“bias makes you stupid”

Wait…What’s The Problem? Isn’t Mayor Wu Just Following The Tactics And Principles Of Her Party?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I don’t understand. The Biden Administration has declared that opponents of his policies are threats to democracy. The current Justice Department has sought extreme and excessive punishment for the protesters and rioters at the Capitol in January of 2021 while ignoring the violent and disruptive acts of the George Floyd Freakout rioters and demonstrators. The Democratic Administration sought to intimidate parents who were critical of woke school boards seeking to inject sexual politics and CRT ideology into public school curricula. And yet when Boston’s mayor Michelle Wu admitted that her staff compiled a list of her most vocal critics and protesters to hand to local law enforcement authorities, the public, which in Boston is primarily Democratic and progressive, howled in outrage.

This is how their increasingly totalitarian party operates in 2023. This is what they voted for. What are they complaining about?

Continue reading →

More From The A.I. Ethics Files: The Suspicious Photograph Contest Entry

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The photo above was entered into a photography competition but disqualified because the judges “suspected” that it was generated by artificial intelligence. As it turned out, the photograph was taken legitimately, but by the time the contest entrant learned about her disqualification, the competition had been settled. Suzi Dougherty used a high-level iPhone to createn the unsettling photo of her son standing near two mannequins while visiting a Gucci exhibition.

The photo competition was sponsored by Charing Cross Photo in Australia. Disqualifying Dougherty’s photo via Instagram post, the judges said they were “intrigued” by the photograph, but “suspicion set in.”

Oh. Well that’s OK then!

Continue reading →

This Biased Journalism Fiasco Explains So Much It Should Be Taught In Journalism AND Ethics Classes

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! And sure, journalism is a profession! You can always trust journalism icons!

No…no…and no.

Business Insider published an alleged news article headlined, “More people actually moved out of Florida than New York or California in 2021.” Part of the ongoing effort on both the political Rights and the Left to sink Florida Governor Ron DiSantis’s chances of keeping Donald Trump off the GOP 2024 Presidential ticket, the story claimed to debunk the conventional wisdom that the ultra Woke states are bleeding residents while DiSantis’s state’s population is growing. 674,740 residents left Florida, BI told us, exceeding the total of 433,402 residents who had fled California and the 287,249 residents moving out of New York.

It was pure confirmation bias. The stats were unbelievable on their face, but the Business Insider staff believed them anyway, because they wanted to. After being roundly smacked on social media, BI reversed itself with a replacement post headlined, “We got it wrong: More people moved out of New York and California than Florida in 2021,” that revealed,

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Power Line

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The tweet above is a joke, and announces itself as one. What makes the joke especially funny is that it is conceivable that New York’s ridiculous, socialist, Dunning-Kruger victim Congresswoman would really say something like this. That is also why it is extremely important ethically for the satire account’s tweets to make it clear that its output is parody.

The site does that. The account has the handle @AOCpressTwo and the username Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Press Release (parody). Its bio reads, “I’m the boss – you mad bro? (parody)” (www.twitter.com/AOCpressTwo).

However, in conservative website Power Line’s weekly collection of memes, cartoons and jokes covering the previous seven days’ events from a rightish perspective, it includes this version of the tweet:

Continue reading →

Ethics Verdict: Disney Is Officially Incompetent

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Yes, those are “the Seven Dwarfs” of “Snow White and” fame, according to our national steward of childhood fantasy and iconic fables, the Disney Corporation. That photo is smoking gun evidence of insanity, a production shot from the upcoming live action version of the 1937 movie that made Walt Disney’s artistic vision a cultural force, now retitled “Snow White.” Of course Snow White is going to be Snow Of Color, as the actress playing the German fairy tale princess is Latina Rachel Zegler, who has already embraced the company’s current “screw tradition, common sense and legacy” attitude by tweeting, “Yes I am Snow White; no, I am not bleaching my skin for the role.”

You do recall why Snow White was called Snow White, right?

Continue reading →

One Ethics Villain Promotes Another, As The Associated Press Pimps For Black Lives Matter On Its Anniversary

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Sometimes an ethics story defies my ability to devise an appropriate headline. The AP story “Black Lives Matter movement marks 10 years of activism and renews its call to defund the police” is a prime example. The story is even worse than the headline (“activism” is a deceitful and deceptive euphemism for violence, lies, divisiveness and fraud), with the once-trustworthy news organization displaying the worst of U.S. journalism’s ethics rot.

The scam that is Black Lives Matter has done nothing but damage since its emergence in 2013, but to hear the AP tell it, this is a movement for Americans to honor. Let’s see…I haven’t checked yet, and I promise to reveal what I find: is the AP’s reporter who wrote this junk, Aaron Morrison, an African American?

Why yes, he is! What a coinkydink. This piece of propaganda could only have been written by a devoted supporter; the AP rigged the story. That’s American journalism in 2023.

Let me provide some highlights with commentary:

Continue reading →

Now THAT’S An Unethical Lawyer…And Maybe Two

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that lawyer James Saunders, who previously worked for the Internal Revenue Service, violated the law by voting twice in both the 2020 and 2022 national elections. His public defender Scott Roger Hurley—he’s on the right above— is arguing that his client should be acquitted because it was “an accident.” “Mistakes do happen, accidents do happen,” he told the court.

Suuuuure.

Saunders voted in two separate locations in two separate states: Cuyahoga County in Ohio, and Broward County in Florida, and in both elections. “The fact that you do that in consecutive general elections I think takes ‘accident’ to the land of imaginary doubt, and not reasonable doubt,” the prosecutor said.

Ya think?

Continue reading →

Anatomy Of A Canadian Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Ugh.

Alberta premier Danielle Smith was photographed with a man wearing the T-shirt you see above. It was circulated on social media. Immediately, she was criticized intensely, and predictably, Smith immediately groveled. Her spokesperson said, “The premier didn’t read his shirt and obviously doesn’t agree with its message. She has always been clear that she supports the LGBTQ+ community and will continue our work to make sure they feel safe in our province.”

What’s going on here?

1. The guy, whoever he is, is a jerk. That’s not a T-shirt, it’s a protest sign, and intentionally confrontational. I have always agreed with the maxim that a person’s IQ is inversely related to the number of words on his or her T-shirt. This is a prime example.

2. Further proving that the T-shirt wearer is someone to be avoided: the back of it read, “Good people disobey bad laws.” No, in fact good people obey all laws, or if they want to engage in civil disobedience, violate the “bad law,” accept the consequences, and see how many people agree with them. Asserting that it is good to break laws you happen to think are “bad” is a recipe for societal chaos.

3. The premier lied, and obviously so. How could she miss all those words, unless she can’t read? The guy’s a walking billboard; you can’t stand next to someone like that and not appear to be endorsing his message.

4. Whoever drafted that statement should be fired. What is it that Smith doesn’t agree with? Should straight people be ashamed? It’s not the message that is objectionable but the in-your-face gesture. It’s like “It’s OK to be white”—the shirt’s purpose is to annoy and start an argument.

5. What does a T-shirt have to do with “feeling safe”? Safe from words? Should non-LGBTQ individuals feel “unsafe” when they see Pride parades, signs and slogans?

The Des Moines Climate Change Propagandist Weatherman Is Quitting. He Should Have Been Fired.

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Poor KCCI-TV meteorologist Chris Gloninger is quitting because viewer criticism of his slots hyping climate change propaganda while he was supposed to be giving local weather reports became too unbearable. Well good, except that he should have been fired first.

“I started just connecting the dots between extreme weather and climate change, and then the volume of pushback started to increase quite dramatically,” he said in his interview with The Associated Press.

Except that’s not his job. He is a meteorologist, not a climate scientist, and isn’t qualified to “connect” the dots. Weather isn’t climate, and while climate change activists find ways to connect virtually any kind of weather to the climate change doom watch, that is not what people tune into weather reports to hear. For me, it’s in the same category as NFL players using games to protest social policy.

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces, Sociology Dunces, Law Enforcement Dunces…Whatever: The California Reparations Task Force

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Try a mind experiment: if California’s ridiculous and racist Reparations Task Force wanted to exacerbate racial tensions as much as humanly possible while also making African-Americans seem as toxic to society as a KKK Grand Dragon could imagine in a fever dream, what would it be doing differently that it is doing right now? We know that the group is already recommending that millions of dollars in taxpayer reparations for slavery be handed out to the state’s blacks, even though slavery never existed in the Golden State. But wait, there’s more!

Continue reading →