When the #MeToo movement emerged, the idea appeared to be that women (and men!) should speak out about sexual assault and sexual harassment, that powerful people should not feel entitled to take physical liberties with others, and that the culture needed to unequivocally and clearly condemn such conduct. Like most abstract concepts, it sounded good in theory, until—
—the question about what constituted sexual assault and harassment remained unanswered, because in so many cases it is a matter of perception and perspective.
—basic due process and the presumption of innocence were ignored, minimized, or jettisoned entirely, turning the accused into victims themselves
—Democrats sought to weaponized the movement politically, raising questions about motive, equal justice, and bias, and turning what should have been a bi-partisan movement into a cynical partisan one.
—The “women must be believed” mantra, discriminatory, unjust and ridiculous on its face, became part of the narrative and burst into open misandry and outrageous double standards.
The cognitive dissonance scale will come in handy today:
1 Cultural incompetence. “First Man,” about the first landing on the Moon, is a bust at the box office, and that result should have been completely predictable to anyone who has any sense at all about U.S. culture. Maybe if Hollywood loses enough money, it will figure out that its role is to celebrate and contribute to U.S. culture and values, not to trash them. The decision to omit the planting of the flag on the moon may have been rationalized as an artistic choice, but it resonated as a tone-deaf (at best) or obnoxious political one. That blurry, stiffened flag on the Moon is certainly one of my most vivid memories of the event—why would any film excise it, unless it was trying to make an anti-patriotic statement? Writes lonely Hollywood conservative critic Christian Toto:
Why did it matter? That moon walk represented a monumental U.S. victory. The moment gave the U.S. a decisive space race blow against the Soviets. Armstrong’s heroism completed President John F. Kennedy’s vow to reach the moon by decade’s end. The flag mattered.
Well, of course. The real question is, how estranged from their own nation and history must the filmmakers be not to know this? The American flag, American achievements, American pride, and patriotism are all high on the CD scale for most citizens and movie-goers except for the most estranged and anti-democratic of our education system’s victims. Openly opposing them drives the messenger down the scale.
(The film’s British co-star, Claire Foy, calling President Trump “the penis of America” in an interview probably didn’t help either.)
2. Translation: “We are really, really stupid, shameless and desperate!” PETA has launched an anti-milk campaign attempting to link the beverage to white supremacy, tweeting “Cows’ milk has long been a symbol used by white supremacists. One more reason to #DitchDairy” and blogging,
“Aside from ‘lactose-tolerant’ white supremacists, cow’s milk really is the perfect drink of choice for all (even unwitting) supremacists, since the dairy industry inflicts extreme violence on other living beings. PETA is trying to wake people up to the implications of choosing this white beverage and suggesting that they choose something else pronto.”
Of course, this is just Cognitive Dissonance Scale gaming 101. Democrats and the left-biased news media have tried to use the white supremacy smear to attack President Trump and conservatives, but the scale didn’t get used the way they hoped. Instead of linking the President to racism and dragging his scale ranking down, they linked themselves to dishonest race-baiting and unscrupulous name-calling, both very low on the scale, and dragged themselves down the scale.
Morons.
3. Did Republicans recruit the migrant mob? If they didn’t, they might as well have. A hoard of South Americans openly intending to defy U.S. law and force their way across the boarder, looking for all the world like one of the deadly “herds” of zombies that periodically menace the heroes of “The Walking Dead” and “Fear the Walking Dead” …
could not provide a better illustration of why the progressive position on illegal immigration is nuts, and thus indefensible. It is amusing watching the mainstream media trying to spin the unspinnable: these are people openly planning on defying U.S. sovereignty and law, and they think they can get away with it because of the irresponsible rhetoric of Democrats and shills like David Hogg, who told a college audience that the U.S. is “stolen land” and thus illegal immigration is justified.
Cognitive dissonance scale analysis: Hoards of non-citizens trying to force themselves across our boarders are low on the scale, in deep negative numbers, like zombies. Those who rationalize, justify or support them will be pulled lower on the scale by associating themselves with them. Continue reading →
Bulletin: When the opposing teams are announced before Game #1 of the 2018 World Series tomorrow night, the manager of the National League Champion Los Angeles Dodgers, Dave Roberts, will receive a loud standing ovation from the capacity Fenway Park crowd as he walks out to the third baseline.
There is no question about this. Anyone who knows Boston, Fenway, Red Sox tradition or the team’s fan culture has any doubts: it is a sure thing. That ethical gesture of gratitude and respect is as certain as the tide coming in on Cape Cod’s Wellfleet beaches, or the leaves turning gold in Concord this Fall. Red Sox fans have always maintained the tradition of recognizing excellence from opposing players, but the gesture and salute tomorrow goes far beyond that. For it was Dave Roberts, then a reserve pinch-running specialist in the twilight of his career and playing his only season with Boston—and only a couple months of that season at that—who was sent in to run for Kevin Millar, who had walked in the bottom of the 9th inning of the potential elimination game in the 2004 ALCS.
The hated New York Yankees were leading the best of seven series three games to none, and no team in baseball history had ever come back from such a deficit to win. Pitching was Yankee closer Mariano Rivera, probably the greatest relief pitcher of all time. Everyone knew that Roberts had entered the game for one reason: to steal second base and set up the possible game tying run. And he did it—it was a close play, but he made it, and seconds latter, Red Sox batter Bill Mueller singled him home to tie the score. David Ortiz won the game with a home run in extra innings, and the Red Sox went on from there to sweep New York, and the St. Louis Cardinals in the 2004 World Series as well. The team’s storied 86 year World Series drought was finally over, along with it the Curse of the Bambino, Pesky holding the ball, Lonborg facing Gibson on two days rest, Ed Armbrister getting away with blocking Fisk’s throw to second, Bucky %!^$! Dent’s cheap homer, the ball rolling under Buckner’s legs, Grady Little’s Great Choke, and more, as they all faded into irrelevancy like a long, horrible nightmare. Continue reading →
The federal trial that began last week in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, featuring America’s oldest college being accused of discriminating against Asian-American applicants should, if there is justice in the world, both finally kill the lingering bigotry of college affirmative action policies and expose the U.S.’s most prestigious educational institution, and the ideological philosophy that has captured it, as the hypocritical and fraudulent entity that it is. Does Harvard discriminate on the basis of race? Why yes, it does. There is no valid argument that it does not. Evidence shows that the college ties itself into logical knots concocting ways to justify not admitting Asian-American applicant who would sail into freshman classes were not their race used to undermine their candidacy. The plaintiffs cite reports that Harvard itself conducted in 2013. The reports, by Harvard’s Office of Institutional Research, found that being Asian-American was negatively associated with being admitted. Harvard claims that it must consider race in order to have a “diverse” student body, which is important, it says, to the quality of education one can obtain there. “Diversity,” however is and has always been a rationalization for discrimination. No matter how affirmative action is framed, the fact is that it is a zero-sum game: for each individual whose race benefits their quest for admission, there is another individual whose race is used as a justification to reject him or her. There is no way of getting around this inconvenient fact, yet Harvard and other elite institutions persist in denying it. Continue reading →
1. Comment moderation ethics. In many online news sites, including those of major newspapers, the comments contain this spam:
I have received $18429 last month by working online from home. I am a full time college student and just doing this easy home based job in my spare time not more than 3 to 4 hrs a day. This online job is very easy to do and its earnings are awsome than any other office type full time job. Join this home job right now and start making more cash online by just follow instructions on this blog…..
I’m looking at a Boston Herald online article about the World Series, and out of 14 comments, 8 are some version of the text above. First of all, of course, the people who post it are unethical creeps, polluting a discussion forum to pick up some cash. The site operators are just as bad. If you can’t moderate a comments section and keep it readable and on-topic, then don’t have one. Lazy, irresponsible and with no respect for readers—and they wonder why the public doesn’t trust the news media.
2. Here’s a rule of thumb: If a group or individual publicly announces a formal ethics complaint being made against a lawyer or a judge, it an abuse of process and the complaint system. Such ethics complaints should be made privately, since they are investigated and only become public if reason is found to levy sanctions. The announcement of a complaint in a press release or other public forum means that the complainant is trying to impugn an individual without proof, fair gearing or due process.
Judicial Watch has filed a complaint against Christine Blasey Ford’s lawyers, and released the letter to the bar to the public. There may be some grounds for discipline, though it’s borderline. More unethical, in my view, is Judicial Watch using the ethics complaint process as a political weapon.
3. Signature significance, but of what? Comedian Amy Schumer announced that she won’t appear in any Super Bowl commercials to show her support of Pioneer Pointless NFL Kneeler Colin Kaepernick. What is that? Can you boycott something you haven’t been asked to do? Why is she boycotting the Super Bowl to support a protest against (sort of) racial injustice and police brutality? If people were desperate to have Amy in an ad, what would they have to do? Pass laws letting people resisting arrest to threaten police officers without consequences? Authorize reparations to be paid to anyone with an Elizabeth Warren-like percentage of slave blood? Now, Amy protesting the fact that NFL is making billions by giving young athletes brain disease, that would make some sense.
I think making a pointless and silly announcement like this is signature significance for someone who will do anything to get publicity and signal their virtue to the social justice warrior faithful. Anyone else would realize how idiotic it is. Continue reading →
Broadway is officially irrelevant to American culture, and it’s their own damn fault.
A half-century ago, Broadway fare provided rich common content for Americans of all classes, creeds and ages. It was rare when a song from a Broadway musical wasn’t on the Top 40. Cast albums were found in most households. Broadway dramas provided the sources for a high percentage of non-musical movies.
Books could be written and have been about the forces that sent The Great White Way reeling toward irrelevancy, from popular music moving away from forms that told stories taking musical scores off the charts for good, to TV supplanting both movies and live stage as the primary source of drama. Substantially, however, the problem is financial. Unions drove the prices of live theater to an unsustainable level, to the point where most American have no opportunity to see a professional stage show and no desire to spend their resources so recklessly if they did. Broadway shows are routinely priced at three figures, and even far away from Broadway, like near me in Arlington, Virginia, single tickets for musicals often top a hundred dollars. Well, as the Ancient Greeks and Elizabethans knew, live theater is important cultural connective tissue, permitting common experience, group bonding, and mass emotional release. It’s healthy for society, and was once thought to be essential. No more.
The Broadway League has released the results of its annual audience survey, which are being called “good news.” I call the results death throes. The survey already cooked the books by only surveying Broadway ticket buyer, which is a tiny and shrinking percentage of the public.
Among the findings:
That good news was that the average age of the Broadway theatergoer last season was 40.6, the lowest it’s been since 2000. 15% of all theatergoers are under 18 years old,, with the average age at a musical at 39, 51.5 at a play. Got it: more very rich people are taking their kids to see Broadway shows. Meanwhile, the family-friendly shows are not teaching new things or breaking new ground, for they are mostly re-hashes of movies the less affluent kids can see for almost nothing, and are better versions too.. Here are current shows deemed “family friendly”: “Frozen,” “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” “Mean Girls” and “SpongeBob SquarePants,” as well as the continuing runs of “Aladdin,” “Anastasia,” “Dear Evan Hansen,” “Hamilton,” “The Lion King,” “The Play That Goes Wrong,” “School of Rock” and “Wicked.” Let’s see: four adaptations of Disney animated films, an animated TV show, Harry Potter, two hit movie comedies about schools, teachers and parents, and a couple others.
So Broadway producers pandering to families seeking low-brow “culture” have succeed in masking the aging of the core Broadway audience.
The percentage of the Broadway audience made up of people from the New York area continues to rise, with 38 % of Broadway patrons were from the New York metro area, with 20% from New York City. Increasingly Broadway is a local phenomenon.
A question nobody asked: How many people from west of the Mississippi saw a Broadway show last year? Or wanted to? Continue reading →
By the time Terry J. Albury arrived in Minneapolis in 2012, about 11 years after he went to work for the F.B.I., he had grown increasingly convinced that agents were abusing their powers and discriminating against racial and religious minorities as they hunted for potential terrorists.
The son of an Ethiopian political refugee, Mr. Albury was the only African-American field agent assigned to a counterterrorism squad that scrutinized Minnesota’s Somali-American community. There, according to his lawyer, he became disillusioned about “widespread racist and xenophobic sentiments” in the bureau and “discriminatory practices and policies he observed and implemented.”
In 2016, Mr. Albury began photographing secret documents that described F.B.I. powers to recruit potential informants and identify potential extremists. On Thursday, he was sentenced to four years in prison after pleading guilty last year to unauthorized disclosures of national security secrets for sending several of the documents to The Intercept, which published the files with a series titled “The F.B.I.’s Secret Rules.”
Observations:
1. GOOD!
2. Whether Albury’s perceptions of discrimination were accurate or not, they were not excuses for breaking the law. Continue reading →
