The Other McCain

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

Why Has She Never Met a Good Man?

Here is the transcript of her video rant: “I’ve never once met a good man — my entire life, going on almost 32 years, OK? I’ve never met one genuinely good man. Every single man I have encountered has done something absolutely horrific and minimized it. Every single man that I’ve encountered is a liar, […]

Peer Pressure and Morality: Or, Why Do ‘Girls Go Wild’ in Daytona Beach?

From the headline, you might have expected me to illustrate this post with a picture of college girls twerking in their bikinis on Spring Break in Florida, so why did I choose John Stuart Mill instead? In his most famous work, On Liberty, Mill famously described “the tyranny of the majority,” by which he meant […]

Has #GamerGate 2.0 Begun? Bizarre Clash Over Sick Fetish Videogames Wrecks ‘Games Journalism’ Site Waypoint

Like the original #GamerGate, this is a complex story, involving (a) a feminist anti-porn censorship campaign, (b) online payment processors, (c) producers of videogames with content so disgusting I don’t want to describe it, and (d) the staff of a videogame review website associated with Vice Media. In case you didn’t realize it, Vice declared […]

Conclusions in Search of Evidence: Sex and the Modern Female Journalist

My two daughters are named Kennedy and Reagan, and one of my sons is named Jefferson, so I’m not against the trend of presidential names, but probably you shouldn’t name your daughter “Carter.” That was my first thought when I encountered the name Carter Sherman, who writes for the U.S. edition of the Guardian. Knowing […]

Death by ‘Equality’

Captain Becky “did not turn left”: As they flew south along the Potomac River on the gusty night of Jan. 29, the crew aboard an Army Black Hawk helicopter attempted to execute a common aviation practice. It would play a role in ending their lives. Shortly after the Black Hawk passed over Washington’s most famous […]

‘I Am Trying, and Admittedly Failing, to Understand How This Makes Sense’

One should never try to “make sense” of Amanda Marcotte. Ever since she first burst upon the national consciousness in 2007 — as one of two feminists (the other being the execrable Melissa McEwan) hired to blog on behalf of Democratic presidential aspirant John Edwards — Marcotte has been an inspiration for mockery hereabouts, and […]

Against Euphemisms

However much you hate the creeping totalitarianism of our time, you don’t hate it enough. Let me quote this: One of Orwell’s most important messages in 1984 is that language is of central importance to human thought because it structures and limits the ideas that individuals are capable of formulating and expressing. If control of language was […]

The Dumbest Take on the 2024 Election

A few weeks ago, I bought a copy of Thomas Sowell’s 1987 book A Conflict of Visions as a gift for a young man who was struggling with his political views. My intention is, once he’s finished reading that, to give him the second book of that Sowell trilogy, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation […]

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