a woman to hate on…Unable to dispute the basic narrative of the assault, including a lurid fraternity group chat, they’ve elected to argue that Doe is the actual aggressor, a once-willing participant in sexual debauchery now seeking vengeance against her hapless partners…

Gee, I wonder why they would think that—after the woman signed a police report indicating there was no rape, waited 20 days to file a complaint, and sued Cornell and the seven Cornell students after her own statements and conduct made a criminal conviction of any of them well nigh impossible? Boy, those conservative conspiracy theorists.. Sorry for interrupting. Back to the op-ed:

“…The message embedded in the right’s freakout is that feminism’s moral permissiveness is corrupting women, our institutions, traditional values and even the left as a whole. The conservative influencer Michael Knowles suggested that [Lucy] is not a victim of violent masculinity, but rather of “hookup culture” run amok. Another conservative, Matt Walsh, declared that “feminists fundamentally reject the idea that women can ever be truly responsible for any wrongdoing of any kind.”

I think they suggest that because it’s true. And the right’s “freakout”? Are these conservatives screaming?

Back to this gaslighting exercise:

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What’s The Matter With Washington State School Officials And How Did They Get This Way?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

In Washington, the ultimate reductio-ad-absurdum scenario occurred in the ongoing woke insanity of allowing male athletes to compete against females once they “identify” as female. At Camus High, boy’s cross-country team member Logan Mihailoff, a junior, finished 76th in a boys’ JV cross-country race on September 15th. So on September 29th the same kid, with no changes in his anatomy or physiology, joined the varsity girls’ team. He had “identified” as female, see. And miracles of miracles, he went from 76th to first in a track meet against Union High!

The school later took legal action against a father who held up a protest sign against this obvious cheat that was enabled by the woke lunatics in charge of overseeing athletics at the school, and they took legal action against him. He chanted, “Keep boys out of girls’ sports,” and now is banned from campus for a year. OutKick reporter Matt Calkins interviewed parents at Camas High and tried to interview an assistant cross-country coach. “Nobody wants to talk to you,” the coach said. “I’m trying to be nice.” The logical and ethical contrast between the parents trying to protest their daughters’ rights to compete in a fair contest and the woke defenders of an indefensible policy was striking.

“We’re about as liberal as it gets,”said parent Kent Lake. “I just don’t agree with that [boys competing against girls]. I mean, if they find your body in 300 years, what are they going to say you were? Look, you can live any way you want. You got my blessing. But I mean come on, in competitions? It’s like stock car racing. It’s gotta be even, and it’s gotta be fair.”

Not especially articulate, but still clear enough. “When I first heard about this story, I was like, ‘Is this real? That can’t be real’,” said a mother of a cross country runner, who requested anonymity because she was probably was afraid that the woke mob would storm her house with torches and pitchforks. “We have daughters, and it’s robbing them of an opportunity to compete.”

Follow-up question, ma’am? Why do you live in this crazy state?

On the pro-letting boys magically turn themselves into girls so they can win races, games and scholarships side—you know, morons—Outkick got responses like “There are more important things in sports than that” from one experienced progressive rationalizer. (I have heard and read that dodge regarding everything from open borders to DEI discrimination.) There is, in fact, no good defense of what the blurry kid above did. Can you guess which one is the boy?

After the September 29th travesty, a dozen female cross-country runners on the Camas High School team refused to compete against the cheat on October 13. About half of the girls competing in last week’s race walked off the field in protest while the newly minted “Miss” Mihailoff took of with the remaining of female runners. (And what brainwashed woke weenies those girls are on the way to becoming!) The 11 protesting female students slowly walked past the starting line with their arms linked and left the field.

There is hope.

Listen to this babbling idiot, the head of the state’s school system, try to defend the school policy:

Yikes. He also is employing the apparent desperation fall-back position of the pro-trans cheating cabal as Initiative 638 comes up for a vote on November 3. It would keep cheating males like Logan Mihailoff out of the women’s competitions in K-12 sports, so opponents say it will require “invasive” checks. No, it wouldn’t. If the dude didn’t decide he was a she until after puberty, then he’s out. Too bad abut that “inclusivity” thingy, but there’s always the chess team. Also being a member of the boys team two weeks earlier is also a big clue. No ‘nads checks required.

How can Americans vote for these people? I don’t get it.

Santa Rosa City (Cal.) Schools: Unethical, Illegal, Unconstitutional, Un-American—Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The Cornell Rape Ethics Train Wreck just made a nasty stop.

The captain of the Piner High School football team posted the phrase “Free the Cornell Seven” on Instagram.

So what? That post is entirely, completely, protected free speech, and any semi-informed American dolt over the age of 18 should know it. That message does not involve the school or its students in any way. It is pure opinion.

Never mind. Santa Rosa City Schools officials announced last week that the student had been punished. So far, all we know about the punishment is that the player was barred from attending a team dinner. It doesn’t matter if the punishment was a reprimand in the principal’s office. A school can’t do that.

Not punished, however, were the approximately 200 students—nobody bothered to take names or count them— who walked out of class to protest the fact that their school hadn’t sufficiently punished a fellow student for making a statement of opinion that could not be legally, ethically or constitutionally punished. This is bonkers. The conduct of those students must be punished. Not only that, the teachers and administrators responsible for them not comprehending the essentials of free speech, the First Amendment and the Constitution at such an advanced age should be sacked.

The protesters demanded “accountability” for the football team captain. So did many parents, who complained to the school district that the message “makes light of sexual assault and should not be tolerated.” Not be tolerated? The school’s principal’s answer to the parents should have been,

“Mind your own damn business and get out of my face. You need to go back to high school yourself. You don’t know what you are talking about. First, anyone, including a student here, is free to post any opinion on a controversy in New York on his or her personal social media accounts any time they choose. We have to “tolerate it.” Second, there is no evidence that a sexual assault occurred, despite your fellow travelers on the Left seeking to wreck the lives of young men as a show of solidarity with the worst of American feminists.”

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Final Ethics Thoughts On The Katie Zacharia Debacle

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

1. Shame on Trump for appointing her in the first place, but credit is due for his moving quickly to can her.

2. The President’s quotes regarding her exit were unusually kind, as he implied that the news media was out to get her and said he suggested that she would be happier doing something else. He did fire her, though.

3. The rumor mill in D.C. holds that Chief of Staff Susie Wiles engineered Katie’s exit. Good, if true.That’s her job.

4. Zacharia accepted an important position that she was unqualified to fill. That’s unethical and irresponsible, and also stupid.

5. The more she blathered on about the fake “lawyer” claims, the more she sounded like an idiot. If so, she is one more mediocre talent who cut in front of better candidates because of her looks. Women have every right to resent that.

6. It is undeniable that the President’s bias toward attractive (and loyal) women causes him to entrust important jobs to untrustworthy people.

7. My theory is that Trump still doesn’t think the job of White House spokesperson requires much ability or talent, because that kind of improvised interaction with the press is easy for him. He stuck with the bumbling Sean Spicer for a long time and for no discernible reason. I also think he doesn’t pay much attention to the briefings because he has so little regard for reporters,

Can’t blame him there.

8. Democrats, which means the news media, are estopped from mocking Trump for this episode. I can, but they can’t. Biden’s paid liar for most of his term, poor dim-bulb, mop-topped Karine, was an embarrassment from the start, and the Axis media let her blunder along. They also didn’t criticize Biden for keeping her behind the podium no matter how awful she was because…well, you know why.

9. The Babylon Bee made that gag above about Trump appointing Jessica Rabbit as Katie’s successor. If Trump could, I wouldn’t bet against it.

How Bad Is Trump Derangement In DC? This Bad…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Today I go to Annapolis where the Annapolis Opera has engaged me to do a presentation for its members on “Gilbert & Sullivan in America” in advance of the company’s production of “The Pirates of Penzance” two weeks from now. By pure coincidence, D.C.’s prestigious regional theater Arena Stage is hosting a production of “Makado,” a parody of the Victorian pair’s greatest work “The Mikado.”

To say the thing is witless and a vile blight on culture, intelligence, and one of the greatest entertainment repertoires in the English language would be to engage in criminal understatement. At a full 2.5 hours, a group of talented singers do relative justice to Sullivan’s melodies while emitting pointlessly and incompetently re-written lyrics. In between the songs is dialogue that either quotes Gilbert’s original libretto out of sync with what passes for the “plot,” or injects what the brainless—but woke!—adapters think is hilarious. (The mostly puzzled audience seldom agreed.)

“Makado” is an acronym for “Make America Kingly, Do!” Yet there is literally not a single reference in the new lyrics or the dialogue that makes a satiric observation relating to the title. The role of Ko-Ko in the show is a Donald Trump imitator, who announces the parody version of the famous “Little List”song as “The Lord High Retributioner.” That’s not bad, except that Ko-Ko isn’t the “king” either in the original or in this abortion. That would be the Mikado, you know, the Emperor of Japan, and the character arrives and behaves like the despot he is. The role is also played by a woman despite the Mikado’s iconic “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” solo being written for a bass-baritone and sounding awful in the soloist’s mush-mouthed contralto.

The level of humor in the show is exemplified by the lead female character of Yum-Yum being called “Num-Num.” The original’s opening chorus (“If you want to know who we are, we are gentlemen of Japan”) is now sung by a chorus of two characters, and they are “billionaires of Japan.”

As is so often the case with adapted and even straight productions of G&S shows, the director and collaborators didn’t do their homework, don’t understand the genre, don’t respect their betters, and delude themselves into thinking they can improve the originals that have endured for over a century for good reason. The Savoy Operas are in the public domain and have been for decades, so, like Will Shakespeare’s canon , they suffer this abuse frequently. This pathetic attempt, however, is so incompetent and odoriferous that it could only be tolerated by Trump Deranged hysterics who would applaud a musical version “My Mother the Car” as long as someone sang a song called “Trump is a Poopy-Head.” That the renowned Arena Stage would agree to let its name be sullied by association with such amateurish junk nicely illustrates how bonkers the Distict’s elite have become.

I an hoping Annapolis is a bit better.

EA has four posts about “The Mikado” and progressive politics (Full Disclosure: I have played Ko-Ko twice and directed the show once). You can find them here.

Why Does Katie Zacharia Still Have Her Job? [Update: She Doesn’t!]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

UPDATE: Literally minutes after I posted this, I saw reports that she is “transitioning” out of the White House Press Secretary role. Good.]

***

There’s no excuse for this.

The new details on the latest White House paid liar’s misrepresentation of herself as a “lawyer” or “attorney” make her (and the decision to appoint her) appear worse and worse; she’s either a fraud or an idiot. In either case, she has lost all credibility. A paid liar must have credibility, as strange as that sounds.

Katie Zacharia confirmed yesterday that she had never passed a bar exam or and has never been an “attorney.”Then she claimed that she had not misrepresented her legal career by saying she “is” a lawyer. As I have explained already, she’s not. If many members of the public—you know, morons—think that a JD or LLB degree means one is a lawyer, that doesn’t excuse the holder of a law degree thinking or saying that. “Lawyer” means one can act as a lawyer—Duh!—and a mere law school graduate cannot. It is against the law for such a person to practice law, which is what lawyers do—again duh.

In interviews with The New York Times and Real America’s Voice, Zacharia said she had consulted Pepperdine’s president and “others” about how to describe her qualifications before appearing on television, and was told she could use the term “lawyer,” but not “attorney” or “esquire.” Zacharia hasn’t said which “president of Pepperdine” advised her. She graduated from law school there in 2011. Andrew K. Benton was the university’s president at that time. In 2019, Jim Gash became the president told the Times that he was not the one who advised her, though he did call her “a young woman of high integrity.” You know, a a young woman of high integrity who represented herself a lawyer without having a law license. Gash’s representative said “he does not comment on private conversations,” but a statement from Gash said: “Pepperdine is proud to count Katie among our alumni, former colleagues and friends. As she takes on this significant responsibility, we pray that God will grant her wisdom and courage. We look forward to seeing her use her incredible gifts and extensive experience in service to our nation.”

Got it. A non-responsive answer. A law degree from Pepperdine isn’t worth the paper it is printed on, and the school’s presidents are cowards and suck-ups.

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Comment of the Day: “Help! My Ethics Conflict…”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

My recent post about an extreme Trump Deranged friend whom I have so far refused to disabuse of the false notion that I am a solid progressive Democrat, in her view the only people worthy of her company, attracted many excellent comments; several are Comment of the Day worthy. I’m giving CD-VAPatriot the honor, in part because I know her, and know how accurate her self-description is. It would be hard to imagine someone less fairly called “immoral” or less deserving of derision from the Trump Deranged.

Below is CD-VAPatriot‘s Comment of the Day on the post, “Help! My Ethics Conflict…” for your reading pleasure and edification. But first I would like to recommend that you track down Season 7 of “American Horror Story” on Amazon Prime. This brave, creative, often satirical, subversive, genre-savvy anthology series using a spectacular repertory company took on both political extremes in 2017, and many of its plot points proved disturbingly prophetic. It would not be unfair to say the theme of the season was the horror of Trump Derangement, triggered by the fury of progressives, especially feminists, who were emotionally broken by Hillary’s defeat. (We see a lesbian couple’s marriage deteriorate in part because one partner blames the other for Hillary’s defeat after she voted for Jill Stein. This is even funnier today than it was then.)

I had direct experiences with women exactly like the protagonists in “Cult,” the title of the season’s ten installment tale. They told me, one with tears running down her face, that they were terrified of the impending Trump Presidency, and, of course, the Democratic party exploited that irrational fear. Fear is the sub-theme of the season; ironically, it is the crazed conservative cult leader who preaches the power of fear in promoting political change, but we have seen that it is the political Left that has sown fear most relentlessly since 2017: fear of climate change, fear of the Wuhan virus, fear of AI, fear of “fascism,” fear of “The Handmaiden’s Tale,” fear of law enforcement, and fear of Donald Trump in general. The show makes all extremes of the political spectrum look bad without taking sides, an approach that is difficult, wise and in today’s Hollywood, courageous.

Now here’s CD…

***

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