Res Ipsa Loquitur: This Is Why Harris Will Avoid Interviews As Much As Possible Before The Election

Wow.

Without intense preparation, without biased and complicit moderators helping her along, without being able to shift focus to an adversary, this is what Kamala Harris is. Here we have just a ten minute interview featuring soft-ball questions from a friendly Philidelphia journalist, and the result is evasiveness, gibberish and vacuous non-answers.

Some highlights:

Asked about the ephemeral “opportunity economy,” Harris says,

“For example, thinking about developing and creating an opportunity economy where it’s about investing in areas that really need a lot of work and maybe focusing on, again, the aspirations and the dreams but also just recognizing that at this moment in time some of this stuff we could take for granted years ago, we can’t take for granted anymore.”

Oh. What????

Here’s Harris filibustering the basic and easy question, “Talk about bringing down prices and making life more affordable for people. What are one or two specific things you have in mind for that?”…

Well, I’ll start with this. I grew up a middle-class kid. My mother raised my sister and me. She worked very hard. She was able to finally save up enough money to buy our first house when I was a teenager. I grew up in a community of hardworking people. You know, construction workers and nurses and teachers. I try to explain to some people who might not have had the same experience, but a lot of people will relate to this.

You know, I grew up in a neighborhood of people who were really proud of their lawn, you know, and I was raised to believe and to know that all people deserve dignity and that we as Americans have a beautiful character. You know, we have ambitions and aspirations and dreams, but not everyone necessarily has access to the resources that can help them fuel those dreams and ambitions. So, when I talk about building an opportunity economy, it is very much with the mind of investing in the ambitions and aspirations and the incredible work ethic of the American people and creating opportunity for people, for example, to start a small business.

The only competent response to that babbling is to repeat the question as if Harris had a coughing fit or something, which the interviewer did not.

Here’s another Harris gem: “My focus is very much about what we need to do over the next 10-20 years to catch up to the 21st century around, again, capacity, but also challenges.”

Right. I do a lot of public speaking, and if I ever hear myself talking like that, I will check myself into the hospital on suspicion of suffering a stroke.

This is the candidate the Democratic Party believed was so superior to all other options that she was nominated by acclamation, without having to face any opposition at all. Here I would typically add, “Democracy!” but “Idiocracy!” seems more apt.

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Can anyone explain this? The WordPress AI bot was apparently completely confused by Harris’s blather and told me to tag this post “Harry Potter,” “Football” “Dreams” and “Fantasy.”

On Trump’s Rejection Of Another Debate…

It is amusing, in a mordant way, to hear Kamala Harris tell her rallies that Donald Trump has an obligation to voters and democracy to agree to a second debate with her. She might as well be wearing a giant blinking “I am a shameless hypocrite!” neon sign on her head, as would be her party, if it had a literal head.

Democrats in general are ethically estopped from making this complaint. President Biden and his party rejected debates before the Democratic primaries. Harris was awarded her DEI Presidential nomination without having to test herself against any other potential nominees, in a debate or on a ballot. Trump, meanwhile participated in a training-wheels debate against whom he was assured would be his opposition in November, and when that presumed nominee metaphorically burst into flames, the Democrats demanded and got a Mulligan.

If I were Trump, I wouldn’t have agreed to the last debate.

The way ABC rigged the debate to boost Harris’s chances made Trump’s decision to eschew future public muggings by the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media) obvious and unassailable. The moderators “factchecked” Trump five times and Harris not at all: now there’s neutrality for you. (Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!) It’s not as if Harris didn’t repeatedly misrepresent facts and repeat familiar Democrat Big Lies, because she did. The decision had apparently been made by ABC brass to “Get Trump!”

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The Dumbest Ethics Train Wreck Ever Is Still Barreling Down The Tracks!

Australian Olympian Rachael ‘Raygun’ Gunn has been named as the world’s top female breakdancer by the World DanceSport Federation. Raygun topped the ranking with 1,000 points thanks for her single win at the Oceania Continental Championship last October. This, despite her losing every match in the field during the Paris Olympics each by scores of 18-0, and thoroughly embarrassing the “sport,” herself, and the Games themselves.

So how could this academic narcissist, Dr. Rachael Gunn, who hopped around like a kangaroo in her Olympic routine be the #1 ranked women’s breakdancer in the whole wide world in the latest rankings when her total score of 0 points put her in last place among the 16 breakers in the main Olympic competition?

My answer: it’s the “March of Folly” phenomenon. Everyone knows this honor makes no sense, and everyone knows that such a self-evidently absurd rankig will discredit everyone involved. However, just as in the Charge of the Light Brigade, the launching of the Challenger Space Shuttle, and so many other disasters throughout history where it seemed easier to just stay on the path to chaos than to stand up and scream, “NO! Stop! This is insane!” the World DanceSport Federation decided it was easier to look ridiculous than to avoid an obvious fiasco.

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Artificial Intelligence Raises a Lot of Ethics Issues, But This Isn’t One of Them…

From An Experiment in Lust, Regret and Kissing (gift link!) in the Times by novelist Curtis Sittenfeld :

My editor fed ChatGPT the same prompts I was writing from and asked it to write a story of the same length “in the style of Curtis Sittenfeld.” (I’m one of the many fiction writers whose novels were used, without my permission and without my being compensated, to train ChatGPT. Groups of fiction writers, including people I’m friends with, have sued OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, for copyright infringement. The New York Times has sued Microsoft and OpenAI over the use of copyrighted work.)

The essay describes a contest between the bot and the human novelist, who also employed suggestions from readers. I do not see how an AI “writer” being programmed with another author’s work is any more of a copyright violation than a human writer reading a book or story for inspiration. Herman Melville wrote “Moby-Dick” after immersing himself in the works of William Shakespeare. Nor is imitating another author’s style unethical. All art involves borrowing, adopting, adapting and following the cues and lessons of those who came before. In “Follies,” Stephen Sondheim deliberately wrote songs that evoked the styles of specific earlier songwriters. He couldn’t have done this as effectively as he did without “programming” himself with their works. Continue reading

Ethics Quote of the Week: PJ Media Pundit Stephen Green [Expanded]

“The Dems got what they wanted tonight. The Progressive Axis — Harris and her ABC News foils — got under Trump’s skin and stayed there…”

Stephen Green, aka Vodkapundit, on last night’s debate.

Finally. This is the first time I’ve seen anyone adopt the Ethics Alarms description of the anti-democratic cabal as “the Axis.” I did a search just now: I may have missed one somewhere, but Green’s is the first I can find. Good. Ethics Alarms has been using the term “Axis of Unethical Conduct” for years. It is fair, descriptive, and appropriate.

The coordination last night between Harris and the unabashedly biased ABC moderators during the debate was one of the more obvious examples of the Axis at work.

Added: I bailed out when the ABC hacks let Harris’s Big Lie about Trump calling white supremacists “fine people” go with being “factchecked” after the Axis pair had repeatedly challenged Trump. Presumably I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

Tuesday PM Ethics Anxieties, 9/10/24

It’s been slim ethics pickin’s of late, probably because everyone is obsessed with the campaign and the Debate To Decide The Fate Of Democracy (or DTDTFOD for short). These things always launch ridiculous numbers of fake news items, like “How Trump and Harris Will Try to Attack Each Other at the Debate” on the Times website, a variety of what I call “psychic fake news;” “How Trump Has Used Debates to Belittle Women” (‘poisoning the well”) on its front page, and also “As Debate Looms, Trump Is Now the One Facing Questions About Age and Capacity.” Translation: The mainstream media Democratic shills want to make the election about “age and capacity.” Then we have the hilarious “Hillary Clinton Has Advice on Debating Trump: ‘He Can Be Rattled’” Taking advice from Hillary on how to beat Trump is like taking advice from George Foreman about how to beat Muhammad Ali. I chuckled at “Liz Cheney Accuses G.O.P. Trump Backers of Betraying Their Principles.” Kamala Harris literally represents the opposite of everything she and her father at least pretended to stand for until Trump Derangement struck. Still, there are some issues lying around that need to be cleared…

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ABC Provides A Fake News Classic!

“Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” I find this stunt by ABC News today as astounding as it is unforgivable.

The Axis, as I noted yesterday, is shaken to its core by polling data that seems to show that Kamala Harris’s efforts to hide, lie, cackle and flip-flop her way to the White House is no longer working despite the news media’s intense assistance. Meanwhile, Nate Silver posted today that his analytical model gives Trump a 53.4% chance of winning Wisconsin, 54.9% in Michigan, 60.8% in Nevada, and a 64.9% chance of winning Pennsylvania, giving Trump a likely 312 votes in the Electoral College.

So ABC, determined to rescue their party’s flagging spirits, published a story headlined, “Harris support rises among some likely voters: POLL.” “As previously reported, Kamala Harris leads Donald Trump by a slight 4 percentage points, 50-46%, among all adults and registered voters alike, and by 6 points, 52-46%, among likely voters in the latest ABC News/Ipsos poll. While those numbers are virtually identical, closer assessment shows movement to Harris in some groups when comparing all adults with likely voters — notably, those younger than 40, younger women in particular and Black people,” this trusted name in journalism announced.

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THIS Is Ethics Zugzwang: The Infrastructure Problem

The tweet above illustrates a modern ethics zugzwang phenomenon. I was struck by the tweet because I had recently had an argument with my relentlessly Democratic sister about the Supreme Court’s decision in Relentless v. Department of Commerce and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, striking down the landmark 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council that made federal agencies the presumptive lawmakers in matters Congress had not specifically addressed if an agency rule was “reasonable.” She believes that Chevron’s fall will be a disaster.

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Ethics Quiz (or “What the HELL Is Going On at Yale Divinity School?”): The Spell

Who is Adrienne Brown (and why did she stick a Lifesaver in her nose?) is a far, far FAR left writer and facilitator, a supporter of almost every toxic Leftist delusion you can imagine, from Black Lives Matter to transformative justice, from defunding the police to abolishing prison. Her very existence is testimony to the power of the Great Stupid in 21st Century America, which naturally includes the embrace of DEI by previously respectable institutions.

College Fix has an account by a student at Yale’s Divinity School, included one of Brown’s writings in its Before the Fall Orientation. The three-day orientation included a series of discussions and activities preparing incoming students for the year ahead, followed by small group discussions. At one point, students were rquired to read aloud, line by line and one by one, from Adrienne Brown’s “Radical Gratitude Spell,” which is this:

you are a miracle walking
i greet you with wonder
in a world which seeks to own
your joy and your imagination
you have chosen to be free,
every day, as a practice.
i can never know
the struggles you went through to get here,
but i know you have swum upstream
and at times it has been lonely

i want you to know
i honor the choices you made in solitude
and i honor the work you have done to belong
i honor your commitment to that which is larger than yourself
and your journey
to love the particular container of life
that is you

you are enough
your work is enough
you are needed
your work is sacred
you are here
and i am grateful

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Ethics Villain: CNN

The announcement that the shamelessly biased and wildly incompetent “media expert” Brian Stelter is returning to CNN and that the network is resurrecting “Reliable Sources,” the once legitimate media watchdog show that Howard Kurtz ably and fairly hosted until it was corrupted by Stelter, proves one thing. CNN, after a brief (and only partial) attack of conscience, is fully committed to being a metaphorical whore for the Left again. After all, it has to help save democracy! Here’s Stelter’s announcement:

This revolting development means that Stelter, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon, CNN’s most flaming propagandists and untrustworthy talking heads who were fired for disgracing even what is now laughingly called broadcast journalism, have found gainful employment, not at Hardee’s where they belong, but again in the field that they sullied by their presence. Continue reading