double standards

The YouTube Ethics Dilemma: I Need The Platform, But It’s A Censorious, Partisan Propaganda Machine

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I don’t miss Twitter much. I quit the social media platform last year, disgusted with its blatant partisan censorship, its censoring of Donald Trump, and the odd way it flagrantly maintained a double standard in which misleading or questionable progressive tweets were opinions, but misleading or questionable conservative tweets were lies, mandating the tweet-monger’s banishment.

I also had been warning lawyers in my ethics seminars to eschew Twitter at all costs, since, I said with my tongue only slightly piercing my cheek, using it lowered the average lawyer’s IQ by between 15 to 25 points. (I estimated this on the evidence of poor former Harvard Law icon Larry Tribe, whose conspiracy theory tweets and ethics rules beaches on the platform raise the rebuttable presumption that he has entered the Biden Zone…not that this obvious decline has stopped the Washington Post and New York Times from publishing his increasingly over-heated and badly-reasoned op-eds.)

I decided that I should take my own advice and leave Twitter. Besides, my involvement with Twitter in the end consisted solely of issuing links to Ethics Alarms posts, which elicited virtually no traffic or retweets at all. (Except for you, Opal!)

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Ethics Workout, “Get In Ethics Shape For 2022 Edition,” 12/27/21: No Pain, No Gain!

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

1. On second thought, who needs work? The United States has been a nation that embraced work as a value and a mark of character as no other. Naturally, this core value has been under assault from the Left as part of its cultural overhaul strategy. The pandemic created an opining that has been brilliantly exploited politically, leading to a large part of the work force now unwilling to work. The Congressional Progressive Caucus, the biggest bloc of liberal lawmakers in Congress, has endorsed a bill proposed by Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., which would seek to implement a four-day workweek. Americans work far more than people in most other affluent countries, and we also produce more without using, as some countries do that I might mention, slave labor. But the work ethic is weakening.

The anti-work ethic is the goal on one of Reddit’s fastest growing sites — r/antiwork. The subreddit is “for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, [and] want to get the most out of a work-free life.” It is up to 1.4 million members, ranking among the top subscribed-to subreddits.

Members discuss tactics workers can use to slack off, cheat, sabotage, and steal from their employers. You would learn there, for example, that April 15th is “Steal Something From Work Day.” [Pointer and source: Linking and Thinking on Education]

2. Observations on the Gallup Poll on public approval of Federal leaders (You can find the poll here).

  • Yes, I know, polls. But Gallup is straighter than most, and while the specific numbers should be ignored, the relative values are interesting.
  • The big finding, and what has been attracting all the headlines, is that Chief Justice John Roberts is way ahead of anyone else on the list, with a bipartisan 60-40 favorability split. This undercuts the pro-abortion strategy of warning that the Supreme Court can’t afford to make its decision on Roe v. Wade cases without considering the potential harm to the Court’s legitimacy. The Court seems to have the most trust of any of the branches, which means that it can (and should) be courageous if legal principles require.
  • Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is second. How many Americans know who he is or what he does? 20%? Less? What is it they approve of?
  • Dr. Fauci is third at 52% approval, which shows you can fool a lot of the people all of the time.
  • Mitch McConnell is dead last, even behind Nancy Pelosi. Good.

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Yet Another IIPTDXTTNMIAFB Whopper!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I am getting sick of all the unethical political junk that has been rearing its yuletide head of late, so I’m sure you must be even more sick of it. But stuff like this, which doubles as rotten journalism too, just has to be noted. After all, what the mainstream media wants is for it to just slip away. All the better to help it lie to you later.

This is yet another IIPTDXTTNMIAFB example, short for “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.” These drive me crazy, because they demonstrate just how much what was once our journalism has transformed into partisan propaganda. The public was hammered daily with media accounts, fact-checks and accusations about how often Donald Trump “lied,” even to the extent of a phony “data base” that called even obvious cases where Trump was joking “lies.” All lie-counting stopped when Joe Biden was elected, however. That was remarkable, especially because Biden has uttered some of the most infamous lies in political history, notably when he gave an entire speech that he stole from another politician—and it was supposed to be an autobiographical speech!

Well, Joe Biden was making up events in his life once again, this time in an address to historically black college graduates in South Carolina, where, not for the first time, he said that he “desegregated restaurants and movie theaters” during the Civil Rights movement.

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Is Your “Little Library Contributing To the Gentrification” Of Your Black Neighborhood? No, The Problem Is That You’re A Racist And A Hypocrite. Fix It!

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Racist library

The New York Times has an astounding, depressing op-ed by a black woman, a “journalist and an author” named Erin Audrey Kaplan in which she announces unequivocally racist, bigoted, anti-white sentiments without a hint of self-awareness. It would be nice to think the Times printed her hateful essay as a “Don’t be like this bigot!” cautionary tale. Knowing the Times as I do, I doubt it.

Kaplan writes that she lives in “a mostly Black and Latino city in southwestern Los Angeles County.” She decided to build a Little Free Library (one of my neighbors in Alexandria has one) in her front yard. The birdhouse-like object (see it in the photo above?) invited pedestrians walking by to borrow (and later return) a book. Kaplan says she erected hers “to signal to my longtime neighbors that we had our own ideas about [community] improvement, and could carry them out in our own way…I envisioned it as a place for my neighbors to stay connected during the pandemic.”

She relates that she took pleasure in observing various neighbors stopping at the tiny library and accepting its friendly invitation, until…

..a young white couple happened by. She writes,

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Nah, Black Lives Matter Isn’t Racist! Whatever Would Give You That Idea?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

BLM Boycott

Black Lives Matter is promoting a boycott of all white citizen-owned businesses, urging supporters to buy “exclusively from Black-owned businesses’ through New Years. “Move your money out of white-corporate banks that finance our oppression and open accounts with Black-owned banks,” the group said on Instagram.

“Racism” and “racist” have both been watered down to near meaningless by the Left’s wielding of them as all-purpose weapons against critics, but under any definition, setting out to harm a business because of the race of its owners is racist to the core.

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November Ending Ethics, 11/30/21: Unethical Appeal, Buried Corruption, The Usual Hypocrisy, A Supreme Court Threat, And That’s Not All…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Bye November

I’m currently weighing whether to try to get up the Ethics Alarms Best and Worst of 2021 this year, after several years in a row of failing to find the time and energy…I am also re-watching “Clickbait” in preparation for the special Ethics Alarms Zoom discussion that, I hope, will soon be scheduled for some tome in the next 31 days. As regular readers here know, my ambitions sometimes exceed my grasp.

Heh. Sometimes...!

1. Oh look, a frivolous appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, because #MeToo, or something…The prosecutors who unethically used improperly obtained evidence to put Bill Cosby prison are now asking the United States Supreme Court to throw out the appellate court ruling earlier this year that overturned his 2018 conviction for sexual assault on due process grounds. Cosby was released in June after serving less than three years of a three-to-10-year sentence. He should not have served any time at all. A ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that Cosby’s rights had been violated when the Montgomery County District Attorney’s office pursued a criminal case against him despite a binding “non-prosecution agreement” given to him by a previous district attorney. Cosby’s rights were violated, raping scum that he is.

Notice how feminists, civil rights activists on the left, anti-Trump fanatics and others who have a monopoly on Truth and Right (or think they do) increasingly want the law to yield to “justice”? There is no valid basis for this appeal. Zip, none. The lawyers filing it should be sanctioned for unethical conduct, just as Trump lawyers who filed suits to flip-flop the 2020 election without evidence have been sanctioned.

2. Speaking of the 2020 election, the shady dealings of Joe Biden’s son, quite possibly with Joe’s knowledge and even facilitation, were, we now know, kept from the public just long enough to ensure Donald Trump’s defeat. Today, Senator Chuck Grassley took to the Senate floor to expose more smoking gun documentation. Here’s the video:

Of course, none of the news networks, except maybe Fox, will run it, and I assume the major print sources sill ignore it. The situation is not helped by the fact that Grassley is 88 and has no business being in the Senate. He’s pretty sharp for 88, which is like saying Jane Fonda is pretty hot for 83. I don’t want to see her do a sequel to “Barbarella”, and I don’t want to have to watch Grassley stumble through an important presentation.

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So: Facebook Decided That Kyle Rittenhouse Was Guilty, And Enabled False Media Narratives. Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Facebook-Censorship

Facebook announced shortly after Kyle Rittenhouse was arrested after the Kenosha shootings, “We’ve designated the shooting in Kenosha a mass murder and are removing posts in support of the shooter.” At this point, there had been no investigation, no assessment of the evidence, and, obviously, no trial. Nonetheless, Facebook, which purports to be a protector of free speech and expression (but is not), decided to cut off debate as well as access to mitigating facts in the incident, and leave the field to one side only. Guess which? Here’s a hint: it’s the side that almost all of social media and Big Tech uses its power and influence to support. (See: 2020 Presidential election)

Want to begin with Facebook’s declaration that two deaths under still undetermined circumstances is a “mass murder”? Ironically, a jury that had far more information before it ultimately determined that this wasn’t a murder at all. Never mind: Facebook removed pro-Kyle Rittenhouse posts, including posts from legal scholars attempting to explain why the teen could well have a valid self-defense claim. Then the platform manipulated its search engine so you couldn’t find any non-negative references to Rittenhouse that slipped through.

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Unethical Tweet Of The Month With Signature Significance: New York Times Contributor Sarah Jeong

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Jeong tweet2

Most tweets, even the very stupid and vicious ones, are not truly unethical because they are just opinions, and as opinions, simply self-indictments by nasty, bigoted, or not very smart people. However, the tweets of certain individuals—elected officials, scholars, journalists, scientists, experts in various fields and, unfortunately, celebrities—carry extra weight and the potential to persuade. When tweets by those people are dishonest or misleading they are irresponsible, and to be irresponsible is to be unethical.

Sarah Jeong is on the New York Times editorial staff, which means that she is trusted by the nation’s (supposedly) most trustworthy newspaper. Yet that tweet is one more example of the mainstream media denying or distorting reality to bolster the party and administration they put in power. The Biden administration is desperately spinning to deny the seriousness of the out-of-control inflation on its watch, but for journalists and pundits to assist them is unethical and despicable. The consumer price index indicates that, from last September to this September, Americans have seen beef prices rise by 18%; gas prices by 42%; furniture prices by 11%; electricity by 5%; and used car prices by 24%. Consumer prices for October, the most recent month with data, jumped by 6.2% compared to what they were a year prior. That’s the highest yearly jump in three decades. But a Times staffer of some notoriety says it’s a nothingburger, affecting the rich more than the rest.

Twitter, of course, doesn’t regard this as disinformation, since it supports a Democratic President’s disastrous fiscal policies.

Liz Wolf points out the obvious at Reason:

Inflation is not a frivolous concern created by panicking, self-interested rich people; nor are rich people currently “flipping their shit” because their assets aren’t doing as well as they’d like. Inflation is something that’s making things significantly harder for the non–”pajama class”—those roughly 79 percent of workers (estimates vary) who do not work remotely, but must commute to their in-person jobs day in and day out, incurring the burden that comes with the rising price of gas. It’s something that’s making it significantly harder for families to feed their kids. It’s something that’s throwing a wrench in some people’s plans to travel for the holidays, as rental cars and hotel rooms have gotten a good deal pricier than before. And it’s something many Americans probably don’t appreciate being lied to about….choosing flippant tweeting over thoughtful analysis is a bad look for New York Times contributors who really ought to be more concerned with the plights of everyday Americans forced to tighten the purse strings for reasons far beyond their control.

It’s worse that that. Allowing a proven bigot, sexist, anti-white racist and extreme ideologue like Jeong to represent it is signature significance for any news organization. An ethical company doesn’t do it; a responsible company doesn’t tolerate it; a trustworthy company doesn’t have someone like Jeong around at all. You may have forgotten this post, which is relevant to this morning’s first as well, when the Times first hired Jeong: Continue reading →

On The Censuring Of Rep. Gosar

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Gosar

The U.S. House of Representatives yesterday voted along party lines, meaning the vote was close and NeverTrumps Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger voted with the Democrats, to censure Representative Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, for posting a juvenile animated video that portrayed cartoon violence against Democrats and illegal immigrants. This was the first censure since 2010 and only the 24th in the history of Congress. The vote also stripped Gosar of his committee assignments.

In a vacuum and in principle, Ethics Alarms applauds the move. When I wrote about Gosar’s moronic stunt ten days ago, I headlined the story “Why Do We Let People Like This Idiot Into Congress?” This naturally assumes that I would not be sorry to see this idiot kicked out of Congress. I also wrote, in conclusion,

“This isn’t the kind of video a member of Congress should be having made, or put on social media. It’s an embarrassment to Congress, his party, his state, and his country. By what bizarre concept of public service and the House ethics rules could anyone conclude that such an assaultive, offensive, infantile piece of agitprop belongs in the public square?”

Gosar should have been censured, BUT… Continue reading →

They’re Shocked—SHOCKED!—That Trump Officials Deliberately Violated The Hatch Act

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Henry Kerner heads the Office of Special Counsel, and his new report following investigations into violations of the 1939 vintage law, known as the Hatch Act, that prohibits Federal employees from using their position to campaign for political candidates fingers thirteen of President Donald Trump’s senior aides, including his son-in-law and his chief of staff. It shows that they blatantly breached the law during the last weeks of the 2020 Presidential campaign, calculating that the Office of Special Counsel would not have time to investigate and issue findings before Election Day.

I’d say that calculation was correct, wouldn’t you? The report has come out more than a year later.

“Senior Trump administration officials chose to use their official authority not for the legitimate functions of the government, but to promote the re-election of President Trump in violation of the law,” the report concluded, adding, “The administration’s willful disregard for the law was especially pernicious considering the timing of when many of these violations took place.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what are you gong to do about it, other than make faces and write mean things? The Hatch Act is a perfect example of the principle that if people can cheat to obtain power or keep power, they will, if they know the penalties will be minimal or less. This is why mail-in ballots corrupt the electoral system, along with other holes in voting integrity. The Hatch Act isn’t enforced, so all administrations allow their officials to violate it. I don’t know if the law is enforceable. It is naive and irresponsible to expect Trump’s aides or any Presidential underlings regardless of party to eschew this unethical practice when they know they can get away with it, and the potential benefits of the violations are significant.

A President has to show that he regards the law as important. I can’t recall any President doing that as long as I’ve followed politics.

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