Movie Club Thursdays – Vertigo (7-24-18)

Fridays at 3pm, I discuss a new book each week with Kevin Michael Grace.

July 27 The Tragedy Of Great Power Politics by #JohnMearsheimer
August 3 Loitering With Intent by #MurielSpark
August 10 Hackers: Heroes Of The Computer Revolution by #StevenLevy

Monday through Thursday, I do a show with Kevin on my Youtube channel at 5pm. On Thursday’s show, we’ll do a movie club and discuss a different film each week. This Thursday we will discuss an Alfred Hitchcock classic.

Roger Ebert wrote:

“Did he train you? Did he rehearse you? Did he tell you what to do and what to say?”

This cry from a wounded heart comes at the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” and by the time it comes we are completely in sympathy. A man has fallen in love with a woman who does not exist, and now he cries out harshly against the real woman who impersonated her. But there is so much more to it than that. The real woman has fallen in love with him. In tricking him, she tricked herself. And the man, by preferring his dream to the woman standing before him, has lost both.

Then there is another level, beneath all of the others. Alfred Hitchcock was known as the most controlling of directors, particularly when it came to women. The female characters in his films reflected the same qualities over and over again: They were blond. They were icy and remote. They were imprisoned in costumes that subtly combined fashion with fetishism. They mesmerized the men, who often had physical or psychological handicaps. Sooner or later, every Hitchcock woman was humiliated.

“Vertigo” (1958), which is one of the two or three best films Hitchcock ever made, is the most confessional, dealing directly with the themes that controlled his art. It is *about* how Hitchcock used, feared and tried to control women. He is represented by Scottie (James Stewart), a man with physical and mental weaknesses (back problems, fear of heights), who falls obsessively in love with the image of a woman–and not any woman, but the quintessential Hitchcock woman. When he cannot have her, he finds another woman and tries to mold her, dress her, train her, change her makeup and her hair, until she looks like the woman he desires. He cares nothing about the clay he is shaping; he will gladly sacrifice her on the altar of his dreams.

But of course the woman he is shaping and the woman he desires are the same person. Her name is Judy (Kim Novak), and she was hired to play the dream woman, “Madeleine,” as part of a murder plot that Scottie does not even begin to suspect. When he finds out he was tricked, his rage is uncontrollable. He screams out the words: “Did he train you? . . .” Each syllable is a knife in his heart, as he spells out that another man shaped the woman that Scottie thought to shape for himself. The other man has taken not merely Scottie’s woman, but Scottie’s dream.

That creates a moral paradox at the center of “Vertigo.” The other man (Gavin, played by Tom Helmore) has after all only done to this woman what Scottie also wanted to do. And while the process was happening, the real woman, Judy, transferred her allegiance from Gavin to Scottie, and by the end was not playing her role for money, but as a sacrifice for love.

All of these emotional threads come together in the greatest single shot in all of Hitchcock. Scottie, a former San Francisco police detective hired by Gavin to follow “Madeleine,” has become obsessed with her. Then it appears Madeleine has died. By chance, Scottie encounters Judy, who looks uncannily like Madeleine, but appears to be a more carnal, less polished version. Of course he does not realize she is exactly the same woman. He asks her out and Judy unwisely accepts. During their strange, stilted courtship, she begins to pity and care for him, so that when he asks her to remake herself into Madeleine, she agrees, playing the same role the second time.

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Is Kevin MacDonald’s Theory of Judaism “Plausible”? A Response to Dutton (2018)

Nathan Cofnas writes:

Dutton (2018, p. 2) says that his argument reduces to six basic claims: (1) “[G]roup selection is a robust model.” (2) “[P]eople tend to act in their ethnic interests.” (3) “Jews are more ‘group selected’ than gentiles,” which means they are genetically disposed to possess traits that give them an advantage in group competition, including “positive and negative ethnocentrism.” (4) The thesis of CofC—that Jewish left-wing activism during the twentieth century was part of a group evolutionary strategy—is more “plausible” than the “default hypothesis.” (5) Jewish left-wing activism “has indeed been in Jewish group interests.” (6) “Jewish representation in intellectual movements that are not necessarily ‘good for the Jews’ simply reflects Jewish high intelligence.”

Regarding (1), Dutton (2018, p. 2) states that it does not matter whether Jews were subject to more group selection than (white) gentiles: “[I]t may be possible for Jews to have developed the qualities highlighted by MacDonald through individual selection alone so group selection does not actually have to be accepted for it to be argued that Jews have been selected for high positive and negative ethnocentrism.” Since, at least on Dutton’s interpretation, the theory of CofC does not stand or fall with group selection, but requires only that Jews are high on ethnocentrism, I will not address the question of whether Jews were subject to more group selection, or whether evolutionary explanations based on group selection are in general plausible.1

I will address claims (2)–(5) in turn. I will not address (6), because this is essentially a partial endorsement of the default hypothesis.

Do “People Tend to Act in Their Ethnic Interests”?
Dutton (2018, p. 3) cites only two studies in support of the claim that “people tend to act in their ethnic interests.” First, Rushton (2005) reported that the most successful beggars in Moscow were ethnic Russians followed by Moldovans followed by dark-skinned Roma. That is, the (primarily ethnic Russian) pedestrians were generous to the beggars in proportion to their genetic relatedness to them. Second, Irwin (1987) reported that intertribal relations between Inuit in Canada reflect genetic relatedness: More closely related tribes are more likely to engage in cooperative behaviors, and are less likely to be excessively destructive toward each other during war.

Even taking the claims of Rushton and Irwin at face value, it seems like a big leap to conclude that “people tend to act in their ethnic interests.” Was it in the ethnic interests of white Americans to fight a war over the slavery of Africans, which killed 600,000 white people? Rich philanthropists of all races donate money to hospitals, theaters, and parks. If people tended to act in their ethnic interests, wouldn’t rich people use their money to support the reproduction of members of their ethnic group? Yet this is hardly the norm except in some small religious communities.

Suppose it is true that, as Dutton (2018, p. 3) says, “[o]n average [people] are more attracted to [those] who are more genetically similar to themselves, they are more likely to invest more in such people even within families and they are more likely to be friends with such people (see Rushton 2005).” Still, most people seem to be primarily focused on themselves, their family, and their friends. The activities that most people are emotionally involved with—sports, music, films, and the like—have nothing to do with advancing their ethnic interests. It seems a much stronger argument than Dutton provides is needed to establish the principle that “people tend to act in their ethnic interests.”

Are Jews High in Ethnocentrism?
Dutton (2018) cites two sources of evidence that Jews are highly ethnocentric. First, MacDonald’s “historical and anecdotal evidence.” Second, Dunkel and Dutton’s (2016) analysis of data from Midlife in the United States 2 (MIDUS 2), a large national survey conducted in the 2000s.

Regarding MacDonald’s “historical and anecdotal evidence,” if the argument in Cofnas (2018b) is correct, then MacDonald’s evidence is based on misrepresentations, distortions of history, and cherry-picking. Dutton (2018, p. 2) appears to accept that I have identified problems with MacDonald’s scholarship.2 So even on Dutton’s view, we should not take what MacDonald says at face value.

Regarding the second source of evidence, Dunkel and Dutton (2016) constructed a “religious in-group favoritism scale…by adding the response to four items”: (1) “How important is it for you to celebrate or practice on religious holidays with your family, friends, or members of your religious community?” (2) “How closely do you identify with being a member of your religious group?” (3) “How much do you prefer to be with other people who are the same religion as you?” (4) “How important do you think it is for people of your religion to marry other people who are the same religion?” They found that Jews and Baptists obtained (similarly) high scores compared to Methodists and Catholics. To explain why Jews supposedly evolved to be higher in ethnocentrism, Dunkel and Dutton suggest that, during long periods of persecution in Europe, “less ethnocentric Jewish individuals would likely have married out into the general population” (p. 314). This comment is noteworthy, since it explicitly acknowledges the obvious fact that marrying out into the general population is a sign of being less ethnocentric. (Opposing intermarriage also contributes to a high score on Dunkel and Dutton’s “religious in-group favoritism scale.”)

Rather than indirectly gauging the commitment of Jews to marrying within their group, it seems better to directly measure their propensity to marry each other by simply looking at intermarriage rates. Intermarriage rates among Jews do not support the theory that Jews are highly ethnocentric. Reform Jews constitute 35%, and unaffiliated Jews 30% of the American Jewish population. Another 6% are affiliated with denominations similar to Reform (Pew Research Center 2013, p. 10). According to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center (2013, p. 37), 50 and 69% of married Reform and unaffiliated Jews, respectively, report that their spouse is not Jewish. This is probably a significant underestimate of intermarriage among Reform Jews, because the spouses of many Reform Jews are gentiles who have undergone nominal Reform conversions, and they would be counted as Jewish in the survey—unfortunately, there are no reliable data on how common this is. An unknown percentage of unaffiliated Jews do not identify as Jewish at all, and these people, who are presumably unlikely to marry Jews, would be missed by the survey. These findings suggest that the intermarriage rate among the at least 71% of American Jews who are Reform (or associated with similar denominations) or unaffiliated is well over 60%, and may be greater than 70%. These are the secular, liberal Jews who participated in the movements discussed in CofC. Their marriage patterns suggest that they are, as a group, not particularly committed to associating closely with their co-ethnics or contributing to Jewish continuity. (The offspring of Jewish–gentile couples do not themselves become strongly committed Jews: 83% report being married to a gentile; Pew Research Center 2013, p. 37.) In fact, Jews have the highest intermarriage rates of any religious group in the USA (Riley 2013).

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‘Elton John and Prince Harry launch bid to ‘smash’ AIDS stigma’

AIDS is easily preventable: Don’t have unprotected anal sex and don’t share intravenous needles. Anyone who can’t follow such simple instructions doesn’t value his life.

NEWS:

AMSTERDAM (AFP) – Elton John joined forces with Britain’s Prince Harry to launch a $1.2 billion initiative on Tuesday to “break the cycle” of HIV transmission by targeting young men, among whom infections are on the rise.

On the second day of a major international AIDS conference in Amsterdam, the two lent their mega-wattage star power to calls for action to end the lingering stigma around the virus and protect generations to come.

“Young people are the only age group where HIV infections are rising, not falling,” warned rock star and veteran AIDS campaigner Elton John as he announced the launch of the MenStar Coalition.

“We have to do much, much more to bring men, especially younger men more fully into the fold,” he insisted.

The coalition brings together different partners, including the UN’s Unitaid and the US fund PEPFAR, as John warned that 24- to 35-year-old men were accessing HIV testing and treatment at “unacceptably low rates”.

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LAT: ‘Los Angeles is filthy, so I started picking up trash. I sure could use some help’

Charles Fleming writes:

Long before we were urged to Make America Great Again, we were told to Keep America Beautiful. Baby boomers may remember the 1950s campaign that made littering a criminal offense, a time when offenders were targeted by Donald Duck singing “Litterbug, Shame on You.”

Did we grow up and forget the message? Or did our children never receive it? Los Angeles is filthy.

Why has Los Angeles become more filthy over the past few decades? Has the composition of LA’s population changed towards people who don’t worry about litter?

Steve Sailer writes:

The Keep America Beautiful campaign was organized by rich WASPs and corporations in 1953 to shame Americans into not littering. (The rise of non-biodegradable plastics made litter semi-permanent.) As commenters have noted, the biggest breakthrough was the 1971 “Crying Indian” TV PSA commercial that used Iron Eyes Cody to racially shame white people into not polluting their environment.

(Okay, Iron Eyes Cody was actually an Italian-American actor who specialized in playing Native Americans, but the point is that the “iconic” commercial worked.)

The more popular way to quiet correct criticism today, though, is to furiously denounce critics as racists. Any criticism of Latinos for their propensity to litter is a Stereotype demonstrating that you are full of Hate.

From a post to a martial arts site: “I tra[in] ufc at a park near my house.

There is always some kind of party/quinceanera going on. And the aftermath is trash everywhere.

I rarely see this with whites and orientals (and not much blacks around here).

Que paso, putos?”

RESPONSES:

* They are from third world countries and bring their third world manners with them.

* The Dominican Republic was the most disgusting place I’ve ever seen in my life. Bags of trash lined the sides of the road. Huge unemployment rate and these lazy fucks can’t bother to pick up their trash or even burn it.

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Hollywood Rallies Around Director James Gunn & Others Who Joke About Pedophilia

* Breitbart:

A series of old tweets by actor-comedian Michael Ian Black about child molestation are raising eyebrows after Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn was fired Friday from Disney for similar jokes making light of pedophilia.
Black’s controversial tweets are filled with sexual innuendos about children, including so-called jokes about having sleepovers with young girls and having “quick” intercourse with a baby.

Below is a sample of the actor’s tweets between 2009 and 2014:

“Went to my kids’ elementary school Halloween parade. Disappointingly few “slutty girl” costumes.”

* Vox Day on Sarah Silverman and Hollywood’s Satan brigade.

* TV show Succession

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