If You Hold The Same Beliefs You Did Thirty Or Forty Years Ago--Why?
Why do people cling to outdated ideas more than their unfortunate past hairstyles?
Bill Maher’s recent New Rule explains in the most sarcastic manner possible why the ossified #MeToo movement needs to add a new amendment for 2025: “If you’re being abused, you’ve gotta leave right away.”
This updates a relentless drive that #MeToo did nothing to dispel, consistently ignoring the central statement of fact in Maher’s Rule: Women have choice and agency.
Maher quite rightly notes, as I’ve been screaming into the feminist wind, that #MeToo needs to recognize sex crime reporting has shot up, as have the number of women willing to speak out—often under their own names rather than social media pseudonyms. States have passed more victim-friendly laws making it easier to report. Sez Maher, “We’re no longer in the ‘No one listens to women or takes them seriously’ era anymore.” Including the police.
His comments were inspired by the Diddy trial, in which Cassie Ventura’s texts come across as less non-consensual than she testified. It points to the strangely controversial feminist notion that women have the agency to leave abusive relationships, and the time to report and leave is as soon as it starts, not ten years into the abuse, or worse, ten years after it ends. The LA Times doesn’t agree; a modern chickie-boo journalist stuck in 1982 argues, essentially, that Diddy’s victims had no personal agency; that ‘trauma connections’, the feminist catchphrase to explain away inconvenient female responsibility, kept them psychologically bound to him. Although they weren’t the only thing, as Cassie Ventura admitted. She stays (present tense) for the money: Diddy is still paying her rent.
The LA writer’s ‘feminist’s’ perspective is so ossified I’m surprised she could move her fingers to type.
She rails against those who ask ‘why don’t they leave,’ rather than asking when that will become a viable question. How much longer, and much more power, must women accumulate before we recognize that it’s easier to avoid developing those infamous trauma connections in the first place?
This ain’t the Ike and Tina Turner era. It ain’t The Battered Wife, The Burning Bed, or a 1980s marital rape trial in which the defendant’s lawyer asked, “A woman who’s still in a marriage is presumably consenting to sex…Maybe this is the risk of being married, you know?”
Never does the LA writer ask the question so many other ossified feminists don’t either: Yes, we agree trauma connections are real along with many complex reasons why women get involved with men like P. Diddy and stay, so why aren’t we encouraging women and particularly young girls to observe their personal psychology to identify their weak points so would-be Cassie Venturas can avoid Diddies?
P. Diddy’s Misogyny and Misogynoir Are The Red Flags His Victims Ignore
I suspect others like Ms. I’m-So Ossified-I-Still-Sport-A-Toni-Home-Perm fear the embarrassing answers, like that putting up with abusive men often involves a mental cost/benefit analysis: How worth it is it to stay? Enough to not have to pay one’s own rent, apparently. And, you got to meet a lot of stars and celebrities, so maybe the drug-laced compulsory group sex was worth it.
The L.A. writer and others whose ideals should have gone extinct by now continue to infantilize women, when they can easily ruin a man’s life by naming him in a #MeToo tweet. Women no longer lack power they once did in the face of patriarchy. I’d expect my contemporaries to get with the program, look around, and observe how downright feminized, for example, the Democratic Party has become. They’re still going on as if women are constantly dragged under by a perpetual riptide of misogyny. Oh please.
We have all failed the Millennials and Zoomers by teaching or at least not challenging outdated victim mentalities that don’t, as Bill Maher points out, hold up to scrutiny anymore.
‘22 scariest lines’?
Speaking of ossified feminists, Ms. magazine recently extracted what they consider to be the scariest parts of the Republican Project 2025.
If you’ve read the document (has anyone?) or even skimmed it, you know there are a shit-ton of bad ideas, but Ms. managed to pull out, instead, good ideas that make the project look a lot less sinister to people whose Permian-era values aren’t summed up as, “If the other side supports something common sense, I’m against it.”
Most of Ms.’s fear factors are those which are now supported by a fair chunk of normie human mammals, including protecting children from trans ideology; adopting “marriage, family, work, church, school, volunteering,” as ‘building blocks’ of a healthy society; promoting patriotism, colorblindness, and workplace competence in place of woke/social justice ideology; marriage promotion; calls for a more fact-based approach to the next pandemic; and defining a woman as what we actually are: Adult human females.
Evolution: It doesn’t just terrify bass-ackwards Christians!
Other selected ‘scary lines’ were genuinely scary, demonstrating conservative hostility to abortion rights and the environment, and a serious hard-on for authoritarianism we’re already watching unfold; but one ‘scary line’ for Ms. was downright hypocritical: Damning the Project for proposing to eliminate promoting abortion information and services abroad. Totally cool, though, with screwing up perfectly normal kids overseas with social-justice ideological genderwoo.
Most of Ms.’s hand-wringing is rooted in unexamined values. These lefty lollies haven’t investigated modern research in the areas of brain science, evolutionary psychology, history, and other schools of thought that have greatly changed how we think about men and women, sex roles, and power.
Their views are as ossified as their knees. As are those of so many in both parties in Washington.
The dinosaurs of D.C.
Washington is a town full of lumbering walnut brains. The comet finally struck, on January 20th. Now all we mammals have to do is ride out the bipartisan authoritarian winter.
The exemplar of ossification in America is our own Trumposaurus Wrecks and his creaky MAGAdon John Hammonds resurrecting bad, unworkable, no-longer-viable ideas like an ideological Jurassic Park. Like tariffs as stuck in the early ‘80s as much as the L.A writer. Like eliminating healthcare. Like hoovering up anyone not-white rather than checking to see if they’re actually illegal immigrants, or criminals. Like eliminating pollution standards. And his love affair with a ‘Gilded Age’-era economic agenda.
Donald Trump is such a relic I’m surprised he didn’t drag his supermodel future wife off the runway by her hair. ‘Pussy-grabbing’ is positively Paleolithic.
The Jurassic Park of museum-worthy long-past-their-sell-by ideas aren’t just limited to the GOPosauruses and their red-capped semi-fossilized Congresscritters.
The equally-ossified Democratatops are now less popular than a Bible at a Diddy freak-off because of their own ideas that, like Trump, they Just. Won’t. Let. Go.
Here’s a screaming example of everything far left-ossified that drives the Democratatops consistently into the extinction ditch: The 5,000-year-old hate-on for all things Jewish, particularly Israel, and the ludicrous notion that the ‘Palestinians’ are sinless and blameless. The left was goose-stepping antisemitism when I was in college, although mostly behind closed doors. But an attack on a music festival empowered them to crawl out from under their death camp rubble to fly their keffiyeh freak flags.
New York mayor wannabe Zohran Mamdani wants to ‘globalize the intifadah’'; Democratic ‘Squad’ Congress members Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush and Ilhan Omar were the only Democrats who couldn’t muster the moral courage to vote for a House resolution late last year to condemn a ‘global rise of antisemitism’. Then there’s the Kiddie Keffiyeh Klan at your local elitist university.
These people who haven’t cracked open a book about Israel or Judaism since the original Exodus would feel quite at home in fifteenth-century Europe.
Traditional Democratic ideals once sensibly rooted in tolerance, human value, diversity and inclusion have fossilized. No one’s questioned whether they’ve taken laudable values too far for too many years. Is there such a thing as too much tolerance, too much human value, too much diversity, too much inclusion? Can we consider those questions, please, while Democrats and the far-left lament the University of Pennsylvania revoking Will Thomas’s swimming awards and naming the actual (real female) winners years after they ‘lost’ to a man with an obvious dick in his swim trunks?
Who’s running the Democrats, anyway? Dr. Renee Richards?
Today, they console themselves after an election trouncing with self-congratulating, holier-than-thou virtue signalling, mouthing pieties to tolerance, human value, diversity and inclusion while they turn away their conservative, Trump-voting family members from Thanksgiving dinner.
And they think Trump voters are the intolerant ones.
Evolve already!
I know so many people whose beliefs and values remain mired in amber.
Cognitive scientist Dr. David Levitin at Montreal’s McGill University claims humans are not wired to change their minds because until very, very recently, information changed so little that facts tended to get stuck in proto-craniums. Except, how would humans have survived if they weren’t forced to learn new ideas and skills, like how to survive the approaching Ice Age?
It strikes many that we often refuse to re-examine old values and beliefs periodically, or simply to naturally evolve, because it might suggest we were wrong, about which we have a veritable phobia, even though it might not always have been a wrong belief, but something changed, or we now have better knowledge.
More contemporarily, changing one’s mind carries particular peril for those whose community is particularly intolerance-based: Failing to kowtow to established ossified narratives runs one the risk of being ostracized from their community with ‘cancellation’ and defriendings. Liberals won’t cross party lines as much as the right. Many Democratic young women won’t date a Trump supporter; who are less likely to feel the reverse, although, as more women drift toward the Republicans, maybe dating is getting easier, especially since many white women traditionally vote that way.
Never do they wonder whether perhaps Trump won partly because he promised to roll back the excesses of Democratic ossified policies and values, however ossified his own might be.
Some people believe they don’t need to change their views when they already ‘know’ they’re right, howevermuch facts fail to support their ossification. Easier, it becomes, to embrace safer ‘crony beliefs’ that reduce the risk of social ostracism rather than adopt ‘merit beliefs’ based in evidence and best available knowledge.
Like they say in Communist countries: Shut up and keep your head down.
Thinking too critically leads to cognitive dissonance from holding conflicting beliefs. De-ossification isn’t popular with one’s peer group, whether they’re lefty liberals or hardcore conservatives. Remember the Dixie Chicks fiasco during Bush II when they offended conservative fragile flowers and got banned from radio?
It really doesn’t pay to think for yourself. Critical thinking is for losers and people who never want to receive a social invitation ever again.
But the dinosaurs did eventually die out, and sometimes it feels like maybe we’re experiencing a global T-Rex vs Velociraptor duke-out to the death. Maybe all we ‘normies’ have to do is stay underground until the last of the progressive and MAGA dinosaurs fall.
After all, we inherited the earth from them once before, and we can do it again.
My views have evolved since I was a know-it-all adolescent. Self-righteous certainty is the death of critical thinking and self awareness. My old university friends who are now 60-something radically woke social justice warriors perplex me. I can no longer relate. If they knew I was reading Douglas Murray books and subscribing to you and the Free Press, they would immediately unfriend me on Facebook. I wouldn’t exactly miss them.
If more than 6 months passed before she decided to false-accuse she should be charged with false-witness and punished.
Accused man's name kept from public as her name is, or both made public.
If investigation finds she lied then his background check do not have 'arrested for rape' and she charged false-witness.. Anyone spreading his name as a rapist charged as false-witness.
False-witnessers punished in public - tasered till screaming and soiling self. Fined an amount to double what he lost in wages and other costs for up to 2 years.
Should the false-witnesser's mother also be publicly tasered till screaming and soiling as an example to other mothers that drive away fathers and mind-rape their children so we all have to suffer the psycho?
I've seen enough studies that show women should not be trusted, so unless solid evidence like video of assault than she should be charged.
Too many innocent men's lives have been destroyed by lying vicious women to not make examples of them. Public screaming and soiling besides mothers and aunts and other adult family. And that is mercy because justice is stoning to death.
Society use to dispose of men and that must change even if many women must burn as witches. Want to dispose of my son, my brother, my uncle? die screaming with judges and all adult bloodline family, you demonic horrors.
That sounds about right for baby-murdering sickos.