“bias makes you stupid”

Army Policy Is Apparently That Its Prosecutors Must “Believe All Women”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This story, initially reported by the Associated Press, is at very least ominous, and at most a reminder that the Biden Administration’s position is that a man accused of sexual assault is considered guilty until proven innocent.

Unless the man is Joe Biden, of course.

At the beginning of last month, the Army’s head sexual assault prosecutor, Brig. Gen. Warren Wells, was fired from his job by Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth. The justification given was a 2013 email in which he had the audacity to remind Army defense lawyers that they were the last line of defense against false accusations. The message read,

Continue reading →

Slow News Day At PolitiFact?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

PolitiFact is arguably the most biased and the least trustworthy of the fact-checking operations—it or Snopes. Its dossier on EA is thick and nauseating: PolitiFact’s releases are progressive and Democratic Party propaganda masquerading as illumination and non-partisan reality. I’d love to know who made the decision to “fact-check” an obviously tongue-in-cheek video claiming that Hillary Clinton is really a lizard.

Did they really think this needed to be debunked? If so, the organization is run by morons. Was the fact-check also a joke? Professional organizations that want the public to trust them can’t afford to make such jokes. Alleged professional organizations with records of deceit, bias and dishonesty like PolitiFact especially can’t afford to make such jokes, because so many of their serious “fact-checks” are only slightly less absurd.

The “Hillary isn’t a lizard” piece is written with no hints of irony or humor, which is, of course, the right way to present such a thing if it is a joke. I really don’t know what to make of the article. I thought Snopes repeatedly fact-checking Babylon Bee gags was bad, but this—well, come to think of it, there is one possible justification. Anyone who trusts PolitiFact despite its long and ugly record of incompetence and bias is conceivably dumb enough to believe that Hillary Clinton is a lizard. In that case, PolitiFact is simply serving the needs of its market.

Another possibility, I suppose, is that Hillary really is a lizard, and PolitiFact is working with the Left, as usual, to make sure the truth doesn’t get out.

So Apparently It Isn’t Just Slaveholding: Being A White Male Is Sufficient Offense To Justify Tearing Down Your Statue…[Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

The insanely woke National Park Service wants to renovate Philadelphia’s Welcome Park by removing its statue of William Penn as well as Penn’s home, the Slate Roof House. The proposed redesign will highlight Native American history at the expense of the memorial to Penn, who founded the colony, now state, of Pennsylvania.

Continue reading →

Observations on Media Research Center’s 2023 Political Joke Survey

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The Media Research Center, a conservative “media watchdog” roughly the Right’s equivalent of Media Matters but with a much bigger job, analyzed six of the daily late night comedy shows: Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”, NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” CBS’s “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and “The Late Late Show with James Corden” until its April exit, from January 3, 2023 through December 22, 2023. The results are here. The researchers counted 9,518 jokes they judged political in nature, and broke them down into categories. 1,601 targeted progressive, Democrats and figures on the left of the political spectrum. 186 aimed at people, groups, or institutions not associated with either side. 7,729 or 81% of the jokes were considered barbs at were directed at individual, organization or positions considered to be conservative. 493 targets were the objects of a single joke, with 285 of these on the right, 167 on the left, and the remaining 41 on non-partisan topics.

The unbalanced percentages are only a surprise in that they are less lopsided than I would have guessed, but still obviously showan absurdly unfair partisan bias. If, as was once the norm in all political comedy, all sides and parties were mocked relatively equally with the President in the White House taking most of the fire, political humor can be fairly categorized as entertainment with the primary objective being to make as many people laugh as possible. Distorted to this extent, however, late night comedy becomes a self-evident propaganda weapon that plays a significant part in the mainstream media mission to sway elections and manipulate public opinion.

Some telling findings:

Continue reading →

Incompetent? Irresponsible? Dishonest? Whatever This Was, It’s Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Look! Another example of IIPTDXTTNMIAFB (“Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.”)!

From the New York Times:

It took the Pentagon three and a half days to inform the White House that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III had been hospitalized on New Year’s Day following complications from an elective procedure, two U.S. officials said Saturday.

The extraordinary breach of protocol — Mr. Austin is in charge of the country’s 1.4 million active-duty military at a time when the wars in Gaza and Ukraine have dominated the American national security landscape — has baffled officials across the government, including at the Pentagon.

Senior defense officials say Mr. Austin did not inform them until Thursday that he had been admitted to the intensive care unit at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. The Pentagon then informed the White House.

The Pentagon’s belated notification, first reported by Politico, confounded White House officials, one Biden administration official said.

Meanwhile, conservatives “pounced”: “What possible motive could there be for doing this? Who knows? It didn’t make a lot of sense, but the Biden administration has an extensive record of covering up scandals, so it wasn’t exactly out of character for the Biden administration to cover something up,” wrote PJ media’s Matt Margolis. Other wags noted that hiding such health-related information about important government officials is the kind of thing China does.

Continue reading →

From the “The Trouble With Protesters” Files…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The trouble with protesters, to cut to the chase, is that a large percentage of them in virtually every protest and demonstration don’t know what they are chanting about and are just happy mob participants. I remember when my college was shut down by a student strike my freshman year, several of my friends were happily raising their fists and carrying signs despite the fact that they weren’t interested or informed on the matter being protested. They all reassured me that they were involved to meet girls. Later, in my first job after law school, the PR director I worked with in D.C. seemed to be attending a protest or rally every weekend. When I remarked that she was unusually politically active for someone who never discussed politics at all, she assured me that she just enjoyed the energy of crowds…and found it a good way to meet guys.

Since yesterday was “Capitol Insurrection Day,” which I predict will be made a national holiday as soon as Democrats get control of Congress, it seems a propitious opportunity to ponder an equally stupid protest in Clifton, Bristol (Great Britain). A resident reported that his Tesla’s tires were deflated, and on the windshield was this message:

Other automobiles on his street were also victims of tire-deflating. The group behind the mass flattening calls itself “the Tyre Extinguishers.” ( The play on words would work better if the Brits spelled “fire” as “fyre.”)

The annoyed Tesla owner told reporters, “It’s ironic, because I was trying to do the right thing by buying an electric car. It’s ridiculous and inconvenient. I get why [climate activism] is happening, but I’m not seeing the point of this.”

The point he ought to derive from the incident is that most climate change protesters know almost nothing about climate science and related matters, like the full environmental effects of electric vehicles. They are passionately protesting what they don’t understand sufficiently to have an informed opinion about, and therefore shouldn’t influence anyone beyond persuading observers that they are passionate, unethical dolts and blights on society.

One more point: deflating the tires of Teslas is a brilliant climate change protest compared to gluing oneself to a famous painting.

___________

Pointer: Curmie

Its Post-Harvard President Firing Tantrum Shows That The Left Is Even More Corrupt Than We Thought! Part III: The News Media and the Race-Baiters [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In a recent essay, Victor David Hanson concisely summarizes why the Left’s angry narrative that Claudine Gay was forced out as Harvard’s president because of racial discrimination is untenable and self-damning. He wrote in part,

…In the respective press releases from both Gay and the Harvard Corporation, racial animus was cited as a reason for her removal. Gay did not even refer to her failure to stop antisemitism on her campus or her own record of blatant plagiarism. Yet playing the race card reflects poorly on both and for a variety of reasons. One, Gay’s meager publication record — a mere eleven articles without a single published book of her own — had somehow earned her a prior Harvard full professorship and presidency. Such a thin resume leading to academic stardom is unprecedented.

Two, the University of Pennsylvania forced the resignation of its president, Liz Magill. She sat next to Gay during that now-infamous congressional hearing in which they both claimed they were unable to discipline blatant antisemitism on their campuses. Instead, both pleaded “free speech” and “context” considerations.

Such excuses were blatantly amoral and untrue. In truth, ivy-league campuses routinely sanction, punish, or remove staff, faculty, or students deemed culpable for speech or behavior deemed hurtful to protected minorities — except apparently white males and Jews. Yet Magill was immediately forced to resign, and Gay was not. Also noteworthy was Magill’s far more impressive and extensive administrative experience, along with a more prestigious scholarship that was free of even a suggestion of plagiarism.

Academia’s immediate firing of a white woman while trying desperately to save the career of a less qualified and ethically challenged Black woman will be seen not as a case of racial bias but more likely of racial preference.

And yet one after another of the prominent pundits, journalists and commentators immediately worked hard to spread the “Gay was a victim of systemic racism” narrative. In so doing, they discredited themselves and the ideology that warps their judgment and ethics.

Presidential candidate Cornel West, a former Harvard professor, wrote, “How sad but predictable that the same figures and forces enabling the ethnic cleansing and genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Gaza – Ackman, Blum, Summers and others – push out the first Black woman president of Harvard! This racism against both Palestinians and Black people is undeniable and despicable! I have experienced similar attacks from the same forces in academia with too many of my colleagues remaining silent! When big money dictates university policy and raw power dictates foreign policy, the moral bankruptcy of American education and democracy looms large! But we shall remain strong in our fight for Truth Justice Love!”

Al Sharpton told his MSNBC audience that the Harvard president’s resignation is an “attack” on “every Black woman” in US.

Mara Gay, one of several NYT’s race-baiters, told MSNBC that”This is really an attack on academic freedom … This is an attack on diversity. This is an attack on multiculturalism, & … I don’t have to say that they’re racist, because you can hear and see the racism in the attacks”

Continue reading →

Most Odious Response to Claudine Gay’s Demise Yet: Hossam (Sam) Youssef, Ph.D

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Now THAT’s anti-Semitism!

Since he asked: Why yes, Alan Garber who is the interim president of the Harvard until a permanent replacement for Claudine Gay is selected, holds Harvard professorships in health care policy, economics, and public policy. As the school Provost, he was the obvious choice to step in. Funny, it didn’t even occur to me that he is Jewish.

Youseff’s credentials are here.

__________________

Pointer: Campus Reform

Its Post-Harvard President Firing Tantrum Shows That The Left Is Even More Corrupt Than We Thought! Part I: Introduction

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Introduction

The worst part of writing a daily ethics commentary blog arrives when a juggernaut ethics train wreck starts causing carnage in all directions. Following the story is critical to the mission here, but doing it thoroughly makes Ethics Alarms less interesting, more predictable, and boring both for me and the readers. Examples of this phenomenon are, unfortunately, numerous. I’m sick of writing about Donald Trump’s miserable habits and rhetoric. I’m sick of writing about the Left dividing the nation, wrecking democracy, and crushing institutions to try to avoid having to defeat him fairly. I got thoroughly sick of writing about a dumb, corrupt, arrogant Democratic Representative who pulled a fire alarm like a 13-year-old to disrupt a House vote, and who should have been harshly punished for it…but was allowed to get away with an obvious lie. Etcetera: the mainstream media bias that so many progressives refuse to admit…the George Floyd Freakout…the DEI scam….the January 6 narrative….you can list them as easily as I can.

And I am really sick of writing about Harvard’s unethical culture, but having to watch and write about the Claudine Gay scandal is the worst yet. This story should have been quickly resolved, allowing Ethics Alarms to concentrate on more legitimately contentious matters. The facts aren’t in dispute, or shouldn’t be, embarrassing though they may be: [Added: I’ll get around to placing links to the corresponding EA posts, I hope, when I have time. You can also find them by searching for “Claudine Gay,” Harvard,” or by clicking on the “Claudine Gay” tag after the post.]

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Month and Ethics Dunce: Ex-Harvard President Claudine Gay

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

I was prepared to write a sympathetic and generous post in response to the resignation of Claudine Gay from the presidency of Harvard University. It must be a crushing blow for her, both personally and professionally. At this moment, I can’t think of a fair analogy from the past in any field: the closest I can come is Richard Nixon’s forced resignation from the American Presidency. She was celebrated as a great trailblazer as the first black and first black female president of the world’s most famous university only a few months ago. Her fall was rapid and ugly.

I an not sympathetic any more, however. Her Unethical Quote of the Month is her resignation letter, which you can read here. It is disgraceful. She never alludes to her failure to adequately address the anti-Semitic and pro-terrorism demonstrations on the Harvard campus. She never mentions her plagiarism in multiple scholarly papers, without which she probably could have survived the criticism arising from her inept testimony in Congress. What she says, in the midst of empty rhetoric about her aspirations and how much she cares about Harvard, is this:

“[I]t has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”

Continue reading →