Archive for 2022

OPEN THREAD: Bring the sugar.

“THOUSANDS.” IN A NATION OF 330 MILLION? In 48 hours of protest, thousands of Americans cry out for abortion rights. I don’t think this headline’s doing the work Vox wants it to.

Related: John Hinderaker asks, Why the abortion hysteria? “The extent to which liberals have gone bananas over the Dobbs case is a phenomenon that demands explanation. Most liberals, after all, understand that the Court has not banned abortion, or in fact placed any limits on it whatsoever. It has simply remitted the issue of abortion to the political sphere where it was prior to 1973, and where it always has belonged, thus ending a half century of usurpation by the Court. Moreover, abortion laws in the U.S. have been extremely liberal compared with most countries–almost every country other than North Korea, in fact. This chart shows in striking fashion how liberal our laws have been compared with Europe’s. . . . One of the many ironies of post-Dobbs hysteria was French President Emmanuel Macron denouncing the decision, even though the Mississippi statute that the Court upheld was more permissive, more liberal, than France’s own abortion law.”

Yes, the Mississippi law in question in Dobbs would be among the more liberal laws in Europe. But I’m wondering how much actual hysteria there is outside of the media, Twitter, and Democratic politicians. And they don’t count because they’re always hysterical about something.

But why? Well, Hinderaker has a suggestion: “Liberals don’t want to debate, they don’t want to persuade. They want to censor. They want some higher authority, whether the Supreme Court, Twitter, or corporate America, to declare all views but theirs out of bounds. They don’t want to participate in democratic politics, they want to rule by fiat. For all their wailing about ‘our democracy,’ the last thing liberals want is the actual give and take of a democracy, which usually entails compromise. I think that is the key reason for the Left’s hysteria over Dobbs. For liberals, having to argue, to persuade, to run for office, to participate in the messy work of democracy where you don’t always win, is a step backward. They had everything going their way, and now…this. Viewed in that light, I think the demonstrations, insurrections, encouragement of assassination of Supreme Court Justices, and arson at Christian maternity centers are understandable.”

JOHN PODHORETZ REVIEWS ELVIS:

Elvis is 2 hours and 40 minutes of camera swoops and dissolves and wipes clearly intended to evoke not only Luhrmann’s own past work but Elvis’s own physical gyrations. This thing never slows down to the speed limit, not even for a second. The problem is that after 10 minutes of dazzlement—the sets and costumes and cinematography are absolutely gorgeous—the whole project starts seeming crazily desperate rather than refreshingly exhilarating. By the time the first hour has passed, you feel simultaneously overstimulated and under-entertained. By the time the second hour mark has come, you start wondering where Fat Elvis is already so you can see the end coming. And when it’s over, you may feel like you never want to go into a movie theater ever again.

Aside from Luhrmann’s welcome insistence that Elvis’s use of African-American musical tropes was born out of love and respect rather than an act of cultural appropriation, he has absolutely nothing of interest to say about Presley and clearly has no clue what the man was about. That is no sin—Elvis’s best biographer, Peter Guralnick, points out that it’s very hard to get a bead on Elvis because he “never kept a diary, left us with no memoirs, wrote scarcely any letters, and rarely submitted to interviews.” Still, if you’re going to make a biopic, you have to present a compelling character we’re willing to follow for the length of the movie—and Elvis here is a total cipher.

Read the whole thing.

JEFF DUNETZ: After SCOTUS Abortion Decision, CNN’s Ana Navarro Pushes Eugenics.

Ana Navarro, a pseudo “GOP strategist” and a CNN commentator shocked the news channel’s audiences on Friday when she said that she supports abortion to kill off autistic and mentally challenged people like her own family. In other words, she supports eugenics.

Navarro’s words sounded like those of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. Sanger created the organization to practice eugenics–a sick belief that the human “gene pool” would be improved through selective breeding and sterilization. In Sanger’s case, improving the gene pool meant keeping African-Americans, morons, those with a family background with a history of illnesses, mental disease (like Ana?)  serious physical defects, and other undesirables from reproducing.

Perhaps she should used the original German phrase, “Lebensunwertes Leben.”

THE GODFATHER AT 50: Skip The Offer, Take The Cannoli.

My latest over at Ed Driscoll.com, comparing The Offer, Paramount+’s bloated and highly fictitious Mad Men-esque 10 episode making of series with Mark Seal’s brilliant recent book, Take the Gun, Leave the Cannoli.

TOP GUN: MAVERICK CATAPULTS PAST $1B AT WORLDWIDE BOX OFFICE:

Paramount/Skydance’s Top Gun: Maverick has raced past the $1B mark worldwide, becoming only the second movie of the pandemic era to reach such rarefied air — and Tom Cruise’s first time to the milestone in a career that has spanned 40 years. It took just 31 days for the aviators to get to $1B with the total through Sunday at an estimated $1.006B worldwide, including domestic’s estimated $521.7M and $484.7M from the international box office.

Cruise’s flying ace had already raced across $900M last Monday, and a few days prior had topped $800M to become Cruise’s biggest movie ever globally.

The overseas holds on this 36-years-later sequel directed by Joseph Kosinski have been nothing short of stellar. Last weekend was off just 21%, and the current frame, at $44.5M in 65 markets, is down only 26% — simply phenomenal.

Earlier: Top Gun: Maverick: Tom Cruise Delivers the Goods.

VIRGINIA POSTREL: Stakeholder Capitalism Isn’t Working As Planned.

The great value of the Friedman doctrine is that it establishes a coherent standard for making tradeoffs. Maximizing economic value tells you to “spend an additional dollar on any constituency provided the long-term value added to the firm from such expenditure is a dollar or more,” as Harvard Business School economist Michael Jensen put it in a 2010 article.

Stakeholder theory, by contrast, tells you nothing. It assumes you just make everybody happy. And, as Jensen wrote, “Without the clarity of mission provided by a single-valued objective function, companies embracing stakeholder theory will experience managerial confusion, conflict, inefficiency, and perhaps even competitive failure.” Jensen’s article is the best articulation of why what he calls “enlightened value maximization” is indispensable.

But neither he nor Friedman fully imagined the chaos that could ensue without it.

Look at the backlash when Walt Disney Co. tried to placate vocal employees by opposing Florida legislation to ban discussing sexual orientation with younger children in schools. The political pushback — like the original protests — reflected a sense of betrayal by a beloved company whose fans see their dreams and values reflected in its characters and stories.

Appeasing one group of stakeholders alienated others. It wasn’t hard for conservatives to find opposing voices within the company. Disney has nearly 200,000 employees and countless customers. All are stakeholders, and they represent every conceivable viewpoint.

By focusing on business goals, by contrast, Netflix, despite other challenges, has more successfully weathered its own controversies, from conservative uproar over the French film “Cuties” to more recent protests about Dave Chappelle’s jokes about trans women. To make expectations clear, the company revised its cultural guidelines for employees to explicitly say, “As employees we support the principle that Netflix offers a diversity of stories, even if we find some titles counter to our own personal values.”

Stakeholder capitalism implicitly assumes a cultural consensus identical to whatever its advocates believe. It harks back to the mid-20th century, when big US companies enjoyed little competition, mass media marginalized all but a narrow range of political, religious and social views, and hierarchy and security dominated worker expectations. It pretends social media, Slack channels and “bringing your whole self to work” don’t exist.

It’s really not working out well for Disney: Disney’s Stock Price Has Lost 50% Of Its Value After Year Of Leftwing Political Electioneering And Badly-Received Woke Programming.