“bias makes you stupid”

Ethics Hero: ADL CEO Jonathan Goldblatt

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I have some reservations about designating anyone an ethics hero when they declare that they “love” MSNBC. Loving MSNBC is a mark of partisan bias and corruption, as well as making someone who regularly appears on the network’s propaganda-spewing shows complicit in the damage being done to civic discourse and democracy by this truly unethical, racist, divisive and destructive network.

But…

After MSNBC’s hosts and guests had been, predictably, mouthing the Palestinian, Democratic Socialist (including “The Squad”) cant about how the massive terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas was somehow justified, and periodically calling for “context,” which is like the Left’s “root causes” narrative after the attacks of 9/11, reliable knee-jerk progressive (he was one of Obama’s aides) and ADL head Goldblatt directly and unequivocally condemned the MSNBC coverage, looking straight into the camera to do it.

MSNBC deserves some praise too: it allowed Goldblatt to finish his long and very articulate spontaneous speech without any attempt to interrupt or cut away. Such instances where the news media is confronted honestly about its disgusting conduct are too rare, and we should pat our respects when they do occur.

“Curmie’s Conjectures”: The Revenge of the Wackadoodles

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

by Curmie

One of my favorite lines from the late singer/songwriter Warren Zevon is “Just when you thought it was safe to be bored / Trouble waiting to happen.”  That lyric came to mind when I happened across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Hamline President Goes on the Offensive.”Well, that lyric and one of my most oft-used phrases, “Oh, bloody hell!”. 

This rather lengthy article—over 3000 words—deserves to be read in its entirety, even if it involves a registration process for free access to a limited number of articles per month, but I’ll try to hit the highlights here.  The author is Mark Berkson, the Chair of the Religion Department at Hamline University.  His was for a very long while the only voice, or at least the only audible one, on the Hamline campus to come to the defense of erstwhile adjunct art history professor Erika López Prater as she was being railroaded by the school’s administration on absurd charges of Islamophobia.

You may recall the incident.  Jack first wrote about it here; my take came a little later, here.  Dr. López Prater was teaching a course in global art history, in which she showed images of a couple of paintings depicting the prophet Muhammad.  Recognizing that there are some strains of Islam in which viewing such images is regarded as idolatrous, she made it clear both in the course syllabus and on the day of the lecture in question that students who chose not to look at those particular photos were free not to do so, without penalty.

Ah, but that left too little room for victimhood.  So student Aram Wedatalla blithely ignored those warnings and (gasp!) saw those images… or at least she says she did, which is not necessarily the same thing.  Wounded to the core by her own sloth and/or recklessness, she then howled to the student newspaper and, urged on by Nur Mood, the Assistant Director of Social Justice Programs and Strategic Relations (also the advisor to the Muslim Student Association, of which Wedatalla was president), to the administration.  The banner was then raised high by one David Everett, the Associate Vice President of Inclusive Excellence.  (Those folks at Hamline sure do like their pretentious job titles, don’t they?)

Anyway, Everett proclaimed in an email sent to literally everyone at Hamline that López Prater  had been “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”  To be fair, he didn’t identify her by name, but there weren’t a lot of folks teaching global art history.  Everett was just getting warmed up.  He subsequently co-authored, or at least jointly signed, a statement with university president Fayneese Miller that “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.”  Not at any university worthy of the name, it shouldn’t.  Anyway, López Prater was de facto fired, because destroying the careers of scholars for even imaginary offenses has become a blood sport for administrators (and, in public colleges, for politicians).

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Smoking Gun: The LA Times Shows How The Next Election Should Be “Stolen” And Calls It Responsible Journalism

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Proving that Alexa is right, the LA Times recruited Tom Rosenstiel, a former reporter and current journalism professor ,to author a candid but frightening essay that demonstrates exactly how deep the unethical cesspool of American journalism is today. The article is “How not to cover Donald Trump’s bizarre 2024 campaign for president,”and it broadcasts its bias and intellectual dishonesty at every turn, including the headline: Trump’s campaign is bizarre only because Democrats have taken the unprecedented and dangerous step of trying to stop a political adversary by using the criminal justice system as a partisan weapon.

The column states outright that it is the obligation of good journalists to cover the Trump campaign and candidacy in such a way that it fails. “It’s a dereliction of the press’ duty to ignore powerful dissemblers and liars in public life,” the professor writes. “We have an obligation to explain what’s false and offer clear and persuasive evidence of the truth. We have to help the public understand.”

If that last sentence doesn’t cause the date “1984” to start flashing in your brain, it should. These people really believe that their “understanding” is the right understanding. They are the perceptive ones, they are the arbiters of all disputes, disagreements and controversies. The arrogance is chilling, particularly because, as Ethics Alarms has pointed out repeatedly, journalists are not especially smart, wise, erudite or creative people. Some are, of course, just as one of my smartest and most ethical friends had driven a delivery van for 30 years. But the idea that reporters and journalists have the critical thinking skills, the breadth of knowledge and the depth of experience to tell the public “what’s false” would be hilarious if it didn’t do so much damage to the proper functioning of democracy.

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Now THIS Is Gaslighting…Or Outright Lying…Or Senility…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

President Biden said yesterday, as he boasted about a misleading jobs report, “The American people are smart as hell and know what their interests are. I think they know they’re better off financially than they were before. It’s a fact.”

It’s not a fact. There were a number of counter factual assertions there. First, the American people are NOT “smart as hell” or they would not have elected a dementia victim who was never too sharp to begin with as President of the United States, Second, Biden and his party routinely act as if the public does not know “what their interests are,” presuming that Big Brother knows best. Moreover, even the substantially dim-witted members of the pubic are smart enough to know they are not “better off financially than they were before,” before meaning, as it should, before the pandemic and the progressive-led lockdown created an artificial crater which any administration would be able to crawl out of and show a relative improvement. The only question is whether Joe Biden believes that “Bidenomics” is working.

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Do Progressive Voters Comprehend The Significance Of Their Elected Officials’ Hypocrisy And Flip-Flops?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Rhetorical question. Based on the evidence, the clear answer is “No.”

Exhibit A for today is that part of the 16th St. “street mural” that Black Lives Matter protesters painted next to the official “Black Lives Matter” lettering ordered up by Democratic Mayor Murial Bowser in 2020, when she pandered disgracefully to the Marxist, racist, scamster movement by re-naming the area running directly to the White House “Black Lives Matter Plaza.” At the time this stunt was intended by Bowser and teh D.C. City Council as a rebuke to then-President trump, but its syill there, even though Bowser has, weasel-like insisted that the “Defund the Police” message isn’t part of the official D.C. mural. Typical Bowser: the protesters are correct; that’s an equal sign to the left, making the full message “Black Lives Matter = Defund the Police.” BLM does stand for defunding the police, among other things (riots, unpunished crime, thugs resisting arrest…). Three years ago, Bowser dodged the a question on ABC’s “This Week” as to whether she would remove the unauthorized message. “It’s not a part of the mural,” mewled, adding that she hadn’t “had the opportunity to review it.” It’s still there, of course.

Nonetheless, just a few days before the embarrassing episode where a Democratic Congressman had his car hijacked at gunpoint, Bowser, whose city is in a crime wave like so many other Democrat-run cities in the thrall of the George Floyd Freakout and The Great Stupid, announced that her city needed more police. “We don’t have the officers that we need, and sadly we’ve lost three to four hundred officers in the last four years,” she said. “We haven’t had officers in our schools, and we have policies that make it difficult to recruit new officers.”

The obvious rejoinder should be, “And whose fault is that, you dummy?” But it isn’t. Joe Biden’s intellect-challenged mouthpiece blamed Rep. Cuellar’s hijacking on Republicans, though the party virtually doesn’t exist in the nation’s Capitol. Moreover, who voted for Bowser, not to mention that long trail of incompetent and/or corrupt Democratic mayors before her stretch back to convicted felon and crack-head Marion Barry (who has a statue honoring him downtown)?

When elected officials act like Bowser, it is convincing evidence that they can’t be trusted. Changing one’s position in the wake of facts that show you were wrong is simply competent leadership, but arguing two positions that are mutually exclusive is the mark of a politician who lack integrity, accountability, and sufficient brain cells to rub together to make small fire. We are seeing this self-indicting conduct coast to coast, from New York—where New York City’s major and the state’s governor still insist that they govern “sancuaries” for illegal immigrants but who are complaining that they don’t have the space or funds to actually be what they say they are—to California, where Gavin Newsom, hoping to fool an entire country into giving him power when he has presided over the ethics and societal rot that is now California, is brazenly taking contradictory positions on a slew of issues. President Biden, much to Donald Trump’s amusement, is now trying to build Trump’s “wonderful wall.”

Hypocrisy and a flagrant flip-flopping apparently means nothing to voters, perhaps because they have been raised to lack integrity themselves.

Meanwhile, back in D.C., the CVS in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of D.C. regularly looks like this:

You see, black lives matter, and black teens, gang members and thieves regularly loot the store, leaving almost all the shelves empty. “A big group of kids, like 45 or more, walk in before school, after school and late at night to steal chips and drinks,” local station Fox 5 reported this week. “They even throw the food and beverages on the ground and stomp on them, leaving behind a big mess. Staff at CVS have been alerted that thieves are aware of when new shipments come in and that’s when they target the store.” Street vendors are allegedly paying people to go in and steal the merchandise so they can resell it.

The neighborhood is almost exclusively black, so the majority of law abiding citizens in the area are the ones being most harmed by the collapse of the rule of law in the District (Black Lives Matter = Collapse of the Rule of Law), but you watch: they’ll still vote for Bowser next time around, or if not, someone as bad or worse. This was the result in Chicago, when voters got rid of one incompetent, lying, leftist mayor only to replace him with someone more radical and inept than even she was.

As Pete Seeger, himself a reality-challenged Marxist, sang in his best composition, “When will they ever learn?” It’s beginning to look like the answer may be “Never!”

The Amazing Trevor Bauer Ethics Train Wreck: It Has Everything: #MeToo, Kinky Sex, Ethics Zugzwang, Predatory Women, ‘Guilty Until Proven Innocent,’ “The Asshole’s Handicap,” Legal Ethics And Baseball! [Part I: The Story] (Updated And Corrected)

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

This story broke a couple of days ago, and readers have been chiding me for not posting on it. I must admit, I was stalling, because it is a total mess that will take two major posts to unravel, and to cap it all off, my baseball posts don’t attract enough interest to meet the time/reward minimum. Nevertheless, this disaster raises major ethical issues. Ignore at your peril.

1. Background: Trevor Bauer: I have written a great deal about Trevor Bower, a talented Major League starting pitcher who, somewhat like Curt Schilling (recently discussed here), had a well-earned reputation for being an eccentric, and kind of a jerk. Bauer was also Donald Trump-like on social media, with similar, if more narrowly focused, results.

He once knocked himself out of a crucial post-season start by cutting a pitching hand finger playing with a drone (he loves drones). In 2018, while pitching for the Cleveland Indians, Bauer appeared to carve “BD 911” into the pitching mound during a game. That has been Truther short-hand for “Bush Did” the 9-11 bombings, and Bauer was widely criticized for the stunt. He then angrily denied that the message meant anything political, but never explained what it did mean. This also did not make him popular in a sport that is branded as patriotic and embodying core American values. In 2019, a sportswriter started claiming that Bauer’s tweets made him a “problem” because he had a contentious exchange with a female Twitter user. He was accused of harassment. It wasn’t harassment, but a pattern was set that eventually bit Bauer, hard.

In 2019, after allowing seven runs, Bauer threw a baseball over the centerfield wall after seeing his manager Terry Francona come out of the dugout to remove him from the game. Bauer apologized profusely, but it was the final straw for Francona, and the Indians traded him. Bauer was among the most vocal critics (and one of the few player critics) of the Houston Astros’ cheating scandal (see here), and cheating in baseball generally. This is also not the way to be popular in the clubhouse. In 2021, MLB announced that umpires would be checking the balls more carefully and regularly to ensure that the rule against doctoring pitches wasn’t being violated. The first pitcher to have his thrown baseballs collected for inspection based on suspicion of doctoring was…Trevor Bauer, Anti-Cheating Crusader. Bauer reacted sarcastically to the report on his Twitter account, and noted that many baseballs were being collected from games across baseball, not only from him. I wrote that this was an ethics red flag for me, as was his reaction when baseball announced the new policy, saying that there would be no way to determine who doctored the balls.

Luckily for Bauer, the SOB can really pitch. In the shortened season of 2020, Bauer won the National League Cy Young Award as one of the two best pitchers the Major Leagues. The King’s Pass reigns supreme in baseball (as in other sports): if a player is good enough, he can get away with almost anything. Almost. The Dodger signed Bauer to a rich, three year contract.

2. The Scandal. Bauer had a much larger scandal coming. A restraining order was taken out against him in late June of 2021 by a former sex partner. The woman claimed she had what started as a consensual relationship involving rough sex with the pitcher, but in a 67-page document, alleged that Bauer assaulted her on two different occasions, punching her in the face, vagina, and buttocks, sticking his fingers down her throat, and strangling her to the point where she lost consciousness twice, an experience she said she did not consent to. After the second choking episode, the woman claimed she awoke to find Bauer punching her in the head and face, inflicting serious injuries. She contacted police, and an investigation of Bauer by the Pasadena, California police department began.

Baseball, which had made the NFL and the NBA look bad (they are bad) by cracking down on domestic abuse by players, placed Bauer on indefinite “administrative leave” although her allegations were unsubstantiated. At the time, I wrote,

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Incompetent Tweet Of The Month

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“Penny” is an LGBTQ activist who didn’t think this tweet through before posting. (This is why Twitter is dangerous to the impulsive, emotional and none-too-bright.) After someone pointed out what the tweet seemed to be saying, it was taken down.

Too late.

How Hard Is It To Make A Competent And Responsible Interim Appointment To Fill A U.S. Senate Seat? Too Hard, Apparently, For Gov. Gavin Newsom…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In California, the governor has the power to appoint a senator to serve until the next regularly scheduled statewide general election. Current California Governor Gavin Newsom had the opportunity to exercise this power because, in a previous example of unethical conduct by a California elected official, Senator Diane Feinstein had died in office after irresponsibly running for re-election when she was already 85 and declining in health and mental acuity. (California voters, who would vote for a pet rock if it had a (D) next to it, dutifully sent her back to the Senate anyway).

Newsom is running a shadow campaign to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for President in 2024 in case President Biden does a Feinstein, and has recently shown his utter lack of integrity (but we knew that) by vetoing three progressive bills that his rhetoric had previously supported, one that would have given striking union workers in California the opportunity to apply for unemployment benefits, another requiring judges to consider children’s gender identities in custody disputes, and a third that would have barred California’s prison system from sharing information about incarcerated immigrants with federal officials, in keeping with California’s “sanctuary state” position. You can almost hear the wheels turning: Newsom knows that progressives will vote for him over Donald Trump no matter what he does, so he’s trying to look like a moderate to those millions of apathetic and ignorant voters who haven’t been paying attention to what’s happening in California under his watch. Good plan! Unethical, weasel-like, but smart.

In a similarly cynical calculation, Newsom promised in 2021 to appoint a black woman should Feinstein’s seat become open. Not only was this an announcement that Newsom placed pandering to poweful Democratic constituency groups over seeking the most qualified person to fill a crucial legislative position, it also was a betrayal of his duty to the population of Claifornia, all of whose interests must be served by a U.S. Senator, but also to the citizens of the United States as a whole, who require the best representation in their republic available. Gender and skin color are not qualifications for high elected office.

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Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Quiz: The Rehabilitated Brain-Eating Cannibal”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I did not, when I decided that the saga of Tyree Smith justified an ethics quiz, foresee that the story neatly dovetailed into a larger theme covered extensively by ethics alarms of late, the untrustworthiness of “experts” and the danger of blindly accepting their pronouncements, influenced as they too often are by ideological biases and political agendas. Longtime commenter Michael R., however (3, 425 comments since October 26, 2012!) managed to connect the dots.

Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Quiz: The Rehabilitated Brain-Eating Cannibal”:

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This is why it is time to remove the monopolies these professional groups have on essential services. The psychiatrists and psychologists have a monopoly on confining people for mental illness and, in this case, releasing the criminally mentally ill. How many times have they failed in this? James Holmes (above), the 2012 Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooter, is a good case in point. He had been banned from seeking psychiatric help because he was deemed too dangerous, but the very establishment that deemed him too dangerous to be around THEM, refused to sign papers that would let the police involuntarily confine him. At least they successfully determined he was a danger to those around him, they just refused to help the general public. We have them pushing puberty blockers and surgical sterilization on children with no evidence this will help. In fact, the actual ailments they suffer from were probably caused by the very ‘experts’ that get to decide the ‘treatment’.

Let’s look at medicine next. The medical associations regulate themselves and are calling for ideological conformity in all physicians. Anyone who disagrees about COVID masks, vaccinations, DEI, affirmative action, etc can’t be a physician. Pharmacists can refuse to fill prescriptions if they don’t agree with the physician’s treatment, or diagnosis, or they think the person looks sketchy. Medicine is an essential service. We can’t have such groups dictating if we can get care or not.

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An Ethics Estoppel Classic: This Op-Ed Heads Straight To The “Pot Calling The Kettle Black” Hall Of Fame…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

How incapable of self-awareness must an extreme abortion advocate be to accuse abortion opponents of manipulating the language to mislead the public about what they are really talking about? The entire pro-abortion movement has been built on linguistic deceit of the most flagrant kind for decades, with abortion being referred to as “choice.” This is deliberate deception, as if proposals to prevent the killing of nascent living human beings have as their objective a broad rejection of autonomy, rather than an ethical respect for human life, no matter how early in that life an individual may be.

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