From the New York Times:

More than 18,000 voters in Texas’ most populous counties had their mail-in ballots rejected in the state’s primary election this month… a surge in thrown-out votes that disproportionately affected Black people in the state’s largest county and revealed the impact of new voting regulations passed by Republicans last year. In Harris County, which includes Houston and is the state’s most populous county, areas with large Black populations were 44 percent more likely to have ballots rejected than heavily white areas…The analysis also found that Black residents made up the largest racial group in six of the nine ZIP codes with the most ballot rejections in the county.

The Times concludes that the ballot rejections and the racial disparity in those rejections provide “the clearest evidence yet that the major voting law passed last year by the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature has prevented significant numbers of people from voting.” Is that a fair analysis? Doesn’t it matter why the disparity occurred?

In the Times piece, that question, which I would rank as indispensable to answering the basic ethics question “What’s going on here?” to begin the quest for a solution, is never asked, answered, or even speculated upon. “We have concrete evidence of the impact that it is having on primarily people of color,” Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston,who is black, said in an interview. “People’s right to vote is being taken away. It’s almost like the 21st-century version of the poll tax, so to speak, when they were asked, ‘How many bubbles are in this bar of soap?’”

That’s some analogy you got there, Mayor. First of all, you are alluding to voter literacy tests, not poll taxes. With poll taxes, there was discrimination on the basis of the ability to pay. “How many bubbles are in this bar of soap?” is obviously an impossible question designed to illegally exclude voters. What is the similarly impossible requirement that black voters found so difficult to comply with in the Texas primaries? We are told, Continue reading →

A nearly completely lost week for me, ProEthics, its clients and Ethics Alarms mercifully comes to a close. One positive note: yesterday I spoke at the first live, face-to-face seminar I have participated in since March of 2020, though I had to do so while stuck in my Godfather impression. At least there was more audience interaction than with the far inferior Zoom versions of my presentations, but it was disheartening to be so worn out by a mere 75 minutes on my feet. Another good sign: nobody in the room wore a mask.

I also had an encouraging conversation with my cab driver, whose name is Duke; it was also my first cab ride in two years. He was an immigrant from Ghana, and launched into spontaneous an eloquent speech about how much he loved living in the U.S., “the greatest country in the world.” I gave him a 35% tip for cheering me up and giving me the boost of enthusiasm I needed to get through my program. Thanks, Duke. I needed that.

1. A Times opinion column today includes what should be an unnecessary headline: “It’s Possible to Learn the Right Thing From the Wrong Person.”

My initial reaction was that the op-ed is about four years late, and should have been plastered on the Times front page when the Left started pulling over statues and re-naming college dorms. Writer Margaret Renkl initiated her piece by referencing an ethics exemplar dear to my heart and that of Ethics Alarms: Sir Thomas More, who was simultaneously inspiring and brutal. She concludes,

But part of living comfortably in a complicated world means recognizing the complexity of human beings — their inscrutability, their ever-changing priorities, above all their capacity for self-contradiction. Much as we might prefer it to be otherwise, it is possible for a person to do unforgivable things and also things that are remarkably beautiful and good. We do human wisdom a great disservice when we expect it to be perfectly embodied in a flawed human being.

Perhaps even more important, we profoundly misunderstand the very nature of art when we think we know in advance what readers — or audience members or gallery visitors — will derive from it. Or, worse, when we presume to tell them what they should derive from it.

Whether it’s a painting or a film or a play or a dance or a poem or a novel or a sculpture or a symphony or any other artifact of creativity made by a restless, curious, questing human mind, a great work of art finds its completion in the restless, curious, questing mind of the person who encounters it. And there is no predicting how that act of transformation, that experience of utter intimacy, might unfold.

Great art of every kind allows people to place themselves, safely, into the larger world. It is transformative precisely because it is one way we come to understand our own part in the expansive, miraculous human story. A great work of art reminds us that our own lives, which too often feel small and insignificant, are part of a story that can be full of cruelty and suffering, yes, but that can also be astonishing. Very often it is magnificent.

When someone tells me that a book should no longer be read — or a film should no longer be screened or a painting hung or a play performed — because of some problematic history attached to the work or its creator, I think of the girl I was in 1980, discovering a truth I desperately needed to find, in just that moment, from a story that might or might not be true about a human being who might or might not be good. A human being who, I know now, was almost certainly both.

Exactly. Continue reading →

You can’t lie much more flagrantly than this.

Convinced that President Biden’s sinking polls are merely the result of poor “messaging” the White House has been on an “It isn’t what it is!” orgy, attempting to blame Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for all of Joe’s ills. In a particularly nauseating insult to the public’s intelligence, it called on TikTok “social media influencers” to carry a message to young and squishy brains that the “influencers” don’t independently understand themselves. That Ellie Zieler above, the 18-year-old who is one of the White House’s prize propagandists.

Yes, it has come to this.

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As longtime followers here know, I have critiqued the ethics advice offered by whomever was in charge of the Times Magazine “The Ethicist” column for years. By far, the best of these has been the current holder of the title, Kwame Anthony Appiah, a real ethicist who teaches teaches philosophy at N.Y.U. Thus his most recent descent into bias and rationalizations to answer a recent query was profoundly discouraging.

“Name Withheld”(of course) complained,

My daughters grew up in a very progressive household, they have embraced the opposite political side from me. My granddaughter hears all the talk in her family, and I feel sure she believes she is hearing the truth. One of my daughters also does not believe in the vaccine and did not have my granddaughter vaccinated. I do not discuss politics with them any longer. They get all their information from the internet and don’t read the mainstream press. The worst thing of all to me is that they believe the election was stolen.

She asks The Ethicist if it would be ethical to disinherit them for their evil beliefs (my words, nor hers, but clearly her meaning) and give her accumulated wealth to “a good cause.” The simple answer is two-fold: “Name Withheld”—can I call her NW for short?—can do whatever she wants with her estate. There is no obligation to pass on wealth to one’s children. However, slapping at them from beyond the grave because Mom was unsuccessful in indoctrinating them in her woke value system is inherently petty and mean-spirited, if she would not have wanted to do so as long as they expressed sufficient sympathy for abortion, the Green New Deal and science-based incursions on liberty. Continue reading →

I’m not mentioning this for sympathy, just full disclosure: a longtime problem tooth went bonkers last night, and I’ve been in agony ever since. Nothing works, I can’t sleep, and I am over-dosed with multiple drugs to no avail. So I’m not sure how this post is going to come out, though the tooth will, as soon as my dentist can clear his schedule. My dental woes are just one more little bonus from the lock-down. On the plus side, if all my teeth fall out, those masks will be a godsend...

1. “The View” does have its uses, I have to admit. The shrill spontaneous utterances of that collection of one-note partisans are revealing. For example, Ana Navarro, the fake Republican pundit favored by CNN because her predictable attacks on President Trump were treated as balance with the rest of CNN’s attacks on him, had this to say in rebuke of guest and minor Trump staffer Stephanie Griffin, who is now trying to get gigs by saying that she left the administration because she she “saw things” she “hated”:

“Four years later? After ‘there were good people on both sides,’ after the way he treated immigrants, after what he said about Mexicans, after hearing the sexual assault boasts on tape, after seeing him make fun of a disabled reporter? You need four years?”

Let’s see: a reference to one deceptive and debunked false narrative, three incidents before Trump was elected, and “the way he treated immigrants,” by which we can only assume she meant “Illegal immigrants,” and is therefore being dishonest,with “how he treated” standing in for “insisting that they don’t get away with breaking the law,” which is what we call “civilization.” That’s the core of the entire anti-Trump rage phenomenon: not substance, style and rhetoric. The first things that Navarro could think of had nothing to do with Trump’s policies or success in office. Thanks, Ana. Just as I thought.

2. At least she lies to Democrats too…Speaker Pelosi, speaking at the 2022 House Democratic Issues Conference, last week, channeled the Biden administration’s new “messaging” blaming Putin’s invasion for rising gas prices and inflation that began a year earlier, then said,

“Seventeen Nobel laureates in economics said that… that legislation [Build Back Better]does not increase inflation. It is non-inflationary because of the way it is written. So when we’re having this discussion, it’s important to dispel some of those who say, well, ‘Is the government spending’ — no, it isn’t. The government spending is doing the exact reverse, reducing the national debt. It is not inflationary.”

Even giving Pelosi the benefit of the doubt and assuming that she meant the deficit, not the debt, her assertion that the trillion dollar plus bill would save money is ludicrous. Despite “how it is written,” the Congressional Budget Office determined, in fact, that Biden’s languishing bill would add $367 billion to the national deficit over the next decade. Is it possible that Democrats believe their own lies?

3. Do these delicate female athletes realize they are setting back the progress of women’s equality by decades with this kind of self-indulgence? Naomi Osaka, the former No. 1 tennis star who started her fall to #78 on the pro tour by announcing that it was too stressful to have to answer post-match questions from reporters, broke down in tears at the BNP Paribas Open because a single unmannerly fan shouted, “Naomi, you suck!” First she demanded that the spectator be ejected, then wanted to take a mic and address the crowd mid-match. After she lost, Osaka again skipped her post-match news conference.

A male pro-athlete who had break-down over a single heckler in an overwhelmingly supportive crowd of spectators would be universally ridiculed, and deservedly so.

4. Ugh. I’ve got three more items, but I just can’t think straight. Waiting for some drugs…sorry!

I nearly included this post’s sub-title in the headline, but it was too long: “Gee, wouldn’t it be great if the United States had a trustworthy, objective and competent journalistic establishment that we could rely on for critical facts?”

We don’t have such an establishment, however.

Gabbard, the former Democratic member of Congress from Hawaii who acquired more delegates in her run for the Presidency in 2020 than Kamala Harris [insert inappropriate cackle here], is roundly detested by her own party and the mainstream news media (but I repeat myself) for refusing to follow party talking points and false narratives on a variety of issues. The latest in her political muckraking is a two-minute video posted to her Twitter account, in which she stated that there are 25 to 30 American-funded biological laboratories in Ukraine and called for an immediate ceasefire around them before an accident spreads dangerous pathogens.

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