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?




 

Comments

146 Responses to “Is Your Kid a Weirdo?”

  1. Finrod Felagund
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 2:21 am

    Heh. My first modem was 1200 baud, replaced after it was fried by lightning by a 2400 baud. I read a lot of Usenet at 2400 baud back then, mostly because it’s very difficult to read text faster than 2400 baud unless you’re an exceedingly fast reader.

  2. Finrod Felagund
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 2:24 am

    I remember the days back before the September That Never Ended where if you said something exceedingly stupid on Usenet, you found the next day in your email box about 100 messages detailing exactly how stupid you were.

    It tended to provide much-needed negative feedback, and people would (usually) Learn.

    Then AOL let loose its mindless hordes onto the Internet in September 1993, and the Internet was never the same.

  3. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 2:30 am

    Do you expect me to flip out and storm to my barn?

  4. Fail Burton
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 4:13 am

    Gay intersectional “feminism” is synonymous with mental illness. Take the creators of the movement like Shulamith Firestone, Robin Morgan, Andrea Dworkin, Kate Millet, Adrienne Rich and Mary Daly and at the very least you have severely traumatized and broken women. These are the “scientists” and “historians” who have assured us heterosexuality was hatched by men prior to the rise of great urban centers and that the concept of “woman” is a ha-ha fraud.

    Tumblr feminism is nothing more than a mental hospital with no wards, walls, doctors or nurses. The concept of intersectionalism which created the split between gay and straight feminists in the ’60s in the first place has evolved into people seeing a woman-hating homophobic KKK in everything from a re-visited John Carter of Mars to college dorms. “Knowledge” and “art” are now synonyms for race and sex, as long as it isn’t straight white men.

  5. Fail Burton
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 4:18 am

    Why would a pragmatic rationalist like Penny be hospitalized for something as complicated as eating? There sure is a lot to think about what with all the forks and mashed potatoes. It’s like a Gordian Knot wrapped around a Rubik’s Cube and buried under the Sphinx. And now Penny has figured it all out and will tell us ALL about the complex dynamics of the natural attraction between men and women and why we eat food and drink water. Why not a book about why we shouldn’t run headlong into brick walls?

  6. Fail Burton
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 4:20 am

    The idea of Penny piloting a plane even today let alone the ’30s is a fantasy. She would come undone if men didn’t deliver her table salt.

  7. Rose Calton
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 4:27 am

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  8. Daniel O'Brien
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 7:57 am
  9. Fail Burton
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 9:10 am

    Do you think Penny has any idea how she’s being exploited as a bearded lady and court jester? How can you not laugh at someone who talks about living and loving under a “capitalist patriarchy”? Does she really see herself as Winston Smith living in an insane world? The truth is Penny’s an insane woman living in a normal world and if she has her way she’ll drive it insane.

  10. Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup » Pirate's Cove
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 9:23 am

    […] The Other McCain wonders if your kid is a weirdo […]

  11. Fatherless
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 9:27 am

    Yes!

  12. Sonja Tyson
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 10:23 am

    So true about the salt. These people never actually do anything productive. They live on our efforts. They reproduce through indoctrinating our children.

  13. JeffS
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 10:57 am

    A friend of a friend on Facebook once posted a picture of first generation hard drives on his timeline, because he’s an IT specialist, and a genuine geek. She hoped to stump him, and she did.

    But not me! Those large copper plates were obvious, so I stepped in to save the day.

    And astounded everyone when I told them the capacity of said plates — about 5MB.

  14. JeffS
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 11:06 am

    And since we are strolling down memory lane … …

    Ever use an acoustic coupler for a computer connection? Oy!

    My first computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80, a/k/a “Trash-80”. Not a bad machine, though.

    And I have a functioning TRS-80 Model 100 laptop. No acoustic coupler, though. I use it as an example of older technology, and it’s right next to my crystal radio receiver and slide rule.

  15. NeoWayland
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 11:19 am

    I should have put up a link for the film. SlingShot It’s on Netflix.

  16. Chas C-Q
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 11:43 am

    Not a parent, but it’s my impression that it’s kind of hard for a parent to parent when the entire institution of government is arrayed against you. The entitlement mentality is taught, not merely absorbed – much less independently invented – by each kid.

    Give a kid so much as a hard look in some places, and he’s increasingly likely to tell a teacher or otherwise have you arrested by “Child ‘Protective’ Services.”

  17. Lloyd Lloyd
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 12:23 pm

    So here is what I did:

    1. I typed in theothermccain.com which did not work. (on my computer)

    2. I backspaced out the .com part, and when I pressed ENTER it brought me to google, which showed a link. I clicked on the link, and it worked.

    It is like I have a DNS that doesn’t work, but google has one that does. The only way I can access the site is through google. The workaround is pretty easy, but it does get a little irritating

  18. Lloyd Lloyd
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 12:24 pm

    The rest of the internet works fine, It is this one site that has the problem.

  19. Steve Skubinna
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 12:27 pm

    You could dye your fur blue and go on Tumblr.

  20. Steve Skubinna
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 12:28 pm

    The idea of somebody like her doing anything is fantasy.

  21. Steve Skubinna
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 12:29 pm

    That’s mighty white of you.

  22. Finrod Felagund
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 12:31 pm

    Personally, I’d like to take a dead TRS-80 Model III (don’t want to gut a working one after all) and put a modern system into it, just to boggle people when I drag it in and boot it up.

  23. Steve Skubinna
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 12:32 pm

    Nothing like being dysfunctional to make you really hate normal.

  24. Steve Skubinna
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 12:39 pm

    I still have two of my old Atari STs, but the one old computer I miss most is the old Atari 800. With the cassette tape drive. And the whopping 64k RAM.

    I remember when I finally got my first 5.25″ floppy drive. Man, I was some kind of BFD then, you bet!

    Even the cassette drive was better than typing up a bunch of punch cards, dropping them off to run through the Univac 1500 or PDP-11, and waiting a day to see how it worked. With the cassette it only took about five minutes to crash.

  25. DeadMessenger
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 2:25 pm

    I remember when Bill Gates said that nobody would ever need more than 640k of memory.

  26. Daniel Freeman
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 4:56 pm

    I just say cluster B to cover all the bases.

  27. Daniel Freeman
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 5:09 pm

    We might get less fragility if it were met with mockery instead of accolades and cash prizes. You get more of what you incentivize.

  28. Daniel Freeman
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 5:19 pm

    At least he adjusted his weirdness to fit his body instead of the other way around. Much less crazy than some people.

  29. RicoSuaveGuapo
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 7:59 pm
  30. Wraith
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 9:04 pm

    There’s a part of me that just wants to say, “You don’t fit in, because we’re obviously better than you. Deal.”

    Seriously, if these people are bound and determined to see themselves as victims, why not give them what they want? There’s plenty of folks of all races and genders and whatever that have actually accomplished something in their lives, and they sure didn’t do it by sitting around whining about how the world didn’t bow down and kiss their butts.

    But that would be cruel. She’s right; Black women don’t have any power or agency in this country today. Just ask Oprah.

  31. mole
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 11:34 pm

    I had an interesting conversation with a chap who was a nurse/psych worker in Afghanistan pre-9/11. I had been working with Afghani refugees in Australia around that time as well.
    We swapped stories and although he was rather left in some of his inclinations we got on well.
    I told him about a few “crusader lawyers” and cranks we had who made life worse for everyone by trying to “break the system” for the refugee migration.

    He went a little quiet, he had dealt with many of the ones I named and his words were “A lot of them came to me about their own problems, they are very troubled people a lot of them”…

    The left is full of broken people projecting their own neurosis’s onto everybody else.

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    November 22nd, 2015 @ 11:35 pm

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  33. Misanthrope
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 11:36 pm

    In far too many cases, it’s not the parents who are inadequate, but the parent.

  34. disqus_saASoogd1x
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 11:39 pm

    fit OE 82

  35. TheOldMan
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 11:41 pm

    Excellent movie!

  36. TheOldMan
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 11:43 pm

    Always take a thick black marker and draw a diagonal line across your card deck. That way when (not if!) it drops, you can get it back into sequence quickly.

  37. Steve Skubinna
    November 22nd, 2015 @ 11:59 pm

    I’d call it Cluster F.

  38. Gmama
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 12:26 am

    Maybe she just thinks too much about it.

  39. setnaffa
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 12:46 am

    Drugs to retard boys’ natural development and electronics at too young an age will allow our youth to be programmed to follow anyone… Think Hitler Youth on speed…

  40. Finrod Felagund
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 1:30 am

    There’s a better quote, from Steve Wozniak:

    “The human mind has not yet exhausted what can be done in 16K of memory, and never will.”

  41. RKae
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 2:14 am

    Why do they think you’re white? Did you shoot a black kid?

  42. DeadMessenger
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 5:01 am

    No way! 84. EE.
    “All the print that’s news to FIT.”

  43. DeadMessenger
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 5:14 am

    I swear, the next deck I have, I’m gonna do that. 😀 (Mine were serialized in pencil. The other people, not so much, lol.)

  44. SDN
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 7:11 am

    We were fancy; if you remembered to number the cards with punches in the first 8 columns, we had a sorter that could reorganize them. Ever seen a grown man cry? I have: he dropped a 5000 card deck down 2 flights of stairs and hadn’t numbered them.

  45. SDN
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 7:12 am

    110 baud acoustic, in 1977.

  46. timmaguire
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 7:55 am

    The kids are alright, they’re just responding to the incentive system they exist within. The problem is the very small number of people who are very over-represented on the faculty and staffs of academia. We could make this whole thing go away with a thousand pink slips.

  47. Ddad99
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 7:58 am

    This could also be the result of the presence of hormones and other drugs in our water supply. Things like birth control pills, Prozac and other prescription drugs appear in readily measurable quantities in our rivers and streams. Smallmouth bass in the Potomac River are bi-gender, with both male and female genitals. Why would it not also happen in people? I also think bcp’s in our water is a major cause of autism.

  48. ganderson
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 8:27 am

    It took me 9 years to get through college because I didn’t spend ENOUGH time reading dead white males!

  49. Ilion
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 8:36 am

    Always punch sequence numbers in the appropriate location on your cards (*). That way, *when* they get dropped, you can use the card sorter to resort them into the proper order.

    (*) with an initial “gap” in the numbering, so that you can insert later modifications.

  50. Ilion
    November 23rd, 2015 @ 8:41 am

    In my first job out of college, I sometimes had to modify the code — as it was executing — by toggling (binary) switches on the front of the case.