The Other McCain

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

Jian Ghomeshi, Sexual Harassment and the Enchanted Crocodiles of Feminism

Posted on | April 25, 2016 | 58 Comments

 

Most Americans have never heard of Jian Ghomeshi, but he’s a celebrity in Canada. Ghomeshi was apparently a serial harasser of women. He was accused of sexual assault, put on trial and acquitted last month. This touched off an endless carnival of pontification by Canadian feminists, who are arguably the most unhinged feminists on the planet.

The largest Canadian feminist website, Feminist Current, is operated by Meghan Murphy, a latter-day disciple of Andrea Dworkin, and Murphy’s reaction to the Ghomeshi verdict was classic:

What we know about Ghomeshi — that he is sadistic; that he is a classic abuser, grooming and manipulating his victims, painting them as jealous liars after the fact; that he is a bully and a narcissist — unfortunately didn’t come into play in terms of [Judge William] Horkins‘ decision. My opinion is that, whether or not the judge was able to determine, without a doubt, that the stories told by the complainants were wholly true, Ghomeshi’s behaviour shows, without a shadow of a doubt, that he is an abusive man. . . .
To me, and to most other feminists in Canada, the small details don’t matter. What Ghomeshi’s victims remember, what they discussed with others, and what their responses to Ghomeshi’s behaviour were don’t make a shred of difference in terms of our understanding of both what the victims went through and continue to go through, as well as in terms of our opinion of Ghomeshi. . . .
“Guilty” or “not guilty” is not a good enough conversation, in this circumstance. If my ex hadn’t backhanded me across the face one night, how would I describe his abuse to a police officer or to a judge, in court? What would he have been found “guilty” of?
The answer, of course, is: nothing.
Not only do we not understand that psychological, verbal, financial, sexual, and emotional abuse are always at play when there is physical abuse, but it also isn’t acknowledged that these things are generally unprovable to outsiders. We don’t understand that men manipulate women into “consenting” to abusive, traumatic sex all the time, to the point that we feel we “chose” it willingly and tell ourselves we enjoyed it.

In Murphy’s interpretation, Ghomeshi is transformed from a guy on trial for specific crimes into a symbol, and his bad behavior is generalized to represent the abuse that all men (collectively) inflict on all women (collectively) under the oppressive system of male supremacy.

Three years ago, Ace of Spades wrote this:

It occurs to me — as a skeptic and secularist — that if you seek to put away Magical Thinking, you put it all away. If you disbelieve in God, then you really ought to disbelieve in Transcendence as well, and Rightwing Sorcerers, and Magic Words, and Sustaining Myth-Lies, and all the rest of it.
One amusement to me, as a lonely disbeliever on the right, is noticing this about the Left: The Left imagines that their disbelief in God frees them from superstition.
In fact it does no such thing. The Left’s disbelief in God does not free them from superstition — rather, it frees the superstition to infect all other modes of their thought.

Ace was writing about the way liberals interpreted the JFK assassination to suit their own essentially religious purposes. The Left clings to myths that justify their commitment to politics as religion and, in doing so, they immanetize the eschaton, as Eric Vogelin would say. Pursuing secular salvation, they become heaven-on-earth crusaders. As fanatical advocates for utopian schemes, they convince themselves that all The Smart People share their beliefs, and accuse their opponents of ignorance and prejudice. Liberals refused to accept the obvious explanation of JFK’s assassination — the pro-Castro madman Lee Harvey Oswald — because this did not fit their conception of how the world works and therefore Kennedy’s death was reinterpreted to fit the liberal mythology.

Correct Opinions and Confirmation Bias

We see this kind of “Enchanted Crocodile” thinking (you really have to read Ace’s whole piece to get the significance of that phrase) whenever the media seize on some event and go into What Does It Mean mode, where the news becomes a didactic lesson, an excuse for liberals to treat us like we are children who need adult guidance to form the Correct Opinions.

Consider, for example, the Black Lives Matter movement that emerged in the wake of the death of Michael Brown in a St. Louis suburb. In her forthcoming book The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, Heather Mac Donald tells how this incident was generalized and imbued with symbolic meaning:

The August 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, spawned a narrative as stubborn as it was false: Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson had allegedly shot the 18-year-old “gentle giant” in cold blood while the latter was pleading for his life, hands raised in surrender. After Brown’s death, rioters torched and looted Ferguson businesses. The facts were that Brown, a budding criminal who weighed nearly 300 pounds, had punched Wilson in the face, tried to grab Wilson’s gun, and charged at him, leading Wilson to fire in self-defense.
In the months that followed, the lie that Brown had died in racially motivated police execution was amplified by the media, college presidents, and the left-wing political class. The newly formed Black Lives Matter movement promoted the notion that black American males were being hunted down and killed with impunity by renegade white police officers.

There is an element of confirmation bias involved here that was exploited by Black Lives Matter. Let us stipulate that the average black person encounters racism on a regular basis, in small, ordinary ways. Very few people are truly “color-blind” and, while outright racial hatred is not common, every black person can describe certain attitudes and behaviors they notice that are in some way prejudicial or discriminatory. More than 50 years past the triumph of the civil rights movement, however, no intelligent adult in America needs another “Racism Is Bad” lecture and yet the liberal media seems to believe we do. To watch CNN coverage of any story with a racism angle, you get the idea that the producers think of their network as a sort of church, and the rest of us are all sinners in need of liberal salvation. All the problems afflicting black America could be solved, if only we cared as much about black people as the CNN producers do.

Of course, CNN producers are not better people than you or me. The liberal propagandists who get paid huge salaries by TV networks enjoy pretending to be better than us, but they really aren’t. Nor is this posture of the bien-pensants harmless. In seizing on incidents like the shooting of Michael Brown and turning them into fodder for a National Conversation About Race, the producers at CNN not only foster a sense of paranoid racial resentment that endangers the lives of police officers, but they also distract attention from the real causes of real problems afflicting the black community. Heather Mac Donald explains in The War on Cops:

A straight line can be drawn between family breakdown and youth violence. In Chicago’s poor black neighborhoods, criminal activity among the young has reached epidemic proportions. It’s a problem that no one, including the Chicago Police Department, seems able to solve. About 80 percent of black children in Chicago are born to single mothers. . . .
The sky-high illegitimacy rate meant that black boys were growing up in a world in which it was normal to impregnate a girl and then take off. When a boy is raised without any social expectation that he will support his children and marry his children’s mother, he fails to learn the most fundamental lesson of personal responsibility. The high black crime rate was one result of a culture that fails to civilize men through marriage.

This is not a new idea, nor is its meaning limited to Chicago. As far back as 1965, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan described the breakdown of the family as a major problem in the black community (and was smeared as a racist for doing so), and a stubborn resistance to confronting this problem has typified the Left’s racial rhetoric ever since. Charles Murray’s classic 1984 study Losing Ground, examining the failures of liberal anti-poverty programs, showed how the “root causes” mentality — the attempt to make white racism the explanation for every problem in the black community — has prevented liberals from enacting effective policies to deal with these problems and, in fact, has caused these problems to get worse. As Murray has more recently shown in his book Coming Apart, the breakdown of the family has not left white America unscathed. Nearly a third of white children (29%) in the U.S. are now born to unmarried women, and nearly half of children whose parents do marry will subsequently see their families fractured by divorce. Nor do these statistics fully capture the decline of marriage-based families in our society. The median age at first marriage has risen dramatically in recent decades. Historically, the typical American women married between ages 20 and 22. From 1947 to 1972, the median age at first marriage for women ranged from 20.1 (in 1956) to 20.9 (in 1972). What this median number means is that the first-time bride in 1956 was more likely to be 18 than to be 23. In such an culture, most young men took a serious approach to their romantic pursuits, because by the time a man reached his early 20s, most young women were either already married or engaged. High-school boyfriend/girlfriend relationships often led directly to marriage and there were relatively few single people older than 25. The birth rate was substantially higher then, so that the typical 25-year-old man during that era was working to support a wife and two children. A teenage boy could see all around him the same pattern, and follow the familiar steps of a path — finish high school, get a job, marry his girlfriend, have babies — that would lead him toward the role of responsible adulthood by the time he was 25.

This social script has been torn to tatters in the past 40 or 50 years. In 1973, the median age at first marriage for U.S. women reached 21 for the first time in more than two decades, and has continued rising steadily — to 23 in 1980, to 24 in 1991, to 25 in 1998. The median age at first marriage for men, meanwhile, increased from 22.8 (in 1966) to 27.1 (in 1996). What this means, culturally, is that adolescence has been extended and adulthood has been postponed, so that the typical 25-year-old American man nowadays is more irresponsible and immature than his grandfather was at the same age, and this postponement of maturity has social consequences — sometimes deadly consequences.

Who Is Committing These Massacres?

Chicago is Murder City, U.S.A., where there were 468 murders in 2015, compared with 416 the year before, a 12.5% increase, as well as 2,900 non-fatal shootings. Chicago had more homicides than any other American city last year, most of the victims were black, and is racism to blame for this? Are white people somehow responsible for the violent mayhem perpetrated in Chicago? The producers at CNN have been awfully remiss in providing us explanations for this ceaseless carnage. There have already been 179 people murdered in Chicago this year, and 70.6% of the victims were black. Just in the past week (April 17-23) Chicago had 94 shootings, including eight fatalities, and scarcely a day goes by that at least one person isn’t shot to death in Chicago.

CNN producers, like other liberals, do not want to face the reality behind the nightmare of violent crime in Murder City. U.S.A. Chicago is being terrorized by young black men who have not learned “the most fundamental lesson of personal responsibility,” as Heather Mac Donald says, and who are representative of “a culture that fails to civilize men through marriage.” This is a nationwide phenomenon, and its effect is not limited to the black community. Wherever the breakdown of the family occurs, wherever unwed motherhood is accepted as normal, wherever there are young men growing up with no sense of responsibility and moral duty, bad things happen and innocent people suffer.

You won’t hear that message from Democrat politicians or liberal pundits. Don’t expect CNN to admit this. Black Lives Matters is too busy demonizing cops, and feminists are never going to face this reality.

What Is it About Men
That They’re Committing
These Horrible Massacres?

That was the headline on a column at the left-wing site Alternet that Meghan Murphy published after the December 2012 massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. The perpetrator of that atrocity was 20-year-old Adam Lanza, who had been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and may have also been schizophrenic. The Creepy Little Weirdo killed his own mother, then murdered 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School before committing suicide. Lanza was similar to other mass murderers, for example Elliot Rodger, the Creepy Little Weirdo who killed six people in Santa Barbara, California, in May 2014. Political correctness prohibits anyone in the mainstream media from remarking that such killers were dangerous lunatics who should have locked up in asylums, because this might unfairly “stigmatize” the mentally ill. However, no such prohibition prevents feminists like Meghan Murphy from using these Creepy Little Weirdo types to demonize men quite generally.

“Much of feminist rhetoric is a form of psychological warfare against men, employing a propaganda tactic in which atrocities. . . . are used as an indictment of all men. . . .
“This atrocity-as-representative tactic — where the very worst thing any man ever does is attributed to all men collectively — is simply a method of hate propaganda.”

“The Queering of Feminism and the Silencing of Heterosexual Masculinity,” April 16

No one ever seems to notice this about feminism. The habitual dishonesty of feminist rhetoric (e.g., faulty generalization) is not consistently criticized, perhaps because it is taken for granted. Feminists have been indulging in this kind of haphazard sophistry for so long that most people don’t even recognize it as a propaganda tactic. Feminists are very selective in their choice of evidence, when they are using anecdotes to support their anti-male arguments, and their logic is quite often circular, the conclusion being merely a restatement of their original premise:

Premise A: Men oppress women;
Premise B: [Some terrible thing that happened];

ergo,

Conclusion: Women are oppressed by men.

You see that whatever terrible thing is Premise B in this “argument” — whether it is Elliot Rodger’s murder spree or the sexual abuse of which Jian Ghomeshi was accused — is really not relevant. Bad things happen every day in the world, and we cannot just go around picking and choosing examples to suit our purposes, where Event X shows Trend Y and is therefore proof of Phenomenon Z, which we have organized a political movement against. Feminism begins with the premise that women are victims of systematic injustice and this thesis of patriarchal oppression is asserted, rather than proven. That is to say, feminists are seldom challenged in their basic claim that every manner of inequality between men and women is proof of unjust oppression. Once we accept their definition of terms (“unequal” as a synonym for “wrong”), we find it is quite difficult to reject whatever argument feminists build upon that idea, because it is never difficult to find examples of “injustice” with which to elaborate this kind of claim.

At a certain level, feminist rhetoric is just the expression of prejudice against men, or perhaps an invitation to a pity-party for women, and what sort of women do we expect to find supporting such a movement?

 

Just as there is a certain type of man who commits mass murder, so also is there a certain type of woman who devotes her life to demonizing men through anti-male hate propaganda campaigns. Probably she wasn’t the most popular girl in high school, and maybe she resented this.

Maybe she looked at the way the world works and decided that her own disappointments were the result of disadvantages that seemed to her unfair, and decided that ending this unfairness was a cause that everyone should support. Rather than honestly seeking to maximize her own happiness as an individual, instead she joined a collective movement of women against men, to change the way the world works. The rhetoric of such movements is dishonest, because their motives are dishonest.

“It never ceases to amaze me that people think feminism is about vilifying men as violent rapists. Feminism would not exist if not for women’s belief that things can be different — that men can be different. We know that masculinity is not innate and we know that men need not rape and abuse. Men choose it. They choose to force themselves on women, they choose to buy sex from desperate women and girls, they choose to treat those women and girls in inhumane ways, they choose to ogle and intimidate us in public places, they choose to call us names and beat us. They also choose to bully other men — their friends, their classmates, their sons — into perpetuating and replicating this behaviour — masculinity, it’s called.”
Meghan Murphy, April 9, 2015

Let any student of rhetoric examine that paragraph and note particularly the use of the word “they.” Ask yourself, “Who is the presumed reader of this article, and who is ‘they’?” The reader is presumed to be female and she is being told that men (“they”) do all these dreadful things. “Men choose it.” What is “it”? Rape. Do all men rape? Do all men patronize prostitutes? Do all men beat women? Do all men bully other men?

The answers are: No, no, no, and no.

If you are a man and do not do these things, does this mean that you are not “masculine”? Why does Meghan Murphy make “masculinity” the target of her attack? Are masculine men always bad men?

Selfish, Dishonest and Cruel

Re-read her paragraph carefully, and Meghan Murphy’s dishonesty becomes apparent. She is doing exactly what she claims she is not doing — “vilifying men as violent rapists” — and she does this by using “masculinity” as a synonym for abusive sexual violence.

This is very much like the way some people use “Zionist” or “neocon” as synonyms for Jew, yet claim not to be anti-Semites. It is not my habit to volunteer for duty with the Thought Police, and I am aware that policy discussions about the Middle East require a certain tolerance in this regard. The late Robert Novak, for example, was proudly Jewish and yet a critic of neoconservatives, especially those in the Bush administration who insisted on war in Iraq. Still, there comes a point at which anti-Zionism is clearly an excuse for Jew-hating and, in the same way, we see how feminism so often is simply man-hating. And the paragraph by Meghan Murphy I’ve quoted is from a column headlined, “Maligning Andrea Dworkin in death amounts to little more than misogyny.”

 

Well, what can anyone say in reply to this? If Andrea Dworkin could not be called a man-hater, no feminist ever could. Dworkin was also one of the most dishonest writers who ever lived, both in the assertions she sought to prove and the methods by which she prove them. Permit me here to quote from my own book, Sex Trouble:

[Dworkin’s 1987 book] Intercourse is a book difficult to describe, mainly because it is so distasteful to describe it. What it is, really, is a series of literary essays. Dworkin takes up the works of a number of male authors, classical and contemporary, and extracts from their writings passages that exhibit (or can be interpreted as exhibiting) what Dworkin considers the universal meaning of sexual intercourse. That is to say, Dworkin finds in these authors the expression of her idea that sex with men is inherently degrading to women, that sexual intercourse involves male dominance and a humiliation of women that is at least symbolic, if not deliberate. In Dworkin’s reading, men desire intercourse with women only as a way to dehumanize women. Male sexuality in Intercourse is always predatory, if not violent, and Dworkin sees male sexuality as rooted in hateful contempt for women. . . .
Andrea Dworkin’s feminism was not about equality with men. Equality would mean that at some point, there might be an occasion when a man could be right and Andrea Dworkin could be wrong. . . .
Here we have a woman whose anger at half the human race was her professional raison d’etre, for whom hatred of men was a litmus test of one’s moral worth: If you did not hate men as much as she did, you were her inferior. And because nobody could ever hate men more than Andrea Dworkin did, this meant she was the most moral person on Earth. Conveniently, then, her worldview had the effect of making her better than everybody else, in her own mind.
Feminism is fundamentally inhumane. It is a totalitarian belief system, intolerant of dissent. It is a rationalization of hate, and therefore feminism can justify telling any lie, so long as men are hurt (and feminists are empowered) by the lie.

To defend Andrea Dworkin is to defend the indefensible, to choose lies instead of the truth, to choose hate instead of love. Andrea Dworkin was selfish, dishonest and cruel, and no decent person could admire her.

By insisting that Dworkin must be praised, therefore, Meghan Murphy has lashed herself to the mast, so to speak. Feminism is synonymous with Andrea Dworkin, and criticizing Andrea Dworkin is misogyny — so we are told by the founder of “Canada’s leading feminist website.”

So, what about Jian Ghomeshi? Meghan Murphy tells us that “the small details don’t matter,” because Ghomeshi “is a classic abuser . . . a bully and a narcissist.” This is very personal to Murphy:

What was most traumatic about my experience coming forward about abuse was not that my abuser wasn’t jailed (I didn’t file a report and, had I, there’s no way he would have been charged. The abuse I experienced, for the most part, wasn’t the kind of vicious and obvious violence the police and courts like to see, in order to fit their definition of “abuse.”) — it was that I was not believed by those around me. It was that my abuser was supported by my community and continues to be supported. That he continues to bully and manipulate and abuse with no repercussions, as far as his social privilege, status, and acceptance go. He is free to do what he wishes and will, as far as I can tell, always get away with it.

Who is this man who abused Meghan Murphy? No friend of mine, and probably no friend of anyone else who reads my blog. He’s somewhere in the “progressive” community in British Columbia, I believe. “All the abusive men I’ve known seemed super nice at first,” Meghan Murphy explained in a 2012 column, and maybe “super nice” is her synonym for “progressive.” If she’s spent any time lately hanging out with fundamentalist Christians, she’s been awfully quiet about it.

“When your abuser calls himself a feminist” was the title of Meghan Murphy’s column about “Dan,” 20 years older than her, “a silly middle-aged man who was trying a little too hard to hang on to his youth.” But I guess he “seemed super nice at first,” eh? It’s weird how Magical Thinking operates, and how political superstition requires the leftist to re-arrange definitions and categories to explain how Good People — the super-nice progressive bien-pensants — are so often not actually good at all.

Why had Dan, 47, never married? Why was he dating girls 20 years younger? If the violence of black teenagers in Chicago is produced by “a culture that fails to civilize men through marriage,” as Heather Mac Donald says, what happens to “progressive” men who avoid marriage? Shouldn’t we be suspicion of “a silly middle-aged man who was trying a little too hard to hang on to his youth”? Why must innocent men — the all-inclusive “they” who are scapegoated by Meghan Murphy for their “masculinity” — take the blame for her own poor judgment? Magical Thinking rescues her from having to take responsibility for her folly, however, and the man who abused her becomes an Enchanted Crocodile. There seem to be a lot of these strange creatures around.

Jian Ghomeshi’s progressive persona
was the perfect cover for his abuse

That’s the headline on a column by (you guessed it) Meghan Murphy:

Initially, the allegations against Ghomeshi did come as a huge shock to me — up until the day he was fired, I’d been a fan — but that shock didn’t, for a moment, lead me to question whether they were true. He gave himself away immediately — the red flags were all there. Beyond that, women rarely make this stuff up. As I read Ghomeshi’s defensive Facebook post, I was filled with a familiar rage — his attempts to pin the accusations on a “bitter ex” à la, “bitches be crazy, wink wink,” to paint himself as a victim, and, of course, his appeal to the current “anything goes because, consent” political climate (“Sexual preferences are a human right,” he stated confidently) were so transparent.
What was and is “shocking,” to me, is not that a seemingly progressive man could be a predator, but that we still refuse to acknowledge how common this is.
I have an ex much like Ghomeshi. . . .
My ex seemed, like Ghomeshi, to enjoy playing the role of Good Guy Activist while simultaneously behaving in abusive ways. I think it thrilled him, in a kind of perverted sense, to be surrounded and supported by “strong” or feminist women (like myself).

The personal is political, always and forever, and Meghan Murphy was a fan of Jian Ghomeshi, whose preference for “rough sex” was not his only problem. He had initially won fame in Canada as drummer for the folk-rock band Moxy Früvous when he was in his early 20s, and apparently he became fixated in a state of arrested development. Ghomeshi was habitually promiscuous and also bisexual.

 

Toronto journalist Leah McLaren knew him well:

As Jian’s star rose, and we both got older, the age of many of the girls he dated stayed the same. It became a standing joke between us that while I’d rejected his advances when we first met, I was now no longer in his preferred demographic. “When did you get too old for me, Leah McLaren?” he used to tease. . . .
Jian wove the most cherished and sacred liberal values of Canadian society into an ingenious disguise that he used to hide in plain sight. He was a wolf in organic, fair-trade lamb’s clothing. One woman I spoke to for this story who is now accusing Jian of sexual assault believes his persona was a deliberate cover for his predatory behaviour. She thinks he created and used his personal brand . . . to get in touch with women so he could abuse them. She also believes that for him, in his sickness, that dark irony was a turn-on. . . .
The fact that we believed the cuddly, wholesome version of Jian makes the crimes he’s accused of doubly galling. Though he never mentioned anything about bondage, domination or a fondness for choking his dinner dates to me, he did enjoy trying to shock me. He once dropped an offhand comment about sleeping with a mutual male friend who was ostensibly straight and had a girlfriend. “It’s no secret I’m bisexual,” he said. His equal-opportunity orientation was known among his close friends, but I always thought of it as more of a political stance than a burning desire. Jian slept with men whenever he felt like it, which was occasionally but not that often. His real preoccupation was women. There were so many I couldn’t keep up. He was unabashedly promiscuous, or at least purported to be. After one bad breakup, he confided in a friend that he’d had sex with dozens of women in two months. . . .
He was attracted to women who were clever and women who weren’t, women who’d achieved professional success and women who hadn’t, but two things almost always remained the same: they were all young and they were all thin. Though he’s not a big guy, the women Jian dated were tiny by comparison. His promiscuity was something his friends remarked on, but it wasn’t a big deal, apart from the occasional social embarrassment, like at my wedding, where he aggressively hit on a family friend’s university-age lesbian daughter. To most of his casual acquaintances, Jian was just another successful, commitment-phobic bachelor with a roving eye in a city that’s full of them.

Hmmm. Why is Toronto full of successful bachelors who are “commitment-phobic”? Isn’t this because Toronto, like most other major cities, is also full of ambitious and hedonistic young women? Oh, the successful “bachelor with a roving eye” has no trouble finding skinny young women who are willing to accommodate him, just so they can brag to their friends that they dated the famous rock-drummer-turned-radio-personality. In the music business, such women are called “star-f–kers,” and in Washington, D.C. — a town renowned as “Hollywood for ugly people” — a similar phenomenon can be observed, but there’s no need to drag Monica Lewinsky into this, is there?

“I would be happy to give [Bill Clinton] a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.”
Nina Burleigh, 1998

How is it that “liberal values” provide “an ingenious disguise,” as Leah McLaren says, that abusive men can use “to hide in plain sight”? Perhaps someone should ask Juanita Broaddrick that question. Oh, and maybe someone should ask Kathleen Willey, too.

Not all of those Enchanted Crocodiles are in Canada, you know.





 


Comments

58 Responses to “Jian Ghomeshi, Sexual Harassment and the Enchanted Crocodiles of Feminism”

  1. Jeanette Victoria
    April 25th, 2016 @ 9:03 am

    Red flags ” women rarely make this stuff up” Is such bullshit they LIE all the time, especially progressive feminist women.

  2. DrGreatCham
    April 25th, 2016 @ 9:07 am

    “It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense. [“The Oracle of the Dog” (1923)]

    You hard-shelled materialists were all balanced on the very edge of belief — of belief in almost anything.” [“The Miracle of Moon Crescent” (1924)]-G.K. Chesterton

  3. DrGreatCham
    April 25th, 2016 @ 9:11 am

    Even feminists like Michelle Tea have noted cases of “feminists” lying about rape and sexual assault. In her case, it was her own girlfriend falsely accusing family members.

  4. robertstacymccain
    April 25th, 2016 @ 9:13 am

    Well, it’s not about the details, see?

  5. jolly green
    April 25th, 2016 @ 9:14 am

    The reason people(and not just liberals)don’t believe in the lone gunman theory is because there is too much evidence that points away from Oswald, and toward a conspiracy, and the simple fact that the man never admitted guilt, claimed he was a patsy, and was then executed before trial.

  6. robertstacymccain
    April 25th, 2016 @ 9:17 am

    Oh, dear …

  7. jolly green
    April 25th, 2016 @ 9:32 am

    The CIA, (starting with then director Allen Dulles), and their power broking cohorts in business and finance are the murderers.

    “Back, and to the left….back, and to the left….”

  8. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    April 25th, 2016 @ 9:33 am

    Obviously there are exceptions, but most women don’t like about sexual abuse…
    https://theconservativetreehouse.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/bill-clintons-victims.jpg

  9. Fail Burton
    April 25th, 2016 @ 9:33 am

    So due process is a small detail and men are Svengali’s. Gotcha. And here’s a nice tidbit from the realm of mental disintegration:

    “Foz Meadows @fozmeadows Apr 19 @EkaterinaTrayt people are so invested in binary gender expressions for toys and animals, Christ”

    So… queer Teddy bears? A transGodzilla? Is my cat gay? By “people” does she mean those of us who don’t suffer from mental illness?

    These people are weird and obsessed beyond my ability to comprehend.

  10. Fail Burton
    April 25th, 2016 @ 9:34 am

    Saul Alinsky did it.

  11. jolly green
    April 25th, 2016 @ 9:36 am

    So, we’re working under the assumption that one needs to be a liberal to reject a government cover-up, and CIA propaganda? Ok, then…I’m sure a lot of libertarians, and paleo-conservatives would disagree.

  12. Jeanette Victoria
    April 25th, 2016 @ 9:37 am

    Yeah I saw that!

  13. Adobe_Walls
    April 25th, 2016 @ 10:14 am

    And that’s probably a good thing.

  14. Fail Burton
    April 25th, 2016 @ 10:27 am

    I changed my mind… it was Buckley.

  15. DrGreatCham
    April 25th, 2016 @ 10:34 am

    “All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: ‘O God, make me a normal twentieth century girl!’
    Thanks to our labours, this will mean increasingly: ‘Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.’” C.S. Lewis “Screwtape Proposes A Toast”

    https://screwtapeblogs.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/screwtape-proposes-a-toast/

  16. CrustyB
    April 25th, 2016 @ 10:36 am

    The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas is located on the floor of the book depository from which Kennedy was shot. There is a very large, well-done exhibit of the assassination there. When you get to the part about Oswald, a big placard on the wall is simply entitled “THE LEFTIST.” If that doesn’t drive liberals into a frothing, foul-mouthed tizzy then I don’t know what.

    BTW I looked at Oswald’s perspective from the window next to the one he shot from. I have the eyesight of a mole and I could have made those shots.

  17. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    April 25th, 2016 @ 10:49 am
  18. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    April 25th, 2016 @ 10:56 am

    The shots have been repeatedly done by marksmen of similar skill as Oswald. Oswald killed Jack Kennedy. He was the only shooter.

    That said, the Ruby assassination of Oswald is a little too convenient (especially Ruby having terminal cancer to boot). Ties to the mob and the Kennedys double crossing people they reached out to in order to get Jack elected–a recipe and motive for revenge.

    It is entirely possible (not proven but certainly within the realm of reasonably possible) that others fired up Oswald to do what he did, then had him killed. If anything that damages the Kennedy mystique even more: highlighting those nefarious ties that Joe Sr. had, Jack took advantage of, and that Bobby’s hubris brought crashing down on all of them.

  19. Art Deco
    April 25th, 2016 @ 10:59 am

    The reason people(and not just liberals)don’t believe in the lone gunman
    theory is because there is too much evidence that points away from
    Oswald, and toward a conspiracy, and the simple fact that the man never
    admitted guilt, claimed he was a patsy, and was then executed before
    trial.

    The conspiracy people actually engaged in inductive reasoning about the case (Josiah Thompson, Cyril Wecht) have seen their theses incrementally discredited (David Lifton’s were discredited as soon as his book appeared). As for the others yapping on about various 3d parties (Jack Ruby, George de Mohrenschildt, Clay Shaw, David Ferrie, E Howard Hunt, and, in your case, Allen Dulles), there was never much there to begin with bar their imagination. A great deal of ink and time has been wasted on this mess and one innocent man (Shaw) was humiliated and financially bankrupted by utterly bogus criminal charges.

  20. Art Deco
    April 25th, 2016 @ 11:07 am

    Ruby was an impetuous man with a hair-trigger temper. He ran nightclubs which featured strip shows and had to deal with shady union officials and characters dunning him for protection money. The notion that he was a hit man for the mob is hard to credit. What one Secret Service agent had to say about Oswald applies to Ruby: the man was too erratic to be trustworthy to anyone plotting skullduggery. He notice them transferring Oswald when he went to buy money orders; in the car out in the lot was his dog.

    I’m not sure when his cancer was diagnosed, but I would be extremely surprised if it was known to him in November 1963. He died in January 1967 and metastatic lung cancer seldom if ever needs 3 years to kill you. More like 3 months will generally do it.

  21. kilo6
    April 25th, 2016 @ 11:23 am

    Since the primary focus of your writing is feminist lunacy, I’d say:
    https://i.imgur.com/oO7Ywbi.png

  22. CrustyB
    April 25th, 2016 @ 11:25 am

    One of my favorite tin-foil hat films was a conspiracy nut who insisted that you can’t work the action on a Carcano in 6 seconds like Oswald did. To prove it, he had an actual Carcano rifle on which he cycled the action and said, there, it’s can’t be done. Someone timed him on the film and he cycled it in less than 6 seconds.

  23. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    April 25th, 2016 @ 11:27 am

    I did not use the term probable for a reason. But possible

  24. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    April 25th, 2016 @ 11:29 am

    One crazy Marine goes on to kill Kennedy and the other goes on to make a string of conspiracy movies…

  25. Quartermaster
    April 25th, 2016 @ 11:32 am

    The first time I read “The Screwtape Letters” the edition I read had the Toast in it. Lewis had a way with words and knew well how to express satanic thought. It’s sad to contemplate how prophetic the passage you quote has become.

  26. Quartermaster
    April 25th, 2016 @ 11:38 am

    ” but most women don’t lie about sexual abuse…”
    Except them. I’m shocked you didn’t see that.

  27. jolly green
    April 25th, 2016 @ 11:39 am

    Discredited by who? Gerard Posner, and a group of CIA propagandists? The Church Committee, based on audio evidence alone, concluded there was a second gunman. If Oswald was involved he was a MK-Uktra robot just like Sirhan Sirhan.

  28. jolly green
    April 25th, 2016 @ 11:42 am

    Funny, military sharp shooters say otherwise, and the feat was only ever replicated by crack shots in a totally controlled environment with top notch rifles. The eye witnesses, Zapruder film, ballistics, and background all say Oswald was not the gunman. Playing up his so called “leftism” was pure CIA propaganda, and again if you think liberals are the only people who dismiss the line gunman theory for the junk it is, you are definitely wrong.

  29. Quartermaster
    April 25th, 2016 @ 11:46 am

    I don’t think Posner’s book laid any conspiracy theory to rest. When I finished the book there were just as many questions as at the beginning.

    Having said that, I don’t live my life wondering about such things. JFK had enough enemies that wanted his hide. Castro and Khrushchev were both on a long list of names.

  30. kilo6
    April 25th, 2016 @ 11:49 am

    Also, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to actually resolve any online disagreement on a topic such as this

    https://youtu.be/YbX0wwp-nlI

  31. Quartermaster
    April 25th, 2016 @ 11:52 am

    Oswald’s leftism was anything but so-called.
    I’ve had the opportunity to examine several examples of the Carcano rifle. It is one of the poorer examples of military rifles built on the Mannlicher action. It is not a weapon I’d voluntarily carry to the field. OTOH, I’ve examined many, and owned several, examples of turn bolt Mausers of the same vintage and they put the Carcano well into the shade.

    I don’t think there is any question that on a theoretical basis alone, that Oswald could have cycled the action fast enough to make the shots heard. To hit much of anything would have involved a very large dollop of luck. There is, however, a very large difference between low probability and no probability.

  32. Art Deco
    April 25th, 2016 @ 11:54 am

    The eye witnesses, Zapruder film, ballistics, and background all say Oswald was not the gunman.

    The Texas School Book Depository was identified as the source of the shots by the overwhelming majority of eyewitnesses and earwitnesses and Oswald was spotted there with his gun. The shots came from the rear and splattered the Connollys with the President’s brains. The first shot missed and went into some asphalt, the second went into the Presidents neck and he reacted with a reflex called Thorburn’s position. It then went into Gov. Connolly, traveled through his chest, and wrist before lodging in his leg. The Governor was seated on a jump seat on a meridian about six inches to Kennedy’s left and several inches closer to the ground. The shots line up adequately. The results of the third bullet were quite graphic.

    Your patsy then booked and later murdered a Dallas cop in front of about 12 witnesses. Innocent people do that all the time.

  33. Quartermaster
    April 25th, 2016 @ 11:56 am

    So, you’re admitting Oswald was innocent, Eh? 🙂
    /sarc (just in case it doesn’t come across)

  34. Art Deco
    April 25th, 2016 @ 11:56 am

    The Church Committee, based on audio evidence alone, concluded there was a second gunman.

    The Church committee never studied the case. The House Assassinations committee concluded that. The conclusion was refuted by a panel of the National Academy of Sciences in 1981. The audio recording the Committee’s acoustics experts were using was not taken in Dealey Plaza.

  35. Art Deco
    April 25th, 2016 @ 12:09 pm

    You cannot lay conspiracy theories to rest because all of them are based on speculation and ‘connecting the dots’ between innocuous events.

    The real Lee Harvey Oswald left school at 15, was addled by delusions of grandeur (an unremarkable vice for a man with more intelligence than discipline and sense), took to thrift-shop Marxism (an unremarkable vice for an unremarkable man who wishes to understand himself as Special), and couldn’t hold a job for sour apples.

    He also contended (which Newsweek discovered when they interviewed 25 years after the fact members of the Russian emigre community who’d been acquainted with him in Dallas) that Gov. Connolly (formerly the Secretary of the Navy) was responsible for his dishonorable discharge from the Marine Corps, and maintained a furious grudge against the Governor for that reason.

  36. Quartermaster
    April 25th, 2016 @ 12:13 pm

    I was not aware of the Newsweek interviews. From those, it’s entirely possible the target wasn’t JFK, but Connolly instead.

  37. CrustyB
    April 25th, 2016 @ 12:25 pm

    The US Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory replicated the shot. “60 Minutes” even replicated the shots in the time allowed for Christ’s sake.

    I could sit here and dismiss your lies all day long but I have an appointment on Planet Earth, so….

  38. CrustyB
    April 25th, 2016 @ 12:34 pm

    I love the “stockade fence” flashback scene in “JFK.” It showed smoke coming out of a rifle held by a shadowy figure. The weapons master on set couldn’t find a rifle that produced smoke because modern (as in “post-Revoltionary War”) era rifles don’t give off smoke. So the prop guy got a bellows and blew smoke from it.

    Which is an allegory for the whole JFK conspiracy bunch: “Blowing smoke.”

  39. DrGreatCham
    April 25th, 2016 @ 1:00 pm

    You’re all wrong. Here’s the real skinny on the conspiracy:

    http://www.theonion.com/graphic/november-22-1963-10584

  40. Fail Burton
    April 25th, 2016 @ 2:45 pm

    When you think of all the wonderful things there are to do in this world, how can Murphy rationalize the sheer level of energy, commitment, hatred and obsession against half the humans on Earth? No normal human being fritters their life away like that. To keep her blog and Twitter feed going, she must be a virtual internet shut-in. And what will she be doing 10 years from now? The same thing? And for what? I just don’t get it. I don’t get it at all. I honestly feel sorry for these women, because they are sick in their minds and hearts. In all my life I have never encountered a culture with such a focused, irrational and relentless hatred of human beings.

    Somebody better do an intervention and tell this woman about Mayan ruins, the Greek Islands and hiking in Lombok or Nepal before she finds herself at 50 holding her head in her hands and saying “My God, what in the world have I done?” You only go round once, lady, and I’d not have your life for all the gold in the world.

  41. concern00
    April 25th, 2016 @ 2:47 pm

    It is quite amazing the power which feminists confer onto men and subsequently belittle themselves as a consequence.

  42. Guest
    April 25th, 2016 @ 3:16 pm

    “[…His progressive] persona was a deliberate cover for his predatory behaviour.”

    But don’t worry y’all, no man will ever pretend to be transgender to “cover for his predatory behavior.” And FYI you are a hateful transphobic bigot for even thinking such a thing!!!!1!

  43. Dianna Deeley
    April 25th, 2016 @ 4:00 pm

    I don’t know if “women rarely make this stuff up” or not. Nor do I care.

    What I do care about is this notion that women can – months or years after the fact – bring charges against a man, and expect that the justice system can do something about it. How? Where’s the evidence? If you don’t have evidence, you can’t complain about a lack of justice.

    Why is that so hard? Why is it a *feminist* thing to instantly discount the lack of evidence?

    That’s not the patriarchy. That’s the absolute minimum needed before you wreck someone’s life.

  44. Art Deco
    April 25th, 2016 @ 4:15 pm

    That’s not the patriarchy. That’s the absolute minimum needed before you wreck someone’s life.

    Well, yeah. But you’re assuming the point of investigations and proceedings is to find out the truth. Their understanding is that the point is to follow a set of rubrics which put a validation stamp on their resentments (because what’s ‘true’ is their roiling inner life).

  45. DeadMessenger
    April 25th, 2016 @ 5:29 pm

    I think it’s possible, sure. I couldn’t even name the vast amount of stupid stuff I’ve seen people do that was prefaced by “Do it, dude! Do it, do it!”

  46. Squid Hunt ?Patriarch
    April 25th, 2016 @ 6:07 pm

    Every time I hear about male feminists, I think about Stiffler (Sean William Scott) in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

    The sad part is, most men would see what type of creep this guy is, and warn these arrogant women if they would listen. But they wouldn’t. That’s boring.

    The image created by this woman psychanalyzing this guy through trading stories with ex girlfriends is a riot. Not an objective, rational source, I think.

  47. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    April 25th, 2016 @ 6:19 pm

    Fortunately in the west we have rule of law…

  48. Finrod Felagund
    April 25th, 2016 @ 7:10 pm

    I bought and read Losing Ground back in the 1980s. It was one of the best political books I’ve ever read.

  49. jakee308
    April 25th, 2016 @ 7:52 pm

    I say to any woman (feminist or not) if emotional or psychological assault is going to be sufficient to charged with a crime then bring it on.

    Women (of a certain type) have been emotionally and psychologically manipulating men since time began (some would even say all of them just that some do it nicer than others) and they have become experts at it. Their mothers hand it down like having brown hair or blue eyes. They learn it at their mothers and grandmothers knee. They even help perpetuate it and the ease with which men are affected by training their young boys to accept such torture as the way things are. Guilt trips, blame shifting, subject changing and straw men arguments are common fare dished out by women to men on a daily basis. It’s my contention that some men become physical because of the onslaught that they have never been taught to deal with. (a failure by their fathers and not done on purpose by their mothers.)

    Yes let’s see how well complaining about someone’s weight or appearance matches up with the emotional torment that women dish out to men about their looks, their job, their friends, their hobbies on a daily basis.

    I say there’s no contest. Women are champion emotional vampires who can suck a man dry of any feelings or desire in a moment. While criticizing them for their technique or lack thereof. All the while taunting him about how worthless he is compared to other men.

    Yeah. Let’s bring in emotional assault into the mix and see what we can do with that.

  50. Fail Burton
    April 25th, 2016 @ 9:49 pm

    Let’s be honest about Murphy: it would be difficult for any normal man to be in close proximity to a mouth like that and hold his temper. Basically, in male terms, what she’s doing is using fighting words. But men have been taught to exempt women from that type of consideration. But when you have a woman arguing “Hey, I’m equal, I’m fierce, I can take it,” she’s gonna take a few haymakers. Because what Murphy cannot grasp is that most women have been taught to realize they are exempt from that fighting words scenario and not push their luck. When you do push your luck, you shouldn’t be surprised it runs out. Is that legal? No. But it’s not necessarily wrong either. My own solution would be to never be around a mouth like that. Every man has his limits. Men are human and when you push them hard enough they will lash out.