In Defense of A$$holery

To paraphrase Henry Girard: I am not, by nature, interpersonally an asshole. But sometimes it is socially expedient for me to ask myself: what would an asshole do in this situation? Because whatever else you might say about it, assholery is almost never second-guessed. "You asshole!" Well, no, but I don't mind you thinking that if it beats the alternative.

Peachy Keenan writes of Colgan Air flight #3407 that crashed in 2009:

If you read the cockpit transcript, you will be shocked at how unsterile it is. Normally no non-essential conversation is allowed in the cockpit during takeoffs and landings. But this captain chatted the entire flight to Rebecca, regaling her with old flying stories, giving her pilot career advice, advising her on lifestyle choices, complaining about his own career decisions. To me, it’s obvious that the older man-younger woman dynamic was at play as he talked her ear off, perhaps in an effort to simply make conversation in an awkward, unnatural pairing, or perhaps to impress her, or perhaps because he just felt awkward around a cute young blonde."

Keenan writes this in the context of pointing out that this and the two recent commercial aircraft accidents all involved under-qualified female aircrew. But reading her account made me grateful that my job doesn't require me to interact with females. Who needs that sh!t.

The sad fact of the matter is that it is trivially easy for us men to be maneuvered into a headspace where we start trying to "impress" a woman. I recalled this scene from the 1996 movie "Beautiful Girls":

I hate this. I hate this enough that this is the point where I stopped watching the movie, and couldn't even get through this clip for the purpose of this post.

I must have trauma.

And lest this seem an exercise in hatin' de wimminz, let me clarify that I hate the degree to which I myself am susceptible, except by vigilant assholery, to the maneuvering.

I hate it for two reasons. I hate it because it's sterile. As a married man, I would not (I avow) be trying to cash this out, and in any case am fully aware how futile that would be anyway. That's probably true in general: like I said, I haven't seen the rest of this movie, but I predict that none of these poor guys has any interaction with Uma Thurman beyond the level we are seeing in this scene. We all of us know this. But here we are, tap dancing for loose change anyway.

The second reason I hate it is that however difficult it is to escape the "older man-younger woman dynamic" mentally, it is impossible to escape it socially. Let's take the Congan Air example. It is possible that Capt. Renslow is chatty by nature, and I'm not even judging. There is a reason that There-I-Was is a pilot cliche; we ALL do it to anyone who sits still for it, especially other pilots. But throw in a cute blond girl, and now the cliche gets mapped onto a template where That Creepy Guy Is Hitting On Me. It doesn't matter what Renslow's intentions actually were. You know that Rebecca spent the last hour of her young life thinking this; you know that the NTSB investigators listened to this tape, looked at each other, and rolled their eyes; and you know that it really sucks that Renslow's family had to mourn with this as their last memory of him. I cringe in embarrassment for all of them.

The Magical Kingdom of Little Saint James

So I see from my newsfeed that AG Bondi will start releasing The Epstein Files today.

Meh. We'll see.

A month or two ago I watched 2024's movie "Scoop" about the November 2019 Prince Andrew BBC interview in which he addressed the Epstein / Virginia Roberts allegations, and it made me realize that I have no intuitive feel for how such an interview will be broadly perceived. To summarize, during the interview Andrew denied any relationship with Virginia and claimed that the photograph of them together had to have been faked. He further expressed regret with how his friendship with Epstein had brought embarrassment to his family. This struck me as reasonable in the sense that it sounded like what an innocent person might say, but the fallout for Andrew was public excoriation and dismissal from any royal association. I guess the rule is: never submit to a media interview in which your own misbehavior is the principal subject.

I was also struck by the questions that were never asked.

The media is clamoring for the #flightlogs, which to me is the least interesting part of this story. The most interesting part is the answer to the questions:

• Who was he working for; and

• What was his agenda.

We in our corner of the internet have speculated for years that the answers to these questions are "Israeli intelligence" and "blackmail", but we don't actually know, the MSM has shown zero interest, and given that our own IC is almost certainly implicated, this is the least likely element to be included in Bondi's imminent doc-drop.

The second most interesting question is: what was it like to travel the Lolita Express?

My understanding is that Epstein would fly groups of prominent people out to Little Saint James for the purpose/pretext of discussing the Big Issues. How did the, um, sex thing happen?

1. Were the girls lined up for you to pick from? "I'll take that one."

2. Were the girls were just milling about, being friendly, flirting a little, waiting for you to make the first move?

3. Was a girl assigned to you in advance, and if so, what was that interaction like? a) Did she just tell you, "Jeffrey assigned me to you this weekend." Or perhaps b) she just flirts with you in particular, making herself look like an easy score?

What kind of reactions did these approaches get?

It seems to me that options 1 and and 3a ought to set off alarm bells. My sense is that the market for actual prostitutes is smaller than that for casual hookups, but maybe Epstein's guest list was pre-screened for people for whom this would not be a problem. (This seems plausible with respect to Prince Andrew.)

Options 2 and 3b maintains the possibility of plausible deniability / self-deception. But did anybody ever say to himself, "You know, I've never been quite this lucky, and . . . how old are you, exactly?" I recalled this scene from the movie "Heartbreakers".

I never watched past this scene. I know that "suspension of disbelief" is the attitude appropriate to a rom-com, but I can't overcome my sense of being insulted on behalf of the male half of the species when we are depicted in media as reduced to slobbering idiots by women. Wouldn't any remotely normal man in this situation slow down enough to wonder whether these girls' agenda is aligned with his own?

I must have trauma.

BTW, Mrs. Phi's theory is that the kind of people Epstein invited onto his airplane were the kind of people who (how can I put this) enjoyed a higher-than-average background level of availability signalling. (This is especially plausible with respect to Prince Andrew.) So when you're sitting there and a Virginia Roberts-level young woman is throwing herself at you, you reasonably say to yourself, "Huh, must be a Tuesday."

Were no normies ever guests? Let's suppose you're "the talent", e.g. a researcher at the MIT Media Lab invited to give a presentation. Of course you would be invited to the afterparty. And you're hanging out by the bar and you look over and there is a Prince Andrew-level celebrity sitting on the couch with a girl on his lap and his hand up her skirt. What do you do?

I would be uncomfortable. I would have multiple thoughts simultaneously. I would think that this is the kind of thing about which I would not want to be called to testify in a deposition. And at my age (now) and grouchy disposition, I would also think: this clearly isn't for me. Those of you here to hate-read are thinking this is merely envy, but if so it's envy operating a high level: I would be uncomfortable even if I had my own Epstein-assigned doxy trying to coax me onto the couch. Because everything in my Life Experience says this can't possibly be authentic.

Anyway, the point is, these are the kind of stories about Epstein I would want to read, and also the kind of stories the media does not want to tell us. Such stories would imply/recount female agency, and female agency is anathema: women can only ever be helpless victims of The Patriarchy, never mercenaries / novelty-seekers / subject to any other motivations that would have them volunteer for this kind of work.

The third most interesting question is: how did Epstein go about his grooming / recruiting? The man was a pimp, and pimping is a skill set.

And then, okay, sure, show me the flight logs. But remember that if they were subject to blackmail, they were also Epstein's victims.

The Job-Haver's Tale

Three years ago, I started my dream job.

I was fortunate, during my stretch in the DOD civil service, to get the kind the projects that allowed me to build credible expertise as a software engineer. Fortunate, because once 2021 happened, my opportunities for gainful employment in my PhD DOD-centric area of expertise basically disappeared for a year. Fortunate as well in that I enjoy software engineering more, earn more money, work with (on average) nicer people in an environment that, while not without its aggravations, is much less politically toxic than I endured in the post-2004 DOD. Fortunate, finally, in enjoying greater personal flexibility for reasons that are behond the scope of the present analogy. Likewise, my new employer seems pretty happy with my contributions, or at any rate the positive feedback I receive for my work is much greater than I am used to, and in particular has allowed me to build new domain-specific expertise that would make me difficult to replace. And our company enjoys a dominant position in our market; with all the turmoil in the technology sector, I have not heard about any layoffs having been contemplated.

So in summary:

• I don't want to quit;
• They don't want to fire me; and
• They won't go bankrupt.

Probably.

Most companies operate their own job portals where they post (theoretically) open positions and receive résumés. These posts usually wind up echoed on the public job boards (e.g. Career Builder), which themselves also offer the opportunity to upload résumés. As near as I could tell, these résumés are hoovered up into the private databases of the third-party headhunter firms, where they can persist long after the source résumé has been taken down. Also as near as I could tell, the headhunter business has been "Uber-ized": the people who are making the recruiting calls are not (I believe) directly employed (W2) by the recruiting company, but rather are independently trying to make these matches based on leads from the company, much like an Uber driver responding to the app. I made this assessment based on the number of calls I was receiving from people with sketchy (i.e. "South Asian") accents, so I could be wrong about the economics of it.

But the point is that, long after I started my new job (which for me was pretty quickly) and had taken down my résumés from the job boards, I continued to receive recruiting calls: "hey, I've seen from your résumé that you have expertise in X field and I'm trying to fill a job with Y defense contractor and are you still available?" And my answer was always they same: yes, I have a job now; no, I'm no longer looking; please remove my name and résumé from your internal database; but . . . thank you for your call. I genuinely appreciate the interest. There is a real hedonic effect when someone says: "We want you. Or might want you pending more information, or at any rate are not rejecting you out of hand." That feels good to me. It feels good even if I'm not looking. It feels good even if the job is objectively terrible (e.g. in DC). At this level of interaction, it is hard to imagine how such expressions of interest have net-negative personal utility.

But I can imagine an alternative scenario. I imagine myself about my business when I cross paths with a stranger, or perhaps not a stranger but someone I know, or know of, but with whom I don't have an ongoing relationship. Being aspirationally pro-social, I say hello, or at any rate make eye-contact and prepare to say hello. I'm not looking for conversation (indeed, would rather not, being busy and regarding most people as uninteresting), but I have it in my head that "hello" is the minimum standard of sociability. But instead of returning the greeting the person says to me, "I work in Human Resources at company X, and I want to take this opportunity to tell you that I wouldn't hire you if you were the last engineer on earth."

In the interest of maximum empathy, I might reason thusly: an HR guy's incentives are different from mine. He has 20 resumes sitting on his desk and he can say yes a maximum of one time. Saying "no" 19 times a day might be personally stressful in a way that saying "no" once every few months is not, and today might have been a particularly tough day. So I say to myself: self, don't take it personally.

But now I imagine having an interaction like this the next day. And the day after that. And the day after that. And every working day and the occasional Sunday for ten years in a row.

I think I would have two thoughts:

1. Is "hello" really the optimum threshold for concluding that someone is a job-seeker? Even granting the maximum empathy above, and even granting that, were I myself a job seeker, I would, lacking imagination, probably start an application with "hello", it seems to me that HR guys are leaning hard into minimizing Type II errors at the expense of a huge number of Type I errors and a lot of net-negative social utility. And this matters to me personally because;

2. That sh!t is demoralizing. To review:

• I don't want to quit;
• They don't want to fire me; and
• They won't go bankrupt.

But on the other hand, these are things that do happen. Work situations that seemed promising become untenable. A company makes the (mis-)calculation that an employee's cost exceeds his benefits. And once- or apparently-strong companies turn out not to be, and disappear. No, probably none of these will happen to me. But the occasional feedback that, if it did, then I wouldn't die jobless and starving? That would have net-positive personal utility. But instead, in this imagined scenario, I would be receiving near-daily reminders that this is exactly what would happen.

"Well, then, don't be such a crappy engineer. Or at any rate, don't look like such a crappy engineer at the level of the negative interactions you are currently experiencing."

This is undeniably good advice and would be exactly what I should do . . . if I were looking for a job. But it seems difficult to operationalize when I am not looking for a job. In this imagined scenario, my boss brings me into his office. "Dr. Phi, as we have told you many times, we are happy with the work you have been doing for us, and we have planned the company's future on the assumption that you will be with us for a long time. But I just received word that you have updated your résumé on Career Builder, and also that you have been spending time developing skills outside of our company's core business line. Are you unhappy here? Are the opportunities we offer not enough for you? Are you . . . planning to leave us?"

I could reply by explaining all this, but it sounds pretty lame even to me.

"And they writhed with their feet for a little space, but for no long while."

A year ago (follow me closely here) Steve Sailer gave an interview with Alex Kaschuta, whom I had never heard of. I think it was the first of Steve's run of online podcast appearances.

Six months ago, Alex interviewed Regan Artnz-Grey, whom I had never heard of.

Two weeks ago, Regan interviewed Jacob Falkovich, whom I had never heard of.

One of Jacob's pinned tweets is a poll by Aella, whom I had . . . well, okay, I had watched the John Stossel interview with Aella a couple of years ago, but whom I had never otherwise followed, and I want to make sure everyone knows this.

Anyway . . .

My take. I've been given to understand (Louise Perry, multiple podcasts, no links, sorry) that, um, choking is now A Thing. (Don't blame me, I'm Gen X.) It occurred to me, reading this poll, that, done correctly, choking could offer its participants a replicable experience of killing / being killed? Not judging, jusk asking the question.

On a related note, in the post-election analysis of Trump's bypassing media gatekeepers by his appearance on Joe Rogan and a number of other podcasts, I have seen the word "manosphere" used to describe the universe of these podcasts. And its frankly irritating. The manosphere was indeed A Thing 15 years ago, and while I could see stretching the term to cover Andrew Tate and Fresh-n-Fit, it is an abuse to apply it to Joe Rogan. It would be rather more accurate to say that such good ideas that were pioneered by the original manosphere have now been assimilated into the larger dissident memeplex (and whatever their differences I would include Alex, Regan, Jakob and Louise as participants); those ideas that were less true or useful have been left to . . . whatever corner of the discourse Andrew represents.

Election Thoughts

Swing Voters

I do not understand "swing voters". I have no "theory of mind" regarding anyone who approaches a presidential election saying, "Gee, I wonder who I'll vote for this year. I'll have to weigh their records carefully and pick the best candidate." I'm not even sure these people exist in any numbers, but if they do, they are an alien species to me. This is not to say that people never switch parties. On the contrary, I know several people who have come to the realization that the party they've historically supported no longer supports their interests and values. But they do not swing.

Marginal Voters

I DO understand "marginal voters". I am one. A voter can be marginal in two senses. In the first sense, they are marginal because they are are generally disengaged. They are lazy or busy or unmotivated by politics. According to the NYT, the emerging Republican majority on which Trump specifically has capitalized has an outsized number of these people, which is why Democrats will be expected to do much better in off-year elections than presidential elections. Candidly, this is a mentally healthy way of living your life.

In the second sense, a voter is marginal because "Republican" or "Democrat" are in themselves insufficient. It is in this sense that I count myself as marginal: I have specific policy objectives, and I regularly bail on candidates who do not have credible commitments, including in the recent cycle. I do not swing, but I will hunt up third party candidates or write-ins when necessary. There is some nuance to this. I can be persuaded to choose pathetic (Jeb Bush) when the alternative is sufficiently scary (Janet Reno). But Obama was never a scary enough candidate to drive me to choose McCain or Romney.

Lessons Learned

Do parties learn? Parties evolve, yes, in the Darwinian sense: old voters die, new voters with new values turn 18, new candidates win elections with new messaging and coalitions (Reagan, Trump) and use their power to remake their parties. But learn from defeat?

I was trying to think of an example, and I finally came up with one: when John Kerry lost the popular vote to Bush, the Democrats collectively realized that being anti-war was an electoral loser. This left some people as political orphans (Glenn Greenwald) but American voters in general love them some wars (for a while, when we win). So anti-war messaging was absent from Democrat party messaging (Obama, Clinton, Biden, Harris) going forward.

This carried a couple of corollaries. The Left realized there was more profit in taking over the military, a project that had already started in 2004 and was complete by the time I left; the military no longer has the right-leaning internal culture it did when I started in the 80s, and now actively purges anyone it catches with heterodox ideas. The Left also has improved its messaging since the Kerry debacle; they can spin all manner of deviance as "supporting the troops", and any Right pushback as "a distraction". For a taste of what this looks like, see most articles at Military.com. Part of where the massive funding advantage the Left enjoys now allows them to spin up instant advocacy groups with a "veteran" patina whom Military.com writers can then quote when they are, for instance, demanding that 100+ thousand "Afghan Allies" be given un-vetted admission to the U.S.

But that's the only example I could come up with. What about now? We'll see.

One of the features of the regime media messaging in the aftermath of prior Democrat losses has been something along the lines of, "Well, sure, the Republicans SAID they were going to do thus and so, but really that was never practical, so look for them to pivot towards a more moderate approach." In an environment where Republicans regarded media favor as advantageous, this obviously created for them a path of retreat, and also carried the covert message that betraying their base would get them invited to all the cool parties. As of this writing, however, I'm not seeing that messaging. The NYT and AP post-election stories have been exactly the same hyperbolic end-democracy-as-we-know-it that they've been running with for almost a decade and already failed spectacularly.

But then, why should they learn? They will begin 2025 with vast institutional power, including the Senate fillibuster. 2026 will be better for them (how could it not?). Trump can't possibly live up to the hype. There will inevitably be a black criminal who breaks the law, resists arrest, and gets himself shot, and the whole circus can begin again.

Takes:

Dumb take: "Kamala was a good candidate" (Kristol, et al.)

In early 2019, when we sat around speculating on who the Democrats would put up against Trump, Kamala Harris seemed like a reasonable Obama second act: a People-Of-Color-ish senator who cleaned up nice and was ready to fulfill the progressive wish list. But what we discovered during the debates was that she had exactly zero ability to parry a thrust, and Tulsi Gabbard sank her candidacy in 20 seconds. She then got VP as a DEI hire and spent four years spouting nonsense, alienating her own staff, and policing intel reports for "sexist language". The first two of these were abundantly reported in regime media until this year, and the last tells you what you need to know about Biden's opinion of her: even if you think it's right and necessary, it's still HR-level make-work that is NEVER assigned to C-suite quality people.

In this respect, Kamala's 2024 personal performance fully met my expectations.

Dumb take: "Kamala ran a terrible campaign" (most Right-leaning commentators)

Kamala lost, so everyone who said "do something else" looks like a genius (as Scott Alexander predicted). But the NYT had it right: every potential strategy has its upsides and downsides. "Do more podcasts" only works if your candidate has something to say and say well, and Kamala had neither of those things. Further, Kamala was trying to both simultaneously cleave to the Biden administration to lay claim to executive experience while at the same time running away from the Biden administration because its consequences were massively unpopular among the marginal voters she needed. At most, only one of those things could be true, and the marginal voters knew that once you opened the box, the cat was either alive or its was dead. So her campaign's appeal was to abortion and Nazis under the bed, and that wasn't enough, not this time. But losing this gamble doesn't mean some other gamble would have had better chances.

Dumb take: "Kamala the Leftist". (most Right-leaning commentators)

Kamala was never anything other than a basic sorority girl. Her "leadership" consisted in figuring out which way the crowd was moving and rushing to the front of it. In the 2019 Democrat primary, that meant trans surgeries for illegal aliens. In the 2024 general election that meant . . . well, not THAT anymore, but her calculation was that openly repudiating 2019-2023 would be worse than not (see above). So she gestured at her campaign website and relied on her media surrogates to assure us that she was now a moderate, and what about abortions and Nazis . . .

Dumb take: "Biden the Centrist". (most Left-leaning commentators)

Biden has spent his political career staying as close as possible to the middle of the Democrat party. The center of that party has moved Leftward dramatically since 2012, and in particular began 2021 with an outsized appetite for revenge against its cultural enemies. Most Democrat politicians -- Biden, Tim Ryan in Ohio, Tim Walz in Minnesota -- moved Left right along with it. I've read any number of commentators mystified by Biden's behavior, because in 80s and 90s blah blah blah; who cares? In 2020, Biden promised his party maximum cultural Leftism, and his regime delivered it in spades, only backing off under this year's electoral pressure. In this respect, Biden's administration fully met my expectations.

Dumb take: "Biden was senile, so therefore . . . " (the NYT; most everybody)

Yes, Biden was senile. In fact, he was visibly declining as early as 2020. But so what? Whatever its electoral liability (probably overstated), Biden's cognitive incapacity should have been, if anything, a net-positive from the perspective of the median Democrat voter. A more vigorous president might have steered his policies more towards the marginal voter earlier; as it was, his administration delivered on his party's core priorities more than any other president since Reagan: trillions of dollars printed for green boondogles; political opponents jailed; alternative media censored; DEI/CT demands institutionalized at every level; tens of thousands of dissenters purged from government service (including me); and (count them) 6-10 million illegal aliens dumped on America's small towns. In general, Democrats have always been more willing than Republicans to actually spend their political capital, but Biden took this to the next level while eating ice cream and shaking hands with invisible people. Gimme some of that sweet-@ss cognitive decline!

Which I might get, by the way. Trump's victory speech in the wee hours of Wednesday morning showed a man much diminished from 2015. But it likely doesn't matter. Trump has re-made much of the Republican party since then; he re-enters office with a team, starting with his impressive VP, that share his vision; and the marginal voters that propelled his victory actually share his core priority of stopping the illegal immigration. We may vote for a person, but we elect a party.

Smart take: "We shouldn't have put our pronouns in our emails." (MSNBC commentator, I think)

For most people, most of the time, politics is something they just read about. I had (until late 2021) a front row seat for the Leftist take-over of the military, but there just aren't enough AGPs to, by themselves, bother many people directly. As I said, this is a mentally healthy way of going through life.

The pronouns business served the Leftist desire to bully and humiliate their cultural enemies, but it also kept the Transanity in the constant view of the normies, and a lot of those normies are marginal voters. Trump was able to detect and capitalize on their widespread distaste for gender ideology as it was playing out in athletics especially, but the pronouns gave it a personal resonance it would not have otherwise had.

Smart take: "America / men / brown men are migogynist" (Al Sharpton; that guy next to Mika)

There are factions in the elites of both parties eager to put women in leadership positions above not just competence (Haley, Palin, Harris) but their electibility as well (those + Clinton). Disentangling the strength of male distaste for female bumbling from that of female authority as such is hard, but it is certainly plausible that there is a critical margin of male voters for whom, when they get a say in it, women in executive leadership is toxic. Note to Republican elites (especially in Arizona): just stop. Women candidates are not the key to women votes, and actively repel male votes. Note to Democrat elites: nah, brah, you keep doing you. Looking forward to your Ilhan Omar nomination in 2028 . . . .

What to expect: more of the same.

My median expecation of Trump 47 is that he picks up where he left off in March of 2020. Now, the ball is much further down the field than it was then, and the Democrats should be expected to defend those gains inch by bloody inch. On the other hand, the Biden "executive actions" are an easy trail of breadcrumbs to follow backwards. Trump by March 2020 had learned how to control the border and build his wall. The deportations are another matter: the regime has spent decades building the processes that make this extraordinarily hard, expensive and time consuming. But he and his team seem motivated, so . . . we'll see.

No Country for New Marriages

I watched the 1993 movie The Piano, at the behest of my mother as it happened. She wanted to know what I thought about it.

It's ridiculous. [Spoilers follow.]

First things first. The economy made no sense at all. The film opens as Holly Hunter (I will be using actors' names throughtout as I can't be bothered to remember character names unless they're in a multi-installment franchise) arrives at a remote New Zealand settlement to begin a contracted marriage (she was "sold by her father") to homesteader Sam Neill. By "remote", I mean that the settlement is not on a natural harbor (e.g. Plymoth) or inland waterway (e.g. the James River), but inland from a beach on the ocean. A fair interpretation is that this beach is the settlment's only access to the outside world, yet not only does beach have no supporting structures, nor at the time of arrival any other vessels, but there isn't even a path from beach to the settlement. After being dropped on beach by rowboat (waka taua I think is what the filmakers were going for; a fair interpretation is that she was most immediately coming from another settlement rather than her native Scotland), she and her considerable stock of belongings (including eventually the eponymous piano) must be hand-ported through the forest up a hill to get to her new home. This homesstead's visible food production hardly looks like it would support Sam Neill, let alone a family of three (Hunter has a ten-year-old daughter, more about whom in a second), still less the gaggle of Maori odd-jobbers who mostly laze about telling dirty jokes. Not that I'm judging, but . . . how do these people eat?

Sam Neill, in negotiation with his best friend Harvey Keitel over a piece of land (more on this in a second) says he has no money. So, how did he afford whatever he allegedly "paid" to marry Holly Hunter? How did he afford the manufactured goods he is later shown trying to barter with the Maori? The movie might have offered some explanation for these anomalies, but I can just hear Ryan George answering with, "So the movie can happen!" during the pitch meeting.

Holly Hunter only ever wears hoop skirts (the mechanics of which are emphasized, about which more in a second), notwithstanding that most of the settlement's ground surface is mud. She does no useful work anywhere in the movie that I could see.

Then you have Neill's best friend Harvey Keitel, whose homestead has zero visible food production and who also does no useful work during the course of the movie. At the end of the movie, Keitel apparently has the wherewithal to take Hunter (more on this relationship in a second) back to what I gather is town life, so a fair interpretation is that he has other resources. But then, what was he doing out there? And what did he eat?

As a segway, a moment on the movie's spiritual economy. The settlement is large enough to support a community theater, but there is apparently no church, nor are there any religious observances shown. I get that New Zealand's settlement was not as religiously based as America's, but it was still settled by nominal Anglicans and Presbyterians. (Fun fact from Wikipedia: 19th century Maoris, having converted to Christianity, attended church at higher rates than Englishmen at the time.) The movie offers no context for this omission either, but it would have been a good place to explain why the settlement's menfolk apparently have no tools other than violence to kepp their women away from predatory neighbors, even their best friends.

Which brings me to the movie's primary narrative. In summary: Holly Hunter, having consented to an arranged marriage and then denying her new husband its associated covenant duties, throws herself at the neighbor who extorted sexual favors from her by bartering the beach-stranded piano from her husband and then offering it back to her one key at a time.

That's it. That's the movie in a single sentence.

On the one hand, women make bad decisions. It's a meta-theme of this blog, and the reason pimping exists as a skill set. But this movie didn't sell it. Harvey Keitel wasn't handsome enough, wasn't rich enough, wasn't dominant enough. His negotiation with Holly Hunter was needy beta supplication. He doesn't even ride to her rescue when Sam Neill sends him her severed finger as a warning. So why does Holly want to be with him? Holly doesn't say. Literally, she doesn't say anything -- the conceit of the film is that she is a mute. That's hard for an actor to pull off, but also relieves her of having to explain her motivations.

This failure of plausibility extends even to minor plot points. For instance, Anna Paquin (the daughter) is depicted as fiercely loyal to her mother from the get-go, yet she betrays her mother's adultery to her step-father. Why? (Ryan: "So the movie can happen!") It would have been simple to have a couple of scenes where the daughter bonds with her step-father to support a scenario where her loyalties become divided, but no, nothing like that. There is a scene that, in retrospect, could be construed as the daughter learning that adultery might be bad (remember, there is no religion in the movie), but this scene was mostly played for giggles.

Since this is a movie review, I should admit that the movie was well acted, especially considering what the cast had to work with. Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin plausibly earned their Oscars on the merits -- 1993 was a strong year for movies, but not especially a strong year for female leads. That said . . . taking her clothes off probably put her over the top.

An aside in the genre of writing about the decline in the quality of movie sex. As other writers have explored, there isn't nearly as much in mainstream American movies as there used to be. There is still some in foreign and independent films, but it strikes me as low in quality. If I had been asked to list the hottest actresses of the '80s and '90s, Holly Hunter would not have been on the list. But I was struck by the fact that her 1993 appearance was easily top 10% of anything I've seen lately.

Contra Rehabilitated Feminism

Following a link from Ace: "Christian, Patriot, Conservative, Feminist", by Danusha V. Goska (if that's her real name . . .).

So, first of all, no. I get that not everybody is a conservative about everything, but if you identify as feminist, and specifically if you advocate for female clergy (as she does), then at a minimum there is a huge-ass carve-out in your conservatism.

Her article contains this paragraph:

Oh, and by the way, as a former leftist, I can let you in on a little secret. Misogyny is alive and well on the left. Some-not-all leftist men feel personally inadequate. They conduct a perpetual, spiteful war with authority. When a woman speaks or acts with authority, they feel especially intimidated. They attempt to buttress their shaky manhood by lashing out against women in ugly ways. Misogyny is a major, and so far ineradicable feature of the New Atheist Movement, several of whose celebrity leaders have been credibly accused of sexual harassment and assault. On the other hand, Some-not-all right-wing men feel confident in their manhood. These self-confident men can enjoy, rather than feel threatened by, smart, strong women.

I tried to copy all the original links into the blockquote above, and I confess to not having read them all, but basically they tell the story that Scott Alexander tells (from the opposite perspective) of the capture/cannibalization of New Atheism by Social Justice. What Scott doesn't say is that feminism had a leading role in the early days of this process, at least according to the links above and in particular this 2014 Buzzfeed piece that covered the state of the conflict up to that time.

For instance, I know I read about "ElevatorGate" when it happened, probably at VoxDay, but from Buzzfeed:

On June 20, 2011, [Rebecca] Watson posted to her Skepchick site an eight-minute video titled “About Mythbusters, Robot Eyes, Feminism, and Jokes.” . . . Around the four-minute mark, she turns serious, discussing a talk she had recently given at an atheists’ conference in Dublin in which she decried “blatant misogyny” in freethought. The audience seemed supportive, she says, but that night, after leaving the hotel bar, something had happened. “A man got on the elevator with me and said, ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting and would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?’” Watson felt deflated, as if her speech had meant nothing. “Just a word to the wise here, guys: Don’t do that … I was a single woman, in a foreign country, at 4 a.m., in a hotel elevator with you — just you — and don’t invite me back to your hotel room, right after I have finished talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner.”

PZ Myers reposted Watson’s video in early July, and soon thereafter, in Myers’ comments section, Richard Dawkins posted a satirical letter, addressed to a generic Muslim woman. “Dear Muslima,” Dawkins began, “Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and … yawn … don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you … But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.” Then Dawkins gets personal: “Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep’chick,’ and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee … And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about!”

But I'm pretty sure this is the first I had heard of Michael Shermer:

“I ran into Shermer in the hallway," [Alison] Smith said recently, speaking publicly for the first time about what happened that night. They began talking, and he invited her to a Scotch and cigar party at the Caesars Palace hotel. “He was talking about future articles we could write, and he mentioned this party and asked if I could come, and I said yes.” At the party, they began downing drinks. “At some point,” Smith said, “I realized he wasn’t drinking them; he was hiding them underneath the table and pretending to drink them. I was drunk. After that, it all gets kind of blurry. I started to walk back to my hotel room, and he followed me and caught up with me.”

On their way from Caesars to the Flamingo, where they were both staying, she chatted briefly with a friend on her mobile phone, she told me. They got to the Flamingo. “He offered to walk me back to my room, but walked me to his instead. I don’t have a clear memory of what happened after that. I know we had sex.” She remembers calling a friend from an elevator after leaving his room. “I was in the elevator, but didn’t know what hotel.”

There is a facet to the practice of corporate (meaning, as a body) Christianity that has sometimes been perceived by its usually-now-former practitioners -- I apologize for all these weasel-words, but I do in fact believe that the Christian ethic of chastity is more complicated than this caricature, I'm just saying that it would be foolish to deny that people have experienced it this way -- as kind of longhouse moralizing about sex. I'm not an atheist and have no standing to speak on their behalf, but let me pretend to be one for a couple of paragraphs. Atheism -- of the New Atheism, conference-going variety -- offers me two specific things with psycho-social cash value:

• Another topic I can nerd-out about; and
• the opportunity to screw without guilt.

So . . . who let these scolds into our tent? Sure the labels have changed -- Christians are now Feminists -- but it's the same d@mned thing! It's just another excuse to sex-shame men (and some women!) into folding our hands politely and following rules that aren't in our interest!

</PretendAthiestRant> Not saying I agree. Just saying I understand the point.

The parallels aren't always lost on feminists, either. On Scott's recommendation (I guess), I've been reading the online comic strip Sinfest, mostly backwards; I've finished as far back as 2017. It's written from a Second Wave Feminist perspective, though contra Scott, that didn't really change in 2019. What did change was that establishment culture went all-in on tr@nnies, and Second Wavers couldn't help noticing that the Christian Right were their only remaining tactical allies. So yes, from 2020 the strip is much more Right-friendly than it had been.

Reading it from before 2019, I noticed, first, that Second Wave Feminism, just like all other waves, is toxic. I could go on about Sinfest's particular brand of misandric toxicity, but read it yourself. My point here is that, among the very small number of male characters given a positive representation is a Christian Fundamentalist cleric. This isn't my reading -- Sinfest specifically identifies him by that label. (Sinfest also gives him a clerical collar, which of course no Fundamentalist would be caught wearing, but it's useful as an artistic device.) And note that this is pre-2019, before the strip makes its Rightward turn.

There is something admirable about Sinfest's consistency. There is something admirable about the consistency of those New Atheists who mounted a doomed defense of their thing. But consistency is a minority taste. Most feminists/atheists fell over themselves to embrace Islam, notwithstanding that its present record on the issues they pretend to care about is vastly worse than Christian civilization has ever been.