The Herd Instinct

That's Show Biz

It isn’t all war and politics chez Technium. Two things I gotta get off my chest.

I didn’t follow the Depp-Heard trial, so my observation may be totally off the mark, but I think that justice would have been better served if the jury had returned a verdict where defendant and plaintiff got an equal amount of damages. Heard ordered to pay Depp $10 million, Depp ordered to pay Heard $10 million, even-Stephen, over and done.

That said, I watched a few minutes of Vasquez v. Heard on YT after the verdict.

As a witness, Heard had the harder job of the two. Women aren’t taught domination techniques, and we are genetically hardwired to smooth over conflict, so when conflict happens, we often go haywire and lose it.

Heard was bullied on the stand by Vasquez and reacted badly. (That, of course, is Vasquez’ job - not taking anything away from her for doing it.) Being borderline, Heard’s boundaries are porous, and she’s a woman.

You must learn to stand your ground in the world. There are distinctly feminine ways of defending one’s boundaries, and the smartest women are expert practitioners of the art. (The smartest men, too. The vast majority of successful men don’t stand their ground by punching people out.) Most feminism was created by borderline women who don’t know how to stand their ground, so they develop a huge chip.

Her lawyers should have prepared her for this. Maybe they did. But it’s hard to get through American feminist conditioning—I am woman, hear me roar! That doesn’t work in the real world.

They should have taken a page from Mrs. Thatcher’s book.

Bear With Us

She had a lifetime’s experience in British politics of being intimidated and standing her ground in a distinctly feminine way.

This is how she did it:

Mrs. T would fix her would-be bully in the eye, drop her breathy voice to a feathery whisper, and say, “bear with me.” And she would steamroll on to make her case—as her interlocutor turned into a bowl of quivering jelly.

In the Heard-Vasquez exchange that I saw, which concerned text messages from Heard, Vasquez managed to portray Heard as a clinging harpy who wouldn’t give Depp “space.” Maybe it wasn’t that way in the real world. But Heard answered the questions in such a hotly emotional way that it confirmed what Vasquez was implying.

Heard should have put on a sincere face and simply said, “No,” to every leading question. That would have slowed the onslaught and put Vasquez in the position of eliciting context from Heard. Which Heard could then have supplied, in her own words, at her own pace. In a verbal duel, it’s all about pace and who controls it. In America we have an obsession (from Hollywood?) with quick banter.

In psychology, this is called “extinguishing behavior” — muffling, blunting, or wrong-footing aggression with an unexpected response. But that’s not feminist. In America, we have Kamala Harris screeching “let me finish!” at pushy questioners.

I didn’t see Depp’s testimony, but I’m going to guess that he did a great job of convincing the audience jury that he was a hurt little boy who was abused by a volatile woman.

Maybe. We’ll see what the judge in the appeal says. Judges are taught to evaluate evidence.

I don’t mean to make light of abuse; but I decry its politicization and tribalization. Do I really need to point out that “believe all women” is grotesque? This woman was a monster. She deserved to be hung. This woman, too.

*************

I see the usual gang of idiots is in a twist about Bradley Cooper’s nose in a biopic of Leonard Bernstein. Um, what? The makeup artists have done an amazing job of making Cooper resemble Bernstein.

Bradley “Maestro” Bernstein

There’s a facial resemblance between Cooper and Bernstein without prosthetics, but yeah, the latter does have a bigger schnozz and the makeup had to protray that, especially as Bernstein ages and the proboscis becomes bigger in relation to the rest of the face.

People actually get paid to kvetch in print about imaginary slights! Nice work if you can get it. In all my years of working in the NYC salt mines, I never got it.

Maybe Scarlett Johansson should have played Bernstein. She’s ethnically appropriate, and so what if she isn’t doesn’t “identify” as a man?

Does This Picture Make My Schnozz Look Big?

We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming of war, propaganda, death, and even worse abysmal stupidity than celebrity trials and Jewish noses.