This is a lousy way to start a Sunday morning, but so be it…

From Law and Crime regarding an incident in Indiana:

…According to a probable cause affidavit, officers with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department shortly before 11 p.m. on Tuesday responded to a call regarding an injured toddler at the Days Inn located in the 8300 block of Craig Street. Upon arriving at the scene, first responders said they immediately located a 1-year-old girl who was suffering from what appeared to be a stab wound to the neck.

Emergency medical personnel rushed the child to the Riley Hospital for Children… the child was initially admitted to the facility in critical condition but was later upgraded to stable condition.

The child’s mother…told investigators that [her 32-year-old sister, Sharon Key] called her at about 10 a.m. that morning and asked if she could stay with her at the Days Inn. Key was dropped off at the hotel later that morning and drank alcohol for “most of the day.” At about 10:30 p.m. that evening, the sisters went to Burger King and arrived back at the hotel…

The mother said she laid her daughter down on her stomach atop the bed closest to the window and went into the bathroom to give her son a bath. A short while later, the mother said she heard “loud noises from the bedroom so she walked out and saw that [Key] was holding a knife in her hand and [her daughter] was bloody and screaming on the bed.” Key [said] “it was an accident” as the mother grabbed a towel and wrapped it around the wound on the back left side of her daughter’s head and applied pressure before calling 911. …after she called 911,[the mother] turned around and saw [her sister] “walking down the hallway towards the exit.” ….Officers found Sharon Key hiding in some bushes near the hotel and placed her under arrest…[She] allegedly said that her pit bull had taken the chicken sandwich she got at Burger King and eaten it. Key then became “mad” and…went after the dog with her knife. The dog… jumped on the bed where the [baby] was [lying]…In an attempt to stab the dog, Key allegedly said that she missed, accidentally hitting her niece instead of the animal.

Observations…

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The New York Times actually has a comedy critic, Jason Zinoman, which is fine. Still, someone needs to tell him to avoid writing about ethics, which he apparently does not comprehend. I, in contrast, have extensive experience in both comedy and ethics, and can say with confidence that his column “Lying in Comedy Isn’t Always Wrong, but Hasan Minhaj Crossed a Line” is the worst published ethics analysis I have read this year, and perhaps ever. Zimmerman’s column is ethics nonsense from the headline to the end.

Let’s start with the headline. There is no lying in comedy, any more than there’s lying in any performing art. Since the sole purpose of comedy is to make a targeted audience laugh, anything goes, or should. (This is one of the rare instances of my being in agreement with Bill Maher). For now, I don’t want to be distracted into justifying anything other than making stuff up, which stand-up comics do regularly and should, but if they are pretending something is true when it isn’t, that’s not unethical. It isn’t unethical because they are comedians, and their audience knows—or should— what their purpose is not to inform, but to amuse.

Since so much of what a comic says is not true—a duck, a Canadian and an acrobat did not walk into a bar—-there is no breach of trust when that comic states anything else as a fact when it isn’t. Dave Chappelle often starts a story by saying, “This is true,” which means that he has decided that the story is going to be funnier if the audience thinks of it as really happening. I don’t assume the story is true because Chappelle says so, but he’s asking for the suspension of disbelief from his audience, just as “The Exorcist” was when it showed Regan’s head turn backwards. We suspend our disbelief in the possessed little girl to be horrified; we suspend disbelief in what comedians say to be amused.

The target of Zinoman’s accusation of unethical comedy is, as the headline states, Hasan Minhaj, who has a Netflix concert streaming. He can’t have “crossed a line” because there are no lines. There are no ethicd rules for comics, nor can or should there be.

Here is an example of what Zinoman calls “crossing a line”:

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On September 15, 2022, Calvin Ushery was clearly shown on a surveillance video as he stomped 68-year-old Chang Suh, a Korean-American jewelry shop owner and hit him over the head at least a dozen times, twice with a hammer. Ushery then stole about $100,000 in merchandise. The evidence, including the video, was indisputable and beyond rebuttal, so his lawyer argued for jury nullification, slyly, because in Delaware, like all but one state (New Hampshire), arguing that a jury should ignore the law is an ethics violation. He said the video would doubtlessly raise “a lot of emotion,” but argued that the jurors’ revulsion shouldn’t be focused on the defendant.

Oh. What? Who then? Surely not his victim, who after a year is still not recovered from the beating (that’s him in a shot from the video). Oh come on—you know the answer by now, don’t you? The emotion should be aimed at the systemic racism that made Ushery into the dangerous enemy of civilization that he is. He needs diversity, equity and inclusion, not punishment. What are we, barbarians?

And that defense message worked! The jury was hung, and a mistrial declared. In the eyes of the law, despite video evidence that he committed a brutal crime, Calvin Ushery is technically innocent.

Elie Mystal is surely thrilled. The racist, anti-police, anti-Constitution Marxist editor for “The Nation,” also a frequent visitor to MSNBC (naturally), argued in 2016 that black jurors should always vote to acquit black defendants, no matter how guilty they may be and no matter how horrible the crime.

“Maybe it’s time for black people to use the same tool white people have been using to defy a system they do not consent to: jury nullification,” Mystal wrote in an op-ed. “White juries regularly refuse to convict or indict cops for murder. White juries refuse to convict vigilantes who murder black children. White juries refuse to convict other white people for property crimes. Maybe it’s time minorities got in the game?” he continued. “Black people lucky enough to get on a jury could use that power to acquit any person charged with a crime against white men and white male institutions.”

Well, that’s our Elie! His degrees from Harvard and Harvard Law School didn’t imbue him with enough critical reasoning skill to overcome his hatred of anyone who isn’t black, and to see his his “burn, baby, burn” nostrums for societal improvement as the garbage that they are. True, Mystal was only hoping that blacks could abuse, rob, rape and kill white people, but nothing in his op-ed ruled out using jury nullification to let minorities—like Mr. Suh—be victimized without justice too. Black criminals’ lives matter more than the lives of law-abiding citizens, which is one prime reason why so many cities are descending into permanent chaos. Over-incarceration, don’t you know.

The Ushery verdict has so far escaped coverage in the mainstream media.

Frank Drebin would like a word…

Yes, this is a Popeye, and I apologize for not doing it sooner. When this blog began in 2009, I often relied on the Poynter Institute’s erudition on journalism ethics matters for blog ideas, because back then, it actually was a relatively non-ideological, non-partisan source of media ethics commentary. In the intervening years, Poynter, like so many other institutions and ethics authorities, slowly morphed into another organ of leftist, progressive, Democratic Party and, eventually, Trump Deranged propaganda. It is now a purveyor of ethics rot in journalism rather than a nostrum for it, which is supposedly its mission. Today, like Popeye, I decided that it was “all I can stands” when Poynter joined other biased media “factcheck” attacks on Trump’s “Meet the Press” interview with a particularly blatant example of exactly the kind of bias Trump complained about in the interview. So I deleted Poynter from the Ethics Alarms blogroll, which I bet you didn’t even know existed. (It’s about half-way down the home page here, along with other links).

I should have exiled Poynter when it took over PolitiFact, already the worst and most biased of all the factcheck services, and continued its partisan and dishonest ways. Its latest, however, was particularly outrageous: “Trump’s ‘Meet the Press’ falsehoods about abortion, Jan. 6 security and bacon prices.”

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Is this the date that marked the beginning of the slippery slope to total gender confusion in sports and American society generally? On September 20, 1973, in asuper-hyped “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match stunt, leading women’s pro Billie Jean King, 29 and in her prime, defeated retired tennis pro Bobby Riggs, 55, proving absolutely nothing. Riggs, essentially a hustler at that stage of his athletic career and an anomalous trick-shot artist and soft-hitter even when he was a competitive player, picked a hot period in the women’s rights movement to exploit by boasting that women were inferior and claiming that even at his age he could the best female players. After the #1 female pro at the time, Aussie Margaret Court, managed to lose to Riggs in their exhibition match, Billie Jean came to rescue the honor of her sex and her sport. Witnessed by over more spectators at the Houston Astrodome and 50 million TV viewers worldwide, King beat Riggs 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. The reaction should have been “So what?”: any 29-year-old male pro would have mopped the Court with King, and she undoubtedly knew it. When a high school soccer team made up of boys easily defeated the women’s Olympic squad, which has been almost as obnoxious as Riggs, few called it a decisive rebuttal of women’s equality in sports. Decades after the Riggs-King sham, women’s pro tennis mega-champ Serena Williams admitted that she would have been an also-ran on the men’s tour. Yet now we have a woke-sanctioned political correctness myth that there’s nothing unfair about this…

…biological males thrashing female competitors in track, cycling, swimming, powerlifting and other sports where size, strength and being saturated with male hormones makes a difference. Thanks, Billie Jean! I’m sure Bobby Riggs is cackling in Hell.

Now let’s get some current ethics matters off the runway…

1. Remember this weird story [discussed here, #3] from 2021? Danish artist Jens Haaning, who was commissioned by the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark to recreate two of his previous works, 2010’s “An Average Danish Annual Income” and “An Average Austrian Annual Income,” which used actual cash to show the average incomes of the two countries. Haaning was given $84,000 by the museum to use in the new art works. Instead, he sent them two blank canvasses he titled “Take the Money and Run,” raising unanswerable questions about the nature of art, and modern art particularly. Is a blank canvas “art” in the right context? Is a joke “art”? Unamused, a Copenhagen court this week ordered Haaning to refund the money, minus his fee for creating the two blank canvas masterpieces.

2. And it begins….Harvard is already trying out ways to discriminate on the basis of race in its admissions without violating the recent SCOTUS decision declaring affirmative action illegal. Harvard has changed its supplemental essay questions from one optional open-ended essay and two optional short essays to a series of five required short essays, each with a 200-word limit. The student newspaper, The Crimson, criticized the limit as inherently discriminatory, because “shortening the essays has a disparate impact that falls heaviest on those from marginalized backgrounds. Learning to package yourself within a shorter amount of space is a product of advanced education; longer essays more equitably allow applicants to discuss their experiences in full, particularly if they are from non-traditional backgrounds and require more space to elaborate on nuanced qualifications.” Really? I would think that a longer essay is more challenging than a short one. But I’m sure a minimum word limit would have been found to be racist too.

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