U.S. Society

How Public Ignorance Grows: Two Case Studies

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

People who don’t adequately research what they write about as pundits, experts or authorities spread their own biases, ignorance and misconceptions like a virus-infected audience member coughing in a crowded theater. Two annoying examples of the phenomenon have surfaced in the last week, but the phenomenon is widespread and frequent.

Here was a collaborative effort: “The World’s Fair beats the hell out of Disney…” is the link currently displayed on the conservative news aggregator Citizens Free Press. That link takes you to an essay by Randy Tatano called “Bring back the World’s Fair.”

“Sadly, time machines don’t exist, or I’d transport you back a few decades to a wonderful tradition this country has abandoned: the World’s Fair,” Tatano writes. “This piece of Americana sadly made its last appearance in New Orleans in 1984. The event moved every few years from one major city to another, and there was always something new to experience….I was fortunate enough to grow up a 30-minute drive from the 1964-65 World’s Fair in New York. It ran from April to October both years, and we made plenty of visits. Combining entertaining rides with a time travel element, it blew away anything you could experience in Orlando…The fair was so big there was an actual cable car called the “Swiss Sky Ride” which took you airborne from one end of the fair to another…It’s been almost 40 years since the last World’s Fair. I find it sad that an entire generation never got to experience one and wonder if we’ll ever see such an amazing event again.”

Tatiano bashes Disney several times in his article, but I found myself wondering, “Has this guy been to Walt Disney World?” and “Did no one tell him that the 1964 World’s Fair was substantially a preview of Walt’s last great project?” About half the New York World’s Fair major attractions Tatiano nostalgically marvels at were designed by Disney engineers and transferred to the new theme park as soon as the New York World’s Fair closed. He doesn’t mention others Disney contributions, like the G.E. “Carousel of Progress” and the audio-animatronic Abe Lincoln, who starred at the Illinois state pavilion. The experience at Flushing Meadows in Queens in 1964-65 didn’t “blow away anything you could experience in Orlando,” it was exactly what Disney World visitors a couple of years later experienced in Orlando: I was at the ’64 World’s Fair, and the similarities were the first thing that struck me when I finally got to Disney’s mega-park ten years later.

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A “When You Keep Hearing ‘Racist Dog-Whistles, You’re The Dog” Classic: All Those “Racist” State Flags

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Jason Patterson, an African American artist who is obsessed with flags and who apparently can sniff out racism that normal people don’t notice, managed to convince the Washington Post to validate his hysterical assessment that the seven state flags pictured above (on a field of “The Stars and Bars” flags) are all secretly sending anti-black, racist, pro-slavery and pro-Confederate messages. He thinks they all should be removed, even though (I’m estimating here) not one American in 10,000 would detect any such messages at all. This is the weird state of mind that has led to statue-toppling across the country, movements to end the honoring of essential Founders like Washington, Jefferson and Madison, and, at its silliest, the elimination of “Turkey in the Straw” as the tinkly tune played by ice cream trucks. It’s fair to describe Patterson as obsessed and unhealthily so, making the Post’s effort to spread his paranoia unethical and irresponsible.

Here’s a summary of Patterson’s flag-o-phobia:

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Comment Of The Day: “That Bomb ‘Finger Gun’ Should Have Never Been Made At All: How Did We End Up With ‘Finger Gun 4’??”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m pretty sure EA has touched on the topic of anti-male student discrimination by teachers in grade school, but not recently and not often enough, because it is a serious cultural and societal problem. The Atlantic wrote about “The War Against Boys” in 2000 before it became a complete propaganda vehicle for radical wokism—I wonder if such an essay would get published today?

2000—let’s see, that was right around the time my wife and I started becoming aware of how normal little boys were being expected to act like good little girls in school, as our authority-resisting, intrepid and energetic son was being routinely abused by boy-hating teachers to such an extent that he was permanently alienated from formal education. The finger gun nonsense is symptomatic of the trend, and crella makes the connection in this, the Comment of the Day on the post, “That Bomb ‘Finger Gun’ Should Have Never Been Made At All: How Did We End Up With ‘Finger Gun 4’??”

Here it is….

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A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Addendum To The Democratic Porn-For-Pay Virginia House Candidate Story

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Several news media sources have now reported that the Associated Press was informed about Susanna Gibson and her husband selling sexual perversions-on-demand via videos on the public porn site Chaturbate. A candidate for a state legislature seeking compensation for letting an audience see her urinate, perhaps on said husband (just to pick one possible videoed activity) is obviously both newsworthy and of legitimate interest to voters (despite the absurd line of defense now taken by Gibson, her defenders and her party), but the AP’s editors deliberately refused to report on it. Instead, the AP alerted Gibson that the secret of the videos was out, so she could take them down, which she did. This was on September 5.

The outlet then waited until September 12, after the scandal had been reported by others, including the Washington Post, to report it as news. Nice.

Observations:

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More On Susanna Gibson, The Democratic Porn-For-Pay Virginia House Candidate

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This story, which exploded my head, got very little commentary on Ethics Alarms last week, which surprised me. Maybe I wasn’t sufficiently clear: sex workers, prostitutes and whack jobs have run for state legislatures from time immemorial, but they are usually considered fringe campaigns and publicity stunts (you know, like Donald Trump’s campaign in 2015) and considered barely worth discussing by reporters. But the Democratic Party in Virginia is actively defending Gibson, really and truly saying that Gibson’s conduct online is just fine because no law was broken. This stance magnifies the possibility that the entire party has 1) lost its collective mind and 2) now has the comprehension of ethics, civics, society and public service of the average muskrat.

Now Gibson, who, if you haven’t read the post, has engaged in graphic sex acts with her husband in videos for the porn site Chaturbate even as she in running to be a Virginia lawmaker, is being enthusiastically defended by her party, despite the fact that the fun couple was offering to take requests for their porn performances in exchange for money. “Y’all can watch me pee if you tip me and some tokens,” Gibson can be heard saying in one graphic videos. “Again, I’m raising money for a good cause.”

I thought the fact that Gibson and her party were actually claiming that Republicans and the media were engaging in illegal “revenge porn” and somehow doing something wrong by alerting the public that a candidate was misrepresenting her character, activities and kinks in her campaign material was sufficient to ping ethics alarms, but maybe not. So let’s drill down more deeply into the muck:

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Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun,This Forum Makes Two In A Week, Not Just One!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I want to thank everyone who pitched in to make the emergency Open Forum earlier this week as lively and interesting as it was. Now don’t rest on your laurels, though: as usual, there’s a lot out there in the ethics trees and underbrush to chew on…

What ever happened to the Doublemint Twins? I worry that they ended up like this…

That Bomb “Finger Gun” Should Have Never Been Made At All: How Did We End Up With “Finger Gun 4”??

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The first stunned Ethics Alarms story about a cabal of idiots with education degrees persecuting a little boy for making a crude imaginary gun out of his fingers was in 2013, just as the Post Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck got rolling and the anti-gun hysterics were going off the rails (to which they, obviously, have never quite returned). I wrote of the first incident, which was in Montgomery County,

The NBC story concentrates on  “whether the boy understands the implications of the gesture.” What implications of the gesture? That he is about to shoot bullets out of his finger? That he intends to kill someone with all the firepower an unarmed 6-year-old can muster? That he is making a mimed reference to a Connecticut school massacre he probably doesn’t know a thing about? Why should it matter what his “intent is? It’s a hand gesture! It isn’t vulgar or threatening except to silly phobics in the school system.

I concluded that it was child abuse by the school, and that “such irrational fearfulness, bad judgment, panic, disregard for the sensibilities of the young, lack of proportion and brain dysfunction forfeits all right to trust, and such fools must not be allowed to have power over young bodies and minds.”

But the finger gun lunatics struck again the next year, as Ohio crazies punished a 10-year-old boy for wielding an imaginary gun without a license. This time I figured out what was really going on—political and cultural woke indoctrination— writing in part,

The radical gun-hating progressives who disproportionately occupy administrative positions in the schools are willing to endure some ridicule as well as to victimize some children if it helps make guns and gun-related play less attractive, thus pointing to a Nirvana where the NRA is a shadow of its former self, and the only ones who own guns are criminals, the police and the government….Is public school political indoctrination more sinister than the proliferation incompetent teachers and administrators? Yes.

I also should have realized that this was the dawning of The Great Stupid.

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The Joe Biden Impeachment Ethics Train Wreck Gets Rolling Big Time With Ethics Estoppel, Government -Media Collusion And A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Spectacular

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

This hilarious episode pushed itself ahead of two other posts because its almost too good to be true, and by good, I mean “Yecchh!”

Let’s begin with the Republican House majority, led by jerks like Rep. Matt Gaetz, forcing Speaker Kevin McCarthy to begin an impeachment inquiry against President Biden. This is incompetent, irresponsible and unethical. To begin with, it’s a waste of time and the public’s attention, which is too divided and limited already. Second, as the GOP proved the last time it executed a futile impeachment, it is more likely to lose votes than to gain them. Third, there is no chance of conviction in the split Senate, zero. If the impeachment is supposed to be some kind of an official rebuke, it won’t be seen as one or taken as one, so the mere impeachment itself will have no substantive consequence or significance. Finally, Republicans impeaching Biden will look like revenge and “tit-for-tat” rather than responsible statesmanship, because it is revenge to a great extent.

Next come the Democrats and their news media agents screaming that there aren’t constitutional grounds for impeachment. I think there are, but it doesn’t matter: the Democrats killed impeachment as a useful Constitutional tool of democracy deader than a frozen mackerel when it concocted two unjustified and purely political impeachments of Donald Trump. There was no impeachable high crime with the first, and the Democrats were so determined to slap Trump before he was out the door that they didn’t even follow due process with the second. Both were obviously partisan, and since members of the party and its allies had been advocating the impeachment of Trump for something literally before he served a day in office, there was no way either impeachment could be objectively viewed as legitimate.

Ethics Alarms has pointed out too many times since Phony Impeachment #1 that the Democrats have guaranteed not only that their next President—Biden, unfortunately—would be impeached as soon as the GOP had control of the House, but that every President hereafter would probably be impeached when the opposing party has a House majority in an endless cycle of payback. Yes, somebody should be standing up for the importance of legitimate impeachments, but the Democrats forfeited that privilege when they broke the system. (What? I thought Trump was the one who threatened constitutional government by defying “democratic norms”!) They are complaining that there aren’t proper grounds to impeach their President? This is as perfect an example of Ethics Estoppel as I can imagine. Democrats cannot make such an argument, not without provoking mockery and contempt. They asked for it, and now, having guaranteed that it would arrive as ordered, they are whining about insufficient evidence.

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Quick Ethics Takes On A Wasted Trip To D.C.

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

  • I was supposed to testify in an arbitration hearing today. I headed to D.C. through the usual awful traffic, finally arriving at my destination after a 45 minute trek, and was informed that my commentary had been postponed suddenly despite being scheduled months ago, and despite my arranging my schedule around it in what has been a very busy September. This occurred after I stayed up until 2 am prepping for my testimony. I could bill for the wasted 90 minutes this fool’s errand took me, but I won’t; ditto the 14 bucks for parking. There were some messed-up communications from the attorney who retained me, but I should have double-checked that all was still as scheduled, and I didn’t.
  • Walking from the parking garage to where the hearing was scheduled, I counted the number of people or all ages walking along looking at their cell phones compared with those who were not: 28 with, only 6 without! This is a genuine social malady with, I suspect, long-term negative consequences that we haven’t begun to understand or prepare for. It reminded me of “Bowling Alone.”

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An Invitation To Be An Unethical Lawyer…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Just as I was preparing yesterday for today’s 3-hour legal ethics CLE seminar (which, coincidentally, contained a section about the unsettled status of lawyers using artificial intelligence for legal research, writing and other tasks in the practice of law), I received this unsolicited promotion in my email:

Let’s see: how many ways does this offer a lawyer the opportunity to violate the ethics rules? Unless a lawyer thoroughly understands how such AI creatures work—and a lawyer relying on them must—it is incompetent to “try” them on any actual cases. Without considerable testing and research, no lawyer could possibly know whether this thing is trustworthy. The lawyer needs to get informed consent from any client whose matters are being touched by “CoCounsel,” and no client is equipped to give such consent. If it were used on an actual case, there are questions of whether the lawyer would be aiding the unauthorized practice of law. How would the bot’s work be billed? How would a lawyer know that client confidences wouldn’t be promptly added to CoCounsel’s data base?

Entrusting an artificial intelligence-imbued assistant introduced this way with the matters of actual clients is like handing over case files to someone who just walked off the street claiming, “I’m a legal whiz!” without evidence of a legal education, a degree, or work experience.

On the plus side, the invitation was a great way to introduce my section today about the legal ethics perils of artificial intelligence technology.