cognitive dissonance

The Bud Light Trans-Pandering Fiasco Sucks Ann Althouse Into Her Most Clueless Post Ever

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

I am, as regular readers here know, generally an admirer of Ann Althouse, the retired Madison Wis. law professor who has operated a long-time blog with a wide following I can only envy. But when Ann jumps the rails, she doesn’t fool around, and her post today commenting on the Bud Light-Dylan Mulroney ethics train wreck makes me marvel, not for the first time, at some of her blind spots.

As usual, someone else’s article triggered her analysis; in this case, it was “Bud Light suffers bloodbath as longtime and loyal consumers revolt against transgender campaign/’In Bud Light’s effort to be inclusive, they excluded almost everybody else,’ says a St. Louis bar owner” at the Fox Business website. The passage that triggered Ann was this:

“Bud Light vice president of marketing Alissa Heinerscheid said she was inspired to update the ‘fratty’ and ‘out-of-touch’ humor of the beer company with ‘inclusivity’ in a March 30 interview with the podcast ‘Make Yourself At Home.’But her effort to be inclusive excluded the people who matter most — Bud Light drinkers, according to St. Louis-area operator John Rieker. ‘It’s kind of mind-boggling they stepped into this realm,’ Rieker, who owns Harpo’s Bar and Grill in Chesterfield, Missouri, told FOX Business. ‘You’re marketing to an audience that represents a fraction of 1% of consumers while alienating the much larger base of your consumers.'”

Here are Althouse’s reactions, with my reactions to her, because this cannot be left unrebutted: Continue reading →

Giving The Devil His Due: It’s Time For Baseball Say “Sorry” And “Thanks” To That Bastard, Charles O. Finley

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Charles Oscar Finley (February 22, 1918 – February 19, 1996), better known as Charlie O. Finley, was easily one of the worst owners of a major league baseball team in history, and that’s saying something, because it is a repellent batch. He probably falls just below #1, Charles Comiskey, the greedy and abusive owner of the 1919 Chicago “Black Sox” largely responsible for his players deciding to take bribes and throw the World Series. (See “Eight Men Out,” one of the ten best baseball movies).

Finley was an insurance mogul who purchased the Kansas City Athletics and eventually moved the team to Oakland, creating a territorial conflict with the San Francisco Giants that violated MLB rules, but he was allowed to do it because Finley threatened to cause havoc with a lawsuit that challenged the game’s immunity from antitrust laws.

That wasn’t the first time Finley was obnoxious and detructive, and it was far from the last. A loud, toxic narcissist, he tried to be the focus of attention on his teams, especially in Oakland, where a crop of talented young stars (Reggie Jackson, Ricky Henderson, Sal Bando, Bert Campaneris, Catfish Hunter, Vida Blue, Rollie Fingers and more) made his team one of the great baseball dynasties. Finley underpaid them and treated all of his players like servants; his abuse was a catalyst for the power of the Players Union and the eventual institution of free agency. Dick Williams, his Hall of Fame manager, quit after a World Series, saying that he would rather leave baseball itself than work for a bastard like Finley.

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David Brooks, A Trump Derangement And “Bias Makes You Stupid” Case Study

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks should have that famous epitaph tattooed on his forehead.

He was once an independent, erudite, interesting essayist of conservative leanings. Then he accepted big bucks to be the New York Times’ token conservative pundit. Soon, after forced contact with Charles Blow, Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman, the Times version on the Stockholm Syndrome took over shortly before the election of Donald Trump, whom, to be fair, the tweedy and classist Brooks surely would have regarded as icky even before his re-education by the Times. Today’s model of David Brooks is incapable of objective analysis, He serves a neon-bright cautionary tale of what happens when bias eats away at one’s analytical abilities and credibility.

Take his latest column…please.

It is called “The Sad Tales of George Santos,” but it quickly devolves into one more gratuitous attack on Donald Trump. What it most reveals, however, is how far David Brooks has fallen.

Halfway through this mess, Brooks writes, after stating the obvious about Rep.-elect George Santos,

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What Shannon Epstein Does Is Not National News And It Is Unethical Journalism To Pretend It Is

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

From The Blaze:

On Thanksgiving Day, Shannon Epstein, 25, climbed aboard a Spirit Airlines flight headed from New Orleans to New Jersey. However, after the plane left the gate but before it could take off, Epstein allegedly began causing a scene, accusing a Latina family seated near her of “smuggling cocaine.”

Because of the wild accusation, airport officials decided to redirect the plane back to the gate so that Epstein could be removed. However, she refused to cooperate, reports say. When deputies tried to force her to deplane, she became “extremely combative,” said Capt. Jason Rivarde of the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office.

During a scuffle with six deputies at Louis Armstrong International Airport, Epstein supposedly caused several injuries. She has been accused of biting one officer in the arm to such an extent that she broke the skin. She has also been accused of kicking another officer in the groin.

Many other news sources including NBC News, Yahoo! and The New York Post are headlining this story and giving it far more circulation and attention than the typical “wacko goes nuts on an airplane” tale.

Why do Shannon Epstein’s antics matter? They don’t. She’s irrelevant to the nation, national security, the economy and the culture. Thousands of more substantive crimes have been committed by similarly insignificant people since she had her meltdown.

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A Non-Election Day Ethics Special! An Ethics Test For Baseball Hall Of Fame Voters

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The major League Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown released its eight-player Contemporary Baseball Era ballot yesterday, as part of its revamped enshrinement process. A 16-person committee including of Hall of Fame players, baseball executives and veteran sportswriters will vote on the candidates at baseball’s winter meetings in December. A player must receive 12 votes to be elected.

All of the eight players failed to get enough votes through the regular voting process. The players on the list, limited to distinguished players who made their greatest contributions from 1980 to the present era, include…

  • Barry Bonds
  • Roger Clemens
  • Curt Schilling
  • Albert Belle
  • Don Mattingly
  • Fred McGriff
  • Dale Murphy, and
  • Rafael Palmeiro.

A clearer ethics test for the voters would be hard to imagine. The threshold question is whether last year’s admission to the Hall of Red Six icon David Ortiz, who once tested positive for an unidentified performance enhancing drug according to test results that were illegally leaked, will be regarded as sufficient precedent to admit Bonds, Clemens, and or Palmeiro. That Bonds was a long-time steroid cheat who did great damage to the game is undeniable. The evidence against Clemens is weaker, but still damning. Palmeiro had the distinction of going before Congress and proclaiming that steroids were the bane of the game and he would never sully himself by using them, and quickly thereafter testing positive himself. None of those three should be admitted to the Hall, and the presence of current Hall of Fame members, I hope, may ensure that they are not. Continue reading →

The Times Promises To Explain “How the NFL Stays So Popular, Despite Its Many Scandals”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

It doesn’t. But I can.

As the football season approaches, the New York Times muses about why television viewership for the NFL last season was its strongest in six years, the television networks committed about $110 billion for the rights to show the league’s games for the next decade, and how the NFL can be on track to meet Commissioner Roger Goodell’s goal of earning $25 billion in revenue annually in 2027. After all, the game and its players were once again engulfed in scandals during the off-season:

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Labor Day Weekend Ethics Warm-Up, 9/2/2022: Which Are The Pod People And Which Are The Fascists?

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

1. More on Biden’s speech…I finally read the text of President Biden’s speech; it was even worse than I expected. What kind of advisors would let a President make such a speech? What kind of President would deliver it rather than fire the speechwriter and whoever advocated saying such stuff in public? It says something significant about the distribution of partisan extremism in the media that CNN and MSNBC would be the only networks to broadcast it, yet, ironically, as true blue propagandists, they should have embargoed the speech for their party’s own good. Fox News should have wanted to broadcast it. It’s the best marketing for the Republican Party I’ve ever seen.

Because there is, as the saying goes, no reason to re-invent the wheel, I’m going to send you over to Althouse for her section-by-section analysis, which is close enough to mine to make a parallel post here a waste of time. A sample:

There are far more Americans, far more Americans from every background and belief, who reject the extreme MAGA ideology than those that accept it.

His version of the soul of America represents what “far more” Americans think, so — what? — screw those other people? Something like 47% of voters voted for Trump, but even if the Trump voters were more dramatically overwhelmed by throngs of more “normal” people, they are still part of the population. Or maybe it’s not about excluding everyone who’s not in the majority. Maybe it’s about rejecting them because they have “extreme MAGA ideology.” What is “extreme MAGA ideology”? Desire for a secure border? Pro-life? Really, what are the elements that Biden envisions as not worthy of debate but justifying denouncement as not normal and not mainstream?

And folks, it’s within our power, it’s in our hands, yours and mine, to stop the assault on American democracy….

It seems to me that it’s within our power to participate in democracy and vote. Where is this “assault”? Why in the name of all that is normal and mainstream is he conjuring up violence — an “assault”? It’s going on right now. Don’t you see it? The “assault” I see is the effort to keep Donald Trump from running again. If the overwhelming majority of Americans reject his “extreme MAGA ideology,” what’s the problem? Let him run and he will be defeated.

Ann calls the speech “disturbing and incoherent.” I’d call it dangerous and irresponsible. Continue reading →

Cognitive Dissonance Also Makes You Stupid: Now NeverTrump Conservatives Are Offended By “1776”

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Anti-Trump madness, aka. Trump Derangement, is causing some Republicans and conservatives to support Democrats, progressives and anti-American totalitarians on the rise in their gradual rejection of all traditional American institutions, heroes, symbols and images. On the Left, the reason for the push to kick them into the dustbin of history is a basic dislike of the nation and its values generally: it’s always been racist, sexist, and imperial, you see, essentially bad, so it needs to be torn down. Everything American became unbearable once slavery was strategically accorded a position so deep and low on the cognitive dissonance scale that the United States’ historical connection to it drags literally everything American below the center line.

Here’s Dr. Festinger’s essential scale again:

The idea is that what we associate with something or someone inevitably affects how we feel about them. If, for example, I am positively inclined toward a character on a TV show—let’s say that character has a plus 4 score on my scale—and that character states admiration for someone whom I detest, say Megan Rapinoe (at least a minus 20 in my estimation), that obnoxious opinion would pull the once-admired character well below zero, which indicates neutral regard. Dr. Festinger’s theories argue that Megan would also improve her ranking by being connected to that character. Continue reading →

Founders’ Are Denigrated In Their Own Homes …And An Organized Protest Is Required

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Apparently the Mad Left’s historical air-brushing mania that began with toppling statues of important American figures from the Confederacy such as Robert E. Lee, moved on to removing statues of Teddy Roosevelt and banning benign college mascots that evoked the Revolutionary era (like George Washington U’s “Colonial”), and generally has sought to “cancel” any American patriot or President who owned slaves, is now turning tours of Thomas Jefferson’s and James Madison’s homes in Virginia into attacks on the two essential figures in our democracy.

At Monticello, Jefferson’s self-designed home that is a tourist attraction in Charlottesville, Virginia, the non-profit operating the site is using its progressive political agenda to make a visit less a pilgrimage of respect than indoctrination into anti-Jeffersonism. A recent visitor described the experience as “depressing and demoralizing and truly upsetting,” with Jefferson-hostile tour guides claiming that his reputation is “wildly overblown.” Of course, this is all because Jefferson was a slave-holder, in direct contradiction of the values and rights he espoused in the Declaration of Independence. Arguably, Jefferson’s slave-holding was more revolting than that of other men of his time, as it included treating one of his slaves, Sally Hemings (and his dead wife’s half-sister) as his concubine. Ick. But Jefferson was a weak and conflicted man with a brilliant and perceptive mind; his slave-holding and other personal flaws, and there were many, are not why he must be celebrated and honored as one of those most responsible for the nation’s existence.

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Woke Derangement Symdrome-Infected Conservatives Board An Ethics Train Wreck To…Hungary??

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

This was late crossing my consciousness, perhaps because I do not trust Tucker Carlson and will not watch his allegedly sincere rants because we know, or should, that he is more interested in ratings than principles. The idea of prominent conservatives suddenly deciding the the U.S. can learn from Hungary, of all places, is ridiculous on its face, but I did not realize the extent to which the current wokeness epidemic has driven many conservatives and Republicans into the mouth of madness.

Carlson has been broadcasting nightly from Budapest, as he has interviewed and celebrated Hungary’s corrupt and authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban.There is no excuse for this, but Carlson thinks Fox News viewers will approve of his: Orban has defied the European Union on the issue of accepting illegal immigrants and refugees, and has installed harsh measures against trans individuals and LGBTQ people generally. He also has taken action to intimidate and control the news media. In embracing such a leader, Carlson (and others—I’ll get to them shortly) is realizing the worst stereotypes of conservative Americans.

Orban is a central-casting anti-democracy thug. Last year, he pushed the Hungarian parliament, which his party controls, to pass laws creating a state of emergency without a time limit, granting him the ability to rule by decree, suspending elections to fill positions that have become conveniently vacant between regular elections, and permitting prison sentences for spreading “fake news.” But his real appeal to Carlson and the Cro Magnon subspecies of conservatives is his persecution of gays and trans individuals. In 2020, Orbán’s government ended legal recognition of transgendered people, and his party has proposed legislation to ban “LGBtQ positive content” in movies, books or advertising.

Gee, what a great guy! Do conservatives comprehend the cognitive dissonance scale at all? This autocratic creep is so underwater on the scale, I’d say a minus hundred or more…

Cognitive Dissonance-SMALL

…that he would drag the Puppies Are Adorable Party below zero if it endorsed him. But on their own currently warped scale, conservatives’ terror over losing such culture war battles as the same-sex marriage debate and illegal immigration restrictions has wokeness so low on the their scale that an aspiring dictator who opposes gays and illegals appears to be in positive territory.

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