Ethics Dunces

Presuming Bias Also Makes You Stupid…and a Failure

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I’m really and truly searching for good ethics topics that haven’t been raised by politics, and its hard right now. This entry in the Ethics Alarms Hollywood clip archive is appropriate…

This time, I was pulled back in by an alleged news analysis story in the New York Times. If it had been an op-ed column, then its thrust would have been slightly more excusable. This was supposedly fact analysis, not opinion, and the article could do nothing but make its readers dumber and more resistant to harsh truths. The piece was headlined, “Will the U.S. Ever Be Ready for a Female President?”[Gift link!]

Morons. The question itself is dunderheaded and insulting in a vacuum, but as analysis of Kamala Harris’s well-deserved defeat, it is a throbbing neon example of “my mind’s made up, don’t confuse me with facts” as well as how rationalizations are lies that we tell ourselves when we want to be deluded. Of course the U.S. will be ready for a female President, as soon as one of the parties nominates a woman who is a strong candidate and who doesn’t run a terrible campaign. Imagine writing this garbage without giggling…

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Oh No, Not This Again: Return of the Faithless Legislator

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Broward County Rep. Hillary Cassel announced yesterday that she will leave the Democratic Party and join the GOP, becoming the second state lawmaker to do so this month. Hillsborough County Rep. Susan Valdés also announced this month that she had joined the Republicans.

Ethics Alarms has covered, and deplored, this behavior before. Doing what Cassel and Valdés have done is unethical, and the identities of the political parties involved don’t matter. By doing this, the two women have committed a fraud on the electorate. Democrats voted for them based in part on their status as members of their party. Their election victories were achieved by misrepresentation. Cassel, ran unopposed for her second term in November; if she had flipped before the election in a timely fashion, she may well have had opposition. Her rationalization for this unethical reversal, as posted on “X”:

Aww, that’s nice. The ethical way to handle a sudden epiphany when one has been elected by the partisans of one party and now suddenly wants to join the opposition is to resign, and run again under the new banner so voters have not been deceived and know who and what they are voting for. This was how former Texas U.S. Senator Phil Gramm handled the problem when he changed parties from Democrat to Republican as a Congressman. He resigned, then ran for his vacated seat and won again. Perfect.

As for the Florida Republicans, good luck with these two converts. They are as trustworthy as the husband who marries the second wife he was cheating with during the first marriage.

Chess Ethics: The International Chess Federation Makes “Professionalism” Look Ridiculous [Updated!]

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Did the world go nuts last week and I missed it? Curmie just sent me this crazy story, and I though it was a gag.

For those of you who don’t follow international chess (that is, all of you), the wonderfully named Magnus Carlsen is a five-time world chess champion from Norway. He has held the No. 1 position in the FIDE world chess rankings since July 1, 2011, indisputably making him one of the greatest chess players of all-time, right next to household names like Raul Capablanca, Ruy Lopez, and Emanuel Lasker. Yesterday he was kicked out of the World Rapid and Blitz Chess Championships in New York after chess’s governing body FIDE barred the Norwegian from participating in the tournament.

Why? He was wearing bluejeans.

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In a Fascinating Though Risky Experiment, NY Gov. Kathy Hochul Decides To Test If Anything Can Make Voters Reject The Democratic Party

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I confess, I don’t know what to call this post, how to define NY Gov. Kathy Hochul at this point, or how to explain American citizens who would put up with her.

She’s had quite an exciting December. On the same day and just two hours after a psychopathic illegal immigrant set a sleeping woman on fire in a New York City subway train, Hochel sent out this…

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Ethics Dunce: Elon Musk

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Ugh.

Elon, Elon, Elon….

Elon Musk apparently became annoyed at some Republican critics for criticizing him over his endorsement of H-1B visas, a work program that allows U.S companies to hire highly skilled non-Americans. So he stripped them of their “blue check” verification on their Twitter/”X” profiles

Laura Loomer, New York Young Republican Club president Gavin Wax, InfoWars host Owen Shroyer, and other far-right figures found that their verification badges had vanished on December 27 after they knocked Musk (and his DOGE co-captain Vivek Ramaswamy) for supporting the hiring of foreign-born engineers over their U.S. counterparts.

Former GOP Congressman and NeverTrumper Adam Kinzinger wrote in part, “So @elonmusk stripped the blue check because someone hurt his feelings?…If you love him great, but don’t pretend he’s for free speech.”

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 16: Those Harris-Walz Bitter-Ender Lawn Signs

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

There are still a lot of Harris-Walz lawn signs up in my neighborhood. I find the one above, the “obviously” sign, especially obnoxious, and I know the nice people who have been displaying that thing now for almost four months. I am trying mightily not to think, “What jerks these people are,” even though they brought me some leftover taco fixings right after my wife died.

I remember a lot of bitter-enders keeping their Gore-Lieberman lawn signs and bumper stickers displayed in 2000 after the Great Hanging Chad Recount and Gore’s appropriate (if short-lived) concession. That was also obnoxious, though at least somewhat understandable given the false narrative being hammered at by the biased left wing news media that Gore had really won the popular vote in Florida and that a partisan Supreme Court had unethically handed the Republicans the Presidency. But today’s out-of-date signs, apparently aiming at virtue-signaling to like-minded deluded progressives, have no plausible justification whatsoever. And what virtues do they think a sign like that signals?

When I saw the one above this morning walking Spuds around my mostly “blue” Alexandria, Virginia neighborhood, my mind immediately flashed to an entry yesterday on The New Neo’s blog, “What was Kamala thinking?” The post began by quoting this story:

Teamsters President Sean O’Brien….discussed his union’s historic decision not to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in nearly 30 years. O’Brien said Harris finally agreed to sit with the Teasmsters for a roundtable after President Biden dropped out of the race, just to only answer a quarter of their 16 questions. Other candidates, including Trump, answered them all. “On the fourth question, one of her operatives or one of her staff slips a note in front of me — ‘This will be the last question.’ And it was 20 minutes earlier than the time it was going to end,” O’Brien told [Tucker] Carlson. “And her declaration on the way out was, ‘I’m going to win with you or without you,’’ he recalled.”

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The Matt Gaetz Ethics Committee Report

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The House Ethics Committee report on former Rep. Matt Gaetz was released today and concluded that there was “substantial evidence” that the recently resigned Florida Congressman paid many women, including at least one minor, to have sex with him, in addition to his likely violating House Rules and other standards of conduct “prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress.” The 37-page Committee Report is here. Read it and weep, as the saying goes.

Gaetz is clearly what is technically called “a sleazeball,” but we knew that, didn’t we? I found it particularly notable that he wasn’t even defended by his own party, which is what we usually see in the “dissents” in such ethics reports. Gaetz’s defenders on the committee only objected to the report being released despite its subject’s leaving the House, which is not the typical course but is not unprecedented either. The report’s dissenters even goes to the trouble of admitting that they have no objections to the report’s conclusions.

The report was published in full by the House Ethics Committee on Monday morning after the panel secretly voted earlier this month to release it. Gaetz, was investigated for four years by the committee over various allegations.

Of course Gaetz has denied doing anything illegal, while admitting that he was just a wild and crazy guy in his younger days. Lying is small change for someone who has engaged in the conduct described in the report. It does appear that the statutory rape episode was the result of him not knowing how old his sex partner was, which is understandable since he appears to have run through sex partners like they were Tic-Tacs. The committee’s report found that Gaetz had also engaged in more typical ethics violations like accepting gifts in “excess of permissible amounts,” including a trip to the Bahamas in 2018. Even then he “engaged in sexual activity” with at least four women on the trip, giving them money as “gifts.”

The report also alleges that there was “sufficient evidence of Representative Gaetz’s intent to derail the investigation.”

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Wow! Apple’s AI Bot Is Already Acting Like Real Live Journalists! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

…by making stuff up and publishing it!

From the BBC: “The BBC made a complaint to the US tech giant after Apple Intelligence, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to summarise and group together notifications, falsely created a headline about murder suspect Luigi Mangione. The AI-powered summary falsely made it appear that BBC News had published an article claiming Mangione, the man accused of the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not. Now, the group Reporters Without Borders has called on Apple to remove the technology. Apple has made no comment.”

This must make human journalists shiver in their boots! If an AI bot can create fake news stories like Hunter Biden’s laptop being just Russian information, the U.S. economy doing great, President Joe Biden being sharp as a tack and Donald Trump emulating Nazis by holding a rally in Madison Square Garden,” who needs live lying reporters to mislead the public and generate fake news?

Reporters Without Borders, also known as RSF,sadit was was “very concerned by the risks posed to media outlets” by AI tools like Apple’s. See? They see the threat!

The group also said the BBC incident proves that “generative AI services are still too immature to produce reliable information for the public.” But hat proof evident long before this incident: Remember “Hunter de Butts?” Michael Cohen’s AI fiasco?

Vincent Berthier, the head of RSF’s technology and journalism desk, explained the obvious: “AIs are probability machines, and facts can’t be decided by a roll of the dice. RSF calls on Apple to act responsibly by removing this feature. The automated production of false information attributed to a media outlet is a blow to the outlet’s credibility and a danger to the public’s right to reliable information on current affairs.”

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Politifact Lies About the “Lie of the Year”But Everyone Knows What the Real “Lie of the Year” Was

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Wouldn’t you think an alleged ”’factchecking” organization would understand what a lie is? Well, the organization is Politifact, so it’s a trick question. It’s a Democratic Party/progressive propaganda outfit and facts are the last thing it cares about: that group of hacks is easily the most dishonest and unethical of all of these thing, much less trustworthy than second in line from the bottom, which might be Glenn Kessler and the Washington Post’s intermittently fair “The Factchecker” feature. And so it was that as the end of 2024 approaches, Politifact announced that this was its “Lie of the Year,”what Trump said on September 10:

“‘In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs.The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”

“With this claim, amplified before 67 million television viewers in his debate against Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump took his anti-migrant, the U.S. border-is-out-of-control campaign agenda to a new level,” Politifact moaned.

But even if the “Their eating pets and wildlife from the parks!” story had been a deliberate lie, it obviously was neither the “Lie of the Year” in either of the two categories relevant to the choice: it wasn’t the most destructive lie, and it wasn’t the most indefensible lie. This was: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Baltimore Ravens Wide Receiver Diontae Johnson

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

It is sad but probably to be expected that so many professional athletes don’t get the ethics thingy. The latest incident: Diontae Johnson, a wide reciever for the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens, for refused when his coach ordered him to take the field late in the team’s Week 13 game against the Philadelphia Eagles. The Ravens are still trying to make the play-offs, but it wouldn’t matter if the game had no importance to the Ravens’ fortunes at all. Johnson is a member of the team; he draws a salary. Apparently he was angry and frustrated over his lack of playing time since the Ravens acquired him, and had been complaining to teammates for weeks. “Tough noogies,” as they used to say when I was a kid in Arlington, Mass. (An alternative was “tough bunnies.” I never understood that, any more than I knew what a “hosey” was.)

Johnson was immediately suspended.

Wait…why was this a difficult decision? It was an obvious decision. This week the Ravens announced that Johnson was told to stay away from the team as a likely disruptive influence. There was some question why the Ravens didn’t just release him, but apparently that is because they don’t want any other teams strengthening themselves during the play-off run portion of the season.

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