The Other McCain

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

The New Thought Crime: ‘Adultism’

Posted on | April 3, 2016 | 64 Comments

Adultism “is running amok in America”:

Parents know what’s best for their children? At the risk of tossing tons of other scenarios aside, we LGBTQIA+ kids have heard that last one plenty while trying to grow up while out. Parents say we’re not bi. Or queer. Or a boy. Or non-binary.
They give us labels at birth and expect us to adhere to them. And when we don’t? Certainly it’s because our parents simply know us better than we know ourselves.
It couldn’t possibly be that parents are — gasp! — people who are ultimately a different being than their children.
But what of my suggested inability to provide parental advice when I’m not a parent myself? Okay, I give you that one. But the thing is that article wasn’t on parental advice.
It was an article on children’s basic human rights, which we tend to so grossly overlook.
How did that point so quickly get turned right back around to focus on the parents instead of the children?
Because adultism. . . .

You can read the rest. Notice that (a) it’s published at Everyday Feminism and (b) the “LGBTQIA+” agenda is foremost in the author’s mind.

The essential sovereignty of parents in raising their own children has been under assault in America for a long, long time. In the 19th century, “reformers” (especially including Horace Mann) began refashioning our education system along the lines of the Prussian model, which viewed children as the rightful property of the state. These progressive “reformers” deliberately sought to undermine parental authority, substituting the ideas of modern “experts” for whatever religious beliefs or old-fashioned customs might have hitherto served to guide parents in the governance of their families. By privileging their own opinions and preferences, these academic experts became self-ratifying authorities.

The manufacturing of “consensus” among a clique of intellectuals can easily create the appearance that these “experts” actually do have all the answers, and that skeptics and critics are simply ignorant.

When it comes to the best methods of child-rearing, the proof is in the pudding, but this pudding takes a long time to prepare. That is to say, you won’t know until your child is an adult whether your methods were right. So if a new “trend” in parenting or education comes along, it’s going to take about 15 or 20 years before you can look at the final product and evaluate the effects of the child’s upbringing.

When we saw the outbreak of student radicalism on university campuses during the 1960s, it became obvious that something had gone badly wrong during those seemingly placid years of the Eisenhower administration. Somehow, a number of spoiled brats (radical leaders of the SDS, for example) had developed ideas of “democracy” that were at odds with what most American adults believed. What caused this so-called “generation gap”? Two words: Public education.

During the great post-WWII economic boom, an enormous hubris characterized the leadership of the American education system. And a desire to instill patriotic idealism in these Future Citizens led to children being taught to celebrate democracy as the summum bonum.

The only way to judge whether something was good or bad, right or wrong, was to have a vote about it, many children were led to believe. To someone who has been taught this kind of mindless devotion to egalitarian democracy, it is enough to condemn anything to say it is “undemocratic.” The traditional family is condemned by this standard.

Let me state this plainly: I am not going to debate my teenage son over whether he should clean up his room and mow the yard.

If children are granted a veto over parental authority, then our society will be overrun by feral youth who have no respect for anything, e.g., “Occupy Wall Street.” Furthermore, the child who is allowed to mope around all day, watching TV and playing video games — which is what children will do, if they are allowed a democratic “right” to decide how to spend their time — will never develop the habits necessary to success.

What is work, after all? Showing up on time and doing what the boss tells you to do or, better yet, figuring out what the boss wants you to do and just doing it without having to be told. Teaching kids respect for proper authority is actually quite important to the child’s future prospects of success and happiness in the world. Also, the child must develop good social skills and learn to cooperate effectively with others. Who teaches these skills and enforces the regime of cooperation? Parents.

It is very easy for a Yale professor, in his tenured sinecure, to lecture parents on how to raise our children, but unless that professor wants to show up at my house on a daily basis to tell my son to stop being mean to his sister, it’s my job, and I’ll enforce my rules in my house without regard to what any damned Ivy League Ph.D. has to say about it.

A Blizzard of Special Snowflakes™

Democracy encourages selfishness.

Let me repeat that: Democracy encourages selfishness. The idea that everybody is entitled to do just as he pleases, and that any obstacle to his pursuit of his selfish appetites is an infringement of his “rights,” is at the root of what has gone so disastrously wrong in American culture.

The overweening narcissism of Special Snowflakes™ we see involved in “activism” on college campuses is testimony to how a misguided devotion to democratic equality tends to develop in young people a self-pitying sense of themselves as Victims of Oppression if they are not given everything they want as soon as they demand it. These young monsters — the Veruca Salt generation — actually believe they are “traumatized” by the appearance on campus of a speaker who disagrees with them.

Having failed to acquire any useful skills prior to graduating high school (no manager would hire such worthless slackers to be a janitor, a waitress or a retail clerk), they arrive on their university campus and discover that being an “activist” is an occupation that requires nothing except a fanatical dedication to Correct Opinions.

In September 1999, I covered an animal rights protest in Washington. Because our children were being homeschooled, I took my 10-year-old daughter Kennedy along for the trip to D.C., where about two dozen demonstrators were gathered in front of the offices of the Department of Health and Human Services. The HHS Secretary at the time was Donna Shalala, whom the activists accused of violating the “rights” of animals used in a federally-sponsored research. The protest chants included a number of catchy slogans:

Hey, Shalala!
Whaddya say?
How many primates

and

Stop the torture!
Stop the pain!
Donna Shalala is to blame!

These protesters were a wretched hive of scum and villainy by comparison to which Mos Eisley looked like a Sunday school picnic. As I later wrote:

Stylistically, the protesters favored the familiar “alternative” look: white guys in dredlocks, Army fatigues and grimy t-shirts, chicks in tanktops and ripped, saggy jeans. Piercing seemed to be universal and unisex. One girl I talked to had both nostrils, one eyebrow and her tongue pierced.

This multiple-pierced young woman, as I recall, was the spokesperson for the group, and I had assumed — silly me — that these crazy animal-rights weirdos were mostly college students. So when I asked the pierced woman if she was a student, she replied, “No, I’m a full-time activist.”

At that moment, I suddenly had a vision of her filling out her IRS 1040 form and, in the space where it asks for “occupation,” writing “activist.”

Never be an activist, kids. Get a real job doing honest work.

It was my daughter, aged 10 at the time, who pointed out something else about these activists. “Daddy,” she whispered,”those people stink.”

Truer words were never spoken, as I later explained:

I was reminded of George Wallace taunting hippie hecklers in the 60s, suggesting there was one four-letter word they ought to learn: S-O-A-P. I don’t know if this neglect of personal hygiene was a political statement on the part of the animal-rights activists, or if maybe they had spent the previous few nights camping somewhere without access to showers, but they genuinely reeked. You could smell them from 50 feet away. Of course, they weren’t there to display their grooming or lack thereof. Of course, they were there to display their outrage, of which they had plenty.

While I have covered many other left-wing protests over the years, that experience in 1999 taught me all I ever needed to know about “activists,” who are always outraged about something. The same kind of people who vandalized Starbucks to protest “globalization” in 1999 turned out to protest against the War in Iraq. The issues change, but the “activists” never do. When I covered a speech by David Horowitz at George Washington University in 2007, the protesters outside chanted:

Sexist! Racist! Anti-gay!
David Horowitz go away!

Anyone who actually knows David Horowitz knows that these slogans were lies, but the truth doesn’t matter to these “activist” types. All they care about is outrage, and if there is nothing to be outraged about, they’ll make up a reason, perpetrate a hate hoax, and claim that this proves the need for a “conversation” about whatever “issue” is their current focus of outrage. At places like Oberlin College, it seems like everybody is majoring in Activism Studies (see “The Cult of Social Justice”) and that protests expressing their more-or-less permanent outrage are to elite private schools what football is to the University of Alabama.

The “activist” mentality is a product of bad parenting and bad education. It is also a product of bad journalism — liberal reporters who get into the journalism racket because they want to “make a difference,” so that they are invariably sympathetic to whatever “cause” the professional activists are promoting, and therefore they never notice what my daughter noticed that day in 1999: “Daddy, those people stink.”

Indeed, and their ideas are smelly, too. Their attitude stinks. Their worldview stinks. Their arrogant sense of entitlement stinks.

A Simulacrum of Parental Authority

So who is this weirdo at Everyday Feminism inventing “adultism” as a new Thought Crime about which activists expect us to be outraged?

James St. James is a Contributing Writer for Everyday Feminism. He works as a transcriber for super-duper secret projects, tends to keep to himself, and is currently pitching a novel that scares agents. He uses his experiences as a way to reach out to others, usually by way of not keeping his mouth shut. When he’s not busy making cis gender people uncomfortable with his trans gender agenda, he likes to play vintage video games and eat candy.

“James St. James” is obviously a pseudonym and the male pronouns (e.g., “his trans gender”) are part of a fiction we are required to believe. Let’s excerpt a bit from one of “his” earlier Everyday Feminism columns:

Quite a bit changed for me over the first couple of years I started testosterone.
My health and mental wellbeing improved, my happy button grew over an inch in length . . .

(Too late for a TMI alert, I guess. My apologies.)

. . . my natural musk became so fragrant that now I gross even myself out if I don’t shower pretty much every day (no deodorant can contain this beast).
So many awesome, big-deal body changes and mind improvements flourished. . . .

(Everything is awesome in Transgenderland!)

In short, I was being treated better by everyday America because people were reading me as a young, white, straight (?!) male. And I recognized many new privileges that came my way because of it. . . .
What we need to be focusing on is — you know — male privilege, which is the actual problem. The patriarchy is being unfair, so it’s the patriarchy we need to attack.
The fact of the matter is that male privilege makes me feel awkward.
I recognize the unfairness that’s happening, so my job is to help further call it out.
I’m read as a man now, after all. And the irony there is that other men are more apt to listen to me about these issues.

You can read the rest. Having now passed the dreaded 2,000-word mark at which a blog post is so long that no more than a few dozen people will finish reading it, let’s go back to the beginning and remember that “James St. James” is now leading a crusade against “adultism.”

Oh, we can’t have any parents becoming upset because their daughters are dating somebody like “James St. James,” can we? Because this testosterone-enhanced “man” can never be a father, and almost certainly will never be a mother (in any conventional sense), adults who object to “his trans gender agenda” might be an obstacle to the “rights” of democratic equality to which “James St. James” thinks “himself” entitled.

 

It’s astounding.
Time is fleeting.
Madness takes its toll.

How is it that this gender-bending androgynous madness has given rise to what we might fairly call The Rocky Horror Feminism Show?

Would we be wrong to guess that, once “experts” replaced parents as the recognized authority for how children should be raised, people with rather . . . unusual ideas were very keen to acquire the credentials and institutional influence necessary to becoming “experts”? Are you surprised to find that concerns about pro-pedophile activism in academia caused one researcher to warn in 2002, “Some people view children as the next sexual frontier”? Oh, look, here’s a headline from 2013:

Remember the Pro-Pedophile Movement
That Liberals Pretend Doesn’t Exist?

In September 2014, Walter Lee Williams, a Ph.D. in anthropology who was “an eminent professor of gender and sexuality studies” at the University of Southern California, pleaded guilty in federal court to traveling the world to pursue sex with boys as young as 9. Williams was co-editor of a 1997 book, Overcoming Heterosexism and Homophobia, and also co-edited the 2003 book Gay and Lesbian Rights in the United States: A Documentary History. But these dots cannot possibly be connected in any discernible pattern, the “experts” keep telling us.

“Don’t listen to right-wing bigots,” the Ph.D.s keep reassuring us. Once the professors’ advice is accepted in society, we discover such “experts” exercise a simulacrum of parental authority over our children.

Did you notice I previously included an Amazon link to Dana Mack’s book The Assault on Parenthood: How Our Culture Undermines the Family? That was first published in 1997, and I read it not long after it was published. The peculiar animosity to parental authority she described had become quite evident to me as a parent trying to raise children in a society where it seemed that lots of “experts” deemed themselves better qualified than my wife or me to decide how to raise our children.

“To live for the moment is the prevailing passion — to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future. . . .
“Narcissism emerges as the typical form of character structure in a society that has lost interest in the future.”
— Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979)

“Experts” suppose themselves to be vastly superior to the rest of us, both intellectualy and morally, so we are expected to sit in polite silence while they lecture us, and then applaud them for sharing their wisdom with us. We are so completely ignorant, and the “experts” are so much more educated than we are, that we should be grateful that the Enlightened Arbiters of Correct Opinions have condescended to speak to us.

These soi-disant “experts” have never deceived me, and I suspect that any reader who has reached the 2,400-word mark in this preposterously long blog post has likewise never been deceived. In the words of Dylan’s thief: “Let us not talk falsely now, for the hour is getting late.” It is a waste of time to write for fools. You, the wise reader, are as capable of discerning the conclusion to the “transgender” syllogism as I am.

Nobody ever paid me a dime to have the Correct Opinions. My job is to report the facts, and the smelly activists don’t care about facts.

Theory? Oh, that’s above my pay grade, ma’am. A fellow’s got to have a Ph.D. before he can expect anyone to care about his theory, but I have to say I was profoundly intrigued by the theories Neil Postman shared in The Disappearance of Childhood. Exactly what was happening in our culture, Postman wondered, that Hollywood would make Brooke Shields a “sex symbol” at age 12? There was something profoundly strange about the Pretty Baby phenomenon. Much like Christopher Lasch, Postman was a man of the Left, but his concerns about the impact of media (especially television) in shaping “youth culture” were as fundamentally conservative as anything ever preached by an evangelist of the Religious Right. “Resistance” to the toxic influence of media, Postman declared, “entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion against American culture.” There is a reason why you’ll find my byline on Neil Postman’s 2003 obituary in the Guardian.

“WHAT? Stacy McCain was published in the Guardian?”

Yep. And got paid for it, too.

Correct Opinions are cheap. Facts have value, and so we return to the fact of “James St. James,” and the accusation of “adultism” leveled in the name of LGBTQIA feminism. Ask yourself: Who wants to undermine parental authority? Why do they wish to do so? What is their motive?

Do you suppose that if you asked “James St. James,” you would get an honest answer to those questions? Are you suspicious of feminist rhetoric about “gender”? Far be it from me to incite any irrational fear in the mind of the wise reader, but at what point does fear become rational?

Draw your own conclusions, wise reader. My job is to point out the facts. Most important, from my standpoint, is the fact that I’m running behind on the electric bill this month. Mrs. McCain expects patriarchy to pay that bill, and there are no Ivy League universities offering me fellowships, for some reason. This past week, my wonderful wife and I went to have our taxes done, and two-thirds of my income last year was from PayPal contributions. So unless and until the Columbia School of Journalism decides they are in need of my services — checking my email and, no, apparently not yet — I must once more remind my wise readers of the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

What’s 2,800 words worth to you? At a penny a word, it would be $28, but I’d be grateful if ten readers gave as much $2.80 each, and if 100 people hit the tip jar for $2.80, my total fee would rise to 10 cents a word, or $280 total. Because I got up early and started writing this about 6 a.m. EDT, and will publish it about 5 p.m. EDT, minus breaks, let’s say nine hours. If my labor were worth minimum wage ($7.25 an hour), that nine-hour job would pay $65.25, but let’s not talk about social justice, eh?

Unlike the faculty of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Oberlin College, for example, I don’t believe in social justice. That means there’s no demand for my services from academia, obviously, nor do I expect that the kind of big-money fat cats who bankroll the Republican Party are likely to decide to cut me a check this month for $1,413.75 ($65.25 a day x five days a week x 52 weeks a year ÷ 12 months). However, if 100 readers were to hit the tip jar for $15 this month, I’d at least be paid slightly more than if I were to get hired full-time at Burger King.

Pardon me for bothering you with simple arithmetic, but nobody at the RNC gives a damn and Mrs. McCain is serious about this electric bill, and my next essay might be headlined: “Would You Like Fries With That?”




 

Thanks in advance.

UPDATE: Linked by the Lonely Conservative — thanks! — and welcome, Instapundit readers! Maybe someone should tell Professor Reynolds, an alumnus of Yale Law, that Harvard Law Is Decadent and Depraved. But he probably knew that already.

 


Category: Education, Family, Gays, Intellectuals, Science, Sex Trouble

Comments

64 Responses to “The New Thought Crime: ‘Adultism’”

  1. Steve Skubinna
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 4:38 pm

    My hat is off to these SJWs. It must take an astonishing amount of effort, time and ingenuity to be, to use a purely technical term, such a G*ddamned f*kcing retard.

    While I would wish they would turn this effort towards something productive, I am grateful that they focus on silly banal forms of evil, and not the grand historical kinds that, for example, left over a hundred million dead in the 20th Century. Okay, they sort of do, but in passive aggressive academic whining and not in putting on armbands and marching the streets busting heads. For this we can all thank the fact that they are nearly universally physical and moral cowards.

    I am also grateful that they so far strenuously avoid rural America, which is filled with people not inclined to put up with their BS. Life is too short for me to spend it suppressing the urge to punch people who manifestly deserve it and are loudly demanding it.

  2. Steve Skubinna
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 4:38 pm

    My hat is off to these SJWs. It must take an astonishing amount of effort, time and ingenuity to be, to use a purely technical term, such a G*ddamned f*kcing retard.

    While I would wish they would turn this effort towards something productive, I am grateful that they focus on silly banal forms of evil, and not the grand historical kinds that, for example, left over a hundred million dead in the 20th Century. Okay, they sort of do, but in passive aggressive academic whining and not in putting on armbands and marching the streets busting heads. For this we can all thank the fact that they are nearly universally physical and moral cowards.

    I am also grateful that they so far strenuously avoid rural America, which is filled with people not inclined to put up with their BS. Life is too short for me to spend it suppressing the urge to punch people who manifestly deserve it and are loudly demanding it.

  3. concern00
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 4:45 pm

    There’s a book I read that’s full of really good advice, that’s representative of millennia of human experience and knowledge.

    He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes. (Proverbs 13:24)

  4. The New Thought Crime: ‘Adultism’ | Living in Anglo-America
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 5:04 pm

    […] The New Thought Crime: ‘Adultism’ […]

  5. Finrod Felagund
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 6:36 pm

    There’s an obvious reason why these types are so concerned about “adultism”: despite their physical age, none of them are adults.

  6. Finrod Felagund
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 6:42 pm

    Oh, and for the record, my all-male alma mater, Wabash College, destroyed Oberlin 55-18 this past football season, 70-10 the year before that, and 27-10 the year before that.

  7. Daniel O'Brien
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 6:46 pm

    Spotted you a double dime. Thanks.

  8. Joe Joe
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 6:55 pm

    ” So when I asked the pierced woman if she was a student, she replied, “No, I’m a full-time activist.””

    Many, many of them are full time activists, especially on college campuses:
    http://www.avoiceformen.net/feminism/vanja-krajina-university-of-toronto/

    “Facts have value, and so we return to the fact of “James St. James,””

    Considering one of this tran’s favorite things is “he likes to play vintage video games”, one wonders if James St. James is a play on Jon St. John, the voice of Duke Nukem.

  9. Mike G.
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 7:00 pm

    I blame Dr. Spock and his book on babies and raising children. I believe he was the first to discourage use of corporal punishment on children. Fortunately… or not…my parents didn’t read that tome.

  10. Fail Burton
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 7:03 pm

    “Dear Feministing, my 7 yr. old girl wants to lead an expedition into the Amazon jungle to find the true grave of Carmen Miranda. She wants carbon fiber plates grafted onto her body to protect her from malaria, anaconda stings, giant dodos, etc. What should I do? – signed, Concerned Mother”

    “Dear Concerned Mother, don’t lay your adultism vibe on your child, or even assume your girl is a girl. Let them have their head. It’s just an exploratory phase they’re going through similar to when I explored the center of the earth by digging a trench in my parent’s basement when I was a child. I have carbon fiber plates grafted into my skull to protect me from mens’ thoughts, so no worries there.

    “PS: there is not much oxygen in the Amazon, so make sure they bring a goldfish bowl – Melissa Fangstank, head mental case, Feministing.”

  11. Joe Joe
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 7:21 pm

    You want to see the latest gibberish from Democratic Underground?

    Are Mason Jars Sexist?
    http://www.democraticunderground.com/~Albertoo

  12. concern00
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 7:39 pm

    Yeah that Dr Spock wasn’t working on the premise of living long and prospering.

  13. The Latest From The Radical Feminists: Adultism And Monosexual Privilege – The Lonely Conservative
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 8:27 pm

    […] The New Though Crime: “Adultism” […]

  14. RS
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 8:36 pm

    N.B. St. James most definitely did not invent the term “adultism.” It is–and has been–part of the multi-front war on traditional families for many, many years. Public education is one front; the juvenile justice system is another front (elastic definitions of “abuse” and “neglect” which allow the state to remove children from homes or “monitor” parents); “human rights” of children is a third front.There are more and I’ve seen a number of them close up from the inside. (Example: Parents lost custody of child for “emotional abuse” because their discipline for bad grades was to quit a school athletic team to concentrate on studies. The “mandatory” reporter was the high school coach who manipulated a 20-something social worker into placing the kid with a teacher so the kid could finish out the season. The parents “won” ultimately, at great cost both financially and their ability to discipline and control their child. That was 30 years ago.)

    The motives of the various groups advocating for these changes differ: Pedophiles want access to children without parental interference via parental right and duty to intervene to protect children; the various state actors what to turn children in to government automatons by eliminating influences which run counter to the idea that the State is God. Yet the purpose is the same: Destruction of the God ordained institutions of Marriage and Family.

  15. Fail Burton
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 8:54 pm

    “Children’s Rights” has been a persistent strain since the beginning and obviously used as camouflage. We’ve heard this from Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Andrea Dworkin, etc. There’s a reason people want laws changed that has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with creating a growth medium for them to prey on.

  16. Daniel Freeman
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 9:28 pm

    Funny coincidence:

    1. Transmen expect to have male privilege.
    2. Their egos need a successful transition.
    3. They “discover” that they have privilege.

    Morissettean irony:

    4. They proceed to act like women everywhere and tell us all how lucky we are to be men, which is arguably a sign of failure to transition.

    I swear, transmen are like Californians that can’t shut up about how they did things there. They left it on purpose, but they can’t escape their perspective. They will always really be Californian female.

  17. Whitney
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 9:34 pm

    Read the whole thing!

    When I was young, born in 67, there was mystery around adulthood that I couldn’t wait to uncover. That was the common feeling of all young people then. To become an adult was something to which we all aspired. I think I may have been part of the last generation to feel that way. Today, no one wants to grow up. Adults are pitied and endless adolescence is a reasonable goal. So now, everyone tries to act and think like teenagers. The majority of adults have abdicated so they won’t seem uncool which is profoundly immature in itself.

    I have no idea what happens next. I think there has been no more bizarre time in all of history

  18. Alex Charles
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 9:54 pm

    “When we saw the outbreak of student radicalism on university campuses during the 1960s, it became obvious that something had gone badly wrong during those seemingly placid years of the Eisenhower administration. ”

    NO – what WAS obvious was that 55,000 young men were killed in Viet Nam. Over 30,000 died after Richard Nixon campaigned for President in 1968 claiming he had a ‘secret plan’ to end the war. At it’s peak, over a half million American soldiers were in Southeast Asia.

    A good portion of an entire generation became distrustful and permanently angry towards the legislators and systems that maintained the war, and ended up working in government, education and media.

  19. Fail Burton
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 11:47 pm

    Betty Friedan’s Vietnam was the evil of women’s magazines and her failed marriage she smeared all over American culture. In other words infantile provincialism and projection accompanied by self-pity. Friedan was the dolt which makes feminism’s doltishness self-explanatory.

    And now we have a fourth wave of this doltishness in progress which saps the energy of this nation by having normal people having to fend off institutional hysteria just to get back to zero. Children’s rights now… set at the service of lesbian supremacism doctrine? Do these people sit around trying to be as crazy as possible?

  20. JT
    April 4th, 2016 @ 12:01 am

    Claremont Review of Books had an article “What Women Want” reviewing a feminist book _Feminism Unfinished: A Short Surprising History of American Women’s Movements_. Apparently one author claims there are “social justice feminists” and “equal rights feminists”.

  21. Daniel Freeman
    April 4th, 2016 @ 12:53 am

    Even the “equal rights feminists” (such as Based Mom) still kneel at the altar of the Female Imperative. Even many men do.

    True egalitarians are very rare and arguably misguided, so counter to idealism they are. They might just enable misandry.

  22. mole
    April 4th, 2016 @ 3:34 am

    “The manufacturing of “consensus” among a clique of intellectuals can easily create the appearance that these “experts” actually do have all the answers, and that skeptics and critics are simply ignorant.”

    This from the experts who gave us Dr Spocks child rearing advice through the 70’s? (though now its sexual perverts trying on a different and entirely inappropriate form of child-rearing)
    http://healthland.time.com/2011/07/14/65-years-since-spock-five-ideas-that-changed-american-parenting/
    Oh what a surprise, Spock turns out to be another person interested in kiddies sexuality.
    “..What Spock really did in Baby and Child Care, which he started writing in 1943, was to sneak Freudian concepts into the American middle-class mind. Surmising that new parents were not yet ready to hear of their infants’ oral, anal and genital stages, Spock simply advised moms and dads not to get alarmed if baby sometimes behaved, well, oddly. He had learned from Freud that repression could produce catastrophic adult neuroses. Better, he advised, to wait things out…”

    Again, at what stage in American life did it seem wise to take advice on ANYTHING from people who are insane?
    If I called myself Napoleon and dressed and spoke like him would it seem wise to give me command of your armed forces training camps?
    Because we have freaks and damaged people running the “camps” of academia.

  23. Category Errors – UPDATED | Rotten Chestnuts
    April 4th, 2016 @ 6:32 am

    […] 4/4/2016: Stacy McCain informs us that “Adultism” is the new […]

  24. RS
    April 4th, 2016 @ 7:14 am

    Within the juvenile justice system, the change was gradual, but profound. Forty years ago, it was legally presumed that children should be with their parents absent a showing of gross physical neglect or abuse. In the late ’70s, we began to see changes in the law which added a requirement that the disposition of children also be in the children’s “best interests.” Slowly the “best interests” standard subsumed the parental preference presumption to the point where the presumption was ignored, if not outright eliminated.

    Add in ever more elastic definitions of “abuse” and “neglect,” i.e. the “emotional neglect” of removing your daughter from a sports team where she was an All-State performer, an increasing cadre of young, progressively educated social workers calling the shots, the elimination of independent lawyers appointed to represent children and parents in juvenile court proceedings, requirements that lawyers who practice before juvenile courts undergo “training,” which was nothing more than indoctrination in the principle that “the state knows best” and you have a recipe for the destruction of family autonomy.*

    And the most insidious thing is that all this occurred/occurs in secret because juvenile proceedings are confidential to “protect” the children. Parents could not complain publicly without risking both criminal sanctions and losing their children. Stated differently, we’ve been on this road for a long, long time.

    *I practiced in juvenile courts representing parents and children, both for pay and by appointment for over ten years. I never lost a case representing parents. Then, one day, a new judge took the bench who was steeped in the “modern” family jurisprudence. Suddenly, I stopped getting all appointments to represent children. I still represented parents for pay, but that lasted only a year or so, before I was informed I couldn’t do so because I didn’t have the “mandatory training”–even though I was a 12 year attorney with several hundred first chair jury trials for Fortune 500 companies, not to mention my experience in juvenile court. The plan was obvious: remove anybody who didn’t play along.

    It’s very, very scary and why I advise to minimize if not eliminate all entanglements between one’s family and the government at all costs.

  25. Instapundit » Blog Archive » OH, THAT DEATH OF THE GROWN-UP: The New Thought Crime: ‘Adultism.’…
    April 4th, 2016 @ 7:40 am

    […] OH, THAT DEATH OF THE GROWN-UP: The New Thought Crime: ‘Adultism.’ […]

  26. James Becker
    April 4th, 2016 @ 7:51 am

    I’m afraid you are sort of wrong about something, Stacy.

    The reason your kid would mope around all day if you didn’t direct him, is because the schools where he went beat the soul out of him.

    My kids get very little direction from me (though they get quite a bit of support), but they rarely mope around. Its not because I act differently than you as a parent. Its because I never sent them to elementary school (they went to Montessori). Since there soul was never destroyed by the experience, they are self directed and have no interest in “moping around”.

    Many parents who home school will tell much the same story – for the same reason.

    My point? Government schooling is even more destructive than even you can imagine.

  27. Asteriks
    April 4th, 2016 @ 8:00 am

    Don’t forget Stephen Baskerville’s
    “Taken Into Custody” (The War Against
    Fathers, Marriage, and the Family)
    http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2008/06/witch-hunts-in-contemporary-america-is.html

  28. Neo
    April 4th, 2016 @ 8:03 am

    When it comes to the best methods of child-rearing, the proof is in the pudding, but this pudding takes a long time to prepare.

    This reminds me of a private sector consultant story.
    A man works for a consulting company and realizes that the product they are supposed to deliver if flawed. He goes to his boss and says …
    “we have to fix this flaw or we will never get work again”
    … the boss picks up a piece of paper and replies …
    “this is a list of the Fortune 500 companies .. by the time we get all the way through this list and wrap around, everybody we have screwed will have retired or changed jobs .. nobody will remember”

  29. Gmama
    April 4th, 2016 @ 8:12 am

    There was a Swedish study that showed people who undergo sex reassignment surgery are 20 times more likely to commit suicide. Hormone replacement surgery can cause cancer and heart disease. The study was conducted in Sweden, a country that is very trans-friendly.

    While there are a small number of people born with ambiguous gender, or malformation of their genitals, in other words an actual medical condition that causes confusion that is not the case for most transgender people.

    The fact that activists cannot admit some youth are confused or have a psychological condition shows they are the zealots. Doctors who conduct studies in conflict with transgender activist are pilloried. Why would anyone allow such radical measures on a child, especially when outcomes are unclear?

  30. Gmama
    April 4th, 2016 @ 8:14 am

    …you as the adult are of course required to pay for what ever your “child” wants, and because you wouldn’t want your child to become that horrible thing the “adult” you should continue to do so forever.

  31. Robert
    April 4th, 2016 @ 8:38 am

    “Let me repeat that: Democracy encourages selfishness. The idea
    that everybody is entitled to do just as he pleases, and that any
    obstacle to his pursuit of his selfish appetites is an infringement of
    his “rights,” is at the root of what has gone so disastrously wrong in
    American culture.” Your opening sentence is spot on, then you go on to describe anarchy, where everyone has Rights while nobody has the right to object. The problem with democracy is by definition the minority have no rights, as the majority won, “get over it.”

  32. Rhino
    April 4th, 2016 @ 8:41 am

    You sound like Moldbug, or perhaps he sounds like you.

    Either way, donation sent.

  33. robertstacymccain
    April 4th, 2016 @ 8:56 am

    Thank you kindly, sir!

  34. robertstacymccain
    April 4th, 2016 @ 9:03 am

    The Founders of the American Republic had studied history enough to know that democracy leads to anarchy, and next to tyranny. Yet when the generation of the Founders had died — Adams and Jefferson died on the same day, in fact –succeeding generations disregarded the lessons of history and the warnings of their ancestors. About 40 years after Jefferson heard “the firebell in the night” (as he warned of the Missouri Compromise), the nation descended into Civil War. When that ended, the Fourteenth Amendment was shoved down the throats of a reluctant citizenry, over the objections of those who warned that embedding a radical conception of “equality” in the Constitution would have dreadful consequences. Here we are in 2016, and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment appears to have swallowed whole the rest of the Constitution, and it seems no one in any position of influence or authority understands what has happened.

  35. Robert
    April 4th, 2016 @ 9:55 am

    You blame Dr. Spock and absolve the brainless boobs who failed to ask a more competent authority, namely their mothers. They managed to get them to the point where they could at least reproduce. The wisdom of the ages can evaporate in a single generation. Use force only when required and only as much as required, Grandma’s wisdom. Knowing the requirements makes the adult.

    Incidentally, the baby care in Spocks book is excellent.

  36. Steve Skubinna
    April 4th, 2016 @ 11:35 am

    Plus, they were all, like totally oppressed by their insane fascist parents, maaaaan.

  37. Steve Skubinna
    April 4th, 2016 @ 11:35 am

    All male? Wow, that must be the rapiest place on Earth!

  38. Steve Skubinna
    April 4th, 2016 @ 11:37 am

    Human beings are the only species that reads books to figure out how to do what all other mammals do instinctively.

  39. Steve Skubinna
    April 4th, 2016 @ 11:38 am

    Since Obamacare has effectively extended childhood to age 27, we have to ask just why Obama hates 28 year olds?

  40. Steve Skubinna
    April 4th, 2016 @ 11:41 am

    “I won’t grow up!
    I refuse to wear a tie!
    Or a serious expression
    In the middle of July!”

  41. Steve Skubinna
    April 4th, 2016 @ 11:44 am

    Even many progressives would be astonished to learn that many hallmarks of the welfare state, including state schooling, are the brainchild of Otto von Bismarck.

    The whole point, of course, was to ensure children grew up to be good servants of the Reich.

  42. Steve Skubinna
    April 4th, 2016 @ 11:45 am

    Franklin knew what he was talking about when he said “A republic, if you can keep it.”

  43. Mike G.
    April 4th, 2016 @ 12:27 pm

    Just stating the facts Jack…er…Robert. And the people who were most enamoured with Dr. Spock’s “teachings”, were the very elitists we’re railing against today.

    The majority of blue collar folks had no truck with the garbage Spock promoted.

  44. Robert
    April 4th, 2016 @ 12:51 pm

    Since humans are the dominate specie on earth it would seem knowledge and wisdom trump instinct. Also humans are the only mammals to have developed writing and there by reading and books, to pass knowledge and wisdom over time and distance, lower orders have only instinct, it is no comparison at all.

  45. Steve Skubinna
    April 4th, 2016 @ 12:54 pm

    Johns Hopkins was a pioneer in sex reassignment surgery in the US. They no longer do it, because it has no effect on the mental well being of the patients. In other words, it does not address whatever underlying problems the “transgendered” have.

    As you note, there may be a tiny percentage of people born with genuinely ambiguous sex. Those people, in a sane world, would be dealt with on a case by case basis, instead of hysterically insisting that all of society be reframed in order to accommodate a mythical issue which is really a matter of psychological maladjustment.

    At some point we chose to go beyond simple acknowledgement of the civil rights of the insane and chose instead to give in to their demands that we all be as insane as they are.

  46. Steve Skubinna
    April 4th, 2016 @ 12:55 pm

    I would agree that knowledge and reason trump instinct, were you to show me some examples of humans doing so on a species wide basis.

  47. Phelps
    April 4th, 2016 @ 2:15 pm

    Science has an answer for the stink. Studies done on political tendencies show a strong correlation between liberal leanings and a lower disgust factor. The more liberal you are, the less offended by things like urine, feces, body odor, dead bodies, pus, etc (“animal reminders” in the art) you are.

    So, they stink because they don’t care if they stink. They don’t find smelling like a sewer disgusting, offensive, or even unpleasant.

  48. Let us grow up [I Peter 1] | Dark Brightness
    April 4th, 2016 @ 2:58 pm

    […] When it comes to the best methods of child-rearing, the proof is in the pudding, but this pudding takes a long time to prepare. That is to say, you won’t know until your child is an adult whether your methods were right. So if a new “trend” in parenting or education comes along, it’s going to take about 15 or 20 years before you can look at the final product and evaluate the effects of the child’s upbringing. […]

  49. Gmama
    April 4th, 2016 @ 4:52 pm

    When your 4 year old prances around proclaiming she is a pony are you required to get her a surgically implanted tail and hooves?

    I do feel badly for people experiencing body dysmorphia, and think there could be unresolved genetic or hormonal issues at work in some cases, but as in other mental disorders a physiological cause should be investigated, then an emotional one.

    Society has elevated being part of a “marginalized group”, and it is hard to believe many youth, looking to be special will adopt a persona that they may not be so comfortable with later in life. Why not wait and let them decide as adults. If someone has an innie they should go to the ladies room, and outie, the men’s room, regardless of the amount of makeup they are wearing.

  50. Steve Skubinna
    April 4th, 2016 @ 4:54 pm

    Not only that, but it shocks the squares.