EVs, SUVs, Lawn Signs, And The Presumption Of Right - The Gulag Of Groupthink

University Park was a tony, leafy, well-to-do neighborhood in Northwest Washington - an all white, deeply progressive part of town, one in which residents took their political beliefs seriously and were not shy to show them off.  All the cars parked up and down the sycamore, ash, and maple-lined streets were either EVs or hybrid SUVs - a uniformity surprising given the disposable income of the community and the range of vehicle offerings on the market.  However, in early decades the neighborhood was equally consistent, first with Volvo station wagons, then Priuses. 

The reason for such consistent uniformity was due diligence.  The residents of University Park had done their homework before buying and bought only the safest, most energy-efficient, most reliable cars on the market.  The Volvos were road tanks that would survive even the most horrendous of crashes, and despite the fact that everyone, thanks to the same cautious, reasonable approach to buying cars, drove them under the speed limit, made complete stops at intersections, and obeyed all road signs, buying the safest cars made infinite, logical sense. 

The new hybrids were no different - while smaller and more vulnerable in horrific accidents, they were better for the environment, less polluting, more considerate of others, and the right thing to do. 

When electric vehicles came on the market - a more serious, deliberate answer to climate change - the residents of University Park lined up.  Despite the well-known geopolitical costs to depending on war-torn countries' rare earth materials necessary for EV batteries, the pollutants attendant upon producing electricity for charging, and the environmental risks of hazardous waste disposal - all no-no issues for environmentalists - the wait for EVs was long. 

 

The hybrid SUV craze was an amalgamation of all the above.  Not quite tanks, but armored and riding high, equipped with every possible safety gadget available, and less-polluting than gas-powered cars, they flew out of car dealerships.  

All this would be well and good, but a neighborhood with only these types of vehicles? Not a sedan in sight?

Groupthink has been well-researched.  There is a tendency for socially appropriate consistent uniformity within homogeneous groups.  It is not surprising that University Park with its high proportion of lawyers, doctors, investors, financial analysts, and high-tech engineers would think similarly when it came to purchase decisions; and so it was that few women wore high heels, designer clothes, diamonds, and gold earrings.

A string of pearls on occasion, comfortable shoes, simple patterned dresses and suits, few hats and certainly no perfume more than sufficed and made a statement that was consistent with everything else.  A business suit or a plain, simply-patterned dress was like a Prius - the buyer has been intelligent, judicious, and world-aware in both.  Add to that the equally persistent social trait of belonging, and you have a lockstep community of like-minded neighbors. 

This is where the understandability stops, for University Park is a profoundly intolerant neighborhood.  Any diversion from these well-established norms is looked at with opprobrium if not suspicion.  People talk openly about their hatred for Donald Trump, the American Right, and conservatism.  Neighborhood chit chat, casual encounters at Whole Foods, and locker room banter at the gym is all consistently and presumptively conservative. No one there could ever possibly imagine a Trump supporter.  Talk is loudly, proudly, and publicly of Trump and Israel hatred, Hitler, insurrectionists, cracker mentality, and Bible-thumping ignorance.  All nod in approval. 

 

Groupthink in University Park was at its worst during COVID where there was absolutely no room for debate, discussion, or objections to the received wisdom.  The neighborhood was shut down, residents wore hazard suits and gas masks, and vigilantes walked the streets to enforce compliance with the established, undeniable, right approach to the pandemic. 

Everything, absolutely everything was in conformity and perfectly consistent.  The ethos, the zeitgeist, the prevailing norms of the community was unassailable in a virtual fortress. 

Hate Has No Home Here, Black Lives Matter, Asylum Seekers Welcome lawn signs, balcony banners and festoons were on every lawn.  The cars, the clothes, the proper COVID behavior, the Trump outrage were not enough.  Something visual and unavoidable had to be added to the vitae. 

Perhaps more to the point no American flags flew anywhere.  Not one house up and down the avenues and streets of University Park displayed a flag, for it had become a symbol of right wing extremism, a MAGA, corrupt, distorted patriotism that smacked of storm troopers and torchlight parades. 

All communities display some sort of uniform behavior.  Adolescents cannot be told apart, so similar are they in dress, hairstyle, tastes and behavior; and few adults ever grow out of this need for belonging and need for legitimacy and identity.  The residents of University Park say to everyone, 'I Am A Progressive', more than any talent, interest or taste.  It defines me perfectly, it provides a consistent, harmonious picture of who I am. 

The Left's famous diversity claims plurality, but groupthink has assured that every one of its potpourri marches to the same drummer.  Race, gender, and ethnicity along with climate wisdom, socialist economics, and accommodating internationalism make up the canon, the liturgy, and the articles of faith.  This 'inclusivity' is an infectious viral indoctrination, and the people of University Park have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. 

In fact there is no diversity there, no inclusivity, no equity - it is a gulag, an intellectual concentration camp, a reservation of complacency and conformity. 

So while one might have some give when it comes to judging this tony corner of the Nation's Capital - all communities seem to subscribe to the same cloistered needs - it is hard to forget that the people living there are among the best educated, more advanced degrees than any in the city and are parallel to Cambridge and Berkeley.  Post-graduate education is supposed to be an indicator of advanced thinking, a trained ability to analyze, reflect, consider, and then conclude. 

How and why, then, is there so little of such logic, so little independent thought, so much intellectual conformity and so dutiful a slavishness to prevailing, narrow norms?  Either the smartest people on the block are actually the dumbest, or the virus of progressivism is fatal.  Probably both. 

Big Game Hunting In An Age Of Virtual Reality - Why Not Shoot To Kill?

Reed Reventlow had been a big game hunter until both Kenyan game laws and American public censure shut him down, but not before his trophy room was hung with bighorn sheep taken in the high Sierra, cougar and mountain lion from the Absaroka mountains, and leopards, cheetahs from the Serengeti. 

As a young man in India he and an Indian Army Colonel had hunted tigers in Assam and wild boar in the forests of Madhya Pradesh. He was proud of the fact that he had taken down big and small game in every continent, and his reputation as a fearless stalker and dead shot preceded him.  He was never one to use beaters to drive his prey into the open for an easy kill, and was as fearless as his native African guides whose forbears had tracked, stalked, and killed with arrows and spears. 

He was not interested in rhinoceros, although many of his mates said there was nothing like standing your ground before a massive charging two-ton brute and putting a bullet between his eyes at 50 meters.  He preferred big cats - somehow the affair seemed more equal, and fair play and equality were all part of the hunt. 

An American associate residing in Delhi who had gone to Manipur to hunt tiger; but the hunt was anything but fair. His Indian guides tethered a bleeding goat to a stake while the American sat in a high blind in a a mango tree, waited for the tiger to approach the goat, and then shot him. It galled and angered Reed to see the trophy - the head of a magnificent Bengal tiger shot from the treetops at close range. 

Hunting animals caused Reed no particular moral concern  There was no difference between a lion and a Texas longhorn or a chicken, slaughtered in the tens of thousands every day.  Higher order, intelligent animals like pigs, dogs, and monkeys were killed, grilled, and enjoyed in Africa, Asia, and the Americas without a hint of remorse. 

Animal rights activists cry foul, and say that sentience exists up and down the phylogenetic ladder, and that vegetarianism is the only moral option. If fish can feel pain when hooked, and that every fish from Johnny roaches to marlins suffer needlessly, then anglers are certainly cruel to their prey.

Gary Varner in his book “Which Animals Are Sentient” (2012) developed a list of criteria; and those animals which met all or most of them felt pain.  Fish met all the criteria (nociceptors, brain, nociceptors and brain linked, endogenous opioids, response to damaging stimuli similar to humans).

Sneddon  et al (2014) elaborated on Varner’s classification, dividing fish into different phylogenetic categories and adding more behavioral criteria.  According to their research, bony fish (the ones commonly caught by recreational and commercial fishermen), met all standards for pain.

Commercial fishermen might claim that netting of fish is painless; and while such techniques avoid spearing or hooking, those hundreds of bluefish, mackerel, or sardines flipping and flopping around on the deck of a trawler are actually going through the agonizing death throes of asphyxiation.

In other words there is no painless way of killing fish except by drugging them in fish farms.

Given this recent, extensive, and exhaustive research, one might well conclude that fish do indeed feel pain and if animal rights activists are right, then all fishing which causes pain should be stopped.

There is no real humane way for Aleuts to kill whales because no one harpoon thrust can be a coup de grace and no bullet always and unerringly finds its way into the animal’s cerebellum for a quick and painless death.  

Earlier tribal hunters on the African veldt wounded a wildebeest or gazelle and then tracked it for miles until, after hours, it died a painful death.  Only skilled and practiced hunters can bring down an elk or antelope with one deadly shot; but there are far more amateurs out there than professional marksmen, and thousands of animals, legally hunted, die bloody and painful deaths.

This killing-animals-for-food argument would have to hold for lobsters.  Throwing them into a pot of boiling water and watching them bang around the pot until dead would have to count.   Sushi lovers in Japan would have to forgo their passion for fresh sushi (slices taken from still live fish).

What about oysters? All oyster-lovers know that the way to tell if oysters are really fresh is if they twitch a bit when you squeeze lemon on them.  They have a nervous system and they respond, but they have no brain; so is feeling pain without making any sense of it still feeling pain?

All well and good say animal rights activists, but culling for food is different from killing for pleasure; but why exactly?  One animal is the same as every other regardless of end use, so shooting tigers and lions for trophies should have no moral opprobrium attached. 

Again animal activists object.  These beautiful creatures should remain in the wild for human beings to see, appreciate, and love.  A zoo, simply an inhumane, torturous way to preserve the life of formerly wild animals, is no answer. 

 

However, argued Reed, we have entered a new, radical, revolutionary period of human evolution.  Virtual reality and the eventual replacement of the 'real' by its computer-generated images will change human perception, experience, and ethics.  The technology is in its infancy, but when brain-computer interface is made possible, then the virtual world will become the real world.  There will be no difference in the two, and the participant will 'be' on the savannah with tigers, lions, and gazelles. 

There will be no need for actual wild game to roam the veldt and the African plains can be opened for more productive human activities - agriculture and cattle raising - and big game hunting.  The reason why poaching remains a problem in Tanzania is because poor Africans are hungry - park preserves have limited their well-being. 

Ahh, say naysayers, nothing will ever replace 'the real thing'; but the new technology will create the smell, the feel, the sound of a light breeze in the grass, the entire experience.  To deny this is simply whistlin' Dixie. 

Reed's big game hunting days are over.  Paying over a million dollars for the privilege of a 'cull', an organized, orchestrated hunt of an overpopulated prey, is not what hunting is all about.  Better to retire in a trophy room filled with good memories.  

Of course there were still plenty of deer, elk, antelope, and moose to shoot and few restrictions in the West, but that was but a diluted, uninteresting replacement for the real thing. 

As virtual reality becomes more advanced and accessible and especially when a seamless interface exists between mind and machine and the whole, vast, immeasurably rich environment of virtuality becomes ordinary, no one will bother going to game parks which will reopen for hunting  Reed would be an old man by that time, so hunting will be for his grandchildren - who, as often happens in families, might well find something else do in the new, changed world. 

Misogyny Or A Bad Streak Of Nasty Women? There Are Enough Of Them Out There To Make A Man Wonder

Robbie Norton had had an unbelievably bad string of luck when it came to female bosses.  There was Betsy, hounded by management for low sales figures, a natural bully, and a bad marriage.  She tried to keep her noxious badgering and open hostility for her staff under control, but there was no tamping down such a one-track, simple mind; and each one of her senior staff dreaded the call, hauled on the carpet for God knows what inefficiency, infraction, or error. 

The thing of it was, she had the CEO's ear - rumors had it that they had been particularly friendly at one time and the job was subsequently hers.  Of course she was no dummy, and her performance in lower-level positions in the company hierarchy was creditable, so the rumors were scotched although never completely forgotten. 

In any case the CEO was no dummy either, so when he saw sales in Betsy's department fall off, he did not hesitate to call her upstairs, give her a good talking to, and send her down with clear marching orders. 

That of course was a clarion call, and in a hastily assembled meeting of her department, she was a dervish of fierce, wild energy.  She howled and yelled, thumped her fist on the table, banged the sales chart until it rocked on its hinges, and said in no uncertain terms that she would have the scalp of anyone who failed to meet his sales targets. 

 

Now, all of this might be excused or explained because of the nature of sales, a brutal business by any measure, a no-holds barred gladiatorial combat with fields of battle littered with dead and dying bodies; but Betsy brought more than just an uber-competitiveness to the table.  She was a mean, nasty, arrogant bitch of a woman who had torn through every office she had worked in and every one of her failed marriages.  

Robbie had heard of the woman's reputation, but caught her on a good day, offering an important position and a generous salary, so like most men, he was certain he could handle anything that came his way.  When the buzz saw was powered up, and Betsy slashed her way through office and cubicle, he knew that he would have to do some fancy footwork to escape her. 

'She's a cunt', said Harold Bates, one of the more recently culled, 'no ifs, ands or buts about it'.  She was a devouring, castrating, man-eating machine, and Bates was glad to be out of her way. 

Here Robbie paused and reflected on the scene.  He had always been pro-woman, if not a feminist then close to it.  He had been raised by a sensible, talented, and ambitious woman who made her way nicely in the business world while keeping a good home and raising a respectful family.  His sister was a sweetheart, a bit shy and retiring, but honest, true, and temperate.  

Politically he had joined progressives in their demands for women's rights, and saw no threat whatsoever to the rising enrollment in professional schools and the ubiquity of women in senior positions; so it was with great reservation that he even listened to his colleague's misogynist harangues, for that was exactly what they were. 

Nevertheless, Betsy was indeed a harridan, a vixen and a succubus, there was no way around it.  He had worked for tough, ambitious, and disciplining women managers before, but there was no precedent for her swath of scorn, distaste, and laying waste. 

She was a product of three failed marriages all of which went to court and ended in sheer mayhem and nastiness, so anyone knowing this and working for her would reasonably assume her guilt.  This was a woman who must have been born a cunt and only developed into an even more vile one as the years wore on. 

Misogyny is not defined as the hatred of a single woman, but of all women; that is, that women as a class are innately manipulative and misandrous - born that way.  God gave them two X's instead of a Y, and sent them on their business.  The Bible after all, makes it clear that the human race was condemned to a life of penury and pain because of a woman.  It was Eve after all who tempted Adam to eat the apple from the Tree of Knowledge to satisfy her own arrogant demands. 

Robbie had not come to the misogyny conclusion but couldn't avoid the following.  Bryce Patton's wife, sick and tired of his desultory inattentiveness, his slavishness to his work, and his clueless and childish fixation with Sudoku puzzles, took a series of lovers, bolted off to St. Bart's with the last, and never gave her husband the time of day thereafter.

Sister Mary Joseph, Mother Superior of the Convent of the Sacred Heart and chief catechetical supervisor of St. Maurice's Church, singled out every boy in Sunday school, berated him, humiliated him, and badgered him for his disrespect to Our Lord and Savior and to God Almighty himself.  

Sister Mary Joseph had made her way up the ecclesiastical ladder by currying favor not with priests and the archbishop but with her cohorts whom she favored and pleased. Men, whether close to God and the Pope or little snotty boys from Broad Street were not worth her time and whatever fraction of the day she had to spend on them, it was to make them penitent and miserable. 

Miss Turnbull was the fifth grade teacher at Jarvis Elementary School, and she was as brutal and nasty as any teacher that had taught in the public school system.  She was an execrable menace, and took out her animus and deep-seated resentment against the boys in her class whom she blamed for every disturbance, annoyance, and problem; and she did her best to neuter them before they graduated, making life easier for Miss Fenwick, the sixth grade teacher only slightly less carnivorous than she. 

August Strindberg was accused of misogyny throughout his writing career, and critics pointed especially to Laura in The Father, and Julie in Miss Julie, women of will, defiance, and certitude who thought little of men and chose to ignore or dismiss them.  Laura in particular was an unstoppable female force out to eliminate her obtuse, clueless, staid husband from her life.  Iago-like she sows doubts about the paternity of their daughter and drives him mad, has him institutionalized and rendered incompetent.  Thanks to all this she gains complete control over her daughter. 

Miss Julie makes the valet, Jean, jump through hoops like a trained animal, and takes pleasure in humiliating and disgracing him.  She willingly sleeps with him, then gets her comeuppance and wanders off incoherently after he refuses to go with her.  

Strindberg, critics said, created a hateful, misandrous character but one who at the same time is so weak and emotionally feeble that she falls under the spell of a virile, confident man.  Double trouble. 

Robbie was on the fence - child of a loving, caring mother; brother to a warm, affectionate sister, lover to a number of lovely, adoring women; but subject to the insults and horrible abrasive nastiness of many others.  He knew that Betsy, Sister Mary Joseph, Miss Turnbull, and Bryce Patton's wife were just the tip of the iceberg.

It all came down to this - a savvy man is always comfortable around women, knowing them as well as he does.  He could be a Casanova, a good husband, or a trusted employee.  Women do not perplex him or surprise him.  Therefore the misogyny-nasty women debate is moot.  He knows how to deal with women, come out on top, or leave the scene before the battle begins.  Washing dishes, cleaning the bathroom, calling when late works wonders.  It doesn't take much to keep things on an even keel and to make out just fine. 

Cynical? Hardly, just a bit of field strategy in the War Between The Sexes. 

Robbie was a happy man because of this insight, this skill, and this savvy.  He found many women irresistible, fascinating, complex, alluring figures, and others not worth spare change; but life was like that, a complicated mish-mash of conundrums, puzzles, and traps.  Most men were befuddled by women and by life.  Not him.