The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Is Your Kid a Weirdo?

Posted on | November 21, 2015 | 146 Comments

 

America is in the grip of a crisis, namely a shortage of normal people. Evidence indicates that the population of kooks and freaks is rapidly increasing, and there are simply not enough sane people to keep the weirdos under control. Especially among the under-30 demographic, the United States is struggling to cope with the proliferation of dangerous perverts, drug addicts, psychotics and Ivy League liberal arts majors:

A student at Columbia University is urging the school to inject more diversity into its required courses, claiming she suffered severe emotional trauma from reading too many books by and about white people.
Columbia students and faculty gathered Wednesday night for a panel discussion on “Race, Ethnicity, and University Life.” . . .
One of the panelists at the event was black Columbia student Nissy Aya. Aya was supposed to graduate in 2014, but instead is only on track to receive her degree in 2016. That, Aya says, demonstrates “how hard it has been for me to get through this institution” . . .
Aya attributed some of her academic troubles to the trauma of having to take Columbia’s current Core Curriculum, which requires students to take a series of six classes with a focus on the culture and history of Western, European civilization. . . .
“It’s traumatizing to sit in Core classes,” she said. “We are looking at history through the lens of these powerful, white men. I have no power or agency as a black woman, so where do I fit in?”

If you can afford to attend Columbia University (annual tuition $51,008), you are not an oppressed victim of society. A student at an elite university who believes she is being “traumatized” by the curriculum is delusional — she is demented, deranged, mad, zany, wacky, off her rocker, and a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

Everybody knows that Columbia attracts fruitcakes and dingbats. The alumni include Megan McCain and Barack Obama, after all. Unfortunately, this weirdo trend is not limited to the Ivy League elite. A poll finds that 40% of “Millennials” (ages 18-34) support prohibiting “statements that are offensive to minorities.” Everything written by “powerful, white men” (Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Hume, Locke, Madison, Burke, et al.) might eventually be banned as “hate speech,” in order to avoid “traumatizing” fragile neurotics like Nissy Aya.

Parents need to be aware that their children could be swept up in this pandemic insanity, which is highly contagious. Monitor your child’s psychological health by asking questions like, “Are you victimized by oppressive gender norms?” and, “Do you need a trigger warning before you read Shakespeare?” If a kid answers “yes” to questions like that — or if they dye their hair cerulean blue and start whining about “objectification” in video games — this indicates your child may be at risk of becoming a weirdo afflicted with Special Snowflake™ Syndrome.

Characteristically, these weirdos believe they are entitled to whatever they want, whether it is a Columbia diploma or better media “representation” of their sexual identity. The Special Snowflake™ is typically a privileged young person who identifies as a victim, either because of their race, their sexual orientation, or whatever mental illness (depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, etc.) they self-diagnosed based on a list of symptoms they read on a  blog. Your kid may seem perfectly fine — an honor student with lots of friends, cheerfully involved in extracurricular activities — and then quite suddenly, for no apparent reason, she starts moping around, wearing bizarre clothes, and grumbling about how she’s oppressed by the patriarchy.

Consider the case of a teenage girl, the daughter of two successful lawyers, who became convinced she was a victim of society:

I’ve never felt quite like a woman, but I’ve never wanted to be a man, either. . . .
I discovered my mistake one day in junior school, when a few of the girls in my class were chatting about what boys they fancied. . . . Even back then, there was something odd about me, a strangeness . . .
I couldn’t think of anything to say that would be both interesting and true. So I mentioned that I often felt like I was a gay boy in a girl’s body. Just like everyone else, right?
I could tell from their faces that this was not right. It was very, very wrong. . . .
I often wished I was a lesbian. But I almost always fancied boys, and if you fancied boys, you had to behave like a girl. And behaving like a girl was the one subject, apart from sports, that I always failed. . . .
I was anorexic for large parts of my childhood and for many complex, painful, altogether common reasons, of which gender dysphoria was just one. I felt trapped by the femaleness of my body, by my growing breasts and curves. Not eating made my periods stop. It made my breasts disappear. On the downside, it also turned me into a manic, suicidal mess, forced me to drop out of school, and traumatized my entire family.
At 17, I wound up in the hospital, in an acute eating disorders ward, where I stayed for six months. . . .
I was bisexual, and I was very much hoping that one day when I wasn’t quite so weird and sad I’d be able to test the theory in practice. . . .
I got better. . . . I left the trauma of the hospital far behind me and tried to cover up my past with skirts and makeup. . . .
At 24, I wrote columns about abortion rights and sexual liberation, and books about how to live and love under capitalist patriarchy. In response, young women wrote to me on a regular basis telling me that my work helped inspire them to live more freely in their femaleness. They admired me because I was a “strong woman.” Would I be betraying those girls if I admitted that half the time, I didn’t feel like a woman at all? . . .
Only when we recognize that “manhood” and “womanhood” are made-up categories, invented to control human beings and violently imposed, can we truly understand the nature of sexism, of misogyny, of the way we are all worked over by gender in the end. . . .
Questioning gender . . . is an essential part of the feminism that has sustained me through two decades of personal and political struggle.

 

Yes, Laurie Penny became “genderqueer,” and is now one of the World’s Most Famous Victims of Heteropatriarchal Oppression.

Victimhood can be quite a lucrative racket for a privileged Special Snowflake™ like Laurie Penny (who graduated from Oxford University and recently completed a prestigious Nieman fellowship at Harvard) but most weirdos cannot cash in so easily on their grandiose delusions of persecution. In fact, a kid who succumbs to this entitlement mentality could get arrested in Pocatello, Idaho:

An Idaho school was placed on lockdown after a student threatened to “kill all the girls” because none of them would send him nude photos.
A 15-year-old boy was charged with one count each of threatening violence at a school and telephone harassment in connection with the threats — which spread quickly across social media Wednesday morning and were then reported to officials at the Pocatello/Chubbuck School District.
Police immediately initiated a controlled access code at Highland High School as officers investigated the threat.
“Some kid who was having attention problems with specifically the cheerleaders, didn’t get nudes,” said student Isaac Gomez. . . .
A screenshot posted online by KIDK-TV appears to show a text message conversation between the teen and a friend who tries to talk the boy out of his violent plot, which he intended to carry out about 9:30 a.m. Friday.
“(I’m) serious I have a 12 gauge shotgun and a 9 mm pistol I will bring and start killing everyone,” one message said. “I also have hunting knives I can bring.” . . .
Additional messages between the teen and his friend suggested his motivation for wanting to kill girls at his school.
“This,” the friend texted, “Over freaking nudes? Dude.”
“Because no one will give any to me,” the teen complained. “Every one hates me. And I hate (one particular girl). And I will kill myself after.”

You see the pattern? Nissy Aya is “traumatized” because Columbia University requires her to read about white males. Laurie Penny is “traumatized” because of the gender that society “violently imposed” on her. And this 15-year-old boy in Pocatello, Idaho, was traumatized because the cheerleaders wouldn’t send him any freaking nudes.

Weirdos have always been dangerous, but now the weirdos are trying to take over society — in the Ivy League, at BuzzFeed, in Idaho — and there are not enough normal people to stop them.

These weirdos are not victims of society. They are the products of inadequate parenting, and our civilization is slowly being destroyed because of the petulant tantrums of whiny brats whose parents lacked the courage to tell their spoiled offspring that the world is not obligated to indulge your hurt feelings. When adults abdicate authority, children never learn to respect others or accept personal responsibility. And so the “broken people” are everywhere nowadays . . .

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Can you guess the favorite presidential candidate of Generation Weirdo?




 

Category: Education, Sex Trouble

Comments

146 Responses to “Is Your Kid a Weirdo?”

  1. JCC
    November 21st, 2015 @ 12:25 pm

    I’m so old, I remember when Tumblr was for normal people.

  2. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    November 21st, 2015 @ 12:29 pm

    All kids have moments of oddness to their parents…but If you are seriously asking the question, you already know the answer.

  3. robertstacymccain
    November 21st, 2015 @ 12:33 pm

    Yeah, that was like what? Four or five years ago.

  4. Steve Skubinna
    November 21st, 2015 @ 12:47 pm

    Used to be that people had an awareness of, and aversion to stupidity. Ideally it would kick in prior to doing something and result in the decision “Better not do that, it would be stupid.”

    Less ideally would be afterwards, when the thought was “Damn, that was stupid.” I doubt that this special snowflake at Columbia will ever have a moment of clarity when she realizes “Oh hell, why did I say that stupid sh!t?”

    We have somehow bred that out of an entire generation of college students. I suppose this is a result of giving out participation trophies just for showing up. Fortunately it does not appear to be universal. There are still millennials who possess the Stupid Awareness Gene. For one thing, most of her class graduated on time, despite having to read about icky white dudes.

  5. NeoWayland
    November 21st, 2015 @ 1:03 pm

    Perhaps the real problem is excusing people from responsibility.

    Many good changes came from weirdos who took responsibility.

  6. CrustyB
    November 21st, 2015 @ 1:04 pm

    How dare the white race, you know, accomplish so much in this world. We need some black revisionist history to remedy this.

    http://bitstrips.com/r/00K2K

  7. Thomas Jameson
    November 21st, 2015 @ 1:47 pm

    The mentally ill girl who isn’t sure who or what she is, who was hospitalized for 6 months to teach her something as basic as eating a square meal, writes columns and books advising other girls how to live their lives. And has a following !!!

  8. robertstacymccain
    November 21st, 2015 @ 2:27 pm

    I know, right? The lunatics are running the asylum.

  9. RS
    November 21st, 2015 @ 2:49 pm

    Describing such people, male or female, as “weirdos” or “lunatics” discounts the very deliberate attempt by Progressives to inculcate these very attitudes. Consider our Columbia student who’s percolating along on the six-year plan:

    “We are looking at history through the lens of these powerful, white men. I have no power or agency as a black woman, so where do I fit in?”

    The unstated assumption which allows her to make those two statements and ask the final question is simply that there is no such thing as universal objective truth. Rather, it is an assertion that the only objective reality exists in her own experiences; those experiences, life lessons, insights, etc. of others have no validity. There is no universal “human condition” with which mankind has struggled for centuries and centuries. Call it “institutional solipsism” if you wish.

    Make no mistake. This is the end result of decades of work designed to eliminate the wisdom of the ages in favor of a blank slate upon which to write and a dumbed-down populace easy to control. When academics and students reject all received wisdom of the ages in favor of researching soft core porn and vampire fan fiction, you know a new Dark Age is upon us.

  10. CSL595959
    November 21st, 2015 @ 3:27 pm

    Do these people realize Marx was a very privileged, rich, white, male?

  11. Lloyd Lloyd
    November 21st, 2015 @ 3:29 pm

    I can’t get to this website by typing in :
    http://theothermccain.com/

    Weirdly enough, I have to google for theothermccain, and click on the link that google provides me. I guess it works, but I am curious as why I can only get in that way.

  12. BFrito
    November 21st, 2015 @ 3:37 pm

    If one looks for worthwhile tumblr blogs, they are out there, especially if one is looking for good art, quotations, photos. (Such tumblrs are best browsed in “archive” mode.) Examples:
    http://heimatwacht.tumblr.com/post/132504193505

    http://petyagencheva.tumblr.com/post/132786006815/alina-von-rauheneck-besiegt-gotthard

  13. Steve Skubinna
    November 21st, 2015 @ 4:08 pm

    Reminds me of the old Apple ad, that suggested people such as Amelia Earhart and Albert Einstein used Macs.

    Being a weirdo by itself is not bad. Most geniuses are a bit off kilter. But as you say, without responsibility weirdness is simply weird. Look at any great artist, musician or writer and you’ll generally find plenty of weirdness (on the other hand, you may find somebody like P.G. Wodehouse or C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkein or Benny Goodman or Ludwig Beethoven).

  14. Steve Skubinna
    November 21st, 2015 @ 4:08 pm

    It’s all because of that privilege. With great privilege come great responsibility.

  15. Steve Skubinna
    November 21st, 2015 @ 4:10 pm

    Your stance is wrong. You’re not holding your tongue right. Impure thoughts are blocking the signal.

  16. RKae
    November 21st, 2015 @ 4:12 pm

    I think they’re victims of “gotta do something new” syndrome. Just saying the words “status quo” with a sneer proves that you’re “questioning authority,” and you’re ready to change the world! (And, of course, people like me are “afraid of change.”)

    We live in a society where every pack of up-and-coming teenagers HAS to upset some apple cart or they simply don’t feel like they exist. They spend their teen years bitching and plotting in their teen echo chamber, and when they hit college… they explode.

    They must have a cause to shriek about; a thing to rip down, and the more ancient, steady, stable, and obvious the better. “Gender! Destroy it! We’re the people who finally destroyed gender!”

    If they could battle against hydrogen, they would.

    I mean, hey, they’re already angry at carbon, aren’t they?

  17. NeoWayland
    November 21st, 2015 @ 4:27 pm

    As a confessed weirdo and part-time troublemaker, I absolutely agree.

    p.s. I’m an Apple fan as well. I even have the Steve Jobs version of that ad you mentioned.

  18. NeoWayland
    November 21st, 2015 @ 4:30 pm

    Well, I’m not sure how to embed it, but here’s the link.

  19. Fail Burton
    November 21st, 2015 @ 4:36 pm

    I’m not fond of exerting my powers of cheap psychology on people I don’t know but the common denominators scream out at you when it comes to this cult. This is an addiction to failure and dissolution by people too cowardly to blow their own heads off without taking as many people with them as they can; in this case, an entire society or civilization.

    When you affirmative action history itself and turn your back on precisely anything which works – namely success – you will end up destroying the viability of successful paradigms and enable failure to be institutionalized.

    Who are we to read; African sages who are presumed to have existed and been erased by whites? Are we to celebrate lifestyles which produce no children? Precisely what is there to celebrate? This is a suicide cult led by delusional people with mental health issues. Their addiction to immigration patterns speaks to their desire to extinguish themselves in as inefficient and indirect a manner as possible. What kind of “genderqueer” woman ardently supports Islam but one too cowardly to put a razor to their own throat? There is no such thing as a “traitor” anymore but that is precisely what these people are.

  20. Fail Burton
    November 21st, 2015 @ 5:00 pm

    The problem with this woman is her racializing everything. Her life must be a nightmare of septic systems, dentists, doctors and technology which she feels she never made a racial contribution to according to her wacky ideas.

  21. Adobe_Walls
    November 21st, 2015 @ 5:09 pm

    Many good things came from weirdo’s doing stupid things and dying as a result, though I must admit that result is pretty much a crap shoot.

  22. Adobe_Walls
    November 21st, 2015 @ 5:11 pm

    The problem with that is the whole world has become the asylum.

  23. Finrod Felagund
    November 21st, 2015 @ 5:20 pm

    There’s weird, and then there’s insane, which sends my thought to a favorite little-known HST quote: “Crazy” is a term of art: “Insane” is a term of Law. Remember that, and you will save yourself a lot of trouble.

    Which leads me to something I said a number of years ago: “The only careers that the insane can succeed at are writer and international chess champion.”

    Where am I going with this? Well, there’s weird, and then there’s crazy, and then there’s insane. These folks are blowing through weird to crazy and are getting mighty close to actually insane.

  24. Finrod Felagund
    November 21st, 2015 @ 5:24 pm

    It makes me almost want to build Outside The Asylum from the Hitchhiker’s Guide books.

  25. Daniel Freeman
    November 21st, 2015 @ 5:38 pm

    I always knew Laurie Penny was wrong, but I thought she was just a cynical scam artist. I had no idea that she was actually a mentally defective scam artist. (It does explain a lot, though.)

  26. Daniel Freeman
    November 21st, 2015 @ 5:42 pm

    I find no joy in being right about “genderqueer” becoming the go-to victim card for socioeconomically advantaged white progressives. It’s too easy, and there’s nothing SJWs like more than easy.

  27. Daniel Freeman
    November 21st, 2015 @ 5:45 pm

    You know, she could always just, I don’t know, maybe stop being such a racist sexist bigot, and try to emulate those successful people of the past (that happen to be a little different from her)?

  28. NeoWayland
    November 21st, 2015 @ 5:57 pm

    I think some weirdos make up for it.

    The other day I saw Slingshot, a film about Dean Kamen’s water project. Now I was never impressed with the Segway, although I thought the tech was incredibly cool. But this water distillation is beyond impressive. Especially the way that he’s working with Coca-Cola to make it work from the ground up in areas that desperately need clean water.

    I think I want one. A gadget the size of a washing machine that can eliminate every single pollutant in water, chemical or biological. And it’s more effective than any municipal source. Think about the implications there.

    All from a weirdo who doesn’t believe it when the experts tell him it can’t be done.

  29. Daniel Freeman
    November 21st, 2015 @ 6:31 pm

    Are you on mobile? Could it be autocorrect?

  30. Daniel Freeman
    November 21st, 2015 @ 6:37 pm

    And then their kids will go on the warpath against oxygen too, which would make dihydrogen monoxide of the devil, inevitably leading to…

  31. Steve Skubinna
    November 21st, 2015 @ 7:20 pm

    No, no! We must all be distinct individuals! We must all dye our hair the same shades and spout the exact same boilerplate word salad to prove our specialness!

  32. Steve Skubinna
    November 21st, 2015 @ 7:22 pm

    Tough call between Borderline Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

    Or it all may be a pretense, given the high value placed on dysfunctional victimhood.

  33. Steve Skubinna
    November 21st, 2015 @ 7:25 pm

    Kinda hard to effect change, it seems to me, when you’re huddled in a hysterical puddle of goo because of the patriarchy.

    But their preferred weapon is emotional blackmail. “See how you’ve destroyed my life with your heteronormative Male Gaze! Now change society to the way I want it!”

    Sadly plenty of well meaning idiots appear willing to dismantle civilization because Laurie haz a sad.

  34. Fail Burton
    November 21st, 2015 @ 7:48 pm

    Who invented manhood and womanhood across 5 continents and thousands of years, mostly at a time when many cultures didn’t even know of the existence of others.

  35. RS
    November 21st, 2015 @ 7:58 pm

    Of course it’s ludicrous, inasmuch as she would undoubtedly denounce Caucasians for “cultural appropriation” if they invoke Martin Luther King or enjoy Jamaican Jerk Chicken.

  36. RS
    November 21st, 2015 @ 8:09 pm

    Speak of the devil. Via Instapundit.

  37. Jeanette Victoria
    November 21st, 2015 @ 8:35 pm

    I feel like Western Civilization has been turned into a Monty Python parody skit

    http://m.ottawasun.com/2015/11/20/free-ottawa-yoga-class-scrapped-over-cultural-issues

  38. Finrod Felagund
    November 21st, 2015 @ 8:36 pm

    I’d like to amend the old joke saying “Come to the dark side, we have cookies” to add: “and we won’t try to take away your fun, as least as long as you don’t try to bother other people with it”.

  39. Jeanette Victoria
    November 21st, 2015 @ 8:37 pm

    LOL I’m so old I remember using my phone receiver in a modem to dial up a message board BEFORE Al Gore invented the Internet.

    Heck I remember Do Not Fold, Bend, Spindle or Mutilate (FYI my first computer was a Commodore VIC-20)

  40. Jeanette Victoria
    November 21st, 2015 @ 8:46 pm

    Hey I’m Hispanic and yet for some reason folks think I am white (unless I’m a pub then the Brits will say “You aren’t quite white are you? No really!)

  41. Durasim
    November 21st, 2015 @ 11:59 pm

    Activists/agitators at Smith College (surprise, surprise) demand reporters swear loyalty oath before being allowed to observe protests.

    http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2015/11/traditional_media_not_welcome.html

  42. DeadMessenger
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 12:18 am

    LOL! I remember those days, too. I built my first computer in my garage from a Heathkit. I programmed it in machine language to say stupid little things, and my friends thought I was cool. For about 10 minutes, because it took me an hour to program it to say the least little thing.

    When I first started at Florida Institute of Technology, you still had to use punch cards to program. So you’d put your card deck on a table outside the computer room, and the pukes in there would come get them and load them for you. There was always a line of decks, and you put yours at the end. Then you waited.

    So once, I put my deck on the table, hefted my backpack onto my shoulder and turned to go wait. Knocking everybody’s cards to the floor. Luckily, nobody got mad.

    Actually, yes they did, murderously pissed off. For three months, dudes would come up to me and say, “Aren’t you the chick that messed up everybody’s punch cards?” and then laugh at me.

    *Sigh*. Those were the days.

  43. DeadMessenger
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 12:21 am

    “Evi, honey, you know Dad and I loooove you. But considering that we’re llamas, we’re not sure where this cow thing is coming from.”

  44. DeadMessenger
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 12:27 am

    People had an aversion to stupidity because in the day they got mocked and shamed for it. And after a couple of experiences like that, you learned not to be so stupid.

    Nowadays, stupidity is rewarded in many circles, notably, schools and HR departments.

  45. DeadMessenger
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 12:30 am

    Maybe you’re really a white hispanic. 😀

  46. DeadMessenger
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 12:37 am

    Oh, good Lord. Really? Isn’t imitation the best form of flattery?

  47. DeadMessenger
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 12:51 am

    “Laurie Penny is an intersection of Feminism and Genderqueer.”

    Laurie Penny is an intersection of Looney Tunes and Wackadoodle.

    As for “violently imposed” gender, yeah, I remember that time I was macro-aggressed by a dude in a keffiyeh who beat me, poked me in the eyes, stuffed a grenade between my butt cheeks, then put a scimitar to my throat unless I agreed that I was a woman, so I said OK, and then he left.

    Is she for real? What a braying jackass.

  48. Daniel Freeman
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 12:59 am

    I always assumed that someday I would be grumpy about “kids these days” because age; but no, they’re actually horribly weak and foolish. My worst nightmare.

  49. thesickmanofeurope_com
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 2:04 am

    Is she (and all these other lunatics) not appropriating MY European Culture by speaking and writing in English?
    I wish they would be more culturally sensitive and stop immediately!

  50. concern00
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 2:06 am

    These kids are not experiencing anything that everyone else that has ever lived has not already experienced. (Ecclesiastes 1:9 …there is nothing new under the sun.)

    I went through this sh-t when I was young and I still experience it to some degree now. The difference between them and us is how we deal with it. They are not being taught how to cope.