Two stories, both head-explodingly idiotic, both linked to Bizarro World Ethics and pathological virtue-signaling needs in oppressive leftist-indoctrination saturated cultures. One is a gag, the other is a tragedy, yet there is hardly a filament of difference between them in the 21st Century ethics and rationality rot they illustrate.
I read the two in succession by pure coincidence, and Poe’s Law immediately leaped into my mind. Poe’s Law was formulated in 20o5 (by Nathan Poe, not Edgar Allan Poe) and has become an essential concept since. It holds that satirical accounts involving extreme examples of ideological insanity can be impossible to distinguish from actual events, because current ideological extremism defies parody. Let’s cut to the chase, for this isn’t a quiz: the satirical piece was “I apologize for my white baby.”
In the latest “Halloween” installment, 2021’s “Halloween Kills”—I cannot believe that they are still recycling this franchise, which was repetitions and boring decades ago, but such is the creativity of modern Hollywood—apparently immortal serial killer Michael Myers, aka “The Shape,” guts a gay couple inside their home and poses them tenderly at the scene. Now, I would think that Michael is displaying new found wokeness in his choice of victims, since his original targets were horny heterosexual teens, a habit later adopted by Michael’s lesser imitator (and his Mom), Jason Voorhees of the equally endless “Friday the Thirteenth” franchise. He should be celebrated, right?
Uh, no. On social media, Michael, still wearing his iconic Willim Shatner mask, is being accused of revealing a homophobic side. My favorite of the many anti-Michael tweets: “Michael Myers is a racist homophobic murderer. No respect for him now.”
RETRACTED: The article discussed is from a hoax site…Reader Isaac led me to the other two articles on the site, which are clearly jokes. Nowhere on the site is it stated that it is a hoax site or that it engages in satire. The dogs post is not obvious satire; it’s not funny, and it’s no more ridiculous than a lot of genuine Black Lives Matter nonsense, the things Rep. Ocasio-Cortez says every other day, or the typical PETA press release.
I resent being tricked like that, as I’ve written before. The Onion is a satire site, and says so up front. So is the Babylon Bee. There was nothing anywhere on the page I read on the United Wildlife Union website to suggest that the post, ridiculous as it is, was intended as satire….not with the crazy stuff I read every day. Poe’s Law is real.
Seattle’s CHAZ—no, wait, it’s CHOP now—police-free zone occupiers, who are giving me flashbacks to the gibberish-spouting SDS campus radicals who took over Harvard’s administration building in the spring of 1969, released their conflict resolution plans, being anarchists and all:
We will form a unique system called the Conflict Resolution Advisory Council.
We hold a community democratic vote to appoint three people to the Council. To eliminate prejudice, we elect one Black man, one Black woman, and one white woman. Each person should undergo at least one 45 minute sensitivity and political training session which we can help organize.
Whenever there is an internal conflict in the Zone, it will be put to the Council. Both people will have an opportunity to present their side of the story to the Council to review.
The Council members will decide on a fair resolution and provide it as advice. Initially the Council will be advisory only. In the future the system could evolve to become more mature with binding resolutions, impositions, retribution, enforcement, and imprisonment.
The appointed people will hear out and settle any internal disputes within the Zone. We’re not suggesting that this Council members become leaders or judges, only referees in case of internal conflicts.
I’d love to ask them to explain how having a black man, a black woman and a white woman will eliminate prejudice, but never mind. Oh, wait! All prejudice and injustice is caused by white men! Got it.
Posted on Reddit were the following amendments to the council plan. Nobody is quite sure if they are real, or a Monty Python-caliber spoof. How would one tell? The Seattle occupiers are silly, uneducated and incompetent, and they are obsessed with progressive, inclusivity, and diversity cant. What follows, if it’s genuine, makes the Green New Deal seem like the Magna Carta. If it isn’t (which i fervently hope), then the People’s Front of Judea (PFJ) from “The Life of Brian” is still doing marvelous work.
I’m pretty certain that by Edits 8 and 9, the brilliant wag who wrote this is revealing the gag…but I’m still not sure. That’s how ridiculous this group is that Seattle now indulges to the disruption of its city and the affront to its saner citizens. Continue reading →
The Babylon Bee, as you should know by now, has taken over from “The Onion” as the hot political satire website, in part because its writers are excellent, and in part because its orientation is conservative. This is discomforting for progressives, who believe that the proper state of political humor must be all-conservative/Republican/Trump bashing all the time.
This, of course, not a healthy state of affairs, but for Democrats and progressive it is a useful one. How many network and cable comedy TV shows are there that essentially target only non-progressive positions and figures? Seven? More? How many are balanced, or chide the liberals and Democrats as their main prey? I count…none. Comedy, at least what remains of it after the scourge of political correctness and metaphorically castrated comics cowed into their place by the “cancel culture,” is now part of the Left’s indoctrination machine.
The allies of the Democratic Party/”resistance”/mainstream media collective, what Ethics Alarms calls “the Axis of Unethical Conduct,” or the AUC, are annoyed by the very existence of a satire site that deftly points out its hypocrisy, lunacy and ugliness. Thus Snopes, the dishonest and partisan “factchecking” site, has repeatedly checked the facts on Babylon Bee stories that anyone with a functioning cerebrum should know were gags. This weak, a particularly deft Babylon Bee story really annoyed the AUC:
Perfect. Perfect. The embarrassing efforts by Democrats and media voices to falsely represent a murderous terrorist as a “revered foreign official” (as the Washington Post described him) is objectively revolting, and shows the depth of insane Trump hate, as I explained here. Because of its sharp and revealing..and funny… message, the piece was retweeted a half-million times. Naturally, it immediately came under attack by—“Surprise, surprise, surprise!“as Gomer Pyle used to say—CNN. Two reporters complained that “Some family members just called [because] their Republican friends on FB are circulating it like it’s legit.”
First, I don’t know how someone can circulate obvious satire as if it’s “legit.” Second, out of a half million or more people, it is inevitable that some will believe anything. Third, when observing the AUC reaction to the completely justifiable droning of this evil man, Poe’s Law applies in triplicate. The reaction of some of the Trump-deranged defies parody. Bernie Sanders, for example, called it the equivalent of Putin assassinating a political rival.
Then there’s the irony of news organizations like CNN, which have been flamboyantly trafficking in fake news during the entire Trump administration, complaining about satirical news stories that, unlike theirs, are not meant to deceive.
1 .Regarding Michael Cohen. The news media, Trump-haters and “the resistance’ are all giddy over Michael Cohen claiming that President Trump made racist comments in his presence. Lawyers who say such things about clients get disbarred. They get disbarred because it is proof that they lack the honesty, trustworthiness and integrity to be trusted professionals.There is no reason whatsoever to trust Michael Cohen, so relying on his account of anything is just an exercise in confirmation bias. He is not a reliable source, and what he says at this point should be taken for what it is: the latest effort by a desperate crook to somehow survive the consequences of his own low-life ways.
2. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez easily makes my list of the dozen most unethical candidates seeking election next week; I hope to get that up soon. Here is the fundraising email the New York socialist sent out:
“Six days from now, we can defeat the brutal white supremacist forces of anti-Semitism, anti-immigrant nativism, and racism.We can hold accountable the cold-hearted monsters who have repeatedly attacked our health care. We can send a message to the bigots and billionaires that this country belongs to all of us. We can win if we show up on November 6. We must end Republican control of Congress and begin to reclaim our nation. A Democratic majority will not bring back the eleven Jewish people in Pittsburgh, massacred while they prayed. Or the two Black people gunned down days before at a Kroger grocery store in Kentucky. It won’t fully stop the relentless attacks against immigrants in America. But on Sunday evening, Pittsburgh mourners—angry and broken-hearted like us—chanted ‘Vote! Vote! Vote!’ They understand the magnitude of the midterm election six days from today: that it affords us the chance to forge a powerful bulwark against Donald Trump’s hate and hold accountable the Republicans who have been complicit in every step of his toxic, self-serving, and destructive agenda. We must offer a path out of the darkness….This is our chance to take action in solidarity with everyone whose lives are threatened by the hate-filled policies of Trump and the GOP,” she says. “Our chance to push back against white supremacist forces across our nation, against the xenophobes who are militarizing the border, against the bigots who seek to erase our transgender families, against the apologists for sexual assault and the Islamophobes who sow hate to divide us.”
I considered doing an ethics audit of this screed—remember, she’s supposed to be a rising star of the Democratic Party—but decided that any objective reader here is more than capable of doing so without any help from me. Res ipsa loquitur.
How should we characterize someone who would vote to give power to a candidate willing to sign such a message?
3. By all means, let’s believe all female accusers...Judy Munro-Leighton, who as “Jane Doe” accused Brett Kavanaugh of rape in an email to Senator Kamala Harris, was treated as a credible accuser and caused the Judiciary Committee to question the SCOTUS nominee about her claims. Now she admits that it was all a partisan-driven lie.
Who suspected that?
She confessed to Committee investigators that she “just wanted to get attention” and that “it was a tactic.” She said she had called Congress during the Kavanaugh hearing process before the Blasey-Ford accusation multiple times to oppose Kavanaugh’s nomination. Regarding the false sexual-assault allegation sent to the Committee through Harris, she said: “I was angry, and I sent it out.” Asked whether she had ever met Judge Kavanaugh, she said: “Oh Lord, no.”
Her false rape allegations against Kavanaugh had exactly as much corroborating evidence as Blasey-Ford’s: none whatsoever. Yet, still, to this second, an astounding number of smart, reasonable Democrats, especially women, argue, and presumably believe, that such an accusation–in Blasey Ford’s case, one that is three decades old and dates from high school— should disqualify a man with an unblemished adult and professional reputation from high office. And they are indignant about it, too.
I don’t get it.
Reportedly, the Senate received over a thousand claims from women claiming that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted or harassed them.
The Senate has asked for criminal sanctions against Munro-Leighton.
Ethics Alarms 