House of Eratosthenes

So three big things happened this week. The Wonder Woman movie came out, and it’s more than above-average, it’s fantastic. Seriously, go see it. This is a model for how all superhero movies should be, and everyone who worked on it deserves congratulations, especially given the challenges. Wonder Woman, lest anyone forget, has gone three quarters of a century without a big-screen movie for a reason, and no sorry feminists but the reason is not just because she’s female.

That actually was not a handicap at all. There’s no national or world-wide conspiracy to keep movie productions male-saturated, or cast only with women who are weak-willed, incompetent, in need of constant “mansplaining” — or if there is such a conspiracy then it isn’t very effective. No, the feminists themselves long ago became Wonder Woman’s big problem, perhaps her biggest problem, although there are others. She’s probably the most poorly-defined superhero ever; certainly, among the classic-era, high-profile superheroes in the DC and Marvel universes. Worse yet, the definitions she does “have” she doesn’t really have. They’re ambiguous.

What happens if she tries to deflect a bullet with her bracelets, and misses, is she bulletproof? And can she fly like Superman, or just leap around? (Non-spoiler spoiler: Even with the movie out now, one might say those questions remain unanswered.) Does she really have an invisible jet. And if so, why. Does twirling around have anything to do with costume changes? Oh and what happens if someone catches her…is it a big secret that Diana Prince is her secret identity?

Every time there’s an incarnation of Wonder Woman, there has to be full or at least partial resolution to these. And, the feminists get ticked off and start rocking the boat. This doesn’t happen to Batman, Superman, Spider Man, X-Men, Daredevil, Green Lantern…you get to just make the movie, go see the movie, enjoy the movie. With the Champion of Themyscira you have to answer questions, including the ones that arouse the feminist ire. Is she gorgeous and appealing to men? Well of course she is dumbass…but, the tolerant progressive feminists can’t tolerate this. Does she shave her armpits? Yeah. Deal. Well, they won’t. What’s her cup size? Well, it’s generous enough you can tell she’s a woman…that freaks them out again. Is her uniform a uniform, as in, the same all the time? And does it cover up her legs? Yes, and no. All the worst possible answers.

And so, feminists do what they do. They bully.

Contrary to popular belief, the feminist movement hasn’t done anything for Wonder Woman at all, not for a very long time. And surveying the wreckage of the timeline during which the two have co-existed, on balance, they’ve been more a hindrance to her than a help.

Nevertheless, the Alamo Drafthouse has ignited a firestorm of controversy…on purpose, in my opinion, for promotional purposes…with their “women-only” Wonder Woman screenings. I think that’s a dumb move, but I don’t hold out any sort of hope that it will be recalled that way. They’re going to get a net win out of this, probably, and if they do then it’s hard to call it “dumb” from a business perspective. But whoever thought it up probably hasn’t read a lot of Wonder Woman material. Has this character ever stood for female safe-spaces? The one thing on which all her origin-stories agree, is that she willingly left one, against the wishes, advice, or maybe even direct orders of her Mother. And this is something that goes back to the very first publication: Wonder Woman is built around a vision that men and women can coexist, after all.

Feminism, as we know it, is here to guarantee that all thinking persons who believe in this, maintain at least some serious doubt.

Well the bullying continues, I see, because a Google search for “women only screening” at this moment harvests at least a full page or two of results that, if you click and read each one, you quickly find are supportive of this dumb move, and harshly critical of anyone who finds fault with it. Nevermind that it’s expressly illegal to discriminate in this way, in many of the jurisdictions in which it’s being done. I guess it’s not within the intellectual capability of a progressive to say “Oops, if we ratify this rule about ‘discrimination,’ it turns out we have to abide by it too, so we’d better re-think this”…if they had what it took to realize such a thing, they wouldn’t be progressives.

Conservatives, on the other hand, as I’ve pointed out before are invested in conserving civilization. Their argument is one of “civilization cannot indefinitely survive this.” And so the idea has been advanced — probably to make the point, more than anything else — that some of the screenings for Star Wars, should be men-only. Another Google Search reveals how hot and trendy it is to offer the last word to the opponents of such an idea, with the status of complete saturation taken by a female “Lucasfilm Executive” who offered this witty retort:

We ladies who work at Lucasfilm will still see it before you.

Huzzah!! Fist pump! You go girlfriend!

No sauce for the goose vs. gander? Are there not men who worked on Wonder Woman? Ah well…there I go, applying critical thinking again…

Silly me. These days, what you’re supposed to do is know the answer up-front and ahead-of-time, after finding out what the Kool Kids have to say about it…just like back in middle school or something. Those would be, I’m guessing, the authors of the snarky thought-pieces showing up in Page One of those Google searches. It’s very fashionable to set up the “gay law professor” filing his grievances as some sort of kook-burger, so I guess one needs to develop a natural resistance against intellectual whiplash too. But then, one is suppose to find rationalizations, however thin they may be, for making discrimination going in the “right” way, compatible with written law. Given the nature of written law, that can be challenging at times, that’s why we have these brilliant legal-beagles ready to talk to the Washington Post…

After reviewing Austin’s municipal code, Stacy Hawkins — an associate professor of law at Rutgers University who specializes in employment law, civil rights and diversity — told The Post that the theater’s management finds itself in an increasingly common position. As public and private sector organizations look for opportunities to celebrate diversity and embrace historically disadvantaged groups, they run the risk of violating laws that were designed to respond to overtly racist, exclusionary practices. Hawkins said anti-discrimination law is increasingly being used to attack diversity efforts through allegations of “reverse discrimination.”

Women-only movie screenings, Hawkins said, are not the same as “old boys” clubs that excluded minorities and women. Intent matters, Hawkins said, but the law is not nuanced enough to distinguish between malicious and benign intent.

“This new focus on diversity and inclusion is not really accounted for by the laws of civil rights and discrimination,” Hawkins said. “Law is not calibrated for our new political paradigm of diversity and inclusion.

“As far as public accommodations are concerned, I can tell you in no uncertain terms that the reason this case was filed under the Austin city code is that it prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex.”

But Hawkins said she remains unconvinced that the women-only screenings violate male employees’ rights. In order for a cause of action under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a male employee would have to show a “material action,” such as losing a job or suffering the loss of pay. As long as male employees are assigned to other screenings in the theater, they aren’t losing their jobs, hours or pay, Hawkins said.

“I don’t think that would constitute an adverse employment action,” she said.

Hawkins said the entire controversy could have been avoided with a simple tweak in the theater’s advertising.

“Just eliminate ‘no men welcome’ language,” she said. “You try to make sure you demonstrate this is an event for and about women and, most likely, men aren’t going to show up.”

This is complicated thinking. I’m probably too lazy to keep up with it, because to a sluggard like me, up is up and down is down. I can’t play these twisty-turn mind games that pretend “diversity” has something to do with women-only audiences. But it looks to me like she’s deliberately conflating Austin city code with the CRA of 1964, to leave a false impression that as long as no dudes lose any hours off their shifts, everything is A-Okay. That’s shifty and deceptive, as is this gibberish about “historically disadvantaged groups,” language meant to legitimize discrimination in one direction even as it excoriates the exact same discrimination running in the opposite direction.

She’s just another passionate advocate, setting herself up as a neutral, adjudicating authority. It’s a problem we encounter so frequently nowadays, we’ve become numb to it. And now, if you read this summary again, you’ll notice she’s subtly changing her focus from what the law says, to what she wishes it would say. We’ve become rather acclimated to that too.

The other thing that happened was that Kathy Griffin’s career probably ended, terminated by her own stupidity. As you certainly know by now if you haven’t been living under a rock, she did an ISIS-sympathetic video in which she held up a bloody Donald-Trump head…

She bizarrely did some damage-un-control with some Gloria Allred wannabe lawyer, where the two of them broke all the rules. And not in a good way. They started off fracturing the rule about how, if you have to explain the punchline, the joke is a fail and it would’ve been much better left untold…sheesh ladies, even I get that one…

Toward the thirty-minute mark, she breaks down in tears and weeps away about how President Trump “broke” her. This is after, earlier in the clip, she goes off with some tough talk about nobody can tell her what to do, yadda yadda yadda…I’m not going to sit and type in some words suggesting I’ve watched every minute. It wouldn’t be honest.

But again, the whiplash. I’m a swaggering, edgy comedienne and I’m going to show PDJT what’s what…to ++whimper++ he broke me and he’s picking on me. How many minutes to go from one extreme to the other? Does it even matter.

While we’re taking it all in, a side-point: Ms. Griffin, according to her earlier comments, only meant to nudge up against the line, and by mistake, some kind of “oopsie” she went WAY over it and is now incredibly sorry and stuff…And of course before being elected President, Trump himself crossed the line, repeatedly, and this was going to be the end of his campaign FOR SURE this time! …a whole bunch of times…

There is an opportunity here for our evolving society to rouse itself from a drunken stupor. Can we get rid of this concept of a line now? Are we that mature now? Or do we have to keep lying to ourselves…

Shock-jocks like Griffin “earn” their way in the world, and establish their whole identities, by making other people as uncomfortable as possible without bringing consequences down upon themselves, and Griffin is “sorry” because she found out in this case there are consequences. Can we stop pretending? If there weren’t consequences, she wouldn’t be sorry and she’d do it again.

This is the trouble with mob rule. It is inherently dishonest and it inspires more dishonesty. You have to swagger around with this nonsense of “I do what I like and no one can tell me what to do”…once in awhile it turns out there are consequences. Then you have to do this whiplash move, suddenly be all contrite and obedient, genuflecting before the false god of consensus. With a bunch of bullshit about how you didn’t mean it and will never do it again…

How do people tolerate this?

Kathy Griffin upset people for one reason and one reason only: It is what she intended to do.

Speaking of which: This week, PDJT crossed yet another line, doing something un-presidential, by — get a load of this — doing something with which some of the people over whom he presides, disagree. It’s outrageous! He pulled out of the Paris accords, which were going to…uh…not sure what. Make rules? No, not even that, not legally-binding ones anyway. Set the stage for some bullying, I guess is the most accurate summation. Overseas bullying. America better do this, America better do that…a bunch of functionally anonymous busybodies four-to-eight time zones away, have decided it. Away goes the money, and to never-never-land go the jobs. Must do this, can’t do that. Someone’s decided we need more of this stuff…

Trump had the nerve to disagree. Well again, if your aim is to “download an opinion,” and get told by some guy on the Internet what you’re supposed to be thinking, thanks to search engines you can get that done pretty darn quickly. But to get some informative run-downs about it along with some quality thinking, that’s a bit tougher. Therefore, it’s worth the time to bookmark this, since it’s the best I’ve seen about it…

Reuters reports that President Donald Trump is set to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement. And writers are apoplectic.

Todd Stern at The Atlantic says such a move would be “indefensible.” At Slate, David McKean and David Wade said pulling out would be a huge mistake “because our planet is currently on a collision course with Mother Nature.” At the Washington Post, Greg Sargent complains that Trump’s rationale is “based on lies.”

You can read for yourself the claims of these authors, but here are a few facts you are unlikely to find.

1. The Senate never signed the agreement

This is kind of a big deal in a democratic republic. At least America’s Founders thought so.

The U.S. Constitution states that the president “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur” (Article II, section 2).

When the deal was completed in 2015, President Obama never sent it to the Senate to be ratified.

2. Emission reduction targets are not binding

Then Secretary of State John Kerry made this fact quite plain. Reporting is mandatory, but actual reductions in fossil fuel emissions are not. Why? Because most nations are not interested in actually reducing their carbon footprints.

“[If] there had been a penalty, we wouldn’t have been able to get an agreement,” Kerry bluntly said. “So we did the best we could…”

This is precisely why climate activists, such as former NASA scientist James Hansen, called the agreement “a fraud”: “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’”

3. It Costs Roughly $100 billion (Annually)

You’ll not find this fact in many of the stories you read. But as the Wall Street Journal reported at the time, “developed countries have to help provide at least $100 billion annually from a variety of sources after 2020 to help developing countries cut their emissions.” (As a point of reference, Trump’s wall was projected to cost about $33 billion less than this.)

Anyone have a guess who will be picking up the bulk of the check on this one?

4. The (non-binding) targets are totally arbitrary

The emission targets are not just non-binding; they are self-made. As John Cassidy of the New Yorker gloomily pointed out at the time, nations can select their own emission targets.

“Not only is the accord voluntary but countries got to set their own targets for carbon emissions. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, the Paris talks were a bit like a potluck dinner, where guests bring what they can.”

5. The agreement relies on self-reporting

The teeth of the agreement comes in mandatory reporting. But what if you can’t trust it?

It was only a few years ago, after all, that China was caught fudging underreporting its coal burning by a whopping 14 percent.

While there is talk of one day creating an independent body to monitor and verify pollution levels, no such body is in place, and the New York Times reports that it just might be staying that way, since “several countries, including China and India, are expected to push for a more lenient system that is reliant on self-reporting.”

6. The U.S. will almost certainly not meet its target—and that could have an adverse impact

Everyone knows the U.S. will not meet the ambitious carbon reduction targets laid out by the Obama administration. As the Washington Post reports, “it’s clear that the Trump administration will fail to meet the climate goals that the Obama administration established under the agreement — namely, a pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent below their 2005 levels by the year 2025.”

This could be problematic, assuming some nations actually do take the targets seriously.

“A great power that willfully misses its target could provide political cover for other laggards and weaken the soft power of process,” said Luke Kemp, a climate and environmental policy expert at Australian National University

And it’s not just the U.S. The New York Times reported that “Russia put forth a plan that is essentially business as usual, requiring no new domestic policies.”

7. The jury on carbon dioxide is still out

Like most of the people reading this article, I don’t have a degree in climate science. But there are people unafraid to point out an obvious fact: Our climate models over the last decade were way off.

The question is: Why?

Believe it or not, there is a community of scientists who contend that the dangers of CO2 emissions have been grossly exaggerated. In fact, some research suggests that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere actually helps the environment more that it hurts it.

Among these scholars is Indur Goklany, a U.S. delegate to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and an IPCC reviewer, who in 2015 published a paper titled “Carbon Dioxide: The Good News”.

In his paper, Goklany concludes that many climate impact assessments suffer from three primary flaws.

“Firstly, they rely on climate models that have failed the reality test. Secondly, they do not fully account for the benefits of carbon dioxide. Thirdly, they implicitly assume that the world of 2100 will not be much different from that of the present – except that we will be emitting more greenhouse gases and the climate will be much warmer.”

None of this says the move away from an international climate agreement must be permanent. Proactive action may be required as we glean new evidence.

But the Paris deal was poorly devised and passed without proper constitutional consent. It’s better left behind. In the meantime, perhaps we’ll learn more about the alleged dangers of climate change.

Well the thing is, I don’t think we’re even ready to start discussing that. You can’t put together a plan if you haven’t defined the goal.

There’s a lot of dishonesty here about the goal. That much isn’t something we have to wonder about; it’s proven. In response to the Trump Administration’s public statements calling for a “renegotiation” of the non-treaty treaty, Europe cries “Non!”

The European Union has rejected Donald Trump’s offer to renegotiate the Paris Treaty, proving it was always about bleeding the U.S. dry and appointing globalists as our governing bodies.

The Paris climate agreement is written so as to be an endless drain on the U.S. economy. If they cared about the climate, they’d work with us…

So the narrative that international cooperation is required to keep the planet livable, therefore we’re all going to work together because we have no alternative — simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because it isn’t happening, and it’s the alwarmist camp that’s not doing it.

This is about control.

And that’s true of all three of these very significant things that happened last week. This demand for special privilege, this over-arching theme of “my message is SO important that it cannot, nor will it have to, survive the everyday challenge of my opposition being allowed the same level of privilege I demand for myself.”

Well…no, not “message is so important.” More like, “message is so fragile.”

It’s good that we’ve got Trump in there and it’s good that we’re pulling out of this treaty-that-is-not-a-treaty. But this has got to be the next thing on the to-do list. This whole idea we’ve allowed to seep in, that “this person must really believe in what he or she is saying, because we’re seeing them demand special accommodations and special allowances, and also that their opposition should be muzzled, this suggests that their platform is particularly worthy of our attention.”

Again, we have become acclimated to it. Slowly but surely. We have come to think of elitism as associated with worthy ideas. We’ve come to believe the best plans are hatched in a cloister. That the defining distinction of Wonderful Thinking That Will Turn Out Good And Stuff, is this formulation that everyone must participate, but that privilege of input is limited only to a few. That this is the birthing condition of the ideas that will move us forward, make us better.

And it is the exact opposite of the truth.

The truth is, good ideas don’t have to be argued that way. “Take your opinion out of here but leave your wallet behind” is what we should be looking upon, with scorn. And no small amount of ridicule.

Think of it as kindness. It’s rather vicious and mean of us, is it not, to passively allow a bunch of crazy-cat-ladies to think they’re making some sort of message heard, merely by watching a movie all by themselves and not allowing any big nasty mean old men in there with them? How did this ever become popularized. It’s truly a mystery. “I refuse to have contact with anyone who isn’t exactly like me” is bigotry, and it is not how you communicate anything at all, certainly no ideas that are ground-breaking. Silly twits, isn’t this just obvious? Wonder Woman wouldn’t do that…

[…] House Of Eratosthenes discusses selective bully culture […]
- Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup » Pirate's Cove | 06/04/2017 @ 05:56
Tucker was way too generous and way too kind. For YEARS liberal comedians have been on television and in the movies simply because they crap all over conservatives, their fellow Americans (as if they cared about country), and haven’t been funny. It’s not even funny to liberals, all it does is “empower” their group think, stroking their own chickens and spanking their own monkeys. Kevin Hart actually has it right. 1.) He’s actually funny. 2.) The other day he said he won’t attack Trump because that just alienates and pisses off half of his viewer-base. The problem we have in this country is that liberals control not just the news media (and universities) but film and television media as well, so unfunny comedians will CONTINUE to wind up on the air and debase half of America because liberals need their daily feelz.
- P_Ang | 06/04/2017 @ 08:09
Right, but just try telling THEM that Stephen Colbert isn’t being funny…

I really think they can’t tell the difference. Between genuine humor vs. validation of their ideological selections. It’s like the endorphin rush flows though their brains by way of different passageways or something…
- mkfreeberg | 06/04/2017 @ 08:20
The “funny” thing is, during the Jon Stewart heyday, my liberal friends repeatedly said Stephen Colbert wasn’t funny. I think it was because he was doing his fake-conservative shtick those days; and while crapping on conservatives was ‘hilarious,’ there really was no way to pull that character off without some biting truths being self-evident, and truth to a liberal is a cold, hard slap with a wet fish. While being hit by a cold, hard piece of watermelon is funny to people who go to Gallagher shows, no one wants the cold, hard fish-slap.

Of course, liberals have that very, VERY selective memory, so you won’t find ANY of them remembering they didn’t like SC back in the day…
- P_Ang | 06/05/2017 @ 05:07
Well, they have trouble remembering things like this, they think it never happened…
- mkfreeberg | 06/05/2017 @ 05:43

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Our Selective Bully CultureSaturday, June 3rd, 2017

Our Selective Bully Culture
Saturday, June 3rd, 2017