Social Media

Comment of the Day: “The Totalitarian Left’s Reaction To Trump’s Interview With Elon Musk Should Tell Voters All They Need To Know About ‘What’s Going On Here’”

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

I usually don’t elevate to Comment of the Day status comments that illustrate common fallacies and lack of perception. I’ve done it a few times: I know it can seem mean. But Cici’s Comment of the Day so exemplifies the abysmal level of comprehension and critical thought so many of our fellow citizens suffer from, thus making them prime targets of misdirection in this election year, that I felt attention should be paid.

Here was Cici’s comment, one of many she offered, on the post about the foreign and domestic Left arguing that a U.S. Presidential candidate should not be allowed free rein to say whatever he chose to in a discussion with Elon Musk, who owns the platform where the discussion was taking place:

“Third parties decide what you read and hear all the time. And I’m not even arguing for that so I’m not sure where you got that from. I trust that people in charge of these platforms are able to factcheck properly.

I don’t share in your mistrust of “institutions.” I think that leads to people not knowing what’s even true or not. You’re free to disagree with that notion.”

Analysis:

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Congratulations to Elon Musk, Who Earns a Golden “Bite Me!”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The “Bite Me!” Award that Ethics Alarms hereby bestows on Elon Musk is the honorable and admirable version of the schizophrenic designation as opposed to the alternative handed to Ann Althouse in this recent post. To alleviate confusion, I will henceforth describe what Musk has earned with his tweet above as The Golden “Bite Me!,” which will be awarded here when an individual displays an inspiring level of defiance“in response to being bullied, pressured and threatened into submissiveness” by sending the unambiguous and fearless message, “Do your worst. I believe in what I am doing, and I don’t grovel to mobs.”

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Somebody Please Explain To the Palm Beach County State Attorney, the Secret Service and Judge Cymonie Rowe That Being An Asshole Is Protected Under The First Amendment…

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I’m truly sick of this stuff. What we have here isn’t even a close call. Michael Wiseman, 68, from Jupiter, Florida, was arrested by local police officers on July 19 because he posted ugly comments on social media expressing disappointment that former President Trump wasn’t assassinated in Butler, Pennsylvania. “The shooter missed,” he wrote on X. “He can’t be the only patriot. Cocksucker, mother and daughter fucker Trump.” And, “Why is Trump allowed to be alive? We need to train patriots. Thomas Matthew Crooks deserves a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor, a stamp, and a national holiday.”

And, “Some people need to be better shots if they know they are going to kill a monster.” Shortly before his arrest, Wiseman wrote, “I am advocating Trump and Vance’s daughters get raped and THEN tell me they won’t fly their kids out of the USA for an abortion.”

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Ethics Dunce: Chaya Raichik

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Chaya Raichik, the industrious conservative gadfly who infuriates the Left by posting the most ridiculous and self-indicting TikTok videos by unhinged progressives, definitely has a nasty side. Exposing public figures, celebrities, local officials, scholars, professors, teachers, corporate execs, prominent athletes, “influencers,” Hollywood stars and would-be activists is an admirable (and useful) pursuit—after all, they post the stuff that makes them look ridiculous or sinister and know that what they say gets noticed. Such statements also often demonstrate why they should not continue in their chosen professions. Siccing the social media mob on a typical working American who posts something dumb on Facebook is very different. It is cruel.

Recently Raichik’s Libs of TikTok account has expanded its target range to private Facebook posts that included ugly comments on the near assassination of Donald Trump. (I could point her to some by my Trump-Deranged friends.) “To bad they weren’t a better shooter!!!!!” was the witty if ungrammatical retort Darcy Waldron Pinckney posted on Facebook to her modest number of FB friends. She worked at Home Depot, but not after the influential anti-woke warrior launched her (also misspelled) “quip” into cyberspace hyperdrive. A week ago, Raichik posted a screenshot of Pinckney’s comment with her photo (above) and wrote, “Hi @HomeDepot! Are you aware that you employ people who call for political violence and the ass*ss*nat*on of Presidents? Any comment?”

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Ethics Dunce (Professional Singer Division): Ingrid Andress

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

See, I have a fair amount of sympathy for alcoholics. But the time to check yourself into rehab is before you kill someone driving, before you blow that crucial case for your client, before you leave your scissors in a patient’s stomach after you’ve operated, and, if you are an award-winning Country singer, before you massacre the Star-Spangled Banner at the All-Star Game Home Run derby, like Andress did last night.

Just listen to that caterwauling!

I find the Home Run Derby a bore, so I didn’t hear her off-key, dying-swan version of our National Anthem until the social media complaints about it reached me this morning. Andress’s breathless, lugubrious style, much in vogue these days, doesn’t appeal to me anyway, but that rendition was especially awful even by awful National Anthem standards, a high bar. How could a multiple Grammy-winner be that bad is a public performance on national TV?

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Comment of the Day: “From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: the Woke Shackles Tighten…”

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

I wanted to get the previous post about artificial intelligence and the unintended consequences of technology up before this timely Comment of the Day by jdkazoo123 from yesterday regarding social media. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t consider all of the social pathogens he was loosing on civilization when he launched Facebook, or even if he foresaw some of them, he went ahead anyway. After all, there were millions of dollars to be made. The message of this COTD is, in brief, “Now what?”

The alarm as well as the puzzlement are justified. Still, one cannot pretend that the benefits that Zuck and others believed were being conferred on society by social media are insubstantial. I’ve experienced one of them very recently: through Facebook I have been able to let my friends, associates and colleagues know about the tragic sudden death of my wife, and to say that the support they are still providing me has been crucial to my sanity and survival is an understatement. Social media also has greatly reduced the power and influence of journalism, which, since journalists have been abusing those and the public’s trust for decades, is a win for truth, justice, and the American way. Nevertheless, the negative effects of the platforms are substantial, as jd notes. Are these benefits worth the costs? Don’t ask me right now: I’m biased.

Here is jdkazoo123’s Comment of the Day on the post, “From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: the Woke Shackles Tighten…”

***

I don’t know if this is a reason to regulate social media, but it is an example of why they are so different and troubling. I think they are a big cause of the polarization that we see here at EA and across the country. I think about my dad and his brother, my uncle. Even though my uncle was 7 years older, they were very close by the time I showed up. I grew up seeing my uncle about 1-2 a year. And as I got older, I noticed my dad and his brother joshed a lot about politics. My uncle was hard core Republican from suburban Pittsburgh, an executive in manufacturing. My dad was a solid Democrat working in military intelligence and the AF reserves. It was fun to see them josh. My uncle would say “Kid, your dad thinks I’m a Republican because I’m rich. What he doesn’t understand is I’m rich because I’m a Republican!”

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: the Woke Shackles Tighten…

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Jennifer Sey, once a competitive gymnast on the U.S. Women’s Olympic team, has launched a new clothing line focused on the threat to women’s sports by the woke-driven incursion of “transitioned” or “transitioning” biological males.

TikTok responded to her ad on that platform by banning he company from advertising with this:

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Ethics Observations On the “Shitposter’s” Scoop

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Last night I saw this story in the New York Post, relayed by conservative provocateur Ace of Spades:

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan revealed Friday that a Facebook user claiming to be a “cousin” of a juror in former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial suggested he had advanced knowledge of last week’s guilty verdict. 

“Today, the Court became aware of a comment that was posted on the Unified Court System’s public Facebook page and which I now bring to your attention,” Merchan wrote in a letter to Trump attorney Todd Blanche and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. 

“In the comment, the user, ‘Michael Anderson,’ states: ‘My cousin is a juror and says Trump is getting convicted … Thank you folks for all your hard work!!! ….’” the judge explained. 

The story also reveals that “Michael Anderson” is a self-admitted “shitposter,” someone who uses social media to spread falsehoods and derail serious discussions on politics and other matters.

Hmmmm.

So the guy, if he is a guy, who revealed this supposed conspiracy to rig the jury verdict against Donald Trump has no credibility at all. He’s a lying asshole and proud of it—you know, like Michael Cohen.

It is only responsible for the judge to reveal this, and for an investigation to take place. This, in turn, will probably give “Michael Anderson” the fifteen minutes of fame he craves, and inspire more assholes to enter the wonderful, profitable, destructive field of “shitposting.”

Meanwhile, I saw MAGA types all over the web last night calling for the trial verdict to be abandoned based on this almost certain trolling effort, thus making themselves look like gullible fools, and confirmation bias victims.

Is this a great country or what?

Ethics Quiz: The NFL Kicker’s Commencement Speech

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Only in the age of social media, mandatory conformity, and militant political correctness would a conservative Catholic commencement address at a tiny conservative Catholic Benedictine College, in Atchison, Kansas about 50 miles northwest of Kansas City, turn into a national controversy. Oops, I don’t want to bias the ethics quiz: forget the way I phrased that.

Harrison Butker of the Kansas City Chiefs, the place-kickers for the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs, was invited to give the Commencement speech for the 2024 graduating class, seemingly an odd choice, but then maybe not. Butker had been outspoken the Cathodic Church in recent years, and I strongly suspect that he delivered exactly what the leadership of Benedictine College was seeking at the ceremony last weekend.

To gauge the reactions on social media and elsewhere, however (it sure sounded like his speech was well-received by the students) you would think his address was from the fiery depths of Hell, as if he had supported Hamas terrorism or anti-Semitism or something. He was roundly attacked on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter/”X.” About 125,000 people have signed a petition on Change.org calling for the Chiefs to fire the kicker; typical progressives: if you don’t espouse their views and support their agendas, then you don’t deserve to make a living. The reliably despicable NFL felt it had to oppose the player’s statements, as if anyone thought he was speaking for the league rather than for himself. “Harrison Butker gave a speech in his personal capacity,” Jonathan Beane, the NFL’s senior vice president and chief diversity and inclusion officer, said in a written statement. “His views are not those of the NFL as an organization. The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger.” Naturally, the most corrupt and hypocritical league in sports felt it had to pander to the woke, and do so by uttering the magic word, “inclusion,” thereby falsely suggesting that Butker advocated exclusion. Best of all, Kansas City used its official social media account to reveal Butker’s residence, doxxing him. Nice. The city is sorry though. That will do him a lot of good when someone burns his house down.

I could quote the sections that has the Angry Left on the warpath—can I say that?—but instead I’m going to publish the whole speech. Then I’ll ask the Ethics Quiz question, and give my answer, abut which I feel strongly. Here is the speech:

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Unethical—But Revealing!—Quote of the Month: Bill McGuire, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College, London

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Remember: Trust the scientists! They know best…

“If I am brutally honest, the only realistic way I see emissions falling as fast as they need to, to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown, is the culling of the human population by a pandemic with a very high fatality rate.”

—British vulcanologist and climate scientist William J. McGuire, “Bill” to his friends, cheering on human death in a tweet he quickly removed after colleagues advised him “Uh, Bill? We’re not supposed to say things like this out loud…”

Of course, the professor might have been saying that the economically disastrous measures being proposed and in some cases adopted by foolish governments like the Biden administration won’t affect the climate sufficiently to make a difference, so the whole movement is futile, irresponsible, based on speculation, and, to be blunt, stupid, but of course he wasn’t. No, this scientist, who is among those we are supposed to trust and obey—you know, like the health “experts” who crippled the economy, our society and the educational development of our children based on guesses about the Wuhan virus that were represented as fact?—believes that the only way to avoid a climate catastrophe (and we all want to do that, right?) is to have millions of people die as soon as possible, one way or another. A plague is a good way! Or we could just execute them, like Mao did. Of course, he shouldn’t be one of those sacrificed for the greater good, because his life is too valuable.

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