"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
Jimmie Bise Jr. describes improvements to his Sundries Shack blog, including “a new webhost that will give me a lot more bandwidth so that the next time Glenn Reynolds wants to Instalanche me, my blog will withstand the traffic onslaught like Lieutenant Dan strapped to the main mast.”
Two words of advice, Jimmie: Dog sex.
2012 was all about elections and “issues.” 2013 . . . dog sex.
Instapundit had this headline:
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS:
My Ex Posted “Revenge Porn” Photos Of Me.
OK, so this was intriguing, but the whole “revenge porn” theme was forgotten as soon as I started reading the article by the (obviously pseudonymous) “Rhoda Kelly”:
I started dating Rob toward the end of high school. He was five years my senior.
Whoa. Full stop. Isn’t this a gigantic red flag? I’m not saying that it is impossible for a 17-year-old and a 22-year-old to have positive romantic experience together, but it was like the first clue (besides the headline, of course) that this story wasn’t going to end happily ever after.
He added me on Myspace, and we talked online occasionally. Then, after hanging out in real life only a handful of times, he insisted that we become a couple.
See there? That’s three warning signs right away:
Just on the basis of that, I figure there’s not only something wrong with the guy, but there’s something wrong with this girl, too.
Maybe I’m old-fashioned. Maybe I don’t “get” the whole online-dating thing. But it seems to me that, unless the girl was of the lonely/desperate misfit/oddball type, she’d be meeting guys through the regular real-life routines — a guy from school, someone she met through an after-school job, “friend of a friend,” whatever. When somebody asks, How did you meet your boyfriend? and your answer is, He added me on Myspace, excuse me for thinking there’s something wrong with you. So I keep reading and find out, yeah, my hunch was right:
I liked him. He played guitar in a punk band and was a gifted graphic designer. He was quiet and cynical, but sweet to me.
Fast-forward three years, after the initial sweetness diluted considerably, and what was left was a controlling, territorial, sardonic, and deeply troubled man who I knew I had to leave, but who by then was like an extension of me. We both struggled with psychological disorders: I was diagnosed with major depression when I was nineteen, and he would have such severe depressive episodes that he couldn’t get out of bed to go to work many days. Or he’d stay awake for two weeks straight because of his recurring nightmares about being abducted by aliens. Once, believing me to be an alien, he lay in my bed sobbing uncontrollably. Later, I looked up alien-abduction dreams and found that many studies pointed to childhood sexual abuse as a cause; after we broke up, he told me that he had in fact been molested as a child.
OK, you can go read the whole thing, and you’ll eventually get to the part where she gets drunk and lets him take a video of them having sex, then finds out he’s posted it online as an act of revenge after they broke up, but that’s not what the story is really about.
What the story is really about is a vulnerable misfit/oddball chick who has trouble attracting a boyfriend in her real-life environment, and instead hooks up with some weirdo she meets online.
Insufficiently aware of her own vulnerability, and apparently incapable of recognizing that Mr. Controlling Older Guy She Met Online might have problematic “issues” of his own, Little Miss Oddball is therefore shocked to find that this leads to a Harmful Relationship That Ends Badly.
The “revenge porn” thing may be the hook that sells the story, but more important is the lesson about How Not to Find Healthy Relationships.
If you’re in that lonely/desperate situation where you’re willing to accept “He added me on Myspace” as an invitation to romance . . .
Do I even have to finish that sentence to explain why it’s a signal that you might be vulnerable to a bad relationship?
Seventeen-year-old girls aren’t always good judges of character. This is why, in ancient days of yore (i.e., when I was a kid), parents made it their business to keep an eye on their 17-year-old daughters. And the default parental position was, Keep Away From My Daughter, Creep.
Lots of bad things happen to people who stray from the wise ways of the ancient days of yore, and being victimized by “revenge porn” is certainly one possibility. All things considered, though, “Rhoda Kelly” should be thankful she’s alive to tell her story. A lot of stories like hers end up with headlines like, “Woman Slain by Obsessive Stalker Ex-Boyfriend.”
What was causing the problem to which ObamaCare was supposed to be the solution? If it was not clear before, it is becoming more so, now that the alleged solution is making the problem worse:
Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers. Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.
Government policies were causing the artificial scarcity of “affordable health care” (a glittering generality) and the new policies known as ObamaCare are aggravating the problem because they are, in effect, just more of the same. We had a lot more “affordable health care” before government decided that health care should be “free” (i.e., subsidized by taxpayers) for some patients, and then states began to mandate and regulate how employers and health-insurance companies should provide coverage to those paying their own premiums.
At about the same time Medicare and Medicaid were enacted, egalitarianism took its Great Leap Forward as a matter of law and policy. The language of “rights” and “discrimination” gained currency, so that employer-provided health-insurance coverage became an entitlement which could not be denied without incurring legal jeopardy.
If health-care is a human right — as the Left proclaims — then certain logical consequences flow from that premise. Those who provide health care (doctors and hospitals) as well as those who are required to act as third-party payers (insurance companies or taxpayers) essentially become hostages in such a situation, with lawyers as the thugs sent to deliver the ransom demand on behalf of the kidnappers, the plaintiffs who are willing to sue to enforce their “rights.”
The free-market system is distorted and artificial scarcity is caused by what amount to government efforts to control prices. Dressed up in the language of “rights” and “fairness,” and promising to rid us of our woes, liberalism’s solutions inevitably create new problems.
Have you noticed that good intentions are becoming increasingly scarce? It’s a supply-and-demand problem, because liberals have lately been so incredibly busy paving the road to hell.
Hat-tip — unexpectedly! — to Instapundit, who has his own interesting news from the front lines of the War of Ideas: He was disinvited from speaking at a local Republican Party function in Utah because his opinions are too “controversial.” Evidently, it was the professor’s (dreadfully wrong) opinion in favor of same-sex marriage that offended the GOP officials. But they weren’t going to pay him for the speech anyway, so it’s no real loss to the professor, nor is there any incentive for me to offer myself as a substitute speaker, despite my outspoken opposition to same-sex marriage.
No one’s ever accused me of holding “controversial” opinions . . .
NYPD arrest Occupy Wall Street protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, Oct. 1, 2011
Commenting on the post-election rancor — e.g., Log Cabin Republicans targeting Chuck Hagel — Professor Glenn Reynolds observes:
You know, somebody — Dave Weigel or Matt Yglesias, I think — was tweeting the other day that the GOP was doing worse post-election than in 2008. Well maybe; at this point, after all, Bush was still in the White House. But Obama is definitely doing worse than in 2008. First the Susan Rice debacle, then the departure of scandal-plagued EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, and now the stalled Hagel nomination. Definitely not as well as in 2008.
Meanwhile, we see gloomy prospects for avoiding the “fiscal cliff,” and the question we ought to be asking is, “How did we get here?”
The problem in trying to answer that question is that the information stream is polluted by the Conventional Wisdom manufactured by the national media, where Democrats out-number Republicans by a factor of no less than 7-to-1. Thus, we must begin the quest for truth by un-learning what our indoctrinators — the “apparatchik MSM,” as Ed Driscoll calls them — would have us believe, and consider the possibility that something quite nearly opposite is true.
Our liberal friends would have us believe that the problem is that Republicans have been captured by Tea Party extremists and are engaged in politically motivated “obstructionism” because the GOP is captive — “epistemic closure”! — to extreme voices on Fox News and talk radio.
What if that MSM-produced narrative is, in fact, the mirror-reverse of the truth? This relates to a comment I made about Barrett Brown, the “Anonymous” spokesman arrested in September:
The specific object of my critique is the outlaw “civil disobedience” vigilante protest mentality involved in the “Anonymous” and “Occupy” movements, an attitude that excuses crime so long as it is committed against enemies of The Cause.
This attitude was revived and popularized by anti-war protesters during the Bush era, where the information-warfare aspect of their propaganda was clearly displayed: President Bush himself was de-legitimized as an election-stealer, the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job,” and the U.S. military response to those attacks was “war for oil,” allegedly undertaken on behalf of Halliburton, etc. There is a narrative that justifies Barrett Brown’s demonization of the FBI, you see. The fact that this left-wing rationalization has passed its sell-by date — like the fragments of the Weather Underground that continued their “revolutionary” violence long after the Vietnam War ended — does not prevent people from continuing to carry the radical torch as if it were still 2005.
As Rodgers and Hammerstein might say, you have to be carefully taught to think the way Barrett Brown and his comrades think, and what Andrew Breitbart called the “Democrat-Media Complex” never bothers to expose and debunk the counterfactual beliefs of the radical Left. Why? Because liberals believe that having a loud, militant left-wing fringe — angry shock troops to assault the GOP-allied institutions of bourgeois society — is good for the Democrat Party.
Whatever you may think of the Republican Party, it is not (as the MSM would have you believe) controlled by “Birthers” and other kooks, and the GOP is not pursuing any kind of extremist agenda. It is actually the Democrats who embraced a dangerous anarchist fringe movement, “Occupy Wall Street,” and in fact it is Democrats who are even now pursuing the radical OWS agenda against “the 1%”: Taxes must be increased on “the rich,” Democrats keep telling us, and they are willing to take us over the “fiscal cliff” if they don’t get their way.
It’s a formula: [Thing you’re angry about] [epithet] [Republican you blame] [obscenity] [heinously violent death wish] #metaphor @jimmiebjr
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) December 19, 2012
For example: “Barbara Walters should be eviscerated by machete-wielding crackheads! #metaphor” — bingo, you’re a tenured Ph.D.@jimmiebjr
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) December 19, 2012
Professor Erik “Head on a Stick” Loomis has established a new precedent in Online Civil Discourse: Any epithet-strewn obscene rant full of violent language against political opponents is acceptable, as long as you explain that it is a Metaphor Right-Wing Morons Can’t Understand.
We thank our enlightened progressive overlords for this blessing.
It has furthermore been established that if you are engaged in metaphor, and sympathizers of your political opponent quote you in such a way as to suggest that your sentiments are deranged, menacing and offensive, this is a “witch hunt,” and anyone who calls attention to this is “orchestrating a campaign” against the user of metaphor.
Such is the essential syllogism of “Statement on Erik Loomis“:
[W]e must stand by Loomis’s side and speak up and out on his behalf, for he has become the target of a witch hunt, and as an untenured professor at the University of Rhode Island, he is vulnerable. Loomis needs our solidarity and support, and we must give it to him. . . .
Glenn Reynolds is now accusing Loomis of using “eliminationist rhetoric.”
Other conservative voices have joined in. The Daily Caller says Loomis “unleashed a flurry of profanity-ridden tweets demanding death for National Rifle Association executive Wayne LaPierre.” Townhall put Loomis’s tweets in the context of NRA members and leaders getting death threats. And just this morning, Michelle Malkin wrote at National Review Online [a column critical of Loomis] . . .
We do not expect any better of the orchestrators of this campaign—this is what they have done for many years, and doubtless will be doing for years to come. We do expect better of university administrators. Rather than standing behind a member of their faculty, the administration has sought to distance the university from Loomis. . . .
In other words, if Professor Wobbly-Gay-Lumberjack Dissertation fails to gain tenure at the University of Rhode Island, the haters win, and the academic right to use fucking bloody hate speech metaphor in Online Civil Discourse will be destroyed.
(Damn it, why did Ace of Spades have to take a vacation this week? How can this douchebag not receive the full-on AOSHQ treatment?)
Nevertheless, in order to show “our solidarity and support” for the unalienable right to employ violent obscene rants metaphor in Online Civil Discourse (and still get tenure at the University of Rhode Island), I will list the signatories to the “Statement on Erik Loomis“:
Perhaps readers can offer appropriate suggestions for what should be done to these subversive Bolshevik intestinal parasites metaphors!
UPDATE: I’ll have to provide the dog-whistle translation for Professor William Jacobson’s eliminationist rhetoric here:
I don’t think Loomis should be fired
Instead, he should be castrated with pruning shears
but that doesn’t mean he should be free from criticism.
And by “criticism,” I mean “Birther lynch mob rage”
And he certainly is not a hero of anything.
Except to the Marxist traitors who voted for the Kenyan usurper!
He’s just a guy who
should have his eyes gouged out with rusty nails because he
wanted to deprive others of the rights he claims for himself.
Right-wing morons don’t understand metaphor, but our ears perk up quick when we hear that secret lynch-mob dog-whistle.
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by Smitty
I’d like to propose ‘glenren’, a contraction of ‘Glenn Reynolds’, as a special term for the blend of faux naïveté, weapons-grade sarcasm, and systematic understatement so brutally employed by The Blogfather:
Usage: “That there was an intense glenren.”
by Smitty
Now, maybe I just have more skin in the game:
“One might have thought that the 2010 mid-term elections . . . would have convinced the Left that they had miscalculated. Instead, they placed their confidence in Obama’s ability to navigate the new environment . . .
“Everything seemed to be proceeding in accordance with those beliefs until Romney dismantled Obama in Wednesday’s debate — a psychological shock that has unhinged the Left, causing them to begin lashing out furiously and rather erratically at anyone who suggests that the dam has broken and that the ‘preference cascade’ may doom Obama to defeat in November.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 6
“[I]t is possible to imagine a scenario where Mitt Romney comes into the Oct. 16 debate sitting on a 4-point lead in the national polls with just three weeks to go before Election Day. And if I can envision such a scenario, you know that Democrats must be imagining the same possibility with a sense of Fear and Loathing.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 7
As a great man once repeatedly said, “Don’t get cocky,” but there are good reasons for Republicans to be optimistic with 22 days remaining in the 2012 campaign. Ed Driscoll has previously invoked the phrase “preference cascade” to describe what we may see if Americans wake up to the reality of the SCOAMF’s incompetence. And today Ed Morrissey employs the same phrase:
I don’t think that Obama has lost the election yet, but there is only three weeks to go now. This is when preference cascades begin to materialize, and usually away from the incumbent, who has had nearly four years to make the case for re-election.
Exactly. While defeating an incumbent president is always an against-the-odds project, history would suggest that (a) the debates would be a decisive factor, and (b) the shift toward the challenger wouldn’t happen until fairly late in the campaign.
If this is what we’re seeing now, then Obama’s poll surge in September — on Sept. 29, he led the Real Clear Politics average of national polls by 4.3 points — was in fact a mirage. Whether or not those of us whom Jonathan Chait called “poll denialists” were right about the skewed samples, Obama’s poll lead prior to the first debate was actually an illusion that did not take into account the underlying reality of (a) Obama’s failed policies and (b) his inability to defend those policies when challenged by Romney outside the media filter.
So far, only one poll (Pew) has shown Romney leading by 4 points nationally, and Romney’s biggest RCP lead was 1.3 points on Saturday, but the latest Gallup tracking poll has Mitt leading 49-47, and if Obama doesn’t score a clear win Tuesday, the whole thing may shift toward an outright Romney landslide.
The RCP Electoral College map currently has the race at Obama 201 and Romney 191, with Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Michigan and Pennsylvania in the “toss-up” category. By this point in 2008, John McCain’s campaign was in meltdown mode and had already pulled out of Michigan. For Romney to win any of those four states would almost certainly be decisive: If Mitt wins Michigan he won’t lose Ohio, and if Pennsylvania is even competitive in the final week of the campaign, Romney could win as many as 300 of 538 Electoral College votes.
What will happen in Tuesday’s debate? Both campaigns are “working the refs” with CNN’s Candy Crowley as moderator, Michelle Malkin reminds us of “plant” infestations at town-hall debates and Noel Sheppard quotes Ed Hart: “We will know in the fullness of time.”
Keep watching the slo-mo walkback by Nate Silver, whose Incredible Mystical Forecasting Model™ has now raised Romney’s odds to a precisely calculated 36.7% after having him at 12.9% Oct. 4.
UPDATE: The Insta-Driscol-lanche! Thanks, Ed.
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