The Internet

10 Ethics Observations on the White Judge’s Email

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Caroline Glennon-Goodman, a Cook County judge, shared a meme that depicts a smiling black boy and a black child’s leg with an electronic monitor on it, a fake ad for “My First Ankle Monitor.” The judge wrote “My husband’s idea of Christmas humor.” It was supposed to go to a friend, but she sent it to the wrong person, another judge ( #@!%^!& autofill!) Oopsie! That judge reported her and the post became public.

Glennon-Goodman has been reassigned by the Circuit Court’s Executive Committee, and ordered to undergo bias training and will face a state disciplinary investigation. The executive committee wrote that Glennon-Goodman’s alleged actions “may violate the Code of Judicial Conduct” and it said it was temporarily reassigning her and referring the matter to the Illinois Judicial Inquiry Board “to promote public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.”

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Unethical Quote of the Month: President Joe Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“It’s just completely contrary to everything America is about. We want to tell the truth. We haven’t always done it as a nation. We want to tell the truth.The idea that, you know, a billionaire can buy something and say, ‘By the way, we’re not gonna fact check anything,’ and you know, you have millions of people reading, going online, reading this stuff. Anyway, I think it’s really shameful.”

—-President Joe Biden, attacking Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg decision’s to end its biased, censorious fact-checking system that relied on partisan propaganda operations like PolitiFact and Snopes.

What’s shameful is a President of the United States advocating speech censorship. Like many of Biden’s brain-addled outbursts lately, however, he has committed the cardinal political sin of saying what he and his puppeteers really believe out loud. So now we know, at least those of us who weren’t paying attention before and couldn’t read the metaphorical neon signs flashing before our eyes, Joe Biden and his entire party advocates the censorship of free speech on social media, including opinion, adverse positions and anything that might expose its rotting proto-totalitarian party for the threat to democracy it has become. Thanks, Joe! But it was pretty obvious already.

I’m glad that I have waited to post the resolution of the “Worst President Ever” inquiry until tomorrow, because so much applicable information has been flowing regarding just how awful Joe Biden has been. I think all who have read the series carefully have figured out that the finals are going to come down to Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Woodrow Wilson and Biden, and it doesn’t take a PhD to guess who the last two competitors will be either. Once I thought the ultimate “winner” was clear-cut, but Joe is fighting for the title to the bitter end.

He and his fellow censors circulated lie after lie before and during the Presidential campaign (among them that only Donald Trump lies) yet Biden has the astounding brass to talk about wanting to tell the truth. You know, truth like Biden being sharp as a tack. “Truth” like the border being secure.

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And As Long As We Are Talking About Doing The Right Things For (Perhaps) the Wrong Reasons: Zuckerberg and Meta

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder and its alter-ego Meta’s chief executive, announced that his flagship social media platform, along with Instagram and Threads, will end its longstanding (and biased, and flawed) fact-checking program, moving instead to a “community notes” system like the one employed by Elon Musk’s reinvention of Twitter.

Good. What took so long?

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Zuckerberg said. The company’s current fact-checking system had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.” “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

In truth, anyone should have been able to figure out that Facebook’s “fact checkers” were progressive, dishonest, partisan hacks. The censors included Snopes (EA dossier here) and PolitiFact (even worse dossier here), which Ethics Alarms, among many others, had marked as biased and untrustworthy years ago, indeed well before Facebook turned to them as censors. The truth is that one person’s “bad stuff” is another’s stimulating opinion or analysis. This shouldn’t be a difficult concept, but in the Age of the Great Stupid, it is. The 21st Century Left likes censorship, indeed has relied on it to hold power, and has embraced the practice on college campuses, social media, and in the news. Sad but true.

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Ford’s Anti-Israel Tweets

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Some questions present themselves, such as,

How much trust should we place in the management of a company that can’t staff and oversee its social media accounts better than this?

Is mere firing sufficient punishment for an employee who would post those? Such an egregious level of betrayal of an employer should carry a lifetime brand, like the scarlet letter.

What could someone guilty of such conduct do to redeem himself?

Ford’s headquarters are in Detroit, an area with a large Arab-American population with strong pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel sentiments. You would think that this incident would be sufficiently predictable that special care would be taken to avoid it. Clearly, that didn’t happen. The incident is also magnified because of the ugly legacy of the company’s anti-Semitic founder, Henry Ford, who among other things promoted the notorious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Henry’s company’s apology was about as inept as one would expect from one that allowed this to occur: “Our X account was briefly compromised and the previous three posts were not authorized or posted by Ford,” a spokesperson said. “We are investigating the issue, and apologize for any confusion caused.”

Ford apologizes for the “confusion”?

Social Media Doesn’t Make College Kids Act Like Morons—Being Morons Make College Kids Act Like Morons

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

(I’m always happy when I can justify posting a Charles Addams cartoon.)

I’m sure this discouraging episode will somehow make it into the dispute over whether TikTok, which apparently gathers data from millions of Americans to put in the clutches of China’s Dark Masters, should be banned or not. The incident isn’t about TikTok, however.

Apparently there is now a viral TikTok-promoted fad in which people lure suspected sexual predators to some location, lie in wait for them, and either call the police or, for even more fun, beat them up. The “game” is modeled after an unethical vigilante TV reality show on ABC that lasted three seasons; I wrote several posts about it on Ethics Alarms’ now unavailable predecessor, The Ethics Scoreboard. Starring “Dateline” reporter Chris Hanson, the show that aired from 2004-2007 would use the internet and phone calls to lure someone seeking underage sexual companionship to a hidden camera ambush. The entertainment came from watching Hanson walk out from behind a bush and make the sick bastard huminahumina his way into coast-to-coast humiliation. The pre-crime predators who were thus “caught” almost never were convicted of anything.

In Worcester, Massachusetts (that’s pronounced “Wuster,” you Bay State ignoramuses!) students at Assumption University came to the wrong assumption that the “To Catch a Predator” game was a good use of their time. Easton Randall, Kevin Carroll, Isabella Trudeau, Kelsy Brainard, and Joaqin Smith, all 18, decided that a “creepy guy” was a sexual predator, so a female student used dating site Tinder to lure him to where he would think was a meeting place for a hook-up with a 17-year old girl. They had enlisted about 30 other students to lie in wait with them, and the mob chased and assaulted him as the stunt was recorded. Oh, the views it would attract! Randall told police that the idea was to emulate “the Chris Hansen videos where you catch a predator and either call police or kick their ass,” but the incident “got out of hand and went bad.”

Ya think?

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Ethics Dunce: Elon Musk

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Ugh.

Elon, Elon, Elon….

Elon Musk apparently became annoyed at some Republican critics for criticizing him over his endorsement of H-1B visas, a work program that allows U.S companies to hire highly skilled non-Americans. So he stripped them of their “blue check” verification on their Twitter/”X” profiles

Laura Loomer, New York Young Republican Club president Gavin Wax, InfoWars host Owen Shroyer, and other far-right figures found that their verification badges had vanished on December 27 after they knocked Musk (and his DOGE co-captain Vivek Ramaswamy) for supporting the hiring of foreign-born engineers over their U.S. counterparts.

Former GOP Congressman and NeverTrumper Adam Kinzinger wrote in part, “So @elonmusk stripped the blue check because someone hurt his feelings?…If you love him great, but don’t pretend he’s for free speech.”

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files:

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The New York Post reports that wanted posters targeting CEOs of insurance and other health care companies are appearing in Manhattan. Some say “HEALTH CARE CEOS SHOULD NOT FEEL SAFE” and include the words “DENY,” “DEFEND,” and “DEPOSE,” which are the same words that the cute assassin who shot UnitedHealthcare’s CEO wrote on his bullets. The posters also feature each executive’s salary, and some have appeared with the photos of CEOs of non-health care companies, like Goldman Sachs. ABC reports some posters say “UnitedHealthcare killed everyday people for the sake of profit. As a result Brian Thompson was denied his claim to life. Who will be denied next?”

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Unethical Website of the Month: “Locals”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Nothing I like better than a big dose of frustration to start up the morning…

Glen Greenwald may be a fine and brave independent reporter, but he’s an unethical one, as I have pointed out here before. I am apparently unable to get out from his clutches, or at least from the con artists he hangs out with. As I wrote about earlier this year, I subscribed to Greewald’s substack, which he stopped contributing to because of some personal matters, but I was still charged for the subscription. (I also have had to endure some personal setbacks this year, but I have managed to fulfill my obligations to Ethics Alarms readers nonetheless, none of whom have paid me for subscriptions. Cry me a river, Glenn.) Then he announced that he was leaving Substack.

On December 10 of 2023, I received a “friendly reminder” from Glenn that my subscription to his new platform would renew in six days. I had never subscribed to the new platform, as indeed I wouldn’t trust Greenwald with another subscription if it cost me only ten cents. I had bigger metaphorical fish to fry a year ago, and never took the time to figure out what the hell was going on, but apparently my subscription renewed.

I have not heard a peep from Greenwald since that message last year, but today I received the same “friendly reminder” as you can see above. The email was “no-reply.” Nowhere was there a link to cancel the subscription, which I had never agreed to any way.

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Unethical Tweet of the Week: “The View” DEI Hispanic, Ana Navarro-Cárdenas 

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Navarro, a fixture on ABC’s “The View,” has been an embarrassment to all of her media employers; they have just been too foolish to realize it. She’s a fake Republican/conservative, initially hired by CNN as a token so she could bash Donald Trump and claim objectivity. She isn’t witty, analytical or smart and has a speech impediment: if she were a white male, she would be defending DUI cases.

That tweet is special. She’s allegedly a lawyer, and she doesn’t know what a precedent is? The precedent is a President giving a suspiciously extensive pardon including crimes that haven’t been charged yet that the President might have directly benefited from to his son. That’s never happened before because it directly benefits the President and has the appearance of impropriety.

The whole tweet, moreover, is based on a passel of rationalizations falsely applied, like “Everybody does it” (#1) and “There are worse things” (#22). “Every President” doesn’t pardon their immediate family. The closest analog was Bill Clinton pardoning his half-brother for a cocaine conviction, but Roger’s crimes were neither as numerous nor as serious as Hunter’s, nor did anyone think Bill had any connection to them.

Saying that Trump also appointed his father-in-law as French ambassador is as relevant to Navarro’s argument as writing, “And he has bad breath, too!” That factoid has nothing to do with the pardon.

Additionally, citing Wilson, Clinton and Trump as Presidential role models in a matter of ethics is idiotic strategy. They are three of the most ethically-inert of all our Chief Executives, and those pardons match their proclivities. Defending Biden by comparing him to that trio is desperate.

I saved the best for last, though: Navarro-Cárdenas is making Americans dumber by spreading Presidential fiction. Woodrow Wilson had no brother-in-law named “Hunter DeButts,” so he couldn’t have pardoned him.

This pure fiction, the results of Navarro being hoaxed or the victim of an AI “hallucination”: either way, it’s irresponsible journalism. She obviously didn’t check her facts before making a false statement, one that impugned a President (though one who earned a lot of impugning).

Thanks, BlueSky!

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

The self-proclaimed progressive onclave social media platform designed to isolate the Good people from unclean thoughts and their Nazi neighbors is proving to be a magnificent social experiment testing the proposition that the Mutated Left of the 21st Century can’t tolerate dissent or any ideas that don’t make them feel warm and cuddly.

As first noted here by commenter Michael R., “Apparently, all the liberals who left X went to BlueSky and immediately started reporting everyone else for not being ‘woke’ enough for their tastes. Their ‘hate speech’ and ‘misinformation’ reports have gone from 350,000 in all to 2023 to over 40,000/day since the election. Of course, some moderation requests probably can’t even get in because they are busy.” Yes, the experiment is working out just fine. These people, as they and their Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates demonstrated, don’t get that freedom of speech thingy. The funny part is that it was in great part the bubble progressives live in that led their party to its2024 disaster, and their solution is …..to construct a stronger bubble.

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