Government & Politics

Friday Open Forum (“Is This a Great Country or What?”)

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I apologize for seeming to force a topic on participants here, as the Open Forum is for you to write about ethics issues that intrigue you, and not necessarily me. However, I can’t think of anywhere else to use the remnants of a post I did a lot of work on before giving up in disgust.

The impetus for this aborted project was reading more of the increasingly unhinged rants of the formerly rational lawyers, artists, scholars and baseball fans on my Facebook feed, whose Trump Derangement is something to behold. One of them posted a chart purporting to list the nations in order of their “quality of life”; this one showed the U.S. 19th, after, among others, Slovenia, Oman, and Estonia. #1 was Switzerland. “I wonder how much lower we will be after Trump and Musk are through with us?” the poster queried to a flurry of likes. angry faces and the “care imogi. The moronic post moved me to look at the most recent such surveys, most of which seem to conclude that Spain is the best country to live in. Spain is a country where you can be imprisoned for criticizing the king, and where the average household income is around $40,000. On the one that was posted by my friend who is leaking IQ points, Spain finished 15th. Huh! First in one quality of life survey, 15th in another. This is, of course, why none of these “scientific” surveys are worth the paper they are printed on: the rankings will always reflect the biases of the researchers. The reason the U.S. always finishes absurdly low in these things is because our learned class believes fervently in socialism, and any nation that isn’t a nanny state is, by definition, inferior. The U.S. allows its citizens to own guns. It allows “dangerous” speech. It isn’t committed to fighting “climate change.” It hasn’t solved its racial tensions, while Switzerland has done such a bang-up job dealing with the descendants of its African slaves.

Yeah well, the U.S. is still guided by the most aspirational mission of any nation on Earth, and it has Major League baseball too, so bite me. (One of the rankings rated the U.S. low for “climate.” Which climate? Hawaii? Fairbanks? )

Spain is, I’m sure, a great country for someone like Richard Gere to live in (he moved there with his Spanish citizen wife and kids after Trump won the election: he was a big Harris supporter) who had lots of money and has already made his mark in life. For the most part, however, the immediate retort that comes to mind when I read someone on Facebook arguing seriously that Spain is a “better” nation than the United States of America, is “Wow, you really are an idiot, aren’t you? I’m so sorry.”

Anyway…Open Forum!

Ethics Short Takes

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

[I could and probably should do full posts on all three of these, but I still haven’t finished my promised Musk Derangement post, and I fear these items will be left neglected if I don’t cover them right away.]

1. President Trump signed an order beginning the process of eliminating the Dept. of Education and folding its essential functions back into other departments. Good. An act of Congress will be necessary to complete the dismantling, but if there is anyone with an honest, rational, statistically sound argument for why this Department should not go away, I haven’t heard or read it yet. The data is pretty damning: U.S. kids are doing much worse now than when the department was begun under President Carter. Post hoc ergo propter hoc and all that, but still, it’s hard to argue that a federal department overseeing an area that has deteriorated under its watch over almost 50 years has a case for continuing. Never mind. The Axis is freaking out anyway. Someone really ought to tell them that occasionally admitting that the President has done something responsible and justified might do wonders for their credibility.

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The Last “Snow White” Post (I Promise)

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Why is the Cognitive Dissonance Scale the graphic I chose for the final word on Disney’s “live-action” remake of Walt’s biggest and most important hit, 1937’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”? (For some perspective, realize that we have the same relationship on the timeline to that film that it had to the Presidency of Millard Fillmore.) It is clear that this cultural ethics train wreck, which EA has been dutifully covering (here, here, here, here here, and here), is now stuck inextricably in cognitive dissonance territory. For most viewers, what they think about the movie will be influenced far more by their biases and what they associate with the movie than the movie itself.

That’s how the scale works, as I keep explaining ad nauseam. If Disney is generally a plus-5 on a ticket-buyer’s scale (once upon a time, Disney would have been a plus-10 or higher on everyone’s scale) and the movie in a vacuum would be at “Meh”-level Zero, Disney would pull the film into positive territory. If Disney is in negative territory already for a different viewer, the film begins with an anchor chained to its metaphorical ankles.

Thus it is hardly surprising to see this as the early returns on the film (which doesn’t officially open in theaters until tomorrow):

Now that’s polarization!

What’s going on here? Well, a lot…

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Seeking Accountability For Giving Anti-White, Anti-American Talking Heads Broadcast Platforms

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The recent head-exploding statement by (finally) fired MSNBC racist Joy Reid would be an Unethical Quote of the Day if it were spewed out of the mouth of most people. Reid constantly said such disgusting things and I reflexively put her racist comments in the Julie Principle files long ago. But what she said in a conversation with fellow racist Ta-Nehisi Coates at a program at Xavier University in New Orleans raises another, broader ethics issue.

Reid said, “When my mother came from Guyana, she realized it is not a land of opportunity for people like us.” That claim, coming from someone with the American experience Joy Reid has enjoyed, is beyond insulting and false on its face: it is also incredibly stupid, even for Reid. When she was finally let go, Reid was making $3 million a year, and had been pulling down a seven figure salary for at least a decade. Her life is powerful evidence that the U.S. is a “land of opportunity” for people like her, meaning, as she did, black people. (It is also obviously a land of opportunity for America-hating, anti-white bigots who will make self-evidently false claims designed to divide the country.)

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Why DEI Must DIE: Exhibit A

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

On the bright side, I suppose its reassuring to know that The Great Stupid is even worse “across the pond” than it is here…

Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust, which cares for buildings in the immortal playwright’s home town of Stratford-upon-Avon, has announced that it wants to “create a more inclusive museum experience.” Therefore, the center of Great Britain’s essential public appreciation of the fact that it was so fortunate to be the birthplace of the greatest writer the world has ever known (unless the Bard was really a visitor from another planet, which has been my personal theory since I had to study “King Lear” in detail in order to direct a production of it) will seek ways to act on the diagnosis that Shakespeare’s works have been used to advance white supremacy.

Yes, these are morons. The legacy of one of the most vital catalysts of Western civilization is in the hands of morons. Now what?

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Ethics Movie: “The Company You Keep”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

2012’s “The Company You Keep” was the last film directed by Robert Redford, which tells you something. Redford is an excellent director but often not a commercially popular one: this movie, about aging Sixties radicals and their slow-dawning realization (or not) that their “movement” was ethically and logically flawed did not do well at the box office, and after his previous ethics movie (“The Conspirator,” which I posted about here) bombed, Redford’s days of getting studios to bet on his work were over.

“The Company You Keep” is not as good as “The Conspirator,” but it is surprisingly relevant in 2025 as we watch the American Left struggling with its hypocrisy, foolish utopianism and increasingly obvious hatred for its own country. Redford plays a former Weatherman (“The Weathermen” was the violent faction of the Students for Democratic Action) who has been in hiding in plain sight since a domestic terrorism action by the group turned fatal. When his long-standing alternate identity as a prominent lawyer is outed by an idealistic young journalist, Redford goes on the run. In the process he encounters former fellow-revolutionaries, some of whom still burn for the cause.

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An Eternal Ethical Dilemma at Arlington National Cemetery

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Once an institution publicly embraces or endorses something that wasn’t that institution’s proper role to endorse, the mistake cannot be remedied without the undesirable result of appearing to reject what should never have been embraced in the first place. The reverse is also true: as EA has pointed out, when the government starts legalizing previously banned substances, it appears that society now approves of their use.

The Trump administration is falling victim to the first version of this phenomenon in its admirable purge of DEI propaganda and practices across the government and its agencies. Naturally, this is being weaponized by the Trump-Hating news media. Today’s example: “Arlington Cemetery Website Loses Pages on Black Veterans, Women and Civil War” at the New York Times.

The story goes on to say, after the deliberately inflammatory title (President Trump is a racist and a misogynist, you know!), that the pages were taken down in response to the administration’s policy of ending promotion of the woke “diversity, equity and exclusion” fad, which is designed to inject “good discrimination” and group preferences into the culture.

The cemetery is operated by the Army, and issued a statement that it is dedicated to “sharing the stories of military service and sacrifice to the nation with transparency and professionalism.” The missing pages are being re-drafted. Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, accused the Trump administration of trying to erase the accomplishments of women and people of color.

Of course he did.

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Why Is So Much of the Public Ignorant, Badly Informed, Confused and Stupid? THIS….

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I had several other posts on the runway (including a Kennedy Center Symphony crowd booing J.D. Vance: stay classy, you patrons of the arts!, but with the developing theme today of The Great Stupid, I couldn’t resist this one. We began with a moronic “influencer,” proceeded to a state-appointed adviser who thinks she’s a reptile, and now an apparently respected black journalist named Karen Hunter.

For some ridiculous reason (that’s the second time I’ve used that intro: it’s a quote from “The Pirates of Penzance”), I was sent an email by SiriusXM about “host SiriusXM host Karen Hunter’s podcast today.” It featured loudmouthed, race-obsessed sports commentator Stephen A. Smith, who because he always drags politics into everything, is now being treated like an expert on politics.

What follows is the exchange during the podcast that was sent to entice me into becoming a follower, springing from Hunter’s questions about “buzz” around Smith being a possible Presidential candidate for the Democrats in 2028. To his credit, he said that the idea was absurd, but I’m more concerned with what this radio host said:

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Peak “Great Stupid” in Oregon (Again)

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I heard some mocking talking heads on Fox News joking about this yesterday and it made no sense to me at all, so I ignored it. Then I found out what had provoked all of the giggling about turtles.

The state of Oregon has appointed JD Holt to an Oregon Mental Health Advisory Board. JD says her pronouns are “they/them/terrapin.” She/they/it is not kidding. So she is out of her frickin’ mind.

From Fox News: “JD Holt, who also goes by “JD Terrapin” on Facebook, is one of roughly two dozen “consumers” on the OHA’s Consumer Advisory Council (OCAC). The council, established by administrative statute, is appointed by OHA Director Dr. Sejal Hathi, who was appointed by Gov. Tina Kotek (D, of course.) The purpose of the OCAC is to advise Hathi on the state’s provision of mental health services, including through investigations and reviews of current practices.”

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Observations on a Jobs Graph

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

That provocative graph above is brought to you by Apollo Global Management.

It purports to reveal what proportion of new jobs added each year since 2016 were in the private and public sectors. I have no way of telling whether the numbers are accurate, whether the manner of presenting them is fair, and whether Apollo has an agenda in presenting them this way. I guess that’s the first ethics observation. It is now impossible to trust news accounts, statistics, analysis, surveys, studies and data, no matter where it comes from. We can add this to the fact that photographs, films, recordings and videos are also untrustworthy.

But here are some more observations on the off chance that the numbers are correct and can be trusted:

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