language

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

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

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.”

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

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

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]

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

“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.

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

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

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

Continue reading →

Come On, Prof. Turley: “Let’s Go Brandon!”= “Fuck Joe Biden!”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

A student known only as “D.A.” was told last spring by Assistant Principal Andrew Buikema and teacher Wendy Bradford at the Tri County (Michigan) Middle School to remove his “Let’s Go Brandon!” hoodie. The school’s dress code states that school officials can “determine [if] a student’s dress is in conflict with state policy, is a danger to the students’ health and safety, is obscene, [or] is disruptive to the teaching and/or learning environment by calling undue attention to oneself.” Western District of Michigan Judge Paul Maloney ruled that the teacher and the principle were within the standards articulated by SCOTUS in in Tinker v. Des Moines in banning the hoodie.

“If schools can prohibit students from wearing apparel that contains profanity, schools can also prohibit students from wearing apparel that can reasonably be interpreted as profane,” Maloney wrote. (The district had banned shirts with the phrases “Fet’s Luck” and “Uranus Liquor” on them.) Maloney added that administrators and teachers could prohibit apparel that said“F#%* Joe Biden,” for example.

“Because Defendants reasonably interpreted the phrase as having a profane meaning,” Maloney said, “the School District can regulate wearing of Let’s Go Brandon apparel during school without showing interference or disruption at the school….”

The judge is right. Prof. Turley, whose analysis Ethics Alarms usually concurs, is wrong this time, and so is FIRE. He argues in part,

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I Don’t Know What To Call This Story, Except “Depressing”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The instant ethics train wreck, courtesy of The Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck, The Ferguson Ethics Train Wreck, The George Floyd Freakout, the Obama Administration Ethics Train Wreck, the DEI Ethics Train Wreck and The Great Stupid, is described by Campus Reform, thusly:

A primarily black student group at the University of Missouri was recently forced to change the name of that it is planning on hosting. The Legion of Black Collegians reportedly intended to name [a back-to-school barbecue event] the “Welcome Black BBQ,” but was forced to change the name by the university administration. The event, which is scheduled to be hosted on Friday, will now be called the “Welcome Black and Gold BBQ,” a reference to the school’s colors. The group wrote in an Instagram post on Aug. 16 that it is “heartbroken” at the name change.

Ugh.

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Brilliant: What Israel Is Trying To Do Is Self-Preservation, Not Genocide. So “Genocide” Has To Be Redefined So Israel Can Be Accused Of Doing It…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The case of “genocide” is a classic in the annals of deliberate linguistic manipulation for unethical goals.

A detailed essay in the New York Times explains the machinations around the word, which is similar to what we have seen recently in other cases, like that of “women,” “racism,” “lying,” “ad hominem” (in a debate here on Ethics Alarms), “fascism,”and “insurrection,” to name just a few of many. The proliferation of this Orwellian process should set off not just ethics alarms but evil alarms.

As the article correctly explains, international law addressing genocide was aimed at extreme and unequivocal examples where a nation sets out to exterminate an entire race or ethnic group for no other reason than that group’s existence. It is the ultimate hate crime, and thus was labeled a “crime against humanity.” The Holocaust was the prime example: nothing describes genocide more indisputably than a group of experts, military officials and government leaders sitting around a table and deciding on a “Final Solution.”

But as the article relates, mission creep has invaded the anti-genocide brigade, for example with the United States being accused of genocide in its treatment of Native American and because of the actions of the KKK and others during the Jim Crow era, and now, with Israel being vilified by the genocide label for being determined to eliminate a terrorist organization pledged to commit genocide against Israelis.

Naturally, the United Nations is complicit in this process, and, naturally, so is the I.C.J., the U.N.’s top court. The U.S., among other nations, supports the Geneva Convention but doesn’t accept the authority of the I.C.J. The article doesn’t explicitly explain why, but the reason is obvious: the court is subject to political motives and bias. It can’t be trusted.

“Genocide” has been slowly made a synonym for “human rights violations,” and wars are by definition human rights violations. Thus the U.N. can always use a politicized definition of “genocide” to declare any war, even one triggered by a nation’s right and obligation to defend itself and its citizens, as “genocide”—particularly if the nation waging the war is Israel.

By the standards being weaponized by the protesters at the Democratic National Convention, the U.S. ending World War II with two atom bombs would qualify as genocide.

This is the unethical—but effective—process:

1. Identify a nation, group, individual, or leader that you want to demonize.

2. Find a word universally regarded as describing conduct that is heinous and unforgivable.

3. Redefine that word so that the policies, conduct or stated position of that nation, group, individual, or leader can be described by it.

4. Repeat that word in association with the nation, group, individual, or leader’s policies, conduct or stated positions so that the word itself is defined by those policies, conduct or stated positions, rather than the other way around.

The average member of the public—you know, morons—won’t know the difference.

What makes this tactic so effective, diabolical, and impossible to stop is that there are many examples of pejorative words that should be used and understood to apply beyond their most narrow definitions. Child abuse. Indoctrination. Propaganda. Totalitarianism. Conflicts of interest. The distinction, perhaps, is whether the expanded definition is made in good faith, or it it is only aimed at a particular adversary to achieve strategic political gains.

The article, “The Bitter Fight Over the Meaning of ‘Genocide’” is here for you to read, freed from the paywall.

As the NYT Enables Terrorism and Anti-Israel Hate With “Think of the Children!” Porn…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Raja Abdulrahim, the New York Times reporter who prepared and wrote the splashy A-Section feature story in today’s print edition, says in her linked bio that “I abide by The Times’s ethical journalism standards. That includes refraining from promoting or protesting issues related to my work.” Can she possibly believe this while writing a piece of “Poor Palestinians!” propaganda like “There Is No Childhood in Gaza”? [Note: This is a gift link from me to get you past the paywall]

I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt, I suppose; it’s the ethical thing to do. Her story, and the way it is written, however, can evoke no possible response from typical semi-attentive and easily manipulated readers than “Think of the children! The Jews are monsters! Cease fire now! The Gazans have suffered enough! Justice for Palestine!”

And this is exactly the end result that Hamas sought when it launched its cease-fire shattering surprise terror attack on Israeli civilians, including infants, on October 7.

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On Jarren Duran, T-Shirts, LGBTG Bullies, and My Dead College Room Mate

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

In an earlier post that few people read (it was about baseball, see) I pointed out the excessive, virtue-signaling punishment handed down by the team on Red Sox outfielder Jarren Duran. His unforgivable offense was calling an abusive fan a “fucking fag” in a moment of temper during a game. The fan had apparent been ragging on him for the entire game from behind home plate, and the slur was picked up by the Red Sox game broadcast microphones and was audible to viewers. Duran apologized (immediately and well), but was fined and suspended for two games, which, given his status as arguably its best player, harmed everyone on the team while the Sox battle for a play-off slot. I have seen no indication that the fan taunting Duran was in fact gay, so the use of the slur “fag” was apparently just a random insult, but never mind: we are now in the world of censorship, word- taboos and hate speech hypersensitivity. I was called a fag once. I remember my response: “Is that the best you can do?” (It was.)

Duram served his two game suspension, but now he is on the LGBTQ Mafia’s hit list. In The Athletic today, “out” Boston sportswriter Steve Buckley goes after Duran again (no vendetta there!) because he wore the T-shirt above while being interviewed about the incident. You know, because sportswriters never use or hear the word “fuck,” and somehow the T-shirt’s legend means that Duran doesn’t take his outburst that employed a taboo word seriously enough.

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Ethics Dunce: The Boston Red Sox (and Anyone Who Agrees With What They Just Did)

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

As I alluded to in an earlier post today, Boston Red Sox star Jarren Duran was caught on a mic in yesterday’s loss to the Houston Astros snapping at an obnoxious Fenway Park fan who was taunting him at the end of a frustrating game for the outfielder. You won’t learn this from any media covering the incident, but Duran said, “Shut up, you fucking fag.”

There is no question that baseball players say much worse in their private interactions with each other, including on the field, but because this was picked up electronically, and because Duran knew that the Red Sox, maybe even more than the rest of Major League Baseball, are lapdogs to all progressive activist groups, immediately issued an abject apology, saying, “During tonight’s game, I used a truly horrific word when responding to a fan. I feel awful knowing how many people I offended and disappointed,” the grovel continued. “I apologize to the entire Red Sox organization, but more importantly to the entire LGBTQ community. Our young fans are supposed to be able to look up to me as a role model, but tonight I fell far short of that responsibility.”

Then he leaped to his death off of the top of the famous Fenway left field wall. Kidding. “I will use this opportunity to educate myself and my teammates and to grow as a person,” Duran concluded.

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