“Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias” is a tag here, representing the sarcastic like EA uses periodically to mock the stubborn gaslighters who insist against overwhelming evidence that we have a benign, honest, objective journalistic establishment when we do not, much to the nation’s despond. Sometimes the metaphorical smoking guns are more choking than others. (One of the reasons I will not be watching tonight’s “debate” is because I fully expect the smoke to be especially thick.)
“Not a Lawyer” has been banned. Don’t reply to any of his comments if he tries to sneak one in.
After arguing relentlessly, snottily and obnoxiously about what is a justified impeachment, this guy revealed in his last post—and by that I do mean last— that he doesn’t even know what an impeachment is, writing that “no Presidents have been impeached.”
Hell, I knew about that common misconception by the historically and constitutionally ignorant when I started giving my U.S. Presidents presentation in Miss Barrett’s fifth grade class at the age of 9. Since the House has impeached Presidents three times since 1996, there is no excuse for a responsible, educated citizen not to know that an impeachment is like an indictment, and no President has been found guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” though Johnson survived by one vote in the Senate, and Nixon would have certainly been convicted. There is even less excuse for someone so uniformed to come here and argue with me about what’s an ethical impeachment. Yeah, I’m ticked off.
Believe it or not, my time is valuable. If you’re going to argue, do your homework, which at a bare minimum means knowing the basics of what you’re arguing about.
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UPDATE: Not a Lawyer has been reinstated, as you can see in the comments below.
I am taking his explanation as sincere, and since he is Not a Lawyer, I have some confidence that he’s not just skillfully writing what he thinks will be be persuasive. I’ve reversed bans before, but not often, because the vast majority of those exiled react like the recently banned commenter who replied, “Fuck you, you Trump supporting fascist!”” Welcome home, Not a Lawyer. Your slate is clean.
All of the below, from his web newsletter “The Silver Bulletin,” in which Silver reveals what his current system of handicapping elections currently foretells regarding the 2024 election. Nate is supposed to be part of the Left’s pro-Democrat, pro-progressive, pro-Biden propaganda machine, so his usual allies are furious with him for “following the science. He writes in part, explaining the results above,
Unlike a lot of the biases in this series, I know this bias is irrational, neighborly and unfair. However, I just can’t shake it. My first instinct, always, when I hear a knock on the door (I disconnected the door bell long ago when it kept going off on its own) is some mixture of anger, annoyance, and dread.
The bias became full blown when a large female Alzheimer patient startled Grace and I awake one morning shortly after we were married by banging on our front door while roaring angry gibberish. It turned out she had wandered off from a facility and thought she lived here. Four police officers had a hard time corralling her. Long before that, though, my mother had poisoned me against the whole concept of surprise visitors: she distrusted them. Then there was that mentally ill guy with an old Weimeraner on a leash who would knock on our door in Arlington, Mass. still thinking he was an air raid warden and that it was World War II. I remember that he had clear blue eyes, dead eyes, like a zombie. This was before I had ever encountered Jehovah’s Witnesses, kids selling magazines to pay for a trip to Disney World, and Comcast salesmen.
And before I had watched so many home-invasion movies.
If I had the time and inclination, I could locate dozens of trenchant quotes from Orwell and others making the same crucial point: fear is the enemy of liberty, and that aspiring dictators recognize that a population in fear of its safety will inevitably bargain away the freedoms and the autonomy of themselves and others. “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery” was the way Thomas Jefferson put it, although usually in Latin. The idea behind America and its crucial unique rebellious character was that as a people we are worthy of democracy because we have the guts and fortitude to resist the siren song of peaceful security. Hence Ben Franklin’s much-quoted, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” FDR, clever and cynical, inveighed against the dangers of fear (“We have nothing to fear but fear itself!”) even as he made brilliant use of fear to make himself the nearest thing to a dictator the U.S. has ever had.
The progressives who visit Ethics Alarms freaked out yesterday over a post in which I referenced the current mutated U.S. Left’s increasingly blatant drift toward totalitarianism…you know,
There was more traffic on that post than there has been on any post here not linked by some mega-site like “Instapundit.” The truth hurts. Ironically, I just stumbled upon an example of our now thoroughly corrupted scientific establishment wielding the tactic of fearmongering by the device of arguing that the public is denying the truth, with the truth being, “EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE! THE WORST EVER! WE’RE DOOMED IF THE SMART PEOPLE DON’T RESCUE US! FAST!“
Well, some, anyway…
Jamaal Bowman (that’s him caught on video setting off a false fire alarm to halt a House vote) lost the House District 16 primary in New York to a veteran Democrat who knows the difference between a fire alarm and and a door. The average IQ of the House just went up several points. The assumption is that it was his aggressive support for Gaza and Hamas against Israel that sunk him; if so, his loss is an example of voters doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. The man is ignorant, dishonest, and dumb as a shingle.
To temper one’s joy at this development, I must note that Lauren Boebert, one of the more embarrassing members of the House from the other side of the aisle, won her primary in Colorado’s 4th District.
Meanwhile, in the special hypocrisy category, John Avlon won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. House in New York’s 1st Congressional District. Avlon, a former CNN commentator and a columnist for The Daily Beast for years, was an early target of Ethics Alarms for his promotion of a “No Labels” movement, which was really a “Democrats who want to pretend they aren’t partisan who use labels like ‘wingnuts’ against conservatives while accusing them of engaging in name-calling.” He’s a phony, but, to look on the bright side, he’s smarter than Boebert and Bowman would be if you soldered their two brains together. And, true to form, he was happy to take the label of “Democrat,” when it suited his purposes, not that his “No Labels” posturing fooled anyone.
Sorett has revealed himself to be the most despicable, incompetent and untrustworthy leader of a prestigious U.S. college, an astounding achievement when you consider the competition.
Silly me, I thought the original story was as bad as it could get. How wrong I was. To recap this post, during a Columbia panel on the campus’s anti-Semitism, Sorett, the Dean of Columbia College, exchanged mocking and derisive texts about the panelists statements about how the pro-Hamas protesters had poisoned the educational environment for Jewish students with the vice dean and chief administrative officer of the college, the dean of undergraduate student life; and the associate dean for student and family support. Unfortunately for all of them, another attendee behind one of the texters took incriminating snap shots of the cell phone screen that revealed the dismissive texts.
After being busted, Sorett tried the Pazuzu Excuse (‘what I said or did wasn’t really me!’) which is bad enough, but “the rest of the story” is worse. This creep fuzzed over the fact that he was part of the texting orgy in his original statement after the texts were revealed, and then put the other three administrators on leave! Nice. The least he could have done was show some solidarity with his fellow anti-Semites and suspend himself. As the highest ranking member of the gossip group, a strong argument can be made that he ratified and enabled the offensive discussion. In fact, I’ll make it: he was more accountable than the three administrators he punished.
Why would TIME magazine print such self-evident junk? Oh, I know, I know…it’s about dogs and cats, so it is guaranteed clickbait, she’s written a book, so she must be an “expert” and if you can’t believe an ethicist, who can you believe? “The Case Against Pets” is intellectually dishonest, silly, and violates the Ethics Alarms principle that advocating an impossible course of action is unethical no matter how wonderful it would be if it could happen. (My favorite: pacifism.)
The author is Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist and the author of several books, including the one this thing is obviously meant to hype, “A Dog’s World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World without Humans.” Boy, talk about a title signaling a dumb book! Next up: “Imagining the Lives of Dogs If They Could Graduate From Law School.”
Has this woman actually ever owned a dog? She says she has pets: I’m betting that it’s a hissing cockroach. Here are some of her assertions:
The betting is that te retired Madison, Wis. law professor and longtime bloggress will still vote for Biden and the Democrats—like Bill Maher, Ann talks a good neutrality game, but always seems to come home again—but still, her observations are frequently spot-on.
This morning she notes that “the top-rated comment — by a lot — at “A.I. Is Getting Better Fast. Can You Tell What’s Real Now?” is..
“Passing AI images off as real ones for the sake of commercial or political gain should be prosecuted as fraud.The severity of the penalties should match the level of risk that disseminating these images poses to our society; i.e., they should be extreme.”
Ann adds, “How terribly punitive and repressive, and yet, isn’t it what you’ve come to expect from the segment of America that reads the New York Times?Notice the aggression mixed with passivity. The comment-writer doesn’t want to face the challenge of becoming more perceptive and skeptical dealing with the onslaught of A.I. images. They want the government to do the dirty work and do it good and hard.”
The short answer is that I don’t feel like cleaning up all the brains, blood and bone after multiple head-explosions. The long answer follows.
The fact that a Presidential election (Is it “the most important Presidential election” ever? This has been claimed about almost every election I can remember, and I remember all of them since I was 10 years old. The Chicken Little Principle applies. Maybe it is, but the whole concept has been abused) is really and truly going forward with these two epically bad candidates as the public’s only serious alternatives represents a catastrophic failure of our system on many levels. This is not a good sign. We could not reach such a dire point if both parties, the public, our institutions, culture and values had not fallen apart in chunks. For me, watching the debate would feel like watching a bloody car crash involving close friends and relatives, except in their car seats instead, without seat belts, will be the United States of America.
Ethics Alarms 