“bias makes you stupid”

I Thought Disney Lost Its Copyright on Mickey Mouse Today. Uh, NO…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

A little over a week ago, I wrote (in Item #3),

As the capper on a really bad year for Disney, Mickey Mouse finally loses its copyright protection on Jan. 1, 2024, and goes into the public domain. Disney unethically used its lobbying power to use its iconic founding rodent to persuade the U.S. Congress to extend copyright protection beyond all reason. Disney’s monopoly over Mickey will end95 years after his debut in the short film “Steamboat Willie,” long, long after the original copyright protection would have expired based on the correct theory that once an artist has gleaned a reasonable benefit and profit from a creation, it benefits the culture and society to be able to use the work to spark innovation and new uses for the original work.

As Carnac the Great would say, “Wrong, Ethics-Breath!”

Disney still has its hooks into Mickey, as the company continues to warp U.S. intellectual property law, setting the precedents for other properties to avoid the public domain far longer than is healthy for the culture. Yes, the original Mickey of 1928’s trailblazing Disney cartoon “Steamboat Willie” (above) has lost its copyright, but not this Mickey,

…or this Mickey,

or this Mickey,

or this one,

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Observations On The NeverTrump Section 3 Big Lie Push

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Maine joined Colorado in barring from its GOP primary ballot yesterday, as Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D) decided that she “had no choice.” She had no choice because she is a rapid partisan Leftist who, like many Democratic operatives in various positions of power within the legal establishment, she is determined that President Biden be rescued from his election peril by any means necessary. Trump’s actions before and during the January 6, 2021, riot in the U.S. Capitol do not justify charging him with inciting a riot, much less an “insurrection” that would trigger Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Maine’s completely partisan and anti-democratic move is sure to be appealed along with Colorado Supreme Court’s finding last week that Trump could not appear on the ballot in that state under the 14th Amendment provision designed to keep members of the Confederacy that prevents insurrectionists from holding office. The U.S. Supreme Court will review the case, one hopes quickly, and had better resolve the issue of whether Trump can run again or if the nation will be thrown into Constitutional chaos by allowing some states to block him.

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Has-Been Director Panders to the Trump-Deranged, Trump Responds Like The Silly Jerk He Is, and the Media Pretends This Is Newsworthy: Make It Stop!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I shouldn’t even be writing about this completely silly and worthless story. It exemplifies, however, the cesspool that we are going to be dunked in for all of the next year. Here’s how it goes:

ACT I

The mainstream news media decided to exploit the Christmas season as an opportunity to take a cheap shot at Donald Trump, since that is considered the patriotic duty of anyone who has ever had contact with him, and because he is a threat to democracy. So, as Columbus’s twin “Home Alone” movies were au courrant once again, Rolling Stone and some other enterprising Trump-bashers dredged up a three-year old Business Insider interview in which has-been movie director Chris Columbus, apparently looking to curry favor with the monolithic woke Hollywood community, revealed that Trump had “bullied” his way into the cameo he performed during “Home Alone 2.”

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“This is Basil. Though He Is a PhD, a Professor, and a Democratic Political Consultant, Bias Has Made Him Stupid and Ridiculous. Won’t You Give a Tax-Deductable Donation to Help Us Find a Cure For Basil and Victims Like Him?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

 Confirmation bias may be the most destructive bias of them all, creeping into the best of minds and casing them to malfunction wildly, and, in tragic cases like that of Basil Smilke, causing them to say and do things that destroy their credibility while making them look ridiculous. This is the bias that makes human beings see and believe what they want to see and believe when a conflicting reality is right in front of them.

I actually did a Danny Thomas spit-take when I read Smilke’s opinion column on CNN’s website titled, “Kamala Harris is not a liability. She may be Democrats’ best weapon.” I got a mouthful of coffee on Spuds, who was lying on me, and he was not pleased. Reading the headline, I was prepared to see that the crazy thing had been authored by a student at Madame Louisa’s Home for the Bewildered, but no. Smilke appears to be well credentialed and to have all his faculties, not that being a professor and director of the Public Policy Program at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute of Hunter College is the highest step on the academic ladder, but hey: Hunter has more credibility than Harvard, and it doesn’t allow plagiarism.

Now, I recognize that Smilke is also a Democratic Party political operative and consultant, so there is an alternate explanation for the piece that doesn’t make him look like a confirmation bias-infected moron. He could be lying to the public and to Kamala Harris in the hopes of getting a job. That would be unethical, of course, but then he’s a Democratic Party political operative and  consultant.

His opinion piece—and why would even CNN publish something this absurd?—reads like it was written under the influence of some powerful mind-altering drug. Here is his argument:

  • Harris has been unfairly savaged by Republicans and conservatives (and a substantial number of Democrats, but he doesn’t mention that) because she is a black woman. It’s all sexism and racism. “Biden’s second-in-command, a former US senator and California attorney general, is being dragged down by a barrage of tropes, the kinds of chatter that many women and racial minorities frequently confront in politics.”

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The Campus Race-Baiters’ Favorite Things

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

College Fix, which has been the source of several EA posts this year, has provided an amusing (or depressing) compendium of 71 people, places and things that “were declared racist or in need of ‘anti-racist’ action” by academics or on college campuses. The list is, shall we say, provocative and revealing. Here are 25 of my favorites and their links; Ethics Alarms covered some of them:

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CNN’s Brianna Kellar and the News Media’s “Think of the Children!” Refrain in Support of Hamas

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Yes, it’s “Imagine” time again. Mainstream media talking heads and hacks have apparently been playing the John Lennon’s sweet and fatuous ode to nonsense over earbuds as they sleep, judging from the angle they repeatedly return to as they push anti-Israel propaganda on the public.

CNN’s Breanna Keilar had a typical “Think if the children!” exchange with Israeli spokeswoman Tal Heinrich yesterday.

Keilar (talking over and interrupting her guest as she Heinrich expressed regret that children in Gaza were being placed in harm’s way): “Tal, when you see those pictures coming out of Gaza, do you see why some people don’t have hope looking at those pictures?”

Heinrich: “Well, we are in the middle of a war that Israel did not start, and did not want.”

Keilar: “It is prosecuting it forcefully, and you see the pictures here.”

Heinrich: “When Hamas started this war — hope and peace and a better future for the region — that is the greatest enemy of terrorists. Once we eliminate these terrorists, we eliminate the rule. We hope that there will be other voices, pragmatic ones that want to work with us towards peace. This is what we want. We want to live in this region peacefully. That’s what Israelis have always wanted. But first, Hamas must be gone, and then we hope that the Palestinian society will de-radicalize. We can’t have — you know, what our troops are finding right now, on the ground, in certain neighborhoods in Gaza, pictures of children, women with guns, Hamas uniform tailored for children. And Hamas terrorists that we have arrested—”

Keilar (interrupting): “Does that make the children justifiable enemies to you? Is that what you’re saying? Does that make all of the children justifiable enemies to you? I mean, you’re raising the specter of them being used in military uniform.”

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 5: The Speed Hump Weenies

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

For this continuing series examining the biases that make me stupid (or not), on the one month anniversary of the last installment, I want to take up the matter of drivers who slow to a crawl or even stop their vehicles entirely when they encounter a “speed hump” in the road.

This past week two such drivers almost caused my car to run into them. In recent years Northern Virginia has gone speed hump mad, putting the things virtually everywhere that isn’t a highway or a main thoroughfare. I don’t mind them, however, nearly as much as I mind the way some drivers seem to regard them as explosive devices. You can safely drive over a speed hump at a moderate velocity; your transmission or axles aren’t going to fall off if your car doesn’t slow down into single digits.

I confess: I regard drivers who freak out at speed humps as emblematic of creeping weenie-ism in the nation. I imagine such drivers as still wearing masks alone in their cars, spending nights shivering in terror over the certain doom that the world faces if we don’t start living like prehistoric cave dwellers, fearing to allow their kids to walk unaccompanied a few blocks home from school, and who want the U.S. to minimize the deployment of its military to tasks involving expanding LGBTQ rights and advancing the cause of diversity, equity and inclusion. I envision them applauding when some anti-gun fanatic shouts that it would be worth eliminating the Second Amendment “if it saved one life” and crippling the First so no feelings are ever hurt by unwelcome opinions.

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Unethical Quote of the Month: Vince Beiser, Professor Frances DeLaurentis and “Georgetown Law Magazine”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

One of the main occupational hazards of being an ethicist and writing this blog is that my ethics Spidey-sense can’t be turned off. This is why anything from TV commercials to an old re-run of “Three’s Company” to a kid leaving an e-scooter by the side of the road can trigger an ethical analysis. This is not a fun way to go through life, but “this is the life I have chosen.”

It may be that the passage in the Georgetown Law Center alumni magazine started my head clanging like the crocodile’s in “Peter Pan” when the alarm clock he swallowed goes off wouldn’t have bothered me if I had I not just reviewed all the unethical quotes of 2023 an hour before reading “AI and the Law” in the Fall 2023 issue (which just arrived last week, a full season late). I don’t think so, however. Here it is:

“Students might well use the [AI]technology to cheat, but at this point stopping them is difficult….And in any case, students have always cheated; in a way, AI may even help level the playing field. ‘AI puts kids who don’t have Uncle Alito to call for help with their take-home exam on an equal footing with those who do,’ says [Prof. Frances] DeLaurentis.”

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Unethical Quote of the Month: Washington Post Associate Editor Ruth Marcus [Link Restored]

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“This was not my original instinct. I thought, and continue to believe, that Gay’s accusers and their allies were motivated more by conservative ideology and the desire to score points against the most elite of institutions than by any commitment to academic rigor. This was, and is, accompanied by no small dose of racism, and the conviction that a Black woman couldn’t possibly be qualified to lead Harvard.”

—Washington Post columnist and associate editor Ruth Marcus, a Harvard Law grad, in an opinion piece titled, “Harvard’s Claudine Gay should resign.”

Marcus, who has one of the thickest and damning dossiers of any pundit on Ethics Alarms, usually strikes me as a dim and predictable partisan analyst, but this is disgusting even by her bottom-of-the barrel standards.

You see what she’s doing there? She agrees with the conservatives who have called for Harvard president Claudine Gay to be fired or resign, but while in Marcus’s case, the conclusion is honorable, considered, rational and pure, conservatives who reached the exact same conclusion did so because of bias and bigotry.

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Musings on Jesse Otero, the Human Broken Window

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Jesse Leonardo Otero, 44, has been arrested 90 times for shoplifting in the Bay area of California, most recently this month. He is a drug addict, homeless, and supports himself by shoplifting and selling stolen property, often stealing from the same stores over and over again. He doesn’t discriminate, though, targeting small businesses, big-box stores, or whatever seems convenient at the time. He isn’t just lifting candy bars: when Jesse steals, it’s usually hundreds of dollars of merchandise at a time. Local police and store managers know him by name. The manager of Five Little Monkeys toy store in Albany, California, for example, says she has reported Otero to police more than 20 times. Jesse ranged far and wide in his shopping trips, and is an expert on the BART transit system, which he uses to hit stores at every stop.

Nobody has kept count of the number of days Jesse has spend in jail for his exploits, but it isn’t very many. The usual routine is that police give Otero a citation and release him. Sometimes, as with this month’s arrest, he is arrested and jailed for a short time, then let out of jail free, just like in Monopoly. All of this ridiculous pattern is due to California voters, in their wisdom, passing a law in 2014 that weakened penalties for everything Jesse does, like illicit drug use, vagrancy, petty theft, and shoplifting. Prosecutors now can’t file a felony shoplifting charge unless the items taken top $950 in value.

Multiply Jesse by several hundred (or thousands?) and you can understand why so many stores in California are experiencing ruinous shoplifting. Social justice warriors, advocates of “restorative justice” and those who regard the fact that a disproportionate number of those in prison are black as proof of systemic racism dispute the validity of the “Broken Windows” theory, but California’s experience is one more bit of significant evidence that the theory is sound.

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