The need for restraints on behavior and where this comes from

Here I’ll discuss some points on political theory, but in fairly abstract form.  Unlike most of my hit pieces here, no ideologies will be harmed.

First of all, imagine that you’re all alone on a lush but uninhabited island.  You could do anything you want, and nobody would mind.  In this tropical paradise, nobody cares what you do.  Furthermore, nobody can offend you, injure you, or violate your rights.  It’s impossible for you to do these things to anyone either.  Nobody else is there!

If you’re a hermit and skilled enough to live off the land, you’ll seldom see anyone else unless you choose to walk to town.  Except for the rare occasions when you do meet someone, then once again, you can do anything you want.  Other than that, there’s nobody who might potentially do anything bad to you, or even offend you.  Technically, the law of the land applies, but nobody cares.  However, on the rare occasions when you are around others, then you’ll have to abide by certain minimum standards of behavior, like wearing clothes.

There’s not too much unclaimed territory left where you can do that, or property where others won’t mind you hanging out indefinitely, but you get the picture.  Another important consideration is that humans are social creatures.  Few of us actually want to be hermits.  For the rest of us, constant solitude would drive us a bit crackers.  However, people aren’t perfect.  We have to moderate our conduct to get along with others.  I’ll get into all that later on.

The evolution of societies

Now let’s consider mankind in the state of nature.  It’s a little different from what Rousseau envisioned, dreaming it all up from pure theory.  We don’t have a time machine to see exactly how it rolled in the early Holocene period.  However, we do have well-documented records of tribal societies from the Age of Exploration.  Even now, in a few remote areas, there are still some tribes that have had hardly any contact with the outside world.

Ten thousand years ago, everyone was living in relatively small tribes.  They shared some characteristics with small towns.  Everyone knew each other and was familiar with their personality quirks.   The tribes did have social hierarchies, but very simple ones.  Everyone knew where they fit.  Social mobility was not achieved by making lots of money as it is now (because there wasn’t any) but rather by gaining reputation and not doing anything to lose face.  The chief was probably the strongest hunter.  If there was an irreconcilable leadership dispute, the challenger could take his followers and branch off to form another tribe.  The shaman was whoever could talk to spirits, gain useful information from them, and heal the sick, or at least do a pretty good acting job of all that.  Law was a fairly simple matter, things like “do what the chief says”, “don’t injure your tribesmen”, “don’t run from battle”, and so forth.  When early mankind figured out where babies come from – actually a pretty significant development in society – then “don’t fool around on your spouse” was added to the list.

When tribes got larger – numbering thousands or tens of thousands – things got a little more complicated.  The barbarian tribes in Europe’s Dark Ages are a pretty good example.  Youths built up their reputation and deeds, and the most seasoned warriors got to be officers.  This later evolved into the hereditary peerage system.  Customary law was getting somewhat more complicated:  “the penalty for a punch in the nose is X, the penalty for knocking out a tooth is 2X”, etc.

Now let’s go way back again, let’s say seven thousand years ago or so.   Small towns were beginning to form.  Being chief had become a hereditary position, probably not long after they figured out where babies come from.  Whoever set up the place became the ruler of the new city-state, forming its first dynasty.  New technologies came along.  For example, someone figured out how to bake clay into bricks, and that you can build cool stuff by stacking them together.  Eventually the cities got a little larger as other tribes drew in.  They would’ve had some differences in dialect and in customs, at least at first.  Past a certain growth in population, not everyone knew each other any longer.  Misunderstandings and conflicts became more frequent.  They had to develop customs for politeness and acting civilized.  Those two terms are from the Greek and Latin word for “city” – polis and civitas.

Fast forward a little further to about five thousand years ago.  The first nations were consolidating in Mesopotamia, China, and Egypt.  Allied city-states united under a single king.  With major cities developing, this needed more hierarchy and infrastructure.  I’ll spare you a long monologue on the evolution of the legal system.  Let’s just say that settling disputes became a little too much for just one man to handle, so this got delegated to judges.  Legal codices got longer, and were recorded with that newfangled invention, writing.  Hammurabi’s Code is one of the most famous.

In time, the legal codes got quite extensive indeed.  For example, medieval Iceland’s law book was called the Grágás.  (That means “Grey Goose”, for some reason.)  It’s the size of three dictionaries.  I’ll resist the temptation to monologue too much about their legal system, but they did get by with just a few regional chiefs.  Disputes were pretty simple back then.  Nobody had to figure out the intricacies of what you can and can’t do in the stock market, for example.  One problem with such a minimalist government was that if you won a lawsuit, you’d have to organize your own Viking raid to collect on it.  Other than that, modern libertarians would’ve loved it there, so long as they spoke Old Norse.

Fast forward to present times.  Populations are exponentially far beyond what they once were, and climbing.  A large fraction of the population lives in cities of millions, and people don’t always know their neighbors, much less everyone else in town.  Customs may vary greatly, and dozens of languages are spoken in some of these cities.  As for the legal system, even the IRS tax code alone would make the Icelandic Grágás seem like a leaflet.  As for the government, that includes dozens of agencies.  Unfortunately, it’s to some degree under the sway of powerful commercial interests, some including international business empires, as well as some very wealthy individuals.

Anyway, things sure got complicated over the last ten thousand years!

The sources of control

OK, so let’s go back to the first point.  To get along with other people, there must be agreed-upon standards of behavior.  That’s pretty important, especially if you have millions of fellow townspeople.  These come from three sources.

1. Self-control
2. Control by social standards
3. Control by law

The first one is pretty simple.  Your id starts screaming like a spoiled brat, your superego yells at your id to shut up, and your ego makes the final call.  Those who have good self-control and treat others with respect tend to have fewer conflicts with others.  Nobody’s perfect, but when a righteous person has a conflict with someone else, it’s usually because the other person was being unreasonable or crossing boundaries.  This is the most agreeable form of control – you made the choice.

As for the second, this includes agreed-upon social standards like customs, ethics, and morals.  (The latter two words come from Greek and Latin roots meaning “customs”, though in English they take on different shades of meaning.)  Some of this is cultural, and religion fills in another part.  Control by social standards is less agreeable than self-control.  You have to live by other people’s rules.  Noncompliance will lead to various social penalties:  odd looks, gossip, the perception that you’re a weirdo, or (at the utmost) shunning.  Still, these are relatively minor compared to control by law, though it gets bad if it’s something that affects your income.  More aggressive forms like shivaree, tarring and feathering, and running miscreants out of town on a rail have gone by the wayside.  If people tried those things these days, then they’d be perceived as the bad guys.

When people don’t share the same set of customs, misunderstandings are more likely.  People from the urban northeast may come across as pretty brusque to a Minnesotan, even when they don’t mean it.  People trained to be excessively polite are at risk of getting walked over by pushy people (no matter where they originate).  That’s a pretty minor example.

If your Southeast Asian neighbors barbecue a dog, that might be a little much for you.  If they see you scratching your nose, they’ll think that’s disgusting.  Misunderstandings between cultures are generally because one doesn’t live up to the standards of another.  As for religion, minor differences don’t matter much these days.  For that matter, atheists can get along in devout communities without feathers being ruffled all that often.  However, there are limits to that.  If a bunch of Muslims settle next to a Hasidic neighborhood, then feathers will be ruffled.  Generally speaking, the more different people are in the same society, the less freedom is possible.  In the beginning, I promised that no ideologies would be harmed, so I won’t go too far with that one.

The third item – control by law – has to step in sometimes.  This is when people don’t control themselves, they refuse to conform to social standards, and a problem results which is serious enough to require intervention by one of the layers of the government.  It’s always been around in one form or another.  Anarchy is pretty silly, suitable only for failed states and fourteen year olds, and it’s been a train wreck on the rare occasions it happens in the real world.

Although it’s a necessity, control by law is the least agreeable form.  At the minimum, you get handed a speeding ticket that might cost you a day’s wages.  Getting sent to prison is worse than getting disfellowshipped from your church, unless you consider it the only source of salvation from an eternity in hell.  (Incarceration is temporary, even for lifers.)  The more enlightened countries such as ours do have several rights and procedural protections for the accused.  However, if you’re innocent but a prosecutor has a case of tunnel vision – a frequent hazard of that occupation – then getting out of the judicial meat grinder is still no picnic.

Plato had much to say about the law.  One analogy he made was that it’s a virtue to dress nicely, but it wouldn’t make sense to mandate it by law.  Indeed, the legal system is a pretty blunt instrument.  Unfortunately, the laws are getting more numerous and persnickety.

For one example, I got a nastygram from the city because I had trash barrels in front of the house.  However, it explained that having trash barrels any place by the side of the house is OK, and it even included a helpful diagram.  At least half of my neighbors got that note too.  Is this something worth micromanaging?  For some odd reason, my property values nearly have doubled in the last several years despite our wicked ways.  If any of us had told the city to take a hike, we would’ve been fined and then slapped with a lien for nonpayment.  For any scofflaws who refused to pay the dreaded trash-barrel-out-front fine, they’d probably get thrown out of their own homes after a sheriff’s sale.

A thousand years ago, Anglo-Saxons were swinging swords.  These days, they’re bothered by trivialities like this.  That’s progress, supposedly.  That was one offhand example; there are entire websites to make fun of silly laws.

Finally, a few centuries ago, attorneys started out as people who were familiar with the law and skilled at rhetoric.  Today, their billable rates are in the same ballpark as surgeons.  They typically specialize in specific legal disciplines:  contracts, wills and probate, criminal law, slip-n-fall suits, etc.  Not even the most brilliant attorney is an expert in every facet of the law.  Their days (often stretching into the night) involve searching through dusty tomes of case law to defeat word games by the opposing attorney, and to counterattack with word games of their own.  If one of those prosecutors mistakenly thinks you’re the bad guy and stops looking for other suspects, then you’re definitely going to need a lawyer to find your way out of the maze.  Simply put, their skills are needed for figuring out what the law actually says.  This facet of modern civilization is more complicated than ever!

Anyway, here are a couple of other ancients who had some things to say:

The more laws, the less justice.
– Cicero
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
– Tacitus

Hopefully some of this was food for thought.

The Boy Scouts of America is in a death spiral after surrendering to the gay agenda

There is an Arabic proverb that goes something like this:

Once the camel gets his nose in the tent, his body will follow.

Pointing this out might result in a lecture about the “slippery slope” fallacy.  Well, it’s not exactly a fallacy if it’s actually the strategy!  The Boy Scouts of America are a case study for this.

The BSA is over a century old, a venerable institution that has since then instructed over a hundred million youths in positive values and practical skills.  For generations, it’s been a way to connect with nature, a great social opportunity, and a place to have fun.

Things started to get shaky during the 1970s.  Scouting was becoming increasingly at odds with the zeitgeist, but I’ll spare you a rant about all that.  They tried to adapt and get hip with the times.  Unfortunately, the moves turned out to be ill-considered.  They survived by going back to the basics, and membership numbers began climbing again.

Today, they face an even greater crisis, and membership levels are below half of their former peak.  It’s a little more than just today’s kids who can’t be convinced to drag themselves away from video games.

The Homintern takes aim on its target

These are some of the things that cultural Marxism does

The Boy Scout oath is the following:

On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.

That’s in pretty clear language, not a lot of wiggle room there.  However, some people didn’t care for the last part of it.  Morally straight?  Well, we can’t have that, now can we?

BSA has been under tremendous pressure for a long time, and sued nine ways from Sunday.  This includes by heavy-hitting outfits like the ACLU.  Those folks in particular have some other agendas too.  James Baldwin, the ACLU’s co-founder, once said:

I, too, take a class position. It is anti-capitalist and pro-revolutionary. I believe in non-violent methods of struggle as most effective in the long run for building up successful working class power. Where they cannot be followed or where they are not even permitted by the ruling class, obviously only violent tactics remain. I champion civil liberty as the best of the non-violent means of building the power on which workers rule must be based. If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties. The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental.

Ain’t that special?  Anyway, I digress.

Highlights on the timeline of destruction

1980:  A young adult from the Bay Area was turned down for an application to the 1981 National Jamboree.  His membership had lapsed, but the greater problem was that he was gay.  They probably wouldn’t have known about it if he hadn’t come out publically in a newspaper interview.  This became the subject of a 1998 lawsuit – a little late to help him get to the jamboree, though.

1990:  A scoutmaster got kicked out because he publically came out gay, again via a newspaper article.  He sued, of course; it’s the great American tradition!  That one went all the way to the Supreme Court.  Quite surprisingly, SCOTUS ruled in favor of the Boy Scouts in a 5-4 decision.  Did one of the liberal Supreme Court members switch to decaf that day, or take some wicked cold medicine?

2000:  BSA adopts a “don’t ask, don’t tell” position.  Were they hoping to avoid vexatious litigation?

2013:  BSA caves in following all the lawfare and other pressure.  They vote to allow openly gay members, though not gay scoutmasters.  Will this be enough to take the heat off of BSA?

2015:  Openly gay scoutmasters are allowed too.  By now, BSA’s membership has been falling steadily across all age cohorts.  When BSA abolished their mean and discriminatory policy, for some reason, membership numbers did not rise again.  After gay guys were now free to take youngsters and adolescents out into the woods, the membership numbers kept dropping – what a surprise, huh?  The Venturers (ages 14-21, formerly Explorers) have fallen the most over time.  During the late 1980s, there were over a million; by 2017, there were under 88,000 remaining.  Gosh, I wonder what’s up with that?

2017:  Girls are permitted to be Boy Scouts too.  I have nothing against girls, but don’t they have a parallel institution of their own?  (Hint:  they sell awesome cookies.  Thin Mints for the win!)  The decision is controversial, but really, what’s all the fuss about?  They’ll just give them condoms.

2017:  Transgender boys (girls who believe they’re boys) can join too, but at this point, nothing matters.

2018:  BSA contemplates filing bankruptcy.

2019:  As of the end of the year, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints will no longer back BSA, after having been their greatest supporters from the beginning.  (Hint:  Try to please your friends, not your enemies.)  I’m the worst Mormon since Joseph Smith himself, but I don’t cotton to that stuff either.  This will be financially devastating, perhaps the last nail in their coffin.  Like I keep saying, “Get woke, go broke!”

Some of these later developments surprised even the gay scoutmaster who got canned and sued them all the way to the Supreme Court.  As he put it:

As “woke” as I am I still had to wrap my head around it when I first heard: the Boy Scouts of America would be admitting girls.

All of my early childhood sexual experiences were with other boy scouts.

So there’s an adolescent sexual fantasy attached to those memories.

Yeah, the end of an era, isn’t it?  One might well ask, what will the future hold?  If the organization survives somehow, perhaps they’ll have “Rubba Rubba” merit badges and put Michael Jackson’s “Jesus Juice” into their canteens.

Motivations

These guys are into youth education and outreach too

Why did the Boy Scouts have a “no homo” policy?  Was that all about being mean and discriminatory?  Like, how dare some private organization actually have membership criteria?

Unfortunately, they’ve had a long-standing pedophilia problem.  A court case in 2012 forced BSA to release a 20,000 page file documenting sexual abuse cases from 1965-85.  There were 1200 incidents, so that averages sixty badtouch cases per year that came to their attention.  A major reason they’re on the verge of bankruptcy lately is because they have 140 lawsuits pending, which resulted from scoutmasters who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves.

Granted, in a nationwide organization that once numbered over four million members, it was inevitable that someone would do something wrong, whether it’s misusing funds or far worse things.  Still, what did happen was terrible.  In fact, “terrible” is quite an understatement.

They did take measures to prevent these serious problems, as best as they could.  In that regard, excluding males who admitted to being sexually attracted to other males makes a lot of sense.  This goes beyond abstract matters of morality.  Simply put, they wanted to keep potential chickenlovers away from the chickens.  It’s similar to the “gezeirah” (fence) concept in rabbinical law, where a line is drawn around “gray area” things that could lead to forbidden conduct.  Since BSA was an all-male organization, the “no homo” rule would eliminate that problem entirely, so long as everyone followed it.  This means that homosexuals should take a hint and find something else to do with their weekends.

Even so, despite best efforts, some kiddy fiddlers got in.  BSA’s leaders aren’t mind readers, so they couldn’t determine with 100% certainty who would or wouldn’t be a problem.  Their “no homo” policy wasn’t an absolute firewall, of course.  Neither were their other measures like background checks, awareness programs, or the “two deep” rule against an adult being alone with a kid.  The “no homo” policy does seem rather like asking prospective retail employees, “Do you think you might be even slightly tempted to pilfer our merchandise?”  Still, at least it was something, and they could exclude members who outed themselves in newspaper articles and such.  They fought to retain their membership rules all the way to the Supreme Court, but surrendered later.

How about the gays themselves?  They could’ve set up their own Gay Scouts.  It wouldn’t even have been objectionable, so long as age of consent laws were observed.  For them, the Gay Scouts could’ve been much more fun than staying at the YMCA or joining the Navy.  Everyone would be DTF, with no risk of awkward gaydar failures.  However, rather than creating their own institution, they invaded another.  Let’s cut the crap – this had nothing to do with a keen interest of theirs about hiking, rafting, and all the rest of it.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that some characters were pretty enthusiastic about getting gays out into the wilderness with adolescents and youngsters.  Were they all about the “hotdogs” and “pasta”?  Comrade Harry Hay, the gay activist pioneer, would’ve considered it quite a buffet.  Allen Ginsberg would’ve loved a campout with so many young, “dewy-limbed” guys.  Even so, I believe most gays know better than to do stuff like that.

There’s something more to it than just that.  Why else did the activists make such an effort to force themselves on a group which had traditional morality as one of its precepts?  Simply put, they were offended by the “no homo” policy.  They wanted to rub BSA’s noses in it and ultimately destroy them.  They knew very well that forcing their way in would do exactly that.  So the pillow-biting activists are getting their revenge.

Cultural Marxism corrupts everything it touches.  This, my friends, is why you should never let the camel get his nose under the tent.

Get Woke, Go Broke – Gillette sells anti-male razors

How many of you folks are going to watch the Super Bowl?  Besides a halftime show which is a spectacle of its own, it’s much like any other sportsball game.  The ritual generally involves yelling at the t00b for two and a half hours, as if it really matters.  The viewer observes the top-level athletes closely, while a six pack and a bag of junk food are close by.  In a football game, the real action lasts about ten and a half minutes.  It’s interspersed with huddles, timeouts, commentators discussing the game like a strategy dialogue between Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz, and lots and lots of commercials.  All that’s a little silly, but it’s beside the point for now.

Speaking of commercials, Gillette has a little surprise for you coming up.  Vide infra:

The video’s description begins “Bullying. Harassment. Is this the best a man can get? It’s only by challenging ourselves to do more, that we can get closer to our best. To say the right thing, to act the right way.”  Then it lists a website where we can be instructed on correct thought or something.  I think I’ll give that one a miss.

As for the advertisement, it’s all pretty rapid-fire, almost (?) subliminal.  They crammed a lot into this minute and three quarters.  It’s hard for the mind to break down analytically in one go, and this seems to be exactly how they meant it to be.  Ever since the 1950s, much psychology has gone into advertisements.  Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, was a pioneer into this branch of applied psychology.  Anyway, Gillette’s ad munchkins really pulled out all the stops on this one.

It opens with many guys who look rather shell-shocked, as if they’re contemplating their sins…  This sets an emotional tone, of course.  More importantly, they stand accused.  Yes, guys like YOU, mister sportsball fan!

During that is a fast voiceover with the phrases:  “Bullying” – “The #MeToo movement against sexual harrassment” – “toxic masculinity”.  The latter is, of course, a famous buzzword in academia.  However, the “toxic” part is barely audible.  Nice!  This implies that this normal characteristic which is part of being male is something bad.  Then the question is posed – is this the best a man can get?

Then it goes into snippets showing bad behavior:

• A boy is crying on Mommy’s lap because someone called him names.  Back in my day, we were told not to let that stuff get to us, which is practical advice.
• Some weirdly discombobulating TV clips.  One is some party.  Another appears to be some sitcom where a White guy is getting grabby on a Black lady.  This looks like a new production, rather than existing sitcom footage, probably because this hasn’t been done on TV before.
• This TV studio showing one of those “hand picked audiences”, Norman Lear style, performs a laugh track.  The voiceover says, “You can’t laugh it off.”  Serious business here, right?
• At a meeting, a guy taps a female colleague on her shoulder, and she looks stunned.  He says, “What I actually think she’s trying to say…”  Of course, this symbolizes “mansplaining“, another new buzzword.  For some reason, my spellchecker thinks that’s a real word.
• Two boys horsing around.
• Responding to that spectacle, the guy barbecuing breaks into a long line.  It’s as if he’s between a mirror facing another mirror, though it’s actually different chubby guys with crotch-level fire pits.  A chant in unison follows, “Boys will be boys.”
• A TV clip with the words “allegations of sexual assault and sexual harassment” appears.  Quite oddly, the announcer is a feminist with an Armenian last name who is associated with a group calling themselves the Young Turks.  For those of you who were asleep during their history classes, the situation would be similar to someone named Goldberg being affiliated with a group called the Hitler Youth.
• This merges into several other newscasts.  The babble is impossible to follow, but presumably it’s about more misbehavior.  However, no famous leftist figures like Harvey Weinstein, Al Franken, etc. actually appear on screen – funny that.

After almost a minute of this wave of pure misery, it shows examples of correct thought.

• The facial expressions on the shell-shocked men begin to change subtly.  The “Wojack / Feels Guys” are turning into NPCs as the new programming starts to download into their heads.
• A football player says, “Men need to hold other men accountable.”
• Two women are at a party, who might or might not be eye-coding (it’s difficult to tell), and a guy says, “Smile, sweetie!”  Another guy steps in and rescues these two damsels in distress.  The “offender” backs off.
• A woman on a crowded street walks by and someone is about to introduce himself.  Just as he’s barely taken a step, someone else rescues the damsel.  “Not cool, not cool!”
• A couple of tough-looking youths in the street shake hands.  It sort of implies that this defused a tense situation.  That much isn’t objectionable; in an environment like that, shit can get real.
• A man tells his young son to repeat “I am strong.”  The implication is that conforming to correct thought is strength.
• The barbecue guys shrink back down into one, and the dad breaks up the kids who are now wrestling.
• Someone somewhere else breaks up a scuffle, then back to the wrestling kids.
• Then there’s a reminder that although there are some Gutmenschen, that’s not enough.  “The boys watching today will be the men of tomorrow.”  Following that is a brief plug for the website instructing in correct thought.

Whew!  Like I said, there’s quite a lot going on in about one and three quarters of a minute.

What’s wrong with their narrative

First of all, most of the bad behavior is pretty low-grade stuff.  However, the TV commentators speaking (without any context) are talking about much more serious matters, which sort of associates it all together.  (Did I mention that these guys are good at psychological tricks?)  This reveals the hypersensitivity that’s become common in the feminist agenda.

The kids at the barbecue aren’t throwing punches or really trying to hurt each other.  It’s normal for parents to tell kids to knock it off or tone it down.  However, the way it’s presented sort of implies that there’s something wrong with horsing around.  Kittens act hyper, puppies act hyper, and children act hyper too, unless they’re doped to the gills on ADD meds.

The back-to-back “damsel in distress” snippets are pretty annoying.  If the guys actually were being obnoxious, it might be justifiable.  Better yet, the strong and independent women could just tell them to knock it off.  They were certainly in no danger.  Like many of these rapid-fire clips spliced together, there’s not enough context to tell what’s really going on.  I don’t recommend bad game, of course, but they’re not actually shown committing a faux pas worthy of any pearl-clutching.  So the message is clear.  You’re not supposed to start conversations; it’s the Current Year!

Note that in both cases, it was a White guy being the “villain” and a Black guy being the Gutmensch telling him to knock it off.  Is that another subtle message there?  The reality seems to be a little different.  For example, that silly Hollaback video wasn’t filmed in lower Manhattan; the actress had to walk through NYC’s “vibrant” neighborhoods for ten hours to get the footage she wanted.  Even then, most of them did nothing more than say “hi'”.

Anyway, if the White guy was getting too friendly with a Black woman, the interference would be understandable.  He’d be told to stick to his own kind.  However, that wasn’t the case here, so the “rescuer” was just being a busybody.  People who take it upon themselves to cockblock for no reason are the ones who are rude.

If Gillette simply wanted to send a message about being righteous, these guys did it better:

It’s a silly movie, but Bill and Ted were onto something.  It’s possible to get the point across without singling out half the world’s population.

Anyway, what would happen if one of these corporations made an advertisement discouraging women from bad behavior by some of them?  You’ll never see anything like a “PMS is no excuse for acting like a brat” commercial, or something about Borderline Personality Disorder.  Still, if some company did air anything like that, it would be treated as the worst atrocity since Darth Vader nuked Alderaan.

Finally, what does all this stuff have to do with disposable razors?  NOTHING!  Anyway, who needs them, really?  I use an electric clipper that will last for years, not something that I’ll have to throw away after a few uses if I don’t want a scratched-up face.  I’d go back to the Brigham Young look, except that one of my girlfriends likes me clean-shaven.

Women don’t really need razors either.  All that got started in 1915 by – you guessed it – a razor company.  I remember the 1970s, so I’m fine with the unshaven look.  Some people might think I just stepped off of a UFO for saying so, but since that’s a natural appearance, I don’t have a problem with it.  Chinese foot binding used to be considered mandatory, but I don’t get that one either.

The public doesn’t like virtue signaling

So far, the video got 1.2 million downvotes and 751K upvotes.  Therefore, of the recorded reactions, about 39% approve, and 61% disapprove.  That’s pretty harsh!  It’s clear that they’ve alienated great numbers of consumers with their message, far more than those who got the warm fuzzies about it.

Comments on that were pretty scathing.  I’m certainly not digging around and cherry-picking here.  The following are the first five comments that showed up on the page when I looked at it:

Thanks for the moral advice, multi-national company that was recently caught profiting off forced child labour and price fixing.

I am so happy that we have found the edge finally of phony virtue signaling to where it can no longer benefit a company. And rightfully so hurts. When you are trying to be genuine and connect with people and it couldn’t be more disingenuous and insulting to reality this is what you deserve

Dear Gillette: What the actual. How about a positive-based commercial, not a comparison-based one? Most men are decent. Treat them like it.

Boys will be boys, but real men will no longer use Gillette

Dear Diary: today I got lectured by a shaving commercial

The first one illustrates a pretty good point.  Some companies use virtue signaling as a smokescreen to draw attention from questionable practices.  To them, and all others who think sociopolitical messages will sell products, I have one thing to say:  GET WOKE, GO BROKE.