U.S. Society

“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Addendum…

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

This post should be seen as a footnote to the previous one, expressing gratitude that the Axis of Unethical Conduct (that’s the “resistance”, Democrats and the mainstream media alliance we have been watching attempting to strangle the democratic process since 2015, if not earlier) is now not even trying to disguise its methods and motives. The Wisconsin Senate race is another close one, and the media is as desperate as Democrats to keep the Senate in Democratic hands, making the defeat of incumbent Republican Ron Johnson Ron Johnson greatly to be wished. And thus, for the Greater Good and because the ends justifies the means, the august New York Times threw all standards of reporting objectivity to the winds and simply announced that Johnson is a poopy-head and his opponent is, as Lina Lamont would say, “a shimmering, glowing star in the political firmament.”

That’s not journalism. That’s campaigning, and cheap campaigning at that. “Leading peddler of disinformation” according to whom? Does Johnson lead Joe Biden? Adam Schiff? Donald Trump? AOC? Facts please! Evidence! Nah, none of that is forthcoming: this is just a “Vote Democrat” tweet, devoid of anything but naked partisan loyalty. NewsBusters executive editor Tim Graham responded that “The New York Times is a leading peddler of misinformation.”

Indeed,

What’s going on here? Well, the Times assumes most of its Twitter followers are progressive partisans who won’t mind the paper exposing its increasingly obvious and destructive bias. They are probably right about that, but fairer Americans are paying attention. Why would anyone trust a news source that would allow something like that tweet to go out under its banner?

The self-banned commenter who hung out here for a while making excuses for the Times would doubtlessly say, “Oh, come on. So some low-level intern or someone similar screwed up. It doesn’t prove the Times is biased.” It proves that the Times doesn’t respect it readers, the public, its profession or its mission enough to take proper care regarding how its power and influence are wielded and who wields it. The fact that the Times hasn’t publicly rebuked whoever was responsible for that tweet and apologized to all, including Sen. Johnson tells us all we need to know, not that those of us who have been paying attention didn’t know it long ago.

Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck Update, Part 2: Hospital Masking

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I actually witnessed this exchange three days ago, as part of my four-day Alexandria, VA hospital adventure:

Woman: Put on a mask! This is a hospital!

Man: Why should I? You’re not wearing one!

Woman: I am!

Man: You’re wearing it under your nose!

Woman: I’m still wearing it! Put one on, or I’m reporting you!

Man. Go ahead!

Whereupon the woman turned to the elderly volunteer manning the desk at the entrance. He wasn’t wearing a mask.

Are the idiotic pandemic masks the official symbol and attire of The Great Stupid? I think so. My experience at the INOVA hospital convinced me. At the Emergency Room entrance. a large sign mandated masks. A security guard ordered me to put one on (but not my wife, who was being checked in). The masks being handed out were those cheap paper things that are either completely useless or mostly useless, depending on who you talk to. During the four days of hospital visits, I didn’t see a single N95 mask on the faces of staff, patients or visitors.

Around the busy ER waiting area, there were unmasked people, masked people, and people wearing masks under their noses or chins. When my wife was being checked in, nobody appeared to care about the masks at all. The nurse processing us wore no mask. I didn’t; my wife didn’t. The attendants who took her to the temporary room did. Later on, all of the nurses and techs were masked, but some doctors were not. Nobody ever asked me or my wife to put one on. In the nearby rooms, the typical scene was an unmasked patient and a mixed crowd of masked and unmasked family members, shoulder to shoulder.

Later, when my wife was moved to a regular hospital room, the signs even disappeared. The Patients Entrance and Visitors entrance had cheap masks available, but there were no apparent requirements. Sometimes the receptionists were masked, sometimes not. Sometimes one was and the other wasn’t. I walked in maskless (let’s see…) eight times, and nobody said a word.

What’s going on here?

Madness, as Major Clipton said. Virtue signaling. Confusion. Mixed messages. Chaos. Fear. Stupidity.

Science!

Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck Update, Part 1

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

[There’s almost no traffic here on Saturday if I don’t get a post up before 10:30am; I guess I’m going to find out what kind of traffic there is if nothing gets posted before 4 pm. Ugh. I’m sorry. Sitting down at my desk is still very painful, more so, in fact, today than yesterday. I also don’t understand why an 18 inch bruise on one leg makes the rest of me feel so terrible. I feel like a weenie, and I’m sorry.]

1. Biden again extended the Wuhan pandemic public health emergency, which was set to expire last week. Now it will remain in place past the midterm elections. This keeps millions of Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program beneficiaries who might lose their coverage enrolled for several more months, and allows allowed vaccines, testing, and treatments to be offered for free. It also requires states to offer continuous enrollment for Medicaid and CHIP, public health insurance programs for low-income individuals, in order to receive additional federal funding.

That’s nice, except that there is no emergency, and Biden’s previous public statements admitted as much. This is an abuse of Presidential power, no more ethical nor legal than a leader’s extending a curfew or martial law to seize dictatorial powers—it’s the same principle, and the same tactic. Congress should throw a fit, but it won’t, because Congress has no principles or guts: the measures benefit voting blocs, and though the President is abusing his emergency powers to bypass the requirements of legislation and rule-making, the public can’t comprehend such details like due process and the separation of powers, nor, apparently, basic honesty. If the President can declare an emergency (extending an emergency is not different from declaring one) when there is none and get away with it, why not martial law?

The Wuhan gravy train has benefited so many (while wrecking the economy, whole sectors of the economy and the education and social progress of our children, just to mention a few of the self-inflicted wounds) that ending it will undoubtedly cause many considerable pain. HHS estimates that as many as 15 million people will lose their Medicaid coverage—but then, they aren’t supposed to have medicaid coverage. 

Many families will also lose supplemental money they received through the federal government’s nutrition program. But the only reason they were getting such funds was because of an emergency that no longer exists. Biden has already used the non-emergency to justify student loan forgiveness (we’ll see if he gets away with that) and make landlords continue to do without rent. HHS overrode state laws regarding which vaccines pharmacists could administer to certain age groups.  Whether the nationalization of pharmacy vaccine rules will expire when the “emergency” is lifted is still open to question. Essentially, this is a scheme to spend more taxpayer money and extend nanny state benefits and ratchet up big government control, using the pandemic as the tool. It is both an abuse of power and a cynical exercise in bypassing democracy. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 10/14/22: Bruised And Embarrassed Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

The above is as close as I can get to the approximate predominant color of the bruise that runs from just above my left hip to below the back if my left knee. The thing is about ten inches across at its widest point. Then there’s the swelling, which reminds me of a joke in “City Slickers.” Thanks to everyone who has sent good wishes, both here and off site. I’m just embarrassed and frustrated, while metaphorically kicking myself for not buying that standing desk I was considering a few years ago. Right now, I’m just going to try to catch up a bit…

1. Apparently the Axis is really  going with the “threat to democracy” narrative. I was watching the News Mix channel on DirectTV. Fox News is nestled between CNN and MSNBC, so you can watch all three channels at once. In the time that Fox was covering rising crime rates (and WaWa pulling stores from Philadelphia after a mob ransacked one outlet), police officers getting shot, the latest inflation numbers, the border mess, and the Justice Dept. being sued to force an explanation for why it allowed illegal protests in front of SCOTUS justices’ homes, the other two networks never budged from reports on the Jan. 6 Star Chamber, backed by films of the riot that occurred 21 months ago. News! Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias… Continue reading →

The Return Of David Leavitt, Ethics Villain [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Actually, when we first heard of David Leavitt, a gaming writer with delusions of grandeur, the Ethics Alarms verdict was not that he was an ethics villain, because the particular misconduct that sparked that 2020 post wasn’t quite dastardly enough (or maybe I was in a charitable mood). That was after he had found a mislabeled electric toothbrush (priced at $0.01 rather than $100) at Target, and when the checkout employee refused to sell the item at what was obviously an erroneous price and the store manager backed up the clerk, David went on a full-bore campaign of vengeance on Target.

“This [Target] manager Tori is not honoring the price of their items per Massachusetts law,” tweeted Leavitt, including the young manager’s photo. He called the police on the manager, and said he was prepared to take her and the store to court. Recognizing an ethically-dead progressive determined to harass evil corporations, disgusted observers started a GoFundMe page that raised $28,000 to cover the victimized manager’s inconvenience. The law Leavitt cited but never bothered to check in fact says that an obvious pricing error, one that qualifies as “gross,” isn’t enforceable. I wrote in part:

Leavitt is being an asshole, in technical terms. He knows the price posted was a mistake. A decent, fair, rational citizen would accept that, alert the store that it needs to fix the label, and stop at that. Maybe such a citizen will get some kind a reward from the store (this once happened to me). Instead, this epic jerk goes, in the immortal words of Marsellus Wallace in “Pulp Fiction,” “Medieval on Target’s ass,” and its poor manager too. His rationalization for his appalling behavior, and this is rich, is that he can’t afford to go to the dentist, so, presumably, he believes this entitles him to steal an electric toothbrush from Target…

I also wrote that I almost felt sorry for David because he had made a national fool of himself. I don’t feel sorry for him after his latest example of ethics rot. He obviously learned nothing, and indeed has decided to step a notch, several, in fact, from asshole to Ethics Villain.

Continue reading →

Emergency Open Forum! (Injured Ethicist Edition)

/ Jack Marshall / 64 Comments

I really hate to do this, because there is a lot to write about, but I’m going to have to open up the blog to reader commentary early this week. I took a nasty fall in a (poorly lit, dangerous) hospital parking lot two days ago, and now have a bruise the approximate size of South Dakota in my sitting area, bowling ball-level swelling, and skinned fingers on both hands. In order of painfulness, I’d rank them sitting, bending over (I had to get my son to tie my shoes), getting into the car, lying down, walking and typing. Standing still isn’t too bad. Plus I’m commuting back and forth to that hospital.

I hope I can figure out a way to get out some posts—you would not believe how long this pathetic entry took and how many times I had to re-arrange the pillows.

The Times Asks: “Is There a Future for Late-Night Talk Shows?” Ethics Alarms Asks: “Is There A Future For News Media That Has Been Made This Stupid By Bias?”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The New York Times John Koblin and Benjamin Mullin apply all of their skill and experience to examine the apparent phenomenon of late night talk shows facing massive changes, and perhaps even extinction. “[A]s streaming has ascended, and network TV audiences and advertising revenue has dwindled, worries that late-night shows could be the latest genre affected by sweeping change are hitting virtually every corner of the entertainment world,” they write.

What’s going on here? Well, these career-long TV analysts conclude,  viewers no longer have a “deep bond” to single late night hosts. Ratings have been sinking because of streaming, and so many alternative options for late night viewing. The cost to produce some late-night shows”is no longer feasible in an era of sinking ratings.”Late-night shows have also struggled to make the transition to streaming video, another consideration weighing on executives,” we are told, in part because “the topical opening monologue, a staple of the genre, has virtually no shelf life in streaming libraries.” Current  late-night network hosts “don’t seem to want a lifetime appointment” unlike their predecessors like Johnny Carson, jay Leno and Letterman. “I think the Carson playbook of 40 years talking to celebrities is probably a thing of the past,” a former late night producer told the Times.

Is that it? I guess so: this long examination of factors and trens couldn’t find any other reason for the genre’s decline.

Funny…the reason I haven’t watched a late night talk show in almost eight years must be unusual: these media reporters don’t detect it. Funnier still, a substantial percentage of the readers who commented on the story seem to see the main reason for the rejection of such talks shows—the same reason I have—very clearly.

A sampling: Continue reading →

Columbus Day Ethics Voyage, 2022: What The Heck Did Chris Get Us Into?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Thoughts...

  • That Columbus sketch was recorded in 1961. Was Stan Freberg ahead of his time , or what?
  • Boy, Paul Fries did a great Orson Welles impression!
  • Ethics Alarms has blown hot and cold on Columbus Day; you can read (or reread) the negative take from nine years ago here. Still, he was a brave man and a visionary, and attention must be paid.
  • And yet in the daily feature “This Day in History” for today, Columbus isn’t mentioned, perhaps because the “New World” was sighted on October 11. The stupid Monday holiday rule makes no sense when it is linked to an actual event with an established date. Columbus’s big moment at least deserves the right date.

1. Elon Musk can’t take over soon enough for me. Twitter, right on cue, proved its totalitarian inclinations by banning this tweet on the pretense that it was “misinformation”:

It wasn’t misinformation, just information that upsets a progressive, vaccine Nazi narrative. Eventually Twitter was shamed into reinstating the announcement, but it doesn’t matter: again, this is signature significance. A trustworthy platform doesn’t do this, not even once. Prof. Turley on his blog was astute enough to remind us that years ago, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal was asked how Twitter would balance its efforts to combat misinformation with wanting to “protect free speech as a core value” and to respect the First Amendment. He responded that the company is “not to be bound by the First Amendment” and will regulate content as “reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.” Agrawal said the company would “focus less on thinking about free speech” because “speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.” Got it. [Pointer: Steve Witherspoon]

Continue reading →

What’s The Ethical Response To Totalitarian Big Tech Companies Like PayPal?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

PayPal added a new term of service to its fine print stating that on November 3, a user will incur a fine of $2,500 when any of the 429 million of them dare to express what the Dark, Woke Lords of PayPal deem to be “misinformation.” You know, by now, how that goes.

This deservedly caused what the media likes to call a”firestorm of protest,” so the mega-company quickly said they didn’t mean it, and that it was all due to an innocent mistake—you know, like by a pimply-faced intern who somehow was allowed to craft the new Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). Who believes that? There’s a Nigerian Prince I want to introduce them to.

If the company was that careless and incompetent, then nobody should trust them. If they intended the levy fines for WrongThink, then nobody should trust them. If they have such contempt for the public that they would float a lie like that and expect anyone to buy it, then nobody should trust them.

Conclusion: PayPal can’t be trusted.

Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On Biden’s Mass Marijuana Pardon

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The pardon is irresponsible, cynical and unethical. It is also transparent: like the college loan forgiveness stunt (which is unconstitutional and a good bet to be knocked down), this is another sop to the Democratic base showing that Biden is keeping his promises made on the 2020 campaign trail. If it does serious damage to the Rule of Law, society, cultural ethics and developing young brains, hey, it’s worth it. Maybe getting more pot-heads to vote will keep the Democrats in power.

The pardon certainly doesn’t reflect any deeply-held convictions by the President, who doesn’t have such convictions. (This is a man who, please note, says he is a devout Roman Catholic who believes that the unborn are human lives from conception, but who champions abortion.) Biden opposed pot legalization until he became the Democratic nominee for president in 2020. Integrity? What’s integrity?

The pardon is guaranteed to lead to an increase in crime. The people with federal convictions for marijuana possession who Biden pardoned broke the law because they felt like it. They don’t respect the law, and Biden’s move endorses that disrespect. Such law-breakers will break other laws, and probably have.

Continue reading →