“bias makes you stupid”

Stop Making Me Defend Donald Trump!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Talk about “Democrats pounce!”

Last week, former President Donald J. Trump was riffing, as is his wont, during a speech in New Hampshire. Going off on the January 6 committee, aka. the Star Chamber, Trump said at one point, “Nikki Haley was in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guards, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that.”

Yes, he had just been talking about Nikki Haley, his main competition in the New Hampshire primary, and the needle got stuck. Trump kept saying “Nikki Haley” when he was referring to Nancy Pelosi.

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Comment of the Day: “Oops! A Chief Diversity Officer Reveals The Real Biases Corrupting Her Field”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It is going to be interesting to see if the currently metastasizing DEI mania eventually collapses as its illiberal and destructive features become impossible to excuse or ignore. I assume it will eventually end up in history’s junk yard, and the sooner the better, but equally bad ideas have survived to cause decades of societal chaos.

The post about the diversity officer declaring “White people,” “Able-bodied people,” “Heterosexuals,” “Cisgender people,” “Males,” “Christians,” “Middle or owning class people,” “Middle-aged people,” and “English-speaking people” to be blights on efforts to build a just society (and then quickly disavowing her language as soon as she was called on it) provoked—is still provoking–many excellent comments, including the Comment of the Day by Extradimensional Cephalopod below. He (It? I don’t know EC’s preferred pronouns) shamed me by pointing out that the woke concept of “privilege” is a manifestation of the fundamental attribution error, which I haven’t discussed here for a long time. His Comment of the Day also provoked the Comment of the Day on a Comment Destined to Become a Comment of the Day by JutGory, who wrote,

Extradimensional Cephalopod: “(I keep unsuccessfully searching for a quote I remember where someone describes their “privilege” as a right that they want everyone to have, e.g. the right to have no reason to fear the police.)” Attribute it to me if you like; that is one of my critiques of the notion of privilege. In some instances, privilege is not part of an unearned advantage; it is part of an unwarranted disadvantage. I am not privileged by being treated the way everyone should be treated; someone else is “under-privileged” by not being treated the way one should be.

“Under-privileged”?

“Unprivileged”?

“Demoted”?

“Debased”?

We don’t really have a commensurate term to describe that.So, people use privilege to describe any advantage that one person may have over another. Actually, common with leftists, we talk about groups, not individuals, and then ascribe a quality of the group to the individual. This is kind of an example of the logical fallacy of division. But, the problem is that individuals have, as comments above have noted, many qualities, some of which are more advantageous or disadvantageous than others (almost as if individuals are somehow unique). It is because of this that they had to come up with notions of “intersectionality” because it turns out that “privilege” is a concept that is inadequate when it comes to describing the world. (But, hey, Ptolemy needed epicycles and the equant to make sense of the universe.)

“Privilege” does not exist. “Privilege” is an attempt to describe phenomena and create a generalization about it.

Here is EC’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Comment of the Day: “Oops! A Chief Diversity Officer Reveals The Real Biases Corrupting Her Field”:

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A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias” Classic: CBS Reports on the Fani Willis Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Now that the anti-Trump, Democrat propaganda-promoting, biased and incompetent mainstream media has been forced to cover the unfolding Fani Willis ethics debacle that threatens to swallow her partisan “Get Trump!” prosecution, it is giving us blazing examples of just how untrustworthy its coverage can be. The headline above looms over CBS’s “news” story that is really a lame and transparent effort to try to spin the Fulton County DA out of the mess of her own making.

The focus of the report is that poor Fani just about had to hire her lover as one of the prosecutors in the high profile case against Donald Trump, because she was “unable to find someone in the DA’s office with the stature and credentials needed for the case,” and “turned to at least two other legal heavy hitters in Atlanta who turned the job down.” Then the article, while conceding that Nathan Wade had little relevant experience, tells us that Wade was Willis’s “friend and mentor” <cough!> and that she told colleagues he “had the toughness to handle the scorched-earth legal tactics that Trump’s lawyers and their co-counsel were likely to employ in the legal battle.” You know, because Trump is such an evil bastard.

Then the article explains that…

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Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Oklahoma State Senator: Nathan Dahm, (R-Broken Arrow)

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Senator Dahm has introduced Senate Bill 1837, the “Common Sense Freedom of Press Control Act.” Here are its main provisions:

“Each individual reporter, producer, writer, editor, or any other employee involved in the production of content distributed by a media outlet is hereby required to:

a. complete a criminal background check conducted by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation,
b. receive a license as prescribed by the Corporation Commission as provided in subsection C of this section,
c. complete a propaganda-free safety training course of no less than eight (8) hours as prescribed by the State Department of Education, which shall be developed in coordination with PragerU,
d. provide proof of liability insurance no less than One Million Dollars ($1,000,000.00), and
e. submit to quarterly drug testing for illicit substances to be administered by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation”

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Oops! A Chief Diversity Officer Reveals The Real Biases Corrupting Her Field

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Attention should be paid.

In the latest issue of the “Monthly Diversity Digest,”  Dr. Sherita Hill Golden defined as her “Diversity Word of the Month” privilege as “a set of unearned benefits given to people who are in a specific social group.” “Given”? She went on to write that

“Privilege is characteristically invisible to people who have it. People in dominant groups often believe they have earned the privileges they enjoy or that everyone could have access to these privileges if only they worked to earn them. In fact, privileges are unearned and are granted to people in the dominant groups whether they want those privileges or not, and regardless of their stated intent.”

Golden then named these unfairly and unethically favored groups: “White people,” “Able-bodied people,” “Heterosexuals,” “Cisgender people,” “Males,” “Christians,” “Middle or owning class people,” “Middle-aged people,” and “English-speaking people.”

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Fani Willis Is Toast and Those Arguing That She Isn’t Are Revealing Their Own Ethics Problems

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

When Ethics Alarms first published a commentary related to the unfolding Fani Willis scandal, it was under the headline, “Since the Media is Sure to Report This Major Ethics Story As Late As Possible If At All, I’m Going To Risk Commenting On It Too Soon…” That was a week ago, and it is now clear, though not definitively proven, that indeed Willis did hire her adulterer boy freind as one of the prosecutors on her Trump case, that she has benefited from it personally, and that she has a fatal conflict of interest that will eventually require her removal from the case, probably bar sanctions, and perhaps even criminal charges. Willis using a church appearance to try to shift the issue to racial persecution by the Evil Right was a fairly obvious indication that the allegations in a court filing are true; so is that fact that neither Willis nor her “great friend” have denied the allegations, which would be the obvious move if the scandal was imaginary. Nonetheless, as I expected, the news media is still slow-walking the story, and the usual Trump-Deranged suspects among law professors, legal ethicists and lawyers are trying hard to muddy the water so the public sees the facts as right wing conspiracy-mongering and unethical attacks on the righteous pursuers of their idol.

Mark well those lawyers, ethicists, pundits, professors and publications that try to defend Willis. They have told you, and everyone paying attention, that bias has either made them stupid, or that they are willing to lie “for the greater good.” They are untrustworthy, in either case.

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Fani Willis’s Sermon

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It is beginning to look like Fani Willis, Georgia’s African-American Democrat Fulton County prosecutor who pledged to “get” Donald Trump, really is involved in a serious conflict of interest involving the case and even criminal conduct. The mainstream media is taking notice, it is no longer a “right wing conspiracy theory,” and most interestingly, Willis has not denied the allegations, which appeared in a court filing.

The New York Times published a story headlined “Atlanta D.A. Defends Qualifications of Outside Lawyer She Hired for Trump Case/At a historic Black church, Fani T. Willis pushed back against an accusation that Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor she brought on, was unqualified for the job” in which we learn that Willis spoke yesterday before the congregation of one of the oldest Black churches in Atlanta, which had invited her to be the keynote speaker for a service dedicated to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She did not mention the details of allegations that she is in an intimate relationship with Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor she hired in 2021 for the Trump-getting, and has earned more than $650,000 in the job to date with some of the lucre benefiting her directly. Instead, she said in part,

“Wait a minute, God! You did not tell me,” she added, “as a woman of color it would not matter what I did — my motive, my talent, my ability and my character would be constantly attacked….A divorced single mom who doesn’t belong to the right social groups, who doesn’t necessarily come from the right family, doesn’t have the right pedigree — the assignment was just too high for lowly me. All I brought to the table, God, is my mind, my heart, my work ethic, my undying love for people and the community.”

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Of Course the Jan.6 2021 Capitol Riot Wasn’t an “Insurrection”; the Real Question Is What to Call Those Who Keep Saying It Was…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Liars? Democrats? Journalists?

One of the New York Times’ least Stockholm Syndrome-suffering conservative pundits, Ross Douthat, has an entry at the Times digital page called “Why Jan. 6 Wasn’t an Insurrection.” He does a good job, and the column would be useful one to circulate to your Trump Deranged social media buddies who have been brainwashed by the constant use of the word to falsely describe the idiocy that unfolded on that day…President Biden being one of the main offenders. Douthat begins with the same expression of frustration over the constant Big Lie-mongering on this topic that I have been suffering from over the entire three-year interim:

I’ve written several times about the case for disqualifying Donald Trump via the 14th Amendment, arguing that it fails tests of political prudence and constitutional plausibility alike. But the debate keeps going, and the proponents of disqualification have dug into the position that whatever the prudential concerns about the amendment’s application, the events of Jan. 6, 2021, obviously amounted to an insurrection in the sense intended by the Constitution, and saying otherwise is just evasion or denial.

I know the piece is behind a paywall, so hopefully Mt. Douthat’s understanding, I’m going to quote a bit more freely from his work—with attribution!!!—than I usually would. He announces his agreement with legal scholar Steven Calabresi in Reason magazine, who has pointed out that the “paradigmatic example” that the drafters of the 14th Amendment had in mind “should guide our understanding of its ambiguities.” That would be the Civil War, “in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed.” Says Douthat, perhaps wondering why he should have to, “a five-hour riot probably doesn’t clear the bar.” Ya think?

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Playing “Good Racial Discrimination” Whack-A-Mole

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Campus Reform and College Fix are two generally excellent sleuth sites from the Right that focus on progressive misconduct and indoctrination in higher education. There are no equivalent sites on the Left, because such sites would have material to report about once a week, if that. Since the U.S. Supreme Court knocked down affirmative action, which was always unfair and illegal, all manner of anti-white discrimination in academia, government, the corporate world and the professions are being exposed, attacked in court, and being reversed. The sheer number of these is staggering, however, and eternal vigilance is the price of an ethical culture. How many of these prejudicial and discriminatory programs are there? After careful research and statistics gathering, I can safely say “A lot.” Also: “Too many.”

Campus Reform threw its metaphorical flag on USC and Compton College, which announced that they have created a “Faculty Prep Academy” for “students of color” only. You could stop right there: that’s illegal, and the schools must know it’s illegal. Never mind: apparently the theory behind such efforts is that they can get away with it.

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Racial Bias and Prejudice at the Golden Globes Awards

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The Golden Globes audience of the Hollywood woke laughed and applauded at the lame and insulting recitation of white stereotypes by a black and an Asian presenter over the weekend. In fact, I don’t object to racial and ethnic stereotypes used for humor, as long as there is a single standard for all. However, it is not news that at this point in our increasingly unethical culture, there isn’t any taboo on making racially denigrating jokes about whites while the same kinds of jokes about any other group will lead to shunning, unemployment, and career disruption. If you want to ensure that racial disharmony gets worse instead of better, that’s a brilliant strategy. Yes, it is hypocrisy exemplified, but those who benefit from this double standard rationalize its appropriateness in a number of ways, or just don’t care.

The Golden Globes were back on prime time after a couple of years’ exile for, among other problems, complaints about their dearth of “diversity,” so you know what the new regime’s priorities were. Signalling their sincerity, the choice of host for the evening was ‘historic”: we are told that Jo Kay was the first Filipino American comedian to serve as MC for the broadcast, and only the second Asian. He was also, if not the first embarrassingly incompetent host, a reminder that choosing a comedian because of his ethnicity rather than his comedy skills is a dubious strategy. Even the reliably woke audience in the seats couldn’t manage to make themselves laugh at him, historic Filipino or not, and Jo Kay bombed. Good.

Watch him be asked back…

In such a warped and rigged environment, how proud of her award could Lily Gladstone be when she became became the “historic” first indigenous person to win a Golden Globe for best actress, for her turn in “Killers of the Flower Moon”? Naturally, she basked in a standing ovation, which at this Golden Globes ceremony, was probably recognition for not being white.