A male photographer friend on Facebook linked approvingly to “When the Grip Is a Woman (and the Gaffer and the Camera Operator, Too)” (nytimes):
Ms. Lister-Jones knew she wanted to work with a woman behind the camera. Only women behind the camera, actually: For her indie comedy “Band Aid,” released Friday, June 2, Ms. Lister-Jones hired an all-female crew, from the grips to the drivers to the production assistants.
“I wanted to see what it would feel like,” she said, “if a community of women exclusively created a piece of art together.”
The article raises a few questions:
- is it legal for an employer to establish a policy forbidding the hiring of workers based on sex, even when the job could be done by a person of any sex or gender ID?
- what happens to an employee who changes gender ID after being hired?
- could it be that the employer here established this policy merely to maximize profits (Hillary and the NYT assure Americans that women will do the same jobs with the same quality for only about 77 percent of the cost)?
- why did the filmmakers hire a male actor for a leading role? (based on the linked-to trailer) Are they making a heteronormative assumption that there is something better about a male-female romance than a female-female romance? If not, why not hire an all-female cast?
But I’m a little more interested in the question of why a male photographer, who has struggled financially for most of his multi-decade career, would celebrate an employer saying “We would never hire anyone like you” and “We got a lot of work done because we didn’t hire anyone like you.” As a 53-year-old with kids, I can understand that an employer would wish to say “We don’t hire anyone over 30 because it is a drag having old people around and we don’t hire anyone with children because they don’t like to work late”, but I wouldn’t cheer about that for my friends on Facebook.
Given that the entire worldwide demand for photographers could easily be met by an all-female workforce, why would this guy celebrate a system that, if adopted by all employers, would result in him never working again?
Readers: Is this an example of ”The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them”? Why is this guy happy to hear about a policy that might make it yet harder for him to get a job?
I’m pretty sure this is illegal. Imagine the outcry if a director announced that he wanted an all male or all white crew, none others need apply. The question is whether, even under Trump, this will be prosecuted. The bureaucracy is still staffed overwhelmingly with leftist Democrats who see nothing wrong with “reverse discrimination” regardless of what the law says.
I was going to copy and paste a part of the article over but it turns out there is, as I should have expected, paragraph after paragraph of nonsense.
As far as why this photographer is happy, that is an odd phenomenon. I know a man in a similar situation who, despite being in somewhat poor position and being harmed by these sorts of stunts, promotes them as well. Maybe my brain and his are just different.
He is just one example of successful brainwashing that causes him approve and even act in accordance with policies detrimental to his own well-being. He possesses the same religious state of mind as for example Russian скопцы did, maybe not so extreme on the spectrum of religiosity, but who knows !
What is interesting is that religious fervor exhibited by my progressive friends who subscribe to various and often contradictory dogmata of their faith (e.g. “race/gender is a social construct, all people are born with equal abilities, unlimited immigration is unconditionally good, etc”) does not seem to be correlated with their IQ at all.
Some things (mathematical ability, ability to analyze written works, etc.) are highly correlated with overall intelligence and other things (musical ability, athletic ability) aren’t. Religious fervor (properly defined) is not associated with intelligence, it’s just that ambitious individuals tend to channel their religious fervor to whatever is the thing that will get you farthest in any given society at any given moment. You get to serve some Higher Cause, your friends admire you for it and it’s career enhancing at the same time -win, win, win! 300 years ago in New England, that might have been being the biggest Puritan and running witch trials. A few years ago it was believing that pre-schools were dens of Satanism. Today it’s being the biggest believer in the secular religion.
Jack D:
Quite.
I am most intrigued by not the overall set of high intelligence believers some of whom may cynically lie for pecuniary purposes, but by the substantial subset of sincere believers — the first subset is uninteresting.
With the second subset(true believers in “the cause”), it feels as if a different part of their brain is used, without any communication to their “rational” side, when they try to reason about what I called “religions matters”. Of course, the second subset members are all proclaimed atheists and act with extreme resentment at a mere hint that their beliefs might not be quite rational. Some matters are just taboos — “I do not feel comfortable talking about that”, this sort of things.
The Alt Right has a derisive 4-letter word for a man like this: cuck.
Ivan: As far as people seeming to be generally intelligent but unable or unwilling to talk about these topics, I have not been able to tell whether they have had some success so would rather not risk this by saying something unpopular or have not had enough experience living in situations where one is exposed to the bad effects of whatever policy they support.
Also, certain groups may just enforce their views more strongly. For example, try being against some types of immigration publicly in Cambridge. Someone might try to get you to lose your job.
Virtue signaling? On a platform that exists almost entirely because of it, at this point? You don’t say!
The rise of the internet led to a lot of articles painting a dystopian picture of how you would be able to tailor your online experience such that you’d never have to see a contrary position on the issues, and how this would lead to a polarized society. Like how surprised Orwell would be with how our surveillance economy has surpassed his wildest imaginings, I am surprised about how severe the divide has become. If it were just “news,” it would be one thing, but it’s not. A typical person’s online experience is overflowing with political ideology, and comments and humor, on every site you visit, almost exclusively flow out of an assumption of which side you hate.
My go-to example has become Reddit. I dare you to read it without a filter. It’s not just liberally-biased due to a preponderance of left-leaning subreddits. Anti-left propaganda has been fenced-in to /r/The_Donald and a few related subs. Anti-right/conservative/Republican/Trump sentiment, on the other hand, bubbles over from their dedicated subs to literally everything else, from videos to images to humor, and everything in-between.
Another good example is this execrable Samantha Bee show on TBS. I’ve tried to watch a couple times. It’s just a literal propaganda front for anti-Trump forces. It’s not even remotely funny. Who’s watching this trash? Apparently, enough people for Variety to write a glowing article about its viewership numbers. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised in a country where the crass joke thief Amy Schumer is considered entertaining.
As I write these things, I feel compelled to point out that I would have voted for Bernie, if I’d have had the chance, but there was no way in Hell I was going to vote for Clinton. I had to settle for Johnson.
Does telling you this signal my virtue, in this forum? Did I avoid a hateful reply, here, by noting that I did not vote for Trump? Do my comments ring more or less true by stating my biases, specifically on Phil’s blog? Does knowing that I find Amy Schumer literally unwatchable help my standing with you?
My point is that your average internet experience is literally overrun with confirmation bias. I figure the people that frequent this blog can see and understand that, but for the average person on Facebook? He’s probably responding to the post without even understanding what he’s trying to accomplish by it. He just knows that he wants to be accepted by a certain tribe, and supporting a cause that is personally detrimental to his livelihood only scores him more points in the eyes of those he’s trying to impress. It’s the modern online equivalent of street cred.
“•is it legal for an employer to establish a policy forbidding the hiring of workers based on sex, even when the job could be done by a person of any sex or gender ID?”
I thought it was legal for small businesses, the employer would be non – EOE entity and would not get any public business. I could be wrong.
I remember when this madness started in earnest during the nineties; this gentleman’s mental state can be best described in 2 words: cognitive dissonance.
I’m see he believes in gender equality, but also apparently in the superior status of women. Certainly he is confident that race doesn’t exist – while bemoaning “white privilege.”
We are going the same way as the old USSR; ultimately the weight of contradictions alone will collapse the old order.
“We are going the same way as the old USSR; ultimately the weight of contradictions alone will collapse the old order.”
I doubt it. The disease is much more severe that the temporary infatuation with the communist idea in 1917-1922. Afterwards, the whip/terror had to be applied to carry on for the next 60-65 years. Even under the oppressive regime, some fundamental sanity wrt basic stuff, like gender, remained . It appears no longer to be the case amongst Western “elites” in this country and elsewhere.