“bias makes you stupid”

Unethical Film and Theater Reviewer Bias, Part I: “Straight People Can’t Act”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Film and theater reviewer biases and politics have always been a blight on the field: the late, absurdly worshiped New Yorker reviewer Pauline Kael would pan terrific John Wayne movies just because he had supported Barry Goldwater. It’s hard to watch a revival of “Hair” (or the stunningly bad film version) without wondering, “What were those reviewers raving about, with that faux rock music and the trite book?” Why, peace, pot and love, baby! ” Hair” was against the war in Vietnam, so it had to be at least as good as “Oklahoma!”

Now, of course, in the era of the Great Stupid, explaining what Big Brother’s tastes in the arts require is a job requirement for film and theater reviewer who are paid in real money rather than free passes. In a New York Times column about how “outdated” classic musicals (that is, insufficiently woke) can be salvaged by appropriately sensitive directors, for example, readers were informed by an “expert” that only gay actors can convincingly play gay characters.

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Ethics Dunce: University of Houston Law Professor Renee Knake Jefferson

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I have resolved to be more vigilant in calling ethics fouls on the various repeat ethical transgressions that proliferate in our society and political discourse. I wrote about some of them here; I just encountered another in an alleged legal ethics news letter. An alleged legal ethics newsletter that I have to pay for. Uh-uh, I’m not letting that pass. I was already triggered because I saw another TV commercial where two people were playing chess and the board was set up wrong. As soon as I see it again and note the product, I will out the company here. For so I have sworn.

Renee (Newman) Knake Jefferson is, she tells us, a law professor and an award-winning author. She “regularly consults on matters related to lawyer/judicial ethics and the first amendment and lawyer speech.” Jefferson holds the Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics at the University of Houston Law Center where she teaches ethics, constitutional law, and a writing seminar on gender, power, law, and leadership. Based on these credentials and the fact that a lot of the legal ethics blogs have been going defunct lately, I decided to subscribe to her weekly Legal Ethics Roundup at substack which promised to keep me up to date on significant developments in the field.

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Busted! The “Completely Independent” Government Transparency Website” Proves It Is Just Another Democratic Party Propaganda Agent [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The effort across the news media and elsewhere in the Axis to distort Kamala Harris’s past record and documented positions sufficiently to render the public totally misinformed regarding the candidate whom Democrats are offering for President in November is rapidly reaching comic proportions. It reached Orwellian proportions some time ago.

GovTrack promotes itself as being independent, unbiased,and trustworthy. For five years, it included an entry on that esteemed site that ranked Harris as the most liberal U.S. Senator in 2019—more liberal than, for example, Bernie Sanders, who is a proto-Communist, and Elizabeth Warren, who advocates a confiscatory wealth tax, wants to cancel most student loan debt, proposes to break up Big Tech companies, and wants a $20 trillion “Medicare for all” program paid for by taxing the living daylights out of businesses. Kamala’s more radical leftist profile is not, one may assume, a policy agenda the majority of Americans favor, so our unethical journalists and related villains are trying mightily to convince voters that Harris “isn’t what she is.”

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The Other Shoe Drops: Why Can’t Leaders Accept Responsibility Until They Are Forced To?

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Gee, waddya know? The incompetent head of the Secret Service finally resigned.

Less than a week ago, Ethics Alarms expressed disgust and amazement that Secret Service head Kimberly Cheatle hadn’t resigned from her job (She’s “historic,” see, so that’s why President Biden wouldn’t fire her.) “This is basic management ethics,” I wrote then. “When the organization leader fails that badly—and it is hard to imagine a worse failure—the leader takes full responsibility and leaves, because the organization cannot retain public trust as long as that leader is in place. There is no other honorable or ethical course.”

Yet she defiantly said that she would not resign, despite also saying that she accepted “full responsibility.” She had spent all of the time since the Secret Service’s incompetence nearly got Donald Trump killed making absurd excuses, trying to blame local police, and lying outright. Yesterday, Cheatle further soiled what remained of her dignity and reputation, evading questions and infuriating members of Congress trying to get to the bottom of what happened in Pennsylvania. Almost as one, the House members told her she needed to quit. If Cheatle has done anything laudable, it is bringing together the parties in a bi-partisan expression of outrage at a single target.

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Ethics Dunce: Chaya Raichik

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Chaya Raichik, the industrious conservative gadfly who infuriates the Left by posting the most ridiculous and self-indicting TikTok videos by unhinged progressives, definitely has a nasty side. Exposing public figures, celebrities, local officials, scholars, professors, teachers, corporate execs, prominent athletes, “influencers,” Hollywood stars and would-be activists is an admirable (and useful) pursuit—after all, they post the stuff that makes them look ridiculous or sinister and know that what they say gets noticed. Such statements also often demonstrate why they should not continue in their chosen professions. Siccing the social media mob on a typical working American who posts something dumb on Facebook is very different. It is cruel.

Recently Raichik’s Libs of TikTok account has expanded its target range to private Facebook posts that included ugly comments on the near assassination of Donald Trump. (I could point her to some by my Trump-Deranged friends.) “To bad they weren’t a better shooter!!!!!” was the witty if ungrammatical retort Darcy Waldron Pinckney posted on Facebook to her modest number of FB friends. She worked at Home Depot, but not after the influential anti-woke warrior launched her (also misspelled) “quip” into cyberspace hyperdrive. A week ago, Raichik posted a screenshot of Pinckney’s comment with her photo (above) and wrote, “Hi @HomeDepot! Are you aware that you employ people who call for political violence and the ass*ss*nat*on of Presidents? Any comment?”

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Yet Another Candidate For My Proposed New Standard For Disbarment…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, has joined the large cadre of fools who seem to seriously believe former President Donald Trump has a strong similarity to Adolf Hitler. After the assassination attempt on July 13, Caraballo posted on Twitter/”X”: “Trump is going to use this as his Reichstag moment to crack down when he’s elected.” See?

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Brilliant, Analytical and Trump-Deranged Is No Way To Go Through Life, Andrew Sullivan….

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Andrew Sullivan, at war with himself, is a fascinating case study. He’s a devout Catholic gay conservative, raised and schooled in Great Britain, and obviously brilliant. Everywhere he has written and opined has seen his cognitive dissonance on display: his friends and colleagues are mostly progressives, many of the knee-jerk variety, and he longs to be accepted and loved by them. Andrew also has too much integrity for that, much of the time anyway. He edited The New Republic after contributing articles most notably on the topic of AIDS and gays in America, but that publication’s turned on him, rebelling when he found scientific and intellectual value in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve,” the theory of which was (and is) officially condemned as politically incorrect and inherently racist. Sullivan, temperamentally inclined to keep an open mind, became a pariah in his own magazine. Later he wrote for The New York Times Magazine but was fired, because his tendency to call out progressives and the Times itself on intellectual dishonesty and bias annoyed Times editor Howell Raines. Sullivan’s whole career has been like this; one of the most influential bloggers when blogging was all the rage, these days he makes money and waves with his substack newsletter, “The Weekly Dish.”

Sullivan writes like a dream, and when he is good, he is very, very good indeed. Ethics Alarms has highlighted several of his essays in the past (most recently last December) and will doubtlessly do so again.

Yesterday I found myself reading Andrew’s latest essay without knowing who wrote it (don’t ask me how that happened). I almost quit reading after a few paragraphs. Oh, great, another diatribe by a Trump-Deranged conservative like David Frum, I thought to myself.

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Ethics Observations on the President’s Zoom Outburst

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

“Tell me who enlarged NATO. Tell me who did the Pacific basin. Tell me who did something that you’ve never done with your Bronze Star — and your — like my son — and, you know — proud of your leadership. But guess what? Well, what’s happening? We got Korea and Japan working together.”

Yikes. That was Joe Biden on a Zoom call July 13th with a group of “concerned” Democratic House members. (“concerned” is the consensus word adopted by the mainstream news media to mean “panicked that the public now knows what their party —and we—knew all along and deliberately hid from the American people.” )

The President was addressing Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), a retired Army Ranger who was awarded a Bronze Star. This alarming quote was just revealed to the Washington Post by one of the participants on the call, which was recorded. It was presumably released now, almost a week later, because Biden hasn’t yet yielded to pressure and entreaties from the party to announce his withdrawal as a candidate for re-election in November. The Post’s headline for its report on the call and its significance: “Behind the scenes as Joe Biden lost control of the Democratic Party.”

[That meme above is from today’s unusually funny collection of headlines, memes and cartoons in Power Line’s weekly collection. The “sloped roof” gags are especially good.]

Observations:

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Well, I Think This Definitively Answers Any Lingering Questions About the Competence and Critical Thinking Skills of the Nation’s Progressives…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

A Morning Consult poll released this week reports that 34 % of Democratic voters found it either definitely or probably credible that Trump staged Saturday’s shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, and less than half, 45 %, agreed that the conspiracy theory is not credible at all.

Be proud, Democrats!

You can read here about various theories, reasons and comparisons regarding this idiocy: I really don’t care. I know idiots when I see them. This tells us that less than half of all registered Democrats have the critical thinking skills of the average meat loaf.

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More Weird Tales of The Great Stupid: Post-Debate/Post-Assassination Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

It is astounding what obvious garbage one can hear and read officials, journalists, pundits, activists and academics state in public for popular consumption these days…

1. In an interview shortly after her Secret Service failed its mission and disgraced itself, Kimberly Cheatle actually said that one of her top priorities was to attract more diverse applicants to the agency.

Ethics Note: The interviewer, a standard issue hack, naturally didn’t ask the obvious follow-up question: “Why is diversity a priority at all in an agency with the assignment of the Secret Service? Who cares what gender, ethnicity or color the agent is who saves the life of a President? Why does it matter? If every agent was a 6’4″ black man who can run a 4 minute mile, dead-lift 400 pounds, score 160 on an IQ test and shoot a wing off a fruit fly at 300 yards, why would the director feel that isn’t an ideal force for the job her agency is committed to do?”

Her only priority should be ensuring that the Secret Service has competent and well-trained agents, and she’s failed at that.

2. Kamala Harris said that J.D. Vance was picked to be a “rubber stamp” for Trump’s “extreme agenda” and that “he will be loyal only to Trump, not to our country. If elected, he will help implement the extreme Project 2025 plan for a second Trump term.”

Ethics Note: One would think that Harris, having been Vice-President, might be aware that the VP has no power to “rubber stamp” or even help implement anything. Every Vice-President is completely loyal to the man who chose them as #2: I can find no example in history of a Vice-President not working, for whatever good it does, to accomplish the President’s polices. (I don’t count Pence refusing to try to stall the 2020 election certification, which was the equivalent of Trump asking him to fly to Jupiter by flapping his arms.) Meanwhile, Harris, as a VP who actively deceived the public—you know, our country?— regarding Biden’s fitness to serve is ethically estopped from complaining that anyone else might put loyalty to the President over duty to country, especially a Marine like Vance.

“Joe Biden is extraordinarily strong,” Harris told CNN’s Anderson Cooper after Biden’s disastrous debate performance, a Jumbo for the ages.

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