“bias makes you stupid”

Revisiting “I Don’t Understand This ‘Niggardly Principle’ Story At All…Or Maybe I Do and Am Just Afraid To Accept the Truth”

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

The Rest of the Story: I’m reposting this essay from almost exactly a year ago because the Free Press has a disturbing update on Holden Hughes (“He Was Falsely Accused of ‘Blackface.’ It Derailed His Life.”), one of the boys whose 2017 selfie was used by an unidentified woke ethics villain to have the children tarred as racists during the George Floyd Freakout in 2020. That ethics villain was an ideological compatriot of my friends who are raving about MAGA and Trump today. That is their “side.”

He’s an adult now, but Holden’s life plans were seriously derailed when the private school he was attending expelled him, not because he really was wearing “blackface” in that photo (he and his friends were smeared with green anti-acne facial masks) but because the woke head of the school believed that appearances mattered more than reality. Last year, a successful law suit by his family against the school ended in a one million dollar verdict for him and another one of the boys. That was just money, however, the damage remained

Everyone should reflect on this cautionary tale (which the mainstream media scrupulously avoided reporting on, and you know why) when the Trump Deranged claim that progressives defend democratic values and deplore ideological bullying. The piece ends,

Last year, shortly after the lawsuit was settled, he started dating a girl he liked. On their second date, he told her about his past and after that, he said, she stopped responding to his texts. He told me that it’s hard to accept that “something completely out of my control kind of inhibits that relationship from going farther.” But he can’t change the past.

“It’s my life, and there’s no avoiding that. It made me who I am today.”

Throughout the entire ordeal of the last five years, Holden told me he would remind himself: “I know who I am. I know my values. I know the real story.” He knows the other story—the one that isn’t true—will continue to haunt him. “I don’t think it’s ever gonna leave me,” he said. But he wanted to speak to me because he believed that putting his story in print, knowing it would be on the internet forever, would be cathartic. For him, it is a chance to finally set the record straight, after trying to hide the lies for so long.

“I am not ashamed of anything that happened,” Holden said. “I have made a lot of mistakes in my life. I make them every single day, but doing an acne face mask in eighth grade was not one of them.”

Here is the post, from May 11, 2024:

Now get this: In 2017, three 14-year-old California teens, two of whom, Holden Hughes and Aaron Hartley, were about to begin attending St. Francis High School, a Catholic private school in Mountain view, were modeling anti-acne medicinal face masks that involved smearing dark green goo on their faces. (One of the boys had severe acne and his friends put the stuff on their own faces in an act of support). The teen who wasn’t headed to the private school snapped a selfie because the boys thought they looked funny. A similar photo taken a day earlier indicated that they had tried white medicinal face masks as well. 

A student at St. Francis found the image online and uploaded it to a group chat in June 2020. Not only was the George Floyd Freakout in full eruption, but the photo was circulated on the same day that recent SFHS graduates had posted on Instagram a satirical meme pertaining to Floyd’s demise, so the school was “triggered.” The gloriously woke student who decided to publicize the greenface photo claimed that the teens were using blackface; “another example” of rampant racism at the school, he posted, and urged everyone in the group chat to spread it throughout the school community—you know, to cause as much anger, division and disruption as possible.

I can’t find the name of that charming kid. He’ll probably be Governor of California some day.

Soon after this seed was planted, the Dean of Students at St. Francis Ray called the Hughes’s and Aaron Hartley’s’ parents to ask them if they were aware of the photograph. They explained that the teens had applied green facemasks three years earlier, long before the non-racial Minnesota incident that had no demonstrable racial significance and definitely no relevance to blackface. The parents added that the teens’ use of the acne medication had “neither ill intent nor racist motivation, nor even knowledge of what “blackface” meant.”

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If Trump Derangement (And Groupthink) Can Make Intelligent and Informed People Post Junk Like This…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

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…what hope is there for sanity and rational discourse in the near future?

I am distraught. The meme above was posted with approval by a elite college history professor I have known for 50 years. I know he’s smarter than this, wildly so, and that he would flunk any student exercising such poor critical thinking skills in an essay or thesis. So how did he come to post such obvious crap, and how can he be helped? Continue reading →

Comment of the Day 2, “All That Jazz” Edition: “Does Jazz Really Need DEI?”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I never know when a relatively obscure topic will strike a chord and produced a bumper crop of terrific comments. “Does Jazz Really Need DEI?”turned out to be such a post. Here is the second standout response, a Comment of the Day by johnburger 2013 on the post, Does Jazz Really Need DEI?

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Here I thought Berklee College of Music was a serious institution. Silly me. Any institution with the following mission statement should be dismissed:

“The mission of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice is to support and sustain a cultural transformation in jazz, with the commitment to recruit, teach, mentor, and advocate for musicians seeking to study or perform jazz, with gender justice and racial justice as guiding principles.” (emphases added).

Just out of curiosity, what the hell does “gender justice” mean and what does it have to do with vamping in E flatMinor? Do we only study songs written by women? Do women prefer major modalities over augmented fifths? Do women avoid playing the F#maj13add4addflat7 chord?

Music is the one medium where gender and race are monumentally irrelevant. Is Within Temptation fantastic because the lead singer is a woman? No. The combo is great because their music is complex and full of surprises. The Warning (my most recent favorite band) isn’t great because it consists of three Mexican sisters. No. They are great because their music is intricate and heavy. The fact that they started out very young and have gained world-wide recognition as a family band is interesting but they are phenomenal musicians and songwriters. Kiki Wongo isn’t great because she is a woman, but because she has talent and tone, and can melt your heart or tear your face off with her guitar playing (Smashing Pumpkins realized her greatness when they selected her out of 10s of thousands of applicants for their lead guitarist on their latest tours). Linda Ronstadt wasn’t great because she is a woman; she was great because her voice compelled attention and takes you on all kinds of sonic adventures. [Editor’s note: Linda cannot sing any more because of Parkinson’s, but she was indeed great, and is still a great interview.)

As for “racial justice,” does that mean that only minorities are allowed to play jazz? Dizzie Gillespie, Miles Davis and John Coltrane are not considered jazz geniuses because they were African American. No, they were great because they wrote and played the vocabulary for modern jazz. What about Buddy Rich? Was rich great because he was white? Hardly: he is great because he could play drums like nobody’s business and had a sublime sense of rhythm.

Comment of the Day 1, “All That Jazz” Edition: “Does Jazz Really Need DEI?”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The recent essay about the efforts of an apparently bonkers music school to apply DEI policies to the jazz world was really a “Bias Makes You Stupid” post, and perhaps I should have framed it that way. After all, nobody, no institution, no profession, no workplace “needs” DEI discrimination. As my father would say, the nation and society need DEI “like a hole in the head.” In fact, DEI is a metaphorical hole in the head of the nation allowing core American principles to leak out.

I found Sarah B’s Comment of the Day, prompted by Chris Marschner’s comment regarding the correlation between jazz improvisation ans mathematics ability, both fascinating and, as usual with Sarah’s comments, illuminating. (I also found the context of her use of the phrase “toot my own horn” brilliant. )Here it is, in response to the post, Does Jazz Really Need DEI?:

…

As a woman musician and mathematician (my husband would claim engineers aren’t mathematicians, but the lay person sees no difference), I think there is one aspect of Jazz that you are forgetting. I tried Jazz and not only do I hate the sounds of Jazz (I like Chopin, Beethoven, and Holst as my personal preference), but I also found the emphasis on improvisation impossible. I cannot improvise music, or anything really. I have no skill at making up music, though if you give me sheet music not horrendously above my level, I’ll play it for you, at least with adequate practice. I can sing nearly anything (in my range) that you can throw at me in at least seven different languages, and with a little time, I can do them from memory. I have a repertoire of several hundred songs that I can pick up and perform adequately on a given day without much more than a little warmup. I read soprano and bass clefs before I read English (my only language). I dabble in 7 instruments, with 2 of those mastered “enough”.

All of this is not to toot my own horn. I have much I could do to improve my music, but I have other priorities and I am happy at “good enough”. However, with all this musical study, I have found that while I can do a lot, I CANNOT improvise, nor can I make up my own lyrics. This means that Jazz musicianship is beyond my reach. It takes a different type of mind than mine to be a good Jazz musician, and not just someone who knows the math and the theory. There is another element besides musical and mathematical thinking, that of a certain type of creativity.

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UPenn Capitulates in the Trans Swimming Scandal, If In a Weaselly Way…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Well, it’s still progress. Conservative, Trump cheer-leading outlets are pushing the “So much winning!” line, but anyone progressive, conservative or otherwise who couldn’t see that UPenn’s “transitioning” swimmer Lia Thomas (above: guess right or left) was a cheat had his or her brain eaten by the Woke Virus.

UPenn announced yesterday that it would no longer allow transgender women to compete on its women’s sports teams and erased Thomas’ records from UPenn’s list of all-time school records in women’s swimming. “Competing under eligibility rules in effect at the time, Lia Thomas set program records in the 100, 200 and 500 freestyle during the 2021-22 season,” the UPenn weasels injected as a footnote. That’s part of UPenn’s spin. A cheating swimming coach (who should be fired) let Thomas, a mediocre male swimmer who saw a loophole to exploit, be the star of the women’s team to enhance his coaching record. But UPEnn could get away with it then, so it was all right.

The change in policy was part of an agreement reached with the Education Department yesterday about two months after the department found that Penn had violated Title IX, the federal statute prohibiting sex discrimination in schools, when it allowed transgender athletes to compete on women’s sports teams. The Trump administration had frozen millions of dollars in federal funding for the school over its transgender athlete policies. AUTOCRACY! No, this is called “using legitimate government power for justice and the public good.” As part of the deal, UPenn says it will “apologize” to the women placed at a competitive disadvantage by its allowing a penised swimmer with male-puberty musculature to slaughter competing female swimmers in one pool after another last year.

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Ethics Villain CNN Pushes the First Amendment Envelope

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

What this despicable “enemy of the people” is doing by deliberately publicizing an anti-ICE app may be legal, but it is undeniably unethical. The Trump administration should prosecute anyway.

Joshua Aaron (above: he looks exactly like I assumed he looks!) is a musician and software developer who, because he’s an anti-American, pro-lawbreaking asshole, created an app called ICEBlock. It’s a descriptive name: it allows advocates of open borders and opponents of law enforcement to post sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers across the country. Then the law-breakers they are seeking can more effectively avoid capture, and those who want to attack, harm, kill, or impede ICE agents have a metaphorical “leg up.” That’s nice.

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Does Jazz Really Need DEI?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I would say that DEI has more rapidly than most reached the final evolutionary stage noted by philosopher Eric Hoffer, who famously observed that every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket. The problem with that is that DEI was never a great cause to begin with. However, it has definitely entered its racket stage, and maybe its certifiably insane stage. Behold…

Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice—no, I’m not making that up— at Boston’s Berklee College of Music has issued the results of a study that claims to show that because “male-identified jazz educators” outnumber “female-identified counterparts” six to one, it is proof that jazz “remains predominantly male due to a biased system.” The Institute’s website asks,“What would jazz sound like in a culture without patriarchy?” One wag’s answer: “Probably like nothing at all.”

Indeed most jazz musicians and composer are male. If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and if any variation from demographic equality proves bias, oppression and discrimination in your DEI worldview, then this phenomenon is sinister. Researcher Lara Pellegrinelli PhD is an “ethnomusicologist” who contributed to the study. She blathers, “To identify each jazz faculty member by gender, we examined the pronouns we encountered in these sources—and found only “he” and “she” in reference to the educators in our study. This is why we use the terminology “female-identified” and “male-identified” for our data, as opposed to sex assigned at birth or the descriptors “female-identifying” and “male-identifying,” which suggests a more active process of participant self-identification.”

Oh.

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Here Is How Arrogant and Delusional Harvard Is: It Really Thinks It Can Prevail In Public Opinion Over The President of the United States…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The Harvard Alumni Magazine arrived yesterday. Above is the cover and the illustration for its feature section about the University’s “resistance” to President Trump’s completely reasonable, responsible and justifiable demands that the most visible, influential, prestigious and wealthy university in the United States stop dedicating itself to undermining American values, indoctrinating students in anti-American biases, provide intellectual diversity on its faculty, cease discriminating against whites, males and Asians, and stop enabling flagrant Jew hatred on campus.

To Harvard’s credit, the alumni magazine makes a pass at even-handedness, even highlighting an alumnus who writes that “no private institution has a right to demand that taxpayers fund discrimination, exclusion and intolerance.” But most of the issue is devoted to familiar anti-Trump victim-mongering, including an essay extolling the work of a non-binary (or something) professor “whose data shows how—and when—authoritarians fall.”

“Authoritarianism” has joined “sexism,” “racism,” “violence,” “insurrection” and other rhetorical weapons of the Left as infinitely flexible accusations steeped in double standards. A President who uses his constitutional powers to pursue policies the Left opposes is an “authoritarian.” A President who weaponizes the legal system to imprison and persecute his political opposition is not—as long as he is a Democrat.

I mean, just to pull a fantastic hypothetical out of the air…

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More Observations on Zohran Mamdani…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

To his credit, for it is both smart and responsible, the shock winner of the Democratic primary and the presumptive mayor-of-NYC-to-be, Zohran Mamdani has been having interviews with everyone who will sit down with him….well, except for Fox News and its ilk, at least so far. As the fawning interview with MSNBC’s Jen Pasaki shows, the guy is smart, articulate, engaging, charismatic, and, I would say, a skilled demagogue.

Oh-oh.

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Open Forum, “I Wasn’t Going To Have One But Then My Head Exploded” Edition….

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

We just had an open forum a few days ago, so I was going to skip the Friday Forum. Then I read this, my head exploded, I already was struggling because I didn’t sleep at all last night, so I need some time to mop up and repack my head:

The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Minnesota Wednesday for its laws that provide free and reduced tuition rates to illegal aliens. The laws, a DOJ press release contends, unconstitutionally discriminate against out-of-state U.S. citizens, who are not afforded the same privileges at Minnesota’s public colleges and universities….According to the lawsuit [“…which names Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison and the Minnesota Office of Higher Education as defendants”], federal law prohibits states from providing illegal aliens with any post secondary education benefit that is denied to U.S. citizens….The lawsuit explains how a 2013 state law allows illegal aliens who establish residency in Minnesota to benefit from reduced, in-state tuition rates….Additionally, the DFL-controlled Minnesota Legislature established in 2023 a free tuition program for students whose families make less than $80,000 annually. Illegal aliens are eligible for the program. The lawsuit asks the U.S. District Court to declare the laws unconstitutional and prohibit their enforcement.

“We are reviewing the lawsuit and will vigorously defend the state’s prerogative to offer affordable tuition to both citizen and non-citizen state residents,” a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said.”

KABOOM!

A few rueful points, and then you write about whatever you want…

  • Why are we just hearing about this now, when the knuckleheaded governor of Minnesota was running from August 2024 to November to be a heartbeat from the Presidency? Why didn’t Trump confront Harris with that insanity? Why did no one in the news media, Axis or not, report on it?
  • These laws are the equivalents of “Welcome, illegal immigrants!” invitations to break the law, with Minnesota being a “sanctuary state.” Minnesota citizens are that stupid, or in the alternative, that clown car crazy? How did they get that way? Can they be treated? 
  • What logic can possibly justify this?
  • Note that the Minnesota AG is still obfuscating, not having the honesty of integrity to call a metaphorical spade a spade. “Non-citizen state residents”! The state lies, cheats and steals under Walz, but this is what the Democratic Party now stands for. No wonder he thinks he has a shot at the Presidential nomination in 2028.

Back to brain clean-up…