Ethics Train Wrecks

Hamas-Israel War Ethics Train Wreck Update: A Case Study in How a News Aggregator Forfeits Trust

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The escalation overnight in the anti-Israel, pro-Jew-killing demonstrations at Columbia University, temporarily at the top of the campus progressives-showing-their-true-stripes and “Oops, I guess we indoctrinated these gullible kids a little too much!” hit parades, was the breaking news I woke up to at 5 am when Spuds asked to go out. I have some ethics observations about this whole disturbing development (the Gaza support on campuses, not Spuds’ bathroom habits), which the Biden administration deserves to have hung around its neck like a stinking dead albatross for signaling that the U.S. sympathizes with terrorists just so it might pick up some Muslim votes in Michigan. In the process of researching that post, I encountered the reason for this one.

Deciding that the immediacy of the 1968 flashbacks justified bumping another post that I have almost completed, I checked the usually reliable news aggregating site Memeorandum (Ann Althouse’s favorite!) to find some early reports and commentary on the student terrorism fans at Columbia taking over Hamilton Hall. And I found…nothing. The top stories as of this moment [remember, by the time you read this, the list may have changed]:

#1: The Kristi Noem dog story! You see, that’s a top story because it reflects poorly on Republicans.

#2 according to the site is an FBI report that crime in the U.S. is really decreasing under Biden—as if there is any reason to trust the FBI any more, and as everyone I know in Northern Virginia is terrified to go into D.C. This is second on the list because it is going to take a huge “It isn’t what it is” push to convince voters that all of those chains moving out of inner cities because of runaway shoplifting are really doing it because they are racist.

#3? Another hit on a Republican, this time from that paragon of objectivity, Rolling Stone.

Coming in at #4…well, I don’t have to belabor the point. There are seventeen more “top stories,” including one about India operating a spy ring in Australia, and the drama at Columbia isn’t anywhere to be found.

Eureka! Now I know that whoever is running this news aggregator site is manipulating the news and trying to mislead the public in support of Joe Biden and the Democrats. Similarly, we have learned that the eruption of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic passion across the nation is just one more example of what a terrible, weak, foolish POTUS Joe Biden is, and how ethically corrupt his party and its supporters have become.

Here’s a third: journalism in this culture is untrustworthy and a metaphorical dagger in the back of democracy….but we knew that.

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“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” For Some Strange Reason, Sayeth the NYT, Trump Doesn’t Trust Our Intelligence Agencies…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Wow, what could possibly account for that? The man is paranoid!

I missed “Campaign Puts Trump and the Spy Agencies on a Collision Course” in the Times two weeks ago. Fortunately a non-Ethics Alarms-reading friend sent me this column by the usually astute and trustworthy Holman Jenkins at the Wall Street Journal. (Aside: I continue to wonder why so few of my friends and long-time associates read this blog, and none of my family members. It must be me, or as one friend who does read Ethics Alarms once said in a moment of self-doubt, “All my best friends hate me.”) His assessment of the significance of the piece tracks exactly with mine, and he seems to be coming from a similar point of view: he doesn’t have any illusions about Donald Trump, but he still finds the Times’ dishonest and biased coverage of him since Trump’s election despicable. Except this one initial arch comment—Gee, imagine not trusting intelligence agencies!—I’ll leave the commentary to Jenkins with a few footnotes from me:

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Ethics Observations on Harvey Weinstein’s Reprieve….

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The New York Court of Appeals overturned the felony sex crimes conviction of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein yesterday. The 4-to-3 decision held that the trial judge deprived him of his right to a fair trial in 2020 when he allowed prosecutors to call witnesses who said Weinstein had sexually assaulted them despite the assaults having never been charged as crimes or proven to have occurred. Using allegations of past bad acts to prove guilt in a criminal trial is generally forbidden in New York and other U.S. jurisdictions with limited exceptions. Since Harvey is already serving a prison sentence for another set of crimes that will keep him locked away until he is almost 90, the decision is more symbolic than useful to Weinstein. But it still needed to be made.

Observations:

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Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: President Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“I condemn the antisemitic protests.That’s why I have set up a program to deal with that. I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

—President Joe Biden answering a shouted question at an Earth Day event at Prince William Forest Park in Triangle, Virginia outside Washington, DC.

Joe Biden saying something stupid, incomprehensible or dishonest is a virtually daily occurrence, but some of his statements have significant consequences, taking them out of Julie Principle territory. This one continues his astounding effort to try to pander to both sides of the Hamas-Israel conflict and their respective supporters simultaneously. It is such an obviously impossible and indefensible mission that it’s amazing that there is anyone who isn’t disgusted and insulted by it, for it is predicated on the belief that everyone is even dumber than Joe.

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This Time I WANT to Defend Donald Trump…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The almost unanimous mainstream media mockery of former President Trump briefly snoozing during the kangaroo court “hush money” trial isn’t the most noxious example of biased, hostile news media coverage as the Axis attempts to, again, clothesline the American leader so many of them have pledged to destroy (Hi there, NPR!) , but it’s particularly contrived and ignorant. Attention should be paid: these are the people crippling democracy while claiming that they want to save it.

The idea, of course, is tit-for-tat: Republicans and conservatives (along with anyone with eyes and ears who isn’t so biased they can’t think) have been pointing out the obvious crisis that the man supposedly overseeing our government is failing mentally and physically, unable to keep a full schedule or speak coherently, almost certainly operating with a metaphorical hand shoved up into his suit and head to give the (barely credible illusion) that he is really calling the shots, in thrall to a dangerous far left cabal, and too old to be safely entrusted with the Presidency even if all of the forgoing weren’t true. Therefore the counter argument, juvenile as it is (“So’s your old man!”) is to default to “wahataboutism” (as well as the usual anti-Trump Big Lies). Trump’s too old! Trump’s no more able than Biden!

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The Explanation For Everything That Afflicts Americans of Color Is Systemic Racism, Part I: Insomnia

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

…someone just has to figure out how and why. Or just assume how and why. Oh, hell, just hand over the reparations already!

Researchers believe that black Americans are likely to have more trouble sleeping than the white Americans who oppress them. In fact, the darker your skin color is, the less sleep you get, says Dr. Dayna A. Johnson, a sleep epidemiologist at Emory University. “The theory is that racial minorities experience a stress that is unique and chronic and additive to the general stressors that all people experience,” said Johnson, a sleep disparity pioneer. “We all experience stress, but there are added stressors for certain groups. For certain populations, racism fits into that category.”

A Johnson-headed study published in the journal “Sleep” claims to find that experiencing racism and can cause people to have problems falling asleep. (What did the researchers do, hire people to racially discriminate against their subjects before bedtime?) The study also concluded that people who anticipate racism may experience interference with their sleep-wake cycle because the dread causes their body to be in a heightened state of anxiety, with higher blood pressure and accelerating heart rate. By this, I glean that being told by the media, politicians and race-hucksters that American society is all racist all the time causes black Americans to lose sleep. Got it. And being white, this is my fault.

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Bitter, Pathetic, Miserable Hillary Clinton

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Yes, I know I’m breaking my own rule about not using unflattering photos of Hillary Cinton, a pledge I made during the 2016 Presidential campaign I think—it might have been earlier. She deserves it in this instance.

I feel genuine compassion for Hillary, just as I do for Al Gore (and Samuel J. Tilden) up to a point. It must be terrible to win the popular vote for President of the United States and lose the election. I think it must be a little like what I am trying to deal with right now after waking up one morning and finding my wife dead.

Hillary is bitter and angry, and I understand that. The ethical mandate in such a situation is to strive to deal with these emotions with dignity, and, in her position as a public figure that many Americans admire and respect (mistakenly), to serve as a role model for everyone else who finds themselves suddenly losing something or someone that assumed they had firmly and safely in their embrace.

She’s failed that mandate spectacularly and repeatedly. Clinton lost the Presidency, not only by the quirk of the Electoral College, but also through her own perfidy, arrogance and incompetence, yet she refuses to take responsibility for any of that. In her view, at least publicly, it is all Donald Trump’s fault, along with the”deplorables” who voted for him. From the moment she learned that she had lost the 2016 election in a stunning upset, Clinton has set out to do everything and anything she can to hurt him, beginning with declaring his election illegitimate, spawning the Russian collusion investigation that crippled his Presidency, and using every opportunity to trigger the Trump Deranged with inevitably diminishing returns.

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American Historians Becoming Woke, Biased, and Corrupt

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Jack Henneman operates an excellent podcast called “The History of the Americans.” In his latest installment, he varies from his usual format to give us an editorial on the topic of the corruption of American history scholarship. Regular readers here would assume that I would approve, for Ethics Alarms has been deploring the ethics rot among American history academics for many years. Introducing his podcast, Henneman explains that he recently attended the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in San Francisco. “I learned a lot,” he writes, “especially how transparently politicized so many professional historians seem have become.”

“This episode recounts some of what I saw and heard, and concludes with my many thoughts on the greatest benefit of learning history, whether history should be ‘useable,’ and,” he adds, “why deploying history for partisan political purposes, as is now happening widely and overtly, corrupts history absolutely.”

The podcaster/historian does an excellent job, and it is work enhanced by his keen understanding of ethics. I listened to the podcast yesterday, and today read the truly nauseating partisan propaganda spewed on Bill Maher’s HBO show by once respectable historian Jon Meacham. Meacham wrote, among other celebrated tomes, “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.” (I don’t know why I’m promoting this traitor to his profession’s book, except that it is excellent, and he wrote it before he jumped the ethics shark, in 2008). He has since become a partisan Democrat to the point where I would view it as a conflict of interest, and one that he has not been forthcoming in disclosing.

It takes a lot for MSNBC to punish anyone for being unethical, that being one of the far, far left network’s missions, but Meacham was fired as a paid MSNBC contributor after he failed to disclose to the network that he was a Biden speechwriter. Before he was caught playing the role of objective scholarly analyst who was secretly being paid to endorse one party, he had made such obviously slanted claims as asserting on MSNBC that the Clinton impeachment process was wholly partisan, while Trump’s first impeachment was not. That’s not just biased, it’s counter-factual: Clinton’s impeachment had a bi-partisan House vote of 258-176, with 31 Democrats joining the Republicans. No Republican voted for Trump’s first impeachment. This is in the same category of dishonest historical analysis for partisan gain practiced by CNN’s pro-Democratic “Presidential scholar” Michael Beschloss, who just makes stuff up now.

Meacham is always described as a “Pulitzer Prize winning historian,” so it is prudent to recall that Nikole Hannah-Jones also got a Pulitzer for the fake history in her “1619 Project.” But when he’s being a pundit, which is apparently most of the time lately, Meacham just skips the facts as it suits him. He tweeted, for example, in 2019, that Trump’s mean tweets about “the Squad” meant that he “has joined Andrew Johnson as the most racist President in American history.”

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Ethics Observations on the Trump “Hush Money” Trial

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Last week Jonathan Turley issued a thorough indictment of the trial in Manhattan, which he described as “a clear example of the weaponization of the criminal justice system.” The George Washington University law professor has been saying this from the beginning about Alvin Bragg’s partisan prosecution, and it should be self-evident: a criminal case relying on the slimier-than-slime, convicted perjurer and disbarred lawyer Michael Cohen as an essential witness should never be pursued, and it is a violation of prosecutorial ethics to do so.

I was surfing between various news networks’ analyses of the case, and only the usually silly “Fox and Friends” crew stated the most important conclusion that the others carefully avoided. It’s a political prosecution, and the purpose is to get a conviction by any means possible, even one tainted and sure to be overturned, so the Democrats can run against Trump as a “convicted felon.” Justice has nothing to do with it, as Turley’s careful assessment makes clear.

The other purpose is to interfere with the certain Republican candidate’s ability to campaign, because he otherwise has the energy and ability to campaign, while his Democratic opposition does not. Yes, the Democrats are interfering with the 2024 election and attempting to rig it even as in other prosecutions and in campaign attacks, they claim Trump is an existential danger to democracy and that his claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” are “baseless.” The unethical conduct of the Democrats in prosecutions like the “hush money” trial is itself a rebuttal of that statement. If I had to define “hypocrisy,” I couldn’t come up with a better example than that.

The question this week was whether it is fair to try Donald Trump in New York City. That’s easy: no. All of the lawfare cases are calculated to go to trial in communities extremely hostile to Trump: New York, D.C., and Fulton County, Georgia, the solid Blue heart of a mostly conservative state. Given the stakes and the defendant, judges should move all of the cases, just as the trial of Derek Chuavin and the three other cops implicated in George Floyd’s death should have been moved out of the Twin Cities, if the objective had been a fair trial rather than to mollify Black Lives Matters.

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Chicago Makes Its Play To Be Named Capital City of ‘The Great Stupid’

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has asked for $70 million to care for illegal aliens after already spending upwards of $150 million to make sure defiant border-crossers know they are welcome. Or, as the late johnny Olden used to say on “The Price is Right,” “Come on Down!”

The budget committee voted 20-8 this week to advance the proposal to the full City Council. The money will come from a discretionary fund, because, apparently, there is no good use for it involving the citizens of Chicago. The idea is so irresponsible that even some Democrats are willing to say so. “Here we are begging for more money when we don’t have money for the people here!” said 9th Ward Alderman Anthony Beale. “When we don’t have money for after school programs. We don’t have money to help our kids get off the street. But yet, we would just blow money left and right.”

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