Remember, Donald Trump and the Republicans are a threat to democracy….
U.S. Society
Companies Deliberately Alienating “Undesirable” Consumers: What’s Going On Here?”
I don’t think we’ve ever seen this before the 21st Century emergence of The Great supid, with those entrusted with the management of for-profit companies deliberately choosing virtue -signaling over profitability. What does it all mean?
Today’s example is Sports Illustrated, which, I must confess, I thought was defunct. The once indispensable sports photography and commentary magazine almost went under last year and was apparently bought by a last-minute rescuer. So how does the magazine launch its comeback? Why, by prominently including the above model in its annual swimsuit issue due out this month, displaying other comely and not so comely models in gowns rather than bikinis (Who, other than Oprah, wants to see Gail King in the S.I. swimsuit issue?) and highlighting Angry Lesbian Megan Rapinoe to promote the issue. That should really draw the guys!
Observations on a Scenario in Which Everyone and Everything Involved Looks Bad Including the Schools and American Society in General
Zoey (above), a high school senior at Ayala High School in Chino Hills, California —we don’t yet know her whole name—was expelled for cyberbullying, intimidation, harassment and attempting to cause physical injury to another person after she used her cell phone to live-stream a classroom brawl between fellow students. There seems to be some suspicion that she was in on the plot to attack one of the combatants, though Zooey denies it. The incident and the report covering it raise all sorts of ethics questions and conclusions.
Such as…
1. Why are students allowed to have cell phones in class at all, specifically cameras? The school has a rule against filming and posting occurrences in the school involving students, potentially embarrassing them, humiliating them and harassing them—why not just confiscate all of the phones before class so this kind of thing is impossible?
2. Zoey’s explanation: “In our generation, you go live to do makeup, to do everything, so it was just going live just to go live. It wasn’t my intent to purposely or try to cause harm to anyone.” I see Zoey has virtually reached adulthood without anyone teaching her that rationalizations aren’t valid reasons for unethical conduct, and “Everybody does it” is particularly wrong.
I Don’t Understand This “Niggardly Principle” Story At All…Or Maybe I Do and Am Just Afraid To Accept the Truth
Now get this: In 2017, three 14-year-odlCalifornia teens, two of whom, Holden Hughes and Aaron Hartley, were about to begin attending St. Francis High School, a Catholic private school in Mountain view, were modeling anti-acne medicinal face masks that involved smearing dark green goo on their faces. (One of the boys had severe acne and his friends put the stuff on their own faces in an act of support). The teen who wasn’t headed to the private school snapped a selfie because the boys thought they looked funny. A similar photo taken a day earlier indicated that they had tried white medicinal face masks as well.
A student at St. Francis found the image online and uploaded it to a group chat in June 2020. Not only was the George Floyd Freakout in full eruption, but the photo was circulated on the same day that recent SFHS graduates had posted on Instagram a satirical meme pertaining to Floyd’s demise, so the school was “triggered.” The gloriously woke student who decided to publicize the greenface photo claimed that the teens were using blackface; “another example” of rampant racism at the school, he posted, and urged everyone in the group chat to spread it throughout the school community—you know, to cause as much anger, division and disruption as possible.
I can’t find the name of that charming kid. He’ll probably be Governor of California some day.
Soon after this seed was planted, the Dean of Students at St. Francis Ray called the Hughes’s and Aaron Hartley’s’ parents to ask them if they were aware of the photograph. They explained that the teens had applied green facemasks three years earlier, long before the non-racial Minnesota incident that had no demonstrable racial significance and definitely no relevance to blackface. The parents added that the teens’ use of the acne medication had “neither ill intent nor racist motivation, nor even knowledge of what “blackface” meant.”
Ethics Dunces: the Shenandoah County School Board
Why the recent decision of the Shenandoah County School Board to restore the names of two local public schools previously stripped of their references to three Confederate generals is unethical is crystal clear to me, but apparently to nobody else, or at least nobody else whose opinion I can find in print.
The Board voted 5-1 to change the two schools’ names back to Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby Lee Elementary School, four years after the same board with different members changed the names to Mountain View High School and Honey Run Elementary School. The previous act of historical air-brushing had occurred because it seemed obvious to those members that a lifetime petty crook overdosing on fentanyl and dying under bad cop’s knee while resisting a valid arrest in Minnesota meant that the names of those schools in Virginia had to be purged. Such was the logic of the George Floyd Freakout.
The George Floyd-inspired re-naming was wrong for the same reason all of the Confederate statue-toppling was and is wrong, as Ethics Alarms has attempted to explain from the moment this destructive movement started. The Washington Post and others call it “a racial reckoning.” It really is a cultural self-lobotomy. Communities and societies honor significant individuals in their histories for many reasons, and the fact that they have been honored in a particular time period is as much a part of history as the individuals themselves. Communities and societies of a subsequent period removing such honors and memorials in periodic outbreaks of presentism actively prevents future populations from examining and comprehending the nuances and conflicts of their own nation and its developing values. It also erases complex individuals and their life stories from our collective memories, a loss no matter how one justifies it.
Friday Open Forum!
Is everything going to Hell, as my sister concludes at the conclusion of every conversation we have that wanders into world events and national politics?
Stay on topic, now; it’s ethics, not politics. I just had to reject a proffered comment that was just a screed against Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), who, I agree, appears to be the dumbest member of the Senate but who could probably clobber in Scrabble a dozen or more House members. Read the EA comment policies, Newcomers!
Now enlighten us…
Dead Wife Condolences Ethics
Consider this a further reflection on the matters explored in this post, written just two days after my wife Grace died suddenly of causes undetermined.
The past two months have been a series of revelations. People’s responses to a personal tragedy befalling someone else illustrate a lot about them, society, and human nature generally.
Such moments are when true friends show their character. I wrote earlier about my friend Tom Fuller jumping into his car and driving the ten hours from Connecticut to Alexandria even as I told him not to. Tom checked into a hotel and gave me desperately needed emotional support and expert assistance—he’s a lawyer, tax specialist and obsessively organized individual in sharp contrast to me—for five days. My sister, with whom I have often had an adversarial relationship, also came through, handling many tasks related to Grace’s death that I was ill-equipped to deal with emotionally and in some cases financially. Both of them have subsequently checked in with me by phone almost every day.
MIT Geniuses Finally Figure Out That Forcing Faculty To Pledge Fealty To Woke World Isn’t Academic Freedom
From one perspective, this development seems encouraging. Maybe the lesson of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is finally starting to take down the destructive DEI delusion.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it will end the use of diversity statements in the faculty hiring process. These statements, typically a page-long, were required of all faculty candidates so they could persuade the institution that they could be relied upon to support and enhance the university’s commitment to “diversity.” The statements are now routine in faculty hiring at many public and private universities, as well in corporations and other organizations. I confess that I had not focused on this development sufficiently; it is scary, and the mainstream media and its pundits apparently felt it was not something “the public has a right to know.” [The only previous Ethics Alarms essay on diversity statements is here. I helped sound the alarm, and then did nothing for two years.]
As she announced the reform, MIT’s president Sally Kornbluth, the lone survivor of the fateful Congressional hearing that led to the dismissal of two other female presidents of elite universities, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, condemned the statements as compelled speech. “My goals are to tap into the full scope of human talent, to bring the very best to M.I.T. and to make sure they thrive once here,” Dr. Kornbluth said . “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”
Interesting phrasing. If they “worked,” whatever sinister meaning that has, would she be eliminating them? The diversity statements are not just compelled speech, they represent compelled ideological conformity. That’s fascist stuff. Explain to me again: who are the “threats to democracy”? It also points to the other perspective besides the one I alluded to at the beginning. The fact that diversity statements has infested academia at all is ominous.
More Re-Branding Ethics: “What is This ‘Boy Scouts’ of Which You Speak?”
No sooner had I posted about the DEI scam trying to hide its spots sufficiently to keep on inflicting discrimination and bias —but good discrimination and bias, of course!—on the American workplace and society in general than news of a sadder and more futile re-branding exercise was announced.
After 114 years of teaching boys ethical values, self-reliance, and life skills, the Boy Scouts of America is abandoning its storied name to escape its sordid recent past, its mismanagement, and its betrayal of its mission and legacy. That’s not the spin, though. The newly named “Scouting America” is being promoted as signaling a more “welcoming” organization. “Though our name will be new, our mission remains unchanged: we are committed to teaching young people to be Prepared. For Life,” Roger A. Krone, president and chief executive of Scouting America, said in a statement today. “This will be a simple but very important evolution as we seek to ensure that everyone feels welcome in Scouting.”
Fat-Shaming Ethics
An issue that arose on this post, about the Governor and First Lady of Illinois releasing what has been described as a “cringey” “Star Wars” Day photo of the two dressed as Luke Skywalker and his sister Leia. I knew someone would accuse me of “fat-shaming” when I wrote that they looked like Luke and Leia has been attacked by the Empire’s “fat ray.” I know what fat-shaming is, and that’s not it. Since there seems to be some confusion on the issue, however, I will take this opportunity to clarify.
Fat-shaming, properly used, refers to the criticism of an individual’s weight and appearance to no other end for no other reason than to attack the individual. Ethics Alarms has consistently condemned this practice regardless of who the targets have been: Al Gore, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy and Rush Limbaugh are some I remember without checking. There may be others. I have a lot of posts here and have my weak moments: I might have made fun of someone based on their weight, but I don’t think so.
The first time I remember being aware of criticism being leveled at a public figure for his or her weight was when the film “Cleopatra” was released in the midst of all the stories about the on-set romance between Richard Burton and Eddie Fisher’s then wife Elizabeth Taylor. Movie critics hated the film as well as Taylor’s performance, and she was especially singled out as being overweight for the role of Cleopatra. (Today she would be criticized for being too white.)
Ethics Alarms 