A New Hollywood Creative Paradigm?

Hollywood is still mostly trapped in its view of itself and society. A stale, 1960's era view of themselves as the good enlightened, struggling against a repressive, McCarthyist people and populace. A group of the true saved enlightened saints, against a dark and evil American people. But recently a glimmering of change is sprouting through Hollywood. Oh don't worry … they still hate America and Americans. But their attitude about themselves is changing. Partly this is due to economics and technology, but partly because of how they see themselves. The change is mostly in the ranks of producer/director/writers, not actors, of course, but it is quite interesting.

The change is that instead of seeing themselves as the new Puritans, "saints" who persevere against a repressive, sexually and politically, "evil White male" regime, the new crowd sees themselves as Batman. Who everyone wants to save them, by extreme violence, while condemning them for doing so if they ever get caught.


Mostly, of course, I'm talking about the Nolan Brothers, and JJ Abrams. The Nolans are famous for the Batman movies, which endorse pre-emption and snooping and all sorts of vigilante violence. Abrams has joined with Jonah Nolan, Christopher's brother, to produce "Person of Interest," perhaps the most unsettling and for what it is, revolutionary conservative show on television.

Nolan's Batman, famously, exists in a world and a city that has failed. Gotham is a pit, decaying into corruption. The cops, save one man, Gordon, are corrupt. Criminals run everything. The few honest District Attorneys are slaughtered, or driven insane, and cannot function. Judges routinely send criminals into a revolving door nuthouse. Nothing works, which is why Batman is needed. He exists because no one else will save Gotham. Leaving it to him, and whatever methods he himself finds appropriate or not. The only lines he follows are ones he draws himself.

You can immediately see the appeal for Hollywood's creative people. All their institutions are failing or have failed. The Studio system that gave them money, a budget, people, and told them what to do are long gone. Have been for nearly forty years. What replaced them, the Agent system, is failing. People are not buying DVDs anymore, nor are Blu-Ray sales fixing the deficit. TV rights are down, foreign sales have been no help with massive piracy, and 3-D is a gimmick whose time has now definitively passed. As Chris Nolan says, film-makers and audiences have spent nearly a century getting ordinary films right, and knowing how to see them. You can't watch 3-D with vision problems (most of the audience), on an Iphone or Ipad, or on ordinary TVs, where people most want to watch movies.

Nothing has worked, and so a few creative people have cast themselves as vigilante heroes. Determined to save the city (Hollywood) from the forces of darkness and violence (foreclosing on the Malibu beach-house) by whatever means required (appeasing the audience with traditional heroes). This earns them disdain from the populace (Hollywood's in-crowd) but they are extra heroic and mavericky.

I'm sarcastic, but that is the process. And more are joining them. Captain America and Thor, no matter what their problems, were straight ahead super-heroic. Therefore, ultra-mavericky when everyone wants to be the hip new happening guy who is the toast of the town and ticks off audiences. Fear, desperation, and a desire to stand out have led the Nolans and others to make movies that appeal to ordinary people with heroics and a distance from the Hollywood mores of "you stupid hicks, your 1950's values stink!"

Person of Interest takes that even further. It is astonishing that a conventional liberal like Abrams is even associated with it (he executive produces). In a key scene, the character Finch explains to the character played by James Caviezel, what he did for the government. Finch, he tells the man he hopes will work with him, developed a software system that would sift through everything. All the phone calls, emails, bank account activity, surveillance videos, supermarket purchases, everything, in daily life, that records activity in a database. And it would look for things, to predict violent acts about to happen.

The public, he says, wanted no more 9/11s. They just did not want to know how it was done. The government having given itself permission to read any e-mail and listen to any phone call, after 9/11, used his program to find out terrorist plots. But he tells the Caviezel character, there was a problem. The program found other things, mundane murder plots not associated with mass casualty terrorism. So he threw those away, but later came back and had the system send him just the social security numbers, of those people who were of interest. They could be the killers, they could be the victims, he could not tell because all he could safely send himself was the social security numbers.

Here there is another failure. The government could, if it wanted to, stop the murders from taking place. As the Finch character tells Reese (Caviezel), while crimes of passion or the heat of the moment cannot be prevented, those plotted over days and weeks and months, often can, because the plotters leave clues that his system can spot. But the government only cares about mass murder terror plots. Because that is the only concern of the public.

Caviezel's character is a former CIA man, presumed dead, who killed a lot of terrorists and enablers after 9/11. He himself, like Batman, decides where he will draw the lines, and what he will or will not do. He does not like killing people, but is good at it. A burnt out and bitter man, he finds redemption in saving people who can be saved but the system lacks the will and ability to save.

The pilot was based on a screenplay developed by Abrams and Nolan, and is pretty revolutionary. The government, far from being an omnipresent fascist state, does the bare minimum to protect a public that wants to pretend it doesn't know what is being done. Again into the gap of failure, by the government AND the people, rush the heroes using new technology and will power, to "be there in time," to stop murders. The pilot tested off the charts, the highest of any drama pilot in 15 years, with "crazy broad appeal you don't usually see," so much so that CBS moved CSI aside for it, and won its timeslot in the premiere with 13 million viewers.

What Hollywood is very cautiously nibbling around the edges of, is that PC and Multiculturalism and restraint and all that, don't work. More 9/11s don't happen because lots of people get killed by drone strikes, combat patrols, and the like aided by outsourced torture, lots of software sweeps of bank accounts, phone calls, emails, travels, airline tickets, and more, plus human intel from forces needing US help/protection/assistance against enemies. Not by a heavy dose of hope and change. More like lots of drone strikes and SEAL missions never publicized, which the public would like to ignore.

Ultimately this is not sustainable, and the lone hero model while very dramatic has its own limitations, as actual policy. Which Hollywood's creative types understand because no one makes a movie by themselves. Indeed the series raises all sorts of questions. Are we willing to tolerate thousands of murders, each year, because we don't want to have intrusive, software-spying? If a couple of guys using the software can save that many, why not the police using it at will?

Naturally, this only around the edges. There is the PC heroic Black female cop. The usual "corrupt White cop ring" though the hot young female prosecutor is corrupt, the schlumpy divorced White guy is the intended victim not the killer. PC still reigns supreme in some areas. No one is asserting a broad-based challenge yet.

But … the whole point of the show is that the good guys use the ever-present surveillance technology (the hero Reese snoops a lot on targets electronically) to stop crimes from happening. In the pilot, they save three lives. They stop murders by not just breaking but obliterating every law, rule, and criminal procedure on the books. They step in because the government will not. The heroic Black female cop is shown as always three steps behind, not knowing who she is pursuing, or even why the hero acts as he does.

Let us put it this way. Not even JJ Abrams believes in Hope and Change and the West Wing anymore. Instead it’s a couple of vigilantes stepping in where the FBI or NYPD will not.
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Pinker's Violence Fantasy: the Truth About War and Violence in the Post Cold War Age

The WSJ's article by Steven Pinker Why Violence is Vanishing illustrates the desperate nature of Liberals and the Modern Western Society (which is profoundly Liberal in the modern, PC sense). Wanting desperately to believe that there is no more reason to fight, sacrifice, and empower nasty and dangerous men to protect us, and build nasty and dangerous weapons, the hope is that by clapping real hard for fairies, ala Peter Pan, we can believe and make it so.


Pinker notes, accurately enough, that the growth of agricultural states and enforcement technology (swords, spears, arrows, etc.) allowed centralizing monarchs to cut down hunter-gatherer personal violence which was horrendous and daily. Enlightenment Monarchs in Europe further cut down violence that was constant and grinding by eradicating banditry, enforcing laws, and promoting safety. This is why native European martial arts and weaponry, including staff fighting, knife fighting, bludgeon fighting, and unarmed combat disappeared save Savate in Marseilles, an ultra-violent port that kept that art alive until the Twentieth Century turned it into a sport. All of this is true.

But what Pinker does not contemplate, is how violence particularly in Europe and China was compressed. True Renaissance peoples did not slaughter each other personally as Dark Ages people did, let along hunter gatherers … most of the time. But a third of German speakers were killed in the Thirty Years War 1618-1648 and the terms Magdeburg Quarter entered the terminology of Europe. In China, the Taiping Rebellion wiped out 20 million people between 1850 and 1864.

Technology and new social orders tended to suppress day to day violence. Neighbor did not stick a spear into neighbor, because he had run off with a daughter or wife. Disputes were adjudicated by the state, even in Aztec Mexico. Bernal Diaz Del Castillo in his "Conquest of Mexico" first-hand account notes how Montezuma spent hours every day listening to people who came before him to judge disputes, this from a people who practiced ritual human sacrifice and cannibalism (as did, notes Diaz del Castillo, all their neighbors and the allies of the Spanish).

BUT … when the state loses control, or warfare becomes "total" with new weaponry that makes old orders obsolete, as in the 1600's, or again in the 1940's, horror emerges. Ordinary Japanese men, often under strict orders from high commanders NOT to engage in rape, pillage and murder, and facing an advancing enemy, spent all their time doing so. The destruction of Manila as American forces advanced in contravention of the commanding officer's orders is one example. Done by men who would not have dreamed of ever doing that in Japan. The violence exacerbated by a civilian population accustomed to obeying orders and unable to offer any real resistance anyway.

Violence, by being so rare, becomes almost viral when it does break out, infecting people with horrific results. There is a scene in the otherwise tedious and boring movie "the Debt," where the villainous Nazi doctor says he knew they would succeed when Jews handed over their children. Von Wallenstein and Tilly were hardly nice men. But they would have found it inconceivable to boast of such a thing, because for them, violence was a path to glory. The idea, of killing children as a means to become a famous and accomplished man would have seemed like … madness. One only became famous by fighting a powerful foe that could certainly destroy you. There was nothing to be found of glory in killing children, old men, women, and defenseless men. Though certainly they did that, on attacks on towns, their views of violence was that their glory came in open battle against a foe well able to defeat them.

Now we come to the heart of Pinker's argument. Like the "War Nerd" Gary Brecher, Pinker believes that somehow humans have stopped becoming violent, and that war will no longer break out because, well dammit human nature changed. He hand-waves the wars and civil wars that have broken out since the end of the Cold War and nuclear duopoly, including the Iran-Iraq War in the twilight of the Cold War, the Central African Wars of 1998-Present (about ten million dead or so), the Sri Lankan Civil War, the constant wars in Sudan, Somalia, and Afghanistan, the Iraq War, the Afghan War, 9/11 and the prospect for non-state violence not seen since the Treaty of Westphalia (growth of non-state militias). Pinker points to globalization and trade, ignoring that some societies are permanent losers in that unless they …

USE WAR TO CONQUER OTHER PEOPLES.

Look at Egypt. It cannot as Spengler/David P. Goldman notes, feed its people, manufacture anything worth buying, or produce literate people let alone engineers and other college graduates who are employable. All it has is War. The hope of conquering Israel, taking the Mediterranean gas fields, and then going on to conquer perhaps weak Italy, rich in resources, slaves, food, land, and without any meaningful defenses or even the will to defend itself.

Egypt, in order to survive without war, would have to deep six all of Islam, spend its time studying math and science not heaving their butts into the air five times a day, use the scientific method not something written in the Koran to figure out the world, teach their women to read and write, outlaw polygamy, give women equal rights, allow religious freedom and intellectual freedom, and promote a national concept of hard work and studying. Egypt would have to copy … China. And they cannot even be China, much less South Korea, Japan, or Finland. All that would destroy nearly everything that makes Egyptian society. The same goes for nearly all of the Muslim world, which would have to cease being Muslim if it is to eat, unless it makes war.

What Pinker does not realize, is that the AK-47, easy GPS, nuclear weapons from Pakistan, Iran, China, and so on, allow a vast equalization. Pakistan can cow the US, attacking our embassy in Kabul according to Admiral Mike Mullen in sworn Congressional Testimony, because they have nukes and we are afraid of them. The same is true for all those North African regimes. Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya cannot feed their people. But they can cross the Med in boats, come ashore in Italy, France, and Spain, and simply take over. Killing any who object. That's violence, and violent enslavement. Which awaits Europeans who have a toy/pretend military and no will to use even that.

An example of Pinker's blinkered, utopian views are below:

Another pacifying force has been commerce, a game in which everybody can win. As technological progress allows the exchange of goods and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of trading partners, other people become more valuable alive than dead. They switch from being targets of demonization and dehumanization to potential partners in reciprocal altruism.
For example, though the relationship today between America and China is far from warm, we are unlikely to declare war on them or vice versa. Morality aside, they make too much of our stuff, and we owe them too much money.
A third peacemaker has been cosmopolitanism—the expansion of people's parochial little worlds through literacy, mobility, education, science, history, journalism and mass media. These forms of virtual reality can prompt people to take the perspective of people unlike themselves and to expand their circle of sympathy to embrace them.

The War Nerd has said the same thing, and much the same was said in … 1913. Britain and Germany simply traded too much with each other to go to War. This was also said in 1938, and of the US and Japan in 1940, which had considerable trade.

What neither the War Nerd nor Pinker really understand is how much of a loser globalization makes a lot of societies and people. Now Egypt, as Spengler notes, has to compete with China for food. As does, note, the US. The US can compete, because it is a richer society. Egypt cannot. So it is starve or war. Egypt will choose … war. Because the cost of War has gone down.

Most "loser societies" do not believe that they will pay any real price for War, and discount their enemies ability to match their "fighting spirit" and willingness to win. Advantages in jet planes or nukes are discounted, and perhaps not too unrealistically. Israel in 1973 had nukes, and Egypt still attacked it. Israel at one point faced annihilation by Egypt, and did not face nukes. If Israel did not use them, in its then greatest hour of need, would it ever? [Likely, not.]

Western societies are often, for the most part, unable to offer violence in any meaningful way. Save fantasy violence in movies, and the idea expressed in recent TV shows and movies that the public wants violence done on its behalf to be safe, no more 9/11's, but does not want to know how it was done or who did it. The violence is kept secret. No bodies in Afghanistan show, nor in Iraq now, though there are plenty. Still even less coverage of people killed by drone attacks in Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, tribal Pakistan, and rumored, Kenya, Tanzania, Eritrea, and Ethiopia.

Meanwhile "loser societies" remain immersed in violence. Violence in unimaginable and unreported ways permeate every inch of daily life, particularly in Muslim society and Latin American society. Santa Muerte or a thinly Catholicized Aztec Death-God, demanding human sacrifice, is rising, with people being tortured and killed over Twitter comments. Often the mass violence has no purpose save the satiating of the killers desires for murder and death. Given the widespread prevalence of human sacrifice and cannibalism that the Conquistadors found in Mexico (not just the Aztecs, EVERY TRIBE DID IT), you might argue that Mexico is reverting to pre-Columbian violent type.

Muslims have daily violence in their society on a deeply personal level, widespread, as well. Women are genitally mutilated, often honor killed, rape is done by judicial punishment, hanging and stoning to death for adultery is on the rise, child brides are increasing, and so is violence between Shia and Sunni, and against all non-Muslims unlucky enough to live in lands filled with Muslims in any number. This is the advantage, so Muslim thinkers and Mexican Drug cartel members alike, view versus the weak and soft West which is unable and unwilling to deal out violence except when it can massively pretend it is not.

Pinker and Brecher alike share in my view, a fundamental flaw by accepting the past as an absolute prediction of the future. They overestimate trade and cosmopolitanization. As Mark Steyn notes, the arrow of civilization does not go one way, women in Cairo in the graduating class of the University looked modern in 1959, and still fairly modern in dress in 1979. Today they are muffled in Burquas. Kabul in the 1950's had women in modern dress in record shops.

Most of the world's population lives in a place where people worship Santa Muerte, or the governments urge them to please on no account kill and eat Pygmies or Albinos for magic powers, or where women are honor killed because they talked to the wrong boy. These are places where commerce means only poverty, because now they must pay more for food and everything else, and they have nothing to sell. These are places where violence is a way of life, constant and casual, and where it is viewed as the best way to get ahead in life.

Globalization has hotwired these places right into Western civilization, and they are not being removed any time soon. Violence, and disturbing violence, are only going to increase. Why? Because the State is a joke, unable to stop violence any more (quick how many Flash Mobs have been crushed) and only able to send middle class people to jail for improperly filling their recycle trash bins. While all the while lacking any external measures to deal with violence except things done in secret and willingly ignored.

Pinker, and Brecher, are state of the art circa say, 1975. Today, they don't grasp that failing states all over the globe (particularly in the West where violence to suppress greater violence is not allowed against non-Whites, see the London riots) running hand in hand with moral pretensions, are easy pickings for failed societies that live in violence. For now, the great majority of Santa Muerte's violence stays South of the Border. That is unlikely to remain so, any more than Muslim violence will remain mostly outside of the West either.
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Mr. EBT and the Death of the Welfare State

One of the most fascinating things about the internet is how it collapses different cultures, events, and people into an "endless now" entirely outside the mainstream media's attempt to edit and control the news that people receive. The video on Youtube linked by Drudge today ("My EBT" by "Mr. EBT") promises an incendiary repudiation of not just Obama, but every Democratic policy since LBJ.




Clive Crook at the Financial Times believes only a "move to the middle" can save Obama's Presidency, but Obama encapsulates much of what the Democratic Party has become: the Anti-White Guy/anti-White Middle Class party.

Democrats rely on gerrymandered districts, with Black and Hispanic voters, and state and nationwide, on Black votes around 95%+, and Hispanic votes around 65-70%+, to win. With a about 30% of the White vote, this is often enough. And the coalition of the anti-White votes and the White elite (Steve Sailer's "hi-lo" team-up) is based on transferring money from middle class voters to Black/Hispanic patronage politicians, and folks like Mr. EBT.

At a time when unemployment is at record highs, families are stressed by ever rising food and energy and clothing costs, Clive Crook does not get it, nor do most of the establishment. Voters among the White middle and working class have rejected the Welfare State because the Welfare State does not exist for them. The Welfare State exists for Mr. EBT. A man incapable of earning a living or doing much of anything, other than "keeping it real, dog." The Bismarckian Welfare State, giving ordinary workers a direct stake in the State, by getting various checks and benefits, regularly, is gone. Taken up by race-based Welfare and a permanent Jihad against the White working and middle class.

It is Mr. EBT on the lower end, making life miserable for pretty much everyone, and various enthusiasms of the White Elite Upper Classes, such as "green" lunacy, hideously expensive electricity rates, banning private autos (but not limousines), flights for the average person (but not private jets) and the like.

There is no more money to be gotten out of the White middle and working class, without a French Revolution style fight over taxation. There is no legitimacy or trust or desire to fund a Welfare State oriented around Mr. EBT. This video, a trivial affair, may yet be the opening start of the widespread repudiation of the Welfare State. Drudge has linked to it from the top of his page. The NYT obviously does not want anyone to see it, nor does the rest of the media. But the very act of the Drudge Report alone (which dwarfs the page views of say, the NYT or CNN) linking it and millions of voters and taxpayers seeing it, is revolutionary.

There is no going back to the Welfare State. The Tea Party exists because ordinary White working people, of some money or struggling means, just don't believe the government exists for any other purpose other than to take money from them and give it to Mr. EBT. Barack Obama and his policies just to borrow a Marxist phrase, sharpen the contradictions and class warfare (with overt racial underpinnings) between the hi-lo team up and the White majority. White guilt and shame are poor foundations for that sort of coalition, and the "swipe, swipe" of Mr. EBT may just start the beginning of the end of the Welfare State. You cannot ask the majority of the nation to make themselves patsies forever.
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Nintendo's Best Bet: Kid Friendly E-Readers

Nintendo's DS with 3-D is a failure. Fears by parents (who buy the things, after all) over seizures and the like limited its sales. Another round of price cuts from $249 to $169, have failed to boost sales. Nintendo has always been the cheaper, affordable, and kid-friendly (no violent stuff for parents who buy the systems anyway) gaming system. That strategy, along with intensive in-house development and integration, has allowed Nintendo to survive when other systems dropped out, were absorbed, or destroyed by larger competitors (mostly Sony and Microsoft). Now of course cheap games on Iphones are really hurting both the Wii and 3DS. But Nintendo has a secret weapon, if only it unleashes it. Books!


E-books are becoming the dominant way in which Americans buy books. Its convenient, fast, and much, much cheaper. With library lending already here for e-pub (Nook and the like) and coming for the Kindle (mobi format), you don't even have to go to your Library. Just download the book from your computer. E-books are cheap, with many free versions of the classics, and other low-cost options of back catalog books. Nintendo has seriously missed an opportunity.

Currently Amazon is the dominant e-reader, but it has an appeal mostly to older, and female consumers. No surprise there, Women account for 80% of the fiction market. Look at the Kindle Ads on TV. They all feature (hot young) women. A kids oriented reader, cheap and good enough, would do well. Particularly if it played kid-friendly, non-violent games (parents are not too keen on shoot-em-up, beat the prostitute to death, games like Grand Theft Auto) and was ... cheap.

Right now, the Kindle with Special Offers is at $114. Of course it needs a cover, and a light for night-reading. But that's cheap. Nintendo could offer a DS, without 3-D (who cares, really) for around $120 with a larger screen, in color, aimed at combining kids reading with educational games. Chess, backgammon, Go, Chinese Checkers, Scrabble, and the like. Currently people are laboriously hacking "homebrew" solutions to read books on their Nintendo DS systems. That's ridiculous. Nintendo ought to offer a cartridge for them, sold off their own website and through retailers, to read e-books. While using their own advantage (in-house engineering staff) to combine cheap/easy gaming and e-books. Bonus if the system reads both e-pub and Kindle mobi format.

E-readers are all targeted at adult women, and that leaves boys and young girls out in the cold. There is a market gap, in which Nintendo can challenge the Ipad and Iphone. No one wants to read a novel on their phone, or much less have their kid reading Treasure Island on it while they need to make a call. A price point of say, $120 that includes games no parent could object to ("Chess makes your kids smarter") and a way of transferring e-books already purchased onto the system, is a no brainer. [Likely a usb-adapter to connect a cartridge to a computer, in a simple file transfer system.] Meanwhile take money put on the table by current Nintendo DS users who would go to the trouble of doing a "homebrew" system. Allow the current DS systems to become e-readers officially, with a Nintendo sanctioned and supported cartridge.

The 3-D bet has obviously failed. Time for Nintendo to do something else. Someone will make a kid-oriented E-reader. It might as well be them.
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Anna Faris and What's Your Number: Redefining Female Sexuality

The Wall Street Journal recently did a story on Anna Faris and her new movie "What's Your Number?"

Produced by New Regency for $25 million and distributed by 20th Century Fox, the movie centers on the sexual exploits of Ally Darling (Ms. Faris), a hard-partying young woman who resolves to track down all of her exes—with the help of a hunky amateur sleuth, played by Mr. Evans—in an attempt to avoid sleeping with more than 20 men in her lifetime.
...
Still, the idea of such a promiscuous lead character was enough to give some studio executives pause. "We had conversations like, 'Is 19 better than 20?' " says Ms. Smith. Ms. Faris wanted to go in the other direction, suggesting to screenwriters Gabrielle Allan and Jennifer Crittenden that the number of past sexual partners be raised to 50. "They were like, 'No, 20's fine,'" she says.

A slew of new movies centering on women behaving badly have been released or are in the works. Hollywood is aiming them straight at female audiences, and they reflect a redefinition of female sexuality.


Some of these movies have been failures. Crazy, Stupid Love has made only $78 million domestically, as of this writing, and only $21 million in foreign revenues, according to Box Office Mojo. The movie cost $50 million to make and another $30 million or so to market, so the movie is likely a net loss, but not one that is a terrible drag (studios always get considerably less than gross revenues, taking around 75% of the first week end revenue and around 50% of the revenue thereafter domestically, and often selling foreign rights at a fixed fee in concert/bundling with other films). The movies are cheap to make, and Hollywood facing huge drops in DVD revenue, no rescue in 3-D, and no great rescues in streaming, is looking to cut costs and find a formula for making cheap movies they can sell and make profits on, even with reduced margins.

In addition, many studio execs are now courting female audiences, an easy transition from the female orientation of TV, from which many mid-level execs have made their transition. While Network heads and production studio heads in TV remain mostly male, the execs under them are often women, which makes sense given that most people watching television are in fact, women. Male-oriented films are a risk. They can hit big, like the Batman films under Christopher Nolan, 300, Taken, the Transformer movies, and some of the Marvel films. Or they can fail spectacularly, like Green Lantern, or Green Hornet, or Cowboys and Aliens. When the movies fail, they do so at a great cost -- the movies require expensive action sequences, often pricey CGI, and represent considerable downside risk. Since most execs don't share in the upside, they tend to want to hedge their downside. This as much as anything accounts for the desire to make a lot more chick-flicks, just raunchy ones.

What is interesting is that the films are redefining sexuality among women, particularly in acceptable behavior, but that there are still limits. Faris wanted the "number" to be 49 sexual partners, and the lead want to avoid sleeping with 50 not 20 men. The screen writers took a more conservative tack, wanting only 19 partners for the lead, not 49. But the limits are being pushed outward, not inward. This reflects in my view a fundamental unhappiness that modern Western women have with their men. Women in the West have moved to far greater heights, than compared to women in any other time and culture. But they remain unhappy, they want "more" from their men. If they live lives richer and more fulfilled in many ways than Cleopatra, they want Caesar or Marc Antony. Not boring old Beta Male Bill in the cubicle next door.

"Crazy, Stupid Love" falls into this category. The plotline concerns the lead character, played by Steve Carrell, who is having dinner with his wife, played by Julianne Moore. She tells him she's unhappy, is having an affair with a co-worker (played by Kevin Bacon), and wants a divorce. They had married as high-school sweethearts and Moore is the only woman Carrell's character had slept with. The rest of the movie concerns Carrell working with a younger, Pickup Artist mentor (Ryan Gosling), to become attractive to women, and gently rebuffing the 17 year old babysitter who has a crush on him to his 13 year old son's dismay. All so he can "win back" his ex-wife who Carrell's character admits to, "was responsible" for the break-up of their marriage by ... not being sexy enough and desired by other women.

The largely failed, because of course it wasn't attractive to men, and women don't want to go back to a guy who failed initially at being sexy. If a man fails in that regard, women want to trade up. This is the appeal of George Clooney, or Brad Pitt. They ARE already sexy, and therefore are the goal to which female protagonists largely aspire in their movies. Besides, most women would prefer Kevin Bacon to Steve Carrell, fantasy wise. But it is interesting in how Hollywood perceives women's interests, and so far as women are generally unhappy with the state of men today in the West (not sexy enough) that is relatively accurate.

TV is even getting into the act, with Are You There Vodka, It's Me, Chelsea based on the memoir by Chelsea Handler and starring Laura Prepon ("That 70's Show") as Chelsea. The lead character is wildly promiscuous, and often drunk. Set to debut mid-season on NBC, the show like Sex and the City is unapologetic about serial sexual behavior by the attractive female lead. Hollywood in both movies and TV is betting that women are comfortable with portraying lots of sexual partners for women as something not to be ashamed of, at least as long it is below a magic number. That's pretty revolutionary, in terms of what women themselves have defined in the West as acceptable sexuality.

Underlying the promiscuity, in both Sex and the City, and the Handler book and TV series (as well as the Faris movie) are the unhappiness the female leads encounter with the men in their lives. It was Tiger Woods who cheated on Swedish supermodel Elin Nordgren, not the other way around. It is George Clooney who dumps his girlfriends, not the other way around. It is Leonardo Di Caprio, who dumps his girlfriends, not the other way around. Women in the West are desperately searching for a dominant, Alpha A-hole they can keep, and since the price these men extract is casual sex, that is what drives an ever expanding sexual partner count for modern Western Women. As I noted back in 2010,, author Julie Klausner's "I Don't Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Faux Sensitive Hipsters, Felons and Others" details her tawdry sexual encounters searching for that elusive, dominant Alpha A-hole male:

Like most of us, she spent her twenties ricocheting from douchebag to douchebag, and she reveals every crappy moment in her dating memoir I Don't Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Faux Sensitive Hipsters, Felons and Others. As expected, there are tons of laugh-out-loud lines delivered from Klaunser's sharp-wit pen. More surprisingly is how cringeworthy tales of blow jobs with goths and bedbug-infested one-night stands are followed with sage observations. For instance, she points out the stark difference between guys and men. (As she writes, if Mad Men was called Mad Guys, it'd star Joe Pesci and not Jon Hamm.)
...
Historically, leading men, at least in comedy, have featured either the feckless or the boorish: the Fred Flintstones and Bullwinkles and then useless beta males. In my book, I say date guys like Rowlf and Fozzi and not Kermit. Let me think about it.
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It's the teenage boys I'm worried about. They're not going to college in numbers. They're going to be angry -- depending on who's coming back from the war. There are charities for girls and I'm all for that, but ultimately, the real problem is the epidemic of inferior men - which is basically what my book is about.

Women have been trying to tell men in the West what is wrong. They just are not sexy enough, dammit! Useless, inferior, beta males. That's why they sleep with hipsters, trustafarians, indie rockers, and felons. Ricocheting as the reviewer (herself a young woman) from douchebag to douchebag. Hollywood is dialed into that complaint, itself being populated in middle and near upper level management, by women. Who share the same complaint. Its one thing if say, your husband is Robert Downey Jr. He's a big time movie star. He's Iron Man, or Sherlock Holmes! It is quite another if your husband or boyfriend is some corporate drone, who does not excite respect or more importantly, desire among your girlfriends. If your girlfriend does not want to sleep with him, he's a useless, inferior, beta male.

This is why Hollywood is worth examining. Hollywood tends to respond poorly, like GM before it, to demands by its customers, but it does respond. How it operates, and what it produces, tells you at least what elite women are thinking, and the men around them as well, in terms of how society functions and how they think it ought to function. So far at least, Hollywood (and publishing) recognize that the large amounts of sexual partners their attractive leading ladies (Klausner is not bad looking, Handler quite attractive in her twenties, Prepon a classic leading lady, Faris quite attractive, Moore still turns heads at age 52) end up with in films/stories is a result of there being too few Alpha A-hole men that are willing to commit. To be that reformed bad boy (like Downey Jr.) that has both domesticity, but not too much, an edge like a fighting dog that is well trained.

That this is not a realistic expectation, for the 99.99% of women who lack the supermodel beauty of say, Giselle Bundchen needed to attract a Tom Brady in the first place, has not yet penetrated. But clearly women are not happy with all these partners, preferring in the main to have one great, sexy, dominant, super-guy. And complaining when they don't get one.

The male part of the equation is of course ignored, but Hollywood being a gay-female ghetto that is to be expected.
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Addendum to Whiskey's Law

In Why The West Collapsed: Case Study Sweden, I proposed "Whiskey's Law" which states that the degree of Multiculturalism and PC in a society is directly related to the amount of equality between men and women, and particularly between men and women of the elites. That the greater the equality between the sexes, all other things being equal, the more loathing of the civilization, culture, heritage, race, religion, and so on will occur in the society. And the greater emphasis on Multiculturalism, PC, and in particular an attempt to import non-Western peoples. A society that has social superiority between (particularly younger) women and their male peers will therefore all other things being equal, will be plagued by PC and Multiculturalism. Naturally, as with all social science theories, this remains merely a theory, and subject to constant revision. In my view, however, any attempt to explain the collapse of the West into PC garbage, must fit the facts, and explain the variance, why some societies are more PC than others.


In the same way that Black society is worth studying, because Blacks collapsed much faster into illegitimacy than Hispanics, Whites, and Asians, so too are places like Sweden, or the United Kingdom. Any remedy that seeks to reverse say, illegitimacy will find far greater effectiveness if it can first understand why the Black nuclear family so rapidly ceased to exist, and why Asians have the lowest rate of illegitimacy among racial groups in the US. Whiskey's Law is only a theory, one I offer for testing and revision, to understand why PC and Multiculturalism is so strong in some places and not in others, and how to remedy the situation.

There are of course limits. Switzerland may have a greater social distance between men and women (women only got the vote over all Cantons in 1971), or it may be that direct democracy simply limits elites. It is however quite odd that elites in the West conspire in the "hi-lo" team-up as Steve Sailer noted, with the low part of the team-up being foreigners. A commenter from India noted that the elites in India have basically brushed off the middle class, noting they have hundreds of millions of votes from poor people, and thus don't have to listen to middle class concerns. But India did not see the need to import impoverished foreigners against their own people, nor has similar "hi-lo" team-ups in places like say, Thailand, or Portugal or Ireland or Hungary resulted in mass immigration, even when in some cases the amount of poor people is relatively low compared to the middle class. It seems odd that elites in the West would seek to import aliens in every way to their nations, given the overt threat to replacing them, which they themselves recognize. The famous quote in Sweden by a high ranking Socialist party member that when Muslims become the majority they will treat Swedes well. Who really believes that?

Other nations that have low amounts of PC and Multiculturalism may be reflecting direct democracy and limits on elites, rather than higher amounts of inequality socially between men and women. But it does seem quite odd that elites in places like Sweden loathe themselves and their nation, while in say, Japan the elites love Japan and all aspects of being Japanese. As do say, Italians and being Italian, even or especially among the elites. Italian elites as far as I know, don't go around disparaging Verdi or Da Vinci and saying they were nothing but trash for being "Dead White Men." Nevertheless the usefulness or not of "Whiskey's Law" remains in its power to describe and PREDICT what societies will be riven by self-hatred and thus PC and Multiculturalism, and which societies will be relatively free of it.

I must also point out that what (under Whiskey's Law) Western Women are seeking, and particularly Elite Western Women, is not a Hitlerian "Kinder, Kuche, Kirche" society, (children, kitchen, church) but one in which men are sexier. If most men are equal, socially, they need to be sexier in other areas. When men do things women say they want, like share household chores, change diapers, cook dinners, do the dishes, etc. they must be far sexier. If today's women's grandmothers were satisfied with men who were faithful, loyal, loving and dependable, and their mothers with men who were faithful, loyal, loving, dependable, and charming and intelligent, today's women demand men who are faithful, loyal, loving, dependable, charming, intelligent, and most of all SEXY!. George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Leonardo Di Caprio can afford to change diapers, or take care of kids, or be a "Kitchen Bitch" if they want to -- they're big time hot celebrity men who most of the female population wants to have sex with, they can afford it. Today's men, cannot, without an extra effort to become far sexier than they already are.

This accounts in my view, for the failure of the nuclear family in the West, seen first among Black people. Most men cannot be George Clooney, by definition. And being a sexy dominant A-hole who is also charming, in other words "Game" as defined by the various pickup artists, such as "Mystery," or Neil Strauss (aka "Style") or Roissy, is akin to becoming an accomplished martial artist. It takes massive dedication, constant practice, extended training, and astonishing amounts of discipline. Time that competes with all other demands.

Women when made equal to most men, don't want a return to social inequality at lower, previous levels. They do not want a return to being "barefoot and pregnant" in the kitchen. Indeed if you look at the movie "Bridesmaids" which plays on female fears of status and romance, the lead character is insecure because she's unemployed, suddenly, loses her boyfriend, and looks like nothing compared to a successful friend. Women want to keep their careers which mark them successful, competent, and important, outside romantic relationships. Women know, that they will not always be pretty (the error many women consistently make is overestimating their time that they will be pretty). They do not want, despite the popularity of Mad Men, and other projects mining that territory (correction, "Pan Am" is being shown on ABC, not NBC, "Playboy Club" is on NBC), to return to the days of female social inequality. Women in the West merely want sexier men. Sexy being defined as dominant, cocky, arrogant, amusing, always having the right words to say, and being desired by all other women around them.

The ability of men in the West to become what women want, that level of sexiness, is probably quite limited. A few pick up artists and their followers, if they practice diligently, can become that kind of man. Which women find quite satisfying. Probably more common will be the "Situation" type approach, the muscle-guido combination which is found in the site Hot Chicks With Douchebags. It probably does not matter which approach is taken, the recovery of the West hinges on women finding Western men sexy and therefore worthy of defense and admiration. If most men become like the Situation, well it does not matter in the short term, because then PC and Multiculturalism would die down. Most Western Women finding their men quite sexy, because now even if they were roughly equal in pay, status in the company, and so on, working alongside them in a cubicle next door, many women would want them. Therefore, they are by definition desirable. And thus, worthy of defense.

PC and Multiculturalism, therefore, as defined as part of "Whiskey's Law" is merely the overt disgust of most Western women particularly those in the elites with the non-sexy nature of the men who are mostly equal to them. If not outright inferior in social stature, a dweeby guy being inferior to a hot chick, even if the dweeby guy is a relatively high earning accountant and the hot chick works at a Starbucks. The way then to kill PC and Multiculturalism, if "Whiskey's Law" is at all an accurate model for explaining those phenomena, is to make most men far sexier. Thus erasing the reason for PC/Multiculturalism among (particularly) elite women.

Can the West be saved? I think yes, but it will not be saved by acts of bravery, it is sad that no one remembers or cares about 9/11 and the heroic sacrifices of the firemen and police that day, or the passengers who fought back on Flight 93. Women particularly in the elite do not lust after them. Instead of Special Ops fighters, firemen, cops, and ordinary men thrust into heroism, women lusted after sparkly gay vampires (Twilight) or more brutal kinds (Tru Blood). Justin Bieber and Robert Pattinson are objects of lust. Not firemen and cops.

Rather, the West will be saved by men like the Situation, or Roissy, or those who follow either path. To become sexy. Like it or not, the fundamentals of human nature still apply. Women will defend men they find desirable and sexy, no matter what they do. Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Clinton, all behaved criminally or poorly, but women defend them because they are the big-shot big man dominant A-hole that most crave. [Not all women crave the A-hole, but enough do to make that behavior the dominant preference in women in the West.] No amount in justifiable pride in the considerable achievements of the West, which in total add up to far higher than any other civilization, will save the West. Women don't care about that any more than they find the ability of male nerds to create amazing technology sexy. Rather it is the social dominance by being attractive to the broadest range of women that has the only possibility of saving the West. One Pickup Artist or Douchebag at a time.
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Steroids Are Bad For You

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