“bias makes you stupid”

The Fantasy Headline

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I don’t want to dwell on the headline above from the Times, but this is just another example of how, as in democracy’s death of a thousand cuts, our journalists deceive, confuse and manipulate public opinion. They also think they are clever about it, just as they think they are smarter than they are.

“President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet,” the Times piece begins. “The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.”

Well.

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Ethics Dunce and Unethical Quote of the Week: John Kasich

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I confess: there was a time when I considered supporting John Kasich to be the 2016 GOP nominee for President (anyone but Trump…well, okay, and Dr. Ben Carson). Then I started listening to him. After he wiped out in the primaries, Kasich became a committed NeverTrump fanatic like the revolting Lincoln Project scamsters, left politics after being a wishy-washy Governor of Ohio, and then began being an anti-Trump “contributor” on Fox News, then CNN, NBC and MSNBC (the tell: he’s a liar) during the first Trump administration.

Kasich enthusiasticly supported Joe Biden in 2020, saying, in an endorsement that has aged as well as Walter Donovan in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”..

….“I’m sure there are Republicans and independents who couldn’t imagine crossing over to support a Democrat. They fear Joe may turn sharp left and leave them behind. I don’t believe that because I know the measure of the man. It’s reasonable, faithful, respectful.”

The tell: Kasich is an idiot.

This diagnosis was proven spectacularly correct when Kasich tweeted, following the NFL’s cynical Bad Bunny halftime show:

“Love the halftime show which celebrates the wonderful Latino culture. Great pick and great show. Bad Bunny hit a grand slam home run!”

Apparently the ” wonderful Latino culture” is celebrated with lyrics like these…

…which Kasich either sat there getting aroused by because he’s a dirty old man, or had no freaking idea what Latinos were hearing. I tend to think that he didn’t even watch the half-time show but defended it anyway because Kasich hates Trump to pieces, so he has done so often in the past decade, Kasich proceeded to make a fool of himself.

There are some admirable aspects to Hispanic culture indeed, like devotion to family, entrepreneurism,a strong work ethics and religious faith, but twerking and a crotch obsession arenot among them. Kasich praised Bud Bunny because Trump Derangement has eaten his brain, such as it was.

Oh…and the tweet also proves Kasich is a dork. Who but a dork uses a baseball term to describe a Super Bowl half-time show?

Gee, Who Could Have Ever Predicted That Marijuana Use Would Become a Problem? Me, For One…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I really try not to get emotional over ethics stories, but the current Editorial Board declaration in the New York Times headlined, “It’s Time for America to Admit That It Has a Marijuana Problem” makes me want to run screaming naked into Route 395.

The U.S. had a marijuana problem a half century ago, when an earlier wave of The Great Stupid washed over the land and all manner of important lessons a healthy and functioning society needed to remember and institutionalize were deliberately tossed away because a lot of passionate, anti-establishment assholes were sure that they knew better than anyone “over 30.” I fought this destructive development from college, when I watched one of my room mates suffer short term memory loss from getting stoned morning and night; in law school, when the student running my lightboard for a production of “Iolanthe” erased all the light cues that we had taken six hours to set up because he was higher than the moons of Jupiter, all the way onto this blog. I put up with the mockery of classmates and dorm mates over the fact that I would not “try” pot (“It’s illegal” wasn’t a winning argument, so I settled on “It’s stupid and destructive.”). I drew a line in the sand with my addiction-prone wife, a former pot-head who was already an alcoholic. My fellow lawyers quickly learned not to get stoned around me because they knew I regarded buying and selling pot when it was illegal grounds for reporting them to bar authorities and respected my integrity enough to have reasonable doubts that I might not pretend that I didn’t know what I knew.

I carried the battle onto Ethics Alarms as the relentless pro-stoner propaganda was heading to victory, resulting in the legalization of the drug, the inevitable result of which the assholes who edit the New York Times have the gall now to tell us “Oopsie!” about after being a significant part of the mob mentality that inflicted it on the public, probably forever.

Back in 2011, I drafted a post that I never finished titled, “To My Friends the Pot-Heads: I Know. I’ve Heard It All Before.” It began:

“I take a deep breath every time I feel it necessary to wade into the morass of the Big Ethical Controversies, because I know it invites long and fruitless debates with entrenched culture warriors with agendas, ossified opinions, and contempt for anyone who disagrees with them. War, abortion, religion, prostitution, drugs, torture, gay marriage…there are a lot of them, and all are marked by a large mass of people who have decided that they are right about the issue, and anyone disagreeing with them is stupid, evil, biased, or all three. Contrary to what a goodly proportion of commenters here will write whichever position I take, I approach all of these issues and others exactly the same way. I look at the differing opinions on the matter from respectable sources, examine the research, if it is relevant, examine lessons of history and the signals from American culture, consider personal experience if any, and apply various ethical systems to an analysis. No ethical system works equally well on all problems, and while I generally dislike absolutist reasoning and prefer a utilitarian approach, sometimes this will vary according to a hierarchy of ethical priorities as I understand and align them. Am I always right? Of course not. In many of these issues, there is no right, or right is so unsatisfactory—due to the unpleasant encroachment of reality— that I understand and respect the refusal of some to accept it. There are some of these mega-issues where I am particularly confident of my position, usually because I have never heard a persuasive argument on the other side that wasn’t built on rationalizations or abstract principles divorced from real world considerations. My conviction that same-sex marriage should be a basic human right is in this category. So is my opposition, on ethical grounds, for legalizing recreational drugs.”

Instead of finishing and posting that essay, I posted this one, which used as a departure point a Sunday ABC News “Great Debate” on hot-point issues of the period featuring conservatives Rep. Paul Ryan and columnist George Will against Democratic and gay Congressman Barney Frank and Clinton’s former communist Labor Secretary Robert Reich. [Looking back, it is interesting how all four of these men went on to show their dearth of character and integrity. Ryan proved to be a spineless weenie, rising to Speaker of the House but never having the guts to fight for the conservative principles he supposedly championed. Frank never accepted responsibility for the 2008 crash his insistence on loosening mortgage lending practices helped seed, preferring to blame Bush because he knew the biased news media would back him up. Will disgraced himself by abandoning the principles he built his career on in order to register his disgust that a vulgarian like Donald Trump would dare to become President. Reich was already a far left demagogue, so at least his later conduct wasn’t a departure. I wrote in part,

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Catching Up With “The Lincoln Lawyer” Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

In this limited series of as yet undetermined length, I’ll be examining the legal ethics issues raised by the Netflix limited series of as yet undetermined length based on the Michael Connelly character, fed through the filter of the ubiquitous David Kelley.

I’m not going in strict order chronological order because why should I? This issue is a rich one, and arrived in Season 3 of the show. A prostitute whom Mickey had advised and had testified to help a client in Season 2 turned up dead, and he agreed to represent the man, her cyber pimp, accused of killing her before he realized she was the victim. Mickey liked and sympathized with the victim; whether he was officially her lawyer is a bit vague, but she seemed to think of him that way.

Can a lawyer represent a defendant accused of killing a lawyer’s client? Sure enough, this has happened; there’s even a Supreme Court case about it.

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Ethics Observations on the President’s Response to His Obamas-As-Apes Post

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

 REPORTER: “Mr. President, you frequently criticize Joe Biden for not knowing what is going on in his name. This racist video that was posted is on your social media.”

 PRESIDENT TRUMP: “I know what’s going on a hell of a lot better than you do! You don’t know what’s going on! I know what’s going on.  No, Joe Biden didn’t have a clue, but we know everything. And when you look at what’s happening with our economy, think of it, we’re way years ahead of schedule. We have thousands and thousands of businesses being built right now, so Joe Biden had no clue. If Joe Biden were elected or if Kamala were elected, we wouldn’t have country right now. We won the election because of minority voters.”

 REPORTER: “Does this post maybe hurt Republicans with, you know, Black voters after the…”

  PRESIDENT TRUMP: “You know, I was, look, we did criminal justice reform. I did the historically Black colleges and universities. I got them funded. Nobody has been, and that’s why I got a tremendous, the highest vote with male Black voters that they’ve seen in many, many decades. I’ve done great with them. Black voters have been great to me. I’ve been great them. Black voters has been great me. I’ve been great to them.  And I am, by the way, the least racist president you’ve had in a long time, as far as I’m concerned. We have — I’ve had a great relationship. Think of what I’ve done. Criminal justice reform. Nobody else could do it. Obama couldn’t do it, nobody could do. Clinton couldn’t. They actually went the other way. They went into a very bad thing for African American people, Black people. They went to a — they did very bad things. I did very good things. But criminal justice reform, and then I funded the universities, which nobody else was willing to do. They were going every year, they’d come back to Washington and they’d be begging for money, begging. I got to be friendly with some of the heads of the schools and they would come back and they would literally tell me they’re forcing us to beg. I’m the one that got them long-term financing and more than they were looking for.  So there’s nobody that’s done more. And I think maybe more than anything else was criminal justice reform. They’ve been trying to get it for years. And I’m the one that got it done, so nobody can tell me about that.”

 “That somebody posts, the staffer posts, you know, posts. And I knew it was all about, if you take a look at that, and see the whole thing, it was a small section at the very end. But that was about fraudulent elections, which we have, a lot of them. We’re gonna get it stopped. And I liked the beginning, I saw it, and just passed it on.”

Observations:

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BREAKING: DEI Bias Eats The A.P.’s Brains

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Why would the Associate Press feel the world needs this “news” when Savannah Guthrie’s mother is still missing?

The Associated Press is troubled that there are so many white athletes at the Winter Olympics. No, it really offered a new story that says this. No I am NOT kidding. The apparently woke-mad Chris Nisi complains in “Europe’s rising diversity is not reflected at the Winter Olympics. Culture plays a big role” [Note: “Culture plays a big role”= “Bulletin: Water is Wet.”]…

Immigration from Africa and the Middle East has transformed the demographics of Europe in recent decades. And while the growing diversity is reflected in many sports such as soccer — Sweden’s men’s national team has several Black players including Liverpool striker Alexander Isak — it hasn’t made a dent in winter sports…At the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, Sweden is sending a team made up almost exclusively of ethnically Swedish athletes, with NHL player Mika Zibanejad, whose father is from Iran, a rare exception. That hardly reflects the diversity of the Nordic country: About 2 million of its 10 million residents were born abroad, about half of them in Asia or Africa, according to national statistics agency SCB.

The lack of athletes of color at the Winter Olympics — and in winter sports in general — has been a recurring theme in the U.S., which is sending one of its most diverse teams to the Games. It hasn’t gotten the same attention in Europe.

The Olympic rosters of France, Germany, Switzerland and other European winter sports nations look a lot like Sweden’s: overwhelmingly white and lacking the immigrant representation seen in their soccer or basketball teams…”

 

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That Tears It: I’m Heading To The Woodchipper…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

On Facebook just now, two brilliant women I have long admired, loved and respected posted the following on Facebook:

…One quoted FDR about the President as a “moral leader.” This was intended by my friend as a knock on Trump. She obviously knows next to nothing about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He cheated on his devoted wife for most of their marriage, ultimately dying with one of his mistresses. He locked up Japanese American citizens in arguably the worst civil rights breach of any American President. He helped the Holocaust to proceed by allowing anti-Semites in his Cabinet to foil the efforts of Jews to escape Nazi Germany. FDR condemned Eastern Europe to decades of brutal Communist rule in gratitude to Stalin. Roosevelt also allowed himself to be elected four times, the last time when he knew he was dying: an odd choice to use in contrast to a President being accused of being a “king.”

FDR was a great President in many ways, but few of our leaders were less interested in morality or ethics than Roosevelt.

.…The other poste that she read Kamala Harris’s book and found it inspiring. I don’t even want to talk about that one…

Today In The Wacky World of Trump Derangement…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

The above tweet (Do they still call them that even though it is no longer Twitter? We need a new word. “Xeet”? “Exit”?) is being circulated on social media followed by declarations that the only ethical course is to root for the Seattle Seahawks in this weekend’s Superbowl broadcast. My Facebook friend, an esteemed professor whom I have known in an arts context since 1969, making him also one of my oldest friends, posted it with commentary stating that the contents made it clear that every decent, thinking person should be rooting for Seattle.

My friend calls football “concussion-ball”) and reviles the sport for the same reason I do, though I have extra ethical ammunition against the National Football League, easily the most unethical among the spectacularly unethical professional sports organizations. If I were inclined to watch the Superbowl, the fact that the NFL was so irresponsible as to pick a cross-dressing, open-borders Trump-Deranged performer who will mostly perform in Spanish to lead its half-time show in what was once a non-partisan, All-American event that everyone could watch without feeling political anxiety would end that inclination instantly.

Who decides what sports teams to root for according to whom their owners are friends with, or where their political contributions go? My answer: crazy people. These factors have absolutely nothing to do with the sports, the teams, the players, or the entertainment value of the team’s games.

If one is looking for a professional sports team to favor and one is a wokeness-obsessed loony, it is probably impossible to cheer on any of them. They are all owned by billionaires or consortia including big, bad corporations. They are all privileged tycoon who reliable act as if they can make their own rules, because much of the time, they can. Jody Allen, for example, was sued along with her brother and Vulcan, the holding company she served as CEO in 2013 by five of her former security guards who alleged sexual harassment by Jodie, illegal activity, cover-ups and more, including bribing customs officials to smuggle animal bones out of Africa and Antarctica. The lawsuit was settled out of court, probably because that’s what rich people and corrupt corporations do when they are scared to death of what discovery will uncover. Not that any of that should matter to a Seattle Seahawks fan.

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I Am Increasingly Reaching The Conclusion That We Can’t Trust Anyone, “Experts,” Researchers and Scientists Included: My Dan Ariely Disillusionment

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

We’ve had some interesting discussions here about “experts” here of late, notably this post. I am rapidly reaching the point where anyone who appeals to authority to justify his or her position, particularly if the authority is a study, a report, an “expert” or a scientist, immediately inspires my skepticism and even suspicion. Now what?

Once again, Duke professor and researcher Dan Ariely is in the news, and not in a good way. Ariely, professor of business administration in the Fuqua School of Business is named 636 times in the more than 3 million additional Epstein files released on January 30. He may be innocent of any wrong-doing and he and Epstein may have just played in a Fantasy Baseball league together, but the problem this creates for me is that I have been using Ariely’s work as authority in my ethics seminars for as long as I can remember.

For more than a decade, I told incoming members of the D.C. Bar as part of their mandatory ethics training that such sessions as mine were essential to making their ethics alarms ring. To support that thesis, I related the finding of research performed by Dan Ariely when he was at M.I.T. Ariely created an experiment that was the most publicized part of his best-selling book “Predictably Irrational,” giving Harvard Business School students a test that had an obvious way to cheat built into it and offering small rewarde for the students who got the highest scores. He tracked how many students, with that (small) incentive to be unethical, cheated. He also varied the experiment by asking some students to do simple tasks before they took the test: name five baseball teams, or state capitals, or U.S. Presidents.

None of these pre-test questions had any effect on the students’ likelihood of cheating, except for one question, which had a dramatic effect.  He discovered that students who were asked to recite a few of the Ten Commandments, unlike any of the other groups, never cheated at all. Never. None of them. Ariely told an NPR interviewer that he had periodically repeated the experiment elsewhere, with the same results. No individual who was asked to search his memory for a few of the Ten Commandments has ever cheated on Ariely’s test, though the percentage of cheaters among the rest of the testees is consistently in double figures. This result has held true, he said, regardless of the individual’s faith, ethnic background, or even whether they could name one Commandment correctly.

The classic moral rules, he concluded, reminded the students to consider right and wrong. It wasn’t the content of the Commandments that affected them, but what they represent: being good, or one culture’s formula for doing good. The phenomenon is called priming, and Ariely’s research eventually made me decide to start “The Ethics Scoreboard” and later this ethics blog.

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Nominee for Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Decade: Someone At The Grammys, It Doesn’t Matter Who, Since The Audience Erupted In Cretinish Applause…

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

“No one is illegal on stolen land.”

—Okay, I do know who it was: Billie Eilish, accepting the Grammy for song of the year.

I can’t imagine why anyone would watch the Grammys, and find it even more unimaginable that anyone would care what these under-educated, bubble-dwelling narcissists think about anything, but as usual for this crowd, one after another stepped up to the mic last night and again proved the immortal wisdom of Laura Ingraham’s edict, “Shut up and sing!”

Eilish’s quote is legally, logically, historically and factually absurd, and yet progressives increasingly find it inspiring and persuasive, which should tell you all you want to know about the current state of that ideological malady. Eilish’s nonsense was the most catchy of the many open borders outburst of the night, but there were many others, like…

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