Race

Welcome To “Bad Research Theater”!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Yes, it’s Alistair Cookie, here for another episode—two, in fact!—of that long-running exhibition loved by the confirmation bias-infected and the unscrupulous alike, “Bad Research Theater”!

Episode I : “The Steam Engines of Galapagos“

The eye-opening scholarly paper “The end of the line: competitive exclusion and the extinction of historical entities” has been published the journal, “Royal Society Open Science.” Bruce Lieberman, professor of ecology & evolutionary biology and senior curator of invertebrate paleontology at the KU Biodiversity Institute & Natural History Museum, uses the history of railroad steam engines history to argue against the merits of “competitive exclusion,” the respected paleontology evolution principle that species can drive other species to extinction through competition.

Working with former KU postdoctoral researcher Luke Strotz, now of Northwest University in Xi’an, China, Lieberman found that the fossil record lacks the detailed data verifying competitive exclusion found in the history of steam engines. Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced!

Many years ago, as a boy trying to bring in distant baseball broadcasts at night on my transister radio, I stumbled across a rural evangelist who was ranting about the godlessness of evolution. “Evolution says that if you put a six cylinder engine in your garage and let it sit there for a million years or so, when you come back and check on it, it will have become an eight cylinder engine!” he said, chuckling heartily. I thought that was the dumbest thing I had heard to that point in my life, and it still is in the top five. Little did I suspect that his idea of comparing mechanical objects with live organisms would be adopted decades later by actual scientists.

Episode II : Anything to Throw Them Off the Track

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Incompetent Punditry, Irresponsible Paper: The Boston Globe Publishes An Op-Ed Called “DEI Denial Is The Modern Day Lynching”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

It really did.

There may have been equally dumb headlines and op-ed pieces, but I can’t imagine what a worse one would be. This is what I get for being a Red Sox fan: the Boston Globe used to have the best baseball coverage in the U.S. back when I was still in Boston, so I return to it periodically when the baseball season looms. This was my reward: an example of deranged, arrogant, dissent-demonizing wokism that should never have been published, and wouldn’t be by a responsible newspaper, if there were such a thing any more.

Criticizing the cynical Diversity/Equity/Inclusion fad that was one of the many mutations of policy and logic to ooze out of the George Floyd Freakout is the equivalent of murdering innocent black men in the Deep South! Of course! What a brilliant analogy! Or perhaps it is more like…let’s see… making a Nash Rambler model out of clubroot and old Silly Putty?

The author of this brain-rotting garbage is Ya’Ke Smith , an associate professor of film at the University of Texas at Austin. Doesn’t that background just scream out: “public policy expert”? The silly rant signals repeatedly that it is just passionate woke nonsense unhinged to facts. For example, he writes, “the execution of George Floyd in Minneapolis.” That’s signature significance: no honest writer or one who cares at all about facts, history, law and reality would write that. Floyd was not by any measure intentionally killed, so he cannot have been “executed.” If I wasn’t obligated to cover terrible punditry and journalism ethics here, I wouldn’t finish reading an essay that characterized Floyd’s death that way. Anyone who would do that is a liar or an idiot, or both.

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“Ick” Or Ethics? Michael Crichton’s 1981 Film “Looker” Is Coming True…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

In “Looker,” a 1981 science fiction thriller starring Albert Finney, James Coburn and Susan Dey, involves a high tech research firm that concludes that real, live models, even after cosmetic surgery, can’t approach the physical perfection that will optimally influence consumers. Models are offered a contracts to have their faces and figures scanned to create 3D computer-generated avatars, indistinguishable from them, which are animated for use in commercials. Once their bodies duplicated digitally, they get lifetime paychecks (though not for as much as Miguel Cabrera, currently at $400,410,623 and counting, gets) and can retire, since their computer-generated, more perfect dopplegangers will be doing their work for them. For some reason, the evil tech firms has all of the models murdered, but that part of the plot is irrelevant here.

42 years later, Levi Strauss & Co. announced in a press release yesterday that it is partnering with an AI company to “increase the number and diversity of our models for our products in a sustainable way.” Yeah, those digital models in “Looker” were also “sustainable,” even though the models’ flesh and blood models were disposable. Levi’s will test the use of AI models to “supplement” real-life models later in 2023.

“While AI will likely never fully replace human models for us”, “—-yeah, tell it to Susan Dey—-we are excited for the potential capabilities this may afford us for the consumer experience,” said Dr. Amy Gershkoff Bolles, global head of digital and emerging technology strategy at Levi Strauss & Co, sounding a lot like James Coburn, the evil advertising genius in “Looker.”

Meanwhile, in arguably related news, Levi Strauss & Co. will be laying off 800 employees — almost 20% of its corporate jobs.

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The First Thing We Do, Let’s Fire All The Principals…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Oh, there are many things that need to happen in the wake of Seattle’s Lincoln High School’s leadership demonstrating that it doesn’t comprehend that government-supported racial segregation is illegal and that openly favoring black students is exactly as contrary to core democratic, Constitutional and American values as openly favoring white students. First, however, we need to fire the smiling, racist, woke-poisoned, incompetent fools above.

Here is what they allowed to be published to students and parents:

Our student leaders in our Black Student Union (BSU), Latino Student Union (LSU), and Asian Student Union (ASU) have been hard at working planning our upcoming Multicultural Week March 13th-17th…On Friday of Multicultural Week, students and staff of color and/or those who identify with any group represented by BSU/LSU/ASU are invited for a lunch potluck.

In other words, white and Jews stay away. These alleged education professionals saw nothing wrong with that, directly in contradiction of Brown v. Board of Education though it was. No ethics alarms sounded, because those alarms are as dead  as Thurgood Marshall in these products of the thoroughly rotted culture currently metastasizing in the state of Washington. Continue reading →

More Weird Tales From “The Great Stupid”: Neat Pantries Are Racist And Sexist!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Some of the Wokish opinion pieces being belched out of The Great Stupid are so outlandish they transcend being selected as Ethics Alarms “Unethical Quotes of the Month.” A truly deranged quote isn’t unethical so much as it is tragic, even one as brain-melting as this one, from “The Conversation,” a website which risibly claims to provide “academic rigor, journalistic flair.” Yeah, only academic rigor could produce an essay like “Pantry porn’ on TikTok and Instagram makes obsessively organized kitchens a new status symbol.”

Here’s the ‘money quote’, the section that proves beyond all doubt that the only reason to take the time to read this precious, arrogant clap-trap is to gain insight into just how crazy the victim-obsessed Left has become:

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Ethics Quiz: The King Kong Cartoon

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

As Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot faced a humiliating defeat (and blamed racism for her fate), the conservative Townhall Media political cartoonist used the iconic scene from “King Kong” to lampoon her.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is the cartoon racist?

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An Unethical Quote Spectacular!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

There are a lot of really unethical people saying some astounding things lately. Such as…

1. Incompetent Elected Official Of the Month Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX), who completely beclowned herself in the The House Weaponization Subcommittee examination of Twitter Files heralds Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger. She was determined to discredit them for daring to reveal the efforts by her party and its allies to bury the Hunter Biden laptop story and censor critics, and apparently did no research into te topic of the hearings at all, announcing that she didn’t know what “a substack” was and showing complete ignorance regarding Bari Weiss. (Ah, if only she read Ethics Alarms!) Meanwhile, all of a sudden Democrats oppose journalists’ desire to protect their sources.

2. Not included in the video above was an offensive question by serial unethical House hack Debbie Wasserman Schulz, the former DNC chair who rigged the 2016 primaries for Hillary Clinton. She accused Matt Taibbi of profiting from authoring the “Twitter Files” reports, implying that he was motivated by persoanl profit, saying: “After the ‘Twitter Files,’ your followers doubled … I imagine your Substack readership … increased significantly because of the work that you did for Elon Musk.”

These people really lash out when they’re exposed, don’t they?

3. Over to the Republican side: Jenna Ellis, one of President Trump’s lawyers in the post-election push to have the results examined, admitted in Colorado Bar disciplinary proceedings that she deliberately engaged in the following misrepresentations “for selfish reasons”:

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Disney Continues Its Transformation Into The Great Stupid’s Cultural Corrupter

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Disney’s animated/live action feature “Song of the South” (1946) is, to say the least, not a metaphorical hill worth dying on. The animated sections are excellent, but Walt, for reasons known best to him, decided to ignore good advice from various members of the black community who advised him not to use the movie to romanticize plantation life, with happy slaves singing away in the Land of Cotton where old times are not forgotten. “Song of the South’s” version of the Old South makes “Gone With The Wind” seem like the “1619 Project” by comparison; shame on Walt, who spoiled any chance of Joel Chandler Harris’s American folk tales being preserved in our culture.

Of course, Walt’s lapse of judgment doesn’t mean, or shouldn’t mean, that people who want to see the movie (and the screen legacy of African-American actor James Baskett, who deserves to be remembered) ought to be prevented from doing so. 21st Century Corporate Disney, however, has fully embraced the paternalistic view that big media companies and the government know best, so “Song of the South” has been treated like those photos of old Soviet leaders who fell out of favor: erased, banished. Nope, sorry, can’t see it, folks: it will make you racist, or if you are properly woke, cause an aneurysm, or something.

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Reflections On The First Stupid, Virtue-Signaling Lawn Sign Of Spring….

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

obxoxious sign

For the second time this week I find myself grafting substantial sections of an archived Ethics Alarms post to a new one. (I promise not to make a habit of it.) The occasion is the appearance on one of my Alexandria, Virginia neighbors’ lawn the idiotic sign above. Once again I was seized with the desire to ring the house’s doorbell and cross examine the residents. Can they explain and justify what’s on that sign? I am almost certain that they cannot, just as my other neighbor who STILL displays a medieval suit of armor next to a 5 x 4 hand-made, painted wooden sign reading BLACK LIVES MATTER in block letters could not justify that obnoxious lawn ornament, since it is, after all, more indefensible than ever now that the movement it stands for has been exposed as cynical hustle.

In 2021, New York Times’ woke propaganda agent Amanda Hess was given a rare slot on her paper’s front page to opine on the sign above, which was apparently the beginning of the the viral Announce to your neighbors that you’re a smug, simple-minded idiot!” epidemic. Ethics Alarms has had several posts about similar signs, but I did not realize that I had missed Patient Zero.

Hess’s analysis by turns informed readers that the sign has “curious power” (to make me detest the homeowner?); that the mottoes are “progressive maxims” (so progressives really are that facile and shallow!), that “Donald Trump is out of office…But nevertheless, this sign has persisted” (Oh! It’s all Trump’s fault?), that the sign is “directed at the adults in the room, reminding them of their own mission” (Really? Open borders? Man-boy love? Anti-white discrimination? Marxism? Why is a sign aimed at adults so naive and childish? ), that it is “the epitome of virtue signaling: an actual sign enumerating the owner’s virtues. There is something refreshing, actually, about the straightforwardness of that.” (There is something refreshing about smug idiots placing signs on their laws that say, “I am a smug idiot”?).

I learned other things from that article:

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Why Punish Dilbert For His Creator’s Rant?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Ethics Alarms discussed the weirdly illogical, emotional and intentionally inflammatory reaction of cartoonist/pundit Scott Adams based on, of all things to freak-out over, a poll by Rasmussen that was even more unreliable than most polls, which is saying something. The fact that I assumed something like the resulting backlash would occur and that Adams should have expected it doesn’t make the reaction any less unethical.

Hundreds of newspapers have now stopped printing the popular workplace satire comic strip. The statements of the San Antonio Express-News, which is part of Hearst Newspapers, and the USA Today Network were typical. The Express-News said that it will drop the Dilbert comic strip “because of hateful and discriminatory public comments by its creator.” USA Today tweeted that it will stop publishing Dilbert “due to recent discriminatory comments by its creator.”

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