This is a banner date in the Civil Rights movement, when. on 1965, 3,200 civil rights demonstrators led by Martin Luther King Jr. began a historic march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, Alabama’s capital. Federalized Alabama National Guardsmen and FBI agents accompanied them on the march. Alabama’s pugnacious governor, George Wallace, opposed civil rights for blacks, bolstering local authorities in Selma in their efforts to foil  the Dallas County Voters League and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as the worked to register local blacks to vote.

On March 7, 600 demonstrators, led by SCLC leader Hosea Williams and SNCC leader John Lewis, began the 54-mile march to the state capital, where they were met by Alabama state troopers who attacked them with nightsticks, tear gas and whips. The incident was seen on national television and helped to catalyze sympathy for the civil rights movement. Rev. King, who was in Atlanta at the time, promised to return to Selma  and lead another attempt. After another failed attempt, U.S. Army troops and federalized Alabama National Guardsmen finally escorted the marchers safely into Montgomery on March 25, where on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol, King addressed a crowd of 25,000 and the nation on live TV.

1. Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! In its effort to ally itself with trans activists and women’s swimming cheativists, NBC altered its photo of a victorious Lia Thomas (on the left) to the more feminine version on the right.

And yet there are still people who insist that the news media is trustworthy on national news and affairs. Continue reading →

Almost a lost week, but not quite. Starting today, I’m just going to “bugger on” in Churchill’s phrase; falling behind in all of these ethics issues and developments and debates has me feeling worse than my the effects of the various drugs and maladies I’ve been coping with the past 10 days or so.

I owe much gratitude to those of you who have been sending along encouragement, good wishes and suggested topics. Thanks.

1. I don’t understand this at all, but I know it’s ominous…

Sent to EA’s attention by a puzzled Curmie, esteemed blogger and Ethics Alarms commenter, the job announcement above tells potential applicants that The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA seeks to hire an Assistant Adjunct Professor on a “without salary basis.” While guaranteeing consideration for employment “without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, sexual orientation or protected veteran status,” the announcement does make it clear that viewpoint discrimination will be applied, as all applicants must include

a “Statement on Contributions to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion – An EDI Statement describes a faculty candidate’s past, present, and future (planned) contributions to equity, diversity, and inclusion. To learn more about how UCLA thinks about contributions to equity, diversity, and inclusion, please review our Sample Guidance for Candidates and related EDI Statement FAQ document.

This is for an Assistant Adjunct Professor of Biochemistry, remember. Clearly diversity of viewpoints is not encouraged at UCLA; it is being actively discouraged.

2. Now THAT is an unethical protest. The Ethics Alarms Protest Ethics Checklist would score this silly ass’s conduct protesting for more and better anti-climate change mitigation as a worthless failure. Louis McKechnie, a mechanical engineering student, ran out onto the field during a soccer game between Newcastle United F.C. and Everton F.C. last week and tied himself to a goalusing a zip-tie. This brave and pointless act halted the game for all of eight minutes, after which he was hauled off by police and arrested.

Grandstanding is not protesting. Now, if the game of soccer was an existential threat to human survival, the eight minutes might have arguably meant something more than “I am a moron.”

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →