Insanity & Doom Update V

Item & Prediction Why this winter could turn out to be a surprisingly sexy Oscar season

It’s not that Call Me By Your Name is especially explicit (though the famous peach scene is definitely going to get people talking), but that it’s unmistakably sensual. Sex is no mere byproduct of love; nor is love an elevation of sex. In Call Me By Your Name, the romantic and the erotic are inextricably intertwined.

Sex and romance also go hand-in-hand in The Shape of Water. It takes less than fifteen minutes for Guillermo del Toro’s fairy tale love story to show us full-frontal nudity and then masturbation — it’s all part of a daily routine for our protagonist, Eliza (Sally Hawkins).

The old advertising line will have to be replaced by Sodomy Sells. Took the best picture Oscar last year (Moonlight) and—the big prediction!—will win again this year, with Name.

This is the tender story of a boy being seduced by a man, with one of them masturbating into a peach and the other eating it. This scene was filmed and will be shown, and there has been much jubilant discussion about it. How can that lose?

Answer: it cannot.

You might say the competition Mother! has a great shot, too. One scene has an earth god, or whatever, tearing a baby out of a woman and tossing it to a ravenous crowd. As Slate writes, “Then a baby gets eaten.” They do not write disapprovingly.

Item EU Moves to ‘Criminalise’ Pro-Life Views and ‘Abortion Denial’

The European Parliament has been accused of trying to “criminalise” pro-life views after passing a report which describes reducing access to abortion as “violence against women and girls”…

The Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) produced the interim report, which calls on all EU member-states to “urgently” ratify a new convention on violence against women, and “recommends”:

“The EU strongly affirms that the denial of sexual and reproductive health and rights services, including safe and legal abortion, is a form of violence against women and girls.”

Cole Porter knew: “The world has gone mad today; And good’s bad today; And black’s white today; And day’s night today.” And the absence of killing is violence today.

Item Peril in Numbers: Affirmative-action hiring endangers the FDNY

How many lives might be lost during Sifton’s training process didn’t enter into the judge’s calculations. He ordered the FDNY to hire 45 women—among the first of the department’s judicially ordered hiring quotas. By 2012, all pretense of honesty and objectivity had been abandoned. Federal judge Nicholas Garaufis ordered the department to adopt an unambiguous quota-hiring system–finding that overt discrimination did not need to be proved because a test’s “disparate impact” on minority-group members is sufficient evidence of bias…

The results of all this quota-setting and bean-counting were predictable. FDNY insiders say that the department struggles to fill the minority quotas despite degraded hiring standards. Hence Paul Washington dissembles to potential recruits. Hence standards for women have grown so lax under Sifton’s dictum that one female recruit failed entrance exams six times and was hired anyway. Hence nine felons–each a beneficiary of Garafulis’s quotas–graduated in a class of probationary firefighters from the city’s fire academy last November.

Diversity is our weakness, and our sickness. Diversity always leads to politically enforced mandated quotas. Always. And quotas always lead to reduced standards. Always.

Item Losing faith? How religious is the British public and how has this changed over time?

* Half (50%) do not regard themselves as belonging to a particular religion, while the largest proportion (20%) of religious affiliates belong to the Church of England. Nearly twothirds (64%) of those aged 18–24 do not belong to a religion, compared with 28% of those aged 65 and above.

* More than half (56%) of those who belong to or were brought up in a religion never attend religious services or meetings. Just 14% attend weekly.

Levels of religiosity have declined over the past three decades and are likely to decline further, mainly as a result of generational replacement.

* One in three (31%) in 1983 did not belong to a religion, compared with one in two (50%) now. The largest decline has been in affiliation with the Church of England, which has halved since 1983 (from 40% to 20%).

* This change — which is likely to continue — can be explained by generational replacement, with older, more religious, generations dying out and being replaced by less religious generations. There is little evidence that substantial numbers find religion as they get older.

Since this is Great Britain, “religiousity” in most areas means Christianity, and in others Islam, which is no great than 6%, according to the survey details. But it is growing, growing.

Item Social Justice Warriors Suggest Banning Veterans From Campus

See below. Thanks to the sharp eyes of Karl Narveson who showed us this is was a hoax (thank God).