deceit

Unethical Tweet Of The Week: Barbra Streisand

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I thought Barbra was smarter than Alyssa Milano, Rob Reiner and Joy Behar.

I’m sure she is, or once was; dementia creeps up on you. I really don’t know how to explain this.

Is she being cleverly deceitful? Yes, some prices are falling, like gas, but prices as a whole are not. They are still rising, the effects of Biden’s inflationary policies are still hurting the middle class and the poor, and the Democrats’ “Inflation Reduction” Act: has had slightly more salutary effects than Gerald Ford’s W.I.N. button, but nothing to boast about. Inflation “coming down” means that the rate of prices going up is lessening, not that prices are actually less than they were. Does Streisand really not know that?

The claim about Trump is definitely deceit. The mainstream media helped with that one,using the pandemic lockdown results that savaged the American economy to conclude that, as CNN, that scrupulously unbiased news source, wrote in September 2020 as part of the media’s push to elect a mentally-declining President because the public thinks he’s a nice guy, “Trump’s job losses are the worst of any American president on record.”

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A Climate Scientist Explains How Science, Academia And The Media Collude To Mislead The Public

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The “climate scientist” in question is really a climate scientist: his name is Patrick T. Brown, and he is the co-director of Climate and Energy at The Breakthrough Institute. His article in the Free Press yesterday is essentially whistle-blowing on his own colleagues, and not only earns him an Ethics Hero designation, but also contains the Ethics Quote of the Month, which is both ethical in that he has the integrity and courage to make it, and a vivid description of unethical conduct that affects us all.

Here’s that quote:

“The paper I just published—“Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California”—focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior. I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.

“This matters because it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the gatekeepers for career success in academia. And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.

“To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.”

This is hardly shocking news, but it is shocking to have one of the scientists—Trust the science! Science is Real!-–who participates in fearmongering climate change propaganda as a means of controlling public policy stating outright what any objective and analytical observer should be able to figure out. Such objective and analytical observers are condemned and mocked routinely as “climate change deniers” and “conspiracy theorists.” His article shows that another description is warranted: right.

Read it all, even though it is likely to make you angry, and to want to shake the piece in the faces of your smug and ignorant climate change fanatic friends and relatives who keep citing “scientific consensus” as justification for expensive and futile efforts to avoid “Climate Armageddon.”

Other infuriating points:

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Official Progressive Deceit: The Equality/Equity Scam

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

In describing to lawyers what deceit is in my ethics seminars (it is amazing how many layers don’t know what deceit is, though it is forbidden in the ethics rules), I often say that deceit is the official language of Washington, D.C. It’s a reliable laugh line, but it’s not funny. Using linguistic tricks to deceive and mislead the public is a tool of dangerous and untrustworthy governments, movements, leaders and politicians. I don’t know if this age old practice has become worse in recent years; to me it seems that way, but it could be an illusion. In the Sixties, leftists like Abbie Hoffman liked to use “liberate” as a synonym for “steal.”

The success of “Black Lives Matter” relied on a linguistic disorientation, like the old gag about a lawyer asking a witness, “When did you stop beating your wife?” What has been dismaying is how few people have the wit and courage to call out the trick and refuse to back down. The use of “immigrants,” “migrants,” “undocumented workers” and other deliberately misleading terms to hide the reality that the subject is law-breaking aliens has also been largely successful in bamboozling the public. “Affirmative action,” a nice and deceptive way to say “racial quotas,” is finally going down, but it kept the Constitution at bay for half a century. The all-time most sinister linguistic cheat, perhaps, is the use of the benign word “choice” to describe the right to kill unborn children.

Lately, the most prominent verbal deceit is embodied in the “Diversity-Equity-Inclusion” mantra, with “equity” serving as the cornerstone of the cheat. Most Americans—hey, thanks, public education system!—think that equity is just another word for equality. Now that Democrats and progressives are fully committed to socialism (while denying it—that’s not deceit, it’s just lying) they have been bombarding the public with the word without clarifying its implications. Equality means equality under the law; it means that every citizen has the same opportunity to accomplish what his or her talents, effort, ingenuity, determination, laws and the vagueries of fate and fortune allow without obstruction by the government. Equity means that every citizen should be guaranteed the same success to the extent government power can make such “equity” possible. It is based on the socialist/communist ideal that it is unfair that life provides unequal benefits , ability and advantages, so central power must ensure fairness by artificially eliminating as many disparities in these benefits , ability and advantages as possible.

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Ethics Quiz Addendum: NBC’s Deceitful Headline

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

“Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!”

NBC’s current headline on the story discussed in today’s Ethics Quiz:

Texas teacher fired after telling Black students his race is ‘superior’

As so many are beating on Donald Trump right now (and deservedly so), it is only fair to point out that his statement that the news media were “the enemy of the people” was and is spot on, and quite possibly the most important and correct observation he has ever made in public. Naturally, it is also one of the statement he is most criticized for, especially by…the enemies of the people.

That headline by NBC is a prime example. It is pure deceit; indeed, I might use it to illustrate deceit in an upcoming ethics seminar. The first line of the NBC story immediately reveals the lie (deceit is lying): “A middle school teacher in Texas has been fired after a video posted on social media showed him telling students his race is “superior.” Other ways to distort the story for the edification of people who only read headlines, or to “poison the well” for those who do read on:

“Texas teacher fired after telling white students their race is ‘superior'”

“Texas teacher fired after telling black student her race is inferior.”

“Texas teacher fired after telling black students he regards their parents race makes them inferior.”

This is a distorted, manipulated, evil headline designed to misrepresent a complex incident into a knee-jerk confirmation of systemic racism and persistent white supremacy.

Is anyone going to call it out for what it is—unethical, biased, unprofessional, and typical of today’s journalism” other than Ethics Alarms?

We shall see.

(Don’t hold your breath.)

Funniest Ethics Quote Ever: The Marshall Project

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

—The Marshall Project, in its analysis of President Biden’s much ballyhooed mass pardon for people convicted of federal marijuana possession, heralded in the news media as the largest act of clemency in a generation.

Weeell, that wasn’t exactly true, was it? As the Marshall Project analysis explains, while the act may have symbolic force in prompting some states to extend clemency to pot violators, and while at the federal level there aboutt 6,500 people with prior marijuana possession convictions on their records may benefit from the pardon by restoring civic rights like voting, or serving on juries,  but only if the marijuana charge was the only felony on their record.

In short, the grand gesture, a sop to the Democratic Party’s drug-loving base, was pure deceit, misleading the public to believe it was something it was not to a ridiculous degree. The way the mainstream media played it, the President was letting harmless, non-violent offenders out of prison and addressing “over-incarceration.” In realty, the “mass pardon” released nobody. Continue reading →

Saturday Night Live Lies And The Biased Mainstream Media Cheers: Propaganda Mission Accomplished

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

That cold open from last week’s Saturday Night Live was a perfect illustration of the maxim, best articulated by the late, great, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” Satire must be granted considerable license, but basing nasty mockery on a deliberate misrepresentation is unethical even if it is funny. The SNL skit above isn’t funny, unless one finds deliberate misrepresentation and outrageous laziness funny. I don’t.

The opening narration essentially takes the skit out of the realm of humor into the murky world of propaganda and public disinformation. Alito’s draft only states that “no woman has a right to an abortion” in the context of Roe v. Wade’s legally flawed and factually sloppy argument that the U.S. Constitution guarantees such a right through the unenumerated right of privacy. The SNL phrasing is deceitful, technically accurate but misleading. The draft does not state that no woman should have an abortion, and specifically states that the opinion takes no position on whether abortion should be legal or not.

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A Deceitful, Indeed Despicable Headline From Drew Curtis'”Fark”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I like Drew Curtis’ Fark a lot; it may be my favorite news aggregator. Drew and his staff devise often clever captions to dozens of news items off the beaten path every day. It’s a left-leaning site: it frequently engages in gratuitous Republican-bashing, and has all of the predictable biases you would expect. Nevertheless, it’s different, amusing and usually benign.

Not this time.

Here was the NBC News headline FARK linked to: “A college professor called the police on two students who were late for class…”

Here is the story.

Now here is the Fark headline: “College professor calls police on two black students for being a) violent, b) drunk, c) late.”

In dozens of subtle and not-so-subtle ways, all across the news media, the web and Big Tech, writers, reporters, pundits and others work to maximize racial suspicion, hate and conflict, typically to ensure Democratic constituency animus towards whites and conservatives. This is a particularly revolting example. At best, the FARK headline is unethical, ruthless clickbait misrepresenting a non-racial incident as racist mistreatment of blacks by white authorities, in order to trick readers into clicking through and inflate traffic.

At worst, it is a deliberate deception to further the Left’s systemic racism narrative.

If you read the story, the students were black and the professor was also black. The NBC headline was fair and accurate: what was newsworthy was that a professor treated tardiness as a criminal matter. Race was irrelevant to the incident. FARK’s headline, in contrast invited the reader to think that a white professor was abusing black students because of their race.

Somebody should be fired for this, and FARK owes its readers, and the nation it is trying to divide down racial fault-lines—just like its favorite party and its current President— an apology.

As for me, I won’t be using FARK again for the foreseeable future.

Good “Misinformation” vs. Bad “Misinformation”

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

AOC tweet deaths

I was hit between the eyes by another example of this hypocrisy this morning, when I read the “Letters to the Editor” section of the Times. A reader named Roger Hirschberg—yes, own it Roger, you shameless propagandist—authored a letter that the Times headlined “Facebook Misinformation.” In the first paragraph, Roger decries Facebook policies that “enable and protect misinformation.” In the very next sentence, he condemns Facebook management for allowing such misinformation “in pursuit of profits,” and cites Facebook’s entries related to “the January 6 insurrection.”

Isn’t that amusing? Roger puffs himself up like a bullfrog in indignation over a communications company pandering to the mob while cashing in, and then gives the Times a chance to do the same, allowing his false characterization of the Capitol riot as an “insurrection,” because that’s the current Big Lie being weaponized by the Left.

Now, I wouldn’t want the Times to censor Roger’s deliberate misinformation—the FBI, if one considers it trustworthy, has definitively debunked that description, as did Merrick Garland in last weeks hearings—because we benefit from revelations with signature significance: if you call the riot an “insurrection,” you’re a lie-spreading jerk or a lazy fool who believes whatever your favorite party tells you. I would expect an ethical publication that respects its readers to acknowledge Roger’s hypocrisy if it chooses to publish his letter, however. If it doesn’t, then the Times is deliberately advancing misinformation….but then it’s the good kind. You know: the kind that can be used to smear Donald Trump and Republicans. Thanks, Roger!

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Our Lying, Propaganda-Spreading, Untrustworthy News Media: The Miami Herald Headline

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

herald headline

I have to regularly update my resolve to not respond to one of my ethics-rotted progressive friends when they say to my face, “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! That’s just a conservative conspiracy theory,” “You’re not only an idiot, you’re an enemy of democracy.” It gets harder and harder by the day. This has been my ongoing struggle at least since the 2008 Presidential campaign, when the mainstream media kept mocking Sarah Palin’s alleged lack of qualifications to be Vice-President while never mentioning that Joe Biden was a babbling fool or that Barack Obama was objectively less qualified than Palin was.

The Miami Herald headline above isn’t unusual; there are these kinds of lies and public manipulation to assist partisan agendas that appear in the news media every day, all day long, and from more influential sources (boy, I nearly wrote “respected sources,” and no mainstream media source deserves respect) than the Herald. Nonetheless, the headline is unusually brazen.

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: American Federation Of Teachers President Randi Weingarten [UPDATED]

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Public-School-Indoctrination

“Critical Race Theory is not taught in elementary schools or middle schools or high schools.”

—-AFT President Randi Weingarten, engaging in the now-routine leftist activist tactic of Rationalization #64, “It isn’t what it is.“

This claim is deceit, like “I did not have sex with that woman” (“because I don’t consider blow-jobs ‘sex.'”) A school does not have to teach the technical “Critical Race Theory” as it was originally formulated by Derek Bell and other politically-motivated academics to be teaching the substance and assumptions of the movement, which is that the United States is a racist nation and that white supremacy has been and continues to be a primary force causing systemic inequality and oppression of black Americans.

Weingarten and other progressive indoctrination proponents know this very well, and the deception is deliberate. Slavery, Jim Crow and the struggles of the civil rights movement are history, and legitimate topics for study in the schools. Using those historical events to advance a narrative of racial guilt and continuing oppression of African-Americans is not history, but sinister and divisive child abuse. The cavil that such a curriculum isn’t literally CRT is misdirection, and the fact that one of the major teachers unions would engage in such deceit is signature significance. Continue reading →