Does Social Intuition Exist?

I have no social intuition. That's not necessarily to say I have no social knowledge, only that most such knowledge has been acquired by being socially punished. But that makes me wonder: what about people who are not punished. Do they ever learn anything?

I was thinking about this while watching the movie The Housemaid on DVD.

I suppose the movie is a perfectly adequate representative of its genre, but otherwise not especially compelling as a story. Everything that happens strikes me as both obvious and contrived, including things that should happen and don't, like grown-up communicating. So I may be guilty of over-analyzing a merely frame-setting scene like the one above, but let me run with it nonetheless.

Were I to walk into my TV room and find a woman-not-my-wife using it, I would leave immediately. And the reason is not because I think that were I to sit down then something something and adultery happens. It's not even because I think Mrs. Phi would get jealous (though at some threshold this might be true). It's because this is sufficiently close to any number of situations in which I was socially punished. Put another way, I have costs and priors.

But . . . what if I had gone through life looking like Brandon Sklenar? Or if your prefer, what if I had gone through life as the kind of person Brandon Sklenar is portraying in this movie? It's hard to imagine a girl ever punished him for sitting on her couch. He might have provoked jealousy from some other woman with a superior claim to his couch-sitting, which could count as a social punishment of a sort, but he could have glided past that as here, no clear lesson learned. He also might have had the experience of sitting on a couch and the girl straight-up assaults him; I don't know how often that actually happens or whether the recipient would count it as punishment, but I would think it ought to at least make him wary going forward.

But it's obvious that attractive people have their own costs and priors and those are very different than mine. Does that affect how they would they handle this situation, or is it all intuition? How do they believe they should handle it, and why?

GenX needs to stop sucking.

Pardon me while I rant for a bit.

It should be hard enough being single without having to deal with this.

Hi I’m Brooke and I harass the right-wing men in my inbox with nonsense until they no longer wish to ‘date’ me. 😉 I do not know these men, and my messages don’t come from dating apps. They come from a satirical Facebook profile of me as a conservative. Read more about me in my introduction post.

Several points:

The fake Bible stories are objectively funny, granted. The troll is even funny at some level. I recall Amy Schumer having a bit like this back in 2015: engage guys on Tinder with a hot pic (not hers, obviously) and see how obnoxious/evil you can be before they lose interest. It's a clever content generator, tbh; we guys will put up with a lot more than we should.

It's less funny in this instance. Or rather, the appeal of the content is more narrow: if your idea of a joke is to "harrass right-wing men", it's only going to be funny to your fellow leftists. YMMV.

But the point of this post isn't really Leftists Be Evil Part MMXXVI. We already knew that. I direct this post to those circulating this content on Female Eva Facebook:

Do you really not know anyone who is single and not wanting to be? I have single (male) friends, and I was single myself just long enough to know how much that sucks. It sucks to try and try and keep getting rejected, and I get that it sucks worse now than back in "my day" when is sucked d@mned hard enough. And I'm here to put my hand on your shoulder and say: keep at it. The only promise I make is that the payoff is worth it.

(And before you start, I also get that single women face the inverse problem: to much attention from the wrong men expressed in the wrong way. And were I the kind of person to have this kind of relationship with you, I would put my hand on your shoulder and say: keep at it. The payoff is worth it.)

But that's not what Female Eva Facebook is actually doing. What they are doing is preemptively shaming men trying their best with words like "Pew Predator". First of all, no, that guy that approaches you in church isn't actually a predator (probably). And second, do you seriously not get that, just as the suck of getting rejected is the path to marriage and family for a man, the suck of badly executed approaches is the path to marriage and family for a woman?

And third: you fellow early-GenX'ers, as a class, suck. You, who benefitted from an open job market in your youth, became in middle-age the DEI enforcers of the last decade. You, who got to enjoy your majority White schools in your youth, now in middle age champion foreign invasion in the name of "compassion". You, who like me probably met your spouse in Sunday school, have already destroyed singles-branded Sunday school and are now hard at work mopping up the stragglers.

Repent and atone. You can start by ceasing your sh!tposting of leftish talking points. You can then, I dunno, maybe host a dinner party for some of your married couple friends and, coincidently, some single men from church and also single women from church. No guarantees, but at least you're setting the stage for something far more beneficial to the future of the church and Christendom itself than whatever it is you think you're currently doing.

Telescopic Abstraction

Scott Alexander takes on "Telescopic Altruism" (TA):

“Telescopic altruism” is a supposed tendency for some people to ignore those close to them in favor of those further away. Like its cousin “virtue signaling”, it usually gets used to own the libs. Some lib cares about people in Gaza - why? Shouldn’t she be thinking about her friends and neighbors instead? The only possible explanation is that she’s an evil person who hates everyone around her, but manages to feel superior to decent people by pretending to “care” about foreigners who she’ll never meet.

Readers will recognize that TA is a restatement of Steve Sailer's concept of "Leapfrogging Loyalties". Scott rebuts:

This collapses upon five seconds’ thought. Okay, so the lib is angry about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza. Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes? Then what’s the problem?

As always, Scott's argument has more nuance than this single paragraph, so read the whole thing. What I want is to address this:

Dave Barry has a saying - "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person."

This is the opposite of the “telescopic altruism” hypothesis. A telescopic altruism believer would insist that being nice to a waiter is a red flag - “he’s just signaling niceness to people of other social classes because he’s incapable of loving people of his own class - I bet he’s a jerk to his family!”

You could call Barry’s alternative position correlated altruism. People who are nice to a far-off group are more likely to be nice to a nearby group, because all forms of compassion come from the same place.

Scott frames the TA discourse as liberal vs. conservative. So let me run with that for a second.

• Is a liberal or conservative more likely to speak politely to the waiter serving him? To tip generously?

• Is a liberal or conservative more likely to greet by name the guy coming to empty his office trash can at the end of the day?

• Is a liberal or conservative woman more likely to be kind to the dweeby coworker trying to screw up the courage to embarrass himself?

• Is a liberal or conservative more likely to invite an immigrant family to share Thanksgiving Day dinner?

These are all opportunities to reach across (condescending, in the classical definition) a divide -- race, class, SMV -- to someone immediately in front of you. I could offer my own guesses as to how these metrics would break down along political lines, but that's kind of beside the point. As Steve himself hints at in his own comment on the post, the actual contest is in some sense between dualing abstractions:

In a fascinating 2009 academic paper by four social psychologists, "The motivated use of moral principles," UC Irvine students who identified as politically conservative were found to be racially evenhanded. When given the scenario about killing Chip to save 100 Harlemites, conservatives were no more or less likely to agree it’s the right thing to do than when told to ponder killing the man with the cornerback’s name to save 100 classical musicians.

In striking contrast, liberal students displayed greater bloodthirstiness when presented with the scenario that gave them an opportunity to kill the WASP to help the blacks. This liberal desire to shove a white man to his death to salvage blacks rather than a black man to salvage whites was extremely statistically significant (p = .002).

Note that this was an exercise in pure abstraction: no live blacks or WASPs were harmed in the making of this survey; they only existed at the meme level. But real people can also be made to exist at the meme level. Here is an example: SecState Clinton's phenomenally successful (given her diplomatic objectives) campaign in 2013-2014 to brand Russian irredentism as "pro-White". Given Russia's primary target was Ukraine, this was at an object level absurd (and regrettably, a segment of the online Right also fell for it), but it was critical in mobilizing the Democrat hive to support Ukraine and getting the ScandiCucks Sweden, who sat out the contest with literal Soviet Communism, to join NATO. I respect the skills.

Once you notice this pattern, you can't unsee it.

TraumaCore

Aria Schrecker writes:

Don’t marry someone who has a trump card that supersedes all your values. I think this can be a source of tension in relationships where one person has religious mandates and the other person has ‘preferences’.*

I thought about this advice when reading what has spawned the latest discourse, "American Diner Gothic":

I matched with a girl on Tinder. Her profile listed she/they pronouns, mentioned trauma, and showed her in cosplay.

This isn't even the full list of red flags Mariani will quickly discover, and of course the relationship ends in his heartbreak. But it occurred to me that trauma (or "trauma"), in addition to per se being something that a romantic partner should expect to negotiate, when appearing in a twitter bio also indicates that the girl will likely use it as exactly this kind of trump card. "We're having a disagreement, but I have trauma whereas you only have preferences, so of course I should get my way."

* I will affirm this from the religious side of the prospective relationship as well: Don't marry someone outside +/-1 SD of your own level of religiosity.

On the Scott A.'s

I've been a Dilbert fan since his comic rolled out in our college newspaper; this would have been late-80s early-90s, I can't remember exactly. I read some of his books, though by no means all. I started listening to his daily podcast during the pandemic once it became clear there were no experts, and I appreciated his approach of explaining to people how they should think about it rather than what to think about it. And I quickly signed up for his Locals once Dilbert became subscription-only. But he obviously had more devoted fans than me, and I apparently never blogged about his cancellation.

With that said, here is Scott Alexander on Scott Adams: here and here.

In both posts, Alexander devotes some pixels to Adams' alleged racism, about which I am indifferent. But his final comment (in the footnotes):

Although I don’t think Adams’ cancellation was fair according to normal human logic, I think it had a certain odd sort of cosmic justice. 4chan’s deployment of the “It’s Okay To Be White” slogan was (maybe literally) out of Adams’ book - say something completely inoffensive, make sure everyone knows it has a secret offensive meaning, then retreat back to “What? You’re upset at our totally inoffensive thing? How silly!” when anyone calls you on it. This manuever didn’t fool woke people at all; the people wearing “It’s Okay To Be White” t-shirts got exactly as many accusations of racism as they would have gotten for wearing swastikas directly. The only person it apparently fooled was Adams, the professional not-being-fooled-by-political-manipulation expert, whose life it randomly destroyed as collateral damage. Oh well.

I've never been able to make much sense of 4chan, but I did follow writers who follow 4chan (is it still going?), and, um, may have had some family members who were locally involved in the whole 2015 (I think) "It's Okay to be White" campaign. Note that the Left's buildup to "ending whiteness" had already started, so contra Scott, the slogan didn't need a "secret offensive meaning" for it to draw the opposition it did. Nor was it necessary for the originators of the slogan to be racist for other reasons (about which, again, I am indifferent); insofar as it was an assertion of white identity, there was no meaning that the Woke would find acceptable.

But having remembered the 2015 history, I also remembered that the slogan was denounced by exactly 100% of the college presidents on whose campuses it appeared. So when Adams ranted about how the slogan was polling in 2023, I was surprised. "Wait, we got 83% approval from whites? And 51% of blacks? That's awesome! Woke is so DEAD ! ! !" So Alexander is on to something here: Adams, God bless him, apparently really didn't know any of this history.

In Defense of Prop 13

Scott reposts commenter Mariana:

I genuinely don’t want you to take this personally. When you or someone over on Slow Boring starts speculating about how I, a young boomer, should be forced out of my nice house that I bought with my own money, it truly makes me want to get a gun and shoot you. Scott, I’m not going to do that, so please don’t ban me. I’m explaining how murderously angry it makes me feel. So every other age group gets to have whatever goods and services are available at a market rate, but old people have to move to shitty apartments because we’re worth so much less than young people?

I will take every legal means at my disposal to prevent you from doing this. I will block you in the courts, I will vote for evil totalitarian bastards if they support my property rights, I will seriously do anything to keep you from patting me on the head and telling me to move on because I suddenly don’t have a right to my own house, because some younger person suddenly wants it.

And replies:

Several people made something like this argument, but I think it’s based on a (understandable) misunderstanding.

The policy that most people in James’ camp are proposing is to repeal California Proposition 13 (or other jurisdictions’ local variants) which lock property taxes to the value of a house when it was bought (rather than the value now). This benefits old people, who might have bought their houses 30 years ago when prices were much lower. Repealing it, and making everyone pay property taxes based on the current price of their house, would incentivize (in some cases, force) old people to move to cheaper houses.

If you treat the Proposition 13 regime as natural, then this is an attack on old people’s rights. But Proposition 13 was only passed in 1978, and plenty of states have no local equivalent. If you treat the pre-13 state of affairs as natural, then 13 is an attack on young people’s rights, and repealing it merely restores the proper fair state of the universe. This is another of those marked vs. unmarked things.

I agree that a lot of the talk around this sounds kind of ethnic-cleansing-adjacent, but nobody has the right to artificially-depressed property taxes.

As he notes elsewhere, Scott is conflicted about Prop 13, so these paragraphs should be treated as an exercise in "steelmanning".

Full disclosure: I support Prop 13 without reservation, or if you prefer, I would support it were I a Californian; my jurisdiction has nothing like it. My support isn't just because I'm an older Gen-X with above-average real-estate holdings (though I am surely that, too); I liked the idea of Prop 13 when I first heard about it in the 1980s. I was in my libertarian phase back then and favorably disposed towards other pro-housing policies like upzoning.

The part of this discussion that "sounds kind of ethnic-cleansing-adjacent" is that very few among Scott's commenters are claiming that California government needs more money for essential services. The framing is that biasing taxes in favor of long-time residents is distorting the distribution of housing resources; the subtext is: you have a house I want, so I will use tax policy to take it from you.

It's a very weird position for a Progressive. To the extent that new residents can afford the inflated house prices to begin with, they will on average be more wealthy. To the extent that they are working age, they have higher incomes on average than those past working age. So Prop 13 is net-effect shifting taxes to more wealthy residents away from less wealthy residents.

Generally, my preferred was of dealing with high housing prices is to lower demand by 50M immigrants. Get back to me after we've tried that.

On Spanking the Generals

My first thought on SECDEF Hegseth's "the era of woke is over" speech to the flag officers assembled for this purpose: kewl.

Subsequent thoughts:

• This is all a light show for "the base", with no further import.

• On the other hand, Donald Trump is president, and I'm not. Presumably, he knows a few things about how to use and maintain power. Things that involve bases and light-shows. Things that Dr. why-can't-we-just-have-good-policy Phi will never know.

• But generals are not going to care about any of this. Generals care about exactly two things: 1) getting promoted; 2) not getting fired. They are, in this sense, pristine sociopaths. It's how they came to occupy the positions they have. SECDEF can remonstrate till the cows come home; meanwhile, the generals will always follow the incentives.

• But the rest of the military -- those who believe, as I once did, that the point of the enterprise is to win a war now and again -- is also an audience. Hegseth's speech, given publicly, does create among them certain expectations of intermediate leadership. This ought to make it difficult for the generals, and the colonels under them, to go back to blathering about how Diversity Is Our Strength. Difficult in the sense that, were they to try, the troops will notice the incongruity, and speak up about it in ways that make the people in charge of the promotions and firings take notice. Perhaps the correct incentives will be put in place after all.

Personally, I'd have had the lot of them shot for Afghanistan. But Donald Trump is president, and I'm not. So we'll try it his way.

The Rehabilitation of Charlie Kirk

I am going to make a prediction. But first some background.

Some years ago, perhaps on the occasion of Gerald Ford's passing, I made this observation:

There is none so beloved of Democrats than a dead Republican.

I am reasonably certain that, were I to dig through their archives, I could find expressed in MSM sources some variants of the following:

• Trump (or Bush '43), you're no Ronald Reagan!

• Reagan, you're no Barry Goldwater!

• Goldwater, you're no Robert Taft!

• Etc.

It's easy to see why. Once safely dead, older Republicans can serve as those against whom younger Republicans can be compared unfavorably. My prediction is that within the next three years, the NYT will be putting the recently late Charlie Kirk to exactly this end, probably against JD Vance.

I regard this as a non-trivial prediction under the present circumstances. As we have seen (cite: the growing database of anti-social reactions, publicly and under their own names, of prominent if not 1st tier Democrat-aligned personalities and even Democrat office-holders), Kirk's assassination has been an occasion for unrestrained glee throughout the Cathedral. As of this writing, this approach is in the process of backfiring hard, not just on the people getting fired, but on the Left brand generally. When an organization as gay and retarded as the NFL finds it expedient to conduct pre-game Charlie Kirk tributes, Dems, you're not winning the culture war.

A fact not lost on tier-one Democrats. I predict that in three years time they will have reasserted control of the narrative and memory-holed the current ugliness. They will instead be trying a new tack: Charlie Kirk was ever so much better than whichever figure on the right most threatens them then.

First of all, it's hard to keep hating a dead guy.

Second, Charlie will have given them much to work with. He was exemplary in his personal grace and magnanimity, an expression of his Christianity. Further, he throughout his career was never more than a few steps away from normie Republican. I hasten to add that "normie Republican" has evolved over the last decade, and Charlie evolved with it. But when I first became aware of Turning Point back then, it struck me as yet more of the Bush-era "conservatism" that no longer interested me; it was only after his passing that I caught up to how important he had become. My point is that when the time comes, the NYT will produce Kirk-isms to use against the 2028 Republican presidential candidate.

Only Thugs Need Apply

My social media feed has been replete with this meme:

Probably not.

One of the ironies of the (I hope) now-winding-down BLM era is that the two egregiously racist mass murders of blacks didn't provoke much in the way of a lawless reaction. Unless I completely missed it (and correct me in the comments if I did), there wasn't any rioting in the wake of either the Charleston church shooting or the Buffalo supermarket shooting. Even in the specific category of deaths at the hands of law enforcement, again the most egregious case of John Crawford III got a small, quiet demonstration from, IIRC, white middle-aged members of Buckeye Firearms, and exactly nothing from his fellow blacks.

Rather, blacks reserve their propensity for riot and mayhem for career criminals who get their comeuppance. Michael Brown and Jacob Blake violently resisted arrest and were deservedly shot. Eric Garner and George Floyd passively resisted arrest and died by accident. Granted Freddy Gray should have been better secured in the back of his paddy wagon, but he certainly deserved to be there. All these guys got riots.

My theory for this -- only a hypothesis, really, since I don't have any direct evidence -- is that these riots are stoked by Antifa operatives under circumstances such as will be maximally polarizing. But my point is that a white lowlife murdering a pretty black girl on the train, were it to ever actually happen, would probably not set off a riot.

Social vs. Physical Danger

Some of the abundant commentary on the murder of Iryna Zarutska has focused on her apparent lack of situational awareness. Steve Crowder, for instance, discussed it at length yesterday. This is surely correct, but it occurred to me that while Iryna's behavior was poorly suited to protecting her from physical hazards, it did seem optimized for protecting her from social hazards.

Watching the video of her last moments, I was reminded of the scene from the movie Anora (free on Kanopy) where the title character is riding the subway home from her job at the strip club. (Apologies in advance if my vocabulary for this sort of thing hasn't been updated since the '80s.) The film leans hard into the contrast: on the clock, Anora the prostitute is warm and charming as customers stuff money in her g-string; off it, she wears baggy clothes, clamps her ears with over-the-ear headphones, clamps her face with a thousand yard stare. All calculated to convey the message: do not even thing about talking to me.

Likewise, Iryna. Whatever she might have been looking for in her personal life, she quite reasonably believed she wasn't finding it late at night on the subway. So she tucked her face under a ballcap (a style choice that I noticed had become common among young women at the gym a few years ago) and absorbed herself in her phone: don't even think about talking to me.

Religiosity vs. Time

In reference to a Pew study on intergenerational religiosity, Scott writes:

Contra compelling anecdotes, only ~5% of people raised very religious end up atheist later in life (X). Most people are about as religious as their parents; most exceptions are only slightly less religious, and most families that secularize do it over several generations.

Okay, but those generations add up.

Here is the Pew data as a matrix. I have reversed the row order such that both row and column indicies increase with religiosity. I have also subtracted 1% from element (4,4) such that the table sums to 1.0.

PEW =

0.0600	0.0100	0.0100	0
0.0400	0.0800	0.0300	0.0100
0.0300	0.0900	0.1600	0.0300
0.0200	0.0500	0.1400	0.2400

Note these are joint probabilities. To find the religious probabilities of the parent generation, we must sum all columns in each row (all code is MATLAB):

P_parent = sum(PEW,2);

P_parent'

ans =

0.0800 0.1600 0.3100 0.4500

To find the religiosity of each subsequent generation, we need the conditional probabilities, which we can derive from Bayes' Theorem:

P_child_given_parent = PEW./repmat(P_parent,1,4) 

P_child_given_parent =

0.7500	0.1250	0.1250	0
0.2500	0.5000	0.1875	0.0625
0.0968	0.2903	0.5161	0.0968
0.0444	0.1111	0.3111	0.5333

Finally, we construct a table showing the generational change over time:

for gen = 1:10

    R_gen(gen,:) = P_parent' * P_child_given_parent^(gen-1);

end

R_gen =

0.0800	0.1600	0.3100	0.4500
0.1500	0.2300	0.3400	0.2800
0.2153	0.2636	0.3245	0.1966
0.2675	0.2748	0.3050	0.1527
0.3056	0.2763	0.2899	0.1281
0.3321	0.2748	0.2795	0.1137
0.3498	0.2727	0.2726	0.1048
0.3616	0.2709	0.2682	0.0993
0.3693	0.2695	0.2653	0.0959
0.3743	0.2686	0.2635	0.0937

Which we can plot:

So, clearly, the Very Religious are the long-term demographic losers. My first thought was that we could make this up in volume, but then I realized that the initial table confounds our greater on-average fertility with the starting percentages; this is a poll of the children, so the children of very religious families were already more numerous among the respondents, assuming the poll was representative. My calculation of the conditional probability assumes fertility is equal, but I'm pretty sure I would need additional fertility data and a way to map it on to these categories in order to correct this.

My second thought is that these statistics might be biased with respect to "family" religiosity: it is plausible that children's characterization of their family's religiosity may be colored by their own. For instance, a child from a "somewhat" religious family who is personally "not at all" religious, might exaggerate family religiosity to "very". OTOH, I'm not sure this matters for predicting the trend.

Sherrod Brown Redux

I see that Sherrod Brown is trying to get back into the Senate by replacing John Husted.

Here are a couple of campaign mailers from 2024. We surmise the Democrats were only sending them to registered Republicans.

Looks like the upshot is that Bernie Moreno is a scuzzy foreigner. I would have thought this line of attack would be off-brand for the Democrats, but never underestimate your opponent's opportunism.

Similarly:

I expect few Ohio voters had ever heard of Don Kissick apart from this Democrat-funded mailing. Their points being:

• Wants the government completely out of your life

• Wants absolutely no restrictions on firearms of any kind

• Is a Navy Vet, but wants to end American foreign aid and pull us out of overseas conflicts

• Promotes a radical flat tax plan that cuts taxes and underfunds government programs

Down boy!

Of course, the Democrats never talk this way when they're actually arguing for Democrat policies. They never say "firearm restrictions", only "gun safety". They never say "government out of your life" as a general criticism, only about "reproductive health" when they're against intervention and "civil rights" when they're in favor of it. They never say "government programs" in general, only the most photogenic recipients in particular. Etc.

This was an obvious effort to siphon votes away from Moreno towards Kissick. This doesn't benefit Brown except to force a runoff election, but I assume the calculation is that Brown would have fared better in Ohio by not having Trump on the ticket. As discussed, the Democrats have the upper hand in low-turnout elections.

Which brings us to 2026, an off-year election where the Democrats can be expected to enjoy an out-of-power boost. Assuming the Democrats want to nominate an old white guy in the primary, I would expect Brown to have at least an even chance against the appointed Husted, who hasn't exactly lit the world on fire. We shall see.

The Best Defense

This article has been the occasion for some rumination.

I knew Tim when we were lieutenants. We ordinarily didn't work together directly, but we served in a unit of a size and under circumstances such that we were in regular social contact for a year or so. There is a personality type likely to ascend bureaucratic hierarchies, so . . . no, we were not friends.

That said, I don't have an informed opinion about his removal as NSA director. I'm inclined to trust the people reported to be involved, but also to say that I would have assessed Tim as likely to rationally follow the incentives as they were presented to him. I can only hope the Trump administration is working to bring those incentives into long-term alignment.

But my rumination isn't really about Tim, except in the most general way. It's really about my career-long inability to deal effectively with Random Acts of A$$holery. No, not everyone I dealt with in government service was as an asshole. But the culture doesn't seem to do much to deter it, and I personally couldn't seem to deter it when it was directed at me. The textbook solution is, I suppose, the same as it was in Junior High: it is deterred by the credible threat of retaliation. But I sucked at it in Junior High, and I sucked at it in the armed forces. It may be counterintuitive, but I have thought more about this since getting my Dream Job and realizing that, no, not all organizational cultures are toxic.

While composing this post in my head, I thought several times about giving specific examples of that toxicity, and each time become mentally buried under the avalanche of potential vignettes. There may be a limit to my trauma re-enactment. But read the linked article above about the personality type. Then read the Venkatesh Rao articles linked there. Then imagine a company of a million employees, most of whom want to grow up to be David Wallace and Jan Levinson. That was what it was like, and it gives me recurring nightmares to this day. I can only be grateful that it is now behind me.

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.