Unethical Website of the Month: “Crowds on Demand” [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This used to be a monthly feature on the old, now defunct, Ethics Scoreboard. I haven’t done many here: the last one was—let’s see—appeared in December 2024! Yet the fake demonstration site “Crowds on Demand” is an easy choice. It’s business is lying by proxy.

“Crowds on Demand is your home for impactful advocacy campaigns, demonstrations, PR stunts, crowds for hire and corporate events. Services available nationwide,” we are told. Ah. Impactful advocacy campaigns that don’t have as many advocates as they pretend to have. Terrific.

“Are you looking to create a buzz anywhere in the United States? At Crowds on Demand, we provide our clients with impactful advocacy campaigns and events. We are best known for organizing passionate demonstrations, rallies, flash-mobs, corporate PR events, and light-hearted events such as paparazzi, brand ambassadors, and PR stunts. We also have virtual capabilities including letter-writing, social proof, and phone-banking campaigns. We can create turn-key advocacy groups complete with qualified passionate leaders to staff them all on relatively short notice.”

All lies. And when your mob for hire starts a riot, “Crowds on Demand” will send in fake National Guard members in to beat them up and get sympathy for your group! OK, I made that up. But it wouldn’t surprise me. “Crowds on Demand came under fire from supporters of President Donald Trump for allegedly supplying paid protesters for the anti-ICE and “No Kings” protests that cropped up across the nation,” I am reading. More recently, the company’s CEO claimed he was offered $20 million to recruit people to participate in the planned anti-Trump protests set to take place tomorrow. Adam Swart, CEO of Crowds on Demand, told the host that organizers of the planned “Good Trouble Lives On” protests scheduled for Thursday tried to hire his company to bolster the size of the demonstration. His reason was that he didn’t think the protests would be effective, and it would make his company look bad.

But you see, the company is bad, whether it promotes that fraudulent demonstration or another one.

The New York Times Really and Truly Published This…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

…to which the total and irrefutable rebuttal is…

Observations:

  • Incredible.
  • If someone believes this, then they are by definition too inattentive, ill-informed, dishonest of stupid to have what they write published in the New York Times.
  • Not only does bias make you stupid, it makes you willing to display to the whole world how biased and stupid you are.
  • Why would anyone trust the Times after this, or any paper that published such an undeniable attempt to erase not just history, but recent history?
  • The headline is pure gaslighting. A reader who hasn’t had her brain wiped like in “Paycheck” will think, “Wait…did I imagine the entire campaign against Trump for at least two years before the election being based on his being a fascist, Hitler II? I must have…the Times says that Trump vilifying political opponents is unique and unprecedented.
  • How long does the mainstream media think it can keep doing this before virtually no one takes them seriously at all?

Major League Baseball Asks What This “Integrity” Is That We Speak Of…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Even though the stupid All Star Home Run Derby was the night before, last night’s Major League Baseball All Star Game, which was allegedly baseball at its best, was decided by another home run derby, this one called a “swing-off.” The game’s nine innings ended in a tie, see, after an unprecedented comeback by the American League, which had trailing by six runs with just three innings to go against the National League’s best pitchers. This set up the game for a thrilling finish, like, say, Carlton Fisk hitting the ball out in the 12th inning of Game Six of the 1975 World Series, but no.

The 95th All-Star Game in Atlanta was settled by a “home run swing-off” to settle the tie. Worse still, the game’s MVP award was given to Kyle Schwarber of the National League, based on how he performed in the “swing-off” (I can’t believe I’m writing this), not in the part of the night known as “a baseball game.”

By the time Rob Manfred, the Worst Baseball Commissioner Ever Not Named Bud Selig , is through making up rules and gimmicks, baseball fields will have fun obstacles—you, know, gnome heads, water hazards and little twisty chutes?—like in miniature golf. He wants to make the game entertaining for people who are bored by baseball….you know, like him.

All of this is because the mega-millionaire players stopped wanting to actually play hard in the iconic exhibition game—might get injured, lose a big contact—and managers were pressured into not playing to win but rather treating the game like an elementary school Halloween parade, where every kid in costume gets a moment in the metaphorical sun (the games aren’t played in the daytime anymore, like they were when kids could watch their favorite players). So pitchers never pitch more than an inning, maybe two for the starters, and players all get an at-bat, but that means that if the game ends in a tie, one or both teams will have no players left. Behold! The stupid “swing-off,” which is even less baseball than the “zombie runner” gimmick used to break ties in the regular season. It had never been used before.

Continue reading →

I Guess It’s Nice That NBC Is So Open About Its Bias, Loyalties and Motives Now…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Anyone: give me a benign explanation for this tweet from NBC News today…

Any takers?

The least damning explanations for this would be that whoever is running the NBC News X account is an idiot. But who hired him? Who trained him?

To state the obvious, the fact that the head of the Biden autopen investigation used an autopen is not newsworthy, ironic, or hypocritical. First, there is no evidence that Comer didn’t fully control the procedure. Second, he’s not President. Third, a subpoena does not confer a benefit on anyone. Fourth, there are no allegations of other serious usurpations of Comer’s power and position. Fifth, there is no indication that Comer is suffering from crippling dementia.

The tweet is an extraordinary example of really, really desperate whataboutism. It would be embarrassing f it came from a hyper-partisan junior House member. For such partisan spin to come from a major news organization is nauseating.

“Bias Makes You Stupid” Crossed With “Self-Anointed Virtue”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

A simple Ethics Dunce verdict doesn’t do justice to Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. There is so many things wrong with his New York Times column “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It” I may not have the time and patience to list them all. Here’s a gift link so you can analyze them yourself.

The major flaw in the piece is flagged by the headline: it’s a long appeal to authority, the writer’s own, but also other “experts.” “It’s true because we say it’s true.” He holds Israel guilty of genocide because he relies on his own analysis and he’s “been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century.” He’s also been marinating in the academic community’s intersectionalism bias and growing anti-Semitism for all those years. He needs to get out more.

It’s not just him, however. “A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide,” Bartov writes. Yeah, this is how the US started freaking out about climate change, how 50 national intelligence experts proved that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, and how the United States crippled its economy and the intellectual and social development of its children because experts kept lying about the Wuhan virus.

Sorry, I am no longer persuaded by “experts”; they have collectively proven incapable of objective analysis too many times. (Don’t get me started on legal ethics experts.) “So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International,” the author says, adding to his cherry-picked list of authorities who agree with him. “South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice,” Omar adds. Now there are three objective analysts!

Continue reading →

Oh So NOW the Axis Cares About Ethics!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

One of the most important and brave missions of the second Trump administration is its determination to root out the “Deep State,” or to be less portentious about it, to eliminate as many entrenched lifetime partisans, almost all progressive, Democrat and left-leaning, as possible.

What we witnessed in Trump’s first term was a literal sabotaging of democracy and the Constitution by furious partisan hacks and activists who were just certain that they knew what was best for the country, and if they had to accomplish it by cheating, manufacturing fake scandals and obstructing the President by any means necessary, so be it. Having succeed, as demonstrated by the dubious election of 2020, these nascent totalitarians were further emboldened. Next we got the passionate, Soviet-style effort to lock Trump up before he could be re-elected, the excessive political prosecutions of the J-6 idiots, the further weaponizing of the Justice Department to intimidate dissenters (as in threatening parents who dared to challenge woke school boards), and the Puppet Presidency. Who knows what would have been in store if the Left’s babbling, DEI, empty pants suit Presidential candidate with her anti-free speech knucklehead running mate had squeaked into the White House? Perish the thought.

Continue reading →

Smug, Self-Satisfied Progressive Asshole of the Year: David Litt

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

The obnoxious screed “Is It Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right-Wing Family?,” authored by an obscure writer I never heard of (three of his better-known mentors are above) and hope I never hear of again, was deemed appropriate content for New York Times readers, and not as satire either.

Litt epitomizes the type of insufferable elitist jerks that have made the modern Left the pit of despond that it has become over the last decade or so. Yuck. Was this guy ever a tolerable human being? The Times should be required to publish a full analysis of how Litt got this way as a public service, kind of like that episode of “I Love Lucy” where her book draft was sought by a publisher to use in a how-to tome to illustrate what writers shouldn’t ever do.

The column is about how Litt “felt a civic duty to be rude” to his wife’s younger brother because he hadn’t seen the light and surrendered his mind to the Woke and Wonderful. A few excerpts will tell you all you need to know about Litt, but I may add a little commentary here and there:

Continue reading →

Nah, There’s No Anti-Israel, Anti-Jewish Mainstream Media Bias…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Britain’s media regulator (Great Britain doesn’t have a First Amendment, remember, so the government can punish dishonest, biased journalism. This is not a good thing…) said today it is investigating a BBC documentary about the dire fate of children in Gaza. The BBC removed the program, “Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone,” from its streaming service earlier this year after it was revealed that the 13-year-old narrator, “Abdullah,” is the son of Ayman Alyazouri, Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture.

Oh. Sounds fair and objective to me! The media reports says this information “emerged.” Translation: the BBC was caught. News programs purporting to be factual must not materially mislead the audience in Great Britain, or so they claim. Imagine if the U.S. had such a regulation and enforced it. There would be no broadcast news.

The independent production company that made the program didn’t share the background information regarding the father of the young narrator’s Hamas ties, claims the BBC. Hoyo Films, which produced the documentary, claims it didn’t “intentionally” mislead the BBC. The BBC meanwhile, was wonderfully trusting and incurious—you know, like good journalists are supposed to be. After all, it’s not like anyone is out to vilify Israel as it tries to survive while protecting its citizens from being raped, murdered and kidnapped by terrorists.

Continue reading →

So Was Biden Lying, or What?

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

The word “lie,” one of the more basic terms in the ethics field, has been thoroughly blurred by a malign combination of ignorance, poor analytical skills, and partisan rhetorical dishonesty. A lie is an intentional misrepresentation of facts and truth in order to deceive. Genuine mistakes aren’t lies. Deliberate hyperboles made for effect but still obvious exaggerations are not lies. Jokes are not lies. Delusions aren’t lies. Opinions are not lies. Asserting a belief that one cannot reasonably know to be true is not a lie. A broken promise is not a lie if the promise was made sincerely. A prediction that does not prove accurate is not a lie. One contradicting what he or she once asserted as a strongly held belief does not prove hypocrisy—a variety of lie—if the individual has generally changed his or her belief in the interim.

In his brief interview with The New York Times last week former President Biden said that he orally granted all the pardons and commutations issued at the end of his term. Those who have suggested that the Presidential autopen was used without his knowledge by aides for such edicts are “liars,” Biden said.

“I made every decision,” Biden insisted.

What value is that interview? First, we know that Biden lies to enhance his own reputation: surely he wouldn’t admit that he was a cardboard cut-out POTUS if that is indeed what he became. Given what we know about Biden’s mental state, he may believe he made every decision, even if he didn’t. If fact, how would he know one way or the other?