U.S. Society

Ethics Quiz: The Brainwashed Democrat Friend

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

I have an old friend from my theater days who is, within his sphere, smart, knowledgeable and impressive. He is also as nice a guy as you could possibly meet. He sends me cards for no reason at all. He says expansively nice things about me on social media.

Yesterday, I saw this post by him on my Facebook feed:

“I’m so happy to see the momentum building for Kamala Harris. She’s overtaking Trump. And I hope this trend continues. She’s running a great campaign. She gives me hope for the future. And she’ll have a great team with her when she’s President. Trump’s racism, misogyny, narcissism, compulsive lying, and utter lack of character disqualify him. I suspect that in the coming months he’ll continue saying crazier and crazier things. And he won’t win new supporters that way.”

Your Ethics Quiz for the opening of the Democratic National Convention, which I’m sure would explode my head continuously if I were foolish enough to watch it which I am NOT, is….

What is the ethical response one can make, if any, to a good friend who innocently posts something so unequivocally ignorant and stupid?

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From the Toxic Popular Culture Files: Smalls Cat Food

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

J.D. Vance’s much maligned “cat ladies” snark , like many furiously slammed comments by conservatives and Republicans are, may have focused attention on to a societal trend seriously threatening the health of American society. (If only he could have articulated it better.)

Lately I have been bombarded with TV ads for Smalls cat food. The promotions and commercials claim that it is “human grade” cat food, and why not, since the TV spots feature disturbed individuals male and female, not just proclaiming these animal companions as their surrogates for children, but literally stating that they are children. “He’s my son,” a young woman says in one ad, speaking of her cat. “She’s literally my baby!” says some guy, also talking about a feline “fur-baby.” Literally!

This would be funny in a mordant way if it were not so ominous. I can’t blame cat food companies for taking advantage of the apocalyptic collision of progressive anti-family attitudes in the U.S. and pet mania: so many people do come to regard a dog or a cat as cheaper, more predictable, less demanding equivalent of a child. What is disturbing about the Smalls commercials is that they represent this mindset as healthy and normal.

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Note To CNN’s Race-Baiters: There Are So, So Many Reasons Not To Respect Kamala Harris…Stop Attributing It To Her Race

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

A conclave of fools, knaves and ethics dunces on a CNN panel illustrated how Democrats and the news media are going to try to elect Kamala Harris: keep the conversation entirely on vilifying her opposition and concentrating on irrelevant trivia…like how to pronounce her name.

It serves CNN’s purposes to feature the worst and the dimmest of Republicans whenever possible: this time its choice was Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina. She’s on my list of 25 most embarrassing members of Congress. Mace either set out to troll professional race-baiter Vanderbilt University professor Michael Eric Dyson by intentionally mispronouncing Kamala Harris’s first name or got confused; first she said the name correctly (with the accent on the first syllable), then reversed herself and said it the way that apparently drives the woke crazy, with the accent on the second syllable. (I sometimes forget which is the right way myself—luckily I’m usually typing her name rather than saying it). Democratic strategist Keith Boykin corrected her, and Mace defiantly said, “I will say Kamala’s name any way that I want to.”

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Unethical Quote of the Week: A Random Democrat Washington Post Reader

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“Sick and tired of all this nonsense. She is a Democrat and will govern like a Democrat and that is good enough for me. Some polices will be a little too far left for a few and some will be a little too centrist for others, but you can guarantee that she will uphold democratic norms and try and govern to make the lives of ALL Americans better, whilst behaving with the decency becoming of the office. Everything else is just window dressing and noise.”

—A highly rated comment on the Washington Post article, “Harris’s policies have shifted and are still taking shape”.

I was torn whether to include the Post reader’s name or not. It’s public, so I could justify it, and I have focused on unethical commenters elsewhere before while using their names. This time, I decided that the individual doesn’t matter. It’s the message; it obviously is how lots of (unethical, ignorant, foolish) people think, and that’s what matters.

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From the “NOW You Tell Me?” Files: Another Research “Oopsie!

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Here we have another one of these stories that should be waved obnoxiously in anyone’s face who lectures you about blindly “following the science.”

For decades—really as long as I can remember—researchers have been telling us that moderate consumption of alcohol was not just safe but in fact beneficial. This wonderful news was welcomed by those who “needed a drink” after a hard day, or self-medicated with a glass of wine (or good scotch) before bedtime, or who tended to have just a bit more than a moderate amount of alcohol now, then, or frequently, but who’s counting?

Along comes a report from the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, that appeared a week ago in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs published by the Center of Alcohol & Substance Use Studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey. It announced, in essence, “Oopsie! All of us trained scientific researchers made just a teeny mistake in our previous studies on this topic, repeatedly, over and over, and for half a century or more!”

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Verdict: The Democratic Party Is The Party That Cheats

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

But you knew that, didn’t you?

Besides, they are only cheating to protect democracy, and the ends justify any means necessary. Right?

Those strategically labelled news clips above are part of a Harris campaign scheme outed by Axios, which has its moments of real journalism. It revealed that the Harris campaign has been editing news headlines and descriptions in Google Search ads making it appear as if the Guardian, Reuters, CBS News, The Independent UK, NPR, Associated Press, USA Today, PBS, CNN, Time and others,including local outlets like North Dakota radio station WDAY Radio are even more openly pro-Harris than they are. The ads include links to articles from the news outlets, but the headlines and supporting text have been altered to read as though the articles support the Harris and the Democrats overtly. An ad that ran alongside an article from The Guardian, for example, links to “VP Harris Fights Abortion Bans – Harris Defends Repro Freedom” and but adds supporting text underneath the headline that reads, “VP Harris is a champion for reproductive freedom and will stop Trump’s abortion bans.”

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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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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 / 64 Comments

That’s the interview above. I haven’t had time to listen to it; it doesn’t matter what was said. It’s an unscripted, spontaneous conversation with one of the two major Presidential candidates. No one who understands elections and who believes in democracy should have any objection to it, fear it, or find its existence threatening in any way. And yet…here is the Harris-Walz campaign’s reaction:

Later, we got this:

Is there any way to excuse or justify such reactions? That is a rhetorical question: there is not. Continue reading →

Quickie From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Why You Can’t Trust The Daily Mail…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

See that headline? See the bullet point right under it? I have a hard time believing that illegal immigrants will cost the Bay State 1.8 billion dollars over two years, but 1.8 trillion dollars is like something Joe Biden would say. It’s obviously impossible.

Yet that throbbing typo has been on the web site for two full days. Nobody noticed? Does nobody on the staff read their own website? No readers were sharp enough to pick up on such a flagrant error?

Amazing. My high school newspaper (The Arlington High School Chronicle) was more professional.

Do not trust the Daily Mail.

J.D. Vance Demonstrates the Ethical Remedy For Partisan Media Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

J. D. Vance made the rounds of the Sunday morning TV shows, and neatly demonstrated why he will be an asset to the Republican ticket in the exchange above with CNN’s biased dim bulb Dana Bash.

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