The Internet

Unethical Tweet Of The Month: Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Larry Tribe

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

  • No, it doesn’t look like that at all.
  • An extensive and expensive investigation held by anti-Trump-biased lawyers found otherwise, and
  • This kind of claim regarding a stolen election has been called “baseless” by the mainstream media and Democrats as a virtual mantra for more than two years, and is routinely categorized as “misinformation.”
  • Tribe, as a law professor, is presumed to know what evidence is, but there is no “evidence” of what Tribe claims, and the Mueller Report specifically stated so, as painful as it must have been.

Tribe’s reputation-scarring delusions, however, are confirmation for the Trump Deranged, who think, for example, this meme by Occupy Democrats is profound: Continue reading →

Facebook Censors Me (Again): My Response

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I posted that idiotic thing above on Mark Zuckerberg’s Monster after reading that the Fake Australia conspiracy was a “thing” among flat-earth types—you know, morons. Although I yield to no one in the strength of my conviction that stupidity lies wide, long and deep upon this nation (see today’s earlier post), there must be limits, so I shared it with my alleged Facebook friends with the question, “Is it possible that some people really believe this?” while adding that my sister honeymooned in Australia, or at least I thought she did. Facebook promptly slapped this on my post and took it down.

Assholes. Continue reading →

On The Freedom Of Speech Front…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Strangely, many of the same people who are claiming that democracy is hanging by a thread or two are also trying to fray a rather obvious thread, the right to free expression and free speech. Since that First Amendment thingy is a bear, they have to find ways around it that will stifle ideas, opinions and arguments that interfere with the “greater good”.”” (as they see it, natch). Or pretend the First Amendment “isn’t what it is” (#64).

Recent developments:

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Worst of Ethics Award 2022: Most Unethical Parent Of The Year…And More!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Kendra Licari was arrested this month and faces up to ten years in prison. In December of 2021, Licari informed police that her daughter and her boyfriend were being harassed, bullied and stalked online. Her daughter, she told them, was frightened and traumatized. Kendra and the boyfriend’s mother, she said, were working together to find the person responsible for the cyberbullying.

Police investigated, and discovered who was making Licari’s daughter’s life miserable. It was her own mother.

The investigators found that Kendra Licari had begun harassing her daughter online in early 2021, sending anonymous threats and insulting messages while pretending to be another high school girl. Though Mom tried to conceal her real identity, but FBI cyber-experts traced the messages to Licari’s IP address.

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The Elon Musk-Twitter Ethics Roller-Coaster Ride Continues

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

(I hate roller-coasters.)

The last week has demonstrated clearly, I think we can all agree, that 1) there is an urgent need for Twitter to be de-politicized, stripped of partisan censorship, and become a trustworthy platform for the unfettered distribution of news, information and opinion to the public, and 2) Elon Musk is too much of a loose cannon to be the manager of Twitter’s reform.

Yesterday almost qualified as a meltdown, or a tantrum, or something. Maybe a joke. Who knows with him? He teased his withdrawal from the daily management of the reeling social media giant. He hinted that the company was teetering on bankruptcy. He put his continued tenure as CEO up for a vote, pledging to abide by the results.

Chaos. Musk is quite a bit like Donald Trump, which shouldn’t be surprising: the successful entrepreneur/ CEO/ autocrat/narcissist is a well-understood personality type, and management by chaos is a management style that can be very effective for the short term in a private company (but not the U.S. government). I worked for a chaos manager for seven years, and he was brilliant at it, but I decided then and there that I could never operate that way. It is hard on subordinates, employees and stake-holders; only the chaotic manager enjoys the pressure. It is a non-Golden Rule management style that relies entirely on utilitarianism as its ethical justification. Yes, the methods causes breakdowns, anxiety and constant crisis, but if it “works,” it’s worth the pain. That’s what Musk has been doing.

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Nah, Democrats In Congress Aren’t Trying To Circumvent the First Amendment By Pressuring Private Entities To Censor Political Speech They Don’t Like…What Would Ever Give You That Idea?

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

This week, three Democratic members of the House, Adam Schiff, André Carson, Kathy Castor, and Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, sent a letter on Congressional stationery to Meta’s President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, urging, pushing and pressuring his company (Meta is the re-branded Facebook parent) to continue to block former President Donald Trump from communicating his opinions, positions and thoughts. The entire letter’s text is below.

It is a smoking gun. Sure, the letter isn’t exactly official, and yes, the four Democrats do not say they speak for Congress as a whole, and yes, it isn’t technically a First Amendment violation, because there is no law involved, and the signers of the letter have no immediate power to make Meta do anything. The letter however, carries an intrinsic veiled threat, and its message is clear: “We can’t censor Trump, so we want you do do it for us.” That is a disgusting violation of the spirit and intent of the First Amendment, making it shockingly clear once again how little respect this corrupted party has for basic individual rights, and how far it is tilting in the direction of totalitarianism. I’m anticipating the sound of a large BOOM emanating from downtown D.C. when Professor Turley reads the letter; presumably he will find it as disturbing as I do. Imagine a similar letter to a major network urging it not to cover the speeches of a prominent critic of Democratic policies, and to ban him from being interviewed as well. I see no substantive difference.

(Just to be clear: “election denial” is protected speech, and Democrats have engaged in it frequently and freely for 20 years.)

The letter follows…It is addressed to Nicholas Clegg President, Global Affairs Meta,1 Hacker WayMenlo Park, California, and begins, ” To Mr. Clegg”:

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More Twitter Revelations…Crickets Or Denials From The Complicit Mainstream Media And The Left’s Censorship Beneficiaries

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Keep it up, guys. With every effort to deny that what happened was what happened, the corrupted U.S. journalists and their employers erode public trust in their profession further, and with it their power. Eventually, there will be a breaking point and an ugly reckoning. Good. They have been asking for it. Yeah, keep up the gaslighting and denial. The fools really think they can bury the story. Even at Memeorandum, which is usually an objective news aggregator, the tweeted revelations by Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi are invisible. (Top story as I write this: a soccer reporter has died.) Very disappointing: I thought they were better than this. Still, the site’s bias is worth knowing about. I will not trust it as I have in the past.

Here’s a smoking gun: look at the transcript of an NPR interview with Newt Gingrich. Newt is unethical slime, but he’s very intelligent unethical slime, and when his personal agendas don’t interfere with his analysis, he is worth listening to. (I learned more in a private two hour seminar with young Newt when he was a Congressman than I learned in many full Government courses at Harvard.) Pay special attention to the NPR interviewer’s refusal to deal with reality that implicates NPR:

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The Other Shoe Drops: How Will The MSM Deny Twitter’s Viewpoint Censorship Now?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Just as Ethics Alarms was flagging the frantic efforts among the left-biased news media and others to deny the obvious and accurate implications of Twitter’s Hunter Biden laptop story censorship—the social media platform deliberately used its power to mislead the public and bolster Democrats— New York Times refugee Bari Weiss dropped the next metaphorical shoe, reporting on more newly released Twitter documents that show its pre-Elon Musk regime was “creating blacklists, preventing disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limiting the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users” and all based on an anti-conservative, pro-progressive agenda.

I can’t wait to see how The Washington Post, Phillip Bump and TechDirt apply Yoo’s Rationalization (“It isn’t what it is”) to muddy the issue this time.

Bari Weiss revealed her conclusions from studying the evidence sent to her by Twitter Avenger Elon Musk in a Twitter stream like the one employed by Matt Taibbi in the earlier revelations—you know, about how the Hunter Biden laptop facts were censored, which the New YorkTimes, Washington Post and the news networks shrugged off as “a nothingburger” because it was “old news,” Hunter Biden didn’t matter, and the laptop story wouldn’t have changed the result of the election anyway, so who cares if was censored by Twitter, and yes, them too?

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The Twitter Hunter Biden Laptop Censorship Proves Social Media’s Anti-Democracy Slant, And The Media’s Rush To Excuse It Proves Theirs

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

This was a test of integrity for the mainstream news media, and they, most predictably, flunked it, and outed themselves as the shamelessly unethical propaganda-spewing hacks they are. Depressing, but good to know, as if we didn’t know already.

As an exemplar of the whole, ugly, revolting effort to dismiss evidence that a biased and partisan Twitter staff deliberately buried a news story that might have harmed Joe Biden’s prospects of winning the 2016 election, Phillip Bump’s “analysis” in the Washington Post could hardly be more damning. Its very headline is an unethical rationalization and an appeal to consequentialism: “No, limiting the Hunter Biden laptop story didn’t cost Trump the election.”

Let’s just start with that, okay? Continue reading →