Research and Scholarship

No A Study Did Not Prove That Trump’s “Touted” Drug Didn’t Work. Not Exactly Fake News, But Close Enough.

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Salon: Trump-touted hydroxychloroquine may increase risk of death from COVID-19; “largest study yet finds no benefits but higher deaths,”

CNN: Study finds no benefit, higher death rate in patients taking hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19.

Fox News: COVID-19 treatment hydroxychloroquine showed no benefit, more deaths in VA virus study

The Washington Post wrote, “On Tuesday, a new government study was published suggesting the drug didn’t offer any benefit in fighting covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, and worse, that its use was correlated with more deaths.”

To be fair to the Post, at least it said that the study should be be viewed “with caution,” and provided a link to the study, not that most of its readers would actually read it. If they had, they would have realized that the study was wildly over-hyped in the media, and didn’t really “suggest” anything of the sort. Once again, this was another example of the news media playing to the confirmation bias of those who want to see the President be wrong. Are they cheering for the pandemic to do as much damage as possible? I refuse to believe that, but some of them sure manage to sound like they do.

I wasn’t going to discuss this tonight, but a smart, usually fair Facebook friend wrote a false description of the study calculated to appeal to the Trump Deranged. I don’t think he would have done that if he had read it, but he hates Trump too, and he doesn’t think the news media is biased—they agree with him, after all, so they must be fair– so he’ll trust the headlines, or the spin, every time. Continue reading →

“1,825 Words You Can Never Say On Facebook”

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

This is ominous: it’s the second time this month that I’ve had good reason to quote George. Did the Democrats already take over?

In 1972, the late George Carlin debuted his famous routine called “ “The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” The words were: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits, all of which you can hear on television today. (Who says life doesn’t keep getting better? ) But George would be fine: I have it on good authority that in Stand-Up Heaven, where Henny Youngman has St. Peter’s job, George is knocking celestial audiences dead (metaphorically, of course,) with his new monologue, “1,825 Words You Can Never Say On Facebook.”

It’s hilarious, if a little long.

The Foundation For Individual Rights In Education has released a report based on its investigation of how public universities—that’s the government, remember—engage in surreptitious censorship of student expression.  Censorship of student expression is illegal, but The FIRE exists because so many universities find that concept too complex to grasp.

Implicated in the results: Facebook, which provides  the tools for censorship, including its automated content filters. These allow state institutions to automatically “hide” users’ comments if they contain words included on Facebook’s undisclosed list of offensive words, or a government entity’s customized list of prohibited words. The filters allow  public universities to quietly remove critical Facebook posts, restricting open campus and public discourse.

The  FIRE surveyed over 200 public universities and colleges across 47 states and the District of Columbia. It found that fully half of the surveyed institutions  use Facebook’s “strong” profanity filter, while nearly a third use the “medium” filter. That means  about 77% of surveyed institutions use an undiclosed  blacklist of prohibited words. Nearly a third of the universities surveyed (59, or 30.3%) created a custom blacklist, collectively censoring 1,825  words and phrases in order to, among other unconstitutional objectives, “block animal rights activists’ criticism of food vendors,” suppress “debate over the fate of  a campus Confederate monument,” and stifle debate over controversial faculty, politicians, and sports teams.

Public universities can and do manipulate Facebook comments to distort the  public discourse. Wright State University, FIRE tells us, deleted comments supporting a faculty strike from its Facebook page,  confining debate over the action to a rigged community forum that appeared supportive of the university’s administration while being critical of striking faculty.

Yup, that’s how fascism works!

 Facebook doesn’t alert a user when their post has been removed, or tell the public that comments have been censored, so this system is perfect for mind and opinion molding. FIRE says,

These automated methods of censorship are not only contrary to a commitment to freedom of expression, but also provide government actors with tools that—in light of recent federal court rulings concerning President Trump’s Twitter feed—violate the government actors’ legal obligations under the First Amendment.

Below are the words that Facebook helps universities control speech and thought by censoring. Some will be relieved to know that “retard” is on it. Then again, so is “poor”…

Comment Of The Day: “Afternoon Ethics Alarms, 4/19/2020: Facebook, Harvard, Broadway And You Know, Morons…” (Item #2)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The post touching on a Harvard  professor’s criticism of homeschooling  (also discussed here) sparked a lot of debate here as it has elsewhere.

Here is JimHodgson’s Comment of the Day on Item #2 in the post, “Afternoon Ethics Alarms, 4/19/2020: Facebook, Harvard, Broadway And You Know, Morons…”

The resistance to and denigration of homeschooling by academia is a source of constant irritation to me. It is another case of “our minds are made up, don’t confuse us with the facts. It’s like they just can’t stand a parent who declines letting the dysfunctional village raise their children.

The current societal shut-down due to the Chinese flu has made homeschoolers of many parents who are enjoying the experience. (This is based on conversations with my extended family and fellow church members, your mileage may vary.) My niece’s two girls, ages 6 and 9, exiled from their regular school, have easily kept up their school work, completed several art and STEM projects, and learned how to plant a vegetable garden. They are outside every day, weather permitting. My daughter’s homeschooling process continues without a hitch with her boys. The article’s undercurrent of opposition to parents actually raising their own children is ominous. Continue reading →

From The Ethics Alarms Archives: “The Siena Research Institute’s Lousy Independence Day Gift: Misleading, Biased and Incompetent Presidential Rankings”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Now and then an old post suddenly get a lot of clicks. Often this will draw my attention to an essay I had forgotten: such was the case with this post from 2010. Someone on Reddit put it up for discussion, and last week the old post had hundreds of views. I was intrigued and re-read it. Good post!

I would change a few observations—in the intervening years we have learned that Woodrow Wilson was even worse than I thought—and add some, but the post was long, and a thorough evisceration of this embarrassing survey’s results would require a book.

***

The Siena College Research Institute persuaded over 200 presidential scholars to participate in a survey designed to rank America’s forty-three Chief Executives. There is great deal to be leaned from the resulting list that the Institute proudly released on July 1; unfortunately, very few of the lessons have anything to do with the men on it.

The list shows us that:

  • A survey is only as good as its design
  • Historians who call themselves “presidential scholars,” working together, could do no better in their supposed area of expertise than to arrive at a ranking that would get most 7th Graders a C in junior high school History, raising serious questions about how history is taught in our universities, but perhaps explaining why Americans choose to be so ignorant of their nation’s past.
  • Historians are, as a group, biased toward liberal causes, against conservatives, and in favor of people who are like them.
  • They are unable to recognize their biases, even when a list like this one makes them stunningly obvious.

Lists are mostly for fun and to start arguments. When one purports to make historical judgments, however, and the individuals doing the judging are supposed to be experts, there is still a responsibility to try to do the task fairly, competently, and responsibly. Continue reading →

Perspective From Michael Crichton On Experts And Predicting Crises

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Michael Chrichton was a unique and relentlessly positive influence on our culture, popular and otherwise, before his death in 2008 at the age of 66.  Trained as a doctor and scientist, he applied his knowledge, his brilliance, and more importantly, his remarkable powers of lateral thinking and unbiased analysis, to myriad  fields, always aimed at a form of public education that was fueled by entertainment.  He taught, he wrote best-selling novels, he was a futurist, he directed movies, he created TV shows.   Mostly he thought, and through the fruits of his thought, made ordinary people smarter, at least those smart enough to pay attention. Yes, he thought a lot about ethics. You can learn more about his career and interests at his website, here.

Michael Crichton was especially interested in threats and crises, how they happen and our reactions to them. His first hit novel, “The Andromeda Strain” was about a deadly virus. He would have been very helpful right now. Though he was himself an expert on many topics, he was wary of the abuse of expertise; though he was a visionary, he was was a vocal skeptic of predictions and assumptions. Crichton, I think, would have found the current weaponizing of hindsight bias to find a new way to demonize President Trump as revolting and dishonest as I do.

In this 2002 lecture, Crichton discussed the media’s obsession with speculation, and society’s unwarranted confidence that the future is predictable, especially when experts are doing the predicting. Some selections: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: The U.S. Congress. Again

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Actor Mark Ruffalo (he plays the Hulk in The Avengers  movies, but it wasn’t because of that role) was invited to testify before Congress last year on public policy involving  public health, chemistry, toxicology, and epidemiology. He has no expertise in these areas at all. The reason was that he starred in “Dark Waters,” which I wrote about here.

Ruffalo is a 9/11 truther, believing  that the U.S. government helped destroy the World Trade Center. That would be enough for me to ding him as an authority on anything, but he has embraced other conspiracy theories as well, like this one.

Never mind: he was presented to the public as an authority on pollution whose opinions on environmental matters have weight. The don’t, and they shouldn’t.

This is a repeat offense. Members of Congress are addicted to the unprofessional and insulting stunt of inviting actors and performers to testify as substantive witnesses on topics that they acted about in movies. As a professional director, I can state with absolute certainty that if an actor is really an expert in something their character was supposed to experience or know something about, 1) that actor is very unusual, and 2) there will still be thousands of real authorities who know a lot more.

Nevertheless, Congress keeps doing this, apparently believing that the public is so naive and gullible that they really believe that because a performer credibly pretends to know what a script-writer prepares to make them sound like the know, they really are experts. Sadly, a lot of the public does believe that. (More sadly, a lot of actors do too) Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Easter Sunday Ethics Warm-Up, 4/12/2020: Missing The Easter Bunny”

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

In today’s Warm-Up, I expressed my problems with Mark Tapscott’s blog post, titled “He Is Risen! Eight Reasons To Believe.”

To summarize the thrust of my criticism as I reiterated it in my replies to his comment and others, Mark argues persuasively that the authors of the Gospels were, at least in this case, trying to tell the story as they heard it, and were not trying to embellish or distort it in the telling to make it more credible in its time. Good. That does not mean, however, that the story they heard is in fact true. The post was also aimed in part at debunking conspiracy theories about the Resurrection being a hoax. Taking Mark’s argument as that, and that alone, it is also persuasive. However, proving something was not intentionally false does not prove it is true.

I will do this however: at the end of my discussion, I said that I regarded Mark’s argument as a tautology, where a controversial document is cited to prove the accuracy of the document itself, and that I regarded that device as intellectually dishonest. Mark’s response persuades me that my  assessment was unduly harsh and unfair, and I both retract and apologize to him for it.

Moreover, the fact that he chose to respond in person so quickly reaffirms my original favorable assessment of his professionalism and character.

Here is Mark Tapscott’s Comment of the Day on Item #4 in the post, “Easter Sunday Ethics Warm-Up, 4/12/2020: Missing The Easter Bunny”:

First, thank you for your kind words regarding my secular writing. I hope that my work in that area continues to merit your approbation. We are, as I believe Confucius is reputed to have said, “cursed to live in interesting times.”

Unfortunately, my reaction is not nearly so positive regarding your critique of my post on eight reasons to believe Jesus was literally resurrected from the dead three days after His crucifixion, just as He said He would be.

“Intellectually dishonest” and tautological? With all due respect, your readers deserve more candor than that from you. You accuse me of these two errors because: “All of his reasons are based on New Testament text. If one believes that the New Testament text is true and accurate, then you don’t need any more reasons. His is a self-ratifying argument.”

If my post was simply arguing for the credibility and historical accuracy of the New Testament, your statement might well more accurately represent what I wrote. I did indeed assume the accuracy of the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, but the eight reasons I offered concerned characteristics of the scriptural accounts and events that point a reasonable reader to their credibility. Continue reading →

On The Recent Steele Dossier Revelations: An Open Letter To An Un-Named Former Ethics Alarms Commenter, Written In Disappointment And Disgust

/ Jack Marshall / 100 Comments

Dear You Know Who You Are,

As you remember, well over a year ago you staged a grandstanding, insulting exit from participation on this blog, declaring that I had “drunk the Kool-Aid.”  Your false claim was provoked because I had successfully navigated through  lies, calculated disinformation and lawbreaking—engineered by those within and without the U.S. government—to conclude that a coordinated effort had been and was underway to overthrow the elected President of the United States. At this point, the fact that your accusation was based on your own blindness and bias is not subject to rational denial or debate.

I knew that at the time, of course. I also felt, and feel, that for you to behave that way, in public, here, was a personal as well as a professional betrayal. We had, I thought, a cordial and mutually respectful relationship. We had exchanged details about the high and low points of our lives face to face.  We are in the same field and profession. I trusted you.

I have provided you some slack in my ultimate judgment on your character because I know that, as we say here often, bias makes us stupid, even the best of us. I have seen this particular bias make many people, even some smarter than you, as difficult as it may be for you to conceive of that, both stupid and  destructive, apparently without a glimmer of self-realization. I recognize that it the phenomenon is, at this point, indistinguishable from an illness, one triggered by emotion and group-think. Thus I am, up to a point, sympathetic, just as I am regarding so many of my Facebook friends who figuratively make asses of themselves every single day  because they are addicted to “likes” and peer approval. Some of them are even lawyers, but you know…lawyers. That is a professional group, along with historians, politicians, historians, scholars, psychiatrist, educators and, of course, journalists, that has broken its duty of trust with the public as it joined a dangerous and unconscionable effort to break our democracy. Continue reading →

The Hydroxychloroquine Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Ever since those two idiots (or maybe one dead idiot and a diabolical spouse) used fish tank cleaner to try to protect themselves from the Wuhan virus and the news media tried to claim the President killed the dead one by recommending the drug (though not the fish tank cleaner), this has been one of those situations where it is impossible to separate legitimate information from the news media  vendetta against Trump and what the actual situation is. Journalists really can’t help themselves; here are Peter Baker, Katie Rogers, David Enrich and Maggie Haberman, the Times’ regular Trump character assassins, in what is supposed to be a news story:

“Day after day, the salesman turned president has encouraged coronavirus patients to try hydroxychloroquine with all of the enthusiasm of a real estate developer.”

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Did the Times ever, even once, call Obama the “community organizer-turned President”? How about “the former enthusiastic pot smoker” turned President?

As I’ve mentioned here before, the official talking point buzzword is that the President “touted” the drug, which is only available by prescription. Some experts, not infected with the Trump Hate virus, have had a reasonable reaction to his optimism. for example,Dr. Joshua Rosenberg, a critical care doctor at Brooklyn Hospital Center, told reporters,

“I certainly understand why the president is pushing it. He’s the president of the United States. He has to project hope. And when you are in a situation without hope, things go very badly. So I’m not faulting him for pushing it even if there isn’t a lot of science behind it, because it is, at this point, the best, most available option for use.”

Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency order late last month allowing doctors to administer it to coronavirus patients if they saw fit. Many have seen fit. David Lat, the founder of the legal gossip site Above the Law, itself a virtual card-carrying member of the resistance, declared that the drug had saved his life during his hospitalization for the Wuhan virus. Continue reading →

Now Entering The Ethics Alarms “Bias Makes You Stupid” Hall of Fame: James Hohmann

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

His bio says that Hohmann is a Stanford University grad and a national political correspondent for The Washington Post, as well as  the author of The Daily 202, the Post’s political newsletter. Here is his recent tweet:

I wonder if he had the same math teachers as Mara Gay and Brian Williams (Item #2)?

The reporter was so eager to mock the President that he concocted a  cheap gotcha! and made himself look foolish. Or maybe not at the Post: this is similar to a lot of the alleged “lies” on the Post’s Trump Lie list, and about as well reasoned: “The President said that he had seen gas selling for 91 cents a gallon, when the average price was $1.94.”

Again I ask, how can the public trust journalists like this to do political analysis? Why would they, unless readers want biased reporting?

_____________________________

Pointer: Instapundit

Aside: A commenter at the Instapundit link above writes,

I may have shared this story on here before, but I remember in my Latin American History course at college, a journalism major raised her hand and asked the following:

“I’ve been doing the reading like you assigned, but there’s one thing I don’t understand. They keep talking about the Andes, but they never say what that is. Are they like some sort of political group?”

True story.
I got more, too.