U.S. Society

On Polls, Biden, Britney Spears, And”Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Note #71, 546

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Back when he was the lone moderate voice on Mediaite, Joe Concha had a brief set-to with Ethics Alarms that concluded with him writing some nice things about us. I hope he still checks in now and then. Concha’s with The Hill now, and one of the journalists who is fair to all sides while acknowledging his profession’s progressive rot.

In related but completely predictable news, the latest Rasmussen Report’s weekly White House Watch shows the President trailing Biden 44% to 47%, nearly within the margin of error, making up more than half of the alleged ten point deficit the same poll showed a little over a week ago.  The significance of this is not the numbers. As I keep pointing out, polls are generally unreliable, polls this far from a Presidential are especially unreliable, and polls involving President Trump and  phantom candidate Joe Biden are about as unreliable as polls can be.

Moreover, the news media has been using polls to demoralize Trump supporters, not to mention foes of open borders, speech suppression, racial and gender quotas, slavery reparations, presumption of guilt for males accused of sexual assault, government sanctioned riots, police defunding, drug legalization, the Green New Deal, manipulative news media, gun confiscation, airbrushing history, denigrating America, partisan coups, totalitarianism—you know, what the Far Left has pushed the Democratic Party into supporting, or at least pretending to. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 7/16/2020: Dreadlocks, Kareem, Scrabble And “Political Slogan? What Political Slogan?”

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

1. This Morning’s Grovel: A white Seattle hairdresser apologized profusely for daring to wear dreadlocks. The key quote: “I have come to understand—far too belatedly—that my hairstyle is harmful.”

To lightly paraphrase Orwell: ‘She loved Big Brother.’

It’s hard to work up any sympathy for people like Irene—weak, ignorant, unwilling to stand up for basic  human rights, like being able to wear your hair any damn way you want to. This is yet another of the one-way “rules” that are being delivered by edict as an alleged remedy for “systemic racism”: Blacks can do anything they want to, whites are severely limited. The hair rules: black women can straighten their hair, dye it blonde, adopt any style the choose as a method of self expression, but a white woman who chooses dreadlocks has “harmful hair.”

Those who won’t stand up for their own liberties deserve to lose them. Irene is a fool, and betraying the values of her country. Continue reading →

KABOOM! Anti-White Stereotyping At The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

Now this  is res ipsa loquitur.

My head exploded when I saw what you will see below, so you are warned. The racist chart  is from the anti-white section of  the  Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture’s  web page.

The page and its agitprop are also anti-black: hard work, punctuality, believing in cause and effect, “rational thinking,” respect for authority, and civility  are all manifestations of “whiteness”, according to the museum. Writes Rod Dreher, obviously post head-explosion…

Did David Duke write this stuff? It’s crazy! If a white man said that black people are lazy, can’t keep to a schedule, have no respect for authority, can’t think straight, are rude, etc. — he would be rightly criticized as racist. But there it is, at the taxpayer-funded National Museum of African American History and Culture. Why? Why do we pay for this racist propaganda? …

The museum teaches black people that being on time for work is racist oppression. Don’t believe me? Look. … I can’t get over this. If you assume that everything these curators say below is true, then you can explain a great deal of the chronic problems within black America. What kind of neighborhood would you expect to have if most of the people in it devalued hard work, rejected the idea that they needed to be on time, refused to defer gratification, did not respect authority, sought out conflict, laughed at politeness, rejected the traditional family model, and so forth? You’d have communities that were beset by crime and generational poverty, without the cultural tools to overcome the chaos. There are plenty of white people in this country who live by similar rules — and they’re chronically poor too.

Hold on to your skull! Here is the chart: Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Quote Of The Day: Roger Kimball”

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I held back a bit on Glenn Logan’s Comment of the Day, because it depressed me, and also because I assume some will argue that it is less about ethics than politics. But the condition Glenn is diagnosing is the direct outgrowth of what Ethics Alarms tagged long ago as the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, and it’s all about ethics, or rather the lack of them.

Here is Glenn Logan’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Quote Of The Day: Roger Kimball”:

Roger Simon said:

And just about now, a great chasm is opening up. The choice, they see, is not so much between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. It is between the America they love—that Donald Trump celebrates—and the out-of-control forces of anti-American hatred that, though he does not understand them, Joe Biden manages to blink and nod and gibber around.

I find this far too simplistic to be truly useful, even though it is powerfully argued. This piece reminds me of a quote by Hannibal Lechter in Silence Of The Lambs:

First principles, Clarice. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature?

So what is the nature of the “particular thing” the Left seeks? Donald Trump’s defeat is the simple answer, facile and, in some ways, honest. But that’s just a manifestation of what the Left wants, and the conclusion it hopes we’ll all reach.

The Left has always been of the opinion that every election that does not produce the result they demand is illegitimate. Even if Trump carries every state but the deepest blue, they will still have that opinion, which indicates that they really don’t care who the GOP puts forth in nomination — unless a Democrat wins, the election will be considered illegitimate and the president a fraud.

Fundamentally, the Left doesn’t even accept the liberals in the country, because most liberals are not calling for massive structural change. That’s why you see so many nominally “on the Left” get “canceled” on social media — because they aren’t “woke” enough. Biden himself would be a victim if he were still in a primary with Sanders or, especially, with Corey Booker or Camella Harris. As it is, he’s just a useful idiot whom the Left hopes to use to capture power, then remove and replace with a more useful idiot. Biden is going to be spending all his time proving he doesn’t deserve replacement.

The nature of this “particular thing” is not about Trump — Trump is its public face, its boogeyman. The “particular thing” into which Simon purports to inquire is far larger than one man. Instead, it is doubtless the entire U.S. system of government and elections. The Left would like to cancel large swaths of government, such is ICE, the FBI, the CIA, and even the military and replace it with organs of social change, indoctrination, and retribution against those who oppose it. Continue reading →

Regarding “Athlete A”….[Corrected!]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“Athlete A,” the Netflix documentary that tells the awful story of USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar’s decades of sexually abusing young female gymnasts—perhaps as many as 500 of them—, how he was allowed to continue his crimes after complaints from parents and others, and the young women who finally sent him to prison with their testimony, is both disturbing and depressing. I watched it last night with my wife, who was horrified that she didn’t know the Nassar story.

Ethics Alarms wasn’t as much help as it should have been. Its first full post about the scandal was this one, which, in grand Ethics Alarms tradition, slammed the ethics of the judge who sentenced Nasser to 60 years in prison, essentially a “Stop making me defend Dr. Nasser!” post. I’ll stand by that post forever, but it didn’t help readers who are link averse to know the full extent of Nasser’s sick hobby of plunging his fingers and hands into the vaginas and anuses of trusting young girls while telling them that it was “therapy.”

The second full post, in August of last year,  was more informative regarding Nasser, but again, it was about the aftermath of his crimes, not the crimes themselves. That post  focused on the the Senate hearings following the July 30 release of the report of an 18-month Senate investigation  that found that the U.S. Olympic Committee and others failed to protect young female athletes from Nasser’s probing hands, detailing “widespread failure by the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (the “Committee”) and other institutions to keep athletes safe.”  Then there was this: Continue reading →

Guest Post: Who Are The Greatest Americans?

/ Jack Marshall / 104 Comments

by Valkygrrl

[Introduction: Ethics Alarms opined that the President’s proposed “Garden of American Heroes” was badly conceived, and his initial nominations for inclusion proved the point. Mercurial commenter Valkygrrl  took the initiative to devise a process for Ethics Alarms readers to compile a better list, and also to organize the results, which I found fascinating. Any further reactions will be confined to the comments.]

The Rules:

1: No presidents, always some controversy, we have other ways of honoring them.
2: Any person who held office must be chosen for something they did outside of said office, no honoring for using the mechanisms of the state no matter how beneficial to society.
3: No Confederates (obvious divisiveness.)
4: You may have only one living person on your list.
5: Your list must be made in good faith. You may not choose anyone you believe will upset or anger me; no “owning the libs”. Honest mistakes accepted.
6: Do not remove someone from your list because they were mentioned by someone else. I want to see if we can find some consensus. That means people Trump or Jack mentioned are allowed.

Here’s the list of nominees as submitted by participants (editorial descriptions mine);

Marian Anderson: Singer, Civil rights activist, Medal of Freedom recipient.

Neil Armstrong: Aviator, Astronaut, First human to set foot on Luna

Isaac Asimov: Teacher, Author of the Foundation series; Seven-time Hugo Award winner (Plus one Retro-Hugo awarded in 2016), Democratic party activist, serial sexual harasser

Irving Berlin: Composer of famous patriotic music

John Brown: Hero, undaunted, true and brave, And Kansas knows his valor when he fought her rights to save; Now, tho the grass grows green above his grave. Popular legend holds that his soul continues to march.

John Moses Browning: Industrialist, Firearms designer.

George Carlin: Humorist, Mentor to time-traveling Gen-Xers.

Andrew Carnegie: Industrialist, Philanthropist, Union buster.

Joshua L. Chamberlain: Union General, Medal of Honor recipient.

Meriwether Lewis  and  William Clark: Explorers, Naturalists. Two very different people presumably nominated for a single achievement alone. Clark was a bit of a bastard.

Samuel Colt: Firearms manufacturer, used assembly line principals before Henry Ford.

Clarence Darrow : Country lawyer, Civil libertarian, Attention whore, Cigar aficionado. Continue reading →

Monday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 7/13/2020: “Hail To The Thingamajiggies!” Edition [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

How.

1. When late is worse than never. Reports say that the Washington Redskins will officially announce that they are changing their name, to what nobody knows, not even them. The team’s obnoxious owner, Dan Snyder, who has run the once cultishly popular and successful NFL franchise into the ground during his incompetent stewardship, had memorably said that he would never change the controversial team name, unquestionably the most politically incorrect in all of sports. That pledge did not anticipate his league going nuts and supine before the George Floyd Freakout, to the point that there may be mandatory kneeling by the time the 2020 season opens.

The attack on the Redskins name was always about power, as has been the decades-long assault on all team nicknames with ethnic references. Survey after survey has shown that the vast majority of Native Americans don’t care; the idea is to bring corporate interests to heel, and then aim at the next, more substantive objective. The competent way for a team to handle this problem is to quietly retire a problematic name like “Redskins” (or a anachronistically provocative logo like the Cleveland Indians’ Chief Wahoo) when the heat is off, making it clear that the change is volitional and not compelled. Then the social justice mob members can’t puff out their little pigeon chests with pride and think “I did this! What’s the next target?”

I don’t care what the D.C. team’s name is. I do care about dishonest and illogical arguments, which is what have been mounted against this name for as long as I can remember. That’s why the Redskins and related matters have so often been a topic here.

I did laugh yesterday when I read a comment predicting that Snyder would announce that the new name would be “the Washington Murderous Savages”… Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Day: Roger Kimball

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

“Everything that is happening between now and November 3 is about November 3. But the fundamental choice is not really Donald Trump or Joe Biden. It is civilization and America on one side, anarchy and woke tyranny on the other.”

Critic and New Criterion publisher Roger Kimball

I detest the habit of so many of my Facebook friends, posting daily the published opinions of pundits–Paul Krugman, Eugene Robinson, George Conway, et al.—in an unending appeal to authority. Usually they have barely thought about the topic at hand at all (often, neither have the authors of the pieces they are circulating); literally, the process saves them the trouble of thinking at all.  When I challenge these opinions by proxy, what comes back more often than not is an attack on an imaginary authority that I must be channeling rather than the substance of my argument. They do this because they can only relay the opinions of others which can be used as passports to a position of favor on their bubble-dwelling “team.” That’s not what I do.

Occasionally, however, an analyst independently comes so close to cloning my conclusions on a topic and does such a superb job expressing them that I cannot do better than pointing readers his way.

Roger Kimball’s article in American Thinker contains many powerful statements. Here’s another: Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Unethical Website Of The Month: Etsy”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Commenter Benjamin has a supple metaphorical pen, and this Comment of the Day, on the previous post regarding the open market platform Etsy selling facemasks as porous as cheesecloth is a blast. I’ll be back at the end to explain why it’s also a crock, but for the nonce, here is Benjamin’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Unethical Website Of The Month: Etsy”:

I oppose that modern compulsion to demand oversight of every man, woman, and child which blames every proximate business or municipality for every loophole it can find not as though a new opportunity has been found but as though this was malfeasance not to have thought to cover every possible route of escape. Etsy likely sees itself as a platform for individual sellers who found a way out of their over-managed corporate bureaucracies, not as an over-managing corporate employers of every seller on its platform. I applaud this model, knowing that other one from the inside with no realistic hope of escape. I could imagine an argument that Etsy must become this wretched, undesirable other thing which creeps throughout the world looking for life and happiness to strangle, but arguments from the presumption that it already is that thing are arguments from an untrue premise. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Prof. Jonathan Turley

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“The sordid history of White House pardons makes this commutation look positively chaste in comparison.”

—-George Washington University Law School Professor Jonathan Turley, responding to the wildly exaggerated indignation of pundits and Democrats over President Trump’s commutation of Roger Stone’s sentence.

Turley, who is always courtly and, for my tastes, excessively restrained even when pulling apart the most irresponsible positions, was clearly irritated by CNN’s legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, a grand hack, who declared that the commutation was “the most corrupt and cronyistic act in perhaps all of recent history” (“cronyistic”?) and  Senator Mitt Romney’s characterization of it as “unprecedented, historic corruption.”

Turley took to The Hill to give Toobin, who should know better, and Romney, who was just exercising his Trump-bashing muscles without concern for such trivialities as facts, a lesson in American Presidential history, saving me the time and trouble: Continue reading →