The Other McCain

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

‘Four Legs Good! Two Legs Bad!’

Posted on | June 8, 2016 | 18 Comments

 

“Some animals are more equal than others,” as everyone learns at the end of Animal Farm, but what would George Orwell say about this?

A lecturers’ union [in England] is refusing to let its officers take part in debates at an equality summit if they are white, straight, able-bodied men.
The equality conference of the University and College Union said that members must declare their ‘protected characteristic’ — whether they are gay, disabled, female or from an ethnic minority — when applying to attend.
Activists say that it means representatives who do not qualify cannot participate in all of the discussions — even though they have been elected by their union branch.
There are four sections of the conference — for women, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) people, ethnic minorities and those with disabilities.
Though there were also some ‘joint sessions’ last year, for break-out discussions reps must have the relevant ‘characteristic’.
That means reps would be barred from debates on areas they were not affected by, and a straight, white man who was not disabled would be unable to attend any.
Yesterday critics branded the policy ridiculous — arguing that people from all walks of life can be dedicated to the cause of equality.
Emma-Jane Phillips, who sits on the UCU equality committee, said: ‘Equality reps are passionate about equality regardless of their own situation.
To infer that someone does not understand someone’s situation just because you don’t tick a box is insulting.’
The Northumbria University lecturer said it meant some reps would have to lie about having a protected characteristic to be able to attend — something she said they would be unwilling to do.
She told Times Higher Education magazine: ‘It is ridiculous that people who regard equality as their life can’t attend our equality conference.’
The issue was raised at UCU’s congress, held in Liverpool last week, when a motion was proposed to give equality reps the automatic right to attend conferences without having to ‘self-identify’. However, it was defeated — the only motion not to pass during the summit’s opening day. . . .
It comes amid a growing culture of students demanding ‘safe spaces’ in which people are banned who might express offensive views. . . .
Last year, Bahar Mustafa, diversity officer at Goldsmiths, University of London, was criticised for banning white men from an equality meeting and writing on Twitter: ‘Kill all white men.’
Students at Cardiff University tried to get feminist Germaine Greer banned from speaking because of her views on transgender people.

Here’s a little story for you kids: In 1970, when I was in fifth grade, we got a new English teacher at Lithia Springs Elementary School.

Tom Dowd was fresh out of Berry College. He had what was considered long hair by the standards of Douglas County, Georgia, at that time. Mr. Dowd also had a mustache — quite “mod” he seemed to us kids, who had heretofore never had such a young teacher — and he also had some interesting ideas about teaching English. Tom Dowd read Animal Farm to us.

For a full week or so, we sat there, about 30 fifth-graders, while our English teacher read aloud to us Orwell’s classic allegory of the Soviet Union. Mr. Dowd explained the symbolism to us — Old Major as Marx, Snowball as Trotsky, Napoleon as Stalin — and thus at the tender age of 10, I learned the history of the Bolshevik Revolution, and also learned from Animal Farm a profound understanding of totalitarianism that has stayed with me all these years.

The Soviet Union was an empire built on deceit and cruelty. The promise of “equality” under socialism was a Big Lie in 1917, and it is still a Big Lie in the 21st century. Not until I was a grown-up, more than a decade after I had watched on live TV as the Berlin Wall was torn down, did I begin to learn the full details of Bolshevik evil. It is estimated that 100 million people were killed by Marxist-Leninist regimes in the 20th century, and what killed them? “Equality!”

There is no such thing as equality in this world. At no point in human history has anything like equality existed above the level of the rudest poverty and ignorance of primitive savagery, nor is there any prospect that “progress” will lead to equality in the future. As the Nobel Prize economist Friedrich Hayek explained, in his masterful refutation of Rawlsian egalitarianism, “social justice” is a mirage. Every political leader who promises to bring about “equality” is a liar, and every intellectual who attempts to mislead young fools with nonsense about “social justice” is a dangerous fraud. Ronald Reagan said this of the Cold War:

While America’s military strength is important, let me add here that I’ve always maintained that the struggle now going on for the world will never be decided by bombs or rockets, by armies or military might. The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith.
Whittaker Chambers, the man whose own religious conversion made him a witness to one of the terrible traumas of our time, the Hiss-Chambers case, wrote that the crisis of the Western World exists to the degree in which the West is indifferent to God, the degree to which it collaborates in communism’s attempt to make man stand alone without God. And then he said, for Marxism-Leninism is actually the second oldest faith, first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with the words of temptation, “Ye shall be as gods.”

Where are today’s Tom Dowds? Where are the teachers who will remind children of a lesson the world should never be allowed to forget?

Thursday afternoon on Capitol Hill, there will be a discussion hosted by the Young America’s Foundation called entitled “President Reagan’s Principles and Philosophy: Now More than Ever.” Our nation is in peril in a world that has forgotten the great truths of history.




 

Category: Education, History, Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 06.07.16

Posted on | June 7, 2016 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Why The Brackets On Twitter Names?
Michelle Malkin: North Carolina Subsidizes American Worker Sabotage
Twitchy: Guess What Happened When Dana Loesch Challenged “Under The Gun” Director To Debate


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Sanders Leads Among Eligible Voters In California
American Thinker: Trump and the Judge – Not About Race, But Rule Of Law
Da Tech Guy: John Ruberry – Why Is Rahm Emanuel Letting Chicago’s Murder Crisis Go To Waste?
Don Surber: Man Who Beheads Gays Decries Islamic Extremism
Jammie Wearing Fools: ISIS Defectors Begging Western Governments For Help To Come Home
Joe For America: VA Drives Quadruple Amputee Hero To Suicide
JustOneMinute: German Spoken Here
Pamela Geller: San Jose Police Chief Who Admits Allowing Attacks On Trump Supporters Affiliated With La Raza
Shark Tank: State Department Says Clinton Aide’s Emails Won’t Be Available For 75 Years
Shot In The Dark: Hillary Clinton, Spouse Abuser?
STUMP: Connecticut Update – No Billionaire Left Behind
The Jawa Report: The Good War Update – NPR Journalist Killed In Taliban Attack
The Lonely Conservative: It’s Like Trump Wants To Lose The Election
The Political Hat: Obama Administration’s Attempts To Reverse Temporally Impose Regulations Ruled Unconstitutional
The Quinton Report: Baltimore May Require Warning Labels On Soda
This Ain’t Hell: Lieutenant Deshauna Barber, Miss USA
Weasel Zippers: Two Groups Of Sandernistas Beat Each Other Up, Each Thinking The Other Supports Trump
Megan McArdle: Universal Basic Income Is Ahead Of Its Time (To Say The Least)
Mark Steyn: The Glass Is One-Sixteenth Full


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Category: Linkagery

‘Anatomy of Rage’: @mstiefvater and the Feminist Injustice Collector Phenomenon

Posted on | June 7, 2016 | 36 Comments

Maggie Stiefvater (@mstiefvater on Twitter) is a successful novelist, married with two kids, living in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

In April 2015, she posted a Tumblr essay, “The Anatomy of Rage,” that begins with an incident in which a mechanic uses the phrase “little girl” while telling her husband that he’s going to fix her car as soon as possible. Now, it is fair to ask what the mechanic intended by his use of the diminutive term “little girl” to describe a 33-year-old woman. Is Ms. Stiefvater petite and youthful looking? Is the mechanic an older man, so that Ms. Stiefvater reminds him of his daughter? Or is he simply the kind of old-fashioned country boy who calls women “little girl” or “sugar,” the same way a Waffle House waitress down home is likely to call her customers “honey” or “sweetheart”? Never mind his intent:

I discovered that I was actually furious. I thought I was over being furious, but it turns out, the rage was merely dormant. I’m furious that it’s been over a decade and nothing has changed. I’m furious that sexism was everywhere in the world of college-Maggie and it remains thus, even if I out-learn, out-earn, out-drive, and out-perform my male counterparts. At the end of the day, I’m still “little girl.”
Possibly this is the point where some people are asking why this tiny gesture of all gestures should be the one to break me.

You can read her entire litany of sexist offenses, ranging from the annoying to the atrocious to the genuinely scary, culminating in this:

I’m tired of the media telling me that it’s mouth breathing bros and rednecks perpetuating the sexism. No: I can tell you that the most insidious form is the nice guy. Who is a nice guy, don’t get me wrong. I carry my own prejudices that I work through, and I don’t believe in demonizing people who aren’t perfect yet — none of us are. But the nice guy who says something sexist gets away with it. The nice guy who says something sexist sounds right and reasonable. The nice guy’s not helping, though. It’s been sixteen years, and the nice guys are nice, but we’re still things to be acquired. We are still creatures to be asked on dates. We are still saying no, still shouting NO, still having to always again and again say “no, please treat me with respect.”

Am I the only one confused by her diatribe? Why does being “asked on dates” by men reflect a lack of “respect”? If a bachelor encounters a woman he finds attractive, is he wrong to express interest in her? She describes being “cat-called every other time I’m at a gas station” and various other genuinely offensive behaviors, but why should (a) clearly unacceptable examples of sexual harassment lead to a denunciation of (b) the ordinary behavior of men asking women on dates? Like many other feminists, Ms. Stiefvater seems to aggregate within a single category — “sexism” — all overt expressions of male heterosexuality.

Ms. Stiefvater doesn’t articulate the source of her resentment beyond reciting a list of grievances, but to speculate rather generally, I think feminists view male sexuality as essentially immature. That is to say, a man who glances too long at a good-looking woman who walks past is perceived by the feminist as an oversexed perpetual adolescent. A mature man should be utterly indifferent to beauty, the feminist believes. It is not merely that her egalitarian ideology leads her to believe that all people should be treated exactly alike, but the feminist also views male sexuality as a fundamentally hostile force, antagonistic to her own interests. Males are her moral inferiors, the feminist believes, because their sexual behaviors and attitudes are inherently immature and selfish. On this basis, therefore, she begins keeping a mental catalog of examples of men’s “sexist” behavior, which is the only male behavior a feminist ever notices. Perhaps a hundred men drove past the gas station while Ms. Stiefvater was pumping gas and paid no attention to her, but that one guy who cat-called her becomes a representative, a symbol, proof of how All Men Oppress All Women Under the Patriarchal Tyranny of Male Supremacy.

Feminism provides an analytical framework within which almost any aspect of male behavior can be viewed as “problematic” — yet another example of misogyny, “male entitlement,” etc. — so that every man the feminist encounters is viewed as a suspect, a likely perpetrator of sexism, and she is a detective on the case, gathering evidence to indict him.

This hostile and suspicious attitude toward men can lead the feminist to become a paranoid type that psychologists call an injustice collector:

An injustice collector is someone who magnifies trivial “injustices” (real or imagined), believes the injustices are “intentional and purposeful” and collects them until he forms an encompassing perspective of himself/herself as a victim of bullying, discrimination and disrespect.

What happens with the feminist injustice collector is that she begins classifying male behavior according to a continuum of sexism. All men are her moral inferiors, the feminist believes, but the evidence of their inferiority can be difficult to find, because their sexism is not always overt. There are subtle shades and degrees of sexism, and the feminist injustice collector becomes an expert at detecting the tiniest bits of evidence, like a forensic investigator scrutinizing a murder scene for latent fingerprints and microscopic traces of DNA.

This suspicious mentality, rooted in an attitude of profound resentment toward males, is apt to metastasize into dangerous irrationality.

Did I mention Maggie Stiefvater has obsessive-compulsive disorder?

Also, she’s a self-righteous pharisaical hypocrite:

I generally try to be a decent person on the internet. Approach life with a semblance of humor, try not to stomp on a whole lot of toes, share a bit of myself with the world. Sometimes I fail to be tactful or harmless, and I try to own up to it when I do. That said, my sense of humor and my range of interests are very specific.

Shes a “decent person” who doesn’t “stomp on a whole lot of toes,” but doesn’t hesitate to denounce all “nice guys” as sexist, and stigmatizes men for the human-rights violation of asking women on dates.

Glass house, stones, some assembly required.

My problem with the Catalog of Sexist Behavior form of feminist rhetoric is that no literate person needs to be told, for example, that cat-calling is offensive. Generally speaking, if you’re reading a feminist blog — or op-ed columns in the New York Times, for that matter — you’re intelligent enough to understand that these behaviors are wrong. We must therefore ask, for whose benefit are these lectures about sexist behavior delivered?

Isn’t it just about feminists signifying their membership in the tribe?

It’s the Feminist Existential Theory of Oppression, wherein being a victim of the sexist patriarchy defines what it means to be a woman.

We heard you the first time, OK? For more than four decades, feminists have been lecturing men about what rotten sexist swine we are — all of us, especially “nice guys” — and we realize that there is nothing we can do about it, because everything men do is wrong, according to feminism.

It’s all one gigantic exercise in “kafkatrapping,” and the only way men can make feminists happy is to avoid feminists altogether:

Guys: Learn to take a hint. Learn to walk away.
If a woman tells you she is a feminist, say nothing and walk away.
No feminist wants to hear what a man has to say, and life is too short to waste your time taking to feminists. Just walk away.
Leave feminists alone, and then they can complain about that.
God knows, they’ve always got to have something to complain about.

Feminism is the Two-Minute Hate, and all men are Emmanuel Goldstein.




 

 

Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 06.06.16

Posted on | June 6, 2016 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 06.06.16

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: #ReadyForCthulhu?
Da Tech Guy: The Missing Argument From This Esquire “No Violence” Piece
Proof Positive: Michelle Obama Totes Dat Barge, Lifts Dat Bale
Michelle Malkin: Finally, These H-1B Fraudsters Are Going To Jail
Twitchy: Hillary’s D-Day Tweet Disgraceful On Multiple Levels


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Young Blacks Not Enamored Of Hillary Clinton
American Thinker: How The Left Is Destroying Science
Don Surber: Fred Barnes – Republicans No Longer Fear A Landslide
Jammie Wearing Fools: ISIS Celebrates Ramadan By Burning 19 Caged Yazidi Girls To Death For Refusing Sex
Joe For America: The Witch Hunt May Soon Be Over – Trey Gowdy Found Her
JustOneMinute: The Longest Week Begins With The Longest Day
Pamela Geller: Sweden Took 162,000 Refugees Last Year – 494 Got Jobs
Shark Tank: NY AG Says Trump University “Straight-Up Fraud”
Shot In The Dark: June 6 – A Tale Of Two Engines
STUMP: Public Pension Quick Takes – Everybody But Illinois Update
The Jawa Report: The Stupid, It Hurts
The Lonely Conservative: Trump Endorses Open Borders Rep. Renee Elmers
The Political Hat: Nevada Primary 2016 – First Week Early Voting Roundup And Prognostications
The Quinton Report: Freddie Gray Book Reviews Full Of Snark, Vitriol
This Ain’t Hell: Taliban Captured In Arizona
Weasel Zippers: Buzzfeed Terminates Ad Deal With RNC, Refuses To Run Ads For Trump
Megan McArdle: What The Saudi Stake In Uber Means For The Unicorn Bubble


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Category: Linkagery

‘The Wounded Antelope of the Herd’

Posted on | June 6, 2016 | 107 Comments

Her blood-alcohol content was three times the legal driving limit, except she wasn’t driving. She had attended a fraternity party:

I had nothing better to do, so why not, there’s a dumb party ten minutes from my house, I would go, dance like a fool, and embarrass my younger sister. On the way there, I joked that undergrad guys would have braces. My sister teased me for wearing a beige cardigan to a frat party like a librarian. I called myself “big mama”, because I knew I’d be the oldest one there. I made silly faces, let my guard down, and drank liquor too fast not factoring in that my tolerance had significantly lowered since college.
The next thing I remember I was in a gurney in a hallway.

The 22-year-old, a recent graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara, had been unconscious when she was sexually assaulted in an alley by a Stanford University freshman named Brock Turner:

The two bikers skidded to a stop on “Scary Path.” True to its nickname among Stanford students, the dirt trail on the edge of campus was home to something sinister in the early hours of Jan. 18, 2015.
The bikers were on their way to a frat party. They halted, however, at the sight of a man lying on top of a half-naked woman.
Normally, the bikers might have been amused to catch sight of fellow students having sex. But this was different.
The man, tall and slim and athletic, was thrusting atop the woman.
The woman wasn’t moving. At all.
“Is everything okay?” Lars Peter Jonsson, a Swedish graduate student, shouted.
When the man turned around, Jonsson could see the woman’s genitals were exposed.
“She didn’t react to my call,” Jonsson testified [March 25] in a Palo Alto, Calif., courtroom, according to the San Jose Mercury News. “I said, ‘What the f— are you doing? She’s unconscious.’”
The man tried to run away, but Jonsson and his friend caught him and pinned him to the ground until police came and made an arrest.

Last week, Brock Turner — a three-time All-American champion swimmer in high school who was once touted as a future Olympian — was sentenced to six months in county jail and three years’ probation:

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky said he weighed Turner’s character, lack of criminal history and remorsefulness in determining to bypass the heavier penalty of six years in state prison requested by prosecutors.
With good behavior, Turner, 20, is expected to serve three months in county jail. He will have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life and complete a sex offender management program. . . .
After Thursday’s hearing, District Attorney Jeff Rosen said Turner should have been sent to prison for sexual assault. “The punishment does not fit the crime,” he said.
In sentencing memos, prosecutors called Turner a “continued threat to the community” and asked the judge to sentence him to six years in state prison.

The leniency of Turner’s sentence has outraged feminists, and it would be the better part of valor not to further arouse their indignation. However, it is worth pointing out that (a) Turner was an 18-year-old freshman, (b) his blood-alcohol level was twice the legal limit, and (c) why does Stanford University allow fraternities to serve alcohol to teenagers?

This is the dirty little secret of so-called “rape culture” on our nation’s college campuses. The legal drinking age is 21, but teenagers want to get drunk, and so university administrations — and police in college towns — simply refuse to enforce the law. Are we supposed to believe that Stanford officials and the police in Palo Alto have no inkling that 18-year-olds are getting drunk at frat parties?

Under California law, “every person who sells, furnishes, gives, or causes to be sold, furnished, or given away any alcoholic beverage to any person under 21 years of age is guilty of a misdemeanor,” and “any person under 21 years of age who purchases any alcoholic beverage, or any person under 21 years of age who consumes any alcoholic beverage in any on-sale premises, is guilty of a misdemeanor.” So the fraternity which served alcohol to Brock Turner was engaged in a criminal enterprise, and furthermore, if furnishing alcohol to someone under 21 “proximately causes great bodily injury” — and, yeah, I think that would include rape — the provider can be sentenced to as much as a year in jail.

If drunk teenagers are committing rape at Stanford, doesn’t the university have an obligation to prevent its teenage students from getting drunk? There are limits to how far the administration can go in supervising its students’ extracurricular activities, but certainly if a fraternity is serving booze to 18-year-old freshmen — who then proceed to rape women who get drunk at these parties — the university is not powerless to act, nor are fraternities exempt from the authority of local law enforcement.

“No More Fun of Any Kind!”

Dean Vernon Wormer would know how to handle this problem, but Stanford University (annual tuition $46,320) spectacularly failed in its duty to protect Brock Turner from the known evils of Demon Rum:

Turner attended a party at the Kappa Alpha fraternity on the southwestern edge of Stanford’s Palo Alto campus . . .
At the party, he met a pair of sisters.
The older one had been reluctant to come out. The 22-year-old had recently graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara and moved back in with her parents. She had a serious boyfriend in Philadelphia and planned to stay home.
But she changed her mind when her younger sister and her friends began to drink whiskey and champagne, she told the jury, according to the Mercury News.
After having four whiskey drinks at home, the woman and her sister were driven to Stanford to meet female friends. From there, the young women went to the party. . . .
According to Turner’s testimony, he and the woman danced and kissed at the party. Sometime around midnight, he asked her whether she would like to go back to his dorm and she said yes, Turner testified.
They held hands as they left the party, but then she slipped and they both fell, he said. Once on the ground, they started kissing near a trash bin, and when he asked whether he could touch her genitals, she once again agreed, he testified, according to the Mercury News.
When he asked her whether she liked it, she replied “uh huh” and then they started “dry humping,” he claimed in court.

This is not your typical “he-said/she-said” incident, because the woman has no memory at all of what happened that night. Her friends disputed Turner’s testimony, but evidently all of them were so drunk they didn’t even notice her leaving the party, and what can we conclude?

Here was a teenage boy, with a .16 blood-alcohol level — seriously drunk, but conscious and ambulatory — who sexually assaulted a passed-out woman with a .24 blood-alcohol level who has no memory of meeting Brock Turner, much less leaving the party with him or being sexually assaulted by him. “He may not look like a rapist,” the prosecutor told the jury at Turner’s trial, “but he is the . . . face of campus sexual assault.”

 

OK, if you say so — this is the face of campus sexual assault: Brock Turner, All-American swimmer, a teenage boy who got drunk at a frat party at an elite university where the administration tolerates underage drinking. We have the court statement of Turner’s victim:

My boyfriend did not know what happened, but called that day and said, “I was really worried about you last night, you scared me, did you make it home okay?” I was horrified. That’s when I learned I had called him that night in my blackout, left an incomprehensible voicemail, that we had also spoken on the phone, but I was slurring so heavily he was scared for me, that he repeatedly told me to go find [my sister]. . . .
When the detective asked [Turner] if he had planned on taking me back to his dorm, he said no. When the detective asked how we ended up behind the dumpster, he said he didn’t know. He admitted to kissing other girls at that party, one of whom was my own sister who pushed him away. He admitted to wanting to hook up with someone. I was the wounded antelope of the herd, completely alone and vulnerable, physically unable to fend for myself, and he chose me. Sometimes I think, if I hadn’t gone, then this never would’ve happened. But then I realized, it would have happened, just to somebody else. You were about to enter four years of access to drunk girls and parties, and if this is the foot you started off on, then it is right you did not continue. . . .
Alcohol is not an excuse. Is it a factor? Yes. But alcohol was not the one who stripped me, fingered me, had my head dragging against the ground, with me almost fully naked. Having too much to drink was an amateur mistake that I admit to, but it is not criminal. Everyone in this room has had a night where they have regretted drinking too much, or knows someone close to them who has had a night where they have regretted drinking too much. Regretting drinking is not the same as regretting sexual assault. We were both drunk, the difference is I did not take off your pants and underwear, touch you inappropriately, and run away. That’s the difference.

Parents must warn their teenage sons about this: Whatever happens in any sexual situation, only he can be held legally responsible.

In the 21st century, no woman is ever responsible for anything.

As for my daughters, I warn them never to get drunk, and certainly to avoid elite universities like Stanford, where all the boys are rapists.





 

Category: Crime, Education, Sex Trouble

Is There Hope for Feminists?

Posted on | June 6, 2016 | 46 Comments

 

Why does God permit boastful fornicators to prosper? Why doesn’t the Lord visit swift destruction upon the wicked and godless?

My friend Pete Da Tech Guy is a devout Catholic who thinks we should pray for God to save feminists from their satanic folly, but I have difficulty imagining that someone as far gone as Laurie Penny could ever repent. My attitude toward genuinely wicked people — and Laurie Penny is pure evil — is that we should pray their folly soon destroys them. We know that all feminists are eternally doomed to Hell. What we need is for these fools to suffer such catastrophic earthly consequences of their own hatefulness that they can no longer lead others to destruction.

That’s just my opinion, of course, and I’m not sure it’s theologically sound. Maybe it’s even sinful to think that way. However, there may be hope to redeem those lost souls inside the feminist death cult:

Kathleen Taylor, a neurologist at Oxford University, said that recent developments suggest that we will soon be able to treat religious fundamentalism and other forms of ideological beliefs potentially harmful to society as a form of mental illness. . . .
She said that radicalizing ideologies may soon be viewed not as being of personal choice or free will but as a category of mental disorder. She said new developments in neuroscience could make it possible to consider extremists as people with mental illness rather than criminals.
She told The Times of London: “One of the surprises may be to see people with certain beliefs as people who can be treated. Someone who has for example become radicalized to a cult ideology — we might stop seeing that as a personal choice that they have chosen as a result of pure free will and may start treating it as some kind of mental disturbance.” . . .
In 2006, she wrote a book about mind control titled “Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control,” in which she examined the techniques that cultic groups use to influence victims. . . .
She notes correctly that “brainwashing” which embraces all the subtle and not-so-subtle ways “we make people think things that might not be good for them, that they might not otherwise have chosen to think,” is a much more pervasive social phenomenon than we are willing to recognize.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Indeed, most victims of brainwashing — Gender Studies majors, for example — seldom realize they have joined a cult. Some people become so brainwashed they take Laurie Penny seriously.

“Especially important is the warning to avoid conversations with the demon. . . . He is a liar. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful. So don’t listen to him. Remember that — do not listen.”
— The Exorcist (1973)

Of course, we should take Laurie Penny seriously as a manifestation of demonic influence, but otherwise, she’s just a pathetic joke.




 


Category: Sex Trouble

‘The Personal Is Political’: Feminism and the Problem With Keeping Score

Posted on | June 5, 2016 | 45 Comments

 

One of the basic problems with feminism is that, by making equality the measure of human happiness, the feminist purchases an infinite supply of resentment. If you convince yourself that everything in the world should be divvied up equally, and that any observable instance of inequality is proof of oppression — social injustice! — you will become permanently angry, and perfectly miserable. Ronald Reagan once mocked the fundamental error of the egalitarian worldview: “We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.”

If you believe inequality is a synonym for injustice, then you must see injustice everywhere, because in order for everyone to be “equal,” we would all have to be identical. This is exactly what feminists have in mind, of course, when they speak of achieving equality by abolishing “gender.”

“Gender is a hierarchical system which maintains the subordination of females as a class to males through force. Gender is a material system of power which uses violence and psychological coercion to exploit female labor, sex, reproduction, emotional support, etc., for the benefit of males. Gender is not natural or voluntary, since a person is not naturally subordinate and no one chooses to be subordinated.”
— Rachel Ivey, 2013

Only if you view the world through the warped lenses of a crypto-Marxist ideology is it possible to see male-female differences as a “system of power” characterized by “violence and psychological coercion.” Yet this bizarre worldview is what inspires the feminist T-shirt slogan “Raise Boys and Girls the Same Way,” which presumes that a gender-free androgynous childhood will eliminate inequality (“the subordination of women as a class”) by eliminating differences between men and women.

Actually, what gender-free childhood will produce is failure.

Common sense plays no part in feminist discourse, or else the problem with their egalitarian androgynous idealism would be obvious to them.

Normal women like masculine men and normal men like feminine women. Why are my teenage sons hitting the gym and drinking protein shakes? Enhancing their muscularity is a way to gain an advantage in the grand Darwinian competition against other young males, and if your teenage sons aren’t doing their reps on the bench press and the squat rack, guess what? They’re going to lose that competition.

“Women are attracted to successful men, and the competitive drive for success is therefore intrinsic to men’s ‘sex role.’ Every attempt to escape this logic is doomed. . . . Winners win and losers lose and, ultimately, no political agenda can change this.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, 2015

Boys compete with boys and girls compete with girls. This is the natural order, which produces a natural hierarchy and, whatever our own situation might be in terms of this hierarchy, no one with common sense would think the way to “fix” it is to have girls compete against boys.

Feminism is based on a zero-sum game mentality which conceives of every interaction between men and women as a manifestation of unjust “male privilege” whereby women are exploited and oppressed. From the feminist perspective, whatever any man has — in terms of career achievement, financial resources or social prestige — he has gained by oppressing women. The more success a man achieves, the more “male privilege” he possesses, according to feminism, and so the most successful man must also be the most oppressive man. Therefore, to bring about “equality,” the goal of feminism must be to prevent male success.

This is insanity, of course, but this is where the logic of feminism leads.

“Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. . . .
“We identify the agents of our oppression as men. . . . All men receive economic, sexual, and psychological benefits from male supremacy. All men have oppressed women.”
— Redstockings, “Manifesto,” 1969

“Feminist consciousness is consciousness of victimization . . . to come to see oneself as a victim.”
— Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (1990)

“Feminism involves the implicit claim that the prevailing conditions under which women live are unjust and must be changed.”
— Carol R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim, Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (2003)

“All women are prisoners and hostages to men’s world. Men’s world is like a vast prison or concentration camp for women. This isn’t a metaphor, it’s reality. Each man is a threat. We can’t escape men.”
— Radical Wind, Aug. 8, 2013

“Radical Feminism is, and has always been a political movement focused on liberating girls and women, those who are born into the sex caste female, from the unnatural, yet universal roles patriarchy has assigned.”
— “Radical Feminism,” Tumblr.com, July 26, 2014

Viewing life as a quasi-Marxist “class struggle” between men and women, as collective groups with mutually antagonistic interests, feminist ideology makes cooperation between men and women impossible. Cooperation in the sense of teamwork assumes that each member of the team has some individual ability to contribute to the overall effort, and in terms of male-female cooperation in marriage and parenthood (which is the fundamental basis of human society) such cooperation inevitably requires role differentiation. This does not mean that the definition of male and female roles must be “rigid” or “polar” (the kind of pejorative language feminists use to disparage “gender roles”), but still we see that certain general patterns of male-female roles persist in family life, despite decades of feminist efforts to eradicate these differences. From the perspective of economics, these patterns can be viewed in terms of division of labor, specialization and efficiencies of scale, but there is no need to do a complete analysis of “gender” in search of an ideal system of male-female cooperation. At the level of individual behavior, each couple works out their relationship and family life as suits them best, within the constraints of the available resources and in consideration of their own abilities. Each of us does the best we can, for ourselves, our spouses and our children — but this is never good enough for feminists.

“The personal is political,” a slogan coined by Carol Hanisch in 1969, was essentially a denial of individual agency in private relationships, an argument derived from feminist “consciousness-raising” groups:

One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.

By intruding the politics of “collective action” into personal relationships, feminism thereby annihilates privacy. This is a totalitarian principle, very similar to the ideas of Mao’s “Cultural Revolution.” There can be no individual freedom — “no personal solutions” — because this might permit people to behave in ways contrary to the egalitarian goals that “collective action” is aimed to achieve. Insofar as everything in society is not perfectly equal between men and women, feminism requires that every private action and personal relationship be subjected to political scrutiny, to determine how it reflects the “prevailing conditions” of oppression from which women must be liberated. Read more

Category: Sex Trouble

WaPo (& By Extension, Beltway) Ideas Mired In 19th Cent. Regarding Tea Party

Posted on | June 5, 2016 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

Among the laundry list of problems with Progress is that freezing the size of the House since 1910 has given us an inert Deep State and a crypto-aristocracy on top. We’re supposed to locate people with the fortitude to survive the campaigns and then send them back to the trough again and again to make sure that a “fair share” of the future being mortgaged trickles down to the States, and hopefully makes it beyond the borders of the State capitol.

When she ran six years ago, Ellmers joined the bus tour hosted by the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity that traveled the country railing against President Obama’s health care law. She later spoke at rallies hosted or co-sponsored by the group and promoted AFP events. In 2010, she even nabbed an endorsement from Sarah Palin.

Now, AFP is one of the main players in the costly crusade to oust Ellmers in the group’s premier foray to defeat an incumbent in a Republican race. Others taking on the congresswoman include the Club for Growth and the antiabortion National Right to Life and Susan B. Anthony List.

And why shouldn’t AFP? What is so flipping magical inside that Beltway that anybody gets re-elected At. All.

No. Expanding on Mark Twain, Capitol Hill, like any compost heap, merits frequent turning, and for the same reason. This is a trend that I expect will continue as we crawl out of the Obama/[YourGuessHere] era: voters continuing to do to the public sector what’s been done to the private. I’ve proven the anti-prophet at every turn since commencing blogging, so I won’t hazard a guess just how much desert we have to wander through to get to The Glorious Future, but fuggedabodit–I’m an optimist.

Let’s get Stacy’s cousin safely out to pasture, please, Arizona.

Category: Uncategorized
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