“The Bulwark’s” Contorted, Self-Indicting Defense Of The Mainstream Media

November 17, 2021 / Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

One reason Ethics Alarms highlighted Andrew Sullivan’s late-to-the-party sounding of his own alarm against the near total corruption of the mainstream media with Left-leaning bias—it was a bit like shouting “Fire!” in a theater that was already burned to the ground—was that I was curious to see if the mainstream media’s defenders would try to counter it. It can’t be countered honestly, you see. At this point, it’s like denying that the Earth moves around the Sun, yet denials are still the reflex norm both among journalists and those who appreciate news reporting working so hard to accomplish their obviously virtuous political agendas.

I did not expect “The Bulwark,” of all places, to defend the mainstream media against Sullivan’s statement of the obvious, but upon reflection, I should have. The Bulwark is the retreat site of poor Bill Kristol after he snapped like a a dry twig in a harsh wind and blew up his credibility, reputation and “The Weekly Standard” in a tantrum over am unmannerly and crude commoner like Donald Trump daring to get elected to the Presidency. Supposedly a man of principle and a true believer in conservative principles, neocom Bill declared that he would rather see those who oppose and would liquidate all of those principles to gain power than to tolerate someone so unworthy accomplishing policy objectives that Kristol would have endorsed a short time ago.

This elitist bit of bigotry (duplicated by other NeverTrumpers like George Will) deserves an eventual clinical analysis. Something similar to one was just focused on one-time conservative pundit for the Washington Post Jennifer Rubin over at “The American Thinker,” where Thomas Lifson writes that Rubin “stands out as possibly the most extreme case of Trump Derangement Syndrome among the former conservatives…Her hatred of Trump and the party that now is dominated by him and his supporters is so extreme that she wants the media to stop treating it as a legitimate representative of the roughly half the populace that votes for it.” Kristol’s agents’ at “The Bulwark” hatred is so extreme that it will defend the mainstream media’s constantly distorting the news to make conservatives and Republicans seem illegitimate. Which is worse? A Leftist media deliberately deceiving the public to warp the democratic process, or a conservative publication enabling it because they share a fanatic hatred? It’s a tough call.

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This Republican Maryland Mayor Just Doesn’t Get The Whole “Community Role Model” Thing

November 16, 2021 / Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Cambridge, Maryland Mayor Andrew Bradshaw, the youngest mayor the city ever elected, now faces 50 counts of distributing revenge porn. State prosecutors announced yesterday that Bradshaw used Reddit to distribute intimate photos of a woman with whom he had previously been romantically involved. Prosecutors allege that he used photos of the victim’s face and “intimate parts” on a Reddit created to facilitate degradation and humiliation, and subreddits devoted to sexual “raceplay.” Bradshaw posted racial slurs there.

Maryland’s Revenge Porn Statute, Maryland Criminal Law Article § 3-809, prohibits “the non-consensual distribution of a private visual representation of another which exposes their intimate body parts or displays them engaged in sexual activity, with the intent to harm, harass, intimidate, threaten or coerce the person depicted.”

The woman, called “Victim I” in the charging document (here), did not consent to the use of her photos. She contacted law enforcement in May about the unauthorized posts, and a police investigation led to yesterday’s charges. Bradshaw faces a maximum penalty of two years of incarceration and a $5,000 fine for each count if convicted.

Observations:

This isn’t going to do much for the Maryland GOP’s efforts to make inroads against the Democratic monopoly in the state.
How do people this stupid get elected? I just don’t understand it.
When they do get elected, can’t they control themselves sufficiently not to do something like this?
I suspect Bradshaw’s political career may be stalled for a while.

Tuesday Ethics Exultations, 11/16/2021 (Okay, Not Including The First Part…Or #2. All Right, #4’s Not So Good Either…)

November 16, 2021November 16, 2021 / Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Snoopy dance

This is another banner date in the long history of bad ethics. On November 16, 1532, Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish explorer and conquistador, performed an epic double cross on the trusting emperor of the Incas, Atahualpa. Vastly outnumbered with only 200 soldiers to overcome several thousand Incas, Pizarro set up a feast in Atahualpa’s honor and then opened fire on the unarmed Incan guests. Trapped in tight quarters, ambushed Incan soldiers had no chance. Pizarro’s men slaughtered 5,000 Incans in an hour. Pizarro suffered the only Spanish injury: a cut on his hand. After the massacre, Pizarro captured Atahualpa, forced him to convert to Christianity, and finally had him murdered by strangulation.

On the positive side, the story was the inspiration for a spectacular Broadway hit, “The Royal Hunt of the Sun,” by Peter Shaffer, before he had even bigger successes with “Equus” and “Amadeus.”

What a horrible story.

1. Good. In Connecticut, repulsive right wing conspiracy contagion Alex Jones lost in court again, as a judge granted victory to the families of eight people killed in the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. They had sued the perpetually lying broadcaster and his Infowars media outlet for defamation. I’d say that was fair: Jones had claimed on his show that the attack that killed 20 first graders and six educators was part of a government-led plot to confiscate Americans’ firearms and that the victims’ families were “actors.” How sick and stupid did someone have to be to believe such garbage? Whatever the answer, there were enough of them to harass the families on the street and at events honoring their dead children and threaten them online and in person. The decision, combined with previous rulings in Texas , means that Jones has lost all the defamation lawsuits filed against him by the families.

I would say that Jones is appealing, but that would be misleading. He says he’ll try to get a higher court to reverse the ruling.

2. Not surprisingly…mainstream media flacks and hacks desperate to run interference for Biden and the Democrats have been giving Yoo’s Rationalization, “It isn’t what it is,” a workout. (It’s also called “gaslighting,” “spinning,” or “lying.”) Recent examples:

The reliably awful Brian Stelter of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” implied that the supply chain problem was one more Fox New myth with a mocking tweet showing fully stocked shelves of milk at a supermarket. He really is that arrogant and stupid. This constantly amazes me. Who hired him? Who lets him keep doing this? My son, who is a Nissan auto mechanic, says supply chain problems have crippled his business for months, with direct impact on his income as well as the ability of vehicle owners to get their cars functioning properly.
NBC business correspondent Stephanie Ruhle, meanwhile, shrugged off the near record leap in inflation, saying, “The dirty little secret here … while nobody likes to pay more, on average, we have the money to do so. Household savings hit a record high over the pandemic. … For those who own their homes, the value of our homes are up. And while the stock market isn’t the economy, you’ve got over half of American households with some investment in the markets, [which] have hit record highs.”

Now there’s a rationalization for the ages! If one can scrape up the extra money to pay for something that shouldn’t cost so much, there’s nothing to complain about! Of course, what one now has to pay for X removes assets that one would have had, and was planning on having, to pay for Y. And, reasons Ruhl, as long as well-off, prudent savers who have invested wisely and own their own homes aren’t devastated by an extra dollar or more on the price of key products, who cares about those other losers? After Ruhle got roasted on social media for her elitism, she came back with a lament about “the two Americas.” See? She cares after all!

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And The Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman/ George Floyd/ Kyle Rittenhouse Ethics Train Wreck Rolls On…..

November 16, 2021November 16, 2021 / Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Prosecutor-square

In the tricky practice of ethics train wreck taxonomy, placing the Rittenhouse trial in the proper category is a challenge. Is the Tale of the Gun-toting Teen its own media bias and activist -fueled social and legal disaster, or is it just an extension of another?

I lean toward assigning this fiasco to the latter category, making it just one more extension of the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck, which eventually begat the George Floyd Freakout, which in turn led to the contrived outrage over the police shooting of Jacob Blake that spat out Rittenhouse’s unhelpful improvisation. After all, Martin, Floyd and Blake all were episodes that had nothing to do with race but that were hyped into divisive racial controversies and trials by irresponsible demagogues, protesters, politicians and reporters.

What I especially like about attributing all of this societal wreckage into a single ethics train wreck is that it demonstrates just how disastrous President Obama’s inflammatory comments equating Martin to “his son” were—as Ethics Alarms pointed out at the time. Maybe if the blame is squarely placed at the metaphorical fish head, Presidents will stop shooting off their mouths like that. (President Biden, do recall, falsely called Rittenhouse a white supremacist.)

This is all prelude to pointing out what a projectile vomit debacle yesterday’s closing arguments were. Both the prosecution and the defense stomped all over proper criminal trial practice and professional ethics.

For the prosecution…

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Comment Of The Day: “…Andrew Sullivan Finally Sees Clearly That The News Media Is Completely Corrupt And Untrustworthy”

November 15, 2021 / Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

idiot meme

This latest opus by Steve-O-in NJ probably qualifies as a rant; I picture him furiously scribbling on paper in a trance, as in “automatic writing” when a medium is channeling Jean Dixon from the beyond. But it’s very good and thoughtful rant. I hope I edited it properly. Oh…I should mention that the tweets above echoing the meme Steve mentions at the start surprised me. I really didn’t think those celebrities could possibly be that stupid.

This is Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Well What Do You Know! Andrew Sullivan Finally Sees Clearly That The News Media Is Completely Corrupt And Untrustworthy.”

***

I saw a meme yesterday that kind of says everything about where the mainstream media and the left (but I repeat myself) are coming from now. It had no picture, it simply said “I want to live in a country where Colin Kaepernick is regarded as a hero and Kyle Rittenhouse is regarded as a terrorist.” I bit my tongue and didn’t say what I was thinking: that ostentatious disloyalty doesn’t make you even close to a hero and let’s let a jury decide what Rittenhouse is, because 1. I wasn’t changing the poster’s mind; and 2. The problem was bigger than those specific examples. Anyone who writes or reposts something like that is in effect saying “I want everyone to think like me and agree with me.” The left and the media have been thinking like that since probably the Clinton days. There’s a reason CNN was then called “the Clinton News Network.”

I have to ask, though, why is Andrew Sullivan just getting this now? Oh, that’s right, the right was opposed to a sudden and seismic cultural shift involving one of the basic building blocks of society, and nothing else mattered, it was all about the belief that heterosexual and homosexual couples were exactly the same and should be treated exactly the same. Single-issue voting is short-sighted, single-issue partisanship is just stupid. Like any other bias, it makes the objective inobjective, the wise foolish, the smart stupid, and the truthful liars.

Dutch missionary Andrew van der Bilj, aka “Brother Andrew” and “God’s Smuggler” used to pray “God, you have made blind eyes see, please make seeing eyes blind,” when he crossed the borders into Communist countries, carrying Bibles and other religious literature that would be considered contraband. Bias seems to do a far better job than God ever did blinding people to a lot more than a few Bibles being brought into an atheistic country.

I wrote three years ago,

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 11/15/21: Peloton, Kubuki, Kamala, Detachment, and Anti-White Bigotry Is Hilarious

November 15, 2021November 15, 2021 / Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

November, September, same difference…

Well, yesterday’s “Moby-Dick” reflections were supposed to be the intro to a warm-up that never was; it got too long and ate the post, just like Moby (or Mocha) would have. So here is what was supposed to follow, with a few updates…

1. This was almost an ethics quiz, but I’m pretty certain about the answer. Peloton has blocked users of its website from displaying hashtags reading “Let’s go Brandon” in their personal profiles.The company says the phrase violates their guidelines. The question is, does it? “Hateful, offensive, or obscene speech is strictly forbidden on the Peloton Service,” the company’s guidelines say. “This includes any leaderboard names, locations, profile pictures, Tags or any other User Content that promotes, relates to, or condones lack of respect, discrimination, or violence of any kind against individuals or groups based on [the usual list]… or political affiliation.”

Since “Let’s go Brandon!” is code for “Fuck Joe Biden,” it is “Fuck Joe Biden” just like “SOS” means “Help!” That certainly is somewhere in “hateful , offensive, or obscene” whether some people find it funny or not. [Pointer: JutGory]

2. The cliche for this is “kabuki theater.” The sham of the Glasgow climate change summit was highlighted at the very end, when China and India, among the world’s biggest burners of coal, raised last-minute objections to language in the unenforceable pact pledging a “phase out” of coal and demanded that it be changed to “phase down,” whatever that means. Since their only option was to accept this crucial weakening of the terms or not to have an agreement they could wave to claim “progress,” the change was accepted. COP26 President Alok Sharma said he was “deeply sorry” for the let-down. “I understand the deep disappointment. It’s also vital we protect this package,” Sharma said. Without China and India’s full commitment and supportive action, the goals of the climate change reforms can’t be met, making the sacrifices, if really made, by the United States and other nations virtue signaling without purpose….you know, like the Biden administration shutting down pipelines.

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Well What Do You Know! Andrew Sullivan Finally Sees Clearly That The News Media Is Completely Corrupt And Untrustworthy

November 15, 2021October 24, 2024 / Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It sure took a while, Andrew, but it’s good to have you on board. Every little bit helps.

Andrew Sullivan is writing at substack now, the place where disillusioned former henchmen (and henchwomen, like Bari Weiss) of the biased and partisan mainstream news media have retreated after they sensed that somehow the people they were working for were doing more harm than good. Some, like independent journalist/muckraker Green Greenwald, flipped loyalties completely and declared his disgust with fury, even pointing out the news media’s campaign of lies against Donald Trump. Sullivan has, in contrast and until now, been unwilling to admit what has been obvious for a very long time: American journalism has really become “the enemy of the people.”

Oh, he has gradually picked off other and related examples of progressive ethics rot in our societyof many : check out the first 12 Ethics Alarms essays here, going back to 2014. These all must have been hard for him, for Sullivan is a moderate conservative turned progressive (by the gay marriage issue), and he doubtlessly would like to support his newfound companions. Yet he couldn’t quite bring himself to accept what I, to name just one objective analysts, figured out and have been documenting for more than a decade.

Now he has. Whew! I thought it would never happen.

In “Denial,” the film about the lawsuit by British Holocaust denier and fake historian David Irving against American Deborah Lipstadt, Tom Wilkinson as Lipstadt’s barrister Richard Rampton, in the process of excoriating Irving to the court where the case is being tried, says in a memorable speech,

My lord, during this trial, we have heard from Professor Evans and others of at least 25 major falsifications of history. Well, says Mr. Irving, “all historians make mistakes.” But there is a difference between negligence, which is random in its effect, and a deliberateness, which is far more one-sided. All Mr. Irving’s little fictions, all his tweaks of the evidence all tend in the same direction: the exculpation of Adolf Hitler. He is, to use an analogy, like the waiter who always gives the wrong change. If he is honest, we may expect sometimes his mistakes to favor the customers, sometimes himself. But Mr. Irving is the dishonest waiter. All his mistakes work in his favor. How far, if at all, Mr. Irving’s Antisemitism is the cause of his Hitler apology, or vice versa, is unimportant. Whether they are taken together or individually, it is clear that they have led him to prostitute his reputation as a serious historian in favor of a bogus rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler and the dissemination of virulent Antisemitic propaganda.

Note the parallels with Sullivan’s description of the mainstream media in his latest newsletter:

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“Moby-Dick” Ethics

November 14, 2021 / Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Moby

Today marks the 170th anniversary of the publication of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” or “The Whale”(never forget that hyphen!). What does the 19th century novel with the most famous opening line in American literature have to do with ethics? Oh, only everything…and not just ethics, but leadership, values, perspective, chaos, hubris, and the ethics-related fact that you never know how things will work out, so all you can do is the best you can.

“Moby-Dick” was Jack Marshall, Sr.’s favorite novel by far, and he had read almost every classic of his era and going back 200 years before he was in high school. I read the book in a tattered hard-cover edition full of my dad’s notes in the margins. (If only I could have read his handwriting!) “Moby-Dick” is tough sailing; public schools did Melville no favors by making high-schoolers read it, even in the redacted versions. Hollywood did even more damage: the book cannot be filmed. The best and most profound parts of novel are the narrator, Melville/Ishmael’s philosophical musings, like when he asks what a dead whale might be thinking when a harpooner nearly downs in its brains.

Eventually, I was able to honor both Dad, Melville and Orson Welles by mounting a production of Welles’ brilliant (but flop) theatrical version, “Moby-Dick Rehearsed,” which I repaired thanks to my father’s comments and inspiration. It was, by far, the most successful production of the American Century Theater’s two decades, the most successful professional production Orson’s invention has ever had, and my most satisfying experience as a director.

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Unethical Tweet Of The Month, And Company Most Deserving A Boycott: Ben & Jerry’s

November 14, 2021 / Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I personally decided that Ben &Jerry’s outrageously expensive ice cream for the Woke and Wonderful would never cross through Marshall doors when it created a flavor honoring partisan hate-monger Stephen Colbert. The company’s cynical political pandering has only gotten worse since. Perhaps the most nauseating aspect of the company’s pose is that it’s obviously a marketing plan to appeal to ice-cream loving progressives. The real Ben and Jerry sold off the brand years ago, like any good socialists, accepting millions to allow a multi-national corporation to pretend it’s the founder as it spouts simple-minded leftist talking points. This tweet, however, charged into Ethics Alarms Popeye territory…

See?

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