Following up on this morning’s radio debate with Little Miss Attila, I found myself interrogated in the comments by Attila’s ally, Darleen Click of Protein Wisdom, who now wants to debate women in the military. This endless appetite for argument — the women’s point being that any man who criticizes feminism qua feminism must be wrong — compelled me to make this point:
Again, you see that my view of these issues is informed by a study of the feminist movement’s actual history, as opposed to a generalized sentimental commitment to “equality” as an ideal.
And this, I say again, is the real ground of the dispute. Feminism has an actual history, bound up in specific ideas and events and people, and the attempt to hijack the term “feminism” as some part of the conservative agenda is misguided, because it requires us to embrace a narrative of feminism that is counterfactual.
(And, no, I don’t care what Christina Hoff Sommers says about it.)
The problem lies in our society’s obsession with “equality,” a liberal fetish that seems to have been smuggled into the conservative tent, so that seemingly we are all egalitarians now. But as I tried to point out in our go-’round over women in the military: Is the job of the U.S. military to kill our nation’s enemies, or is its purpose to provide “equal opportunity” for women?
If you say the latter, then you are on the side of Patricia Schroeder and all the left-wing anti-military Democrats who don’t give a damn about American national security. Continue reading Facts Are Stubborn Things →
Now I see where it started. In the process today of updating readers on his long-running feud with Patterico, Jeff Goldstein linked back to the Nov. 5, 2008, post that started it all. Goldstein linked and quoted Patterico’s post-election assertion that Barack Obama “is fundamentally a good man and a patriot who wants to make this country a better place.” And then Jeff wrote:
Precisely the kind of self-righteous civility that fried McCain. Want to be clapped on the back for your decorum? Fine. Just say so.
But let’s not pretend you are being honest or principled. Graciousness is one thing; praise is another.
One of the most dangerous things a journalist can do, in terms of libel, is to claim to have private knowledge of wrongdoing by someone. That is to say, don’t assert that a person is a drunkard or a wife-beater because of what you were told or claim to have witnessed privately. Unless you’ve got police reports of the person’s arrests for DUI or assault, making such an assertion in print exposes you to a world of legal woes.
[N]obody has sent *me* any cease and desist letters lately. I’m told Jeff can’t say the same. . . .
To be clear: I have not seen the e-mails in question. I was merely told there were many of them, written at odd hours of the morning, they were rants, a letter was sent threatening action if they didn’t stop, they continued, but (i hear today for the first time) stopped soon after.
Not making it up. That’s what I was told. Some on the phone and some in e-mails. . . .
I am trying to persuade the person to release the e-mails and the cease and desist letter. The lawyer who sent it is apparently not thrilled about being dragged into this and is upset at me for having said anything. No decision will be made until after consultation with the lawyer tomorrow.
My own objection is to the use of “gender” instead of “sex.” As an old editor of mine often said, “People have sex. French nouns have gender.” But the grammatical is now the political, I suppose.
Thanks to tip-jar hitters Steve in Grand Rapids, Jack in Oklahoma City, and John in Virginia who includes this note: “All right! I give up. If you write about feminism, I’ll respect you in the morning!”
Clearly, then, some readers appreciate my tremendous sacrifice in re-reading Susan Brownmiller (so you don’t have to). Now I’m re-reading Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement.
Hit the tip jar, brothers. And be ready for the next barrage.
Music critics Robert Christau and Richard Goldstein are rather curious targets for Wolcott, now a washed-up TV critic moonlighting as … well, what, exactly?
Never mind. I’m genuinely perplexed by that Wolcott interview and his out-of-sync reference to legendary magazine editor Clay Felker. While Christgau was re-hired as music editor by Felker in 1974 — after Christgau’s two-year stint at Newsday — Goldstein had been writing continuously for the Voice since 1966. Wolcott joined the Voice in 1972, the same year Christgau left for Newsday, and when Goldstein had already been writing there for more than five years.
Yet, name-out-of-the-hat, Goldstein gets lumped in with Christgau in the “those sort of people” category, responsible for “politicizing” the Voice toward the hard Left.
A couple of music critics had such tremendous influence?
People more familiar with the era may be able to explain that. At any rate, Wolcott left the Voice in 1982 — ousted by the weekly’s “politburo,” we are told — and, if this Smith/Strausbaugh interview is any indication, he was in early 2001 somewhat pro-Bush, or at least not anti-Bush.
What happened to Wolcott? I only ask this because yesterday afternoon he lashed out at Little Miss Attila and invoked my name in the process. This didn’t even make a blip on my SiteMeter, however, and it wasn’t until Attila e-mailed me her reply to Wolcott that I even knew Wolcott had mentioned me. (Attila and I had been playing blogsopheric badminton with “feminism” for a shuttlecock.) And the really strange thing is that the seeming trigger of Wolcott’s lashing-out was a post in which Attila promoted Dan Collins’ fundraiser.
Here’s what these idiot Madison “protesters” — along with their intellectually bankrupt fellow travelers playing Solidarnosc on f***ing facebook as if this is just another cause celebre the world has ginned up to keep hipsters feeling “political” — are actively, vocally agitating FOR: no school choice for kids; no merit pay for teachers; seniority raises, and a first hired / last fired policy that promotes mediocrity, disinterest, and underperformance, while providing no incentive for effective teaching; forced union dues; forced political contributions to the Democrat party, made possible by a tawdry money laundering scheme that in many ways works to disenfranchise Republican voters in the union; the inability of taxpayers to have any say over local schools; and on and on and on. . . .
Go read the whole epic thing, unless you find f-bombs offensive, but the Left’s wacko reaction to the Wisconsin situation could probably make Billy Graham cuss a blue streak.
Somehow I’ve spent the past few days bogged down and sidetracked by stuff that’s kept me from staying on the Wisconsin story the way I should, and now I’ll play catch-up. Here’s video of the thug mob blitzing the Capitol after the Senate vote:
Did you notice what I noticed about that mob? Kinda young-ish, eh? Like maybe they’re not really the struggling proletariat, but actually a bunch of overprivileged University of Wisconsin students acting out their radical fantasies of what it must of been like back in The Sixties, man. As if repealing the protected status of government employees was the moral equivalent of napalming bamboo huts or something.
Whenever I see such puerile upper-middle-class punks doing their pseudo-radical protest thing, there’s this voice in my head saying, “Where’s the Ohio National Guard when we really need ’em?”
So if you lose a vote you get to riot and take over the capitol building? … It’s good that Democrats are showing themselves for what they are…thugs who resort to physical attacks when they don’t get their way.
What’s interesting is to watch lefties doing their Charlie Sheen imitation — “winning!” — in an effort to convice themselves that this crushing defeat they just suffered is actually bad for Republicans. They’ve got polls, you see, just like back in March 2010 they had polls telling them what a brilliant idea it was to shove ObamaCare through Congress, despite clear signals to the contrary like Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts. (See: “Democrats in the Deathmobile,” The American Spectator, March 19, 2010.)
Once again, we are confronted by the yawning gap between what Democrats say during election campaigns — trying to convince middle-class suburban voters how responsible and civil and moderate they are, unlike those dangerous Republican extremists — and what Democrats actually do when their special-interest agenda at stake. Please read Peter Ingemi’s Examiner column, “Two groups, two narratives.”
Just in case you’re wondering when Jeff went sour on Shep, let’s go back to September 2005, when Shep’s melodramatic flair was viciously satirized here, hereandhere.
Shep brings to his coverage the kind of detached stoicism one usually finds on the front row of a Liz Minelli concert.
Why disavow what was, in fact, a brilliant meme? I’m not sure which LGF commenter coined “St. Pancake,” but it was perfect. I used it last year in describing the Left’s “Rachel Corrie Death Cult.” People whose misguided idealism leads them to destruction deserve all the mockery we can heap on them. The purpose of that mockery is to discourage others from imitating their folly, to say to them, “Don’t be such a fool.” Conservatives naturally are averse to breaching the civilized custom that one should not speak ill of the dead. But what shall we say of amoral monsters who have devoted their lives to the destruction of civilization? If Ted Gold, Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins do not deserve respectful remembrance, neither does Rachel Corrie, whose “pacifism” made her a stooge of terrorists. She is forevermore “St. Pancake” and Charles Johnson is an idiot for attempting to disavow that.
Will Patterico mend the breach with Jeff Goldstein? The blogosphere never forgets and, when I linked Patterico the other day, Joy McCann commented: “I’m amused at your linking Patterico, Stacy … but then, that’s me.” And I knew to what she referred. While I’m willing to let bygones be bygones, there is still the matter of Patterico’s past offenses against Jeff at Protein Wisdom. Patterico would no doubt deny that he was at fault, but each man is the the judge of his own honor. Jeff was my friend in the hour of need, and if Patterico offended Jeff, it is incumbent on me to insist that my friend must be made whole or there can be no rapprochement.
No blog is an island, as I say, and when you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way. It would be dishonorable of me — a betrayal of Jeff — to make a separate peace with Patterico for my own convenience.
