Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, Pete Davidson, Whitney Cummings, Bill Burr and other popular U.S. stand-up stars accepted large fees to fly to Saudi Arabia and make people laugh at the first Riyadh Comedy Festival. The organizers claimed it was the largest comedy festival in the world, which it may well have been with over 50 international comedians performing stand-up, sketch, and improv.
The Saudi government paid for the event as a part of an effort to increase investment in the local economy and to improve their global image, which is, as you probably know, less than sterling. Other performers such as Marc Maron (funny) and David Cross (bitter asshole) attacked their colleagues for accepting “dirty money,” performing for ‘bad people”—you know, like anyone who performed at President Trump’s inaugural balls—and putting “a fun face on their [Saudi Arabia’s] crimes against humanity.”
Then there is the perceived hypocrisy, since many of the comedians who attended the festival have complained in the past about risking being “cancelled” for touching on unpopular topics in their routines. A Saudi is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for tweeting jokes about the Saudi government. The comics participating in the festival had to agree to certain restrictions on their content as part of their 7 figure contracts.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Did the comedians do anything unethical by appearing at the festival?
The Philadelphia Phillies, who had the best record in the National league this season are desperate for a World Series championship. They last won it in 2008, and have only won a World Series twice since the team was founded in 1883. Last night the Phillies lost the deciding game of the NL Divisional Series to the Dodgers in a dramatic, extra inning contest (with no stupid “zombie runner” because MLB plats baseball the right way in the post season) on a disastrous final play that is destined to live in Philadelphia infamy.
The culprit was pitcher Orion Kirkering. With two outs and the potential Dodger winning run on third base in the 11th inning, he got the batter to hit a weak grounder back to him. First he fumbled the ball, recovered, and only had to throw to first base to get the third out and end the inning. But he saw the base runner from second running home, and inexplicably threw the ball to his catcher, or tried to. In his panic, he threw wildly. The run scored, the game was lost, and the Phillies season was over.
In baseball terms, Kirkering choked. When the game was on the line and professional athletes are supposed to rise to the occasion and be at their best, he was at his worst. A whole city blames him for the crushing loss: he is now Philadelphia’s Bill Buckner.
All I can do for Orion is to remind him of my father’s favorite poem, by Rudyard Kipling, which he told me gave him hope and solace as young, fatherless boy during the Depression, and later, when having to cope with his own tragedies, failures and perceived shortcomings. I think of it often, and read it again just two weeks ago.
The poem is, of course, “If.”
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs, and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait, and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet, don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves, to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
The headline raises an interesting question: can an ethics villain be an ethics dunce, since ethics villains by definition don’t care about ethics, so how can they be judged stupid for ignoring them? Ah well, a topic for another day. Ann Althouse would ask Grok to resolve the issue…if I ever start quoting AI here regularly, someone please come up behind me and bash in my head with a brick.
I’ve been putting off the National Football League announcing that its now iconic halftime show during the 2026 Super Bowl in Santa Clara will star Bad Bunny, a performer I was mercifully unaware of before the announcement. After all, I could write this post any time between now and February 9, 2026, the day after the national sports event that I will not watch again because the sport it involves is deadly.
Today, however, I am in a bad mood, so it’s time. The Super Bowl has evolved as cultural phenomenon that is one of the rare yearly American events that unifies the nation, families, races and commerce. It is supposed to be non-partisan, non-political, and G-rated so families can watch the game and its surrounding hoopla with their children. When Janet Jackson exposed a nipple during a halftime performance, you would have thought that she has performed a human sacrifice by the reaction in the news media.
But now it is 2025, the Great Stupid still stalks the land, Trump Derangement reigns in the corporate suites, and thus the National Football League, which happily pays its players to become brain-injured, has chosen as its star attraction during the Super Bowl half-time show…
As the American Bar Association amply demonstrates, the American legal profession is overwhelmingly left-leaning and left-biased, not because lawyers are especially informed or intelligent, but because they overwhelmingly graduate from law schools devoted to progressive indoctrination, with law journals that actively discriminate based on viewpoint bias. State and local bar associations are governed and staffed by similarly aligned individuals; reading these organizations’ flagship magazines is an exercise in wading through progressive propaganda. Fighting for the rights of “migrants.” Celebrations of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” White men are a minority among bar association presidents.
I belong to association of legal ethics lawyers, including ethics partners, professors, CLE ethics trainers, those who defend other lawyers accused of malpractice or professional misconduct. Most of the time, the topics discussed on the group’s listserv are interesting and pertinent to my practice (legal ethics experts don’t agree on much). Since 2016, however, the Democratic Party bias of the group and its attendant Trump derangement has increasingly raised its ugly metaphorical head. The conservatives on the list as well as those who realize the inappropriateness of political topics generally stay silent (those ethics referrals are lucrative, after all) until the screaming at the sky gets ridiculous, and the moderator steps in to remind everyone that the discussion is supposed to be confined to legal ethics.
I just renewed my membership, and almost immediately a topic titled “Desperate Times” popped up, launched by (of course) the California lawyers in the group. After waking up to another long post about how “we lawyers” needed to organize to fight all of these terrible policies, I replied,
“This topic has nothing to do with legal ethics, and reinforces my conclusion that the legal ethics profession, like so many others, has deteriorated into a partisan, biased, bubble-dwelling cabal increasingly incapable of objective and trustworthy analysis. The furious effort to spin Fani Willis’s flagrantly unethical conduct was one of many dead canaries in the mine. Is this listserv moderated, or not?”
If you can’t trust ethicists to be objective and unbiased, who can you trust?
One of many Woke World freak-outs going on now is one over the strong signals the Supreme Court gave off during oral argument that it was going to overturn Colorado’s law banning so-called “conversion therapy” as unconstitutional. Naturally the progressive bloc on the court thinks the law is hunky-dory. Why would anyone not want to be gay?
One of the issue that came up in oral argument was whether there is any evidence that trying to talk someone out of being gay is harmful. There isn’t, but Court Dunce Sonia Sotamayor opined that “I don’t think the state has to provide a study to show that the advice is not sound,” comparing conversion therapy to a dietitian or counselor telling a client to do something that would harm their body. In other words, the banned therapy is just bad, and every right-thinking person knows it. This is consistent with Patton Oswalt’s certainty that whatever progressives favor must represent progress, hence opposing it is per se a problem. Progressives believe that being gay is just wonderful. That’s good enough for Sonia: treating someone for it is automatically harmful.
This, of course, comes with the “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” label.
The Post headline truly is despicable. Despite the entire world clamoring for an end, however temporary, to the Gaza war and the abject failure of the U.N. or anyone else to achieve the release of the Israeli hostages, the Post spins the looming success of President Trump’s diplomatic efforts as merely another example of his narcissistic quest for personal acclaim. This is Big Lie of the Resistance #8:Big Lie #8: “Trump Only Cares About Himself, Not the Country.“
It is one of the most persistent of the Big Lies that emerged during his first term: two friends repeated it just yesterday. The smear is a great default excuse to refuse ever giving this President credit for anything, even achievements that are impressive, important and remarkable. It is an especially ethically obtuse smear: motives don’t make an action ethical, the conduct does, and the right thing done for the wrong reasons is still the right thing. In this case, the motive used to minimize Trump’s diplomatic triumph is a weak one, for I can’t imagine why Trump would want a Nobel Peace Prize, so thoroughly has that honor been debased by the flagrant politicizing of the award process.
[Aside: Of the 10 Big Lies I compiled through 2023, only #1 (“Trump is just a reality TV star”) and #9 (“Trump’s Mishandling Of The Pandemic Killed People”) have largely been retired from the Axis of Unethical Conduct and the Trump Deranged mob list of justifications for reviling the President of the United States.]
As related here, Jay Jones is the (black, so he can do no wrong and accusing him of such is racism) Democratic candidate for Virginia Attorney General who through texts made it clear to a colleague that he believed that his adversaries deserved to be killed, and worse, that their children (“little fascists”) deserved to be killed as well.
To those who, like his desperate defenders, claim this was “just a mistake”—you know, like Joe Biden’s debate meltdown was “just a bad night”—I reply that Jones’ rants were signature significance. He wasn’t joking (compared to Jones’ “jokes,” Jimmy Kimmel’s Charley Kirk comments were comedy gold) and a normal, decent, trustworthy human being never even thinks about wanting his adversaries’ family members dead, much less communicates them to others. No, not even once.
1. Ethics Dunce: The New York Daily News, which joined my Rogues Gallery of websites that use unethical tactics to force readers to tolerate ads or pay to subscribe. This was a new one, though: I disabled my ad-blocker, and was returned to the Daily News home page. But now the link I had opened was no longer available. I searched for it: the piece, an editorial, was gone, at least for me. Assholes. If they think I’m going back to that site again or ever link to it here, they can bite me.
2. Damn ethics alarm: I was in a tight time frame this afternoon and had to deposit a check and mail a letter (returning a jury questionnaire saying I was willing to do my civic duty even though getting stuck in a trial is the last thing I need) then get back to the office and handle a problem. I mailed the letter and was rushing to my car when I saw a young black man painfully crossing the parking lot using a walker, with both hands holding plastic grocery bags. So I had to ask him if I could help—I had been stuck using a walker not that long ago—and he demurred…but also wanted to talk. He was so grateful that I, anyone, had cared enough to ask. He wanted to share the horrible sequence of events that had but him in his current state of limited mobility, his bad medical advice, his work interruption, the burden on his family. So I listened. I wasn’t going to walk away saying, “I’m sorry, but I have things to do.” This was a pure Golden Rule situation, Ethics 101, non-ethical considerations vs. the ethical values of kindness, compassion, empathy and respect. Once upon a time, before Ethics Alarms, before I began teaching ethics, I would have ignored that ethics alarm, if it rang at all. The man’s name was Kevin, incidentally.
You can find the poll, released last week, here. The charts are easier to read there.
I know: polls. This one, however, has special significance since it comes through Harvard, currently fighting Trump’s efforts to hold it accountable for its toxic influence on education, politics, its students, the culture, and more.
Is the poll tainted with bias? Of course it is. For example, I found it fascinating that in the chart above revealing how popular various Trump policies are with the general public, the pollsters neglected to ask whether the public approved of elite institutions like Harvard being pressured to stop discriminating against conservatives, whites, and men. A related omission: eliminating DEI. How could they ignore that one?
Nonetheless, the chart above, relatively buried at page 23 so it could be preceded by data showing how unpopular Trump is and how the majority of the public thinks the U.S. is off course, is the most important revelation in the poll. It shows that almost all of the Trump Administration’s policies are favored by the public, in most cases by a large majority. Only so-called Medicaid “cuts” are substantially disfavored, one of many areas where the biased news media has (and continues to) mislead the public.
I had four ethics stories all lined up last night, and then this ugly episode forced its way to the front of the line. I hate that. Still, attention must be paid.
Zohran Mamdani, the presumed next New York City mayor based on polls and the fact that his only viable competition for the job had to resign as New York governor in disgrace, posted a statement on the anniversary of Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel. You can see it above.
To his credit, the “Democratic-Socialist” (that is, communist) was crystal clear about who and what he is, and honest observers from both sides of the partisan divide have not been reluctant to react with appropriate disgust. (The statement should not come as any surprise to anyone who has paid attention to Mamdani, the latest example of a charismatic politician emulating Andy Griffith in “A Face in the Crowd” (1957).
