IIPTDXTTNMIAFB

Ethics Quote Of The Month: Ann Althouse On Biden’s Speech Last Night

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

“I can sum it up in 7 words: We the People, but not you people.”

—–Allegedly non-partisan blogger Ann Althouse (she’s a Democrat), providing a preview of her soon to be posted review of Biden’s “soul of the nation” speech.

As soon as I read that Biden was going to give a prime-time speech on the peril to the “soul of the nation,” I knew exactly what was coming, what motivated it (panic and desperation, plus terrible advisers), and what it would be: the ultimate IIPTDXTTNMIAFB.

And wildly unethical, of course: irresponsible, disrespectful, unfair, and un-American, as well as hypocritical, indeed a betrayal, from a leader who promised on his Inaugeration Day, “We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature. For without unity there is no peace, only bitterness and fury. No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos. This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge, and unity is the path forward.”

Was I wrong?

I haven’t read the various pundits about the speech yet, and I haven’t read the text yet; I have a doctor’s appointment and I don’t want to be nauseous. I am curious about whether any of the usual Biden cheer-leaders will have the integrity to state the obvious, and what was obvious the second the speech was announced. This is deliberate divisiveness. It is the essence of totalitarian messaging; it is more fascist in intent and substance than anything Donald Trump ever did or said.

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PM Ethics Shadows, 4/12/2022: Civil War Memories, Crazy Climate Change Terrorists, Someone Figures Out That BLM Is A Scam, And More [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The Civil War started on this date in 1861, as Southern forces fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor. That’s about all that needs to be said. All wars are ethics nightmares, but none has had more ethics ramifications for this country, from the lives sacrificed to end slavery, to the war crimes of Andersonville, and the total war tactics of Sherman, to the myriad instances of astounding courage, cruelty and incompetence on the battlefields and the ongoing debate about how best to glean the right ethics lessons from them. (Tearing down statues is not it, though.) The Civil War took away our greatest POTUS, Lincoln, and gave us Presidents Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Harrison and McKinley, Civil War veterans all. The one non-veteran in the sequence, Grover Cleveland, is an ethics controversy himself because of it: Grover paid someone else to take his place in the draft. And yet….try asking the nearest college grad to give you the dates of the Civil War. I asked a Cornell law grad and former associate of one of the most prestigious law firm in the nation once.
She guessed “Somewhere in the 1930s, right?”

1. I’ll take “Unethical environmental fanatic nutballs, Alex!” Adbusters, a self-described “international collective of artists, designers, writers, musicians, poets, punks, philosophers and wild hearts” posted instructions on how to deflate the tires of “rich people’s” gas-powered vehicles. [Pointer: JutGory] “Wedge gravel in the tire valves, leaflet the SUV to let them know the tires are flat and why it was done, and walk away. It’s that simple,” the group said in a tweet. The group cautioned “to avoid targeting vehicles with disabled stickers or hangers.” That’s considerate of them…

This is what climate change hysteria does to people who lack ethics alarms. Here’s what they want you to leave on the windshield when you disable a car:

2. Good. Now what took you so long? On the Huffington Post, progressive opinionater Stephen Crockett authored a rueful essay bemoaning the fact that Black Lives Matter is apparently a racket. (Please note that this space figured that out years ago, and it wasn’t hard.)

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The Quest For The Perfect IIPTDXTTNMIAFB Continues, And Joe May Have Given Us A Winner!

/ Jack Marshall / 76 Comments

The issue is mainstream news media double standards, which are unethical in general and especially revolting in the news media’s protective stance toward President Biden no matter how badly he screws up in contrast to its coverage of Donald Trump, who could literally do no right in their jaundiced eyes. Yesterday Biden handed the news media a flaming IIPTDXTTNMIAFB, the convenient Ethics Alarms initials for “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.”

One of the most damaging and despicable Big Lies pushed relentlessly by the “resistance”/Democratic Party/ MSM alliance from the moment Trump was elected in 2016 was that he was a racist. If you asked an adherent of this slander to name any evidence, the “best” they could come up with was inevitably that Trump had vocally embraced the Birther smear about Barack Obama. But this only stands as proof that Trump is an asshole and a troll, about which there has never been any doubt. He made similar claims about Ted Cruz in order to derail his efforts to beat Trump for the 2016 GOP nomination. Trump plays dirty against all rivals. He’s an equal opportunity jerk, but he’s not a racist (or a white supremacist, a related Big Lie).

But the idea of planting these idea was “priming”: make sure “Trump is a racist” is sitting around rotting in the brains of gullible Americans, and let confirmation bias do the rest. So imagine if Trump had ever looked out over a Fort Worth, Texas, crowd at a VA clinic, and, referring to three Texas members of Congress who looked like Rep. Colin Allred (D), Rep. Marc Veasey (D), and Rep. Jake Ellzey (R) (above) who were in attendance, said,

“The three congressman you have here, two of them look like they really could and did play ball, and the other one looks like he can bomb you.”

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Ethics Observations On The Death Of The Isis Leader

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

President Biden announced yesterday that the leader of ISIS, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, had died during an assault in Syria carried out by about two dozen American commandos. Later we learned that women and children were among at least 13 people killed during the raid in Atmeh, a town close to the border with Turkey in rebel-held Idlib Province. This morning, we learned that the trapped terrorist had blown himself up, and others, including women and children, with him.

Well, that’s what people like Hashimi al-Qurayshi are good at.

Ethics Observations:

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And Now, A Christmas Eve IIPTDXTTNMIAFB Video!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuvNWMd1nKQ

[You watch this at your own risk, and if you go blind or your brain melts, you were warned.]

I was wishing and hoping that YouTube would post this, because yesterday it was only available on platforms that WordPress won’t embed. And behold! There it was this morning. Yet another Christmas miracle!

I blush to admit that I have a lot of experience with this kind of earnest, faux-cheery performing: I’ve performed, choreographed and directed such junk myself. Never in the past 30 years, and never with performers in their thirties, however. Kids were best: they can get away with it. This “Up With People” -style horror was annoying when it was in vogue, but now it can only be justified as camp. To see middle-aged adults like this is excruciating, or should be. (I couldn’t last the full 2+ minutes. I just couldn’t)

I also note:

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It’s An IIPTDXTTNMIAFB Video!

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I would have posted this Tik-Tok video earlier, but WordPress will only embed YouTube, and it took a while for that platform to keep down its gorge and include this offal. It has IIPTDXTTNMIAFB (“Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.”) written all over it.

This desperate pro-vaccination PSA seems to have cornered the adjective “cringeworthy,” and teens are using that description as much as adults. The “Joe Byron” reference has to do with another viral video by the YouTube channel SideTalk, which features a bunch of weirdos from Coney Island referring to the President by that name.

Oh. How…clever. Apparently the target audience for a video featuring the Jonas Brothers acting like 10-year-olds are insulted that such an appeal would be regarded as persuasive, and recognize condescending pandering when they see it. The non-target audience is wondering what the President of the United States is doing lowering the stature his office by appearing with these clowns.

Now, just imagine the media reaction if Trump had been the guy with the camera instead of “Byron.” Look who this reality show phony gets to deal with a life and death catastrophe like a pandemic! Norms! Norms! Well, some norms really shouldn’t ever be destroyed…like the norm that Presidents don’t toss away their dignity on the likes of the Jonas Brothers.

___________________

Source: Rolling Stone

Yet Another IIPTDXTTNMIAFB Whopper!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXurJFwucJU

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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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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A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!”/ IIPTDXTTNMIAFB / “It Isn’t What It Is”/Jumbo Spectacular!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Mediate lie

They aren’t even trying to be credible any more apparently. Wow.

See those words above, in Mediaite’s tweet? Now, if I was doing my best Mediaite imitation, I’d write, “Mediaite didn’t claim Joe Biden didn’t refer to Satchel Paige as a Negro” even while you could read that this is exactly what the media news website did.

In fact, here’s what President Biden, in full bumbling mode, said today at a Veteran’s Day event at Arlington National Cemetery:

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Biden Lied And People Died..Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

Former VP Joe Biden Addresses Chicago Council On Global Affairs

The New York Times front page this morning has a disheartening story revealing that President Biden’s assertion to the American people that the collapse of Afghan forces was considered unlikely (but possible!) by U.S. intelligence was untrue. He must have known it was untrue too, or they really are keeping poor Joe in a closet and pulling him out for public appearances with a secret ventriloquist doing his voice. The Times:

“Classified assessments by American spy agencies over the summer painted an increasingly grim picture of the prospect of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and warned of the rapid collapse of the Afghan military, even as President Biden and his advisers said publicly that was unlikely to happen as quickly, according to current and former American government officials. By July, many intelligence reports grew more pessimistic, questioning whether any Afghan security forces would muster serious resistance and whether the government could hold on in Kabul, the capital. President Biden said on July 8 that the Afghan government was unlikely to fall and that there would be no chaotic evacuations of Americans similar to the end of the Vietnam War.…”

The Times is perplexed! The existence of these reports “raise questions about why Biden administration officials, and military planners in Afghanistan, seemed ill-prepared to deal with the Taliban’s final push into Kabul, including a failure to ensure security at the main airport and rushing thousands more troops back to the country to protect the United States’ final exit.” After all, there must be some legitimate reason a good, progressive Democratic President would “seem” to screw up so completely and lie about it! It would never be that he is completely incompetent and evil, like that last President! “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” Even when it is forced into reporting a total, massive, historic botch by the party it works for, the Times cannot be objective or approach the same tone and attitude it would apply to an equivalent blunder by that other party.

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