The Baader Meinhof Complex

I watched the movie the Baader-Meinhof Complex, about the German left-wing terrorist organization the Red Army Faction, on Netflix Instant Play.

It's a good movie. Of particular interest to readers of this blog will be the portrayal of the sexual dynamics of the terrorist cells, which follow a familiar pattern. We see how terrorist psychology in general will favor the most violent and antisocial of a group rising to leadership, and how the presence of females among them hastens this process.

My question is: how does Western society produce people like these? The movie plays up an opinion poll taken in which one quarter of German 20-somethings (I think) voiced their support of the RAF. That's a lot. How can the young people of a country become so indoctrinated with a nihlistic ideology without the cooperation of the state itself?

Especially well done was the character of Horst Herold, the head of the counterterrorism task force chasing the group. Sadly, there is no Wikipedia page in English describing this guy's real life, but actor Bruno Ganz plays him as a La Carre'-esque figure who understands the key to counterterrorism is good intelligence gathering and sythesis.

I also liked the portrayal of the RAF members' stint in what I took to be a PLO training camp in Jordan. As I understand it, the Fatah organization was never especially religious, but neither were they particularly irreligious. The, um, "liberated" practices of the RAF, and their pampered lives in general, annoyed their Palestinian hosts, who . . . well, actually, the PLO were terrorist scumbags too, but they saw themselves as real soldiers preparing for a real war against a real nation-state, and their training program reflected that.

The terrorists' sense of entitlement was amazing. After murdering dozens of people, they cried and protested at their own arrest, like it was somehow cruel and unfair that the government should prevent them from continuing their life of crime.

One has to admire the steely resolve of the German government, and the German people, for not putting an expeditious end to these murdering thugs, but there is really no way for them to win from the terrorists' point of view. If the government reacts with restraint, then it is weak, proving the terrorists' point. If the government does not react with restraint, it is brutal and fascist, proving the terrorists' point. The ideology is hermetic and un-falsifiable.

The film demonstrates the importance of well designed security procedures, and how far we've come in the last 40 years. These procedures were sadly lacking in the late sixties and seventies, and the RAF found it easy to invade buildings and plant bombs back then. When you think about it, it should give you some perspective on the complaints civil libertarians make, even when the complaints are in good faith. Sure, I don't like the constant surveillance, the omnipresent law enforcement, or the overhead either, but this is what can happen when we don't have these things.

German trials are utter circuses. I noticed this in the film The Reader. Defendants that can marshall supporters are evidently free to turn the proceedings into opportunities for grandstanding.

The movie has a hero: Stevan Aust, a left-wing journalist who accompanies the RAF to Jordan, eventually rescued Meinhof's daughters from Sicily before they could be indoctrinated in Communist ideology, and returned them to their father, Klaus Rainer Röhl, who had outgrown his wife's leftism and eventually become a conservative mainstream liberal (or a German version thereof). [Thanks to Frank for the correction.]

“Civil Liberties”: The Last Refuge of the Hypocrite

To the last few of you for whom further discussion of ObamaCare doesn’t upset your stomach (via Robin):

In July 2007, AcademyHealth, a professional association of health services and health policy researchers, published results of a study of sponsor restrictions on the publication of research results. Surprisingly, the results revealed that more than three times as many researchers had experienced problems with government funders related to prior review, editing, approval, and dissemination of research results.  In addition, a higher percentage of respondents had turned down government sponsorship opportunities due to restrictions than had done the same with industrial funding. Much of the problem was linked to an “increasing government custom and culture of controlling the flow of even non-classified information.”

Of particular concern is a provision of the Senate-passed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, [regarding] the … new Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to conduct comparative-effectiveness research.  The bill allows the withholding of funding to any institution where a researcher publishes findings not “within the bounds of and entirely consistent with the evidence,” a vague authorization that creates a tremendous tool that can be used to ensure self-censorship and conformity with bureaucratic preferences. This appears to be an effort in part to bypass the court order in Stanford v. Sullivan, a case involving federal contractual requirements that would have banned researchers from any discussion of their work without pre-approval by the Department of Health and Human Services. The order held that such blanket bans are “overly broad” and constitute “illegal prior restraint” on speech.  The language in the Senate bill attempts to overcome this hurdle by eliminating prior restraint, but using the threat of post hoc punishment as an incentive for self-censorship.

Raise your hand, those of you who remember any of the usual people who fret about free speech for a living making an issue of this during the debate.

Anyone?

Me neither.

(500) Days of Summer

Any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental.

Especially you, Jenny Beckman.

Bitch.

Damn.

(500) Days of Summer is an outstanding movie.  In fact, it is probably the best romance movie I can recall having seen.*   Novaseeker wrote a solid review a while ago, but even he didn’t capture the utterly transcendent level of psychic pain the movie communicates.  As the narrator explains over the opening credits,

There were two things that Summer liked about herself.  The first was her long, brown hair.

The second was how she could cut it off.

And feel nothing.

. . . . .

This is the story of Boy Meets Girl.  But you should know up front that it is NOT a love story.

The movie keeps a light-hearted tone, but its non-linear storytelling means that it never lets you forget the heartbreak that Tom Hansen, the protagonist, is in for.  The buildup of his and Summer’s relationship is therefore all the more poignant, because we even here have the suffering before us.

The movie features an excellent soundtrack. Also noteworthy is the set design: the story is set in the present day, but with a combination of lighting, decor, and costume the viewer is somehow transported to an earlier, undefined era;  it could be the twenties, it could be the seventies, but it doesn’t feel like 2009. The acting is solid throughout, especially from Zooey Deschanel’s Summer, in whose deep blue eyes we can see the empty void where a soul should be.

Parenthood Update

A few weeks ago, I issued a strong two-thumbs-up to the new NBC drama Parenthood.  With the sixth episode airing tonight, I want to offer an updated assessment.

First, I’m enjoying the show immensely.  It is strong and well-crafted.  But it is not entirely free of weaknesses:

• Many of the scenes are overdone.  The writers are unwilling to let the cast members communicate meaning with a single word, glance, or gesture when a dozen of these things can be squeezed in.  This tendency especially aggravates Mrs. Φ (who has consented to watch a few episodes with me) to the point of exasperation; we both want to scream at the T.V., we get it already!  Which is so regrettable because it is so unnecessary. The actors are all experienced and in top form.  They shouldn’t have to beat everything to death.

• Thematically, the show succumbs to the usual clichés where children are Founts Of Wisdom bringing enlightenment to their parents, instead of being little savages needing a good thrashing.  This is particularly annoying coming from the teenaged daughters, both of whom are, in fact, guilty of significant breaches of the law and good family order.

• Several aspects of the plot point involving ne’er-do-well brother Crosby’s illegitimate son could have been made stronger.  Big sister Julia, an attorney, counsels him to ask the mom, who had kept the son’s existence a secret for five years, for a paternity test, talking vaguely about the “legal repercussions.”  Now, this may, in fact, be a good idea, but it would depend on the specifics of California law, and isn’t obvious considering that the mom hasn’t asked Crosby for anything other than to be involved in his son’s life.  (I suspect that, by such involvement, Crosby is “holding himself forth” as the child’s father in a way that makes the paternity test legally moot should it ever come to a child support award – for which the California DSS can sue even without Mom’s involvement.  If this understanding is correct, the show should have the guts to state clearly what "family law" really is.)

• The advice Crosby should have gotten was to tell his current girlfriend Katie, who inexplicably wants Crosby to father her own child, about the new development as soon as possible.  Yet this occurred to nobody until the fifth episode, and Crosby delays informing her well past the point where it starts to look furtive and dishonest.

• While I’m at it, the show’s single greatest implausibility is Crosby’s relationship with Katie.  Katie is evidently a successful professional of some sort, while Crosby is . . . well, he’s got a job working at a recording studio, but he doesn't apppear especially successful.  Nor is he especially stable, or virtuous, or handsome, or charming, or dominant, “bad-boy”, “alpha”, sociopathic, or anything else that a woman like Katie might find attractive.  Dax Sheppard plays him only marginally less cretinous than he played “Frito” in Idiocracy.

• While I’m at it, another implausibility is that Adam and Kristina’s young son Max’s Asperger’s Syndrome would have gone undiagnosed in public school as long as it supposedly did.   Max is well played by Max Burkholder, who turns 13 in November; I don’t recall how old his character is, but I’m guessing no younger than eight.  In reality, teachers would have flagged his behavior patterns within the first few months of first grade.

But frankly, these are so far mere quibbles next to what I like about the series:  strong acting, compelling themes, and poignant situations.

One of the things that regularly occurs to me as I watch this television show is:  I’m really glad I’m a Christian.  It’s too bad the show, like virtually all television shows except The Simpsons, can’t give any major characters a mainstream religious affiliation.  But since it doesn’t, its characters are left to go through life making up their rules as they go along, and this turns out pretty obviously to make their lives a lot harder than they would otherwise be.  I appreciate that few people can tolerate theological overhead to which they do not subscribe, but most of the time, the Christian life is vastly superior to its alternatives.

What if everything you know is wrong?

Via OneSTDV, a cell phone video of a black female student at the University of Wisconsin disrupting a class and being dragged away in handcuffs.

Let’s take a break from our chortling at yet further confirmation of HBD and reflect on how tragic this truly is.

Blacks didn’t always behave this way (or at least, they didn’t behave this way around around white people). This behavior is a relatively recent phenomenon, too recent to be a product of genetic evolution. It is a conditioned response, a product of the culture in which so many blacks are socialized.

Somewhere along the line, this young woman’s defiance was rewarded. It was either encouraged directly, or insufficiently restrained. Somewhere along the line, it worked for her, was allowed to work for her, in the sense of getting her what she wanted, whether it was “her way”, or just respect and status.

This video shows her learning the hard way that the behavior is counter-productive. It no longer works, and in fact carries potentially serious consequences.

This will be a painful lesson. One does not easily recondition oneself away from a lifetime of behavior patterns.

We should know. Think for a moment (you to whom this applies) how, after a childhood and adolescence being told that you should be “nice” to girls, unutterably painful it was to apply even the first principle of Game (by whatever definition). Think of how difficult it was to do this even with an IQ of 130+. Now imagine trying to do it with an IQ of (by my estimate) 90.

So yes, I have some empathy for this girl. I’m not arguing that she should be allowed to go about her anti-social way on the UW campus. I’m not disputing the lessons OneSTDV draws from this at all. But I am saying that though I was never hauled away in handcuffs, I know just a little bit what it is like to be her.

Sex Ratios and College

Roissy, with his usual brio, makes an interesting point:

A sex ratio favoring women might have very different effects in Afghanistan than in the US. In cultures where women have little incentive to slut it up, delay marriage, or pop out bastard spawn confident that the government will act as uber beta provider, they may well become more chaste, and pickier about choosing reliable Dad types. But in cultures of free-wheeling sexuality, easy availability of contraceptives and abortion, female economic empowerment, anti-male divorce laws, and disappearance of anti-slut social shaming mechanisms, women may very well respond to a favorable sex ratio by opening their legs for every alpha male to shower five minutes of attention on them, preferring to share the choicest cock with other women rather than monopolizing the ground beef cock of the squabbling male masses.

As I have blogged before, my daughter's ambition is to attend a service academy, wherein the sex ratios run around 3-4 men for every woman. My chauvinism about women in the military notwithstanding, I have encouraged this ambition for the obvious reasons: fully funded education, potential full funding (with salary) for medical school, and a guaranteed job on graduation. But it also seems like an outstanding way of avoiding the girls-gone-wild atmosphere of civilian colleges where women outnumber men.

But is this expectation realistic? I had thought that by their relative scarcity, the female cadets could hold the male cadets to high standards of courtship behavior. As Roissy points out, however, this depends on female morality, itself a function of a lot of structural factors that are not what they once were.

I'm aware of the academies' episodic scandals, but I had previously chalked these up to higher levels of scrutiny, given the political sensitivities surrounding female soldiers, and the fact that the highly structured life at the academies makes all misbehavior a bad bet for the cadets. But let me ask my readers: does anyone know whether these scandals are, in fact, representative? What is the academies' moral environment for a young woman?

I see three possibilities:

• The high behavioral expectations of the female cadets create a superior moral enviornment compared to the civilian schools where women are more numerous;

• The low behavioral expectations of the female cadets create a fetid swamp; or

• Each individual woman uses her high marginal SMV and her own values to create her own personally-designed dating environment.

Thoughts? Evidence, or at least anecdotes, are preferred to more theory.

Kramer vs. Kramer

On the recommendation of a Spearhead post, I watched Kramer vs. Kramer on Netflix Instant Play.

Random Thoughts:

• Hoffman was 42 years old in 1979. Streep was 30. I wonder how many first marriages really involve 12 year age differences, but let's do the math: At the time of the trial, Kramer says he's been in advertising "since college, maybe ten or 15 years". Let's say 15. That puts his movie age at around 37. He'd been married for eight years at the time of the divorce, plus 18 months since, so let's say 9 years, which makes him 28 at the time of his marriage, at which point, Mrs. Kramer would have been . . . 16? But, of course, in the movie she was closer 24. Hollywood sucks at arithmetic.

• Either Dustin Hoffman overacts through the first 20 minutes of the film, or I am really, really glad my father was never a New York Jew.

• Kramer invites an attractive divorced woman, who lives in the same New York apartment building, upstairs for a heart-to-heart talk the night his wife leaves him. They continue a platonic relationship throughout the movie. Really? What kind of 42 year old married man has these kinds of female friends? I don't. I'm friends, if you can call it that, with the wives of my male friends, but of these, I can think of only one that I might have this kind of conversation with, and then only if it started incidentally.

• Speaking of New York apartments: Kramer, an advertising executive, lives in an itty-bitty, kinda dingy two-bedroom apartment, and eats Salisbury steak for dinner. This is probably realistic, but why does Hollywood blanch at that level of realism today? Compare it to the spacious accommodations that the Friends characters somehow afforded on waitressing salaries.

• Nude scene. You know, I've been meaning to remark for a while now that, frankly, mainstream Hollywood had no idea how to competently execute a nude scene before the mid eighties. Consider, for instance, the movie Body Heat (1981). As I understand cinematic history, Kathleen Turner, for better or worse, blazed the trail as a mainstream American actress doing full-frontal. (Caligula, by contrast, employed exclusively Italian actresses for this purpose.) But even though Turner was an attractive woman at 27, that scene would never survive the cutting room by the standards of today. Likewise here, Jo Beth Williams (I think) was also looked very pretty with her clothes on in 1979, but her (brief) nude scene conjures nothing but embarrassment for her; she would never be cast that way today.

  Are the standards of beauty higher for actresses now than they were? Does Hollywood put a higher premium on a woman's body than her face? Have filmmakers become more skilled at displaying a nude woman in a flattering light? The only thing obvious I can point to is: tan lines. Jo Beth Williams had some pretty obvious tan lines that are distracting an unattractive (and, while I'm at it, fairly implausible on a Manhattan career woman in the middle of winter). You never see those on actresses nowadays, fortunately.

• Kramer's son greets Daddy's naked sleepover with nonchalance. Wouldn't a little boy be intimidated by a strange naked woman? I'm pretty sure that by age six, I was embarrassed to catch sight of my mother's nakedness.

• Interesting the difficulty that a divorced man has: most of the women Kramer knows are other career women whos maternal instincts are firmly suppressed. Where would he get the opportunity to meet Mom-type women if he doesn't go to church?

• What a shame that Kramer's big self-revelation was that the divorce was his fault.

• Kramer's son falls and gets stitches. I had stitches in my head as a kid. It was earlier than '79, but the doctor had a special board to strap me still while he worked. It prevented the thrashing around we see in this movie.

• The platonic divorcee says of her ex-husband, "If he really loved me, he wouldn't have let me divorce him." But what choice did she give him?

• Kramer is fired for taking too much time off from work. He performs his steely-eyed negotiations for his next job pretty well, but without explaining to them the stakes (he can't arrive in divorce court without a job), I can't see how his prospective employers wouldn't perceive his ultimatum as desperate. It would be wildly unlikely that they would hire him.

• Kramer shows his son his new office. My Dad had a downtown office with a view like that. I didn't have the sense to be impressed with it at the time. It wasn't in New York though.

• The uplifting music when Billy finally sees his mom was a bit jarring; did they forget who the protagonist is? Realistically, though, I'm pretty sure that one of the consequences of divorce is that the children tend to glorify the non-custodial parent.

• The custody battle will cost Kramer $15,000, six months worth of his gross salary. Do divorce cases really go to the Supreme Court of NY?

• Maybe Streep's psychobabbly narcissistic testimony had more resonance with audiences in '79.

• I was surprised -- to the point of thinking it implausible -- at the extend of the grilling to which Mrs. Kramer is subjected.

• Hoffman sounds like Woody Allen during his testimony.

• It's really touching -- and naive -- the way the platonic divorcee pleads with Mrs. Kramer that, really, Kramer is a good father. She obviously doesn't understand the psychology of what's going on.

• So, Mrs. Kramer actually granted her husband legal custody in the divorce decree, then shows up 18 months later, and not only wins custody but also gets child support even though she now makes more money than he does? That's the family court we all know and love!