Petition to cut Matt Damon from movie for displaying levelheadedness

Link here. Excerpt:

'As you know, Matt Damon’s been making some interesting (read: really boneheaded) comments related to Hollywood’s current reckoning with sexual predators.

First, the actor told ABC News that he knew Harvey Weinstein — someone he’s worked with regularly — had sexually harassed Gwyneth Paltrow years ago but he “knew that they had come to whatever agreement or understanding that they had come to” and that she “had handled it.” Then, he went on a completely unhelpful “not all men” kick, insisting we should be talking more about the good guys and the spectrum of bad behavior.

Now, Matt Damon may finally see it’s time for him to stop talking and start listening.
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And this all feels a little too familiar: Damon previously came under fire for not checking his privilege in comments he’s made about diversity in Hollywood.'

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Comments

... temperance of position is tantamount to blasphemy. The more I consider it, the more I realize that anything h@ving to do with women particularly as it pertains to men and sex has indeed become a religious cause, just one without a typical religious doctrinal underpinning -- though it does have an ideological underpinning.

Feminists have, like religious movements, pushed to get their own brand of religious values put in place without teaching the ideological dogma underpinning it. That is because if you teach a population the ideological dogma, it opens it up to critique and speculation. This dilutes the impetus to establish behavioral or attitudinal standards in a population, creating classes of "acceptable" vs. "unacceptable" ideas. Just as an example, in pre-colonial America, there were standards of behavior in the English settlements that required all manner of things to be done or not done on Sundays. One was that the wearing of a kerchief in one's pocket was punishable by being consigned to the stocks for some period of time. Being put in the stocks was a potentially fatal punishment depending on various circumstances, but it always entailed great pain and discomfort as well as a great loss of dignity. This is a perfect analogy to the hysteria we are seeing today: punishments way out of proportion to the crime due to the nature of the offense rather than the actual harm the offense may cause. In this case, the "offense" is being the voice of reason among very unreasonable people, to wit, questioning the size of the sanction applied in some cases relative to the greatness of the alleged offenses (and here we are by and large not even referring to actual legal offenses, just neo-social ones).

The underpinning of the no-kerchief rule of the 16th century was simply that kerchiefs were a mark of class distinction in old Europe and to sport one in a coat pocket was to act without the requisite amount of humility the religious bullies thought should be displayed on a Sunday. Humility is a doctrinal value in Christianity for specific reasons tied into the narrative of Christ, according to the belief, God and man in one who in a great act of humility, allowed himself to be sacrificed for the benefit of mere mortals. Thus to fail even to show some effort at cultivating humility, on a Sunday, no less, was an offense against Christian virtue, something that was in effect legislated by the towns. Thus forgetting to remove a kerchief from a coat pocket on a Sunday might bring down on a person a penalty of death. And even if death were not the result, the punishment was all out of proportion to the supposed offense.

Religious bullies are not interested in teaching doctrines and allowing people to decide how to express them for themselves. A self-professed Christian may not agree that refraining from displaying a kerchief constitutes a lack of humility, given that humility is an objectively unmeasurable quality. Someone exposed to underlying doctrine may, then, argue against the practice, and have as much right to as anyone arguing for it.

But as I said, bullies don't like to see people arguing openly and standing their ground. They like to force people to behave and believe the way they want them to. And religious bullies, like their schoolyard counterparts, are neurotic and insecure, gaining their jollies from forcing compliance on others, as well as shaming and holding power over them.

Today's #MeToo feminist bullies are like religious bullies. No discussion of underlying doctrine because to do so opens it up to critique, and nothing invites critique like modern feminism's nutty ideological positions. They want to shut down debate around substance and force others into compliance and demand conformity. To question the motives, or the extremity of thought, is enough to condemn the supposed wrong-doer, just as we are seeing here.

That original Star Trek episode, Return of the Archons, was a great example of this kind of monolithic thinking in action. Any criticism of "Landru" or the smallest lack of deference to his enforcers (the "law-givers") brought immediate condemnation. No kind of thinking about anything that was not approved by "Landru" was enough to get a person beaten to death by an angry mob, or if lucky, just re-processed/brainwashed via some kind of machine in a pseudo-religious ritual. I also think of The Prisoner and the episode A Change of Mind and the whole "un-mutual" thing, where failing to behave a certain way to a fellow Village resident, brought about arrest and a whole system of confession that led to no forgiveness, followed by some kind of brain-washing "re-education".

The two pop culture moments point to the same thing: religious thinking. It requires a suspension of critical thinking and a socially-imposed abject acceptance of a fairy tale of some kind. Failing to do so invites censure, sanction, real-life consequences that are not at all in line with the basic interests of justice that our forefathers so desperately tried to usher into common vogue and to protect with our Constitution.

Alas, the protection is limited to the people' relationship to the government. What happens when the people forget these principles or reject them themselves and instead implement this Dark Ages kind of thinking among themselves?

In a republic, you don't know who to execute when the revolution comes. We have met the enemy and she/he is our fellow citizen.

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