Disney Faces An Inevitable Consequence of the Wokism Game: Ginsberg’s Theorem

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Ginsberg’s Theorem is a parody of the laws of thermodynamics applied to other human pursuits, in the current case, the hopeless race for woke virtue recognition in the Age of the Great Stupid. It begins with the fact that an entity or an individual has begun playing a game, and continues,

1. You can’t win the game.

2. You can’t break even in the game.

3. You can’t quit the game.

The Disney Corporation stumbled into Ginsberg Theorem territory when it decided to make a live action version of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in the throes of the company’s self-destructive woke virtue-signaling addiction. It began by casting a Snow White “of color,” which, of course, made no sense at all, since the whole story is based on an obsession to be the “fairest one of all,” and the central character is named Snow White. Snow that is not white has many icky implications.

Having started to play the game, Disney felt it had to react appropriately when actor Peter Dinklage of “Game of Thrones” fame, the best known of all performing “Little People,” gratuitously attacked the project, saying, “It makes no sense to me. You’re progressive in one way, but then you’re still making that fucking backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together!” That single critique from a single individual who had appointed himself as the voice of all small people everywhere was all it took for Disney to make the mind-blowing—but woke!—decision to make “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” without dwarfs. As chronicled here at the time, as soon as a picture of the seven replacements hit social media…

…the backlash and ridicule was so furious that those whatever-the-hell they were supposed to be were canned, the movie’s premiere was cancelled, and the whole film went back to the drawing board. Let’s see now: the live action version of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” couldn’t have dwarfs play dwarfs because…well, because Peter Dinklage said so. They couldn’t replace Little People actors with non-dwarfs, no matter how “diverse” and “inclusive” they were, because that made no sense, though it took the social media mob to explain this to Disney’s creative team. Ah-HA! The solution was to have a live action movie with 7/8 of the title characters not played by actors, but by weird CGI things reminiscent of the original animated film’s iconic dwarfs, but neither as charming nor as convincing….

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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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Societal Enabling of Abnormal Behaviors

/ Jack Marshall / 81 Comments

Guest Post by Steve Witherspoon

[My first reaction to this passionate guest post was “Gee, how do you really feel, Steve?” My second was “The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the host.” My third is: I wouldn’t laugh yet. One of my oldest friends is visiting D.C. to meet his new grandson, birthed by the wife of his former daughter, now son. When I went to the memorial service of a former thoroughly Irish Catholic boss from the streets of Brooklyn, I discovered that two of his three sons, all of whom I knew as children, are now middle aged women, and seemingly very happy about it. A close member of my immediate family is “transitioning.” Whatever it is that’s going on here, its getting dig in like a tick.]

I have raised the question in an earlier essay titled, What’s Considered Normal, where I looked into the differences between what is considered to be “normal” and “abnormal”. You can read the arguments presented in the entire post if you like, but I’ll briefly summarize some of the details as I go along in this essay.

I think it’s extremely important that everyone understands the core of an argument based on the words used and how those words are defined. So with that in mind, let’s start by presenting some generally accepted “norms”.

NORMAL

  • Conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected
  • Conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern..
  • …characterized by that which is considered usual, typical, or routine.
  • If something conforms to a general pattern, standard, or average, we describe it as normal.

ABNORMAL

  • Deviating from what is normal or usual.

  • Not normal, average, typical, or usual.

  • Something that is abnormal is out of the ordinary, or not typical

ENABLING

  • Supporting or allowing (whether intentionally or unintentionally) harmful or destructive individual behaviors thus preventing the individual from facing either the consequences of their choices and/or generally accepted reality.

Dysfunctional: Deviating from the norms of social behavior in a way regarded as bad.

Delusional: Characterized by or holding false beliefs or judgments about reality that are held despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, typically as a symptom of a mental condition.

Now that we have the terms settled, on to the core of this essay…

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Wow! This Story Is Embarrassing to SO Many People Who Deserved to Be Embarrassed!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

An easy “Nelson.”

A British jury last week convicted Lydia Mugambe of forcing a young Ugandan woman to work as her slave after tricking her into coming to the U.K.

Mugambe, studying for a doctorate in law at the University of Oxford when she got into the slave business, is a high court judge in Uganda (DING!),a criminal tribunal judge at the United Nations (DING!), and previous Human Rights Fellow (DING!) at Columbia University (DINGDINGDINGDINGDING!—Is Columbia having a bad month or what?)

Mugambe’s passionate social justice activism for “gender-based justice” (DING!) previously earned her the People’s Choice Gavel Award from Women’s Link Worldwide (DING!). In 2022 Mugambe also won the Vera Chirwa Human Rights Award of the University of Pretoria, South Africa (of course DING!) , for her work to ensure gender-based justice in Africa.

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Unethical Quote of the Month: “The Ethicist” (Kwame Anthony Appiah)

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“We are, as I’ve argued before, entitled to a life informed by the fundamental facts about our existence. Even the painful ones? Perhaps especially those. This truth belongs to her.”

—New York Times advice columnist Kwame Anthony Appiah, aka. “The Ethicist” concluding his advice to the inquirer who asked, “My Adopted Cousin’s Biological Parents Were Siblings. Do I Tell Her?”

Kwame is pretty clearly the best of the various “experts” who have manned the long-time feature in the New York Times Magazine; at least he’s a real ethicist, a philosophy prof at NYU. (I say “manned” because the Times has never given the post of “The Ethicist” to a woman. Go figure…) Lately, however, I’ve been a bit worried about the guy, and wondering if “The Great Stupid” is getting to him. More answers like this one, and I’ll be tempted to dub him the “Un-Ethicist,” in honor of the old 7-Up campaign branding the soft-drink as the “Un-cola.”

I’m just going to focus on the quote above and not the whole column, because The Ethicist is stating an absolute principle that is absolute hooey. The inspiration for the edict “The truth belongs to her” was the usual participant in the column, “Name Withheld,” asking whether he or she, as the only living relative who knows the actual family origins of a cousin, (or as Kwame puts it, is “the sole custodian of an intimate truth concealed from the very person it concerns) should spill the rotten beans now, when they both are seniors.

Because the dark family secret can be nothing but disturbing or worse, I see no possible benefit to anyone by revealing it to the cousin now. She knows she was adopted, but she does not know that her biological parents were brother and sister—at least that’s what the inquirer’s now-deceased mother told her “in absolute confidence.” All records are sealed: there is no way for the “truth,” if it is the truth, to come out, as all involved except the adopted cousin are dead. The clueless cousin has a husband, children or grandchildren.

Even in his (as usual) prolix answer, The Ethicist struggles to find any real benefit to the inquirer revealing the secret. Any genetic abnormalities, from which the Clueless Cousin has apparently been spared, would now be detected with modern medical screening and are increasingly unlikely with succeeding generations. So he defaults to the “rule,” encomium, or whatever he thinks it is, that the cousin must have this depressing, disturbing and useless information because “this truth belongs to her.”

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The Latest Disingenuous Excuse For Harris’s Defeat: “No Daylight”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Kamala Harris lost the election because she was an empty suit, DEI Vice-President who tried to fake her way to the finish line while running one of the most incompetent campaigns in American Presidential history. There’s no mystery. It didn’t help that she was inextricably linked to the worst administration ever, slowly being revealed as a four year fraud on the American public. What’s the mystery? The constant, futile and insulting efforts we keep hearing by apologists for the Harris debacle are continuations of the denial and the “it isn’t what it is” gaslighting that has been the standard operating procedure for the Axis of Unethical Conduct since 2016.

Now comes Amie Parnes at The Hill to explain the real reason the Worst Presidential Candidate Ever lost to Donald Trump. President Biden kept insisting that “there be no daylight” between the policies of his adminsitration and what Harris advocated on the stump, in interviews, and in the statments of her surrogates: “Almost everywhere she went, Harris walked among former Biden aides who sought to defend his presidency. Her campaign was run by a former White House deputy chief of staff…and a phalanx of department heads who had served Biden until the previous month.”

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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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