Science & Technology

Quick Facebook Ban Update…

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Facebook continues to reject any links to Ethics Alarms posts, although one occasionally and randomly slips through apparently. I have never received any explanation for this, though some posts do get the “community standards” excuse. If Ethics Alarms violates “community standards,” it is only because the blog refuses to enable knee-jerk “resistance” plots and narratives, or engage in the Left’s mass denial that the mainstream media has become a propaganda organ and cannot be trusted.

Efforts to contact Facebook and acquire any information or response have been futile. The consequences of this action by Facebook are tangible. Posts before this action would be routinely shared on Facebook between 20 and thousands of times. It has hurt blog traffic, and conceivably my business, ProEthics, which benefits from my visibility.

Today I was made aware of the Trump Administration’s Tech Bias Sharing Tool, which is collecting accounts of censorship and other content-based abuse by social media and the large tech companies. I just posted the whole story, as only I can.

Let’s see if anything happens.

Can We Agree That Polls Are Just A Form Of Fake News?

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

 

A couple of week before the Mueller Report’s summary was released, one  poll announced that Trump’s approval had finally topped 51%.  Then it dived again because of some  dumb tweet or bad news. After the report came out and there were no smoking impeachment guns, we were told that it was ominous that the President’s approval rating hadn’t moved.  Then it did move–up—in some polls, but after the “I’m fucked!” story, it moved down. Meanwhile, the Biden and Bernie polling race continued like the climax in “Seabiscuit,” but it was Pete Buttigieg’s polls that had everyone talking, since they had increased exponentially, though only into single digits still. Then, as Joe Biden’s entry into the race approached, Drudge announced a shock poll yesterday: Good Ol’ Joe led the President by 8 percentage points in a hypothetical run against Trump. Run, Joe, Run!

Issues & Insights offers a useful perspective on all of these polls: Continue reading →

The Massie-Kerry Exchange: Sadly, Everybody’s Stupid

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

First I encountered several conservative media references to an exchange between former Secretary of State and Presidential candidate John Kerry and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky.  This occurred at at a House committee hearing Tuesday on “The Need for Leadership to Combat Climate Change and Protect National Security.” The sense of the references was typified by this headline in Townhall: “Watch Incoherent John Kerry Get Destroyed Over His Bogus Climate Change Claims.”

Then, almost immediately later, I found Rolling  Stones account of the same exchange. It’s click-bait headline: “Is This the Dumbest Moment in Congressional History?”

Talk about Roshomon! How could both of these accounts possibly be accurate? Was Kerry reduced to a babbling fool by the Republican Comgressman’s deft cross examination, or did Massie embarrass himself? The truth was that everyone involved on all sides of this mini-foofaraw was, and is, stupid in one way or another, including the biased bloggers and pundits who saw what wasn’t there.

For Kerry to represent himself as any kind of expert on climate change is so silly even Democrats shouldn’t fallfor it. Yet here is Rolling Stone, saying outright, “Kerry is an expert on climate change who helped broker the Paris climate accord.” Kerry, like Al Gore and so many others whose belief in climate change doomsday predictions is based on politics rather than their comprehension or even review of the science, is just mouthing what he has been briefed to say. He has no background in science, no demonstrated aptitude for it, and has a well-established record of saying really dumb things about subjects he should be able to understand. The Paris accord was a diplomatic agreement, not a scientific one, and, of course, was symbolic and meaningless.  Kerry is an expert on symbolic and meaningless.

Massie is an MIT grad and trained as an engineer, so one could fairly expect that he is a little more legitimately conversant in climate science than Kerry, though he hardly proved it this day. He did prove that he’s no lawyer. Setting out to discredit Kerry’s climate change expert status should have been easy: just show a typical climate change model chart, like this one, Continue reading →

Afternoon Ethics Romp, 4/10/2019: A Swirl Of Emotions…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Ah, I feel wefweshed!

Just took a post-seminar nap—one of the bennies of a hime business– counted philosophers jumping over a fence, and now I’m awake and ready to rumble…

1. Wow. The quality of posts on this morning’s Open Forum is off the charts. Now my self-esteem is crushed , since it’s obvious that I’m keep the group back with my mundane commentary. If you haven’t dropped in on the colloquy yet, I recommend it highly.

2. This is why we can’t  have nice things, and will have fewer and fewer of them as time goes on…Related to a thread in the Open Forum, about a controversy over the way artificial intelligence screens job applicants is this news from a week ago. Google announced that it was dissolving a newly established panel. called the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC). which was founded to guide “responsible development of AI” at the tech giant (colossus/ behemoth/monster). The group was to have eight members and meet four times over the course of 2019 to consider issues and recommendation regarding Google’s AI program. The idea was to have an intellectually and ideologically diverse group to avoid “group think” and narrow perspectives.

I know something about such enterprises. I once had the job of running independent scholarly research within the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on contentious policy matters. My methodology was to invite experts from all sides of the issue, the political divide, and spectrum of professions and occupations. The method worked. Oh, we had arguments, minority reports, everything you might expect, but the committee meeting were civil, stimulating and often surprising. This, of course, requires an open mind and mutual respect from all involved. Continue reading →

Naked Teacher Principle, The Selfie Variation

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Pure as the driven snow! Especially if her breasts really look that THAT…

The Naked Teacher Principle (NTP) states that a secondary school teacher or administrator (or other role model for children) who allows pictures of himself or herself to be widely publicized, as on the web, showing the teacher naked or engaging in sexually provocative poses, cannot complain when he or she is dismissed by the school as a result.

Ah, would that it were always this simple! In the past, we have had to deal with the “naked teacher who paints with his butt and naughty bits on camera with a bag over his head” principle, for example.  Another teacher got fired when the naked photos of herself she had on her own tablet inadvertently was sent to the students in her class. Continue reading →

From The Elephantine Ethics Alarm “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Files: Reuters, Beto O’Rourke, And The Cult Of The Dead Cow

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Reuters reported Friday that newly declared Democratic Presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke had been part of an infamous hacker group as a teen. (Hacking is illegal unethical, don’t you know.)

Reporter Joe Menn said that he learned about O’Rourke’s involvement in the group when he began researching The Cult of the Dead Cow, which he called “the most interesting and influential hacking group in history.”

He discovered that an alumnus of the group had a member who was sitting in Congress. “I didn’t know which one,” Menn said, “and then I figured out which one it was. And the members of the group wouldn’t talk to me about who it was. They wouldn’t confirm that it was this person unless I promised that I wouldn’t write about it until after the November 2018 election,” that being O’Roarke’s unsuccessful effort to defeat Texas Senator Ted Cruz last year. Reuters, to be clear, sat on the story, which may have interested Texas voters, for two years.
Continue reading →

Site In Transition: Sorry For The Inconvenience!

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

If you tried to see the site in the last hour minutes or so, you probably noticed that it was a mess. I have upgraded the WordPress subscription so I can, among other things, have more design flexibility, have my own ads to try to finance this project, and some other features….it might also get around the blog’s inexplicable Facebook ban. The problem was that my old theme had been “retired,” so when the software shifted, it didn’t adapt, causing the text to run off the page. It took me a while to a) discover this b) figure out what was going on and c) fix it. (My son helped.)

The current design is temporary, but at least it is readable. I apologize for the inconvenience, but I think this is a positive step for Ethics Alarms.