I'm Entitled To Your Opinion Dep't: Mehera Bonner Reviews Dunkirk

The meat of her criticism is actually apt; the film doesn't appear to have an actual plot, but instead is a series of pastiches of interwoven stories: the older man (Mr. Dawson) piloting a private pleasure boat to rescue Tommies on the Dunkirk beach, the outnumbered fighter pilots taking on relentless Luftwaffe adversaries hectoring ground troops and sinking transports, the young soldier separated from his unit trying against the odds to make it home (Tommy), the commanders in charge of moving the men off the beach and onto the absurdly small (and shrinking daily) numbers of available military transports. That is, she's not wrong in this specific complaint.

But the film itself has earned a great deal of praise, and deservedly so, despite the overall failing of lacking apparent narrative. Part of that is because we already know the outcome: Britain's fathers came to the rescue of her sons, and even a significant number of French troops as well. It is beautifully photographed, flawlessly acted, and rippling with dramatic tension from the opening until almost the close. None of these virtues apparently appeal to Bonner:

But my main issue with Dunkirk is that it's so clearly designed for men to man-out over. And look, it's not like I need every movie to have "strong female leads." Wonder Woman can probably tide me over for at least a year, and I understand that this war was dominated by brave male soldiers. I get that. But the packaging of the film, the general vibe, and the tenor of the people applauding it just screams "men-only"—and specifically seems to cater to a certain type of very pretentious man who would love nothing more than to explain to me why I'm wrong about not liking it. If this movie were a dating profile pic, it would be a swole guy at the gym who also goes to Harvard. If it was a drink it would be Stumptown coffee. If it was one of your friends, it would be the one who starts his sentences with "I get what you're saying, but..."

How terrible — someone makes movies that appeal to men? Her reaction isn't quite "THIS MUST STOP NOW", but you can hear her mentally outfitting anyone who actually likes the film with an invisible fedora (the universal headgear of the MRA). The idea that men died in battle so that someone like Bonner could spout narcissistic and childish opinions is itself cringe-worthy, but as Kyle Smith ably answers in National Review Online, the problem is really a branch of the Annie Wilkes model of culture (emboldening mine):

In a moment of clarity I understood what the two main imperatives of higher education were to Absurd Feminist and to so many of her peers: First, instead of broadening her horizons and taking her outside herself to discover the world, she demanded the educators filter all knowledge through her own experience to make it relatable to her. Second, all learning was to be valued in proportion to how effectively it could be made into a cudgel in the identity-politics war. Dispatches, with its virtually all-male cast, represented a pernicious advance for the patriarchy, even if it was about the agonies suffered by men.

It seems unlikely that Marie Claire’s reviewer, Mehera Bonner, has before her an exceptionally bright career of writing about film. As for a career of writing about feminism, though, the sky, for Bonner, is the limit. Her essay could plausibly have appeared on any number of bristling feminist sites. What is her reasoning except feminism taken to its logical extreme? Feminists often declare to the world that they stand merely for an entirely reasonable proposition — say, that women’s lives are as important as men’s. Who would dispute that? Yet feminist writing usually continues far past this point into a need to prove women and men have been equally important in every context, even in history. If women turn out to be mostly irrelevant to an incident, then it is the moral duty of socially conscious creative artists to ignore the matter. They should retrain their sights on something that will give absurd feminists something they can relate to, something that will advance the cause of feminism in general.

 She doesn't like the movie; fine, we get that. But as Smith observes, "Feminism means constant maintenance of an imaginary set of scales, and she fears Dunkirk adds weight to the masculine side, tipping the culture away from women." What could be more absurd?

Presumably, They Don't Teach At A Veterinary Med School

"Don't Gender Your Pets". Author "Christie's" other stories are just as funny.

Bullety Stuff, Sunday Edition

• The narrative that Republicans are the principle reason why Obamacare isn't working is remarkably durable. Maybe Democrats should have created a system that wouldn't depend on their political enemies implementing it?
• The rise of the employer-provided "exclusive provider" health insurance plan. It eliminates out-of-network options for most things, but at a substantial savings ("double digit").
• Data Gone Odd looks at rape statistics (and particularly false reporting of rape) in a two-part series (part 1, part 2). As Scott Greenfield summarizes,
  
  

  The 2-10% false rape accusations stat is untrue. Actual stats:
  
  True-ish: 35.3%
  Definitively False: 5.9%
  Inconclusive: 58.8% https://t.co/6fMxzd3EaL

  — Scott Greenfield (@ScottGreenfield) July 16, 2017

• Perhaps the first recorded instance of publish or penis, i.e. the theory that getting cited in others' work "contribute[s] to 'white heteromasculinity'". 
• Steven Pinker thinks Harvard's attempt to shut down off-campus clubs starting in 2022 is a terrible idea. 
• Free speech is terrible, says progressive Christina Berchini.
• Even Vox Dep't: Nancy MacLean's hackish attack on the Public Choice school of economics backfires, Vox runs a wholly reasonable response, warning against reading everything as a conspiracy theory.

Goodbye, Moo

The toughest little dog I ever met. The biggest heart. She survived Montana winters without shelter. She killed songbirds and gave them to us, as if to say, "today, we eat!". She barked me in to the house, and out from it. She bit my calves to keep me from leaving the room. She taught me so much about dogs.

And now she is gone, a week ago yesterday, the fatal injection after days without eating, in our home and among friends and family. The house still seems empty without her.

Goodbye, Moo. I will always love you.

Dumb Polls And The Value Of College

Pew recently released the results of a poorly-worded poll showing that Republicans now believe that college is a net detriment to the nation. The poll did not inquire about particulars of why this might be, e.g. the crippling debt colleges bequeath their inmates. There is a cost-benefit tradeoff that is simply not getting done on college sheepskins, in the main. University professors, and more importantly, the vampire army of administrators hiding behind them count on the anesthetic of widespread American cultural approval of college as a means unto itself. Consequently, a lot of degrees end up providing poor returns on the substantial sums required to get them. Pretending that college is an unalloyed good in this way is deeply dangerous, as the ranks of young people with poor job prospects and mountains of debt show.

Despite the weak wording of the poll, the answers hint at who might think of colleges as a negative thing, and why. It is simply undeniable that academia remains one of the serious redoubts of Marxism in the west; there are things so stupid only a college professor can believe them. As they age, the academics and academia more broadly have become increasingly illiberal: legal racial segregation, a modern Jim Crow, now finds its primary impulse, not in the rural south, but in places like UC Berkeley and CSU Los Angeles, both of which operate black-only dorms. Students employ the heckler's veto to disinvite heterodox speakers from campus. Title IX, originally designed to provide gender equity in things like college sports, now is used to peddle false, hysterical tales of rampant campus sexual violence, fueling witch hunts pursuing chimerical dating fiascoes, ruining the lives of young men whose accusers may never be known or confronted; such young men have no right to legal counsel or due process. Modern women's studies programs are home to one of the most pernicious, anti-scientific lies ever told, the idea of humans as a "blank slate". That is, they promote the notion that there are no distinctly male and female behaviors and modes of thinking driven by biology, but that all these things result exclusively or primarily from social conditioning. You will look in vain in any of their supposed scholarly papers for reference to anyone doing work with functional magnetic resonance imaging, or evolutionary biology; it as if they operated in an academic silo.

So it is entirely comprehensible why people might look upon the university today as a horrifically expensive, self-indulgent, and even dangerous institution. Academia has become a haven for progressive dogma. It is deeply intolerant of divergent opinions. And it has the mammoth support of the Federal government.

Letter to David Noe, General Manager Of Rev-A-Shelf, LLC

Sent to David Noe, General Manager of Rev-A-Shelf, LLC this morning:

I have ordered three of your products for our kitchen, two of which have not fulfilled the basic requirement of fitting in the minimum advertised depth. The first was a clear manufacturing error (installed on slides at least two inches too long for the space, and so large they broke through the provided shipping box) and was replaced. The second, more vexing issue is with a 4WCSC-1835DM-2 two-bin drawer that extends approximately 3/16” past the limit of the 21-3/4” depth it is supposed to fit in. I have been in contact with Joe Dowdle in your customer service department, and have provided him with photos of the product and the obvious problem we have with it. He has twice told me he would get in touch with manufacturing and would call back, but never did. When I contacted him today, he didn’t even know my phone number (which I provided in my initial email on the subject) or email address (which he would have known had he kept it).

Frankly, your customer service is atrocious. It is simply inconceivable that for an organization this large you don’t have a trouble ticket system for dealing with such issues that retains such basic information as customer contact data (he didn’t remember that), product model (neither that), description of the problem (also forgotten), and history of the problem (nope) with its resolution. This is the third call I have had to initiate to get this resolved one way or another. It’s clear your company is shipping defective products; whether you care to rectify that situation will tell how much longer you stay in business.

In response, I got an autoresponder saying he would be out of the office until June 12. SRSLY.

Update 16:29 CDT: After sending this and posting it to Rev-A-Shelf's Facebook page and Twitter account, I heard back from a very contrite Mr. Dowdle. He at last determined that the issue was a manufacturing change that altered the depth requirement, which had not been propagated to the customer-facing parts of the company, including the website and resellers. He apologized for the delay as well. I also received a call from a woman who identified herself as the head of customer service for Rev-A-Shelf, and she, too, apologized. She also told me that she was surprised to learn that he had said they had no trouble ticket management system, because the company uses Salesforce internally.  Clearly if they have it, their support people aren't using it.

California's Single-Payer Delusion

I somehow managed to miss Colorado's rejection of a single-payer system by a stupendous 80-20% margin in last November's election, with overall tax hikes that would have amounted to a 7% increase on employers and 3% on employees. This followed Vermont's quiet rejection of single-payer on cost grounds back in 2014. Apparently this hasn't fazed California lawmakers, who continue to pretend that the most politically popular fantasy among naive Democrats isn't also impossibly expensive. Particularly, they appear to be soft-pedaling the reality that their proposed system will dwarf all other state expenditures by a factor of nearly four, leaving me to wonder who they will bludgeon to make the whole thing work.

Look, I get it — medicine is expensive, customer service sucks, and nobody can figure out pricing. But that doesn't mean shoveling the mess onto the state will fix those problems. It's not only naive to believe as much, it's incomprehensible: you can't fix costs without dealing with the physician shortage, patent abuse and regulatory moats, and a mess of other, related problems. Single-payer is basically saying, "hey, those things are terrible — and we should totally pay those guys their extortionate fees so nobody at the point of sale has to." It turns Martin Shkreli from a robber baron into just another guy making money in medicine.

Update 2017-05-23: Reason says the figure is only twice the overall state budget. Win!