Bill Murray Hits the #MeToo Hurricane

I have a bit of a soft spot for actor Bill Murray, because of his standout role in Groundhog Day. But I also understand that he can also be pretty unpleasant around other humans.

Well, now production has been suspended on the movie "'Being Mortal' after a complaint was made blasting the actor and 'Saturday Night Live' alumn Bill Murray, 71, of displaying 'inappropriate behavior' toward females on set."

Murray “was very hands-on touchy, not in any personal areas, but put an arm around a woman, touched her hair, pulled her ponytail — but always in a comedic way.

And "some women felt uncomfortable and he crossed a line."

This is why, back in the old days, men and women were kept apart. Because the whole point of being a man is that you have the courage to cross lines.

And I understand how the "women felt uncomfortable." Women expect to be complimented and asked out on dates. But women don't like to be complimented by men they don't want to ask them out on dates.

If women were men, they would activate the male Culture of Insult in such cases and tell the offender to take his creepy remarks and hands and put 'em where the sun don't shine.

But women don't have a Culture of Insult. They usually don't confront men -- or women -- directly. Instead they complain to to friend -- in the expectation of being soothed, according Greatest Author of All Time, George Eliot. Women have a Culture of Complaint.

So, actually, I feel for the women on the set of "Being Mortal." What do you do when a national icon like Bill Murray hugs you and pulls your hair? Even apart from being a woman, are you going to risk your job by publicly talking back to Bill Murray and embarrassing him in public? You think he won't retaliate? 

So the #MeToo movement is an all-girl Culture of Complaint and you can see this in the Bill Murray bust-up. A "complaint" was made. And "women felt uncomfortable" on set. In other words, nobody confronted anyone. Woman A complained to Woman B and a consensus was built up among the women on set and then someone complained to the director or producer or whoever is the guy you complain to.

I think this situation is the basic problem with the modern Public Square. In my view, the public square was created by men for men, as Georg Simmel wrote over a century ago.  And I say that the public square is a Culture of Insult, and it is a domesticated version of the duel. In which My Man Alexander Hamilton died at the hands of the despicable Martin Van Buren.

I first started addressing this issue with respect women in the public square back in 2014.

And by the way, if "I am woman hear me roar" then it must mean that women have to develop the courage to confront male bullies in the public square.

Because if women want to replace the public square with the #MeToo culture -- which assumes woman as a helpless victim of male oppression -- then there is no public square. Cue "Tiptoe Through the Tulips."

Prediction: I expect that men will create a new public square separate from the current woke-dominated public square, because men want to be men and duke it out with other men for dominance in the eternal male dominance hierarchy.

And that's another thing. Men sort themselves into a dominance hierarchy. Lobsters. You could look it up. But females all think they are as good as any other woman. Oh sure, they have Mean Girls and Cruel Stepmothers and all the wicked witches of folk tales and myths. But at heart, every women thinks she is just as good as the next woman. Guess why there are so many princesses in fairy tales.

Personally, I believe that the "just as good as any other woman" culture cannot work in the public square. The point about hierarchy is that it saves time and it saves lives because it reduces conflict. In a group without hierarchy you have to renegotiate the hierarchy every day. And that takes a lot of time.

As for Bill Murray, I expect he behaves like a louse because he has always got away with it. They say that in Groundhog Day he was absolutely impossible. No doubt. But the movie turned out to be a classic. 

California: Where the Logic of Over-Under Bites

Although I critique the over-under political formula of our educated ruling class as a bad thing, I also understand that it traps our liberal friends.

To do a bit of logic on you...

If you agree with the notion that "there is no politics without an enemy" it means that anyone in politics is necessarily battling with an enemy. In politics you strive to win the control of government, the apparatus of force, and the reason you do that is to be able to take the fight to the enemy.

In the old days of the feudal system, society was simply hierarchical. The warriors were the political leaders and the lower classes knew their place. The middling sorts were yeomen and small landholders or leaseholders. The lower orders were serfs and slaves. And political life was all about the enemies of the feudal lords.

But ever since Marx at the latest, the West has operated on a more combative political system, what I call an over-under political formula. Under this system the rulers pose as the saviors of the lower class against the oppression of the oppressor class. This oppressor class has variously been the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, the patriarchs, the racists, and now "white oppressors."

The fly in the ointment is, of course, that these "oppressors" are not an overbearing political elite armed with all the powers of government, but ordinary private individuals, for the most part unorganized, just going about their ordinary lives.

So what happens after the over-under political formula has been in operation for a generation, or getting on for a century and more?

The answer, of course, is California, which is visibly hollowing out. The upper class of tech lords and Hollywood and government bureaucracy is doing very nicely thank you. The lower class is pacified with all kinds of benefits and privileges and exemptions from the law.

And the middle class is getting screwed to the wall. The American Spectator's Dov Fischer puts things fairly well.

It is not just Steven Greenhut writing one of his excellent columns about California nor a Tucker Carlson special about Los Angeles committing suicide. Rather, this is intense and hits everyone really close to home: people really are leaving California. And, yes, I will turn off the lights.

 Because, of course, the middle class can't change anything in California. The educated class is all in on green energy and systemic racism. The lower class is getting its bennies. And the middle class is stuck in the middle with eroding schools, sky-high energy, and sky-high housing prices.

So whaddya do? All you can do in alifornais up sticks and leave.

Incidentally, when I knew some Californians back in the 1970s and 1980s I could see all this developing. But I could also see that the people I knew just accepted this as the way things are. Of course we needed to preserve hill-slopes from development.Of course water was a problem and we needed to conserve it. Of course the coastline was fragile and we needed to protect it. And so on.

Sorry folks. What you get in California -- and anywhere else where you let the educated class off the leash -- is the agenda of the educated class and the rest of the world go hang. Because our educated class only knows what gets boiled up from the deep by the thousands of activist groups. And if things don't work out the solution is more activism. And you are a racist.

In California all you can do if the educated class oppresses you is to leave. In the rest of the US we are going to have to stop them. Because there's nowhere for us to go to.

Twitter and the Public Square

Conservative social-media stars are shocked, shocked that their Twitter follower counts are suddenly increasing in the days after Elon Musk bought the store.

Donald Trump Jr. led the way in questioning the giant spike, which saw him gain 87,296 new followers by Tuesday — and another 119,022 by Wednesday morning, after weeks of averaging roughly 7,000 per day.

And FoxNews chappie Tucker Carlson is all-of-a-sudden not "banned" any more. And he gained 141,000 followers all-of-a-sudden.

I know some people are suspecting a deep dark conspiracy. But I just think that the content moderators at Twitter are just ordinary corporate drones. If the boss -- like Vijaya Gadde -- says cancel conservatives, then they will do her bidding.

But if the boss bursts into tears. Well, that's a signal. For something. Only, being a man, I don't understand "women's tears."

According to POLITICO, Gadde got teary-eyed on Monday when discussing Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter. 

Know what, Vijaya honey. You need to realize that Musk buying Twitter is not quite the same as the death of a beloved pet.

It gets worse.

Twitter employees have reportedly struggled with the news that the company is on the verge of being acquired by Tesla CEO Elon Musk with some of them too "shocked" to speak over the billionaire’s plans to promote freedom of speech.

Oh, I wouldn't worry, Twitterers. I'm sure you'll get used to the new rules. Just as you were quite happy shadow-banning and suspending and banning conservative users in the past, I'm sure that you will get the same frisson from banning the odd AntiFa mostly peaceful protester when they really get off the reservation and doxx Andy Ngô for the 45th time..

But I think that we conservatives need to turn over a new leaf when it comes to sneering at the "literally knows nothing" tweets of our liberal friends. I suggest that we never go sharper than the ancient put-down used by Southern women:

Bless her heart.

Although, of course, next time the world turns, I dare say that "bless" will be considered religious bigotry; "her" will be consider cis-het hate speech; and "heart" will be considered... well, I know not what it will be, but it will be something hateful. 

Ari Melber Literally Knows Nothing

No doubt you've all seen the remarks of MSNBC chappie Ari Melber on Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter.

There is truly nothing funnier than this MSNBC host ranting about what Elon Musk could do to Twitter, and accidentally giving a perfect description of how Twitter has actually operated for the last five years

pic.twitter.com/bskfBHQGON

— Cabot Phillips (@cabot_phillips) April 26, 2022

Yes, the video is OK, but I'm a text sort of guy. So here is the transcript of Ari Melber's remarks:

You own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you, you don't have to explain yourself. You don't even have to be transparent. You could secretly ban one party's candidate or all of its candidates, all of its nominees. Or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else. The rest of us might not even find out about it until after the election. Elon Musk says this is all to help people because he is just a free speech, philosophically clear, open-minded helper.

I suppose the important thing to understand is just how easily people persuade themselves that they are the good guys, and that people that disagree with them are the bad guys. That's what all the babble about "hate speech" and "disinformation" and "misinformation" is about. It gives educated people permission to censor the other guys. Because they are peddling conspiracy theories. Because they are racists. Because they hate Muslims. Because they are conspiring with the Russians. 

So, in their own best interests...

But, like I always say. If your ideas are the best, if everyone else is peddling disinformation, then what's to worry about? Their false ideas will fail, and your glorious ideas will win.

Problem is, of course, that none of us are patient enough to let the market or the science decide. We all want to give The Truth a little nudge. And if that means a little bit of censoring, or even de-platfforming, or mostly peaceful protesting, well... But those guys over there are Bad People! Can't you see that?

And when the wrong people are getting elected, and the wrong people are getting on the Supreme Court, and the wrong people are teaching our kids, and totally clueless yahoos  like AOC (or Marjorie Taylor Greene) are getting elected to Congress in the other party...

Well, clearly all good people will agree that we have to Do Something to avoid a complete takeover by the "far-right." Or the "far-left," as the case may be. Just ask Ari Melber.

Populism: France vs. US

 So, in France the populist-nationalist candidate Le Pen goes down 59-41, while in the US Donald Trump in 2020 went down 52-48. (Yes, I know. And Biden got 81 million votes. Really.) What gives?

I'm reading a piece from Richard Hanania, where he's podcasting with a Frenchie, and the Frenchie says that the difference is that Le Pen is radioactive. If you talk to an anti-immigrant Frenchwoman and tell that, presumably she's voting for Le Pen, she replies:

Me? Voting for Le Pen? I will never do that. I’m not an extremist, only fascists vote for Le Pen. This is somebody who just explained to you that if she had her way, she’d send back all the immigrants and their descendants, if it doesn’t work we’ll have to kill some.

It makes you realize the practical usefulness of the whole racist-sexist-homophobe thing. Oh no! I would never vote for an extremist!

Whereas in France Macron is just the status quo. You may not like him, but you don't fear him.

Hanania's Frenchie pollster also says that older people are afraid of Le Pen because they fear that her policies -- such as leaving the EU -- will cause inflation and hurt their pensions and retirement income.

Whereas here in the good old US and A, I'd say that the Democrats are the party of inflation, and also the party of woke extremists.

Or at least, you could cause the voters to be really confused about whether white nationalist J6 armed insurrectionists are really an order of magnitude worse that BLM and AntiFa protesters burning down commercial districts.

I suppose that's the point of the J6 committee: making the right radioactive. OK. It's not rocket science. For any politics there must be an enemy. So, who's going to be the enemy? That is the only question.

Hey! I know! Let's make pointy-headed wokey intellectuals with nice comfortable gubmint jobs and pensions into the enemy! Why didn't anyone think of that before?

You can see the genius of a chap like Gov. DeSantis in making the blue-hairs at Dis-e-ney into the extremists. It's the way to get to the moms. They'll believe anything they see on TV, except when it comes to their kids.

Really, the job of the populist nationalists is simple. Just make sure that the voters get the idea that the populist nationalists are the safe choice and the wokey, bird-chomping, LGBT activists are the extremists.

How hard could it be?

Russia: Is it all Dugin's Fault?

The chap who is really Putin's brain, according to Tim Black on Spiked, is Alexander Dugin. He's the guy that's inspiring Putin to go back to the future with Traditionalism and Orthodoxy.

[In his] Foundation of Geopolitics in 1997... he argued that the geopolitical forces shaping the world derived from a foundational conflict between... four civilisational zones: the American zone, the Afro-European zone, the Asian-Pacific zone, and the Eurasian zone. It was ethnic Russians’ destiny – ‘as the bearers of a unique civilisation’, as Dugin put it – to play the leading role in bringing together and constituting Eurasia as a regional hegemon in the coming ‘multipolar world’.

Calling on Heidegger he proposes that Russians inhabit a particular Russian form of Dasein, being-in-the-world: "spiritual rather than rational, collectivist rather than individualist, strictly hierarchical rather than democratic," Otherwise we are all stuck with liberalism.

Honestly, I don't think that is going to work. I'd say Russia made sense back in the day when it was part of the grassy steppe providing grass for the horses of warrior Huns and Mongols. I'd say Russia made sense as a feudal land in the agricultural era, back in the day. I'd say that Russia and Ukraine today make sense for about five people growing the grain to feed the Middle East.Otherwise it makes sense as a park in which to hunt mastodons and other extinct megafauna reconstituted from fossilized DNA. Jolly good fun too.

That is why Russia of late has been hag-ridden by ideologists trying to come up with a good narrative. It just doesn't make sense as a geopolitical power center.

Mind you, I don't make any excuses for our own narrative ideologists, still making like it's World War II and that but for glorious NATO the whole world would collapse into murderous nationalisms. Or a Holocaust of transgenders. Or something. Maybe murderous racisms.

Now, I'm all in favor of a Multi-Oceanic Piracy Patrol, MOPP, that would be charged with chasing pirates away from good honest tankers and container ships and marooning the Captain Flints and Mate Billy Boneses and Quartermaster Long John Silvers on out-of-the-way islands without benefit of womankind. Maybe we could get Elon Musk to set up a rocket system to project anti-piracy patrols anywhere in the world in one hour. And we might even protect billionaires' mega-yachts as part of the deal.

Other than that, I'd say, the Russian ruling class is no different than our ruling class. It's obsessed with the need for a vitally important ruling class, right here in River City. Only we don't need no stinkin' ruling class. Did you read about the vigilantes in South Africa that set up a vigilante system in 24 hours to take care of an outburst of looting. All I can say that if South Africans can do it in 24 hour, we red-blooded Americans can do it in 12 hours.

Yeah, go ahead and defund the police, liberals. We deplorables can handle it.

The Why of Biden's La La Land

If you are a racist-sexist-homophobe like me, it is hard to get your brain around the policy bonfire that we call the Biden administration. Victor Davis Hanson calls it La La Land.

Open the borders. More mask mandates. Redo the 1970s inflation. Stop oil and gas production. Cancel pipelines. Asks Hanson:

What explains an America that suddenly no longer works? 

Maybe, he writes,

The administration fears the anger of the hard Left more than the furor of the American people.

I don't think that's the reason. I just think that Biden does unlimited immigration, COVID craziness, green energy, defund the police, unlimited bail, because for every one of these issues there are half-a-dozen activist groups creating an issue that you don't want to oppose. Not if you are a Democrat.

I just saw a piece today reporting that Charlie Crist in Florida wouldn't say nuttin' about teachers grooming kids. Because no Democrat can go against the LGBT agenda.

You would think that the Biden administration would have the chops to navigate a middle road between the world of left-wing activist groups and the ordinary middle class. And I think that, if 2020 had been an ordinary campaign year, then the candidate that would have emerged as Democratic nominee would have squared the circle between the crazies and the moderates. 

But because Democrats came together in a smoke-filled room to give the nomination to Biden rather than to a surging Bernie Sanders they had to agree to go with the full menu of crazy leftiness as the price of Sanders going along with Da Fix Is In.

Anyway, it is clear to me that Biden doesn't have the chops, or the authority, or the charisma to push back against the far-left agenda, from immigration to green energy to LGBT to wild-and-crazy handouts.

I think that in a way this is all providential. Maybe it's a good thing that the Dems, with an ageing president and a 50-50 Congress, are pushing wild-and-crazy extreme lefty La La issues. Because the utter failure of all these issues, all at once, is what it takes for ordinary people to get the message and go to the voting booth and say Go Away.

It takes mob scenes at the border to discredit the immigration activist groups.

It takes soaring gasoline prices to discredit the green energy scam.

It takes soaring grocery prices to force the Fed to stop printing money.

It takes Libs of Tik Tok videos of crazy lefty teachers boasting of teaching LGBT to pre-pubescent school-kids to prompt legislators and moms to cry Stop.

Otherwise the public square and the narrative is completely sucked up by the liberal activist groups and their well-connected activists and their inside track in the media and their defacto control of social media.