Government & Politics

Yet More Evidence Of An Already Self-Evident Proposition: Our Journalists Are Disgustingly Biased and “Enemies of the People”: The NYC ISIS Terrorist Attack

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

I have mused several time here that anyone who seriously asserts in a comment that the mainstream media isn’t fatally biased against conservatives, Republicans, and, naturally, President Trump risks being banned from the commenting wars. I have yet to act on that threat, because only one respectable commenter has challenged me on that assertion, one who has earned a multitude of Ethics Alarms brownie points for good faith and courageous arguments that often run counter to the currents here.

Nonetheless, the position is untenable, and has been for years. The latest example days ago when a smoking IED was tossed at a group of protestors outside Gracie Mansion by an ISIS-supporting terrorist yelling “Allah Ackbar!” Since the U.S. is in the process of attacking Iran, and since the mainstream media is committed to elevating the welfare of Muslims (and illegal immigrants, and violent criminals, Somali fraudsters, anti-American elected officials and international foes of the U.S….) over the interests of law-abiding, loyal and patriotic American citizens, the mainstream media immediately framed the attempted terrorist act as a bigoted attack on NYC’s Muslim Communist mayor Zohran Mamdani:

CBS announced, “Improvised explosive found at protests near Manhattan’s Gracie Mansion, Mamdani’s official residence, NYPD says.”

NBC:

UPI: “Suspicious devices ignited at anti-Islam protest in New York”

The Hill: “Device ignited at Gracie Mansion protest was explosive: NYPD.”

I admit it: I was fooled. I thought, based on perusing the reports, that the bombs, which the NYT initially described without noting that they were explosive, were hurled by anti-Islam protesters.

CNN’s framing was so disgusting that the Axis news network had to issue a retraction, which itself was misleading:

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Harvard Grade Inflation Ethics and the DEI Train Wreck, Part I: A Depressing Protest From Students “Of Color”

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

[This is a long post, but I urge you to read it all the way through. I cannot imagine a more powerful rebuttal to the advocates of “diversity, equity and inclusion.”]

Last October, in “Harvard’s Self-Indicting Grade Inflation Report,” I wrote about the school’s embarrassing report that revealed that 60% of the grades handed out at the supposedly elite college (my alma matter, and my sister’s, and my father’s, where my mother was Dean of Housing once-upon-a-time) are now As, making Harvard resemble Garrisons Keilor’s imaginary Minnesota community where “all the children” seem to be are “above average” even though that’s impossible.

In a prescient comment (as is often the case), AM Golden wrote in part, taking off from a Dean Amanda Claybaugh’s statement that it was desirable to “ produce a broader distribution of grades,”

That’s the problem. They don’t want to admit they accept unqualified applicants because many of those applicants will be disproportionately minorities. Returning standards to what an elite institution should have will mess with the faculty push for D.E.I. The standards have to stay low if the experiment is to be prioritized over pure academics. They have set too many precedents to easily back away now…

They have created bubbles where remote learning, mask wearing, protesting for the correct causes and making equal outcomes are virtues valued over a solid education. Backing up now will cause mass revolt on campuses. Like the news media, the colleges will be accused of caving to Trump. The asylum has been run by people who should have been inmates for so long that the actual inmates can’t be helped.

Sometimes I think Ethics Alarms is the only online community where clear-eyed vision dependably resides. For right on cue, as Harvard announced a long term effort to start grading seriously again, a coalition of “of color” Harvard students sent this open letter to the campus:

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Jesse Jackson Jr. Properly Slams Obama and Biden for Trying To Turning His Father’s Funeral Into An Anti-Trump Campaign Rally

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Well good for him.

Jackson said, during a private memorial service at Rainbow Push Coalition headquarters in Chicago, that “[Y]esterday, I listened for several hours to three United States presidents who do not know Jesse Jackson.”

He continued,

“He maintained a tense relationship with the political order, not because the presidents were white or black, but the demands of our message, the demands of speaking for the least of these — those who are disinherited, the damned, the dispossessed, the disrespected — demanded not Democratic or Republican solutions, but demanded a consistent, prophetic voice that at no point in time ever sold us out as people. And it speaks volumes about who the Rev. Jesse Jackson was.”

Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Joe Biden all used their eulogies to attack the President and his policies, though, as you might have guessed, Harris was the most obnoxious and made the least sense. “Let me just say I predicted a lot about what’s happening right now,” Harris smirked. “I’m not into saying I told you so but we did see it coming.” I’d love to ask her what it was exactly that she “saw coming.” The forceful repudiation of the weak, zombie administration she was part of? The voters’ rejection of her embarrassing DEI candidacy? Her running mate’s utter disgrace and exposure as a corrupt hack?

Jackson’s was a subtle and measured rebuke, so subtle and measured that most of the Axis media felt it necessary to ignore it. Many, realizing how inappropriate it was for Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to turn attention away from Jackson’s father and onto their hatred of Donald Trump at Jesse Jackson Sr.’s funeral, also worked to hide the Democrats’ nauseating conduct from the public…after all, there’s an election coming!

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Oh Canada! The Government Assisted Suicide/Euthanasia Slippery Slope…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments
@the.free.press

One out of every 20 deaths in Canada is now caused by the government’s assisted suicide program. What’s even more shocking is how fast the deaths are approved.

♬ original sound – The Free Press – The Free Press

It is reassuring to know, at least for me, that the ethics issues EA has been most adamant about continue to inspire the same analysis from me. On the topic of legal human euthanasia (assisted suicide), the position here hasn’t changed since the policy, now legal in Illinois, California, Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Montana, Maine, New Jersey,New York, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington first began to spread. Gee, I wonder what those states have in common? Oh…right. An ideology that devalues life: that’s today’s progressive movement and its Democratic Party.

This toxic and corrupting culture holds that individual life is not precious, but rather is subordinate to the needs of the many. Letting people kill themselves, or, if necessary, allowing their families and care-givers to let them be killed, costs a lot less than letting the old, sick, depressed and poor try to hold on to every last minute of existence. Masquerading as individual “choice,” the versatile word that encompasses letting mothers snuff out burgeoning young life in their wombs for their convenience and career advancement, the right to have the government kill you quickly metastasizes into a cultural norm where autonomy, courage, fortitude, individualism and reverence for life erodes in the interests of affording a nanny state.

Euthanasia is a straight violation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative; it also, in cases where the object of this kind of “palliative care” is forced on victims, as it frequently is in Canada, a Golden Rule breach. The only ethical system it can be squared with is Utilitarianism, but only of the most brutal kind that was used as the justification for the mass murders under Hitler, Stalin and Mao.

I personally authorized the hospital pulling the plug on my 89-year-old mother when she lapsed into a coma after unsuccessful surgery. My father, who always told us that he would not be a financial or other kind of burden on his family, managed to die during a nap, also at 89, apparently by force of will. My ethical assessment of the Left’s fondness for assisted suicide has been aired frequently on Ethics Alarms, most thoroughly in a series of posts in September of 2019: The Euthanasia Slippery Slope: A Case Study, Comment Of The Day: “The Euthanasia Slippery Slope: A Case Study”, and Addendum: To “The Euthanasia Slippery Slope: A Case Study,” Hypothetical And Poll.

In the first post, I wrote, “I believe that permitting an individual to kill another with the victim’s consent is so ripe for abuse—Dr. Kevorkian comes to mind—that it crosses an ethical line that should be thick, black, and forbidding.  The alleged consent of the doomed can too easily be coerced or manufactured for the convenience of others.” That position hasn’t changed one whit.

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Welcome To Unethical Rationalization 31A, “The Hypocrite’s Balm,” or “Any Port in a Storm!”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

This is the first new rationalization added to the rationalizations list in a long time, though I have at least two others I have been pondering for a while. Rationalization #31 A, however hit me like Pete Buttigieg’s imaginary maul when a respected legal ethicist wrote on the listserv for the Association of Professional Liability Lawyers today that “Lefties” like him were suddenly embracing state’s rights in response to the need to “resist” President Trump, and attempted to justify this reversal by shrugging, “Any port in a storm!”

And there it was. I could hardly believe that wasn’t on the list already, but it wasn’t. I assigned “The Hypocrite’s Balm” as a sub-rationalization to the infamous #31, The Troublesome Luxury: “Ethics is a luxury we can’t afford right now.” I also could have placed it under #25. The Coercion Myth: “I have no choice!,” but it is distinct from both.

#31 stands for brutal Utilitarianism, “the ends justify the means.” #25 is the whine of someone who is too cowardly to make the kind of tough ethical choice that has unpleasant non-ethical consequences. But “Any port in a storm” is the motto of activists who decide that their minds are made up, facts and logic no longer appeal to them, and they are willing to ally themselves with beliefs, organizations, individuals and missions that they have previously reviled in order to avoid admitting they may have been wrong, or that they should reassess their position based on new information, experience, or the metaphorical ice water of reality being thrown in their faces.

Rationalization #31 A describes the warped, desperate and destructive mindset of the Axis of Unethical Conduct today along with the Trump Deranged. So obsessed are they with their hatred of Donald Trump and the fact that he has at least temporarily derailed the Mad Left’s march to single party, nanny state, multicultural, anti-American DEI dominance that they are willing to anchor themselves in “ports” sane liberals would have avoided like ebola in the recent past.

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A Quick Ethics Villains Inventory…[Link Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

A lot of unethical junk has been flying around lately, and just to keep my brain clear (and yours) I feel the need to take stock. This isn’t a complete list, of course, just one that includes miscreants whose conduct and/or character I feel need additional attention here…

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Oh Look! A U.S. President Who Actually Fires People!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

President Biden fired nobody in his Cabinet over four years despite its containing multiple fools, knaves, DEI props and boobs. That is signature significance for a poor leader and untrustworthy Presidents. President Trump has fired Kristi Noem.

Good.

Noem’s irresponsible mouthing-off during the I.C.E operations in Minneapolis showed a loose cannon management style that the Administration could ill-afford as the face of its crack-down on illegal immigration. True, that Noem was untrustworthy had already been flagged on Ethics Alarms; she should never have been appointed in the first place. One of the marks of ethical leadership is the willingness to change course after a mistake, however. Trump, who makes a lot of them, proved with this firing that he is capable of doing that. EA advised that he Noem had to leave a month ago, but better late than never.

Being willing and able to fire a subordinate doesn’t mean one is an effective leader or manager, but not being willing to do so is strong evidence that one is unworthy of responsibility or, as in Joe Biden’s case, not paying attention.

Apparently A Majority Of Younger Americans Think The U.S. Invented Slavery. I’ll See You At The Wood-Chipper…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

A few days ago, I saw a chart showing what U.S. demographics believed that the United States invented slavery. I noted it for a future post, and now I can’t find it, but I found plenty of authority that supports that assertion. Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at their City Journal, has been making this point for years. Way back in 2016, The College Fix wrote in part,

For 11 years, Professor Duke Pesta gave quizzes to his students at the beginning of the school year to test their knowledge on basic facts about American history and Western culture.

The most surprising result from his 11-year experiment? Students’ overwhelming belief that slavery began in the United States and was almost exclusively an American phenomenon, he said.

“Most of my students could not tell me anything meaningful about slavery outside of America,” Pesta told The College Fix. “They are convinced that slavery was an American problem that more or less ended with the Civil War, and they are very fuzzy about the history of slavery prior to the Colonial era. Their entire education about slavery was confined to America.”…

The origin of these quizzes, which Pesta calls “cultural literacy markers,” was his increasing discomfort with gaps in his students’ foundational knowledge.

“They came to college without the basic rudiments of American history or Western culture and their reading level was pretty low,” Pesta told The Fix….

Often, more students connected Thomas Jefferson to slavery than could identify him as president, according to Pesta. On one quiz, 29 out of 32 students responding knew that Jefferson owned slaves, but only three out of the 32 correctly identified him as president. Interestingly, more students— six of 32—actually believed Ben Franklin had been president.

Pesta said he believes these students were given an overwhelmingly negative view of American history in high school, perpetuated by scholars such as Howard Zinn in “A People’s History of the United States,” a frequently assigned textbook.

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There Is Hope: Jasmine Crockett Gets a “Nelson”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Wow, that was a short tenure as a Democratic Party “rising star”!

Representative Jasmine Crockett issued a statement last night conceding the Democratic Senate nomination in Texas to James Talarico, a state lawmaker and seminarian, but not before claiming earlier that she had been defeated by Republican election tampering and that voters had been “disenfranchised.”

“Texas is primed to turn blue, and we must remain united because this is bigger than any one person,” she said in her statement. “This is about the future of all 30 million Texans and getting America back on track.” At least Crockett is smart enough to know that bitterly complaining after getting beaten is no way to continue her political career. What is a way will prove elusive in her case. At best, she may try to be Texas’s Stacy Abrams. Talk about low aspirations…

Talarico said in a speech early today that “The people of our state gave this country a little bit of hope.” He didn’t mean it quite the way I do, but he’s right anyway. In a little detail that few news sources (including the New York Times) are bothering to mention, Crockett’s expanded ego led her to believe her own press clippings and run for the Senate rather than try to keep her current seat in the House. She didn’t run in the primary to represent her current district, so at least until 2009, the loud-mouthed, vulgar, jive-talking, in-your-face parody of a black politician is out of national politics. That means both Crockett and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who took turns insulting each other like mean girls during a House session last year, will be out of Congress come January. Greene is already gone. Calloo Callay!

There is indeed hope: Crockett’s ad hominem, “fuck”-filled, ugly style of political discourse lowered the bar to gutter level, and yet the Trump Deranged cheered her on. But even her solid “blue” district had the sense to see that she was a fraud, talking down to black voters with a fake ebonics accent, and generally assuming that Abe was wrong when he said you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

As usual, Abe was right. Pssst! Abe! Now do Gavin Newsom…

Good News, Progressives, Democrats and Trump Deranged! The Washington Post Is Still Biased, Dishonest and Untrustworthy…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

What a joke.

A lot of my Trump Deranged Facebook friends flipped out in fury after owner Jeff Bezos fired much of the Washington Post staff, including many unethical, lying pundits and columnists. How dare Bezos interfere with his paper’s partisan propaganda just because it was losing money by the millions? Many of my mentally ill friends announced that they would boycott Amazon in vengeance.

I’m thrilled to be able to inform my miserable friends, relatives and colleagues that they now have a reason to buck up. The Post may be gutted, but whatever remains in the ruins is still dishonest, unethical, biased and as partisan as ever.

In a story three days ago headlined, “Outside White House, hundreds protest attack on Iran, urge end to conflict,” the Post highlighted a protest that broke out near the White House hours after “Epic Fury” began. The reports chose to explain the event though the eyes of Ermiya Fanaeian, “a 25-year-old PhD candidate in political science at Howard University” whom the Post introduced as a young woman who “has lived in the United States since she was 1, but still has family in her home country of Iran.”

As “word spread of attacks there by Israel and the U.S.,” Post reporters Jasmine Golden and Liam Scott wrote, Fanaeian “grew concerned about her relatives and other Iranians” and “decided to protest the military action.” “It hits close to home,” Fanaeian was quoted as saying. “I also know that the people in Iran are the ones who are going to experience the most, the biggest consequences from these attacks.”

Poor Ermiya! This is the news media playing the cognitive dissonance game. Let’s watch the President’s attack on an international villain and purveyor of terrorism that has been declaring “Death to America!” and planning death to Israel for decades, as filtered through the emotions of an innocent young female student worried about her family.

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