1. Here’s a typical unbiased New York Times front page headline regarding the impeachment trial (from last week):
“One One Side, Piles of Evidence, On the Other, Heaps of Scorn”
Here’s some more scorn: there is no evidence at all of impeachable offenses on that pile, and scorn for the President is being treated as evidence.
2. This is astounding. (From johnburger, and thanks) Check out this.
Baseball philosopher, iconoclast and analyst Bill James is one of my heroes for his amazing ability to look past conventional wisdom with an open mind. Beginning as essentially a self-published pamphleteer writing out of his basement, James’ counter-traditional explorations of baseball statistics eventually changed how baseball was watched, assessed, scouted and played, simply on the strength of Bill’s ideas and his facility in explaining them.
His talents could be used in many other fields–James has recently branched out into examining famous unsolved murders—but it is also true that many of the ideas he has developed in relation to baseball have wider applications. For example, James was the source of the concept of “signature significance,” which is a staple here at Ethics Alarms.
His writing also taught me that bias makes us stupid, and about the insidious power of rationalizations. Many of James’s observations seemed intrinsically obvious once he made and explained them, and the fact that baseball executives, writers and players could have been so wrong about their own game for so long seemed incomprehensible. But the reasons were what they always are, in all fields. People are biased toward what they have always believed —confirmation bias–and the “It’s always been this way” variation on the most powerful rationalization of them all, “Everybody does it” breeds blindness and intellectual laziness. Continue reading
Here is another question to Slate’s sex advice column, “How to Do It”:
I’m a cis woman in kind of a classic millennial sex pickle: I’m really repelled by heterosexuality politically and personally, but I’m also really into dick. I’ve been thinking maybe I should look for bi dudes/ bicurious gay dudes, but I am not sure how best to do that. Rich, what would you think of a woman being on Grindr or Scruff? I do want to be respectful of gay men’s spaces and not horn in where I’m not welcome, but I really would love to find a vers guy with queer politics who would be up for casually dating a woman. What do you think? If you were me, where would you look?
—-Radical
My answer? Continue reading
Of course too soon.
This is dead ethics alarms on display. A 41-year-old NBA legend, his 13-year old daughter and seven other human beings die in a helicopter accident, and less than six hours later, a Washington Post reporter, involuntarily abetted by The Daily Beast, issues a tweet about the low point in his life and career.
Is Sonmez going for #MeToo brownie points? It sure looks like it. Let’s get a jump on canceling Kobe Bryant, womyn! It’s never too early.
No compassion for the family, no sorrow for the dead. Gotta trash the man, because there won’t be enough time in the future to rehash the 17-year-old rape allegations that Bryant, with the assistance of the King’s Pass, managed to avoid having destroy his career.
Has social media made people so cruel? Is this just the natural ethics void political journalists and progressive websites slip into after a few years of peddling hate against the President, day in, day out?
How can ethics alarms not ring out, loud and strong, when the idea is floated to attack a dead celebrity the same day he and his daughter are killed?
Update (6:50 PM): After being excoriated on Twitter, Sonmez deleted her tweet.
Too late.
Further Update: The Post suspended Sonmez. Good.
Notice of Correction: I originally included The Daily Beast in the headline, failing to notice that the article Sonmez linked to was from 2016. The Beast is blameless, and I apologize for the error. Thanks to VPJ for the note.
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To share this with your Facebook friends who idolize the mainstream media, use this Twitter link: https://twitter.com/CaptCompliance/status/1221581127862968323
On December 14, 2019, I posted “The Democratic Party’s Unethical And Irrational Obsession With Diversity” at a point where I concluded that the Left’s diversity con had reached res ipsa loquitur dimensions, at least for Americans still capable of hearing what this res was loquituring despite years of pummeling by consultants and diversity seminars. That would be that “diversity” is a cover word for “quotas and affirmative action.”
I’ve been in some of those seminars; to my undying shame, I’ve even taught a couple for a fee. They are intellectually dishonest to the core, resting on the Bizarro World argument that more diverse groups and bodies are necessarily better, wiser, and more effective than homogeneous groups with more ability and talent. This is manifestly nonsense, except that it is not politically correct to say so. Is President Trump’s Cabinet better in any way because Ben Carson is Secretary of HUD? He’s a dolt, as anyone who watched the GOP Presidential debates knows beyond a shadow of a doubt. Is the Supreme Court better because Justice Sotomayor is on it? Read one of her opinions and then try to say that with a straight face.
The proof that diversity activism is a rationalization-based scam is everywhere, with the fact that it is only applied in one direction the smoking res. Nobody argues that NBA and NFL teams would be better of they had demographics closer to the nation’s. The Oscars were attacked because there aren’t “enough” black performers or female directors nominated this year, but no one complains about the lack of diversity in all-black awards shows. The impetus for December post was all the Democratic and mainstream media flesh-rending over the fact that the erstwhile Presidential candidates “of color” had been so weak and feckless that even Democrats had rejected them. “But…but..diversity!”
Pointing to the Washington Post’s assessment of the top 13 people with the best chance of being on the party’s ticket as Vice President—all are women, minorities or both—I wrote, “What subliminal message are Democrats sending to the world when they exclude straight, white men as qualified candidates for Vice-President? That’s easy. They are saying that the party cares more about diversity than it does about leading the nation.”
Diversity without rigging the result can be a valuable measure of how race, ethnicity and gender-blind the culture has become, but the fact that any group or body happens to appear diverse is itself no indication of excellence. Anyone who claims otherwise is lying or deluded.
I thought the bloviating about the Democratic debate line-up was as ridiculous as this sham could get, Boy was I wrong. Continue reading
I don’t understand why this story should even be news, but the fact that it was treated as news, and worse, promoted as news by an NAACP official, is significant , disturbing, but, sadly, not at all surprising.
Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in New York, was returning to Baltimore from New York on Amtrak last week as she often does. She was sitting in a general-admission area of a largely empty passenger car when a female junior conductor asked her to leave her seat and move into another car because she had “other people coming who she wants to give this seat.”
Now as it happens, I was once asked to move to another Amtrak car. I had no idea why, but assumed there was a good reason, and the inconvenience was negligible. Maybe a large group was getting on at the next stop. It was, simply, not a big deal. I’ve been asked to change seats on airlines, too, sometimes with an explanation, sometimes not.
But then, I’m not a high official with a civil rights advocacy organization with an interest in exacerbating racial disharmony in order to sat in business. . Ifill tweeted, “When I was laying [the junior conductor] out to the conductor, at one point, I said, ‘I can sit where I want,’ and I thought, ‘This isn’t 1950.” Continue reading
Doomsday clock showing 3 minutes to midnight
I had completely forgotten that today is the day the Barry McGwire Fan Club or whatever the scientists who maintain the so-called Doomsday Clock call themselves behind closed doors reveal how close we are to destruction this time. From the Hill:
The famed Doomsday Clock has been set at 100 seconds to midnight this year, the closest it’s ever been to the metaphorical point of the Earth’s destruction. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists unveiled this year’s setting for the clock at a news conference Wednesday morning at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
“Speaking of danger and destruction is never easy. If you speak the truth, people will not want to listen because it’s too awful. It makes you sound like a crackpot,” said former California Gov. Jerry Brown (D), executive chairman of the Bulletin.
“Today we live in a world of vast, deep and pervasive complacency,” Brown added. “Even if there is a one-in-100 chance that these men and women before you are correct and we are truly in a dangerous moment, you would never know that from the president, from Republican leadership and from Democratic leadership.”
What a great job for Jerry Brown! Anyway, I had also forgotten that I had posted about this silliness in 2017, not long after President Trump had been sworn in, but several readers had not, and I received several reminders today. I went back and read the post, and it seemed appropriate to re-post it.
One update: at the end, I note that WWII songstress Vera Lynn, whose iconic rendition of the ballad “We’ll Meet Again” accompanied atom bombs exploding at the end of “Dr. Strangelove,” was 100 years old, and still singing. Well, I’m thrilled to report that Vera is now 102 , and she’s STILL singing. Here she is:
Take THAT, Doomsday!
I’m sure you have noticed that the scary Doomsday Clock, which tells us how long we have until “midnight,” aka. nuclear Armageddon, has been on the move again.
NBC News recently announced that the dreaded Clock was ticking like the soundtrack of “24 Hours, proclaiming: “Thirty seconds closer to global annihilation!” The New York Times, which now averages at least eight “President Trump is a menace to civilization!!! ARGGH!!!” columns, editorials or news stories every…single…day, duly announced, “Thanks to Trump, the Doomsday Clock Advances Toward Midnight.” Across the pond, the UK’s Independent stated as fact, “We’re closer to doom than any time since the Cold War!”
Why? Because the Doomsday Clock says so!
Can we officially make that “The Ridiculous Doomsday Clock?” This has to be the most useless and malfunctioning timepiece in recorded history. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day: this damn thing is never right.
The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists dreamed the gimmick up back in 1947 , and its initial setting was “seven minutes to midnight” as in…
What sense did it make to have a clock already set at seven minutes to 12? Why wasn’t it at least a seven-minute stopwatch? What was its setting during the Black Plague? Did the dinosaurs have a Doomsday Clock? Did a wise Diplodocus and a precocious Stegasaurus see a meteor coursing through the Jurassic skies and conclude, “Oh oh. Eventually one of those is going to land here, and we’re all toast. Move the Doomsday Clock to 80 million years before midnight, let’s settle our affairs, and tell the rest of the gang that the mammals are coming…”?
The group of egg-heads devising the clock explained that it symbolized ” the urgency of the nuclear dangers that the magazine’s founders—and the broader scientific community—are trying to convey to the public and political leaders around the world.” OK, I can see that as a minor, fear-mongering news item in 1947—kind of like the climate change hysteria is now—but I would also say that when a group describes a peril as urgent and it hasn’t urged in 70 years, that isn’t just old news, it isn’t newsworthy at all. Continue reading
January 23 is a big day in ethics, good and bad. In 1964, poll taxes were finally banned via the 24th Amendment. In 1973, peace was finally declared in the Vietnam War (though it was hardly the “peace with honor” President Nixon called it.)In 1977, “Roots” debuted as a TV mini-series, helping to educate millions of Americans who knew very little about slavery. In 1988, the Challenger exploded as a result of an engineering ethics breakdown. On this day in 1998, Bill Clinton looked America in the eye and denied having sex with Monica. Of course, he wasn’t lying, because he meant “sexual intercourse.” Sure. And finally, in 1989, Ted Bundy was electrocuted. Good.
1. Impeachment notes. I will not watch the trial, but these kinds of things that come to my attention cannot be ignored:
Instead, we are here today to consider a much more grave matter, and that is an attempt to use the powers of the presidency to cheat in an election. For precisely this reason, the President’s misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box—for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won. In corruptly using his office to gain a political advantage, in abusing the powers of that office in such a way as to jeopardize our national security and the integrity of our elections, in obstructing the investigation into his own wrongdoing, the President has shown that he believes that he is above the law and scornful of constraint.
Good Lord. Continue reading
Yup…a CNN journalist tweeted out a lie , let it go viral, then came back later and said he made it up, but we “know” it’s true.
A trustworthy news organization would fire a reporter who did this immediately. CNN has not and will not, because CNN is not a trustworthy organization.
On a related track, Matt Laszlo, a journalist who works at The Daily Beast and NPR, tweeted,
Continue reading
That’s me. The bee is Facebook…
A really low blow (among the other low blows, like the jerk who accused me of getting all of my ideas from Drudge) came from a former commenter here, who accused Ethics Alarms of being an “echo chamber.” That truly ticks me off. If the Trump Deranged don’t have the wits or open minds to test their biases where intelligent, informed, articulate adversaries are likely to respond, that’s not my fault, and it’s exactly what the left side of the blog’s commentariat did. They didn’t rebut the position here, proven correct, that the Justice Department’s handling of The FISA warrants were part of a dangerous effort to undermine the Trump campaign and his election: they just accused me of “drinking the KoolAid” and quit, or were insulting. They never tried to argue away the smoking gun evidence of the soft coup plans A through S that I have meticulously documents since 2016, they just act as if the current impeachment excuse is justified and offered in good faith, when it is so clearly not. It’s all denial, spin, dishonesty and mob mentality. I ended up in today’s piranha tank by pointing out to a lawyer that the the fact that Trump was intemperate at a meeting of generals was not sufficient to trigger the 25th Amendment, and that lawyers, like her, shouldn’t be misleading the public by making such lame arguments. I posted the amendment, and said that “Unable” to perform the duties of the office doesn’t mean, as she and others are arguing, “Unable to perform the duties that way she and other would prefer them to be performed” and stating that approval polls do not reflect the degree to which the impeachment charade is helping to re-elect Trump.
These are the smart Deranged. Imagine what the others are like.
1. Resistance porn. “A Very Stable Genius” is the latest “tales out of school” anti-Trump book. In this it is no different from those that have gone before, from Omarosa’s tell-all on up the ethics evolutionary scale. This one was authored by Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, so naturally the news media is celebrating it as if it is somehow different. What it is a collection of mostly anonymous accounts of people who have axes to grind and scores to settle against Donald Trump, and are violating basic professional ethics to do it. Are all of the stories true? I’m sure some are, maybe most—they don’t sound out of line with what we knew about this President before he was elected. Yet they are by very nature distorted by the theme of the book and the presumed anti-Trump bias of the book’s audience. What is so alarming about Trump’s eagerness to have a meeting with Putin? So what if he questions why U.S. businesses shouldn’t be allowed to engage in bribery abroad, when it is the accepted norm in many countries? There’s an answer to the question, but it’s not a dumb question; in fact, its one international ethicists still debate. And do you really think Trump saying to Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, “It’s not like you’ve got China on your border” wasn’t a joke? Taking it as otherwise is classic conformation bias and disrespect. It sure sounds like a typical Trump joke to me. Continue reading
