Humor and Satire

Ethics Pro Tip: If You’re a Realtor Using AI To Scam Potential Customers, You’re Not Only Unethical, You’re an Idiot

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Since AI bots are gradually corrupting everything from funny dog videos to legal briefs, it should not surprise anyone to learn that the little buggers are making real estate ads unreliable too. “Realtors Are Using AI Images of Homes They’re Selling. Comparing Them to the Real Thing Will Make You Mad as Hell” lays out this revolting development. “Future” writes,

“Realtors have made extensive use of the tech, manipulating photos of properties beyond recognition by giving facades and interiors a heavy coat of AI-generated paint. Text descriptions of properties have turned into a heap of ChatGPT-generated buzzwords, devolving an already frustrating house hunt into a genuinely exasperating experience. Making sense of what a rental apartment actually looks like in the real world has regressed into a guessing game. We’ve already come across bizarre listings of inexplicably classified houses with smoothed-over architectural features, misplaced trees, nonsensically rearranged furniture, and mangled props.”

Fortunately, the people most likely to cheat using AI are also the ones who have exceeded their Peter Principle ceilings and are incompetent at their chosen fields, hence the felt need to used bots to try to fool others who probably are smarter than they are. The ethics values are incompetence and dishonesty.

And thus we have the risible tale of the listing for a property in Fort Totten, a suburb in northern Washington, D.C., that has been taken down from Apartments.com. While the ad was up, it seemingly promised that for just $1,800 a month, a lucky renter could have her own bathroom Hell-spawn. See it in the photo above, crawling onto the bathroom sink?

Giraffe360, an AI image editing tool for real estate photos, points out on its website that real estate organizations “consistently prohibit” edits that remove or alter structural elements, erase or modify views, or digitally renovate or upgrade interiors or exteriors. “Here’s a simple test: if an edit would require physical renovation to achieve in real life, it shouldn’t be in an MLS listing photo,” it advises. But there is a loophole: edits that create H.P. Lovecraft creature features on the property probably should also be taboo.

“How do you not notice the melted demon crawling out of the wall before you hit publish?” one user wrote, attempting to rebut the presumption that AI image editing tools were involved. That’s an easy question that regular Ethics Alarms readers can answer by quoting The Waco Kid: “You know. Morons!”

Breaking!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

….and Savannagh Guthrie’s mother is still missing.

I know I’m harping on this, but it needs to be harped on. The news networks are still giving breathless reports on this single disappearance of a woman the American public knew nothing about 11 days ago, and whose only claim to importance is that she is the mother of the Today Show’s hostess, which doesn’t even mean as much as it did a decade ago.

The Today Show made Dave Garroway, Tom Brokaw, John Chancellor, Barbara Walters, Jane Pauley, Joe Garragiola and Bryant Gumbel national figures; also Willard Scott and J. Fred Muggs, a chimp, once upon a time when most American actually watched the morning show. Now? I bet more Americans listen to Bad Bunny recordings than had a clue who Savannah Guthrie was before CNN, MSNBC and Fox News started spewing this story up our metaphorical noses like Navage.

Yet there are already specials being aired about Mrs. Guthrie’s disappearance, which makes no difference to the fate of the nation, the state of the union, or the welfare of the public in any way, shape or form. The coverage, which now resembles the endless obsession with the Malaysian airline disappearance (but a lot more than one woman vanished with that mystery), is preventing the public from learning about other events and issues that are genuinely important to more than a single family. It is also helping the news media bury stories its political bias causes it to want buried.

(I find myself fighting the impulse to hope that Mrs. Guthrie was abducted and eaten by a trans female illegal immigrant Gavin Newsom supporter, who had been arrested and released 12 times by the Biden Administration.)

This episode does have importance, however. It is important because it proves that our journalists are not journalists. They are greedy, irresponsible hacks who hold the same ethical standards as drug dealers and organized crim: prey on people’s base needs and addictions, because it’s so profitable. Hey, everybody loves a mystery, right?

Sure…and the tale of Savannah Guthrie’s mom, however it turns out, will make a dandy “48 Hours” episode. One. Last night we were getting breathless updates about an arrest. The guy’s been released: now the mystery is whether he is a DoorDash driver or not.

It would all be funny if it wasn’t so damning. The people we rely on to inform us so we can be competent citizens in a republic are silly, greedy, irresponsible and untrustworthy hacks. We shouldn’t need this ridiculous spectacle to convince us by now, but how can anyone doubt it after this?

Not Quite De Minimis Non Curat Lex, But Mighty Close…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

When I heard that Rep. Omar had been “assaulted” and “attacked,” I assumed that something violent had occurred. When I read that a “substance” has been “hurled” at her, I assumed that the substance was 1) toxic and 2) aimed at her face.

Nah. The idiot squirted liquid harmlessly at her chest, and the “substance” turned out to be vinegar. It might as well have been water. For her part, the scamster, anti-Semitic “Squad” member didn’t even appear startled, much less harmed.

Yes, there is no question that this qualifies as an assault, as it placed a victim in legitimate fear of an un-consented to touching. The “substance” could have been bleach or battery acid or that stuff that made Margaret Qualley crawl out of Dem Moore’s back, and it could have been squirted in her eyes. We obviously can’t have public figures or even random, normal citizens on the street having that happen to them, so the “attacker” has to be tried and punished, I would assume with probation and a fine.

However, in reality what occurred was less consequential than a cream pie in the face, and Omar has been playing victim now for days, whining about bigotry and intimidation, and behaving as if not going into hiding after a few drops of vinegar hit her clothes (Would that even stain?) makes her Joan of Arc. And she’s getting TV time for doing it!

Meanwhile, the Left’s pundits are furious that President Trump suggested that the mini-spectacle was “staged.” Of course Trump should shut up in cases like this, but if they were going to fake a pathetic “attack” on Omar to give her a chance to play victim and wanted to make sure she was never in a scintilla of peril, that’s what it would look like.

The Left is also ethically estopped from complaining about Trump’s effort to minimize an indignity inflicted on a Democrat after so many Trump Deranged pundits, like Joy Reid, claimed the assassination attempt on Trump where a man sitting behind him was shot dead was “staged.” Then there was so much of the Left’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death, as in “Hooray!”

Pages: 1 2

The DEI Slippery Slope Goes Here:

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Suraj Bhaskar, 20, from Uttar Pradesh, one of the Indian states, failed the NEET medical school admission exam twice. Determined to become a doctor, however, the plucky young man wouldn’t give up. Indian law mandates a 5% set aside in admissions for people with disabilities (PwDs) in government-aided higher education institutions, including medical colleges.

So he cut off his foot.

A police investigation indicated the violent assault on Suraj that his older brother reported was in fact a carefully planned ruse. The aspiring doctor was indeed found unconscious with a severed foot, but the plot fell apart rapidly.

“The accused tried to mislead the investigation with a fabricated story, but his claims did not stand scrutiny during sustained questioning and examination of evidence,” a police spokesperson told local reporters. A diary belonging to Suraj conatined an entry that read, “I will become an MBBS doctor in 2026,” and his girlfriend testified to Suraj’s obsession with getting into medical school. He had unsuccessfully tried to obtain disability-related documents a few months prior, but was foiled. The medical report determined that Suraj’s foot had been cleanly cut off, most likely with a machine, and the incision was too clean to have been inflicted with a violent knife attack as the two brothers claimed. The syringes found in a field near where Suraj lay strongly suggested that used a drug to numb his legs before performing the self-amputation.

His foot is still missing.

There appears to be some doubt as to whether any charges or punishment will follow with this scheme, which is widely seen as self-punishing. If nothing else, Suraj’s medical career has definitely gotten off on the wrong foot.

I’m sorry, but I regard it as unethical to pass up an obvious punch line like that.

Musk’s Ethics Rorschach Maduro Meme

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I was originally going to make Elon Musk’s endorsement of the meme above on Twitter/”X” an ethics quiz, but decided, after reading the furious and wide-ranging arguments from Ann Althouse’s own commenters that I’d rather focus on this as an example of how political orientation, personal morality and confirmation bias combine to make cultural coherence increasingly difficult today.

The main focus of the comments…there are 141 of them now (I’m envious)—is on Althouse’s declaration that it is “shameful” for Musk to circulate such a thing with a laughing emoji.

I must confess, I didn’t completely get the joke at first because I didn’t recognize rapper, P Diddy (Sean Combs), now serving time in a Federal prison for sex-related charges. Rap and Hip-Hop are big holes in my cultural literacy.

Had I used the meme as an EA ethics quiz, my own conclusions would have been 1) jokes are not unethical if they make people laugh, even if they are cruel, vulgar, or politically incorrect, but 2) it is unethical, as in irresponsible and incompetent, for important, valuable, influential figures in our culture to gratuitously and recklessly undermine their own credibility and popularity by associating themselves with divisive practices and ideas for no good reason. President Trump does this constantly. It is Cognitive Dissonance Scale malpractice.

However, Ann’s single word “Shameful” landed in her blog like a bomb thrown into Times Square at midnight on New Year’s Eve. You can (and should) read the responses here. An incomplete summary of the various arguments:

Continue reading →

Flashback: Depressing How Little Has Changed In 16 Long Years…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I was looking for an appropriate “Night Before Christmas” post and found this instead, a parody I wrote on Christmas Eve in 2009, the very first year of Ethics Alarms, in reaction to the ethically-tainted passage of the “Affordable Care Act,” which didn’t make health care affordable. I knew the bill was smoke and mirrors and that it would not accomplish what it was supposed to do.  I knew that we would be in one mess or another as a result of the ugly thing, supposedly the signature legislation of the Obama Administration…and sad thing is that it probably was. What does that tell you?

I was struck, as you will be, how much of my mordant satire seems relevant today, and how little has changed.

So let’s travel back to that halcyon year, and the day before Christmas…

Continue reading →

BREAKING! I Was Hoaxed Again! “Behold Portland’s Holiday Thing! (How Progressives Get This Way and Can They Be Cured?)” Is Officially Retracted

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

UPDATE!

Well this is all I needed on a busy day that just included me re-injuring my leg after being pulled off my feet by Spuds. The post below is based on a hoax, and damn the hoaxers to hell. Spreading false stories on the web is unethical, and satire sites are obligated to signal when a post is intended as parody. A few notes:

1. Thanks to the crack EA commentariate for flagging this.

2. The fake story is still up on the usually reliable conservative commentary site Victory Girls, which linked to the fake story I used.

The VG Naughty List: Just A Few

3. I was fooled because first, none of the quotes sounded unlikely given what we have heard and witnessed in Portland in the recent past, and

4. I had never seen a “butt plug” before.I apologize to Ethics Alarms readers and the City of Portland. I try to be careful, but this time I was fooled.

5. Apparently the hoax was inspired by Portland’s city officials this year referring to their annual tree lighting event as just “the tree” or “winter tree,” deliberately omitting the word “Christmas.” Typical dumb Portland wokeness at work: if the hoaxers had only made it clear what they were spoofing, I’d call it a successful and well-deserved satire.

6. I apologize to all, including the City of Portland, for my error.

***

I missed this, which happened about a week ago, in part because I view Portland as a lost cause. You know those zombie apocalypse movies where the survivors will say, sadly, “Boston’s gone, San Diego’s gone”? Portland’s gone, and has been for a long time. I would say it’s Patient Zero for Trump Derangement, woke insanity, anti-Americanism and The Great Stupid, except there are so many other candidates: New York City, California, Minnesota. None of them, however, have descended so far into incompetent cultural madness as Portland, as exemplified by the Christmas, sorry, Holiday Thing the city unveiled this month.

Portland officially replaced its traditional Christmas tree—to be fair, it’s so hard to find evergreen trees in Oregon these days—with that whatever it is above. Officials described the holiday display as “bold,” “inclusive,” and “a meaningful departure from tree-based expectations.”

How far gone do you have to be to utter the words “tree-based expectations” without feeling ridiculous?

City leaders, presumably the same ones who let Black Lives Matter take over parts of the city five year sago, explained the traditional Christmas tree ultimately failed to reflect Portland’s “evolving” relationship with holidays. Thus the “inclusive” replacement, officials said, is intentionally ambiguous, streamlined, and designed to invite interpretation.

I, for example, interpret it as “meaningless, joyless crap.”

Continue reading →

Now THIS Is A Frivolous Lawsuit…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Ethics Alarms has mentioned before the fact that it is very difficult for a lawyer to violate Rule 3.1 in the Rules of Professional Conduct, which prohibits frivolous law suits and appeals. The ABA version of the rule, “Meritorious Claims & Contentions,” states,

“A lawyer shall not bring or defend a proceeding, or assert or controvert an issue therein, unless there is a basis in law and fact for doing so that is not frivolous, which includes a good faith argument for an extension, modification or reversal of existing law. A lawyer for the defendant in a criminal proceeding, or the respondent in a proceeding that could result in incarceration, may nevertheless so defend the proceeding as to require that every element of the case be established.”

Why is it hard to violate the rule? It is because even the most desperate “Hail Mary” law suits sometimes win. “Good faith” simply requires that the attorney bringing the suit honestly believes it might succeed, which means that it helps if he’s an idiot.

The last time Ethics Alarms suggested a law suit was sanctionably frivolous was in 2020, when Alan Dershowitz sued CNN for what was just typical sloppy, biased CNN reporting. The First Amendment protects news outlets from defamation suits by public figures unless the defamatory news is deliberate and malicious. I flagged another 3.1 violation in 2019, when a lawyer filed 49 appeals for the same client in a condo dispute despite the fact that multiple judges had rejected his arguments and said, in effect, “Don’t come back here again with this crap!”

Today I learned about a frivolous sexual harassment lawsuit by a female lawyer against another lawyer at her former firm. As an epitome of frivolity, it takes the metaphorical cake.

Her complaint alleged that the man ogled and stared at her, took photographs, and generally created a hostile work environment by his unwanted attentions.

The defendant is blind.

The Obligatory Joke Principle

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Today a Facebook friend who is addicted to posting about the most mundane and prosaic matters on her page. Today, the press had to be alerted to this revelation: “For some reason my phone no longer recognizes my thumb-print.” Talk about the problems of the privileged! I’m sure it’s Trump’s fault. She added, “Does anyone else have this problem?”

A comment read: “Yes. My phone doesn’t recognize your thumbprint either.”

I hope, if I had seen the query first, I would have issued the same mandatory response. When Fate, or God, or whoever is in charge of cosmic humor delivers to you through the mouth or text of an agent a slow, hanging curve-ball of a straight-line that begs to be knocked out of the metaphoric ballpark and you let it go by, you have violated a sacred obligation to the human race. It needs as much mirth and merriment as it can get, and if a perfect opportunity to get a laugh like that set-up goes unrealized—because of fear, lack of attention, witlessness or self-absorption—a grievous ethics offense had been committed. Shame. Shame.

Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz of the Day: Mencken-Style Ad Hominem

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

At the Washiungton Free Beacon, columnist Andrew Stiles writes,

Jack Schlossberg, the sentient boat shoe and semi-employed TikTok user, is running for Congress in New York. It was bound to happen. The 32-year-old Democrat belongs to the Kennedy dynasty—that inexplicably beloved menagerie of goon-faced Habsburgian freaks, Nantucket douche bros, chronic alcoholics, and bloated sex pests. Schlossberg, a mentally deranged internet addict who cracks jokes about guzzling “Jew blood” and “male jizz,” has sought to inject the storied Kennedy brand with Gen Z flare.

That anti-Kennedy invective made me laugh out loud more than once. But is it fair commentary to mix in so much ad hominem invective in an opinion column if it is genuinely funny, at least to a substantial number of readers (or listeners)?

Famous (or infamous) journalist-pundit H.L. Mencken (1880-1956, above) excelled at this sort of thing; he may have even invented it. Here is part of his “obituary” for three-time (losing) Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan after he died shortly after he faced off against Clarence Darrow in Dayton, Tennessee in Tennessee v. Scopes aka, “Monkey Trial”:

Continue reading →