The ostensibly outraged feminist must say that, "Kevin Williamson wants to hang one-third of American women." Little do they know that this use of statistics points out that abortion has become so common as to be mundane.
Jessica, please. In the Republic of Kev, a woman who has already had an abortion would be grandmothered in, so to speak. The capital punishment regime would be a deterrent to new abortions, and the actual number of hanged women would be relatively low.
I'm not signatory to much of anything that Kev has to say, including this. It does say a lot about the protected status of women in the workplace that the female staff at the "Atlantic," would have had a good argument for a hostile work environment.
And it speaks volumes about the women involved, they just wanted to no-platform Kev. You'd think all these young firebrand female polemicists would enjoy having a Kev around to sharpen and temper their arguments.
Female columnists probably skew higher in neuroticism than average.
The Jessicas want a media representation of a young woman's abortion to be a moment of sisterhood with your friends Hannah and Marnie and Jessa being supportive.
Young women are conditioned to think of their first abortion as a rite of passage.
I wonder if Kevin regrets deactivating his Twitter account.
Wednesday, April 25, 2018
Thursday, April 05, 2018
The Language of Lindsay Shepherd
Defiant bemusement.
Shepherd invited Faith Goldy to Wilfrid Laurier University to give a speech entitled, "Ethnocide." That's a provocative way of talking about native displacement, and Shepherd is now labeled a Nazi for her troubles.
If you call her a "crying white girl," she's just going to wonder why.
Maybe the unthinging that the left does so well should be used on them. Colonization? That's not a thing. Once they define terms, they've lost the argument.
Monday, April 02, 2018
The Social Indignation Boycott
Boycotts are not the "free market." They are conducted by ostensibly free people, but they are not the workings of a "free market." Not when producers are made to weather abuse over an everyday business decision like marketing.
A free market is when countless individuals exercise their discretions in myriad ways. A boycott these days means a company has violated some queer social contract. Very occasionally an airline or whatnot will endure some mild general opprobrium, but that's nothing compared to the social outrage boycott.
Markets may operate more fairly or efficiently if more information is available to both parties to transactions. But Media Matters isn't Consumer Reports.
Yes, I did say "ostensibly free people." There is coercion involved, and people's livelihoods directly threatened. You think they will stop there?
The above-all reason to generally disdain boycotts is that they are invariably instigated by collectivists.
A free market is when countless individuals exercise their discretions in myriad ways. A boycott these days means a company has violated some queer social contract. Very occasionally an airline or whatnot will endure some mild general opprobrium, but that's nothing compared to the social outrage boycott.
Markets may operate more fairly or efficiently if more information is available to both parties to transactions. But Media Matters isn't Consumer Reports.
Yes, I did say "ostensibly free people." There is coercion involved, and people's livelihoods directly threatened. You think they will stop there?
The above-all reason to generally disdain boycotts is that they are invariably instigated by collectivists.
Saturday, September 23, 2017
Maria Is Confident
Sometimes when I see an advertisement, I imagine the madcap life of the person that created it. It's always some earnest guy named Darrin, who has Paul Lynde as his brother-in-law, and Larry Tate is his boss. While Darrin juggles ideas and storyboards, chaos reigns in the background, like a family friend hitting on his hot wife and having her turn him into a dog.
The reality of the ad-man's life is probably more like a stultifying group-think collaborative, because how else would you get an ad campaign like Quicken Loans Rocket Mortgage, that is so attuned to the culture?
This is "Maria," and she is "confident."
This woman is a new breed we'll call "Adderall Mom," because she literally does everything. Her hair is frazzled because she has to fold laundry, buy groceries, and raise a child. Her kid's hair is just as frizzy and unkempt. Both of these gals are apparently semi-feral.
She even plays lead guitar in a garage band. It's a grrl band, with her black neighbor on keyboard, and her Asian neighbor on bass. Diversity quota achievement unlocked!
Maria is a total Mary Sue as well, or maybe rather a Maria Sue. She can make household repairs like removing the trap to her kitchen sink to fix a clog and hell's bells did her daughter put a doll's head in the sink? The mother's psychopathy has been passed on to her offspring.
Maria's kitchen sink doesn't have a garbage disposal, and there is something else about her domestic situation that seems a bit off. She ain't got no mans. But wait! There, in the background, out of focus, that clearly looks like a man.
But look at the composition. He is on one end of the porch, squeezed into a corner, and the kid is on the other side. The kid's mother is literally and figuratively between them, even elbowing him aside. This guy is clearly auditioning for the role of father figure, and failing.
If you've made it this far, congratulations, there is another ad for Rocket Mortgage that induces even more cringe.
This is "Sarah," and she is also "confident." Sarah is a fifth-grade teacher who builds combat robots and wears an empowering shirt with GIRLBOTS empoweringly emblazoned in a drippy monster-type font.
Why "GIRLBOTS," I wonder. Did New Line Cinema trademark that well-established term of female empowerment, "Fembots"?
Nevertheless, this is a very important milestone in advertising, because it is established scientism that if little girls do not see women doing STEM on television, they will become very discouraged and become psychologists.
Sarah's advertisement dispenses with the husband idea altogether, because it's established science that any woman who's that good at STEM was born with a male brain and is a lesbian.
Here, Sarah so doesn't need a man because she can program a lawnmower to keep her, ahem, lawn, nice and trimmed. Kind of makes you wonder what other motorized or battery-operated devices she programs in order to maintain her, ahem, other needs.
I can't wait for the next installment in the Rocket Mortgage series. I'm really hoping for a lesbian couple, and it would be neat if one of them was in a wheelchair.
At least Darrin was a good straight man.
This is "Maria," and she is "confident."
She even plays lead guitar in a garage band. It's a grrl band, with her black neighbor on keyboard, and her Asian neighbor on bass. Diversity quota achievement unlocked!
But look at the composition. He is on one end of the porch, squeezed into a corner, and the kid is on the other side. The kid's mother is literally and figuratively between them, even elbowing him aside. This guy is clearly auditioning for the role of father figure, and failing.
If you've made it this far, congratulations, there is another ad for Rocket Mortgage that induces even more cringe.
Why "GIRLBOTS," I wonder. Did New Line Cinema trademark that well-established term of female empowerment, "Fembots"?
Nevertheless, this is a very important milestone in advertising, because it is established scientism that if little girls do not see women doing STEM on television, they will become very discouraged and become psychologists.
Here, Sarah so doesn't need a man because she can program a lawnmower to keep her, ahem, lawn, nice and trimmed. Kind of makes you wonder what other motorized or battery-operated devices she programs in order to maintain her, ahem, other needs.
I can't wait for the next installment in the Rocket Mortgage series. I'm really hoping for a lesbian couple, and it would be neat if one of them was in a wheelchair.
At least Darrin was a good straight man.
Saturday, September 09, 2017
Wind River (2017)
Wind River, written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, is a multi-jurisdictional murder mystery set on an Indian reservation. U.S. Fish and Wildlife agent, Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), first appears onscreen in a white snowsuit, camouflaged to blend in with the wintry landscape. A pack of wolves is maneuvering to pick off a sheep from a grazing flock, and a concealed Lambert fires a round from his rifle, killing one wolf, and causing the rest to withdraw.
Two of Wind River's main themes are introduced in this scene. Lambert embodies the shepherd archetype, willing to protect sheep from wolves. This literal embodiment carries into a figurative one, as human beings are separated from their flock to perish.
We are also introduced to an implicit theme, that of camouflage and concealment.
In a subsequent scene, Lambert is called to investigate the killing of a steer, which he deduces is the work of a mountain lion and her cubs. "She's teaching them how to hunt. And she's teaching them on livestock," he tells his father-in-law, Crowheart.
The lions' tracks lead away from the steer carcas, to high up in the timber line, accessible only by snowmobile. The mountain passes around Park City, Utah stand in for the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming.
While tracking the lions, Lambert encounters different tracks, the deep tracks made by a person running, and then sees crimson stains in the snow. The tracks and blood trail end in the body of a young woman, half-buried in the snow, her blue parka a bright contrast on the white snow field.
Lambert pulls out his radio and calls for emergency assistance in a flat voice, "I found a body on the Wind River Indian Reservation, I need emergency assistance." Renner's Lambert is emotionally composed throughout, but it is a cloak for emotions that are buried beneath the surface. Lambert looks at the ground while talking, or looks into the distance to compose his thoughts, and never betrays the pain he himself is still processing.
Lambert and FBI Agent Jane Banner go to interview Martin Hanson, the father of the dead girl, Natalie. The scenes between Lambert and Martin form the emotional core of the movie. A full Shoshoni, Martin is even more reserved than Lambert. Martin has a tall, warrior stature, hawk-like features, and black eyes that are trying to comprehend the loss and grief before him.
Martin tries to conceal his grief, because he must. What remains of his family, his wife and his son, are disintegrating. Banner encounters Martin's wife, Annie, sitting on her bed, cutting her arms and and hands with a kitchen knife out of pure sorrow.
Lambert and Martin go out on to the porch, and a little of Lambert's hard-earned Arapahoe wisdom pours out. Lambert shares the lesson from his experience with loss, telling Martin, "You'll never be whole. Ever. What was taken from you can’t be replaced. You’re daughter's gone. As soon as you accept that, as soon as you let yourself suffer, allow yourself to grieve ... You’ll be able to visit her in your mind, and remember all the joy she gave you."
This is just the first instance of Lambert acting as an emotional shepherd, guiding those in pain toward resolution.
Agent Banner, played by Elizabeth Olsen, is emotional counterpoint to Renner's stoicism. Olsen has enormous blue eyes set in an almost malnourished skull, and they convey the fear she would rather disguise. While Banner is interviewing Sam Littlefeather on the doorstep of his dilapidated drug house, he attacks her with pepper spray. This sets off a dramatic sequence where Banner pursues him inside. Her vision is impaired, and it would have been understandable for her to wait before entering the house looking for him. It's a moment of seized initiative, of peering around corners, trying to recover enough sight to fight.
Martin's son, Chip, is one of the inhabitants of the dilapidated drug house, and he is almost too far into a drug haze to realize the fact that his sister is dead. While Chip is handcuffed in a truck waiting to go off to jail, Lambert confronts him with this stark reality, and enables Chip to begin his healing journey.
Once the mystery is resolved, Lambert guides Banner through her own emotional gateway, helping her to transcend the experience, as the movie itself transcends the genre. Banner lies in a hospital bed, recovering from her wounds, and Lambert picks up a woman's magazine and begins flipping through it.
"I know what you're doing," Banner says.
Lambert reads the title of one of the stories, "'How to know if he’s into you -- ten signs. Number one: he looks you in the eye when he speaks.' You’re supposed to do that anyway, ain’t you?" This makes her laugh, and then her emotions come out easily, cathartically.
We are also introduced to an implicit theme, that of camouflage and concealment.
In a subsequent scene, Lambert is called to investigate the killing of a steer, which he deduces is the work of a mountain lion and her cubs. "She's teaching them how to hunt. And she's teaching them on livestock," he tells his father-in-law, Crowheart.
The lions' tracks lead away from the steer carcas, to high up in the timber line, accessible only by snowmobile. The mountain passes around Park City, Utah stand in for the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming.
While tracking the lions, Lambert encounters different tracks, the deep tracks made by a person running, and then sees crimson stains in the snow. The tracks and blood trail end in the body of a young woman, half-buried in the snow, her blue parka a bright contrast on the white snow field.
Lambert pulls out his radio and calls for emergency assistance in a flat voice, "I found a body on the Wind River Indian Reservation, I need emergency assistance." Renner's Lambert is emotionally composed throughout, but it is a cloak for emotions that are buried beneath the surface. Lambert looks at the ground while talking, or looks into the distance to compose his thoughts, and never betrays the pain he himself is still processing.
Lambert and FBI Agent Jane Banner go to interview Martin Hanson, the father of the dead girl, Natalie. The scenes between Lambert and Martin form the emotional core of the movie. A full Shoshoni, Martin is even more reserved than Lambert. Martin has a tall, warrior stature, hawk-like features, and black eyes that are trying to comprehend the loss and grief before him.
Martin tries to conceal his grief, because he must. What remains of his family, his wife and his son, are disintegrating. Banner encounters Martin's wife, Annie, sitting on her bed, cutting her arms and and hands with a kitchen knife out of pure sorrow.
Lambert and Martin go out on to the porch, and a little of Lambert's hard-earned Arapahoe wisdom pours out. Lambert shares the lesson from his experience with loss, telling Martin, "You'll never be whole. Ever. What was taken from you can’t be replaced. You’re daughter's gone. As soon as you accept that, as soon as you let yourself suffer, allow yourself to grieve ... You’ll be able to visit her in your mind, and remember all the joy she gave you."
This is just the first instance of Lambert acting as an emotional shepherd, guiding those in pain toward resolution.
Agent Banner, played by Elizabeth Olsen, is emotional counterpoint to Renner's stoicism. Olsen has enormous blue eyes set in an almost malnourished skull, and they convey the fear she would rather disguise. While Banner is interviewing Sam Littlefeather on the doorstep of his dilapidated drug house, he attacks her with pepper spray. This sets off a dramatic sequence where Banner pursues him inside. Her vision is impaired, and it would have been understandable for her to wait before entering the house looking for him. It's a moment of seized initiative, of peering around corners, trying to recover enough sight to fight.
Martin's son, Chip, is one of the inhabitants of the dilapidated drug house, and he is almost too far into a drug haze to realize the fact that his sister is dead. While Chip is handcuffed in a truck waiting to go off to jail, Lambert confronts him with this stark reality, and enables Chip to begin his healing journey.
Once the mystery is resolved, Lambert guides Banner through her own emotional gateway, helping her to transcend the experience, as the movie itself transcends the genre. Banner lies in a hospital bed, recovering from her wounds, and Lambert picks up a woman's magazine and begins flipping through it.
"I know what you're doing," Banner says.
Lambert reads the title of one of the stories, "'How to know if he’s into you -- ten signs. Number one: he looks you in the eye when he speaks.' You’re supposed to do that anyway, ain’t you?" This makes her laugh, and then her emotions come out easily, cathartically.
Saturday, August 19, 2017
Totality
It begins at 9:06 am PDT, on Monday. The path of totality is drawn across United States like the finger of God, evoking the spiritual division of our nation.
We once fought a war over our divisions, four score years after our nation's founding.
More than six hundred thousand men died in the conflict.
If you want to find out what started the Civil war, you can look at Wikipedia, or open a history book, and you'll get a satisfactory answer.
It's worth keeping in mind that history is written by the winners.
Well, now the victors have decided that the terms signed at Appomattox, and assented to by our institutions since then, are no longer valid. The symbols that long softened the shame of The Lost Cause are to be burned in the pyre of America's Great Cultural Revolution.
The symbols can no longer be said to stand for valor, bravery, brotherhood, and chivalry. They have been reduced to mere symbols of slavery.
Countless Southern boys carried the rebel spirit into battle in service to the Union, subsequent to the Civil War. Their blood was shed at Anzio, Belleau Wood, Chosin, Da Nang, and in countless other battles.
Even the Stars and Bars and the Confederate Battle Flag are being lowered.
The what then? question is being answered, and it's not pretty. Activists replaced a Robert E. Lee statue in Baltimore with a statue of a black pregnant woman. That aesthetic nightmare was rightly ripped down.
The ritual purification of the public square includes Father JunÃpero Serra, who established twenty-one missions in California. These were the first settlements of Europeans in California. Father Serra's statue in Mission Hills was vandalized.
Tear them all down if you want. Follow the Third Commandment and don't allow graven images, I won't argue. But these people are convinced they are on the right side of history, and that even the most degenerate images are better than heritage.
It's like hell on earth, now.
More than six hundred thousand men died in the conflict.
If you want to find out what started the Civil war, you can look at Wikipedia, or open a history book, and you'll get a satisfactory answer.
It's worth keeping in mind that history is written by the winners.
Well, now the victors have decided that the terms signed at Appomattox, and assented to by our institutions since then, are no longer valid. The symbols that long softened the shame of The Lost Cause are to be burned in the pyre of America's Great Cultural Revolution.
The symbols can no longer be said to stand for valor, bravery, brotherhood, and chivalry. They have been reduced to mere symbols of slavery.
Countless Southern boys carried the rebel spirit into battle in service to the Union, subsequent to the Civil War. Their blood was shed at Anzio, Belleau Wood, Chosin, Da Nang, and in countless other battles.
Even the Stars and Bars and the Confederate Battle Flag are being lowered.
The what then? question is being answered, and it's not pretty. Activists replaced a Robert E. Lee statue in Baltimore with a statue of a black pregnant woman. That aesthetic nightmare was rightly ripped down.
The ritual purification of the public square includes Father JunÃpero Serra, who established twenty-one missions in California. These were the first settlements of Europeans in California. Father Serra's statue in Mission Hills was vandalized.
Tear them all down if you want. Follow the Third Commandment and don't allow graven images, I won't argue. But these people are convinced they are on the right side of history, and that even the most degenerate images are better than heritage.
It's like hell on earth, now.
Sunday, August 13, 2017
Dunkirk (2017)
In the opening scene of Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, we meet Tommy, a retreating British soldier played by Fionn Whitehead. Tommy and his mates are walking through the deserted streets of the French town of Dunkerque, leaflets fluttering gently from the sky, when their stroll is interrupted, fractured by gunfire.
The fusillade is deafening, and startling, and the boys start to run, but only Tommy makes it over a wall to temporary safety. This begins Tommy's quest for escape and survival.
The enemy makes himself heard by dropping bombs that explode, firing guns that shatter the air, and especially by dive-bombing Stukas that sound like banshees. We never see the face of the enemy; in fact, the enemy is completely disembodied throughout.
War is loud because it's supposed to be. Dunkirk is loud because ear-splitting instruments of ruin represent chaos, and Dunkirk is a movie about the essentiality of order from within chaos.
That's also why we never see a German soldier. The enemy is unseen, yet potentially everywhere. They ply the English Channel in U-boats, submerged by the water that is itself an agent of chaos, and a barrier to safety.
The unseen German soldier represents the unknown. The unknown is an archetypal form of chaos. Outside your island of safety, of tea and toast with jam, of all that is known, there is an infinite universe that is hostile or indifferent to your existence and survival. The unseen German soldier is a reminder that outside the ordered realm, there exists a vast realm where the chances of not surviving are nearly infinite.
The promotional tag-line for Dunkirk reads, "When 400,000 men couldn't get home, home came for them." Home is the rolling green countryside viewed from the window of a train that must have been a welcome change from a beach pelted by wind that would blow the foam across the sand.
Home represents the ultimate orderliness, in a very British stiff-upper-lip manner. Order is personified by Commander Bolton, played by Kenneth Branagh. Calm, rational, stoicism is deeply embodied by Mr. Dawson, played by Mark Rylance, who pilots his motor yacht Moonstone across the channel to help the evacuation.
Order is the scores of life preservers neatly stacked belowdecks of Moonstone. Mr. Dawson doesn't even turn around at the sound of approaching aircraft. He knows they are Spitfires from the engine's thrum, saying, "Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, sweetest sound you could hear."
Stoicism is embodied by Mr. Dawson telling the shivering soldier he rescued, "There’s no hiding from this." And it's symbolized by the masses of soldiers queuing in neat lines down to the shore, dispersing when the Stukas appear, and reassembling when the Stukas move off.
This order has counterpoint in the utter chaos of war. Tommy hides along the mole, hoping to sneak aboard the next boat after being kicked off a hospital ship. The hospital ship is bombed at its berth, and sinks within minutes, men diving off the wreckage to safety.
Tommy boards another ship, which is torpedoed during the night crossing, and sinks also. His journey through chaos is nowhere near done, and neither is Britain's. Tommy's imperative is his own personal survival, by whatever means, but Nolan imbues him with virtue nonetheless. When Tommy's ship is torpedoed, he opens a hatch that allows a few boys a passage to safety. It's a very small act compared to the hundreds of boys and nurses trapped on board that will surely drown.
But it's not nothing. When Tommy arrives safely back on the dock in England, a man congratulates him, "Well done lads!" Tommy replies, "All we did was survive."
"That's enough."
The fusillade is deafening, and startling, and the boys start to run, but only Tommy makes it over a wall to temporary safety. This begins Tommy's quest for escape and survival.
War is loud because it's supposed to be. Dunkirk is loud because ear-splitting instruments of ruin represent chaos, and Dunkirk is a movie about the essentiality of order from within chaos.
That's also why we never see a German soldier. The enemy is unseen, yet potentially everywhere. They ply the English Channel in U-boats, submerged by the water that is itself an agent of chaos, and a barrier to safety.
The unseen German soldier represents the unknown. The unknown is an archetypal form of chaos. Outside your island of safety, of tea and toast with jam, of all that is known, there is an infinite universe that is hostile or indifferent to your existence and survival. The unseen German soldier is a reminder that outside the ordered realm, there exists a vast realm where the chances of not surviving are nearly infinite.
The promotional tag-line for Dunkirk reads, "When 400,000 men couldn't get home, home came for them." Home is the rolling green countryside viewed from the window of a train that must have been a welcome change from a beach pelted by wind that would blow the foam across the sand.
Home represents the ultimate orderliness, in a very British stiff-upper-lip manner. Order is personified by Commander Bolton, played by Kenneth Branagh. Calm, rational, stoicism is deeply embodied by Mr. Dawson, played by Mark Rylance, who pilots his motor yacht Moonstone across the channel to help the evacuation.
Order is the scores of life preservers neatly stacked belowdecks of Moonstone. Mr. Dawson doesn't even turn around at the sound of approaching aircraft. He knows they are Spitfires from the engine's thrum, saying, "Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, sweetest sound you could hear."
Stoicism is embodied by Mr. Dawson telling the shivering soldier he rescued, "There’s no hiding from this." And it's symbolized by the masses of soldiers queuing in neat lines down to the shore, dispersing when the Stukas appear, and reassembling when the Stukas move off.
This order has counterpoint in the utter chaos of war. Tommy hides along the mole, hoping to sneak aboard the next boat after being kicked off a hospital ship. The hospital ship is bombed at its berth, and sinks within minutes, men diving off the wreckage to safety.
Tommy boards another ship, which is torpedoed during the night crossing, and sinks also. His journey through chaos is nowhere near done, and neither is Britain's. Tommy's imperative is his own personal survival, by whatever means, but Nolan imbues him with virtue nonetheless. When Tommy's ship is torpedoed, he opens a hatch that allows a few boys a passage to safety. It's a very small act compared to the hundreds of boys and nurses trapped on board that will surely drown.
But it's not nothing. When Tommy arrives safely back on the dock in England, a man congratulates him, "Well done lads!" Tommy replies, "All we did was survive."
"That's enough."
Monday, July 24, 2017
Her (2013)
Most of the exterior scenes were filmed in the early-morning in Los Angeles, within a hazy light that is glaring and gloomy at once.
This atmospheric effect is commonly called an "inversion layer," which is a reversal of the normal decrease of air temperature with altitude. The cooler air is near the surface, and the air gets warmer as the altitude increases.
It's upside down.
The story's protagonist, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), is a man living in an inverted universe. While on the rebound from a failed marriage, Twombly begins a relationship with an operating system.
Her doesn't have a lot of gadgets and technology, but everybody seems to be interacting with an operating system of their own. They walk around in public, singly or in pairs, oblivious, immersed in a different reality.
Children appear in Twombly's gauzy recollections, but when he and Catherine (Rooney Mara) meet in the present to sign divorce papers, he doesn't ask about them.
Twombly climbs a set of stairs and overlooks the beach on one of his dates with Samantha. This mass of humanity would pretty much encourage me to turn around and go home.
Jonze re-visits this theme of climbing stairs at the end of the movie, after Samantha has evolved to the point where she leaves him. Twombly and Amy (Amy Adams) ascend to the roof of his skyscraper apartment building.
Skyscrapers are omnipresent in Her, and though sterile, represent the only aspirational motivation. Everyone else is barren or sterile. As the sun rises and bathes Amy and Twombly in morning light, I was left wondering what it was that prevented him from taking her hand and doing a 40 floor swan dive.
Thursday, June 29, 2017
Trump the Heel
A good way to cope with our crazy world is just admit that you have very little control over anything. Also helpful is thinking that everything is scripted and staged, like pro wrestling.
Did Donald Trump succeed in his hostile takeover of the Republican Party? Well, that's like asking if Trump really conducted a hostile takeover of Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Entertainment.
Yes and no. Trump's story arc is not yet complete.
Trump now plays the role of the heel, the one who takes cheap shots and hits below the belt. It's not "dignified," and it's hard to defend him sometimes. Especially when he calls Mika Brzezinski "Low IQ."
He also called her, crazy, and said that she was, bleeding from a face-lift.
Trump has insulted Mika's honor, called her stupid, and implied that Joe Scarborough's woman is a shop-worn kook who needed a new face.
This is a real alpha move by Trump. This is Trump asking, Who Bitch Is This?
He's responding to Mika's constant mocking, like this morning's teensy hands swipe, which she delivered with a squeaky voice.
Trump responded by saying to Joe, hey, control your woman or I will perform a dominance display on your ass.
I don't know that Scarborough has any room to maneuver here. He can't threaten the President, or challenge him to a duel. So how does he avenge the slight to Mika's honor?
Chivalrous displays from elsewhere in the media will demonstrate that a woman's honor is worthy of defending, but what will Joe do?
We've already seen that Melania is willing to defend her husband. She said that, when her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder.
What I wouldn't give to see Melania and Mika brawl in real life, that is, in a carefully scripted and staged WWE event.
Yes and no. Trump's story arc is not yet complete.
Trump now plays the role of the heel, the one who takes cheap shots and hits below the belt. It's not "dignified," and it's hard to defend him sometimes. Especially when he calls Mika Brzezinski "Low IQ."
He also called her, crazy, and said that she was, bleeding from a face-lift.
Trump has insulted Mika's honor, called her stupid, and implied that Joe Scarborough's woman is a shop-worn kook who needed a new face.
This is a real alpha move by Trump. This is Trump asking, Who Bitch Is This?
He's responding to Mika's constant mocking, like this morning's teensy hands swipe, which she delivered with a squeaky voice.
Trump responded by saying to Joe, hey, control your woman or I will perform a dominance display on your ass.
I don't know that Scarborough has any room to maneuver here. He can't threaten the President, or challenge him to a duel. So how does he avenge the slight to Mika's honor?
Chivalrous displays from elsewhere in the media will demonstrate that a woman's honor is worthy of defending, but what will Joe do?
We've already seen that Melania is willing to defend her husband. She said that, when her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder.
What I wouldn't give to see Melania and Mika brawl in real life, that is, in a carefully scripted and staged WWE event.
Thursday, June 01, 2017
Wonder Woman
I'm not going to lie: I'm excited to see Wonder Woman. I watched the trailer today, and it made me feel something powerful and I'm thinking through what that something is.
First, note that the feminist reaction to this movie is not universally positive. Feminists closed ranks around Ghostbusters more monolithically than for Wonder Woman. First, there was an uproar because Diana doesn't have armpit hair. It's not enough for feminism's lesbian wing that Diana was raised among a group of Amazon warriors, she's got to have pit hair, too.
There is a boycott in Lebanon because Gal Gadot, who was born in Israel, is a Zionist. The little neo-marxists who claim feminism also by and large hate Israel.
The anti-Wonder Woman zeitgeist seems to be coalescing around the viewpoint of Guardian reviewer Steve Rose, who complained that Wonder Woman doesn't break the glass ceiling. She's a "weaponized Smurfette" according to Rose, and the movie is destined only to be a "camp classic."
Yeah, we'll see. I predict that we will see mothers and fathers taking their daughters and sons to see this movie, because there is something universal about it.
That archetype, besides the well-tread female superhero myth embodied by Buffy and Xena, is that of a crusader / nurturer. If you aren't with her, then you are against her, and her ultimate duty is protective and maternal.
There seems to be a great hunger for embodiment of this archetype right now. In spite of what feminists like Steve Rose would have you believe, the children and grown-up children who go to the movies aren't interested in a movie about a woman who works eighty hours a week to become partner.
They want to imagine a woman who will go to war to protect them.
I don't have a problem with a movie about women who break the glass ceiling. It's just that that is a new archetype that is being forced upon us. If you want to make a movie about that, I'm sure it will appeal to some people. It may even become universal some day. Probably not though.
Wednesday, May 31, 2017
Put Phenotype Aside
They claim to be angry because professor Bret Weinstein refused to participate in Evergreen's "Day of Absence." This year, instead of people of color choosing to stay home, they demanded that white people leave campus for the day.
Weinstein has described himself as "deeply progressive." He wrote a letter to Rashida Love informing her that he "would encourage others to put phenotype aside and reject this new formulation."
Love, the Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services, wasn't having it, and why should she? Black women built America, and black women are magic.
Rashida Love has achieved a level of woke that shouldn't even be possible, let alone meaningful.
The students at Evergreen are angry. It may have something to do with the fact that they are students at Evergreen, where the acceptance rate is 98.9 percent. Evergreen isn't anybody's first choice, or even fall-back position.
A smart person would go to community college and build up college credit. A moron goes to Evergreen and pays full price. A full-blown retard takes out student loans and volunteers for a life of indentured servitude for the privilege.
If you watch the video, it looks like a struggle session after the scrap-booking seminar from The Learning Annex. How is Evergreen State College preparing these people for a hostile world? By teaching them how to recycle?
Isn't the point of college to teach you skills that will make you dangerous, rhetorically speaking? Don't you want to be a person to be respected? The only danger an Evergreen alumnus will ever pose is to themselves, or the attendant at the King County needle exchange.
Is there a back story to this, like how a five year old with Down's Syndrome and tremors did this all by themselves, left-handed, in a moving Volkswagon?
This is your problem right here.
Seriously, though, the moral obligation of the trustees of Evergreen State College is to close the campus and refund everyone's tuition.
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