Journalism & Media

Poe’s Law In “The Great Stupid”: Which Is Satire And Which Is Woke Derangement?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Two stories, both head-explodingly idiotic, both linked to Bizarro World Ethics and pathological virtue-signaling needs in oppressive leftist-indoctrination saturated cultures. One is a gag, the other is a tragedy, yet there is hardly a filament of difference between them in the 21st Century ethics and rationality rot they illustrate.

I read the two in succession by pure coincidence, and Poe’s Law immediately leaped into my mind. Poe’s Law was formulated in 20o5 (by Nathan Poe, not Edgar Allan Poe) and has become an essential concept since. It holds that satirical accounts involving extreme examples of ideological insanity can be impossible to distinguish from actual events, because current ideological extremism defies parody. Let’s cut to the chase, for this isn’t a quiz: the satirical piece was “I apologize for my white baby.”

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Stop Making Me Defend Pete Rose!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Pete Rose, baseball’s all-time hit leader who received a lifetime (and justified) ban from baseball for betting on games while a manager, was my very first Ethics Dunce, way back in January of 2004, on the old Ethics Scoreboard. Since then Pete has come up here often, with a thick and varied ethics dossier. The man is a slimeball; there is no disputing it. He knowingly violated baseball’s most inviolate rule; he lied about it in more than one way; he ended up in jail for defrauding the IRS; he has attempted multiple schemes to cash in on his own misconduct. Rose is the poster boy for the King’s Pass: he assumed that rules and laws didn’t apply to him because he was a Great and Beloved Player. Yes, he was a great, beloved, unique and entertaining player, but Pete Rose wouldn’t know an ethical value if it were nailed to his forehead.

And yet…the most recent attack on Rose’s character is contrived and unfair.

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Now THIS Is An Unethical Lawyer…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

And yet he’s running to be elected judge!

No, I don’t understand this at all.

Matthew Leveridge, the commonwealth’s attorney for Russell and Wayne counties in Kentucky, should have been disbarred.  He admitted to impregnating a criminal defendant, Latisha Sartain, whom he prosecuted for drug trafficking in 2011. A motion filed on Sartain’s behalf in 2014 alleged that Leveridge filed a motion to revoke her five-year pretrial diversion agreement after she ended their relationship and revealed her pregnancy to Leveridge’s wife. For some reason, this didn’t result in any bar discipline, or an episode of “Law and Order.”  But wait! There’s more! Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Ex CNN Anchor Chris Cuomo

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“I saw a lot of brave men and women deciding to take somebody on who had a tremendous amount of power and who had come at them by name too and that’s a scary thing.”

—-Disgraced CNN star Chris Cuomo, celebrating himself and CNN for slanting new reports in order to oppose Donald Trump.

Cuomo could not have made a stronger case against the left-biased news media if that had been his objective. Many of his statements to Bill Maher in Cuomo’s appearance on HBO’s “Real Time” would serve as well as the above to prove just how arrogant and unethical Cuomo’s previous profession has become. For example, there is this: Continue reading →

“Ignorant, Stupid And With Dead Ethics Alarms Is No Way To Stay In Business, Atlantic Sports Bar & Restaurant…”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

And now for something completely appalling! The Tiverton, Rhode Island eatery posted this meme to Facebook:

Now what?

What occurred after the meme went up was that a local talk radio host called to investigate. She says the restaurant owner told her that he thought the meme was funny and then cut off the call. The employee who posted the gag alleged that he didn’t know who the girl in the photo was.

After the post had been taken down by the restaurant, a contrite apology went up in its place:

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Observations On The Trans Dinosaur Emoji Appropriation Tragedy [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

I guess Tucker Carlson does have his uses after all: somebody on his staff uncovered a head-explodingly silly NPR feature from January, and the topic was still so silly that it didn’t filter down into the rest of of conservative media until this week. What NPR felt was a matter worth spending taxpayer funds on and wasting listener’s ears on was this, and I am NOT kidding: in the words of a guest on the segment, “Many people who are queer, whether they are trans or some other form of genderqueer or whatever it is…We love dinosaurs.” Continue reading →

Gallup Finds “Media Confidence Ratings at Record Lows”…Well, Good!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Why “good”? It’s obviously not good that the trustworthiness of journalism has declined so precipitously. What is good, since the news media has proven itself to be so biased, irresponsible, dishonest and untrustworthy, is that the public is waking up and no longer trusts it. That minimizes the damage. It does not solve, however, the existential danger to our democracy of having a propaganda system instead of objective and reliable reporting.

Sure, this is a poll, and polls themselves are biased and unreliable. Gallup and Pew, however, are the most reliable of the pollsters, and this one at least seems right. 11% trust in TV news is essentially no trust at all: that number represents the moron component that shows up in every poll. (The 16% trust level in newspapers is irrationally high.) Continue reading →

Even More Weird Tales Of The Great Stupid! WaPo Publishes A Peak Stupid Op-Ed, Then Censors Readers Who Say It’s Stupid

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I really do wonder at what point the vast majority of Americans who have not become irreversibly deranged by the confluence of the Trump Freakout, the George Floyd Freakout, the Trans Freakout ,the Wuhan Virus Freakout and the Roe Reversal Freakout sharply slap their foreheads “I could have had a V8!” style and ask, “Why are we letting these unstable, untrustworthy people dominate our discourse and manipulate our culture?”

For the provocation keep escalating. The Washington Post’s editors actually thought that a Poe’s Law evoking piece headlined “My name is a Confederate monument, so I cross it out when I write it” was worthy of publication. In an orgy of narcissism, U.S. history-hatred and virtue-signalling, a writer named Bayard Woods saluted his ridiculous habit of crossing out his own name, which he says, “had stood as a Confederate monument over every story I had ever written.” See, the Bayards and the Woodses had owned slaves. By this brilliant logic, I should cross out my name too, since Chief Justice John Marshall was a slaveholder and “Jack” honors Jack the Ripper.

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The Victoria’s Secret Smoking Gun: The New York Times Doesn’t Just Use Unethical Reporting To Push Its Political Agenda…It Does It To Push A Social Agenda As Well

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

The Times article yesterday was headlined, “Victoria’s Secret and What’s Sexy Now: A rebranding and a new documentary have the lingerie company back in the cultural cross hairs.” The piece emits barely-restrained enthusiasm for VS’s controversial rebranding and implies that the effort, while having to overcome much bias and cultural headwinds, is succeeding….and should. The final words written by NYT fashion maven Vanessa Friedman are these:

[P]erhaps the real takeaway from all of this is that no one person or brand or size or shape gets to say what’s sexy — and that should be seen as a good thing.

That sexy in the end has to do with feeling at ease in your skin, rather than in any single garment. That there are as many definitions of the term as there are people in the world. And that actual empowerment doesn’t come in a bra and panty set. It comes out of it.

Her article begins by saying that when the fantasy female bedroom attire company announced, in a fit of wokeness, that it would “become a champion of female empowerment, replacing its bevy of supermodel angels with the VS Collective, ten women of great accomplishment as well as varying ages and body types — the news was met, generally (and understandably), with raised eyebrows.” Among those virtual eyebrows were those of this blog, which observed at the time in part [Item #3]:

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Ethics Dunces: Kathryn Rubino, And, As Usual, “Above The Law”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

What a vile website Above the Law is! The legal gossip cyber-rag, which belched forth the hateful Elie Mystal (who once argued on the site that black jurors should always refuse to vote “guilty” regarding black defendants regardless of the crime or the evidence), covers the progressively rotting legal profession with gusto, and does everything it can to make the profession even more left-biased than it already is. As a recent article by one of Elie’s successors, Kathryn Rubino, shows, a lack of fairness and decency helps the rotting process a lot.

The headline that caught my eye was “On Second Thought, Maybe Federal Judges Shouldn’t Have Hired The Law School Student Famously Accused Of Saying ‘I HATE BLACK PEOPLE’” I was immediately tempted to headline this post, “On Third Thought, Maybe A Site Run By Lawyers Shouldn’t Promote The Concept That Accusations Alone Justify Wrecking A Lawyer’s Career.”

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