In “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” Louis Carroll’s Mad Hatter asks Alice the riddle, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” One would think that the question in the headline above is equally obscure (the Guthrie, in Minneapolis, is one of the most respected and celebrated regional theaters in the country) but it has an answer. Like the Colbert late night show, which has since its inception sought to exclude anyone who isn’t woke, obsessed with progressive politics or, since 2015, Trump Deranged, the Guthrie now aims at entertaining only that same audience, except in its case only the wealthy, white, upper-middle class demographic within that audience, or others willing to sit still for relentless leftist propaganda and cant.
A recent audience member for The Guthrie’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Dolls House” wrote about his experience. “A Doll’s House” is about as moldy a feminist tract as there is (I once called the play the drama equivalent of Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” but much longer, and even more over-exposed (it was written in 1879, so its analogies with the real state of womanhood, especially in the U.S., have been increasingly forced as time goes by. (No, her husband did not stop Nora from having an abortion: she would never have dreamed of killing an unborn child.)
Waay back in 2012, Ethics Alarms presented “The Knight Scale,” described as a “ten point scale for rating the outrageousness of race-card sightings.” I named the scale after a race-baiting L.A. blogger who insisted that the cartoon above, suggesting that First Lady Michelle Obama was taking on imperial airs as the Obama departed for yet another lavish family vacation, was “racist.”
” Race-baiting has been one of the primary features of public discourse embedded in our culture by having a black President, was well as one with so many unscrupulous race-obsessed supporters and so much evidence of incompetence and dishonesty to try to defend. Its widespread use, tacitly approved if not orchestrated by the White House, has also contributed to the vastly deteriorating race-relations in the U.S., along with the racial distrust and anger fueling it. I have stated, and strongly believe, that this will be, above all else, Barack Obama’s legacy. The tragedy this represents cannot be over-stated. I am offering now and belatedly a revised Race-Baiting Scale, running from 1, the least offensive and significant form of race baiting, to 11, the worst and most unethical. Two notes: 1) All entries are based on the assumption that no actual racist or bigoted conduct has occurred, and 2) It is stipulated that all actual racist conduct or bias is unethical and should be called out and condemned.”
Here is the current version of Ethics Alarms Race-Baiting Scale (I’m retiring “Knight”). The race-baiting flagged in the previous post is a classic #11.
Conservatives and Republican pundits in Virginia and elsewhere are “pouncing”on an online political cartoon re-posted by the Powhatan County Democrats, who were transparently trying to change the subject after their party’s candidate for Virginia Governor looked like a coward and sounded like a fool in her recent debate with the Republican candidate, Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears.
“The Democrat party of Virginia everyone. Open racism, open hatred, and endorsed violent fantasies. Where is the bottom of their depravity? This is disgusting,” quoth one social media wag in a tweet widely quoted by critics. Twitchy, the conservative website that focuses almost entirely on goings on at “X,” called the cartoon “blatantly racist.”
Much as it gives me pleasure to see Democrats and progressives “hoist by their own petard,” the petard in this case being reflex race-baiting, it’s still an unethical tactic. Here is the real Sears…
It’s time for an encouraging ethics tale, and this is one.
(That’s Pandora above, viewing the last, and only benign, occupant of her famous box. Hope!)
The Academy of Classical Christian Studies high school girls basketball team in Oklahoma City won last season’s division championship game. A last second buzzer-beating basket against Apache High School did the job. But something didn’t feel right to Academy head coach Brendan King …perhaps the faint ping of an ethics alarm. He went home that night and watched the game tape.
“As soon as I walked out of the locker room, my stomach kind of turned into knots. And I said, ‘I’m going to need to know if we really won this game or not,'” King told reporters. Sure enough, when he checked the tape and tallied up the baskets, he discovered his team had actually lost. The true score should have been 43-42, with Apache High the victors and the winners of the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association girls basketball championship. Somehow 2 points had been mistakenly given to King’s team, making it the 43-42 winners.
League rules state that once a game is completed, it is in the books and the records can’t be changed. King decided to tell his team the bad news anyway. The girls unanimously agreed what the right course was, and it was to appeal their own victory. In an unprecedented reversal, the league agreed, and King surrendered the championship plaque to Apache High.
Apache girls basketball head coach Amy Merriweather said that more than the championship, she and her team were grateful for the ethics lesson. “It showed us, you know, there are still good people in this world,” Merriweather said. “It’s something we’ll always remember.”
Saying it is a “dark day in the halls of CBS News,” Dan Rather, the disgraced CBS anchor who was fired after trying to use a forged document to kneecap President George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, went straight into Fantasyland as he condemned the selection of Bari Weiss to oversee CBS News.
“The former opinion writer for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times is not a reporter. She has never worked in television news and she has never led a staff larger than a few dozen,” Rather ranted on his substack. “That all changed this week when David Ellison, whose Skydance Media recently acquired CBS, installed Weiss in a position created for her. She will not report to the president of CBS News — as one might expect — but to David Ellison directly.” Rather finds it horrific that Weiss would even consider criticizing Democrats and Republicans with equal intensity, since everyone knows that Trump and the Republicans are evil. “While one must keep an open mind, it is hard to do so when such a statement portends a push for ‘bothsidesism’ and arguments reliant on false equivalences. There can be no equivalences drawn between the two political extremes in this country, especially when one extreme is led by a man who rarely speaks without lying.” Got it. “Bothsideism” is nothing but a deliberately pejorative term for “objectivity.” If you have decided that one side is always right and the other side is by definition wrong, you end up like Dan Rather, a biased, untrustworthy hack.
Weiss left the New York Times with a damning letter of resignation after not being able to tolerate the paper’s flagrant Democratic and progressive bias. This morning CNN said that she “claimed” it was biased, just as Uri Berliner “claimed” that NPR is biased and Christopher Columbus “claimed” the world wasn’t flat. The New York Times and NPR (AND CBS, AND ABC, AND NBC…) are screamingly and undeniably biased to the extent that they can’t be said to be practicing trustworthy journalism at all.
Reportedly the CBS staff is freaking out over Weiss’s “10 core journalistic values” for the network news division. That the CBS culture is steeped in “advocacy journalism,” aka propaganda distribution, is proven by the fact that they are objecting to what was once accepted and standard journalistic values:
1.Journalism that reports on the world as it actually is. 2. Journalism that is fair, fearless, and factual. 3. Journalism that respects our audience enough to tell the truth plainly — wherever it leads. 4. Journalism that makes sense of a noisy, confusing world. 5. Journalism that explains things clearly, without pretension or jargon. 6. Journalism that holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny. 7. Journalism that embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices so that the audience can contend with the best arguments on all sides of a debate. 8. Journalism that rushes toward the most interesting and important stories, regardless of their unpopularity. 9. Journalism that uses all of the tools of the digital era. 10. Journalism that understands that the best way to serve America is to endeavor to present the public with the facts, first and foremost.
“I’m an H.I.V.-positive gay man who is distraught with where the country is headed [1], so I am actively participating in protests. I have a liberal friend who lives in an overwhelmingly Trump-supporting small town and is married to a Trump supporter. She messages me often about her fears of what is going on [2] and seems equally distraught. I’ve shared with her how current politics could affect my life [3] and how, although I’m very aware of my privilege [4], I’m concerned about people who aren’t as privileged and how they could be affected.[5] But she doesn’t participate in protests [6] and doesn’t like to actively show her views except on social media.[7] There are protests in small towns close to her that could use her support. [8] Once, there was a B.L.M. protest in her town, but she had ceiling fans being installed. [9] She passed on another recent protest because she had a birthday party. She has never participated and I’m getting increasingly annoyed. [10] I think it’s important to show up. [11] I also know that everyone is different, so I’m trying to reconcile this. [12] She comes off to me as someone who’s comfortable in her life and doesn’t want to shake anything up [13], which is the height of hypocrisy to me. [14]
I feel like apathy is how we got here in the first place [15], and I’m really struggling with how and whether to keep people like this in my life.”
I wish I could be confident that “The Ethicist” chose this foolishness to show that there really are deranged people out there so watch out, but I doubt it. The short and pithy response to it should be “You’re an asshole. Seek help.” But how many of you know people who think like “Name Withheld”? The footnotes…
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…
Ethics Alarms 