The Other McCain

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

Feminism: Hatred as ‘Social Justice’ (or Why @MostlyPregnant Won’t Apologize)

Posted on | May 31, 2016 | 23 Comments

“How do I say this sensitively. If you are a cis-het white guy your opinion is not as valuable and you should avoid speaking it or writing it.”
Drew Koshgarian, March 30, 2016

When someone called my attention to that quote, I recognized it as yet another reiteration of feminism as a synonym for “SHUT UP!”

This unseemly desire to silence others, to monopolize public discussion and tell people what to think by controlling what they are allowed to say, is one reason why I keep saying Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It. We can understand (as pure selfishness) Drew Koshgarian’s motive for asserting that, as a female, her opinion is more valuable than any male opinion. Yet she is also white, “cis” (i.e., not transgendered) and heterosexual — married to a white male, in fact — so why her insistence that, for example, a Latina lesbian’s opinion or a Taiwanese transvestite’s opinion is more valuable than her own husband’s opinion? This is all about the hierarchies of “oppression” and “privilege” according to the social justice formula with which young people are indoctrinated in 21st-century academia.

What is the pedagogical purpose of training young people to view the world through the warped lenses of a crypto-Marxist ideology, where all value is determined by the rigid categories of identity politics? Well, we know that university faculty (like the government bureaucrats who run the public school system) are overwhelmingly Democrat, so that there is a partisan payoff to propagating this radical “progressive” worldview. Certainly it is easy to explain why so many young people support the geriatric socialist Bernie Sanders, just as it explains why the bogus “Republican War on Women” narrative helped Barack Obama win re-election in 2012 with the widest “gender gap” ever recorded by Gallup.

The rhetoric of “social justice” becomes hate propaganda, a form of psychological warfare intended to demoralize and intimidate opponents. Theodore Dalrymple observed in a 2005 interview:

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

You see that political correctness means “people are forced to remain silent” — lest they be accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. — while the Left promotes dishonest propaganda as “journalism,” “entertainment” and “education,” as well as politics. Within the progressive cult, people like Drew Koshgarian reflexively repeat the formulaic social-justice jargon of “privilege” vs. “oppression” and never think critically about the validity of their own worldview.

“I avoid speaking in situations where I am more privileged than who I’m with, [because] changing habits to share better takes efforts.”
Drew Koshgarian, May 30, 2016

What does this mean? Koshgarian explained “this is not hatred but an effort at redistribution of airspace and import,” and added: “It’s rare to hear a different viewpoint and they ought to be heard.” We are therefore supposed to imagine that Drew Koshgarian has a habit of mute silence in the presence of transgender people, gay people, Asians, Latinos and black people. However, when she encounters a heterosexual white man, Drew Koshgarian expects him to remain silent in her presence. Heterosexual white men have no human value, according to her social-justice mentality. Nothing can justify the “privileged” existence of heterosexual white men, whose opinions therefore are always wrong.

How is this “not hatred,” as Drew Koshgarian insists? Perhaps she would defend herself with the “diversity” rhetoric by which university administrators justify quotas in admissions and hiring. For decades, American universities have systematically discriminated against males, who are now only 43% of undergraduate enrollment. Women receive more than 70% of bachelor degrees in such fields as psychology, education and public administration, and women also get a majority of doctorate degrees, outnumbering males more than 2-to-1 in doctorates awarded in education and health sciences. No one in academia apologizes for this anti-male discrimination, however, and while universities claim to care about “diversity,” the political views of the faculty are a monolith of left-wing ideology. As Thomas Sowell once quipped: “The next time some academics tell you how important ‘diversity’ is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.” Academia has become so intolerant of dissent that university students organize violent disruptions to prevent Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking on campus. In fact, after the president of DePaul University defended the right of College Republicans to invite Yiannopoulos to speak there, a sociology professor announced her resignation from DePaul, claiming that the president’s defense of “so-called free speech . . . is delusional.” The university president showed “a lack of moral courage in the disguise of intellectual objectivity and positional neutrality,” Professor Shu-Ju Ada Cheng declared:

The lack of position is a position, and your chosen position is to reinforce the existing inequalities. Shame on you. I am glad I will no longer be part of this institution and be complicit in the institutional practices that support our racist society.

If this is a common view among the faculty of our nation’s universities, are we surprised that young people like Drew Koshgarian believe the opinions  of white heterosexual males should never be heard in public? No, we are not surprised. Our education system is controlled by left-wing ideologues who indoctrinate youth into The Cult of Social Justice, a belief system that authorizes hatred toward those who can be categorized as “privileged,” who must be silenced in order to grant the “oppressed” hegemonic control of public discourse.

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
William F. Buckley Jr., 1959

Do not expect an apology from Drew Koshgarian, because it is impossible for a social justice cult member to understand how she could be wrong.





 


Surrender Without a Fight?

Posted on | May 31, 2016 | 94 Comments

“Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle. . . . Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. . . . Because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.”
Gen. George S. Patton, 1944

Today, there is encouraging news for Republicans. The latest NBC tracking poll shows Donald Trump closing in on Hillary Clinton:

While Clinton is looking to wrap up the Democratic nomination with a strong performance in the final group of states on June 7, her advantage in a hypothetical matchup against the Republican nominee has dwindled by the week. Over the last seven days, Clinton led Trump 47 percent to 45 percent, with the Manhattan businessman drawing 2 points closer since the last weekly survey.

This is mirrored in the Real Clear Politics poll average, where Clinton led by 10 points six weeks ago in mid-April, but is now just a single point ahead of Trump. This is encouraging news, I say, if you are a Republican who considers it imperative to defeat the Democrats. On the other hand, if you are a disgruntled intellectual like David Frum, Trump’s impressive success is a threat to all that is good and holy:

The television networks that promoted Trump; the primary voters who elevated him; the politicians who eventually surrendered to him; the intellectuals who argued for him, and the donors who, however grudgingly, wrote checks to him—all of them knew, by the time they made their decisions, that Trump lied all the time, about everything. They knew that Trump was ignorant, and coarse, and boastful, and cruel. They knew he habitually sympathized with dictators and kleptocrats—and that his instinct when confronted with criticism of himself was to attack, vilify, and suppress. They knew his disrespect for women, the disabled, and ethnic and religious minorities. They knew that he wished to unravel NATO and other U.S.-led alliances, and that he speculated aloud about partial default on American financial obligations. None of that dissuaded or deterred them.  . . .

You can read the whole thing, if you’re into that kind of totally demoralizing Voice-of-Doom trip. David Frum hates Donald Trump about as much as does former Hillary adviser Alec Ross, who called Trump “a vulgar, demented, pig demon.” There is a bipartisan consensus against Trump among the decadent intellectual elite, while among the electorate — you know, the actual citizens of America who elect presidents — there is a bipartisan consensus that we need to stop listening to the intellectual elite. It seems a substantial segment of the electorate have decided that the “experts” got us into this mess, and so to hell with the experts.

Is it my job to tell the America people they’re wrong? No, because I actually agree with this anti-elite consensus and the fact that the chosen messenger, Donald Trump, is far from ideal in many ways does not alter the basic politica goal, i.e., defeat the Democrat Party.

We must fight the war we are actually in with the army we actually have.

Now is not the time — scarcely five months before Election Day — to sit around bemoaning the accumulated problems of the GOP political apparatus that made it impossible for conservatives to nominate some other candidate that they might have preferred over Trump.

Honestly, a year ago, it seemed to me that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was the man to beat, but he didn’t catch fire in the early debates and was the first candidate to quit the primary race. So much for my own “expert” opinion, I suppose. When he quit the campaign, Walker urged others in the crowded primary field to emulate his example, in order to unite behind a non-Trump candidate. Yet 11 candidates went all the way to the Iowa caucus in February, with eight candidates (Ben Carson, Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, John Kasich, Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie and Rick Santorum) divvying up about 25% of the vote, which might otherwise have gone to either Ted Cruz (who narrowly won Iowa) or Marco Rubio, who placed third in the caucuses. How different might the outcome of the primary campaign have been, if Cruz had won Iowa more decisively and Rubio had finished second, with Trump third? I don’t know, but nearly three weeks later, when Trump decisively won the Feb. 20 South Carolina, only five other candidates (Rubio, Cruz, Bush, Kasich and Carson) were still running, and defeat in South Carolina ended the campaigns of Bush and Carson.

Could this winnowing of the GOP field have been done much earlier? Yes, but do you think any of the consultants and campaign operatives on the payrolls of Team Bush — which raised $162 million — were going to tell Jeb that his candidacy was a waste of time and money? Or what about the various political “experts” hired by the campaigns of Carson, Kasich, Christie, Fiorina, Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal who between them raised a combined total of more than $200 million? Wasted money, wasted time, and nothing meaningful to show for it. All in all, about $400 million was squandered on the ultimately futile campaigns of Republican candidates who didn’t make it past South Carolina, and did anyone seriously believe John Kasich’s extended candidacy could help stop Trump in the much-talked-about “brokered convention” scenario?

Well, all that is now decisively over, and Bill Kristol is now publicly fantasizing about a third-party candidate — an idea perhaps slightly less realistic than a teenage boy’s wet dreams about Kate Upton.

Simple question: Do we want to beat Hillary, or not?

It is evident from the polls that Donald Trump can beat Hillary, and if some of our conservative pundit friends can get over their hurt feelings over their failures in the GOP primary campaign, maybe Trump will beat Hillary. But if we wake up the morning after Election Day and find that Hillary Clinton has been elected president because some disgruntled Republican “strategist” types didn’t do all they could to help beat Hillary, there is going to be hell to pay. The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans, and a victory for Hillary is a defeat for America.

Let’s win this thing.





 


Johnny Depp, Chump?

Posted on | May 30, 2016 | 77 Comments

“I’m a lucky man.”
Johnny Depp, November 2014

“Johnny Depp got used, manipulated, set up and made to look like an a–hole.”
Doug Stanhope, May 2016

“Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.”
Benjamin Franklin

The Giant Wheel o’ Karma turned against Johnny Depp last week when his wife Amber Heard filed for divorce and then filed for a restraining order, accusing Depp of domestic abuse. Anyone who was surprised by this simply hasn’t been paying attention to the many omens of doom surrounding their relationship. Most obviously, Depp was 49 when he dumped the mother of his two children (French actress Vanessa Paradis, whom he had been with for 14 years) to be with Heard, who was then 26. A move like that is nearly always a mistake. If you can’t make a relationship work with the mother of your children, what makes you think you’re going to have better luck with a woman half your age?

Oh, sure, Depp and Paradis had “grown apart,” their relationship was “on the rocks,” yadda yadda yadda, but if any middle-aged man honestly thinks that the solution to such a problem is to hook up with a 20-something, he should probably consult a psychiatrist.

So, what do we know about Little Miss Homewrecker, Amber Heard?

Heard, who was raised Catholic, subsequently declared herself an atheist after being introduced to the works of Ayn Rand by her then-boyfriend. She has said of Rand, “I’ve read all of her books. Ever since then, I have been obsessed with her ideals. All I’ve ever needed is myself.”

WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!

Look, I loved Atlas Shrugged as an attack on the liberal welfare-state mentality of the New Deal, but when it reaches the point where Rand rolls out her Nietzsche-influenced anti-Christian philosophy? No, thanks.

The ugly denouement of Rand’s personal life — her affair with Nathaniel Branden, a leader of the weird cult following around Objectivism — was sufficient proof that, whatever else you say about free-market idealism, it is no substitute for sexual morality. If you’re a middle-aged movie star looking for thrills, I suppose hooking up with a young Objectivist could be fun, but marry her? Whoa. Slow your roll, homeslice.

Another thing: Watch out for lapsed Catholics. Hitler was a lapsed Catholic. Yeah, backslid Baptists and apostate Pentecostals have been known to go off the deep end, but when Catholics go bad, they’re likely to go all the way to pure evil. Prostitution, witchcraft, human sacrifice, voting Democrat — there’s no limit to their wickedness.

OK, nice Catholic girl from Texas hooks up with boyfriend who gets her reading Ayn Rand, she becomes an atheist, moves to Hollywood and . . .

 

Actress Amber Heard comes out
as a lesbian at GLAAD event

. . . The 24-year-old stepped out on Friday night for the GLAAD 25th anniversary bash with girlfriend Tasya van Ree. . . .
‘Injustice can never be stood for. It always must be fought against and I just was sick of it being a problem.
And she explained how, by hiding her sexual identity, she felt she was admitting it was a bad thing to be gay.
She says: ‘I personally think that if you deny something or if you hide something, you’re inadvertently admitting it’s wrong.’

Oh, but no labels, please:

“It’s been frustrating as I don’t label myself one way or another — I have had successful relationships with men and now a woman. I love who I love, it’s the person that matters.”

It depends on how you define “successful relationships,” I guess. Maybe her ex-boyfriends would define “successful” differently, but no one’s interviewing them to find out their opinions of Ms. Heard. As for her relationship with Tasya van Ree, who is 10 years older than Ms. Heard, let’s ask: What’s up with this “no labels” idea? Sure, I’ve got a copy of Lisa Diamond’s Sexual Fluidity on my bookshelf, so I’m familiar with this phenomenon at the conceptual level, but in terms of day-to-day life, it makes no sense whatsoever. A person who is either heterosexual or homosexual can narrow the choices down to 50% of the human race, at least, whereas a polymorphous “no labels” sexuality . . .

Well, wouldn’t that be kind of emotionally exhausting after a while? “Maybe I like this . . . No, wait, probably I like that a little better.”

Three words: Borderline personality disorder.

It was my lesbian friend Cynthia Yockey who pointed out the substantial overlap between bisexuality and borderline personality disorder. People with BPD notoriously have “boundary issues.” They can’t stand to be told “no,” and don’t think the rules should apply to them. They love to cause drama, and would rather have negative attention than to be ignored. BPD is “characterized by extreme fear of abandonment; unstable relationships with other people, sense of self, or emotions; feelings of emptiness; frequent dangerous behavior; and self-harm.”

Does that fit Amber Heard? I’m not qualified to offer a clinical diagnosis, but her “no labels” attitude struck me as symptomatic, and it seems as if the “unstable relationships” factor was evident in her marriage to Johnny Depp. There are reports that Ms. Heard never fully let go of her relationship with Tasya van Ree, and that this created problems.

Depp’s friend Doug Stanhope says he never liked Ms. Heard, and accuses her of blackmailing Depp. We cannot know the whole truth of two people’s private relationship, so I’ll reserve judgment as to the details, but let me say this in general: I don’t trust bisexuals.

This wasn’t something I’d spent much time thinking about until I started studying radical feminism, which necessarily requires paying attention to lesbian feminism, and issues surrounding women’s sexuality in general. Once I started examining the Feminist Tumblr phenomenon, I encountered a seemingly interminable war over the boundary between lesbians and bisexual women — and the bisexuals were clearly the aggressors in that conflict. However, in a strange reversal of reality, bisexual women depicted lesbians as the villains in the conflict, asserting that it was “extremist” or “bigoted” for lesbians to exclude from their lives the possibility of relationships with (or attraction to) males.

Now, I can’t say how much this Tumblr quarrel reflects any real-life conflict inside the LGBT coalition, but it did make me think about why (some) guys are so absurdly enthusiastic about the idea of bisexual women, viewing them in terms of a porn-inspired fantasy of threesomes. This kind of fetishistic obsession is unhealthy, to say the least, and pursuing such fantasies can have disastrous consequences.

About 25 or 30 years ago, there were plenty of married guys who thought “swinging” (or polyamory, as it is nowadays called) was an excellent way to “spice up” their sex lives, and they would cajole their reluctant wives into trying it. These guys were typically eager to get their wives to replicate the “hot” girl-on-girl scenes that were so common in porn videos. And, having overcome their initial reluctance, some of these wives discovered they liked other women much better than they liked their porn-addicted weirdo husbands, leading to divorce. Oops.

Once you’ve heard a few sad tales like that, you tend to develop a dim view of the misguided notion that living out one’s wildest fantasies is necessary to self-fulfillment. “Lead us not into temptation,” see?

This brings me back around to my distrust of bisexuals, because here’s the thing: If lesbians don’t trust bisexual women, why should men?

Within the lesbian community, the negative stereotype of bisexual women is that they always end up going back to men. Is that true? Should this be celebrated as a triumph of the heteropatriarchy? I’m not sure. Bisexuality is quite trendy nowadays, and my hunch is that this trend bodes ill for the future because, despite the tendency to disparage bisexuality as “just a phase” or “they’re just doing it for attention,” such women are likely to have difficulty forming durable monogamous relationships. Of course, you’d need a lot of research studies to be able to demonstrate such a correlation in terms of social science, but old-fashioned common sense and anecdotal evidence suggests that the man who thinks it’s a smart idea to marry a bisexual woman may be bitterly disappointed by the result.

Johnny Depp probably wasn’t thinking in terms of statistical probability when he hooked up with Amber Heard. He was a middle-aged guy and she was a 26-year-old blonde — no, a guy in that situation doesn’t calculate the odds rationally. “Thinking with the wrong organ,” as they say, and maybe Amber Heard wasn’t shrewd and cunning, but just emotionally unstable, but either way, Johnny Depp got played for a chump.

Pay attention to those warning signs, guys.

 

Feminism and ‘Strong Delusion’

Posted on | May 30, 2016 | 28 Comments

 

One of the things you notice about feminists, if you pay attention, is how many of them lack basic self-awareness. It seems unfair to accuse them of hypocrisy because it seems they cannot perceive the contradictions of their arguments, which are apparent to anyone outside the feminist cult. We often behold in feminism the neurotic psychology of self-justifying rationalizations, scapegoating and projection. Furthermore, because their worldview is essentially paranoid — a fear-based belief system that relies on an imaginary patriarchal conspiracy — feminists conjure up phantom threats with which to do battle. Consider the claims of Valerie Tarico:

Sexual intimacy and pleasure are some of humanity’s most cherished experiences. The so-called “best things in life” include natural beauty, fine dining, the arts, thrilling adventures, creative pursuits and community service. But love and orgasms are among the few peak experiences that are equally available to rich and poor, equally sweet to those whose lives are going according to plan and to many whose dreams are in pieces.
Religious conservatives think that these treasured dimensions of the human experience should be available to only a privileged few people whose lives fit their model: male-dominated, monogamous, heterosexual pairs who have pledged love and contractual marriage for life. . . .
To be clear, I’m not saying that Christianity’s sex rules are only a function of patriarchal Christian privilege. During the Iron Age, from whence Christianity’s sex rules got handed down, society was organized around kin groups, and the endlessly warmongering clans of the Ancient Near East were more at risk of extinction than overpopulation. Legally enforced monogamy created lines of inheritance and social obligation, clarifying how neighbors should be treated and who could be enslaved.
Also, hetero sex necessarily carried the risk of pregnancy, which made it adaptive to welcome resultant pregnancies. Children do best in stable, nurturing families and communities, and in the Ancient Near East, “No marriage? No sex!” may have served to protect the well-being of mothers and children as well as the social power of patriarchal men. But in today’s mobile, pluralistic societies with modern contraceptive options and social safety nets, God’s self-appointed sex police have little credible excuse save their own compelling need to bully and boss and stay on top.
It should come as no surprise that Church authorities want an exclusive license to grant “legitimate” sexual privileges. . . .
The ways in which God’s Self-Appointed Sex Police try to obstruct intimacy and orgasms are legion. . . .

You can read the whole thing, but you get the drift here. Along with her simplistic anthropology — locating the source of “patriarchal Christian privilege” in the Iron Age in the “Ancient Near East” — Tarico also provides a simplistic sociology in which “mobile, pluralistic societies with modern contraceptive options and social safety nets” have transcended these allegedly primitive “sex rules.” However, when we consider the basic procreative function of sex, the need for “stable, nurturing families and communities” has remained unchanged by modernity. Before there can be a “pluralistic society” with all the features Tarico describes, there must first be human life — children must be conceived, born and raised to adulthood — and it is therefore harmful to sneer dismissively at the family unit (and its attendant “sex rules”) as an obsolete remnant of a primitive past. Consider this list of states, ranked by total fertility rate (TFR, average lifetime births per woman, calculated on 2014 birth rates):

TOP FIVE
Utah ……………………. 2.33
South Dakota ……….. 2.27
North Dakota ………. 2.24
Alaska …………………. 2.19
Nebraska …………….. 2.16

BOTTOM FIVE
Connecticut …………. 1.63
Vermont ……………… 1.63
New Hampshire …… 1.58
Massachusetts ……… 1.58
Rhode Island ……….. 1.56

On average, women in conservative, religious Utah have 49% more babies than do women in liberal, secular Rhode Island. Whatever other socioeconomic or demographic differences there may be between the high-fertility and low-fertility states, we see that the “Birth Dearth” (as Ben Wattenberg called it) is most evident in liberal New England.

You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that Valerie Tarico supports population control as a solution to climate change, because more babies mean more carbon emissions. Unfortunately for the Gaia-worshipping “green” cult, however, the world’s most prolific baby-makers are unlikely to be reading their arguments.

Top Ten Countries by Total Fertility Rate
(Average lifetime births per woman)

  1. Niger …………………….. 6.76
  2. Burundi ………………… 6.09
  3. Mali ……………………… 6.06
  4. Somalia ………………… 5.99
  5. Uganda ………………… 5.89
  6. Burkina Faso ………… 5.86
  7. Zambia …………………. 5.72
  8. Malawi …………………. 5.60
  9. Angola …………………. 5.37
  10. Afghanistan …………. 5.33

Probably the folks in Burundi and Burkina Faso don’t worry too much about their carbon emissions. Meanwhile, in the First World . . .

Total Fertility Rates for
Selected Industrial Nations

South Korea …………… 1.25
Japan …………………….. 1.40
Greece ……………………. 1.42
Italy ……………………….. 1.43
Germany ………………… 1.44
Austria …………………… 1.46
Spain ……………………… 1.49
Switzerland ……………. 1.55
Canada ………………….. 1.59
Denmark ……………….. 1.73
Australia ………………… 1.77
Belgium …………………. 1.78
Netherlands …………… 1.78
United States …………. 1.87

The demographic collapse of industrialized societies, due to their abnormally low birth rates, is a very serious social problem.

“Europe needs many more babies to avert a population disaster” was the headline on a Guardian article in August 2015, and if the problem is not quite so bad in the United States, perhaps we can thank the Iron Age “sex rules” of “patriarchal Christian privilege” that Valerie Tarico deplores.

Yet who is playing “self-appointed sex police” in our society? Where do we see those with a “compelling need to bully and boss and stay on top”?

 

It is feminists who are the “sex police” on America’s university campuses where, backed by the power of the federal government, they are implementing new laws and policies that deprive students of basic rights in the name of fighting a non-existent “rape epidemic.”

Is America suffering from too much marriage and monogamy, as Valerie Tarico’s argument implies, or is the exact opposite true? Aren’t most of the problems that feminists criticize as “rape culture” the product of a society where random hookups are commonplace and where “sex rules” — the social standards and customs surrounding sexuality — are in a state of chaos and confusion? In a society where dating apps like Tinder and OKCupid make it easy to find partners for casual sex encounters, young people in the 21st century do not lack sexual freedom. What they do lack are meaningful and committed relationships, the kind that those allegedly primitive Iron Age “sex rules” helped protect. We see that Valerie Tarico’s paranoid fear of “patriarchal Christian privilege” has led her into a counterfactual belief system — exactly as the Bible warned.

“And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”
II Thessalonians 2:11-12 (KJV)

In 1973, radical feminist Mary Daly proclaimed the “spiritual dimension of feminist consciousness” in a movement that manifested itself “not only as Antichrist but also as Antichurch,” as a “rising woman-consciousness” unleashing chaos and terror by destroying the “Christocentric cosmos.” This deliberate destruction of Christian belief — “the myths of patriarchy,” in Daly’s phrase — obviously would have enormous consequences. What sort of culture would we expect to emerge in a society that rejects the divine authority of “Thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13) and other biblical commandments? Oddly enough, we may cite here the testimony of lesbian feminist Suzanne Pharr:

According to the FBI, there are several thousand women killed by their husbands and boyfriends every year. This number does not include the great numbers of women killed by rapists on the street and in their homes. . . .
Men beat, rape and kill women because they can; that is, because they live in a society that gives permission to the hatred of women.

So she wrote in “Hate Violence Against Women,” an essay included in the 1993 Women’s Studies textbook Feminist Frameworks. Is it true that we now “live in a society that gives permission to the hatred of women”? What sort of madness is this? Only in a society that has ceased to value women’s unique role in the creation of human life could this kind of violent “hatred of women” flourish, and what kind of fool would dare attack human life at its very source? Oh, wait . . .

“Marriage means rape and lifelong slavery.”
Ti-Grace Atkinson, 1969

Pregnancy is barbaric. . . .
“Moreover, childbirth hurts. And it isn’t good for you. . . .
“Reproduction of the species cost women dearly. . . . Women were the slave class that maintained the species in order to free the other half for the business of the world.”

Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970)

“Women’s oppression is based in the fact that she reproduces the species. . . .
“In terms of the oppression of women, heterosexuality is the ideology of male supremacy.”

Margaret Small, “Lesbians and the Class Position of Women,” in Lesbianism and the Women’s Movement, edited by Nancy Myron and Charlotte Bunch (1975)

“The first condition for escaping from forced motherhood and sexual slavery is escape from the patriarchal institution of marriage.”
Alison M. Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (1988)

“I don’t particularly like babies. They are loud and smelly and, above all other things, demanding . . . time-sucking monsters with their constant neediness. . . . Nothing will make me want a baby. . . . This is why, if my birth control fails, I am totally having an abortion.”
Amanda Marcotte, March 2014

Feminists condemn marriage as slavery and reject motherhood as oppression, and denounce babies as “time-sucking monsters.” Do they imagine their radical worldview will have no negative consequences? What did feminists expect their death cult ideology would produce?

When Valerie Tarico celebrates abortion as a “blessing,” do she believe that her hateful arguments against life itself will not undermine morality? Doesn’t feminism, by inciting murderous hatred toward the innocent in the name of “choice,” undermine the moral basis of kindness and respect toward others? Yet those in the grip of “strong delusion” quickly lose touch with reality and succumb to all manner of wickedness and folly.

Valerie Tarico praises Satanism, she accuses pro-lifers of “penis worship,” and promotes transgenderism. And have I neglected to mention perhaps the ultimate irony, that Valerie Tarico has a Ph.D. in psychology?

I was 26, in the last stage of my PhD program . . . at the University of Washington. . . .
I said to the god in my head, “I’m not making excuses for you anymore. I quit.” And just like that, God was gone.

When confronted by such a claim, logic requires us to point out that, if God exists, His existence is independent of any individual’s belief. Facts are facts, and you are free to believe whatever you want, but your belief does not alter the facts. The truth is still true. Furthermore, nature abhors a vacuum and, in consequence of the modern assault on Christianity, we constantly see proof of a familiar phenomenon: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

Valerie Tarico encourages hatred toward Christians in the name of “science,” and encourages hatred toward men in the name of “feminism.” It is useless to argue with fanatical atheists, because arguments require respect for facts and logic, and their hatred is wholly irrational. They are under “strong delusion” and find “pleasure in unrighteousness.”

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The Sex Trouble project has been supported by contributions from readers. The first edition of Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the War on Human Nature is available from Amazon.com, $11.96 in paperback or $1.99 in Kindle ebook format.





 


Rule 5 Sunday: O Girls!

Posted on | May 29, 2016 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

While I was momentarily tempted to stir things up by posting the illustration from the change.org petition “Give Elsa A Swastika” a/k/a “Elsa, She-Wolf Of The SS”, I decided instead to go with something less provocative, to wit this illo of a Baltimore Orioles fangirl, since I am in Charm City for the weekend and the locals haven’t burned the place down.
As usual, many if not all of the following links are to pics of scantily clad women (or in EBL’s case, occasionally, women we wish were in burkas if not body bags) and these pics are generally considered NSFW. Whatever evil consequences befall you as a result of poorly timed clicks are definitely not our fault.

An enthusiastic Orioles fan

90 Miles From Tyranny leads off this week with Is That A Tan Line?, Morning Mistress, and Girls with Guns, followed by Goodstuff, in whose megablog Anastasiya Kvitko defies social media experts with her boobery. We also heard from Animal Magnetism with Rule 5 Hunting FAQ Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, The Last Tradiion with Bella Hadid and Amber Heard, and First Street Journal with Down Under.

EBL’s herd of (sometimes mutant) heifers this week includes Katie Couric (past her best by date), Amber Heard, Transgender NYT Reporter, and Rosie Byrnes.

A View from the Beach contributes The TSA Milks Rose ByrneArchaeologists Find Chinese Invented Mass Market BeerWe Had a Better Day . . .Smithsonian Romanticizes Indian Oyster IndustryWhy Waste the Good Stuff?What’s Wrong With a Little Lesbian Necrophilia?“Here Comes the Rain Again”Random Art PostThe Story of Donald Trump and Miss Piggy, and Redskins Refuse to Resent Name Appropriation.

At Soylent Siberia, it’s your Alderaan Coffee Creamer, Monday Motivationer el Fuego, Tuesday Titillation, Humpday Hawtness Casabas, Fursday Perfection, Latent Lingerie Sushi & Snooch, and Wakeup Weekender.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Belen Rodriguez, his Vintage Babe was Marika Rokk, and Sex in Advertising is covered by Heidi Klum for Victoria’s Secret. At Dustbury, it’s Ciara and Rebecca Black.

Thanks to everyone for your linkagery! Deadline to submit links to Rule 5 Wombat mailbox for next week’s D-Day Rule 5 Memorial is midnight on Saturday, June 4. Deadline to submit links to the Wombat-socho mailbox for the FMJRA is noon on Saturday.


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New York City Is a Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy — Just Ask @JessicaValenti!

Posted on | May 29, 2016 | 78 Comments

 

Jessica Valenti has written a memoir, Sex Object, that is exactly what you would expect — a vengeful diatribe against heterosexual men.

Like most other feminists, Valenti is oblivious to the fact that her relentlessly negative portrayal of men is just anti-male propaganda. No woman can expect any success as a professional feminist unless she conveys this message: All men are evil, and all women are their victims.

To form your opinion of men based on the writing of feminists is like studying Jewish culture by reading Mein Kampf. Yet like other feminists, Jessica Valenti denies that she hates men. Perhaps not, but she and her comrades certainly incite anti-male attitudes and promote negative stereotypes of men and, most particularly, stigmatize male sexuality.

Normal male attraction to women, particularly male admiration of beauty, is condemned by feminists as “objectification.” While we may deplore superficiality or an idolatrous obsession with physical appearance, there is nothing inherently wrong with the pleasure we derive from beauty, nor is it scandalous that good-looking people (male or female) are highly desired as romantic partners. This is simply human nature, which cannot be changed by any amount of political rhetoric.

Does Jessica Valenti suppose that a “nerd rights” movement could make guys with high SAT scores as popular with women as NBA All-Stars? No, of course not — the geek in the Math Club might become a software billionaire and buy an NBA franchise someday, but young women still chase after the 6-foot-7 power forward, and not the 5-foot-7 nerd.

Why, then, does Jessica Valenti suppose that complaining about the “objectification” of women — feminist jargon for normal male interest in women’s beauty — can accomplish any real change in the social hierarchy? In an excerpt from her book published by the U.K. Guardian, we learn that, as a girl, Valenti was insecure about her looks, and wanted to be liked by cute boys who didn’t like her as much as she liked them:

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.
I was feeling that loneliness acutely at the time, because I was obsessed with a boy named Matt. Matt — the first in a long line of blond boys I would fall for — told me once that I would be so, so pretty if not for my big nose. All I heard was, he thought I could be pretty! . . .
I imagined all of the things that would go right if I were just to have a smaller nose. I would have a boyfriend and the girls in school would stop making fun of me.

OK, let’s get a show of hands here: Who was insecure about their looks as a teenager? Everybody? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Unlike feminists, however, sane people don’t turn their adolescent woes into a lifelong political crusade. We do not resort to a crypto-Marxist “dialectic” (thank you, Shulamith Firestone) to rationalize whatever bothered us as kids, nor do we have an all-encompassing theory of our “oppression” to justify ourselves in clinging to childhood grudges and lashing out at scapegoats we blame for our disadvantages and dissatisfactions.

Would I have liked to date Carol Purdy or Vicky Jones in middle school? Would I have been pleased if my fondness had been reciprocated by Janet Howton, Priscilla Yates or any of the dozens of other girls I had crushes on during my childhood and youth? Of course. However, I was an immature skinny class clown and it was not until I was 18 that I began to “hit my stride,” so to speak, and my belated success so greatly exceeded my early failures that I can laugh at the memory of my childish insecurities and adolescent loneliness. Most adults get over their teenage heartbreaks, so why do feminists like Jessica Valenti seem to spend their lives in a campaign of vengeance based on their unhappy youth?

Feminist ideology is mostly rationalized self-pity — a quixotic crusade for “equality” as the imagined solution to personal misery — and as such is an exercise in irrational futility. The Women’s Liberation movement erupted with a protest at the Miss America pageant in 1968, when I was just starting fourth grade. Almost half a century later, Jessica Valenti is getting paid to recycle the same familiar arguments. Beauty pageants “epitomize the roles we are all forced to play as women,” the feminist protesters declared in 1968, proclaiming that “women in our society [are] forced daily to compete for male approval, enslaved by ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards we ourselves are conditioned to take seriously.”

Never mind whether that indictment of the Miss America pageant was fair or accurate. Even if we stipulate, arguendo, that the protesters had some legitimate grievances, still we must ask, what have nearly five decades of feminist activism done to change women’s lives? Are ugly girls any happier in 2016 than they were in 1968? Are women still “enslaved by ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards”? And why, in order to justify their vindictive rage against males, do feminists resort to propaganda tactics?

Feminists seize on atrocity narratives to demonize males, deliberately exaggerating the frequency of “men’s violence against women” in order to promote an attitude of sexual paranoia (“Fear and Loathing of the Penis”) that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for women to form healthy relationships with men.

That’s from “Anti-Male Propaganda: Understanding Feminism’s Use of Atrocity Narratives,” a 3,700-word post I published last week, and do you suppose that any feminist on the planet would acknowledge such a critique? Of course not. Feminists can never admit that what they are actually doing is fomenting a totalitarian ideology of hatred using dishonest methods pioneered from Marxist-Leninist regimes in the 20th century. The Comintern and the KGB, the Red Guards in China and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia — anyone who has studied Communist propaganda tactics can trace the origins of the slanderous rhetoric of feminism. Males have replaced the capitalist bourgeoisie as the “class enemy” in the feminist adaptation of Marxist ideology, and women are to feminist theory what the “proletariat” was to Marx. Catharine MacKinnon frankly acknowledged feminism’s debt to Marxism in her 1989 classic Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. What Professor MacKinnon did not foresee, however, was that the Soviet empire was on the verge of its final collapse into the “ash heap of history.” Why should we expect feminism to succeed when Marxism failed? This is a question feminists continue to ignore. You can read Kate Weigand’s Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation and find no acknowledgement of the underlying doubts about feminism’s future that are raised by a study of Communism’s historical failure.

Instead, feminists continue their ceaseless campaign of slander. Tales of wrongdoing by male criminals are used to imply collective guilt: “See? Here is psychotic mass murderer Elliot Rodger — typical sexist!” Murderers, rapists, pornographers, pimps — despicable criminals and perverts constantly appear in feminist rhetoric, symbolizing all men as participants in a system of oppression in which all women are victims.

Consider this excerpt from Jessica Valenti’s book:

The two worst times for dicks on the New York subway: when the train car is empty or when it’s crowded. As a teenager, if I found myself in an empty car, I would immediately leave — even if it meant changing cars as the train moved, which terrified me. Because, if I didn’t, I just knew the guy sitting across from me would inevitably lift his newspaper to reveal a semihard cock, and even if he wasn’t planning on it, I sure wasn’t going to sit there and worry about it for the whole ride.
On crowded train cars I didn’t see dicks – I felt them. Pressing into my hip, men pretending that the rocking up against me was just because of the jostling of the train.
The first time I saw a penis on the subway, I was on the platform for the N train three blocks from my house in Queens, on my way to school. I was 12. I had just missed a train, so I was the only person there other than a man all the way at the other end of the platform. He was so far away that I could see only the outline of his shape, but soon I noticed his hand moving furiously – and that he was walking quickly towards me with his penis in his hand. I had always thought myself prepared for something like this; I knew I was supposed to yell or run, but I just stood there. I didn’t look away or turn around, and even though I felt my knees giving out, my feet felt strongly planted to the ground.

Let us ask: Are all men in New York City depraved perverts?

On an average weekday, 5.7 million people ride New York’s subway system, and if half of those passengers are male, then there are nearly 2.9 million men riding those trains. Are all these men just waiting for an opportunity to grope a teenager or flash their penis at a 12-year-old girl?

I hate New York City, and therefore I will answer YES!

Men in New York are certainly the worst men on the planet. Jessica Valenti is correct: Every man in the city is some kind of disgusting freak.

Oh, sure, these men claim they’re riding the subway back and forth to their so-called “jobs,” but feminists know that the real reason men use those trains is to obtain kinky sexual thrills by rubbing up against women or committing indecent exposure. So, because New York City is swarming with so many millions of rapists, exhibitionists, voyeurs, sadomasochists, child molesters and serial killers, Jessica Valenti would have us believe that all men are as bad as the subhuman creeps who ride the subway trains in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn.

Just days ago, I said that “as a father, I would never want my daughter living in a wretched hive of scum and villainy like New York City.” Men there are notoriously bad, yet Jessica Valenti still lives in New York, and is raising her daughter there. Having been sexually terrorized all her life by the awful men of New York, why doesn’t Jessica Valenti leave the city? Why not move to a lesbian separatist community in Alabama?

Never expect an answer to questions like that from any member of the feminist cult. Jessica Valenti will continue pretending that the rest of us are too stupid to notice the obvious flaws in her warped worldview, nor will she acknowledge that the profound dishonesty of her anti-male hate propaganda is apparent to any student of rhetoric.

No, Jessica Valenti will never adjust her belief system to reality, because this would require her to get over her childhood grudge about the misfortune of being a big-nosed girl with hairy arms, the kind that blond boys named Matt didn’t like. Instead, she will continue telling atrocity tales — men who ride New York subways are perverts, therefore all men are evil — and pretending that she doesn’t know exactly what she’s doing: Encouraging other women to hate men as much as she hates men, because the basic problem in the world, according to feminist ideology, is that women don’t hate men as much as men deserve to be hated.

Jessica Valenti may get old, but she will never grow up.





 


FMJRA 2.0: Live From Baltimore

Posted on | May 28, 2016 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

‘Feminist Motherhood’ and the ‘Transgender Kindergartner’
Dark Brightness
Living In Anglo-America
The Pirate’s Cove
The Lonely Conservative
Batshit Crazy News

Rule 5 Sunday: Women In Limousines
Animal Magnetism
Batshit Crazy News
Proof Positive
A View from the Beach
90 Miles from Tyranny

What Happened to Professor Bealer?
The Political Hat

A Balm For Conservatives In Trumpreich
Batshit Crazy News

FMJRA 2.0: Pink Cadillac
The Pirate’s Cove
Batshit Crazy News
A View from the Beach

More Feminists, More Gender Theory
Living In Anglo-America
Batshit Crazy News

On @MattMcGorry, @MeghanEMurphy and the ‘Male Feminist’ Problem
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 05.23.16
Batshit Crazy News
Proof Positive
A View from the Beach

Anti-Male Propaganda: Understanding Feminism’s Use of Atrocity Narratives
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 05.24.16
Batshit Crazy News
Proof Positive
A View from the Beach

‘Body-Positive’ Feminism
Batshit Crazy News

NY Times Transgender Columnist Was Accused by Wife of Rape and Abuse
The Political Hat
Batshit Crazy News

Feminist @Kat_George Can Read Your Mind, You Heteronormative Misogynist
Dark Brightness
The Political Hat
Batshit Crazy News

Gay Australian Rugby Player Arrested by FBI, Sought Sex With 6-Year-Old Boy
Living In Anglo-America
The Political Hat
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 05.25.16
Batshit Crazy News
Proof Positive
A View from the Beach

In The Mailbox: 05.26.16
Batshit Crazy News
A View from the Beach

Did Her Majesty Drop Some Hormones In The Little Pajama Boy, Or What?
Batshit Crazy News

Top linkers:

  1.  Batshit Crazy News (15)
  2.  A View from the Beach (6)

Thanks for your linkagery!


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Did Her Majesty Drop Some Hormones In The Little Pajama Boy, Or What?

Posted on | May 27, 2016 | 47 Comments

by Smitty

Everyone’s getting their Twitter riffs on over this:

Added my own little bit of doggerel in that AABCCB scheme that seems to work well:

I guess it’s all fun and games until Trump names Sarah Silverman for VP.

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