The Streisand Effect

The “Get Trump!” Files: The Washington Post Weaponizes “The Streisand Effect”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Of course it did.

Some, or many, Trump-haters out there…or the Democratic National Committee—after all, Democrats cheat—sent out into social media the above fake photos of the President kissing White House aide Natalie Harp, the young aide who has been targeted by the Angry Left as a possible object of Trump’s sexual attention. This went “viral,” The Washington Post claims, though if my fanatically Trump-Deranged Facebook friends didn’t peep about it, and they believe anything if it can be interpreted a barely negative about the President, I am dubious.

So the Washington Post decided to make certain that as many people see the photos as possible. Althouse’s immediate reaction was “WaPo wants you to know it’s fake… but you’ve got to see this, got to get it imprinted on your fragile brain.” Bingo. The Post even introduces the fake photos with “‘Hoaxes like these are “death by a thousand cuts’ that chip away at people’s trust, one expert said.” And here’s another cut! I wonder if the Post staff stood around in a mob while the article was being prepared, chanting “CUT! CUT! CUT! CUT!”

The Post did include references to BBC journalist and fact-checker Shayan Sardarizadeh’s nine-part thread on X, explaining his process for determining that both images were resolutely fakes. That arrives deep into the article however.

In 2003, Barbara Streisand sued to force an aerial photographer to remove a photo of her Malibu cliff-top mansion from a website. The lawsuit made the photo into global news, and hundreds of thousands of views and downloads when the photo had only been downloaded six times, twice by Babs’ lawyers, before the controversy. Techdirt later coined the term “The Streisand Effect,” which has come up many times on Ethics Alarms. Frankly, I’m surprised that the Axis of Unethical Conduct hasn’t been using AI-generated fake photos far more than it has so far. “CUT! CUT! CUT! CUT!” Of course it is an unethical and despicable practice, but as Harry Reid will remind us from the Lake of Fire in Hell, “It works!”

Case Study Of An Ethics Train Wreck: The Crooked Cap Affair

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Baseball has been doing a bang-up job lately validating my baseball ethics posts. My conviction is that the game is and has always been a cultural ethics microcosm, revealing and clarifying ethical dilemmas and conflicts with applications far removed from the game itself. Yesterday there was another example.

Behold…

During the sixth inning of the St. Louis Cardinals’ 7-6 victory over the Colorado Rockies last night, Cardinals rookie reliever Hancel Rincon, making his first appearance in a big league came, wore his cap rakishly askew. Rincon was pitching to Rockies batter Cole Carrigg when home-plate umpire Doug Eddings decided to react to the query of the previous Rockies batter, who had asked Eddings, “Hey, can he wear his hat like that?”

Batters since the dawn of baseball time have tried to find ways to wage psychological warfare against pitchers; EA had an earlier example this season, here. This one worked: the comment inspired Eddings to join the fashion police. Eddings halted the game, motioned to Cardinals catcher Leo Bernal, and told Rincon to fix his cap, punctuating the request with “Grow the fuck up!” Rincon complied. Three pitchers later, Carrigg hit an inside-the-park home run and Rincon exited the game shortly thereafter.

Later in the inning, Cardinals manager Oli Marmol was ejected from the game by Eddings. Marmol explained: “We have a kid making his debut, and in between an at-bat, he tells him that he needs to fix his hat and, ‘The kid’s not going to wear his hat like that on my field.’ Last I checked, this is Coors Field, so I took issue with it.” Not only did Eddings eject Marmol, but he also called a pitch-clock violation that gave Rockies designated hitter Troy Johnston a 1-0 count to start his at-bat against the new Cardinal pitcher. That was not a valid use of the rule, but umpires think they are God sometimes. It’s tradition!

“And then the pitch violation while I’m out there having a discussion, that’s also stupid, in my opinion,” Marmol said later. “So there’s a lot of moving parts to that one. At the end of the day, I thought they handled it poorly, and I’d like an explanation at some point.”

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Ugh…So The President Attacks The Pope! The Two Diagrams Trump Doesn’t Understand…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This is ridiculous.

The President took to social media again yesterday to announce that he doesn’t like the Pope:

What an irredeemably stupid thing to do.

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Ethics Quiz: The Offensive… Wristband?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Apparently a biological male who “identifies as female” plays on the Plymouth Regional High School girls’ soccer team in New Hampshire. When the team played its regional rival Bow High School, some Bow parents, protesting the presence of the player whom they regarded as a danger to the born-female players on the Bow team, wore wristbands like the ones above as a silent protest. The Bow High athletic director had told concerned parents before the contest that “in the wake of a federal judge’s ruling that the term ‘girl’ includes males who identify as female,” he felt he was powerless. (He’s a weenie. If he agreed with the parents, he could simply have his team refuse to play the Plymouth team, accept the consequences, and raise the issue.)

When the parents’ “XX” bands appeared at the game, school officials stopped the soccer match, ordered the parents to remove the wristbands, and even “issued [a] police-enforced ‘No Trespassing order’” against two parents who refused.

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Ethics Quiz: The “Inappropriate Dance” [Updated and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Maybe this one should be titled, “Tell Me What I’m Missing.”

Buhach Colony High School (California) principal Robert Nunes was placed on administrative this week after a video of an obviously planned and choreographed bit of foolery with the basketball team’s mascot “went viral.” It was a pep rally. Mascots (which I hate, but that’s another issue) frequently do these kind of routines, and bringing authority figures into the gag is standard fare, giving the human butts of the giant costumed things a chance to appear more human, show they are good sports, yada yada. I’ve seen baseball managers get in to faux fistfights with these escapees from a Disneyland parade. The crowd generally loves it, the morons. Big deal.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is is fair to suspend a high school principal for that routine above?

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The Democrat Porn Star Virginia Legislature Candidate Renders The “Ethics Dunce” Designation Obsolete: “The Naked Porn-Performing Political Candidate Principle” Perhaps?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I don’t know what you call this, but whatever it is, “ethics dunce” just isn’t enough.

That’s Susanna Gibson above with her husband (I don’t know where those annoying stars came from) performing on a porn website while she was already running as a candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates. The 40-year-old Democrat, along with her lawyer husband, have been appearing in flagrante delicto on an X-rated website, and offering to perform sundry sex acts in front of the camera, including those involving violence and bodily excretions, in exchange for money—not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But after the conservative Washington Free Beacon was tipped off to this rare proclivity on the part of a political candidate and wrote about it, Gibson announced that she was shocked—shocked!—that anyone would feel that a candidate for the legislature soliciting money for sex acts was something the public had a right to know about. She found a lawyer willing to try to use Maryland’s “revenge porn” law to punish such people. Daniel P. Watkins of the Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch firm, argues that “it’s illegal and it’s disgusting to disseminate this kind of material”and says that he is “working closely with the F.B.I. and local prosecutors to bring the wrongdoers to justice.”

Sure, Danny, good luck with that! It’s a ridiculous idea for a law suit, but ya never know, so it slips under the wire as “ethical,” though any lawyer bringing such a suit should have to wear a bag on his head.

Ugh. Where to begin?

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Wednesday Ethics Wind-Down / Thursday Ethics Warm-Up, 10/14-15/2020: The Unmasking Of News Media And Social Media Bias Continues…[UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

phantom-of-the-opera

1. Notes from The Great Stupid. Here is a passage from a New York Times book review of “The Tragedy of Heterosexuality”:

“In examining the pressure to partner with the opposite gender we find the extortions of capitalism, the misogyny of violence against women, the racist and xenophobic erasure of nonwhite families, and the homophobic hatreds that pervade so much of everyday life.”

Well, that and the biological imperative to continue the species. This brilliance is the work of Haley Mlotek,  a senior editor for SSENSE. Imagine: this is the quality of thought among our intellectual class.

No wonder the political class is so idiotic.

2. So this is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, is it? Nikole  Hannah-Jones, faced with a careful and accurate fisking of her fraudulent “1619 project” by Times columnist Bret Stephens (covered by Ethics Alarms here) did not try to rebut him, or make a civil, reasoned argument. She did what her entire generation of prominent African Americans have been conditioned to do, because it works so well. She accused Stephens and the Times of racism, with a dash of sexism for flavor. Hannah-Jones tweeted,

“In 1894, the NYT called Ida B. Wells a ‘slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress’ for daring to tell the truth about lynching. 100 years later she earned the Pulitzer Prize. These efforts to discredit my work simply put me in a long tradition of [black women] who failed to know their places.”

(It is satisfying to watch the Washington Post pounce on the Times over this fiasco. The rivalry between the papers is one of the few factors that ever pushed one of them into practicing actual journalism these days.)

As for Nikole Hannah-Jones, she is a child. Her tantrum was irresponsible and an embarrassment to the Times, and she should, by rights, be fired. She won’t be, because of black privilege, now enhanced in the wake of the George Floyd Ethics Train Wreck. The embarrassment for the Times, however, will linger. This woman was given leave by the paper to create and promote a false historical narrative that was not designed to enlighten but to further a political agenda. In truth, the Times deserves the embarrassment even more than Hannah-Jones deserves to be fired.

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Now I’ve Actually SEEN “Cuties,”So I know What I’m Writing About…

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

What does Barbara Streisand have to do with “Cuties,” you ask?

And, from my perspective, I have been taught, once again, that I should not rely on the opinions of others. Why is that such a difficult lesson to process? I bet I’ve “learned” it a thousand times, and yet here we are.

I initially wrote about pundit Rod Dreher’s angry assessment of the Netflix hit (it is one of the most streamed productions in its history) in this post. I think it was clear that I hadn’t seen “Cuties” myself, but I should not have written that he was disgusted “with good reason.” Veteran commenter Humble Talent provided Ethics Alarms with his critical assessment of “Cuties” in his Comment of the Day; it was negative as well. Having now watched the film with my wife last night (I regarded the session as work, not recreation), I understand what Dreher’s perspective was, and  I cannot say that Humble’s critique is “wrong.”

I disagree with both of them, however.

My thoughts on “Cuties”:

1.  I did not enjoy the movie. I would not watch it again. I would watch “1918,” “Parasite,” “The Circle“…even “JFK,” “Ghost” and “La La Land,’  all movies I felt were at best disappointing and at worst ridiculously over-hyped, before I would sit through “Cuties” again. (I would rather watch “Cuties” than revisit “The Deer Hunter,” but then I would rather have my fingernails  pulled out than revisit “The Deer Hunter.”)

2. That doesn’t not mean I think “Cuties” is a bad movie. It’s a very good movie, for the audience it was made for. (“Ghost” is not a good movie, and anyone who thinks so is a tasteless sap.) This isn’t just a “chick flick,” it is a flick that men should be warned not to see, and possibly banned from trying.

3. As a man, I felt like a voyeur watching these semi-pubescent girls try to navigate their emerging sexuality and the corrosive influence of the culture. It’s not that I’m uninterested in this aspect of a reality I didn’t experience, it’s just that…ick. My wife, on the other hand, who grew up with three sisters, kept asking, “So what was supposed to be so objectionable about this?”

4. If art is supposed to convey truth, “Cuties” succeeds, I suspect. Of course, just because a story is true or embodies truth doesn’t mean it needs to be made into a movie. This precise topic has been dealt with before, but never so directly, at least in any movie that has been widely publicized.

5. I agree with Humble’s complaint that the director—a woman, of course—focused the camera on the girl’s bodies as they gyrated and twerked to the verge of salaciousness. I’m sure she would have a good answer for why she made this choice, and why it was artistically valid, but it was still a troubling choice.

6. I thought the girls were all excellent, and several were remarkable. That does not mitigate one of my ethical objections to the film, which is that juveniles were given this kind of material to absorb and experience. It doesn’t matter that they performed it well, and it doesn’t matter that the movie could only be made with pre-teen actresses. Nor will it change my view if they all grow up to be well-adjusted and happy adults: that’s moral luck. The actresses were below the age of consent, and should not be asked to/ compelled to perform such material. The parents who consented for them are irresponsible and unethical, just as Dakota Fanning’s parents were unethical to allow her to be in a  graphic rape scene in “Hounddog,” just as Brooke Shields’ parents were unethical to allow her to appear as a pre-teen prostitute in “Pretty Baby,” just as Linda Blair’s parents were unethical to allow her to play the possessed girl in “The Exorcist.” I  may ask child performer advocate Paul Peterson to author a guest column on his view of “Cuties.” I think I know what he will say.

7. One of the major complaints about the film is that it will appeal to pedophiles. That’s an unfair reason to criticize a movie: the fact that sick people will like it for the wrong reasons. I refuse to believe that pedophiles are the intended audience, nor that either the director or Netflix were seeking to entertain men who have a sexual fixation on little girls. I’m sure “Seabiscuit” titillated some people who fantasize about having sex with horses.

8. The runaway success of “Cuties” is as fine an example of “The Streisand Effect” as we are likely to find. The only reason a film like this, focusing on a Muslim pre-teen coping with her family stresses by becoming obsessed with sexually provocative dancing that is rampant among girls just slightly older, becomes an cultural phenomenon is if it is controversial. Critics like Dreher guaranteed that many more people would watch “Cuties” than the subject matter would normally draw. It’s not titillating or enjoyable to watch 11-year-olds get into sexually provocative costumes and make-up and act like go-go dancers in a cage. It’s creepy, and it’s supposed to be creepy. But Dreher and the other would-be conservative cultural gate-keepers made sure that the pervs would find “Cuties” and settle down to watch with their lotion handy. Good job, everybody!

Now THIS Is The Streisand Syndrome: The Strange Saga Of Professor Bruce Hay

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

You have to go to the links; I can’t do justice to this story without giggling. Primarily, I want to highlight this epic mess because it’s the best example of the Streisand Effect ever, a situation where an attempt to seek redress for an alleged smear brings more publicity to negative details about the supposed victim far beyond  anything the original conduct could have. To make the fiasco more juicy still, here is a Harvard Law professor revealing himself as an utter fool, and engaging in a frivolous—that is, unethical— attempt to use “sexual harassment” to apply to “you used your feminine whiles to manipulate me, and I fell for it.”

Sexual harassment doesn’t mean that.

The hilariously baroque story involves… Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Day…Or Is It Just Icky?: Alan Dershowitz

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“I have had sex with one woman since the day I met Jeffrey Epstein. I challenge David Boies to say under oath that he’s only had sex with one woman … He has an enormous amount of chutzpah to attack me and challenge my perfect, perfect sex life during the relevant period of time.”

—-Alan Dershowitz on Fox News,  attacking super-lawyer David Boies, who is representing Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a woman who claims Dershowitz had sex with her while she was one of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex slaves. 

  • Too much information, Professor.
  • Has Dershowitz never heard of the Streisand Effect? His complaining about the accusation is publicizing it.
  • Decorum? Modesty? Restraint? Dignity? Privacy? Dershowitz is 80: he’s supposed to be in the generation hat still appreciates these things.
  • He had sex with one woman for almost two decades? It was nice of him to give her a break while he chatted with Laura Ingaham…
  • Ick.