The Other McCain

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

2 Cops Shot in San Diego; 1 Dead

Posted on | July 29, 2016 | 9 Comments

The San Diego Union-Tribune reports:

Two San Diego police gang-detail officers making a traffic stop in Southcrest late Thursday night were shot several times, one mortally wounded, triggering a massive police search into the daylight hours. One suspect is in custody. . . .
The slain officer was shot several times, rushed to a hospital in a patrol car but died at a hospital despite life-saving efforts, San Diego Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman said early Friday. The wounded officer underwent surgery early Friday and was expected to survive. . . .
There was no update on the condition of the suspect, who was taken into custody about 11:30 p.m. in the Chollas Creek ravine just south of the site of the shooting. Officers had found a blood trail leading toward him.

A second suspect was reportedly in a standoff with police. More from Fox News and the Los Angeles Times. (Via Memeorandum.)

 

Category: Crime

In The Mailbox: 07.28.16

Posted on | July 28, 2016 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Trump Turns Obama & Hillary’s Statements Against Them, Trolls The Media All Day
Twitchy: “Then Take It From Me, Commie!” Black Trump Supporter Defends The Flag At #DemsInPhilly
Austin Bay: Tailgunner Hillary And The Putin Hack
Moe Lane: Let’s Unpack The Glaring Problem With The Rocketeer Sequel


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Podcast #11 – The Bragging Episode
American Power: Francesca Valle Threatens Harassment Suit Over Facebook Post
American Thinker: Creeping Sharia In Healthcare
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily News
Da Tech Guy: Public Breastfeeding Is A Gentleman’s Business
Don Surber: Trump The DNC
Dustbury: Is It Mary Or Sue?
Fred On Everything: Virtue And The Streets – A Dummy’s Guide To Police Work
Jammie Wearing Fools: Historic! Another Top Clinton Supporter Is Under Federal Investigation
Joe For America: Chuck Norris Sets It Straight
JustOneMinute: Hillary’s Big Night Is Coming Up
Pamela Geller: Gang Of Muslims Storms Nudist Pool In Germany Yelling “Allahu Akbar”, Threatening To “Exterminate” Women
Shark Tank: Rubio’s New Ad Attacks Failed Obama/Clinton Foreign Policy
Shot In The Dark: Wolf!
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – Bigfoot More Likely To Exist Than Moderate Syrian Rebels, also, Things Banned At Twitter
The Political Hat: Intersectional Irony Of Planned Parenthood
This Ain’t Hell: Stolen Valor Hunting – Not For Amateurs, also, Bernath V, Lilyea Et Al., Updates
Weasel Zippers: VA Spent $20 Million On Art While 1,000 Veterans Died Waiting For Treatment
Megan McArdle: How Obama Learned To Speak Republican


The Rocketeer
Shop Amazon – Handmade Handbags & Accessories

Category: Linkagery

What Is ‘Rape Culture’?

Posted on | July 28, 2016 | 49 Comments

“Once you understand what rape is, you will understand the forces that systematically oppress you as women. . . .
“What is rape?
“Rape is the first model for marriage. . . .
“Rape is the primary heterosexual model for sexual relating.
“Rape is the primary emblem of romantic love. . . .
“Rape is a function of male imperialism over and against women.
“The crime of rape against one woman is a crime committed against all women.”
— Andrea Dworkin, “The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door,” in Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics (1976)

As previously mentioned, I will be giving a presentation for the “Forum on Campus Sexual Assault, Consent and Due Process” Aug. 1 at Central Piedmont Community College Central Campus in Charlotte, NC. The title of my presentation will be “Sexual Paranoia: The Ideology of ‘Rape Culture’ Hysteria,” and will include about two dozen quotes demonstrating how the current campus crisis has its roots in feminist theory, especially as this anti-male ideology is promoted in university Women’s Studies programs. My presentation will include about two dozen quotes from feminist sources spanning nearly five decades since the emergence of the so-called Women’s Liberation movement in the late 1960s. Most of those quotes have been used here at the blog over the past two years and many are included in my book Sex Trouble: Essays on Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature.

The quote from Andrea Dworkin cited above is not included in my conference presentation, but I wanted to discuss it here to show how this anti-male belief system is so deeply rooted in feminist belief that it is impossible to speak of “moderate feminism.” This quote from Dworkin, describing rape as “the primary heterosexual model for sexual relating,” is about as close as she ever came to saying that all heterosexual intercourse is rape. She never said that in so many words, but in reading her work — and I have read four of her books — this is the only reasonable inference of her meaning. This is not a matter of a few phrases in a single book or article, but a theme endlessly reiterated throughout Dworkin’s career, and her vehement opposition to heterosexuality, per se, was the entire basis of Dworkin’s fame. “Maligning Andrea Dworkin in death amounts to little more than misogyny,” feminist Meghan Murphy wrote last year on the 10th anniversary of Dworkin’s death, but who is “maligning” Dworkin? Is it “misogyny” to quote Dworkin?

Feminists are fundamentally dishonest, and their defensive reaction when confronted with their own words — compelled either to defend or repudiate what they or one of their eminent comrades have written — exposes this dishonesty. Andrea Dworkin was a particularly bold liar, whose career was built on slanderous falsehoods. Her hateful anti-male screeds were constructed by an artful use of propaganda tactics. The speech quoted above was one she delivered seven times between March 1975 and April 1976, mainly on college campuses, including SUNY-Stony Brook, the University of Pennsylvania, SUNY-Old Westbury and Queens College/CUNY. Her use of evidence is selective, as she presents various authorities (e.g., the biblical Book of Deuteronomy and Ovid’s Ars Amatoria) as sanctioning rape and cites these ancient sources as supposedly representing a universal regime of male supremacy. The problem with this, of course, is that the vast majority of Americans have never read anything Ovid ever wrote, and how many Americans in 1975 were living as if they took the Bible seriously? Was it pious Christian young men whose “male imperialism” was terrorizing helpless college girls at SUNY-Stony Brook or Penn? Or perhaps Andrea Dworkin meant to impugn scholars of Latin, who left the library filled with concupiscent lust after reading Ovid and assaulted the first coed who caught their eye.

Speaking of dishonesty, Dworkin was often guilty of using the work of others without due credit. She was not a plagiarist, but she had a habit of citing the same facts from the same sources used by other feminist writers, without acknowledging where she had found these facts. Susan Griffin’s groundbreaking 1971 article “Rape: The All-American Crime” gets a single footnote reference in Dworkin’s Our Blood, although anyone can compare her 1975 speech “The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door” to Griffin’s 1971 article and see the repeated use of the same sources (e.g., a 1952 Yale Law Journal article and a 1971 book by Menachim Amir) to make the same points. You might think that Dworkin could have been bothered to mention Griffin’s name in the actual text of her speech in acknowledgement of her debt, but it would not do for The Great Author to admit the extent of her wholesale borrowings from a lesser writer.

The Methods of Anti-Male Propaganda

Dworkin’s skill as a propagandist, however, was remarkable. She tosses out the names of a few 20th-century novelists (e.g., D.H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer) and claims their work proves that society condones rape:

A woman is taken, possessed, conquered by brute force — and it is the rape itself that transforms her into a carnal creature. It is the rape itself which defines both her identity and her function: she is a woman, and as a woman she exists to be f–ked. In masculinist terms, a woman can never be raped against her will since the notion is that if she does not want to be raped, she does not know her will.

Let us admit that the attitude Dworkin describes flourished among certain bohemian and intellectual types as a consequence of the popularity of Freudianism and other theoretical explanations of sexual psychology. Well, theories are a dime a dozen, but the basic idea that some sort of natural instinct is involved in sex is just a matter of common sense:

Sex is about reproductive biology. Human beings are mammals, and any eighth-grader can figure out what that means in terms of sex.
Once you understand this scientific definition of sex, everything else is just details.

Alas, intellectuals require theories to explain everything, and novelists require action for their books, so Freudian theory inspired a great many triumphant rape scenes in 20th-century novels. Could I discuss this at length? Could I point out, for example, that women are naturally reluctant to engage in sexual intercourse because the potential consequence of pregnancy involves a tremendous responsibility? Could I furthermore point out that women are naturally concerned to avoid a reputation for promiscuity, since such a reputation decreases her opportunities for marriage? Yes, I could discuss many factors related to the issue of consent, and why the “default no” is every woman’s basic attitude toward sex, thus requiring men to engage in negotiation to close the deal. However, it is not my purpose here to articulate any theory of my own in regard to human sexual behavior. Rather, I merely wish to say that the particular theories which produced what Dworkin calls “masculinist” ideas about rape as “the primary emblem of romantic love” were no more to be considered typical of the average male than Dworkin’s own attitudes could be considered typical of the average woman.

 

Dworkin employed a typical method of feminist “rape culture” propaganda, playing games with statistics and anecdotes. First, use dubious statistical methods to exaggerate the frequency of rape, making it seem commonplace, creating the impression that every man is a violent sexual predator and every woman must live constantly in fear. Then, include anecdotes about particularly atrocious cases (e.g., a gang rape where the accused suspects were not prosecuted) to convey the idea that women are routinely victimized in brutal ways and that the system — patriarchy! — is deliberately rigged against women. And so, about midway through “The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door,” Andrea Dworkin offers this:

The FBI, in its Uniform Crime Reports, reported that in 1974, 55,210 women were raped in this country. This was an 8 percent increase over 1973, and a 49 percent increase over 1969. The FBI notes that rape is “probably one of the most under-reported crimes due primarily to fear and/or embarrassment on the part of its victims.” Carol V. Horos, in her book Rape, estimates that for every rape reported to the police, ten are not. Applying Horos’ estimate to the number of rapes reported in 1974 brings the total estimate of rapes committed in that year to 607,310. It is important to remember that FBI statistics are based on the male definition of rape, and on the numbers of men arrested and convicted for rape under that definition. According to the FBI, of all those rapes reported to the police in 1974, only 51 percent resulted in arrest, and in only one case out of ten was the rapist finally convicted.

Dworkin here demonstrates how the propagandist uses facts to create lies. A false impression (i.e., rape is common) is intentionally created by the use of an actual statistic (55,210 reported rapes) combined with an estimate of unreported rapes used as a Magic Multiplier to produce a figure of more than 600,000 rapes — a Scary Big Number. Whatever the actual number of rapes in 1975 was, however, the U.S. population in 1974 was 214 million, about 110 million of whom were women, so that even if we accept the 10x Magic Multiplier and stipulate that there were 600,000 rapes in 1974, this means 0.5% of women were raped that year. In other words, 99.5% of women managed to get through the year without being victims of rape and (something else Dworkin doesn’t mention) this was during an era when violent crime had spiraled out of control.

Crime ………………. 1960 ………. 1975
Rape ……………………….. 17,190 …….. 56,090
Robbery ………………… 107,840 …… 470,500
Aggravated assault ….. 154,320 …… 492,620
Murder………………………. 9,110 ……… 20,510
All violent crime …….. 288,460 …. 1,039,710

There was a frightening increase in the number of reported rapes during this 15-year span, but this was part of a trend when all violent crime increased by 277% percent, when the number of murders more than doubled, aggravated assaults tripled, and robberies quadrupled.

Activists who now claim that there is a “campus rape epidemic” never acknowledge the historical background of how rape, like all violent crime, increased so dramatically during the social upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s. This was an era when “reforms” promoted by liberals (including the decriminalization of pornography) were arguably major contributors to the breakdown of cultural norms that had previously served to restrain sexual violence. The crime wave that erupted in the 1960s was finally halted in the 1980s and 1990s as a result of conservative policies (including federal “mandatory minimum” sentences for drug traffickers) that put criminals in prison where they belong. Technological developments — national computer databases of DNA, fingerprints and criminal records, as well as widespread video surveillance — have made it easier to solve crimes and prosecute perpetrators, and this has produced a remarkable decrease in crime since the 1990s:

Between 1997 and 2013, the rate of rape or sexual assault against women dropped by about 50 percent. . . . The decline in the rate of sexual assault is part of a widely observed decline in violent crime more generally, which is down about 60 percent over the past 15 to 20 years.

Remember that, even according to the figures cited by Andrea Dworkin in 1975 — when violent crime rates had sharply increased — only 1 in 200 U.S. women were victims of rape annually, assuming that the actual number of rapes was 10 times the number reported to police.

Yet here we are, more than 40 years later, when authorities agree that crime rates have significantly decreased, and feminists insist that 1-in-5 female college students are victims of sexual assault. This aspect of “rape culture” rhetoric cannot be justified by reference to known facts, which means that feminists are lying about rape — and doing so on a monumental scale, deliberately exaggerating the frequency of campus rape perhaps as much as 40 times the actual rate.

“No, 1 in 5 women have not been raped on college campuses,” Ashe Schow wrote in the headline of an August 2014 column explaining the basic flaws in the methodology behind this phony statistic. The problem of campus sexual assault “will not be solved by statistical hijinks,” as Christina Hoff Sommers has said. Sommers seems willing to extend to feminists the courtesy of believing they actually care about preventing rape. But why should liars be granted the presumption of good faith?

For more than 40 years, feminists have been exploiting the issue of rape in the same way that Andrea Dworkin did — combine horrifying anecdotes of violence and injustice with inflated statistics to create the impression that these atrocities are routine, that all women are victims and all men are dangerous predators. And this anti-male propaganda culminates in a call to action: “We must do something! Organize! Protest! Demand new laws! Pay more feminists to give speeches on campus!”

Feminism: Sex With Men Is ‘Impossible’

What was Andrea Dworkin’s motive for lying about rape? To make money. To sell books. To encourage young women to hate men as much as she hated men, thus to build a loyal readership of man-hating women sympathetic to her radical message. Why?

“Rape culture” is a feminist synonym for heterosexuality.

When Andrea Dworkin began touring campuses lecturing college girls about rape in 1975, she was promoting her book Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality, which makes genuinely strange arguments, as Dworkin avows herself an apostle of “natural androgynous eroticism”:

The discovery is, of course, that “man” and “woman” are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female both. . . .
I have defined heterosexuality as the ritualized behavior built on polar role definition. Intercourse with men as we know them is increasingly impossible. It requires an aborting of creativity and strength, a refusal of responsibility and freedom: a bitter personal death. It means remaining the victim, forever annihilating all self-respect. It means acting out the female role, incorporating the masochism, self-hatred, and passivity which are central to it. Unambiguous conventional heterosexual behavior is the worst betrayal of our common humanity.

In her first book, Andrea Dworkin declared herself against heterosexuality, per se, and she never recanted this radical position, condemning sexual intercourse as synonymous with “personal death” for women. Her next book, Our Blood, included the speech she made at a 1975 Lesbian Pride rally in New York, in which she declared that lesbianism “shines as bright as the summer sun as noon.” Depicting men as the forces of darkness, Dworkin issued this remarkable prophecy:

In this country in the coming years, I think that there will be a terrible storm. I think that the skies will darken beyond all recognition. Those who walk the streets will walk them in darkness. . . Those who are raped will see the darkness as they look up into the face of the rapist. Those who are assaulted and brutalized by madmen will start intently into the darkness to discern who is moving toward them at every moment.

Men are darkness, a looming threat in a “terrible storm” of rape, assault and brutality — this is what Andrea Dworkin believed and, we are told by feminists today, it is “misogyny” to criticize Dworkin. Her speech about rape, which Dworkin gave on so many college campuses, concluded by summarizing the themes of her book Woman Hating, which rejected “polar role definition” and the “fictions” of male and female identities:

Rape is the direct consequence of our polar definitions of men and woman. . . . Given these polar gender definitions, it is the very nature of men to aggress sexually against women. . . Rape is no excess, no aberration, no accident, no mistake — it embodies sexuality as the culture defines it. . . .
In this society, the norm of masculinity is phallic aggression. Male sexuality is, by definition, intensely and rigidly phallic. . . .
The fact is that in order to stop rape, and all of the other systematic abuses against us, we must destroy these very definitions, of masculinity and femininity, of men and women. . . We must excise them from our social fabric, destroy any and all institutions based on them, render them vestigial, useless. We must destroy the very structure of culture as we know it, its art, its churches, its laws; we must eradicate from consciousness and memory all of the images, institutions, and structural mental sets that turn men into rapists by definition and women into victims by definition. Until we do, rape will remain our primary sexual model and women will be raped by men.
As women, we must begin this revolutionary work. When we change, those who define themselves over and against us will have to kill us all, change, or die. In order to change, we must renounce every male definition we have ever learned; we must renounce male definitions and descriptions of our lives, our bodies, our needs, our wants, our worth . . . We must refuse to be complicit in a sexual-social system that is built on our labor as an inferior slave class.

Heterosexuality is synonymous with slavery, Dworkin declared, and she is certainly not the only feminist who has said as much — the quotes in my presentation next Monday will include numerous other examples of such claims. And notice that Dworkin’s demand for “revolutionary work” is entirely destructive in its motives and goals. Because “our social fabric,” our “institutions” and our “culture” are based upon definitions of masculinity and femininity that assume heterosexuality as the norm, then everything must be destroyed in order to end “phallic aggression.”

Thus we return to the original question: “What is ‘rape culture’?”

Feminists who have fomented a phony “rape epidemic” hysteria on our nation’s capital have relied upon public ignorance as to the nature of feminism’s core belief system. Anti-male hate-mongers expected that no one would ever take the time to do what I have done in the past two years, namely to acquire more than 100 books by feminist authors, dating back to the very beginning of the Women’s Liberation movement and including textbooks commonly assigned in Women’s Studies courses today, and extract from these works the fundamental elements of feminist theory.

For too long, most conservatives have treated feminism as a joke, a thing to be mocked when it occasionally erupts in daily news headlines. It is easy to laugh, for example, when we hear about a staff member at a Catholic university being suspended for having a discussion with a student in which the staffer was accused of “denying transgenderism” — an accusation that Los Angeles investigated as a hate crime. Yet the fact that a formerly religious institution has now become so corrupt that no one can be permitted to teach Christian belief on campus is no laughing matter. Nor is it humorous that university students in the throes of bizarre delusions (Cosette Carleo calls herself “gender-neutral”) wield the power to inflict career-ending punishment on anyone on campus who criticizes their madness. Before you laugh at this, imagine the horror of parents who have sent their children to Loyola Marymount University (annual tuition $42,569) only to discover that this allegedly Christian institution has instead been captured by the Gender-Sexuality Alliance which, along with the office of LGBT Student Services, annually promotes “Rainbow Week,” otherwise known as LGBTQ+ Awareness Week.

 

Here we see how the radical project announced by Andrea Dworkin — the destruction of masculinity and femininity, etc. — has attained official authority in academia, so that no one employed at Loyola Marymount (or any other university) would dare speak out against feminism’s avowed purpose to “destroy the very structure of culture as we know it.”

Our nation’s universities are now committed to this cultural destruction. Readers will perhaps not be surprised to learn that female students are a majority (57%) of enrollment at Loyola Marymount, where the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies has just hired Dr. Mairead Sullivan as a new assistant professor. Dr. Sullivan’s dissertation, “challenging the conventional border between feminist and queer theory,” makes “a claim for the theoretical value of feminism’s radical variant and its commitment to an ‘anti-social politics’ and a violent ‘politics of destruction’ as providing a specific and terrorist threat to reproductive futurism.” Exactly why Catholic parents would pay $42,569 a year to send their children to a university that promotes this “politics of destruction” is something the administration of Loyola Marymount has not bothered to explain. Adam Cassandra asks, “Why Is This Catholic University Trashing Catholic Teaching On Sexuality?” Well, because that’s what it takes to “destroy the very structure of culture as we know it.”

What is “rape culture”? Everything — and feminists want to destroy it all.




 


Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 07.27.16

Posted on | July 27, 2016 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 07.27.16

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Louder With Crowder: Cenk Uygur Of Young Turks Goes Insane
Proof Positive: Ending Gun Violence At The #DNC
EBL: Media Is One Of The New Gods
Michelle Malkin: #BlueLightFriday – From The White House To Your House
Twitchy: Wikileaks Releases Hacked DNC Voicemails During Primetime Of #DemsInPhilly


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: It’s Time To Sue Activists
American Power: Leftists Outraged After Trump Says Russia Should “Find” Hillary’s “Missing” E-Mails
American Thinker: Little Green Lies – Why Electric Cars Won’t Save The Environment
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Da Tech Guy: Bloomberg For Hillary Vs. Giuliani For Trump Perfectly Summarized
Don Surber: Obama Enters Trump’s Spider Web
Dustbury: Such A Deal, Indeed
Jammie Wearing Fools: The Ship Is Sinking – Corrupt Clinton Getting Negative Bounce During “Historic” Convention, Now Trails Trump 47-40
Joe For America: Leaked DNC E-Mails Show Payoffs For Donors – Now There’s A Surprise!
JustOneMinute: I Have A Problem With Peter Beinart’s Problem
Pamela Geller: Video – Democrats Burn Israeli Flags At National Convention
Shark Tank: Wasserman Schultz, Moments After Being Booed Off Stage
Shot In The Dark: Madre De Dios
STUMP: Number Checking – What’s The Income Percentile For The Obamas?
The Jawa Report: Revenge Of The Kremlin
The Political Hat: Poe’s Law, University Edition
The Quinton Report: DNC E-Mail – Cambridge, MD Is “A Shitty Town”
This Ain’t Hell: Army Major General David Haight Canned
Weasel Zippers: E-Mails Show DNC Shamelessly Cheering Job Losses In North Carolina
Megan McArdle: The Democratic Machine Chose Hillary Long Ago, But Why?


Join Amazon Prime – The Star Trek Collection – Available on Amazon Prime Instant Video
Join Amazon Kindle Unlimited 30-Day Free Trial

Category: Linkagery

In The Mailbox: 07.26.15

Posted on | July 26, 2016 | 6 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
First Street Journal: #DemsInPhilly – So Appropriate To Hold It In The City Of Brotherly Love!
EBL: 60 Minutes Decides Not To Air Clips About DNC’s Efforts To Undermine Sanders Candidacy
Michelle Malkin: “Tough Guy” Trumpka’s Blood-Stained History
Twitchy: Sandernistas Spoil Historic Moment Of Party Unity By Staging Mass Walkout At #DemsInPhilly


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Australia Doesn’t Have A Conservative Party
American Power: U.S. European Elites Just Not Equipped To Deal With Islam’s Insurgency
American Thinker: Democratic Platform – Killing The Unborn Is Fine With Us
Animal Magnetism: Zing!
BLACKFIVE: Book Review – Tag, You’re Dead by J.C. Lane
Da Tech Guy: The Question The NBA and the Left Don’t Want To Answer Regarding The All-Star Game
Don Surber: Negative Ads Bounce Off Trump’s Chest
Dustbury: Mark It Well, Sir
Jammie Wearing Fools: “I Want The People To Know My Story So They Know What Kind Of Man Alan Grayson Really Is”
Joe For America: French Fries Matter – Town Burned By BLM
JustOneMinute: Tomorrow’s Spin Today
Pamela Geller: Democrat Congressman Says “Jews Are Like Termites”
Shark Tank: Controversy Surrounds NRA Endorsement Of Craig Aldrich
Shot In The Dark: Go Figure
The Jawa Report: Everyone Wave Buh Bye To Debbie Wassermann Schultz
The Political Hat: According To Academia, Mountains Are People Too
This Ain’t Hell: That DHS Report, Once Again
Weasel Zippers: DNC Has To Put Lyrics For Pledge Of Allegiance On TelePrompTer
Megan McArdle: Sanders Supporters, Your Shouting Will Not Protect You


Louis L’Amour’s The Sacketts Five-Book Bundle
Shop Amazon – Our Best-Selling Kindle – Now Even Better

Category: Linkagery

Bungling, Inc.: Yahoo Sold to Verizon

Posted on | July 26, 2016 | 78 Comments

Yahoo is arguably the worst-run major company in the history of high tech. In 1998, Yahoo could have bought Google for a mere $1 million. Four years later, after Google was already crushing Yahoo’s search-engine business, Yahoo offered $3 billion for Google, and was turned down. Google wanted $5 billion, but Yahoo wouldn’t pay that much. Google is now worth more than $350 billion. In 2008, Microsoft offered $44 billion for Yahoo, an offer Yahoo rejected. And then on Monday, it was announced Yahoo would be sold to Verizon for a mere $4.8 billion:

Yahoo was once the king of the Internet, a $125 billion behemoth as big in its time as Facebook or Google are today. Now it’s being sold to Verizon for comparative chump change.
On Monday morning, Yahoo announced the end of the long process to extricate itself from a mess of its own making with a sale of its core operating business to Verizon for $4.8 billion in cash. The transaction ends the independence of one of Silicon Valley’s most iconic pioneering companies. Yahoo’s seventh and final CEO, Marissa Mayer, will reportedly depart upon the deal’s conclusion with severence pay worth more than $50 million.
The sale will unite Yahoo with another fallen star, AOL, the first web portal Verizon bought last year for $4.4 billion. The United States’ largest wireless provider is betting nearly $10 billion that combining the two formerly dominant websites will give it an edge in mobile content and advertising technology it can leverage across its more than 140 million subscribers.

Yahoo’s record of disastrous decisions is arguably the worst business bungling since Esau sold his birthright to Jacob for a mess of pottage. Instead of evolving into a modern media powerhouse, the company repeatedly stood still while agile competitors rushed to capture highly profitable new online markets. While rival networks busily monetized mobile app ecosystems and secured premium ad placements from high-traffic digital entertainment sectors like the best bitcoin casinos, Yahoo remained paralyzed by executive indecision. The pioneer brand possessed both the massive capital reserves and the initial user base necessary to dominate almost any emerging vertical on the web, yet it systematically squandered those early advantages and watched its digital empire crumble into irrelevance.

 

Category: Economics

In The Mailbox: 07.25.16

Posted on | July 25, 2016 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Proof Positive: Abe Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, and Melania Trump Walk Into A Bar…
EBL: American Gods
Twitchy: #DemsInPhilly Delegates Modifying “Love Trumps Hate” Signs, And The DNC Will NOT Like It


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Doomed To Repeat History
American Power: Surge Of Terror In Germany
American Thinker: DNC Wikileaks Hack Outs Hillary Shill At The Washington Post
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
BLACKFIVE: Book Review – The Field Of Fight by Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn
Da Tech Guy: Baldilocks – Three-Dimensional Thinking
Don Surber: Finally, Proof That Hillary Runs The Media
Dustbury: And Death To Your Home Town
Jammie Wearing Fools: ISIS Fighters Get In Touch With Their Feminine Side
Joe For America: “Angel Moms” Turn On Paul Ryan
JustOneMinute: Let The People Decide
Pamela Geller: Muslims Rally Against ISIS On National Mall, Attract Only Small Crowd
Shark Tank: Debbie Wassermann Schultz Booted From Democratic National Committee
Shot In The Dark: Well, I’ll Be!
STUMP: How Not To Be A Dumbass – #DNCLeaks Shows How Not to Use E-Mail
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – Keep Your Feet And Hands Inside The Vehicle At All Times
The Political Hat: Donald Trump And The Holding Of Tongues
The Quinton Report: WMAL’s Brian Wilson Accused Of Harassment
This Ain’t Hell: The Serious Consequences Of Post Traumatic Sex Disorder
Weasel Zippers: MSNBC Claims DNC Chair “Receives Cheers” As Crowd Boos Her Relentlessly
Megan McArdle: Two Forecasts For The Democratic Convention


Don Surber’s Trump The Press For Kindle Out Today – Just $2.99!
Shop Amazon – STEM Toys & Game Store

Category: Linkagery

A Simple Question: Is This True?

Posted on | July 25, 2016 | 88 Comments

“Patriarchy — an enforced belief in male dominance and control — is the ideology and sexism the system that holds it in place. . . .
“Homophobia works effectively as a weapon of sexism because it is joined with a powerful arm, heterosexism. Heterosexism creates the climate for homophobia with its assumption that the world is and must be heterosexual and its display of power and privilege as the norm. Heterosexism is the systemic display of homophobia in the institutions of society. Heterosexism and homophobia work together to enforce compulsory heterosexuality and that bastion of patriarchal power, the nuclear family.”
— Suzanne Pharr, Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism (1997)

Last week, I spent some time compiling about two dozen feminist quotes into a Powerpoint slide presentation for the “Forum on Campus Sexual Assault, Consent and Due Process” to be held Aug. 1 at Central Piedmont Community College Central Campus in Charlotte, NC. These quotes are intended to demonstrate how the anti-male ideology of radical feminism has contributed to the current climate of fear and suspicion on American college campuses. Feminist rhetoric incites irrational hostility toward male students that fuels the “rape culture” hysteria, and this attitude of sexual paranoia is promoted in Women’s Studies course that enroll some 90,00 students annually in U.S. colleges and universities.

That quote from Suzanne Pharr cited above is actually required reading in many Women’s Studies courses. For example, it was assigned in an Introduction to Women’s Studies (WMS 302) class at Cal State-Fullerton taught by Dr. Susan Feldman in spring 2011. Originally published in 1988, Pharr’s feminist treatise about homophobia is including in numerous anthologies used as Women’s Studies textbooks, included Feminist Frameworks (edited by Alison M. Jaggar and Paula S. Rothenberg, 1993) and Making Sense of Women’s Lives: An Introduction to Women’s Studies (by Michelle Plott and Lauri Umansky, 2000) among others. Its widespread recognition (more than 600 citations listed by Google Scholar) can be taken to mean that Pharr’s ideas about homophobia and sexism are recognized as Official Truth in academic feminism.

Well . . . is it true?

For example, does patriarchy as Pharr describes it — “an enforced belief in male dominance and control” — actually exist? And in what sense is “heterosexism” distinct from “homophobia”? Aren’t these just two different words describing the same concept? Words mean things, and a failure to interrogate the definitions of terms often leads us into confusion, especially when confronted with the tendentious claims of special pleaders like Suzanne Pharr, a lesbian who begins her treatise with what can only be described as a solicitation of sympathy:

Homophobia — the irrational fear and hatred of those who love and sexually desire those of the same sex. Though I intimately knew its meaning, the word homophobia was unknown to me until the late 1970s, and when I first heard it, I was struck by how difficult it is to say, what an ugly word it is, equally as ugly as its meaning. Like racism and anti-Semitism, it is a word that calls up images of loss of freedom, verbal and physical violence, death.
In my life I have experienced the effects of homophobia through rejection by friends, threats of loss of employment, and threats upon my life; and I have witnessed far worse things happening to other lesbian and gay people: loss of children, beatings, rape, death. Its power is great enough to keep ten to twenty percent of the population living lives of fear (if their sexual identity is hidden) or lives of danger (if their sexual identity is visible) or both. And its power is great enough to keep the remaining eighty to ninety percent of the population trapped in their own fears. Long before I had a word to describe the behavior, I was engaged in a search to discover the source of its power, the power to damage and destroy lives. The most common explanations were that to love the same sex was either abnormal (sick) or immoral (sinful).

She is a victim of hateful prejudice, Pharr would have us believe, and anyone who disapproves of homosexuality is “irrational.” Gay people are oppressed, and heterosexual people are “trapped in their own fears.” We must all RSVP to her pity party, or else be condemned as bigots.

What of this “irrational fear and hatred” of which Pharr speaks? Most critics of the gay-rights movement fail to see how the accusation of homophobia involves a diagnosis of psychopathology, an 180-degree reversal of the former consensus that homosexuality is a mental illness. Whereas Freud and other early psychologists saw homosexuality as a disease in need of treatment, it did not take too long after the American Psychiatric Association removed this diagnosis from the DSM in 1973 before gay radicals began playing armchair psychologist and telling straight people that we were the ones in need of treatment.

This kind of reversal is typical of the social justice mentality. Progressives constantly accuse their opponents of bad motives (mala fides), and contend that ordinary common-sense attitudes are harmful prejudices. For example, most people consider obesity unattractive, but this widespread attitude makes fat people unhappy, and so we have the “fat acceptance” movement insisting that “all bodies are beautiful” and feminists demanding equal representation for fat women in fashion ads. Almost any majority attitude is subject to this kind of indictment by the social justice crowd. Patriotism is stigmatized as xenophobia and religion is “anti-science,” etc.

Most people are heterosexual, and insofar as they ever think about homosexuals at all, it is not with “irrational hate and fear,” but rather to wonder: Why are those people so miserable and angry all the time? If “gay” is a synonym for happiness, it sure as heck doesn’t fit the militant activists and pathetic whining sad-sacks like Suzanne Pharr.

Well, you see, this is where the accusation of “homophobia” comes from. It’s not their fault they are so miserable. Instead, society is to blame. Our “irrational” disapproval make gay people feel sad. This accusation raises several questions that the accusers are never required to answer. For example, why is our approval for their private behavior so important to them? Beyond that, however, if an aversion to homosexuality is “homophobia,” isn’t every heterosexual in some sense a homophobe?

That is to say, if we really buy into the “equality” argument, believing that homosexual behavior is such wholesome fun that no one would dare disapprove of it, shouldn’t we be eager to participate in this pleasurable recreation? The mere fact that we are not gay ourselves rather strongly implies that we personally dislike homosexual behavior, and why should heterosexuals sit in guilty silence while Suzanne Pharr or anyone else lectures us about how “irrational” our preferences are?

The reason so many heterosexuals do suffer such insults in silence, I suspect, is that they have a guilty conscience and are afraid of being accused of “hate” if they defend themselves against the charge of homophobia. This is how “Kafkatrapping” tactics work: The liberal calls you a racist, and if you try to deny it, your denial is cited as proof of your guilt. How do you prove your innocence of such Thoughtcrimes as racism, sexism and homophobia? Shouldn’t the burden of proof be on the accuser? And beyond this lies the question that the person targeted by “Kafkatrapping” seldom thinks to ask the self-appointed Thought Police: Exactly how does my personal opinion on this subject harm anyone?

Suppose, for example, you find yourself accused of “Islamophobia.” You were engaged in a discussion of terrorism or immigration or foreign policy and said something a liberal didn’t like: “Islamophobia!” the liberal shouts, accusing you of being a hateful racist bigot. What the liberal is doing here is asserting that it is immoral to disagree with him.

Well, who is harmed by your opinion? You aren’t the Secretary of Defense or a member of Congress, so that your alleged anti-Muslim prejudice doesn’t influence public policy in any meaningful way. It’s not as if you are running around hurling Molotov cocktails at mosques or otherwise committing lawless violence against innocent Muslims. Therefore, why is this liberal ANGRILY TYPING IN ALL CAPS about what an awful person you are, merely because you expressed an opinion on the Internet? And exactly what does “Islamophobia” mean, anyway?

Words mean things, and the Left’s habit of coining new words to define as “oppressive” any attitude or opinion the Left dislikes is one that isn’t challenged often enough. It wasn’t until the AIDS crisis hit in the 1980s that the word “homophobia” began being hurled around haphazardly. In common usage, “homophobe” is simply a synonym for Republican. As with “sexist” and “racist,” the word “homophobe” is really just a political label which can be defined as someone a Democrat doesn’t like.

No one ever accused Suzanne Pharr of being a Republican, and she testifies to having “experienced the effects of homophobia through rejection by friends, threats of loss of employment, and threats upon my life.” Well, I’m not gay, but I’ve suffered “rejection” and “loss of employment” on various occasions, and I’ve been threatened, too. However, because I’m not a member of an Official Victim Group, there are no textbook anthologies teaching college kids to feel sorry for poor, pitiful me. And damn their pity all to hell, anyway. This whole liberal guilt-trip mentality is nothing but a political hustle, the kind of cheap scam no ordinary con artist would touch less it taint his reputation.

Suzanne Pharr would have you believe that your disapproval of her preference has “the power to damage and destroy lives.” I don’t make a habit of inquiring about people’s sexual habits, although since I began researching feminism I assume that all Women’s Studies majors are lesbians. It’s impossible to imagine how any woman could fill her mind with such toxic anti-male poison and actually like men. Only a man with enormously high self-esteem could read as much of this wretched stuff as I have without becoming completely demoralized.

Why does Suzanne Pharr hate men so much? In typical feminist fashion, she justifies this by accusing men of unjust “dominance and control” and denouncing the nuclear family as a “bastion of patriarchal power,” and more generally depicting men as brutal, loathsome tyrants:

Violence against women is directly related to the condition of women in a society that refuses us equal pay, equal access to resources, and equal status with males. From this condition comes men’s confirmation of their sense of ownership of women, power over women, and assumed right to control women for their own means. Men physically and emotionally abuse women because they can, because they live in a world that gives them permission. Male violence is fed by their sense of their right to dominate and control, and their sense of superiority over a group of people who, because of gender, they consider inferior to them.

Who are these men? Every time I read feminists going on about the universality of “violence against women,” and the “sense of superiority” over women by which men allegedly justify their abuse, I start wondering if somehow I’m failing here in my “bastion of patriarchal power.” Having been married for 27 years and fathered six children, certainly such a patriarch as myself ought to have some of this “power”and “dominance” and “control” that feminists insist I possess, but where is it?

Also, “boys don’t hit girls” is a basic rule that I was taught from childhood, as was every other boy from a decent Christian home, and my wife and I have taught the same thing to our sons and daughters. For a man to hit a woman is the act of a coward and, if a man should feel himself insulted by a woman, the manly thing to do is to walk away, speaking of which . . .

Never talk to a feminist.

How many times do I have to repeat this advice? To be accused of oppressing women through domination, control, abuse and violence — which is what every feminist accuses all men of doing — is a deliberate insult that no decent man should be expected to tolerate.

Any intelligent person who reads Suzanne Pharr’s Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism can see that what she is really doing is asserting the inferiority of men. Her vehement anti-male prejudice — her belief that all men are brutal monsters — is essentially a rationalization and justification of her own lesbianism. The emotional subtext of Pharr’s argument can be summarized succinctly: “I do not love men because men are bad and therefore do not deserve love.” 

Of course, no one can be forced to love anyone else, and it would be cruel to compel someone to empty out their subconscious and publicly confess their most shameful secrets, but you read enough of this stuff (and dear God, I’ve read more than enough) and you cannot help noticing the rigidity of the psychological defense mechanisms involved. Dress it up in all fancy jargon you like — try reading Judith Butler sometime — and feminist theory is still a whirlpool of childish narcissism, an explanation of personal unhappiness inflated to the grandiose scale of a revolutionary creed. It’s not just the lesbian feminists who blame the patriarchy for all their woes, but also embittered heterosexual women like Jessica Valenti:

I wrote in my diary at the time, I’m so ugly I can’t stand it. I have a big gross nose, pimples, hairy arms. I will never have a boy like me or a boyfriend. All of my friends are pretty and I will be the one with no one.

All men must be made to suffer for her adolescent misery, you see.

What is Jessica Valenti’s feminism except an elaborate revenge fantasy? And how is her vindictive hatred of men different from Suzanne Pharr’s? On the one hand, the lesbian feminist Pharr asserts that heterosexual women are all victims of violent male domination, whereas on the other hand, the heterosexual feminist Valenti recounts all the horrible abuse she’s suffered from every man except the handful of men she personally likes. Pharr asserts that 100% of men are bad, and Valenti merely reduces this figure to 99.9999%, to exempt from condemnation her husband and a few ex-boyfriends she remembers fondly. A Venn diagram:

 

To heterosexual feminists like Jessica Valenti, “sexist” is really nothing more than a synonym for a guy I don’t like, whereas to lesbian feminists like Suzanne Pharr, “sexist” is simply a synonym for male. Why are men expected to tolerate insults from emotionally damaged women who want to use us as scapegoats for their childhood resentments?

We can define feminism as an “irrational fear and hatred” of men. Why aren’t all feminists lesbians? This is the great mystery. If feminist theory is true, then Jessica Valenti is a victim of patriarchal power and also a willing enabler of oppression, since she is forcing her own daughter to be raised under the tyrannical male authority of her father.

However, the phrase “if feminist theory is true” signifies a speculative hypothetical, requiring us to imagine an alternative universe. Even I am not crazy enough to understand what the world would be like if feminist theory were true. And thank God, it’s not.




 

Category: Gays, Sex Trouble
« go back — keep looking »

    About

    This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

    Subscribe to our feed

    Search

    Admin